The Ninth Configuration

  “Timewise.”

  “Considered from the angle of time, and given a volume of matter equivalent to the earth’s, such a probability would require ten to the two hundred and something power billions of years- a number with so many zeros in it you couldn’t fit them into a book the size of The Brothers Karamazov. And that’s just one molecule. For life to appear, you would have to have millions in existence and at roughly the same time. Which I find more fantastic than simply believing in a God.”

  Cutshaw sat up. “Are you finished?”

  “Yes.”

  Cutshaw stood up and went to the door, where he turned and said cryptically, “Tawdry Groper eats unblessed venison.” Then he turned again and strode from view. The crash of a hammer pounding plaster resounded through the wall. Kane walked out of his office. To the right of the door he saw Fairbanks, wearing an Air Force high-altitude helmet. He was holding a short-handled sledgehammer and was glaring at a hole in the wall. Groper raced up to him, cursing. “I hid it, goddammit, I hid it!” He ripped the hammer from Fairbanks’ hand. “How the hell did you find it?” he yelled.

  “I wouldn’t dare tell you that,” said Fairbanks. He whipped the hammer back out of Groper’s clutch and told him, “Kindly stand aside.”

  “You little—”

  Groper had lifted an arm as though to strike him, when Kane intervened.

  “Major Groper!”

  “Sir, he’s been—”

  “I don’t care what he’s done; you are not to lay hands on any of these men at any time for any reason.”

  “But, Colonel—”

  Groper was about to say more, but as his eyes looked into Kane’s, he broke off, took a step backward, saluted stiffly and retreated to his quarters.

  Kane regarded the inmate kindly. “You’re Captain Fairbanks,” he said.

  “Not today.”

  “I’m sorry. I was sure you were—”

  “Not today. Understand me? Multiple personality. ‘My house has many mansions.’ ”

  “Yes.”

  “I am Dr. Franz von Pauli.”

  Kane put a fatherly arm around his shoulder. Far down the hall he caught a glimpse of Cutshaw staring at them from the dormitory door. Kane looked at the hole gouged out of the wall and said, “Why did you do that, Captain Fairbanks?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Why did you do that to the wall?”

  “I thought you were kidding.” The inmate’s eyes were intense and pale blue and set in an innocent pudgy face that belonged at a junior college tea dance. “I do it,” he replied, “in the interest of science and nucleonics; because I’m convinced we can walk through walls! Not just me; I mean anyone. Cops. People. People in Nashville.

  It’s the spaces! The empty spaces between the atoms in my body-or yours:

  you don’t mind my getting personal? No. If it gets you uptight, let me know.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You got a headache?”

  Kane had winced as though in reaction to a sudden, stabbing pain, lowering his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed. “No,” he said softly.

  “Terrific. Look, it’s all in the size of the empty spaces between the atoms in that wall: when you look at it relative to the size of the atoms themselves-well, the size of the spaces is immense! It’s like the distance, frankly speaking, between the earth and the planet Mars, and—”

  “Come to the point, please, Captain Fairbanks,” said Kane in a voice that reflected strain, yet was not unkind.

  “What’s the hurry?” asked Fairbanks. “The atoms won’t leave. Hell, they’re not going anyplace.”

  “Yes.”

  “Colonel, atoms can be smashed; they cannot fly!”

  Kane reacted to something like pain again.

  “Do you have to go toy-toy?” asked Fairbanks. “Number two?”

  Kane shook his head.

  “Listen, don’t be ashamed; we’re only human.”

  Kane lowered his arm from the inmate’s shoulder. “Tell me why you strike the wall.”

  “You’re dogged. I like that: dogged but fair. Now listen. The spaces-the same immense and empty spaces between the atoms in that wall exist between the atoms in your body as well! So walking through the wall is merely a matter of gearing the holes between the atoms in my body to the holes between the atoms in that wall! That naughty stubborn fucking—”

  Fairbanks ended his statement with another great swing of his hammer. Plaster flew out in all directions. He looked sullen; he stared at the hole he had just produced. “Nothing,” he muttered.

