EIGHTY
ASSUMPTION CONCERNING THE FOREGOING MADE FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY
It would have been even worse if they’d stopped to watch the fun.
EIGHTY-ONE
THE MEANING OF THIS UNWARRANTED INTRUSION
Sanctuary within a sanctuary, Reedeth thought: this office enclosed by the fortress of the hospital. Here offered temporary refuge from the impersonal gale of lawenforcement, Lyla and Madison sat opposite him on the consultation couch, side by side like frightened children—she wearing a hard mask of misery, the corners of her mouth downturned, her shoulders slumped and her hands pressed tight between her knees; he stolidly erect, no expression on his dark face.
A shiver traced down his spine as he pictured Madison’s muscles bulging to hurl a man bodily through a window. How could that kind of terrible violence have escaped unnoticed during so many years of the most modern and thorough study of the man’s mental condition? Even granting that sibyl-pills induced temporary insanity—that was what it amounted to whether or not one dignified it by the name of a pythoness trance—granting that they provoked bone-snapping convulsions, granting that Madison was in excellent physical condition and quite strong enough in his normal state to pick up this heavy desketary as indeed he had once done in Reedeth’s presence while engaged on a repair job: the story he and Lyla told simply didn’t make sense.
Oh, certainly their account of being kidnapped by Mikki Baxendale’s private macoots was borne out by all kinds of corroborative evidence. The clumsy stab-marks left by the injections still showed, Lyla’s in the base of her thumb presumably because the yash she was wearing would have shielded her from an injection where Madison had taken his, in the top of the shoulder. There was even a detectable trace of Narcolate in a tiny scab he had removed from the knee’s wound, trapped in the blood before it clotted. So far, so good.
But as for the rest, Madison’s singlehanded victory over nine assailants, and the girl’s half-crazy visions of a myriad battles scattered from end to end of history, climaxing in a prediction about something supposed to happen next year—
Reedeth’s jaw dropped. He felt it fall and couldn’t cancel the impulse. The solid world around him suddenly seemed tenuous, like swirling mist. Only a day or two ago he’d seen for himself that a pythoness could indeed deliver comprehensible oracles about total strangers, clear enough even for impersonal automatics to relate to their subjects. As though facts he had long been aware of had been shaken, kaleidoscope-fashion, into an unexpected pattern conveying a message on a non-verbal level, he found himself considering a brand-new hypothesis. Was it possible that the synergistic effect of Narcolate and a sibyl-pill had combined to generate in Madison a talent as unsuspected as pythoness talent had been before the pioneering days of Diana Spitz? Could he—did he—know about things which hadn’t happened yet?
But the whole notion seemed so absurd he gave a harsh laugh, causing Lyla to look up at him with a vague sketch for curiosity reflected on her face.
“Nothing,” he sighed in reply to her unspoken question. And, before he could qualify the bald statement, the comweb buzzed. Ariadne appeared in the screen, the familiar background of her home showing behind her fair head.
“Jim, what on earth are you doing in your office on a Saturday afternoon? I’ve been calling you at home for the past two hours!”
“Sweeping up a mess with my bare hands,” Reedeth muttered. “That’s what I’m doing.” He summed up what had happened, and concluded, “Just to top everything else, Miss Clay can’t get back into her apt, I understand. Her only key was left behind at Mikki Baxendale’s, and the fee you sent off for her performance here went direct to Dan Kazer’s account, as her mackero, but since he’s dead his account has been blocked pending distribution of his estate. So I gather she doesn’t even have the money to pay a locksmith to let her into her own home.”
“That’s no problem,” Lyla said with a trace of scorn. “Harry could let me in. He did it before.”
Reedeth looked at her blankly.
“Someone I thought was a friend of Dan’s moved into our apt while I was shut up here yesterday. Harry opened the door and let me in without a key.”
“Don’t you have a Punch lock on the door?” Reedeth said, mystified.
“Yes, of course we do.”
