Kate Wilhelm

 

THE FUSION BOMB

 

 

AT DUSK the barrier islands were like a string of jewels gleaming in the placid bay. The sea wasn’t reflecting now, the only lights that showed were those of the islands and the shore lights that were from two to four miles westward. The islands looked like an afterthought, as if someone had decided to outline the coast with a faulty pen that skipped as it wrote in sparkles. Here and there dotted lines tethered the jewels, kept them from floating away, and lines joined them one to another in a series, connective tissue too frail to endure the fury of the sea. Then came a break, a dark spot with only a sprinkling of lights at one end, the rest of the island swallowed in blackness of tropical growth.

 

The few lights at the southern end seemed inconsequential, the twinkling of hovering fireflies, to be swept away with a brush of the hand. No lines joined this dark speck with the other, clearly more civilized, links of the chain that stretched to the north and angled off to the south. No string of incandescence tied it to the mainland. It was as if this dark presence had come from elsewhere to shoulder itself into the chain where it stood unrecognized and unacknowledged by its neighbors.

 

It was shaped like a primitive arrowhead. If the shaft had been added, the feathers would have touched land hundreds of miles to the south, at St. Augustine, possibly. The island was covered with loblolly pines, live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, cypress and magnolia trees. The thickened end was white sand, stucco houses, and masses of hewn stones, some in orderly piles and rows, others tossed about, buried in sand so that only corners showed, tumbled down the beach, into the water where the sea and bay joined. Philodendron, gone wild, had claimed many of the blocks, climbing them with stems as thick as wrists, split leaves hiding the worked surface of the granite and sandstone, as if nature were working hard to efface what man had done to her island. Those blocks that had been lost to the sea had long since been naturalized by barnacles, oysters, seaweeds; genera­tions of sergeant majors and wrasses and blue crabs and stonefish had lived among them.

 

At low tide, as it was now, the water whispered gently to the rocks, secrets of the sea murmured in an unintelligible tongue that evoked memories and suggested understanding. Eliot listened hard, then answered: “So I’ll tell the old bastard, take your effing island, and your effing job, and your effing money and stuff it all you know where.” The sea mocked him and he took another drink. He sat on one of the stones, his back against another one, and he put a motor on the rocky end of the island and wound it up. It was a rubber-band motor. The arrowhead pointed due north and cut a clean swath, its motion steady and sure, like a giant carrier. And when he had circled the world, when he had docked at all the strange ports and sampled all the strange customs and strange foods, then he didn’t know what to do with his mobile island, and he sank it, deep into the Mariannas Trench where it could never be raised again, where it would vanish without a sign that it had existed. He drank again, this time emptying the glass. For a moment he hefted it, then he put it down on the rock next to him.

 

“Eliot! Where are you?”

 

He didn’t answer, but he could see the white shape moving among the rocks. She knew damn well where he was.

 

“Pit, old man, I’m through. I quit. I’ll leave by the mail boat in the morning, or swim over, or fly on the back of a cormorant.”

 

“Eliot! For God’s sake, don’t be so childish! Stop playing games. Everyone’s waiting for you.”

 

“Ah, Beatrice, the unattainable, forever pure, forever fleeing, and fleet.” But I had you once, twice, three times. Hot and sweaty in my arms.

 

“You’re drunk! Why? Why tonight? Everyone’s waiting for you.”

 

She was very near now, not so near that he could make out her features, but near enough to know that she wore a white party dress, that she wore pearls at her throat, near enough so that the elusive whisper of the sea now became water swishing among rocks. He stood up. She was carrying her sandals.

 

“You’ll bruise your feet. Stay there, or better, go back and tell them that I do not wish to attend another bloody party, not an­other one for years and years.”

 

“Eliot, the new girl’s here. You’ll want to meet her. And . . . it’s a surprise, Eliot. Please come now. He’ll be so disappointed.”

 

“Why? He already hired her, didn’t he? Tomorrow’s time enough for me to meet her. And the only surprise around here is that we don’t all die of boredom.”

 

He picked up his glass and let a trickle of melted ice wet his lips. He should have brought the pitcher of gin and lemonade. Have to remember, he told himself sternly, no half measures from now on. Been too moderate around here. Moderation’s no damn good for island living. He stood up. The sea tilted and the rock tried to slide him off into the water. He could hear vicious laughter, masked as waves rushed around stones. Beatrice caught his hand and led him out of the jumbled rocks.

 

“Come on, let’s take a walk,” she said. But the drunkenness was passing, and he shook his head.

 

“I’m okay,” he said. “Sitting too long, that’s all. Let’s go to the damn party and get it over with.”

 

She half led, half pushed him along the cypress boardwalk toward the main house.

 

“The new girl. What’s she like?”

 

“I’m not sure. You know she got over on the pretext that I had recommended her. Turns out that we lived in the same town back when we were growing up. So I should know her, except that I’m ten years older than she is. I dated her brother when I was sixteen, but I can’t remember much about her. Or her brother either, for that matter. She was Gina’s age when I saw her last. She’s twenty now, a student, looking for summer work, perfect to spell Marianne while she has her baby, and so on. But you’ll see.”

 

Just what we need, he thought. A young single girl to liven things up around here. “Is she pretty?”

 

“No. Very plain actually. But do you think that will make any difference?” Beatrice sounded amused.

 

How well we know each other. She can follow my thought processes, come to my conclusions for me, without even thinking about it. A simple temporary dislocation of the ego. The board­walk led them around the ruins, and they approached the house from the back. Curiously old-fashioned and unglamorous, one floor that rambled, deep porch; there was a lot of ironwork, grilles, rails, scrolls and curlicues that should have been offensive but were pleasing. They skirted a swimming pool that had been concerted to a sunken garden and walked along the ornate porch to the front entrance. Wide windows, uncovered, with massive shutters at their sides. View of a room the width of the house, fireplace on one wall, bar and stools, low, gold gleaming cypress furniture, red Spanish tile floors that didn’t show the scars of the constant polishing of the sand. Beyond the room there was a terrace, shielded from the sea wind by a louvered wall of glass. Moving figures broken into sections by the partly opened glass slats, the hum of voices, echo of Spanish guitars. All substantial and real, all but the fragmented people.

 

Eliot took a deep breath and entered the terrace. Beatrice paused a moment to speak to Mr. Bonner, who would go over to her place to babysit. Eliot was aware of their low conversation, as he was aware of the new girl who stood out because she was new and very pale. Not pretty. Homely, actually. He nodded at Mr. Pitcock, whose eyes always seemed to see more than was visible. He was seventy; why weren’t his eyes starting to dim? Pitcock knew that he’d been drinking, knew that he’d tried to forget the party, knew that if Beatrice hadn’t been sent after him, he would have passed it up. So fire me, he thought at the old man, and knew that the old man was aware of that thought also. They shook hands and Pitcock introduced the new girl.

 

“Donna, this is the project director, Dr. Kalin. Eliot, Donna Bensinger.”

 

“Hello, Eliot.” Too fast. Should have called him Dr. Kalin. He didn’t like her pasty skin, or the limpness of her hand when he touched it, or the pale, myopic eyes, and the thin dun-colored hair that looked as if it needed a shampoo.

 

“I hope you won’t find it too dull here, Miss Bensinger,” he said, and looked past her at Ed Delizzio, who was standing at the bar. “Excuse me.”

 

He thought he heard the dry chuckle of Thomas Pitcock as he left them, but he didn’t turn back to see. “Christ,” he said to Ed. “Just - Christ!”

 

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Ed poured a martini and put it in Eliot’s hand. “Drink. That’s all that’s left.” He refilled his own glass. “After this breaks up we’re going to play some poker over at Lee’s house. Want to sit in?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“The buffet is ready in the dining room.” Mrs. Bonner’s voice was eerie over the intercom.

 

“Come on, let’s eat.” Pitcock led them across the patio, into the house, his hand on Donna’s arm, talking cheerfully to her. He was tall, straight, bald, brown. Why didn’t he stoop and falter?

 

Mary and Leland Moore beckoned to Eliot. Mary was small and tanned, hair sun-bleached almost white. She always seemed breathless. “Can you come over later? The boys are playing poker.”

 

Eliot accepted again and they went into the dining room with the others. On the table was a glazed cold turkey, hot lobster in sherry sauce, biscuits, salads. There was an assortment of wines. He picked at the food and drank steadily, refusing to pretend an interest in the small talk and forced gaiety about him.

 

“I have no theory to forward as yet, sir,” he said distinctly.

 

“Damn it, a hypothesis then.”

 

“I don’t have that much yet.”

 

“A hunch. A wild guess. Don’t couch it in formal terms. You must be thinking something by now. What?”

 

“Nothing. Can’t you get it through your head that I won’t be forced into a generalization.”

 

“You’re afraid to.”

 

He reached for the champagne and when he raised his gaze from the iced bottle, he caught the bright blue eyes on him. For a second he almost believed they had been speaking, but then he heard Marty’s voice, and a giggle from Donna, and he knew that he had said nothing. The old man continued to watch him as he poured more champagne, spilling some of it, and replaced the bottle. “Fuck off,” he said, raising his glass and returning the silent stare. Donna giggled louder and this time the others laughed also, and the old man’s gaze shifted as he, too, chuckled at Marty’s story.

 

After they ate, Mrs. Bonner appeared with a birthday cake, and they all sang to Eliot and toasted him with champagne. At eleven thirty Beatrice signaled that they should wrap it up. Eliot stood up and made his way to Pitcock.

