by Sol Stein
Henry wove his way through the woods for several hundred yards in the direction of the building that housed the lockers. There would be a long way to crawl to get there unnoticed. Crawling was much more exhausting than running. Besides, how could he crawl carrying this big stick? He could throw the stick away. Suppose he needed it. He could run to the building. That would attract attention. At the edge of the woods, he looked for activity between himself and the building. None. He would chance walking, calmly, as if he belonged there. If someone spotted him, he’d simply run back to the woods, and they’d light the brush fires immediately. If only they’d had a chance to rehearse this!
If the building housing the lockers had its front door locked, how would he get it open? Were there windows? He couldn’t remember.
His heart skipped when he saw the open door. First, a feeling of elation, followed by alarm. If the door was open, one of the Cliffhaven people must be in there. He could hear the sounds he had heard during his four-hour ordeal.
This is not a sensible thing to do, he thought, as he walked in the door. The Cliffhaven man—he looked like Clete from the back—was fussing with someone at the other end of the room. The man turned around. It wasn’t Clete, someone a bit older, with a moustache.
“What are you doing here?” the moustache said.
It was the young man against Henry’s stick.
“Hey, you must be Brown,” the man said.
The moustache doesn’t seem frightened. He doesn’t know I’m going to try to kill him, Henry thought.
“Give me that stick,” the moustache said.
He’s used to people obeying.
The moustache was walking straight toward him.
The woman he’d been shoving around was crouched against the far wall, staring at Henry.
He is assuming that I am passive like the others, Henry thought. He’s a fool.
When they were five feet apart, the man stopped. “Give me that stick.”
“Sure,” Henry said and, in the same moment, stepped forward with his left foot and, holding the stick as if it were a baseball bat of his youth, swung it with all the strength he could muster against the man’s head. The man’s left arm came up to ward off the blow, and Henry’s stick glanced off the man’s forearm, hitting his cheekbone with a sickening crack.
“You son of a bitch,” the man said, tottering a step or two backward, spitting blood. The club, now in the position of readiness for a tennis backhand, came back around with a force Henry didn’t know he had. It hit the man in the right jaw, and with an inarticulate cry he collapsed at Henry’s feet.
Henry watched the blood ooze from the man’s mouth, reddening the ends of his moustache. The blood dribbled onto the concrete floor, assuming the shape of a large red amoeba, searching. I hope he doesn’t die.
Except for the woman hunched against the far wall crying, the place was suddenly silent. What had the people inside the lockers made of the commotion?
“Listen to me,” Henry shouted. “You are being freed. I am going to open the lockers. Margaret! Are you here, Margaret?”
The babble of voices from inside the lockers made it impossible to distinguish any one voice.
“Please,” Henry shouted against the din. “Go to the center of the resort, near the dining hall. You’ll be safe from the fire there. Don’t go near the woods or you’ll burn to death! Margaret?”
He couldn’t hear for the noise. Suddenly, he caught the body at his feet stirring. Blood was now bubbling out of the nose as well as the mouth and ears. Henry could not bring himself to club the man again. He started opening the lockers one after the other as quickly as possible, glancing at the prostrate form in the middle of the room. That man needed a hospital.
Out of the lockers started to emerge pathetic creatures, men and women without wills, some in great pain from the cramped confinement.
Henry opened the lockers one after another, his arms working in rhythm. The occupants tumbled or slid or fell to the ground in front of him.
Where was that freckle-faced man who’d been put in for eight hours? The eight hours were long up, he’d be somewhere else. God, how long have some of these people been in here, days?
“Don’t be crazy,” Henry shouted. “You’re free. Get going. Move out the door. Head for the dining hall.”
It was then he heard her voice and his name, just a few lockers away. With a twinge of guilt he skipped the next three or four lockers and opened the one he thought the sound came from. The man inside was dead.
Quickly, Henry opened the next locker and it was Margaret. He had never seen her bereft of life and strength. She came forward into his arms, and he eased her onto the floor. Her lips were dry, her legs stiff and aching from the cramped quarters.
Henry looked up to see one man trying to crawl back into his locker.
Henry grabbed him by his shoulder. “No, no,” the man wailed. He was out of his mind.
“Let’s go!” Henry shouted, waving them toward the door. Then he knelt beside Margaret.
“Can you walk?”
She nodded. “Sure. Just give me a minute.”
“We have to get out of here.”
Henry shouted at the others. “You’ve got to get out of here. Move!” The idiots wouldn’t leave.
A tall, sinewy man of about thirty came up to Henry and said, “I opened the rest of the lockers, but they seem afraid to leave the building. Some are too sick.”
“When did you get put in?” Henry asked.
“Just a couple of hours ago. I’m okay.”
He didn’t look like the others. He might be strong enough.
“Can you help me with this woman?” Henry asked.
“Sure thing.”
Together they helped Margaret to her feet. She rubbed her thighs. “I’ll be okay,” she said.
“We’ll have to make time getting to the woods,” Henry said to the sinewy man.
Outside they moved as rapidly as they could. Suddenly, a thought hit Henry as if it were a hammer blow. He hadn’t thought of the people in the locked rooms. If the fire reached the buildings, they’d be burned alive. You couldn’t help everyone. Perhaps help from outside would come before the building caught.
