The Ninth Configuration (7 page)

Major Groper held on to the railing of the second-story balustrade and looked incredulously at a scaffold bearing Gomez as it creaked slowly upward toward the ceiling. On his way to “paint the ceiling like the Sistine Chapel,” Gomez was stirring one of several large buckets of paint.

He hove up close to the adjutant. “Some weather,” said Gomez.

Groper said, “Jesus Christ almighty!”

He looked below. A pack of dogs of various breeds were yapping, barking and howling outside a utility room that faced on the main hall. Krebs held their tethers. Groper saw Kane emerge from his office and walk over to the sergeant. The door to the utility room flew open, disclosing an agitated Reno. Looking into the room, he commanded, “Out! Get out! Take a walk!” A large chow padded out of the utility room, and Reno called after him acidly, “Tell your stupid agent never to waste any more of my time!”

Reno saw Kane and approached him, outraged. “Can you imagine?” he said.

“He lisps! Here I am casting Julius Caesar and the idiots send me a dog that lisps!” He turned and called back into the utility room. “You too, Nammack! Get lost!”

Out came Nammack, clad in a brand-new blue-and-red Superman costume.

“But why?” asked Nammack. “Tell me why! Just give me one reason that makes any—”

Reno interrupted, exasperated. “Colonel Kane, would you do me a favor? Please? Would you kindly explain to this imbecile here that in none of the plays of Shakespeare can there be a part for Superman?”

“There could be, the way I explained it,” Nammack sulked.

“The way you explained it!” Incredulous, Reno whirled on Kane. “You know what he wants? You want to hear? When the conspirators draw their knives, he wants to rescue Julius Caesar! Honest to God! He wants to swoop down like a rocket, pick him up and then go hurdling mighty temples at a single, incredible bound! He—”

Paint splattered down in gobs, and Reno looked up and saw Gomez. “Fucking bananas,” he murmured. “Bananas!” Reno told the sergeant, “Next!” and Krebs released the leash of an eager Afghan. Reno escorted it into the room. “You bring any photographs with you?” he asked as he closed the door.

Price appeared before them. He was encased in a NASA space-suit, a simulated flying belt on his back. He spoke through a miniature loudspeaker system built into the suit. “Any news from Earth?” he asked Kane in a voice that resonated electronically. He turned down the volume. “Sorry. Any letters?”

“Your planet has demanded your return,” said Kane.

“Fuck that. Any packages? When I was on Mars my mother sent a cheesecake every month. She used to pack it in popcorn to keep it moist. All that shit about canals on Mars is a myth. Take my word, Mars is drier than an asshole in hell.”

Outside, an ambulance siren wailed; Fromme was driving it around the grounds, testing the equipment. He now wore a stethoscope of his own and had a surgeon’s gown and medical bag.

“Yes, Mars is dry,” said Kane.

“Nice fungus you got there. Moist. I like things moist.”

“I’ll check on the cheesecake,” said Kane.

“Giant Brain, you’re okay,” said Price. “I’d shake your hand, but I can’t make the scene with the tentacles. Jesus, I can’t even eat calamary. Oh, excuse me. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“No offense.”

“You never know what might piss people off on different planets. Once on Uranus I said ‘tomato,’ and I was in jail so goddam fast it made my head swim. The Earth ambassador had to spring me. People are touchy. You brains wear clothes? Never mind. Don’t answer. I don’t want to know. Tabu. That’s a perfume back on Earth. You know what? I’ll tell you: this place is nice.”

Groper watched and listened in a daze. From outside on the grounds, he heard Fromme honking the ambulance horn at Fairbanks, who was dressed like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape and was zooming about on a motorcycle. He saw Kane walk slowly to a cellar door. When he opened it, the shattering sound of a jackhammer ripped at the naked air from below, where Cutshaw and most of the other inmates had embarked upon a tunneling operation.

In the basement, Cutshaw yelled, “Cut that thing off for a minute!”

“Yeah, okay.” An inmate turned off the jackhammer. A loud, creamy hush enveloped the group.

“Now then, notice,” said Cutshaw. He was lecturing some men who were gathered before him. With a wooden pointer he tapped a blueprint tacked to an easel. “Tunnel One and Tunnel Two are decoys. Three is the big one. Three is a maximum security.”

“Where does it go, Big X?” asked a redheaded inmate named Caponegro.

