“Don’t be ridiculous, Liza.” Extra abrupt, denying a self-evident truth. “If the structure survives, it survives. Time-lag damage is out of the question. . . .” A new thought occurred to him. “Besides, we may not have a week to spare. What with the fever in St. Kinnow and now last night’s raid—I’m sure you know the Founder’s attitude. He would not want us to be pusillanimous.” So the blame (if it ever came to it) was moving on: from her to him, and now on to the Founder. “Have you asked him?” Liza said.
“I can’t.” Thank God. “All communications outside the region have been stopped. They’re even jamming private radio.”
“Then the responsibility is entirely yours.”
“Of course, child. Of course.” But he scuttled now. “And I’m perfectly capable of shouldering it.”
So her alibi, despicable, was constructed. She looked across at Roses, busy with a jigsaw, quite happy that people should talk in front of him about things that he had no hope of understanding. It was a pleasant little world, there in the hospital room. Inevitably, when it ended a lot of other things would end as well. She turned back to Professor Kravchensky in the observation screen.
“I’ll be out tomorrow,” she said. “There’ll be a lot
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to arrange. You probably couldn’t do it all before then anyway.”
"But you are well, child? You have no symptoms? You and your . .. companion?”
She nodded. He wasn’t asking after her, he was asking after his research program. She didn’t blame him—a fortnight ago, before Roses, she would have felt just the same. If nothing else, then, Roses was a humanizing influence. Having no more to say to the professor, she smiled at him and shut him off. Until tomorrow.
As things turned out, however, Professor Kravchen- sky’s ancient, quavering shoulders were spared any great weight of responsibility. Shortly after four that afternoon the Founder, alarmed by the national situation, flew in by helicopter under a Royal Air Force cover. Regulations had been bent: the Founder had friends (that is to say, frightened enemies) in many high places. He was quarantined at once in the hospital, armed with several telephones and those of his entourage- including, perhaps on Igor Kravchensky’s advice, a new young wife—who had been able to fit into the helicopter. Naturally, and immediately, he made his presence felt. Dr. Meyer had never had, and never would have, a worse patient.
“I feel isolated, doctor. My analyst tells me this is harmful. It’s bad enough to be cut off from my board- room by the unconstitutional rulings of a jealous government, without this further incarceration.”
This wasn’t paranoia. He was being awkward simply for its entertainment value. And Dr. Meyer, guessing as much, was powerless.
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Littlejohn.” This was the fifth call in half an hour. “Couldn’t you and your wife look on the next two days as a sort of second honeymoon?”
“My wife’s job, young man, is to feed me up, to suck
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me off, and to laugh at my jokes. In return she gets to spend my money. Don’t you, my dear? Such an arrangement only works in the wide open spaces of a millionaire’s playground. Two days together in a hospital room amount to advanced mental cruelty.”
To this poor Dr. Meyer had no answer.
“You’re thinking perhaps I shouldn’t have brought her? My analyst agrees with you. It would be far less troublesome if I performed her functions for myself. On the other hand, my lawyer advises me to beware of the desertion laws, and subsequent alimony. So where am I?”
In need of a beer enema, thought the doctor, not always the most delicate of men.
A few rooms away from Manny Littlejohn, but happily unaware of the stresses he and all those involved with him were enduring, Roses and Liza got ready for bed. The day, apart from Professor Kravchenskys intrusion, had been gentle and untroubled. Being in clinical isolation, they were not visited: pulse rate, blood pressure, blood composition, respiration, brain patterns, all were monitored automatically, and their waste products analyzed far away in the hospital laboratory. Their food was delivered through airlock hatches, from which Liza collected it and served it to herself and Roses. He also received the pills she gave him, and went dutifully into the adjoining bathroom, where there was water and a drinking glass. She liked waiting on him. He accepted her services with neither embarrassment nor arrogance. He was autonomous and sturdy, yet obviously very glad of her company. While he was in the room she moved around it with pleasure, appreciated not for her careful components but for herself. In his presence it seemed natural to wear clothes, so she did—though she feared they would make special the
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moment she wanted to be easiest of all, the moment of going to bed.
She wondered if he was sharing her growing sense of peace. It was hard to tell: he didn’t appear to treat her any differently from everyone else who didn’t crowd him. He smiled at her, he answered her, sometimes he told her things, mostly he got on with what he was doing. If his day was shaping itself to any expected conclusion (as hers was) he certainly gave no sign.
She was cleaning her teeth in the adjoining bathroom when he wandered in. “My sister used to do that,” he said proudly. “And my Mum too.”
She shuddered at the implication. Could she really be planning to kiss him? “Why don’t you try it, Roses? The toothpaste tastes lovely.”
He took her brush, pushed the button and watched it spin. “Got your spit on it,” he said. “Wouldn’ be right.” But he tasted her toothpaste, and let her show him how to swill his mouth out. Though he hadn’t yet managed to call her by her name, at least he wasn’t still saying “Miss.”
