by Kate Wilhelm
She could smell coffee. Sometimes when Leo Arkins was in a very fine mood, he offered her a cup of his special brew. Now she sniffed it hungrily, but he ignored her, and continued to talk about the conference.
He was a genius, she reminded herself. He had made many breakthroughs in the field of linguistics; he was the acknowledged leader in the field. But he could also be wrong, she thought. No genius was right every single time; why should he expect to be?
“. . . leave Wednesday evening. Thursday and Friday we’ll work with Schmidt—”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Arkins. You said we?”
He glared at her. “We, my dear Brighton. You and I. We! Is this how you spend your time? Staring vacuously into space?” His voice rose to a screech, then with an obvious and very deliberate effort, he controlled it again. “I said I am taking you to Northwestern with me tomorrow, Wednesday. We shall return on Saturday morning. Did you hear me this time?”
She was shaking her head. “I can’t. I have classes every morning. To do what?”
Speaking very slowly, as if to the idiot he often called her, he explained that Schmidt was trying once more to replicate his work. “If we go, help him set up the conditions, have you train his aides, there is no reason he should not get identical results. He has to get results!”
And that was the hitch. No one was able to replicate Leo Arkins’s results. As he talked, she began to think about Walter, and she realized she wanted to go away briefly. He took her so much for granted, she thought. He would be lonesome without her; on her return they would recapture what they had had so briefly in the beginning. Arkins did not wait for her acceptance, but returned to his own office as soon as he finished telling her the details of their trip, which would be by train leaving the next morning at eight-thirty.
That night when she told Walter, he nodded. “I’d do the same thing,” he said. “Sometimes it’s the only way, and you may never even know what the one factor was that you corrected in setting up the experiments somewhere else.”
“Don’t you even care that I’ll be gone four days?”
He looked surprised. “Of course I’ll miss you, baby. You know that.”
She shook her head impatiently. “That isn’t what I mean. He tells me I have to do this, and you say, that’s right. Then he makes me do something else and you think that’s okay. Doesn’t it even bother you that I have to do whatever that man tells me?”
“Ah,” Walter said then. “You want a knight in shining armor to come to your rescue. But I told you, honey, I’m not the guy for that role. I let my armor rust away to nothing before you were born, and I have no power, no influence, no money, nothing to intervene with. It’s a job. That’s all.”
“I don’t want you to do anything, just care!”
“I care, baby. I care. But what changes when I say that? You still go to Chicago tomorrow. We still live in this apartment. I still have so many debts I won’t be out of hock until I’m ninety. But I care.”
He was laughing at her, she knew, and for a moment she wanted to hit him. Then suddenly she was laughing also, and the moment was over. “You win,” she said. “It’s the nine- or ten-year-old me, isn’t it?”
He nodded, laughing out loud now. “Let me tell you what frightens me, Jean. I can see you meeting a tall young virile man, a man with money and a car and a six-room apartment. I can see you falling in love with him so hard and fast that you forget about me instantly, and when you finally remember, you say what a funny old man he was indeed.”
“Mm. Poor old thing. Poor old ex-Casanova, decrepit, used up, a has-been, can’t cut the mustard at all these days . . .” She caressed him as she commiserated, and then giggled when she felt his erection against her leg.
“Witch, witch,” he murmured in her ear as he picked her up and carried her to the bedroom.
She snuggled against him contentedly and played with his ear lobe.
CHAPTER
6
JEAN and Leo Arkins stood side by side watching the computer printout. It was late, nearly eleven, neither had had dinner, had thought of dinner. Jean felt dazed and hollow and weak as she read the message.
They took food from dock. Not enough money. Not enough grain (corn) (so) men came back to burn buildings. Government sent army . . . troops fired on people . . .
Arkins read it slowly, his voice wavering with excitement. “Are you sure?”
“I can’t be certain. I think so. There are some obvious mistakes, but I think it’s all I can do with it right now. There are blanks, six or seven words, but we should be able to get them with a simple Markov formulation. They in turn may help with some of the rough spots. Two or three more days, if it’s right.”
Arkins tore off the printout; his hand was shaking hard. “Call!” he whispered hoarsely. “Call! Read what we have.”
“But it isn’t finished.”
“If this much is right, we’ve made it. Brighton, don’t you understand? We’ve done it!”
Tiredly she moved to the other desk and dialed the number of his assistant in Boston. She didn’t think about the time until Grunwald’s wife answered the phone sleepily. Grunwald came on and she handed the phone to Leo Arkins.
“You have to check it now!” he screeched. “Take it down and go check it!” He read the brief message, muttered something incoherent, and hung up. “He’ll call back in ten minutes. He’ll get the message from his safe and decipher it, then call back. Ten minutes.” His little hand was racing up and down his coat front, pulling at buttons, twisting at them.
It was closer to half an hour before Grunwald returned the call. Jean watched Arkins as he listened. He blanched, and she thought he would fall down. She moved closer to him, to catch him if he should collapse. At first she thought his reaction was due to disappointment, but then she realized that he was nearly hysterical with excitement, that Grunwald had confirmed the message. They had translated a foreign-language message without a clue, without a key, without a Rosetta stone, which was the third factor.
