by Kate Wilhelm
“Sid’s coming in half an hour,” Murray said, motioning toward the chair. He sprawled on the mattress. “Want to wait for him, or tell me first and then repeat it?”
“I . . . It’s there, just like Sid thought it would be. Enough to start with anyway. Do you believe it’ll work? Really believe we can do anything?”
“Christ, I don’t know. Sometimes I do, then I stumble over people in the halls, up and down the stairs, none of them working, just hanging on with coupons and scrip, and I know there’s no way anyone’s going to finance it again. But I don’t know.” A door slammed and a child began to scream piercingly. “It has to work,” he said then, grimly.
Murray listened to the screaming child and thought, Again. He had started in a building like this, had lived in buildings like this for years and finally had escaped, only to be forced back again. He remembered the pallets on floors where roaches and rats ran freely, the unending nights of fear because this time his father might actually kill his mother. And later the nights of joining the cursing, wild melees. Lying drunk in hallways, a kid, fourteen, fifteen, bombed out of his mind . . . He had escaped once, far enough, he had thought, never to come back. But, he told himself sharply, he had done it; he could do it again. Only he needed Alpha, or something as big as Alpha. Escape had to be more complete, farther, with no possible way down again.
He looked at Cluny, a faint look of distaste on his face as the child’s screams continued without letup. Cluny had had it easy, he knew. Things had appeared before him when he needed them, whatever he needed. Never had to fight for anything in his life, never had to grub, sneak a book inside his jacket, go without anything to buy the books that spelled out escape, no matter what the subject. Never made a hard choice in his life, he thought, and there was no hatred or jealousy in him. He accepted that that was how it was: Cluny had been born over there, he had been born here; so be it. He liked Cluny and recognized that his worst fault was ignorance, innocence, and he was hardly to be blamed for circumstances. But Cluny could be used, he also knew. Murray had spent his entire lifetime learning how to use people, to get them to do what he wanted and required from them. Cluny never had had any need to learn that particular lesson, had no defenses against it. He would play Cluny with all the TLC he could muster, he knew, because Cluny spelled escape again. He was likable, good looking, tall, everything that Murray was not, everything that Sid was not. And he had a magic name. He was his father’s son, with a name that would automatically open doors. He would be good at the lunches, the hearings, the meetings; he would know how to behave with small groups at clubs, at expensive restaurants, in exclusive bars. Puppets, Murray thought; they were all puppets, being pulled this way and that by forces they could dimly perceive and never completely understand. He knew his past goaded him, that he in turn would spur on Sid and Cluny, who would act upon others. . . . Puppets all.
Sid arrived in much less than the half hour he had allowed. He was impatient, almost rude in his brusqueness. “What did you find? What kind of stuff?”
“His personal dreams, plans, hopes. Ways to make it pay off at the various stages of completion, to keep the taxpayers happy and make news, that sort of stuff. Detailed plans for each department, equipment lists, maximum and minimum . . .”
“How much of it’s done now? Is there enough finished to be able to start using it without much more construction?”
“Yes. That’s what he was pushing all the last year when they were deciding to close it down. About a fifth of it was structurally finished—not completed inside, not equipped, but ready to furnish. Opposite that section the shell is finished enough to start a slow spin.”
Sid raised his head and yelled a long strident cry of jubilation. “We’ll do it then! That was what we had to know! I knew the papers had lied about it! The government lied about it! Everyone lied. Your father wasn’t even called to testify at the hearings! They were so goddamn scared of the election that year. And for what? They lost anyway. Then that goddamn fascist Friedericks! Sat in the White House for eight years, afraid to go take a leak! His crew said it would take billions more and it would be years before anyone could start using the facilities! They funked out. Build canals, hire cloud seeders, build those goddam Newtowns. Pull the sheet over your head and hole up! Too scared to see past their noses any more. I knew it!” He took a deep breath and stopped for a few seconds. “Okay, now we know. When can you and Murray get back down there, dig out the facts, figures, everything?”
“Next week; a week from Sunday.”
“Jesus H. Christ! Why the delay?”
“My mother has things she has to do before we set up shop there. It’s her house, you know.”
“All right; all right. Sorry I snapped. Excited, all that. That’s okay. It’ll give us time to brainstorm this from every angle we can think of, make lists of things we need to dig out, ask questions, do a lot of preliminary work. It’ll make the rest go faster in the long run.”
“I won’t have much time,” Cluny mumbled, not looking at either of them. “There’s something I have to take care of. You and Murray can do that, can’t you?”
Sid remained silent, and when Cluny finally glanced at him, he was scowling. “Woman?”
Cluny nodded.
“Is it something you’ll be able to take care of during the next week? It won’t hang you up longer than that?”
“No way,” Cluny said. “A week from Sunday we’ll be on the train, everything here finished.” His hands clenched painfully as he spoke.
“Goddamn it!” Murray snapped. “This isn’t something you’re going to be able to do now and then when you have a spare minute or two.”
“I said a week from Sunday!” Cluny muttered.
After he had gone Murray cursed heartily. “Why now? I’d like to drive a truck over her, whoever she is!”
