E. von Wald - Runaway Home

“Yes, it is.”

“I don’t know how to thank you for your help. I’ll talk it over with my wife and let you know.”

“Fine.”

For some minutes after he left, Deitrich stared at the ceiling, trying to think of nothing, absolutely nothing. He had seen the Tsuroak sort of thing happen before, one way or another. It was the tragic reason for the careful regulation of the big fleets. But sometimes men were bribed. Sometimes they were stupid or just careless.

There is one fixture that time-jumping has installed in every civilized system, and that is the TJ club, or its equivalent. These organizations were the outgrowth of the fractional trickle of population that for one reason or another found itself dislocated not only from its native land, but also from its whole native culture. It was there that the quiet, awed and homesick travelers went out of a hunger for the familiar. And if they did not usually find much of the familiar at a TJ club, at least they had the hope of it.

Deitrich sat in a booth, moodily listening to the music. There was a woman perched on the bar, and in a low, haunting voice she sang strains of age-old melodies. It was soothing, despite the fact that he had never heard them before. But he noticed that many of the patrons that night must have recognized them, because there was a hush the minute she started. A waiter brought him a bottle of good oonalyn wine and two glasses, and Deitrich was content to wait.

She came into the room hesitantly, looking around at the scattering of immigrants, and the few older residents who had not yet given up the tired habit of the place. Deitrich watched her. Finally she saw him, and came on over to the booth.

He got slowly to his feet, smiling. “I was wondering if I had missed you.”

“You weren’t here last night,” she said accusingly.

“At the subcommissioner’s office, you practically said that you wouldn’t see me. Afraid it would upset you, I suppose.”

She nodded and sat down opposite him. “I guess you know what I meant.”

“Sure. You’ve settled down. But you still haven’t quite accepted it.”

She sighed. Deitrich poured her some wine. “Have you ever been back?” she asked him.

“Several times.”

“How was it?”

“About as I expected. At least, it was about as I expected after I got to know what to expect. The first time it wasn’t so different, because I had been gone only about thirty years. But the last time I had to take a language course before I could understand what they were talking about.”

“I never went back,” she said. “Just kept on going. Sometimes I was ahead of the local age, sometimes behind. Generally a little behind.”

“That’s why you started moving farther out, trying to catch up.”

“Yes. I’d have gone out to the colonies, but I ran out of money.”

He leaned back and nodded. “That’s what they all do. Somehow, no matter which way you go, you always seem to lag a little behind the popular culture of your destination. But it wouldn’t solve it if you went out to the colonies,” he said. “The colonies wouldn’t be quite so far ahead of you in the things you know, but they’d be just as different as the rest. They all develop a little differently.”

“I imagine so.”

“I don’t just imagine it.” He paused and sipped his wine. “You know what?” he said and she looked at him attentively. “I don’t even know your name.”

She burst out laughing. “Sara McGee,” she told him.

He repealed it slowly, tasting the familiar sound of the words. “That’s a very nice name, Sara.”

“Most people can’t understand it any more. I’ve been thinking of changing it.”

“Don’t,” he begged. “It’s too nice.” She laughed again, but it faded as her gaze darted out across the room. “I used to come here all the time,” she murmured. “Until it got sort of depressing.” The singer at the bar held a long sad note. “They’re all so… so lonesome,” she breathed.

He slowly drank his wine and made an approving face. Then he said gently, “Certainly they’re all lonesome, Sara. Or homesick would be the word if they have some of their family or friends with them. But as you say, it’s lonesome if they came by themselves.”

“Don’t you get lonesome?” she asked.

“Yes. But you can get used to being lonesome, too. Your attitude changes to accommodate the situation if the situation becomes chronic.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier if you made the shorter runs they have back in the Home? Between local systems, I mean?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps. When I first started this business though, the ships went a lot slower than they go now. The average short-run was anywhere from thirty to forty years. Other runs were as much as sixty or seventy between the local systems.

“After sixty years,” he said, “all your family and friends are very old, dying if not dead. And coming back just at that time makes you feel bad. But it’s not half so bad as coming back after thirty years or so, and finding that they haven’t aged quite enough to be resigned to it. Then you become a positive and glaring indication that they are older than they let themselves think.”

“That never happened to me.”

Deitrich gazed at her, feeling the wine warm his stomach and ease the bitter discipline. Nostalgia began to creep over him. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?”

She asked, “You want to know how I got into it?”

“That’s up to you. But I know you didn’t just come out to see the sights, like you said you did.”

“No. Not really.”

Deitrich waited. He refilled his own glass, and then, as she finished, hers. She took a deep breath and spread her hands on the table. She studied them intently.

“I was just a kid, you know. Twenty-four. But that was before they raised the legal age in the Home Galaxy to thirty. So they couldn’t stop me from going.”

She looked up and forced a laugh. “They should have done it sooner.” Deitrich just smiled back at her and shrugged. “There was a man… boy, I should say, because he was no older than I.” Back to the study of her fingernails again. “I married him. It was a mistake.”

“So you ran away.”

“Uh huh.” She nodded and looked up again, half defiantly.

“Was he a jerk?”

“No. He was all right. I was the jerk.”

Deitrich sipped his wine. “Don’t feel so bad about it, Sara,” he said. “Don’t feel so bad about running away. The universe is full of people who are running away all the time.”

“Oh, I know,” she replied. “I’ve got over it. I’m a full forty-six now—subjectively. But you were curious. So I told you.”

The woman on the bar had stopped singing and gone away. From somewhere a weird orchestra was playing tunes from the outer colonies.

“Now you tell me what you ran away from,” she said.

“Me?” Deitrich mused. “Nothing. I was just a crazy kid. It was the new thing, very marvelous. The pay was much better than you could get anywhere else with my experience, so I signed up.” He smiled wistfully. “You should have seen me strut the first time I got back. All my old buddies were middle-aged by then, and I was still the cocky kid. It must have taken me a week to realize that they wouldn’t have a thing to do with me.”

She gazed at him over the rim of her wineglass. He watched the faint creasing of tired lines around her eyes as she smiled. He grinned happily back at her.

There was more wine, and they sat there, talking the language of their own time, stumbling occasionally on the half-forgotten constructions, and laughing delightedly at the jokes that were laughed at then. Although their spheres of activity had been so diverse that neither actually could recall anyone that was personally known to both, it was enough that they both knew the same world. They reviewed the minor catastrophes that had been so important. A half-remembered fragment of a popular song, and the theater, and one excursion season when they both had been in Lunar City, Luna—apparently at the same time. The fact that there had been seven million other humans in Lunar City along with them did not seem to lessen the intimacy of the coincidence in the slightest.