The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

by Gene Wolfe

  HOUR OF TRUST

  You read, let us say, that this or that Corps has tried … but before we go any further, the serial number of the Corps, its order of battle are not without their significance. If it is not the first time that the operation has been attempted, and if for the same operation we find a different Corps being brought up, it is perhaps a sign that the previous Corps have been wiped out or have suffered heavy casualties in the said operation; that they are no longer in a fit state to carry it through successfully. Next, we must ask ourselves what was this Corps which is now out of action; if it was composed of shock troops, held in reserve for big attacks, a fresh Corps of inferior quality will have little chance of succeeding where the first has failed. Furthermore, if we are not at the start of a campaign, this fresh Corps may itself be a composite formation of odds and ends withdrawn from other Corps, which throws a light on the strength of the forces the belligerent still has at his disposal and the proximity of the moment when his forces shall be definitely inferior to the enemy’s, which gives to the operation on which this Corps is about to engage a different meaning, because, if it is no longer in a condition to make good its losses, its successes even will only help mathematically to bring it nearer to its ultimate destruction … .

  —PROUST,

  Remembrance of Things Past

  The north and south walls were pale blue, of painted plaster over stone. A wide door in the north wall, of dark wood and old, dark, discolored brass-work, gave into the hotel corridor, floored (like the big room itself) in dull red tile. Flanking this door were elaborate wrought iron candelabra; their candles would be lit later that night by Clio Morris, on signal from Lowell Lewis, when Force Cougar was pinned down near the 75—94 interchange in Dearborn and he felt things needed cheering up. Clio (that stenographic muse of history) was good for lighting such things: she was tall, and wore high heels and short skirts; and the soft coiffures she favored lent her face a brown and gold aureole when the flames were behind it.

  To the right of the candelabrum on the right side of the doorway stood a heavy “library” table with a blue vase full of fresh cinerarias, the blue vase and blue flowers against the blue wall producing a ghostly effect—the shadows of vase and blossoms more visible and distinct than the things themselves. Above this blue ghost was a very large and brightly colored photograph in a massive frame. It depicted a barren hill crowned with the ruins of a large stone building, of which only (what once had been) the foundation of a tower retained any semblance of its original form. At the bottom of the frame a small brass plaque had been let into the wood, and this was engraved with the words Viana do Castelo, presumably to guide any tourist who might wish to visit the site.

  Next to the candelabrum on the left of the door stood one of the twenty-three large leather-covered chairs which dotted the floor of the room—empty despite the invitation of a small table positioned near its right arm at a height convenient to hold a drink; above this chair was a second photograph of exactly the same size and shape as the first, framed in the same way. It depicted a barren hill topped with the tumbled ashlars of another (but equally demolished) stone building. The atmosphere of this photograph was so similar to that of the first that it was only after a careful process of ratiocination that the viewer (if he troubled) convinced himself that it was not a picture of the same ruin from a different angle, though in fact the two held no detail in common but the bright Portuguese sky. The plaque at the base of this second frame read: Miró.

  The south wall held three doors, each of them smaller than the large door in the north wall that gave access to the remainder of the hotel, and each leading to a bedroom-sitting room with a bath. The leftmost (east) bedroom looked down into the patio garden of the hotel, and the central bedroom out (south) toward a wing of this patio, with a wall and a street beyond. All the bedrooms were comfortably furnished with carpets and chairs and (in each case) a large double bed, but this central bedroom had, in addition, a vidlink terminal which Lewis’s executive assistant, Peters, would use several times that night. It was a wardrobe-sized gray machine with a screen, a printer, a speaker, keys for coding the addresses of others, and various switches; it had been built by United Services Corporation, the company which employed Peters, as well as Lowell Lewis and Miss Morris and Donovan (five foot eight, two hundred and thirty pounds, thinning blond hair; European sales manager for United Services, a good salesman and a hard worker; he felt he didn’t really have to worry if U.S. went down—hell, he’d lived in Europe for the past eight years, his wife was Belgian and he spoke Flemish, German and Swedish like he owned them and he had connections all over and half a dozen European firms would be tickled pink to lay their hands on him. He was right too).

