Sturdy little toy, this, many orders of magnitude more useful than the old K&E deci-trig log-log slide rule sitting home on his dresser. Expensive, too. Could have lived with less. So why did you buy it, then? Mark grinned at the little machine. That damned commercial, of course, so clever. Little radio play about the Rockwell advertising department, sleazy guys arguing about how they could make their pitch unique. How does our product differ from all the others? But... but... then the tacky little jingle about “...big, green numbers and little, rubber feet!”
Hell, I still remember the whole thing! “Oh, you can’t go wrong with Rockwell...”
o0o
April the 12th was the twentieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight. With bright morning sunshine flooding in through the sliding glass doors, Mark turned on the nineteen-inch Panasonic portable, still tuned to CBS, because they always had the best coverage, despite Uncle Walter’s unfortunate decision to retire, camera view out across mosquito inlet toward the launch pad. Brilliant, clear blue sky. After so many delays, today would be the day for sure, a pleasant enough coincidence.
The little one-bedroom apartment was nice enough, though way too cramped, but with Marian holding onto the house and Alice still in college, it was the best he could do. OK. I don’t really need a living room, it’s not like I entertain a lot. Bedroom lined with books, breakfast nook in the little kitchen, and use the living room as a den and office. Chair, TV, desk, light table... Might as well get something done...
But he sat rooted in the chair, staring at the TV. Too damned tired to work just yet. Feel so old... Right. And when did 46 start being old? The guy piloting that thing is just about your age. Reading glasses in space, for God’s sake...
Just feeling sorry for yourself, old man. Married twenty-seven years and the judge puts your poor old butt in the street, because women have to be “taken care of.” So what? Stop whining and get on with the rest of your life. There was a sharp pang in his chest then, one of those pretend “heart attacks” that used to send him scurrying to the hospital.
Just anxiety. I can give you something for it if you’d like...
No thanks, Doc.
Thought you were going to have a real heart attack when Dad died, sudden like that, Mom on the phone, bawling her grief in your ear, crying steadily at the funeral, talking about how badly she wanted to die now and go with him. No way to comfort her, not with all those memories of Mom sitting in Dad’s lap, smiling at him, happy with him, memory repeated over and over again, Mom and Dad just getting a little older in each and every snapshot. Then Mom standing by his fresh-dug grave, silent, not smiling any more.
Christ, Mom. You had a good trip. Not a damned thing to complain about. At least Dad got to see his great-grandson before he went. Billy the proud poppa, beaming down at brand new Jerry Severn. Hilarious to slap a name like that on some squalling, wrinkled red thing.
Not long after that, Marian broke the news.
And here I sit, in an apartment all my own...
Another glance at the bright TV picture. Well, going pretty good this morning. Fifty-nine minutes on the countdown clock, so I might as well get something done while I wait.
The box on the desk was waiting too, right beside the brand-new thirteen-inch color monitor. Went the extra mile there. Could’ve bought a color TV and gotten away with it. Too fuzzy though, hard on my eyes since I had to start wearing these damn bifocals...
Open the box and look down at the thing. Putty-colored, with high profile keys and the familiar Commodore logo, familiar because they had a couple of PETs at the office. He set it on the desktop and started hooking up wires, plugging things in. Even bought a disk drive instead of a tape deck. Do it right, if it’s going to mean anything at all. The Commodore 64 looked good set up, not as “professional” as the old PETs, but pretty nice. Not metallic like the TI-99/4a he’d looked at, but a whole lot nicer than Billy’s big, boxy Apple II. Probably a good choice. Math not as good as the TI, but more RAM for less money, a lot greater likelihood it’ll still be supported after Texas Instruments goes belly-up...
He hit the “on” switches in sequence and waited. Screen alight. Operating system, available RAM space, and READY. Cursor blinking beside the word. “Ready.” Jesus. You had to laugh at the thought of all those people taken in by colorful TV ads, bar-chart histograms rising like magic on the screen, rushing out to buy a real computer. Be the first person in your neighborhood to own a computer? Well, buy one of our computers and maybe you can own the neighborhood. Imagine them now, sitting dumbfounded, wondering, “Ready for what?”
Movement on the TV...
