Homegoing

Chapter 10

The chlorofluorocarbons don’t just trap heat. They also eat ozone. Everyone has known that this is true since the middle of the twentieth century, but of course human beings didn’t let that stop anything. They kept right on manufacturing them and pouring them into the air. After all, they were very profitable to make. The relevant figure-of-merit equation for human behavior has always read “$1 (now) >1 human life (later).” So the flood of ultraviolet over three-quarters of a century has taken its toll. Cloud-covered Alaskan trees have mostly survived (except where killed by acid rain). Clear-skied Scandinavian ones have not. The blistering sunlight has combined with the scourging thermal winds to damage most of the world’s most fertile farmlands. Still, the arable lands that are left are now quite adequate to feed the world’s population, for the simple reason that the human population is a lot lower than it used to be. The things that have helped reduce Earth’s population to a manageable size include melting ice inundating the land, destruction of ozone, acid rain, dust bowl-making winds—and, oh, yes, one other thing. The other thing isn’t around any more—because it has burned itself out—but it was a remarkably efficient population-control device in its time. Its name was AIDS.

When Marguery Darp tapped at Sandy’s door the next morning he was already awake. He had been up for hours. He had spent the time exploring the novelties of his room, practicing with the curious gadgets in the bathroom, and staring at the sights visible out the window. Most of all, he had been busy with a surprise for Marguery.

He would have given it to her the moment he saw her, but he had no chance. She arrived in haste, apologized for being late, and hustled him over to the television studio for a person-to-person talk to the Hakh’hli ship itself. He decided to save the surprise. It was a pleasure he could afford to postpone, because he had plenty of other pleasures going for him. Sandy’s second day on Earth was even more joyous than the first. It was less scary, because he had learned at least the rudiments of Earthly behavior; he had conquered Earthly toilets, elevators, even “shopping,” and besides, at some point he could bring out the surprise he had in his pocket for the woman he loved.

When they got to the studio, his Hakh’hli cohort-mates were less joyous. They were standing in the lobby with their own escorts, Hamilton Boyle and the woman named Miriam Zuckerman. “I’m hungry,” Obie wailed as soon as he saw Sandy. “Polly says we can’t have midday meal yet, but I’ve been up for hours.”

“It isn’t time yet,” Polly said crossly. She, too, was suffering from those long human-Earth days that never seemed to end.

Obie was not consoled. “We should‘ve started practicing living by this dumb kind of time long ago,” he complained.

“You’ll get used to it,” Sandy reassured him, although in fact he was a long way from being used to it himself. In his case it didn’t seem to matter. He felt as though he didn’t need sleep at all. When Hamilton Boyle looked at his watch and said there was time before the broadcast for them all to get some “breakfast,” he assented eagerly.

At the door of the hotel, Boyle stopped them. “Hats on, everybody?” he asked, checking them. “Good. And one other thing. The ultraviolet probably isn’t good for your eyes, either, so Miriam has something for you.”

What the woman named Miriam Zuckerman had were shiny-faced glasses—“sunglasses,” she called them—a large-sized pair for Sandy and two even larger, specially built ones for the two Hakh‘hli that fitted around their heads with an elastic strap. Marguery helped Sandy on with his and paused, gazing at his ear.

“What’s that?” she asked.

He said, embarrassed, “I guess you’d call it a ‘hearing aid.’ I’m kind of deaf, actually. It’s because—well, there’s a pressure difference between Earth and the ship standard atmosphere, you see, and we kept our quarters at the Earth level. So going in and out hurt my ears when I was little, and the Hakh’hli had to fix me up with this.”

“Interesting,” said Boyle. “Mind if we take a look at your ear later on? We have some pretty good doctors for things like that.”

“We Hakh’hli have excellent doctors,” Polly said frostily.

“Oh, no doubt. But perhaps ours have had more experience with human medicine, don’t you think? Anyway, let’s go to the restaurant.”

“I’d rather have cookies and milk in our room,” Obie said wistfully.

