Madison turned one hand over as though spilling water from its cupped palm. He said, “Servicing the automatics is the job I’m good at, Mr. Conroy.”
“You’re not kidding,” Reedeth said. He seemed to have recovered his self-possession. “What you did to this desketary of mine is almost unbelievable. And, come to think of it, I never thanked you.”
“Yes, that’s a point I was coming to,” Conroy said. “You’ve told us about this desketary and how it’s been modified—can you give us some examples of its new behavior?”
“I just did,” Reedeth countered. “All this is being kept confidential, and it’s just as well!”
“That’s a negative kind of demonstration. How about a positive one? How about something which will prove that the entire resources of the Ginsberg cybernetic complex can be tapped through this single input? As I understand it, that’s what you’re claiming.”
“I don’t think there’s any doubt of it!” Reedeth exclaimed. “I never thought I could—” He stopped abruptly.
“Never thought what?”
A faint beading of sweat had suddenly appeared on Reedeth’s forehead. “I never thought I’d be able to make inquiries through my desketary about Dr. Mogshack himself,” he muttered. “But I guess that’s kind of an internal point, not one which visitors would appreciate.”
“I appreciate it,” Conroy said with some grimness. “I have a clear impression of what it must be to work under your boss, even though I’ve escaped that misfortune so far. I still want that demonstration, though. Hmmm! That’s an idea.” He turned to Flamen. “The automatics here are notoriously among the most advanced and elaborate in the world. Do you happen to have a problem on your mind they could solve for you?”
“Now just a—” Reedeth began, but Flamen had reacted instantly.
“Sure I do,” he said. “Doctor, do regular vu-transmissions form part of the environment of your patients which your automatics take into consideration?”
“Oh, naturally,” Reedeth said, a trifle puzzled. “As . they go to green, we phase our patients back to the outside world, and vushows play a key rôle in the process.”
“My God,” Conroy said very softly; Flamen disregarded the comment.
“So in that case let’s ask your miraculous desketary why my own computers have assured me that unlimited free Federal computer time won’t get rid of the interference which has been plaguing my show recently,” Flamen said, and leaned back in his chair with a smug expression.
“I don’t think I quite understand that,” Reedeth said after a pause. “Ah … I don’t watch your show, I’m afraid. I’m always working when it comes on.”
“It’s perfectly straightforward,” Flamen said. “My show, and only my show, has been suffering ridiculous amounts of interference literally every day for months past, and it’s getting so bad people are switching off in droves. The Holocosmic engineers swear blind it’s nothing they can fix. I want to know whether to believe them, or whether I’m being sabotaged, or whether I’m going out of my mind and developing a persecution complex. It seems like a reasonable question to put to the computers in a mental hospital. Especially since my own equipment seems to have a blind spot on the subject, and it this moment strikes me that maybe if I am being sabotaged the sabotage extends to my computers at the office!” He was growing heated as he ended the tirade.
With a suspicious glance, as though prepared to agree with the suggestion of paranoia, Reedeth summarized the question for his desketary, and waited for the most probable answer: insufficient data.
It didn’t materialize. In its usual patronizing tone, the machine said, “Both Mr. Flamen and the Federal government’s computers lack the data to evaluate this problem.”
“Does that mean you have the data?” Reedeth said, confused.
“Yes.”
Flamen was looking equally astonished; it was obvious that he hadn’t expected to receive a serious reply to his query, but only meant to live up to the challenge implicit in Reedeth’s claims about his desketary. Since this had been the key element in persuading him to accept responsibility for Madison after his release, it was logical that he should put maximum pressure on it. He was torn between disappointment at not scoring against Reedeth, and genuine desire to learn the answer.
“So get it to answer the question for me!” he rapped at Reedeth.
“I’ll try,” the psychologist muttered, and put the problem to the machine. Promptly the mechanical voice responded.
“Mrs. Celia Prior Flamen possesses the ability to interfere with electromagnetic radiations in the band used for three-vee transmissions, and this fact is not stored either at the offices of Matthew Flamen Inc. or at the Federal computation center at Oak Ridge. It was established upon her arrival at this hospital and has not subsequently been relayed to any other cybernetic system.”
