Executive (28 page)

Tedium was the greatest problem. Oh, certainly we made love, but the novelty of physical sex soon passed. At my age it took time to recharge; I found that about once per twenty-four-hour period was all I really cared for, and even though we did our best to make a production of each one, that left about ninety-five percent of the time available for other things. To some, paradise is isolation with a pretty and willing woman; no one who has actually tried that believes in it anymore. For one thing, the challenge is gone. For another, a desire fulfilled is a desire eliminated. When Amber had been anonymous via the helmet, she had been fascinating; each contact was an act of discovery. When she became known but forbidden, she was still fascinating. Now both her mystery and reticence were gone, and there was not a great deal remaining. She was not an intellectual partner; she did not know how to play challenging games. I couldn't even argue with her; she accepted everything I said or did without significant resistance.

Oh, we got along. But the glow was off. I became eager to find a bubble and get out of the ship, and I suspect that Amber, could she have been persuaded to hold an opinion of her own, would have felt the same. The quest became everything.

Naturally, when we finally scored, it was at the wrong moment. We had tried just about every possible variant of sex, struggling to relieve the boredom, and had discovered a promising game: Pin the Tail on the Donkey. No, no pin, no tail; we used our own anatomy, seeking to make the sexual connection.

Naked, we took turns freezing in place, in free-fall, while the other closed his or her eyes and sought to make physical contact at only the key site. The closer the first touch to the bull's-eye, the higher the score. Amber was leading, having landed her bottom on my left knee, but I had figured out by elimination and by sound what her position had to be and believed I could home in on the site this time. Doing it blind was much more exciting than doing it sighted, and I was really getting into the spirit of the game. If I scored, I would get to complete the act, while she was bound by the rules to remain fixed in position, ravished without reprieve. If I missed, she would get another turn, would probably score, and I would have to remain frozen while she had her way with me and won the game. The victory, at this stage, was more important than the sex.

I drifted through the short space, in my blind free-fall, head, hands, and feet held back, only my center extremity forward—and felt contact with her body. I opened my eyes and saw that I had scored; it was her cleft I was touching. “Ha, wench!” I exclaimed.

And the alarm sounded.

Amber laughed. It was a rule: the alarm severed any play. I had lost my opportunity and would have to start from scratch next time.

“Damn nuisance!” I muttered, and launched myself to the cockpit, my bare anatomy squeezing past hers in what at any other time would have been an interesting fashion. She made as if to bite at my member, and I made as if to knee her in the head. I squeezed into the pilot's seat, which was clammy to my skin, and she followed to peer over my shoulder.

Ahead was a blip, a monstrous one. “Oops—we've drifted out of zone,” I said, disgusted. “That's a city!”

But immediately I realized that it couldn't be; we were well below the inhabited level. Any true city-bubble would implode here. It was a city-sized bubble!

We homed in on it, and the size expanded as we got close. This thing was huge! It was like a planetoid, a perfect sphere. This was our strike!

We circled it, making sure there were no flaws, before planting our strike marker.

And spotted a marker already in place. This bubble had a prior claim.

For an instant I confess that I felt temptation: to remove the other marker and set our own, claiming this phenomenal strike ourselves. But quickly I suppressed the urge. For one thing, it was illegal and unethical. For another, claims were normally booby-trapped against just such an intrusion.

Sadly we moved on.

About a month later we found a bubble we could keep. It was smaller than the first but still well worthwhile. We staked our claim and contacted the company office, and our tour as prospectors was done. But somehow the disappointment of that first, denied strike remained with me. To have been so close to such a fortune in commissions...

I was not so foolish as to meet physically with my opposition again. I confined myself to more formal news conferences, and I was confined to my interview chamber: they could attack only my holo image.

But that they did.

Some questions were routine, but one man stood and cried, “I call upon all decent citizens to fight without letup to end the terrible Tyrancy! We are being oppressed by a madman and must free ourselves of this yoke by destroying him!”

