Читать книгу Heroes of Earth - Martin Berman-Gorvine - Страница 13

CHAPTER 8

This stupid history paper is driving me crazy. What did I have to go and write about such a complicated subject for?

It was no good asking Dad, Alison knew; she’d only get a rant she could never write down and hand in for class. But it also made her sick to think about cleverly rewording the textbook the way anyone else in class would. Adventures in American History, ugh! It was the most boring textbook ever.

“You take things way too seriously,” Shaniqua said with a wave of her hand when Alison brought up the problem at lunchtime. “Write whatever makes Miss Burbage happy.”

“What about thinking for ourselves?”

Shaniqua snorted milk out of her nose, then delicately dabbed at it with her napkin. “In this town? Get serious, Alison honey. Just smile and tell them what they want to hear, so you can graduate and go off to college. You want to cause trouble, do it there. At least you’ll have plenty of company.”

“And get happy-foamed, or expelled, or disappeared? No thank you.”

“Then I really don’t understand what you’re going on about, girl. Just hum along to that Cosmic Harmony in public and do what you want in private. Everyone else does.”

“If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?”

“Long as there was a big ol’ pile of mattresses at the bottom, I would.” Alison had to chuckle at that. “Really, why make a big deal out of this?” Shaniqua said. “Just book some time on the n-reader and you’ll get all the material you need, if the textbook is too boring for you. But you’d better put your name on the list fast. As it is you’ll have to come in on the weekend to use it.”

“Can’t.” Alison lowered her voice. “My mom has NINA, remember?”

“But you could still go on the N-Network, Allie. Less than one in a million people gets NINA. You’re more likely to win the lottery! Why make things hard on yourself?”

Alison bit her lip. “What if it’s genetic? They don’t know for sure it’s not. I mean, what if it fries my brains?”

Shaniqua rolled her eyes. “It’s not scary, Allie, I promise you. I’ve used the one here, like, a hundred times for school projects. It didn’t fry my brains. Do I seem like a zombie to you?” She leaned over the unappetizing remains of her lunch, bugged her eyes out and wiggled her fingers. “Booga booga!”

Alison chuckled nervously. “But really, what’s it like, being on the n-net?”

Shaniqua shrugged. “It’s not ‘like’ anything else. For a sensum, which is all they let us do anyhow, it just feels like you’re right there at whatever place and time you’re supposed to be observing. It is a little strange for the earlier recordings because there’s no smell or touch, but that just makes it like watching a tri-vee. Or maybe like being a ghost.

“For an assignment last year I got to sit right next to the High Satrap during that famous interview the British guy did with him forty years ago. You know, the one where he explained why he had to rewrite the Constitution.” Shaniqua was a great mimic, and she lowered her voice and imitated the High Satrap himself. “Let me make one thing perfectly clear, David. I could have done the easy thing, the popular thing, and tried to retain the outmoded system of elections, even after our friends on high explained, with the wisdom of tens of thousands of years of civilization, how inefficient they are compared with monarchy, but…”

“Shh! We’ll get in big trouble,” Alison said, holding in her laughter.

Shaniqua went back to her normal voice. “I tried to touch his sleeve once and my hand passed right through his arm! That was kind of freaky, but there’s nothing to it, really.”

“But what about a massthink causing instant, total NINA? I heard they let a senior up in Salisbury join a massthink last year. She already had her acceptance letter from MIT, but now she’s, like, a vegetable.”

Shaniqua waved this off. “There’s always rumors like that. I heard it that the girl was from Norfolk and was going to Caltech before she became a drooler. Like I said, you’ll only be doing sensums, so there’s no risk anyway. Booga booga!”

Up in her bedroom, Alison put her pencil down. Her history paper was due Monday morning, and there was only one solution she could think of: since she couldn’t go on the n-net for a sensum of what it had been like during the Arrival, she’d have to talk to Grandma for a first-hand account. But that wasn’t so simple, since Mom’s mother, her only living grandparent, was in assisted living back in Baltimore. So she went looking for her father. Finding him in the kitchen, washing and drying the last of the supper dishes, she asked if they could all “go back home” for the weekend and explained why.

Dad sighed as he put a saucepan away. “I can’t get away, Allie-bear. You know we’ve got the National Medical people coming this weekend to give Mom a custom wheelchair.”

Alison started guiltily. How had she put that out of her mind?

“Tell you what, though,” Dad added. “I think you’re old enough to take the saucer to Baltimore by yourself.”

“Really, Dad? That’d be great!”

He smiled. “I’ll drive you to the Wallops Island Interplanetary Base early Saturday morning. Deal?” He held up his hand and she high-fived him.

