The Fist of God

Another female voice came on the line.

“Director’s office. Can I help you?”

The British accent probably helped. Martin explained he was Dr. Martin, an academic over from England on a brief visit, and would be grateful to speak with the Director. A male voice took the phone.

“Dr. Martin?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Jim Jacobs, Deputy Director. How can I help you?”

“Look, I know it’s terribly short notice. But I am over here on a quick visit to give a lecture to the Near Eastern studies department at Berkeley. Then I have to fly back. Fact is, I was wondering whether I might come out to Livermore to see you.”

The sense of puzzlement came right over the telephone wire.

“Could you give me some indication what this is about, Dr. Martin?”

“Well, not easily. I am a member of the British end of the Medusa Committee. Does that ring a bell?”

“Sure does. We’re about to close down right now. Would tomorrow suit you?”

“Perfectly. I have to lecture in the afternoon. Would the morning be all right?”

“Say ten o’clock?” asked Dr. Jacobs.

The appointment was made. Martin had adroitly avoided mentioning that he was not a nuclear physicist at all, but an Arabist. No need to complicate matters.

That night, across the world in Vienna, Karim took Edith Hardenberg to bed. His seduction was neither hurried nor clumsy but seemed to follow an evening of concert music and dinner with perfect naturalness.

Even as she drove him back from the city center to her apartment in Grinzing, Edith tried to convince herself it would just be for a coffee and a good-night kiss, though deep inside she knew she was pretending.

When he took her in his arms and kissed her gently but persuasively, she just allowed him to; her earlier conviction that she would protest seemed to melt away, and she could not prevent it. Nor, deep inside, did she want to anymore.

When he swept her up and carried her through to her tiny bedroom, she just turned her face into his shoulder and let it happen. She hardly felt her severe little dress slip to the floor. His fingers had a deftness that Horst had never possessed—no pushing and shoving and snagging of zips and buttons.

She was still in her slip when he joined her beneath the Bettkissen , the big soft Viennese duvet, and the heat from his hard young body was like a great comfort on a bitter winter’s night.

She did not know what to do, so she closed her eyes tight and let it happen. Strange, awful, sinful sensations began to run through her unaccustomed nerves beneath the attentions of his lips and softly searching fingers. Horst had never been like this.

She began to panic when his lips strayed from her own and from her breasts and went to other places, bad, forbidden places, what her mother had always referred to as “down there.”

She tried to push him away, protesting feebly, knowing the waves beginning to run through her lower body were not proper and decent, but he was eager as a spaniel puppy on a downed partridge.

He took no notice of her repeated “Nein, Karim, das sollst du nicht ,” and the waves became a tidal flow and she was a lost rowboat on a crazy ocean until the last great wave crashed over her and she drowned in a sensation with which she had never once in her thirty-nine years needed to burden the ears of her father confessor at the Votivkirche.

Then she took his head in her arms and pressed his face to her thin little breasts and rocked him in silence.

Twice more during the night he made love to her, once just after midnight and again in the blackness before dawn, and each time he was so gentle and strong that her pent-up love came pouring to meet his in a way she had never envisaged could be possible. Only after the second time could she bring herself to run her hands over his body while he slept and wonder at the sheen of the skin and the love that she felt for every inch of it.

Although he had no idea his guest had any interest in the world other than Arab studies, Dr. Maslowski insisted that he drive Terry Martin out to Livermore in the morning rather than go to the expense of a cab.

“I guess I have a more important guy in my house than I thought I had,” he suggested on the drive. But though Martin expostulated that this was not so, the California scholar knew enough about the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to know that not everyone blew in there on a phone call. Dr. Maslowski, with masterly discretion, refrained from asking any more questions.

At the main security gate uniformed guards checked a list, examined Martin’s passport, made a phone call, and directed them to a parking area.

“I’ll wait here,” said Maslowski.

Considering the work it does, the Laboratory is an odd-looking collection of buildings on Vasco Road, some of them modern, but many dating back to the days when it was an old military base. To add to the conglomeration of styles, “temporary” buildings that have somehow become permanent are slotted between the old barracks. Martin was led to a group of offices on the East Avenue side of the complex.