“Maybe everybody else is. What’s the problem?”
“All my furniture’s gone. A dunning robot is trying to shake me down for nine bigs. I don’t know where Carole is. I can’t remember what I was doing earlier today. I’ve got a note here about getting tickets to Caracas that I wrote myself, and I don’t know why. And—”
“Skip the rest,” Munson said. “I can’t do anything for you. I’ve got problems of my own.”
“Can I come over, at least, and talk?”
“Absolutely not!” In a softer voice Munson said, “Listen, Paul, I didn’t mean to yell, but something’s come up here, something very distressing—”
“You don’t need to pretend. You’ve got Helene with you and you wish I’d leave you alone. Okay.”
“No. Honestly,” Munson said. “I’ve got problems, suddenly. I’m in a totally ungood position to give you any help at all. I need help myself.”
“What sort? Anything I can do for you?”
“I’m afraid not. And if you’ll excuse me, Paul—”
“Just tell me one thing, at least. Where am I likely to find Carole? Do you have any idea?”
“At her husband’s place, I’d say.”
“I’m her husband.”
There was a long pause. Munson said finally, “Paul, she divorced you last January and married Pete Castine in April.”
“No,” Mueller said.
“What, no?”
“No, it isn’t possible.”
“Have you been popping pills, Paul? Sniffing something? Smoking weed? Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t take time now to—”
“At least tell me what day today is.”
“Wednesday.”
“Which Wednesday?”
“Wednesday the eighth of May. Thursday the ninth, actually, by this time of night.”
“And the year?”
“For Christ’s sake, Paul—”
“The year?”
“2003.”
Mueller sagged. “Freddy, I’ve lost half a year somewhere! For me it’s last October. 2002. I’ve some weird kind of amnesia. It’s the only explanation.”
“Amnesia,” Munson said. The edge of tension left his voice. “Is that what you’ve got? Amnesia? Can there be such a thing as an epidemic of amnesia? Is it contagious? Maybe you better come over here after all. Because amnesia’s my problem too.”
Thursday, May 9, promised to be as beautiful as the previous day had been. The sun once again beamed on San Francisco; the sky was clear, the air warm and tender. Commander Braskett awoke early as always, punched for his usual spartan breakfast, studied the morning xerofax news, spent an hour dictating his memoirs, and, about nine, went out for a walk. The streets were strangely crowded, he found, when he got down to the shopping district along Haight Street. People were wandering aimlessly, dazedly, as though they were sleepwalkers. Were they drunk? Drugged? Three times in five minutes Commander Braskett was stopped by young men who wanted to know the date. Not the time, the date. He told them, crisply, disdainfully; he tried to be tolerant, but it was difficult for him not to despise people who were so weak that they were unable to refrain from poisoning their minds with stimulants and narcotics and psychedelics and similar trash. At the corner of Haight and Masonic a forlorn-looking pretty girl of about seventeen, with wide blank blue eyes, halted him and said, “Sir, this city is San Francisco, isn’t it? I mean, I was supposed to move here from Pittsburgh in May, and if this is May, this is San Francisco, right?” Commander Braskett nodded brusquely and turned away, pained. He was relieved to see an old friend, Lou Sandler, the manager of the Bank of America office across the way. Sandler was standing outside the bank door. Commander Braskett crossed to him and said, “Isn’t it a disgrace, Lou, the way this whole street is filled with addicts this morning? What is it, some historical pageant of the 1960’s?” And Sandler gave him an empty smile and said, “Is that my name? Lou? You wouldn’t happen to know the last name too, would you? Somehow it’s slipped my mind.” In that moment Commander Braskett realized that something terrible had happened to his city and perhaps to his country, and that the leftist takeover he had long dreaded must now be at hand, and that it was time for him to don his old uniform again and do what he could to strike back at the enemy.
In joy and in confusion, Nate Haldersen awoke that morning realizing that he had been transformed in some strange and wonderful way. His head was throbbing, but not painfully. It seemed to him that a terrible weight had been lifted from his shoulders, that the fierce dead hand about his throat had at last relinquished its grip.