The astronaut beamed. “My son, it goes absolutely nowhere. Incidentally, these tunnels are strictly out of bounds for Reno. If you see him here, chase him immediately; there’ll be slippage enough as it is, without his fucking dogs down here. Let’s be sure that he’s—” Cutshaw broke off as he noticed Kane looking down from the doorway at the top of the stairs. “Heavenly caribou, you are ours!” he shouted up joyously. “Ours alone and no one else’s!” The men began cheering and applauding.

Groper could not bear it any longer. “Jesus!” he croaked. “Jesus Christ!” He looked down at his hands. They were squeezing the railing and his knuckles were white.

Groper went searching for Colonel Fell. When he found him in the clinic, Groper was shaking. Fell was at his desk, talking quietly to Krebs, who was sitting on the edge of the examining table.

“What the hell is happening?” the adjutant cried out, his voice on the verge of cracking. “This is crazy! For Christ’s sake, Fell, what’s going on? Do you know they’re digging tunnels downstairs in the basement? They’re fucking digging down there! They’ve got a jackhammer!”

“Oh, well, how far can they get?” said Fell. He had a drink in his hand.

“That isn’t the point!” shouted Groper.

“What is?”

“This whole thing is crazy!”

Groper had entered the service as a volunteer at the age of eighteen. For a man from a slum background, the service meant escape from the constant indignities of poverty. Groper had read and reread Beau Geste, and in the Marines he had expected a life of pursuing the “Blue Water,” a self-esteem based on honor and valor and romantic ideals. The bizarre goings-on at the mansion and his partial custodianship were the ultimate attack on whatever he valued in himself. “Kane should be stopped! For Chris-sakes, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing! He doesn’t know shit about the service! I checked in his 201 file: he’s a goddam dumb civilian; he got a stupid direct commission just six months ago! What in the hell is he doing in command? What the hell is he doing!”

“He’s got an idea that if he indulges all the fantasies of these men, it’ll prove an accelerated catharsis for them. In other words, they’ll be cured.”

“But that’s preposterous!”

“You got any better ideas?”

“But these guys aren’t sick; they’re all faking!”

“Oh, fuck you, Groper.”

Groper’s broad veined nostrils flared. He darted a glance at the cup in Fell’s hand. “You’re drunk,” he said.

Sergeant Christian came into the room. He was carrying a stack of cardboard clothing boxes. He put one of them on the examining table. “Your uniform, sir,” he told Fell. “They just came in.” Then he looked at Groper. “Sir, I put yours in your office. On your desk.”

“What uniform?”

No one answered.

Later that evening, Groper stormed into Kane’s office. Kane was at his desk, staring out at the rain. He did not turn at Groper’s entrance.

Groper was breathless. “Sir, why do I have to wear this?” he demanded.

Kane turned slowly and looked at the adjutant. Groper was dressed in a German Gestapo uniform from the era of World War II. So was Kane. “What?” asked the colonel. His stare was numb and remote, and he winced as if in pain. A trembling hand traveled slowly to his forehead. He seemed displaced, uncomprehending. “What did you say?” he repeated.

“I said, why do I have to wear this?”

Kane jerked his head slightly, as if he was clearing a blurring of his vision. “It’s called psychodrama, Major. It’s a more or less accepted tool of therapy. The inmates are playing the role of Allied prisoners of war attempting to tunnel their way to freedom.” Kane appeared to be squinting now. “We are their captors,” he said.

“We’re their prisoners!” Groper cried angrily. His new-found knowledge that Kane had no military background, and was therefore a civilian in Groper’s eyes, had freed the adjutant of his former inexplicable fear.

“Nothing but yellow-bellied goof-offs have a ball out there!” he blurted. “I mean, Christ! Why do I

have to help their fun? I’m not a psychiatrist! I’m a Marine! By God, it’s an unfair imposition and I think I’ve got a right to—”

He broke off and took a step backward. Seething, shaking, Kane rose and cut him off in an icy, hoarsely whispered voice that gathered fury with every word: “Jesus! Jesus Christ, man! Why don’t you love somebody a little! Why don’t you help somebody a little! Help them! Help! For the love of Christ! You green-soaked, caterpillar-torturing bastard, you’re going to wear that uniform, bathe in it, sleep in it. Try to take it off and you’ll die in it! Is that clear!” Kane leaned over the desk, his weight supported on trembling fingertips.

