“Honey, I do have to tell Harold something.”
“Oh, sure, mom. But not as a problem. What I want to talk about is Kl — Jem. The planet Jem. I’m going there, mom.”
“Yes, of course, you told me that. In a year or two, maybe, when things settle down—”
“I want to settle them down, mom. I want the United States to send enough muscle up there to make it fit to live in. Fit for you to visit someday, if you want to. And I want to do it now. I’m supposed to leave in eighteen days.”
“Margie! Really, Margie!”
“Don’t take on, will you? It’s what I want.”
Alicia Howe had not been able to prevail against that argument in more than a dozen years. She had no hope of prevailing against it now. The thought of her daughter flinging herself through space to some terrible place where people died disgustingly was frightening. But Margie had demonstrated a capacity for taking care of herself.
“Well,” she said, “I guess I can’t send you to your room. All right. You haven’t told me what you want me to do.”
“Ask Harold to get me onto one of his newsmaker programs. He’ll know how to do it better than I can tell him. They’re backing away from my planet, mom, cutting the funding, complaining about the problems. I want the public to know how important it is, and I want to be the one to tell them.” She added strategically, “Poppa was right behind me on this at first, but now he’s changed his mind. He wants to call the whole thing off.”
“You mean you want to put the squeeze on your own father?”
“Exactly right.”
Alicia Howe smiled. That part was sure to appeal to her current husband. She spread her hands resignedly and moved toward the phone. “I’ll tell Harold what you want,” she said.
Ana Dimitrova sat with her eyes closed in a broad, low room, elbows on a ring-shaped table, head in her hands, earphones on her head. Her lips were moving. Her head twitched from side to side as she tried to match the rhythms of the taped balloonist song that was coming over the headset. It was very difficult, in large part because it was not a balloonist’s voice making the sounds. It was a Krinpit’s. The tape had been made several weeks before, when Detrick’s last surviving Krinpit had had no one left to talk to but Shirley, the one surviving balloonist.
But her name had not been Shirley. Her name, rather beautiful, had been Mo’ahi’i Ba’alu’i, which meant something like Sweetly Golden Cloud-Bearer. Krinpit rasps and tympani did not easily form the balloonist sounds. But Shirley had understood him — no, Ana corrected herself, Mo’ahi’i Ba’alu’i had understood him. Ana was determined to do the same, and so she played and replayed sections of the tape:
Ma’iya’a hi’i (these creatures unlike us) hu’u ha’iye’i (are vicious animals).
And Cloud-Bearer’s response:
M’u’a mali’i na’ahu’iha. (They have killed my song).
Ana pushed the headphones off her ears and allowed herself to rub her eyes. The headaches were very bad tonight. And this awful room! Twenty headsets and tape-control panels before twenty identical hard-backed chairs, all around the ring. So bleak! So unsympathetic!
Unsympathetic? Ana clucked her lips at herself. That was one of the English language’s booby-trap words: sympathetic, simpatico. They sounded so much alike. But they did not mean the same thing, and it was embarrassing to a translator of Ana’s skills to fall into the blunder of confusing them. It proved she was too tired to work anymore this night, and so she switched off the tape decisively, hung the earphones on their hook, and stood up to go. She intended to wish a courteous good night to those few other eager project personnel who had shared her desire to put in overtime at the tape ring. But there weren’t any. They had all left while she was concentrating.
It was nearly eleven o’clock! In six hours she would have to be getting out of bed!
Hurrying down the empty company street toward her room, Ana paused halfway, changed course, and entered the dayroom. Really, these headaches were too bad! But there was a dispensing machine in the dayroom, and sometimes one of the American soft drinks containing caffeine would constrict the blood vessels and reduce the thumping, thumping throb long enough for her to get to sleep.
But as she dropped a dollar into the machine and waited for the cup to fill, it seemed to her that coming here had been a mistake, after all. Such an ear-drubbing of noise! A dozen couples were dancing frenziedly to a stereo at one end of the room. At the other a young Oriental man had a guitar, and a group was singing with him, quite at cross-purposes to the music on the stereo. Quite uncaring. And even more noise came from the television alcove: a babble of excited voices, laughter. What could they be watching? She drifted closer to peer at the screen. Someone was lifting a pillowcase out of a sonic washer and exclaiming rapturously over its pristine shine. Were these people excited over a commercial?
“Oh, Nan,” cried her roommate, elbowing toward her. “You missed it. She was wonderful. ”
“What? What did I miss? Who was wonderful?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Menninger. It was really super. You know,” confided the woman, “I never really liked her. But tonight she was just beautiful. She was on the six o’clock news. It was just a little person-to-person interview, like a follow-up to a story about Jem. I don’t know why they picked her, but I’m glad they did! She said such wonderful things! She said Jem gave hope to all the unhappy people of the world. She said it was a planet where all the old hatreds could be forgotten. A place where — what did she say? — yes, a place where each child could elect a morality and an idea, and have the space and the freedom to live his life by it!”
Ana coughed Coca-Cola in a fine spray into her cupped hand. “Colonel Menninger said that?” she gasped.
“Yes, yes, Nan, and she said it beautifully. We were all touched. Even people like Stud Sweggert and Nguyen the Tryin’ were really moved. I mean, they even kept their hands to themselves. And the newscaster said something about sending troops to Jem, and Colonel Menninger said, ‘I’m a soldier myself. Every country has soldiers like me, and every one of us prays we’ll never have anything to do. But on Jem we can do something useful! Something for peace, not for destruction. Please let us do it.’ — What?”
Nan had been marveling to herself in Bulgarian. “No, no, please go on,” she said.
“Well. And just now they repeated parts of it on the late report, and they said the public response has been incredible. Telegrams, phone calls. To the White House and the UN and the networks — I don’t know where all.”
Ana forgot her headache. “Perhaps I have been doing Colonel Menninger an injustice. Truly, I am amazed.”
“Well, I am too! But she made me feel really good about what we’re doing, and everyone’s talking about it!”
And they were. Not only in the barracks dayroom. Senator Lenz’s phones were ringing, and it was constituents urging him to make sure the heroes on Jem got support. Newsrooms around the country were watching the electronic tally of calls from the public: Jem, Jem! Spot pollsters were reporting great and growing public concern. God Menninger’s phone rang only once, but the person on the other end was the President of the United States. When he hung up, Menninger’s face was tense and stern, but then it relaxed and he broke into a smile. “Honey,” he said to empty space, “damn your black heart, you do your old man proud.”