“As you say,” Prior muttered, rising and heading for the door.
On the threshold, poised to follow him, Diablo hesitated and glanced back.
“Say—uh—Flamen! I didn’t mean to make like an uppity nigra, you know. When I think what you could do to pillory us knees with that equipment”—he jerked his head—“I’m kind of surprised at your restraint.”
“Oh, sure,” Flamen said indifferentiy. “I could show Mayor Black like in bed with three blank girls, or the Detroit city council in a daisy-chain around the committee table, detail correct down to the pubic hair. But that’s not what it’s for. It’s for things that rate an eighty-plus probability reading, and up.”
“Yeah,” Diablo said. “Different approach, I guess.” He seemed for a moment about to say something else, but finally shrugged and turned to go out with the impatiently waiting Prior.
Alone, Flamen tugged at his beard and cursed under his breath. Reaching a decision, he stretched out towards the main information board and punched for data about packling; he talked about it glibly enough, but he had very little idea how it was done. From the densely clotted verbosity of the article he had on file he managed to extract the broad outlines after five minutes’ concentration; it was exactly what Prior had talked about when trying to describe the treatment accorded to patients in the Ginsberg, the construction of an optimum psychoprofile towards which the actual profile was gradually constrained.
Where there was room for maneuver was in the selection of the parameters for the optimum curve. Though the data on file didn’t include a bald statement to that effect, it was clear on reading between the lines that choosing them was largely an arbitrary process. Flamen considered that for a while and at length rubbed his hands together, pleased.
Granted that no one else enjoyed quite the household reputation of Mogshack, who had once been called “the Dr. Spock of mental hygiene,” there must surely be someone else in his field with considerable authority, whose views were diametrically opposed, and who could be relied on to set up an optimum curve for Celia’s personality which offered the greatest possible chance of contradicting Mogshack’s own proposals. He punched for the list of candidates, and at the very top he found a name appearing which made him almost tremble with excitement.
Who would have thought that the computers would immediately suggest Xavier Conroy?
SIXTY-FOUR
REPRINTED FROM THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN OF 4TH MARCH 1968
Danger of US ‘apartheid, with martial law’
From Alistair Cooke: New York
The country has had three days in which to absorb the shock of the first instalment, the official summary rather, of the report of the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, shortly to be known as the Kerner Commission, after Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois who presided over the seven-months’ investigation by nine whites and two Negroes.
Today, for those who hope for more light and a finer perspective on the Commission’s findings, there fell the blockbuster of the whole report: 1,489 pages of exhaustive and exhausting investigation of riots in cities big and small. Riots that hardly materialised, riots that shook the social and economic life of the cities to their roots.
Very few people on the outside looking in are likely to stagger through this fascinating and depressing testament; and the fewer people on the inside of State and city government will be too busy trying to decide between the “three choices” which the Commission concludes now confront American society.
First, there is a continuation of present policies, with the same or a little more money going into the rehabilitation of the cities, and the same methods, bordering on suppression by arms, being used to hold the riots. This way, the Commission is convinced, will do little “to raise the hopes or absorb the energies” of the increasing population of young city Negroes; will lead to more violence; and “could lead to urban apartheid and the permanent establishment of two societies.”
Little hope
The second choice would be to work at once for the “enrichment of the slums” and “a dramatic improvement” of the people’s lives by substantial increases in public moneys for education, employment, housing and the social services. The Commission sees little hope of permanent improvement through this approach either …
The third choice, and in the Commission’s view the only one that can save the United States from “two societies—separate and unequal” (probably maintained by martial law) is reinforced time and again in the report’s detailed documentation of city grievances. These include the pervading bigotry of white attitudes, the rising numbers of young Negroes doomed never to be employed at all (one third of all employable young Negroes in the 20 biggest cities are today unemployed), the flight of the whites to the suburbs from which they are unlikely to vote more taxes for cities reduced to decaying ghettoes for Negroes only.
This third choice requires nothing less than “a massive national effort” to integrate the social and economic life of the two races and the officers of the law who must protect it …
SIXTY-FIVE
ASSUMPTION CONCERNING THE “MASSIVE EFFORT” REFERRED TO IN THE FOREGOING MADE FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY
It didn’t happen and that worked entirely too well.
SIXTY-SIX
THE MILLS OF GOD GRIND SLOW BUT THE MILLS OF MAN SEEM ALL TOO FREQUENTLY NOT TO GRIND AT ALL REGARDLESS OF HOW OFTEN THEY SPIN ON THEIR AXES
“Ariadne, for God’s sake,” Reedeth said to the beautiful, invariably flawless image in the comweb screen. “I need to get high, or drunk, or something, and I’d rather not do it alone.”
For an instant he thought she was simply going to snap at him and cut the connection. However, she sighed and leaned back in her chair. “You seem to have spent all day moaning, and I guess it’s too much to expect you to stop before your manic-depressive cycle shifts out of its present phase. So what am I supposed to do—provide unofficial therapy?”
There was a taut bitter silence. Finally Reedeth said in a completely changed tone, “Here’s an interesting psychological problem for you—or maybe it’s sociological, to be more precise. When did friends go out of fashion?”
