Decision (2 page)

Chapter 1

The jogger came around the bend in the mountain road shortly after nine, as he had almost every morning since work on the plant had entered its final stages.

He broke stride. Stopped, hands on hips, to survey what they were doing in the valley below. Studied it all carefully for a moment. Tossed his usual grin, wave, thumbs-up.

They returned his greeting cheerfully. Someone yelled, “Hey, man!” as someone always did.

Then he resumed stride and jogged on by as he had a hundred times before.

After he was gone the day crew—as distinct from the night crew, whose members sometimes saw him more often—retained their usual distant impression of an individual: stocky, open-faced, pleasant, amiable. No one to notice, particularly; no one to stand out in anybody’s mind as worthy of any particular attention. Not the sort you would turn to look at twice.

Or even once, for that matter.

The kind of face that gets lost in a crowd.

An ordinary guy.

So passed—and would continue passing until his objective, now a handful of days away, was achieved—Earle Holgren—or Billy Ray Holgren, or Billy Ray, or Holgren Williams, or William Holgren, or Henry McAfee, or McAfee Johnson, or Everett Thompson or Everett Ray.

You could take your pick, he thought wryly, a sudden grim little smile that would have much surprised the workers at Pomeroy Station Atomic Energy Installation slashing his pleasant expression with startling savagery for a moment. He didn’t much care, as long as he wasn’t caught.

Not that there was anything pending right now for which he should be caught—at least not anything that
he
recognized. Actually, he supposed, he was on the run as he had been for more than a decade, but in his mind he saw it as simply exercising reasonable caution in the face of the monstrous unfairness and injustice of the system.

He had a date with that system, and in one way or another he had been keeping it ever since college. Up to now only a few of his countrymen had been aware that he had this date. Very soon, he promised himself with a happy inward convulsion of glee so intense as to be almost sexual, the whole world would know.

He jogged on through the bright May morning, the air still benign and mellow, not yet far enough into the day to be stifling, the scent of pines and firs and lush mountain growth everywhere around him. Birds sang, rabbits scurried, two deer sprang startled across the road. No one else was there, no cars, no other joggers. The only indication of man was the distant sound of jackhammers, the echoing call of distant voices, the groan of a climbing truck. Only a man spoiled this perfect place. A sudden blind anger replaced the convulsive joy.
Man!
How he ruined everything.

More specifically, how
Americans
ruined everything. A scarifying contempt for his fellow citizens replaced the anger. Americans and their arrogant uncaring, Americans and their crude disinterest in everything that made life beautiful and worth living, Americans and their greed!

The moods of Earle Holgren were as shifting as the wind but they always came back to a basic rage against his country and his countrymen.

They didn’t
deserve
what they had.

They were so stupid—and so overbearing—and so wanton with the infinite bounty the Lord had given them.

Such was the basic thrust of the education his generation had received. It was no wonder some of them felt themselves appointed to correct all this. And it was no wonder, given all the weapons and clever processes an industrial society so lightly left lying around, that some of them became instruments of death.

So here he was at thirty-six, child of wealth, veteran of the Sixties and early Seventies, one who had never compromised, one who had never come in from the cold—one who had managed to carry with him into new and changing decades the unchanged convictions of an unbalanced period and a twisted view of life in America no longer valid if it ever had been.

Some might consider this a terrifying mental weakness, condemning him to repeat until it destroyed him—and many others along the way—the pattern of a hate-sprung, unrelenting vengeance. Earle Holgren thought of it as a strength—his strength. He had to think this or go finally and completely insane.

Perhaps he was; he sometimes thought with a giddy feeling that he was floating somewhere out there with only his own iron will and eternal anger to support him. But the will
was
iron and the anger
was
eternal, and although to the great majority of his countrymen it might seem that both were far beyond the norms of rational behavior, to him they were the permanent and unyielding conditions of his life.

