Memories of the Future Page 12

  * * *

  I am introduced to the goings-on of the upper middle class. Robinette and I play tennis and badminton and golf. We go swimming in her father’s in-ground pool. She introduces me to her friends. We go out almost every night. We sit sometimes in quiet cafés, looking at each other over our drinks. Often we do not say a word. What words are there to say?

  One night when we are sitting in yellow candlelight a young man about my age walks in from the bar, slaps Robinette on the shoulder, says, “Hi, Rob,” and pulls up a chair and sits down. “I stopped by your house, and they said you’d gone somewhere with your great-grandfather and that maybe you’d be here. You were supposed to write—remember?”

  He gives me a funny look. “Jerry,” Robinette says, a touch of color in her cheeks, “this is Bud Downs. We went to college together. Bud, this is Lieutenant Commander Jerry Walsh. You must have heard about him, or seen him on 3V. He’s been to the stars.”

  Bud’s face lights up. He has the handsome, blunt features of a born jock. “Oh. Sure. But I didn’t know he was related to you, Rob. Hi, Grandpop!”

  He puts his hand on Robinette’s knee. She brushes it off. He blinks at her. “Hey, how come? Grandpop here, he won’t say a word—will you, Grandpop?”

  There is anguish in Robinette’s eyes. “Please go away, Bud.”

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Please go away.’ ”

  He stares at her. Then he stares at me. He gapes. Then he swings furious eyes back to Robinette and says, “You incestuous bitch!”

  I am upon him then. The table tips over and the glasses catapult to the floor. The candles become transient falling stars. He is bigger than I, but if he were twice as big, he still wouldn’t stand a chance. Robinette seizes my arm before I can lash out at him again. We are the cynosure of stares. The bartender hurries into the room. Bud shakes his fist at me and leaves. After I pay the bartender for the damage done, Robinette and I leave too.

  We go for a long ride in her Ponse. The night wind is cool upon our faces. After a long while she says, “I never dreamed he’d come to see me.”

  “It got to me when he put his hand on your knee.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She finds the narrow road that leads to the lake and parks on the bluff in the same place we parked before. There is no moon tonight, no Diana with omniscient eyes—only the stars, and the lights of fishing boats far out on the water.

  Robinette says, “There was never anybody else but you.”

  I touch her hand.

  “It’s unfair. We’re no closer than second cousins.”

  This time I dare to kiss her cheek. At once, she is in my arms. The stars I learned to hate look down at us with self-satisfied eyes as we get a blanket out of the trunk and walk down a winding path to the beach.

  * * *

  In the days that follow we continued to play tennis and badminton and golf, and to swim in her father’s underground pool. We continue to go out almost every night. In the middle of the night when the house is dark and silent, she comes to my bed or I go to hers.

  Sunday mornings we go to church with my grandson and my granddaughter-in-law. They are Methodists. I was a Methodist too, before I left for the stars. The church is brand new, but the song it sings is as old as the hills. I sit beside Robinette in the Fields’s pew. My grandson likes to exhibit me, for although it is true he does not like me, I am still an asset to his prestige. My first apostasy is a family secret. The second he knows not of.

  * * *

  “Saying, ‘I have hid my feelings,

  fearing they should do me wrong.’

  Saying, ‘Dost thou love me, cousin?

  Weeping, I have loved thee long.’

  “Whenever I say those lines, Jerry,” Robinette breathes into my ear, “I know it’s all right for me to be in your bed.”

  * * *

  I have my own bit of Tennyson. The words run often through my mind—

  She is coming, my own, my sweet,

  Were it ever so airy a tread,

  My heart would hear her and beat,

  Were it earth in an earthy bed;

  My dust would hear her and beat,

  Had I lain for a century dead;

  Would start and tremble under

  her feet,

  And blossom in purple and red.

  We wear our masks by day, but sometimes they fall off and bare our faces. Robinette’s friends begin giving us curious looks, and when we walk into cocktail lounges the buzz of voices momentarily ceases. Bartenders leer at us whenever we stand at bars.

  Robinette tells me again and again that we are the same thing as second cousins. And she is right. But she cannot see the middle class because she is inside it.

  My grandson is not a fool. Yet he is one of the last to tumble. And I do not think he would have tumbled even then if my granddaughter-in-law had not whispered hearsay into his ear.

  He tiptoes down the hall one night to my room. I hear him coming. But Robinette and I are not fools either, and in the naked radiance of his flashlight he finds me all alone in my bed. She does not come to me till afterward, when he is snug in his.

  At breakfast we sit like innocent children, our masks in perfect place. But the seed has been planted, and even without nutrition will grow into a horrendous tree.

  * * *

  Robinette finds me packing my bags. “Jerry, please don’t go.”

  “What are the lines? ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, Lov’d I not honour more.’ ”

  “But you’re not going off to war!”

  “No. I’m just retreating from the field.”

  “I won’t let you.”

  “Everybody knows about us, Robin.”

  “So what if they do? We’re not the first cousins who ever fell in love!”

  “You know as well as I do that they see us in a somewhat different light.”

