Bonny said, “Imaginary playmate.” She sighed wearily.
“No he is not imaginary,” her daughter said.
“Okay,” Bonny said irritably. “He’s real. Meet Bill,” she said to Doctor Stockstil. “My daughter’s brother.”
After a pause, her face set with concentration, Edie said, “Bill is glad to meet you at last, Doctor Stockstill. He says hello.”
Stockstill laughed. “Tell him I’m glad to meet him, too.”
“Here comes Austurias,” George Keller said, pointing.
“With his dinner,” Bonny said in a grouchy voice. “Why doesn’t he teach us to find them? Isn’t he our teacher? What’s a teacher for? I must say, George, sometimes I wonder about a man who—”
“If he taught us,” Stockstill said, “we’d eat all the mushrooms up.” He knew her question was merely rhetorical anyhow; although they did not like it, they all respected Mr. Austurias’ retention of secret lore-it was his right to keep his mycological wisdom to himself. Each of them had some sort of equivalent fund to draw from. Otherwise, he reflected, they would not now be alive: they would have joined the great majority, the silent dead beneath their feet, the millions who could either be considered the lucky ones or the unlucky ones, depending on one’s point of view. Sometimes it seemed to him that pessimism was called for, and on those days’ he thought of the dead as lucky. But for him pessimism was a passing mood; he certainly did not feel it now, as he stood in the shadows with Bonny Keller, only a foot or so from her, near enough to reach out easily and touch her… but that would not do. She would pop him one on the nose, he realized. A good hard blow—and then George would hear, too, as if being hit by Bonny was not enough.
Aloud, he chuckled. Bonny eyed him with suspicion.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was just wool-gathering.”
Mr. Austurias came striding up to them, his face flushed with exertion. “Let’s get inside,” he puffed. “So we don’t miss Dangerfield’s reading.”
“You know how it comes out,” Stockstill said. “You know Mildred comes back and reenters his life again and makes him miserable; you know the book as well as I do—we all do.” He was amused by the teacher’s concern.
“I’m not going to listen tonight,” Bonny said. “I can’t stand to be shushed by June Raub.”
With a glance at her, Stockstill said, “Well, you can be community leader next month.”
“I think June needs a little psychoanalysis,” Bonny said to him. “She’s so aggressive, so masculine; it’s not natural. Why don’t you draw her aside and give her a couple of hours’ worth?”
Stockstill said, “Sending another patient to me, Bonny? 1 still recall the last one.” It was not hard to recall, because it had been the day the bomb had been dropped on the Bay Area. Years ago, he thought to himself. In another incarnation, as Hoppy would put it.
“You would have done him good,” Bonny said, “if you had been able to treat him, but you just didn’t have the time.”
“Thanks for sticking up for me,” he said, with a smile.
Mr. Austurias said, “By the way, Doctor, I observed some odd behavior on the part of our little phocomelus, today. I wanted to ask your opinion about him, when there’s the opportunity. He perplexes me, I must admit . and I’m curious about him. The ability to survive against all odds—Hoppy certainly has that. It’s encouraging, if you see what I mean, for the rest of us. If he can make it—” The school teacher broke off. “But we must get inside.”
To Bonny, Stockstill said, “Someone told me that Dangerfield mentioned your old buddy the other day.”
“Mentioned Bruno?” Bonny at once became alert. “Is he still alive, is that it? I was sure he was.”
“No, that’s not what Dangerfield said. He said something caustic about the first great accident. You recall. 1972.”
“Yes,” she said tightly. “I recall.”
“Dangerfield, according to whoever told me—” Actually, he recalled perfectly well who had told him Dangerfield’s bon mot; it had been June Raub, but he did not wish to antagonize Bonny any further. “What he said was this. We’re all living in Bruno’s accident, now. We’re all the spirit of ‘72. Of course, that’s not so original; we’ve heard that said before. No doubt I’ve failed to capture the way Dangerfiekl said it… it’s his style, of course, how he says things. No one can give things the twist he gives them.”
At the door of the Foresters’ Hall, Mr. Austurias had halted, had turned and was listening to them. Now he returned. “Bonny,” he said, “did you know Bnuno Bluthgeld before the Emergency?”
“Yes,” she said. “I worked at Livermore for a while.”
“He’s dead now, of course,” Mr. Austurias said.
“I’ve always thought he was alive somewhere,” Bonny said remotely. “He was or is a great man, and the accident in ‘72 was not his fault; people who know nothing about it hold him responsible.”
Without a word, Mr. Austurias turned his back on her, walked off up the steps of the Hall and disappeared inside.
“One thing about you,” Stockstill said to her, “you can’t be accused of concealing your opinions.”
“Someone has to tell people where to head in,” Bonny said. “He’s read in the newspapers all about Bruno. The newspapers. That’s one thing that’s better off, now; the newspapers are gone, unless you count that dumb little News & Views, which I don’t. I will say this about Dangerfield: he isn’t a liar.”
Together, she and Stockstill followed after Mr. Austurias, with George and Edie following, into the mostly-filled Foresters’ Hall, to listen to Dangerfield broadcasting down to them from the satellite.
As he sat listening to the static and the familiar voice, Mr. Austurias thought to himself about Bruno Bluthgeld and how the physicist was possibly alive. Perhaps Bonny was right. She had known the man, and, from what he had overheard of her eonversation with Stockstill (a risky act, these days, overhearing, but he could not resist it) she had sent Bluthgeld to the psychiatrist for treatment which bore out one of his own very deeply held convictions: that Doctor Bruno Bluthgeld had been mentally disturbed during his last few years before the Emergency—had been palpably, dangerously insane, both in his private life and, what was more important, in his public life.
But there had really been no question of that. The public, in its own fashion, had been conscious that something fundamental was wrong with the man; in his public statements there had been an obsessiveness, a morbidity, a tormented expression that had drenched his face, convoluted his manner of speech. And Bluthgeld had talked about the enemy, with its infiltrating tactics, its systematic contamination of institutions at home, of schools and organizaions—of the domestic life itself. Bluthgeld had seen the enemy everywhere, in books and in movies, in people, in political organizations – that urged views contrary to his own. Of course, he had done it, put forth his views, in a learned way; he was not an ignorant man spouting and ranting in a backward Southern town. No, Bluthgeld had done it in a lofty, scholarly, educated, deeply-worked-out manner. And yet in the final analysis it was no more sane, no more rational or sober, than had been the drunken ramblings of the boozer and woman-chaser, Joe MacCarthy, or of any of the others of them.
As a matter of fact, in his student days Mr. Austurias had once met Joe McCarthy, and had found him likeable. But there had been nothing likeable about Bruno Bluthgeld, and Mr. Austurias had met him too—had more than met him. He and Bluthgeld had both been at the University of California at the same time; both had been on the staff, although of course Bluthgeld had been a full professor, chairman of his department, and Austurias had been only an instructor. But they had met and argued, had clashed both in private-in the corridors after class—and in public. And, in the end, Bluthgeld had engineered Mr. Austhrias’ dismissal.