The Far Arena

by Richard Ben Sapir

  'He can't find them all. He will not kill the cow that freely gives him milk,' I said.

  'And so freely. Ten million. I should have it bagged already.'

  'Do you ever smile, Demosthenes?'

  'What for?'

  His voluminous accounts were so neatly rolled on this large table between us. I could not resist suddenly reaching over and scattering them. They were for my service, of course, but I just had to do it. Any other man on his day of freedom would be drunk.

  'Laugh, Demosthenes. The world is funny.' He screamed at me, ordering me out

  ‘I will do it because you are a freedman,' I said with a great smile.

  ‘You will do it because I demand it'

  'No. Because you are free. It is an important thing.' I threatened another fastidious pile of round scrolls, and Demosthenes succumbed.

  'All right. Because I am free,' he said.

  'Good day, freedman. Always free in my heart, always with respect in my heart.'

  'Get out'

  I demolished another pile of accounts. He threw a sella at me, very clumsily.

  'Should have been a stylus, Demosthenes. You never miss with an account.'

  'You may just have misplaced twice Domitian's fee by your insanity,' he said, pointing to a corner of the table now empty. 'Quiet or I'll burn them.'

  'I'll burn you and your muscles,' answered Demosthenes. 'Money does not burn.'

  'Money does everything, Eugeni. Get out. Go play with your swords and your politics. A man of thirty-three. Shameful.' Thirty-one,' I said. Thirty-three and every day of it.'

  He says thirty-three, but he says it from corners of the room. The room smells. But smells differently. It is not the smells of ink and must and scrolls and human sweat never aired.

  It is a strange smell. Demosthenes, poor Demosthenes is not there. He could not be there. What I did to poor Demosthenes. It serves me right to hear him call after me that I am thirty-three. But how would he have known? I did not know with certainty how old I was, only approximately.

  It is just punishment that I lie here in pain. Can I see? Is that a figure talking. Yellow hair. No, it cannot be. She wears pure white. And her hair is light yellow and her skin pale as death. And yet in white like any ranking toga.

  Perhaps not death, but madness.

  Seven

  'Publes, Publi ?' Lew McCardle was confused. 'No. There was no one I knew by that name. No. No one at the site, I think. I didn't know all the names, but I would have remembered that one.'

  Dr Petrovitch appeared deeply concerned. His hand rested on the tape recorder that had played that name. It had come from what Dr Petrovitch had described as 'a constant conversation, almost a reliving of something.'

  He played the tape again. He smoked. Lew could sense Dr Petrovitch was examining him as much as listening to the tape. They were in Dr Petrovitch's small office - Dr Petrovitch behind his desk. Lew in a chair, fidgeting. He had purchased a pair of bluish slacks and a grey sports jacket that almost went with the slacks three days before, when the home office told him to wait at his hotel for further instructions.

  'Before returning to the site?' he had asked.

  'Wait,' he was told. That was two days ago, and he considered buying another jacket, one that might go with the pants, if he had to wait another day. It was hard finding big men's clothes, even in Norway.

  Petrovitch's office was a collection of official plaques of recognition, Western comfort technology such as quartz lighters, digital clocks, and an electrically powered plastic statue of a little boy about to relieve himself. The boy shot whisky from his organ when you pressed his red cap. McCardle had seen one once in the duffle bag of a rigger. He didn't know bad taste could be that well exported.

  Petrovitch played the tape. It was a man mumbling. 'Yes?' said McCardle, confused by the strange mumbling sounds. Why should it be played for him ?

  'Do you recognize that voice?'

  'No.'

  'When did he injure himself?' ‘I don't know, Dr Petrovitch.'

  'You didn't hear him call out, Pubbly, Pubbles, Pubble?' ‘I heard.'

  ‘Was that the man who killed him ? Or who you thought killed him or - let us be realistic - tried to kill him ? Eh ?' ‘Eh,what?'

  ‘Eh, attempted to kill ?' ‘No.'

  ‘How do you know ?' asked Petrovitch. 4I don't know,' said McCardle.

