OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  A few will always know. Francis of Assisi--he guessed. Thomas à Kempis. Most who knew were church heretics in their day--as I was in mine. And what I say is still heresy."

  He became silent again. He looked from face to face. "Colonel. You are a soldier.

  You are ready by your profession to die for other men. It is a noble readiness. Will you turn back?"

  The colonel retreated a step and leaned against the riveted bulkhead. Sweat once more broke upon his countenance, poured down; he crossed himself again and Chris sadly shook his head.

  Finally the colonel could speak. "You ask me to be disloyal."

  "I ask you--only to decide in your own self--what loyalty is."

  "I cannot turn, then."

  "Learned?"

  The journalist's eyes were steady--and tragic. "Nothing would be gained. Others would merely follow in place of us."

  "I but asked you to decide for yourself--not for them."

  The journalist flushed. "In my profession we do not even agree to stand ready to die for other men. I am here not to determine, but merely to report."

  "Sopho?"

  The physicist's eyes blazed suddenly. "Yes," he said. "I'll go back! I was never certain. I am always ready to restudy a problem!"

  Chris put his arm around the old man. "You!"

  But the scientist pulled away. "On one condition."

  "And that?"

  "Prove yourself!"

  "But, doctor, it is you who must provide the testimony--!"

  "Empirical evidence is my condition. Something measurable. Suspend, for one moment, one natural principle--"

  Ruefully, Chris laughed. "To simple men--fishermen, farmers, tax collectors--the power of any genuine conviction seemed miraculous because of its accomplishments. I healed the neurotics of my day. By suggestion, I added to the innocent gaiety of many a gathering. But even that poor, positive procedure is inverted now; many churches find their miracles in the hysterics of their own sick-bleeding, stigmata, fits!" He sighed.

  "Surely you, doctor, a miracle-maker in reality--are not naive enough to ask that the very heart of truth be magically violated so you may accept truth? The evidence is-- within you. I never said more. Find it there, man!"

  "I thought so," the doctor replied in a cold voice.

  Chris spoke persuasively. "You could work a miracle of transformation within yourself. But--even if I should suspend the very forces upon which that possibility depends--you would exert the last resource of your ingenuity to find out by what mechanical trick I achieved your illusion, as you'd call it! Prove, doctor, that you would not!"

  "Let's see the experiment." Sopho's eyes were hard.

  The stranger thought a moment and presently chuckled to himself. "The unsolved riddle of the cause-- the source-- the nature--of the energy in your atoms, doctor! Would you like to understand that next step in your science?"

  "Impossible!"

  Chris looked ardently at the old man.

  A moment later, the scientist's eyes shut. An expression of immense concentration came upon his features. Perspiration welled and trickled on his countenance--as on the colonel's. Suddenly his eyes opened again. He grabbed the colonel's arm. "Great God, man! I've cracked the toughest problem in physics! The thing just came to me this moment! Why! With this equation--we'll be able to make bombs that will assure American domination for a century! I'll win my second Nobel Prize! Every nuclear physicist's head will swim with envy! The financial possibilities--billions!--trillions! I'll just get it on paper--!" He broke off. "Wasn't there--somebody else--standing here?" he said perplexedly. "Never mind! Lend me a pencil, Learned!"

  "Somebody else?" The colonel shook his head. "Nobody but the three of us. And the gunners. Jesus, I wish this mission was ended! I've been having a terrible struggle in my conscience about it!"

  Learned said, "Have you? Me--too. I kind of hate humanity today. I kept wishing-

  -something would break down, and stop the whole thing. I get a choked-up feeling when I think of those people."

  The scientist was crouching, now--gazing at the streaming gray desolation beyond the windows. "Funny," he said to the gunner at his side. "A minute ago--I was sure I'd got a new insight into a very complex problem. Now--I can't even remember my approach."

  The gunner, who held palaver of the brass and all VIPs to be but one more nuisance of war, said, "Yeah?"

  The B-29 flew on toward its as yet unspecified destination.

