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Most of the other pushers thought he was sick. Not that it mattered. Pushers were a tolerant group when it came to other pushers, and especially when it came to anything a pusher might care to do to a puller. He wished he had never told anyone how he spent his leave time, but he had, and now he had to live with it.
So, while they didn't care if he amused himself by pulling the legs and arms off infant puller pups, they were all just back from ground leave and couldn't pass up an opportunity to get on each other's nerves. They ragged him mercilessly.
“How were the swing-sets this trip, Ian?”
“Did you bring me those dirty knickers I asked for?”
“Was it good for you, honey? Did she pant and slobber?”
“âMy ten-year-old baby, she's a pullin' me back home . . . '”
Ian bore it stoically. It was in extremely bad taste and he was the brunt of it, but it really didn't matter. It would end as soon as they lifted again. They would never understand what he sought, but he felt he understood them. They hated coming to Earth. There was nothing for them there, and perhaps they wished there was.
And he was a pusher himself. He didn't care for pullers. He agreed with the sentiment expressed by Marian, shortly after lift-off. Marian had just finished her first ground leave after her first voyage, so naturally she was the drunkest of them all.
“Gravity sucks,” she said, and threw up.
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It was three months to Amity, and three months back. He hadn't the foggiest idea of how far it was in miles; after the tenth or eleventh zero his mind clicked off.
Amity. Shit City. He didn't even get off the ship. Why bother? The planet was peopled with things that looked a little like ten-ton caterpillars and a little like sentient green turds. Toilets were a revolutionary idea to the Amiti; so were ice cream bars, sherbets, sugar donuts, and peppermint. Plumbing had never caught on, but sweets had, so the ship was laden with plain and fancy desserts from every nation on Earth. In addition, there was a pouch of reassuring mail for the forlorn human embassy. The cargo for the return trip was some grayish sludge that Ian supposed someone on Earth found tremendously valuable, and a packet of desperate mail for the folks back home. Ian didn't need to read the letters to know what was in them. They could all be summed up as “Get me
out
of here!”
He sat at the viewport and watched an Amiti family lumbering and farting its way down the spaceport road. They paused every so often to do something that looked like an alien cluster-fuck. The road was brown. The land was brown, and in the distance were brown, unremarkable hills. There was a brown haze in the air, and the sun was yellow-brown.
He thought of castles perched on mountains of glass, of Princes and Princesses, of shining white horses galloping among the stars.
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He spent the return trip just as he had on the way out: sweating down in the gargantuan pipes of the stardrive. Just beyond the metal walls unimaginable energies pulsed. And on the walls themselves, tiny plasmoids grew into bigger plasmoids. The process was too slow to see, but if left unchecked the encrustations would soon impair the engines. His job was to scrape them off.
Not everyone was cut out to be an astrogator.
And what of it? It was honest work. He had made his choices long ago. You spent your life either pulling gees or pushing
c
. And when you got tired, you grabbed some
z
's. If there was a pushers' code, that was it.
The plasmoids were red and crystalline, teardrop-shaped. When he broke them free of the walls they had one flat side. They were full of a liquid light that felt as hot as the center of the sun.
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It was always hard to get off the ship. A lot of pushers never did. One day, he wouldn't either.
He stood for a few moments looking at it all. It was necessary to soak it in passively at first, get used to the changes. Big changes didn't bother him. Buildings were just the world's furniture and he didn't care how it was arranged. Small changes worried the shit out of him. Ears, for instance. Very few of the people he saw had earlobes. Each time he returned he felt a little more like an ape who has fallen from his tree. One day he'd return to find everybody had three eyes or six fingers, or that little girls no longer cared to hear stories of adventure.
He stood there, dithering, getting used to the way people were painting their faces, listening to what sounded like Spanish being spoken all around him. Occasional English or Arabic words seasoned it. He grabbed a crewmate's arm and asked him where they were. The man didn't know so he asked the Captain, and she said it was Argentina, or it had been when they left.
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The phone booths were smaller. He wondered why.
There were four names in his book. He sat there facing the phone, wondering which name to call first. His eyes were drawn to Radiant Shiningstar Smith, so he punched that name into the phone. He got a number and an address in Novosibirsk.
Checking the timetable he had picked upâputting off making the callâhe found the antipodean shuttle left on the hour. Then he wiped his hands on his pants and took a deep breath and looked up to see her standing outside the phone booth. They regarded each other silently for a moment. She saw a man much shorter than she remembered, but powerfully built, with big hands and shoulders and a pitted face that would have been forbidding but for the gentle eyes. He saw a tall woman around forty years old who was fully as beautiful as he had expected she would be. The hand of age had just begun to touch her. He thought she was fighting that waistline and fretting about those wrinkles, but none of that mattered to him. Only one thing mattered, and he would know it soon enough.
“You
are
Ian Haise, aren't you?” she said, at last.
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“It was sheer luck I remembered you again,” she was saying. He noted the choice of words. She could have said coincidence.
“It was two years ago. We were moving again and I was sorting through some things and I came across that plasmoid. I hadn't thought about you in . . . oh, it must have been fifteen years.”
He said something noncommittal. They were in a restaurant, away from most of the other patrons, at a booth near a glass wall beyond which spaceships were being trundled to and from the blast pits.
“I hope I didn't get you into trouble,” he said.
She shrugged it away.
“You did, some, but that was so long ago. I certainly wouldn't bear a grudge that long. And the fact is, I thought it was all worth it at the time.”
She went on to tell him of the uproar he had caused in her family, of the visits by the police, the interrogation, puzzlement, and final helplessness. No one knew quite what to make of her story. They had identified him quickly enough, only to find he had left Earth and would not be back for a long, long time.
