Asterisk (32 page)

Several minutes elapsed. Then a middle-aged woman appeared in the doorway of the building. She carried a shopping bag. She looked in the direction of his car. She crossed the street. The man with the police credentials prepared to open his door. He was ready. Whatever might arise, whatever, he was ready for it. The woman was good-looking, well dressed, respectable; a suburban matron.

She knocked on his window.

He unrolled it.

She spoke quietly. “I understand you're looking for John Thorne—”

“Where did you get that impression?”

“Please. There isn't time. My daughter just received a message from him. She's arranging to go and meet him, I think.”

The man got out of the car. “You sure?”

“She said so,” the woman said. “I told her to hand the message over to the police.”

“You did right, lady,” the man said.

He followed the woman into the apartment building. They went up to the second floor in the elevator. The woman, biting her lower lip, said: “My motive in doing this is simple. I don't like John Thorne. I don't like him associating with my daughter. Is that clear?”

“Clear,” the man said.

“And I knew you were watching the building because you expect him to come here, don't you?”

The man shrugged.

The elevator stopped. He followed the woman along the corridor toward the apartment. She took a key from her bag and unlocked the door. They went inside.

“She's in the bedroom,” Mrs. Emerson said. “I do believe she's locked herself in.”

The man rapped on the bedroom door. “Come out,” he said. “Come out. Don't waste my time.”

She had used the service stairs. She crossed the foyer of the building quickly. Outside, in the rain, she ran to the corner, diagonally crossed the street, turned right, turned right again, and when she was sure she hadn't been seen she stopped running.

It was twenty minutes past two when Sharpe got the message. He swore, then with a feeling of the most acute reluctance, he was obliged to telephone his master. Banishing Tarkington—well, he thought, that was like simply taking a cancerous lung out of a body that had already succumbed to the ravages of the same disease in other organs. It was correct and it was futile. He listened to the telephone ringing.

4

Thorne was alone in the lounge when the door opened and she came in. She saw him and she started to cry. He put his arms around her and she cried against his shoulder for a long time. He smoothed her wet hair away from her forehead and thought how pale, how frail, she looked. There were dark circles under her eyes. When she had stopped crying she raised her face to look at him and then she began, with some small hysteria of relief, to laugh. She said his name over and over. He led her to a sofa and they sat down.

She regained her composure slowly.

“John, oh Christ,” she said. “I thought, no, I don't know exactly what I thought. Then I got the flowers. I—”

“Easy,” he said. “Were you followed here?”

She laughed again, brushing her eyes with the cuff of her raincoat. She shook her head. “I don't think so. My mother, I hope she won't get into any trouble, but when the flowers came she suddenly got this amazing idea on how to get me out of the building. I didn't think she had it in her or that she cared. Christ. I was scared. Really scared.”

“Your mother helped?” Thorne asked. There was something melting in the New England frost.

Marcia laid her face against his arm. She said, “Your sartorial taste is bewildering. Where are you shopping for coats these days?”

He kissed her lightly on the forehead, suddenly aware that with her presence his strength had come back, that the erosion of his spirit wasn't complete.

“The coat was necessary,” he said. “I'll explain all that to you later, love. Right now, I need to talk with you.”

The door of the lounge opened. A student, dressed in the bell-bottom jeans, complete with cuff embroidery of the late hippie period, stepped into the room. He went to the bookshelf, sifted through some periodicals, then sat down in the faraway corner of the room.

“Shit,” Thorne said. “Is there someplace we can go?”

“There's my office—”

“It's out. As soon as they find you gone, they'll be swarming around your office—”

“Okay. Do you think you could drink some coffee?”

“Where?”

She stood up. “Come with me.”

They went down into the basement of the building, using the stairs. There was a coffee machine in the basement corridor. Marcia put some coins in, selected two black coffees, then they walked to an empty classroom. They went inside, shut the door, sat down at a desk.

“Okay,” Thorne said. “This ought to do for a time.”

Marcia was smiling at him.

He looked at her for a moment.

