by Philip Wylie
Mr. Grove would, given a few minutes to change his clothes. (Agreed.) Was he right in thinking the President didn’t want his guards to recognize him? (He was.) Then, perhaps, he should be a Mr. Tree? (Good.)
“Fellow named Tree coming for a private talk,” the President told his minions. “Old friend. And—by the way—get me a room across the hall. Send him there. I’ll be in it. This is one of those old-pal things. Okay?”
A room across the hall and down a bit was arranged. The President moved into it promptly, for he had a hunch about Mr. Grove. In due course the man appeared, knocked and entered, a person reddish of hair, gray-eyed, stooped, with plump cheeks and a Santa Claus potbelly. He was not what the President had hoped for and utterly mystifying to the people on guard duty. But clean of weapons, they ascertained.
The door shut on the two. Mr. Grove had spoken in a tweaky tone. His overcoat, which he’d worn needlessly since he’d not had to go outside, was wet. He’d been in the snow, then. The tall, disappointed President, as he looked at his odd-ball guest, wished he’d not had that hunch. In a minute the wish vanished because the man piped a question! “Not your suite, Mr. President? Plainly! I assume you just took this room to insure privacy? No bugs here? No ‘protective’ listening gadgets? Am I right?”
“You are.”
“So I thought, owing to your word about being careful to make no impression. If you’ll pardon me, I interpreted it rather fancifully.” Grove walked to the bathroom and remained there for a few minutes. When he reappeared he was another man: brown-haired, broad, erect, wearing a handsomely tailored gray suit and a smile, expansive and heartening. “This is me, sir. I gathered you wanted a very private talk—though I could only guess about your reason.”
The President was both astonished and amused. He felt suddenly excited, too. “Your letter in the paper,” he began, “suggested a possibility. But first, would you like a drink?” Grove shook his head and watched the President sip a transported highball before he went on. “Tell me who you are, your history in brief and all about your intelligence work.”
For nearly an hour, with few interruptions, the President listened; listened to as strange an account of a human life as he’d ever heard of or even read:
Grove, Ringling Wallenda; age fifty-four; semi-retired; with considerable wealth—several millions.
Born, Sarasota, Florida. Both parents born in Russia. Father, Igor Grovidnskovsklovi (or something like that). Mother, Ilena Bekovskil, or about that. Father had owned a small traveling circus in Russia before the Red Revolution and was a trapeze and slack-wire performer in his show. Mother, animal trainer. As European Communist regime became increasingly unbearable, the father, mother, family, and their circus in its vans moved across Siberia, giving shows en route and finally went into China—Manchuria.
Three Grove (et cetera) children with troupe, all performers. During the next years (in China and Malaysia) all three died of epidemic diseases and the circus was finally disbanded. Parents reached USA and sought circus work. Their hoarded money and valuables about exhausted when they reached Sarasota, Florida, winter quarters of Barnum and Bailey; they were taken on immediately.
Boy born Sarasota and named for circus czar, Ringling, and the Wallendas, famed for high-wire acrobatics. The President remembered them. Young son was educated in Florida during winters, when not on the road. He’d become an acrobat, clown, and aide in his mother’s animal acts, also. She performed in side shows—as a snake charmer for some years. At sixteen, Grove entered college; his parents wanted their surviving child well educated. Graduated with engineering degree. Popular at school (not stated but obvious), athletic, and began to develop a hobby, stage magic. Young Grove liked doing magic tricks even better than his circus acts. University of Miami.
Served as infantry officer in Second World War. (Didn’t mention decorations but admitted, when asked, field promotions to the rank of major by VE Day. Recruited for postwar intelligence by “Beetle” Smith; the major spoke perfect Russian (parents used it at home) and knew local dialects; also German, learned from circus people. And Italian (the Wallendas). Very valuable work (check if possible to do so without calling attention to Grove) especially in areas behind Soviet lines.
The President was almost speechless as the man went on.
