“How’re you feeling?” he asked.
Dan said, “Good enough. I’ve got to get out of here today. How long have I been here?”
“This is the third day.”
Dan could feel a shock race through him. “Three days? Then the Council meeting…”
“It’s over. They picked Larry as Chairman.”
“Larry!”
Joe shrugged and evaded looking straight into Dan’s eyes. “Larry was there, you weren’t. I don’t know what went on before the meeting, what Larry did to convince them. The rumble is that Larry let them know he wanted to be Chairman, and as long as you were too sick to depend on, he ought to have the job.”
Dan sagged back in the bed.
Looking worried, Joe added “They … uh, they held services for the people who died in the fire—yesterday.”
“Yesterday.”
“Yeah.”
“My father too? They didn’t wait…”
“Everybody. One single service. Their remains went into the hydroponics tank.”
“They couldn’t wait for me?”
Joe shrugged and looked away.
Dan reached up and grabbed his wrist. “They couldn’t wait a day or two for me to be there?” he shouted. “For my own father!”
“Larry decided…”
“Larry!”
“Listen,” Joe said, his voice suddenly low and urgent. “I know you and Larry have been friends since you were kids. But he sure isn’t acting like a friend of yours right now.”
Dan let himself sink slowly back into the yielding warmth of the bed again. He could feel his heart racing. Deliberately, he took a deep, calming breath.
“I’ve got to be calm,” he said, his voice steady now. “If I get excited, the medics will trank me again. If I show them I’m calm and relaxed, then they’ll let me out.”
Joe looked at him for a moment. “What’re you going to do when you get out?”
“I don’t know,” Dan said. “Something… but I don’t know what.”
Joe left shortly afterward. Dan held himself rigidly under control, not speaking, not moving, trying to not even think. He concentrated on the sensor screens next to his bed. Keep those luminous traces as calm and steady as you can. Watch them wiggle across the screens; heartbeat, blood pressure, alpha wave, respiration, basal metabolism. Calm and steady. Calm and steady. Stare at them, let them hypnotize you. Feel your heart muscle working inside you. Slower. Slower. Calm. Steady.
He fell asleep watching the screens. And he dreamed. Dreamed of the luminous lines worming across the screens; they were ropes, they were snakes, twining around him, choking him, crushing him. But then he was watching from somewhere far off as the glowing snakes squeezed the life out of someone else. His father! Himself!
He woke screaming.
“The more I think about it, the more glad I am that we voted you Chairman,” said Dr. Loring.
Larry Belsen was sitting in the main room of the Lorings’ quarters.’ Valery sat next to him on the foldout couch. Her father was comfortably sunk in the depths of a webchair. Every time he moved, the plastic webbing creaked; Larry was afraid it would give way under his weight.
Dr. Loring was one of the twelve oldest men awake, and thus was a permanent member of the Council. He had been a child when the ship had left Earth, and had never undergone deepsleep. “I want to see it all, from beginning to end,” he often said. The Council balanced age, tradition and stability against youth, vigor and change. The twelve oldest people awake were permanent members. The remaining Council seats were filled by younger men and women, and the Chairman was always elected from the younger generation, for a one-year term.
“Yes, you’ll be a good Chairman, Lawrence, my boy,” Dr. Loring went one. “Frankly, I always had my doubts about Dan…” he glanced at his daughter, “…as far as being Chairman is concerned. Too emotional. That’s not bad in some aspects of life, of course, but as Chairman…”
Valery smiled at the old man. “Dad, you’ve told us the same thing three times now.”
“Oh? Really? Well…” He shook his head, looking slightly embarrassed. Dr. Loring was a heavy man, big-boned and round with paunch. He was nearly bald, nothing but scraggly white tufts of hair sticking out around his ears. H is eyes were big and moist and always blinking. Larry thought of him sometimes as a frog who’d been turned into a prince… fifty years ago.
Dr. Loring turned in his webchair, producing a chorus of groans from the plastic, and called to his wife: “What about dinner?”
She was standing in the kitchen alcove, thoughtfully watching the bank of dials set alongside the eye-level oven.
“I’m trying to time everything so that it’s all done together, and everything will be hot when we sit down… Valery, you can fold out the table and set places.”
As Val got up, Dr. Loring complained, “It was a lot easier when the microwave ovens were working. This business of using heat for cooking… it’s barbaric.”
Larry said, “We just can’t afford the electrical power for microwave cooking until the main generator’s back on the line.”
“Hmmph. There’s another thing about Dan. How long has that generator been out? It’s his responsibility—”
“Now don’t go blaming him,” Larry said strongly. “It’s not his fault. Nobody aboard ship knows much about the generator— Dan’s had to train himself and a special crew just to get ready to tackle the job.”
Dr. Loring mumbled, “Well it’s been a long-enough time, certainly.”
“They’ve got to be very careful,” Larry insisted. “Joe Mailer’s going through the computer core for instructions about the generator. If they goof, you know, we’ll be in real trouble.”
“Don’t get so upset, dear,” Mrs. Loring said. “Dinner’s ready at last… I think,” she added.
The meal was fine. The vegetables and fruits came from the ship’s hydroponics gardens; the synthetic meat came from the biochemists’ “ranch,” where nutrients and enzymes and other special chemicals were put together to form a constantly-growing blob that had all the nourishment of real organic protein. No one awake had ever tasted actual meat from a real animal, except in dimly remembered childhood, but the biochemists insisted that their synthetics tasted “just like steak… even better.”
Larry found that he was getting more and more nervous as the meal went on. Got to tell them about us sooner or late, he kept saying to himself. But the dinner-table conversation kept rolling along, and he couldn’t find an excuse to bring the subject around to himself and Valery.
He kept glancing at Valery, waiting for her to say something, to help him get started. But she looked more amused at his consternation than anything else.
As usual. Dr. Loring was doing most of the talking. Ordinarily, Larry could let the old man’s rambling speeches go in one ear and out the other; but tonight he was getting edgy. Damn, I wish he’d shut up for a minute!
It was Mrs. Loring who finally came to his rescue. She was the model from which Valery got her looks. Even at her age, she still looked lovely, strong, vital. Her hair was still the same sun-gold as Valery’s; her eyes sparkled the same way.
She laid a hand on her husband’s arm and said, interrupting him, “Dear, why don’t we have some wine with our dessert? Is there still some left in that bottle you made?”
He looked at her, puzzled, for a moment. “H’mm? Uh, why yes… but…,”
“I know we save it for special occasions,” Mrs. Loring said, “but this is a special occasion, isn’t it? After all, it’s not every day that we elect a new Chairman.”
As Dr. Loring pushed his chair back from the table, Larry took the opportunity:
“It’s a double occasion— Valery and I want to get married.” He said it as quickly as he could.