Chapter 2

“It was about this time that the telephone rang in the secret briefcase // Belonging to the one mortal man // Who might be able to stop all of this senseless destruction and save ‘America Herself’!”

Billy the Mountain, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention 

The elevator in their concrete office building played bossa nova music. On any given day, there was one of six tracks playing. Riding it down, Gerald liked to imagine in his mind that his role in the government was that of a secret agent and that, descending in the elevator, he was actually going down into some secret government records hall, or a volcano base. 

He would emerge from the doors as they opened and walk into a groovy, minimalist lounge with angular leather armchairs and polished wood floors. Everyone would be wearing sunglasses and black business wear. He’d walk into a sleek kitchenette featuring a state-of-the-art microwave oven and black linoleum countertops. Nodding poignantly to another agent, he’d grab a mug of black coffee made on the electric drip coffeemaker

Scanning the room, he’d spot a man wearing a trench coat in the back corner who looked like Leon Redbone, smoking a cigarette. The man would say a code phrase, like, “I wonder if the store will run out of toys this Christmas,” and Gerald would reply, “I hope they’ve learned their lesson from last year.” And pseudo-Leon would lead him to the hangar with the fully chrome starship, to whisk them away to a beautiful, but secretly dangerous, asteroid island paradise. There, they would stop turncoat spies in the Far Pacific with their skills of spy-craft and razor sharp wit.

The door opened and, as usual, it was just the regular bureau lobby, with the pea-green armchairs and the coffee table with a stack of magazines. 

“Good morning, Linda,” he said to the young receptionist, as he walked into the room. Linda was in school for a degree in English literature, but hoped to go into advertising. She had sandy blonde hair and bright eyes and was wearing a grey sweater. She looked a bit like his daughter Sally.

“Morning, Gerald,” she said, “how is Emmitt doing?”

Gerald had once brought Emmitt into the office. The people he worked with had been generally laid back about it, and liked the little animal companion roaming the halls for a day. 

“He’s doing just fine.” Gerald said, “He’s been napping a bit more lately — I think it keeps him a bit warmer in the winter.”

“Is it cold out there in the gorge?” Linda asked.

It was pretty cold out there. He shrugged, leaning on the reception desk.

“I think as much as anywhere, but I keep the heat pretty low. We’ve got lots of blankets, so he bundles up.”

“That’s right,” Linda said, smiling, “I forgot you’re cutting energy costs. Oh, speaking of which, there’s a man from the Keyston District here today. A young guy, black, I think his name was Mr. Wheeler? I believe he’ll be in the meeting with Mr. Hanson. Something to do with some new kind of energy.”

“Interesting,” Gerald said, thinking, “I’m a little surprised I’m being included on that meeting — it seems a bit out of my department.”

“Maybe you’re being promoted!” Linda said cheerfully.

Gerald chuckled.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said, “Don’t you have to do something remarkable to get a promotion? Lateral migratory is more of my style.”

Linda waved at him admonishingly.

“Oh, don’t be so down on yourself, Gerald,” she said, “who knows what will happen? Anyways,” she looked at the clock, “I shouldn’t keep you, they’re starting in a couple of minutes. Hope the meeting goes well!”

“Thank you, Linda,” he said, walking towards the conference room.

“Don’t mention it!” she said.

Gerald walked down the hallway. There were framed photographs on the walls of various landscapes from all across their jurisdiction. The Great Crater Lakes of Umpqua, the peak of Mount Saint Helens on Evergreen, and the Bruneau Dunes on Threebear, a sandy expanse in a world mostly covered in lakes and forests. Few of the pictured landscapes were actually managed by the Bureau, but it was the thought that counted.

The conference room was down the hall on the left. Gerald rapped on the doorframe and went in. At the table was Tim Hanson, a wire-thin, scrappy guy with graying blonde hair and glasses. He was wearing a pale green buttoned shirt with the Bureau logo emblazoned on the breast. Tim had started his career as a wildlife biologist, but transferred out of field work after he tore a tendon behind his knee ten years ago.

