“Why do we serve them even when we know? (And most of us do know.) There are so many reasons, especially for an author in middle life. The children, medical expenses, maybe the cost of a divorce—who turns down a fast check?”
And:
“Where am I now? Put ‘where’ in quotes. And ‘when.’ (See Rodgers and Hart.) And look up that Ghost speech again. And there’s something in Matthew, I think. One of the parables—about the unjust steward and how it’s a good idea to make friends out of wicked powers. Because . . .”
It was the Pernod. And whatever the—the Pernod said about middle-aged reasons, I shall not sell this story. I checked the parable of the unjust steward.
. . .for they shall receive you into their everlasting dwellings.
They Bite
There was no path, only the almost vertical ascent. Crumbled rock for a few yards, with the roots of sage finding their scanty life in the dry soil. Then jagged outcroppings of crude crags, sometimes with accidental footholds, sometimes with overhanging and untrustworthy branches of greasewood, sometimes with no aid to climbing but the leverage of your muscles and the ingenuity of your balance.
The sage was as drably green as the rock was drably brown. The only color was the occasional rosy spikes of a barrel cactus.
Hugh Tallant swung himself up onto the last pinnacle. It had a deliberate, shaped look about it—a petrified fortress of Lilliputians, a Gibraltar of pygmies. Tallant perched on its battlements and unslung his field glasses.
The desert valley spread below him. The tiny cluster of buildings that was Oasis, the exiguous cluster of palms that gave name to the town and shelter to his own tent and to the shack he was building, the dead-ended highway leading straightforwardly to nothing, the oiled roads diagramming the vacant blocks of an optimistic subdivision.
Tallant saw none of these. His glasses were fixed beyond the oasis and the town of Oasis on the dry lake. The gliders were clear and vivid to him, and the uniformed men busy with them were as sharply and minutely visible as a nest of ants under glass. The training school was more than usually active. One glider in particular, strange to Tallant, seemed the focus of attention. Men would come and examine it and glance back at the older models in comparison.
Only the corner of Tallant’s left eye was not preoccupied with the new glider. In that corner something moved, something little and thin and brown as the earth. Too large for a rabbit, much too small for a man. It darted across that corner of vision, and Tallant found gliders oddly hard to concentrate on.
He set down the bifocals and deliberately looked about him. His pinnacle surveyed the narrow, flat area of the crest. Nothing stirred. Nothing stood out against the sage and rock but one barrel of rosy spikes. He took up the glasses again and resumed his observations. When he was done, he methodically entered the results in the little black notebook.
His hand was still white. The desert is cold and often sunless in winter. But it was a firm hand, and as well trained as his eyes, fully capable of recording faithfully the designs and dimensions which they had registered so accurately.
Once his hand slipped, and he had to erase and redraw, leaving a smudge that displeased him. The lean, brown thing had slipped across the edge of his vision again. Going toward the east edge, he would swear, where that set of rocks jutted like the spines on the back of a stegosaur.
Only when his notes were completed did he yield to curiosity, and even then with cynical self-reproach. He was physically tired, for him an unusual state, from this daily climbing and from clearing the ground for his shack-to-be. The eye muscles play odd nervous tricks. There could be nothing behind the stegosaur’s armor.
There was nothing. Nothing alive and moving. Only the torn and half-plucked carcass of a bird, which looked as though it had been gnawed by some small animal.
It was halfway down the hill—hill in Western terminology, though anywhere east of the Rockies it would have been considered a sizable mountain—that Tallant again had a glimpse of a moving figure.
But this was no trick of a nervous eye. It was not little nor thin nor brown. It was tall and broad and wore a loud red-and-black lumberjacket. It bellowed, “Tallant!” in a cheerful and lusty voice.
Tallant drew near the man and said, “Hello.” He paused and added, “Your advantage, I think.”
The man grinned broadly. “Don’t know me? Well, I daresay ten years is a long time, and the California desert ain’t exactly the Chinese rice fields. How’s stuff? Still loaded down with Secrets for Sale?”
Tallant tried desperately not to react to that shot, but he stiffened a little. “Sorry. The prospector getup had me fooled. Good to see you again, Morgan.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Just having my little joke,” he smiled. “Of course you wouldn’t have no serious reason for mountain climbing around a glider school, now, would you? And you’d kind of need field glasses to keep an eye on the pretty birdies.”
“I’m out here for my health.” Tallant’s voice sounded unnatural even to himself.
“Sure, sure. You were always in it for your health. And come to think of it, my own health ain’t been none too good lately. I’ve got me a little cabin way to hell-and-gone around here, and I do me a little prospecting now and then. And somehow it just strikes me, Tallant, like maybe I hit a pretty good lode today.”
“Nonsense, old man. You can see—”
“I’d sure hate to tell any of them Army men out at the field some of the stories I know about China and the kind of men I used to know out there. Wouldn’t cotton to them stories a bit, the Army wouldn’t. But if I was to have a drink too many and get talkative-like—”
“Tell you what,” Tallant suggested brusquely. “It’s getting