 

“Thanks for the party,” he said. He was very unsteady.

 

“Wait a second, will you. I have something for you, didn’t want to bring it out before.” The old man said good-bye to his guests and then left Eliot for a moment.

 

If he brings me a check, I’ll rip it to shreds before his eyes. He thought longingly of another drink, but he didn’t want to delay to mix it and drink it. The old man returned carrying a bulky package. He watched Eliot’s face as he tore off the wrappings.

 

“I know how much you’ve admired my Escher works; thought you might like one.” It was a large, complicated drawing of builders who were destroying what they built, all in one process. Eliot stared at it: the figures seemed to be moving, toiling up stairs, stairs that flattened out and went down again somehow even as he watched. He blinked and the movement stopped. “Thanks,” he said. “Just thanks.”

 

Pitcock nodded. He turned to the window to look out at the beach. “It’s a strange night, isn’t it? Don’t you feel the strange­ness? If it were August I’d say a hurricane was on its way, but not so soon. Just strange, I guess.”

 

Eliot waited a moment, wanting to force the talk to the futile project, the open-ended task that Pitcock had hired them to do, but he clamped his lips hard and remained silent.

 

“You accept the job then?” the old man asked, in the plush office on the thirtieth floor of the glass and plastic building in New York. “Without questioning its merits? Promise to see it through?”

 

“I’ll sign the three-year contract,” Eliot said. “Seems fair enough to give it that much of a try.”

 

“Good. And at the end of the three years, we’ll talk again, and between now and then, no matter how many doubts you raise, you’ll carry on.”

 

Eliot shrugged. I will do my best to uphold the honor of the project. He said, “I don’t pretend to think that we’ll be able to accomplish anything, except to add to the data, and to bring some order to a field that’s in chaos. Maybe that’s enough for now. I don’t know.”

 

The old man turned toward him, away from the window. “It’s working out. I know you don’t agree, but I can feel that it’s taking shape. And now this feeling of strangeness. That’s part of it. Undercurrents. Someone’s projecting strong undercurrents, strong enough to affect others. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

 

The others were loitering near the sunken garden, all except Beatrice, who had gone ahead to relieve Bonner of his baby­sitting chores. Eliot fell into step beside Mary.

 

Soon she’ll say, you’ve been awfully quiet, something to that effect. And I’ll say, thinking. Been here two years and two months, for what? Doing what? Indulging a crazy old man in his obsession.

 

“Eliot, are you going to stay?”

 

“What?” He looked at the small woman, but could see only the pale top of her head.

 

“You’ve been acting like a man trying to come to a decision. We wondered if you are considering leaving here.”

 

“I’ve been considering that for two years and two months,” he said. “I’m no nearer a decision than I was when I first took it up.” He indicated the house behind them. “He’s crazy, you know.”

 

“I don’t know if he is or not. This whole project seems crazy to me, but then, it always did.”

 

“Is Lee getting restless?”

 

“Isn’t everyone?”

 

“Yeah, there is that.”

 

The trouble was that there were only ten people on the island and they all spent nine-tenths of their time on it. They were all tired of each other, tired of the island paradise, tired of Mrs.

 

Bonner’s turkeys and champagne parties, tired of the endless sta­tistics and endless data that went nowhere.

 

We go through the motions of having fun at the parties, and each of us is there in body only, our minds busy with the data, busy trying to find an out without cutting off our connections with the old man. Each one of us afraid the goose will suddenly stop production, wondering if we have enough of the golden eggs to live on the rest of our lives, wondering if any of this is worth it. If anything out there in the real world would be any better, make any more sense. Twenty-five thousand a year, almost all clear, living quarters and most of the food thrown in, no need for cars or servants. Company plane to take us away for vacations, bring us back. Travel expenses, hotel expenses, everything paid for. Looking for ways to spend money. Endless project at twenty-five thousand a year, a raise to thirty, or forty? Keen eyes that see too much, files with too much in them, birthdays, childhood friends, illnesses, mistakes almost forgotten, but in the files. Mary was talking again.

 

“I almost wish we never had come here, you know? Lee would have been fine. He had a job at Berkeley all lined up. He would like to teach, I think. But probably not now. Not after this kind of freedom and so much money.”

 

“He can always quit,” Eliot said more brusquely than was called for. He liked Mary. Mary and Gina were the only ones that he did like. Neither was a threat to him in any way.

 

“At least we can always say that, can’t we?”

 

They paused at his house and he remembered that he was supposed to bring some mixer. “I’ll be over in a few minutes,” he said, and left her as Lee and Ed drew near. He put the drawing down, but he didn’t want to look at it again yet. Not until he was sober.

 

He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror and thought, thirty. Good Christ! Back in April Beatrice had become thirty, and had cried. Then, furious with him for taking her, with herself for needing solace, she had run away from him, and since then had been cool and pleasant, and very distant. If he cried now, would she appear from nowhere to put her arm about his shoulders, to pat him awkwardly as she maneuvered him into bed and reassured him that he still had most of his life ahead? He laughed and turned away, not liking the mirror image. He was deeply suntanned, and his eyes were dark brown, his eyebrows straight and heavy, nearly touching, like a solid, permanent scowl.

 

“Just one thing more, Mr. Pitcock. Why me? Why did you select me for this project?” The contract was signed, the question made safe by the signatures.

 

“Because you’re avaricious enough to do it. Because you’re bright enough to see it through. Because you’re cynical enough not to get involved personally no matter what the data start to reveal.”

 

That’s me, he thought, searching his kitchen for mixer. Avari­cious. Bright. Cynical.

 

Donna was seated at the round table, across from an empty chair, his chair. He put the mixer down and looked at them. Ed Delizzio, twenty-five, a statistician from Pitcock Enterprises. Dark, Catholic, observed all the holy days, went to mass each Sunday, had a crucifix over his bed, a picture of Mary and Jesus on his wall. Marty Tiomkin, atheist, twenty-four. Slavic type, tall, broad, serious, with a slow grin, a slower laugh, thick long fingers. Prob­ably could swim to England, if the spirit ever moved him. Very powerful. He was the computer expert. He could program it, repair it, make it go when it was sick, talk it into revealing cor­relations or synchronicities where none seemed possible. He treated it like a wife who might fly to a distant lover at any time unless she received unswerving loyalty and devotion. Marty and Ed had been hired at the same time, almost two years ago. At first they had had separate houses, like the rest of the staff, but after a month they had decided to share one house. Inseparable now, they went off on weekend trips, during which they picked up girls from one of the northern islands, or made a tour of the houses of Charleston. Now and then they brought girls back to the island with them.

 

Donna was next to Marty, and on the other side of her was Leland Moore. He was tall and intense, probably the most honest one there, tortured by the futility of what he was doing, but also by the memory of a fatherless childhood in a leaky fifteen-foot trailer that his mother kept filled with other people’s ironing. He wanted land, a farm or a ranch, with hills on it, and water. Slowly, month by month, he came nearer that goal, and he wouldn’t leave, but he would suffer. Sitting by him was Mary, who worried about her husband too much. Who couldn’t understand poverty as a spur because she never had experienced it, and thought only black people and poor Southern dirt farmers ever did. Beatrice wasn’t there.

 

“I can’t stay,” Eliot said. “Sorry. Too much booze too early tonight, and the champagne didn’t help. See you tomorrow.”

 

To sit across from Donna all night, to watch her peer at her cards, and watch those pale fat fingers fumble ... He waved to them and shook his head at their entreaties to stay at least for a while.

 

“Will you show me the offices tomorrow, Eliot?” Her voice was like the rest of her, just wrong, too high-pitched, little-girl cute, with the suggestion of a lisp.

 

He shrugged. “Sure. Eleven?”

 

He walked up the beach. The tide was coming in fast now, the breakers were white-frosted and insistent. In the woods behind the dunes night life stirred, an owl beat the wind steadily, a deer snorted, the grasses rustled, reviving the legend of the Spaniards who walked by night, bemoaning the abandonment of the fort they had started and left. The air was pungent with the sea smells, and the life and death smells of the miniature jungle. He walked mechanically. Whatever thoughts he had were dreamlike in that he forgot them as quickly as they formed, so that by the time he turned at the end of the island and retraced his steps along the beach, it was as if he had spent the last hour or more sleepwalking. He stopped at the pier and then walked out on it to the end where he was captain of a pirate ship braving the uncharted seas in search of unknown lands to conquer. It was flat and stupid and he let it go.

 

The pier was solid, a thousand feet out into the ocean; it seemed to move with the motion of the sea and the constant pressure of the wind. Eliot leaned against the end post where a brown pelican roosted every day to watch the sea and the land, alert for subversives, immorality, unseemly behavior, including littering of the beach . . .

 

Lee Moore’s house had a light; the others were all dark. Eliot wondered if they were still playing poker, if Donna Bensinger had won all their money, if Lee and Ed were singing dirty sea chanteys yet. He flicked his cigarette out into the water. Thirty, he thought, thirty. Forty thousand dollars in the bank, more every day, and no one to tell me to do this or that, to come in or stay out. Freedom and money. The dream of a sixteen-year-old wash­ing dishes after school in a crummy diner. Buy a boat and go around the world after this is over. Or start traveling on tramps and never stop. Or—get a little place somewhere and let the money draw interest, live on the dividends forever. Or ... He heard voices. Two pale figures running along the sand toward the waves. The tide had turned again. The urgency was gone. Proof, he thought, right here before our eyes day in and day out. Never changing, eternal cycles; he didn’t know if he meant the tide or the couple. He looked at the nude figures. It had to be Donna, pale hair, white body. The man could have been any of them, too far up the beach to see him clearly. They ran into the surf and she shrieked, but softly, not for the world to hear. The man caught up with her and they fell together into the shallow water.

