Thrice upon a Time (18 page)

Ten minutes later they were walking with Elizabeth toward the Engineering Block, which contained the Mathematics and Physics Department, along a path below the looming bulk of the Reactor Building.

"So, how was your lady-friend?" Elizabeth inquired. "Pleased to see you, I trust."

"Of course," Murdoch replied. "Two handsome, husky, unattached American males—what more could a girl want? We're meeting her later for a drink."

"My word! You don't waste much time. Now I know how you people got to the Moon so quickly. Anyway, I'm glad I was able to help."

"You always did strike me as a romantic at heart," Murdoch said.

"Perhaps I felt I owed you a favor." Elizabeth was smiling mischievously.

"What are you talking about?" Murdoch asked her, puzzled.

"Maybe I should say I owed the Rosses one. Charles was a professor at Stanford when Herman and I met, you know. He fiddled the timetables around just so that we could work on the same projects together. So, you see, there are romantics at heart in your family too."

"Anne, come on back over and join the party. We don't have splinter groups in this pub. It isn't sociable." The voice was Trevor's, calling above the background of voices from a circle of Burghead people seated around a table filled with bottles and glasses in one corner of the spacious, oak-beamed lounge. Trevor was a square-built six-footer, with a pink-hued face and wearing a dark blazer with striped tie, who was sitting with three of his pals, Nick, Sam, and Steve, at one end of the group. Anne had been talking to them when Murdoch and Lee arrived at The Bull some two hours earlier. Since then she gravitated toward the two Americans to introduce them to the rest of the crowd, and for the last twenty minutes or so had been talking to Murdoch by the bar, off to one side. Trevor appeared to have grown visibly more irritated by this as the empty glasses in front of him accumulated. At the other end of the table, the rest of the group were talking with Lee about Stateside plans to supplement the U.S. fusion program with orbiting solar-to-microwave converters and other proposed developments.

"Who is he?" Murdoch asked in a lowered voice. "I thought you didn't have any regular guy. I mean, I don't want to make some kind of ass out of myself here."

"Oh, don't take any notice," Anne said, keeping her eyes on Murdoch. "He can get a bit bombastic when he's had a drink or two. He belongs to a rugby club, and I've been there with him a couple of times because they're a good crowd to have a laugh with. That's all there is to it."

"He sounds like I'm trespassing or something." Murdoch looked past Anne's shoulder, but Trevor had turned his head away and was talking to somebody next to him.

"Nonsense," Anne said. "That's for me to decide. I told you, don't take any notice. He's forgotten already that he said it. Now, what were we talking about?"

"You were telling me about Jenny and her disappearing tricks."

"That's right. How about you? Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

"One of each. They're both a bit younger than me. They live with my folks."

"In Chicago?"

"Yes. Iain's twenty-five. He's a born businessman like my pa. My sister wants to be a dancer in the movies. She's mother all over."

"What's her name?"

"Tanya. She's eighteen."

"That's nice. I like that name."

"Hey, Doc," Lee called suddenly from one end of the table. "These guys won't believe we're gonna dig a tunnel under the Atlantic. Come over here and tell 'em I'm serious." It was a chance to rejoin the party without looking submissive.

"Let's go talk to the people," Murdoch murmured. He picked up their glasses from the bar and moved over to where Lee was sitting. Anne followed, pretending not to notice Trevor's glare from the other end.

"He's serious," Murdoch said. "We're gonna dig 'em all over—New York City to the West Coast… Toronto to Texas. Airplanes will be strictly for backwoods routes and museums."

"It makes sense," Lee declared, turning back to the faces listening around him. "Why have to shove all that air out of the way when you can go through tubes where there isn't any air? Why lift motors up and then bring them down again when all you really want to move is the passengers?"

"Just like that," Jerry said flatly. Jerry was a cryogenics specialist who worked at one of the injector nodes. "Like a well in the garden."

"Why not?" Lee asked simply.

