So of course there was nothing to do then but go up to Skyfac. Raoul insisted on paying for his own passage, which startled and pleased me. "How can I ask you to buy a pig in a poke?" he asked reasonably. "For all you know I may be one of those permanently spacesick people."
"I anticipate having at least some gravity in the living units, Raoul. And do you have any idea what an elevator costs a civilian?"
"I can afford it," he said simply. "You know that. And I'm no good to you if I have to stay in the house all day. I go on your payroll the day we know I can do the job."
"That's silly," I objected. "I plan to take carloads of student dancers up, with no more warranty than you've got, and they sure as hell won't be paying for their tickets. Why should I discriminate against you for not being poor?"
He shook his head doggedly, his eyeglasses tattooing the sides of his nose. "Because I want it that way. Charity is for those that need it. I've taken a lot of it, and I bless the people who gave it to me when I needed it, but I don't need it any more."
"All right," I agreed. "But after you've proved out, I'm going to rebate you, like it or not."
"Fair enough," he said, and we booked our passage.
Commercial transportation to orbit is handled by Space Industries Corp., a Skyfac subsidiary, and I have to congratulate them on one of the finest natural puns I've ever seen. When we located the proper gate at the spaceport, after hours of indignity at Customs and Medical, I was feeling salty. I still hadn't fully readapted after the time I'd spent in free fall with Shara, and the most I could pry out of the corporation medicos was three months—my "pull" with the top brass meant nothing to the Flight Surgeon in charge. I was busy fretting that it wasn't enough time and tightening my guts in anticipation of takeoff when I rounded the last corner and confronted the sign that told me I was in the right place.
It said:
S.I.C. TRANSIT (gloria mundi)
I laughed so hard that Norrey and Raoul had to help me aboard and strap me in, and I was still chuckling when acceleration hit us.
Sure enough, Raoul got spacesick as soon as the drive cut off—but he'd been sensible enough to skip breakfast, and he responded rapidly to the injection. That banty little guy had plenty of sand: by the time we were docked at Ring One he was trying out riffs on his Soundmaster. White as a piece of paper and completely oblivious, eyes glued to the outboard video, fingers glued to the Soundmaster's keyboard, ears glued to its earplugs. If elevator-belly ever troubled him again, he kept it to himself.
Norrey had no trouble at all. Neither did I. Our appointment with the brass had been set for an hour hence, just in case, so we stashed Raoul in the room assigned to him and spent the time in the Lounge, watching the stars wheel by on the big video wall. It was not crowded; the tourist trade had fallen off sharply when the aliens came, and never recovered. The New Frontier was less attractive with New Indians lurking in it somewhere.
My attempts to play seasoned old spacehound to Norrey's breathless tourist were laughably unsuccessful. No one ever gets jaded to space, and I took deep satisfaction in being the one who introduced Norrey to it. But if I couldn't pull off nonchalance, at least I could be pragmatic.
"Oh, Charlie! How soon can we go outside?"
"Probably not today, hon."
"Why not?"
"Too much to do first. We've got to insult Tokugawa, talk to Harry Stein, talk to Tom McGillicuddy, and when all that's done you're going to take your first class in EVA 101—indoors."
"Charlie, you've taught me all that stuff already."
"Sure. I'm an old spacehound, with all of six months experience. You dope, you've never even touched a real p-suit."
"Oh, welfare checks! I've memorized every word you've told me. I'm not scared."
"There in a nutshell is why I refuse to go EVA with you."
She made a face and ordered coffee from the arm of her chair.
"Norrey. Listen to me. You are not talking about putting on a raincoat and going to stand next to Niagara Falls. About six inches beyond that wall there is the most hostile environment presently available to a human. The technology which makes it possible for you to live there at all is not as old as you are. I'm not going to let you within ten meters of an airlock until I'm convinced that you're scared silly."
She refused to meet my eyes. "Dammit, Charlie, I'm not a child and I'm not an idiot."
"Then stop acting like both." She jumped at the volume and looked at me. "Or is there any other kind of person who believes you can acquire a new set of reflexes by being told about them?"
