Death Qualified (56 page)

    She shook her head, aghast.

    "What happened to you?"

    "I got glimpses," he said slowly.

    "Another world. Like going from the dun-colored Kansas plains into the Technicolor of Oz. There's another world within reach, here, there, all around us. We've always known it was there, but there was something in us lacking; the ability to attain it failed. Most who kept trying went mad, some reached out and felt a wall as cold and forbidding as steel, and they rebounded in denial, in anger. People tried to reach that other world with meditation, prayer, fasting, drugs.. ..

    Frobisher learned how to retrain the brain, to free a latent ability; he learned how to open the gate, but he couldn't go through. He must have got glimpses, enough to know what he couldn't have. You talked once about the veil of ignorance, but this is the opposite. The veils are gone. In that other world there aren't any more veils." His voice broke and he turned away; awkwardly he got up and left the table to stand with his back to Barbara and Frank. "I have to go home. I really have to be alone."

    "I'll drive you to town," Barbara said.

    "I'll sleep on your couch tonight."

    He shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was muffled and thick.

    "I don't want anyone near me for a while.

    I'll drive in. I'll call you in a day or two."

    Barbara looked at the table, where she had made a mess with her coffee. It had run all the way across. She saw the key to Doc's house in the puddle, and she said, "Not home. You could go to Doc's house, house sit for him a day or two. Will you do that? Please, Mike, you'll be alone. They won't be back until Sunday. You can't drive by yourself now. Not tonight."

    "Good idea," Frank said, and stood up.

    "I think there's an extra poncho in the hall closet. You get them and I'll go find a flashlight and walk over with Mike, show him the guest room over there, make sure there's coffee, little things like that."

    When Mike did not protest immediately, Barbara hurried out to get the ponchos. She returned with two of them.

    Mike was very distant, very calm. His eyes were reddened Briskly she began to clean up the coffee on the table. Frank came back with the flashlight, and in another minute he and Mike left. No one spoke again.

    She stood in the silent house, her arms wrapped about her, shivering. She had never been so cold.

    Frank was making dinner for three, Barbara realized the next afternoon. She had a headache and felt as if she might be catching a cold, or the flu, or something, and even when she thought this, she knew she was simply exhausted.

    Bad night? Frank had asked that morning, and she had glowered at him, had continued to glare throughout the morning, and early afternoon; now her glare was even fiercer as she watched him preparing three game hens.

    "What's the use? He wants to be alone. Remember?"

    "I intend to haul his ass over here for dinner," Prank said cheerfully.

    "Now, let's see, sweet potatoes. Did I get sweet potatoes?" He wandered off to the pantry.

    She paced the house, too restless to sit still, too tired not to feel every step she took as painful. At the sliding door she gazed at the river, silver today under a sky that couldn't decide if the clouds should lift altogether or not.

    Although the sun came through, vanished, appeared again, the river remained silver, not at all reflective of the abrupt changes in the heavens. The new storm front had evaporated.

    How could anyone see it any differently? she wondered, as she had over and over that day. This was the way the world was, clouds, trees, river, people, bridges, garbage dumps.. .. Suddenly, looking at the silver river, she remembered what Nell had said about her dread at the idea of that girl's body being dragged over rocks in the river.

    It was as if she had caught an echo of the actual event when Janet Moseley had been dragged over the lava, Barbara thought then. She tried to shake away the thought, but it persisted.

    What would it be like, she wondered, to be the one-eyed person in the world of the blind? Would you scorn them, pity them, ignore them, use them? Use them, she thought darkly. If the way people used people now was any indication, if anyone had that kind of edge, life would be hellish, at least until everyone had one eye, when it would all even out again. Would the blind hunt down and try to kill off the one-eyed? She nodded. They would have to. Self-preservation would demand it. The power of numbers against the power of superhuman abilities. It would be bloody.

    Why, then, her thoughts continued, did Schumaker and company permit Lucas to stay alive? She sat at the table thinking and was only vaguely aware when Frank began doing things in the kitchen again, then not at all aware of him until he touched her arm.

    "Wine," he said.

    "You drink wine. Me cook. You wake up and drink wine."

    She blinked at him.

    "Dad, Lucas must have appeared absolutely normal until the night Emil Frobisher was killed and they began drugging him. He said he was hallucinating, remember? In the tape, he said he was seeing things, hearing voices and the laughing boy. He knew where the boy hid the disks. They were communicating somehow.

    But it started that day, not before. Why?"

    Frank had come tcr a stop halfway back to the cooking area. He swung around to look at her.

    "Go on."

    "He knew Frobisher killed the boy. Afterward they drugged and hypnotized him, and after that he was always controlled until he ran away. But he appeared normal after he ran away, he was able to shop, drive, do whatever he had to do. I can't believe those girls would have got in his car if he had seemed insane. The people in the cafe in Sisters would have stopped it, or at least they would have remembered if he had been acting crazy in any way. No one mentioned anything like that. His father said he was afraid of being followed, but that wasn't crazy. It was very real."

    Frank was watching her closely. "What are you getting at?"

    "Why did Schumaker assume that Mike would be in sane, appear insane?"

    Frank poured himself a glass of wine and came to the table to sit opposite her.

    "Bobby, what are you getting at?"

    "They don't know as much as they think they do," she said.

    "They must have thought that Lucas was driven mad when maybe it was their own interference that made him that way. As soon as he was free, he was okay, and ac cording to his last tape, he said he knew why the boy laughed. Remember? And he laughed. Nell said he was happy, laughing when she saw him. Frobisher must have altered the program more than they realized. The last boy he tried it on apparently didn't go insane in the slightest, but it took with him. Maybe it took with Lucas in spite of what they believed about their control of him, making him forget all about it. That's why he bought food and camping stuff. He must have intended to spend time alone listening to the tapes, trying to remember what had gone on before they started treating him. He must have remembered finally, and that's why he was happy and laughing at the end."

