“You may be in no loop,” Dr. Fein pointed out.
“But we may be,” Crayne said.
Doug, still on his feet, said to Crayne and Benz, “Could we include Merry Lou in our decision-making?”
“Why?” Benz said.
“I can’t think too clearly any more,” Doug said. “Merry Lou can help me; I depend on her.”
“Sure,” Crayne said. Benz, too, nodded.
General Toad examined his wristwatch stoically and said, “Gentlemen, this concludes our discussion.”
Soviet chrononaut Gauki removed his headphones and neck mike and hurried toward the three U.S. tempunauts, his hand extended; he was apparently saying something in Russian, but none of them could understand it. They moved away somberly, clustering close.
“In my opinion you’re nuts, Addi,” Benz said. “But it would appear that I’m the minority now.”
“If he is right,” Crayne said, “if—one chance in a billion—if we are going back again and again forever, that would justify it.”
“Could we go see Merry Lou?” Addison Doug said. “Drive over to her place now?”
“She’s waiting outside,” Crayne said.
Striding up to stand beside the three tempunauts, General Toad said, “You know, what made the determination go the way it did was the public reaction to how you, Doug, looked and behaved during the funeral procession. The NSC advisors came to the conclusion that the public would, like you, rather be certain it’s over for all of you. That it’s more of a relief to them to know you’re free of your mission than to save the project and obtain a perfect reentry. I guess you really made a lasting impression on them, Doug. That whining you did.” He walked away, then, leaving the three of them standing there alone.
“Forget him,” Crayne said to Addison Doug. “Forget everyone like him. We’ve got to do what we have to.”
“Merry Lou will explain it to me,” Doug said. She would know what to do, what would be right.
“I’ll go get her,” Crayne said, “and after that the four of us can drive somewhere, maybe to her place, and decide what to do. Okay?”
“Thank you,” Addison Doug said, nodding; he glanced around for her hopefully, wondering where she was. In the next room, perhaps, somewhere close. “I appreciate that,” he said.
Benz and Crayne eyed each other. He saw that, but did not know what it meant. He knew only that he needed someone, Merry Lou most of all, to help him understand what the situation was. And what to finalize on to get them out of it.
Merry Lou drove them north from Los Angeles in the superfast lane of the freeway toward Ventura, and after that inland to Ojai. The four of them said very little. Merry Lou drove well, as always; leaning against her, Addison Doug felt himself relax into a temporary sort of peace.
“There’s nothing like having a chick drive you,” Crayne said, after many miles had passed in silence.
“It’s an aristocratic sensation,” Benz murmured. “To have a woman do the driving. Like you’re nobility being chauffeured.”
Merry Lou said, “Until she runs into something. Some big slow object.”
Addison Doug said, “When you saw me trudging up to your place… up the redwood round path the other day. What did you think? Tell me honestly.”
“You looked,” the girl said, “as if you’d done it many times. You looked worn and tired and—ready to die. At the end.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry, but that’s how you looked, Addi. I thought to myself, he knows the way too well.”
“Like I’d done it too many times.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then you vote for implosion,” Addison Doug said.
“Well—”
“Be honest with me,” he said.
Merry Lou said, “Look in the back seat. The box on the floor.”
With a flashlight from the glove compartment the three men examined the box. Addison Doug, with fear, saw its contents. VW motor parts, rusty and worn. Still oily.
“I got them from behind a foreign-car garage near my place,” Merry Lou said. “On the way to Pasadena. The first junk I saw that seemed as if it’d be heavy enough. I had heard them say on TV at launch time that anything over fifty pounds up to—”
“It’ll do it,” Addison Doug said. “It did do it.”
“So there’s no point in going to your place,” Crayne said. “It’s decided. We might as well head south toward the module. And initiate the procedure for getting out of ETA. And back to reentry.” His voice was heavy but evenly pitched. “Thanks for your vote, Miss Hawkins.”
She said, “You are all so tired.”