It might have escalated into a full-scale quarrel, but the waiter picked that moment to arrive with Norrey's coffee. The Lounge staff like to show off for the tourists; it increases the tip. Our waiter decided to come to our table the same way George Reeves used to leap tall buildings, and we were a good fifteen meters from the kitchen. Unfortunately, after he had left the deck, committing himself, a gaunt tourist decided to change seats without looking, and plotted herself an intersecting course. The waiter never flinched. He extended his left arm sideways, deploying the drogue (which looks just like the webbing that runs from Spiderman's elbow to his ribs); tacked around her; brought his hand to his chest to collapse the drogue; transferred the coffee to that hand; extended the other arm and came back on course; all in much less time than it has taken you to read about it. The tourist squawked and tumbled as he went by, landing on her rump and bouncing and skidding a goodly distance thereon; the waiter grounded expertly beside Norrey, gravely handed her a cup containing every drop of coffee he had started out with, and took off again to see to the tourist.
"The coffee's fresh," I said as Norrey goggled. "The waiter just grounded."
It's one of the oldest gags on Skyfac, and it always works. Norrey whooped and nearly spilled hot coffee on her hand—only the low gee gave her time to recover. That cut her laughter short; she stared at the coffee cup, and then at the waiter, who was courteously pointing out one of the half dozen LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP signs to the outraged tourist.
"Charlie?"
"Yeah."
"How many classes will I need before I'm ready?"
I smiled and took her hand. "Not as many as I thought."
The meeting with Tokugawa, the new chairman of the board, was low comedy. He received us personally in what had been Carrington's office, and the overall effect was of a country bishop on the Pope's throne. Or perhaps "tuna impersonating a piranha" is closer to the image I want. In the vicious power struggle which followed Carrington's death, he had been the only candidate ineffectual enough to satisfy everyone. Tom McGillicuddy was with him, to my delight, the cast already gone from his ankle. He was growing a beard.
"Hi, Tom. How's the foot?"
His smile was warm and familiar. "Hello, Charlie. It's good to see you again. The foot's okay—bones knit faster in low gee."
I introduced Norrey to him, and to Tokugawa as an afterthought.
The most powerful man in space was short, gray, and scrutable. In deference to the custom of the day he wore traditional Japanese dress, but I was willing to bet that his English was better than his Japanese. He started when I lit up a joint, and Tom had to show him how to turn up the breeze and deploy the smoke filter. Norrey's body language said she didn't like him, and I trust her barometer even more than my own; she lacks my cynicism. I cut him off in the middle of a speech about Shara and the Stardance that must have used up four ghostwriters.
"The answer is 'no.'"
He looked as though he had never heard the expression before. "—I—"
"Listen, Toke old boy, I read the papers. You and Skyfac Inc. and Lunindustries Inc. want to become our patrons. You're inviting us to move right in and start dancing, offering to underwrite the whole bloody venture. And none of this has anything to do with the fact that antitrust legislation was filed against you this week, right?"
"Mister Armstead, I'm merely expressing my gratitude that you and Shara Drummond chose to bring your high art to Skyfac in the first place, and my fervent hope that you and her sister will continue to feel free to make use of—"
"Where I come from we use that stuff for methane power." I took a lingering drag while he sputtered. "You know damn well how Shara came to Skyfac, and you sit in the chair of the man who killed her. He killed her by making her spend so many of her offstage hours in low or no gee, because that was the only way he could get it up. You ought to be bright enough to know that the day Norrey or I or any member of our company dances a step on Skyfac property, a red man with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork is going to come up to you and admit that it just froze over." The joint was beginning to hit me. "As far as I'm concerned, Christmas came this year on the day that Carrington went out for a walk and forgot to come back, and I will be gone to hell before I'll live under his roof again, or make money for his heirs and assigns. Do we understand each other?" Norrey was holding my hand tightly, and when I glanced over she was grinning at me.
Tokugawa sighed and gave up. "McGillicuddy, give them the contract."
Pokerfaced, Tom produced a stiff folded parchment and passed it to us. I scanned it, and my eyebrows rose. "Tom," I said blandly, "is this honest?"
He never even glanced at his boss. "Yep."
"Not even a percentage of the gross? Oh my." I looked at Tokugawa. "A free lunch. It must be my good looks." I tore the contract in half.
"Mister Armstead," he began hotly, and I was glad that Norrey interrupted him this time. I was getting to like it too much.
"Mr. Tokugawa, if you'll stop trying to convince us that you're a patron of the arts, I think we can get along. We'll let you donate some technical advice and assistance, and we'll let you sell us materials and air and water at cost. We'll even give back some of the skilled labor we hire away from you when we're done with them. Not you, Tom— we want you to be our full-time business manager, if you're willing."
He didn't hesitate a second, and his grin was beautiful. "Ms. Drummond, I accept."
