The Wapshot Scandal (17 page)

They ate frozen meat, frozen fried potatoes and frozen peas. Blindfolded one could not have identified the peas, and the only flavor the potatoes had was the flavor of soap. It was the monotonous fare of the besieged, it would be served everywhere on the site that night, but where were the walls, the battering rams, where was the enemy that could be accounted for this tasteless porridge? Coverly was happy there and they talked about New England during the meal. While the women washed the dishes Coverly and Griza spoke about running the Keats vocabulary through the computer. Griza’s invitation to dinner seemed to have been a gesture of trust or assent and he agreed to run the vocabulary through the hardware if Coverly would make the preparations. They drank a glass of whisky and ginger ale and Coverly went home.

On the next night Coverly arranged his life along these lines. He left the computation center at five, cooked supper, bathed and put his son to bed. Then he returned to the computation center with his soft leather copy of Keats and began to translate this, on an electrical typewriter, into binary digits. “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” he began, “the air was cooling, and so very still. . . .” It took him three weeks to get through it all including
King Stephen
. It was half-past eleven one night when he typed: “To feel forever its soft fall and swell,/Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,/Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,/And so live ever—or else swoon to death.”

CHAPTER XV

Griza said that if everything went on schedule he would run the tape through late on a Saturday afternoon. He telephoned Coverly on Friday night and told him to come in at four. The tape was stored in Coverly’s office and at four he brought it up to the room where the console stood. He was very excited. He and Griza seemed to be alone in the center. Somewhere an unanswered telephone was ringing. His instructions, converted into binary digits, asked the machine to count the words in the poetry, count the vocabulary and then list those words most frequently used in the order of their usage. Griza put the instructions and the tape into a pair of towers and pulled some switches on the console. He was in that environment where he felt most like himself and swaggered around like a deck hand. Coverly was sweating with excitement. To make some conversation he asked Griza about his mother and his wife but Griza, ennobled by the presence of the console, did not reply. The typewriter began loudly to clatter and Coverly turned. When the machine stopped Griza tore the paper off its rack and passed it to Coverly. The number of words in the poetry came to fifteen thousand three hundred and fifty-seven. The vocabulary was eight thousand five hundred and three and the words in the order of their frequency were: “Silence blendeth grief’s awakened fall/The golden realms of death take all/Love’s bitterness exceeds its grace /That bestial scar on the angelic face/Marks heaven with gall.”

“My God,” Coverly said. “It rhymes. It’s poetry.”

Griza was going around turning off the lights. He didn’t reply.

“But it’s poetry, Griza,” Coverly said. “Isn’t that wonderful? I mean there’s poetry within the poetry.”

Griza’s indifference was implacable. “Yuh, yuh,” he said. “We better get out of here. I don’t want to get caught.”

“But you see, don’t you,” Coverly said, “that within the poetry of Keats there is some other poetry.” It was possible to imagine that some numerical harmony underlay the composition of the universe, but that this harmony embraced poetry was a bewildering possibility and Coverly then felt himself to be a citizen of the world that was emerging; a part of it. Life was filled with newness; there was newness everywhere! “I guess I’d better tell somebody,” Coverly said. “It’s a discovery, you know.”

“Keep cool,” Griza said. “You tell somebody, they’ll know I was using the console on off hours and I’ll get my arse reamed.” He had turned off all the lights and they moved into the corridor. Then at the end of the corridor a door opened and Dr. Lemuel Cameron, director of the site, came toward them.

Cameron was a short man. He walked with a stoop. His ruthlessness and his brilliance were legendary and Griza and Coverly were frightened. Cameron’s hair was a lusterless black, cut so long that a curl hung over his forehead. His skin was dark and sallow with a fine flush of red at the cheek. His eyes were mournful but it was their brows, their awnings, their hairy settings, that made his appearance seem distinguished and formidable. His brows were an inch thick, brindled with gray and tufted like the pelt of a beast. They looked like structural beams, raised into a position that would support the weight of his knowledge and his authority. We know that heavy eyebrows support nothing, not even thin air, nor are they rooted in the intellect or the heart, but it was his brows that intimidated the two men.

“What’s your name?” he asked. The question was directed at Coverly.

“Wapshot,” he said.

If Cameron had been a recipient of Lorenzo’s bounty, he showed no signs of it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“We’ve just made a word-count of the vocabulary of John Keats,” Coverly said in his most earnest manner.

“Ah, yes,” Cameron said. “I’m interested in poetry myself although it’s not commonly known.” Then, raising his face and giving them a smile that was either gassy or insincere, he recited with practiced expression:

How many worlds around their suns
Have woven night and day,
For countless thinking things like men,
Now deep in stone or clay!
Their story caught in light now comes
To us, unskilled to know
The comedy, the tragedy, the glint of friend or foe,
In that faint and cryptic message
From afar and long ago.

Coverly said nothing and Cameron looked at him narrowly.

“I’ve seen you before?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where.”

“On the mountain.”

“Come to my office on Monday,” he said. “What time is it?”

“Quarter to seven,” Coverly said.

“Have I eaten?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” said Coverly.

“I wonder,” he said, “I wonder.” He went up on the elevator alone.

