Alternities (21 page)

“And what have these mothballed oil wells to do with missiles?”

“I would have thought you could guess. I’m prepared to allow you to place two of the launchers on each platform. That would be the ten you have here, and a dozen more. I’m sure you agree that the isolation will provide much better security than trundling them along our public roads, where a traffic accident or a curious thief could unmask the disguise at any time.”

Taskins was not at all sure that he agreed, or that Madison, O’Neill & Co, would, either. “It’s certainly worth considering,” he said, rising from the settee, “and I’m sure that President Robinson will give it his close attention. May I take that map?”

“I had it prepared for just that reason,” Somerset said. “It’s innocent enough in itself. Please see that the less innocent explanations aren’t committed to paper.”

“Perhaps you’d prefer to talk directly to the President,” Taskins suggested. “I’m certain a secure line could be arranged—or even a state visit.”

“No,” Somerset said with an understated finality. “It’s not yet time for that.”

Wallace stood alone on the twelfth-floor balcony of his new home and looked south at the heart of the city. As far as he could tell it was little different from the city he remembered: a few more tall buildings, Meridian Street six lanes instead of four.

He could see the square spire of the cathedral gate house, thought he could make out the slender column of the War Memorial. That had been one of the first field trips he had taken with the Youth Defense Reserve: to Indianapolis to see the Soldiers and Sailors Monument and climb the stairs to the eyrie at the two-hundred foot level.

“Here you are,” Arens said from behind, joining him. “I thought you’d disappeared.”

“Just sightseeing.”

“How’s it look?”

“Can’t really tell from here,” Wallace said.

“I’ll tell you what you can’t see. A city with no green spaces, no character, and only about eleven women worth chasing. Look—see those grain elevators?” he said, pointing at a file of white concrete columns standing just apart from the city center. “That’s three blocks from the state Capitol. The governor can see grain elevators out his office window, can you believe it?”

“So where are you from, Arens?”

“Manhattan. New York City. The best.”

“I’ve never been there.”

“Then you probably think this is pretty exciting,” Arens said with a friendly grin. “Anyway, I’m going out. This apartment isn’t the only thing I’ve been away from for five days, you know?”

Wallace turned back to the railing. “Okay.”

“Problem?”

“Just wishing I could go downtown.”

Arens shrugged. “Go.”

“What?”

“Just avoid Meridian Street. You’re new enough here that most of our people don’t know you.”

“I thought we were supposed to stay put until our orientation was over.”

“You are. But you don’t have to.”

“Come again?”

Arens flashed a lopsided grin. “First lesson, Wallace. The stationmaster sets down a lot of rules, yeah. But out in the field, we’ve got our own rules. And the main one is that if you do your job right, the rest is nobody’s business but your own.”

“But—”

“See, outside the cloister, there’s nobody to police us but ourselves. I’ll play nanny to the ones that need it, like Fowler in there. But I didn’t volunteer to play warden to anybody. So go downtown if that’s what you want.”

“What about Gary?”

“You want to take him with you?”

“Not really.”

“Is he a right guy?”

“I don’t know,” Wallace said. “I don’t know him well enough.”

“Then you and I’ll leave together. Let him think I’m riding herd on you.”

Wallace looked hard at the youth. “You’re not setting me up, are you? A little game of let’s-burn-the-new-boy?”

“You’ve got your ‘us’ and ‘them’ all confused,” Arens said, crossing his arms. “Look, what’d they tell you about fraternizing with locals?”

“Uh—permitted only in the course of official duties. We’re supposed to socialize with other people from the station.”

“Absolutely right. Except I’m on my way to pin a local girl to her mattress, and if I’m lucky this is going to be the time I catch her fertile as black earth.”

“You want—”

“Damn straight I do. So relax. You’ve got an even bigger secret to tell on me than I have to tell on you. Go downtown and wallow in that homecoming spirit.” He winked as he backed away into the apartment. “Just try not to kill any badges while you’re out, all right?”

A smile came slowly to Wallace’s lips. “You’ve got it,” he said. “Happy fucking.”

