“I surely do,” Diablo nodded. “It’s a point I overlooked, and I shouldn’t have. It’s the kind of touch I’ve always prided myself on adding to my own reconstructions for propaganda shows, the little striking bit which all by itself makes the scene appear real,” He clawed at his beard so vigorously it looked as though he might tear out the roots. “Go on. What else was it that made you ask Madison who he is?”
“The fact that when Miss Clay asked him straight out, was it him who fouled up her prophesying at the hospital, he said yes. Correct, Miss Clay?”
“Harry seemed to know what I meant without my explaining,” Lyla said, glancing nervously at the knee. “But—ah—should we be talking about him as if he wasn’t in the room?”
“Harry seems to be committing the crime of silence,” Diablo said without humor. “We’ve been trying to get a straight yes or no out of him all afternoon; maybe if we annoy him sufficiently by talking about him this way we’ll provoke a few useful comments. Hey, Harry?”
Madison gave a very faint smile and still said nothing.
“If that’s how you want it …” Conroy said. “Well, apart from the actual oracle that turned into an echo-trap, and this confusing nonsense about a man with seven brains—”
“I remembered that!” Lyla sat bolt upright suddenly. “My God, how could I have forgotten again? While I was sitting there at Mikki Baxendale’s place, watching him, I was saying it over and over to myself: ‘I met a man with seven brains!’ ”
“A hell of a lot of things seem to be being remembered,” Reedeth said cynically. “Prophecies after the event never impressed me very much.”
“Maybe not,” Conroy said. “How about prophecies before the event, though? Jim, would a patient in the Ginsberg be allowed access to a vuset receiving kneeblank propaganda, like for instance one of Diablo’s shows relayed by a Chinese or Nigerian satellite?”
“No, of course not. Anything that disturbing to the personality, like having one’s guilt feelings played on, would be disastrous. It can be tolerated outside, where there are plenty of distractions, but in the enclosed environment of the hospital—no, definitely that couldn’t be allowed.”
“In other words—” Conroy began, to be cut short by an exclamation from Flamen as the latter turned away from his computer board.
“Jackpot! Christ, this is—this is enormous! Here, someone pass me a carton of that beer if there’s any left.” The spoolpigeon was so excited he was almost clapping his hands. “Pay dirt on absolutely every angle of the entire story! The Gottschalks are planning to opt out of the Iron Mountain data center in favor of new installations of their own, and it looks as though the likely location is in Nevada where the younger pollies like Anthony and Vyacheslav have moved to get away from Marcantonio’s stamping-grounds here in the East—which means he may very well not approve of the idea. And there is a whole new line of weaponry scheduled for mass production shortly. It looks as though it’s been redesigned from the ground up, and I’ve even traced a code letter ‘C’ which appears to identify the series. Christ, if I have to spend the rest of the weekend here, if I have to use up the computer time the Feds are giving me on this one subject, I’m going to come up on Monday with the biggest goddamned story I ever handled! It’s a sensaysh, just purely a sensaysh! Imagine being able to say what a struggle inside the cartel is about while it’s still going on!”
Abruptly it dawned on him that the faces turned to him wore uniformly dismayed expressions, and he broke off. “What’s the matter, Professor?” he challenged Conroy. “You were telling me I should tackle the Gottschalks, weren’t you? But you don’t exactly look overjoyed!”
“Diablo!” Conroy kept his eyes on Flamen, not on the knee. “Your show about these new weapons—is it the only coverage of them up to now?”
“As far as I know,” Diablo confirmed.
“And the show’s only been canned? It hasn’t yet been on the beams?”
“Right.”
“And in any case patients in the Ginsberg aren’t allowed access to broadcasts from Blackbury or any other knee enclave.” Conroy drew a deep breath. “So how could Madison not only predict these prototype weapons, but even identify the code letter which refers to them?”
“I don’t understand,” Flamen said, looking in bewilderment from one to other of his companions.
“That,” Conroy assured him, “makes you even with the rest of us.”
