Frederik Pohl - Jem

Ana pushed the headphones off her ears and allowed herself to rub her eyes. The headaches were very bad tonight. And this awful room! Twenty headsets and tape-control panels before twenty identical hard-backed chairs, all around the ring. So bleak! So unsympathetic!

Unsympathetic? Ana clucked her lips at herself. That was one of the English language’s booby-trap words: sympathetic, simpatico. They sounded so much alike. But they did not mean the same thing, and it was embarrassing to a translator of Ana’s skills to fall into the blunder of confusing them. It proved she was too tired to work anymore this night, and so she switched off the tape decisively, hung the earphones on their hook, and stood up to go. She intended to wish a courteous good night to those few other eager project personnel who had shared her desire to put in overtime at the tape ring. But there weren’t any. They had all left while she was concentrating.

It was nearly eleven o’clock! In six hours she would have to be getting out of bed!

Hurrying down the empty company street toward her room, Ana paused halfway, changed course, and entered the dayroom. Really, these headaches were too bad! But there was a dispensing machine in the dayroom, and sometimes one of the American soft drinks containing caffeine would constrict the blood vessels and reduce the thumping, thumping throb long enough for her to get to sleep.

But as she dropped a dollar into the machine and waited for the cup to fill, it seemed to her that coming here had been a mistake, after all. Such an ear-drubbing of noise! A dozen couples were dancing frenziedly to a stereo at one end of the room. At the other a young Oriental man had a guitar, and a group was singing with him, quite at cross-purposes to the music on the stereo. Quite uncaring. And even more noise came from the television alcove: a babble of excited voices, laughter. What could they be watching? She drifted closer to peer at the screen. Someone was lifting a pillowcase out of a sonic washer and exclaiming rapturously over its pristine shine. Were these people excited over a commercial?

“Oh, Nan,” cried her roommate, elbowing toward her. “You missed it. She was wonderful. ”

“What? What did I miss? Who was wonderful?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Menninger. It was really super. You know,” confided the woman, “I never really liked her. But tonight she was just beautiful. She was on the six o’clock news. It was just a little person-to-person interview, like a follow-up to a story about Jem. I don’t know why they picked her, but I’m glad they did! She said such wonderful things! She said Jem gave hope to all the unhappy people of the world. She said it was a planet where all the old hatreds could be forgotten. A place where — what did she say? — yes, a place where each child could elect a morality and an idea, and have the space and the freedom to live his life by it!”

Ana coughed Coca-Cola in a fine spray into her cupped hand. “Colonel Menninger said that?” she gasped.

“Yes, yes, Nan, and she said it beautifully. We were all touched. Even people like Stud Sweggert and Nguyen the Tryin’ were really moved. I mean, they even kept their hands to themselves. And the newscaster said something about sending troops to Jem, and Colonel Menninger said, ‘I’m a soldier myself. Every country has soldiers like me, and every one of us prays we’ll never have anything to do. But on Jem we can do something useful! Something for peace, not for destruction. Please let us do it.’ — What?”

Nan had been marveling to herself in Bulgarian. “No, no, please go on,” she said.

“Well. And just now they repeated parts of it on the late report, and they said the public response has been incredible. Telegrams, phone calls. To the White House and the UN and the networks — I don’t know where all.”

Ana forgot her headache. “Perhaps I have been doing Colonel Menninger an injustice. Truly, I am amazed.”

“Well, I am too! But she made me feel really good about what we’re doing, and everyone’s talking about it!”

And they were. Not only in the barracks dayroom. Senator Lenz’s phones were ringing, and it was constituents urging him to make sure the heroes on Jem got support. Newsrooms around the country were watching the electronic tally of calls from the public: Jem, Jem! Spot pollsters were reporting great and growing public concern. God Menninger’s phone rang only once, but the person on the other end was the President of the United States. When he hung up, Menninger’s face was tense and stern, but then it relaxed and he broke into a smile. “Honey,” he said to empty space, “damn your black heart, you do your old man proud.”

FOR TWENTY KILOMETERS Charlie and his flock tried to follow the little biplane as it chugged and bounced through the sky of Jem. No use. The balloonists soared high, swooped low, found winds that carried them toward the heat pole, but never fast enough to keep up. Charlie sang a mournful farewell song into his radio as they turned away, and the sound penetrated even the noisy rattle of the little engine inside the plane. “Too much noise,” shouted Kappelyushnikov cheerfully into Danny Dalehouse’s ear. “Turn off, please?”

“Let me say good-bye first.” Dalehouse sang into the tiny radio, then switched it off. Far behind and half a kilometer overhead, the flock bobbed acknowledgment. Dalehouse craned his neck to see forward, but the camp of the Greasies was of course nowhere yet in sight. They were flying almost directly toward the Heat Pole — “southeast” by the convention of considering the poles of rotation as north and south, however irrelevant that was to compasses and sextants — and it was uphill almost all the way. How foolish of the Greasies to locate their camp in the least hospitable part of the planet! But who could figure why the Greasies did things?

Kappelyushnikov leaned over and slapped him on the shoulder. “You wish to puke?” he called encouragingly, pointing over the side of the cockpit. Dalehouse shook his head. “Is all right, you know,” Gappy went on. “Is little rough, yes. We are fighting winds, not making love to them like in balloon. But you have truly outstanding aircraft technician in charge!”

“I’m not complaining.” And in fact, he had no reason to complain. The biplane was a technological marvel on Klong — on Jem, as they were supposed to call it now, he reminded himself. At least they were flying! The Greasy camp was hard to reach any other way. There were no cars on Jem, because no roads. Only a tracked vehicle could go very far, and even the Greasies did not have them to spare. Because, in their pigheaded way, the Greasies had camped ten kilometers from the nearest usable water, boats were out. You could fly there for this semi-summit meeting that was supposed to make everyone on Jem friends again. Or you could walk. And Dalehouse spared a thought of compassion for the poor, proud, pedestrian Peeps, who were no doubt doing just that somewhere below.

So just to be flying was a triumph, although he wished Gappy had not brought up the subject of airsickness. It was not so much the motion that was bothering him as the food they had been eating. With twenty-two more mouths to feed, the old catch-as-catch-can meal style was down the drain. Unfortunately, the new people had brought their appetites, but they had forgotten to pack a chef to satisfy them. The food was unbearable. No one dared complain. The person who bitched would be the next cook.

Still, the community was growing. The third resupply ship had brought a great deal! This sputtering little two-winged airplane, folded and stacked and foolish-looking, but demon-strably workable, because it was working. The little plutonium-powered machines and instruments that had given Mor-rissey sensors to study the Creepies in their tunnels under the ground and Dalehouse himself radios to pass on to Charlie. A new Argus orbiter to photograph clouds and help them predict the weather. Or at least to guess at it a little more accurately.