Next to him was a man who Gerald inferred to be Mr. Wheeler. He was tall and athletic, in his mid to late twenties, and wore a slimming three-piece suit with a houndstooth jacket. Gerald had not met this man before — the normal group he remembered seeing from Keyston were a lot of rough and ready rangeland managers, ecologists, and wildlife experts. It had admittedly been a while since he’d visited, though.

“Morning fellas,” Gerald said.

“Good morning, Gerald,” Tim said, waving him into the room, “Happy Monday. Antonia is just grabbing a few things from her office, she’ll be right with us.” Antonia Keyserling was the deputy director of management resources. Mr. Wheeler stood up, shortly followed by Tim Hanson. “Gerald,” Tim said, “I’d like to introduce you to Stan Wheeler.”

Gerald and Stan shook hands. He had a solid handshake.

Tim went on as they all sat back down.

“Stan is a project coordinator for the Keyston District. He’s been working on the groundwork for a new project out there to look into some alternative methods of power generation. The proposed action would be constructing a solar power array in the sagebrush east of a town called Pilot’s End.”

“Very cool,” Gerald said. “That’s one of the big timber towns on the other side of the mountains, right?”

Stan Wheeler nodded, tenting his fingers.

“That’s right,” he said, “Pretty much anybody who lives out there, their life revolves around the mill — Blitzen-Dunlap Lumber Company is the biggest employer, and their mill in Pilot’s End is still the biggest in the Federation. Engineers, electricians, carpenters, accountants. Salespeople. Everybody’s kept afloat by the mill.”

Gerald got the impression he was supposed to know this information, but the drier parts of their world weren’t much his forté. He’d been trying to keep unnecessary drives to a minimum.

“Interesting,” Gerald said, “I don’t keep up with that part of Umpqua much. The high desert does feel a bit like the middle of nowhere to me.”

Tim Hanson laughed.

“Sure. Not many people are entertaining the thought of moving to Pilot’s End, but it’s an industrial powerhouse that keeps our world afloat. We have a debt of gratitude to pay to those people.”

Stan Wheeler nodded.

“Fair enough,” Gerald said, “That’s the lifeblood of this Bureau, right? Look at the whole ecosystem of a place and see all the different uses. I suppose that applies on a planetary level in addition to regional or local.”

Stan nodded again, smiling.

Just then, Antonia Keyserling came into the room with a stack of binders and paper. Antonia carried herself with the poise of a journalist, someone who knew a bit about everything. Speaking broadly, she was cool. She was a great conversationalist and had worked at the Bureau for over a decade. Antonia had greying black hair pulled back, olive skin and dark eyes framed by a pair of glasses. 

“Hey Gerald,” she said, setting the binders down on the tabletop, “How was your weekend?”

“Oh good,” Gerald said, “Just did a few projects around the house. You?”

“It was pretty good. Mike and I went to a concert at the Schnitz on Saturday. Have you ever heard of Talking Heads?”

Gerald laughed.

“I see ‘em all the time on the tube,” he said. He knew he was being obtuse, but it was a schtick.

Antonia rolled her eyes.

“It’s a band — they’re… hard to describe. I suppose it’s broadly rock music, but more avant-garde, maybe like art pop? I’m not sure if you’d like them, Gerald. You seem like a classics guy to me.”

“I listen to Willie Nelson, if that’s what you’re implying.”

Gerald noticed that Stan Wheeler seemed tense, on the edge of his seat. He felt a bit awkward, continuing to talk — it was a blessing and a curse to always notice how everybody was feeling. After a bit more reminiscing on the weekend, Gerald left a gap in the conversation and glanced at Stan.

“Anyway, coming back to your earlier comment, Gerald,” Stan said, grabbing hold of the gap, “that’s an innovative way to look at things; what you were saying about considering a planetary ecosystem, I mean. I’ve increasingly been looking at ways to think like that, in order to decrease our dependence on big hardfuel companies and develop more local solutions.”

“Right, right,” Gerald nodded, “to decrease the dependence on foreign hardfuel and gain energy independence for the Federation,” he said, quoting something he’d heard on the news.

Stan shifted in his seat.

“Yes, that’s one way to look at it, but what I’m primarily looking to do is actually to remove fuel merchants from the equation,” Stan replied. “Remove the middleman, and have customers purchasing their energy directly from renewable power producers generating power in their own backyard. This solar power array is a proof of concept for that new approach.”

