A Creed for the Third Millennium (20 page)

When Dr Christian walked into her kitchen
with yet another sophisticated woman in tow, Mama froze to the spot and stood
with her spoon dripping sauce all over the floor, mouth agape.

He leaned over to kiss her cheek. 'Mama,
this is Mrs Lucy Greco. She'll be staying with us for a few weeks, so would you
mind taking the mothballs out of the spare room and finding another hot-water
bottle?'

'Staying?'

'That's right She's my editor. I've been
commissioned to write a book for the Atticus Press and we've got a deadline, you
see. It's all right, she's a psychologist herself, so she's better equipped than
most outsiders to understand our crazy household. Where are the
others?'

'Not come across yet. When they heard you
were coming, they decided to wait for you rather than eat at the usual time.'
Mama recollected the guest, still standing smiling politely and blankly. 'Oh,
Mrs Greco, I am sorry! Joshua, watch the pots. I'll take Mrs Greco up to her
room. And don't worry, my dear, the bit about mothballs is just a fine example
of Joshua's humour. I do
not
have moths, and I have
never
needed
mothballs to keep a room fresh!'

Joshua did as he was told and watched the
pots. It had perhaps been a little unkind of him not to apprise his family of
Mrs Greco's presence, especially since he had called to let them know he was
coming home. But occasionally they did need a jolt, and this was a delicious
one, particularly for Mama. When she rushed back into the kitchen so quickly
that it was obvious she had barely stayed long enough settling Lucy Greco to
observe the decencies, he grinned.

'Mama! I'll bet you didn't even show Mrs
Greco where the bathroom was.'

'She's over the age of consent, she'll
find it. Now what's going on, Joshua? All these years and you've never displayed
any interest in women, now all of a sudden you bring two home inside of a
week!'

'Judith is a colleague I've just finished
some work for, and Mrs Greco is exactly what I said she was, my
editor.'

'You're not taking the mickey out of
me?'

'No, Mama.'

'Wellll...' She packed the word with
meaning.

'You might be dizzy, Mama, but do you
know something else?' he asked, moving away
from the stove to pick up a cloth, and smiling at her as he did so.

'No, what?' she asked, smiling
back.

'You're a really nice person.' And he
bent to wipe the sauce off the floor before Mama, a fast mover, slipped in
it.

She took advantage of this softening
immediately. 'Are you sure you're not just the teeniest bit interested in Dr
Carriol? She'd be so perfect for you, Joshua!'

'Oh, Mama! Once and for all,
no!
Now don't you want to hear about my book?'

'Of course I do, but save it until after
dinner, then you won't have to repeat it. I've got some news the rest already
know about, so I'll tell you before they come across.'

'What news?'

She opened the oven, peered inside, shut
it, and unbent. 'We had a national emergency this afternoon about two
o'clock.'

He stared. 'A national
emergency?'

'Yes. They evacuated the whole of West
Holloman, not such a feat considering it's March and most of the houses are
empty — but hard enough with the streets five feet deep in frozen snow — it
would have been worse if we hadn't had that thaw—'

He interrupted her with an awful frown.
'Mama, describe the emergency, not the obvious!'

'Ohhh!' She gritted her teeth in
frustration, then couldn't resist going on with her story posthaste.
'As
I was saying, they evacuated the whole of West Holloman. Just came banging
on our doors and hustled us out to buses and whisked us off down to the railroad
station — you know, the old part that's deserted except for bums and no one
knows what to do with? They fed us soup and showed us a first-release movie and
then let us go home again about five. So I wasn't put out at all that dinner's late. You rang about a
minute after we got in.'

'How odd!'

'Apparently they thought they'd unearthed
a contaminated dump of radioactive waste next door to the old gun factory? You
know, where they've started the district clearance scheme? Anyway, some
workman's Geiger counter went off like a siren, and the next thing we had the
National Guard and the Army — full-bird colonels running round a dime a dozen!
It was really fun, actually. I saw people I haven't seen in years.'

