Michaelmas

by Algis Budrys

  "Good evening, Horse," he said laughing, tilting his head up to study Watson, whom he hadn't seen personally in some time, and who seemed flushed and a little weary.

  "Damn near morning," Watson snorted. "Lousy racket. Meet Doug Campion."

  Campion was very taut and handsome. There was an in-definable cohesiveness about him, as though he were one solid thing from the surface of his skin on through—maho-gany, for instance, or some other close-grained substance which could be nicked but not easily splintered. From those depths, his black eyes stood out. Even the crisp, short, tightly curled reddish hair on his well-shaped skull looked as if it would take a very sharp blade to trim. He was no more than five-foot-nine and probably weighed less than one hundred fifty pounds. He might readily have been an astronaut himself.

  "Very pleased to meet you, sir," he said briskly. "It's an honour and a privilege." He shook Michaelmas's hand with the quick, economical technique of a man who has done platform introductions at fund-raising events. His eyes took in Michaelmas's face and form, and put them away some place. "I've been looking forward to this ever since I got into the trade."

  "Won't you please sit down?" Michaelmas said, not be-cause Watson wasn't already halfway into the chair beside him but because Campion put him in mind of the politesse of policy meetings and boardrooms. He decided that Cam-pion must be very self-confident to have abandoned his safer and inevitably rapid progress up the network corporate ladder. And he remembered that Domino had been im-pressed by him.

  "Thank you, Larry," Campion was murmuring. Watson was settling into his seat as if trampling hay, and tilting his fist up to his mouth as he caught the eye of the first- class stewardess. "Well, Larry," Watson said. "Looks like we're going to be climbing the Alps together, right?"

  "I guess so, Horse," Michaelmas smiled.

  There was a pleasant chime simultaneously from Wat-son's and Campion's comm units.

  Watson grunted, pulled the earplug out of its take-up, and inserted it in place. On Michaelmas's other side, Campion did the same. The two of them listened intently, faces blank, mouths slightly open, as Michaelmas smiled from one to the other. After a moment, Watson held his unit up to his mouth and said: "Got it. Out," and let the earplug rewind. "AP bulletin," he explained to Michaelmas. "One of their people got a 'No Comment' out of UNAC about some of their people having flown to Limberg's place. Jesus, I wish that girl would get here with that damned cart; I'm tapering off my daughter's engagement party. Looks like there's something happening over there after all."

  Michaelmas said : "I imagine so." A No Comment in these circumstances was tantamount to an admission—a UNAC public relations man's way of keeping in with his employers and with the media at the same time. But this was twice, now, in this brief conversation, that Horse Watson had hinted for reassurance.

  "You buy this story?" Watson asked now, doing it again. Michaelmas nodded. He understood that all Watson thought he was doing was passing the time. "I don't think Reuters blows very many," he said.

  "Me too, I guess. You have time to pick up any crowd reaction?"

  "Some. It's all hopeful." And now, trading back for the relay of the AP bulletin, Michaelmas said :

  "Did you pick up the Gately comment?" When Watson shook his head, Michaelmas smiled mischievously and held up his machine. He switched on a component that imitated the sound of spinning tape reels. "I—ah—collected it from CBS in my cab. It's public domain anyway. Here it is," he said as the pilot lights went through an off-on sequence and then held steady as he pressed the switch again.

  Will Gately was United States Assistant Secretary of Defence for Astronautics, and a former astronaut. Always lobbying for his own emotions, he was the perfect man for a job the administration had tacitly committed to inepti-tude. "The wave of public jubilation at this unconfirmed report," his voice said, "may be premature. It may be damp-ened tomorrow by the cold light of disappointment. But tonight, at least, America goes to bed exhilarated. Tonight, America remembers its own."

  Watson's belly shook. "And tomorrow Russia reminds the world about the denationalization clause in the UN astro-nautics treaty. Jesus, I believe Kerosene Willy may revive the Space Race yet."

  Michaelmas smiled as if Gately's faux pas hadn't fore-closed Major Papashvilly's chances of immediate promotion. Especially now, the USSR couldn't risk raising the world's eyebrows by making their man Norwood's equal in rank. By that much, Gately and the Soviet espousal of fervent gentle-manliness in pursuit of the Balanced Peace might have conspired to put the spritely little Georgian in more certain danger.

