Kleo began to snivel.
Nick said nothing, thought nothing; he was empty and numbed. A hand, colder than that of death itself, gripped his heart, killing off all emotion.
FOUR
Picking up his line-one fone, Willis Gram, Council Chairman of the Extraordinary Committee For Public Safety, bantering said, ‘How’s the capture of Provoni coming, Director? Any new news?’ He chuckled. God knew where Thors Provoni was. Probably dead long ago, on some airless planetoid far away.
Police Director Lloyd Barnes said stonily, ‘Are you speaking of media releases, sir?’
He laughed. ‘Tell me what the TV and the papers are blabbing about now.’ He could, of course, turn his own TV set on, without having even to get out of bed. But he enjoyed raking his stuffed-shirt Police Director over the coals re the Thors Provoni situation. The color of Barnes’ face usually proved interesting in a morbid sort of way. And, being an Unusual of the highest order, Gram could enjoy firsthand the chaos in the man’s mind when it came to anything dealing with the topic of the runaway traitor.
After all, it had been Director Barnes who had released Thors Provoni from a Federal prison ten years ago. As rehabilitated.
‘Provoni is going to narrowly slip through our fingers again,’ Barnes said gloomily.
‘Why don’t you say he’s dead?’ It would have enormous psychological consequences on the population – and along the lines he would have liked to see.
‘If he shows up here again, the basis of our situation would be jeopardized. By merely showing up—’
‘Where’s my breakfast?’ Gram asked. ‘Tell them to bring it in.’
‘Yes sir,’ Barnes said, nettled. ‘And what do you want? Eggs and toast? Fried ham?’
‘Is there really ham available?’ Gram asked. ‘Make it ham, with three chicken eggs. But make sure nothing’s ersatz.’
Not enjoying his servant-role, Barnes muttered, ‘Yes sir,’ and got off the line.
Willis Gram lay back against the pillows; one of his personal men immediately manifested himself and expertly propped the pillows up exactly as they should have been. Now where’s the damn paper? Gram asked himself, and held out his hand to receive it; another of his personal staff-members noted his gesture and adroitly produced the current three editions of the Times.
For a time, he leafed through the first sections of the great old newspaper – now government-controlled. ‘Eric Cordon,’ he said at last, making a motion with his right hand to show that he wished to dictate. At once a scribe appeared, portable transcriber in hand. ‘To all council members,’ Gram said. ‘We cannot claim Provoni’s death – for reasons which Director Barnes has pointed out – but we can deliver Eric Cordon. I mean we can execute him. And what a great relief that will be.’ Almost, he thought, like getting Thors Provoni himself. Throughout the Under Men network, Eric Cordon was the most admired organizer and speaker. And there were, of course, his many books.
Cordon was a true Old Man intellectual, a theoretical physicist who could inspire a great group-response among other disenchanted Old Men who longed for the ancient days. Who would, if he could, put the clock back fifty years. Cordon, however, despite his unique forensic ability, was a thinker, not a doer – as was Provoni: Thors Provoni the man of action who had roared off to ‘get help’, as Cordon, his onetime friend, had reported in endless speeches, books and grubby tracts. Cordon was popular, but – unlike Provoni – Cordon was not a public menace. With his execution, he would leave a void which he had really never properly filled. He was, despite his public appeal, strictly small-fry.
But much of the Old Men population did not understand that. Hero worship surrounded Eric Cordon. Provoni was an abstract hope; Cordon existed. And he worked and wrote and spoke here on Earth.
Picking up the line-two fone he said, ‘Get me Cordon on the big screen, Miss Knight.’ He hung up, settled back in his bed and once again snooped into the articles in the newspaper.
‘Further dictation, Council Chairman?’ the scribe inquired, after an interval of time.
‘Oh yes.’ Gram pushed the newspaper aside. ‘Where was I?’
‘“I mean we can execute him. And what a—“’
‘To continue,’ Gram said, clearing his throat. ‘I want all department heads – are you getting this? – to grasp and understand the reasons behind my desire to finish off whats-hisname.’
‘Eric Cordon,’ the scribe said.
