Voyage From Yesteryear

Bernard sighed and forced his voice to remain reasonable. “Now, come on … That ‘boy’ disobeyed strict orders not to get drunk, and he started roughing up the girl long after he’d been warned lots of times to cool it. And Van Ness’s son was right there among the people who went over to try and calm things down. Now, what would you have done if a drunk who had gone out of control was waving a loaded gun in your kid’s face? What would anybody have done?’

“How do you know?” Jean challenged. “You weren’t there. And that’s not the way it sounded when Kalens was talking just now. And a lot of people seemed to agree with him.”

“He’s just playing on emotion, Jean. I had it on down here for a few minutes but couldn’t stand it. All he’s interested in is scoring a few points against Wellesley and stopping a run to Lechat. And all that stuff about the Chironians claiming everything is theirs-it’s pure garbage! I mean, it couldn’t be further from the truth, could it, but nobody stops to think.” He frowned to himself for a moment. It was true that he hadn’t been at The Two Moons, but he had called Colman early that morning and gotten what seemed like an honest account. But with Jean acting the way she was, he didn’t want to mention that. “Anyhow, the facts about the shooting are on record,” he said. “All you have to do is ask Jeeves.”

Jean seemed to dismiss the subject from her mind. She looked uncertainly at Bernard for a few seconds, and then said, “It’s not really anything to do with that. It’s- oh, I can’t put this any other way-it’s you.”

Bernard didn’t seem as surprised as he might have been. “Want to spit it out?”

Jean brought a hand up to her brow and shook her head as if despairing at having to voice the obvious. ‘When I first knew you, you wouldn’t have sat down here playing with trains while all this was going on outside,” she replied at last. “Don’t you understand? What’s happening out there, right now, is important. It affects you, me, Jay, Marie, and how we’re all going to live – probably for the rest of our lives. Twenty years ago you-both of us-we’d have done something. Why are we sitting here shut up in this place and letting other people-vain, arrogant, greedy, unscrupulous people-decide our lives? Why aren’t we doing something? It’s that. I can’t stand it.”

Bernard made no reply but let his eyebrows ask the question for him.

Jean raised her hands in an imploring gesture. “Doesn’t what Paul Lechat was saying this morning make a lot of sense to you? Isn’t it the only way? Well, he’s going to need help to do it. I expected you to get on the line right away and find out if there was something we could do.

But you hardly even talked about it. Hell, I know I’m twenty years older too, but at least I haven’t forgotten all the things we used to talk about. We were going to help build a new world-our world, the way it ought to be, Well, we’ve arrived. The ride’s over. Isn’t it time we started thinking about earning the ticket?”

Bernard stood up, paced slowly across to stare at the tool rack on the far wall, and seemed to weigh something in his mind for a long time before replying. Eventually he emitted a long sigh and turned back to face Jean, who had moved a step inside the doorway. “We can still build it,” he said. “But it doesn’t quite work the way we thought then. Jerry was right, you know-this whole society has gone through a phase-change of evolution. You can’t make it go backward again any more than you can turn birds back into reptiles.” Bernard came a pace nearer. His voice took on a persuasive, encouraging note. “Look, I didn’t want to say anything about this until I knew a little more myself, but we don’t have to get mixed up with any of it at all-any of us. Kalens and the rest of them belong to everything we’ve heft behind now. We don’t need them anymore. Don’t you see, it can’t last?”

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