Henry said, “I don’t mind their having a look from a suitable distance, in case that’s part of the dilemma.”
“It’s not. They have already had a look from a suitable distance. Our concern is that the president might conclude that we are going to boost some sort of military hardware into space that will be targeted on the United States or its space station and satellites.”
“But the rockets are harmless. The satellite photos should tell them that.”
“One would think so. One would also think the CIA and the Pentagon know that the rockets are in Mongolia.”
“I’m sure they do,” Henry said. “So why are you humoring them?”
“Because humoring them seems to be what they’re asking us to do,” General Yao said. “It’s all very puzzling.”
“Why not just state the obvious? Why play this game?”
“The president of the United States is a nervous man. He might not believe the obvious. He leads a volatile democracy that might throw him out of office for letting China get ahead of America. He might be tempted to reassure the voters and assure his reelection by putting some kind of battle star in orbit, with all missiles pointed at us.”
Henry said, “I’ll talk to him.”
“And tell him what? The truth?”
“As you say, that’s probably the last thing he’d believe.”
“Don’t be so certain of that, Henry,” General Yao said. “He’s been briefed on the core of the earth problem.”
“He has?”
“Of course. He was strongly affected. Maybe he has made the connection to you and this new project of yours. Or his experts have made it, which is the same thing.”
“Who are his experts?”
“Who knows?” Yao said with a smile. “In China they would of course be astrologers, geomancers.”
Henry did not ask how General Yao happened to know what the president of the United States had been briefed on and how he reacted. His demeanor suggested that he just took it for granted that Yao knew what he was talking about.
“It’s only a matter of time before your government sees the future, or the possible lack of it, and decides to save itself,” General Yao said in his reasonable manner. “After that will come the European Union, Russia, Japan, India. And private enterprise, which is already busy—meaning you, of course.”
“Not China?”
“That’s a different question. But my government is worried. We fear this situation is a recipe for space war.”
“Which Henry Peel will have caused?” Henry said.
“Quite possibly. You mean well, Henry. You are greatly admired in this country. The whole world owes you its gratitude for your inventions and for what you’re trying to do by virtuous stealth to preserve civilization. But if your work is mistaken by the American government for a Chinese plot to conquer space, which could only mean to a mind like the president’s that China intends to conquer the United States, the speed with which things could get out of hand could take the world’s breath away.”
Henry gave General Yao a very long look. He said, “I hear what you’re saying to me, General. May I ask why you’re saying it?”
General Yao stopped smiling. The difference this made in his appearance was astonishing. The light in his smooth countenance went out as if a circuit breaker had popped. His eyes dulled, his complexion became a shade darker.
“I was not told why I should deliver this briefing, Henry,” he said. “But I hope nevertheless that you are hearing what I am saying to you.”
3
I FLEW OUT THE NEXT morning. Henry remained behind. As usual, there were no good-byes. In Newark, Melissa, whom I had not seen for weeks, was waiting for me outside customs. In her severe dark suit and perfect maquillage, she looked every bit the big-time Wall Street lawyer.
“Henry has a surprise for you,” she said.
“What kind of a surprise?”
“If I told you that, it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
On the drive into the city, we talked about her children. They were teenagers now. The girl was beautiful and boy-crazy. Melissa suspected her son, who was a soccer star, of taking steroids. She suspected both kids of living dangerously behind her back. With their looks and allowances, how could things be otherwise? As a single mother, Melissa was a worrier and a spy. She had a tracking device that could pinpoint both kids’ precise whereabouts by locating their cell phones. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she implanted computer chips beneath their skin.
The car pulled up in front of an apartment building on Central Park West. The doorman watched appreciatively as Melissa’s very long legs unfolded from the backseat.
“Hello, Edward,” Melissa said. “Remember this lady.”
