by John Boyd
After dinner she showered and put on the green frock Hal had liked and spent an extra five minutes on her makeup. She pleasantly anticipated meeting Hans, a pleasure at odds with her strategic position. Clayborg was no matinee idol, by one foot in height and by an additional six inches of flaring hair, but he attracted her like a vacuum cleaner, and his mind was a magic lantern.
While she watched the magic lantern cast shadows on the walls, the walls were closing in. If the petition failed, she knew she could expect a pleasant chat in Gaynor’s office, with ceremonial tea, perhaps, and their discussion of Freda Caron’s future would end with a guillotine-edged suggestion: “Freda, perhaps you’d be happier in pure research.”
Once she had had a roommate in college, Freda recalled, a Catholic girl of reckless nature who was always starting a novena about once every twenty-eight days, and…
The phone rang. Hans was waiting. “Standing by for six drinks and a discussion of the Stanford-Hammersmith experiment.”
Downstairs she slid into their comer booth, saying, “I exaggerated last night. Four drinks is my limit.”
“How’d you discover your limit?”
“I have a phobia against being touched. It leaves me after four drinks.”
“Then your capacity hasn’t been established empirically. What you’ve established is the number of drinks it takes to let you feel normal.” He whipped a slide rule from his pocket and squinted at it in the pale glow from the table lamp. “Projecting the curve, your optimum feeling should occur somewhere in the area of five and three-fourths drinks… Waiter, two double martinis!”
It was her first martini, and she liked the metallic tingle. “If this were a bell,” she said, “it would strike a very clear note… Tell me truly, Hans: what are our chances for getting the Gaynor Station on Flora?”
“Very slight.”
“Oh, dear! If it fails, Doctor Gaynor will blame me.”
“That’s the name of his game,” Hans said casually. “When the Navy moved in, Gaynor figured the petition would fail, so he set you up as a pigeon for the Navy’s big guns. Now, you’ll take the blame for the petition’s failure.”
“If you’re my friend, Hans, why did you agree to let me present the petition?”
“I figured you saw a chance to get the personal attention of the Secretary of Agriculture, since he’s watching, and I figured Rosie’s eloquence plus your charm would give us a fair chance. So, I bet on you. Rosie’s neck snap was the fickle finger of fate.” He sipped his drink and said, “What I can’t figure is how space madness got onto our agenda in the first place.”
“James Berkeley steered it on,” she said. “He and I are next in line for Bureau Chief, and he’s cutting me out.”
“Don’t worry about Berkeley,” Hans said. “You’ve got weapons to blast him out of any entrenchment, and I’ll show you how to use them before the night’s over. Anyway, in office politics, the methodology of the psychiatrist puts him at a disadvantage.”
“Speaking of psychiatry,” she said, “what’s the Hammerford-Stansmith Experiment?”
“Stanford-Hammersmith,” he corrected, eyeing her drink. “You’re not ripe yet.”
“You couldn’t tell me anything more shocking than what you’ve already laid bare about office politics. I read the manual Maneuvering for Promotion. But it’s one thing to read about knife fighting; It’s quite another to feel a knife in your back.”
“Shock lag between theory and practice,” he said. “You’re bloodied now. Sooner or later you’ll learn to enjoy the thrust and parry, particularly the thrust.”
He was talking on a high level, she knew, but, somehow, his language seemed slightly suggestive.
He leaned forward. “The first rule of office politics, Freda, is to form friendships in high places. At Santa Barbara, we’re all given cabinet-minister status to spare us from intraoffice politics. Of course,” he added cryptically, “we still practice extraoffice politics, for our friends.”
“Why, Hans Clayborg, you never told me you had cabinet rank.”
“I thought you knew.”
“I noticed Gaynor deferred to you, but I thought it was because of your political knowledge. I never thought pure-research people got…” She paused.
“So high,” he finished for her, grinning. “Waiter, another round!”
Her first martini had made her bold. “Hans, why don’t you get Gaynor transferred, and get me his job?”
