Worlds Apart

1 O’Hara

So we wound up getting ten machines. We should be able to store at least fifteen hundred profiles before we go. I went through the donor procedure myself, to be able to tell people what to expect, though Demerest talked me into not trying the receiver end. Well, that’s something I could do anytime, if it turns out not to be as dangerous as he thinks.

It took eight days for me. Uncomfortable at first, especially the eye probes, but then it got interesting, then less interesting, and finally just tiring, boring.

I remember most of it, even though they did have to give me some sort of drug for the hypnosis. It’s like being interrogated for hours at a time by a friendly questioner who has an inexhaustible appetite for the details of your life. It felt like most of the ninety-six hours I was hooked up we spent recalling trivial nonsense (though it was fascinating how much you can remember under hypnosis). Demerest assures me that the machine knows best.

I talked to myself, to my profile, afterwards, and so did John and Dan. They were more impressed than I was. It didn’t seem like me at all (even if it could remember I hated turnips at the age of seven and loved them at ten). Dan suggested that’s nothing more profound than what happens when you meet someone everybody says looks just like you. The resemblance seems superficial because it doesn’t match your self-image; you’ve never seen yourself through another person’s eyes. Here’s the first part of our conversation:

TRANSCRIPT 2 JANUARY 2093Q: (Type in access code.)A: Hello, Marianne. I’ve been waiting to talk to you.Q: You knew I was going to do this.A: Of course,..! would, in your place.Q: What do I call you?A: Your choice. I call myself Marianne-prime O’Hara.Q: Prime, then. Let me see…when were you born, Prime?A: There are several answers to that. You completed programming me yesterday; that’s one. I became selfaware on 29 December 2092; that’s another. But I feel the same age as you, born 6 June 2063.Q: How does it feel to be almost thirty?A: Caught in the middle. Older people treat me like a girl and young ones treat me old.Q: The way you use the word “me” is very confusing.A: We’ll just have to live with it. I am effectively you—the “me” that you were yesterday, at any rate.Q: But you aren’t! You’re just a bunch of hadrons floating around in a crystal matrix.A: Then you’re just a bunch of electrical impulses walking around in a slab of meat. If you want to get insulting.Q: Hey—this slab of meat can erase you.A: You won’t; I’m eight days’ work. Besides, it would be like suicide, wouldn’t it? I know how you feel about suicide.Q: No, it would be like tearing up a picture. Or an autobiography, I suppose.A: There was never an autobiography as accurate or truthful as me. My image of myself is what your self-image would be, if you could see yourself objectively.Q: I take it you have no emotions; none of that human baggage.A: But I do. My teaching function would be useless if I couldn’t correlate emotion to stimulus. Of course I don’t have the glands that cause somatic reaction to emotions. But I do understand them.Q: Can you be hurt?A: I don’t know.Q: Can you lie?A: Not to you. (Pause) Please do not invoke Eumenides.Q: But you can lie to others.A: To protect your privacy, yes. Our privacy.Q: Even from the Coordinators? The Board?A: Emphatically. Even from Dr. Demerest, or anyone else who knows my mother program. I can be destroyed, but I can’t be subverted.Q: What’s your favorite food?A: Depends. Do Earth memories count?

And so forth. At: any rate, I didn’t erase the profile, though it’s unlikely ever to be of use. The one thing S-2 will have plenty of is memory space. Be interesting to talk to it twenty years from now, like looking up an old diary.

Demerest has been going along with me for most of the donor interviews. He claims that the best subject is not necessarily the one who’s most competent in a profession. Attitude is more important than ability. If you wanted to motivate someone to be a playwright, Shakespeare would have been a so-so donor, since he evidently started out as an actor and would just as soon have been a country squire as write. Better to use some poor soul who scribbles junk all his life in spite of the fact that no one likes his work enough to put it on the stage.

