She shrugged. “Four or five months ago when he started all this I thought they could handle it—I really did.” When Peters looked at her questioningly she added, “The companies. I thought they could hold things together. So did Lou, I guess.”
“So did I,” Peters said.
“I know. You’re a lot like Lou—when he was younger. That’s what I meant when I said you reminded me of somebody: Lou when he was younger.”
“You couldn’t have known him then,” Peters told her.
“I didn’t. But about a year ago he showed me some tapes he had. They were training tapes he made twenty or twenty-five years ago. They showed him explaining some kind of machine; he was an engineer originally, you know. He looked a lot like you—he was a handsome man, and I guess he wanted me to see that he had looked like that once.”
“You sleep with him, don’t you?”
“I used to. Up until about six weeks ago. Now I’m trying to figure out why.”
Peters said, “I wasn’t asking you for an explanation.”
“I know,” the girl said. “You just wanted to find out if it was safe to fight with me, right?”
“Something like that.”
“The formal business power structure and the informal one.”
“Something like that.”
“You still think there’s a chance we’ll win and you’ll have a career with U.S.”
Peters shrugged. “With my education I don’t see anything else to shoot for— that’s something I didn’t understand until recently: you don’t get that degree; it gets you. Now, for me, it’s this or nothing.” He moved away from the vidlink and sat down beside her on the bed. The spread was satin, and he began to stroke it with his fingers.
“You think people like Burglund are going to pull us through? I mean, really?”
Peters was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “He won’t, but I still don’t know why not.”
“I do,” Clio said. “I’ve been helping Lou deal with some of them. What do you think it takes to be a successful businessman? Enterprise, lots of guts, hard work, high intelligence—right?”
“Roughly.”
“You want to tell me how you use those things to manage a tree farm in Georgia?”
“I don’t know,” Peters said. “I don’t know anything about the lumber business.”
“Neither does he. Or if he does, it doesn’t do him any good. Look, they’ve got all this land, with pines growing on it. When it starts getting mature—ready to cut—anyplace, people make them offers for it: paper mills and lumber companies. And since some of it gets mature every year they know quite a bit about price—all they have to do is look up last year’s bids. When one comes in that looks good, they can tell that company to go ahead if it’s a cash deal, and if it isn’t they can look up their credit in Dun and Bradstreet. They’ve got a regular crew that comes around and replants when the cutting’s done.”
“You make it sound easy,” Peters said.
“No, it isn’t easy—but it isn’t your kind of hard either. It takes a special kind of men who can go year in and year out without rocking the boat in any way. People who never get so bored with it they get careless, and that know when they have to bow to the state legislatures and when they ought to threaten to fight a new law through the courts. But now you’re telling them to get out and recruit soldiers—well, most of them were in the army themselves at one time or another, they were majors and colonels and all that, at desks, but they don’t know anything about soldiers, or thinking, or running anything that doesn’t go by routine. We used to say that what we wanted was initiative and creativity and all those things, just like we said we wanted kindness and human values, and the American frontier, while it lasted, actually encouraged and rewarded them, but we’ve been paying off on something else for a hundred years or so now, and now that’s all we’ve got.” Peters had slipped his hand between her thighs, and she looked down at it and said, “That took you a long time.”
He said, “I didn’t want to interrupt you.”
And later, “We still might do it.” He took her hand in the dark. “If we can change things just a little before it’s too late we still might do it.” The girl’s body blossomed fire that engulfed and scarred and clung; naked and burning he reached the center of the room beyond, but he fell there, on the Moroccan carpet that covered the red tiles, and, though they poured tepid water on him from the spent ice buckets, died there.
AFTERWORD
This one taught me a lesson. I needed a story, lacked an idea, and resolved to steal one. Damon Runyon was good, and I had a Runyon collection; I would open the book at random, read the story, and rewrite it as SF. (If this sounds desperate, it was.)
Opened at random, the book palmed off on me “A Light in France,” which may well be the only bad story Runyon ever wrote. I clenched my teeth, swore a mighty swear, and plowed on— eventually throwing out just about everything in “A Light in France.” You have read the result. I hope you enjoyed it.
THE DEATH OF DR. ISLAND
