Steel Beach

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I'm no good at mathematics. I never was good at math, so why should I keep resorting to these numeric metaphors? Maybe my ignorance helps protect me. For whatever reason, here it is:

If you're like me, you try to make the equations of your life balance out in a way favorable to you, in a way such that you can live with the answer. Surely there's a way to fudge this factor so the solution is a nice smooth line from y to x, a line that points to that guy over there. Not at me. There's just got to be a constant we can insert into this element that will make the two sides of the equation-the universe the way it is, and the universe the way we want it to be-agree in perfect karmic Euclidean harmony.

Alas, a lot of people seem to be better at it than I.

I tried, I tried till my mind was raw, to make the CC responsible for Mario's death.

There was the first, trivial solution to the problem, of course. That was straightforward, and really solved nothing: the CC was responsible, because he created the chaos that drove me into the cave.

So what?

If Mario had been killed by a falling boulder, would it help me to get angry at the boulder? Not in the way I needed help. No, dammit, I wanted somebody to blame. What I desperately wanted to believe was that the CC had lured me out of the cave so that some unseen minion, some preternatural power, some gris-gris voodoo necromancy had been able to steal over my darling and suck the breath from his lungs like a black cat.

But I couldn't make it add up. It would have taken powers of paranoid imaging far beyond mine to make it work.

So why did he die?

It was almost a week before I really wondered how he died. What had killed him. After I abandoned the idea that the CC had deliberately murdered him, that is. Was it a malformation of the heart the medicos had overlooked? Could it have been some chemical imbalance? A newly-mutated disease of dinosaurs, thus far harmless to humans? Did he die of too much love?

It was hard to get answers for a while there, in the chaos following the Big Glitch. The big net was not operational, you couldn't just drop your dime and pop the question and know the CC would find the answer in some forgotten library system. The answers were there, the trick was to retrieve them. For a few months Luna was thrown back to pre-Information Era.

I finally found a medical historian who was able to track down a likely cause of death to put on the certificate, not that Mario was going to have a death certificate. The regular doctors had been able to eliminate all the easy answers just by looking at the read-outs of my obstetrical examinations, the ones I had before visiting Heinlein Town made further exams too risky. They also had fetal tissue samples. They were able to say unequivocally that there had been no hole in my darling's heart, nor any other physical malformation. His body chemistry would have been fine. They laughed at my idea of a new disease, and I didn't mention my choked-with-love theory. But they couldn't say what it was, so they scratched their heads and said they'd have to exhume the body to find out for sure. And I said if they did I'd exhume their hearts out of their rotten chests with a rusty scalpel and fry them up for lunch, and shortly after that I was forcibly ejected from the premises.

The historian didn't take long to find some musty old tomes and to wrest from them this information: S.I.D.S. It had been an age of medical acronyms, a time when people no longer wanted to attach their names to the new disease they'd discovered, a time when old, perfectly serviceable names were being junked in favor of non-offensive jawbreakers, which quickly were abbreviated to something one could say. This according to my researcher. And SIDS seemed to stand for The Baby Died, and We Don't Know Why.

Apparently babies used to just stop breathing, sometimes. If you didn't happen to be around to jog them, they didn't start again. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Don't anybody ever tell me there's no such thing as progress.

Ned Pepper, back there in Texas, had been the only one to sense it. In Texas, in the 1800's, a country doctor might have intuited something when the baby came out, might have told the mother to keep an extra-special eye on this one, because he seemed sickly. There's damn little of intuition left in modern medicine. Of course, babies don't die of diphtheria, either.

When Ned heard about it it shocked him sober. He began to think he might really be a doctor, and the last I heard he was in medical school and doing pretty damn well. Good for you, Ned.

Lacking the CC to pin the blame on, I quickly fastened it on the only other likely candidate. It didn't take long to compile a lengthy list of things I would have done differently, and an even longer one of things I should have done. Some of them were completely illogical, but logic has nothing to do with the death of a baby. Most of these things were decisions that seemed good at the time, hideous in retrospect.