    Frank gulped down most of his wine.

    "I tell you this, honey. I'm just real glad those disks are gone, burned up, the research gone, done with."

    She was paying scant attention, her eyes narrowed in thought, frowning. '-"What if Schumaker has that detective keep an eye on Mike for a time, a couple of weeks, say?

    Maybe not around the clock or anything like that. But to check up on him now and then. What if they begin to wonder if he's insane, or why he isn't, if that's the case?

    Frobisher was the only one of that bunch who actually saw an unqualified success, apparently, and he killed the boy.

    You saw Herbert Margolis, how he reacted; he knows the truth about those deaths. Dad, they can't just walk away from Mike now; they're too frightened of what they've let loose. What will they do if they suspect the process affected him the way Frobisher meant it to?"

    "Christ on a mountain!" He stood up and went to the other side of the kitchen.

    He had no answer, she knew, any more than she did. In a little while he said he was going to go collect Mike now because later he would be too busy finishing the meal, and maybe she could shake herself enough to set the table. He sounded very cross.

    Although the dinner was excellent, the dinner party sank without a ripple, Barbara thought later at the table, with not a thing to say. Mike was like a schoolboy whose ears still rang with his mother's admonitions: Sir up straight, mind your P's and Q's, speak when spoken to, be polite and taste everything, laugh at your host's jokes.. In between obeying without hesitation all the orders, he sat silently, withdrawn, preoccupied, mired in whatever it was that had possessed him and turned him into an expression less stranger.

    Finally Frank laid down his fork carefully and leaned on his elbows, regarding Mike.

    "Son, either you tell us what you're going through, what's on your mind, what happened to you and how it's affecting you, or I'm going to pour the gravy on your head. Hear that?"

    Mike looked puzzled at first, then belatedly he smiled.

    The smile was short-lived. He folded his napkin and put it down on the table.

    "I think I'd better go now," he said.

    "I'm sorry, Frank, Barbara. I shouldn't have come, not yet. I can't say anything about it. I don't know what to say. I don't know what's happening, or even how to talk about it. It's like hearing music for the first time and trying to describe it to the deaf. Do you talk about it in mathematical terms, in emotional terms, as a force, resonances, sound waves, as a reminder of yesterday, all the yesterdays? See? I don't know how yet. Or even if there's any thing to talk about."

    He stood up and looked at Barbara with an expression that was quickly banished and replaced by one of friendliness

    "I'll give you a call," he said, and left them at the table. In a moment they heard the door open and close.

    Neither moved.

    That look, she thought distantly, trying to hold her awareness far away from herself, as if to cage it, contain it, not feel it at all that look had been one of pity.

    THIRTY-SIX

    time passes, barbara thought sometime during the night.

    Whatever it is, it passes. You think it won't, that it got stuck somewhere, and then you see the hour has changed after all. She felt this was a revelation worthy of great discourses, discussions, debates. She stifled a giggle, moving from her window back to the bed, which she had torn up so completely that she had to remake it before she could crawl back under the covers.

    Four o'clock, she realized a bit later in wonder. She had thought it would never leave the three hour. Three o'clock, three-fifteen, three-eighteen.. ..

    She tried to arrange the coming day, but. the pieces eluded her. Instead, she kept thinking of the nature of violence, and how once more she had stepped into the cage with the violent ones. In spite of all her protests, her yearning to be free of it, her determination to participate no more in a system that was irreparable, she had walked inside the arena again. Now she was committed to see Nell through it. And then? Then, she knew, she wanted to destroy Ruth Brandy wine and Herbert Margolis, and most of all, Walter Schumaker. The self-knowledge filled her with despair.

    Well, she told herself sourly, you tried to be saintly, and you failed. Sainthood's not for you, kiddo.

    Or anyone else, she added, looking at the clock again;

    this time she pulled herself from the bed. Trying so hard to relax was more exhausting than being up doing something.

    Sweep the kitchen, wash windows, read the alma406

    nac, read the cereal box, anything was better than the kind of physical struggle it was to remain in bed.

    What had Frobisher offered and then taken back? Un expectedly, the question welled up again, like Old Faithful gone erratic, she thought in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee. What would it be like to hear music in the land of the deaf? To see in the land of the blind? Evolution, Mike had said, offered, withdrawn, destroyed. Yet the feeling of change was rampant. She had seen all the new age magazines, the psychic bibles, the ads, the workshops announced Had the apes sensed change? Had they stared at their hands without thumbs in wonder? Had Neanderthal Man glimpsed Cro-Magnon across the valley, and felt fear and wonder? She shook her head sharply and poured the coffee.

    Maybe humans didn't have time to wait for nature's evolution, she thought at the table, her hands cradling the hot mug. No time, no time. The Earth is threatened; we're all threatened. No time to wait. They had set themselves up as Titans, but unlike Prometheus, they had not been willing to pay the price, the agony of the rock. They had found something, and then destroyed it. Something evil, deadly?

    Something wonderful that they couldn't have themselves?

    Or just something so different that where it would lead could not be predicted, nor what changes it would bring about? That would be the most fearsome of all; to change the world with no idea of what the changes would ultimately mean. But wasn't that exactly what the miners, the forest levelers, the dam builders, the chemical companies were already doing? Making changes on a scale inhumanly large, with unpredictable results. A butterfly wakes up, and someone in a corporate office says do it, and the world changes.