Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  “I’m afraid you’re being too subtle for me.” Cluny took his coffee to a chair where he could see them all and sat down.

  “I think you understand,” Davies said. “The time’s come when you choose sides. It’s that simple really. We say we have to hit first, take home all the cake. Others say not now, wait. They’ll still be saying that when the bombs start to fall, while they’re frying in their snug little houses. We need people like you with us from the beginning.”

  Cluny shook his head. “But my natural inclination is to say not now, let’s wait. I don’t believe the Russians will start a war, unless they’re driven to it.”

  “If it’s handled right, there won’t be a war,” Bledsoe said smoothly. “A few orbiting satellites get knocked out, a display of power, that’s enough in this modern age. Both sides know what’s to be expected if certain steps are taken swiftly enough, enough power exerted at the beginning. We won’t start the war, there’s no need to. But if they move first, we have no doubt about the next countermoves. That would be the holocaust we all want to avoid.”

  “With all due respect, sir,” Cluny said, “I think it’s a mistake to think we’d fight back but the Russians wouldn’t.” He shook his head slightly. “I don’t think you understand what Alpha really is—a scientific laboratory, that’s all. It’s not a weapon, it can’t be defended or used as a weapon of war. The people up there are scientists.”

  “And what about the ongoing experiments with the microwaves melting the ice packs in the Arctic? If the satellite were shifted in orbit, the beams focused elsewhere . . .”

  “There are safeguards built into the system,” Cluny said flatly. “That was considered and guarded against.”

  For the first time that evening Luther Krohmeier spoke to Cluny directly. “People who won’t cooperate won’t be there. Others can undo all the fail-safes. We’re going to decide who’s up there and who isn’t when the time comes.”

  “Luther! No threats!” Mr. Davies cried. “We don’t have to use threats with men of intelligence. Cluny and I have other business to discuss tonight. I’ll talk with him further on this matter. We don’t demand an immediate response, my boy. Think of it. Later I’ll try to explain our position. But now, there’s vintage brandy and excellent Celebesian coffee, and my God! wasn’t that dinner superlative!”

  He had given the cue and the others knew it. Within half an hour they finished the coffee and brandy, shook hands all around, and left Cluny with his father-in-law. Mr. Davies poured more coffee for himself and waved generally toward the silver pot. A servant had brought in fresh coffee as the other guests had prepared to leave. The ashtrays had been taken away, the empty glasses, the brandy. Now the coffee was on the low table that served both couches. Cluny sat opposite Mr. Davies.

  “You know I’m politically neutral,” Cluny said slowly. “I really won’t take sides in this. I think what you’re doing is dangerous beyond comprehension.”

  Davies seemed withdrawn now, deeply thoughtful. All former traces of joviality had been erased. “I know about the message,” he said. “We’ve known for a long time actually. How you brought it back with you, the gold, everything.”

  “Did Lina tell you?”

  “Remember that talk we had, when we first met? I told you then she wasn’t like other women, other daughters. She used to tell me things no daughter should tell her father. I never knew what to do about that. She’d come home and tell me about her men, what they did, what they said, everything. I think she did it to torment me. She looked very much like her mother, you know. She knew what it did to me when she told me those things.”

  His voice was still very remote, and he looked at the coffeepot, not at Cluny. “She told me about the stuff you had and I sent a man around to collect it, make a copy while you were sleeping. We’ve been working on it too, with no success. But our people, don’t have the special talent that your Jean Brighton has.‘She’s getting something. According to my reports she’ll be the one, if it can be done. It’ll prove to be a Russian trick, of course. Maybe she can demonstrate that. You went straight for the best, didn’t you. I admire you for that. You have an eye for the best there is.”

  There was a cold lump in Cluny’s chest now. It made breathing difficult and swallowing something he had to do very consciously. “You still haven’t got to the point,” he said, and was surprised to hear the steadiness in his voice.