“It is not yet time for cookies and milk,” Polly rebuked him. “If you are really hungry you can try some of this Earth food; it will be good to discover if you can digest it.”

“Aren’t you going to try some?” Hamilton Boyle asked politely. “The biologists say we have about the same kind of metabolism, you know.”

Polly looked at him thoughtfully. “And how do your biologists know that?” she asked.

He looked apologetic. “Well, of course, we’ve tested the food samples Lysander was kind enough to give us.”

“Indeed!” said Polly, gazing hard at Sandy. “No matter. We will discuss that another time; but I am not prepared to experiment on myself. An astronomer like Oberon can be spared, but I am in charge of this expedition. I, at least, am not expendable.”

From every side the sensory inputs assailed Sandy—unfamiliar, tantalizing, mysterious—Earthly. He delighted in the smells of the Earth: sweat, perfume, feet, cinnamon, fresh-brewed coffee, pine trees, sewage, roses, gardenias, pepper, bakery bread, roasting meat, boiling cabbage, stepped-on excrement of dogs, fresh-cut grass, laundered clothes, hot oil, wet paving. He was thrilled by the colors of Earth: mountains that were green, brown, white-topped, rust red, mud gray. Human skin in chocolate, olive, pink, black that was almost purple-blue, pale that was almost white. It had never occurred to him that the Hakh’hli were color-deprived until he saw the cars and trucks, from white to cobalt blue and fire red and sunshine yellow; the clothing in every hue and pattern; the signs that flashed (even in daylight!) in every spectrum hue.

Most of all it was the people who thrilled him—pausing to stare, leaning out of windows to gape, calling friendly hellos as they passed. Most of all, of course, it was one particular person. When they crossed a street Marguery courteously took Sandy’s hand. Her touch made him shiver. He didn’t let go of her hand even when they were safely on the other side. Marguery gave him a curious, unsmiling look. But she didn’t resist, and he held her hand all the way to the revolving door of the restaurant, when she gently disengaged herself to let him go through first.

They were expected. The waitress led them at once to a table for six—four chairs and two empty spaces for Polly and Oberon. Around them other breakfasters peered curiously from their tables as the two Hakh’hli arranged themselves, squatting comfortably enough on the floor, their heads at about the same level as the humans.

The variety of Earth food was baffling. There was a whole “breakfast” menu and a quite separate one for “lunch”; Hamilton Boyle explained that they could choose from either one. Neither Sandy nor the Hakh’hli had ever had the necessity of choosing what to eat at any meal. Sandy floundered. All the names of things were familiar—well, reasonably familiar. Though what could “Eggs Benedict” or “avocado melt” be? He had no trouble recognizing such things as hamburgers, fries, milk shakes, fudge, ice cream, and cheese sandwiches. But when the three escorts chose for themselves and the dishes arrived they offered samples, and none of the things tasted anything like the practice foods they had eaten on the ship. Certainly none of them were at all like ordinary shipfare. Hippolyta refused to touch any of them; she had brought a fistful of shipfare biscuits in her pouch and munched them doggedly.

Sandy was more daring—or more stubborn. After all, why should human fare be alien to him when he was human? It wasn’t easy, though, until Marguery came to his aid. He let her order for him. Gratefully he found that he could manage the plain boiled potatoes she chose, and graduated from that to dry toast. But everything else he sampled only a nibble at a time, and had to force himself that far.

Oberon was more daring. He had a dozen different things spread before him on the table—a Western omelette, an avocado stuffed with crabmeat, a hamburger, a “Texas chili dog”; Sandy lost track of the names. Obie managed to eat some of the hamburger, but everything else was too startlingly strange. He wheedled a few biscuits from Polly and chewed them morosely. But he cheered up when the waitress brought them “dessert.” It was called “ice cream.” His first tentative spoonful made his eyes pop in surprise, but then he declared it delicious. “It’s cold,” he cried in pleased surprise. “I never heard of eating things that had been refrigerated, but it’s good.”

“If it doesn’t poison you,” Polly said darkly.

