And yet there she was, sitting there miserably, looking as if he could shatter her like a coffee cup, shatter her with a single flick of his finger. If he didn’t at least pretend to believe her, what then? What then? How could he shatter her like that? She would hate him for it— for forcing her to remember the past, to care about it. And so. . . one had to go on, to act.
He lifted his hand, so frightened that the movement felt like teleoperation. He was a dwarf in a waldo, a waldo that was stiff, touchy, unfamiliar: lift, quick modulate! To the left, hold; return, hold; steady. Down gently. Gently gently onto the back of her hand. Clasp, very gently. Her hand was really very cold; and so was his.
She looked wanly at him.
“Let’s—” He had to clear his throat. “Let’s go back to our rooms.”
• • •
For weeks after that he remained physically clumsy, as if he had withdrawn into some other space, and had to operate his body from a distance. Teleoperation. It made him aware of how many muscles he had. Sometimes he knew them so well he could snake through the air, but most of the time he jerked across the landscape like Frankenstein’s monster.
Burroughs was flooded with bad news; life in the city seemed fairly normal, but the video screens piped in scenes of a world Frank could scarcely believe. Riots in Hellas; the domed crater New Houston declaring itself an independent republic; and that same week, Slusinski sent tape of an American orientation in which all five dorms had voted to leave for Hellas without the proper travel permits. Chalmers contacted the new UNOMA factor, and got a detachment of U.N. security police to go there; and ten men arrested 500, by the simple expedient of overriding the tent’s physical plant computer and ordering the helpless occupants to board a series of train cars before the tent’s air was released. They had then been trained off to Korolyov, which was now in effect a prison city. Its transformation into a prison had become general knowledge sometime recently, it was hard to recall exactly when, as it had an air of already-always about it, perhaps because the parts of a prison system had existed for several years, scattered planetwide.
Chalmers interviewed some of the prisoners over their room videos, two or three at a time. “You see how easy it was to detain you,” he told them. “That’s the way it will be all over. The life-support systems are so fragile that they’re impossible to defend. Even on Earth advanced military technology makes a police state much more possible to implement than ever before, but here it’s absurdly easy.”
“Well, you got us when it was easiest,” replied a man in his sixties. “Which was smart. Once we get free I’d like to see you catch us. At that point your life-support system is as vulnerable to us as ours is to you, and yours is more visible.”
“You should know better than that! All life support here is hooked back ultimately to Earth. But they have a number of vast military powers at their disposal, and we don’t. You and all your friends are trying to live out a fantasy rebellion, some kind of sci-fi 1776, frontiersmen throwing off the yoke of tyranny, but it isn’t like that here! The analogies are all wrong, and deceptively wrong because they mask the reality, the true nature of our dependence and their might. They keep you from seeing that it’s a fantasy!”
“I’m sure there was many a good Tory neighbor arguing the same case in the colonies,” the man said with a grin. “Actually the analogy is in many ways a good one. We’re not just cogs in the machine here, we’re individual people, most of us ordinary, but there’s some real characters too— we’re going to see our Washingtons and Jeffersons and Paines, I guarantee you. Also the Andrew Jacksons and Forrest Mosebys, the brutal men who are good at getting what they want.”
“This is ridiculous!” Frank cried. “It’s a false analogy!”
“Well, it’s more metaphor than analogy anyway. There are differences, but we intend to respond to those creatively. We won’t be hefting muskets over rock walls to take potshots at you.”
“Hefting mining lasers over crater walls? You think that’s different?”
The man flicked at him, as if the camera in his room were a mosquito. “I suppose the real question is, will we have a Lincoln?”
“Lincoln is dead,” Frank snapped. “And historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.” He cut the connection.
Reason was useless. Also anger, also sarcasm, not to mention irony. He could only try to match them in fantasyland. So he stood up in meetings and did his very best, haranguing them about what Mars was, how it had come to be, what a fine future it could have as a collective society, specifically and organically Martian in its nature, “with the dross of all those Terran hatreds burnt away, all those dead habits that keep us from really living, from the creation that is the world’s only real beauty, damn it!”