«But I don’t anticipate that they’ll cause any trouble. In fact, I’m reasonably sure they’ll not only go along but be enthusiastic about giving us all the help they can. General Rudge, the big noise there, was in Washington last week end and, strictly off the record and in confidence, I showed him your prospectus. And he told me, also unofficially, that it looked good to him, although of course they’ll have to check the figures forty ways from Sunday and I have a hunch they’re going to insist on upping a few of the safety factors a little.
«Well, that’s the score to date, darling. Wish it wasn’t so long till the mid session recess, seven long weeks. But by then probably the bill will be passed and signed—with luck your appointment will have been made and confirmed. Then we can really celebrate, no?
«Meanwhile, don’t forget to Write Your Congressman.»
I wrote my congressman that I missed her like hell.
And I was missing her like hell. Being away from her was showing me that I really loved her and that what was between us was something deep and important, not just an affair, like others I’d had. Sometimes I almost damned Project Jupiter for keeping us apart.
Alone—and I’d never felt alone before—I found that there were too many evenings in a week.
It was a very rainy rainy season in Los Angeles, but I walked a lot, sometimes having to wade in flooded streets. I read a lot. As often as I could without boring them I spent evenings with Klocky or M’bassi, arguing or playing chess. I heard an occasional concert, took in a few shows. Still there were too many evenings. Seven of them a week.
Why did I love Ellen? It was like asking why I had five fingers on each hand.
The days rushed by, at work, and the evenings crawled.
From Ellen, early February: «My telegram of yesterday told you that the bill passed the Senate, darling. Quite probably, if you were sticking as close to the viddy for news as I suspect, you knew it even before my telegram got there.
«But I doubt that any of the newscasts carried a breakdown of the vote, so you probably don’t know how close a thing is was. It scared us, and it’s changed our plans a little.
«Max, it passed by a margin of only three votes.
«And it wasn’t because Rand crossed us up. He didn’t. Of the approximately twenty-five votes in the Senate that make up the conservationist bloc, only a few went against us; nearly all of them either were absent at the time of the voting or abstained.
«And we had twenty-five certain votes lined up on our side—the fifteen we can always count on and ten more that we’d traded for. We’d figured that, as usual, the other fifty votes, the in-betweeners, would divide about equally. And if that had happened we’d have had almost a two to one majority with the conservationists abstaining.
«But even with no organized opposition, with no speeches against the project, those in-between votes went heavily against us. The actual vote was 36-33, which means that out of forty-four votes cast besides the twenty-five we were sure of, we got only eleven, one vote out of four.
«Since then we’ve found out why, by talking to some of the in-betweeneis who usually vote our way, who are usually willing to go along with any expansionist project in reason. There’d been a sudden change of sentiment because of that Mars rocket crash last week, the three-million-dollar rocket carrying cargo and six men for the Mars colony that was hit by a meteor and crashed on Deimos.
«I’d heard about it at the time, of course. I’d even known that there was what I’d thought was a mild popular furor over it, but I’d never suspected that men supposedly intelligent enough to be sent to the Senate of the United States would be swayed by that furor. As though we’d curb surface transport because of one train crash, no matter how much money it cost or how many people it killed!
«So although, thank God, the bill did go through, we got a scare that showed us how overconfident we’d been. And we learned that before we let that bill be reported out of committee and voted on in the House, we’ve got to plan carefully and move cautiously. We’ve got to go in for horse trading on a big scale.
«And we’re going to have to wait, in any case, at least until after the recess and possibly even a month or so longer, until that rocket crash is less fresh in the minds of the representatives and their constituents. If, God forbid, there’s another rocket crash within the next couple of months, we’ll simply have to keep that bill in committee until we can try to jam it through on the closing day of the session. And it would be pretty much of a gamble even then.
«So if Klocky hasn’t made irrevocabl arrangements to start his leave on the first of March, it will be better if he waits a month and starts the first of April. Please ask him to, because I’ve got a selfish reason, too, for wanting it that way. The midsession recess this year will be the second two weeks in March, from the sixth through the twenty-first. If Klocky leaves the first of March you’ll be holding down his fob and I know you wouldn’t be able to take those two weeks off. But if he stays on through March, could you possibly, so soon (although it seems so long) after the week we had in Mexico City?
«I still have this damned headache, although it isn’t as bad now as when I wrote you last. Now that the excitement about the appropriation bill is temporarily over, I think I’ll go to a doctor about it; hope it isn’t migraine, although they’ve got pretty good techniques for taking care of that now so it’ll be nothing to worry about seriously even if that’s what it is.
«Do let me know as soon as you can about those weeks, so we’ll have time to make plans if you’ll be free.»
It was all right with Klockerman; he’d made arrangements and plans to start his leave the first of March, but it wasn’t too late for him to change them. I telephoned Ellen that evening and we had a long talk. We picked Havana, Cuba; we arranged to meet there on the sixth of March.
The narrow vote in the Senate and the delay necessary before the bill could be brought before the House didn’t worry me seriously at all. If anything they made me more optimistic. Things had been going too smoothly, too easily, I’d felt. A hitch or setback of some sort had been due and overdue. Now that there’d been one and it hadn’t been a fatal one, I felt better.
Lunch one Sunday with M’bassi, rabbit food for him and a steak for me. Afterwards since it was a sunny afternoon and unseasonably warm for February even in Los Angeles, we went to one of the nudist beaches to sun ourselves for an hour or two. I, to get an early start on the tan I wanted to acquire. M’bassi because he loved the sun and its warmth; God knows he didn’t need a tan.
We talked of lions. M’bassi brought them up.
«Yesterday afternoon,» he said, «I did a thing that I have never done before. I went to a zoo. I went there to look at a lion. I had not seen a lion for thirty years. I saw one.»
«What did it look like?»
«It looked like a lion. It looked very much like a lion. But for a while I suspected that it was not one, because it looked so different, so utterly different, from the lions I had seen as a boy in Africa, so utterly different from the lion that had saved my life by mauling me. Then I realized that the difference was not in the lion but in my perspective on the lion. It was an odd experience. I am glad that I went.»
«The difference in perspective,» I said, «could be due to either of two things. The difference between a free lion and a caged one, or the difference between the viewpoint of a boy and the viewpoint of a man. Which was it, M’bassi?»