Because of this he had long since put aside his family and everything that had shaped him as a child. His parents, bewildered and shattered like so many by what they considered the monster visited upon them unjustly by inexplicable fate, had long since ceased their futile attempts to contact him. For nearly a decade after he vanished from their world, which he did immediately after graduating from Harvard and receiving Grandfather Holgren’s quarter-million-dollar trust fund at age twenty-one, their anguished appeals were to be found among the many that filled the “Personals” columns in major newspapers from New York to San Francisco.

“Earle Holgren, we love you and need you. Please call. Mother … Earle Holgren, please contact Father at Blue Ridge House… Earle Holgren, Happy Birthday. We love you. Mother, Father and Sis.…” And finally the last resort: “Anyone knowing whereabouts of Earle William Holgren, formerly Greenwich, Conn., please notify A. J. Holgren, ‘Seaswift,’ Greenwich. Ample reward.”

He had seen a few of these, for he and his companions got a perverse pleasure out of following the scraps of broken parental hearts that surfaced so often in so many publications in those years. Once in a while there was a great surge of yearning, a sudden return to childhood simplicities, that almost prompted him to answer; but each time he put it sternly aside and felt that he became stronger. Finally there was no responsive emotion in his heart at all. He was satisfied at last that that part of his life was dead.

Once in a great while this brought a disturbing aftermath. Perhaps other things were dead too? Perhaps everything was dead? Perhaps he was a zombie with nothing left to hold on to, no center to his life, nothing inside at all.

But this too he put sternly aside on the very rare occasions when it troubled him. Although many of his old companions dropped away, seduced back by the more conventional rewards of the system, still there were some who remained; and although the riots, the protests, the robberies and bombings had also dropped away for a time to almost nothing, still there were a few, enough to bolster his feeling of still belonging to a cause beyond himself. And now in the last several years violent protest had begun to revive, washed along on the rising tide of economic unrest, inflation, the swift burgeoning of all kinds of crime, all across the country. Violence, never very far away in the land of handguns and economic uncertainty, was becoming king again. And the great cause of righting the wrongs of American society could still be pursued. The endless (if endlessly disappointed) quest to bring perfection to an imperfect country was still worthy of a heart’s devotion, a lifetime’s dedication.

America—the America of his parents, the steady, decent, respectable, good-hearted America that had been, and remained, the ideal of so many—was becoming terrified. The steadily rising crime rate of the Seventies had surged ever higher into the Eighties, and with it the opportunity for such as he to return to the violent forms of protest that were the most satisfying because they were both frightful and usually impersonal enough in execution to free him from any feelings of direct personal responsibility.

Thus his mind could retain the serene certainty of its own righteousness—his only, but impregnable, shield against the violent horror of his age—and against the fact that he himself had made his own substantial contributions to those horrors in these recent years.

Grandfather Holgren’s trust fund was still in excellent shape—he of course had never paid income tax on it, which was one of the charges society had outstanding against him—and with the aid of a lawyer in New York friendly to him and others of his kind he had made a series of carefully hidden investments that had actually increased it substantially. Thus supporting himself was no problem. It was also no problem to support Janet, with whom he had lived for the past three years, and little John Lennon Peacechild, who had come along a year ago to intrigue and interest him in a remotely unconnected sort of way. They could live where and as they pleased—underground and modestly, of necessity, but very comfortably for all that.

He was approaching the end of the road. It terminated at an old deserted mine shaft set into the hillside. So woods-wise had he become as a youngster in these same hills, when they used to come down each summer to what his father called “Blue Ridge House,” that there was no sign visible to the casual passer-by that the entrance to the shaft had been disturbed since the vein petered out sixty years ago. Not even a woodsman as experienced as he could tell without very close examination that certain logs and brush, a little too carefully distributed, hid the small cave that opened just to the left of the entrance and curved back into the hillside. Part of it had once been used for storage and that was what he was using it for now; but unless someone really suspicious had a really urgent motivation to find it, the chances were that no one ever would.

