by Kate Wilhelm
One night her family went to Colonel Cluny’s house for dinner. She had played with Arthur Cluny all her life, although he was four years older than she, but recently a strangeness had come between them, and now they were uncomfortable with each other. Everyone called him Cluny; he was seventeen that year, and had grown very tall and was as thin and awkward as a stick drawing, all elbows and knees and feet that he never seemed to know where to put.
As soon as dinner was over he asked Jean if she would like to hear some records and she said no very politely in a way that would have been ridiculous just a few months earlier. He looked relieved. Jean liked his mother very much. She was plump and short and could whistle dozens of bird calls. Jean saw the look that passed between mother and son.
His said, I tried. And hers said, Not really. For a moment Jean felt sorry for Cluny. His father muttered something about no rest for the weary and took Daniel off to his study; Mrs. Cluny and Stephanie began to talk about the food shortages and the rationing everyone expected within six months. Throughout the West electricity and water were being rationed already. Jean excused herself to get her book from the car. She had not wanted to come tonight, but her father had said teasingly that Cluny would be crushed if she didn’t appear, and reluctantly she had permitted herself to be drawn along with them. Crushed, she thought bitterly, walking along the white concrete drive to where the car was parked.
She stopped outside the open study window when she heard her father’s voice.
“. . . won’t work, Marcus. You know it won’t work. We can’t do it alone!”
“Goddamn it! Make it work then! Try! They’re going to close down the son of a bitch! That lousy Atherton is loaded for us. Goddamn bastard!” There was a long silence, but before Jean moved again, Colonel Cluny said in a lower, more intense voice, “You know anything else we can do? Just say it if you do.”
“Shoot Atherton?”
“Maybe it’ll come to that. Maybe it will. And I’d do it in a minute if he was the only one. So would you. But he isn’t.”
“Okay. Okay. When?”
She knew he would be slouched down in his chair, his legs out before him, the way he was after an all-day hike, or a weekend out on the gulf fishing, with too little sleep, too little rest. He sounded as tired as she had ever heard him.
“Jean, where are you?”
It was Cluny’s voice coming from the back of the house.
She ran, and when Cluny came into view she was just closing the car door, her book in her hand.
“Mom sent me out,” Cluny said. “She thinks I should play a game with you or something.”
Jean giggled. “I know. Monopoly?”
“Yeah. I said I’d show you my telescope. It’s out back. You want to see it?”
She didn’t want to, but she went with him anyway, because she did not want to go into any lighted room just yet. She was certain anyone who glanced at her would know immediately that she had been eavesdropping.
The next day Daniel told Jean and Stephanie that he was going back to the station one last time. “Maybe if I try hard I can get to the bottom of the trouble up there,” he said, and that was the official reason given for his mission. There was a special on television about the many troubles, and then the President came on to say he personally was sending the most honored and respected astronaut of all time to investigate, to talk to the men up there, to try to find a solution to the problems that had repeatedly slowed down the project.
Lying in bed that night, Jean thought to herself, No one said anything at all. They took an hour, but they didn’t say anything, not really. And she wondered if the President knew why her father was being sent to the station again. She wondered if anyone on the hour-long program knew that nothing had been said.
Four days later Colonel Cluny came to tell Jean and Stephanie that Daniel had been killed.
“He was going around the completed part in a small one-man capsule,” the colonel said. “He made the turn, headed out and around the steel members, and then he just kept going. There was never any radio contact at all. He got out of range of radar almost instantly. It must have been a total malfunction of the craft. That’s the only thing that could have happened.” His face was gray and haggard. He looked dead. He was lying. Jean took a step toward him, another, but then her mother screamed a long, piercing, anguished wail, and Jean felt herself crumble. She no longer knew what she had intended, if anything. A doctor attended to her mother, took her away, and the colonel turned toward Jean, but she backed away, shaking her head. At the door she turned and ran. She looked up at the bright light in the sky and screamed as loud as she could, “I hate you!”
CHAPTER
2
ARTHUR CLUNY splurged his entire month’s rations on wine the day he received his Ph.D. in astrophysics. The party went on most of the night and when dawn was a pale smudge on the horizon Cluny and a few close friends went out to find an open restaurant for eggs and coffee. It had been the first wine and smoke party for many months; none of them was sober. They all ignored the panhandlers, the women, the teen-agers’ roving gangs on the streets.
Sid kept chanting a fifteenth-century call to vespers, and Roald and Murray recited Kipling’s Jungle Books. Ralph was becoming maudlin. “They’ll put you away in a high observatory on a mountaintop and nobody will ever see you again, but they will name comets after you. Cluny One, Cluny Two, Cluny Three . . .”
Murray had started a new Kipling story, interrupted it to call back to Ralph, “Maybe he’ll find an asteroid with the fountain of eternal water in it!”
They entered an all-night cafeteria, where they were met at the door by a collector who demanded to see their ration coupons before they could go through the serving line. He looked bored and depressingly sober.
