Starburst

26

THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES HAD BEGUN her career as a diet technician, Spec. 5, in the 456th Infantry Battalion. The other name for her job was KP pusher, but Mae Prewick was the gentlest overseer the kitchen help ever had. They got the work done all the same, because they liked her. Everybody did, especially the platoon leader as it turned out.

When Mae Prewick married Lt. James Braddock Tupelo it did not really interrupt her career. It simply gave her a new one. Her career became not so much a matter of advancing her own status as of keeping James B. from screwing up his, as he made the transition from Army officer to government flunky, to Congressman—ultimately to where he was now. She was happy in her work. James B. was a good-hearted man, with a few exceptions.

She was hoping very much that these people from Alpha Centauri were not going to turn out to be one of the exceptions.

They were really a freaky lot, in the Vice President's opinion, but not a whole lot freakier than the creatures from all over North America she had been dealing with for a decade now. Farmers and freebooters. Romantic voyageurs from Canada Francaise and arrogant embassies from the West Coast. Pipsqueak potentates from what used to be Appalachia, kings of three hills and half a valley—she had entertained them all. And all about the same way. She pushed her White House KPs into producing lavish meals, made sure there was plenty of drinking liquor to make the negotiations run smooth, nursed the hangovers on the mornings after.

It didn't really make much of a change from what she would have been doing anyway, if James B. had stayed in the Army and by now she had been setting up Saturday- night poker games for his company officers. The stakes in the games were higher now, and they weren't played with cards, but those all-night sessions were still bluff and call, sweep up the pots or take your licking. It did not matter that now she was sometimes called Mrs. Vice President in­stead of Hey-Mael Especially since what she was Vice President of was really bounded only by Norfolk, Baltimore, and the Shenandoah National Park. But it mattered, a little anyway, that this new batch of gamblin' friends didn't seem to know how to play the games. So many of them were kids. Mae Tupelo had never been able to have kids of her own, and she was sentimental about them. All of them. Even weirdos like this batch. And the ones that weren't children, or next thing to it, like that funny Jeron —well, Eve Barstow had been a fine woman at one time, the old pictures proved it, but she had sure let herself go. Five little kids. One half grownup. One fat lady that gasped every time she climbed two steps . . . the Vice President frowned to herself, because she didn't really know, and nobody else seemed to know either, whether or not there was another member of the crew. Sometimes seemed like there was. Sometimes seemed like there wasn't; and you couldn't get a straight answer out of any of them. There were times when you'd swear before God you heard a grownup man talking. And then you'd say something to them, not nosy but friendly, and you'd get one of those laughs.

They really knew how to laugh nasty when they wanted to, and at those times the Vice President told herself she didn't care a bit what her husband was up to. Serve them right! But then she'd see how little they were, really. That one they called Molomy. Fourteen at the most. Never had a dress-up doll until Mae Tupelo gave her one. And then, come to find out, that littlest one, the only one with the sensible name, Bill, was her kid!

And the seesaw of the Vice President's feelings went back to not caring a bit what happened to them.

You had to admit, though, that in some ways they had been raised up pretty well. You invited them, they invited you. You welcomed them to Washington with a big party, and they invited you to a picnic in front of their ship the next day. Not the kind of picnic Jimbo had much use for, all greens and fruits and things, but real pretty the way they were spread out. You took them for a cruise up the river to see Mount Vernon, and they came back with asking you to come see the inside of their ship the next day. That had cheered Jim up some, although he wasn't invited in the ship—ladies only, Eve Barstow said, as though it was some kind of a joke. Funny, but Jimbo took it as a joke, too, or at least laughed that way he had when somebody did something he expected them to, and didn't really like. There was something going on, all right. What proved it was that the President didn't even get mad when he found out that the girl from Puget and one of the Amish ladies were invited too.

And then the next morning, when she started out for the ship, half the guards around the White House were missing and the other half wouldn't meet her eye.

So Mae Tupelo was not entirely at ease as she entered the ship, but as soon as she got inside she forgot to worry. What a funny place!

Although it looked forbiddingly large on the outside, it was quite cramped on the interior. "That doesn't really matter," Eve Barstow told her, "because we only have to be in it for a few hours at a time."

"The big ship is still in orbit," Jeron offered—evidently "ladies only" did not refer to the ship's crew. "That one we stayed in for four years."

