A sensible person would have replied,
I’ll think about it—
or better yet,
No.
I said, “Before I answer, I’d like to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Have you run a background check on me?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the worst thing you found out about me?”
“No significant sins were discovered,” Henry said.
“No crimes, either?”
He paused before he spoke—sizing me up, I thought, wondering if he should give me an honest answer.
Finally he said, “Only the crime that was committed against you when you were fifteen.”
“What do you know about that?”
“That you were raped. That you were injured. That the rapist was not brought to justice.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No. The court records are sealed.”
“What else?” I asked.
“That you spent fourteen months in a psychiatric hospital. That during that time you bore a child that was surrendered for adoption.”
“None of that bothers you?”
“The crime angers me,” Henry said. “But what happened to you against your will when you were hardly more than a child has no bearing on the subject under discussion.”
I said, “It bothers
me,
Henry. It bothers me a lot. I had an excellent psychiatrist, and he tried to teach me how to live with this, and mostly I do as he suggested, but I never go out at night without thinking that the rapist might be waiting for me, and I never go home to a dark apartment without wondering if he’s inside, hiding.”
“Are you afraid of men?”
“I’m afraid of one man who was a boy when he did what he did. The others I judge for what they are, not what they might be.”
I saw something in his eyes.
I said, “Really.”
He nodded, moved a hand. Another long pause.
Henry said, “I can offer you protection.”
I said, “There’s no such thing.”
He didn’t argue. He waited patiently for me to say whatever I was going to say next.
I said, “The answer to the job offer is yes for the time being, provided we never return to this subject.”
“Agreed,” Henry said. “Melissa will deposit a retainer to your account for the first six months.”
I said, “You do remember that I’m writing a book?”
“What hours are you undisturbable?”
“Six a.m. till noon.”
“That’s fine. Please don’t get sick because I can’t spare you. You shouldn’t have much in the way of expenses, but whatever they are, you can bill them at the end of every month. Get a bigger place if you need one and charge it as an expense.”
“I like it where I am.”
Henry’s image shrugged. He said, “I’ll be in touch.”
That was the entire negotiation. Later in the day, using my old computer, I went to my bank’s website. My checking account showed a deposit of five hundred thousand dollars.
My balance was now $500,967.57.
~ * ~
3
SOON AFTER THIS—so soon as to take me by surprise—Henry called at the stroke of noon.
He said, “I want you to come to a meeting. A car will pick you up at two o’clock. You’ll be gone for about a week.”
“Same place?”
“No,” Henry said. “Colder climate.”
There were three other passengers aboard the airplane with me, tall men about Henry’s age who were very clubby with one another. Not with me. They took me for exactly what I was, someone they didn’t know, and ignored me. They dressed like Henry, in jeans and T-shirts and sneakers—but then, so did I. The steward, the same young Asian I had met on the flight to the Grenadines, brought drinks and dinner. Afterward the men went to the back of the plane and played video games. I read for a while before turning out the light.
When I woke, not remembering when I had fallen asleep, it was daylight. The men were sound asleep, stocking feet protruding from the blankets. The pheromones were quite strong. Only one of them snored. My watch said five after one. I had no idea where we were or what our destination might be. We had been in the air for about nine hours. The safety video had told us that the cruising speed of this aircraft, a Gulfstream, was six hundred miles per hour, with a range of seventy-five hundred miles. Ergo, we wouldn’t run out of fuel for another two thousand miles.
The steward, this time wearing a name tag that identified him as Daeng, touched the back of my hand.
I said, “Where are we?”
“Almost there,” he whispered, with a brilliant smile. “Better hurry before they all wake up.”
When I emerged from the lavatory, the men were drinking coffee, eyes dull with sleep, hair standing on end, dark-chinned, not one bit friendlier than before. We broke through the clouds. A khaki desert, seemingly endless, came into view. In the middle distance, a dozen missiles, looking like great big rifle bullets arranged in a circle, materialized. They must be pointed at the United States— where else?
Beyond them lay a runway. The Gulfstream landed without so much as a squeak of tires and we disembarked—me first as the men, suddenly chivalrous, stood back and let me pass as if we had landed deep in the twentieth century. Outside, it looked and felt more like the tenth century The wind moaned and stirred up dust.
There were no formalities—not a soul to be seen, no soldiers or police asking for passports. At the other end of the runway I saw a squat concrete building but could not make out the flag that flew above it. A large van was parked on the tarmac. Daeng loaded our luggage into it and we all piled in—the boys in the backseat, me in the front. Daeng got behind the wheel and drove smoothly along an absolutely straight macadam road that seemed to go nowhere.
