On, Off

He hung up.

Feet dragging, crushed at his impersonal tone, Desdemona unlocked the boardroom and pushed the button on the TV just as the wall clock registered 9 A.M. Oh, how she didn’t want to see this! No sooner had she gotten through the Hug door than all and sundry were whooping that the Monster had been caught. As if the cops in her squad car hadn’t been full of it! Now she would have to see what Carmine had been up to in the night marches, and she feared that. Presumably he was unhurt, but for three nights she had been eaten by worry, even terror. What would she do if he never came home again? Oh, what on earth had possessed her to declare her independence by hiking the weekend before his Ghost watch commenced? Why hadn’t she realized that he wouldn’t come home on Sunday night? All her hopes had been pinned on that as she walked the magic of the woods: how she would throw her arms around him and tell him she couldn’t live without him. But – no Carmine. Just the echoes of his richly red apartment.

The TV shimmered into life. Yes, there was the courthouse, surrounded by a crowd many hundreds strong, journalists everywhere, police everywhere. One cameraman from channel six apparently had found himself a perch on top of a van roof and could pan the whole scene; another was in the crowd, and a third on the sidewalk near an arriving squad car. She spotted Carmine standing with a big uniformed captain she recognized as Danny Marciano. Commissioner Silvestri was at the top of the courthouse steps looking very smart in a uniform twinkling with silver braid. Then from out of the back of the squad car emerged Dr. Charles Ponsonby. Her heart seeming to squeeze up, Desdemona watched with jaw dropped. Ye gods, Charles Ponsonby! A Hugger. Bob Smith’s oldest and best friend. I am witnessing, she thought, the extinction of the Hug. Are the Parson Governors watching this in New York City? Yes, of course they are! Our channel is a network affiliate. Have the Parson Governors found that escape clause? If they haven’t, they will redouble their efforts after this bombshell.

What happened next was so fast it seemed over before it had begun: the little black man, that hat saying WE HAVE SUFFERED, the sound of four shots, Charles Ponsonby going down, and Carmine deliberately putting himself in front of the little black man still holding a squat, ugly pistol. When Carmine did that as the cops all around slapped leather, Desdemona felt herself die, waiting frozen in time for the sound of a dozen guns reflexively cutting him down. His roar of “Hold your fire!” came clearly on the airwaves. Carmine stood miraculously unharmed, the cops were holstering their weapons and moving to grab the little black man, who made no attempt to evade them. She sat shivering, hands over her mouth, eyes starting from their sockets. Carmine, you fool! You idiot! You flaming soldier! You didn’t die – this time. But I am doomed to the fate of a soldier’s woman, always.

Whom to tell first? No, best tell them all at once, right this moment. The Hug had a speaker system: Desdemona used it to summon every Hugger to the lecture theater.

Then she went to Tamara’s office; someone would have to man the phones. Poor Tamara! A shadow of her old self since Keith Kyneton had slammed his door in her face. Even her hair seemed to have wasted away, lackluster and unkempt. She didn’t even react, just nodded and continued to sit staring into space.

The news of Charles Ponsonby’s secret activities broke upon the people in the lecture theater like a clap of thunder: gasps, exclamations, a degree of incredulity.

To Addison Forbes, it was God in the burning bush: with no Ponsonby or Smith in the way, the Hug would become his. Why would the Board of Governors search elsewhere when he was so eminently suitable? He had the clinical experience that drove researchers to produce, his reputation was international. The Board of Governors liked him. With Smith and Ponsonby gone, the Hug under Professor Addison Forbes would go on to bigger and better things! And who needed the conceited Great Panjandrum from India? The world was full of potential Nobel Prize winners.

Walter Polonowski hardly heard Desdemona’s crisply succinct summary; he was too depressed. Four kids from Paola, and a fifth coming up from Marian. With a wedding band looming, Marian was shedding her mistress’s skin to reveal a new epidermis striped in wifely colors. They are serpents, we are their victims.