The nine minute built-in hold was over and the clock was counting down again, electric feeling in the air, as if this was it. Well, maybe. Anything can happen now. Last time, just a couple of days ago, they’d aborted at T-39 seconds, newspeople standing in long, silent rows, cameras ready...
But today is the twentieth anniversary of Vostok 1...
Then it went down and down and down, Mark dragging the old hassock Marian let him have up in front of the TV, leaning in close so he could watch it without glasses. Make it real. As if the naked TV screen, were, somehow, something real...
Down past twelve, plumes of steam coming out of the turbine vents, splash of sparks, yellow fire turning blue then clear. Main engine start... camera pulling back to show the cloud of smoke, then the solids lit, much heavier smoke with fire boiling crazily in its depths...
Columbia bounced off the pad, clearing the tower, climbing on a dense column of smoke, fire barely visible, while the camera pulled back so you could see it go, climbing over the heads of the newsmen and women. Two guys in the foreground, standing near the countdown sign, one fat, holding a camera, the other less so, holding binoculars, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, rather strange looking...
Moment of intense regret. I wish I’d just gone on down. I could be standing with those guys right now, feeling what they’re feeling...
In a little while, the rocket was up in space.
o0o
Mark sat back from the AppleStar Touchvoice III+, unclipping the microphone from his collar, reading the last words of the article, lips moving slightly. Well. Pretty good. Another few thousand bucks in the can, at any rate. He reached out and touched the SAVE/EXIT icon on the right hand side of the screen and watched the file explode out of the picture, system desktop reappearing.
Hell of a way for an old man to make a living, really, but the outdoor engineering days are long gone. Not much civil tech going on anymore anyway. Not much of anything, these days, younger engineers going overseas, if they could. Even Billy, talking about taking his wife and kids out of the country, maybe get a decent-paying job in Serbia or Kazakhstan, where there was new infrastructure abuilding.
I’ll miss Jerry though. Of course the boy was getting too old to have much interest in his grandfather, finishing up high school, slim, handsome, fresh-faced...
Mark shut off the computer and was suddenly aware of his reflection in the screen. Not too damned bad. Still slim, though I don’t work hard any more. Still got all my hair, even if it is white. If this was a mirror, I could see the corneal rings... and the little scars where my glasses used to sit. Glasses. I wonder where I put them? He grinned at his reflection. Good riddance, after fifty years!
He pushed back from the desk and turned the chair around, looking out the window into sunset. Nice fall colors in the sky, clouds turning brown in the fading light, blue turning to vermilion, dark red over the horizon. The weather’d been good all week. A sunny day when we buried Mom in the spot she reserved beside Dad. I wish I could imagine them together right now...
No. Nothing. Gone. Hard times, though. I thought about giving her an Alcor burial, just silliness, but a sliver of hope for the rest of us. She wouldn’t have wanted it though, not with Dad Purina Worm Chow all these years...
He sighed and stood up, stretching. Morbid thoughts, all right. Useless. Ow. The twi
nge in his shoulder was back, making him worry. I’m just a few years short of how old Dad was when he died. Maybe... Christ. More morbidity. Also useless. Dad had thirty years of cheeseburgers on me. I’ve got another twenty years to go, maybe more. A whole generation. Practically another whole life...
o0o
The big, flat box of the HDTV, dominating one wall of the living room, was already set to CNN-4, Endeavour on the launchpad, outlined by darkening sunset colors, T-60 minutes and counting. It would, just barely, be dark by the time the thing went. Something familiar...
Oh, Hell. Apollo 17. Another “last time.” Hard little ball of regret in his throat. Well, at least the TV keeps getting better and better. But the ship would fly to orbit with its nine-man crew, primary mission to attach a de-orbiting rocket to the little bit of Freedom that had been built, just so it could fall harmlessly into the sea, avoiding the hysteria that had accompanied the fall of Skylab, of Salyut 7, of Mir.
All over. Like everything else in my life. America entering its senescence after a short, brilliant youth. No more moonshots. No more Voyagers. No space station at all. After this, no more Man in Space. Childhood dreams finished. Russians gone. Chinese and Japanese never went. Europeans just couldn’t seem to get their act together...
