The Very Best of F & SF v1 (16 page)

“Think so.
Probably any minute.”

I finished my
coffee, washed out the cup.

“Let me know
right away what it is.”

“Check. Thanks
for the coffee.”

Lottie was still
working and did not look up as I passed.

Upstairs again,
my highest eye was now high enough. I stood it on its tail and collected a view
of the distance: Fleecy mobs of clouds boiled and frothed on the other side of Saint
Stephen’s. The mountain range seemed a breakwall, a dam, a rocky shoreline.
Beyond it, the waters were troubled.

My other eye was
almost in position. I waited the space of half a cigarette, then it delivered
me a sight:

Gray, and wet
and impenetrable, a curtain across the countryside, that’s what I saw.

... And
advancing.

I called
Eleanor.

“It’s gonna
rain, chillun,” I said.

“Worth some
sandbags?”

“Possibly.”

“Better be ready
then. Okay. Thanks.”

I returned to my
watching.

Tierra del
Cygnus, Land of the Swan—delightful name. It refers to both the planet and its
sole continent.

How to describe
the world, like quick? Well, roughly Earth-size; actually, a bit smaller, and
more watery. —As for the main landmass, first hold a mirror up to South
America, to get the big bump from the right side over to the left, then rotate
it ninety degrees in a counter-clockwise direction and push it up into the
northern hemisphere. Got that? Good. Now grab it by the tail and pull. Stretch
it another six or seven hundred miles, slimming down the middle as you do, and
let the last five or six hundred fall across the equator. There you have
Cygnus, its big gulf partly in the tropics, partly not. Just for the sake of
thoroughness, while you’re about it, break Australia into eight pieces and drop
them about at random down in the southern hemisphere, calling them after the first
eight letters in the Greek alphabet. Put a big scoop of vanilla at each pole,
and don’t forget to tilt the globe about eighteen degrees before you leave.
Thanks.

I recalled my
wandering eyes, and I kept a few of the others turned toward Saint Stephen’s
until the cloudbanks breasted the range about an hour later. By then, though,
the weather satellite had passed over and picked the thing up also. It reported
quite an extensive cloud cover on the other side. The storm had sprung up
quickly, as they often do here on Cygnus. Often, too, they disperse just as
quickly, after an hour or so of heaven’s artillery. But then there are the bad
ones—sometimes lingering and lingering, and bearing more thunderbolts in their
quivers than any Earth storm.

Bettys position,
too, is occasionally precarious, though its advantages, in general, offset its
liabilities. We are located on the gulf, about twenty miles inland, and are
approximately three miles removed (in the main) from a major river, the Noble;
part of Betty does extend down to its banks, but this is a smaller part. We are
almost a strip city, falling mainly into an area some seven miles in length and
two miles wide, stretching inland, east from the river, and running roughly
parallel to the distant seacoast. Around eighty percent of the 100,000
population is concentrated about the business district, five miles in from the
river.

We are not the
lowest land about, but we are far from being the highest. We are certainly the
most level in the area. This latter feature, as well as our nearness to the
equator, was a deciding factor in the establishment of Beta Station. Some other
things were our proximity both to the ocean and to a large river. There are
nine other cities on the continent, all of them younger and smaller, and three
of them located upriver from us. We are the potential capital of a potential
country.

We’re a good,
smooth, easy landing site for drop-boats from orbiting interstellar vehicles,
and we have major assets for future growth and coordination when it comes to
expanding across the continent. Our original
raison d’
ê
tre,
though, was Stopover,
repair-point, supply depot, and refreshment stand, physical and psychological,
on the way out to other, more settled worlds, further along the line. Cyg was
discovered later than many others—it just happened that way—and the others got
off to earlier starts. Hence, the others generally attract more colonists. We
are still quite primitive. Self-sufficiency, in order to work on our
population: land scale, demanded a society on the order of that of the
mid-nineteenth century in the American southwest—at least for purposes of
getting started. Even now, Cyg is still partly on a natural economy system,
although Earth Central technically determines the coin of the realm.

Why Stopover, if
you sleep most of the time between the stars?

Think about it
awhile, and I’ll tell you later if you’re right.

The thunderheads
rose in the east, sending billows and streamers this way and that, until it
seemed from the formations that Saint Stephen’s was a balcony full of monsters,
leaning and craning their necks over the rail in the direction of the stage,
us. Cloud piled upon slate-colored cloud, and then the wall slowly began to
topple.

I heard the
first rumbles of thunder almost half an hour after lunch, so I knew it wasn’t
my stomach.

Despite all my
eyes, I moved to a window to watch. It was like a big, gray, aerial glacier
plowing the sky.

There was a wind
now, for I saw the trees suddenly quiver and bow down. This would be our first
storm of the season. The turquoise fell back before it, and finally it
smothered the sun itself. Then there were drops upon the windowpane, then
rivulets.

Flint-like, the
highest peaks of Saint Stephen’s scraped its belly and were showered with
sparks. After a moment it bumped into something with a terrible crash, and the
rivulets on the quartz panes turned into rivers.

I went back to
my gallery, to smile at dozens of views of people scurrying for shelter. A
smart few had umbrellas and raincoats. The rest ran like blazes. People never
pay attention to weather reports; this, I believe, is a constant factor in man’s
psychological makeup, stemming perhaps from an ancient tribal distrust of the
shaman. You want them to be wrong. If they’re right, then they’re somehow
superior, and this is even more uncomfortable than getting wet.

