While she was looking at the photograph, her hand made its own way into the pocket of her dressing gown and emerged holding a strip of bubbled tinfoil. Alice put the picture down and ejected a silver-and-blue capsule from the strip. She raised the tiny ovoid to her mouth, but hesitated without swallowing it. For the past week – in accordance with Dr Kinley’s suggestion – she had progressively delayed the taking of the first cap by an extra hour every day. The aim, the shining goal, was to get through an entire day without any psychotropic medication at all. If that could be achieved just once there would be prospects of further successes and of finally becoming a whole woman again.
Alice rolled the capsule between her finger and thumb, and knew this was not to be her day of triumph – the children had seen to that. Harold from three doors along the block, or Jean from the house on the corner, or Carl from the next street. With the casual ruthlessness of the very young they had long ago deduced that her illness made her an easy prey, and they had declared a quiet war. Alice placed the capsule on her tongue, yielding to its promise of a few hours of peace, then an irksome thought occurred to her. While she was asleep the broken window in the living room would admit dust, insects, possibly even human intruders. There had once been a time when she could have slept contentedly in an unlocked house, but the world and all the people in it had been different then.
She took the capsule from her mouth, dropped it into her pocket, and went to fetch a waste bin. It took her fifteen minutes to gather up the larger fragments of glass, an armoury of brittle daggers, and to vacuum the carpet until it was free of gleaming splinters. The next logical step would have been to contact the maintenance department and report the damage, but she had had the telephone disconnected a year previously because its unexpected ringing had jolted her nerves too much. She had even, and quite illegally, cut the wires of the public service loudspeaker in the hall for the same reason. On this occasion it would not have taken long to get dressed and go to a phone in the shopping arcade, but Alice shrank from the idea of leaving the security of the house at such short notice. Her only option was to cover the broken window in some way until she felt strong enough to have it properly mended.
In the spare bedroom, the one Victor had used as a workshop, she found a sheet of alloy wide enough to span the window, and a quick search along the shelves produced a tube of Liqueld adhesive. She carried the materials into the living room, squeezed some adhesive on to the metal window frame and pressed the alloy into position. Within a minute it was so firmly in place that it was beyond her strength to move it. Satisfied that her defences were once again intact, Alice closed up the drapes, returned to the front room and lay down on the divan. The rolls of fat which had gathered around her body in a year of housebound inactivity had hampered her in the work she had just done and she was breathing heavily. The acrid smell of unhealthy perspiration filled the room.
“Damn you, Victor,” she said to the ceiling. “You’d no right.”
Victor Ledane had been one of a team of five who had gone outside the sunward cap of a Model Two habitat to install a parabolic mirror which was going to be used as an auxiliary power source. The work was being done in a hurry against a completion deadline imposed by engineer-politicians back on Earth. As Alice understood it, one of the team had ignored standard procedure and had begun stripping the non-reflective coating from the dish before it was fully secured. Only a fraction of the bright metal surface had been uncovered, but when the mirror accidentally swung free of its mountings a blade of solar heat had sliced open the space suits of two men. And one of them had been Victor Ledane.
Alice and he had been living on Island One for six years at the time. Those had been good years, so absorbing that she had lost contact with her few friends back on Earth, and when the Island’s community director, Les Jerome, had asked her to stay on she had readily agreed. She had known, of course, that the sociologists and psychologists were mainly interested in having a genuine space widow on tap, but with Victor gone nothing seemed very important. Obligingly, she had continued to live in the same house, had waited for the promised return of joy, and had tried not to think about the hard vacuum of space which began centimetres beneath the floor.
The trouble was … there had been no resurgence of joy.
Eventually she had settled for an inferior substitute, one which was dispensed in the form of silver-and-blue capsules, and now it was becoming impossible to distinguish between the two. The only way to restore her judgment would be to start living without the capsules, getting through one week at a time, but the point that Dr Kinley and the others seemed to miss was that – to begin with – it would be necessary to get through that first, endless, impossible day …
Alice fought to hold back the tears of frustration and despair as she realized that, on a day which had begun so disastrously, she was unlikely to hold on as late as noon before seeking relief. It came to her with a rare clarity that, for some people, the burdens of humanity were, quite simply, too great.
There was a gratifying response to Robbie’s announcement.
After initial whoops of disbelief the younger members of the Red Hammers lapsed into silence, and Robbie could tell that – already – they were a little afraid of him. He made himself appear calm as Gordon Webb and the three other boys who made up the Supreme Council took him aside for a talk. Robbie went with them, occasionally glancing back at the juniors, and was thrilled to find that David, Pierre and Drew – even Gordon himself – were treating him almost as an equal. They were holding something in reserve, because he had not yet actually made the run, but Robbie was being given a strong foretaste of what it would be like to be a grown-up, and he found it a satisfying concoction. He wondered if his parents would notice a change in him when he went home for his evening meal, and if they would speculate on what had brought it about …
“… make up your mind which valley you’re going to,” Gordon was saying. “Yellow or Blue?”
Robbie forced his thoughts back to the present, and to the unfortunate necessity of having to qualify for senior status in the gang. Because of the truce with the Yellow Knives there would be less risk in going in their direction, but there would be more glory in a fleeting invasion of Blue Flash territory, and it was the glory that Robbie wanted. The glory, the respect and the recognition.
“Blue,” he said, and then, remembering a line from a television drama, “where else?”
“Good man.” Gordon clapped him on the back. “The Flashers are going to be sick. We’ll show ’em.”
“We’d better get Robbie’s challenge ready,” Drew said.
Gordon nodded. “Are there any of the Blues watching us?”
Pierre took a small telescope from his pocket, moved out from the shade of the rhododendrons and trained the instrument on the Blue Valley residential section which was visible, at an altitude of some one hundred and twenty degrees, above a strip of sky in which the Earth and Moon could be seen sweeping by every twenty-one seconds. As the distance from where the boys stood to the heart of Blue Flash territory was less than two hundred metres for the most part, the telescope was scarcely necessary, but it was a prestigious part of the Supreme Council’s equipment and was always brought into action on such occasions.
“All clear,” Pierre droned presently, and Robbie felt a thrill at being at the centre of such military efficiency.
Gordon cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted instructions to the watchful group of juniors. “Spread out and keep away from here. Create a diversion.”
The smaller boys nodded dutifully and moved away through the neat little park in the direction of their homes. Robbie was disappointed that they would not be present to see him make his run, but he understood the wisdom of Gordon’s precautions. In addition to the risk of alerting the Blue Flashes, there was the more immediate danger of attracting the attention of adults in their own valley.