  “If you’re going to go, I’m going with you.”

  I sit down on the bed.

  “Look,” Robinette says, “next month after I become part of the law firm we’ll be living in the city, and no one will ever guess we’re related.”

  “They’ll find out.”

  “Even if they do, it won’t matter. People living in the city don’t give a damn about such things.”

  “About this they will.”

  “Then let’s just thumb our noses at them, Jerry. There’s no law that says we can’t be lovers.”

  No. Not yet. “I was only thinking of what it’ll do to you.”

  “What do you think it’ll do to me if you run away?”

  I am weak. I do not get up and finish packing my things. I go on sitting on the bed.

  * * *

  My daughter writes me a vicious little note and leaves it in the mailbox in an envelope addressed to me:

  You ruined my mother and left her to die. Now you’re ruining my granddaughter. May God bring the wrath of Heaven down upon you, you incestuous dirty old man!

  * * *

  Two centuries ago I would have been tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. And Robinette would have been thrown into the streets.

  But nothing, really, has changed.

  * * *

  We do not go to bars anymore. We avoid all public places. We steer clear of her friends. We go for long drives in the country. I no longer dare to go to her bed, but she still dares to come to mine.

  * * *

  You could say, how was I to know, and how was she? You could say that the blame for our apostasy should be laid upon the lap of space. You could say, well what would you have done if you were she or I? You could say that time has caught us in a trap. You could say that when all is said and done, what difference will it make? You could say a hundred, a thousand such things, but your words would be like dead leaves falling from a tree, and the people walking down the road, the people who pay false homage to a god they made and who drink coffee, wine, and tea, whose mores form halos around their
heads, would pay them no more heed.

  * * *

  The building is old. It is one of the oldest buildings in the city. It has Gothic overtones. I look up to see if there are gargoyles staring down at me from the eaves, but I see only the lowering sky.

  Robinette has parked her car at the curb and I have parked mine just behind it. She gets out and comes back to where I am sitting behind the wheel and leans over the door and kisses me. “Wish me luck.”

  “I thought it was all set.”

  “It is, but I haven’t signed the contract yet, and being lawyers, they might have changed their minds.”

  “And miss out on having someone as beautiful as you in their firm? Never!”

  She smiles and I mark down the memory of her face. “You can come in and wait in the outer office.”

  “No. I’ll wait here.”

  “As soon as I come back we’ll go looking for our apartment.”

  Trim in an azure suit, unforgettable, she clicks across the walk and ascends the granite steps. I watch the door devour her. I watch the people walking by on the street, but I do not see them. I start up the car and join the traffic flow. I leave the top down, even though I know that at last it is going to rain.

  Saying, “Dost thou love me, cousin?

  Weeping, I have loved thee long.”

  * * *

  I leave the city far behind. Toward evening it begins to rain. I can hear the raindrops pattering upon my grave, but I do not hear her airy tread, and I know that by now she, too, must be dead.

  Three-Mile Syndrome

  I AM DIFFERENT EACH TIME WE LEAVE EARTH. I despise the country of my birth. It is infested with hypocrisy—the hypocrisy of people who pretend to love their neighbors when in their hearts they know only greed and envy and frustration. Who hide their hatred behind lamblike masks. But I do not wonder why they—and millions of others who are equally abominable—were chosen to live, while those of us here in the stasis ship were condemned to die, because we are no less abominable than they. I hate in unison with the other patients, I am in harmony with them. But it is an apathetic hatred, for we have ceased to care. I hate the girl who administers to our needs, because she does not have eyes for me, and I hate the pilot for whom she has eyes, but my hatred is dulled by dispassion.

  I said “leave Earth,” lending the impression that the stasis ship itself departs. This isn’t true. Earth leaves, and the ship remains where it was, while Earth makes her annual journey around the sun, and each time she makes her revolution, we wait for her return—not because we really care whether she does or not, but because we have nothing else to do; mere hours pass for us, one year for her. Time stasis is at work, not time travel, but here on board the ship, we pretend we are traveling in time because traveling is better than standing still, even when you have nowhere to go.

  The girl (her name is June) who has eyes only for the pilot begins making her rounds of our ward with her medicine tray. She is a nurse and stewardess combined; neither she nor the pilot is condemned to die. When she comes to where I am brooding by my black window, she hands me a tiny paper cup that contains one of the magical capsules the researchers came up with during Earth’s most recent revolution. She is brown-haired and blue-eyed, and although she is far from being beautiful, her health makes her seem so. Each time I see her, she seems more beautiful than the time before. Apparently the purity of the air on board the ship has a salubrious effect upon her.

  I swallow the capsule although I know it has no more therapeutic value than the water I wash it down with. She says that I barely touched my dinner and asks if I am hungry. I tell her no. She says she will bring me a cup of decaffeinated coffee so that I will have something, at least, in my stomach. I shrug. I doubt if I will even be able to gag it down.

