To Sail Beyond the Sunset (52 page)

Mr. Harriman looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. He had grown gaunt since the last time I had seen him and his eyes burned with fanatic fervor—he made me think of those Old Testament prophets.

He studied me, then turned to George. “Have you explained to Mrs. Johnson what a risk she would be taking?”

George nodded glumly. “She knows.”

“I wonder. Mrs. Johnson, I’m cleaned out and Harriman Industries is a hollow shell—that’s why I haven’t called a directors’ meeting lately. I would have to explain to you and to the other directors the risks I’ve been taking. Mr. Strong and I have been trying to hold things together on jawbone and sheer nerve, long enough to get the Pioneer off her pad and into the sky. I haven’t given up hope…but, if I take your money and I am forced into bankruptcy and my senior company into receivership, my note to you could not be in a preferred position. You might get three cents on the dollar; you might not get anything.”

“Mr. Harriman, you are not going to be bankrupt and that tall ship out there will fly. Captain LeCroix will land on the Moon and return safely.”

He smiled down at me. “It’s good to know that you have faith in us.”

“Its not just faith; I’m certain. We can’t fail now for the lack of a few pennies. Take that money and use it. Pay it back when you can. Not only will
Pioneer
fly, you also will send many ships after her. You are manifest destiny in person, sir! You will found Luna City…freeport for the Solar System!”

Later that week George asked me if I wanted to be in the blockhouse during the launching—Mr. Harriman had said to invite me. I had already considered it, knowing that I could demand it if I cared to push it. “George, that’s not the best place to watch the liftoff, is it?”

“No. But it’s the safest. It’s where the VIPs will be. The governor. The president if he shows up. Ambassadors.”

“Sounds claustrophobic. George, I’ve never been much interested in the safest place…and the few VIPs I’ve met struck me as hollow shells, animated by PR men. Where are you going to be?”

“I don’t know yet. Wherever Delos needs me to be.”

“So I figured. You are going to be too busy to have me hanging on your arm—”

“It would be a privilege, dear lady. But—”

“—you are needed elsewhere. Where is the best view? If you weren’t busy, where would you watch it?”

“Have you visited the Broadmoor Zoo?”

“Not yet. I expect to. After the liftoff.”

“Maureen, there is a parking lot at the zoo. From it you would have a clear view to the east from a spot about fifteen hundred feet higher than Peterson Field. Mr. Montgomery has arranged with the hotel to place some folding chairs there. And a radio link. Television. Coffee. If I weren’t busy, that’s where I would be.”

“So that’s where I will be.”

Later that day I ran across my son Woodrow in the lobby of the Broadmoor. “Hi, Mom! They got me working.”

“How did they manage that?”

“I didn’t read my contract carefully enough. This is ‘educational and public communication activity associated with the Moonship’—meaning I have to set this thing up to show people how the ship works, where it will go, and where the diamonds are on the Moon.”

“Are there diamonds on the Moon?”

“We’ll let you know later. Come here a sec.” He led me away from the crowd in the lobby into a side hall by the barbershop. “Mom,” he said quietly, “if you want to do it, I think I have enough bulge around here to get you into the blockhouse for the liftoff.”

“Is that the best place to see it?”

“No, it’s probably the worst. It’ll be hot as a June bride, because the airconditioning isn’t all that good. But it’s the safest place and it’s where the high brass will be. Visiting royalty. Party chairmen. Mafia chiefs.”

“Woodrow, where is the best place to watch? Not the safest.”

“I would drive up Cheyenne Mountain. There is a big paved parking lot outside the zoo. Come back into the lobby; I want to show you something.”

On a giant (four-foot) globe that made my mouth water, Woodrow showed me the projected path of the
Pioneer
.

“Why doesn’t it go straight up?”

“Doesn’t work that way. She goes east and makes use of the Earth’s rotation…and unloads all those extra steps. The bottom one, the biggest one, number five, drops in Kansas.”

“What if it landed on the Prairie Roadway?”

“I’d join the Foreign Legion…right behind Bob Coster and Mr. Ferguson. Honest, it can’t, Mom. We start out here, fifty miles south of the road, and where it lands, over here, near Dodge City, is over a hundred miles south of it.”

“What about Dodge City?”

