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  4

  Humming beerily to himself, Jim Woodruff unlocked the stateroom door and entered. His wife was sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs with her hands in her lap; to look at her, you would think she hadn’t moved. “Em,” he said with forced enthusiasm, “you won’t believe this place. They’ve got movie theaters here, and a Turkish bath, and a shopping mall— What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, dear, I’m fine.”

  “Well, you’re tired. That’s natural.” He took a turn around the room, jingled the keys in his pocket, sat on the bed. “I met a nice guy in a bar—he’s from Akron, he’s in real estate there. We’re going to have a great time, Em.”

  “I am tired, but I’ll be all right after a while.”

  “Sure you will. You’ll have plenty of time to rest. Did you have a nice nap?”

  “I couldn’t, but I will later. What was his name, the man from Akron?”

  “Boyko, Bill Boyko. He gave me his card. A real nice guy. You know, Em, you wouldn’t believe the clothes on some of the women you see here. I mean, fur coats, high heels, Arab pants, you name it. Talk about the Ritz, this is it. You want something from room service?”

  “I don’t think so. There’s a lot of things in the refrigerator, in there.”

  “Yeah?” Jim rose and went to see for himself. Cold beer, soft drinks, fruit juice, sandwiches in plastic, cheese. He took a beer and came back. “Pretty soft,” he said. “This is the life, Em, wait and see.”

  “Attention,” said a voice. “Attention, all passengers. A boat drill will be held in five minutes. Please consult the card posted on your stateroom door to find your boat station, or ask any steward for assistance. When the alarm bell sounds, all passengers are requested to go to their stations.”

  Jim got up and looked at the card on the inside of the door. “Lifeboat Thirty-seven,” he read. “Guess we’d better go.”

  “What does that mean, a boat drill?” Emily was sitting up with her hands clasped tightly together.

  “It just means we have to go to our lifeboat, find out where it is and so on, so we’ll know in case of an emergency. It’s a routine thing, Em; they do it on every ship.”

  “But what do you mean, an emergency? The ship isn’t going to sink, is it?”

  “Of course the ship isn’t going to sink. My God, Em, how could it sink, a thing this size? Be reasonable, will you?”

  Her voice went high and thin. “But if it isn’t going to sink, why do they have lifeboats?” She jumped when a bell began ringing in the corridor outside.

  Jim clanked his beer can on the table. “I haven’t got time to argue with you now. Are you coming or not?”

  “No,” she said. “No, you go, Jim. I can’t.”

  “All right, then, damn it.”

  At the door, he took another look at the diagram on the card. Boat 37, it was on the port side of the Boat Deck near the stern; that should be easy.

  The bell was still ringing. He got on the elevator with a bunch of other people who had a slightly embarrassed holiday air. They glanced at him and at each other with little smiles, as if to say, “This is really ridiculous, but isn’t it fun?” Their spirit began to infect him, and by the time they got down to the Boat Deck he was feeling a lighthearted excitement.

  It was easy to find Lifeboat 37, because nearly the whole crowd was going there. The number was on a sign over one of two massive doors that opened off a kind of deep alcove. Stewards were waiting to help them over the sill. At the end of a short passageway was an open door in a white curving wall; they walked in and found themselves in a long yellow room lined on either side with blue-cushioned seats. Up in front was a pilot’s chair and a console, with television screens and three round windows.

  One of the stewards was standing up in front with a clipboard in his hand; he was Chinese by the look of him, but he spoke English like anybody else. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you will sit down and give me your attention please, I will call off your names in alphabetical order.” They shuffled down the aisle, sorting themselves out. The seats were only about two-thirds filled.

  “Abbott, Mr. and Mrs.?”

  “Here.”

  The steward went down his list. There was no reply to many of the names he called, and he shook his head disapprovingly when he was through. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I want to call your attention to the features of your lifeboat. In the unlikely event of an emergency requiring us to abandon Sea Venture, the alarm would sound and you would all come immediately to this station. In that event, I hope we would have better attendance than we had today.” There was a little embarrassed laughter.

