A For Anything

4

Dick Jones opened his eyes lazily to a green-and-gold morning, knowing as he awakened that there was something special about this day. Comfortably asprawl, giving himself to the cool breeze as sensuously as a cat, he wondered what it might be: a hunt today? visitors? or a trip somewhere?

Then he remembered, and sat up suddenly. This was the day he was leaving Buckhill to go to Eagles.

He stretched and swung himself out of the big circular bed, lithe, tanned, and big for his sixteen years. His body was proportioned like a man's, broad in the shoulders and chest, but all his muscles were buried under a layer of boyish fat There was a subtly unfinished look about him, a bluntness.

He padded across the silken carpet and into the bathroom, toes splaying on the cold marble. Taking a deep breath and letting it out, he dived into the pool. Goldfish scattered as he plunged down into the center; the tiles underwater were a blurred sea-green, lit by yellow disks along the walls. He turned upward, and broke surface. Two strokes brought him to shallow water, and he rolled over on his back, awash to the chest, dripping and blowing. He looked around, saw no one, and shouted, "Sam!"

The body-slob tumbled in, half asleep, carrying a canister and brush. He was a tall, pasty-skinned boy, a year older than Dick; they had grown up together. Without speaking he began to soap his master and work up a lather. He rubbed emollients into Dick's hair and scalp, shaved him with a safety razor, finally brought the hose over and rinsed him down with a cold spray. Sam's heavy underlip never stayed closed, and he had big ears that stuck out. Between his shoulderblades was a design in purple ink, a stag leaping, with the word "BUCKHILL" and a series of numbers under it, enclosed by purple leaves. Still sleepily silent, he wrapped a towel around his master and began to chafe him dry.

"Sam, this is my last day at Buckhill," Dick said.

"Yes, Misser Dick. You going away by Colorado tomorrow."

"I'll be away four years. I'll be over twenty when I come back."

"Dess right. You be twenty. Dess right, Misser Dick."

Dick snorted, feeling a vague sense of outrage. All right, the boy was only a slob -- or "slave"; if you wanted to please Dad and use the old term -- but even slobs were supposed to have some feelings. In magazines and teledramas they were always bawling when they thought about their young masters going away; so what was the matter with Sam?

Then he discovered he was hungry, and forgot the matter. "I'll have ham and eggs," he said, taking the towel himself. "Eggs over, and a plate of wheat cakes, Sam -- and milk, and coffee. Tell them to hurry up, I'm starving to death."

While the slob phoned his order down to the kitchen, Dick got fresh clothing from the wardrobe and began dressing himself. In passing he turned on the wall screen: it was tuned to KING-TV in Buffalo Keep, and Dick watched the cavorting musicians with half an eye, nodding his head to the rhythm. He liked military music; it was the only kind he understood.

Sam had come back from the phone and was talking in his ear; the music drowned him out. "What?" said Dick irritably. "Turn that thing down."

Sam reached over and found the right button on the bedside table console; the music faded to a hoarse umpah, umpah. "Cook says," he repeated, "is too busy by banquet for make you breakfas'. So you got to send me down by Stores for dupe one, or either -- "

"Damn it," said Dick angrily, and paused to suck in his stomach while he zipped up the tight blue-and-saffron trousers. That wasn't just the way the suit was cut; he was outgrowing his measurements again, "Why does everything have to go to pieces around here, every time there's some damn banquet?"

"Misser?"

"Never mind. Hurry up and get out of here, and I'll go myself."

In the corridor, two slobs in light overalls were taking down the wall panels one at a time and putting up new ones, identical except that the old ones were turning blue-green with corrosion, and these were shining new bronze, fresh from the Gismo. Dick recognized the figures of the bas-reliefs as old friends; they had been in the corridor all his life, slowly changing from bright to dull in an eternal rhythm. He paused to look at a familiar hand clutching a rifle stock, and at the familiar hard-set face above it, both glittering raw, bright metal -- newly reborn.

Down below, the Big Hall was deserted except for a common house slob busily scrubbing, his bare arms gleaming with sweat. The rows of tables were all bare under the lights; the covers had not yet been laid.

It was twenty-five after seven by the big electric clock. Dick's parents would still be lying abed; so would his sister Constance, who had been turning into a sluggard lately. His brothers Adam, Felix and Edward might be up, but there was no telling where. Unfeeling brats, they were probably off riding or boating somewhere by themselves, not caring whether he might want to see them on his last morning.

