Worlds Apart

1

O’Hara found Room 6392, hesitated, and knocked firmly. The door slid open. It was a small room with nothing but a table, two chairs, and a cot. A woman stared at her from the other side of the table. She was an older woman, in her sixties, face a web of worried lines, chin resting on interlaced fingers, no expression in her tired eyes.

“Come in, O’Hara. Sit down.” She did; the door closed behind her. “Aren’t you happy with your job?”

“May I ask who you are?”

“I’m on the Board, of course. I can’t tell you my name.”

“We’ve met once before. You administered the preferment and aptitude tests to my class, ninth form.”

She smiled slightly. “Thirteen years ago. You have a remarkable memory for faces. Aren’t you happy with your job?”

O’Hara settled back in her chair. “I haven’t made any great effort to keep that secret. No, I’m not particularly happy. Is that surprising?”

“Why aren’t you happy?”

“It’s not a job for a nontechnical person. It took months for me to gain the confidence of the people whose work I coordinate. Some of them still see me as an interloper.”

“Would you care to name them?”

“No. I don’t think they’re wrong.”

“Yet you haven’t filed for a transfer.”

“I assumed the Board had a good reason for giving me the assignment.”

“The Board can be in error. Weren’t you trying to second-guess us?”

“In a way. I’ve read my profile, of course. It looked like a test.”

“It was. And you were doing quite well, until yesterday.” She opened a drawer and took out a piece of paper. “This is a request from Coordinator Berrigan’s office, that you be transferred to the Janus start-up program. Did you have anything to do with this?”

O’Hara closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “On the contrary. One of my husbands suggested it several months ago. I refused because I thought the Board would interpret it as manipulation. I mentioned it to Dr. Berrigan, who is a friend, and she agreed.”

“That the Board would react negatively?”

“That’s right. I was going to wait until after this year’s evaluations, and then write up a detailed request.”

“To be transferred to Janus.”

O’Hara shook her head slightly. “Just for a position more appropriate to my talents. I expected that the Janus Project would be filled up by then.” She leaned forward and looked at the piece of paper. “Was this request made by my husband?”

“Not directly; the program that selected you was written by someone else. But both your husbands were consulted as a matter of course.” She sat back and folded her arms over her chest. “Please understand that I personally don’t disbelieve you. But only two other people were chosen from the Policy track, for a project employing over seven hundred. Given the…unique assets that you possess, it wouldn’t be difficult to arrange things so that the program would have to choose you as one of the three.”

“It sounds as if you should be interviewing my husbands, or whoever wrote the program. Not me.”

“It may be done. That’s up to the Engineering Board. Right now I have an unpleasant task…” She reached into the drawer and brought out a hypodermic gun and a jar of swabs. “Would you volunteer to be interviewed under the influence of a strong hypnotic drug? You may refuse.”

“Sure I can.” She rubbed her palms on her thighs. “I don’t have anything to hide. Over there?”

“Yes. Lie down and roll up your sleeve.” Sharp smell of alcohol when she opened the jar.

O’Hara lay down on the cot, tense. “I’ve heard of this. But I thought you had to do something really drastic.”

“Not at all. It’s a standard procedure. Just close your eyes now, it won’t hurt.”

Q: How do you feel now?

A: All right. Sleepy.

Q: Do you remember when your husband John first mentioned the Janus Project?

A: Both of my husbands have been talking about it for years. They were both involved in the initial planning.

Q: I mean, when did he first mention your working on the start-up program?

A: That would have been sometime last September. We were walking up in the half-gee area, he’d had a month of zerogee and needed exercise, and I guess I was complaining about the Stat group. He thought he could get me transferred.

Q: But you told him not to do it.

A: It wouldn’t look good.

Q: Tell me about John.

A: He’s funny.

Q: Amusing? Or peculiar.

A: Both. He’s always joking, he carries a little notebook to write down the last lines of jokes he hears, but mostly it’s just his outlook. Everything is funny to him. He’s an awful tease.

Q: He’s crippled.

A: Yes. He was born with bad curvature of the spine. His parents were too poor to get him corrective surgery, and now he’s too old for it. That’s why he came to New New, to work in the low-gee labs. Gravity hurts him.

Q: Did you ask him to get you assigned to the Janus Project?

A: No. He asked me and I said no.

Q: Do you think he went ahead and did it against your wishes?

A: I’m going to ask. But that wouldn’t be like him.

Q: Is John a good lover?

A: You mean sex?

Q: That’s right.

A: (Pause) He’s not very imaginative. Neither is Dan. But they’re both groundhogs, you know.

Q: Why did you marry groundhogs?

A: I don’t know. John says I’m a throwback. (Laughs.) Says I only love him because his knuckles drag on the ground.

Q: Do you love them?

A: I married them.

Q: That’s not an answer. (No response.) Do you love Jeff Hawkings?

A: I think so, if he’s still alive. He wasn’t there the past two months, I’m afraid for him.

Q: Who do you love more, John or Dan?

A: I guess… usually John. He’s easier to get along with.

Q: Who do you love more, John or Jeff?

A: Jeff, I think.

Q: But you’ll never see him again.

A: Maybe not.

Q: Do you think of Jeff while you make love with your husbands?

A: Oh yes.

Q: Of the four men you have formed long associations with, three have been physically unusual: a cripple and two giants. Have you ever thought about why that should be?

A: Yes I have.

Q: Why, do you think?

A: It may be that I want their gratitude. With Charlie Devon, I think maybe it was… I was young and wanted to prove something. Jeff and John, I don’t know. It may be that I see myself as a freak. Or it may have been coincidence.

