Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along after the Bomb

VII

In front of the pharmacy in Point Reyes Station, at nine in the morning, Eldon Blaine waited. Under his arm he held tightly his worn briefcase tied together with string. Meanwhile, inside the building, the pharmacist removed chains and struggled with the metal doors; Eldon listened to the sound and felt impatience.

“Just a minute,” the pharmacist called, his voice muffled. As he at last got the doors open he apologized, “This was formerly the back end of a truck. You have to use both your hands and feet to make it work. Come on in, mister.” He held the high door aside, and Eldon saw into the dark interior of the pharmacy, with its unlit electric light bulb which hung from the ceiling by an ancient cord.

“What I’m here for,” Eldon said rapidly, “is a wide-spectrum antibiotic, the kind used in clearing up a respiratory infection.” He made his need sound casual; he did not tell the pharmacist how many towns in Northern California he had visited in the last few days, walking and hitching rides, nor did he mention how sick his daughter was. It would only jack up the price asked, he knew. And anyhow he did not see much actual stock, here. Probably the man did not have it.

Eying him, the pharmacist said, “I don’t see anything with you; what do you have in exchange, assuming I have what you’re after?” In a nervous manner he smoothed his thinning gray hair back; he was an elderly, small man, and it was obvious that he suspected Eldon of being a napper. Probably he suspected everyone.

Eldon said, “Where I come from I’m known as the glasses man.” Unzipping his briefcase, he showed the pharmacist the rows of intact and nearly-intact lenses, frames, and lenses in frames, scavenged from all over the Bay Area, especially from the great deposits near Oakland. “I can compensate almost any eye defect,” he said. “I’ve got a fine variety, here. What are you, near– or far-sighted or astigmatic? I can fix you up in ten minutes, by changing around a lens or two.”

“Far-sighted,” the pharmacist said slowly, “but I don’t think I have what gou want.” He looked at the rows of glasses longingly.

With anger, Eldon said, “Then why didn’t you say so right off, so I can go on? I want to make Petaluma today; there’s a lot of drugstores there—all I have to do is find a hay truck going that way.”

“Couldn’t you trade me a pair of glasses for something else?” the pharmacist asked plaintively, following after him as he started away. “I got a valuable heart medicine, quinidine gluconate; you could most likely trade it for what you want. Nobody else in Marin County has quinidine gluconate but me.”

“Is there a doctor around here?” Eldon said, pausing at the edge of the weed-infested county road with its several stores and houses.

“Yes,” the pharmacist said, with a nod of pride. “Doctor Stockstill; he migrated here several years ago. But he doesn’t have any drugs. Just me.”

Briefcase under his arm, Eldon Blaine walked on along the county road, listening hopefully for the pop-popping noise of the wood-burning truck motor rising out of the stillness of the early-morning California countryside. But the sound faded. The truck, alas, was going the other way.

This region, directly north of San Francisco, had once been owned by a few wealthy dairy ranchers; cows had cropped in these fields, but that was gone now, along with the meat-animals, the steer and sheep. As everyone knew, an acre of land could function better as a source of grains or vegetables. Around him now he saw closely-planted rows of corn, an early-ripening hybrid, and between the rows, great hairy squash plants on which odd yellow squash like bowling balls grew. This was an unusual eastern squash which could be eaten skin and seeds and all; once it had been disdained in California valleys… but that was changed, now.

Ahead, a little group of children ran across the littleused road on their way to school; Eldon Blaine saw their tattered books and lunch pails, heard thcir voices, thought to himself how calming this was, other children well and busy, unlike his own child. If Gwen died, others would replace her. He accepted that unemotionally. One learned how. One had to.

The school, off to the right in the saddle of two hills: most of it the remains of a single-story modern building, put up no doubt just before the war by ambitious, public-spirited citizens who had bonded themselves into a decade of indebtedness without guessing that they would not live to make payment. Thus they had, without intending it, gotten their grammar school free.

Its windows made him laugh. Salvaged from every var iety of old rural building, the windows were first tiny, then huge, with ornate boards holding them in place. Of course the original windows had been blown instantly out. Glass, he thought. So rare these days… if you own glass in any form you are rich. He gripped his briefcase tighter as he walked.

Several of the children, seeing a strange man, stopped to peer at him with anxiety augmented by curiosity. He grinned at them, wondering to himself what they were studying and what teachers they had. An ancient senile old lady, drawn out of retirement, to sit once more behind a desk? A local man who happened to hold a college degree? Or most likely some of the mothers themselves, banded together, using a precious annload of books from the local library.