“I’m not,” Benz said. “I’m mad. Mad as hell.”
“At me?” Addison Doug said.
“I don’t know,” Benz said. “It’s just—Hell.” He lapsed into brooding silence then. Hunched over, baffled and inert. Withdrawn as far as possible from the others in the car.
At the next freeway junction she turned the car south. A sense of freedom seemed now to fill her, and Addison Doug felt some of the weight, the fatigue, ebbing already.
On the wrist of each of the three men the emergency alert receiver buzzed its warning tone; they all started.
“What’s that mean?” Merry Lou said, slowing the car.
“We’re to contact General Toad by phone as soon as possible,” Crayne said. He pointed. “There’s a Standard Station over there; take the next exit, Miss Hawkins. We can phone in from there.”
A few minutes later Merry Lou brought her car to a halt beside the outdoor phone booth. “I hope it’s not bad news,” she said.
“I’ll talk first,” Doug said, getting out. Bad news, he thought with labored amusement. Like what? He crunched stiffly across to the phone booth, entered, shut the door behind him, dropped in a dime and dialed the toll-free number.
“Well, do I have news!” General Toad said when the operator had put him on the line. “It’s a good thing we got hold of you. Just a minute—I’m going to let Dr. Fein tell you this himself. You’re more apt to believe him than me.” Several clicks, and then Dr. Fein’s reedy, precise, scholarly voice, but intensified by urgency.
“What’s the bad news?” Addison Doug said.
“Not bad, necessarily,” Dr. Fein said. “I’ve had computations run since our discussion, and it would appear—by that I mean it is statistically probable but still unverified for a certainty—that you are right, Addison. You are in a closed time loop.”
Addison Doug exhaled raggedly. You nowhere autocratic mother, he thought. You probably knew all along.
“However,” Dr. Fein said excitedly, stammering a little, “I also calculate—we jointly do, largely through Cal Tech—that the greatest likelihood of maintaining the loop is to implode on reentry. Do you understand, Addison? If you lug all those rusty VW parts back and implode, then your statistical chances of closing the loop forever is greater than if you simply reenter and all goes well.”
Addison Doug said nothing.
“In fact, Addi—and this is the severe part that I have to stress—implosion at reentry, especially a massive, calculated one of the sort we seem to see shaping up—do you grasp all this, Addi? Am I getting through to you? For Chrissake, Addi? Virtually guarantees the locking in of an absolutely unyielding loop such as you’ve got in mind. Such as we’ve all been worried about from the start.” A pause. “Addi? Are you there?”
Addison Doug said, “I want to die.”
“That’s your exhaustion from the loop. God knows how many repetitions there’ve been already of the three of you—”
“No,” he said and started to hang up.
“Let me speak with Benz and Crayne,” Dr. Fein said rapidly. “Please, before you go ahead with reentry. Especially Benz; I’d like to speak with him in particular. Please, Addison. For their sake; your almost total exhaustion has—”
He hung up. Left the phone booth, step by step.
As he climbed back into the car, he heard their two alert receivers still
buzzing. “General Toad said the automatic call for us would keep your two receivers doing that for a while,” he said. And shut the car door after him. “Let’s take off.”
“Doesn’t he want to talk to us?” Benz said.
Addison Doug said, “General Toad wanted to inform us that they have a little something for us. We’ve been voted a special Congressional Citation for valor or some damn thing like that. A special medal they never voted anyone before. To be awarded posthumously.”
“Well, hell—that’s about the only way it can be awarded,” Crayne said.
Merry Lou, as she started up the engine, began to cry.
“It’ll be a relief,” Crayne said presently, as they returned bumpily to the freeway, “when it’s over.”
It won’t be long now, Addison Doug’s mind declared.
On their wrists the emergency alert receivers continued to put out their combined buzzing.
“They will nibble you to death,” Addison Doug said. “The endless wearing down by various bureaucratic voices.”