EIGHTY-EIGHT
FROM: ROBERT GOTTSCHALK TO: ANTHONY GOTTSCHALK URGENT AND SECRET
(A) Buy controlling interest in Holocosmic network by 1100 est Monday and Discontinue Matthew Flamen show paying maximum $2,000,000 for breach of contract
(B) Failing (A) Discontinue Matthew Flamen
EIGHTY-NINE
DRAWING A BLANK WHILE LOOKING FOR A KNEE
“Nothing?” Morton Lenigo inquired.
The man who had entered the room dropped wearily into a chair and shook his head, crowned with ostentatiously nappy hair. “Fuck-all,” he said. “That goddamned fool—Mayor Black, I mean. No reply from this block of apts where they’re supposed to have installed Diablo—no reports from any of my X Patriot sympathizers I asked to try and spot him if he shows on the street—no reply from the offices of this company they fixed him a job with because the comweb is turned over to an answering service for the weekend. … Might as well have taken him out and sunk him in the ocean with weights on his feet!”
“Think someone did?” Lenigo suggested after a pause.
There was a silence crowded with the stench of depression. Eventually the man said, “I’ve been avoiding that idea. But someone who could hire in that honky devil Uys …”
“Yes,” Morton Lenigo said. He relied on his reputation to complete the statement for him. Shortly the other man got up and went away.
NINETY
DIAGNOSIS
“The logical thing,” Diablo said after reflection, “is to comp out the things which seem the craziest, hm? Like maybe see if there’s anything in the literature about having prophetic visions under the influence of a sibyl-pill. And this will give us a handle to grab hold of the rest by, like what you say these automatics at the hospital told you about Mrs. Flamen.” He rose. “Flamen, could you show me how to—?”
“Now just a moment!” Flamen’s cheeks were reddening. “I need to use my computers right now. Weren’t you listening to what I just said?”
“And don’t you realize how you were put on to what you just discovered?” Conroy cut in forcibly. “You owe it to Madison—which means you owe it to Reedeth—which means you owe it to his colleague Dr. Spoelstra for inviting Miss Clay to perform at the hospital, and to her too for providing the oracles we’ve been discussing, and—”
“Oh, there won’t be any end to this!” Flamen gibed. “I suppose I owe it to my brother-in-law too, for persuading me to let Celia stay on in the Ginsberg instead of being transferred to a private sanitarium! But I wouldn’t feel inclined to thank him for doing her that particular favor.”
“I was wondering when you’d remember that you theoretically brought me to New York for the weekend to set up parameters for her packling,” Conroy said with deliberate acerbity.
The fire of Flamen’s incipient fury blazed up. “Damnation! If we hadn’t got sidetracked into this stupid business about Madison we’d have been out to the Priors’ place by now and you’d have met Celia and probably the whole thing could have been tied up in a few hours!”
“And you wouldn’t have got what you wanted out of it,” Conroy snapped. “Using her case as a basis for attacking Mogshack could be dismissed as a personal grudge. You’ve got something far better, I can tell you that right now! Get Diablo to ground it on Madison’s delayed release, demand packling of Mogshack himself to locate this megalomania the Ginsberg’s automatics have diagnosed, and you’ll have him down by the end of the year. And that’s not the only thing you’ve been given, handed to you on a silver platter! You’ve got the item about the Got
tschalks too!”
“So I’m supposed to make a list of everybody who did anything to get me where I am, go down them checking each one off when I’ve said thanks for doing me the favor?”
“Yes, yes and yes!” Abruptly Conroy’s fraying control over his own temper failed, and he jumped to his feet, confronting Flamen from the vantage point of his greater tallness. “What the hell good is it going to do anyone to move someone like Mogshack off his petty little pedestal if the people who do it haven’t even noticed that he’s pulling their strings and making them dance? Are you so dumb, witless, shortsighted you’re willing to put up with the worst of all the things that are wrong with our poor sick planet?”
“Why, you—!”