  The City of Horror and Shame.

  Back at the base, the brass was laying plans for a second run--to the City of Naked Sorrow.

  9

  A scorcher.

  It was my father's phrase and came back to me as familiarly, when I opened my eyes, as the heard reveille of my childhood. The sun glared on the dark window-blinds, penetrating them at myriad pinpoints. I remembered summer mornings in Massachusetts, Ohio, North Dakota, Jersey, and on the cool, bright shores of Lake George.

  "Rise and shine, everybody! It's a scorcher!"

  The buoyant baritone of a man of God, excited by his life, frustrated in every excitement by his Faith; a man in there, as we used to say, trying.

  The room was a fumarole--its atmosphere spent by my breathing and stained with the carbonic reek of yesterday's cigarettes. Nothing came through the windows; they were open to the eye--but invisibly walled by the heat. A stratum of smoke and dust lay across a sunbeam; the light pierced it, struck the corner of a mirror, broke, and rebounded to the ceiling in a prismatic dazzle: red, green, blue, yellow, purple.

  The little awl had ceased pecking my throat. I swallowed--without unnatural sensation--reached for the phone, ordered coffee, and sat up naked on the bed's edge, leaving a damp plaster cast of myself in the sheet. I took a short shower and picked up the Sunday papers cautiously.

  Karl didn't speak.

  Saving his strength for the exhaustion of the day.

  Ten-fifteen.

  The coffee set my nerves dancing like a swarm of gnats, without bringing relief from the deadness, the ache, the recollection of sleep in every cell-fatiguing sleep--and the yearn for youth's restful slumber.

  I dialed Paul's Brooklyn number on the private line. The phone rattled in his heat-trap and not even a ghost took it up to listen. Lint on the divan--lint and threads--and I began to pick compulsively.

  Nothing much in the papers.

  The airlift.

  (How could we, the American people, take pride in our freight flights when we had permitted ourselves to be euchered into the extravagance--only to meet force again in sillier forms? The effort was without dignity, without principle, without understanding, without sense.)

  The pennant race.

  (I remembered Babe Ruth.)

  A call girl had been arrested, after the cops had tapped her telephone and listened.

  I viewed her attractive face in the tabloids and read the elaborate report of her dialogue with her clients.

  (Since when had freedom stooped to tap the phones of prostitutes? What excellence of police was this, in a world community where hardly an honest man or woman remained, where half a billion people slowly starved, where thieves and cheats were commoner than spots of oil or horse-dung in streets? And how the cops enwhored Lady Liberty when they invaded the life of that busy lass! Truly dirty deeds bought their own big privacies: corporations burned their books and politicians lost their records.

  Mere tarts, however, had their phones tapped and their words recorded. What a splendid free nation I had come to live in! With what marvels of detective science!) Well--not for long.

  My weary effort would soon peter out.

  Maybe then I could go and watch Kipling splash on his big-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair. I pondered for a while over those hairy comets. Well. All of us had short arms. We all reached too far.

  I dialed Dave.

  Veto said he was asleep and would call me when he woke.

  When will Monday come?

  Never?

/>   Why be impatient? Isn't it better to not--know?

  Not for Joel No, no, no.

  Finally, I got my chassis, frame, machine, chemical factory, over to the bridge table and, though my pilot was still missing, I began to fly better on my iron mike.

  (Isn't it great to be up-to-date?)

  At noon, the phone screamed.

  "Hi, boy!"

  "Hey. Thanks."

  (I should have used those roses in my crise. They were there. I wasn't.) Dave took a fraction of a second to decide not to say what he had been about to say. Perhaps that he was afraid I'd think him foolish.

  I looked at the flowers and the pilot was sitting amongst them.

  "Any news of our Paul?" he asked.

  "My agent lost the trail around midnight."

  "I've got bulletins up to three A.M.--last time he called. He'd been to Madam Blaine's--and she'd given him the runaround."

  "Marcia's there," I said.

  "I know. I called after that and Hattie put her on. Rough gal."

