MacAllister thought about it. Actually he’d prefer to eat alone, but it was to his benefit to keep Margie happy. “Sure,” he said, “that would be nice. I know you’re very popular here, though.” A little stroking never hurt. “Can we find a place where the peasants won’t recognize you?”
“No problem,” she said. “We’ll go over to Carmen’s.”
WITH ABOUT THREE minutes to go, the kid producer came in and rearranged the seating. “You’re here,” he told MacAllister, moving him to his right. “It gives you the library backdrop. You’ll look very literary. Exactly the effect we want.” He checked his notes. “Just relax.”
Irritating little squeak.
Marge seated herself in the center, asked what the next book would be, but pressed her finger over her earpiece before he could answer. “Valentina’s here,” she said. “She’ll be right in.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Kouros. She says her friends call her ‘Valya.’ She’s Greek.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll like her.”
“I’m sure I will.” MacAllister couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to spend most of her waking hours sitting in a tin can traveling between Tampa Bay and Arcturus. Priscilla Hutchins had spent years doing that. As women went, Hutch was no dummy, but she couldn’t have been all that smart.
He heard voices in the adjoining room. A woman appeared at the door, talking to someone he couldn’t see. She was a striking creature, tall and athletic. The sort of woman who had probably starred on her college soccer team. She finished her conversation, nodded, and came in. A hand closed the door behind her.
Valentina had red hair, intense blue eyes, sculpted cheeks, and she looked at MacAllister as if she thought there was something vaguely comical about him.
Marge did a quick set of introductions. Valentina spoke with a mild accent. She said she was pleased to meet him, but she didn’t seem to know who he was. Poor woman needed to keep up. The producer, now sealed in the control room, was whispering into a mike.
Marge signaled they should leave the studio. “We want to make an entrance,” she said, leading them off to the right. “What we’ll do,” she said, “is talk about the Academy’s mission, whether starflight is safe, what we’re getting from it, and so forth.” She smiled at them both. “Try not to agree with one another any more than you have to.”
Somebody was doing the weather. While they waited, they did some small talk. Valentina had been piloting for the Academy twelve years; she was originally from the Peloponnesus; and she had the impression MacAllister might once have flown with her.
“Not me,” he said. “I’ve only been off the planet once.”
“You’ve missed quite a lot,” she said.
Red lights flashed, the show’s theme music came up, he heard a voice telling viewers they were watching the 282nd edition of Up Front with Marge Dowling. Fingers pointed their way, and Marge returned to the set while a virtual audience applauded enthusiastically. She welcomed the greater Tampa Bay area, and the nation at large, and summoned first Valya, then MacAllister. They took their assigned seats while she reviewed the latest update, which was that the Heffernan was still missing. She went on to provide some background on the mission, why they were going to Betelgeuse, how big the star was, and so on. MacAllister’s eyes started to glaze over. What he was willing to go through to sell a few books.
THE FIRST QUESTION went to Valentina: “We’ve had starflight now for more than two generations. The common wisdom is that superluminals are a safe form of transportation. Is that true?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know how this sounds in light of the event you just reported. But nevertheless, considering the distances traveled, there is no safer mode of transportation in existence.”
MacAllister rolled his eyes. “What is it, Mac?” Marge asked.
“Look out for statistics,” he said. “At the beginning of the space age, the first space age back in the twentieth century, they used to measure transportation safety by the number of fatalities per passenger-mile. Using that method, the safest form of travel in 1972 was the Saturn moon rocket. We don’t really want to measure distance. If you simply count fatalities against the number of flights, the superluminals don’t look quite so good.”
Valentina sighed. “You’re right, Gregory,” she said, putting a slight stress on the name, informing him he was out of his league here. “You can prove pretty much anything statistically. I’ve been riding the Academy’s missions all my adult life, and I never have a qualm.” She smiled. “And I’ve never lost anybody. Nor has anyone I know lost anybody.”
Her adult life probably consisted of about fifteen years, but he let it go.
“What’s your best guess?” Marge asked. “How serious is this Heffernan thing? How’s it going to turn out?”
“I think we’ll find them,” she said. “It’s just a matter of getting to the area where they were lost and picking up a radio signal. Of course you never really know, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“I hope not,” said MacAllister. “But the real issue here is, why do we bother to go out there at all? What’s the point?”
