“Want to come over here with me and raise a kid?”
“You’re drunk, Hank,” she said.
“Not very,” I told her. “I’m serious. Why don’t you chuck Beta-2 City to your next in command, take a shuttle boat over here, and I’ll resign to an advisory position and you and me will live in idyllic free fall in the Center Section for the rest of our natural lives — which may not be very long; so think it over, Lee.”
“This desert got you down, Hank?”
“Lee, it’s such a waste! How the hell did we know we were going to run into this sort of nonsense? If we had known, maybe we could have prepared for it. But at this rate we’ll be running through meson fields as thick as this or thicker all the way out, and they eat through the hull just like a file.”
“Or we could come out of this one in ten minutes and not hit another one the whole time left. We don’t know what’s out there, Hank.”
“Hell, a purple dragon with crepe-paper wings may be out there too, waiting for jelly beans like us to roll by. But it’s not likely. The only thing that is likely is that we’ll be gnawed up by these damn meson fields until there isn’t a scrap of anything resembling a starship left. The outside viewscope already shows that the hull looks like a road map of the North Atlantic states. Three hundred years of this and we’ll be lucky if a lump of Swiss cheese gets to Leffer. Lee, come over and spend the time with me.”
“Hank,” she said. (I couldn’t see her. We always talked to each other with our eyes black. I hadn’t seen her in person since she was twenty-two. The idea of her pushing seventy now made me feel funny.) “Hank, suppose we do get out of the desert. I’ve got at least ten years of teaching to do if these kids are to get through the next three hundred years alive and look like something Earth would be proud of. By then we’ll both probably be ready for the Death’s Head.”
“There’re others to teach them, Lee.”
“Not enough. You know that.”
I was quiet for maybe six seconds. “Yeah, I know that.”
Then she surprised me, and I realized in a moment how much all this sand count business was taking out of her. She said very quickly: “The next time the sand count reaches a hundred and twenty-five, I’ll come to you, Hank.” And she switched off. I feel like a little less than two cents.
The entry ended and Joneny glanced at the next: “Sand count up to eleven,” and the next, “Sand count down to eight,” and the next, “Sand count down to seven,” then: “Sand count steady at seven.” For almost a month it continued there. Then an alarmed: “Sand count up to nineteen.” “Sand count up to thirty-two.” An hour later: “Sand count up to thirty-nine.” An hour on: “Sand count seventy-nine.” And the next hour:
How it happened, or why, I don’t know. I’d been watching the needle creep up for the past three hours. Sand count ninety-four; sand count one hundred seventeen. I felt like I was nothing but sweat sherbet, frozen and useless. Then the damn inter-vessel phone was shouting at my elbow. When I punched the switch, I heard Lee’s voice: “Oh, for God’s sake, Hank, what are we going to do? What’s happening? Why?”
“Lee, I–I don’t know.”
“Jesus Christ, Hank, sand count one hundred thirty-eight, one forty-nine. Oh, Hank, we had a dream, a dream about the stars! And now we won’t get there. Oh, God, we won’t get there!” She was crying. I was just numb. When I looked at the meter, the needle was moving with the speed of a second hand on a watch.
“It’s a hundred and ninety-six, Hank. I’m coming over. I’m coming over to you, Hank.” I could hardly hear her for the tears.
It was at two hundred and nine. “You’re crazy,” I cried back at her. “Even the shuttle boat would be eaten up before you got two hundred miles. Oh, goddamn it, Lee, we won’t make it.”
She was still crying, “I’m coming to you, Hank,” and the needle soared somewhere up past three hundred. Then — it just reversed itself and whipped back down to zero, pausing for about three seconds at forty-five before it slipped off the other end of the scale. My first thought was that the meter had broken.
I could just hear Lee trying to catch her breath on the other end of the phone. “Hank?”
“Lee?”
“We’re out of it, Hank.” Nothing was broken, except maybe something inside me. “We’re in the sea again. It’s clear sailing, Hank.” Then she said, “I am coming to see you. I won’t stay, but I want to see you.”
Joneny turned the page and read on.
For half an hour the exhaust from her shuttle boat was like a wisp of wild hair blowing brightly on the viewscope. She came in with her eyes clear and her ears open and I went down to the tube to meet her. I saw her walk in. She must have seen me and paused for a moment. I think she raised her head, and I saw her brown eyes sparkling, and her black hair shaking to her shoulders. I saw the slightly pugged nose and the clear alabaster skin and the smile on lips just a trifle full. Then she came toward me — and I realized what I had seen.
“Hank,” she said when she had walked — very slowly — along three quarters of the way. Now I went toward her. Her hair was short, white, her eyes were wide, and there was no smile on her face. She breathed hard. “Hank?” It was as though she didn’t believe it was me. Then she said, “Hank, you’re going to have to get me out of this gravity before I have a stroke.”
“Huh?”
“I haven’t been well recently and I’ve been keeping to the free-fall section.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure,” I said.
“I’m afraid my feet are killing me.” She gave a little laugh.
The voice was hers. I had followed its aging over the forty years that separated us from Earth. But when I put my arm around her shoulder to help her, the skin was like loose cloth over her bones. We got to the edge of the tube and into the lift. When we reached the free-fall section, she got a hell of a lot more relaxed. Once she stopped and looked at me. “I guess…you’ve come through in a little better shape than I have, Hank. Well, they say pretty women age quickly. And I used to be…be very pretty, wasn’t I, Hank?” She laughed again. “Oh, forget it, Hank. Boy, now I know what it means to have sore feet.”
“Sore feet?” I asked.
“Hasn’t that gotten around this City yet? That’s what the kids say now when somebody’s been in free fall too long and they come into a gravity section. Don’t worry. It’ll get here. It’s funny the way we pick up the kids’ expressions. They pick ’em up from us, make up new meanings. Then we get ’em back again. They affect us almost as much as we affect them.” She sighed. “We’ve put so much Earth into them, they want everything to be Earth again. So they keep giving Earth names and Earth phrases to things that belong out here. Do you think we’ll make it, Hank?”
I didn’t say anything. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. She waited with a smile sitting so strangely on the loose skin of her lips. Then the smile went and she looked down at her wrinkled hands. When she looked up, there was something like fear in her expression.
“Lee, we’re old now, aren’t we? It doesn’t seem so long.” I said it almost like a question, as though perhaps she could explain to me how it had happened.
When she did speak, she just said, “I think I better go back now.”
We exchanged two more words, just at the shuttle boat door, and both of them were “Good-bye.” I took her in my arms, and she held on to my shoulders as tight as she could. But it wasn’t very, and I let her go quickly. Then she was just a wisp of silver light on the view screen.
I was in a bad mood for the rest of the day and the kids avoided me like plague. But that evening I put in a call to Beta-2 City.