Groper’s eyes were wide. He backpedaled slowly toward the door. “Yes, sir.” He was stunned. Behind him, the door flew open and knocked him to the floor. Cutshaw slipped in, looked at Groper, snatched the American flag from the wall and placed a foot on the major’s neck, announcing, “I claim this swamp for Poland!”

“Groper, get out of here!” Kane said shakily.

“Immediately!” added Cutshaw as the adjutant knocked away the flag and quickly scrambled to his feet. “And keep that uniform clean,” added Cutshaw. “I’m putting you in for Best of Show.”

Groper averted his eyes and left. Cutshaw stared after him for a moment; then he turned to Kane. “What’s up? What’s going on?”

Kane was at his desk again. His head was propped in his hands. “Nothing,” he said. He looked up at Cutshaw. Compassion pooled in his eyes. “What is it?” he asked gently. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, for one thing, Major Strasser, my men want proper toilet facilities every fifty feet of tunnel. Can you provide that?”

“Yes,” said Kane.

Cutshaw glanced swiftly at the wall he had once attempted to climb.

“Incidentally, have you fixed that goddam wall yet?”

“No.”

“But you’ll fix it.”

“Yes.”

“Who are you?”

Kane’s face was in shadow. He did not reply.

“Who are you?” Cutshaw repeated. “You’re too human to be human.” His face turned suspicious. He walked to the desk. “I’d like a sucker,” he told Kane grimly.

“What?”

“A sucker, a common lollipop. Can I have one?”

“Why?”

“Okay; so you’re not Pat O’Brien. Pat O’Brien would have given me a sucker without putting me through a third degree or checking my fucking credit references. Who the hell are you? All this suspense is a pain in the ass. Maybe you’re P. T. Barnum,” he ventured. “P. T. Barnum slaughtered lambs. He set up this cage at his side show, see, and he stuck in a panther and a lamb together. And there was never any trouble. Huddy, the public just went wild! They said, ‘Lookit, a panther and a lamb and they don’t even argue! They don’t even discuss!’ But, Hud, what the public never knew was that it was never the same poor lamb. That fucking panther ate up a lamb every single day at intermission for three hundred days, and then they shot him for asking for mint sauce. Animals are innocent. Why should they suffer?”

“Why should men?”

“Ah, come on, that’s a setup; that you’ve got answers for. Like pain makes people noble and how could a man be more than a talking, chess-playing panda bear if there weren’t at least the possibility of suffering. But what about animals, Hud? Does pain make turkeys noble? Why is all of creation based on dog eat dog, and the little fish are eaten by the big fish, animals screaming in pain, all creation an open wound, a fucking slaughterhouse?”

“Maybe things weren’t like that at first.”

“Oh, really?”

“Maybe ‘Original Sin’ is just a metaphor for some horrible genetic mutation in all living things a long, long time ago. Maybe we caused those mutations somehow: a nuclear war that involved the whole planet, perhaps. I don’t know. But perhaps that’s what we mean by the ‘Fall’; and why innocent babies could be said to have inherited Adam’s sin. Genetics. We’re mutations; monsters, if you will.”

“Then why doesn’t Foot just tell us that? Why in Christ can’t he simply make an appearance on top of the Empire State Building and give us the word? Then we’d all be good! What the fuck is the problem? Is Foot running short on tablets of stone? My Uncle Eddie owns a quarry; I can get them for him wholesale.”

“You’re asking for miracles,” Kane observed.

“I’m asking for Foot to either shit or get off the pot! Diarrhetic strange gods have been waiting in line!”

“But—”

“A busload of orphans went over a cliff today! I heard it on the news.”

“Maybe God can’t interfere in our affairs.”

“Yes, so I’ve noticed.” Cutshaw sat down on the couch.

“Maybe God can’t interfere because to do so would spoil his plan for something in the future,” Kane appealed. There was a caring in his voice and his eyes. “Some evolution of man and the world,” he continued, “that’s so unimaginably beautiful that it’s worth all the tears and all the pain of every suffering thing that ever lived; and maybe when we get to that moment in time we’ll look back and say, ‘Yes; yes, I’m glad that it was so!
’ ”

“I say it’s spinach and to hell with it.”

Kane leaned forward. “You’re convinced that God is dead because of the evil in the world?”

“Correct.”

“Then why don’t you think he’s alive because of the goodness in the world?”

“What goodness?”

