CHAPTER SEVEN
The dinner and the speeches were over and the evening had broken up into a round of socializing and renewals of old acquaintanceships. After talking for a while with some of the guests who had remained seated around their table, Dyer and Laura excused themselves to move on to one of the bars in the hotel where the function was being held. It was a warm night and Laura opted for the open-air Terrace Bar overlooking the East River, toward which many of the guests had begun gravitating.
Dyer had enjoyed himself more than he had expected. He had found most of the conversation stimulating and entertaining, and had seen little trace of the boring stereotypes for whom he had been half prepared, and who, it seemed, existed mainly in movies about movies but not in the real movie world. Odd, he thought. Also, Laura had been different. Here, in her own element and surrounded by her own kind of people, she was relaxed and had shed all of the defensive attitudes she adopted instinctively when she was in Dyer’s world. In place of the outsider with a point to prove that he remembered from his lab, he now saw a composed, self-assured mature woman, whom he was beginning, he was forced to admit to himself, to find strangely fascinating.
They emerged into the cool night air and Laura slipped an arm through his and proceeded to steer him firmly toward an empty table beneath the bordering shrubs.
“There. This is better than all that noise in there, isn’t it,” she said as they sat down. “We can be civilized with each other, even if it is only for one night of the year.” Dyer ordered drinks via the tabletop touchpad, grunted his agreement to the statement and settled back to take in their surroundings. Laura watched him in silence for a while and then asked:
“So, how has the evening been so far? You seem to be liking it.” Dyer brought his eyes back from following the progress of a brilliantly lit Lockheed sinking gently downward into Kennedy Airport on the final stage of its descent from the ionosphere.
“You won’t believe it, but better than I thought,” he said. “I expected a lot of phonies but most of the people I’ve met have been very interesting. Some of the speeches went on a bit, but I suppose that’s to be expected.”
“You see, Ray. It’s not only us who have hackneyed ideas about what scientists are like. You have them about showbiz people too. At least we’re trying to do something about it. That’s what you said we should do, isn’t it—test our ideas to see if they’re true?”
Dyer grinned suddenly. “If that’s the case, it makes you scientists,” he taunted playfully. “So the question doesn’t arise. All you have to do now is learn to accept what the tests tell you, You see, we’re really very nice people but your preconceived notions won’t allow you to believe it. If I don’t wear odd shoes on my feet or grow cabbages that eat people, I must be the exception.”
“You’re back at work again,” she replied. “Tonight I’m not working. Talk about something else.”
“Women,” he offered without hesitation.
“Oh dear. I should have guessed.”
“No,” he told her smugly. “You’ve got it wrong. Jumping to conclusions again. What I meant was all this stuff you’re always saying to Betty about . . . the crusade. How come you’re so hung up about it?”
“What makes you want to know that?” Laura asked in surprise.
“Oh . . . I don’t know. Just curious.”
Laura made a slight shrug and thought to herself for a moment.
“No single big thing . . . I guess I’ve always thought that way. And I still do,” she added pointedly. “That’s okay by you, isn’t it?”
“Sure.” Dyer made a throwing-away motion with his hand. “That’s what I thought. I figured it had to come from way back somewhere. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who’d let her opinions be moulded much by people today . . . know what I mean? I can’t think it’s something that somebody told you about yesterday.” He nodded to himself as if she had just confirmed something. “I bet your mother was that way too. Right?”
“Yes, she was, as a matter of fact . . . a lot that way. She had good reason, too. My father was a slob . . . couldn’t make his job work out and couldn’t make his marriage work out so he messed around all the time and tried to live it up in a fantasy world because he never grew up enough to accept things. I left Detroit when I was sixteen because I couldn’t stand it anymore . . . Always—” Laura broke off and looked at Dyer accusingly. “Hey, what are you trying to do—psychoanalyze me or something?”
“No. I told you—I was just curious.”
Laura narrowed her eyes and regarded him suspiciously.
“You used to be a shrink or something before you got into computers, didn’t you? Didn’t you say something about Harvard Med School once?”
