4
THERE is concern about the "craziness" you have sometimes exhibited. Perhaps you should give more information on this matter.
Well, look, it gives me concern, too. Trust me on that point. But most of the time it isn't too serious, as long as I get treatment. The important thing to understand is that my problem wasn't caused by a desire to have sexual intercourse with my mother, or because I was weaned off the bottle too early. My problem wasn't Freudian at all. It was metabolic.
So I made sure, all the time I was on the Moon, that I went to see my doctor every time I thought I was behaving in even the least peculiar .way; and as a matter of fact I did right after leaving Alma that night.
I hadn't made an appointment, so the doctor was busy with another patient. But she flashed me the have-a-seat sign, and I settled down to watch some news broadcasts while I waited. Wouldn't you know it? The first thing I saw was Garold Tscharka and his Santa Claus chaplain being triumphantly interviewed about the victory they had just apparently scored for Pava.
It really wasn't an issue that interested me a lot. When the Budget Congress had first announced it was going to review the question of continuing to fund the colonies I thought it was sensible of them. Those worlds were no bargains, anyway. But obviously the two Millenarists didn't agree; they were glowing with success. "A victory?" the big preacher was saying—was braying, rather; he had a big, raspy voice when he was orating, and he was taking no trouble to keep the volume down. "Certainly it's a victory, but not just for our heroic pioneers in the Pava colony. The victory is for common sense and freedom!"
"Just what have you accomplished?" the invisible interviewer asked, and it was Captain Tscharka who answered.
"They're going to leave us our ships and fill our requisitions. That's all we need. Maybe a couple of hundred years from now, when Corsair is getting rickety, we'll have to take up the question again. But for now the colony is safe."
Isn't that a killer? He had to be lying through his teeth, even then, but he made everybody believe him. That was the thing about Captain Garold Tscharka. He was wholly wrongheaded in almost every way I can think of—but, even now, I almost miss the man.
When the doctor let me in she looked up from her screens and said, "You again." But she was smiling when she said it.
I said, "Yes, me, Helge. I nearly blew my pod a couple of hours ago, so I thought you might want to take a look."
"Hum," she said, leaning back and looking at me. That tone and posture meant Tell me all about it and don't leave out any details, so I did. Helge got up and walked around. Finally, she perched in silence on the edge of her desk, kicking her heel against it, until I finished. Then she said, "All this happened hours ago?"
"Well, I would have come right in, Helge, but I had things to do." Like eat. Like Alma, but I didn't specify.
She said, "Hum," again, but this time it didn't mean anything but Hold still because she was running her sensors over me.
Helge's always both glad and sorry to see me. She likes me for the novelty, because I'm an interesting case, but she's also a little bit sorry when she sees me because she really can't treat me properly.
The condition I suffered from was a medical anomaly. The specific ailment I suffered from was so rare that doctors had decided long ago that it didn't exist at all, and even the words used to describe it had been expunged from the medical vocabulary. In the old-fashioned term, I had a "psychosis" that closely resembled "schizophrenia" of the type once called "manic-depressive." It wasn't something they could vaccinate against at birth. It came from my genetic heritage; my mother and my father just happened to carry some very rare recessive genes, and I was the one-in-a-billion lucky lottery winner of the chance to express them.
In itself that shouldn't have been much of a problem. Metabolic-based loopiness gets cured by changing the body's chemistry around, and that's generally easy to do. The quick and dirty way, what doctors used to do when they first figured out how the body chemistry could mess the mind up, was to deal with the symptoms. When the patient was depressed they'd give him pep-up pills, when he was hyper they'd give him tranquilizers.
Then, when they began to think about cures, they tried other kinds of treatments. Then they'd inject the protein or other missing chemical into the bloodstream, so that the symptoms wouldn't occur at all. The first disease they did that with, I think, wasn't a mental problem, it was something called diabetes. That kind of treatment was what they called "the needle way," and it worked. The diabetics that stuck themselves with insulin every day lived perfectly normal lives—unless they ran out of insulin.
So then the doctors began to figure out how to trick the body into making its own insulin, or whatever, as a healthy body was supposed to do in the first place. The theory was that if they could use some carrier to deliver genetically active material to the patient's system they could get the process going. Then, if the stuff they put in was tolerated by the body's system (that is, if it was not inactivated by the body's immune defenses, and if it wasn't causing anything nasty like tumors), the added genetic material would settle down and release the desired recombinant protein (or whatever) at a controllable rate indefinitely. When that happened the patient was "cured." He could forget he'd ever been sick, no needles, no worries, no nothing.