“Gaynor’s my pigeon,” he grinned. “I need him to help me get entropy experts on Flora. I may lose this battle, but the war goes on.”
“You aroused his vanity so strongly with the Charles Gaynor Station that he’s… willing to sacrifice me to get it.”
“Well, I see your judgment’s not impaired. Are you ready for the Hammersmith-Stanford theory?”
“Shoot, Luke,” she said, using a Polino phrase and thinking that she sincerely liked this man with the wire hair and the rank of cabinet minister. She might very well make him her first friend in a high place.
He waited for the waiter to attend their drinks, then said, “Hammersmith and Stanford are two English experimental psychologists who set up an artificial tropical oasis near Loch Ewe, Scotland. In this garden, where dulcimers strummed through the warm and perfumed air, they placed maidens in various stages of dress. Into the garden they brought young spacemen whose profiles showed they had formerly possessed rampant libidos but who were now night walkers. The maidens cooed and sighed and beckoned, but to no avail. The spacemen kept their eyes on the stars.
“In particular, I remember one young lieutenant, Ian Harris, whose fiancée awaited him in the garden. They had planned to be married after his shakedown cruise, but he had returned starstruck from his first voyage.”
Hans paused, rolling his glass around the rim of its base, and Freda could have sworn his eyes moisted over. “Ian’s beloved had volunteered to help him, and she was waiting in the garden when he entered, gazing up at the stars. She was not undraped in the academic sense, but she was tantalizingly clothed. When Ian entered, she said, ‘Ian, this is your Suzanne, and I’m lonely.’
“For a fleeting second, his eyes dropped and he saw her. His responses were instantaneous, obvious, and normal. But his eyes went back to the stars, and in a voice trembling with passion he said, ‘Suzanne, Sagittarius is so clear tonight, you can actually see the archer.’ ”
Hans finished his drink and ordered another round.
“What happened to the girl?” Freda asked.
“She married a swab jockey, better equipped for the rigors of space, who got into OCS through her fathers pull—he was an admiral—and her husband’s now commander in the Royal Space Navy.”
“Why didn’t they put her on a limb,” Freda wondered aloud, “and put Ian underneath her tree?”
“I don’t think that was the error,” Hans said, “but there was an error. Currently I’m corresponding with the chief of the Psychiatric Department at Houston on this matter. I think the Hanford-Stammersmith theory takes a pratfall in the libidinal area.”
“How so?”
“For the intellectual—and, mind you, only the most sensitive minds succumb to space rapture—the primary erogenic zone is the brain. Their libidos are not sublimated but coordinated. Intellectuals don’t ‘fall in love.’ They form value judgments. For instance, if an architect is designing the Chartres Cathedral, a rape case strolling through his office couldn’t draw his attention from the drawing board. Your boy Polino probably attracts you, but your libido, which is stronger than most, is focused on plant life. I contend that Hammerford-Stansmith offered libidinal lures without comcomitant values to be judged.”
“If I have a strong libido, Hans, why do I resent being touched?”
“A defense mechanism, bars to keep the beast caged, levees to keep the flood channeled for socially useful purposes.” Again he whipped out his slide rule, squinting at it in the dim light. “You’ve had three doubles; according to my calculat
ions, your thalamus should be in balance with your cerebrum. Lets try a game of ‘feelies.’ Here, give me your right hand.”
He took her right hand with his left hand and ran his fingers up and down her bare upper arm. “Any reaction?”
“Goose pimples!”
“Normal. You’re slightly ticklish. Now, through my coat, squeeze my right arm with your left hand. What does it feel like?”
“Hard. You’re very muscular.”
“I play handball with that arm… Now, Freda, close your eyes and place your right hand, palm up, on the table. I’m placing my index and second finger of my right hand into the groove formed by the index and second finger of my left hand and placing the four fingers in your palm. Now, grip the four fingers lightly. Good! Any repulsion?”
“None whatsoever!”
“Very good. Now, here. What do you feel?”
“I feel like another round. Order us one while I go to read the scoop, but send them to my room. That bartenders getting mighty curious!”
