Perhaps soon. The Americans were said to be training women astronauts. If the Americans looked likely to send a woman into space, the Soviet Union would do it also, and quickly. The last Soviet experiment with a woman kosmonaut had been a disaster. (Was it really her fault? Leonilla wondered. She knew both Valentina Tereskovna and the kosmonaut she’d married, and they never talked about why her spacecraft had tumbled, ruining the chance for the Soviet Union to make the first space docking in history.) Of course, Valentina was much older, Leonilla thought. That had been in primitive times. Things were different now. The kosmonauts had little to do anyway; ground control made all the important decisions. A silly design philosophy, Leonilla thought, and her kosmonaut colleagues (all male, of course) shared this view, but not loudly.
She put the last of her used instruments into the autoclave and packed her bag. Kosmonaut or not, she was also a physician, and she carried the tools of the trade most places she went, just in case she might be needed. She put on the fur cap and heavy leather coat, shuddering a little at the sound of the wind outside. A radio in the next office had a news program, and Leonilla paused to listen when she heard a key word.
Comet. A new comet.
She wondered if there would be plans to explore it. Then she sighed. If there was a space mission to study the comet, it wouldn’t include her. She had no skills for that. Pilot, physician, life-support-systems engineer; those she could do. But not astronomy. That would be for Pieter or Basil or Sergei.
Too bad, really. But it was interesting. A new comet.
■
On Earth there was plague. Three billion years after the planet’s formation there came a virulent mutation, a form of life that used sunlight directly. The more efficient energy source gave the green mutant a hyperactive, murderous vigor; and as it spread forth to conquer the world, it poured out a flood of oxygen to poison the air. Raw oxygen seared the tissues of Earth’s dominant life and left it as fertilizer for the mutant.
That was a time of disaster for the comet, too. The black giant crossed its path for the first time.
Enormous heat had been trapped in the planet’s formation; it would be pouring out to the stars for a billion years to come. A flood of infrared light boiled hydrogen and helium from the comet’s tissues. Then the intruder passed, and calm returned. The comet cruised on through the cold black silence, a little lighter now, moving in a slightly changed orbit.
February: One
On the other hand, it is necessary to shape the social structure of the worker’s world in such a way as to take away his fear of being a mere cog in an impersonal machine. A true solution can come only through the conception that work, whatever it must be, is the service of God and of the community and therefore the expression of man’s dignity.
Emil Brunner, Gifford Lectures, 1948
Westwood Boulevard was not even remotely on the way between the offices of the National Broadcasting System and the Randall home near Beverly Glen, which was the main reason Harvey Randall liked the bars there. He wasn’t likely to run into any of the network officials and he wasn’t likely to find any of Loretta’s friends.
Students wandered along the wide street. They came in assortments: bearded and wearing jeans; clean-cut with expensive jeans; deliberately weird, and young-fogey conservative, and everything between. Harvey strolled with them. He passed specialty bookstores. One was devoted to gay lib. Another called itself the Macho Adult Bookstore and meant it. And another catered to the science fiction crowd. Harvey made a mental note to go in there. They’d probably have a lot of stuff about comets and astronomy geared to a general readership; after he read that he could go to the UCLA campus store and get the really technical material.
Past the sisterhood place was a plate-glass window. Letters in Gothic script said SECURITY FIRST FEDERAL BAR. Inside were stools, three small tables, four booths, a pinball machine and a jukebox. The walls were decorated with whatever the customers preferred; a supply of marking pens lay on the bar, and the walls were whitewashed at intervals. Paint peeled away in places to reveal comments made years before, a kind of pop-culture archeology.
Harvey moved into the dimness like a tired old man. As his eyes adjusted, he spotted Mark Czescu on a stool. He pulled himself up next to Czescu and propped elbows on bar.
