Look at the Birdie (20 page)

“Probably all you need is sleep,” I said, helpfully, I thought.

“Sleep! Hah! All night I couldn’t sleep. Hot milk, pillows under the small of the back, sheep—”

“Party downstairs?”

He sighed. “The neighborhood was like a morgue. It’s something inside me, I tell you.”

“Well, as long as you’ve got your appetite—”

“Did I invite you here to torment me? Breakfast, my favorite meal, tasted like sawdust.”

“Well, your voice sounds fine, and that’s really the heart of the matter just now, isn’t it?”

“Practice this afternoon was an utter flop,” he said acidly. “I was unsure, rattled, blew up. I didn’t feel right, not ready, half naked—”

“You look like a million dollars, anyway. The barber did a—”

“The barber is a butcher, a hacker, a—”

“He did a fine job.”

“Then why don’t I
feel
like he did.” He stood. “Nothing’s gone right today. The whole schedule’s shot to hell. And never in my life, not once have I had the slightest bit of anxiety about a recital. Not once!”

“Well,” I said hesitantly, “maybe good news would help. I saw Ellen Sparks at lunch yesterday, and she said she—”

Larry snapped his fingers. “That’s it, that’s it! Of course, that Ellen, she’s poisoned me!” He paced the floor. “Not enough to kill me; just enough to break my spirit before tomorrow night. She’s been out to get me all along.”

“I don’t think she poisoned you,” I said, smiling. I hoped to divert him by being chatty. I stopped, suddenly aware of the awful significance of what I was about to say. “Larry,” I said slowly, “Ellen left for Buffalo last night.”

“Good riddance!”

“No more postcards to tear up at breakfast,” I said casually. No effect. “No more honking of horns before practice.” Still no effect. “No more ringing of the barbershop telephone, no more rattling of the garbage can at bedtime.”

He grabbed my arms and shook me. “No!”

“Hell yes.” I started to laugh in spite of myself. “She’s so balled up in your life, you can’t make a move without a cue from her.”

“That little termite,” said Larry hoarsely. “That burrowing, subversive, insidious, infiltrating little—” He hammered on the mantel. “I’ll break the habit!”

“Habits,” I corrected him. “If you do, they’ll be the first ones you ever broke. Can you do it by tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” He moaned. “Oh—tomorrow.”

“The houselights go out, and—”

“No flashlight.”

“You get set for your first number—”

“Where are the coughs?” he said desperately. “I’ll blow up like Texas City!” Trembling, he picked up the telephone. “Operator, get me Buffalo. What’s her name again?”

“Sparks—
Ellen
Sparks.”

I was invited to the wedding, but I’d have sooner attended a public beheading. I sent a sterling silver pickle fork and my regrets.

To my amazement, Ellen joined me at lunch on the day following the wedding. She was alone, lugging a huge parcel.

“What are you doing here on this day of days?” I said.

“Honeymooning.” Cheerfully, she ordered a sandwich.

“Uh-huh. And the groom?”

“Honeymooning in his studio.”

“I see.” I didn’t, but we had reached a point where it would have been indelicate for me to probe further.

“I’ve put in my two hours today,” she volunteered. “And hung up one dress in his closet.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Two and a half hours, and add a pair of shoes.”

“Little drops of water, Little grains of sand,”
I recited,
“Make the mighty ocean, And the beauteous land.”
I pointed to the parcel. “Is that part of your trousseau?”

She smiled. “In a way. It’s a garbage can lid for beside the bed.”

“This
is
quite a hole you have here,” said Josef Broznik enthusiastically, gripping the guard rail and peering into the echoing blackness below. He was panting from the long climb up the mountain slope, and his bald head glistened with perspiration.

“A remarkable hole,” said Josef’s twenty-five-year-old brother, Peter, his long, big-jointed frame uncomfortable in fog-dampened clothes. He searched his thoughts for a more profound comment, but found nothing. It was a perfectly amazing hole—no question about it. The officious mine supervisor, Borgorov, had said it had been sunk a half mile deep on the site of a radioactive mineral water spring. Borgorov’s enthusiasm for the hole didn’t seem in the least diminished by the fact that it had produced no uranium worth mining.

