Worlds Apart (13 page)
Authors: Joe Haldeman
“It sounds as if you should be interviewing my husbands, or whoever wrote the program. Not me.”
“It may be done. That’s up to the Engineering Board. Right now I have an unpleasant task…” She reached into the drawer and brought out a hypodermic gun and a jar of swabs. “Would you volunteer to be interviewed under the influence of a strong hypnotic drug? You may refuse.”
“Sure I can.” She rubbed her palms on her thighs. “I don’t have anything to hide. Over there?”
“Yes. Lie down and roll up your sleeve.” Sharp smell of alcohol when she opened the jar.
O’Hara lay down on the cot, tense. “I’ve heard of this. But I thought you had to do something really drastic.”
“Not at all. It’s a standard procedure. Just close your eyes now, it won’t hurt.”
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Q
: How do you feel now?
A
: All right. Sleepy.
Q
: Do you remember when your husband John first mentioned the Janus Project?
A
: Both of my husbands have been talking about it for years. They were both involved in the initial planning.
Q
: I mean, when did he first mention your working on the start-up program?
A
: That would have been sometime last September. We were walking up in the half-gee area, he’d had a month of zerogee and needed exercise, and I guess I was complaining about the Stat group. He thought he could get me transferred.
Q
: But you told him not to do it.
A
: It wouldn’t look good.
Q
: Tell me about John.
A
: He’s funny.
Q
: Amusing? Or peculiar.
A
: Both. He’s always joking, he carries a little notebook to write down the last lines of jokes he hears, but mostly it’s just his outlook. Everything is funny
to him. He’s an awful tease.
Q
: He’s crippled.
A
: Yes. He was born with bad curvature of the spine. His parents were too poor to get him corrective surgery, and now he’s too old for it. That’s why he came to New New, to work in the low-gee labs. Gravity hurts him.
Q
: Did you ask him to get you assigned to the Janus Project?
A
: No. He asked me and I said no.
Q
: Do you think he went ahead and did it against your wishes?
A
: I’m going to ask. But that wouldn’t be like him.
Q
: Is John a good lover?
A
: You mean sex?
Q
: That’s right.
A
: (
Pause
) He’s not very imaginative. Neither is Dan. But they’re both groundhogs, you know.
Q
: Why did you marry groundhogs?
A
: I don’t know. John says I’m a throwback. (
Laughs
.) Says I only love him because his knuckles drag on the ground.
Q
: Do you love them?
A
: I married them.
Q
: That’s not an answer. (
No response
.) Do you love Jeff Hawkings?
A
: I think so, if he’s still alive. He wasn’t there the past two months, I’m afraid for him.
Q
: Who do you love more, John or Dan?
A
: I guess… usually John. He’s easier to get along with.
Q
: Who do you love more, John or Jeff?
A
: Jeff, I think.
Q
: But you’ll never see him again.
A
: Maybe not.
Q
: Do you think of Jeff while you make love with your husbands?
A
: Oh yes.
Q
: Of the four men you have formed long associations with, three have been physically unusual: a cripple and two giants. Have you ever thought about why that should be?
A
: Yes I have.
Q
: Why, do you think?
A
: It may be that I want their gratitude. With Charlie Devon, I think maybe it was… I was young and wanted to prove something. Jeff and John, I don’t know. It may be that I see myself as a freak. Or it may have been coincidence.
Q
: You delayed menarche as long as physically possible. Didn’t you like boys?
A
: (
Emphatically
) No! Especially the Scanlan boys.
Q
: Have you ever had sex with a woman?
A
: That must be in your records.
Q
: Did you like it better?
A
: No, it was just for Charlie Devon’s sake. He wanted me to try everything.
Q
: Is Charlie still alive?
A
: No. He was on Devon’s World.
Q
: Do you miss him?
A
: No.
Q
: Did Dan have you assigned to the Janus Project?
A
: I don’t know. It would surprise me, he’s very regulation.
Q
: But they both have said they want you to work on the project.
A
: Of course they do.
Q
: Would one or both of them work to have you reassigned without first discussing it with you?
A
: I don’t think so. (
Pause
) Unless… they’re intelligent men. They might have foreseen this interview.
Q
: Would you like to have the Janus assignment?
A
: Yes.
Q
: Explain why.
A
: It would be more interesting and more important,
and I might be better liked.
Q
: You don’t think your coworkers like you?
A
: They think a mathematician should be in charge of the section. So do I.
Q
: You don’t think your work is important.
A
: Maybe the industrial safety part is, and maybe an occasional surprise epidemiological correlation. Most of it is trivial. I suppose someone has to do it.
Q
: But not someone of your talents.
A
: That’s right.
Q
: Will you tell me which of your subordinates disapprove of your being in charge?
A
: No.
Q
: Because?
A
: I wouldn’t want them to be punished. They’re right, anyhow.
Q
: Very well. If the Janus Project goes through, will you volunteer? Will you go?
A
: No.
Q
: Why not?
A
: I want to go back to Earth… I want to see Jeff again.
Q
: You know that’s very unlikely.
A
: I know.
Q
: All right. Now I want you to take a deep breath, yes, like that, and exhale completely. Again: in… out. Now I’m going to count up to ten, and I want you to keep breathing this way as I count. When I reach ten, you will awaken refreshed, and very pleased with yourself for having cooperated with me. And after you awaken you will remember three things. One, your coworkers admire you. Two, your work is quite important, even when its importance is not immediately obvious. Three, if you find out that either of your husbands has done something wrong, getting you assigned to the Janus Project, you will want to contact the Board and explain it to them. Will you remember these things?
