by Philip Wylie
Now, entering the hysterical lobby of the hotel as dawn broke, he walked dazedly to the desk. The clerk looked at him with frightened eyes. “Yes, Dr. Gaunt?’”
“Is there a piano anywhere around that I could use?”
“Dr. Gaunt!”
A faint smile broke the face which a winter’s sun tan had turned a sickly yellow.
“I’m all right, Mr. Jenkins. It’s just that I’m not ready to sleep again, quite. And it’s always been my custom, when I’m particularly disturbed, to play to myself. It helps me think.”
“Oh.” The answering smile was wan. “God knows, if it will help anybody like you to think—! Let me see. Would you mind the ballroom?”
“Why should I?”
The tremendous portières were drawn. Slipcases covered what seemed acres of furniture around the dully shining dance floor. Here and there light pierced the draperies.
Lances of sunshine, not bright enough to illuminate the room, struck prismatic pendants on the chandeliers and so flecked ceiling, walls and floor with tiny rainbows. On the bandstand stood a covered grand piano; beside it, chairs and music racks.
Gaunt had been let in through double doors fifteen feet high, unlocked by a shaky-fingered bellboy. Gaunt closed them and sauntered to the piano, first throwing back its cover and then sitting on the stool. For a minute, he opened and shut his hands.
Presently, in the prism-lit chamber, he played “Chopsticks.” It was an elaborate arrangement and he did not play very well: his rhythm was good but he occasionally missed notes.
As he played, his face became softer.
He was remembering. . . .
Remembering, he began:
Say it with music
Beautiful music!
Somehow they’d rather be kissed
To the strains of Chopin or Liszt. . . . (1921, Irving Berlin)
Long ago.
Edwin and Edwinna hadn’t been born, then.
Paula and he had gone to Paris that summer.
He could hear foreign fiddles playing the old tune.
Saxophones playing it again at one of the college proms.
He could see people dancing. In a room something like this. The gymnasium.
He grinned. His right foot chonked on the pedals and his left beat time to
“Dardanella.”
Memory. . . .
It was the 6th of August and 1945 and he and Paula were at their summer place—
at Sunset Point, on Lake George. He had known about it all along and expected it: he had been at Alamogordo that fateful night. But this was different. Hiroshima. He’d kept thinking: that’s the name of the first city—Hiroshima—I wonder what it means in Japanese? And he had asked Paula but she hadn’t been able w tell him. So he had thrown away the newspaper with the violent black headlines and gone into the living room and seated himself at the upright and played “Dardanella.”
Paula had called, after a while, “How in the world can you just sit there drumming that trash?”
And he’d answered, “Oh, maybe because music is good for savage beasts—like us Americans. Maybe because it gives me perspective to play tunes from the dear old days when I aspired to be jazz pianist and the world was innocent. Or, maybe, because I’m a vulgarian at heart. Isn’t the lake beautiful this afternoon?”
And she’d come in and kissed his head and they had looked at the blue lake, the green mountains, the farther mountains that were olive and mauve where shadows fell in the valleys. Kissing his head—kissing his face—and, presently, since they were alone in the house that afternoon, forgetting altogether that this was Day One of the Atomic Age.
Treating it like any other good day.
I—got rhythm. . . .
And that newer, asinine thing. How did it go?
The ballroom echoed to the banged-out chords of “Mule Train.”
Clickety-clack!
Gaunt felt, in the cold, dismembered portions of his soul, the beginning surge of little forces that added themselves together, perfused and suffused within him, and bit by bit restored his sense of humanity, his strength.
He played on.
By and by one of the great doors opened again but he did not hear it. A white-haired old man entered the ballroom, stared, and stopped short. For a moment his sensitive face was stricken. But soon, as his eyes grew more used to the light, he grinned.
“I suppose,” he called, when Gaunt stopped to consider what to play next, “there’s a drop of Nero even in a philosopher’s blood!”