ChinTekki-tho’s broadcast from the interstellar ship came to them through a mixture of human and Hakh’hli technology. The ship’s transmission went to the communications equipment in the lander, back in the Inuit Commonwealth. There a human camera inside the lander was to pick the picture up from the lander’s screens to retransmit to all the human world. When Polly heard Bottom explaining the setup she cried sharply, in Hakh’hli, “But that is wrong and not at all advisable! You were given no authority to permit humans to enter our vessel!”

“You are incorrect and not accurate,” Bottom said smugly. “Authorization came from ChinTekki-tho himself.”

“But that should not happen!” Polly began in indignation, and then collected herself. She turned to the humans in the studio and, weeping a friendly tear, said, “I was simply confirming the arrangements with our cohort-mates. Everything is prepared. You will be addressed by our personal leader, the Senior ChinTekki-tho.”

“We’re honored,” Hamilton Boyle said politely. “Of course, we wondered why the Hakh’hli didn’t simply transmit directly to our own Earth stations, instead of going through your landing ship.”

“That was undoubtedly a decision of the Major Seniors,” Polly explained. “They surely had an excellent reason. They always do.”

In the screen, Bottom turned to listen to something, then turned back. “That was the twelfth-twelfth warning,” he said into the camera. “ChinTekki-tho is almost ready to speak.”

And then the picture on the screens in the studio switched to the lander’s own receivers.

It was certainly not a good picture. In spite of the best efforts of humans and Hakh’hli the broadcast systems were not very compatible, and annoying moire figures kept creeping across the screen in pale rainbow tints. But Sandy immediately recognized their old teacher as he beamed out at them.

“Greetings,” ChinTekki-tho said in his precise English, weeping gladly. “It is a very great honor to be the first Senior of the Hakh’hli to speak to our friends and brothers, the human beings of Earth. As our friends in the first landing group have already informed you, we come to you in peace and friendship. Just as you humans do, we Hakh’hli have a tradition that a visitor brings gifts to his hosts,”—Sandy frowned suddenly, since he had never heard of that tradition; but Polly made a quick pinching gesture and he was silent—“and so we have first given you the gift of a member of your own race, John William Washington, known better to his Hakh’hli friends here as Lysander, restored to his native world by us in proof of our good intentions.” Then ChinTekki-tho beamed and hunched himself closer to the camera. “Are you in good health, Lysander?” he inquired. “Are you pleased to be with your own people again?”

Sandy felt Polly’s eyes boring into him. He said at once, respectfully. “It’s wonderful, ChinTekki-tho. I’m very happy here.”

He waited for a response. It took a few moments to arrive, while the Senior gazed amiably into the screen. Of course, Sandy thought; the ship was a good long distance away, and even radio signals at the speed of light took appreciable time for the round trip. Then ChinTekki-tho waggled his head. “That is good, Lysander. Now let me speak of other things. There are many other gifts we Hakh’hli wish to offer the people of Earth. I will describe only a few of them. We are aware of some of your problems. We have certain techniques for dealing with radioactive and other kinds of pollution which we will gladly put at your disposal. We also have ways of gene-splicing new kinds of vegetation to seed your devastated forests and help to redress the carbon dioxide imbalance.”

ChinTekki-tho wept a charitable tear, as he allowed this to sink in for his human audience. Then he added, “There is also the question of energy. The drive engines of our ship produce enormous quantities of energy. We are willing to convert this into electricity and beam it down to the surface of your planet, wherever you direct. This is a free gift. All you need to do is put up receivers for it. Then there is the device we call an ‘electromagnetic accelerator.’ I believe that your own term is ‘railgun.’ With this as a launcher you will be able to put satellites into space again. They will go through the debris orbit so rapidly that no more than from two- to five-twelfths of them will be destroyed. This is acceptably low, since the capsules themselves require no engines or fuel, thus making them so cheap that losses up to six-twelfths or more can easily be tolerated.”

