“I’m awake.”
“You were nodding, Catherine Earnshaw!”
“I assure you,” said Kane, “I was not.”
“You are determined to start an argument! But as usual I’ll give ground. I’ll accept your sniveling perjury. Hud, what’s happened to Scarlett O’Hara? What has happened to gracious living? Tell me, what do you think of asps?”
“Asps?”
“You are absolutely incapable of giving a straight answer!”
Kane blinked. “I didn’t follow the question.”
“You couldn’t even follow the spoor of the Incredible Colossal Man. How do you get to the bathroom, Hud? How do you ever find it! Your uniform looks clean but I doubt some foul play.” Cutshaw produced a lollypop and began to lick at it noisily.
“Earlier,” said Kane, “you came to my door and asked a question. You said, ‘Why do animals suffer?’”
“Yes.”
“Cutshaw, what did you mean?”
“What did I say?”
“You said, ‘Why do animals suffer?’”
“Then that’s what I meant, you blazing ass! What do colonels get a month, Hud? I’m writing a letter to Congress!”
“Cutshaw, why did you ask the question?”
“Impertinent, saucy bastard. I asked you what colonels got. Now don’t play Socrates with Cutshaw, friend! Whose therapy is this?”
“Certainly not mine.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of a Catholic are you?”
Kane raised an eyebrow. “I’m confused,” he said.
“Ah! The beginning of wisdom!”
“Are you a Catholic?”
“Never mind that, you oaf! Ask me about my obsessions!”
“Will you answer?”
“Yes. I will.”
“Very well,” said Colonel Kane. “What are your obsessions?”
“Well, frankly, I hate feet.”
“The way they smell?”
“The way they look. Hud, I cannot stand the sight of them!”
“Does that include your own?” asked Kane.
“Especially my own! How could a wise and beautiful God give us ugly things like feet! Give us padding things like feet! They’re a disgrace! An anomaly! A disaster area, Hud! If God exists, he is a fink!”
“A fink.”
“Or a foot. Yes, a foot. An omniscient, omnipotent Foot! Do you think that is blasphemous?”
“Yes,” said Kane, “I do.”
“I believe I capitalized the ‘F.’”
“I believe you’re referring to the problem of evil.”
“I am referring to the problem of feet! Christ, don’t complicate the argument; it’s tawdry enough already!”
“Let’s go back to animal suffering.”
“No, let’s not,” said the astronaut, making a clearly abortive effort to wrap a leg around his neck.
“But isn’t it all the same thing? What you’re saying about feet? Namely, how can there be evil coexistent with a good God?”
“Hud, kindly stick to feet.”
“You think they are ugly.”
“I know they are ugly.”
“But without them how could you walk?”
“Good Foot, you are dumb! Give me wings so I can fly!”
“Ahh,” breathed Kane, leaning back in his chair. “So we’ve come to the heart of the matter. At last we’ve come to flying.”
Cutshaw leaped up out of the sofa and Grouchoed to the door. “Want my opinion, Colonel Caribou? You are a quack nonpareil!” He opened the door, swooped outside and disappeared from Kane’s sight.
Kane clasped his hands under his chin and began to ponder. Fell looked in. “How’s it coming?” asked the medic.
“Is Cutshaw Catholic?”
“I’m not sure. I think he was. Yeah, maybe he was.”
“That seems to figure,” murmured Kane.
“Why do you ask?” inquired Fell.
“It seems to be very much on his mind. Perhaps it’s related to his problem.”
“The latest con,” mumbled Fell.
“What?”
“Nothing. See you around the campus.” Fell quietly closed the door.
Kane returned to his study of the men’s dossiers. When that was completed, he went to the bookshelf, plucked out the elementary psychology text that Fell had noticed earlier. Kane opened it to the bookmark and immediately was immersed in very deep study. Now and again he would underline. At times he would flap open a dictionary and look up a word.
* * *
The inmates’ dormitory was neatly lined with footlockers, cots and washbasins. In a corner of the massive room a fireplace blazed with flame, logs crackling merrily. The inmates were gathered around Cutshaw.
