The Peacock Cloak

to watch his step.”
    “Why did you say you would do something then?”
    He was in quite a state. Sweat was running down his plump face.
    “I’m sorry. I thought I… I just thought that…”
    “You wanted my approval. You tried to get it by lying. That’s pathetic.”
    “Listen, Juan. I can get you some work. It’s a bit dangerous and it’s illegal but I could get you five thousand for a day’s work, plus a Republic of Greenland visa for you and your wife and your kid.”
    Suzanne and I had never married – as beachrats we couldn’t marry, since we had no legal existence – but I let that pass.
    “Come on, Thach. Don’t make even more of a fool of yourself. Why should I believe this ridiculous story when you didn’t do either of the things you said you’d do for me before?”
    “Because this time it’s true. Please, Juan, let me buy you a drink and I’ll tell you about it. You look as though you could do with one. Listen to me while you drink, and if you’re not interested, that’s fine, you can walk away. What will you have lost?”
    He led the way to a nearby pub, the sort of place that the more prosperous Old Brits went to drink, with a proper licence and prices inflated to some ten times the black market rate by Provisional Government taxes.
    “We have something in common,” Pham said as he brought me my beer. “I am a Vietnamese, you are a Spaniard, but there is no longer a country called Vietnam or Spain.”
    No, I thought, but he had British nationality and a house of his own. I was a beachrat living in a damp bedsit in Walton Street. The parallels were not that striking.
    “As to this country,” Pham said, “where is it going? Apparently the population is three times its level fifty years ago, and Old Brits are outnumbered nearly two to one. But…”
    “I hate Old Brits,” I said. “Their red faces, their cold angry eyes. Why should they run everything? Why do they think they’re so much better than everyone else?”
    Pham shrugged.
    “The Old Brits are like children on a beach with the tide coming in, trying to protect their sandcastle with its paper flag. You did the same once I’m sure, as did my parents. They’ll fail soon enough, just as you did. They’ll go under. So why get angry with them?”
    I shrugged.
    “All the Brits with real money,” Pham said, “are already moving to places like Greenland and Svalbard and the Antarctic Peninsular…”
    “As will you I presume?”
    He looked embarrassed but didn’t answer. Obviously he had some bolthole lined up for when the sandbags and ditches were no longer enough to keep the marsh out of his precious college. Why did he try and make these claims to be like me when he so obviously wasn’t?
    “Some people,” he said, “are looking at the possibility of leaving the planet altogether.”
    “Yeah. I’ve heard.” Then I looked at him in surprise. “Surely that’s not what you…?”
    “Oh good God no, no, not me.”
    Again he blushed.
    “Leaving the planet is fraught with difficulties, of course,” he said. “You only have to think of the size of rocket and the quantity of fuel that’s required to take even three or four people into space.”
    “This is very interesting,” I said, downing the remainder of my beer, “but I really don’t have the time to…”
    Dr Pham clasped my arm.
    “Just a moment, please Juan. I’m getting to the point. As I say, it simply isn’t practical to transport more than small handfuls of people up from Earth into space. No one gets a ride into space who isn’t a billionaire. But, as you know, there is a theoretical possibility of using matter replication to send copies of human beings to remote locations at the speed of light.”
    “I need to look for a job, Thach. You may have time to chat about matter replication, but I don’t. Thanks for the beer.”
    “Wait!” This time he grabbed my arm so tightly that it actually hurt. “Listen, I want to help you. We immigrants have got to stick together.”
    I shook his hand off me.
    “So get to the point. What are you suggesting?”
    Pham looked quickly around to make sure no one else was near enough to hear.
    “Listen, Juan, I’ve been involved in a little work on the side, a little project on behalf of some rather wealthy backers. It’s all a bit hush-hush but they need volunteers who will let themselves be put through a resonance scanner so as to make a copy which can be transmitted to an orbital laboratory that my