He paused for a moment again, beaming. “Finally,” he said, “we have much knowledge of scientific matters which your own scientists may not have discovered as yet. And, because our ship has traveled so far and observed so much, we have firsthand knowledge of many other stellar systems. All this we will put at your disposal. For a beginning, let me now display some of the astronomical records from our archives.”

And then ChinTekki-tho disappeared from the screen, and it began to show pictures—poor quality ones, unfortunately, because of the discrepancies between human and Hakh’hli broadcasting technology, but nevertheless pictures no Earthly astronomer had ever seen.

ChinTekki-tho’s voice described what they were seeing as the views unfolded. “This is the star you call Alpha Centauri from no more than one thousand radii away. These display the planetoids of the star Epsilon Eridani—as you see there are many of them, but all small and without significant atmospheres. Our colleague Oberon can tell you more of all these things. Now we are seeing the pictures of your own Sun and planets and the Earth itself as our ship approached.”

The astronomical pictures winked away and ChinTekki-tho reappeared. “This is only a beginning, my friends of Earth,” he said. “My dear student, Oberon, is a certified astronomical specialist.” In the studio Obie happily gazed around at the audience, waggling his head in confirmation. “He has with him a library of data in the memory stores of the lander and ten thousand times as much at his command on the big ship itself. He will supply you with as much astronomical data as you can wish. And our other experts also will instruct your specialists in their own areas; and all this we give you as our guest present.” He paused for a moment, beaming into the camera. “And now,” he said, “I will leave you for the moment. But we will speak again—many times—in this new age of shared knowledge and friendship that has opened up for us all.”

The image disappeared. Marguery sighed and uncrossed her legs. “You know,” she said conversationally, “it’s still hard to believe.”

“Believe it,” Sandy said smugly. “The Hakh’hli have all sorts of things they can give you—us, I mean,” he added quickly.

Hamilton Boyle was looking at him quizzically. “I’m sure of that,” he said. “I wonder what they’re going to want in return?”

When the broadcast was over the two Hakh’hli hurried back to the hotel room for their midday meal. “What about you?” Marguery asked Sandy. “Are you hungry? Would you like to have a drink first?”

He hesitated, not because he was in any doubt about what he wanted to do—he wanted to be alone with Marguery Darp, the sooner the better—but because he wasn’t sure of the best way to arrange it. “Do you mean a milk shake?” he ventured.

“I was thinking more of a different kind of drink,” she said, grinning, and took him to the rooftop cafe.

When Sandy discovered that a “different kind of drink” involved alcohol he was startled. “But alcohol’s a poison, isn’t it?”

“Well, I suppose it is,” Marguery agreed. “But it’s a special kind of a poison. It helps relax people, you know? And it’s supposed to help your appetite, too, to have a drink before a meal. Look. We’ll get you a spritzer—that’s just white wine and soda water—not very much wine, all right?”

The magic word for Sandy was “wine.” “Oh, yes,” he said enthusiastically. A glass of wine or two would be just about right to set the scene for his surprise, for he knew that in human affairs wine was inextricably linked with romance. But when the glass came and he tasted it, he looked up at Marguery in pained surprise. “It tastes spoiled,” he said.

“It isn’t spoiled. It’s fermented. That’s how wine is made,” she told him.

“Aren’t fermented and spoiled the same thing?” He didn’t press the point. He was determined to do all the things that human males did in pursuit of human females. The second sip tasted as bad as the first, but then he began to become aware that a sort of inner warmth flowed from the drink. He decided he could get used to it.

He reached for the surprise in his pocket, preparing to smile, but Marguery was getting up. “Let’s go out on the balcony,” she said. “There’s a nice view.”

That was true. He looked around at the town of Dawson and the countryside so near beyond it. Everything seemed propitious for his surprise. As she sat down he remained standing. “Marguery,” he began, “I have something to—ouch!”

He swatted at his neck. When he pulled his hand away there was a drop of blood on it. “What was that?” he demanded.

She inspected his hand. “A mosquito, I guess,” she said, sympathetically. “That was just bad luck; there aren’t usually any up this high. But we’ve had a lot of them these past years. The birds used to eat them, but the birds got pretty well decimated in the bad years, just like us. What was it you were going to say?”