  "Yeah."

  "In a bad mood. Wanted me to come up."

  "I went there and caught her act, personally." Dave said, "I honest-to-God didn't think there was any need of putting a tail on the lad. Maybe I should have. Now what?"

  "Now we wait till he gets hungry, sleepy, or runs out of dough."

  "I'll keep you posted from my end. I'll send Charlie over to Paul's apartment again. Do a couple of other things. And stop by later."

  "If he checks with me, I'll let you know."

  "Good. I've got a meeting with my moguls right after lunch. They are trying to dream up a cycle. Yesterday--they ran through the Frankenstein possibilities and then got in your territory-animal horror. You should have been there! You would have yorked parade floats."

  "You might suggest phallic worship. Remember? They could put it in the past.

  You know, Mu, Atlantis, Lemuria, Ancient Rome. I doubt if the censors would gather what it was. Think it was educational. How about a documentary of Pompeii?"

  ' I'll enter it on my agenda." Dave whistled down the scale. "Some weather! I took in my human head. It had stopped shrinking. I was afraid it might explode."

  "You better pack a little dry ice in your own hat!"

  "How you feeling?"

  "About like Utah."

  He considered that. "Jesus," he said. "Take it easy! Be over by and by."

  I got dressed and went downstairs. There were people--maybe two dozen--in the Knight's Bar, for lunch, resuscitation, or the pelt of the dog that bit them.

  Not Yvonne, though. A bit early.

  The city was shockingly quiet. When the traffic lights changed, sometimes, nothing else did. You could hear one car pass on the street. Even the buses seemed enfeebled: their special arrangements for traumatizing man roared, ground, and hammered only at long intervals.

  The Musak was trying hymns, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof.

  With twenty-one cold shrimps, a couple of ounces of mayonnaise, some lettuce, and a few gills of iced coffee inside me, I felt better.

  When I got out on the sixteenth soaking pit I discovered Yvonne knocking on my door--my hall door, for a wonder. After a little bickering, I went back to the cold restaurant with her. Not too much bickering.

  It was the New Yvonne. Anybody could see that. She was 'dressed up in dark-blue linen and she ordered crustaceans, too, on my recommendation. Then she began to talk.

  ' I'm going back to Pasadena on the afternoon plane," she said. "I've been talking to Rol about half the morning. I talked away a fortune. But it was worth it. I told him--

  everything."

  "Everything?"

  She nodded. Her gray eyes were gentle, inaccessible, fixed on a plane-landing a couple of thousand miles away, and night in the lamplit, lower hills of California, where the eucalyptus trees grow. She repeated the opening gambit on Long Distance: It's me, Rol. I want to come back. . . . I know you want me to . . . But I don't know if you will when . . . Look! Think of why I went. . . . Don't apologize! Don't be like that!

  Because--Rol--me, too!

  He didn't believe her.

  Then he thought it was--masochistic experiment.

  Don't you see, darling, that's why I was so extra frantic? So weirdly angry? I had to find that out.

  "Then he was jealous!" Yvonne laughed softly--happily. "I think that was good for him."

  "No doubt."

  "In the end--all he could say was, 'Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!' "

  "And you feel like hurrying?"

  She spoke reproachfully. "'Wouldn't you?"

  "Yes."

  "I want to have eighteen kids," she said. "And I want them all to grow up florists and nurserymen and horticulturists. I understand me. Us. He had to spend all his time in the greenhouses because I spoiled the whole rest of his world. I'll get him out oftener, now. Not too much. Enough."

  I looked at her--the clear amethyst irises, the gilded cascade of her hair, the expectation of her body. "You sure will."

  ' I'm so--full--so--complete. So-- ready."

  "There are other girls like Gwen," I said. "Some."

  "I'll be busy. Don't you think? The children, for one thing. And my libido will be preoccupied, I imagine. Don't you? And suppose I had a small emotional accident some foggy afternoon at Malibu?"

  "Rol would raise hell."