‘Yes.’ Gram nodded. ‘Why we must destroy Eric Cordon is as follows. Cordon is the link between the Old Men of Earth and Thors Provoni. As long as Cordon is alive, people feel the presence of Provoni. Without Cordon they have no contact, real or otherwise, with that ratty space bastard out there somewhere. In a sense, Cordon is the voice for Provoni while Provoni is gone. I admit that this might backfire; the Old Men might riot for a time… but on the other hand this might bring the Under Men out of hiding where we could get at them. In a sense, I’m about to deliberately spark a premature show of force by the Under Men; there will be wild waves as soon as Cordon’s death is announced, but ultimately—’
He broke off. On the big screen, which comprised the far wall of his great bedroom, a face had begun to ignite. A thin, esthetic face with hollows about the jaw: a weak jaw, Gram reflected as he saw the jaw move with speech. Rimless glasses, meager hair in the form of carefully combed strands across an otherwise bald head.
‘Sound,’ Gram instructed, as Cordon’s lips continued to move inaudibly.
‘… pleasure,’ Cordon boomed, as the sound came on too loudly. ‘I know how busy you are, sir. But if you wish to speak to me—’ Cordon gestured elegantly. ‘I am ready.’
To one of his bedside aides, Gram said, ‘Where the hell is he now?’
‘In Brightforth Prison.’
‘You getting enough to eat?’ Gram asked the image on the big screen.
‘Very much so, yes.’ Cordon smiled, showing teeth so even as to seem – and probably were – false.
‘And you’re free to write?’
Cordon said, ‘I have the materials.’
‘Tell me, Cordon,’ Gram said energetically, ‘why do you write and say those damn things? You know they’re not true.’
‘Truth is in the eye of the beholder.’ Cordon chuckled in his thin, humorless way.
‘You know that trial a few months ago,’ Gram asked, ‘where you were sentenced to sixteen years in prison for treason? Well, goddam it, the judges have gone back and eradicated the specifications of your punishment. They’ve now decided on the death penalty.’
No expression appeared on Cordon’s bleak face.
‘Can he hear me?’ Gram asked an aide.
‘Oh yes, sir. He hears you, all right.’
Gram said, ‘We’re going to execute you, Cordon. You know, I can read your mind; I know how afraid you are.’ It was true; inside Cordon quaked. Even though their contact remained purely electronic, with Cordon himself actually two thousand miles away. Psionic capacities like this always baffled the Old Men – and, frequently, the New Men as well.
Cordon said nothing. But it was obvious that he grasped the fact that Gram had begun to feel him out telepathically.
‘Down underneath,’ Gram said, ‘you’re thinking, “Maybe I should bolt. Provoni is dead—“’
‘I don’t think Provoni is dead,’ Cordon broke in, showing outrage: his first genuine facial expression.
‘Subconsciously,’ Gram said. ‘You’re not even aware of it.’
‘Even if Thors were dead—’
‘Oh, come off it,’ Gram said. ‘You know and I know that if Provoni were dead you’d drop your agitation and propaganda enterprises and creep off out of public sight for the rest of your damn ineffectual life.’
A buzzer in the communications apparatus to Gram’s right all at once squeaked into life. ‘Pardon me,’ Gram said, and pressed a switch.
‘Your wife’s attorney is here, Council Chairman. You left word that he was to be let in no matter
what you were doing. Shall I send him on in, or—’
‘Send him in,’ Gram said. To Cordon he said, ‘We’ll notify you – Director Barnes, most probably – an hour before your scheduled death. Goodbye, I’m busy now.’ He made a motion and the wall-size screen dribbled into opaqueness.
The central bedroom door opened and a slim, tall, well-dressed gentleman with a short beard strode briskly into the room, briefcase in hand. Horace Denfeld, who always dressed this way.
‘Do you know what I read in Eric Cordon’s mind just now?’ Gram said. ‘Subconsciously, he wishes he’d never joined the Under Men, and here he is, the leader of it – to the extent that they have a leader. I’m going to obliterate their existence, starting with Cordon. Do you approve of my ordering Cordon’s execution?’
Seating himself, Denfeld unzipped his briefcase. ‘According to Irma’s instructions, and my professional advice, we have changed several clauses – minor ones – in the separate maintenance agreement. Here.’ He handed a folio, a document, to Gram. ‘Take your time, Council Chairman.’
