Renaissance, page 4
Grayson held out his hand, and incredibly - it seemed incredible, yet also logical - she gave him the card. He had to struggle against trembling anew as his gaze scanned the document… Right eye - left eye - numbers, figures - astigmatism…
But no mention of the damage to his previous lenses, and no mention of the Utt. Grayson turned the card over. The second side was blank.
'Yes, it's there,' he said in a piercing voice. The sound was startlingly loud. Hastily, he handed the card back, and as hastily said, 'Is this all? Is there any more besides this?'
'N-no.' Her thin face was suddenly puzzled; suddenly the visit must have seemed peculiar to her. But, in the end, she simply shook her head.
Grayson heard his sick voice babbling on. 'As you know, these matters are very important to a male; so if you'll have this prescription taken over, tell Dr Flendon I'd appreciate it if he'd expedite—'
With a terrible effort, he caught the unnecessary words that were still gurgling up inside him, throttling them before they could erupt forth; then he muttered a goodbye and strode out. As he walked along the hallway to the elevator, he grew aware that his clothes were drenched with perspiration.
chapter nine
Mila was out when he arrived at the house. Grayson started to nod, started to walk along toward his room - when that information penetrated.
'Out?' he echoed. Involuntarily, he turned. 'Where is she?' he asked.
Rosie bridled belligerently. 'That's for a woman to know, and a man to mind his own business,' she said.
There was a tiny thought in Grayson's mind during the moment after these words were spoken. The thought was a kind of awareness of thirty-plus years of compressed - something… finding a way out of a psychic super-heated boiler deep inside him.
He did have one other thought. It had to do with Rosie herself. He had always thought of the housekeeper as being a red-faced, buxom, middle-aged type long past the age of passion, but who - he now reflected - was probably younger than he was.
He made the final evaluation of her from close up. His hands were around her throat, and he was squeezing her neck and shaking her at the same time. As he watched her face turn a richer red and then purple, he bellowed, 'When I ask you a question, you answer, understand?'
With that, he gave her a hard shove. They had been in the large hallway, which divided the house into two virtually separated segments - except for the kitchen at the rear. Rosie, thus flung away from him, staggered all the way back to the kitchen wall, and there she sagged to the floor onto her knees. From that position she stared up at the gaunt man who was coming toward her.
During those moments, reason had returned to Grayson. And so it was a concerned employer who walked forward, intending to help the woman to her feet, and to apologize.
Rosie, in her state, was not capable of distinguishing between the berserk who had attacked her, and the appalled man whose only thought was to help her.
She started to cry, a wailing sound. As she sobbed, and wept, and begged for mercy, she also said things about Mila, and where Mila was, and what she was doing, that Grayson didn't clearly hear. Nor, for the moment, was he interested.
It took him a good twelve minutes to calm his emotionally shattered employee. Several other minutes were taken up, as he led her to her bedroom, and onto her bed. After he had gone out, and softly closed her door behind him, Grayson heard a sudden sound. A key turning, a lock clicking. Rosie had locked herself into her bedroom.
That brought a small resurgence from the psychic boiler. But the feeling was more a sense of the unfairness of things. Not one bit of remorse for what she had said. Not, apparently, a single awareness that what she had got was long overdue for a thousand similar minor insults.
Suddenly, he was wishing he had asked her to repeat where she had said Mila was. But - with a frustrated swallow - a little late for that… He stood there, striving to recall the bits and pieces of Rosie's sobbings and moanings on that subject. But it was impossible. Something about Mila being a guide, and going out ajt one o'clock every day.
He had a feeling, from the tone of the enforced admissions, that whatever Mila was doing, and wherever she was, was specifically a woman thing.
For want of knowing what else he should do, Grayson retired to his bedroom.
He had a feeling that there would be consequences to his outburst, and so he lay there mentally vague, and slept twice, and did not awaken the second time until Mila came in to tell him that dinner was on the table.
All through the meal, his wife's face held a pallor that he had seen briefly two nights before, but never previously in their long life together. It was a dark discoloration; splotchy, not even.
Gradually, Grayson came out of the gloom that his act of violence had plummeted him into. He grew interested in the spectacle on the other side of the table.
Toward the end of the meal, Mila said without looking at him, 'You don't believe those wild things that Rosie said about me.'
Since Grayson didn't remember what those 'wild things' were, he held his peace.
His wife continued in a voice that trembled, "The poor woman was so terrified she repeated a plot from a recent movie she saw.'
'What movie?' asked Grayson.
'How would I know?' A tiny bit of color had come into Mila's face, and her voice had in it a touch of her long-practiced rage. She added, with asperity, 'The things people say when they're being tortured they don't always remember afterward.'
Grayson was silent. He cautioned himself against making any admissions. He realized that, in a perverse way, he was enjoying the game. It occurred to him that he was really in quite a strong position… She thinks I know what Rosie confessed.
It was an amazing situaion. He had never been in such a one-up condition in their entire married life. He wondered, in a kind of haze, what she could possibly be involved in that was so important for her to conceal from him.