That was the right way to do it, but it didn't work for me. They couldn't find a carrier that would survive in my body.
They tried everything they could think of. For instance, one thing they could do would be simply to flood the patient's system with carriers that would just float around in the bloodstream, like bacteria or leucocytes, and do their job. When they tried it on me, though, mine didn't. The carriers were rejected, or they just stopped working. (And all through these trials, you understand, I was going loopy about half the time, depressed to the point of catatonia the rest. There's a special name for that horrid catatonic state; they call it "depressive stupor," and I never want to live through it again. So I lost patience pretty fast. I wanted to get this business finished—at least, I wanted that at such times as I was sane enough to be able to figure out what I did want.)
Then they tried carriers that would actually bond with working parts of my body, instead of just floating around unattached. They tried immature muscle cells, called myoblasts; they tried immature bone cells; they tried white blood cells, keratinocytes, fibroblasts, liver cells—they tried everything they could think of, and those wonderful strong immune defenses in my body just chewed them all up and spat them right out again. There was more they could do, they told me—when I was in one of my brief lucid periods—like try to turn down my immune defenses enough to tolerate the genes. That had some drawbacks, they admitted. For instance, I'd probably keep on catching a lot of little illnesses, everything from warts to pneumonia, but those could be treated. . . .
I said no. I said no more experimenting, please. I said I was tired of those terrible, wild mood swings, and I wanted out of the clinic.
So they sighed and went back to the quick and dirty. The needles.
They made it as easy on me as they could, with time-release material so that I only needed a shot about once every three or four months . . . but I would, they said, always need the shots. Unless I wanted to alternate between zombie and lunatic for the rest of my life.
"You better have some blood work," Helge decided when she was through poking me. She sent me off to the medtech, who greeted me like an old friend. I didn't have to be told what to do. I had my arm stretched out for the needles before the nurses said a word. When the machine had taken its blood and finished its workup Helge called me back. "You're all right, Barry," she said, watching the colored lines on her diagnostic screen swirl around. "You didn't actually go round the bend and hurt anybody when you had that little flare-up, did you?"
I shook my head. "Well, then," she said. "I don't think that was a manic spell. I think it was just the same normal kind of spell of aggravation that I might have myself. Everybody has them. Just don't get yourself excited anymore, all right?"
That was a dismissal, but I didn't get up. "There's something else," I said.
"Hum," she said, patting a couple of strands of hair into place behind her ear. What "hum" meant this time was, I thought so, so get on with it.
"I've been thinking about getting married," I told her. "I think the woman I want to marry is likely to want to have children. I want to know if that's a good idea."
She looked annoyed, because she'd been all set to see the last of me and get off to her coffee break, but she looked interested, too. She frowned, trying to remember something. "Barry? Don't you have a son somewhere?"
"I do. He's sixteen."
"And he didn't inherit?"
"Thank God, no. He's been tested."
"Hum." She turned back to the screen. When it displayed my entire chart, she said, "Do you want to see where your problem is?"
"No," I said. I'd been shown those charts before.
She wasn't listening, though. "Look here," she said, moving the cursor across the screen. "That's the gene locus, in the arm of the chromosome there, do you see? That's where the little bugger is that does you in."
I wasn't even looking. "And if I have another child and this time I pass that gene on—?"
She leaned back thoughtfully. The strand of her hair had come loose again and she was twisting it around her finger. "I can only talk probabilities, Barry. You know these mental disorders aren't transmitted as classical Mendelian traits. You need both the genetic predisposition and the triggering environmental stimulus for them to appear."
"But that stimulus could happen."
"Well, sure it could. So you don't want to pass those genes along. Naturally. But there's no problem in preventing the transmission. Oh, there's a little nuisance, of course, but the procedure's straightforward. What I mean by 'straightforward,'" she went on kindly, "is that impregnation occurs in the normal way—I mean whatever way you and your partner consider normal. Then, as soon as she's pregnant, she comes in to see us and we flush out the fertilized ovum and examine it. The nuisance part is that she'll have to give a urine sample every morning, because we have to get that ovum as soon as we can, while it's still floating free and hasn't attached itself to the womb yet. We want to get it after the third division, when it's a cluster of eight cells. We take one of the cells and test it. That testing takes an expert, because the genes are only about a thousand base pairs apart—"
I stirred to keep her from going on forever. "Then what?"