“What’s the plan?” asked the one named Zook. He was a wiry and dark-complexioned man, and had eyes that probed like death rays, deep-set and close together.
“We’ll start with ‘D,’” responded Cutshaw. “‘Acts of insolence much too insolent to be recognized as insolence.’ Then from there we go to letters and from—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Corfu interrupted. “Why are we trying to get rid of him? The man seems very gentle; not at all like Colonel Ryan.”
Cutshaw pinned him with scorn. “He is also a psychologist—a very top psychologist. He knows too much, you horse’s nose!”
“I like him,” said Corfu.
Cutshaw eyed him for a moment, and his expression, it seemed to Corfu, spoke of a tugging inner conflict. Then Cutshaw turned to Zook. “Are you ready, my little star?”
“No,” said Lieutenant Dorian Zook. “What’s my motivation?”
“Fear,” said Cutshaw, “fear. Stark, staring fright. This boy Kane is Foxy Grandma, Zook, the type that’s really dangerous. Plays it dumb right up to his teeth. So keep your guard up every second!”
That evening Kane met Zook. His eyes red from study, the new commanding officer was ascending to his quarters when the former pilot approached him.
“You!” rasped Zook.
Kane halted, blinked his eyes. “What do you want?” he asked wearily.
“Wrong!” stabbed Zook.
“I’ll ask you again—what do you want?”
Zook bowed his head, mopped his brow with a sleeve and muttered, “Boy, oh, boy—another one!”
Kane looked down at his shoes. “I’m your new commanding officer. I am Colonel Hudson—”
Zook interrupted fiercely, spewing, “Listen, baby, I know who you are! Now why play ‘Let’s Pretend’!”
“What do you mean?” asked Kane, looking up, suddenly alert. “Pretend what?”
“That you can’t read my thoughts! That we’re not on the planet Venus and that you’re not a Venusian! That you haven’t invaded my mind to make me believe I’m still on Earth! Now come off it, sweetheart; it’s all hypnotic illusion! I’m not on Earth and you’re not an Earthman! We’re knee-deep in fungus and you’re a giant brain! Now don’t give me stories; just give me back my flying belt!”
“Flying belt?” Kane echoed.
“Flying belt?” mocked Zook, pitching his voice to an insulting falsetto. “Maybe you’re not a brain at all. You could be a giant parakeet!”
Kane tried edging past him. “Later, why don’t we—?”
Zook blocked his passage, his voice loud and demanding. “My Buck Rogers flying belt! I want you to give it back!”
Kane smiled bleakly. “Oh. I see. So you can fly?”
“Why do you think I want it, dum-dum! So I can play Tinker Bell in Peter Pan? Listen, straighten out your tentacles, baby, I’m worried about you.”
“So am I,” muttered Kane.
“Oh, is that a Venusian wisecrack? Beautiful, kid; that’s all I need—elephant jokes from a bug-eyed monster!”
“Look—” tempered Kane.
But Zook began to bellow. “You’ve got my space ship, you’ve got my zap gun, you’ve got my body—
what more do you want! Why do you want my belt?”
Kane, desperate for sleep, made another futile attempt to get past him. “I don’t have your belt,” he insisted. “And I’m really not a Venusian.”
Zook’s tone was humoring. “Sure, baby, sure. You’re an Earthman. Swell. Now who won the ball game?”
“Today?”
“Wrong!” Zook leaned his head in close to Kane’s conspiratorially. “Level with me, sweetheart: are you just one brain or two glued together? I mean, glued kind of sloppy-like, ’cause kid, I’ve got to be honest with you: sometimes I ask you questions and you don’t answer me too good.”
Captain Groper appeared before them. “Sir?” he said to Kane. “Do you still want Captain Fell?” Shortly before, Kane had asked to see him.
“Yes,” said Kane; “yes.”
“Well, he hasn’t checked off the grounds,” said Groper, “but we can’t seem to find him anywhere.”
“Sure, you can’t find him anywhere!” bawled Zook. “He’s flying around with my belt! Get him down!”