“That’s the best kind.”

The city was in fact little different from what he remembered, but Wallace saw it differently now.

He was no longer a wide-eyed fourteen-year-old. He knew a Boston, a Philadelphia, a London. He had a scale of reference against which to measure what had once been the only sizable city in his experience.

And that scale told him that Arens was largely right. He saw Indianapolis now as a generic Tinker-toy scale-model-railroad kind of city, containing all the requisite parts of a metropolis but with the soul of an overgrown small town. Modestly overgrown, at that. It was a ten-minute walk from the White River on the west to the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks on the east, a distance which spanned the entire mercantile, banking, and government complex.

The wide streets were barren of trees, the brick and cinderblock buildings squat and functional, the few modern towers over twenty stories bland and interchangeable. What style and grace Wallace could find was contained in a very few structures: the ornately facaded Publix Theatre, the castlelike Union Station, a copper-spired Catholic church, a turn-of-the-century tobacconist’s shop.

But still, it was comforting to be there, walking the almost deserted streets, marking the absence or presence of childhood landmarks. It was not home, but it was familiar, more familiar than foreign.

The six-story Federal Rail warehouse on South Street where his brother had worked was still there, though the sign now said OGIHARA FARM DISTRIBUTORS and the water tower which once sat on its roof was gone. He wandered north of Monument Circle to look on the sprawling Ionic-columned court house, which had so impressed a young Rayne Wallace with its size and classical solidity. It was unchanged and still impressive.

Wallace saved for last a long detour west toward the river and a more personal landmark. He had undergone the first round of competitive screening for the Guard at Oscar C. McCulloch School (No. 5), a grammar school twice the size of the twelve-section consolidated in Hagerstown. He remembered the day and the school vividly, down to the blue and white hemispherical maps of the world which flanked the front entrance.

But No. 5 was a memory only. The site where it had stood was part of the parking lot for a cluster of low-rise apartments under construction. Wallace absorbed that fact with an uncomfortable sense of reality having been violated, and backed away almost superstitiously, retreating mentally and physically to safer havens. As night came to the city skies, he hurried back along quiet side streets to Arens’ apartment.

His curiosity had been blunted for the moment, and yet there was a question which nagged at him.
What would my life have been like here
, he wondered. It was a thought the form of which was unfamiliar. Neither Red Philadelphia nor Yellow London had ever stirred such a reflection. He was clearly not of those places.

But this was different. He both belonged, and did not belong. It was home, and not-home. And the conflict between the two brought questions for which he had no answers. “What would my life have been like here?” It was a question which invited him to regret realities which he had accepted, decisions and turnings and events past and better forgotten.

And by the time he returned to the apartment, those thoughts had unsettled him enough that he regretted having left it in the first place.

There was a stiff breeze coming off the lake, driving small wavelets to slap against the steel hull of the deep-water freighter tied up at Dock 11. She flew the Canadian flag from her stem, and her bow bore the name
Belle Isle
.

Except for those distinguishing marks, she might have been any of a score of nearly identical ships plying the Great Lakes waters. The size of the seaway locks between the lake ports and the Gulf of St. Lawrence had dictated their lines and dimensions, eight hundred feet long and drawing thirty feet of water fully loaded.

Most of
Belle Isle
’s cargo for this voyage was already stowed away belowdecks: refrigerated containers packed with frozen sides of Kansas beef, great rolls of newsprint from Minnesota mills, tanklike shipping casks of agricultural fertilizer.

But the final item on the manifest had been late arriving and was not yet loaded. Six gleaming new candy-red diesel tractors stood lined up on skids on the quay, temporarily separated from their sixty-foot trailers. All six tractors bore the International Harvester logo on their grilles and the Navigator 5000 nameplate on the side of their engine compartments.

By contrast, the silver-white trailers, one of which was at that moment waiting for the bare hook of the tower crane, bore no identifying marks at all. But each was already destined to acquire local coloration soon after their arrival at Glasgow—the royal blue and white of Hampton Transport, the crest and arms of Imperial Tea, and so forth.

