Case and the Dreamer (16 page)

“Back he comes the next day, really, doesn’t begin to be lunchtime, screaming at me. Called me a dammit. ‘Dammit,’ he screams, ‘frigidity I can deal with, but this is ridiculous. You and your dammit dammit butler …’ ”

“Dammit?”

“You are very young,” said Ejler Edgar gently. “I am substituting. ‘Your dammit butler put me to bed with an ice cream cone!’ Then he called me a dammit and stormed out.”

“But why? I mean,
why?
”

“Because Cupid can only act on the data he gets. Maybe that’s what the blindfold means. And because the word love is so rich in meanings and so poor in distinctions between those meanings, Cupid gave him love as he himself defined it, one of the times he was here.”

“Defined it how?”

“I won’t tell you,” said Ejler Edgar. I guess I looked pretty stricken because he said, “but I’ll write it.”

“Write it where?”

“Why, up there at the top of your story,” said Ejler Edgar Aylmer, may he rest easy wherever he may be.

Not having heard anything in so long, I went over to his lab and banged:
bip-bip. bam bam
. “Hey, come in,” came Stromberg’s voice, and it called my name.

Thirty-eight years I’ve known Stromberg, and that instant recognition of my knock, that immediate
Hey, come in!
are things I am very, very proud of. I never knew how I earned them. I learned from a third party one time that he liked having me around because he could talk with me about anything, anything at all, all the things that kept that great big brain of his seething along the way it did: physics, chemistry, art, music, electronics, poetry, food, love, politics, philosophy, humor. The third party had it, wrong. He could talk to me about things. Not with. Nobody could talk with him about those things. Not all those things.

So in I came and through the dark front office to the lab with its rows of Miller flasks, with the hoods, the beautiful bewilder of crystal plumbing, the computer array with its visual mutter of indicator lights and readouts, red and orange and off-white to green, the huge pegboard over the electronics bench with its racks of tools and shiny black boxes and bundles of test leads like parades of trained baby snakes with chromium jaws. Through an inner door I could see something of the chemistry and bio lab, where, if the readouts muttered in lights, the gleam of glass was a complex whisper. Around the back wall, where I could not now see it, I knew there were cages and surgical instruments, a scrubbing sink with treadle-controlled valves, a stainless steel vet’s examining table, microscopes, microtomes, two centrifuges, a sterilizer and a sink. Two entire walls, right to the ceiling, were glass-fronted cabinets of chemicals. Through a further door was, I knew, a library with its own computer terminal for instant retrieval of book locations and to tap into outside sources.

The main laboratory, where I stood just inside, was lit only by a wash of yellow light from the open door of the little room in which Stromberg kept nothing but his cot and his coffee, and a dazzling cone of “daylight” fluorescence from a point in the ceiling. On a low stool in the center of this disc of light sat Stromberg, half dressed—the top half—with his legs spraddled out due south and due west respectively, anointing his pubic area heavily with a thick blue-gray paste. He flashed me a smile, said “Nothing alarming,” and went on with his work.

I had nothing to say and so said it while he finished what he was doing. He then wiped his fingers with a succession of tissues, replaced the cover on the jar of paste, placed a series of gauze pads on the affected area, where they stuck enthusiastically, and rose. I followed him into the cot-and-coffee room. “I needn’t have said that,” Stromberg grinned, “about being alarmed. Not to you. You have that virtue—did anyone ever tell you? You seem to be completely accepting. You’re not judgmental. You don’t apply moral and social yardsticks to what people do. You just take it in and you wait. That’s kind of nice.” He went into the little bathroom in the corner and washed his hands busily, like a surgeon. “Make coffee.”

It was made. I fixed mine, honey and milk, and his, black, in big ceramic cups. I could have corrected his accolade. I have as many prejudices, make as many moral evaluations as the next man, and more than some. What Stromberg was not in a position to know was that I did not, would not, could not apply any of them to him, and never had. Just for an immediate example, when he came out of the bathroom wearing only a polo shirt, with his masculine apostrophe protruding from a nest of stuck-on white gauze slowly staining grey, it could not be called ludicrous. Stromberg was never ludicrous. Not to me.

