“Why, no. The President told me himself,” Dorrie said, aware that she was trying to score points in case of another visit from Dash, “that putting a man on Mars was absolutely indispensable to the future of the human race. I believe him. We owe a—”
“Play that back,” Hengstrom commanded.
“What?”
“Play back what you just said. Putting a what on Mars?”
“A man. Oh. I see what you mean.”
Hengstrom nodded sadly. “You see what I mean, but you don’t change the way you think. Why a man? Why not a person?” She looked commiseratingly at the soundperson, who shook her head in sympathy. “Well, let’s get to something more important: do you know that the whole crew of the Mars voyage is supposed to be male? What do you think of that?”
It was quite a morning for Dorrie. She never did get her ceramic pieces on camera.
When Sulie Carpenter came on duty that afternoon she brought Roger two surprises: a cassette of the interview, borrowed from the project public-relations (read: censorship) office, and a guitar. She gave him the cassette first, and let him watch the interview while she remade his bed and changed the water for his flowers.
When it was over she said brightly, “Your wife handled herself very well, I thought. I met Hagar Hengstrom once. She’s a very difficult woman.”
“Dorrie looked fine,” said Roger. You could not read any expression in the remade face or hear it in the flat tones, but the bat wings were fluttering restlessly. “I always liked those pants.”
Sulie nodded and made a note to herself: the open lacing up both sides of each leg showed a great deal of flesh. Evidently the steroids implanted in Roger were doing their job. “Now I’ve got something else,” she said, and opened the guitar case.
“You’re going to play for me?”
“No, Roger. You’re going to play.”
“I can’t play the guitar, Sulie,” he protested.
She laughed. “I’ve been talking to Brad,” she said, “and I think you’re going to be surprised. You’re not just different, you know, Roger. You’re better. For instance, your fingers.”
“What about them?”
“Well, I’ve been playing the guitar since I was nine, and if I stop for a couple of weeks my calluses go and I have to start all over again. Your fingers don’t need calluses; they’re hard enough and firm enough to fret the strings first time perfectly.”
“Fine,” said Roger, “only I don’t even know what you’re talking about. What’s ‘fret’?”
“Press them down. Like this.” She strummed a G chord, then a D and a C.
“Now you do it,” she said. “The only thing to watch out for, don’t use too much strength. It’s breakable.” She handed him the guitar.
He swept his thumb over the open strings, as he had seen her do.
“That’s fine.” She applauded. “Now make a G. Ring finger on the third fret of the high E string — there. First finger on the second fret of the A. Middle finger on the third fret of the low E.” She guided his hands. “Now hit it.”
He strummed and looked up at her. “Hey,” he said. “Nice.” She grinned and corrected him. “Not nice. Perfect. Now, this is a C. First finger on the second fret of the B string, middle finger there, ring finger there… Right. And this is a D chord: first and middle finger on the G and E strings, there, ring finger one fret lower on the B… Perfect again. Now give me a G.” To his surprise, Roger strummed a perfect G.
She smiled. “See? Brad was right. Once you know a chord, you know it; the 3070 remembers it for you. All you have to do is think ‘G chord,’ and your fingers do it. You are now,” she said in mock sorrow, “about three months ahead of where I was the first time I tried to play the guitar.”
“That’s pretty nice,” Roger said, trying all three chords, one after another.
“That’s only the beginning. Now strum a four-beat, you know, dum, dum, dum, dum. With a G chord—” She listened, then nodded. “Fine. Now do it like this: G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, C, C, G, G, G, G, G, G… Fine. Now again, only this time after the C, C do D, D, D, D, D, D… Fine again. Now do them both, one after the other—”
He played, and she sang with him: “ ‘Kumbaya, my lord. Kumbaya! Kumbaya, my lord. Kumbaya—’ ”
“Hey!” Roger cried, delighted.
She shook her head in mock dismay. “Three minutes from the time you pick up the guitar, and you’re already an accompanist. Here, I brought you a chord book and some simple pieces. By the time I get back, you should be playing all of them, and I’ll start you on finger-plucking, sliding and hammering.”
She showed him how to read the tabulature for each chord and left him happily puzzling out the first six modulations of the F.
Outside his room she paused to take out her contacts, rubbed her eyes and marched to the office of the director. Scanyon’s secretary waved her in.
“He’s happy with his guitar, General,” she reported. “Less happy about his wife.”
Vern Scanyon nodded, and turned up a knob on the comm set on his desk: the sound of the chords for “Kentucky Babe” came from the tap in Roger’s room. He turned it down again. “I know about the guitar, Major Carpenter. What about his wife?”
“I’m afraid he loves her,” she said slowly. “He’s all right up to a point. Past that point I think we’re in trouble. I can bolster him up as long as he’s here at the project, but he’ll be a long time away and — I’m not sure.”
Scanyon said sharply, “Get the marbles out of your mouth, Major!”
“I think he’ll miss her more than he can handle. It’s bad enough now. I watched him while he was looking at that tape. He didn’t move a muscle, rigid concentration, didn’t want to miss a thing. When he’s forty million miles away from her — Well. I’ve got everything taped, General. I’ll run a computer simulation, and then maybe I can be more specific. But I’m concerned.”
“You’re concerned!” Scanyon snapped. “Dash will have my ass if we get him up there and he blows!”
“What can I tell you, General? Let me run the simulation. Then maybe I can tell you how to handle it.”
She sat down without waiting to be asked and ran her hands over her forehead. “Leading a double life takes a lot out of you, General,” she offered. “Eight hours as a nurse and eight hours as a shrink isn’t any fun.”
“Ten years on staff duty in Antarctica is even less fun than that,” Vern Scanyon said simply.
The presidential jet had reached its cruising altitude of 31,000 meters and slid into high gear — Mach 3 and a bit, grotesquely faster than even a presidential CB-5 was supposed to go. The President was in a hurry.
The Midway Summit Conference had just ended in disarray. Stretched out on his chaise longue with his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep to keep the Senators who had accompanied him out of his hair, Dash bleakly considered his options. They were few.
He had not hoped for a great deal from the conference, but it had begun well enough. The Australians indicated they would accept limited cooperation with the NPA in developing the Outback, subject to appropriate guarantees, et cetera, et cetera. The NPA delegation murmured among themselves and announced that they would be happy to provide guarantees, since their real objectives were only to provide a maximum of the necessities of life for all the world’s people, considered as a single unit regardless of antiquated national boundaries, et cetera. Dash himself shook off his whispering advisers and stated that America’s interest in this conference was only to provide good-offices assistance to its two dearly beloved neighbors and sought nothing for itself, et cetera, and for a time there, all of two hours, it had seemed that there might be a substantive, useful product of the conference.