The Young Unicorns Page 9

  Dave sat at the Bishop’s feet, his mind whirling. His brain, which had always, even during the summer of his disenchantment with the Alphabats, seemed a reasonable and adequate instrument, could not cope with this mad confusion of Emily calling up a genie, Dr. Austin being connected in some way with the unknown leader of the Alphabats, the Bishop being forced underground to a throne in an abandoned subway station. Why? Who was threatening him? This was no fit place for a bishop. This was not the way a bishop ought to behave. Nothing made sense. None of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle went together to make any kind of coherent picture.

  On the edge of the platform, broken and rusty subway track behind them, the three boys shifted their weight uneasily. B’s gaze was fixed on the pewter lamp in the Bishop’s lap. At the edge of the shadows the green-robed figure stood, immobile, imperturbable. Amon Davidson crouched, rodentlike, behind the Bishop. He looked old and wizened and ugly; Dave’s dark and fierce good looks had been inherited from the mother who had never paid the scantest attention to him, the mother who was the first person to betray his trust.

  The Bishop raised his head. His eyes were dark with compassion and grief. “Amon: take the boy home. Davidson: I will send for you again. If you have need of me or have anything to tell me, I will leave word that I am always ready to receive you.”

  A, who had been teetering at the edge of the platform, came forward, nervously licking his lips. “Hey, Bishop, what about the lamp?”

  The Bishop looked from A to Dave to the tarnished lamp on his lap and back to A again. “Ah, yes. The lamp. But do you think he is ready for the lamp yet? Were you ready the first time? Do you think Davidson is prepared?”

  “But I thought—”

  “Ah, that is just it, A, my lad. Are you not happier when you let me do the thinking? I said that I would send for Davidson again, did I not? And I think the lamp had better wait. But you three boys may stay. Amon: go.”

  Amon pulled the shoulder of Dave’s jacket. Dave rose from the low stool, feeling cramped and as though he had been sitting in the same position for hours: was it hours? Time had no meaning in the catacombs.

  During the long, uphill journey through the tunnel Amon Davidson spoke only once. “Not a word about this or I’ll kill you.”

  In the darkness behind him Dave raised an unseen eyebrow. “Who’d believe me?”

  When Amon Davidson finally led the way through the stone opening he was out of breath. In the furnace room his face was grey and he was panting.

  “Wait and catch your breath, Pop,” Dave said.

  Amon leaned against the wall by the huge blue boilers, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and wiped the sweat from his face. “You vowed,” he said.

  “I’m not likely to forget.” Dave looked at his father. They shared a room, but they had not communicated with each other since Dave was a little boy tagging about the Cathedral after school. Often weeks would go by without their exchanging more than grunts. Now Dave looked at his father and realized that he was an old man and a stranger.

  “Pop,” he said, “why’d you get involved with the Bats?”

  “I’m not,” Amon Davidson said. “Bats’re involved with me.”

  “You shouldn’t have brought them to the Bishop.”

  “That’s up to me.”

  “The Bishop doesn’t understand things like the Bats. He’s a holy man. Not like the Dean: different.”

  “I’ll take care of him.”

  “Listen, Pop, what’s all this tunnel bit?”

  “You saw.”

  “Yeah, but I suppose it was you who found it?’

  Amon put the handkerchief back in his pocket, answering with pride, “I do all the Bishop’s puzzles.”

  “How come this?”

  “He needed a place no one would know. A place no one would guess.”

  “So you figured this out? Or did you already know?”

  “What I don’t know about the Cathedral, no one knows,” Amon said. Dave knew this to be true.

  “So maybe you just blundered onto this, hanh?”

  “In the beginning.”

  “Why did he have to go underground?”

  “He told you.”

  “No, Pop. There’s more than that.”

  “No one must know.”

  “Know what?”

  “What he’s doing.”

  “What is he doing?”

  “If he wants you to know he’ll tell you.”

  “You tell me.”

  Amon shook his head.

  “Why not, Pop?”

  Amon started out of the boiler room. The big machines purred like enormous prehistoric cats. “You don’t trust me. I don’t trust you.”

  Dave followed him. Amon’s strong lantern lit the crypt, made weird and dancing shadows. Dave did not like it. “Pop. How much do you know?”

  “Enough.”

  “Enough to what?”

  “Keep my mouth closed.”

  “Pop, who’s the leader of the Alphabats?”

  But his father’s mouth was closed literally as well as figuratively.

  Eight

  After dinner that same night, while Dave was being taken to the strange and unique setting for a bishop’s throne, Vicky sought her father in the study. Dave’s anger at her for having talked so rashly to the man with no eyebrows burned in her, particularly because she thought he was probably right and she should have kept her mouth closed. “Are you busy, Daddy?”

  Dr. Austin looked up from his desk, controlled impatience.

  “Yes, but I need a break. Come on in.”

  “Everybody’s mad at me—well, Dave is.”

  “What have you done now?”

  “Talked too much, as usual.”

  “Who to this time?”

  “If I tell you, everybody’ll say I’ve been talking too much again. Do I?”

