Triumph (10 page)

Ben chuckled. "I see. We'll have to watch him. Didn't know the Japanese, after a standard American upbringing, could turn out to be Lotharios."

"I'm trying to say just that: you don't really appreciate what we are up against!

Kit, by the time he reached eighteen and after he decided Faith wouldn't soon settle down with him, had an intercollegiate reputation--and now has a café-society carbon copy.

Woman's dream come true, though briefly for each 'lucky' woman. I know nothing whatever about Lotus Li's life. Born in Hawaii, went to the university there, came to what the Islanders call the 'mainland' two years ago to finish at Radcliffe. I seem to recall her father sent one daughter, for part of her education, to the Sorbonne. But he had several children and I'm not certain that one was Lotus. As for Paulus' Connie--real name's Heliconia--" He stopped. "Have you talked to her?"

"Not really. Not yet."

"Looked
at her?"

"She's very beautiful."

"Beautiful!" Vance exploded the word. "You should see Connie in a bathing suit!

From the time she was sixteen, I often thought--
even I
, a married man--" He broke off and laughed at himself with a sound that lacked complete integrity. It was the first falseness Ben had detected in him.

Farr presently continued. Needlessly, Ben thought. "I'm trying to be honest with you, and clear. I'm assuming you've got self-control the rest may not have. Anyhow.

Heliconia--Connie--went to Fenwich High when George did. Now, about that 'bathing-suit' thing. I daresay Faith may have told you my wife's background?"

Ben shook his head, smiled slightly. "I've only seen your daughter a few times outside the hospital. For lunch. Usually, with others. She said very little about her mother. She realized, of course, I knew about you. As everyone does."

Farr ignored that. "Valerie's mother and father were old-school liberals--the Nineteen Twenties variety. The mother had inherited money--mines in the West--and gone to Smith. Val's dad was a professor in a super-permissive school for girls who are rich, reckless, vivid, and imagine they are--or are imagined by doting parents to be--

brainy. So there was money, social position, academic status--and liberalism of the most enthusiastic, not to say, extremist, sort--all about Valerie, as a child, girl, and young woman. She first attended an advanced,
moderne,
or
cuckoo
kid's school up in Massachusetts, where they did things--were allowed to--that I still don't believe. Like, if you felt in the mood, during geometry, taking off all your clothes and singing songs that sailors usually keep to themselves. If you--?"

"--get it? Yes. Some of my colleagues still submit their youngsters to that species of educational torment. Torment . . . owing to the absence of all discipline."

"Exactly! Well, a lot of the ideas still adhere to Valerie. Some, I've benefited from greatly.
My
people were ultraconservative. The complete opposite of hers. I suppose that was what first so attracted me. Anyhow, when Heliconia Davey reached high-school age, she went on for a summer or two doing things she'd always taken for granted--including one my wife insisted on. That is, mixing with other kids, like Faith--" he hesitated an instant before going on--"along with George Hyama. Even swimming together in our indoor pool in the old place. But a time came when Connie quit. She had the body of a leopard, golden-brown, and just that taut, that alive. She wanted to be a dancer. Ballet.

But she had to work her way, in Vassar--earn whatever her folks couldn't furnish from earnings and savings, which meant hard work for Connie. Connie learned a trade. Pride and effort--or
something
--changed her to a more intellectual person.

"But, as a
high-school
girl, past adolescence, she became the most-chased young woman in this part of Connecticut--and many pursuers were older men, also--white, rich, and very respectable, except when they saw Connie. I'm not sure what caused her to change her ways. I know her parents went through agonies, certain their one child would end up a grade-A bum. But almost overnight, in her senior year at high, Connie stopped even talking to all white men and most white women--Valerie and Faith and me, excepted. So far as I know she's never dated--seriously or frivolously--any white man, since. She never again showed up for a swim. Till her graduation from Vassar she lived, I think, like a nun. Since then, I can't say. On a glance, she makes ninety-five per cent of all men of all sorts and ages forget she is a Negress and concentrate on the fact she's a woman."

Ben said nothing.

