Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  The waitress turned back to glare, as though she didn’t like being called by name—so it’s Marie, is it?—but then she walked off without speaking, and when she brought both juices and slapped them down, the bag lady pushed dirty-looking coins across the counter, saying, “And fifteen cents for you.”

  “I don’t think I know you, hon,” the waitress said, with that suspicious glare.

  The bag lady had a huge and sunny smile, beaming and happy. “Oh, I’m nobody,” she said.

  The waitress, frown welded into place, scooped the change off the counter and went away again. If this woman speaks to me, Susan told herself, I’ll pretend not to hear. But the bag lady drew a magazine—Esquire, of all things—out of some deep recess within her clothing, opened it, and began happily to read while downing tiny sips of tomato juice.

  It wasn’t till Susan’s English muffin had arrived and been half consumed that she became aware of the bag lady studying her profile. Susan gave her a quick glance—that smile seemed sad now, for some reason—then hurriedly looked away to concentrate on the muffin, but it was too late. “A pretty girl like you,” the bag lady said softly. “You shouldn’t be unhappy.”

  Surprised, Susan looked full at the woman, and this time saw nothing in her face but pity and good intentions. ccWhat do you mean?” she demanded, knowing she didn’t sound as tough as she wanted. “I’m not unhappy.”

  “It’s some fellow, I bet,” the bag lady said, nodding slowly, heavily. “It’s always some fellow.”

  Susan gave her a cold and distancing smile, refusing to be drawn any further into conversation, and turned back to her muffin. If she speaks to me again, Fll move to another stool.

  A ripping sound startled her, and she turned to see that the bag lady had torn a page from her magazine and was now smoothing it onto the counter between them. “If I was your age,” she said, “and I was unhappy over some fellow, here’s what Fd do.”

  Susan couldn’t help looking at the torn-out sheet, and when she saw it was a full-page ad for vodka she couldn’t help laughing. “I guess that is one answer,” she said.

  “No, no, the contest the bag lady told her, tapping the ad with a dirty fingernail and a fat grubby finger. “I’d get away, I would, and that’s just the way to do it.”

  How did I get stuck with this? Susan asked herself, but there didn’t seem to be any way not to look more closely at the advertisement, and to see that it was indeed an announcement of some sort of essay contest, in which the first prize was an all-expense trip to Moscow.

  Moscow! Russia? What kind of prize was that? Millions of people trying to get out of Russia, this vodka company’s giving away a free trip in. “Oh, I don’t think,” Susan started, smiling with a more gentle dismissal this time, “I don’t think that’s the—”

  “You just do it,” the bag lady said. “You’ll see I’m right. You’ve got plenty of time at work, you can do it there, easy as pie. And off you go, it’s a whole new world, a whole new experience.”

  “I don’t win contests, I’ve never won anything in my—”

  “I’ll bet you could win this one,” the bag lady said. “Change your life, it would.” Finishing her tomato juice in one final noisy gulp, she struggled off the stool and gave Susan her sunniest smile, saying, “It’s just perfect, a pretty girl like you.” She pushed the sheet from the magazine closer to Susan. “See if I’m not right.”

  “But—why do you want to give this to m£?”

  The bag lady smiled and nodded. She patted Susan on the shoulder, her touch surprisingly light and comforting. “Just think of me as your guardian angel,” she said, and went off, swaying from side to side like a tugboat in a heavy sea.

  “Weird,” Susan said to the waitress, who had come immediately to remove the empty tomato juice glass. She wished she could call her Marie, but knew she couldn’t.

  “Mm,” said the waitress, and touched the page torn from the magazine. “This hers?”

  “No, no,” Susan told her, not sure why. “It’s mine.”

  The waitress shrugged and went away. Susan, lifting her coffee cup, studied the rules of the contest.

  It didn’t look that hard, really.

  Ananayel

  Well. I have to be more careful, I see, in choosing who to become when I walk upon the Earth. What a sad sack of guts I was in that cafe! My feet truly did hurt; in fact, I was aches and itches all over. It was only knowing I’d be out of that carcass soon that made it possible to go on. Their lives may be brief, humans, but they can certainly seem long.