Sheila, an artist of some sort from the plant, looked up incredulously at Murdoch and then back at Lee. "But what are you going to dig them with? You simply can't get coolies these days, and even if you could, there aren't enough shovels."

"You melt your way through," Lee said. "Heavy currents are pretty good at melting rock under high pressure. They're doing it in Utah for deep mining. The shield even makes its own glass to line the tunnel behind it as it goes. It works great."

Tom, who worked with Jerry, gave Murdoch an appealing look. "Okay, but… fourteen thousand miles an hour?… Lee's saying the bloody trains will be able to do fourteen thousand miles an hour. Surely not."

"That's what the studies predict," Murdoch said with a shrug. "Coast to coast in just over twenty minutes, city center to city center. Why not? There's no air drag, and if you levitate the cars magnetically, there's no friction worth talking about either."

Anne moved through between two of the chairs and sat down in one of two vacant seats between Sheila and Tom. Murdoch took the other.

"That's fantastic," Tom said. "I'd read a few things about something like that, but I didn't know it'd got a definite go-ahead."

"I've had a thought," Jerry said suddenly. "If they got it up a little bit more, to eighteen thousand, they wouldn't have to bother levitating it at all. It'd be in orbit!"

"Hey, an underground satellite!" Lee exclaimed. "How about that?" They all laughed.

"So when will all this happen?" Sheila asked, leaning forward to look at Lee. "What dates are we talking about?"

Lee finished a long swig from his pint glass and wiped his mouth with the side of his hand. "They should start the transcontinental ones inside a couple of years. You'll have to wait a while longer for the Atlantic one though. They've still got to figure out exactly what they're gonna do about crossing tectonic plate margins."

"These people make me bloody sick." The voice came suddenly from the far end of the table. The conversation died abruptly. It was Trevor, sounding slightly slurred. "I'm sick of these b-bloody Yanks, coming over here and telling us how bloody clever they are all the time," he pronounced. As he spoke, he looked from one to another of his own henchmen at the far end, but his voice was loud enough to carry to everybody, obviously deliberately. His eyes had taken on a detectable glaze, and his face was a shade redder than it had been earlier. From the corner of his eye, Murdoch saw Lee stiffen.

"Aw, shut up, Trev," Jerry threw back, trying to make his tone sound bored. "Now you're spoiling the party. We don't want to talk about that."

"That's a point," Tom said, turning to Murdoch and getting back to the previous topic. "How are they going to get around that?" Murdoch started to describe a recent proposal that involved telescopic sections of tunnel that would pivot inside twenty-mile-long excavated caverns to compensate for the drift of the plates. As he spoke, he stole a glance over Anne's shoulder at Trevor, who was glowering at them while draining the last of yet another Scotch.

"It's true though," Trevor came in again from the far end. "We all know they've done some clever things. Why can't they leave it at that? Why do they always have to come over here and act so bloody superior about it?
We
beat them hollow with heavy-ion fusion, but we don't keep on about it all the time, do we?"

"Nobody's acting superior," Anne said curtly. "But
some
people seem to be doing their best to appear inferior."

"Well said, Anne," Jerry approved. "Shut up, Trev."

"You can't tell Trev to shut up," Sam said from the far end, feigning a note of surprise in his voice. "That won't do. Whose side are you supposed to be on?"

Sheila sighed and looked imploringly from one end to the other. "There aren't any sides over anything. For Christ's sake don't start getting silly, Trevor, why don't you go onto Cokes or something?"

"I prefer to stay with the Scotch, thank you. Why? What are you trying to say?"

"She's trying to tell you you're over the mark," Tom said. "It's time you laid off."

"I'm all right. All I said was some of these foreigners make me sick… " Trevor leaned back heavily in his chair and seemed to lose the thread of what he had been about to say. He scowled and raised his eyes to look in Murdoch's direction. "Coming over here and carrying on as if it was
them
who educated the world… all talk." He brought his eyes to focus on Murdoch directly, squinting as if he were trying to peer through a haze. "You see… there is this thing called
cul-ture,
old boy." He pronounced the word slowly, as if expecting them not to have heard it before. "There is more to life, you may be surprised to learn, than just making more and shoddier machines. But the colonies probably haven't got round to finding out about that yet."

