But the children weren’t put off. That didn’t happen, at least. Bale’s fears, his theme-park notions of Heaven, his awry orientation and sense of the surreal didn’t send them into decline. And if they shared his misgivings about the place’s skewed geography, if it offended their sense of the orderly that Italy was a stone’s throw from Asia or that China shared a border with Mexico, they never let on. The mutualized climate didn’t bother them. That they didn’t have to deal with mountains or cross seas seemed not to trouble them. Nothing seemed to trouble them. They were not upset, or even perhaps aware, of the simple symbolism of their arrangements. They spent their lives like sober sailors.
And if they seemed less excited than they’d been, Eddy put it down not to boredom — they weren’t bored — but to something like the mildest loss of innocence, becoming acclimated perhaps to being in a new country, their jet lag smoothed over, their travelers’ up-front awe cleared up.
The fact was that they were concerned about getting to, or getting back to, Mary Cottle’s room.
Except for Eddy, who didn’t know about it, they were on their best behavior, the adults as well as the children, at the peak of their conscientiousness. Working, though not all of them knew this — Eddy, of course; Mary Cottle herself — as a group without even knowing it.
For the first time, buddy aligned with buddy without being reminded. Janet Order and Tony Word, Rena Morgan and Noah Cloth, Benny Maxine and Lydia Conscience formed into pairs. On line, they held each other’s hands tight as tickets. And Eddy Bale, touched, wondered what he’d been worrying about. They seemed sweet, totally without airs, like school children on field trips, their diseases oddly muffled by their patience and courtesy, something faintly disadvantaged about them still, long- suffering but not fatal, reduced to a sort of poverty, perhaps, some vaguely respectful, intimidated sense of the out-of-their- element clinging to them. They might have been on queue at the water fountain or waiting to board a bus. Whatever, they seemed subdued, serious as beggars making their manners. They didn’t so much as whisper among themselves, let alone bray out the loud public jokes Bale had half expected. That they were physically mismatched — Janet and Rena towered over their tiny charges — only managed to make them seem even more settled, almost married, as if the difference in their ages and heights signified some acute mutual acceptance, the way a wife guiding a blind husband seems somehow even more intimately connected to her partner than if the man were sighted. It was the same with Lydia Conscience and Benny Maxine. The underage, gorbelly girl, pregnant-seeming behind her great tumor, and the teenage boy looked like joined, hand-in-hand lovers, overwhelmed, perhaps, and certainly too young for their circumstances, but as bonded and content as youthful, dangerous killers on a spree.
Behind the children, watching over them, Nedra Carp and Colin stood beside each other while Mr. Moorhead went bustling from pair to pair, checking, but decorous and proper as a maître d’.
And, looking all of them over as they waited to be handed into the cars that would carry them up the seventeen stories of Spaceship Earth (Future World’s great landmark, a huge sphere, pocked as an immense golf ball), Eddy Bale felt a strange pride in the odd group. It’s because they’re taking it so well, he thought.