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  'Damned right we played Arkansas. Beat 'em in the last two minutes. You blew your man out of his hole like he was made of straw. It was the greatest block I have ever seen.'

  'I'm sorry. I don't remember. I remember Michigan, though.'

  'What happened at Michigan ?'

  Lew McCardle tapped his left knee. Torn ligaments.'

  'Ended your career.'

  ‘No. I played the next year.'

  'Something ended your career.'

  'No. You're thinking of my not going to the pros.'

  Mr Laurie snapped his fingers. That's right. You could have been something in the pros.'

  'I did all right considering. I'm happy with Houghton and what I've got. I've got the early retirement. I've got a good house. I've got two cars. I've got vacations, and I can pay for my wife and daughters.'

  'You didn't do all right, Lew, considering.' The dusty twang was gone now. The words were chosen and sharp and quite specific. There was no grin on the tight, tanned face of James Houghton Laurie III of Houghton Oil. ‘Considering your degrees and your skill and your intelligence, you did not do well, considering.'

  'Considering where I came from and what I could have been, I did very well.'

  'We both came from North Springs, Texas, Lew.'

  'We did not come from the same place, sir. We came from the same town.'

  'You have a chance now, Lew, to make up for all your missed opportunities. To make that doctorate from the University of Chicago pay off. Lew, I am talking about a vice-presidency for you. For your wife, Kathy, for your children, I am talking about my country club. I am talking shares, shares in Houghton, not that employee-option thing, real shares at good prices in a company whose worth you might help increase.'

  'I'd be happy to, sir. Houghton has been good to me. I never would have left the site unless I was ordered to.'

  'Lew. I know that. I trust you. You can't buy trust. You can't rent it. But you've got it.'

  'I am ready to go back to the site now. I'll go now.'

  'No,' said Laurie. He raised a hand. 'There's another rockhound. We sent him up a couple of days ago. We need something more. We need trust here. It was not a wise decision to send that thing down from the site. And I know it wasn't your decision. And believe me, you don't have to show me some piece of paper saying you were told to leave that site. You've given me your word. And you're a Maky.'

  Thank you,' said Lew.

  'Why, you may ask, was it a bad decision?' said Mr Laurie, stopping Lew from answering the question which Laurie was about to answer himself. 'Because it was unlucky. It was also stupid. But worse, unlucky.'

  Mr Laurie sighed. He rose from his seat like a man weary with the world. He went to the bed on which his jacket lay. From an inside pocket he took a thin black box. He held it aloft briefly as though it were evidence

  'A treacherous world,' he said ‘I have bodyguards in the two rooms next to this, I don't go anywhere without them. I don't use the phone for anything more than ordering a hamburger. A treacherous world.'

  'You mean terrorist kidnappings of business executives?' asked Lew.

  Laurie turned a dial on the box and it sounded like a radio with heavy interference. He put it on the small, grey marble coffee table between them.

  'No. Those kids don't mean piss. I'm talking about Gulf, Standard Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Norway, Kuwait. I'm talking oil, Lew, a treacherous world and a needed commodity.'

  ‘I know there's competition,' said Lew, and got such a baleful look from Laurie that he added: 'More than competition.'

  'That's just about right. More than competition. This isn't a radio playing. It cuts bugging of our conversation. I don't know how it works. It's the latest today, and tomorrow it won't be worth a piss in a rainstorm, because there'll be a new one you've got to have. We use it, they use it, everybody uses it. Everybody just keeps getting better at listening in on others and stopping others listening in. Never ends. That's competition.'

  ‘I see how difficult your job is,' said Lew.

  'Thank you,' said Laurie, if this were the best of all possible worlds, we would be proud of what that Russian doctor is doing. We would say to the world we found it here, here on our exploratory site and here and here. Do you follow ?'

  Lew nodded. He finished his drink. Laurie poured another. Lew noticed creases in the tanned neck and freckles above Mr Laurie's colour.