He sat down, rubbing his neck. “Just that I have something to give you,” he said, scowling. He had planned a more graceful presentation, but his neck really itched.

Marguery took the piece of paper he handed her and glanced at it curiously. It was the poem he had written for her that morning:

O my

very

Dear sweet Marguery!

How I desire to love

All the parts of you

The sweet limbs yes

The big breasts yes

The lips & eyes yes

The other parts yes

And all the rest yes

Love yes!

Love yes!

Love yes!

Love you!

Yes! You!

“My God,” she said, looking up at him.

He asked eagerly. “Do you like it?”

She didn’t answer right away. She read it over again carefully, then gave him a sidelong look. “Is that supposed to be a picture of me?”

“Well, no, Marguery,” he said, embarrassed. “It’s not a picture. That’s not how Hakh’hli poems go. It’s just supposed to sort of suggest you.”

“You made me look like a man.”

“Oh, but no! Not at all! You don’t look like a man in the least, dear Marguery. If I’ve offended you in any way—”

She put a finger across his lips, laughing. “Sandy, you haven’t offended me. That’s really nice, in fact. I don’t think anybody ever wrote a poem for me before. Only—”

He waited humbly for what was to come. “Yes?”

She bit her lip. “Well, the thing is—I guess I probably should have mentioned it before. I’m married, you see.”

He stared up at her in horror. “Oh, Marguery!” he whispered.

She seemed to be displeased. “Well, you don’t have to take it that hard.”

“Oh, but I do! I had no idea that you were a ‘married’ person. Can you possibly forgive me?”

“Oh, hell, Sandy! Of course I forgive you. There’s no law against hitting on somebody, even if they’re married. Especially if you don’t know they are. It’s really kind of flattering. In fact, I appreciate it.”

“Thank you,” he said gratefully. “I promise I won’t do it again. After all, there are plenty of other Female Hu—of other attractive women around for me to, uh, ‘hit on.’ ”

She didn’t look pleased at that. In fact, she was scowling. “Look, Sandy, slow down a minute, will you?” she commanded. “You’re a nice guy. I like you. There’s no reason to jump into something, like.”

He said simply, “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I mean there’s no hurry. We’ve got plenty of time.”

He was puzzled. “But you said you were married?”

“Well, I am,” she said shortly. She picked up her drink and took a thoughtful swallow, while Lysander gazed at her in bafflement. “Only,” she added, “I’m not really working at being married. I haven’t even seen Dave for three or four months.”

“Dave? Is that your ‘husband’?”

She thought that over. “In a manner of speaking. It’s pretty much in the past tense, though. Look,” she said, putting down her glass. “Dave and I got married in college, seven years ago. He was a football player—could’ve done basketball if he wanted to, because he’s seven feet two. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a pretty big woman, and there aren’t that many men that go for my type. You’d think the big ones would, but you look at the couples and you’ll see those seven-footers are always with chicks no more than five feet three.”

“Why is that?” Sandy asked, interested.

“Why? Men! That’s why, because they’re men. Or anyway,” she added fairly. “I don’t know what the reason is, but that’s the way it goes. So when Dave asked me to marry him I didn’t know how long it would be before I got another chance. Anyway, I liked him. And we got along fine, too, while I was still trying to get into astronaut training—maybe he figured that was safe enough, because there weren’t any manned launches—until I signed up with InterSec. Then I think he felt threatened. He didn’t mind me being big, but he really didn’t like the idea of being married to a cop.”

“A cop? You mean, like Kojak?”

She looked puzzled. “What’s a Kojak? I mean a police officer. That’s what InterSec is, you know; it’s the overall security agency for all the commonwealths. Its full name is InterCommonwealth Security. So Dave and I hacked along for a couple of years . . . only the last year or so it hasn’t really worked. He’s asked me if I want a divorce.”

“Oh!” Sandy cried joyously. “I know about divorcées!”

