Joe Haldeman - Worlds

Dover’s famous “white cliffs” were behind us, which didn’t make much difference, since it was too dark to see anything beyond the parking-lot lights. We got aboard and drove through a couple of blocks of nondescript modern buildings, and then out into the countryside, which was probably very picturesque, but unfortunately was not visible. All we could see was a pool of light on the road and vague shadows on either side.

After a few minutes we turned into a driveway and slowly crawled up a hill. The road had a couple of centimeters of snow on it and, from the crunching sound, seemed to be only gravel underneath. A large old house sat on top of the hill, yellow light streaming out of small windows on the ground floor. It was made of stone, covered with dead ivy, and the guides said it had been used as an inn for nearly three hundred years.

Our hostess, a florid fat woman, met us at the door and silently counted the people as they filed in. We were given a packet of information and a bed number; women to the right, men to the left.

Our dormitory was a huge room with, I think, the highest ceilings I’d ever seen. Bunk beds along one wall, two footlockers across from each bed, linen folded neatly on each footlocker. It was cold and drafty.

I was first one into the john, and made a delightful discovery: a bathtub! It was in a little closet separate from the toilets, with a sign-up sheet on the door. There was nobody signed up for the next half-hour (only four women in the room before we invaded), so I put down my name and went back to the footlocker for a towel.

I locked the closet door and slid the blinker card into the paybox, two pounds for thirty minutes. About twenty dollars. I would have paid ten times that. The faucet coughed and began to splash hot water into the plastic tub. Slightly brown water, but it made a great cloud of steam. I undressed and stood in the water while the tub filled, loving the moist heat rising. When it was deep enough I sat into the delicious sting and leaned back. The water shut off and I lay there like a dormant reptile for half an hour. I’d brought the travel packet in but couldn’t get up the motivation to reach for it. The tub started to drain and somebody knocked.

She started the tub while I was dressing—close quarters—and it turned out we were the same sort of outlanders, in a sense, as she’d come to New York from a farm in Kansas, and was also used to baths rather than showers.

Something was nagging at me. It would catch up in a few hours.

There were only a few people in the dormitory room. Most of them were on the back porch, smoking and talking. I would have joined them, for the talk, but didn’t want to go outside with wet hair. The woman on the bunk next to mine asked whether I played chess; we hauled a foot-locker between the beds and set up a board. She was good and I hadn’t played in years; the end game resembled Pearl Harbor.

Her name was Violet Brooks and I liked the apologetic way she enveloped my troops and destroyed them. She was an undergraduate, a senior from Nevada. I was curious about that state but she didn’t want to talk too much about it. Said it wasn’t as bad as most people said, but she was never going back. No taste for anarchy. Not many jobs for English majors, either.

We went into the “common” room, which was warmer and had tea and coffee, and leafed through our information packets. Violet had been to England once before, as a girl, when her mother had brought her along on a business trip. But she had only seen London, and claimed a week was scarcely enough to hit a few high points. We had eight days for the whole country.

Jeff came in with a number of other men, all covered with snow and slightly redolent of brandy. They stood around the stove that was keeping the urns warm, talking loudly and joking. The hostess stuck her head in and gave them a dour look.

They had been engaged in snow sculpture. Violet and I stepped outside for a few seconds to view their handiwork. It looked like a cross between a fat woman and a mountain of snow. They called it “the Venus of Dover.”

Violet and I, it turned out, were the only students along who were not citizens of the United States. So we were free to take a side trip into the Supreme Socialist Union, which would not admit Americans. We decided to look into it—China, at least, was a fascinating prospect—though I suspected it would be too expensive. (Violet had plenty of money; her mother ran a bordello.) No need to decide until February.

They had delayed dinner until ten, for our transatlantic stomachs, which made it only a couple of hours early. Bangers and mash, an authentic English meal, bland sausage with mashed potatoes. I didn’t mind it, but Jeff said he finally understood why the British had roamed the seas to forge an Empire: they were in search of a decent meal.

A few warm beers afterward, and some excited talk about going into London tomorrow, and I went off to bed.

Lying on the hard mattress, under a heavy quilt, I started sweating although I wasn’t particularly hot. Then dizziness and a sudden feeling of rootless horror—and I realized I’d forgotten to take the pill. The Klonexine from lunch had worn off.

I got the bottle from my bag and rushed into the john and washed down a pill. Then I sat in one of the stalls, sweating, teeth chattering, waiting for it to take effect.

I felt like crying out, or just crying, but managed to keep my jaws shut. And think, after a fashion.

I may have made a dreadful mistake. Lulled by the drug. I wasn’t escaping anything, going east, just postponing trouble. I should have gone up instead. This world was no place for anyone with access to another. I should be down at the Cape, waiting for a seat. Going back to Daniel, to peace. Leaving this desperate planet to work out its own fate.

The pill did its magic, corralling all of the norawhatzis into a safe place. I could almost talk myself back down. I had pretty well cut myself off from James and his group. Benny was resourceful. The Cape would be there when I got back. I got very sleepy. The sheet was damp and cold, but I lay very still and it warmed under me.

I dreamed a montage: Benny held down and forced to take pills, my pills. Jacob’s Ladder coming down, hitting New York. Violet looking at me with James’s glass eyes. Jeff tying me up with padded ropes, naked, rampant.

When we got off the tube in London I was set to immerse myself in History and Culture—but the first sight was a weird combination of anatomy and abnormal psychology. The Lambs of the Eternal Eye.

There were about a dozen Lambs in a line, begging, as we got off the train. They wore saffron robes and made soft music with finger-cymbals and sticks. Their skulls had been surgically removed from the eyebrows up, replaced with clear plastic, a sight presumably more pleasing to God’s eye than to mine.

They had stationed themselves wisely, as their tin plate full of foreign coins and currency showed. A blinker-card economy is hard on beggars; they had to get to foreigners before the Bank of England did, or on their way home.

One of them carried a sign saying THE BRITISH RAIL SYSTEM DOES NOT ENDORSE THIS ACTIVITY.

London taxis have human drivers. Eight of us squeezed into a cavernous black vehicle; Jeff told him the name of our hotel. We emerged from underground into bright morning sunlight and blue sky—garish after months of New York’s perpetual cloud.

The driver had an impenetrable accent (Cockney, I later learned), and chattered constantly. We drove down the Thames and sped by Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park—the Albert Memorial was almost majestic in its ugliness—and finally down into Kensington, where our hotel was. One man was trying to follow our progress on a map, and remarked that we were being taken for a ride in American idiom as well as British fact. I think the driver said this was the fastest route for this time of day.