Q: You delayed menarche as long as physically possible. Didn’t you like boys?

A: (Emphatically) No! Especially the Scanlan boys.

Q: Have you ever had sex with a woman?

A: That must be in your records.

Q: Did you like it better?

A: No, it was just for Charlie Devon’s sake. He wanted me to try everything.

Q: Is Charlie still alive?

A: No. He was on Devon’s World.

Q: Do you miss him?

A: No.

Q: Did Dan have you assigned to the Janus Project?

A: I don’t know. It would surprise me, he’s very regulation.

Q: But they both have said they want you to work on the project.

A: Of course they do.

Q: Would one or both of them work to have you reassigned without first discussing it with you?A: I don’t think so. (Pause) Unless… they’re intelligent men. They might have foreseen this interview.

Q: Would you like to have the Janus assignment?

A: Yes.

Q: Explain why.

A: It would be more interesting and more important, and I might be better liked.

Q: You don’t think your coworkers like you?

A: They think a mathematician should be in charge of the section. So do I.

Q: You don’t think your work is important.

A: Maybe the industrial safety part is, and maybe an occasional surprise epidemiological correlation. Most of it is trivial. I suppose someone has to do it.

Q: But not someone of your talents.

A: That’s right.

Q: Will you tell me which of your subordinates disapprove of your being in charge?

A: No.

Q: Because?

A: I wouldn’t want them to be punished. They’re right, anyhow.

Q: Very well. If the Janus Project goes through, will you volunteer? Will you go?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: I want to go back to Earth… I want to see Jeff again.

Q: You know that’s very unlikely.

A: I know.

Q: All right. Now I want you to take a deep breath, yes, like that, and exhale completely. Again: in… out. Now I’m going to count up to ten, and I want you to keep breathing this way as I count. When I reach ten, you will awaken refreshed, and very pleased with yourself for having cooperated with me. And after you awaken you will remember three things. One, your coworkers admire you. Two, your work is quite important, even when its importance is not immediately obvious. Three, if you find out that either of your husbands has done something wrong, getting you assigned to the Janus Project, you will want to contact the Board and explain it to them. Will you remember these things?

A: Yes.

Q: Very good. (Interviewer counts to ten.)

When O’Hara cleaned out her desk at Public Health she found there were only two things that actually belonged to her, a pen she’d gotten used to and a piece of plastic, silly gift from Jeff. It was opaque from six years of nervous rubbing; you would have to hold it up to a strong light to see the shamrock inside.

She didn’t have her own office at the Janus Project, just a carrel at the library. She had no underlings and, in a sense, no boss; her job title was Demographics Coordinator. The job, Grade 16, had no formal description: she was to define and evolve her own function in terms of what seemed necessary to the project, as the project grew.

All the past year’s grinding away at applied mathematics turned out to be useful now. She had to study thousands of pages of preliminary reports that the project had already generated. Most of it came from committees of engineers, and the math was more clear than what passed for prose.

It was a perfect job for her talents but a potentially disastrous one for her weaknesses. She spent longer and longer hours at the carrel, sleeping in snatches and eating only when the stomach cramps got annoying. The third month, she took an armload of work down to the Bellcom studio to wait out the night. Jules Hammond had to tell her that it was no use: a satellite picture showed that the Plant City hospital had burned to the ground. She didn’t stop crying until she was under sedation in the psychiatric ward.

Charlie’s Will

Jeff Hawkings had been safe, more than a hundred kilometers southeast, when the hospital was fired (an impressive bit of arson, as most of the building had been made of composites). He was moving southward slowly, town by town, hoping that his reputation would precede him and protect him.

He was an odd figure traveling, even apart from being so old. He rode inside a muledrawn cart that led another mule laden with supplies. The cart was decorated with red crosses and the word HEALER on all sides. It was sheathed in bulletproof plastic, except for gunports, and Jeff himself was protected with bulletproof clothing and an assortment of weaponry.

Jeff spent two weeks in Wimauma, waiting. Tad caught up with him there. He’d brought a fuel cell and the Uzi. With his beard shaved off, he could pass for sixteen. They started south together.

2

For a week or so she was numb and distant. A therapist carefully brought to the surface the complex skein of hopes and fears, fantasies and guilts that wound around the symbol “Jeff”-and separated the symbol from the person, and allowed her to grieve for one lost love without his memory also carrying the burden of lost youth, innocence, freedom, joy: lost Earth. Her husbands joined in the therapy (learning some things they already knew), and in less than a month she was commuting between their beds and her carrel, conscientiously avoiding the opiate of over-work, trying to love and play without being too obviously grim about it.

This was her current job: slightly less than a third of New New’s population, 75,000 people, were willing to join the Janus Project. Some twenty thousand were rather fanatical about it. But the crew, or population, of the star-ship was limited to ten thousand.

One problem was the fanatics. Most of them were not the kind of people you would like to be locked up with for the rest of your life. Many of them obviously wanted to leave New New because they felt trapped. Many of them were frankly paranoiac about Earth. It wasn’t likely that their mental conditions would improve in the relatively stark and confined starship environment.

Yet some of them would have to be included, because of the other problem. Ten thousand is a large crowd to jam into a starship, but they can’t just be random folks. Even beyond the obvious specialties necessary to keep the starship puttering along, there were thousands of specific skills necessary to build a new civilization at the other end. These skills would have to be passed on to the replacement generations born during the flight.

