“Well, wasn’t he what he seemed to be?” Paul asked. Jeebee shook his head.
“I got to know him very well,” he said. “Behind the way he talked and acted he was really very sensitive to the human realities underlying the abstractions with which we all worked. In fact, I still think he’d deliberately cultivated that tough appearance of his to hide his sensitivity toward the people he had to work with.”
“So you liked him,” Paul said.
“Yes,” said Jeebee, “and he liked me—strangely enough.”
“Why, strangely enough?” said Paul. “People like each other or they don’t. You can’t pin down reasons.”
“Oh, he told me some reasons he liked me, from time to time,” Jeebee said. “He thought I had a remarkable enthusiasm, and he told me I had a highly unusual, intuitive ability to represent social processes in the language of mathematics.”
“Did you?” asked Paul.
“Yes,” Jeebee said slowly. “At least as far as the mathematics went, I guess I did. At least compared with the people I worked with.”
There was another stretch of silence. It was a comfortable silence during which Jeebee was thinking of his academic days and of Bill Bohl. He was brought back to the present by Paul.
“Well, there you were, studying for your doctorate with this Bill Bohl as an adviser,” said Paul. “How did you get from there to Stoketon?”
“Stoketon was a real break for me,” Jeebee said with enthusiasm, “and something I never would have got if Bill hadn’t had such a high idea of me. You see, even before I’d finished my doctoral thesis, Bill had let me work with him on half a dozen articles that promised to open new avenues of approach to mathematical modeling. The articles got quite a bit of attention.”
“That’s important?” said Paul.
“That’s very important,” Jeebee answered, “particularly for someone at the stage I was at, then.” He paused.
“Then, when I finished my doctoral thesis, Bill talked me into staying on at the university, on a postdoctoral fellowship. It paid next to nothing, but the main thing was it let me go on working with Bill; and this paid off handsomely later on, when Bill was awarded a founder’s grant to establish the Center for the Study of Quantitative Sociodynamics—the Stoketon Group.”
“He invited you in on that, did he?”
“He did more than just invite me,” Jeebee answered. “He’d actually written me into the grant, with the grant paying my salary. All that was required after that was for the university to give me its blessing—award me a nominal academic title that made me eligible for fringe benefits and gave me access to their libraries; that went along with the faculty post. At Stoketon, I was a resident research fellow with a permanent position—as distinguished from the experts we had, who came, stayed for a while, and then left.”
“I get the idea you liked it there,” said Paul.
“I did,” Jeebee said, remembering, “I really did. I was kind of a maverick, or at least, a lot of them thought of me as sort of an oddball. But it’s great working with people who are good themselves; and we all got along very well. I think I really turned into something at Stoketon. Pity was, it was only along the lines of the academic work I was doing. As far as the outside world was concerned—the kind of thing I need to survive nowadays—I was just as much a loner and as much an innocent as I’d ever been. That was one of the reasons my neighbors chased me out, finally.”
“You weren’t going back to your brother’s until that happened?” said Paul.
“Oh yes. Of course I was,” said Jeebee. “The Collapse had hit. We’d no connection with any of the cities around us anymore. The water was off. There was no more electricity. Stoketon was turning into a little, tight, armed community. The thing was, I wasn’t really part of it. I’d almost been part of it, when a woman who lived there worked for me. But when she quit, it was a signal—even though I didn’t know it at the time—that I was being cut off and labeled an outsider. Luckily, I’d already started accumulating some things to go west with—including an electric-driven bike. Anyway, when I finally did leave, it was with some of them shooting at me.” He hesitated.
“I lost the bike a couple of weeks back in a small town, where I stopped, thinking maybe I could do some trading. That was the same town where I picked up Wolf.”
He fell silent again, remembering.
“Well,” Paul said at last, his eyes on the ears of his horses, “I’d say you’ve done some growing since you left that Stoketon of yours.”
After that they had driven on in silence for some little while before talking of something else.
Now, Jeebee found them pausing as he had recommended to Merry, and it turned their early lunch into something almost like a picnic. Normally lunches were eaten as they moved—sandwiches and hot coffee, and occasionally a piece of pie or cake baked the evening before. In this case, Nick, whose turn it was to cook, again set up a folding card table on the grass beside the wagon, with chairs at it for all of them, and served them soup, fried potatoes that had been roasted in the open fire the night before, and ham, covered with a homemade but very tasty gravy.
Jeebee did not require telling that part of all this, including the table outside on the grass, was intentional. The smells of the cooking were meant to reach up and tickle the noses of Greta and Wolf, back among the trees.
How much of what followed was due to this, or to other factors, was impossible to tell, but they were just finishing up their food when Greta showed herself at the edge of the trees. She came backing out of the woods with her tail wagging furiously.
She dropped to her elbows, her hindquarters still high, as though bowing to an unseen playmate, then darted in and out of the woods in a series of clownish dashes.
Jeebee went to get his binoculars and stood by the table, trying to focus on the darkness of the woods. He was positive that Wolf was in there, and that this behavior of Greta’s was addressed to him. But the difference between light and shadow, particularly in the bright noonday, kept him from seeing very far in among the trees, even with the help of the binoculars—though they were little enough help at that.
After a moment, he felt the binoculars taken out of his hands and something round and a good deal heavier pushed into them. He looked down, and saw that Paul had handed him a pair of good binoculars, much larger and heavier than the opera glasses.
Jeebee put these to his eyes and eventually was able to make out a shadow that, as he studied it, resolved itself finally into Wolf. Just inside the shadow of the nearest trees, Wolf was standing, side on to Greta and the wagon beyond. He was the picture of canine perplexity. His near forepaw was slightly raised as though unwilling to advance one more step beyond the security of the tree line. His head, turned toward Greta and the rest of them, was held high and his ears were erect and forward, in an expression of extreme alertness.
It seemed to Jeebee that even at this distance, he could see the sharp brightness of Wolf’s eyes, holding them all in tight focus. Jeebee thought he saw Wolf quiver as he stood. Nonetheless, he did not move toward the wagon.
Jeebee passed the binoculars back to Paul.
“It seems I’m not the only one who’d like to get Wolf down here for a bit,” he said.
Paul put the binoculars to his eyes, adjusted them, and watched for a moment.
“He’s coming out, I think,” he said at last.
Indeed, in that moment, Wolf did move forward enough so that the sunlight revealed him clearly to the unaided eye at the edge of the trees. He stood, still in the sideways alert stance, looking down at Greta. After a moment he turned and took a few more steps toward them, then stopped and backed up.
“Greta!” Merry called. “Greta, come back here!”
Her call broke the tension between dog and wolf upon the hillside. Wolf turned at the first word and vanished into the darkness. Greta straightened up from her play pose and stood looking after him for a moment, then slowly turned and trotted back down to the wagon, stopping every so often to turn and look back at the woods. But Wolf did not reappear.
When she reached Merry, she fawned on her, crouching before her and clearly apologizing for whatever she had done that Merry had considered wrong.
“That’s all right,” Merry said, stooping over to pet her. “Good girl.” Greta launched herself upward to lick at Merry’s face in an ecstasy of joy at being forgiven.