Then he told her.

He told her about Asterisk.

She listened without interrupting, her eyes never leaving his face. When he had finished, she was silent for a long time.

She looked at him incredulously.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know what you're thinking.”

He paced round the room for a time, sipping coffee from the waxed cardboard container. She continued to watch him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I know how it sounds. But I can only tell you what I saw, Marcia. But it explains—it explains why Burckhardt was killed. He was sitting on information that was explosive, only he didn't know what to do with it, and because of his own sentimentality, because he thought of me as some carbon of my father, he imagined I'd know the best thing to do. Maybe he wanted it all brought out in the open, maybe he just wasn't sure.”

She had her eyes closed. She said: “It's wild—”

“More than wild,” Thorne said. “It explains that weird personnel list at Escalante. Jesus! I should have known. Linguists, a cryptanalyst. The possibilities of extraterrestrial life, language. It makes sense.”

He crumpled his coffee cup and aimed it at the wastebasket. She was watching him now, as if she were observing the edges of lunacy.

“It's true,” he said.

“Okay. Okay.”

“I know what I saw.”

She approached him across the room and held his hands a moment, looked at him sympathetically.

“Think,” he said. “Think what it means. Just stop and think about it.”

“I'm trying, John.”

“It isn't simply a space revolution,” he said. “Having Asterisk, understanding it, how it got here, what made it move, how it communicated with its own base, there would be hundreds of technological details so advanced that any power possessing Asterisk would be—”

“I see that, John,” she said quietly.

She leaned against the blackboard. There was a half-rubbed-out phrase written in chalk behind her:
The area of Sarawak in square miles is roughly equivalent to …
The rest was gone. I'll never know now, he thought.

Then he said: “The question is, what do I do now?”

“What do you think you
should
do?”

He rubbed his jaw, leaned against the desk, then he crossed the room and embraced her. He said: “I think it's too important to sit on. I don't think it's something that should be kept back from the rest of the world …”

“I had a feeling you'd say that,” Marcia said.

He kissed her. The lips were cold, the hair still wet from the rain.

“And the consequences?” she asked.

“I can't predict them. All I know right now is that they want me dead.”

“You'd make a God-awful corpse, Thorne,” she said. “Even in your glad rags you look way too healthy.”

“I have no intention of shuffling off just yet,” he said. “So the question right now is, what's the best way of proceeding? What's the strategy?”

“The newspapers?”

“Which newspaper? Who'd print it? Do you think anybody would believe me?”

“Sure,” she said. “You've got some good contacts in the press. It would be the easiest thing in the world, my love, to find out your credibility quotient, no?”

“I guess,” he said. He looked up at the rainy window. “What bothers me is that they're out there and they're looking hard and I can't keep running on my luck forever.”

“Where do we go?” she asked. “Our apartment is obviously taboo, my office is off limits, my mother's place would be charming as a hornet's nest right now and we can't just hang out in here …”

Thorne thought for a moment. He thought of them tracking him and her through the wet city, the slow-moving cars, the radio communications, footsteps on stairs, the sound of knuckles on doors. His luck could not continue forever: crossing a street, waiting for a walk signal, catching a taxi, a bus, sooner or later they would see him. And now that Marcia was with him he felt doubly conspicuous.

“Where's the nearest telephone?” he asked.

“I guess outside the Student Union,” she said.

“Let's go there.”

He took her hand, they left the classroom together, climbed the stairs up from the basement and began to walk across the campus. The rain was constant, drumming, lashing across the university. They reached the callbox outside the Union. Inside, with Marcia crammed against him in the tiny space, he thumbed through the yellow pages of a rather dilapidated directory and found the number he wanted. He pressed in his coins, dialed, waited.

“Who are you calling?” she asked.

Before he could speak to her, the telephone was answered. A girl's voice. He asked quickly to be put through to Donaldson. The girl said that Donaldson wasn't expected back until five. He hung up.

“Who's Donaldson?” Marcia asked.

