The Cocoon Trilogy

by David Saperstein

  And that bitch you call a wife would put me in the hospital, Rose thought. She composed herself, but she didn’t wipe her tears as they dripped slowly down her face. As she spoke again, she tasted their salt. These are the tears of our affliction, she thought, recalling the Passover story of Moses and the Exodus. “Listen darling - business is business. We understand. When do you think you can get down?”

  “Well, Mom,” Craig answered, “you know the problem is the kids and school. The next vacation they get is in four months. We’ll plan for that, but it’s right in the middle of our busiest season. We’ll talk…work something out”

  Rose took a deep breath. “Fine, darling. Let us know. I’ll call you on Sunday.”

  “Okay, Mom. Love to Dad. Be well.”

  He hung up. She deliberately replaced the receiver in its cradle, fighting the impulse to slam it down. She reached toward the roll of paper towels, pulled off a piece, and dried her tears. She then put her foot on the garbage-can lever, opened the top of the can, and dropped the towel with a flourish. Adjust, she thought, then readjust. Is that a life?

  When Rose Charnofsky met Bernard Lefkowitz, she was seventeen years old and stunningly beautiful. Her eyes were brown, large and innocent. Her long dark hair reached to her waist. Her figure was slender but carefully hidden. The Charnofsky family was a very proper family that prided itself on high morality. They were Orthodox Jews. Her father was an extremely religious man. After all these years it was hard for her to remember him. Once recently, when she had gone to visit an aunt in Miami Beach, she had vividly remembered her father.

  Rose’s aunt was well past eighty. She lived in a small apartment hotel on Third Street, off Collins Avenue. It was a neighborhood filled with old people, old houses, and old hotels. Rose found it depressing. Yet, to those people it was part of the good life they had found in America. They were all immigrants from worlds Rose could not imagine. She had, as a child, heard all the stories about the Czar and the anti-Semitism and the pogroms, but it seemed so far away and foreign to her that she never believed much of it was true. When the atrocities of the Nazis were revealed after World War II, she watched the old people nod their heads and understand. She had been horrified and furious. They had been complacent and accepting. To them it had seemed only natural that Jews should be murdered.

  This old aunt, Aunt Ruth, had been one of those who accepted it all. As Rose climbed the stairs to her aunt’s efficiency apartment, the scent of heavy cooking was in the hallway. It brought back a vivid memory. Suddenly it was the odor of Friday night at home. The modest, three-room apartment in Brooklyn was spotless. Her mother had spent the entire day cleaning and cooking. Her father was home early. Dinner was early. Conversation was sparse. Then he was off to synagogue, but the smell of Sabbath stayed behind.

  Aunt Ruth’s hallway was filled with the same smell, and for a moment Rose expected her father to open the apartment door. When Aunt Ruth opened it, Rose was startled back to reality. She embraced her aunt and drank in her love. Then, uncontrollably, Rose began to cry. The tears were not for Aunt Ruth, nor for her father. They were tears for the pain that her ancestors had endured; for the courage they had to leave their homes and to find a new life in a foreign land. They were tears of understanding, because no matter how poor they were, Rose realized those people knew they were safe. They had been delivered. They too had adjusted. The fact that Rose couldn’t quite face was that the tears were also for herself. She had also spent her life adjusting, but to things that were, by comparison, unimportant. Her affliction was self-imposed pity.

  Perhaps it was the times; perhaps it was the burden of being first generation in the promised land; perhaps it was because her suffering was so small compared to what the old people had experienced. In any case, the tears flowed and a part of her opened to let out love that she had not clearly felt or expressed before.

  CHAPTER TWELVE – PROCESSING BEGINS

  The cocoon had no cover, hinge or door. Instead, it was peeled away by the two copper men. The room remained flooded with red light. As the layers were peeled from the cocoon, they disintegrated at the instant they were no longer attached to the cocoon. It happened in a flash, and there was no apparent trace of the material after that. There was something about the process that gave Jack the feeling he was in a massive darkroom watching technicians develop a huge photograph.