Like some Air Force genie out of a wild blue lamp, Sergeant Krebs appeared magically, and in one liquid motion hustled Zook away from Kane and in the direction of the dorm. “Get him down!” roared Zook, in the fierce grip of Krebs. “Get him down or I’ll burn all your fungus! You hear? You hear? Your saucers, I’ll break all your saucers, you’ll be grounded just like me! I’ve had about all that I can stand, you brains! Wait until I tell them! When the Interplanetary Council hears that—!”
A door slam cut him off. Kane heaved a sigh and looked to Captain Groper. “Not in his room?”
“I knocked. But no answer. And it’s locked. This happens pretty often, sir. Just seems to disappear.”
“I’ll see him in the morning.”
Groper seemed verging on making a comment; but withheld it, moved on. Kane put a hand on the banister, then noticed that Corfu was slapping brush onto canvas in the center of the hall. He hummed as he grandly dabbed. Kane squinted to make out the painting. Then saw it well enough. It was a purple, winged foot arching majestically under a halo.
Chapter 6
Alice Hesburgh, the Senator’s wife, had a sultry, roving eye with the memory of a camera when it came to one fact: Once, at Michigan State, she’d been Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. It was there that she’d met the Senator, then a lecturer in government. He was fifteen years her senior, but she thought he looked “wise.” The Senator, for his part, thought she looked preternaturally sexy. She unearthed for him dreams of lust that he had long ago misplaced.
Their dates had been surreptitious, but at last, when they were discovered, the rumor spread like crabgrass that sweet little Alice was diligently trading her body for the promise of passing grades.
The scandal was squelched by their engagement, but in the wake of the announcement came a flurry of dark murmurings among the male undergraduates. They were threatening to lynch Hesburgh for “crimes against fraternities” and “the practice of demonology.” One burly junior, a tackle on the football team and clearly enamored of Alice, was ready to swear under oath that he’d seen Hesburgh “in a wizard’s cap drawing a pentangle around Alice while talking white mice danced around him in trance.” This bizarre threat, however, came to no fruit. Nor did the pleadings of Alice’s mother that she was “mesmerized by an Electra complex,” the argument melting to ashes in the face of Alice’s reminder that she’d never seen her father, who had hied himself to the wilds of Tierra del Fuego with a lady softball player just three days after Alice’s birth.
Alice married Hesburgh.
They were settled now in Georgetown in a house along the Potomac near the university campus. Hesburgh was now forty-five and Alice merely thirty. She could pass for less and frequently did. On moonlit nights when the fusty Senator was deep in filibuster, Alice would slip into tennis shoes and a shaggy, oversized sweater and import her sizzling charms into a local campus beer hall. At times she attended football rallies, and once, in an incredible extension of her thought-provoking activities, was nominated for “Homecoming Queen” by a campus club at Georgetown. The Senator only discovered it when a request came to his secretary for some “eight-by-ten glossies” of Alice. Their life was not serene.
Alice was not a homemaker. For example, the Senator’s milk bills ran to ninety dollars per month, a rather compelling figure when one considered that they were childless. Alice would open a bottle of milk, pour out a cupful, and leave the bottle uncapped on a table, where inevitably it soured. She also loved to redecorate, room after room and over and over again: from Modern to Japanese to Provincial to Early Tudor to whatever struck her fancy. Whenever the Senator balked, she would scream about Medicare, which Hesburgh staunchly opposed. “Old folks are dying,” she would shrill, “and all you can think about is milk … that and Chinese Modern!” He could never find proper rebuttal. He saved it for the Senate floor, where he would lacerate waste in government with a fury that left him hoarse.
Yet it was jealousy that moved him most mightily, even drove him into inanities. Once, in his bedroom (Early Mandarin that month), after discovering that Alice had been given the lead in the senior class play, he dared to threaten her with a letter opener (Persian, left over from July), husking in wild, bathetic tones, “If I can’t have you, no one will!” He was prevented from further idiocy by the entrance of the maid bringing Alice a glass of hot milk.
