“None.”
“Any functional disability or decreased activity as a result of the disease?” Rachel and Jennie look slightly puzzled; he’s testing me to see if I understand the terminology.
“None.”
“Any change in appearance over the last few years in the first skin areas to be affected? Changes in colour or tissue density or size of the thickened ridges?”
“None.”
“Any other kinds of changes I haven’t thought to mention?”
“None.”
He nods and rocks back on his heels. He’s cool, for someone who is going to develop non-dysfunctional ropes of disease himself. I wait to see if he’s going to tell me why he’s really here. The silence lengthens. Finally McHabe says, “You were a CPA,” at the same time that Rachel says, “Anyone want a glass of ’ade?”
McHabe accepts gladly. The two girls, relieved to be in motion, busy themselves pumping cold water, crushing canned peaches, mixing the ’ade in a brown plastic pitcher with a deep wart on one side where it once touched the hot stove.
“Yes,” I say to McHabe, “I was a CPA. What about it?”
“They’re outlawed now.”
“CPAs? Why? Staunch pillars of the establishment,” I say, and realize how long it’s been since I used words like that. They taste metallic, like old tin.
“Not anymore. IRS does all tax computations and sends every household a customized bill. The calculations on how they reach your particular customized figure is classified. To prevent foreign enemies from guessing at revenue available for defense.”
“Ah.”
“My uncle was a CPA.”
“What is he now?”
“Not a CPA,” McHabe says. He doesn’t smile. Jennie hands glasses of ’ade to me and then to McHabe, and then he does smile. Jennie drops her lashes and a little colour steals into her cheeks. Something moves behind McHabe’s eyes. But it’s not like Peter; not at all like Peter.
I glance at Rachel. She doesn’t seem to have noticed anything. She isn’t jealous, or worried, or hurt. I relax a little.
McHabe says to me. “You also published that artical.”
“How do you happen to know that?”
Again he doesn’t answer me. “It’s an unusual combination of abilities, accounting and history writing.”
“I suppose so,” I say, without interest. It was so long ago. Rachel says to McHabe, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Outside, do you have medicines that will cure wood of termites?”
Her face is deadly serious. McHabe doesn’t grin, and I admit—reluctantly—that he is likable. He answers her courteously. “We don’t cure the wood, we do away with the termites. The best way is to build with wood saturated with creosote, a chemical they don’t like, so that they don’t get into the wood in the first place. But there must be chemicals that will kill them after they’re already there. I’ll ask around and try to bring you something on my next trip Inside.”
His next trip Inside. He drops this bombshell as if easy passage In and Out were a given. Rachel’s and Jennie’s eyes grow wide; they both look at me. McHabe does, too, and I see that his look is a cool scrutiny, an appraisal of my reaction. He expects me to ask for details, or maybe even—it’s been a long time since I thought in these terms, and it’s an effort—to become angry at him for lying. But I don’t know whether or not he’s lying, and at any rate, what does it matter? A few people from Outside coming into the colony—how could it affect us? There won’t be large immigration, and no emigration at all.
I say quietly, “Why are you really here, Dr. McHabe?”
“I told you, Mrs. Pratt. To measure the progress of the disease.” I say nothing. He adds, “Maybe you’d like to hear more about how it is now Outside.”
“Not especially.”
“Why not?”
I shrug. “They leave us alone.”
He weighs me with his eyes. Jennie says timidly, “I’d like to hear more about Outside.” Before Rachel can add “Me, too,” the door flings violently open and Mamie backs into the room, screaming into the hall behind her.
“And don’t ever come back! If you think I’d ever let you touch me again after screwing that… that… I hope she’s got a diseased twat and you get it on your—” She sees McHabe and breaks off, her whole body jerking in rage. A soft answer from the hall, the words unintelligible from my chair by the fire, makes her gasp and turn even redder. She slams the door, bursts into tears, and runs into her bedroom, slamming that door as well.
Rachel stands up. “Let me, honey,” I say, but before I can rise—my arthritis is much better—Rachel disappears into her mother’s room. The kitchen rings with embarrassed silence.
Tom McHabe rises to leave. “Sit down, Doctor,” I say, hoping, I think, that if he remains Mamie will restrain her hysterics—maybe—and Rachel will emerge sooner from her mother’s room.
McHabe looks undecided. Then Jennie says, “Yes, please stay. And would you tell us—” I see her awkwardness, her desire to not sound stupid “—about how people do Outside?”
He does. Looking at Jennie but meaning me, he talks about the latest version of martial law, about the failure of the National Guard to control protestors against the South American war until they actually reached the edge of the White House electro-wired zone; about the growing power of the Fundamentalist underground that the other undergrounds—he uses the plural—call “the God gang.” He tells us about the industries losing out steadily to Korean and Chinese competitors, the leaping unemployment rate, the ethnic backlash, the cities in flames. Miami. New York. Los Angeles—these had been rioting for years. Now it’s Portland, St. Louis, Atlanta, Phoenix. Grand Rapids burning. It’s hard to picture.
I say, “As far as I can tell, donations to our repositories haven’t fallen off.”
He looks at me again with that shrewd scrutiny, weighing something I can’t see, then touches the edge of the stove with one boot. The boot, I notice, is almost as old and scarred as one of ours. “Korean-made stove. They make nearly all the donations now. Public relations. Even a lot of martial-law Congressmen had relatives interred, although they won’t admit it now. The Asians cut deals warding off complete protectionism, although of course your donations are only a small part of that. But just about everything you get Inside is Chink or Splat.” He uses the words casually, this courteous young man giving me the news from such a liberal slant, and that tells me more about the Outside than all his bulletins and summaries.
Jennie says haltingly, “I saw… I think it was an Asian man. Yesterday.”
“Where?” I say sharply. Very few Asian Americans contract the disease; something else no one understands. There are none in our colony.
“At the Rim. One of the guards. Two other men were kicking him and yelling names at him—we couldn’t hear too clearly over the intercom boxes.”
“We? You and Rachel? What were you two doing at the Rim?” I say, and heard my own tone. The Rim, a wide empty strip of land, is electro-mined and barb-wired to keep us communicables Inside. The Rim is surrounded by miles of defoliated and disinfected land, poisoned by preventive chemicals, but even so it’s patrolled by unwilling soldiers who communicate with the Inside by intercoms set up every half-mile on both sides of the barbed wire. When the colony used to have a fight or a rape or—once, in the early years—a murder, it happened on the Rim. When the hateful and the hating came to hurt us because before the elecro-wiring and barbed wire we were easy targets and no police would follow them Inside, the soldiers, and sometimes our men as well, stopped them at the Rim. Our dead are buried near the Rim. And Rachel and Jennie, dear gods, at the Rim…
“We went to ask the guards over the intercom boxes if they knew how to stop termites,” Jennie says logically. “After all, their work is to stop things, germs and things. We thought they might be able to tell us how to stop termites. We thought they might have special training in it.”