Gina came out of the kitchen, smiling, carrying two tumblers of liquor, her own Old Fashioned, his Black Russian. She put the drinks down on the coffee table and stood looking down on him, hands on slim hips. Look of concern. “You all right, Mark?”
He sighed, then shook his head. “Sure. I just get tangled up in old memories sometimes...”
She sat in his lap, pulled her legs up, put her arms around his neck and leaned close. “Yeah. I guess... I didn’t expect to feel this way when I got old...”
“Old, Hell!”
That made her smile, lean in closer, nuzzling her face against his. She was pretty damned nice looking for a woman pushing sixty. Still slim, not too many lines in her face. Let her hair go gray though, unlike Marian, who’d been dying hers for decades.
Kids didn’t like seeing her in his lap like this, especially in front of the younger grandchildren, so it was just as well they’d ignored his invitation to come over for an Endeavour party. They’d’ve brought Marian anyway, bitter Marian, with all her acid little remarks, eliciting his usual muttered response.
Well, dear, you didn’t have to throw me away...
He rubbed his hands up and down Gina’s back, feeling her smooth muscles through the thin blouse, just a faint hint of loose skin here and there, spine a well-defined ridge.
Murmuring into his neck, she said, “You keep that up, we’ll miss the launch...”
Smiling back at her, feeling her solid, comfortable weight on his lap, Mark dismissed yet another little pang: I could’ve had this all my life if only... Hell, boy. Forget about that. You’ve got it now. That’s all that matters.
“Maybe,” he said, hands drifting down past her hips, “it isn’t worth watching.”
o0o
Mark sat at his desk in the spacious, glass-walled office, nine floors above the street, higher than most of the other buildings in this part of town, staring into space. Nice day out there. Sunny. Cloudless. Probably a bit of a breeze ameliorating the August heat. Nice day for a walk. No smog. Not any more. Car exhaust diminishing as emission standards tightened, more and more people going for quiet electrics, long-haul trucks running on low-residue, stack-scrubbed synfuel...
Nice day for a walk. And you should be happy you can go for a walk on your seventy-sixth birthday, old man, no cane, no pain, not a problem in the world.
It’s just that you’re all done. Finished again.
Mark sighed and leaned back, staring at the low, flat black box of the Toshiba Vortex transmedia system sitting on the corner of his desk, spidery headset crumpled in a pile next to it. No, you just don’t want to do this. It’s only been eight years since you started Future Life, eight years in which you built it up into the twenty-first century’s premier technophile vidmag. Eight years in which you built what felt like a whole new career. And careers are supposed to last a lifetime...
OK. So this one did last a lifetime. You just don’t have a whole lot left. Twenty years? In twenty years, I’ll be under the ground. Not a clean thought. Alcor and its competitors out of business, proto-corpsicles thawed and buried. That nice insurance policy just one more pile of cash, insignificant compared to what the magazine made you. Ten years? Maybe. If I’m lucky. Ten years in which to grow frail and sick and very, very old...
Hah. Maudlin. Morbid. Get on with it. Retire and hand it over to the people you trained. Go sit in the sunshine. Finish those ten years in comfort. Owe it to Gina, at least...
He picked up the headset and slipped it on, watched admiringly as the virtual office formed up around him. All right. Point at the imaginary voicewriter and see its blue LED blink, acknowledging your presence, sheet of paper forming in the air above it, column of icons like magic in the air beside you. Reach up and grasp the NOTE icon. “Editorial Number 96,” he muttered. Tap the CENTER icon, then tap ITALICS. “Ave. Atque. Vale.”
Hmh. Very nice looking. Now if only the software engineers would come up with subroutines that were really good at recognizing global context-sensitive stylesheets, external to the local setup-universe. Give it time. If you live long enough, you’ll see it happen. Hmmm... All right, that’s what I’ll talk about, then...
o0o
Later, at home, he sat on the couch, Gina curled against his side, watching TV, dinner a warm lump just to the left of center. Holding onto me. Worried that I’ll be upset, feeling a little guilty. Retired, by God. All over. And in six weeks we’ll move to a nice little house in Cocoa Beach...