  “When all our passengers are aboard,” the steward went on, “the door would be closed and the lifeboat launched by pulling this red handle. The boat can also be launched electronically from the Control Center, provided the door is closed and sealed. As you can see, the lifeboat is completely enclosed and can be launched whether or not Sea Venture is submerged. If it is launched from a submerged position, the lifeboat will automatically rise to the surface and begin to broadcast a location signal. When it is on the surface, if conditions permit, the hatch you see overhead can be raised. Food sufficient for ten days is stored in the lockers overhead. Other supplies, including first-aid kits and life preservers, are also stored there. Are there any questions?”

  “What happens after we get to the surface?” someone called.

  “In the event of abandoning Sea Venture near the mainland or an inhabited island, the lifeboat will be navigated to safety. Otherwise the lifeboat will be picked up by a rescue vessel. Are there any other questions?” He waited a moment. “Very well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your courtesy and patience. The drill is now over. Thank you.”

  They all trooped out, laughing and talking.

  5

  The perm section, Newland discovered, was very much different from the passenger area. Higpen met them at the entrance and walked beside New land’s chair while Hal, silent as usual, walked behind. The corridors here were wider, and they were tiled, not carpeted; the apartments—they were not called staterooms—had draped windows looking out on the corridors; there were brass knockers on the doors. There was a fountain in the big central square—it was not called a lobby—and trees grew in tubs under the bright twenty-foot ceiling, and there was a playground with children in it. Higpen, obviously proud of his domain, showed them the church and the synagogue, the theater, the school, the dairy, the goat and pig farm. The animals were in neat enclosures; they came running to look at Newland and sniff his fingers. There were rabbits, too, and poultry.

  There were many children, more than Newland had expected. There were Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and Sea Scouts; there was a 4-H Club. Everywhere they went, friendly people came up to talk to them.

  Higpen took them to see the hydroponics farm, where endless rows of plants grew sturdy and green from tanks of nutrients: beans, peas, squash, tomatoes, onions, beets. There were long rooms full of dahlias, carnations, lilies of the valley. “We supply all the fresh vegetables and all the cut flowers for the restaurants in the passenger section,” Higpen said proudly. “All this green stuff helps with the air recycling when we’re submerged, too. We get four crops a year. No pests, no scale, no rust. Even the chemicals we use, a lot of them come straight out of the ocean.”

  Next he took them to see the fishery. Newland could not go into the pressurized area because of his heart problem, but he was able to watch on television screens. He saw workers standing beside a vast trough surging with green water, from which nets brought up silvery flopping masses of fish, some bigger than a man.

  “Those there are tunnies,” Higpen said. “Good eating. Those little ones, they’re trash fish, but we grind them up for fish meal and fertilizer. This is our big cash crop; we process and freeze about three hundred tons a year, over and above what we eat ourselves. We process krill, too, a kind of plankton, and make fish paste out of it. You may have heard that the Pacific is a d
esert; well, don’t believe it. You could make soup out of this sea water.”

  From the fishery they went to Higpen’s neat apartment, where they met a friend of his, Yetta Bernstein, a stocky gray-haired woman. “What would you like?” she asked. “A glass of beer? Some wine?”

  “I’d like a soft drink if you have one.”

  She brought him a 7-Up; Hal accepted a beer. “Ben, and Yetta,” Newland asked, “how close is Sea Venture to being self-sustaining?”

  Higpen shrugged. “Not very. It’s the passenger money that supports us—the profit from that is about twelve million dollars a year. Part of that goes into amortizing the investment, along with the government subsidies, and the rest is paid to stockholders.”

  “The perms are the stockholders?”

  “Some of them are. Some just lease space here, and we’ve even got a few renters—people trying it out to see if they like it. If we didn’t have the passenger operation, no, we couldn’t come near paying our own way. We take in about six hundred thousand dollars a year from the fishery, and another five hundred thousand from the farms and gardens, but that’s a drop in the bucket.”