On her way to the pill dispenser for the first time in her life, she felt weirdly buoyant and free. Something was wrong with gravity!
Part of her airiness came from the certain knowledge that Hans Clayborg was the best ally in a high place any woman administrator could possibly have. This man was an authentic genius. He could read her mind. He could manipulate bureau chiefs over telephones. He could explain the Goldberg theory to a botanist and write directives to a neuropsychiatric chief denouncing the Hammerstand-Smithford theory. He had promised to teach her how to blast out an entrenched foe. She would feel safe around him even with a dying sun. He could figure out a way to relight the lamp. He had taught her, with a flick of the fingers, that her life-dominating obsession was merely a childish aversion, even if he didn’t guess the right reason. She didn’t have the slightest doubt that this boy would come up, sooner or later, with a handful of human corn seeds.
She returned to find him standing to meet her, fighting his own battle with gravity, and he said, “I’ve rechecked my figures by the bar lamp, and I think you’ve gone over the optimum. Besides, I don’t want room service coming in. My first reaction would be to jump out of the window, and sixteen stories is a long, long drop.”
“Come along, then, little man. But there’s one house rule in my room… No teeth! You take them out. How’d you lose them anyway, Hans?”
Always the gentleman, he retrieved her purse from the table and slipped his teeth into the bag, explaining, “I was trapped in a vulnerable position.”
It was a strange interlude, without apprehension, without even expectation or curiosity. Somewhere near the ceiling Doctor Caron floated and observed with clinical detachment the crab which scuttled toward Freda, sounding like a seal strangling a bark. But to Freda it was a turtle, and she giggled. “What are you giggling about?” he asked.
“I remind myself of a beach,” she said, “and you’re a turtle digging in the sand to lay an egg. But why doesn’t your shell clack?”
“I could clack my teeth if you prefer clacks, but you took them.”
Later, he said, “Oh, boy,” as he dragged her to the shower, “you are different.”
Courteous as always, Hans turned on the cold water as she sat in the corner of the stall. Leaning above her, grinning his toothless grin, he said, “Now, Freda, once more, with Gaynor. He’ll give you the Bureau, send Berkeley to Tucson, and throw in the experimental farm as a bonus.”
Suddenly his enthusiasm changed to gentleness. He bent beneath the pelting drops, kissed her tenderly on the cheek, and said, “Good night, sweet princess, and bands of angels lull thee to thy rest.”
His gentleness touched her, and as he softly closed the shower-stall door, she began to weep. Poor Paul! One girl’s defloration was another’s efflorescence, Polino had said; but, here, on a night that should have marked her entry into womanhood, she had felt nothing but a whimsical merriment, thought of nothing but crustaceans.
Her analyst was right. Condemned forever to psychic virginity, she was as frigid as the water pelting back and sides. Caronous sireni pseudodos! Frozen Freda! Paul, her beloved, was getting nothing but an empty package. Her warm tears merged with the cold shower and she slept.
At almost five o’clock she awakened with nausea, and turning off the shower, she went to the toilet and was sick. The pill, she thought. She was allergic to those quick-action pills. Considering the matter objectively, a momentary nausea was far, far better than coming to her wedding, gowned in white, and five months advanced into pregnancy.
She dried her cherry-red body and calmed her chattering teeth, checked to see that Hans had not forgotten his teeth, and crawled into her mussed bed.
Strangely at peace with herself, she joined the Athenians for breakfast. There was an air of subdued elation in the alcove, though Hans greeted her with his ordinary cordiality, no whit the more, no whit the less, and handed her the reason for their happiness.
A columnist in the Posthole, the Eavesdropper, reported that the debate in the committee was splitting along party lines, which meant that if Heyburn went with his party, Flora would be admitted to earth’s colonial system.
“What do you think now, Hans?” Gaynor asked.
“Things are brightening up,” Hans said.
Gaynor beamed at her. “If this goes through, and the Gaynor Station’s established, we’ll owe it all to our Department of Cystology.”
