Metzger's Dog

2 The sidewalks on the campus of the University of Los Angeles were crowded and chaotic. John Knox Morrison disliked that part of it, the sense of all these people wandering about according to no visible pattern, sometimes two or three abreast so he had to sidestep to let them pass. The bicycles added an element of danger to the matrix as they knifed through any momentary openings in the crowd at unpredictable angles and at speeds that reduced control to the art of picking a gap and aiming at it. Whenever John Knox Morrison visited a university campus he tried to arrange a way to avoid this feeling: have someone pick him up at the airport and take him to the right building. But Los Angeles was difficult because he had too many people to see on different campuses. Back in Washington it was easy to forget what it meant to come west. It was hard to envision a city eighty miles long and eighty miles wide.

At least here at ULA he knew where he was going. If it hadn’t been so near to lunchtime he’d have stopped in the romanesque revival building on his left for a doughnut. He knew the place better than most of these young people, he supposed. He’d been coming here since most of them were babies. A young girl with a worried expression on her face stared directly into his eyes as she passed. That one was an example: a child whose self-absorbed, unconfident gaze rested on the tall, gray-haired man in a gray suit making a measured way through the crowds. For an instant he wondered if she envied him his age. She probably thought he was a dean or vice-president, someone whose gray hair and presence here meant that he had long ago passed the midterm examinations, written the papers that seemed so awesome to her now.

It almost made John Knox Morrison smile to himself as he turned the corner and walked down the broader, easier expanse of University Avenue. The irony appealed to him—the child would have been puzzled and disappointed if she could have known who he really was. But he was more important on this campus than any dean or vice-president. If that little girl took a course in physics or chemistry or biology, the equipment she used would be the equipment that came here because he’d willed it. If she took a course in any of the social sciences, it would probably be held in the building he’d approved in 1968. The list was too long to remember at the moment, and it included a number of items he found distasteful to contemplate, investments that might not yield any discernible return before the end of the century. When he arrived on a university campus, he brought with him the force of the greatest determining factor in human history. John Knox Morrison was one of four senior executive officers of the federal government’s National Research Foundation, by far the largest and richest of the agencies that dispensed government research grants. When he spoke with professors, deans, department chairmen, there was little doubt that John Knox Morrison spoke with an authority that obliterated all titles and institutional structures, reduced them to ephemeral and meaningless local customs. He spoke with the power of money.

WHEN MORRISON REACHED THE SOCIAL SCIENCES BUILDING he took the elevator to the third floor and walked directly to Ian Donahue’s office. On the door was printed only “300–307 Professor Donahue.” Inside, there were an anteroom and a short hallway opening onto a complex of small rooms. Morrison passed one room where a young, bearded man was staring angrily at the display screen of a computer terminal, and another where two girls were drinking coffee and cataloguing what looked like machine-scored answer sheets for some kind of examination.

Donahue was waiting for Morrison in his private study at the end of the hall. Donahue’s round, unlined face flashed a grin as he closed the door. “Great to see you, John,” he said. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine,” said Morrison. “Just fine.” Donahue’s manner always confused him at first. He supposed that he probably was Donahue’s friend, in a way. When they’d met, Donahue had been an Assistant Professor in the fifth year of his appointment, with no significant publications and not much hope of doing anything remarkable enough to justify his receiving tenure in two years. In those days Ian Donahue’s office was a dark little closet of a room that he shared with a truculent and abrasive young colleague who, judging from the disordered assortment of clothes and toothbrushes, must have been in the habit of spending nights there with women. It must have been a hopeless time for Donahue. The only thing he had going for him was a short article that had appeared in an obscure academic journal called Sociometry, which he had attached to a grant application to the National Research Foundation. It hadn’t attracted any attention among the probably twenty or thirty sociology professors who’d read it, but it had been enough to cause something of a stir in Morrison’s office. Morrison even remembered the title—“The Jalisco Famine of 1946: Toward a Quantification.”

What had intrigued Morrison and his colleagues wasn’t to be found in the major portion of the article. That was only an interpretation of demographic statistics. What interested Morrison was a speculation that it was possible to identify and isolate certain intangible ideas peculiar to a culture, assign them numerical values, and work out which ones cause people to behave irrationally. The Jalisco famine was by then a standard problem in the field: In the middle of the summer of 1946, when the crops were growing well in the fields, the weather was perfect, and no trouble was in sight, the rumor of a famine swept through Jalisco, causing twenty thousand small farmers to abandon their farms and flee the area. Because they did that, the crops failed, thousands starved, and the famine rumor came true.

Ian Donahue, an unknown and unpromising Assistant Professor, had hit upon an idea that had stimulated Morrison’s imagination. If cultural fears could be assigned numerical values in retrospect in this single instance, they could be assigned numerical values in the present. If Donahue could explain past behavior, his formulae could also predict future behavior. Morrison perceived, if some others didn’t, that if the quantities were known they could also be adjusted. If they could be adjusted, mass action could not only be predicted, it could also be precipitated. Morrison knew a number of people who would be very interested in Donahue’s research.

That had been the real beginning of Donahue’s career, a string of successes that had stretched over twenty some years. The complex of offices assigned to Ian Donahue in the Social Sciences Building was larger and more lavish than the offices of the whole Sociology Department.

MORRISON SAT IN THE CHAIR that looked out over the campus, the trees and lawns like a tiny park inserted in the midst of the sprawling, grayish city. “It’s already November, Ian,” he said. “In Washington it’s November, anyway. Here it always seems to be August.”

“I know,” said Donahue. “I’ll have the final draft of the report to you by December first. I promise. It’ll be on your desk before Thanksgiving if there are no surprises.”

