Jennie’s eyes grow wide; they both look at me. McHabe does, too, and I see that his look is a cool scrutiny, an appraisal of my reaction. He expects me to ask for details, or maybe even—it’s been a long time since I thought in these terms, and it’s an effort—to become angry at him for lying. But I don’t know whether or not he’s lying, and at any rate, what does it matter? A few people from Outside coming into the colony—how could it affect us? There won’t be large immigration, and no emigration at all.
I say quietly, “Why are you really here, Dr. McHabe?”
“I told you, Mrs. Pratt. To measure the progress of the disease.” I say nothing. He adds, “Maybe you’d like to hear more about how it is now Outside.”
“Not especially.”
“Why not?”
I shrug. “They leave us alone.”
He weighs me with his eyes. Jennie says timidly, “I’d like to hear more about Outside.” Before Rachel can add “Me, too,” the door flings violently open and Mamie backs into the room, screaming into the hall behind her.
“And don’t ever come back! If you think I’d ever let you touch me again after screwing that… that… I hope she’s got a diseased twat and you get it on your—” She sees McHabe and breaks off, her whole body jerking in rage. A soft answer from the hall, the words unintelligible from my chair by the fire, makes her gasp and turn even redder. She slams the door, bursts into tears, and runs into her bedroom, slamming that door as well.
Rachel stands up. “Let me, honey,” I say, but before I can rise—my arthritis is much better—Rachel disappears into her mother’s room. The kitchen rings with embarrassed silence.
Tom McHabe rises to leave. “Sit down, Doctor,” I say, hoping, I think, that if he remains Mamie will restrain her hysterics—maybe—and Rachel will emerge sooner from her mother’s room.
McHabe looks undecided. Then Jennie says, “Yes, please stay. And would you tell us—” I see her awkwardness, her desire to not sound stupid “—about how people do Outside?”
He does. Looking at Jennie but meaning me, he talks about the latest version of martial law, about the failure of the National Guard to control protestors against the South American war until they actually reached the edge of the White House electro-wired zone; about the growing power of the Fundamentalist underground that the other undergrounds—he uses the plural—call “the God gang.” He tells us about the industries losing out steadily to Korean and Chinese competitors, the leaping unemployment rate, the ethnic backlash, the cities in flames. Miami. New York. Los Angeles—these had been rioting for years. Now it’s Portland, St. Louis, Atlanta, Phoenix. Grand Rapids burning. It’s hard to picture.
I say, “As far as I can tell, donations to our repositories haven’t fallen off.”
He looks at me again with that shrewd scrutiny, weighing something I can’t see, then touches the edge of the stove with one boot. The boot, I notice, is almost as old and scarred as one of ours. “Korean-made stove. They make nearly all the donations now. Public relations. Even a lot of martial-law Congressmen had relatives interred, although they won’t admit it now. The Asians cut deals warding off complete protectionism, although of course your donations are only a small part of that. But just about everything you get Inside is Chink or Splat.” He uses the words casually, this courteous young man giving me the news from such a liberal slant, and that tells me more about the Outside than all his bulletins and summaries.
Jennie says haltingly, “I saw… I think it was an Asian man. Yesterday.”
“Where?” I say sharply. Very few Asian Americans contract the disease; something else no one understands. There are none in our colony.
“At the Rim. One of the guards. Two other men were kicking him and yelling names at him—we couldn’t hear too clearly over the intercom boxes.”
“We? You and Rachel? What were you two doing at the Rim?” I say, and heard my own tone. The Rim, a wide empty strip of land, is electro-mined and barb-wired to keep us communicables Inside. The Rim is surrounded by miles of defoliated and disinfected land, poisoned by preventive chemicals, but even so it’s patrolled by unwilling soldiers who communicate with the Inside by intercoms set up every half-mile on both sides of the barbed wire. When the colony used to have a fight or a rape or—once, in the early years—a murder, it happened on the Rim. When the hateful and the hating came to hurt us because before the elecro-wiring and barbed wire we were easy targets and no police would follow them Inside, the soldiers, and sometimes our men as well, stopped them at the Rim. Our dead are buried near the Rim. And Rachel and Jennie, dear gods, at the Rim…
“We went to ask the guards over the intercom boxes if they knew how to stop termites,” Jennie says logically. “After all, their work is to stop things, germs and things. We thought they might be able to tell us how to stop termites. We thought they might have special training in it.”
The bedroom door opens and Rachel comes out, her young face drawn. McHabe smiles at her, and then his gaze returns to Jennie.”I don’t think soldiers are trained in stopping termites, but I’ll definitely brim?
On his second visit to me six days later, just before the Block dance, Tom McHabe seems different. I’d forgotten that there are people who radiate such energy and purpose that they seem to set the very air tingling. He stands with his legs braced slightly apart, flanked by Rachel and Jennie, both dressed in their other skirts for the dance. Jennie has woven a red ribbon through her blonde curls; it glows like a flower. McHabe touches her lightly on the shoulder, and I realize from her answering look what must be happening between them. My throat tightens.
“I want to be honest with you, Mrs. Pratt. I’ve talked to Jack Stevenson and Mary Kramer, as well as some others in Blocks C and E, and I’ve gotten a feel for how you live here. A little bit, anyway. I’m going to tell Mr. Stevenson and Mrs. Kramer what I tell you, but I wanted you to be first.”
“Why?” I say, more harshly than I intend. Or think I intend.
He isn’t fazed. “Because you’re one of the oldest survivors of the disease. Because you had a strong education Outside. Because your daughter’s husband died of axoperidine.”
At the same moment that I realize what McHabe is going to say next, I realize too that Rachel and Jennie have already heard it. They listen to him with the slightly open-mouthed intensity of children hearing a marvellous but familiar tale. But do they understand? Rachel wasn’t present when her father finally died, gasping for air his lungs couldn’t use.
McHabe, watching me, says, “There’s been a lot of research on the disease since those deaths, Mrs. Pratt.”
“No. There hasn’t. Too risky, your government said.”
I see that he caught the pronoun. “Actual administration of any cures is illegal, yes. To minimize contact with communicables.”
“So how has this ‘research’ been carried on?”
“By doctors willing to go Inside and not come out again. Data is transmitted out by laser. In code.”
“What clean doctor would be willing to go Inside and not come out again?”
McHabe smiles; again I’m struck by that quality of spontaneous energy. “Oh, you’d be surprised. We had three doctors inside the Pennsylvania colony. One past retirement age. Another, an old-style Catholic, who dedicated his research to God. A third nobody could figure out, a dour persistent guy who was a brilliant researcher.”
Was. “And you.”
“No,” McHabe says quietly. “I go in and out.”
“What happened to the others?”
“They’re dead.” He makes a brief aborted movement with his right hand and I realize that he is, or was, a smoker. How long since I had reached like that for a non-existent cigarette? Nearly two decades. Cigarettes are not among the things people donate; they’re too valuable. Yet I recognize the movement still. “Two of the three doctors caught the disease. They worked on themselves as well as volunteers. Then one day the government intercepted the relayed data and went in and destroyed everything.”
“Why?” Jennie asks.
“Research on the disease is illegal. Everyone Outside is afraid of a leak: a virus somehow getting out on a mosquito, a bird, even as a spore.”
“Nothing has gotten out in all these years,” Rachel says.
“No. But the government is afraid that if researchers start splicing and intercutting genes, it could make
