Just a Couple of Days (11 page)

 

38
Thus was their relationship born on the swift kiss of a pun. Neither suspected what the other would become to each of them. Like phrases running wild in the Logos, they knew neither who nor by what mechanism nor for what reason they were whistled for (if they understood that they were whistled for at all). They were simply compelled to come together. Sophia was the question, and Blip was the answer. And vice versa.

It happened like this:
Free Hugs
, confident with his identity as a gallant suggestion, suddenly slammed into
Who is Hugs?
, some smart-assed interrogative who turned him into an emotional imperative by her very presence. What a ridiculous rendezvous! Christ, the two utterances really didn't have anything to do with each other, drawn together by some clever misunderstanding, some sly twist of fate. But sense or nonsense, that which motivates the plane of language cannot be resisted any more than that which motivates the plane of life. The soul knows this, of course, as does its equivalent in the communicative cosmos. It keeps its head in the heavens, and has but one toe in the untamed tides of this world, just enough to animate the mind, which fails to see what is perfectly apparent.

Another question,
Why aren't apples called reds?
, who longed for her answer but bragged of her independence nonetheless,
once heard rumors of such fantastic foolishness, such confident meaninglessness, and she scoffed.

 

39
In my own time and space, I retired to the front porch with my dog, Meeko, a good-natured mutt, surely the furthest a canine could be from a hound of hell. I sat stroking his ears, watching night settle onto my isolated residential street, trying to fathom the events of the day. After a bit, I remembered Tynee's enigmatic purple envelope, whose contents I had not yet found a chance to read. I didn't know it then, but the boastful introduction would turn out to be no hyperbole. This is what the letter said:

 

Congratulations, Dr. Fountain!

Due to your extraordinary expertise in the area of molecular biology, you have been selected to participate in research of monumental historical importance.

We represent a top-secret committee of military and industry representatives that has been long disturbed by the nature of warfare. Mind you, we are not so foolish as to believe that war can be done away with; indeed, we recognize the utter inevitability of it in human nature. However, the Committee for Peaceful Conflict (CPC) was founded upon a sincere belief in the possibility of
humane weaponry and warfare
. Briefly, the concept of humane weaponry and warfare is to incapacitate, rather than terminate, an enemy. Traditional warfare decimates entire population centers. This renders natural resource reserves virtually worthless by destroying vital transportation routes and causing billions of dollars in property
damage. The toll in human suffering need hardly be mentioned.

The CPC has been actively promoting and sponsoring a shift away from these foibles of the past for some time now. Humane weaponry and warfare
is
possible, and recent research in genetics puts humanity on the threshold of an era when the economic and human devastation wrought by war will be nothing more than a memory.

Our research program has proceeded in three stages. Stage one, Operation Moneybags, was dedicated to the identification of the most efficient incapacitating agents. To that end, a massive survey of chemicals was undertaken, without success. Chemistry is the technology of the past, as you must surely realize, and genetics is the technology of the future. With that realization, the program was scrapped and begun anew.

Let us remind you before we go any further that our goal is
humane weaponry and warfare
, not germ warfare. We are not searching for or looking to create a new plague upon humankind. Rather, we seek to remove the plagues of economic devastation and human suffering from the annals of warfare. War cannot be helped, but it
can
be peaceful.

All disclaimers aside, once a suitable carrier virus was identified, it was brought into the laboratory for genetic mapping. This has been accomplished. Stage two, Operation Recount, involved the manipulation of the genome. We believe we have engineered a highly unique virus with specialized symptoms that, were it introduced into a population center, would almost immediately incapacitate it without a single building being destroyed and with a minimum of human suffering.

Stage three, Operation Small Change, involves you, Dr. Fountain. In short, we need your expertise. Humanity needs your expertise. A viral incapacitating agent such as we have been describing is useless without a cure or a vaccine. We possess neither of these. Although President Tynee has assured us that you would be glad to provide your services, we prefer to allow you to decide. At the time of a decision in the affirmative, you will be fully debriefed and allowed access to our records and laboratories, as well as provided with luxurious and sequestered accommodations. Let us know of your decision via President Tynee.

This letter is necessarily vague. It is not, however, news to any intelligence organization in the world. Suffice it to say that we are not the only nation developing such weapons. For your protection and reassurance, a team of agents has been watching your every move.

The choice is yours, Dr. Fountain. Humanity anxiously awaits.

 

The memo was signed with the letters CPC, and carried a postscript a few lines down. It read: “P.S. Better living through genetics.”