  “Yes. Of course. I almost had you killed when you went to the island. I sent you there to kill you. I didn’t want to do it while you were still in shock, you see. I wanted you to be aware. And then I didn’t do it. I’m still surprised that I was able to have second thoughts. For a whole week all I could think about was how I’d do it, but then I realized that you wanted it too. I’d be doing what you were too cowardly to do for yourself. And I made new plans, better plans.” The lump vanished as swiftly as it had formed. At last, Cluny thought, it was out. They both knew. He cleared his throat, but Davies waved him silent, regarding him through narrowed eyes, as if he never had looked at him before.

  “I know how you must have felt,” he said. “I could almost sympathize. Almost. I wanted to kill her many times, but I didn’t, and that makes the difference.”

  “I didn’t want her dead!”

  “But she is dead, and you’re alive. You killed her and I can prove it, Cluny. We know when you got back that night, both times. She told me how trusting you were, how you called her a goddess, thought her pure and chaste. She thought it was very funny that you were so idealistic and naive, and she was touched by it. She was very perceptive, you know. She knew that you didn’t love her, not as she really was. The woman you loved didn’t exist. She told me that. And she said that if you ever really saw her, you’d kill her. She wrote me a letter saying just that. That’s the difference between us, Cluny, you and me. I knew what she was and loved her, and when you found out you killed her.”

  Cluny felt frozen to the couch, unable to move, unable to look up at Davies. She had told her father everything he had said, everything he had done. He felt very tired of trying to move, tired of listening, of trying to understand.

  “You’ll do what we want you to do, Cluny. Whatever we want. And I’ll watch you doing it, watch you change and become something else, watch you wishing you were dead over and over, watch you living and wanting death. You’ll do your own work, come and go to Alpha when you want to. And we’ll know, you and I both, that when I snap my fingers, you’ll jump as often and as high as I say. So I will kill you, but it will be very, very slow, and every day you’ll know it’s happening.”

  Now Cluny looked at him. “Do you really think I care if you tell them? I’ll dial the number for you.”

  “I know. I know, Cluny. But I wouldn’t do it. Someone else will, and I’ll protest and try to protect you, and get you declared mentally unstable and see that you get medical treatment. I’ll treat you just like my own son, pay for private hospitals, everything. There are drugs that do strange things to people, make them very docile and tractable for hours at a time, and then when the effects wear off, full memory returns. You’ll have a lifetime to experience them, Cluny. Fifty years? Forty? You know I can do it, my boy. You know it.”

  Staring at him, Cluny did know it. He stood up and walked away from the couch, away from the table, away from Mr. Davies.

  “Two days, Cluny. You have two days, and then we go on from here.”

  There was little traffic, but people on foot were as thick at eleven as they had been at noon. Cluny walked with his head bowed, seeing little, looking up when he was accosted by women who were selling themselves, by men who were begging, by boys who offered whatever he wanted. He stayed in the downtown section, where the dimmed lights made it like a late overcast afternoon with hordes of shoppers on the prowl. Every corner had two policemen, or soldiers. The windows were all protected by wire cages, or steel bars. He walked to the corner, crossed the street, turned and walked back the way he had come, turned again,
then again and again. He had to think, had to think, had . . . His mind kept returning to Lina.

  He shook his head angrily. Davies, he had to think of Davies and what he represented, what they could accomplish. The message was a catalyst, he thought. No matter what it actually said, if they ever learned what it said, it had served this other purpose already: the unexpected pressure it had exerted had brought to a head a long-festering boil. Without it the boil might have stayed sore and tender for another generation; it might have come to a head alone, but also it might have gone away again, might have been reabsorbed.

  He did not realize when his thoughts shifted, but when he became aware of them, he was again in bed with Lina, remembering. . . . He stopped, looking about him. He was still in the downtown section. It was twelve-thirty.

  Jean had to announce that it was real, he realized. It was the only way to buy time now. He tried to think of Jean inspiring the kind of blind love he had had for Lina, and he knew it could not happen. Jean was too honest. She would force a lover to look at her, to see her and know her. Love with someone like Jean would not be a total loss of self, not the way he had lost himself. Love with Jean would be a finding of self, a growing larger than self. With a sense of guilt, he tried to banish the thoughts. “I did love her,” he muttered, and the words were ignored as he thought about Lina and what he had felt for her.