Stan Wheeler seemed like a pretty smart guy, leaving Gerald feeling a bit out of his depth. He was tracking with what Stan was saying, but it seemed like the man’s mind moved a hundred miles per hour. He nodded.

“Gotcha.”

Tim Hansen nodded and leaned across the conference room table to grab a binder from Antonia.

“Yeah, Stan, you’re right to notice that — Gerald is quite the innovator in his personal life. Always looking for a way to create more efficiency on a personal level, which has been inspiring to me.”

Gerald felt his neck turning red. Tim Hansen had never said anything one way or the other about all the work he’d been doing at his house.

“Thanks Tim,” he said.

Tim smiled.

“Of course, Gerald. One of the reasons we’re all here meeting together today is that Antonia and I would love for you to consider taking on this new project with Stan.”

Gerald felt his eyebrows go up in spite of himself. Antonia and Stan were nodding. He felt a bit out of the loop.

“Oh,” he said, “I wasn’t expecting this.”

Tim shifted his approach.

“Now, of course, there’s no need to make a decision right this second — our intention wasn’t to put you on the spot, but just to bring you in on this conversation and start to collaborate a bit.”

Gerald nodded, furrowing his brows.

“What would be the role on the project?” he asked, looking to Stan, “are you needing somebody to manage records and documentation, or…” He left it open ended. Things like this weren’t exactly in his wheelhouse.

Antonia Keyserling replied.

“Not records keeping, Gerald, you would be coming on as the new district manager for the Keyston District.”

His mind started to wander a bit. Linda had said something about a promotion. Had she known about this? Had everybody known about this? Shoot, he thought. Gerald had been a manager of all sorts of things — records rooms, a government financial accountability team, even a burger and shake shack — but a district? He realized he hadn’t said anything.

“Oh,” he said. “Wow. District manager? Um. Isn’t there already a district manager? I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes.”

“Well,” said Antonia, “that’s actually the fortuitous thing — Ken Barnhill, the district guy out there for over twenty five years, is looking to finally retire. They’re on the hunt for his successor, so to speak.”

Stan chimed in.

“I was hired on five months ago to start developing this new approach. We’re using this transition as something of a reinvention of the Keyston District, to diversify our use of all that sagebrush and turn the high desert into a powerhouse for alternative energy production.”

“How’s that going over with the ranchers?” Gerald asked. He knew there’d been some conflict out there about public land ownership.

Tim shrugged, almost ambivalently.

“There’s challenges, like there always are with a new thing, but in the long run we feel like it’s a good play. Like Stan was saying, we need to take the planetary ecosystem into consideration.”

Gerald looked to Stan, but he seemed to be thinking.

“Alright,” Gerald said. “Well, whatever you think is the best course of action, sounds good to me.”

Antonia pressed him.

“While I appreciate that, I’d love to hear what you think about this opportunity, whether or not it sounds like something you’d want to do.”

Gerald considered. It seemed like everybody else was already in the loop on this. Stan Wheeler had been working for the Keyston District for five months, which meant five months of work had already been done on the solar array project. And it seemed like everybody had given a great deal of thought to all of this. 

Whether or not he agreed that he was the right man for the job, if Antonia Keyserling and Tim Hansen were here asking him to take on this role, he didn’t want to call their judgment into question. After all, he was sure they knew much more about the project than he did. He didn’t want to get in the way of a good thing that would make a big difference, especially because of his own ignorance.

So he did his best to be decisive. 

“No, it’s good. I’m definitely on board with the Bureau on this. This solar array sounds like a great option for the high desert communities, and I suppose for Umpqua as a whole. I’m grateful for your thinking of me, and I’ll do my best to make sure this project goes well.”

Tim Hansen nodded slowly. Gerald hoped he’d reassured them.

“Alright, well, that sounds good,” Tim said. “The change isn’t going to take place overnight,” he said, looking at Antonia, “but we have done a bit of the groundwork to free you up in your current role and enable you to seamlessly transition into this new position. 

“I don’t want to put more pressure on you,” he went on, leaning on the armrest of his chair, “but, if you’re comfortable with it, we’d love to see you moving to half time in your current role as early as next week, and devoting half your time to some of the early stages of this new project. And keeping that arrangement for as long as you need to fully transition. What do you think?”

