Sidney's Comet (6 page)

And the employees murmured: “Praise be to Uncle Rosy. He loves us all.”

Nelson touched a heat switch on the metronome, setting the device into operation. Click . . . click . . . click . . . click. The pendulum swung back and forth, a passage every fifteen seconds. Sidney pressed his red button with each metronome click, activating his envelope stuffer at the rate of four per minute.

After several minutes, the metronome automatically slowed, making a click every twenty seconds. Then it slowed again, to a thirty-second click. Sidney’s eyelids grew increasingly heavy. He dozed off. Then, half awake, he tried to catch up by pushing the button several times in rapid succession.

“No, no Malloy!” a voice said. “You’re going too fast!”

Startled, Sidney looked tip to see the scowling face of Malcolm Penny staring down at him through round spectacles perched on the end of a disapproving nose.

“Oh!” Sidney said, sitting up straight. “I’m terribly sorry!”

Penny shook his head disapprovingly, set his jaw. “And your desk, Malloy . . . it’s not organized according to standard!”

“But I thought it—”

“Your day calendar and auto-staple remover, man! Don’t you ever look at the manual?”

Sidney heard a metronome click, pushed the stuffing tray button. “I’m sorry, Mr. Penny,” he said. “I’ll correct it right away.”

The Second Assistant to the Assistant Manager straightened, still shaking his head. “See that you do,” he snipped. Then he rolled down the aisle to look for other violators.

* * *

Still angry over his encounter with the base sergeant an hour before, Javik stepped out of a Bu-Health surge-pool. Smelling the back of his hand, he shook his head and thought:
Still a trace odor of that god-damned garbage. The skit permeates every pore in my body
—

Javik shivered as he walked dripping wet across the blue Italian tile of the main bathhouse toward a line of naked men and women waiting to get into Tanning Room Five. His leg and arm muscles ached from the weight exercises he had completed fifteen minutes earlier.

“This old body can’t take it anymore,” he muttered.

Finding a place in line, Javik looked around and motioned to a towel monitor standing nearby. A dark-haired young man wearing the silver and gold leotard of Bu-Health moto-shoed over, draped a long white towel over Javik’s shoulders.

“Sign here,” the young man instructed, thrusting a Tele-Charge board under Javik’s nose. Javik unsnapped a transmitting pen from the board, squiggled his name across the tiny screen. A green imprint of Javik’s signature appeared on the screen as he wrote, and as he finished, his consumer identification number and the amount of purchase appeared. All this faded quickly, being replaced by a flashing orange “Thank You.” The young man retrieved his Tele-Charge board and rolled back to his post.

Javik pulled the towel around his shivering body and felt its warmth take hold. The line moved quickly. Soon he had signed another Tele-Charge board and was in the warm, brightly lit tanning room. It was a high-ceilinged room, with eighty-eight levels of tanning slabs stretching upward, connected by steel ramps and clanking conveyor lifts. Harmak played “Dreamer’s Lullaby,” one of the new restful background tunes. The smell of perspiring bodies wafted across his nostrils.

“Hey Tom!” the voice came from above. Javik looked up, saw the goggled, ruddy face of Brent Stafford smiling down over the edge of a thud-level tanning slab. “I saved you a place!” Stafford motioned for Javik to come up.

Javik stepped onto the clanking conveyor lift, rode it to a third level ramp. From there it was only a few short steps to the tanning slab beside Stafford. Javik removed his towel, donned a pair of goggles and dropped face down onto the warm, clear glass of the slab. Heat lamps all around warmed his body, soaking into every aching muscle. “Ah!” Javik sighed. “That feels good!”

Stafford turned to face Javik, peering through his goggles as he asked, “When’s the big reunion?”

“Saturday night.” Javik focused upon body smells carried by a downdraft.

“Twentieth, isn’t it?”

“Uh huh. Old PS. five-oh-two. Be nice to see the bunch again . . . Charlie, Bob, Sidney. . . . Hey, I wonder if Sidney ever permied up with Carla. . . .”

Stafford sat up, sprayed water over his body with a passing porta-shower. “You know, Tom,” he said, measuring his words carefully, “You’d do well to watch that temper. With good behavior, I’ve heard it said you can get another commission.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know.” Javik shifted on his belly, turned his face away from Stafford.

“Could have been worse, buddy. You might have been court-martialed and shot for that . . . but they took your war record into account.”

