In the Distance, and Ahead in Time

by George Zebrowski

  “Go ahead. My vacation was the usual. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Julian’s face disappeared and the expressionless face of the reporter appeared. The face smiled just before it spoke.

  “Julian—that’s the name you are known by?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you describe your work for our viewers, Julian?”

  “I am a water sculptor. I make thin plastic molds and fill them with water. Then I put them out into the void and when they solidify I go out and strip off the plastic. You can see most of my work orbiting my home.”

  “Isn’t the use of water expensive?”

  “I re-use much of it. And I am independently wealthy.”

  “What’s the point of leaving your work outside?”

  “On Earth the wind shapes rock. Here space dust shapes the ice, mutilates it, and I get the effect I want. Then I photograph the results in color, and make more permanent versions here inside.”

  Praeger watched Julian and the reporter float over to a large tank of water.

  “Inside here,” Julian said, “you see the permanent figures. When I spin the tank the density of each becomes apparent, and each takes its proper place in the suspension.”

  “Do you ever work with realistic subjects?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think you could make a likeness of the Earth?”

  “Why?” Praeger saw Julian smile politely. The reporter suddenly looked uncomfortable. The tape ended and Julian’s face reappeared.

  “See what they send up here to torment me?”

  “Is the interview going to be used anywhere?” Praeger asked.

  “They were vague about it.”

  “Have you been happy?”

  Julian didn’t answer. For a few moments both screens were still portraits. Both men knew all the old complaints, all the old pains. Both knew that the UN was doing secret extra-solar work, and they both knew that it was the kind of work that would revive them, just as it might give the Earth a new lease on life. But they would never have a share of it. Only a few more years of routine service, Praeger knew, and then retirement—to what? To a crowded planet.

  Both men thought the same thought at that moment—the promise of space was dead, unless men moved from the solar system.

  “Julian,” Praeger said softly, “I’ll call you after my next watch.” Julian nodded and the screen turned gray.

  On impulse Praeger pushed the observation button for a look at station 233. It was a steel and plastic ball one hundred feet in diameter. Praeger knew that most of Julian’s belongings floated in the empty center, tied together with line. When he needed something he would bounce around the tiny universe of objects until he found it. Some parts of the station were transparent. Praeger remembered peering out once to catch sight of one of Julian’s ice sculptures, and seeing a pale white ghost peer in at him for a moment before passing out of sight.

  Praeger watched the silent ball that housed his friend of a lifetime. Eventually, he knew, he would join Julian in his retirement. A man could live a long time in zero-g.

  The alarm in his cubicle rang and Higgins’s voice came over the audio. “That fool! Doesn’t he see that orbital debris?”

  Praeger had perhaps ten seconds left to see station 233 whole. The orbital junk hit hard and the air was gone into the void. The water inside, Praeger knew, had frozen instantly. Somewhere inside the ruptured body of Julian floated among his possessions even as the lights on the station winked out.

  Praeger was getting into his suit, knowing there was no chance to save Julian. He made his way down the emergency passage from his cubicle, futilely dragging the spare suit behind him.

  The airlock took an age to cycle. When it opened he gave a great kick with his feet and launched himself out toward the other station. Slowly it grew in front of him, until he was at the airlock. He activated the mechanism and when the locks were both open he pushed himself in toward the center of the little world.

  Starlight illuminated Julian’s white, ruptured face. Through the clear portion of the station Praeger saw the Earth’s shadow eclipse the full Moon: a bronze shield.

  For a long time after Praeger drifted in the starlit shell. He stared at the dark side of the Earth, at the cities sparkling like fireflies; never sleeping, billions living in metal caves; keeping time with the twenty-four hour workday; and where by night the mannequins danced beneath the flickering screens, their blood filled with strange potions which would give them their small share of counterfeit happiness.

  Praeger tried to brush away the tears floating inside his helmet, but with no success. They would have to wait until he took his suit off. When the emergency crew arrived an hour later, he took charge.

  The station was a hazard now and would have to be removed. He agreed. All this would be a funeral rite for Julian, he thought, and he was sure the artist would approve.

  He removed all of Julian’s written material and sent it down to his publishers, then put Julian’s body in a plastic sack and secured it to the north pole of the station bubble.

  He left the sculptures inside. On the body Praeger found a small note:

  When we grow up we’ll see the Earth not as a special place, but just as one place. Then home will be the starry cosmos. Of course this has always been the case. It is we who will have changed. I have nothing else to hope for.

  The hulk continued in its orbit for three weeks, until Praeger sent a demolition crew out to it and blew it out of existence. He watched on the monitor as they set the charges that would send it into a new orbit. Station 233 would leave the solar system at an almost ninety degree angle to the plane of the ecliptic, on a parabolic path which would not bring it back to Sol for thousands of years. It would be a comet someday, Praeger thought.

  He watched the charges flare up, burn for thirty seconds, and die. Slowly the bubble moved off toward the top of the screen. He watched until it disappeared from the screen. In twenty-four hours it would be beyond the boundaries of Earth. Interstellar gas and dust would scar it out of all recognition: a torn seed on the wind.