From the screen Ariadne looked out with bewilderment to match Reedeth’s. “Nonsense,” she said firmly. “You can’t get past a Punch lock without the key—not unless you smash the door down. Jim, I think you’d better reconsider what you’re doing. There are some—ah—suspect claims being made, don’t you think?”
“I’m telling you,” Lyla said, and set her mouth in a mutinous line.
Reedeth was framing a reply, when another signal began to flash on the desketary, and he brightened. “Excuse me,” he said to Ariadne, and switched to another circuit. When his image reappeared on her screen, he wore an expression of dismay.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“Flamen got here.”
“But I thought that was what you were waiting for—why should it make you look so sour?”
Reedeth sighed. “No reason, I guess. It’s just that he’s brought Conroy with him.”
“Conroy? Xavier Conroy? But I thought he was in Canada!”
“Flamen had him flown to New York for the weekend. I get the impression he wants a second opinion about his wife, and you certainly couldn’t pick anyone more opposed to Mogshack, could you?”
“No more than Mogshack’s opposed to him. Watch yourself, Jim! You realize what’ll happen if Mogshack finds out you’ve—” She hesitated, searching for a word.
“That I’ve been ‘trading with the enemy’?” Reedeth supplied with a bitter smile. “If he takes what’s actually sheer coincidence as a personal insult, I’ll have had proof of what the automatics told us about him, and I won’t wait to be fired. I’ll resign. I wouldn’t much care to go on working for a lunatic.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Ariadne said. “Jim, if you’re happy with the company you have right now, you’re welcome to them—but I tell you this! The way you’re going, you’re likely to wind up viewing the Ginsberg from the inside of a retreat yourself!”
She broke the connection with an ill-tempered snort, and Reedeth was left with his mouth half open to utter an abortive counterblast.
What a crazy predicament, to have got hung up on Ariadne of all the available women in the world!
But events were crowding in on him too rapidly to allow time for anger. Already Flamen and Conroy were on the pediflow towards his office. He started to rise with the intention of going to greet them, but canceled the movement and felt his features deform into a scowl.
Ariadne had been perfectly right. He was going to be in trouble if Mogshack learned about all this—not just Conroy’s intrusion, but Madison’s commitment into the guardianship of someone who promptly disregarded his obligations. He hated the idea of confronting his visitors: Flamen because right now he was furious with the man for landing him and Madison both in a mess; Conroy because …
Well, making an honest if silent confession: because at the back of his mind he felt vulnerable to Conroy’s contempt, and in their brief exchange over the comweb, half an hour ago, there had been the long shadow of the scathing irony with which Conroy had treated juvenile inanities in his students’ arguments, back in the days when Reedeth was working under him.
He hoped desperately that neither Lyla nor Madison had seen through his carefully maintained mask.
And then there they were, at the door, being admitted, Conroy shaking hands with every appearance of affability; a mechanical routine of introduction had to be gone through, which gave a short respite from awareness of depression—and while Reedeth was still trying to formulate his next remarks, Conroy had sat briskly down and taken charge.
“Well! From what I’ve been able to pick up by talking to Flamen on the way here, you’ve got some serious problems, Jim,
and so have our two friends here. I’m particularly interested to meet you, Miss Clay, because one of my students asked about the pythoness phenomenon in class the other day and I gave them the subject as an assignment—which naturally meant I had to investigate it myself before correcting what they turned in. I hadn’t taken it very seriously before, but I have found that some remarkable authorities vouch for its authenticity. What’s your view, Jim?”
Reedeth stumbletongued. “Why … Why, I’ve been compelled to react the same way, I guess. I never took pythonesses seriously until Miss Clay put on a performance here.”
“I heard about that from Flamen,” Conroy injected.
“Yes, of course: he recorded the show.” Reedeth swallowed. “But it was having the automatics analyze the oracles she delivered which convinced me, not the performance itself. I—”
Lyla sat up sharply. “You didn’t tell me you’d had my oracles comped!” she said in an accusing tone. “Christ, if I’d only known you were going to do that …! What did the automatics tell you?”