He slid a drawer out of the wall and removed a pair of white boxer shorts and a disposable white coverall. He put them on and slid his feet into throwaway slippers, took from another drawer a large plastic bag, banged it open, and handed it to me. He stripped the cot completely, rolling up the foam mattress, sheets and blanket, and while I held the bag open, manhandled the whole bundle inside.
He twisted the top closed, padded out to the office, and came back with a big bright tag reading C
ONTAMINATED
. “Go wash your hands,” he said, dragging the bag off toward the outer door. “Nothing lethal,” he reassured me as I went into the bathroom.

In the bathroom were graffiti. Not many.

N
OTHING IS ALWAYS ABSOLUTELY SO
.

“E=MC
²
MAY AFTER ALL BE A LOCAL PHENOMENON
.”

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

“A
NY ANSWER IS NOT NECESSARILY THE ONLY ANSWER.”

—C
HARLES
F
ORT

—and, surprisingly

Y
OU BLOW MY MIND

AND

I’
LL SUCK YOURS

“Joey broke his thumb,” I said, coming out of the bathroom.

“Broke? How? When? On what? Is it—”

I put out my hands placatingly. Stromberg can talk at you sometimes like over a gunsight. “Clean break, simple fracture, three weeks ago, no complications. Stuck his thumb through the spokes of the pulley on his gemstone tumbler.”

“Why isn’t there a guard on it?”

“There is a guard on it. He opened it up to show another kid why there was a guard on it.”

Tension flowed out of his shoulders and neck and tugged at the corners of his mouth as it went away. He held up his left hand, wiggled the little finger. Flexed, it was a little out of line at the second joint. Never noticed that before. “Did the exact same thing when I was his age,” he said. “How about that.… How’s Curie?”

“Perfect. Just beginning to find out that being a girl’s not the same as being a kid.”

He liked that. I’d known he would. He twinkled at me and gently gibed, “Incipient chauvinism?”

“Mine, not hers. Never hers.”

We went into the main lab where he picked up the ointment and tissues he had left on the floor by the stool. Tidy man. He asked it, finally; he had to:

“Mitty?”

“Just fine. Just fine. Took the kids to Arrowhead for a week. Got a new green cape.”

“Look, is she happy?”

I had to wait a bit to answer that. “Happier,” I said carefully. “That figures.” He nodded, and then nodded again. “No place to go but up. I—I’ll drop around soon, see them.”

“Good idea.”

He shot me a special look of his. It makes you blink when he does that. Lasers don’t need gunsights. “You see them a lot.”

“Mm.” Almost every day, a lot of nights, but there was no need to say it.

“That’s good.” He was still a moment, then made a characteristic gesture of his, raising his hands, letting them fall to slap his thighs. Change of subject. He went to the office doorway and hit the wall-switches. Hooded lights over the far benches winked on, and the aching cone from the ceiling went out. It was a lot pleasanter that way.

“Everything’s a part of everything anyway,” he said.

“Who said that?” For I knew it was a quote.

“The singer Donovan. Also the
I Ching
, the joss sticks, divination by sheep’s guts, and me.”

“Okay.” Then I waited.

“ ‘To measure a circle, begin anywhere.’ ”

I knew who that was. That was Charles Fort.

He finally found a place to begin. And he was right; he could have begun anywhere. I knew this man, I’d been with him in this mood before. It drove some people past all patience, the way he moved from one thing to another, however authoritatively; they wanted a neat title for it all, like the label on a jar of ointment, letting you know ahead of time what was inside what it was made of, what it was for. With Stromberg, you had to wait while he made a brick, set it aside, wait while he cut a beam, set it aside, wait while he forged nails and roofing tar and conduit and sash. When he was done it would be a structure; you could trust him for that.

“Some people,” he said, “are gifted—maybe it’s ‘afflicted’ with
a different time scale from other people. They don’t think in biographical time—I mean, my era, things since I was born, or in historical time, the miserable tick of time—” he snapped his fingers “—since we began to write our adventures and our lies about our adventures. They think in geological time, in astronomical time, in cosmological time. I’m talking about the idiots who involve themselves in science fiction, reading it, writing it. Some scientists. Some philosophers.”

“Some mystics.” I shouldn’t have interrupted. I do know better. But he almost conceded the point.

