by John Boyd
Chapter Six
According to Freda’s acquaintances who were informed on such matters, a novena was a devotion stretched over a week and two days. If she had started prayers on the first night, forgoing the fornication and intoxication, she might have finished her devotion with a day to spare, but her faith in prayer might have suffered a setback. Heyburn gave the Flora plea a flat turndown.
Findings were announced Saturday at two p.m., two days after Heyburn’s seven-day revel amid the fleshpots of Bismarck and Mandan had ended. It was a blustery, snowy day outside, but Freda had to admit he looked chipper and cherubic after his all-expense-paid tour. In a crowded chamber, at one minute after two, Eastern Standard Time, the Senator rose to face the red “action” lights of the cameras, rapped his gavel three times, and announced:
“Comes now the findings of the Senate Committee on Planetary Selection. To all present, the President of the United States sends greetings. Be it known that his committee, by a vote of five to four, finds that the planet known variously as Flora, the Flower Planet, and the Planet of Flowers, coordinates 121.63 degrees horizontal, 3.187 degrees vertical and down, 14.383 parsecs out from Galactic Center, on the wheel of the Milky Way, is hereby designated a pariah planet. To his beloved constituents, the Citizens in Good Standing of the United States, on earth or in high heavens, he does declare said planet now, and forever more, unsuitable for their habitation, unless this decree be revoked by the UN Planetary Council in subsequent session assembled. This decree, issued on the eleventh day of February, 2237, does in no way revoke the terms and privileges of scientific expeditions currently employed or in process of being employed upon said planet until the third day of November, 2237.
“Many cogent and well-phrased, even attractive arguments”—here he focused a smile on Freda, who almost reeled from its impact—“have been presented to this committee, but the President, in his wisdom, finds the weight of his considerations in favor of the nay-sayers.
“Gentle petitioners, I am charged to express the Presidents high appreciation for your concern in matters pertinent. Hearings are over. Petitioners dismissed.”
Once only he rapped his gavel, and the sound rolled through the chamber with the hollowness of trapped thunder.
To Freda the sound was a knell. On this spot, on this day, her career was ended on the lower levels of administration. She had let herself be shamefully outmaneuvered by Berkeley and shamelessly sacrificed by Charles Gaynor. Never would her guns be trained on Berkeley, for Gaynor would have to pull the trigger, and Charles Gaynor would never pull her trigger. Sadly she knew her resolution to be academic. In a symbolic sense, the oracle of the ladies , lounge had prophesied truly: Charles had already done it to Freda, without love, in Washington.
Freda arose to leave, when Hans restrained her, saying, “Wait.”
Heyburn still stood before the lectern, looking up at the cameras as if to check that all lights were out. He licked his lips avidly, and the spectators seemed to lean toward him. Watching, she saw the cherubim die behind his pancake, saw the greasepaint wrinkle as his jowls slackened. Even the color of his eyes seemed to change from pale blue to steely gray, and his lower lip extended a full quarter inch from beneath his upper. Before her very eyes, the devil’s advocate was assuming the form of his client.
“O.K., boys,” he growled, “this is off the record.”
Reporters near Freda, who had folded their pads and laid their pencils down, drew steno machines from their coats, and she knew an underground press conference was about to begin.
“Dear friends and dearer enemies”—Heyburn opened with an oratorical roll, but the honey had gone from his voice—“when this motley concord of bleeding hearts, Easter eggheads, and Southern California ballyhoo artists, including a starlet with the bumpers of a lavender Cadillac, swished into this chamber, the place began to reek with undue influence on a Senate committee.”
“How much did the Navy pay for your vote, Heyburn?” someone shouted.
“Thank you, dear enemy, for the inspiration of rage. But that’s for me to know and Internal Revenue to find out.”
He paused, took a sip from a glass beside the lectern, and bowed his head in appreciation of the jeers and cat-calls. But when he raised his hand for silence, silence was immediately granted.