‘What will happen when Cordon is gone?’ Gram asked as he unfolded the legal size sheets of paper and began reading here and there; in particular he scanned the passages marked in red.
Denfeld said offhandedly, ‘I couldn’t even manage to guess, sir.’
‘“Minor clauses”,’ Gram mocked with bitterness as he read. ‘Jeez Christ, she’s upped the child support from two hundred pops a month to four.’ He shuffled among the pages, feeling the edges of his ears glow with wrath – and with stunned dismay. ‘And the alimony up from three thousand to five. And—’ He reached the last sheet; it was strewn with red lines and sums penciled in. ‘Half my travel expenses – she gets that. And all of what I make for paid speeches.’ His neck had become grimy and soggy with warm, stinging sweat.
‘But she’s allowing you to keep all your earnings from written material which you—’
‘There isn’t any written material. Who do you think I am, Eric Cordon?’ He tossed the papers brusquely onto the bed; for a time he sat steaming… partly from what he had just now read and partly because of the attorney, Horace Denfeld, who was a New Man; low as he was in the general New Man standings, Denfeld considered all Unusuals – including the Council Chairman – merely a pseudo evolvement. Gram could pick it up from Denfeld’s mind: that low, constant level of superiority and contempt.
Gram said, ‘I’ll have to think it over.’ I’ll show it to my own attorneys, he said to himself. The best government attorneys there are: those in the tax branch.
‘I want you to consider one thing, sir,’ Denfeld said. ‘In a way, it may seem to you that it’s unfair of Mrs. Gram to ask so—’ He searched for the word. ‘So large a share in your property.’
‘The house,’ Gram agreed. ‘And the four apartment buildings in Scranton, Pa. All that, and now this.’
‘But,’ Denfeld pointed out smoothly, his tongue flitting about his lips like a paper streamer dancing in the wind, ‘it is essential that your separating from your wife must at all costs be kept secret – for yourself. For the fact that a Council Chairman of the Extraordinary Committee For Public Safety cannot let a breath of… well, shall we say la calugna—’
‘What’s that?’
‘Scandal. There can’t be a scandal for any high-ranking Unusual or New Man anyhow, as you well know. But this, plus your position—’
‘I’ll resign,’ Gram grated, ‘before I sign that. Five thousand pops alimony a month. She’s insane.’ He raised his head and scrutinized Denfeld. ‘What happens to a woman when she’s getting a separate maintenance or a divorce? She – they – want everything, nailed down or otherwise. The house, the apartments, the car, all the pops in the world—’ God, he thought, and rubbed his forehead wearily. To one of his servants he said, ‘Get me my coffee.’
‘Yes sir.’ The aide fiddled with the coffee maker, handed him his black, strong espresso cup.
To the aide, and to everyone in the room, Gram said, appealing to them, ‘What can I do? She’s got me.’ He placed the folio of documents in the drawer of his bedside desk. ‘There’s nothing more to discuss,’ he said to Denfeld. ‘My attorneys will let you know my decision.’ He glowered at Denfeld, whom he did not like at all. ‘Now I have other business.’ He nodded to an aide, who put his firm hand on the attorney’s shoulder and guided him toward one of the doors leading out of the bedroom.
After the door had shut behind Denfeld, Gram lay back, meditating and drinking his coffee. If only she’d break a law, he said to himself. Even a traffic law – anything to get her behind in her relationship to the police. If we caught her jaywalking we could make it stick; she could resist arrest, use foul and obscene language in public, be a public menace by virtue of the fact that she had deliberately flouted the law… and, he thought, if only Barnes’ people could catch her on a felony rap; for example buying and/or drinking alcohol. Then (his own attorneys had explained this) we could hit her with an unfit mother suit, take the children, put the blame on her in a true divorce action – which, under those circumstances, we could make public.
But, as it stood, Irma had too many things on him. A contested divorce would make him look bad indeed, what with what Irma could scrape together out of the gutter.
Picking up his line-one fone he said, ‘Barnes, I want you to get hold of that cop dame, that Alice Noyes, and send her in here. Maybe you should come along, too.’