She left the bathroom, closing the door behind her, hoping he would wash. (Her mother again, her albatross.) Having no nightdress, she kept her clothes on and pottered around the room, tidying up, putting the last pieces into his jigsaw. . . . Then she picked them out again—not for fear of making him feel inadequate, not patronizingly, but rather to avoid taking him over. He came out of the bathroom, wearing his red check shirt, well pulled down, and climbed carefully into the far side of his bed. He lay on his back, with his eyes tightly closed. Liza switched off the light, undressed, and got in beside him. It was then or never.
“What’s this, then?” Not too frightened this time to talk. Oh God, let it be simple.
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“I’m in love with you. My dear.” Words he couldn’t mistake.
“Ar, well now.... Don’ know about that, though.”
“It’s not something you know. It’s something you feel. It makes me feel I want to be here beside you.”
There was a long silence, so long that Liza thought she had lost. Lost everything. Then—
“Maybe you’d better stay, then.”
She stayed.
He felt her presence. It engulfed him. She drew him in, existed for him more vividly, more immediately, than anything he had ever known. He was lost in her. She excluded everything but herself, the pressure of her body, the smell of her sex.
He lay for a long time without thought, fixed in tense equilibrium, aching with need and denial. Unfamiliar awarenesses crowded in on him: his breath that could not be silenced; his saliva that flowed, and was swallowed, and flowed again; the sound of her parted lips; his hand against her thigh; their legs trembling where they touched. He lay quite still, afraid not of her but of his pounding heartbeats. Pictures of imagined sensation began to dazzle the dark screen of his mind. Need and denial. The pictures came more brightly, more precise, more fantastic.
He moved his mouth against the warm black air. Need grew to an intensity beyond the control of his past, contained now only by uncertainty, by a body that did not dare.
He dared not. He dared not stop her. He dared not stop her hand in its movement down over his shirt, turning back its hem, creepi
ng under it up his thigh. He dared not move to stop her fingers as they lightly ruffled the hair around his testicles. And when the fingers closed, they closed around every part of him, every
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bone, every muscle, every blood-cell, every hair, every thought. They closed around his entire being. They closed out uncertainty. They closed out the possibility of a body that did not, could not dare. He turned in the darkness, tearing and gasping.
He slept. She beat down nausea, not caring to move her head in case she woke him. Her mouth bled, and her left breast, and the muscle along the top of her left shoulderblade. There were bruises on the soft insides of her thighs. To breathe was difficult. She was cold and ashamed. She was grateful that he slept. She could face nothing from him; pride, guilt, arrogance, penitence, amusement, disgust, accusation, evasion, acceptance— there was nothing from him, nothing possible, that she could face. He had made her his victim. She had demanded that he should. She was grateful that he slept, and wished he might sleep forever.
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SEVEN
Roses was a dawn animal. He woke while the light was still pale and green and watery in the bare hospital room. He lay still for some minutes, as was his custom, filling out his consciousness slowly with sound and smell and touch. Returning to life was every day a new satisfaction to him. A recognition of loved familiarities. But on this particular morning there was much that was unfamiliar. He thought about it.
He remembered that he was in the hospital: that would be the reason for most of the strangeness. But not the tight dry film that seemed to be puckering the hair on his belly, itching at his thighs. Not the odd taste in his mouth, or the slight soreness. He realized what the taste was, opened his eyes, remembered. Remembered. Remembered enough. . . . Not each movement, each significance, but enough. Turmoil, exaltation, horror, chaos. His opened eyes saw Liza asleep beside him, saw enough.
He eased himself out of the bed, cat smooth. She moved her head and frowned, but did not wake. He put on his trousers, avoiding the scum, the shame on his body, and his worn canvas sneakers. He escaped from the room, down deserted corridors till he found his way out into the sanctuary of the innocent morning. There was dew on the grass. The low rays of the sun laid silvered shadows between each blade. The air was still
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and cool. Roses received the silence and accepted it— had forgotten the summery morning clamor that had once filled the valley. He went quickly down Fore Street, its cobbles exact through the thin soles of his shoes, its houses poised on the edge of movement.
When he reached the Village quay he paused, for two security guards were walking by, on patrol. They spoke to him, friendly, unsurprised to see him about so early, unsurprised that he did not answer. They walked away across the long shadows, skirted the edge of the Village Green and disappeared between the side of the crew room and the Village pub. A dog, also friendly, advanced and was not answered either.
Roses ran down the slipway onto the beach. Close under the quay wall he removed his shoes and then his trousers. He walked out into the water, indifferent to its early morning coldness. When his long shirt-tails began to dip in the water he lifted them, bundling them into one hand and bending his knees as he washed himself. He did not look back at the Village—if he did not see, then he was not seen. He felt no revulsion, handling himself: the cold water de-animalized, and besides, he knew his shame was not so simple. After he had washed he walked backward out of the water, lowering his shirt-tails as he went. In the shelter of the wall again, he pulled his trousers on over cold, insensitive skin. His trousers clung to his wet legs and his sneakers rubbed as he walked.
Now he could hide. He went home to his kitchen, where the immediate past could be lost under the associations, the weight of an entire lifetime. His concealment was not from the Village, not from Liza, not even from himself. The refuge he needed was from the bellowing moments of non-self, from the hideousness that had briefly overcome him, from the need he had re
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fused knowledge of for all his adult life. He must hide from a fearful dream.