  Amos Bright telepathed to Shiny Black - It goes well. The first is normally an expendable, but I think we will have it.

  Shiny Black answered aloud. “No reason to doubt. The process had proven itself before in the Cenedar Quadrant.”

  Hal interrupted. “True, Commander No Light, but Cenedar is an ammonia ice planet. I recall no time-test of cocoon in an oxygen-hydrogen medium.”

  The conversation was terminated by Commander Shiny White, known as Commander All Light. “Your kindness, please! It is peeled. My sensors indicate moisture. Some condensation, I believe. Check me, No Light.”

  The Shiny Black turned his face toward the cocoon on the table. It was now almost the shape of a man. He telepathed - I concur. Some moisture has entered. But it is not harmful and the soldier is not spoiled. If the others are like this, we will require more time for the drying than anticipated.

  The copper men were removing the last of the covering. In the red light Jack could see a man, or at least the shape of a man, lying on the table. It did not move as Commanders Shiny Black and Shiny White moved around the table examining the body. Finally, Jack was able to see the full figure. It was a human form, with a few variations.

  Jack did not notice the lack of genitals at first because he was shocked to see that the body had no eyes. There were sealed slits that wrapped around either side of the face to where ears should have been. He remembered Shiny Black’s face when he had taken his human face off on the boat. This man also had no nose or mouth. And there was no hair. Then Jack noticed the lack of penis and testicles. At that point the room began to hum and pulsate.

  Before Jack could react, Amos was at his side, helping him down from the high chair. “It’s getting late, Jack, and we have work to do. I think it might get uncomfortable for you here. Let’s go out.”

  Jack followed Amos to the door. Just as it was closing behind them, Jack heard a shrill piercing sound coming from the room. Then it was silent. “Part of the process,” Amos said. “I promise that you will see it all very soon. This is the first and we must test it very carefully before we process those we have and release others. They have been here for a long time.”

  He took Jack to another room with a blue door and opened it with a key. “This is your room. I will come for you in the morning. Please rest and don’t worry, but by all means contemplate what you have seen and learned today. There is much more that you will learn in the days ahead.”

  He closed the door and locked it. The room was not unlike a Holiday Inn or Ramada motel room, except that Jack was locked in for the night.

  Before Amos Bright returned to the processing room, he stopped at another door that was red. He went in and picked up a silver case. Inside the processing room, the heat had dissipated and the group was huddled around the center table. When Amos entered he immediately felt their disappointment. How bad is it? he telepathed.

  “Recoverable, but damaged,” Hal answered. “But it may be difficult to revise the programs to overcome the damage.”

  “We can try,” Shiny Black interrupted.

  “We must,” Shiny White said.

  Amos set down the silver case at the head of the table. He quickly scanned the body and saw the spots. “Did the moisture do this?” he asked.

  “Perhaps,” said copper man one, “but it may also be from the electrical input. I will send the scout probe back to the base tonight and bring down more instruments. I believe we will lose this soldier. This development is not good news for our mission.” He turned and left the room.

  Amos opened the silver case. In it there were two teardrop-shaped glasslike bulbs.
Copper man two came over and touched them. They began to glow. The copper man then slid his forefinger along the eye slit of the body on the table.

  “You will do an insertion, anyway?” Shiny Black asked.

  “We must,” Amos answered. “It is procedure, even with damage.”

  Copper man then inserted one teardrop into the slit. The opposite side of the man’s body quivered. He then inserted the other teardrop and the other side of the body quivered. “Good tone,” copper man said. They all agreed. He then removed a small, red, glowing stone from under the head of the soldier and passed it to Amos.

  Hal and Harry rolled a narrow table next to the center table and slid the body onto it. They then wheeled the body to the back of the room and placed it onto one of the cots. The cone-shaped light above the cot switched on and a white beam emanated from the light. It split into two beams and entered the eye slits. Another beam, blue in color, came from the cone and widened to cover the upper torso of the man on the cot. Finally, a third beam, deep green in color and shimmering, appeared and spread out to encompass the entire body.

