Half an hour later, in his private office, it was just Knefhausen and the President. Although presumably it was still broad daylight outside, all the Oval Office's lights were on; the steel plates on the windows kept out the sun, if not the distant sounds of the troubled city. "All right," said the President, "it's hit the fan. The next thing is the world will know it. I can postpone that a few weeks, maybe even a few months. I can't prevent it."
"I am grateful to you, Mr. President, for—"
"Shut up, Knefhausen. When I agreed to do this I took the risk of impeachment knowingly. Now I think the stakes are higher than that."
"Mr. Presidentl I must point out that at that time only three people knew the secret. It was not my decision that there should be more."
"I don't want speeches from you, and I won't accept recriminations. There is one thing I want from you, and that is an explanation. What the hell is this about mixing up narcotics and free love and so on?"
"Ah," said Knefhausen, "yes, you refer to the most recent communication from the Constitution. I agree completely. I have already dispatched, Mr. President, a strongly worded order. Because of the communications lag it will not be received for some months, but I assure you the matter will be corrected."
The President said bitterly, "I don't want any assurances, either. Do you watch television? I don't mean 'I Love Lucy' and ball games, I mean news. Do you know what sort of shape this country is in? The bonus marches in 1932, the race riots in 1967—they were nothing. Time was when we could call out the National Guard to put down disorder. Last week I had to call out the Army to use against three companies of the Guard. One more scandal and we're finished, Knefhausen, and this is a big one."
"The purposes are beyond reproach—"
"Your purposes may be. Mine are, I hope, or at least I try to tell myself that it was for the good of science and humanity I did this, and not so I would be in the history books as the President who contributed a major breakthrough. But what are the purposes of your friends on the Constitution? I agreed to eight martyrs, Knefhausen. I didn't agree to forty billion dollars out of the nation's pockets to give your eight young friends ten years of gang bangs and dope."
"Mr. President, I assure you this is only a temporary phase. I have instructed them to behave responsibly."
"And if they don't, what are you going to do about it?" The President, who never smoked, stripped a cigar, bit off the end and lit it. "My God," he said, shaking his head, "it's politicians who are supposed to be the manipulators, not scientists. You're acting like a tinpot Jehovah! You use human beings like laboratory rats, tricking them and in the end killing them."
It is not an easy thing to challenge a President in his Oval Office, but Knefhausen faced him stoutly. "All of that, yes," he agreed. "For a good end. You yourself, Mr. President, agreed that the end in this case justifies the, I will admit, not pleasant means, and in any case for such questions as this it is too late for you and me. Our ruse must be continued as long as possible."
"And when the people on the Constitution find out?"
"That is impossible," Knefhausen declared. "I give you my word on that. Not for a long time."
"And when they do?"
Knefhausen shrugged. "Then the experiment passes beyond our control," he said.
9
THERE WAS NOT ACTUALLY A HYDROPONICS "ROOM" ON the Constitution. There were hydroponics trays and hydroponics clusters. The designers of the ship had meant them to be fitted into crannies and alcoves all over the vessel, but the occupants had redesigned the designers' work here, as in much else. Plants were still in unlikely places, but the fourth "level" (it wasn't really level, anymore) above the plasma shields was now stuffed with growing things. An orangerie, a hothouse, a place that smelled of vines and damp.
Everybody liked it. They liked it too much to suit Eve Barstow, who was spending more and more of her time there. The plants did not particularly need tending, because they grew well by themselves with the automatic trickle-drips and drains that fed them; even the experiments could get along quite well without Eve, because Flo Jackman did most of that. But it was a nice place. It was a place for Eve Barstow to be, and there weren't many like that on the ship. Thinning seedlings, picking ripening fruit, loosening the soil (or the sort-of soil, partly quartz pebbles, partly what you didn't really want to think about)—that was a form of solitaire for Eve, a self-imposed task to conceal the fact that she had very few real ones.
It was astonishing to Eve to find how quickly she had grasped hard subjects when she had nothing to do but study them. But it was distressing to find how far beyond the hardest of them some of the other people on the ship had gone. She could rely on the fact that the plants would not surpass her. And they smelled good, and there was a jungly, exotic feel in the hothouse air. With Flo's concurrence and no one's objection, she had encouraged the tomato vines to curl across the gaps between the stacks of trays, and the beans to climb along hooks set in the wall. It made the tending and the picking a little harder, but it created a wild prettiness among all the steel and plastic. She was put out by the fact that the others liked it, too, and so she was not left undisturbed very much of the time. But sometimes, sometimes it was all hers. Apart from wishing she were somewhere else ... or wishing her husband would try a little harder to communicate ... or wishing she were as tall as Ann Becklund or as well-breasted as Dot Letski ... or wishing she would get laid a little more often or could get to a garage sale now and then . . . apart from wishing, being in the hydroponics room was her favorite thing to do.
Like a watermelon seed from someone's lips, she was, she felt, being squeezed out. She thought she recognized the signs. When Eve was younger she had served her term in the counterculture— nothing bad, none of the hardest stuff. Just a time to rebel and fool around. She had observed or experienced almost every known form of interpersonal relationship, from quickies to the communes. For a time she had been enthralled by the notion of plural marriage. Three or four husbands, a batch of sharing wives—what a nice thing! How marvelous to have tenderness there for you whenever you wanted it, and how more marvelous still to be allowed to go off by yourself when you chose, without depriving someone else. But she had observed that something always went wrong. In the sturdiest of the four-way. six-way, multiple-way marriages she had seen, sooner or later one of the equal partners stopped being equal. The group expelled the individual. Within the shared joy was individual misery.
The crew of the Constitution had not begun the practice of multiple mating, or at any rate had not institutionalized it. But Eve could feel the forces pressing against her. The balanced atom had been ionized, and one electron, named Eve Barstow, had been flung out. She circled the nucleus wistfully, at no great distance, but she could no longer join the dance.
Since Eve was a sensible person she knew that the case was not as bad as she pictured it to herself. Of course there were problems! There had to be. This was certainly a stressful situation, and the shrinks had briefed them thoroughly. They had dinned into each of the voyagers that, however relaxed any of them might seem on the surface, there would be fear and anger and hysteria bubbling underneath. Of course, they hadn't explained just how great the stress would be. Because how could they have known?
And Eve was not wholly neglected. Shef still played chess with her, although he was as likely as not to be both reading and carrying on a conversation with someone else at the same time. Her husband, every now and then, remembered to invite her to bed. And there was Ann Becklund. Ann was also a sensible person, and even kind. Sometimes kind—actually, most of the time she was kind, when she wasn't fighting back some internal shit-storm of her own. They talked together. Sometimes about the ship; sometimes girl talk, what kinds of kids they would like to have if ever there were any chance of having any, what they remembered of their different, but similar, youths.