A voice from behind him called; it was a woman, and as he turned he heard the squeak-squeak of a bicycle. “Are you the glasses man?” she called again, severe and yet attractive, with dark hair, wearing a man’s cotton shirt and jeans, pedaling along the road after him, bouncing up and down with each rut. “Please stop. I was talldng to Fred Quinn our druggist just now and he said you were by.” She reached him, stopped her bicycle, panting for breath. “There hasn’t been a glasses man by here in months; why don’t you come oftener?”

Eldon Blaine said, “I’m not here selling; I’m here trying to pick up some antibiotics.” He felt irritated. “I have to get to Petaluma,” he said, and then he realized that he was gazing at her bike with envy; he knew it showed on his face.

“We can get them for you,” the woman said. She was older than he had first thought; her face was lined and a little dark, and he guessed that she was almost forty. “I’m on the Planning Committee for everyone, here in West Marin; I know we can scare up what you need, if you’ll just come back with me and wait. Give us two hours. We need several pairs… I’m not going to let you go.” Her voice was finn, not coaxing.

“You’re not Mrs. Raub, are you?” Eldon Blaine asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You recognized me—how?”

He said, “I’m from the Bolinas area; we know all about what you’re doing up here. I wish we had someone like you on our Committee.” He felt a little afraid of her. Mrs. Raub always got her own way, he had heard. She and Larry Raub had organized West Main after the Cooling-off; before, in the old days, she had not amounted to anything and the Emergency had given her her chance, as it had many people, to show what she was really made of.

As they walked back together, Mrs. Raub said, “Who are the antibiotics for? Not yourself; you look perfectly healthy to me.”

“My little girl is dying,” he said.

She did not waste sympathetic words; there were none left in the world, any more-she merely nodded. “Infectious hepatitis?” she asked. “How’s your water supply? Do you have a chlorinator? If not—”

“No, it’s like strep throat,” he said.

“We heard from the satellite last night that some German drug firms are in operation again, and so if we’re lucky we’ll be seeing German drugs back on the market, at least on the East Coast.”

“You get the satellite?” Excitedly, he said, “Our radio went dead, and our handy is down somewhere near South San Francisco, scavenging for refrigeration parts and won’t be back probably for another month. Tell me; what’s he reading now? The last time we picked him up, it was so darn long ago—he was on Pascal’s Provincial Letters.”

Mrs. Raub said, “Dangerfield is now reading Of Human Bondage.”

“Isn’t that about that fellow who couldn’t shake off that girl he met?” Eldon said. “I think I remember it from the previous time he rea4 it, several years ago. She kept coming back into his life. Didn’t she finally ruin his life, in the end?”

“I don’t know; I’m afraid we didn’t pick it up the previous time.”

“That Dangerfield is really a great disc jockey,” Eldon said, “the best I’ve ever heard even before the Emergency. I mean, we never miss him; we generally get a turnout of two hundred people every night at our fire station. I think one of us could fix that damn radio, but our Committee ruled that we had to let it alone and wait until the handy’s back. If he ever is… the last one disappeared on a scavenging trip.”

Mrs. Raub said, “Now perhaps your community understands the need of standby equipment, which I’ve always said is essential.”

“Could—we send a representative up to listen with your group and report back to us?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Raub said. “But—”

“It wouldn’t be the same,” he agreed. “It’s not—” He gestured. What was it about Dangerfield, sitting up there above them in the satellite as it passed over them each day? Contact with the world… Dangerfield looked down and saw everything, the rebuilding, all the changes both good and bad; he monitored every broadcast, recording and preserving and then playing back, so that through him they were joined.

In his mind, the familiar voice now gone so long from their community—he could summon it still, hear the rich low chuckle, the earnest tones, the intimacy, and never anything phony. No slogans, no Fourth-of-July expostulations, none of the stuff that had gotten them all where they were now.

Once he had heard Dangerfield say, “Want to know the real reason I wasn’t in the war? Why they carefully shot me off into space a little bit in advance? They knew better than to give me a gun… I would have shot an officer.” And he had chuckled, making it a joke; but it was true, what he said, everything he told them was true, even when it was made funny. Dangerfield hadn’t been politically reliable, and yet now he sat up above them passing over their heads year in, year out. And he was a man they believed.