Repeatedly she had told her classes there was no way to decode an unknown language without the third factor. “You have to share certain common assumptions,” she had said. “Things you can point to, in a sense. The Rosetta stone was such a factor. If you have an unknown language, and even a partial translation of it into another language that you do know, then you can translate it into your own language, if there is enough text to work with. The third factor.” She could almost hear her own voice saying this to her classes, but had she told them wrong? she thought wonderingly. And even though the proof was there, she still could not believe in it entirely, not yet.
Arkins hung up finally and turned to her. “We’ll start working on the missing phrase; it must be a relative clause, no more than that. We’ll find it. We’ll find it. It can’t elude us now.”
“I can’t work any more today,” Jean said. “I’m too tired. Tomorrow, the next day . . .”
“Tired! Tired? How can you be tired! You still don’t know what we’ve done here! You still don’t understand! Get out! Go home! Fool!”
“It’s just guesswork,” she said to herself, walking down a deserted corridor that was gloomy with infrequent lights too dim to do more than add shadows. The building was very musty, as if decay was already setting in. It was her guesswork, she added. No one else realized how unscientific this project was, how much she relied on twitches and even boredom when she selected one phrase over another, one sentence over another equally likely. Walter often berated her for not forcing Arkins to add her name to the papers he published, add her name to the research grants he received regularly. Of course, Arkins would never agree to any of that, but even more important, she did not want her name on it; she did not believe in what they were doing, in what she was doing. She was performing for pay, she thought bitterly, doing well enough to keep her job and security and the apartment and Walter. Arkins had turned down her proposed research, had forced her to keep on with this work, but one day she wou
ld go back to her own projects and forget this crackpot theory, she told herself grimly. Her interests, she had tried to explain to Walter, were in the hidden communications language made possible; how people used words understood by both parties to say things that had no connection with the spoken message. She believed it was common in all language groups, and had done preliminary work to demonstrate it in English. “If you use the dictionary and define the words, you see that often that isn’t what you mean at all,” she had said one night. “It’s a face-saving device that lets us talk without the risk of exposing ourselves too much, endangering ourselves to ridicule or disgust or something like that.” Walter had listened patiently, but then had gone back to what he wanted to talk about—Arkins, his work, her place in it, the need for her to assert herself, the benefits she would receive if she was recognized as a partner, not merely a graduate student.
At the outside door she waited for the security guard who would escort her home. No woman was permitted to walk on campus alone after dark any longer. The new people had taken over three more halls during the spring, and now numbered over a thousand bored, restless, hate-ridden people with nothing at all to do most of the time.
At home Jean told Walter about the breakthrough, and he shared Leo Arkins’s excitement. “He’ll get his new laboratory now. Sky’s the limit for success.”
“What with?” she asked,’ too tired to care, though. She ate cheese and bread and sipped her milk and thought about the paper work she had not yet looked at, thought about the spring midterms she would have to give and then grade.
“Government money will flow like water now,” Walter said. “Army money, Pentagon money. Whatever he asks for.” She felt her face stiffen and had trouble swallowing. “You really think so? With money as scarce as it is?”
“Honey, money’s never scarce when something big comes up that needs it. The Army isn’t getting short-changed. . . . What’s the matter?”
“I’m tired.” She stood up, leaving the food on the table without a thought, and went toward the bedroom.
“Not just tired,” Walter said, catching her, holding her at arms’ length to examine her. “What did I say?”
She shook her head. “The Army, secret services, CIA, FBI, all of them. They’ll snatch it up, won’t they? I won’t work for them. I went out of my way to find a place where I’d be removed from all that, where I’d never have to think about them, and you say they’ll come here. I won’t work for them.”
“Come sit down,” he said quietly and led her to the couch. “Stay put while I mix us a drink. You can use something.” She sat obediently and when he put the drink in her hand she sipped it, not wanting it, not wanting to talk, wanting only to go to bed and be in a deep sleep for a long time.
“Listen, baby, you can’t shake your head and say you don’t want to do this or that. Not any more. We’re all past that stage in our lives. And you know it. Honey, listen to me.” She realized she had been looking dreamily at the wall of books, paying scant attention to his words.
“You are in a position to make Arkins pay off finally. He needs you, honey. He can’t do this without your active participation. And he’ll have money to throw around. He’ll have to grant your doctorate on the basis of this work.‘This research is as good as a thesis; better. More money, and a bigger apartment. Think what it could mean, honey. A real job, a professorship. Tenure. He could get tenure for you.”
She shook her head slightly, trying to stop his voice. She drank again and emptied her glass; he took it from her and put it on the floor.
“We need all those things, baby,” he said. “You know we do. We could do some of the things we’d both like to do. Travel. You could travel with Arkins’ blessing now. He’d see to it that you got ration coupons, clearance, whatever you need. He knows damn well that you’re responsible for his success. We could go anywhere.”
