Wine of the Dreamers: A Novel

by John D. MacDonald

  “Larry Roy, national TV favorite, today jumped or fell from the forty-first story of a New York City hotel. Melly Muro, Larry Roy’s seventh wife, told police that she could think of no reason for suicide, unless it could be a breakdown due to overwork. Melly, you will remember, is the redheaded woman who figured so largely in the divorce of Franz Steeval, composer and conductor, three months ago. Larry Roy was her sixth husband.

  “Martha Needis, the Jersey City landlady who, last Tuesday, murdered her six roomers in their beds with a steak tenderizer, is still at large.

  “In Memphis, debutante Gayla Dennison was today acquitted of murdering her guardian. She wept tears of joy.

  “At Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, government psychiatrists today disagreed on their diagnoses in the case of Corporal Brandt Reilly, the enlisted man who, ten days ago, turned an aircraft cannon on a company formation, killing sixteen and wounding twenty-one.

  “And here is a light note in the news. Today, Pierre Brevet, French artist, is in serious danger of being lynched by irate American womanhood. He has been in this country for three days. He told reporters that he heartily approves, for French women, the new beachwear consisting of halters only, but after a visit to Jones Beach yesterday, he feels that this is one daring style this country could do without. He stated that his objections are deep-seated. Could that be a pun, Pierre?”

  “You have just heard Melvin C. Lynn with the Wilkins’ Mead news. And now do you hear that? Know what it is? You—pouring your first full golden glass of Wilkins’ Mead from its handy lip-sized bottle. And tonight you have that date you’ve been waiting for. The big important date with the ‘one and only.’ Take her a bottle of Wilkins’ Mead too. And then you can be sure that the two of you will enjoy one of the most—–”

  Bard Lane grunted and punched at the radio button. The airdale voice was mercifully silenced.

  Sharan Inly said wryly, “No mead for me. But a beer would go good, if the man can arrange it.”

  “Did I wake you up with that racket? Sorry.”

  “You didn’t wake me up. That creamy little voice of Melvin C.’s is insidious. It crept into my dreams, licking its chops at sudden death, Bard. I listen to him and feel that we’re in an age of decay, and he is its prophet. Wonder what compulsion makes him go all oily over a nice juicy hammer murder?”

  “You work all the time, don’t you, Sharan? Always the psychiatrist.”

  He could feel her eyes on him. “You always shy away from psychiatry. There’s always a little bitterness in your voice when you bring it up. Why?”

  “If I start telling you my attitude, it will turn into an argument. Looks like a beer spot ahead. How’s our boy?”

  She knelt on the front seat and reached into the back as he began to slow for the neon flicker far ahead. She turned and plumped down into the seat with a sigh. “He’ll keep for another three hours without a booster shot. Better park where it isn’t too light, so nobody will get nosey.”

  There were a few shining new cars in the large parking lot, a larger number of dusty heaps, some pickup trucks and a few huge trans-state trucks. Bard parked near a weary-looking clump of live oaks, and carefully locked the car. He straightened up and stretched stiffness out of his joints. Sharan, standing nearby, made the time-honored and infinitely feminine gesture of looking back down over each shoulder to see how badly her skirt was wrinkled. The night breeze molded the thin skirt against the long clean thigh-lines, the trim hips. He felt the stir of pleasure in looking at her, along with the knowledge of the trap. Biological trap. Nature takes clear fresh skin, and youth and a slim body, and the child-bearing ability, holds it up and says, “This is what you want.” And the pulse responds.

  The acid twang of a jukebox cowhand quavered on the night air. “… She never reely tole me that she loved meeeee …”

  There were metal tables on the patio, on the stones that were still warm underfoot from the sun-heat of the long day. He held a chair for Sharan, then went inside, walking the cramped tiredness out of his legs, muffling a yawn with the back of his hand.

