A War of Shadows

NINE

He’d put out the word, of course, but he never expected anything to come of it. That’s what made the whole thing, the final agreement to help ferret out the perpetrators of the Wilderness Organism, so easy.

If these people were really the old-line radicals, the last person they’d trust on something like this would be Sam Cornish, the man who’d refused to take part in the airplane blowup, the man who’d run out on his “brothers and sisters” and hid out in a Vermont commune for years, plagued by terrible dreams.

It was a compromise his conscience could accept. Say “yes” and do what they wanted, knowing nothing would happen.

About four days after the FBI man had approached him, he received a message at the commune. It came to his cover name, by mailgram, and was very simple.

If you are seriously interested in alternate employment, we will be interviewing applicants from your region in Boston on April 4. It gave an address in that city not really so far away, a time, and was signed The Woodbine Laboratories, Ltd.

He just stood there staring at the thing for several minutes. He knew what it was, who it had to be from, what it had to be about.

Well, here it is, Sam, he said to himself not once but over and over again. He was sweating although it wasn’t a warm day, and shaking slightly.

He walked out in his beloved woods and stared at the mountains for the rest of the afternoon. He wanted to think it out, but he couldn’t seem to think at all. He felt drained, empty somehow, a dreamless sleepwalker.

He’d have to go, he knew. Deep down, he’d given his word—and the pictures of those stricken innocents in the towns would join those screamers in the airplane if he did not try. He knew it, knew also that the damned all-knowing smugly self-confident Federal Bureau of Investigation had known as well, known even before he would admit it to himself.

He was sick, upset, shaking, and felt more alone yet more of a pawn to others’ desires than ever in his whole life. He didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all.

But he would go, damn their eyes.

Curiously, that last night at the commune he didn’t dream at all.

Boston had changed radically since the Cambridge Disaster had swept the metropolitan area as the Black Plague had swept London centuries earlier, striking down more than eighty percent of the area’s population. It was no longer a huge port, business and commercial center—people were still reluctant to return, despite the vaccines—but it retained its old character, its odd mixture of old and new buildings, and some commerce was returning, for it was still the most convenient harbor for the New England region.

And many people, those who never thought of the Death any more, actually preferred it as it was—a rustic city center of about 50,000 people, uncrowded, uncluttered, many of the old neighborhoods burned to the ground during the panic now replaced with trees and grass, giving it almost a garden air in the April sunlight.

He had a little time, and briefly toured some of the historic structures from the nation’s founding that had survived everything thrown at them. It was almost as if he were trying to kindle inside himself some sort of feeling that would make the coming ordeal a matter of belief rather than blackmail.

He could sympathize with those early revolutionaries. Sam Adams, the fiery rabble-rouser who’d moved mobs to stone the British. His nasty yet principled cousin, John, who took time out from figuring how to overthrow the British to defend the soldiers accused of shooting citizens in the Boston Massacre—and won.

Somehow those two men meant something, he thought. Sam—he stirred the crowds to mob violence in that very Boston Massacre, yet Sam wasn’t there to get shot, nor had he ever had any clear idea of what the revolution was about. Sam, his cousin once remarked, just loved overthrowing governments.

Who were Sam Adams’ inheritors? Robespierre, the aristocratic lawyer who executed tens of thousands in the French Revolution including his own best friends, yet could not rule or control the revolution he wrought. Another man better suited to overthrowing than governing.

Karl Marx, the studious scholar and social scientist, who labored for a proletariat against the intelligentsia when he himself was one of the latter, and who left his wife and eleven children in the slums of London to talk of the coming revolution with international intelligentsia at the British Museum. Friedrich Engels, a millionaire who always lived like one and never even helped out his friend Marx with the rent. Lenin, the upper middle class student who’d never done a day’s real labor in his life. Mao the librarian, and Stalin the former monk.

What a collection. Was any great popular revolutionary a member of the masses, the proletariat for whom he claimed to labor? Could any of them swing an axe and build a stable in the Vermont forests?

And yet they all got to where they were through the blood of those masses. Sam Adams wasn’t at the Boston Massacre he precipitated, but the blood of honest working people was. Crispus Attucks fell, shot dead, a mulatto sailor between ships, the first of them.

