A Creed for the Third Millennium Page 8

  Georgetown was home, and home was charming. Since this part of the country was not yet consistently excruciatingly cold in winter, Dr Carriol had decided to forgo the additional degrees of warmth boarding up the windows of her little red-brick house would have given her, preferring to look out all year round onto the delightful tree-lined street and the lovely old houses along its far side.

  All her spare money and her prospects had been mortgaged two years earlier to purchase the house, and she was still groping through difficult financial woods. Oh, pray this major gamble of her professional career paid dividends to her as well as to the country! If Harold Magnus had his way, she would receive very little of the credit, but (and luck had nothing to do with it) she had managed the conduct of Operation Search in such a manner that he would find it very difficult to steal all her thunder.

  There was no man in her life apart from the occasional date she accepted more to be seen to be dating than from any genuine desire to court an intimate relationship. She cared nothing for the sex act, so obliged indifferently whenever it was demanded of her without attaching one iota of importance to it, neither resenting nor thinking better of a man who did demand it. Washington was an easy city to become a mistress in, a hard city to find a husband in. However, a husband would not have suited her at all; he would have taken up too much of time and energy she needed to apply to her work. And a lover was basically a nuisance. Children she had taken care of when she turned twenty-five by undergoing hysterectomy. These were not times to pin your hopes and spiritual fires on domestic bliss anyway, but she was the kind of woman who genuinely adored her work and could not imagine any close relationship with a man rivalling it in her affections.

  It was cold, so she changed into a glove-tight pure cotton velour track suit, put on thick socks of wool and a pair of knitted woollen bootees, and warmed her hands over the gas flame as she made herself a snack of stew and boiled potato, the stew out of a can and the potato fresh. Eating would warm her up. And then, even though the sun had risen several hours before, she could go to bed fuelled for sleep.

  3

  When the fog came down at the end of January some aspects of life stopped and some started. Out of its all-pervading furtiveness it bred furtiveness. Things dripped hollowly. Footsteps came and went muffled, directionless, threatening. Two people could pass within a yard of each other and not know they had even passed. Some sighed and some died, each a kind of giving up the ghost. An infinite weariness, that fog, as if the very air itself gave up the ghost and sank in upon its own skin and in so doing condensed enough to make itself visible at last. So much sighed in it, so much died in it.

  Among those who died in it was Harry Bartholomew, of a gunshot wound in the chest. He was cold, poor Harry, he was always cold. Perhaps he felt the cold more than others, or perhaps he was essentially weaker. Certainly if he had had his way he would have been heading for the Carolinas or Texas or anywhere in the warm south for the winter, but his wife wouldn't leave her mother, and her mother wouldn't leave Connecticut. Yankees did not venture south of the Mason-Dixon line for any reason short of a civil war, said the old lady. So each winter Harry and his wife stayed on in Connecticut, though Harry's job finished on November 30 and didn't start again until April Fool's Day. And the cantankerous ungrateful old lady gobbled up every bit of what precious little warmth the Bartholomews had. Harry's wife saw to that, and Harry went along because it was the old lady who had the money.

  The result was that Harry became a criminal of the worst kind. He burned wood. His house was relatively isolated in the middle of its square six-acre block, so on windy nights he could get away with it fairly easily. Oh, what a difference that gloriously glowing mass of ignited carbon made!

  Their stove dated back to the latter decades of the last century, when everyone had begun burning wood in the carefree days before local and state and federal authorities had clamped down hard. For the trees were going far too fast, and the cold damp air clotted around the huge increase in carbon particles to form genuine pea-soup fogs. The fogs kept getting worse. And worse. More and more people burned wood, more and more power was generated from coal.

  At first the smokeless zones were urban and suburban only. Harry lived in the countryside of middle Connecticut, where the hills are gentle and rolling and the forests used to be extensive. Then wood as combustible fuel was completely outlawed; wood must be saved for paper and construction. And coal was to be conserved for generation of power, production of gas, manufacture of synthetic materials. Most precious of all, petroleum consumption was cut back to the barest minimum. The Smokeless Zones became a single Smokeless Zone affecting every county in the country, north and south.

  People still burned wood clandestinely, but less and less as time went on; there were plenty of tree-loving environmentalists to form local vigilante groups, and caught offenders were punished drastically by the levying of huge fines, plus removal of privileges or concessions or both. But even knowing all this, still Harry Bartholomew went on burning wood, terrified, panic-stricken, haunted, incapable of kicking the habit.

  The fogs no longer came down all winter long, as they used to during the final ten years before the burning of wood and coal in homes and apartments was completely outlawed, but they still came down whenever atmospheric conditions were right; the powerhouses, factories and institutions contributed more than sufficient carbon from their coal burning to the air when fog conditions were at optimum. And when the fogs did come down, they were a godsend to people like Harry Bartholomew. He had developed a method of stealing wood, and it worked.

