The Clan of the Cats Page 7

  “Tantrum?” growled Harel. “I’ll show you who is your master for good and all, you impudent capitalist pig!” So saying. he whirled the stick of dense, tough wood up above his head yet again, but this time it was clearly not aimed at the table.

  That blow never fell, however. Thinking, “Goddammit, enough is enough! No way is that fat fucker going to beat me with that cane,” Bedford gave the threatening man his left fist with all his force behind it squarely in the solar plexus.

  With a wheezing grunt, Harel doubled, gasping. The raised stick dropped from his fingers and both hands sought the place that hurt, covered it.

  Fists cocked and ready, should more force be needed, Bedford half crouched on the balls of his feet. Stekowski just sat and stared, looking as stunned as Harel; the old man had paled, and although his lips moved, no sound emerged from them. Between them, Ruth Marberg and Zepur Baronian took Harel’s elbows and got him into a chair, the elder woman then picking up the blackthorn stick and tucking it out of sight behind the coffee console.

  Gradually, the adrenaline began to drain from Bedford and he was able to ask in almost-normal tones, “Where the hell is Dr. Singh, anyway?”

  Dr. Baronian shrugged. “Probably in his quarters, upstairs, meditating. He turns everything off when he meditates, the intercom, included. Want me to see if I can find him, Jim?”

  He nodded. “Yes, if you would be so kind. I’d really like to have us all in here when I tell the full story of this last trip and lay out what we are going to have to do to survive, to get as much as one more dollar of funding.”

  They all sat down to wait for Drs. Singh and Baronian to come. Bedford stirred absently at his cooling coffee and kept a wary eye on the big man, who had begun to breathe more easily. Bedford sensed that unlike many bullies, there was beneath all the bluster and the histrionics a potential for real and dangerous violence.

  (“If only I had known there and then just how right my intuition concerning Dr. Harel truly was,” he later was to record in his journal, “how different things might have been for us all. Who was it who said that ‘if only’ are the saddest words in the English language? They are.”)

  Chapter V

  Bundled against the chill of the concrete-walled underground room, Milo spent long days reading the notes of James Bedford by the light of the smaller of the gasoline lanterns. It was well that they had killed and helped to bring back the big bull elk, for the night following that fortuitous kill saw another blizzard blow up, this one lasting in fits and starts for the best part of a week, and Milo could only hope against hope that his lone rider had found a secure place to hole up with his mare until it blew itself out and he could once more proceed on his mission to bring the clans back here to these ruins.

  As he continued to read through the boxes of folders, all meticulously arranged by date, he came to understand the long-dead James Bedford, came to sympathize, to empathize with the man, came to feel that he had truly known him. He regretted that Arabella Lindsay had not lived to this day, for she too could have read the journals and would have been truly delighted to do so, for they and what they contained would have answered so very many of her questions about the world of the dead past, partially quenched her endless curiosity about the people of that world of her forebears and how they had lived.

  “Hmm,” he thought. “How old would Bella be today were she alive? About mid-sixties, I think, not a really great age for clansfolk. Yes, but not more than a barehandful of that first generation of the people from the MacEvedy Station are still alive, either — the change from settled farming and animal husbandry to a constantly moving existence of herding, hunting and gathering was just more than any but the very toughest-fibered of them could take and live on. Even so, they lived on longer as new-made nomads than they could, any of them, have expected to subsist at that doomed station, with or without being perpetually besieged by plains rovers, as they were when the clans and I chanced across them.

  “But the children and grandchildren of those first-generation Lindsays and MacConochies and Dundases and Hamiltons and Rosses, MacKensies, Douglases and Keiths, born to the life, are become the tough, self-reliant and hardy clansfolk of today. And a large proportion of them possess at least a fair amount of telepathic ability, too, which makes a survival trait for such a life as we all lead, so in the course of succeeding generations it should become stronger and more prevalent among the Horseclansfolk.”

