The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (18 page)

Barker smiled. "Connie's always making plans for people."

"You don't take him very seriously."

"Do you? There are the people in this world who act,
and the people who scheme. The ones who act get things done, and the ones who
scheme try to take credit for it. You must know that as well as I do. A man doesn't
arrive at your position without delivering results." He looked knowingly
and, for a moment, warmly, at Hawks. "Does he?"

"Connington is also a vice-president of Continental
Electronics."

Barker spat on the grass. "Personnel recruiting. An
expert at bribing engineers away from your competitors. Something any other
skulker could do."

Hawks shrugged.

"What is he?" Barker demanded. "A sort of
legitimate confidence man? A mumbo-jumbo spouter with a wad of psychological
tests in his back pocket? I've been mumbled at by experts, Doctor, and they're
all the same. What they can't do themselves, they label abnormal. WTiat they're
ashamed of wanting to do, they condemn others for. They cover themselves with
one of those fancy social science diplomas, and talk in educated phrases, and
pretend they're actually doing something of value. Well, I've got an education
too, and I know what the world is like, and I can give Connington cards and
spades, Doctor—cards and spades—and still beat him out. Where has he been? What
has he seen? What has he done? He's nothing, Hawks—nothing compared to a real
man."

Barker's lips were pulled back from his glistening teeth.
The skin of his face was stretched by the taut muscles at the hinges of his
jaws. "He thinks he's entitled to make plans for me. He thinks to himself:
'There's another clod I can use wherever I need him, and get rid of when I'm
done with him.' But that's not the way it is. Would you care to discuss art
with me, Doctor? Or music? How about literature? Pick your period. I know 'em
all. I'm a whole man, Hawks—" Barker got clumsily to his feet. "A
better man than anybody else I know. Now let's go join the lady." He began
walking away across the lawn, and Hawks slowly got to his feet and followed
him.

Claire looked up from where she lay flat on the diving
board, and leisurely turned her body until she was sitting upright, her legs
extended. "How did it work out?"

"Oh, don't worry," Barker answered her.
"You'll be the first to know."

Claire smiled. "Then you haven't made up your mind yet?
Isn't the job attractive enough?"

Hawks watched Barker frown in annoyance.

The kitchen door of the house sighed shut on its air spring,
and Connington broke into a chuckle behind them. None of them had heard him
come across the strip of grass between the house and this end of the pool.

He dangled a used glass from one hand, and held a partially
emptied bottle in the other. His face was flushed, and his eyes were wide with
the impact of a great deal of liquor over a short period of time. "Gonna
do it, Al?"

Instantly, Barker's mouth flashed into a bare-toothed,
fighting grimace. "Of course!" he exclaimed in a startlingly
desperate voice. "I couldn't let it pass—not for the world!"

Claire smiled faintly to herself.

Hawks watched all three of them.

Connington chuckled again. "What else could you've
said?" he laughed at Barker. His arm swept out in irony. "Here's a
man famous for split-second decisions. Always the same ones." The secret
was out. The joke was being delivered. "You don't understand, do
you?" he said to the three at the edge of the pool. "Don't see things
the way I do. Let me x'plain.

"A technician—like you, Hawks—sees the whole world as
cause an' effect. And the world's consistent, explained that way, so why look
for any further explanation?

"Man like you, Barker, sees the world moved by deeds of
strong men. And
your
way of lookin' at it works out, too.

"But the world's big. Complicated. Got more answers in
it than it needs. Part-answers can look like the whole answer and act like it for
a long time.

"For instance, Hawks can think of himself as
manipulating causes 'n producing effects he wants. 'N you, Barker, you can
think of yourself as s'perior, Overman type. Hawks can think of you as
specified factor t' be inserted in new environment, so Hawks can solve new
'vironment. You can think of yourself as indomitable figure slugging it out
with th' unknown. And so it goes, roun' and roun', 'n who's right? Both of you?
Maybe. Maybe. But can you stan' to be on the same job together?"