Peter studied Borgorov with interest. He seemed a pompous ass of a young man, yet his name merited fear and respect whenever it was mentioned in a gathering of miners. It was said, not without awe, that he was the favorite third cousin of Stalin himself, and that he was merely serving an apprenticeship for much bigger things.

Peter and his brother, Russia’s leading myrmecologists, had been summoned from the University of Dnipropetrovsk
to see the hole—or, rather, to see the fossils that had come out of it. Myrmecology, they had explained to the hundred-odd guards who had stopped them on their way into the area, was that branch of science devoted to the study of ants. Apparently, the hole had struck a rich vein of petrified ants.

Peter nudged a rock the size of his head and rolled it into the hole. He shrugged and walked away from it, whistling tunelessly. He was remembering again the humiliation of a month ago, when he had been forced to apologize publicly for his paper on
Raptiformica sanguinea
, the warlike, slave-raiding ants found under hedges. Peter had presented it to the world as a masterpiece of scholarship and scientific method, only to be rewarded by a stinging rebuke from Moscow. Men who couldn’t tell
Raptiformica sanguinea
from centipedes had branded him an ideological backslider with dangerous tendencies toward Western decadence. Peter clenched and unclenched his fists, angry, frustrated. In effect, he had had to apologize because the ants he had studied would not behave the way the top Communist scientific brass wanted them to.

“Properly led,” said Borgorov, “people can accomplish anything they set their minds to. This hole was completed within a month from the time orders came down from Moscow. Someone very high dreamed we would find uranium on this very spot,” he added mysteriously.

“You will be decorated,” said Peter absently, testing a point on the barbed wire around the opening. His reputation had preceded him into the area, he supposed. At any rate, Borgorov avoided his eyes, and addressed his remarks always to Josef—Josef the rock, the dependable, the ideologically impeccable. It was Josef who had advised against publishing the controversial
paper, Josef who had written his apology. Now, Josef was loudly comparing the hole to the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Colossus of Rhodes.

Borgorov rambled on tiresomely, Josef agreed warmly, and Peter allowed his gaze and thoughts to wander over the strange new countryside. Beneath his feet were the
Erzge-birge
—the Ore Mountains, dividing Russian-occupied Germany from Czechoslovakia. Gray rivers of men streamed to and from pits and caverns gouged in the green mountain slopes—a dirty, red-eyed horde burrowing for uranium …

“When would you like to see the fossil ants we found?” said Borgorov, cutting into his thoughts. “They’re locked up now, but we can get at them anytime tomorrow. I’ve got them all arranged in the order of the levels we found them in.”

“Well,” said Josef, “the best part of the day was used up getting cleared to come up here, so we couldn’t get much done until tomorrow morning anyway.”

“And yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, sitting on a hard bench, waiting for clearance,” said Peter wearily. Instantly he realized that he had said something wrong again. Borgorov’s black eyebrows were raised, and Josef was glaring. He had absentmindedly violated one of Josef’s basic maxims—“Never complain in public about anything.” Peter sighed. On the battlefield he had proved a thousand times that he was a fiercely patriotic Russian. Yet, he now found his countrymen eager to read into his every word and gesture the symptoms of treason. He looked at Josef unhappily, and saw in his eyes the same old message: Grin and agree with everything.

“The security measures are marvelous,” said Peter, grinning. “It’s remarkable that they were able to clear us in only
three days, when you realize how thorough a job they do.” He snapped his fingers. “Efficiency.”

“How far down did you find the fossils?” said Josef briskly, changing the subject.

Borgorov’s eyebrows were still arched. Plainly, Peter had only succeeded in making himself even more suspicious. “We hit them going through the lower part of the limestone, before we came to the sandstone and granite,” he said flatly, addressing himself to Josef.