We drove eastward
—whizzed
would be the better word, because Daeng had set the cruise control at one hundred miles per hour. No doubt parched desert creatures crawled and slithered in the sand beside the road, but the van seemed to be the only moving object in this drab and empty landscape. The radio, tuned to a satellite station, played twangy Chinese music loud enough to make conversation impossible—not that any was likely.
After an hour or so we arrived at a large round structure that was meant to resemble a yurt. Several smaller yurts surrounded it to make a compound. The yurts were made of some shiny space-age material I could not identify. A bank of solar panels and a row of wind turbines, propellers spinning, completed the tableau. Several fearsome-looking chow chow dogs roamed the grounds unleashed. Daeng handed each of us a chain necklace from which a blank plastic card dangled.
“Please wear these at all times for your own safety,’’ Daeng said.
We got out of the van. Three of the chows left the pack, each choosing one of the men. A fourth, a lion-colored animal, attached itself to me. The rest—there were maybe a dozen dogs in all—kept their distance.
Daeng and the dog escorted me to my yurt. After he had shown me the amenities—the yurt was a little America—Daeng pointed at the plastic tag hanging from my neck.
“It’s for the dogs,” he said.
“They check people’s ID?”
“They smell it,” Daeng said. “Each tag has a different scent, to differentiate individual humans. The chows attack if they don’t smell it, so don’t forget to wear it. Don’t be alarmed when they walk along with you. They’re trained to do that. Don’t try to be friendly with them. They don’t like it.”
I said, “Where are we?”
He flashed his perfect smile.
“Hsi-tau—Little Gobi Desert, the Chinese part,” he said. “Henry will be expecting you in the big yurt in half an hour.”
I left early, accompanied by my guardian chow, hoping to be the first to arrive, but the men were already seated around a table, engaged in a lively conversation with Henry. One of them was an American. The other two, though perfectly fluent in English, were not native speakers. This surprised me a little. Aboard the airplane they had certainly acted like Americans and dressed and sounded like them, too. But then, who in the world didn’t, nowadays?
Henry explained to me that that these men were engineers who specialized in spacecraft design, then came straight to the point without explaining my presence to them.
“We are here to answer a question,” Henry said. “What is the largest spacecraft that’s possible to build and launch into orbit with present technology?”
“That depends on where you want to build it,” said the genuine American in the group.
“Then where is the best place?”
“Low Earth orbit. You don’t have to contend with gravity.”
“Ha!” said another, who sounded like a Russian. “You will contend with a lot of gravity when you start lifting the parts of your spaceship two hundred miles straight up from the surface of the earth.”
“One moment, please,” said the third, plainly a German. “We’re starting from the wrong direction. First decide what is the optimum size for the job, then design to that size.”
In short, nobody answered the question, simple though it might be. Henry said, “Think in terms of a ship that could keep a crew alive and sane for a thousand years or more and deliver them at their destination in a condition to walk, speak, think, and remember what their mission was. And carry it out.”
“You’re kidding,” the American said.
“On the contrary,” Henry said.
“Forty generations in space?” said the German. “This is science fiction. With such a small gene pool, living in isolation from culture in an environment without gravity, they’ll be grotesque monsters in far less time than a thousand years.”
Henry said, “The genetic destiny of the crew is a separate question. The problem we are here to discuss is the design and construction of a space vehicle that can remain in space for a very long time and sustain a crew of several hundred human beings in such a way that they will remain human to the end of the voyage.”
The engineers exchanged glances.
The Russian said, “Tell us, Henry. Is this an intellectual exercise, or do you actually plan to build this spacecraft?”
“It’s not an intellectual exercise,” Henry replied.
“What’s the timeline? When does construction begin?”
“As soon as we have a blueprint.”
“That would take decades and hundreds of engineers. It’s a huge undertaking.”
“We don’t have decades,” Henry said.
The American—these fellows were scrupulous about taking turns—said, “The crew would be self-sustaining—produce their own food and everything else?”
“Yes.”
“Replace themselves in the usual way?”
“Yes.”
“What if they multiply at the same rate as earthlings? World population in the year one thousand was maybe three hundred million. Now it’s seven billion. Your ship would have to be the size of a planet to accommodate that.”
“True,” Henry said, “but irrelevant.”