  'We are about to make major bids on exploratory alien rights,' said Laurie. 'We don't want it known that we are exploring before we buy the rights for it. We don't like doing business like this, but everybody does it, and if we don't, we go out of business. It's like that black doo-hickey buzzing away. You've got to have it. All right, we have it.'

  'I don't know too much about bidding, Mr Laurie.'

  'You know enough to just realize what I'm talking about. If we know for sure what we're bidding on, we've got the right atmosphere. I'm talking bidding atmosphere, and I don't want it spoiled. Now, if that thing the Russian is working with becomes known worldwide as some kind of miracle, there are going to be more reporters and other kinds of newspeople than you've ever seen. And what we want quiet is going to be found out and is going to be noisy as hell. It'll ruin the atmosphere. Everybody is going to know who and where and what is going on up there. Now, this is a fluid situation. That cadaver could get up and walk and say he's Louis XIV of France, and then forget it. It's carnival time above the seventieth parallel.'

  'I was aware of what kind of site we were drilling.’

  'Good. I imagine the men do tend to know what they're working on and some of the broader ramifications. But I'm not just talking about international publicity. I'm talking about such harmless little questions as how far did you haul it ? What did you bring with you? How deep down? Glacial ice? Permafrost? What ? Those sorts of things.'

  'They already know the depth of discovery of the ... thing.'

  'All right. We'll live with it. What we're looking for, Lew, is someone to block for us. And by that I mean I don't expect you to go demolishing some opponent somewhere, but sort of like brush blocking. And by that I mean delaying any sort of great publicity and sort of specific answers about where you found it and how. That's what I mean.'

  ‘I won't say anything to anyone. I'll go home now. I've put in a lot of consecutive time and I'm close to retirement. I haven't given information other than the depth of the ice to anyone. And I'm sorry about that. You can trust me to keep my mouth shut, Mr Laurie.'

  'We need more than that, Lew.’

  ‘Sir?'

  'I am the goodwill ambassador of Houghton. I go from country to country promoting our commitment to the benefit of mankind. We are a committed company. Houghton Oil is committed to the energy of man and the welfare of man. Because we are committed, we are assigning one of our vice-presidents - a learned man with a doctorate - to assist the project of Dr Semyon Petrovitch, in co-operation with the Scandinavian-Soviet Friendship Pact. This vice-president will allocate funds from Houghton to support this project. This vice-president will make sure that for at least a month, maybe two months, answers to certain questions are delayed, no matter whether the patient lives, which would attract publicity eventually, or dies, which would require some answers for Norwegian health authorities or whatever. It is a fluid situation, Lew. We need someone sensitive to our interests. You must use your judgement.'

  McCardle was about to tell Mr Laurie that he was not a vice-president. But now he knew he was, just as Semyon Petrovitch had known he would be working on the project. Lew seemed to be the last to know these things. He listened to who would do things for him back at Houghton, different ways to get funds -there were donations to the university which came from Houghton Public Affairs, there was dead, solid cash which came from a Credit Suisse account, and then there was his personal account here in Oslo.

  There was more money looking back at Lew McCardle now than he had ever made cumulatively.

  'We don't expect you to hide the damne
d body in some ditch, but we do expect judgement'

  'I don't know if I'm fit for this, Mr Laurie. I'm a geologist. I've chosen this area. It's been good to me.'

  'We're going to be better.'

  'I don't want better.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because this is good enough. This is really good for me. Considering everything, I feel quite lucky I've got what I've got and gotten where I've gotten.'

  'Lew McCardle, you can't do this to us. We need you.'

  'There must be better people.'

  'Maybe there are. But the Russians have cleared you, we trust you, and you have been accepted to take your sabbatical leave from us with this university here.'

  James Houghton Laurie turned off the thin little black box on the elegant coffee table between them.

  'My name's Jim, Lew,' he said. And poured another drink.

  'All right, Jim,' said Lew McCardle.