Gerald’s brain was drawing a bit of a blank.

“That sounds fine,” Gerald said, “I’m sure I can hand things off to the others on my current team; they’re definitely a capable crew and I know they’ll do a great job.”

“See, Gerald,” Antonia said, nodding her head, “that team-building, empowering kind of mentality is what we’re hoping for in this new solar project. As you and Stan start recruiting specialists for the environmental assessment, my hope is that you’ll bring that kind of attitude to this new team. And I hope you see the confidence we have in your abilities — we trust that the team the two of you develop will be the right people for the job, and you’ll have considerable autonomy in that process.”

Tim Hanson nodded.

“That’s right. We have a short list of people who may be promising leads, both old colleagues and some promising new applicants that have come through the pipe in recent weeks, but we’ll leave it to your discretion to make the final call. With that said, any questions or comments from you gentlemen?”

Both men shook their heads and said it was all clear. Stan Wheeler thanked Tim and Antonia for their time with a winsome smile, and they wrapped their meeting up.

Stan caught Gerald in the hallway outside as Tim and Antonia side-barred in the conference room. 

“I’m looking forward to working with you, Gerald,” he said politely. “It sounds like you’re really qualified.”

“That’s what they say,” Gerald said, shrugging.

“You’re humble,” Stan said, matter-of-factly, nodding his head.

“Huh,” Gerald said, “haven’t much thought of it, but thanks, I suppose.”

“Well, isn’t that what they say about humility? That the humble person isn’t necessarily thinking about themselves enough to notice that they’re humble?”

Gerald smiled.

“Well, Mr. Wheeler, maybe it’s the end of an era — what’s going to happen to me now that you’ve made me aware of it?”

Stan Wheeler laughed like the joke was funnier than Gerald felt it was.

“That’s smart,” Stan said, “I appreciate that. Like I said, I’m definitely looking forward to working with you. Speaking of which, I’ll be in Roseport for a couple more weeks to get things squared away here, and one of the recent applicants Tim Hansen mentioned earlier is actually a Roseport local. Would you be able to join me in meeting with him sometime next week?”

“Sure, that sounds good to me,” Gerald said. “I’m usually in Roseport Monday through Friday, so I’m pretty flexible. Maybe more so, now, with this transition.”

“Great,” Stan said, “I’ll be working from the office here, so I’ll let you know. Anyway, I have a lunch meeting I need to prepare for, so I’m going to my office. Good to meet you Gerald, I’ll see you around.” 

Stan smiled and waved curtly, walking around the corner to his office. Gerald said goodbye and wandered back up to the front.

“How’d things go?” Linda asked, looking up from her textbook. The lobby was empty.

“You appear to be a bit of a soothsayer, Linda,” Gerald said.

Linda balked.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. But oh!” she said, “They offered you a promotion?”

“That’s right — to district manager of the Keyston District.”

“Keyston District,” she repeated, folding a dog-ear in her page and closing her textbook. “Isn’t that out east of the mountains?”

“Sure is,” Gerald said, sitting on the pea-green sofa. He sifted through the magazines there and found one with a photograph of rangeland on the cover. He flipped it open and quickly found an article about Keyston, with a photo of the town. It was an old frontier town sitting in the shadow of a large bluff, with a river or a creek running through it. He held up the photo. “Keyston,” he said.

“Interesting,” Linda said. “Are you gonna move to Keyston, then?”

“Oh,” Gerald said. “I hadn’t considered it.”

“I mean, I suppose you commute here to Roseport even though you don’t live here. Maybe you could do the same?”

“It’s a bit longer of a trip,” he said. He’d not even considered relocation during the meeting. He was kicking himself internally. He never thought things through.

“Well,” Linda said softly, “I’m sure Tim and Antonia will be able to help you figure out something that works for everybody.” 

“Yeah,” Gerald said, “of course.”

Gerald settled into the couch and started to read the magazine article, which was all about cattle grazing, all the while imagining fictional conversations with real estate agents. He was showing them his little bungalow in Waucoma Gorge, leading them stoically through the carpeted rooms lined with firewood, in each conversation finding himself having nothing good to say.