"Norrey. Furthermore," she went on to Tokugawa, "we'll make a point of telling everybody we know how nice you've been, any time the subject comes up. But we are going to own and operate our own studio, and it may suit us to put it on the far side of Terra, and we will be independents. Not Skyfac's in-house dance troupe: independents. Eventually we hope to see Skyfac itself settle into the role of the benevolent old rich uncle who lives up the road. But we don't expect to need you for longer than you need us, so there will be no contract. Have we a meeting of the minds?"
I nearly applauded out loud. I'm pretty sure he'd never had a personal executive secretary hired right out from under his nose before. His grandfather might have committed seppuku; he in his phony kimono must have been seething. But Norrey had played things just right, grudgingly offering him equals-status if he cared to claim it— and he needed us.
Perhaps you don't understand just how badly he needed us. Skyfac was the first new multinational in years, and it had immediately begun hurting the others where they lived. Not only could it undersell any industry requiring vacuum, strain-free environment, controlled radiation, or wide-range temperature or energy density gradients—and quite a few profitable industries do—but it could also sell things that simply could not be made on Earth, even expensively. Things like perfect bearings, perfect lenses, strange new crystals— none of which will form in a gravity well. All the raw materials came from space, unlimited free solar energy powered the factories, and delivery was cheap (a delivery module doesn't have to be a spaceship; all it has to do is fall correctly).
It wasn't long before the various nationals and multinationals who had not been invited into the original Skyfac consortium began to feel the pinch. The week before, antitrust actions had been filed in the US, USSR, China, France, and Canada, and protests had been lodged in the United Nations, the first steps in what would turn out to be the legal battle of the century. Skyfac's single most precious asset was its monopoly of space—Tokugawa was running scared enough to need any good press he could get.
And the week before that, the tape of the Stardance had been released. The first shock wave was still running around the world; we were the best press Tokugawa was ever likely to get.
"You'll cooperate with our PR people?" was all he asked.
"As long as you don't try to quote me as 'heartbroken' by Carrington's death," I said agreeably. I really had to hand it to him: he almost smiled then.
"How about 'saddened'?" he suggested delicately.
We settled on "shocked."
We left Tom in our cabin with four full briefcases of paperwork to sort out, and went to see Harry Stein.
We found him where I expected to, in a secluded corner of the metals shop, behind a desk with stacks of pamphlets, journals and papers that would have been improbable in a full gee. He and a Tensor lamp were hunched over an incredibly ancient typewriter. One massive roll fed clean paper into it, another took up the copy. I noted with approval that the manuscript's radius was two or three centimeters thicker than when last I'd seen it. "Say hey, Harry. Finishing up chapter one?"
He looked up, blinked. "Hey, Charlie. Good to see you." For him it was an emotional greeting. "You must be her sister."
Norrey nodded gravely. "Hi, Harry. I'm glad to meet you. I hear those candles in Liberation were your idea."
Harry shrugged. "She was okay."
"Yes," Norrey agreed. Unconsciously, instinctively, she was taking on his economical word usage—as Shara had before her.
"I," I said, "will drink to that proposition."
Harry eyed the thermos on my belt, and raised an eyebrow in query.
"Not booze," I assured him, unclipping it. "On the wagon. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, fresh from Japan. Real cream. Brought it for you." Damn it, I was doing it too.
Harry actually smiled. He produced three mugs from a nearby coffeemaker unit (personally adapted for low gee), and held them while I poured. The aroma diffused easily in low gee; it was exquisite. "To Shara Drummond," Harry said, and we drank together. Then we shared a minute of warm silence.
Harry was a fifty-year-old ex-fullback who had kept himself in shape. He was so massive and formidably packed that you could have known him a long time without ever suspecting his intelligence, let alone his genius—unless you had happened to watch him work. He spoke mostly with his hands. He hated writing, but put in two methodical hours a day on The Book. By the time I asked him why, he trusted me enough to answer. "Somebody's gotta write a book on space construction," he said. Certainly no one could have been better qualified. Harry literally made the first weld on Skyfac, and had bossed virtually all construction since. There was another guy who had as much experience, once, but he died (his "suit sold out," as the spacemen say: lost its integrity). Harry's writing was astonishingly lucid for such a phlegmatic man (perhaps because he did it with his fingers), and I knew even then that The Book was going to make him rich. It didn't worry me; Harry will never get rich enough to retire.
"Got a job for you, Harry, if you want it."
He shook his head. "I'm happy here."
"It's a space job."
He damned near smiled again. "I'm unhappy here."