Czescu was thirty-odd, almost ageless, a perpetual young man about to launch himself on his career. Harvey knew Mark had been in the Navy for four years, and had tried several colleges, starting at UCLA and working down through community junior colleges. He sometimes called himself a student even yet, but no one believed he’d ever finish. He wore biker’s boots, old jeans, a T-shirt and a crumpled Aussie digger hat. He wore his black hair long and his black beard full. There was ground-in dirt under his nails and fresh streaks of grease on the jeans, but his hands and clothes had been freshly washed for all of that; he just didn’t have any pathological need to be scrubbed pink.
When Mark wasn’t smiling he had a dangerous look, despite the respectable beer belly. He smiled a lot; but he could take some things very seriously, and he sometimes moved with a tough crowd. They were part of his image: Mark Czescu could run with the real bikers if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. Just now he looked concerned. “You don’t look good,” he said.
“I feel like killing somebody,” said Harvey.
“You feel that way, I could maybe find somebody,” Mark said. He let it trail off.
“No. They’re my bosses. They’re all of them my bosses, damn their innumerable souls.” Harvey ordered a pitcher and two glasses, and ignored Mark’s suggestion. He knew Mark couldn’t arrange a real murder. It was part of the Czescu image, to know more than you did about whatever subject came up. It usually amused Harvey, but just now he wasn’t in the mood for games.
“I want something from them,” Harvey said. “And they know they’re going to give it to me. How the hell can they not know? I’ve even got the sponsor wired! But the sons of bitches have to play games. If one of them fell off a balcony tomorrow, I’d be in for an extra month breaking in a new one, and I can’t afford the time.” It didn’t hurt to humor Czescu; the guy could be useful, and a lot of fun—and maybe he could arrange a murder. You never really knew.
“So what are they going to give you?” Mark asked.
“A comet. I’m going to make a whole series of documentaries about a new comet. The guy who discovered it chances to own seventy percent of the company that will sponsor the documentaries.”
Czescu chortled. Harvey nodded agreement. “It’s a beautiful setup. Chance to make the kind of films I really want to do. And to learn a lot. Not like that last shit, interviewing doomsters, everybody with his own private vision of the end of the world. I wanted to cut my throat and get it over with before that one was finished.”
“So what’s wrong?”
Harvey sighed, and drank more beer, and said, “Look. There are about four guys who could really tell me to go take a flying frig and make it stick. But that’d be a mistake, right? The New York people won’t put up with blowing a sponsored series. They’re going to buy the show. But how will anyone know they’ve got the power to say no if they don’t hesitate and demand I write up treatments and do budget estimates and all that crap? None of that shit gets used, but they’ve got to have a ‘sound basis for decisions.’ Four fucking prima donnas who actually have the power.
“Okay, I could live with them. But then there are a couple of dozen who couldn’t stop a Time for Beany revival, but they want to show how important they are, too. So to show each other they could really stop the show if they wanted to, they raise as many objections as they can. Got the best interests of the sponsors in mind, right? Don’t want to get Kalva Soap mad, right? Bullshit. But I’ve got to put up with it.” Harvey was suddenly aware of what he sounded like. “Look, let’s change the subject.”
“Right. You’ve noticed the name of this place?”
“Security First Federal Bar. Cute. Stolen from George C
arlin. About time, too.”
“Right! Now maybe some others will pick up the idea. Can you see Crazy Eddie’s Insurance?”
“Why not? They bought cars from Madman Muntz. How about Fat Jack’s Cancer Clinic?”
“Fat Jack’s Cancer Clinic and Mortuary,” Czescu said.
The tightness in Harvey’s neck and shoulders was going away. He drank more beer, then went to a booth where he could lean against something. Mark followed and took the opposite seat.
“Hey, Harv, when we making another run? Your bike still work?”
“Yeah.” A year ago—no, dammit, two years and more—he’d said the hell with it and let Mark Czescu lead him on a ride up the coast, drinking in little bars, talking to other drifters, camping where they felt like it. Czescu took care of the bikes, and Harvey paid the bills, not that they amounted to much. It had been a time of no worries. “The bike works, but I won’t get a chance to use it. When this series gets going it’ll take full time.”
“Anything I can get in on?” Mark asked.
Harvey shrugged. “Why not?” Mark often worked on Harvey’s shows. He carried cameras or clipboards and did maintenance or just plain acted as gofer. “If you’ll shut up once in awhile.”
