9
It was a half hour before he had a chance to speak to Madeleine Lennox alone. She joined him on the promenade deck at sunset. ‘Do you believe it was a heart attack?’ she asked.
'I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It could have been. But watch it.’
‘How? You mean I don’t even dare eat anything the rest of the trip?’
‘Not that. The only thing sure is that he’s too damned clever to repeat himself. And a heart attack in a woman’s not as plausible, anyway. But keep your door locked.’
‘Are you going to?’
‘You’re damned right I am.’
‘Seems a duplication of effort.’
‘What?’ he asked.
The smoke-gray eyes were wide and utterly innocent. ‘Bolting so many doors.’
Trying to warn her was futile, he could see that. ‘Then you don’t think it’s serious?’
‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘But don’t you remember how effective you were against lightning?’
Barset brought word shortly after ten that Captain Steen’s condition seemed a little better. His pulse was stronger, and less erratic, and he was sleeping. Lind was with him constantly.
Goddard heard six bells strike as he lay naked on his bunk in the sweltering dark. Almost immediately there was a light rap on the screen door. Not even bothering to pull on the shorts, he padded over and looked out through the louvers. It was Madeleine Lennox. He unlocked the door and pulled it open. She stepped inside quickly, and was in his arms while he was still trying to secure the door again. He had an impression of amusement mingled with the eagerness.
‘Your reputation’s ruined,’ she whispered against his ear. ‘I think Karen saw me.’
‘What about yours?’
‘Oh, I’m sure she has no illusions about me. Women never do.’ There was a little murmur of discovery and delight then. ‘Mmmmm. You must have been expecting me. Or somebody. Are you sure you weren’t in the coast guard, instead of the navy?’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘That motto of theirs I always adored. Semper paratus.’ She began throwing off the robe and pajamas.
She was much better company, he thought, after she’d caught the streetcar than while she was chasing it. She jettisoned all pretense along with her clothing, gave not the slightest damn whether she captivated him or not, and demanded nothing but the mechanics of sex. She reminded him of Wilde’s remark that England and America were two countries separated by the same language; the most intimate of all human relationships was the perfect barrier to any intimacy at all.
With Haggerty it had been speech. They’d been stoned together for five days up and down the coast from San Diego to Sea-Tac, talking constantly, once even spending the night in the same bedroom, and he didn’t know her first name, nor she his. Apparently there was some quality about people who lived in bubbles that enabled them to recognize each other from the first, because in the whole period only once had either of them asked a question to which he expected a serious answer.
He’d met her in the bar at the San Francisco airport. It was late in the afternoon on a weekend, so the place was overflowing, and the one double martini PSA allowed for the forty-minute flight up from Los Angeles International was wearing thin. There was no space at all at the bar, but he spotted a table occupied by a girl sitting alone, a slender, almost fragile-looking blonde with a mink coat thrown over the back of her chair. He went over.
‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ he asked.
‘Not at all.’ Her manner was as gravely gentle as that of a nun. ‘Actually, I’ve always wanted to see Buenos Aires.’
‘Oh, I’m off for the weekend,’ he said. 'I don’t take the job home with me.’ He ordered a double martini, and she asked for another Jack Daniels, which could be significant. She looked perfectly sober, but he’d seen more than one ethereal blonde still lifting them off the tray when strong men were asleep in corners.
‘Do you use chloral hydrate?’ she asked.
‘Oh, no. That went out with the crimps on the Barbary Coast. Our labs came up several years ago with a timed-release spansule; the opiate takes effect in about twenty minutes, and then an aphrodisiac eight hours later. Powdered rhinoceros horn.’
‘I always assumed that was a male aphrodisiac. Connotation, I suppose.’
‘Well, we add estrogen, of course, so there are no side effects, like facial hair. Actually, the world market is so depressed, now that Castro’s cleaned up Havana, we’re diversifying into pornography and textbooks, and phasing out the girl operation as fast as we can take care of key personnel.’
‘What’s your average net per unit laid down in, say, Saigon?’
‘It depends,’ he said. ‘Age, and so on. Are you a virgin?’
‘No, I’m sorry. I was violated in my teens by an ectomorph.’
