Government Men Page 15

CHAPTER 9

  HER!

  Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever.

  - June Masters Bacher

  Bates sat in shock for long minutes after his VISICOM with Ryan. What the duce was going on? As a rough guesstimate, it had been at least N (N>5) years since the White house had COMed the DOD. Bates remembered the incident because Barns bragged about it for months. It was surprising enough to learn that Ryan was aware that DOD still existed. On top of that, to then actually get a personal call from possibly the second most powerful person in DC was absolutely unbelievable!

  Ryan had tried to sound casual, but Bates doubted that anything that Ryan ever did was casual. The man was obviously under enormous pressure. What national or international crisis was troubling Ryan? Why would anyone need missiles, bombs, and troops nowadays?

  And, what did Ryan and the NP have on Melberg? He couldn't imagine that it had anything to do with Melberg's work here at DOD. Had the man been moonlighting downtown with the DC big-wigs and gotten himself into trouble? Perhaps. He had heard that Melberg was talented and ambitious, and that he would have gotten Barns' job if it hadn't been for politics, though why a man with both talent and ambition would stay on in the DOD was a mystery. Leading DOD people usually had either talent or ambition, but not both.

  Strange doings were afoot, that's for sure: Barns and Twig were acting psycho, and Melberg was on the lamb. The Ryan VISICOM. Janet in the news. And of course there was also his own inexplicable promotion. All of it had happened within the last few days. There didn't seem to be a logical connection between these anomalous events; could it all be the result of astrology or biorhythms or something? Bates didn't believe in those. Such phenomenon could best be tackled by chaos theory, perhaps. But whatever the cause, the well-ordered and predictable world he enjoyed less than a week ago seemed to be a thing of the past. Bates didn’t like so much excitement. He was even having trouble sleeping lately.

  He had often suspected that the universe was much more complex, mysterious, and unpredictable than the dullness of his own life suggested, and that all the science and other knowledge that mankind had built up over the centuries didn't yet amount to a hill of beans. Maybe those suspicions were correct. Maybe the Earth had been in an unstable equilibrium state, but something had finally tipped the balance, popping all sorts of long hidden things out into view that had been hiding just under the surface for ages. Oddball things that didn’t care about causing a man to lose sleep. What was it and where was it all leading?

  Fortunately though, he thought, sighing and glancing at his watch, at least this day full of events was behind him. The workday was over, and he could go home with Milo. He opened his Pizza box and gave the last cold slice of everything-on-it Pizza to the dog. Milo gulped it down gratefully, anchovies and all. On the way home, they would stop at McDonald's for some quarter-pounders and fries. At least nothing else weird would happen today.

  He was wrong. As he reached out to switch his VISICOM to auto-receive mode for the evening, it informed him of another call which he decided to take, despite conventional wisdom that argued against answering calls-as-you-went-out-the-door.

  He received the biggest shock of the week when Janet Garb's face appeared on the screen. "Hello Narb," she said, after a moment.

  Bates couldn't say anything. This had to be a fantasy. Wasn't it?

  "Yes, it's me, Janet! It's been a very long time.” She smiled briefly the smile he remembered in a thousand dreams.

  Bates couldn't say anything. The universe had twisted into something unrecognizable again.

  "I know its presumptuous of me to call you after all these years, but there has been some unexpected trouble.”

  Bates was still incapable of saying anything. But he realized on some level of awareness that from the way she looked and sounded, she was indeed deeply troubled. It was more than time that had aged her since they were lovers long ago. There was tenseness in her voice, a measured pacing of her words, and a downturn to the corners of her mouth that Bates still knew so well. It reminded him painfully of the previous time that they spoke; when she broke it all off between them. Yes, he sensed she was in trouble, but that thought was far in the background of his mind at the moment.

  Totally overwhelming everything else was the exquisite experience of just seeing and hearing Janet again! He had nothing but memories of her for so many years. So many long, empty, wasted years, in which the more he tried to forget her, the more he remembered her. And now to simply see her again and to hear her voice was heavenly!