“There’s a little man with a switch, hired solely to push that switch and bring step five down in open country. If he makes a mistake, they tie him to a tree and let wild dogs tear him to pieces. Don’t worry, Mom. Step four lands around here, off the coast of South Carolina. Step three lands in the Atlantic north of this narrowest place where the nose of South America faces the bulge of Africa. Step two lands in the South Atlantic near Capetown. If it goes too far, we’ll hear some interesting cussing in Afrikaans. Step one—ah, that’s the one. With luck it lands on the Moon. If Bob Coster made a mistake, why, it’s back to the old drawing board.”

It will be no news to anyone that
Pioneer
lifted off to plan and that Captain Leslie LeCroix landed on Luna and returned safely. I watched from Cheyenne Mountain, the zoo parking lot, with such a fine, horizon-wide view to the east that it seemed to me that I could stand on my tiptoes and see Kansas City.

I’m glad that I got to see one of the great rockets while they were still in use—I know of no planet in any patrolled universe where the big rockets are still used—too expensive, too wasteful, too dangerous.

But oh, so magnificent!

It was just dark when I got up there. The full Moon was rising in the east. The
Pioneer
was seven miles away (I heard someone say) but the ship was easy to see, bathed in floodlights and standing tall and proud.

I looked at my chrono, then watched the blockhouse through binoculars. A white flare burst out its top, right on time.

Another flare split into a red and green fireball. Five minutes.

That five minutes was at least a half hour long. I was beginning to think that the launching was going to abort—and I felt unbearable grief.

White fire lapped out of the base of the ship and slowly, lumberingly, it lifted off the pad…and climbed faster and faster and faster and the whole landscape, miles and miles, was suddenly in bright sunlight!

Up, up, and up, to apparent zenith and it seemed to have bent back to the west and I thought it was falling on us—

—and then the light was not quite as bright and now we could see that this “sun” overhead was moving east…and was a moving bright star. It seemed to break up and a voice from a radio said, “Step five has separated.” I remembered to breathe.

And the sound reached us. How many seconds does it take sound to go seven miles? I’ve forgotten and, anyhow, they weren’t using ordinary seconds that night.

It was “white” noise, almost unbearable even at that distance. It rumbled on and on…and at last the turbulence reached us, whipping skirts and knocking over chairs. Someone fell down, cursed, and said, “I’m going to sue somebody!”

Man was on his way to the Moon. His first step to his Only Home—

George died in 1971. He lived to see every cent paid back, Pikes Peak Space Catapult operational, Luna City a going concern with over six hundred inhabitants, more than a hundred of them women, and some babies born there—and Harriman Industries richer than ever. I think he was happy. I know I miss him, still.

I’m not sure Mr. Harriman was happy. He was not looking for billions; he simply wanted to go to the Moon—and Daniel Dixon euchered him out of it.

In the complex maneuverings that got a man to the Moon Dixon wound up controlling more shares of voting stock than Mr. Harriman controlled, and Mr. Harriman lost control of Harriman Industries.

On top of that, in lobbying maneuvers in Washington and in the United Nations, a Harriman daughter firm, Spaceways, Ltd., became the “chosen instrument” for the early development of space, with a rule, “The Space Precautionary Act,” under which the company controlled who could go into space. I heard that Mr. Harriman had been turned down physically, under this rule. I’m not certain what went on behind the scenes; I was eased off the board of directors once Mr. Dixon was in control. I didn’t mind; I didn’t like Dixon.

In Boondock, centuries later or about sixty-odd years ago on my personal time line, I listened to a cube,
Myths, Legends, and Traditions—The Romantic Side of History
. There was a tale in it concerning time line two that asserted that the legendary Dee Dee Harriman had managed, many years later, when he was very old and almost forgotten, to buy a pirate rocket, in which he finally made it to the Moon…there to die in a bad landing. But on the Moon, where he longed to be.

I asked Lazarus about this. He said that he did not know. “But it’s possible. God knows the Old Man was stubborn.”

I hope he made it.

Decline and Fall

I am not certain that my situation was improved when these ghouls grabbed me away from those spooks. I suppose that almost everybody has fantasies about making the punishment fit the crime or about some scoundrel who would look his best in the leading role at a funeral. It is a harmless way to kill time during a sleepless night.

But these weirdos mean it.