Connington laughed again, his high heels planted in the
lawn. "Me, I'm personnel man. I don't look cause and effect. I don't look
heroes. Explain the worl' in a different way.
People—
that's all I know.
'S enough. I feel 'em. I know 'em. Like a chemist knows valences. Like a
physicist knows particle charges. Positive, negative. Atomic weight, 'tomic
number. Attract, repel. I mix 'em. I compound 'em. I take people, 'n I find a
job for them, the co-workers for 'em. I take a raw handful of people, and I
mutate it, and make isotopes out of it—I make solvents, reagents—'n I can make
'splosives, too, when I want. That's
my
world!

"Sometimes I save people up—save 'em for the right job
to make 'em react the right way. Save 'em up for the right people.

"Barker, Hawks—you're gonna be my masterpiece. 'Cause
sure as God made little green apples, he made you two to meet . . . 'n me,
me,
I found you, 'n I've done it. I've
rammed
you two together . . . 'n
now it's done an' nothing'll ever take the critical mass apart, and sooner, later,
it's got to 'splode, and who're you gonna have left then, Claire?"

Hawks broke the silence. He reached out, pulled the bottle
out of Connington's hand, and swung toward the cliff. The bottle flailed away
and disappeared over the edge. Then Hawks turned to Barker and said quietly:
"There are a few more things I ought to tell you before you definitely
accept the job."

Barker's face was strained. He was looking at Connington.
His head snapped round in Hawks' direction and he growled: "I said I'd do
the damned job!"

Claire reached out and took hold of his hand, pulling him
down beside her. She thrust herself forward to kiss the underside of Barker's
jaw. "That's the ol' fight, Hardrock." She began nibbling the skin,
with its faint stubble of beard, gradually inching her mouth down his throat,
leaving a row of regularly-spaced marks; wet, round, red parentheses of her
lipstick, enclosing the sharper, pinker blotches where her incisors had worried
his flesh.

"Don't the three of you
care?"
Connington
blurted, his head jerking back and forth. "Didn't you
hear?"

"Tell me something, Connington," Hawks said.
"Did you make your little speech so we'd stop now? Or could anything make
us stop, now things are in motion the way you hoped?"

"Not
hoped," Connington said. "Planned.
Knew I'd find a man like you and a spot for Al someday. Today's the day. You
think I'd do it, I wasn't sure?"

Hawks nodded. "All right, then," he said in a
tired voice. "I thought so. All you wanted to do was make a speech. I wish
you'd chosen another time. Are you on your way back to the plant now?"

Barker said to Connington: "I've had better men than
you threaten me. I'm here. They're not."

Claire chuckled in a silvery ladder of sound. "Isn't it
too bad, Connie? You were so sure we'd all fall down. But it's just like it
always was. You still don't know where to push."

Connington backed away incredulously, his arms spread as if
to knock their heads together. "Are you three
crazy?
Do you think I
made this stuff up out of my
head? Listen
to yourselves—even when you
tell me it's all malarkey, you have to say it each a certain way. You can't
shake loose from yourselves even for a second; you'll go where your feet take
you, no matter what—and you're
laughing
at me? You're laughin' at
me?"

He lurched around suddenly. "Go to hell, all of
you!" he cried. "G'wan!" He began to run clumsily across the
grass to his car.

Hawks looked after him. "He's not fit to drive
back."

Barker grimaced. "He won't. He'll cry himself to sleep
in the car. Then in a few hours he'll come in the house, looking for Claire's
comfort." He looked down at Claire with a jerk of his head that broke the
chain of nibbles. "Isn't that right? Doesn't he always do that?"

Claire's lips pinched together. "I can't help what he
does."

"Barker," Hawks said, "I want to tell you
what you're going to have to face."

"Tell me when I get there!" Barker snapped.
"I'm not going to back out now."

Claire said: "Maybe that's what he wants you to say,
Al? Putting it that way?" She smiled up toward Hawks. "Who says
Connington's the only schemer?"

"What's the simplest way for me to get back to
town?" Hawks said.

"I'll drive you," Barker said coldly. His eyes
locked on Hawks. "If you want to try it."

Claire murmured a chuckle and suddenly rubbed her cheek down
the length of Barker's thigh. She stared up at Hawks through wide, pleasurably
moist eyes, her upstretched arms curled around Barker's waist. "Isn't he
grand?" she said huskily to Hawks. "Isn't he a man?"

