Player Piano (19 page)

D
OCTOR
P
AUL
P
ROTEUS
was a man with a secret. Most of the time it was an exhilarating secret, and he extracted momentary highs of joy from it while dealing with fellow members of the system in the course of his job. At the beginning and close of each item of business he thought, “To hell with you.”

It was to hell with them, to hell with everything. This secret detachment gave him a delightful sense of all the world’s being a stage. Waiting until the time when he and Anita would be in mental shape to quit and start a better life, Paul acted out his role as manager of the Ilium Works. Outwardly, as manager, he was unchanged; but inwardly he was burlesquing smaller, less free souls who would have taken the job seriously.

He had never been a reading man, but now he was developing an appetite for novels wherein the hero lived vigorously and out-of-doors, dealing directly with nature, dependent upon basic cunning and physical strength for survival—woodsmen, sailors, cattlemen….

He read of these heroes with a half-smile on his lips. He knew his enjoyment of them was in a measure childish, and he doubted that a life could ever be as clean, hearty, and satisfying as those in the books. Still and all, there was a basic truth underlying the tales, a primitive ideal to which he could aspire. He wanted to deal, not with society, but only with Earth as God had given it to man.

“Is that a good book, Doctor Proteus?” said Doctor Katharine Finch, his secretary. She’d come into his office carrying a large gray cardboard box.

“Oh—hello, Katharine.” He laid the book down with a smile. “Not great literature; I’ll promise you that. Pleasant relaxation is all. All about bargemen on the old Erie Ship Canal.” He tapped the broad, naked chest of the hero on the book jacket. “Don’t make men like that any more. Well, what’s in the box? That for me?”

“It’s your shirts. They just came by mail.”

“Shirts?”

“For the Meadows.”

“Oh,
those
things. Open them up. What color are they?”

“Blue. You’re on the Blue Team this year.” She laid the shirts on the desk.

“Oh, no!” Paul stood and held one of the deep blue T-shirts at arm’s length. “Dear God in heaven—no!” Across the chest of each of the shirts, in blazing gold letters, was the word “Captain.” “Katharine, they can’t do this to me.”

“It’s an honor, isn’t it?”

“Honor!” He exhaled noisily and shook his head. “For fourteen days, Katharine, I, Queen of the May and captain of the Blue Team, am going to have to lead my men in group singing, marches, greased-pole climbing, volley ball, horseshoes, softball, golf-ball driving, badminton, trapshooting, capture the flag, Indian wrestling, touch football, shuffle-board, and trying to throw the other captains into the lake. Agh!”

“Doctor Shepherd was very pleased.”

“He always has been fond of me.”

“No—I mean he was pleased about being a captain himself.”

“Oh? Shepherd is a captain?” Paul’s raised eyebrows were part of an old reflex, the wary reaction of a man who has been in the system for a good many years. Being chosen to captain one of the four teams
was
an honor, if a man gave a damn about such things. It was a way the higher brass had of showing favor, and, politically, Shepherd’s having been chosen
a captain was a striking business. Shepherd had always been a nobody at the Meadows, whose chief fame was as a pretty fair softball pitcher. Now, suddenly, he was a captain. “Which team?”

“Green. His shirts are on my desk. Green with orange lettering. Very vivid.”

“Green, eh?” Well, if one cared about such things, Green was the lowest in the unofficial hierarchy of teams. It was one of those things that was understood without anyone’s saying anything about it. Having looked this far into the piddling matter, Paul congratulated himself for having been named captain of the Blue, which, again, everybody seemed to feel was the team with the most tone. Not that it made any difference at all any more. Made none. Silly. To hell with it.

“They certainly give you enough shirts,” said Katharine, counting. “Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.”

“Nothing like enough. For two weeks you drink and sweat, drink and sweat, drink and sweat, until you feel like a sump pump. This is a day’s supply at the outside.”

“Uh-huh. Well, sorry, that’s all there is in the box except this book.” She held up the volume, which looked like a hymnal.

“Hi ho—
The Meadows Songbook,”
said Paul wearily. He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Pick a song, Katharine, any song, and read it aloud.”

