Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 31 March 1973
The Gazette Bids Goodbye to Mr Miles
The Gibber’s Creek Gazette and all its readers bid goodbye today to long-time editor, Mr Bruce Miles.
Mr Miles has been the editor of the Gazette since 1938. He intends to spend more time with his grandchildren and going trout fishing, a sport in which he is the holder of several trophies. We wish Mr Miles every success and all enjoyment in his retirement. May he earn more trophies still!
The new editor will be Ms Cheryl Gladstone. Ms Gladstone graduated from the Queensland Institute of Technology with a degree in journalism in 1971. She has since worked at the Moreton Bay Advertiser in sunny Queensland. Welcome to dusty Gibber’s Creek, Ms Gladstone!
JED
The Chosen of the Universe’s community was on the other side of Gibber’s Creek. Jed tried to analyse her feelings as Boadicea crested the hill out of town.
Anger, protectiveness, both of which she needed to hide from Scarlett, so proud of her almost-independence. As well as her new flared jeans, disguising her thin legs, her new pale lipstick, and the mascara and eyeliner she probably shouldn’t have let her use, but couldn’t bring herself to refuse.
Jed Kelly would not allow anyone to hurt her adopted sister. Someone who tried to convince Scarlett that she could walk had the potential to hurt her deeply — especially if that person was a charming young man.
Scarlett might say she didn’t believe the promises of a cure, that she was simply curious, that she wanted to thank the young man she thought of as her rescuer. But coming here might very easily increase the young man’s hold on her.
Scarlett was the first family Jed had known, before she had discovered that she did indeed have relatives, who came to love and accept her even before their biological relationship was proved. If that young man or his guru hurt her little sister, she would cut them off at the knees. Metaphorically only.
Possibly.
The dusty road cut through flat land, over the hill from the river, overgrazed paddocks snaked with orange erosion gullies, demarcated with barbed-wire fences, and then another kind of fence, made of tall thick mesh with the top sloping outwards, more fitting for a commercial site at the edge of the suburbs than in the paddocks of Gibber’s Creek.
The wire mesh gate stood open, the gravel road giving way to bitumen. Expensive, thought Jed. You didn’t put in a fence like that and tar a road unless you had real money. Even the Drinkwater drive was gravel.
Boadicea topped a slight rise. Fruit trees appeared, in neat rows, with long black strips of polypipe and drip irrigation, familiar because Sam had just put them in for the new trees at Dribble.
Clear plastic greenhouses stretched behind them on one side of the road with long green dapples of what might be vegetable crops in the distance. On the other side, a series of circles and mandalas held what Jed assumed to be herbs, though far more varied than the parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, basil and mint for mint sauce that she was used to.
The building in front of them was incongruous in the autumn grass landscape: an almost blank concrete rectangle painted blindingly perfect white, with two blocks attached one on either side that had rows of windows, each with metal shutters. The single door in the wall of the central building, with four concrete steps up to it, was as white as the concrete.
Jed parked in one of the neatly marked-out parking spaces. A white station wagon and a white ute were the only other cars there. She looked down at her knee-length green silk dress, the outfit completed by a straw hat with a green velvet rose. ‘Do you think that they’ll paint us white too?’ she asked as Scarlett manoeuvred herself out.
‘Nope.’ Scarlett looked at the steps with slight trepidation. ‘There’s no ramp here.’
Even as she said it, the doors opened. Two figures appeared. The younger one ran towards them. ‘Welcome! I’m Mark,’ he said to Jed, holding out his hand.
Jed shook it, glancing at the older man on the steps. It was the man she had met on election day: the face that looked tanned but not weathered, teeth that could blind you at forty paces, the same glaring white he had worn before, but this was a kurta and loose cotton pants instead of a suit. She looked back at Mark. Handsome, and probably always had been, and had relied on his good looks to ease his way through life. The embarrassment of the unexpected and very public epileptic seizure, the realisation that his body was not perfect, must have been a shock, enough to make him easy prey for a confidence trickster.
‘Do you have a wheelchair ramp?’ asked Jed, a bit abruptly.
‘No, sorry. Ra Zacharia and I can carry Scarlett up the stairs.’ Mark looked down at Scarlett with both affection and protectiveness.
‘I don’t like being carried.’ Jed heard the protest in Scarlett’s voice.
Mark grinned at Scarlett. ‘We won’t drop you. I promise.’
He doesn’t understand, thought Jed. Maybe no one who hadn’t worked with young people like Scarlett — or who hadn’t been helpless themselves — could really understand.