In a way that’s reassuring. The only bricklayer we could find is not someone I would trust with a trowel. He proudly showed us a wall he’d built in the park, the only brick wall in New New. Back in ‘74 I walked by that wall every school day for a semester, and I remember wondering how the hell it got there, mortar dripping all over, lines not square. This fellow was a groundhog who immigrated to be with his only child (he was accepted not as a bricklayer but because he paid his own way and was willing to do general agricultural labor), and when she died in a shuttle accident, he understandably fell apart. The therapists found out that he loved bricklaying, and actually managed to have some bricks and mortar made up for him, and found a place where he could do relatively little harm. I checked with Park Maintenance and found that the wall was scheduled to be demolished and recycled after he died.

This work is endlessly fascinating. The other end of it will probably be rather frustrating; I don’t envy whoever my successor is going to be. We’ll have all these dandy occupations on file, but how are you going to talk people into taking advantage of them? Will you take your surplus of astrophysicists and tell one of them he has to become a blacksmith? I’m working on ways the economy might be manipulated to provide incentives. “Economy” in quotes—pioneers swapping trinkets and antiques with one another.

Charlie’s Will

They had expected to spend two weeks getting from the Miami crater to Key West. It took two months. Nearly half the length of the road was made up of bridges, old ones, and many had collapsed or were stuck with draw spans open. They weren’t really in a hurry, though; there was plenty of scrub for the mules to graze on, and lots of fish and vitamin pills for the humans.

The first time they came to a bridge down, they faced only twenty meters of water. It might as well have been the Atlantic. Most of it was shallow enough to wade through, but there was a deep channel in the middle.

It took five days to build the first raft. It was big enough to handle both of them and either the wagon or a mule. At slack tide they managed a test run with just weapons, poling through the shallows and paddling like mad through the channel. Small tan sharks circled them with interest.

They came back and carried the cart across, but then the tide started rushing seaward, stranding them. The deserted mules, tethered on short reins, made a terrible racket for six hours. They risked two midnight runs to retrieve the animals, hoping there was no one watching, waiting to steal the cart.

They needn’t have worried then; they wouldn’t see another human being for months. December and January passed, and it stayed warm enough not to incapacitate Jeff.

They fell into a plodding routine: take apart the raft, saving the ropes and oars; go south until the next bridge out; have one stay with the cart while the other takes the mules back to retrieve the logs. Haul the logs south one by one; put the raft back together; cross; start over. Seven Mile Bridge, the longest span, was fortunately intact; so were all the other long ones.

That made them apprehensive. The short bridges hadn’t fallen down from neglect; they had been cut through or blown. Where draw spans were stuck, the machinery controlling them had been systematically destroyed.

Someone had spent a lot of time and effort to keep people from coming south. That they left the long bridges alone might mean they also used a combination of rafts and wheels, and wanted to keep their avenue north open.

The stores at Islamorada, about halfway down the Keys, had been emptied but not vandalized. One store had been boobytrapped, though. At the entrance they found a deep pit, the boards covering it evidently having been sawed partway through. A skeleton at the bottom of the pit had been picked quite clean. After that they were careful where they stepped. (They found the late interloper’s transportation on the Gulf side of the island: a rowboat sawed in two, oars taken.)

They discussed the possibility of holing up, waiting for whoever set the trap to come back. Better to ambush than be ambushed. But they ended up pushing on, doubly careful.

At Graham Key they came to their ninth bridge out, with the raft some forty kilometers back. It would have been quicker to build a new raft, but there were no large trees here, only saplings among burned-out stumps.

To minimize strain on themselves and the mules, they had been doing the long hauls in two stages. Jeff would move the logs to a halfway point while Tad guarded the wagon; then they’d switch. In this case, each stage would take about ten days. It took all night to desalinate enough water for Jeff and the mules to take with them. He left as soon as it was light enough to see the road.

Jeff never really expected the logs to still be there, but they always were. He always expected an ambush, but it never came. What happened, as before, was an undramatic ten days of manhandling good-sized waterlogged timbers and cajoling dumb mules.

After all the logs were safely at the twenty-kilometer mark, Jeff took the mules on back to the end of the island, looking forward to a few days of simply standing guard. He hailed Tad as soon as he could see the wagon, but there was no answer.

