Jim lived in the same lockless rooms as the rest of us, but by day he went to engineering school and at night he tended bar in a beach joint; and, as soon as he asked me, we got married.
Why, if it wasn't for marrying Jim Barstow, how could I possibly have got to Alpha Centauri? He was the one who shamed me into going back to school, settling down, making careers for the two of us. I owe him a lot, damn his soul.
"Those kids!" cried Molomy in indignation, and stood up. "Ringo!" she screeched. "You break any more petri dishes and I'll pound you good!"
The two-year-old thumbed her nose and screeched back, "Up yours, Molomy!" Honor was satisfied; but there was less rattling of glassware as they worked in the stripy sunlight thereafter, so Molomy was satisfied too. Molomy was tired of working, if not of authority, so she decided to converse herself a rest. "I guess you've heard," she said confidingly, one grownup to another. "Crazy, isn't it?"
"You shouldn't say grownups are crazy," I said automatically, although of course I agreed with her. Crazy? Impossible would have been a better way to put it, if I hadn't seen the little worldlet growing with my own eyes. "It's quite an astonishing thing Aunt Ann is doing!"
"Oh, sure, but I meant the others. Flo wants more breeding stock, and Uncle Shef says it's too much trouble making chromium and iridium and all those things here, so he wants some shipped out—"
I stood up and faced her. "I don't know what you're talking about!"
She was triumphant; old Aunt Eve was always the last to know, but she hadn't been sure in this case. "Why, the plan to demand some new shipments from Earth, Eve. I thought you knew. Everybody knew, even the little kids." And tittering from the workbench confirmed it, until Molomy quelled them with a look.
And I hadn't known a thing about any of this!
I needed someone to talk to. When you came right down to it, there was only one logical candidate.
Jeron's personal house was in the middle of a cathedral grove of towering redwoods. Not real redwoods; the thirty-meter tallest of them was only six years old, and their chief ancestor had been rhubarb. But they looked quite fine.
They were my own grove, or had been, and you would think Jeron would have been a little grateful to the person who gave them to him.
Not he. He shrugged, and pointed out that I should not be surprised that Ann was making a new planet. She had, after all, said in the message to Knefhausen that she intended to.
"But that was just rhetoric! It's impossible—isn't it? The bits and pieces of matter have to take a long time to get together. Even longer to cool—"
He laughed. "Still trapped in the myth of causality," he observed. "If you don't understand, shall I show you?"
"Show me what?"
"Something." He led me proudly to his bedroom, a chamber I had been careful to stay out of for some years, and flung the door wide.
It was an Uncle Ghost production, and it looked like Fourth of July fireworks—only reversed fireworks, because they were going the wrong way. Not exploding. Imploding. It showed bits and pieces of matter spiraling into a central point, and that point becoming a world. It was rather pretty, like all of Will Becklund's toys for the kiddies, but it was not what I wanted to see. "Uncle Ghost made it for me personally," he said importantly, and unnecessarily.
"He doesn't like to be called Uncle Ghost."
"I don't like to be told what Uncle Ghost likes to be called," he said, "and anyway, you didn't come here to ask me about Ann's planet."
I hesitated. "Actually you're right. I'm concerned about this message to Earth."
He pushed me out of his room crossly and closed the door. "We want some things they have. What's wrong with that?"
"It's that word 'demand.' It just isn't the right way to do things, Jeron. I can understand wanting things from Earth —there are some I'd like too! Some decent coffee, a couple of recent issues of Good Housekeeping, a box of cordial cherries from Blum's. But I wouldn't demand them."
"We need templates," he said. "Anyway, it's not exactly a demand. More like a threat."
"A threat!"
"They send us what we want, Shef won't use the dis-ray on them again."
"Jeron! What we want can't be so much! That's like putting a pistol to somebody's head to ask him what time it is."
He shrugged. "What would you do?"
"I'd be more polite. We could exchange gifts! We've got all these wonderful new things we've grown—there's nothing like them back home! We could put together a sort of package of the best of them and send them off. Then, if we mentioned what kind of things we wanted, they'd send them to us. I'm sure they would."
He rubbed his velvet chin and scowled at me. "Mostly wouldn't work. Our stuff is adapted for light gravity. For Earth they'd need whole new stem and root systems, God knows what else."
"Oh, I could breed that in no time."
"Huh." He stood up and peered out at the habitat, thinking.
"Will you help me, Jeron?"
He shook his head irritably. "No, what you say is dumb, Eve. I don't like your idea. But I've got a better one."
22
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (WASHINGTON, D.C.) opened the storm window of his study and leaned out to yell at his Chief Science Advisor. "Harry, get the lead out! We're waiting for you!" Harry looked up and waved, then continued doggedly plowing through the dripping jungle that was the North Lawn. Between the overgrown weeds and the rain and the mud it was slow going, but the President had little sympathy. He slammed down the window and said, "Damn the man, he just goes out of his way to aggravate me. How long I supposed to wait for him so I can decide if we have to move the capital or not?" The Vice President looked up from her knitting. "Jimbo, honey, why do you fuss yourself like that? Why don't we just move and get it over with?"
"Oh, woman! We can't do that. It would look so bad." The President threw himself into a chair despondently. He was a big man, and the old chair creaked warningly. "I was really looking forward to the Tenth Anniversary Parade," he complained. "Ten years, that's really something to brag about! And I don't want to hold it the hell out in the sticks, I want it right down Constitution Avenue just like the old days, with the people cheering and the reporters and the cameras all over and everything. Then let that son of a bitch in Omaha say I'm not the real President."
His wife said placidly, "Don't fuss yourself about him, honey. There's worse nearer."
"He wouldn't even send a delegation!"
"We got enough to feed right now, you know that. Jimbo? You know what I've been thinking, though? The parade might look a little skimpy on Constitution Avenue anyway. It would be real nice on a kind of littler street."
"Oh, what do you know? If Washington's under water, what makes you think Bethesda would be any better?"
His Secretary of State put down his solitaire cards and looked interested for the first time. "Doesn't have to be in Bethesda, Jimbo. I got some real nice land up near Dulles we could move to. It's high there."
"Why, sure. Lots of nice high land over to Virginia," the Vice President confirmed. "Remember when we went out on that picnic after your Second Inaugural? That was at Fairfax Station. There was hills there all around. Just beautiful."
The President slammed his fist on the coffee table and yelled, "I'm not the President of Fairfax Station, Virginia, I'm the President of the U. S. of A.! What's the capital of the U. S. of A.? It's Washington! Always has been. Always will be. And that's where the President stays! My God, don't you see how those jokers in Houston and Omaha and Salt Lake and all would laugh if they heard I had to move out of my own capital? 'Sides, there's all those delegations that's here already, the Amish and the New York and the Wheeling folks." He broke off and scowled suspiciously at his Vice President, who was also his wife. "Now, what are you looking that way for?"