Jem

TWELVE

WHAT ANA DIMITROVA had seen of the United States was what she had seen of most of the world: airports, hotel rooms, meeting halls, city streets. So at first she looked around with lively interest as the electrobus whined along an eight-lane superhighway toward the place she had been ordered to report to. So much open space, not even farmed! And contrar-ily, so many places lined up one after another as they passed through communities — places to eat, places to sleep, places to drink, places to buy gas. What prodigious devourers these Americans must be to keep them all flourishing!

More than half of her companions in the bus were Americans, and they were busy devouring, too, several smoking in flagrant disregard of the signs, a couple chewing gum, three in the back seat passing around a bottle in a brown paper bag. The army sergeant who had offered her part of a chocolate bar was now offering the Canadian agronomist woman some round hard candies with holes in them. Nan was making an effort to like the others because she surely would be seeing a lot of them in training. It wasn’t easy. One by one, each of the American men had made friendly overtures to her which turned in seconds into sexual ones. Even the Vietnamese colonel, so tiny and delicate that she had sat down next to him at first, thinking he was a woman, had begun to make personal remarks in his beautiful high-pitched English. She had changed seats six times so far and now resolutely sat staring out the window even though she was no longer seeing anything. Such compulsive consumers — she could not help feeling that they seemed obliged to consume her as well.

She touched the tiny microfiche from Ahmed at the bottom of her blouse pocket. She had no reader for it, but she needed none. As always it was formal, not very rewarding, and extremely short:

My dear Ana, I appreciate the letters you have been sending and think of you often. With great affection, Dulla

He could have spent a few P$ more, she thought resentfully, and then, as always, brought herself up sharply. Ahmed was from a poor country. Even fiched and faxed, the cost per square centimeter of a letter from Kungson to Earth was very high. (But in her own letters she had poured money out like water. (But she could not judge him; she had not had the life experience of measuring every penny. (But it was not just the economy of space and money — how much more he could have said if he had chosen, in even fewer words! — it was the economy of emotion that she begrudged.))) Three deep in parentheses, she took her mind off Dulla and resolved to think about more profitable subjects, and then realized the bus had stopped.

Three uniformed Americans had entered by the driver’s seat. One of them gestured for silence and said to the bus at large, “You people are welcome, and let’s see some ID.”

Craning her neck, Nan could see a barricade with two other soldiers standing by it. They were not at attention, but they were watching the bus quite carefully, and she observed that what had looked like a well-clipped hedge stretching away on both sides of the barrier had barbed wire inside it. How curious. They were treating this place as though it were some sort of military installation rather than a center for preparing scientists and support personnel for a peaceful expedition to Kungson. Big-power customs were so strange to her. When the MPs came to her, she handed her passport over and smiled at the tall black one who was studying it. He returned her look impassively.

“Name?”

Of course, it was right there, next to his thumb. “Ana Elena Dimitrova.”

“Place of birth?”

“My place of birth? It is Marek, Bulgaria. That is a city south of Sofia, not far from the Yugoslavian border.”

“Put your thumb here, please.” She pressed against the little pad he extended to her and then on a square white card, which he tucked into her passport. “Your papers will be returned to you later,” he said, and then unbent. “You like to dance? There’s a nice group at the club tonight. Ask for me if you don’t see me. Name’s Leroy.”

“Thank you, Leroy.”

“See you later, honey.” He winked and moved along. Ana found a tissue and wiped the ink off her thumb wonderingly. These Americans were even worse than Sir Tam — not just the Americans, she corrected herself, thinking of the Vietnamese colonel and his agile, tiny hands. Would it be like this always? Would it not be even worse when she was part of the small colony on Kungson and they were all living in each other’s pockets anyway?

But at least then Ahmed would be somewhere near! In the wrong encampment, yes. But she would find a way to see him.

Let her just get on the same planet with him again, and they would be together! It made the whole ordeal seem worthwhile.

By the next day, not even that made it seem altogether attractive. She could not have attended Leroy’s dance that night if she had wanted to. There was no time. Issue of new clothing: “You will wear these here fatigues at all times, except when instructed by your instructors.” Assignment to quarters: “You will maintain cleanliness at all times. At all times all personal possessions are to be kept in your footlock-ers.” Preliminary briefing: “You will fall out at oh six hundred hours for breakfast. From oh seven hundred to eleven hundred you will participate in your individual refresher courses of instruction in the application of your specialized skills on Klong. From twelve hundred to sixteen-thirty you will complete your survival course to teach you your survival skills for surviving in the environment of Klong. From eighteen hundred to lights out at twenty-two hundred you will conduct your personal affairs except when required to participate in additional refresher courses or survival instruction. Weekends? Who’s the guy who wants to know about weekends? Oh, you. Well, there aren’t any weekends here.” By the time all that was finished it was nearly midnight, and then Ana dragged her suitcase to the tiny, bare room that had been assigned to her, coldly furnished like the showcase cell in a county jail, only to find out that her roommate was the Vietnamese colonel. Even here rank had its privilege. But Ana was having none of it, and so it was back to the billeting office and a good deal of argument, and by the time she was able to get to sleep in a new room with a female roommate it was nearly two.

Breakfast was discouragingly huge — eggs and sausage and cereal, and breads with jams and marmalades, and peanut butter in opened liter cans on every table — and for dessert they spent an hour receiving inoculations. None of them were painful, but from the grins and jokes of the medics Ana knew that they would be later on. And then she lined up with the other two dozen of her detachment in a wet, cold wind, and they were marched off to their various refresher courses in the application of their specialized skills. Ana’s tiny group included the Canadian woman and two men unknown to her, and they wound through the camp streets, past a baseball field and a bowling alley, between barracks and anonymous buildings with armed guards patrolling before them, out into an open field half a kilometer square. In the center of it was a sort of tethered balloon shaped like a sausage, fifty meters long, with guards around the perimeter and three of them grouped before the entrance. There was a fence surrounding the whole thing, and more guards at the gate in the fence; and before any of them were permitted inside, they had to go through the same tedious business of checking IDs one more time.