Gaunt turned and chuckled. “Fiddling while Rome burns? Hello, Tateley! Come in! I was trying to relax.”
“You’re not absolutely the worst pianist I ever heard!”
“A vulgar taste, I’ll admit to. But as for my technique—”
“It’s enthusiastic, I’ll say that!” The old man stepped up on the stage with nimbleness and sat down on the stool beside Gaunt, who asked. “Can you play
‘Chopsticks’?”
“It’s been a long time—” The astronomer put his index fingers together. They began.
“Keep going.” Gaunt shouted. “I’ll do the variations—you hold the main theme.
You’ve got the beat, old boy! The feeling!” They went through the musical rigmarole to the end of Gaunt’s variations.
Then the philosopher turned. “You were hunting me up?”
“Of course.”
“Something—else?”
“Something.” Tateley drew a breath. He rubbed his hands together, then pressed them between old knees that showed thin and gnarled through his gray trousers. “We’ve all been called back again. How are you for sleep?”
“How is anybody?”
“This is the last gambit,” Tateley said, after a while. He peered off into the dusky room.
Gaunt said, “Hunh!” He looked at the astronomer, turned back to the keyboard, and began to play softly, “We’re headin’ for the last roundup.”
The obviousness of the tune, which the astronomer recognized, the silliness of Gaunt’s piano playing, gave the old man one more moment of anxious doubt. But as he studied Gaunt’s face he understood a second time and more deeply than before.
To such a man, Tateley thought, to a man who has spent his life amidst the reflections, the dreams, the hopes humanity has for itself—to a man who has bent himself to learn and to teach what is true and what the world ought to do in relation to truth—
these light tunes are a final yang and yin of it. They are his ironic commentary on his fellows and also on his kinship with the tawdriness of his fellows. They are, just as much, a kind of appeal to that dim intuition which makes necessary for every man, however ignorant and dull, to have his private art. Apology and defiance—abnegation and common prayer—escape and identification.
Tateley shut his eyes for a moment, squeezed them together. Who am I, he thought, to criticize a lack of magnitude? I, who have devoted all my self-important hours to the remotest of the paradoxes: hot stars in cold space? This is a human being!
He put his arm across Gaunt’s shoulders. ‘“You kind of know, Bill, what I mean by—‘last gambit’?”
“I kind of think I do.” Gaunt smiled.
There was a pause. Tateley said, “Do you happen to know a song called, ‘Any Little Girl That’s a Nice Little Girl’?”
Now, that absurd lilt filled the great chamber, as frivolous and pointless as the miniature rainbows that bespattered the bronze gloom.
“I used to sing it,” Tateley said, “when I courted Emma. I played the mandolin a little in those days. You know, I’d completely forgotten that?”
Gaunt nodded without a smile.
Any little girl that’s a nice little girl
Is the right little girl for me!
She don’t have to look like a girl in a book
With a straight front X-Y-Z. . . .
The old man’s eyes were burned by held-back tears. There’s another thing about this damned ritual, he thought. It’
s recapitulation. It’s more potent than a calendar, than a list of the presidents and the wars. It’s memory in the raw. It’s America down the years. It reminds him elf the good things, the happy times, the jokes, the sentiment. He doesn’t have to think—just play this drivel and it turns into some sort of emotional history.
Gaunt stopped abruptly. He dropped his arms and sighed. “Well? Let’s get it done, if that’s how things are. They want us back again?”
“God knows what for,” the astronomer replied. “They’ve already made the decisions and sent out the word.”
“What was it?” Gaunt played an arpeggio. “They threaten to shoot the works?
Blow up the planet? We surrender—or else nobody survives: Something of that sort?”
“You’re a shrewd man, Bill!” Tateley shrugged. “An ultimatum came from Borovgrad this morning. It was signed by Karlodtskov. They said they had an oxygen bomb and would use it in twenty-four hours if we did not surrender unconditionally. Said the bomb had not been tested and the People’s Republic could not be held accountable for the effect, which might include stripping the earth’s atmosphere.”