 

Eliot watched the laughing figures, rolling, grappling, and he felt only disgust for the girl, and the man, whoever he happened to be. Too quick. Everything about her was too quick. He started to move from the post, but there were others now coming from the dunes, running together so that it was impossible to say if there were two or three, or even four of them. The light from a crescent moon was too feeble, he couldn’t make them out. Now there was a tight knot in his middle, and he felt cold. He looked down at the swells of the sea, black and hard looking here, but alive and moving, always moving. When he looked again at the beach he knew that there were six people, dancing together, run­ning, playing. All naked, all carefree and happy now. They paired off and each couple became one being, and he turned away. With­out looking again at the figures, he left the pier and hurried home. He was shivering from the constant wind on the pier.

 

Strange, fragmented dreams troubled his sleep. The night witch came to him and tormented his flesh while he lay unable to move, unable to respond, or refrain from responding when that pleased her. Then he was crawling up a cliff, barren and rocky, windswept and cold. He was lost and the wind carried his voice down into crevices when he tried to call for help. His hands hurt, and he knew his toes were bleeding, leaving strange trails, like the spoor of an unidentified animal. He was on a level plain, with a walking stick in his hand, weary and chattering with cold. The wind was relentless, tearing his clothes from him; the rock-strewn field that he traversed was like dry ice. He kept his eyes cast down, so he wouldn’t lose the nebulous trail that he had to follow, strange reddish wavery lines, like blood from an unknown animal. He tried to use the walking stick, but each time he struck it on the boulder, he felt it attach itself, knew that it rooted and sprouted instantly, and he had to wrench it loose again.

 

Eliot sat on his porch drinking black coffee, a newspaper on the table ignored as he stared over the blue-green waters. The sun was hot already, the day calm, the water unruffled. Another perfect day in paradise. He frowned at the sound of light tapping on the screen door. Donna Bensinger opened it, called, “Hello, are you decent? Can I come in?”

 

“Sure. Around the corner on the porch.” He didn’t stand up. She had on shorts, too short for her bulging pale legs, and a shirt that didn’t conceal her stomach at all. Her hair was pulled back with a yellow ribbon; there were bright red spots on her cheeks, and her nose flamed, as did the tops of her bare feet and forearms. One morning and she was badly burned already. By the end of the day she’d be charred and by the next day, probably in the hospital, or at least on her way home again. He motioned for her to sit down.

 

“Coffee?”

 

“Oh, no, thank you. This is all so fantastic, isn’t it? I mean, the island, the houses for all of us, people to bring you groceries and anything you need, boats we can use. I never dreamed of a job like this. It’s right out of a movie, isn’t it?”

 

He turned from her to resume his contemplation of the quiet ocean. She continued to talk. He finished his coffee and stood up. “Let’s go. I have a date at twelve. I can show you the offices and explain briefly what you’re to do in half an hour or so.”

 

Eliot was six feet tall, his stride was long and quick, and he made no pretense of slowing it for the girl. She trotted at his side. “Oh, I know that people have planted all this stuff, that it didn’t just happen like this, I mean the orchids in the trees, and the jasmines and hibiscus and everything, but doesn’t it look just like one of those dream islands where the heroine wears a grass skirt and sings and the hero dives for pearls, and there’s a volcano that erupts in the end and they all get away in those funny boats with the things sticking out of the sides of them? Who started to build something here?”

 

“Spaniards. They brought in the rocks to build a fort, then abandoned it.”

 

“Spaniards! Pirates!” She stopped abruptly, then had to run to catch up. “I can see the ships with all those sails, and slaves haul­ing the blocks all roped together, a Spaniard in black with a long whip . . .”

 

The pink stucco building that they were approaching was lav­ishly landscaped with tropical and semitropical plants imported from around the world: travelers’ palms, fifteen-foot-high yucca plants, Philippine mahogany trees, a grouping of live oaks hung with gray-green Spanish moss that turned the light silver. A small lake before the building mirrored the trees, swans gliding through the water hardly distorted the images.

 

“The office building used to be a guest house,” Eliot said. “It has its own kitchen, a hurricane-proof basement. Come on.” There was another of the wide porches; then they were inside, in the cooled air of the lobby. This had been converted into a lounge, with a coffee maker, tables and chairs, a color television, a fire­place. Eliot showed her through the building quickly. Her office was small but well furnished, and she nodded approval. The old dining room had been equipped with a computer, several desks and chairs, a typewriter desk, drawing table lighted by a pair of fluorescent lamps. Next door was the file room, cabinet after cabinet, with library tables in the center of the room, all covered with folders and loose papers. “Marianne usually kept it up to date, but these last weeks she really wasn’t well enough.”

 

She sounded put-upon. “I have to file all that stuff?”

 

“Beatrice will come over a couple of hours every day to show you the system, help you get caught up. She’s Pitcock’s private secretary, but she knows this work too.”

 

He showed her the rest of the first floor, then they went down­stairs to the recreation room, where he sat down and lighted a cigarette. “Any questions?”

 

“But you haven’t told me anything about what I have to do, except the filing. And what you’re doing here, all of you, I mean.”

 

“Okay. I didn’t know how much Pitcock told you. You’ll handle correspondence, type up reports, keep the files up to date. We are studying the effects of cycles. First we establish the fact of cycles, correlate synchronous cycles, check them back as far as you can find records for, and predict their future appearance. We collect data from all over the world, Marty feeds it into his computer and the monster spits out answers. The snowshoe hare and the lynx have the same cycle. There are business cycles of highs and lows that persist in spite of wars, technological discoveries, any­thing that happens. Weather cycles, excitability cycles in man. War and peace cycles. There are cycles of marriages in St. Louis, and cycles of migrations of squirrels in Tennessee.” He stopped and stubbed out his cigarette hard, mashing it to shreds.

 

After the silence had lengthened long enough for him to light a new cigarette and for her to start fidgeting, she said, “But—why? I mean, who cares, and why?”

 

Eliot laughed and stubbed out the new cigarette. “That’s the best damn question anyone’s asked around here for over two years.”

 

At noon he picked up Gina to take her to Charleston. Beatrice was dressed, as if she too would go, if he only asked again. He didn’t look directly at her, nor did he ask. The day was not a success, although usually he enjoyed taking the child to town. He kept wondering what Beatrice was doing, what the others were doing, if they were all together. He returned to the island with Gina at six thirty. Pitcock and Bonner were talking on the dock when he brought the small boat in.

 

Pitcock reached for Gina’s hand. “Have a good time, honey?”

 

“Eliot bought me a see-through raft. And a book about sea shells. And we went on rides at a carnival.”

 

Eliot handed the parcels to Bonner, checked the boat again, then climbed out. The motor launch was gone. Pitcock stood up, still holding Gina’s hand. “Come over to dinner later, Eliot? The others have gone out fishing. I’ll see Gina home.”

 

“Beatrice?”

 

“She’s here. She’ll be over later too.”

 

“Okay. See you around eight?”

 

* * * *

 

Donna was there. Eliot paused in the doorway when he saw her, shrugged, and entered. She smiled at him, dimpling both cheeks. Beatrice nodded, murmured thanks for Gina’s gifts, then turned away. Pitcock handed him a martini, and Eliot sat down with it and studied an Escher drawing over the mantel. It reminded him of his dream, following his own trail that he was making so that he wouldn’t get lost when he came along. He shook his head and tried to pick up the gist of the story Pitcock was telling. Donna was hanging on every word. She was no more burned than she had been that morning, must have spent the day inside somewhere. He wondered with whom, then concentrated on Pitcock.

 

“Selling you down the river was no idle threat, not just a little piece of slang that got started; what it was was a death sentence. It meant actually selling a slave to work in the bottom lands on the coast—downriver. Swamps, disease, floods, alligators, snakes. Sure death real quick. And the sands kept piling up on the islands, the rocks got buried deeper and deeper. In eighteen forty my great-granddaddy bought three of these islands, ten dollars an island, or some such amount. He was ashamed to put down the real figure he paid for them, just said they were cheap. Along about nineteen twenty-eight, twenty-nine, a hurricane came and stripped a lot of the sand away again, and by the time I got around to coming out to see the damage, hell, I found a pile of rocks and stones, the foundation of a fort, all that stuff. Decided to keep the island. But I sold off the other two. One island’s enough for a man.”

 

“Fifteen fifty,” Donna said, her eyes wide. “Wow! I wonder what happened to them, the Spaniards.”

 

Pitcock shrugged and glanced at the glasses the others were holding. He poured more martini into Eliot’s, was waved away by Beatrice. Donna hadn’t touched hers. “Malaria. Possibly a hur­ricane. They went ahead with St. Augustine, but they never came back up here.”

 

“Well, I think they were crazy. It’s the grooviest place I’ve ever seen. Last night the wind in the palm trees and the sound of the ocean, and the way the air smells here. I mean, I slept like a baby. I’ve never slept like that before in my life. And awake at dawn! I couldn’t stand not going out right away! I just had to go out and jump into the water and swim.”

