What I had first called this new world to myself was Eden. The name was fair enough. And, although I wouldn't have guessed I'd like farming, it beat the dickens out of calculating mortgage rates in Chicago.
What made it even better, of course, was that my special skills kept me away from stoop labor, except now and then when a crop had to get in right then. Learning the binary arithmetic had been a bit of a strain, but once that was out of the way I took over all the financial problems for the collective. I was a solid asset to the consort, and they treated me that way. They were sorry to see me take off for New York.
Not many people had ever been sorry to see me leave before.
So, as the blimp swayed gently down toward the old New Jersey swamps and I counted over my crates of avocados and lettuce, I was actually looking forward to going back home. My real home. The one around Palm Springs.
It was very nearly what I had dreamed of as a kid. When I was young I was very religious—I didn't have much choice, did I? The Moral Might Movement was getting itself together, especially in the suburbs of Chicago. I wanted to be Good. Mostly what I wanted was to avoid getting crisped for eternity in the fiery flames of Hell, where (so Reverend Manicote assured me every Sunday) I was almost certainly going to go if I drank, missed Sunday school, or went skinny-dipping. He also mentioned Heaven now and then. That was sort of like Tahiti in my six-year-old mind; I knew it was there, but didn't see much chance of ever visiting it in person—at least, not without a really good lawyer to find a loophole in the rules. I mean, how could God possibly forgive my weighty six-year-old burden of sin? I'd told lies. I'd stolen nickels from my mother's purse. I'd shown disrespect to my elders. Oh, I was a bad one, all right! But I did daydream sometimes about what Heaven would be like if I ever found a way there. And what I dreamed was close enough to the Desert Agricultural Consort, even to the fact that, as Reverend Manicote had assured us, there was no marrying or giving in marriage in Heaven. That was true enough for me in California. There were women there-more than forty percent of the population was female-but they had mostly come to join husbands or lovers, and there wasn't much of a pool left over for single men like me.
But that was what I had wangled the New York trip to do something about.
We floated down to the Great Meadow, where winchmen were waiting to grab our cables, and I peered out the cabin window. New York City hadn't changed much. There was no real reason it should have-it was only about six weeks since I'd headed out for my new job in California, but, my goodness, it seemed a lot longer.
As soon as we were secure I stepped out into a rainy, chilly New York October day, and got my tennis shoes full of mud on the first step.
Herby Madigan was waiting for me on the pad, trying to peer past me to see what was in the cargo hold. He grabbed the manifest out of my hand before he even said hello and ran his eye down the list. "Tomatoes?" he asked indignantly. "What'd you bring us tomatoes for? We've still got plenty from Jersey and the Island."
"In a couple of weeks you won't have," I told him, "and then you'll be begging us. Anyway, there's dates and avocados"—his eyes lit up—"and I've put in some cases of oranges and coconuts, just to show."
"Oranges!" he said.
"We can't deliver much quantity, I'm afraid," I said, "because it'll be a while before the groves are really producing again. Can we get out of the rain while we talk?"
We didn't quite make it on the first try, because one of the airtraffic people stopped me to ask if I'd seen any signs of ballistic recoil on the way from California. He looked pleased when I told him I hadn't, less pleased when I explained that I'd been asleep about half the time and busy with paperwork most of the rest. Still, he was content to tell me that nobody had experienced much of it in the last month or so; evidently the resonances were damping down on schedule.
So then we were allowed to go into Herby's office, a brightly lit, messy cubicle in one of the bubble structures in the park. We haggled over prices for half an hour. I took my wet shoes off and let my socks dry while we talked. He had some real coffee and gave me a cup, and I wondered if we could grow the stuff. Decided against it. People from the consort had already gone exploring down into Baja and other parts of Mexico. Someday we might want to hive off a colony to grow coffee and maybe bananas and papaya there, but they were too far from Palm Springs to be good ideas right now. Anyway, I had plans enough for the next year. "We'll have fresh spinach and grapes for you in about a month," I told Herby, "and Crenshaw melons around Christmas. We're short of labor, though. Do you know if there are likely to be any real farm workers coming through?"
"Nobody's coming through any more," he said absently, thinking about Crenshaw melons for Christmas. "They've closed all the portals, except for a couple of signal-only peeping stations. You might pick up some workers anyway; there's still a few hundred physicists and soldiers and so on waiting for assignment in the hotels."
I sighed. Retraining physicists and soldiers already took a lot of time away from trying to revive old orchards and planting new crops. "If you've got twenty volunteers," I said, "we can take them back tonight. Families would be best. Or single women?"
He laughed. I expected him to; that was a joke. When we'd finished haggling over prices and contracts for future delivery, he poured another cup of coffee for us both and leaned back, gazing at me. "Dominic?" he said. "How would you like to come back and work for me in procuring?"
"No, thanks."
He persisted. "You'd have a hell of a lot better job. I'd match anything they pay, and you'd be in the city. We've got power and water in half the West Side now. It's going to be really nice here."
"After you get it cleaned up," I said, grinning.
"Sure! It's happening. Five years from now—"
"Five years from now," I told him, "we'll be cleaning up San
Diego. Now, there's a pretty place for a city! Not to mention the climate."
He said thoughtfully, "You know, I wouldn't mind living in California sometime, after we get things straightened out around here. I've been thinking about Los Angeles—"
"Los Angeles! Who would want to revive Los Angeles?" I looked at my watch. "Nice talking to you, Herby, but my return flight's not going to wait for me and I've got some things I want to do here. Any chance of borrowing a pair of dry shoes somewhere? And maybe a raincoat?"
The lobby of the Plaza was cleaner than I'd left it, and emptier. Something like twenty-two thousand Peety-Deepies had come through the New York City relocation centers. Only about two hundred were left in the Plaza, and some of the other hotels had already been closed down, mothballed, pending some time in the future when they would be needed again for people who came in planes or cars instead of portals.
I didn't linger. My first business was with the transient desk, where they let me borrow a terminal long enough to type in a name and get an address. I asked the man at the counter how to get to Riverside Drive, found out I could pick up a taxi in front of the hotel, and only then realized I didn't have any money to pay a taxi fare. Or anything else. "Can I pay with my California money card?" I asked, and he tried not to laugh.