“The report is not why I came here,” said Morrison, his hand raised. “I had to come through to talk to somebody at USC, and I thought it would be a good time to see you. It’ll also give me a chance to fill in another on-site visit.”

Donahue nodded. He’d read in the newspaper a few days before that one of the Congressional committees was examining travel expenses of government officials. Even a man like Morrison must have to make every trip look as full of business as possible.

Morrison said, “The big thing, though, is that the Latin America grant is going to terminate on January one. I wondered what you had in mind after that.”

Donahue shrugged. “The usual. As I said, the final report will be in a month early. Apply for a renewal. We’re in a very productive phase right now; I don’t think you’ll be in doubt when you see the paperwork.”

“I know you’re right, Ian, but I don’t think you understood what I said. It isn’t just your grant that terminates in January. It’s the whole project, the Latin America Outreach. Over a week ago the House subcommittee on Science and Technology let the request for continuation die.”

“But that always happens!” said Donahue. “The administration always calls in a few favors and the money comes through. You told me that years ago.”

Morrison stared out the window and shook his head. “Not this time,” he said. “I’ve checked. This time the administration isn’t going to pursue it. They’ve decided to change the emphasis to Africa for the moment.”

“Damn! So that’s it. Now I know who you saw at USC. It’s that pompous fool Graham Baker, isn’t it?”

Morrison said nothing, only stared out over the trees toward the distant freeway.

“I see,” said Donahue. “It’s because he’s younger than I am, isn’t it?”

“No, Ian, of course not. You know that age nonsense only happens in chemistry and physics. It really is the Africa thing. The Latin America project is just getting too much scrutiny this year. And the smart money is saying the Africa thing is going to need the attention.”

“All right, but I’m warning you. I have no idea what Baker can do for you, but he’s no scientist.”

“It’s not my decision,” said Morrison. “I’m telling you, it’s not. I don’t make policy. Believe me, it sometimes makes me unhappy. Next year a tenth of my budget is already earmarked for linguistics research—specifically to develop quick ways of teaching Americans to speak languages like Somali, Bemba, Tswana, Luo, and Dinka.”

“That’s absurd,” said Donahue. “I’m being cut loose to fund a project to teach a dozen unrelated languages of doubtful use? John, there are more Spanish-speaking people in Los Angeles than there ever have been speakers of Luo in the world.”

“I know that, Ian. There are others who know it too. And I have connections with a few of them, people in private foundations that don’t have to rely on the whims of subcommittees for their existence. I have a few suggestions for you.” Morrison produced a card. “I think this one is your best bet,” he said. “The Seyell Foundation. You’ve heard of them?”

“Of course,” said Donahue.

“If I were you I’d give this man a call,” said Morrison, handing Donahue the card. “Benjamin Porterfield. I’ve known him for years. He’s the new president of the Seyell Foundation, and something of a specialist on Latin America himself. I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.”

Donahue took the card. All it had was the name and a telephone number, printed in raised black letters. “Thanks. You’re a real friend. Will you come out with me for dinner at Scandia? There’s someone I’d like you to meet—a graduate student who’s working with me on the final report. Her name is Grace Warner.”

“Let me call you later on that, Ian,” said Morrison. He rose to leave. “I’m going to stop back at the hotel for an hour or two and see if I can get out of another appointment. It’s something I can probably take care of on the telephone.”

As Morrison rode the elevator to the ground level he thought about Ian Donahue. In a week or two Donahue would collect himself and call Porterfield at the Seyell Foundation and be pleasantly surprised. The Seyell Foundation was now preparing to distribute the largest set of grants in its history for studies like Donahue’s. Ian would probably even like Ben Porterfield, a quiet, businesslike man in his late fifties who would appear to Donahue to be an answer to his prayers. The image struck Morrison as appropriate. That was what they called the investors in the theater, wasn’t it? Angels. In the old days when Porterfield had been the Company’s chief Special Operations officer in Guatemala, that had been the name his band of guerrillas had given him—El Ángel de Muerte. But Ian Donahue would never get to hear that. If Donahue tried to find out about Porterfield he’d be able to learn that he was a respectable business executive, a former president of a small airline, a former vice-president of a major food corporation who’d been on the board of directors of the Seyell Foundation for years. It would never occur to him that the Foundation had been converted, year by year, into one of the CIA’s client companies. Donahue might even feel some relief at the ease of dealing with private research funds after so many years of federal audits and on-site visits. Porterfield’s personality would probably be a relief too. He was hard headed and aloof. Donahue might even be able to get out of the business of finding female graduate students who didn’t mind spending an evening in the Beverly Wilshire with a middle-aged visitor from Washington. That part was a pity, Morrison thought, but it had to be. The orders were that the Latin America project was ready to go underground. From now on no funds that could be traced to the taxpayers would end up in Donahue’s research accounts. It was the end of a long and mutually satisfactory association. Los Angeles would never be quite the same for John Knox Morrison. He wondered if the person who’d written the orders in Langley had an inkling of the fact that he was destroying the best portion of Morrison’s sexual history since Harvard in the spring of ’47. Those orders had passed Donahue, perhaps the most talented procurer in America, from Morrison, a man with spirit and taste and appreciation, to whom? Porterfield was a man who had eaten armadillo. That said it all. He wouldn’t even consider accepting one of Donahue’s graduate research assistants, because he wouldn’t want to take the trouble to explain the knife scar on his back. The legend was that Porterfield was very happily married to the woman he’d been with since the early fifties, but John Knox Morrison didn’t accept that. Porterfield clearly had no human feelings. He had the mind and tastes of a Soviet political commissar, the sort they sent into desert countries to train terrorists on a five-year tour of duty. Donahue’s young students would be wasted on him. It was a pity.