Why Do Birds

CHAPTER 27

When he told her he was at the Park Avenue this time, she said, "You're coming down in the world, aren't you?"

"No, wait till you see."

"What do you mean?"

"It's a surprise."

She walked up to the desk that evening and gave her name. The desk clerk looked at her with instant respect and called a uniformed guard, who escorted her to the elevator.

"Listen, just tell me the room number; I can find it myself, " she said.

"No, ma'am, this one is hard to find."

They got off at the fiftieth floor; he led her down the corridor, through a door marked PRIVATE, to an unmarked elevator. There were two overstuffed chairs in the elevator, with a little table between them. On the table were a cigarette box and lighter, both in rose quartz, a travertine ashtray, and a cut-crystal dish containing pink and white mints. "Up," said the guard, holding the door. He smiled and stepped out; the door closed. The elevator went up.

When the door opened, a young black man in plastic denims was standing there. "Hi! You must be Linda," he said.

"Yes, I am. Who are you?"

"I'm Rong." He put out his hand. "Come on in, we're waiting for you."

"You are, huh?" She let him lead her into a vast living room with exposed timbers in the ceiling. Three or four people were standing in front of the fireplace; half a dozen more were scattered around the room, drinking and smoking. There were a great many roses, lilies, and chrysanthemums in vases.

Doc Wellafield came toward her. "Linda!" he said, and gave her his cushiony hand. "Ed was here just a minute ago-"

"He went to the can," said Rong helpfully.

"While we're waiting for him, let me introduce you to, uh-" He turned. "Uh, Florence?" An attractive woman in her fifties came forward, smiling. Others were drifting toward them across the room. "Linda, this is Florence Rooney. Florence, Linda Lavalle."

"We've heard so much about you," said Rooney.

"Florence is Ed's social secretary," said Wellafield."And this isJeff Carruthers-" A smiling beanpole of a man with an oiled forelock, teeth probably false. 'Jeff is one of the consultants from Washington."

Stone was hurrying toward her across the room. As soon as he let her go, she said, "What is this, a penthouse?"

"It's the penthouse, it covers the whole roof. Did you meet everybody? Never mind, I'll introduce you later. Come on and take a look." He took her hand and led her to the French windows that opened on a landscaped garden. They stepped out; the air was fresh and pure.

"This is incredible," she said. "But who are all these people?"

"Rong-you meet him? He's a guy I met on the street when I first got here. He turned up and I gave him a job, and Florence, she was that architect's secretary? She wanted to work for me too. And the rest of them, they're some of the people who're working on the Cube Project in Washington. They just came down for the weekend. Well, what do you think?"

A few yards away there was a weeping willow with a circular white seat around its trunk. Ducks were swimming in the pond behind it; beyond that, she glimpsed a bright green lawn and a little flag.

"What is that, a golf course?"

"Just a putting green, but there's a swimming pool and a sauna and all that stuff. They bought it for me."

"They bought it for you? The whole thing?"

"Sure."

"I thought the idea was to keep moving around from one hotel to another. "

"Right, but they thought this was better because it's easier to control the traffic, with that private elevator. Listen, some of these people are probably going to want to eat here, but we don't have to. Would you rather go out?"

"Oh, no, here is fine. Can we eat in the garden?"

"Sure. Come on, I'll find you a menu."

Waiters set up tables in the garden under strings of Japanese lanterns. Lavalle found herself seated beside Jeff Carruthers and opposite another planner named Walter Scavo. Carruthers was saying, "Let's take, for instance, the Watusi in Africa. They're herdspersons, their whole life is cattle. Their wealth is cattle. How are we going to persuade them to get in those boxes and leave their cattle behind? They're very tall, by the way."

"We may have to do special boxes for them," Scavo said. "About leaving the cattle, okay, we tell them there's going to be cattle on the new planet. Bigger and better cattle. And everybody gets twice as many cattle as they had before. I mean, we can't put cattle in those boxes, let's not get ridiculous."

"What about pets, though?" Lavalle asked.

"Okay. You got a dog or a cat, or maybe a parakeet, if there's room for it you take it along. Maybe you have to make some tough decisions, but that's life."

"Speaking of pets, I see another problem," Carruthers said. "We're going to have packs of dogs roaming around, and we're going to have lots of abandoned farm animals that can't take care of themselves."

"Maybe the dogs will take care of them.Just a little joke. Seriously though, we're going, and we can't take every cow, pig and chicken with us. What happens after we leave well, the Earth is going to be destroyed anyway, so who cares?"

Carruthers put down his fork. "We'd better take a lot of pictures. Of the way it was."

After dinner Stone murmured, "Let's get out of here." He led her to a door at the far end of the room and ushered her into a living room only a little smaller than the other. "This is a little private apartment. Nobody comes in here unless I say so."

"How many of those people have you got living here?"

"Well, Doc does, and Rong, and Florence, of course. She's got things organized to where I don't have to worry anymore, I just look at the schedule and do what it says."

"And you're paying their rent, and their food too?"

"Plenty of money, Linda. Listen, there's something else I wanted to show you." He led her out the French windows, along a fence concealed by shrubbery, on the other side of which they could hear the guests' cheerful shouts and laughter. He showed her a break in the eucalyptus hedge where they could get through a plastic flap into the stink and heat, and stand at the parapet to look out over the lights of the city sparkling through the haze. The reflected lights in the dome above were like molten stars.

"This is beautiful," she said.

"Yeah, I guess so. What're all these gold pyramids? I never saw them before."

"They're very popular; they started going up on the tops of buildings twenty years ago. Do you know you can buy your own golden pyramid now, and a mummy case to be buried in?"

"You're kidding. How much does that cost?"

"About a hundred thousand for the cheapie model."

"Jesus." He stared out into the violet-brown fog. After a moment he said, "A hundred thousand bucks to be buried in a mummy case, and kids starving because they haven't got a dime. Satellites in space, and computers that talk to you. Something went wrong, I could tell that as soon as I got here. If you have all these gadgets, and people are still starving, then you're just showing them more great things they can't have."

"Well, what else is new?"

"And another thing, I notice people are still talking about progress and growth, as if it was the same thing. We never should of got to six billion people in the world. In the thirties, two billion, we could handle that. We should of stopped there, and we could of, or anyway close to it. But we didn't, and now they're talking about ten billion, or twenty. You talk about selling people on bizarre ideas, how about that one?"

"It's a better world, in some ways. Anyway, it doesn't matter now, does it?"

"I guess not. Listen, there's something else I wanted to talk about. I haven't asked you to marry me-"

"Well, hey, I haven't asked you, either. "

"No, but what I wanted to say, I want to, but I can't. Not until this is over. "

"Well, that means never, doesn't it?"

"I don't know. Maybe not, but anyway, not for the next eleven years."

"Okay."

Later she asked, "Why are you wearing that thing on your finger?"

He looked at it. "It's just a little bubble bandage. to cover the ring."

"You used to just turn it around when we had sex.'"

"Yeah, but-"

"You don't want me touching it."

"That's right, because, you remember I told you, I thought it would wear off?"

"And you want it to?"

He squirmed a little. "I don't want it to, but if I'd of kept touching you with the ring, how would you ever know? It isn't fair to you. You could of been married to Julian by now."

"Forget it."

After a moment she said, "Suppose it does wear off. I could do you a lot of harm if I turned against you."

"Like what?"

"Remember when you told me about Ginger Rogers dancing in front of a window with a see-through skirt?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that film wasn't made until nineteen thirty-five."

He looked at her steadily. "And you thought I didn't know that? What are you telling me, you think I'm a phony?"

"I don't know what to think. Let's get up and have a sandwich.''