“Am I supposed to thank them for that? Hell, they should thank
me . . .
and you too . . . for what we did.”

“You’ve got to see their point of view.”

“Their
point of view?” Javik felt rage rising inside. “I belted that wet-behind-the-ears gay major after you and I were almost shot down by an Atheist fighter squadron!”

“They don’t see any justification for hitting an officer, Tom. You know that.”

“We saved two base ships with a little initiative, and that armchair fairy read us out for not getting the proper authorizations!”

“I know, I know.” Stafford sounded sleepy.

“Now it’s happening again, Staf. That damned garbage shuttle’s driving me crazy.”

Stafford turned to his back. “You’re right. I can’t argue with a word. But we’ve got to use our brains . . . you know, play their silly games a little.”

“We bust our asses and what do we get? Some creep spouting off about rules and procedures! Well for Christ’s sake! I’m a Star Class Captain, not a stinking garbage shuttle pilot!” Javik paused, breathing hard, turned to face Stafford. “Get the hell off my case, will ya, Staf ?”

“Damn you!” Stafford said. His creased face stiffened. “I’m trying to help you, you hothead! Can’t you see that?”

“I don’t need your help!”

“Yeah? Then get the hell away from me!”

Javik rose with his towel. “You’re a little old lady, Staf. Always telling me the safest things to do, aren’t you? Well, I’ve had enough! DO YOU HEAR ME? ENOUGH!”

“Everybody in the place hears you,” Stafford sneered.

Javik turned without another word and stalked off.
Pleasure domes,
he thought.
Maybe a forest maiden will calm me
. . . .

Sidney did not have to look at his watch to know it was time for the second afternoon coffee break. He was already nearing the elevator bank when the bell rang. Carla waited in the elevator as usual, holding the door open. Sidney rolled on without a word.

“Perfect timing again,” Carla said as the doors whooshed shut. She placed both hands in the pockets of her carmine red pantsuit and mentoed:
Sub-nine-sixty-six, Presidential override. Code twenty-four.

“That Presidential override is nice,” Sidney said, knowing what she had done. “Our car used to stop at every floor before you got it.”

“Just don’t tell anyone about it,” she said focusing on Sidney’s receding hairline and high forehead. “I had to pull strings to get it.”

“How did you manage it?”

Carla smiled. “Leave a girl some secrets, Sidney.” She thought of Chief of Staff Billie Birdbright.
Billie likes me enough to give me an override. But when will he get around to asking me out?

The car dropped quickly and silently, depositing them at the entrance to the Cave Coffee Shop. It was an immense, dimly lit restaurant, dotted with hundreds of tiny tables. Each of the four perimeter glassite walls looked out upon one of the iridescent bat caves that honeycombed the ground beneath New City.

“You’re quiet today,” Carla said as they took a seat at their usual window booth overlooking an underground waterfall. She looked at his soft-featured face, with its familiar pug nose and wing-like ears at the sides. “You aren’t worried about a comet coming, are you?” She laughed.

“No. The doomies are crazy. I was just thinking about my job again . . . and wishing to Uncle Rosy I’d taken a physical for the Space Patrol twenty years ago.”

“But your . . . “—Carla looked around, whispered—” . . . disability. It would have shown up.” She touched a tiny dice cage mounted on the table, looked at him intently with understanding in her eyes.

“Maybe not.” Sidney watched people beginning to stream into the coffee shop. “The incorto dispenser my father implanted . . . in place of my appendix . . . has an x-ray scrambler. It takes special equipment to detect it.”

“Your father was a great surgeon,” she said, looking at him tenderly. “You seem so unhappy in Central Forms. Could it be that you would prefer life on a therapy orbiter?”

“With the exception of missing you, it might be more interesting.” He laughed nervously. “Look at me, Carla. I want so desperately to be a gallant captain at the controls of a space cruiser, on a great mission to the outer reaches of the galaxy. And here I am . . . hundreds of floors underground!” He fell silent, gazed out into the cave as a flurry of large butterfly bats passed in front of the waterfall, then disappeared behind a blue and white stalagmite formation.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Really I am.” She reached across the table, took his pudgy hand in hers. “You always had that romantic dream of running away to the sky . . . even when we were kids.”