Murder is all they think about. The first night I was here they listed fifty-odd people who needed to be killed, itemized their crimes, and offered me the honor of being the next member to count coup—pick a client, do! One whose crimes are particularly offensive to you, Milady Johnson—

I admit that the listed miscreants were a scrofulous bunch over whom even their own mothers would not be likely to weep but, like Mr. Clemens’s favorite son, Huckleberry Finn, I am not much interested in killing strangers. I am not opposed to the death penalty—I voted for it every time the matter came to a vote, which was frequently during the decline and fall of the United States—but in killing
pour le sport
I need to be emotionally involved. Oh, forced to a choice I would rather shoot a man than a deer; I can’t see the “sport” in shooting a gentle vegetarian that can’t shoot back.

But, given full choice, I would rather watch television than kill a stranger. Some, at least.

I said, “I don’t see anyone on that list who is to my taste. Do you happen to have in your file of better-deads someone who abandons kittens?”

The fat chairman smiled at me under his dark glasses. “Now that’s a delicious idea! No, I think not…unless by chance there is someone nominated for other reasons who also abandons kittens. I will have Research set up an inquiry at once. Madam, what would be an appropriate termination for such a client? Have you studied it?”

“No, I haven’t. But his death should involve homesickness…and loneliness…and cold…and hunger…and fear…and utter despair.”

“Artistic. But perhaps not practical. Such a death might stretch out over months…and we really do not have the facilities to permit a deletion to last more than a few days. Ah, Bluebeard—you have something to add?”

“Do what our sister suggests for as many days as we can afford the space. Then surround the client by a holo of enormous trucks, giant holos, the way traffic must look to a kitten. Have the images bear down on him, with overpowering sound effects. Then hit him with a real truck—a glancing blow to maim him. Let him die slowly, as is often the case with a road-killed animal.”

“Madam, does that appeal to you?”

(It made me want to throw up.) “Unless something better comes along.”

“If we can find such a client for you, he will be saved and held at your disposal. In the meantime we must find you someone else for coup, not let you sit among us naked of proper pride.”

That was a week ago and I have begun to feel just a hint of the idea that if I do not promptly find on their list a client I wish to terminate, then…just possibly…we don’t want to hurry you…but still…if I don’t make blood coup soon, how can I be trusted not to betray them to the Supreme Bishop’s proctors?

On that Time Corps mission I carried out in Japan in the 1930s, I wish I had investigated those reports of another woman who might be me. If I had proved to myself that I was indeed tripled for 1937-38, then I would sleep better here-now, as that third loop would have to be farther ahead on my personal time line…which would prove that I will get out of this mess still breathing.

That’s the real trick: to keep breathing. Isn’t it, Pixel? Pixel? Pixel! Oh, damn!

▣

Changes—In 1972 Princess Polly died in her sleep—heart failure, I think, but I did not have an autopsy. She was a little old lady who had lived a long life and, I think, a happy one, on the whole. I said a prayer to Bubastis, asking Her to watch for the arrival in the eternal Catnip Fields of a little black and white cat who had never scratched or bitten without just cause and who had had the misfortune to have had only one kitten—by Caesarean section and the kitten never opened its eyes—and then she had lost her kitten factory by spaying because her surgeon said that she could never have a normal litter and could not safely risk another pregnancy.

I did not get another kitten. In 1972 I was ninety years old (although I admitted only to fifty-nine…and tried my darnedest—exercise and diet and posture and cosmetics and clothes—to look forty). Being ninety in fact, it was possible, even likely, that another kitten would outlive me. I chose not to risk that.

I moved to Albuquerque because it had no ghosts for me. Kansas City was choked with ghosts of my past, of every sort, both sad and happy. I preferred not to drive by a site, such as our old home on Benton Boulevard, or where our old farmhouse out south had once been, when driving past would cover the happy used-to-be with dreary or unrecognizable what-is.

I preferred to remember Central High School the way it had been when my children attended it. In those days the scholastic records of Central’s graduates at West Point and Annapolis and MIT and other “tough” schools caused Central to be rated as the finest secondary school in the west, equal in academics to the best preparatory schools, such as Groton or Lawrenceville—instead of what it had become: mostly babysitting for overgrown infants, a place where police prowl cars gathered every afternoon to stop fights, to confiscate knives, and to shake down the “students” for drugs—a “high school” where half the students should never have been allowed to graduate from grammar school because they could not read or write well enough to get along in the world outside.