Ten From Infinity, Paul W. Fairman [intellectual books to read txt] 📗

so what do I do now?

Fifteen minutes later, Les was asleep.

There was always a certain tension involved in Frank Corson's visits to Rhoda Kane's apartment, with Rhoda usually slightly on edge, waiting for one of Frank's outbursts.

An outburst consisted of his suddenly springing to his[Pg 11] feet with a scowl and announcing: "Goddamn it, I don't belong here!"

Rhoda always followed the same script at the beginning of these traumas by inevitably asking, "Why, darling? Why must you say that?"

"Oh, hell, Rhoda! I don't want to hurt you but—"

"Darling, you know I'll go to your room with you if you'd be more comfortable there."

He strode to the window angrily and, for Rhoda, there was that indescribably sweet and exciting reaction she always got from his nakedness. Like a Greek god standing there, she thought, and it thrilled her even though she knew she was being a little subjective about it.

She smiled with tender, understanding amusement as she realized Frank's pattern never varied. His outbursts never came until the first fierce need of her had been assuaged; this was to her liking because her need was as great.

Reacting according to current, "broad-minded" thinking and Manhattan sophistication, she regarded herself and Frank as having a "good physical relationship." Which individual need was the greatest, she had never been able to say. But there certainly was something extraordinary about it. In analyzing it, she'd arrived at the conclusion that they'd been able, on the basis of personal rapport, to function in a completely uninhibited manner; thus, some of their love-making, when lifted out of context and surveyed objectively, might have been called abnormal. Rhoda did not think so, however; or, if she did, she blocked the idea successfully by telling herself that whatever she and Frank did together was all right because they did it. She told herself it was good for them because they looked at it with a healthy attitude.

She could, of course, have gotten this opinion, or one in complete opposition to it, from two different psychologists, but she preferred to play it as she saw it.

She had wondered at times just how important the sex relation was in her attachment to Frank. It was of major importance, of that she was sure, but was it the key? If they drifted apart physically, would the other aspects of[Pg 12] the relationship vanish? She thought not, but she certainly would not have been willing to put it to the test.

Frank Corson was through looking out the window now and he began pacing nervously. "Sure—so it's fine to be a doctor. It's the sure-fire answer for later in life. But what about now? What about this crawling up the ladder inch by inch?" He turned on her defiantly.

"Living on your money!"

"You aren't!"

"All right. Maybe not technically." He looked around the room resentfully. "Using your apartment for—"

"Frank! When I have guests, do they hesitate because my apartment is nicer than—?"

She knew she'd hurt him even before his head came around and his eyes narrowed. "So that's what it really is to you!"

She'd said the wrong thing, but even as she sprang up from the bed she felt that it made no difference because he would have found something else. "I didn't mean it that way. You know I didn't."

She ran to him and laid her hands on his chest; his eyes traveled down her naked body and his mind struggled. His expression said it was a little unfair of her to come so close and stand that way, nude and beautiful and eager, in front of him, especially when he had a point to make.

"I'm a pauper trying to keep up with the rich."

She knew how to break his mood now. She smiled and pressed against him lightly and said, "Uh-huh, but what a pauper. And darling, money wouldn't change that part of it a bit."

He drew her to him violently. The impact of their bodies hurt her ribs but she gloried in the pain. She let her knees weaken and sank to the thickly carpeted floor, bringing him down with her.

She knew Frank's outburst was over—at least for that day.

Later, on the bed, he opened his eyes sleepily. "What time is it?"

"A little after ten."

"That gives us almost two more hours." He looked out over the East River. "It's beautiful."[Pg 13]

"Isn't it?"

"If I went right into research—took a job somewhere—I could afford to give this to you."

She thought of saying, But, darling, I've got it already, and decided a change of subject would be more judicious and said, "You were kidding last night, weren't you?"

"Kidding?"

"About the man with two hearts."

Frank grinned a little sheepishly. He was extremely handsome and totally unconscious of it, and when he grinned that way it made him look like a little boy caught stealing jam, and Rhoda always wanted to hug him. But she forebore as he said, "It does seem a little silly, doesn't it?"

"You'd know more about that than I do. Is it silly?"

"Let's say the chances of such a thing happening are rather remote."

"You only used your stethoscope last night?"

"That was all. I went by what I heard."

"What will you do now? X-ray?"

"I'm not sure I'll do anything. The idea is so preposterous."

She regarded him thoughtfully. "It's not like you to lose interest in anything until you know the answer."

He snubbed out his cigarette. "Let's forget Park Hill and funny anatomies, baby. Let's sit on the terrace and bathe ourselves in luxury the way the TV ad says."

And that was the way things stayed for two hours. The time passed swiftly, and when Frank was finally dressed and ready for the street, he refused Rhoda's offer to drive him to the hospital because she was very late, too. He kissed her good-bye, went down the twelve floors in the elevator, and hurried out of the building.

There was no cab in sight and he began to walk. Half a block later he turned a corner and stopped dead. He was facing a man who was coming in the other direction. He stared. The man stared back. Frank automatically stepped aside, but the man did exactly the same thing, at the same time, and they did a little dance there on the sidewalk. Then the man veered around him and moved on[Pg 14] up the street. Frank turned and stared after him, then walked slowly in his own direction.