  While musing, Milo had stuffed his greenstone pipe with some of the fine tobacco out of one of the sealed tins that had been a part of James Bedford’s survival store. That done to his critical satisfaction, he used one of the butane lighters Bedford had also included to light the mixture, drawing in several mouthfuls of the smooth, fragrant smoke before thinking on.

  “In a way, it’s too bad that the late James Bedford’s mind didn’t run to fiction writing, for he owned a rare talent to put the reader directly into the places and situations he describes here in this journal of his; he could no doubt have made quite a name for himself as an author in that long-ago world. But if he had, of course, this place most likely would not have been here when we needed it and that huge wolfpack would probably have torn us all to gobbets and eaten us . . . and I don’t think that even my unusual constitution could’ve survived that sort of death.

  “Even so, Bella would’ve been enthralled to read this journal, for it would’ve answered so many of her questions about the world as it was so long ago. She never ceased to be obviously thrilled to hear of how, before everything went to hell, thousands of folks every day were transported across the widths of whole continents or oceans in the space of less than a day, flying high above the clouds — six and seven miles straight up — sitting in complete comfort, watching moving pictures, listening to music, eating, drinking, sleeping, talking with others, reading books or magazines or newspapers, whatever they wished to do at the time.

  “She knew well of ground vehicles, both tracked and wheeled ones, of course. Unlike most inhabited places, the MacEvedy Experimental Agricultural Station had managed by hook or by crook to keep some of its vehicles and sophisticated firearms, and even its electricity was in operation and use up until only a score of years before her birth. But she did not know of the networks of fine, wide, paved roads that once connected tens of thousands of towns and cities one with the other, and it excited her to hear of how vehicles not too much different from the stripped hulks scattered around the MacEvedy Station could, on those roads, cover in an hour or less distances that would now exhaust a good rider with a string of remounts to travel in a full day.

  “And she never tired of having me open my mind, my memories, that she might see through my eyes the vast multitudes of people who inhabited that world, the differing races and nationalities. She especially loved to go into my memories of the cities — the larger ones in particular, New York, Tokyo, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Delhi, Cairo, London. And such a sojourn was always followed by hundreds of questions about anything and everything having to do with the people and their everyday lives, their artifacts, their habits, the huge buildings, where they raised their crops, what kinds of livestock they husbanded. One image which she never had ceased to ask him to recall was that of flying into the Los Angeles area one night, one Santa Ana — cleared night, with the tens of thousands of lights below the plane stretching from horizon to far horizon like a vast swarm of fireflies.

  “She was just born a century or so too late,” Milo sighed to himself, puffing on his pipe and filling the low-ceilinged, icy room with layer on layer of blue-gray smoke. Poor little Bella, she hungered for any slightest scrap of new knowledge concerning the past, that dead world of her ancestors. And I really could impart her very little of the scenes she most craved, traveling as I did mostly from one war to another, generally in the more primitive parts of the world where my services were needed, going mostly by air, at that — and there’s damn-all to be s
een from six or seven miles up, unfortunately — and one almost never encounters ladies of fashion in swamps, jungles, mountains, deserts, the bushlands or montane forests where I spent the bulk of my time after the U.S. Army decided I was too old and retired me.

  “Hell, by their lights, I was too old. I enlisted in 1938 — or was it 1937? — and I think my age was listed then as thirty. Yes, I looked older, looked just as I do now, in fact, but the army of that time, between World War One and World War Two, could not afford to be at all picky or to pry too deeply into an otherwise healthy, acceptable and qualified would-be recruit’s past, not in an era when the most they could pay privates was twenty dollars a month and found. But even so, by the early seventies, the Pentagon records indicated that I was pushing sixty-five, pushing it damned hard, too. And the damned whiz kids who had managed to fuck up a war we could’ve easily won in the beginning went into screaming tizzies at the mere thought of a sixty-four-year-old lieutenant colonel leading a combat unit in Vietnam.”

  He chuckled evilly in remembrance of the half-disbelieving type who had at last physically confronted him in a Pentagon office, so long ago, his narrow, bureaucratic mind almost blown by the utter, patent impossibilities of the unimpeachable documentations and the mid-thirtyish-looking officer who sat beside his desk, the left breast of that officer’s blouse solid with row upon row upon row of campaign ribbons and awards from three wars and several nations besides his own.