“I didn't break any laws,” he pointed out.
“That's what no one could understand. I told them you had talked to me and told me a long story, and then I went to sleep. None of them seemed interested in what the story was about, so I didn't tell them. And I didn't tell them about the . . . the Starstone.” She smiled. “Actually, I was relieved they hadn't asked. I was determined not to tell them, but I was a little afraid of holding it all back. I thought they were agents of the . . . who were the villains in your story? I've forgotten.”
“It's not important.”
“I guess not. But something is.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you should tell me what it is. Maybe you can answer the question that's been in the back of my mind for twenty-five years, ever since I found out that thing you gave me was just the scrapings from a starship engine.”
“Was it?” he said, looking into her eyes. “Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it
was
more than that. I'm asking
you
if it wasn't more.”
She looked at him again. He felt himself being appraised for the third or fourth time since they met. He still didn't know the verdict.
“Yes, I guess it was more,” she said, at last.
“I'm glad.”
“I believed in that story passionately for . . . oh, years and years. Then I stopped believing it.”
“All at once?”
“No. Gradually. It didn't hurt much. Part of growing up, I guess.”
“And you remembered me.”
“Well, that took some work. I went to a hypnotist when I was twenty-five and recovered your name and the name of your ship. Did you knowâ”
“Yes. I mentioned them on purpose.”
She nodded, and they fell silent again. When she looked at him now he saw more sympathy, less defensiveness. But there was still a question.
“Why?” she said.
He nodded, then looked away from her, out to the starships. He wished he was on one of them, pushing
c
. It wasn't working. He knew it wasn't. He was a weird problem to her, something to get straightened out, a loose end in her life that would irritate until it was made to fit in, then be forgotten.
To hell with it.
“Hoping to get laid,” he said. When he looked up she was slowly shaking her head back and forth.
“Don't trifle with me, Haise. You're not as stupid as you look. You knew I'd be married, leading my own life. You knew I wouldn't drop it all because of some half-remembered fairy tale thirty years ago.
Why?
”
And how could he explain the strangeness of it all to her?
“What do you do?” He recalled something, and rephrased it. “Who
are
you?”
She looked startled. “I'm a mysteliologist.”
He spread his hands. “I don't even know what that is.”
“Come to think of it, there was no such thing when you left.”
“That's it, in a way,” he said. He felt helpless again. “Obviously, I had no way of knowing what you'd do, what you'd become, what would happen to you that you had no control over. All I was gambling on was that'd you remember me. Because that way . . .” He saw the planet Earth looming once more out the viewport. So many, many years and only six months later. A planet full of strangers. It didn't matter that Amity was full of strangers. But Earth was home, if that word still had any meaning for him.
“I wanted somebody my own age I could talk to,” he said. “That's all. All I want is a friend.”
He could see her trying to understand what it was like. She wouldn't, but maybe she'd come close enough to think she did.
“Maybe you've found one,” she said, and smiled. “At least I'm willing to get to know you, considering the efforts you've put into this.”
“It wasn't much effort. It seems so long-term to you, but it wasn't to me. I held you on my lap six months ago.”
She giggled in almost the same way she had six months before.
“How long is your leave?” she asked.
“Two months.”
“Would you like to come stay with us for a while? We have room in our house.”
“Will your husband mind?”
“Neither my husband nor my wife. That's them sitting over there, pretending to ignore us.” Ian looked, caught the eye of a woman in her late twenties. She was sitting across from a man Ian's age, who now turned and looked at Ian with some suspicion but no active animosity. The woman smiled; the man reserved judgment.
Radiant had a wife. Well, times change.
“Those two in the red skirts are police,” Radiant was saying. “So is that man over by the wall, and the one at the end of the bar.”
“I spotted two of them,” Ian said. When she looked surprised, he said, “Cops always have a look about them. That's one of the things that don't change.”
“You go back quite a ways, don't you? I'll bet you have some good stories.”
Ian thought about it, and nodded. “Some, I suppose.”
“I should tell the police they can go home. I hope you don't mind that we brought them in.”
“Of course not.”
“I'll do that, and then we can go. Oh, and I guess I should call the children and tell them we'll be home soon.” She laughed, reached across the table and touched his hand. “See what can happen in six months? I have three children, and Gillian has two.”
He looked up, interested.
“Are any of them girls?”
INTRODUCTION TO
“Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo”
This story contains a lot of dogs. They are Shetland Sheepdogs, known to the people who love them, as I do, as Shelties, to the people who know nothing about them as “miniature collies,” and to all small children as “Look, Mom! It's a little Lassie!”
This seems a good time to say a few words about the living soul who I have shared my life with longer than anyone else. Longer than my first wife, longer than my sons, longer than I lived at home with my parents and sisters, longer than I have lived with Lee, though I hope in a few more years that will have changed. I'm speaking of the finest dog that ever lived, my beloved Sheltie, Cirocco. That's my prejudiced opinion, of course, but I would have no respect for any dog owner who wouldn't proudly say the same thing about that special dog who, for a time, made your life worth living through the down and lonely hours.
She was our second Sheltie. We got the first, Fuchsia, from a friend in Marin County with half a dozen of them, who was basically letting her newest litter run wild at her country house. She was giving them away. Fuchsia lived for eleven years, brightening our lives, then one day ran out in front of a car. The lady who hit her took her to the vet, who couldn't save her. I was in Los Angeles when I heard the news, in the Polo Lounge, taking my first meeting with the
Millennium
production people. I couldn't continue, and they all understood.