There was a stunned silence in the room. At length Flamen said faintly, “But … Reedeth, are your automatics as crazy as your patients?”
“It certainly sounds like it,” Reedeth agreed. His cheeks had gone pale. “Unless … No, it’s absurd. But—”
“But what?” Conroy cut in with enthusiasm instead of the scorn they had expected.
Reluctantly Reedeth said, “Well, it is true, now that I come to think of it—there were a hell of a lot of breakdowns in our internal comweb directly following Mrs. Flamen’s commitment. Remember, Harry?” He turned to Madison.
“Ah … Yes, doctor, that’s perfectly true,” the knee said in a depressed tone.
“Even so,” Reedeth said, appearing to regret his former reaction, “I don’t see how one could—”
“Jim!” Conroy interrupted. “Do you trust the automatics you work with here?”
“Damn it, I put exactly the same question to Ariadne the other day,” Reedeth sighed. “Prof, I literally don’t know! That was such an incredible—”
The comweb buzzed, and in the screen there appeared the familiar face of Elias Mogshack, a smile parting his moustache from his beard, a cordial tone coloring the words he started to speak as the image of Reedeth appeared before him.
“Ah, Dr. Reedeth! I heard you were devotedly working out of normal hours to clear up some—”
And it stopped.
Silence.
Resuming, the voice was like a saw cutting into wet wood, the bite and rasp overlaid with a whine of petulance. “Aren’t you Xavier Conroy?”
Completely unperturbed, Conroy nodded. “Good afternoon, Dr. Mogshack. It’s a long time since we had the pleasure—”
“What the hell are you doing in my hospital?”
“Yours?” Conroy countered delicately. “Strange—I thought it belonged to the government and people of the State of New York.”
“You son of a bitch,” said Mogshack, and his lips folded together so tightly that when he parted them again they remained bloodlessly pale. “Get out. Get off the grounds of the Ginsberg Hospital this minute or I’ll have you removed by the police.”
Reedeth said, “Dr. Mogshack—”
“Did you invite this man into the hospital?” Mogshack thundered.
“What? Well, I guess I—”
“You speak to me on Monday the minute you arrive on the hospital premises! I’ll tell you then what I think of you—I wouldn’t want Conroy to be able to gloat over my bad judgment in offering you a post at the Ginsberg. But I’d recommend you to start looking for other employment; that much I will say right now!”
The screen blanked. A few seconds went by; then the desketary said, “On the orders of the hospital director, this unit is inactivated until oh-nine-hundred Monday morning next.”
And went dead.
“Well, if you want that fixed, Madison can presumably do it,” Flamen said, curling his lip as he turned to glance at the knee.
“Stop it, Flamen,” Conroy said quietly. “Yes, Madison very probably can override the inactivation, but do you want to give away your ace in the hole?”
He stood
up. “All right, that settles it,” he said. “Up till this very moment I had doubts. You too, Jim? But I think Flamen just had an example of the kind of person who’s allegedly ‘cured’ his wife, and Madison just saw who it really was who kept him here after the due time, and you, Jim, had your marching orders. Let’s get out of here like he told us to—in the state he’s in, he’s perfectly capable of keeping his word about having me dragged out by the busies. Isn’t he, Jim?”
Reedeth drew a deep breath. He said, “You remember I mentioned a little while ago that I’d got data about Mogshack out of this desketary? Well, what it said …” He hesitated, but an access of fury carried him over his mental logjam. “It said he wanted to have the whole United States committed to his care! Well, he can damned well count me out!”
“I can’t think,” Conroy said glacially, “what better evidence you could offer Flamen here for the accuracy of your automatics’ answer to his question than the perfect match between that diagnosis of your boss’s mental condition and the behavior he just exhibited. Flamen, you have computers in your office?”
“Well—yes, naturally!”
