CHAPTER TWO
A new marriage, a new beginning, Al promised himself for what had to be the hundredth time. He stared resolutely up at the ceiling, dimly illuminated by the light trickling in from the bathroom. Next to him, Maxine was fast asleep, her long legs curled towards her sculpted stomach. He wanted to touch her, but he couldn't. He was too busy trying to pull himself together.
He had really hoped to avoid a nightmare tonight. He had taken every possible precaution: the careful doses of liquor throughout the day, a glass of whiskey when he had finally reached the Project, fast and furious love-making with a beautiful woman, everything that usually helped stave off the memories. He raised a hand—thanks to sixteen ounces of bourbon finally almost steady again—and ran it through his damp hair. Who was he fooling? He knew why it had happened. He knew what he had forgotten. He had gone to bed without washing. He had given into the siren-song of the goddess lying next to him, with the sweat and subtle grime of a long day spent in the air still coating his weary body. In spite of his miserable attempts to protect himself, this oversight had left him vulnerable, and he had been dragged back there.
He tried not to happen again now, but his impeccable memory and gift for detail—a trait that over the years he had come to loathe, and that he wished very much he could obliterate—was too fast for him and for the liquid protection that had not quite kicked in yet. Six years without a real bath, six years without a hot shower, six damned years when he hadn't even been able to wash his hands on a daily basis!
Though he had just returned from the bathroom, where he had taken off a whole layer of skin with his frantic scrubbing, he could still feel the accumulated filth of unending months in abject squalor. At Hoa Loa, he remembered dimly, the prisoners had been allowed to clean themselves once every three or four days, provided they were able to walk to the open-air washrooms—which the obstreperous ones who were constantly being "serious punished" usually weren't. You had half an hour before you had to be back in your cell, but if you were really lucky the guard would wait seven or eight minutes before turning off the flow of cold water to the concrete sink in your cubical. At least you had soap: a bar of harsh lye stuff that wouldn't lather no matter what you did to it. At the time, shaving with the blunt state-issued razors and that brutally abrasive surfactant had seemed like hell. Oh, the innocence of youth.
The camp commander at Xom Ap Lo had considered bathing a privilege. Cooperative—or at the very least not openly defiant—inmates were permitted ten minutes at the well once a week. It wasn't enough time for a full scrub, but at least you could do your hands and your face. If you were really quick you could strip down and make an attempt at hygiene where it was most needed but (with diarrhea and dysentery rampant and the niceties of toilet facilities nothing but an academic theory postulated by the clinically insane) almost impossible to maintain. And, of course, in the stifling misery of summer you could wring some of the vileness out of your sweat-soaked prison fatigues.
Deep in the jungle where the V.C. influence was tempered neither by NVA discipline nor the unending pressure from the government to use the POWs as propaganda tools, there had been no such thing as regularly scheduled washing. When your clothes grew too malodorous for the guards' taste (not yours, God only knew), they were simply confiscated before you went in for an "interrogation" session, and returned afterwards in the same condition as before—or worse, if it was a slow day. When you yourself started to reek so badly that even Charlie couldn't stand the stench, they would truss you up in manacles and leg irons, hog-tie you with stout rope, and then throw you in the river. That hardly ever happened, though. Quon wanted to keep you ashamed, debased and miserably uncomfortable. When you felt like an animal, it was that much harder to resist like a man.
On one particular day—must've been late in the summer of '71—they had strung him up from the gallows just beyond the tiger cage. His wrists were bound with coarse rope, and spread in a "v" above his head. After four years of brutal captivity Al had learned to be thankful for small mercies when he could find them. He spared himself a moment of blissfully optimistic gratitude: it was murderously painful, but at least Charlie hadn't tied his elbows together this time.
At least, too, he could finally breathe a little—though as his body dragged down on his arms and the wasted muscles in his chest began to constrict he knew it wouldn't last. They had just hauled him out of the sewage pit behind Quon's bunker. He'd been down there for days, no food, no water, hip-deep in the vile sludge that was now coating his body. The sun was baking the muck to a thick, stinking crust over his arms and legs, his torso, his neck. He had tried so hard to keep his feet down there, but you just couldn't stand for that long, without food or sleep. His hair was matted with the stinking stuff, too, and he could feel the skin of his face tightening where it was smeared with the accumulated waste of guards, prisoners and villagers. Maybe, he thought, frantically trying to hold on to something as the pain grew and he could feel his joints stiffening, maybe with this coating of putrescence covering his skin, he wouldn't burn today…
Charlie wasn't blind to that possibility either, though. Instead of waiting awhile, they started whipping him right away. The lashes cut through the shell of filth and bit deep into his back. His blood started to mingle with the grime, liquefying it again. Another blow, and another. He stifled a scream of agony.
