The Pigeon Project

by Irving Wallace

  “Yes, I understand.”

  Take it.”

  “I will.” Jordan turned away, reached down and searched the pockets of the coat, and then found the folded sheet of paper inside the breast pocket. He unfolded it, to be certain. What he read was undoubtedly the formula for C-98, indecipherable to him. But this was it, the world’s treasure. He folded it again and placed it snugly inside the breast pocket of his own jacket.

  He returned to the bed, stood over MacDonald.

  “I have it, Professor,” he said. “What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Do…”

  Jordan waited.

  MacDonald’s lips worked again. “Do what you think best.”

  His eyes closed. His head fell sideways. He was still.

  Jordan reached down and took the old man’s wrist and tried to find a pulse. There was none.

  Professor Davis MacDonald, discoverer of the Fountain of Youth, was dead.

  X

  It was early evening in Paris.

  “Pull up here, Pierre,” Tim Jordan ordered their driver. “You can park here, can’t you?”

  “No problem, monsieur,” said their chauffeur, drawing his Mercedes up along the curb.

  Jordan opened the rear door. “We want to get a little air.”

  “I will be waiting,” said their chauffeur.

  Jordan helped Alison out of the car. He glanced around. They were on the Quai de Montebello, across from the café with a red awning, the Restaurant It Bouteille d’Or, on a thoroughfare that ran above the Seine River on the Left Bank.

  “I felt like a walk,” said Jordan.

  “I did too,” said Alison.

  They strolled slowly in silence.

  Jordan could see that the intense grief had finally left Alison’s face. In the warm Paris night, she looked calm and reposeful. And beautiful.

  It had been a week since Professor MacDonald’s death, Jordan remembered, and most of their grief had been spent during the time it had taken the cruise ship to reach Piraeus. Once in bustling Athens, going into and out of the Athens Hilton, they had been too occupied doing what had to be done to continue dwelling on the cruel fate that had befallen MacDonald.

  They had telephoned MacDonald’s younger sister in London and with difficulty informed her of MacDonald’s accidental death outside Venice. They had agreed upon a story: MacDonald, in Venice en route to Paris, had signed up for the last part of a cruise on a ship going to Piraeus. He had been intrigued by a collection of antique guns that a private collector on the ship was transporting. Examining one, he had accidentally discharged it and had been killed instantly. They had agreed to ship MacDonald’s body by air to his sister, who wanted to have him buried beside his mother in the family plot.

  In Athens, also, they had met with the bureau chief of the Associated Press and released to them the news of Professor MacDonald’s accidental death. Alison had filled in details of MacDonald’s background. The bureau chief had immediately written the story and put it on the wires. It surprised and dismayed Jordan, the following day, to see how little coverage was given to the death. To the press, the world, this was merely one more obscure scientist, well known only among his colleagues, and his passing was worth no more than routine space. But soon, Jordan was pleased to know, the story would be different. Word of MacDonald’s thunderous discovery would be released to the world, and his obituary would be enlarged a hundred times over and his name would become a household word and he would have immortality.

  The day the notice of MacDonald’s death had appeared in print, Jordan had remembered something he had overlooked and was still curious about. Venice. What had happened in Venice after they had fled? Surely Colonel Cutrone and the mayor would have lifted travel restrictions into and out of the city and lifted the communications blackout. An explanation of sorts would have appeared in the newspapers while he and Alison had been at sea.

  Jordan had returned to the Associated Press offices in Athens and requested to see the back file of copies of the International Herald Tribune. He had found the story almost immediately, on the front page of the issue published two days after their escape.

  There it was, the announcement from Mayor Accardi. The spy had finally been cornered and caught. Venice had become an open city again. Normal traffic had resumed, tourists leaving, tourists entering, commerce once more under way. The spy was in custody. The missing defense plans had been recovered. The carabinieri were interrogating the agent. There would be no further details until the interrogation had been completed. However, several tourists, departing Venice, had spoken of seeing wanted posters—all of them since removed from sight—that had identified the foreign spy as someone called E. MacGregor, who had posed as an American. The United States Department of State, mildly interested to know whether the arrested spy had actually been a United States citizen, had made a routine inquiry.

  That was the sum of it. That was all. Jordan had shaken his head over the story. He had always known the Italians were imaginative and adept at fiction.

