by Kate Wilhelm
“We need a car. One of us has to go up to Coos Bay and get a car, and then we're all set.”
“You,” Follett said. “Too many people recognize me. You paying?”
“Yep. All the way. I pick up all expenses.”
Milton Follett continued to study the idea. Lasater could tell when he stopped considering it and let his mind drift to Lyle Taney; a film of perspiration put a shine on his forehead.
Outside, the rain started again. It was like a drum beat on the metal roof.
* * * *
Lasater was not even certain he had heard a knock on the door until he opened it to see Lyle Taney there with rain running off her. She was dressed in her down jacket and jeans, boots; her hood was pulled low on her forehead. She looked like a commercial for a hikers’ club. He grinned at her and stepped aside to allow her to enter. She pushed the hood back and stood dripping on the rug.
“My God,” Lasater said. “You look great! I've never seen you look better!” Her lips were soft without any trace of chapping now; her eyes were clear and bright, as green as sea water; her face glowed, the windburn totally gone. She had swept Follett with one quick glance, and now was looking at Lasater steadily.
“I think the lady wants to talk to me in private,” he said to Follett.
“Raining too hard,” Follett said, not shifting his gaze from Lyle Taney.
“What can I do?” Lasater asked helplessly. “He's bigger than both of us. You want a cup of coffee? Let's get that jacket off, dry out a little.” He made no motion, but continued to study her, the changes in her. Always before she had kept herself way back where she thought she was safe, but now she was right out front, not hiding at all. Her eyes blazed at him, straight on. Then he thought, she was sleeping with the kid! He was fascinated and disgusted by the idea.
“Why are you still here?” she asked. “What else do you want? You drove Saul Werther to his death. What more can you do?”
“He isn't dead, Lyle. Let's not pretend. Werther, the kid, you, me, we're all in this together. We've come too far to try to kid each other.”
“I'm warning you,” she said, “if you don't get out of here and leave Carmen alone, and leave me alone, I'm going to call the sheriff's office and the nearest FBI office and anyone else I can think of and make a loud noise about an ex-agent and an ex-football player who keep threatening and harassing me.”
“Baby, I'm on their side. National security takes precedence over local affairs every time.”
“You're a liar, Mr. Lasater. I intend to make those calls if you don't get out of here and leave us alone.”
Lasater laughed and reached past her to lean against the door. “Honey, what makes you think you'll be going anywhere to do any complaining?”
She did not move. “I asked everyone in the park which camper you and the football player were in,” she said evenly. “Two tents, a motor home, two campers, and a trailer. Some of the boys thought it was neat to be camping out next to Milton Follett. They might even ask for an autograph.”
Follett made a sound deep in his chest, a grunt, or a groan.
Lyle continued to watch Lasater. “Just so there wouldn't be any excuse to delay,” she said, “I brought you this.” She took her hand from her pocket and tossed the bug onto the bunk bed.
“She's lying,” Lasater said to Follett then. “She doesn't want cops asking that kid questions any more than we do.”
“Let her go,” Follett said. He had stopped watching her and now was looking at Lasater murderously. “She's been using my name around here. Let her go.”
He was infuriated because the plum had been yanked out of reach, Lasater knew. There would be no way of getting him to cooperate again soon if she walked out the door. “Let's take off, go down the beach a ways and decide how to handle this.”
“You'll have to move my car,” Lyle said. “It's blocking you. One of you will have to go out and move it, and some of the people I talked to will be curious enough to be watching—” Now she looked at Follett, as if she knew he was the one to work on. “I left a note for Carmen, telling him I was coming here. If he comes down, and he will, and finds all of us gone, he'll call the police fast.”
“He put you up to this, didn't he?” Lasater demanded.
“You win because no one really opposes you,” she said, and there was a new intensity in her voice. “I tried to close my eyes to what you were, what you were doing, trying to make me do. But I'm not afraid anymore, Mr. Lasater.”
She was telling the truth; she was not afraid. He knew it, and he realized that Milton Follett knew it. For a moment the tableau held. Then, as if from a great distance, Lasater heard himself mutter, “Oh, my God!” and suddenly he knew what it was the old man had found. “It wasn't a cancer cure, was it?” he whispered. Wildly he turned from her toward Follett. “I know what it was! Look at her!”
Follett was moving the few steps that separated him from the other two. Savagely he jerked Lasater away from the door. “Get the hell out of here,” he said to Lyle.
She left. She had not yet reached her car when the camper shook as if a heavy weight had been slammed against the side of it. She did not look back, but got inside her car and put the key in the ignition.
She started the car, left the camping area, climbed the steep gravel driveway.
He used it on me, she thought clearly, and it seemed as if the rain had come inside the car, was blurring her vision. She saw Carmen on the road and stopped for him. He examined her face quickly.
“You could have been hurt!”
“But not killed?”
For a moment he was silent. She started the car again and drove south, toward the beach where they had walked with Saul.
