Echo Round His Bones (11 page)

Candide
is at the Opéra Comique. It was in
expectation of her departure that I wanted to speak to you down here
instead of in my usual rooms upstairs, for that -- on the other side of
the second door Bridgetta opened -- that is our manmitter-in-residence."
Bridgetta-Sub-One closed the door of what had seemed, to Hansard, no more
than a closet behind her. The six people watched the closed door in perfect,
unbreathing silence, and in a moment a hand appeared through the oak panel.
One could sense in the startled gestures of that hand all the wonderment
that must have been on the woman's face. Panofsky purred forward in his
chair and lifted his own hand up to catch hold of hers, and how much
relief and happiness there was in the answering clasp of her hand.
Now the woman who had lately been Bridgetta-Sub-One stepped through the
door, smiling but with her eyes tight shut, an inescapable reaction to
walking through one's first door.
She opened her eyes. "Why, then, it's true! You were right, Bernie!"
The two Panofskys chuckled indulgently, as though to say, "Aren't I always
right?" but forbore to be more explicit. It was her birthday party, not his.
The new Bridgetta-Sub-Two regarded her three doubles with an amused and
slightly fearful smile, then, for the first time, lifted her eyes to
see the figure standing behind them. The smile disappeared, or if it did
not quite disappear, it changed into a much more serious kind of smile.
"Who is he?" she whispered.
Hansard wasn't able to answer, and no one else seemed about to rescue
him from his difficulty. Hansard and Bridgetta stood regarding each
other in silence, smiling and not quite smiling, for a long time.
In the following days it became a matter of dispute between them (but the
very gentlest of disputes) whether what had happened could be legitimately
said to be, at least in Hansard's case, love at first sight.
After the curry dinner that Panofsky had prepared to welcome the new
Bridgetta, after the last magnum of champagne had been emptied and the
glasses tossed out through the closed windows, the two Panofskys took
Hansard into a spacious library, in one corner of which a third Panofsky
(Sub-One) was leafing through a handsome folio volume of neo-Mondrian
equations.
"Oh, don't mind
him
," Panofsky reassured Hansard. "He's really the
easiest person in the world to live with. We ignore him, and he ignores
us. I took you aside so that we might continue our discussion of this
afternoon. You see, Mr. Hansard -- may I call you Nathan? -- we are
living here under most precarious circumstances. Despite our sometimes
luxuriousness, we have no resources but those which the Panofsky and
Bridgetta of the Real World -- a nice phrase that, Nathan, I shall adopt
it, with your permission, for my own -- can think to send us.
"We have a certain store of canned foods and smoked ham and such set aside
for emergencies, but that is not a firm basis for faith in the future,
is it? Have you much considered the future? Have you wondered what
you'll do a year from now? Ten years? Because, as the book says, you
can't go home again. The process by which we came into being
here
is as
irreversible as entropy. In fact, in the largest sense, it is only another
manifestation of the Second Law. In short, we're stuck here, Nathan."
"I suppose, in a case like that, sir, it's best not to think too much
about the future. Just try and get along from day to day."
"Good concentration-camp philosophy, Nathan. Yes, we must try and endure.
But I think, at the same time, you must admit that certain of the old rules
of the game don't apply. You're
not
in the Army now."
"If you mean that matter about my scruples, sir, I've thought of a way
my objection might be overcome. As a captain I have authority to perform
marriages in some circumstances. It seems to me that I should have the
authority to grant a divorce as well."
"A pity you had to go into the Army, Nathan. The Jesuits could have used
a casuist like you."
"However, I must point out now that a divorce is no guarantee that a romance
follows immediately after, though it may."
"You mean you'd like me to leave off matchmaking? You Americans always
resent that kind of assistance, don't you? Very well, you're on your own,
Nathan. Now, hop to it."
"And I also want it understood that I'm not promiscuous. Those four women
out there may all have been one woman at one time, but now there are
four
of them. And only one of me."
"Your dilemma puts me in mind of a delightful story of Boccaccio's.
However, I shall let you settle that matter with the lady, or ladies
themselves."
At that moment three of the ladies in question entered the room.
"We thought you'd want to know, Bernie," said Jet, "that Bridget is dead."