“While the honored petitioners paraded their wide-eyed ingenue and an emotional cripple before us—that hound dog baying at a midday moon—the motto of the great state of Kansas kept rolling in majesty through my mind, Ad Astra per Aspera, to the stars, the hard way.”
It was an off-the-record speech and would be honored as such by the home-circulated newspapers, but the clicks of the steno machines were rising and falling with the pace of Heyburn’s words.
“Ad Astra per Aspera,” he repeated, and paused for sad effect. “A motto inscribed on the grave of a dream where rots the moral fiber of our Republic, destroyed by the four horsemen of civilization: ease, order, intellect, enlightenment. Dear friends and dearer enemies, there is no moral equivalent of war, no progress without pain, no color without conflict, no vitality without violence. I oppose all Tahitis in space. I close all cul-de-sacs of flowers. Sound for me the iron ring of the deadly planets, and I will raise my hand in blessing, saying, ‘Go. Meet and overcome the challenge.’ But I will sound forever ‘Nay!’ to the lotus eaters, the lovers of ease, the oglers of nonfunctional beauty.”
“Hate! Hate!” a heckler shouted.
“There is no progress in paradise,” the Senator continued. “Man could not have walked so splendid in the sunlight had he not been cast from Eden. But the circle of fate which led from the apple has brought us back again to applesauce. When Adam went east from Eden, he moved in the vicious logic of the circle. The farther from Eden he walked to eastward, the closer to Eden he came from the west. Even now my nostrils scent the effluvium of that oasis which will prove the grave of our spirit.”
“Die! Die!”
“Dear enemy, die I shall; but I shall die standing on the legs of a man, hurling curses at the dying sun, and not as a vegetable succumbing silently to the first nips of frost. And I shall die blaspheming the name of the Great Circle, God, as a circle that ever returneth in to the self-same spot, with little of sadness and less of sin and compassion the soul of the plot.”
“Heresy! Blasphemer!”
Suddenly Freda noticed that members of the audience were throwing their shoulders in feints, pecking their heads, putting body-English on his words in the manner of vicarious participants at a prizefight.
“Honored petitioners”—he turned toward the Athenians—“you have received the thanks of the President. Now, accept my little contribution. To the Hollywood ingenue with more up front than on top, hail and farewell. To the platinum-colored egghead, hail and farewell. To the bush-league couch climber, hail and farewell. God grant you a turbulent flight back to your irrigated geraniums!”
Freda was appalled by his discourtesy uttered with such venom and accuracy, but the crowd was hushed and waiting. As the Senator took another sip of his liquid, she heard the sough-sough of breathing around her. Heyburn had named but three of the Athenians, and she, too, leaned forward, waiting.
“And you, O antenna-headed Daedulus, master fabricator, I fear your Icarian messengers have flown too close to this sun—”
“Of a bitch!” someone yelled, and the audience tittered.
“The wings you built had a malfunction in the cooling system. Your Icarus has taken another pratfall. Return, O puppet master, to your Santa Barbara rehearsal rooms with your strings and your puppets and your hurdy-gurdy tunes. You have rolled snake eyes once more. Your dice game is over. There’ll be none of your craps on Flora.”
He drank again, keeping a steady eye on Clayborg. When he spoke again, he seemed to petition the petitioner. “Clayborg, I’ve asked you before, and I ask you again—quit playing by the rules! When the outermost stars have faded and the outermost planets fall, when the great galaxies coll
apse, give us a head start on the next cycle. You know the path before you. Take it! Break the Great Circle and let us mold its contours to our own design. Cheat God! Cheat the Great Cheater!”
A contagion swept the audience, which began to chant, “Cheat, Clayborg, cheat! Cheat, Clayborg, cheat!”
Hans stood and raised his hands for a silence granted. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not gifted with the Senators eloquence, so I’ll not harangue you. Let me say simply: there’s a divinity that ends our shapes… True, there is no moral equivalent of war. But there is no warlike equivalent to morality. To cheat God, to short-circuit evolution, would demand a long journey, and who would we send on that journey? Our liver-lipped Senator from North Dakota?”
Clayborg let the shouts of “No! No!” die a slow death.