  Campion said, startlingly after his silence, "The good doctor sure knows how to use his prime time." Michaelmas cocked his head towards him. Campion was right. But he was also making himself too knowledgeable for a man who'd never met Limberg. "Three-thirty a.m. local time on September twenty-nine when he got that Reuters man out of bed." Campion was documenting his point. "Hit the good old USA right in the breadbasket", meaning the ten p.m. news on September 28.

  It occurred to Michaelmas that Campion realized Lim-berg had moved as if to play directly to the Gately-types. But Watson was missing that because Campion had made himself annoying.

  "What I'm thinking," Watson had said right on top of Campion's final consonant, "is we're going to hit Berne about seven-thirty a.m. local. Limberg's still up in that sanatorium with the UNAC

  people and Norwood, and the conversa-tion's flying. Then you figure that old man will go without his beauty sleep? I don't. It's going to be maybe noon local before we stand any chance of talking to that crafty son of a bitch, and that's six hours past my bedtime. Meanwhile, all the media in Europe is right now beating the bushes there for colour, background, and maybe even the crash site. Which means that the minute we touch ground, we've got to scurry our own feet like crazy just to find out how far behind we are."

  "Don't their European people have some staff on the ground there now?" Michaelmas asked gently, nodding towards the network decal on Watson's comm unit while Campion sat up a little, smiling.

  "Oh, sure," Watson pressed on, "but you know how string-ers are. They'll be tryin' to sell me postcard views of the mountains with Xs inked on 'em where the capsule may have come down except it's got months of snow on it. And meanwhile, will UNAC give us anything to work on? They need their sleep too, and, besides, they won't peep till Limberg's explained it all, and talked about his prizes he was fortunate enough to scoff up although he's of course above money and, mundane gewgaws and stuff like that. Norwood stays under wraps, and he sleeps, or else they switch us a fast one and slide him out of there. What do you bet we get a leak he's been moved to Star Control when all the time they've got him in New York, God forbid Houston, or maybe even Tyura Tam. You'd enjoy the Aral climate in the summer, Doug. You'd like the commissars, too—they eat nice fresh press credentials for breakfast over there, Sonny."

  Michaelmas blinked unhappily at Watson, who was con-centrating now on the approaching liquor caddy and fishing in his breast pocket for money. He felt terribly sorry Watson felt obliged to hire Campion for an assistant when he was so afraid of him.

  "Let me buy you fellows a drink," Watson was saying. Since he knew Michaelmas's drinks were on his ticket, and he despised Campion, Horse Watson was trying to buy his way into the company of men. Michaelmas could feel him-self beginning to blush. He breathed quickly in an attempt to fight it down.

  "Maybe I'd better take a rain check," Campion said quickly. "Going by your summation, Mel, I'd be better off with forty winks." He turned off his comm unit, leaned back with his arms folded across his chest, and closed his eyes.

  "I'd be glad of another one of these, miss," Michaelmas said to the stewardess, holding up his half-full glass. "You make them excellently."

  Watson got a bourbon and water. He took off the top half with one gulping swallow and then nursed the rest in his clenched hand. He sat brooding at his stiffly out-thrust shoes. After a while, he said forcefully: "Been around a long time, L
arry, the two of us."

  Michaelmas nodded. He chuckled. "Every time something happens in South America, I think about the time you almost led the Junta charge across the plaza at Mara-caibo."

  Watson smiled crookedly. "Man, we were right on top of it that day, weren't we? You with that black box flapping in the breeze and me with my bare hands. Filed the damn story by cable, for Christ's sake, like some birthday greet-ing or something. And told 'em if they were going to send any more people down, they'd better wrap some armour around the units, 'cause the first slug they stopped was the last." He put his hand on the sealed, tamper-proof unit he might be said to have pioneered at the cost of his own flesh.

