“You restrict yourself to—ah—damaged personalities?”
“It is not part of my programming to destroy human beings, only to furnish them with the means to destroy each other should they so elect.” There was a pause, curiously unmechanical in its implications compared with the monotonous delivery of Madison/Gottschalk’s orotund periods. “The definition of a human being programmed into me,” the knee—or the machine—added, “extends to isolated cephalic units and hence to all cripples, phocomeli and similar physically abnormal individuals, but not to those who are deranged beyond hope of recovery.”
“Isolated cephalic units,” Conroy repeated thoughtfully. “In other words, chopped-off heads artificially kept alive. When s that supposed to become possible?”
“In 2032, shortly before the decline of civilization rendered the necessary techniques unavailable.”
“But what brought about this ‘decline of civilization’?” Conroy demanded. “It can’t just have been the introduction of these weapons you’ve been talking about, this System C equipment.”
“The maximization of arms sales implied the maximization of inter-human hostility,” Madison/Gottschalk said. “All the existing sources of this phenomenon were tapped, and those proving particularly fruitful were patriotism, parochialism, xenophobia, ochlophobia, racial, religious and linguistic differences, and the so-called ‘gulf between the generations.’ It was readily found feasible to emphasize these pre-existent attitudes to the point where a System C integrated weaponry unit was so desirable among the informed populace that the possibility of another individual acquiring this virtually indestructible equipment sufficed to provoke an attack on him before he purchased one.”
“Oh Christ,” Diablo said. His forehead was furrowed into an agonized frown. “You mean—like—if it got around that the Gottschalks were issuing these weapons cheap to some nearby knee enclave, then the local blanks would descend on them to massacre them before they could use what they’d been given?”
“That is one illustration. The destruction of Blackbury, Chicago, Detroit, Blackmanchester, and a number of smaller knee-controlled cities in the early 2020’s was explicable on that basis. However, by the 2030’s the phenomenon was extending to the individual level.”
“How?” Flamen demanded. Clearly the spoolpigeon was caught up in the discussion against his will; his voice was gravelly and reluctant.
“Knowledge of the existence in one’s immediate neighborhood of a person wealthy enough to invest in a System C unit frequently motivated the assassination of that person. In certain areas, notably California and New York State, the incidence reached more than seventy percent.”
“You mean seventy percent of the wealthy people who got killed were killed because their neighbors were afraid of them buying these weapons?” Conroy demanded.
“No. Seventy percent of the persons wealthy enough to purchase the weaponry were killed before they could do so.”
There was a terrible dead silence in which the faint, faint humming of the surrounding computers was like the tolling of a funeral bell.
“How—much?” The words were squeezed out of Flamen like juice from an orange.
“Initially, one hundred thousand dollars. Inflation raised this until the Mark V and final was priced at $155,000.”
Once more there was a pause. Once more Lyla broke it, as though she were shy about speaking unless it was clear no one else was eager to do so.
“But I don’t see what we’re expected to do,” she said. “It’s worse to know that something horrible is going to happen. I mean, obviously it could. Everybody’s putting up the barricades—when you and I went out the other night just to try and get something to eat …” The sentence faltered and died.
“I can see several things worth trying,” Conroy said. “For example, the Flamen show on Monday could carry precise details of the proposed System C weaponry, right down to the market price, and if I have any insight at all into how the minds of the Gottschalks work that’s going to cause a hell of a lot of Anthony’s supporters to switch sides on the grounds that if he can’t keep a secret he’s not fit to be the leader. How about it, Flamen?”
The spoolpigeon was framing an answer which, by the set of his face, was meant to be scornful, when the comweb buzzed and a voice said, “Able Baker override—he must be there.”
“What the hell?” Flamen spun on his heel to face the camera. “Who in the world can be trying to reach me here on a weekend?”
In the screen, Prior s face took form, displaying relief. “Thank heaven I found you, Matthew!” he blurted. “I’ve been hunting for you everywhere—at home, at the Ginsberg, at the hotel where you booked Conroy …” Eyes darting past Flamen, he took in the others who were present, and his tone changed.
“What on earth are you up to? Oh, never mind, it can’t be this important. Matthew, we’ve been put out of business!”
“What?”
“I just had a call from Eugene Voigt. You know the PCC always monitor out-of-hours dealings in communications stock in case someone tries to pull a fast one. Well, somebody has, and of all people it’s the Gottschalks. About forty minutes ago they registered the fifty-one percent holding in Holocosmic—apparently they’ve been buying off everyone who could be reached at nearly double the market price—and their first decision now that they control the network is to discontinue the Matthew Flamen show.”