He sprang from bed, full of questions.
Where am I? What kind of place is this? Why am I not at home? Where are my books? Why do I feel so happy?
This seemed to be a hospital room.
There was a veil across his mind. He pierced its filmy folds and realized that he had committed himself to—to Fletcher Memorial—last—August—no, the August before last—suffering with a severe emotional disturbance brought on by—brought on by—
He had never felt happier than this moment.
He saw a mirror. In it was the reflected upper half of Nathaniel Haldersen, Ph.D. Nate Haldersen smiled at himself. Tall, stringy, long-nosed man, absurdly straw-colored hair, absurd blue eyes, thin lips, smiling. Bony body. He undid his pajama top. Pale, hairless chest; bump of bone like an epaulet on each shoulder. I have been sick a long time, Haldersen thought. Now I must get out of here, back to my classroom. End of leave of absence. Where are my clothes?
“Nurse? Doctor?”’ He pressed his call button three times. “Hello? Anyone here?”
No one came. Odd; they always came. Shrugging, Haldersen moved out into the hall. He saw three orderlies, heads together, buzzing at the far end. They ignored him. A robot servitor carrying breakfast trays glided past. A moment later one of the younger doctors came running through the hall, and would not stop when Haldersen called to him. Annoyed, he went back into his room and looked about for clothing. He found none, only a little stack of magazines on the closet floor. He thumbed the call button three more times. Finally one of the robots entered the room.
“I am sorry,” it said, “but the human hospital personnel are busy at present. May I serve you, Dr. Haldersen?”
“I want a suit of clothing. I’m leaving the hospital.”
“I am sorry, but there is no record of your discharge. Without authorization from Dr. Bryce, Dr. Reynolds, or Dr. Kamakura, I am not permitted to allow your departure.”
Haldersen sighed. He knew better than to argue with a robot. “Where are those three gentlemen right now?”
“They are occupied, sir. As you may know, there is a medical emergency in the city this morning, and Dr. Bryce and Dr. Kamakura are helping to organize the committee of public safety. Dr. Reynolds did not report for duty today and we are unable to trace him. It is believed that he is a victim of the current difficulty.”
“What current difficulty?”
“Mass loss of memory on the part of the human population,” the robot said.
“An epidemic of amnesia?”
“That is one interpretation of the problem.”
“How can such a thing—” Haldersen stopped. He understood now the source of his own joy this morning. Only yesterday afternoon he had discussed with Tim Bryce the application of memory-destroying drugs to his own trauma, and Bryce had said—
Haldersen no longer knew the nature of his own trauma.
“Wait,” he said, as the robot began to leave the room. “I need information. Why have I been under treatment here?”
“You have been suffering from social displacements and dysfunctions whose origin, Dr. Bryce feels, lies in a situation of traumatic personal loss.”
“Loss of what?”
“Your family, Dr. Haldersen.”
“Yes. That’s right. I recall, now—I had a wife and two children. Emily. And a little girl—Margaret, Elizabeth, something like that. And a boy named John. What happened
to them?”
“They were passengers aboard Intercontinental Airways Flight 103, Copenhagen to San Francisco, September 5, 1991. The plane underwent explosive decompression over the Arctic Ocean and there were no survivors.”
Haldersen absorbed the information as calmly as though he were hearing of the assassination of Julius Caesar.
“Where was I when the accident occurred?”
“In Copenhagen,” the robot replied. “You had intended to return to San Francisco with your family on Flight 103; however, according to your data file here, you became involved in an emotional relationship with a woman named Marie Rasmussen, whom you had met in Copenhagen, and failed to return to your hotel in time to go to the airport. Your wife, evidently aware of the situation, chose not to wait for you. Her subsequent death, and that of your children, produced a traumatic guilt reaction in which you came to regard yourself as responsible for their terminations.”