In the elevator, Melissa provided a short biography of the doorman. Edward was a retired army sergeant, a former member of Delta Force who had gone on secret missions all over the world, shooting bad guys and rescuing good guys. All the other doormen were ex–Delta Force or Navy Seals or had even more impressive top-secret résumés.
The apartment was on the top floor. Melissa unlocked the door with a remote control like the ones that come with expensive cars. Four deadbolts snapped open, one after the other. Then the door swung open. The lights switched on by themselves. A large painting, unmistakably an original Edward Hopper, dominated the hall. Other pictures were displayed in the lofty living room, including what looked like a lost Seurat and a pre-Raphaelite portrait of a postcoital woman that could only have been painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself. Every other room in the apartment was also loaded with pictures and sculpture—a Rauschenberg in the master bedroom, a wall of Old Master drawings in the second bedroom, Henry Moore bronzes and at least a thousand leather-bound books, including all of mine, in the study. The ceilings were at least fifteen feet high. The view of the park was terrific.
My clothes were in the closets, my books on the shelves, my computer in the study.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“It’s one of Henry’s places,” Melissa replied.
I said, “And we’re here for what reason?”
“Henry wants you to live here.”
“Really? Why?”
“Maybe he couldn’t bear the thought of you living in that drug dealer’s pad on York Avenue.”
“So he just up and moved me out?”
“Actually, I did, on his instructions. He didn’t tell you?”
“Not a murmur.”
Melissa wore the look of perpetual amused condescension that is affected by the very rich. It was Melissa who belonged in this Xanadu. She knew this.
She said, “I’ve taken care of the lease on York Avenue. Your own place is sealed and wired, so we’ll know if the intruders call again. The rent will be paid by a bank. You should have no problems with the mobsters who own the York Avenue place, but if you do, call me immediately. I advise you to move your money to a different bank and get rid of your cell phone. Buy a cheapo and throw it away and get another one when you’ve used up the minutes. Do not install a regular phone. Change your email account. Use a different server. Encrypt everything. If you want to get laid, go to a hotel. But don’t use a credit card.”
I said, “How thoughtful you are. Are you telling me I’m in protective custody?”
“No,” Melissa replied. “I’m telling you how to be careful.”
She looked at her watch. “I have to go pick up the kids,” she said.
She showed me how to operate the remote—one button to unlock the front door, another to open it, a third to turn off the alarm system, another to close the door—it was too heavy to close by hand—and lock it behind me and set the perimeter alarms and turn off the lights. She refrained from telling me not to lose the remote.
Melissa had one more item on her checklist. “By the way,” she said, “this building doesn’t allow pets that weigh more than ten pounds. So no chow chows.” She kissed the air beside my ears, mmmm, mmmm, left and right.
“Ciao!”
She was gone in a paradiddle of five-inch heels.
Melissa or another of Henry’s innumerable helpers had stocked the refrigerator and freezer with enough gourmet food for a month. I did not go outside for a week. I couldn’t tear myself away from the pictures. And besides, I still had enemies, and one of them was Bear Mulligan.
However, nobody can live forever without fresh air, so eventually I did venture out. For old times’ sake I took a run around the Reservoir. I stayed away from the Ramble and other hazardous parts of the park. Was I being stalked? A person might as well be stalked by T. rex as by Bear. I stopped once or twice to tie my shoes while glancing artfully behind me. I saw nothing except the usual aimless crowds. Bear would have towered over them, but he was not the only one who might be keeping an eye on me. The fact that my enemies knew how to blend into the mob could only mean that they were professionals. I wished that I did have the chows to protect me. How I would have prevented them from attacking everyone in the park who didn’t wear a “Me-Friend” ID strung around their necks, I could not imagine.
Despite my anxieties, I was hungry. It was warm enough today to eat outdoors if you were wearing a sweater, so I walked over to the Boathouse and bribed my way onto the deck. While I waited for a waiter to notice me, I watched the ducks and swans on the Lake. Their balletic movements induced a sort of trance.