Set on the side of a ridge, the Raub house overlooked West Marin County, with its vegetable fields and irrigation ditches, an occasional goat staked out, and of course the horses; standing at the living room window, Eldon Blaine saw below him, near a farmhouse, a great Percheron which no doubt pulled a plow… pulled, too, an engineless automobile along the road to Sonoma County when it was time to pick up supplies.

He saw now a horse-car moving along the county road; it would have picked him up if Mrs. Raub hadn’t found him first, and he would have soon reached Petaluma.

Down the hillside below him pedaled Mrs. Raub on her way to find him his antibiotics; to his amazement she had left him alone in her house, free to nap everything in sight, and now he turned to see what there was. Chairs, books, in the kitchen, food and even a bottle of wine, clothes in all the closets—he roamed about the house, savoring everything; it was almost like before the war, except that of course the useless electrical appliances had been thrown out long ago.

Through the back windows of the house he saw the green wooden side of a large water-storage tank. The Raubs, he realized, had their own supply of water. Going outside he saw a clear, untainted stream.

At the stream a kind of contraption lurked, like a cart on wheels. He stared at it; extensions from it were busily filling buckets with water. In the center of it sat a man with no arms or legs. The man nodded his head as if conducting music, and the machinery around him responded. It was a phocomelus, Eldon realized, mounted on his phocomobile, his combination cart and manual grippers which served as mechanical substitutes for his missing limbs. What was he doing, stealing the Raubs’ water?

“Hey,” Eldon said.

At once the phocomelus turned his head; his eyes blazed at Eldon in alarm, and then something whacked into Eldon’s middle—he was thrown back, and as he wobbled and struggled to regain his balance he discovered that his arms were pinned at his sides. A wire mesh had whipped out at him from the phocomobile, had fastened in place. The phocomelus’ means of defense.

“Who are you?” the phocomelus said, stammering in his wary eagerness to know. “You don’t live around here; I don’t know you.”

“I’m from Bolinas,” Eldon said. The metal mesh crushed in until he gasped. “I’m the glasses man. Mrs. Raub, she told me to wait here.”

Now the mesh seemed to ease. “I can’t take chances,” the phocomelus said. “I won’t let you go until June Raub comes back.” The buckets once more began dipping in the water; they filled methodically until the tank lashed to the phocomobile was slopping over.

“Are you supposed to be doing that?” Eldon asked. “Taking water from the Raubs’ stream?”

“I’ve got a right,” the phocomelus said. “I give back more than I take, to everybody around here.”

“Let me go,” Eldon said. “I’m just trying to get medicine for my kid; she’s dying.”

“‘My kid, she’s dying,’ “ the phocomelus mimicked, picking up the quality of his voice with startling accuracy. He rolled away from the stream, now, closer to Eldon. The ‘mobile gleamed; all its parts were new-looking and shiny. It was one of the best-made mechanical constructions that Eldon Blaine had ever seen.

“Let me go,” Eldon said, “and I’ll give you a pair of glasses free. Any pair I have.”

“My eyes are perfect,” the phocomelus said. “Everything about me is perfect. Parts are missing, but I don’t need them; I can do better without them. I can get down this hill faster than you, for instance.”

“Who built your ‘mobile?” Eldon asked. Surely in seven years it would have become tarnished and partly broken, like everything else.

“I built it,” the phocomelus said.

“How can you build your own ‘mobile? That’s a contradiction.”

“I used to be body-wired. Now I’m brain-wired; I did that myself, too. I’m the handy, up here. Those old extensors the Government built befQre the war—they weren’t even as good as the flesh things, like you have.” The phocomelus grimaced. He had a thin, flexible face, with a sharp nose and extremely white teeth, a face ideal for the emotion which he now showed Eldon Blaine.

“Dangerfield says that the handies are the most valuable people in the world,” Eldon said. “He declared Worldwide Handyman Week, one time we were listening, and he named different handies who were especially well-known. What’s your name? Maybe he mentioned you.”

“Hoppy Harrington,” the phocomelus said. “But I know he didn’t mention me because I keep myself in the background, still; it isn’t time for me to make my name in the world, as I’m going to be doing. I let the local people see a little of what I can do, but they’re supposed to be quiet about it.”

“Sure they’d be quiet,” Eldon said. “They don’t want to lose you. We’re missing our handy, right now, and we really feel it. Could you take on the Bolinas area for a little while, do you think? We’ve got plenty to trade you. In the Emergency hardly anybody got over the mountain to invade us, so we’re relatively untouched.”

“I’ve been down there to Bolinas,” Happy Harrington said.

