by Kate Wilhelm
“Yours truly,” Murray admitted modestly. “There’s a dozen more. Want them one by one, one a day, all in a heap?”
“Let’s stick to the first one. They say it’s a hoax and we come back with: You must have done it then. And they say no we didn’t, and so on. And meanwhile the hardnoses on both sides are getting hot and sticking burs under the generals. . . .”
“Yeah,” Murray said. “Same thing.”
“What if we did it?”
“No matter where you start, the ending’s the same,” Murray said. “We’ve been over it a hundred times and we keep coming out in the same lousy place.”
“I don’t follow that. They couldn’t prove it a hoax if we did it and were pretty damn careful.”
“So we’re a couple of Russian scientists, and someone tells us the Americans have found this orbiting gold scroll with a message; you could set it to music, head the top forty in a week. Anyway, we do the same analyses that Zach’s having done now and come up with the same results. A draw. That leaves us heads or tails. Fake or real. Since it’s the Americans who found it, and we know how power hungry they are, we opt for fake. What are they after? To prove to the world they talk to God? To gain superiority when they’re slipping badly economically, and it’s even in doubt if they can survive. Ah ha! we say. This is why they pushed to reactivate the station at this time. To spring this little joke on the world. It must be, because we all know they shouldn’t have spent the money on it now. They should be home digging canals and building aqueducts and trying to house and feed displaced people. Even if we don’t know exactly what they have planned as a follow-up, we don’t believe them, and we agree with those who say they must be stopped before they do whatever it is they are planning to do.”
“So it’s a no-win game no matter what anyone does,” Cluny said after a few moments. “Maybe we should put a firecracker on its tail and send it away so no one will ever find it again.” He didn’t look at his friend, but continued to stare at the line of boats in the distance. “But what if it’s legitimate?” he nearly whispered then.
“Yeah,” Murray said heavily. “It could be for real.”
Cluny thought and then said, “So we have to try our damnedest to prove it’s a hoax, and if we really can’t, then find it again, but next time with a mixed crew, Russian and American—something like that?”
“Welcome back to the gang,” Murray said, patting his arm. “That’s it. What else?” ‘
What else? Cluny thought later, walking along the beach alone. Nothing else. The night was heavy with clouds and the waves lapping the shore sounded dull and sullen, hitting heavily at random intervals. A storm was moving in from the west and already he could see the lightning in the distance. Not yet as strokes, but as a general cloud glow that flickered off and on, revealing mountainous piles of cumulus clouds each time.
All that water, he thought, wasted on the gulf and this lousy island. For what? To keep the oleanders sunshine yellow, and the hibiscus scarlet? A white heron lifted silently a few yards in front of him; it flew around him and landed at the edge of the water again. A ghost, he thought. It was a ghost. He would not permit himself to turn around to see the bird. Ghost, as silent as a ghost, as ethereal, as unafraid. That was the real difference between people and ghosts. People were afraid. Three times he had come to the edge of the water and stared longingly at the horizon. When he regained more muscle power, he had decided the first time, and the second; the third, he had not even pretended to himself that he would start swimming toward the unreachable goal. He was afraid to die, he thought with disgust. It would be so simple to start swimming. How long could he last? Ten minutes, fifteen? At first he had known that when he foundered, he would still be in shallow water, and that would have been humiliating, to try to drown oneself in water so shallow that a man his height could simply walk out again. It would have been the equivalent of a scratch on the wrist, a Band-Aid to cover it with, sympathy from friends and relatives. He wanted no sympathy from anyone.
He had not told them at first because it had seemed so apparent to him that they would know. They should have known. To have spoken of that last scene to strangers would have been unthinkable. How could he have told anyone without telling everything? How he had worshiped her from the start. How he had dreamed of her body every single night he was away from her. How he had been able to see her and feel her and not be bothered by the endless chatter that flowed from her lips. He had known from the beginning that she was unfaithful when he was away, and yet he had known that that woman was not his Lina. His Lina was his alone forever and ever; she did not even exist when he was gone. Another soul took over her body then, did things with it, took it places; his Lina’s existence began and ended with his presence. He had wanted to tell them, but there had been no way to begin, no way they could have understood. No one had ever understood how much he had loved her. If he had not been so far away, he thought, probably he would have told them. But he had been millions of miles from them all, had heard them as if from a great distance; it had been like a telephone connection that was bad and scrambled everything but the most direct, clearly pronounced syllables. He had heard and understood them so imperfectly. They had told him to sit down, and he had not known what they meant until someone had taken his arm and guided him to a chair.
The lightning flared closer and this time a rumble of thunder rolled across the sky like a train. He should have told them, he thought bleakly, so they could punish him. They had not punished him, and he could not punish himself. He stood and waited for the lightning to strike him, but the storm veered away from the island altogether and finally he went inside, where Murray was waiting with a nightcap laced with a sedative.
He looked at the glass and then put it down on the table. “Not this time. I’ll sleep or I won’t. Eventually a body does fall asleep, isn’t that the theory? Eventually.”
Murray nodded.
