Daniel and John, perhaps independently, both presented O’Hara with a “big fish in a small pond” argument. The social structure of Janus would parallel New New’s, with Engineering and Policy Coordinators at the top of two separate tracks, but with less than a tenth of New New’s population to draw from. So she would be much more likely to make it to the top.
She didn’t doubt this was true, but was not sure that it was an attractive proposition. The motivation that drove her ambition was to her complicated and obscure. The Board’s analysis was that it stemmed from a need to be admired, rooted in the rejection she had received from her Scanlan playmates and the lack of appreciation her mother and stepfather had shown for her academic achievement. To O’Hara that explanation sounded facile and incomplete. It ignored the abstract pleasure she took in problem-solving, which she thought was the main driving force behind her desire to advance: the higher you got, the more important and complex the problems were, and the more satisfaction in their solution. That also made her hesitate to accept her husbands’ argument. Janus would be a World, but it was primarily a spaceship. The Engineering Coordinator would be the captain; the highest she could aspire to would be chief stewardess.
And there was Earth, too. Once the plague was under control, there would be a need for administrators who had experience with Earth—though how relevant her experience would be in dealing with the strange world Jeff described, she couldn’t say.
Every month she went down to the Bellcom studios and listened to him, hoping that he would have found a new power source, so they could have a two-way conversation. (Intact fuel cells were rare because the most common variety contained a small silver bar inside; for a while after the war those bars were used as currency.) But his signal grew progressively weaker, and during the past two full moons there had been no transmission at all. The technicians said it was likely that was because the power he could generate had fallen below their antenna’s thresh-old of sensitivity. She hoped they were right.
In the course of seven communications Jeff had given them a vivid picture of the brutal world that was Charlie’s Country. Heavily armed bands of children and teenagers, “families,” either settled on farms or roamed from city to ruined city, looting. They sometimes traded with one another and sometimes fought desperate battles for each other’s supplies. Girls were impregnated soon after menarche, and would keep on having babies until they died, usually around eighteen or nineteen. Many of the babies were born dead or were grotesque mutations. Most of the families destroyed the mutations, but some kept them around as pets.
They had two holy books, the Christian bible and a booklet called Charlie’s Will. Jeff thought that Charlie’s Will must originally have been a heavy-handed satire against religion; now it was taken literally. A version printed about a year after the war contained an explanation for the plague—it was God’s reaction to the sin of contraception. Living a sensible twenty years or less, people had to make a lot of babies. It explained the war itself as punishment for mankind’s assault of the heavens. Thus the Worlds were responsible for all misery, both in historical “fact” and by theological fiat. Jeff had stopped trying to convince people otherwise; heresy could be very dangerous.
The insanity of daily life was compounded by reliance on oracles. For a week or two before a person died of the plague, his brain was infected and he raved, rambling nonsense. They thought it was disguised advice from God or His avatar, Charlie.
Jeff knew about Deucalion; he had watched it move across the sky and merge with the bright star that was New New. He said he hoped that was proof they had survived, since he was under the impression that the asteroid wasn’t due for another twenty years or so, and he assumed they had done something to speed it up. Other people had seen it too—some families used a simpleminded kind of astrology, watching the sky for omens—and their interpretations of it were interesting. God had finally destroyed the World, or Charlie’s spirit had moved into it, or aliens from outer space had taken it over and were going to invade Earth.
2 
John was weaker than ever, coming back from two months of zerogee. When their schedules matched, O’Hara walked with him in the low-gravity sections, trying not to lope as he shuffled painfully along.
“So how’s the promotion working out?” Ogelby looked up at her sideways.
“Too early to tell.” She took two long steps, then caught herself and waited. “Actually, it’s a pain. I wish they’d let me stay in Resources Allocation. Everybody under me knows my job better than I do.”
“Take it from an old hand. It’s time to be very careful.” Ogelby was Grade 20, the highest.
“Oh, I know that. They’re testing me… my profile said ‘the subject’s main weakness is an unwillingness to delegate authority.’ So they put me in a position where I can’t do anything else.” She’d been shuffled up and sideways to become Director of Statistics in the Public Health Division. “I hadn’t even thought about statistics since I was sixteen. And that was just a basic, you know—‘if you have six black balls and four white balls—’”
“You’re a male basketball team. Mixed—”
“Spare me.” They stopped at a picture window that overlooked the curved expanse of parkland below them. “How soon do you think you’ll be ready for one gee?”
“God. I don’t even want to think about it.” He put his back to the view, looping both arms through the railing, to take some weight off his feet. “That’s what you’ve been studying, nights? Statistics?”
“Trying to get through a text. But I’m having to relearn calculus to do the proofs. It’s demoralizing, how fast you forget things.”
“If you need help…”
“No, thanks. I went through that with Dan. This stuff comes too naturally to you guys. When Dan tries to explain something I wind up knowing less than when I started.”
He nodded. “I’m no teacher, either.”
“Besides, I’m just doing it as a gesture. All this chisquare, standard deviation…all we really do is get numbers from Vital Statistics and put them down in various columns. How many workdays lost to colds last September? Shall we serve more chicken soup this September? I’m sure it would all be very fascinating to somebody else. I’ll stick with it for a year, until after the next Board review. If they give me a good evaluation I guess I can assume I’ve passed their little test. Then I can look around and ask for a transfer.”
“Want me to get you a transfer?”
“Into Engineering track?” She laughed. “No thanks.”
“It would be Policy track, assigned to Engineering. At your grade or a step higher.”
“No, it would look too fishy. With you a twenty and Dan an eighteen, and my being friends with Sandra, I don’t dare go near Engineering. The Board would see strings being pulled and freeze me forever.”
“It would be a computer selection. No personal recommendations at all.”