She thought, Then he really is insane.
"He withdrew into a fantasy of tranquillity," Black said, winding the clock that Junie had brought over. "Back to a period before the war. To his childhood. To the late 'fifties, when he was an infant."
"I don't believe a thing you're saying," she said, resisting it. But she still heard it.
"So we found a system by which we could let him live in his stress-free world. Relatively stress-free, I mean. And still plot our missile intercepts for us. He could do it without the sense of load on his shoulders. The lives of all mankind. He could make it into a game, a newspaper contest. That was our tip-off, originally. One day, when we dropped into his headquarters at Denver, he greeted us by saying, 'I've almost got today's puzzle finished.' A week or so later he had gotten a full-scale retreat fantasy going."
"Is he really my brother?" she said.
Black hesitated. "No," he said.
"Is he any relation to me?"
"No," Black said, with reluctance.
"Is Vic my husband?"
"N-no."
"Is anybody any relation to anybody?" she demanded.
Scowling, Black said, "I--" Then he bit his lip and said, "It so happens that you and I are married. But your personality-type fitted in better as a member of Ragle's household. It had to be arranged on a practical basis."
After that, neither of them said anything. Margo walked unsteadily into the kitchen and reflexively seated herself at the table there.
Bill Black my husband, she thought. Major Bill Black. In the living room, her husband unrolled a blanket on the couch, tossed a pillow at one end, and prepared to retire for the night.
Going to the living room door, she said, "Can I ask you something?"
He nodded.
"Do you know where the light cord is that Vic reached for, that night in the bathroom?"
Black said, "Vic managed a grocery store in Oregon. The light cord might have been there. Or in his apartment there."
"How long have you and I been married?"
"Six years."
She said, "Any children?"
"Two girls. Ages four and five."
"What about Sammy?" In his room, Sammy slept on, his door shut. "He's no relation to anybody? Just a child recruited somewhere along the line, like a movie actor to fill a part?"
"He's Vic's boy. Vic and his wife."
"What's his wife's name?"
"You've never met her."
"Not that big Texas girl down at the store."
Black laughed. "No. A girl named Betty or Barbara; I never met her, either."
"What a mess," she said.
"It is," he said.
She returned to the kitchen and reseated herself. Later, she heard him switch on the television set. He listened to concert music for an hour or so, and then she heard him switch the set off, and then the living room light, and then get under the blanket on the couch. Later on, at the kitchen table, she involuntarily dozed.
The telephone woke her up. She could hear Bill Black flailing about in the living room, trying to find it.
"In the hall," she said groggily.
"Hello," Black said.
The clock on the wall above the kitchen sink told her that the time was three-thirty. Lord, she thought.
"Okay," Black said. He hung up the phone and padded back into the living room. Listening, she heard him dress, stuff his things away in the suitcase, and then the front door opened and shut. He had left. He had gone.
Not waiting, she thought, rubbing her eyes and trying to wake up. She felt stiff and cold; shivering, she got to her feet and stood before the oven, trying to get warm.
They're not coming back, she thought. At least, Ragle isn't coming back. Or Black would wait.
From his bedroom, Sammy called, "Mommy! Mommy!"
She opened the door. "What's the matter?" she said.
Sitting up in bed, Sammy said, "Who was on the phone?"
"Nobody," she said. She entered the room and bent down to tuck the covers over the boy. "Go back to sleep."
"Did Dad get home yet?"
"Not yet," she said.
"Wow," Sammy said, settling back down and already drifting back into sleep. "Maybe they stole something... left town."
She remained in the bedroom, seated on the edge of the boy's bed, smoking a cigarette and forcing herself to stay awake.
I don't think they'll be back, she thought. But I'll wait up anyhow. Just in case.
"What do you mean they're right?" Vic said. "You mean it's right to bomb towns and hospitals and churches?"
Ragle Gumm remembered the day he had first heard about the Lunar colonists, already called lunatics, firing on Federal troops. Nobody had been very much surprised. The lunatics, for the most part, consisted of discontented people, unestablished young couples, ambitious young men and their wives, few with children, none with property or responsibility. His first reaction was to wish that he could fight. But his age forbade that. And he had something much more valuable to volunteer.
They had put him to work plotting the missile strikes, making his graphs and patterns of prediction, doing his statistical research, he and his staff. Major Black had been his executive officer, a bright individual eager to learn how the plotting was done. For the first year it had gone properly, and then the weight of responsibility had gotten him down. The sense that all their lives depended on him. And at that point the army people had decided to take him off Earth. To put him aboard a ship and transport him to one of the health resorts on Venus to which high government officials went, and at which they wasted much time. The climate on Venus, or perhaps the minerals in the water, or the gravity -- no one could be sure -- had done much to cure cancer and heart trouble.
For the first time in his life he found himself leaving Earth. Journeying out into space, between planets. Free of gravity. The greatest tie had ceased to hold him. The fundamental force that kept the universe of matter behaving as it did. The Heisenberg Unified Field Theory had connected all energy, all phenomena into a single experience. Now, as his ship left Earth, he passed from that experience to another, the experience of pure freedom.
It answered, for him, a need that he had never been aware of. A deep restless yearning under the surface, always there in him, throughout his life, but not articulated. The need to travel on. To migrate.
His ancestors had migrated. They had appeared, nomads, not farmers but food-gatherers, entering the West from Asia. When they had reached the Mediterranean they had settled down, because they had reached the edge of the world; there was no place left to go. And then later, hundreds of years later, reports had arrived that other places existed. Lands beyond the sea. They had never gotten out onto the sea much, except perhaps for their abortive migration to North Africa. That migration out onto the water in boats was a terrifying thing for them. They had no idea where they were going, but after a while they had made that migration, from one continent to another. And that held them for a time, because again they had reached the edge of the world.
No migration had ever been like this. For any species, any race. From one planet to another. How could it be surpassed? They made now, in these ships, the final leap. Every variety of life made its migration, traveled on. It was a universal need, a universal experience. But these people had found the ultimate stage, and as far as they knew, no other species or race had found that.
It had nothing to do with minerals, resources, scientific measurement. Nor even exploration and profit. Those were excuses. The actual reason lay outside their conscious minds. If he were required to, he could not formulate the need, even as he experienced it fully. No one could. An instinct, the most primitive drive, as well as the most noble and complex. It was both at once.