The others in the car turned to gaze at him inquiringly, with uneasiness mixed with perplexity.
“Yeah,” Crayne said. “These automatic alerts are really a nuisance.” He sounded tired. As tired as I am, Addison Doug thought. And, realizing this, he felt better. It showed how right he was.
Great drops of water struck the windshield; it had now begun to rain. That pleased him too. It reminded him of that most exalted of all experiences within the shortness of his life: the funeral procession moving slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, the flag-draped caskets. Closing his eyes he leaned back and felt good at last. And heard, all around him once again, the sorrow-bent people. And, in his head, dreamed of the special Congressional Medal. For weariness, he thought. A medal for being tired.
He saw, in his head, himself in other parades too, and in the deaths of many. But really it was one death and one parade. Slow cars moving along the street in Dallas and with Dr. King as well… He saw himself return again and again, in his closed cycle of life, to the national mourning that he could not and they could not forget. He would be there; they would always be there; it would always be, and every one of them would return together again and again forever. To the place, the moment, they wanted to be. The event which meant the most to all of them.
This was his gift to them, the people, his country. He had bestowed upon the world a wonderful burden. The dreadful and weary miracle of eternal life.
The Pre-Persons
Past the grove of cypress trees Walter—he had been playing king of the mountain—saw the white truck, and he knew it for what it was. He thought, That’s the abortion truck. Come to take some kid in for a postpartum down at the abortion place.
And he thought, Maybe my folks called it. For me.
He ran and hid among the blackberries, feeling the scratching of the thorns but thinking, It’s better than having the air sucked out of your lungs. That’s how they do it; they perform all the P.P.s on all the kids there at the same time. They have a big room for it. For the kids nobody wants.
Burrowing deeper into the blackberries, he listened to hear if the truck stopped; he heard its motor.
“I am invisible,” he said to himself, a line he had learned at the fifth-grade play of Midsummer Night’s Dream, a line Oberon, whom he had played, had said. And after that no one could see him. Maybe that was true now. Maybe the magic saying worked in real life; so he said it again to himself, “I am invisible.” But he knew he was not. He could still see his arms and legs and shoes, and he knew they—everyone, the abortion truck man especially, and his mom and dad—they could see him too. If they looked.
If it was him they were after this time.
He wished he was a king; he wished he had magic dust all over him and a shining crown that glistened, and ruled fairyland and had Puck to confide to. To ask for advice from, even. Advice even if he himself was a king and bickered with Titania, his wife.
I guess, he thought, saying something doesn’t make it true.
Sun burned down on him and he squinted, but mostly he listened to the abortion truck motor; it kept making its sound, and his heart gathered hope as the sound went on and on. Some other kid, turned over to the abortion clinic, not him; someone up the road.
He made his difficult exit from the berry brambles shaking and in many places scratched and moved step by step in the direction of his house. And as he trudged he began to cry, mostly from the pain of the scratches but also from fear and relief.
“Oh, good Lord,” his mother exclaimed, on seeing him. “What in the name of God have you been doing?”
He said stammeringly, “I—saw—the abortion—truck.”
“And you thought it was for you?” Mutely, he nodded.
“Listen, Walter,” Cynthia Best said, kneeling down and taking hold of his trembling hands, “I promise, your dad and I both promise, you’ll never be sent to the County Facility. Anyhow you’re too old. They only take children up to twelve.”
“But Jeff Vogel—”
“His parents got him in just before the new law went into effect. They couldn’t take him now, legally. They couldn’t take you now. Look—you have a soul; the law says a twelve-year-old boy has a soul. So he can’t go to the County Facility. See? You’re safe. Whenever you see the abortion truck, it’s for someone else, not you. Never for you. Is that clear? It’s come for another younger child who doesn’t have a soul yet, a pre-person.”
Staring down, not meeting his mother’s gaze, he said, “I don’t feel like I got a soul; I feel like I always did.”