“A columnist. He has an amazing phobia about the present occupants of the White House. Total loathing would be more appropriate, I guess. If I'm going to talk to the press, it might as well begin with someone like Donaldson.”

Marcia drew a shape with the tip of her finger in the steamed-up window. “What now?” she asked.

“We've got some time to kill before Donaldson is expected back—”

“It's five past three,” she said, looking at her watch.

“Is there a movie house nearby?”

“If you're fond of subtitled lasciviousness I know the very place.”

They left the phone booth and walked. Momentarily, Thorne wondered if what he intended to do was the right thing; he wondered about the validity of the old adage that concerned sleeping dogs and how they are best left to lie. But Burckhardt obviously hadn't thought like that, Burckhardt hadn't been deterred by that kind of doubt. And what was Asterisk finally but a discovery of such enormous importance that it couldn't be left, like some cheap secret, some minor advance in nuclear gadgetry, in the hands of a few militants whose patriotism was simply an extension of their need for adequacy? No, Burckhardt hadn't been irked by doubts like that. Whatever else Asterisk might be, it was something that had to be shared, something that had to be given to the world. Thorne was suddenly sure of this now, certain that what he planned to do was the right thing, finally the only thing.

They came to a street crossing, moving quickly to the other side against the don't-walk signal. A few hundred yards from the sidewalk, pale neons glimmering in the rain, was the marquee of the small cinema.
Adults adults adults!!!
An undiscovered French beauty, her photographed face tinted in a somewhat surreal way, stood in cardboard cutout with her legs splayed and her hands on her breasts.

“That's the place,” Marcia said.

“You been here before?” Thorne asked.

“I wasn't always sweet and innocent, buddy,” she said. “That only happened when I met you.”

They began to run through the rain.

About twenty yards from the cashier's booth, twenty yards from the cardboard model, twenty yards from the security of the dark interior, Thorne suddenly stopped.

“No,” he said.

It was all a question of plotting lines, rather like one of those puzzles kids did when you joined dots until you had a picture of a donkey, or an elephant, or a horse. These were more complex lines, of course, than in some simple juvenile drawing, but the principle was not vastly different. A florist, a cab driver, you used the memories of people instead of a pencil; you drew your lines on the basis of recollections. What it narrowed down to for Sharpe was the campus where the girl was employed. A taxi driver remembered dropping off a young man whose appearance was similar to that of the person who had ordered roses to be sent to the girl; and that person, according to the charge card, had been John Thorne.

Sharpe put the receiver down and, rubbing his forehead with the flat of his hand, turned to look at Dilbeck.

“I think we've got them,” he said.

Dilbeck sighed. It seemed to him that it was a song he had been hearing for so long that its melody now was suggestive of a familiar lament.

“One of my people has seen them in the vicinity of George Washington,” Sharpe said.

Dilbeck, his raincoat smeared with a moist film, his black scarf knotted tidily at his throat, picked up his gloves. He had a sudden overwhelming urge to look at John Thorne, to come face to face with the person who had caused them all so much grief. One quick look, that was all; a form of recognition. As if to say, Good try, too bad, it's been a long haul. He stood up and rainwater slicked from his coat to form an oily pool at his feet.

“Get your car, Sharpe,” he said.

Sharpe seemed puzzled. “Why?”

“Let's see if we can prevent another fiasco.”

Sharpe made a gesture of frustration: “But who's going to run control if I leave my desk?”

“Find somebody. It doesn't matter who. I think we have to be in on whatever's going to happen.” Dilbeck moved to the door, pulling his leather gloves on. They were English gloves, he had bought them at a shop in the Burlington Arcade in London, in the year 1954; his second assignment to London, which he remembered just then with a slight touch of nostalgia, recalling his admiration for British cool, his enjoyment of their unflustered approach to things. He wished he had brought some of that home with him and imparted it to his own people; instead, what he had brought back was a taste for Typhoo Tea, marmalade on toast, and leather patches on the elbows of tweed jackets. He pulled the door open. Sharpe was fumbling into his coat.