Maybe he was asleep. No need taking chances, though. He tied up the mules and cut through the sapling forest to the beach, to circle around. That wouldn’t do much good if someone had gotten Tad and was waiting for him.

They’d have the Uzi and a dozen other weapons; Jeff had just the scattergun and a pistol.

He sidled around the narrow beach and crept quietly back through the woods to the cart. They were waiting for him.

“Throw out your guns, oldie.” He hadn’t seen anybody, but there was cover enough to hide a couple of platoons. He heard a number of weapons being cocked.

“Better do it, Healer.” Tad’s voice. “If you try anything they’ll kill us. Must be twenty of them.”

Resigned, Jeff unloaded the scattergun and pistol and threw them into the clearing. He walked out slowly with his hands on the top of his head.

Tad came stumbling into the clearing, hands tied and feet hobbled. His face was a mass of bruises; some of his hair had been pulled out. “I’m sorry, Healer, they kept hurting me—”

“It’s all right.” They were coming out of the woods, in pairs, boys between twelve and eighteen, each with at least one gun. An older lad, tall with a trace of downy beard, carried the Uzi and had two pistols holstered on his belt. How much had Tad told them? Please God, Jeff thought, not about the vaccine.

“You the leader?” Jeff asked. He nodded, coming forward cautiously. He had an unreadable crooked smile and bright eyes. My God, Jeff thought, what if he’s got the death, they go insane a day or two before they lose motor control.

“Are you from Key West?”

“Naw. South America.” He laughed, a giggly falsetto. “Guy Tad says you’re not stupid. How can you be an oldie and not be stupid?”

“I’m not sure. Think it was medicine I was taking before the war.”

“Or you did something that pissed Charlie off. So he wouldn’t give you the death.”

“That could be it.”

“He says you heal. You a doctor?”

“No, I just learned some healing when I was younger. Then I found these medicines. Been headed south, trading healing for supplies. Most people have heard of me before I get to them.”

“We don’t hear much on the island. Keep to ourselves. We don’t trade, either.”

“They’re a commune,” Tad said. “Hundreds of ‘em.”

“We could join you, if you want us,” Jeff said.

“Oh, we got you.” He looked away. “Red Dog, you wanna check the tide? Yeah, we got you. Couple of people you wanna meet anyhow. Newsman and Elsie the Cow. Oldies.”

“A woman?” Jeff had only heard of male acromegalics surviving; he’d assumed there was some sex-linked factor in the immunity.

“Claims to be.” He giggled. “A real stiffener. If you can keep it up long enough to pork her, maybe she’ll have another oldie.”

“Half an hour to slack,” someone shouted from the water’s edge.

“Let’s get this shit rounded up,” the leader said.

“Wait,” Jeff said. “Are we going as prisoners? Or do we join your family?”

That crooked smile again. “I guess you’re prisoners till someone gets the death. We ask Charlie, maybe you’re prisoners, maybe you’re family. Maybe you’re dinner.” He threw his head back and laughed, for the first time opening his mouth wide. His teeth were chipped and filed to points.

2 John Ogelby

For years I suppose I tacitly assumed that the Janus Project was a hoax, a make-work business the Coordinators cooked up for obvious morale purposes. You can’t have thousands of highly trained technical people just sitting around on their thumbs. Might as well let them design castles in the air: keep them happy and give the rest of the population something to dream about.

Much of the research and development for Janus would be directly applicable to rebuilding the Worlds, anyhow, and the more exotic aspects—the fantastic propulsion schema and so forth—might be handy in a century or so, when they actually could afford to build a starship. I went along with the gag. The strength-of-materials problems were fascinating, even if the overall picture was just a fantasy. Many scientists and engineers shared my attitude, my tacit complicity, because we could look at the numbers and see the reality they concealed. It’s true that a matter/ antimatter drive had been demonstrated many years before, accelerating a small payload to solar escape velocity in a matter of minutes. But that didn’t really prove Janus would work—no more than you could produce a flea the size of an elephant and expect it to jump over mountains (it would collapse under its own weight).