Is this, really, what revolutionaries are like? Sam Cornish wondered. Didn’t Joseph Conrad write derisively that the revolutionaries who want to smash their way to universal happiness will simply add to the sum total of human misery?

But, he told himself, if all this is true, then everything else is a lie. Man’s dreams were but a ghastly Midas Touch, turning everything they reached to instant putrefaction.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Jefferson, the aristocratic slave owner wrote.

Why did the beautiful spring day seem so dark and ugly now? Why did the bright green grasses springing from early rains and warmer, longer days seem suddenly like evil things, grasping and clawing their way to the surface? Why did the charming old buildings now seem so shabby and sinister?

He walked across the ancient Boston Common, pausing in the center of it to see the great, black sculptural arches of the artist Sean Spacher, with the eerie gargoyle-like creatures at the base and the eternal flame framed by the ugly yet majestic curving beams.

He paused to read the plaque.

Erected by the People of the United States as a continuing memorial to man’s folly, as a remembrance for those lost who were so dear and as a commitment that they shall be the last to die in such a manner.

Almost a million people, dead of a simple bacteria created just across the Charles River by eager scientists when one tiny little bacterium escaped somehow to the outside world.

… A commitment that they shall be the last to die in such a manner.

California… North Dakota… Maine… Nebraska… Maryland…

Carried there not by a mistake, but by Sam Adams’ grandchildren, none of whom had ever worked, and none of whom that he could ever remember had a clear idea of what the revolution was all about.

Whatever happened to Sam Adams after the Americans won that revolution, anyway? Or Thomas Paine? Or Patrick Henry?

That’s right. Paine left here and went to France to do it all again.

He glanced at his watch and quickened his pace. This wasn’t the time to be thinking such thoughts—or was it?

The building, a middle-aged office building with some character to its architecture, looked innocent enough. He walked in and checked the directory. A good deal of the building was vacant, that was obvious. Not a real business center around here.

Woodbine Laboratories was easy to spot. It was one of only eleven tenants.

He took the elevator to the ninth floor and stepped out. It was an oddly empty and deserted place, yet it had the smell of new paint. Most of the doors were closed and dark; but there was one with a light on that said Woodbine Laboratories Ltd. on the door, and he hesitated a second, considering knocking, then reached for the handle.

Inside was a small, comfortable office with a large switchboard staffed by four middle-aged women. It was the last thing he expected. He looked around, trying to spot any other offices or branching corridors, but this seemed to be it. And none of them were paying the slightest attention to him.

He stood there a moment, feeling lost and foolish, then harrumphed a few times. Finally one of the women finished a conversation, wrote something down on a pad, and looked up at him with a smile.

“Yes?” she inquired pleasantly.

“I—ah, I’m a job applicant. I got a telegram to come here at 3:00 P.M.sharp.”

She looked puzzled. “That can’t be right. We sure don’t need anybody here and there’s nobody higher-up around, ever. We’re just the mail drop.”

He was certain she wasn’t talking about revolutionaries. “Mail drop?”

She nodded. “Sure. We take orders for mail-order beauty creams, hand lotions, and the like. You know. You must have seen the TV ads. ‘Call thisnumber now to have your Magic Creme rushed C.O.D. to your door.’ ”

He was feeling a little numb and thoroughly confused. “That’s what Woodbine Laboratories makes? Beauty creams?” was all he could say.

She nodded again. “Far as I know. Of course, I’ve never seen them. They’re actually out in California. We just call in the orders at the end of each shift.”

He turned. “I must have the wrong place,” he muttered, and touched the knob to leave.

“Wait a minute!” the woman said. “Hey! Mary! You know anything about somebody interviewing for jobs today?”

He sighed and turned. A matronly-looking woman turned from her switchboard and eyed him, nodding slightly to herself, a slight smile on her face.

“Mr. Cornish?” she asked pleasantly.

He felt suddenly tight again. “Yes,” he responded.

“The hiring isn’t done here.” She scribbled something on her order pad, tore it off, and he walked over and took it from her. “Go over there and I think you’ll find who you really want.”

He stared at her, and for a second he thought he should know her, but the feeling vanished. He smiled back at her, thanked her, and left.

