“But sir, Mrs. Mandella got a zero priority rating way back in 2010.”
“What the hell is that supposed to me”
“S-i-r…” The smile was hardening in place.
“Look. Pretend that I came from another planet. What is a ‘zero priority rating’?”
“Another-oh! I know you!” She looked off to the left. “Sonya-come over here a second. You’d never guess who…” Another face crowded the cube, a vapid blonde girl whose smile was twin to the other nurse’s. “Remember? On the stat this morning?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “One of the soldiers-hey, that’s really max, really max.” The head withdrew.
“Oh, Mr. Mandella,” she said, effusive. “No wonder you’re confused. It’s really very simple.”
“Well?”
“It’s part of the Universal Medical Security System. Everybody gets a rating on their seventieth birthday. It comes in automatically from Geneva.”
“What does it rate? What does it mean?” But the ugly truth was obvious.
“Well, it tells how important a person is and what level of treatment he’s allowed. Class three is the same as anybody else’s; class two is the same except for certain life-extending-”
“And class zero is no treatment at all.”
“That’s correct, Mr. Mandella.” And in her smile was not a glimmer of pity or understanding.
“Thank you.” I disconnected. Marygay was standing behind me, crying soundlessly with her mouth wide open.
I found mountaineer’s oxygen at a sporting goods store and even managed to get some black-market antibiotics through a character in a bar downtown in Washington. But Mom was beyond being able to respond to amateur treatment. She lived four days. The people from the crematonum had the same fixed smile.
I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the Moon, but the phone company wouldn’t let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond. I had to get a credit transfer from Geneva. The paperwork took half a day.
I finally got through to him. Without preamble:
“Mother’s dead.”
For a fraction of a second, the radio waves wandered up to the moon, and in another fraction, came back. He started and then nodded his head slowly. “No surprise. Every time I’ve come down to Earth the past ten years, I’ve wondered whether she’d still be there. Neither of us had enough money to keep in very close touch.” He had told us in Geneva that a letter from Luna to Earth cost $100 postage-plus $5,000 tax. It discouraged communication with what the UN considered to be a bunch of regrettably necessary anarchists.
We commiserated for a while and then Mike said,
“Willy, Earth is no place for you and Marygay; you know that by now. Come to Luna. Where you can still be an individual. Where we don’t throw people out the airlock on their seventieth birthday.”
“We’d have to rejoin UNEF.”
“True, but you wouldn’t have to fight. They say they need you more for training. You could study in your spare time, bring your physics up to date-maybe wind up eventually in research.”
We talked some more, a total of three minutes. I got $1000 back.
Marygay and I talked about it through the night. Maybe our decision would have been different if we hadn’t been staying there, surrounded by Mother’s life and death, but when the dawn came the proud, ambitious, careful beauty of Columbia had turned sinister and foreboding.
We packed our bags and had our money transferred to the Tycho Credit Union and took a monorail to the Cape.
“In case you’re interested, you aren’t the first combat veterans to come back.” The recruiting officer was a muscular lieutenant of indeterminate sex. I flipped a coin mentally and it came up tails.
“Last I heard, there had been nine others,” she said in her husky tenor. “All of them opted for the moon… maybe you’ll find some of your friends there.” She slid two simple forms across the desk. “Sign these and you’re in again. Second lieutenants.”
The form was a simple request to be assigned to active duty; we had never really gotten out of the Force, since they extended the draft law, but had just been on inactive status. I scrutinized the paper.