Stella came back with a little cardboard box, silver-colored and battered, and repaired with tape. The Olympus Pearlcorder and accessories were in a jumble inside the box, along with extra tapes and batteries.
‘everybody will have to use one when we get the assignments,” she said. tow?’,
66You have to memorize every word of your assignment, and you have to be able to start anywhere, in the middle, toward the end, anywhere. So what you do is read it onto the tape, and then before you go to sleep and when you wake up, you play it and say it right along with yourself, over and over and over. It has to be so much second nature that you don’t have to think about it when you go out on an operation. They’re very, you know, compiete. You will get off at the corner of Main and Central. You will wale quickly north on Main on the right-hand side of the street. When you get to the bus stop at the southeast corner of Main and
The Green Ripper
Pearl, you will wait there until precisely fourteen hundred hours. You will turn and enter the General National Bank Building, take the first available elevator, and ride up to the fifteenth floor. You will turn left when you exit the elevator, follow the corridor to the fire door at the end.’ And so on. That was only part of a practice operation I did. There were two more pages of orders. By the time I started it, I never had to think of what to do next. I knew. I was like some kind of machine, you know?”
I took the recorder back to T-6 and left it on the bunk and came back and helped her with the meal. Since it was the last day of the year, Persival had canceled all afternoon exercises and given orders for solitary meditation and rest. I acquainted myself with my tape recorder. There was an attachment to screw onto the bottom of it which worked as a voice-actuating device. I tested the sensitivity. I put a tape in and read some of The Loving Heart.
“Just as white reflects all colors and black absorbs all colors, the Lord both reflects and absorbs all the thoughts and desires which pass through our mind. When you know that your thoughts are turning negative, that you are losing faith in your own faith, you must become one vith a trusted Brother or Sister who loves you, and through that person renew and restore each other to the positive glory of the Church.”
I listened to it come back, with little clicks where it had turned off by itself and come back on again at the sound of my voice, sometimes eliminating the first syllable after the pause.
It amused me to think of what Meyer would say about this mishmash. Though perfectly willing to pursue the philosophical concept to the furthest thicket of his mind, he has no patience with imprecision of thought, looseness of expression.
I read the tattered Pearlcorder manual again and pondered where to place the device. Persival and Alvor were the ones I wanted to tap. Alvor had a little square cement house of his own. It resembled him. Persival lived in the most elegant accommoda- tion of an, a fat tan motor home with bulbous rounded corners and six soft but not flat tires. In the evenings he would confer with Chuck or Alvor or both of them in his motor home. It had obsolete Arizona plates and was not readily visible from the broad flat area of the stony plateau.
One side of one tape was good for thirty minutes. Planting the machine was no good if I had no way to retrieve it.
The quality of the light had changed. I opened my door. Snow was falling, big fat flakes, melting as they fell, coming down in ever greater quantity,
The Green Ripper dimming the sky. As I stood there I heard the van coming. It stopped near the warehouse, and I went out to see if I could help, shoving the recorder into my pocket. There were some small heavy wooden boxes in addition to the supplies they had gone after. Chuck appeared, and as he and Alvor carried the boxes into the warehouse, I was detailed to move the provisions to the kitchen. It took four trips, and when I went back to the van, Brother Persival was standing, grimacing with pain, beside one of the small boxes which had fallen into the snow.