“A cop? You mean, like Kojak?”
She looked puzzled. “What’s a Kojak? I mean a police officer. That’s what InterSec is, you know; it’s the overall security agency for all the commonwealths. Its full name is InterCommonwealth Security. So Dave and I hacked along for a couple of years . . . only the last year or so it hasn’t really worked. He’s asked me if I want a divorce.”
“Oh!” Sandy cried joyously. “I know about divorcées!”
She gave him a hostile look. “You know what about divorcees?” she demanded. “No, don’t answer that. Anyway, I like your poem, and I think I probably like you, too. Only let me think about it a little bit, okay?”
“Oh, right.” Sandy nodded enthusiastically, because that was how they did; the girl never said yes right away, at least not in the kind of movies he liked best, with a lot of tapdancing. But still—
The other thing he knew was that there was a necessary next step.
The wine was helping out his decisions. He leaned closer to her in a preparatory way. She look worried, then comprehending. “Sandy,” she began. “People are watching us inside the bar—”
But when he put an arm around her she didn’t resist.
As a kiss it wasn’t much, apart from the startling discovery Sandy made. He hadn’t expected her mouth to be open, after all! But as a definite first step toward doing It, the sensations were dizzying. He was breathing hard when she broke away, laughing. “Ouch, Sandy,” she said, rubbing her neck. “You don’t know your own strength, do you?”
“Oh,” he said abjectly. “I’m so very sorry—”
“Oh, cut that out! I liked it, only next time don’t squeeze so hard. You’ve heard the expression about being built like a brick, uh, outhouse? Only in your case it isn’t brick, it’s granite slabs.”
He hadn’t even heard the last part of that. “Next time?” he repeated, eyes wide with hope.
She sighed and patted his arm. “I did say next time, didn’t I? Okay, but just remember that next time isn’t this time. Give it a rest. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right around you; that’s my job, after all.”
He sighed and straightened up. “All right,” he said, and took another swig of his drink. The warm feeling was becoming even more pronounced, and it seemed to have spread agreeably to his groin. He was smiling to himself when he saw that Marguery was watching him out of the corner of her eye. “What?” he asked, surprised. He wondered if he had missed an obvious cue.
She hesitated for a moment. Then she asked, “What’s it like?”
He looked at her in puzzlement. “What’s what like?”
“Being in space. Tell me what it’s like. Please. I’ve always wanted to know.”
He sat up straight, peering at her. She was in dead earnest. She wasn’t being flirtatious or even friendly; she was staring at him as though he had some kind of secret that her life depended on, waiting for him to speak.
But he didn’t know what to say. “Oh,” he said, waving a vague hand, “you know.”
“I don’t know,” she said harshly. “I want to know.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Sorry,” he said. “Only there isn’t much to tell about what it’s like. When you’re in the big ship it doesn’t feel like you’re in space. It doesn’t feel like you’re anywhere in particular, just there. The engines are going at the regular G-thrust all the time, and you don’t feel anything except when there’s a course change, like when we went around the Sun—”
“Around the Sun?” she whispered, her eyes wide with fascination. So he had to tell her every bit about it—what they saw in the screens, what they felt as the ship heated up, what it was like when the main engines at last were turned off in Earth orbit, and most of all how it felt as they came down in the lander. “And you flew that thing?” she asked, her eyes bright.
“Oh, no,” he admitted. “They wouldn’t let me do the actual piloting. That was Polly’s job. I know how, though.” And then he had to tell her about the hours in the flight simulator.
Before he finished she had whispered to the waiter, and two new drinks were in front of them—not wine for him this time, but a carbonated soft drink that made him sneeze. “Gesundheit,” she said dreamily. “You know, I trained in one of those things, too.”
He blinked at her. “A Hakh’hli flight simulator? But you weren’t on the ship!”
“No, of course I wasn’t on your ship. How could I be? But we had flight simulators of our own. There are still volunteers to go into space, you know.”
“But they can’t, can they? That ring of debris—”
“Right,” she said bitterly. “We can’t get through the garbage ring. Unmanned satellites, yes. Sometimes. We send them up every once in a while, and about one out of five of them survives for a year without damage. Well, without being totally destroyed, anyway. That’s not bad, for unmanned satellites. We can always make more of them. But it isn’t good enough odds to send up people. People are a lot more fragile. So when I signed up for astronaut training Dave and I had a big fight. He called me a kamikaze—well, actually it was, ‘You kamikaze bitch!’ ”
“Kami—? Oh! You mean, like the Japanese suicide pilots from your World War Two?”
“That’s right. It meant he thought volunteering to go into space was like committing suicide. The way it turned out, he was pretty near right. The first two ships they launched did, in fact, kill their crews. Four astronauts. Two in each ship. People I’d trained with. So they called off the program, and then the rest of us never got up there at all.”
“But you’d still like to?”
She blazed at him. “You’re goddamn well told we’d like to. Not just me! There are millions of kids out there who’d give their right eyes to do what you’ve done—and hundreds of millions of grownups who’d kill you in a hot minute to take your place.”
“Really?” he asked, alarmed. “But that wouldn’t work, Marguery. The Hakh’hli wouldn’t be fooled. They’d know right away—”
He stopped, because she was laughing at him. “I’m sorry, Sandy,” she said. “I didn’t mean that literally. But I didn’t exactly not mean it, either, only I don’t mean you should worry about somebody actually trying it. No one will.”
“I didn’t really think anyone would,” he assured her, almost truthfully.
“But don’t think the human race isn’t interested in space! In fact, there’s going to be an astronomical convention in York next week. They’re probably going to ask all three of you to come to it, so they can see the pictures and listen to you talk—and, I guess, most of all just to be in the same room with somebody who’s been there.”
Sandy took a thoughtful sip of his drink. The fizziness in his nose stopped just short of being actually painful; he decided he liked it. “Marguery?” he asked. “How did you get into such a mess?”
“Mess?”
“The mess in the world. The debris in space. And letting things warm up so the ocean levels went up, depleting the ozone layer, acid rain. All those things. How did you human beings let it all get so bad?”
“Us human beings? And what are you?” she demanded harshly. “Chopped chicken liver?” And then, as he opened his mouth for a puzzled question, she shook her head. “Never mind. I know what you mean.” She reflected for a minute. “Well, I guess the only answer is that the old people didn’t know they were doing wrong. Or anyway the ones that did know it was wrong didn’t count, and the ones that counted didn’t care.”
“They didn’t know war was wrong?”
“Oh, well,” she said doubtfully. “I guess they knew that, all right, only they got themselves into a place where it just happened. There was a place called the Near East—”
“Near to what?”
“That’s just what it was called, Sandy, the ‘Near East.’ Anyway, they had a little war, only they got to using what they called ‘tactical nukes.’ And then people outside that part of the world got involved, and then the big countries began using the big nuclear missiles. On each other. Well, the orbital defenses took care of most of them, but it was really a mess, you know.”
“I wish I did know,” Sandy said wistfully. “We stopped getting your broadcasts along about then, you know.”
“Really? Well, all right, I guess I can fill you in. It’s a long time ago, but I think I know most of it, anyway. About five percent of the nukes got through. A submarine-launched one took out Washington, D.C.—that was where the government was then—and a bunch landed in New Mexico and Arizona and so on, but, really, it wasn’t a big nuclear war. I think altogether only fifteen warheads hit their targets. Only that was really all it took, you see. And after that—”