They were damned clever, though, he had to admit to himself as he rode back to street level and walked outside. A hell of a way to see if it’s the right man without any problems. A hell of an information front! God! You could even pass code messages in the phoned-in orders through your own toll-free number! Who could tell?

The new address wasn’t in Boston at all, but in West Newton. He debated for a moment how to get there, then hailed a cab. There were a lot of cabs and few private vehicles in Boston these days.

The cabbie was a surly sort who didn’t talk much and looked like a balding fugitive from a bad jungle movie. They sped quickly out of the city.

Finally they pulled up at an apartment house on the outskirts of West Newton. Sam looked at the scribbled memo. “This isn’t the address,” he told the driver.

“Yes it is, Mr. Cornish,” the cabbie replied in an accent that sounded slightly Spanish.

He had to laugh. All the angles. “Tell me, what would have happened if a real cabbie had beaten you to me?” he asked.

The man shrugged. “I am a real cabbie, for the record,” he replied. “In any case, you’d have gone to the other address and someone would have directed you here.”

He laughed again and started to get out. Suddenly he heard the man yell. “Hey, man! I said I was a real cabbie!” He pointed to the meter.

Sam paid him, wondering what would have happened if he hadn’t, and walked into the apartment.

It was an old, smelly, musty place built a good thirty years before and not well maintained since housing got cheap in the Boston area. It was very quiet, too. Not a sound behind any of the doors, and no names on the doors or mailboxes. He wondered where he should go.

A door opened down the hall and a woman’s head leaned out. “Down here!” she called pleasantly. He shrugged and walked to her.

There were two other people inside, a man and a woman in addition to the woman at the door. All looked to be in their thirties or forties.

And, again, they all looked somehow familiar.

“Sit down, Sam,” the woman who’d called him said, and gestured to a chair. He sat, and she took a seat on a sofa opposite him, the other two sitting on either side of her.

“You don’t remember me, do you, Sam?” said the woman.

He shook his head. “You look vaguely familiar, I have to admit, but…”

She smiled wistfully. “We’ve all grown older, Sam. You, too. Your body sure as hell is in good shape, but your face! Man! Like all the others! Reminds me that we’re all getting old.”

He relaxed, remembering her now. Take off twenty pounds around those hips and smooth out that pitted face, put a reddish-brown pageboy wig on her thin and frazzled black hair, and you had her.

“Hello, Maureen,” he said.

She brightened. “So you do remember! Wow!” Suddenly her manner and tone softened. “I guess we’re all getting old.”

He remembered her, all right. One of the original old college crowd. The sex groupie type, he recalled. Slept around bisexually with all and sundry. She wasn’t so attractive any more.

He managed a chuckle. “But not too old, right? Back in harness after all this time.”

She was suddenly all businesslike. “Why do you want to get back, Sam?”

He thought about it. He’d thought about it all day, the answer to that question.

“I was dead, Maureen. I just had a breakdown, couldn’t take it any more. I needed out, a rest. But walking out—well, it kind of killed me. Once up there in the commune I just couldn’t bring myself to leave. I guess it was like a return to the womb, few responsibilities, no cares. I’d been living tense, expecting to be dead at any moment, for years. Then I was safe, secure—I don’t know how to explain it.”

“But why come out now, Sam?” she pressed. “Why leave the cocoon at all?”

He sighed. “I was a zombie. Oh, I didn’t admit it to myself, no, but I was. Up there I was safe, insulated—but without purpose. I just existed, Maureen. I reached that point a couple of years ago, but I had no place else to go. All of you were underground or in jail or dead, and I was still wanted by the feds. I kinda put myself in prison up there—I couldn’t get out when I wanted to.”

Maureen turned to the others one at a time, then asked the man, “Well? What do you think?”

The man shrugged. “Why not? I don’t think he’ll gum up anything, and at least we know he’s safe.”

Maureen turned to the other woman, who just shrugged and nodded. She then looked straight at Sam. “Okay, I guess that’s it. Welcome to the club.”

He smiled and started to say something, but suddenly he felt a series of tiny pricks in his arm. He whirled around, surprised, and saw two other men, both huge and muscular, grinning at him. One had a needle-gun in his hand.

He started to say something, started to protest, panic rising within him, but_, the whole world was suddenly spinning and he blacked out.