Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (18 page)

           
To be public information director
(PID) for a nuclear power plant less than a hundred miles from a major
population center like New York City is not, at the best of times, an easy job,
but Joshua Hardwick cheerfully soldiered on, almost never losing heart.
Thirty-three years old, pudgy and open-faced, a relendess optimist and a
refugee from the advertising business in the city, Hardwick could sing the
pro-nuclear song with the best of them, downplaying the downside and painting a
picture of an energy-rich and peaceful and happy and secure future dominated by
the image of a little girl in a pink crinoline dress playing ball on an expanse
of lush green lawn. Like Hans Brinker himself, he could skate with aplomb over
the occasional patch of thin ice, such as plant safety or disposal of
contaminated wastes, awing and distracting the populace with the grace and
assurance of his arabesques.

           
But this was too much. Arriving at
Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant this morning, after his usual pleasant
bucolic twenty-minute drive from his home in
Connecticut
, Joshua was startled to see
demonstrators
marching around on the
asphalt of the country road out front.

           
Oh, God. Not since the operating
license struggle when the plant first opened had there been demonstrators here.
The emptiness of this rural area, its calm and quiet, seemed to deter most
dissenters, as though they needed crowds and hard pavements to fully believe
their own rhetoric.

           
This was a very small demonstration:
fewer than a dozen protestors, plus, parked a little distance away, one state
police car containing a couple of bored troopers. But was it an augury of worse
to come? Squinting, leaning forward over his Honda steering wheel to look out the
windshield, Joshua tried to read the signs the demonstrators carried:

           
“No Nukes Is Good Nukes.” Well, yes,
we know that one.

           
“No Experiments With Our Lives!”
Hmm; that one’s new, but what does it mean exactly? That’s the trouble with
slogans, they can get a little too cryptic for their own good.

           
“Keep Maniac Philpott Away From
Reactors!” Well, that was straightforward enough, if not quite as clear as
chicken broth.
Maniac Philpott.
A
person? Who?

           
Did one of the demonstrators have a
halo? Joshua blinked, and peered again, and of course not. Just a trick of the
light.

           
As usual, Joshua showed his face and
his clearance badge to the guard at the gate, who looked more grim than
customary this morning but who did wave him through in the ordinary way. Joshua
waved back, and drove up and over the gentle rise concealing the main
structures from the idle gaze—or concentrated gaze, for that matter—of the
populace on the public roadway, and as he drove he mulled that last sign.

           
“Keep Maniac Philpott Away From Reactors!”
Wasn’t there a Philpott, a scientist, some kind of big-dome thinking machine,
over at Grayling, not far from here? Philpott, Philpott; Joshua couldn’t
remember the first name. There was new construction starting, off to the right
of the main buildings, but Joshua, deep in thought, barely registered it.
Philpott; Philpott. A scientist, an experimenter.

           
“No Experiments With Our Lives!’

           
“Oh,
no.
Here?
Here?
Inside
his Honda, as he steered toward his reserved parking space, Joshua looked
stricken. They wouldn’t.

           
And yet they would.

           
“I don’t know how the news leaked so
soon,” Gar Chambers said.

           
“Not through me, obviously, not
through the
spokesman
here,” Joshua
said, not bothering to hide his irritation.

           
They sat together in Gar’s office,
he being chief operating officer of the facility and Joshua’s immediate boss,
and the reason Joshua didn’t bother to hide his irritation was that they both
knew he could walk out of here and into a job at least as good as this one by
the end of the working day. As a spokesman, for anything at all, Joshua was one
of the naturals.

           
Four years ago, when Green Meadow
III first opened and the spokesman job here became available, Joshua and his
wife, Jennifer, had just completed their first year in their weekend country house,
had come to the realization that they no longer liked the commute to New York
or the work in New York or even the life in New York, and Joshua had upped
roots and converted himself from a harried account executive in a thankless
enterprise to a country gendeman who did some chatting for the nuclear industry
from time to time. Personally, he had no opinion about nuclear power one way or
the other, any more than he’d held strong opinions about the cat food,
lipstick, or adult diapers he’d once sold. So if the job was going to become
unpleasant, with demonstrators outside the gates and secrets held back from him
within, he’d be just as happy being spokesperson for the New York State Tourist
Council.