“Later, please, Miss Clay,” Reedeth said in a frigid tone. “Right now I have some business to clear up with Mr. Flamen, which shouldn’t have been necessary, and as soon as that’s straightened out I propose to go home. My arrangements for the weekend have been completely fouled up by what I can only call an absolute lack of consideration.”
“Jesus God,” Conroy said, before the bridling Flamen could respond to the accusation. “Jim, you sound so much like Mogshack I could believe you’ve been taking lessons. Hold it!” he added, raising a hand to forestall a snappish answer from the younger man. “I’ve been talking with Flamen for the past hour or more and I agree he was entirely too casual about accepting responsibility for our knee friend here. But, on the other hand, you didn’t make it very clear to him just what he was committing himself to, did you? You were in such a hurry to move Madison along—”
“Hurry! Lord, he’s been stuck in here for months longer than necessary!”
“No excuse for not being thorough,” Conroy said, in precisely the tone Reedeth remembered from his student days. “There’s never an excuse for not being thorough, especially when nowadays you can have all the fiddling little routine details comped out automatically. That’s what computers are properly used for,” he parenthesized to Flamen. “You seem to think I don’t appreciate them, but believe me in their right place they’re indispensable. The trouble is that people simply don’t treat them the way they ought to. Now, Jim!” He leaned forward earnestly. “Let me ask you a question that I hope you’ll answer honestly, and if you do you wont be in such a hurry any longer to head for home.”
Reedeth sighed. “Very well, go ahead.”
“Are you happy working under Mogshack?”
There was a pause. Suddenly Reedeth gave a forced laugh. “All right, I wont duck that one. No, I’m not—not any longer.”
“Why not?”
Another pause, longer. During it Reedeth’s eyes moved to Madison’s face and stayed there, fascinated.
“I guess,” he said at last, the words grinding out as though being dragged over gravel, “because I’m no longer convinced that the patients discharged from here are properly cured.”
Flamen tensed visibly, and his expression shifted from irritable to excited.
“In what sense are they not properly cured?” Conroy said, with the inflection he might have used to encourage a student to reach the logical conclusion of some argument he had propounded in an essay.
“I don’t know!” Reedeth jumped to his feet and paced restlessly up and down the office. “It’s just that … Well, over the past few days we’ve had two cases that troubled me dreadfully, and it was Miss Clay’s oracles that tipped the balance in my mind.”
Lyla’s turn to draw herself up alertly. Not noticing, Reedeth ploughed on.
“Mrs. Flamen was one of them. She’d responded excellently, of course, or else she wouldn’t have been released, but—but this wasn’t so much treatment as indulgence. And I honestly don’t think we’d have realized unless Mr. Flamen had complained about the coldness with which she behaved to him. So I’ve been wondering …” The words trailed away into a shrug. “And the other was Madison’s,” he concluded lamely.
“Flamen,” Conroy said with an air of satisfaction, “I think you may have a proposal to put to Jim Reedeth now.”
Flamen shaped words with his lips, canceled them, and shot out a hand towards the desketary. “Ah—doctor! Is what we say monitored by that thing and stored in the hospital data banks?”
Reedeth passed a weary hand through his hair, tousling it. “I could arrange for it not to be,” he muttered. “Madison worked it over for me a few days ago, and it’s not exactly standard any longer.”
“Ah-hah!” Conroy said. “I got hints about that from Flamen too, on the way here. So make the arrangements, Jim, and hear what Flamen wants to say to you.”
Reedeth gave the desketary a curt order, and glanced at Madison.
“Will that fix it?”
Madison looked ever so slightly uncomfortable; by contrast with his previous imperturbability, it was as though a mountain had trembled. He said, “I guess so, doc.”
“Damn it, you altered the thing—you must know!” Reedeth blurted, then mastered himself with an effort. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a bit on edge today. Okay, Mr. Flamen, let’s hear what you want to tell me.”