  'What if I said you had a wounded worker, perhaps frostbitten, perhaps with serious exposure, and you did not want for one reason or another to risk an investigation. Maybe you even thought the body was dead. How to get rid of it? Well, why not science?'

  'Do you think that, Dr Petrovitch?'

  4I think we have a very peculiar body, speaking a language we are just beginning to identify. I think you owe me explanations now.'

  'I discovered it at eight point two metres, guaranteed in glacial ice. Guaranteed.'

  This was not the first attempt to kill John Carter.'

  ‘His name is John Carter?' asked McCardle.

  Dr Petrovitch shook his head. 4I have named him tentatively. I want you to look at it. I want to show you a peculiar body.'

  They had to take an elevator downstairs and go across a park in the cold weather to reach the hospital, where a doctor grabbed his arm to shake his hand and congratulate him.

  4Don't believe wild rumours,' Dr Petrovitch said. 4Give me time. Just time. Thank you.' He dismissed the man by not waiting for an answer but plowing on through the corridors with McCardle at his side.

  4I hope to get my office into the hospital,' said Petrovitch, 4or get hospital facilities into my office building. They have me stretched out here. But the hospital facilities are good. Excellent.'

  John Carter, as he was listed as a patient in the hospital, had a private room at the end of a hall, with special equipment from the intensive-care unit.

  4I am exercising a bit of discretion,' confided Petrovitch. 'Secrecy if you will. Why not give him an American name, eh?' The name on the door was listed as 'Carter, John,' and his doctor, 'Petrovitch, Semyon.' The disease was, innocently enough, 'frostbite.'

  When Petrovitch opened the door, aperson stumbled backwards out into the hall like a pea from a too-tight plastic bag. The room was packed.

  White-coated medical personnel, a few secretaries, and a young very blond man - whom Dr Petrovitch identified to Lew McCardle as someone who should know better - filled the room like a clandestine party.

  Petrovitch, in faltering Norwegian - faltering because it had to bear rivers of anguish - explained to everyone that they were being unscientific, that they were raining chances of a scientific approach to anything, and that they did not understand what had happened; their very presence was both harmful to the process and to the patient.

  That's the man who found him,' said someone in English, pointing to Lew.

  McCardle couldn't see the patient through the upright bodies, but he did see the top of a plastic tent.

  'You should be ashamed, all of you,' said Petrovitch. 'All of you.'

  'Why are you hiding your achievement, Dr Petrovitch?' asked another nurse.

  'Because we don't know what exactly we have achieved. Now, please. You will all know everything, when we know.'

  'I am sorry,' said the young, very blond doctor. 'We have been unprofessional. The excitement got to us, so to speak.'

  'That is when you need to be a professional,' said Dr Petrovitch. He squeezed the arm of the doctor, and winked. And to the little crowd in the room: 'We really don't know what we have. Please, give us time.'

  'Was he frozen, really, in ice?' asked a young secretary, but the cold disapproving stares of her colleagues quieted her, and a flush filled her cheeks so suddenly they could have made noise. 'Sorry,' she said with a squeak and put her hand over her mouth.

  Dr Petrovitch waited for the room to empty.

  The little fellow breathed with a faint wheeze in a clear plastic oxygen tent. His cheeks appeared raw where the nurse had wiped away vomit in
the hyperbaric chamber two days ago. Clear plastic tubes ran up his nostrils. Lew got his first good look at the man. He had high cheekbones and now had the beginnings of a stubble of a beard. He was quite muscular, and now Lew saw a healed welt on his right side. The scars on his right forearm and left shoulder appeared raised, like pale ribbons. A small microphone hung from the top of the oxygen tent down above the mouth. It was attached to a running tape recorder.

  'The problem with anything to do with cryonics is the mystery attached to it. They think miracles. There is no such thing as a miracle,' said Petrovitch. 'Yet here they are like children, looking at a body in intensive care, when we have a whole hospital of them. But this one, they said, was dead, so we have a miracle. Not so, Dr McCardle. Not so. Now what really happened ?'

  'What I told you, Dr Petrovitch.'