  'Lew, whatever happened to your pro career? If I remember, everyone said you could have been another Luke Sikes. He was all pro with the Chicago Bears, wasn't he?'

  'He died two years ago.'

  ‘I know. I read the alumni news. Had two pages. He was something. He was the best to come out of M and C 'He was a day labourer in Sante Fe.' 'I thought he was a policeman ?' 'He was for a while.'

  "The alumni news didn't say he had stopped.' 'No. They didn't.'

  'You know, Lew, Luke Sikes is in the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.'

  'I know,' said Lew McCardle, who had contributed to a fund-raising appeal for a sustained monument to Luke Sikes, which also took care of the family's funeral bills. Sikes had died owing almost two thousand dollars on an annual income twice that. And he owned nothing. And Sikes had been arrested twice for breaking and entering in petty crime. 'I know,' said Lew McCardle. But what he knew was that he could have been another Luke Sikes, and he wasn't.

  Lew and Jim, two old Makys, had a final drink, and old Jim boy said he didn't expect to hear from oP Lew for a while.

  Vice-president McCardle finished the bottle of Tennessee sippin' whisky. He drank from the crystal glass. He phoned Houston, Texas. He phoned home. A housekeeper answered.

  'Lew who ?' she asked.

  'Lew McCardle. Mrs McCardle's husband. Tell her Lew is on the phone. I'll hold.' He cupped a bit of the whisky in the cradle of his tongue and breathed in its aroma.

  'Yes, Lew. Is that you?'

  'Yeah, honey. How are you ?'

  'I am fine. More than fine. Do you know that they are investigating us for the club? Not any club. But the one with Lauries andHoughtons?'

  'I'm a vice-president.'

  'Fantastic. What a surprise,' she said. The voice still had the clipped Connecticut sounds. She had never lost her accent. And she had always sounded like money, and, once, she said money didn't matter. But that was when they were young, and he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and money didn't seem to mean any more than how much you had instead of who you were. Which is what it was back in Houston.

  'I'm in Oslo, Norway. Why don't you and the girls come on out and visit ? I'll be here a while.'

  'What about Paris?'

  ‘I’m in Oslo.'

  'You said that. Can you get to Paris ?' 'Not right away.' 'When can you, Lew ?' 'I don't know.'

  'When you can, let us know, and all of us will fly out to meet you. That's wonderful about your vice-presidency. Fantastic, Lew I didn't think you had it in you. When did you say you'd be in Paris?'

  'I didn't, honey.’

  'Oh,' she said.

  'Give my love to the girls.'

  'They'd go to Paris. I know.'

  'Yes. Well. When I can,' said Lew McCardle wearily and ordered up whatever kind of whisky they had in the hotel. They brought up a bottle of scotch. He drank it from the bottle. In his whole career as a geologist, the most important thing in it was keeping a hubbub away from that little fellow he found in the ice. He wondered what the men back at the site were doing, and he could bet they weren't drinking scotch whisky in a fancy hotel suite.

  He tried to remember the Arkansas game that had so impressed James Houghton Laurie. The old man used to come into the lockers and stuff twenty-dollar bills into your hands, and a Ulysses Grant fifty-dollar bill if you put someone out. He used to talk of Maky guts.

  In McCardle's first game, one of his team-mates rubbed some blood from his jersey on to McCardle's as they were coming off the field.

  'That's for Mr Laurie. You'll see.'

  In the locker room, there was Laurie wearing a cowboy shirt tucked into what McCardle would find out later were British tailored pants, which were tucked into five-hundred-dollar cowboy boots, so everyone on the team said.

  As young McCardle passed by the older man, he felt a handshake and something crisply folded in it.

  ‘That's hittin', boy. Makys hit. We're hitters.'

  It was his first payoff from James Houghton Laurie III. 'He loves to see blood,' said the team-mate. 'What he give you ?'

