“How do you think she knows, Van?” I watch him curiously. He’s exhilarated. He’s still grave, but there’s a fondness and a thrill in his gravity.
“I — don’t — know, Tom! I’ve ruled out ESP. It’s nothing supernatural. What she’s doing is high-order math without knowing how she does it.”
“Like an idiot savant.”
Van Dorn gives me a single, steely look. “Don’t hand me that, old buddy. That lady is not only not an idiot, as you well know, but is a great lady in her own right.”
“Right. Is she on heavy sodium, Van?” I ask in the same voice.
He sets down his drink, eyes level, lips thin. “I’m glad you asked, Tom. Now that you’re part of the team. If she is, old buddy, she ain’t getting it here. You see that?” Picking up his drink, he holds it toward the French window. Beyond it, beyond the magnolias rises a silver bullet of a water tower. “You know where our water comes from? A ten-inch flow well, artesian water fifteen hundred feet straight down. More to the point, Doctor, where does yours come from?” He sits back, drinks his drink. “I knew you knew about Blue Boy. Seriously, where does your water come from?”
“Same as yours. The town has an artesian well.”
We look at each other. He smiles for the first time. “You’re a sly one. You didn’t suppose, did you, that I didn’t know that you knew about the boys’ little Hadacol juice in the water?”
“I supposed that you knew. I talked to Bob Comeaux and he told me you were on the ACMUI team.”
Van Dorn snorts and pushes back in his poker chair. “Me with those Rover boys? No way. No, I’m only a visiting fireman, consultant, no, those guys wanted some coolant — I’m the project engineer — I got the go-ahead from the guys at NRC. They had medical spread sheets from NIH, which looked promising to me. Hell, that’s down your alley, Tom. You’re the expert on the pharmacology of radioactive isotopes, especially sodium. You tell me.”
“What do you think of that pilot, Van?” I ask, watching him.
“Blue Boy? Shit.” He clucks, makes a face, pulls up close. “You really want to know what I think of those guys?”
“Yes.”
“I think they’re a bunch of Rover boys, eagle-scout mid-level bureaucrats, Humana airheads, Texas cowboys — hell, that’s where I made my money, Texas, remember? I know those types — who ride into town and shoot up the rustlers and have a ball doing it.”
“You don’t approve of what they’re doing?”
He gives a great open-hand Texas shrug. “Well, who’s going to argue about knocking back crime, suicide, AIDS, and improving your sex life — any more than you’d argue about knocking back dental caries by putting fluoride in the water. But that’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?”
“The point is, you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You don’t treat human ills by creaming the human cortex. That’s a technologist for you. Give a technologist a new technique and he’ll run with it like a special-team scatback.”
“Are you talking about Dr. Comeaux and Dr. Gottlieb and their colleagues?”
Van Dorn makes a face. “Max Gottlieb is unhappy with them too. He’s a reluctant conspirator. But he’s locked in — by his position at Fedville. But the rest of those guys, you want to know what they are?”
Not really. “What?”
“Those guys are a bunch of ham-fisted social engineers, barnyard technicians, small-time Washington functionaries, long-distance reformers — you know who they remind me of? They remind me of the New England abolitionists, that bunch of guilt-ridden Puritan transcendentalist assholes who wanted to save their souls by freeing the slaves and castrating the planters. These guys — you know how they produce Olympic weight lifters in the U.S.S.R.? By steroids and testosterone — the same way they do football players and racehorses in Texas. These guys are running a barnyard. That’s no way to treat social ills or to treat people. Those damn cowboys are killing flies with sledgehammers. Do you know the latest they’re up to?”
“No.”
“Okay, so we’ve got a problem with teen pregnancy, children getting knocked up by the thousands right here. Plus a mean, demoralized, criminal black underclass. A real problem, right? But you don’t cure it by knocking back all women in the pilot area into a pre-primate estrus cycle, do you? You don’t treat depression by lobotomizing the patient anymore, do you? You don’t treat homosexuals by dumping stuff in their water supply and turning them into zombies, do you?”
“What do you do, Van?”
But he doesn’t need an answer. He’s jumped up to fix another drink and is pacing up and down. He stops above me. “You don’t treat the ills of society by dumping stuff in the water supply, Tom.”
“Then why did you participate in the project? It was you who gave them the sodium isotope.”
“I’ll tell you why, Tom.” He’s brooding now, eyes as brilliant as agates. “Because it’s war. In time of war and in time of plague you have to be Draconian.”
“Plague? War? What war?”
“Tom, we have, as you damn well know, three social plagues which are going to wreck us just as surely as the bubonic plague wrecked fourteenth-century Europe. If you’d been in London in 1350, wouldn’t you have dumped penicillin in the water supply, even if it meant a lot of toxic reactions? Wouldn’t you have quarantined the infected?”
“What three plagues are we talking about, Van?”
He counts them off with big referee arm strokes. “One: crime. We can’t go out in our own streets, Tom. Murder, rape, armed robbery, up eighty percent. We don’t have to tolerate that. Two: teenage suicide and drug abuse, the number-one and — two killers of our youth. Number three: AIDS. Now we’re talking plague, Tom, five million infected, a quarter million dead.
“So why are you complaining about this pilot project?”
“Tom, I have no quarrel with their short-term goals. Every society has the right to protect itself — even if it means temporary loss of civil liberties. But those cowboys — hell, they like what they’re doing, and I think they want to keep on doing it. You want to know what their trouble is?” He leans over me. I can smell breathed bourbon.
“What?”
“Goals, Tom. They have no ultimate goals. They don’t know what in the hell they’re trying to accomplish. They’re treating everything in sight, curing symptoms and wiping out goals. It’s like treating a headache with a lobotomy. Tom, we have to leave the patient human enough to achieve the ultimate goals of being human.”
“What are the ultimate goals of being human, Van?” I look at my watch. I’m already sorry I asked. Where is Lucy?
Now Van is half-sitting on the poker table, swinging a leg, arms folded, at his ease, well-clad and graceful in his coveralls and — yes, exhilarated. He’s nodding, eyes gone fine and faraway.
“I’ll answer that by telling you what I tell the boys and girls out there. Incidentally, it’s no accident, Tom, that since we took over this seg academy, we’ve got the highest SAT scores in the state and the most National Merit scholars. You know what the answer is, Tom, the only answer? Excellence? We give them the tough old European Gymnasium-Hochschule treatment. We work their little asses—”
“Right. Look, Van. I have to find Lucy. We have an appointment—
“Sure, sure.” He goes on but we’re moving toward the door.
We’re walking in the magnolia alley toward the parking lot, Van taking measured steps, sauntering planter-style, hands in pockets, gazing down at the fine pea gravel. No sign of Lucy.
“Tom, would you like to hear my own private theory of the nature of man?”
The nature of man. I can’t stand theories about the nature of man. I’d rather listen to Robin Leach and watch Barnaby Jones.