  But there was one more announcement to come.

  This morning, at breakfast in Athens, Jordan had found a follow-up news story datelined Venice, brief and conclusive, on page three of the International Herald Tribune. The spy who had caused the blockade and quarantine of Venice was dead. He had committed suicide in his cell, hanged himself with his belt. (How convenient, the belt, but what sloppy fiction, thought Jordan.) The spy, who had used the name MacGregor and pretended to be an American, had been identified as Dr. Angelo Perfetti, an Italian inventor from Bologna and a onetime military consultant. He had stolen Italy’s secret defense plans, sought a hiding place in Venice, intending to demand ransom for return of the plans, threatening otherwise to sell them to a foreign power. But now, Colonel Cutrone had told a press conference, the city’s nightmare was over. Venice was alive and well, and it again belonged to the world.

  The smooth Venetians, Jordan thought. All loose ends tied up. And a new language that used victory for defeat.

  Only once, in Athens, had Jordan and Alison touched upon the subject of MacDonald’s discovery for the prolongation of human life.

  Jordan had asked, “Will you be reading a paper on C-98 to the International Gerontology Congress in Paris?”

  “No. The congress adjourned two days ago.”

  “Well, there are other means.”

  “There are.”

  No more had been spoken of MacDonald’s legacy. Alison had wired for the car and driver she had used before in Paris, and when their Olympic Airways plane had brought them to De Gaulle Airport in three hours, Pierre and his Mercedes had been waiting for them.

  On the way to depositing Alison at the Plaza Athénée, Jordan had wanted to delay the moment. He had requested Pierre to take them on a detour along the Seine.

  And now they were strolling above the Seine, and Jordan was acutely conscious of one momentous piece of unfinished business.

  Professor Davis MacDonald’s historic legacy was entirely in their hands.

  Jordan was busy lighting his pipe. As they passed a boarded bookstall, Jordan indicated a flight of uneven stone steps leading down to the Seine. “Let’s go down there and walk along the river,” he said.

  Alison nodded.

  They descended carefully to a broad cobblestone quay running just above the sparkling green waters of the Seine. They went to the portable rails and stared down into the water. A thousand bright lights danced in the river, reflecting the soaring illuminated spires of the Cathedral of Notre Dame across the way.

  Jordan placed a hand on the railing and faced Alison. “There’s something we really haven’t discussed,” he said. He patted the breast pocket of his jacket. “The professor’s formula. What do you want to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s up to you. He left it for you, Tim. He told you to do what you thought best.”

  “It was an odd way for him to put it. As if he didn’t know. He had always thought it was r
ight to reveal it to the world. But after Venice, I guess he was no longer sure.”

  “Nor am I any longer sure,” said Alison. Then she added quietly, “Are you?”

  He thought about it again. Indeed, he had hardly stopped thinking about it since the day of MacDonald’s death.

  The potential for good and evil that the formula contained had already been tested upon human beings, in Venice.

  Some had reacted sanely, decently. He reviewed the sparse litany of names. The monk Pashal. The Contessa De Marchi. Oreste Memo. They had been good. But two of them only up to a point.

  He reviewed his chamber of horrors, the ones who had played Judas, betraying, selling out, hungry for life or money, mostly life—all corruptible, rotten, ready to do anything to their fellow humans for the chance of continued survival for themselves or their close ones. The names came easily to him and—except for the Russians, the Venice police, the mayor—the review of each name, each friend, each acquaintance, was a stab. Don Pietro Vianello. Dr. Giovanni Scarpa. Felice Huber. Cedric Foster. Teresa Fantoni. Sembut Nurikhan. Bruno Girardi. Marisa. Above all, Marisa, with her final insanity.

  Evil, he knew. The formula’s potential for evil could transform the world into a population of Mr. Hydes.

  Yet, he also knew, there was more. Larger issues to be considered. He reviewed them briefly. The formula offered so much promise of good. The curbing of illness. The postponement of too-early extinction by death. The formula offered Time, the treasure most sought after by humanity. Time for the sweetness of more gentle, balmy spring mornings. Time for the exhilaration of more crisp, leaf-crackling autumn afternoons. Time extended for loved ones and for love-making. Time for greater inventions, creations, wisdom. Above all, youth—it offered youth suspended.