That discomfited Farr. "Perhaps I should be a bit more explicit, Ben." The scientist thought not, but said nothing. "I myself am a broad-minded man. I'd have to be, married these near-thirty years to Valerie. Understand, I love my wife. I'd give--have given--all I possess, to have been able to prevent her from--from--from putting a booze barricade between her and life." Ben reflected that even without "all he possessed,"

Vance Farr would have been comfortable with his wife's inheritance; he decided it was an unworthy thought. After all, people like the Farrs had never known what it is to wait table and do odd jobs to get an education. Or to be born in a family where the daily fluctuation in the price of hamburger was important. Or to grow up thinking, always, whether to spend or not spend a dime, as Ben had done for the first twenty years of life. Vance Farr did love his wife genuinely, although in a way Ben hardly regarded as ideal. A way Farr now made even plainer and even less ideal-seeming:

"It is destroying Valerie. Drink. A wonderful woman, too."

Ben said, quietly, "She'll get a chance,
here.
I mean--!"

Vance Farr shook his head. "No. You mean, there's nothing to drink in this labyrinth?"

He laughed mirthlessly. "For one thing, though I never told Valerie and didn't bother to show you, this place connects, through steel doors up the shaft, with a wine cellar Granddad built. I kept it stocked, in the family tradition. You'll see! But the real thing is, I hoped, if this dungeon had to be used, Valerie would most likely get here in time. And I didn't want her to suffer the misery of being an immolated-alcoholic, without a drink to assuage that craving. There's plenty of liquor!" He eyed the scientist. "Oh. That! I did wonder for a while how come Val managed to get tight right off, without asking me, or somebody, to get her a drink.
No.
If she ever 'finds herself,' she'll have to do it
by
herself, and in the midst of people who go on drinking. I'd hate myself for trying a forcible reform. You'll get to realize, Ben, when you've come to know her sober--which she is, nearly all day--what an extraordinary person Valerie is."

"Couldn't she," Ben asked, rather vaguely, and not quite sure just what he meant,

"I mean--won't she--more or less naturally act as chaperone for the young women you're worried about?"

Vance stared. "Val?
Chaperone!
But I told you of her up-bringing! You don't understand! To Val's parents free love wasn't just one of four freedoms--it was all four!

Why in the world Val has remained faithful to me through all our marriage, I'll never figure out! I don't deserve it!" He rose, paced, sat again. "After all, a man in my business-

-a merchant--spends a lot of his life in other cities, other lands, far from his home. I haven't been exactly a saint. Val never expected me to be! Quite the contrary! Not a jealous bone in her body! Of course, as we've grown older, and as I've become, I suppose, monotonous and over-familiar, less desired and desiring--and as Val, poor girl, has become more and more alienated by drink--she's developed a certain shrewishness about purely imaginary 'other women.' Her mind is warping, I fear. For I've never to
her
knowledge been 'indiscreet,' Bernman. Never to her certain knowledge!"

The scientist caught again an overtone of sanctimoniousness, or a false undertone of self-righteous defensiveness. He wished the other man were not thus revealing a flaw in his personality. It wasn't necessary, and Ben had found Farr, otherwise, a sincere, very brilliant, imaginative person. He again said nothing.

Farr waited, drumming uncertain fingers on the bridge table. Finally, with a shrug, he said, "That's about it! I merely meant to explain that if we're entombed here for month after month, there are inevitably going to be some romances. When they begin, the inevitable result will be some pretty violent jealousies. In close quarters that emotion can be dangerous. I went into all this because I knew you'd be on the side of keeping order, preventing quarrels--fights, even--and demanding decency, or grace, anyway, from all hands."

"But," Ben said perplexedly, "naturally! What else?"

"Good man!" Farr seemed to have been relieved of a burden. He rose and clasped Ben's limp, surprised hand. "Knew you'd understand. "

Startled, Ben thought for a second, returned the handshake mildly, and decided he had to be absolutely sure. "Vance," he asked solemnly, "do you, by chance, mean, in all that talk, that
you
are warning
me
to—to--"

"To what?"

"To leave Faith alone?" He blurted it.

"Good Lord!" Farr was chuckling. Fantastically, Ben felt.
"Faith
decides who leaves her alone--or doesn't!"

"Then"--Ben was still puzzled--"do you plan to give a similar talk to all the other men? As a general precaution?"