All this, he realized belatedly, was at least partly before-breakfast crankiness. The duped eggs might choke him, but he needed some food in his stomach.

Stores was a cooled vault, lit by islands of fluorescents on the ceiling. In one of the pools of light there was a little crowd of slobs clustering around Possum's counter. For a while Dick couldn't even attract the old man's attention. He moved in closer, shouldering his way.

Possum's eyes were red-rimmed and irritable; with his veined beak and the sparse fuzz on his narrow head, he looked like an angry fledgling agape for worms. "Wot, wot?" he was saying. "One crissal cennerpiece with roses and wot? Lillies of the velley ... all right. And a hunnerd wot? Balloons? Wy dint you say so? Dont all holler by same time. Wait half a minute, can't you ... seventeen sconces, I got det. Shettup! You got to wait. You got to wait. I can't do every damn ting by same time ... "

"Possum!" Dick bellowed.

The old man's face only turned more sour. He listened unwillingly, fidgeting, while Dick gave his order; he scrawled symbols on his pad, then made as if to turn to the next impatient slob.

"Now, Possum," said Dick, moving closer. Reluctantly, the old man went shuffling back along the aisle, moving in a flickering pool of cold light that followed him as he went. He stopped under the hanging sign that said "Food." Like all the rest, the tall shelves of this section were divided into pigeonholes, each one just large enough to hold one small gnarled object. There were thousands of these, shelf after shelf all the way back into the big room. To look at them, they might have been oddly shaped pebbles, or dried-up bits of root.

Possum's gnarled forefinger rasped down the line of pigeonholes, stopped at one, flicked out the hard little lump into his palm. Grumbling half-audibly, he went into the Gismo Room. The massive door swung to behind him.

Dick fidgeted. The lump, he knew, was something called an "arrested prototype," or a "prote" for short. More to the point, it was his breakfast in unrecognizable miniature -- cooked perhaps twenty years ago and duped on the Gismo, but incompletely. The process had been stopped in the middle, so that what came out was not a plate of eggs and bacon, rapidly cooling, but a gnarled lump of quasi-matter that could be stored in a pigeonhole, and would keep forever. When Possum put it back on the primary side of the Gismo, and removed the inhibitor, an exact copy, not of the prote but of the original breakfast, would appear at the other terminal.

To Dick, the process was boringly familiar. If asked, he would have agreed half-heartedly that the Gismo was a marvel; actually, he took it for granted, like TV, or copters. He knew, too, that he owed his own existence and that of the world around him to the anonymous inventor of the Gismo, some seventy-odd years ago; but that was history. Just now he was more interested in finding out whether the prote Possum had chosen was the right one, or -more likely -- a slipshod approximation.

Here came the old man plodding in his circle of light. There was a steaming platter on his little cart. He paused to deposit the prote in its niche; then in a few moments he was lifting the platter onto the counter. Eggs, bacon, toast, milk, coffee. The golden yolks trembled, ready to spill.

Dick choked back a shout of pure exasperation. "Possum, I said eggs over ... Oh, hell, what's the use?" He caught the nearest slob's eye, motioned him to pick up the platter, and followed gloomily to one of the eating nooks that lined the near wall.

The day was quite definitely spoiled. There was nothing wrong nutritionally or in the taste of a duped meal, of course; it was just the principle of the thing. Only slobs, generally speaking, ate duped food; people had specially cooked meals. True, most of the ingredients were duped to begin with, so the distinction was not crucial; but it was there.

He ate hungrily but without satisfaction, pushed the remnants of the yellow-smeared whites around on his plate, crunched off another bite of toast, then gave up and threw the plate, silverware and all, into the waste chute.

All the same, having eaten made a difference. Feeling gloomy but less irritable, he went out, down the corridor past the kitchens with their tantalizing odor of roast fowl and pastry, and emerged from the hillside exit. The air was fresh and cool, flower-scented, with a tang of new-mown grass. The clear chunk, pause, chunk of an axe came from somewhere below. In spite of himself, Dick breathed joyfully deep. His feet were light on the path as he turned downhill.

Ten yards or so down, he paused to look back.