  Then he looked at Kane. “I keep experimenting, see. I concentrate hard. I try to exert the full force of my mind on the atoms in my body so they’ll mix and rearrange; so they’ll fit just exactly those spaces in the wall. And then I try the experimental method -I try to walk through the wall. Like now. I just took a running dash, and I failed-horribly!”

  He swung once more at the wall and another hole gaped forth. “Stuck-up cunts,” he muttered.

  “Why did you do that?” asked Kane.

  “I am punishing the atoms! I am making of them an example! An object lesson! A thing! So when the others see what’s coming -when they see I’m not kidding around-why, they’ll fall into line! They’ll let me pass through!” Fairbanks accompanied the end of his statement with another vicious swing. “Independent snots!” he said, glaring at the wall. “Shape up or ship out!”

  “May I?” asked Kane, gently lifting the hammer from the inmate’s grasp.

  “Sure!” growled Fairbanks. “Swing! Enjoy! Maybe they’ll listen to a stranger!”

  “I had something else in mind.”

  The inmate looked outraged and grabbed for the hammer. First he gave a tug then a vigorous pull; but the hammer did not move from Kane’s grip. He looked down at the hammer, and then up at Kane, his eyes a little fuddled. “Your grip is very strong,” he said at last.

  “I think,” said Kane, “that your problem may lie in the properties of the hammer: some nuclear imbalance impinging on the ions.”

  “Interesting theory,” said Fairbanks.

  “Would you mind if I kept the hammer for study?”

  Suddenly Fairbanks began to scream. He struggled furiously to regain the hammer. Krebs and Christian appeared and restrained him. He was hysterical.

  “Medication is indicated here,” said Kane.

  “I’ll have to find Colonel Fell,” Krebs told him. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “Who else has a key to the drug locker?”

  “No one,” said Krebs. Fairbanks kept shrieking. His eyes bulged out.

  “Not even a medical orderly?” asked Kane.

  “No, sir. Not since we had the pilferage, sir.”

  “From the drug locker? What was taken?”

  “The colonel’s Cadbury Fruit and Nut bars, sir. He stores them there.”

  He paused and then added, “It’s the temperature, sir.”

  Kane released the hammer and Fairbanks subsided. “There may be a recurrence,” Kane said softly. “You’d better find him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Fairbanks looked puzzled. “Where the fuck did this hammer come from?” he asked. Kane slipped it from his grasp and Krebs and Christian led the inmate away. Kane stood rooted, looking down at the hammer in his hands. Then he clutched at his head.

  Groper was watching him from the second floor, where he stood by the balustrade. Kane looked up at him as if he had known he was being watched. Groper walked quickly toward his bedroom.

  5

  Back in his office, Kane again immersed himself in study. Outside it was raining and somewhere a clock tolled nine. Kane looked up and stared at the window as the rain battered against it in sheets. Someone came into the room. It was Krebs.

  “Captain Fairbanks is still okay, sir.”

  “Good. Where’s Colonel Fell? Have you found him?”

  Krebs hesitated, then said, “No, sir. But he hasn
’t checked out, so he must be on the grounds.”

  Kane’s face was tense and pained for a moment; then he said, “When you find him, please tell him to come to me right away. I need to see him.”

  “Yes, sir.” Krebs did not leave. He stood looking at Kane.

  “That’s all, Krebs. Thank you,” said Kane at last.

  “About Colonel Fell, sir,” said Krebs.

  “Yes?”

  Krebs was hesitant. “I think he covers up, sir.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I think things hurt him a lot, sir. You know-sick people; patients dying on him. I wouldn’t want you to think badly of him, sir. I think he does what he does to take his mind off things.”

  Kane stared at him for a while; then he felt at his brow and said, “I see.”

  “Have you got a headache, sir? I can get you some aspirin, sir, if that will help.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Krebs. I’m all right. Good night.”

