The Voices of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

on a little weight, she still looked good. I didn't exactly love Gina anymore, and I certainly didn't blame her for the divorce (she didn't have much choice about that, with me in the nuthouse) or for remarrying this man Gerard (who, actually, seemed to be a pretty decent guy), but there was still some little strain in talking to her.
    "Hi, Barry," she answered, the usual couple of seconds later that you get on a Moon-Earth call. "How've you been?"
    I told her how I'd been, while I peered past her. The room behind her wasn't one I'd ever seen before—they'd moved since Christmas—and I was pretty sure it didn't look the way it usually looked anyway. Gerard and their jointly produced three-year-old daughter, Theris, were decorating the wallpic for the occasion. Racing little dots of colored light were spelling out "Happy Birthday Matthew" and the little girl was trying to draw a birthday cake with a penlight.
    "I guess you want to talk to Matthew. He's in his room getting dressed, Barry. We're going to have a party. Wait, I'll switch you over."
    "Thanks," I said, but she didn't wait to hear. The screen blanked while she told him he had my call, and when it lighted up again he was peering out at me.
    "Happy sixteenth birthday, Matthew," I said to my son. He was taller and skinnier, but he still had Gina's clear, brown eyes.
    He said politely, "Thank you, and thanks for the check you sent me, too, friend Barry."
    "Friend Barry" meant he was still a Quaker; he'd been through five or six denominations since he was twelve. It was his business; I didn't comment. I saw crossed hockey sticks hanging on the wall behind him, so I asked him if he had made the team, and he had, and I asked him how school was going, and he told me his marks, and I asked him if he'd made any decision about college, and then he surprised me.
    "I don't know if I'll go. I've been thinking of going out to a colony."
    "An interstellar colony? No more asteroid mining?" (He'd talked about that a year earlier; I had been sort of pleased that he'd decided to follow in his father's footsteps as an asteroid miner—even though his father had quit the Belt before he was born.)
    "I think I want to be part of making something," he said, sounding uncomfortable about discussing that sort of thing with his father.
    "But there's a good chance they'll cancel the colonies."
    "No, it doesn't look that way. I don't know if you follow the debates, friend Barry—" I didn't, not very closely, anyway. "But they say the Tax and Budget hearings are leaning toward keeping the colonies going."
    "Well," I said, "that'll make Captain Garold Tscharka happy," and then I had to explain that by telling him how I'd just been servicing a genuine interstellar colony ship, and what it was like. So for a good five minutes or more he sounded really interested in what his father was up to. That's a big plus, you know. One of the hard parts of talking to your sixteen-year-old son no more than two or three times a year is discovering subjects he likes to talk about.
    So we had a pleasant chat, and when I finally let him go to finish dressing for his guests I felt pretty good. Even a divorced and detached father likes to think there's still something between him and his one and only son . . . but you wouldn't understand about that, either, would you?
     
    I don't think I've given you any idea of how comfortable our life was on the Lederman antimatter-factory colony on the Moon. Oh, it's a little worrisome, too, of course; you never really forget that you're living in the blast area of what might someday turn out to be the biggest explosion the human race has ever seen. But the colony had churches and theaters and sporting arenas—it was astonishing to watch a basketball game in lunar gravity!—and restaurants like Danny's where I was going to meet Alma. We had everything anybody might want there, just about—as long as you didn't mind living underground.
    See, we didn't live on the surface. That's