“Take it easy. Simmer down. So he wants a woman. He’ll get over it.” Sid stretched. “Or he’ll settle in with her or something. Terri’s not getting in the way, is she?”
“That’s different,” Murray said. He knew it was different, but he could not have said why he knew it, or how it was different.
The Saturday before his deadline, Cluny asked Lina to marry him.
“Everyone always wants to marry me,” she said, laughing at him. “But they don’t really mean it. They really mean will I live with them for a couple of weeks or months, until they get tired of me, I guess. Do you really mean it, Cluny?”
“More than I’ve ever meant anything in my life.”
“And there’s a Newtown near your place in the South? I probably could get a job there, couldn’t I? Teaching little kids things. Little kids like me; they’ll listen to me and do what I tell them. Someday I’d like about three or four children of my own, but not very soon, because I think a person should have more experiences, be more mature when they become parents, just so they will understand—”
“Will you marry me?”
“Oh, I thought I told you. Yes, you silly thing. I think it’s because you’re so tall. You must be the tallest man I ever met who liked me, really liked me. Most of them like shorter women. Have you ever noticed how it’s the little short men who love tall women? I think it’s . . .”
Cluny stopped listening and instead watched the way the light ran up and down her cheek when she spoke, the way her beautiful green eyes shadowed and lightened as her gaze rested on him, then darted away, came back, examined the ceiling. . . . There had never been another woman like her, he knew, no one as beautiful, as desirable, as thrilling to love. It had to be marriage; nothing else would satisfy him. Marriage in the Biblical sense, where a man possesses a woman wholly, completely, forever. He couldn’t bear the thought of another man with her. No more, not ever again. She would be his alone, true to him, a goddess for him to adore and worship and love forever. To see her for the first time each day was to suffer again the agony of dread that she would go away. Touching her made him ache with a desire that he never had believ
ed in before. Having her was prelude only, always prelude. There was nothing he could not do now, he thought suddenly. He had conquered a goddess, made her his own, and there was no other difficulty in life that could affect him at all, not after this. He knew he was undeserving of such luck, and that he had to prove himself in order to keep it. A goddess needed a god at her side, a world-changer, someone who could shape the world just as surely as she was shaping him, changing him. Alpha, he thought. He would give her Alpha, and then the stars themselves.
He knew he could never tell anyone the thoughts that raced through his head that night, but he had made a pledge. Fate had arranged for him to be at that restaurant on that one night; the only time in his life he had been there, fate had sent her there too. Everything seemed as inevitable as the tides, as irresistible as aging. For a moment he felt a wash of fear at the idea of anonymous fate reaching down through infinity to touch him, to arrange his life, but the moment passed quickly. It had happened against odds that would make statisticians squirm, and now that it had happened, there was only the one direction to follow, the one path to take, the one goal to reach. And he was on the path.
For the first time he began to think seriously of Alpha, visualizing it as his father had seen it years ago: a beautiful gleaming wheel in space, the first wheel of the chariot to carry them to the stars.
CHAPTER
5
FOR four hours a day, five days a week, Jean worked for Dr. Leopold Arkins in the Linguistics Department. She also taught two freshmen classes and one sophomore class in linguistics, and although she was a Ph.D. candidate, she knew she would not make it that year. Perhaps never, she thought, squaring her shoulders, ready to face Leo Arkins for the first time since his dismal reception at a national conference in Atlanta. Corinne Duland had brought copies of the devastating papers half a dozen different linguists had presented, virtually destroying his work, with innuendo and implication where there were no facts and counterresearch.
He would in turn flagellate her, Jean knew. Leo Arkins was a small man with a paunch; he had masses of black hair that covered his forehead down to his eyes, and a congenital deformity that caused him to limp slightly and had arrested the growth of his left hand when he was a child. He had no family, no interests in anything other than his work. He detested weakness, would allow himself none at all, and found it in everyone else.
She entered the language laboratory and didn’t realize how tense she had become until she saw that the room was empty; a long sigh of relief brought relaxation to her diaphragm. The door to his office was closed, as was the door to the reception room. Quietly, hoping he would not hear her during the next four hours, she approached the desk that had a computer terminal, sat down and prepared to work. The room was small, with only two desks—one with a typewriter, the other with the terminal—and one extra chair. Arkins’s secretary had quit recently, the third one to come and leave since Jean’s arrival two years ago, and this one had not been replaced. Jean often worked through without seeing anyone at all. She turned on the terminal, identified herself—Brighton, slave laborer for Arkins, was how she privately decoded the series of numbers and letters she used; the computer acknowledged her right to access. She typed in the directions and the printout picked up where it had left off the day before.
While the printout continued to accumulate in a stack of papers, all precisely folded, all with numbered word combinations from top to bottom, Jean withdrew another stack of similar printouts and began checking the word groups. Some were clearly nonsense, grammatically correct but with no intelligible content. Others had content, but were ungrammatical or irrelevant: wheat takes me, I take home dock, I am to there, he is dock here, food brings home . . .
