The Hammer of Eden (11 page)

“Maybe I—”

He allowed a flash of anger to show. “No!”

“Okay, okay,” she said hastily. She bit her lip.

Dusty said excitedly: “Hey, this is where Daddy lives!”

“That’s right, honey,” Melanie said. She pointed to a low-rise stucco apartment building, and Priest parked outside it.

Melanie turned to Dusty, but Priest forestalled her. “He stays in the car.”

“I’m not sure how safe—”

“He’s got the dog.”

“He might get scared.”

Priest twisted around to speak to Dusty. “Hey, Lieutenant, I need you and Ensign Spirit to stand guard over our spacecraft while First Officer Mom and I go inside the spaceport.”

“Am I going to see Daddy?”

“Of course. But I’d like a few minutes with him first. Think you can handle the guard duty assignment?”

“You bet!”

“In the space navy, you have to say ‘Aye, sir!’ not ‘You bet.’ ”

“Aye, sir!”

“Very good. Carry on.” Priest got out of the car.

Melanie got out, but she still looked troubled. “For Christ’s sake, don’t let Michael know we left his kid in the car,” she said.

Priest did not reply.
You might be afraid of offending Michael, baby, but I don’t give a flying fuck
.

Melanie took her purse off the seat and slung it over her shoulder. They walked up the path to the building door. Melanie pressed the entry phone buzzer and held it down.

Her husband was a night owl, she had told Priest. He liked to work in the evening and sleep late. That was why they had chosen to get here before seven o’clock in the morning. Priest hoped Michael would be too bleary-eyed to wonder whether their visit had a hidden purpose. If he got suspicious, stealing his disk might be impossible.

Melanie said he was a workaholic, Priest recalled as they waited for Michael to answer. He spent his days driving all over California, checking the instruments that measured small geological movements in the San Andreas and other faults, and the nights inputting the data into his computer.

But what had finally driven her to leave him was an incident with Dusty. She and the child had been vegetarian for two years, and they would eat only organic food and health store products. Melanie believed the strict diet reduced Dusty’s allergy attacks, although Michael was skeptical. Then one day she had discovered that Michael had bought Dusty a hamburger. To her, that was like poisoning the child. She still shook with fury when she told the story. She had left that night, taking Dusty with her.

Priest thought she might be right about the allergy attacks. The commune had been vegetarian ever since the early seventies, when vegetarianism was eccentric. At the time Priest had doubted the value of the diet but had been in favor of a discipline that set them apart from the world outside. Their grapes were grown without chemicals simply because they had been unable to afford sprays, so they had made a virtue of necessity and called their wine organic, which turned out to be a strong selling point. But he could not help noticing that after a quarter century of this life the communards were a remarkably healthy bunch. It was rare for them to have a medical emergency they could not cope with themselves. So he was now convinced. But, unlike Melanie, he was not obsessive about diet. He still liked fish, and now and again he would unintentionally eat meat in a soup or a sandwich and would shrug it off. But if Melanie discovered
that her mushroom omelet had been cooked in bacon fat, she would throw up.

A grouchy voice came through the intercom. “Who is it?”

“Melanie.”

There was a buzz, and the building door opened. Priest followed Melanie inside and up the stairs. An apartment was open on the second floor. Michael Quercus stood in the doorway.

Priest was surprised by his appearance. He had been expecting a weedy professorial type, probably bald, wearing brown clothes. Quercus was around thirty-five. Tall and athletic, he had a head of short black curls and the shadow of a heavy beard on his cheeks. He wore only a towel around his waist, so Priest could see that he had broad, well-muscled shoulders and a flat belly.
They must have made a handsome couple
.

As Melanie reached the top of the stairs, Michael said: “I’ve been very worried—where the hell have you been?”

Melanie said: “Can’t you put some clothes on?”

“You didn’t say you had company,” he replied coolly. He stayed in the doorway. “Are you going to answer my question?”

Priest could see he was barely controlling his stored-up rage.

