Uptown Local and Other Interventions (31 page)

“Not bad, huh?” Kit said.

“What were you thinking of?” Nita said, as overhead the dragon burst into song like a chorus of cheerful thunders.

“Dungeons and Dragons.”

“Where are the dungeons?”

“Don’t ask. C’mon, your turn!”

Nita headed down the stairs, trying not to stare as they were followed downward by several people dressed like young kings, and a snow-white, one-horned beast that was definitely not a goat.

So the afternoon went, and as it went along, it began turning into a competition—the two of them vying to produce the brightest New York, the darkest one, the most extravagant, the emptiest. They changed subway lines several times, for more variety. On the double A line, Kit found a Central Park full of friendly dinosaurs, and got his foot stepped on by an over-affectionate triceratops, so that he limped for a couple of days thereafter. Nita found a New York where single-minded robots trundled up and down steel streets, and where a self-propelled garbage truck tried to remove her and Kit as refuse. Probably in reaction, Kit immediately found a Manhattan entirely inhabited by talking beasts, some of whom could be seen walking humans on leashes; the two of them didn’t spend much time there. Nita found a stop on the D train that gave onto a New York in the middle of an ice age, where polar bears stalked deserted streets in the screaming, snowy wind. Kit found a New York sunken like Atlantis, in water that they could breathe; fish were nesting in the drowned trees, and the Empire State Building was smothered in white coral, a blind-walled ghost of itself in the wet green-blue twilight.

How is it happening?
Nita thought as she and Kit came up from a stop on the F train’s line into a moonlit Manhattan completely devoid of buildings or streets—one huge park from river to river.
Are we finding these places? Or are we making them somehow?
The only answer was the high, melodious howl of a wolf from the northward, joined a second later by a second voice, and a third.

“Come on,” she said, “watch this.” Down the stairs she went again, back through the turnstiles, concentrating fiercely. A D train came thundering in.

“What’re you going for?” Kit hollered in her ear.

“Shush!”

The train came, the only odd thing about it being the presence of an actual locomotive puffing steam. They got on and rode in silence, accompanied only by a drunken gentleman talking peacefully to himself, and a pretty Afrcan-American girl in starry leggings, singing along with her iPod under the train’s roar. Nita let several stops go by, thinking hard, losing her concentration, finding it again.
If we make them, then why not... why not...?

The train stopped and Nita jumped up, knowing this was the right spot whether she’d pulled off what she wanted or not. The doors opened, and she practically sprinted out of them, Kit coming close behind. Up the stairs she went and then stopped and stood panting at ground level, at Forty-second and Fifth, right by the Library.

It was their own world. The green-painted newsstand was right by the kiosk where it should have been. Behind them the Library reared up white and solid, and across Forty-second was the usual row of stores. Traffic was running as usual. Nita breathed more slowly.
I did blow it,
she thought....

“No horns,” Kit said.

She glanced at him, then looked out in shock at the traffic. It was moving with quick efficiency, and no horns were blowing, and the drivers all looked alert but good-humored. Nita began to watch the pedestrians, then, in growing wonder. It was apparently lunch hour, and they were striding about their business with the usual New Yorkers’ energy; but the faces were happy, or eager, or interested, or thoughtfully calm—all of them. No look of boredom, or worry, or anger or pain or hunger, was to be seen anywhere. And the street was clean, and when the light changed there was no gridlock—

“The druggies are gone,” Kit said. And sure enough, the guys who usually stood at this corner at lunchtime, saying (apparently to themselves), “Smoke, smoke, smoke ...” were entirely missing. Nita, slowly smiling, could understand it. None of these busy, involved, glad people looked like they needed drugs....

“But it’s ours,” Kit said. “Our world—“

“Real close,” Nita said. “Kit—why couldn’t ours
be
like this—?”

“It’d take forever.”

“Would it? This took just a few minutes.”

“We’re wizards ...”

“So is one percent of everybody alive. Okay, not five minutes, maybe, but if we all worked together, a year, five, ten—“

“How?”

Nita let out a breath. “I don’t know.”

Kit looked at her and shook his head. “Let’s walk a little,” he said.

