Our Children's Children (8 page)

“You stay right here,” said Senator Andrew Oakes. “You go sit behind the wheel. Time comes when I can't climb stairs, I'll go back home and let some young man have my seat. But not right yet,” he said, wheezing a little, “not right now. Maybe in another year or two. Maybe not. Depends on how I feel.”

He stumped toward the stairs, clomping his cane with weighty precision upon the driveway. He mounted the first step and stood there for a moment before attempting the next one. As he mounted each step, he looked to either side of him, glaring into the landscape, as if daring someone to remark upon his progress. Which was quite unnecessary, since there was no one there—except the driver, who had gone back to sit behind the wheel, studiously not watching the old man's progress up the stairs.

The door came open when he was crossing the pillared portico.

“I am glad to see you, Senator,” said Grant Wellington, “but there was no need to make the trip. I could have come to your apartment.”

The Senator stopped, planting himself sturdily before his host. “Nice day for a drive,” he said, “and you said you would be alone.”

Wellington nodded. “Family in New England and the servants' day off. We'll be quite alone.”

“Good,” said the Senator. “My place you never can be sure. People in and out. Phones ringing all the time. This is better.”

He stumped into the entry. “To your right,” said Wellington, closing the door.

The old man went into the study, shuffled across the carpeting, dropped into a huge, upholstered chair to one side of the fireplace. He laid his cane carefully on the floor beside him, looked around at the book-lined shelves, the huge executive-type desk, the comfortable furniture, the paintings on the wall.

“You have got it good, Grant,” he said. “I sometimes worry about that. Maybe you have it too good.”

“Meaning I won't fight. Will be afraid to dirty my hands.”

“Something like that, Grant. But I tell myself I'm wrong. Did plenty of fighting in your day. Out in the business world.” He gestured at the paintings. “Always suspicious of a man who owns a Renoir.”

“How about a drink, Senator?”

“Late enough in the afternoon,” said the Senator judiciously, “for a splash of bourbon. Great drink, bourbon. American. Has character. I remember you drink scotch.”

“With you,” said Wellington, “I drink bourbon.”

“You been listening to what is happening?”

“Saw some of it on TV.”

“Man could stub his toe,” said the Senator, “on a thing like that. He could stub his toe real bad.”

“You mean Henderson.”

“I mean everybody. Easy thing to do.”

Wellington brought the Senator his drink, went back to the bar to pour his own. The Senator settled more deeply into the chair, fondling the glass. He took a drink, puffed out his cheeks in appreciation. “For a scotch man,” he said, “you carry a good brand.”

“I took my cue from you,” said Wellington, coming back and sitting on a sofa.

“I imagine the man at 1600,” said the Senator, “has a lot on his mind. Maybe more than he can handle. Terrible batch of decisions to be made. Yes, sir, a lot of them.”

“I don't envy him,” said Wellington.

“Most terrible thing that can happen to a man,” said the Senator. “With election coming up next year. He'll have that on his mind and it won't help him any. Trouble is he has to say something, has to do something. Nobody else has to, but he has to.”

“If you are trying to say that I should say nothing or do nothing, you are succeeding very well,” said Wellington. “Never try to be subtle, Senator. You're not very good at it.”

“Well, I don't know,” said the Senator. “You can't come straight out and tell a man to keep his mouth shut.”

“If these people are really from the future.…”

“Oh, they're from the future, all right. Where else could they come from?”

“Then you can't go wrong on them,” said Wellington. “They are our descendants. What they are doing is like a bunch of kids running home after they got hurt.”

“Well, now, I don't know,” said the Senator, “although that's not exactly what I meant. It's not the people; it is old Sam up there in the White House. He's the one who's got to do something about it and he's bound to make mistakes and we got to watch careful to evaluate those mistakes of his. We can jump on some of them and some of them we can't. There may be even a few things he does that we have to go along with; we can't be too unreasonable. But the thing right now is not to commit ourselves. You know and I know there are a lot of people want that nomination next summer to run against old Sam, and I mean, if I can imagine it, that you are the one who gets it. Some of the other boys will think they see some opportunities in what the man up there does and they'll get anxious and start shooting off their mouths and I tell you, Grant, that the people won't remember who was first, but the one who happens to be right.”

“Of course, I appreciate your concern,” said Wellington, “but it happens that you made this trip for nothing. I had no intention whatever of taking a position. I'm not sure right now there is a position one can take.”

The Senator held out his empty glass. “If you don't mind,” he said, “another little splash.”

Wellington poured another little splash, and the Senator settled back again.

“That matter of a position,” he said, “is something that is going to require some long and prayerful thought. It has not become apparent yet, but there will be positions practically begging to be taken and a man must look them over good and select them very carefully. What you say about these folks being our descendants is all well and good. You being a man whose family history is long and proud would think that way, of course. But you got to remember that there are a lot of people with little family history and not proud of what they have, and these people, who make up the greatest part of the good old U.S.A., are not going to give a damn about them being their descendants. Maybe them being our descendants will make it all the worse. There are a lot of families these days that are having lots of trouble with their own immediate descendants.

“There are several millions of these people already through the tunnels and they still are pouring through and while we can hold up our hands in pious horror and ask how we are going to take care of them, the real gut reaction will come when those extra millions begin to have an effect on the economy. Food may suddenly get scarce and other things as well and prices will go up and there'll be a housing problem and a labor problem and there won't be goods enough to go around and while all this now is just economic talk, in a little while it will cease to be just economic talk and every man and woman in this fair land of ours will feel the impact of it and that's when there's hell to pay. And that's the time when a man like you must pick out his position and study all the angles before he settles on it.”