"Then it's simple. If the gene is absent, we reimplant the rest of the cluster and pregnancy goes on normally. But if the bad gene's there. well, then we discard the cluster and you try again next month. We do it all the time—oh," she said, having switched back to my chart. "Sorry. I didn't notice you were Orthodox."
"Western Orthodox. And not very."
"Then you don't have a problem, Barry. Unless your fiancée—?"
"She isn't my fiancée yet. I haven't asked her."
"Well," she said, "I guess it wouldn't be your classic, romantic, on-bended-knee proposal, but when you do you'd better tell her all this stuff. You can send her to me for more information, if you want to. Some denominations don't like the idea of discarding a fertilized ovum, and then, too, some people think it's dangerous. It isn't, though. At that stage all the cells are still undifferentiated. The embryo won't notice that we've taken one to look at. You'll have a healthy baby. If your own parents had done that—"
"I know. I wouldn't have this problem. On the other hand, I wouldn't ever have been born, either, would I?"
She didn't respond to that. She mulled for a second, then said, "I should mention that there are other ways of going about it."
"Like what?"
"Complete genetic suppression. You go in for twenty-four hours, they destroy your spermatophiles—"
"Hey!"
"It doesn't hurt, Barry. And it's reversible. But that means you're sterile; then they give you an implant and you're in business again. Only the implant is tailored to suppress your bad genes." She saw the face I was making and laughed. "Men," she said. "Trust me. It doesn't affect your sex life at all."
I thought that over. "You said it only takes twenty-four hours?"
"That's all—except, of course, we don't do that here. You'd have to go to one of the big clinics on Earth."
I got up. "Thanks," I said, not meaning it, and left.
On the way out I played back some of the things Helge had said. It seemed to me that Helge was right. The only way I could find out how Alma would feel about these questions would be to ask her.
Right after that I began to wonder how I myself really felt about that other big question, the one that comes with the word "commitment."
If I asked Alma questions about how she felt about dealing with my genetic problems, there would then be only one way the conversation could go from there. That would be to propose marriage to her.
I didn't know if I was ready.
I don't know what would have happened to my life if I had got my courage together and taken that next step. My life would have been different, all right. But would it have been better?
I don't think I've succeeded even yet in giving you a very accurate idea of what our lives were like, back on the Moon. They were very different from what we have now. They were certainly a lot more comfortable.
It's true that they weren't perfect, though. When I think back to those carefree days on the Moon I have a tendency to forget that at the time I didn't think they were really carefree at all. What I remember is that the only real cares I had were the personal worries I made up for myself. Like what it meant when Alma called me by the wrong name. Like whether or not I would lose her—and whether I could somehow figure out a way to both keep her and simultaneously keep open the option to lose her, painlessly and without recrimination, if I ever decided that that was what I wanted to do.
Apart from those self-inflicted wounds—and, well, yes, apart from the faint but real worry nobody on the Moon was ever completely without, namely, that someday somebody might accidentally push the wrong button inside the crater and the whole Lederman antimatter factory would go up in a ball of plasma, of which I would myself be a tiny part—apart from that sort of thing, I mean to say, we didn't have any worries. The Moon was rich. We all had jobs. Anybody who didn't have one was shipped instantly back to Earth, and the jobs at Lederman were both interesting and paid well. The factory did everything possible to make our lives palatable because that was good business for them; they didn't want any disgruntled workers doing anything terminally stupid. Everything that state-of-the-art technology could provide, the lunar authorities had bought for us. They were clearing and lining additional lava tubes all the time. That meant that there were new housing units, bigger and more comfortable, appearing on the market regularly. One tube was even being half-filled with expensively manufactured water to make a swimming pool. Even the Lederman management couldn't give us solitude, of course. But we could get something close to it by taking a stroll through the farm tubes, steamy and warm with their crop racks green and sweet-smelling all around us and only a rare glimpse of a distant farm worker to disturb our privacy; Alma and I had made love two or three times in those jungly recesses. We had the best of medical care, and the best of food, and all the entertainment the networks could provide. We were spoiled rotten, in fact. I loved it.
The next day I had a date with Alma to go down to the grand concourse to watch the Taoist New Year celebration. It was kind of a personal anniversary for us—we'd met at the same event the year before. Besides, the Taoists put on a great show. They all get dressed up in red and gold, with dancing and chanting, firing off their acoustic poppers and electronic flares.