"You fixed it up real nice," the Vice President said automatically, but not very sincerely. Much of what she saw was simply confusing. The padded seats, the toilets, the wonderful windows for looking out—that she understood easily enough; and the control board, worse than any washer-dryer in the Officers Quarters in the old days, she could accept without having to understand. But what were those ragged clusters of things that looked like-—like what? Seed pods? Rotting tamales? They hung along the walls like garlic buds in a delicatessen. Eve Barstow pulled some of them out with pleasure.

"They're going to be presents, Mae," she said, unwrapping some to show to her, others for the other women. "It won't be much of a surprise now, but here they are. These are lamb. You have to give them plenty of nitrogen and phosphorus when you plant them. These are marshmallows, we use them mostly for sugar. These are different kinds of decorative flowers—-I'm not really sure which is which right now. It's hard to tell from the seedlings—"

"Not for me," Jeron corrected. He placed his finger on one shoot. "This one will bloom red, white, and blue," he said. "Eve thought you'd like that. This one blossoms with a picture of me on it. I bred that one myself," he said offhandedly, no longer looking at Mae Tupelo. His eyes were on the woman from Puget as he stripped the damp husk from the seedling. "Would you like it?" he asked. "I don't know if it'll grow in all that snow in Puget, though."

She laughed in surprise. "We get less snow than they do in Washington."

"That's ridiculous," Jeron said with scorn. "I can read a map. You're as far north.as Maine, and Uncle Shef told me about Maine winters. You don't have to take it if you don't want it," he added, and carelessly tossed the husk back in its rope basket.

The Vice President sighed softly. Aunt Eve took pity on her. "The red, white, and blue is for you, for sure," she said. "Now, do you want to see how this thing works?"

There was a sudden air of tension in the ship. "You mean go up for a flight?" Darien asked after a moment.

"Sure, why not?"

But the Amish woman looked so startled and worried that the Vice President shook her head. Jimbo would kill her, but she said, "No, really, I mean thanks a lot but no. Do you think you could tell us a little bit about how it runs, though?"

Jeron reached back and pulled young Bill forward. The boy instantly piped, "Well, those are the seats we sit in. It's pretty easy to fly this thing, but sometimes your delta-Vs get pretty hairy if you're operating in an atmosphere, so we tied ourselves in." He frowned as he noticed an expression of incomprehension on the faces peering at him, and Darien McCullough cut in:

"That doesn't exactly explain what makes it go."

"Oh, that." He patted a white enamel cylinder about the size of a domestic hot-water tank. "It's just thermonuke, inside here. There's a plasma cord in there about the size of my finger, and it's real hot. Ski says it's about a million Kelvins—of course, it's turned off now."

"I think they mean how do we contain that much energy," Aunt Eve offered. She sighed and scratched her head. "Let's see. I helped draw up that Godel message that explained the whole thing, but it's a long time ago. . . . The first thing to do is renormalization. Do you people know what that means?"

Obviously they did not; Darien was looking intent but unsure, the Amish lady skeptical and somewhat unhappy, only the Vice President seemed comfortable. "Good lord, no," she said, "but I do like hearing those words, so go right ahead and explain it."

"All right." Eve thought for a second. "Well, everybody knows that quantum field theory says even empty space has to contain infinite energy, right? That's just Heisenberg. In a practical sense that does not usually make any difference, because you don't get work done from energy, you get work from changes in energy states or differences between energy states. So when the old physicists wanted to do mathematics about energy in space they dropped out the term for the infinite energy; that was called renormalizing it."

Darien raised a hand. "Are you saying that you, what is it, renormalize equations?"

"No, no, no! We renormalize space." Eve looked around to the children for help, but they were as perplexed as she. None of them had ever been exposed to human beings, at least to human beings over the age of two, who did not understand simple physics. She said, unsure of herself but unable to find a better way, "If you read the Godel message, you probably remember something Ski put in; it was a quotation from John Wheeler. It went like this: 'Geometry bent one way describes gravitation. Rippled another way somewhere else it manifests all the qualities of an electro magnetic wave. Excited at still another place, the magic material that is space shows itself as a particle.' Do you see? It's all geometry. All we have to do is arrange the geometry properly and the rest takes care of itself; space is renormalized, energy flows, and we move."

Jeromolo Bill giggled, "Look at them, Aunt Eve!" he squeaked. "They're not taking in a word of it, are they?"