  Her voice, even troubled, was like the most wonderful music that could ever be imagined. It was like recovering from decades of being deaf and blind, to rediscover symphonies and gardens and sunsets. It was rediscovering life, after simply going through the motions. He wiped the gathering tears of joy from his eyes.

  And of course, he still couldn't say anything, or really listen to anything either. At some rational level Bates realized suddenly that he hadn't comprehended a single word that Janet had been saying. He struggled to pierce the vale of his emotions and to understand what she was talking about.

  "I can understand that what I've told you comes as a great shock.”

  What part was that, he wandered?

  “I'm truly sorry to have upset you Narb!”

  Upset? Why would he be upset? This was the best thing to happen to him in twenty years!

  “But I'm glad to have seen you again. We'll get by somehow, even if you choose not to come.”

  Who's 'we', he wandered? Get by? Get by what? Come? Come where?

  “Of course, what does anything matter anymore anyway?”

  Huh?

  She looked at her watch, than back at Bates, sadly. "Good luck to you Narb."

  "Ugh, hah-ah," Bates struggled to clear his voice.

  THEN, SHE SIMPLY SIGNED OFF!

  Bates stared at the blank screen for several seconds in total shock; then his practiced hands flew to the VISICOM controls in desperation. He immediately confirmed that there was no more signal; she really HAD signed off! He hit the VISICOM 'return last call' function. No good. There was no number in memory to support a return call. She had deliberately suppressed that function at her end.

  Bates jumped up and screamed at the top of his lungs, causing a startled Milo to run around the room howling sympathetically. Whatever excitement was going on here, as long as he was a member of the Bates pack, Milo needed to be a part of it.

  Bates began randomly pacing around the office and talking incoherently to himself. "Yea gods! Of all the addle-brained, nincompoop capers! I can't believe it! She was right there, and I didn't say a single solitary word to her! Worse, I didn't listen to her! She wanted my help and I don't even know what's going on! One chance in twenty years and I screwed it up! FUDGE FARKING WINKIES!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

  Margaret come to the office door briefly to peek in timidly. He shooed her away, quieted himself and Milo down, sat down before his VISICOM again, took a deep breath, and hit the playback button.

  Praise to the heavens, the VISICOM began to play back the call; apparently the record function had been on! Bates exhaled a deep sigh of relief, and turned his full attention to the recorded conversation. This time, not a single gesture or syllable would get by him. He would absorb it all. He would be a sponge, a vacuum, an anechoic chamber, a perfect blackbody, a shortstop: whatever it took.

  On the left side of the screen Bates viewed the recording of himself, a pathetic balding, middle aged, pudgy, plain, pale, poorly dressed man, with a blank, shocked, demented idiot look on his face, surrounded in his office by Milo, pizza boxes, Pepsi cans, and other assorted trash. Except for Milo and the trash, it looked an awful lot like the photo on his driver’s license: horrible! No wonder Janet had hung up on him!

  On the other side of the screen was HER. She appeared to be calling from a public VISICOM booth someplace. Compared to his fond memo
ries of a coed twenty years younger, she looked older of course, and worried, but still fantastic. He zoomed her window larger, and shrunk his own pathetic image down to wallet/driver’s license size.

  Janet's story was brief but totally incredible. Monday night, while he partied to celebrate his ascension to the position of Head of DOD, Janet and one of her students had discovered that the Earth would essentially be destroyed on Christmas Eve!

  On the recorded replay, Bates' visible and auditory reaction to this rather astounding pronouncement was: NOTHING! Nothing at all! In the replay he still sat staring out at her with blank bulging eyes and open, gaping mouth. He looked like the stuffed catfish that Oscar had on his living room wall as a conversation piece. Bates didn't even like that particular catfish either, though as a rule, he had nothing against fish or cats either, for that matter.

  Apparently the Government didn't believe Janet, or for some reason wanted to cover up the story, because the other astronomers she had sent the story started to mysteriously disappear, as did her students, and now she was on the run from the National Police herself. She had called Bates to ask him to meet her at a certain camp site in Arizona, a place known only to the two of them from long ago. She said that only then would he understand why she had called him in the first place.

  She pleaded for him to come!

  And in response he still had said absolutely NOTHING to her. For her it must have been like trying to talk to a wax zombie. Good grief, what must she have thought of him!

