Farmer Philip - Riders of the Purple Wage

Charlie screamed. According to what he was told, he was still screaming when the cops came. He did not remember.

If he was screaming until his throat was raw for days afterward, it was because he was giving vent to all the futility and despair and suffering and the sense of being imprisoned, straitjacketed, chained, which he felt for himself and which the cesspool dwellers he worked for felt far more keenly than he. And it was for Laura, whose drive and brains might have freed her, given her some freedom, anyway. No one raised here ever really got free of it.

He did not remember stabbing Ketcher many times. Vaguely, he did recall a blurred vision of Ketcher on his back, his arms and legs up in the air and kicking like a dying water beetle. Charlie was told that blood had covered him, Ketcher, and Laura like liquid shrouds. His informant, a black cop, had not been trying to impress him. Born here, she had seen worse when she was in diapers.

When discharged from the mental ward of the hospital five months later, Charlie had no job and did not look for one. In what seemed a short time, he was on welfare.

The irony was doubled when Rex Bessey came to ask him if he wished to sign up for sterilization.

“I’m really embarrassed,” Rex said. “But it’s my job.”

Charlie smiled. “Don’t I know. But I’m not going to sign. My wife—you know Blanche—called me yesterday. She just had a baby girl. We’re going to get together again. It may not work out, but we’re trying for the sake of the baby, for ours, too. I got hope now, Rex. I’m on welfare, but I won’t be forever. My situation’s different. I wasn’t raised on public aid, handicapped by my environment from birth, and I don’t have two strikes against me because I’m black. I can make it. I will make it.”

Rex got a beer and sat down. He said. “You’ve been so sunk in hopeless apathy, your friends just gave up. You know I was the last to quit coming around. You just wouldn’t stop your dismal talk about Laura. I did my best, but I couldn’t cheer you up. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t take you anymore.”

Charlie waved his hand. “I don’t blame you. But I’m better. I know I’ll make it. My wife’s phone call, well, soon as I hung up, something seemed to turn over. How can I describe it? I’ll try. Listen, insects thrive as a species mainly because they breed so wondrously. Kill all but two, and in less than a year, there are 10 billion. It’s nature’s way; God’s, if you prefer. People aren’t insects, but nature doesn’t seem to care about the individual human or insect being killed, or even millions being wiped out. Laura Dott was one of the unlucky ones, and that’s the way it is.

“But I’m human. I do what insects can’t do. I care; I hurt; I mourn; I grieve. But I wasn’t doing what most humans do. Healing, getting over the hurt as time did its work, accepting this world for what it is. Nor was I trying to do my little bit to make the world just a little better. I gave up even that after Laura died.”

Charlie fell silent until Rex said. “And?”

“Blanche and I were discussing what to name the baby. Blanche’s mother was named Laura, and she wanted to name the baby Laura. I was so struck with the coincidence, I couldn’t talk for a minute.”

Rex leaned forward in the chair, his huge hand squeezing the sides of the beer can together.

“You mean?”

“One Laura down, one Laura to go.”

“They just killed one of our babies!”

The tiny TV transmitter-receiver orbiting the mothership, Herschel, showed the bright side of the craft and, below, the blue-green oblate shape of Uranus. Though Herschel was in epsilon, the broadest of the planet’s eleven rings, the TV viewers on Earth did not see epsilon. The coal-black particles composing the ring were too far apart and too small to appear solid at this close range. Nor did the rings cast a shadow on the planet. At this moment and for twenty years to come. Uranus was tipped so that its south pole was to the Sun. When the TV satellite circled to Herschel ’s other side, its camera would show the bright crescent that the Sun made on the planet’s southern hemisphere.

“There’s the Sun.”

Rees, the anchorman for KPIT-TV, was talking from the Houston studio to his three billion viewers. “That tiny disk of intense light. Not much compared to our bonfire terrestrial Sun, but it’s millions of times brighter than the great star Sirius. From Uranus, our Sun is a bright thought in the midst of many pale ones.”

Throughout the special program, the statistics had been spooned to the mass audience because of its limited attention span, an estimated three and a half minutes. The viewers had learned, or a least heard, that Uranus was the seventh planet out from the Sun. It was a far-off celestial body, being nineteen point eighteen times the mean distance of Earth from the Sun. Way out.

The “jolly green giant,” as the Herschel crew called it, was only one-fifth denser than water and was more massive than fourteen Earths. Its hot core of silicon and iron, however, was not quite as large as Earth’s. The outermost layers of its enormous atmosphere were thin, cold hydrogen layers. A spacecraft descending through this (none had) would get warmer as it passed through methane, hydrogen, and helium clouds into a thick fog of ammonia crystals. The warmth was only relative; you certainly couldn’t use it to toast your marshmallows.

Below the crystals blowing at hurricane speed would be water vapor clouds. Then the fog would become slush and, later and deeper, hot liquid hydrogen. At a depth of approximately eight thousand kilometers, the temperature would shoot up to more than two thousand degrees Centigrade. Then the spacecraft would penetrate, if it could, a slushy or frozen layer of water and ammonia. The rock-metal core would be at seven thousand degrees Centigrade, hotter than the surface of the Sun.

At this statement, one of the three billion viewers had muttered, though in no terrestrial language, “A thousand kilometers above the core is hot enough for the third stage of growth.”

Uranus, Rees said, had seven small moons. Puck and Bottom had recently been added to the long-known Ariel, Titania. Oberon, Umbriel, and Miranda.

Like Saturn, Uranus had rings around its equator, but these were not Saturn-bright. They were dark and much narrower, steeped in iron oxides and complex carbon compounds, which absorbed sunlight. These rotated in a thin gas of negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions.

Most of this data had slipped by or been forgotten by most of the viewers. They were absorbed in watching the Herschel matching its velocity and proximity with one of the larger objects forming the ring. This was black and about two meters long and three meters at the widest part. Its “body” was flattened out; its “wings” were almost as thick as the body. It looked more like a devilfish or batfìsh than anything, though it took some imagination to see the parallel. What made it so riveting to the viewers was that it was not the first such object observed. One hundred and thirty-nine had been photographed in this small sector approximately one hundred kilometers wide and ten thousand kilometers long.

“No theory has been advanced, so far,” Rees said, “as to why these space objects seem to resemble artifacts. Nor has any scientist theorized why they’re so evenly distributed.”

“How about the need for living room, space to grow and feed in?” Agrafan said. Agrafan was one of the two viewers in three billion who could have enlightened Rees. Not that he was going to do so.

The Herschel , having matched its velocity exactly to that of the object, moved sideways toward it. The screen displayed to the Earthbound audience a closeup so that they could see the four “antennae,” two slim spirals of seeming rocklike material projecting from the junction of “wings” and “body” and two pointing from the “belly.” The remotely controlled TV machine revolving around the ship showed the cargo bay port swinging out from the hull. Then it showed the brightly illuminated bay and a long mechanical arm unfolding from its base on the hull. Its spidery metal “fingers” were opening.