“Not too bad.”
To distract himself from the pain, Newland thought about the fax last night from Marcia Sonnabend. the public relations director of L-5, Inc., in New York. “A good many questions here,” she had written, “about the recent story in the Toronto Star, which has been picked up by wire services here and abroad. I send faxes of stories from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Examiner. At the board meeting Monday there were suggestions that this publicity is damaging to our position and that it should be counteracted soonest. Please give me your thoughts on this. John Howard of the Times, who has always been sympathetic, is willing to do a telephone interview at your earliest convenience; Time and Newsweek are also interested. If you would like to go ahead with this, please let me know so we can set up times.”
One of the stories had been headlined, L-5 GURU WAVERING IN FAITH?
The steward brought in their breakfast, oatmeal and toast for Newland, scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns and fried tomatoes for Hal. “What time is it in New York now?” Newland asked when they were finished.
“Quarter after one.”
“They’ll be out to lunch. Let’s try in a couple of hours.”
Hal carried him back to bed, and Newland sat up with a book on oceanography, not quite seeing the pages. After all, what was he going to tell her? If he gave an interview with all the old ringing declarations in it, would anybody believe them? Did he believe them himself? Newland honestly did not know. He was attracted by the simplicity of the perms, their quiet enthusiasm for Sea Venture. There was a striking difference between them and the space-colony enthusiasts: they lacked the mountain-climbing mystique, the fanaticism; they were simple small-town people whose town happened to be afloat on the Pacific.
He heard Hal talking quietly in the other room; presently he came in and handed Newland the phone. “She’s on the line.”
“Hello, Marcia? How are you?”
"Hello, Paul,” said her clear voice. “You sound as if you’re just around the corner. How’s it going?”
“Oh, all right,” said Newland. “I’ve been getting the grand tour. It’s very interesting, but I may have overdone it a little. Marcia, I’m afraid I’m just not up to any phone interviews right now.”
“I understand,” her voice said after a moment.
“Will you tell the news people that I’ll be in touch when I’m feeling stronger, say in a week or so?”
“Of course. Paul. Look, how would this be? Let me put together a statement and fax it over to you tomorrow morning. Just something to keep the wolves at bay. All right?”
“Yes, fine.”
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s Olivia, she wants to talk to you.”
Olivia Jessup was L-5’s managing director, an old friend. Her voice was scratchy and thin. “Paul, I’m sorry to hear you’re not feeling up to snuff. I won’t keep you, but I just want you to know that Bronson and a couple of the others are making a stink.”
“That’s normal,” said Newland.
“Yes, but it’s serious, Paul. Bronson is politicking to get you voted out. What he’d really like is to expel you from the organization.”
“I know,” he said.
“All right. Do what you think best, but don’t wait too long. Good-bye, dear.”
Newland gave the phone back to Hal and put his book aside, not pretending to read anymore. There was a sour taste in his mouth; he was tired of all the maneuvering, the speeches, the true things that had somehow lost their truth over the years. When had it started to go wrong?
The tickle of uneasiness had begun before he was really aware of it, maybe as long as five years ago. In the beginning they had all been starry-eyed together, a great bunch, wonderful people, brothers and sisters. And now the L-5 habitats were still drawings on paper turning yellow around the edges; what they had instead was the Manned Orbital Vehicles, MOVs, armed with laser weapons.
Maybe that was always the way it had to be. The military, first in Germany, then in the United States and the Soviet Union, had supported rocket research through the long difficult years. You had to take the money, because you couldn’t get it anywhere else. If you wanted to make spaceships, you did what they wanted and kept your eye on the ultimate goal.
An old rhyme came into his head. The rockets go up, the rockets come down. “Dot's not my department," says Werner von Braun.
7
One of Bliss’s time-consuming duties was to preside at frequent cocktail and dinner parties whose guests were chosen by the purser from among the rich and powerful aboard Sea Venture. These necessary entertainments would certainly have ruined his liver had he not adopted the stratagem of the famous Mr. Gibson, a teetotaler who had bribed bartenders to serve him chilled water in a martini glass, with a cocktail onion to distinguish the ersatz from the genuine. Since the Gibson was now a popular drink, however, Bliss had replaced the onion by a slice of sweet pickle, and this sometimes caused comment. When that happened, as it had just done. Bliss always confessed.
“What an unusual idea,” said Mrs. Pappakouras, a handsome Greek lady in a flowered Paris caftan. “A pickle in a Gibson, do you call it, or a martini?”
“I call it a Bliss, actually; it’s my own invention.”
“Really! May I try a sip?”
“You may, certainly, but you’ll be disappointed—it’s plain water.
Her eyes narrowed with amusement. “Oh, you bad man! Then you are not really drinking at all?”
He told her the story about Gibson—“a government official in Washington, I believe. Funny that he should have been immortalized in this particular way. The Gibson as we know it is more or less neat gin.”
William Firestein, the former senator from Colorado, who was standing beside Mrs. Pappakouras with a tall glass of Scotch in his hand, said gravely, “I’ve known several people in Washington who used the same device—not with a pickle, though, Mr. Bliss. And I’ve known several hundred who should have done it.”
“Well, you know,” said Bliss, “if I didn’t, I’d be pickled myself.”
This was about as far as Bliss went in the line of humor; it drew a polite laugh, as always. Maurice Malaval, the French industrialist, remarked with a smile, “It is very interesting how some people become immortalized, as you say. You know of course Monsieur Guillotin, who gave his name to the instrument by which he lost his head. And you know perhaps Monsieur Daguerre, who invented the daguerreotype. But perhaps you do not know Monsieur Poubelle?”
“No, who was he?” asked Firestein.
“He was the inventor of the dustbin—you would say in America, the garbage can.”
“Really!”
“Yes, and in France, his name lives again every time we say, ‘The garbage can is full.’ ”
Across the room, the beer tycoon Howard Manning was talking to Eddie Greaves. “Eddie, you’re getting off at Guam, is that right?”
“Yeah, man, they’re going to fly me from there to Tokyo for a concert on the fifteenth. I took this trip so I could get away from the phone and, you know, work on some songs, but that phone rings all day and all night.”
Manning smiled. “You can always take it off the hook.”
“Yeah, and I could of done that in L.A., too. But it’s a change of scene. What about you, how long you staying on?”
“I’m getting off at Guam, too; I have a conference scheduled in Manila—same date as your concert. I’ll be sorry to miss it.”
“Yeah, well, we can’t all get lucky.”
When she had had a few days to get over her nervousness, Emily began to feel almost at home in Sea Venture. A little newspaper, the CV Journal, was waiting for them in the printer tray every morning, and several times there were letters as well. As Jim said, the size of the room didn’t matter, after all they only used it to sleep, and there were so many other places to go, so many things to do. They met a very congenial couple, the Prescotts, in the lounge one day and afterward spent a good deal of time with them.