The man who called himself Kendrew watched the loading process from the
Belle Isle
’s bridge, high on the sheer face of the aft superstructure. His presence was questioned by neither captain nor bridge crew. The captain, who also held that rank in the Canadian naval reserve, had received his instructions directly from Ottawa. The crew had been told that the harbormaster had asked them to accommodate a “manufacturer’s representative” and needed to know no more.

Kendrew waited patiently until the last of the tractors had been lowered into its nesting place amidships. Then as the great loading doors began to close, he left the bridge and went down into the hold to see that they had been satisfactorily secured.

To his pleasure, they had—the loadmaster, like the crane operator, was a member of the Company. Both had been warned that the trailers were more than five times as heavy as their declared weight on the bill of lading and had made the proper allowances.

Walking the deck as the preparations to sail proceeded, the captain met Kendrew at the gangway. “Everything all right?”

“Everything’s all right.”

“Then see you on the other side of the puddle, eh?”

Kendrew shook his head. “Someone else will take delivery.”

“I understand.”

By the time Kendrew reached the harbormaster’s offices, the lines holding the freighter had been cast off and coiled, and her deep-thrumming engines were edging her away from the dock. On seeing Kendrew, the harbormaster excused himself from his own office, leaving and closing the door behind him.

Kendrew picked up the phone and dialed a number which appeared in no published directory. When he heard an electronic squeal from the other end, he recited a six-number sequence. A second squeal told him the code and the call had been accepted.

His message was brief. “Mama’s bitch has whelped another litter of pups,” he said. “Please tell Pa.” Then he hung up and moved to the harbormaster’s window, allowing himself to linger until the
Belle Isle
passed through the gap in the port’s stone breakwater, beginning its two thousand mile journey to the sea.

But Kendrew could not linger too long, for he had a journey of his own to make. Unexpectedly, the reason still unexplained, Madison wanted him in Washington. So for the first time in nearly a year, he was going home.

Wallace found Fowler playing solitaire on the dining room table.

“Where’s Arens?” the analyst asked, looking up from his game as Wallace entered.

“Still out. He dropped me off.”

“Which means we’re stuck here.”

“I guess.”

“They’re treating us like prisoners, you know? I didn’t think it’d be like this. Blacked-out vans. Everything off-limits except your residence and the gate house. No travel without your monitor. They brought us here to do a job. Why don’t they trust us?”

“It’ll loosen up.”

“It’d better,” Fowler said, gathering up his cards. “This guy they’ve stuck us with—what do you think of him?”

“A little sure of himself, maybe, but all right.”

“I don’t like his attitude,” Fowler griped. “He doesn’t take what he’s about seriously.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t take us very seriously.”

“He’s supposed to be helping us. But here it is, our first night here, and where is he?”

“Working, I guess.”
Parting the petals, actually
—

“Is being a field agent a twenty-four-hour job?”

“You do things when they can be done,” Wallace said with a shrug. “Did you expect a guided tour of the city?”

“I expected him to put us in the picture.”

“Local orientation starts tomorrow down at the cathedral.”

“I know that. But with the way they’ve treated us so far, do you really think they’re going to tell us everything?”

Wallace flopped his body into the well-worn club chair near the balcony. “Maybe not.”

With a surprisingly agile flourish. Fowler fanned the cards, stacked and cut them one-handed, then set the deck neatly on the table. “Keep a secret?”

Wallace smiled. “I think I can manage.”

“While you two were gone, I poked around a little here.”

“Not very polite.”

“I’m just trying to figure out what they’re hiding from us.”

“Did you?”

“I found some interesting things. Like last week’s television program guide. Did you know that there are fifteen different channels here?”

“I’ve seen places that have more.”

“Not at home.”

“No. Not there.”

“And a lot of them run through the night. Movies. Music. Sports. And lots of things you never see back home. There’s one channel called
Worldview
. Nothing but travelogues—Qatar, the Amazon, and some countries I never heard of. Even one about Azerbaidzhan. That’s part of Red Russia. And there’s another channel called
Body and Soul
that had a show about anal sex. About how to do it, can you believe that?”