He paused, evidently having run out of initial material. He had not expected to get this far before being lasered down or hauled out.

“Continue,” I told him. “Free speech is one of the guarantees the Tyrant makes.”

There was a ripple of laughter. But it wasn't very strong, and I could see that there was considerable support for the man's position. I had indeed progressed from savior to enemy in the minds and hearts of the average folk. They simply weren't interested in my substantial reforms; they saw only the inconvenience that they themselves suffered at the moment.

Normally the discoverer of a bubble either took his bonus and retired, or if it was a small strike, went on as much of a binge as it would finance, then returned to prospecting. But I was a management trainee, so we stayed with our bubble, following it as it proceeded from the wild state to the civilized state.

First it had to be brought to the processing level. A gee-shield was installed, so that it was no longer dependent on the turbulent currents for support. Tugs nudged it upward, until it floated just below the inhabited level. Then it was cleaned up and rendered airtight, and a lock installed. The atmosphere was pumped out, the pressure reduced to Earth-normal, and breathable air was instituted.

Then they began fashioning the bubble into a residential sphere. They got it spinning, so there was internal gee, and installed prefabricated units and plumbing and electrical lines and all the rest. Amber and I participated, working on one crew and another, getting the overall picture.

I worked under a Saxon foreman named Gray, who evidently had not been given the word about Jose Garcia's manager-trainee status. Gray was no bigot and no genius; he just knew his job and wanted it done right. His job was to establish secure foundations for the residential section of this bubble, so that there would never be a collapse after the apartment chambers were installed. Under his direction I had to drill holes into the hard shell of the bubble, to anchor those foundations. This was simple in concept but not in detail; those holes had to be positioned so precisely that they were surveyed in, and the drilling had to be done by heavy-duty laser. Bubblene is the hardest commercially viable substance available and is resistant to breakdown, but the same properties that make it excellent for ships and cities make it hellish to penetrate. Certainly a suitable laser will vaporize anything, but vaporized bubblene is dangerous, as it naturally precipitates the moment the vapor leaves the heat, coating everything it touches with bubblene.

That means that the body of the laser drills itself and perhaps the hands of its operator. The first worker to encounter that effect had to have his hands flayed, literally, to get them clean. I used hefty protective gloves, of course; in fact, I was in a light space suit, because though there was now air in the bubble, accidents and leaks were always possible in the early stages of conversion. Still, I had no hankering to play with such vapor. So my unit was set to heat the material to the softening point, so that it could be drilled. My laser was focused in a ring, and a diamond-sonic bit was in the center of that ring, gouging out the material and sucking the debris into a holding chamber. I had had to take a spot course in the use of this instrument, and I watched its indicators carefully, doing my job right. It was tedious, but each successful hole was an accomplishment; I knew that a century hence, this bubble would probably still be in use, and these same holes would be containing the bolts that anchored all its internal structures. That's a kind of immortality.

As the days passed I came to know Gray. He had a wife from whom he was estranged, and a six-year-old daughter he visited at every opportunity. He shared custody, but now that she was entering school, she couldn't be with him in the bubble. He was evidently irritated about that; he had no objection to education, but he loved his child and didn't like the separation. Thus the school became the focus of his ire.

“You see the kind of books they're using to teach those kids to read?” he demanded rhetorically. “Dick and Jane?”

I admitted that I hadn't. “My ward is fifteen,” I said. “She's beyond Dick and Jane, though she's still perfecting her reading. She's...” I shrugged. “They call it retarded. She doesn't take well to schools, so I had to have her tutored. Now she's carrying on alone; if she passes the test, she'll get her credit, anyway.”

“Ward?” he asked. It seemed he hadn't been informed about this this, either.

I shrugged again. "She—we wanted each other, and it's legal now, but some folk don't understand. I...

lost my other job because of that, but we're together."

He nodded. “Man's business with a woman is his own, if she's consenting.” I knew from the records I had checked that he was tolerant on this score, for his interest in a woman not much older had been responsible for the damage to his marriage.