“I would take that attitude, wouldn’t I?” Haldersen said. “Sin and retribution. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I always had a harsh view of sin, even while I was sinning. I should have been an Old Testament prophet.”
“Shall I provide more information, sir?”
“Is there more?”
“We have in the files Dr. Bryce’s report headed, The Job Complex: A Study in the Paralysis of Guilt.”
“Spare me that,” Haldersen said. “All right, go.”
He was alone. The Job Complex, he thought. Not really appropriate, was it? Job was a man without sin, and yet he was punished grievously to satisfy a whim of the Almighty. A little presumptuous, I’d say, to identify myself with him. Cain would have been a better choice. Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. But Cain was a sinner. I was a sinner. I sinned and Emily died for it. When, eleven, eleven-and-a-half years ago? And now I know nothing at all about it except what the machine just told me. Redemption through oblivion, I’d call it. I have expiated my sin and now I’m free. I have no business staying in this hospital any longer. Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. I’ve got to get out of here. Maybe I can be of some help to others.
He belted his bathrobe, took a drink of water, and went out of the room. No one stopped him. The elevator did not seem to be running, but he found the stairs, and walked down, a little creakily. He had not been this far from his room in more than a year. The lowest floors of the hospital were in chaos—doctors, orderlies, robots, patients, all milling around excitedly. The robots were trying to calm people and get them back to their proper places. “Excuse me,” Haldersen said serenely. “Excuse me. Excuse me.” He left the hospital, unmolested, by the front door. The air outside was as fresh as young wine; he felt like weeping when it hit his nostrils. He was free. Redemption through oblivion. The disaster high above the Arctic no longer dominated his thoughts. He looked upon it precisely as if it had happened to the family of some other man, long ago. Haldersen began to walk briskly down Van Ness, feeling vigor returning to his legs with every stride. A young woman, sobbing wildly, erupted from a building and collided with him. He caught her, steadied her, was surprised at his own strength as he kept her from toppling. She trembled and pressed her head against his chest. “Can I do anything for you?” he asked. “Can I be of any help?”
Panic had begun to enfold Freddy Munson during dinner at Ondine’s Wednesday night. He had begun to be annoyed with Helene in the midst of the truffled chicken breasts, and so he started to think about the details of business; and to his amazement he did not seem to have the details quite right in his mind; and so he felt the early twinges of terror.
The trouble was that Helene was going on and on about the art of sonic sculpture in general and Paul Mueller in particular. Her interest was enough to arouse faint jealousies in Munson. Was she getting ready to leap from his bed to Paul’s? Was she thinking of abandoning the wealthy, glamorous, but essentially prosaic stockbroker for the irresponsible, impecunious, fascinatingly gifted sculptor? Of course, Helene kept company with a number of other men, but Munson knew them and discounted them as rivals; they were nonentities, escorts to fill her idle nights when he was too busy for her. Paul Mueller, however, was another case. Munson could not bear the thought that Helene might leave him for Paul. So he shifted his concentration to the day’s maneuvers. He had extracted a thousand shares of the $5.87 convertible preferred of Lunar Transit from the Schaeffer account, pledging it as collateral to cover his shortage in the matter of the Comsat debentures, and then, tapping the Howard account for five thousand Southeast Energy Corporation warrants, he had—or had those warrants come out of the Brewster account? Brewster was big on utilities. So was Howard, but that account was heavy on Mid-Atlantic Power, so would it also be loaded with Southeast Energy? In any case, had he put those warrants up against the Zurich uranium futures, or were they riding as his markers in the Antarctic oil-lease thing? He could not remember.
He could not remember.
He could not remember.
Each transaction had been in its own compartment. The partitions were down, suddenly. Numbers were spilling about in his mind as though his brain were in free fall. All of today’s deals were tumbling. It frightened him. He began to gobble his food, wanting now to get out of here, to get rid of Helene, to get home and try to reconstruct his activities of the afternoon. Oddly, he could remember quite clearly all that he had done yesterday—the Xerox switch, the straddle on Steel—but today was washing away minute by minute.