Murray sat next to Cluny after they had selected their food. Their choice had been limited to scrambled eggs, pies, and sweet rolls. Murray was overweight, with the unhealthy fat of one whose diet consisted almost entirely of starches. He kept adding catsup to his eggs and eyeing Cluny’s three rolls. He was a biochemist, unemployed.
Virgil began to talk about the demonstration planned for the Fourth of July at the Pentagon. “Research Water, Not Bombs,” he said. “That’s the slogan. This time we’ll get in and take it apart.”
Ralph made a snorting noise of derision.
“Would any of you gentlemen care to donate a water ration coupon for the refugees?” The voice was cool, the words carefully enunciated, as if the speaker knew a table of drunken students would understand nothing less than perfect diction.
Cluny looked up at her. She was tall, five ten at least, and she was very beautiful, with long brown hair done in a loose braid over one shoulder, and feathery curls over both ears. She wore no make-up; her skin was so flawless it looked unreal. Her eyes were green, with long straight dark lashes.
Cluny heard the others talking, flirting, trying to get her to join them, trying to learn her name. Virgil had his coupon book out, thrust it at her. “Take all you want, but tell me your name first. Just the name.”
She tore out one water coupon and returned the book. Someone asked whom she was working for, and she answered that one. “The American Refugee Society.” Everyone else was handing her the coupons she had asked for. She turned her gaze to Cluny, who shook his head.
“I don’t have any more,” he said and was surprised to hear his own voice. He felt he never had heard his own voice before that night. “I have food coupons,” he said.
She shook her head slightly, accepted a coupon from Murray, and then she left.
She wore a pale yellow Grecian-type garment, slit on one side up to her thigh and caught at one shoulder with a butterfly brooch; when she moved, her long leg flashed pink.
“Wooie!” Virgil said then, wiping his forehead. “She could collect arms and legs and need a truck to haul them away with!”
Cluny had risen, and on both sides hands pulled him back down. “Un-unh, my boy,” Sid s
aid mournfully, tugging at him. “She’s straight, a good woman, dedicated to the welfare of others. You know a good woman has been the ruin of more men than demon rum itself?” He nodded wisely. “ ’S a fact.”
Cluny struggled, but they restrained him until he gave it up. When they left the restaurant it was full daylight; early workers were already out, along with the street people, who never left.
Sid and Murray returned to Cluny’s apartment with him; the others went lurching away in the opposite direction. Later that day Cluny left his two friends sleeping on the sofa bed and the floor while he went out to find the office of the American Refugee Society. There was a single woman on duty; he remembered it was Saturday. He asked about the girl, and found he was holding his breath until the woman answered.
“Oh, you must mean Lina Davies. She won’t be in until Monday. Can I help you?”
He mumbled something and left. Monday. He would wait all day Monday.
“Okay, Cluny. What now, old friend?” Sid asked that evening.
They had cleaned up the one-room apartment enough to be able to sit down without knocking anything over. There was the sofa bed, which sagged to the floor, an overstuffed chair with the stuffing completely out of one arm, several straight chairs, a tiny refrigerator and a two-burner stove built into a sink unit. Books were stacked under a small table, at the side of the sofa, and under a window. The walls were covered with posters of pop art and good prints of Kandinsky, Japanese line drawings, Michelangelo’s horse studies, and other miscellany. If anyone had told Cluny that his room was a mess, he would have been surprised; he had not seen it for many months, had not really looked at it hard since the day he had taken it, grateful to have found it.
“Go work on a canal or aqueduct somewhere, I guess,” Cluny said. His head ached dully and although he was hungry, the thought of eating was repugnant. Food would sink right down through his stomach.
“No,” Sid said firmly. ”You will not. How are you fixed for bread, dough, cash, jingle-jangle?”
Cluny shrugged. His father had had a lot of insurance, and there was the pension, which his mother expected to share with him until he could find something to do.
“Right,” Sid went on as if he had answered aloud. “Here’s what we’re going to do, old friend. We’re going up to Alpha, get it started again. You, Murray, and me. How about that!” Cluny shook his head and the aching came in closer, began to throb behind one eye. “I bite,” he said. “Tell me.”
“You go back home, back to your father’s files, dig out everything there. Everything—every argument, every detail, the floor plans, everything. And we make a case for going. Murray can do the kind of biological work that’s banned here. I can look for radioactive rocks or something. You can set up an astronomy unit. See?”
“They’ve been trying that for years,” Cluny said. “You know there’s no money for it.”
“They are not your father’s son,” Murray said then. “We think you could do it, Cluny. Probably no one else could. They might do it if only to give people something to think about instead of depressions and drought and famine, and China and Russia threatening to bang each other out of existence. If they claim it’s for weather research, it could stop the demonstrations. They just might go for it.”
“Do you have any idea how much it would cost?”
“No, and that’s why you’re to start digging in your father’s files.”
“But it’s all on record. There’s nothing I can find in his private files that isn’t in Washington. Others have been through it all a dozen times.”
