On the screen, Vidya opened his eyes and stared at the shapes of Sole and Rosson. Giant lips moved silently, fleshy and foot-long—and spoke bad language at him.
By night, as the children slept, their speech would be reinforced by the whispering of feathermikes, by the hypnothrob of sleepteaching.
In the canteen at lunchtime, another vicious bitchy brush with Dorothy.
Sole sat at the same table with her, chewed a piece of gristly stew and thought how indigestible Dorothy was herself, emotionally. She betrayed little of Sole’s dangerous love for his children. Fortunate for her charges that her partner in the enterprise, Rosson, was the warm human being he was.
“Dorothy, do you ever worry about when the kids grow up?” Sole blurted out rashly. “What’s going to happen to them for the next forty or fifty years?”
She pursed her lips.
“Their sex drive can be controlled, I suppose—”
“I don’t mean sex, I mean what about them as people. What’s going to happen? We don’t ask that question, do we?”
“Need we ask it? I’m sure there’ll be space for them.”
“But what sort of space? Outer Space? Space in a thermos bottle tossed in the cosmic sea in the direction of the nearest star? A crew for a starship?”
Dorothy Summers didn’t seem to encounter any gristle or else swallowed what she did.
“I told Sam it was a mistake appointing married people,” she said tartly. “I don’t imagine your having a child of your own helps objectivity.”
Sole thought instinctively of Vidya—before he remembered that ‘his’ child was called Peter…
“Do you have any idea how large the world’s population is?” she demanded. “I mean, can you visualize it? All the children that are going to be born before today’s over-or wiped out before tonight by accident! Do you think it matters one scrap that a dozen boys and girls are brought up-lavishly, I might add-in somewhat unusual circumstances? Don’t come whining to me, my friend, if you get cold feet on a winter’s morning.”
Sole smiled uncomfortably.
“Can you visualize what the fate of these brats might have been had they not come here? Haddon is Aladdin’s Cave so far as they’re concerned. Instead of the rubbish heap!”
“Aladdin’s Cave? May they discover the Open Sesame for us poor mortals then—”
“Indeed, Chris, yes in-deed. I’ll tell you one thing—if they don’t find it for us, then somebody else will. The Russians have some pretty queer things going on in their mental hospitals-besides using them to keep their intellectuals locked up!”
“What awful stew this is,” said Sole, hoping to escape from her clutches; but she pinned him tight as a piece of meat on her fork, for she’d seen Sam Bax heading their way with his own plate of stew. Dorothy blandly reported the conversation to him as soon as he sat down.
Sam nodded sympathetically.
“Have you heard the story about the American spinster and her Venus Fly Trap, Chris?’
And Sam proceeded to tell a sick-funny story that deftly put Dorothy down as the spinster she was and Sole as the sentimentalist. The situation was glossed over-apparently Sam wanted his staff to be on the best of terms today.
“This woman lived in a New York skyscraper where they wouldn’t let her keep any pets, not even a goldfish,” Sam explained in a jolly, steamrolling manner, between forkfuls of stew. “So she bought a plant to keep her company. A Venus Fly Trap. The Fly Trap can count up to two so it can obviously think after a fashion—”
“A plant can count?” sniffed Dorothy suspiciously.
“Truly! One tap on the tripwire of this botanic gin-trap-say a grain of sand falls on it-and there’s no reaction. But give two taps, like a fly would when it lands and stamps its feet-and the jaws snap shut. That’s genuine counting-thinking, of a sort. Well, this woman’s apartment was so clean and airconditioned and high above the city streets, there weren’t any flies ever-so she had to feed it cat food to keep it happy. This went on for two years till one day she found a fly in the kitchen. She thought she’d give her Trap a treat so she caught the fly and fed it to it. Trap closed. Trap digested the fly. A few hours after that the Trap died of food poisoning. Live prey! It died of reality!”
“Or of DDT,” sniffed Dorothy.
“Of the perils of a controlled environment, I prefer to think! There’s a moral in that for us. Any danger the kids face isn’t concerned with their being in those three worlds down below-but in being brought out of them.”
Sam forked up the rest of his stew then sat back surveying Sole and Dorothy Summers amiably.
“More important than this little argument between you two people, however, is-tomorrow.” He wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, screwed it into a ball and dropped it neatly in the centre of his plate. “We’re receiving a visit from one of our American colleagues, which I gather the powers-that-be consider rather important.”
He fished in his pocket.
“I’ve got a working paper this man’s written on your subject, Chris. Would you glance through it before then?”
Sam passed the xeroxed sheets over.
Thomas R. Zwingler: A Computer Analysis of Latent Verbal Disorientation in Long-Flight Astronauts. Part One: Distortion of Conceptual Sets.
Dorothy craned her neck to read the title too.
“My God,” she sniffed. “The pomposity of it.”
Sam shook his head.
“I don’t think you’ll find Tom Zwingler so pompous in person.”
“Where did you meet him?” Sole asked.
“A seminar in the States last year,” Sam answered vaguely. “Tom Zwingler’s a floater-attached to a number of agencies. Sort of experiment co-ordinator.”
“What agencies?” Sole pressed, annoyed at his own recent display of vulnerability. “Rand? Hudson? NASA?”
“I gather he’s on the salary roll of the National Security Agency. Communications Division.”
“You mean espionage?” Dorothy raised an eyebrow sarcastically.
“Hardly that, judging from this paper, Dorothy. A communications man.”
“A halfway house man,” smiled Dorothy. “Like our Chris?”
Sam frowned. He rose bulkily from his seat.
“Tomorrow afternoon then, two-thirty. We’ll give him a run-down on the present state of the art at Haddon. Right?”
Sole nodded.
“I suppose so,” sniffed Dorothy ungraciously.
TWO
The police captain flew in by helicopter, a war-surplus Huey Iroquois Slick, in the midst of a downpour, and wanted to interview Charlie Faith immediately.
Jorge Almeida, Charlie’s Brazilian adviser, put his head round the door-a slim serious individual with hot dark eyes and a light milk chocolate skin suggesting perhaps an Indian grandparent.
“Visitors, Charlie,” he called against the rattle of rain on the tin roof.
Jorge was proud with a truly Brazilian pride of this Amazon Project now opening up half of a country that was itself half a continent, but which had lain dormant for so long: had remained a subconscious landscape, peopled by fantasies of El Dorado and lost cities and giant anacondas that could outrun a horse. Jorge despised these fantasies almost as much as he despised the savages haunting the jungle like ghosts of this dreamscape. From the safe, hitherto uninvolved distance of Amazonia he tacitly supported the military régime that had sworn to tame and civilize this land. His own talents had been approved by two years at the National Civil Engineering Laboratory in Lisbon, and resentment lurked in his soul at being subordinate to a yanqui engineer, however temporary the arrangement. Charlie wasn’t blind to this, but they were stuck with each other and usually made the best of it.