  Milo had just shrugged. “Mr. Henshaw, I cannot help it if I did not age as you feel I should have. You Pentagon hotshots may well control a lot of things in this sad, screwed-up world, but the will of God is not one of them, thankfully. You have my personnel file and all of the other DOD records, all of the fingerprints match — including the new set you had me impress today, right? So I am in fact Lieutenant Colonel Moray, Milo, no middle initial, 0-2-284-755. Right? Right!”

  The paunchy, jowly man just stared at Milo for a long minute. Despite the air conditioning, sweat gleamed on his balding head; his short, pudgy fingers trembled and his dark, beady eyes blinked incessantly behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. All through their several meetings, his color had alternated between a pasty white and a glowing beet red. His thin lips fluttered, and Milo suspected that the anus bunkered up between those porcine haunches must be spasming wildly.

  At last, the most uncivil civil servant burst out, repeating himself for the umpteenth time, “But but you simply cannot be Lieutenant Colonel Milo Moray. I don’t know who or what you are, but you absolutely cannot be him! It’s impossible, do you hear me? The doctors at Walter Reed say that you have the physical constitution of a twenty-five-year-old man, did you know that, whoever you are? And Lieutenant Colonel Milo Moray is almost sixty-five years old, and you . . . you don’t look one day over thirty-five years old, if that! So who are you? What are you? When did you assume Moray’s identity and why?

  “Yes, your prints match the records . . . but that can only mean that someone, sometime, somewhere, has doctored them, and that’s a job for the CID, I think.”

  “Then why don’t you ring CID up, Mr. Henshaw?” Milo said disgustedly. “And while you and they are playing your games, just let me get back to ’Nam, to do what I do best.”

  Pale once more, Henshaw again stared at Milo. “You must be a raving lunatic, whatever else you are. You want to go back to that filthy, bloodsoaked hellhole? Anyone with any sense or the moral fiber to recognize that what we are doing, have done, there is wrong is doing everything possible, pulling every string pullable, to get out, get reassigned to almost anywhere. It’s a no-win situation, and the plug will certainly be pulled on the whole stinking imperialistic mess just as soon as Senator McGovern is elected president and that warmongering Nixon is out of Washington.”

  Milo smiled coldly. “Mr. Henshaw, were I you, I would not make the error of holding my breath until the senator becomes president. Despite everything that you believe, disbelieve and opine, I am a good bit older than you, I’ve been around America and Americans some longer, and I can tell you that they are a proud people, a people accustomed to winning, and very damned few of them are thus likely to vote for a man whose plan is to crawl on his knees to Hanoi, to plead abjectly for peace with a savage, barbaric enemy, a catspaw of international Communism.

  “But whether we eventually surrender to the type of people that McGovern represents, run out on our friends or not, so long as we’re still fighting, I want to be there; so either retire me from the army or cut me orders back to ’Nam. I’m tired of farting around here with left-liberal defeatists — ‘Lose the world without killing anybody’ — like you, too many members of Congress, most of the media and the unwashed, unshorn packs of young Marxists who seem to show up at the sight of a television crew, with their beads and flowers and narcotics and not enough brains inside their craniums to tan the hide of a pygmy shrew.

  “Yes this war has ground on for far too long, our citizens are getting tired of it all, tired of getting young men back in coffins, tired of living with the gut knowledge that once more, just as in the Korean War, American arms and aims have been stymied, stabbed in the back, betrayed, by a rotten combination of hubris, fuzzy thinking and cowardice — if not outright treason! — on the parts of their elected leaders, legislators and appointees.

  “I don’t like to think that perhaps my onetime commander in chief was a willing pawn of the Communists, a man with no strength of convictions dimwitted or just a pitiful coward, so I often in my own mind attribute Harry Truman’s successful efforts to see the Korean War lost to his preoccupation with things he no doubt felt were more important to him, the nation and the world, things such as coming up with choice gems of barrackroom filth and invective to sling at anyone who failed to appreciate as exalted art the caterwauling his daughter called singing.