The two of them were standing now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The bronze head of a boy, pulled dripping from the Aegean where countless years of lying on ocean bottom had turned it a flaky green, now stared out at them with lustrous eyes that gave it a look of life. Hesburgh, intent, was spelling aloud from a guidebook: “E-p-h-e-b-e—Ephebe. Ephebe of—”
Alice interrupted him, nervously twirling a glove. “Oh, never mind, darling; it’s really such a bore.”
Hesburgh pursed his lips, glaring up from the guidebook into the eyes of the Ephebe. “It’s a classic work of art,” he gritted.
“Hm?” throated Alice, automatically primping her hair as she spied an attractive male some yards away in front of a Picasso. He’d caught her eye and now he wafted her a quite innocent smile. “What was that you said, my dear?”
“I’m trying to build an image, fairest. Now please don’t make any waves.” Suddenly Hesburgh saw the man, saw Alice still staring.
“Oh, what a perfectly marvelous ‘peace dove,’” she cooed, starting to move away. “I think I’ll wander over—”
“Back!” Hesburgh grabbed her arm and held her. “It’s a ringtailed hawk!”
“Oh, honestly!” whined Alice. “Nolan, people are watching!”
As Hesburgh looked to see who might be watching, she escaped. Simultaneously a burly man in uniform backed into him, his nose deep in a brochure. Both men turned.
“Oh, pardon me,” said the man in uniform, “I was—” He stopped and stared at the Senator. It was General Lastrade. He made an elephantine attempt at feigning surprise at the encounter. “Why, Senator Hesburgh!” he clucked. “I never dreamed you were an art lover!”
The Senator’s eyebrows gathered like the dark clouds of a storm. “And I never dreamed that you wore crepe-soled shoes! You lightning-billed egret! What the hell do you mean creeping up on me here in a hallowed hall of culture! I will hear no special pleading for your bomber appropriation!”
“You do me wrong, sir, wrong!” The expression on Lastrade’s face was an exemplar of outraged innocence.
Hesburgh was about to retort but he suddenly spied Alice chatting gaily with the man whom she’d been ogling the moment before. “Alice!” he barked sternly, and hastened toward his wife.
Lastrade looked deep into the eyes of the Ephebe and grunted, “I blew it!”
The Ephebe made no reply, a phenomenon to which it owed its continued survival as an integral work of art.
Chapter 7
Captain Groper knew the difference between himself and a Persian rug. The bane
of his life was simply that others had never recognized the distinction. Am I a zoom? a cup of pudding? he would ask his pillow every night until he grew surfeited with the answer, which was never the one he wanted. Fresh out of high school he’d sold insurance, rising to dizzying heights of obscurity capped by the day when his boss clapped his back and told him, “Groper—you’re okay.” Then Groper read T. E. Lawrence, somehow connected it to Beau Geste, which he read six times within a week. Soon after that he joined the Air Force in the vague and visionary hope that they would assign him to find the “Blue Water,” and that when he’d found it, the world would find him. But from the beginning he’d been an adjutant, a crisply uniformed in-basket; still a Persian rug. Cutshaw was not a rug, he knew, nor any of the other inmates. He hated them for that.
He sat in his office reading poetry when the call came from Miss Mawr. She would not speak to him, however; that was his Karma; he’d expected it. She wanted Colonel Kane. Groper decided that it sounded urgent and went seeking his commander.
Ten pensive days had passed at the mansion. Colonel Kane had left instructions that he was not to be disturbed except in case of an emergency, then locked himself in his quarters. During his retreat the Slovik mansion gave off an air of fretting restlessness, of being at loose ends, shifting on its foundations from haunch to massive haunch, waiting for Kane to emerge. Cutshaw had pounded on his door several times, but got no answer. He seemed rueful and chagrined, and, after the third day, slightly frantic. He took to writing messages on useless scraps of paper and then slipping them under Kane’s door. One of the messages stated that “Tawdry Groper eats unblessed venison!” Another issued the challenge, “I can prove there is a foot!” And still a third made the comment that “There is nothing less attractive than a caribou that pouts!”