I snapped out of it in a hurry when Adam sat down at the table with me.
“Another fateful encounter,” he said. “May I join you?”
I didn’t say a word or make a gesture. That was all the encouragement he needed.
He said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”
He ordered grilled sole and a salad for both of us and a bottle of Meursault. He was as handsome as ever. He was charming. He was warm to the touch. He had a mind-reader’s look in his eyes. I’m not used to drinking alcohol at lunch. After the third glass, I was quite seriously relaxed. Candy is dandy, liquor is quicker.
Hours later I woke up in a hotel room with the faint taste of sole and butter on my tongue. Adam was gone. He had picked up my clothes and folded them neatly before he left. On the floor, my running shoes stood primly side by side, socks draped over them. He left no note, but on the bathroom mirror he had soaped his phone number and, ugh, a heart pierced by an arrow.
Once again, Adam had stalked me. How did I know he was the only one? When I left the hotel I took a local train to South Ferry, then rode back uptown on an express, took a crosstown bus to the East Side, walked for a while, staring into store windows at the reflections of several hundred strangers, any one of whom could have been tailing me. Finally, I darted into the Waldorf by one door and left by another, then dashed across Park Avenue and leaped into a taxi that took me home.
Suspicion took charge of me. I knew Adam had followed me to the Boathouse. He had followed me once before, in Chelsea. Now he had done it again. Whom did he work for? How could he afford a bottle of Meursault?
For most of the night I lay awake, furiously lecturing myself: You idiot! What have you done?
At 5:00 a.m. on the dot, exactly an hour before I began writing, Henry called.
He said, “About what time will you finish work today?”
“If I start now, around eleven,” I replied.
“I’ll pick you up in front of your building at noon.”
“When will we be coming back?”
“Tonight, late, I think. But maybe tomorrow.”
Click. Henry never said hello or good-bye. He called, he hung up. He arrived, he left.
He was right on time in a sports car that was new to me. He was driving himself. As before, he turned north on the West Side Highway. My heart sank. Garbo again, Amerigo again.
Gleaming German cars again, when we arrived. Amerigo met us at the door. The house smelled of wax and air freshener and the bitter sap of recently cut stems of greenhouse flowers.
Awaiting us in the library were Ng Fred, the spacecraft engineers I had met on my first trip to Hsi-tau, and a tall horse-faced man I had never seen before. The men wrung Henry’s hand and nodded absently to me. I saw no sign of Garbo and gave thanks. Chairs had been arranged in a circle. We all sat down and waited for Henry to tell us why we were here. The grandfather clock in the library—an odd place for it—struck two after a lengthy overture of chimes. Henry waited politely until the mechanism had done its thing, as if the clock might be a living being whose feelings he did not want to hurt.
He said, “We’ve come to the hard question.”
He paused for a long moment, glancing from face to face.
“That question,” Henry said, “is the Choice, capital C. Apart from the crew, who and what goes aboard the mother ship? More difficult still, who and what do not go aboard? How do we decide?”
Minutes passed. The grandfather clock ticked, a sound long lost to human ears. Henry waited patiently for someone to say something. No one wanted to go first. In his own mind, Henry may have been first among equals. To everybody else, he was a half-god, possessed of powers that mortal minds could barely comprehend. Finally the newcomer cleared his throat. His looks were unusual: long bones, balding crown with horseshoe fringe, big ears with lobes the size of egg yolks, pince-nez hanging from a black shoestring. He blinked a lot. He wore a wide-wale corduroy suit, rumpled and stained, and Birkenstock sandals with thick woolen gray socks. His manner suggested that whatever shyness the rest of us might have, he was no newcomer to the hall of the demigods.
Henry said, “Yes, Prof?”
In a faintly transatlantic accent, Prof said, “Let’s begin with the ethical question, shall we? I believe that’s why I’m here.”
He gave Henry an inquisitive look—I am right about that, am I not, old chap?
