'How long do you think it'll take to make contact with our people stranded over there ?' Howard asked him. 'A day ? As long as a week ?'
'Let's find out,' Stanley said shortly, and started at once in the direction of the power supply of
Dar Pethel's defective Jiffi-scuttler.
The depressing task of bringing the colonists back from alter-Earth had begun.
14
In November, despite the abusive broadcasts from the Golden Door Moments of Bliss satellite, or because of them, Jim Briskin succeeded in nosing out the incumbent Bill Schwarz; and thereby won the presidential election.
So now, at long last, Salisbury Heim said to himself, we have a Negro President of the United
States. A new epoch in human understanding has arrived.
At least, let's hope so.
'What we need,' Patricia said meditatively, 'is a party, so we can celebrate.'
I'm too tired to celebrate,' Sal said, It had been a tough haul from the nominating convention to this; he remembered clearly every inch of it. The worst part, it went without saying, had been the collapse of the abortive emigration program announced in Jim's Chicago speech; why that had not put a permanent end to Jim's election chances, Sal Heim did not know even at this late date.
Perhaps it was because Bill Schwarz had managed to move so adroitly, had embroiled himself -
deliberately - in the situation; hence much, if not most, of the ultimate blame had fallen on him, not on Jim.
'But we deserve to take a little time off to relax,' Pat pointed out. 'We've been working for months; if we go on this way .. .'
'One beer at one small bar,' Sal decided. 'And then bed. I'll compromise at that.' He did not especially enjoy going out in public, these days; inevitably he rubbed up against some individual who had been a part of the colonizing effort on alter-Earth or who, anyhow, had a brother-in-law who had gone trustingly over there. Such encounters had been rather unpleasant; he always found himself trying to answer questions which simply could not be answered. Why'd you get us into that ? had been the primary inquiry, asked in a variety of ways, but still always amounting to the same thing. And yet, despite this, they had won.
'I think we should get together with a few people,' Pat disagreed. 'Certainly with Jim; that goes without saying. And then Leon Turpin, if he'll join us, because after all it was Mr. Turpin who got us off the hook by bringing those people back to our world - or anyhow his engineers did.
Someone at TD did. It was TD that saved us, Sal; let's finally face it and give credit where credit is due.'
'All right,' Sal said. 'Just so long as that little Kansas City businessman who showed up with that defective 'scuttler isn't along; that's all I insist on.' The man on account of whom all the trouble had broken out in the first place. At the moment, Sal could not even recall his name, an obvious
Freudian block.
'The one I blame,' Pat said, 'is Lurton Sands.'
'Then don't invite him either,' Sal said. But there was hardly much chance of that; Sands was in prison, right now, for his crime against the sleeping bibs and his ridiculous attempt on Jim's life.
As was Cally Vale for having lasered the 'scuttler repairman. That whole business had been excessively melancholy, both intrinsically and as a conspicuous harbinger of the difficulties which it had ushered into their collective lives, difficulties which by no means were over.
'You know,' Pat said fretfully, 'there's one thing that still, right now, I can't quite get out of my mind. I keep having this sneaking, nervous anxiety that. ...' She smiled at him uneasily, her jessamine lips twitching. 'I hope I don't pass it on to you, but...'
'But deep down inside,' Sal finished for her, 'you're afraid a few of those Pekes have stayed on this side.'
'Yes.' She nodded.
Sal said, 'I get the same damn intimation, now and then. Late at night, I keep looking out of the corner of my eye, especially on the street when I see someone furtive looking hurrying away around a corner to get out of sight. And the funny thing is that from what Jim tells me, I know he feels exactly the same way. Maybe we all have a residual sense of guilt connected with the
Pekes ... after all, we did invade their world first. It's our consciences bothering us.'
Shivering, as she was wearing only a weightless Tafek-web negligee, his wife said, 'I hope that's all it is. Because I'd really hate to run into a Peke some dark night; I'd think right away that they'd opened a nexus again into our world at some point and were very carefully, secretly, ferrying a wide stream of their cousins and aunts across.'
As if we're not desperately overcrowded as it is, Sal thought, without having to cope with that any more.
'What I can never comprehend,' he murmured, 'is why they didn't accept our liberal offer of The
Smithsonian. And for that matter the Library of Congress. Gosh, they pulled out without getting anything.'
'Pride,' Pat said.
'No.' Sal shook his head.
'Stupidity, then. Dumb, dawn-man stupidity. There's no frontal lobe inside that sloping forehead.'
'Maybe.' He shrugged. 'But how can you expect one species to follow the logic of another ? They operate at their level; we operate at ours. And never the twain will meet... I hope.' Anyhow not in his lifetime, he said to himself. Maybe a later generation will be open-minded enough to accept such things, but not now; not we who inhabit this world at this particular moment.
'Shall I ask Mr. Turpin to come here to our place ?' Pat asked. 'Are we going to have the party here ?'
'Maybe Turpin won't want to celebrate Jim's victory,' Sal said. 'He and Schwarz were pretty thick through most of the campaign.'
'Let me ask you something,' Pat said suddenly. 'Do you think George Walt really are a Wind
God ? After all, they were born with two bodies and four arms and legs, the artificial part wasn't installed until much later. So originally they were exactly what they pretended to be. Jim didn't tell that Sinanthropus that.'
'You're darn right he didn't,' Sal said vigorously. 'And don't you rock the boat out of any misplaced ethical motives ... you hear ?'
'Okay,' she said, nodding.
Outside on the sidewalk a gang of well-wishers yelled up praise and slogans of congratulations; the racket filtered into the conapt, and Sal went to glance out the living room window.
Some Cols, he saw. And also some Whites. Just what he hoped to see; just what the entire struggle had been about. How long it had been in coming ... almost two centuries more than it should have taken. The mind of man was uncommonly stubborn and slow to change. Reformers, including himself, were always prone to forget that. Victory always seemed just around the corner. But generally it was not, after all.
A vote for Jim Briskin, he thought, recalling the cliches and tirades of the campaign, is a vote for humanity itself. Stale now, and always oversimplified, and yet deep underneath substantially true. The slogan had embodied the motor which had driven them on, which had, finally, enabled them to win. And now what ? Sal asked himself. The big problems, every one of them, still remained. The bibs, in their all too many warehouses throughout the nation, had become the property of Jim Briskin and the Republican-Liberal Party. As had the desolate, roving packs of unemployed Cols, not to mention the unhappy lower fringes of the white in-group . . men such as
Mr. Hadley, who had been the first White to emigrate, as well as nearly the first to come stumbling back, after the nexus had, mercifully, been reopened.
It'll be a hard four years for Jim, he realized soberly. He's inherited a vast, savage burden from
Schwarz. If he thinks he's worn down now, he should see himself next year or the year after that.