Shortest Day (9 page)

Arlo nodded at the women, but he was thinking about his own problems, not those of the fragile village between the Science Center and the Yard. There was a rumor of an approaching cutback in the astronomy department. Who would be asked to leave? Who but the junior members of the staff, Harley Finch and Arlo Field?

“One of us or both of us?” Arlo had said to Harley. “Do you think they'll knock off you and me?”

Harley had not wanted to discuss it. “Jesus,” he mumbled, “I hope to God they don't go through with it.”

Arlo didn't waste time thinking about it. He was content to bide his time with his own future, his own life. He would find his level sooner or later. But he couldn't help noticing Harley's new habit of hanging around the office of the chairman of the department. Was he currying favor, or what?

The observatory complex was a collection of buildings on a hilltop between Concord Avenue and Garden Street. Once upon a time it had made use of its famous telescope, the Great Refractor, but in the polluted atmosphere of Cambridge the old instrument had long since become a historical curiosity. Astronomy on Observatory Hill was no longer optical. It was X-ray, gamma ray, radio astronomy, using instruments scattered all over the world and on satellites high above the earth.

But some of the observatory's old functions were still going strong. Arlo dropped in to say hello to Johnny Mitchell in the tiny office of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. Johnny was in charge of a clearing-house for information about comets and novae and black holes and variable stars. As Arlo looked in his door, Johnny's telephone was ringing, his computer screen was reporting the arrival of electronic mail, and paper was coming out of his fax machine.

Johnny nodded at Arlo and picked up the phone. “Right,” he said, “gotcha. R. Coronae Borealis, magnitude estimate 6.7. This was last night, right? Right.”

Arlo grinned at Johnny and headed for the chairman's office, passing chambers sacred to Harvard astronomical history—the Library of Glass Plates, the room that had been Harlow Shapley's. In the chairman's office he found an ominous sign of trouble. Harley Finch was there before him, in close conversation with the chairman.

Startled, they backed away from each other and stared at him. Harley moved his arm behind his back as if he were hiding something. They were like a couple of kids caught smoking behind the barn.

“Well, hello there, Arlo,” said the chairman heartily. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh, sorry, I thought we had an appointment.”

“Whoops,” said the chairman, flipping open his calendar.

“It doesn't matter,” said Arlo. “I'll come back another time.” Turning to leave, he caught a glimpse of the object behind Harley's back. It looked familiar. Its shiny cover was like the one attached to his report on his work at Kitt Peak last summer.

Why were they whispering about his summer report? It had been blameless enough. Well, maybe its blameless-ness could itself be blamed. Arlo had been too unimportant to be permitted a lot of time with the McMath solar telescope, and therefore he hadn't accomplished much science of his own.

He left the office wondering if he should look for other employment. If they were about to fire somebody, it would surely be Arlo Field. Harley Finch would make sure of that.

PART TWO

THE BOAST

No one could ever frighten me
,

For many I have slain
.

I long to fight
,

'Tis my delight

To battle once again
.

Saint George and the Dragon

CHAPTER 10

I'll pierce thy body full of holes and make thy buttons fly
.

Traditional British Mummers' Play

T
he officer inspecting Palmer Nifto's tent city was not employed by the city of Cambridge. Sumner Plover was a member of the Harvard Police Department. He was one of sixty-three sworn officers who had attended the Massachusetts Training Council Academy for firearms training and instruction in the general laws of Massachusetts.

Sumner was a trusted and experienced officer, but this time he was very late in discovering what was going on.

The overpass was part of his North Yard territory, but it was invisible from his cruiser. His territory was too big, that was the trouble. Officer Plover was responsible for patrolling the Law School and the Littauer School of Government on Massachusetts Avenue and the residence halls on Everett Street and a long stretch of Oxford Street with all its science buildings—McKay Laboratory and Mallinckrodt, the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the great glass edifice of the Science Center—and on Divinity Avenue the biological laboratories and the University Herbarium and William James Hall, and farther to the east the Yenching Library and the Semitic Museum and Hillel House and the Divinity School. It was an awful lot to keep track of.

Sumner didn't know much about the insides of all these buildings except for the glass flowers in the Museum of Comparative Zoology—everybody knew about the glass flowers. Sumner had a college degree from Boston University, but he had avoided math and science as much as possible, and as for the theological part of his beat, his own religion was a long way from that of the wild radicals in the Divinity School.

But he felt an instinctive respect for the diversity of teaching and research going on around him. One of his friends in the other police department, the one belonging to the city of Cambridge, was always referring to Harvard professors as double-domed assholes, but not Sumner Plover. After all, some of these scientists had won Nobel Prizes. It pleased him to think that his own part of the university was pushing back the frontiers of scientific knowledge. On his day off he sometimes drove his wife around his district, telling her the names of the buildings and their special requirements for security. Bonnie loved the glass flowers.

But his intimacy with the neighborhoods of the North Yard had failed him this time. The mall over Cambridge Street was largely invisible from the corner of Kirkland and Oxford Streets, where his cruiser patrolled every day. And therefore Sumner did not learn about the tent city until it had been in existence for two whole days, when his intercom suddenly burst into scratchy life while he was moseying around the MCZ parking lot, looking for cars without the right kind of sticker.

It was the sergeant who was his patrol supervisor. “Woman named Box reports tents on the overpass. She sounds like a nutcase, but maybe you'd better look into it. Name of the party in charge is Tyler, Wat Tyler.”

So it was not until then, far too late for prompt removal, that Sumner discovered to his horror the wooden shack and the nine tents, and the throngs of homeless people and students and hangers-on, and the tangled lengths of extension cord and the open mike and the interference with the pedestrian crosswalk of the new encampment called Harvard Towers.