Off to one side there was a tall chimney coupled to the main tent by a flexible plastic tube. The chimney roared. Though there was no smoke, the shimmering at the top showed that some very hot gases were boiling high into the air out of it. It did not seem to serve any function that Ana could guess. But then, neither did the weapons that all the permanent personnel carried. Who were they meant to be used against? What possible enemy threatened a training base for a scientific expedition which, after all, was in a sense the property of the entire world?

When she finally got through the gates and the guards, she found herself in a long, open shed covered with the opaque white plastic of the bubble. The atmosphere was damp and heavy, filled with strange smells, and the lighting was sultry red. At first she could see very little, but she was aware that people were moving about between rows of what seemed to be smaller, transparent bubbles. The lighting came from a bank of gas-glow tubes, all red, and there was not very much of it.

The guide who had brought her to this place was speaking to her. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I think so. Why not?”

“Sometimes people can’t stand the smell.”

She sniffed gingerly: pepper and spice and jungle rot. “No, it is fine.”

The Canadian woman said, “Everything sounds funny.”

“There’s positive pressure in the outer shell. Your ears probably popped a little. That’s so that if there’s any air leakage it will all be inward, not out, and of course the air from this chamber gets incinerated at fifteen hundred degrees as it is pumped out — maybe you saw the chimney.”

“One has heard stories of dangerous diseases,” Nan ventured.

“No. There aren’t any. Oh, sure,” the guide went on gloomily, “you can get killed around here. But that’s allergies, not disease, and you’ve all had your shots for them. Dimitrova, you’re for linguistics. You come with me; the rest of you stay right here till I get back.”

He led her through the hothouselike room, past the rows of plastic bubbles. As her eyes became dark-adapted she could see that each of them contained some sort of specimen — mostly plants, and some of them were immense. One towered ten meters, nearly to the top of the shell. It looked like a giant cluster of ferns, and Ana marveled at the money that had been spent to transport that immense mass over the light-years. Apart from the outside roaring of the incinerator, the sounds of pumps, and the noises the people in the shell made, there were sounds she could not identify — a sort of faint, wailing, high-pitched song, and groaning, clattering noises. They came from where she was heading for. The guide said, “Welcome to our zoo.”

And then she saw the balloonist.

She recognized it at once; there could not be another creature as strange as that anywhere in the universe! But it looked… damaged. It was tethered inside a cage. Its great bubble was throbbing but almost limp, sagging against the ground. She stared, fascinated, and saw that a flexible plastic coupling had been taped neatly to a hole in the gasbag, and the plastic line went to a cylinder of gas. A woman with a tape recorder was crouched by the cylinder, adjusting the gas valve as she listened to the balloonist’s plaintive song.

No wonder the voice sounded so faint! He was operating at a fraction of normal pressure, far too little to let him fly, only enough to let him gasp a sobbing sort of song. The woman looked up and said, “You’re Dimitrova? I’m Julia Arden, and this” — pointing at the balloonist—” is Shirley. She’s singing about her childhood right now.”

Ana shook hands courteously, staring at the sad, wrinkled little creature. Those sounds did not seem like language! She could not imagine understanding them, much less translating them, no matter how many times they halved her brain! She said doubtfully, “I will do my best, Mis Arden, but do you think you can really teach me to talk to that?”

“Me? Maybe not. I’ll help, and so will the computers, but the one who’s going to teach you is Shirley herself. She loves to sing to us. Poor thing. She doesn’t have much else to do with her time, does she?”

Nan looked at the creature for a moment and then burst out, “No, but what a shame, really! Can you not see she is in pain?”

The other woman shrugged. “What do you want me to do about it?” Her tone was less hostile than defensive. “I don’t suppose Shirley volunteered for this duty, but then, neither did I. Your job is learning her language, Dimitrova, and let’s get on with it.”

“But to see a creature in pain—”

Julia Arden laughed and then shook her head. “Sweetie, you only got here last night. Wait a day or two. Then you can talk to me about pain.”

From 0700 to 1100 Ana Dimitrova stretched the muscles of her mind until she thought she would die of it, and from 1200 to 1630 she balanced the diet by doing the same to her body.

Julia Arden had been right. Within forty-eight hours Ana was an expert on pain. She woke up each morning with a hazy overcast of brightness that she knew was the foretaste of migraine. She went to bed each night with so many aches, throbs, and bruises that it took all the will she had to refrain from swallowing the pills they had given her. She could not afford pills. She needed her mind alert, even while she slept, because sleeping was only another kind of study for Ana, with the taped calls of the balloonists murmuring under her pillow all night long.

The headaches, all right — they were something she was used to. Worse than that, the shots were producing their effect. Her skin was covered with little blisters and bumps, some that itched, some that were tender, some downright painful every moment of time. Not just pain. She wheezed and coughed. Her eyes ran uninterruptedly, and so did her nose. She was not alone; everyone in her group was having the same reaction to the allergy shots. If this was the prophylaxis, what could the illness itself be like? And then she saw the holos of the unfortunate Peeps who had died of their reactions before the countermeasures had been developed, and they defined for her the difference between prophylaxis and reality. It was not comforting to her. It was terrifying! How had Ahmed fared in all this? He had said nothing in his letters, but perhaps he was only being brave.

And every afternoon — feel well, feel ill, no matter — there she was out on the exercise field. Push-ups and five-hundred-meter runs, obstacle courses and rope climbing. Her hands were raw, then blistered, then calloused. Even through the coveralls her knees were scraped bloody. Everywhere on arms and legs where there was not a pimple or a blister, there was a bruise.

