“Yes,” Coverly said.
“First of course we have the homosphere,” the doctor explained. He spoke with the forced courtesy of some professors. “Within the homosphere the primary components of air are uniformly mixed in their standard proportions by weight of 76 percent nitrogen, 23 percent oxygen and one percent argon, apart from water vapor.” Coverly turned to see him. His face was drawn by the intense cold. His breath smoked. His habit of explanation seemed impervious to the majesty of their circumstances. Coverly felt that he barely saw the light and the mountains. “We have within the homosphere,” he went on, “the troposphere, the stratosphere and the mesosphere with, beyond the mesopause, oxygen and nitric acid, ionized by Lyman Beta components and above this oxygen and some nitric oxide, ionized by short ultraviolet ray. The electronic density above the mesopause is 100,000 a cubic centimeter. Above this it rises to 200,000 and then to a million. Then the gross density of atoms becomes so low that the electron density diminishes. . . .”
“I think we’d better go down,” Coverly said. “It’s getting dark. Would you like to go first?”
Cameron refused and called good luck to Coverly as Coverly poled off. He made the first turn and the second but the third turn was already dark and he took a spill. He was not hurt but, getting to his feet, he happened to look overhead and saw Dr. Cameron descending sedately in the chair lift.
Coverly met his friends below the chair-lift station and went on to an inn where they had a drink in the bar. Cameron and his retinue came in a few minutes later and took a table in a corner. It was no trouble to hear what Cameron was saying. It seemed that he could not control the penetrativeness of his voice. He was talking about running the trail and talking about it in detail; the hairpin turns, the long stretch of washboard, the icy schusses and the drifted snow. Here was a man responsible in a sense for the security of the nation, who could not be counted upon to tell the truth about his skiing. He was notorious for his insistence upon demonstrable truths and yet in this matter was a consummate liar. Coverly was fascinated. Had he brought another and a finer sense of truth to the face of the mountain? Had he judged from the chair lift that the trail was too steep and swift for his strength? Had he guessed that if he admitted to judicious timidity he might have impaired the respectfulness of his team? Had his disregard for the common truth involved some larger sense of truth? Coverly didn’t know whether or not he had been seen from the chair lift.
A secretary led Coverly into Cameron’s office that morning. “Your interest in poetry,” the old man began at once, “is my principal reason for asking you here, for what could be more poetic than those hundred thousand million suns that make up the glittering jewelry of our galaxy? This vastness of power is utterly beyond our comprehension. It seems certain that we are receiving light from more than a hundred billion billion suns. It is conservatively estimated that one star in a thousand carries a planet hospitable to some form of life. Even if this estimate should prove a million times too big there would still be a hundred billion such planets in the known universe. Would you like to work for me?” the doctor asked.
“I don’t think you understand, Dr. Cameron,” Coverly said. “You see, my only training is in taping and preprogramming. When I was transferred from Remsen the machine made a slip-up and I ended in public relations; but I don’t think you understand that—”
“Don’t you tell me what I understand and what I don’t understand,” Cameron shouted. “If what you’re trying to tell me is that your ignorance is limpid and abysmal, you’re trying to tell me something I already know. You’re a blockhead. I know it. That’s why I want you. Blockheads are difficult to find these days. On your way out tell Miss Knowland to have you transferred to my staff. Write me a twenty-minute commencement address along the lines of what I’ve just said and plan to leave with me for Atlantic City next week. What time is it?”
“Quarter to ten,” Coverly said.
“Hear that bird?” the doctor asked.
“Yes,” Coverly said.
“What is he saying?” the doctor asked.
“I’m not sure,” Coverly said.
“He’s calling my name,” said Cameron, a little angrily. “Can’t you hear it? He’s calling my name. Cameron, Cameron, Cameron.”
“It does sound like that,” said Coverly.
“Do you know the constellation Pernacia?”
“Yes,” said Coverly.
“Did you ever notice that it contains my initials?”
“I’d never thought of it that way,” Coverly said. “I see now, I see it now.”
“How long can you hold your breath?” Cameron asked.
“I don’t know,” Coverly said.
“Well, try.” Coverly took a deep breath and Cameron looked at his wristwatch. He held his breath for a minute and eight seconds. “Not bad,” Cameron said. “Now get out of here.”
Chapter XVII
We are born between two states of consciousness; we spend our lives between the darkness and the light, and to climb in the mountains of another country, phrase our thoughts in another language or admire the color of another sky draws us deeper into the mystery of our condition. Travel has lost the attributes of privilege and fashion. We are no longer dealing with midnight sailings on three-stacked liners, twelve-day crossings, Vuitton trunks and the glittering lobbies of Grand Hotels. The travelers who board the jet at Orly carry paper bags and sleeping babies, and might be going home from a hard day’s work at the mill. We can have supper in Paris and, God willing, breakfast at home, and here is a whole new creation of self-knowledge, new images for love and death and the insubstantiality and the importance of our affairs. Most of us travel to improve on the knowledge we have of ourselves, but none of this was true for Cousin Honora. She went to Europe as a fugitive.
She had developed, over the years, a conviction that St. Botolphs was the fairest creation on the face of the earth. Oh, it was not magnificent, she well knew; it was nothing like the postcards of Karnak and Athens that her Uncle Lorenzo had sent her when she was a child. But she had no taste for magnificence. Where else in the world were there such stands of lilac, such lambent winds and brilliant skies, such fresh fish? She had lived out her life there, and each act was a variation on some other act, each sensation she experienced was linked to a similar sensation, reaching in a chain back through the years of her long life to when she had been a fair and intractable child, unlacing her skates, long after dark, at the edge of Parson’s Pond, when all the other skaters had gone home and the barking of Peter Howland’s collies sounded menacing and clear as the bitter cold gave to the dark sky the acoustics of a shell. The fragrant smoke from her fire mingled with the smoke from all the fires of her life. Some of the roses she pruned had been planted before she was born. Her dear uncle had lectured her on the ties that bound her world to Renaissance Europe, but she had always disbelieved him. What person who had seen the cataracts in the New Hampshire mountains could care about the waterworks of kings? What person who had smelled the rich brew of the North Atlantic could care about the dirty Bay of Naples? She did not want to leave her home and move on into an element where her sensations would seem rootless, where roses and the smell of smoke would only remind her of the horrible distances that stood between herself and her own garden.
She went alone to New York on a train, slept restlessly in a hotel bedroom, and one morning she boarded a ship for Europe. In her cabin she found that the old judge had sent her an orchid. She detested orchids, and she detested improvidence, and the gaudy flower was both. Her first impulse was to fire it out of the porthole, but the porthole wouldn’t open, and on second thought it seemed to her that perhaps a flower was a necessary part of a traveler’s costume, a sign of parting, a proof that one was leaving friends behind. There was loud laughter, and talk, and the noise of drinking. Only she, it seemed, was alone.