“Here’s the song for the Green Team, Doctor Shepherd’s team. To the tune of the
William Tell Overture.
”

“The whole overture?”

“That’s what it says here.”

“Well, go ahead and give it a try.”

She cleared her throat, started to sing softly, thought better of it, and lapsed into plain reading:

“That’ll put hair on your chest, Katharine.”

“Oh, gosh but it’ll be fun! You
know
you’ll love it when you get up there.”

Paul opened his eyes to see that Katharine was reading another song, and her eyes shone with excitement and she rocked her head from side to side. “What’s that you’re reading now?”

“Oh, I wish I were a man! I was just reading your song.”

“My song?”

“The Blue Team’s song.”

“Oh—
my
song. By all means, let’s hear it.”

She whistled a few bars of “Indiana,” and then sang, this time heartily:

“Hmmm.”

“And you
will
win, too. I know you will,” said Katharine.

“You going to be at the Mainland?” The Mainland was a camp for wives and children, and women employees whose development wasn’t yet complete, across the water from the Meadows, the island where the men went.

“That’s as close as I can get to the real thing,” said Katharine wistfully.

“That’s close enough, believe me. Tell me, is Bud Calhoun going to be there?”

She colored, and he was instantly sorry he’d asked. “He had an invitation, I know,” she said, “but that was before—” She shrugged unhappily. “And you know what the
Manual
says.”

“The machines can’t stand him any more,” said Paul heavily. “Why don’t they build in a gimmick that will give a man a free drink before he gets the ax? Do you know what he’s up to now?”

“I haven’t talked to him or seen him, but I did call up Matheson’s office to find out what was going to be done with him. They said he was going to be a project supervisor for the—” her voice caught “—for the Reeks and Wrecks.” Emotion was giving her a rough going-over now, and she left Paul’s office hurriedly.

“I’m sure he’ll do well,” Paul called after her. “I’ll bet we won’t know our city a year from now, with him thinking up things for the Reeks and Wrecks to do.”

Her phone rang, and she relayed the information to Paul that Doctor Edward Finnerty was at the gate, wanting in.

“Bind his hands and feet, put a bag over his head, and have four men bring him up. Fixed bayonets, of course. And be sure and get a picture of it for Shepherd.”

Ten minutes later, Finnerty was escorted into Paul’s office by an armed guard.

“For heaven’s sake—look at you!” said Paul. Finnerty’s hair was cut and combed, his face was pink, shining, and shaved, and his seersucker suit, while worn and a poor fit, was crisp and sanitary-looking.

Finnerty looked at him blankly, as though he couldn’t guess what the fuss was about. “I’d like to borrow your car.”

“Promise to wipe off the fingerprints when you’re through?”

“Oh—you’re sore about that pistol business, I suppose. Sorry. I meant to throw it in the river.”

“You know about it, then?”

“Sure—and about how Shepherd turned in a report on you, too, telling how you let me in the plant without an escort. Tough.” Finnerty, after less than a week in Homestead, had taken on rough, swashbuckling mannerisms—glaringly synthetic. He also seemed to be getting a real kick out of being a liability as an associate for anyone respectable.

Paul was amazed, as he had been amazed at Kroner’s, by how much others knew about his affairs. “How do you know so much?”

“You’d be surprised who knows what, and how they find out. Surprise the pants off you to know what goes on in this world. My eyes are just opening.” He leaned forward earnestly. “And, Paul—I’m finding myself. At last I’m finding myself.”

“What do you look like, Ed?”

“Those dumb bastards across the river—they’re
my
kind of people. They’re real, Paul, real!”

Paul had never doubted that they were real, and so found himself without any sort of comment or emotional response for Finnerty’s important announcement. “Well, I’m glad you’ve found yourself after all these years,” he said. Finnerty had been finding himself ever since Paul had known him. And, weeks later, he’d always deserted that self with angry cries of impostor, and discovered another. “That’s swell, Ed.”

“Well, anyway, how about the keys to the car?”

“Is it fair to ask what for?”