“In fact I’ve traveled all around, even as far inland as Sapramento. Nobody has seen what I’ve seen; I can cover fifty miles a day in my ‘mobile.” His lean face twitched and then he stammered., “I wouldn’t go back to Bolinas because there are sea monsters in the ocean, there.”

“Who says so?” Eldon demanded. “That’s just superstition—tell me who said that about our community.”

“I think it was Dangerfield.”

“No, he couldn’t,” Eldon said. “He can be relied on, he wouldn’t peddle such trash as that. I never once heard him tell a superstition on any of his programs. Maybe he was kidding; I bet he was kidding and you took him seriously.”

“The hydrogen bombs woke up the sea monsters,” floppy said, “From their slumber in the depths.” He nodded earnestly.

“You come and see our community,” Eldon said. “We’re orderly and advanced, a lot more so than any city. We even have streetlights going again, four of them for an hour in the evening. I’m surprised a handy would believe such superstition.”

The phocomelus looked chagrined. “You never can be sure,” he murmured. “I guess maybe it wasn’t Dangerfield I heard it from.”

Below them, on the ascending road, a horse moved; the sound of its hoofs reached them and they both turned. A big fleshy man with a red face came riding up and up, toward them, peering at them. As he rode he called, “Glasses man! Is that you?”

“Yes,” Eldon said, as the horse veered into the grassextinguished driveway of the Raub house. “You have the antibiotics, mister?”

“June Raub will bring them,” the big florid man said, reining his horse to a stop. “Glasses man, let’s see what you have. I m near-sighted but I also have an acute astigmatism in my left eye; can you help me?” He approached on foot, still peering.

“I can’t fit you,” Eldon said, “because Hoppy Harrington has me tied up.”

“For God’s sake, Happy,” the big florid man said with agitation. “Let the glasses man go so he can fit me; I’ve been waiting months and I don’t mean to wait any longer.”

“Okay, Leroy,” Happy Harrington said sullenly. And, from around Eldon, the metal mesh uncoiled and then slithered back across the ground to the waiting phocomelus in the center of his shiny, intricate ‘mobile,

As the satellite passed over the Chicago area its winglike extended sensors picked up a flea signal, and in his earphones Walter Dangerfield heard the faint, distant, hollowed-out voice from below.

“… and please play ‘Walzing Matilda,’ a lot of us like that. Arid play ‘The Woodpecker Song.’ And—” The flea signal faded out, and he head only static. It had definitely not been a laser beam, he thought to himself archly.

Into his microphone, Dangerfield said, “Well, friends, we have a request here for ‘Walzing Matilda.’ “ He reached to snap a switch at the controls of a tape transport. “The great bass-baritone Peter Dawson—which is also the name of a very good branch of Sctoch—in ‘Walzing Matilda.’ “ From well-worn memory he selected the correct reel of tape, and in a moment it was on the transport, turning.

As the music played, Walt Dangerfield tuned his receiving equipment, hoping once more to pick up the same flea signal. However, instead he found himself party to a twoway transmission between military units involved in police action somewhere in upstate Illinois. Their brisk chatter interested him, and he listened until the end of the music.

“Lots of luck to you boys in uniform,” he said into the microphone, then. “Catch those boodle-burners and bless you all.” He chuckled, because if ever a human being had immunity from retaliation, it was he. No one on Earth could reach him—it had been attempted six times since the Emergency, with no success. “Catch those bad guys… or should I say catch those good guys. Say, who are the good guys, these days?” His receiving equipment had picked up, in the last few weeks, a number of complaints about Army brutality. “Now let me tell you something, boys,” he said smoothly. “Watch out for those squirrel rifles; that’s all.” He began hunting through the satellite’s tape library for the recording of “The Woodpecker Song.” “That’s all, brother,” he said, and put on the tape.

Below him the world was in darkness, its night side turned his way; yet already he could see the rim of day appearing on the edge, and soon he would be passing into that once more. Lights here and there glowed like holes poked in the surface of the planet which he had left seven years ago– left for another purpose, another goal entirely. A much more noble one.

His was not the sole satellite still circling Earth, but it was the sole one with life aboard. Everyone else had long since perished. But they had not been outfitted as he and Lydia had been, f or a decade of life on another world. He was lucky: besides food and water and air he had a million miles of video and audio tape to keep him amused. And now, with it, he kept them amused, the remnants of the civilization which had shot him up here in the first place. They had botched the job of getting him to Mars– fortunately for them. Their failure had paid them vital dividends ever since.

