“And some philosophy?” Ivo inquired, thinking of the Senator’s remarks in that connection.
“Of course. So if you—”
They entered Groton’s apartment. Ivo could smell breakfast cooking and knew that Beatryx was at work. It made him feel obscurely homesick; nobody ever took institutionalized food if they could help it, though that served in the station was exceptionally good.
“I had no childhood,” he said.
“You mean the project. A controlled situation, certainly, and perhaps undistinctive. But after you left—”
Ivo remembered the turning point. Perhaps it had begun, if it could be said to have had a beginning, the day he was twenty-three. February third, 1865. The day he admitted to himself that he had consumption.
Point Lookout, Maryland — as horrible a place as any he could imagine. Surely this was Hell, and Major Brady the devil. Twenty acres of barren land surrounded by palisades. The prisoners were Southern White; many of the guards were Black. The Negroes took pleasure insulting and torturing any people they chose, but the cold of winter was worse yet. There was not enough food, clothing or sanitation, and no medical facilities for the prisoners. The water was foul. The only shelter was the collection of A-tents and Bell-tents. They slept on the bare, damp ground, denied both planks and straw for bedding, and no wood was permitted inside the compound for any fire. Objection of any nature to these conditions brought infamous retaliatory measures and further reduction of the scant rations.
He shared a tent with a dozen men. While the crowding provided a certain blessed amount of bodily warmth, it also spread disease at a savage rate. Diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid fever, scurvy and the itch… fifteen to twenty men died every day. And now he could no longer deny the tubercular coughing and the wastage of his own body. He realized he was dying.
Had it been only four years ago that the great state of Georgia voted secession from the Union? He had not at first been a secessionist, but the vote had been held at Milledgeville, only two miles from where he eked out his living by tutoring. The sentiment, like disease, had been highly contagious; even the clergy were belligerently patriotic. The afflatus of war was breathed upon them all. Somehow he had become convinced of his ability to whip at least five Yankees, singlehanded; indeed, any stalwart Georgian could!
Now he looked about him at the human desolation of Point Lookout. “What fools we were!” he whispered. The conceit of an individual was ridiculous because it was powerless, but the conceit of a whole people was a terrible thing.
Flushed with patriotic illusion, he had volunteered to fight. He, whose only skill was musical!
It had not all been hard. He remembered fondly the time he, a bedraggled soldier, had passed beneath the windows where a local Philharmonic Club was rehearsing. He had taken out his flute and played there in the street — and the orchestra ceased rehearsal, listened, and arranged to grant him honorary freedom of the town!
During furlough there had been concerts with friends, and of course the ladies! He was always in love, and never ashamed to win fair hearts by the music of his flute.
He had smuggled that flute into the prison camp, and its music now was one of the few comforts he had. It had been the one thing he refused to part with, when the Lucy was captured in the Gulf Stream, running the Yankee blockade. He, as Signal Officer, had refused to declare himself to be an Englishman, preferring capture to a dishonorable escape.
Today he was dying of that decision, as his nation was dying of the Union armies. Somehow, until today, he had had hope. Was not God just?
Harold Groton was waiting for his answer. What could he tell the man?
“It’s very hard to define. I came near death when I was twenty-three. Is that what you want?”
“If it affected you deeply, yes. Some people nearly die and are hardly concerned, while others are profoundly moved by an innocent remark. It isn’t the event so much as its personal importance to you.”
“It is important to me. I was sick and in — prison. Some friends — put up bail. On the ship home—”
“You weren’t in America?”
“Not exactly. The ship I was on was frozen in the ice for three days on the way to City Port, Virginia.”
Groton refrained from commenting.
Was it worth the effort to make the man understand? For the sake of accurate data for the pseudo-science of astrology? Ivo remained distracted by his grief, and could not bring himself to care.
Three days icebound, early March, 1865. He and the other repatriated prisoners huddled in the hull, shuddering with the cold. The end for him was very near.
Another prisoner practiced on the flute. A little girl, daughter of a passenger above, heard it and marveled at the melody. “If you think I’m good, you should hear that other fellow play!” the man told her. “But he’s not going to last long, in this cold.”
She reported the episode to her mother. “I know only one person that skilled with the flute,” the woman said. “An old friend of mine. Surely he could not be here!”
But she investigated, nagged by the possibility — and found him there in the hold, wrapped in an old soiled quilt, eyes staring, wasted body subject to spasms of pain. She knew her friend.
It was so crowded in the hold that they had to pass him over the heads of the other prisoners to get him out. She plied him with brandy, but he was too far gone to swallow.
She warmed him and ministered to him, she and her little girl. By midnight he revived somewhat. She presented him with his flute — the best medicine! — and weakly he began to play.
The prisoners below yelled for joy as they heard the sound of it. He was going to recover!
“That act of friendship — I think that was the turning point,” Ivo said. “I surely would have died, otherwise.”
Groton shook his head. “It is a strange story you tell, Ivo. But as I said, its validity lies chiefly in its importance to you, not in the overt details. I’ll apply it to my researches.”
Ivo, nervous again, declined to share breakfast with the Grotons and found his way to the mess hall. He was not very hungry.
It was still early, by the station’s day, when he finished, and he continued to be restless. Was Afra still sleeping in his — Brad’s — room? Should he go back yet?
He stopped off at the latrine — and realized suddenly that every toilet faced in the same direction. The arrangement was such that when a person sat, he had to face the “forward” orientation of the torus.
“When you take your inevitable bow, your stern is sternward.” he said aloud, finally appreciating Brad’s pun — a pun inflicted upon the nomenclature of the entire station.
He blinked, feeling his eyes moisten with the pathos. Bradley Carpenter, PhD in assorted space technologies at age twenty-two — straining with all that remained of his mind at twenty-five to utter one German word…
Brad — pride of the nameless project the participants had mischievously dubbed “The Pecker Experiment.” It had been patterned after, or at least inspired by, a much better known effort antedating it by twenty years: The Peckham Experiment. But if the good doctors of Peckham had suspected what sinister offshoots their well-meant research would spawn, they might have had severe misgivings.
A certain British medical group, as Ivo understood it, had set out in the nineteen thirties to ascertain the nature of health. It had seemed to them that the medical profession’s attention to illness was mistaken; how much better it would be to take the steps necessary to preserve health, so that tedious and only partially effective remedial measures became unnecessary. A regular, complete physical checkup for everyone, the basic unit of attention being not the individual but the family. But would the average family respond favorably to such a service?
The center established in Peckham in 1935 soon demonstrated that they would. For several years many of the families within a radius of a mile had participated, enjoying a sensation of well-being they had never known before. Astonishingly, the records showed that ninety percent of the participants — presumed to be a representative cross-section of the nation — were not in good health at the time of application. The “normal” person was an ill person.