Chapter 1

“It was then I knew I’d had enough, burned my credit card for fuel // Headed out to where the pavement turns to sand // With a one-way ticket to the land of truth and my suitcase in my hand // How I lost my friends I still don’t understand.”

Neil Young, Thrashers

Just like clockwork, Gerald Susanhouse heard the thermostat click off as he was putting his arm into the sleeve of his winter coat. He wasn’t worried. The Susanhouse seniors, his parents, had raised him and his brothers on the world of Lamont, orbiting the Basin Star, for a couple of years. They had been especially poor then, when Gerald was eight up until he turned eleven, and they’d lived in a town called Petoskey, which was bitter cold in the winter. 

Half a century and half a dozen planetary hops later, his permanent residence on the world of Umpqua, orbiting at the galaxy’s edge of the Federation worlds, still couldn’t hold a candle to those Lamont snowstorms.

Ever since the big fuel shortage six years ago, and now with all the fracas over energy, Gerald had taken it to heart. He started making lifestyle changes — baby steps at first, and then bigger steps. Then he started talking to other folks doing the same thing. Waucoma Gorge had a small-but-devoted group of people doing their best not to be fuelish, like those ads they were running on the tube said. 

Gerald capped his thermostat at 60 degrees, even in the winter (although occasionally he’d splurge and dial it up to 65 when it got freezing cold). He started wearing sweaters and cardigans. He bought the clock thermostat at a Sears. 

After realizing the amount of heat he was losing right through the roof, he started to get creative. You could buy insulation from a building hardware store in East Roseport, and he’d put eleven inches of it in the attic of his house. He might have gone insulation-mad that autumn; he wrapped the water heater and the kitchen pipes under the sink, too.

But this coming year, he was going to bite the bullet and replace the fuel-guzzling furnace with a good, old-fashioned wood stove like they’d had in Petoskey, growing up. Gerald remembered he and Mick, his kid brother, would get sent out into the woods to collect firewood all year round, and they’d stack it high on the drafting table in the closed porch to dry it out. Gerald liked the thought of doing that again. It seemed youthful, like an adventure.

“Alright, cool cat,” Gerald said to Emmitt the Cat, who was patrolling the top of the log pile stacked against the living room wall, “you keep this place guarded until I get back. Only one wood run this weekend, I promise.” 

Emmitt had ice-blue eyes and a little pink nose and liked to snooze in the pile of boots and shoes that migrated around the living room and kitchen, ever since the mud room became storage for wood. The cat went prone, flitting his tail against the drawstring of the Venetian blinds that were somewhere back behind all those logs. Emmitt looked at him with skepticism. 

“Hey,” Gerald tsked, “I don’t care if you have fur, this wood stove is going to keep both of us warm. It’s high time you start being grateful.”

Emmitt blinked dispassionately and then turned to stare out the window at the neighbor’s new fence. There was no getting through to that cat. At least he paid his rent on time.

Gerald filed through the mud room and went out the door. He locked the bolt and let the screen door clatter shut, already down the concrete steps to the sidewalk with his hands in his jacket pockets. The day was cold and he could see his breath, but last week’s minimal snowfall had all but melted.

It was a twenty minute drive in the rubber-tire Datsun pickup out into the hills south of town. He only took the truck when he needed to haul something — he knew the m.p.g. wasn’t great. Gerald drove past the chain link gate into the yard of Pallas Mills, a family timber operation he frequented. Now that Bill Pallas was bedridden, his daughter Angie ran the day to day. 

Gerald killed the engine and hopped down from the cab. He headed for the main office.

“Good morning, Angie,” he said, pushing open the office door and setting off the little tinkle bells. Angie was looking at a clipboard and didn’t look up right away. The room smelled of two-hour old black coffee and cigarette smoke, and the linoleum tiles of the office were yellowing and badly chipped in places. The wall was decorated with metal advertisement posters for machine parts, government permits, and a neon Miller High Life clock.

“Good morning, Gerald,” Angie said at last. She was a blonde woman in her mid-forties, wearing a green checkered flannel shirt over a white tee. Her hair was pulled back in a bun and she had a mechanical pencil tucked over her ear. “Got bad news,” she said, setting down the clipboard.