Returned USA late 1948. No funds. Parents dead. No desire to go into circus again. Refused what he called “desk job” in re-formed intelligence, in Washington. Turned his long-time hobby of magic into a professional act and traveled for years as “Zeno the Wizard.” (I even saw him, in a musical! Wonderful tricks!) Tiring of show business and wanting financial security, Grove moved to a village in New York State (Warsaw).
A friend, an old circus performer, lived there and had built a small factory nearby to manufacture joke toys and party gags, the most profitable of which, he’d written Grove, was a cigar that did not explode, but, once well lighted, poured forth a roomful of black, harmless smoke, astounding in its sudden volume.
Grove had gone to the village in western New York State to see his friend, a man crippled by his big-top act years before. Grove was, if anything, ingenious. He did not much care for his friend’s callow products but he did, on that first visit, suggest a few novelties that were produced and made a profit. In time, Grove bought a house in Warsaw. He liked the Northern summers and the unusually hospitable spirit of its people. He became a partner of the factory owner; his fertile mind originated an endless series of games and toys and jokes which were a success and (the President first inferred and then certified, as he thought of the toy series lately presented to his grandnephews and grandnieces) the firm, by then, Grove, Inc., had pioneered in toys and games that did not involve the violence which had always been anathema to Grove, on TV, and as advertised products for young kids.
“Grove Games” were now available everywhere and their inventor had achieved the security he’d longed for—many times over. He spent winters in South Miami, still. The firm’s founder had died years ago.
Grove had never married—a regretted admission—for his love for children and young people was great. Questions showed he had contributed to children’s welfare organizations and his homes, north or south, were, the President gathered, kid-swarmed. The man had even run away with himself a little in talking about young America, its needs, lacks, narrow and inadequate education, alienation from nature, and its hopefulness.
Grove was also a physical fitness buff who went so far as to assert any man up to age seventy ought to be able to do a back flip or walk on his fingertips, feats he demonstrated, with quiet ease.
All the rest of that interval the man and the man’s past beguiled the Chief Executive. He lay awake till late telling himself that, unique as Grove was, all human beings are unique. Yet he couldn’t dismiss casually what he’d heard and seen. Pictures ran like movies from the entrance to the exit of his guest and his use of the bathroom again to emerge as the fat, reddish-haired, high-voiced nonentity in a still-damp overcoat who toddled down the hall tossing idiotic salutes, to the disdain and unspoken amazement of Secret Service men. Presidents don’t ordinarily spend half an afternoon with such a jerk—old friend, old classmate or whatever.
Grove had done it though the Chief faked a slight embarrassment when he went back to his suite. The house phone, he then found, with a grin, had been cut off: no more whimsical calls allowed. He had dined with several Buffalo notables and excused himself early. But even reading didn’t stop his memories of the afternoon: not even the work of his favorite essayist, Joseph Wood Krutch, whose books he read and reread, keeping one always at hand. The clear, rhythmic and acutely perceptive prose blurred. Time after time he saw, not print, but Cagg, telling him about the Zed Classification. And the self-consciously elegant décor of his suite turned into a room down the hall and a man doing a somersault in the air, who landed without a palpable thud.
A man who had suggested, after that was in order, a means by which he and the President would commu
nicate, secretly. One who, if he were checked out (by very devious means), might volunteer for the task the President had in mind.
Should such an enterprise be suggested to any person, he wondered—when it might lead to death—and an unseen obit in Zed?
While snow buried Buffalo and spread white camouflage on the filthy ice of Lake Erie the President debated what he so much desired, so truly felt he needed, and was so reluctant to define even to himself.
A personal spy, he finally acknowledged, whose target would be the CIA.
At last, tired, his conscience still hurting, he told himself that Grove, after all, would decide for or against, granted the mission materialized.
Then the President slept.
Three weeks later, as arranged, the President took a rather rare early morning walk, trailed by Secret Service men, of course. It was a cold and dull day. The Chief Executive wore an overcoat and carried a newspaper. It appeared to be a bother to his arm swing so, as he came up to a trash can, he tossed it away.