  Young Lew McCardle had opened his hand to find a ten-dollar bill. The team-mate looked at it unimpressed. He had twenty dollars.

  'Wait until you put someone out. If you do, jump around a lot and don't go back to the huddle right away so he'll see your number and remember it.'

  There was a hundred-dollar game once. Was that the Arkansas game? Lew McCardle couldn't remember. He tried to remember other things, good things. He tried to remember when the love was good with Kathy, and it was so long ago, and he had spent so much time trying to get back what the marriage had promised in the beginning, that he had never really made note of when was the last time the lovemaking was good.

  It was not bad, he knew. But it was not good. It was just there. And he had often felt that it could have been better. But then again, it could have been worse, too.

  He had done all right, considering.

  Eight

  Fourth Day - Petrovitch Report

  Condition critical. Plasma volume totally restored. White blood count remains high, 1200 mm, yet hemolysis appears to be cUminishing, and red blood count increasing. EEG activity enormous. A state of semi-consciousness.

  Repetition of one word 114 times over a six hour period. Word: 'Meramme'. Language as yet unidentified. Shock still remains severest danger.

  It was too silly for a comment, so she got an embrace.

  'Eugeni, be serious,' said Miriamne, laughing. She could in her good way scold like a song and laugh like an admonition, never hurting but enlightening. We were in our peristilium, open to the good summer sky, surrounded on the sides by fresh and growing things with water bubbling from a small fountain into a long, curving marble pool that caught the reflection of each white fluff of cloud above.

  Outside, through corridors, was the atrium where my personal business was done, the retainers and emissaries met and formalities were dispensed with. Outside that was the vestibule where people waited to be allowed into the atrium, and outside that were the streets of Rome, with walls surrounding my house of such plain and unadorned countenance that none who did not know I lived here would take a second glance.

  'Miriamne, how can I be serious when you tell me that not only is there an all-powerful god, but that he takes specific interest in everything on earth, and that if I let him, he will lift my worries also.'

  'It is true.'

  'Then enjoy your truth privately.' 'I want to help you,' she said.

  'You may worship privately in any manner that you wish, and this has always been so ... Even according to your legends, he didn't help his own only son who was executed like a criminal. In disgrace. I do have something on my mind which I must tell you, and it makes me sad.'

  'You don't understand, Eugeni.'

  'Shhh, woman. I must tell you something unpleasant.'

  'Then quiet. I have something pleasant, and you yourself said that this place, our place, for you and Petronius and me, was only for good things. I have a good thing to tell you.'

&nbs
p; 'You have an interesting defence when cornered - to hurl our son at me.'

  'You are cornered. Now listen,' she said, and her finger pointed right into my nose.

  'If you promise not to strike me,' I said in mock horror.

  ‘I make no promises,' she said and pushed me back on the soft pillows where we sat. There were couches but we both preferred the pillows. 'Now listen. The pain was not a punishment. It was God's gift to take away the sins of the world.'

  'Then he is not all-powerful because he could do it by decree if he wanted.'

  'He wanted to show his love by his suffering.'

  'Don't you ever show your love for me that way. I get no pleasure from someone else's pain, least of all someone I love. Enough of that talk. It is sweet nonsense. Thank you, but please, listen. I have something I must tell you. It is about Publius, your friend, and our son Petronius' friend. It is a sad thing.'

  'The only sadness, Eugeni, is not to hope.'

  'There are other sadnesses in this world.'

  'They are but the seed dying so that the flower may bring new life. You do not know the plan of the one God who gave his one son for us.'

  'Very pretty, Miriamne, and you are often eloquent, but please, this is about life and death.'

  ‘I talk of that, too.'

  'No, you don't. I do not interfere with your private things that you have kept private. But this has to do with the world.'

  'And you are foolishly sad,' she said. She put a finger to my nose and pushed me back on our pillows. 'And it was you who said nothing sad should be talked of here in our special place.'

  ‘I had hoped this would be so.'