The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes (22 page)

Forced into close and continuing proximity to Kyra, he felt his attitude toward her broadening and deepening, and the changes were not all from within. Subtle but profound alterations were occurring in her. The nimbus of femininity always around her grew more alluring, her movements more languid, her voice throatier,—her girlish vivacity seemed to be mellowing into womanhood.

More pronounced than any physical change was her growing humanization, and that was superficially apparent to the entire security squad after she made a bikini-clad entrance into the pool at nine, Saturday morning, by plunging from her balcony railing directly into the water. Only a scattering of people watched her dive then, but Sunday at nine a larger group had gathered, and by Monday there was standing room only at the poolside. Balancing for a few extra seconds on the rail, she obviously enjoyed the calls and wolf whistles from below.

Fawn Davies, the displaced beauty-school student, took to spending almost an hour each evening brushing and styling Kyra’s hair, for Kyra enjoyed the ministrations as fully as any woman of earth.

Breedlove had reason to believe her adaptation to human ways went deeper than the acquisition of feminine attitudes and to feel that a deeper dye of human longings and aspirations was staining her soul. On the first Sunday of her captivity, he directed her to Shakespeare, explaining that a knowledge of the author’s works was the sine qua non to an understanding of English literature. Then he went for a walk until lunch, at which time she told him the Bulfinch helped her understand Shakespeare’s allusions. By dinnertime she had read Shakespeare’s complete works.

He had reservations about the amount of information any speed reader retained, but it would have been presumptuous of him to quiz her. Although Shakespeare’s archaisms were explained in footnotes, he felt she must have had difficulty with his concepts and the rich, compressed Elizabethan style. At dinner she proved he had erred.

Dinner was Kyra’s mandatory public appearance each day at the center table in the interior dining room, surrounded by her bodyguard. Her appearance assured other security personnel, many of whom never saw her during the day, that their ward was alive and well. After Turpin had said grace over the meal, Breedlove remarked, “Gentlemen, we now have with us a Shakespearian scholar. Just before we came down, Kyra read the last line of his last sonnet.”

“I wonder what the last line of the last sonnet is,” Laudermilk said, and Kyra took the remark as a question.

“ ‘Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love,’ ” she answered.

Emboldened by her eagerness and the accuracy of her response, Breedlove plucked one of his favorite lines from memory. “Complete this line, Kyra. ‘On such a night did Dido—’ ”

“Oh, that’s Lorenzo speaking to Jessica in The Merchant of Venice.”

She straightened. Her shoulders leaned slightly forward. She spoke, and her voice, registering a bantering, masculine affection, caught all the flirtatious nuances of the lines as she recited:

“In such a night

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand

Upon the wild sea banks, and waft her love

To come again to Carthage.”

Each man at the table had some literary background. Slade wrote western romances. As an Army officer with little else to do; Laudermilk read extensively, and Turpin could quote the King James Bible at the drop of a fork. Breedlove spent long winters without television and had an English major’s degree from college. The astonishment and pleasure of the four men showed in their eyes.

Measuring the effects of her artistry against her audience, Kyra gained confidence. Leaning back, arching playfully away from the man who had spoken the lines, she became a mocking Jessica, answering:

“In such a night

Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,

Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,

And ne’er a true one.”

“Little lady,” Slade said, “I’m inviting you to recite Shakespeare before the whole squad in the theater Monday night. You owe it to your talent to let the people see it.”

“Why, Ben, I’d be right happy to do just that.”

The next morning Breedlove selected her readings from the more familiar passages of the poet. Looking up from a book on molecular physics she was reading, Kyra noted his selections from the page numbers, but she did not review the lines. Her omission of a rehearsal, which indicated that she could recall the lines, made him aware that her intensive reading was truly an attempt to store in her memory banks all she could gather of the world’s culture and science in order to take the library with her in her mind.