“But he would have to go, as a bribe for his cooperation.”
“Let us all die,” someone shouted.
Clayborg raised his hand. “So, you see, a choice would be difficult. I have met few in my life whom I would send beyond the worlds’ end. This lady, so grossly maligned by the gentleman from North Dakota”—here he laid his hand atop Freda’s head, and she felt as if she had received a benediction, although this was a purely intuitive feeling, since she had no previous experience with blessings—“is one of the few I might select for such a journey. From personal knowledge, I can attest that she has more on top than up front.”
She would have to take that remark under advisement, Freda thought, as Hans removed his hand and continued. “But I have accepted the Law of Morality, and I will not cheat. We have been given the cycles of creation, and we will work within those cycles. We will defeat God at His own game, playing the game by His rules, but we will defeat Him as men, to join with Him as men. Despite the Senators proposal, I do not choose to be Lucifer by popular acclamation. I do not choose to be Prince of Darkness by senatorial appointment. I certainly do not choose to be Beelzebub to yonder Satan.”
He paused briefly for cheers of approval.
“Once we take arms against God in open warfare, there can be no victory, there can be no armistice, and there’ll be no discharge from the war. I am not proposing passive acquiescence to fate. I am a militant. I shall not cease from mortal strife, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have built our New Jerusalem; but, by Gods grace, gentlemen, we’ll build His city with mortal fingers… I thank you.”
There was a reverent pause. Nothing more could be said, and the crowd began to file from the chamber. Freda noticed that most of the men were sweating profusely.
Berkeley and Gaynor left promptly, but Freda stayed behind with Hans to receive the handshakes and backslaps of the right-thinking listeners, while the others went to congratulate Heyburn. In her opinion, Clayborg had definitely won the confrontation. She was not positive what the confrontation was all about, but it had been thrilling. When she finally got Hans away from the group and they were walking down the corridor to the taxi stand, she asked him what it was all about.
“Oh,” he dismissed the incident, “Heyburn was simply provoking the moral equivalent of a street riot. You have to give the crowd its bread and circuses. Stripped of rhetoric, Heyburn knew that I was behind the Flora petition, and he would have known it if I had been in South Africa during the hearings… I liked that ‘Easter egghead’ he tagged on Charlie… Of course, I’m sorry you were involved. I should have suspected Gaynor was up to something when I met you in Bakersfield, but, hell, I can’t worry about anybody’s plots but my own.”
He held the taxi door for her, and as he slid into the seat beside her, she asked, “What was the argument about cheating God and breaking the circle?”
“Some more barnyard oratory. The universe collapses and explodes, in and out, like this.” He moved his hands like an accordion player’s. “And he wants me to rev up a starship to a velocity that will send it out of space and out of time. In that condition, you are nothing and no longer subject to natural laws—beyond God, in Heyburn’s language.
“It would be a simple matter, according to Goldberg’s Law of Diminishing Entropy, to figure when the next explosion will occur and make a round trip into nothingness with preset controls to come back during the next cycle with fully evolved human beings, their technology microfilmed and ready. But I can’t buy it—lurking outside the law, waiting to pounce on a virgin universe.
“We’d control evolution, and then what would the next cycle produce? More Heyburns? Who among us is qualified to twist the helix?”
“Surely there must be some worthy persons. You even mentioned me.”
“Would you like to go?” he asked seriously.
“Certainly not! I’d be a very defective specimen.”
“Your answer qualifies you for the voyage and proves my point. At Santa Barbara, we call it Catch-69. Those who are qualified to go won’t go. Only predators, the greedy and power hungry, would be willing to wait outside the law and pounce on a virgin universe. They would have absolute power over the wellsprings of creation. Since absolute power corrupts absolutely, who wants a totally corrupt God? No, Freda, my ship won’t carry no fakers, marihuana smokers, or acid-trip takers.”
For a moment he paused, then added, “So, I’m sending no ship.”
“What about your seeds?” she asked.
“Seeds? Oh, they conform to law.”