"All right, I'll tell you about it. My guess is a year of design work, three or four years of heavy construction, and then a kind of permanent maintenance job keeping the whole thing running for us."
"What?" he asked economically.
"I want an orbiting dance studio."
He held up a hand the size of a baseball glove, cutting me off. He took a minicorder out of his shirt, set the mike for "ambient" and put it on the desk between us. "What do you want it to do?"
Five and a half hours later all three of us were hoarse, and an hour after that Harry handed us a set of sketches. I looked them over with Norrey, we approved his budget, and he told us a year. We all shook hands.
Ten months later I took title.
We spent the next three weeks in and around Skyfac property, while I introduced Norrey and Raoul to life without up and down. Space overawed them both at first. Norrey, like her sister before her, was profoundly moved by the personal confrontation with infinity, spiritually traumatized by the awesome perspective that the Big Deep brings to human values. And unlike her sister before her, she lacked that mysteriously total self-confidence, that secure ego-strength that had helped Shara to adjust so quickly. Few humans have ever been as sure of themselves as Shara was. Raoul, too, was only slightly less affected.
We all get it at first, we who venture out into space. From the earliest days, the most unimaginative and stolid jocks NASA could assemble for astronauts frequently came back down spiritually and emotionally staggered, and some adapted and some didn't. The ten percent of Skyfac personnel who spend much time EVA, who have any way of knowing they're not in Waukegan besides the low gee, often have to be replaced, and no worker is depended on until his or her second tour. Norrey and Raoul both came through it—they were able to expand their personal universe to encompass that much external universe, and came out of the experience (as Shara and I had) with a new and lasting inner calm.
The spiritual confrontation, however, was only the first step. The major victory was much subtler. It was more than just spiritual malaise that washed out seven out of ten exterior construction workers in their first tour: It was also physiological—or was it psychological?—distress.
Free fall itself they both took to nearly at once. Norrey was much quicker than Raoul to adapt—as a dancer, she knew more about her reflexes, and he was more prone to forget himself and blunder into impossible situations, which he endured with dogged good humor. But both were proficient at "jaunting," propelling oneself through an enclosed space, by the time we were ready to return to Earth. (I myself was pleasantly astonished at how fast unused dance skills came back to me.)
The real miracle was their equally rapid acclimation to sustained EVA, to extended periods outdoors in free space. Given enough time, nearly anyone can acquire new reflexes. But startlingly few can learn to live without a local vertical.
I was so ignorant at that time that I hadn't the slightest idea what an incredible stroke of good fortune it was that both Norrey and Raoul could. No wonder the gods smile so seldom—we so often fail to notice. Not until the next year did I realize how narrowly my whole venture—my whole life—had escaped disaster. When it finally dawned on me, I had the shakes for days.
That kind of luck held for the next year.
The first year was spent in getting the ball rolling. Endless millions of aggravations and petty details—have you ever tried to order dancing shoes for hands? With velcro palms? So few of the things we needed could be ordered from the Johnny Brown catalog, or put together out of stock space-hardware. Incredible amounts of imaginary dollars flowed through my and Norrey's right hands, and but for Tom McGillicuddy the thing simply would not have been possible. He took care of incorporating both the Shara Drummond School of New Modern Dance and the performing company, Stardancers, Inc., and became business manager of the former and agent for the latter. A highly intelligent and thoroughly honorable man, he had entered Carrington's service with his eyes—and his ears—wide open. When we waved him like a wand, magic resulted. How many honest men understand high finance?
The second indispensable wizard was, of course, Harry. And bear in mind that during five of those ten months, Harry was on mandatory dirtside leave, readapting his body and bossing the job by extreme long distance phone (God, I hated having phones installed—but the phone company's rates were fractionally cheaper than buying our own orbit-to-Earth video equipment, and of course it tied the Studio into the global net). Unlike the majority of Skyfac personnel, who rotate dirtside every fourteen months, construction men (those who make it) spend so much time in total weightlessness that six months is the recommended maximum. I figured us Stardancers for the same shift, and Doc Panzella agreed. But the first month and the last four were under Harry's direct supervision, and he actually turned it in under budget—doubly impressive considering that much of what he was doing had never been done before. He would have beat his original deadline; it wasn't his fault that we had to move it up on him.