  The girl June says that when we rendezvous again, she is certain the researchers will have found a true cure during the year that will have passed for them. But I know better. The next rendezvous will merely be a repetition of all the previous ones, and all the year will have netted will be a new batch of worthless medication. I told the medmen last time they boarded the ship that they were wasting their time, and they said that I was wrong and that next time the researchers will have found what they are searching for. I said, “You people said that ten years ago, and you’re no closer to curing us now than you were then.” They said that a breakthrough was imminent, and that anyway, only ten days had passed for me. I said, “Hallelujah!” They said I didn’t seem to care one way or the other. I said, “I don’t,” and they said that indifference was part of the syndrome and that they would cure me whether I wanted to be cured or not. I said, “You look like you need to be cured yourselves. You look sick.”

  * * *

  My black window isn’t all black; there are polliwogs of light in it. The polliwogs are the stars; the ship’s near lack of temporal motion has stretched them out of shape. I watch them often as I recline on my chair-couch, and sometimes they seem to wriggle in my gaze. Polliwogs in a black pond, wriggling. Wriggling and getting nowhere. They bring to mind the human race, which, frantically and for millennia, has been trying to wriggle from point A to point B, without realizing that point B is point A in disguise. I never liked the human race; now I hate it, too. It is ironic to know that while we lie here hating together, some of our noble compatriots on orbiting Earth have temporarily cast their own hatred aside and are working around the clock to find a cure for our loathsome disease, while only hours pass for us and a whole year for them.

  The cure, the super antigen, the magic serum. We are, in effect, quarantined in time, although our disease is not contagious. MEASLES, MUMPS, CHICKEN POX, SCARLET FEVER—KEEP OUT! This dedication on the part of our compatriots to the task of saving out lives would be heartwarming if, through the ages, so many lives had not been wasted through neglect and through indifference. But whose neglect? I ask myself. What indifference? The neglect and indifference of other people? But why shouldn’t other people be neglectful and indifferent with regard to people who themselves are neglectful and indifferent? Why should one individual expect from another that which he will not bestow himself? It is human to be neglectful, to be indifferent. Neglect and indifference are part of the syndrome of human existence. I have neither the right nor the obligation to expect or to give help. If a man cannot stand on that truth, he deserves to die. I have gone full cycle and am arguing against myself, and I have failed to cast so much as a shadow of a doubt on the unselfishness of the people who are trying to save our lives.

  * * *

  “Drink it while it’s still warm.”

  It is the girl June with my coffee. I take the cup from her and set it on the little table beside my chair-couch. “How do you feel?” she asks.

  “I feel fine.”

  “Any new abscesses?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” Her concern seems genuine, but I know it is not. She is pretending to be Florence Nightingale. “You don’t need to keep them secret from me.”

  “You tend to your troubles and I’ll tend to mine.”

  She looks at me, her head cocked slightly to one side. Then she turns and walks forward to the control room, where her real interest lies.

  Directly across the aisle from me on one of the dual chair-couches supplied for the marrieds lie the Warricks. Once, no doubt, they were a handsome couple, but the abscesses that have appeared on their faces have lent them the aspect of a pair of lepers. Thus far, mine have appeared only on my stomach and chest, although there is a new one, I believe, beginning to manifest itself on the inner side of my left thigh. I do not bother to make a visual check, I do not even bother to reach beneath the covers and explore the area with my fingers. Another abscess is simply another hole in a ship that is already sinking into the sea.

  At first the etiologists thought the abscesses were a new form of basal cell cancer, and bone marrow tests were not made. When an etiologist named Eustace Siddon insisted that the tests be made, abnorm
al cells were in the patients’ spicules. They were unlike any cells ever encountered before, and subsequently were discovered in the patients’ bloodstreams. The disease became known as Siddon’s disease, and new cases were diagnosed all over the world. Its cause remained a mystery, but a concerted effort on the part of pharmaceutical companies in the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union led to the development of a serum that, when administered soon enough, killed the cells and aborted the marrow’s ability to create more. A worldwide inoculation program was launched, but the serum wasn’t wholly successful because those who had been first afflicted with the disease were too far gone to be helped. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had discovered how to isolate pockets of time, and stasis ships were built in which to house the premature victims till a more effective serum could be developed. Such ships were leased to other nations so that the lives of their premature victims might be sustained by stasis also. I do not know how many stasis ships there are in space now. Ours may be the last one. Our ward is already half empty.

  * * *

  Sometimes as I look through my black window at the polliwogs of stars, I make mental jumps to Earth Past. I was a successful businessman before the disease struck me. My company bought apartment complexes that the federal government, in its desperate attempt to lower the federal budget, had ceased subsidizing. We refurbished them and gave the renters the option of buying the apartments they were living in. In most cases they could not, since the prices we asked were commensurate with the cost of renovation—with, of course, a margin of profit added—and in such cases the apartments were bought by outsiders. A bald statement such as this implies inhumanity, but the implication is unjust because in most instances the renters would not have been able to pay the unsubsidized rent and would have had to leave whether I had come along or not. I merely took advantage of a situation for which I could not in any way be held responsible. If inhumanity was involved, it lies on the federal government’s doorstep, not mine.