“Christ,” Stockstill said, “I don’t know; I haven’t the foggiest idea.”
Bonny, laughing, said, “Oh, you’re so earnest.”
“She says that to me, too,” George Keller said, with a faint smile. “My wife sees mankind as a race of dungbeetles laboring away. Naturally, she does not include herself.”
“She shouldn’t,” Stockstill said. “I hope she never does.”
George glanced at him sourly, then shrugged.
She might change, Stockstill thought, if she understood about her daughter. That might do it. It would take something like that, some odd blow unprecedented and unanticipated. She might even kill herself; the joy, the vitality, might switch to its utter opposite.
“Kellers,” he said aloud, “introduce me to the new teacher one day soon. I’d like to meet an ex-cello player. Maybe we can make him something out of a washtub strung with baling wire. He could play it with—”
“With horsetail,” Bonny said practically. “The bow we can make; that part is easy. What we need is a big resonating chamber, to produce the low notes. I wonder if we can find an old cedar chest. That might do. It would have to be wood, certainly.”
George said, “A barrel, cut in half.”
They laughed at that; Edie Keller, joining them, laughed, too, although she had not heard what her father—or rather, Stockstill thought, her mother’s husband—had said.
“Maybe we can find something washed up on the beach,” George said. “I notice that a lot of wooden debris shows up, especially after storms. Wrecks of old Chinese ships, no doubt, from years ago.”
Cheerfully, they departed from Doctor Stockstill’s office; he stood watching them go, the little girl between them. The three of them, he thought. Or rather, the four, if the invisible but real presence within the girl was counted.
Deep in thought he shut the door.
It could be my child, he thought. But it isn’t, because seven years ago Bonny was up in West Marin here and I was at my office in Berkeley. But if I had been near her that day—
Who was up here then? he asked himself. When the bombs fell… who of us could have been with her that day? He felt a peculiar feeling toward the man, whoever he was. I wonder how he would feel, Stockstill thought, if he knew about his child… about his children. Maybe someday I’ll run into him. I can’t bring myself to tell Bonny, but perhaps I will tell him.
X
At the Foresters’ Hall, the people of West Marin sat discussing the illness of the man in the satellite. Agitated, they interrupted one another in their eagerness to speak. The reading from Of Human Bondage had begun, but no one in the room wanted to listen; they were all murmuring grim-faced, all of them alarmed, as June Raub was, to realize what would happen to them if the disc jockey were to die.
“He can’t really be that sick,” Cas Stone, the largest land-owner in West Marin, exclaimed. “I never told anybody this, but listen; I’ve got a really good doctor, a specialist in heart diseases, down in San Rafael. I’ll get him to a transmitter somewhere and he can tell Dangerfield what’s the matter with him. And he can cure him.”
“But he’s got no medicines up there,” old Mrs. Lully, the most ancient person in the community, said. “I heard him say once that his departed wife used them all up.”
“I’ve got quinidine,” the pharmacist spoke up. “That’s probably exactly what he needs. But there’s no way to get it up to him.”
Earl Colvig, who headed the West Marin Police, said, “I understand that the Army people at Cheyenne are going to make another try to reach him later this year.”
“Take your quinidine to Cheyenne,” Cas Stone said to the pharmacist.
“To Cheyenne?” the pharmacist quavered. “There aren’t any through roads over the Sierras any more. I’d never get there.”
In as calm a voice as possible, June Raub said, “Perhaps he isn’t actually ill; perhaps it’s only hypochondria, from being isolated and alone up there all these years. Something about the way he detailed each symptom made me suspect that.” However, hardly anyone heard her. The three representatives from Bolinas, she noticed, had gone quietly over beside the radio and were stooping down to listen to the reading. “Maybe he won’t die,” she said, half to herself.
At that, the glasses man glanced up at her. She saw on his face an expression of shock and numbness, as if the realization that the man in the satellite might be sick and would die was too much for him. The illness of his own daughter, she thought, had not affected him so.
A silence fell over the people in the furthest part of the Hall, and June Raub looked to see what had happened.
At the door, a gleaming platform of machinery had rolled mto sight Hoppy Harrington had arrived.
“Hoppy, you know what?” Cas Stone called. “Dangerfield said he’s got something wrong with him, maybe his heart.”
They all became silent, waiting for the phocomelus to speak.
Hoppy rolled past them and up to the radio; he halted his ‘mobile, sent one of his manual extensions over to delicately diddle at the tuning knob. The three representatives from Bolinas respectfully stood aside. Static rose, then faded, and the voice of Walt Dangerfield came in clear and strong. The reading was still in progress, and Hoppy, in the center of his machinery, listened intently. ‘He, and the others in the room, continued to listen without speaking until at last the sound faded out as the satellite passed beyond the range of reception. Then, once again, there was only the static.
All of a sudden, in a voice exactly like Dangerfield’s, the phocomelus said, “Well, my dear friends, what’ll we have next to entertain us?”
This time the imitation was so perfect that several people in the room gasped. Others clapped, and Hoppy smiled. “How about some more of that juggling?” the pharmacist called. “I like that.”
“‘Juggling,’” the phocomelus said, this time exactly in the pharmacist’s quavering, prissy voice. “ ‘I like that.’
“No,” Cas Stone said, “I want to hear him do Dangerfield; do some more of that, Hoppy. Come on.”
The phocomelus spun his ‘mobile around so that he faced the audience. “Hoode hoode hoo,” he chuckled in the low, easy-going tones which they all knew so well. June Raub caught her breath; it was eerie, the phoce’s ability to mimic. It always disconcerted her… if she shut her eyes she could imagine that it actually was Dangerfield still talking, still in contact with them. She did so, deliberately pretending to herself. He’s not sick, he’s not dying, she told herself; listen to him. As if in answer to her own thoughts, the friendly voice was murmuring, “I’ve got a little pain here in my chest, but it doesn’t amount to a thing; don’t worry about it, friends. Upset stomach, most likely. Over-indulgence. And what do we take for that? Does anybody out there remember?”
A man in the audience shouted, “I remember: alkalize with Alka Seltzer!”
“Hoode hoode hoo,” the warm voice chuckled. “That’s right. Good for you. Now let me give you a tip on how to store gladiola bulbs all through the winter without fear of annoying pests. Simply wrap them in aluminum foil.”
People in the room clapped, and June Raub heard someone close by her say, “That’s exactly what Dangerfield would have said.” It was the glasses man from Bolinas. She opened her eyes and saw the expression on his face. I must have looked like that, she realized, that night when I first heard Hoppy imitating him.
“And now,” Hoppy continued, still in Dangerfield’s voice, “I’ll perform a few feats of skill that I’ve been working on. I think you’ll all get a bang out of this, dear friends. Just watch.”
Eldon Blaine, the glasses man from Bolinas, saw the phocomelus place a coin on the floor several feet from his ‘mobile. The extensions withdrew, and Hoppy, still murmuring in Dangerfield’s voice, concentrated on the coin until all at once, with a clatter, it slid across the floor toward him. The people in the Hall clapped. Flushing with pleasure, the phocomelus nodded to them and then once more set the coin down away from him, this time farther than before.