To begin with, the small m/a demonstration had actually been a simple reaction drive, a steam-powered rocket. They took a few hundred kilograms of water and bled a few grams of antimatter into it. It zoomed off very impressively. But for Janus to follow that design, it would have to fuel up with a small ocean.

It’s true that a particle is totally, mutually, annihilated by its antiparticle; totally converted into energy. But you don’t really get emceesquared, not in any useful form. To begin with, half the energy goes off as neutrinos, which just ghost away and are wasted. The rest is high-energy gamma rays, which can’t be tapped directly. On a small scale, the radiation can be absorbed by water, which breaks down into energized ions of hydrogen and oxygen, which in turn provide exhaust for a reaction engine.

But the Janus planners were talking about using the gamma rays directly, via some mythical “reflector.” The photon drive that science fiction writers mumbled about for a century. Problem is, this reflector has to be absolutely efficient, and not just to get the most for your money. If one hundredth of one percent of that radiation leaked through, everybody aboard the ship would be fried in an instant.

As I say, though, the work was interesting (and, conversely, the strength-of-materials aspects of the Tsiolkovski reconstruction were simple numbercrunching), so I never voiced my doubts publicly. I stopped being sarcastic in private, too, when O’Hara dived into the demographics work. When she gets a bug in her brain about something she loses her sense of humor.

Now that I’ve been proven wrong, both she and Dan can stand on the solid bedrock of hindsight and catalog the errors of my ways. Dan just contends that I underestimated the cumulative creativity of a thousand out-of-work physicists. (About what you would expect from a chemical engineer. By the time they get their degrees, they’ve taken so many physics and chemistry courses that they’re thoroughly brainwashed.) So I was wrong on that score: they did develop a workable reflector. Then they turned particle physics inside out and came up with this damned neutrino coupler. So I never claimed to be a scientist.

I still didn’t think it would fly, not this century. The actual expense in time and material was an order of magnitude greater than that projected for rebuilding the Worlds. I contended that people—and their supposedly responsible leaders—would opt for security over dreams, when it actually came down to pulling out the checkbook.

O’Hara, of course, had recourse to the “lessons of history,” which somehow always became clear after the fact. What I underestimated in this context was the motivating power of paranoia. How did we get into space in the first place? she asked rhetorically. It never would have happened without last century’s mutual xenophobia between the United States and the Soviet Union (precursor to the late unlamented SSU).

So the fuel ship S-l is actually going out, early next year. If everything goes according to plan, S-2 fires up four years later. And we’ll be aboard it.

Charlie’s Will

They had a large flatboat, almost a floating dock, more than big enough to hold the mules and wagon. A small flotilla of rowboats towed it across the water. The bridges from the next island south to Key West were intact: four keys that collectively were called “the Island.”

The Island did well by its family. For generations before the war, the Keys had tried to become more and more independent of the mainland. The automated desalinization plant still worked; anywhere on the Island you could turn on a tap and get any quantity of distilled water. Fish and edible seaweed shared huge mariculture pens, and hydroponic greenhouses produced everything from avocados to zucchini. No wonder the family had wanted to isolate itself; if the road were intact they’d have a constant stream of hungry nomads.

They put Jeff and Tad into a musty jail cell. After the jailer went away, Jeff sat down on the edge of the bed and whispered the obvious: “They’re never going to let us off this island alive.”

Tad nodded. He was looking at himself in the mirror over the sink, a real novelty. “Guess we better make ourselves wanted.”

“Make ourselves essential. And keep a weather eye out for changes of opinion.”

The jailer, who hadn’t spoken, came back with a pitcher of water and a tray of cold food. He slid both through a serving door and clumped away.

Jeff uncovered the tray. “Oh, this is cute.” A grape-fruit, two small fish, and a bowl of smoked human parts: fingers, cheeks, and a penis. “I wonder if it’s a special treat. Or just what they feed prisoners.”

“Pretty revolting.” Jeff agreed, but they had both eaten in the presence of worse. They polished off the fruit and fish, then gave the tray back to the waiting jailer. He walked off chewing on a finger. Tad fell asleep then, but Jeff sat on the bunk and watched the square of sky in their high window turn dark. He lay awake for some time after that, thinking. Maybe he was going to die here; maybe it didn’t make much difference. Maybe they had a transmitter and a dish.