Ra Zacharia turned the brilliance of his teeth towards Scarlett. ‘One day you won’t have to be carried anywhere. Several of our members were once in wheelchairs, just like you. We don’t have ramps here, because ramps mean you accept you will never walk.’
He held out his hand to Jed. ‘Miss Kelly? I believe we have met before. I’m Dr Zacharia, though here we prefer the term Ra.’ His grip was firm and professional.
‘You’re a doctor of medicine?’
He smiled at her. ‘Yes.’
‘Then you should know not to make promises you can’t keep.’
Ra Zacharia met her eyes. ‘I never do. Every person here is a testimony to that. One day Miss O’Hara is going to walk up those stairs. Most humans have no idea how far we will all walk in the decades to come. Mankind has finally stepped off its planet . . .’
‘I know,’ asserted Jed. ‘I worked at Honeysuckle Creek during Apollo 11.’ She carefully omitted to say she had only washed dishes. Let Ra Zacharia assume she was a computer scientist or astronomer.
He evaluated that, then nodded. ‘Then you’ll understand. The older scientists and technicians said the moon landing couldn’t be done. But once humanity puts its mind to a task, it succeeds. We’re eradicating smallpox worldwide, growing crops in deserts with the Green Revolution. One day Miss O’Hara will be able to walk.’
Jed glanced at Scarlett. If there was one trace of hope in that small face, she was going to rip off Ra Zacharia’s nose. But her sister was still staring at the steps.
Ra Zacharia and Mark bent, with what looked like practised action, and carried Scarlett up the stairs together. Jed followed with her chair, then put the brakes on while they lowered Scarlett into it.
Scarlett looked flushed, embarrassed.
Jed examined Mark again. Still smiling. He seemed to look at Scarlett with real affection, but Scarlett had said he told her that he liked her because she was intelligent. Jed knew the look of high intelligence, the slightly too-intent stare of someone who drank in data. It was unmistakable. And this young man had no trace of it.
Whatever had drawn Mark 23 to Scarlett, it was not her intelligence.
Jed stepped through the door, then stopped. Ra Zacharia smiled at her obvious surprise. She had expected white walls, fluorescent lights. Instead they stood in an atrium, gently lit by clear skylights. The only furniture was a small table made of a polished slab of red gum. Its legs were the randomly curving branches of trees, and it held what looked like a hand-made pot filled with dollar notes and twenty-cent pieces. And, yes, the walls were white, but softened by pots and hanging baskets of what smelled like herbs, certainly basil and thyme, two of the few she recognised. The floor was covered in bright red carpet flecked with yellow.
Ra Zacharia said, ‘Everything here is carefully designed. We live an intentional life, Miss Kelly, not an accidental one. Greenery relaxes people and boosts their immune systems. So does natural light. A depressed person looks down and so needs to see bright, warm colours. An effervescent personality looks up and so needs more soothing white.’
‘Mark told Scarlett that you all wear white to make you careful.’
Ra Zacharia gave Mark an approving glance. Mark flushed. ‘Exactly. But we also wear white because life itself is discordant and breeds stress, especially in the world outside.’
‘There’s no stress here?’ asked Jed with an amused edge to her voice.
‘As little as possible. Do you know the works of B F Skinner, Miss Kelly? Walden Two?’
‘I studied it at uni.’
‘Then you will find a lot here that is familiar.’
Jed thought of the chaos of the commune. ‘No democracy then?’
‘No. Why should those who have no educated opinion control how a community is run? Each team leader is responsible for their area, and they agree — consensus, not voting — on who is our chairman.’
‘You.’
‘So far. But we promised you lunch . . .’
They headed along a corridor, again lit by skylights, that opened into a refectory. The floor there was red linoleum. There were six long tables, a hatch that opened into what must be the kitchen, its benchtop stacked with plates.
More expense, thought Jed. Was this one of those cults where everyone had to give everything they owned to the leader?
She gazed at the other people in the room, who were focusing on their food, not the visitors. Slightly more women than men, and slightly more young people than older, all silent, all smiling. Two of the women had to be in their late sixties at least.
But if Ra Zacharia made his money getting his followers to give him all their money, or leave it to him in their wills, why choose someone like Mark, who presumably had no money to give? Or were bodies able to tend the gardens outside and do other hard physical work as valuable as rich potential donors?
Had everyone there truly been cured of a major illness? Apart from one older woman with dark rings around her eyes, all seemed well. Jed wanted to ask what each had been cured of, but knew she couldn’t. One lesson you learned early at River View was that no one should be defined by their illness.
