Worlds (12 page)

“The one who died. I thought I saw her Friday night, the day before she died. You know I had to go to Washington.”

I nodded. He was part of a show in a gallery there.

“Thought I’d take the red-eye, save a couple of bucks. Went down to Penn to catch the two a.m. Going down the escalator to the train, she was coming up. She had a wig on, but no way you could disguise that nose.”

“Sure it was her?”

“I sort of half waved, then caught myself. She saw me and looked away.”

“What are you driving at?”

“Don’t you see? James gave her an assignment in Denver. Remember? And here she is, sneaking in from Washington at two in the morning. And the next day she’s dead.”

“My God.”

“You see? It’s too much of a coincidence. It’s possible, just possible, that she did commit suicide. Not likely.”

I held him more tightly. “Somebody found out she was… working for the government.”

“A counterspy, double agent, whatever. What probably happened was, they had somebody following me, checking me out. Saw her, reported… maybe she was under suspicion anyhow. They force-fed her some pills and washed them down with booze.”

“The Times
said there was a suicide note.”

“Right. In her typewriter.”

The door to the shower room slammed and I felt a chill down my back, under the hot water.

“What are we going to do?” I whispered.

“Right now? We—” I put my hand over his mouth. A man was using the urinal. There were only three men on this floor, and they were all closer to the other john. My heart was banging.

“Sammy? Is that you?”

The urinal flushed. “Maintenance,” an unfamiliar voice said. I held on to Benny with my teeth clenched and eyes squeezed shut. Then the door slammed again.

“Was that the maintenance man?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never talked to any of them. Benny—stay with me. I’m afraid.”

He stroked my shoulder softly. “I don’t think we’re in any danger yet. They don’t have any reason to suspect that we think they’re anything other than they said they were.”

“You left the bug where it was?”

“Of course. And you should do the same if you—no. Just assume there
is
a bug, in your room somewhere. Don’t bother to search.”

“You will stay with me tonight?”

He kissed me. “Sure.” If there was a bug under my bed that night, it heard nothing more erotic than two people staring at the ceiling.

It was a good idea to keep my diary as loose sheets. After Benny left in the morning, I removed all the pages that referred to any of this spy stuff, tore them up, and flushed them away (after retyping the innocent parts). I decided I might keep a separate diary if there were some way to absolutely hide it.

The organization that O’Hara and Benny have made contact with is neither small nor without a name. Of the people they’ve met, only James is aware that he belongs to the Third Revolution (Katherine also knew the name, and was willing to die for it, though that happened in a way she had never foreseen).

The FBI is aware of the 3R, and is concerned. They have dossiers on over twelve thousand members and suspect there are some fifty thousand more, protected by the tight cell system. They are wrong by an order of magnitude: the Third Revolution claims over six hundred thousand Americans and resident aliens (including one from outer space). About one out of five operates at the “expediting” level, which is mostly target practice and weapons drill. Fewer than one in five thousand is aware of the actual size and strength of the organization, which has over a million small arms stashed around the country, and tonnes upon tonnes of high explosive, made into standardized bombs, for sabotage. And two nuclear devices, one permanently sealed under the subway tracks in Washington, three blocks from the Lobbies’ Office Building.

Of the very few people in Washington who are aware
of the true danger presented by 3R, one is the FBI’s second-in-command, who is also 3R’s first-in-command.

The 3R’s attitude toward America would have been easily understood by the soldier of the previous century who said, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

29 October.    I gave my report to James last night, same place as the first meeting. He seemed interested and sympathetic, as were the others, and agreed that there might be a pattern, which a better mathematician could extract. Benny was too nervous. I hope they don’t suspect anything. He gave his report and was warmly congratulated. James had already seen the letters, of course. The bill comes up for “second reading” next week, and we’ll find out then whether the letters had the desired effect. The meeting was subdued because of Katherine’s death. Damon, who shared her faith, said a short prayer in Arabic. It was grotesque. Did James kill her? Damon? I gave my “ultimatum” to James, and he accepted it without question. He said he would do the same in my position. Toward the end of the meeting I felt lulled. That’s dangerous. They seem nice people, full of concern and social consciousness. One or more of them are capable of putting a bug under Benny’s bed and, probably, killing a person for being on the wrong train. I’m frightened but also fascinated. Only seven weeks
before the quarter’s over, and I can escape to Europe without arousing suspicion. But Benny?