"I was over there last year," Sam said casually. "Do you know, they put ice in sherry?"

Nick, who was sitting on Trevor's other side, gave an exaggerated gasp of disbelief. "You're joking! That's as bad as serving unchilled white."

"Oh, they do that too," Sam told him. "In fact they—"

"Stop it!" Anne cut in sharply. "If you can't hold a few drinks, then don't make a spectacle of the fact. Aren't manners supposed to count somewhere as well?"

"It's a sham society," Steve joined in, ignoring her. "Know what I mean—all plastic and tinsel on the outside, but nothing inside. Anything that glitters fascinates them."

"Did you ever come across that sissie thing they call football?" Nick asked.

"They wear spacesuits for it," Sam said. "Air-conditioned and spray-sanitized, I think." He shook his head wonderingly. "They make a big fuss about it though."

Trevor leaned forward and held his jacket out to display the badge on the breast pocket. "See that? English League rugby badge, that is. What you call a
man's
game… I wonder why it never caught on in the States. I mean, they're always
talking
about their he-man footballers and their bloody Marines, aren't they?"

"Maybe we grew out of needing to prove things," Murdoch suggested, deciding that things had gone far enough. He held Trevor's eye steadily and forced himself to remain calm.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Trevor demanded.

"Burghead's quite a place. I'm impressed. I didn't expect to find it being run by schoolkids. I thought you'd have left such nonsense behind a long time ago."

"Are you saying we're incompetent?"

"No. I'm just saying that right now you're acting pretty dumb."

"Dumb?" Trevor shot a puzzled glance at Nick and Sam. "What does he mean, dumb? I'm speaking, aren't I? Is the poor chap deaf or something?"

"They get their words mixed up," Sam said. "I think he means stupid."

"Oh, I see… " Trevor set his glass down on the table and nodded slowly. "We're getting personal, are we? I wasn't being personal. I was just talking about things in general. Wouldn't you say he was being personal?"

"Very personal," Nick agreed. "Quite uncalled for, I'd say."

"Listen, Yank," Trevor said, looking back round abruptly and speaking in a harsher, and now openly derisive, voice. "
I
happen to be at Burghead because I qualified to work at Burghead.
I'm
here because I'm a bloody good engineer, and I've got a degree from European Energy Community's university to say so. Why are
you
here?"

"You know why he's here," Sam said, making little effort to disguise the sneer. "He's traveling tourist-class. His grandad knows Lizzie Muir."

"You mean they're not qualified?" Nick asked in mock surprise.

"I think they dropped out," Sam replied.

"God knows what business it is of yours," Sheila said, sounding exasperated. "But if you must know, Murdoch's grandfather happens to be a Nobel Prize winner… for physics."

"So?" Trevor demanded, gesturing toward Murdoch. "What's that supposed to make him? My father was a surgeon. That doesn't make me a member of the BMA."

"It means I don't need pieces of paper and boy-scout badges on my coat to remind me who I am," Murdoch said, allowing his tone to become sarcastic. "What's left in there when you peel it all off?"

"Wrong. They stand for something that matters," Trevor shot back.

"That's what people who wrap boxes in plastic and tinsel say."

Trevor's face darkened. "Are you trying to make a fool of me, Yank?"

"There's no need. You manage okay on your own."

Trevor stood up from his chair, lurching against the table in the process and slopping some of the drinks. His jowls had inflated, and his expression was ugly. Lee was on his feet in the same instant, facing him from a few feet away. His movement had been smooth and catlike; his face was expressionless, but his muscular frame stood poised on a hairspring. Murdoch gripped the arms of his chair and forced himself to stay put. Lee could probably have taken all four of them even without Murdoch's help, but that wasn't the way.