The parade went on and his tagging guard didn’t think of retrieving the cast-away newspaper. But a man who looked unlike the real Grove, and nothing like the Grove who’d visited the room in the Buffalo hotel, came up, by and by. He plucked out the Post. He did not even open it till he had returned to his big brick house on the hills above Warsaw. There he found seven sheets in the presidential handwriting—between some added pages of notes for a speech.
The next time the President took his walk in the direction of the first paper-dropping, he noticed that somebody, kids, likely, had spilled a daub of white paint on the trash can he’d used to dispose of the paper. The daub had a shape vaguely like a fish. But with feelers, or antennae, where the blob ran down in two streaks. Nobody else gave attention to that trivial result of seeming vandalism—which might not even have been that, anyhow: pigeons could have produced the same effect.
After he saw the white blotch the President relaxed, in a way.
Grove was going to try.
3
Axe
The room was twenty-six stories under the ground, in Maryland, not far from the Baltimore-Washington Expressway. The earth’s surface above the buried building was tree-covered. Beyond it stood another government edifice with a parking yard, all in plain view. The parking yard was large enough for a bomber take-off and had been used for that (occasionally, at night).
Thousands of people turned off the expressway to their jobs in the visible structure. The route was well marked by signs, saying: Federal Computer and Computer-Computer Building. Its employee horde used those big and bizarre machines to collate data on the citizens of USA, all the data available to all governing bodies, to all corporations and credit bureaus, to nearly all sources that had data on people, true or hearsay—checking and then cross-checking the mass of material so its sum could be put on easily retrievable microtape.
This monstrous place wasn’t related to the one deep beneath the adjacent woods except in one way. The FCCC building was entered from three ramps, at three levels. Banks of elevators took myriads up and also down. Of those arrivals who went down, many boarded tram cars that conveyed them to the subterranean edifice. So the Computer and Computer-Computer building had not only a data-processing and data-storing function but it was a blind, serving as the major entrance to the buried and equally huge structure. That fact was supposed to be secret. And of the morning people who went up or down, none cared to mentioned that many went deeper down and then elsewhere: to do so was to risk losing one’s job, or worse. The so-called “moho-scraper” was thus kept secret from the general public, at least.
Such, then, was the location and nature of the headquarters of the CIA, or Combined Information Authority. In a big room on its twenty-sixth floor down (and the last but one) sat the director, Arthur Xavier Eaper, a man of medium height and weight, white-haired, but not from advanced age. Almost everything else about him save the snowy hair was average. His eyes, for example, were not blue, yet not quite gray and certainly not hazel. They were the color of gristle and had an empty look, as do so many eyes of that uninteresting tint. His left thumb was missing but a prosthesis made so excellent a replacement that few knew of the loss.
His age was fifty-nine. He was a pin-stripe addict and a chronic attaché-case carrier. His feet were small. He wore loafers in the office, handmade, British and black. At home, alone, he preferred elkhide slippers. His nose was his only superb organ: Roman, thin to near cutting edge and small of nostril. His eyebrows were heavy and black, a cosmetic effect, perhaps. (Or had he admired the looks of Warren Gamaliel Harding, as some asked but no one knew?)
He had graduated from Harvard, Columbia and MIT—a Bachelor of Arts, an M.A. in languages and a Ph.D. in physics. He spoke eleven languages; six like a native, the other five, well enough to pass if he were not interrogated at length. He had risen to deputy administrator in the OSS (Office of Search and Security) after the Second War. He had missed out in Korea owing to a five-year bout with skin trouble—a period he’d used to advance special forms of knowledge and esoteric skills, in a planned manner and for a purposeful end: to gain the post he now held.
His desk was huge, a kneehole type, anything but executive-nude. Upon it were many objects—a cigarette box, several ash trays, three sacks of Bull Durham and a gold holder for cigarette paper (he rolled his own), along with at least twenty mementos of his past: thumbscrews from Dachau, a human eyeball in a decanter of alcohol, a scalp-red hair and female—with the rest. Many had two functions and only one of them was to distress visitors.