  “We’ve never been much of a family for hoarding secrets. Some people confuse this with forgetting personal privacy.”

  “Daddy—”

  “What?”

  “You’ve—you’ve been doing it, haven’t you?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Doing what you just said. Hoarding a secret.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Just that—just—oh, it’s all so complicated! I love Emily and Dr. Gregory and Mr. Theo and Dave and all, but sometimes I wish we’d never left Thornhill.”

  “But we have left, Vicky. We’re here.”

  “Everything’s different. It’s not just moving from the country to the city; it’s everything else, too. It’s John being off at college and not having him to talk to, or to argue with at the dinner table. Funny: arguing with John is one of the things I miss most. Nothing will ever be the same again, and it scares me. Coming to New York, and knowing Emily, and … everything’s changing, including me, and I hate it!”

  Dr. Austin laughed and took Vicky over to a sagging and extremely comfortable couch, pulling her down beside him. “Now listen to me, Victoria Austin. You’ve spent a lot of time wanting to be yourself, and to assert your own identity, and all the other typical rebellious adolescent stuff. You’ve gone on in high and lofty tones at the dinner table about freedom, haven’t you?”

  “Well, yes,” she said, trying to sit up straight on the couch, which was soft and invited relaxation. “I think it’s important, people being free.”

  “So do I, Vicky. But we aren’t free to remain static, to refuse to change. That isn’t freedom. That’s death, death either for the individual person or for the family.”

  “But why?” Vicky demanded.

  Her father smiled at her intensity. “You’ll find as you grow older that you’ll never know all your reasons for doing something, no matter how much you’ve tried to train yourself to be objective. And I’ve discovered that the better you want your motives to be, the more mixed they are, like mine for moving the family to New York. The primitive, bad emotions, like hatred, or revenge, come closer to p
urity in us poor human beings than our nobler ones. So, no matter how or why we got here, here we are, Vicky, and our lives and Emily’s seem to be woven more tightly together every day. You two are pretty close, aren’t you?”

  Vicky leaned her head against her father’s shoulder in the old familiar way. Her father was a big man, and simply to lean against him, to feel his arm firmly about her, gave her a childlike sense of security, at least momentarily. She did not need to remember how drawn he had looked as she came in and gazed at him across the desk, or that he was older, thinner, part of all the terror of change. She could change, but not her father, not her mother …

  “Yes. Emily’s a real friend. We can talk. Or not talk. I forget she’s Suzy’s age. She seems so much older. And I seem so much younger to myself than I did just a few months ago.”

  “That, you know,” her father said, “is a sign of maturity.”

  “Is it? Emily is, isn’t she? Mature, I mean. She’s sort of my first real ‘best’ friend, though the kids at school would ride me if they knew my best friend was one of the little kids. Oh, Daddy, this year is so different from the way I thought it was going to be! I thought I was going to be grown up and have dates—you know, after what happened with Zachary and Andy on our trip last summer I thought I had it made—but with Andy’s family moving to Paris—I haven’t even had a letter from either Andy or Zachary since September—I thought I’d outgrown being the ugly duckling but I’m right back in it, and the boys are already making eyes at Suzy. And I get jealous. And—well, I know this sounds awful, but there are times I envy Emily, because she has a talent, a real one, and she knows what she’s going to do and who she’s going to be—”

  “Who is she going to be?”

  “Emily Gregory, who is a pianist …”

  “Can’t you be Vicky Austin?”

  “That’s not enough,” Vicky started, then gave her father a shamefaced grin, banged him on the knee, said, “Homework calls. Couldn’t you arrange it so’s we’d have a few days of peace and quiet? Then maybe I could keep my foot out of my mouth.”

  Vicky was given, whether by her father’s arrangement or no, a week that was almost an ordinary week. The only disruption to the usual noisy routine was that the children argued less than usual. Each was, as it were, sitting on the extraordinary things that had happened, and waiting to see which, if any, were going to hatch. Vicky, who was the only one not to have seen the genie, would have liked to ask about him, but decided it was about time she kept her mouth closed about something. Everywhere she went she looked, instead, not for the man in green robes but for the man with no eyebrows.

  Dave, who could have told her who he was and where he was, did not. His mind burned with rage and consternation. —This is not how a bishop behaves. This is not how a bishop behaves. It’s wrong. It’s not normal. But things aren’t normal. What could have happened to make him sit on a throne in the subway? And why that get-up? He used to dress more like the Dean. What were Bats doing there? What’s my father up to? Is it all his fault? No, not Pop, he doesn’t care enough about anything. Just his wood carving and his puzzles and doing little things for the Bishop …

  —And Dr. Austin, Dave thought, reading history to Emily but not listening to his own voice.—No. No. He can’t have anything to do with the Alphabats, he …

  He slammed down the book. “Practice your piano for ten minutes, Emily. I’ll be right back.”

  He ran up the stairs three at a time. In the Austin dining room Vicky and Suzy were at the table doing homework. Dave pulled out a chair, plunked himself down, and sat there silently until Suzy said, “So what’s up? Why aren’t you down with Emily?”