“Everywhere! It’s all around us!”

“After an answer so zestfully fatuous, I feel I should terminate this discussion.”

“If we’re nothing but atoms, just molecular structures no different in kind from this desk or this pen, then how is it there is love in this world? I mean love as a God might love. How is it that a man will give his life for another?”

“Never happened,” said Cutshaw.

“Of course it’s happened. It happens all the time.” Kane was not reasoning dispassionately: he was arguing, involved.

“Give me one example,” Cutshaw demanded.

“But it’s obviously true.”

“Give me one example!” Cutshaw was up and had marched to the desk, confronting Kane.

“A soldier throws himself on top of a live grenade to prevent the other men in his squad from being hit.”

“That’s reflex action,” Cutshaw snapped.

“But—”

“Prove that it isn’t!”

Kane looked down and examined his thoughts. Then he looked up at Cutshaw and said, “All right. A shipwreck survivor in the middle of the ocean finds out that she has meningitis and deliberately goes over the side of the lifeboat, drowning herself to keep the others in the boat from contracting the disease. Now, what do you call that? Reflex action?”

“No, I call that suicide.”

“Suicide and giving up your life are not the same.”

“You’re so dumb you’re adorable.”

“The essence of suicide is despair.”

“The essence of suicide,” Cutshaw rebutted, “is nobody gets to collect the insurance.” Kane started to reply, but Cutshaw argued over his voice: “All the examples you’re trying to give me or are going to give me can be explained.”

“Like the way you explained that woman in the lifeboat?”

“She might have had children in that lifeboat, which makes her performance maternal instinct. Maybe somebody pushed her over the side.”

“Not so,” said Kane with a shake of his head.

“How the hell do you know? Were you there?”

“No, of course not; it’s just an example.”

“Right! That’s exactly my point! That’s what I’m getting at:

Who the hell knows whether all the examples we keep on hearing about aren’t bullshit, or don’t have some bullshit, basically selfish explanation?”

“I know,” Kane asserted firmly.

“I don’t! Now give me one-just one-example that you know of personally!”

Kane was silent, his eyes on Cutshaw’s, burning, mysterious.

“Just one! That guy with the grenade, maybe?”

Kane stared down at the desk.

Cutshaw’s tone became forlorn. “I thought as much,” he muttered. Then quickly he was animated, manic. “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he announced. “I want you to take me to Mass.”

“But your God is dead,” said Kane.

“That’s right. But I have a deep and trenchant interest in the study of primitive cults. Besides, I love to worship statues just as long as I don’t have to look at their feet. Have you ever seen anything as tawdry as the feet of an old St. Joseph statue with the faded paint and the crummy old plaster chipped away on the toes? You want to talk about sleazy? Holy Christ! Listen, take me to Mass tomorrow. I’m serious. I’ll be quiet and good, Hud, I swear it. Please? I’ll just sit and think pious thoughts. Okay?”

Kane was silent, considering.

“Okay, fronds? Can I think about fronds? Or I’ll sit there and quietly think about pianos!” He leaned his face in close to Kane’s. “I want to go,” he said softly. “Really.”

Kane agreed to take him. Cutshaw loped from the room, euphoric. He ran out to the courtyard, clapping his arms around his chest as a chilling breeze sprang up and the vivid orange ball of the sun slipped down below the tree line into darkness. Groper stood at his office window, watching him. He saw Krebs and Christian enter the courtyard. The two sergeants were dressed in Nazi Storm Trooper uniforms, each with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a German shepherd in tow. They took up positions a distance apart at the outer perimeter of the yard and began pacing off a sentry watch. When Cutshaw saw them he let out a yipping cheer. Groper shook his head. He would check Kane’s file again. He remembered a paragraph dealing with his psychiatric methods. A word eluded him. Was it “novel”? “Erratic”? He asked a clerk-typist to dig out the file, and to put in another tracer on Fell’s, which had never arrived. He shuffled the papers on his desk and noted that a new inmate was due to arrive. He buzzed for an orderly and told him to get a bed ready.

Krebs and Christian patrolled until eleven, when the lights were turned out. Once, earlier, they had approached each other from opposite ends of the courtyard and halted briefly at close quarters and Krebs had intoned, “I’ll bet my savage dog can lick your savage dog.” Christian refused to be lured into answering, and the sergeants continued walking and were never observed to converse again the entire evening.