  “Good night, sir,” said Krebs.

  “Please close the door behind you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  6

  Kane returned to his reading and note-taking. Hours passed. Fell did not appear. The rain was torrential, slamming at the windows. Kane squinted at the words he was reading, blinking, straining to see. Finally, he could not keep his eyes open any longer and he laid down his head on his folded arms. He slept.

  And dreamed. Rain. A jungle. He was hunted. He had killed someone. Who? He was kneeling by the body. He turned it over, but the head stayed facing down and blood gushed out of a headless neck. Then a man with a Z-shaped scar on his brow said, “For Christ’s sake, Colonel, let’s get the hell out of here!” He plucked a white mouse from out of the air and the mouse became a pure white lily stained with blood. Then Kane was on the surface of the moon. There was a lunar landing craft to the right, and an astronaut, Cutshaw, moving, drifting, through the atmosphere, until at last he extended his arms beseechingly up to a crucified Christ at the left. The figure of Christ had the face of Kane. Then the dream became lucid. He dreamed he awakened in his office and Billy Cutshaw was sitting on his desk, eying him intently while lighting a cigarette. Kane said, “What is it? What do you want?”

  “It’s about my brother, Lieutenant Reno. You’ve got to help him.”

  “Help? How?”

  “Reno is possessed of a devil, Hud. He is levitating nightly and he also talks to dogs, which is not entirely natural. I want you to cast out his demons. You’re a colonel and a Catholic and an unfrocked priest.”

  Suddenly Reno was in the room, floating three feet off the floor. He was wearing a high-altitude flight suit. He looked at Kane and opened his mouth and out came the yappings of a dog.

  Kane put a finger to his neck and felt a round Roman collar. He experienced a surging exhilaration.

  It was then that the dream again changed in texture, and seemed to be not a dream at all. Cutshaw was staring at him intently, his cigarette glowing in the dimness. “You awake?” said the apparition.

  Kane moved his lips and tried to say “Yes,” but no sound would issue forth. He spoke with his mind, thinking-saying?—”Yes.”

  “Do you really believe in an afterlife?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean, really.”

  “Yes, I believe.”

  “Why?”

  “I just know.”

  “Blind faith?”

  “No, not that; not that, exactly.”

  “How do you know?” insisted Cutshaw.

  Kane paused, dredging for arguments. Then at last he said (thought?):

  “Because every man who has ever lived has been filled with desire for perfect happiness. But unless there is an afterlife, fulfillment of this desire is impossible. Perfect happiness, in order to be perfect, must carry with it the assurance that the happiness won’t cease; that it will not be snatched away. But no one has ever had such assurance; the mere fact of death serves to contradict it. Yet why should Nature implant in everyone a desire for something unattainable? I can think of no more than two answers: either Nature is consistently mad and perverse; or after this life there’s another, a life where this universal desire for perfect happiness can be fulfilled. But nowhere else in creation does Nature exhibit this kind of perversity; not when it comes to a basic drive.

  An eye is always for seeing and an ear is always for hearing. And any universal craving-I mean a craving without exceptions-has to be capable of fulfillment. It can’t be fulfilled here, so it’s fulfilled, I think, somewhere else; sometime else. Does that make any sense? It’s difficult. I think I’m dreaming. Am I dreaming?”

  Cutshaw’s cigarette briefly glowed bright. “If you dream, don’t drive,” he rasped. And then Kane was on the island of Molokai, where he had come to cure the lepers, but it somehow was also an orphanage where a Franciscan monk was lecturing to children in military uniform, their faces blank and eroded. Suddenly the roof fell in upon them as bombs struck Molokai. “Get out! There’s still time! Get out!” cried the monk. “No, I’m staying with you!” cried out the Kane in the dream. The Franciscan’s head came loose from his body and Kane picked it up and kissed it fervently. Then he hurled it away in revulsion. The head said, “Feed my sheep.”

