Something Made of Vacuum

It was late on an overcast day in Quito when Tom walked down the stair from the shuttleplane and first touched the ground of Earth. He had not quite been sick, but when he looked up into the gray sky the movement of his head made him stumble a little. He was amazed to see that the airport cart was driven by a man in a uniform. Was he a peasant who had been given a make-work job? A convict? Some kind of hereditary thing? He climbed into the cart with the other passengers and gave the driver a stiff, awkward nod.

The lumpy clouds in the sky moved as he looked at them, which reinforced his queasiness.

He spent the flight to Mexico City in an aisle seat, trying to read magazines. At an airport restaurant, he ordered enchiladas and managed to get mole sauce all over his face and part of the shirt he had bought with Helene. He was nervous and awake, watching news broadcasts with little comprehension, on the flight to Chicago. The sight of stewards walking up and down the aisles, not secured by harnesses and without armor against collisions, raised more questions than he could cope with: he wound up saying nothing to them and did not get any drinks.

He called Helene when his plane was approaching the airport. She answered in her nightgown, sleepy and blinking. “Tom? What the hell? Where are you?”

“I’m on the plane coming into Ohare Airport,” he said. “Can you come meet me?”

“You’re here? Tom, I ran away from you. We’re not together. What the hell are you doing?”

“So I just ran toward you. We can be together when you meet me at the airport.”

“Do you have any idea what time it is? It’s two in the morning here!”

“What part of your day is that? I can’t keep track after three days in transit.”

“It’s the middle of the damn night, that’s what!”

“Helene, please come meet me.”

She looked out at him from his wristband. “Did you throw up,” she asked, “on the atmosphere approach?”

“Almost, but I kept it down,” Tom said.

“You must have wanted to come here pretty bad.”

“You have no idea. Or wait, I hope maybe you do have an idea.”

“All right. I’ll be at the airport in half an hour. I’ll call you when I get there.”

Tom had never seen anyone or anything flying that was shaped like an airplane. He spent his last half-hour in the air searching for articles on “How Do Airplanes Fly?”, was completely dissatisfied with the explanations he found, and had worked himself into a minor panic by the time the plane touched down. He left the airplane by a covered walkway and did not see the night sky.

The airport terminal, however, seemed familiar and homely when he entered it, a hundred times the size of the terminal at Sinus Amoris but populated by much the same kind of travelers. He even saw a few passengers in Hawaiian shirts. Helene called, and with her help and many wrong detours, he managed to get out to the terminal lobby to meet her.

The season was early autumn in Chicago. Helene wore a light brown leather coat belted at the waist, and even that vague suggestion of her figure made his heart leap when he looked at her. She had her hair pulled back with a band, she was bleary-eyed from sleep, she was carrying a brown sweater under her arm, and she looked beautiful.

He held out his arms when he saw her. She frowned, hesitated, then opened her arms and embraced him when they met. She did not kiss him. When she stepped back, she handed him the sweater. “I figured you’d show up with just that shirt,” she said. “It’s cold in the mornings this time of year. Put this on.”

He pulled on the sweater, saying “Helene, I ...”

“Tom, there are fifty couples in this hall doing big reunion scenes,” Helene said. “Let’s save it for a while. Come on, I’ll take you out for breakfast. My car’s in the lot.”

They walked through the cavernous parking garage. “You own a car all for yourself?” Tom asked.

“Yeah. As a salesman, I have to go to a lot of weird locations and sometimes I can’t pick up a driverless, so I have a car and I can drive it myself. A lot of people don’t, but I have a license to operate a car manually,” she said. When they reached her car, Tom balked at entering in it without quite knowing why. It took him a moment to realize that the windows bothered him because they were too thin to hold air pressure, and then to reassure himself that they did not have to. Helene waited for him with some asperity.

When they exited the garage, Tom was introduced to the concept of paying for parking, something he had never deduced from watching movies set on Earth.

In the early-morning darkness, the traffic was light. Tom stared out the window at the stores and houses they passed. “Everything seems … I don’t know, old, kind of worn down,” he remarked tactlessly. “Is it just this area?”