“Well, if all you want to do is talk nonsense—”
“Nonsense hell. How many friends have you got, Ariadne? I mean friends, that you know won’t mind when you want to talk about your problems, who may even be able to help with advice, or a loan, or whatever.”
“I don’t have that kind of problem,” Ariadne shrugged. “I believe in being an individual and in looking after myself. If I couldn’t, I doubt if I’d have the arrogance to try and help other people to achieve the same success in their own lives. But I have lots of friends, so many I couldn’t list them—so many I’ve never managed to have them all to the same party!”
“Those aren’t friends,” Reedeth said doggedly. “I have them, too: I guess I recognize five or six hundred people, recall them well enough to ask the right questions about their families and their jobs. But … Hell, let me take an illustration of what I mean. This girl Lyla Clay, that I finally managed to turn loose after what seemed like an eternity of struggling through red tape—”
A flicker of interest appeared on Ariadne’s face. “Oh, you got her straightened out?”
“More or less. I’ll tell you in a moment. Let me finish what I started to say. Her mackero was killed last night—murdered. He didn’t live long enough to say why someone went for him. It was just purposeless. But there it is: he died and she went into shock. Luckily she has her own doctor, someone I know who charges reasonable rates and takes his poorer patients seriously, so—Hell, now I’m interrupting myself!”
He drew a deep breath. Ariadne said during it, “Why do they call it ‘red tape’? Do they use special red-backed tape for confidential official recordings, or something?”
“Oh, for Gods sake, woman! Ask your desketary! I don’t know and I don’t care! This is important, what I’m trying to ex
plain!”
“So get to the point a bit faster,” she said crossly. “I’m exhausted.”
“Think I’m not? Give me a straight answer to this then: out of all the hundreds of people you know, who do you care about enough to go into severe shock when you lose them?”
There was a long pause. Eventually Ariadne said with a strained expression, “Well, my parents, obviously, and my brother Wilfred, and—”
“I said friends, not relatives. People you’ve selected for yourself out of all the available millions since you came of age and went out into the world on your own.”
“I …” Ariadne shook her fair head, her face eloquent of the conflict between shame and honesty. “I don’t know if there’s anyone. You know, I don’t think I ever considered the point before.”
“So why not?”
Recovering a little, Ariadne said tartly, “Doesn’t your friend Conroy have views on that?”
“You mean his argument that the total sum of emotional engagement of a modern individual is as rich as Romeo and Juliet’s, but it’s divided up among a far greater number of people so it appears to be very casual? Oh, I think he’s damned right. It’s the difference between a room-light and a laser beam. You can have just as much wattage in the system, but because it’s not so concentrated it does much less damage. And I think that’s great—it may have been okay to have one transcendent experience in days when one could only expect to live to be twenty-something anyway before catching the plague, but now that we live the better part of a century on the average it seems a shame to burn ourselves out. But—” He clawed furiously at his beard. “Damn, I’m taking the craziest long way around to get to what I want to say! What I’m talking about is a loss, not a gain. People still do have troubles, people still do need advice and help and all the rest of it.”
“They get it,” Ariadne said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re here in the Ginsberg, a state-financed hospital with the most advanced facilities in the world.” She contrived to gloss her words with a suggestion of tolerant long-suffering.
“Yes, but suppose something happened to you like what happened to Lyla Clay, or even Harry Madison? Wouldn’t you rather turn for help to someone you’d personally chosen, an intimate friend, than risk getting caught up in the kind of vast impersonal bureaucracy I’ve spent all day battling with? That girl Clay isn’t sick except insofar as she’s had an experience no girl ought to undergo—no one ought to undergo, ever!—and because she’s three months under age in this state and had been arrested on suspicion of mental disorder I had to waste hours and hours in needless arguments!”
“But you did get her out in the end,” Ariadne sighed.
“Yes, I did indeed. No thanks to your beloved Mogshack, either. When I appealed to him he slapped me down with the argument that nowadays even a suspected mental case mustn’t be let loose on the streets for fear of provoking a riot like last night’s. If that’s the case, then—then hell! You shouldn’t be allowed to appear in public because you’re pretty enough to risk some knee trying to pick you up, with the danger of triggering a riot when you slap his face for being a nuisance!” Aware that he was growing heated, Reedeth forced himself to adopt a calmer tone.
“If you meant that as a compliment,” Ariadne said, “you didn’t phrase it terribly well.”
“I’m not interested in compliments right now! In fact I’m not interested in very much at all except trying to figure out now how I can save people like Lyla Clay and Harry Madison from being shut away because they have something peculiar happen to them. That’s not what I chose my job for, guarding a prison full of people with original minds.”
“We’ve been over this before,” Ariadne said. “We always get hung up on the question of what’s original and what’s crazy.”
“So we do. I thought I was going somewhere else and I seem to have wound up in the same old groove.” Reedeth rubbed his forehead. “I guess I didn’t think out the consequences very clearly before I started talking, but what put me into this frame of mind was really very simple. I managed to get rid of Harry Madison as well as—”
“What? How?”