“You’ve probably figured out already that I’m sufficiently worried about my wife to have her independently packled by Dr. Conroy,” Flamen said slowly. “I did warn you that if she was prematurely discharged I’d take some such steps, didn’t I? But if it does turn out that she’s suffered at the hands of your director, I won’t stop with a simple suit for damages. I’ll do my utmost to have him impeached and dismissed.”
“No wonder you wanted to prevent that being recorded!” Reedeth said. He gave a thin smile. “Yes, I’d more or less figured that out. What are you trying to get me to do—bore from within to undermine him? Forget it. But I wouldn’t weep if someone else took over who was—well—let’s say less dogmatic than he is. It’d make working here a lot easier, and what’s more I think we’d do a better job.” He ended on a note of defiance, looking almost surprised at his own decisiveness.
“I’m sure Flamen wasn’t asking you to turn traitor,” Conroy said promptly. “But it shouldn’t be necessary to tell you, Jim, that I work much more happily on the basis of personal reactions than computerized analyses. And every now and again …”
It was his turn to hesitate, and his hearers looked at him in puzzlement as he glanced from one to another of them, his gaze lingering longest of all on Lyla.
“I’d better declare my interest,” he said eventually, and gave a wry grin. “Without intending the least disrespect to Flamen’s position and influence, on reflection I can’t believe that something as straightforward as independent packling of Mrs. Flamen is going to afford the lever to topple your boss off his pedestal, Jim. It could far too easily be discounted on grounds of personal pique—couldn’t it? And yet on the flight down from Manitoba I was thinking just how necessary it is to get Mogshack out.”
He leaned back in his chair, put the tips of his fingers together, and stared at them musingly.
“You see … like it or not, and frankly I don’t like it, this city of New York has a prestige, a cachet, a quality of influence, left over from the days when America really was on top of the world. There’s this curious kind of envy—I’m sure you’ve noticed it—which means that even people in Capetown and Accra and the capitals of Asia have a nostalgic regard for what’s done in New York, much in the same way as the Goths and Franks venerated Rome even after Alaric had sacked the city and the Romans had ceased to be a major power. And here’s Mogshack on top of the local heap, and I sincerely believe he’s doing things which are going to be disastrous. But they’re being imitated from Mexico to Moscow, and—and I’m getting worried. Jim, do you appreciate at all w
hat I’m driving at?”
Reedeth had lowered himself into his chair again. He gave a wary nod.
“I do have to confess that I’m not happy about the system I work under,” he said. “Whether you, Prof, or anyone, can produce something better, though …”
“Me, I’m old and tired, and reduced to teaching a handful of not overly bright students not even in the country of my birth,” Conroy sighed. “But I think I might conceivably be able to shift a dead weight off the minds of the next generation, who will have to clear up the mess we leave behind. I’d like to try, anyhow, and what I’m proposing is this. During the past few days, it looks as though not just one but a whole complex of curious and questionable events have taken place here, which combined will furnish Flamen with what he wants. Excuse me,” he added to the spoolpigeon. “But as I said, the case of your wife on its own isn’t enough. On the other hand, maybe if we took everything together, we might come up with a concerted attack. Let’s start with something which most people will find very strange—no disrespect, Miss Clay, but people do still mostly look on pythonesses with suspicion. How about this matter of calling in a pythoness and then acting on her oracles?”
“We didn’t,” Reedeth said. “Not exactly. As I said, it was what the automatics told us about the oracles which convinced us.”
“Us?”
“Me and my colleague Ariadne Spoelstra. It was her idea to invite Miss Clay to perform here.”
“And Mogshack approved?”
“Of course. Though I understand he needed a lot of persuading.”
“Good, there’s our first line of approach. Here’s our second.” Conroy turned to Madison. “I seem to be apologizing for my own phrasing every minute or two, don’t I? But I’ve got to say that I’m sure people outside this hospital are going to be astonished to learn you were servicing the automatics here for several months while you were still officially a mental patient. And I’m certain that you don’t feel too kindly disposed towards the man who kept you in long after you should have been discharged.”