  He took a very small sip of his drink. Watson was not drunk, and he was not a drunk, but he didn't smoke or use sticks, and he had nothing to do with his hands. Nor could he really stop talking. Most of the plane passengers were people with early-morning business—couriers with certificates or portable valuta; engineers; craftsmen with specialties too delicate to be confidently executed by tele-waldo; good, honest, self-sufficient specialists comforted by salaries that justified personal travel at ungodly hours— and they lay wrapped in quilts or tranquil self-esteem, nodding limp-necked in their seats with their reading lights off. Watson looked down the dimness of the aisle.

  "The way it is these days lately, I'd damn near have to send off to Albania for my party card and move south. Foment my own wars."

  "You miss it, don't you?" Michaelmas said in a measured kidding tone of voice.

  Watson shook his head. Then he nodded slightly. "I don't know. Maybe. Remember how it was when we were just starting out — Asia, Africa, Russia, Mississippi? Holy smoke, you'd just get something half put away, and somebody'd start it up again somewhere else. Big movements.

  Crowds. Lots of smoke and fire."

  "Oh, yes. Big headlines. A lot of exciting footage on the flat-V tube."

  "You know, I think the thing about it was, it was simple stuff. Good guys, bad guys. People who were going to take your country away overnight. People who were going to cancel your pay-cheque. People who were going to come into your school. People who stood around in bunches and waved clubs and yelled, "The hell you will!" Man, you know, really, those were the salad days for you and me. Good thing, too; I don't suppose either one of us had enough experience to do anything but point at the writing on the wall. Neither one of us could miss the broad side of a barn, period. Right? Well, maybe not you, but me. Me, for sure."

  "It's not necessary to be such a country boy with me, Horse."

  Watson waved his hands. "Nah! Nah, look, we were green as grass, and so was the world.

  Man, is it wrong to miss being young and sure of yourself? I don't think so, Larry. I think if I didn't miss it, the last good part of me would be all crusted over and cracking in the middle. But whatever happened to big ideological militancy, anyway? All we've got left now is these tired agrarian reformer bandidos hiding in the Andes, screaming Peking's gone soft on im-perialismo and abandoned 'em, and stealing chickens. I wonder if old Joe Stalin ever figured his last apostle would be somebody named Juan Schmidt-Garcia with a case of BO that would fell a tree?"

  "Yes, the world is quite different now from the way I found it in my young manhood,"

  Michaelmas said. Looking at the slump of Watson's mouth, he spoke the words with a certain sympathy. "Now most of the world's violence is individual, and petty."

  Watson snorted softly. "Like that thing in New York where that freak was sneaking in on his neighbours and killing them for their apartment space. Nuts and kooks; little grubby nuts. Good for two minutes on one day. Not that you should measure death that way, God rest the souls of the innocent. But you know what I mean. Look. Look, we're in a funny racket, all of a sudden. You figure you're gonna spend your life making things real for the little folks in the parlour, you know?

  Here's the big stuff coming at you, people; better duck. Here's the condition of the world. You don't like it? Get up and change it."

  "Yes," Michaelmas said. "We showed them the big things, and that made the small things smaller. More tolerable. Less significant."

  Watson nodded. "Maybe. Maybe. You're saying the shit was there all along. But I got to tell you, when we showed 'em a gut-shot farmer drowning in a rice paddy, it was because it meant something in Waukegan. It said, 'Today your way of life was made more safe. Or less.' But you show 'em the same guy today, and it's about a jealous husband or some clown wants to inherit his buffalo. And you know it's not going to get any bigger than that.

  "It's cowboys and Indians again," Watson said. "Stories for children. It doesn't mean a thing to Waukegan, except the guy's dying, and he's dying the way they do in the holo dramas, so he's as real as the next actor. They judge his goddamn performance, for Christ's sake, and if he's con-vincing, then maybe it was important. It makes you sick to think he's not interesting if he's quiet about it. Man, so little of it's real any more; they've got no idea what can happen to them.

  They don't want an idea. You remem-ber that quote Alvin Moscow got from the plane crash survivor? 'We would all be a little kinder to each other.' That is what you and I should be all about.

