He was comfortably replete when Mrs. Washington produced a final surprise-a small wooden box containing a wax honeycomb. As long as he could remember,
Duncan had been familiar with that term for lightweight structures; it required a mental volte face to realize that this was the genuine, original item constructed by Terran insects.
“We’ve just started keeping bees,” explained the Professor. “Fascinating creatures, but we’re still not sure if they’re worth the trouble. I think you’ll like this honey-try it on this crust of new bread.”
His hosts watched him anxiously as he spread the golden fluid, which he thought looked exactly like lubricating off. He hoped that it would taste better, but he was now prepared for almost anything.
There was a long silence. Then he took another bite-and another.
“Well?” asked George at last.
“It’s-delicious-one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.”
“I’m so pleased,” said Mrs. Washington. “George, be sure to send some to the hotel for Mr. Makenzie.”
Mr. Makenzie continued to sample the bread and honey, very slowly. There was a remote and abstracted expression on his face, which his delighted hosts attributed to sheer gastronomical-pleasure. They could not possibly have guessed at the real reason. Duncan had never
been particularly interested in 124 food, and had made no effort to try the occasional novelties that were imported into Titan. The few times that any had been pressed upon him, he had not enjoyed them; he still grimaced at the memory of a reputed delicacy called caviar. He was therefore absolutely certain that never before in his life had he tasted honey.
Yet he recognized it at once; and that was only half the mystery. Like a name that is on the tip of the tongue, yet eludes all attempts to grasp it, the memory of that earlier encounter lay just below the level of consciousness. It had happened a long time ago-but when, and where? For a fleeting moment he almost took seriously the idea of reincarnation. You,
Duncan Makenzie, were a beekeeper in some earlier life on Earth…. Perhaps he was mistaken in thinking that he knew the taste. The association could have been triggered by some random leakage between mental circuits.
And anyway, it could not possibly be of the slightest importance…. He knew better. Somehow, it was very important indeed.
HISTORY LESSON
Of all the old cities, it was generally agreed that Paris and Washington offered the best combination of beauty, culture, history-and convenience Unlike such largely random aggregations as London and Rome, which had defied millennia of planning, they had been adapted fairly easily to automatic transportation. Could he have risen from his tomb in Arlington, the luckless Pierre Charles
L’Enfant would have been proud indeed to have discovered how well he had laid the ground for a technology centuries in his future.
Though an official car was available whenever he wished, Duncan preferred to be as independent as possible. Coming from an aggressively egalitarian society, he never felt quite happy when he was afforded special privileges-except, of course, those he had earned himself. Now that his sprained ankle was no longer paining him he had no excuse for using personal transport, and one could never know a city until one had explored it on foot.
Like any ordinary tourist-and Washington expected the incredible total of five million before the end of July-Duncan rode the glide ways and auto jitneys gaping at the famous buildings and remembering the great men who had lived and worked here for half a thousand years. In the five-kilometer-long rectangle from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, and from the Washington Monument to the White House, no changes had been permitted for more than a century. To ride the shuttle down Constitution
Avenue and back along Independence, on the south side of the Mall, was to take a journey through time.
And time was the problem, for Duncan could spare only an hour or two a day for sightseeing. His planned schedule had already been wrecked by a factor that he had refused to take seriously, despite numerous warnings. Instead of his usual six, he needed no fewer than ten hours of sleep every day.
This was yet another side effect of the increased gravity, and there was nothing he could do about it; his body stubbornly insisted on the additional time, to overcome the extra wear and tear. Eventually, he knew, he would make a partial adaptation, but he could hardly hope to manage with less than eight hours. It was maddening to have come all this way, to one of the most fascinating places on Earth, and to be compelled to waste more than forty percent of his life in unconsciousness.
As with most off-worlders, his first target had been the National Museum of
Astronautics on the Mall, because. it was here that his own history
had begun, 126 that day in July 1969. He had walked past the flimsy and improbable hardware of the early Space Age, and had taken his seat with several hundred other visitors in the Apollo Rotunda just before the beginning of the half-hourly show.
There was nothing that he had not seen many times before, yet the old drama still gripped him. Here were the faces of the first men to ride these crazy contraptions into space, and the sound of their actual voices-sometimes emotionless, sometimes full of excitement-as they spoke to their colleagues on the receding Earth. Now the air shook with the crackling roar of a
Saturn launch, magically recreated exactly as it had taken place on that bright Florida morning, three hundred and seven years ago-and still, in many ways, the most impressive spectacle ever staged by man.
The Moon drew closer-not the busy world that Duncan knew, but the virgin
Moon of the twentieth century. Hard to imagine what it must have meant to people of that time, to whom the Earth was not only the center of the
Universe, but-even to the most sophisticated-still the whole of creation…. Now Man’s first contact with another world was barely minutes ahead. It seemed to Duncan that he was floating in space, only meters away from the spidery Lunar Module, bristling with antennas and wrapped in multicolored metal foil. The simulation was so perfect that he had an involuntary urge to hold his breath, and found himself clutching the handrail, seeking reassurance that he was still on Earth.
“Two minutes, twenty seconds, everything looking good. We show altitude about 47,000 feet…” said Houston to the waiting world of 1969, and to the centuries to come. And then, cutting across the voice of Mission
Control, making a montage of conflicting accents, was a speaker whom for a moment Duncan could not identify, though he knew the voice…. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning
him safely to the Earth.” Even back in 1969, that was already a voice from the grave; the President who had launched Apollo in that speech to Congress had never lived to see the achievement of his dream.
“We’re now in the approach phase, everything looking good. Altitude 5,200 feet.”
And once again that voice, silenced six years earlier in Dallas:
“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people….”
“Roger. Go for landing, 3,000 feet. We’re go. Hang tight. We’re go. 2,000 feet. 2,000 feet…”
“And why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal … ? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? WE CHOOSE TO GO TO THE MOON!” “200 feet, 41/2 down, 51h down, 160, 61h down, 5V2 down, 9 forward, 120 feet, 100 feet, 31h down, 9 forward, 75 feet, things still looking good..”
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept, one that we are unwilling to postpone, and one that we intend to win!”