Another World

by Gardner Duzois

  The brightest eyes around him were reading The Double Helix to find out how to make it in research, or marking up the Dun & Bradstreet flyers. If Hobie stood out at all, it was only that he didn’t seem to be worried about making it in research or any other way, particularly. But that fitted in, too. Those days a lot of boys were standing around looking as if they couldn’t believe what went on, as if they were waiting for—who knows?—a better world, their glands, something. Hobie’s faintly aghast expression was not unique. Events like the installation of an armed patrol around the school enclave were bound to have a disturbing effect on the more sensitive kids.

  People got the idea that Hobie was sensitive in some indefinite way. His usual manner was open but quiet, tolerant of a put-on that didn’t end.

  His advisor did fret over his failure to settle on a major field in time for the oncoming threat of college. First his math interest seemed to evaporate after the special calculus course, although he never blew an exam. Then he switched to the pre-college anthropology panel the school was trying. Here he made good grades and acted very motivated, until the semester when the visiting research team began pounding on sampling techniques and statistical significance. Hobie had no trouble with things like Chi square, of course. But after making his A in the final he gave them his sweet, unbelieving smile and faded. His advisor found him spending a lot of hours polishing a six-inch telescope lens in the school shop.

  So Hobie was tagged as some kind of an under-achiever, but nobody knew what kind because of those grades. And something about that smile bothered them; it seemed to stop sound.

  The girls liked him, though, and he went through the usual phases rather fast. There was the week he and various birds went to thirty-five drive-in movies. And the month he went around humming Mrs. Robinson in a meaningful way. And the warm, comfortable summer when he and his then girl and two other couples went up to Stratford, Ontario with sleeping bags to see the Czech multimedia thing.

  Girls regarded him as “different” although he never knew why. “You look at me like it’s always good-bye,” one of them told him. Actually he treated girls with an odd detached gentleness, as though he knew a secret that might make them all disappear. Some of them hung around because of his quick brown hands or his really great looks, some because they hoped to share the secret. In this they were disappointed. Hobie talked, and he listened carefully, but it never was mutual talk-talk-talk of total catharsis that most couples went through. But how could Hobie know that?

  Like most of his peer group, Hobie stayed away from heavies and agreed that pot was preferable to getting juiced. His friends never crowded him too much after the beach party where he spooked everybody by talking excitedly for hours to people who weren’t there. They decided he might have a vulnerable ego-structure.

  The official high school view was that Hobie had no real problems. In this they were supported by a test battery profile that could have qualified him as the ideal normal control. Certainly there was nothing to get hold of in his routine interviews with the high-school psychologist.

  Hobie came in after lunch, a time when Dr. Morehouse knew he was not at his most intuitive. They went through the usual openers, Hobie sitting easily, patient and interested, with an air of listening to some sound back of the acoustical ceiling tiles.

  “I meet a number of young people involved in discovering who they really are. Searching for their own identities,” Morehouse offered. He was idly trueing up a stack of typing headed Sex differences in the adolescent identity crisis.

  “Do you?” Hobie asked politely.

  Morehouse frowned at himself and belched disarmingly.

  “Sometimes I wonder who I am,” he smiled.

  “Do you?” inquired Hobie.

  “Don’t you?”

  “No,” said Hobie.

  Morehouse reached for the hostility that should have been there, found it wasn’t. Not passive aggression. What? His intuition awoke briefly. He looked into Hobie’s light hazel eyes and suddenly found himself slipping toward some very large uninhabited dimension. A real pubescent preschiz, he wondered hopefully? No again, he decided, and found himself thinking, what if a person is sure of his identity but it isn’t his identity? He often wondered that; perhaps it could be worked up into a creative insight.

  “Maybe it’s the other way around,” Hobie was saying before the pause grew awkward.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, maybe you’re all wondering who you are,” Hobie’s lips quirked; it was clear he was just making conversation.

  “I asked for that,” Morehouse chuckled. They chatted about sibling rivalry and psychological statistics and wound up in plenty of time for Morehouse’s next boy, who turned out to be a satisfying High Anx. Morehouse forgot about the empty place he had slid into. He often did that, too.

  It was a girl who got part of it out of Hobie, at three in the morning. “Dog,” she was called then, although her name was Jane. A tender, bouncy little bird who cocked her head to listen up at him in a way Hobie liked. Dog would listen with the same soft intensity to the supermarket clerk and the pediatrician later on, but neither of them knew that.

  They had been talking about the state of the world, which was then quite prosperous and peaceful. That is to say, about seventy million people were starving to death, a number of advanced nations were maintaining themselves on police terror tactics, four or five borders were being fought over, Hobie’s family’s maid had just been cut up by the suburban peacekeeper squad, and the school had added a charged wire and two dogs to its patrol. But none of the big nations were waving fissionables, and the U.S.-Sino-Soviet détente was a twenty-year reality.

  Dog was holding Hobie’s head over the side of her car because he had been the one who found the maid crawling on her handbones among the azaleas.

  “If you feel like that, why don’t you do something?” Dog asked him between spasms. “Do you want some Slurp? It’s all we’ve got.”