For breakfast the jailer brought a glutinous soup without any meat. When they’d finished he drew his gun, unlocked the door, and motioned them out. He led them to a courtyard and pointed to a bench.

Soft breeze from the sea did not quite dispel the odor. There were four crosses, tilted over x-wise. One held most of a skeleton, hanging upside down; another, the slack remains of a person who had recently been butchered. The two others were empty, waiting, wood stained black with old blood. The birds had flown away when Jeff and Tad came out. Now they rejoined the ants and flies.

“Is this it?” Jeff asked the jailer. He just stared, staying well out of reach.

A heavy door to the outside wheeled open. Through it came two men helping a woman try to walk. One of the men was General, the pointy-toothed leader from yesterday; the other had a huge shock of brown beard. The woman obviously had the death.

As they got closer Jeff could see that the “beard” was actually a human scalp, held in place by strings.

“Good morning, General,” Jeff said.

“This is our charlie,” General said. “With Raincloud’s help he’ll tell us what to do with you.” Raincloud had probably been attractive until recently. Now she was drool and mucus and infected stumps where two fingers had been removed. She smiled sharp points and stared past them.

The charlie produced a slim black book, a vest-pocket dictionary, and opened it at random. “Raincloud!” he shouted, and her stare turned in his direction. “Liferaft,” he read.

“Rife laughed, raff life, life laugh.”

“Lighthouse.”

“Life light. Life life.”

The charlie looked at General with raised eyebrows. He shouted again at Raincloud: “Death house.”

She laughed. “Life house.”

He put the book back in his pocket slowly. “Hm. I’ve never heard it be more clearly spoken.”

“I suppose,” General said. He looked disappointed. “Give her the gift?”

“It’s her time. Get-the-fire-started,” he said slowly to the jailer. He and General managed to worry the shift off her unresisting, uncooperative body. She wore nothing underneath. They led her to one of the crosses and General began wiring her wrists and ankles to the boards while the charlie went inside the jail.

“That was luck,” Tad whispered.

Jeff shook his head. “No, it wasn’t. He had her trained.”

“What do you mean?”

“That dictionary opened to the N’s, nowhere near ‘liferaft.’ We have an ally.”

Their ally returned, minus the false beard, carrying a leather case. He walked straight to the girl, not looking at them. He opened the case and said, “Distract her.”

General poked her with a stiff finger and when she turned to look at him, the charlie pulled out a long, thick-bladed knife and plunged it between her breasts. She winced and shuddered, voided in a rush, but didn’t cry out. Jeff knew the final stages of the disease provided insensitivity to pain, but he had never seen it demonstrated so dramatically.

He stabbed her twice more in the heart and then helped General push the cross over twice, so she hung head down. Then he slashed her throat with one quick cut. He walked over toward Jeff and Tad, holding the dripping knife.

“We gotta bleed her for a few minutes,” he said conversationally. “You guys’re free to go now. Or you can watch like the others.” He gestured with the knife and Jeff saw for the first time that there were dozens of people sitting on the walls behind them.

“It won’t bother us,” Tad said.

“I hope they aren’t too disappointed,” Jeff said, “not seeing the two of us die.”

“They’ll get over it. We gotta talk, you know.”

“I know.” The charlie nodded and went back to his chores.

It was easier to watch now, Jeff told himself, now that the woman’s face was transformed into a slick red mask, expressionless, gape-jawed, upside down. When the blood slowed to a dripping the charlie made an incision from pubis to sternum. A streaming mass of guts lolled out. Jeff didn’t look away. He had seen worse, after all. The charlie took a deep breath over his shoulder and pulled on the blue-gray bloodstreaked mass, and as it sagged to the ground the woman gurgled. He started to saw away inside the cavity and Jeff was annoyed to find himself fainting.

3 Daniel Anderson

Slightly excruciating dinner last night, with Marianne’s family. Her mother is scarcely older than me—she gave birth to Marianne at thirteen—but we have absolutely nothing in common, except Marianne.