“Borovgrad,” Gaunt repeated. “I wonder if that’s the last one?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You ever read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court?”
The astronomer shrugged. “I imagine I did.”
“There’s a point at which the hero is about to be burned at the stake. But he’s prepared a lot of fireworks. An eclipse of the sun is also about to take place. Just before they apply the torch, and just as the sun starts to show the moon’s profile, the Yankee touches off some of his skyrockets, with a hell of an incantation. It consists, as I remember it, of the names of cities. ‘Constantinople,’ and so on. King Arthur and his minions were greatly impressed, and called off the burnings.”
Tateley looked at the other man mildly. “I’m afraid the connection still eludes me.”
“One of my superstitions,” Gaunt answered. “Everybody brought up as we were has superstitions, no matter how he tries to shed them. Culture’s lousy with compulsives and taboos. Shed the old ones; new ones appear. And since the atom’s beginning, I’ve collected those weird names—the cadences, and wondered against all common sense what name would put a period to the list. You know. Alamogordo-Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Bikini-Eniwetok. Doesn’t that sound like a medieval formula for summoning a djinn?
One more word, I kept thinking, and the demon will be out of the bottle. So I merely wondered if Borovgrad would top it off and do the trick. Sounds demonaic enough.’”
“Oh.” The astronomer nodded to himself and finally said, “You seem very calm about all this.”
“Anything but! Still, since you’ve said the decision has been made, I take it that our summoning is perfunctory. We’re going to be told what’s what—and no choice for us. Why, then, should I exert my faculties?”
“We had our chance,” Tateley said in a tone of agreement. “And all we did was—
”
“Convene, confer, form committees, elect chairmen, fret and stew, confide in each other, brace each other up, tear each other down—in short, behave like a bunch of women delegates trying to decide whether to have the next flower show in the summer or the fall.”
“Still, when a matter involving such difficult scientific knowledge is at the center of things, it’s too bad the final decision was made, not by scientists, but by one politician and three or four military men.”
“Science? I don’t know,” Gaunt answered. “When the end of the world is threatened, I doubt if science is much involved. People, rather. It’s a human problem then. Since the President refused to surrender—”
Tateley interrupted. “How the devil do you know that?”
“Why—if he’d surrendered, you’d have come wobbling down here looking for me and when you found me you’d have said in a tottering voice, ‘It’s the end!’ or words to that effect. The possibility of the end of our world, to you, Tat, is less sinister than the ending of human liberty would have been. Dignity versus the ape.”
The other man nodded grudgingly, “I suppose you’re right. What the President did was to radio back that, unless the Soviet surrendered in twelve hours, we would use our untested bomb on them.”
“Damn! Great! The untested bomb we don’t have.”
“And doubt they have.”
“Well, well, well!” Gaunt murmured. He played a few bars. “I guess we better go back to the White House. I’m tired of that place, but we shouldn’t have to spend much more time there. You know, Tat, we’re going to learn soon now just how much value there is in poker, as contradistinguished from nuclear physics!”
The astronomer sighed,
After the four quietest and most frightful hours through which Gaunt had ever passed, he, and the hundreds of persons in the White House and the thousands then waiting in the streets, were informed that the Soviet had capitulated. A new government was being formed. Emissaries would be at the disposal of the American government on the day following. All attack had been countermanded and no further atomic explosions would occur in the United States or elsewhere. The American forces were begged to hold their fire. The war was ended.
But it was not an occasion for rejoicing.
Blake said, when the President had made the announcement, “Now we will have time to face the problem!”
Gaunt was assigned to attend a conference In New York. He would have gone there in any case, at the first opportunity: Edwin was missing. The efforts he had been able to make by wire, by phone, by letters scribbled to friends of his son after each day’s discussion and conference had produced no satisfactory reply. So Gaunt left Washington in haste. And at Edwin’s apartment, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the philosopher found as much of an answer as he was to have for a long time.
