Speaking of yourself, I daydreamed about you all day and so have virtually nothing in my notes about Hemingway, Eli Whitney, and Methodism. The night with Byron was somatically unsatisfying, but it did reawaken an over-powering itch I’ve been scratching away at by myself for a month.
Sorry, old groundhog, I can feel your ears getting red. But I’ve made an exhaustive study of masturbation over the past few weeks, and I would like to share with you my findings: it is quick and easy and you don’t have to clean up your room beforehand. I would do it right now but I have a late seminar and can’t afford to be more tired than I already am. If I take another ’phet I’ll be up all night, and be out of phase with the rest of the world for a week. (That’s how dull and rationalized my so-called sex life has become.)
So I will bow to your wishes (and John’s) and stop keeping my hands to myself. Whether I’ll continue the tutelage of my pet poet, I don’t know. See if he’s still smiling, the next time I see him. Love—
Marianne
17. One-sided Conversation
—Hello, no vision.
—Oh, it’s you.
—Two new friends, maybe. Let me call you back later.
—Endit.
(A half-hour later he walks into a bar he knows will be crowded and noisy at this time. He nurses a drink until 2:47. He goes to the public phone and punches the number that is appropriate for that day and hour.)
—Will here.
—We have a probable and a possible. Probable is the poet type I mentioned last time. He’s somewhat conspicuous, but that does have its uses. The other is a woman from New New York—
—New New York, the satellite. She—
—I know. Not to get deeply involved; not to find out too much. Her sympathies might be valuable some day. She seems politically disaffected with her home government and realistic about American politics.
—Yes….
—She’s a student at NYU. American Studies and something else.
—I don’t know. It’s usually a year. That would be enough time for what I have in mind…. Oh, one complication. She’s a friend of the poet’s; I think they’re sleeping together. For the time being, we shouldn’t bring him in any deeper than she goes.
—No, she was brought into the Grapeseed by one of my fourth cadre, second level. A female who lives in the same dormitory.
—No, the poet, well, they met outside. He’s been coming down for a couple of months. It’s—
—I know. But it doesn’t seem suspicious.
—Trust me, I’ll fed them out a little more. The poet seems clean but it’s hard to check up on her.
—Sure.
—If you can do it without any fuss. Her name’s Marianne O’Hara, line name Scanlan. She mentioned living on the, uh, fourth level, which is a voting region…..
—Presumably. But the University records could be forged.
—Can’t see it. If she’s acting she’s too good for them to insert at this level. And why would they do an insert who was an alien and a priori a temporary resident?
—Barely possible. Anything’s possible. If you want, I’ll hold off until you check.
—All right.
—No, we lost one last week. Cab accident, didn’t look suspicious. So now we stand at one seventy-eight, with fifty-four at the expediting level.
—We do indeed. Endit.
18. Death and Tariffs
O’Hara went to the next Worlds Club meeting armed with the information John had passed on to her. Most of the people knew that and more.
“They could have kept it secret,” a man from Mazeltov complained. “That’s the trouble with you Yorkers. You-stay in too-close touch with Earth.”
“Where would you peddle your metal,” a man said, “without our marketing and shipping arrangements? Build your own slowboats and shuttles?”
“I’m not talking about economics,” the Mazeltov man said.
“What are they talking about?” O’Hara asked Claire. “What secret?”
“The lunar CC material. It’s all over the papers, haven’t you heard?”
“But I haven’t seen a thing. I’ve known about it for days!”
“Didn’t use to be news,” Claire said, looking through her bag. “Not until the Lobbies started twitching…. Guess I left the paper at home.”
“I’ll get one.” O’Hara went into the main restaurant section of the Liffey and put a dollar in the Times machine; punched up “Space.” It dropped twenty pages and flashed for another fifty cents. Usually you got two pages and change. O’Hara bought the rest and scanned the pages as she walked back to the meeting room.
The Senate was in an uproar. U.S. Steel was calling for a unilateral boycott of Worlds goods and services, and they had a lot of support.
Tomorrow night there was going to be a prime-time referendum: “Resolved: That all exports to the Worlds be halted until new agreements, guaranteeing long-term economic interdependence, can be reached between the United States and the Worlds, together and severally.”
She sat down across from Claire and leafed through the pages. “It’s out-and-out blackmail.”
“Not really,” Claire said. “Just good politics; better to do than be done to. Unusually farsighted.”
“I was going to say ‘premature.’ Don’t they know that this is really just a test?”
“But you do have to admit that we would pull our own boycott, eventually. Once we could live off Deucalion.”
“Twenty years or more.”
Claire shrugged. “Farsighted.”
The man from Mazeltov sat down with them. “Claire, you’re in systems engineering, right?” She nodded. “How long can we hold out?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. It depends on what you mean by ‘we.’ Your world and mine, Von Braun, will start to feel it in a couple of months. Larger systems are more resilient to shock; Devon’s World could hold out for years. New New York could go twenty years, probably, with careful birth control. If you add selective euthanasia, they could keep the World running for centuries.”
O’Hara looked thoughtful. “Twenty years.”
“You see? They aren’t really being precipitate. Just cold-blooded.”
“What about a larger ‘we’?” the man said. “New New could export food and water; they’ve done it before.”
“They did it for Braun when I was a baby,” Claire said. “That do you think, Marianne?”
“That was an emergency. I don’t know.” She sipped her beer. “There’s another political aspect to it, that the U.S. has to be thinking of… not just maintaining imbalance of trade. It looks as if they may be trying to push us into unity.” She glanced at the paper. “That’s why the phrase together and severally.’”
“There are worse things,” the man said.
“It would be a disaster.” O’Hara sighed. Old argument. “We’d be a suburb of Earth forever. Just another country.” The Worlds did have a loose organization, through the Import-Export Board and various unanimous agreements concerning immigration and noninterference. But there was nothing resembling autonomy except for a mutual orneriness toward Earth.
There was an awkward moment of silence while everybody decided not to run around that track again. “Speaking of other countries,” O’Hara said, “what about Common Europe? Are they cooperating?”
“Europe”—Claire nodded—“Supreme Socialist Union, and the Alexandrian Dominion. Japan has pledged to import nothing and limit its launches to bare life support for its two Worlds. The Pan-African Union is officially neutral, but their only launch facility is Zaire. They’re in bed with Germany. We do have Pacifica on our side, and Greenland, I think.”