  A string line ran between Harry's house and the eastern boundary of his property, a low stone wall that cut him off from his eastern neighbour, Eddie Marcus. Eddie's property was a lot bigger than Harry's, something over sixteen acres, and it was solid trees because Eddie didn't farm. In the days before wood burning became so difficult and culpable, Eddie had lost many trees, but gradually his position as the local vigilante leader (Eddie was a militant Green Earther, as was his father before him) and the size of his threats made tree thieves look elsewhere. Until the night Harry ran his string line to Eddie's boundary wall and hid the big spool to which it was still attached in a cavity well camouflaged by leaves, as was the played-out length of string.

  There the spool lay until a fog came. And when it did, Harry followed the string from his house to the stone wall, stepped over it, and played out more string. In the interest of speed he had elected to use a chain saw rather than an axe or a manual saw, relying on the deadening effect of the fog itself, the long distance between his boundary and Eddie's house, the fact that of course Eddie's house was well boarded up, and, in the event he was heard, his ability to make a quick getaway by following his string line. The chain saw he equipped with extra mufflers and while he used it wound it in blankets as well; a good mechanic, he had squirrelled a little arsenal of spare parts away, and painstakingly repaired the damage all this swaddling did to the chain saw's overheated motor.

  For five years he got away with stealing his neighbour's trees. Of course Eddie discovered the remains of Harry's depredations, but blamed them upon a man who lived behind him, with whom a feud had been going on for over twenty years. Congratulating himself upon his cleverness, Harry watched the hotted-up feud with glee, and cocksurely went on stealing Eddie Marcus's trees.

  At the end of January in the year 2032 the fog came down with most satisfying thickness, coinciding with a thaw that had become almost unheard of in the midst of winter, a thaw that held promise of a rare early spring — and plenty more fogs, thought a very happy Harry Bartholomew.

  He had stretched his string in a new direction, and followed the knots he had tied in it, confidently counting distance, over the wall, into the thick of Eddie's trees. But Harry's system failed at last. He ended up too close to Eddie Marcus's house, and the sound of his chain saw penetrated behind Eddie's sealed windows.

  Grabbing the old Smith & Wesson carbine from above
his mantel, Eddie plunged out into the fog. At his trial he protested that he had only meant to frighten the culprit. He called out a warning to the invisible tree thief to stand where he was or be shot, heard what he thought was a slight movement going off to his left, aimed the gun to his right, and pulled the trigger. Harry died immediately.

  The case aroused a lot of mixed feelings in the state, and received a lot of publicity nationwide. The two trial lawyers were brilliant, and old foes. The judge was famous for his wit. The jury was composed of diehard Connecticut Yankees who refused to go south for the winter. And the public benches were packed with people to whom this case meant much, people who remained in Connecticut all year round, and suffered the cold dumbly, and didn't quite understand all the reasons why the government was so adamantly against wood burning, and now felt an unaccustomed stirring of old, buried emotions.

  'I'm going to Hartford to sit in on the Marcus trial,' Dr Christian announced to his family after dinner one evening at the end of February.

  James nodded, understanding at once. 'Oh, half your luck! It will be fascinating.'

  'Joshua, it's too cold and too far from home!' cried Mama, who never liked to see him leave 1047 Oak Street, Holloman, while winter stalked outside; the memory of Joe's fate terrified her.

  'Nonsense!' said Dr Christian, uncomfortably aware of the reasons for Mama's distress, but knowing that he was going to Hartford no matter what. 'I must go, Mama. It's cold, yes, but we've already had one massive thaw, and all the signs say this is going to be a short winter for once. So I doubt I'm going to run into a blizzard.'

  'Hartford is always at least ten degrees colder than Holloman,' she said stubbornly.

  He sighed. 'I must go, Mama! Feelings are running very high, there hasn't been a situation in a long time so likely to air buried resentments about our current anguishes. A murder trial is highly charged to begin with, and this one in particular is connected to all the emotions right at the roots of millennial neurosis.'

  'I'd like to come with you,' said James wistfully.

  'Why don't you?'

  'Not at this time of year. One is all the clinic can spare, and we've had a vacation more recently than you, Josh. No, you go, and tell us all about it when you come back.'

  'Are you going to try to talk to Marcus?' asked Andrew.

  'I sure am! If they'll let me, and he's willing. He probably will be, because I imagine he's clutching at every straw that comes his way right now.'

  'Oh!' said Miriam. 'You think he'll be convicted.'

  'Well, he has to be. It's really a question of what kind of sentence, isn't it? A matter of degree.'

  'Do you think he meant to kill, Josh?' she asked.

  'Until and if I see him, I'd rather not hazard a guess. I know everyone thinks he did, since he assumed it was the other guy he was pointing the gun at. That's the trouble with loudmouths. But when the chips are down — I don't know. I'm not at all sure a man of Marcus's type would intend to kill unless he was physically surrounded by plenty of moral support in the shape of his fellow vigilantes. When he went out into that fog to see who was cutting down his trees, he was very angry, yes, but he was also very alone, and fog is the kind of substance that damps emotion right down very quickly. I don't know, Mirry.'

  Mary heaved a huge sigh and looked grumpy. 'Then if you won't take James, I had better come with you,' she said ungraciously.

  Dr Christian shook his head emphatically. 'No. I'm going on my own.'