  Her dimples showed. "I would try to make certain he never found out about it. My privacy. And I am quoting you, Dr. Wylie! Oh, I could hug you right here and now! And anyway--it isn't so much something you do. It's something to know is unlocked, that's all.

  When you can--you probably never do; when you can't--you hardly do anything but yearn; and never know for what. You know that--don't you? That's why Gwen--?"

  I picked up her hand and looked at the big, square diamond. "Pin none of your flowers on me, cooky. It was a dangerous prescription. I tried to weasel out of the charge that I'd compounded it. But I did. Mr. Wylie's toxic monologue."

  "Mr. Wylie's elixir for the self-righteous."

  "America," I said, "is the wrong climate for taking a capsule of that so-called sin and expecting a cure. In some other country--or age--"

  "Don't orate today. I couldn't listen." She ate a shrimp. "I wish I knew more about you."

  "Me, too." I went on, "Be good to Rol. Remember--these high tides run out. And remember--they always come in again."

  "You going?" She said it almost without interest. She didn't need company any more.

  I nodded. "The last installment is passing through the chopper. Here's another item, cooky. People who live in greenhouses mustn't cast the first stone."

  For a moment, her gaze faltered.

  I watched delicate changes of her color; she had beautiful skin. I watched the old stain reappear in her eyes. Her chin thrust out a little and shook a little and was firm. Her eyes turned amethyst again. "I'll remember," she said.

  I thought she would, maybe.

  "Do me a favor?" She was opening her handbag. "I haven't told dad I was flying back. I don't want to go through all the argument. Will you call him--after five-thirty?"

  "If I don't forget."

  She closed the bag. "I bet you would! So thanks anyhow. I can wire him--from La Guardia."

  "Safer."

  She said, "Good-bye, Phil."

  I kissed her.

  10

  It didn't seem possible to work.

  For half an hour I fussed around--trying to feel cooler--looking at my throat in the living room mirror and then the mirror on the medicine chest in the bathroom--hunting for a sunless spot in the forest-green sitting room--shunting the bridge table about.

  I condensed the opening of Part Six in my mind, then tapped out the result on the portable. I thought Durfree would like it. Editors are fond--overfond of brevity. I took a shower and tried to write wet, but it ran down me, and my tail itched on the turkish towel.

  Finally, I got cutting again.

  Paul showed up around f
our--when I had about ten pages--an hour--left to go. He looked like an adolescent registering despair in an amateur play.

  "Nothing," he said, and he sat down listlessly in an overstuffed easy chair that was covered with chintz in full leaf. He didn't bother even to loosen his tie.

  I looked at him and compassion melted out of me.

  "Eaten?"

  He nodded. "Had to. Have to keep going."

  I said, "Nuts."

  It was time, I thought, for Dr. Wylie to reverse the field. We had been running with sympathy too long. Tears filled his eyes. "I hate to make such a spectacle of myself!"

  "How right you are!"

  "Phil--I'm caving in! I can't think of another thing to do. My guts are full of ground glass. All I see--is Marcia--in my mind. I can't go on this way--"

  "Want to quit--going on that way?"

  "How can I?" It sounded as if he didn't want to quit.

  I said, "Listen, Paul, if you care to go to the cleaner, the dentist and down a gantlet all at once--you can quit."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Want a look at the real score? Or do you prefer to carry the torch of your slap-happy illusions forever?"

  He stared. "You know something you've kept from me!"

  "Certainly. I know a lot I couldn't tell you if I tried."

  "For Christ's sake--!"

  "All right. And remember, you asked. You went up to Hattie's last night--"

  "That fat she-fiend--!"

  "--and they said Marcia wasn't there. But she was."

  He leaped to his feet. "I'll grab a cab--"

  I got to my feet, too--not by leaping, and stood in front of him. "You'll grab no cab. Paul. Sit down--or shall I sit you down?"

  "Go on--" he said. "Tell me, then."

  "Marcia is up at Hattie's--working."

  He looked at me dementedly and snatched the phone.