  The west wall was entirely of glass and showed the Atlantic Ocean. Because the sun was low now, Peters (a middle-sized young man with a camouflaged face—Peters was one of those people who look a little Jewish but probably aren’t, and he played a good game of lacrosse) had drawn gray velvet drapes across this ocean; but later Clio Morris would open these drapes in order to see the stars.

  The east wall was also entirely of glass. It was, in fact, one immense vidlink screen fifteen feet high and thirty-five feet wide, originally installed in this permanently leased suite to demonstrate the fact that vidlink, unlike conventional television, employed what United Services referred to as “Infinite Scanning,” by which the United Services copywriters meant that a vidlink picture was not divided into a number of scan lines and hence could be magnified—like reality itself—to any extent. When this screen was turned off it was a dark and brooding presence upon which the room instinctively focused, but no drapes were provided that might be used to cover it. (When turned on it was sometimes camera as well as screen, the viewer beheld in his beholding.)

  The red tile floor was, except at the edges of the room, covered with a dark Moorish carpet on which were scattered, as smaller and less regularly shaped carpets, the hides of Angora goats. The twenty-two armchairs that did not orient themselves to the north wall were arranged on this floor facing (generally) east in a way suggestive of a loose theater. A portable bar stood close to the west window, and at this bar Peters sat eating scrambled (mexidos) eggs.

  The large door in the north wall opened and Donovan came in. He was wearing a light-colored suit and a panama hat. He saw Peters and asked, “Everything set for tonight?”

  Peters shrugged.

  “It better be. It better be good. I’ve got people coming from all over.” He named an important German industrialist. “————is coming.” He leaned closer to Peters, who was afraid for a moment that the end of his (Donovan’s) tie might fall into his (Peters’s) eggs, which were covered with a sauce that, without being ketchup, was nonetheless the color of blood. “Do you know what he told me? This’ll be the first time he’s been outside Germany since 1944. Think of it. Damn near fifty years. The old man himself.”

  Peters nodded, his mouth full of eggs, and said, “Wow!”

  Donovan named a prominent Italian industrialist. “————is coming too. From Turin. Of course he goes all over, buying art and all that crap. Hell, he spends more time in the States than I do.”

  “Not now he doesn’t,” Peters said.

  “Well, hell no,” Donovan said, offended. “What do you expect?”

  The door to the central bedroom opened and Lewis’s secretary came in wearing a yellow dress and carrying a tear sheet from the vidlink. She said, “Call for you, Mr. Peters,” and Peters took the sheet from her and went into the bedroom.

  The call was from a modeling agency in another quarter of the city, and he found himself talking to a sharp-featured, crewcut young Englishman who wore jade earrings and a (phallic) jade pendant. The Englishman said, “Tredgold here,” and Peters nodded and asked, “What can I do for you, Mr. Tredgold?” and then, unconsciously imitating Donovan, “Everything set?”

  “Just what I was going to ask you,” Tredgold said, and smiled. “You’re g
oing to do it still?”

  “Have our little party?” Peters said. “Oh, yes.”

  “Marvelous. You know, you people have come back wonderfully just in the past few weeks.”

  “Oh, we’re not dead yet,” Peters said.

  “Spirit.”

  “The girls will be here?”

  “Ten on the dot.” Tredgold looked at his watch. “Never fear. They are primping their little hearts out at this very moment.”

  “The ones Mr. Lewis selected.”

  “Quite.” Tredgold smiled again. “I daresay the old boy enjoyed that; did he say anything after?”

  Peters tried to remember, then decided it was one of those cases where a lie—he called such lies “fables” to himself—would serve better, and said, “He talked about it for an hour after we got back, and—you know—told me why he’d picked this one and not that one; all the fine points.”

  “He has an eye for décolletage, one saw that. For that matter I have myself.”

