by James Gunn
“I wouldn't want you to do that,” he said submissively, and moved forward into darkness. More by sound than sight he followed her footsteps down a hallway into a living room where returning vision and the light filtering through closed drapes over a picture window let him make his way to an upholstered chair. McCleary sat stiffly on the edge of a matching sofa; it was covered in velvet with variable-width stripes of orange and brown and cream. She lit a cigarette. The lingering odors of stale smoke and a littered ashtray on the glass-covered coffee table in front of her suggested that she had been smoking one cigarette after another.
“What do you know about my daughter?” she asked. She was under control now.
“First of all,” he said, “she is an important person.” He held up a hand to forestall her questions. “Not just to you, overriding as that may be at the moment. Not just because she is a person in a society that values every individual. But because of her potential."
“What do you know about that?” she demanded. A note of doubt had crept into her voice.
“It's hard to explain without making me seem like a crackpot or a fool,” Johnson said, leaning toward her to emphasize his sincerity. “I have—special knowledge—which comes to me in the form of—visions."
“I see.” Doubt had crystallized into certainty. “You're a psychic."
“No,” Johnson said. “I told you it was difficult. But if that's the way you want to think of it—"
“I've had dozens of letters and telephone calls from psychics since my daughter was abducted, Mr. Johnson, and they've all been phonies,” she said coldly. “All psychics are phonies. I think you'd better go.” She stood up.
He stood up along with her, not submitting to, but resisting his dismissal. He looked into her eyes as if his eyes had the power to compel her belief. “I think I can find your daughter. I think I know how to get her back. If I thought you could do it without my help, I wouldn't be here. I want you to know that I could find myself in great difficulties and my mission in jeopardy."
“Where is my daughter?” It was not the tone of belief but of a final examination.
“With your husband."
“You guessed."
“No."
“You know about the message."
“Was there a message?"
“You're from Steve. He sent you."
“No. But I sense danger to your daughter and perhaps to your husband as well."
She slumped back to the sofa. “What are you then?” she asked. “Are you just a confidence man?” Her tone was pleading, as if it would comfort her if he admitted her guess was right. “What do you want from me? Why don't you leave me alone?” If she had been a more dependent person she might have turned her face from his and cried.
“All I want is to help you,” he said, sitting down again, reaching toward her with one hand but not touching her, “and to help you find your daughter."
“I don't have any money,” she said. “I can't pay you. If you're preying on my helplessness, it won't gain you anything. If you're seeking notoriety, you will be exposed eventually."
“None of these things matter beside your daughter's safety and her future. Moreover, you may not be able to control the events of your life as you have been accustomed to doing, but you are not helpless. I don't want any money. I don't want any word of my part in this to get out to anyone, and certainly not to the press. It would be dangerous to me."
“Then what do you want?"
“I want to get to know you,” he said, and as she stiffened he hastened on, “so that I can find your daughter.” His glance moved around the room as if he were looking at it for the first and the last time. At the picture window that looked out over the desert valley and the solar power project when the drapes were drawn, where surely a little girl had stood and watched for her mother's return. At the electronic organ in the corner that neither McCleary nor her daughter could play. At the doors that led to bedrooms where a woman and a man had slept and made love and lain awake in the night. At other doors that led to baths, to the hall, to the kitchen and dining room on the other side of the hall. “I want information about your work, your daughter, your husband, the circumstances of your daughter's abduction...."
She sighed. “Where do you want to start?"
“The message. What did it say?"
“The sheriff told me not to describe it to anyone. He said that knowledge of it would either be guilty knowledge or proof of the abductor's identity."
“You've got to trust somebody some time,” Johnson said.
“And the police are not to be trusted, Mr. Johnson?” Through her concern flashed the perceptiveness that had made her director of a major research project.
“From the police you get police-type answers,” he said. “Investigation, surveillance, evidence, apprehension. I think you want something else—your daughter back safely and preferably without your husband—"
“My former husband,” she corrected.
“Your former husband's injury or punishment."
“Ms. McCleary,” said the voice of Mrs. Ross from the hall doorway, “the sheriff is here to see you."
“Thank you, Mrs. Ross,” McCleary said.
“Come in, sir,” Johnson said. “I've been expecting you."
* * * *
The room was not much of a jail cell. It was a small room without windows. The walls were paneled in plywood faced with mahogany and decorated with framed prints of famous racehorses. In the center of the room was a long table lined with chairs on either side.
It had never been intended for a cell. It was a small dining room off the main cafeteria, where groups could get together for luncheon conversations. Now a young man sat across the table from Johnson, silent and nervous, uncertain about his duties and privileges as a jailer.
He was a junior engineer on the Solar Power Project, and he had been asked to guard the prisoner while the sheriff made arrangements to transport the prisoner to the county jail some forty miles away. The young man fidgeted in his chair, clasped and unclasped his hands, and smiled uncertainly at Johnson.
