When she had gone, J, sitting high, turned his face to his new room-mate and put on a smile. “Hi. My name is J Middleton Little,” he said politely. “Glad to know you, sir.”
The new room-mate, who was perhaps in his late sixties, had a lean old face, very clean. His skin was drawn, shallowing the wrinkles. He had dark eyes, and they were fierce. He said nothing. J felt like an idiot. “That’s just the initial J,” he babbled. “My family didn’t bother … Say, what happened to the other man? Did he vanish?”
“Maybe he died,” said the man in the other bed bitterly, and he looked away.
“Well,” said J in a moment, “all I can say is I wish to the Lord I had a double martini.” He stared straight ahead.
He heard a throaty sound. “I’m sorry, Mr. Little,” his roommate said. “My name is John Barkis, and the fact is, so do I.”
J looked, and the man was smiling at him. J couldn’t help feeling an impact. For some reason there was power here. And it had charm.
CHAPTER 2
Saturday Night
The trays came, the meal was eaten, the trays went away. All the while J bore in mind the idea that this man was in a desperate state of health and had seemed to have been in pain. But J had no chance to arrange or even affirm any other recollections of the peculiar conversation he had overheard. His room-mate was betraying no sign of pain and no sign of suspicion, either. On the contrary, he kept asking the usual kindly questions, and J found himself delivering his autobiography in the usual sketchy manner. He did so gladly. It took him off the hook.
“What I do is, I manage an office,” he told this Barkis. “That is, I’m the assistant, but it is a very, very big firm of CPA’s, and second banana there is bigger than a lot of top bananas elsewhere—as bigness goes.”
“Oh, sure, I find the job interesting.”
“Well … I had four years of liberal arts and then graduate work. School of Business. That was after the service.”
“You bet. Fought the war at my desk in San Francisco. Never flinched,” J clowned. But the other man’s smile was fleeting. He asked another question.
“No, in Southern California. I’m only here since Thursday. I was supposed to fly home today, but the darnedest thing.…”
J went into the tale of his near-accident and warmed up to the task of making it amusing. His audience gave him perfect attention, but J could not make the man laugh aloud. Instead, his room-mate asked where in Southern California J lived.
“Burbank. Suburban Los Angeles, you could say. Nice place to raise a family.”
“You have a family, then?”
“I sure do. Three kids, boy and two girls. Our youngest daughter is still in high school. The others are married. Three grandchildren, now. Girl and two boys. Makes a nice balance, so far.”
“Indeed. And your wife is … with you?”
“You bet. Same old wife I started with.”
“You have not—seen much of the world, I take it?”
“Every once in a while,” said J solemnly, “I go half a mile over the border to Mexico and drink a glass of beer. No, I never got around to travel,” he continued as this fell flat. “I just keep slogging along in the same old rut. Nice place, my rut, you know. All the comforts of home. Who needs foreign intrigue?”
J reflected that he would be hard put to dig up anything bizarre or exciting in that sense that had ever happened to him. “You know,” he burst out, “I was thinking to myself this morning that I may be smack dab in the middle of this whole society. You tend to stop and think when you’ve nearly got yourself …”
He was going to say “dead,” but J caught the word before it fell out of his mouth. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he recovered smoothly. “Turn over in your mind the name I’ve had all my life. Middleton was my mother’s family name. So here I am, J Middleton Little. And, by golly, it suits me. I’m middle-class. Middle-income. (Of course, I like to think it’s high middle.) And middlebrow, for sure. I just might be the Average Reasonable Man in the Street, for all I know.”
“J Middleton Little,” the other man murmured, and J seemed to hear a note of pity.
J wasn’t asking for pity. He said, “I enjoy it, Mr. Barkis. Neither the top nor the bottom, that’s for me.” (Whoops! “Top” was a word he had overheard.)
“What you say is very interesting,” said his room-mate dreamily.