* * * *

Alison hated getting up early on the weekend, but there wasn’t much choice. The air was cold and bright when she and Dad set out a little after eight, and their breath puffed out in clouds. She’d left waffle batter all prepared next to the waffle iron on the kitchen table, hoping Arnold could manage to feed himself and Mom without too much trouble—though she’d put the new fire extinguisher out on the table too, just in case.

The family’s battered old Chevy Ampere carried them the four miles down the causeway to the saucer field in just a few minutes; for once Dad wasn’t risking a fine by trying to drive the thing manually, instead letting the global DriveNet on the High Ones’ mothership do the steering.

While they sailed along, Dad gave Alison a pink knobbed whelk shell he’d found on the beach a few weeks ago, a little one just two inches long, to give to Grandma. “Tell her I’m sorry I can’t come and bring Mom,” he said.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right getting her into the new wheelchair?” Alison asked.

Dad ruffled her hair. “Don’t worry, Allie Bear. That’s what the Universal Health is for.”

At the fenced-in entrance to the field she had to separate from Dad to go through the female strip-search. The guard was a roundish, middle-aged lady with a scowl and calloused hands who made Alison feel like she was doing something wrong just by breathing. Plus the guard “accidentally” jammed her rigid, rubber-gloved forefinger up Alison’s butt, making her yelp.

“Don’t be such a baby about it,” the lady snapped.

Dad must have seen something in Alison’s face because he asked her what was wrong, but she just shook her head. Luckily she didn’t have to stand around waiting with him; the little intercity saucer was already parked nearby, hovering about ten feet above the field of bright green salt-marsh hay, with a gleaming metal ramp leading up to it from one of the wooden boardwalks. The thing created so little breeze Alison barely even noticed that her hair was blowing around since she’d forgotten to wear the bright pink cap Grandma had knitted her last year.

“Well, I’d better get back home,” Dad said. “The Universal Health people are going to be there in less than an hour.” They hugged quickly and Alison shouldered her pack.

There was plenty of room in the saucer, which had a diameter about as long as a school bus and could seat about seventy-five people in two concentric rings. The saucer was half empty, so Alison had no trouble getting a window seat. Of course, you never got to see the really cool part…

“Good morning, folks, and welcome aboard the Hemi-Viscount Oofffffff’calalius,” the High One pilot said over the intercom, in what sounded like a down-home Southern accent. Not that long ago, he would have been out among his human passengers, pressing tentacles to hands, but the insurgency had gotten so bad they didn’t dare emerge from their sealed-off pod at the top of the saucer. “We’d like to thank you for choosing Imperial Spacelines for this short hop to Proxima Centauri 5.”

Alison sat bolt upright and shouted in alarm, but the intercom voice was chuckling.

“Jest kiddin’ there, folks, this girl’s only going to Baltimore. If your final destination is Proxima Centauri’s fifth planet, you’re going to need a bigger saucer and some rather elaborate breathing apparatus.”

A kindly-looking middle-aged lady on Alison’s right leaned over and patted her on the arm. “Sorry he gave you a fright, dear. I take this flight all the time, the pilot fancies himself quite a comedian.” Alison managed a weak grin.

Meanwhile the saucer had lifted silently and without any sensation of acceleration into the stratosphere. Alison could see all of Chincoteague and the fat fishhook shape of Assateague Island’s southern end out her window. But she didn’t get to enjoy the view long.

The pilot was back on the intercom, his tone serious. “Passengers, please put your window shades in the full upright and locked position for bubble blowing.”

Alison put her hand out obediently, but hesitated, her breath taken away by the green and tawny islands in the deep blue sea below her.

The pilot’s voice sounded a sterner note. “Folks, I cannot hyperinflate the bubble universe we need to make the hop to Baltimore until you all—”

The lady to Alison’s right reached over and snapped the plastic cover down, pinching Alison’s right fingertips so she yelped.

“That’s better, folks. Brace for bubble!”

Alison’s stomach turned a sick somersault, which made her forget all about the dirty look the lady was giving her. She barely had time to wonder whether it was really true that seeing a bubble universe would make you go insane before the pilot said pleasantly that he’d like to be the first to welcome them to Baltimore and the passengers were free to watch their descent to the landing field.

The bus to Sunup Happy Life Dwellings took longer than the saucer ride had, leaving Alison too much time to fret over how Grandma would feel about her coming alone for help with a school assignment. What if she got mad? She’d been so transparently eager for everyone to stay the last time they visited, back in August. Alison bit her nails until they bled, punishing herself for having written so few letters in the three months that had passed since then. Poor Grandma! She’d had the same longevity treatments as everyone else, but since her stroke she couldn’t live on her own—and yet she missed her family and especially Grandpa, who had dropped dead suddenly of a heart defect no one even knew he had.