  Parks of Rest and Culture

  The air was foul, barely breathable, acceptable only to those who had no choice. The pool, five hundred feet long and two hundred wide, was almost completely hidden in the predawn darkness. It had once been operational, but now all the pavement was cracked and huge stones sat on the empty bottom; they had rolled down from the cliffs which rose in a semicircle at the west end of the grounds. The single granite and concrete module which had been the administration building sat on its own concrete island in the center of the waterless pool. Inside, the two floors had partially caved in. On its high granite pillar on the roof the old clock was dead at two a.m.—or p.m. The whole area had once been a park, but now the branches on the trees outside the fence were bare and brittle and dry.

  Beyond the tall fence, above the dead trees, the lights from the stone city penetrated weakly through the layers of dirt-fog and morning mists. There stood the old apartment buildings which were not serviced by the numerous air filtration plants scattered throughout the city.

  Praeger stood in the metal doorway of the main filter house and peered at the soft grained lights beyond the fence through his air filter mask. The face-plate sprouted a spiral hose which ended in the chemical tank strapped to his chest. At his feet he felt the vibrations of the huge pumps below ground which filtered the air, heated or cooled it for those select New York City buildings whose tenants qualified for the utility and preservice modifications under the Human Resources Allocations Act of 1985. Such buildings had no windows, only locks at the front entrance, seldom used; each roof was a copter square.

  This morning, when his night shift was over, he would have to take the subway home; the city copter was out of service. He tried to accept the thought and ignore it.

  He
peered up past the fence and eroded hillside through his faceplate and thought of the eyes which would be watching him as it grew lighter, when he left the grounds through the gate.

  He looked to the east, where the orbital space mirror was hastening the dawn by two hours, to light up the city early with its reflected light; an effort to keep crime down. On the Asian mainland, he knew, the Russians were using similar mirrors to light up their battlefields with the Chinese.

  The real dawn was more than an hour away. Praeger turned and walked back through the open doorway. He did not bother taking off his mask inside.

  The plant hummed, and after a few moments the humming seemed to become a roar as the vibrating air pressed in on his ears. He walked down the row of pressure gauges, giving each one a glance. Then he went to the log pad on the wall and filled in the data. He could have done it without checking; the figures were always the same.

  He went outside again as if hoping for something miraculous to happen. He stood in the open door, leaning against the metal frame and looking toward downtown—mid-Manhattan, where he could just barely see the old trade center towering over the Empire State Building, a pair of titans against the steel-gray sky. Always, he thought, the old and the new, the old never quite dying away, the dream never replacing the reality entirely. When we start for Centauri, there will still be mud huts in Asia, the unclean washing away their sins in the Ganges.

  In the eastern sky an eye opened in the morning mists, a white-hot reflecting surface shouting the sun’s light Earthward.

  Praeger waited, and later came the true dawn; incredibly scarlet, a function of all the dirt in Earth’s atmosphere, it streaked the sky. The planet could still manage its own kind of beauty. Though the wounds of the biosphere were deep, they were healing into scars. But the thin layer of human consciousness stretched over the surface of the planet—the noösphere—had ruptured; and the human organism in its entirety was being spilled back into the evolutionary past, into the abyss of screams.

  In the morning sunlight the concrete surfaces of the pool area were a bright gray-white. Praeger began his walk around the fence on the inside, checking for damage; a human insect moving slowly on the slightly raised walk.

  At the west end of the grounds, just below the cliffs, he found a large hole in the chain fence, the largest of six during the week. It led to the small path that ran on the other side of the fence just below the cliff wall. It was not a planned path, but one which had been created by vandals, prowlers and playing children during the years. He smiled, thinking, they have better wire cutters than the city repair crews. The hole was very neatly cut out. He turned away from the fence toward the administration building and walked briskly across.

  He stopped in front of the flagpole by the front entrance, noticing that the rope had been cut again during the night. Then he went into the small office, the only usable room in the empty building, and found that the night watchman had vomited all over the floor again.

  The place stank, but he forced himself to sign the blotter and punch out on the creaky old machine. The watchman, as usual, had checked out hours ago, knowing that no one would report him, or care.

  Praeger went over to the crusty old bulletin board and peered at the new addition. The examination to renew his technician’s rating was to be given at 1:00 p.m., May 1, 1998, which was next Wednesday. He was worried about the rising standards and about his wife’s reaction if he did not pass. Would she accept living in a non-environmental-control apartment—one open to the air, with perhaps only an air conditioner for the summer? They had adjusted well to seeing each other only in the afternoons, but she would never be—had never been—very close to him. He did not know what she would do.

  He left the office and went along the walk by the fence until he came to the north exit gate, his shadow a long darkness to his right. Here once huge crowds of people had stood in line to gain entrance to the pool. He fumbled with the key and opened the rusty old lock; he pushed at the gate, straining, until it creaked open enough for him to pass. He locked it behind him and paused at the top of the stone steps which led to the street below.