Best of all, Harry turned out (as I'd hoped) to be one of those rare bosses who would rather be working with his hands than bossing. When the job was done he took a month off to collate the first ten inches of copy on his takeup reel into The First Book, sold it for a record-breaking advance and Santa Claus royalties, and then hired back on with us as set-builder, prop man, stage manager, all-around maintenance man, and resident mechanic. Tokugawa's boys had made astonishingly little fuss when we hired Harry away from them. They simply did not know what they were missing—until it was months too late to do anything about it.
We were able to raid Skyfac so effectively only because it was what it was: a giant, heartless multinational that saw people as interchangeable components. Carrington probably knew better—but the backers he had gotten together and convinced to underwrite his dream knew even less about space than I had as a video man in Toronto. I'm certain they thought of it, most of them, as merely an extemely foreign investment.
I needed all the help I could get. I needed that entire year—and more!—to overhaul and retune an instrument that had not been used in a quarter of a century: my dancer's body. With Norrey's support, I managed, but it wasn't easy.
In retrospect, all of the above strokes of luck were utterly necessary for the Shara Drummond School of New Modern Dance to have become a reality in the first place. After so many interlocking miracles, I guess I should have been expecting a run of bad cards. But it sure didn't look like one when it came.
For we truly did have dancers coming out of our ears when we finally opened up shop. I had expected to need good PR to stimulate a demand for the expensive commodity, for although we absorbed the bulk of student expenses (we had to—how many could afford the hundred-dollar-a-kilo elevator fee alone?) we kept it expensive enough to weed out the casually curious—with a secret scholarship program for deserving needy.
Even at those prices, I had to step lively to avoid being trampled in the stampede.
The cumulative effect of Shara's three tapes on the dance consciousness of the world had been profound and revolutionary. They came at a time when Modern dance as a whole was in the midst of an almost decade-long stasis, a period in which everyone seemed to be doing variations of the already-done, in which dozens of choreographers had beat their brains out trying to create the next New Wave breakthrough, and produced mostly gibberish. Shara's three tapes, spaced as she had intuitively sensed they must be, had succeeded in capturing the imagination of an immense number of dancers and dance lovers the world over—as well as millions of people who had never given dance a thought before.
Dancers began to understand that free fall meant free dance, free from a lifetime in thrall to gravity. Norrey and I, in our naivete, had failed to be secretive enough about our plans. The day after we signed the lease on our dirtside studio in Toronto, students began literally arriving at our door in carloads and refusing to leave—much before we were ready for them. We hadn't even figured out how to audition a zero-gee dancer on Earth yet. (Ultimately it proved quite simple: Dancers who survived an elimination process based on conventional dance skills were put on a plane, taken up to angels thirty, dumped out, and filmed on the way down. It's not the same as free fall—but it's close enough to weed out gross unsuitables.)
We were sleeping 'em like torpedomen at the dirtside school, feeding them in shifts, and I began having panicky second thoughts about calling up to Harry and putting off our deadline so he could triple the Studio's living quarters. But Norrey convinced me to be ruthlessly selective and take ONLY the most promising ten—out of hundreds—into orbit.
Thank God—we damned near lost three of those pigeons in two separate incidents, and we conclusively washed out nine. That run of bad cards I mentioned earlier.
Most often it came down to a failure to adapt, an inability to evolve the consciousness beyond dependence on up and down (the one factor skydiving can't simulate: a skydiver knows which way is down). It doesn't help to tell yourself that north of your head is "up" and south of your feet is "down"—from that perspective the whole universe is in endless motion (you're hardly ever motionless in free fall), a perception most brains simply reject. Such a dancer would persistently "lose his point," his imaginary horizon, and become hopelessly disoriented. Side effects included mild to extreme terror, dizziness, nausea, erratic pulse and blood pressure, the grand-daddy of all headaches and involuntary bowel movement.
(Which last is uncomfortable and embarrassing. P-suit plumbing makes country outhouses look good. Men have the classic "relief tube," of course, but for women and for defecation in either sex we rely on a strategic deployment of specially treated . . . oh, hell, we wear a diaper and try to hold it until we get indoors. End of first inevitable digression.)
Even in inside work, in the Goldfish Bowl or Raoul's collapsible trampoline sphere, such dancers could not learn to overcome their perceptual distress. Having spent their whole professional lives battling gravity with every move they made, they found that they were lost without their old antagonist—or at least without the linear, right-angled perceptual set that is provided: we found that some of them could actually learn to acclimate to weightlessness inside a cube or rectangle, as long as they were allowed to think of one wall as the "ceiling" and its opposite as the "floor."
And in the one or two cases where their vision was adequate to the new environment, their bodies, their instruments, were not. The new reflexes just failed to jell.