“You could be killed,” he said then. “But you could be hurt and hurt and hurt for a long time first.”
She nodded. “Why did you do it to me?”
“We need help. We have to stay together in case one of us gets hurt. The other has to take care of him. No hospitals. No doctors. There are a few others, but they all have work to do, and some of us have to be able to travel here and there.”
“To attend conferences, see who is getting too close.”
“Yes. Lyle, who would you hand it over to? Our government? A church leader? Who should be given it? Eight hundred million Chinese? Two and a half billion Asians? Four and a half billion of all of us? A scientific elite? The military? Who, Lyle?”
She shook her head. “You're as bad as Lasater. Judge, jury, executioner.”
“We know we are,” he said very quietly. She thought of the immensity of the sadness she had detected in Saul. “Four people so far have followed that line of research,” he said. “One of them was already spending his Nobel Prize money. I killed him and buried him.” His voice was very flat now; she did not want to look at his face. “One of them died following the injection. Two of them are back at work, helping us keep it undiscovered.”
They had reached the wide beach. Today the water was almost black under the low clouds and pounding rain. It was low tide, the waves were feeble. Lyle parked and they sat staring out at the endless sea. She thought of the story of the fisherman and his three wishes. This was her third trip to this winter beach. I wish ... I wish ... There was nothing to follow the words. Golden wings, she thought. She could wish for golden wings. Why me? she had wanted to demand of Lasater.
Why me?
“I don't want it,” she said. “I didn't ask for it. You didn't ask me if I agreed.”
“I know. If you had wanted it, we wouldn't have chosen you.”
“You can't make that decision for the rest of humanity. No one can make such a decision for everyone.”
“I know. We can't, but we have to, because if we don't someone else will. Who? You know the fears about an escaped genetic experiment? If a mutated virus got loose, there wouldn't be any way to stop it. There wouldn't be any way to stop this either. We're carriers. You're a carrier now. It's in the blood, in every cell of your body. A transfusion,
sexual contact, that's all it takes. Think of the malnutrition here now with our four-and-a-half-billion population, and then start multiplying it endlessly. Parents, children, their children, all living forever until their metabolism stops because there's no food for them. They would hurt for an awfully long time before that happened, Lyle, and they would hurt very bad.”
She thought of the look on Follett's face back in the camper. She had recognized that look: cruelly possessive, hungry. Sexual contact. And the Folletts and the Lasaters would be the ones to get it. The others might all die, but not the Folletts and Lasaters of the world. Lasater knew, but it did not matter. No one believed him, and soon he would grow old, die. She looked at the sea, wishing for a sign, for a rainbow, a streak of gold at the horizon, anything to take the decision away from her. There was only the gray water rising and falling in slow swells, and the steady rain.
“I don't know any science,” she said finally. “What could I possibly do?”
“First, write your eagle book. We'll stay here and go on just as we've been doing. You'll become a rich reclusive woman. You'll travel around the world, taking pictures, talking to people. We need others, Lyle. You'll have to help me find the right ones, recruit them, sometimes bury them.”
Reclusive, she thought. Of course. Talk with many others, friends of none of them. No one could bear watching children age and die, watching friends suffer, grow old, die... “Others to do what?” she asked dully.
“At first we thought no one could ever have it, no one at all. It doesn't change you, you know. You don't gain wisdom. or courage, or anything else. You just keep living, exactly the way you are. But more recently we decided that if the world could change, if enough people could change ... I don't know if it will work. Sometimes I know it can't. But we have to try. A few people here and there, people like you who don't want power or glory, who don't want to drive others to do their bidding. Unwilling recruits every one, the most reluctant elite the world has ever seen.”
It was starting to get dark now; the clouds pressed closer against the ocean as if waiting for darkness to hide their possession of it. Lyle turned on the key. “We should get back before the fog comes in.” She did not engage the gears yet, but sat with the motor idling. “Why are you here, at this place?”
There was a long pause before he answered. “Sometimes we have to go somewhere far away from people, where there are things that haven't been changed much, where no one talks to us very much. There are a few mountains, places in the desert, upper Maine, here. We need a place where we can just live without having to think for a while.”
Lyle nodded. When the pain gets too great to bear, you try to escape, she thought: the bottle, pills, sex; and when none of them gives more than a momentary surcease, you go to the woods, or to the winter beach.
“Saul is well then. It was a trick to get him out of here.”
“Yes. I had to wait to make certain you were with us. If your fever had gone too high, you might have killed off the genetic material we gave you. We couldn't know right away. Tomorrow I'll send a message to the Times personal column to let him know you're okay.”
Now she shifted gears and started to back up. “I know what the message should say. ‘Blue float has come ashore safely.'”
“Welcome home,” Carmen said in his most gentle voice. She thought of the eagles, beyond good and evil, the winter beach entering a transition now, going into spring, and then summer when the ocean would bring back the scrubbed sand, make amends. All ordered, necessary, unavoidable. She started the drive home.
* * *
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