She paused, staring into her drink. Then she said, “Well, things got pretty bad. There were a lot of people sick from radiation, and then it was hard to get food to the cities, and nothing could come at all from the Near East, where it all started, and a lot of fuel came from there . . . and then there was the AIDS. That was bad stuff, Sandy. It was bad around the old United States, but in lots of places it was just, well, there wasn’t anybody left after a while. Before they got the vaccines they’d just send people with it to Africa to die, because everybody there was going to be dying, anyway. Not just from AIDS; from malaria, and typhus, and just plain starvation.” She looked sad. “They had ten times as many people back then. Now Africa’s empty. There’s only about half a billion alive in the whole world. A single country like China or India had a lot more than that all by themselves before the war.”
“Are you telling me that five billion people died?” Sandy gasped.
“Sandy,” she said reasonably, “they’d probably all be dead by now, anyway. And—” She hesitated, then burst out, “And they deserved it, damn them! All of them! The thing I can’t forgive them for is that they shot us out of space, forever!”
Chapter 11
The thing that keeps the human race trapped on the surface of the Earth is its own previous activities in space. Just as has happened often before in human history, the human race has been defeated by its own success. As soon as the first rockets reached Low Earth Orbit they began shedding pieces of themselves. By the 1980s more than seven thousand objects were routinely tracked—pieces the size of a baseball and up, from a wrench dropped by a space-walking astronaut to abandoned fuel tanks the size of a box car. In those days it required a full day’s computing before any Shuttle flight to plot an orbit that would not result in a catastrophic collision with some spinning piece of space junk. But at least the big pieces could be located. The ones too tiny to be tracked were the real killers. At least half a dozen working satellites were by then known to have been damaged or destroyed. Any scrap of metal—any crumb, even a chip of paint—at the velocities of Low Earth Orbit could puncture and even destroy another satellite. But that was only the beginning. Then along came Star Wars. Some people thought the Strategic Defense Initiative wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, it almost did. After the war, all those thousands and thousands of pop-up lasers and killed satellites and “smart rocks” and exploded missile parts filled the Low Earth Orbit volume with an impenetrable spinning mine field of junk. So space travel came to a shuddering stop, just when it had become almost easy. There were places where the minefield was thinner than other places—the least dangerous were above the planet’s poles—but even in the thinnest places only armored satellites could hope to get through, at great cost in launch mass because of their great weight and the fact that they had to be launched without help from the Earth’s spin. Even those stayed operational only as long as it took for some colliding scraps of metal, plastic, or paint to pit their mirrors and fry their instrumentation. Of manned flights after that, there were none at all. Not successful ones, anyway. Not for more than half a century, and none likely until the junk orbits decay, a matter of hundreds of years.
The Major Seniors saw how obviously hungry the human race was for space, anything that had to do with space. That was good news for the Major Seniors; they decided to authorize the trip to York Commonwealth.
Polly got the news relayed from the lander by Tanya, and she greeted it, as she greeted most news, with an irritated twitch of the forearm. “But the Major Seniors have not instructed which of us to go and not remain behind,” she complained.
“For this reason,” Tanya said smugly, “it appears you must decide. Their order cannot now be questioned. Ship’s orbit has taken it below Earth horizon and not in range of our transmissions.”
Polly switched off the radio and looked at Obie and Sandy grimly. “Then that is how it will be,” she declared. “Let me see. Obie, you are our astronomical expert, therefore you must go.”
“Oh, pellets!” Obie grumbled. “Do you mean that I am to go alone and not with company?”
“Of course not. You would behave irresponsibly and not with adult Hakh’hli prudence. I myself will accompany you.”
“No, I want a friend,” he said in English. “I want Sandy to come with me.”
Polly glared at him, pinching her thumbs together warningly in air. Obie quivered but belligerently stood his ground. After a moment’s thought Polly gave a shrugging twitch of her forearms and declared grandly, “I decide that that is how it is to be; we will all three voyage to this York. Lysander, instruct your Earth female that this is so.”