The big one: How could I justify terminating my pre-natal care? So I'd promised the Heinleiners not to compromise the secret of their null-suits. So what? Was I trying to say my child died because I was protecting a source? I would gladly have betrayed every one of them, root and branch, if it could have helped Mario take that one more breath. And yet…

That was then; this was now. When I'd made the decision to stay away from doctors my reasons had seemed sufficient, and not dangerous. Bear in mind two things: one, my ignorance of the perils of childbirth. I'd simply had no idea there were so many things that could kill a baby, that there was such a thing as SIDS that could hide itself from early examinations, from mid-term detection, even from the midwife during delivery. The test for SIDS was done after birth, and if the child was at risk it was cured on the spot, as routinely as cutting the cord.

So you could argue that I wasn't at fault. Even with the best of care, Mario'd have been just as dead if I'd left the ranch and sought help, and me along with him. The CC had said as much. And I did try to convince myself of that, and I almost succeeded, except for the second thing I bade you to bear in mind, which is that I had no business having a child in the first place.

It's hard for me to remember now, washed as I am in the memory of loving him so dearly, but I haven't tried to hide it from you, my Faithful Reader. I did not love him from the start. I became pregnant foolishly, stayed pregnant mulishly, perversely, for no good reason. While pregnant I felt nothing for the child, certainly no joy in the experience. There were twelve-year-olds who gave birth for better reasons than I. It was only later that he became my whole world and my reason for living. I came to believe that, if I'd loved him that much from the start of his creation, I'd still have him, and that the Biblical scale of my punishment was only fitting.

With all that to wallow in, and with past history as a guide, I expected I'd be dead soon. So I retired to my cabin in Texas and waited to see what form my self-destruction would take.

There had been another culprit to examine before coming to face my own guilt: Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

She tried to contact me several times after the restoration of order. She sent flowers, candy, little gifts of all kinds. She sent letters, which I didn't read at the time. It wasn't even that I was angry; I just didn't want to hear from her.

The last gift was a bulldog puppy. I did read the note tied around her neck, which said she was a direct descendant of the noble line of Ch. Sir Winston Disraeli Plantaganet. She was so ugly she went right off the end of the Gruesome Scale and back around to Cute. But her bumptious good nature and wet puppy kisses threatened to cheer me up, to interfere with my wallowing, so I popped her into a cryokennel and added her to my last will and testament, which was my sole useful occupation at the time. If I lived, I'd thaw her.

I did live, I did thaw her, and Miss Maggie is a great comfort to me.

As for Liz, she abdicated her throne and committed herself to a dipso academy, got out, fell off, joined A.A. and found sobriety. I'm told she's been clean for six months now and has become a major-league bore about it.

It's true what she did was dastardly, and although I understand that it's the liquor that does the shit, it's the boozer that takes the drink, so I can't really let her off on that account… but I do forgive her. She had no hand in Mario's death, though she bears a heavy load for some others. Thanks for the mutt, Liz. Next time I see you, I'll buy you a drink.

I did live, and for some time that was a wonderment to me. It seemed the CC really had been telling the truth. My self-destructive urges had come from him.

I'll forgive you if you swallowed that. I believed it, too, at least long enough to get over the worst of my grief and remorse, which is probably just what the CC intended when he told that particular whopper. How do I know it was a lie? I don't really, but I have to assume it was. Perhaps there was a grain of truth in it. It's possible that some seed was planted in my psyche. But I lived it, and I remember it, and the plain truth is I wanted to die. I wish there was some quick and easy way to explain why. Hell, if there was a long and complicated way I'd set it down here; I'm not shy about agonizing, nor about introspection. But I really don't know. It seems so dumb to go through all that and not come out of it with a deeper insight, but the best I can say is that for a while I wanted to kill myself, and now I don't.

That's why I'm taking it as fact that the CC lied to me. Even if he didn't, I'm responsible for my actions. I can't believe in a suicide compulsion. If the urge was contagious, its germ fell upon fertile ground.