“I was a neurological researcher,” Dyer told her. “That’s not quite the same thing.”
“It still has to do with heads though.”
“And that’s about as far as it goes,” he said. “I was concerned with finding out more about how brains work, not with fixing them after they’ve started blowing fuses. A lot of things that were learned in that field were later applied to designing smarter computers, so it made sense for me to move on the way I did.” He was about to say more but frowned and checked himself. “But that’s work again, and you said we’re not working.”
The drinks appeared in the dispenser hatch. Dyer removed them, passed one to Laura and lapsed into silence while he tasted his own.
“So, what made you take up medicine?” Laura asked after a few seconds.
“Oh, it was in the family I guess. My father was a doctor . . . space medicine.”
“Was? Isn’t he around anymore?”
“Oh sure. Retired. Lives on the West Coast with my mother. They’re okay.”
“What kind of space medicine did he do?” Laura inquired, intrigued. “Was he with ISA? Did he go on any space missions or anything exciting like that?”
“He sure did.”
“Wow! I’ve always wanted to go up and never had the chance. Tell me about it. I’m interested.” Laura sat forward to lean on the table and stared at him expectantly. Dyer smiled and shook his head.
“It was nothing wildly spectacular. He was in it a long time . . . joined in 1985 after he left the Navy, when it was still NASA . . . did a few tours in orbital stations over the years . . . spent a lot of 1992 up at one of the lunar bases . . . moved to Europe when ESA was set up, and then came back to the States when they all got merged into ISA. He had plenty of variety to keep him from getting bored I guess.”
“So where did you appear on the scene?” Laura asked. “Here or in Europe?”
“I was two years old when they moved to Europe,” Dyer told her; “If I told you where I was born, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“Ever hear of Gilbert and Sullivan?”
“Of course.” Laura looked puzzled. “They wrote songs.”
“Not that Gilbert and Sullivan. The ones who came later, in 1994.”
Astonishment flowed into Laura’s face.
“You don’t mean the two experimental space colonies they put up before they started building the big ones?”
“Uh huh.”
“Really? You were born in one of those? That’s fantastic!” She frowned as another thought occurred to her. “Say, that makes you something of a rare animal, doesn’t it? No offense, but I thought they didn’t go in much for that kind of thing that long ago. You must have been special or something.”
Dyer laughed. “I was—a special kind of accident. Pa was the Chief Medical Officer on Gilbert, which meant he was up there for a long time at a stretch, so it was normal for wives to go along too. But because of regulations, when they found out that I was on the way, they couldn’t ship mother down again. Normally she’d never have got away with it, but being the Chief M.O.’s wife . . . Well, if Pa didn’t say anything about it, there was no reason for anybody else to think anything.”
“You mean he let it go deliberately?” Laura sounded incredulous, but at the same time delighted.
“He always said he didn’t, but I don’t see how he couldn’t have known. But if you knew him, you’d know it’s him all over.”
“He sounds the kind of guy that does things his way and to hell with what you or I or the world thinks,” Laura commented.
“You’ve about got it,” Dyer nodded.
“It shows,” Laura declared with a trace of satisfaction. “That’s what makes you so pigheaded. There—now you’ve been shrunk. And I didn’t even have to go to Harvard to figure it out.”
“I’m not pigheaded,” Dyer protested. “I just happen to have firm opinions on what my job’s all about. I know what works and what doesn’t if you’re trying to separate truth from garbage. That’s what science is. I get irritated when people insist on misinterpreting it.”
“And you’re also touchy,” Laura told him sweetly. She drank from her glass while Dyer calmed down again. “Anyway,” she said, “It’s the same thing.”
“What is?”
“Being firm and being pigheaded,” she replied.
“Of course it isn’t. What are you talking about?”
“The form of the verb varies according to its subject,” she said. “I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded.” Dyer collapsed back in his chair and shook his head in capitulation. Laura leaned forward and patted him fondly on the back of his hand. “You’ve forgotten I used to write scripts,” she said, laughing. “You see, I know what my job’s all about too.”