  “Do what?” Hobie quavered.

  “Politics?” guessed Dog. She really didn’t know. The Protest Decade was long over, along with the New Politics and Ralph Nader. There was a school legend about a senior who had come back from Miami with a busted collarbone. Some time after that the kids had discovered that flowers weren’t really very powerful, and that movement organizers had their own bag. Why go on the street when you could really do more in one of the good jobs available Inside? So Dog could offer only a vague image of Hobie running for something, a sincere face on TV.

  “You could join the Young Statesmen.”

  “Not to interfere,” gasped Hobie. He wiped his mouth. Then he pulled himself together and tried some of the Slurp. In the dashlight his seventeen-year-old sideburns struck Dog as tremendously mature and beautiful.

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” said Hobie. “I mean, it’s not unusually bad. It’s just a stage. This world is going through a primitive stage. There’s a lot of stages. It takes a long time. They’re just very very backward, that’s all.”

  “They,” said Dog, listening to every word.

  “I mean,” he said.

  “You’re alienated,” she told him. “Rinse your mouth out with that. You don’t relate to people.”

  “I think you’re people,” he said, rinsing. He’d heard this before. “I relate to you,” he said. He leaned out to spit. Then he twisted his head to look up at the sky and stayed that way awhile, like an animal’s head sticking out of a crate. Dog could feel him trembling the car.

  “Are you going to barf again?” she asked.

  “No.”

  But then suddenly he did, roaringly. She clutched at his shoulders while he heaved. After awhile he sagged down, his head lolling limply out on one arm.

  “It’s such a mess,” she heard him whispering. “It’s such a shitting miserable mess mess mess MESS MESS—”

  He was pounding his hand on the car side.

  “I’ll hose it,” said Dog, but then she saw he didn’t
mean the car.

  “Why does it have to go on and on?” he croaked. “Why don’t they just stop it? I can’t bear it much longer, please, please, I can’t—”

  Dog was scared now.

  “Honey, it’s not that bad, Hobie honey, it’s not that bad,” she told him, patting at him, pressing her soft front against his back.

  Suddenly he came back into the car on top of her, spent.

  “It’s unbearable,” he muttered.

  “What’s unbearable?” she snapped, mad at him for scaring her. “What’s unbearable for you and not for me? I mean, I know it’s a mess, but why is it so bad for you? I have to live here too.”

  “It’s your world,” he told her absently, lost in some private desolation.

  Dog yawned.

  “I better drive you home now,” she said.

  He had nothing more to say and sat quietly. When Dog glanced at his profile she decided he looked calm. Almost stupid, in fact; his mouth hung open a little. She didn’t recognize the expression, because she had never seen people looking out of cattle cars.

  Hobie’s class graduated that June. His grades were well up, and everybody understood that he was acting a little unrelated because of the traumatic business with the maid. He got a lot of sympathy.

  It was after the graduation exercises that Hobie surprised his parents for the first and last time. They had been congratulating themselves in having steered their fifth offspring safely through the college crisis and into a high-status Eastern. Hobie announced that he had applied for the United States Air Force Academy.

  This was a bomb, because Hobie had never shown the slightest interest in things military. Just the opposite, really. Hobie’s parents took it for granted that the educated classes viewed the military with tolerant distaste. Why did their son want this? Was it another of his unstable motivational orientations?

  But Hobie persisted. He didn’t have any reasons, he had just thought carefully and felt that this was for him. Finally they recalled that early model rocket collection; his father decided he was serious, and began sorting out the generals his research firm did business with. In September Hobie disappeared into Colorado Springs. He reappeared for Christmas in the form of an exotically hairless, erect and polite stranger in uniform.

  During the next four years Hobie the person became effectively invisible behind a growing pile of excellent evaluation reports. There seemed to be no doubt that he was working very hard, and his motivation gave no sign of flagging. Like any cadet, he bitched about many of the Academy’s little ways and told some funny stories. But he never seemed discouraged. When he elected to spend his summers in special aviation skills training, his parents realized that Hobie had found himself.

  Enlightenment—of a sort—came in his senior year when he told them he had applied for and been accepted into the new astronaut training program. The U.S. space program was just then starting up again after the revulsion caused by the wreck of the first manned satellite lab ten years before.

  “I bet that’s what he had in mind all along,” Hobie’s father chuckled. “He didn’t want to say so before he made it.” They were all relieved. A son in the space program was a lot easier to live with, status-wise.

  When she heard the news, Dog, who was now married and called herself Jane, sent him a card with a picture of the Man in the Moon. Another girl, more percipient, sent him a card showing some stars.

  But Hobie never made it to the space program.

  It was the summer when several not-very-serious events happened all together. The British devalued their wobbly pound again, just when it was found that far too many dollars were going out of the States. North and South Korea moved a step closer to reunion, which generated a call for strengthening the U.S. contribution to the remains of SEATO. Next there was an expensive, though luckily nonlethal fire at Kennedy, and the Egyptians announced a new Soviet aid pact. And in August it was discovered that the Guévarrista rebels in Venezuela were getting some very unpleasant-looking hardware from their U.A.R. allies.