“Are you all right?” Helene asked.
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m coming down with something.”
“The Venus virus. Everybody’s getting it.”
“Yes, that must be it. The Venus virus. You’d better keep clear of me tonight.”
They skipped dessert and cleared out fast. He dropped Helene off at her flat; she hardly seemed disappointed, which bothered him, but not nearly so much as what was happening to his mind. Alone, finally, he tried to jot down an outline of his day, but even more had left him now. In the restaurant he had known which stocks he had handled, though he wasn’t sure what he had done with them. Now he couldn’t even recall the specific securities. He was out on the limb for millions of dollars of other people’s money, and every detail was in his mind, and his mind was falling apart. By the time Paul Mueller called, a little after midnight, Munson was growing desperate. He was relieved, but not exactly cheered, to learn that whatever strange thing had affected his mind had hit Mueller a lot harder. Mueller had forgotten everything since last October.
“You went bankrupt,” Munson had to explain to him. “You had this wild scheme for setting up a central clearing house for works of art, a kind of stock exchange—the sort of thing only an artist would try to start. You wouldn’t let me discourage you. Then you began signing notes, and taking on contingent liabilities, and before the project was six weeks old you were hit with half a dozen lawsuits and it all began to go sour.”
“When did this happen, precisely?”
“You conceived the idea at the beginning of November. By Christmas yon you were in severe trouble. You already had a bunch of personal debts that had gone unpaid from before, and your assets melted away and you hit a terrible bind in your work and couldn’t produce a thing. You really don’t remember a thing of this, Paul?”
“Nothing.”
“After the first of the year the fastest-moving creditors started getting decrees against you. They impounded everything you owned except the furniture, and then they took the furniture. You borrowed from all of your friends, but they couldn’t give you enough, because you were borrowing thousands and you owed hundreds of thousands.”
“How much did I hit you for?”
“Eleven bigs,” Munson said. “But don’t worry about that now.”
“I’m not. I’m not worrying about a thing. I was in a bind in my work, you say?” Mueller chuckled. “That’s all gone. I’m itching to start making things.
All I need are the tools—I mean, money to buy the tools.”
“What would they cost?”
“Two-and-a-half bigs,” Mueller said.
Munson coughed. “All right. I can’t transfer the money to your account, because your creditors would lien it right away. I’ll get some cash at the bank. You’ll have three bigs tomorrow, and welcome to it.”
“Bless you, Freddy,” Mueller said. “This kind of amnesia is a good thing, eh? I was so worried about money that I couldn’t work. Now I’m not worried at all. I guess I’m still in debt, but I’m not fretting. Tell me what happened to my marriage, now.”
“Carole got fed up and turned off,” said Munson. “She opposed your business venture from the start. When it began to devour you, she did what she could to untangle you from it, but you insisted on trying to patch things together with more loans and she filed for a decree. When she was free, Pete Castine moved in and grabbed her.”
“That’s the hardest part to believe. That she’d marry an art dealer, a totally noncreative person, a—a parasite, really—”
“They were always good friends,” Munson said. “I won’t say they were lovers, because I don’t know, but they were close. And Pete’s not that horrible. He’s got taste, intelligence, everything an artist needs except the gift. I think Carole may have been weary of gifted men, anyway.”
“How did I take it?” Mueller asked.
“You hardly seemed to notice, Paul. You were so busy with your financial shenanigans.”
Mueller nodded. He sauntered to one of his own works, a three-meter-high arrangement of oscillating rods that ran the whole sound spectrum into high kilohertzes, and passed two fingers over the activator eye. The sculpture began to murmur. After a few moments Mueller said, “You sounded awfully upset when I called, Freddy. You say you have some kind of amnesia too?”
Trying to be casual about it, Munson said, “I find I can’t remember some important financial transactions I carried out today. Unfortunately, my only record of them is in my head. But maybe the information will come back to me when I’ve slept on it.”