 

Eliot laughed harshly and choked. “Nothing,” he said when he finally could speak again. “Nothing. Just thinking how we all felt at first, then how the days began to melt into each other, and the weekends tended to blur and run together, and how you’re always tearing off another page of the calendar, another month gone to hell.”

 

Beatrice swept him with a sharp look, and he returned her gaze coldly. She was always so cool, so self-possessed, she didn’t like scenes or emotional outbursts, and his voice had been thick with emotion. “Just don’t go childish on me, okay? If you have something to say, say it, but don’t pout or sulk or scream obsceni­ties.” And he said, “You can sweat and moan and cry, just like any other woman.” “But not with you, not again. I don’t like performing, even for an audience of only one.”

 

“Dinner’s ready.” The goddam intercom.

 

“But the work’s coming along,” Pitcock said to Donna. Pitcock was laughing at him, Eliot knew, not on his face where it would show, or in his voice where it could be heard, but somewhere inside him there was laughter.

 

Pitcock told Donna about the hotel suite he maintained in the Windward Hotel, and the car there available at all times. “Bonner will run you over to the mainland, or the other islands any time you want to go, pick you up again later, or you can just check in and spend the night. Nice shops, a movie or two. Don’t want you getting lonesome, you know.”

 

Donna’s eyes grew larger and she ate without glancing at her food.

 

And later: “Supposing that you were an intelligent flea on a dog. Life’s been pretty good, plenty to eat, no real drastic changes in your life, or that of your parents or grandparents. You can look forward to generations of the same existence for your children and theirs. But supposing that, because you are intelligent, you want to know more about this thing that is home to you, and when you start digging you find that it isn’t the universe after all. What you thought was the whole world turns out to be a tiny bit of it, with masters ordering it, forces working on it that you never dreamed of. Things you thought were causes turn out to be effects, things that you thought were making you act in one way or another turn out not to be causing any such thing, they just happen to correspond to your actions. Take weather, for instance. Sunspots affect weather. Weather affects people, the way they feel, moody or elated. Right? Maybe. What if weather, sunspots and moods are all the effects of something else that we haven’t even begun to suspect yet? You see, they are synchronous, but not causal. What else has that same periodicity of eleven point three years? Some business cycles.” Pitcock was warming up now. Eliot had forgotten how long it had been since there had been someone new to explain things to. He scowled at his wine glass and wished the old fool would finish. “A businessman was shown a chart of the ups and downs of his business, and he nodded and said, yep, and he could explain each and every one of them. A strike, a lost shipment of parts, an unexpected government contract. Another man might compare the ups and downs to the excitability curve and claim that that explained it. Someone else might point to a weather chart and say that was the cause. Or the sunspot charts. Or God knows what else. But what if all those things are unrelated to each other, just happen to occur at the same time, all of them caused by something apart from any of them, something that happens that has all those effects? That’s what we’re after. Keep taking another step backward so you can get far enough away to see the whole pattern.”

 

Or until you step off the end of the gangplank, Eliot added silently.

 

Donna was staring at Pitcock. “That’s . . . that’s kind of spooky, isn’t it? Are you serious?”

 

“Let me tell you about one more cycle,” Pitcock said, smiling benignly. “Ed will give you a chart tomorrow, your own personal information chart. Every day at the same time you will be required to X in a square that will roughly indicate your mental state for the day. Feeling very optimistic, happy. Moody, apprehensive. Actively worried. At the end of the month Ed will go over it with you and draw you a curve that will show you your high point and your low. It’ll take about fifty days to finish it, probably. Most people seem to have a cycle of fifty to fifty-five days from one high to the next. Now, I’ll warn you, nothing you do or don’t do will change that chart. You’re like a clock ticking away, when it’s time to chime, there it is.”

 

Donna made dimples, shaking her head. “I don’t believe it. I mean, if I flunk a test, I feel low. Or if a boyfriend shows up with someone else. You know. And I feel good when I look nice, and someone pays attention to me.”

 

“Furthermore,” Pitcock said, ignoring her, “statistics show that although the low points occupy only ten percent of the sub­ject’s life, during these periods more than forty percent of his accidents occur. This is the time that suicides jump, or take an overdose. It’s the time that wives leave husbands, and vice versa. During the high points, roughly twelve percent of the time, twenty percent of the accidents take place, suggesting that there might be overoptimism. The other forty percent of all the acci­dents are spaced out in the rest of the time, sixty-eight percent of your life. It’s the high and the low periods that you have to watch for.”

 

“But why?” Donna said, looking from him to Beatrice to Eliot.

 

“That’s one of the things we want to find out with this research,” Pitcock said. He glanced at his watch. “May I suggest coffee on the terrace? It’s always pleasant out there this time of the evening.”

 

“Do you mind if I beg off?” Beatrice asked, rising. “I still have some packing to do. I want to get an early start with Gina in the morning.” She added to Donna, “She’s going to spend a couple of weeks with her grandparents in the mountains.”

 

Donna nodded. “Could I come with you, help you pack or something?”

 

There was a quick exchange of glances between Beatrice and Pitcock; then she smiled and said of course. Eliot stood up also, but Pitcock said, “You won’t rush off, too, will you? Something I wanted to bring up, if you aren’t in a hurry.”

 

Progress report? A dressing down? A boost in morale? Eliot shrugged and they watched the girls vanish among the magnolia trees. “Drambuie and coffee on the terrace. Right?” Pitcock moved ahead of him and sat down facing the sea. The breeze was warm and gentle, clouds drifted by the moon; a shift, and the moon was gliding among castles.

 

“What would you do if you left here tomorrow?” Pitcock asked after several minutes.

 

“I don’t know. Hadn’t thought about it. Not much, at least not very soon.”

 

“Nothing so fascinating to you that you’d dash right off instantly to do it?”

 

“ ‘Fraid not.”

 

“Listen.” Pitcock leaned forward slightly. A loon cried out three times, then stopped abruptly, and once more there was only the sound of the waves and the wind in the palm trees.

 

Pitcock’s voice was lower. “I have a suggestion then, Eliot. Not an order, merely a suggestion. How about starting a book on the data we’ve collected here?”

 

“Me? Write a book? About what?”

 

He listened to Pitcock’s low voice, and his own articulated thoughts, and those stirrings that never found words, and later he couldn’t separate them. “If you knew you had to have surgery, would you permit it when your cycle is at its low point? You know you wouldn’t. How about starting a business? You know the fig­ures for failures and successes, the peaks and troughs. You’d be crazy to pick one of the low spots. An eagle doesn’t have to under­stand updrafts and currents and jet streams in order to soar and ride the winds. . . .”

 

Something for everyone. Cycles on every side, ready to be used, causes unknown, but obviously there. Circadian cycles, menstrual cycles, creativity cycles, excitability cycles. War cycles, peace cycles. Constructive and destructive cycles. Determinism as conceived of in the past, so simplistic, like comparing checkers to chess. A reordering of life-styles, acceptance of the inevitable, using the inevitable instead of always bucking it, trying to circumvent it.

 

He walked on the beach and seemed to feel the earth stirring beneath his feet. Bits of the earth flowing down the river, into the bay, material to be used by the sea as it constructed the islands grain by grain, shaping them patiently, lovingly as the very face of the earth was changed, subsiding here, growing there, swelling and ebbing. Eternal cycles of life and death.

 

He stumbled over the stones of the ruins and climbed the rough steps of the incompleted tower, a sand-filled stone cylinder. There was lightning out over the ocean, a distant storm too far away to hear the thunder. He watched the flashing light move northward. I don’t want to do your goddamned book, Pitcock. Hire yourself a nice obedient ghost writer and do it yourself. Where does it lead? What does it imply? Something I don’t want to examine. Flea on the dog, ready to be scratched off, sprayed off, get swept off in the torrent of the river when the dog swims.

 

“Something happened last night. I don’t know what it was, but it has everyone on the island uptight today. Do you know?”

 

“No.” I don’t know. I won’t know. I dreamed a crazy dream. Or else they had a bacchanal, and I don’t know which, and won’t know.

 

“I thought I had time, five years, even more. But now . . . Don’t tell me you won’t do it, Eliot. Don’t say anything about it for a while. Let it lie there. You’ll come back to it now and again. See what happens if you don’t worry it.”

 

But I won’t. I don’t want to do it. I want to finish my three years and get the hell out. Chess and checkers. Not with humans, Pit. Not a game, even on a macrocosmic scale. Not fleas on a dog. Free agents, within the limits set down by our capabilities and the government.

 

He slept and dreamed, and rejected the dream on awakening. Although unremembered, it left an uneasy feeling in his stomach, and he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. Later he found him­self at the ruins and he stood gazing at a mammoth oak tree. The Spaniards had built around it. They had laid a terrazzo floor be­tween the tower and the fort, connected by a walkway that was to have been covered. The pillars were there. And they had built around the oak tree. Crazy pagans, he muttered. Hypocrites with your beads and crucifixes and inquisitions. He walked on the top layer of the stones that made up the fort. They hadn’t closed the square. One-tenth of it done, then abandoned.

 

That week Marty fell in love with Donna. Marty had been friendly to Eliot in the past, but now avoided him, refused to look directly at him, and managed to be gone with Donna every day when Mrs. Bonner announced lunch from the basement inter­com at the office building.