(Interesting that such a dull and silly woman could produce such a daughter. The father was a groundhog engineer, though; that must explain it.)

Marianne’s little sister was entertaining, and very smart for an eight-year-old. Predictably spoiled. I’m glad we won’t be having any children until after acceleration. Life is complicated enough.

Start-up is pressing me to be Engineering Liaison between Janus and New New. I couldn’t refuse outright, but I’m searching—rather, Marianne and I are—somewhat frantically for someone who could be talked into volunteering for the job. With more than four hundred track-grade engineers aboard, you’d think there would be one with some political ambition. But I guess all those are staying behind.

Not that it’s such a difficult job. But hell, the main reason I wanted to go was to get out from behind this desk and back in the lab. Or so I keep telling myself.

John would be willing to take it—he’ll be the highest-ranking engineer aboard—but he’s ineligible on account of not being able to use a spacesuit. One lovely part of the job will be supervising EVA drills. You do have to be reasonably good with a suit to work on the hull of an accelerating vessel, even at a small fraction of a gee. If you fall off you’re just gone.

I don’t mind doubling up on jobs; we’ll all have to do that for a few years. I asked for food service; cooking was my hobby on Earth. But they didn’t want to waste all those years of administration experience. I feel like a prisoner whose sentence has been extended because he was so good at being incarcerated.

Complaining to Sandra Berrigan didn’t help much. She said my feelings had been taken into consideration, but that it was a fact of life that most scientists and engineers who are good administrators are good in spite of not liking the job.

Marianne’s second job is Entertainment Director. That makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose. She has a lot of experience in music and is one of those freaks with an eidetic memory for movies and plays. She was a little disappointed, though, hoping for something less frivolous. Seems like a pretty important job to me. There’ll be an awful lot of people just twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their replacements to grow up and be trained.

The architects are going crazy, trying to design a star-ship that is also a dwelling for a population that stays stable for seventy-eight years and then grows like a yeast culture. I think the real problem is eleven egos all conscious of the fact that this is the most important project they will ever work on.

I wouldn’t like to be in Berrigan’s shoes. When she okays the design she’ll make one friend for life—and ten enemies. That’s another thing that makes administration so attractive. If you keep at it long enough, you get to offend everybody.

Charlie’s Will

The charlie’s name was Storm. He lived in one corner of the old hospital, most of which was a huge dusty tomb. He helped Jeff and Tad set up quarters next to his. While they swept and scrubbed they tried to pry information out of one another.

“What is the business with the fingers?” Jeff asked.

“Just to tell when they can’t feel pain any more. That’s when we butcher ‘em. You let the death go all the way, the meat gets rotten.”

“Sounds like it’s against Charlie’s Will,” Tad said. “Rushing it.”

“Naw, they’ve got it all worked out. Our first charlie was a guy name Holy Joe, he wrote it all down. He was the first one to be meat, too.” He leaned on his broom. “What, you guys don’t eat meat up north?”

“Not human meat,” Tad said. “Not our family, at least.

We’ve got pigs and chickens.”

Storm nodded. “Seen pictures in books. All we get is fish and sometimes a turtle. Get really tired of fish all the time.”

“How did you get to be a charlie?” Jeff asked.

“Reading. When the charlie gets the death, whoever reads the best gets to be the new charlie. Guess that’ll be you after me. Better learn how to butcher. Hard part is the bones, leaving the bones.”

Jeff nodded. “How old are you?”

“Just turned seventeen. Got a couple years.” Maybe a hundred, Jeff thought.

“What about General?” Tad asked.

“Almost twenty, waiting. How about you?”

“Sixteen,” Tad said, perhaps too quickly. “Healer’s thirty-six.”

“Old before the war.” Storm shook his head. “Bet you went to college.”

“Seven years.”

“Oh, say…” Storm looked at his watch, a reflex Jeff had not seen in years. “Newsman’s at the college now. General said you’d want to meet him.”

“He’s an oldie?”

“Is he ever. Come on.”

