by John Barnes
When the kiss breaks, he looks a little dazzled. “So how am I in real life?” she asks.
“Sweet,” he says. “And tender. Not like XV at all, but it’s really, really nice. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” she says. “If you pass through Tapachula, look for a dumpy American who never does anything but sit around and read nice, big, thick trashy novels.” They shake hands—it’s almost solemn—and for good measure she adds a line she had on stage once, back when she was still Mary Ann, Laura’s last line at the end of Tea and Sympathy—“‘When you speak of this later—and you will—be kind’”
He nods, they both say goodbye, and she gets into the limo and tells it “Airport.” It closes its doors, drives out of the lot onto its track, and she’s on her way.
Maybe after this vacation, if she still feels the same way about XV, she’ll put the money into a permanent annuity for herself, start auditioning again in New York, do some real acting… and start dating bellhops. It’s not that good a joke, but she laughs all the way to the airport about it.
One of the reasons nobody notices when John Klieg and Glinda Gray go out to lunch together, and don’t come back, is that after all these years anyone would assume that they are working on something and have chosen to do it outside the building. The major reason, however, is that everyone stopped to catch the XV of Synthi Venture’s pre-vacation departure, and they are all plugged into goggles, muffs, and scalpnet at the moment that Klieg and Gray walk down the hall together.
Glinda is not quite believing that this is happening. She went into the office and said, “The one thing the AI says is that there’s a ninety-six-percent possibility of more and stronger wind, all over the hemisphere, than there has ever been before. Every really fragile structure is going to take damage. They can replace and reinforce antennas for communications, they can bury power lines, they can shore up smokestacks or replace them with jets… but what they can’t do is quickly modify the space-launch facilities. For those you’ve got to have the spacecraft moving pretty fast before it ever hits the wind. The wind is going to completely shut down satellite launching for months, first in the Northern Hemisphere, then in the Southern. And satellite launching is close to a trillion-dollar-a-year business.”
“Nobody has an all-weather launch facility?”
“They can air-launch from airplanes or jumplanes, operating out of the few all-weather airports. But even all-weather airports shut down for hurricanes, boss, and air launch has been fading since single stage to orbit came in. Everything is right there… if we can get an all-weather launch system together in the next three months, we can probably get a global monopoly on space launch for a year or so.”
From the way he looked up at her and grinned, she knew she had done well, and when he grabbed the phone and gave the orders to get a real study rolling and give her authority over it—god, she’d be in charge of a thousand-member team by the end of the month—she knew it was more than good. She’d really grabbed the whole works this time.
What she didn’t expect was what he said next. “Okay, most of that won’t start rolling till Monday, and after that you’ll be so busy you’ll never take time off. And neither will I if this lives up to its promise. Why don’t you and I go pick up Derry and go do something fun together for the rest of the day?”
In the first place, it never occurred to her that John Klieg had even listened to her when she’d talked about her personal life; moreover, she had no idea what he did with his time on weekends—in fact, her impression was that all he ever did was work, going home mostly to eat and sleep. But on top of that… unmistakably, and here she was without makeup, in sweater, jeans, and sneakers because it was Saturday—her boss, a nice guy and great-looking, has asked her out. And included her daughter in the invitation, which sounds like a man who is serious.
So as they go down the hall together, she’s more tongue-tied than she’s been in years, and he seems to be pretty quiet too. In the parking garage, they decide to go in his car, and set hers for an automatic “find home” so that it will go back to her garage and park itself sometime in the next couple of hours, whenever the continuous traffic data it receives indicate that it will be cheapest.
He sets his car for her address, and it rolls down the ramp and onto the track. “This is totally contrary to all my principles,” he says, with a fraction of a laugh, like a cough. “I’ve been in business of one kind or another for twenty-five years, and this is the first time I’ve ever asked an employee out.”
Glinda looks down at her lap and smiles. “Well, I’ve been at GateTech for sixteen years myself, boss, and this is the first time I’ve dated inside the company.”
“You could start by calling me ‘John’ instead of ‘boss’”
“I could try, John. But it might take a while before it comes naturally.”
“Good start, anyway. Well, let me see. I remember from what you’ve told me that Derry is horse-crazy, likes to do ‘grown-up’ things like have lunch and go to the theatre, and gets cranky when you break promises to her. Is having me along at lunch going to count as a broken or slightly damaged promise?”
“Hah,” Glinda says, and as she leans back, she finds herself thinking, Remember, even if he does own the place, he’s only one level up from you. Think of it as a Clerk I dating a Clerk II. “Derry wants me to date more. And when she sees it’s a good-looking older guy with money, she’ll be overjoyed. She’s got all kinds of goofy ideas from XV, even though I only let her use the family channels. Even on those, the whole romance thing gets a little oversold.”
“No kidding,” the boss—John, dammit—says. The big Chevy Mag Cruiser swings nimbly onto the freeway, and then across it to the Premium Skyway. The view over the Cape and out toward the Atlantic is its usual bland self—trees and sand down to water. She remembers when she first came here, with her ex, it seemed so exotic to them after their years in Wisconsin.
