Traveling around the world, I wasn’t really aware of the extent to which relations between the Worlds and America had degenerated, and the last three days had been so full of personal terror that I wouldn’t have noticed if the Sun had started rising in the west.
There were only thirteen people at the meeting. Most of them had already moved to Cape Town, but had come back to New York to tie up loose ends. Everyone else was either down in Florida or home in the Worlds. They explained: Nine days before, the United States had put a temporary prohibition on the sale of deuterium for space flight, even at the astronomical price U.S. Steel had been getting.
Steve Rosenberg, from Mazeltov, explained it to me. “New New York found two more CC deposits on the Moon; they may be rather common. So they got a little aggressive. The Import-Export Board increased the price of satellite power. They gave the U.S. a schedule of monthly increases that would continue until the price of deuterium went back to normal. So the U.S. cut it off.”
“Which was no surprise to the Coordinators,” I said.
“I imagine not. But we have enough deuterium in storage to get everyone back, with some to spare. They’re trying to get everyone back as soon as possible, which is why Cape Town.”
I’d learned that Cape Town was a collection of tents and shanties inside the entrance to the Cape. Worlds citizens were going up in order of reservations, and they were up to May first. I could be home in a week.
But it wasn’t quite as orderly and comfortable an evacuation as had been planned. They were using only one shuttle, the high-gee one, to save fuel. People were allowed only seven kilograms of baggage, including clothes. The rest of the payload was seawater.
“Why salt water?” I asked.
“Well, there are valuable chemicals in it, and salt for food. But mainly it’s the heavy hydrogen: deuterium and tritium.
“We found out that all of the water U.S. Steel was giving us was light water’—all of the heavy hydrogen had been processed out of it. That wouldn’t normally make any difference, since it’s always been cheaper for us to buy heavy hydrogen from Earth, than to set up a plant to make our own. It’s different now. Jules Hammond pointed out last week that there’s enough deuterium and tritium in a tonne of seawater to boost forty tonnes to orbit.”
“So we’ve built a plant?”
“It’s not the sort of thing you can do overnight. But they’re in the process. In a month or so, it’s possible we’ll be able to ‘bootstrap’ water into orbit, without using any earth-made fuel.”
“Do the Lobbies know this?”
“Yes… it should make them more cooperative.”
I wasn’t so sure.
The meeting was strained. A lot of talk concerned what to take along as your seven kilograms. I resolved to go naked and barefoot, so as not to leave my clarinet behind. Actually, though, I didn’t have much beyond the clarinet and my diary. I’d fed guilty taking things that were just souvenirs. Some cigarettes for Daniel and some Guinness for John. Benny’s picture. What of Jeff’s?
When the meeting was breaking up, I mentioned that I didn’t want to go back to my dormitory room, saying it had just been painted. The only one who wasn’t going straight to the Cape was Steve Rosenberg; he offered me a couch.
When we were “alone” on the subway, he asked whether I would rather share his bed. I said I was in too complicated an emotional state for sex, and he understood. So I lay awake for some hours on his couch, mostly worrying about seeing Jeff, partly wishing I were in the next room. There’s no better sleeping pill, and Steve seemed gentle as well as pretty.
39. I Want to Be in That Number
I tried to call Daniel the next morning but was told the equipment was “not functioning.” Went back to the dorm and found a note, unsigned, saying there was an urgent meeting that night, be at the Grapeseed at eight. I planned to be a couple of thousand kilometers away.
I closed my account at the credit union and went to a broker and converted most of the cash into twenty ounces of gold, always scarce in the Worlds. Put two changes of clothing in my bag, then loaded everything else into the trunk, took it down to Penn Station and had it sent to Cape Town. Then I met Jeff for lunch.
He was stunned at the news of Benny’s death. He couldn’t argue with the necessity of my going to Cape Town and getting home as early as possible.
“But marry me first,” he said.
“You keep asking me that in restaurants,” I said. “You know I love you, Jeff, but… it would just make both of us unhappy.”
He shook his head and clasped both my hands. “A symbol, that’s all. It doesn’t even have to be permanent. We could get married in Delaware, make it a one-year renewable contract. Then when I get to New New York we can make whatever arrangement seems right.”
A one-year contract didn’t sound much like marriage to me. But it would make it easier for him to emigrate. “I guess there’s no harm in it Could we do it right away?”
“I have two days off. We could even squeeze in a little honeymoon, in Cape Town.”
“New Orleans,” I said. “I’m not going back without seeing it.”
We spent about an hour in Dover, thirty seconds of which was taken up by a bored notary reciting the marriage statute to us. Better than a Devonite ceremony, I guess, but not exactly moving.
It was a good time to visit New Orleans. The week before had been the annual sustained riot of Mardi Gras, and things were getting back to normal—a sustained wild party, that is to say.
Gambling and prostitution are legal in the old French Quarter; the gambling confined to one large casino but the prostitution is everywhere. It was handled better than on Broadway. To keep his or her license, a whore had to submit to a daily medical inspection. Prices were fixed by law, and any crime against a customer was cause for automatic and permanent revocation (a “ticket to Nevada,” I found out they called it). Most of the whores wore conspicuous costumes—a “slave girl” in rags and chains gave me a shiver—but some wore regular clothes, with license prominently displayed. Many transvestites and people whose orientation was ambiguous or, more likely, flexible. Some gorgeous chunks of male meat that gave me unwifely urgings.
But mainly it was music. It wasn’t pure Dixieland everywhere—in fact, there were even a few places with that mindless Ajimbo noise—and even where there was Dixie-land, it was usually not the classical raucous polyphony, but smoother modern variations. But Preservation Hall had the real stuff, and Jeff dutifully sat with me for hour after hour there. He claimed to enjoy it, but I’ve seen ‘his music collection, and it runs to urban ballads with a little light opera, no jazz.
In a spirit of evening things up, I went to the Casino with him, and watched him play for a couple of hours. He went in with five hundred dollars and said he’d play until he’d doubled it or lost it. He lost it, mainly on blackjack, though he dropped about a hundred on I-Ching, the rules for which I never did figure out.
We made love often and with some desperation, and walked the quaint streets saying obvious and important things. We ducked out of the rain into an antique store on Decatur Street, where my foolish mudball cop bought me a ring that must have cost several weeks’ salary, a fire opal surrounded with diamond chips. Later, when he was sleeping, I slipped out and went back to the same place, and traded an ounce of my gold for a man’s ring, a small gold nugget set in black onyx, and slipped it on his finger without waking him. Saying goodbye was very hard. Afterwards I sat in our room, my room now, for a long afternoon of staring and thinking.