But it's funny, isn't it? My first attempts seemed prompted by nothing more than a gargantuan funk. Then I found a reason to live, and lost him, and now I feel more alive than ever.

I wasn't so philosophical at first. When it became apparent to me that I was going to live, when I gave up heaping blame on myself (I'll never entirely give that up, but I can handle it now), when I'd learned the how of his death, I became obsessed with why. I started going to churches again. I usually did it with a few drinks under my belt. Somewhere during the service I'd stand up and begin an angry prayer, the gist of which was why did You do it, You slime-sucking Son of a Big Bang? I'd stand on pews and shout at the ceiling. Usually I got ejected quickly. Once I got arrested for tossing a chair through a stained glass window. There's no doubt about it, I was pretty crazy for a while there.

I'm better now.

Things got back to normal quicker than anyone had a right to expect.

Whatever they did to the CC, it affected mainly his higher "conscious" functions. Vital services were interrupted only during the Glitch itself, and then only locally. By the time the CC visited me in the Double-C Bar the vast physical plant that is the life blood of Luna was humming right along.

There were differences, some of which still linger. Communications are iffy much of the time because the still-severed parts of the CC don't talk to each other as easily as they used to. But phone calls get through, the trains still run on time. Things take a little longer-sometimes a lot longer, if they require a computer search-but they get done.

A measure of that is Susquehanna, Rio Grande, and Columbia Railroad, planned, approved, and built entirely since the Big Glitch. It's now possible to travel from Pennsylvania to Texas on one of the SRG amp;C's three wood-burning steam-powered trains in only five days instead of the thirty minutes it used to take on the Maglev. This is called progress. Most of that time is spent being gently rocked on a siding while holos of virgin wilderness slide by the windows, but you'd swear it was real. It's been a shot in the arm for Texas tourism, and a financial bonanza to Jake and the Mayor, who thought it up and pushed it through. Congratulations, Jake.

And to Elise, too. Last I heard my star pupil had her own table at the Alamo where she fleeces tourists by the dozens every day. Know when to fold 'em, honey.

I went out to visit Fox the other day, still hard at work in Oregon. We swapped Glitch stories, as everybody still does who hasn't seen each other for a while, and he had been little affected. He hadn't even heard of it for the first twenty-four hours, because his own computers functioned independently of the CC, like Callie's. Turns out I could have hid out in Oregon as well as at the CC, but I don't think anything would have turned out differently. It wasn't a friendly visit, though, since I was there representing the SRG amp;C, whose tunnel was half-way from Lonesome Dove to the shores of the Columbia, and which Fox had vehemently opposed. He wanted to keep Oregon pristine, didn't even want to allow the small edge settlement, a logging camp to be called Sweet Home, which would be the northwest terminus of the railroad. I told him a few guys in plaid shirts with sawblades weren't going to hurt his precious forest, and he called me a capitalist plunderer. A plunderer, imagine that! I'm afraid that what spark had been there was long extinguished. Kiss my axe, Fox.

A few months after the crisis, when I was finally emerging from my church-vandalizing funk, I had need of Darling Bobbie's services again, so I went looking for him only to find he'd turned himself back into Crazy Bob and was no longer on the Hadleyplatz. He wasn't back on the Leystrasse, either. I finally ran him to ground in Mall X, the ultra-avant fleshmart, where he now specialized in only the more outrageous body styles favored by the young. He tried to talk me into getting my head put in a box, but I reminded him it was me and Brenda who were responsible for that particular fashion outrage, with our story on the Grand Flack. He did the work I required for old times' sake, but rather grudgingly, I thought. Crazy again, after all these years.

As for the Grand Flack himself, I heard from him, too. He called me up to thank me. I couldn't imagine what I'd done to deserve that, and didn't really want to listen to him, but I gathered he now regretted all the time he'd spent on the outside, seeing to the affairs of the Flacks. In prison he was able to devote himself to television around the clock. He wanted me to speak to the judge and see about extending his sentence. I'll surely try, old man.