 

Eliot kept to himself all week. He worked alone in his office, had a solitary dinner, then prowled about the island until early morning when fatigue drove him to bed and fitful sleep beset by dreams that vanished when he tried to examine them. He knew that the others were together much of the time. Sometimes late at night when the wind eased he could hear their voices, laughing, but he didn’t see them again. He caught himself watching one or the other of them for an overt sign of conspiracy.

 

Friday afternoon Marty and Donna went to the northern islands for the weekend. Beatrice was gone, to the mountains to visit Gina. Ed Delizzio and Eliot were invited to Lee’s house for dinner on Friday night, and there was no graceful, or even possible, way for Eliot to refuse without hurting Mary’s feelings.

 

“It’s been a funny week, hasn’t it,” Mary said. “Eliot . . .” She looked toward her husband, set her mouth, and continued quickly, “Last week, the night that she came, did you have a peculiar dream?”

 

Lee put his knife down too hard, and she said, “I have to find out. Has Marty spoken to you all week?” She had turned back to Eliot almost instantly.

 

“No. Why? What about a dream?”

 

“All right. We all dreamed of ... an orgy. Either we dreamed it, or it happened. Lee and I talked about it right away, of course. We thought it was our dream, strange, but ours. Then something Marty said made me realize that he had dreamed it, too. Only he had the players mixed up. And Beatrice . . . Well, you can ask her what she dreamed sometime. So I asked Ed, and he said almost the same thing. You?”

 

Eliot nodded. “Yeah. Except I wasn’t asleep. I saw it, down on the beach. I hadn’t gone home yet.”

 

No one moved or spoke. Mary paled, then she flushed crimson, and finally broke the silence with a sound that was meant to be a laugh but sounded more like a sob. She picked up her wine glass and choked on a swallow. Without looking at Eliot she said, “Well, if you saw what Lee and I dreamed, you must have had quite a show.”

 

“It wasn’t on the beach,” Ed Delizzio said hoarsely. “It was back by the ruins, between the fort and the tower. We had a fire, and a ceremony. Rites of some kind.” He stared ahead as if seeing it again. “I searched for ashes, for a scorched place. I got down on my knees the next morning and searched for a sign. . . . Nothing.”

 

Eliot looked at him curiously, wondering how he had missed noting the haggard appearance of the younger man. Ed’s eyes appeared sunken, haunted, as if there were only darkness before him that he was trying to pierce.

 

“It’s her fault,” Mary said softly. “I don’t know how or why, what she has done, anything. But I know she’s to blame. Night after night I wake up listening and I don’t know what for.”

 

“Hey, knock off talk like that,” Lee said, and while his voice was light, his hand that closed over hers on the table made her wince.

 

Mary looked at Lee and there was certainty on her face. Eliot stood up. “Is there coffee, Mary? I have an appointment with Pitcock later on. Can’t dawdle here all night.”

 

Lee looked relieved as Mary’s face relaxed and she smiled a genuine smile and stood up. “Sorry, Eliot. Pie? Cherry pie and coffee coming up.”

 

They all helped her clear the table and ate pie and drank coffee. Mary refilled the cups, then asked, “Are you quitting, Eliot? Is that why you have to see Mr. Pitcock?”

 

“Mary!” Lee looked at Eliot and shrugged eloquently. Eliot laughed.

 

“No, dear heart, I’m not quitting. In fact I might write a book for the old goat.”

 

Mary looked disappointed. “She thinks that if you’d just quit then the whole thing will fold and I won’t have to actually do anything,” Lee said.

 

“You really want to go, don’t you?” Eliot asked her.

 

“I was willing to stay, wasn’t I, Lee? I never mentioned leaving, did I? But now, after this week, I’m afraid and I don’t know why. I don’t like that.”

 

“Mary, relax. We were all together at dinner. Maybe the lobster was a little off. Or the wrong kind of mushroom in something or other. I mean, I was a lot more worried when I thought it was just me than I am now knowing that everyone experienced some­thing like that.”

 

She studied his face for a long time, then nodded. “You could be right, Eliot. I guess it must have been something like that.”

 

Lee sighed, and even Ed seemed relieved. Soon after that Eliot left them and walked over to Pitcock’s house.

 

“I decided to do the book,” he said without preamble.

 

Pitcock was on the terrace alone. There was a touch of day­light remaining, enough to make the water look like flowing silver. “Would you mind telling me why you decided to do it?” Pitcock said after a moment.

 

“Mainly because I feel like there’s something trying its damned­est to keep me from doing it.” Eliot was surprised at his own words. He hadn’t meant to say that, hadn’t thought it consciously.

 

“I should warn you, Eliot, that it could be dangerous. Espe­cially if you really feel that way.”

 

“Dangerous how? Psychologically?”

 

“Sometimes I forget how bright you are. Sit down, Eliot. Sit down. Have you had dinner?”

 

Eliot refused another dinner and left the old man on his terrace. They would talk the next day. All my life, he thought, always drifting, everything too easy, too meaningless to become involved with any of it. Like a cork on the stream, this way and that, touching reality now and then, then bobbing away again. Never mattered if I got waterlogged and sank, or if I kept on floating along. Just didn’t matter. Then that crazy old man pulled me into his madness, and now I don’t feel like I’m floating with the current at all. I’m bucking it and I don’t know why, or where I’m going, what I’ll find when I get there. And I don’t want to get out. I won’t get out, and it, that mysterious it that I feel now, it will get in my way, and maybe even try to hurt me ... He laughed sud­denly, but his laughter was not harsh, or cynical, but light with amusement and wonder.

 

Sunday afternoon. “Some things I should tell you, Eliot. There’s a trust already set up, to continue this research. It’s your baby.”

 

“When did you do that?”

 

“Almost as soon as you came here I started making the arrange­ments. It doesn’t have to be here, you understand. You can move the operations if you want to.”

 

“And if I decide to quit, then what?”

 

“I would ask that you personally supervise finding the right man to carry on. I won’t issue directives, anything like that, if that’s what you mean. At your own discretion.”

 

Eliot stared at him coldly. “No ties, of any sort. What I want goes. If I change the direction, whatever.”

 

“Whatever.”

 

They stopped to listen. Loud voices from the next house, Ed’s house that he shared with Marty. Pitcock was staring toward the sound intently, not surprised, not startled.

 

Eliot left him and trotted along the boardwalk to Ed’s house. Marty was backing Ed up against the screened porch. There was a cut on Ed’s cheek. Marty’s fists were hanging at his sides and at that moment neither was speaking. Off to one side Donna was pressed against the door of the house, holding her hands over her mouth hard.

 

“Knock it off, you two. What in Christ’s name is going on?”

 

Neither of them paid any attention to Eliot. From nowhere a knife had appeared in Ed’s hand. “Okay, Marty, baby. Come on in and get it. Come on, baby. Come on.” Ed’s voice was low.

 

Marty hesitated, his eyes on the knife. Before he could move again Eliot jumped him, knocking him to the ground. He brought his knee up sharply under Marty’s chin, snapping his head back, then hit him hard just under the ribs. Marty gagged, doubled up gasping.

 

“Ed! Oh, Ed, he might have killed you! I thought he was going to kill you!” Donna ran to Ed and held him, sobbing.

 

Eliot watched, mystified. He helped Marty up, keeping a firm grasp on his arm. Marty had no fight left in him. He looked at Ed and Donna and from them to Eliot, his face twisted with con­tempt and hatred. Furiously he jerked loose from Eliot and turned away to go around the house, not speaking. A second later the front door slammed.

 

“Ed, come over to my house. You’re hurt! You’re bleeding. He was going to kill you!” Donna was tugging at Ed’s arm.

 

“Is anyone going to fill me in? What was that all about?”

 

Donna looked blank. “I don’t know. He went out of his mind. He started to scream and yell at me and I made him bring me back. Then he went at Ed. Over nothing. Nothing at all.”

 

Ed shrugged. The knife was gone. Eliot wondered if he had even seen a knife. “Damned if I know,” Ed said. He was breath­ing fast now, as if fighting off shock or fear. “He came at me call­ing me names like I haven’t heard since I left the Bronx.” Donna started to sob again and he put his arm about her shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “Hey. Don’t do that. It wasn’t your fault.” He led her toward her house.

 

“So,” Eliot told Pitcock later, “I tried to get something out of Marty. He was packing. He cursed me out and finished throwing his stuff into his suitcases, then left. Period.”

 

Beatrice had returned, was waiting with Pitcock. Neither seemed at all surprised. “It was bound to happen,” she said. “They were deadly rivals. That togetherness was too openly self-protective. Donna should have been twins.” She shivered. “I didn’t know Ed carried a knife out here. He’s an expert, you know. It’s in his file.”

 

Eliot walked home with her later; at her door he said, “Some­thing else, Beatrice. Something happened here last week, some­thing inexplicable that has affected us all. A mass hallucination, a mass dream. That’s all it was, a psychic event of some sort, not explained yet, but not real.”

 

They had been standing close together; she drew away. “Are you certain, Eliot? Absolutely certain? Anything strong enough to touch every one of us, change us somehow, must have some reality of its own.” Then she went inside.