  “Hard on the heels of his disgraceful display of gutlessness, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in Cuba, John Kennedy proceeded to commit us, to plunge us arse-deep into propping up the Diem regime in Saigon. French shilly-shallying, on-again-off-again governmental support of their hard-fighting troops in Indochina had already resulted in a humiliating defeat and loss of the north to Ho Chi Minh and his cadre of Marxist stooges, the splitting up of the country and the turning over of the non-Communist south to Diem and his criminal family with their hordes of equally criminal sycophants.

  “Now, true, Mr. Henshaw, John Kennedy had had nothing whatsoever to do with the installation of Diem; that had been done by the French colonials and their figurehead-puppet emperor. But if our then commander in chief had had the intestinal fortitude to — even as late as ’sixty-two, when he had heard General Taylor’s report — insist that as part of the price for an increased American presence and aid commitment, either Diem do things our way or be replaced by someone who would, he might have lived long enough to see a victory in Vietnam; and even if not, he at the very least would’ve seen more real possibility of victory than there was when he was assassinated barely three weeks after his coreligionist, Diem, had been deposed and shot.

  “As before, Mr. Henshaw, as with Truman, I dislike having to think that Kennedy and Johnson after him were tools of international Communism, despite the clear indications of either that or such degrees of naiveté and stupidity as to boggle the mind. Therefore, in their particular cases, I usually assume that they both were sufficiently preoccupied with active domestic socialization of this once-great nation of ours as to not really care to devote much of their personal time to Southeast Asia and to just allow the Pentagon whiz kids to run their costly, bloody and unforgivable little games with the lives of thousands! to drag the war out for needless years and so devastate much of what had been some of the richest, most productive land anywhere upon the Euro-Asian landmass that they now have to import food of every sort.”

  Henshaw’s lips were become a thin, compressed line and there was now depthless hostility in his eyes. “Moray, what you’ve said here in the last few minutes smacks to me of n
othing less than flagrant insubordination if not outright treason! I now can see and thoroughly understand why your records show such flattering notes and commendations from that fascist, reactionary, Russian-baiting, rightwing radical fool Barstow. You’re just like him. Joe McCarthy would have loved you with your groundless accusations against three of your avowed commanders in chief!”

  A smile flitted briefly across Milo’s face. “Why thank you, Mr. Henshaw, thank you very much.”

  Henshaw sat for a moment with his mouth agape, his face a very picture of puzzlement. “For what, Moray?”

  Milo bedded the hook with secret delight. “Why, for those compliments, of course, Mr. Henshaw, those completely unexpected but still deeply appreciated compliments.”

  Henshaw’s face went from red to ashen once more, and a hint of fear came into his eyes. “Moray . . . colonel, are . . . are you quite well?”

  Milo chuckled. “If anyone should know, it’s you, sir. If you’re in doubt, why not read through Walter Reed’s report on me again? Or you could ring them up, for that matter. If what you are actually questioning is my mental and emotional condition, then, no, I am not mad . . . but consider this; even if I were and knew it, I’d be expected to give you that same answer. Right?

  “As to why I thanked you, what I found complimentary was your comparison of me to Eustace Barstow.”

  “But . . . but . . . how . . . what . . . ?” spluttered Henshaw, his pale face and hairless head slowly edging again from pink to pinker. “That man is certifiable! How he’s retained so much power for as long as he has is simply beyond me or any other rational person. He’s —”

  “He’s a true patriot, in his own way,” put in Milo quietly. “He was one of the first men to have recognized the true and deadly danger to this nation, its people, all free nations of the world and even civilization itself that was then and is still poised by ‘our brave Russian ally’ of World War Two. If I and others had paid more attention to him, worked for him and with him, away back when, instead of doing our own version of the Wanna-Go-Home Boogie, there is at least a slim chance that we and ’Nam and the rest of this suffering world wouldn’t be in the sad shape it is today.