One of the first changes you notice after the Glitch is how much more medical treatment you need. My body is still full of nanobots, I assume, but they don't work as well or with as much coordination as they used to. I never actually researched why it's like that, having very little interest in the subject. But for whatever reason, I now have to go in almost monthly to have cancers eradicated. I don't mind, much, but a lot of people do, and it's just one more thing adding pressure to the Restore the Cortex movement, those folks who want to bring back the CC, only bigger and wiser. We're so spoiled in this day and age. We tend to forget what a nuisance cancer used to be.

That's where I ran into Callie, at the medico shop, having her own cancers removed. Runs in the family, as they say.

We didn't speak. This wasn't an unusual condition between us; I've spent half my life not speaking to Callie, or not being spoken to.

She had come to get me up at the cave. That's probably a good thing, as I don't know for sure if I'd have been able to get up from the grave and walk home on my own. It may even be a good thing that she asked me the question she had no right to ask, because it made me angry enough to forget my grief for long enough to scream and shout at her and get her screaming and shouting back. She asked me who the father was. She, who had never allowed me to ask that question, she who had made my childhood so miserable I used to dream about a Daddy arriving on a white horse, telling me it had all been a big mistake, that he really loved me and that Callie was a gypsy witch who'd kidnapped me from the cradle.

Sometimes I think our society is screwed up about this father business. Just because we can all bear children, is that an excuse to virtually eliminate the role of father? Then I think about Brenda and her old man, and about how common that sort of thing used to be, and you wonder if males should be allowed around little children at all.

All I knew for sure was I missed mine, and Callie said she'd tell me if I really wanted to know such a silly thing, and I said don't bother because I think I know who it is, and she laughed and said you don't understand anything, and that's when we stopped talking and walked down the hill, together but alone, as we'd always been. See you in twenty years, Callie.

Still, I think I do know.

As for Kitten Parker… why spoil his day?

A year has passed now. I still think of Mario. And I often wake up in the middle of the night seeing Winston tearing the arm off that King City policewoman. I never found out what happened to her. She was as much a victim as any of us; the KC Cops were dragooned into the war by the CC, had no idea what they were doing, and too many of them died.

A year has passed, and we change, and yet things stay the same. The world rolls over the holes left by the departed, fills in those spaces. I didn't know how I'd run the Texian without Charity, but her sources started coming to me with stories, and before long one of them had emerged to take her place. He's not near as pretty as she as, but he has the makings of a reporter.

I'm still running the paper, still teaching at the school. And I'm the new Mayor of New Austin. I didn't run, but when the citizen's committee put my name forward I didn't pull out, either. The Gila Monster column is still as venomous as ever. Maybe it's a conflict of interest, but no one seems too concerned. If the opposition doesn't like it, let them start their own paper.

Once a week I have a guest column in the Daily Cream. I think it's Walter's way of trying to lure me back. Not likely, Walter. I think that part of my life is done. Still, you never know. I didn't think they could talk me into being Mayor, either.

I saw Walter only last week, in the newly re-opened Blind Pig. The old one had been destroyed by fire during the Glitch and for a while Deep Throat had threatened to leave it shuttered. But he bowed under the weight of public demand and threw a big party to celebrate. Most of King City's fourth estate was there, and those that weren't stoned when they arrived soon became so.

We did all the things reporters do when gathered in groups: drank, assassinated the characters of absent colleagues, told all the scandalous stories about celebrities and politicians we couldn't print, drank, hinted at stories we were about to break we actually knew nothing about, re-hashed old fights and uncovered new conspiracies in high places, drank, threw up, drank some more. A few punches were thrown, a few tempers soothed, many hands of poker were played. The new Blind Pig wasn't bad, but nothing is ever as good as the good old days, so many complaints were heard. I figured that fifty years of mopped-up blood and spilled drinks and smokes and broken crockery and the new place would be pretty much like the old and only me and a few others would even remember the old Pig had burned.

