Third World (12 page)

It was another thing to ride off after
saying goodbye to her mother, seeing the tired pleasure on Andrea’s
face, and then thinking, thinking, all the way home.

Surely Polly would tell
someone, and that was bad enough. Surely she would mention it to
her mother, and he wasn’t quite sure if he could ever face
her
again.

Andrea might think Hank was more
suitable for her age, not her daughter’s. The trouble was that Hank
wanted to have some kids.

The initial fear had all been about
Polly’s rejection. He’d been pretty much expecting it, but she had
surprised him. The secondary fears were plentiful, not least of
what people might think.

Now Hank had a week to think about
things. He gave himself a haircut as best he could, using scissors
and the only mirror in the house, removed from the wall of the
front room and put up outside where the light was
better.

He shaved every day, and spent an
inordinate of time checking himself in the mirror. The terrors
mounted.

What in the hell would people
think?

He’d heard some talk before, about this
and that old gomer who couldn’t grow old gracefully and leave well
enough alone. Some of them had married up with some very nice
wives. People would talk, that was for sure. But the rewards were
surely worth it. Polly was as pretty as a peach, not that anybody
around here had seen too many of those lately.

He supposed he’d better sneak into town
and get himself a new shirt. Tomorrow would be best, for he wanted
to avoid small talk if he could—that meant pretty much anybody he
might meet.

Hank couldn’t help his feelings, and
May-October marriages had worked before. The trouble lay in how to
get into one.

It wasn’t the money, it was only a
couple of dollars admission, and ten cents a beer after
that.

The real problem would be when they
entered the door and all those people would turn to look and see
who it was. There would be Hank and Polly.

His guts fluttered inside awful fierce
whenever he thought about it, which was often even though he was on
his second big net by this time. The work was slow, but there
wasn’t much else to do so he kept at it.

Poor old Hank was full of surprises
these days. Wait until old Red heard about this!

He’d be fit to be tied.

Chapter Ten

Hank Needed a
Shirt

As it happened, Hank needed more than
just a shirt, and he also had the impression Abe Peltham knew a
little more than he was letting on. In all honesty, it probably had
been nine or ten years since Hank had bought a shirt, and Peltham
wasn’t exactly stupid. None of Hank’s relations had died or
anything like that or surely Abe would have heard.

He wasn’t particularly honest either,
judging by the prices.

“
Ten dollars for the shirt,
and fifty cents for the hair gel.”

He probably made that stuff up in the
back room. Hank unscrewed the lid as Abe looked on. He had a sniff.
It didn’t smell like lard or anything, it was all right, or so he
guessed. He had no idea of what he was doing.

Hank wanted one or two things for his
kitchen, and the bill went a little higher. Hank resolved to get
the hell out of there.

Finally he scraped up the nerve to ask
for aftershave, which Abe cheerfully pointed out on the public
shelves in the store proper. It must have been sitting there for
years and Hank had never noticed it. He knew where the beans were
and everything.

Peltham must have been hard up for
making change the way his eyes lit up when Hank pulled out a small
roll and a few coins. He didn’t ask too many questions and for that
Hank was grateful.

Courting was good for business, that
would explain it.

Red wasn’t around it seemed, so Hank
rode home and settled in with a bottle of Old Chester, the whiskey
they brewed up in Capital City. He had a few more days to wait and
a lot on his mind, not the least of which was that he wasn’t
getting any younger.

Polly preyed on his mind, that was for
sure. He was afraid to want her too badly in case she wouldn’t want
him. While his mind recoiled from the thought, he had to take it
into account at some level. She had every reason to say no to a
proposal of marriage, and probably would.

To say that Hank was sick with fear
would be accurate. He had this fantastic dream of him and Polly and
three boys and a couple of girls…unbelievable. Hank just couldn’t
help it.

For some reason, thoughts of his
mother, and his father, and he had two sisters and a brother out
there somewhere, occupied his mind a substantial portion of the
time. There was a bittersweet sadness when he remembered what it
was to be a kid, and growing up, and to be part of a family and
all. His mom and dad were dead, but he sometimes wondered if any of
the others had done anything interesting. Adults at the time of
departure, his siblings had stayed on Earth. The tearful scene in
the departure lounge, with everyone crying and clinging to one
another was still strong in his memory. For his parents, successful
enough people in their own way, it was the culmination of the dream
of a lifetime. Departure was the worst day of his life…so
far.

The thoughts brought nothing but
sadness.

He’d never see his brother and sisters
again of course, although that hadn’t been his highest priority at
the time. Billy Perkins was his best friend back then. He wondered
if Billy even remembered him or thought about him from time to
time.

Hank was petrified at leaving
Earth.

***

They called the area
The Land of a Million Lakes,
and while there probably wasn’t quite that many, to take the
wrong road and end up facing a small and nameless lake became a
part of the routine to Newton’s increasing frustration. Everything
seemed to take forever on this planet.

Whether using the terrain map or
satellite pictures, the lack of man-made features meant it all
blended into green mush, only the texture giving a hint as to
actual vegetation, with the occasional rock outcrop in grey and the
more ephemeral watercourses shown in dotted blue lines.

But the people were something else.
Their friendliness, their exuberance astounded him after the
austere discipline, the personal and professional reserve he’d
lived with for years.