They simply were not meant, any of them, to live in space. In most cases they left friends—but they all left.
All but one.
Linda Parsons was the tenth student, the one that didn't wash out, and finding her was good fortune enough to make up for the run of bad cards.
She was smaller than Norrey, almost as taciturn as Harry (but for different reasons), much calmer than Raoul, and more open-hearted and giving than I will be if I live to be a thousand. In the villainous overcrowding of that first free-fall semester, amid flaring tempers and sullen rages, she was the only universally loved person—I honestly doubt whether we could have survived without her (I remember with some dismay that I seriously contemplated spacing a pimply young student whose only crime was a habit of saying, "There you go" at every single pause in the conversation. There he goes, I kept thinking to myself, there he goes. . .).
Some women can turn a room into an emotional maelstrom, simply by entering it, and this quality is called "provocative." So far as I know, our language has no word for the opposite of provocative, but that is what Linda was. She had a talent for getting people high together, without drugs, a knack for resolving irreconcilable differences, a way of brightening the room she was in.
She had been raised on a farm by a spiritual community in Nova Scotia, and that probably accounted for her empathy, responsibility, and intuitive understanding of group-energy dynamics. But I think the single over-riding quality that made her magic work was inborn: she genuinely loved people. It could not have been learned behavior; it was just too clearly intrinsic in her.
I don't mean that she was a Pollyanna, nauseatingly cheerful and syrupy. She could be blistering if she caught you trying to call irresponsibility something else. She insisted that a high truth level be maintained in her presence, and she would not allow you the luxury of a hidden grudge, what she called "holding a stash on someone." If she caught you with such psychic dirty laundry, she would haul it right out in public and force you to clean it up. "Tact?" she said to me once. "I always understood that to mean a mutual agreement to be full of shit."
These attributes are typical of a commune child, and usually get them heartily disliked in so-called polite society—founded, as it is, on irresponsibility, untruth, and selfishness. But again, something innate in Linda made them work for her. She could call you a jerk to your face without triggering reflex anger; she could tell you publicly that you were lying without calling you a liar. She plainly knew how to hate the sin and forgive the sinner; and I admire that, for it is a knack I never had. There was never any mistaking or denying the genuine caring in her voice, even when it was puncturing one of your favorite bubbles of rationalization.
At least, that's what Norrey or I would have said. Tom, when he met her, had a different opinion.
"Look, Charlie, there's Tom."
I should have been fuming mad when I got out of Customs. I felt a little uneasy not being fuming mad. But after six months of extraterrestrial cabin fever, I was finding it curiously difficult to dislike any stranger—even a Customs man.
Besides, I was too heavy to be angry.
"So it is. Tom! Hey, Tom!"
"Oh my," Norrey said, "something's wrong."
Tom was fuming mad.
"Hell. What put the sand in his shorts? Hey, where're Linda and Raoul? Maybe there's a hassle?"
"No, they got through before we did. They must have taken a cab to the hotel already—"
Tom was upon us, eyes flashing. "So that's your paragon? Jesus Christ! Fucking bleeding heart, I'll wring her scrawny neck. Of all the—"
"Whoa! Who? Linda? What?"
"Oh Christ, later—here they come." What looked like a vigilante committee was converging on us, bearing torches. "Now look," Tom said hurriedly through his teeth, smiling as though he'd just been guaranteed an apartment in Paradise, "give these bloodsuckers your best I mean your best shot, and maybe I can scavenge something from this stinking mess." And he was striding toward them, opening his arms and smiling. As he went I heard him mutter something under his breath that began with "Ms. Parsons," contained enough additional sibilants to foil the shotgun-mikes, and moved his lips not at all.
Norrey and I exchanged a glance. "Pohl's Law," she said, and I nodded (Pohl's Law, Raoul once told us, says that nothing is so good that somebody somewhere won't hate it, and vice versa). And then the pack was upon us.
"This way Mister when does your next tape come over here please tell our viewers what it's really believe that this this new artform is a valid passport or did you look this way Ms. Drummond is it true that you haven't been able to smile for the cameraman for the Stardance, weren't you going to look this way to please continue or are readers would simply love to no but didn't you miss Drummond pardon me Miz Drummond do you think you're as good as your sister Sharon in the profits in their own country are without honor to welcome you back to Earth this way please," said the mob, over the sound of clicking, whirring, snapping, and whining machinery and through the blinding glare of what looked like an explosion at the galactic core seen from close up. And I smiled and nodded and said urbanely witty things and answered the rudest questions with good humor and by the time we could get a cab I was fuming mad. Raoul and Linda had indeed gone ahead, and Tom had found our luggage; we left at high speed.