  Across the street stood red-brick apartment buildings, five stories each, open-windowed, unserviced by the plant in which he worked. A number of the people who lived in these buildings were hired every month during the back-blowing operation at the plant—the process by which the huge filters were removed and cleaned. Usually that was done on his shift and he supervised it with the help of two armed policemen.

  He heard a clatter on the step pavement near him. A half-dozen stones struck and bounced and rolled around him. He looked up in time to see the kids on the roof of the house directly in front of him duck away from his masked gaze. He went down the steps and walked north along the street toward the Tremont subway station. He felt slightly relieved when he came to the big police cruiser parked next to a fire hydrant. Inside, the uniformed policemen were asleep in air-conditioned comfort. He stopped and rapped with his knuckles on the heavy safety plastic “glass.” One of the cops woke up, looked at the dash clock, grinned and waved his thanks as Praeger turned to continue down the street. In a moment the cruiser turned on its engines and air system to high and streaked past him on its way to the precinct. As he watched it disappear ahead of him, he could almost feel the eagerness of the two cops to get to the station to check out. Momentarily he felt a keen resentment because the copter had not come to pick him up. Normally he would have been halfway home by now.

  There was an old man staggering toward him down the street with one hand outstretched. “Money?” the old man said, stopping in front of him, blocking his way. The thought of the old man’s mouth so near him, the mouth and nose taking in air in greedy gasps, the chest rising and falling in seeming panic, made Praeger sick. The old man’s body was shaking; the effort he was exerting to control his stance resulted in a powerful sustained trembling. The eyes were bloodshot; one was set crookedly in its socket and seemed to be staring at the pavement.

  Praeger shook his head. He never carried any money with him. His green city uniform would be enough to admit him to the subway.

  “None left? No more—no more money?” the old man rasped in amazement. He coughed. Then his good eye also turned down to look at the pavement and he dragged himself past Praeger, as if resigned to the fact that there was nothing to be gained from this astonishing masked creature.

  Praeger continued down the street. He turned the corner and went up the hill to Tremont. At the top of the hill there was a small park. Here, too, the trees were dead. There were no squirrels or birds, but a lone cockroach darted past him into the sewer. He remembered, years ago, sitting in St. James Park—on a bench, looking into the cracked and gullied clay tennis courts—watching the pigeons and squirrels moving around in the meager grass. There had even been leaves on many of the trees in those days, enough to hide the tall tower of the bank which held the Fordham clock. Then the Jerome Avenue elevated train had come by, noisier every year as the foliage diminished. It had scared the shit out of all the animals. Every year there had been more dead birds and squirrels lying around. Then, one year, there was no spring.

  She came into the room and sat down on the bed where he was sleeping. “Did you hear me, Chris?” There was no urgency in her voice. He mumbled and tried to turn over but she was sitting on the covers.

  “The milkman brought an extra bottle of water today by mistake, didn’t you notice? I’m not going to tell him.”

  “Betty, let me sleep.” He tried to turn over but she was still in the way. She started rubbing his stomach, to arouse him. He had been dreaming of working on a space station. …

  He opened his eyes and looked at her. She had that usual blank look on her face, the one she wore when she wasn’t angry or dreaming. Her long blond hair was combed out and she had nothing on. The daylights were on in the room. The landscape wall showed the mountain valley in Canada where
she had been born. He thought of all the power she used keeping the wall on, and how little of her salary as a daycare instructor she used for the apartment.

  “Betty, please get out of here and let me sleep.”

  “When is your exam?”

  “Next Wednesday, now get out!”

  She smiled and walked out of the room. The daylights and picture wall went out as she closed the door. In a moment he knew she would be dialing someone on the phone. He became drowsy again, wrapping himself in the darkness. The space station was in front of him, a jeweled toy next to a sparkling Earth.

  He came into the lobby, his air mask under his left arm, and stopped under the huge glass chandelier. There was no point in worrying about the examination, he told himself. It would soon be done and over with. A large sign on the wall to his left caught his eye. He walked up to it and read the print below the huge photograph of the Earth in space. The legend urged him to take a job on one of the trans-lunar-Earth stations tied in with ecosystem and resource control.

  There was a list of openings—weatherwatch, atmospheric engineering, satellite repair, orbital debris clearance. The requirements were: a technical background and aptitude, and the capacity to work alone. Benefits included generous Earth leaves, and further opportunities to work in extra-Lunar and Moon surface positions. Applications here at Central Park West Station. The wall view poster bore the name NASA-EUROSOV.

  The NASA-EUROSOV office was just down the hall from the wall view poster. Praeger walked in, picked up an application from the dispenser and filled in his tech identification number. He waited a few minutes, knowing that it was now too late to get to his examination room, and dropped the computer card into the receiving slot on his way out. His tech rating could not expire before he qualified for the NASA-EUROSOV programs, which usually had to go begging for applicants.

  In the hallway he thought of the disadvantages of working in space, all the little things which made it impossible for a man to do it for any great time. Physical and mental disadvantages. The Moon was better, if a man made up his mind to stay for good. Otherwise he would have to wear special weights during his stay to keep him in shape for Earthside. It was easy, they said, to put off wearing them.