  Contrary to the old saying that nations never learn from history, the U. S. showed that it had learned from its long agony in Viet Nam. What it had learned was not to waste time messing around with popular elections and military advisory and training programs, but to ball right in. Hard.

  When the dust cleared, the space program and astronaut training were dead on the pad and a third of Hobie’s graduating class was staging through Caracas. Technically, he had volunteered.

  He found this out from the task force medico.

  “Look at it this way, lieutenant. By entering the Academy, you volunteered for the Air Force, right?”

  “Yes. But I opted for the astronaut program. The Air Force is the only way you can get in. And I’ve been accepted.”

  “But the astronaut program has been suspended. Temporarily, of course. Meanwhile the Air Force—for which you volunteered—has an active requirement for your training. You can’t expect them to just let you sit around until the program resumes, can you? Moreover you have been given the very best option available. Good God, man, the Volunteer Airpeace Corps is considered a super elite. You should see the fugal depressions we have to cope with among men who have been rejected for the VAC.”

  “Mercenaries,” said Hobie. “Regressive.”

  “Try ‘professional,’ it’s a better word. Now—about those headaches.”

  The headaches eased up some when Hobie was assigned to long-range sensor recon support. He enjoyed the work of flying, and the long, calm, lonely sensor missions were soothing. They were also quite safe. The Guévarristas had no air strength to waste on recon planes and the Chicom SAM sites were not yet operational. Hobie flew the pattern, and waited zombie-like for the weather, and flew again. Mostly he waited, because the fighting was developing in a steamy jungle province where clear sensing was a sometime thing. It was poorly mapped. The ground troops could never be sure about the little brown square men who gave them so much trouble; on one side of an unknown line they were Guévarristas who should be obliterated, and on the other side they were legitimate national troops warning the blancos away. Hobie’s recon tapes were urgently needed, and for several weeks he was left alone.

  Then he began to get pulled up to a forward strip for one-day chopper duty when their tactical duty roster was disrupted by geegee. But this was relatively peaceful too, being mostly defoliant spray missions. Hobie in fact put in several months without seeing, hearing, smelling or feeling the war at all. He would have been grateful for this if he had realized it. As it was he seemed to be trying not to realize anything much. He spoke very little, did his work and moved like a man whose head might fall off if he jostled anything.

  Naturally he was one of the last to hear the rumors about geegee when they filtered back to the coastal base, where Hobie was quartered with the long-range stuff. Geegee’s proper name was Guairas Grippe. It was developing into a severe problem in the combat zone. More and more replacements and relief crews were being called forward for temporary tactical duty. On Hobie’s next trip in, he couldn’t help but notice that people were acting pretty haggard, and the roster was all scrawled up with changes. When they were on course he asked about it.

  “Are you kidding?” his gunner grunted.

  “No. What is it?”

  “B.W.”

  “What?”

  “Bacteriological weapon, skyhead. They keep promising us vaccines. Stuck in their zippers—look out, there’s a ground burst.”

  They held Hobie up front for another mission, and another after that, and then they told him that a sector quarantine was now in force.

  The official notice said that movement of personnel between sectors would be reduced to a minimum as a temporary measure to control the spread of respiratory ailments. Translation: you could go from the support zone to the front, but you couldn’t go back.

  Hobie was moved into a crowded billet and assigned to Casualty and Supply. Shortly he discovered that there was
a translation for respiratory ailments too. Geegee turned out to be a multiform misery of groin rash, sore throat, fever and unending trots. It didn’t seem to become really acute, it just cycled along. Hobie was one of those who were only lightly affected, which was lucky because the hospital beds were full. So were the hospital aisles. Evacuation of all casualties had been temporarily suspended until a controlled corridor could be arranged.

  The Gués did not, it seemed, get geegee. The ground troops were definitely sure of that. Nobody knew how it was spread. Rumor said it was bats one week, and then the next week they were putting stuff in the water. Poisoned arrows, roaches, women, disintegrating cannisters, all had their advocates. However it was done, it was clear that the U.A.R. technological aid had included more than hardware. The official notice about a forthcoming vaccine yellowed on the board.

  Ground fighting was veering closer to Hobie’s strip. He heard mortars now and then, and one night the Gués ran in a rocket launcher and nearly got the fuel dump before they were chased back.

  “All they got to do is wait,” said the gunner. “We’re dead.”

  “Geegee doesn’t kill you,” said C/S control. “You just wish it did.”

  “They say.”

  The strip was extended, and three attack bombers came in. Hobie looked them over. He had trained on AX92’s all one summer; he could fly them in his sleep. It would be nice to be alone.

  He was pushing the C/S chopper most of the daylight hours now. He had got used to being shot at and to being sick. Everybody was sick, except a couple of replacement crews who were sent in two weeks apart, looking startlingly healthy. They said they had been immunized with a new antitoxin. Their big news was that geegee could be cured outside the zone.

  “We’re getting reinfected,” the gunner said. “That figures. They want us out of here.”

  That week there was a big drive on bats, but it didn’t help. The next week the first batch of replacements were running fevers. Their shots hadn’t worked and neither did the stuff they gave the second batch.