Marge tossed the question to Valentina.
“This is our backyard,” she said. “We’d be remiss not to look around. To see what’s there.”
“Our backyard,” said MacAllister, “by your reckoning is pretty big. And I can tell you what’s there: rock and hydrogen. And empty space. And that’s it. We’ve spent billions on starflight, and we have nothing to show for it. Zero.”
Valentina looked as if he were being irrational. He drew a condescending smile from her. “A year ago,” she said, “we intercepted an omega cloud that would eventually have destroyed the planet. I know Mr. MacAllister thinks that is of no real consequence, but I’m sure your viewers would have their own opinions.
“We also rescued the Goompahs. You’ve probably forgotten that, Gregory.” Again that offbeat stress on his name. Poor Gregory. He’s not too bright.
“Saving the planet is good,” MacAllister said with a straight face. “But it’s done. I’m obviously glad we were able to do it. That doesn’t mean we should stay out there indefinitely, at an escalating cost to the taxpayer. Look: There are millions of people in undeveloped countries who never get a decent meal. Every time we wipe out one plague, we get another. Meantime, the oceans continue to rise. They’re talking about a collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf within the next ten years. If that goes, folks in Pennsylvania are going to get their feet wet. Right now, we charge back and forth between Sirius and the Dog Star — ”
“Sirius is the Dog Star,” said Valentina.
“And what do we have to show for it? We get a physical description of another place nobody cares about.”
“You want to save us from the greenhouse problem —?”
“Of course.”
“And from famine?”
“That would seem to be a good idea.”
“Solving either problem will require technology. We can learn a great deal more about planetary maintenance by studying what goes on elsewhere. We have to do more now than simply raise the cities another three or four meters. We have to find a way to get control of the climate. That means experimentation. But I don’t think we want to be conducting experiments of that nature at home.”
“I think, Valentina, that may be a little over the top.”
“Maybe. But if you’re right, and nobody really cares what’s out there, I wonder whether we’re even worth saving.”
MACALLISTER FOUND HIMSELF thinking of Hutchins sitting in her office at the Academy. She wouldn’t be watching this live, but she’d hear about it, would probably see it that evening. So he tried to go easy. But it wasn’t in his nature. Pouring big money into starflight at a time like this was unconscionable. And dumb.
“Dumb?” said Valentina. “You remind me of the guys in the Spanish court who said something like that about Columbus.”
“In those days,” he said, “you could breathe the air in America. It makes a difference. I say, if people want to go to the Big Dipper, let them buy their own canoe.”
“You’re talking as if only a few of us have gone to the stars. In fact thousands of people have experienced superluminal flight. And anyhow it’s not really individuals who’ve gone to Arcturus, it’s the species. We’ve all gone.”
“Tell that to the people on East Fifty-third in the Bronx.”
“Gregory, we’re wired to go. You and I can sit here and talk all we like, but that won’t change anything. There’s a destiny involved. We could no more not go than you could sit through a conversation like this and not say a word.”
He sighed. “When people start talking about destiny, it means their argument has hit the wall. What we should do is get the people who are always going on about the stars, pile them onto a few ships, and let them go colonize Alpha Boobus III. With the single proviso that they stay there.”
IT’S MORE OR less traditional after these on-air debates to shake hands after the show. MacAllister had even gone for drinks occasionally with people with whom he’d conducted blistering debates. This one had been innocuous enough, but Valentina wasn’t a professional. She took everything personally, and when Marge congratulated them on a good performance, the Academy pilot glanced at him as if he were not worth her time, said good day in a voice an octave lower than the one she’d used during the show, and stalked out of the studio.
Normally, MacAllister was proof against beautiful women. They were okay for ordinary males, but they could prove a major distraction for somebody who operated at his level. Still, he liked to be admired by the fair sex, enjoyed the occasional come-hither glance, and was inevitably willing to follow up on the invitation so long as he could see no downside. But when Valentina strode out in that uncivil manner, his feelings were hurt.
And there again was evidence of the damage women could do. Had she been a male, he wouldn’t have given a damn. As it was, riding back to the hotel in his cab, he sat uncomfortably holding up his end of a conversation with the publisher’s rep, wishing Valentina had been a better sport about things.