"Bleeding Christ, Tom," I said as the cab pulled away, "next time schedule a press conference for the next day, will you?"
"God damn it," he blazed, "you can have this job back any time you want it!"
His volume startled even the cabbie. Norrey grabbed his hands and forced him to look at her.
"Tom," she said gently, "we're your friends. We don't want to yell at you; we don't want you to yell at us. Okay?"
He took an extra deep breath, held it, let it out in one great sigh and nodded. "Okay."
"Now I know that reporters can be hard to deal with. I understand that, Tom. But I'm tired and hungry and my feet hurt like hell and my body's convinced it weighs three hundred and thirteen kilos and next time could we maybe just lie to them a little?"
He paused before replying, and his voice came out calm. "Norrey, I am really not an idiot. All that madness to the contrary, I did schedule a press conference for tomorrow, and I did tell everybody to have a heart and leave you alone today. Those jerks back there were the ones who ignored me, the sons of—"
"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "Then why the hell did we give them a command performance?"
"Do you think I wanted to?" Tom growled. "What the hell am I going to say tomorrow to the honorable ones who got scooped? But I had no choice, Charlie. That dizzy bitch left me no choice. I had to give those crumbs something, or they'd have run what they had already."
"Tom, what on earth are you talking about?"
"Linda Parsons, that's what I'm talking about, your new wonder discovery. Christ, Norrey, the way you went on about her over the phone, I was expecting . . . I don't know, anyway a professional."
"You two, uh, didn't hit it off?" I suggested.
Tom snorted. "First she calls me a tight-ass. Practically the first words out of her mouth. Then she says I'm ignorant, and I'm not treating her right. Treating her right, for Christ's sake. Then she chewes me out for having reporters there—Charlie, I'll take that from you and Norrey, I should've had those jerks thrown out, but I don't have to take that crap from a rookie. So I start to explain about the reporters, and then she says I'm being defensive. Christ on the pogie, if there's anything I hate it's somebody that comes on aggressive and then says you're being defensive, smiling and looking you right in the eye and trying to rub my fucking neck!"
I figured he'd let off enough steam by now, and I was losing count of the grains of salt. "So Norrey and I made nice for the newsies because they taped you two squabbling in public?"
"No!"
We got the story out of him eventually. It was the old Linda magic at work again, and I can offer you no more typical example. Somehow a seventeen-year-old girl had threaded her way through the hundreds of people in the spaceport terminal straight to Linda and collapsed in her arms, sobbing that she was tripping and losing control and would Linda please make it all stop? It was at that point that the mob of reporters had spotted Linda as a Stardancer and closed in. Even considering that she weighed six times normal, had just been poked full of holes by Medical and insulted by Immigration, and was striking large sparks off of Tom, I'm inclined to doubt that Linda lost her temper; I think she abandoned it. Whatever, she apparently scorched a large hole through that pack of ghouls, bundled the poor girl into it and got her a cab. While they were getting in, some clown stuck a camera in the girl's face and Linda decked him.
"Hell, Tom, I might have done the same thing myself," I said when I got it straight.
"God's teeth, Charlie!" he began; then with a superhuman effort he got control of his voice (at least). "Look. Listen. This is not some four-bit kids' game we are playing here. Megabucks pass through my fingers, Charlie, megabucks! You are not a bum any more, you don't have the privileges of a bum. Do you—"
"Tom," Norrey said, shocked.
"—have any idea how fickle the public has become in the last twenty years? Maybe I've got to tell you how much public opinion has to do with the existence of that orbiting junkheap you just left? Or maybe you're going to tell me that those tapes in your suitcase are as good as the Stardance, that you've got something so hot you can beat up reporters and get away with it. Oh Jesus, what a mess!"
He had me there. All the choreography plans we had brought into orbit with us had been based on the assumption that we would have between eight and twelve dancers. We had thought we were being pessimistic. We had to junk everything and start from scratch. The resulting tapes relied heavily on solos—our weakest area at that point—and while I was confident that I could do a lot with editing, well. . . .
"It's okay, Tom. Those bums got something their editors'll like better than a five-foot lady making gorillas look like gorillas—they worry a little about public opinion, too."
"And what do I tell Westbrook tomorrow? And Mortie and Barbara Frum and UPI and AP and—"
"Tom," Norrey interrupted gently, "it'll be all right."