  She subsided, looking even more grumpy; and it never occurred to any member of her family that she was dying to go — anywhere! That her private thoughts and dreams were filled with visions of herself travelling, travelling, shriven by distance of the pain of unrequited love, shriven by distance of the tyranny of this suffocating, dedicated family. Yet if she had looked eager, bounced up and down a bit, clasped her hands in joy at the prospect of going somewhere, Joshua would undoubtedly have taken her. So what did that mean? That she didn't really want to go? No! No. It meant that they were stupid, unperceptive, so unconcerned with the welfare of Mary Christian that they couldn't be bothered levering up the edge of the facade to see what lay beneath. So the hell with them. Why should she help them? And yet — oh, to be free! Free of love, free of this hideous Cyclops-eyed family…

  A daily bus covered the forty miles between Holloman and Hartford, a gruelling journey because of the frequency with which the bus left the main highway to pick up and set down passengers. No between-town roads other than proper highways were ploughed in winter, just as the only in-town roads kept clear were bus routes.

  Had the Marcus trial been scheduled a week earlier, the journey would have been a great deal easier. But the thaw had come and gone, the snow was piling up again, and the temperature had dropped below zero Fahrenheit. By the time the bus got to Middletown it was snowing hard, and it continued to snow all the rest of the way, making the journey longer and even more miserable.

  His credentials had obtained him a room at a motel only a short walk from the courthouse; like all public hostelries the motel was allowed to heat its premises to a full sixty degrees Fahrenheit between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., and to burn a gas imitation of a log fire in its residents-only dining room. When he came in to eat on that first night he was surprised to find the room almost full, until he realized that like himself the other guests were in town to follow the Marcus trial. Journalists mostly, he supposed; he recognized Maestro Benjamin Steinfeld eating alone at a corner table, and Mayor Dominic d'Este of Detroit at another table in the company of a dark-haired, white-skinned woman whose face looked vaguely familiar. As he passed he bent a puzzled stare at her over his shoulder; to his surprise, she responded with a small polite smile and bow of cool yet ready acknowledgment. Not a famous television face, then. He must indeed have met her somewhere, but where?

  The hostess was tired, poor thing, he could feel it in the bruised molecules of air around her. So he sat down at the table just behind Mayor d'Este and his companion, and took the menu the hostess handed him with a specially sweet smile of thanks. And she received the smile, as people seemed to, he didn't know why, as if he had handed her a cup of some life-giving elixir. What a magical thing a smile is! he thought. So why then if one tried to preach the smile as bona fide therapy did it come out sounding trite and shallow and banal, like a particularly bad greeting card?

  The menu was far from intolerable, a fairly wide range of old-style Yankee or East Coast dishes from three kinds of clam chowder to pot roast to scrapple to Indian pudding. Oddly enough (considering the quality of Mama's cooking), he was always more interested in food when away from home, especially when, as now, the trip was not connected with the ordeal of a professional conference. He ordered the New England clam chowder, a London broil and Russian dressing on his salad, and deferred a decision on dessert until later, all this done with the same sweet smile for the waitress he had given earlier to the tired hostess.

  Maestro Steinfeld got up to leave the dining room, nodding regally to this and that acquaintance, and pausing for a word or two with his television colleague from Detroit. The woman with Mayor d'Este was introduced to him, Maestro Steinfeld bowing to kiss her hand; this movement flopped his hair forward and thus allowed him as he straightened to throw his head back dramatically, settling his dishevelled coiffure into place again as if it had been designed for just this contingency.

  Dr Christian watched out of the corner of his eye, amused. Then the first of his food came, so he bent his attention upon the big bowl of steaming milky chowder and discovered that its bottom was laudably full of minced clams and diced potatoes.

  When the time came he declined dessert, for the meal had been almost too plentiful, fresh, and excellently cooked.

  'Just coffee and a double cognac, thank you.' He nodded towards all the occupied tables. 'Quite crowded tonight.'

  'The Marcus trial,' explained the waitress, mentally agreeing with the hostess's whispered aside to her that she was serving by far the
most attractive man in the room. Oh, Maestro Steinfeld was gorgeous in a standoffish way, and Mayor d'Este was so handsome he looked a bit as if he was made of wax, but Dr Christian was really nice; his smile said he found you genuinely interesting and likeable, without giving you the slightest suggestion of a man on the make.

  'They had to call me in to help,' the waitress went on, and then added, in case this sounded as if she was not a professional waitress, 'I don't work Tuesdays as a rule.'

  An up-country girl from somewhere like the 'land of Goshen', Dr Christian decided; unsophisticated and down to earth. 'I didn't realize the Marcus trial was such a big issue,' he said.

  'It's going to be in all the papers,' she said solemnly. 'That poor man! All he wanted was a bit of wood.'

  'It's against the law,' said Dr Christian, his manner reassuringly free from disapproval.

  'The law don't have a heart, mister.'

  'Yes, that's absolutely true.' He looked at her left hand. 'I see you're married. But you work.'

  'Gotta pay the bills, mister, they don't pay themselves.'

  Have you had your child yet?' He asked because mostly when a woman had her child she gave up work.

  'Nuh-uh. Johnny — he's my husband — says we gotta wait until we get a permanent relocation in the south.'