To be sure, she scolded herself, for all of this there was a clear purpose! Kungson was no picnic dell; it was a place of strange and perhaps lethal dangers. These measures, however brutal, were only to help her meet those dangers and conquer them. If she had not volunteered for the job, she had also not refused it when offered.

And finally, the most potent argument of all. It was the way to Ahmed. So she did her best all the time and was secretly proud of the fact that some of the others were doing less well than she. The tiny Vietnamese colonel, Nguyen Dao Tree, fell in a heap from the knotted ropes one afternoon and was taken to hospital. (He was back the next day, limping but game.) One woman, an older one, perhaps almost forty, fell flat on her face halfway up a rocky hill; she was taken away too, and she did not return.

One made quick friendships in such a place. She learned to call the colonel “Guy” and to respect his quick mind and sense of humor. She learned, too, to avoid being alone with him or with the sergeant, Sweggert — or indeed with any of the men, all of whom seemed to possess special reserves of strength when in the presence of an attractive female. Or an unattractive one. Her roommate, Corporal Elena Kristianides, was certainly not pretty, but more than once Nan staggered back to find the door locked and sounds of faint moans and giggles inside. When at last admitted, she always said forgivingly, “Please, it is all right, Kris. Do not speak of it.” But it was not all right. She needed her sleep! Why didn’t they need it too?

As days became weeks the fatigue lessened, the bruises healed, the reactions to the antiallergens diminished. The headaches stayed the same, but Nan was used to them, and she learned to take part in the friendly chatter in the mess hall. Always there were such stories! They were going to Kungson on a one-way trip and were expected to breed there and raise a new race of humans. They were not going to Kungson at all, but to a new planet, not yet announced or even named. They were not going into space at all. They were going to be parachuted onto the Scottish coast to commandeer the oil refineries. They were going to Antarctica, which was going to become a new Food Bloc colony, since a process had been discovered for melting the ice cap. At first Ana was frightened by such stories, then amused, then bored. She began making up stories of her own and found them as quickly passed along as any other. But some of the stories seemed true. Even some terrible ones: an unexplained accident in space that had destroyed the Peeps’ resupply ships and even their tachyon-transit satellite itself. She let herself be late for dinner that night to listen to the evening news; sure enough, it was official. How terrifying! What would it mean to Ahmed? But then the news went on to say that the expeditions of the Fuel and Food blocs had offered help to the expedition of the People’s Republics, and with her heart full, Ana hurried to the dining room, demanded attention, and proposed that they all sign a letter of sympathy and good wishes to their colleagues of the People’s Bloc. The faces all turned to her, then whispered among themselves, half-embarrassed, but in the long run they let her write the letter, and they all signed. The next afternoon her training supervisor even excused her early to carry the document to the office of the camp commandant. He listened to her blankly, read the document three times, and then promised to send it through channels. At dinner that night she reported glowingly what had happened, but her news was drowned in other news. There were three new stories. First, that they were to receive a large shipment of new trainees the next day. Second, that a date had been set for their flight to Kungson, less than three weeks in the future. And third, contradictorily, that the whole project was about to be canceled.

Such stories! Nan stood up angrily, rapping her fork against her thick chinaware cup. “How can you all believe this nonsense?” she demanded. “How can all of these be true at once?” But not many of the others were paying attention, and she felt a tug at her elbow.

It was the colonel, who had, as he often did, squeezed in between Ana and her roommate at the table in order to try his fortunes one more time. “Sweet, beautiful Ana,” he said, “don’t make a fool of yourself. I know something of these stories, and they are all true.”

That one of them was true was proved the next morning. Sixty-five more persons arrived at the base, and Ana knew one of them! It was the blond woman who was Godfrey Menninger’s daughter.

Of course, everything was turned topsy-turvy. All of the billeting accommodations were changed to make room for the new arrivals — no, not for that reason alone, Ana realized, because most of the new ones, and quite a few of the old ones, were housed in another barracks half a kilometer away. Nan lost her WAC corporal roommate and feared at once that she would get Colonel Guy back again. But that did not happen. He went to the other barracks, and Nan was moved in with the Canadian woman, whose specialty seemed to be growing food crops in unusual circumstances. Marge Menninger caught sight of Nan in the crowd and waved to her. But they had no chance to speak — not that Ana had any particular reason to want to speak to the American, anyway — and in all the confusion, she was nearly an hour late for her morning session with the female balloonist.

The creature was no longer a specimen to Ana. She was a friend. Into the cognitive half of Ana’s brain the songs of the balloonists had poured. In the first day she had learned to understand a few simple phrases, in a week to communicate abstract thoughts; now she was almost fluent. Ana had never thought of herself as having any kind of a singing voice, but the balloonist was not critical. They sang to each other for hours on end, and more and more Shirley’s songs were sad and despairing, and sometimes even disconnected. She was, she told Ana, the last survivor of the dozen or more of her species who had been wrenched from Kungson and hurled to this inhospitable place. She did not expect to live much longer. She sang to Ana of the sweetness of warm pollen in a damp cloud, of the hot, stinging sadness of egg-spraying, of the communal joy of the flock in chorus. She told Ana that she would never sing in the flock again. She was thrice right. She would not have dared sing with her voice so pitifully harsh and weak because the gas pump gave her only faltering tones. She had no chance of being returned to Kungson. And she knew death was near.

Two days later she was dead. Ana arrived at the zoo to find her cage empty and Julia Arden supervising the sterilization of its parts.

“Don’t take on,” she advised gruffly. “You’ve learned all you need to know.”

“It is not for the learning that I weep. It is because I have lost someone dear.”

“Christ. Get out of here, Dimitrova. How did they let a jerk like you into this project in the first place? Crying over a dead fartbag and sending love letters to the Peeps — you’re really out of it!”