“Good God,” said Wellington, “this thing is happening out there—our own people of the future fleeing back to us—and here we sit, the two of us, and trying to figure out a good, safe political position.…”

“Politics,” said the Senator, “is a very complicated and a most practical business. You've got to be hardheaded about it. You can't ever afford to get emotional about it. That's the first thing that you must remember—don't ever get emotional about anything at all. Oh, it's all right to appear to be emotional. Sometimes that has a certain appeal for the electorate. But before you can afford to get emotional you must have everything all figured out ahead of time. You may be emotional for effect, but never because you feel that way.”

“It's not too attractive the way you put it, Senator. It leaves one with a slightly dirty taste.”

“Sure, I know,” said the Senator. “I know about that dirty taste myself. You just shut your mind to it, is all. It's all right, of course, to be a great statesman and a humanitarian, but before you get to be a statesman you have to be a dirty politician. You have to get elected first. And you never get elected without feeling just a little dirty.”

He placed the glass on the table beside his chair, fumbled for his cane and found it, heaved himself erect.

“Now, you mind,” he said, “before you go saying anything, you just check with me. I been through all this before, many times before. I guess you could say I have developed a political instinct for the jugular and I am seldom wrong. Up there on the Hill we hear things. There are some real good pipelines. I'll know when there's anything about to happen, so we'll have time to study it.”

19

The press conference had gone well. Arrangements had been made for the President's TV appearance. The clock on the wall ticked over to 6 P.M. The teletypes went on clacking softly to themselves.

Wilson said to Judy, “You'd better call it a day. It's time to close up shop.”

“How about yourself?”

“I'll hang on for a while. Take my car. I'll call a cab and pick it up at your place.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out the keys and tossed them to her.

“When you get there,” Judy said, “come up for a drink. I'll be up and waiting.”

“It may be late.”

“If it's too late, why bother going home? You left your toothbrush last time.”

“Pajamas,” he said.

“When did you ever need pajamas?”

He grinned at her lazily. “OK,” he said. “Toothbrush, no pajamas.”

“Maybe,” said Judy, “it'll make up for this afternoon.”

“What this afternoon?”

“I told you, remember. What I planned to do.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, oh, that. I've never done it that way.”

“You're a shameless child. Now, run along.”

“The kitchen will be sending coffee and sandwiches to the press lounge. Ask them nice and they'll throw a crust to you.”

He sat and watched her go. She walked surely, but with a daintiness that always intrigued and puzzled him, as if she were a sprite who was consciously trying to make an earth creature of herself.

He shuffled the loose papers on the desk into a pile and stacked them to one side.

He sat quietly once that was done and listened to the strange mutterings of the place. Somewhere, far off, a phone rang. There was the distant sound of someone walking. Out in the lounge someone was typing and against the wall the wire machines went on with their clacking.

It was all insane, he told himself. The entire business was stark, staring crazy. No one in their right mind would believe a word of it. Time tunnels and aliens out of space were the sort of junk the high school crowd watched on television. Could it all, he wondered, be a matter of delusion, of mass hysteria? When the sun rose tomorrow, would it all be gone and the world back on the old familiar footing?

He shoved back the chair and got up. Judy's deserted console had a couple of lights flashing and he let them flicker. He went into the corridor and down it to the outer door. Out in the garden the heat of the summer day was cooling off, and long shadows thrown by the trees stretched across the lawn. The flower beds lay in all their glory—roses, heliotrope, geraniums, nicotiana, columbines and daisies. He stood, looking across the park to where the Washington Monument reared its classic whiteness.

Behind him he heard a footstep and swung around. A woman stood just a little distance off, dressed in a white robe that came down to her sandaled feet.

“Miss Gale,” he said, a little startled. “What a pleasant surprise.”

“I hope,” she said, “I have done nothing wrong. No one stopped me. Is it all right to be here?”

“Certainly. As a guest.…”

“I had to see the garden. I had read so much of it.”

“You have never been here, then?”

She hesitated. “Yes, I have. But it was not the same. It was nothing like this.”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose that things do change.”

“Yes,” she said, “they do.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“No, I guess not.” She hesitated again. “I see you don't understand. I can't imagine there is any reason why I shouldn't tell you.”

“Tell me what? Something about this place?”

“It's this,” she said. “Up in my time, up five hundred years ahead, there isn't any garden. There isn't any White House.”

He stared at her.

“See,” she said, “you don't believe it. You won't believe me. We have no nations there—we just have one big nation, although that's not exactly right. There aren't any nations and there isn't any White House. A few ragged, broken walls is all, a piece of rusted fence sticking from the ground that you stub your toe upon. There isn't any park and there aren't any flower beds. Now can you understand? Can you know what all this means to me?”

“But how? When?”

“Not right away,” she said. “Not for a century or more. And now it may never happen. You're on a different time track now.”

She stood there, a thin slip of a girl, in her chaste white robe, belted at the waist, talking of different time tracks and of a future when there would be no White House. He shook his head, bewildered. “How much do you understand?” he asked. “Of this time track business? I know your father mentioned it, but there was so much else.…”

“There are equations that you have to know to understand it all,” she said. “There are, I suppose, only a few men who really understand it. But basically it's quite simple. It's a cause-and-effect situation and once you change the cause or, more likely, many causes, as we must have done in coming here.…”

He made a motion of futility with his hand. “I still can't believe it,” he said. “Not just the time track, but all the rest of it. I woke up this morning and I was going on a picnic. You know what a picnic is?”