  Back at the table Amos Bright was placing the small glowing red stone, the size of a golf ball, into the silver case. Copper man two, Shiny White, and Shiny Black gathered around the case and each reached a hand into the case and touched the rock. They all telepathed the same thought --- Home!

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN – A MAN FROM BROOKLYN

  The clear, blue water gurgled, filling the pool as Joe Finley dealt the cards. Today he was partners with Art Perlman. He liked playing with Art because Art was not only a shrewd card player, but a quiet man who didn’t jump on a partner if he made a mistake. That was important to Joe. He was sensitive to criticism. As an actor he had experienced more than his share and taken it personally.

  As the others arranged their hands, Joe poured a cup of lemonade from his Thermos and popped a pill into his mouth. He washed it down with one gulp and then returned to his hand and the game.

  Art Perlman watched from across the table. That is a brave man, he thought. I don’t know how I would react to having leukemia. Art chuckled to himself at the thought because death was not a stranger to him. He had lived with it all his adult life. However, that kind of death was quick and always for a reason one could understand. Even rationalize.

  It began on the streets of downtown Brooklyn. Arthur Perlman was the third son of Abraham Perlman, mattress maker. His oldest brother, Sam, had died in World War I on some godforsaken battlefield in France. He was buried there, and no one from the family had ever seen the grave. Art’s second oldest brother, Harry, attended City College. It was decided that he was going on to medical school. At that time, Art was sixteen and a creature of the streets. The roaring twenties were roaring and Prohibition was in its third year. After Sam’s death, his parents had withdrawn from life in general. They spent most of their money on Harry’s education. They had written Art off as a wild son who would end up badly. They were simply too tired to control him.

  First generation, third born was the way Art looked back on his childhood and his eventual chosen profession. I was just there at the wrong place at the right time, he always mused.

  The wrong place was the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The right time was Prohibition. His first job was unloading bootleg whisky from Canada in the middle of the night after it had been off-loaded from smugglers boats onto Long Island beaches and trucked to Brooklyn. The pay was good. Art could make in a few hours what it took his father a day or two to make. On good nights he often got a bonus.

  The next step up the ladder was delivering booze to the clubs. Speakeasy’s. He was doing that by the time he was eighteen. By then he was part of an organization that controlled the bootlegging and waterfront of Brooklyn. It was run by Italians and Jews. Words such as Mafia and Family came later. They were just gangs in those days.

  About that time, his father came out of his depression long enough to take notice of his young son’s ways. There was a confrontation that brought his mother to tears and brought Arthur to City College as an accounting student. His father forced him to promise to finish school and keep away from the “bums.” Art kept the first part of the promise, but not the latter. He was actually encouraged to go to school by the head of the gang, Angelo Sorocco. Angelo was an immigrant. He had worked his way up and had been given a small section of Brooklyn by the “big boys.” He was a good soldier and followed orders. As a result he was privy to the larger plans of the gang. He foresaw the day when educated men, who could also be trusted, would be needed by the organization. “Go to school, Arty. Be an accountant ... be a lawyer ... use that Jew brain of yours and I promise you we will have a place for you when you finish.”

  While in school, Sorocco got him a steady night job in one of the downtown clubs at the cash register. By the time Art had finished school, the Depression had begun. He was a Certified Public Accountant by day but at night he collected the cash from fifteen gang-owned clubs in Brooklyn and Manhattan. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Arthur Perlman opened his own accounting firm. His only clients were the various businesses of what was to eventually morph into part of the Gambino and Genovese Families. Many of the financial dealings of Brooklyn’s organized crime filtered through the hands of Arthur Perlman, C.P.A.

  Death entered the picture when, at a secret meeting in Atlantic City, a new business was formed. It was eventually known as Murder, Incorporated. Arthur Perlman was spared the job of handling its finances, but he was involved in setting up the fee structure and payment methodology for its services.