Ana marched back to the barracks, threw herself down on her cot, and allowed herself to weep as she had not done in months — for Shirley, for Ahmed, for the world, and for herself. “Out of it” described her feelings exactly. How had everything become so hideous and complex?

That afternoon in the exercise field was an ordeal. The physical strain was no longer a real problem, but for some days now the “exercises” had taken a new turn. All of them, her own original detachment as well as the new arrivals, had been working less to strengthen their muscles and reflexes than to learn to handle unfamiliar equipment — unfamiliar to Ana, at least. She observed that all of the new people, and some of the old, had obviously had experience with it already. Such equipment! Heavy hoses like water cannon, backpack tanks and nozzles like flamethrowers, lasers, even grenade launchers. For what grotesque purpose was all this intended? Tight-lipped, Ana did as she was told. Repeatedly she found herself in difficulties and had to be bailed out by one of the others. The colonel saved her from incinerating herself with a flamethrower, and Sergeant Sweggert had to rescue her when the recoil of her water cannon knocked her off her feet.

“Please do not concern yourself,” she gasped furiously, pulling herself erect and reaching once more for the hose. “I am quite all right.”

“Hell you are,” he said amiably. “Lean into it more, honey, you hear? It doesn’t take muscle, just a little brains.”

“I do not agree.”

He shook his head. “Why do you get so uptight, Annie?”

“I do not like being trained in the use of weapons!”

“What weapons?” He grinned at her. “Don’t you know this stuff is only to use against vermin? Colonel Menninger spelled it all out for us. We don’t want to kill any sentients; that’s against the law, and besides, we’ll all get our asses in a crack. But all the intelligent ones got little cousins, crabrats and airsharks and things that dig around in the dirt and come out and chew your ass off. Those are what we’re going to use this stuff for.”

“In any event,” said Ana, “I do not require assistance from you, sergeant — even if I believed you, or your Colonel Menninger, which I do not.”

Sweggert looked past her and pursed his lips. “Hello, there, colonel,” he said. “We was just talking about you.”

“So I noticed,” said Margie Menninger’s voice. Ana turned slowly, and there she was. Looking, Ana observed without regret, quite poorly. The shots were having their way with her; her face was broken out in cerise blotches, her eyes were red and running, and her hair showed dark roots. “Get on with it, sergeant,” she said. “Dimitrova, see me in my room after chow.”

She turned away and raised her voice. “All right, all of you,” she cried. “Get your asses down! Let’s see how you crawl!”

Rebelliously Ana dropped to the ground and practiced the way of worming herself across an open field that she had learned the day before. These were infantry tactics! What nonsense for a scientific expedition! She conserved her anger carefully, and it lasted her the rest of the afternoon, through dinner, and right up to the moment she knocked on Menninger’s door in that other barracks halfway across the base.

“Come in.” Lt. Col. Menninger was sitting at a desk in a white, fluffy dressing gown, rimless granny glasses on her nose, a half-eaten dinner tray pushed to one side. She looked up from some papers and said, “Take a seat, Ana. Do you smoke? Would you like a drink?”

The angry fires inside Ana banked themselves. But they were still ready to blaze out. “No, thank you,” she said, in general, to all.

Margie stood up and poured herself a scant shot of whiskey. She would have preferred marijuana, but she did not care to share a joint with this Bulgarian. She sipped a centimeter off the top of the drink and said, “Personal question. What have you got against Sweggert?”

“I have nothing against Sergeant Sweggert. I simply do not care to make love with him.”

“What are you, Dimitrova, some maximum women’s libber? You don’t have to ball him on the parade ground. Just let him give you a hand when he wants to.”

“Colonel Menninger,” Ana said precisely, “are you ordering me to encourage his sexual overtures so that I can complete the obstacle course more readily?”

“I am not ordering you to do diddly-shit, Dimitrova. What is it with you? Sweggert comes on to everything with a hole in it. It’s his nature. He comes on to me, too. I could put the son of a bitch in Leavenworth for the places his hands have been on the drill field. But I won’t, because he’s a good sol — Because he’s essentially a good person. He’ll help you if you let him. You can always tell him to fuck off later on.”

“This I consider immoral, Colonel Menninger.”

Margie finished her drink and poured half of another. “You’re not too happy here, are you, Ana?”

“That is correct, Mis Menninger. I did not ask for this assignment.”

“I did.”

“Yes, no doubt, perhaps you did, but I—”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I asked for it for myself, but I also asked for it for you. I picked you out by name, Ana, and it took hell’s own conniving to make the Bulgarians turn you loose. They think you’re pretty great at translating.” She tossed down the rest of the drink and took off her glasses. “Look, Ana, I need you. This project is important to me. It should be important to you, too, if you have a spark of patriotism in your body.”

“Patriotism?”

“Loyalty, then,” said Margie impatiently. “Loyalty to our bloc. I know we come from different countries, but we stand for the same thing.”

Ana found herself more puzzled than angered by this strange American. She tried to sort her feelings out and express them exactly. “Bulgaria is my home,” she began. “I love my home. The Food Bloc — that is a much more abstract thing, Mis Menninger. I understand that in a world of two hundred nations there must be alliances and that one owes one’s allies some sort of allegiance, or at least courtesy. But I cannot say I feel loyalty. Not to the Food Bloc.”

“To the whole human race then, honey,” said Margie. “Don’t you see it? You just said it for yourself — a world of two hundred nations. But Klong can be a world of one nation! No fighting. No spies. No cloak-and-dagger shit. Who colonized America?”

“What?” It took Ana a moment to realize she was supposed to answer the question. “Why — the English? Before them, the Dutch.”