The room, forty by thirty feet, had been carpeted from wall to wall in blood-red nylon and the walls, a dilute shade of that hue, were bare as walls of an operating room. The lighting was indirect and bright at the time because the administrator (or director) was reading. As he read he often clucked with disapproval. The book, entitled The Cadmium Caper, had been compared by critics to the works of the late author of the James Bond stories. Arthur Xavier Eaper disagreed, and, being the top American exponent of the same trade, he may have been right and the reviewers wrong.
He sat in a beat-up swivel chair on a thin cushion of foam rubber covered with the belly-hide of an oryx. There was one more nearby chair, across the desk, for a visitor—a rather heavy article of oak. It bore some resemblance to the conventional electric chair but was more comfortable and lacked, of course, visible electrodes. Beyond the grim souvenirs on his side of the desk was a bank of buttons and another of lights. On his side, also, were certain levers and control knobs not visible from a visitor’s angle.
Now, as the director read, a light glowed. Arthur X. Eaper was in the middle of a passage about an effort of the agent-hero to escape pursuit on a glacier, aided by vacuum cups handmade while he’d been captive in a secret Red cave, one hundred and eleven feet below Lake Lucerne. He did not see the light.
Ten seconds passed.
A chime sounded.
“Nuts!” said the director. He pressed (unnumbered but memorized) button fifty-four. A drawer slid toward him at his right and he dropped the book into it, on top of three others of a similar sort. The drawer slid back of its own will, in three seconds and without a sound, coming or going. Eaper pressed another button in another series; these were pink.
Now the office intercom was operational and he growled, “Whicket?”
“Yes, sir. Sorry to disturb you. We’re having a bit of a problem. Chap here insists on seeing you. Got to Seventeen Purple on his own.”
“Good God!”
“Seems to know the routine, up to that point. Colonel Garboyle’s on duty at Seventeen Purple. Holding, there.”
The administrator, or Axe, was vexed. “Who the hell is he?”
“We aren’t sure. Checking in CX. Says to tell you his name and you’ll see him.”
Suddenly the director’s voice froze. “I am waiting, Whicket, for the name. Any reason to withhold the only essential information?”
“No, sir.” But the outer of
fice hesitated before it went on, anxiously. “He calls himself Mobile MacB. Forrest. Has a card to that effect, engraved by Tiffany.” A description began to flow, nervously.
Abruptly, the administrator was glad of his assistant’s verbosity. Had Whicket not talked on, he might have ordered the invader tossed out. But the interval reminded him of an incident he rarely recalled and then only with chagrin: the time when he’d been holed up behind the Russian lines, as Berlin was about to fall—holed up in Schrekdamham, as it had then been. Now it was Leninskovosk. He vividly recalled the accursed, vacant brewery where he’d gone to ground—with the NKVD hot on the trail and Soviet Naval Intelligence (Skisvovkolt) only blocks away, besides: a house-to-house search. Doomed.
It had been that man, code name Mobile MacB. Forrest, who’d gotten Eaper out. His real name had been—what? Something related to trees, of course. Woods? Thicket? No. “Whicket” had suggested that. Which brought him back to the open line:
“Give me five minutes for a decision. And skip the checking. I know him. And I do not believe he is a playboy.” “Playboy,” naturally, referred to “enemy agent,” which made it possible to discuss certain people in public with an easy disguise of lascivious looks and robust guffaws.
“Check and out, sir.”
Eaper rocked back in the swivel chair and remembered, much against his wish.
The dank stone emptiness and the smell of mildew, the rotting wood and spider webs came clear from long ago. Oglethorpe coming in—through the storm sewer route, reporting that the search had reached Goering Plaza—and then falling dead, aware, certainly, while he’d reported, of the lethal hatpin that had been fired from an air pistol into his back. You know we French stormed Ratisbon. It had been Eaper’s thought at the moment of the chap’s death and he prided himself in that. But not the rest.
