“Oh, that tail you had on me this morning,” I said. “Wondered why he quit so easy. It was to phone you, wasn’t it? Let you know I was away from the apartment house or something?”
But she was ignoring me now. “Your own methods seem to have worked better, Miss — Brant? Must be hard on the heels, starting so young. My fault really, only I never would have thought Abe had a yen for children. Oh, here, you might want this when you’re of age.” She twisted off the ring and flung it clumsily. Except to twitch her feet aside so that the ring rolled under the armchair, Sharon didn’t look at it or move.
Even after yielding to that need for a gesture, Miriam must have held some frail hope of success, slow in dying. She approached Abraham with outstretched appealing hands. Though I had almost no doubt of the outcome, I found I was holding my breath. Miriam had talent.
It was not his distant quiet that broke her control. Something else; something I saw in him, and though I know he tried to hide it, Miriam must have seen it too. Pity. I heard her gasp, saw her make a savage unthinking motion toward her handbag. I saw Sharon jump up; if Miriam had completed the motion, I believe Sharon would have thrown herself in front of Abraham before he could stop her. But Miriam’s mind remembered where the gun was, more quickly than her hand. She choked and turned away, harmless and pitiful. “I’ll take — what you said, to Joe Max.” It was interesting to me that she said “Joe Max” just then. “Abe, you’re making a terrible mistake.”
I was glad that Abraham answered nothing. She went by me slowly, not looking at me, perhaps not even thinking about the gun, which I would not have returned to her. She didn’t slam the door.
Sharon’s arms were around Abraham, tight and close. “Will,” she said over her shoulder, “Will, is the sun by any chance over the yardarm, and I don’t mean on my account?”
6
Sharon went into the country with us today. A holiday, a half-impromptu picnic. Not an escape, unless Sharon may have thought of it that way, a little. Spring has come earlier than ever this year. There was some small rain last night, and today the earth was washed and sweet and ready; we found bright winter aconite in the woods, and the first of the tiny white violets that hide in corners of the rocks.
We rented a car, Abe and I, and rather than oblige us to grope through Brooklyn, Sharon met us at a subway exit uptown. We didn’t venture on a Robbie-road, but went over the old bridge and followed one of the fine North Jersey highways until we came on a modest road that promised to lead into the Ramapos. Just the three of us, and by unspoken consent we said not a word during the drive about what had happened or might have happened at the Green Tower Colony Friday afternoon.
It seems that in order to contemplate a major calamity to the human species you need distance. More than the Martian distance. When the black wings swoop too close your eyes blur; Martian or human, you must look away, not so much for the sake of hoping or pretending, but because your heart says: “I am not ready.” Or it says, perhaps: “There was no need of this. There could have been another way….” The pilot over Hiroshima — could he look down?
Certainly there was nothing in the spring woods to remind us of grief.
There had been no more approaches from Max’s people since Miriam’s visit. Abraham and I were not followed when we hunted up that rental garage. Nothing was prowling behind us when we took that little road off the highway. Sharon had brought a basket with lunch, and we had wine — good Catawba wine from somewhere in the smiling lake country.
I could turn my face away from the homely ugliness of our rented car; I could forget our stuffy American clothes and imagine that we were — no matter where. Perhaps a mountainous island in that country where once upon a time human life was a pleasant thing to explore — or so said Theocritus, Anacreon, other voices. Pan never died. He watches and breathes across the pipes, wherever earth and forest, field and sky can come together and make their harmony for the Arcadian son of Hermes.
Often enough, Drozma, I think of your great-grandfather, how he labored to collect and recopy the writings of his own greatgrandfather, who knew Hellas as it truly was, when the sun was high. Those writings could be published, if Union is ever possible. I tried to imagine Union, this afternoon. The dream was blotted away by another image — the image of a neat little tube full of green powder.
I saw Abraham stretch comfortably with his head in Sharon’s lap. He said: “Will, I begin to tell myself it couldn’t happen. Anyway there’s a good chance. Isn’t there?”
“A chance.”
“What Hodding developed wasn’t as powerful as he thought. Or maybe not as easy to spread, not as viable outside the laboratory. Or the tube fell into the river and was carried unbroken out to sea.”
“In Hodding’s ramblings, did he say anything about the incubation period?” I asked that, not wanting to know.
“Not that I heard…. Out to sea — but the cork would come loose sometime, and Lord, what then? The sea’s mammalian life — transmission sooner or later back to—”
“Don’t,” said Sharon, and slid her hand over his eyes.
“Well, it didn’t happen,” said Abraham, for her sake. “So far as today is concerned, it didn’t happen.” She bent down until her tumbling hair hid his face, to whisper something that they thought was none of my business; no doubt something to do with the hour when they left me in a contemplation that looked like human sleepiness, and strolled away into the woods. They are very sweet and natural children, when civilization relaxes its grip on them. Capable of unspoken understanding, too — that should help, if it turns out that they have years together and not just a few bright moments snatched before the climax of a world disaster. It seemed to me that he was following a train of thought parallel to mine, for presently he said: “Will, assuming nothing happened when Walker threw that thing — assuming any of us can have such a thing as another slice of, say, forty or fifty years — what about my forty or fifty? I’m thinking about work. This blue-eyed lady’s got no such problem: she already knows what she can do. And it looks to me as if most people had no such problem: a few have a very plain call to one kind of achievement or another, and the big majority just think of work as an unavoidable unpleasantness, something to be got out of the way so that they can play at nothing in particular, if they can’t find some means of dodging it altogether — which is no good for me, but if I have a call to anything, damn it, it usually sounds like a hundred voices calling all at once. Locomotive with no rails…. You told me a while ago that you’d bummed around a lot, tried several different things. Ever hit on the one kind of work you really wanted to do? Something that made all the rest a prologue?”
Yes, but I couldn’t say so. Forcing myself back into the human frame of reference, and hastily, I said: “Nothing to offer but a moth-eaten bromide: find out what you can do best and stay with it. Finding out might take awhile. I’m merely passing it back to you.”
He smiled. “Yes, but that might be one of the hard bromides the moths can’t chew. And one finds out by trial and error? Mostly error?”
“Maybe. At twelve you were rather preoccupied by the plague-take-it mysteries we like to wrap up in a bundle named ethics.”
“Yes.” He watched me a long while, his dark eyes hazy. “Yes, I was, Will….”
“And?”
“Yes, I still am. Learning more and knowing less all the time.”
“Oh, after a while you work out a synthesis that holds up to your satisfaction. In your thirties perhaps, if you’re lucky.”