His worry that the family had been duped
for some unknown but nefarious purpose died. 'Well, we always did wonder what
used to go on in that research building of theirs, why they needed walls four
feet thick and a twenty-four-hour security patrol. Now I guess we know,
huh?'

'They told us they'd removed the stuff to
safety somewhere else, and said it was safe to come home again.'

'Let's hope we don't get it back in next
year's fish,' he said dryly.

'They don't do that any more, dear,' she
said soothingly. They take it to the dark side of the moon.'

That's what they tell us, you
mean.'

'Anyway, a nice Army colonel told me
there was a chance we'd have to be evacuated again, because they have to sift
through the whole site now to make sure it's clean, and it might take them a few
days.'

The door opened and in trooped the rest
of the family, full of pleasure to see the prodigal returned.

'Only he's not alone,' said Mama
mysteriously. '
He
came with his lady friend.'

Mary and Miriam and the Mouse tried to
look enthusiastic, the men looked genuinely so.

'How long is Dr Carriol staying?' asked
Mary sourly.

'Oh, it isn't Dr Carriol,' said Mama,
purring. 'This one's not a doctor, she's a missus, and
her name's Lucy Greco. Isn't that pretty? She's very pretty too.'

His siblings and his in-laws stared at
him, stupefied.

Dr Christian burst out laughing. 'If I'd
only known how much fun it was to bring strange women home with me, I'd have
started years ago!' he said, wiping his eyes. 'You mutts!'

'Come on now, out of the kitchen,' said
Mama, shooing. 'Since I'm going to serve dinner in exactly five minutes, it
would be nice if you set the table for me.'

'Who is she?' asked Miriam, putting down
forks.

'After dinner,' said Dr Christian, and
refused to say any more. The moment Lucy Greco walked in he introduced her all
round, then said to her, 'Mum's the word until later.'

Later was the living room, over coffee
and cognac. He told his family about the book. Their reactions were much as
expected; identically curious and joyous and totally supportive of
him.

'I
think it's a wonderful idea,
Josh,' said James warmly, speaking for everyone.

'Well, I have to thank Dr Carriol for it,
really. It was her idea.'

Discovering the identity of the true
author of the project made the three young women a little wary, but after
examining it from all angles, they had to admit it still sounded like a great
idea.

'I've always thought you should write a
book,' said Mary, 'but I never thought you'd manage to overcome your inhibitions
when you still couldn't unblock yourself after we gave you the new IBM
voicewriter last Christmas.'

'Believe me, I thought the same. I guess
this is the only way possible for me — to have someone else do the actual
writing,' he said, smiling.

'So you're an editor?' asked Andrew,
looking both charming and spectacularly beautiful.

She responded to the question and the
man. 'That's right. But I'm a specialist editor. I really do participate in the
writing of the book, where most editors are withheld from a book's early stages.
With the fiction writer, for instance, editors are chiefly useful in late draft,
as critics. They can't tell the fiction writer what to do or how to do it, they
just spot the weaknesses and inconsistencies in the plot and characters and so
forth. Now I don't do any fiction at all. I specialize in collaborating on the
writing of books with people who have something
significant
to say, but
don't have the gift of putting on paper what they want to say.'

'You make it sound as if fiction writers
don't have anything significant to say,' said James, who adored
fiction.

Mrs Greco shrugged. 'It largely depends
on your point of view, and never the twain shall meet. Ask a fiction editor and
you'll be told the only books that survive the test of time are fiction.
Personally I'm not a fiction fan. It's as simple as that, really.'

'There's room for both,' said Dr
Christian.

The discussion went on, lively and
interested; and from a dozen vantage points around the room a battery of video
cameras silently went on recording every word said and every face saying it.
When the plants were tended on Sunday those glaucous lenses would be gone, for
the people who had installed them during a most convenient emergency evacuation
exercise would institute another such crisis on Saturday evening.