  Davies had been right in saying that his was the real love. He had known her, accepted her exactly as she was, and still had wanted only her happiness. And if that was the definition of love, he admitted, he had not felt it. But he knew there was more than that. His passion had to mean something, had to account for something.

  Davies must realize that Cluny would not join forces with the militarists. He was too shrewd to miscalculate about that. Cluny was bumped into from behind before he became aware that he had stopped walking. He moved to stand before a barred show window, and for the first time that night he was seeing himself as Davies must have seen him. Passionate, infatuated, blindly loyal, totally selfish. Davies must also think he had the same attachment to Alpha, to his work there.

  Davies believed in Cluny’s blind devotion to his work, to Alpha and his place on it; that was why he had brought in Luther Krohmeier with his threat of keeping Cluny off Alpha, and the general who had reinforced that threat. That was why he had counted on the weight of his own threat of daily brain death by drugs and a lifetime of torture through not being able to continue in his work. And it was all empty.

  What had driven him was Lina, from start to finish. He had done everything for her, to show her that he was deserving of her. No one had known that, not Lina, not Murray, not Sid, not Mr. Davies. All the passion he had brought to Alpha, getting it running again, getting his own position there—it had all been to demonstrate something to her.

  He started to walk again. Intellectually he could form the words and say them to himself: he had not been in love; it had been a blind infatuation, longer lasting than most, but of the same nature as any adolescent boy’s blind passion for an unattainable princess. In a world without dragons, he had gone after Alpha, and he had won the princess. Now the adolescence was over. Emotionally he could not accept the words he said to himself. Emotionally he might never be able to accept his rational judgment.

  Maybe, he thought, on some deep level he had known that only through her death could he finally free himself from that long-sustained adolescence. What Davies could know least of all, he realized, was that he, Cluny, recognized his own need for punishment, and was willing to suffer it, even welcomed it.

  But not yet, not yet. His punishment should be his alone. Not his and the world’s, not Alpha’s and its people. Not Jean’s for doing what he had forced her to do. He remembered with disgust how easy it had been to threaten her, how knowingly he had touched the nerve that would make her yield.

  Davies thought she was getting something, he remembered, and he felt his stomach churn. How had Davies known? He looked about him then; he was still in the vicinity of the Ambassador Hotel. He had walked for hours up and down the streets that bounded the hotel. Why were all those people still on the streets? Not as many as earlier, but still hundreds and hundreds of them, shuffling along, huddled in display areas, drooped in doorways. There was a taxi stand before the hotel; he roused a nodding driver and gave him Murray’s address.

  He let himself in quietly, went to Murray’s room and awakened him, holding one hand over his mouth while he shook him. Murray struggled briefly, then permitted himself to be dragged into the bathroom, where Cluny turned the shower on full.

  Whispering, he told Murray everything that had happened. “I’ve got to get Jean,” he said afterward. “Ward must be a plant. They know what she’s doing. They mustn’t suspect that I know that or they might move before I get back.” Murray shook his head. “Put that on the back burner,” he said. “We’ll take care of the girl. You’ve got to go along with Davies. You can be of more use there.”

  “Murray, wake up! Davies trusts me as much as I trust him. I won’t be able to do anything, learn anything. They’ll use me to endorse whatever policy they have, no more than that. We have to protect Jean; she has to announce that the message is real, even translate it. Davies honestly believes it’s a Russian hoax, and they’re getting ready to jump. They believe in what they want to do. They think we’re lost unless they act now. We have to buy time with that message.”

  “Will he carry out his threat? Have you arrested?”

  “He’s too shrewd to gamble without having the cards. He will tighten the screws first, but in the end, yes.”