“Hoode hoode hoo,” Walt Dangerfield chanted into his microphone, using the transmitter which should have carried his voice back from millions of miles, not merely a couple hundred. “Things you can do with the timer out of an old R.C.A. washer-dryer combination. This item arrives from a handy in the Geneva area; thanks to you, Georg Schilper—I know everyone will be pleased to hear you give this timely tip in your own words.” He played into his transmitter the tape recording of the handyman himself speaking; the entire Great Lakes region of the United States would now know Georg Schilper’s bit of lore, and would no doubt wisely apply it at once. The world hungered for the knowledge tucked away in pockets here and there, knowledge which—without Dangerfield—would be confined to its point of origin, perhaps forever.

After the tape of Georg Schilper he put on his canned reading from Of Human Bondage and rose stiffly from his seat.

There was a pain in his chest which worried him; it had appeared one day, located beneath his breastbone, and now for the hundredth time he got down one of the microfilms of medical information and began scanning the section dealing with the heart. Does it feel like the heel of a hand squeezing my breath out of me? he asked himself. Someone pushing down with all his weight? It was difficult to recall what “weight” felt like in the first place. Or does it merely burn. .. and if so, when? Before meals or alter?

Last week he had made contact with a hospital in Tokyo, had described his symptoms. The doctors were not sure what to tell him. What you need, they had said, is an electrocardiogram, but how could he give himself a test like that up here? How could anyone, any more? The Japanese doctors Were living in the past, or else there had been more of a revival in Japan than he realized; than anyone realized.

Amazing, he thought suddenly, that I’ve survived so long. It did not seem long, though, because his time-sense had become faulty. And he was a busy man; at this moment, six of his tape recorders monitored six much-used frequencies, and before the reading from the Maugham book had ended he would be obliged to play them back. They might contain nothing or they might contain hours of meaningful talk. One never knew. If only, he thought, I had been able to make use of the high-speed transmission… but the proper decoders were no longer in existence, below. Hours could have been compressed into seconds, and he could have given each area in turn a complete account. As it was, he had to dole it out in small clusters, with much repetition. Sometimes it took months to read through a single novel, this way.

But at least he had been able to lower the frequency on which the satellite’s transmitter broadcast to a band which the people below could receive on a common AM radio. That had been his one big achievement; that, by itself, had made him into what he was.

The reading of the Maugham book ended, then automatically restarted itself; it droned from the start once more for the next area below. Walt Dangerfield ignored it and continued to consult his medical reference microfilms. I think it’s only spasms of the pyloric valve, he decided. If I had phenobarbital here… but it had been used up several years ago; his wife, in her last great suicidal depression, had consumed it all—consumed it and then taken her life anyhow. It had been the abrupt silence of the Soviet space station, oddly enough, that had started her depression; up until then she had believed that they would all be reached and brought safely back down to the surface. The Russians have starved to death, all ten of them, but no one had foreseen it because they had kept up their duty-oriented line of scientific patter right into the last few hours.

“Hoode hoode hoo,” Dangerfield said to himself as he read about the pyloric valve and its spasms. “Folks,” he murmured. “I have this funny pain brought on by over-indulgence… what I need is four-way relief, don’t you agree?” He snapped on his microphone, cutting out the tape-in-progress. “Remember those old ads?” he asked his darkened, unseen audience below. “Before the war—let’s see, how did they go? Are you building more H-bombs but enjoying it less?” He chuckled. “Has thermonuclear war got you down? New York, can you pick me up, yet? I want every one of you within the reach of my voice, all sixty-five of you, to quick light up a match so I’ll know you’re there.”

In his earphones a loud signal came in. “Dangerfield, this is the New York Port Authority; can you give us any idea of the weather?”

“Oh,” Dangerfield said, “we’ve got fine weather coming. You can put out to sea in those little boats and catch those little radioactive fish; nothing to worry about.”

Another voice, fainter, came in now. “Mr. Dangerfield, could you possibly please play some of those opera arias you have? We’d especially appreciate ‘Thy Tiny Hand is Frozen’ from La Boheme.”

“Heck, I can sing that,” Dangerfield said, reaching for the tape as he hummed tenorishly into the microphone.

Returning to Bolinas that night, Eldon Blaine fed the first of the antibiotics to his child and then quickly drew his wife aside. “Listen, they have a top-notch handy up in West Marin which they’ve been keeping quiet about, and only twenty miles from here. I think we should send a delegation up there to nap him and bring him down here.” He added, “He’s a phoce and you should see the ‘mobile he built for himself; none of the handies we’ve had could do anything half that good.” Putting his wool jacket back on he went to the door of their room. “I’m going to ask the Committee to vote on it.”