“And before them maybe the Italians and Spaniards, with Columbus, and maybe, for Christ’s sake, anybody you like — the Vikings, the Polynesians, the Chinese. Who knows? But the people who live in America now are the Americans. And that’s who’s going to live on Klong in another generation or two. The Klongans. Or whatever they call themselves. A single race of human beings. Never mind where they come from here! They’ll be all the same, all part of the same wonderful… well, dream. I don’t mind calling it a dream. But you and I can make it come true, Ana. We can learn how to live on Klong. We can build a world without national barriers and without the kind of senseless competition and rapacity that have ruined this one. Do you know what it means to have a whole new world to start over on?”

Ana was silent. “I — I have had some thoughts of that sort myself,” she admitted.

“Of course you have. And I want to make it happen. I want to lay the foundations for a world society that understands planning and conservation and cooperation. Do you know how much we’re putting into this? Four ships. Nearly ninety people. Thirty-five tons of equipment. The invasion of Europe cost less than this one launch, and believe me, everybody involved is screaming. It costs too much. It upsets the Peeps. The Greasies will raise their prices. We need the resources to solve the problems of the cities. Half the Congress would like to call it off tomorrow—”

“One has heard rumors,” Ana said cautiously, “that the launch may be canceled.”

Margie hesitated, and a shadow crossed her face. “No,” she corrected. “That will not happen, because it is too important. But that is why I asked for you, Ana. If we can send ninety people, they must be the best ninety people there are. And you are the best translator I could find.” She reached out and touched Ana’s sleeve. “Do you understand?”

Ana drew away as soon as she could without giving offense, her thoughts uncertain. “Y-yes,” she said unwillingly, and then, “but, on the other hand, no. What you say is most persuasive, Mis Menninger, but what has it to do with the use of flamethrowers and other weapons? Are we to build this fine monolithic world by destroying everyone else?”

“Of course not, Ana!” cried Margie, with as much shock and revulsion in her voice as she knew how to put there. “I give you my word!”

There was a silence. “I see,” said Ana at last. “You give me your word.”

“What else would you have me do?”

Ana said thoughtfully, “One has so little contact with the rest of the world here. I would like very much an opportunity to discuss this with others. Perhaps with my own delegation at the United Nations?”

“Why not?” exclaimed Margie. She looked thoughtful for a moment and then nodded. “I’ll tell you what. As soon as training’s over we’re all going to get three days off. I’m going to New York myself. Come with me. We’ll eat some decent food, go to a few parties. And you can talk it over with anyone you like. Agreed?”

Ana hesitated. At last, unwillingly, she said, “All right, Mis Menninger. That sounds attractive.” It did not, for many reasons, but as a just person Ana had to concede that it sounded at least fair.

“Fine, honey. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m overdue for a long, hot bath.”

Margie locked the door behind the Bulgarian woman and ran herself a tub with some satisfaction. What the stupid prunt didn’t know was that she was leaving Camp Detrick direct for the launch pad. The next chance she would have to talk anything over with anybody would be on Klong, and there let her say whatever she liked.

But Ana Dimitrova was only one problem, and maybe the easiest to solve. “One has heard rumors that the launch may be canceled” indeed! If Dimitrova had heard them, then everybody had heard them, and maybe the rumors were close to being true.

Margie allowed herself five minutes of luxurious soaking in the tub. When she got out she draped a towel around her body, not from modesty but from distaste; the shots had raised angry red welts all over her skin, and even with the ointment and the pills they itched. She did not want to be seen like that. Certainly not by the senator. It was bad advertising for the merchandise.

As she was dialing Adrian Lenz’s private number she looked at herself in the mirror, frowned, and switched to voice only. “Hello, honey,” she said as soon as he was on the line. “I’m sorry there’s no picture, but this place doesn’t have all mod. cons., and anyway” — she giggled — “I don’t have any clothes on.”

“Hello, Margie.” Senator Lenz’s voice was neutral. It was the sort of tone one uses to a brother-in-law or an airport security guard; it said, I acknowledge there is a relationship between us, but don’t push it. “I assume you’re calling me about your proposed new launch.”

“Just ‘proposed,’ Adrian? You voted for it three weeks ago.”

“I know my own voting record, Margie.”

“Of course you do, Adrian. Listen, I didn’t call you up to quarrel with you.”

“No, you didn’t,” said the senator. “You called me up to try to keep me in line. I was pretty sure you’d call. I’m even pretty sure of what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me that we’ve got a hell of a big investment in Klong now and if we don’t nourish it the whole thing might go down the tube.”

“Something like that, senator,” Marge Menninger said reluctantly.

“I was sure of it. You know, we’ve heard those arguments before. Every time the DoD wants something outrageous they start by asking some piss-ant amount as a ‘study grant.’ Then a little more because the study showed some really promising idea. Then some more because, gosh, senator, we’ve gone this far, let’s not waste it. And then, the next thing you know, we’ve got some stupid new missile or antiballistic defense system or nuclear bomber. Not because any sensible person wants it, but because there was no place to stop. Well, Margie, maybe this is the place to stop Klong. Three days from now there’s a committee meeting. I don’t know which way I’m going to vote, because I don’t have all the information yet. But I’m not making any promises.”

Margie kept the disappointment out of her voice, but she was less successful with the anger. “This project means a hell of a lot to me, Adrian.”

“Don’t you think I know it? Listen, Margie, this is an open line, but I thought you might be interested in something. I’ve got tomorrow’s early edition of the Herald here, and there’s a story from Peiping.

’Authoritative sources’ say that repair crews at their tactran satellite have definite evidence that the explosion which destroyed the satellite and two transport ships was of suspicious origin.”

“I watch the news, Adrian. I saw that. And there was another story, too, that said that dissident elements within the People’s Republics were thought to be responsible.”

The senator was silent. Margie would have given a lot to have seen the expression on his face just then, even at the cost of revealing the sorry condition of her own, and her hand reached out to restore the vision circuit to the call. But then the senator said, “I guess that’s all we should say under the circumstances, Margie. I agree with you about one thing. You’ve gotten us into this pretty deep.” And he broke the connection.