Johnson smiled back reassuringly. “How is the project going?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” The engineer was a pleasant-looking young man with sandy hair bleached almost white by the sun, a face peeling perpetually from sunburn, and large hairy hands that he didn't know what to do with.
“The Solar Power Project,” Johnson said. “How's it going?"
“What do you know about the project?” the engineer demanded, as if he suspected that Johnson, after all, was the hireling of the oil interests.
“Everybody knows about the Solar Power Project,” Johnson said. “It's no secret."
“I guess not,” the engineer admitted. He looked at the metal table with its printed wood grain as if he wished it were a drawing board. “This is an experimental project, and we've demonstrated that we can get significant amounts of power out of solar energy."
“How much is that?"
“Enough for our own needs and enough more to justify the overhead towers that cross the hills toward Los Angeles.” the engineer said with a mixture of pride and defensiveness.
“That is a significant amount."
“During daylight hours, of course."
“Then why is the project still experimental?” Johnson asked.
The young man at last found something to do with one hand. “Well,” he said, rubbing his chin and making the day's stubble rasp under his fingers, “there's one problem we haven't solved."
“The daylight problem?"
“No. Energy can always be stored by pumping water, electrolyzing it into hydrogen and oxygen, with batteries or flywheels. The problem is economics: it's cheaper to burn coal, even if you toss in the cost of environmental controls and damage. Almost one-fourth as cheap. And nuclear power costs less than that. Other forms of solar power, including power cells for direct conversion of sunlight into electricity, are either less efficient or more expensiv
e."
“If the project has accomplished its purpose,” Johnson asked, “why is it still going on?"
Both the engineer's hands were in motion now as he defended his project and his profession. “We still hope for a breakthrough. Producing cheaper solar cells through integrated factories. Maybe cheaper computer-driven mirrors. Maybe putting solar power plants in space where the sun shines twenty-four hours a day, if we could solve the problem of getting the energy back. Maybe some new method of converting sunlight into useful energy like chlorophyll or the purple dyes found in some primitive sea creatures."
“Nature's method of converting sunlight into energy may still be the most efficient,” Johnson said. He looked up at one of the racehorses. It was a shiny red, and it was happily cropping blue grass inside a white rail fence.
“We're trying that, too,” the engineer said. “Energy farms for growing trees or grasses. But put it all together and it doesn't add up to a third of the energy needs of the world that once were satisfied by cheap oil."
“What about nuclear energy?” Johnson asked.
“Inherently dangerous—particularly the breeder reactor. Not basically any more dangerous in its total impact than coal or oil, but the risks are concentrated and more visible. So the moratorium on the building of new nuclear power plants has effectively ended the effort to make nuclear energy safe."
“Well,” Johnson said, “there's a lot of coal.” The engineer nodded. By now he was treating Johnson like an equal instead of a prisoner. “That's true,” he said, “but unlike oil, coal is dirty. It has to be dug, and that damages the miners—or the land if it's strip-mined. Sulfur has to be removed, in one way or another, to avoid sulfur dioxide pollution. And the coal will run out, too, in a century or so."
Johnson looked sad. “Then the energy depression is going to get worse until the coal runs out, and after that civilization goes back to the dark ages."
The engineer clasped his hands in front of him, almost in an attitude of prayer. “Unless we can come up with a workable technology for nuclear fusion."
“Fusing atoms of hydrogen together?"
“Making helium atoms and turning into energy the little bit of matter that's left over.” The engineer's index fingers had formed a steeple. “The true sunpower—the solar process itself, clean, no radioactivity, inexhaustible, unlimited power without byproducts except heat, and maybe that could be harnessed to perform useful work if we're clever enough. Why, with hydrogen fusion man would have enough power to do anything he ever wanted to do—clean up the environment, raise enough food for everybody, improve living standards all around the world until everybody lives as well as we used to, return to space travel in a big way, reshape the other planets or move them into better orbits, go to the stars—” His voice stopped on a rising note like a preacher describing the pleasures of the life to come.
“But we haven't got it yet,” Johnson said.
The engineer's eyes lowered to look at Johnson, and his hands folded themselves across each other. “We just haven't got the hang of it,” he said. “There's a trick to it we haven't discovered, and we haven't got much time as civilizations go. For the past decade we've been through an energy depression that shows no signs of letting up. How much longer can we go on? Maybe thirty or forty years, if we're lucky and don't have a revolution or a major war; and if we don't discover the secret to thermonuclear fusion by then the level of civilization will be too low to apply the technology necessary to bring it into general use, and after that there'll be no one capable of thinking about anything except personal survival."
“Pretty grim,” Johnson said.
“Ain't it?” the engineer said, and then he smiled. “That's why we keep working. Maybe we can buy a little time, ease the pressures a bit. Maybe somewhere a breakthrough will occur. If we don't find it, maybe our children will."
The engineer was a dreamer. Bill Johnson was a visionary. He knew what was coming, but the engineer jumped when the knock came at the door like the future announcing itself.