No, it’s not, thought J, trying to corner another wisp of memory. Hadn’t that visitor called this man Doctor? J didn’t want to ask. He wasn’t going to turn the tables and start a series of questions now, however polite that might be. If his room-mate didn’t know about the eavesdropping or, knowing, was choosing to ignore it, J was more than willing to skip the whole thing himself.
“After all,” Barkis was saying, “the economy, at least, bases on you, does it not? On your conscientious industry day in and day out, on you and all the others like you, who go your rounds and pay your bills and ask for nothing more.”
The phone rang, and J was glad of it. (Nuts to this turn of the talk. His sense of self had begun to bristle at that “nothing more”!) He picked up the phone. “Excuse me. This will be my wife.”
“Long suffering … in quiet desperation … gallant enough to say that you enjoy … Perhaps you do,” the old man kept mumbling.
Sophia said into J’s ear in her accusing way, “How are you now?”
“Just fine. A-okay. How’s everything there?”
Sophia began to tell him that everything there was fine, but J watched (out of his eye corner, with some surprise) his roommate begin to struggle out of the other bed and totter to his feet. (Should he be doing that? J wondered.)
He began to give Sophia a list of the kinds of tests he had undergone, but at the same time he kept ready to spring to assist while the thin old body, arrayed in rather elegant pajamas, staggered perilously across to the lavatory door. When that door closed, J sighed into the phone.
“What?” said Sophia at once.
“Nothing, honey. I guess I don’t like it much being stuck here another night.”
“I don’t like it, either,” she said promptly. “Are you surely getting home tomorrow?”
“That I am. All I’ve got to do is get past the lawyers. I’m getting out of this bed as early in the morning as I can. Believe me, I’d rather be sitting in the airport.”
“Oh, J, it must be miserable!”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been interesting in a way. Tell you all about it when I get there.”
“Well, you be sure and get here,” she said in her scolding voice. “But you do feel perfectly all right?”
“Not only that, I’ve got the word of modern science on it. Only things wrong with me come from hanging around for darned near fifty years.”
Sophia laughed. They said goodnight.
J settled back. His room-mate came out of the lavatory. He went to his bed rather more briskly than he had left it. He lay, breathing fast, for a moment. Then he said, “I am trying to remember exactly what you must have heard.”
Why the old fox! J thought. He dragged himself in there just to test it out!
“Listen, I never meant to hide in there. I’m very sorry. It just got too embarrassing. I’d like to apologize. I honestly …”
His room-mate said quietly, “Are you a lover of mankind, Mr. Little?”
J was jolted. “I gather there was some top secret stuff being mentioned, but you don’t have to worry about me, Mr. Barkis.” He was going to add that he hadn’t understood a thing, but Barkis interrupted.
“I wonder, Mr. Little, if you would mind getting out of bed and closing the door very firmly? Please?”
J got out of bed and closed the door to the corridor. He firmed it with exaggerated care. He got back under his covers, feeling frightened for some reason. “I don’t want you to tell me anything I’m not supposed to know,” he said. “I promise you that I won’t mention a word that was said. Listen, I never took a science course in
my life without kicking and screaming all the way. All I know is right out of science fiction. That’s about the extent.…”
J subsided. His room-mate was rigid. He seemed to be screaming silently. Was he in pain?
In a while Barkis turned his face. “I’ll ask you not only to make that promise,” he said, giving J a cold lick of his eye, “but promise not even to mention me. Let it be assumed that your original companion lasted out the night.”
“All right,” said J uncomfortably.
“But it won’t be easy, will it? For you to refrain from telling your wife and your grown children something of this very strange adventure?”
There it was again, that pitying distance. J began to say that even if he told, his people were trustworthy, but he didn’t get beyond two words into his sentence.
“I am asking you to promise not to speak of this to one living soul.” Now the older man’s eyes were fierce. “Mr. Little, I am what they call a terminal case. I am going to die quite soon. You overheard that, surely? Nevertheless, I ought to have known that you were there. My … friend simply assumed that I would know. It’s not his fault. It’s not your fault. The fault is mine.”
