“Now, look here,” Max said, still grinning. “I didn’t come all the way out here to listen to you feeling sorry for yourself. I stopped in Avalon to be inspired by your beautiful face. If you’re going to be depressed, I’ll just take my com and tomatoes—”
“Corn and tomatoes!” Nai and Eponine exclaimed in unison. The women ran over to the box. “The children haven’t had any fresh produce in weeks,” Nai said excitedly as Max opened the box with a steel bar.
“Be very, very careful with these,” Max said seriously.
490 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
“You know that what I am doing is absolutely illegal. There’s barely enough fresh food for the army and the government leaders. But I decided you deserved something better than leftover rice.”
Eponine gave Max a hug. “Thank you,” she said.
“The boys and I are very grateful, Max,” Nai said. “I don’t know how we’ll ever repay you.”
“Fll find some way,” Max said.
The two women returned to their chairs and Max sat down on the floor between them. “Incidentally,” he said, “I ran into Patrick O’Toole over in the second habitat. He asked me to say hello to both of you.”
“How is he?” Eponine asked.
“Troubled, I would say,” Max replied. “When he was drafted, he let Katie talk him into reporting to the army— which I’m certain he would never have done if either Nicole or Richard could have spoken to him even once— and I think he realizes now what a mistake he made. He didn’t say anything, but I could sense his distress. Naka-mura keeps him in the front line because of Nicole.”
“Is this war almost over?” Eponine asked.
“I think so,” Max said. “But it’s not clear the king Jap wants it to be over. From what the soldiers told me, there’s very little resistance left. They’re mostly mopping up inside the brown cylinder.”
Nai leaned forward. “We heard a rumor that another intelligent species was also living in the cylinder—something altogether different from the avians.”
Max laughed. “Who knows what to believe? The television and newspaper say whatever Nakamura tells them, and everyone knows it. There are always hundreds of rumors. I myself have encountered some bizarre alien plants and animals inside that habitat, so nothing would surprise me.”
Nai stifled a yawn. “I best be leaving,” Max said, standing up, “and let our hostess go to bed.” He glanced at Eponine. “Would you like someone to walk you home?”
“Depends on who the someone is,” Eponine said with a smile.
A few minutes later, Max and Eponine reached her tiny
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hut on one of the side streets of Avalon. Max dropped the cigarette they had been sharing and ground it into the dirt. “Would you like someone . . .” he started.
“Yes, Max, of course I would,” Eponine replied with a sigh. “And if that someone were anyone, it would definitely be you.” She looked directly in his eyes. “But if you shared my bed, even one time, men I would want more. And if, by some awful chance, no matter how careful we were, you were ever, ever to test positive for RV-41, I would never forgive myself.”
Eponine pressed herself against him to hide her tears. “Thanks for everything,” she said. “You’re a good man, Max Puckett, maybe the only one left in this crazy uni verse,”
Eponine was in a museum in Paris surrounded by hundreds of masterpieces. A large group of tourists passed through the museum. They spent a total of forty-five seconds looking at five magnificent paintings by Renoir and Monet. “Stop,” Eponine shouted in her dream. “You can’t possibly have seen them.”
The knocking on her door chased the dream away. “It’s us, Eponine,” she heard Ellie say. “If it’s too early, we can try to come back later, before you go to school. Robert was worried that we might get tied up in the psychiatric ward.”
Eponine leaned over and grabbed the robe hanging on the room’s solitary chair. “Just a minute,” she said, “I’m coming.”
She opened the door for her friends. Ellie was in her nurse’s uniform, with little Nicole in a makeshift carrier on her back. The sleeping baby was wrapped cleverly in cotton to protect her from the cold.
“May we come in?”
“Of course,” replied Eponine. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I must not have heard you.”
“It’s a ridiculous time for us to visit,” Ellie said. “But with all our woric at the hospital, if we didn’t come out here early in the morning, we’d never make it.”
“How have you been feeling?” Dr. Turner asked a few seconds later. He was holding a scanner in front of Epo-
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nine and data was already being displayed on the portable computer monitor.
“A little tired,” Eponine said. “But it could be just psychological. Since you told me two months ago that my heart was beginning to show some signs of degradation, I have imagined myself having a heart attack at least once a day.”
During the examination Ellie operated the keyboard that was attached to the monitor. She made certain, that the most important information from the checkup was recorded in the computer. Eponine craned around to see the screen. “How’s the new system working, Robert?”
“We’ve had several failures with the probes,” he replied. “Ed Stafford says that’s to be expected because of our inadequate testing. And we don’t yet have a good data management scheme, but on the whole we’re very pleased.”
“It’s been a savior, Eponine,” Ellie said without glancing up from the keyboard. “With our limited funds, and all the wounded from the war, there would have been no way we could have kept the RV-41 files current without this kind of automation.”
“I only wish we had been able to use more of Nicole’s expertise in the original design,” Robert Turner said. “I hadn’t realized she was such an expert on internal monitoring systems.” The doctor saw something unusual in a graph that appeared on the screen. “Print a copy of that, will you, darling? I want to show it to Ed.”
“Have you heard anything new about your mother?” Eponine asked Ellie as the examination neared its completion.
“We saw Katie two nights ago,” Ellie replied very slowly. “It was a difficult evening. She had another ‘deal’ from Nakamura and Macmillan she wanted to discuss. . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Anyway, Katie says that there will definitely be a trial before Settlement Day.”
“Has she seen Nicole?”
“No,” Ellie answered. “As far as we know, nobody has. Her food is brought in by a Garcia and her monthly checkups are done by a Tiasso.”
Baby Nicole stirred and whimpered on her mother’s
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back. Eponine reached down and touched the portion of the child’s cheek that was exposed to the air. “They are so unbelievably soft,” she said. At that moment the little girl’s eyes opened and she began to cry.
“Do I have time to nurse her, Robert?” Ellie asked.
Dr. Turner glanced at his watch. “All right,” he said. ”We’re basically finished here. Since both Wilma Mar-golin and Bill Tucker are in the next block, why don’t I call on them by myself and then come back?”
“You can handle them without me?”
“With difficulty,” he said grimly. “Especially poor Tucker.”
“Bill Tucker is dying very slowly,” Ellie said to Eponine in explanation. “He’s alone and in great pain. But since the government has now outlawed euthanasia, there’s nothing we can do.”
“There’s no indication of additional atrophy in your data,” Dr. Turner said to Eponine a few moments later. “I guess we should be thankful.”
She didn’t hear him. In her mind’s eye, Eponine was imagining her own slow and painful death. / will not let it happen that way, she told herself. Never. As soon as I am no longer useful . . . Max will bring me a gun.
“I’m sorry, Robert,” she said. “I must be sleepier than I thought. What did you say?”
“You’re no worse.” Robert gave Eponine a kiss on the cheek and started for the door. “I’ll be back in about twenty minutes,” he said to Ellie.
* ‘Robert looks very tired,’ * Eponine said when he departed.
“He is,” Ellie replied. “He still works all the time . . . and worries when he’s not working.” Ellie was sitting on the dirt floor with her back against the wall of the hut. Nicole was cradled in her arms, suckling at a breast and cooing intermittently.
“That looks like fun,” Eponine said.
“Nothing I have ever experienced is even remotely similar. The pleasure is indescribable.”
It’s not for me, Eponine’s inner voice said. Not now. Not ever. In a fleeting moment Eponine recalled a night of passion when she almost hadn’t said no to Max Puckett.
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