“That’s where we’re going,” Conroy said with authority. “I don’t imagine you have a setup to match the Ginsberg’s, but unless he objects I want to take along our highly recommended electronicist here: apart from anything else I only have until tomorrow night in this town and I’d like to be assured that when I head for home there’s some capable engineer looking after the problem of this interference on your program, regardless of whether it is or is not your wife’s doing like the machines say. I’d also like to take you along, Miss Clay, unless you have something else to do. I get hunches sometimes. Right now I have a hunch that—”
He broke off, looking almost sheepish at his own tone of voice. “The hell, I do have a hunch, and it’s so acute it practically hurts! I have this crazy notion that there’s a pattern underlying air this, and properly used it will torpedo Mogshack very satisfactorily. But it’s got to be done fast!” He put his hands up to his head as though overcome, and Reedeth stared at him in bewilderment.
Lyla, who had been silent for a long while, said suddenly, “Yes, Professor.”
“What?” Conroy turned to her, blinking. “Oh. Oh, yes. I mean … yes. Madison, who the hell are you?”
Reedeth said, “Prof, I don’t think I—”
“I don’t give a damn what you think!” Conroy blazed. “I know what I think, and that’s what counts. You coming or not?”
“Coming …?”
“To Flamen’s office!” Conroy barked. “You know what’s happening, don’t you, woman?” he added to Lyla.
“I—I’m not quite sure, but …” Lyla rose unsteadily to her feet. “All I know is I’m scared, but I’m coming.”
Flamen said, “I feel dizzy. What happened?”
“If it’s got through to you, it’s big,” Conroy said, and marched towards the door. “Move!”
EIGHTY-TWO
MOTION PASSED BY SEVENTEEN VOTES TO TWO AT A CONFERENCE HELD OVER A SECURE COMWEB LINK BETWEEN REPRESENTATIVES OF ALL THE MAJOR KNEEBLANK ENCLAVES IN NORTH AMERICA WITH THE EXCEPTION OF BLACKBURY
Be it resolved: That in view of the grave disservice to the cause of black self-determination resulting from Mayor Black’s reliance on a white South African racial expert in the implementation of his pro-melanist policy inasmuch as it has entailed the dismissal of Pedro Diablo who is known to be a staunch and irreplaceable advocate of a standpoint adhered to by all participants in this discussion every possible step be taken to rectify the consequences of his misguided act at the earliest opportunity including if need be the forcible packling of Mayor Black to determine whether his behavior is in conformity with the best interests of American melanism.
EIGHTY-THREE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY USAGE SO NEW AS NOT YET TO HAVE BEEN INCORPORATED IN ANY RECOGNIZED GLOSSARY BUT SUFFICIENTLY COMMON TO HAVE COME ORALLY TO THE ATTENTION OF A NUMBER OF LEXICOGRAPHERS
“Sprained knee” (for kneeblank, Afrikaans nieblanke non-white person): a colored person constrained to live and/or work in a white-dominated environment rather than an enclave or a country with a colored government.
EIGHTY-FOUR
ONE KNEE SPRAINED, ONE TIME BADLY OUT OF JOINT
What exactly was going on Flamen had no idea, but Conroy seemed persuaded that it was far more likely to lead to the collapse of Mogshack’s authority than the original plan, and clinging optimistically to that he allowed himself to be swept along by events. Followed by his ill-assorted gaggle of companions, he rode the pediflow in the Etchmark Undertower from the elevator to the door of his office, feeling in his pocket for the Punch key to admit them.
But when he applied it, he realized that the door was already unlocked.
“What the hell?” he said under his breath. The panel moved aside at a touch, before he had time to consider that if there was an intruder in the office it would make more sense to steal quietly away and send for the busies than to walk in and confront him. In spite of the fact that his occupation exposed him to the potential fury of a great many of his victims, he had never carried a gun to protect himself, and he doubted whether anyone else in his party was armed at the moment.
While he was still in the grip of his initial surprise, however, one of the internal doors slid back and a dark face appeared, wearing an embarrassed expression like a kid caught stealing candy.
“Good God!” Conroy said over Flamen’s shoulder; he was the taller by half a head. “Aren’t you Pedro Diablo? Well, you seem to have landed on your feet after being so unceremoniously thrown out of Blackbury!”
