Isaac Asimov - Foundation and Empire

And in other respects, the siege was even closer; for the shrouds of helplessness and doom had already invaded—

Bayta plodded her way down the pink-waved aisle past the rows of milky plastic-topped tables and found her seat by blind reckoning. She eased onto the high, armless chair, answered half-heard greetings mechanically, rubbed a wearily itching eye with the back of a weary hand, and reached for her menu.

She had time to register a violent mental reaction of distaste to the pronounced presence of various cultured-fungus dishes, which were considered high delicacies at Haven, and which her Foundation taste found highly inedible—and then she was aware of the sobbing near her and looked up.

Until then, her notice of Juddee, the plain, snub-nosed, indifferent blonde at the dining unit diagonally across had been the superficial one of the nonacquaintance. And now Juddee was crying, biting woefully at a moist handkerchief, and choking back sobs until her complexion was blotched with turgid red. Her shapeless radiation-proof costume was thrown back upon her shoulders, and her transparent face shield had tumbled forward into her dessert, and there remained.

Bayta joined the three girls who were taking turns at the eternally applied and eternally inefficacious remedies of shoulder-patting, hair-smoothing, and incoherent murmuring.

“What’s the matter?” she whispered.

One turned to her and shrugged a discreet, “I don’t know.” Then, feeling the inadequacy of the gesture, she pulled Bayta aside.

“She’s had a hard day, I guess. And she’s worrying about her husband.”

“Is he on space patrol?”

“Yes.”

Bayta reached a friendly hand out to Juddee.

“Why don’t you go home, Juddee?” Her voice was a cheerfully businesslike intrusion on the soft, flabby inanities that had preceded.

Juddee looked up half in resentment. “I’ve been out once this week already—”

“Then you’ll be out twice. If you try to stay on, you know, you’ll just be out three days next week—so going home now amounts to patriotism. Any of you girls work in her department? Well, then, suppose you take care of her card. Better go to the washroom first, Juddee, and get the peaches and cream back where it belongs. Go ahead! Shoo!”

Bayta returned to her seat and took up the menu again with a dismal relief. These moods were contagious. One weeping girl would have her entire department in a frenzy these nerve-torn days.

She made a distasteful decision, pressed the correct buttons at her elbow, and put the menu back into its niche.

The tall, dark girl opposite her was saying, “Isn’t much any of us can do except cry, is there?”

Her amazingly full lips scarcely moved, and Bayta noticed that their ends were carefully touched to exhibit that artificial, just-so half-smile that was the current last word in sophistication.

Bayta investigated the insinuating thrust contained in the words with lashed eyes and welcomed the diversion of the arrival of her lunch, as the tile-top of her unit moved inward and the food lifted. She tore the wrappings carefully off her cutlery and handled them gingerly till they cooled.

She said, “Can’t you think of anything else to do, Hella?”

“Oh, yes,” said Hella. “ I can!” She flicked her cigarette with a casual and expert finger-motion into the little recess provided and the tiny flash caught it before it hit shallow bottom.

“For instance,” and Hella clasped slender, well-kept hands under her chin, “I think we could make a very nice arrangement with the Mule and stop all this nonsense. But then I don’t have the . . . uh . . . facilities to manage to get out of places quickly when the Mule takes over.”

Bayta’s clear forehead remained clear. Her voice was light and indifferent. “You don’t happen to have a brother or husband in the fighting ships, do you?”

“No. All the more credit that I see no reason for the sacrifice of the brothers and husbands of others.”

“The sacrifice will come the more surely for surrender.”

“The Foundation surrendered and is at peace. Our men are away and the Galaxy is against us.”

Bayta shrugged, and said sweetly, “I’m afraid it is the first of the pair that bothers you.” She returned to her vegetable platter and ate it with the clammy realization of the silence about her. No one in earshot had cared to answer Hella’s cynicism.

She left quickly, after stabbing at the button which cleared her dining unit for the next shift’s occupant.

A new girl, three seats away, stage-whispered to Hella, “Who was she?”

Hella’s mobile lips curled in indifference. “She’s our co-ordinator’s niece. Didn’t you know that?”

“Yes?” Her eyes sought out the last glimpse of disappearing back. “What’s she doing here?”

“Just an assembly girl. Don’t you know it’s fashionable to be patriotic? It’s all so democratic, it makes me retch.”

“Now, Hella,” said the plump girl to her right. “She’s never pulled her uncle on us yet. Why don’t you lay off?”

Hella ignored her neighbor with a glazed sweep of eyes and lit another cigarette.

The new girl was listening to the chatter of the bright-eyed accountant opposite. The words were coming quickly, “—and she’s supposed to have been in the Vault—actually in the Vault, you know—when Seldon spoke—and they say the mayor was in frothing furies and there were riots, and all of that sort of thing, you know. She got away before the Mule landed, and they say she had the most tha-rilling escape—had to go through the blockade, and all—and I do wonder she doesn’t write a book about it, these war books being so popular these days, you know. And she was supposed to be on this world of the Mule’s, too—Kalgan, you know—and—”

The time bell shrilled and the dining room emptied slowly. The accountant’s voice buzzed on, and the new girl interrupted only with the conventional and wide-eyed, “Really-y-y-y?” at appropriate points.

The huge cave lights were being shielded groupwise in the gradual descent towards the darkness that meant sleep for the righteous and hardworking, when Bayta returned home.

Toran met her at the door, with a slice of buttered bread in his hand.

“Where’ve you been?” he asked, food-muffled. Then, more clearly, “I’ve got a dinner of sorts rassled up. If it isn’t much, don’t blame me.”

But she was circling him, wide-eyed. “Torie! Where’s your uniform? What are you doing in civvies?”

“Orders, Bay. Randu is holed up with Ebling Mis right now, and what it’s all about, I don’t know. So there you have everything.”

“Am I going?” She moved towards him impulsively.

He kissed her before he answered, “I believe so. It will probably be dangerous.”

“What isn’t dangerous?”

“Exactly. Oh, yes, and I’ve already sent for Magnifico, so he’s probably coming, too.”

“You mean his concert at the Engine Factory will have to be cancelled.”

“Obviously.”

Bayta passed into the next room and sat down to a meal that definitely bore signs of having been “rassled up.” She cut the sandwiches in two with quick efficiency and said:

“That’s too bad about the concert. The girls at the factory were looking forward to it. Magnifico, too, for that matter.” She shook her head. “He’s such a queer thing.”

“Stirs your mother-complex, Bay, that’s what he does. Someday we’ll have a baby, and then you’ll forget Magnifico.”

Bayta answered from the depths of her sandwich, “Strikes me that you’re all the stirring my mother-complex can stand.”

And then she laid the sandwich down, and was gravely serious in a moment.