Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. … Four short years ago, he could not have sat here without being mobbed. Now, at most a curious look from the passersby, this airport being the busiest of New York’s five and the terminal building thronged day and night. In the distance two girls giggling together with frequent glances in his direction.
Definition of spoolpigeons: an about to be extinct species.
Angry with himself and the world, he forced his mind to switch to what ought to have been a fascinating subject, the question of Morton Lenigo’s whereabouts. He had checked his office computers this morning as usual, because even though it was Saturday and he had no noon slot to prepare for he was too tense to alter his routine. But the Lenigo problem was currently as flexible as an anaconda. Having missed the story the day it broke, he was now faced with the probability of missing the next stage because it would happen over a weekend. It was small consolation to have stirred up the subject of the Detroit blackmail deal. Nobody seemed to have reacted to that; the monitors had logged virtually nil response.
He looked around at the anonymous strangers riding the pediflows and thought: Don’t they care?
Answer—they’d rather not. For them Morton Lenigo had the reality of Father Christmas or the Devil, a legend in his own lifetime not to be taken seriously until they were forced to it … by which time it would be far too late.
So he found himself faced with more personal problems than he’d had in months and no weighting in favor in any area. Thinking of knees: Pedro Diablo. Vanished in strict accordance with the customs of his forcibly adopted blank hosts, doubtless not to appear again until office time on Monday morning but then entering polite and calm and unhelpful. Flamen had hoped for a sense of dynamism, a jolt to his own exhausted imagination. None had resulted from their meeting. Only the tension of anticipation had drained away and left him flabby, like a perished balloon.
And Celia. He shivered. A cool withdrawn stranger. That was my wife, that lovely body pressed mine and convulsed in orgasm? That mouth on mine, that voice whispering in darkness? Memory says yes. Rationality says no. Rationality says this is a different person with the same name and features.
He asked himself: Is it in me, the reason for the change? Is it in those doom-laden words the doctor pronounced at the Ginsberg about previous emotional attachments being symptoms of immaturity? According to Mogshack Celia was cured, but he was here today with precisely the intention of proving Mogshack a liar. Because of what had been done to Celia?
No, because it was necessary for spoolpigeons to shoot an occasional sacred cow in order to survive.
And concerning survival: that impossible reading of zero! Given unlimited Federal computer time, the source of the interference on his program must be identifiable! Yesterday’s, the first with Diablo participating if you could call it participation, had suffered three breaks, not the record, but any at all was too much, and yet when he called to register the latest of scores of furious complaints the despair of the engineer i/c transmission had been somehow convincing. The Directorate had even invited him to their next general meeting to discuss the problem.
The hypocrites, he thought. Got to hit them! And with something harder than the flabby threat of the PCC. Ace in the hole, maybe—Harry Madison? Oh, ridiculous!
Looking back, he was aware of grasping at straws and knew why he’d been impelled to fall in with Reedeth’s request. Not by Prior’s eagerness to exorcise the specter of that zero reading, not by the dark eyes of Diablo trained on his face. By his own terrifying sense of dissolution. Diablo trained in the real school of hard knocks coming to join the company; his wife treating him like an unknown; a conspiracy among his employers to sabotage his transmissions … It was like living in a hut on an ice-floe and feeling the warm breeze of summer come from the south.
Something’s working against me, he decided suddenly. Something too subtle for even Federal computers to root out!
But that felt like paranoia on the way. One had to believe in something, even if it were only a fallible government god.
Maybe Prior had been right to buy a Lar after all. The fortunes of the knee enclaves certainly seemed to be on the ascendant; perhaps letting oneself believe in supernormal powers enabled the subconscious to guess correctly more often than if one was convinced of being defeated from the start. Ask Conroy—?
And here he was, a man with a grizzled beard, thin, above average height, marching from the immigration barrier with a deep-etched scowl and carrying a light travel-bag on a sling. Recognizing him from the tapes he had played over before deciding to invite him to New York, Flamen jumped up and framed an effusive welcome.
