Cities in Flight

Helmuth cut the radio out. The girl was freshly dressed—in so far as anybody dressed in anything on Jupiter V—and Helmuth wondered why she was prowling the decks at this hour, half-way between her sleep period and her trick. Her hair was hazy against the light from the corridor, and she looked less mannish than usual. She reminded him a little of the way she had looked when they had been lovers, before the Bridge had come to bestride his bed instead. He put the memory aside.

“All right,” he said. “I owe you a mix, I guess. Citric, sugar and the other stuff are in the locker … you know where it is. Shot-cans are there, too.”

The girl shut the door and sat down on the bunk, with a free litheness that was almost grace, but with a determination which, Helmuth knew, meant that she had just decided to do something silly for all the right reasons.

“I don’t need a drink,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been turning my lux-R’s back to the common pool. I suppose you did that for me—by showing me what a mind looks like that’s hiding from itself.”

“Evita, stop sounding like a tract. Obviously you’re advanced to a higher, more Jovian plane of existence, but won’t you still need your metabolism? Or have you decided that vitamins are all-in-the-mind?”

“Now you’re being superior. Anyhow, alcohol isn’t a vitamin. And I didn’t come to talk about that. I came to tell you something I think you ought to know.”

“Which is—?”

She said: “Bob, I mean to have a child here.”

A bark of laughter, part sheer hysteria and part exasperation, jack-knifed Helmuth into a sitting position. A red arrow bloomed on the far wall, obediently marking the paragraph which, supposedly, he had reached in his reading. Eva twisted to look at it, but the page was already dimming and vanishing.

“Women!” Helmuth said, when he could get his breath back. “Really, Evita, you make me feel much better. No environment can change a human being much, after all.”

“Why should it?” she said suspiciously, looking back at him. “I don’t see the joke. Shouldn’t a woman want to have a child?”

“Of course she should,” he said, settling back. The pages began to flip across the wall again. “It’s quite ordinary. All women want to have children. All women dream of the day they can turn a child out to play in an airless rock garden like Jupiter V, to pluck fossils and make dust-castles and get quaintly starburned. How cosy to tuck the blue little body back into its corner that night, and give it its oxygen bottle, promptly as the sound of the trick-change bell! Why it’s as natural as Jupiter-light—as Western as freeze-dried apple pie.”

He turned his head casually away. “Congratulations. As for me, though, Eva, I’d much prefer that you take your ghostly little pretext out of here.”

Eva surged to her feet in one furious motion. Her fingers grasped him by the beard and jerked his head painfully around again.

“You reedy male platitude!” she said, in a low grinding voice. “How you could see almost the whole point, and make so little of it— Women, is it? So you think I came creeping in here, full of humbleness, to settle our technical differences in bed!”

He closed his hand on her wrist and twisted it away. “What else?” he demanded, trying to imagine how it would feel to stay reasonable for five minutes at a time with these Bridge-robots. “None of us need bother with games and excuses. We’re here, we’re isolated, we were all chosen because, among other things, we were quite incapable of forming permanent emotional attachments and capable of any alliances we liked without going unbalanced when the attraction died and the alliance came unstuck. None of us have to pretend that our living arrangements would keep us out of jail in Boston, or that they have to involve any Earth-normal excuses.”

She said nothing. After a while he asked, gently: “Isn’t that so?”

“Of course it’s not so,” Eva said. She was frowning at him; he had the absurd impression that she was pitying him. “If we were really incapable of making any permanent attachment, we’d never have been chosen. A cast of mind like that is a mental disease, Bob; it’s anti-survival from the ground up. It’s the conditioning that made us this way. Didn’t you know?”

Helmuth hadn’t known; or if he had, he had been conditioned to forget it. He gripped the arms of the chair tighter.

“Anyhow,” he said, “that’s the way we are.”

“Yes, it is. Also it has nothing to do with the matter.”

“It doesn’t? How stupid do you think I am? I don’t care whether or not you’ve decided to have a child here, if you really mean what you say.”

She, too, seemed to be trembling. “You really don’t, either. The decision means nothing to you.”

“Well, if I liked children, I’d be sorry for the child. But as it happens, I can’t stand children—and if that’s the conditioning, too, I can’t do a thing about it. In short, Eva, as far as I’m concerned you can have as many kids as you want, and to me you’ll still be the worst operator on the Bridge.”