"What!" said Hansard.
"Nothing to become excited about, Nathan," Panofsky said soothingly.
"These things have to happen."
"She committed suicide, you see," the new Bridgetta explained to Hansard,
who had not seemed to be much comforted by Panofsky's bland assurance.
"But
why
?" he asked.
"It's all in Malthus," said Bridie. "A limited food supply; an expanding
population -- something's got to give."
"You mean that whenever. . . whenever a new person comes out of the
transmitter, you just
shoot
somebody?"
"Goodness no!" said Jet. "They take poison and don't feel a thing.
We drew lots for it, you see. Everyone but Bridie, because her experience
makes her too valuable. Tonight Bridget got the short straw."
"I can't believe you. Don't you value your own life?"
"Of course, but, don't you see? -- " Bridgetta laid her hands on the
shoulders of her two doubles. "I have more than one life. I can afford
to throw away a few as long as I know there's still some of me left."
"It's immoral. It's just as immoral as joining those cannibals."
"Now, Nathan," Panofsky said soothingly, "don't start talking about
morality until you know the
facts
. Remember what we said about the old
rules of the game? Do you think
I
am an atheist that I would commit
suicide just like that, one-two-three? Do you think I would so easily
damn my immortal soul? No. But before we can talk about right and wrong,
we must learn about true and false. I hope you will excuse me from making
such expositions, however. I have never enjoyed the simplifications of
popular science. Perhaps you would care to instruct the good captain in
some first principles, my dear Bridie, and at the same time you could
instruct Bridgetta in her new duties."
Bridie bowed her head in a slightly mocking gesture of submission.
"Yes, please," said Hansard. "Explain, explain, explain. From the beginning.
In short, easy-to-understand words."
"Well," Bridie began, "it's like this."
TEN
MARS
I should never have joined the Justice-for-Eichmann Committee, he thought.
That was my big mistake. If I hadn't joined the committee I could have been
chief-of-staff today.
But was it, after all, such a terrible loss? Wasn't he happier here? Often
as he might denigrate the barren landscape, he could not deny to himself
that he gloried in these sharp rock spines, the chiaroscuro, the dust
dunes of the crater floors, the bleeding sunsets.
It is all so . . .
what? What was the word he wanted?
It was all so
dead
.
Rock and dust, dust and rocks; the sifted, straining sunlight; the quiet;
the strange, doubly-mooned heaven. Days and nights that bore no relation
to the days and nights measured off by the earth-synchronized clocks
within the station. Consequently there was a feeling of disjunction from
the ordinary flow of time, a slight sense of floating, though that might
be due to the lower gravity.
Five weeks left. He hoped . . . but he did not name his hope. It was a game
he played with himself -- to come as near to the idea as he dared and then
to scurry away, as a child on the beach scurries away from the frothing
ribbons of the mounting tide.
He returned down the olive-drab corridors from the observatory to his office.
He unlocked the drawers of his desk and removed a slim volume. He smiled,
for if his membership on the ill-fated committee had cost him a promotion,
what would happen if it became known that he -- Major-General Gamaliel
Pittmann -- was the American translator of the controversial German poet
Kaspar Maas? That the same hand that was now, in a manner of speaking,
poised above the doomsday button had also written the famous invocation
that opens Maas' Carbon 14:
Let us drop our bombs on Rome
and cloud the fusing sun,
at noon, with radium. . . .
Who was it had said that the soul of modern man, Mass Man, was so reduced
in size and scope that its dry dust could be wetted only by the greatest
art? Spengler? No, somebody after Spengler. All the other emotions were
dead, along with God. It was true, at least, of his own soul. It had rotted
through like a bad tooth, and he had filled the hollow shell with a little
aesthetic silver and lead.
But it wasn't enough. Because the best art -- that is, the art to which he
found himself most susceptible and which his rotting soul could endorse
-- brought him only a little closer, and then still a little closer,
to the awareness of what it was that underlay the nightingale's sweet
tremolos and brought him nearer to naming his unnamed hope.
Fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do.