But no computer stood before a tough-minded audience of security people Monday night and brought to it the sadness and laughter her performance evoked. It was the shortest hour Breedlove had ever spent. Kyra’s range of feelings and her ability to project those feelings astonished him as it did the others. She could not have made them feel if she did not possess the feelings herself, and the realization of her transformation, her acquisition of a human heart, as it were, planted the seed of a purpose in his mind.

The memory of the evening helped to soften the news Slade brought to them on Tuesday: the President was still considering Kyra’s petition. There would be no automatic approval.

“It’s a budget problem,” Slade explained. “The value of the uranium is too great for a state gift and too small to be included in any foreign-aid program.”

“Is plutonium cheaper?” Kyra asked. “It would do as well.”

“It’s all restricted, and the price is academic anyhow. The uranium will be on its way by Wednesday. The Government Accounting Office is working out the kinks.”

But on Wednesday the President referred Kyra’s petition to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Norcross had won the first round. A telephone call from Cohen brought the news to Kyra’s suite before Slade came through the door, disappointed and chagrined over his error in prognostication. Although depressed by the rebuff, Kyra reacted with a sensible question, “When will the joint committee meet?”

“Not before next Wednesday. At the moment it doesn’t have a quorum in Washington, but I think we’re being given a runaround.”

Wednesday would be June 9, less than two weeks before the summer solstice. If Cohen failed, Kyra would be marooned on earth. Breedlove had felt Kyra’s fears at the prospect on the meadow, but the girl who had transmitted her anxieties to him then, by the touch of her hand, was different from the woman she had become. She no longer evinced the detached attitude toward suffering which had drawn the comment of his mother. Even the pity she felt for Slade in his chagrin was genuine, her consolation touched with sympathy.

“Don’t be so downhearted, Ben. You’re not responsible for that old committee, and I know you’re doing everything you can for me—short of violating the law.”

Reinforcing Breedlove’s growing hope that Kyra might adapt to earth was his confidence that the government knew what it was doing. By now the President had all the facts he needed to make the correct decision, and Breedlove remembered Slade’s remark that Kyra was no genetic threat to the earth apart from her tribe. Separate provisions could be made for them. If they had only a fraction of Kyra’s adaptability, they could find a home on earth. Even Myra had been frightening only in a psychological sense, and she could learn to control her hostility. On earth, too, Crick would be able to find his longed-for playmates, and green hair was statistically only slightly more unusual than red.

He could almost convince himself to pull for General Norcross in the dispute being waged in Washington. Norcross had all the findings about Kyra at his disposal, and the general would never risk the security of the continent, much less the planet, unless he was very sure of what he was doing.

Such reasoning came easily to him when alone in the suite with Kyra, where he could hear the swish of her slacks as she passed, the tinkling notes of her laughter, and surreptitiously watch the halo the light formed around her hair as she sat reading. Conversationally she was delightful. Once in reading Gray’s “Elegy,” she took exception to the lines:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

“Breedlove, flowers are brazen hussies. They bloom. They don’t blush. They wear bold colors when all other plants wear green and flaunt them to tempt every roaming, sex-mad bee.”

Such an original fancy would have drawn him to any woman, and in Kyra it made him more aware of a beauty that was becoming more alluring with each passing day. The hips beneath her narrow waist seemed to grow more rounded, their sway more pronounced as she walked, and her bouncing breasts grew fuller. His behavior toward her was at all times proper. If anything, his was still Shelley’s “desire of the moth for the star,” but the gravitational pull of earth’s committees was swinging the star closer, and Kyra had virtually promised herself to him if she should stay.

If she had to be on the planet when the transit of the sun swung southward, he wanted to be near her to comfort her when the seasonal terror he had glimpsed in the wardroom began. Then, when the summer storm had ebbed, he would make her a citizen of earth by marriage. As his wishes became his desires, he decided to plead his suit with Kyra honestly and openly, but he would have to transfer her from this penal atmosphere, the dining-room sycophants and hallway snoopers, into an atmosphere of candlelight and wine, in short, Pierre’s.