It was again cold and lowering when he arrived, such weather as indicates by a frigid atmosphere, a scudding gray sky and the premature beginnings of winter dusk that New York is a northern metropolis set near a chilly sea. The building in which son, his son’s wife, Frances, and their children lived, had a deserted seeming. There was no doorman. The ferns in the lobby were withering. It was probably the superintendent’s wife, Gaunt absently thought, who had always watered them.
He rang for the elevator and waited a long while.
“No,” said the cross old man who operated the car. “I don’t know where he is!
Five-six of the tenants are missing—away—someplace. All day long, I gotta tell jerks I don’t know where they are. I run an elevator, mister, not an information bureau!” His tobacco-colored eyes squinted at the anxious face of the tall passenger and their expression changed slightly. “Hell! Don’t mean to be rude! I had six granddaughters, mister.”
“Tough,” Gaunt said. “I’m sorry.”
He was let into the familiar apartment. The elevator man followed him. “Around six, the night ‘it’ happened—I went through all the rooms where nobody was. In here, she left a roast going. Just ready to eat. Took it out. Woulda burned. That was the sort of thing I was checking for. Put it in the icebox. Suppose it’s still there. Forgot it.” A faint buzz came from the hall. “Gotta go. Help yourself.”
Gaunt scrutinized a growing heap of mail behind the door, on the floor. Nothing.
He walked to the desk in the living room and sat down, going through it slowly. A lump came in his throat. Frances was a conventional girl. Ambitious for Edwin, but sweet. The notes she had left unmailed were stiff and schoolgirlish; they were also dutiful and kindly. The neat shopping lists were full of items for the youngsters—new vitamins, special foods. Frances spent most of her time thinking about her children, planning for them and reading conscientiously in magazines for women, for parents, so that her two young daughters would have the best benefits.
Nothing there about Edwin.
The children’s beds were neatly made. Toys lay on the nursery floor.
In th
e master bedroom, the twin spreads were smooth and the twin blue puffs folded. Gaunt hurried through, unaware of the wetness of his eyes until, in the bedroom alcove, he sat down at Edwin’s typewriter desk and found it was hard to read the mail heaped there.
Edwin was a brilliant chemist and an excellent businessman but Edwin, in definite contrast to his pretty wife, was not orderly.
Gaunt came upon carbons of recent letters written by his son. The topmost was addressed to him. He read it with trembling hands.
Dear Dad:
In a hell of a hurry! (He usually was.) So this will be terse. Forgive. Tried to phone you a dozen times. Circuits jammed, service rotten, missed. There is no use trying to say anything here about this hellish phantasmagoria. I can’t believe it’s real, in a sense, can you? In another way, I believe it’s all too real! But this is no place, no time, to go into it-
—rom that standpoint.
A report came in yesterday—Air Force channels—that a whole tribe of native women had survived. in New Guinea, of all places! My old colonel is heading up a fast mission, to find out. It’s important, to my way of figuring. If some women did survive, it means something real has happened and the rest are—what? Gone forever? Guess so. If the report is phony we can go back to thinking the whole thing is—again, what?
Nightmare? Mass hallucination? Something universal, therefore different. Anyhow, I’m going on the junket. Might take a week. Month. Depends. My colonel, I suppose, could order me to, anyhow; point is, I want to go and know. First stop, when I get back, will be wherever you are. Love, Dad, sympathy.
Edwin
P.S. See Blake and the Prexy have appointed you to head up an evaluation commission.
Congrats! They picked a good man. Stay on the ball and if you need an assistant, save the spot for me! I was about to add—love to Mother. Appalling, isn’t it all? E.G.
A tear splashed the page. Gaunt noticed then that the typewriter paper was wrinkled in two small, circular spots where other tears, those of his son, had fallen and dried, probably when he had read over the carbon copy.