  But Venice had raised the dark specters also. In Jordan’s mind and heart they were real, and they were terrifying. Prolonging human life meant a monstrous expansion of the earth’s inhabitants. Stifling overpopulation. Massive food shortages, unemployment, suffering, starvation. In turn, crime, violence, savagery. Dwindling energy. Waste and filth rotting the environment. Constant wars for survival, and quicker senseless wars to balance the perpetually mounting birthrates. Upheavals. Loss of individuality. Elites of the elderly. Boredom, life becomes a movie that has run too long.

  Tonight, he could see tomorrow clearly. He saw the Fountain of Youth, and it was polluted.

  He stared at Alison. “You asked me if I was no longer sure of what to do. I am sure. Do you want me to do what I think should be done?”

  “Davis wanted you to. So do I. Do what is best.”

  Jordan dug into his inside jacket pocket, pulled out the folded sheet of paper. Turning his back on Alison, he strode to an opening in the railing and stepped out to the edge of the embankment over the Seine.

  He hesitated only a brief moment, and then slowly, resolutely, he tore the folded paper in two, then tore it again and again, until it was in shreds. With a fling of his arm, he cast the pieces of paper into the river.

  For a while, he watched the shreds lie on the water, and then he watched them separate and spread and glide away into the darkness.

  He walked back to Alison.

  He said, “Now I’d better take you to your hotel and look for a room of my own.”

  She did not move. “You don’t need a room of your own. You have one, mine—ours—if you feel as I feel.”

  He took her in his arms and kissed her—a long, warm passionate kiss.

  He had never felt more alive.

  Hand in hand they started toward the stone steps and the ascent to Paris.

  “What next, Tim?” she asked.

  He smiled. “A honeymoon in Paris. Then I’m going to write. Perhaps about this. The truth in fiction.” He paused. “Do you think it’ll ever happen again in life?”

  “Someday.”

  “Will it ever be good for the human race?”

  “I don’t know, Tim. Our children will learn. Or their children. Maybe they’ll be able to cope with it. Now let’s not waste any more time. We don’t have 150 years, you know.”

  Happily, they started up the stairs.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Irving Wallace was born in Chicago, Illinois. When he was a year old, his parents moved to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he was raised and educated until he was seventeen years old. Taking a year off between high school and college, Wallace helped form the Wisconsin Collegiate Expedition, whose goal was the discovery of the legendary Fountain of Blood in the Honduran jungles. During this expedition, he interviewed Huey Long in New Orleans, climbed 17,343-foot Mount Ixtaccihuatl in Mexico, and helped to discover the Fountain of Blood. After one year of college, Wallace left school to devote his full time to writing.

  From the time of his first sale in 1931, he wrote nonfiction and fiction for national periodicals until 1953, at which time he began to write the first of his published books, The Fabulous Originals, The Square Pegs, The Sins of Philip Fleming and The Fabulous Showman. In 1960, Wallace’s controversial, international bestselling novel, The Chapman Report, was published. The Chapman Report, banned in Ireland and the Union of South Africa as too pornographic, was followed by twelve more successful books, including The Twenty-Seventh Wife, The Prize, The Three Sirens, The Man, The Sunday Gentleman, The Plot, The Writing of One Novel, The Seven Minutes, The Nympho and Other Maniacs, The Word, The Fan Club and The R Document. All of Wallace’s novels, and five of his nonfiction books, have been on the national bestseller lists in the United States and Great Britain. His most recent book was a mammoth work of nonfiction, The People’s Almanac, written in collaboration with his author-son, David Wallechinsky. The R Document was the ninth of Wallace’s last twelve books to be acquired by motion pictures.

  Wallace is a member of The Manuscript Society; the Author’s League of America, New York; The Writer’s Guild of America, Los Angeles; P.E.N., New York; and the Society of Authors, London. In recent years, Wallace has taken an active role in national politics. In the summer of 1972, he covered the Democratic and Republican national political conventions, writing a daily “novelist’s-eye-view” of the proceedings for the Chicago Daily News/Sun Times wire service and its 110 newspaper clients.

  The entire Wallace family, including Sylvia, his wife, and their son, David, and daughter, Amy, is engaged in creative writing. Irving Wallace and Sylvia Wallace presently live and work in their home in Brentwood, California.