Had the room not
been so full of
plants a faint smell of fresh paint might have been detected, but the leaves
were as efficient at absorbing smells as they were at absorbing surplus carbon
dioxide. It was the new-type videotape that encoded what it saw and heard in
every one-second epoch into such a minute segment of tape that, given the number
of channels across its width, it would not be exhausted for a full two weeks, a
much longer time than was needed in this
present situation. Even the power feeding the cameras had been tapped from the
mains outside the Christian residences, to make sure no trace remained of this
four-day surveillance.

After Dr Christian left Washington so
abruptly, Dr Moshe Chasen found it as difficult to concentrate on relocation as
he had before Dr Christian had appeared in Washington. When he came into his
office on Monday he was aware his new colleague must soon go, but he had fully
expected to see that long thin body draped around a table, had looked forward to
letting his eyes rest on that dark fallen-in face. But no Dr Christian. In the
end he had telephoned John Wayne looking for Dr Carriol, and then was told of
the unexpected departure.

'Please don't attempt to contact Dr
Christian,' John Wayne said in the voice which indicated the instructions were
not his, but his chief's.

'I
need
him!' cried Dr
Chasen.

'I'm sorry, sir, I really can't help
you.'

And that was the end of that, until Dr
Judith Carriol walked into his office on Wednesday afternoon.

'Dammit, Judith, couldn't you at least
have given me an opportunity to say goodbye to the man?' he roared.

Her brows rose. 'I'm sorry, Moshe, I
didn't think,' she said coolly.

'Bullshit! You never stop
thinking.'

'Missing him, Moshe?'

'Yes.'

'I'm afraid you'll have to get along
without him.'

He took off his reading glasses and
stared at her fixedly. 'Judith, just what
is
Operation Search?' he
asked.

'A search for one man.'

'To do what?'

'Time will have to tell you that. I
can't. Sorry.'

'Can't, or won't?'

'A bit of both.'

'Judith, leave him alone!' It was a cry
from the heart.

'What on earth do you mean?'

'You're the worst kind of meddler. You
use other people to attain your ends.'

'There's nothing unique about that, we
all do it.'

'Not like you,' he said grimly. 'You are
a special breed. Maybe it's the times have bred you, I don't know. Or maybe your
kind has always been with us, but the times have given you unlimited
opportunities to rise high enough to do real harm.'

'Claptrap!' she said disdainfully, and
walked from the office, closing the door behind her gently to indicate that
he
was whistling into the wind.

Dr Chasen sat for a moment chewing the
earpiece of his glasses, then sighed and picked up a sheaf of computer readouts.
But he couldn't see what they said because he hadn't put his glasses on again.
He couldn't put them on. His eyes were too full of tears.

For six weeks Dr Judith Carriol had no
contact of any kind with Dr Joshua Christian, but the middle three of those six
weeks saw her watching the man in almost every smallest detail on hour after
hour after hour of videotape. And when she wasn't watching him or his family or
both, she was listening to his patients, his ex-patients, the relatives of his
patients and his ex-patients, his friends, even his enemies, talk about him on
audiotape. It was highly significant, she felt, that nothing she discovered
lessened her enthusiasm for him.

Even after Dr Moshe Chasen had taxed her
so directly with the consequences of her actions, it did not occur to her that
in serving her own purpose she might not be serving Joshua's; she saw the two as
one and the same, indivisible, and sanctified her prying secret work as evidence
of the purest, most selfless devotion. Had Joshua Christian himself known what
she was doing and had he taxed her with it rather than Moshe Chasen, still she
would have been able to look deep into his eyes and assure him clear through to
her core that what she did was for his benefit, and enormous benefit at that.
She was not consciously evil; had she been, Dr Christian would have sensed it at
once. Nor was she quite heartless. Perhaps the worst thing that could be said of
her was that she lacked ethics, that she was not honourable. But then nothing in
her life had been conducive to the inculcation of ethics, of honour.