Going to the closet of his apartment, Ian Duncan bent down and carefully lifted a cloth-wrapped object into the light. We had so much youthful faith in this, he recalled.
Tenderly, he unwrapped the jug; then, taking a deep breath, he blew a couple of hollow notes on it. Duncan & Miller and Their Two-man Jug Band, he and Al Miller had been, playing their own arrangement for two jugs of Bach and Mozart and Stravinsky. But the White House talent scout -- the skunk. He had never even given them a fair audition. It had been done, he told them. Jesse Pigg, the fabulous jug-artist from Alabama, had got to the White House first, entertaining and delighting the dozen and one members of the Thibodeaux family gathered there with his version of ‘Derby Ram' and ‘John Henry' and the like.
‘But,' Ian Duncan had protested, ‘this is classical jug. We play late Beethoven sonatas.'
‘We'll call you,' the talent scout had said briskly. ‘If Nicky shows an interest at any time in the future.'
Nicky! He had blanched. Imagine being that intimate to the First Family. He and Al, mumbling pointlessly, had retired from the stage and their jugs, making way for the next act, a group of dogs dressed up in Elizabethan costumes portraying characters from Hamlet.
The dogs had not made it, either, but that was little consolation.
‘I am told,' Nicole was saying, ‘that there is so little light in the ocean depths that, well, observe this strange fellow.' A fish, sporting a glowing lantern before him, swam across the TV screen.
Startling him, there came a knock on the apartment door.
With caution, LAN Duncan answered it. He found his neighbour Mr Stone standing there, looking nervous.
‘You weren't at All Souls?' Edgar Stone said. ‘Won't they check and find out?' He held in his hands Ian Duncan's corrected test.
Duncan said, ‘Tell me how I did.' He prepared himself.
Entering the apartment, Stone shut the door after him. He glanced at the TV set, saw Nicole seated with the oceanographers, listened for a moment to her, then abruptly said in a hoarse voice, ‘You did fine.' He held out the test.
‘I passed?'
Duncan could not believe it. He accepted the papers, examining them with incredulity. And then he understood what had happened.
Stone had conspired to see that he passed. He had falsified the score, probably out of humanitarian motives. Duncan raised his head and they looked at each other, neither speaking. This is terrible, Duncan thought. What'll I do now? His reaction amazed him, but there it was.
I wanted to fail, he realized. Why? So I can get out of here, so I would have an excuse to give up all this, my apartment and my job, say fork it and go. Emigrate with nothing more than the shirt on my back, in a jalopy that falls to pieces the moment it comes to rest in the Martian wilderness.
‘Thanks,' he said glumly.
In a rapid voice, Stone said, ‘Y-you can do the same for me sometime.'
‘Oh yeah, be happy to,' Duncan said.
Scuttling back out of the apartment, Stone left him alone with the TV set, his jug and the falsely corrected test papers, and his thoughts.
3
One would have to go back to the year 1994, the year that West Germany entered the Union as the fifty-third of the United States, to understand why Vince Strikerock, an American citizen and an inhabitant of The Abraham Lincoln Apartments, was listening to der Alte on the television set while he shaved, the next morning. There was something about this particular der Alte, President Rudi Kalbfleisch, which always irritated him, and it would be a great thing when Kalbfleisch, in two more years, reached the end of his term and had, by law, to retire. It was always a great thing, a good day, when the law got one of them out of office; Vince always found it worth celebrating.
None the less, Vince felt, it was best to do all that was possible with the old man while he remained in office, and so he put down his razor and went into the living room to fiddle with the knobs of the TV set. He adjusted the n, the r and b knobs, and hopefully anticipated a turn for the better in the dire droning on of the speech ... however, no change took place. Too many other viewers had their own ideas as to what the old man ought to be saying, Vince realized. In fact there were probably enough other people in this one apartment building alone to offset any pressures he might try to exert on the old man through his particular set. But anyhow that was democracy. Vince sighed. This was what they had wanted: a government receptive to what the people said. He returned to the bathroom and continued shaving.
‘Hey Julie!' he called to his wife. ‘Is breakfast about ready?' He heard no sound of her stirring about in the kitchen of the apartment. And come to think of it, he hadn't noticed her beside him in bed as he had groggily got up this morning.
All at once he remembered. Last night after All Souls he and Julie, after a particularly bitter fight, had got divorced, had gone down to the building's M & D Commissioner and filled out the D papers. Julie had packed her things then and there; he was alone in the apartment -- no one was fixing his breakfast and unless he got busy he would miss it entirely.
It was a shock, because this particular marriage had endured for six entire months and he had become thoroughly used to seeing her in the mornings. She knew just how he liked his eggs (cooked with a small amount of Mild Munster cheese). Damn the new permissive divorce legislation that old President Kalbfleisch had ushered in! Damn Kalbfleisch in general; why didn't the old man turn over and die some afternoon during his famous two o'clock nap? But then of course another der Alte would simply take his place. And even the old man's death wouldn't bring Julie back; that lay outside the area of USEA bureaucracy, vast as it was.
Savagely, he went to the TV set and pressed the s knob; if enough citizens pushed it, the old man would stop entirely the stop knob meant total cessation of the mumbling speech.
Vince waited, but the speech went on.
And then it struck him as odd that there should be a speech so early in the morning; after all, it was only eight a.m. Perhaps the entire lunar colony had gone up in a single titanic explosion of its fuel depot. The old man would be telling them that more belt-tightening was required, in order to restock the space programme; these and other quaint calamities had to be expected. Or perhaps at last some authentic remains of a sentient race had been unearthed -- or was the term unmarsed? -- on the fourth planet, hopefully not in the French area but in, as der Alte liked to phrase it, ‘one's own'. You Prussian bastards, Vince thought. We never should have admitted you into what I like to phrase as ‘our tent', our federal union, which should have been confined to the Western Hemisphere. But the world has shrunk. When you are founding a colony millions of miles away on another moon or planet, the three thousand miles separating New York from Berlin did not seem meaningful. And god knew the Germans in Berlin were willing.
Picking up the telephone, Vince called the manager of the apartment building. ‘My wife Julie -- I mean my ex-wife did she take another apartment last night?' If he could locate her he could perhaps have breakfast with her and that would be cheering. He listened hopefully.