by Philip Wylie
TRIUMPH
by
PHILIP WYLIE
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 63-7705
COPYRIGHT © 1963 BY PHILIP WYLIE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA For Ted and Mike and Gale Pryor
CHAPTER 1
The young man driving the car interrupted a question about mathematics to whistle. "Brother! Is that the one?" He nodded at a private, ten-place jet plane standing in slack-winged silence at the head of the airstrip.
Ben Bernman grinned and, characteristically, answered the math question before he spoke of the plane: "Belongs to Vance Farr, my weekend host."
The pale, intent youth whistled again, but softly. "He must own all the tea in China and the coffee in Brazil!" The other man chuckled. "Maybe he does. He's in the import-export business."
"Oh." The driver braked his secondhand vehicle as it neared the jet. "That Farr!"
He remembered something. "Wasn't it his daughter you rescued, last winter?"
The older scientist, who was not really old, busied himself with two items of luggage, a brand-new airplane suitcase made of reinforced magnesium and a second item that invariably went wherever Ben went, and invariably in his hand or at his side: a locked, leather briefcase. With these extricated from the rear seat, he answered. "Faith Farr. Yes. I happened to be the first person to pass the place where she'd skidded off the road, in a blizzard. So naturally I stopped and went back and found the lady."
The other scowled briefly, then smiled in recollection. "Not the way I read it," he said, admiration in his voice. "I remember that plenty of cars had passed and not noticed the drifted signs of that wreck. It took--and I more or less quote--the brilliant Dr.
Bernman to make the scrutiny and deduction, stop, wander with a flashlight in the blinding snowflakes till he found the damsel, hoist her near-freezing and unconscious form to his brawny shoulder, and roar to a hospital."
Ben cuffed Dr. Swenson lightly.
But he went on, eyes twinkling. "She was exceedingly beautiful, judging from the photographs appearing at the time. About--roughly--as attractive as you are homely, Doc.
A coppery-haired blonde, right? Angel face. Brains, too, if I recall the stories. Or was that brains item just press-agent stuff?"
"Faith's plenty bright," Bernman answered. He picked up his luggage and, for an instant, eyed his assistant with an expression that was sad, regretful or, perhaps, meek.
For a man of his reputation, a man who'd won the Fermi Prize at twenty-six and now, ten years later, one who headed a department at Brookhaven, Ben Bernman was far too modest, his assistant and chauffeur felt.
Swenson watched his chief move toward the plane in the staggering heat of the last Thursday of that July, wondering if any very rich girl was bright enough truly to appreciate Doc Bernman. He decided not, and turned the car.
The pilot of Vance Farr's plane came hurriedly and the two men argued a little absurdly about carrying the luggage. Ben gave in with a slightly embarrassed laugh and, sweating, followed the muscular pilot--Al, he'd said his name was--to the jet.
Minutes later it was airborne.
Ben watched the atomic-research facility at Brookhaven as it diminished in the shimmering air to a toylike marvel: bizarre buildings that contained reactors and particle accelerators, lead-walled gardens where experiments went forward in the effect of radiation on plants, red-and-white stacks and shielded earthrises beneath which plasmas, sun-center-hot, stormed in magnetic "bottles" as the search was continued to find a means of transforming the energy of fusion bombs to a practical power source.
They'd been at it for almost twenty years now, and during the past six he'd worked on the theoretical end, at Brookhaven. When the distant toy-town and its Martian aspect were replaced by the blue of Long Island Sound, Ben perceived the speed of this luxurious plane; but the quietude of its blue-and-gold interior surprised him only when the pilot, AI, spoke: "Be over the Connecticut shore in a sec. Then it's only thirteen-fourteen minutes to Uxmal."
"Ooshmal?"
"The Farr place. Spelled, 'U-X-M-A-L.' Mayan town in Yucatán."
"Oh, yes!" Ben had never seen Uxmal--or Chichen Itza, either; but he knew about them.
"Ever been there before?"
"Never have."
"Quite a sight. If you like, I'll take a tum around the place, Doctor."
"Sure. Uxmal. Mrs. Farr told me it was modernistic, with what she called a Mayan-Toltec 'feeling.' But I didn't know--"
"She just picked a name for it last month."