She gave him a hostile look. “You know what about divorcees?” she demanded. “No, don’t answer that. Anyway, I like your poem, and I think I probably like you, too. Only let me think about it a little bit, okay?”

“Oh, right.” Sandy nodded enthusiastically, because that was how they did; the girl never said yes right away, at least not in the kind of movies he liked best, with a lot of tapdancing. But still—

The other thing he knew was that there was a necessary next step.

The wine was helping out his decisions. He leaned closer to her in a preparatory way. She look worried, then comprehending. “Sandy,” she began. “People are watching us inside the bar—”

But when he put an arm around her she didn’t resist.

As a kiss it wasn’t much, apart from the startling discovery Sandy made. He hadn’t expected her mouth to be open, after all! But as a definite first step toward doing It, the sensations were dizzying. He was breathing hard when she broke away, laughing. “Ouch, Sandy,” she said, rubbing her neck. “You don’t know your own strength, do you?”

“Oh,” he said abjectly. “I’m so very sorry—”

“Oh, cut that out! I liked it, only next time don’t squeeze so hard. You’ve heard the expression about being built like a brick, uh, outhouse? Only in your case it isn’t brick, it’s granite slabs.”

He hadn’t even heard the last part of that. “Next time?” he repeated, eyes wide with hope.

She sighed and patted his arm. “I did say next time, didn’t I? Okay, but just remember that next time isn’t this time. Give it a rest. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right around you; that’s my job, after all.”

He sighed and straightened up. “All right,” he said, and took another swig of his drink. The warm feeling was becoming even more pronounced, and it seemed to have spread agreeably to his groin. He was smiling to himself when he saw that Marguery was watching him out of the corner of her eye. “What?” he asked, surprised. He wondered if he had missed an obvious cue.

She hesitated for a moment. Then she asked, “What’s it like?”

He looked at her in puzzlement. “What’s what like?”

“Being in space. Tell me what it’s like. Please. I’ve always wanted to know.”

He sat up straight, peering at her. She was in dead earnest. She wasn’t being flirtatious or even friendly; she was staring at him as though he had some kind of secret that her life depended on, waiting for him to speak.

But he didn’t know what to say. “Oh,” he said, waving a vague hand, “you know.”

“I don’t know,” she said harshly. “I want to know.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Sorry,” he said. “Only there isn’t much to tell about what it’s like. When you’re in the big ship it doesn’t feel like you’re in space. It doesn’t feel like you’re anywhere in particular, just there. The engines are going at the regular G-thrust all the time, and you don’t feel anything except when there’s a course change, like when we went around the Sun—”

“Around the Sun?” she whispered, her eyes wide with fascination. So he had to tell her every bit about it—what they saw in the screens, what they felt as the ship heated up, what it was like when the main engines at last were turned off in Earth orbit, and most of all how it felt as they came down in the lander. “And you flew that thing?” she asked, her eyes bright.

“Oh, no,” he admitted. “They wouldn’t let me do the actual piloting. That was Polly’s job. I know how, though.” And then he had to tell her about the hours in the flight simulator.

Before he finished she had whispered to the waiter, and two new drinks were in front of them—not wine for him this time, but a carbonated soft drink that made him sneeze. “Gesundheit,” she said dreamily. “You know, I trained in one of those things, too.”

He blinked at her. “A Hakh’hli flight simulator? But you weren’t on the ship!”

“No, of course I wasn’t on your ship. How could I be? But we had flight simulators of our own. There are still volunteers to go into space, you know.”

“But they can’t, can they? That ring of debris—”

“Right,” she said bitterly. “We can’t get through the garbage ring. Unmanned satellites, yes. Sometimes. We send them up every once in a while, and about one out of five of them survives for a year without damage. Well, without being totally destroyed, anyway. That’s not bad, for unmanned satellites. We can always make more of them. But it isn’t good enough odds to send up people. People are a lot more fragile. So when I signed up for astronaut training Dave and I had a big fight. He called me a kamikaze—well, actually it was, ‘You kamikaze bitch!’ ”

“Kami—? Oh! You mean, like the Japanese suicide pilots from your World War Two?”