Henry answered with one of his tiny smiles and said, “Why not?”
“Why not indeed? This enterprise will stand or fall on the question of ethics. More than any other factor, ethics has the power to imperil, even to destroy the enterprise before it ever gets”—he chuckled—“off the ground.”
The Prof began his presentation. He knew his subject inside out. The material was dense. His delivery was practiced. It went on and on. I listened carefully. Much of what the Prof was telling us about the history of right behavior was interesting in its way, though by no means unfamiliar. After an hour or so, the others began to fidget. Henry called a break. Everyone rushed to the toilets, including me.
Henry ran me down in the hallway.
“How do you like the Prof?” he asked.
“Love him,” I said.
“When we get back, interrupt him,” Henry said.
I was the last to return to the library. The moment I appeared in the doorway, the Prof drew the breath that clearly was going to be exhaled a millisecond later as a cloud of words.
I said, “Excuse me. I have a thought.”
Actually, I didn’t. I had no idea what I was going to say, but I was under orders.
I received a sour look from the Prof, who said, “How very interesting. However, I haven’t quite finished.”
I held up a palm. “If you’ll indulge me, sir, my thought is this—survival is the issue here. It is the moral imperative of moral imperatives. No smaller issue can be permitted to intrude.”
The Prof’s eyes widened. His lips twisted in contempt, disguised as amusement. He said, “You take my breath away.”
Henry said, “Go on.”
The Prof shook his head in deep puzzlement. Henry was giving this empty-headed floozy the floor?
I said, “The idea is to save the species. Nothing else matters.”
“In other words, play God,” said the Prof. “Do whatever you feel like doing and devil take the hindmost?”
“No, sir. Do what’s possible in the circumstances.”
“Nonsense,” said the Prof.
I developed my nonsensical thoughts at some length while the Prof stood helplessly by because Henry let me talk, seemed even to w
ant me to talk.
At last the Prof spoke. “Balderdash!” he said.
He turned on his heel without so much as a nod to Henry, let alone the rest of us, and strode out of the room, then out of the house. Apparently he did not brook contradiction.
“Shall we go on?” Henry asked.
We did so, until the sun went down. I took little part in the discussion, which turned practical and technical the moment the Prof departed—how many engineers did we need, how many physicians, teachers, pilots, navigators? Should the ethnic balance duplicate the numbers on Earth, or should selection ignore race and consider only usefulness? No one else referred to my behavior toward the Prof, but it bothered me. If past experience was any guide, it would probably continue to bother me for years.
Embarrassment had been my faithful companion for most of my life. Now it sat down beside me at dinner, when the German engineer, while pulling back my chair, congratulated me on my victory.
“Pompous ass,” said the German, who had been educated in England and gotten his money’s worth in terms of accent. “A bit of humiliation will do him good.”
“I wasn’t trying to humiliate anyone.”
“You rang his bell anyway, old girl. Well done.”
After dinner, Garbo materialized and murmured into my ear.
She said, “I’m told everyone is spending the night. And that brings me to a question.”
“Which is?”
“You and Henry. One room or two?”
“Two.”
Her eyes were bright, and in them you could read her thoughts. She wasn’t fooled by this deception, not Garbo. What else could I be for if not to sleep with the trillionaire?
But as things turned out, I did spend part of the night with Henry. Before dawn—it was still dark of night—I heard someone tapping on my door. My visitor was Henry. He was fully clothed, Yankees cap and all.
“I’m going out for coffee,” he said in a half whisper. “Want to join me?”
In the nearest town he found a Dunkin’ Donuts with a bunch of pickup trucks parked outside. Inside, everyone was dressed pretty much the same way Henry was—that is to say, like people who lived from paycheck to paycheck. Most of the guys were beefy, and when he came back to the table with our breakfast, I understood why. Each donut represented an instantaneous weight gain of not less than twice its own bulk. Henry had bought us two apiece, along with two enormous cups of coffee.
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