“You mentioned the early reading books,” I said. “I was educated on Callisto, and I learned English as a second language. We didn't use Dick and Jane, but I know they've been around for centuries. I guess they're pretty stodgy.”

He laughed. “You haven't seen 'em? Then you sure don't know! They aren't stodgy anymore! I was helping Lisa to read from them, and I nearly got a hard-on! What the hell are they teaching our kids these days?”

I remembered that Hopie had set out to reform the school system in many ways, but this sounded strange. “Just what is in those books?”

“I'll tell you what's in 'em!” he exclaimed, getting his ire in gear again. Those who are tolerant about man's business can be less so about children's business. “Here she was reading this book, 'See Dick run. Run run run.' Then next page it says, 'Dick runs to Jane's house. Jane says, ”I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.“ Dick says, ”Great!“ Then Jane lifts up her dress. Dick looks. Look, look, look!' I mean, it goes on like that! Playing sneak-peek behind the couch. And that's only the beginning!”

I managed to avoid a smile. Hopie had certainly reformed the first-grade reader! My daughter, who had been so shocked at my relationship with Amber! Surely Thorley had not been responsible for this suggestion; she must have gotten it from Roulette. “How did Lisa react to it?”

“She thought it was great!” he said indignantly. “She couldn't wait to turn the page. She couldn't even handle all the words on the one page, but she wanted to get to the part where Dick showed his. 'See it grow. Big, big, big!' My six-year-old little girl!”

“Well, curiosity is natural in children. If such material encourages them to read—”

“It did that, all right!” he agreed. “But, my God—if that's what's in the first-grade reader, what the hell's in the second-grade reader? What's in the high school reader?”

“I don't think they've changed those yet,” I said. “Amena's in that one, and it's copyrighted 2650. They're probably stair-stepping it up, following one grade through, until the whole school system's been updated.”

“Then it's not too late to get rid of this smut!” he said.

“Lots of luck,” I said. “The Tyrancy's pretty set in its ways.”

“The Tyrancy!” he exclaimed. “I thought it was great at first, but now with this shit, and the med cutoff—” He grimaced.

“You're over the limit?” I asked. This was an excellent way to survey the reactions of the common man to the new programs.

“My mother is. She's seventy-five, and the cutoff's at seventy. First time she gets sick, they'll just let her die. How can they do that? She's a good woman!”

“Well, I heard that medical expenses were getting up so high—”

“Sure, and they need to be cut back. But not out of my mother's hide!”

There, of course, was the rub. People who agreed with the thrust of the new programs still didn't want to pay the price themselves. But ultimately every program had to be paid by the people; there was no other way.

“I wonder...” I said. “Your Lisa... my Amena can't speak English, but she understands it. She might listen, and she could signal 'no' if the word was wrong. That way you could use books outside the Dick and Jane trainer.”

His face brightened. “Sure thing! Let's try it.”

We tried it the next time his daughter came to visit. Amber had learned how to read English now, which made it possible for her to study in that language, since it was not necessary to speak what she was reading. We found a fairly simple book, and little Lisa read aloud, and Amber nodded affirmatively for the right words and negatively for the wrong ones. The two girls liked the arrangement, and it seemed to help both.

The work progressed, and by the time I drilled my last bolt hole, the first tier of apartments was anchored on the region where I had started, and the second tier was in progress. So, things were moving along, but I saw that it would have been far more efficient had all the holes been drilled together by a skilled crew that traveled from bubble to bubble, so that in one day the next step could proceed. As it was, my speed of work limited the following work, making it inefficient. I mentioned this to Gray, and he agreed. “But don't bother suggesting it to the front office,” he advised. “This is JBC, guaranteed inefficient. If we started doing things the way they should be done, we'd get halfway competitive with the private bubble companies, and the bureaucrats would be out of work.”

“But I thought this company was planetized in order to make it competitive!” I protested.