“What’s the news?” Gerald asked, leaning against a full filing cabinet.

Gerald was a sixty-something divorced state employee with grey, straight hair that hung down nearly to his shoulders. His nose was long-ish and a bit too large and had a bit of a bump, but he had clear green eyes and a full beard, a decent tan, and he was still in great shape thanks to his daily walks and weekend bike rides. He had played billiards with Angie a couple of times over the years at a local bar in Hood River, but Gerald was never very good at billiards and things had never gone anywhere.

“No scrap wood today,” she said apologetically, “sorry.” 

“Huh,” Gerald said, rubbing his face. “Any idea why not?”

‘Yep,” she said, shrugging and leaning back in her creaky desk chair, “it’s all getting sold to another mill in the Valley now. They’re chipping it and using it for hardboard.” 

“Huh. Since when?”

“Since Tuesday,” she said, “when I met with Doug Baugh.”

Gerald walked over and pulled a chair out from the desk and sat down.

“I see,” he said, “finances a bit tight, Angie?” He glanced at the clipboard but couldn’t read it upside down.

“We’ll make it,” she said, folding her arms, “it’s just been a lean winter so far. We’re counting on it being just a temporary dip. And that early freeze caught us off guard. Trying to cut through a frozen log isn’t a cake walk.”

“I can imagine,” Gerald said.

There was an awkward silence.

“What do you do with all that wood, anyway?” Angie asked after a moment, “Do you do handicrafts or something?”

“Nope,” Gerald said, smiling, “I’m stocking up. I’m replacing my old furnace with a wood stove next month.”

“Ahh,” she said, leaning forward, “you’re one of those conservationists. Always looking to save a kilowatt, right?”

“Just trying to do my part.”

“Well,” she said, standing up, “I wish we could help you out. Hope you don’t freeze without our wood.”

Gerald stood up as well.

“Oh, nah,” he said, shaking his head, “I’ve got a couple more options up my sleeve, and a decent supply already.”

“Well, I won’t ask who your other suppliers are. I know a trade secret when I hear one.”

Gerald laughed.

“Ha, yep.”

There was another awkward silence. They both stood there in the office. It seemed like she didn’t actually have anywhere else to be. The High Life clock showed 10:25, but he thought it was a bit later than that.

“Welp,” he said, “I won’t keep you. You take care, Angie. Say hi to your dad for me.”

“Yep,” she said, sitting down with a creak, “we’ll see you around, Gerald.”

Gerald got back in his truck and drove back towards town. On the outskirts, he took a left and drove to the dump. He passed through another chain link fence and parked the car in the lot, headed for the junk pile. David Detwiler, a big guy from the Garden Station who lived on-site in a double-wide, would let Gerald poke around. It used to be Gerald’s second stop, but now with Pallas Mills selling off their unusable wood, he wondered if the dump was maybe his only option.

Detwiler wasn’t around as far as Gerald could tell, but it wasn’t the first time he’d let himself in and just gotten down to business. Even when he did come around while Gerald was sifting through, it didn’t seem to be an issue. He’d just nod and climb the stairs to his double-wide, rubbing his mittened hands together for warmth.

Unlike Pallas Mills, most folks didn’t come out to the dump, especially on a cold Saturday morning, so Gerald had it to himself. He liked to work carefully. The last thing he needed was a rusty nail through the foot. A quick glance showed him that somebody had thrown away a battered credenza, and there was some old table legs and particle board, too. There could be more, with a little digging.

He put on some work gloves and started hauling stuff out. In the end, it wasn’t a bad score of wood, even though the look of stacked table legs and leaned plywood fresh from the dump wasn’t ideal for the living room. He usually kept that stuff in the garage, leaned up against the workshop wall. It was filling up though. He figured he might need to reorganize a bit. 

Gerald hopped into the cab, wood scrap on a tarp in the bed, and felt the engine rumble as he pulled towards the exit.

“Thanks!” he called out to Detwiler, but he wasn’t sure if Detwiler was within earshot to hear him. He went through the gate and hung a left at the T, back towards town.