  “Good Christ!” Murray felt the shower, adjusted the heat, and then stepped under it. He stuck his head out and growled, “Go make some coffee. I’m still sleeping, remember.”

  Cluny put on coffee and then sat down and started writing. When Murray padded out barefoot, wrapped in a floor-length robe, Cluny handed him the paper. Murray glanced at it, put it on the table, poured coffee, and then sat down to read it. He added a note to the bottom, and for the next fifteen minutes they exchanged notes silently. Finally Murray nodded, got up and left, returned with an atlas. He turned to the Western states, studied the page, and then pointed to Boise. There would be a plane waiting in Boise for Cluny and Jean, and Doris if she wanted to go along. Murray was not happy with it, but he admitted grudgingly that it was the best of several alternatives he could come up with.

  Cluny wrote a short letter to Mr. Davies, explained his job of getting the dictionary bound, what it meant to Jean. He said that in return she was working on the message, that if he didn’t fulfill his part of the bargain she would more than likely simply vanish into the mountains with her Indian friends again. It was fake-sounding, he thought, reading it over, but it would have to do. He mailed the letter at the airport, and caught the seven-thirty flight to San Francisco, with a connecting flight to Portland.

  That afternoon he picked up the dictionaries. He ordered twenty more copies, paid for them in advance, and gave instructions about mailing them to Robert at the reservation.

  The following day he caught the bus to Bend. There were a dozen other passengers for the first part of the trip, but most of them got off before they reached the high Cascades. They were people who had defied the government’s orders to leave the countryside, and they were clinging to a precarious livelihood in the mountains just as the early settlers had done.

  The bus started down the eastern slopes, then slowed and came to a stop in the middle of the wilderness. On the road were many Indians on horseback; others were on the side of the road.

  “What the hell’s going on?” the driver yelled through his open window.

  One of the Indians approached the bus and called back, “Is Arthur Cluny aboard? I have a message.”

  Then Cluny saw Doris and he rushed to the front of the bus.

  “Bring your belongings,” the tall Indian called again.

  He grabbed his suitcase and the parcels he had brought and left
the bus high above the deserted village of Sisters.

  They stayed in the woods all that day. In the evening the group split, most of them heading north toward their homes in the reservation. Their horses were loaded with game, berries, nuts. Robert and three other Indians remained with Cluny at the edge of the pine trees, waiting for dark. All day they had listened to the airplane going back and forth, back and forth. While they waited for darkness, a slender boy of twelve or less appeared at Robert’s side and spoke briefly to him, vanished again.

  “They’ve sent more men, more cars to patrol the roads,” Robert said. “They know you’re with us; there are men at the reservation waiting for you.”

  Cluny said, “And Jean? Have they found Jean?”

  “No. They won’t find her. They, like you, would never think of looking for her on foot in the desert.”

  Cluny had protested vehemently, had urged speed in finding her, had insisted on riders spreading out to search for her. Robert had shaken his head, saying only that her plan was wise. The wind started to blow at sunset and by the time they were ready to move it was a howling, cold, demon wind. Cluny thought of Jean out there on foot alone, and he shivered.

  “Don’t try to force the pinto,” Robert said at the beginning. “He’ll follow my lead.” He mounted and two Indians took places on each side of Cluny, the last one followed behind, and they moved steadily over the rough ground. They should not ride at night, Cluny thought, visualizing the dropoff’s, the sheer canyon walls, the treacherous scree of loose gravel and obsidian and lava. He could see so little that he was effectively blind; he could tell no difference in the trail where they slowed to a painstaking crawl, and the places where Robert let his lead horse break into a trot. When they crossed the highway, they could see the taillights of a car moving away from them, heading north. They rode parallel to another road, and several times they were within shouting distance of cars on slow patrols. They had to use the road to go down a steep cliff at one point, and they waited under juniper trees until the patrol car passed, and then let the horses gallop after it, pacing it down the hill into a valley. When the car’s red brake lights came on, they returned to the scant cover of the rocks and trees. The car turned and went back up the cliff. One of the Indians laughed.