“Maybe so. Maybe, though I tend to think that a lot of them, and a lot of composers and artists and the more broad-spectrum theologians, take off at right angles to what I see as the linearity of things, the progress from cause to effect. I dunno. Maybe that gives them a perspective as important as, cosmological-time thinking. I dunno. I dunno. They’re not mutually exclusive. Room for everyone. It’s a ‘big universe.’ ”

We sat down. Stromberg literally, one hunker at a time, sat on his hands. “Trying like hell not to scratch,” he explained. “Anyway, people with a mental set like that are regarded as something less than human. Cold. Uncaring, lacking in something … it isn’t like that. It isn’t. It’s just that marriage contracts and chivalry and whether or not you report to church or carry the clan bone through your nose, these things can’t weigh too heavily in the presence of continental drift and the birth and death of stars. You can love her and rub her feet and try to get tickets for the opening, to make her happy, but what do you do with the recognition that she, and you, and all your works and thoughts, are trivialities? Especially when you can’t say it to her. Never. Never.”

“Oh.”

He shot me a look. “I think I heard a light go on.”

“You did. I never really knew before. More
—she
never knew, doesn’t know. She thinks she failed you in some way. She takes it hard, the papers: N
OBEL
L
AUREATE AT
R
ACE
T
RACK
. Dr. Stromberg seen in Hollywood in the company of. Dr. Stromberg in temporary custody after waterfront brawl. She thinks she did all that, some way.”

“Well, she didn’t.” He waved his hand at the computer wall. “That did. The big extrapolation. Hey, I held your head through something once. Your kid sister.”

I nodded. It still knotted my stomach. “Ran through a plate-glass door. Face, hands, arms, legs. Squirting twenty jets of blood.”

“Horrible,” he agreed. “But after the initial emergency was over and they had her put together again and on the way back, what was driving you right off the track?”

I remembered. “ ‘What did she do to deserve this?’ ”

“Right. And I was able to tell you that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘deserve’ belong to some other scale, some other country, language, some other set than the cause-and-effect sequentiality that resulted in all that virgin’s blood.”

“It helped.”

“Sure it did. Unfortunately, there’s no way to pour the same balm on my wife without insulting her.”

I said, very carefully, “It was very sudden. One day, a set-in-his ways family man. The next, lawyers’ and bankers’ letters, a huge settlement, and the day after, the headlines begin. It’s too easy to assign it to some middle-aged itch, the pursuit of vanishing youth. Something happened.”

He nodded, and rapped his head, replacing the hand under his right buttock. “The whole thing was there, had been for a long time. But on that day the lights went on for
me
.” Again he nodded at the computers.

I just waited until he came to some internal decision and began to speak. “Listen:

She wounds you, as a rose will wound, Not always, as expected, with its thorn. A rose will always wound you with its rose
.

“Gooseflesh.”

“Gooseflesh. Right. Harry Martinson, a Swede wrote it. Gooseflesh for Bach’s “Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor,” for the last movement of
Beethoven’s 9th
, for a sailplane, for Nureyev, for Gagarin who, said, “I am an eagle.” Gooseflesh for the groining of a Gothic cathedral and for Ellington and for Dylan Thomas. Gooseflesh,
if you like, for
pons asinorum
and the little fingernail of your first child. But by what towering arrogance do we attach any importance or permanence, to any of these things? Importance to us, whose things they are, of course naturally. But to a
louse?
What does human transcendence have to do with a louse, except that it might make a single human sit a little stiller to be bitten?

“And by what towering conceit do we assume that a louse has not its own Shakespeares and Mozarts? No one ever thought of that—not ever. We will tolerate a louse by not thinking about it, sometimes by not believing it exists, but when we become aware, we smother it with blue butter, never dreaming or caring that all the lice might be sharing the equivalent, to lice, of ‘A rose-red city, half as old as time.’ ”

He leaned forward and spoke with a terrible intensity. “All right, I’ll tell you what I saw when the lights went on, when the computer read me out the final extrapolation. We are all lice on the earth, life living off life, down to the bacteria which live off the substance of the earth itself. And up to now the earth hasn’t known nor cared. Now it knows, now it cares. Not as a conscious entity, of course; I’m not giving you the
When the Earth Screamed
kind of poppycock. Linear causation: the rare accident of our atmosphere and its special orchestration of components produced life, and now life has made itself manifest enough to upset the balance.”