For instance, in all of New New there were only two people with the job classification “medical librarian.” Both of them had volunteered. One was a man in his eighties who’d had two nervous breakdowns and was more or less addicted to tranquilizers. The other, young and healthy, was a Devonite who was rigidly intolerant of anyone who wasn’t a Devonite. Yet the ship did need a medical li-brarian, and no student was currently working toward certification in that specialty.

(The medical library itself was no problem; the star-ship would be taking along a cybernetic duplicate of New New’s entire library. Except for certain sensitive military and political materials, this contained a copy of every remotely important Earth document, printed or videoed or cubed, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to The New York Times of March 16, 2085, and everything published in New New after the war. With polarized-quark memory, the whole thing fit into a machine the size of a steamer trunk. In medicine as in every other field, it would not be a problem of lacking information—just of knowing how to find it.)

The Devonites in general were a headache. The star-ship was supposed to start out with a population of ten thousand and, ninety-eight years later, wind up with twice that number. There were a few Devonite sects that allowed birth control under unusual circumstances, but for most of them it was one of three unforgivable sins. If they allowed one percent of the starship to be Devonite, fifty females, and if each of them and each of their female descendants bore ten children, they could produce about 300,000 children in ninety-eight years.

So if the starship, as promised, did retain the respect for individual liberty that existed in New New, then orthodox Devonites—one gender of them, at least—would have to be left behind, since religious freedom would allow them to refuse the necessary vasectomy or laporos-copy. (The plan was for ova to be quickened on a strict replacement basis, one birth for each death, until twenty-five years before they reached their destination. A significant number would live through the whole voyage, barring unforeseen medical or environmental problems, since the average life span in New New was 118.)

O’Hara wasn’t convinced that the starship could actually be run along the same lines as New New. The system she’d grown up in was a crazy-quilt of electronic democracy, communalism, anarchy, bureaucracy, technocracy. She knew the anarchy was largely an illusion, a formalism that the actual power structure tolerated as a safety valve. There wouldn’t be room for it aboard the good ship New-home.

There wouldn’t be room for a lot of things that people took for granted in New New—least of all, the comforts they remembered from before the war, the state of relative ease and freedom they were slowly rebuilding. Many of the inconveniences they regarded as temporary would be unchangeable facts of life. Marianne suspected that mundane discomforts such as overcrowding and monotonous diet would ultimately prove less important than existential problems; isolation, lack of affect, undirected anxiety, boredom.

Why was she looking forward to it?

3

They called it a “solarium,” even though the light and heat didn’t come from the sun. The zerogee swimming pool—actually just a globe of water that slowly rotated, with no bottom or sides—was fairly close to one of the four arcs that illuminated the inside of New New. On the lightward side was a transparent wall with clamps for towels; people would dry off and float there, baking.

Berrigan didn’t bother toweling, just made a turban for her hair. “You actually do want to go now?” she said to O’Hara. “I thought you were trying to talk your husbands out of it.”

“I don’t know.” O’Hara was drifting away from the wall; she did a lazy duck-and-roll and flutter kick that brought her back within reach of the clamped towel. “I’ve been weighing things. Part of it’s keeping peace in the family…keeping the family at all, actually.”

“They’d leave you?”

A man she didn’t know drifted by and made the fingersign query for sex. O’Hara smiled and shook her head at him.

“I really don’t know… a few days ago I would’ve said maybe for Dan, but definitely no for John.”

Berrigan nodded her head slowly. “The photon reflector.”

“That’s right. Before they came up with that, I don’t think John took any of it really seriously. Didn’t think it would fly.”

“Not alone in that.”

Another man drifted toward them; O’Hara tethered one ankle and wrapped the towel around her hips, a signal of unavailability. “Now, well, he’s been very withdrawn since the announcement. Thinking things over.”

“And Dan?”

“Daniel’s very happy. But he’s always assumed I’ll come to my senses and go along. Maybe he’s right.”

“You want some cheap advice?”

“I guess I do.”

“Don’t use your husbands as an excuse to run away. You’re still upset about losing Jeff Hawkings.”

“That’s part of it.”

“But Earth is still there, and all of your training and experience points toward an Earth liaison position. Probably the very top.”

“That may be fifteen, twenty years away. Maybe never.”

“In twenty years you’ll be two years younger than I am now. Anything could happen. Suppose it takes thirty, fifty years for Earth to recover? You’ll still be in a good position. If you go to Janus, where will you be fifty years from now?”

“Halfway to Epsilon Eridani. Nearly halfway.”

“If everything goes according to plan. A lot of engineers aren’t as optimistic as Daniel.”

4

The Janus Project was not humanity’s first starship, technically. Several planetary probes launched in the twentieth century were inching their way toward the stars, and after some skillions of years might actually come near one. But there had been two practical small-scale demonstrations.

The most interesting was Project Daedalus, a fusion-powered probe launched by the European Space Agency many years before the war. It was also headed for Epsilon Eridani—toward the oxygen-water world that was New-home’s destination—and if things had gone according to plan, it would have sent back a view of the target world in the first year of the new century. Daedalus would flash by the star system at nearly a fifth of the speed of light, having barely an hour to cap off its half-century mission by spying on the earth-sized planet and broadcasting back data. (It would actually fly by in 2090, the signal taking 10.8 years to travel to Earth at the speed of light.)

Unfortunately, Daedalus was lost. The carrier beam that kept Earth in touch with it had fallen silent a couple of years after the war.

