In Our Hands the Stars

by Harry Harrison

  He was gone before Martha could answer, with his two shadows trailing after him. She shook another cigarette out of the pack and lighted it; at this rate she would have a pack smoked before noon. She twisted about, with her legs up on the couch, smoothing down her skirt. Had she worn the right thing? The knitted dress was always Nils’s favorite. How long had it been? She turned quickly when she heard a car—but it was only the traffic passing on Strandvejen. The sun burned down on a scene of green grass, tall trees, and the bright blue waters of the Sound beyond. White sails leaned away from the wind and a bee-buzzing motorboat drew a pale line of wake toward Sweden. A June Sunday with the sun shining—

  Denmark could be heaven, and Nils was coming home! How many months …

  It was practically a convoy, three large black cars, pulling into the drive and stopping before the house. A police car and another car parked at the curb beyond them. They were here. She ran, getting there ahead of Skou, throwing the door wide.

  “Martha!” he shouted, dropping his bag and sweeping her to him, kissing her so hard she had no breath, right there on the porch. She managed to push free, laughing, when she realized that a small circle of men was waiting patiently for them to finish.

  “I’m sorry, please come in,” she said, aware that her hair was mussed and her lipstick probably smeared, and not giving a damn. “Arnie, it is wonderful to see you. Come in please.” Then they were in the living room, just the three of them, with the sound of heavy feet stamping through the rest of the house.

  “I’m sorry about the honor guard,” Nils said. “But it was the only way we could get Arnie back to Earth for a holiday. It was time for us all to have a break, and I think maybe him most of all. Watchdog Skou agreed on it as long as Arnie stayed with us, and Skou could make all the security arrangements he wanted to.”

  “Thank you for having me,” Arnie said, leaning back wearily in the upholstered chair. He looked drawn and had lost a lot of weight. “I am sorry to impose …”

  “Don’t be silly! If you say another word I shall throw you out and make you stay at the Mission Hotel which, as you know, is absolutely non-alcoholic. Here you get drinks. To celebrate. What would you like?” She stood and opened the bar.

  “My arms feel heavy as lead,” Nils said, scowling as he moved his hand up and down. “I’ve barely enough strength to lift a glass to my mouth. That gravity, one-sixth of Earth’s, it ruins the muscles.”

  “Poor dear! Shall I bottle feed you?”

  “You know what you can do to give me strength!”

  “You sound too exhausted. Better have a drink first. I’ve made a pitcher of martinis—all right?”

  “Fine. And remind me, I have a bottle of Bombay gin in my suitcase for you. We have it tax-free on the Moon, since they have decided to call it a free-port area until someone comes up with a better idea. The customs men, very generous, allow us to bring one bottle back. An 800,000 kilometer round trip to save twenty-five kroner in duty. The world’s mad.” He took a deep drag on the chilled drink and sighed with pleasure.

  Arnie sipped at his. “I hope you will excuse all the guards and fuss, but they treat me like a national treasure—”

  “As you damn well are!” Nils broke in. “With all the Daleth equipment on the Moon, you are worth a billion kroner on the hoof to any country with the money to buy you. I wish I weren’t so patriotic. I would sell you to the highest bidder and retire to Bali for life.”

  Arnie smiled, almost relaxing.

  “They had a conspiracy. The doctors, Skou, your husband, all of them. They thought if they made an armed fort of your home that I could come here. The weather could not be better.”

  “Sailing weather,” Nils said, and drained his drink. “Where’s the boat?”

  “In the water, like you asked, tied up on the south side of the harbor.”

  “What a day for sailing! Why don’t we all go down there—no, damn, Arnie’s supposed to stay in the house.”

  “You two go, I will be fine right here,” Arnie insisted. “I will get some sun in the garden, that is what Nils promised me.”

  “No such thing,” Martha said. “Nils is going to the harbor and get all hot and tarry. He never sails the boat, just caulks seams and things. Let him get it out of his system while we loaf in the garden.”

  “Well—if you don’t mind?” Nils was already leaning toward the door.