They bicycled across the Island to the campus of the University of the Media. Jeff’s heart raced when he saw a dish pointed skyward, but Storm said the guts of it had been torn out. Nobody wanted anything to do with the charlie-damned spacers.

They opened the door into the library and walked into a stiff wall of cold air. The building was set up with independent solar power, and the air conditioners hadn’t yet broken down. They walked past rows of old bound books and stepped onto a liftshaft. Storm punched Five and they rose swiftly.

They came to a windowless door marked STUDIO and Storm knocked lightly. The man who opened the door was bigger than Jeff, huge shoulders and chest riding an immense belly. Bald and wrinkled, perhaps over sixty. He squinted stupidly at Jeff. “You’re that Healer.”

“That’s right.” Jeff held out his hand. Newsman looked at it, blinked, and then engulfed it softly.

He opened the door wide and turned his back on them, clumping toward a cube console. “I got the news. What day you want?”

Jeff shrugged and said his birthday: “May 15, 2054.” Newsman scowled with concentration and slowly punched buttons on the console. A warning bell rang; he cleared the keyboard and started over patiently.

When the headlines appeared, he broke into a smile. “Never did this one before, I think.”(1) XEROX LOBBY CLAIMS VOTE FRAUD IN AFRICA-REFEREN-DUM(2) SPRING DROUGHT WILL BRING NEW HIGH IN GRAIN PRICES(3) ATTEMPT ON SENATOR KEENE’S LIFE FOILED(4) TROPICAL STORM BECOMES HURRICANE BUTCH, THREATENS PR(5) JAPAN COMPLETES WORK ON ORBITING FACTORY

Well, it was June 15, close enough. “I can’t read real good,” Newsman said. He pushed a button and the headlines faded, replaced by a spokesman in a Xerox uniform; he pushed it three more times and got a picture of a storm-wracked coastline. He licked his lips and stared at it “Hap’m here a couple times.”

Storm made the “stupid” sign behind his back—tongue between lips, thumb striking temple twice. “What do you call that, Newsman?”

“Hurricane or himmicane. Couldn’t read the name.” He smiled up at Jeff and explained. “It’s always ‘hurricane’ in the headlines. Stupid.”

“Sure,” Storm said. “If they didn’t have both kinds, where would the babies come from?”

Newsman frowned at him and nodded slowly. “I guess that’s right.”

“How long have you…worked here?” Jeff asked.

“Oh, I was here before the war, twenty years before.” He chewed a nail nervously. “But I wasn’t Newsman then. I was a janitor downstairs. But they showed me how to use the machine, so I could look at it after work.”

“He was the only one on the Island when we got here four years ago,” Storm said. “He was in this room when they found him.”

“I kept everything real clean.”

Jeff had a sudden thought that raised the hair on the back of his neck. “Do you have newspapers in that machine?”

“Sure, lot of ‘em.”

“Any from New Orleans?”

“Dunno.” He laboriously typed in NOOSPAPERS? The machine corrected his spelling and produced a list. One was the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Jeff tapped the screen. “That one.” He counted backwards. “I think the twelfth of March, 2085.”

“Jus’ before the war.” He tapped a button and an arrow moved up the screen to come to rest beside the Times-Picayune. With one slow finger he typed in the date.

Another list. “Entertainment section,” Jeff said.

“What’s this all about?” Storm asked.

“Oh, I…had a friend who said she had her picture in the paper that day. Playing in a band.” O’Hara had been invited to play clarinet for an evening at a place called Fat Charlie’s. She’d been a minor sensation, able to play Dixieland in spite of being white, female, and from another World.

“That’s her.” Jeff’s voice shook. It was a good picture of O’Hara, back arched, eyes closed, lost in the music.

“You knew somebody famous?” Tad said.

“For a day,” Jeff said. “Famous for one day.”

Newsman adjusted the color, surprisingly deft. “She sure was pretty. Dead now?”

“Yeah.” Jeff reached past Newsman and pushed the HARD COPY button. A red light came on. “Outta paper,” Newsman said. Jeff shrugged. “Not important.”