She opened the door on the first knock and stood out of the way. The wind was whipping the ground snow in swirling circles. Some of it blew in the door as Bob entered. She slammed the door behind him. The snow on the floor decided to wait a while before melting. "Okay. You're here," she snapped. "There's no fire and no place to sit. The bed's the only warm place and you know it. I didn't know you were this hard up. And, by the way, I don't have any company, thanks for asking." If Bob couldn't figure out from that speech that she was pissed, he'd never win the prize as Mr. Perception.
"I am that hard up," he said, moving closer. "Let's get it on."
"Say what?" Bob had never been one for subtle technique, but this was pushing it. She tried to step back but his hands gripped her arms. They were cold as ice, even through the housecoat. "Bob!" He pulled her to him and buried his face in her hair.
"It's not what you think," he whispered. "We don't have time for this, worse luck."
"Bob!"
"No, just bear with me. Let's go to your bedroom. I don't want you to freeze."
He led her to the back of the house and she slid under the covers without inviting him in. He lay on top, still wearing his thick leather coat. Whatever he had in mind, she realized, it wasn't sex. Not with her housecoat, the comforter and his greatcoat playing chaperone.
He kissed her hard and was whispering hoarsely in her ear before she had a chance to react. "Angels down. A scoopship. It crashed."
"Angels?" Was he crazy?
He kissed her neck. "Not so loud. I don't think the 'danes are listening, but why take chances? Angels. Spacemen. Peace and Freedom."
She'd been away too long. She'd never heard spacemen called Angels. And-- "Crashed?" She kept it to a whisper. "Where?"
"Just over the border in North Dakota. Near Mapleton."
"Great Ghu, Bob. That's on the Ice!"
He whispered, "Yeah. But they're not too far in."
"How do you know about it?"
He snuggled closer and kissed her on the neck again. Maybe sex made a great cover for his visit, but she didn't think he had to lay it on so thick. "We know."
"We?"
"The Worldcon's in Minneapolis-St. Paul this year--"
The World Science Fiction Convention. "I got, the invitation, but I didn't dare go. If anyone saw me--"
"--And it was just getting started when the call came down from Freedom. Sherrine, they couldn't have picked a better time or place to crash their scoopship. That's why I came to you. Your grandparents live near the crash site."
She wondered if there was a good time for crashing scoopships. "So?"
"We're going to rescue them."
"We? Who's we?"
"The Con Committee, some of the fans--"
"But why tell me, Bob? I'm fafiated. It's been years since I've dared associate with fen."
Too many years, she thought. She had discovered science fiction in childhood, at her neighborhood branch library. She still remembered that first book: Star Man's Son, by Andre Norton. Fors had been persecuted because he was different; but he nurtured a secret, a mutant power. Just the sort of hero to appeal to an ugly-duckling little girl who would not act like other little girls.
SF had opened a whole new world to her. A galaxy, a universe of new worlds. While the other little girls had played with Barbie dolls, Sherrine played with Lummox and Poddy and Arkady and Susan Calvin. While they went to the malls, she went to Trantor and the Witch World. While they wondered what Look was In, she wondered about resource depletion and nuclear war and genetic engineering. Escape literature, they called it. She missed it terribly.
"There is always one moment in childhood," Graham Greene had written in The Power and the Glory, "when the door opens and lets the future in." For some people, that door never closed. She thought that Peter Pan had had the right idea all along.
"Why tell you? Sherrine, we want you with us. Your grandparents live near the crash site. They've got all sorts of gear we can borrow for the rescue."
"Me?" A tiny trickle of electric current ran up her spine. But … Nah. "Bob, I don't dare. If my bosses thought I was associating with fen, I'd lose my job."
He grinned. "Yeah. Me, too." And she saw that he had never considered that she might not go.
'Tis a Proud and Lonely Thing to Be a Fan, they used to say, laughing. It had become a very lonely thing. The Establishment had always been hard on science fiction. The government-funded Arts Councils would pass out tax money to write obscure poetry for "little" magazines, but not to write speculative fiction. "Sci-fi isn't literature." That wasn't censorship.
Perversely, people went on buying science fiction without grants. Writers even got rich without government funding. They couldn't kill us that way!
Then the Luddites and the Greens had come to power. She had watched science fiction books slowly disappear from the library shelves, beginning with the children's departments. (That wasn't censorship either. Libraries couldn't buy every book, now could they? So they bought "realistic" children's books funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, books about death and divorce, and really important things like being overweight or fitting in with the right school crowd.)
Then came paper shortages, and paper allocations. The science fiction sections in the chain stores grew smaller. ("You can't expect us to stock books that aren't selling." And they can't sell if you don't stock them.)
Fantasy wasn't hurt so bad. Fantasy was about wizards and elves, and being kind to the Earth, and harmony with nature, all things the Greens loved. But science fiction was about science.
Science fiction wasn't exactly outlawed. There was still Freedom of Speech; still a Bill of Rights, even if it wasn't taught much in the schools--even if most kids graduated unable to read well enough to understand it. But a person could get into a lot of unofficial trouble for reading SF or for associating with known fen. She could lose her job, say. Not through government persecution--of course not--but because of "reduction in work force" or "poor job performance" or "uncooperative attitude" or "politically incorrect" or a hundred other phrases. And if the neighbors shunned her, and tradesmen wouldn't deal with her, and stores wouldn't give her credit, who could blame them? Science fiction involved science; and science was a conspiracy to pollute the environment, "to bring back technology."
Damn right! she thought savagely. We do conspire to bring back technology. Some of us are crazy enough to think that there are alternatives to freezing in the dark. And some of us are even crazy enough to try to rescue marooned spacemen before they freeze, or disappear into protective custody.
Which could be dangerous. The government might declare you mentally ill, and help you.
She shuddered at that thought. She pushed and rolled Bob aside. She sat up and pulled the comforter up tight around herself. "Do you know what it was that attracted me to science fiction?"
He raised himself on one elbow, blinked at her change of subject, and looked quickly around the room, as if suspecting bugs. "No, what?"
"Not Fandom. I was reading the true quill long before I knew about Fandom and cons and such. No, it was the feeling of hope."
"Hope?"
"Even in the most depressing dystopia, there's still the notion that the future is something we build. It doesn't just happen. You can't predict the future, but you can invent it. Build it. That is a hopeful idea, even when the building collapses."
Bob was silent for a moment. Then he nodded. "Yeah. Nobody's building the future anymore, 'We live in an Age of Limited Choices.' " He quoted the government line without cracking a smile. "Hell, you don't take choices off a list. You make choices and add them to the list. Speaking of which have you made your choice?"