“I’m here to explain,” Melanie said. She was enjoying Michael’s fury.
What a screwed-up marriage
. “This is my friend Priest. May we come in?”

Michael stared at her angrily. “This had better be pretty fucking good, Melanie.” He turned his back and walked inside.

Melanie and Priest followed him into a small hallway. He opened the bathroom door, took a dark blue cotton robe off a hook, and slipped into it, taking his time. He discarded his towel and tied the belt. Then he led them into the living room.

This was clearly his office. As well as a couch and a TV set, there was a computer screen and keyboard on the table and a row of electronic machines with blinking lights on a deep shelf. Somewhere in those bland pale gray boxes was stored the information Priest needed. He felt tantalized. There was no way he could get at it unaided. He had to depend on Melanie.

One wall was entirely taken up with a huge map. “What the hell is that?” Priest said.

Michael just gave him a who-the-fuck-are-you look and said nothing, but Melanie answered the question. “It’s the San Andreas fault.” She pointed. “Beginning at Point Arena lighthouse a hundred miles north of here in Mendocino County, all the way south and east, past Los Angeles and inland to San Bernardino. A crack in the earth’s crust, seven hundred miles long.”

Melanie had explained Michael’s work to Priest. His specialty was the calculation of pressure at different places along seismic faults. It was partly a matter of precise measurement of small movements in the earth’s crust, partly a question of estimating the accumulated energy based on the lapse of time since the last earthquake. His work had won him academic prizes. But a year ago he had quit the university to start his own business, a consultancy offering advice on earthquake hazards to construction firms and insurance companies.

Melanie was a computer wizard and had helped Michael devise his setup. She had programmed his machine to back up every day between four
A.M
. and six
A.M.
, when he was asleep. Everything on his computer, she had explained to Priest, was copied onto an optical disk. When he switched on his screen in the morning, he would take the disk out of the disk drive and put it in a fireproof box. That way, if his computer crashed or the house burned down, his precious data would not be lost.

It was a wonder to Priest that information about the San Andreas fault could be kept on a little disk, but then books were just as much of a mystery. He simply had to accept what he was told. The important thing was that with Michael’s disk Melanie would be able to tell Priest where to place the seismic vibrator.

Now they just had to get Michael out of the room long enough for Melanie to snatch the disk from the optical drive.

“Tell me, Michael,” Priest said. “All this stuff.” He indicated the map and the computers with a wave of his hand, then fixed Michael with the Look. “How does it make you
feel?”

Most people got flustered when Priest gave them the Look and
asked them a personal question. Sometimes they gave a revealing answer because they were so disconcerted. But Michael seemed immune. He just looked blankly at Priest and said: “It doesn’t make me
feel
anything, I use it.” Then he turned to Melanie and said: “Now, are you going to tell me why you disappeared?”

Arrogant prick
.

“It’s very simple,” she said. “A friend offered me and Dusty the use of her cabin in the mountains.” Priest had told her not to say which mountains. “It was a late cancellation of a rental.” Her tone of voice indicated that she did not see why she had to explain something so simple. “We can’t afford vacations, so I grabbed at the chance.”

That was when Priest had met her. She and Dusty had been wandering in the forest and got completely lost. Melanie was a city girl and could not even find her way by the sun. Priest was out on his own that day, fishing for sockeye salmon. It was a perfect spring afternoon, sunny and mild. He had been sitting on the bank of a stream, smoking a joint, when he heard a child crying.

He knew it was not one of the commune children, whose voices he would have recognized. Following the sound, he found Dusty and Melanie. She was close to tears. When she saw Priest she said: “Thank God, I thought we were going to die out here!”

He had stared at her for a long moment. She was a little weird, with her long red hair and green eyes, but in the cutoff jeans and a halter top she looked good enough to eat. It was magical, coming across a damsel in distress like that when he was alone in the wilderness. If it had not been for the kid, Priest would have tried to lay her right then and there, on the springy mattress of fallen pine needles beside the splashing stream.

That was when he had asked her if she was from Mars. “No,” she said, “Oakland.”