30 October.    Benny and I discussed possible stratagems. He’s even more scared than I am, with good reason. Talked for hours and wound up where we’d started. He raised an interesting, possibly hopeful, point. The bug might easily be left over from the previous tenant Benny knows that she was a small-scale drug dealer. So either the police or her wholesaler could have been eavesdropping on her. Also, Katherine. All I really knew of her was her intensity. Alvarez, in
The Savage God
, says that every suicide “has its own inner logic and unrepeatable despair,” and for some reason that sounded like Katherine. Maybe she wasn’t the woman on the escalator. It’s a big city, full of unrelated twins.

6 November.    I really don’t know. Benny and I are trying to convince each other that it’s just paranoia. The meetings are innocent enough on the surface. Nothing’s said that would raise an eyebrow at the Grapeseed. But there’s so much goatshit mystery around it. Today a stranger sat down across from me at lunch and struck up a conversation. When the other person left he said he had a request from James: would I be willing to give a speech to a small group, comparing the state of civil liberties in the Worlds with those here. I told him what I’d told James. Nothing public. He said it would be only about forty people, and very private. I agreed to do it. In fact, I’m looking forward to it. It won’t be what he expects.

12 November.    It’s a good thing I had my notes together. Less than a day’s warning for the speech (Damon gave me the message, at Grapeseed). The speech was less interesting than the reactions. The old-fashioned communists didn’t like what I had to say about Tsiolkovski. The ones who leaned toward conventional People’s Capitalism were alarmed by the distribution-of-wealth system in Devon’s World, as, I suppose, were any fellow atheists. (Well, it doesn’t really alarm me, but I don’t consider myself anti-clerical. A job is a job.) ¶Will was there, but he didn’t say anything. I wonder about him and James. Who is whose boss, or are they equals? As far as I could tell, they didn’t even say hello. Benny wasn’t there (I talked the speech
over with him, but he wasn’t invited) and neither was anybody else I knew but James, Will, and Damon. From the atmosphere of the crowd (it was more like sixty people than forty) I got the impression I was talking to a group of leaders. Love to know more about the structure of the group, and the actual size of it. But when I tried to bring it up last meeting, a real chill dropped.

13 November.    A woman in my religion class dropped a note in my lap on the way to her seat. “Take care not to recognize me.” Well, I didn’t. She must have been at the talk last night, but I was nervous in front of a room full of strangers, and rarely looked past the first two rows.

17 November.    Will came to my room tonight, and we talked for a couple of hours. He was more relaxed than I have ever seen him. ¶The main topic under discussion was the need for secrecy and his concern that I shouldn’t misinterpret the group’s motivation for it. There are conservative elements in almost every Lobby, even the labor Lobbies, that would love to have a libertarian “whipping boy.” (Which is odd in the perspective of my own reading of American history, which strongly associates libertarianism with conservatism. Terms change as attitudes evolve, I suppose. Jefferson was a libertarian but owned human slaves.) Most disturbing was his assertion that there is some group, small and highly secret, that is practicing “waster politics”—assassinations and pinpoint sabotage—which is being covered up by the government. He couldn’t reveal his source and offered no proof, other than the fact that a lot of politicians have died very young recently. He also pointed out that no competent electrical engineer would accept the authorities’ explanation for last week’s blackout in Boston (that goes along with what I heard at Worlds Club Tuesday). These assassinations have all taken place in Washington, where the government virtually owns all news media. Will believes the group must indeed be part of the government, perhaps a powerful Lobby, perhaps even a clandestine arm of the FBI or CBI. If his aim was to reassure me, he accomplished the opposite. Two nameless groups to be afraid of now, instead of one.