“This is a milk run. I want to pick up my clothes and stuff at your house and run them over to Lasher’s.”

“You’re living with Lasher?”

Finnerty nodded. “Surprising how well we hit it off, right from the first.” His tone implied the barest trace of contempt for Paul’s shallow way of life. “Keys?”

Paul threw them to him. “How do you plan to use the rest of your life, Ed?”

“With the people. That’s my place.”

“You know the cops are after you for not registering?”

“Spice of life.”

“You can be jailed, you know.”

“You’re afraid to live, Paul. That’s what’s the matter with you. You know about Thoreau and Emerson?”

“A little. About as much as you did before Lasher primed you, I’ll bet.”

“Anyway, Thoreau was in jail because he wouldn’t pay a tax to support the Mexican War. He didn’t believe in the war. And Emerson came to jail to see him. ‘Henry,’ he said, ‘why are you here?’ And Thoreau said, ‘Ralph, why
aren’t
you here?’ ”

“I should want to go to jail?” said Paul, trying to get some sort of message for himself out of the anecdote.

“You shouldn’t let fear of jail keep you from doing what you believe in.”

“Well, it doesn’t.” Paul reflected that the big trouble, really, was finding something to believe in.

“All right, so it doesn’t.” There was weary disbelief in Finnerty’s voice. He was apparently getting bored with his convention-ridden former friend from the north side of the river. “Thanks for the car.”

“Any time.” Paul was relieved when the door closed behind the new—this week’s—Finnerty.

Katharine opened the door again. “He scares me,” she said.

“You needn’t be scared. He wastes all his energy on games with himself. There goes your phone.”

“It’s Doctor Kroner,” said Katharine. “Yes,” she said into the telephone, “Doctor Proteus is in.”

“Would you please put him on,” said Kroner’s secretary.

“Doctor Proteus speaking.”

“Doctor Proteus is on,” said Katharine.

“Just a moment. Doctor Kroner wishes to speak with him. Doctor Kroner, Doctor Proteus in Ilium is on the line.”

“Hello, Paul.”

“How do you do, sir.”

“Paul, about this Finnerty and Lasher business—” His playfully conspiratorial tone implied that the proposed prosecution of these two was sort of a practical joke. “Just wanted to tell you that I called Washington about it, to let them in on what we’re going to do, and they say we should hold off for a while. They say the whole thing ought to be well planned at the top level. It’s apparently bigger stuff than I thought.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s beginning to look like a problem nationwise, not just Iliumwise.”

Paul was pleased that there was to be a delay, but the reason for it was a surprise. “How could Finnerty get to be a problem nationwise or even Iliumwise? He’s only been here a few days.”

“Idle hands do the Devil’s work, Paul. He’s probably been getting into bad company, and it’s the bad company we’re really after. Anyway, the top brass wants in on whatever we do, and they want to have a meeting about it at the Meadows. Let’s see—sixteen days from now.”

“Fine,” said Paul, and added, in his mind, the imaginary seal he affixed to all official business these days—“And to hell with you.” He had no intention of turning informer on anyone. He would simply stall until he and Anita were fully prepared to say, “To hell with you, to hell with everything,” aloud.

“We think the world of you over here, Paul.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Kroner was silent for a moment. Suddenly he shouted into the phone, almost rupturing Paul’s eardrum.

“Beg your pardon, sir?” The message had been so loud as to be all pain and no sense.

Kroner chuckled, and lowered his voice a little. “I said, who’s going to win, Paul?”

“Win?”

“The Meadows, the Meadows! Who’s going to win?”

“Oh—the Meadows,” said Paul. It was a nightmarish conversation, with Kroner vehement and happy, and with Paul devoid of the vaguest notion as to what was being discussed.

“What team?” said Kroner, a shade peevishly.

“Oh. Oh! The
Blue Team
is going to win!” He filled his lungs. “Blue!” he shouted.

“You bet your life we’re going to win!” Kroner shouted back. “The Blues are behind you, Cap’n!” Kroner, then, was on the Blue Team, too. He started to sing in his rumbling basso: