The Masters of Atlantis (15 page)

Six big reclining chairs stood empty in the Red Room as a daily reminder to Mapes of his failure. He had bought these matching leather recliners and arranged them before the fireplace in a semicircle for the summit meeting that, it appeared, would not now take place. Mr. Jimmerson and Sir Sydney, with their aides, all of flag rank, were to have sat in them at varying angles, the ones they found most comfortable, feet well forward, this pride of recumbent lions hammering out the truce terms, popping up and falling back as the moment demanded, in the give-and-take of negotiation.

Mr. Jimmerson kept to his old wingback chair. Nearby was Austin Popper's chair, in which no one else was permitted to sit, not even Mapes, who had to provide his own, a stool, drawn up close to the Master, the better to get and hold his attention. This made for a clutter of chairs and tables in a fairly small area, seven of the chairs never used.

Mapes often felt that his words were lost in all the furniture. He could keep the Master's attention for no longer than two or three minutes at a time. There was no one else in the big stone house he could talk to. Mr. Bates was in and out of the hospital and Maceo never had much to say.

Mr. Jimmerson had lately taken to walking about in the Temple with his face in a big book of one kind or another. He moved at a slow glide through the rooms, reading silently. Now and then he stopped and broke into a low, appreciative murmur over some happy turn of phrase or some interesting fact come to light. “Just looking something up,” he would say, with an apologetic grin, when encountered on one of these strolls.

Mapes came to the unhappy conclusion that the Master had lost his sense of mission and had abandoned himself to the study of antiquarian lore for its own sake. The old man simply would not bestir himself. He was content to pad around the Temple in his molting Poma, looking things up in books. He offered no guidance, no word of praise or blame. Mapes felt unappreciated and just barely visible in the long shadow cast by Austin Popper. He decided there was nothing more he could do. It was time to begin his new life in radio.

He remained at the Temple until the following spring, when he applied for admission to a school for radio announcers in Greenville, South Carolina. The school was owned and operated by an old army friend. A prompt reply came, offering him the position of dean of the school. He accepted, but put off telling the Master of his decision for a day or two, shrinking from what he believed would be a painful scene.

But the Master took the news in stride. He said, “You're much too hard on yourself, Mapes. We'll talk about that another time. Here, I want to show you something.”

They were in the Red Room. Mr. Jimmerson held a world atlas on his knees opened to a map of North America. He had been tracing straight lines on it with pencil and ruler. The lines joined Burnette, Indiana, with Naples, Florida, and La Coma, Texas. “Take a look at this.”

Mapes looked and said nothing.

“Well? Don't you see? How our Temple and the two Pillars form the points of an equilateral triangle?”

“Yes, I see that.”

“It could hardly be chance.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“I was just looking something up in the atlas when it jumped out at me.”

“Yes. I wonder, though.”

“What?”

“This Burnette-La Coma line seems to be a little longer than the other two.”

“A bit perhaps.”

Mr. Jimmerson was peeved with Mapes, who, for all his dedication, had never shown warm feeling for the symbolic forms. He had a good mechanical understanding of them but the music escaped him. Neither was he quick, like Austin, to grasp the significance of a thing.

“Perhaps just a bit. Or a simple illusion. There is a certain distortion, as you well know, in all map projections.”

“That's true.”

“Doesn't this suggest something to you?”

“I'm not sure I see what you're getting at, sir.”

“Gnomon solutions for Gnomon problems. No shadow without light. Pletho's Twenty-seventh Proposition.”

“The Twenty-seventh?”

“ ‘Look not to the meridian of the land of the seven rivers but look rather to the delta and know that the way in is likewise the way out.' ”

“You see some application?”

“Certainly I do. What are we looking at here if not the Greek letter delta? You worry too much, Mapes, about trivial things, and you miss the important event right under your nose.”

“I do worry about our slippage in membership. You don't think that's an important problem, sir?”

Mr. Jimmerson didn't think so. His reading of the situation was that no such problem existed. Gnomonism was self-correcting. The brotherhood had contracted, true enough, in terms of crude numbers, but that need not be regarded as a real decline. It might even be argued that the Society was now standing at flood tide, what with the perfect triangular balance of Burnette, Naples and La Coma. What they must do now was clear enough. This particular triangle with one side perhaps a bit forced, must be enclosed in a circle, a curving line that would ever so gently touch the vertices and then continue on its endless flight. Within that figure would be allegorical values to be carefully worked out, using Pletho's sliding segmentation scale and the compass of Hermes. Then, and not before then, the Jimmerson Spiral might be introduced into the calculations, with what amazing results time would show. The way in was the way out.

Mapes took his leave for South Carolina. Mr. Jimmerson and Mr. Bates and Maceo wished him well in his radio career. They said they would miss him but did not go so far as to ask him to stay on.

IT WAS another spring four years later when Popper turned up at the Temple. Rumors about him had drifted in to Burnette but nothing in the way of direct and reliable reports. There was one story that he had been found dead of multiple gunshot wounds in a Joplin tourist court. Another one had him walking the streets of Los Angeles in an alcoholic daze, wearing brick-red rayon trousers, feigning deafness and living on charity. In yet another one he was said to be locked away in a state institution, where he was hopping, barking, twitching and kept under close restraint.

Mr. Jimmerson dismissed these rumors as nothing more than Sydney Hen's poisonous gossip. Austin had his own good Gnomonic reasons for whatever it was he was doing. He would return to the Temple in his own good time.

A light drizzle was falling on the day he came back. Maceo was outside, standing in the shelter of the gazebo. He was watching the big cement trucks with their tilted ovoid vats turning slowly about. Popper appeared on foot, picking his way through the construction litter. Maceo followed his approach but didn't recognize him in his horn-rimmed glasses, tan raincoat, black wig and soft plaid hat. There was nothing deceptive about the wig. It was ill-fitting and too black, and the hair was matted in ropes and whipped up into whorls and peaks and frozen in place with wax.

“Here, have a pen on me,” he said to Maceo. “One of the new ballpoints. Say, what's going on here, my man? New highway? Elevated expressway?”

Maceo looked away and fell into the minstrel-show performance that he used with white strangers. “Sho is,” he said.

“Right over the old stables. And look, the big oaks are gone too, and the rose arbor and the garage. There's the old Buick exposed to the weather. I don't like this. I call this a dirty shame. This was once such a showplace. That house was the architectural glory of Burnette.”

“Sho was.”

“I used to live here, you know.”

“Sho nuff?”

“Is the Master in?”

“He at his books. Busy with his thoughts.”

“I tried to call. What happened to the phone?”

“Mr. J. taken it out. He say nobody ever call 'less they want something.”

“That's the Master for you. But what's going on? All the curtains drawn. The place is like a tomb.”

“Mr. J. say some things easier to see in the dark.”

“What a brain. That's the Master all over. You still don't know me, Maceo?”

Maceo raised his eyes and looked him over. “Well, I declare. Mr. Austin Popper.”

“Sho is. Put 'er there, compadre. I'm back.”

They went inside to the Red Room. Mr. Jimmerson was in his chair with a book. “Yes?” he said, peering up at the stranger with the grotesque hair. “Can I do something for you?”

Popper took up a position before the fireplace. He crossed his arms and arranged his feet in a Gnomonic stance and uttered the first words of the ancient Atlantean exchange.

“From wheat,”
said Mr. Jimmerson, now roused.

“
Whatever it is, you may be sure I shall perform.
Austin? Is that you?”

“It's me, all right. How in the world are you, sir? What are you doing here in this red twilight? You've put on some weight, I see. You and Maceo both. Here, sir, I brought you a little necktie organizer. I don't know what I would do without mine.”

Popper gave no very good reasons for his long absence or for his failure to communicate with the Temple. He waved off questions about the recent past, explaining that he was still not free to discuss his intelligence work for the government. “It'll all come out in thirty years, that secret stuff,” he said. He went on to say that he was now living in “a western city,” where he was happily married to an attractive older woman named Meg. Meg not only had money of her own but was a trained dietician into the bargain. All their meals were scientifically planned and prepared. She bought him a new red Oldsmobile every year. They had a town house, a cabin on the lake, and kept registered spaniels. For two years running they had been voted the cutest couple at their country club. On alternate weekends, when they were not entertaining guests at home, they distributed baskets of food, representing a nice balance of the four food groups, to poor people.

“You'd love Meg, sir. She's just a great gal. But hey, I'm talking too much about Meg and myself. I want to get filled in on you. How I've missed the old gang. You and me and Mr. Bates. Huggins, Maceo, Mapes, Epps. What would be the odds on putting together another team like that? You couldn't do it these days. Tell me, sir, what's new with you? Can you put me current? Who's cutting your hair, by the way?”

“Maceo.”

“I know you used to like your temples left full but they do say the close crop is more sanitary. Tell me, how is Mr. Bates?”

“He's in a nursing home.”

“You're not serious.”

“His back was hurting and so they pulled all his teeth.”

“Doing fairly well now?”

“His back still hurts. He can't eat anything.”

“But coming around nicely? Getting proper care?”

“They don't turn him over often enough.”

“He's bedfast?”

“Not exactly.”

“Gets up every day and puts on his clothes?”

“Not altogether, no. Not every day.”

“Off his feed, you say.”

“No, he stays hungry. He just can't chew anything.”

“But his color's good?”

“Not real good.”

“But otherwise fit? Has all his faculties? Takes an interest in community affairs?”

“Not much, no.”

“How I've missed the old Red Room. But you know, I don't remember these recliners at all. What are all these big chairs for?”

“They've been here for years, Austin. Mapes brought them in here and lined them all up for some kind of meeting.”

“Good old Mapes. Such a useful fellow to have around. I hear he's more or less running the show these days.”

“Oh no, he's gone. Mapes left us some time ago. He went off somewhere to go into radio work.”

“Radio repair?”

“I don't think so.”

“Not commentary.”

“Yes, I believe it was his plan to talk on the radio. I can't say I've ever heard him talking on the radio.”

“What, Mapes at the mike? The big broadcast of 1952? I'm sorry, sir, I don't see it. I see Mapes at middle-level retail management. I don't see Mapes at the console with a bright line of patter.”

“I may have it wrong. Do you still have your cockatoo, Austin?”

“Blue jay. No, sir, he caught the flu and died, poor little fellow. Back during the war.”

“You didn't get another one.”

“No, sir, I couldn't very well get another Squanto. Besides, Meg won't have anything around but blooded dogs.”

“Look, Austin, your chair. I saved it for you. It hasn't been moved. Your room is waiting for you too.”

It soon came out that Popper's visit was more than a social call. He had a plan. Life had been good to him, he said. His country had been good to him and Indiana had been good to him. Any number of people had been kind to him along the way, most memorably Mr. Jimmerson, who had taken him in when jobs were hard to come by, and who had launched him on the Jimmerson Spiral. Lately, in his prosperity, he had been reflecting on all this, and considering various ways of repaying the debt of honor. Direct handouts of money were not the answer. A shower of rupees in the street was always good fun but the gesture had no lasting effect. The solution he had hit on was political. Public service was the answer. His contribution would be to the cause of better government, whereby all would benefit. What he wanted to do was to help Mr. Jimmerson become governor of Indiana.