Farr shook his head, almost aggrievedly. "No. I simply gave you the background of those here, as I know it, for the reason I said. You're a solid-seeming type, emotionally. You have standards. And guts. Don't stop me." He raised his short-fingered hand. "I know what it cost you to face the fact, just after you came here, that you cared about my daughter, and wouldn't ever let it show. Proud of you for it! In a way, anyhow.

But I feared you assumed others have as much self-command as you. They haven't!

You'll see, I think. And I'm glad I know now that you'll help, if, or when, I need help, to keep things sane."

"I'm sure," Ben answered, "you're needlessly worried."

"I hope so. Anyhow, I'll worry less, since we've talked." Once again he looked at his watch. "Time, nearly, to check the heat situation. Shall we go?"

Halfway up the shaft they saw that the area of luminosity on the underside of the middle doors had grown dimmer and, they both thought, slightly smaller. Relieved, they came back.

Ben said, as the elevator portal shut and Farr started toward the ladder, "I think I might take the outside radiation-level readings after this." He held the metal rungs till Farr shouted from the highest: "Dropped back to eighty-nine!" He climbed down.

Ben was absent for fifteen minutes. When he returned Farr was lounging and smoking a cigar. Ben had wanted a cigarette all day, all this night, like the others who smoked and yearned to do so here--achingly, nervously, tensely. But since Farr had not smoked, Ben had assumed, like the rest, that their air supply wouldn't permit it. Now, seeing the thick, spiral-issuing cigar in Farr's fingers, Ben snatched a pack of cigarettes from a pocket and greedily lighted up.

Farr watched him, almost without awareness. Looked at his cigar. "Funny. I smoke a dozen of these a day, or even more. And hadn't thought to--till just now."

Ben explained that everybody else had assumed smoking was "out."

Farr's head shook. "Lord, no! The air's filtered constantly. We clean it, dry it, take out the carbon dioxide, add oxygen as required, and reuse it. Like a submarine."

Ben smiled. "About everybody will sure be glad to know that! But how come, with a cigar habit, you
didn't
smoke all these hours?"

Farr's smile was wide and yet his eyes were unamused. "Dunno. Just didn't notice the urge. What were the readings?" Ben hesitated. "It must have been sodium," he said.

"Not serious for us--short half--life-but--"

Farr clamped down on the cigar. "You're not making sense."

Ben still hesitated. "First gauge I read made me think--one George says came up on signal from behind a cave door, at the far rim of the quarry."

"I know. Go on!"

"I thought the system had blown! Reading was so high. Second one, in your north property, in a special well, confirmed the first. I still can hardly believe it! But
all
the gauges radioing us any information--half of those you fixed up--agree, more or less."

"Man, out with it! High, I take it?" "The level outside, around your property--or what used to be yours--seems close to one
million
roentgens."

"A million! No!" Farr blanched, sagged, muttered. "A million! Impossible!"

"Not if the enemy set off enough devices rigged to spill maximum amounts of radioactive sodium over the American landscape. It's what you'd expect."

"But, a
million roentgens!
When
six hundred
is fatal, if you take it over your whole body for minutes!"

"Sure. And if you stepped into a million roentgens, you'd--I don't exactly know!

Sort of wilt, crumple, start to go black and die, standing--at a guess."

"How far inland would it--?"

"Can't say. Clear across the United States in the next few days. Some big fraction of that level anyhow, if they used enough sea mines on both coasts. We've known such things would be possible, as you said, since mid-1950. But we never officially presumed any enemy would try it."

"Crazy!"

"The whole thing is! So's this place, for that matter!"

Farr sat rooted. "Nonsense! This place is the only fragment of common sense
left
in--the whole world, maybe! But, a million roentgens! Even half a million! A quarter!

And even if half of the amount fades in--what?"

"Fifteen hours, if it's sodium."

"Will anybody survive it? Short of having--?" Farr looked at the vast oblong chamber carved from stone.

"I'd imagine not," Ben answered listlessly. "Unless they're airtight, like us, and heavily barricaded, like this place. Small leaks of air, that hot, would be enough to do the job. In the best of standard civilian shelters."