When she and Hans got back to the hotel, there was another telegram from Hal: “Am getting assistance from unexpected source. God bless the grass of Flora! Soon, tulips will be in Bakersfield; tomorrow, the world! Strumming a dissonant guitar in Old Town. Having a wonderful wish. Time you were here.”
Both vexed and amused by his language, she noticed the dateline was Friday night and that it had been sent from Fresno. She handed the telegram to Hans, who was checking out at the desk, and said, “Interpret this.”
Hans glanced at it. “The tulips are adapting to earth so fast they need controls. ‘Tomorrow, the world’ was the slogan of twentieth-century Nazis, who set out to conquer the world. Since he’s been freed of stoop labor by some undesignated pollinator, he’s playing a guitar in a jazz joint.”
“Do you think he was drunk when he wrote it?”
“No,” Hans said, “His spoonerism is too apt. The boy has a man-sized crush on you.”
“Oh, Hans.” She blushed. “He knows I’m engaged.”
“Which only makes you more of a challenge… Keep in touch with me about those tulips, Freda, but don’t feel hurt if I don’t answer your letters. When I’m solving impossible problems, I tend to get absentminded.”
Because of the blizzard, there was a two-hour delay in the takeoff for the land of irrigated geraniums. As Gaynor and Berkeley dozed in the seats ahead, Freda and Hans enjoyed their last double martini together on the one-cocktail flight. Between them lay the bittersweetness of parting for two, Freda thought, who had loved not wisely and not too well.
Hans tended more toward the bitter. “I feel guilty about you, Freda,” he complained, “because you reflect on my chess playing. I tried to sacrifice a pawn, Gaynor, but Heyburn jumped him to capture the queen, you.”
“Gaynor was responsible for the sacrifice/’
“Yeah, he got in the game. But the game’s still in progress. Clayborg hasn’t lost.”
“Caron has,” she said.
“If life were played by chess rules, yes,” Clayborg admitted. “Heyburn’s unofficial reprimand hurt you. As time passes and his august reputation grows and senility hardens his dislikes, he might block your appointment to the bureaucracy—if you can get by Gaynor.”
“I’m a realist, Hans. Gaynor will assign me to pure research, and I’ll end my days puttering around among potted plants.”
“There’s another way to go—my way,” he said. “If you can come up with an authentic contribution to the plant sciences, you can win an appointment to one of the Think Factories—Princeton, Santa Monica, or Santa Barbara—which will make you the peer of the chief executive.”
/> “I doubt my capabilities,” she said.
“I don’t! Listen, Freda. I have a hunch about those tulips. They may be your key out of the administrative cellar. Here’s the crux of my suggestion. Observe those flowers from every possible angle. Assume, for instance, that they evolved from field mice, and look for facts to prove the theory.”
“You sound like a psychiatrist.”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “But it’s not enough to ‘see life steady and see it whole.’ You have binocular vision, and to use it you have to keep shifting your head. A student of mine in Australia has created a successful methodology merely by attributing impossible causes to phenomena.
“You must practice the suspension of disbelief, for the universe is illogical, and you yourself are a mathematical impossibility. You were a million-to-one shot on the night you were conceived—project those odds back through the generations!”
Freda pinched herself. She was there.
“Here’s my suggestion,” he continued. “If you find anything about the tulips which merits a monograph, write the treatise and send it through channels. The channels will protect your authorship even though every bureaucrat who reads it will add a dissenting opinion to show he’s thought about the subject in even greater depth.
“Now, this is important: send a copy of your dissertation to me. The Institute for Advanced Studies will rule on the validity of your theorems without the handicap of forty-eight different negative endorsements. I’ll see to that. You know I’m a manipulator, and you have no reason to trust me; but you do, don’t you?”
“For some reason, Hans, I do.”
“I could verbalize your reasons.” He grinned. “But I won’t.”
Freda let him have his moment of self-indulgent triumph, but she knew very well why she trusted him. With or without his false teeth, he loved her; and, she could have added truthfully, in an abstract, impersonal, and highly sanitary manner, she returned his love.