“That’s right. It meant he thought volunteering to go into space was like committing suicide. The way it turned out, he was pretty near right. The first two ships they launched did, in fact, kill their crews. Four astronauts. Two in each ship. People I’d trained with. So they called off the program, and then the rest of us never got up there at all.”

“But you’d still like to?”

She blazed at him. “You’re goddamn well told we’d like to. Not just me! There are millions of kids out there who’d give their right eyes to do what you’ve done—and hundreds of millions of grownups who’d kill you in a hot minute to take your place.”

“Really?” he asked, alarmed. “But that wouldn’t work, Marguery. The Hakh’hli wouldn’t be fooled. They’d know right away—”

He stopped, because she was laughing at him. “I’m sorry, Sandy,” she said. “I didn’t mean that literally. But I didn’t exactly not mean it, either, only I don’t mean you should worry about somebody actually trying it. No one will.”

“I didn’t really think anyone would,” he assured her, almost truthfully.

“But don’t think the human race isn’t interested in space! In fact, there’s going to be an astronomical convention in York next week. They’re probably going to ask all three of you to come to it, so they can see the pictures and listen to you talk—and, I guess, most of all just to be in the same room with somebody who’s been there.”

Sandy took a thoughtful sip of his drink. The fizziness in his nose stopped just short of being actually painful; he decided he liked it. “Marguery?” he asked. “How did you get into such a mess?”

“Mess?”

“The mess in the world. The debris in space. And letting things warm up so the ocean levels went up, depleting the ozone layer, acid rain. All those things. How did you human beings let it all get so bad?”

“Us human beings? And what are you?” she demanded harshly. “Chopped chicken liver?” And then, as he opened his mouth for a puzzled question, she shook her head. “Never mind. I know what you mean.” She reflected for a minute. “Well, I guess the only answer is that the old people didn’t know they were doing wrong. Or anyway the ones that did know it was wrong didn’t count, and the ones that counted didn’t care.”

“They didn’t know war was wrong?”

“Oh, well,” she said doubtfully. “I guess they knew that, all right, only they got themselves into a place where it just happened. There was a place called the Near East—”

“Near to what?”

“That’s just what it was called, Sandy, the ‘Near East.’ Anyway, they had a little war, only they got to using what they called ‘tactical nukes.’ And then people outside that part of the world got involved, and then the big countries began using the big nuclear missiles. On each other. Well, the orbital defenses took care of most of them, but it was really a mess, you know.”

“I wish I did know,” Sandy said wistfully. “We stopped getting your broadcasts along about then, you know.”

“Really? Well, all right, I guess I can fill you in. It’s a long time ago, but I think I know most of it, anyway. About five percent of the nukes got through. A submarine-launched one took out Washington, D.C.—that was where the government was then—and a bunch landed in New Mexico and Arizona and so on, but, really, it wasn’t a big nuclear war. I think altogether only fifteen warheads hit their targets. Only that was really all it took, you see. And after that—”

She paused, staring into her drink. Then she said, “Well, things got pretty bad. There were a lot of people sick from radiation, and then it was hard to get food to the cities, and nothing could come at all from the Near East, where it all started, and a lot of fuel came from there . . . and then there was the AIDS. That was bad stuff, Sandy. It was bad around the old United States, but in lots of places it was just, well, there wasn’t anybody left after a while. Before they got the vaccines they’d just send people with it to Africa to die, because everybody there was going to be dying, anyway. Not just from AIDS; from malaria, and typhus, and just plain starvation.” She looked sad. “They had ten times as many people back then. Now Africa’s empty. There’s only about half a billion alive in the whole world. A single country like China or India had a lot more than that all by themselves before the war.”

“Are you telling me that five billion people died?” Sandy gasped.

“Sandy,” she said reasonably, “they’d probably all be dead by now, anyway. And—” She hesitated, then burst out, “And they deserved it, damn them! All of them! The thing I can’t forgive them for is that they shot us out of space, forever!”