“It’s everywhere, as far as I’ve seen, and I’ve seen more than most people,” Helene said. “For a hundred years, anybody with any get-up-and-go has emigrated to one of the planets. We’re the ones who were left, we don’t have as much energy as people used to, and a lot of things like houses are starting to wear out now. Welcome to Earth.”

The twenty-four-hour restaurant was quiet when they entered, except for banal background music. It was close enough to the expressway to attract a fair number of patrons, but the pre-dawn atmosphere left them all silent and withdrawn. A waitress led them to a booth, past diners sitting solitary, in couples and in groups, but all hunched over their food, reading the news or other text on various devices. Tom looked hard at men who appeared to be construction workers getting ready for the day’s work, who sat together without speaking. They passed a man and woman dressed in social clothes, apparently at the end of a date, who also sat without speaking. No one looked back at him.

When they were seated, they ordered breakfast. Out of her coat, Helene wore a soft blue woolen dress. “Are you okay now, Tom?” she asked, speaking in a voice low enough that the people in the next booth would not be able to hear her. “You were puffing just from the walk to the car. I think full gravity’s harder on you than you thought it would be.”

“I’m okay,” Tom said. He instinctively kept his voice low as well. “I feel a little heavier, but also, every time I move my arms and legs it feels like they’re shooting forward because I’m not getting any resistance from my suit. But I’ll get used to this.”

He was silent for a while, looking at her. Helene said, even more quietly, “Don’t stare at my chest like that. That’s rude. Hello? Earth to Tom?” Then she glanced down at herself, and said, “Oh. Tom, this is where they’re actually supposed to be. I guess there are some things I liked about one-sixth gravity.”

“Do you know, people who live on the Moon live about twenty years longer than people on planets? One-sixth gravity really eases the strain on your heart.”

“Do you know, you should go back there then and live twenty years longer? Tom, you don’t belong here and I don’t belong there. If you were to stay here, you’d live twenty years less.”

“But I’d be with you.”

“No, you’d be living with some other woman because there’s no way in hell I’m going to let a man die twenty years early for my sake. But for God’s sake, Tom, do you realize this is pretty much our second date? You can’t be talking about a lifetime already.”

“No, wait,” Tom said. “We played pitch and toss together, which was sort of a date, then we watched the rockfall, that counts as a date. Then we went to air town, and the next day we went to the vineyard and then we went flying, that’s three dates right there.”

Helene just looked at him, then shook her head. Tom said, “It’s been enough time for me to say I love you. I do love you.”

The waitress arrived with their food and Helene was spared from having to reply. Tom closed his eyes a moment and said a brief silent grace over his food.

“That saying-grace thing, is that something that’s important to you?” Helene asked, when the waitress had left.

“It’s kind of important. You don’t have to do it.”

“You’re a member of the First Baptist Flat Piece of Ground back home, and I’m an agnostic Jew. We’ll just add that to the list of pressure points,” Helene said. After a moment, she added, “You know, for a gourmet who loves food as much as you do, you hold your fork like a little kid.”

“I haven’t had much practice with forks,” Tom muttered.

“Here,” Helene said gently, and touched his hand. “Not with your fist. Open your hand, then hold it like this. Good, that’s better.”

“As a boyfriend,” Tom said, “I’m not providing much leadership in this relationship, am I?”

“You’re not my boyfriend. You’re very dear to me, but this can’t work and we both know it. You need to go home to the Moon, and go check out every unmarried Moon Man woman one at a time until you meet the one who gives you the right 38 data points. Sooner or later you will meet a nice girl who gives you high skin conductivity or low skin conductivity, whichever one you’re supposed to have, and then you’ll know it’s true love.”

“Helene, I came one and a quarter light-seconds here to tell you I love you.”

“And I drove to and from the airport to tell you, ‘No.’”

“No, you don’t love me, or no, you won’t let me love you?”

“Let’s just leave it at ‘No’,” Helene said. “And, Tom, please, don’t make me say that again. I hate saying that to you.”

“I’m not crazy about it either.” They ate in silence for a while, and finally Tom said, “They always say everybody talks about the weather, so hey, how about that weather outside, huh?”

“It’s supposed to be a pretty nice day today,” Helene said. “But Tom, do you see how far out of position you are? At home you sit around with your family in minus 150 degrees and it doesn’t seem odd to you, but when you got here I had to tell you that it gets cold at three in the morning. Tom, we’re just too different.”