  He took good care of his parents by buying them a home near his own in Manhattan Beach, an exclusive section of Brooklyn. He met Bess Bernstein at a neighborhood party one New Year’s Eve, and they married one year later.

  He loved Bess and the home she made for him. They had one child, a son, Harold. Bess had nearly died in childbirth and the doctor warned against having any more children. Harold and the house became Bess’ life. Art’s life was his work.

  As he sat at the card table by the pool, watching Joe Finley pop the pills into his mouth, he thought back on the day that he had to tell Bess about his work. He knew he was going to be called before a grand jury and that his books were going to be subpoenaed. There might be publicity, and although the right newspapers, judges, and politicians had been taken care of, there was always the possibility that some nosy young D.A. wouldn’t get the message and snoop around his home. The Organization had authorized him to reveal to Bess whatever he felt was necessary.

  She had taken it well. Far better than Art had expected. But she did pop some pills into her mouth, too. “Just to relax me,” she had said.

  Then later, as they sat alone in the darkened living room, her voice broke the silence with a question that made Art realize how alone he was in the world outside of his business friends. “Arthur, tell me ... did you ever kill anyone?”

  “What are you asking?” he had answered. “Kill? Me kill? Are you crazy?”

  “Arthur,” she had replied, “I am not a stupid woman. 1 read the papers and from time to time I see the work you bring home. Some of the names ... some of the clients ... I read about them in the papers. I’m not stupid. I put two and two together. Just answer me that one question. I have to know. The rest will go to my grave with me. I promise.”

  “Never, my darling. As God is my witness. Never.” And that was the end of her questions.

  “What are you, a comedian today?” Ben Green asked.

  Art said, “What?”

  Ben answered, “I asked you to throw a card and you say never...”

  “Sorry, Ben ... I was just, uh, daydreaming.”

  “Daydream on your own time.” Art threw a king of clubs. The game began.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN – LADY ON THE LADDER

  The week had passed quickly for Jack Fischer. He stood on the Manta III’s flying bridge in the warm, late afternoon sunlight and watched the commanders bring the last cocoon of the day t
o the surface. By his count, that made number sixty. He figured a bit more and calculated that at this rate it would take them about thirteen more weeks to raise all of the buried Antarean army - nine hundred forty one soldiers.

  Jack was anxious to get back to condo complex. Tonight he was going to see Judy for the first time since this adventure had begun.

  He recalled how he had been locked in his room that first night. Later, he heard the key in the door and Amos Bright appeared. “I almost forgot that you have to call your girl friend on the ship-to-shore radio. We’d better do that now.”

  Judy had been upset when he told her he’d be occupied full time for a while. She did not like to be alone. Jack suggested that she have a friend move in with her. He suggested a fellow actress with whom Judy took a class. “You can work with each other on that part you’re going to do at the Grove Theater,” he said, and her mood had lightened.

  “When will you be back?” she asked.

  Jack looked over at Amos. “One week from now,” Amos mouthed. Jack repeated those words to Judy.

  There was a silence and then she said, “I’ll see you here then. Don’t bother to call. I may be out!” And she hung up the phone.

  Amos apologized for the inconvenience and promised that if Judy was unreasonable he would do his best to explain to her. Jack told him that it would not be necessary.

  The two copper men were lifting the last cocoon onto the deck. Hal and Harry were breaking down the equipment. Amos was giving All Light and No Light a hand as they climbed onto the deck.

  The drill had become routine. Jack started the twin diesels and raised the anchor. Off to starboard, the Terra Time was already under way, heading back toward Coral Gables.

  With a final check to be sure all were aboard and secure, Jack eased the powerful engines into gear and pushed forward on the throttle. The twin diesels responded, cutting a neat wake through the darkening Gulf Stream. Home lay ahead - a night off and the company of one very warm, female, human being. He could imagine the taste of her and his body tingled with anticipation. The title of a recently popular song, “It Ain’t Love, But Baby It Feels So Good,” passed through his mind, and he began to sing the song to himself.