“But if I promise you …”
“I have resolved,” Barkis swept on bleakly, “to let them give me no pain-killers whatsoever, lest in some drugged state my tongue went out of control, and I said too much. I had resolved to deny this miserable body any dominion and use my will. Then I blew it, after all.”
J said promptly, “No, you didn’t. Whatever was said won’t go out of this room with me.”
“It will go out of this room with you,” said Barkis, “and sit, bursting in your memory, all the way to California.”
“What will?” J snapped impatiently. “You don’t understand. Listen, I couldn’t make head nor tail of one damned thing the two of you did say. Gibberish! Poonacootamoowa to the moon! How can I tell a top secret that I don’t know?”
“You wouldn’t know you were telling it,” said Barkis flatly. “In my judgment you had better know.”
J sank against his pillows, feeling annoyed.
“And for your promise,” said his room-mate with a high overtone like a subtle screech, “to obliterate the consequences of my stupidity, I can promise you seven seats to the moon.”
Oh? Well! J winced away from this knowledge. He had long ago concluded that this man was a scientist of some kind, and probably top, at that. But now he knew that the finest mind can deteriorate. This seemed very sad to J.
“So you read science fiction, Mr. Little?” Barkis broke the silence rather sweetly.
“Some,” said J shortly. “Not much.”
“What do you think of it?”
“It can be good or bad, I guess,” said J sulkily.
“Implausible, of course?”
“Oh, sure,” said J. “Although I guess we’ve learned not to be quite so sure.” He was squirming. The fact was, J thought, such stories were too often only good old Westerns in space helmets. Furthermore, he tended to resent authors who could give the good guys or the bad guys any old kind of imagined magic, at any time, so that the reader never even knew the rules.
“I suppose, then, you’d repeat an old nut’s dying fantasies? Surely, they are only a form of fiction.”
J was hit. He said stiffly, “I have already told you that I won’t repeat a word I heard you say.”
“Ah, yes,” said Barkis, “but such a promise is subject to revision. For instance, if you revise your notion of the circumstances under which it was given? As the mental state of him to whom you gave it?”
“It is?” said J tightly.
“And subject, also, to your faith in the integrity of some other. Your wife, for instance. A secret is not much fun to keep alone.”
“Why don’t you,” said J angrily, “stop having so much fun, then?”
They were silent. J felt shame. That hadn’t been a very nice thing to say. “It wasn’t your fault,” he murmured. “Don’t worry …”
“I have no children nor grandchildren,” the man said.
J glanced at him. Now what?
“Even so, I should be sorry to see the human race vanish from the universe. I can assume you feel that, too?”
J didn’t even bother to answer.
“There are things,” said Barkis slowly, “that some men can do, now, that most men cannot imagine ever being done. There are things known, and the Average Reasonable Man knows not that they are known.”
“You speak as one of the elite, I guess,” said J, stung.
“Why, I suppose so,” said Barkis. His smile did pleasant things to his wrinkles. “If I tell you that it is quite possible—today, tonight, tomorrow—for men to colonize the moon, will you believe it?”
“I have no way to assess or judge your knowledge,” said J, “have I?”
Barkis sighed. “Aye, there’s the rub.” He raised on his elbow. “But you do know it is possible that this planet could be made uninhabitable—never mind in how many ways?”
“I’ve heard rumors to that effect,” said J stiffly. “We live with that these days.”
“There is a … what shall I call it?… a group of people who know that, and live with it, but who do not intend to be present on the occasion of the extinction of the species. They are of all so-called races and nationalities, and they watch, all over the world, in very sensitive spots.” The man was speaking in flat tones as if he droned a report. “The moment it becomes apparent to them that such desolation is upon us, they intend to remove themselves and a few well-chosen thousands to the moon. And shelter there. When this earth is clean, in time, they will return and be the seed. And so the species can try again.”