Conroy undermined that after the first three words.
“Let’s get the hell out of here before I scream,” he said. “Got a skimmer or something?”
“Sure—uh, yes, of course.”
“Then take me to the hotel or wherever you’ve arranged for me to stay. Can you smell the atmosphere here? Can you sense the hate those bastards are generating?”
Memory reeled back and Flamen heard Lyla talking about her reaction to the atmosphere at the Ginsberg.
“How do you mean?”
Conroy jerked his thumb towards the barrier. “There’s a squeeze on today. Everyone who’s been out of the country for longer than a week’s visit to relatives is being grilled. What’s caused that—the Lenigo affair?”
“I suspect so,” Flamen agreed.
“Aren’t you sure? I thought you spoolpigeons knew the inside data on everything.”
Nettled, Flamen said, “I know why he was let in, and so would you if you’d been watching my show yesterday.”
“I was in class. A noon slot here isn’t a noon slot in the west.” Seeming more to lead the way than to be escorted, Conroy marched ahead at such a pace Flamen was hard put to keep up. “But I presume one of the knee enclaves finally got around to blackmailing him in—correct?”
Well, here’s a patronizing son-of-a-bitch, Flamen thought resentfully. Nonetheless he said, with what politeness he could summon, “It was a well-kept secret until I broke it yesterday.”
“Ah, that’s because people don’t take the trouble to use their minds any more. They rely on computers so much they’re forgetting how to ask questions. Getting a knee enclave to blackmail him into the country is squarely in line with Lenigo’s standard tactics—and I’m flattering him by calling them ‘his’ tactics. They go way way back to the industrial unrests of the nineteenth century, at least, and probably a good deal further. What he did in Britain followed exactly the same pattern. He exploited the long-standing truth that if you can get five percent of the population behind any movement whether it’s pro or anti you can bring down governments. There aren’t enough knees in the whole of Britain even today to take and hold a multi-million city the size of Birmingham. Yet it’s knee-run now, and so’s Manchester, and so’s Cardiff, and there are half a dozen other large cities where blanks are moving out so fast you can hardly see them leave whenever five or six knee families buy into the neighborhood. He didn’t do that with overwhelming manpower—he didn’t have the manpower. It was a matter of leverage in the right place. So what was the right place here—Detroit?”
They had reached the skimmer by now, and Flamen was glad of the distraction caused by getting aboard. Conroy’s manner suggested that he was prepared to treat computers on the some footing as an abacus, and he wasn’t used to that sort of attitude.
Once aloft and being directed by Ninge traffic control, however, Conroy resumed exactly as though no time had passed. “Speaking of leverage, by the way, what leverage are you hoping to exert on the windmill?”
“Windmill?” For the moment Flamen had forgotten the metaphor employed in their exchange of cables. “Oh! Yes, of course: Mogshack?”
“Mogshack!” Conroy snapped, and grimaced. “Lord, I’d never have thought that after such a long time away I could still react so strongly to that man’s name! I guess it’s be
cause even though Canada is still a relatively civilized country—because it has large empty areas people can expand into without rubbing elbows all the time, like Russia—we’re still not immune from the pernicious influence of his doctrines. Do you realize that in my class at the university there are still two or three girls whose faces I haven’t seen since the beginning of the year because they keep their street yashes on in class and even turn up to tutorials wearing them? And I can’t order them to take the things off because they’d most likely complain to their parents and have me disciplined by the faculty. As though I were some horny teenager with indecent designs on their virtue!”
Feeling rather as though he’d stepped into a puddle and found himself being carried down a raging millrace instead, Flamen ventured, “But how much of this are you blaming on Mogshack? Surely one man can’t be responsible for the entire neo-puritan movement—isn’t it a reaction against the permissivity of the last century, as Victorianism was against the bawdiness of early times?”