Looming over him in the cool sunlight, Buckhill was gray and knobby and huge. It looked as if the mineral kingdom had tried to create a behemoth of its own, there on the hillside, and had half succeeded. The unfinished monster slept, waiting for the second spasm of effort that would give it life.

The old inn, a C-shaped mass of fieldstone, part of it vaguely Alpine, part vaguely Spanish, had been built as a tourist hotel under the democracy, in those days when the Poconos had swarmed with vacationers from the kennels of New York and Philadelphia. The first Man of Buckhill had added the fortifications and the three hideous stone sentry towers. The second Man, and the first Jones (a nephew of the famous Nathan MacDonald, whose portrait hung in the Long Corridor), had built the landing field, and a lot of underground shelters and gun emplacements; but the third Man -- Dick's Great-Uncle John -- had only added a few tennis and squash courts and things of that kind. And except for upkeep and minor landscaping, Dick's father, the fourth Man, had done almost nothing.

That was all right with Dick. Buckhill was perfect as it was -- he would not change a stone of it when he was the Man. Let even the ugly towers stand in their places; let Dunleavy trundle out the same duped shrubs and flowers for transplanting, each in its turn, forever and ever. That, it seemed to Dick, was the way life should go.

But he was sixteen, and not yet the Man; and he had to go off to Colorado for four years.

Dick's, grandfather, as it happened, had taken and held Buckhill in the first place with the help of the MacDonald family, who were collateral ancestors of the present Boss in Colorado. As a consequence, Buckhill was still considered the leading house of the whole eastern seaboard above Charleston Manor, and Buckhill's heir automatically became a brigade officer in the Boss's army, to serve a four-year hitch at Eagles in Colorado. It was an honor, he was looking forward to it, and he couldn't get out of it even if he wanted to; so that was that.

Shadow closed over his head like water as he walked down into the gorge. The vines and mosses that covered the bank on his left were dripping; the air was full of mustiness. Just before the first bend, he came upon two garden slobs grubbing out a young maple that had fallen across the trail. The earth under the exposed roots was rich and moist; the fresh wood chips had a sharp tang of their own. The two slobs leaned silently on their axes and waited; in the dimness, their eyes gleamed bluish-white. Dick clambered over the fallen trunk and went on.

Farther down, the air was as still as if it had been poured in years ago, and left to settle. Passing, Dick reached out to the bank and idly brushed his hand over a fleshy-spined mat of club mosses, three species of them growing together within arm's reach. He had learned their names, painlessly, on many a walk down this trail with Padgett the tutor.

There was botany for you; yes, and here was petrology a little farther on, where the pages of the great stone book lay open: limestone, slate, red sandstone, marl.

Botany, ecology, forestry ... Dick paused beneath the slanting ten-foot bole of the William Penn Hemlock. After a moment he climbed the little slope to stand above it, and put his arms around the rough scaly bark. Looking up, he saw the enormous trunk swooping away into distance, so tilted and bare that it made him queasy to follow it: the tree seemed to be tilting not up, but everlastingly downward into a bottomless sea of green.

He stepped away again, feeling small and apologetic, as he always did after touching the big tree. "Without permission" was the phrase that occurred to him: but of course that was ridiculous. He turned his back on it (for the last time?) and went downward again.

He had been listening for the sound of the water, and now he heard it. It grew stronger as he went down the zigzag stairway, his footsteps hollow on the boards. The upper falls, swollen by spring rains, made a thunderous white torrent, dropping short and heavy into the upper pool. The spray filled the air, almost hiding the carved-out niche in the rock wall opposite, on whose cold, slippery floor he and Adam had crouched so often, playing Crusoe, or Captain Nemo, or ...

He followed the stream down past the dark middle pool and out into the glen. Even here the sunlight had not yet reached, but there was a diffuse glow from above, like a winter dawn. The water was as clear as melting ice, and almost as cold in the lower pool and the stream, inch-deep over the smooth red stones with their startling dividing lines of green algae. He crossed the footbridge and continued down the other side, relishing the padded silence that closed in on him as he grew farther away from the nearest human soul.

This was the heart of Buckhill, somehow. All the fields above were noisy with birds at this moment -- jays, grackles, crows, cardinals -- but down here there was not a sound; even the falls were muffled out of hearing. This was the quiet, secret place around which all the rest turned. And he was saying his good-bye to it.