  “How many people are employed in the fishery, farms, and gardens?”

  “About four hundred, in the winter.”

  “And you’ve got a permanent population of around two thousand? What do the rest of them do?”

  Yetta Bernstein said, “They do all the things you’d expect people to do in a town of two thousand. We have a dentist, two lawyers, a bank and an insurance company. We have the people who own grocery stores and run the movie theater and so on. Ben owns a hardware store, and I run a book outlet.”

  “But then you’re all taking in each other’s washing?”

  “No, not altogether,” Higpen said patiently. “We have a lot of people here who are bringing in outside income. Several database firms, for instance. We’ve got a guy who writes novels—you probably never heard of him, but he makes a living at it, and that money comes into the economy. We’ve got a very successful investment advisory service. They do their business by satellite datalink, just like they would if they were ashore, and their people can stop off in Manila and Taipei and Tokyo to see for themselves what’s going on, and the travel doesn’t cost them anything.”

  “Even so.”

  Higpen nodded. “Even so, we’re not self-sustaining, let alone self-sufficient. Sea Venture is a prototype. To make it really work economically, we’d have to have a population of at least a million.”

  “Do you think that will come?”

  “Oh, I have mornings when I think it will. There are all kinds of plans and schemes. The one I like best is a flat construction that rides on the surface or just below it. It covers acres, it’s a flexible assembly of linked modules so it just rides along like a raft of seaweed. Solar cells covering all that area—there’s plenty of sunlight out here. It wouldn’t need the passenger service, it wouldn’t have to make any scheduled stops, it would just keep going around the gyre, around and around.”

  “That’s a lovely word, gyre. It reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, or that poem of Yeats’—‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre…’”

  Higpen nodded soberly. “This is the big one we’re in, the North Pacific Gyre, but there are smaller ones you could get into if you wanted to. There’s one north of the Hawaiian Islands, for instance. Or you could ride back and forth on the North Equatorial Current and the Equatorial Countercurrent.” Newland looked at him curiously. “This is your dream, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, before I open my eyes, I’ve been dreaming about it and I think I’m there.”

  Back in his room, Newland looked at the menu: there it was, an appetizer. Pâté de krill. He ordered it, and it was delicious.

  How could any man discover his own motives, or confront them honestly if he did find them? Was it merely the fact that he was now too ill to go into space, the certain knowledge that he would never get there alive, that had made him begin to doubt the L-5 program to which he had given thirty years of his life? Or, to go farther back, was it the coincidence of his name that had turned him unconsciously toward thoughts of space colonization in the first place? He had known many such coincidences. Was it the fact that his own life seemed to him to have taken on a gentle descending arc, now in his seventh decade, that had made him wonder if, after all, there might be something to be done here on Earth?

  He knew the arguments, for and against. He had used those arguments, in lectures and debates, too long and often to put any great value on them. He knew how easy it was, and how necessary, to convince oneself first in order to persuade other people. He had been a scientist long before he became an advocate, and he still had the habit of skepticism toward unproved ideas, his own most of all.

  Then there was the logic of events. The first prototype ocean habitat was here; it had cost two billion dollars to build, less than three-tenths of a percent of the most optimistic estimate for the first L-5 colony: and that would have been only the beginning. Back and forth he went: yes, the benefits of a space colony would have paid back the original investment many times over by now. But there was no space colony, and Sea Venture was here.

  6

  After Newland’s morning bath, Hal Winter carried him back to the hospital bed and began to work on his legs, contracting and straightening them. “Feeling okay?” he asked.

  “Not too bad.”

  To distract himself from the pain, Newland thought about the fax last night from Marcia Sonnabend, the public relations director of L-5, Inc., in New York. “A good many questions here,” she had written, “about the recent story in the Toronto Star, which has been picked up by wire services here and abroad. I send faxes of stories from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Examiner. At the board meeting Monday there were suggestions that this publicity is damaging to our position and that it should be counteracted soonest. Please give me your thoughts on this. John Howard of the Times, who has always been sympathetic, is willing to do a telephone interview at your earliest convenience; Time and Newsweek are also interested. If you would like to go ahead with this, please let me know so we can set up times.”