"Oh."
Al listened to talk from some control tower or other, in the headphone covering his opposite ear. His nearer ear was free of its disc for in-flight colloquy. He nodded to himself and went on talking about the Farr "place" in Connecticut:
"It's on a hilltop-young mountain, comparatively, for these parts. Called Sachem's Watch. The Farr family have owned it since before the Revolution. One of those Victorian jobs stood on it--all gables and porches with fretwork. Iron deer in the gardens.
Shrubs clipped to look like birds and animals. Mrs. Farr decided to build the new place maybe ten years ago. About when I signed on as Farr's pilot. They had a turboprop Panther then, and a couple of choppers. Helicopters." The blue-eyed, extraverted man saw Ben had understood "choppers," and grinned. "You probably fly a lot, being in the H-bomb business, eh, Doctor?"
"Some. Though I'm not, really, in the bomb end. Was, for a while. But back there at Brookhaven, we're trying to tum H-bomb power into cheap electricity."
"Hope you do! Anyhow, they tore down the Victorian job, gazebos and all, and had one of that--what-was-his-name--that Frank Lloyd Wright's students--man of fifty, now--design their new house, so-called. Cut a road to the top--the old road was for buggies, I guess--round and round the hill. Going up it dam' near gets you dizzy--a real spiral climb! Mr. Farr sold off a hunk of the hilltop land and some developers built a bunch of co-operative apartment houses there. Mrs. Farr raised hell about that, and planted full-grown white pines and spruces, oaks and maples, all around the new house, to cut off any sign of the development. Candlewood Manor, it's called. The Farr place has a lot of history. Big caves under Sachem's Watch. Farr's great-grandfather used 'em, so it goes, to hide slaves in, over a century ago. Thing called the Underground Railway."
"Yes," Ben said.
"Don't suppose your folks had reached America yet." Al said that casually, not meaning to be hurtful and hardly aware he had indicated the evident fact that Dr. Ben C.
Bernman was a Jew.
"Still in Germany," Ben replied pleasantly. "And points east. Estonia. The Ukraine."
"Sure. Well, the Farrs hid slaves that got from Dixie to Long Island Sound as stowaways in ships, before the Civil War. And there were Farrs living on Sachem's Watch before the Revolution. Men who went to fight it with Israel Putnam. Big family, once. Funny, how those big families can dwindle down to--well, even to just one person.
And that, a girl. Faith."
Ben said nothing.
Al shook his head. "Imagine! Imagine having your name as celebrated and historic as 'Farr' and then realizing it is going to disappear, the minute a lone gal becomes Mrs. So-and-so!" He glanced, innocently, at the scientist. "Say! You're the man saved her, last winter!"
"Mere chance."
"Saw you on TV! In the papers! Be damned!" Al meditated a moment. "Didn't mean anything by that crack back there about when your folks reached the good old U.S.A."
"Of course not."
Al relaxed. He listened again to the phantom talk fro
m the unknown source and hooked a throat mike to a blue collar open over red hairs on his chest. He spoke briefly and almost inaudibly insofar as Ben was concerned. Numbers, mainly, and a final,
"Roger!" Then the jet tilted for a slow tum and Al pointed. "Uxmal," he said.
Ben looked down with absorption. The house--if a rectangular set of buildings with a flashing moat, surrounding an interior "patio" so extensive that its flagged areas, gardens, and terraces dwarfed a tennis court, could be called a house--lay ahead of and below the slowing jet. A spiral highway, visible here and there through giant trees, gave the hill a terraced look, suggesting, at least, the step-pyramids of ancient Mayans and Aztecs. The low buildings, flat-roofed, glass-walled, stone-supported, here and there sustained by squared timbers, did resemble pictures of the temple-surrounded playing courts of their barbaric ruins in Yucatán.
"Uxmal" was a good name for the place, Ben thought.
He also noticed, as the plane held its arc, the white, numerous, and many-angled roofs of the cooperative apartments--of Candlewood Manor, he repeated to himself. And he saw the massive tree-plantings that separated Uxmal from the common herd at Candlewood--a nevertheless expensive abode. His attention moved to another phenomenon.