“I’m not blaming Mogshack for the phenomenon itself. What I detest about him is the way he’s swum with the tide, exploited his influence for personal advancement! What’s good about the current phase of our social cycle? Practically nothing. Yet what does Mogshack’s doctrine amount to? A bunch of catch-phrases about ‘being an individual’ and ‘retiring and regrouping’ and all the rest. Do you find him applying any standard of judgment to determine whether the result is going to be a good individual? Not that I’ve noticed! Bland, shapeless, malleable—yes. Original, creative, stimulating—never!”
Flamen said nothing, thinking of Celia.
“And that’s the man they entrust with the responsibility for the mental hygiene of the State of New York!” Conroy continued, glancing out over the city. By now they were at the regular five-hundred meter level for private skimmers, and being slotted tidily through a multicolored gaggle of traffic bound for the New England resorts. “Has your mental health improved? The hell it has. The Ginsberg is twice the size of any previous hospital, it’s only a few years old—but already it’s overloaded, and life in the city is intolerable because you never know when riots may break out, when you’ll be burgled or mugged or just shot for the amusement of a gang of teenagers! When you give someone an important job you expect him to show results. You don’t expect him to be content with soothing banalities about the inevitability of his failure.”
His tone was not venomous, merely resigned; however, Flamen was pleased to hear him voice such hostility. He said, “In that case you’ll probably be interested to learn how I propose to—uh—topple the windmill.”
Conroy turned his head expectantly.
“It’s … Well, it has to do with my wife Celia. She was committed to the Ginsberg around the beginning of the year. Breakdown. Not very pleasant. Ah … He hesitated, but forced out the damning admission. “She took to sykes and wound up with Ladromide. I didn’t know until about her third or fourth dose.”
“How long had you been married?” said Conroy caustically.
“It does sound improbable, I guess.” Flamen felt his cheeks growing hot; he hadn’t blushed for years. “But I’m afraid that before the—uh—crisis we’d drifted apart to some extent. I have business, my own friends, all sorts of distractions, and the temperature had kind of cooled, to the point where we had separate rooms and like if she was asleep when I got home I didn’t intrude on her.”
He broke off with an effort. Here he was meeting Conroy for the first time and already pouring out things he seldom confided to anyone, even old friends, as though needing to offer excuses for himself.
“Be an individual!” Conroy sighed. “Separate rooms! Your own private lives! Damnation, when it reaches down the middle of a marriage to pry the spouses apart how can anyone defend that attitude?”
“She was committed while I was on a business trip,” Flamen said very rapidly. “When I found out she was in the Ginsberg I didn’t take her away because my brother-in-law Lionel Prior recommended Dr. Mogshack very highly and so I settled for simply paying for her care. I mean, having her a ward of the State government would have been …” He shrugged.
“So?” Conroy prompted.
“So I don’t like what they’ve done to her. I don’t like the—the walking talking dummy she’s been turned into. I want her packled to find out whether she’s been helped or harmed by what Mogshack’s done to her. And I want the parameters for the packling set by someone like you who—uh—who has a different approach to mental health.”
“Packling!” Conroy said, and twisted his mouth as though he had bitten a rotten fruit. “That’s half of what’s wrong with our society in itself! Getting computers to set up patterns for human beings to copy—did you ever hear of anything so absurd?”
He hunched forward energetically. They were in sight of two of the LR sites from Thursday night, and over both aerial cranes were grappling up wreckage in great dust-shedding nets so that new buildings could be erected as rapidly as possible. Shooting out his arm to point at the nearer one in Harlem, he said, “There’s a ready-made parable for you! What do they call those in the news? They call them ‘LR,’ or at most ‘last resort’ strikes, don’t they? A perfect piece of Mogshackery, a phrase that implies all the whining excuses: ‘I couldn’t help it, I did my best, they didn’t play fair!’
Oh, sure! But no mention of the fact that there were kids in there, hm? No mention of the fact that ‘I’ happened to be sitting safely a hundred meters up in a gunship armed with self-seeking missiles and thousand-watt laser-guns! I’d like to see some of the killers brought down to ground level and turned loose with hands and feet and teeth against the people who were mashed to pulp in that block of apts! That’s what I’d call ‘being an individual’!”