  I selected that option because I wanted to appear as the person Susan Carrigan would think of as least threatening; so no man was possible, of course. The traditional golden-haired white-gowned barefoot youth would lack conviction, somehow, in that neighborhood. A child would not have threatened, but equally would not have been persuasive about the contest in the magazine. A young and attractive woman—without all those twinges and pangs—would have been held at a wary distance, as in some way a competitor. So I chose my category from among the types available in Susan Carrigan’s environment, with pains and stings intact.

  We angels make the form we want, you know, from the atoms of our own free-flowing selves; we do not, except under the most dire circumstances, commandeer the body of a living creature. Thus, from my own protoplasm, I have been a shepherd keeping watch over my flock by night; I have been a centurion bidding one to go and another to stay; I have been a leaping hart glimpsed briefly through the pines and followed to salvation. Once I was a butterfly, and became so lost in its infinitesimally tiny brain that I nearly forgot my own true self, and almost remained in there, a butterfly for the rest of its short life. (Now, there’s brevity!) Would I have died, then, when the butterfly did? I have no idea, and the question is of some moment to me, now that everything has changed.

  Because, you know, He does not come after us. Like spies in novels of intrigue, once we are on the mission we are on our own. And the greatest danger we face—it’s the greatest danger humans face, too, but they don’t realize it—is our own free will.

  Here is a paradox that surpassed! all understanding. God is omnipotent, among His qualities. And yet, angels and men have free will, can choose their own destinies, can opt to disobey even His desires. (As Lucifer did, notoriously.) Thus it is that God has always nudged men, has engaged in confidence tricks and little scams, has played at times with a stacked deck, has thrown up illusions and toyed with mirrors, all to get humankind to want to do what God has in mind. And now that what he has in mind to do is end this world, the same methods come into play. I have been sent, therefore, to arrange things, to set the stage, to coach the unwitting actors in their parts.

  To end this world. For men to do it themselves, to release that final fire, envelop the globe in such a volume of ravening searching flame as to leave nothing with life in it anywhere on the cinder that remains; not a weed, not a bug, not a drop of water in which impurities could form and flow and start it all again. Nothing left but a lifeless ball, tumbling around and around the sun. And man to do it himself, of his own free will. And a little help from me.

  2

  The explosion was a small one, confined to one room in the laboratory wing, with very little damage, all in all: two metal tables bent out of shape, a couple of hopelessly charred wooden chairs, some minor flasks and cruets destroyed, three windows to replace, walls and ceiling to repaint, that’s about all. Minor, really, very minor.

  But that wasn’t the point, dammit. Carson damn well knew what the point was, because he damn well knew what Philpott was up to in there, and the point was, Philpott might have blown up the whole damn university. Including its president, himself, Hodding Cabell Carson IV, who would not appreciate being snuffed out of existence at the peak of his career by some tenured maniac who, not content to be famously an explorer at the very outermost frontiers of scientific knowledge, actually has to go on and on doing experiments! And blowing things up along the way.

/>   Carson let off steam over lunch in his private dining room with his provost, Wilcox Breckenridge Harrison: ccThe man could have blown us all up! So far, he’s merely done for some two-hundred-year-old foliage, but is that a portent or not?”

  And he waved his chilled salad fork at the large windows beside them, through which the older and more stately parts of Grayling University could be seen, heavily overgrown with ivy. A prestigious private university, Grayling, tucked away here in the rolling hills of upstate New York, with a prestigious president and the most prestigious of modern physicists on the faculty, Dr. Marlon Philpott, who was a menace to everything civilization holds dear.

  Harrison said, ccWhat is it that blew up, anyway?”

  “God knows.” Carson chomped on a lot of iceberg lettuce covered with botded diet Italian creamy salad dressing. “The worst of it is, if you ask Philpott what in Christ’s holy name he’s doing over there, he’ll tell you, at length, and not one word in ten makes the slightest bit of sense. I take it, though, it was not his famous strange matter that blew, but something more mundane.”