  Kane awakened with an inchoate shout. He wasn’t in his office. He was fully dressed and sitting on the floor in a corner of his bedroom. He could not remember how he had gotten there.

  7

  Reno awakened at dawn and looked at Cutshaw’s cot. It was empty. He slipped on fatigues and walked down the aisle past the cots and footlockers and out of the dormitory. All the other inmates were sleeping.

  Reno searched the mansion, looking for Cutshaw, then went outside and padded through the fog. He stopped and looked around the desolate courtyard once and bitterly muttered, “Fardels!” At last he saw him. The astronaut was lurking in the lower branches of a spruce where Groper customarily stood before Assembly. He was stirring a gallon of paint balanced between his knees. Reno scuttled up the tree trunk and parted a branch. “Captain Billy!” he exclaimed.

  “For Christ’s sake, keep your voice down!” Cutshaw said guardedly. “What in the hell are you doing up here?”

  “It’s Kane!” whispered Reno excitedly. His eyes were shining and wild.

  He was hyperventilating.

  “What about him?” Cutshaw retorted, picking a pine needle out of the paint.

  “Billy, none of him is him!”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Kane is Gregory Peck in Spellbound, Billy! He comes to take charge of a nuthouse and it turns out the guy’s really crazy himself!”

  Cutshaw exhaled a weary sigh. Even among the mansion inmates it was generally conceded that Reno entertained a number of obsessions more magnificent than most. Once he had reported that while strolling “jaunty-jolly” through the grounds on a moonless night, he had detected “hissing from above,” and looking up, spied Major Groper “crouched amidst the fronds of a palm tree,” deep in whispered conversation with a giant black-and-white owl. Nothing had shaken him from this story. When Cutshaw had reminded him that the estate was visibly barren of any variety of palm tree, Reno had eyed him pityingly and said in soft rebuttal, “Anyone with money can pull out a tree. And then certain parties could very easily fill in the hole.”

  From that day forward, Reno was ignored. There was only one way to be rid of him, and that was to walk away.

  Cutshaw looked down. It was a twenty-foot drop.

  “Kane is Gregory Peck,” Reno said again. “Last night in the middle of the night, I wake up and there’s cookies in my teeth, raisins and crap; so I go to the clinic, see, for some dental floss, and who do I see on his arse like he’s in some kind of trance or something?” Reno began to imitate the scene, his hands moving in dazed but purposeful action: picking something up; throwing something down; picking something up; throwing something-

  Cutshaw interrupted the performance. He pointed to the
ground: “Down!

  Get down! I want you to fall like an overripe mango!”

  “There’s also another possibility, Billy. The drug-chest door was sitting wide open. He could have been bombed on something.”

  “Scram!”

  “Lots of doctors get hooked on drugs,” Reno argued reasonably. “Lots of psychiatrists are deeply disturbed. You know that. They’ve got the highest suicide rate of any profession there is, and that’s a fact, you can check that, Billy.”

  Cutshaw paused at this, an eyebrow lifting cautiously. “When did this happen?” he asked.

  “About three in the morning, I swear it. Listen, here’s the capper, the proof, here’s what he does! It was just like Gregory Peck in Spellbound, Billy. It was just like the movie, exactly! I go and get a fork. Understand? I get a fork and also a tablecloth from the mess! I put down the tablecloth in front of him, with the fork I made some ski tracks on it, and he fainted! Just like Gregory Peck in the movie!”

  Cutshaw pointed to the ground again, gritting, “Get down! You hear me? Get—” He broke off suddenly and put a finger to his lips and a hand over Reno’s mouth. Then he looked below and tilted the gallon can of paint so that its contents spilled out smoothly.

  From below, the voice of Groper rumbled upward: “You son of a bitch!”

  “Can I talk now?” Reno asked.

  “Yes, go ahead.” Cutshaw beamed, satisfied.

  “I forgot to mention one thing: Kane had a cat with three heads on his lap. He might have been stroking it.”