Murray and Sid were both shaking their heads. Murray said, “He was a dreamer, Cluny. You know he was. It was his baby all the way. His and Brighton’s. They pushed it down Congress’s throat, made the government accept it and then finance it. They got the others to go in, France, England, Russia. You know how much manipulating they did, just to get it started? What’s on record is what was finished. What we think you’ll find are your father’s dreams, his plans, and that’s what we need now.”
“Hell,” Sid cut in. “Half the stuffs been classified, and it’s not on record. But I’d be willing to bet my mother’s gold teeth that you’ll find it in his files. You don’t give away all your baby’s records. You make copies, fudge a little here and there, and you keep the important ones yourself. You’ll see.”
“What about Brighton’s stuff?”
Murray answered. “Mrs. Brighton became a lush and the kid went to live with her grandparents. Mrs. Brighton signed a release for the government to take all her husband’s stuff out. No one seems to know what happened to any of it after that. Probably in a Quonset hut somewhere, molding away.”
Cluny went to the window then and stood looking at the street below. Nothing he saw registered in his consciousness. He might have been looking at a blank wall. Jean, he thought. And what happened to Jean after that? He didn’t ask. He doubted that they had followed up that part. No reason for them to have wondered what happened to little Jean.
“How long have you been planning this?” he asked, turning toward them again.
“A year. We wanted to tell you sooner, but you were too busy and it was important that you have the Ph.D. Doctor Cluny carries a hell of a lot more clout than Arthur Cluny, student.”
“You’ve been waiting for me to grow up,” Cluny .said, his voice heavy with self-mockery. “Now I put on the long pants and do a man’s work, is that it?”
Sid nodded. And Cluny knew his mocking words had been true ones.
Sid looked hung over, and deadly serious. He was a slightly built man, going bald already although not yet thirty. He had been Cluny’s space geology teacher at Harvard several years earlier, and they had become friends during the course, and afterward the friendship had cemented. He lived with Terri Ruthchild, taught, and made model spaceships for a hobby. And Sid cultivated friendships that would pay off, Cluny found himself thinking.
Sid was watching him. “I didn’t think of it until a year ago,” he said, as if privy to the inner workings of Cluny’s head. “In fact, something you said started it. One night you said the only place to study astronomy was in space. Everything else was working through a smoked glass. Remember? You thought the same thing I did then, but you put it aside. Now I’m bringing it out again. That’s all.”
“Okay, okay,” Cluny said irritably. “I’m going home next week. I’ll see if Dad had anything at home. I’ll have a look at it if he did.”
Murray stood up then. “Jesus, I had forgotten what wine does to the head,” he complained. “I’m going. Cluny, after a couple weeks, give Sid a call, okay? I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ll come down and help you go through the stuff.”
Cluny nodded. He and Murray had been friends for nearly ten years. His mother liked Murray. There would be no problem in having him around for a while. And if it was a waste of time, it would not matter anyway, since Murray had nothing here to hold him. He and the rest of the biochemistry department had been fired en masse the previous year when it had been learned they were continuing the forbidden genetic engineering research.
Sid went to the door also. Cluny caught his arm. “You know they won’t agree to anything like this, don’t you? They won’t spend the kind of money it would take, not now.”
“I think they will. Have you ever been really desperate, down to rock bottom, and decided to do something totally foolish and more expensive than you could possibly afford? Sometimes that’s the only thing to do when you’re desperate enough. Gamble with everything you have left, hoping it’ll pay off real big. I think we’re ready to try that desperate gamble.”
They left, and Cluny sat with his head in his hands for a long time, thinking about desperation. He thought of Murray living in a rat-infested rathole of a room, in Rat Cathedral, living like a rat himself, scrounging, making do, doing without. And Sid, working full time at the university, but on three-quarters pay, with new cuts foreseen, and new layoffs as the student population shra
nk again and again. And he thought of himself without a job, without hope for a job, without any prospect of having anything at all better than he had right now. And right now he had nothing except his mother’s largesse.
It was as if he had been born in an endless world, but sometime when he was not watching, they came along and put walls on it, and every year since then, when he glanced out, he could see that the walls had moved inward a bit, until they were almost within reach, and the world had become constricted and shadowed. There was the deepening depression, shortages, and crowding as people were forced out of their homes in the Western states. If the drought did not end, there would be more crowding, more displaced people, more shortages. And there was no hope. Every day there was less hope that the drought would end before the walls came together.
Deliberately he had cultivated a functional blindness to the problems as long as he could, as long as he had been in school. He had lived with, nurtured, the belief that by the time he got his doctorate the problems would be gone, the rains would come again, and the people would go back home. He had refused to join any of the militant groups with their ceaseless demands for this program or that, and he had in fact thought them all very silly and naive, as if the government could make it rain. Or make the grass grow where there was no water. Or provide jobs when industries were forced to close because there was no water or electricity. The times can’t always be good, he had thought with disgust at some of his friends when they marched, or held demonstrations. And at the end, when reality began to encroach on his world, when his applications for jobs went unanswered, and his colleagues shrugged vaguely when he brought up the question of work, he had felt only a dull resentment and in relief had gone back to his books and his research and his thesis. One thing at a time, he had thought then. First the degree, then worry about what to do with it.
