‘No, I’m sorry. I was violated in my teens by an ectomorph.’
He shook his head. ‘Trying to police the whole damn world, and a woman’s not even safe on the street.’
She introduced herself. She was Mrs. Haggerty, she said, from New Bedford. Her husband was a whaler.
* * *
Madeleine Lennox gave a shivery little gasp and said something, her lips moving against his. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘You remembered right where they were. Oooooh!’
He was conscious of momentary wonder; he must be programmed by punch cards. They lay nude in each other’s arms in the darkness; he had a leg thrust between her thighs while his fingertips softly brushed the erogenous zones of her back. She jumped, and shivered again.
He was away a lot, Haggerty went on, but it was a good job challengewise, with the usual retirement, stock options, country club membership, expense account, and so on. Sparm, Inc., was one of the older companies with a reputation for being a little on the stodgy side, but it had been taken over by a conglomerate, shaken up, and given a transfusion of new blood, so it was a pretty gung-ho outfit and on the move, with plenty of room on the top side for a man who could carry the ball.
‘He’s just been picked to head up R and D,’ she said, ‘and I hardly see him from one month to the next. He’s all wrapped up in a new white whale they’re just getting off the drawing board and into hardware. The oil’s much lower in cholesterol, and there’s a big defense contract coming up as soon as they iron the bugs out of the polyunsaturated napalm they’re working on.’
He winced at the subliminal flash of the red Porsche as it spun out and went through the guardrail at a hundred miles an hour. Now and then in an unguarded moment some random word would get to him, even through the bubble, and he’d see Gerry’s face as he’d seen it that last time less than an hour before she was killed, the view itself no more than a flash, two or three seconds at most, as she looked at him and her stepmother with loathing and disgust before she wheeled and ran back through the house and they’d heard the Porsche go snarling out the driveway. It hadn’t burned; that wasn’t why the word ‘napalm’ had triggered it. It was her sense of outrage at the use of it, the bombing, the whole Vietnam war. She’d be proud of him now, too, he thought, and then wondered which
‘Did they come up with a revolutionary new deodorant just recently?’ he asked Haggerty. ‘It seems to me I read about it. The go-go funds discovered them, and the stock went up thirty points in a week.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, that was Sparm, Inc. And another spin-off from R and D and the white whale. But it wasn’t a deodorant; it was a revolutionary new filter that reduces tar and nicotine sixty-seven percent. It’s made of the baleen, mixed with sintered yak wool. He made a lot of money out of it by exercising his stock options, but sometimes I get the impression he’s married to that whale. And when he does get home—’
'I know, that damn wooden leg,’ Goddard said. ‘It must be awkward.’
‘It’s not really wood,’ Haggerty said. ‘Except for a Circassian walnut ferrule. Van Cleef and Arpels makes it. It’s anodized titanium with inlays of jade and Mexican opal, and the socket is lined with the belly fur of an unborn agouti. On a special order you can have it fitted with a jeweled clasp to carry your key to the executive washroom.’
He told her about the underground skyway, and how he had discovered this sanctuary, this peaceful subculture existing within the larger, hostile culture of the automobile dwellers. He was a writer, he said, doing research for an article for
In all bars except those in airports, you were marooned, he went on. You were safe enough as long as you were inside because the natives were disarmed at the doorway; this tradition had been established in the Old West even before the invention of the automobile, perhaps in anticipation of it, some prescience or foreboding that the day would come when there would be much more sophisticated weapons abroad in the land than the primitive and relatively harmless Peacemaker Colts and Frontier .45’s checked at the door in that happy era. And a Californian, forcibly shucked from his automobile and separated from it for any length of time, while prey to the same vague feelings of resentment and unease as an oyster removed from its shell, will, like the oyster, seldom attack. But, inevitably, bars close, or you have to leave one and move to another to escape some bore, and they’re out there by the hurtling millions, armed with Fords and Chevrolets and, for only dollars a month more, with Cadillacs. But from the airport bar you simply stepped out back, boarded a jet, and went to the one next door in San Diego, Portland, or Los Angeles, at thirty thousand feet.
Of course, at that altitude you did miss some of the beauties of the countryside, the beaneries, filling stations, used-car lots, neon, asphalt, smog, billboards, the proliferating acne of tract housing, and murmuring sylvan streams freighted with condoms and empty beer cans, but that was a small price to pay for being wafted from one sanctuary to another across four hundred miles of hostile territory whose populace was forever torn between devout but conflicting desires to maim you or sell you something. The ecology was simple; all airports had bars, nearly all had hotels, and all you needed was a drip-dry wardrobe and a few credit cards. And there was just enough challenge to keep it interesting; you had to
She agreed with him that something should be done for serious drinkers, and offered to help with the study. As a minority group, they’d been sadly neglected, and with the oncoming generation turning increasingly to pot and acid there was a very real danger they might become extinct, their entire culture lost forever. Only yesterday, in some bar, she’d heard a man order a frozen daiquiri.
To simplify the logistics of the operation he changed to bourbon too, and they carried a survival kit of three bottles in her luggage for the late hours of the night, morning horrors, and as insurance against election days, civil uprisings, or any natural catastrophe which might cause the bars to be closed. He had never known anybody who could drink as much as Haggerty and show as little effect of it except to talk, to talk incessantly, amusingly, and forever, apparently as a sort of perpetual exercise in the avoidance of all thought or of ever, in an unguarded moment, saying anything she meant. The night they’d shared the same room he had awakened toward dawn to see her sitting on the floor in pajamas, her cheek down on one arm spread across the seat of a chair while the hand slowly clenched and unclenched in agony.
‘I’m sorry, Haggerty,’ he said, for a moment forgetting the rules. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘That,’ she said, ‘is the first stupid thing I ever heard you say.’
She wasn’t entirely in accord with him, however, that the automobile dwellers were hostile. This fallacy, she believed, had grown out of the slipshod methods of some of the early investigators intent only on a quick doctorate and nailing down a grant to be off to Africa, and was based on nothing sounder than the fact that so many anthropologists had disappeared into the Californian countryside never to be heard of again. Subsequent studies had revealed that nearly all of them were alive and well in Los Angeles.
She explained this one night when they were finishing off a last bottle of Jack Daniels in her room. He’d forgotten which airport hotel it was, but it overlooked a freeway, and they were watching the endlessly hurtling projectiles curving past them.
‘All we can do,’ he said, ‘is pray that Slivovitz got through to Fort Huaracha. Can you keep loading the rifles while I deliver the baby?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you’re falling into the same error, and for the same reason, as Huysmann when he first advanced the hypothesis that it was some sort of primate equivalent of the lemming migration. He wasted a whole seventy-thousand-dollar grant trying to find where they were throwing themselves off the cliff, and backtracking to discover where they were springing out of the ground. He simply didn’t notice they were going in both directions. That’s why I can’t believe the intent of it is hostile at all. If they were chasing something, all eight lanes would be going the same way.’
Tieboldt did discover this, she went on, but he was just as baffled by it as Huysmann had been by overlooking it. It had already been established that they were highly sexed, and that they were a bartering people who subsisted by selling each other things they called goods and services. His theory was that it was a dance of some sort, a ritual evolved out of these aspects of their tribal heritage, but he could never come up with a satisfactory answer as to how either courtship or commerce could be carried on while they were going past each other in