  One of the stories had been headlined, L-5 GURU WAVERING IN FAITH?

  The steward brought in their breakfast, oatmeal and toast for Newland, scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns and fried tomatoes for Hal. “What time is it in New York now?” Newland asked when they were finished.

  “Quarter after one.”

  “They’ll be out to lunch. Let’s try in a couple of hours.”

  Hal carried him back to bed, and Newland sat up with a book on oceanography, not quite seeing the pages. After all, what was he going to tell her? If he gave an interview with all the old ringing declarations in it, would anybody believe them? Did he believe them himself? Newland honestly did not know. He was attracted by the simplicity of the perms, their quiet enthusiasm for Sea Venture. There was a striking difference between them and the space-colony enthusiasts: they lacked the mountain-climbing mystique, the fanaticism; they were simple small-town people whose town happened to be afloat on the Pacific.

  He heard Hal talking quietly in the other room; presently he came in and handed Newland the phone. “She’s on the line.”

  “Hello, Marcia? How are you?”

  “Hello, Paul,” said her clear voice. “You sound as if you’re just around the corner. How’s it going?”

  “Oh, all right,” said Newland. “I’ve been getting the grand tour. It’s very interesting, but I may have overdone it a little. Marcia, I’m afraid I’m just not up to any phone interviews right now.”

  “I understand,” her voice said after a moment.

  “Will you tell the news people that I’ll be in touch when I’m feeling stronger, say in a week or so?”

  “Of course, Paul. Look, how would this be? Let me put together a statement and fax it over to you tomorrow morning. Just something to keep
the wolves at bay. All right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Here’s Olivia, she wants to talk to you.”

  Olivia Jessup was L-5’s managing director, an old friend. Her voice was scratchy and thin. “Paul, I’m sorry to hear you’re not feeling up to snuff. I won’t keep you, but I just want you to know that Bronson and a couple of the others are making a stink.”

  “That’s normal,” said Newland.

  “Yes, but it’s serious, Paul. Bronson is politicking to get you voted out. What he’d really like is to expel you from the organization.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “All right. Do what you think best, but don’t wait too long. Good-bye, dear.”

  Newland gave the phone back to Hal and put his book aside, not pretending to read anymore. There was a sour taste in his mouth; he was tired of all the maneuvering, the speeches, the true things that had somehow lost their truth over the years. When had it started to go wrong?

  The tickle of uneasiness had begun before he was really aware of it, maybe as long as five years ago. In the beginning they had all been starry-eyed together, a great bunch, wonderful people, brothers and sisters. And now the L-5 habitats were still drawings on paper turning yellow around the edges; what they had instead was the Manned Orbital Vehicles, MOVs, armed with laser weapons.

  Maybe that was always the way it had to be. The military, first in Germany, then in the United States and the Soviet Union, had supported rocket research through the long difficult years. You had to take the money, because you couldn’t get it anywhere else. If you wanted to make spaceships, you did what they wanted and kept your eye on the ultimate goal.

  An old rhyme came into his head. The rockets go up, the rockets come down. “Dot’s not my department,” says Werner von Braun.

  7

  One of Bliss’s time-consuming duties was to preside at frequent cocktail and dinner parties whose guests were chosen by the purser from among the rich and powerful aboard Sea Venture. These necessary entertainments would certainly have ruined his liver had he not adopted the stratagem of the famous Mr. Gibson, a teetotaler who had bribed bartenders to serve him chilled water in a martini glass, with a cocktail onion to distinguish the ersatz from the genuine. Since the Gibson was now a popular drink, however, Bliss had replaced the onion by a slice of sweet pickle, and this sometimes caused comment. When that happened, as it had just done, Bliss always confessed.