  “Go on,” Martha laughed. “Just come back in time few dinner.”

  “I’ll find Skou and tell him where I’m going. Not that they care about me, since all I know about a Daleth drive is how to push the buttons.”

  Martha had to find him his work trousers, then a paint-stained shirt, then his swim trunks before he was ready and slammed out of the house. Arnie had gone to his room to change and, at the sight of all the delicious sunlight, Martha put on a bathing suit too. All Danes were sun worshipers on a day like this.

  Arnie was on a lounge on the patio, and she pulled the other one up next to him.

  “Wonderful,” he said. “I did not realize how much we miss color and being out of doors.” The shadow of a gull slid across the grass and up the high wooden fence. The air was still. Someone laughed, far away, and there was the distinct plock-plock of a tennis ball being played.

  “How is the work going? Or as much of it as you can tell me about.”

  “The only secret is the drive. For the rest it is like running a steamship company and opening up the wild West at the same time. Did you read about our Mars visit?”

  “Yes, I was so jealous. When do you start selling passenger tickets?”

  “Very soon. And you will have the very first one. There really are plans being made along those lines. In any case, those surface veins of uranium on Mars made the DFRS stock soar tremendously on the world markets. Money is being poured into the super-liner that the Swedes are building, mostly for cargo, but with plenty of cabins for passengers later. We will lift her by tug to the Moon and put the drive in there. The base is almost a city now, with machine shops and assembly plants. We do almost all of the manufacturing of the Daleth units there, except for standard electronics components from here. It is all going so well, no one can complain.” He looked around for a piece of wood to touch, and found none among the chrome-and-plastic garden furniture.

  “Shall I bring you a board or something?” Martha asked, and they both laughed. “Or better yet bring you a cold drink. The yard, closed in like this, cuts off the breeze, and you can actually work up a sweat in this kind of weather.”

  “Yes, please, if you will join me.”

  “Try and stop me. Gin and tonic since we already started on gin.”

  She came back with the drinks on a tray, silently on her bare feet, and Arnie started when he saw her.

  “I didn’t mean to surprise you,” she said, handing him a glass.

  “Please do not blame yourself. I know that it is I. There has been a great deal of work and tension. So it is really very good to be here. In fact it is almost as hot as Israel.”

  “Do you miss Israel?” she asked, then quickly said, “I’m sorry. I know that it’s none of my business.”

  The smile was gone, his face set. “Yes, I miss the country. My friends, the life there. But I think that I would do the entire thing over again in the same manner if I were given a second chance.”

  “I don’t mean to pry….”

  “No, Martha, it is perfectly all right. It is on my mind a good deal of the time. Traitor or hero? I myself would rather die than cause injury to Israel. Yet I had a letter, in Hebrew, no signature. ‘What would Esther Bar-Giora have thought?’ it said.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Yes. She looked very much like you. The same kind of hair and”—he glanced at her figure, more flesh than fabric in the diminutive bathing suit, and looked away and coughed— “the, what you might call, the same sort of build. But dark, tanned all the time. A sabra, born and grew up in Israel. One of my graduate students. She married t
he professor, she used to always say.” His eyes had a distant, haunted look. “She was killed in a terror raid.” He sipped his drink. In the silence that followed the distant shouting of children could be heard.

  “But do not let me sound too gloomy, Martha. It is too nice an afternoon. I would like to have known who sent that letter. I wanted to tell whoever it was that I think Esther would have been angry at me, but she would have understood. And in the end she might even have agreed with me. There must be a time when the issue of all mankind should come ahead of our concerns with our own country. You should know about that, what I mean. Born an American, now a Dane, a real citizen of the world.”

  “No, not really.” She laughed to cover her confusion. “I mean I am married to a Dane, but I am still an American citizen, passport and all.” Now why had she told him about that?