 

40
The letter left me both intrigued and apprehensive. I had a team of agents protecting me? Was I in danger? I strained my eyes into the darkness off my porch but could see no one lurking about. I attempted to reassure myself by noting that Meeko seemed relaxed, and surely he would sense another's presence nearby. But it was fast becoming impossible for me to think of anything but torrents of frightful scenarios fed by a lifetime of
espionage movies. The state of mind that emerged within me was utterly unexpected and terrifying. I have since harbored nonfalsifiable suspicions that it was not entirely without psychotropic influence, given the activities of the CPC and their objectives concerning me. But this is conspiratorial conjecture.

As I recall, I began to panic when Meeko stirred and I imagined that he heard something across the street. I glanced around wildly, scanning the charcoal shadows, then thought better of it and inspected my body for the point of a laser sight. I was clean, it appeared, but then I realized that the point was probably on my head. I felt naked and wide open, and a nightmarish dread was crawling over me like all the roaches in hell, smothering my rational faculties. I tried to calm myself, and succeeded in forcing a smile onto my face when I mused that perhaps Blip's irrationality was contagious. I patted Meeko's side, and he thumped his tail appreciatively. Good dog, protecting your paranoid proprietor.

“You'll let me know if you smell anything, won't you, boy?” I said to him, loud and lightsome, but only succeeded in unnerving myself further by the agitated sound of my own quaking voice, greeted as it was by an antagonistic silence that stomped on my already tenuous grip on reality.

My imagination then suddenly threw an embarrassing temper tantrum, and I sat in a frightful paralysis, immobilized by panic, for the subjective hour or so that it took a single leaf, a pioneer of the coming autumn, to drift to the ground. At last, the hum of a distant car began to fill in the shrieking void. This gave me some brief comfort, but I soon realized that the car was getting louder, much, much louder, and coming closer. Presently, I saw its high-beam headlights glare into view as it turned the
corner a couple of blocks away. It was on my street and would be passing my house any moment.

I had an impulse to race inside and hide under the covers, but acting on one's fears only makes things worse. So I stayed put, filled with horrific apprehension, tied with the terror that bound me to my chair, refusing to let the floodwaters of fright rising in my soul chase me to higher ground. It was an enormous effort, like holding on to a scalding plate until you get it to a table, but I was determined not to move until that car passed. Nothing less than my sanity seemed to be at stake. Afterward, in a few seconds, I would surely relax again and laugh at myself.

Meeko, irritated at the sound of the vehicle's broken exhaust system, lifted his head and growled as the car crossed the intersection onto my block. Human and canine, we shared a few moments of consciousness that night. The approaching car filled our perception. Its high beams lit up the entire street and the unmuffled combustion of the engine was like cinematic machine-gun fire over speakers with blown woofers. Meeko sat up as the car's noise increased. My heart was pounding and my stomach hurt, but then, glory be, the car was past my house.

Boom!
A deafening blast knocked the wind out of the sigh of relief I was breathing. Meeko and I scrambled to our feet simultaneously. Our two brains, still operating at the same primal level, struggled savagely to make sense out of the noise that had confronted them. Meeko began barking madly, more ferociously than I'd ever seen him. Our few moments of shared consciousness were soon over, as I very quickly realized that the noise was just the car backfiring. This knowledge did nothing to quiet my pounding heart. Thinking I was the more rational
species of the two of us, I took charge and calmed Meeko down, then went inside and telephoned Tynee at his office-apartment.

“President Tynee,” I was still breathless, and my voice was trembling. “I want to be sequestered tonight. I've read the letter.” Meeko began barking violently again, snarling at the door, giving rise to my own survival instincts once more. “Quiet!” I roared at Meeko, into the receiver.

“Take it easy,” Tynee said calmly. “What's going on?”

“I think the team of agents might have lost me. I want to be sequestered tonight. I don't like this one bit, goddamnit!” Either I was losing my mind or I saw a movement outside the window.

“I'll make the arrangements. Hold on.”

I held on. No, I thrashed and struggled furiously against the deranged quicksand of delusion sucking me into a pit of dread. I watched Meeko in horror as he sniffed and whined frantically at the door. I felt I was facing certain death. Violent death. Any moment my head could explode from a sniper's bullet, I kept thinking. What were my last words? Was it “goddamnit”? That can't be a good note to end on.

“Peace on Earth,” I stammered aloud, just in case.

“What?” came Tynee's voice on the other end.

“Nothing. What's going on?”

“Someone will knock on your door any minute. Trust them. They will bring you in safely.” Tynee was remarkably cordial, even hospitable, in his tone. In retrospect, it strikes me as suspicious that he was not the least bit irritated or alarmed at my desperate state.

“Okay,” I said tentatively, like a child promising to stop crying if given a lollipop. “Is that it?”

“That's it.”

“Is there a code word or anything?”

“No, that's it. I'll talk to you again in the morning.”

“All right.” I hung up the phone, somewhat disappointed that I wasn't to be privy to a secret knock.

THE BOOK O' BILLETS-DOUX