What made the game possible was that he didn't care. Not a used razor blade. Not a piece of torn, sticky tape. Not a single discarded container. It didn't matter.
It struck him that it was time that he did make a remark. 'What puzzles me,' he said, 'is why you took Rosie into your confidence.'
The woman flashed, 'You've got to talk to somebody. You can't spend your whole life in silence… never saying anything to an intelligent person.'
The outburst penetrated the man. The penetration was instantly so deep that he had time only for a passing awareness that what she had said was an admission that she had taken Rosie into her confidence. The failure to reject his accusation established that there was something to confide and, therefore, confess.
Grayson muffed the opportunity. The thirty-plus years of her withdrawnness was a bigger event than any current madness.
'You could have talked to me,' he said.
'You!'
The word was explosively emitted. Her lips were parted, as if other words were about to fire forth. But at that instant she must have had some cautionary thought of her own.
She swallowed, and when she spoke it was in noticeably a different tone, a controlled thought. She said, 'Anyway, the whole thing is ridiculous, and I don't want to hear another word about it.'
Grayson said, 'You brought the subject up.'
'I could see what you were thinking,' she said, instantly impatient with his simple truth.
Grayson was completely in control of himself, though sadly realizing that he was not going to learn her secret. Too bad. The thbught he had was that all these wives were reflecting the Utt-guided world, fulfilling their own twisted lives in some way that no male had ever thought to investigate. He hadn't. And he had heard no rumors, either.
A question remained in his mind. How did one close off a conversation like this? He considered what he did know, and that was what he referred to.
'I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do about this,' he said. 'In future, tell me when you plan to go out daytimes, and where.'
The rest of the meal was eaten in silence, with a pale-cheeked woman at one end of the table, and a baffled man at the other.
Since he hadn't learned details, it was scarcely a victory.
The rest of the evening was typical Grayson family separate existence. Each of its two principals retreated to their side of the house. And Rosie stayed in her behind-the-kitchen retreat.
Grayson toyed vaguely with the idea of visiting Miss Haskett. But there was another thought, a puzzled-at-himself thought: Really, this is ridiculous. I am not that kind of a person. I have a wife who was just-as lost as I was in all this trtt non-sense. Maybe now we can straighten things out… He retired at his regular hour of eleven o'clock.
About ten minutes after Grayson turned out his light, the door to his bedroom opened. There was a light in the hallway beyond, and silhouetted against its brightness he saw that the person who had opened the door was Mila.
She had on her robe, and in the brief glimpse he had of her, she looked very much as she had two nights before… She came in quickly, and closed the door.
In the consequent darkness, he could hear her bare feet padding across the floor toward him.
Pause.
Abruptly, there was a shadow beside the bed, and a tugging at the blanket. And the feel of cool air as the sheets were lifted.
Moments later, there she was in the bed, under the sheets, only inches away. Silence settled - Was she lying there in the nude? Had she been drinking? Was he now expected to go through the hideous experience of making love to a drunken woman?
He could hear her breathing in the near night.
'Peter.' It was a small voice, tentative. 'Are you awake?'
Grayson hesitated. Then: 'Yes.'
'I'm lonely, Peter.'
Grayson did not move. He felt remote from those words -and from her appeal. It was too long. She had been too much of a bitch, one of millions of wives who had done all those incredible automatic things against men… He was a male, psychically castrated by the Utts. Along with other women, she had^ proved for all time that one woman, or a billion, was, were, totally incapable of responding to a man so defeated. Not once in all those years had a single, understanding thought penetrated into that feminine brain.
And, obviously, at this moment she was reacting at some sub-level to the change in him that must now be apparent.
Grayson was appalled as he considered the implications. Pre-Utt human history said that men had used their greater physical strength without mercy to subjugate and control women. And it was to such threat of control that women responded.
And nowhere a sign of human intelligence doing anything more than acting as a vague guideline in a generalized legal fashion. Down where the sexes confronted each other, life operated at an abysmally primeval strata.
'Peter, I don't want to be over there on the far side of the house anymore. I think it's wrong—'
A critical note in her voice. As she spoke, those words struck Grayson. Just a minute, he thought, just one minute. Is she implying somehow that I put her over there? He felt an instant outrage rising up in him. Yet, after a moment, he suppressed the feeling, because - well - because it was only another automatic behavior.
It would be a little difficult, he argued to himself, where behavior was one hundred percent automatic, to disapprove one automatic aspect of it more than any other automatic.
He was still thinking about it when there was a movement of the bed and of the quilt. The next moment her nude body was on top of him; and he was being subjected to a sincere embrace.
It was very convincing. Kisses as in the days of their courtship, except her mouth felt a little different. Perhaps an age difference. And her body seemed less firm. But even as he had the awareness, he also had a repeat of the thought that maybe having a personal intimacy with one's wife was, in fact, the best solution.
It took awhile. Negative thoughts kept intruding. There was one period when he simply lay still and waited. And had the gloomy thought that his future activity had, indeed, better be restricted to Mila because other women would surely not tolerate a male who kept collapsing into semi-impotence.