“You don’t know how I feel about them,” she said and now she wanted to weep. She had had nothing to eat all day, except three bites of cheese and a sip or two of milk, she wanted to tell him, and the drink he had made for her had not been very little, and now she was feeling weepy and drunk.
“Have you thought for a minute what the alternatives are?”
She remained silent. She did not want to talk about any of it now.
“You’ll be out of a job. They won’t let you stay here in the apartment, and since it’s your lease, I won’t be able to stay either. We’ll have to find someplace to live, and you know what that’s like. We couldn’t afford the rent on an apartment in town. And there’s no work. Nowhere. You’ll be blackballed as a teacher, they’ll see to that. No work, period, no matter where you go.” He shook her arm. “Do you understand?”
During the next two weeks Arkins was busy making calls to all parts of the country. He flew to Washington twice and the second time he returned he was jubilant. Arkins never confided in her, but she knew he was working on his paper to be given before the International Society of Linguists in New York the second week in April.
Walter had never been more solicitous, more tender, or more loving than he was during those weeks. He brought her small surprises—a bunch of crocuses, a box of goat-milk fudge that one of his students made, a scarf for her hair. One of their problems had been money from the beginning. Walter and his second wife had gone very heavily into debt, and when he left her, he had assumed the entire burden of paying off their creditors. Walter had taken several cuts in salary, as everyone had done, except the security forces. Jean’s salary never had been very large to start with.
She knew any little gift that he bought her now would come out of his personal expense allowance, that he would do without something to please her. She was so touched that she could not even thank him when he gave her the scarf. Tears burned her eyes as she fingered it. And when he caught her up in a fierce embrace and kiss, she knew that this was what mattered, not what happened in school, in the laboratory, or anywhere else. Only this mattered.
In April one of the dormitories was burned down and there was a riot on the far side of campus. Jean could see none of it from the Linguistics Department, or from her apartment, but all day sirens wailed, and crowds surged back and forth over the grounds. There were no classes that day; people were told to stay inside, and she waited, very frightened, until Walter came home from his early class. They stood at the window in the bedroom and watched the activity below, thousands of people running this way, then that, and in the distance the billowing black smoke.
“We could leave here,” she said suddenly. “We keep telling ourselves there’s no other choice, but there are choices. We could work on a farm somewhere, or get jobs waiting table somewhere. There’s always something.”
He shook his head, his arm hard about her shoulders. “We live as close to poverty as I can stand as it is,” he said. “This won’t go on. It’s the spring weather that got to them. They want to go home and get on with life.”
“So do I.”
He released her, almost flung her away from him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a naive child, talking as if the world you knew as a kid is still there waiting for you to come back to it. My parents live in a Newtown, outside Indianapolis. You didn’t know that, did you? I never mentioned that little fact, did I? I went there last year. You know what it’s like for them? Two rooms, smaller than these, made out of plywood and cardboard. Someone sneezes a block away and every apartment shakes. The elevators were condemned before they were ever operated. They pay as much rent there as we pay here, did you know that? No hot water in their rooms. A communal shower. One electric light per room, period. And God help them when it rains because there aren’t any storm sewers, and the buildings are flush with the ground. They had a nice house, a pretty yard and garden, trees, and now they have two hundred square feet, and share the bathroom with three other families. You want to go to that? You think you could stand living there?”
She stared at him helplessly. He had n
ever mentioned his parents. She wondered if that was part of the debt he had assumed, helping them survive. She did not dare ask.
Two days after Arkins returned from his trip to New York, where he had been received with respectful skepticism, he told Jean their work had been classified by the government.
“No more papers, no more demonstrations, no more sharing ideas with Schmidt or Grunwald or anybody else. We can’t talk about it except during working hours. You are to give up your classwork entirely, devote your full time to this project. . . .”
He was broken, she thought with a rush of sympathy. He looked old, ill, exhausted, and frightened. His looking frightened was the worst of all. His small left hand clutched his coat spasmodically.
“Can they do that? We’re not in the Army or anything.”
“They can do it,” he said. “I thought they would give us money to expand, to hire more people. . . . I thought they would encourage others to pursue this inquiry. . . . I thought it was a breakthrough in knowledge, but it’s just another weapon.”
“What if we won’t do it?”
“They control the finances of this department, every department, every university. There’s no choice.”
He looked at her despairingly. “Poor little Brighton. That you too should be caught up in it. I’m sorry, Brighton.”
She found herself shaking her head. “It isn’t my project. They can’t make me stay. I won’t do it, Dr. Arkins. I won’t be a party to it.”
His little hand opened wide, then closed on his coat again. He nodded. “They can’t make you stay, of course. You are a student only. I told them that and they believed me. You can leave.” He turned toward his office, then without looking at her again, he added, “I lied to them. I shall lie again. I shall make them accept that you are a student only, of no consequence. But my one paper is public now; others know. They’ll be working on it too; no one can stop that. They’ll do it quietly, without publicity. You should know that, Brighton. It will go on. Although of course here it will die.”