‘Help yourselves,’ said Ra Zacharia. ‘Don’t forget to try the bread. It’s our own recipe. Dried milk, wheatgerm . . .’
Skinner’s Walden Two had boasted of its bread. Jed had loved the book, had read it three times. So many of its ideas made sense. Walden Two was indeed a far better place to live than the world outside.
But Skinner’s Walden existed only in his imagination. Could it be made real? And Skinner had definitely not included aliens.
She followed Scarlett and Mark up to the hatch, took a plate, a slice of bread, looked for butter or margarine and found none, so added what looked like peanut butter instead. Corn on the cob, tofu in a peanut sauce, iceberg lettuce salad with beansprouts, sliced tomatoes. She took her plate back to the table where Ra Zacharia already sat with Mark. They had evidently abandoned their own lunch to meet them. A place had been left for Scarlett’s wheelchair, between Jed and Mark.
Two small glasses of something thick and green sat at her place and Scarlett’s. Empty glasses with traces of a similar green sludge sat on the other tables. ‘What’s this?’
‘Wheatgrass juice,’ said Ra Zacharia. ‘The essence of life in a glass.’
‘Though we each have our own herbal mix,’ began Mark. He stopped at a glance from Ra Zacharia. Interesting, thought Jed. Were the members here dosed with herbs as well as ‘oneness with the universe’? Herbs could be as potent as any synthetic medicine. And as deadly, if used incorrectly.
Jed sipped the wheatgrass juice, then decided that speed was the best attack and downed it in one draught. The muck tasted as if a cow had already digested it, with all of its stomachs, and then chewed it once again as cud.
She bit warily into the bread. It tasted heavy, and far too healthy. The tofu was tofu, but the sauce was both sweet and spicy, and the corn, tomatoes and salad were fresh . . .
Suddenly she realised what was niggling her. No talk. None whatsoever . . .
‘Are we allowed to speak?’
Ra Zacharia’s eyes seemed to reward her for being a good girl and noticing. ‘Speaking during meals is permitted, but not encouraged. Silent eating means you truly taste the food. So much eating in the outside world is automatic; so much life not truly lived. We have times for talking, and times for silence. Each in its season.’ He smiled. ‘Earth has its seasons too. We are finishing one, beginning another.’
Jed had a feeling Ra Zacharia didn’t mean the new federal government. ‘The Age of Aquarius? Brotherhood and understanding?’
Ra Zacharia gave a thoughtful smile. It was a good one that looked well practised. ‘All the talk about the New Age of Aquarius is humanity’s attempt to make sense of something it only dimly feels.’
‘And your messages from space explain it?’
‘You think I’m a charlatan. I deal in facts. Every person here,’ Jed could feel each person in the room stare at them as Ra Zacharia spoke, ‘has been wounded deeply in their flesh and spirit. Each one here has been healed. This is fact. The messages from space come whenever Alpha Centauri is visible in the sky. Anyone can see them, or decipher them.’
‘Perhaps I’ll try tonight if you tell me which star, sorry, spaceship to look for. Your book didn’t give exact directions.’
‘I hope you will, Miss Kelly. The ship is travelling, so there was no point in giving a position in my book. It would soon have been out of date.’
Plausible. Jed forked up more tofu, trying to work out why she felt so antagonistic.
‘You can’t con a con artist.’ Was she remembering the words old Fred had told her at the billabong, warning her not to con those he loved? Or had his ghost whispered them? Jed sniffed for cooking sausages, but there was just the scent of wholemeal bread and a faint herbal tang.
But the words had clarified her worry. Ra Zacharia was showing them too much, too fast, and answering questions they hadn’t asked. Which meant he was carefully not leaving them time to think of the questions he didn’t want to answer.
There was a con here. But what?
Around them, people drifted away as they finished eating, taking their empty plates to the hatch that was now cleared of food. ‘No tea or coffee?’
‘No caffeine. Nor alcohol or drugs,’ Ra Zacharia added, still smiling. The man could win an Olympic smiling match, thought Jed, irritated. ‘This is a place where we celebrate reality, not distort it. Drinking fluids with meals can inhibit the absorption of nutrients. We drink in our work areas, living areas, not here — other than the wheatgrass juice.’
He stood and took his own plate to the hatch. He turned back to Jed. ‘Miss Kelly, I give you my word no one will try to make your sister join our community. Nor will anyone ever suggest again that she can be healed. You understand that, Mark?’