Yet, though it took time, he presently completed the act. Whereupon, exhausted, impervious to what may have happened to Mila during all these minutes, he rolled over and went to sleep.
Grayson awakened in pitch darkness with a thought… Only one problem remained: What would he do with The Revolution… ? As he lay there, the inevitable logical reality of that configuration also moved through his mind. Consciously, he braced himself. It seemed to him that his purpose with The Revolution had to be limited.
Save himself from it. Nothing more.
Extricate, evade, hold away—
He assumed it was impossible to defeat the Utt, who had conquered a mightily armed earth, almost without a shot being fired.
Therefore, concentrate exclusively on defeating The Revolution, and that only in relation to himself. Which, surely, he, who knew so much, and they so little, could do.
chapter ten
His new spectacles were on his desk when he got to the office. There was also a memo from Miss Haskett: 'I have passed Dr Flendon's bill on to the accounting department with instructions to send him a check. Underneath was the signature, Alison H.; and there was a p.s., which asked simply, 'Is this goodbye?'
Grayson stared palely down at the final three words. But finally he picked up the spectacle case, removed the glasses, and stared at them.
A choice.
Put them on, and have all those intense feelings fade into the passionless world that seemed unbelievable now when he looked back. But, still, the memory of those apathetic years was there in his mind. They had happened.
The alternative: not put them on.
Actually, of course, it was not a problem. This was a decision he had made in the wee hours of the previous night.
With abrupt renewal of determination, he replaced the new spectacles in their case, and slipped the case into his inside breast pocket. Then he sat examining the cracked lenses so skillfully repaired with the tape manufactured by his own company.
The crack was not easy to see in either lens. Relieved, he headed for his own workroom.
He spent most of the morning in that private laboratory putting together an apparatus. Shortly after noon, he was ready. Firmly, he got himself an open line on his switchboard and dialed the number that the man who had dressed as a woman had given him.
Once again he listened to the click of the switching machines, as his call was relayed through a radio sender. As before, a voice came on; and what was thrilling about it, and what stopped him for the time of several heartbeats, was it was not the same voice.
The man repeated his query: 'Yes?' More sharply.
Hesitation ended. Grayson pressed the button that activated the special mechanism that he had constructed.
It was a long-ago, forbidden method. Somewhere in the Utt takeover, it had got lost in the minds of a few scientists. It had a brief nourishment in the power struggles between and among certain" giant corporations and, of course, countries.
The method had originally interested Grayson, sufficiently for him to follow it up, exactly as the mirror did later, and for the same reason. Naturally, this approach, since it was mechanical, did what it did, invariably.
It transmitted a high-frequency sound complex along the wire through the ears of the listener into his brain. It stirred the hallucinatory mechanism. Told it stories, which it evoked from the subject's own memories. Moved him thereafter in a fantasy that was as real as… real.
Grayson watched a needle on his specially constructed apparatus. It moved - suddenly. Immediately, he closed a relay.
And had his permanent, directional location neatly locked in.
Grayson took off his work clothes, and dressed, whistling under his breath. Large thoughts bounded around inside his head; and in the vicinity of his jaw was the energetic sensation which, for want of a better term, he had always labeled his 'chin-up' condition.
At such moments, he modestly acknowledged that the physicist - himself - who had contributed numerous inventions to the Haskett Manufacturing Laboratories was, in fact, a minor genius. Out there were a lot of people who didn't understand the laws of Nature as he did. It would be ridiculous if he permitted them to control him.
He had to admit The Revolution's determination and its ruthlessness still exceeded his by a geometric multiple. But maybe he could fight even if he didn't commit murder while doing so. Much as one played a game of chess, he could fend them off while he sharpened his tools for whatever developed.
It wouldn't be the first time, according to historical accounts, that a small power had by a fierce show of capability convinced a belligerent neighbor to leave it out of its aggressive calculations.
—All I want is to go about my own business… Surely, it was a small goal, not unachievable.
He took a bus, of course. En route, in his 'chin-up' condition, he thought about that critically for the first time. Shook his head abruptly. No, no. That would be veering. It would be going along with The Revolution against the Utt. Such, he reminded himself, was not his purpose.
So, no car for him.
Oliver Street, he discovered ran north and south, pointing toward some low hills at the south end. It was an old street, he observed, as he walked along it. As far as his gaze reached, the street consisted of old, two-story residences. Every house looked lived in. On such a street, neighbors must know each other, and must therefore be wondering about the occupants of number 477, his destination.
—Well, that was their problem… Grayson went briskly up the veranda and rang the dooorbell. The man who presently answered was a slender fellow about five-feet-nine, age about thirty-five, with dark, haunted eyes and a bushy mustache. Obviously, he didn't ride around passing himself off as a woman.
The almost black eyes brightened as Grayson spoke the key word. The man's slim hands reached out, and pulled Grayson inside. 'My dear brother,' he said huskily. He embraced the physicist, murmured several times, 'Mike, for God's sake, where have you been all these years?' But his hallucinatory programming required no reply.
