"I do what I feel like doing," said Perriweather. He had been raised that way.
"Well, we're watching you," Gloria said.
"And I am always watching you," Perriweather had said.
That evening after he had brooded all day over the news of the Ung-beetle disaster, the Muswassers came to Perriweather's home. They seemed absolutely gleeful.
"Why are you smiling?" Perriweather asked.
"More than a hundred delegates are dead. The TNT didn't work but that other thing we planted did."
"Dammit, woman, all the Ung beetles are dead. You think that's a victory?" Perriweather demanded.
"The delegates. More than a hundred. We did it. That thing we planted."
"Where'd you plant it?" Perriweather asked. "Never mind, I'll tell you. You planted it inside something refrigerated, didn't you?"
"Right in their refrigerated medicine container," Gloria said with a proud smile.
"Exactly, you idiot. And by the time it had warmed up enough to be of use, it was too late. And all it could do was infect the chimpanzees. The deaths of all those beetles is on your head."
"I'll take the blame for that if I get the credit for the hundred delegates," Gloria said.
Perriweather shook his head. "I can't tolerate this anymore. Now I hear stories about two new scientists at the IHAEO. They say they're preparing even bigger crimes. No more half-measures."
"What are you going to do?" Nathan Muswasser asked.
Perriweather said he was going to take out the entire lab, all its equipment and all its personnel, in retribution for the Ung genocide.
"Impossible," said Gloria.
"Too dangerous," said Nathan.
"You know," Perriweather said coldly, "I've been putting up all the money for the Species Liberation Alliance for years. Every time I'm called on, I defend you, and you people will do anything but take real risks. Now, when I need you, where are you? You're telling me things are impossible or too dangerous."
"You're just too interested in bugs," Gloria said.
"And you're just too insensitive to their plight," Perriweather said.
"But we'll work with you," she said. "We need your money, so we'll work with you."
"I think I'll be able to do this one without you," Perriweather said. "If I need you, I'll call."
After they left, he sat for a long while staring at the study door. Of course they didn't understand what he wanted. No one, not since he was five years old, had ever understood what this heir to the Perriweather fortune had wanted.
His wife did not know. He knew what she wanted.
She wanted to be married to a Perriweather. Sometimes, she wanted to copulate. Eventually, after being turned down by him enough times, she took lovers. Sometimes he would watch them from the floor above but it just didn't interest him.
He was willing to reproduce. In fact, that had been one of his requirements upon agreeing to marry her. But he insisted that before they copulate, she be with egg.
"I'm not going to fertilize an empty uterus," Waldron had said to the most beautiful debutante of North Shore society, now his bride.
"Well, some people, Waldron, you know, some people enjoy it."
"I guess they do. Some people."
"You didn't tell me you didn't enjoy it," she said.
"You didn't ask," said Waldron, his thin elegant patrician features looking like an ice mask.
"I assumed," she said.
"Not my fault," he said. They had honeymooned on a tour of Europe. Waldron, his bride found out, liked alleys. Garbage dumps held more fascination for him than the Louvre or British theater.
He often mumbled as he passed cemeteries, "Waste. Waste."
"Human life? The death of us all, dear, is inevitable. But we can be remembered by our loved ones," the beautiful young Mrs. Perriweather had said.
"Nonsense," he snarled. "Brass, steel. Airtight, watertight. Just throw them in the ground. Let them do some good."
"Have you always felt this way?" she asked.
"Of course. What a waste. Sealing bodies up like that is so ... so . . ."
"Futile? Pathetic?" she offered.
"Selfish," said Waldron.
At the time, Peiriweather's mother was still living and the young bride asked if Waldron had always been that way.
"You noticed?" asked the grande dame of North Shore society.
"When he asks for rotted fruit for dinner, it really is hard to miss, Mother. May I call you Mother?"
"I'm glad finally that someone does. Yes, Waldron does things that most people might consider different. But he is not, let me stress, he is not insane. Perriweather men have often been different. But they are not, let me reiterate, insane."
The mother-in-law was on her veranda, which stretched out over the rocky line that met the gray Atlantic that fine spring day.
"Perriweather men have sealed themselves in barrels and tried to float down the Amazon. One Perriweather liked to eat roasted bat. Another felt he was the bird god of the Incas, and Waldron's father, I must confess, liked to lather himself in glue before he did 'it.' "
"You poor woman," said the bride.
"Water-soluble. I insisted on water-soluble glue," said the older Mrs. Perriweather. "I never would with epoxy. But back to important things. None of the Perriweather men were ever really insane."
"What does it take for you to call one of them insane?"