His cats were waiting for him. Noisy, they stood on the various cluttered surfaces, clumsily indignant, knocking things over that he should have abandoned them for nearly two full days. He fed them, and in the simple, accustomed movements forgot his dream. He spoke to them individually. He did not mind their scorn, their disregard for his attentions, their interest solely in the food he gave them. Even the cat that did not seem to know him, the black tom spitting vilely as he guzzled, Roses did not mind its strangeness. Cats came and went—for some his kitchen was doubtless no more than a staging point. He stared at the tom, thinking it vaguely familiar. But cats were cats, were a self-contained group, wild, appeasable, with which he shared his home.
He circled the room, touching things. He took his calendar down from die alcove by the stairs and held it in the light from the door, the better to remember his father by. He wrapped a blanket around his knees and sat down in his folding chair slung with red and blue stair runner. Thirty-eight years made a tight cocoon about him. The dream was outside, no longer visible. He’d always hated hospitals.
It was six o’clock before the night nurse, doing her final morning round of the screens, saw that Roses Varco was missing. She woke his roommate, Liza Simmons, but gained no useful information. Even when fully awake, Liza seemed dazed and oddly unforthcoming. A search of the Village was started immediately.
Meanwhile the night’s analytical readings were analyzed. Although Liza was in a mild state of shock from a violent emotional experience that showed up on the graphs around eleven the previous night, her physiology was totally normal. Roses Varco too, up to his de
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parture that morning at five-ten, had been showing no signs of ill health. A radio message was sent at once to the searchers: since Mr. Varco was to have been released that morning anyway, there was no need to bring him back to the hospital when found. A final checkup could be carried out on site. Since the search party had decided to start their search at Roses’ home, they were already with him when the message arrived.
Roses watched the hospital orderlies confer among themselves. They could do what they liked with him, as long as they did not try to take him back to that hospital. Getting him there in the first place had been a trick, a betrayal on the part of . . . But the things that happened in hospitals must be forgotten, must never have been. One of the orderlies turned back to him and explained what they were going to do. Roses listened no further than to understand that it was not necessary for him to return to the hospital—after that he 'merely smiled and nodded through all the well- meant words. So he was taken completely by surprise when they started trying to remove his shirt. He quickly caught on, of course. In the end four of them were needed to undress him and hold him down while a fifth made the necessary examination. And all the time him roaring like a buffalo.
Liza Simmons was discharged from the hospital at a decent time, and in a decent manner. She too (though for different reasons) suffered shame at the final examination, but she was too civilized to show it. She wanted to deny loudly what the nurses would make of the state of her body, lout she was too civilized to do that either. They could make what they liked of it: no, she would rather they didn’t, but they would anyway. She was the girl who had sexed with Roses Varco and got more than she bargained for. By the look of . . . things. She
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walked defiantly away from the examination room, from the hospital, but never from what had happened.
The morning was warm, and several of the people she passed had already shed their clothes. She smiled at them distantly, looked inward for scars on her psyche and found them. The scars on her body were slight, would heal and disappear. But she wondered if she would ever see a penis agai
n without her stomach cringing, without reliving the blind, random assault, without coming near to nausea. She recognized her danger—after a crash you drove again, and as soon as possible. She must sex again, and soon, with some bland, unshakable exponent. But not today. Today her thighs were sore and the tear on her lip would open again too easily. Not today. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or even the day after.
After breakfast in her quarters, at the table she had placed by the window overlooking trees and the calm expanse of Penheniot Pill (which failed to work their usual magic), she went down to the laboratory and Professor Kravchensky. She needed work to do. She needed the blessed controllability of figures.
The professor was on the internal phone, speaking to Manny Littlejohn still quarantined in the hospital.
“Indeed yes, Founder. Two cats. Very savage little animals. One of them escaped after the experiment, but we recaptured it. The vet has them under observation at this moment. Both in excellent health, according to his reports.”
There was a pause, Manny Littlejohns turn to speak, during which the professor, brave at the end of half a mile of wire, covered the earpiece and welcomed T.iza with an impatient gesture toward a pile of prepared calculations. Then he returned to Manny Littlejohn, waited for a slot, neatly inserted his commercial.
“Take-out perfect, reentry perfect, everything going
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exactly as I would wish it. By tomorrow evening, when you’re out of the hospital, I should be ready to . . . As a matter of fact, I’m planning to test the programming on scaled-up body-weights this very afternoon. To that end I’m making inquiries about obtaining a sheep. . . . The difficulty is that neighboring farmers will have been exposed to the St. Kinnow infection, so that negotiations for purchase are bound to be— I beg your pardon, Founder?”
Even to Liza, now at the computer desk, the Founder’s two words were clearly audible.
“Steal one, Founder? Well yes, of course . . . if you say so. Yes, I know—I know they graze close to our northern boundary. . . The professor wrung his one hand not holding the telephone. “I wonder—I wonder if you could possibly call Color Sergeant Cole yourself and give him the necessary authoritization? Or the O.S., perhaps . . . ?”
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