The other probe had been a matter/antimatter demonstration, a small reaction drive carrying a payload that was little more than a beeper. Most scientists were more annoyed than impressed by the expensive stunt, which provided no new theoretical knowledge. It was primarily a demonstration of temporary political amity between the United States, which provided the launch vehicle and fuel containment apparatus, and the SSU, which tied up a valuable synchrotron for most of a year, manufacturing antimatter, particle by particle.

John Ogelby said that the m/a demonstration only proved that politicians can’t read equations. Saying that it was a “great step toward reaching the stars” was like successfully screwing in a light bulb and then claiming you were ready to build a power plant.

5

Much of what O’Hara did at her carrel was “freeassociation database scanning,” a sort of computer-augmented woolgathering. She would type in, for instance, “APTITUDE,” and the computer would answer “2,349,655:,” which was the number of data entries that either had the word “aptitude” in their titles, or had been cross-referenced under that word. Then she would narrow it down, say, by typing in “PUBLISHED AFTER 2060,” and the machine would say “32,436:,” still more than an after-noon’s reading. After further modifying it with WORLDS and EDUCATION, the number was down to 23. She would ask for a list of the titles, and usually wouldn’t find anything that clicked, and would start over.

In this particular case, though, she found an article that had been published in New New a few years before the war, in a journal of applied psychology: “Aptitude Induction Through Voluntary Hypnotic Immersion.” She’d had a sort of morbid interest in hypnosis ever since the interview that preceded this job, so she read it.

After a couple of paragraphs, she punched up the author’s name and found that he was still alive. She finished the article and called him. He was at a seminar; she left a message and they wound up meeting after dinner at the social sciences faculty lounge.

The lounge must have been a very comfortable place once. Now half of it was partitioned off for someone’s “temporary” living quarters, and all of the couches and chairs had been crowded into the space that was left. She recognized Dr. Demerest—they hadn’t talked but she’d punched up his dossier after the computer made the appointment—standing in the corner, trying to make the beverage dispenser work. He was a short bald man in his nineties. She picked her way around the furniture and introduced herself.

“Dr. O’Hara?” A few dozen more lines appeared in his forehead (no eyebrows to raise). “I expected, never mind what I expected, coffee?”

“Tea, please. Or anything it will surrender.”

He was shaking the machine gently. “It doesn’t respond to violence. Somebody must have hit it.” He waved O’Hara to a nest of easy chairs. “Machines do sulk. I’ve been humoring this one for thirty years.” He wiggled the T button and it agreed to produce a cup of tea. He drew another one and joined her.

He held his cup in both hands and squinted at her. “Give me a moment to adjust here. We’re the same grade but you’re evidently younger than most of my students. Janus start-up. Crazy stunt. You really think that damned thing is going to fly?”

“A lot of people do,” she said quietly.

“A lot of people think Jesus is coming in a Buick. But you. Do you think it’ll fly? You plan to go?”

“At first I didn’t…didn’t think it would work and wouldn’t go even if it did. Now I guess I’ll go if they take me. Whether it works out, they say that depends on whether they can get the neutrino coupler to work.”

He shook his head. “Going to be dull around here after all the crazy people leave. What’s a demographics coordinator and what does she want with an old interface psychologist?”

“I read the article you wrote in ‘82 about aptitude transfers. It looks like a technique we could use. But there aren’t any later references. Did you ever follow it up?”

“Hm. Did and didn’t.” He rubbed his long nose, remembering. “Sort of farmed it out, set it up as a doctoral project for a couple of exchange students. One of those things. They went back to Mazeltov.” He shrugged. Nobody in Mazeltov had survived the war.

“We stayed in contact, of course. I have all their raw data and their preliminary findings. Haven’t got around to putting it into publishable form. But it does confirm the validity of the technique. What does that have to do with demographics?”

“Well, we have a problem. We’re trying to create a sort of microcosm, a miniature replica of the human race.”

“Ah. But you only have, what is it? Ten thousand people? I see. You want a file of dopplegangers.” He shook his head in a series of short jerks. “Hm. Take forever. Might not work at all.”

“I was thinking of a more limited application, at first, anyhow. For instance…glass-blowers. Not for jewelry and such, but the people who custom-design equipment for scientists and medical people. There is only one person alive who does that. She’s over a hundred.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Before the war there were almost a half-million specifically named occupations. Less than a tenth of them have any living practitioners.”

“Hm. You can’t think that more than a thousand of them are relevant to your bunch. Mostly still available, engineer types.”

“Even so. I’ve come up with literally hundreds of instances like the glass-blower. Where the only people who have an aptitude either don’t want to go or can’t.”

“Oh, I think I see. I see your problem.” He blew on his tea and stared into it “You understand the limitations of the induction technique?”

“I’m not sure. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“All right. I take this crotchety old glass-blower and try to talk her into spending a week or ten days living in the psych lab. Suppose she agrees—and she has to want to; if I coerce her it probably won’t work. Then I try to put her into a state of extreme hypnotic receptivity, suggestibility. Have you ever been hypnotized?”

“Once.”

“You probably know it doesn’t work with everybody. Some people, you can put into a deep trance with a few minutes of quiet talking. Others you can shoot full of drugs and they resist you all the way.

“If your glass-blower is receptive, I put her under and then hook her up to the machine. The semantic computer part talks to her. The biologue part coordinates what she’s saying to her physical state: skin temperature, pulse, blood pressure, brain waves. Mostly brain waves, in twelve frequencies.

“It’s rather hard work. With a hundred-year-old, I’d probably want to spend a couple of weeks, not keep her under more than two or three hours a day. Eventually, though, I’d have a cybernetic profile of her attitudes toward just about everything, and incidentally a fairly complete biography. You know the Turing paradox?”