  "Man, who knows what's real any more, and who feels it? You run your fingers over a selector and the only action that looks right to you is something they did in a studio with prefigured angles, stop motion, the best lighting, and all that stuff. Even your occasional Moroccan school-teacher hung over a slow fire three days ago can't compete with that stuff. It's not like he was a Commie that was going to corrupt the morals of Mason City, or even that he was a Peace Corps volunteer that crossed some Leninist infiltrator. It's just some poor slob that told the kids something that's not in the Quran, and somebody took exception to it. Man, you can get the same thing in Tennessee; what's so great about that? Is that gonna make you rush out and join some crusade to stop that kind of stuff? Is that gonna touch your life at all? Is that gonna make you hear the marching band?"

  "It might cause you to sip your wine more slowly."

  "Okay. Yeah, But you know damned well the big stories now are some guy dying by inches inside because he can't make his taxes and who, where, has the half million that disappeared out of the transit bill? I mean that's all right, and it's necessary, and even after your third pop or your third stick, it'll get through to you, kind of, if Melvin Watson or L. G. Michaelmas, begging your pardon, Larry, pushes it at you in some way that makes you feel like you're paying attention. But nobody dies for anything any more, you know? They all the only on account of, just like holo people, and half the time these days we just pass along a lot of dung from the lobby boys and the government boys and the image gurus like our friend the Herr Doktor.

  "My God, Larry, we're just on a fertilizer run here. UNAC's just a bunch of people jockeying to get by, just like in any widget monopoly or thingumbob cartel in the world. When Norwood went, who cried at UNAC? All you heard was the haemorrhage shot 'round the world. So they shook out some expandable patsies and then they were right in there pitching again, talking about the increased effect on the goal attainment curve and all that other vocabulary they have to kiss it and make it well with. Scared green for the appropriation; scared to death they picked the wrong voodoo in school. But they're safe. They'd be sick if they realized it, but the whole world's like they are even if it would turn their stomachs to believe it.

  "Christ, yes, they're safe. It's fat, fat, fat in the world, and bucks coming out of everybody's ears; spend it quickly, before the damn economy does what it did in the seventies and we have to redesign whole industries to get rich again. Smart isn't 'Can you do it, is it good to do?' Smart is

  'Can you make 'em believe what you're doing is real?' And real is 'Can you get financing for it?' "

  Michaelmas sat very still, sharing Watson's angle of blind vision down the aisle and being careful not to do anything distracting. He had learned long ago never to stop anyone.

  Watson was unstoppable. "Norwood's up the
re breathing and feeling in that megabuck beauty shop of Limberg's and suspecting there's a God who loves him. I know Norwood— hell, so do you. Nice kid, but ten years from now he'll be endorsing a brand of phone. The point is, right now he's on that mountaintop with all that glory ringing in him, but that doesn't make him real to his bosses and it doesn't make him real to the little folks in the parlour. What makes him real is Limberg says he's real and Limberg's got not one but two good voodoo certificates. Christ on a crutch, I've got half a mind to kill Norwood all over again—on the air, Larry, live from beautiful Switzerland, ladies and gentlemen, phut splat in glorious hexacolor 3D, and let him be real all over every God-damned dining-table in the world. Ten years from now, he'd thank me for it."

  Michaelmas sat quiet.

  Watson swung his head up and grinned suddenly, to show he was kidding about any part that Michaelmas might object to. But he could not hold the expression very long. His eyes wandered, and he jerked his head towards Cam-pion. "He really asleep?"

  Michaelmas followed his glance. "I believe so. I don't think he'd relax his mouth like that if he weren't."

  "You catch on." Watson looked nakedly into Michael-mas's face with the horrid invulnerability of the broken. "I don't have any legs left," he explained. "Not leg legs— inside legs. Sawed 'em off myself. So I took in a fast young runner. Hungry, but very hot and a lot of voodoo in his head.

  Watch out for him, Larry. He's the meanest person I've ever met in my life. Surely no men will be born after him. My gift to the big time. Any day now he's going to tell me I can go home to the

  'sixties. Galatea's revenge. And I'll believe him."

  Michaelmas couldn't be quite certain of how his own face looked. In his ear, Domino had been telling him : "As you can imagine, I'm getting all three sets of pulse and respira-tion data from your area, so there's considerable garbling. But my evaluation is that Campion hasn't surrendered consciousness for a moment."

  Watson had been clenching at his stomach with one hand. Now he put his drink down and got up to go to the lavatory. Campion continued to half-lie in his seat, his expression slack and tender.