           
All of which Gar knew as well as
Joshua. Sounding apologetic, he said, “We were hoping to get the situation in
place before any public announcement was made. A fait accompli is much easier
to deal with, as you know.”

           
“So
I
was kept outside the loop.”

           
“I’m sorry about that,” Gar said. “I
really thought we could keep it quiet.”

           
“An experimental physicist,” Joshua
said, “world-renowned, is going to move over here from
Grayling
University
to conduct experiments in new kinds of
energy. And you thought you could keep that secret. Half the secretaries here
must know it by now, but I
didn’t
know it.”

           
“It’s probably the construction that
gave it away,” Gar said.

           
“Construction. Oh, yes, I saw
something on my way in. What’s that all about?”

           
“A new laboratory for our distinguished
guest,” Gar said. :Well away from the reactor, well away from waste storage.
Absolutely guaranteed safe, no possible problem to anybody ever.”

           
“Doesn’t he have a lab over at
Grayling?”

           
“Well, yes,” Gar admitted.

           
Joshua smelled the reek of old fish.
‘Then why isn’t he staying there?”

           
Gar looked depressed, even a litde
sick. “He blows things up sometimes,” he said. “They seemed to feel, a college
campus wasn’t the right place for that.”

           
“But a nuclear power plant is.”

           
Gar spread his hands. “Joshua, the
decision was made far above thee and me. Far above.”

           
“Okay,” Joshua said, “so there’s
something in it for our masters. What’s in it for us?”

           
Gar tried to look hopeful.
“Prestige? The inside track on new advances in energy research?”

           
‘Those are pretty thin bones,”
Joshua said, “but I’ll do my best to make soup of it. For a while, anyway.”

           
Gar lifted his head, alert and
worried, as though he’d just heard a shot down the hall. “For a while?”

           
“I don’t know, Gar,” Joshua said,
“this is kind of discouraging. To have secrets kept from me, things I really
need to know.”

           
“It won’t happen again, I promise.”

           
“It happened once.”

           
Gar said, “Joshua, I need you now.
It wasn’t my idea to have that goddamn genius move in on us, but he’s here, or
he’s going to be here very soon, and we’ve got to sell him to the public. We
can’t let Dr. Marlon Philpott become the excuse for a new round of anti-nuclear
demonstrations.”

           
“He already has.”

           
“I need you,” Gar repeated. “Stay
with the team, Joshua” “Did the team stay with me?”

           
“It will, it will. Don’t abandon the
ship now, not when we’re in crisis. Get our story out, Joshua. Please.”

           
Joshua, somewhat mollified, and
aware that the Tourist Council would provide only a little bit more money with
a much longer commute, got to his feet and said, “Gar, for you. Only for you.
I’ll see what I can do.”

           
Gar also stood. “Thank you, Joshua,”
he said.

*
 
*
 
*

           
For the next few weeks, and
particularly after Dr. Philpott moved into his new laboratory on-site, the
demonstrations outside the main gate of Green Meadow III grew larger and more
unruly every day.

           
In warm weather, in the darkness of
a new moon, Kwan climbed over the rail in the soft air and swiftly descended
the ladder rungs to the kitchen staff’s deck. It was nearly three in the morning,
and everyone on this deck was presumably asleep, exhausted by the day’s labors.
Li Kwan, after labor of a much more pleasant sort, and a nice nap in the arms
of an Italian college girl named Stefania, felt no sleepiness at all, and
paused on the lower deck, forearms on the thrumming rail, to look out at their
phosphorescent wake, not even minding that hint of engine oil in the salty air.

           
Tuesdays made it possible. Kwan
could survive his exile now, his flight, his forced anonymity, but only because
of Tuesday. Rarely would the same woman be aboard two Tuesdays in a row, but if
so he was delighted with the opportunity for a reunion. He had learned to stay
away from alcohol, and to sleep for a while on Tuesday afternoons in
preparation for the night. His life had become, at least one day a week, more
than bearable; it was comfortable, even luxurious.