Hawks waited at the head of the flagstone steps as Barker
trotted stiffly down to the garage apron and flung up the overhead doors with a
crash. Claire said murmurously behind him: "Look at him move-look at him
do things—he's like a wonderful machine out of gut and hickory wood! There
aren't any other men like him, Ed—nobody's as much of a man as he is!"
Hawks' nostrils widened.

An engine came to waspish life in the garage, and then a
short, broad, almost square-framed sports car came out in a glower of sound.
Hawks walked around, stepped over the doorless flank of the car and cramped
himself into the passenger side. He settled his lower back into the unpadded
metal seat, which was slewed around to leave more room for the driver.

Claire stood watching, her eyes ashine. Connington, slumped
over the wheel of his Cadillac, facing them at an angle, lifted his swollen
face and contorted his lips in a sad reflex.

"Ready?" Barker shouted, running up the engine and
edging his right foot away from the center of the brake pedal until only the
bead of his cheap shower slipper's cardboard sole was holding it down.
"Not frightened, are you?" He stared piercingly into Hawks' face.

Hawks reached over and pulled out the ignition key. "I
see," he said quietly.

Barker's hand flashed out and crushed his wrist. "I'm
not Cunning-ton and that's no bottle—hand over those keys." He was shaking
violently.

Hawks relaxed his fingers until the keys barely kept from
falling. He put out his other arm and blocked Barker's awkward, left-handed
reach for them. "Use the hand that's holding my wrist," he said.

Barker slowly took the keys. Hawks climbed out of the car.

"How are you going to get back to the city?"
Claire asked as he walked past the steps.

Hawks said: "I walked long distances when I was a boy.
But not to prove my physical endurance."

Claire licked her lips. "No one manages you worth a
damn, do they?" she said.

Hawks paced steadily toward the sloped driveway.

He had barely set foot on the downslope when Barker shouted
something strained and unintelligible behind him, and the car sprang into life
again and hurtled by him. Barker stared intently out over the short hood, and
threw the car into a broadslide. Spuming up dust and gravel, engine roaring,
clutch in, rear wheels slack, it skidded down sidewards, its nose toward the
cliff wall. The instant its left front fender had cleared the angle of the
cliff, Barker banged the clutch up. The right side hovered over the edge of the
cut for an instant. Then the rear wheels bit and the car shot down the first
angle of the drive, out of sight. There was an instant scream of brakes and a
great, coughing scuff of tires.

Hawks came around the angle of the drive, walking steadily
through the turbulent, knee-high swale of opaque dust that gradually settled
into two smoking furrows leading down from the two broad swatches that scarred
the bend of the dogleg. Barker was staring out to sea, sitting with his hands
clenched over the top of the steering wheel. As Hawks came up parallel to him,
Barker said: "That's the fastest I've ever done it."

Hawks turned into the access road and began walking down
over the wooden bridge.

"Are you going to walk all the way back into
town?" Barker bawled out hoarsely.

Hawks turned around. He came back. He stood with his hands
on the edge of the passenger's side and looked down at Barker. "I'll
expect you at the main gate tomorrow at nine in the morning, sharp."

"What makes you think I'll be there? What makes you
think I'll take orders from a man who won't do what I would?" Barker's
eyes were sparkling with frustration. "What's the matter with you?"

"I'm one kind of man. You're another."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Barker began
beating one palm against the steering wheel. What began as a gentle insistent
nudge became a mechanical hammering. "I can't
understand
you!"

"You're a suicide," Hawks said. "I'm a
murderer." Hawks turned to go. "I'm going to have to kill you over
and over again, in various unbelievable ways. I can only hope that you will,
indeed, bring as much love to it as you think. Nine sharp in the morning,
Barker. Give my name at the gate. I'll have your pass and clearance slip."

He walked away.

Barker muttered: "Yeah." He rose up in his seat
and shouted down the road: "He was right, you know it? He was right! We're
a
great
pair!"

Hawks came, eventually, to the general store which marked
the join of the sand road and the highway. He was carrying his suit coat over
his arm, and his shirt, which he had opened at the throat, was wet and sticking
to his gaunt body.