Yet what else was there? Outside of the silver filling there was only
the hollow shell, his life of empty forms and clockwork motions. He was
generally supposed to be a happily married man; that is, he had never
had the energy to get a divorce. He was the father of three daughters,
each of whom had made a good marriage.
Success? Quite a lot of success. And by acting occasionally as a consultant
for certain corporations he had so supplemented his Army income that he had
no cause to fear for the future. Because he could make agreeable conversation,
he moved in the best circles of Washington society.
He was also personally acquainted with President Madigan, and had gone on
hunting trips with him in his native Colorado. He had done valuable volunteer
work for The Cancer Fund. His article, "The Folly of Appeasement,"
had appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly
and been commended by no less
a personage than former Secretary of State Rusk. His pseudonymous
translations of Maas and others of the Munich "Götterdämmerung school"
had been widely praised for their finesse, if not always for their
content. What else
was
there? He did not know.
He knew, he knew.
He dialed 49 on the phone, the number of Hansard's room. I'll play a
game of Ping-pong, he thought. Pittmann was an extremely good Ping-pong
player. Indeed, he excelled in almost any contest of wits or agility.
He was a good horseman, and a passing-fair duelist. In his youth he had
represented the United States and the Army in the Olympics Pentathlon.
Hansard was not in his room. Damn Hansard!
Pittmann went back out into the corridor. He looked into the library and
game room, but it was empty. For some reason he had grown short of breath.
Darkling, I listen.
Ex-Sergeant Worsaw was outside the door of the control room. He came to
attention and saluted smartly. Pittmann paid no attention to him. When
he was alone inside the room he had to sit down. His legs trembled,
and his chest rose and fell sharply. He let his mouth hang open.
As though of hemlock I had drunk, he thought.
He had never come into the control room like this, never quite so
causelessly. Even now, he realized, there was time to turn back.
The control room was unlighted, except for the red ember of the stand-by
lamp above the board, which was already set up for Plan B. Pittmann leaned
forward and flicked on the television screen. A greatly-magnified color
image of the earth, three-quarters dark, appeared.
Love never dies. It is a mistake to suppose that love can die. It only
changes. But the pain is still the same.
He looked at the button, set immediately beneath the stand-by light.
Five weeks. Was it possible? Would this be the time? No, no, surely the
countermand would come. And yet . . .
Tears welled to Pittmann's gray eyes, and at last he named his hope:
"Oh, I want to, I want to. I want to push it
now
."
Hansard had seldom disliked his work so intensely -- if it could be called
work, for aside from the mock run-throughs of Plan B and the daily barracks
inspections, "A" Company had been idle. How are you to keep twenty-five men
busy in a small, sealed space that is so fully automated it performs its own
maintenance? With isometrics? Pittmann was right: boredom was the great
problem on Mars.
Strange, that they didn't rotate the men on shorter schedules. There was
no reason they couldn't come here through the manmitter on eight-hour shifts.
Apparently the brass who decided such questions were still living in a
pretransmitter era in which Mars was fifty million miles away from earth,
a distance that one does not, obviously, commute every day.
Hansard had tried to take Pittmann's advice and looked through the library
for a long, dull, famous book. He had settled on
Dombey and Son
,
though he knew nothing about it and had never before read anything
by Dickens. Though he found the cold, proud figure of Dombey somewhat
disquieting, Hansard became more and more engrossed with the story. But
when, a quarter of the way through the book, Paul Dombey, the "Son" of
the title, died, he was unable to continue reading the book. He realized
then that it was just that irony in the title, the implied continuity
of generations from father to son, that had drawn him to the book. With
that promise betrayed, he found himself as bereft as the elder Dombey.
A week had passed, and the order to bomb the nameless enemy had yet to
be countermanded. It was too soon to worry, Pittmann had said; yet how
could one not worry? Here on Mars, the earth was only the brightest star
in the heavens, but that flicker in the void was the home of his wife
and son. His ex-wife. Living in Washington, they would surely be among
the first to die. Perhaps, for that very reason, they would be among
the luckiest. The countermand would certainly be given; there was no
need to worry. And yet, what if it were not? Would not Hansard then be,
in some small degree, guilty of their deaths, the deaths of Nathan Junior
and Marion? Or would he be somehow defending them?