It was the same man. It was the Park Avenue hit. It was the man he'd left in Ward Five with a broken leg. It wasn't a brother or a cousin or a chance resemblance. It was the man himself or an exact double. And what were the percentages against attending a patient one night and meeting his exact double on the street the next morning?

They were fantastic. Like hitting the Irish sweeps.

It was the man. It had to be.

Except that he wasn't broken-legged now. He was walking across the Upper East Side, wearing that same look that was as good as anyone else's, except that you got the impression of an emptiness behind his eyes.[Pg 15]

2

Those in the know in Washington, D.C., upon seeing Brent Taber rush to a taxi or dodge a pedestrian on Pennsylvania Avenue, could well say, "There walks power." But there were few indeed who possessed enough knowledge of the Washington inner structure to be able to make this observation.

Brent looked more like a coal heaver than a public servant with a well-oiled escalator into the White House. He appeared more able to direct a gang of dock workers than to jockey a delicate issue through the bloody jungle of national politics. Many of the people who accepted this deception did so at their peril and were not around any more. To others not so foolish, Brent Taber symbolized a completely necessary facet of a working democracy—secret government. This necessity sprang from the realization that even an open society must maintain areas of privacy or it is doomed.

Such was the man, and such was his mission of the moment—an issue of the utmost secrecy. So hush-hush, in fact, was this mission that when Brent Taber arrived at his office that morning and found Senator Crane pacing his reception-room carpet, his heavy eyebrows gathered and he began mentally checking his "tight ship" for a leak.

Senator Crane was the exact opposite of Brent, in that he looked to be exactly what he was; a figure rigidly type-cast to the role of a blustering, tactless servant of the people. Which, in Crane's case, meant that he was a[Pg 16] servant of Crane's career and any faction of his supporters that could further it. Still, the Senator could not be called dishonest. He was merely a flexible rationalizer. He sincerely believed that what was good for Crane was good for the "folks back home."

And just now, he felt that a knowledge of what the hell was going on in Brent Taber's orbit was probably not good for anybody and had better be aired.

As Brent entered, Crane came right to the point. "Goddamn it, Taber, just what in blazes is going on around here?"

Brent's thick lips hardly moved, a characteristic that Crane found infuriating because that was the way shady characters talked into Senatorial investigation microphones and it looked pretty bad. But Brent's words came quite clear: "Routine business, Senator—an honest effort to get a day's work done."

"You mean to tell me the meeting that's been set up here is routine?"

Brent shrugged. "Meetings are meetings, Senator."

Crane ticked it off on his fat fingers. "Pender of the Army, Bright of the Navy, Jones of the Air Force, Hagen of the FBI, Wilson from Treasury—they all trooped through here into your private conference room." He pointed pompously at his own chest. "But Crane of the Senate—"

"You forgot Birch of the State Department," Brent cut in. "Or hasn't he arrived yet?"

"—Crane of the Senate is barred! Now just what in the hell—?"

There are times for tact and times for bluntness, and this was a time, Brent decided, for the latter. "What goes on here, Senator," he said, "is none of your business. Otherwise, you would have been invited."

Crane's face darkened and Brent thought pleasantly of a brain hemorrhage blowing the top of his fat head off. But this was too much to hope for.

"Brent," Crane exploded, "I'll get you! So help me, I'll get you! Just who the hell do you think you are—demeaning the dignity of the United States Senate? Just[Pg 17] who are you to say what the people should or should not know?"

"Decisions of that nature are made upstairs, Senator. I don't presume to possess the judgment needed in such matters."

"You're an arrogant bureaucrat! Your kind comes and goes because when you get too goddamned arrogant the people rise up in their wrath and knock you off."

Marcia Holly, Brent's secretary, was studiously transcribing some notes and Brent turned his scowl on her because, damn it, she was laughing like hell at the whole thing. And, by God, a secretary didn't have the right to laugh at a United States Senator, even with her eyes, no matter how much a congenital idiot he was.

"I'm sorry, Senator," Brent said. "If you have a complaint, please take it up with my superiors. Just now I—"

"Your superiors? And who the devil are they? Who can find them? Where do they have offices? Go around trying to find your superiors and nobody ever heard of you."

Brent half smiled as he felt a sneaking admiration for Crane. The son-of-a-bitch had a disarming quality of honesty. If he planned to knife you, he drove straight in, the knife held high.

"One of the disadvantages of being a negative personality, Senator," Brent murmured.

"Sure! You're about as negative as a charging grizzly," Crane snorted and headed for the door as though his air had been cut off.

After his bulk had vanished into the corridor, Brent turned a scowl on Marcia Holly. "And what are you snickering about."

She raised large blue, innocent eyes. "Me? I? Oh, golly. I just found a cute little Freudian slip in these notes and—"

"Shut up. Are they all here?"

"Birch of the State Department sent regrets. A duty call on the Tasmanian Embassy or something."[Pg 18]

"Okay—and next week he'll be screaming to high heaven about being left out."

Marcia's laughing eyes agreed. "Ain't it the truth?" she marveled.

Brent strode past her and expertly mussed her sleek hairdo in a quick gesture. As he entered his private conference room, he turned and grinned at her silent fury.

Inside, they were all waiting for him, seated around a teakwood table. The wall-to-wall carpeting was wine-red. The chairs were deep and upholstered.