“It’s a legal matter,” his mother said briskly. “Strictly according to age. And you’re past the age. The Church of Watchers got Congress to pass the law—actually they, those church people wanted a lower age; they claimed the soul entered the body at three years old, but a compromise bill was put through. The important thing for you is that you are legally safe, however you feel inside; do you see?”
“Okay,” he said, nodding.
“You knew that.”
He burst out with anger and grief, “What do you think it’s like, maybe waiting every day for someone to come and put you in a wire cage in a truck and—”
“Your fear is irrational,” his mother said.
“I saw them take Jeff Vogel that day. He was crying, and the man just opened the back of the truck and put him in and shut the back of the truck.”
“That was two years ago. You’re weak.” His mother glared at him. “Your grandfather would whip you if he saw you now and heard you talk this way. Not your father. He’d just grin and say something stupid. Two years later, and intellectually you know you’re past the legal maximum age! How—” She struggled for the word. “You are being depraved.”
“And he never came back.”
“Perhaps someone who wanted a child went inside the County Facility and found him and adopted him. Maybe he’s got a better set of parents who really care for him. They keep them thirty days before they destroy them.” She corrected herself. “Put them to sleep, I mean.”
He was not reassured. Because he knew “put him to sleep” or “put them to sleep” was a Mafia term. He drew away from his mother, no longer wanting her comfort. She had blown it, as far as he was concerned; she had shown something about herself or, anyhow, the source of what she believed and thought and perhaps did. What all of them did. I know I’m no different, he thought, than two years ago when I was just a little kid; if I have a soul now like the law says, then I had a soul then, or else we have no souls—the only real thing is just a horrible metallic-painted truck with wire over its windows carrying off kids their parents no longer want, parents using an extension of the old abortion law that let them kill an unwanted child before it came out: because it had no “soul” or “identity,” it could be sucked out by a vacuum system in less than two minutes. A doctor could do a hundred a day, and it was legal because the unborn child wasn’t “human.” He was a pre-person. Just like this truck
now; they merely set the date forward as to when the soul entered.
Congress had inaugurated a simple test to determine the approximate age at which the soul entered the body: the ability to formulate higher math like algebra. Up to then, it was only body, animal instincts and body, animal reflexes and responses to stimuli. Like Pavlov’s dogs when they saw a little water seep in under the door of the Leningrad laboratory; they “knew” but were not human.
I guess I’m human, Walter thought, and looked up into the gray, severe face of his mother, with her hard eyes and rational grimness. I guess I’m like you, he thought. Hey, it’s neat to be a human, he thought; then you don’t have to be afraid of the truck coming.
“You feel better,” his mother observed. “I’ve lowered your threshold of anxiety.”
“I’m not so freaked,” Walter said. It was over; the truck had gone and not taken him.
But it would be back in a few days. It cruised perpetually.
Anyhow he had a few days. And then the sight of it—if only I didn’t know they suck the air out of the lungs of the kids they have there, he thought. Destroy them that way. Why? Cheaper, his dad had said. Saves the taxpayers money.
He thought then about taxpayers and what they would look like. Something that scowled at all children, he thought. That did not answer if the child asked them a question. A thin face, lined with watch-worry grooves, eyes always moving. Or maybe fat; one or the other. It was the thin one that scared him; it didn’t enjoy life nor want life to be. It flashed the message, “Die, go away, sicken, don’t exist.” And the abortion truck was proof—or the instrument—of it.
“Mom,” he said, “how do you shut a County Facility? You know, the abortion clinic where they take the babies and little kids.”
“You go and petition the county legislature,” his mother said.
“You know what I’d do?” he said. “I’d wait until there were no kids in there, only county employees, and I’d firebomb it.”
“Don’t talk like that!” his mother said severely, and he saw on her face the stiff lines of the thin taxpayer. And it frightened him; his own mother frightened him. The cold and opaque eyes mirrored nothing, no soul inside, and he thought, It’s you who don’t have a soul, you and your skinny messages not-to-be. Not us.
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