Mark nodded.
‘The offer has been made.’ Ra Zacharia turned to Scarlett. ‘If you wish to accept it, you must ask. Mark will show you around.’ He patted Mark’s shoulder — even his hands were evenly tanned — then strode off to a door on the far side.
Jed looked at Mark, startled. She had expected Ra Zacharia to try to convince her through the entire tour. Either he trusted that what they’d see would impress her, or he knew Mark would not be able to answer awkward questions. Like how was all this paid for . . .
Or, just possibly, this might be genuine.
Two hours later Jed was reluctantly impressed.
One kitchen, stainless-steel benches, a washing-up machine powered by water, needing no detergent. Then a laundry, where a gigantic washing machine tossed clothes with twice the power of an ordinary one.
‘That’s why most of our clothes are made of linen,’ explained Mark. ‘Linen is tough enough to be boiled or washed vigorously, so we don’t need to pollute with washing powders or detergents.’
A big well-lit room filled with looms, soft music with a rapid but gentle beat, six people weaving what looked like carpets and woollen cloth.
‘This is one of our chief sources of income. The wool comes from our sheep — they’re Tukidales, carpet wool sheep. Australia has more merinos than human beings, but few carpet wool sheep, so we get a high price per kilo for what we don’t use ourselves.’
Jed gazed at the workers, five older women and an older man. The man mumbled to himself. The smiling woman next to him reached over and wiped off a dribble of spit with a white handkerchief.
Mark followed her gaze. ‘That’s Mark 48. He’d had a stroke, couldn’t even stand up when his wife met Ra Zacharia last year. He’s still improving every day.’
‘So cures aren’t immediate then?’ demanded Jed.
‘Of course not. Not for everyone.’
People did recover from strokes, thought Jed. Like Tommy had. But the body’s natural recovery from a stroke helped with careful diet and therapy, was far different from growing a new spine for a girl like Scarlett.
And each person in that room too had that faint but ever-present smile.
They moved along the corridor to a room that Mark said was a chemistry lab, but which looked more like a kitchen or perhaps a medical stillroom, with bundles of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, although the benches were stainless steel and the vessels were test tubes and glass beakers instead of cauldrons. No sign of a nursery, as they had at Walden Two. ‘No kids?’ she asked.
Mark hesitated. ‘Not for a couple of years yet. Kids take time, break up the focus. But there’ll be a kids’ wing one day. This is the sleeping area.’
A wing of single rooms, each with a single white quilted bed. No wardrobes. No bookshelves. And no privacy, thought Jed. ‘No double beds?’
Mark smiled, a deeper smile than the Chosen’s almost permanent one. ‘If you want to sleep together, a single bed is all you want. But afterwards, people need privacy. Silence, stillness. You can’t have that if someone else is with you.’
‘Why no cupboards?’
‘We share whatever we need. The clothing room is just in here. Anyone can help themselves. That’s the “where does this go?” room, for anything that doesn’t quite fit in the work rooms. And this,’ the pride was clear in his voice, ‘is the library.’
Jed whistled, which would have had Matilda giving her the dragon eye. The longest room she had yet seen, laid out like a proper library, with moving shelves of books, tens of thousands of them.
Somehow, someway, Ra Zacharia controlled a lot of money.
‘And here we are in the refectory again.’
‘What’s in the other wing?’
‘That’s astronomy and medical. Ra Zacharia is in charge of those.’
‘Can we see them?’
‘I don’t have access, but I’m sure he’d be happy to show them to you another time.’
‘Why don’t you have access?’
‘Oh, of course I go there if I’m sick. But when you live together you need rules so work doesn’t get interrupted. I’ve shown you the areas where I work . . .’
‘You don’t have one single job?’ Scarlett had been surprisingly quiet.
‘Of course not. It wouldn’t be fair to have someone clean toilets forever. Each job is assessed at so many units per hour. Cleaning the toilets — they’re composting ones, by the way, Clivus Multrums from Sweden — gets ten credits per hour; cooking gets three; weaving gets three too; general cleaning is six. We each need to work thirty units a day.’
Like Walden Two indeed. ‘And you are gaining credits from showing us around?’ For that had been what the guide in the book earned.
Mark grinned. ‘Two credits only, because it’s fun.’
Had he earned two credits an hour for picking up Scarlett too? ‘What were you doing in the bookshop the other day?’
Mark looked startled.
‘You have that enormous library. Is one of your jobs to get books to add to it? Or did you go to the bookshop to meet Scarlett?’