He’d never seen anything like it. You
asked someone their name and they started off the tale with their
great-grandpa and how he came to be here. They worked their way
through aunts and uncles, cousins and nieces and nephews, and
finally they came to their own story.

There were three more villages, all
uninteresting in their sameness, all empty of anyone the facial
recognition software in the helmet viewers could discern, and by
the time they got out of each village, Newton was convinced they
had met pretty much everybody. Half of the buildings were shacks,
there were some small, cozy cabins, definitely in the minority, and
they had run across any number of abandoned buildings, rotting away
in the moist vegetation, some of them just heaps on the
ground.

Everyone had questions. Everyone wanted
to meet them or just to talk with them, to offer the troops drinks
and food. They were showered with invitations to stay over, and it
was all he and the others could do to fend them off
politely.

There was just no way he could have let
one or two troops go off with this or that family, nice as pie as
they might be. They had a schedule to keep, and more villages and
stops along the way. One complication would lead to another, and
another. They were desperate for company, and news, and a
conversation that they hadn’t already had a hundred times
before.

They wanted to hear about
the Family, and the Empress and all the things that were going on
in the
real universe.

He’d never heard that particular term
before.

Once Newton mentioned a short stint of
duty on Barker’s World, and some guy asked if he’d ever meet Dale
Freeman.

As long as they were sticking to the
main northwest highway, more of a track strictly speaking, they
were making reasonable time and might still achieve their goal,
which was a small town called Black Springs about three hundred
kilometres from Capital City. At least it had a more imaginative
name.

They had just pulled out of Shiloh,
which at least had a white-painted board church going for it and a
population of six hundred. Time hung heavy on everyone’s hands, but
there was nothing he could do about that.

“
All right.” Newton let off
the microphone button for a moment as he collected his thoughts and
waited for the inevitable chatter to calm. “The next stop, eighty
k’s up the road is a place called Oak River. Apparently they have a
hotel. And a bar.”

“
Yay.” The cheers and calls
in his headset sounded pretty unanimous.

“
In the meantime, we have
had, I am pleased to announce, a continuous period of twenty-six
hours without any noticeable precipitation.”

Jackson looked over from the driver’s
seat.

“
I was wondering. Something
seemed unnatural.”

Newton snorted and keyed the microphone
again.

“
In the meantime, stay awake
if you can. It’s better to sleep in a bed and we should get there
before nightfall. Any questions?”

They had questions. There were four or
five all speaking at once.

“
Sorry people, you know
about as much as I do.”

He shut his headset off for five
minutes. That should cure the problem. Let them yap amongst
themselves.

If they thought he was listening or
even cared they were wrong.

They were out in the taiga now. The
horizon seemed a hundred kilometres away when they crested a hill,
and yet it was probably only five or six. It was hard to pinpoint
exactly which contour line on the map display might correspond to
exactly which distant ridgeline or notch in the green-clad ridges
in front of them. The clarity of the air was startling, and in this
light, with the sun low on the horizon, the hills and valleys stood
out in stark detail.

The only time they knew
where they were, and all this in spite of the satellite mapping and
location system, was when they came to a
place.

It might seem odd, but a planet with no
places was hard to navigate across. Thirty-seven k’s up the road
was a crossroads.

Until then, they were smack dab in the
middle of nowhere, and they hadn’t passed a human being, an animal,
or any sign of habitation in the last half hour.

What was really strange was the lack of
garbage—this had to be the cleanest planet Newton Shapiro had ever
seen.

It also bespoke a poverty, of a kind
Newton had never seen before. He was supposed to report his
findings. Most of the people he’d met had never seen a doctor in
their entire lives.

That was one thing.

They were a remarkably cheerful people,
which was another.

Newton had been struck by the absolute
lack of law and authority out here. What was really strange was
that they didn’t seem to miss it.

It was like where there was no
temptation, there was no crime, no matter the poverty of the place.
Basically there was nothing to steal and nothing to buy with the
proceeds since everyone seemed to know everyone else’s business.
Unfortunately that sort of solution couldn’t be applied to more
populous worlds, or anywhere but in the strictest
isolation.

***

Monday and Tuesday were the worst for
Hank. Wednesday broke with low, dark clouds, high winds and a
falling barometer. To stay indoors was unthinkable without anything
to do so Hank lit a couple of extra lamps, as oil was in good
supply. He hardly used it with the longer summer days.

Beginning in the back bedroom,
privately admitting that it was a bit small and dark to share with
a wife, (and the more beautiful she was, the more unsuitable it
was,) Hank swept and brushed and wiped every surface, removing the
blanket and sheets for laundering, getting them started by soaking
in water, while he polished any wooden surfaces that were
varnished. That meant mostly the top of his narrow dresser and the
turned posts of his bed, which was fairly narrow but long enough
and of good, store-bought quality. If this worked out, they might
be needing a new one.

One of the best investments he had ever
made, a lot of folks made their own mattresses—bracken was a crop
with many uses, and Hank had slept on a hand-stuffed bracken tick
for years before his business got around to turning a buck. He had
been hankering for something to spend it on when he saw Peltham had
one in the store, all wrapped in plastic and covered with sticky
labels. The half-price label was the one that caught Hank’s
attention. The fact that the plastic was yellowed and torn on a
corner made no difference to him.