There was a gasp, then a shout, from the watchers on the levee. Even the Amish. Darien saw one of the levee policemen turn and wave frantically toward the top of the Washington Monument, but even he turned right back to see the most exciting group of tourists to enter Washington D.C.'s National Airport in at least two decades ... or ever!
"What a funny bunch!" cried one of the Amish women, earning a reproving look from her husband.
But she was right. They came strutting out of the entrance and each one—at precisely the same point—stopped, and stared slack-jawed at the immense sky overhead, and was bumped out of the way by the person behind him. It was not just the infinite overhead sky. Most of the interstellar wayfarers were experiencing rain falling on their heads for the first time ever.
They were all very young. Not just young. The operative word, Darien thought, was "weird." Some of them were darker than the President himself, some almost albino white. They had features that ranged from emaciated aquiline -to puffy blobs of noses surrounded by bulging cheeks—and yet, Darien thought, how could that be? There should not be such differences! They were all children of the same eight astronauts. All of them had been white, looking about as interchangeable as any NASA crew. How did the kids come to be all so different?
And, above all, how come they were so young? Barring one middle-aged woman, they were children—some of them surely no more than three or four years old. She had expected perhaps the original eight, now surely in their fifties or beyond, with perhaps a leavening of the more mature, teenagers . . . but not this kindergarten!
All around the ship was now a scene of confusion. Half a dozen state coaches were being galloped across the taxi strip by agitated drivers, the unmatched teams surging and tangling with each other under the whip. The guards were trying to come to attention. All the old rifles were at port arms now, not actually pointed at the visitors but ready, and the soldiers were looking to their lieutenant for orders —who, in turn, was peering through opera glasses at the top of the Washington Monument. Darien caught a flicker of light from one of the little windows under the shaft's aluminum cap. If it was a signal, the lieutenant did not seem to find it helpful. He was arguing with a teenager from the ship, trying to keep his eyes on the Monument at the same time, and the discussion collapsed entirely when the horses and carriages pulled up. The children from the ship wailed and fled. Only the physical obstruction of the older woman at the door, trying to calm them, kept them from retreating into the ship. The teenager had joined the panicky retreat, but he recovered quickly and began shouting commands. Slowly the others came back toward the carriages. Those huge snorting animals in the traces were less terrifying than the teenager, it seemed.
Darien picked up her purse and held it to her lips. "I'm going to the bridge now," she murmured.
"Good idea, Derry. They're starting to move here—" The voice was lost in a blare of band music.
"Say again, Jake," she ordered, wincing at the noise.
"You can hear for yourself," his voice shouted. "Jesus God, what a racket! But you'd better get on over there, because they're on their way!"
The head of the President's parade was approaching the bridge by the time Darien got there, and the traffic congestion was considerable. Darien pushed her way through a knot of government employees in dungarees and cotton flannel shirts, no doubt given the day off to swell the crowd, and found herself behind a line of twenty or thirty soldiers doing traffic duty. They were keeping farm wagons off the bridge but allowing pedestrians to pass. Darien glanced at the approaching parade, studied the reviewing stand just across the road which was obviously where it was going to wind up, and decided the pedestrians had the right idea. For one thing, they were farther from the parade's two bands.
She walked out onto the span just as the first mounted soldiers in the escort appeared at the other end.
From the District end of the Arlington Bridge you could see right up the weedy hill that had once been America's best-kept cemetery. A later administration had built a small cinder-block fort commanding the bridge itself, and the outriders turned aside to gather under the fort, leaving the carriages with the visitors to enter the bridge alone.
And there they stopped.
There was some argument going on. It appeared the people from the spacecraft were arguing with their drivers, and, although Darien was too far to know which side won, the debate was resolved by the spacefarers' getting out of the carriages and lining up to cross the bridge on foot.
Even from that distance, Darien could see that they were not enjoying themselves. The rain had more or less stopped, but what was left in its place was a muggy, buggy heat. Some of them were sneezing violently, and had to be helped along by soldiers from the guard detachment. All of them were swatting at the insects.
Even so, they started off across the bridge bravely enough. Before they were halfway the bold marching step had slowed down, and even the arrogant teenager from the scene at the airport was beginning to limp. They reached the point where Darien stood, and that was the end of it. Two small children sat down in the middle of the road, weeping. The teenager snapped angrily at them without effect, then shrugged. His gaze wandered over the crowd on the curb, with incurious loathing, pausing briefly to meet Darien's eyes.
Darien McCullough could count on her fingers as well as any neighbor gossiping about a pregnant bride. She knew that it was unlikely that any of the children could be as much as twenty years old, yet there was a grownup ferocity in the man's stare. It shook her. She looked away quickly, but when she glanced back his eyes were still on her.
The carriages were beginning to approach from the far end of the bridge, and the noise distracted him, freeing her to look more attentively at the rest of the group. There seemed to be seven of them in all, two quite small boys, three young girls surrounding the age of puberty, the angry- eyed young man—and, good heavens!, Eve Barstow!
For Darien McCullough, the sight of Eve Barstow was a personal shock, saddening and complete. How different she looked! The slim, smiling bride who had taken off so bravely for Alpha Centauri was now transmuted into a plump, faded woman who limped as though her feet hurt. No doubt they did. Even her Earth-born muscles had lacked practice for twenty years. And there, behind her, there was— -
There was what, exactly? Darien could not be sure. The day was still warm, but surely not hot enough to be producing mirages over the pavement. And yet there was something behind Eve Barstow, between her and the approaching carriages, that was making the hillside across the bridge creep and waver, like a view seen through flawed glass. It was too small to be heat refraction, too well defined to be a blurring of her own vision—why, she thought in amazement, it almost looked like the outline of a human form!
That was the first time anyone on Earth saw Uncle Ghost.
25
YOU KNEW THAT YOUR NEAREST AND DEAREST HAD FIRED A wad of devastation at the Earth. You knew that the consequences' had to be awful. But you didn't know, until you saw with your own eyes, that what resulted was not so much tragic as tacky. The majesty of the Presidency had boiled away with the nukes.
There was this matter of the parade, for instance. You want to talk about parades? Eve Barstow had seen real parades\ Dozens of them! Parades that took four hours to pass a given point, with regimental bands blaring in perfect sync and drum majorettes doing baton whirls and cart-wheels down the avenue, and the people lined up twenty deep for miles on end. Fourth of July parades and Pasadena Rose Bowl parades and Armed Forces Day parades, and the least of them could have swallowed this pipsqueak affair up in between a Boy Scout troop and a Lithuanian- American Ladies' Marching Society delegation and never noticed it. And yet, truly, this was parade enough for her to participate in. She got to the White House simply worn out, even though they had been in carriages most of the way, and the kids were worse off than she. Strength is not endurance. The man who can clip seconds off a four- minute mile may fall over in total exhaustion before he gets halfway through the Boston marathon. And although they had carefully strengthened themselves for the unforgiving pull of 32 ft/sec2, they had not practiced long marches, because in the spacecraft where was there to walk to?