‘Jed!’ Scarlett’s mutter was accompanied by a dig from her elbow.
‘Um . . .’ Mark glanced at Scarlett, obviously unwilling to reply.
So he had been there to meet Scarlett, who was almost always at the bookshop on Friday afternoons while Jed helped at River View. But he didn’t want Scarlett to know. Nor was he prepared to lie about it. Which, rather than turning Jed off, made her like him more. He might have been told to meet Scarlett, but he understood it would hurt her to hear that.
The white-clad kitchen staff — both male and female, and no aprons, thought Jed, all seemingly in the best of health except one woman with the faint suggestion of a limp — were putting out more platters of bread, and what looked like fruit purées rather than jams. Afternoon tea, but without the tea?
‘Would you like —?’ began Mark.
‘We need to go,’ said Jed. Which was true. She had to digest this, try to make sense of it. And Scarlett had been too quiet for too long. Could she possibly be hoping that the order and discipline of this building, the seeming serenity of the lives within it, might conceivably mean that Ra Zacharia’s promise could be true?
They walked towards the front door. ‘I hope you’ll come again soon,’ said Mark. ‘There’s a lot more to show you. The shearing shed, the greenhouses —’
‘What do you do in the chemistry lab?’ As Mark hesitated, she added, ‘You must work there, as you showed it to us.’
‘Mostly wash test tubes.’ She heard the truth in his voice, as well as the wish he could claim something more important to impress both her and Scarlett. ‘Miss Kelly?’
‘Jed.’
‘Jed. I . . . I was in a bad way before I came here. Most of us were. I truly believe this community is the best place on earth. For everyone.’
‘Maybe you’re right.’ Jed Kelly, millionaire, even if a reluctant one, had choices, comfort, security. Few were as lucky as she was — and it had been luck, not hard work, that had given her all she had now. The community of the Chosen of the Universe seemed to truly offer its inhabitants a better life than they might have elsewhere. But at what cost — and to whom?
Jed nodded at the jar of money on the side table by the door. ‘Should I add to that?’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Mark quietly. ‘Anyone who passes through these doors can help themselves to as much as they need. It’s a pot for taking money from, not putting in.’
And yet someone must fill it. At, presumably, so many credits per hour. ‘Thank you,’ said Jed. She hesitated. ‘Are you allowed to visit other people?’
‘Of course.’
He seemed so surprised by the question Jed felt even more relief. Everything she had read about cults had emphasised that a true cult kept its members segregated from the world, imprisoned within a small circle of belief. Ra Zacharia must either feel extremely confident, or so eager to target her money, that he allowed Mark not just the freedom to visit her and Scarlett, but to feel that he was free.
‘Come to dinner some evening.’ She’d like to see what Matilda and Nancy made of Mark.
What would Matilda make of the Chosen of the Universe? It seemed slightly similar to Matilda’s own scheme during the Depression, the original River View, where the unemployed worked to build their own homes and grow their own food.
Those who worked — and kept Matilda’s rules — had comfort and security. But that settlement had faded with World War II as the inhabitants found lucrative jobs as men went off to war or joined the armed forces themselves. Only one family returned to their small house at the end of the war. They’d been given jobs at the new therapy centre, in the kitchen and garden.
Would Matilda approve of the community of the Chosen? She should. Jed should too. But aliens . . .
No, Jed realised. Aliens didn’t really bother her. Even otherwise quite sane people believed in aliens — those millions who’d bought von Däniken’s book. Her unease came from a community based on gratitude to one man, the one who had ‘healed’ them. The one they must obey if they were to stay healed, and in the quiet refuge of this community.
Neither gratitude nor dependence had been part of Skinner’s utopia.
Mark hesitated, then bent and quickly kissed Scarlett’s cheek. ‘See you soon,’ he said, obviously waiting for them to go. Equally obviously, he had forgotten that Scarlett and her chair could not get down the steps.
Jed evaluated the stairs, then quickly took the handles of Scarlett’s wheelchair before Scarlett was forced to ask for help. She could manage taking it down, Scarlett and all.
Probably.
Mark flushed as she began to heave the chair down the stairs and ran to help steady it. They had just reached the car park when Ra Zacharia appeared. He ran down the steps and held out his hand to Jed. ‘It was good to meet you again.’
The proper response would have been, ‘It was good to meet you too.’ Or even, ‘Thank you. It was an interesting tour.’ Jed simply nodded.