“Shut up!” Conroy thumped fist into palm with such force it made a sound sharp as a gunshot. “Why in hell should I have to tell you this, a spoolpigeon who must have seen it happen hundreds of times? You’ve never got at the people who matter, the people it might help us if we got rid of them. You’ve got at the people who were trapped and cornered by circumstances, who like took a risk one time and it didn’t work so they had to take another and another, or pocketed a bribe and found they liked the higher standard of living, or whatever the hell.
“One thing leads to another in this world, Flamen, and we human beings get dragged along like—like dead leaves spinning in the wake of a skimmer. Diablo was saying a while back how you fine down your principles so that a machine can handle them, and pretty soon the person using the machine comes to imagine that this is how it’s always been—there never was a subtler way of thinking. That’s some of where it’s at, but it’s not all by any means. Take the fine expensive home you live in, with its automatic defenses and its mines sown under the lawn like daffodil-bulbs. You shut yourself up behind armor-plate, you shut your mind too. You advertise Guardian traps on your show, don’t you—those steel bands spiked like an Iron Maiden? What’s the mentality of someone who’s prepared to come home from visiting neighbors and find a corpse hung up in the doorway? I say he’s already insane when he commits himself to that course of action, and you don’t have to wait for him to lose his marbles under an overdose of Ladromide before he stops thinking as a responsible mature person ought to! And what’s the reason that’s advanced for acting this way?” He rounded on Reedeth.
“You know! You probably have it dinned into you a dozen times a day at your work! ‘Be an individual!’” Conroy contrived to make the slogan sound obscene. “And what’s this been twisted into? The biggest Big Lie in history! It’s no use making your life so private you refuse to learn from other people’s experience—you just get stuck in a groove of mistakes you need never have made. We have more knowledge available at the turn of a switch than ever before, we can bring any part of the world into our own homes, and what do we do with it? Half the time we advertise goods people can’t afford, and anyhow they’ve got the color and hold controls adrift because the pretty patterns are fun to look at when you’ve bolted and barred your mind with drugs. Split! Divide! Separate! Shut your eyes and maybe it’ll go away!
“We mine our gardens, we close our frontiers, we barricade our cities with Macnamara lines to shut off black from white, we divide, divide, divide!” A stamp emphasized each repetition of the word. “It gets into our families, goddamn it, it gets into our very love-making! Christ, do you know I had a girl student last year who thought she was having an affair with a boy back home and all they’d ever done was sit in front of the comweb and masturbate at each other? Twenty miles apart! They’d never even kissed! We’re going insane, our whole blasted species—we’re heading for screaming ochlophobia! Another couple of generations and husbands will be afraid to be alone in the same room with their wives, mothers will be afraid of their babies, if there are any babies!
“And for what purpose? Why are we encouraging the spread of this lunacy? I mean we here, in North America. I don’t mean the Afrikaners sitting smug on top of their pullulating heap of poor black devils hungry, half-naked and diseased, the richest people in the world battening on the poorest. That’s just greed, which is a comparatively clean kind of vice. I’m talking about perversion, horrible, disgusting, systematic, deliberate perversion of the power of reason to destroy people without killing them, to strip them of their initiative, their joy in life, their hope, for Christ’s sake, their last ultimate irreducible human resource, hope. Out of sheer desperation millions of people are abandoning the use of reason, bankrupting themselves to buy mass-produced plastic idols, in a last puerile attempt to outdo the bastards who’ve made reason a dirty word.
“They’ve done it, you know—it’s the dirtiest word in any human vocabulary right now. And it’s been brought about in my own lifetime, almost entirely. Cold rational decisions, every step leading to them perfectly logical, underlay the wars in Asia, the war in Indonesia, the war in New Guinea, and at every step we lost. Not just the wars, but bits of ourselves. Compassion. Empathy. Love. Pity. We systematically chopped ourselves down to the measure of a machine.