One side of Sachem's Watch had been sheared away--by man or nature, he couldn't be certain in the brief view he had. But he saw a cliff-face that began some distance downhill from Uxmal and then, to his faint surprise, as the plane unfolded it, a mighty slope of raw limestone that had evidently been quarried from the area in recent times, for it lay in glittering beige blocks of enormous size, below the cliff. That evidence of Brobdingnagian blasting vanished as trees intercepted it. Next, for instants, Ben glimpsed the white clapboard sides and slated church steeples of as much of Fenwich Village as tall trees allowed airborne viewers to behold.
The plane straightened, descended, bumped. Ben had a flashing sight of a tall young woman with copper-gold hair, in a light-brown dress, standing beside a cream-and-scarlet automobile. Faith.
The jets thundered into air-scoops that threw their power forward; with a gingerly foot, the pilot braked, thrusting Ben forcefully against his safety belt. It was a short airstrip for such a craft, the scientist thought. But long enough.
Ben said, in the sudden diminishing of that final sound, "Nice trip!"
Al grinned. "Poky! Never did over five hundred miles an hour. No time for climbing, to go supersonic." He increased the sound again, swung the plane around, and blasted grass alongside the paved strip as the plane rushed back toward the other end of the field.
There, he cut the two jet engines.
Doors opened automatically, their click amazingly sharp and specific. Hot air rushed in from the wilted field, air bringing the aroma of baking concrete and grass perishing. Al made to unhitch himself and Ben shook his head. "Stay right there, friend!
When the day comes that sees me unable to lug a suitcase and a little locked sack a hundred yards across a field, I won't be riding jets!"
"Have it your way! Pleased to meet you."
Faith ran toward him from the shade. He realized the motor of her Jaguar was running and thought it wasteful till he saw its windows up and understood: it was air-conditioned and Faith had not wanted it to heat up inside, as it would have, in minutes, without cooling on this torrid afternoon.
"Welcome, Ben!" she called.
"Hi, Faith!"
They were almost within handclasp distance when he saw the flare on her ring finger. Not aware that he did so, Ben stopped. So did she. Faith seemed surprised, then understood. "You should read the society pages, darling," she said softly. "Happened a week ago. Kit Barlow. I'd assumed you knew."
He smiled then, and strode forward. "Lucky guy!" he said, and dropped both pieces of luggage. His long arms went around her and his ugly-solemn face bent down.
He kissed her firmly. "I'm glad for both of you," he said.
She looked at him, brows winged, her gold-dappled, hazel eyes alive and truthful.
"The hell you are!"
He kept his smile. "'Have it,' in Al's words, 'your way.''
Faith shrugged.
It was cool in the car, so cool he felt cold. But the thermometer on the dash showed seventy-five degrees. Outside it was probably well over a hundred in the shade.
Which made the contrast.
For the first part of their journey she was occupied by driving. A sweep of paved access-road took them onto the Yankee Turnpike. There, men driving alone in big cars, medium cars, and small cars, along with whole families in cars that sometimes sprouted children from every steaming window, swept north in all three lanes. Only Thursday. But every businessman who could, and every family able to do so, sped outward to escape the brick-kiln walls of Greater New York, to get clear, even, of Bridgeport, in this heat wave, or of any and every city, and to move out into any countryside beyond suburbs. There, still, an excessive glare fell on hamlets and farms and penetrated trees, hot as the pointed fire from sun-aimed magnifying glasses. Even the countryside panted. Its lakes were warm, its ponds hot, and some brooks had vanished, for the midsummer while.
The Yankee Turnpike, where Faith fought out a series of accelerations to gain the opposite lane, led to a cloverleaf that took them onto a blazing stretch that became asphalt and dived under trees and had a new name: Wandering Hills Road. The Jaguar slowed on a bridge beneath which water charged and foamed. Faith said, "The Lute River."
"Lovely name!"
"Isn't it!" The car moved ahead. "When I was little, I thought that lute meant
'flute,' or something like it. So I used to listen for whistling sounds. It never had any.
Winter or summer, nearby or in the distance, it always either tinkled or jangled, sort of, in deep tones. Like a lute." She smiled.
