“No, I don’t want you to clear out your desk.” Selig laughed again.
Stirling moved uneasily hi his chair as he tried to loosen the bonds of perspiration gripping his clothes. “If there’s nothing else …”
“Don’t rush away… I’ve ordered some coffee.” Selig pressed a button. “Let me confess something to you, Vic. I expect you’re wondering why I had you down here in person, instead of handling this matter through the usual channels?”
“Well, I … “
“Of course, you were. You’re not dumb. The truth is I wanted to talk to somebody who had been up there in person. I’m not claustrophobic; don’t get that idea; but those islands up there in the sky have always fascinated me, Vic.
“Tell me, what was it really like?”
Stirling hesitated, then gave a general description of the upper surface of International Land Extension, U.S. 23, in which he was careful to put very little more than would be found in a good reference work. A gray-haired woman with cylindrical shins brought in the coffee; and, while they were drinking it, Selig asked a number of questions about how the villagers lived. He seemed naively disappointed to hear they had not developed a separate tribal culture complete with initiation ceremonies and fertility rites.
“I’m afraid they were a pretty uninteresting bunch,” Stirling said as he stood up to drain the last of his coffee.
“They sound that way,” Selig twinkled. “I guess I’ve always been too much of a romantic anyway.”
When Stirling finally broke free of the Record office he went for a cold drink, but the bar’s dark and airless confines made him feel as though he had been sewn up in black velvet. The beer tasted of chemicals, and he kept imagining the intertwining of tanned limbs—Melissa’s and Johnny’s. He decided it was time to go and see his mother.
On the way out of the bar he noticed a newspaper vendor at the door; then he remembered the world had been getting along without him for six months, and he had no idea what had been happening. He put a coin into the machine and waited while it printed the hourly edition. The pre-rush hour lull was prevailing outside. He got a cab without any difficulty and settled down to read the paper during the trip. It was a single sheet and—being an electronic throwback to the coumntos of the Middle Ages— carried a temporally narrow slice of the world’s affairs.
It was the day of the full moon; and, as usual, there was a snide story about the billions of frustrated Chinese males who would be denied normal relations with their wives for the next four days, on pain of having their names displayed on wall posters as betrayers of the gloriously regulated and synchronized womanhood of China. There was news of the failure of TWEAK, the desperation project in which a multimillionaire had spent his whole fortune in launching a ship, which was all power plant and no pay-load, simply to find out, once and for all, if Einstein had been right and the stars really were unattainable. Crime and sports news filled out the bulk of the edition, and Stirling was throwing the sheet aside when his eyes picked out a familiar name, Mason Third.
The story contained no mention of the Receders. It simply stated that Senator Mason Third had announced he would ignore the Administrator’s ban on his public rallies and speak in Boston that night on the Land Extension scandal. Stirling was astounded both by the use of the title “Senator” and the generally respectful tone of the copy. A lot must have happened in six months. He settled back thoughtfully in his seat and waited for the taxi to carry him home.
Mary Considine was intent on building a bouquet of artificial ferns when he opened the door and walked into the cramped apartment. She looked up and studied him for a moment with baffled eyes. “Kill the fatted planktonburger,” Stirling said finally. “I’ve come back.”
“Are you going to stay here?”
“Yes, if you can fit me in.”
His mother nodded casually, but he saw a furtive gleam of satisfaction in her eyes; and he wondered—for perhaps the thousandth time—what refinements of Twenty-first Century living had forced her withdrawal. Could it have been simply the sheer monotony of thirty-five years in a fam-apt? There was no way to find out, because her shell permitted no emotional communication in either direction. Mrs. Considine uttered words when they were absolutely necessary, but she never talked. Moving with heavy patience through furniture which nudged her at every step, she pulled her sleeves down over her mottled, red forearms and began to prepare his bed. This, Sterling thought, is what I offered Melissa.
He spent the rest of the day at the television set, switching from channel to channel, trying to re-orientate himself in the world’s affairs. The first thing he was able to confirm was that Mason Third really was a senator for Pop-mod 162, an area roughly corresponding to the seaboard of the old Georgia. Even under the streamlined electoral system introduced at the beginning of the century, Third had traveled far and fast—an indication that he had been preparing the ground carefully in advance. His ticket, from the tantalizing references Stirling caught, seemed to be a dressed-up version of the Receders’ anti-everything attitude. But the fact that a man could succeed in politics by being against the Food Technology Authority, the lies program, enforced population control—and apparently for nothing—carried alarming sociological implications for anybody who wanted to think about them. Stirling had no desire to think about anything at all, but it was necessary to numb his mind with information to prevent him noticing the slow inward creep of walls.
Another thing which immediately became apparent was that the F.T.A. political machine had gone into action against the Government because of its dismissal from the lie. Loaded connotations in straight newscasts, wisecracks by disc jockeys, heavily weighted magazine programs, all hammered home the point that Administrator Raddall had acted against the F.T.A., yet had given a bunch of squatters unlimited freedom to trample down the nation’s food voider their unwashed feet. The propaganda was good and it was effective.
Late in the evening, Stirling tired of watching the F.T.A. puppets dance on the ends of their all too visible strings. He tried to read and then to interest his mother in talking, but in the end decided to go out in search of air. At the bottom street level he stood on the sidewalk for several seconds, laboring desperately for breath, before he walked aimlessly towards the city center. Sometime later he began to notice people staring.
Stirling had covered several more blocks, consciously watching out for the signs of recognition in strangers’ eyes, before he saw his own face looking out from the bill-board screen of a Record news vendor. Beside it, the Special Edition sign was winking with its ruby light. Stirling had to join a short queue before he was able to drop in a coin for his own copy. The headline was:
HOBOES IN HEAVEN–––- THE FULL STORY
Underneath it, a lengthy subheading said: “On He 23 a group of men who have no respect for society live high and wide off the nation’s food supplies and thumb their noses at the American people. Victor Stirling, a Record reporter, was there! Here at last is the full story of the dropout society—the men who made suckers of YOU!”
Accompanying the story was a three-column, head-and-shoulders picture of Stirling from the Record’s stock files, and another showing him being rushed away from the elevator car by the F.T.A. men. The caption read, “After his six months’ imprisonment on He 23, Record reporter, Victor Stirling, is helped from the elevator by the F.T.A. officers who brought him down to safety.” In the photograph Stirling was stumbling and holding his head, but there was no way of knowing this was a result of earache —a fact which had lent itself to the production of one of the most heavily loaded pieces of copy he had seen in a long time. He had been a prisoner on the He, but anybody reading the paper would get the idea he had been rescued by the F.T.A.