“How could you expect a man to be a good neighbor when he’s spent years shooting at shadows, moving tree-branches, silhouettes on window-shades? How could you expect him to be a good citizen when he’s seen his government authorize the killing of thousands, millions of other human beings? How could you expect him to be a good father when he’s spent his early twenties torturing children to get information about enemy troop positions? That started as far back as the seventies, wasn’t it? Madison, you were in the Army!”
As though an ebony statue had acquired the power of speech, the kneeblank’s lips parted. “United States Army Intelligence Manual Volume Five, Countersubversion, Section Nineteen, Residual Intelligence from Non-combatant Sources, Chapter Two, Correlation of Juvenile-derived Information, paragraph twelve, Reliability of Information Obtained Under Duress.”
“My God!” Reedeth whispered, barely audible. Conroy ignored him and plunged on.
“Right, right! We’ve been laid out on the Procrustes bed of the computer, and instead of our toes being chopped off we’ve lost little bits of our brains!
“And now the Gottschalks, who’ve already degraded the institution of the family by turning it into a skeleton for the foulest monster ever dredged out of the human subconscious with their grandfather-father-son rank order and their monosyllabic/polysyllabic gimmickry, now they’re apparently going to equip people who’ve had this done to them with—how did you put it, Madison? ‘Equipment adequate to raze a medium-sized city,’ is that right? Flamen, instead of comping some petty little story that’s going to do no more than reinforce your own worthless image to the public, why don’t you comp something important, like asking your beloved machines to estimate the human race’s chance of surviving past the end of the century? That would—Why, child! You’re crying!”
His tone and manner changed magically, and he darted across the room to put his arm around Lyla’s bare shoulders. She had hunched forward with her face in her hands and was sobbing.
“I’m sorry!” she forced out between snuffles. “I just couldn’t help it”
“Now don’t you think of apologizing!” Conroy straightened, leaving one lean hand on Lyla’s nape. “You’re showing the only decent human reaction out of all of us. It is something to weep over, what we’re doing to ourselves, but I’ve forgotten how. I got so frustrated I let myself be pushed aside. I can’t even claim vicarious credit for trying to stop it—even Jim Reedeth there, whom I regarded as one of my best students, went right along with the crowd the moment he got the chance. Flamen’s spent his working life persuading his audience that the people who get to the top can be exposed at any moment as venial, deceitful, corrupt; even Pedro Diablo, for whom there’s a smidgin of excuse, can’t deny that he’s devoted his talent to setting human beings against each other. And it looks as though Madison has responded so well to Mogshack’s treatment that he’s no more capable of tears than a machine is.”
“That’s not entirely
surprising,” Madison said, stirring from his long-time rigidity.
“What?” Conroy blinked at him.
“I’m taking a calculated risk in making the following admission.” Madison rose to his feet in a single smooth movement. “However, computation indicates that this is a nexus at which the intromission of additional data is likely to generate consequences that are intrinsically incalculable, and the alternatives have been exhausted without leading me to conclude that a superior outcome can be attained without intervention. A further operative factor is that partial data have already been inadvertently introduced into the situation owing to ingestion of a preparation of psycho-coca and parabufotenine, the synergistic effect of this substance on a male human metabolism already circulating a critical dose of Narcolate not having been previously recorded.”
Conroy glanced around the room. Flamen was staring in utter bewilderment, and so was Diablo; Reedeth had tensed, as though expecting to be attacked, and his lips were forming silent words, perhaps indicating regret at his own willingness to believe that Madison was indeed fit for discharge from the Ginsberg. Only Lyla seemed to have some insight into whatever might be happening. She had lowered her palms from her tear-wet cheeks and was gazing at Madison in wonder.
“That’s how you talked at Mikki Baxendale’s,” she whispered. “That’s the same tone of voice!”
“Madison?” Conroy said uncertainly.
“A pseudonym,” Madison said. “You are in fact speaking to Robert Gottschalk—”
“Christ!” Flamen breathed. “So you’re the new mystery man I’ve been hearing—”
“And the reason I am incapable of displaying such an emotional response as the shedding of tears is that I was not programmed to react in that fashion.”