Or he thought that he was! The recurring dream came back again. This time it progressed past the point where he was standing naked outside the house. He threw pebbles against the window of the bedroom but repeated casts failed to wake Roosevelt. He went around trying the doors and windows, and when he got to the front door, he found it unlocked. He crept in through the front room, into the small kitchen, and he took the two steps needed to get to the door opposite the bathroom. This led up a steep stairway to the attic, a section of which had been made into a tiny bedroom. He would have to go slowly, walking on the ends of the steps. They squeaked abominably if he stepped in their middle.
It was then that he saw that the doors to his parents' bedroom and the younger children's were open. Moonlight came in. (Never mind that it had been dawn just as he opened the front door. This was a dream.) By its bright light he saw that his parents' big old-fashioned brass bed was empty. And so was his little sister's. He looked around the corner and saw that the bunkbeds of Mungo and James, Junior were also deserted.
Nor was Roosevelt in his bed.
In a panic, he looked out the back window. The doghouse in the backyard was empty.
Everybody, even the dog, had gone off without a word.
What nameless crime had he committed?
32
"The training blimp will be completed within a month," Firebrass said. "Jill Gulbirra is the most experienced aeronaut by far, so she'll take charge of the training. In fact, I'm making her captain of the trainer. How about that, Jill? If you can't be commander of the big ship, you will be unchallenged chief honcho of the little one. Don't ever say I never did anything for you."
The other men offered her their congratulations, though some did so sourly. Cyrano seemed genuinely delighted, and if he had not been aware of her dislike for being touched, would doubtless have embraced her tightly and kissed her. On impulse, Jill pulled him to her and gave him a quick hug. After all, he was trying to make up for his offensive behavior on the Riverbank.
Twenty minutes later, she, Firebrass, Messnet, Piscator, and ten engineers began working on the blueprints for the big airship. The specifications had been determined during three weeks of hard work, usually twelve to fourteen hours a day. Instead of drawing lines on paper, however, they made blueprints on the cathode-ray tube of a computer. This was much faster, mistakes or alterations were erased quickly, and the computer itself double-checked the proportions. Of course, the computer had to be programmed first, and Jill participated in this. She loved this sort of work. It was creative and gave her a chance to play with mathematical relations.
Nevertheless, it did cause nervous tension. To relieve this and to stay in good physical shape, Jill fenced for two hours almost every day. Sword exercise here was not what it had been on Earth. The light, supple foil was discarded for the heavier, stiffer rapier. Moreover, every point of the body was a target, requiring that the fencers wear padded garments on their legs.
"We are not playing now," Cyrano told her. "You will be learning to fence for more than just points. The time may come when you will be striving in deadly earnest to keep your opponent from running you through while you try to pierce him from front to back."
She had been an excellent fencer. A great teacher, an Olympic champion, had told her that she could become a top contender in world competition if she would devote enough time to training. That had been impossible since her job required too much time away from the fencing courts. But when she had a chance to practice, she had taken it. She loved fencing; it was in some respects a very physical form of chess, which she also loved.
It was a joy to take a blade in hand again and to relearn all the long-unused, but not quite forgotten, skill. It was an even greater joy to find that she could beat most of her male opponents. Though she looked awkward, once she had gripped the handle of the rapier, she became all grace and liquid speed.
There were two men she could not master. One was Radaelli, the Italian master, author of Istruzione per la schema di spada a di sciabola, published in 1885. The other, the indisputable champion, was Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac.
Jill was surprised at this. For one thing, fencing in his time had not yet developed into a fine art. It was not until near the end of the eighteenth century that the art neared its apex of technique. Cyrano had died in the middle of the seventeenth century before the foil had been invented, when men fought, often to the death, with techniques somewhat primitive, if spectacular. The Italians had put together the basic structure of modern swordplay by the early seventeenth century, but not until the beginning of the nineteenth century had the techniques reached the ultimate.
Thus Cyrano had established a reputation as the greatest swordsman of all times without having to compete with the more sophisticated fencers of a later age. Jill had believed that his reputation had been wildly exaggerated. After all, no one knew if the famous incident of the Porte de Nesle was true or not. No one except the Frenchman himself, and he would not talk about it.
However, he had learned all later refinements from Radaelli and Borsody. Within four months of starting his education, he was steadily out scoring his mentors. In five months, he was unbeatable. So far, at least.
Though rusty at first, Jill soon gained polish and began to give him a better battle. Never once, however, did she win more than one point of the total five within the six-minute limit of a match. And he always made four points before she got one. This led her to believe that he was giving her the one point to soften the defeat. Once, after a match in which she became furious because of her frustration, she accused him of patronizing her.
"Even if I were in love with you and desired very much to keep from hurting your feelings," he said, "I would not do that! It would be dishonest, and while it is said that all is fair in love and war, it is not so for me. No, you have gotten your points fairly because of your quickness and skill."
"But if we were playing for keeps," she said, "with unblunted points, you would have killed me every time. You always strike first."
He raised his mask and wiped his forehead. "True. But surely you are not thinking about challenging me to a duel? You are still not angry with me are you?"
"About that incident on the bank? No. Not about that."
"About what, then, if I may be so bold to ask?"
She would say nothing then, and he would raise his eyebrows and shrug his shoulders in a completely Gallic manner.
Cyrano was better than she. No matter how much she practiced, no matter how hard her determination to best him, because he was a man, because she did not like to lose to anybody, male or female, she always lost. Once, when she had jeered at his ignorance and superstitions and so had made him furious (she had done it on purpose), he had attacked her with such vigor that he had touched her five times in one and a half minutes. Instead of losing his head, he had become even more a being of cold fire, moving with certitude and swiftness, doing everything exactly right, one hundred percent anticipatory of her every movement.
It was she who was humiliated.
Rightfully so, she told herself, and she apologized, though it was a double humiliation to do so.
"I was terribly wrong to sneer at your lack of knowledge of science and at your mistaken beliefs,'' she said. "It is not your fault that you were born in 1619, and I should not have taunted you with that. I did so just to make you so mad I'd get an edge on you. It was a rotten thing to do. I promise not to do it again, and I most abjectly beg your pardon. I did not really mean it."