“I wasn’t asking for another reason why this relationship is doomed,” Tom said.

“No, you weren’t. I’m sorry. It’s all I can think about, looking at you.”

“Maybe it’s not romantic, but I look at you and I think about seeing you in that hotel room. That was a pretty wonderful night, wasn’t it?”

She smiled shyly. “Yes, it was. Also the next morning. Tom, I wish we’d had more time together.”

“We’re together now.”

She just shook her head again, slowly. “I can’t believe in it, anymore. Your Mom and Dad called me again. They told me you left your suit with them. Tom, you still want to go back, you know you do. You wouldn’t have left your suit if you didn’t expect to go back to it.”

Tom looked at her. “Why did you send your suit to me, instead of just cashing it in?”

Helene drank more coffee. “It’s so nice to drink coffee out of a cup,” she remarked irrelevantly. “Rather than sucking it through a straw. I guess … I don’t know, when you’ve been that intimate with an object, it’s kind of hard to let it go to strangers, you know?”

“I do know. You’ve got some Moon Man in you now, haven’t you? We rubbed off on you.”

“Yeah. That’s not a good thing.”

Tom stood up. “I have to go to the washroom,” he said. “That’s another thing about Moon Men, we never really learn much bladder control, since we don’t need to.”

Helene hissed, “Also, you never learn to not make remarks like a toddler when you’re in a public restaurant! Just go! Don’t tell me about it!”

“Oh, hush! You worry so much about what you can say and what you can’t say that you and all the other mouth-breathers never say anything that means anything.”

“Tom, do you know you’re a damn bigot?” All around them, heads turned at the sound of Helene’s voice. “You’re calling us names? You M-M’s have the social skills of oysters! You never come out of your shells and you think that makes you superior to natural human beings?”

“Social skills!” Tom yelled. “What in hell would you or any other Earthman know about social skills? Look at ’em all here!” He waved his hands at the faces now turning toward them from all directions. “You’re all isolated, sitting with your heads down, lonely as hell. On the Moon, we’d be talking with each other, gossiping, chatting, being social. I walked in here, I’m a stranger in town, and nobody as much as said hello. A Moon Man can go to any village in any port and everybody will call you by name, ask how you are, talk to you like they value you as a person. You people can’t even talk to people you know.”

Helene stood as well. “Then why don’t you go back to your village? Your little ethnic community where everybody’s your buddy and everybody can see your blood-sugar level and everybody knows everything you eat and every time you take a dump! You’ve got no right to come down here and tell me I’m lonely. I’m not lonely, I’m normal! All of these people, they’re all normal! You’re the one who’s weird and that is not a compliment! Why are you here?”

“Because I love you.”

“I love you too, you jerk, but I also know how to go to the bathroom without having to announce it to the world!”

“You love me too?” Tom asked.

“Yeah, I figured that out, like, day before yesterday. But it still doesn’t change anything.” Helene pulled a bill out of her purse and laid it on the table, then said, “Let’s get out of here.”

“Kiss him!” somebody laughed, and three or four people started tapping on their glasses with spoons.

Tom turned to the nearest one and asked, “What does that mean?”

“It means you should kiss her, you jerk.” There was more laughter all around.

Tom looked around at all the eyes watching him, his own eyes wide and frightened. Helene said, quietly, “Come on, Tom. Can you hold it for a little while longer?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Then let’s go.”

Outside, the sun had risen and the air was fresh and cool with dawn. Tom walked through the door and stopped so abruptly that Helene almost walked into him. He was staring up into the cloudless blue sky. “Tom?” Helene asked.

He turned unsteadily, his eyes wild, then spun a second time. “Tom, what’s wrong?” Helene asked.

“There’s no … you know, thing overhead,” Tom stuttered helplessly. “Not anything. Roof, lid, dome, you know what I mean. Nothing holds the air in. It could out-gas in, in, in minutes.” He drew a deep ragged breath and leaned back, craning his neck to see straight up.

Helene took his arm. “Tom, it’s okay. Don’t worry. It’s always like this.”

“Empty … the air is just … ” Tom gasped. His eyes rolled up, and he fainted and fell.