           
Perhaps too luxurious? It was too
easy to forget in these circumstances who he really was. Not merely a kitchen
scamp who crept up the equivalent of a drainpipe to bed his betters on the
upper floors, he was a part of a massive human movement against tyranny and
oppression, a small but inspired element in a drive to free one-quarter of
humanity from the slavery of the ancient murderers.

           
I must not let this luxury soften
me, Kwan told himself. I must not let my love of women distract me from my love
of freedom.

           
Faint lights were visible from time
to time, far away to starboard. Some city of
Africa
; they were steaming up the African coast of
the Adantic now, with
Barcelona
the next stop and then
Rotterdam
, and then
Southampton
, and on and on. Eventually, some part of
the North American continent would be reached, and when it was, he would have
to find a way off the ship.

           
Some American girl? Could he
persuade an American girl to smuggle him off with her? Could he insert himself
among the visitors who crowded aboard at every stop to see off their friends?

           
A way will present itself, Kwan was
sure of that. As though he had at his side a guardian angel—in the shape of the
Statue of Liberty, perhaps, like the one in Tiananmen Square—he was confident
he would not give in to ease, not lose heart, not be defeated. The road would
open before him.

           
Smiling, pleased with his adventure
of the night, with his accommodation to this temporary world, with the fact of
his own confidence and youth, Kwan gazed out at the glittering wake of
Star Voyager,
as it disappeared into the
utter blackness of the vast ocean. Such a confident wake.

           
What affected Susan most of all was
Grigor’s matter-of- factness. He behaved as though his courage were the most
natural thing in the world, as though being brave were something like being
blue-eyed or left-handed. It wasn’t an English kind of stiff-upper-lip thing,
nor an American’s self-conscious imitation of Humphrey Bogart or Indiana Jones.
It probably wasn’t even anything generically Russian, but simply Grigor’s own
personality: laconic, aware but unafraid, viewing his own history as it passed
by with interest but dispassion. He must have been a wonderful fireman, Susan
thought, before they killed him.

           
She was twenty minutes late today,
because demonstrators opposed to some sort of esoteric research at the nuclear
power plant near the Taconic Parkway exit had blocked the road. Grigor was not
in his room, but the nurse called Jane, at her desk in the hall, grinned hello,
and said, “He’s faxing.”

           
“Thanks.”

           
It no longer struck anyone odd to
have a patient in a cancer research hospital in upstate
New York
—within ten miles of a nuclear power plant,
no less—faxing jokes to
Moscow
. In

           
Russian. Susan had spent days
searching New York last spring, and at last had found a typewriter dealer named
Tytell who had come up with a Cyrillic-alphabet typewriter, a used one he’d
gotten years before from the Soviet U.N. mission. So now Grigor could tap out
his gags two-fingered and not subject some long-suffering secretary in
Moscow
to his truly terrible penmanship.

           
In truth, Susan didn’t think
Grigor’s jokes were particularly funny, but she understood she wasn’t his
intended audience. The Russian television people at the other end of the fax
machine seemed pleased, and that was what counted.

           
And also what counted was that
Grigor’s spirits were kept reasonably buoyant. Susan could make the drive up
from the city only on weekends, and it seemed to her now that every week he’d
declined visibly, become thinner, slower, feebler. His eyes were deep-set now,
ringed in gray. The gums were steadily receding from his teeth, so that more
and more he looked like a skull, particularly when he laughed. Realizing that,
he did his laughing with closed lips these days, or covered his mouth with his
hand. It broke Susan’s heart to see the embarrassed way he brought that hand
up, the haunted eyes looking out at her as he laughed in secret; laughing was
so much a part of his life, and to have it hampered and hedged seemed
unnecessarily cruel.