And there was no one really suspicious in his world as he had presently created it. Janet was as placid as a cow, having gone through all the expected stations of the route to salvation as a certain segment of their generation saw it. She had smoked, sniffed, snorted, main-lined, finally done the conventional and turned to alcohol. Now she lived in a gentle haze, mouthing all the old slogans dutifully when prompted, paying less and less attention to causes, more and more to John Lennon Peacechild, whom she obviously regarded as the best trip of all, the very best she had ever been on. She seemed always mildly drunk, never seemed to want to leave the cabin, always seemed content to hover around the child, which was fine for his purposes because he didn’t want her hobnobbing with the neighbors anyway.

The old virtues, he sometimes told himself with an ironic inward smile, had reclaimed Janet with a vengeance. Next she would want to formalize it all with a wedding ring, which he wouldn’t give her because that would also give her a legal claim on his inheritance, and that he was not about to give anybody. It was all very well to advocate sharing, but what was his was his and no washed-out hippie was going to run off with any of it. Like everything in his world, Janet was a convenience (and John Lennon Peacechild an accidental, mildly interesting dividend). As long as it suited him, they would remain. When they became a bother—or a danger—or he got sufficiently bored—he would get rid of them and that would be the end of it.

He stood for a moment listening. Now the distant agitations at Pomeroy Station were too far away to be heard at all. No human sound broke the busy mountain silence. The wind sighed gently in the trees, jays screeched, a crow spoke crossly somewhere in the high branches, four more deer sprang away startled at his approach. He looked carefully all about, held himself rigidly listening for a measured minute. With a sudden pantherlike stealth that suited the mountains, he was at the mine-shaft entrance. Logs and brush were swiftly pushed aside. He reached in, dropped something, as swiftly replaced his careful camouflage, stepped back from the entrance and stood, hands on hips again, as though he were studying it with an interested curiosity for the first time.

Charade completed, he shook his head as though in amused puzzlement, turned and came back to the circular area where the road ended. He jumped up and down several times, slapped his arms across his chest, jogged in place for a moment or two and then started off down the road again as casually as he had come.

In Washington, D.C., far from the gently rolling foothills of the South Carolina Blue Ridge, others were also considering the condition of the country and their own responsibilities toward it. They were not finding it so easy to analyze and prescribe for as Earle Holgren did. Much sooner than he expected—and they of course had no way of expecting it at all—they would find Earle Holgren in their lives. They would also find the present Secretary of Labor, Taylor Barbour. The encounters would be fateful for all concerned, and for a society greatly troubled by the constant escalations of crime and violence.

For the time being, however, the unique and highly individualistic group that worked in the stately white marble building facing the Capitol across the greensward of Capitol Plaza had a wider concern, its implications not yet narrowed down to the specific of an Earle Holgren. Their canvas was infinitely broader: and today, as they gathered for their usual Friday conference to clear up the odds and ends that remained before scheduled June adjournment, the eight Justices who for the moment comprised the Supreme Court of the United States were more deeply concerned than they had been in a long, long time.

“Not since civil-rights days,” Clement Wallenberg remarked after they had exchanged suitable small talk.

“Not since ever,” Rupert Hemmelsford responded glumly as they took their seats around the long table in the comfortable antique-filled Conference Room just across the hall from the formal Supreme Court Chamber.

“In fact, my sister and my brethren,” the Chief Justice said, employing the quaint verbal usage with which Supreme Court Justices actually do address one another on many occasions formal and informal, wry or serious, “if things keep up the way they’re going, I expect we’re in for one hell of a time. There must be a dozen cases on the subject already in the courts below, waiting to come up to us.”

“If
we accept them,” Waldo Flyte pointed out. “We don’t have to grant them certiorari. Nobody can force us to consider anything we don’t want to consider. We can always sidestep the issue.” He winked cheerfully. “We’ve done it before.”