“Touring as in traveling?”

“Never mind. What it boils down to is that if you put her behind a screen, and put a voice-simulation output to the semantic computer behind another screen, and talked to them…well, you’d be hardpressed to tell which one was the human. I could tell, because I know some good trick questions…pardon me. Old men ramble.

“So you have this cybernetic glass-blower. It does you absolutely no good. No lungs. So you take an appropriate subject and run the process in reverse. This is even harder work, physically, because what you’re doing is manipulating his blood pressure and so forth, induction field for the brain waves, while you suggest he make the same response as the old glass-blower. The computer, that is, suggests it.

“When he comes out of it, he won’t know a damned thing about glass-blowing. But he will sure as hell want to learn, and he’ll learn fast and well, if he’s at all suited for the profession. You wouldn’t want to take someone with low manual dexterity, of course. There are more subtle screening criteria, too. You wouldn’t take someone who had injured himself severely with glass as a child. He’d be a nervous wreck all his life.”

“The instance you used was motivating a one-armed man to play the violin.”

“He’d kill himself. He couldn’t live with it. And the process isn’t really reversible; you could put him back under and motivate him to play some one-handed instrument, but that wouldn’t erase his wanting to play the violin.”

“That’s something I wanted to know. You could take a pianist and motivate him to study the violin—and he wouldn’t transfer all his energy to the violin? He’d still play the piano?”

“We didn’t pursue that too far. The danger’s obvious. Motivate him to play every damned instrument in the orchestra. You’ll turn him into a zombie. Indecision, depression. He’ll pick up a horn and play a few notes and then walk over to the harp and then have an irresistible urge to play the piano, and so forth. Drive him mad in a week. You’re a polymath, aren’t you?”

O’Hara nodded slowly.

“Thought I saw a gleam in your eye. How many degrees do you have?”

“Four. Two doctorates.”

“I know what you’re thinking. Disabuse yourself. You can’t tack on new specialties like ornaments. It wouldn’t be very effective and it might even be dangerous. This technique isn’t for overachievers, it’s for people who aren’t strongly motivated.”

“All right, okay.” But she looked thoughtful.

“What was it you had in mind?”

“Oh, I’ve never been strong in maths and sciences. Most of my friends are on the Engineering track, though. Both my husbands.” She smiled ruefully. “Half the time it’s as if they’re talking a foreign language. One where I know some of the words but no grammar.”

He made a little clucking sound. “Happens all the time. First woman I married was a mathematician. That’s how I wound up in this mongrel kind of specialty. Down to cases, though. You want to do this to several hundred people? Do you know how long that would take?”

“What, are you the only person who can do it?”

“No, quite the contrary. Any nurse…hell, I could teach anyone in a day or two. Teach you, if you’re not squeamish about sticking thermometers into people. The machine does all the hard parts, but that’s just it: there’s only one machine. Ten days for a subject to program it and another ten for the induction. That’s eighteen per year. Maybe twenty, if most of them are good subjects.”

“We’ll just have to build more machines, then.”

He laughed, a bark. “Sister, I haven’t had a requisition granted since before the war. Psychological research is not a high priority, not this kind.”

She had been on the edge of her chair through the whole conversation. She sat back and beamed at him. “It is now.”

Charlie’s Will

“Trouble,” Jeff said. Under the blanket on Tad’s lap, two clicks as he turned the Uzi’s selector switch to full automatic.

They’d been traveling down the Tamiami Trail for two days, overgrown jungle on both sides of the old highway, some shells of deserted towns but no people. Now there were people.

First a large boy stepped out from behind a bush about ten meters ahead, holding an old shotgun in his right hand, his left palm facing out to halt them. Both mules stopped abruptly. Seven more boys filed out across the road. Only one of them had a firearm, a rusty.22 rifle, but the others all carried machetes. Jeff was surprised that three of them were black. He hadn’t seen any other racially mixed families.

The first boy didn’t raise the shotgun but kept it pointed vaguely toward them. “What you peckerwoods doin?”

“Going south,” Jeff said. “I’m Healer.”

“Yer whater?”

“Healer.” Tad had shifted so the Uzi was lined up on the boy, but the lead mule was in the way. “You haven’t heard of me?”

“Uh-uh. We keeps pretty much to ourselves. People come by, we don’t gen’rally talk much.” One of the children giggled. “You heal people? You got the touch?”

“I have medicine.”

He laughed. “We never did hold for that. Not even before Daddy and Ma died.”

“Charlie’s will,” Jeff said.

“What?”

“Never mind…if you have sick people I can help them.”

“Well, I’m sick of catfish. Sure could use some roast mule. Any reason you shouldn’t—”

It happened very fast. The boy started to raise the shotgun and Tad stood up abruptly and leveled the Uzi on him. He dropped it. Then there was a shot from the left that hit Tad on the chest and spanged off his body armor. Tad twisted, saw smoke and fired a burst at it. By that time Jeff had the scattergun unclamped and aimed at the boy with the rusty rifle.

There was a strange gurgling sound and a boy or young girl staggered dying through the brush, throat and chest ripped open, face gone, still holding a rifle. When the children saw it they dropped their weapons. The apparition made it almost to the road; pitched forward and lay there twitching.

“Now I didn’t tell her to do that,” the boy said.

“Right,” Tad said. “She was just walkin’ through the woods.”

“Probably others,” Jeff said. “They wouldn’t just have one girl.”

“The girls are up at the house, ‘cept Judy here. She always has to git in on things.” He stared at the dying girl. “Don’t suppose you kin heal her, now?” Jeff didn’t say anything. “Whyn’t ya shoot her again. Put her out of it.”