Ra Zacharia held out his hand to Scarlett. She shook it too. ‘Thank you,’ she said, then added the words Ra Zacharia was obviously waiting for. ‘It was fascinating.’
And that, thought Jed, was all too true.
Ra Zacharia looked at Jed again. ‘I know what you think, Miss Kelly. You think this is all too good to be true. But may I ask just one thing? Go outside tonight. Stand in silence under the sky. Look towards Alpha Centauri and just breathe. Breathe the night air. Breathe silence. Feel the universe about you. Feel you are part of it as well.’
It was strangely like Fred’s advice that first rain-soaked night she’d come to Gibber’s Creek, when the swaggie had saved her life, not just with his sausages but with his advice to push away the terror she had lived with for so long, push it back enough to stop and see and hear the world around her.
‘I’ll do that,’ she said slowly.
Zacharia smiled. Not a charismatic smile, but a real one. Perhaps, thought Jed, a man can use his charisma as a tool for good. Perhaps a charismatic man did not necessarily mean a bad one.
Perhaps.
‘Next time you visit I will give you the coordinates so you can translate the spacecraft’s message to humanity yourself. Though if you gaze up long enough, you may find it yourself, once you know that it is there.’ He turned to go.
‘Ra Zacharia?’ Jed said impulsively.
He turned back.
‘There’s a girl who lives at the commune by the river, Halfway to Eternity. Her name is Leafsong. She can’t talk. Could you heal her too?’
‘No,’ said Ra Zacharia gently.
‘Why not?’ demanded Scarlett. Jed was glad to hear a small note of anger in Scarlett’s voice for her friend.
‘I’ve met the girl in town, several times. And yes, I sought her out, because I had been told she couldn’t speak. But she can speak. She simply doesn’t wish to. Perhaps I could convince her — yes, Miss Kelly, I am very good at persuasion. It is a skill, like any other, and I use it for good. But it would be deeply wrong to make Miss Leafsong speak. She is who she is, and needs no changing.’
Scarlett glanced at Jed. Jed nodded. This man was right. And insightful. But no con man was ever successful without insight. And if this was a con, it was very successful indeed.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Mark waved as Boadicea rode over the immaculate bitumen towards the gravel road. The car bumped across the track beyond the high gates before Scarlett spoke. ‘Well?’
‘Well. Well. Well.’
‘Don’t go all Shakespeare clever on me. You know what I mean.’
‘No, I don’t. Are you asking what I think of Mark? If he really likes you, or is using you to get to me, and me to get to the Thompson money? Or what I think of the Chosen of the Universe?’
‘All of those. And I know Mark is using me to get to you. But . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Jed gently. ‘There is a but. I think Mark was probably sent to the bookshop to meet you. I think he also likes you. Really likes you.’
‘Living there would be . . . easy,’ said Scarlett. ‘Even if Ra Zacharia couldn’t cure me.’
A grown-up version of River View, which Scarlett had so recently escaped.
Did Scarlett realise that? Would she subconsciously want to return to security or be repelled by it? Impossible to tell from the girl’s face. And possibly Scarlett herself didn’t know. Scarlett was far too intelligent to make a judgement without data. And neither of them had enough. Yet.
Where had the money come from to set up the community, to keep it going? Surely not from hand-woven cloth. And there was that promise that Scarlett would be able to walk. Skinner’s book had no miraculous cures for its Walden Two members. But then Walden Two had not had a doctor in charge. Were there possibly medical advances that even the experts at River View like Matron Clancy didn’t know about? Or, Jed admitted, didn’t speak of, in case they raised false hopes?
She’d like to see the X-rays that showed Ra Zacharia’s brain tumour, and ones that showed it was no longer there. She couldn’t ask, but Dr McAlpine might be in a position to. ‘How about asking Mark to dinner one Saturday night?’
Scarlett glared at her. ‘Don’t you dare invite Matilda and Nancy and Michael and Dr McAlpine to dinner with Mark.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want him inspected —’ Scarlett stopped, blushed.
Did Scarlett hope that Mark might become a boyfriend? Or was she just protective, as Mark had been protective of her? ‘Just you and me and Leafsong at dinner then,’ said Jed softly. ‘How about that?’
‘That is acceptable,’ said Scarlett. Jed ached at the hope in her voice. For a handsome young man to find her desirable, lovable? Or for the chance to walk?
Jed wished she knew. And tonight, she was going to look towards Alpha Centauri and try to find that Morse-coding star, or spacecraft. And, just possibly, feel part of the universe once again.