I remembered
then that I had forgotten my raincoat, umbrella, and rubbers. But it
had
been a beautiful
morning, and W.C.
could
have been wrong...

Well, I had
another cigarette and leaned back in my big chair. No storm in the world could
knock my eyes out of the sky.

I switched on
the filters and sat and watched the rain pour past.

Five hours later
it was still raining, and rumbling and dark.

I’d had hopes
that it would let up by quitting time, but when Chuck Fuller came around the
picture still hadn’t changed any. Chuck was my relief that night, the evening
Hell Cop.

He seated
himself beside my desk.

“You’re early,” I
said. “They don’t start paying you for another hour.”

“Too wet to do
anything but sit. Rather sit here than at home.”

“Leaky roof?”

He shook his
head.

“Mother-in-law.
Visiting again.”

I nodded.

“One of the
disadvantages of a small world.”

He clasped his
hands behind his neck and leaned back in the chair, staring off in the direction
of the window. I could feel one of his outbursts coming.

“You know how
old I am?” he asked, after a while.

“No,” I said,
which was a lie. He was twenty-nine.

“Twenty-seven,” he
told me, “and going to be twenty-eight soon. Know where I’ve been?”

“No.”

“No place, that’s
where! I was born and raised on this crummy world! And I married and I settled
down here—and I’ve never been off it! Never could afford it when I was younger.
Now I’ve got a family...”

He leaned
forward again, rested his elbow on his knees, like a kid. Chuck would look like
a kid when he was fifty. —Blond hair, close-cropped, pug nose, kind of scrawny,
takes a suntan quickly, and well. Maybe he’d act like a kid at fifty, too. I’ll
never know.

I didn’t say
anything because I didn’t have anything to say.

He was quiet for
a long while again.

Then he said,
“You’
ve
been around.”

After a minute,
he went on:

“You were born
on Earth. Earth! And you visited lots of other worlds too, before I was even
born. Earth is only a name to me. And pictures. And all the others—they’re the
same! Pictures. Names...”

I waited, then
after I grew tired of waiting I said, “ ‘Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn...’ ”

“What does that
mean?”

“It’s the
beginning to an ancient poem. It’s an ancient poem now, but it wasn’t really
ancient when I was a boy. Just old.
I
had friends, relatives, even
in-laws, once myself. They are not just bones now. They are dust. Real dust,
not metaphorical dust. The past fifteen years seem fifteen years to me, the
same as to you, but they’re not. They are already many chapters back in the
history books. Whenever you travel between the stars you automatically bury the
past. The world you leave will be filled with strangers if you ever return— or
caricatures of your friends, your relatives, even yourself. It’s no great trick
to be a grandfather at sixty, a great-grandfather at seventy-five or eighty—but
go away for three hundred years, and then come back and meet your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson,
who happens to be fifty-five years old, and puzzled, when you look him up. It
shows you just how alone you really are. You are not simply a man without a
country or without a world. You are a man without a time. You and the centuries
do not belong to each other. You are like the rubbish that drifts between the
stars.”

“It would be
worth it,” he said.

I laughed. I’d
had to listen to his gripes every month or two for over a year and a half. It
had never bothered me much before, so I guess it was a cumulative effect that
day—the rain, and Saturday night next, and my recent library visits,
and
his complaining, that
had set me off.

His last comment
had been too much. “It would be worth it.” What could I say to that?

I laughed.

He turned bright
red.

“You’re laughing
at me!”

He stood up and
glared down.

“No, I’m not,” I
said, “I’m laughing at me. I shouldn’t have been bothered by what you said, but
I was. That tells me something funny about me.”

“What?”

“I’m getting
sentimental in my old age, and that’s funny.”

“Oh.” He turned
his back on me and walked over to the window and stared out. Then he jammed his
hands into his pockets and turned around and looked at me.

“Aren’t you
happy?” he asked. “Really, I mean? You’ve got money, and no strings on you. You
could pick up and leave on the next I-V that passes, if you wanted to.”

“Sure I’m happy,”
I told him. “My coffee was cold. Forget it.”

“Oh,” again. He
turned back to the window in time to catch a bright flash full in the face, and
to have to compete with thunder to get his next words out. “I’m sorry,” I heard
him say, as in the distance. “It just seems to me that you should be one of the
happiest guys around...”

“I am. It’s the
weather today. It’s got everybody down in the mouth, yourself included.”

“Yeah, you’re
right,” he said. “Look at it rain, will you? Haven’t seen any rain in months...”

“They’ve been
saving it all up for today.”

He chuckled.

“I’m going down
for a cup of coffee and a sandwich before I sign in. Can I bring you anything?”

“No, thanks.”

“Okay. See you
in a little while.”

He walked out
whistling. He never stays depressed. Like a kid’s moods, his moods, up and
down, up and down... And he’s a Hell Cop. Probably the worst possible job for
him, having to keep his attention in one place for so long. They say the job
title comes from the name of an antique flying vehicle—a hellcopper, I think.
We send our eyes on their appointed rounds, and they can hover or soar or back
up, just like those old machines could. We patrol the city and the adjacent
countryside. Law enforcement isn’t much of a problem on Cyg. We never peek in
windows or send an eye into a building without an invitation. Our testimony is
admissible in court—or, if we’re fast enough to press a couple buttons, the
tape that we make does an even better job—and we can dispatch live or robot
cops in a hurry, depending on which will do a better job.