  Petrovitch looked deep inside, into the inner space that has no dimension. It was a thought poised in time. 'Nude, eight point two metres, eh?' ‘Yes.'

  'Some other mysteries, we have, Dr McCardle. The man has scars.'

  ‘I see. I've been looking at them. They seem raised, Dr Petrovitch.'

  'Because those wounds have not been sewn but have been cauterized. It is an ugly way to heal a wound, by burning oil or some substance. It is a painful way. I do not know of anyone who does it that way today. Do you know how it got those wounds ?'

  'No. I said I found it, Dr Petrovitch.'

  'Yes, that is what you said, and I had hoped you would help clear this up now and get it out of the way. Nevertheless, you have enough to do.'

  Petrovitch reached into the cabinet under the tape recorder. Inside was a box with about forty cassettes. Lew saw labels of time. Apparently, the people here had been recording every minute of the little fellow's mumbling.

  ‘I want your word as a scientist that you do not know this man and really did discover him in the ice you delivered him in. I need that now. I need your word, Dr McCardle.'

  'Well, yes, you have it. I gave it. It's so.'

  'All right, I accept it. We will proceed under that assumption. We have other questions that just need answering desperately, such as why the knuckle on the right hand was not set correctly ?

  And it has the strangest set of calluses I have ever seen, on the inside of the right hand and the back of the left hand. I have never seen calluses on the back of the hand like that.

  'And it's got two burn welts just beneath its ribs on its right side. I don't know what put them there.’

  Lew McCardle shrugged. He wasn't following the conversation. He had thought Dr Petrovitch was suspicious about something, then he felt he was part of Dr Petrovitch's project, and now he got the tapes pushed into his hands.

  'He has been talking a mile a minute. He is reliving something. It tortures him. The language is not Italian, nor is it Spanish but close to both of them.'

  'Why are you giving me these ?' asked Lew, looking at the tapes in his hand.

  'To help with the translation.'

  'I'm leaving today, Dr Petrovitch.'

  Petrovitch looked puzzled. 'I am sorry. Then my embassy must be wrong. They said you would be working with me handling the non-medical, non-scientific sort of things.'

  McCardle put the tapes back in the Russian's hands.

  'Sorry,'he said.

  'I must know where you found him then. I must know before you leave.'

  'I can't tell you that for a while. All my information is owned by my company.'

  'And therefore,' said Dr Petrovitch, rising to the attack, 'I must assume you had an injured man and, not wanting the publicity or notoriety, quietly pretended he was frozen.'

  That is ridiculous, doctor.'

  Then why are you reluctant to tell me where ?'

  'Because it's company policy.'

  'Well, that leaves me high and dry, Dr McCardle. I need your supportive data, and I cannot fathom why you would deny them to me unless there is some unpleasant explanation.'

  'I see your point, doctor,' said McCardle. 'I am retiring very soon. I will have plenty of time to give supporting data then. Write to me, Houghton Oil, Houston, Texas, USA, and I will give you all the supporting data you need. And more than that, Houghton will probably give you some funds because we do like to be known as the committed company.' McCardle spoke softly and slowly, trying to give reassurance from his voice. ,

  Dr Petrovitch squinted his face suspiciously, then shook hands.

  Thank you anyhow. And thank you. Thank you for the specimen.'

  The body jerked and with a voice distant in its own belly called out what sounded like 'Meramney, Meramney, Meramney', and then it was quiet. Dr Petrovitch observed secretions from the corner of the eyes of the body, as though it were crying. Petrovitch noted that, mentioning that certain glands now worked, on a chart on a table beside the bed. He looked at his watch and also wrote down the time and the date.

  The language, again, escapes us,' said Dr Petrovitch. 'But never mind. That is our problem. Do you have cars at your home?

  'Yes, two.'

  'Do they drive well?'

  'I don't know. My wife and daughters use them.'

  'Do they have tape recorders and radios in them ?'

  'I don't know, but probably. I haven't been home for a while.'

  'And bars with whisky.'

  'I doubt it,' said Lew.

  'I may be able to visit some day. That would be nice.' 'If you do, come on down, as we say.'