  “Strange matter?” Harrison grinned, tentatively. “You’re putting me on.”

  “No, by God, I’m not.” Carson wiped his lips on linen, dropped the napkin back on his lap, sipped a bit of the San Gimignano, and said, “It all makes sense, in its way, if only he weren’t so intent on proceeding with it. The fact is, he’s right, we do need new energy sources. The oil’s running out, we have thirty or forty years of it left. The public, given increasing familiarity with nuclear power, has grown less accepting of it, rather than more. Solar power is a joke. So is wind, so is water, so is coal. What’s needed is something brand-new, and our friend and nemesis, Dr. Marlon Philpott, is hot on the trail of one of the possibilities.”

  “Strange matter,” suggested Harrison.

  “Don’t ask me what it is. I asked him once, and all he did was say quark-quark-quark. You know these scientists.”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  “In any event,” Carson said, “that, believe it or not, is the scientific term for this theoretical substance our Dr. White Rabbit is in pursuit of. Strange matter. If he can isolate it, it could apparently provide us with energy beyond our wildest dreams.”

  “So the occasional explosion—”

  “Don’t say that,” Carson warned. “That’s what he says. I talk to him about this destructive tendency of his, and the man is blithe. God, I hate him! Blithe!”

  Harrison dared to laugh. “He isn’t that bad, Chip. And he does bring a certain renown to the university.”

  “The university,” Carson said coldly, “had a certain renown before Dr. Marlon Philpott first set fire to his kindergarten desk.”

  “Well,” Harrison said, “maybe he’ll be more careful from now on.”

  “Not a chance.” Carson seemed to have finished his glass of San Gimignano. He touched its rim with a fingertip and the waiter came forward to do the refill as Carson said, “And, this afternoon, I have yet another appointment with yet another insurance agent, resulting from this little peccadillo of our Dr. Philpotfs. A person named Steinberg.” Carson raised a we’re- in-this-together eyebrow, then raised his glass. “You can imagine how I’m looking forward to that?

  * * *

  Michael Steinberg was everything Carson had expected—Semitic as a rug merchant—except that he was unexpectedly sympathetic and understanding. “These kinds of industrial accidents,” he said, clucking like a hen over his forms as he sat hunched in the usually comfortable armchair facing Carson’s large empty desk, “you don’t expect in a nice quiet atmosphere of learning like what you got here. Grayling University, to have explosions.” Exactly. An understanding response at last; but from what a quarter. Though warmed by the man’s comprehension, Carson knew not to wash the university’s dirty linen in public: “Dr. Philpott is a distinguished member of the faculty. His researches may be a little...” he permitted himself a dry chuckle here “... hair-raising at times, it’s true, but they are necessary.”

  “But are they necessary here)” asked the insurance man, tapping his pen in irritating fashion against his packet of forms.

  That faint feeling of fellowship sputtered in Carson’s breast, and died. ccWhat do you mean? Of course they’re necessary here. Here is where Dr. Philpott is a tenured full professor.”

  “Forgive me, Dr. Carson,” the man said, ducking his head, blinking behind his black-rimmed spectacles. “This is not the company speaking, you understand, this is only a thought I myself had, at this moment, that could perhaps be of use.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

  “Dr. Philpott is a tenured professor at Grayling University,” Steinberg said, and shrugged. “But does his laboratory have to be physically present at the university? Aren’t there places better suited to such things?”

  Carson had no idea what the man was talking about. “Like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, an army camp, something like that.” He gestured with his pen toward the window. “There must be some sort of government facility not far from here. You must have friends in Washington.”

  “Several,” Carson agreed stiffly. One did not mention one’s influence aloud, and certainly not to Semitic strangers from insurance companies.

  “When Dr. Philpott is being a professor,” Steinberg went on, “he is here, on campus, this beautiful campus. When he is being a researcher, he is somewhere else. Twenty miles? Thirty miles away? Some government installation where they know how to deal with explosions.”