He saw her momentarily a child, pert-nosed, wide-eyed, each metallic filament of her hair disordered by play--sweaty, perhaps, in summer--her then-flat chest bared (or, in winter, wearing ski pants, probably) listening for a river to make sounds it couldn't, or didn't, or wouldn't. He banished the picture, almost as an angered man might douse the fire of a cigarette.
The Jaguar now rose on the spirals that terraced Sachem's Watch: sheer stone on the inside of the rising turns with, soon, treetops, opposite and below. They both noticed, when a random sunray set spinning color flying about the leather-upholstered car from her ring. Both looked at the ring.
"Mother," Faith said, "is ecstatic. Naturally. She's plugged Kit since he was eight and I was six--when the Barlow family built their place. On a slope of this hill. We'll pass it, soon. Dad's indignant."
"Indignant?" Ben's voice showed surprise.
She laughed. "Why not? He knows Kit and I have bored each other, off and on, for ages."
"People do," he responded gently. "Married people. Always. From time to time."
"Oh . . . that. Sure. But Dad thinks Kit is a 'lightweight,' mentally. A Little Leaguer, Dad calls him, who never grew. Dad sometimes refers to him also as"--she giggled--"'what you find on the other end of golf clubs.' Still--" she didn't sigh, though she would have, if she'd been given to self-dramatization, "Kit's big and easygoing and comfortable and familiar and very tolerant!" The wide eyes cut toward him.
He ignored them. "I'm anxious to meet Kit."
"I'll bet!" Faith's laughter was short and she followed it with a question. "Why didn't you ever ask me to marry you?"
A joke? Sadism? Did she mean it? Ben felt twenty billion electron volts could not have shocked him more. But he felt he had to hurry with some sort of reply. He took an attitude seemingly, at first, very solemn:
"Let's consider that question, Faith. First, the man's looks. Mine. I have been called a bean pole. Even, 'the Israelite Ichabod Crane.' My ears have been described as squashed paper cups set at right angles to a head that is often said to be more equine than human. Horselike. This beaky and elongated nose has been claimed as the equal of anything Modigliani ever painted. My eyes are held to be the same
'blue-clay blue' that the pre-Roman cannibals of Britain daubed themselves with."
She gurgled with mirth. "Homely," she finally agreed. "But how! Yet, when you smile, it's like a Christmas tree coming on in the dark! Next fact. All the people who work for you, with you, over you--everybody I ever heard of who knew you--loves you.
Including me. So there!"
He nodded soberly but went on. "You are Money, Miss Farr. Also, Society, Café Society, and Blue Blood-- not mud-blue, either. The McCoy. My old man is a Jewish shop-owner in Newark. I'm exactly one generation from going to church in a yarmulke."
"Oh, fiddle! You're as religious as Dad. Nil. Nix. None."
"Then there is the matter of my métier."
"Math? Physics? I was damned good at math in college! Our prof literally implored me to go on, after calculus."
"But you studied opisthotonos dancing, instead."
"You fool! Wait a sec! Opisthotonos. That's the spinal back-bend you get in your dying agonies if you take strychnine. Or if you die of tetanus."
He nodded, his expression unimpressed. "Next on the agenda. My present plans.
Along about mid-October I'm scheduled to leave for Antarctica--"
"Ben! You're not!"
"--a thing you'd know I recently agreed to do, if you read the science news. Some special studies to be conducted down there, of the magnetosphere, certain new missiles, and communications. Some low-temperature work: laser phenomena at near-absolute zero."
"Near-absolute zero is right! How long will you be gone?"
"Two years," he said quietly.
She accelerated so savagely she had to brake hard and instantly, afterward, to keep from leaving the road and flying onto the roofs of Candlewood Manor Apartments, visible below. She flushed, then grew slightly pale, bit her lip, glanced at a vast mansion set far back from the road, and did not tell Ben it was the Barlow home--did not need to.
Finally, she said, "Do--are you--allowed visitors?"
"Like in penitentiaries?" He chuckled. "Sometimes."
"Women?"
"Sometimes. Wives, at least. After all, it was--oh, in the Kennedy Administration, I guess--second term, I think--when they started building a genuine, domed city in Marie Byrd land--and it's as comfortable as your family's Park Avenue penthouse, indoors, even at minus seventy outdoors."