“George?” said the voice of Ellen McCleary. “Open up. I want to talk to the prisoner."
* * * *
Outside the day had turned to night. The stars were out, bright and many-colored, and the Milky Way streamed across the sky like a jeweled veil. The reflected heat from the desert below seemed friendly now against the cool evening breeze pouring down from the hills.
Ellen McCleary stopped a few yards from the cafeteria building and turned to face Johnson. “I guess you think I'm a silly woman, not able to know her own mind, first having you arrested and then setting you free."
“I may think many things about you, but not that you're a silly woman,” Johnson said. “That battle has been won; you don't have to keep fighting it. Your presence here as director of this project is proof of that."
“I thought about it,” she said, shrugging off his interruption but not looking at him, “and I decided that I couldn't throw away the chance that you might be able to help. If I can get Shelly back—” She didn't finish the sentence. Instead she held out an oblong of stiff white paper. It was a Polaroid snapshot.
He took a few steps back into the light that streamed through the front window of the cafeteria building. The picture showed writing—red, broad, smeared—against a shiny black background.
“He wrote it on the bathroom mirror with my lipstick,” she said.
Johnson read the message:
Ellen—The Court gave Shelly to you, but I'm going to give her what you never could—the full-time love of a full-time parent.
“Is that your former husband's handwriting?” Johnson asked. He seemed to be looking through the picture rather than at it.
“Yes. His language, too. He's a madman, Mr. Johnson."
“In what way?"
“He—” She paused as if to gather together all the fugitive impressions of a life with another person. She took a deep breath and began again. “He thinks that the way he feels at the moment is the only thing that matters. That he may feel differently tomorrow or even the next moment doesn't count. He'd be willing to kill himself—or Shelly—if he felt like it at the moment.” She let her breath sigh out. “That's what I'm afraid of, I guess."
“Are you sure he's homicidal?"
“I'm making him sound crazier than he is, I know, but what I'm trying to say is that he's an impulsive person who believes that people should only do what feels right to them. He doesn't believe in the past or the future. Now is the only thing that exists for him. He thinks I'm cold and unfeeling, and I see him as childish, and—but I'm talking as if you're a marriage counselor. We tried that, too."
They talked together now in the darkness, two voices without faces, sound without body. “That's all right,” Johnson said. “It helps me get the feel of things. Did he have a profession, a talent, a job?"
Her voice held the hint of a shrug. “He was a bit of a lot of things—a bit of a painter, a bit of a writer, a bit of an actor, but a romantic all the time. What really broke things up, though, was when this project got started and I was selected as director. I was in charge, and he was just—around. He had nothing to do, and conditions were pretty primitive for a while. That's when Shelly was conceived—as sort of a sop to his manhood. But it didn't last. He left for a few months when Shelly was about a year old, came back, we quarreled, he left again, and finally I divorced him, got custody of Shelly, and that's about it."
“Not much for what—ten years of marriage?"
“Yes.” She sighed. “Shelly is all, and he's taken her."
“Where did you meet?"
“In Los Angeles. At a party at a friend's house. I was a graduate student at Cal Tech; he was an actor. He seemed romantic and strong. I was—flattered, I guess—that he was interested in me. We got married in a whirlwind of emotion, and it was great for a few months. Then things began going bad. I irritated him by worrying about my career, by wanting to talk about where we were going to be next year, ten years from now.
He annoyed me by his lack of concern for those things, by his unrelenting demands upon my time, my attention, my emotions. Part of my emotions were invested in other things—in my work, for one—and he could never understand that, or forgive it."
“I understand,” Johnson said. “The times your husband left—did he return to Los Angeles?"
“I think he did the first time, although we weren't communicating too well then. But that's where he said he'd been when he came back."
“The second time?"
“I don't know. We didn't communicate at all until the divorce, and then it was through lawyers. Until that.” She indicated the photograph in Johnson's hand, a shadowy finger almost touching the white rectangle.
He held it in his fingertips, almost as if he were weighing it. “I suppose the police checked all his friends in Los Angeles."
“And his relatives. That's where he was born and grew up. But they didn't find anything. Nobody has seen him recently. Nobody knows where he might have gone with Shelly."
“Did he have any hobbies?"
“Tennis. He liked tennis. And parties. And girls.” The last word had an edge of bitterness.
“Hunting? Mountain climbing?” Johnson's words were tentative, as if he were testing a hypothesis.
She seemed to be shaking her head. “He didn't like the outdoors. Not raw. If he'd liked to hike or hunt, he still might be here,” she said ruefully. The blur of a hand gestured at the mountains that rose to the east and the north and the west of them.
“He sounds restless,” Johnson said. “Could he stay in one place for long at a time? If he starts moving around, the police will find him."
“He never has been able to stay still before, but if he thought that was the only way to hurt me he might be able to do it."
“Is Mrs. Ross sure he's the one who tied her up?"
“She never knew Steve. I hired her after he left. But she identified his picture."
“There was nobody else with him? Nobody who might be making him do what he did?"