He stopped. The glow of happiness winked out in an instant. Marge was staring at him with an expression that he could only interpret as one of horror.
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Of course I am. What’s wrong?”
“This whole terrible charade—this fake slush— being used to grab the sympathies of the world. What a gigantic, grisly hoax! And you’re proud of it!”
“Marge, I—”
“You what?” she asked quietly. “You were sitting there radiating content and happiness. How could you?”
“Just take it on its own terms,” he said tightly. “As a creative effort. Don’t drag moral confusions into it. You always have to cobweb things up by dragging in morality and preachery.”
“You can’t take anything on its own terms, Ted. That’s your mistake. You have to look at it in context, and in context I can only say that this thing stinks from top to bottom inside and out.”
He slammed his fork to the table. “Marge!”
She stared steadily at him. “I guess I spoke out of line, Ted. I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t mean to preach.” The muscles of her jaws were tightening in convulsive little clumps, and Kennedy saw she was fighting hard to keep back another big emotional outburst. He reached out and gripped her hand.
“Don’t get worked up over this thing,” he told her. “From now on let me leave my job at 2:30 and forget it until the next morning. Otherwise we’ll be at each other’s throats all the time.”
“You’re right, dear. We’d better do that.”
He turned his attention back to his meal. But the food seemed dead and tasteless now, and he was totally unable to recapture the euphoric mood of just a few moments before.
A vast gulf was opening between himself and his wife, and it was getting wider day by day. He thought back over that glow of contentment and wondered how he could ever have attained it. What he and Spalding would be doing was a pretty soulless enterprise, he admitted to himself. There was nothing nice about it. And yet he had worked himself up into a fine esthetic frenzy over it, until Marge’s few harsh words had opened his eyes.
And I was proud of it, he thought. My God, don’t I ever think at all?
7
June 31, 2044—Leap Year World Holiday, by the Permanent Calendar. The extra day, intercalated in the otherwise changeless calendar every four years to take up the slack of the six hours and some minutes the Permanent Calendar was forced to ignore.
A day of revelry, Kennedy thought. A day between the days, a day that was neither Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday nor Thursday, nor Friday, Saturday or even Sunday. A timeless day on which no one worked except for holiday double-pay, on which even the rules of civilization went into the discard heap for twenty-four hours. It fell between Saturday, June thirtieth and Sunday, July first and since this was a leap year there would be two nameless days instead of the usual one at the end of the year.
The Kennedys chose to spend their day at Joyland Amusement Park on the Floating Island in Long Island Sound. Privately, Kennedy detested the hustle and bustle of the World Holidays; but they were family customs, deeply embedded in his way of life, and he never dared to speak out against them.
The road was crowded. Bumper to bumper, deflector plate to deflector plate, the little enameled beetles clung together on the Thruway. Kennedy sweated behind the wheel. The air-conditioners labored mightily. At his side Marge looked fresh and gay in her light summer clothes, red halter and light blue briefs. Her legs glistened; she wore the newest aluminum sprayons.
“The Egyptians had a better slant on this leap year business,” he said. “Every year they saved up the fragment of a day that was left over, and let them pile up in the back room of the temple. Then every one thousand four hundred and sixty years all those quarter-days amounted to one full year, and there they were with a whole year that they didn’t figure into the calendars. The Sothic year. Of course, the seasons got pretty loused up while waiting for the Sothic year to come around, but that was okay. They held big festivals all that year. An eagle with painted wings was burned alive in a nest of palm branches to celebrate the event. And then the seasons came right again. Origin of the Phoenix legend.”
Marge giggled. Up ahead a car stalled in the furious heat and the radar eye of Kennedy’s automatic brake picked up the impulse and throttled the turbos; he and Marge rocked slightly forward as the car slowed to thirty.
“It was a fine system,” he went on. “And Egypt lasted long enough to celebrate two or three Sothic years. Emperor Augustus killed the Phoenix in 30 B.C. when he stabilized the Egyptian calendar. No more years of festival. We’re lucky to get a day once every four years.”
The car’s air-conditioners, whined sourly as the vehicle came to a complete halt. Marge said, “One thousand four hundred and sixty years ago America belonged to the Indians. Our ancestors were painting themselves blue and worshipping Druids in wicker baskets. And in the same amount of years hence we’ll all be forgotten. Sothic years won’t work nowadays; by the time the next one comes around nobody’ll remember to insert it in the calendar.”
“Sure they will. Otherwise you’ll have winter coming in May and summer in November and—” The congestion cleared ahead and he whisked the car on. The inside-out-side thermometer read sixty-nine inside the car, ninety-seven outside. The compass told him they were heading westward along the Thruway toward the Sound. Not a bad car at all, he thought, my battered old ’42 Frontenac. Hardly in the class with Haugen’s new Chevy-Caddy, of course, but ample for my purposes.
They reached another snag in the traffic pattern. Kennedy let go of the wheel and let his hand rest lightly on his wife’s cool knee.
“Ted?”
“Eh?”
“Let’s try to have a good time together today. Relaxed, Calm. Just having fun.”
“Sure, Marge. Today’s World Holiday. No ulcers today.” He flopped back against the cushion as the car started moving violently. “Damn! These holiday drivers!”
It had been a rough month. Rough, but exciting. He and Spalding had thrown themselves full force into the pseudo-colony on Ganymede. Endless reams of paper covered with biographical sketches of people who weren’t, thick dossiers on Ganymedean weather and the rigors of life in a dome and a million other things. It was like writing a story of space adventure, Kennedy thought, with one minor wrinkle: this wasn’t for the fantasy mags. It was going out over the newstapes and the fax sheets and people were gobbling it up.
It went like this:
“Ganymede, 23 May 2044—Another day passed in relative comfort for the Extraterrestrial Development and Exploration Corporation’s experimental volunteer station on the tiny world of Ganymede, after the heavy snowfall of yesterday. Lester Brookman, Colony Director, commented, ‘Except for the usual hazards of life on an alien world, we’re doing fine.’
“The colony’s one invalid was reported in good health. She is Mrs. Helene Davenant, thirty-one, wife of an atmospheric engineer, who suffered an appendicitis attack early yesterday morning. Colony Surgeon David Hornsfall operated immediately. Dr. Hornsfall said after the operation, ‘Mrs. Davenant is in good shape and there is no danger of complications. The low gravity will aid in her quick recovery and I hope to have her back at work in the hydroponics shed in a few days.’ The news eased fears of millions on Earth who were thrown into alarm by a premature report of peritonitis.”
And so it went, Kennedy thought. Emotional involvement. Soap opera on a cosmic scale. It was now a little over a month since the Kennedy-Spalding pseudo-colony had received its official unveiling, and in that month life with Marge had grown increasingly difficult.