He shook his head. ‘Trying to police the whole damn world, and a woman’s not even safe on the street.’
She introduced herself. She was Mrs. Haggerty, she said, from New Bedford. Her husband was a whaler.
* * *
Madeleine Lennox gave a shivery little gasp and said something, her lips moving against his. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘You remembered right where they were. Oooooh!’
He was conscious of momentary wonder; he must be programmed by punch cards. They lay nude in each other’s arms in the darkness; he had a leg thrust between her thighs while his fingertips softly brushed the erogenous zones of her back. She jumped, and shivered again.
He was away a lot, Haggerty went on, but it was a good job challengewise, with the usual retirement, stock options, country club membership, expense account, and so on. Sparm, Inc., was one of the older companies with a reputation for being a little on the stodgy side, but it had been taken over by a conglomerate, shaken up, and given a transfusion of new blood, so it was a pretty gung-ho outfit and on the move, with plenty of room on the top side for a man who could carry the ball.
‘He’s just been picked to head up R and D,’ she said, ‘and I hardly see him from one month to the next. He’s all wrapped up in a new white whale they’re just getting off the drawing board and into hardware. The oil’s much lower in cholesterol, and there’s a big defense contract coming up as soon as they iron the bugs out of the polyunsaturated napalm they’re working on.’
He winced at the subliminal flash of the red Porsche as it spun out and went through the guardrail at a hundred miles an hour. Now and then in an unguarded moment some random word would get to him, even through the bubble, and he’d see Gerry’s face as he’d seen it that last time less than an hour before she was killed, the view itself no more than a flash, two or three seconds at most, as she looked at him and her stepmother with loathing and disgust before she wheeled and ran back through the house and they’d heard the Porsche go snarling out the driveway. It hadn’t burned; that wasn’t why the word ‘napalm’ had triggered it. It was her sense of outrage at the use of it, the bombing, the whole Vietnam war. She’d be proud of him now, too, he thought, and then wondered which now he meant, which manifestation of her father’s talents, the nonstop drunk or the automated lover.
‘Did they come up with a revolutionary new deodorant just recently?’ he asked Haggerty. ‘It seems to me I read about it. The go-go funds discovered them, and the stock went up thirty points in a week.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, that was Sparm, Inc. And another spin-off from R and D and the white whale. But it wasn’t a deodorant; it was a revolutionary new filter that reduces tar and nicotine sixty-seven percent. It’s made of the baleen, mixed with sintered yak wool. He made a lot of money out of it by exercising his stock options, but sometimes I get the impression he’s married to that whale. And when he does get home—’
'I know, that damn wooden leg,’ Goddard said. ‘It must be awkward.’
‘It’s not really wood,’ Haggerty said. ‘Except for a Circassian walnut ferrule. Van Cleef and Arpels makes it. It’s anodized titanium with inlays of jade and Mexican opal, and the socket is lined with the belly fur of an unborn agouti. On a special order you can have it fitted with a jeweled clasp to carry your key to the executive washroom.’
He told her about the underground skyway, and how he had discovered this sanctuary, this peaceful subculture existing within the larger, hostile culture of the automobile dwellers. He was a writer, he said, doing research for an article for Reader’s Digest, ‘New Hope for the Living: Never Leave the Airport.’ And while this was aimed at any sector of the populace which might have a cursory interest in survival, it would be of particular interest to serious drinkers.
In all bars except those in airports, you were marooned, he went on. You were safe enough as long as you were inside because the natives were disarmed at the doorway; this tradition had been established in the Old West even before the invention of the automobile, perhaps in anticipation of it, some prescience or foreboding that the day would come when there would be much more sophisticated weapons abroad in the land than the primitive and relatively harmless Peacemaker Colts and Frontier .45’s checked at the door in that happy era. And a Californian, forcibly shucked from his automobile and separated from it for any length of time, while prey to the same vague feelings of resentment and unease as an oyster removed from its shell, will, like the oyster, seldom attack. But, inevitably, bars close, or you have to leave one and move to another to escape some bore, and they’re out there by the hurtling millions, armed with Fords and Chevrolets and, for only dollars a month more, with Cadillacs. But from the airport bar you simply stepped out back, boarded a jet, and went to the one next door in San Diego, Portland, or Los Angeles, at thirty thousand feet.