Margie sat thoughtfully blow-drying her hair for the next ten minutes, while her mind raced. Then she picked up the phone and dialed the orderly room. “Colonel Menninger here,” she said. “Notify the training officer that I will not be present for tomorrow’s formations, and have transportation ready for me at oh eight hundred. I need to go to New York.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the OD. He was not surprised. All members of the project were restricted to the base, and the orders said there were no exceptions. But he knew who had written the orders.

Margie sat impatiently in the audience section of the Security Council chamber, waiting to be called. The delegation from Peru was explaining its recent vote at considerable length while the other nine members of the council waited in varying degrees of fury to explain each other’s. The question seemed to have something to do with the territorial limits for fishing fleets. Normally Margie would have paid close attention, but her mind was a good many light-years away, on Klong. When the young black woman came to fetch her for her appointment she forgot about Peru before she had left the auditorium.

The woman conducted her to an inconspicuous room marked Authorized Personnel Only and held the door open for her without going, or looking, inside.

“Hello, poppa,” said Margie as soon as the door was closed, turning her cheek to be kissed.

Her father did not kiss her. “You look like hell,” he said, his voice flat and without affection. “What the fuck have you been teaching these ‘colonists’ of yours?”

Margie was caught off guard; it was not any of the questions she had expected from him, and certainly not what she had come to discuss. But she responded at once. “I’ve been teaching them survival tactics. Exactly what I said I was going to teach them.”

“Take a look at these,” he said, spreading a sheaf of holoflat pictures before her. “Art exhibits from Heir-of-Mao’s private collection. Cost me quite a lot to get them.”

Margie held one up, wiggling it slightly to get the effect of three-dimensional motion. “Makes me look fat,” she said critically.

“These came out of the pouch of a courier in Ottawa. You recognize them, I guess. There’s one of your boys throwing a grenade. And a nice shot of a flamethrower drill. And another one of a girl, I won’t say who, stabbing what looks a hell of a lot like a Krinpit with what looks a hell of a lot like a sword.”

“Oh, hell, poppa, that’s no sword. It’s just a flat, sharp knife. I got the idea from watching the stew chef opening up oysters at the Grand Central Clam Bar. And that Krinpit’s only a dummy.”

“Hell’s shitfire, Margie! That’s combat technique!”

“It’s survival, dear,” she corrected. “What do you think? The biggest and ugliest dangers our boys and girls are going to face are the Krinpit and the burrowers and the balloonists and, oh, yes, not to forget the Greasies and the Peeps. I’m not advocating killing, poppa, I’m just teaching them how to handle themselves if killing is going on.” Her face clouded. “All the same, I wish I knew who took those pictures.”

“You will,” he said grimly. “But it doesn’t matter; those are just copies. The Peeps have the originals, and Tam Gulsmit’s probably got a set of his own by now, and the Peeps and the Greasies on Klong are going to hear about it by next week at the latest, and interexpedition friendship is over. Did you listen to the debate in the council?”

“What? Oh, sure — a little.”

“You should have listened a lot. Peru has just extended its ocean borders to a thousand kilometers.”

Margie squinted, perplexed. “What does that have to do with maybe some fighting on Klong?”

“Peru wouldn’t do that without a lot of backing from somebody. They’re nominally Food, sure, because of the anchovy catch. But they don’t have a pot to piss in when the fish go deep, so they try to keep friendly with the other blocs.”

“Which one?”

Her father pushed the corners of his eyes up. He did not do it because there was any risk of this supersensitive room being bugged; it was only a reflex not to speak the name of Heir-of-Mao unnecessarily.

Margie was silent for a moment while the card sorter in her brain ordered her hierarchy of priorities. She came back to Number One. “Poppa,” she said, “Peru can stick their anchovies in their ear, and I’m not going to lose sleep about which one of my people is a spy, and if we get a little scandal about combat training we’ll survive it. None of it’s going to matter in two or three weeks, because we’ll be there, and that’s what I came to see you about. Adrian Lenz is crawfishing. I need help, poppa. Don’t let him cancel us out.”

Her father leaned back in his chair. Margie was not used to seeing Godfrey Menninger looking old and tired, but that was how he looked now.

“Sweetie,” he said heavily, “do you have any idea how much trouble we’re in?”

“Of course, I do, poppa, but—”

“No, listen. I don’t think you do. There’s a tanker aground on Catalina Island today, with six hundred thousand tons of oil that isn’t going to get to Long Beach. Wouldn’t matter, normally. Southern California keeps plenty of reserves. But their reserves got diverted to your project, so they’re low now. Unless they get that tanker afloat in forty-eight hours, Los Angeles is going to spend the weekend in a brownout. What do you think is going to be the public reaction to that?”

“Well, sure, a certain amount of shit is going to—”

He raised his hand. “And you saw the story in this morning’s papers. The Peeps know their tactran satellite was deliberately destroyed.”

“No, it wasn’t! That was an accident. The bomb was just supposed to knock out the supply ship!”

“An accident in the commission of a crime becomes part of the crime, Margie.”

“But they can’t prove — I mean, there’s no way in the world that they can pin it on me unless—”

She looked at her father. He shook his head. “The Italian isn’t going to tell them anything. He’s already been taken out.”

So poor Guido was not going to live to spend his hundred thousand petrodollars. “He gave good value,” she said. “Look what you got out of his microfiches. You have proof that the Greasies set up their base where they did because they had seismic scans to show oil under it. That’s against treaty right there.”