Priest knew where the vacation cabins were. He picked up his fishing rod and led her through the forest, following the trails and ridges that were so familiar to him. It was a long walk, and on the way he talked to
her, asking sympathetic questions, giving his engaging grin now and again, and found out all about her.

She was a woman in deep trouble.

She had left her husband and moved in with the bass guitarist in a hot rock band; but the bassist had thrown her out after a few weeks. She had no one to turn to: her father was dead, and her mother lived in New York with a guy who had tried to get into bed with Melanie the one night she had slept at their apartment. She had exhausted the hospitality of her friends and borrowed all the money they could afford to lend. Her career was a washout, and she was working in a supermarket, stacking shelves, leaving Dusty with a neighbor all day. She lived in a slum that was so dirty, it gave the kid constant allergy attacks. She needed to move to a place with clean air, but she could not find a job outside the city. She was up a blind alley and desperate. She had been trying to calculate the exact overdose of sleeping pills that would kill her and the child when a girlfriend had offered her this vacation.

Priest liked people in trouble. He knew how to relate to them. All you had to do was offer them what they needed, and they became your slaves. He was uncomfortable with confident, self-sufficient types: they were too hard to control.

By the time they reached the cabin it was suppertime. Melanie made pasta and salad, then put Dusty to bed. When the child was asleep, Priest seduced her on the rug. She was frantic with desire. All her pent-up emotional charge was released by sex, and she made love as if it were her last chance ever, scratching his back and biting his shoulders and pulling him deep inside her as if she wanted to swallow him up. It was the most exciting encounter Priest could remember.

Now her supercilious handsome-professor husband was complaining. “That was
five weeks
ago. You can’t just take my son and disappear without even a phone call!”

“You could have called me.”

“I didn’t know where you were!”

“I have a mobile.”

“I tried. I couldn’t get an answer.”

“The service was cut off because you didn’t pay the bill. You’re supposed to pay it, we agreed.”

“I was a couple of days late, that’s all! They must have turned it back on.”

“Well, you called when it was cut off, I guess.”

This family row was not bringing Priest closer to that disk, he fretted.
Got to get Michael out of the room, some way, any way
. He interrupted to say: “Why don’t we all have some coffee?” He wanted Michael to go into the kitchen to make it.

Michael jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Help yourself,” he said brusquely.

Shit
.

Michael turned back to Melanie. “It doesn’t matter
why
I couldn’t reach you. I couldn’t. That’s why you have to call me before taking Dusty away on vacation.”

Melanie said: “Listen, Michael, there’s something I haven’t told you yet.”

Michael looked exasperated, then sighed and said: “Sit down, why don’t you.” He sat behind his desk.

Melanie sank into a corner of the couch, folding her legs beneath her in a familiar way that made Priest think this had been her regular seat. Priest perched on the arm of the couch, not wanting to sit lower than Michael.
I can’t even figure out which of those machines is the disk drive. Come on, Melanie, lose the damn husband!

Michael’s tone of voice suggested he had been through scenes like this with Melanie before. “All right, make your pitch,” he said wearily. “What is it this time?”

“I’m going to move to the mountains, permanently. I’m living with Priest and a bunch of people.”

“Where?”

Priest answered that question. He did not want Michael to know where they lived. “It’s in Humboldt County.” That was in redwood country at the northern end of California. In fact the commune was in
Sierra County, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, near the eastern border of the state. Both were far from Berkeley.

Michael was outraged. “You can’t take Dusty to live hundreds of miles away from his father!”

“There’s a reason,” Melanie persisted. “In the last five weeks, Dusty hasn’t had a single allergy attack. He’s healthy in the mountains, Michael.”

Priest added: “It’s probably the pure air and water. No pollution.”

Michael was skeptical. “It’s the desert, not the mountains, that normally suits people with allergies.”

“Don’t talk to me about
normally!”
Melanie flared. “I can’t go to the desert—I don’t have any money. This is the only place I can afford where Dusty can be healthy!”