Sidney's Comet (16 page)

Chapter Six

H
ISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, FOR FURTHER READING AND DISCUSSION

August 6, 2326: The Last Holy War. “A great little war,” in the words of colorful General William C. (“Bomber Bill”) McKay, Bu-Mil’s seventh minister. On that day, AmFed turbo bombers rained holy bombs on non-Christian enclaves around the world. The Treaty of Rabat followed, in which the planet was divided into three nations—the American Federation of Freeness (encompassing North and South America, India, the Middle East, Europe, Australia and S.E. Asia); Afrikari (all of Africa except Egypt); and the Union of Atheist States (Soviet Union, China and several minor nations).

Monday, August 28, 2605

It was the first morning coffee break, Garbage Day minus four. Carla mentoed the galactic pool cue, watched her white cue ball carom off an obstacle post and enter a side pocket. A wallscreen over the table lit up with bright yellow and purple gamma flashes as the cue ball’s matter was consumed by one of the game’s synthetic black holes.

“Damn!” Carla said. She looked at her opponent, Samantha Petrie. Petrie was plump, perhaps three years Carla’s junior, with saucer-like round eyes and a toothy smile.

“Too bad,” Petrie said with an I-got-you smile. “That’ll cost you another hundred bucks.”

Carla nodded with resignation. ‘That’s enough for me,” she announced, reaching into her belt purse. Carla wore a tangerine orange business suit dress, with a ruffled white blouse and a narrow striped tie. A tiny painted orange beauty mark graced her left cheek.

“Three straight!” Petrie said. “I’ve never beaten you like that!”

“I beat myself. Too many things on my mind.” Carla passed three crisp new hundred dollar bills to Petrie, then closed her belt purse.

They moto-shoed across the crowded Presidential Bureau Gameroom to a wallscreen on which President Ogg could be seen delivering a campaign speech. “Do you want to talk about it?” Petrie asked.

Carla thought for a moment, then: “Might help.”

They sat on a couch in front of the wallscreen, listening while Ogg harangued about Hoovervilles and unemployment lines in the “bad old days.” People on nearby lounge chairs and couches watched the screen or chatted in low tones. The President concluded by requesting that everyone punch Tele-Charge voting button number one on Tuesday. “A vote for me is a vote for prosperity,” he promised. The screen went dark.

“Sidney has a terrible handicap,” Carla began sadly. “He’s being sent to a therapy orbiter.”

“Oh,” Petrie said, her tone sincere. ‘That’s unfortunate.”

Carla picked nervously at her cuticles. “I tried to visit him yesterday at the detention center, but he refused to see me.”

“What does he have?”

“A nerve disorder. I’ve known about it for years, but he was always able to control it . . . until Saturday night. He had an attack at the reunion.”

“How sad.”

“I just wanted to give him some code information—a few numbers and names to drop in the right places. You know, to make life a little easier for him up there.” Carla felt tears welling up in her eyes. “I also wanted to say goodbye.”

“I wish there was something I could do.”

“I know what you must be thinking,” Carla said, glancing at Petrie. “He should have submitted himself for therapy long ago.

“I didn’t think any such thing. I know how you feel about him.”

“Do you? How?”

“It’s been obvious to me for a long time that one of you had to have a problem . . . loving one another the way you do but never becoming permies.”

“I suppose I do love Sidney, but f just never . . .” She cleared her throat, wiped tears from her cheeks. The orange beauty mark smeared. Petrie put an arm across Carla’s shoulder.

Carla chewed at her upper lip. “It’s been terribly difficult. And I hurt him by not going to the reunion.”

“No one can blame you for that,” Petrie said consolingly. “If that hunk Billie Birdbright had called ME at the last minute, I’d have found a way to go out with him too.”

“I couldn’t turn Billie down. All the girls want to go out with him. Just think of it, Samantha—He’s Chief of Staff!”

“You shouldn’t feel ashamed. This may sound cold, but you have every right to be happy. It’s Sidney’s problem, not yours.”

“I suppose.”

“How was the date with Billie?”

“Fine.”

“You can tell me, Carla. Did you? . . .”

Carla laughed and pushed her friend away. “You’re a Nosy Nellie!”

“I hear a lot of good stuff that way!”

Carla’s face grew sad again and she stared at the darkened wallscreen. “I’ve seen the statistics,” she said. “One institutionalized cappy supports seven-point-three-two-five government employees. But . . . well, I don’t know.” She sighed.

“Cappy sounds so impersonal, doesn’t it?” Petrie said.

“He’s much more than a statistic,” Carla said. “Sidney is flesh and blood, a warm, loving human being!”

“Yes, but maybe this is better for him. You know, being with his own kind. Everything in the American Federation is so perfect. Their kind is better off in a separate area, where people won’t laugh and call them names.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Carla rubbed her temple with the fingers of one hand and thought back over the years she had known Sidney—all the good times and special occasions.

Will I ever see him again?
she wondered.

From the fifth floor conditioning room in Building C, Javik could see New City Field perhaps a thousand meters to the East. A mid-morning sun seemed to drift in a clear blue sky, casting the profile shadows of rockets and support aircraft across the asphalt of the field.

Javik smelled the acridity of his own perspiration, looked down at rings of sweat on his grey workout suit. The lung pump to which he was connected throbbed and surged, strengthening and cleansing his body’s breathing system. He removed the mouthpiece, watched a large group of people in the distance who were gathered around an older model passenger rocket. Small guard contingents could be seen posted at other ships on the field, and Javik knew the reason: people trying to escape the comet had already stolen a number of small and medium sized rockets.

Javik looked to one side as he felt the pressure in the room change, saw Colonel Peebles moto-shoe in carrying his military cap in one hand. “Greetings,” Peebles said.

The tone was sinister to Javik’s ears, and he did not return the salutation.

“Getting in shape?” Peebles asked. His nose wrinkled. “Smells like it.”

Javik smiled as he noted the lack of muscle tone on Peebles’s emasculated body. This was Peebles’s second visit of the day, and Javik saw no point in feigning civility. They had nothing to discuss.

“The General would like me to brief you on certain ship’s functions,” Peebles said, “and on the method of approach you will use in getting close to that streaking ball of fire.”

“Ha!” Javik said. He lifted a dexterity amplification cube, held it between both palms and went through a series of joint and muscle tone exercises. ‘That’ll be the day, Peebles . . . when I take instructions from you!”

“This mission is no simple exercise,” Peebles said, glancing around the room irritably.

“There are message box briefing systems onboard ship, I presume?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll study inflight. You didn’t tape them yourself, did you?”

“No. Job-Sharing wouldn’t permit such a thing.”

“Good. I don’t want to listen to your whining voice in space.” Javik smiled as he twisted his torso.

Peebles took a deep, exasperated breath, turned to leave.

“I do have one question for you,” Javik said as he continued exercising. “I was grabbing a cup of coffee from the vending machine outside the briefing room . . . right after I talked with you and Munoz.”

“Oh?”

“The door was open, and I heard you say something about hoping for the best. What the hell kind of a comment was that?” Javik set the dexterity amplification cube on a bench. “All our technology, and you’re hoping for the best?”

“I don’t recall saying anything like that,” Peebles said, lifting and dropping his eyebrows. “You must have misunderstood.” He rolled out of the room hurriedly with this thought:
What I wouldn’t give to watch the Madame do her slicing routine on that insolent bastard!

Peebles just retreated,
Javik thought.
Wonder how that weakling got to be an officer. . . .

Alone in his office, Dr. Hudson mulled over what he had to do. A half-eaten donut lay on a napkin at the right side of his green desk mat. He stared at the donut disconsolately.

Munoz has gone crazy,
he thought.
I’ve got to get off a message to Nancy. She can keep that blasted cappy off our ship
. . . .

Hudson formulated the wording of an electronic letter in his mind.
I’ll send it myself after hours,
he thought.
Then I can destroy all record of it on this end.

But Hudson understood too well the hardest part: in his presence, Munoz could read his thoughts.
I’ll have to control every thought when he’s around,
Hudson thought.
I’ll clutter my head with other things. He’d kill me for this
. . . .

* * *

A slushpile of humanity was assembled in the cool morning shade of the passenger rocket. Sidney Malloy stood in their midst, wearing a light green hospital gown. He shivered at a gust of wind, squeezed the gown collar shut around his neck with his good hand. Having lost track of the shots given him by attendants since his capture, Sidney felt numb and wobbly.

For a moment, he wondered if Javik had really visited him in the sleeping room, or if it had been a drug-fogged dream.
It happened,
Sidney told himself.
It happened!

Blind and crippled babies cried incessantly in the arms of white-uniformed Bu-Med attendants, next to people who had met similar fates by accident or disease in their later years. They leaned on moto-crutches and sat in wheelchairs, drooling, chewing, grimacing, having convulsions and throwing up. Sidney breathed through his mouth because of the stench, looked from face to face at forlorn eyes and hopeless expressions on all sides. These were the traditional clients of Bu-Med.

Another group of clients waited to be taken aboard for the trip to Saint Elba. These pale-skinned men and women stood apart in handcuffs and chains, surrounded by black-uniformed Security Brigade guards. Moments earlier, Sidney had heard an attendant explain that they were “doomies,” the dangerously insane who demonstrated against Freeness and the AmFed Way. The attendant said this type always searched for causes, and now their cause was a comet which allegedly would destroy the planet. The doomies spoke in angry tones, lunging and pulling at their chains in great clatters and surges of fury. Some had rebellious, angry eyes that glared at anyone daring to look upon them. Others were heavily sedated, and their eyes rolled up and around, not focusing upon anything.

A sea of white-uniformed attendants surrounded and far outnumbered these groups of clients. Sidney overheard two female attendants talking nearby:

“You
volunteered?”
said one. “I was assigned to this rotten duty by the Job Board.”

“I don’t think it’s rotten,” the other said. “We can help these poor creatures.”

“You’ve got a strange attitude, sweetie,” the first said. Sidney detected cruelty in her voice.

A small hoy with straw-yellow hair screamed suddenly and fell to the pavement at Sidney’s feet, writhing and kicking spastically. Sidney started to reach down to him, when a female attendant rushed over and administered an injection in the boy’s arm. Sidney felt a sharp pain in his own twisted left arm, as if the needle had punctured his skin too. He rubbed the arm. Feeling a little dizzy, he shook his head to clear it.

When Sidney’s head cleared, he watched the boy’s jerking motions gradually slow and subside. The boy lay there unconscious on his side, with a twisted, pained expression on his thin face. Two attendants placed him on a moto-cot and rolled him to one side.

“Is this craft spaceworthy?” an attendant asked. Sidney did not hear another attendant’s reply. Voices were drowned in the whir and clank of an approaching entry lift.

Hearing a mumble to his left, Sidney looked down at a hunchbacked old man whose lips were moving slowly. The man had sparse grey hair, deeply creased skin and dark age splotches across his face and on the backs of his hands. A single black hair grew out of a mole on the old man’s chin.

Forgetting his own situation momentarily, Sidney was repulsed by the sight of such a decrepit human specimen.
He’s not far from the Happy Shopping Ground,
Sidney thought, dismayed that anyone had to reach such a loathsome state. Then Sidney asked, “What did you say?”

The old man cleared his throat, hawked and swallowed. “This is a bunch of shit,” he said in an angry, gravelly voice.

Sidney stared down at a broken front tooth as the man spoke, then asked, “What do you mean?”

“The good things in society are reserved for normal, youthful people.” The voice was bitter. “They’re throwing us away, like someone’s garbage.”

Sidney wanted to tell the man he was going to be in the Space Patrol with Tom Javik, but decided against it and said, “I’m sure they’ll take good care of us.” He watched the entry lift lock into place against the passenger rocket.

“My son hid me out for years,” the old man said, rubbing the mole on his chin. “But finally his wife . . . the bitch . . . turned me in.”

“You should be thankful for having such a wonderful son.”

“Thankful? There’s nothing to be thankful about! I couldn’t go out in public! They don’t want people like me around!” The old man started to lose his voice, coughed.

“There are a lot of good things about the American Federation,” Sidney said.

The old man wiped saliva and phlegm from his chin with his gown collar, then glared up at Sidney and demanded, “Name just one.”

“Freeness.”

“Ha!”

“There were terrible depressions before Freeness,” Sidney said, “with millions of people out of work. They stood in souplines and begged for survival.”