She sighed and went after him. This place seemed too good to be true, but it
was
true.
Why not, why not?!
The thought kept singing in Nita’s head as they crossed the street and she saw the sun glance fierce and bright off the Chrysler Building as off an upheld spear.
There must be a way….

They stopped long enough to buy a hot dog apiece from a vendor and eat them where they stood. Then, “I’m getting tired,” Kit said.

Nita wasn’t even slightly tired, but she said, “Okay. Where now?”

“One more ride?”

“Sure. Where?”

“I want to go to Kennedy and see the planes, while we’re so close.”

It was likely to be three-quarters of an hour’s ride, but Nita shrugged. “Okay.”

They went down to the D train station under Rockefeller Center and caught a Train-to-the-Plane, one of those special trains that normally cost more. No one asked them for an extra fare, though, and they found a forward-facing window seat and settled in, for the plane train makes some of its run above ground, on elevated tracks that give a good view. The train made its usual underground stops in Manhattan, howled along through the tunnels below the river, and then burst out into bright Brooklyn sunlight and climbed above the brick and tarpaper rooftops, hooting merrily.

They stared out the window and watched the forest of chimneys and antennas and water tanks go by. Slowly the path of the train declined, curving southward, and passed Aqueduct Racetrack with its acres of parking lots. Sunset was approaching: the east was darkening blue.

Houses grew few, and the streets began to be lined with factories and warehouses, or with broad round tanks that said TEXACO or SHELL, full of kerosene for jets to burn. “It looks the same,” Nita said to Kit. So it did: for after Aqueduct even the factories went away, and they turned a last broad curve lined on both sides with great empty stretches of reeds and cattails, hissing softly in the early evening wind. Then the train pulled in at the last stop, the Howard Beach stop that would serve the airport until the new airport train started running. They got out and walked up the creaking wooden walkway to the dingy little station building and out to the driveway circle where the buses waited that would take them across the miles of parking lots to the Kennedy terminals. Out the door and down the little ramp they went, and under the evening sky they paused, listening to the marsh and the seabirds crying, and the wind off Jamaica Bay—

... And the sudden thunder before them, and a light like a lance of fire, leaping upward, shaking the air in their lungs for as long as it remained in atmosphere—then, burning with impossible brilliance, turning every color of the rainbow in order, and flaring searing blue as it went into transluminal drive and vanished. Riding that tail of fire had been a graceful teardrop-shaped starship the size of a city block.

Nita looked at Kit in astonishment—and then at the front of the bus, which said KENNEDY SPACEPORT—SHUTTLE, TERMINALS A-F.

They got on the bus.

They rode once right around the terminal circle, just to see the docking cradles and the hangars, the great round or teardrop-shaped ships being pumped full of reaction mass from the bay—for these ships were direct-mass converters that used the same fusion process the Sun did and could crack fuel-quality hydrogen out of any compound (such as water) that had some. They watched the catering trucks, and the little Port Authority flitters and ion-drive craft going about their business; they watched the hundreds of thousands of passengers, only some of them human, going in and out of the terminals with their luggage floating or walking behind them. And at the far end of the circle they got off the bus and went up onto the observation deck behind the space commuter terminal to look out across the field. There they gazed down along the eighteen-thousand-foot runway built out across Jamaica Bay and into the Great South Bay’s waters, and had the ultimate satisfaction of seeing the space shuttle
Enterprise,
newest of that name, drop like a graceful stone to the runway, silhouetted against the burning sunset and the up-rearing towers of Manhattan. Far above, the evening star had come out, and the air smelled of kerosene and cooling tarmac.

Nita sighed.
Enterprise
rolled to a stop, and the support trucks rolled up with the stairs; and a little crowd of tourists from one of the L-5 stations in orbit started coming out of the retrofitted craft, bumping into each other as they stopped to take pictures.

“Nostalgia,” said a voice from beside them. “No one cares about those old workhorses anymore. It’s the star-ships, the big cruisers, that everyone finds romantic.”

Nita and Kit looked over to one side. There was a man leaning on the railing—quite old, and balding on top, but with an erectness about his posture that made them wonder why he needed the cane that leaned on the Plexiglas beside him. He was well dressed in a sort of a cross between a jumpsuit and a business suit; and if his eyes were deep and old, they were also fierce. He looked a little dangerous.