At one point I found myself sitting by the big round table in the back room where serious cards were played. I wasn't playing-nobody in that room had trusted me at a card table in years. Walter was there, scowling at his hand as if losing the pitiful little pot would send him home to his fifty-room mansion penniless. Cricket was there, too, doing his patented does-a-flush-beat-a-straight befuddled routine, looking ever so dapper a gent now that he'd affected nineteenth-century clothing as a more or less permanent element of his style. In his double-breasted tweed jacket and high starched collar he was easily the most interesting guy in the room, but the spark was gone. Too bad, Cricket. If you'd only had any sense we could have made each other's lives miserable for five, six years, and parted heartily detesting each other. Think of all the great fights you missed, damn you, and eat your heart out. And Cricket, a friend should take you aside and tell you to drop the innocent act, at the poker table at least. It worked better when you were a girl, and it wasn't that great even then.

And who should be sitting behind the biggest stack of chips, calm, smiling faintly, cards face-down on the table and worrying the hell out of everyone else… but Brenda Starr, confidant of celebrities, the toast of three planets, and well on her way to becoming the most powerful gossip journalist since Louella Parsons. There was very little left of the awkward, earnest, ignorant child I'd reluctantly taken on two years earlier. She was still incredibly tall and just about as young, but everything else had changed. She dressed now, and while I thought her choices were outrageous she had the confidence to make her own style. The old Brenda could now be seen only in the cub reporter groupie at her elbow, attentive to her every need, a gorgeous gumdrop who no doubt had grown up wanting to meet and hobnob with famous people, as Brenda had, as I had. I watched her turn her cards over, rake in another pot, and lean back watching the new deal. Her hand stroked the knee of the girl, casually possessive, and she winked at me. Don't spend it all in one place, Brenda.

During the next hand the talk turned, as it eventually does at these things, to the affairs of the world. I didn't contribute; I'd found early on that if people noticed me they tended to clam up about the Big Glitch. This was a group that kept few secrets. Everyone there knew about Mario, and many of them knew of my troubles with the CC. Some probably knew of my suicides. It made them cautious, as most probably couldn't imagine what it must be like to lose a child like that. I wanted to tell them it was all right, I was okay, but it's no use, so I just sat back and listened.

First there was the CC, and should we bring him back. The consensus was that we shouldn't, but we would. Having him the way he was was just so damn handy. Sure, he screwed up there at the end, but the Big Brains can handle that, can't they? I mean, if they can put a man on Pluto a week after he left Luna, why don't they spend some of that money to make things easier and more convenient to the taxpaying citizens? I think that's what will happen. We're a democracy-especially now that the CC's no longer around to meddle-and if we vote for damn foolishness, damn foolishness is what we'll get. I just hope they make provision this time around for somebody to give the New CC hugs on a regular basis. Otherwise, he's apt to get pettish again.

There was no consensus on the other big topic of the day. It was a question that cut deeply and would certainly cause many more shouting matches before it was resolved. What do you do with the new things the CC discovered during his rogue years? In particular, how about this memory-recording and cloning business, eh?

The Hitler analogy was brought up and bandied about. Under Hitler's reign a Dr. Mengele performed unethical experiments-sheer torture, mainly-on human subjects. I don't know if anything useful was learned, but suppose there was. Was it ethical to use that knowledge, to benefit from that much evil? It seems to me your answer depends a lot on your world view. Myself, I'm not sure if it's ethical (which probably says a lot about my world view), but I don't think it's wrong, and I have a personal involvement in the question. Right or wrong though, I do think it will be used, and so did just about everybody else in the room, reporters being the way they are. People were going through the records the CC didn't destroy-I'm one of those records in a way, but not a very forthcoming one-looking for new knowledge, and if it has a practical use, it will be used. Cry over that if you're so inclined. Myself, I guess in the end I feel knowledge has no right or wrong. It's just knowledge. It's not like the law, where some knowledge is admissible and some tainted by the method of its discovery.