 

They reorganized and rescheduled work on Monday. Without Marty at the computer there was much that would have to be postponed until they got a replacement. Donna and Ed smiled softly at each other and wandered off down the beach when it was lunchtime. Eliot watched and tried to see her as Marty must have seen here, as Ed obviously saw her. All he saw was the bulgy figure, sagging breasts in too-tight dresses, or halters. The thick legs and arms. Indentable flesh, skin that didn’t tan but looked mottled, with red highlights. Thursday night he had dinner with Beatrice on her porch. She lived next to Mary and Lee Moore. They had no lights on yet when they heard Mary calling to Beatrice in a muffled but urgent voice.

 

“Damn,” Beatrice said. She left Eliot. After a moment he fol­lowed her.

 

“. . . your friend. Just do something. I won’t have her crying on Lee’s shoulder. Take her home, or something.” Mary’s voice was too controlled, too tight.

 

“For heaven’s sake, Mary. Tell her to clear out. It’s your house. Where’s Ed?”

 

“He went for a walk, she said. I don’t know. All I know is that she’s in there crying on Lee’s shoulder and they won’t even hear me.”

 

She broke then, suddenly and completely. Eliot couldn’t see them, they were hidden by a fence of yellow oleanders, but he could hear her weeping and Beatrice’s voice trying to soothe her. He circled them and approached the house.

 

Donna was in Lee’s arms. He was holding her tightly, smooth­ing her dull hair. His eyes were closed. Their voices were too low to hear any of the words.

 

“Lee!” They didn’t move apart. Lee opened his eyes and stared at Eliot blankly. “Lee! Snap out of it!”

 

“They used her,” Lee said dully. “They both used her to get even with each other for some childish thing. They didn’t care what happened to her at all.”

 

Eliot took a step toward them, stopped again. “Lee, Mary’s hurt. She needs you now. She’s hurt, Lee.”

 

Lee’s face changed; slowly the life returned, then suddenly he looked like a man waking up. He dropped his arms from Donna and stepped around her without seeing her at all. “Mary? What’s wrong with Mary?”

 

“She’s out there. Beatrice found her. She needs you right now. By the oleanders.”

 

Lee ran out of the house. Donna stared after him, her face tear-streaked and ugly. She turned to Eliot. “I was frightened. Ed had a knife, he began to talk crazy, saying if I would repent now and die before I sinned again, my soul would be saved. I was so frightened. He wants to kill me.”

 

Eliot saw her hopelessness and despair, the overwhelming fear that had driven her to Lee for help. She was so agonizingly young and inexperienced, so susceptible. Her large eyes awash with tears that made eddies and shadows and revealed depths that he hadn’t suspected before, her body hidden now by adolescent fat that would dissolve and reveal a woman with a firm slim figure, protected until she was ready to find union with ... He blinked and laughed raucously. “God, you’re good, doll!” He laughed again and now the tears were gone and her eyes were flat and hard, like a reflecting metal polished to a high sheen. Wordlessly she left the house.

 

He found Mary and Lee. Beatrice was nearby, her back to them. “All of you, come on in. I want to say something.” Inside again he didn’t know what he could say. Nothing that would make any sense.

 

“Mary, you have to forget this.” Mary looked at the wall, her face composed and set. “I mean it, Mary, or else she will have won. You’re giving her exactly what she came here for. She doesn’t want Lee any more than she wanted Marty or Ed. She wants to drive wedges. To come between people. We all watched it happen. This is the very same thing. You’re intelligent enough to see this, Mary. You too, Lee.”

 

Lee had been watching him stonily. Now he said, “Hasn’t it oc­curred to you that you’re butting in on something you don’t know a damn thing about? That girl was frightened. Mary acted like a bitch. Period.”

 

Eliot sighed. “Oh, Christ.”

 

“I’m leaving,” Mary said furiously. “I won’t stand by and see you make a fool of yourself. And when she throws you over, you’ll know where to look for me.”

 

“And you,” Eliot said. “Right on cue. That’s the scenario, all right. For God’s sake, you two idiots, open your eyes and see what you’re doing and why!” He jammed his hands into his pockets. They continued to avoid looking at one another. Finally Eliot shrugged. “Okay. If you really can’t see it, then leave, Mary. It’s the only thing to do. I’ll take you over tonight.”

 

“What are you talking about?” Lee demanded coldly.

 

“I mean that if you two are so caught up in this that you believe it’s real, she has to go away, or one of you will kill the other one. Either snap out of it and convince me that you’re aware of what’s happened, or I’ll take Mary to Charleston. I won’t leave you to­gether.”

 

A new intentness came into Lee’s face. Ignoring Mary, he took a step toward Eliot. “All this crazy talk. You’re the one who started all this.” His eyes narrowed and his hands clenched. “That night, down on the beach, I saw her with you. I let her convince me that it was a dream, but I saw you. I know what I saw. And I’m going to kill you, Kalin. I’m going to choke your lies right back down in your throat.”

 

Suddenly the screen door was flung open and Ed Delizzio stepped into the room. Mary screamed. Ed had the same knife that he had threatened Marty with. This time he was holding it to throw. His quick look swept the room, stopped at Lee, and in the same instant that his arm rose, Mary moved toward Lee, her hands out. She pushed him hard; the knife flashed; she screamed again, this time in fear and pain. She staggered against Lee and fell. For a second Lee swayed, gray-faced; then he dropped to his knees at her side.

 

“It’s nothing,” she said shakily. “It touched my arm, that’s all. Lee . . . Darling, please, don’t. Please, Lee.” He was rocking back and forth, holding her, weeping. When she tried to get up, he gathered her into his arms and lifted her and carried her into the bedroom. Beatrice followed them.

 

Eliot picked up the knife, closed it, and put it in his pocket.

 

“I guess we should call the police,” Ed said emotionlessly.

 

“We’ll call nobody,” Eliot said. He studied Ed, who continued to stand in the doorway. Even his lips seemed bloodless. “Are you all right?”

 

“Yes. Spent. Used up. Everything’s gone. I’m okay now. It’s over.” He looked like a shock victim: ashen-faced, blank, rigid.

 

They waited in silence until Beatrice returned. She was pale and avoided Ed’s glance. “They’re in there crying like babies. She’s all right. Hardly even scratched. Mostly scared.”

 

“Let’s go,” Eliot said. He motioned for Ed to leave with them. “We could use a drink.”

 

Beatrice hesitated. “Can we leave them? You said . . .”

 

“Everything changes from moment to moment, honey. Every­thing’s the same and everything keeps changing. They’ll be all right now. Ed’s going to keel over and I’m damned if I want to carry him across the island. Give us a drink, Beatrice. We all de­serve it.”

 

Beatrice kept close to him as they walked around the oleanders. “No lights,” she said on her porch, then added quickly, “It makes us so visible.” She left them. There was the sound of the refrigera­tor door, ice in glasses, liquor being poured. Then she was back and handed them both glasses, very strong bourbon and water. She pulled a chair closer to Eliot’s. “How can she do this to us?”

 

“She’s a witch,” Ed said.

 

“No. She’s not a witch. And she hasn’t done a damn thing to any of us. Whatever we’re doing, we’re doing to ourselves.” Eliot finished his drink and went inside to refill his glass. When he re­turned, Beatrice was alone.

 

“You upset him more than anything up to now. Eliot, is he likely to do anything like that again?”

 

“I don’t think so. He sinned. Now he’ll repent, in the good traditional way. Prayers, good deeds, confession. Whatever he does to atone.”

 

“Is it all over now? Who else is there to go berserk? Are you safe?”

 

“Nobody is safe from himself. Nobody that I know, anyway. Maybe Pitcock. I’m gambling on Pitcock, but I don’t know.” He drank deeply. The alcohol was numbing him now and he felt grate­ful.

 

The wind blew harder and the palm trees came to life. On the porch the silence deepened. Beatrice took Eliot’s glass from his hand and went inside with it, bringing it back in a few moments without speaking. He put it down this time. There had been a need before, but the urgency was gone.

 

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Beatrice said quietly, “but whatever it is, it’s changed you.”

 

“Nobody understands, least of all me. I’m just groping for the right thing to do from one moment to the next, no plans, no over­all theory to account for anything.”

 

“It won’t go on like this, will it? We couldn’t stand this kind of turmoil day after day.”

 

“No. It’s building up to something. Can’t you feel that? Each step is farther, each thrust more nearly mortal.” Lassitude was creeping through his bones. Abruptly he stood up. “I have to go or I’ll fall asleep here.”

 

“Eliot... Do you have to go?”

 

“I think so. Are you afraid?”

 

“No. It isn’t that. Yes, go now. I’ll see you in the morning.”

 

“No work tomorrow. I’m going by the office and post a sign, a declared holiday.” He held her hand for a minute. Soon, he thought, soon. Then he left her and walked through the darkness of the shadows cast by the oak trees and the pines, around the ruins that rose abruptly, smelling the night-blooming cereus, and the sea, and the constant odor of decay that was present wherever there were tropical plants. The scents mingled, the drive toward life stronger than death, blossoms in decay, greenery erupting from the black. He didn’t turn on a light when he got to the building, but walked through the dark lobby that echoed hollowly.

 

He sat at his desk for several minutes before he flicked the light switch. Then he typed the notice quickly and found scotch tape to attach it to the door. His head was starting to throb and his weariness returned, making his legs ache and his back hurt. Outside the building, he hesitated at the lake. It was spring-fed, cool, clean water, without a ripple on its surface. The moon rode there as sedately as if painted. A whippoorwill cried poignantly.