Every once in a while she circled a sentence and typed its number on the input keyboard. After a time her eyes began to burn and she had to stand up and move around the tiny office for a few seconds. The computer kept sending out phrases, folding the papers, apparently able to go on forever with the few dozen words in this program. She sat down again and read the next collection of words: grain gets to me, and the next and next. I have no food to take home. She felt a mild flicker of interest and circled the sentence, and when she typed in the number this time she added another key, signaling that this one took priority.
“Why do you give some of them higher priority than others?” Arkins had demanded early in the first months that she had worked for him.
“I don’t know. You told me to if it seemed warranted.”
“Yes, but why those particular sentences? They are no more correct than others in the series. Why those?”
“I don’t know,” she had repeated helplessly. “Should I stop doing it?”
“No! You idiot! I want the reasons for your choices! We must program them into it. Think, woman! Why?”
But she was not a woman to him, not then, not now. She was a part of the complex machinery that finally was proving his theories that any language, even the most difficult coded languages, could be understood and decoded by a computer if only it was programmed correctly. The universality of unconscious grammars would yield to the computer, he argued. And during the last two years he had been able to show the first evidence of corroborative proof.
Suddenly she knew he was in his office, without being aware of having heard the hall door open and close, or any other sound from the room behind her. She closed her eyes briefly, then went on down the list of words, some of them making sentences, others not, and tried to ignore the definite noise he was making now. Something slammed, something else fell to the floor, a chair thumped against the wall. Her door was flung open.
“Brighton, haven’t you got it yet? What have you been doing? Didn’t you even bother to come in while I was away? Do I need a policeman to keep watch?”
His voice was high-pitched, shrill at times, and his words were all clipped and hard, spat out in a way that made him sound furious even when he was in a good mood.
“Still working on it,” she said, keeping her voice as neutral as she could.
“Still working on it,” he repeated in perfect mimicry. He was very red-faced and his tiny left hand clutched his coat in a white-knuckled grip; veins stood out on the back of it. Jean was fascinated and repelled by that small hand. Sometimes when he was having a tantrum his deformed hand seemed to lead a life of its own, trembling, then clenching, flexing its fingers. . . . Sometimes, when he was in a jovial mood, the hand patted his chest, rubbed up and down his coat lapel, or worked with a button. He appeared unaware of it. Sometimes Jean had the feeling that the grotesque hand was reaching for her. She had had nightmares about that hand.
“You will plan to work until six until further notice,” Arkins screeched at her. “I will have this finished before April! You hear me? Before April! And if we have to work until seven, or eight, or however long it takes every day, we’ll do it!”
“You know I have three classes a week,” Jean protested, but she. knew it was useless. And there was no one over him to whom she could complain. He was the department head.
“Then teach them, you simpering idiot! Until six! Starting now, today. This is to be completed in the next three months!”
He wheeled about and left, slamming the door behind him. For a moment Jean didn’t move, then she went to the other desk to call home, to tell Walter she would be late.
She could quit, she thought, walking home in a freezing rain. She could go to a different school and get her Ph.D. and laugh in his face. She could find a job teaching at a junior college or high school, something. She forced herself to stop thinking of alternatives that were clearly impossible. She hated herself for playing fantasy games when her frustration overwhelmed her and her helplessness became almost a physical burden. There was no school where she would be accepted, especially if she simply quit working under Arkins, who was the authority in the field. And there were no jobs, none at all. She repeated this to herself twice, forming the words, as if to make certain all of her mi
nd got the message she was sending it.
She had studied under Arkins, doing her work for her master’s degree here at Michigan State University. He had required a paper from his dozen students that year, giving detailed plans on how to go about developing a computer program to decipher coded messages. Jean had suggested starting with children, ten-year-olds, and recording their conversations for a period of time, feeding the words into the computer and using them as the parameters of the probable message, thus limiting the possibilities, which were infinite without some such limitations imposed from outside.
“Why children?” he had demanded.
“Because they tend to use uncomplicated grammatical constructions.”
“Set it up!”
“But I haven’t finished my thesis yet. When?” It was April, her thesis was due in May.
“Give me the damn thesis. It’s finished enough. I’m going to be your Ph.D. adviser, and you’ll be a TA, working under me, in my department.”
“I have no money to go on. I was going to quit this year.”
He had looked at her for a moment, then said with fury that he did not even try to control, “You will do exactly what I tell you, do you hear? Quit! To work in a restaurant? To have a baby? Don’t you even know what I’m offering you, you miserable little woman?”
She had hated him then, she hated him now, but because she did know what alternatives she had, she did the work that she did not believe in, that she thought was futile and a dead end. He snapped his whip and she cringed and the work got done, results started to appear, and she hated him more than ever.
And every time she felt she could not bear it another day, she forced herself to recall Mesa and the last time she had gone there, to her mother’s house.
Jean had watched the riots on television in the dorm lounge. Mexicans, Chicanos, Indians, whites . . . They burned down the municipal buildings, the courthouse, the city hall; they blockaded the streets with flaming junk cars and barrels and packing crates, and when the fire engines came they doused them with gas and fired them.