But there were the guards who checked her bed at midnight, the anger of Slade if he was detected sneaking out with her, and there was the threat of Huan Chung, who might or might not be a figment of Slade’s imagination. One night, as his fancies idly played with the idea of escape and the perils Kyra might face outside the walls, she looked over from a book she was reading and said, “ ’Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.’ ”

“Why did you think of that?”

“I was remembering Lady Macbeth,” she said. “Those are her words. Now, there was a woman. It was she who said, ‘We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail.’ ”

“Kyra, you can read my mind!”

“Not at all, dear Breedlove. I can read your facial expressions.”

He never broached his plans to Kyra, because he could devise no scheme for getting her out of the motel and, finally, because he did not have to. Set in motion by a telephone call from Abe Cohen, Friday afternoon, the parts of the plan fell together like a self-assembling jigsaw puzzle while Breedlove merely stood and watched. Cohen’s call came at the end of the lawyer’s day in Washington.

“The hearing’s set for Friday the eighteenth. The committee’s chairman is being called back from an African junket. Meanwhile the State Department’s moving for an open session, and State has an argument. A secret session to grant a nonresident alien uranium would destroy U.S. integrity and jeopardize the Nonproliferation Treaty. I’m using a counterargument from HEW to get the President to sign, but he’s wary of secret agreements, and the HEW argument is not as strong as I thought.”

On news he would have considered catastrophic a week earlier, Breedlove hung up the telephone feeling elated. The eighteenth was only three days before the solstice, international agreements took priority over Kanabian biology, and this committee would never get Kyra off the ground. More immediately, Cohen’s call gave Breedlove a reason to enter Kyra’s bedroom, where Fawn was styling her hair.

Seated before her dresser mirror watching Fawn at work, Kyra looked up at Breedlove when he entered and said, “From the gleam in your eye, I’d say you’re bringing bad news.”

“Cohen called. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy won’t convene until the eighteenth.”

“ ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace,’ ” she intoned. “Well, Breedlove, it looks as if you’re going to father a new breed of hybrids after all… Doesn’t Fawn have nimble fingers?”

“She comes from a long line of porcupine-quill pickers,” he commented, surprised by Kyra’s blitheness.

“With this hair style,” Fawn said, “you’ll look ravishing.”

“But for whom?” Kyra asked, her gaiety gone. “Tinkers and Evers and Chance? I can hardly bear to face those plastic palm fronds another week, or Ben’s tales, Gravy’s leers, and Little Richard’s adoration. Breedlove, why don’t you spring me out of this joint and take me dancing at Pierre’s?”

“I’ve been trying to figure a way to smuggle you out and get you back in time for Slade’s bed check.”

“It would be easy tomorrow night,” Fawn volunteered. “On Saturday I punch out at eight p.m. You could slip Kyra’s dress into the back of your car. I could bring Kyra a black wig and Coppertone for her skin, and she could walk out in my uniform as me.”

“That’s a terrific idea,” Kyra said, “You could bring a platinum wig and make-up and take my place in bed. I’m sure Breedlove would slip you a few bucks for baby-sitting our guards. And I know I can get Ben off the premises Saturday evening. Would you take me, Breedlove?”

“Of course, but we’d be alone out there with no protection.”

“I don’t need any protection, unless Huan Chung shows up in drag and you fall in love with him.” No longer asking his advice or consent, they continued the planning, even considering such details as a table reservation at Pierre’s, which Fawn would make from an outside telephone. Fawn was as excited as Kyra, and so cooperative Breedlove broke into the conversation with the remark, “If this comes off, Kyra and I will name our first hybrid girl ‘Fawn.’ ”

If either heard his remark she ignored it.

Saturday morning Slade did not drop by the suite after breakfast, and Breedlove thought he knew why. Slade had broken the news of the committee’s delay manfully enough at dinner, then sunk into a morose silence Kyra seemed to share. Now the twice-dishonored prophet refused to show himself in Kyra’s suite. Instead he remained in the patio, alone, dressed in a swim suit, lounging in a deck chair and staring into space, a completely dejected man.