"All right? How it is all right? Tell me how it's all right."
I saw where she was going. "Hell, yeah. I never thought of that, hon, of course. That pack o'jackals drove it clean out of my mind. Serves 'em right." I began to chuckle. "Serves 'em bloody right."
"If you don't mind, darling."
"Huh? Oh. No . . . no, I don't mind." I grinned. "It's been long enough coming. Let's do it up."
"Will somebody please tell me what the hell is—"
"Tom," I said expansively, "don't worry about a thing. I'll tell your scooped friends the same thing I told my father at the age of thirteen, when he caught me in the cellar with the mailman's daughter."
"What the hell is that?" he snapped, beginning to grin in spite of himself and unsure why.
I put an arm around Norrey. "It's okay, Pa. We're gettin' married tomorrow.'"
He stared at us blankly for several seconds, the grin fading, and then it returned full force.
"Well I'll be dipped in shit," he cried. "Congratulations! That's terrific, Charlie, Norrey, oh congratulations you two—it's about time." He tried to hug us both, but at that moment the cabbie had to dodge a psychopath and Tom was flung backwards, arms outstretched. "That's tremendous, that's . . . you know, I think that'll do it—I think it'll work." He had the grace to blush. "I mean, the hell with the reporters, I just—I mean—"
"You may always," Norrey said gravely, "leave these little things to us."
The desk phoned me when Linda checked in, as I had asked them to. I grunted, hung the phone up on thin air, stepped out of bed and into a hotel wastebasket, cannoned into the bedside table destroying table and accompanying lamp, and ended up prone on the floor with my chin sunk deep into the pile rug and my nose a couple of centimeters from a glowing clockface that said it was 4:42. In the morning. At the moment that I came completely awake, the clock expired and its glow went out.
Now it was pitch dark.
Incredibly, Norery still had not awakened. I got up, dressed in the dark, and left, leaving the wreckage for the morning. Fortunately the good leg had sustained most of the damage; I could walk, albeit with a kind of double limp.
"Linda? It's me, Charlie."
She opened up at once. "Charlie, I'm sorry—"
"Skip it. You done good. How's the girl?" I stepped in.
She closed the door behind me and made a face. "Not terrific. But her people are with her now. I think she's going to be okay."
"That's good. I remember the first time a trip went sour on me."
She nodded. "You know it's going to stop in eight hours, but that doesn't help; your time rate's gone eternal."
"Yeah. Look, about Tom—"
She made another face. "Boy, Charlie, what a jerk."
"You two, uh, didn't hit it off?"
"I just tried to tell him that he was being too uptight, and he came on like he couldn't imagine what I was talking about. So I told him he wasn't as ignorant as he gave himself credit for, and asked him to treat me like a friend instead of a stranger—from all you told me about him, that seemed right. 'Okay,' he says, so I ask him as a friend to try and keep those reporters off of us for a day or so and he blows right up at me. He was so defensive, Charlie."
"Look, Linda," I began, "there was this screwup that—"
"Honestly, Charlie, I tried to calm him down, I tried to show him I wasn't blaming him. I—I was rubbing his neck and shoulders, trying to loosen him up, and he, he pushed me away. I mean, really, Charlie, you and Norrey said he was so nice and what a creep."
"Linda, I'm sorry you didn't get along. Tom is a nice guy, it's just—"
"I think he wanted me to just tell Sandra to get lost, just let Security take her away and—"
I gave up. "I'll see you in the mor . . . in the afternoon, Linda. Get some sleep; there's a press conference in the Something-or-other Room at two."
"Sure. I'm sorry, it must be late, huh?"
I met Raoul in the corridor—the desk had called him right after me, but he woke up slower. I told him that Linda and patient were doing as well as could be expected, and he was relieved. "Cripes, Charlie, her and Tom, you shoulda seen 'em. Cats and dogs, I never would have believed it."
"Yeah, well, sometimes your best friends just can't stand each other."
"Yeah, life's funny that way."
On that profundity I went back to bed. Norrey was still out cold when I entered, but as I climbed under the covers and snuggled up against her back she snorted like a horse and said, "Awright?"
"All right," I whispered, "but I think we're going to have to keep those two separated for a while."
She rolled over, opened one eye and found me with it. "Darl'n," she mumbled, smiling with that side of her mouth, "there's hope for you yet."
And then she rolled over and went back to sleep, leaving me smug and fatuous and wondering what the hell she was talking about.