“She’s dead,” Tad said. “Just some parts don’t know it yet. Be a waste of ammo.”

“I’ll do it, then.” He reached down for the shotgun.

“The hell you will.” The boy touched the gunstock but looked up at Tad and then slowly straightened again.

“What you gonna do? You gonna kill us all?”

“Probably not. No point to it,”

“What about those catfish?” Jeff said calmly. “You smoke them?” The boy nodded. “We’ll trade for some dry beef. And I’ll treat your sick, as I say. That’s what I do.”

Tad walked over to the line of boys and picked up the shotgun and rifle. He put them in the cart and went to the girl, who had stopped twitching. He toed her over on her back and scowled. “Dead.” He took her rifle.

“We’ll go get some catfish,” the leader said.

“No, you won’t.” Tad pointed the muzzle of the Uzi at the youngest one. “He’ll go. I’ll go with him. Rest of you stay here and talk with Healer.”

Nobody said anything while the boy led Tad away. “You don’t have any sick people?”

“Nup.”

“Anybody die recently?”

“Two in the fall. One last spring.”

“The oldest, right?”

“How’d you know that?”

“Did they talk nonsense for a while, stop eating, wet themselves—”

“They did that.”

“It’s going around.”

He looked at the other boys, pursed his lips and thought. “I guess if you had medicine for that, we could take it.”

“I’ll give you a typhoid shot, might help. When my partner comes back.”

“We wouldn’t try nothin’.”

“Sure.”

Tad returned after a few minutes with eight girls, three of whom had infants, and six small children toddling alongside, apparently none of them mutants. He had a plastic bag of greasy smoked fish and another ancient rifle. The girls had tried to shoot him with it but couldn’t make it work.

Jeff gave them their shots and a few sticks of dried beef. Then they took the oldest boy and one of the girls hostage, to discourage pursuit, and left as it was getting dark.

There was no moon but enough starlight to tell road from jungle. They were surrounded by creepy reptilian noises, croakings and slitherings. The mules went slower and slower and finally refused to go on. Jeff had to turn on a light to make them move, using up irreplacable electricity and providing a beacon for followers. But overall it may have been safer: more and more often, as the night went on, they came upon large rattlesnakes slumbering on the warm road surface. Best to give the creatures ample warning.

About midnight they came to a wide spot in the road that had once borne the improbable name Frog City. Jeff gave both the hostages sleeping pills and, once they were safely asleep, left them in an abandoned shop, along with the old weapons, no ammunition. Tad took a pep pill and they continued east, figuring to keep moving through the night and most of the next day.

By noon they were still in the Everglades. No human contact, no sign that they were being followed. The snakes had retired to the bush at dawn. There were alligators, some large, but they kept their distance. Long-legged birds of many varieties entertained them. The weather was beautiful, bright and cool, and under other circumstances it would have been a pleasant outing. But they might be coming up on a real logistics problem.

Long before the war, roads like this had become anachronisms, since almost all intercity transport was by floater or subway. The roads were useful for floater navigation and in some areas were kept up for the benefit of bicyclists and hikers. That was the case with the Tamiami Trail, a scenic path connecting Tampa with Ciudad Miami.

But they didn’t want to go through Ciudad Miami. It was hard enough to get along with the various families when they spoke English. Neither of the men was fluent in Spanish, so they had to find a road south sometime before they got into Miami’s metropolitan area. But their simple map didn’t show how far that area extended. There was only one road going south before they got to US 1, which hugged the coast and was definitely in Spanish-speaking territory. That was Florida 27, and it was a dotted line: “no maintenance.” They didn’t know how old the map was. There might be bridges out or areas that had subsided and flooded, or the road might have become thoroughly overgrown and impassable, perhaps indistinguishable from the surrounding wilderness. Or it might be in the middle of a Hispanic suburb; there was no way to tell until they got there. Jeff had never been to Florida before he’d brought Marianne O’Hara down to escape the war, and Tad had rarely left his parents’ commune, never going this far south or east.

Their fears were groundless, as they might have deduced from the fact that they’d met nobody coming west on the Trail from Miami. There was no Ciudad Miami. They noticed a funny smell; before either identified it as salt tang, they could hear the unmistakable sound of waves breaking. The vegetation subsided to young mangrove scrub and clogged weeds that crawled over the road. They tied up the mules and picked their way over a slight rise to stand on a beach of fused glass.

6

O’Hara had asked for fifteen minutes at the next Start-up meeting. The committee, plus advisers and assorted hangers-on, had grown too large to hold meetings by cube conference. They had to commandeer a cafeteria between shifts.

With considerable competition from the noise of the clean-up crew, O’Hara outlined the hypnotic induction process and said that she wanted the resources to build and operate at least a dozen of the machines.

Stanton Marcus, an old man who had been Policy Coordinator for ten years while O’Hara was growing up, was at the meeting even though he wasn’t officially part of the committee. He raised the first objection.

“It’s a very clever idea,” he said without much enthusiasm, “but I don’t think that it needs to be given high priority. Could I see that list?” O’Hara handed him the two-page list of specialties for which she wanted aptitudes induced. He read it slowly, nodding and breathing loudly through his nose.

“In every case, there’s only one person left who is qualified,” she said.

“That’s just the point,” he said without looking up. He finished the list and handed it back, then put his fingers together in a steeple and frowned importantly.

“As you say, many of these people are indispensable. They’re indispensable to New New as well as to your eventual colony. You propose to take them out of circulation for two weeks and put them through a grueling physical ordeal. Many of them are quite old.”