Of course, at that altitude you did miss some of the beauties of the countryside, the beaneries, filling stations, used-car lots, neon, asphalt, smog, billboards, the proliferating acne of tract housing, and murmuring sylvan streams freighted with condoms and empty beer cans, but that was a small price to pay for being wafted from one sanctuary to another across four hundred miles of hostile territory whose populace was forever torn between devout but conflicting desires to maim you or sell you something. The ecology was simple; all airports had bars, nearly all had hotels, and all you needed was a drip-dry wardrobe and a few credit cards. And there was just enough challenge to keep it interesting; you had to look sober enough to get aboard the airplane in the first place and to buy the two drinks they allowed you during the flight, but still far enough from it to obviate any possibility you might really dry out before you reached the next station on the underground.
She agreed with him that something should be done for serious drinkers, and offered to help with the study. As a minority group, they’d been sadly neglected, and with the oncoming generation turning increasingly to pot and acid there was a very real danger they might become extinct, their entire culture lost forever. Only yesterday, in some bar, she’d heard a man order a frozen daiquiri.
To simplify the logistics of the operation he changed to bourbon too, and they carried a survival kit of three bottles in her luggage for the late hours of the night, morning horrors, and as insurance against election days, civil uprisings, or any natural catastrophe which might cause the bars to be closed. He had never known anybody who could drink as much as Haggerty and show as little effect of it except to talk, to talk incessantly, amusingly, and forever, apparently as a sort of perpetual exercise in the avoidance of all thought or of ever, in an unguarded moment, saying anything she meant. The night they’d shared the same room he had awakened toward dawn to see her sitting on the floor in pajamas, her cheek down on one arm spread across the seat of a chair while the hand slowly clenched and unclenched in agony.
‘I’m sorry, Haggerty,’ he said, for a moment forgetting the rules. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘That,’ she said, ‘is the first stupid thing I ever heard you say.’
She wasn’t entirely in accord with him, however, that the automobile dwellers were hostile. This fallacy, she believed, had grown out of the slipshod methods of some of the early investigators intent only on a quick doctorate and nailing down a grant to be off to Africa, and was based on nothing sounder than the fact that so many anthropologists had disappeared into the Californian countryside never to be heard of again. Subsequent studies had revealed that nearly all of them were alive and well in Los Angeles.
She explained this one night when they were finishing off a last bottle of Jack Daniels in her room. He’d forgotten which airport hotel it was, but it overlooked a freeway, and they were watching the endlessly hurtling projectiles curving past them.
‘All we can do,’ he said, ‘is pray that Slivovitz got through to Fort Huaracha. Can you keep loading the rifles while I deliver the baby?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you’re falling into the same error, and for the same reason, as Huysmann when he first advanced the hypothesis that it was some sort of primate equivalent of the lemming migration. He wasted a whole seventy-thousand-dollar grant trying to find where they were throwing themselves off the cliff, and backtracking to discover where they were springing out of the ground. He simply didn’t notice they were going in both directions. That’s why I can’t believe the intent of it is hostile at all. If they were chasing something, all eight lanes would be going the same way.’
Tieboldt did discover this, she went on, but he was just as baffled by it as Huysmann had been by overlooking it. It had already been established that they were highly sexed, and that they were a bartering people who subsisted by selling each other things they called goods and services. His theory was that it was a dance of some sort, a ritual evolved out of these aspects of their tribal heritage, but he could never come up with a satisfactory answer as to how either courtship or commerce could be carried on while they were going past each other in opposite directions at a combined velocity of a hundred and forty miles an hour.
Later investigators had decided the only way to the answer was to enter the dance and see where it led, which accounted for nearly all the missing scientists. It was estimated that at the present time there were still twenty-seven anthropologists circling endlessly around the Los Angeles freeways like spaceships in orbit, unable to find a way off.