Nita had heard so many people talking to themselves that day that she almost didn’t react. But there was a sad sanity about the man that tugged at her somehow, and suddenly Tom’s memory spoke inside her, saying, “Speak to strangers.”

“Why don’t they care?” she said. “About the shuttles, I mean.”

The man looked at her in surprise, then settled on the railing again, watching the great rolling tender come out to lean the shuttle back upright and attach its booster tanks. “Earth orbit,” he said, “what’s that? Who cares about the Moon? Space is open to a hundred light-years out now ... but the outward move’s stopping there. The government isn’t interested in any more exploration. They want money now, and safety. Leave the exploring to other worlds, they say. We’re comfortable. Why stick our necks out?” His voice was full of scorn. “And the mercantiles agree with them. Everything I’ve done has come down to making bankers fat. The heart, the joy, they’re gone ...”

“I’ve never been on the shuttle,” Nita said. The man looked at her strangely.

“It’s that way where we are, too,” Kit said, and for the second his voice was as fierce as the man’s eyes. “They don’t believe in going to space just to
go
anymore. They go because they’re scared someone else will do it first, or because someone else might make money out of it.”

“The stars,” Nita said, sorrowfully. “I’d give a lot just for a base on the Moon.”

The man looked at them more strangely than before, taking in their clothes, the look of them. “Where are you from?” he said slowly.

“New York,” Nita said.

“Not this one,” said Kit.

“Not this—“ The man broke off. “Do you know who I am?” he said.

They looked at him and shook their heads.

In the east, over the bay, the Moon was up, just before its full. The man turned to gaze at it with an odd, angry love. “And—where you come from—there’s no Jura Base, no Tycho Dome? No Tranquillity Center?”

“No,” Nita said.

“Not yet,” said Kit.

“But there is a space program—“

“Just the shuttles. We’ve got a space station and the space telescope, but not much more.” Kit sighed. “There’re a few planetary probes. And lots of satellites ... including some that kill each other with lasers.”

The man took his cane away from the Plexiglas and leaned on it, and still stood straighter than anyone Nita could remember. “Show me,” he said.

She began to shake. “You might not be able to get back.”

“I don’t care,” the man said. And it was plain he didn’t.

So they showed him. They slipped out of the commuter terminal a side way—the man said there were people he wanted to avoid—and caught the shuttle bus for the Howard Beach station. Nita went through the turnstiles first, pitching her token over for their guest to use. Under blue evening they made their way back to Manhattan on a train completely graffiti’d over, inside and out, except for a few neglected windows. The man looked at all this in astonishment. But that was nothing compared to his amazement when they hit their first Manhattan station and he saw the oldness of it, the grime, the bitter or wild or lively faces that waited for the train. And the ads, the posters on the walls, fascinated him. “Television,” he said, as if it were an alien word. “Automobiles. It could be the dawn of the Age.”

Nita’s thought, though, was that it was getting too dark for her and Kit not to leave: both their parents would pitch a fit. “We have to go home,” she said.

“I
am
home, I think,” the man said.

Kit looked at him hard, wanting to be sure he understood. “It’s not where we found you.”

“It’s home,” the man said, fierce-eyed. And then he looked out the window like a child seeing wonders. “It could be different,” he said. “This time.”

The train was stopping near Port Authority. Nita and Kit got up. Nita held out her token to the man. So did Kit. “In case you need to get back,” Kit said.

The man took them, his eyes shining.

“Bye,” they said.

“The same to you,” said the man.

As the train pulled off, they saw him looking uptown, and smiling.

*

They shuttled to the East Side, then took the Grand Central worldgate home and got yelled at for being out too late; and life for them otherwise went on as usual. At least for that day, their boredom was cured.

Three universes over, the sudden disappearance of Robert Anson Harmon, the father of modern starflight, multitrillionaire inventor of the Harmon Mass Conversion system and holder of a hundred pivotal patents, caused months of sensational stories in the press. His company’s lawyers did well for themselves in the months that followed. But eventually he was given up for dead, and the world he had helped to build went on well enough without him.