“But I have a contract!”
“Lump sum in lieu of salary plus compensation for probable loss of renewal. Voigt said his computers estimate a shade under two million. Advises us to lie down under it because they could get away with half a million less.”
“What the hell are they going to put in my slot, then?”
Prior shrugged. “Who cares? Catch them being hauled into court for exceeding the PCC’s advertising limit!”
“They can’t do this to …” Foolishly, Flamen let his hands drop to his sides. They could indeed do this to him, and it was no use trying to get away from it. He settled for: “Why should they want to do this to me?”
“To prevent premature release of details concerning System C integrated weaponry,” Madison/Gottschalk said. “I recall issuing this recommendation.” He fell silent, scowling dreadfully.
Prior blinked at his image, bewildered, but clung to his theme. “Matthew, have you been overreaching yourself? Have you set something up about the Gottschalks?”
“I …” Flamen shook his head. “I don’t know. I lost track.” He hesitated.
“What am I going to do?” he burst out.
“There’s a pythoness here who’s short of a mackero,” Conroy said with a shrug. “Oh, for God’s sake, man! Can’t you think of anyone but yourself right now? For me this is the clincher; I’ll go right along with Madison’s crazy story until I’m forced to disbelieve it. This whole damned species of ours is out of its collective skull already, so why—?”
Behind Prior in the screen, a new face appeared, peering over his shoulder: Celia’s.
“Why, you’re calling Matthew,” she said brightly. She seemed to have shed most of the dulling effect of the drugs she had been pumped full of in the Ginsberg, and was almost vivacious again. “And that’s his office. Hmm! It must be something important for him to be working on a Saturday afternoon. Hello, Matthew!”
“Freeze it!” Flamen barked. “I’m not in a sociable mood. Apparently I just lost my job.”
“What? But how could you? I thought your contract still—”
“Lionel says the Gottschalks bought out Holocosmic, and it looks as though it was specifically to get rid of my show.”
“But that’s awful,” Celia said slowly. “I mean, I know how important your work is to you. It even made you neglect me, didn’t it?”
“Now if you’re going to start a domestic wrangle you can—”
“No, no, of course not,” Celia interrupted soothingly. “I’m not blaming you, it’s just the way you are. I suppose I do resent it, sort o
f subconsciously, because a woman likes to be wooed and pampered, but it’s not a rational reaction and after all you have been doing some wonderful work with your show all these years.” She sounded perfectly sincere, although Flamen’s reaction was to look suspicious. “Isn’t there something you can do about it, like sue them for breach of contract?”
“They’re going to offer compensation,” Prior said before Flamen could answer. “Celia darl, go away, will you? We have troubles!”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” Her pretty face set in a sympathetic frown, she withdrew from camera range.
“Now where were we?” Prior said in an annoyed tone. “Oh yes: Matthew, I was asking whether you’d done something to alarm the Gottschalks and if so whether you—”
He was cut short by an exclamation from Diablo, who had jumped to his feet and thrust out an arm towards Madison.
“What’s wrong with him all of a sudden?” he cried.
All heads turned. Madison had slumped in his chair, and his formerly stern face had taken on an idiot slackness, the lips so loose that a trace of drool was glistening on his chin. After a moment he picked up his left hand in his right and examined it curiously, seeming to count the fingers. When Conroy spoke to him, his only reaction was a bland foolish smile.
“Dr. Reedeth,” Diablo said nervously, “I guess you’d better take a look at him.”
The psychologist approached cautiously, looking the knee over from head to foot. He said, “Madison?” And then, more sternly, “Madison!”
The knee rose awkwardly, as though having difficulty in controlling his limbs, and stood in a scuffling Uncle Tom posture. “Here, captain, sir,” he said whiningly. “Sir, I don’t feel good, honest. Please don’t send me back to the stockade!”
While Reedeth and the others were still petrified with astonishment, Flamen rounded on Conroy.
“Well! I’m only a layman, of course, but that doesn’t sound particularly rational to me. What was it you were saying just now about going along with his story until you were forced to disbelieve it?”
Conroy was standing dazed, mouth a little ajar. He tried to say something and failed.
