“No.”
“They did. Somebody shot it down with a sporting gun. And when it crashed they beat the pilot to death with clubs. Honest to God, Norman”—his voice cracked—“I don’t remember clearly enough to be sure I wasn’t in there with them!”
I’m going to cave in. Some part of his mind retained enough detachment to realise, sensing an aura like that of a gathering storm. I mustn’t drop the roach on the carpet. He aimed it at an ashtray and the controlled gesture blended smashingly into something that must be done this instant, this very quantum of time, so that his hand began to move normally and ended up making a blind jab and letting the roach go and jerking back up with its mate to cover his face as he leaned forward and broke down sobbing.
Norman, uncertain, got up, took half a pace forward, changed his mind, changed it again and came near. He said, “Donald, some of this is from pot and some of it’s from the police gas and some of it’s tiredness…”
The facile excuses faded away. He stood gazing down at Donald.
Started it? Did he? What did he—what could he—do? He’s a colourless sort of codder, inoffensive, never blew up even when I snapped at him about bringing home nothing but Afram girls. Mild. Underneath: temper?
The admission came as a dismaying shock: I don’t know. For years we’ve shared a home, traded shiggies, talked small talk for politeness’s sake—and I literally don’t know.
And Elihu Masters seems to think I’m fit to take charge of a helpless little country and make it over like Guinevere making over one of her clients, slicking it into the latest modern style.
One of us is genuinely crazy. Me?
He tapped Donald’s shoulder awkwardly. “Here!” he said. “Let me help you to bed. There’s time for a couple of hours’ rest before I leave for work. And I don’t have to disturb you.”
Passive, Donald allowed himself to be led to his bedroom. He threw himself down across the coverlet.
“Want I should put your inducer on?” Norman asked, stretching out one hand towards the cable of the little Russian device concealed in the pillow, which guaranteed rest to the worst insomniac by induction of sleep-rhythms in the medulla.
“No, thanks,” Donald muttered; then, as Norman was about to leave, he called, “By the way! When did I say Guinevere was having her party?”
“Ah—tonight, I guess.”
“Thought so. But I’m so confused … They picked up Victoria pretty quickly, didn’t they?”
“What?”
“I said they picked her up pretty quickly.” Detecting a note of puzzlement in Norman’s voice, Donald raised himself on one elbow. “Didn’t you shop her? When I saw her things were gone, I—”
He broke off. Norman had turned in the doorway to look across the living-room. Without further movement he could see, through the open door of his own bedroom, the closet door standing ajar to reveal vacancy where the current shiggy was allowed to hang her clothes.
“No, I didn’t shop her,” he said at length without a trace of emotion. “She must have decided to shade and fade while her news was still warm. Much good may it do her. But frankly I don’t care. As you saw, I hadn’t even noticed that her gear was gone until you mentioned it.” He hesitated. “I guess I should tell you right away, come to think of it, in case I don’t see you in the morning before I go out. I—ah—I may not be in New York much longer.”
With shocking suddenness Donald remembered the inspiration which had come to him earlier in the evening, and then had been driven instantly to the back of his mind by the irruption of the pseudo cab. Yet weariness overlay even his pride at the insight he had displayed in figuring out the truth. He had to let his head fall back on the soft engulfing mound of the pillows.
“I didn’t imagine you would be,” he said.
“What? Why not?”
“I thought they’d send you to Beninia sooner or later. Sooner, huh?”
“Howinole did you know that?” Norman closed his hand violently on the jamb of the door.
“Worked it out,” Donald said in a muffled voice. “That’s what I’m good at. That’s why they picked me for my job.”
“What job? You don’t have a…” Norman let the word die, listened to silence for a while, and eventually said, “I see. Like Victoria, hm?” The question shook with fury.
“No, not like Victoria. Christ, I shouldn’t have said it but I just couldn’t help it.” Donald forced himself into a sitting position. “No, please, not like Victoria. Nothing to do with you.”
“What, then?”
“Please, I’m not supposed to talk about it. But—oh, Jesus God, it’s been ten mortal years and…” He swallowed convulsively. “State,” he said at last in a tired voice. “Dilettante Dept. If they find out that you know I’ll be activated in my army rank and court-martialled in secret. They warned me. It sort of puts me at your mercy, doesn’t it?” he ended with a wan smile.
“So why did you tell me?” Norman asked after a pause.
“I don’t know. Maybe because if you want a chance to get even with me for what I did tonight I think you deserve one. So go ahead. The way I feel right now, I wouldn’t care if an avalanche fell on me.” He slumped back on the bed and shut his eyes again.
In Norman’s mind there came the grinding sound of rock breaking loose down a mountainside. A pang as sharp as an axe-blow struck across his left wrist from bone-tip to bone-tip; wincing, he caught at the hand to make sure it was still whole.
“I’ve got even with enough people to last me for life,” he said. “And it’s done me no good. No damned good at all. Go to sleep, Donald. You’ll feel better by this evening, I’m sure.”