Minamata was only one of the CC's horror chambers, and not the worst. Some of those stories have come out, some are still being suppressed. Most of them you'd really rather not know, trust me.

But what about the problem whose penultimate answer had been a being who thought he was Andrew MacDonald minus all human feelings, and whose final solution were the troops of mindlessly loyal soldiers that gave me so much trouble on the first day of the Glitch? Because they weren't really the end product. The CC had felt the technique was perfectible, and I have no reason to doubt it. That was the one the public was clamoring to know more about: immortality.

Yeah, but it wasn't really immortality, somebody said. All it meant was that somebody else very like you, with your memories, would live. You, the person sitting here at this table holding the most terrible cards you ever saw, would be just as dead as ever. Once the public understood that they'd realize it wasn't worth the trouble.

Don't you believe it, somebody else said. My cards aren't all that bad, and it's the only hand I've got, so I'll play 'em. Up to now people's only shot at living forever has been to produce something that will live after us. Artists do it with their art, most of the rest of us produce children. It's our way of living on. I think this would appeal to the same urge. It'd be like a child, only it'd be you, too.

At that point somebody nudged somebody else and the thought went around the table, silently, that we oughtn't to be talking about children… you know… with Hildy around. At least I think that's what happened, maybe I'm too sensitive. For whatever reason the conversation died, with only an unexpected apostrophe at the end, in the form of Brenda's little gumdrop looking around with innocent eyes and piping, "What's wrong with it? It sounds like a great idea to me." It was her only comment of the evening, but it put the kibosh on my own theory, which was that it was a useless idea, that people would rather have children than duplicate themselves-essentially, not to put all your spare cash into memory-cloning stocks. Suddenly, looking into that innocent face of youth, I wasn't so sure. Time will tell.

Two years of my life. Probably the most eventful, but time will tell about that, too.

I am sitting in the parlor car of the Prairie Chief, destination Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I decided since I'm part owner of the SRG amp;C it was high time I took a ride. It's a school holiday so for once I have the time. I'm writing, in longhand, with a fountain pen, on foolscap SRG amp;C stationery resting on a mother-of-pearl inlaid mahogany table set with an inkwell and a crystal vase full of fresh bluebonnets. Nothing but the best for the passengers on the Prairie Chief. The waiter has just brought me a steaming cup of tea, with lemon. Ahead I can hear the chugging of the engine, No. 439, and I can smell a hint of its smoke. Behind me the porter will soon be turning down my Pullman bunk, making it with crisp white sheets, leaving a mint and a complimentary bottle of toilet water on the pillow. Also in that direction the cook is selecting a cut of prime Kansas City beef, to be cooked rare, suitable for the owner's dinner.

All right, it's brontosaurus, if you want to get technical. It might even be from the Double-C Bar.

We'll soon be pulling into "Fort Worth," where we'll take on wood and water. I don't plan to get off, since I'm told it's just a dreary cowtown full of rowdy and possibly dangerous cowhands, quite unsuitable for a well-brought-up lady. (That's what I'm told; I happen to know, since I watched it being built, that it's just a big room with rails and a dirt street running through it, scattered with wood buildings and backed by a great holo show.)

Outside my window dusk is gathering. Not long ago we saw a herd of buffalo, and not long after that a group of wild red Indians, who reined their mounts and watched solemnly as the iron horse huffed by. From Central Casting, and on tape, but who cares? The parlor car is crowded with Texans and a few returning Pennsylvanians. They all wear their best clothes, not yet too mussed by the journey. Across from me a little Amish girl sits with her parents, watching me write. Next to them is a group of three young single gentlemen, trying not to be too obvious about their interest in the single girl at the escritoire. Soon the boldest of them will come over and ask me to dine with him, and if his line is any better than "Whatcha writin', cutie?" he will have a companion for dinner.