“Romance is very definitely oversold,” John adds, probably hoping to continue the conversation. Glinda realizes she’s been letting herself drift. “On the other hand, I like to think it does exist.”
“Yep, it does,” Glinda says emphatically. “And I still believe in it.” Yep. Damned Wisconsin coming out in her; at least she didn’t say “you bet.” “But I’d like to keep it from being Derry’s focus of life for a couple more years yet. She’ll have sixty or seventy years for it once she starts. And besides, I just don’t think it’s healthy for a little girl to be interested in a grown woman’s, uh, dating life.”
John nods approvingly. “So, just out of curiosity and because I’m desperately insecure, how much has she had to be interested in lately?”
“Well, nothing at all for the last two years…” They both start to laugh at that. “Okay, maybe there’s some reason for concern, but the concern shouldn’t be coming from an eleven-year-old. How long’s it been for you?”
Klieg shrugs. “Oh, seven or eight years, I guess, depending on what you count. For a while I subscribed to a romance service, if you know about those… but for the last few years I haven’t even done that.”
“Romance service” is not quite the kind of euphemism that “escort service” used to be, but it’s not far from it, either. What the romance service guarantees is that a fixed number of attractive women—the customer defines “attractive,” but it need have nothing to do with the sort of women who would really be attracted to the customer—will approach the customer romantically, somewhere out in public, act friendly and interested, and accept at least five dates with him.
As long as he doesn’t ask, he’ll theoretically never know whether he’s being lucky or the service is functioning. In practice, a paunchy middle-aged businessman can usually figure out that the girls in their late teens and early twenties who keep picking him up in bars or at the park are coming from the service, unless he’s seriously self-deluded as well. “So,” she says cautiously, “what did you order from the romance service?”
“
Everything,” he says. “They had kind of a sampler deal, where they’d just throw your name in at random. The trouble is, I’m not any good at telling someone who likes me from someone who acts like she likes me. I kept getting disappointed when they didn’t want to go beyond the fifth date.”
“But they must have—” Glinda was about to say “asked you for money,” but then she realized that they might not have, if he didn’t ask for sex.
“Oh, sure, some of them were just hookers, but it didn’t take that long to figure out which ones—they were the ones who started talking about sex before I got the car door closed. But that wasn’t most of them. The thing is, a lot of young women go to work for those services. Don’t forget that the colleges turn out a lot more educated people than the economic system can really absorb. Heck, middle-class parents have more kids than the system can absorb into the middle class. So a lot of very nice, well-spoken, pretty young women, who didn’t happen to study anything they have a prayer of getting a job with, sign up with a romance service because not only do they make a living, they also meet men with money. And if they meet one they like, there’s no reason why they can’t keep dating him if they like. I went out with one of them for a year or so, but”—he sighs—“she decided she liked another guy—sort of a starving poet close to her own age—better. Can’t say I blame her, really.”
Glinda chooses her words carefully. “It seems a pity that that’s all a young woman can find to do with herself.”
“Oh, they could wait tables or answer the phone somewhere,” Klieg says. “The trouble is that an awful lot of people expect they can get paid for being attractive.”
“Well, they can.”
“True,” he admits, “but most of them don’t like realizing what the cost of making a living that way is. Anyway, I got kind of tired of it, and then really tired of it, and dropped the subscription. What you could meet that way—aside from hookers—was young women who were very good at looking good and spending money. Good for decoration or long conversations about their feelings, but that was it. Most of them didn’t seem to have read much in college, or at least not to remember it.” Klieg sighs. “So, anyway… getting back to the present case, I figured, well, if you don’t like me, I can always bribe you into staying with the company, because I do need you as an employee. And if you do… well, I just like you, for some reason or other, and I suddenly realized I had been taking all my risks over on the business side of the ledger. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could take a chance on the personal side.”
Glinda smiles a little at that. “So, how do you feel?”
“Somewhere between terrified and happy. Anyway, what’s your idea of a good place to eat? Or what’s Derry’s, if they’re not compatible?”
She wags her finger at him. “Ah, ah, if we’re going to fulfill this child’s fantasies, you have to guide me to some perfect little café where they have three special dishes that only you know about and everyone knows you by your first name.”
“Well… there is a place where everybody knows my name. I eat there every other day or so. But I wouldn’t say it had any special dishes, certainly not any that only I know about.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, but it’s not exactly a perfect little café, it’s um… it’s a Shoney’s, actually. They don’t know I’m the president of GateTech, but everyone knows me.”
Glinda gapes at him. “You eat at Shoney’s? Why?”
“Well, not just any Shoney’s, this particular one. And I’ve got three good reasons. One, in the early days when I traveled a lot, for some odd reason I always had good luck with that chain—and when you’re putting in your sixth straight three-hundred-mile day, it’s nice to have something really predictable. So I got hooked on it that way—it’s just a very comforting place for me to go. Two, it’s self-reinforcing. Once you’ve been going to a place for a while and they know you, you get friendly service and they treat you well.”
There’s a long pause.
“And what’s the third reason?” Glinda asks.
“I like the food.”