He closed the door gently, using his left hand and ignoring the pain that was still as violent as if it had been real.
context (12)
THE SOCIOLOGICAL COUNTERPART OF CHEYNE-STOKES RESPIRATION
“If you want to know what’s shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: extremism. It is an almost infallible sign—a kind of death-rattle—when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them. A sound biological comparison would be the development of the fangs of the sabre-tooth tiger to the point where the beasts can’t close their mouths any more, or the growth of armour that’s indisputably impregnable but which weighs so much the owner can’t support his bulk.
“On this basis, it’s fairly certain that Christianity won’t last out the twenty-first century. To take but a couple of prime instances: the hiving off from Rome of the so-called Right Catholics, and the appearance of the Divine Daughters as an influential pressure-group. The former exhibits a remarkable deviation from the traditional attitude of the Catholic Church as an institution that above all concerned itself with the family, Western style; the Right Catholics have become so obsessed with the simple act of fucking that they appear to have no time left for other aspects of human relationships, although they issue pronunciamenti galore on them. None of these bears even the slight relevance to contemporary reality which a sympathetic eye (not mine) can detect in similar statements originating from the Vatican. And the latter, who professedly model themselves on the mediaeval orders of nuns but who actually have borrowed the majority of their tenets—antimechanisation, distrust of bodily pleasure and so on—from respectable, well-integrated groups like the Amish and then soured them by a judicious admixture of the vinegar of hatred, are capitalising on about the most self-defeating of modern trends, our reluctance to further overburden our resources by having large families. They exploit our vicarious appreciation of people, especially women, who decline to have any progeny whatever, thus relieving us of a sense of personal responsibility for the whole damned mess.
“They won’t last.
“I can’t say I see much better times ahead for Muslims, either; though Islam has
become a sizeable minority religion in the Western West in the past half-century, the spearhead of its advance has been the descendant of a schism, like the Right Catholics. I mean, naturally, the Children of X, who have constructed nothing more than an analogue of Christianity using their murdered patron as their Osiris-Attis-Jesus figure. They’ll go the way of the mystery religions of ancient times, and for the same reason: they’re exclusionist, and you aren’t allowed in unless you fulfil certain conditions of birth, primarily that you should be recognisably coloured. (I feel a lot less strongly, by the way, about racial discrimination in organisations I don’t want to join. It’s an indication that they’ll die out eventually.)
“Regrettably, however, this leper-mark of extremism isn’t confined to such expendable traits as religion. Look at sex, for example. More and more people are spending more time at it, and resorting to ever more devious ways of keeping up their enthusiasm, like commercially available aphrodisiacs and parties that are considered to be failures unless they evolve into orgies. A hundred different shiggies a year, which is something a young man can achieve without doing more than taking off his clothes, fulfils neither of the essential biological requirements of the sexual urge: it doesn’t lead to a stable environment for the cubs of the next generation, nor does it establish the kind of rapport between couples (or multiples—marriage works on all kinds of bases, not invariably monogamous) which serves to avert crisis over the possession of other members of the species. On the contrary, it leads rather to a kind of frenzy, because instead of the partners enjoying a continual and reciprocal reassurance about their respective masculinity/femininity they are driven to seek that reassurance anew every few days.
“In effect, applying the yardstick of extremism leads one to conclude that the human species itself is unlikely to last very long.”
—You’re an Ignorant Idiot by Chad C. Mulligan
continuity (12)
IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE AUTOMATIC BUT ACTUALLY YOU HAVE TO PRESS THIS BUTTON
A shrill ringing gaffed Donald through the ears and dragged him struggling out of the deep water of sleep. Cursing, he managed to focus his eyes on the wall-clock and saw it was only nine-thirty anti-matter. He tried for a while to convince himself that what had disturbed him was nothing more than Norman leaving for work a quarter-hour later than usual. But the ringing repeated.
He almost fell off the edge of the bed and forced his arms into the sleeves of a robe. A good few people didn’t own such garments any longer; if they had callers before they were dressed they went to the door as they were and if the callers were shocked that was their problem. At least half the shiggies off the circuit who had briefly stayed in this apartment owned nothing but street-clothes, and those exiguous enough to pack in a single bag. But he was a little old-fashioned.
He made it to the door still less than normally alert, and when he checked through the spy-port to see who was outside all that registered on his mind apart from the number—four of them—was that his callers were from out of town. This was demonstrated by their carrying coats slung over their arms.
Stifling a yawn, he opened the door.
All the visitors were youthful in appearance, though at closer sight the one standing closest to the entrance might have been older than Donald. All wore rather formal clothing: sweaterettes and slax in shades of grey, green, dark blue and beige. The effect was that they were wearing uniforms, one apiece. All seemed to have natural hair, neither dyed nor coiffed. It struck Donald, much too late, that if a group of yonderboys wanted to gain access to someone’s home this was exactly how they would have disguised themselves, discarding their gaudy shirjacks with the built-in fake musculature and their skin-tight codpieced slax.
The one who headed the rest said, “Morning, Mr. Hogan. You don’t have any shiggies here at the moment, do you?”
“I—uh—what’s it got to do with you? Who are you?”