Police occifer Noyes headed the team which had been trying, for almost three months, to get something on Irma. Twenty-four hours a day, his wife was monitored by police video and audio gadgetry… without her knowledge, of course. In fact, one video camera scanned the happenings in Irma’s bathroom, which unfortunately had not turned up anything to speak of, Everything Irma said, did, everyone she saw, every place she went – all on reels of tape at PSS Central in Denver. And it added up to nothing.
She’s got her own police, he realized gloomily. ExPSS flatheads who roamed about with her when she went shopping or to a party or to Dr. Radcliff, her dentist. I’ve got to get rid of her, he said to himself. I should never have married an Old Man wife. But it had happened long ago, when he did not hold the high position which had become his later on. Every Unusual and every New Man sneered at him in private, and he did not like it; he read thoughts, lots of them, emanating from many, many people, and buried there somewhere lay the contempt.
It was exceptionally great among the New Men.
While he lay waiting for Director Barnes and occifer Noyes, he examined the Times once again, opening it at random to one of its three hundred pages.
And found himself confronted by an article on the Great Ear project… an article which called the byline of Amos Ild, a very well-placed New Man: someone Gram could not touch.
Well, the Great Ear experiment is just rolling merrily along, he thought sardonically as he read.
Thought to be beyond the scope of probability, work on the first purely electronic telepathic listening device advances at a reassuring rate, officials of McMally Corporation, the designer and builder of Great Ear, as it has come to be called, said today in a press conference attended by many skeptical observers. ‘When Great Ear goes into operation,’ Munro Capp opined, ‘it will be capable of telepathically monitoring the thought-waves of tens of thousands of persons, and with the ability – not found among Unusuals – to unscramble these enormous flood-tides of…
He tossed the newspaper away; it fell with a noisy thump to the deep pile of the carpeted floor. Those New Men bastards, he said savagely to himself, his teeth grinding impotently. They’ll pour billions of pops into it, and after Great Ear they’ll build a device which can replace precog Unusuals, then all the rest, one by one. There’ll be poltergeist machines rolling along the streets and buzzing through the air. We won’t be needed.
And… instead of the strong and stable two-party government which they now had, there would be a one-party system, a monolithic monster with New Men h
olding all key posts, at all levels. Goodbye to Civil Service – except to tests for New Man cortical activity, that double-domed neutrologics with such postulates as, A thing is equal to its opposite and the greater the discrepancy, the greater the congruity. Christ!
Maybe, he thought, the whole structure of New Man thought is a gigantic put-on. We can’t understand it; the Old Men can’t understand it; we take their word for it that it’s a whole new step upward in the evolution of human brain-functioning. Admittedly, there are those Rogers nodes, or whatever. There is a physical, different structure of their cerebral cortex. But…
One of his intercoms clicked on. ‘Director Barnes and a woman police occifer are—’
‘Send them in,’ Gram said. He leaned back, made himself comfortable, folded his arms and waited.
Waited to tell them his new idea.
FIVE
At eight-thirty in the morning, Nicholas Appleton showed up at his job and prepared to begin the day.
The sun shone down on his shop, his little building. Therein he rolled up his sleeves, put on his magnifying glasses, and plugged in the heating iron.
His boss, Earl Zeta, stumped up to him, hands in the pockets of his khaki trousers, an Italian cigar dangling from his overgrown lips. ‘What say, Nick?’
‘We won’t know for a couple of days,’ Nick said. ‘They’re going to mail us the results.’
‘Oh yeah, your kid.’ Zeta put a dark, large paw on Nick’s shoulder. ‘You’re cutting the grooves too light,’ he said. ‘I want them down into the casing. Into the damn carcass.’
Nick, protestingly, said, ‘But if I go any deeper—’ The tire will blow if they back over a warm match, he said to himself. It’s equal to shooting them down with a laser rifle. ‘Okay,’ he said, the fighting strength oozing out of him; after all Earl Zeta was the boss. ‘I’ll go deeper,’ he said, ‘until the iron comes out the other side.’
‘You do that and you’re fired,’ Zeta said.
‘Your philosophy is that once they buy the squirt—’