“But our ordinance against funny people,” Patricia protested. “And Mrs. Wallace is Chairman of the Committee this month; you know how she feels, she’d never let any more phoces come here and settle. I mean, we have four as it is and she’s always complaining about them.”

“That ordinance refers only to funny people who could become a financial burden to the community,” Eldon said, “I ought to know; I helped draft it. Hoppy Harrington is no burden; he’s an asset—the ordinance doesn’t cover him, and I’m going to stand up to Mrs, Wallace and fight it out. I know I can get official permission; I’ve got it all worked Out how we’ll do the napping. They invited us to come up to their area and listen to the satellite, and we’ll do that; we’ll show up but not just to listen to Dangerfield. While they’re involved in that we’ll nap Happy; we’ll put his phocomobile out of action and haul him down here, and they’ll never know what happened. Finders keepers, losers weepers. And our police force will protect us.”

Patricia said, “I’m scared of phoces. They have peculiar powers, not natural ones; everybody knows it. He probably built his ‘mobile by means of magic.”

Laughing with derision, Eldon Blaine said, “So much the better. Maybe that’s what we need: magic spells, a community magician. I’m all for it.”

“I’m going to see how Gwen is,” Patricia said, starting toward the screened-off portion of the room where their child lay on her cot. “I won’t have any pant of this; I think it’s dreadful, what you’re doing.”

Eldon Blaine stepped from the room, out into the night darkness. In a moment he was striding down the path toward the Wallaces’ house.

As the citizens of West Marin County one by one entered the Foresters’ Hall and seated themselves, June Raub adjusted the variable condenser of the twelve-volt car radio and noticed that once again Hoppy Harrington had not shown up to hear the satellite. What was it he had said? “I don’t like to listen to sick people.” A strange thing to say, she thought to herself.

From the speaker of the radio static issued and then first faint beepings from the satellite. In a few more minutes they would be picking it up clearly… unless the wet-cell battery powering the radio chose to give out again, as it had briefly the other day.

The rows of seated people listened attentively as the initial words from Dangerfield began to emerge from the static.”… lice-type typhus is said to be breaking out in Washington up to the Canadian border,” Dangerfield was saying. “So stay away from there, my friends. If this report is true it’s a very bad sign indeed. Also, a report from Portland, Oregon, more on the cheerful side. Two ships have arrived from the Orient. That’s welcome news, isn’t it? Two big freighters, just plain packed with manufactured articles from little factories in Japan and China, according to what I hear.”

The listening roomful of people stirred with excitement.

“And here’s a household tip from a food consultant in Hawaii,” Dangerfield said, but now his voice faded out; once more the listening people heard only static. June Raub turned up the volume, but it did no good. Disappointment showed clearly on all the faces in the room.

If Hoppy were here, she thought, he could tune it so much better than I can. Feeling nervous, she looked to her husband for support.

“Weather conditions,” he said, from where he sat in the first row of chairs. “We just have to be patient.”

But several people were glaring at her with hostility, as if it was her fault that the satellite had faded out. She made a gesture of helplessness.

The door of the Foresters’ Hall opened and three men awkwardly entered. Two were strangers to her and the third was the glasses man. Ill-at-ease, they searched for seats, while everyone in the room turned to watch.

“Who are you fellows?” Mr. Spaulding, who operated the feed barn, said to them. “Did anyone say you could come in here?”

June Raub said, “I invited this delegation from Bolinas to make the trip up here and listen with us; their radio set is not working.”

“Shbh,” several people said, because once again the voice from the satellite could be heard.

“… anyhow,” Dangerfield was saying, “I get the pain mostly when I’ve been asleep and before I eat. It seems to go away when I eat, and that makes me suspect it’s an ulcer, not my heart. So if any doctors are listening and they have access to a transmitter, maybe they can give me a buzz and let me know their opinion. I can give them more information, if it’ll help them.”

Astonished, June Raub listened as the man in the satellite went on to describe in greater and greater detail his medical complaint. Was this what Happy meant? she asked herself. Dangerfield had turned into a hypochondriac and no one had noticed the transition, except for Hoppy whose senses were extra acute. She shivered. That poor man up there, doomed to go around and around the Earth until at last, as with the Russians, his food or air gave out and he died.

And what will we do then? she asked herself. Without Dangerfield… how can we keep going?