Someplace for the kids to visit. Astonishing thought: my children are getting old! Billy’s hair iron gray now, even baby Alice nearing the end of her forties... Grandkids then. Most of them don’t really know me. Jerry, though, a fine strapping young man, just about ready to turn thirty, happy with that young wife, what’s-her-name... Lisa! Right. How could I forget? Not that old. Jerry and Lisa, proudly showing off their new baby boy, name of Matthew Severn. Little red Matt. What a marvel. Great-grandchildren now. Something I didn’t expect, but I guess I just wasn’t thinking...
Gina shifted position, stretching out her legs with a faint murmur of protest, rubbing her hand across his stomach then straightening up, stretching. “Good grief,” she muttered, “stiff already...”
Mark laughed, signaling to the TV with his free hand, dumping the dull old movie they’d been watching, switching over to the global newsnet, hugging her tight with the other.
“Oof. God,” she said, and, “I can’t believe I’m so stiff just from sitting here...”
Old joints, creaking here, creaking there. “You’re lucky, damn you. I’ve been stiffening up for the past thirty years.”
She smiled up at him, long lines from the corners of bright blue eyes, patted him on the thigh, and said, “Longer than that, I think...”
Laughter just a puff of air from his nostrils. “Hmh.” He snuggled down, lips rubbing on her forehead, waited while she tipped her head back for a real kiss.
When it was over, she sighed, delicate, a soft, young sound, head against his chest. “Fifteenth anniversary coming up. I can hardly believe it...”
Fifteen years. Another ten and she’ll have been with me longer than Marian. Jesus. Marian. Dead two years already? Kids not too happy when you didn’t go to the funeral... Stop it. Happy now. He hugged her gently. “Fifteen years. No regrets.”
Her arms were around his chest, squeezing him close.
On TV, the newshead was talking about something... Several men in expensive-looking suits, sitting around a conference table. Representatives of the American Aerospace Consortium. The commerce secretary. The vice president. Artist’s conception of the various competitors for the NNLS, New National Launch System, mostly single-stage very high energy concepts, unmanned but mannable
, part of the Third Millennium Infrastructure Initiative. SynchroNet Platform. Man-tended...
Other stuff, but Gina was pulling his head down, closing out that imagery, pulling him into her world, more immediate, much more certain, just a tiny slice of regret left behind, caption beginning, If only...
o0o
Mark lay back on their comfortable bed, watching Gina get undressed. She was facing away from him, over by the caddy where his own clothes already sprawled, more fastidious, draping pieces carefully, though wrinkles were a thing of the past.
Not too many wrinkles at that...
Blouse sliding over her head, back very smooth in the shadowy light, hips flaring just so... Little pouches of flesh just above them, where her little bit of fat had drained away, skin not elastic enough to take up the slack. Maybe a vain woman would have it cut away. Maybe she would, but she’d said nothing...
Arm, still limber, reaching back, unhooking the brassiere, shrugging it off, and you could see by the movement of skin on her ribs that she was sagging just a little more with every passing month, tissue shriveling, making her once-fine breasts look empty indeed. Maybe she looks at herself in the mirror, handles them perhaps, and is sorry she never had children...
Slipping the bikini briefs down, bending over to step out of them, Mark’s breath catching slightly as desire kindled here and there...
She turned to face him, hands on hips, posed just so, watching him look at her, eyes wandering, face and form and back again.
What one word will tell her how I feel right now? “Beautiful...” he told her.
Gina looked down at him, eyes bright, smiling. “Well,” she said, “looks like that famous ‘male climateric’ we’ve all heard so much about is just another old wives’ tale...”
He beckoned to her. “Just bring that old wife’s tail over here and we’ll see how many myths we can manage to debunk...”
o0o
Toward the end of one long evening, shadows lengthening as the sun set inland, Mark sat alone on his porch, waiting for the rocket to go up. Not quite a night launch, but close enough. He glanced at his watch, then down at the screen of the little TV sitting on the table beside him. Ten minutes. Well, you could go inside and watch it in comfort, get away from the bugs for a while, get a better view too, plugged into the RealWorld 3-D Entertainment Center, maybe blend newsnet footage with unedited NASA Select In-house Video shots...
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