The Vice President could find it in heart to love even bratty kids; she patted Bill on the head, looked at her Mickey Mouse watch, and sighed, "Oh, my goodness! Look at the time! Thanks for the tour, but if you folks are going to get any lunch I better be getting back to the White House."

Lunch was only Chesapeake Bay oyster chowder and a nice salad from the Vice President's own kitchen garden. Her KPs didn't need to be supervised for that, so what she said was not true; and as she walked back to the White House she was worrying.

Little bitty untruths, of course, never worried the Vice President. Social lies rested lightly on her; she was not a theoretician, and abstract arguments in that area were as meaningless to her as what that John Wheeler, whoever he was, had said about gravitation, whatever he meant by that. She knew what gravitation was—it was what made you puff when you went up a flight of stairs. It wasn't geometry, and neither was matter, and what difference did it all make, for heaven's sake? Mae Tupelo did not deny that in some theoretical sense all that stuff might be true—but who cared?—or even that there might be some abstract rule requiring truth-telling rather than falsehood, say when you were testifying under oath. None of that affected her life. It often turned out that the truth hurt people, and a pleasant lie left them at peace.

The truths she was carrying around right now were very likely to hurt. The truthful thing to have said to the visitors was, "My husband's up to something tricky and I have to find out what it is," but a person couldn't say that. And the truthful thing to say to her husband, when she saw him, was, "You're never in this world going to be able to handle that ship, so forget it." And maybe she would say that; but before she tried any truths on James B. she was going to find out what falsehoods he had been laying on her.

Mae Tupelo did not expect her husband to have no secrets at all. He had plenty. She could name three of them right off—their names were Rose and Diane, and that little Marine orderly, Sylvia. That didn't mean anything. That was just the dog in any man. No, the kind of secrets she didn't want Jimbo keeping from her were like that bad thing with Dieter von Knefhausen—Mae Tupelo was sure she could have kept him alive, good thick stews and fresh greens, instead of whatever he got in that silly old dungeon—and, most especially, whatever it was that was going on now.

The question was, what could she do about it?

One way was to ask him. That was the wrong way. The Vice President had better ones, and so by the time the President was up in the Lincoln Room digging out his ears and buttoning his shirt to be ready for lunch, she had already had a few words with her own personal CIA. "Jimbo," she said, "you got to have the White House Guard off practicing commando tactics in Rock Creek Park, and it's not going to work."

He scowled like a thundercloud. "What's not going to work?" he demanded dangerously, but she stood up to him.

"Hijacking that spaceship. That's what's not going to work. Not counting it's a really mean thing to do, you can't get away with it."

He sat down and reached for a Fresca, his gaze calculating as he looked at his wife. "You think not?" he inquired.

"I know it, James B!"

He shook his head. "How they going to stop me, Mae? They've got no guns. You see any guns there anywhere?"

"There's worse things than guns! Besides, how do you know what they've got up in that big ship up in orbit?"

"Up in orbit's not here. Besides, once we get this one, we could just run up there and take that one too, right? What's to stop us?"

"We-don't-know-how is to stop us, for one thing."

He grinned. "They do, honey."

"Jimbo! They're company! How's it going to look if you make slaves out of them?"

He finished the Fresca and tossed the bottle out onto the overgrown lawn. "You know," he said sweetly, "you might be right at that, Mae. I'm going to have to think this over, but right now it's about time to eat lunch."

The President joined his guests for the drinks on the porch and then wandered off for a private word with the guard commandant, and that was all the Vice President needed. She had not moved more than five yards from Jeron, waiting for her chance. Of course he was talking real close with that Puget woman—same dog in every man —but there might not be another chance. "Mr. Jeron, honey," she said, low and fast, "by this time tomorrow night my husband's going to have armed men in your ship, and you're not going to get in it until you do what he wants you to."

"That's silly," said Jeron scornfully. "He can't do that!" But the Puget girl put her hand on his arm.

"Yes, he can, Jeron. Listen to Mrs. Tupelo—what should Jeron do?"

The Vice President smiled and bobbed her head as though they were talking about the drinks or the other guests or the weather, her eyes never off the door her husband had left through. "Though it gravels me to say it," she said, "I think you ought to take that little flight you were talking about, and don't come back for a while. Do it soon. Do it before he gets up tomorrow morning, because after he's had his coffee it's going to be too late."