He pulled up to the house and rolled the garage door up. Inside, on the right, was his workshop, built out of a mix of hardboard and drywall he’d gotten from a old pal. Right now, it was filled with scrap wood, stacked high around the stationary tools inside. On the left, though, was the Studebaker Hawk. 

It was a passion project; he’d built it up from bones over the past ten years, though it had been drivable after about three. The Hawk was a two-tone, wedgewood blue and arctic white coupe, high-finned, with round headlights and a silver front grill. It was a hybrid, or a trident, as they called them; so it was roadworthy on hover-jets for local driving, it could fly on the highway, or be full-tilt on the interstar routes. 

He would fly the Hawk to Evergreen and Threebear, the other main worlds in the Pacifica system, primarily for work. The Bureau would compensate him for mileage, which was nice of them. 

He’d also done a couple little leisure trips, years ago — once to Evergreen and the San Juans, and once all the way out to the Emperor Chain Asteroids. He’d picked up the Hula bobble on the dash from there.

It was a shame that, seeing the Hawk, most people immediately thought gas guzzler. Gerald had actually done a lot of work to the engine and souped the car up with the latest parts, at least as far as the guts were concerned. 

But truthfully, it was still a bit of a cruiser, and the bill at the fuel station was a bit steeper than it’d take to fill a little Concord economy car, or a Pacer. But it was as economical as you could get for what it was. A sensible cruiser, he figured.

Gerald unloaded the wood scraps from the back of the Datsun and piled them carefully behind the Studebaker Hawk in the garage, leaning them up against the workshop wall. He closed the garage door again and locked it and parked the Datsun on the street. 

He went inside the house. Emmitt the Cat was on top of the refrigerator.

“Careful,” Gerald said, “you’re gonna knock something off there.” He tossed his keys down on the kitchen table and began unlacing his boots, standing on one foot with a hand on the chair. He could see his breath inside the house.

“Go curl up with blankets or something,” Gerald said. “Well, I don’t know — maybe it’s warmer or something closer to the ceiling. Not really any practical way for me to get up there and find that out for myself. Maybe you’re brighter than you look, cat.”   

Emmitt looked self-satisfied from the top of the fridge.

Gerald cracked open a cheap beer and started to make himself some lunch. He had the rest of the weekend to himself — a daunting prospect that normally involved several neighborhood walks, bike rides, bottles of beer, and craft projects; and a lot of trips to scavenge and chop wood at Pallas Mills. Seemed like that would all be in the past now. He’d have to come up with some other way to spend his time. 

But it was just as well, he figured, finishing a sip of beer and spreading mustard on some bread. Necessity was the mother of invention, after all. The thermostat clicked on, right on schedule.

“Where the eagle glides, descending, there’s an ancient river bending // Through the timeless gorge of changes where sleeplessness awaits.”

Neil Young, Thrashers

Gerald woke up on Monday morning before it was light out. His bed was covered with heavy blankets, so he took a deep breath in the bleary haze of being freshly awake and braced himself to get out of bed. When he did, it was cold.

He padded into the bathroom and started to get ready for the work week. The fluorescent light over the sink mirror plinked and flickered on. He showered in under five minutes, starting with warm water and then cooling it down after he finished washing his hair. He toweled off and stood in front of the mirror for a moment looking at his face, then combed his hair and brushed his teeth.

Emmitt was up-and-at-‘em when he came back into the bedroom, walking on top of the dresser. Gerald got dressed, choosing his khakis and a pale blue button-down shirt, with a green pullover. He laced up his leather shoes. He pulled on a brown corduroy jacket lined with sherpa wool.

He ate a breakfast of shredded wheat with milk, a couple of sausages, and some applesauce; he washed the dishes right then with soap and cold water and put them on the rack to dry. Then he fed Emmitt some premium kibble. Meanwhile, Gerald grabbed the messenger bag he’d prepared the night before and did a once-over of the things he’d be bringing with him.

After the cat finished his meal, Gerald patted him on his little head.

“You be good now,” he said, “Keep the house in good order, all that. I’ll be back tonight and we’ll have some dinner.”

Emmitt scanned the house for threats. He seemed satisfied after a moment and settled into his perch on the shoe pile.