  “Papers,” he said, lifting his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Meaningless. We are what we think we are. Our deeds reflect our ethos. I am stating it badly. I never did well in philosophy, or in anything other than physics and mathematics. I even failed stinks once, forgot a retort on the burner and let it explode. And I never thought much about anything other than my work. And Esther, of course, when we were married. People used to call me a dry stick, and they were right. I never played cards, nothing like that. But I could see and I could think. And watch the attempts to destroy Israel. And when the idea of the Daleth drive came closer and closer to reality, I thought more and more about what should be done with it. I remembered Nobel and his million-dollar guilty-conscience awards. I thought of the atomic scientists who had been certified or who had committed suicide. Why, I kept thinking, why can’t something be done before the discovery is revealed? Can I not turn it to the benefit of mankind instead of the destruction? The thought stayed with me, and I could not get rid of it, and—in the end—I had to act upon it. I did not think that it would be easy, but I never thought it would be this hard …”

  Arnie broke off and sipped at his drink. “You must excuse me; I am talking too much. The company of men. A woman, a sympathetic ear, and you see what happens. A joke.” He smiled a twisted grin.

  “No, never!” She leaned over impulsively and took his hand. “A woman would go mad if she couldn’t tell her troubles to someone. I think that’s the trouble with men. They hold it all in until they explode and then go out and kill someone.”

  “Yes, of course. Thank you. Thank you very much.” He patted her hand clumsily with his and lay back heavily, eyes closed. A fat bumblebee hummed industriously around the hollyhock that climbed the side of the house, the only sound now in the still of the afternoon.

  * * *

  “Den er fin med kompasset, Slå rommen iglasset …”

  Nils sang happily in a loud monotone, scraping away at the paint blister on the cockpit cover. The harbor was deserted; on a summer Sunday like this every boat was out in the Sound. He would be too, as soon as he finished this job. He hated to see any imperfections on his Måge, so he ended up doing much more painting and polishing than sailing. Well, that was fun too. He had muscles and he liked to use them. Though they would ache tomorrow after the months of enervating lunar gravity. He was barefoot, stripped to his swim trunks, sweating greatly and enjoying himself tremendously. Singing so loud that he was unaware of the quiet footsteps on the dock behind him.

  “That’s a terrible noise that you are making,” the voice said.

  “Inger!” He sat up and wiped his hands on the rag. “Do you make a habit of sneaking up on me? And what the devil are you doing here?”

  “Accident, if you can call fate that. I’m with friends from the Malmo Yacht Club, we’re just out for the day.” She pointed at a large cabin cruiser on the other side of the harbor. “We tied up here for lunch—and some drinks of course, you know how thirsty we Swedes get. They all went into the kro. I have to join them.”

  “Not before I give you a drink—I have some bottles of beer in a bucket. My God but you look good.”

  She did indeed. Inger Ahlqvist. Six feet of honey-tanned blonde, in a bikini so small that it was hardly noticeable.

  “You shouldn’t walk around like that in public,” he said, aware of the tightening of the muscles in his stomach, his thighs. “It’s just criminal. And torture to a poor guy who has been playing Man in the Moon for so long that he has forgotten what a girl even looks like.”

  “They look like me,” she said, and laughed. “Come on, give me that beer so I can go get my lunch. Sailing is hungry work. How is the Moon?”

  “Indescribable. But you’ll be there one of these days soon. DFRS will need hostesses, and we’ll bribe you away from SAS.” He jumped down into the cockpit, landing heavier than he realized, still not adjusted to the change in gravity, and opened the cabin door. “I’ll get one for myself too. Isn’t this the weather? What have you been doing?”

  He went to the far end where he had the green bottles in a bucket of water with chunks of ice. She stepped into the cockpit and leaned down to talk to him.

  “The same old round. Still fun, but don’t think I haven’t envied you all this Moon and Mars travel. Do you mean what you said about the hostess thing?”

  “Of course.” He clicked the caps off both bottles with an opener fixed to the bulkhead. “No details yet, secret and all that, but there are definite plans for passenger runs in the future. There have to be. Do you realize that we can reach the Moon base faster than the regular flight can go from Kastrup to New York? Here.”