           
The fax machine was in a small
windowless room—a big closet, really—stuffed with the machinery of the clerical
trade: a large copying machine, a Mr. Coffee, a paper cutter, several staplers,
and a tall gray metal cabinet full of stationery supplies. Grigor sat hunched
on the room’s one small typist’s chair, back to the doorway, punching out the
phone number with his bony forefinger. Shoulder blades protruded sharply
against the back of his shirt, like stubby angel wings. She wanted to put her
arms around him, but never had.

           
Sensing movement, Grigor turned, saw
Susan, and smiled with his lips held close together, like a prissy man sipping
from a straw. “A remarkable machine, this,” he said, by way of hello. “I merely
touch a few numbers, and in no time at all I can hear a busy signal eleven
thousand miles away.”

           
Smiling back, not showing him
anything except the smile, Susan said, “Is that one of the jokes you’re
sending?”

           
“One of the jokes I’m
not
sending,” he said, and punched the
numbers again. “No, the fax isn’t common enough in the Soviet so far. I sent
one gag— Ah, the busy signal.” He broke the connection, turned back to Susan.
“I did send one: The Moscow/Washington hot line is by fax now. The only trouble
is, the KGB made us attach ours to a shredder.”

           
Boris Boris didn’t like it.” He
peered at her shrewdly. “Neither do you.”

           
“Try again,” she said gently,
gesturing at the machine.

           
He turned to it.
“This
fax should be attached to a
yacht,” he said, tapping out the number. “It would make a fine anchor. Ah, yes,
the signal of busyness. The only sign of economic activity in all
Moscow
, the fax machine at Soviet Television TV
Center on
Korolyov Street
.”

           
After three more tries, the call did
at last go through, and Grigor fed his two pages of jokes, asides, and
suggestions into the machine, then carried the originals back to his room,
paused to take his medicines, and at last they could leave for their drive in
the country.

           
This was probably the last cycle of
the seasons Grigor would ever see. Susan’s cousin Chuck Woodbury, the AIDS
research doctor, had soon after Grigor’s arrival in the States passed him on to
other doctors, experts in his particular kind of radiation- induced cancer, and
while various medicinal combinations they’d tried had put his illness into
slight remission for short periods of time, the advance of the disease was
still inexorable, and gradually accelerating its pace.

           
Grigor had arrived in this
mountainous terrain, less than a hundred miles north of
New York City
, in late May, and had so far seen the
finish of spring’s green burgeoning and the flowered lushness of summer. Now he
was seeing the first of the great autumn foliage display; every day, more
leaves on more branches had turned to russet and ruby and gold. He would most
likely see this change all the way through to bare black trees against a white
sky, standing in great drifts of rusty leaves; he would probably see the first
snowfall of winter. But would he experience the end of winter? Unlikely.

           
The country rolled, rich in reds and
yellows, backed by the dark green of pines. Susan drove through little
gray-stone towns and newer clapboard or aluminum-sided developments.

           
Grigor talked about the beautiful
vistas of this new land he’d never known he would visit, and sometimes talked
about the beautiful vistas of
Russia
as well; unstated between them was the
knowledge that he would never see those Russian vistas again.

           
The drive was tiring for Grigor
eventually. “I hate to go back,” he finally said, “but...”

           
'There’s tomorrow,” she reminded
him. She almost always spent Saturday night at a motel near the hospital, so
she and Grigor could have the two weekend days together. He’d never come to the
motel with her, nor had either of them raised the suggestion that he might.

           
That was a taboo area, by mutual
consent. Susan wondered sometimes if her feelings for Grigor were merely
self-defensive, if she were just protecting herself from a real, adult,
dangerous relationship with a man by concentrating so exclusively on someone
who simply could not offer a long-term commitment. But her feelings for Grigor
seemed so much stronger than that, more profound. She’d even thought at times
about the possibility of having his child, helping him to leave some echo or
reminder of himself in the world. She’d never mentioned that idea to him,
knowing instinctively that, rather than please him, the prospect of fathering a
child he would never see, who would never be alive in his lifetime, would
appall and sadden him.

           
Was he even capable of sex?
Weakened, all the systems of his body slowing and failing, would it be possible
for him any more? Susan shied away from the question, uncomfortable even to
find herself thinking about it.