  Inside there were booths and dancers and girl-laughter and soft drinks held under the table edge for the quick jolt from the package store bottle. He stood at the beer bar and waited patiently, a tall tanned man with blunt bones in his face, with widow’s peak slanting sharply back into the crisp brown hair, gray-touched, with an odd look that combined both mildness and authority. He wore a rumpled khaki hunting jacket over a faded blue work shirt, open at the throat.

  He carried the two frosted bottles and one glass out to the table. Sharan was making up her lips, turned in the chair so the light from the doorway struck her mirror at the right angle. She smiled up at him, capped the lipstick and dropped it back into her white purse.

  “How are we running on time, Bard?”

  “We can kill a half hour and still get there a good hour before the conference.”

  “Want me to drive for a while?”

  “No thanks. It’s better to be doing something.”

  His big brown fist rested on the table top. She patted it with a quick, affectionate gesture. “Don’t let it get you down. Screening wasn’t your responsibility.”

  “My responsibility is to get the job done. I couldn’t pass the buck if I wanted to.”

  The light behind her haloed her cropped curls. She was indeed pleasant to look at. A face that was almost, but not quite, thin—with eagerness, mobility, sensitivity. She held her glass in both hands, like a child. Thrown together on the job, they had kept their relationship on the plane of friendship, mutual respect. There had been isolated moments—bending together over a desk, a quick glance across a crowded office, an inadvertent touch—when he had become conscious of his own awareness, and hers. But by unspoken agreement between them they always forced a return to an unemotional status. Maybe one day there would be time. Maybe one day the pressure of responsibility would be taken away, and there would be time for play.

  He had wondered about her in the beginning. This new crop of young professional women no longer had any consciousness of fighting for equality. It existed. In the beginning he had accepted the idea that her amorality would be no less casual than that of the other women her age on the project. For a time he had skirted the idea of asking her to add the self-evident closer aspect to their association. But, at the time, he had decided that his duty was to maintain all his energies at the highest possible peak.

  Now he was glad he had made that decision, for as he had come to know her better he realized that a casual amorality would not integrate with the rest of her character. In fact, she would probably be decidedly old-fashioned in that regard. And, had he asked her bluntly, he suspected that something in their relationship would have ceased to exist in the moment she denied him.

  Women who played for keeps were becoming so rare as to be refreshing.

  Until the all-pervading, all-important, capital J Job was done, Sharan Inly would remain Dr. Inly, Project Assistant in Charge of Psycho-Adjustment.

  “The General,” she said dolefully, “is going to be muy irritado.”

  “That is an understatement. Fat blue sparks are going to crackle off his fingertips.”

  She finished her glass, refilled it from the bottle. “How about that argument we’re going to have? Want to start now?”

  “You want to hear someone attack your profession, Dr. Inly?”

  “Sure. I’m a missionary. I’ll bring enlightenment to your poor layman mind.”

  “Here goes. Ever since Freud and Jung, you people have been honing certain basic weapons. I am a layman in psychiatry. However, I am a scientist. As a scientist, I am disturbed by your acceptance of the truth of your basic assumptions. Take the case of the critter we’ve got out in the car. I’ll use a little of your gobbledegook language. He’s been screened two ways. Loyalty and, in your province, stability. You hunted for all the garden-variety neuroses and couldn’t find any of any importance. Ergo, we’ve got a stable gu
y. No delusions of persecution, no manic-depressive tendencies, no control so excessive it smells of dementia praecox. Doesn’t miss his mother, save lady’s shoes or draw pornographic pictures. Your ink-blot tests, properly fitted into statistical distribution charts, show that Mr. X is a nice clean-living ambiverent, ideal technician material.”

  She frowned. “You quarrel with that?”

  “Not at all. But the neat little tests assume that this stability is a permanent state.”

