“Well — well, how’ve you been? Like the country life?”
“That’s one reason I’ve been wanting to get you. Willy, I’m bored. It’s all very healthy and nice, but I want to do something dissipated and wicked. Naturally I thought of you.”
“I’m flattered. Pick you up at eight?”
She checked a clock above the phone. “No, look, let’s get a good night’s sleep. Besides, I’ve got to get in the rest of the potatoes. Meet me at … the Ellis Island jetport at ten tomorrow morning. Mmm … Trans-World information desk.”
“Okay. Make reservations for where?”
She shrugged. “Pick a place.”
“London used to be pretty wicked.”
“Sounds good. First class?”
“What else? I’ll get us a suite on one of the dirigibles.”
“Good. Decadent. How long shall I pack for?”
“We’ll buy clothes along the way. Travel light. Just one stuffed wallet apiece.”
She giggled. “Wonderful. Tomorrow at ten.”
“Fine-uh … Marygay, do you have a gun?”
“It’s that bad?”
“Here around Washington it is.”
“Well, I’ll get one. Dad has a couple over the fireplace. Guess they’re left over from Tucson.”
“We’ll hope we won’t need them.”
“Willy, you know it’ll just be for decoration. I couldn’t even kill a Tauran.”
“Of course.” We just looked at each other for a second. “Tomorrow at ten, then.”
“Right. Love you.”
“Uh…”
She giggled again and hung up.
That was just too many things to think about all at once.
I got us two round-the-world dirigible tickets; unlimited stops as long as you kept going east. It took me a little over two hours to get to Ellis by autocab and monorail. I was early, but so was Marygay.
She was talking to the girl at the desk and didn’t see me coming. Her outfit was really arresting, a tight coverall of plastic in a pattern of interlocking hands; as your angle of sight changed various strategic hands became transparent. She had a ruddy sun-glow all over her body. I don’t know whether the feeling that rushed over me was simple honest lust or something more complicated. I hurried up behind her.
Whispering: “What are we going to do for three hours?”
She turned and gave me a quick hug and thanked the girl at the desk, then grabbed my hand and pulled me along to a slidewalk.
“Um … where are we headed?”
“Don’t ask questions, Sergeant. Just follow me.”
We stepped onto a roundabout and transferred to an eastbound slidewalk.
“Do you want something to eat or drink?” she asked innocently.
I tried to leer. “Any alternatives?”
She laughed gaily. Several people stared. “Just a second … here!” We jumped off. It was a corridor marked “Roomettes.” She handed me a key.
That damned plastic coverall was held on by static electricity. Since the roomette was nothing but a big waterbed, I almost broke my neck the first time it shocked me.
I recovered.
We were lying on our stomachs, looking through the one-way glass wall at the people rushing around down on the concourse. Marygay passed me a joint.
“William, have you used that thing yet?”
“What thing?”
“That hawg-leg. The pistol.”
“Only shot it once, in the store where I bought it.”
“Do you really think you could point it at someone and blow him apart?”
I took a shallow puff and passed it back. “Hadn’t given it much thought, really. Until we talked last night.”
“Well?”
“I … I don’t really know. The only time I’ve killed was on Aleph, under hypnotic compulsion. But I don’t think it would … bother me, not that much, not if the person was trying to kill me in the first place. Why should it?”
“Life,” she said plaintively, “life is…”
“Life is a bunch of cells walking around with a common purpose. If that common purpose is to get my ass—”
“Oh, William. You sound like old Cortez.”
“Cortez kept us alive.”
“Not many of us,” she snapped.
I rolled over and studied the ceiling tiles. She traced little designs on my chest, pushing the sweat around with her fingertip. “I’m sorry, William. I guess we’re both just trying to adjust.”
“That’s okay. You’re right, anyhow.”
We talked for a long time. The only urban center Marygay had been to since our publicity rounds (which were very shelted) was Sioux Falls. She had gone with her parents and the commune bodyguard. It sounded like a scaled-down version of Washington: the same problems, but not as acute.
We ticked off the things that bothered us: violence, high cost of living, too many people everywhere. I’d have added homolife, but Marygay said I just didn’t appreciate the social dynamic that had led to it; it had been inevitable. The only thing she said she had against it was that it took so many of the prettiest men out of circulation.
And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it alclass="underline" any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder.
It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were — like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long — at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I’m not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra K’S or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger.
And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front; sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air-but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate.
But this war … the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional, more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.
You approached the dirigible by means of a small propeller-driven aircraft that drifted up to match trajectories and docked alongside. A clerk took our baggage and we checked our weapons with the purser, then went outside.
Just about everybody on the flight was standing out on the promenade deck, watching Manhattan creep toward the horizon. It was an eerie sight. The day was very still, so the bottom thirty or forty stories of the buildings were buried in smog. It looked like a city built on a cloud, a thunderhead floating. We watched it for a while and then went inside to eat.