For hours it had continued. At last they had cut him down, but not before he lost muscular control. They dragged him by the ropes still binding his wrists, and deposited him in the tiger cage—because, obviously, he just hadn't suffered enough. It wasn't until before dawn the next day that he roused sufficiently from the stupor of torment to realize that his back was sure to go putrid with infection…
It hadn't rained for more than a week after that.
Al moaned softly, shuddering as he surfaced out of the intrusion. He was trembling again, and wondered whether he should try to make it into the other room for another drink. He wanted to shower again, but wasn't sure if his legs would support him. He had a dread fear of collapsing in the shower and having Maxine find him like that… she had no real sense yet of his weakness, and if he could just keep her from finding out…
Maxine. She stirred beside him as if responding to his thought. Al rolled his head towards her. She was gorgeous. She was real. She was here, now, in the present.
He reached out almost frantically and pulled her into his arms, his lips finding her sleep-slackened mouth and inhaling deeply of her fragrant breath. She murmured something, and her hands instinctively caressed his back. Al almost cried as that sensation penetrated his fogged mind. She didn't care. She didn't find him vile, filthy, disgusting. She was holding him.
She was also asleep, a cruel voice in the back of his head taunted. If she woke up… if only she knew what he had been thinking about a minute before…
Desperately, his mouth pressed harder against hers. He clutched the back of her head with one hand, his fingers catching on her silken hair. Her grip on his body tightened a little as she responded intuitively to the advances. Then her eyes opened in the semidarkness, and she smiled.
"Hey," she breathed, wriggling nearer to him and pressing against him.
He didn't repulse her. She wasn't revolted by his presence. She didn't pull back from his touch. As they both gave in to the passion of the moment, neither noticed the hot tears of gratitude that coursed down Al's cheeks.
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Donna Eleese hated Starbright.
She had come to the government with the proposal six years ago, fresh out of graduate school with two doctorates under her belt, rose-tinted glasses on her nose, and stars in her eyes. Along with three other scientists including her mentor, Doctor Darian Hubbard of Caltech, she had laid out a strategy for achieving the impossible. Backed by the forward-thinking Admiral MacArthur and two enthusiastic senators, they had quickly obtained funding under a top-secret cart-blanche contract with the Department of Defense. The foundations had been sunk, the synchrotron laid out, and the cover for the Project established. Inside twenty-eight months they were sixty percent operational, and starting to run acceleration tests.
In the third year, things had started to go wrong. Doctor Hubbard had suffered a debilitating stroke that had pushed him into premature retirement and left Donna as the most qualified quantum physicist at Starbright—and possibly in the country. Though still struggling to develop as a scientist, she had found the burden of management thrust upon her shoulders without warning. The added duties of staff appointments and team coordination had been in no way offset by her increased authority and the sudden recognition of her invaluable, indeed indispensable, nature. In her struggle to expand into this new and unwanted role, Donna knew that she had stepped on people's toes, bruised egos, and created an image of herself as a draconian and authoritarian witch. People had begun to see her as argumentative, demanding and generally hostile. What they couldn't see was how much she loathed the burden of command forced upon her, and how insecure she was in the new position. She didn't want to be a department head: all she had ever wanted to be was a scientist.
Not ten months after Doctor Hubbard's stroke, Admiral MacArthur had announced he would be leaving the project as soon as he could train a replacement. So had begun the Age of Calavicci.
Every time she thought about the Project's new Administrator, Donna found her teeth grinding with frustration. There was no denying the captain had charisma—he did, and in copious amounts. His bravado was equal to none, and he was a definite crowd-pleaser. For example, a year ago he had turned one of the useless polymers that the chemistry department was constantly cranking out in their search for gel coolants—this particular one a phosphorescent hard plastic that emitted 2.4 candles of neon blue light—into "Starbright" buttons. That had delighted the entire staff. Even Donna owned one. It was brilliant: the kind of genius creation that only a man with the mind of a sixteen-year-old could have dreamed up.
She didn't mean that Calavicci wasn't intelligent. He was definitely sharp. He had a degree in chemistry that he had obtained before Donna had learned how to read—that meant that it was fundamentally useless. His masters, also obtained at M.I.T., was much more current. It involved electrical engineering, and to a lesser degree computers. Prior to allowing MacArthur to bring him on the Project, Donna had made a point of reading his thesis. With the theoretical scientist's instinctive scorn of her pragmatic counterparts, Donna reflected that at least Calavicci could change a light bulb.