 

Very slowly Eliot began to take off his clothes. He walked out into the water, and when it was up to his thighs, he dove straight out into it, down, down. The moon shattered and fled, the resting swans screamed alarm, and half a dozen ducks took flight. Eliot let out his air slowly, measuring it, and when it was gone he began to rise again, but suddenly he doubled in pain. He sank, struggling to loosen the knot in his stomach. The water was luminous now, pale green and silver, and where the bottom had been there was nothing. He sank lower, drifting downward like a snowflake. The broken moon was falling with him, flecks of silver, a streak of a heavier piece flashing by; the minuscule particles of it that touched him adhered, turning him into a radiant being, floating downward in the bottomless pool. From somewhere a thought came to him, unwanted and obtrusive: The lake is only eight feet deep in the very center. He tried to push the thought away, but his body had heard, and the struggle began again, and now he tumbled and one leg stretched out until his toes felt the sandy bottom and pushed hard. He exploded in pain, as the moon had exploded. The water rushed in to fill his emptiness and he gasped and choked and coughed and the fire in his lungs was all there was.

 

He lay on the sand, raw and sore from retching, and he knew he couldn’t move. His legs wouldn’t hold him yet. Another spasm shook him and he heaved again.

 

He had little memory of getting to his house and into bed. He dreamed that the Spaniards dragged themselves up from the shadows where they lived and toiled to complete the fort through­out the night. They were crude shadow figures themselves, silent, carrying impossibly heavy burdens on their backs, climbing the crude steps to lay the blocks, and the fort took shape and rose higher and higher. He woke to find it nearly noon.

 

There was a note on his table to see Pitcock as soon as conven­ient. He showered and made coffee, and after he had eaten he walked over to the main house. Pitcock was in his office.

 

“Ed came by to say he was leaving,” Pitcock said. “He wouldn’t tell me what happened. Will you?”

 

“Sure.” His account was very brief, and when he got to his ad­venture in the lake, he summed it up in one sentence. “I went for a swim in the lake and nearly drowned.”

 

“Part of the same thing?”

 

“I believe so.”

 

“Yes. Well, we agreed that it would get dangerous.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Have you seen Donna this morning?” Pitcock toyed with a pencil and when it fell, he jerked. He looked at his hands with curiosity. Before Eliot could answer his question, he said, “Maybe we should disband the project now. God knows we have to start over with a new staff.”

 

“I haven’t seen Donna. Do you really want to quit?”

 

“I feel like a man swimming the channel. I’m three-quarters of the way there, but I want to turn around and go back. I feel like either way I’ll lose something. I don’t think I can make it all the way, Eliot.”

 

“That’s because we don’t know exactly what’s in the water for the last quarter of the trip. We keep finding out there are things that we weren’t ready for. Ed’s knife. I put it in my pocket, but it’s not there now. Swimming in a lake that suddenly became bottomless. You can walk across that lake in the dry season. What’s ahead? That’s the question, isn’t it?”

 

“Is it? I keep wondering, and if we found out that the earth is an illusion dreamed by a god, what harm have we done? Why are we being stopped? Who’s meddling?”

 

Eliot stared at him, then shook his head. “I think you should go away for the weekend. Get away from here for a few days, see how you feel about it Monday. If you want to break it all up then, well, we can talk about it.”

 

“You can’t leave now, can you? You’ll see it through, no mat­ter what happens?”

 

“I can’t leave now.”

 

Pitcock looked shriveled and old, and for several minutes his bright blue eyes seemed clouded. Surprisingly, he laughed then. “You asked once why I picked you. Because I could see myself in you. The self that I could have been forty years ago. But instead I took the other path, extended an empire. Pitcock Enterprises. I thought there was time for it all, and I was wrong. I thought it was a kind of knowledge, that if I bypassed it, I could have it just the same if I forced someone else to seek it and let me see the results. Nontransferable. Not knowledge, then. Not in the ac­cepted sense. I pushed you and prodded you and goaded you into going somewhere and I can’t follow you. Leave me alone, Eliot. I have some work to do now.”

 

Eliot stood up and started to leave, but stopped at the door. “Pit, I don’t know anything. If I did, I would make you see it. But there’s nothing.”

 

Pitcock didn’t look at him. He had picked up the pencil again and held it poised over a notebook as if impatient to resume an interrupted task. Eliot went out.

 

“Eliot, are you all right?” Beatrice was waiting for him. She held out his watch. “I found it by the lake.”

 

Eliot took her in his arms and held her quietly for a long time. “I’m all right.”

 

“The lake shore is a mess, as if you were fighting there. I went to your house and saw that you’d had breakfast. I knew it was all right, but still. . .”

 

They walked in the shade, toward the far end of the island. The trees, the dunes to the seaward side, all masked the sound of the ocean, and there were only bird songs and an occasional rustling in the undergrowth. There was a cool, mossy glen, where the air was tinted blue by a profusion of wild morning glories that never closed in the shadows. Very deliberately and gently Eliot made love to Beatrice in the glen.

 

She lay on her back with her eyes closed, a small smile on her face. “I feel like a woods nymph, doing what I have to do, without a thought in the world. My brain’s on vacation.”

 

He ran his finger over her cheek. She was humming. With a chill Eliot realized that she was humming “Ten Little Indians.”

 

* * * *

 

That afternoon Eliot made some preliminary notes:

 

Any eschatological system, whether religious, mathemati­cal, physical, or simply theoretical for purposes of analogies is counter to the world as it exists. Experimental bias, ob­server effect, by whatever name science would call it, the addition of life in a universe reverses the entropic nature of matter. Eschatology can validly be applied only to inert mat­ter; the final dispersion of the atoms in a uniform, energyless universe is a reformulation of what others have called the death wish. Since man rose from the same inert matter, this pull or drive or simple tendency exerts its purpose in every cell of his being. But with the random chemical reaction that brought life to the lifeless, another, stronger drive was created. The double helix is the perfect symbol for this new, not to be denied drive that manifests in rebirth, renewal, in an ever widening spiral of growth and change . . .

 

“Eliot!” Lee’s voice jolted him awake. “Pitcock’s missing. We can’t find him anywhere.”

 

“Where have you looked?” Eliot hurried out to join Lee. “Where’s Bonner?”

 

“He went to check out the office building. We went through the house, then the ruins. He likes to prowl among them. I looked in on Beatrice. I thought he might be with you.”

 

“Okay. Check out the other houses. I’ll take the beach, work back through the stones toward his house.”

 

Two hours until it would be dark, two hours, plenty of time to find him. Not in the woods, but among the dead rocks. A quarter of a mile of jumbled rocks, fan-shaped, narrowed at the ruins, spreading out at the water’s edge, piled higher there with deeper cracks between them. Eliot zigzagged from the edge of the water to the ruins, back to the water. He called, and the whispering sea mocked him. From a distance he could hear Lee’s voice calling. A catbird practiced Lee’s shout, then gave it up and trilled sweetly. Eliot stopped abruptly. He strained to hear, then began working his way more slowly toward a high place where six of the massive stones had been piled up. “I’m coming, Pit.” He couldn’t be cer­tain now if he had heard the old man or not. He searched franti­cally but carefully among the bases. Here the water lapped at the rocks with every third or fourth wave. The tide was turning.

 

“Eliot.”

 

This time he knew he had heard. He found the old man lying in an unnatural position, his shoulders and his hips not in line. Pitcock was very pale, but conscious. His voice was a faint whisper.

 

“Can’t move, Eliot. Back’s hurt.”

 

“Okay. Take it easy, Pit. We’ll get you out of here.” Eliot clambered back up the rocks and yelled for Lee. An answer came back faintly, and he waited until Lee was closer. “Bring a stretcher, a door, something to carry him on.” Lee appeared at the head of the rocks and waved. “Tell Bonner to get the launch ready. Mrs. Bonner to call the hospital.” Lee waved again and ran toward Pitcock’s house. Eliot returned to the old man.

 

There was nothing he could do now. He found his handkerchief and wiped Pitcock’s face gently. He was perspiring hard.

 

“Heard someone crying. Couldn’t find her. Slipped . . .”

 

“Don’t talk now, Pit. Save it. Your pulse is good. It’s not seri­ous, I’m sure. Rest.”

 

“Eliot, don’t send me over tonight. Isn’t fair, not now. Get me back to the house. Help me up.” His face was gray, cold and moist. His eyes were glazed.

 

Damn Lee! Where was Bonner? “Take it easy, Pit. Soon now. Just take it easy.” He yanked his shirt off and covered the old man with it. He mopped his face again.

 

“I didn’t do it, Eliot. I didn’t want to fall.” He looked past Eliot and groaned. His eyes closed. Beads of sweat came together and a trickle ran across one eye, another down his temple. Eliot wiped his face again and the man shuddered. “She’s up there,” he mumbled. “Watching us.”

 

Eliot looked over his shoulder, across the tumbled rocks. She was standing on the wall of the fort, not moving, a dark shape against the paling sky. “Don’t worry about her, Pit,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.” He caught a motion and turned to see Lee and Bonner picking their way among the blocks with a door. Beatrice darted before them, burdened with blankets and a beach mat.

 

“How bad?”

 

“I don’t know. Shock.” He glanced quickly toward the fort. She was gone.

 

“For God’s sake, be careful!” he said moments later as they started to move Pitcock to the door, padded now with the beach mat. They covered him and fastened him down securely with the blankets, and then Lee and Eliot carried him to the motor launch. Mrs. Bonner met them at the dock.