Two days later Cluny decided they had to leave the island. “I can’t stand it much longer,” he said. “Overnight it’s become a fancy prison, and I’m tired of salt water and sun. Let’s go to your place.”
“Thought you’d never ask. Would you believe I can be ready in five minutes? I was beginning to look for Friday’s footprints on the beach.”
Cluny heard himself laughing and was shocked into silence again. Murray was grinning approvingly at him. He called his office and got travel priority and a booking, and the next day they met the housekeeper on the dock. “Turn around, madam; we’re going to island-hop today,” Murray said to her. How much she understood was problematical; she had never spoken a word of English to either of them, but she shrugged and waited until they got in her little outboard motorboat, then she turned it toward the Keys and sped back across the water.
Cluny and Murray jogged along the Potomac to the rendezvous with Zach, and then sat down, breathing too hard, next to him on a park bench. Cluny’s legs throbbed; but he had kept up, he thought with a grim satisfaction. He had his legs back now; his heart was functioning normally; he was an Earther again.
Zach was holding a long tether attached to a wire-haired terrier that was running in excited bursts of speed after birds. Zach looked more tired than ever.
He nodded and said, “Cluny, are you fit now? Are you well enough to travel, take part in this mess?”
“Yes, of course. To do what?”
“I have half a dozen men in on this by now,” Zach said disgruntledly. “I don’t like it. And Samuelson, our metallurgist, is howling for a look at that can. The chances of a leak increase by a factor of ten with each new person. No more. We need someone who can visit several linguists and see if that goddamn message can be translated. I can’t go to the CIA or the FBI or any other service with it. They have to be independent and they can’t be told a damn thing. Can you handle it?”
“How about travel priorities? Can you arrange that?”
“Doc Weill is going to have you in for a check. He’ll say you’re heading for a
breakdown and recommend VIP treatment, including priority papers. They’ll get you aboard anything moving at any time. I’ll send an itinerary for you to follow. You’ll have a tail, a couple of tails; pay no attention to them. One of them will be mine. God alone knows who else will stick to you. Murray will bring you the message. Okay?”
“Was someone else following me . . . that night?”
Zach nodded, watching his small dog.
“Then they, whoever it was, know too,” Cluny said softly. “Why haven’t they told the police? They’ve got a time bomb to play with. Or blackmail.”
“Exactly,” Zach said. He stood up. “You’ll need a cover story. You’re looking for your childhood sweetheart, Jean Brighton. Murray will bring you her dossier to fill you in on the past fourteen years.” He whistled to the dog, tightened the leash, and walked away with his head bowed.
That night Murray insisted that they watch the television news. It was the first time Cluny had paid any attention to current news in months.
The lead story was the continuing coverage of the destructive fire in Cincinnati Newtown, in which ninety-eight people had died and three thousand had been seriously burned or overcome by smoke inhalation.
Russia was experiencing a disastrous drought in its western plains and had issued directives to the farm cooperatives not to plow millions of acres for fear the damage from wind erosion would be irreversible.
The fourteenth desalination plant would open in ten days on the California coast. The price of oranges was expected to rise by fifteen percent and rationing was being tightened on all produce starting immediately. . . .
There were congressional hearings, and there were refugee demonstrations, a riot in Kansas City, and a picnic for the Newtown outside Atlanta. Cluny tried to stop hearing any of it and partially succeeded; he was jerked back to full attention by the last story. The first fatality among the scientists had been reported by Alpha. Claud Frankl had died in a docking accident. Frankl was one of the geologists working under the direction of Dr. Sidney Oberlin. There were no details yet concerning the cause of the accident. Murray cursed fluently and turned off the set. “That was due for release tomorrow, or the next day,” he said. “We’ve got a real sieve down there, old friend. A real holy sieve.”
“Why didn’t you mention it to me?” Cluny asked angrily. “Can’t trust me?”
“Don’t be an ass! What would you have done about it? We’re waiting for details. He was out alone and lost pressure. No one seems to know why. Goddamn it!”
He stamped across the room to a small bar and made drinks for them both and handed Cluny one. His face was an ugly mottled red. The apartment was very likely bugged; or the possibility was so great that they acted as if they knew it for a fact and said nothing in the rooms that they weren’t willing to share with half a dozen other people.
“Fm going to bed,” Murray said abruptly and left Cluny alone in the living room.
Cluny read through the dossier on Jean Brighton and could not connect anything in it to the scrawny kid he had played with on the Florida beaches. It made little difference, he thought; her trail led him to Arkins, and that was his target. Arkins could translate the message if anyone could. Jean had moved on; he would stop with Arkins. For a moment he was overwhelmed with a memory of swimming in the rising surf of a high tide pushed even higher by the first winds of a hurricane still far offshore. Jean swam beside him, her thin body nut brown, taut with the effort of body-surfing a cresting wave to shore. He yearned to go back, to have those few good years over again, to know them for the good years, savor them minute by minute. . . .
Restlessly he tossed the folder down.
