Sometime during Leo’s dreams, the frogs stopped chirping.
Leo’s eyes snapped open. He had already been kidnapped from this room once, and it would not happen again. He eased off the narrow bed. His hand slid below the mattress to the waiting haft of his knife, then he waited. As the screen door creaked open, Leo leaped toward the noise and onto his intruder, knife ready for blood.
“Get off me, what is this?” protested an angry and disheveled Dr. Anson Johns. Spotting the knife, “Were you planning to kill me, too?”
Leo saw that Dr. Johns was not armed, unless his grip around the slim neck of a brandy bottle counted. The Doctor was stinking drunk. Leo released him and sat back, naked, on the bed.
Johns went on spewing his outrage. “This what you call the new civilization? This what your revolution brought us to? Attacking visitors with knives? Is that the best humanity can offer now after all this fuss and bother?”
“What do you want?” Leo asked calmly.
“I want to know if you know where Suez is? Did he say anything to you?”
“No.”
“Well, he’s gone.” Dr. Johns slouched into the chair by the desk. “I guess you’re not surprised. I guess I’m not surprised.” He sighed toward the wall, “Other friends have flown before.”
His tone changed from anger to supplication, as drunks will do, as he talked to Leo. “He took your bicycle, too, you may as well know. All his work here, everything we’ve done, and he left with nothing but a bicycle.” Johns was feeling sorry for himself, but Leo characteristically let him talk on.
“I blame you. Before you got here, Mister high-and-mighty Commissioner of the goddamned so-called Revolutionary Council, he was willing to tough it out. Oh well, the truth is, I think it’s worse than that. I don’t think Dr. Albert Suez ran away from here so much because he was discouraged with what he was doing. It was you and your revolutionary siren song. He actually wanted to get back to society. He’s just crazy enough, just ambitious enough, to think he could get in on this big scientific upheaval that he thinks is going on. He wants to invent things. Of course, he invented things here, but he wanted to invent things where he could see them implemented, and we’re not doing a lot of implementing here at Spring Farm and Laboratories. Your fault.”
“I didn’t tell Suez to go,” Leo asserted.
“Maybe you didn’t,” Johns went on in his commiserative way, “Maybe you didn’t send the most precious person in the world to her room, bawling her eyes out, earlier this evening either, did you?” Johns had returned to accusations.
“Did you talk to her?” Leo asked.
“Didn’t.” Johns responded. “Couldn’t. Nobody could’ve. She’ll work it out on her own, if I understand the kind of person she’s become, or she’ll ask if she needs help. Either way, there’s nothing anybody else can do. But it gives me some pleasure just to let you know what a sorry sumbitch you are to put the most precious person in the world in a fit of crying.”
“The most precious person in the world,” Leo repeated.
“It’s my fault,” the drunk recriminated against himself. “I should never have let you see her. I should have hid her from you as soon as I knew you were coming, or even before that. I took too big a chance because you’re such a high-and-mighty muckety muck of the so-called goddamned Revolutionary Council and because I had to impress your worthless ass instead just for the goddamned privilege of getting to continue the experiments that could, would, put the world right at last.
‘You think I’m in love with her, don’t you?” Johns accused.
“Yes.”
“You think I’m in love with her and that I’m jealous because you’ve had your hands on her. Hell, commissioner, you’re just part of the experiment as far as you matter, if you matter at all.
‘Come to think of it, I am in love with Jane Early. So is everybody else. Everybody that knows her, or that will someday know her. I know you’re in love with her, and that’s about the only thing, right now, that I don’t blame on your sorry commissioner ass. Anybody would fall in love with her. She’s the most precious person in the world. Jane Early.”
He took a long swig, straight, from the brandy bottle, and handed it to Leo. The smell of the brandy, mixed with John’s hot brandy-breath, filled the room, and Leo was tempted. He eyed the bottle briefly, then handed it back.
“Giving it up? Good idea,” said the Doctor. “I would, too, if I could. And I will, too, someday. But not tonight.” He took another long gulp. Leo noticed the morning light beginning to illuminate the screen behind his drunken guest.
“She’s one of your patients, isn’t she?” Leo said. “One of your laboratory experiments?”
“No, she’s not one of them. She’s the whole thing,” the doctor muttered. “She’s it. She’s everything. She’s the proof of the pudding, the light of the world, the Empress of the Nile...” he went on.
“The most precious person in the world.”
“That’s right. Most precious. She shows that it works. I don’t have to show the world how I do it, I just have to show them Jane Early. She is the most open-minded, caring, intelligent, completely human person since, By-God, Jesus Christ, or Buddha, or better than that.”
He rose and brought his odorous face close to Leo’s, “You fell in love with her in a minute, didn’t you, you cynical sumbitch. Anybody would have, everybody will.” He put his hands on Leo’s shoulders and shook him insistently. “Isn’t that enough proof for you? Isn’t that enough to let me turn on one lousy goddamned generator and get back to work? Isn’t it enough for you to let me put an end to human suffering once and for all? Tell the truth, you sumbitch. What do you think of her? What do you think of me, her creator?”