“I’m hip.”
The bar was filling up. The jukebox ran out of sound, and Mark got up. “Something just for you,” he said. He retrieved his twelve-string guitar from behind the bar and took a chair at the end of the room. This, too, was part of his routine: Czescu sang for drinks and meals in bars. On their run up the coast Mark had got them free steaks in half the places between L.A. and Carmel. He was good enough to be professional, but he wouldn’t discipline himself; whenever he got a regular gig it didn’t last a week. To Mark, those who made steady money were magicians with a secret that he couldn’t quite learn.
Mark strummed an experimental chord, then began a prologue. The tune was the old cowboy number, “Cool Clear Water.”
All day I face the TV waste, without a trace of culture,
Pure culture.
With soapbox operas all day long, and giveaway shows that run too long,
And lead you on,
From culture.
Pure…sweet…culture.
Harvey laughed approval. A fat man at the bar sent over a pitcher of beer and Mark acknowledged with a toss of his head.
The sun goes down, and through the town you hear the cry for culture,
Sweet culture.
While lawyers grin, and cops will win, to stop the sin of culture.
Culture. Pure…culture.
There was a short break as Mark picked at the guitar. The chords jangled, obviously wrong, but obviously right too, as if Mark were searching for something he could never find.
Keep a tunin’, friend, it’ll set you in a trend,
And your mind it’s goin’ to bend,
And hook you in the end,
With culture. Culture. Pure culture.
Friend, can’t you see, for you and me, and a mind that’s free,
It’s pay TV for you and me,
And culture. Culture. Pure…sweet…culture.
The guitar stopped and Mark said in a plonking voice, “Almost as much as you get from an old Bogart movie.”
PURE, SWEET, CULTURE.
“Leonard Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra and the Rolling Stones in a dazzling display of
CULTURE. Pure, sweet, culture.
“Folks, tonight we have a debate between the president of the United Farm Workers versus twenty-two hunger-maddened housewives armed with butcher knives. It’s
CULTURE. P*U*R*E, S*W*E*E*T, C*U*L*T*U*R*E.”
Jesus, thought Harvey. Jesus, I’d like to play a recording of that in a goddam executive council meeting at the network. Harvey leaned back to enjoy his moment. It wouldn’t be long before he had to go home to dinner, and Loretta, and Andy, and Kipling, and the home he loved but whose price was just so damned high.
The Santa Ana still blew, hot and dry across the Los Angeles basin. Harvey drove with open windows, his coat thrown onto the seat beside him, tie atop the pile. Headlights picked up green hillsides among bare trees, palm trees at intervals. He drove in the full summery darkness of a California February and he noticed nothing unusual about it.
He hummed Mark’s song as he drove. One day, he thought. One day I’ll slip a tape of that onto the Muzak system so three-quarters of the business people in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills will have to listen to it. Half concentrating, he daydreamed in fragments that shattered when some car ahead slowed and the flare of brake lights surged like a wave.
At the top of the hill he turned right onto Mulholland, right again onto Benedict Canyon, downhill slightly, then right onto Fox. Fox Lane was one of a cluster of short curved streets lined with fifteen-year-old houses. One of them belonged to Harvey, courtesy of Pasadena Savings and Loan. Further down Benedict Canyon was the turn onto Cielo Drive, where Charlie Manson had proved to the world that civilization was neither eternal nor safe. After that Sunday morning of horror in 1969 there was not a gun or a guard dog to be had in Beverly Hills. Back orders for shotguns stretched delivery time to weeks. And ever since, despite Harvey’s pistol and shotgun and dog, Loretta wanted to move. She was searching for safety.
Home. A big white house with green roof, trimmed front lawn, a big tree and small porch. It had a good resale value, because it was the least expensive house on the block; but least expensive is a relative thing, as Harvey well knew.