  “Interesting business you’re in.”

  “Quite.” Tredgold smiled again, his fingers twiddling one of the round jade earbobs. “Peters, I shouldn’t ask this if I were a gentleman, but how old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Just my own age. Good school and all that?”

  “Harvard Business School,” Peters said.

  “That’s good, I suppose. I went to a red-brick university myself. You like what you’re doing? Following old Lewis about and all that?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And someday you’ll be a big pot yourself—that is, if the hairies don’t tear it all down for you—but right now it’s a bit of a bore, eh? Big company and all that. Our little agency here is big company too, you know. Owned by————” -he named a British newspaper—“and they’re owned by————” -a company Peters had always associated with music tapes. “That’s American, you know. Small world.”

  “It is,” Peters said. He was wondering what would happen to Tredgold if they lost the war. Probably nothing.

  “So I was once where you are now—not quite so high, of course. At the paper; Mum and Dad had scrimped and put me through, and I was to be a journalist. One is chosen to go up in the first three years—you’re aware of that? Or not at all. Only I made a bish. You only make one bish, you know.”

  “I know,” Peters said.

  “But I was fortunate: I made a cracking good one, and they sent me here. Old Wellingsford called me into his office just after and said they wished to transfer me—a nice place for a chap like you, was the way he put it. They wanted an Englishman to run it, but the wages were Portuguese—very sorry and all that, but the rule about dismissed if you refused transfer still holds, can’t go breaking rules every moment, can we?”

  “So you went,” Peters said.

  Tredgold nodded. “Boring you, aren’t I? But you can’t say so—that’s the fault of a good school.”

  “You’re not boring me,” Peters said honestly.

  “Ah,” said Tredgold. He leaned back in his chair and for an instant Peters thought he was about to put his foot up on the desk, but he did not. “Well, I put up a brave front, you know. Going to be manager there, Mums, and good-bye for a bit, eh? Tear. Dick Whittington and all that. Tear.”

  “Bye, Dad,” Peters said, getting into the spirit of the thing.

  “Right. Absolutely. Salary four thousand bloody escudos per month, and never told them the bloody escudo’s hardly worth a farthing.”

  “You can live here cheaply, I suppose, once you know your way around the city.”

  “I shouldn’t know,” Tredgold said. “The week I came the really big pots got tired of seeing their little subsidiaries on the bad side of the books and declared a bonus for management—three percent of the net; damned little really, you’ll say, but I’m the only management we have—and all we’re going to have, as long as I’m managing. And I mean to say, a modeling agency with all those great newspapers behind it to threaten the politicians—how can one lose?”

  “If you’re in the red,” Peters remarked wisely, “three percent of nothing is zero.”

  “Oh, but we didn’t stay there, you know—not with that sort of money in view.”

  “Sounds as though they should have put you in charge long ago,” Peters said. It was one of his stock compliments.

  “They didn’t want it, you know.” Tredgold’s smile was broader than ever. “I daresay you think profit’s what they’re generally after, don’t you? Went to business school and they taught you that.”

  “Yes, they did,” Peters admitted. “Or I should say they taught us that the object of business management was to maximize the value of the stock—that was the definition we had to learn.”

  “Oh, son!”

  “I know in Britain”—Peters fumbled for words—“there’s more concern for, uh, social objectives, but still—” He stopped. Tredgold was laughing. “Well, what is it then?”

  “My dear chap … my dear old chap, look about you; haven’t you ever seen a firm where one of the salesmen started to do really well selling on commission? What do they do, eh? Fire him, take part of the territory from him, possibly make him sales manager—no commission there, you know—something of the kind. Yet he was making the firm a mint and now they haven’t got it. He was a mere salesperson, you see, and they’d sooner bankrupt the place than have him make too much. Let me tell you something: the big ones, the ones with offices and works of one sort or another all about, like yours and mine, can buy profits whenever they choose just by offering a thin bit of them to the chaps who do the work. But they don’t and they won’t, and who can blame them? I mean, what would they do with the bloody stuff?”