CHAPTER XVI

Coverly reported to Cameron’s office on Monday morning. He clearly recalled his first encounter with the old genius. This had been in the mountains, three hundred miles north of Talifer, where Coverly had gone skiing one weekend with some other men from the office. They reached the place late in the afternoon and would have time for only one run before dark. They were waiting for the chair lift when they were asked to step aside. It was Cameron.

He was with two generals and a colonel. They were all much bigger and younger than he. There was an appreciable stir at his arrival but he was, after all, a legendary skier. His contribution to the theory of thermal heat had been worked out from his observation of the molecular action on the base of his skis. He wore fine ski clothes and had a scarlet headband above his famous eyebrows. His eyes were brilliant that afternoon and he moved toward the lift with the preciseness and grace (Coverly thought) of someone who enjoys unchallenged authority. He went up the mountain, followed by his retinue and then by Coverly and his friends. There was a hut or refuge at the summit where they stopped to smoke. There was no fire in the refuge. It was very cold. When Coverly had adjusted his bindings he found that he and Cameron were alone. The others had gone down. The presence of Cameron made Coverly uneasy. Without speaking, without making a sound, he seemed to project around him something as palpable as an electromagnetic field. It was late, it would be dark very soon but all the mountain peaks, all of them buried in snow, still stood in the canted light of day like the gulfs and trenches of an ancient sea bed. What moved Coverly in the scene was its vitality. Here was a display of the inestimable energies of the planet; here in the last light was a sense of its immense history. Coverly knew enough not to speak of this to the doctor. It was Cameron who spoke. His voice was harsh and youthful. “Isn’t it remarkable,” he said, “to think that only two years ago it was generally thought that the heterosphere was divided into two regions.”

“Yes,” Coverly said.

“First of course we have the homosphere,” the doctor explained. He spoke with the forced courtesy of some professors. “Within the homosphere the primary components of air are uniformly mixed in their standard proportions by weight of 76 percent nitrogen, 23 percent oxygen and one percent argon, apart from water vapor.” Coverly turned to see him. His face was drawn by the intense cold. His breath smoked. His habit of explanation seemed impervious to the majesty of their circumstances. Coverly felt that he barely saw the light and the mountains. “We have within the homosphere,” he went on, “the troposphere, the stratosphere and the mesosphere with, beyond the mesopause, oxygen and nitric acid, ionized by Lyman Beta components and above this oxygen and some nitric oxide, ionized by short ultraviolet ray. The electronic density above the mesopause is 100,000 a cubic centimeter. Above this it rises to 200,000 and then to a million. Then the gross density of atoms becomes so low that the electron density diminishes. . . .”

“I think we’d better go down,” Coverly said. “It’s getting dark. Would you like to go first?”

Cameron refused and called good luck to Coverly as Coverly poled off. He made the first turn and the second but the third turn was already dark and he took a spill. He was not hurt but, getting to his feet, he happened to look overhead and saw Dr. Cameron descending sedately in the chair lift.

Coverly met his friends below the chair-lift station and went on to an inn where they had a drink in the bar. Cameron and his retinue came in a few minutes later and took a table in a corner. It was no trouble to hear what Cameron was saying. It seemed that he could not control the penetrativeness of his voice. He was talking about running the trail and talking about it in detail; the hairpin turns, the long stretch of washboard, the icy schusses and the drifted snow. Here was a man responsible in a sense for the security of the nation, who could not be counted upon to tell the truth about his skiing. He was notorious for his insistence upon demonstrable truths and yet in this matter was a consummate liar. Coverly was fascinated. Had he brought another and a finer sense of truth to the face of the mountain? Had he judged from the chair lift that the trail was too steep and swift for his strength? Had he guessed that if he admitted to judicious timidity he might have impaired the respectfulness of his team? Had his disregard for the common truth involved some larger sense of truth? Coverly didn’t know whether or not he had been seen from the chair lift.

A secretary led Coverly into Cameron’s office that morning. “Your interest in poetry,” the old man began at once, “is my principal reason for asking you here, for what could be more poetic than those hundred thousand million suns that make up the glittering jewelry of our galaxy? This vastness of power is utterly beyond our comprehension. It seems certain that we are receiving light from more than a hundred billion billion suns. It is conservatively estimated that one star in a thousand carries a planet hospitable to some form of life. Even if this estimate should prove a million times too big there would still be a hundred billion such planets in the known universe. Would you like to work for me?” the doctor asked.

“I don’t think you understand, Dr. Cameron,” Coverly said. “You see, my only training is in taping and preprogramming. When I was transferred from Remsen the machine made a slip-up and I ended in public relations; but I don’t think you understand that—”

“Don’t you tell me what I understand and what I don’t understand,” Cameron shouted. “If what you’re trying to tell me is that your ignorance is limpid and abysmal, you’re trying to tell me something I already know. You’re a blockhead. I know it. That’s why I want you. Blockheads are difficult to find these days. On your way out tell Miss Knowland to have you transferred to my staff. Write me a twenty-minute commencement address along the lines of what I’ve just said and plan to leave with me for Atlantic City next week. What time is it?”