Alma loved all that kind of thing. She was flushed and happy, but something was bothering her. She kept giving me looks out of the corner of her eye until she finally said, "Barry? Have you got something on your mind?"
I leaned over to kiss her ear. "Just you," I said. That was true, it just wasn't specific. The specific thing on my mind was that I was wondering whether, when we got back to her room, I should start on that line of conversation that would end up with "Will you marry me?" It was a warming kind of thought, and an appropriate time to pop the question—our anniversary, after all. And then I began to wonder why I wanted to wait until we got to her room. And then I actually opened my mouth to say something—I'm not sure what, but I had the feeling it was going to be a step along that road. . . .
And then, "Watch it," she said, pulling me out of the way as three or four lion dancers pranced by. One of them lifted up the skirt of his lion suit to toss a handful of sticky poppyseed candies at us.
"Oh, great," Alma said, putting a couple in her pouch. "Rannulf loves these things."
That stopped me cold.
I hadn't wanted to think about Rannulf just then. After a moment, chewing happily, Alma gave me another of those looks. "Were you going to say something?"
"Right," I said. "I was going to say it's winding down here. Let's go back to your place." We did; and then it was easy enough to stop talking and start making love.
Yes, I know I shouldn't have been so easily put off. On the other hand, Alma could have been a little more tactful, too. Faults on both sides, I suppose.
Then we didn't have much chance to talk for a few days, because I got real busy. One of the orbiter pod-catchers began to leak propellant and had to be replaced. The catchers are where the antimatter goes to be transshipped to the customers, and they're part of a fuelmaster's responsibility—in this case, mine.
While I was busy at that, another interstellar ship, the Jean Bart, came in from the Alpha Draconis colony with a load of returnees. The quitters had been dropped off at the Skyhook to Earth before we ever saw them, of course. By the time the ship got to lunar orbit for deluding, the crew had had plenty of time to adjust to the fact that their colony had been almost terminated and then given a new lease on life; I wondered what they made of it, but didn't ask.
Then that second ship appeared from Pava, the one called Buccaneer. I didn't board it myself—another fuelmaster was servicing it—but I caught a glimpse of its captain at the landing pad, a man named Bennetton. He didn't stay on the Moon. He took right off for Earth to join Garold Tscharka at whatever Tscharka was doing while he waited for Corsair to be refitted.
Then I got a surprise. Two ships that serviced the Martian colonies were in orbit, and when I defueled mine I expected to be right back within a day or two for refueling—the short-run solar-system ships don't usually need repairs or anything much in the way of refitting between voyages. But its captain told me they were going to be delayed in getting fuel for a week because a big new two-hundred-pod order for antimatter fuel was coming through.
Naturally I checked it out. It was what I guessed. Captain Tscharka had got his wish, and the destination for all those extra pods was Pava.
That night Alma and I watched an operetta on the screen. Neither of us was enjoying it much. Alma seemed unusually thoughtful, and I was making up my mind about whether I wanted to discuss Tscharka, the Corsair, the fuel pods—and Rannulf Enderman—with her. As we were drinking a nightcap after the show she brought it up herself.
"I guess Corsair will be leaving soon," she said, meaning that she wanted to know if I'd heard anything.
I hadn't; it wasn't yet on my worklog. "Kept you busy making the stuff, has it?" I asked; that was Alma's job at Lederman, guiding the particle beams through the accelerator rings, and she knew better than I how much antimatter was being manufactured for what purpose.
She didn't answer the question, except with another question—a trait I've never approved of. "I wonder what they want with all that antimatter."
Well, Tscharka had told me his answer to that—true or not, I didn't know—so I repeated it for her. She didn't look impressed. "They're going to do more exploration around Delta Pavonis? What for? So they can set up more colonies? I don't see the point."
That was another trait in Alma Vendette that I hadn't entirely enjoyed in recent days. She'd seemed down. I don't mean clinically depressed—no, that was my own specialty—but more abstracted than I liked. I didn't want to think that it was because Rannulf was on his way to another star, but I took the chance of asking. "What's the matter? Is something worrying you?"
She considered. "Nothing specific, I think," she said at last. "It's just that nothing we do seems to be particularly important."
"You mean here at Lederman? But we are important. If we didn't make the fuel the colonies would just die."