  “Build more plants, I suppose,” Peters said.

  “More problems for the big pots, and the government on them too; and should one of those new works not go, their reputations suffer—so why risk it? None of them know the least about manufacturing anyway.”

  “Give it to the stockholders then.”

  “Just makes the blighters greedy. No, quite seriously now, Peters, y’know what saved me? Potty little Portugal has to be shown in a separate column in the annual report, and we balance out the limousine thing—so I’m permitted to feather my wee nest. Besides”—Tredgold winked—“there are fringes. Here, love.”

  A pretty dark-haired girl came on camera. Tredgold said, “Give us a kiss, love, and blow one to the Yank—I say, Peters, your chief is behind you; bet you didn’t know it.”

  Lowell Lewis was coming through the door from the large, chair-strewn room beyond. His face, heavy and unexceptional as ever, might have been a trifle drawn. Peters put Tredgold on Hold.

  “Can you get me Hastorf on that thing?” Lewis said. He named a steel company, and when Peters still hesitated, added, “Pittsburgh.” Peters keyed the number and got a secretary, who, seeing Lewis, touched a button by which she replaced her own face with the image of a white-haired man of fifty-five or sixty. Peters cleared his throat and slipped out of the console chair; the white-haired man said, “Hi, Lou.”

  Lewis nodded and said, “Phil.”

  The white-haired man smiled. “Just about to take myself home, but what can I do for you?”

  “I don’t want to hold you up,” Lewis said.

  “Any time.”

  Lewis smiled. “Pittsburgh quieter now?”

  “Oh, we’ve never had trouble out here, Lou. We’re twenty-five miles outside the city proper, you understand. What we say is, let them have the damn place for a while and wear themselves out on it. Employees who lived in the central city are free to bed down right here in the offices at night—of course, it’s a bit hard on them.”

  “What I wanted to know, Phil, was about the planes. I was just talking to General Virdon, and he stresses the importance of having air support.”

  “We’re guaranteeing fourteen fighter-bombers,” the other man said.

  “Good. Couldn’t scrape up a few more
for us, could you?”

  Hastorf shook his head. “Not much in the way of ground crews left now, Lou. We’re sending some of our laboratory people over to the base to help out, but of course they’re mostly metallurgical specialties. Couldn’t spare a few technicians from your outfit, could you? Or some engineers?”

  “Would it get me more planes tonight?”

  Hastorf said, “I’ll talk to the boys.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. An engineer for every plane over the fifteen.”

  “Fourteen,” Hastorf said.

  “I thought you said fifteen. In fact I’m sure of it.”

  For the first time Hastorf appeared to notice Peters. “Young man,” he said, “could we hear from you?”

  Peters said, “Fifteen.”

  Hastorf gave him a wry smile before turning back to Lewis. “I’ve only got fourteen, Lou.”

  “All right, damn it, an engineer for every plane above fourteen.”

  Afterward he said to Peters, “Knew him in college. Hastorf.”

  Peters nodded.

  “Damn funny, isn’t it? He went with them, and of course I went with U.S., and hell, I don’t think—no, I bumped into him at some kind of trade show once. I remember having a drink with him. A machine tool show.”

  Peters said, “I guess you talked over old times.”

  “That’s right.” The old man turned and walked toward the door, then stopped. “Now here we are working together again.” He shook his head. “For thirty years he’s been with that steel outfit—a whole different world. Our senior year we were both on the dance committee. It’s like you were seeing somebody rise from the dead—you know what I mean, Pete?”

  Peters said, “I think so. Does————” -he named the steel corporation that employed Hastorf—“have the Air Force now?”

  “Most of it’s with some oil outfit in Texas.”

  Lewis shut the door behind him, and Peters touched, for an instant, the spot toward which Tredgold’s dark girl had blown her kiss. Then he hit Release, wondering if Tredgold had bothered to wait. Tredgold said, “’Lo, Peters. Recovered from my revelations yet?”