Safely in the woods, they stopped to catch their breath just as Henry spotted Jake, waving. He ran over to him.
Jake had just finished securing Blaustein to a sapling with his own belt.
“He tried to get away,” Jake said. “You can’t trust him. Is that your wife?”
Henry nodded.
“Who’s the other one?”
“I don’t know.”
Margaret and the younger man had now come over.
“Margaret,” Henry said. “This is Jake. He’s been helping me.”
Jake nodded.
The other man stretched his hand out to Henry. “My name’s Shamir,” he said.
“Henry Brown. My wife, Margaret. This is…”
Jake held his hand out. “Jake Fetterman.”
Henry said, “How long have you been in Cliffhaven, Shamir?”
“Since last week. I’m doing fine. I’ve been in the lockers twice already.”
“What did you do?” Henry asked.
“The staff member who took me to my room the first night said something about me not looking Jewish, so I said he didn’t look too Jewish either, something like that, and before I knew it we were arguing, and I told him to just do his job and shut up. So what he did was get permission to put me into the lockers for four hours before I had unpacked my bag.”
“Terrific. Who steered you to this place?” Henry asked.
“Well, I’m a photographer. I was hitchhiking from San Francisco to San Diego. I’ve done it lots of times, not to save money particularly, to meet people. Somebody in Frisco suggested Cliffhaven, great views for a photographer.”
“Did they get whoever was driving you?”
“No, no,” Shamir said. “When I saw the Cliffhaven sign, I asked to be let out. I wal
ked up here carrying my small bag, and boom, I’m a prisoner. They took my cameras, two good ones. This one they didn’t see.” Shamir took a tiny Minolta out of his change pocket.
“I have some terrific pictures, if I can get out of here, I thought, so I waited till dark, then walked down the road same as I came.”
“Trusties brought you back?”
“You, too?” Shamir asked.
Henry nodded.
“What’s your plan?”
“We’re going to set fire to these woods. How many brushpiles, Jake?”
“I did six or seven more, good ones, before I saw that bastard Blaustein trying to sneak away.”
“One moment,” Shamir said to Henry. “Can you point to where your furthest brushpile is in that direction?”
“I think about there,” Henry said, pointing.
“And in the other direction?” Shamir asked.
Henry nodded to Fetterman. Jake pointed to where he had erected the last brushpile.
“Excuse me,” Shamir said, “but if you’re aiming at a conflagration, you may not have extended the line of brushpiles far enough around the circle. A bomber dropping ammonium nitrate—if one got here soon enough—could extinguish the blaze in two or three passes.”
“How do you know this?” Henry asked.
“Just what I read. Never been involved in fire fighting, but I put in two years with the Air Force.”
“Whatever fire-fighting equipment Cliffhaven has,” Henry said, “I’m sure they don’t have airplanes.”
“Listen, if this forest goes up, the fire fighters’ll have to call in all the help they can get, including military. These woods are bone-dry. Tens of thousands of acres went up a year ago.”
“Cliffhaven won’t call in outside help.”
“Then we have to,” Shamir said.
“All the phones go through the switchboard.” Henry looked over at Blaustein, tied to the tree. “Isn’t that so?”
Blaustein coughed, said nothing.
Henry walked over to within two feet of the tied man.
“What’s the matter, you sick?”
Blaustein shook his head.
“Then talk. Is there a phone that doesn’t go through the switchboard?”
Blaustein coughed again.
Henry raised his hand, then slapped Blaustein’s face hard.
“You didn’t have to do that,” whimpered Blaustein.
“Answer me.”
“There’s a direct telephone in Mr. Clifford’s house, the last building over.”
“I hope the lines don’t burn before we can get to it,” Shamir said. “Well, then, shall we do another group of brushpiles along that way?”
“No,” Henry said. “We’ll go with what we have. If they come looking for us in these woods, we might find ourselves caught before we light a single one. That’s a chance we can’t take.” He glanced over toward Margaret. “Can you help?”
“Sure,” Margaret said.
“Okay,” Henry said. “Let’s start at the two extremes and work our way toward here. Shamir, Jake, we’ll each light a fourth, then meet back here. Let me have a match, Jake.”
“I don’t smoke,” Jake said. “Don’t you?”
Henry looked at Shamir, who shrugged his shoulders. “You mean,” Henry said, “after all this, we have nothing to light the torches with?”
18
Mr. Clifford usually arranged for his meetings with the staff in a corner of the dining hall so that he could stand on the raised corner level and see the faces of everyone he was talking to. Today he felt the same exhilaration he had felt when he had heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Nothing stimulated him like the prospect of battle. His face had better color than usual. Even Abigail would have thought him commanding as he waited for silence in response to his raised hands.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “this is not, as you know, a regularly scheduled meeting, but as a matter of some urgency I have two announcements to make.”
They were all there, the familiar faces, except for the half dozen on duty in the compound. Allen Trask would do a good job of briefing them later.
“You all know that one of our guests, a man by the name of Henry Brown, escaped our custody after beating one of the trusties unconscious. He will of course be rather severely punished for that infraction.”