 

“There’ll be an ambulance waiting.” She looked at Pitcock and turned white. “My God! Oh, my God!”

 

“Go with them,” Eliot said to her. “You, too,” he told Beatrice. “Get out of here.”

 

“No. I couldn’t help him.”

 

They got him on board and Lee worked with the mooring line. Eliot turned again to Beatrice. “Please go on. Stay with him. He might want you.”

 

“Don’t send me away, Eliot. Please don’t send me away.”

 

He nodded and the three of them stood on the dock and watched until the launch started to pick up speed in the smooth water of the bay. As the roar diminished, the silence of the island settled preternaturally. “Where’s Mary?”

 

“In our house.”

 

“Let’s get her. We have to stay together tonight.” They started across the island. Under the trees the light was a somber yellow, the air hot and still, thick and oppressive. Through the branches overhead the sky was dirty yellow, the color of Donna’s hair. No bird stirred, no tree frogs sang, the palm fronds stood stiff and unmoving. Eliot set a fast pace and they hurried a bit more. When they came to the ruins, twilight had descended, and rounding the aborted building they involuntarily stopped. Before them was a concrete ocean, gray on gray, the sea and horizon an encapsulat­ing solid that was closing the distance to them rapidly.

 

“Get Mary, fast. We’ll go to the office building.” Eliot’s hand closed hard on Beatrice’s arm. She was gazing about in wonder. She reached out to touch the granite block, then her hand swept through the air, her fingers spread apart, as if trying to feel for something not there. “It’s an illusion, a trick of the light. A storm’s coming fast.”

 

She looked at him, touched his cheek as she had touched the rock. “But I can’t tell the difference. This afternoon, I dreamed, I thought, or hallucinated, something. Everything was like a flat illustration from a book. I . . .” She shook herself and laughed self-consciously. “I found your watch. Here.” She pulled it from her pocket and handed it to him. Eliot stared at it for a long time. Then Lee and Mary were with them and they turned to go to the office building.

 

Halfway there, the wind came. It came with a shriek that was too high-pitched, and it carried sand and dust that brought night. The island shook, and the trees ground their branches together. Eliot grasped Beatrice’s hand and pulled her, blinded by flying matter and the driving wind that was tearing up rotted and rotting leaves and twigs and stripping leaves from the oaks and needles from the pines. It was a hot wind. When the noises ebbed they could hear the sea pounding. A tree shuddered and crashed down across the walk and they stopped, panting, then ran on, clamber­ing over the trunk. Now they could see the office building and the lake dimly. The lake looked like a saucer of water rocking back and forth. There was no sign of the waterfowl. They began to run across the parklike setting and the water rocked higher on the far side of the lake.

 

“For the love of God, hurry!” Eliot cried, and nearly yanked Beatrice off her feet. The water was swinging back now, and at the same time the wind increased, pushing the water up and out of its banks. Lee and Mary had reached the building, but Beatrice stumbled. Eliot knocked her to the ground and wrapped his arms around her, and the water hit them.

 

They rolled with the wall of water, tumbled over and over, grinding against the walk, against the sand and bushes. Beatrice went limp and Eliot held her head tight against him and let him­self roll. He closed his hand over her mouth and nose so she wouldn’t breathe in the roiling water and dirt. When he knew he could hold his breath no longer, that Beatrice would die if she didn’t get air, the water abruptly fell. Everything stopped, even the wind paused. There were hands on him, Lee, trying to help him up. Eliot resisted feebly, the hands persisted, and the weight that was Beatrice was removed.

 

“Can you get up, Eliot? Can you move? I’ll carry her inside and come back for you.” Again the peace returned, but after an in­finitely long time, he opened his eyes and knew that he had to get up, had to get inside the shelter of the building. The wind was start­ing to build again and he struggled to his knees, then pulled him­self upright and, staggering uncertainly, stumbled to the entrance as Lee was coming out for him.

 

He was hardly aware of being led inside, of anything that hap­pened for the next few minutes. Beatrice smiled wanly at him, then lay back on the couch where Lee had put her. Outside, the storm built to a new intensity.

 

“How long has it been?” Mary asked much later. There was no light in the building, the electricity had long since failed. They could hear the howling wind, now and again punctuated by ex­plosive noises as if a wrecking crew were hard at work destroying the island and everything on it.

 

Eliot looked at his watch; it had stopped. He shrugged. Some­thing crashed into the building and the whole structure shuddered.

 

“What is it?” Lee asked later. “A tornado would have gone long ago. There wasn’t any report of a hurricane. What is it?”

 

Eliot stood up. The building shuddered again with a new blast of wind. “I have to go find her,” he said.

 

“No!” Beatrice, pale and torn and cut and filthy, and very beau­tiful. He touched her cheek lightly. She backed away from him and sat down. Very frightened. Tears standing in her eyes. No one else said anything.

 

No matter which way he went the wind was in his face. The rain drove against him horizontally, blinding him, and he was buffeted with debris of the storm. There were trees downed every­where, and he stumbled and fell over them and crawled and dragged himself to his feet again and again. He lost his sandals and knew that his feet were bleeding. His bare chest was hatchmarked by cuts and scrapes. Then he felt the smooth terrazzo underfoot and he knew that soon he would find her. He fell again, hard against a roughly worked block that was cold and wet. The pound­ing rain dissolved him; he flowed through the rock where there was silence and peace and no more pain. He rested. Very slowly, after a long time, he found himself withdrawing from the nothing­ness of rest; the rock was cutting into his chest, and where it had scraped his cheek raw there was pain. He pulled away. Lightning burned the air, sizzling so close that he was blinded. The thunder that was almost simultaneous with it deepened and he vibrated with the roar. Blinded and deafened, he pushed himself away from the rock, reeled backward and clung to the great oak tree until his vision cleared again. Then he lurched away from the place, toward the water’s edge and the jumbled rocks there. Be­hind him lightning flashed again, the tree exploded, showering a geyser of splinters over him. He didn’t look back. The tree crashed to the ground, one of the branch ends brushing him as it fell.

 

The thunder of the sea contested the thunder of the air, over­came it as he drew nearer until there was only the roar of the ocean. The waves were mountainous, crashing over the highest of the rocks now, grinding rocks against rocks, smashing all to a powdery sand that it would fling away to rest in a watery grave. Eliot saw her then.

 

I’ve come for you.

 

You can’t touch me.

 

Yes. I can. I know you.

 

She laughed and was gone. He waited, bracing himself against the wind, and lightning illuminated her again, closer.

 

Don’t run anymore. I’ll still be here no matter how far you run. Always closer.

 

A wave broke over his feet, and again she laughed and the mo­ment was over. He didn’t move.

 

Eliot, go back to them. Or they’ll all die. And death is real, Eliot. No matter what else isn’t, death is real.

 

He had only to reach out to touch her now. Her flesh was as alive as his own, the arm that he caught twisted and pulled reassuringly.

 

You’ll kill them all, Eliot. Beatrice. Lee. Mary. They’ll die. Look at the water. It’s going to cover the island.

 

Another wave broke, higher on his leg this time. The water was rushing among the blocks, reaching out for the fort now.

 

She struggled to free herself, she clawed his face and bit and tried to bring her knee up. Eliot twisted her around and they slipped and fell together, his grasp on her arm broken. He brought his hands up her body and fastened them on her throat, and the waves were over his head as he choked her and beat her head against the rocks and knew that he was drowning, being swept out to sea by the furious undertow, but still he held her. Her strug­gles became feebler.

 

God! Help me!

 

He can’t! He brings destruction and plagues and wars and death. No help.

 

She was hardly moving, and they were both swept up together and dashed against the piled-up blocks. Eliot blacked out, but his hands didn’t let go, and when the pain released him, he knew that he still held her although he could no longer feel her.

 

God, please! Please.

 

He brings the floods and the winds and devastates the land and kills mankind. He is death and I’m sending you back to him.

 

You’re crazy. You can’t kill. They’ll punish you. They’ll hang you. Put you in an institution for the rest of your life.

 

And the spark of life that is stronger than all the powers of death commands the waters to be stilled, and they are quiet.

 

There was only silence now.

 

“Help me pull him out of there.” Lee’s voice. “Can you unlock his hands?”

 

“Is he dead? For God’s sake, Lee, is he dead?”

 

“No. Beatrice, get out of the way. He’s. . .”

 

Eliot opened his eyes to a tranquil night. He was between two stone blocks, waves breaking over his legs. His hands and arms ached and he looked at them; his fingers were locked together. There was no sign of her. Beatrice reached down to touch him and he felt his muscles relax, and took her hand.

 

“It’s over then?”

 

“Yes. How? What happened?” Beatrice shook her head vio­lently. “Never mind. Not now. Let’s get you inside. You’re hurt.”

 

They walked around the toppled oak tree, but in the wet black ground there were sprouts already, palely green, tenacious. There would be a grove there one day.

 

“The oak tree is the only casualty.” Lee said in wonder. “You’d think with all that wind, the thunder and lightning, the whole island would be gone. One tree.”

 

Eliot felt Beatrice’s hand tighten in his, but he didn’t say any­thing. She knows. A temporary displacement of the ego and she comes up with what I’m thinking, just like that. He didn’t find it at all curious that no one asked what had happened to Donna. They were on the spiral, safely now, and they would continue to search for patterns that would prove to be elusive, but maybe, now, not too elusive after all.