The apartment had two bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and a large living room. It was luxurious by most standards. Cluny found himself thinking of Murray’s tenement room, where the three men had decided they could seize the moment and make Alpha come alive again. Rags to riches, he muttered to himself and turned off the light. He went to the window and stood there with his drink, looking at the great city twenty stories below. Not as brightly lighted as it used to be, sprawling more than ever, swarming with refugees demanding rain, demanding an end to the drought, a return to the good life that was becoming a myth in their minds.
But worse than the crowding and the fear was the perpetual threat that swung lower with each motion of the pendulum. He remembered a study he had used once in a college paper for history, or sociology, or something. The study had detailed the reactions of masses of people to unendurable stress: first came anger, a positive reaction even though it often included violence; next came stoicism, the manifestation of the intention to wait out the situation; then came apathy, the helplessness of repeated frustration. Following this stage inevitably there was an outburst of insanity—behavior that was not suitable for problem solving, the study had worded it discreetly. They go nuts, Cluny thought. And they go on a rampage. And the whole world was sitting on the verge of apathy and madness. Most of the demonstrations were quiet and controlled and filled with hopelessness and despair, not with the wild excesses that had taken place in the sixties. That would be welcomed now, any show of life would be welcomed now. But they came with dull eyes and stood silently, and then left again, hungrier and tireder and somehow dirtier than ever. Their shame was evident on their faces, in the way they moved, the way they could not bring themselves to shout now; they were ashamed for having been driven from their land by an enemy they had never tried to placate or understand’ They had no god to turn to for help; their government was futile in its efforts to bring water to the parched land and keep the green sprouts thriving through the hellish summers. The canals and aqueducts were like fragile green veins in a vast bone-white corpse.
Bewilderment, humiliation, and apathy, those were the masks people wore, and it was terrifying. They were ripe for a messiah, or a dictator, or anyone who was forceful enough, strong enough to be heard. And if they started to move, there would be no way to stop them again. He was frightened, everyone was frightened, everyone who thought at all. And they were helpless. Nothing could be done. He knew it, everyone who thought about it came to the same realization: Nothing could be done.
“What we need is a good strong virus that’ll wipe out about half the people overnight,” Murray had said once. Joking? Cluny had not known then, did not know now. “With half the people we could manage,” Murray had gone on. “There’s enough of everything for about half of us, and we could kiss off the deserts and not give them a thought again. A modest proposal,” he had added, grinning, but not with his eyes. His eyes had remained somber and frightened. Standing at the window, Cluny thought about such a virus and almost wished it could be developed overnight, used the following day. Within a month the shock would be gone, and the survivors would be able to start over again. Maybe that was what the militarists were after, he thought with a start of revelation. They never came out and said it blatantly as Murray had done, but the effect would be the same. Halve the population, be certain you were in the right place, and then resume a real life. They would buy it down there, he thought with a chill. Everyone would assume he would be in the right place and the others would go. They would buy it. It almost made sense.
He finished his drink, but continued to stand at the window, and now he was thinking of all the things he and Murray and Zach had not said to each other out of fear. The same fear that prevents a child from trying to anticipate Christmas too hard lest it should somehow evaporate kept them from saying anything about the possibility that the message was real. Any other civilization that had been able to cross interstellar space to leave a calling card would have an advanced technology that could handle a world-wide drought, they would have said, if fear had not stalled the words in their throats. That civilization would have gone beyond the petty wars that again and again had sidetracked Earth from its own future, had manacled nations in hatred and blood when they might have been growing, becoming capable of meeting advanced beings as equals. Cluny rested his f
orehead on the window and clenched his glass hard, and after a moment he realized he was praying. He did not know to whom or what he was addressing his prayers, but they existed, anguished pleas for help, for assurance that the message was real, that fate was intervening at a time when without help Earth was certainly destined to engage in the war that everyone knew would not be won. “We can’t be on the top of the ladder,” he whispered to the dimly lighted city below. “This can’t be as high as we get. It can’t be.”
CHAPTER
12
IT had been a year since that first morning when Jean awakened slowly, dragging herself from a deep sleep with great effort. There were strange noises and smells, and the bed she lay on was hard and unyielding, altogether unfamiliar. She thought she was back in her university apartment, sleepily reached for Walter beside her, and then jerked into full wakefulness.
Now she remembered the day before, the night before, when women had bathed her and tended her cut and bleeding feet; someone had fed her broth, and someone else had very gently rubbed ointment on her face and hands. Dully she stared at the ceiling. All that effort, she thought, all her aches and sunburn and cuts for nothing. Her face was painful, and her hands hurt. When she moved her toes a sharp pain raced up her arch, up her leg. She did not try to move again, not yet. There was a soft noise, not like the other noises people were making in the early gray morning. She could hear low voices, the sound of a pan on a stove, the dull clang of an iron stove door being shut. . . . The new sound came again, a faint scratching at the door. She turned to look at it, and as she did, it opened a crack and a small face appeared. It was a girl with eyes as bright as sunlight on diamonds. The child slipped inside the room, holding her finger to her lips. She was no more than six, perhaps five, and very tiny. She flashed gleaming teeth and approached the bedside quickly, whispering in an unfamiliar language, speaking very fast, now and then giggling or chuckling between phrases.