  All at once, what the man was saying made sense. Carson actually smiled upon him. “Mr. Steinberg,” he said, “you just may have something there.”

  Steinberg shrugged. He ducked his head. He smiled his crooked little smile. He said, “And along the way, it could be, I save the company a few dollars.”

  Ananayel

  Of course, the basis for anti-Semitism is the fear that Jews are clever without restraint. That is, since they are separate from “us”—ccwe” already consider them separate, so they are—they need have no compunctions in their dealings with “us,” and they are clever. Their cleverness makes them useful—as lawyers, doctors, accountants, and so on—but their lack of compunction makes them dangerous. What they might do transmogrifies at once into what they surely are doing, too cleverly for “us” to catch them at it. They are clever, and they have no reason to show “us” mercy; how hateful.

  Hodding Cabell Carson has no peers. He accepts orders from above, he delivers orders below. Who could slip the suggestion into his mind, the suggestion I needed placed there? No one in his normal circumference.

  It had to be an outsider. It also had to be someone he would see as clever. And it would be best if the person were seen to be making the suggestion altruistically on the surface, but actually for his own advantage.

  Humans are quite simple, really. And on to Moscow.

  3

  Cjrigor awoke. He almost never needed the alarm these days, though he still routinely set it every night before taking the midnight pill. But he woke these mornings five or seven or nine minutes ahead of the alarm, and lay unmoving in the black darkness while his mind roved. For some reason, he did his best thinking in these brief moments in the dark, just before the four A.M. pill; by the time the alarm sounded, more often than not, he had at least one new joke to write on the notepad beside his bed.

  A new five-year plan has been announced. Its goal is to tell the truth about all the other five-year plans.

  Yes!1 No? It was so hard to tell, really. Comedy now seemed not so much about humor as about defining the limits in a world where the limits shifted daily; a situation which was already comic, or at least absurd. The purpose of a joke these days was not to make people laugh at the comedy of it but at the daring of it, at how close the joke teller has come to the very edge of the permitted, in a time when nobody knows what’s permitted. Everything? Hardly.

  The alarm buzzed, a discreet low nois
e, penetrating within this room but not strong enough to disturb any other resident of the complex. Grigor sat up, switched on his bedside light, put the notepad on his knee to jot down the five-year-plan joke for later study in the cold light of day, then got out of bed and padded into the bathroom for water with which to take the pill. He had a much more lavish life here in Moscow than he’d ever had in Kiev. His own private room, well-furnished. His own bathroom, fully equipped, even to a hardly rusted shower. Such luxury!

  Our orbiting cosmonaut is on strike. He refuses to land until he’s allotted an apartment as large as his capsule.

  Grigor took his pill, used the toilet, then padded back to the bedroom and wrote the cosmonaut line on the notepad. Maybe so, maybe so. It was safer to talk about strikes today than even two or three years ago. Topicality, that was the secret. Dart in when the subject’s safe, use it, be out and gone when the next crackdown comes.

  God save Godless Russia. When would that one get its moment? It was one of the first jokes Grigor had ever thought of, and it had scared him so much—still did—that he’d never even written it down. Would he, ever? Would it be said on the television by Boris Boris, ever?

  Oh, well. The future holds wonders, no doubt, some few of which will still be seen by Grigor Alexandreyovich Basmyonov, fireman/jokesmith. Consoled by that thought, Grigor got back into bed, knowing that only a moment or two of introspection would pass before he was asleep once more. Amazing how easily he slept. Amazing, he thought, that he slept at all. Using up these precious hours.

  The transition from Grigor Basmyonov, fireman, bachelor, twenty-eight years of age, lifelong resident of Kiev, to Grigor Basmyonov, gag writer for the television star Boris Boris and inhabitant of the Bone Disease Research Clinic resident center at the Moscow University Teaching Hospital overlooking Gorky Park, began on April 26, 1986: Chernobyl.