When he at last got up from the weedy bank, he was aware that he had stayed longer than he meant to. He couldn't tell how much longer; tune seemed to run at a different rate in the glen. Or, rather, it seemed not to run at all, until you suddenly awoke with a lurch to find that your muscles ached and your stomach felt empty.

That reminded him: there wouldn't be any lunch, on account of the banquet. He crossed the lower footbridge and toiled up the slope, quartering back to the house by way of the bridle path. Sure enough, the sun was high; in another fifteen minutes it would be flooding the glen. It was getting hot, top; he was flushed and sweating by the time he reached the kitchens.

Inside, it was hotter still; a cook's inferno of sweat-dripping scarlet noses, spattered aprons, curses, banging plates and scullions underfoot. The breathless air was thick with the smells of duck, goose, pheasant, capon, squab; of venison, beef pie, whole suckling pig, breast of lamb; of steamed oysters, clams, giant prawns, lobsters, soft-shell crabs; of cod, albacore, flounder, mackerel, swordfish, salmon; of compotes and savories, sweet-and-sours, cheeses, puddings; of breads, rolls, biscuits, lady fingers, pies, cakes little and big. Greasy kitchen boys with stuffed eyes were hurrying everywhere; oven doors were banging, dishes clattering, men at the edge of their sanity were shouting from raw throats. A steel tray went ringing across the floor with a tinkle of broken crockery behind it; there was a shriek from the smallest kitchen boy and a torrent of abuse from the cooks. Dick seized the moment to slip around behind a long table loaded with floral centerpieces (all smelling of hot grease), to the counter where the cut cheeses stood, surrounded by tiny genteel wedges. Dick cut himself a more substantial chunk, grasped a pitcher of milk with the other hand, and escaped.

That the cheese was duped, like the milk, mattered to him not at all; he had stolen his meal from the kitchen like a person, instead of asking Possum for it like a slob. He ate under an arbor beside the bowling green, dropped the remains under a bush, and strolled down the hill past the pavilion and the tennis courts. Every yard of the grounds was thick with memories; the soil, the weeds in odd corners, the very tufts of grass were the same year after year. Everything was known and familiar, sight, sound and smell. He paused at the edge of the exercise ground, where, little Blashfield the armorer was shouting at his awkward squad, "Hup! Two! Dree! Faw! By de right flank, hup! you donkeys, hup!" Sunlight glittered on the stocks of the dummy rifles; the green-striped legs rose, fell.

Here was Artcraft Row, heat waves rising from the potters' kilns as usual, an intermittent tapping from the low, cool sheds where the cobblers and carvers worked. A mongrel yawned in the dust, scratching its ear. There was a clang! tink, clang! tink from the smithy, that fell pleasantly into silence. High in the blasted oak over the carpentry shops, a catbird began to sing. Full-hearted, Dick passed on toward the stables.

The exercise boys were taking out the Arabs and thoroughbreds, gray coat and brown, proud Assyrian heads tugging at the bridles. Dick watched them with a connoisseur's pleasure for a while, then went on down the row to where his own favorite, Gypsy Fiddler the Morgan was stalled. The gelding had just had his morning rundown and his coat gleamed like silk. His head came up when he saw Dick; he whinnied, and stretched his neck over the stall door. Gyp was a three-year-old, wide-chested, short and compact, the perfect saddle horse for broken country, in Dick's view. One of the stable boys came up. "Ride him dis mornen, misser?" Dick waved him aside and saddled the gelding himself.

They took the easy upland trail past the meadows and the blossoming apple orchards. Lulled by the mild air and the motion, Dick fell into a reverie of himself in a gaudy uniform, feather-helmeted, leading a troop of horse against some vaguely imagined enemy.

But four years ...

Why, four years ago, he had been twelve, a mere tadpole.

He had broken his leg on the ice, learned to dive from the high board, been praised by Blashfield for his small-arms shooting, grown about nine inches, started to shave, killed his first buck -- all that arid innumerable other things, in four years.

He imagined himself coming home, tall and fierce, thinner in the cheeks and heavier in the shoulders, with a look in his eye of things unspeakable. His mother met him at the door. She had been crying. "Oh, Richard! Your father has ... "

He came out of it with a start. The gelding had carried him all the way up the trail to Skytop; the sky was a wide blue bowl around him, and far off to northward he saw a glint of light: It was a dyne or copter, lowering. After a moment he saw another, and then a third. The guests were beginning to arrive.