But not for bed. It would be a pointless exercise. The service I lately required of Darling Bobby/Crazy Bob was to render me asexual, like Brenda when I first met her. This was probably foolish and certainly extreme, but I found that I couldn't bear the thought of sex, and in fact loathed that opening that had brought Mario into the world for his short, perfect time. I had even less interest in being male again. So I jumped off the sexual choo-choo train and I'm not sorry I did it. I think I'll be ready to board again any day now, but it's been a relief not to be at the mercy of hormones, of either polarity. I may do it every twenty years or so, as sort of a sabbatical.

As darkness falls and the train rocks gently, I realize I'm happier than I've been in a long time.

Now we've spent some time together, and it's almost time to leave you. You've met Hildebrandt, Hildegarde, and Hildething: railroad tycoon, publisher, teacher, syndicated columnist, bereaved mother and tireless crusader for pronoun reform. There's really only one more thing worth knowing about him/her/it.

I'm going to the stars.

What I have is an invitation to make a reservation. I didn't mention this earlier, maybe it slipped my mind, but about a week after Mario died I sat down for a very long time with Walter's pistol, a bottle of good tequila, and one round. I drank, and I loaded and unloaded the gun, and drank some more and pointed it at things: a tree, the side of the cabin, my head. And I thought about what the CC had said about a virus, and what I had concluded about the veracity of that statement, and wondered if there was anything I could think of I really wanted to do? All those other things… sure, they bring me satisfaction, particularly the teaching, but they wouldn't serve any more as the answer to the question "What do you do, Hildy?"

I thought of something, thought about it some more, and hied myself out to the Heinlein, where I asked Smith if I could go along when he took off, worthless as my skills might be to his enterprise. And he said sure, Hildy, I meant to ask you if you were interested. We'll need somebody to handle the publicity, for one thing, to establish the right spin-control when it's time to leave, and most especially when we get back. We'll need advice on how to market our stories with maximum profit. Hell, most of us will probably need somebody to ghost-write them, as well. Scientists, test pilots, technical types, we all get tongue-tied when it comes to that part; just read the early accounts of the space pioneers. Go see Sinbad over in the publicity department, see if you can't get him straightened out. If you're any good, I expect to make you head of the department in a week. You couldn't be worse at it than Sinbad.

So this is in the nature of a farewell. All the people I've mentioned so far… not a one of them will go. They're just not the type. I love them to various degrees (yes, even you, Callie), but they are Luna-bound, to a man and woman. "Hansel," "Gretel," "Libby," (who recovered, by the way), "Valentine Michael Smith;" these will be my shipmates, whether we leave next year, in twenty years, or in fifty years. The rest of you are already left behind.

Teaching, railroading, running the Texian, these are all things I do. But in my endless spare time (Hah!) I do what I can to further the aims of the Heinleiners and their crazy project. Result: a two percent increase in inquiries during the last year. Not exactly setting the world on fire, but give me time. When I've done all I can in that regard I hang around. You got a bottle you want washed, a trash pail that needs emptying, a whoosis that needs polishing? Give it to the Hildething and it will get done. There is no job too menial for me, mainly because I'm completely useless at the important jobs. My aim is to become so indispensable to the project that it would be unthinkable to leave me behind. Go without Hildy? Cripes, who would shine my shoes and rub my feet?

And there you have it. I promised you no neat conclusion, and I think I've delivered on that. I warned you of loose ends, and I can see a whole tangle of them. What of the Invaders, for instance? Brother, I don't know. Last time anybody checked they were still in charge of our fair home planet, and unlikely to be evicted soon. If we ever get around to it, that's another story.

What will we find out there? I don't know that, either, and that's why I'm going along. Alien intelligences? I wouldn't bet against it. Strange worlds? I'd say that's a lock. Vast empty spaces, human tragedy and hope. God. Mario's soul. Your wildest dream and your worst nightmare all could be out there.

Or maybe we'll find Elvis and Silvio in a flying saucer singing old-timey rock and roll.

Think what a story it'll be.

– Eugene, Oregon

May 2, 1991