Frownfelter’s paper, ‘The Carapace People of the San Fernando Valley,’ was by far the most reliable work on the subject, and the one that did the most to dispel the myth that they were hostile. ‘He spent a whole winter observing the members of a group near Van Nuys,’ she went on, ‘gradually gaining their confidence and allaying their fears that he intended any harm to the carapaces until he was allowed to approach quite near and study them at first hand. He found them quite friendly and open, and even eager to point out the advantages of their particular shells.
‘He was surprised to discover that they weren’t physically attached to the carapace in any way, even by an umbilicus, and that they could leave it at will, though they were always reluctant to do so. Whether this emotional attachment was sexual in nature or quasi-religious, he was never able to determine, but he inclined to the latter since it seemed to be shared equally by both sexes. Is there anything left in the bottle?’
One morning Haggerty was simply gone. She’d checked out before he got up, and left no message. Then, two days later, the drunk had abruptly come to an end. He was aboard an afternoon flight from San Diego to San Francisco. The miniskirted stewardess had just served him a double martini when he looked down and saw the blue of the Pacific below them and wondered how he could have been so stupid that it had never occurred to him before. He’d been searching in the wrong place all the time. It was out there. He handed the drink back to her. ‘Tell the captain to have one on me.’
‘You want him to lose his job?’ she asked with mock severity.
‘Give him a doggie bag. He can take it home.’
* * *
For the fifth time Karen Brooke tried to wrench her thoughts back to the book in her hands, but too many conflicting emotions were pulling at her. She was uneasy, and helpless, and illogically angry at herself. Captain Steen worried her, and she couldn’t make up her mind about Lind. He remained a complete enigma. One moment she trusted him, and then the next she was convinced he was a monster or madman.
And there was nobody she could talk to. Goddard? He was too self-sufficient and impervious to share any of her forebodings about this ship, and would only make her feel ridiculous. Further, in the past hour she had faced the fact, finally, that she didn’t like him, and it was the timing of this that had occasioned her self-anger. Why couldn’t she have arrived at the conclusion before she inadvertently saw Madeleine Lennox slipping into his cabin? This, she told herself hotly, had nothing to do with it, but the stupid fact remained there to taunt her.
She had found him attractive at first, with the homely male face, the assurance, and good manners, until she began to suspect this was all there was to him, that there was no warmth anywhere or capacity for feeling. She was sick to death of the hard, the smooth, and the impervious. They were too good at everything, and never seemed to have any doubts at all. Fear was alien to them because they were convinced they could, and nearly always did, walk away from the wreckage unscathed, while the involved, the less well-coordinated, and the earnest squares got their heads knocked off. And when, infrequently, one of the group did kill himself in the pursuit of kicks, the others bore it very lightly. Within a month after she’d watched in horror as Stacey fell from that sheer rock face in Yosemite, three of his very good, and very married, friends had made passes at her.
She was aware she was by no means unique in this; it probably happened to most widows and divorcees, but the callousness and the calm assumption they were doing her a favor had left her with what she felt was a permanent aversion to the breed. Too bad about old Stace, but they knew how rough it must be, and there was no sense in her wrecking her health. The fact that their marriage was already shaky and might have wound up in divorce hadn’t changed her reaction to these impervious but magnanimous studs who were willing to service her until she had made a permanent arrangement of some kind. And Goddard was another one, merely a few years older and hence a little smoother and more assured, and more immunized against the danger of ever feeling anything.
She dropped the book on the desk, and switched out the light. The fan droned on in its futile attempt to do anything about the heat. She felt very much alone and troubled, and it was a long time before she could get to sleep.
* * *
When Goddard awoke it was dawn and Madeleine Lennox was awake beside him, raised on one elbow to appraise the failure of her hand’s manipulation. Their eyes met. ‘O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?’ she asked. She smiled, kissed him softly on the check, and climbed naked from the bunk to gather up her pajamas.
When she went out, he stepped to the door and watched until she was inside her own cabin again. There was no one else in the passageway. He was just about to close the door when Barset appeared at the far end of it. He called out to ask how Captain Steen was.
Improving, Barset replied; resting much easier. Goddard closed the door and lit a cigarette, knowing Madeleine Lennox would have heard the good news too. Hell, there was nothing to worry about; it was all imagination.