She shrugged. That was even more displeasing; I wondered how much Millenarism was still in the back of her mind. "What I'm looking for, hon, is some kind of meaning. The way life was in the old days, when work meant something, and people got together and had babies and—listen, Barry, don't be shocked, but the other day I even thought of having the contraceptive implant taken out."
That straightened me right up. And that, at last, made her smile. In fact, she laughed out loud. "Oh, hon," she said, "don't be silly. I wasn't serious."
But maybe she was, I thought. And maybe that was my cue to ask the question that had been on the tip of my tongue to ask for weeks now, and maybe I would have. But I didn't get the chance, because just then the factory emergency alarms went off—beepity-beepity-beeeeep, over and over again, coming out of every audio point in the Lederman works and community.
When you live and work in the Lederman colony that is a sound that freezes your blood. I knew it was only a drill this time—I could be pretty sure of that, because both Alma and I were still alive—but the rules are that you have to act as though the drill is real, and both of us were very faithful in following those rules. We both snapped our pocket screen on and began to search our dedicated bands for data and instructions.
Any operation that's as critical as the antimatter factory at Lederman needs to keep its damage-control procedures up to speed. To make sure of that, the master controls are programmed to invent a simulated emergency at random intervals—they average fifteen or twenty a year—and when those beepers go off every one of us drops whatever he's doing and gets to work trying to deal with whatever that day's simulation had chosen to simulate.
As a fuelmaster crew chief my criticality-zone damage-control job was to make an eyeball inspection of potential danger areas. If I had been in the factory area, I would have grabbed my radiation readers and run to my first checkpoint. Since I wasn't, I simply logged on to the duty chief, Warren Bellick, and watched to make sure he was doing what I would have done.
He was. The beeping had stopped by the time he got there and the computer voice was identifying the problem. It told us that the exercise the computer had devised to entertain us this day was a (make-believe) misalignment of the particle beam, so that antimatter was being formed outside the target area. That wasn't a frighteningly big emergency, even if it had been real instead of something the computer made up to keep us on our toes. But it did mean that every operation everywhere in the complex had to be safed until it was dealt with.
Of course, the real fear we all had to live with is that sometime—anytime, maybe within the next second—there would be a big emergency—say, the magnetic field failing to hold an actual lump of antimatter in position, so that it somehow contacted real matter and blew . . . and thus compromised the containment shells of all the other little nuggets of antimatter, so they all blew at once.
Once in a while the computer decided to give us a really serious problem of that kind, but I never could see the point. If that happened there was no way we could cope with it. That was why all the workings of the factory were on the surface of the Moon, instead of deep down in old lava tubes like the residential sectors—and why the Lederman factory had been sited within the walls of a crater on the Moon's limb in the first place. The hope of the planners was that if the factory ever did blow, the walls would force most of the explosion to go straight up and out into space. "Up" from the factory crater was well away from Earth itself. Thus, a maximum accident would certainly destroy everything inside the walls. That would put a terrible crimp in space travel for lack of fuel for a long time to come, and any people who happened to be inside the crater wall at that moment would become instant plasma. So, I was pretty sure, would most of what was outside the walls, too, no matter what they said. But the accident would be only a frightful catastrophe instead of, well, the Millenarists' yearning dream of the end of the world.
Although just about everything that goes on inside the crater walls is critical, some parts are more critical than others. That makes a difference in people's working conditions. It's only the teams that do the actual insertion of antimatter into the pods that can't afford to have any distraction at all; those rooms are as sterile and concentrated as any surgical operating theater. Most of the other workers at least are allowed to play music, and some of them—in the assembly rooms for the pods themselves, for instance, or the coil-winding rooms for the magnetic containment—even are allowed to have news screens. Not that what they do isn't critical; but after they've finished their work it gets very thoroughly tested before it moves on to the next step, so mistakes can be caught. Where actual antimatter is present, there's no test. It either behaves quietly as it should. Or it doesn't, and that's all she wrote.
Since this time the "emergency" was only a practice alert the check was over in ten minutes, and the beepers were replaced with the gentle drone of the "all clear." By then Warren was already at his last stop, in the launch room. Naturally there was no antimatter there—we don't keep the stuff around; as soon as a pod is filled and ready, it's launched to one of the orbital catchers to wait for its customer—and Warren turned and grinned into the camera. "False alarm, fellows," he told us silent overseers, and blanked off.
By then Alma had been cleared, too. I suppose that I could have gone back to the subject we'd been talking about. But I didn't; and another opportunity to change my life went down the drain.