To Maurice Finch, the news brought sorrow, but sorrow of a peaceful kind. He had always thought that to give up medicine would be tantamount to a death sentence, but the events of the past few months had taught him that this need not be so. His plants were patients too; his skilled and loving hands could tend them, heal them, help them multiply. Yes, life with Cathy on a chicken farm looked very good. And he’d beat those mushrooms yet.

Kurt Schiller was not surprised. He had never liked Charles Ponsonby, whom he had suspected of secret homosexuality; Chuck’s attitude was a little too subtly knowing, and the art whispered of a nightmare world beneath that anonymous exterior. Not its subject matter, more an emanation from Chuck. In Kurt’s book he had gone down as one of the chains-and-leather boys, heavily into pain, though Schiller had always assumed Chuck was on the receiving end. The passive type, scuttling around to serve some terrifying master. Well, evidently he, Kurt, had been wrong. Charles was a true sadist – had to be, to have done what he did to those poor children. As for himself, Kurt expected nothing. His credentials would guarantee him a post no matter what happened to the Hug, and he had the germ of an idea about transmitting diseases across the species barrier that he knew would excite the head of any research unit. Now that the photograph of Papa with Adolf Hitler was ashes on the hearth and his homosexuality was out in the open, he felt ready for the new life he intended to lead. Not in Holloman. In New York City, among his peers.

“Otis,” Tamara shouted from the door, “you’re needed at home, so get going! I couldn’t make hide nor hair out of what Celeste was saying, but it’s an emergency.”

Don Hunter and Billy Ho ranged themselves one on either side of Otis, helping him out of the row of seats.

“We’ll take him, Desdemona,” Don said. “Can’t have his wonky heart playing up if he’s needed.”

Cecil Potter watched channel six’s footage replayed on CBS in Massachusetts, Jimmy on his knee.

“Man, will you look at that?” he asked the monkey. “Uh-uh! Hooee! I am so glad to be outta there!”

When Carmine opened his door that evening Desdemona charged at him, weeping noisy tears, pummeling his chest angrily. Her nose was running and her eyes drowned.

Hugely gratified, he put her tenderly on the new sofa he had acquired because easy chairs were all very well and good for talk, but nothing beat a sofa for two people to smooch on. He let the storm of tears and ire abate, rocking her and murmuring, then used his handkerchief to clean her up.

“What was all that about?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“You!” she said, hiccoughing. “Bloody huh-huh-hero!”

“Not bloody, and no hero.”

“Bloody hero! Stepping in front to take the buh-buh-bullet! Oh, I could have killed you!”

“It’s great to see you too,” he said, laughing. “Now put up your feet and I’ll fix us a couple of snifters of X- O.”

“I knew I loved you,” she said later, calmed down, “but what a way to learn how much I love you! Carmine, I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have you in it.”

“Does this mean that you’d rather be Mrs. Carmine Delmonico than live in London?”

“It does.”

He kissed her with love, gratitude, humility. “I’ll try to make you a good husband, Desdemona, but you’ve already had a televised preview of what a cop’s life entails. The future won’t be any different – long hours, absences, stray bullets. However, I figure someone’s on my side. So far I’m still in one piece.”

“As long as you understand that whenever you do foolhardy things, I’ll bash you up.”

“I’m hungry” was his answer. “How about some Chinese?”

She heaved a huge sigh of satisfaction. “I’ve just realized that I’m not in danger anymore.” A tinge of anxiety crept into her voice. “Am I?”

“The danger’s over, I’d bet my career on it. But there’s no point in looking for a new apartment. I’m not letting you leave this one. Sin is in.”

“The trouble is,” he said to her as they lay in bed, “that so much of it remains a mystery. I doubt Ponsonby would ever have talked, but when he died all hope of that died too. Wesley le Clerc! Tomorrow’s problem.”

“You mean Leonard Ponsonby’s murder? The identity of the woman and child with the face?” He had told her everything.

“Yes. And who dug the tunnel, and how did Ponsonby ever get all that gear into his killing premises, from a generator to a bank vault door? Who did the plumbing? A major job! The floor of the place is thirty