“I think,” Leo said in a carefully measured voice, “that you had something to do with what happened to me last night. You either arranged the whole thing, or you at least cooperated with those small capitalist losers.”
Johns’ drunken face cocked sideways with curiosity. “You’re flattering me,” he said. “Or you’re libeling me, one or the other. You think I would be in on some kidnapping scheme? Do you picture me collaborating with a bunch of low level crooks? Hah! It would be amusing if it weren’t so outright dumb!”
Leo: “If it’s true, and if you left any tracks, or if the survivors know you were in on it, you should start thinking about covering up before it occurs to Otharine Jones to ask questions.”
“I’m not afraid of Otharine Jones,” Johns snarled. “I’m not afraid of you either. Here’s how I describe my feelings toward all of you, ‘disgust.’ I’m disgusted that I have to deal with any of you, and that I have to sit on what is probably the greatest breakthrough in the history of health science. She disgusts me. You disgust me. This whole line of talk disgusts me. What would you do about it, even if you knew?”
“Nothing.” Leo said. “I don’t think I would care either way. Otharine could kill you, like she did the others, or not, and it wouldn’t make a lot of difference one way or another. I’ve seen plenty of death, so much that it’s accumulated on me. Another one, or another thousand, probably wouldn’t matter. But, we’re supposed to be through with violence and there aren’t supposed to be any more executions. I’m not going to do anything about you and Otharine.”
“You’ve killed men,” Johns accused. “You’ve killed men and probably women too. You come in here, with their blood on your hands, and you purport to judge me. You purport to decide whether or not my life’s work, my work to end all of the savagery about you and the rest of the human race, is worth having!”
It’s easy enough for an old drunk to condemn another. “I did what I did, and you did what you did. Both of us washed it down with a whole lot of alcohol. The only difference between you and me, right now, is that I’m still sober. Now get away from me. Go rant at somebody else, or go to bed!”
There were tears on the doctor’s burning cheeks as he rose to full height. "Order them to let me turn on my generator!" Was it an imperial command or a whining request? Jones' mouth grimaced, and his hands and arms shook, but he could speak no more. Clutching his brandy, he lurched out the door.
Leo sat silently, turning all of the revelations over slowly in his mind. It was humbling, in a way, to see himself and everyone else as Dr. Johns saw them, as characters being manipulated on a stage. Puppets. Dr. Johns saw everyone, Suez and everyone else, only in relation to his own needs. Maybe he did indeed love his “creation” Jane Early, but it was only because he loved himself. But he hates himself, too, Leo thought, and that must mean that he hates the rest of us as well.
At least one thing could now be decided, Leo thought. No generator would to be turned on at Spring Hill Farms and Laboratories.
He swung his legs off the bed and looked for clean clothes. Today, after all, was supposed to be his big parade day. He walked through the kitchen and picked up some sliced bread and coffee, then ambled out to the porch to wait. Jane Early was already sitting there.
“It’s the prettiest part of the day,” she began. “Of course, in this heat, it’s just about the only bearable part of the day, isn’t it?” Leo could feel her incandescent smile warming him throughout as he sat down beside her. “I’ve worked out some things, but I suspect that you have, too. Would you like to go first?”
Leo put his hand over hers. “Are you OK now?”
“Don’t worry.” She squeezed his hand slightly. “What set me off last evening was a memory. It’s the first one I’ve had. Up to then, I didn’t really remember anything except this farm. I had no past, and I didn’t even notice it. It was taste that changed me. Taste, they say, is the strongest of memories. With that taste, I remembered abuse, abuses, from men, and it pained and frightened me. It wasn’t what I remembered that panicked me so much, it was that I remembered anything at all. It was the realization that I haven’t always been here, that I do have a past in addition to my present and future. After a few minutes or hours of fear, I got past it. Now I want to know what abuses I’ve suffered, and what happiness I’ve known, too. And when I was bored, and when I was interested, and who else has been in my life. I’m not afraid of it, now that I know it’s there, I’m just more curious than ever!
‘Now, what about you? Tell me some more about Leo.”
“You’re amazing,” Leo began. “You’ve spent no time at all figuring out the most momentous things about yourself and your own life, and you immediately want to know more about somebody else.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to tell me?” she teased.
Leo wanted to re-open himself as he had on the bed with her, but the intimate setting was not there, and he wasn’t sure how she might feel about his most recent decision. He did tell her, however, that knowing her had made him more interested in the problems at hand, in the territory, and, he admitted, in his own life. He could have spent hours sharing thoughts with this incredible woman.
But Otharine Jones was trotting into view on horseback, and she was leading another horse with an empty saddle.