“Who’s choosing the chosen people?” said J promptly. “Who elected the elite?” he asked. (He didn’t believe a word of this nonsense, but he was beginning to enjoy it.)
“That’s shrewd,” said Barkis. His clean old face now sparkled. “That’s very shrewd. But what can the elite be, today, but the brainy ones? Who else could make this project Work? Still it has recently occurred to me that the group may be somewhat top-heavy. It may need at least one Average Reasonable Man. And perhaps his Average Family? I can’t go, as you see. But since I wear some laurels in the sight of that company, I have the disposition of seven seats. They are now yours, Mr. Little. As a reward if you like. Or a bribe. Whichever.”
“Oh, boy,” sighed J. Even his toes were wiggling in outrage. “This is all very interesting, as a bedtime story. But I said I won’t talk, and I won’t talk, and that should be enough without an elaborate snow job.”
“And, of course, you never promised not to repeat a silly bedtime story. What harm, eh?” The man was bitter.
J was getting angry. “Okay. What harm?” he snapped. “Explain to me.”
“Do you see resigned millions letting the chosen go?” said Barkis wearily.
“So you’ve got to bribe anybody who gets to know? But you haven’t got enough bribes for everybody?”
“Efforts continue,” said Barkis, “to save everybody. This Ark may never have to be set afloat. The reason for secrecy,” he said in a louder voice, “is a well-considered decision not to risk bringing on the catastrophe we still hope to avert.”
“Well, I’m certainly glad to hear that efforts continue,” said J sarcastically. “Is the President brainy enough to get to go? What’s the government’s position?”
“I don’t see it along nationalistic lines,” said Barkis. “I see the human family. You are a father. Would you—”
“Don’t preach to me, please,” barked J. “For one thing, I’m the father of three human children, not mankind.”
His room-mate began to nibble on his pale lips. J licked his own. This argument was weird.
“To answer your question,” Barkis said in a minute, “governments know; none can officially know. So don’t go running to our government for confirmation. Not every one in government knows what the government knows.”
J blinked at him.
“Don’t you see it can’t be public? Tell me, Mr. Little, do you conceive of the common people of many nations as becoming, in an instant, a harmony of thoughtful minds, all dedicated to the long view and the salvation of the seed of man?”
J, feeling slightly chilled (within the story), said, “I imagine there’d be some questions raised—How come your guys got more seats than our guys?—and so on.”
Barkis rolled his head. “And some mad children on this earth with power to destroy more than they recognize to be in being.”
“Okay, okay,” said J. “I’ve given you my word.”
There was silence.
“Tell me this,” said J in a moment. “Why can’t you just take a promise? Isn’t your little group of top brains going to have to believe what you promise one another? You’ll never get to the moon, let alone back again, if you don’t.”
“You speak of a principle,” said Barkis softly. “That eases me.”
“I’m glad,” said J grimly. “So now don’t give it another thought.”
He seemed to know that Barkis was in pain, although the man made no moan. The spasms seemed to come and go.
“We are agreed,” his room-mate said. “But there’s one thing more. You are going to California tomorrow?”
“You bet I am.”
“Then I must arrange for you to receive the ticket.”
“What ticket?’”
“Seven seats to the moon.” Barkis raised on his elbow again. “My word is good, Mr. Little. I’ll have it registered in your name and delivered to you. Six seats to fill as you like, but you must sit in the seventh. Write down your address.”
J didn’t protest. If the old man was really loopy, too much argument couldn’t be good for him. J wrote down his name and address.
Barkis received the piece of paper and put it into his pajama pocket (whence J expected it would probably go to the laundry). “The carrier,” said the old man musingly, “will have to identify himself. You might, by chance, be approached by the wrong people, who may be watching me, especially.”
(Ah, J thought, poor old cracked head! What needless suffering!)
Seven Seats to the Moon Page 2