“Gladly!” he cried, and hurried out ahead of the others to meet Marguery Darp.
The news seemed to make her happy. In fact, they were all happy. Sandy was pleased because Marguery Darp was pleased. Polly was self-righteously pleased to be doing what the Major Seniors wished of her. And Obie—well, Obie had decided to be ecstatic. At the curbside, he showed it with a whole new repertory of cries and cavorting. “New York, New York,” he shouted, leaping to the top of the hotel marquee and down again. “Oh, Sandy! We will have so much fun on the Great White Way! We will give our regards to Broadway, and remember everyone to Herald Square—but what,” he asked, coming breathlessly down beside Marguery Darp, “is a ‘Herald Square’?”
“I think it was an old street corner in New York City,” she said. “I guess it’s underwater now.” And then, to Sandy, she said, “I’m really pleased. Hudson City’s a great town. I have a place there myself, and it’ll be fun showing you around.”
“Thank you,” Sandy said promptly. “I too think it will be fun, only—” He hesitated, swallowing. “Only, will it be necessary to travel again in that very rapid aircraft of yours?”
She patted his arm. “Not at all. We don’t use those vertical-takeoff planes for long distances; they use too much fuel, even if it’s only hydrogen. No. We’ll go by blimp. It’s a little over a twenty-four-hour trip, and I promise you’ll love it. It’s almost like a cruise.”
“A cruise? Like ‘Love Boat’?”
She frowned. “I don’t know what ‘Love Boat’ is, and you’re not starting that again, are you? Because we’ve got a busy day today. If you’re all going off to York, there are about a hundred people here in Dawson who are dying to ask you questions.”
Obie made a face. Sandy didn’t, because he did not want to be undignified in Marguery Darp’s presence, but all the same he complained, “They’re always asking us questions. Don’t we get any time off?”
“This evening,” she said firmly. “After all your interviews. We’ll have a kind of a bon voyage party, up on the rooftop. All right? But now let’s get busy.”
Busy they certainly were. For the morning’s interrogation they were all three confronted by half a dozen polite, insistent questioners. And the questions they asked! Why did the Hakh’hli freeze their eggs instead of letting them hatch? What were the names of the Earth films shown to the entire ship’s company? What was the Hakh’hli word for “magnetic repeller”? What would happen if, say, something like a little asteroid struck the interstellar ship in its drive compartment? Even Polly shivered when she was asked that last one. “It would be terrible,” she said, presenting her tail to be licked in sympathy (but none of the humans understood the gesture, and Obie and Sandy were too far away). “It would wreck the ship.”
It was a sour note to end the morning’s questioning. Polly muttered darkly that she didn’t see how she could even eat after that, but of course she and Obie did. Sandy was not so lucky. Marguery Darp had disappeared on some errand, and all he had was a sandwich before the afternoon session began.
This time he was questioned alone, by three separate waves of interrogators. Most of them he had never seen before, and though they unfailingly told him their names and, wincing, accepted a handshake of greeting, he could not tell them apart. The first batch wanted to hear his personal story, starting with the Hakh’hli discovery of his parents’ spaceship. They took a full hour to cover every detail of his childhood, his education, and his relationships with the other members of his cohort—with ChinTekki-tho and MyThara, too. It was almost the first time Sandy had given his dear, lost nursemaid a thought since the lander pulled away from the interstellar ship, and he almost wept with sorrow and guilt. The second batch was more specific. In his training, they said, he had spoken of games and contests. Were any of those, well, military? (Oh, no, he assured them; the wrestlers used to fight to the death, but even they didn’t do that any more.) And no one used ‘weapons’? (Of course not! Why would a Hakh’hli use a ‘weapon’ against another Hakh’hli?) Not even ‘police’? (But of course not again! The Hakh’hli didn’t have ‘police’— what would they be needed for? The Major Seniors did not permit ‘crime,’ and no Hakh’hli would go against the wishes of the Major Seniors.)