           
She’d forgotten the anti-nuclear
demonstration. Their roundabout aimless drive, drifting through the falling
leaves, had taken them to another approach toward the hospital, and all at
once, as they topped a low hill, flanked by yellowing birch and beech and elm
and dark green pine, there it was laid out before them, as frenzied yet compact
as a scene in a movie. Which in a way it was, since almost all demonstrations
are actually composed for television news coverage. So it was in the usual
manner that the triumvirate of demonstrators and police and television
technicians boiled away furiously together down there, enclosed within an
invisible pot; one inch outside camera range, pastoral placidity reigned.

           
“I think I can get past,” Susan
said, hands gripping the wheel as she braked, coming slowly down the slope.

           
The left side of the road here was
flanked by tall chain-link fence with razor wire at the top. Behind it, the
woods were, if anything, more lush than anywhere else in the neighborhood,
since the power company had added extra trees, mostly pine, to hide the plant
tucked into the folds of hills. Only the access road, with its electric gate
and guardpost and discreet sign, suggested what lay inside.

           
The demonstration was centered on
that plant entrance. It spilled out to cover the entire road, protestors
weaving in their ragged oval, waving their signs, shouting their catchphrases,
while local police and private guards contained and controlled them, and the
television crews moved and shifted around the perimeter like sharks around a
shipwreck. Scuffles kept breaking out in the middle of the action, drawing more
observers and participants, but then snuffing themselves out; it was to no
one’s advantage to let this confrontation get out of hand, move beyond an
acceptable predetermined level of hostility. No side wanted to harm its
reputation in
Washington
and
Albany
and on Wall Street, where the real
decisions would be made.

           
On the right, the land was wilder,
scrubbier, with more underbrush and more visible dead branches or the remains
of dead trees. The power company owned this land as well, to protect itself,
but didn’t bother to manage it. The shoulder on that side, opposite the plant
entrance, was broad and weedy, with a shallow ditch. It seemed to Susan she
could leave the blacktop and make her way around the demonstration without
getting caught up in it. The alternative was a detour of about fifteen miles,
and Grigor was already very tired. She’d chance it.

           
Up close, the sights and sounds were
ugly. Passion and righteousness twisted the faces of the demonstrators, while
leashed animal rage froze the faces of the police and guards, and the faces of
the TV people bore the placid untouched evil beauty of Dorian Gray. Though the
car windows were rolled up, Susan could plainly hear the lust for carnage in
all those raised voices, like a primitive tribe psyching itself up to attack
another village. Blinking, she drove at a slow and steady pace, the car
slanting into the ditch on the right, bumping over the uneven ground.

           
“They’re right,” Grigor said,
looking out the windshield. He sounded unlike himself, bitter and angry and
defeated.

           
They were nearly past when another
quick outbreak of violence occurred, just beyond them on their left: a sudden
release of pressure, boiling over of rage, like bubbles in lava. Police wands
swung, wedges of protestors moved and swayed, and a TV cameraman looking for a
better angle backed directly into Susan’s path, forcing her to stop.

           
She was afraid to sound her horn,
not wanting to attract the attention of any of the participants, and while she
was waiting there, growing more and more frightened, two people came reeling
out of the scrum, a man and a woman, supporting one another. Or he supporting
her, his arm around her waist, her hand on his shoulder. He looked up, saw the
car, and as he raised his free arm in supplication, she thought,
Ben! What’s he doing here?

           
But of course it wasn’t Ben
Margolin, whom she hadn’t seen since college, whom she’d been madly in love
with for one semester (and part of a second). Still, that instant of false
recognition predisposed her in his favor, so she nodded as she met his eye, and
gestured for them to come to the car. The woman, she could see, had a short
diagonal cut on her forehead, a line of dark red blood, straight on its upper
side, ragged below, like a line in a graffiti signature.

           
The TV cameraman moved closer to the
action, out of Susan’s path, as the man who wasn’t Ben Margolin opened the rear
car door, helped the woman in, and piled in after her. Susan immediately
accelerated, bearing down hard on the pedal, the car jouncing, rear wheels
spinning before catching hold.