“Don’t be a child, Margie. What does ‘proof’ have to do with it? Sir Tam and the Slopies can’t prove you handed Ghelizzi the bomb, but they don’t have to prove, they only have to know. And they do. Peru proves it. Not to mention a few other little news items you may not have heard about yet, like the American embassy in Buenos Aires being fire-bombed this morning. That’s a little message from Sir Tam or Heir-of-Mao, I would judge. What do you suppose the next message is going to be?”

Margie realized she had been scratching her blisters and made herself take her hand away. “Oh, shit,” she said glumly, and thought hard while her father waited.

But really, she reflected, the basic rules were unchanged. The equation of power was utterly clear. No nation could afford to fight any other nation in the whole world anymore. Food, Fuel, and People each owned enough muscle to smash both the others flat, and all of them knew it. Worse than that. Even the tiniest nation had a minute sliver of muscle of its own, gift of the breeder reactors and the waste reclaimers. Not enough to matter in a global sense, no. But Peru could enforce its decisions if driven to. Ecuador could kill Washington or Miami, Denmark could destroy Glasgow, Indonesia could obliterate Melbourne. Fire-bombings and riots — well, what did they matter? There was a permanent simmer of border incidents and small-scale violence. Each year, a few thousand injured, a few scores or hundreds dead. But the lid never blew off, because everybody knew what would happen.

“Poppa,” she said, “you know nobody can do anything really serious. The balance of power prohibits it.”

“Wrong! The balance of power breaks down as soon as somebody makes a mistake. The Peeps made one when they fired rockets at our gasbags on Klong. I made one when I let you carry that bomb to Belgrade. It’s time to pull the fuses, honey.”

For the first time in her adult life, Margie Menninger felt real fear. “Poppa! Are you saying you’re not going to help me with Lenz?”

“I’m saying more than that, Margie. I agree with him. I’m seeing the President tomorrow, and I’m going to tell him to scrap the launch.”

“Poppa!”

He hesitated. “Honey, maybe later. After things quiet down—”

“Later’s no good! You think the Peeps aren’t going to reinforce as soon as they can get another satellite up there? And the Greasies? And—”

“It’s settled, Margie. ”

She looked at him, appalled. This was the God Menninger that his whole agency knew and she had rarely seen. It wasn’t her father she was looking at. It was a human being as implacable and determined as she herself had ever been, and with the accustomed support of a great deal of power to back his decisions up.

She said, “I can’t change your mind.” It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t give it an answer. “Well,” she said, “there’s no reason for me to hang around here then, is there? Good-bye, poppa. Take care of yourself. I’ll see you another time.”

She did not look at him again as she got up, collected her brown leather officer’s bag and her uniform cap, and let herself out.

If her father was as determined as she, the other side of the coin was that she was no less determined than he. She stopped in the visitors’ lounge and entered a public phone booth to dial a local number.

The woman on the other end was a strikingly handsome human being, not a sex symbol but a work of art. “Why, Marjorie,” she said. “I thought you were off doing spy stuff for your father or something — Marjorie! What’s the matter with your face?”

Marge felt her blotched chin. “Oh, that. That’s just a reaction to some shots. Can I come over to see you?”

“Of course, lover. Right now?”

“Right this second, mom.” Margie hung up the phone and hurried toward the elevators. But before she entered them she stopped in a ladies’ room to check her makeup.

Marge Menninger’s mother lived, among other places, in the residential tower section of one of New York City’s tallest and most expensive skyscrapers. It was an old-fashioned place, built when energy was cheap, so that it made economic sense at that time to economize on insulation and rely on huge inputs of BTUs all winter long and continuous air conditioning all summer. It was one of the few that had not been at least partly rebuilt when oil reached P$300 a barrel, and it would have been ruinously expensive for most tenants — even most well-to-do tenants. The condominium apartments were no more expensive to buy than any others in a good neighborhood. But if you had to ask what the maintenance costs would be, you couldn’t afford them. Alicia Howe and her present husband didn’t have to ask.

The butler welcomed Margie. “How nice to see you, Miss Menninger! Will you be using your room this time?”

“Afraid not, Harvey. I just want to talk to mom.”

“Yes, Miss Margie. She’s expecting you.”

As Alicia Howe rose to be kissed, she made a quick, all-seeing inventory of her daughter. Those awful splotches on her complexion! The clothes were passable enough, as army uniforms went, and thank heaven the child had been born with her father’s smiling good looks. “You could lose a couple of kilos, lover,” she said.

“I will, I promise. Mom, I want you to do me a favor.”

“Of course, hon.”

“Poppa’s being a little difficult about something, and I need to go public. I want to hold a news conference.”

Alicia Howe’s husband owned a lot of television: three major-city outlets and large interests in a dozen satellite networks. “I’m sure one of Harold’s people can help you out,” she said slowly. “Should I ask what the problem is?”

“Mom, you shouldn’t even know there’s a problem.”

Her mother sighed. She had learned to live with God Menninger’s off-the-record life while they were married, but since the divorce she had hoped to be free of it. She never talked to her ex-husband. It wasn’t that she disliked him — in her heart, she still thought him the most interesting, and by a long way the sexiest, of her men. But she could not cope with the knowledge that any little slip of the tongue from him to her, and from her to anyone, might bring catastrophic consequences to the world.

“Honey, I do have to tell Harold something.”

“Oh, sure, mom. But not as a problem. What I want to talk about is Kl — Jem. The planet Jem. I’m going there, mom.”

“Yes, of course, you told me that. In a year or two, maybe, when things settle down—”

“I want to settle them down, mom. I want the United States to send enough muscle up there to make it fit to live in. Fit for you to visit someday, if you want to. And I want to do it now. I’m supposed to leave in eighteen days.”

“Margie! Really, Margie!”

“Don’t take on, will you? It’s what I want.”

Alicia Howe had not been able to prevail against that argument in more than a dozen years. She had no hope of prevailing against it now. The thought of her daughter flinging herself through space to some terrible place where people died disgustingly was frightening. But Margie had demonstrated a capacity for taking care of herself.