A
: Yes.
Q
: Very good.
(Interviewer counts to ten.)
When O’Hara cleaned out her desk at Public Health she found there were only two things that actually belonged to her, a pen she’d gotten used to and a piece of plastic, silly gift from Jeff. It was opaque from six years of nervous rubbing; you would have to hold it up to a strong light to see the shamrock inside.
She didn’t have her own office at the Janus Project, just a carrel at the library. She had no underlings and, in a sense, no boss; her job title was Demographics Coordinator. The job, Grade 16, had no formal description: she was to define and evolve her own function in terms of what seemed necessary to the project, as the project grew.
All the past year’s grinding away at applied mathematics turned out to be useful now. She had to study thousands of pages of preliminary reports that the project had already generated. Most of it came from committees of engineers, and the math was more clear than what passed for prose.
It was a perfect job for her talents but a potentially disastrous one for her weaknesses. She spent longer and longer hours at the carrel, sleeping in snatches and eating only when the stomach cramps got annoying. The third month, she took an armload of work down to the Bellcom studio to wait out the night. Jules Hammond had to tell her that it was no use: a satellite picture showed that the Plant City hospital had burned to the ground. She didn’t stop crying until she was under sedation in the psychiatric ward.
Charlie’s Will
Jeff Hawkings had been safe, more than a hundred kilometers southeast, when the hospital was fired (an impressive bit of arson, as most of the building had been made of composites). He was moving southward slowly, town by town, hoping that his reputation would precede him and protect him.
He was an odd figure traveling, even apart from being so old. He rode inside a muledrawn cart that led another mule laden with supplies. The cart was decorated with red crosses and the word
HEALER
on all sides. It was sheathed in bulletproof plastic, except for gunports, and Jeff himself was protected with bulletproof clothing and an assortment of weaponry.
Jeff spent two weeks in Wimauma, waiting. Tad caught up with him there. He’d brought a fuel cell and the Uzi. With his beard shaved off, he could pass for sixteen. They started south together.
2
For a week or so she was numb and distant. A therapist carefully brought to the surface the complex skein of hopes and fears, fantasies and guilts that wound around the symbol “Jeff”—and separated the symbol from the person, and allowed her to grieve for one lost love without his memory also carrying the burden of lost youth, innocence, freedom, joy: lost Earth. Her husbands joined in the therapy (learning some things they already knew), and in less than a month she was commuting between their beds and her carrel, conscientiously avoiding the opiate of over-work, trying to love and play without being too obviously grim about it.
This was her current job: slightly less than a third of
New New’s population, 75,000 people, were willing to join the Janus Project. Some twenty thousand were rather fanatical about it. But the crew, or population, of the star-ship was limited to ten thousand.
One problem was the fanatics. Most of them were not the kind of people you would like to be locked up with for the rest of your life. Many of them obviously wanted to leave New New because they felt trapped. Many of them were frankly paranoiac about Earth. It wasn’t likely that their mental conditions would improve in the relatively stark and confined starship environment.
Yet some of them would have to be included, because of the other problem. Ten thousand is a large crowd to jam into a starship, but they can’t just be random folks. Even beyond the obvious specialties necessary to keep the starship puttering along, there were thousands of specific skills necessary to build a new civilization at the other end. These skills would have to be passed on to the replacement generations born during the flight.
For instance, in all of New New there were only two people with the job classification “medical librarian.” Both of them had volunteered. One was a man in his eighties who’d had two nervous breakdowns and was more or less addicted to tranquilizers. The other, young and healthy, was a Devonite who was rigidly intolerant of anyone who wasn’t a Devonite. Yet the ship did need a medical librarian, and no student was currently working toward certification in that specialty.
(The medical library itself was no problem; the star-ship would be taking along a cybernetic duplicate of New New’s entire library. Except for certain sensitive military and political materials, this contained a copy of every remotely important Earth document, printed or videoed or cubed, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to
The New York Times
of March 16, 2085, and everything published in New New after the war. With polarized-quark memory,
the whole thing fit into a machine the size of a steamer trunk. In medicine as in every other field, it would not be a problem of lacking information—just of knowing how to find it.)
The Devonites in general were a headache. The star-ship was supposed to start out with a population of ten thousand and, ninety-eight years later, wind up with twice that number. There were a few Devonite sects that allowed birth control under unusual circumstances, but for most of them it was one of three unforgivable sins. If they allowed one percent of the starship to be Devonite, fifty females, and if each of them and each of their female descendants bore ten children, they could produce about 300,000 children in ninety-eight years.
So if the starship, as promised, did retain the respect for individual liberty that existed in New New, then orthodox Devonites—one gender of them, at least—would have to be left behind, since religious freedom would allow them to refuse the necessary vasectomy or laporoscopy. (The plan was for ova to be quickened on a strict replacement basis, one birth for each death, until twenty-five years before they reached their destination. A significant number would live through the whole voyage, barring unforeseen medical or environmental problems, since the average life span in New New was 118.)
O’Hara wasn’t convinced that the starship could actually be run along the same lines as New New. The system she’d grown up in was a crazy-quilt of electronic democracy, communalism, anarchy, bureaucracy, technocracy. She knew the anarchy was largely an illusion, a formalism that the actual power structure tolerated as a safety valve. There wouldn’t be room for it aboard the good ship New-home.