‘We sank a couple, didn’t we, Dad? Christmas cheer and all that. You two should have come along.’
It occurred to me then why Jim was coming at everything from such an odd angle, exhilarated and aggressive. He was nervous. And realising this, I realised why. He was covering for Bob. Bob had once again failed to visit Betty. It must have been obvious to Fel as welclass="underline" she felt for my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze.
‘When I come back,’ Jim said, ‘I expect Mum’ll be… well, I hope—’ He hesitated, finding himself suddenly on dangerous ground, and something else occurred to me: how strange all this must seem to him! He had spent most of the last year, prior to basic training with the Space Force, on a peacekeeping tour of Sri Lanka. Of all of us, he had the least understanding of what Betty was going through, and the least notion why anyone could have thought it was a good idea.
‘Well, of course,’ Stella exclaimed. She laughed. ‘Everything’ll be different in a year.’
As though her assurances were a cue, Georgy Chernoy entered the living room.
‘George! Where have you been?’ (Only Stella ever anglicised Georgy Chernoy’s name. I suppose it was a sort of endearment. I wondered what he thought of it.)
Georgy strode up to Stella’s chair and kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I could not get away.’ He took in the table, his daughter, me. ‘You must be Robert,’ he said to my father. ‘And James.’
Jim stood up, none too steadily, to shake his hand.
‘Congratulations.’ Georgy pumped his hand. ‘When do you fly out?’
‘But I only just got here,’ Jim shot back, and over laughter, ‘Tomorrow morning.’
‘And the big launch?’
Jim grinned. ‘I’d be the last to know that.’
‘Jim’s been telling us how their ship’s drive works,’ Fel said.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Did you know that the bomb-delivery mechanism is based on a Vimto dispensing machine?’
‘Yes. I did.’ This flatly, and without humour. I wondered why Georgy was trying to shut his daughter down. To Jim: ‘Well, I wish you luck with it.’
Try as he might – and I was not convinced that he was trying especially hard – Georgy Chernoy could not let go the noblesse oblige of his people, for whom such pyrotechnic adventures were, according to their conceit, quite superfluous.
‘There’s something splendidly muscular about this effort, isn’t there? Yes?’ He fished around the table for signs of assent and, ignoring their absence: ‘Here we are – in the Bund, I mean – setting off firecrackers from high-altitude balloons, spreading sails to catch the sunlight, spitting ions out the back of flameless rockets, sending up fist-sized microsatellites on pencil-thin laser beams. And here you are, shipping ruddy great pipes halfway around the Earth and threatening to nuke an entire desert so as to get a frigate into orbit.’
‘The point of space,’ said Jim, ‘is being there. Don’t you agree? No, you don’t,’ he continued, not letting Georgy respond. ‘You’d rather send up machines. Each to his own, but I want to see the Earth spread below me with my own eyes.’
Georgy cocked his head: a predator sizing up prey. ‘What a pity you only have one pair.’
Stella shot me a look. She didn’t like the combative turn the conversation was taking. But what was I supposed to do? Get the two sides of this dinner to meekly agree on their mutual incomprehension? I said: ‘I suppose, having given birth to the dead in Catford, it’s a relatively small step to give birth to them on the Moon.’
Georgy’s smile tightened.
‘That is the idea, isn’t it?’
‘It’s certainly a possibility,’ he conceded.
‘Already you’re populating other planets!’
He did not look at me. ‘Quite why everyone is so fascinated by the population curves of the Jewish race, I’ll never know. It has always been like this. As if we’re a sort of human isotope. Don’t let them reach critical mass!’
His angry defensiveness astounded me. Why now, here, among friends, was Georgy referring to his community by the old, unhappy name? The whole point of the Bund had been to repudiate its tribal past. Of all the bizarre figures forged in the inferno of the Great War, the Bundist – thoroughly modern, rigidly materialist, crushing the rabbi under his proletarian heel – had surely been the most compelling, the most exhilarating.
‘If it was critical mass we were afraid of,’ I said, ‘I think we’d look at London and declare that battle lost for good and all.’
By Georgy’s expression, I could see that he still thought I was attacking him. Fel had let go of my hand. Perhaps she thought so, too. I did not care. My blood was up. I knew what he thought I was. All I could do was answer fire with fire. ‘When you’ve finished snatching racial failure from the jaws of political victory,’ I said, ‘you might just possibly see that I was paying you a compliment. Whatever the Space Force accomplishes – men in space, men on the Moon, men on Mars – it’s obvious to me that you will still be first to settle these places. That is, I assume, what your machines are for? To build for your arrival?’
‘First to settle?’ This from Bob, for whom none of my oh-so-important opinions had made any sense at all. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I think Jim and his mates might surprise you there, Mr Chernoy.’
Chernoy did not miss a beat. ‘How very proud you must be of your son,’ he said, reaching across the table.
Bob, blinking, rose as if hypnotised to shake Georgy’s hand.
I glanced at my watch. ‘Stella?’
Stella and I served the food while Jim, in the lull occasioned by my absence – what on earth had I been thinking? – held forth about his training. Bob, at least a little tight and with a second bottle of beer on the go, listened intently. Georgy had relaxed at last, though as usual his open, warm smile gave absolutely nothing away. I couldn’t catch Fel’s eye to see what she thought of my altercation with her father. It hadn’t been my finest hour, but of one thing I was sure: he had started it.
‘I don’t know how we’re going to fill the days of our voyage, exactly,’ Jim admitted. ‘There won’t be much to master about the ship itself: it’s the size of a frigate, as you say, and a damn-sight easier to sail.’
‘And where will you go?’ Georgy asked. ‘All being well.’
More rearrangements of the glassware: ‘So you see, even Jupiter is not outside our range.’
Georgy looked impressed. ‘And do you have special suits prepared for Mars?’
Jim blinked, blindsided by a question so specific and so very much off the point. ‘I’d be the last to know about details like that,’ he said again.
‘Only I’ve heard it said that it’s going to be easier to run on the Martian surface than it is to walk,’ Georgy said. ‘So I suppose the designers are going to have to think about that.’
You could see Jim taking confidence from the question. You could see him thinking: Here we are, two men together, thrashing out the technical detail. ‘True enough,’ he said. ‘Your power-to-weight ratio is different in lower gravity – more like a child’s. The smaller you are, the stronger you are relative to your size. And that’s why little kids are always running about from place to place. It’s easier for them to run than walk.’
I remembered the strange combination of awkward slowness and pell-mell speed exhibited by Chernoy’s Processed infants: old souls in bodies adapted to a more accommodating physics.
Before I could put any of that into words, however, Georgy once again launched himself into wild territory. ‘A lot of little kids running about on the Red Planet!’ he cried.