The staff members laughed. They knew what he meant.
“First we have to catch him.”
Again laughter.
“We always do.” Clifford loved the way his audience responded, this time with applause. He remembered their first escapee, a very tall man with bushy hair, who had broken his leg stumbling through the underbrush heading downhill toward the road. Eventually he had had to call for help. The dogs found him. The fellows hadn’t even bothered to return him to his room. They were under instructions. Do the same thing as you would with a horse that had a broken leg.
“In the present instance, we believe the man still to be on the premises. His wife, who accompanied him to Cliffhaven, is being kept secure for him—”
He nodded in response to the laughter.
“—in the lockers. There’s a staff member in the locker building, just in case. In the meantime, as you will learn in a moment, I have a plan to regain control of this individual that will involve all of you. And that will, as usual, succeed.”
He held his hands up to acknowledge their approbation, and then moved them in such a way as to bring a silence that was absolute to the large room.
“You all know that keeping a diary or daily record of any kind in Cliffhaven is forbidden.”
There were nods here and there. Clifford took the time to look at each part of the audience.
“Several months ago,” he continued, “I asked at a meeting of the entire staff whether anyone was keeping a diary. Everyone answered in the negative. One person in this room was lying.”
He noticed eyes darting glances.
“Though I am not present here a good deal of the time, I know sooner or later everything that goes on in my absence. Does anyone doubt that?”
Clifford, who was well read in history as well as genetics, knew that the respect and admiration of his staff was not enough. He wanted what Napoleon had with his troops. Adulation.
“I had proof presented to me that George Whittaker, who I had entrusted to manage Cliffhaven, had covertly committed treason against that trust by keeping a self-serving diary to whitewash himself should Cliffhaven ever be defeated by its enemies.”
Staff members looked around to see where George Whittaker was sitting.
“You won’t find George in this room,” Clifford said quietly. Perhaps Whittaker had been popular with some of the people. He had to be certain his decision was accepted by all.
“Cliffhaven,” he said, “is the beginning of a national movement. I am sure you are all proud that Cliffhaven is the single most successful experiment of its kind in the history of the United States.”
He allowed them to applaud. Were some not doing so? As he glanced around the room, he saw the last ones join in, till everyone was clapping. Then he continued, “With the discovery of Mr. Whittaker’s treachery, I had no alternative but to accept his immediate…resignation.”
They were waiting for the rest, he could see that. “Our collective security—I am speaking of everyone in this room, in this enterprise—is dependent on complete trust. The question then was: Could I trust George Whittaker as an ex-employee on the outside? Something I know—and which you may have guessed—is that our enemies on the outside would gladly pay great sums of money to get someone like George Whittaker working for them, even testifying falsely against our cause. That thought may or may not have crossed George Whittaker’s mind. Indeed, it may have crossed the minds of one or another of you. If that is the case, you must know my response. I have a huge investment in Cliffhaven, monetary as well as ideological. I will not see it jeopardized by anyone…” Clifford looked around the room to
emphasize the point. “For any reason.”
They needed the lesson.
“As a consequence of an action he initiated—keeping that self-serving diary—George Whittaker stepped across the line. Therefore, he is no longer with us, not in Cliffhaven, not anywhere.”
They understood.
“His treason has been punished. I hope it is the last case of that kind I will ever see here.”
He studied their faces. The meeting, he judged, had been valuable.
“Now,” Mr. Clifford said, “for some good news. It is my pleasure to introduce you to the new manager of Cliffhaven, Mr. Daniel Pitz.”
The applause was sporadic. Mr. Clifford let a slight frown cloud his visage. The applause increased, and increased again until it became unanimous and loud. Dan, getting up on the platform next to Mr. Clifford, drew the conclusion that some of the staff had liked Whittaker. Or maybe they were just scared, working in a place that seemed not to tolerate ex-employees. Whittaker was a fool for having kept a diary where it could be found.
Dan waved a hand at the group, taking in their faces, wondering if some of them might be sexually useful to him in time.
“Mr. Pitz,” Mr. Clifford said, “has managed several resorts previously and has had a highly successful career. Beyond that…” Dan noticed Clifford was beaming at him now. He hoped the old man wasn’t going to say too much.
“Beyond that, Mr. Pitz has certain unique qualifications for his work at Cliffhaven.”
That’s all, please, Dan thought.
“I’ll say no more,” Mr. Clifford said. “You’ll all have a chance to meet with him as the days progress. Now, I want to say that just before this meeting I had a talk with Clete, who was superintending the Browns at Cliffhaven. I have come to the conclusion that he was not at fault in Brown’s escape. However, I have told Clete, as I am now telling all of you, when you have your first talks with a new resident it is important to ascertain who might or might not be a troublemaker. Most of our residents give us little or no trouble, as you know. If you think we have picked up a potential troublemaker, let Dan know right away.”
Mr. Clifford saw Oliver Robinson, who had been left in charge of the compound during the meeting, coming in the back of the dining hall. Robinson ran to the rostrum, whispered in Mr. Clifford’s ear. A buzz went through the audience.