  “She doesn’t need me while she’s practicing.”

  “She’s supposed to have you read to her first.”

  “I told her to practice. I want to talk to you.”

  Vicky looked up from the paper on Richard II she was writing for English. “What about?”

  “I want to know more about the laser.”

  “Ask Daddy.”

  “He’ll be too technical for me. How did he get into research on the laser beam, living way off in the country?”

  “Oh, it’s always been his Thing,” Vicky said. “He was always corresponding with people like Dr. Shasti and Dr. Shen-shu. And working on formulas and things and using the hospital lab whenever he got a chance. The thing is, he’s such a good doctor that he kept having less and less time for research.”

  “Did he know Hyde before he came here?”

  Vicky shrugged. “I don’t know. He was always meeting people. Anyhow, when Dr. Hyde offered the job to Daddy, it was exactly the kind of thing he’d always wanted to do.”

  “How did you kids feel about it?”

  “Sort of staggered at first. But then Mother and Daddy took us on a great trip out to California and back last summer, sort of to bridge the gap between the two lives, and by the time we moved here we were used to the idea.”

  “What do you know about the laser?”

  “Not much,” Vicky said, turning back to Richard II. “Suzy’s the scientist.”

  “Tell me about it, then.”

  Delighted to show off, Suzy slammed her French notebook. “First of all, it’s an acronym.”

  Dave gave an annoyed grunt. “Okay. What’s an acronym.”

  Suzy gave a pleased and slightly feline grin. Now, at last, Dave would have to realize that she was more than just a pretty little kid with curly blond hair, even if she wasn’t a genius like Emily. “An acronym is an acrostic.”

  Vicky, holding her finger on her place in Richard II, her pen over her notebook, said, “An acronym is a word made up of the first letters of something, like NATO,” and continued writing.

  “Laser,” Suzy said, “is from Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. LASER.”

  She was so smug that Dave grinned. “Okay. Now can you tell me what it means?”

  He sounded condescending, and she flashed, “Yes, I can tell you. But you wouldn’t understand.”

  He apologized quickly. “Sorry, Suze. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Try telling me, will you?”

  She asked suspiciously, “Why do you want to know all of a sudden?”

  “No particular reason. Just never got around to asking before. What is a laser?”

  “It’s a violently intense beam of coherent radiation.” She looked at him through limpid violet eyes, was pleased to see that he didn’t understand, so she elaborated for him. “It’s light, that’s all, but it’s so—well, sort of extremely tight that it’s about the most powerful thing going.”

  “How does it get its power?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to think of terms he could understand. “A water pistol: Daddy said to think of it as the tiniest and most powerful water pistol in the world, one that sends out a fine stream of water under extremely high pressure. Water controlled that way could be as powerful as a bullet, couldn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I get that. Go on.”

  “Well, multiply that a million or so times. That’s how powerful a laser beam is. If you shoot a laser ray it makes a bullet from a revolver or a machine gun seem as mild as instant whipped cream sprayed from one of those cans. You can cut anything with it, absolutely cleanly and accurately. It’s used for eye operations and for brain operations.”

  —Eye operations, Dave thought.—That’s why Suzy got so excited about Emily. But Dr. Austin said it wouldn’t work, not for the kind of blindness where the optic nerve’s completely gone.

  “Anyhow,” Suzy continued, “it uses Planck’s constant. You take something like a crystal of ruby and you get an electromagnetic wave and then you sort of get stimulated emission of radiation at the frequency ƒ. Is that clear?” She looked at him triumphantly.

  “Yeah, sure. Now tell me what it means.” As she hesitated Dave said, “Come on. Translate.”

  Suzy grew pink. “I memorized it,” she admitted finally.

  �
�You mean it’s just gobbledygook to you, too?”

  “Not exactly. Anyhow, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “So what’s your father’s particular game?”

  “Game?”

  “What’s he do that’s so special?”

  “Control,” Suzy said promptly, relieved not to be asked for further technical explanations she couldn’t give. “He makes a controlled Micro-Ray.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a special sort of instrument that gives the surgeon control over the beam so he can do all kinds of operations quite simply and safely that he couldn’t even dream about otherwise.”

  “Is that what your father does for Dr. Hyde, then? Help him control the beam?”

  “Yes,” Suzy said proudly.

  “I see. Yeah, that’s quite something, Suzy.” He stood up. “I better get back down to Emily. What’re you doing tonight?” He peered over her shoulder at her book.

  “French.”

  “She’s okay on French. What else?”

  “Math. Set theory.”

  “Ugh. We’re in for a struggle, then. Thanks for the info.”

  But it didn’t really help him very much beyond proving what he had already figured out, that Dr. Austin’s work was important.

  For the next few days he tried to sort things out, unsuccessfully. Close-mouthed at best, he was, in his confusion, less talkative than ever, so that the children remarked on his taciturnity.

  “Can you open your mouth wide enough to read me my history?” Emily asked one afternoon in exasperation.