“Well,” she said, “I guess I can’t send you to your room. All right. You haven’t told me what you want me to do.”

“Ask Harold to get me onto one of his newsmaker programs. He’ll know how to do it better than I can tell him. They’re backing away from my planet, mom, cutting the funding, complaining about the problems. I want the public to know how important it is, and I want to be the one to tell them.” She added strategically, “Poppa was right behind me on this at first, but now he’s changed his mind. He wants to call the whole thing off.”

“You mean you want to put the squeeze on your own father?”

“Exactly right.”

Alicia Howe smiled. That part was sure to appeal to her current husband. She spread her hands resignedly and moved toward the phone. “I’ll tell Harold what you want,” she said.

Ana Dimitrova sat with her eyes closed in a broad, low room, elbows on a ring-shaped table, head in her hands, earphones on her head. Her lips were moving. Her head twitched from side to side as she tried to match the rhythms of the taped balloonist song that was coming over the headset. It was very difficult, in large part because it was not a balloonist’s voice making the sounds. It was a Krinpit’s. The tape had been made several weeks before, when Detrick’s last surviving Krinpit had had no one left to talk to but Shirley, the one surviving balloonist.

But her name had not been Shirley. Her name, rather beautiful, had been Mo’ahi’i Ba’alu’i, which meant something like Sweetly Golden Cloud-Bearer. Krinpit rasps and tympani did not easily form the balloonist sounds. But Shirley had understood him — no, Ana corrected herself, Mo’ahi’i Ba’alu’i had understood him. Ana was determined to do the same, and so she played and replayed sections of the tape:

Ma’iya’a hi’i (these creatures unlike us) hu’u ha’iye’i (are vicious animals).

And Cloud-Bearer’s response:

M’u’a mali’i na’ahu’iha. (They have killed my song).

Ana pushed the headphones off her ears and allowed herself to rub her eyes. The headaches were very bad tonight. And this awful room! Twenty headsets and tape-control panels before twenty identical hard-backed chairs, all around the ring. So bleak! So unsympathetic!

Unsympathetic? Ana clucked her lips at herself. That was one of the English language’s booby-trap words: sympathetic, simpatico. They sounded so much alike. But they did not mean the same thing, and it was embarrassing to a translator of Ana’s skills to fall into the blunder of confusing them. It proved she was too tired to work anymore this night, and so she switched off the tape decisively, hung the earphones on their hook, and stood up to go. She intended to wish a courteous good night to those few other eager project personnel who had shared her desire to put in overtime at the tape ring. But there weren’t any. They had all left while she was concentrating.

It was nearly eleven o’clock! In six hours she would have to be getting out of bed!

Hurrying down the empty company street toward her room, Ana paused halfway, changed course, and entered the dayroom. Really, these headaches were too bad! But there was a dispensing machine in the dayroom, and sometimes one of the American soft drinks containing caffeine would constrict the blood vessels and reduce the thumping, thumping throb long enough for her to get to sleep.

But as she dropped a dollar into the machine and waited for the cup to fill, it seemed to her that coming here had been a mistake, after all. Such an ear-drubbing of noise! A dozen couples were dancing frenziedly to a stereo at one end of the room. At the other a young Oriental man had a guitar, and a group was singing with him, quite at cross-purposes to the music on the stereo. Quite uncaring. And even more noise came from the television alcove: a babble of excited voices, laughter. What could they be watching? She drifted closer to peer at the screen. Someone was lifting a pillowcase out of a sonic washer and exclaiming rapturously over its pristine shine. Were these people excited over a commercial?

“Oh, Nan,” cried her roommate, elbowing toward her. “You missed it. She was wonderful. ”

“What? What did I miss? Who was wonderful?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Menninger. It was really super. You know,” confided the woman, “I never really liked her. But tonight she was just beautiful. She was on the six o’clock news. It was just a little person-to-person interview, like a follow-up to a story about Jem. I don’t know why they picked her, but I’m glad they did! She said such wonderful things! She said Jem gave hope to all the unhappy people of the world. She said it was a planet where all the old hatreds could be forgotten. A place where — what did she say? — yes, a place where each child could elect a morality and an idea, and have the space and the freedom to live his life by it!”

Ana coughed Coca-Cola in a fine spray into her cupped hand. “Colonel Menninger said that?” she gasped.

“Yes, yes, Nan, and she said it beautifully. We were all touched. Even people like Stud Sweggert and Nguyen the Tryin’ were really moved. I mean, they even kept their hands to themselves. And the newscaster said something about sending troops to Jem, and Colonel Menninger said, ‘I’m a soldier myself. Every country has soldiers like me, and every one of us prays we’ll never have anything to do. But on Jem we can do something useful! Something for peace, not for destruction. Please let us do it.’ — What?”

Nan had been marveling to herself in Bulgarian. “No, no, please go on,” she said.

“Well. And just now they repeated parts of it on the late report, and they said the public response has been incredible. Telegrams, phone calls. To the White House and the UN and the networks — I don’t know where all.”

Ana forgot her headache. “Perhaps I have been doing Colonel Menninger an injustice. Truly, I am amazed.”

“Well, I am too! But she made me feel really good about what we’re doing, and everyone’s talking about it!”

And they were. Not only in the barracks dayroom. Senator Lenz’s phones were ringing, and it was constituents urging him to make sure the heroes on Jem got support. Newsrooms around the country were watching the electronic tally of calls from the public: Jem, Jem! Spot pollsters were reporting great and growing public concern. God Menninger’s phone rang only once, but the person on the other end was the President of the United States. When he hung up, Menninger’s face was tense and stern, but then it relaxed and he broke into a smile. “Honey,” he said to empty space, “damn your black heart, you do your old man proud.”