If all poets had Benny’s capacity for enjoying alcohol, literature would be an easier course of study. There wouldn’t be as much of it.

We spent Wednesday afternoon at a wine-and-crackers place near the Russell building, willing to pay a little more to get away from the being-watched feeling we got at the Grapeseed. The wine wasn’t remarkable, and I wasn’t drinking much anyhow, with management seminar in the evening. I had one glass out of the first liter, and Benny finished the rest in less than an hour. Which wasn’t unusual; it took that much to relax him.

He was in one of his odd maniac moods, though, and the wine might as well have been tea, for all its apparent effect. It had been more than a month since the Washington show, and he hadn’t spent half of what his drawings had brought in.He signaled for another liter. “Can you imagine? Any idiot with a drafting board and a steady hand could do that.”

“Come on, Benny; I couldn’t. And I’ve got the steadiest hand at this table. Currently.”

“Nope.” He held a hand out in front of me, palm down. While I was trying to frame something to say, a silver five-buck emerged slowly from between the first two fingers. He
rolled it down his knuckles, flipped it and caught it “Want to try?” He held it out to me.

“Seriously, I’ll have to go to class in a while. You don’t want one of
these
characters to walk you home.”

We were almost two blocks from Broadway, but most of the people were orifice-peddlers of some gender, with their usual retinue. “Might hire one,” he said.

“What?”

“To walk me home, spacer. Some of them’ll do anything for a price.”

“Just keep it down to four liters. It bothers you, doesn’t it?”

I could hear his brain grinding out some non sequitur about the wine or the whores. Instead he nodded and said quietly, “That gallery called today. They want twelve more.”

That was twice as many as he’d sold in October. “That’s wonderful—”

“When I said no, they offered to drop their commission to fifteen percent.”

“You still refused?”

The waiter brought the wine. Benny touched the flask but didn’t pour himself any. “It’s not art.”

That was true, as far as I could tell. Good decoration, though; I had one on my wall. “So what is baby-sitting?”

“Baby-sitting, I can read. Besides, I’m good at it.”

“You’re good at drawing, too. How long would it take you to do a dozen scenes?”

“Two days, maybe three. A week if I was lazy.”

“Three months’ income for a week of work? You’re a lunatic!”

He laughed and poured us each a glass. “I think you’ve just put your finger on it. Must be that cultural perspective James admires so.”

“You can’t get out of it that easily. You’re being a prima donna and you know it. You need the money.”

“No, I don’t. I need the self-respect.”

“What’s so denigrating about using your hands, craftsmanship?”

“Nothing!”
He drank half the glass, and refilled it. “I’ll still do some drawings. And I’ll go out on the Square, as usual, and set them up on a rack, maybe do some juggling, sell them to people walking by.”

“For a tenth what the gallery pays.”

“Less than a tenth. But listen… you should’ve been there. They had this poster up, big doleful picture of me, puffed-up biography with all these embarrassing reviews, rising young poet who may become-nobody bought those drawings as art, or even as craft. They bought them as simple curiosities, maybe investments. People who can drop a couple of thousand bucks like a handful of soybeans, just for—”

“That’s just it! They can afford it; it might as well be you who takes it.”

He waggled a finger at me. “That doesn’t sound like a good communist talking.”

“I’m
not
a communist.”

“Excuse me.” He took a drink. “You live in a state—”

“A World.”

“You live in a world where the state, the world, owns all the capital and gives you room and board, and an allowance, and little trinkets like trips to Earth if it thinks you need them. To me that sounds like ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’”

I tried to keep my voice steady. “I meant communism, Earth-style. Not Marxism. But we don’t have that, either. Marx couldn’t have foreseen the kind of isolated economy you get in a space settlement.”