“Middle Mesozoic period, probably,” said Josef. “We were hoping you’d found fossil ants deeper than that.” He held up his hands. “Don’t get us wrong. We’re delighted that you found these ants, it’s only that middle Mesozoic ants aren’t as interesting as something earlier would be.”

“Nobody’s ever seen a fossil ant from an earlier period,” said Peter, trying halfheartedly to get back into things. Borgorov ignored him.

“Mesozoic ants are just about indistinguishable from modern ants,” said Josef, surreptitiously signaling for Peter to keep his mouth shut. “They lived in big colonies, were specialized as soldiers and workers and all that. My myrmecologist would give his right arm to know how ants lived before they formed colonies—how they got to be the way they are now. That
would
be something.”

“Another first for Russia,” said Peter. Again no response. He stared moodily at a pair of live ants who pulled tirelessly and in opposite directions at the legs of an expiring dung beetle.

“Have you
seen
the ants we found?” said Borgorov defensively. He waved a small tin box under Josef’s nose. He popped off the lid with his thumbnail. “Is this old stuff, eh?”

“Good heavens,” murmured Josef. He took the box tenderly, held it at arm’s length so that Peter could see the ant embedded in the chip of limestone.

The thrill of discovery shattered Peter’s depression. “An inch long! Look at that noble head, Josef! I never thought I would see the day when I would say an ant was handsome. Maybe it’s the big mandibles that make ants homely.” He pointed to where the pincers ordinarily were. “This one has almost none, Josef. It
is
a pre-Mesozoic ant!”

Borgorov assumed a heroic stance, his feet apart, his thick arms folded. He beamed. This wonder had come out of
his
hole.

“Look, look,” said Peter excitedly. “What is that splinter next to him?” He took a magnifying glass from his breast pocket and squinted through the lens. He swallowed. “Josef,” he said hoarsely, “you look and tell me what you see.”

Josef shrugged. “Some interesting little parasite maybe, or a plant, perhaps.” He moved the chip up under the magnifying glass. “Maybe a crystal or—” He turned pale. Trembling, he passed the glass and fossil to Borgorov. “Comrade, you tell us what you see.”

“I see,” said Borgorov, screwing up his face in florid, panting concentration. He cleared his throat and began afresh. “I see what looks like a fat stick.”

“Look closer,” said Peter and Josef together.

“Well, come to think of it,” said Borgorov, “it does look something like a—for goodness sake—like a—” He left the sentence unfinished, and looked up at Josef perplexedly.

“Like a bass fiddle, Comrade?” said Josef.

“Like a bass fiddle,” said Borgorov, awed…

A drunken, bad-tempered card game was in progress at the far end of the miners’ barracks where Peter and Josef were quartered. A thunderstorm boomed and slashed outside. The brother myrmecologists sat facing each other on their bunks, passing their amazing fossil back and forth and speculating as to what Borgorov would bring from the storage shed in the morning.

Peter probed his mattress with his hand—straw, a thin layer of straw stuffed into a dirty white bag and laid on planks. Peter breathed through his mouth to avoid drawing the room’s dense stench through his long, sensitive nose. “Could it be a child’s toy bass fiddle that got washed into that layer with the ant somehow?” he said. “You know this place was once a toy factory.”

“Did you ever hear of a toy bass fiddle, let alone one that size? It’d take the greatest jeweler in the world to turn out a job like that. And Borgorov swears there wasn’t any way for it to get down that deep—not in the past million years, anyway.”

“Which leaves us one conclusion,” said Peter.

“One.” Josef sponged his forehead with a huge red handkerchief.

“Something could be worse than
this
pigpen?” said Peter. Josef kicked him savagely as a few heads raised up from the card games across the room. “Pigpen,” laughed a small man as he threw his cards down and walked to his cot. He dug beneath his mattress and produced a bottle of cognac. “Drink, Comrade?”

“Peter!” said Josef firmly. “We left some of our things in the village. We’d better get them right away.”