“Ten percent is a good return on any investment, Matthew. All right, please love me that ten percent—and I’ll love you ten percent of what I loved—still love!— my darling husband. Is there enough love in that ten percent for a second kiss? It’s a long way to the Moon—they must keep me warm all the way.” She closed her eyes and waited.
(Hey, twin, lover boy is doing better this time.) (Don’t bother me now, I’m busy!)
Presently Mr. Barnes murmured, “Lovely.”
“All swollen and fat now, that’s why I wear styles that cover them. But you should have seen Eunice—the first Eunice, my benefactrix—at her lovely best. . . in styles to show it.”
“I still say they’re lovely. I guess we had better stop this, I’ve got a roomful of people waiting out there. And you have almost four hours of processing before you go on to quarantine. If you want to go to Andes Port with your own doctor, you had better go now.”
“Yes, Matthew. I love you—ten percent—and I’ll still be loving you on the Moon. At compound interest. Through that door?”
“Through there and follow the signs. Good-bye, Eunice. Take care of yourself.”
(Boss, that’s either a new high or a new low. Was he kissing us? Or a billion dollars?) (It seemed to me—though I’m still learning compared with you two trollops—that the young man started out kissing a billion dollars . . . and wound up kissing Joan. Us. Quite well, too. Dears, I find that my animal nature has been considerably stirred—I’m looking forward to us being back in circulation again.) (Hell, yes, Jock darling, we all are. It occurs to me, Joan, that there must be lots of homesick out-migrants who will appreciate a simple country girl who learned clear back in junior high to kiss with her eyes closed and her lips open.) (Eunice, that’s what I’m counting on. Seven billion people makes Earth a terribly lonely place…but there are only a few thousand on Luna and, if we try, we can get to know all of them and love most of them. What do you think, Jake?) (Johann, we can try. We will. Wups, here’s our first stop. ‘Physical.’ Goose bumps and indignities. But what the hell?—somebody kissed us good-bye.)
29
As re-reported in the Christian Science Monitor, Izvestia condemned the announcement (Daily Selenite, year 35, day 69) of the Lunar Commission’s call for proposal studies for terraforming Ganymede as “one more provocative example of the insatiable territorial aggressions of the mad-dog alliance of the two major imperialist, counterrevolutionary, genocidal powers, the United States of America and the so-called People’s Democratic Republic of China and demanded that the UN Security Council take action before it was too late. In Sequoia National Park three families (or possibly one extended family) were discovered living two hundred feet up in a giant redwood. The group (seven adults, five children—two less than a year old) claimed to have been up the tree more than three years; extensive arrangements for their unique style of living lent substance to the claim. They were booked on a variety of charges but the U.S. district attorney declined to prosecute: “I ain’t about to waste my time and taxpayers’ money on a bunch of monkeys. Let’s chase ‘em back up the tree!”
The Iowa State Annual Picnic in Long Beach, California, suffered 243 cases of acute food poisoning (botulism-D), 17 muggings, 3 rapes, and was rained out. “—from the great State of New York knows that slum clearance is no answer. Must we hear the death rattle before we admit that any organism, be it man, or city, or civilization, in time grows old and dies?” In a letter in Nature (UK) it was claimed that scientists in Novosibirsk had solved both the problem of twinning replication and of extrauterine fetal development in vitro and must now be reckoned as back in the Great Powers race with a potentially unlimited supply of workers, soldiers, and peasants. An editorial in the same issue urged the Nobel letter-writer to give up writing science-fiction or at least change his brand of hashish. Debate on proposed legislation for control of neo-psychedelics continued: “Has the gentleman on the other side of the aisle ever given thought to the potentially disastrous effect on our economy of actually enforcing the narcotics laws we already have? Or is he talking for the video audience?” Experienced observers predicted no vote this session.