  He handed her the bottle and she stepped forward to get it. “Skål.”

  She drank deeply, lowered the bottle with a contented sigh, her lips full and damp. Just inches away. There was no thought involved.

  His bottle dropped to the deck, rolled, spilling out a pale stream of foam. His arms were around her back, the flesh of his hands against the warmth of her skin, her thighs tight to his thighs, the pressure of her breasts flattening against him. Her mouth was open, her lips beer-moist against his.

  Her bottle dropped, rolled, clattered against the others.

  They did not hear it. They were falling.

  * * *

  Arnie’s mouth was slightly open, and his head had fallen over to one side; he was breathing deeply and regularly. Martha rose slowly so as not to disturb him. If she stayed in the still heat of the garden any longer she would fall asleep too, and she did not want to do that. She went into the house and slipped into a light beach jacket, then knocked on Skou’s door. He opened it, wearing a pair of earphones, and waved her in. He had converted the back bedroom into a command post, and there was a table full of communications equipment. He issued instructions and switched off.

  “I’m going to the harbor for a bit,” she told him. “Professor Klein is asleep in the back yard, and I didn’t want to bother him.”

  “That’s our job, watching him. I’ll tell him where you went if he wakes up.”

  It was only a five-minute walk. Martha went along the beach, carrying her sandals. The sand was warm and felt good between her toes. She stayed away from the water, which she knew, even now, would be far too cold for swimming. The air was still, almost soundless except for the flut-flutting of a helicopter overhead. Probably part of the guard for Arnie. There were a number of extra cars and trucks parked in her neighborhood, and she knew that some of the neighbors had unexpected guests. That poor, tired little man was being guarded like a national treasure. Well he probably was one. She waved to a party of friends sunning themselves on the beach, and climbed the stone steps to the top of the seawall. The harbor was almost empty of boats, and there was Måge—but Nils was nowhere to be seen.

  Perhaps he had gone across the road to the kro for a drink? No, he usually stopped there on the way to get some bottles of beer. Where could he have gotten to? Below decks probably.

  She was about to call to him when she saw the beer bottle on the cockpit floor, and next to it, trailing through the half-open door, a piece of blue fabric. The halter top of a bikini.


  In that single instant, with heart-stopping clarity, she knew what she would see if she looked into the cabin. As though she had lived this instant before, sometime, and had buried the memory which was now surfacing. Calmly-why? she wasn’t feeling calm—she stepped forward to the edge of the dock and leaned far out, holding onto the bollard anchored there. Through the door she could now see the starboard bunk, Nils’s broad back, and what he was doing. The arms that were tightly pressed against that back, the tanned legs …

  With a muffled sob she straightened up, feeling a hot wave of anger sweeping over her, reddening her skin. Here, in their boat, after being away all this time, not even home yet!

  Ready to jump into the boat, ready to hurt, bite, tear, she did not want to hold back. But there was shouting, loud noise. She looked up.

  “The sail is stuck!” someone shouted in Danish from the single-masted yacht that was rushing in toward the dock, almost on top of her.

  There was a brief glimpse of a man wrestling with the fouled rigging, a woman pushing at the tiller, screeching something at him, and children grabbing for ropes and falling over each other. At any other time it would have been funny. They were coming on, still too fast, and the woman jammed the tiller hard over.

  Instead of striking bow on, the boat turned, hitting a glancing blow to the pilings, bouncing away. One of the small children fell off the cabin roof onto the deck and began to shriek in fright. The sail came down in a jumble and the man fought with it.

  Then they lost way and bobbed to a stop. Tragedy averted. Someone even began to laugh. It had only taken seconds. Martha started forward again—then hesitated. In those brief instants everything had changed. They would be sitting up, pulling on clothing, laughing perhaps. She felt embarrassment at the thought, and hesitated. She was still as angry, though the anger was choked within her. The little yacht was tying up a few feet away. Could she, coldly now, enter that cabin, scream at them with these others here? A boy brushed against her, apologizing as he fastened one of the lines.