  The rest of the recording was the ending that he had paid attention to before. Bates had certainly learned a great deal from the recording, but there was still no way to call her back, as she had left no address or VISICOM number. Sure, he could track down her home phone through directory assistance but that would probably be worthless if she was on the run from the NP. It could be less than worthless, if the NP was tapping her home VISICOM. He couldn't try to call her back. Bates again paced the room in frustration.

  The only thing he could do is go to their old campsite in Arizona and hope that she appeared. He had revisited the place so many times in his memories that finding it should be no problem, even after twenty years.

  He immediately made airline reservations on United Flight 210 to Phoenix leaving Dulles Airport in only three hours. Then he and Milo rushed out to the Nitro. Fortunately, it was loaded with Premium Fuel. The car shot out the front gate past a startled Hank and practically flew towards his apartment.

  However, halfway home Bates realized that he had some preparations to make before he could leave for Phoenix. From his car he first VISICOMed Mel, who was still at work, to tell him he would be on Annual Leave indefinitely, and that he, Mel, was to be in charge of DoD in his absence. He wouldn't tell his startled friend where or why he was going. He had never told anyone else about Janet, not even Mel or Oscar, and there was no use in getting Mel involved now. Also, he arranged for Mel to take care of Milo. Despite a few hundred IQ points difference in their levels of intelligence, Mel and Milo had similar personalities, and got along very well together.

  As an afterthought, Bates asked Mel to check on the trajectory of Dannos. Due to his cosmological studies, Mel had VIP connections in the astronomy community that he could tap.

  Despite his faith in Janet and her capabilities, it was still a little hard for Bates to accept everything she had told him regarding Dannos. The destruction of the Earth was almost too extreme and serious a situation to even contemplate. To Bates, the whole idea was refutable on basic philosophical and psychological grounds. The philosophical principles of continuity and uniformity suggested to Bates that the world of today would pretty darn well match the world of yesterday and tomorrow, here and anywhere in the cosmos. That should be especially true over a time-span that was super-short from a cosmological standpoint, such as a person's lifetime, unless they were exceedingly unlucky.

  Sure, the Earth could get clobbered by an asteroid. It had happened before, lots of times, and it would very likely happen again; that much was well established by science. But lately it only happened once in tens or hundreds of millions of years. So then, what were the odds it would happen this Christmas-eve? Tiny! This stuff just didn't happen in real-life. It was amusing as a pulp-science fiction topic, but in real life it couldn't be any more likely than encountering dragons, unicorns, ghosts or space aliens. Fortunately life and reality just weren't that damned dramatic.

  Psychologically, Earth's destruction was simply too bad a thing to be real; denial was so much easier, and something that Bates was well practiced in. He felt that there simply had to be some sort of crazy mistake, and with Mel's help he would clear things up for Janet somehow.

  Bates said good-bye to Mel. Then, remembering his poor appearance as recorded during the VISICOM call, Bates drove to a K-MART for new clothes and luggage. He wanted to look his best when he met with Janet.

  He got lucky; he caught the tail end of their fall clearance sale of winter clothes. Another week and there would only be summer clothes everywhere. He hadn't kept records and couldn't prove it legally or scientifically, but it seemed to him that every year clothes sales in department stores shifted a little, until it had gotten to the point where basically winter clothes had to all be purchased in the summer, and summer ones had to all be purchased in the winter.

  Why people put up with buying clothes months ahead of time when they were usually late with everything else was a huge mystery and a situation that Bates strongly objected to. He even wrote a technical paper once explaining seasons and mean temperatures, and sent copies to several department stores, without results. They were still screwed up. The only hope seemed to be that if sales slipped only a few months further, seasons and clothes sales would again match up.

  Shopping was an effective means of reducing worry for Bates, and he felt better after he had finished. He tried to blank-out predications of the Earth’s destruction, and worries about Janet’s legal problems, and focus on the positive points. In balance, he could scarcely believe his good fortune. The bottom line was this: Janet actually wanted to see him! Compared to that, the odd doings at the office and even this new business about the Earth being destroyed in a week seemed like insubstantial irrelevant hooey.

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