Dismayed by Conroy’s fierceness, Flamen said, “Ah—yes, but surely the safety of the greatest number is a primary …”
The words sounded mealy-mouthed after Conroy’s vehemence, and ran dry.
“Well?” Conroy said, turning to face him. “I must say I didn’t expect to hear you, a spoolpigeon, speaking out in favor of the established order.”
“But this is the world we’ve got,” Flamen said faintly. He could not recall being so much at a loss since he was in college and had to deal with an instructor who bullied rather than led his students towards knowledge. “We have to try and decide what is and what isn’t worth keeping, and if we do think something’s worth keeping we have to try and protect it.”
“So name what’s worth keeping,” Conroy countered. “This convenience we’re riding in—this skimmer? Sure, but did it have to be manufactured in Detroit by people whose skins guarantee they can’t market their skills anywhere else in the country? How secure do you feel in your annual skimmer when you take off in it for the first time? How certain are you that some melanist fanatic hasn’t been around the dispatch field sabotaging the skimmers destined for blank purchasers, so that they’ll crash after the first thousand miles? What’s going to protect you against that? The police can’t! Neither can your local Gottschalk, for all the guns he can offer you. No wonder people hardly talk to their friends face to face any more, but call up to save going across the street in case they get shot by a passing knee.”
A bleep signifying they were over their destination, the Hilton Undertower, saved Flamen from having to reply at once, and he was grateful all over again. It was years since he had come up against anyone with such strong feelings as Conroy’s, and he was obscurely troubled, as though the battering words had struck a long-forgotten chord in his memory.
A few minutes for checking in and having his bag sent to his room, and Conroy was holding forth anew in the hotel’s main bar, his rodomontade proof against any attempt by Flamen to interrupt with more details of his plot to undermine Mogshack.
“As I said earlier, even up in relatively civilized Canada I find the traces of Mogshack’s teachings regardless of who actually formed the last link in the chain of communication to my st
udents. How do you feel, for example, about murders on campus?”
“Well, I—”
“We’ve had two this year: a jealous homosexual boy stabbed his lover because he was seen with a girl, and a crazy father came up and shot his daughter because a friend of hers—some friend!—told him she was sleeping with a boy who had some Indian blood. Iroquois, to be exact. Me, I’d have been rather pleased; they were a distinguished tribe in their day, the Iroquois. But thank goodness I don’t have a daughter and my sons are both safely married. Irrelevant. I was talking about campus murders. What’s happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don’t give me that hog-wash about students at college having to be treated as adults—there’s nothing adult about playing with guns and grenades!”
He had dialed a beer and now poured the whole of it down his throat in a single thirsty gobble as though washing away an unpleasant taste. Flamen said, caught up in the discussion in spite of his own preoccupations, “Yes, but adolescence has always been the most emotionally disturbing time, and—”
“Who sold that crazy father a gun to go shoot his daughter with?” Conroy interrupted. “Some ‘emotionally disturbed’ adolescent at the corner store where he cobbles together lasers in a one-man workshop? The hell! That was a late-model Gottschalk gun; I saw it myself in the dean’s office, later.”
“I’m lining up something on the Gottschalks at present, too,” Flamen said. He heard something close to timidity in his tone. Granting that Conroy was old enough to be his father, it was still ridiculous to find himself reacting in this fashion. Against all odds, he was running a five-slots-weekly show on the Holocosmic network, whereas in his own field Conroy had failed so signally he was reduced to teaching, not even in his native country.
“Ah-hah? That won’t work,” Conroy said, replacing his glass for a fresh beer. “And that’s another reason I detest Mogshack, by the way. I never knew him to try and wean a patient away from dependence on guns. Yet he has two, three thousand a year of the population of New York State through his hands. By this time, if he’d done his job properly, he’d have created a glut of second-hand weaponry and cooled the temperature in this city past the flashpoint.”