When the bus pulled up at the glassed-in “sunroom,” Grandma was there waiting for her, all but jumping up and down with excitement. “Hello, dear! How is school? How’s my favorite granddaughter doing in twelfth grade?”

“Fine, Grandma.” Good Lord, she’d obviously gotten her hair done for this visit. The chestnut strands were carefully piled up in the wasp’s nest that had been popular fifty years ago, and she had on her best blue dress, the one with the white lacy collar. Her face was so carefully made up you could hardly even tell the left side was droopy from the stroke.

Alison was flattered and ashamed, all at once. As they walked up to Grandma’s room she explained what she needed for her school assignment.

“So you need me to reminisce about the good old days?” Grandma said. “I can do that! But first, let’s sit down in the kitchen and get you your milk and Oreos.”

“I’m on a diet, Grandma,” Alison protested, but the plate was already in front of her, the glass (which had originally been a jam jar) was full of ice-cold milk, and it was too much to resist as her grandmother started talking.

“Your grandfather and I were students at Towson State, north of town. We weren’t really into our studies because we were hippies, of course. Counterculture freaks,” she said.

“I don’t know what a ‘counterculture’ is.”

“Disturbers of the Cosmic Harmony, they’d call us now. They called us worse back then. The day of the moon landing, Phil and I went to a be-in on campus.”

“A what?”

“A big party where people were passing around joints and dropping acid.”

“Grandma!”

She shrugged her shoulders under her lace collar. “You want to know how it was, I’m telling you how it was. Somebody had set up a big color TV on a podium, with a dozen extension cords connected to each other running to the dean’s office in the administration building. Which was closed, since it was summer, so somebody must’ve had to break in.”

Alison clapped her hand over her mouth and let out a shocked giggle.

“When the great moment happened, Phil and I were in the middle of an argument.”

“An argument? About what?”

“About whether the moon landing was real or the government was faking it.”

“Just like Barry Freed!” Alison said, half-whispering.

“Who? Anyway, I can’t even remember which side I was taking. But suddenly people were gasping, screaming, freaking out. I remember one guy said real loud, ‘Worst trip ever!’ Phil and me, we just looked at each other. Most everybody ran off, hoping that it really was just a bad trip and if they slept it off it would go away.

“We were part of the small group that stayed and got to see the mothership descending over the White House an hour later.” Grandma chuckled. “People said afterward that the mothership looked like a giant bath toy, and that Risssss-erianus creature resembled a shower cap. But Phil always said it was the White House and that wind-up doll of a president who looked like toys, next to those huge things.”

Alison stiffened instinctively. You just didn’t talk about the Viceroy of Earth and the High Satrap like that. But Grandma had her own rules. I’d better get to the point. “Grandma, this is all really cool, but the point of my paper is how the High Ones brought world peace. What were the huge celebrations like that night, when the High Ones destroyed all the world’s nuclear weapons?”

Grandma absently pulled apart an Oreo, dunked the half without the cream filling in her milk, and took a slow, meditative bite before answering. “So that’s what they’re teaching you kids now, huh? Huge celebrations? There were some pretty raucous parties that night, it’s true. From what I heard, they made our ‘be-in’ look like a little kid’s birthday party. End-of-the-world hysteria is what it was. People thought we were all gonna die.”

“What? But the High Ones had just saved us from, like, extinction!”

Grandma shook her head. “We had our own little party that night, Phil and I.” She winked at Alison. “That’s when your mother was conceived.”

“GRANDMA! Gross!”

“Look at your face, kid! Red as an apple!” Grandma laughed, patting Alison’s hand. She took another bite of her cookie. “Yep, that was some night. You couldn’t get away from the TV. Even if you didn’t have yours on, you could hear everyone else’s blaring. They kept broadcasting the same clip over and over again, of the mushroom cloud over that missile silo in Kansas being sucked back down into the ground like God was drinking it through a straw.

“From that moment, everybody knew that the High Ones could do whatever they wanted to us. If they wanted us to have world peace, by God, we were going to have world peace. Or our world would be in pieces.” Grandma chuckled at her own pun. “More Oreos, dear? You haven’t even touched yours.”

Cookies were the last thing on Alison’s mind. She was too excited. This is so different from what the history textbook says! But it’ll show how primitive humans were when the High Ones arrived. My paper is sure to get an A!