“Dr. Demerest says there’s no danger.”

“But his trials were done with students, were they not? Young people?”

“They were. But the Mazeltov studies included several people who were over a hundred, both as programmers and receivers.”

“Receivers?” someone said. “Why give a person that old a new aptitude?”

“Autopsy,” she said bluntly. “They wanted to look for changes in the brain’s chemistry or gross structure.” Back to Marcus. “None of them died, though, before the war. It’s just not that dangerous.”

“You have access to those subjects’ medical records?” Marcus said mildly.

“I wouldn’t find anything. Mazeltov and B’ism’illah Ma’sha’llah stayed independent of the Public Health data pool. As you know.”

He smiled. “They were always mavericks. The point is, you can’t really say that it won’t affect the health of these irreplaceable people.”

“I can only say that none of the subjects has died. And Demerest had the process done to himself, both ways, in his eighties.”

“Still in the bloom of youth,” Marcus said, and some of the committee laughed. “I’m not saying that your idea is a bad one, just that you have a false, if forgivable, sense of urgency about it. After all, it will be more than a century before you need most of these people. You’ll be in close contact with New New all that time; it’s not as if you’ll be sailing off the edge of the world. All that is involved is a simple transfer of data, which, it seems to me, can and ought to be done at New New’s convenience—without taking vital people off the job at a time when they are most needed.”

Berrigan came to O’Hara’s defense. “Stanton, you’re talking to hear yourself talk. Once these personalities are on file, they’ll be as useful to New New as to us. Where is New New going to be when these people die?”

“I’m sure replacements are being trained.”

“Not for all of the categories,” O’Hara said. “This cabinetmaker, for instance. His skills are useless to New New, almost useless, since he works only in wood. They might be vital to us, if we decide to use the planet.”

“I suppose we can spare him,”

“He’s a hundred and twenty years old and can’t leave the zerogee ward. But there are others, as Dr. Berrigan says, whose profiles New New ought to preserve for its own sake.”

“It certainly is worth considering. I’ll recommend that Policy look into it.”

“I did that more than a week ago,” O’Hara said. “Nothing has come of it.”

He gave the youngster an indulgent smile. “Realities, O’Hara. You aren’t on Policy track.”

“I am indeed.”

“She’s Grade Sixteen,” Berrigan said. “You’d think somebody would’ve paid some attention.”

“Well. You know how busy things are.” He rubbed his chin and squinted at O’Hara. “I remember you now. You’re the woman with all the degrees. Two husbands on Engineering track. You caused a certain amount of discussion at board meetings.”

“You’re saying she shouldn’t expect too much cooperation from Policy,” Berrigan said.

“Engineering, either,” he said. “O’Hara, you’re neither fish nor fowl; you can’t grease anybody’s track. Things are busy, as I say, and it’s just the wrong time to start yet another new program. You’re offering Policy people an extra workload but no real career enhancement is attached to it.”

“That’s why it was so much fun to work with you, Stanton,” Berrigan said. Their terms had overlapped. “You’re so above politics.”

“Oh yes. Engineering track is never concerned with anything but the abstract merits of a proposal. So I suggest we put it to a vote.”

“Not ‘we,’ Stanton. You’re only here to liven things up. Discussion?”

A grossly fat man named Eliot Smith raised his one flesh limb—both legs and an arm were mechanical replacements—and said, “I’m not in favor of a simple yes-or-no vote. Almost all of us have mastered arithmetic… O’Hara, would you put those figures up on the screen?” She tapped out a sequence on her portable keyboard and the flatscreen on the wall lit up with the information she’d shown during her presentation: dollar equivalents of manpower and materiel requirements for one through twenty machines, and a column showing price-per-machine for each number. (The unit cost dropped steeply for up to nine machines, and then leveled off.)

“Okay, now give me control. Smith 1259.” He unfolded his own keyboard while she typed in his number.

“Now there’s no such thing as an objective analysis here. You gotta go through the whole list of professions and give each one a weighting factor, and everybody’s factors would be different. Me, I wouldn’t take ten of those cabinetmakers for one mediocre vacuum welder. But then I’ve never been on a planet and don’t understand why anybody wants to bother with it.

“Anyhow, your ideal-case analysis would rank those people in terms of desirability. I suppose the practical way would be to take a consensus. Grind out a number for each one that reflects how indispensable each skill is from our aggregate point of view. You see where I’m going?” There was a general murmur of assent.

“Then you take and ask the computer for an actuarial analysis on each individual case: what is the probability that each person will live for ten years? Someone’s gonna die, you want to move him up the list. So you divide the rank factor by this actuarial fraction, which gives you a new rank number. Kapeesh?”

John Ogelby laughed. “You just bought yourself a cabinetmaker, Eliot. You’re treating it as if age and probable, desirability were stochastically independent. That’s not the case.”

“Christ, Ogelby.” He tapped a plastic hand against a plastic leg. “If you weren’t so pretty you’d be dangerous.”

Marcus sighed in exasperation. “Will someone please translate that into some human language?”

“My pleasure,” O’Hara said, trying to repress an evil grin. “Most of the old-time professions, the ones that would be most useful in a planetary environment naturally would belong to people who were born on Earth. There were almost no tourists in New New at the time of the war, right?”

He nodded slowly. “Trade sanctions.”

“Well, then. There are only two classes of groundhogs left in New New: renegades like Quasimodo there, who had become Worlds citizens, and old folks or sick ones who were stuck; couldn’t risk the trip back. Cabinetmakers among them.