  “They do not! The tests and the whole theory admit that in the face of unexpected strain, even the most stable, the most adjusted, can become psychoneurotic in one way or another. My goodness, that’s why I’m employed out there. It’s my job to detect the presence of any change in the face of strain and …”

  “Now you’re stating my point. I say that one of your basic assumptions is that there has to be an environmental change to create the strain which results in an alteration of this basic quotient of stability. I say that the assumption is too hasty. I say that there is something further to study. I think the shift from stability to instability can come in the twinkling of an eye and come without reference to any outside stimuli. Forget hereditary weaknesses. Forget the old business about escaping from a life that is unbearable. I say that you can take a perfectly adjusted guy, put him in a situation where his life is satisfying—and boom, he can go off like that. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. Why? Why does it happen? It happened to Bill Kornal. One minute he was okay. The next minute it was as though something … quite alien took over his mind. So now we’ve got him out in the car and there’s four month’s work lost.”

  “Are we going to go back, Bard, to the old idea of being possessed by devils?”

  “Maybe we should. How about the news we listened to? What keeps perpetually messing up mankind? Jokers who go off their rocker when they’ve got every reason not to. No, you people are doing a good, but a limited job. Floating around somewhere is an X factor that you haven’t found yet. Until you do I’m looking at psychology and psychiatry with a limited and dubious acceptance, Sharan.”

  There was a whisper of sound. He searched the night sky until he saw, against the stars, the running lights of a jet transport, losing altitude for the Albuquerque landing, the six flame-tongues merged, by the altitude, into a thin orange line.

  The breeze stirred her hair. She said slowly, “I should rise up in mighty wrath and smite you hip and thigh, boss. But a still small voice within me says there might be something in what you say. However, if I admit you might be right, I’m also admitting the impossibility of ever isolating this X factor. How can you find something that hits without warning and disappears the same way?”

  “Possession by devils,” he said, grinning.

  She stood up, slim against the light, more provocative to him in her complete, thoughtful, forgetfulness of self than if she had posed carefully.

  “Then,” she said, “the devils are more active lately. Oh, I know that every generation that reaches middle age believes firmly that the world is going to hell. But this time, Bard, even at my tender years, I think they may have something. Our culture seems like a big machine that’s vibrating itself to bits. Parts keep flying off. Parts that are important. Decency, dignity, morality. We’ve all gone impulsive. Anything you want to do is all right, provided your urge is strong enough. It’s a … a …”

  “Sociological anarchy?”

  “Yes. And there, Mr. Lane, you have my motivation. Now you know why I’m so desperately anxious for you to succeed. I keep feeling that if mankind can find some new horizons, there’ll be a return to a decent world. Quaint, aren’t I?”

  They walked across the lot toward the car. He looked at the night sky, at the stars which seemed closer, more attainable here.

  “Elusive devils, aren’t they?”

  She caught his wrist as they walked, her nails biting into the flesh with quick strength. “They won’t stay elusive, Bard. They won’t.”

  “Four years now, that I’ve had my little obsession, Sharan, and they seem as far away as ever.”

  “You’ll never give up, Bard.”

  “I wonder.”

  They had reached the car. Through the rear window, open an inch, came the soft sound of Bill Kornal’s snores.

  “It makes me feel ill to have you talk of giving up,” she said in a half-whisper.

  He leaned over to put the key in the lock. His shoulder brushed hers.

  Without quite knowing how it had happened, he found her in his arms. She stood tightly against him with upturned lips, and with a small, plaintive sound in her throat. He knew that he was bruising her mouth, and could not stop. He knew it was a forgetfulness, a little time stolen from the project, from the endless drain of effort and responsibility. He had expected to find in her all the warmth and passion of any healthy young adult. He was pleased that her intensity matched his own.

  “This is no good,” she said.

  She stood a little aside, her head bent. He knelt and swept his hand back and forth across the gravel until he found the keys. He straightened up.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “We’re both tired, Bard. We’re both scared to death of what General Sachson might do. We were clinging to each other for … comfort. Let’s forget it.”

  “Let’s not exactly forget it, Sharan. Let’s shelve it for future action.”

  “Please,” she said sharply.

  “All right, so I shouldn’t have said that.” He knew that his tone was a shade indignant.

