She made up the term she was behind Ray and they graduated together in seventy-five; she was twenty-three then and he was twenty-four. And it was right in the middle of the Depression and there were no jobs or partnerships for young and inexperienced lawyers; even the older ones were barely hanging on, like people in every other profession except psychiatry. And Ray’s money was gone. They had to look for any kind of work they could get, just to keep eating. Ellen was the first to get a job because of her experience as a waitress and the comparatively rapid turnover in waitress work even in depression times. It took Ray three months of hunting before he got any kind of work at all. It was a construction job. On his third day at it he fell from a girder four stories in the air and was killed.
«Did you love him, Ellen?» I asked.
«Yes, by then, very much. I’m afraid I married him mostly for practical reasons, but in five years I’d come to love him very deeply.»
«Have you loved many men, Ellen?»
«Four, only four. Three besides you.»
Ralph Gallagher was the second.
She met him four years later when she was a law clerk in the firm of Gallagher, Reyoll and Wilcox. He was older than she, but not too much older, forty-one to her twenty-seven. He was already becoming prominent in politics and was well on his way to being a big man. He’d been married once but had been divorced several years.
Ellen had admired him, looked up to him. When, several months after she started work there, he began to notice her and be friendly to her, she was pleased. When he’d taken her out a few times, she was even more pleased to learn that he was looking for a wife and not a mistress, and that he thought she would be just right for the job.
She married him. And for the ten years they had together before his death she merged her own ambitions with his; she made being his wife her career. She learned how to entertain for him. She learned politics, the practical kind, and used them to help him. She helped make him mayor of Los Angeles and an almost certain winner in the next election for the governorship of California.
But coronary thrombosis got him first.
And Ellen got another shock. She was broke again, flat broke. Familiar as she had been with his political affairs she had paid no attention to his financial ones, and he had stupidly put all his eggs into one basket, a basket with no bottom in it. His estate, after final expenses were paid out of it, was barely going to break even.
Ellen had had a law education but had never practiced; it would have been late for her to start at thirty-seven. But she knew politics and she bore a name that was respected in California, especially in Los Angeles.
She ran for city council and won easily, won a second time by an even bigger vote two years later, was made president of the council. Then two terms in the state assembly. And after that she was talked by the leaders of her party into running in the special election to fill the unexpired portion of the Senate term of a man who had died in office.
«And would have been miserably defeated, Max, if you hadn’t pulled a rabbit out of a hat.»
«Out of your opponent’s office, my love. But you skipped over man-I-loved number three. Was it Bradly?»
«Yes, it was Brad. For about a year, a couple of years ago. It ended then, sort of by mutual consent and without even a quarrel, so I guess it couldn’t have been too serious.»
«But he came to you with the Jupiter project? Or had he sold you on that before?»
«A little of both. He’d talked about it before, while we were in love or thought we were, but just in a general way. When he heard I was running for the Senate he came to me with the specific plans, the prospectus, and asked me to try to get it through if I won. I told him I would, never dreaming he’d make the political mistake of talking about it to reporters just before the election. If I’d foreseen that, I’d never have agreed.»
I said, «You don’t mean that. You mean you’d have warned him to keep his yap shut. Or—do you mean you weren’t really enthusiastic about the project itself? That it was just your friendship with Bradly that made you agree?»
«Well, it was partly that. Oh, I liked the idea of a rocket going out to Jupiter. I wanted to see man take another step out, in my lifetime. But it wasn’t really important to me and I certainly wouldn’t have staked my political career on it. You want to know, Max, when I got really enthusiastic about that rocket? The evening I first met you. The look in your eyes, the way you talked, the way you thought. I guess a little stardust rubbed off on me that evening. I found myself talking about horse trading that bill through Congress as though it was the most important legislation in the world—and suddenly it was.»
«And did you know that evening what was going to happen between us?»
«Of course. Almost as soon as you walked in the doorway.»
I shook my head wonderingly. «Would you like a drink?» I asked her.
She would. I got up and made one for each of us.
Back in bed, sitting up with drinks in our hands, we talked some more.
«Max, do you really think we’ll ever reach the stars? They’re light years away, and a light-year is a frightening distance.»
«It is, if you let it frighten you.»
«How far is the nearest one? I’ve heard, but I’ve forgotten.»
«Proxima Centauri is about four light years. And we still don’t know how far the farthest ones are because the galaxies keep on going for all the billions of light years our telescopes show us. Maybe the relativists’ finite universe is wrong and they go on forever. Maybe there is an infinity.»
«And an eternity?»
«You’re in the middle of that now. This talk about the age of the universe being a specific figure—two billion years, four billion years—nuts. Can you think that suddenly somebody or something wound up a clock and started it running, that there wasn’t any time before a certain specific moment? Time can’t be stopped or started, damn it. If this particular universe does have a definite age, isn’t eternal and constantly renewing itself by some process we don’t yet understand, then there must have been universes before this one. In eternity there could be an infinite progression of universes, an infinite number of them past and an infinite number to come.
«Maybe, Ellen, there was a universe umpteen billion years ago in which two people were sitting up beside one another in bed, just as we are, with maybe the same names we have, drinking the same drinks, saying the same things—except that maybe they were wearing different colored pajamas because that was a different universe.»
Ellen laughed. «But half an hour before, then, they weren’t wearing any pajamas at all so you couldn’t have told the difference. But Max, leaving time and eternity out of it, do you really believe the relativists are wrong about the universe being finite in volume, space curving back on itself? Even finite, they allow for it being pretty big, you know.»
I took a sip of my drink. I said, «I hope they’re wrong, because no matter how big they decide it is, if it’s finite then there must be a farthest star, and I don’t like to think there is. Where would we go from there?»
«But if space curves on itself, wouldn’t the farthest star be the nearest one too?»
«Woman,» I said, «that is really a frightening thought. It makes me dizzy. I refuse to buy it, or even examine it. Let’s get back to a finite universe. If this one is finite, there could still be an infinite number of universes like it, an infinity of finites. Like drops of water. Maybe we are like animalculae in a drop of water that happens to be separate from other drops of water, a universe in itself. Do you suppose the animalculae ever suspect that there are other drops of water besides theirs?»