LITMIR.BIZ

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sly smile. “Would you love her?”

      “I love you, here in this world.”

      She stopped eating. “I can’t believe it. You said ‘love’ right out loud in public.”

      “I often tell you I love you…”

      “…when we’re having sex,” she said.

      “Well, yeah.” Mark looked around. “Read me some of ‘Auguries of Innocence,’” Mark said.

      “Later,” Jennifer said archly. Mark grinned. He left money on the table and they slid out quietly into the cold night. In the car, Mark tapped the heater a couple of times to get the fan started. Jennifer huddled in her coat. “Winter’s coming,” she said. “Yeah,” Mark replied. Sadness flooded through him. He busied himself wiping condensation off the windshield as they drove down Providence Road. “Time flies by,” he said. “Remember that demonstration the cops broke up last summer? I remember running down Maryland Avenue dodging tear gas.”

      “Revolution for the fun of it, right?” she said. “Like Abbie Hoffman.”

      “Maybe…but now, I’m taking this really great class called Politics and Economics. A girl in the class was pointing out that Hobbes…”

      “Can you get the heater running?” Jennifer said.

      Mark tapped and the fan grudgingly began to turn again. Mark wiped the windshield by hand. “Hobbes said social disorder is the worst of all possible situations, even worse than dictatorship, and I think he may be right.” It had been Carol quoting Hobbes in Wollheim’s class.

      In the dash lights Mark could see Jennifer’s attention was elsewhere. The heater fan stopped and Mark tapped it to life again. “By the way,” he said, “what’s your roommate like this semester?”

      “Jeff wants me to get him another blind date?”

      Mark parked at the trailer and they hurried inside. Bill was sitting on the couch in front of the little black and white TV. Empty blue and white Busch cans littered the room. Jeff wandered into the room dressed in slacks and a sweater.

      “What band is playing at the Black and Gold?”

      “Wolfgang and the Warlocks.” The commercial ended and Bill reabsorbed himself in Star Trek. Mark got two beers from the refrigerator, handed one to Jennifer, and they took seats on the couch. Jeff, suddenly interested in a TV show he detested, opened a beer for himself and sat down on the couch beside Jennifer.

      The Enterprise was surrounded by three Klingon ships. “Klingon-design,” Jeff noted, feigning great interest. “But they are Romulan ships,” Bill said. Jeff grinned, “Saves on the show’s production costs when you can use the same models for both.”

      The Romulan commander turned out to be a woman. Kirk and Spock beamed over to her ship to negotiate, and she slapped Kirk in the brig. “Now she’ll put the moves on Spock,” Jeff whispered. He got three cans of Busch from the refrigerator and passed them around.

      “How’d they get in this mess, anyway?” Mark asked. “The usual Kirk stupidity?”

      “Romulan cloaking device,” Jeff said. “Spock looks like he may make a deal with the Romulans.”

       At the next commercial Mark and Jennifer withdrew quietly into the darkness of Mark’s microscopic bedroom. They took off their clothes and lay together, but Mark made no move to touch her. In the other room, Star Trek played on, very softly. Mark whispered. “I do love you.”

      “I love you too.” She paused. “Is something wrong?”

      He lay silent for a minute. “No.”

      * * *

      The University library Friday night at nine. Mark forced his attention onto his Thermodynamics textbook. Around him the cavernous library was silent. He worked at his homework until ten o’clock, then drove the ten miles to his parent’s farm. The house was already dark. He let himself in and went to bed in his old room, tossed and turned in the dark for a while, then clicked the light back on. He took down Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky and reread chapter one.

      The next morning, it was just his father and sister at the breakfast table with him. “Your mother is not feeling very well this morning,” his father said. He took her some food on a tray.

      After awhile Mark went with his father to the shed where they got the old tractor started, hooked up the trailer, and drove out across familiar fields to one of the new walnut tree plantations on a hillside overlooking one of the ponds. With long-handled shears they each walked down a row of ten-foot-tall trees, pruning and throwing the cut branches on the trailer.

      “Nice trees,” his father said. “Planted them ten years ago. The first couple of years are slow going. There’s lots of competition from the residual fescue in these fields, but once they get up to about six or eight feet tall they do fine.”

      After an hour they took a break, sitting on the back of the trailer. The day was mild and sunny. The oak and maple trees were brilliant with color.

      Mark’s father was quiet. A light breeze had come up and was rippling the surface of the pond. Red and yellow, brown and green leaves waved in the wind. The air was intoxicatingly clear and cool. Mark’s father looked at the grass and the trees, the wind ripples on the pond, the crystal blue sky with a filigree of cirrus clouds to the north. “Your mother is not well,” he said quietly. “She goes in for more tests next week, but it’s just to confirm the diagnosis. She has cancer.”

      Cancer. Mark’s mind retreated from the word. “What can be done?” he asked.

      “The doctors will do all that can be done,” his father said with a bit too much confidence. “You just need to keep to your studying.” His father turned to him and removed his glasses, looking strangely defenseless without them. “And spend as much time with her as you can these next months.”

      At the house, Mark went into his mother’s room and chatted with her for a while. She seemed tired but cheerful. He sat in the blue easy chair and they watched a rerun of Have Gun—Will Travel. She hadn’t touched her breakfast. Beside the TV, the drapes were open a little. He could see her garden carefully prepared for next spring. Mark kept his mind empty as the show wound on. Eventually, Richard Boone pronounced the final benediction and the theme music played. Mark saw his mother was sleeping and slipped out of the room.

      Chapter 6

      The plane lumbered over the grass, wings rocking, and paused in front of Grant, Mark, and Dave. They clambered in. It wheeled around, careful not to blow prop-wash over the other skydivers’ chutes stretched out on the grass, maneuvered onto the runway, and took off. The day was cool and sunny and perfect.

      At altitude over the drop zone, the pilot settled the plane into a glide. The three jumpers stepped out onto the strut and fell away in quick succession. In free fall Dave was grabbing air, slowing to let Mark catch up. Mark kept his legs and arms pulled in until he was even with Dave, then spread out and they maneuvered toward each other.

      Isolated in the roar of the air, the brilliant sunshine, the world spread out below him, Mark’s mind was fully absorbed and entirely relaxed. He and Dave drifted past each other just out of reach, then slowly drifted toward one another. Mark reached out; his hand brushed Dave’s jumpsuit but couldn’t grip. His reach caused him to tumble and fall faster as he angled away. He stabilized, laughing, and saw Dave too far away to reach in the time that remained. He angled his body to track upwind of the drop zone and watched the ground spreading out hypnotically as he fell. He was absolutely free. His altimeter said twenty-eight hundred feet, then twenty-six. He hooked his thumb in his ripcord ring, but waited another second. Twenty-four hundred. He pulled and his chute rippled open, the harness yanked him upward in a great swoop, and he was sitting in clear air two thousand feet above the ground.

      “Why’d you go so low?” a voice above him said conversationally. Mark

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