  He unlocked the door. She slid under the wheel and across to her side. He chunked the door shut and drove out in a long curve onto the highway, accelerated viciously up to cruising speed. He gave her a quick glance. She was staring straight ahead, her face expressionless in the reflected dash lights. A big jack bounded from the shoulder into the road, startling him. He felt the tiny thud in his wrists as the wheel hit it, heard her sharp intake of breath.

  “Just say I was possessed by one of those devils,” he said.

  “Probably we both were,” she said. He glanced again and saw her smile. She moved a bit closer to him. “Besides, Bard, I’m a prim kid, I guess.”

  “Didn’t taste very prim.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said, enigmatically. “Now be good.”

  The gray sedan droned through the night.

  TWO

  As the grayness in the east began to pale the conference room lighting, Bard and Sharan sat with the other three persons awaiting General Sachson.

  Gray, shaggy Colonel Powys, Projects Coordinator, rolled a yellow octagonal pencil against the polished top of the conference table, pressing so hard with his palm that the pencil made an irritating clacking sound as it rolled. Major Leeber, Sachson’s aide, sleek and demurely pompous, nibbled at one edge of his moustache. The lean enlisted stenotype clerk turned a glass ashtray around and around and around.

  Bard glanced over at Sharan. She gave him a wan smile. There were bluish shadows around her eyes.

  “The general’s very upset about this,” Powys rumbled. His words dropped, like stones, into the pool of silence. There was an accusation behind his tone. The inference was that no one else was upset. Bard Lane restrained the impulse toward sarcasm.

  The wall clock had a sweep second hand. Each time the hand made one full revolution, the minute hand jumped one notch with a tiny grating clack. Leeber yawned like a sated cat. He said, in a soft voice, “You’re quite young for all that responsibility, Dr. Inly.”

  “Too young, Major?” Sharan asked politely.

  “You’re putting words in my mouth, Doctor.”

  “Major, I use that prefix for state occasions. I am Miss Inly.”

  He smiled at her, sleepy-lidded.

  As the sweep second hand touched the hour and the minute hand clacked, the door swung open and General Sachson came in, small blue eyes full of electric crackle, neat heels striking at the rug. He was of minimum stature for Army requirements, with a face
like a dried butternut, a man of snap and spit and polish and a score of uniforms tailored by experts.

  “Hen shut!” Powys brayed. Only Sharan remained seated.

  Sachson rounded the corner of the table, flicked his eyes across them in the moment of silence and then sat down, indicating with a chopping gesture of a child’s thin brown hand that they should do the same.

  “Meeting to order!” he snapped. “For God’s sake, Sergeant, get the names right this time.”

  “Yes sir,” the sergeant said in an utterly uninflected voice.

  “Report damage, Dr. Lane. And keep to the point.”

  “Kornal broke down the door of the lab where the control panels were being assembled. He was alone in there for an estimated ten minutes. Adamson estimates that Kornal set us back four full months.”

  “I assume,” Sachson said in a deceptively mild tone, “that the door was not considered sufficiently important to be guarded.”

  “There were two guards. Kornal knocked them down with a piece of pipe. One is all right. The other is in danger. A depressed skull fracture.”

  “The military, Dr. Lane, has discovered that the use of a password is not exactly a childish device.”

  “Kornal was privileged to secure a pass at any time to enter that lab. He was working long hours.”

  Sachson let the silence grow. The sergeant sat with his waiting fingers poised on the stenotype keys. The blue eyes swung slowly around to Sharan Inly.

  “As I understand the theory of your work, Dr. Inly, it is your responsibility to anticipate any mental or emotional breakdown, is it not?” Sachson asked. His tone was replete with the mock gallantry which showed his distaste for the involvement of women in such projects as the one at hand.

  Bard Lane saw Sharan’s pallor increase a bit. “As William Kornal had access to all portions of the project area, General, it is self-evident that he was a double A risk on a psychological basis.”

  Sachson’s smile was thin-lipped. “Possibly I am stupid, Dr. Inly. I don’t find things to be as ‘self-evident’ as you seem to think they are.”