“One moment please.” The man gestured to his companions and advanced with them at his heels; Donald, even yet incompletely awake, fell back, feeling very vulnerable with nothing on except his flimsy thigh-length robe.
“Didn’t expect to be back here so soon,” the spokesman said affably, closing the door. “All right, check it out fast!”
The three sparewheels tossed their coats on handy pieces of furniture. Each proved to have been concealing something in his covered hand. Two of them had small instruments which they proceeded to point at the walls, ceiling and floor, watching them intently. The third had a bolt-gun, and he strode rapidly from room to room of the apartment peering around suspiciously.
Donald’s heart began to feel very heavy inside his chest, as though it were pressing on his intestines and threatening to squeeze up vomit from him like toothpaste from a tube. He said weakly, “Back so soon…? But I’ve never seen you before!”
“I get only our own stuff,” one of the sparewheels said, lowering his incomprehensible instrument. The second nodded. The third returned from his tour of inspection putting his gun away in a concealed pocket beneath his left arm.
“Thank you,” the spokesman said mildly. “Ah—shagreen, Mr. Hogan. I think that should explain our visit adequately…?”
There was no menace in the gentle questioning note on which he uttered the words, but abruptly the heaviness of Donald’s heart became so great it seemed to have stopped altogether, and he could imagine the ponderous burden dragging him down to the floor.
Shagreen. Oh my God. No!
He hadn’t heard the word, to his knowledge, since a day ten years before when the colonel, in that office in Washington, warned him how he would be activated if the need arose. And the reference to “coming back”, and to “our own stuff”—!
I told Norman. Last night I was sick and stupefied and couldn’t control myself. I told him the truth. I’m a traitor. Not just a spy, not just a fool who can start a riot without trying. I’m a traitor too!
He licked his lips, absolutely unable to react even to reveal his dismay. The spokesman was going on, and certainly he did not have the air of an official sent to arrest a traitor.
But all the things he could do would be equally bad.
“I’m Major Delahanty. We haven’t met before, but I feel I know you better than most of your friends do. I took you over from Colonel Braddock when he retired last year. These are my assistants, by the way—Sergeant French, Sergeant Awden, Sergeant Schritt.” The sparewheels nodded but Donald was much too confused to think anything except that he now, finally, knew the name of the colonel who had administered his oath was Braddock.
He said, “You’ve come to activate me, hm?”
Delahanty looked quite sympathetic. “Didn’t pick the best time, did we? What with that shiggy turning out to be an indesper and then you getting fouled up in the riot last night … Schritty, why don’t you fix some coffee for the lieutenant here and maybe for all of us?”
That fixed it firmly in Donald’s mind: “the lieutenant here”. Probably the choice of phrase was calculated. It bit home on his brain like a steel claw.
“I—I have to go to the bathroom,” he whispered. “Sit down and make yourselves at home.”
* * *
When he had emptied his bladder he tugged open the medicine cabinet and stared first at his own reflection, bleary-eyed, unshaven, then at the bottles, packets and phials ranged on the shelves. He stretched out his hand for some Wakup tablets, and his fingers brushed a neighbouring jar. Out of habit he read the label. It said: POISON. NOT TO BE TAKEN.
All of a sudden he was as frightened in reality as he had imagined in his long-ago nightmares. He clung to the side of the washbasin to stop himself keeling over, teeth chattering, vision tunnelled down to a single bright white patch, which was the label bearing the burning words.
Faust felt like this. The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, the devil will come and Faustus must be damned … How long did he buy with the currency of his soul—ten years?
What
are they going to make me do? At least I have one hope denied to Faust … Might not be quick, but provided they assume I’m favouring my bowels not my bladder they’ll give me five or ten minutes. The lot at one go should be enough.
He snatched up the jar and flipped off the lid. At the bottom of the opaque container a dusting of whitish powder lay, mocking him.
He was abruptly very cold, but the shaking from terror was at least driven away by the honest shivers that now racked him. He dropped the jar, and the lid after, in the disposall, and gulped down the Wakup pills he had at first intended to take.
After another couple of minutes he turned and left the bathroom with careful, unhurried strides.
* * *
It was a fresh shock to discover that, instead of dialling for coffee from the block kitchen as a stranger might be expected to do, Sergeant Schritt had used Donald’s own maker, kept in his bedroom along with a can of his favourite blend.
Christ, how much do these people know about me? Earlier, when I talked so dangerously to Norman …
His voice, though, remained reasonably steady when he said, “I didn’t realise you’d been watching me so thoroughly.”
“Routine, I’m afraid.” Delahanty shrugged. “We much prefer our operatives to live alone, as you know, but that in itself, these days, is pretty much of a suspicious circumstance, what with there not being enough accommodation to go around. Mr. House is as clean as they come, of course, a good respectable mosque-goer and holding down a very responsible position, but the fact that you were both working the shiggy circuit has given us some uncomfortable moments, I must confess. Especially last night when we detected that ingenious gadget in the polyorgan. I haven’t run across that one before, and it’s the next best thing to foolproof, blast it.”
Holding his cup of coffee very carefully so as not to spill a drop over the rim, Donald sat down. He said, “Ah—how did you find out about that?”