He also had an amazing adaptive mechanism. He could pick things up with amazing rapidity. This wasn't what Donna considered a desirable trait. Quite the contrary. His ability to fake his way through a conversation as if he knew what he was talking about—and there was no way he could: a fighter pilot from the slums of New York just wasn't mentally capable of comprehending physics so advanced that it bordered on fantasy!—made him a very dangerous associate. People who appeared more intelligent than they were could cause some very serious problems, especially when they were deluding themselves as well as others.
The one thing Donna absolutely couldn't stand about Calavicci, however, was his personality; the very trait that endeared him to so many. Most of the women at the Project found his advances flattering and his carriage charming. Donna saw him for what he was: a lecherous, middle-aged ex-star-jock whose ego had been inflated beyond belief by a decade of ululating press attention. The Congressional Medal of Honor for valor in Vietnam was only the start. There were citations for battles, for wounds, for comrades saved, aided and honorably buried, for his antics in space, and for service as a flight instructor (the man even had teaching medals!). This unending stream of honors and ten years of being told how wonderful he was had made Calavicci into an intolerable egotist, if you gave him the benefit of the doubt and didn't just assume he'd been born that way.
It didn't help that he liked his liquor. Though he didn't turn up for work drunk, and he was always meticulous about appearances, it was no secret that every time he rode into town on his ridiculous black bike he returned with several bottles of booze. There was something about the very concept of a hard-drinking, lascivious old man that Donna found fundamentally repulsive. During her first summer of post-secondary education she had taken English Lit—in itself the course from purgatory—from a man like that. Professor Bryant, an alcoholic, dirty-minded wash-up who traded top grades for sexual favors, had wound up impregnating one of Donna's classmates that year. The girl's father had pushed through a shotgun wedding, and left his daughter to lie in the bed she had made. The baby had been stillborn. It stood out in Donna's mind as one of the most senselessly and stupidly tragic things she had ever witnessed. If only she'd known what was going on, she might have been able to change things. She hadn't, and she couldn't make any difference now, but every time she saw Calavicci trying one of his pickup lines on the other women at the Project, she was reminded of the cautionary tale of Jamie Lee Bryant.
At least, she reflected as she tossed away yet another piece of junk mail (how do you get junk mail at a top-secret project?), Calavicci had shown no inclination towards catching himself a trophy wife whose life he could ruin.
It was three in the morning, and she couldn't sleep. Rather than descend back into the depths of the Project to wrestle with the frustration that was the accelerator, she was trying to get her personal life in order, and that meant sorting through the week's neglected correspondence. She tossed away a letter from the Caltech Board of Alumni. A letter from her cousin in West Virginia was slipped into a drawer to deal with later. The next envelope made her smile. It was from Doctor Hubbard. She read his letter ravenously. He was quite happy in Halifax, where he and his wife had moved to be near their grandchildren. He had enclosed an article of interest.
Donna unfolded it eagerly. Her mentor and friend was always sending interesting snippets he had come across during his perusal of the ever-growing body of primary literature. He had time to devote to journals that Donna couldn't spare, and he even subscribed to one or two of the more obscure and disreputable publications.
This particular article, Donna noticed with annoyance, had come from one of the latter. American Physicist Now was the tabloid of the world of scientific journals. Its submissions weren't even peer-reviewed, and in her experience the only people who published there were those without the knowledge, skill, validity, connections or know-how to publish anywhere else. In other words, the dregs of the scientific community. Underqualified graduate students trying to pay the bills, high school teachers with delusions of grandeur, small-town professors at community colleges, and other people no one with any reputation worth losing would touch with a ten-foot pole.
Still, Doctor Hubbard had obviously found something to be interested in if he'd bothered to send it to her. She examined the title. That was the author's first problem. Far from being the explicit, detailed banner one expected of a proper journal article, this one sounded like the heading for some freshman's D-grade term paper in Philosophy. She read it out loud, just to prove how moronic it sounded.
"Holography and the Mind," she sneered. She glanced at the by-line. Dr. Samuel Beckett, M.D., Ph.D., huh? What was an M.D. doing writing articles about holography, anyway? Exactly.
Deciding that Hubbard must have sent it for laughs, she tossed the article into the wastebasket. It wasn't worth looking at: she didn't feel like laughing.
Funny how little one did, when one hated one's life.