Diablo gave a distracted nod, eyes on Flamen. “Ah … I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “IBM couldn’t get me one of the practice units you suggested until Monday at the soonest, and having seen what your equipment is capable of I simply couldn’t resist the temptation of coming in to play around with it. I did get the code to isolate the unit, of course—it didn’t need special wiring after all—and I promise I haven’t done it any harm.”
“You might have had the courtesy to let me know!” Flamen snapped. “I damned near mistook you for a burglar, and I was all set to sneak off and send for the police! Right now, though, we have more important uses for our computers, so I’d appreciate it if you’d get lost.” Ill-temperedly, he strode past Diablo and into his own office.
“Nonsense,” Conroy said, following.
“What?”
“I said nonsense. For one thing I’ve wanted to meet this man for years—he’s probably the best intuitive psychologist on the planet, and I regularly use recordings of his shows as study themes, to illustrate how a determined individual can manipulate the mass audience. And for another thing, you’re angry and frustrated, I’m pretty much manic, and we have to contend with a hell of a complex problem. It’ll be very damned useful to have someone around with a detached point of view, and I can’t think of anyone much more detached than someone who never wanted to be in New York at all and would far rather still be home in Blackbury. Right?” he added to the knee.
“Who in the hell are you?” Diablo demanded in astonishment.
“Oh—I’m sorry! I’m Xavier Conroy.”
“You are?” Diablo’s verge-of-hostile manner changed magically. He held out his hand. “Damn it, I’ve been hoping to meet you for years, too! Why in the world did you let them chase you off to that backwater teaching job in Manitoba?”
“I’m excessively fond of my own opinions,” Conroy said wryly. “Students are generally sufficiently overawed not to shout their professors down, even these days, and it gives me a false sense of achievement when I see my own doctrines coming back at me in their term papers. But I had no business taking it for granted you’d want to stick around here, of course. It’s just that—well, like I said, we have a problem, and … Do you get hunches, Mr. Diablo?”
“I guess I do, now and then. Not that they amount to real premonitions, if that’s what yo
u’re driving at. Or else I’d still be at home and a lot happier. But one gets a feel for the propaganda potential of any given news-item, for example.”
“That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about,” Conroy nodded. “Over the past hour or two I’ve been seeing and hearing some absolutely extraordinary things, and there’s a tantalizing sense of a pattern growing out of them. You got the same feeling, didn’t you, Flamen?”
A little annoyed at being shuffled to the sidelines on his home ground, Flamen gave a curt nod; a heartbeat later he repented and amplified it, looking puzzled.
“Yes, back there at the hospital I had this momentary fit of—of excitement, I guess it was. It was so strong it made me feel dizzy.”
“I’m still getting it,” Lyla said, very pale. She was standing in the doorway as though shy about entering. “I never felt anything like it before—at least, not since I was a kid and everybody around me was busy preparing for war to break out. I didn’t understand what was happening, of course, but I distinctly associate to the same mixture of fear and excitement.”
“Miss Clay is a pythoness,” Conroy said to Diablo. “How do you feel about pythonesses?”
There was a pause. At length, with a chuckle, Diablo drew up the left sleeve of his smart New York-styled oversuit and revealed that just below the elbow he was wearing a Conjuh Man Inc. juju bracelet: an intricately braided ring of hair from a lion’s mane.
“It’s the kind of thing I guess we know more about than blanks do,” he said. “You take sibyl-pills, Miss Clay?”
“Ah—yes.”
“We kneeblanks were used to tapping the same kind of mental forces long before they got around to synthesizing the drugs you use in a clean modern laboratory. I have—I mean I had—a seeress on my staff back home who could do almost everything these computers do except build up reconstructed scenes for transmission. Used her a lot, like about one story a month regularly where-ever we needed more data than we could get through official channels. She was right, too, four times out of five. Matter of fact I’m kind of glad to see how blank society has been turning back to human insights these past few years instead of sticking to machines exclusively.”