As Freda ordered ham and eggs with a stack and a sausage patty, plus a large orange juice and a bloody mary, she read Clayborg’s mind. He did not figure for a moment that the petition would be granted. He was giving her this last opportunity to bask in official sunshine.
Tonight she would begin that novena, she decided. She could get a third of the way through. She was not particularly religious, but any little thing that could help should be tried. Anything to prevent her from using her big guns on Charles Gaynor.
Food and the bloody mary helped realign her focus on the world, and Freda spent most of the day in the Library of Congress reading in a field outside of her field. She skipped lunch and dinner with the Athenians, but she welcomed the eleven-o’clock call from the bar. “Don’t wear that green dress,” Hans said to her. “Or I’ll keep my teeth.”
Dressed in blue serge, she entered, and Hans went straight to the point, over sloe-gin fizzes. “I knew you knew what I was doing when I sounded optimistic this morning. You and I are in rapport. The Navy’s going to work Heyburn over from stem to stern. Speaking of framework, I apologize for last night. My calculations were off. When we reached the sensitive area, I couldn’t see the slide rule. I was blinded by your green dress and golden hair. Barring a few idiosyncrasies, you’re the most potent combination of beauty and brains I’ve met, but there’s no true beauty without some strangeness of proportion. Please, dear lady, never wear green again. You need Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara needs me, and you throw me off my game. Always wear navy blue to our rendezvous. It’s safer, since I’m allergic to the Navy.”
His plea was jocular, but there was intensity in his eyes and rigidity to his hair that belied his humor. Gently she reached over and took his hand. “Hans, you’ve taught me great truths, and I’m grateful. I enjoy our nightly sessions, and I don’t wish to throw you off your game. I promise you, I’ll never wear green, never drink over four drinks, and never ask you to remove your teeth again.”
Hans’s incredible ability at offhand predictions proved correct when, after three days’ deliberations, Heyburn was wafted to North Dakota as a guest of the Space Navy to dedicate the Senator Heyburn Training Pad for student pilots. The committee went into recess pending his return.
Freda was grateful for the time. She was involved at the Library of Congress, but her reading was done on the premises, and no book was checked out in her name.
Frigidity in the female was a battlefield, she found, which had been fought over since the reign of Queen Victoria. It was a field littered with the misspent efforts of psyc
hologists, psychiatrists, gynecologists, and French woman novelists. As a speed reader, she covered forty volumes in six days. Books by psychiatrists were legal briefs beginning with an assumption supported by quotations from other books to prove the validity of the assumption, and the other books quoted the subject book to support their assumptions. This was how “schools” of psychology were born, she discovered, and each had its guru. Brushing aside the drones to get to the queen bee, she found two well-documented opinions: (1) Frigidity in females did not exist organically. (2) Orgasms in females could not occur organically. On the seventh day, she rested and tossed a coin—heads “yes,” tails “no,” but by now her platonic friendship with Hans had progressed to the point where she could discuss anything with him, and with freedom. She tossed the problem to Hans.
He clapped an astonished hand to his forehead. “Child, you are naive. I told you it was a slide-rule error.”
“But you were only figuring my optimum drinking capacity.”
“Not your drinking optimum,” he assured her, “but your feeling optimum. I was calculating the point at which your desire to be loved balanced your fear of being touched. Because I was too drunk to read the scale correctly, I took you beyond the point of no return. Your cerebral impulses had correctly ceased to function, but your thalamus was too dead also. When you giggled, I knew I had lost. I could have waited in the shower with you until your sensitivity came back, but, frankly, I couldn’t take the cold water for an hour or two.”
He shook his head slowly, “Don’t let your life be wrecked by my physical cowardice. On your wedding night, carefully measure out and drink four and one-quarter martinis, then pray for the safety of Paul Theaston.”
She appreciated his reassurance, but she knew, sadly, that he was her friend now. He wouldn’t hesitate to lie to her. Anyway, her problem was as bad as ever. Paul strongly disapproved of drinking, and he would think it suspicious indeed if his supposedly innocent bride carefully measured out and drank four and one-quarter martinis on their wedding night in order to prime herself for their nuptial couch.