“Now Eliot proposes a situation where people will more or less be taken in reverse order of life expectancy. So you’re going to get a disproportionate number of old coots who know how to repair gasoline engines and chip flint into arrowheads. That’s what you mean, John?”

The hunchback blew her a kiss. “Not bad for a history major.”

“Right,” Eliot said. “So now you’ve got this new ranking. Buggy-whip sharpeners and all. What we’re looking for is a sense of the cost-effectiveness associated with each number of machines—but keeping in mind the mortality factor. Too few machines and we’re gonna lose data; how much are those data worth?

“Now this is what I’d like O’Hara to do. I wouldn’t mind taking out a couple of hours looking over her list and ranking these professions. Anybody too pressed for time to do that?” He looked around the room. “Good. O’Hara can route it to us and give us a deadline. Say we just assign a number from zero to a hundred to each job. Then she takes and normalizes?” He looked at O’Hara.

“Sure,” she said. “Divide each number by the contributor’s average response, mean response, and then apply the actuarial factor.”

“Zeros, dear,” Ogelby said, “Divide zero all day and it still comes out zero.”

“I’ll work it out somehow.”

“Okay,” Eliot said. “Now what we want to have before the next meeting is a three-dimensional matrix that integrates these weighted, normalized numbers with the data up here on the screen. I don’t mean integrates, not in the calculus sense.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. Marcus was leaning on his elbows, eyes covered with both hands.

“Now I’m no theorist,” Eliot said, “but I’ve been crunching numbers all my life. I’d be real surprised if you didn’t come up with more of a stepwise relationship than a continuous one, pseudo-continuous.” He pronounced the “p.” “This’ll give us break points in terms of cost effectiveness, see?”

“I think so. What you’re calling a three-dimensional matrix would boil down to a set of tentative schedules for one machine, two machines, and so forth. What you want to find is, say, a small difference between seven and eight machines but a big difference between eight and nine. So the real choice is between eight and nine.”

“Right.” Eliot sat down.

“Sandra,” Marcus said from behind his hands, “don’t you people ever just decide on anything?”

She gave him a sweet smile. “Never prematurely.”

Charlie’s Will

“Christ and Charlie,” Tad said, almost reverently. “That must have been one hell of a bang.”

Jeff kicked at the fused sand with the heel of his boot It crunched and made little dents. “Air burst,” he said, staring at the dents. “Maybe a G-bomb, gigaton.”

“What’s that?”

“Big. The biggest… it’s a matter/antimatter bomb. They claimed they didn’t have one and we claimed we didn’t.” He squinted out over the sea. “I think I saw the flash, what, four hundred kilometers north. So bright I thought it was a second hit on the Cape.”

“What the hell they want Miami for? Nothin’ but pedros.”

“You tell me.” Jeff had once heard a rumor that some conservatives in the military were in favor of targeting Miami in case of war: America for Americans. “Who gives a shit now? See if we can get the mules up here.”

For several hours they rolled along the hard granular surface of the crater’s edge. The rim was apparently an arc of a perfect circle some thirty or forty kilometers in diameter. From their perspective it seemed to be almost a straight line, barely curving away at either horizon. They started out dead south, though, and by evening were going southeast. The tide started coming in, pushing them toward the mangrove scrub. There was no sign of a road.

About sundown a large wave crashed and splashed foam around the mules’ hooves. They panicked, dancing, and Jeff had to get out and calm them down. “Guess we ought to move inland and make camp. Don’t want to be caught out here.”

“Yeah. I’m dead anyhow.” Jeff was pushed to his limit, too, but they got out and hacked a pathway through the bush. Jeff went back and piled up brush to conceal their hiding place, which might have saved their lives.

After midnight, a quarter moon low on the horizon, they woke to the sound of voices and footsteps. Jeff unsafed the Uzi and motioned for Tad to stay back, and crawled silently up to the edge of the beach.

Naked savages whispering Spanish. Nine or ten of them in a tight group, talking quietly, the leader with a bright torch. They were armed, two with guns and the rest all with stainless-steel axes. They came close enough for Jeff to read the brand “Sears” on the axes’ heads. Some of the axes were crusted with blood. They were creeping along, evidently looking for sign. Jeff and Tad alternated standing watch for the rest of the night. The group came back just before dawn, grumbling, and missed them again.

They took off at first light, and before noon the man-grove gave way to scorched concrete and tumbled buildings. A post office said Perrine. They found Main Street, US 1, and turned south.

Perrine was uninhabited but people had been through. They checked the ruins of several supermarkets and couldn’t find a scrap of food.

“What if it’s like this all the way south?” Tad said. “We have maybe two weeks’ food.”

“Two weeks should get us to Key West. Maybe part-way back, if there’s nothing down there. We’ll pick up something along the way,” he said without conviction. “Catch some fish.”

“You know anything about fishin’?”

Jeff shook his head. “City boy.”

“Me neither. We had a pond fulla catfish, but we just trapped ‘em.”

“Guess it’s time to learn.”

They found a sporting-goods store that had been completely ransacked for weapons and ammunition, but still had a bewildering array of fishing gear. And a book, fortunately—Fishing in the Florida Keys—that gave them some idea of what a wellequipped sportsman would take where they were going.

It would have given that sportsman pain to see the two of them sitting on a bridge over shallow water, fishing with stiff deep-sea rods and heavy tackle. But it worked, in these waters that had hardly seen a hook in the past seven years. After a day of unraveling mistakes, their main problem was not one of catching fish, but deciding which ones to keep.