"You'll need cash," he told me. "Out in the lobby there's a cash dispenser. If you've got your card, it'll probably take care of you."
It did. It took the help of two bystanders for me to figure out how to make it work, but then it spat out twenty-four sixteen-dollar bills, h-chew, k-chew, k-chew, and I scuttled away. Hick in the big town! Some things didn't change.
In the taxi I turned the money over curiously. It was really a nuisance to use cards for little things, or even for such bigger things as dealing with the independent communities in Palo Alto and Santa Barbara or playing poker on Saturday nights. They were interesting colors: greeny-gold and black on one side, gold and scarlet on the other. The numbers were in binary, of course, and they weren't made out of the kind of banknote paper I'd seen all my life—all my other life-but of something that had a feel almost like silk, and, I discovered when I risked a corner of one, was distinctly harder than paper to tear. Altogether it was neat-looking money. The picture of
Andrew Jackson on one side and the White House on the other weren't steel engravings but holograms. As I turned the bills in my hands the perspective shifted slightly, and halos of other colors appeared around the pictures, red, white, and blue behind Jackson, a full-spectrum rainbow over the White House. The name of the printer was on the notes, an outfit in Philadelphia—first I knew anything was going on in Philadelphia—and I made a note, as best I could while the taxi jolted up the potholes and cracked cement of Broadway. Next council meeting I would take up the question of whether we wanted to print some of these for ourselves.
Then we were at Riverside Drive; I paid off the taxi driver and looked around. The Hudson ran clear and sweet. There were big trees growing over on the cliffs at the jersey side, and I couldn't see the George Washington Bridge—hadn't been built yet, I supposed, when all building stopped. But the apartment house I was going to was in good shape. There was glass in the windows. The hail floors were clean tile. And while I was climbing the stairs to the sixth floor I heard the whir of motors and realized that the climb wasn't necessary—they'd even got the elevators running. And when I got to apartment 6-C and knocked on the door it opened right away, only the person who looked out at me wasn't who I expected at all. It was the senator. "Nicky!" he cried. "Hey, Nyla! It's Nicky DeSota. Come and say hello!"
Then she appeared, looking pretty and happy and very much like the person I was looking for—as much as I looked like the senator—almost as much, because there was that very visible difference when she shook my hand. And nothing would do but that I come in, and have some more of that real coffee and talk for a while about what I was doing and what they were doing and how, really, we were pretty well off where we were, the worlds we'd left behind be darned.
It was a pity she was the wrong Nyla.
But they were able to tell me where the right one was, and twenty minutes later I was on my way. To the old Metropolitan Museum of Art. No more than two minutes from where I'd landed in the blimp in the first place.
The senator and his Nyla had been surprised to see me. The Nyla without thumbs was more than that. She was flabbergasted, and a little suspicious. "All that stuff back home," she said at once, "is over. If you're sore, you're sore, and I wouldn't blame you. But I'm not apologizing, either."
"I'm not sore," I said. "I just want to take you to dinner—. maybe across the park, in that restaurant with the trees around it."
"I can't afford that!"
"I can," I said. "Mind if we walk? I'd like to keep an eye on how they're loading the blimp."
So we walked, and I showed her how they were loading tractor parts and case after case of data cards for our memory stores in exchange for the produce we sold. And she told me about her work at the museum. It wasn't skilled work, she said at once, a little belligerently, but it was good work. "Fortunately," she said, "they were building a new wing when the war wiped them out, so a lot of the best stuff was stored carefully and it's in pretty good shape. But the stuff that was on public view! Especially the paintings! I can't restore them, none of us really can very well, but we're spraying them to kill the mold, and drying them, and trying to save all the little flakes of paint that fell off onto the floor. I think someday somebody will be able to put a lot of them together."
"I didn't know you were interested in art," I said, steering her into the restaurant. The smells were marvelous; of course, the restaurant was right there at the market, so they got their pick of the first and freshest stuff that came in.
"I guess," she said objectively, not meanly, "you didn't know much about me at all, did you? And maybe I wanted it that way. So you'd be more scared of me."
I let that pass. We got a table and ordered. We started with avocados stuffed with crabmeat; the crab came right out of the Hudson River, but the avocados were our own, no more than five hours in the city, and absolutely perfect.
"That is a good job," I said, "although I guess there isn't much of a need to get it all done right now, is there? I mean, the paintings, sure. But the other stuff—I saw that Cleopatra's needle thing as we came by. Nothing much is going to happen to it that hasn't happened already." The obelisk had been flat on the ground, and in several pieces, broken as it fell. It had lasted for thousands of years in Egypt, but a few decades of New York City's freeze-and-thaw had knocked it over.
She looked up from scraping the last of the meat out of the avocado shell. "So?" she asked.
"So I wondered if you might be interested in another job. Not in your specialty, of course—there's not much in the secret-police line around here. How would you like to conduct an orchestra?"
She put down her fork. "To con— An orch— Shit, Nicky, what the hell are you talking about?"
"Call me Dominic, all right?" I had forgotten she was such a potty-mouth. Probably she'd get over it, though; most of the people seemed to.
"Dominic, then. What do you mean? I've never conducted an orchestra!"
"Didn't you tell me you once wanted to play the violin?"
"I did play the violin!" But she put her hands on her lap instinctively.
"You can't now, right," I nodded. "I understand that. That wouldn't stop you from leading other musicians, would it?"
"What other musicians?"
I grinned. "They call themselves the Palm Springs Philharmonic. Actually, they're amateurs. Not bad, though. It's part-time stuff for them; they all work on the collective."
"What collective?"
"I'm head financial officer for the Desert Agricultural Consort," I told her. "It's like a kibbutz, only we don't call it that because most of us aren't Jewish. We're going to have a good orchestra someday. Right now— Well, you'd have time for a couple of other jobs, at first."
"What couple of other jobs?"
"Well, one, teaching music to the kids. And any grown-ups who wanted to learn. We don't have a music teacher."
She pursed her lips. The rabbit stew had arrived and she sniffed it approvingly. "And?" she asked, dipping a spoon to taste.
"Well, the other thing isn't a job exactly. I mean, I thought you might like to marry me."
I don't think I had ever surprised her before. I'm not really sure I'd surprised very much of anybody very often before. Not even myself. She stared at me, while the rabbit stew got cold—hers did. Mine I dipped into. I was starving, and besides it was delicious.
"What about Greta What's-her-name? The stewardess?"
I shrugged. "I asked her, you know? Made my one-minute commercial? She said no." I began to grin, because it was kind of funny, when I thought about it in retrospect. "I got this Dear John holocard, you know?" And I'd taken it back to my room when the senator was out and played it, and there she was, pretty as ever. I didn't quite cry. But nearly. "She said, 'You're a sweet man, Nicky, but you're nothing but trouble. I don't need trouble. I just want to get on with my life.'"