They laugh more from the broken tension than from the feeble joke. John Klieg leans back farther—he is too old to trust automatic guidance on cars, and won’t let his hands get far from the wheel or his foot move away from the brake—looks at her sideways, and says, “I hate to tell you this, but your boss doesn’t have an ounce of class. I’m solid twentieth in everything but business.”
“Even including using old-fashioned expressions like ‘solid,’” Glinda says, pulling her legs up and turning to sit facing more toward him. She’s always known he was handsome, kind, and considerate, but she’s beginning to realize how much more attention he has been paying to her than she has to him.
“Especially using old-fashioned expressions like ‘solid,’” Klieg agrees. “If I hadn’t stopped myself, I’d have said ‘stone.’ I wrote editorials for my high-school paper defending Dan Quayle. Now, about this daughter of yours—do we have to take her somewhere pretentious by the water to make her happy?”
“Only if we want to convince her we’re serious,” Glinda says, “and I’m still working on believing this isn’t some vivid dream. She’d probably be happy at Shoney’s, for that matter.”
“Well, for a bizarre suggestion—start high end and work low? Maybe go to a café for lunch, then to her riding session—maybe you and I could have drinks and some conversation while she rides?—then Shoney’s for dinner and then movie for three? With the possible option of covert handholding under the popcorn?”
“I think we can make a deal of this,” Glinda says, “as long as the movie either has monsters or is set in space.”
“Is that what Derry’s into?”
“Not for her; for me,” Glinda says. “Life is boring enough and contains enough unhappiness. If I’m going to see a movie I want to see something that will either scare me silly or get my mind up in the clouds.”
John Klieg beams at her. “Gee, if a guy was to know you, say, for sixteen years or so, he might finally notice you had a pretty good idea of fun.”
She smiles at him; she’s recognizing the style of speech. “So, John, where are you from?”
“Little town you never heard of—Winona, Minnesota. Southeastern part of the state, across the river from Wisconsin.”
An hour’s drive from where Glinda grew up. Maybe she can get away with saying “You bet” after all.
Louie Tynan is busy for the first time in months, and he doesn’t know whether to be happy or not. They’ve put up four polar-orbit satellites, which rise and set relative to his own equatorial-orbit space station at least seven or eight times per day. Every time one does, at a precisely calculated instant, the satellite sends a laser pulse that passes through the Earth’s atmosphere, at varying altitudes, and is then received for spectrographic analysis on the station. The thirty or so lasers that send each pulse have precisely known wavelengths and power; if the light were only passing through a vacuum, you could figure out how much power would arrive at what wavelength, down to parts in ten billion.
But although air is transparent, it’s not perfectly transparent; it’s subject to minor variations (look down a hot road on a summer day), and not all the variations are neutral with respect to wavelength (consider a sunset).
So instead of the predicted set of exactly known values for power at each wavelength, the laser light coming into Louie Tynan’s “camera,” as he thinks of the gadget, is altered by the air it passes through, and the exact way in which it alters tells them quite a bit about methane.
Louie’s job, all day, has been to power up a remote manipulator, a little tractor with an arm that crawls around the outside of the station on tracks, take the spectrographic camera out of storage, put it in the airlock, use the remote manipulator to put it in place and hook it up… and sit back and pretend to know what he was doing, besides making sure that some little lights stayed green through the first twenty tries.
; Right now Louie is taking a break in the observation bubble. They don’t really need a man to do these observations at all—they could do the whole thing on robotics—but as long as they have a crewed space station, and one crusty old fart on it who doesn’t want to come down, might as well get some work out of him. It may not be the most productive way to do the thing, or even the most productive use of the astronaut, but this way NASA PR guys can make noises in public about quick responses and being able to get on top of a breaking situation.
And because they’re doing that, he also has to print out graphs derived from the results every so often, and then make a set of notes about the graphs and read his results back to ground control. This bit is pure showboating; the sad fact is that in the first place, not being a meterologist, he doesn’t have any more understanding of what the graphs mean than what they told him in a three-hour tutorial the week before, and anyway, the people who do know what they mean are getting copied on all the data instantly on the ground. The only purpose is for the taxpayers on the open channel to hear their most expensive single employee earning his keep.
Some bored grad student on an internship has been set up down there to ask him questions that everyone already knows the answers to, so that he can appear to be expressing an opinion and judging the situation. Louie’s job is essentially a several-day-long publicity stunt.
On the other hand, it’s more news than crewed space exploration has gotten in months. He thinks of Congressperson Henry Loamer, UL-LA, who has occasionally referred to the space station as the “orbiting retirement home” and to Louie himself as “our single most expensive Federal employee, who is doing just what Federal employees usually do, sitting on his butt and soaking up tax money.” It will be weeks before old Henry realizes all this could be done cheaper and better by robot, and meanwhile he’s shut up.
Besides, Louie’s got to admit that this has been good for him. Having to do visuals every few hours, sitting in front of a camera and reading off the report, has made him shower, shave, all that easy-to-overlook stuff. He may not be the height of elegance, but at least he’s freshly showered and wearing a clean coverall, and he has more than one clean coverall.