  Back at the Hotel Haakon, Lew found his room had been changed to a suite, and he tried to explain to the concierge that he couldn't afford a suite, had not ordered one, and was moving out, probably this evening.

  The concierge said if he wished he could check out whenever he wished, but that he was now in the main suite, It was paid for, and they were most happy to have him.

  In the living room of the suite, Lew McCardle found out why. It was one of the major shocks of his life.

  'Oh,' he said, when he saw the elderly man rise to greet him with a wide-open, friendly grin and an outstretched hand.

  'Oh,' said Lew, standing confused in the doorway and not knowing whether to enter without an invitation. 'I have permission, instructions rather, in writing saying I was supposed to leave the site. It's in writing from the superintendent, sir.'

  And as soon as Lew had said that, he realized how silly it was.. And he was further put off by the friendliness. James Houghton Laurie III, chairman of the board of Houghton Oil himself, was inviting Lew into the suite.

  'Lew, you ol' Maky, where'd yew get thet gawdawful jacket, boy? Take it off before anyone finds out you're working for us. They'll think we've gone dust-bowl broke down at Houghton,' said Laurie, getting up out of a soft chair to shake the hand of Lew McCardle and suggesting they put some good sour-mash whisky into the boy's stomach before they talked of the problems of the world and of Houghton and of Lew McCardle. Just two old Makys - Maky being the nickname of Texas Mechanical and Christian College, known for its sometimes very good football teams, its relatively good petroleum engineers, and the fact that until the 1960s every student had to attend Sunday services, drunk or sober, sick or well. Houghton Oil underwrote Texas Mechanical and Christian.

  These fancy, spiffed-up foreign hotels drain my blood. C'mon in, Lew, and let's put some good whisky in our bellies before they dry up from the piss these damned Norwegians try to pass off as booze.'

  'Yes, sir,' said Lew. And he wondered whether he should have brought his discharge paper from the site up with him from the hotel safe, or whether he should mention it all again.

  'Good to see a Maky face,' said Laurie. 'Especially when there's trouble.'

  While both he and Laurie could call themselves Makys, Lew had attended that school, while Laurie, who had gone to Harvard, sat on the board of directors with other Lauries and other Houghtons. In 1907 a Houghton did actually attend Texas Mechanical and Christian for a semester.

  It remained a school where Houghtons and Lauries got employees, not their educations
.

  Yet, they had boasting rights to the old campus. And when they wanted to be down-home, so to speak, they were Makys.

  'With or without water, Lew?' asked James Houghton Laurie. He had his hand on a crystal tumbler, and he half-filled it with dark Tennessee sipping whisky. The room had gilt-edged furniture with several small marble-topped tables and delicate painted chairs, the sort Lew McCardle sat on gently, testing whether it was really made for sitting.

  Mr Laurie could talk Texas or he could talk Wall Street. He looked like a sweet old man with a gentle tan and age spots and a smile like a red old crease going across his face. He wore a soft white shirt with a blue polka-dot tie, grey, soft trousers, and casual black shoes. His jacket was thrown over a chair.

  If Lew were that rich and had gone to Harvard also, he thought, he would talk down-home Texas, too. He could afford to.

  'Lew, we're on the three-yard line ready to score in the Cotton Bowl, and time is running out, and we're going in over your hole. What I'm asking for now, what we're all asking for, is some of that old blow-'em-out Lew McCardle blocking.’

  Mr Laurie motioned McCardle to sit on a thin-spoked chair with delicate flowers painted on the legs. Lew sat. The chair held.

  'Do you remember the Arkansas game ? You must have knocked that defensive lineman ten yards back. I have never seen such a hole you gave to our running back.'

  'Did we play Arkansas?' said Lew, trying to remember. He took a good, solid drink of the whisky. Lew would meet a Houghton or a Laurie every few years at some formal dinner. James Houghton Laurie was the one who took Texas M and C football most seriously. Lew had spoken to him more when he was an undergraduate at the school playing tackle than he did later, after his advanced degrees, when he went to work for the company.