Dan let his mind drift back, slowly, remembering little things, trying to pin down just when it was, what single instant in time, that he had stopped fighting Paul and started pitying him. It had been different, years before. Paul was always the smart one, then. He never had Dan’s build, or Dan’s daring, but he could think rings around him. Dan was always a little slow—never forgot anything he learned, but he was a slow study. Until he found out there were ways to get around that Dad and Mom had always favored Paul, babied him and protected him, and that was tougher to get around, but there were ways.
There was the night the prize money came from the lottery. How old was he then? Twelve? Thirteen? Paul was seventeen. Dan had grubbed up ten dollars polishing cars, and matched Paul’s ten to split a ticket down the middle. Never dreamed the thing would pay off, the National Tax Lottery was very new at that time. And then, to their stunned amazement, it did pay off, two thousand dollars cash, quite a pile for a pair of boys. Enough to buy the jet racer Dan had his heart set on. He’d been so excited tears had poured down his face, but Paul had said no. They would split the money fifty-fifty, just like the ticket, Paul had said. There were hot words, and pleading, and threats, and Paul had just laughed at him, until Dan got so mad he sailed into him with his fists. Bad mistake, that Paul was skinny, not much muscle, but he had five years on Dan, and a longer reach. Paul connected just once, a left jab that put Dan flat on his back with a concussion and a broken jaw, and that was that Or so it seemed, except that Dan had actually won the fight the moment Paul struck the blow. It was the broken jaw that did it, and then later the fight between Mom and Dad, with Dad saying, “But Mary, he asked for it!” And Mom responding tearfully, “I don’t care, that big bully didn’t have to mutilate him.” Of course Dan won. A dirty way to win, both the boys knew, but Dan got his racer on the strength of that broken jaw. The bone never healed quite right, the fracture damaged one of the centers of ossification, the doc had said, and later Dan became God’s gift to the political cartoonists with that heavy, angular jaw—a fighter’s jaw, they called it.
That fight started it From then on Dan knew he could beat Paul. He didn’t feel good about the way he’d beaten him, but it was a good thing to know he could. Couldn’t ever be sure of it, of course, had to keep proving it, over and over, just to be sure. The successes came, and he always let Paul know about them, chuckling with glee, while Paul sat quietly, learning to take it.
To take it? Or to fight back, ineffectually, and slowly come to hate him? Hard to say. There was the night Dan broke with the Universalist Party in New Chicago, at that hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner. He’d told them all, that night. The big boys in the party had cold-shouldered him and put Jack Libby up to run for mayor instead of Dan. Oh, he’d raised a glorious stink that night—he’d never enjoyed himself so much in his life, turning their whole lousy twisted machine over to the public on a silver platter. Cutting loose from the old crowd, appointing himself a committee of one to nominate himself on an Independent Reform ticket, campaign for himself, and elect himself. A whippersnapper of thirty-two. Paul had laughed at the blistering speech he’d given before he stomped out of the banquet hall. “You do get melodramatic, don’t you, Dan? Well, if you want to cut your own throat, that’s your affair.” Dan had exploded in rage, told Paul to watch what happened before he shot off his mouth, he might see a thing or two—and he saw a thing or two, all right. He remembered Paul’s face a few months later, when Libby conceded his defeat at 11:45 on election night, and Dan rode into office with a new crowd of people ready to help him clean up New Chicago as it hadn’t been cleaned up since the Two Weeks’ War. The sweetest bite of the whole victory pie had been the look on Paul’s face that night.
So they’d fought, and Dan had won and rubbed it in, and Paul had lost and hated him for it, until slowly, Dan’s attitude had subtly changed from “Okay, you wise guy, I’ll show you” to “Come on, Paul, quit floundering around and start doing something! Who needs engineers? You’ll starve to death,” and then finally, to “Poor Paul.”
How had it happened? Why?
Dan wondered, suddenly, if he had ever really forgiven Paul that blow to the jaw.
He shook himself, scowling into the blackness outside the plane. Okay, they’d fought it out, a game between brothers, only it never was a game, really. He knew how much he owed to Paul. He’d known it with growing concern for many years. And now if he had to drag Paul back to Washington by the hair, he’d drag the silly fool.
They didn’t look very much alike. There was a spareness about Paul, a tall, lean man, with large soft eyes that concealed their anger and a face lined with tiredness and resignation. A year ago, when Dan had seen him last, he had looked a young sixty, closer to forty-five. Now he looked an old, old sixty-one. How much of this was his illness Dan didn’t know. The pathologist at the Hoffman Center had said: “It’s not very malignant right now, but you can never tell when it’ll blow up, and it’s one of the new viral tumors that we can’t deal with just yet He’d better be scheduled for his Retread as soon as possible, if he’s got a permit.”
That was doubtless part of it, but part of it was just Paul. The house was exactly as Dan had expected (though he had never been inside this house since Paul had come to Starship Project fifteen years ago), stuffy, severe, rather gloomy; rooms packed with bookshelves, drawing boards, odds and ends of papers and blueprints and inks; thick, ugly furniture from the early 2000’s; a cluttered, improvised, helter-skelter barn of a testing lab, with modem equipment that looked lost and alien scattered among the mouldering junk of two centuries.
“Get your coat,” said Dan to his brother. “It’s cold outside. We’re going back to Washington.”
“Have a drink.” Paul waved him toward the sideboard. “Relax. Your pilot needs a rest.”
“Paul, I didn’t come here to play games. The games are over now.”
Paul poured brandy with deliberation, one for Dan, one for himself. “Good brandy,” he said. “Wish I could afford more of it.”
“Paul. You’re going with me.”
“Sorry, Dan.”
“Do you know what you’re saying?”
“Perfectly.”
“Paul, you don’t just say ‘Thanks, but I don’t think I’ll have any’ when they give you a rejuvenation permit. Nobody refuses rejuvenation. There are a million people out there begging for a place on the list. It’s life, Paul. You can’t just turn it down.”
“This is good brandy,” said Paul. “Care to take a look at my lab, by the way? Not too well equipped, but sometimes I can work here better than—”
Dan turned on his brother viciously. “I will tell you what I’m going to do,” he said, hitting each syllable. “I’m going to take you to the plane. If you won’t come, my pilot and I will drag you. When we get to Washington, we’ll take you to the Hoffman Center, if you won’t sign the necessary releases, I’ll forge them. I’ll bribe two witnesses who will swear in the face of death by torture that they saw you signing. I’ll buy the doctors that can do the job, and if they don’t do it, I’ll sweat them down until they will do it.”