“Flamen agreed to act as his guardian. His company needs an electronicist, and when I suggested Madison he said yes. Hardly took any persuading.”
“And you just turned him loose—a kneeblank in New York on a martial law day?”
“There still are knees in New York, whether you like it or not, legally entitled to walk the streets! And Miss Clay seemed to take a liking to him when I introduced them and offered to see him through the—”
“You turned a knee out in a blank girl’s company, her in shock and him with a mental record as long as my arm?” Ariadne was almost out of her chair. “Christ, there’s likely to be another riot tonight! It’ll be a miracle if they get out of the rapitrans terminal alive!”
“I—”
“What kind of a cloud-cuckooland are you living in, Jim? All this gobbledegook about friends going out of fashion, all this phoney idealism about having someone to turn to in time of need…! I’d rather have honest enemies than a friend who could treat me like you just treated those poor people!”
“But—!”
“I know what’s wrong with you, Jim,” Ariadne said fiercely, leaning close to the camera in her office so that her head threatened to protrude from Reedeth’s screen. “It upsets you having people around that you’ve been made responsible for without being consulted, because they were like caught up in a riot or you found them here when you arrived. What you want isn’t to prepare them for a safe return to ordinary life—only to shuffle them off somewhere out of sight so you don’t have to take an interest in them any longer! When you hear that Madison has been gunned down on the street, or Lyla Clay was raped by a white gang because they saw her with a knee escort and decided a girl who kept that sort of company was fair game, are you going to go into shock? The hell you are!”
She broke the connection with a look of actual disgust, as though about to vomit on her desketary, and Reedeth said foolishly to the uncaring air, “But that’s not what I…”
Aware that the comweb connection had been severed, the desketary said, “I’m sorry?”
“Oh, go to hell!” Reedeth roared, and stormed out of the office.
SIXTY-SEVEN
AN OPINION UNREPENTANTLY HELD BY XAVIER CONROY DESPITE REPEATED ATTACKS ON HIS STANDPOINT BY (AMONG MANY OTHER NOTABLE AUTHORITIES) ELIAS MOGSHACK
“Man is not a rational being, he is a rational animal, and to claim that in debasing the influence of the gonads and other glands, in producing a perfectly plastic, perfectly yielding, perfectly unirritating conformist dummy you have cured a severe mental disorder is exactly equivalent to boasting that you have eliminated the risk of tinea pedis by amputating at the ankles.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
THE LINE DIVIDING DAY FROM NIGHT ON EARTH OR ANY OTHER PLANET OR SATELLITE IS TECHNICALLY KNOWN AS “THE TERMINATOR”
There was an “atmosphere” at the Prior home that evening to which a number of factors each contributed noticeably.
Having reluctantly brought his sister Celia back from the Ginsberg Prior had found his wife Nora talking on the comweb to Phil Gasby’s wife and the latter on being introduced had said, “Ah yes, she’s the one who’s spent so long in the State lunatic asylum, isn’t she? I trust they know what they’re doing to let her out. Snff.” End of conversation and beginning of neighborhood-wide scandal.
Celia’s presence annoyed Nora, who smashed a dish containing reheated deep-frozen beef Bourguignon in the middle of the dinner table shortly before her brother-in-law was due to arrive and disappeared to her room with a shout to the effect that she had married only Lionel of the Prior family and not all his mentally deranged relatives. Her customary ill-temper had been exacerbated earlier by his attempts to explain why engaging the celebrated kneeblank Pedro Diablo as a colleague at Matthew Flamen Inc. entailed advantages outweighing the social stigma of working with a blac
k man on an equal footing (relevant quotations from the dialogue: “I’ll never be able to hold my head up in this neighborhood again and we’ll have to move!” and “If he needs a job let him go and look for one in Africa!”).
The freshness of the disastrous citizens’ defense group exercise in people’s memory meant that instead of the normal evening-long flow of solidarity-generating comweb calls there was a dull silence in the house and a crackling awareness that the treachery of Lionel Prior in carrying out his successful mock raid on his neighbors’ homes was being discussed in scores of calls so close at hand one could almost have stolen out back and eavesdropped on the speakers.
There was additionally the terrifying notion abroad that Morton Lenigo might have arrived with the faultless blueprint for a nation-wide seizure of power by the knees and during the day the Gottschalks had announced some very expensive but unprecedentedly destructive new weaponry which in this high-priced district virtually no one could afford so soon after laying out for the regular spring models.
Throughout all of which, including the dinner, Celia retained a marble statue’s calm and a polite flow of small-talk concerning her brother’s business, world affairs since her hospitalization, and the various antiques he had lately purchased and put on display in the living-zone. Her imperturbability was due to the fact that she had been drugged for five months without interruption at the Ginsberg and even if she stopped taking the medicine prescribed for her immediately, it would be several days before the cumulative effect on her personality wore off.
On the arrival of her husband Matthew Flamen she was just finishing her dessert, and after a cool greeting and the offer of her cheek to be kissed, she said it was advisable for her to go straight to bed since she had been warned against overtiring herself directly after her return to the outside world, good night.