His house had a conventional driveway, not a big circular entry like the house across the street. He took the corner at a good clip, slowed in the drive, and zapped the garage door with the radio-beam widget. The door swung up before he could reach it; perfect timing, and Harvey scored a mental point with himself. The garage door closed behind him and he sat for a moment in darkness. Harvey didn’t like driving in rush hours, and he drove the rush hour twice nearly every day of his life. Time for a shower, he thought. He got out of the car and walked back down the drive toward the kitchen door.
“Hey, Harv?” a baritone voice bellowed.
“Yo,” Harvey answered. Gordie Vance, Randall’s neighbor on the left, was coming across his lawn with a rake trailing behind him. He leaned on the fence, and Harvey did the same, thinking as he did of cartoons of housewives chatting this way; only Loretta didn’t like Marie Vance, and would never be seen leaning on a back fence anyway. “So, Gordie. How are things at the bank?”
Gordie’s smile wavered. “They’ll keep. Anyway you’re not ready for a lecture on inflation. Listen, can you get away on the weekend? Thought we’d take the scouts up for a snow hike.”
“Boy, that sounds good.” Clean snow. It was hard to believe that no more than an hour away, in the Angeles Forest Mountains, was deep snow and wild, whistling wind in the evergreens, while they stood here in their shirtsleeves in the dark. “Probably not, Gordie. There’s a job coming up.” Christ, I hope there’s a job coming up. “You better not count on me.”
“What about Andy? Thought I’d use him as patrol leader this trip.”
“He’s a little young for that…”
“Not really. And he’s got experience. I’m taking some new kids on a first hike. Could use Andy.”
“Sure, he’s up on his schoolwork. Where are you going?”
“Cloudburst Summit.”
Harvey laughed. Tim Hamner’s observatory wasn’t far from there, although Harvey had never seen it. He must have hiked past it a dozen times.
They discussed details. With the Santa Ana blowing there’d be melt-off on all but the top elevations, but there would certainly be snow on the north slopes. A dozen scouts and Gordie. It sounded like fun. It was fun. Harvey shook his head ruefully. “You know, Gordo, when I was a kid it was a good week’s hike to Cloudburst. No road. Now we drive it in an hour. Progress.”
“Yeah. But it is progress, isn’t it? I mean, now we can get there and still keep a job.”
“Sure. D
amn, I wish I could go.” By the time they’d driven up—an hour—and hiked in and got the gear out of their backpacks and set up camp, and got damp wood burning and their backpack stoves going, the freeze-dried mountain food always tasted like ambrosia. And coffee, at midnight, standing in a shelter out of the wind and listening to it whistle above…But it wasn’t worth a comet. “Sorry.”
“Right. Okay, I’ll check with Andy. Go over his gear for me, will you?”
“Sure.” What Gordie meant was, “Don’t let Loretta pack for your son. It’s hard enough hiking at that altitude without all the crap she’d make him carry. Hot-water bottles. Extra blankets. Once even an alarm clock.”
Harvey had to go back for his jacket and tie. When he came out of the garage he went another way, into the backyard. He’d thought of asking Gordie, “How do you feel about calling it ‘Gordo’s Bank and Kaffeeklatsch’?” From the look on Gordie’s face when the bank was mentioned, it wouldn’t go over. Some kind of trouble there. Private trouble.
Andy was in the backyard, across the pool, playing basketball solitaire. Randall stood quietly watching him. In zero time, in what must have been a year but felt like a week, Andy had changed from a boy into a…into a stick figure, all arms and legs and hands, long bones poised behind a basketball. He launched it with exquisite care, danced to catch the rebound, dribbled, and fired again for a perfect score. Andy didn’t smile; he nodded in somber satisfaction.
Kid’s not bad, Harvey thought.
His pants were new, but they didn’t reach his ankles. He’d be fifteen next September, ready for high school; and there was nothing for it but to send him to Harvard School for Boys, certainly the best in Los Angeles; only the school wanted a fortune just to hold a place, and the orthodontist wanted thousands now and more later. And there was the funny noise from the pool pump, and the electronics club Andy was involved in, it wouldn’t be long before the boy wanted a microcomputer for himself and who could blame him?…And…Randall went inside, quietly, glad that Andy hadn’t noticed him.
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