Sidney fought back a tear, turned to study her classically featured face, with its straight Roman nose and high cheekbones. A red painted beauty mark dotted the left cheek, and long curls of golden brown hair cascaded onto her shoulders. People thought Carla of average build, and the muscle tone of her body provided evidence of time spent in Bu-Health gyms. Sidney tried to smile, said, “I remember we used to play condominium together. And we promised to become permies someday. . . . ” He cleared his throat.

“The grown-up world isn’t simple,” Carla said.

“Can’t we find some way to work it out?”

“No!” She spoke firmly. “We’ve been through that before . . . the probability of cappy offspring and all. It wouldn’t be fair to them.”

“But that’s only a fifty-fifty chance. And even if there was a handicap, maybe we could find a doctor who would—”

Her voice grew cool. “No,” she said. “Absolutely not.” She pulled her hand away, noticed Chief of Staff Birdbright slide into a booth two tables behind Sidney. Birdbright smiled at Carla. She looked away, said to Sidney: “Let’s order now. Everyone’s arriving.”

They mentoed orders into a tabletop receiver. Then they fell silent while waiting for the order to arrive, glancing at one another for several agonizing moments without speaking.

The coffee shop was full now, and Sidney listened to a talkative silver-haired girl at the next table. “I don’t know what happened to Abercrombie,” the girl said. “One day I came to work and he wasn’t there. Then packing meckies cleared his desk. Judy asked her supervisor, but he just said, ‘Abercrombie is no longer with us.’ It’s all kinda weird, if you ask me.”

A tray holding two Styrofoam cups of coffee and a plate of mini-donuts popped out of the table between Sidney and Carla. Carla signed a Tele-Charge board mounted next to the dice cage, then mento-spun the dice. Her results appeared on the Tele-Charge screen.

“Five sixes!” she exclaimed. “That puts me in the Trip to Glitterland Sweepstakes! Now you try it!”

Sidney signed the board, mento-spun the dice cage.

“Aw,” she said, her voice reflecting disappointment. “Only a pair of fives.”

“Oh well,” Sidney said, reaching for his coffee cup. “Guess I wasn’t meant to do anything exciting.”

“I can’t believe it!” she said. “Just think! I could be a winner!”

“Uh huh.”

“Isn’t Freeness wonderful?”

“Yeah.” Then his voice grew more cheerful as he said, “I’m happy for you.”

Carla knocked over her coffee cup in her excitement, spilling liquid on her dress. “Dam!” she said, quivering as she reached for a napkin. “I’m so excited I can’t stop shaking.”

Sidney used his napkin to wipe the table.

“Thank you,” she said, dabbing at the dress with her napkin. “I’ll change as we leave. There’s a venda-dress machine in the lobby.”

“That reminds me,” Sidney said. “What are you wearing to the reunion?”

“I don’t know.” She lifted her gaze to the attentive eyes of Billie Birdbright. “I’ll shop for it tomorrow.”

* * *

General Munoz did not like to be kept waiting. Slapping his gold-braided military cap rhythmically against his thigh, he moto-paced the length of Dr. Hudson’s office. Passing from sunlight to shadow, he mentoed the digital cuckoo clock on the wall, noting the readout beneath the closed cuckoo bird doors: P.M. 3:39:26. He spun angrily as he reached an end wall, then saw Hudson standing in the doorway, holding a red velvet box.

“Sorry I’m late,” Hudson said nervously. He entered and set the box on his desk. Adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses, he said, “You’re going to like this.”

Munoz’s dark eyes flashed. “Hrrumph! Nearly ten minutes wasted! My time is valuable, you know!”

Hudson kept his gaze on the box, smiled proudly at the corners of his mouth. “Open it.”

Munoz rolled to the box with his orange mustache curled into a scowl, but there was a glint in his eyes. Setting his cap on the desk, he opened the box, then stared at a burnished gold cross and chain which lay on red velvet. “A cross? But I alrea . . . “ He stopped, noting Hudson’s bemused expression. Munoz lifted the cross out, studied it intently.

“It looks like the cross you’ve always worn, General. But it’s more. Much more. The wearer of this baby commands all AmFed weather control machinery. Simply touch the cross with either hand and memo-transmit.”

Munoz looked at the cross with disinterest.

“This is a nicer, more compact system, General. We can dismantle the weather console now. . . . All that bulky equipment has been replaced by one little device. You can play God with this little unit, changing the weather as you please, wherever you are.”

Still no response from General Munoz.

“To monitor the results, you simply close your eyes and there it will be, dancing on the insides of your eyelids.”