Gerald went out the front door and locked it behind him. He went to the garage, where he set the messenger bag on the driveway and rolled up the door. Climbing into the Studebaker Hawk, he turned the key in the ignition and heard the engine thrum to life. He pulled it out onto the short driveway and popped out quickly to close the garage behind him as the headlights cast across the quiet street.

He wove his way out of Waucoma Gorge in the dark, turning through neighborhoods until he reached the riverside. He heard the sounds of the early risers — a lot of restless dogs, but also those who commuted to far off places. He’d be journeying alongside some of them to Roseport.

At the edge of town he caught the on-ramp and streaked up into the dark, misty sky above the river, following the bobbing white road dots that led onto the highway. He came up to speed and settled into highway altitude. Cruising over the gorge, he thought about the week ahead of him. 

Gerald worked for the government, for a branch that primarily dealt with land management. Even though the capital of the Federation was multiple stars away in the Quat (or, the Federal Quaternary System, which comprised the Basin Star, the Tidewater Star, New Albion, and the Gulf Star, as well as Garden Station) much of the land on the outer worlds was owned and managed by the Federation directly. It was a distinctly outer worlds setup.

His Bureau managed those lands on behalf of all the people of the Federation, including those locals on-world who utilized the natural environment for all kinds of things — mining, timber, livestock grazing, recreation, and on and on.

Gerald liked his job. He’d worked his way up within the government, served as a manager for several different branches of it, but he enjoyed working for the Bureau more than the others. The Bureau was a liaison between the natural lands of these beautiful outer worlds and the people who lived in and around them. They were stewards always, protectors sometimes, and tour guides many other times, pointing people to the wealth of diverse natural resources there at hand, just around the bend. 

The Bureau was occasionally controversial, as all government can sometimes be. Gerald generally preferred to avoid that kind of conflict. His department dealt primarily with the storage and cataloguing of land survey records — boundary markers, geological features, “whose mining claim is this?” kind of questions. Although things sometimes came to a point of contention, as boundaries often can, his work usually dealt with conflicts that happened a century ago, recorded on paper for posterity and put in a filing cabinet. 

Gerald did understand the passion on both sides, though. It was hard to know what news was true regarding the fuel shortage. Regardless, he just wanted to do his part. But he knew folks didn’t always see it that way.

The floating skybuoys over the Gorge glowed with incandescent orange in the morning darkness, glinting on the river water a hundred feet below. The surrounding traffic started off sparse, but after a while, more vehicles swept up onto the highway and drove alongside him, and he heard the low hum of the engines. Below the horizon, the sun began to warm the sky with light. The hills whisked by, blurred by the speed of traffic, and the power poles and wind turbines came like staccato silhouettes against the new sunrise.

The flatlands of Roseport came into sight before too long. First he saw the little spaceport, which was used for training space pilots and running flights in-atmo on Umpqua. Then came a swath of suburban residences, and then the great industrial sea of North Gresham, and then more suburbs, stretching on for miles. He saw Signal Mountain there to the south. As he wound his way through Laurelhurst, he saw the city skyline, glowing pale orange and green and red, glinting in the winter morning sunrise. As he passed through the Lloyd District, he flew past his old exit, which led to the old Bureau headquarters down below. It was now some kind of other state office, or perhaps abandoned. He hadn’t visited since they’d moved.

He flew over the Camas River and came down at the Morrison Transfer Station, threading the Studebaker Hawk into the skyway of higher traffic that formed a super-lattice above the urban city streets below for pedestrians and rubber-tire vehicles. 

Gerald saw his building on the left, a massive, recently-finished building made in a brutalist, concrete style. He turned and flew into the upper parkade, scanning his badge at the kiosk and driving into the echoing concrete colonnades that spiraled up and up until he found a spot. 

Gerald pulled the Studebaker Hawk into a parking space and killed the engine, settling the car gently to the pavement. He pocketed his keys and made for the elevator, checking his watch to discover he was early by fifteen minutes, as he’d intended. He had a meeting with Tim Hanson, the associate director, to talk about a new project the Bureau was beginning. Hanson had said it would be a big change for everyone, which made Gerald wonder what exactly the project would entail.

He entered the elevator and pressed the button to descend to their floor. After a moment, it rattled and began its descent, twenty floors down to the Bureau.