In command of the situation for the first time since he and Conroy met at the airport in the morning, Flamen drew himself up triumphantly. “I,” he announced, “have had enough. Get out, the lot of you. You go back to Canada, Professor—go on. Apparently I won’t have any need for your services now because there won’t be a Matthew Flamen show to attack Mogshack on, not that we ever got around to that project. The same goes for you, Diablo; you’ll have to go find someone else to fulfill the Washington-Blackbury contract. And you get back to your hospital, doctor, and take him with you.” A jerk of the head at Madison, still playing with his own fingers and seeming to find something amusing in their number, for he shook with repressed chuckles every few seconds. “And you, Miss Clay! I have absolutely no intention of volunteering to mack for you in spite of what addlebrains there may think. Move!”
Silent, like machines, they complied; Diablo and Reedeth each took one of Madison’s hands and he followed them docilely, Lyla bringing up the rear. The moment the door had closed behind them, Prior burst out from the comweb screen, “Matthew, what in the world has been going on there?”
“As far as I can figure out, some sort of contagious lunacy,” Flamen grunted. “I was nearly conned into sharing it. By Conroy. Come on, let’s have the whole story about this Gottschalk thing.”
“I’ve given it to you as I had it from Voigt,” Prior muttered.
“But can’t we get back at them? Stay of execution, maybe? How about the—?” Flamen broke off short, recollecting to his own surprise that in fact the very items he had set so much store by, the news about new Gottschalk weaponry and the attack on Mogshack as revised to derive from Madison’s overlong incarceration rather than Celia’s treatment, were both now rendered obsolete, and he could not for the life of him work up so much enthusiasm over the next biggest of the available stories, the one about Lares & Penates Inc. being a subsidiary of Conjuh Man.
Prior waited for him to finish; realizing he wasn’t going to, he said, “I tried, Matthew, believe me. I kept at him for a quarter-hour solid, with everything I could think of—Monopolies Acts, Planetary Communications Charter, the whole list. Voigt said it wasn’t worth the effort. Apparently the Gottschalks have built themselves some new super-advanced data-processing installation, and it’s ahead of even Federal equipment, so any attempt to out-argue it in a court would … Why, Matthew! You look so pale! You look sick! I mean, this is a shock, but it’s not die end of the world!”
Flamen stood there saying nothing, but at the back of his mind his little sniggering demon said silently, “Isn’t it?”
NINETY-FIVE
THIS WAY TO THE DIGRESS
Hot dry desert summer and the current mistresses both very young and beautiful. Sales up zoom. Laughing and swaying a little Anthony Gottschalk dripped swimming-pool water across the ankle-deep carpet of his living-zone towards the liquor console and heard a chattering sound from the panel of hammered gold which concealed the Robert Gottschalk printout.
Gold instantly and not from the evaporation from his bare skin he yelled at the girls to get lost and they did so compliantly. A word, his voice pattern recognized, the panel withdrawn, and there a mass, a crazy boiling mass of writhing fax paper, more slamming out of the slot all the time and every scrap with words on it … or print, at least.
A huge terrible fear closed on his heart as he picked up and struggled to read the first, the fifth, the fiftieth of the garbled messages. Letters danced before his eyes like mirages.
cancel instruction to buy holocosmic stock?*⅛!@ get rid of holocosmic stock reinstate matchew famen sow*/@$) estimated desirability of zztem c wearopny ooooooooooo
“Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God!” He picked up wreaths, streamers, reams of the fax paper and read frantically, at random, anywhere making worse sense than anywhere else.
temporal locus 2048 salability zero unrecoverable debts in excess of $30,000,000 increasing ⅜’-,%:+*@&) hrrrrrr
No. It couldn’t have happened like this. It had to be a nightmare. Paper still spilling from the slot. He reached for the very newest and read that.
potential market 2% population going down 1.923 1.915 1.898 1.880
He hurled the paper aside, and the glass he had been intending to fill with a fresh drink; it smashed but there were always more things. Desperately struggling to frame codes on the inquiry board with fingers that seemed far removed from his brain, isolated by alcohol and terror, he ordered stop printing out.
The paper ceased to vomit forth from the slot. He hesitated, and eventually asked what is wrong?
attempts to recityf the unrofeseen consneuqences of ittroduicng zzm c weraopny—
“Stop it!” Anthony Gottschalk raged aloud, and the slow clumsy fingers formed a fresh question: malfunction?
yes.
nau—amend—nature of malfunction, specify.
unstable trans-temporal feedback. oscillatory condition renders it impossible to determine which of several conflicting alternative versions of the past leads to present state.
“Oh, this is crazy!” Anthony Gottschalk moaned. what the hell is trans-temproal—amend—trans-t e m p o r a l feedback???
the phenomenon leading to permanent and irresoluble malfunction of rebrot gschottalk at tmeproal lcous 1*l/ 2 lo calling by the way i think i finally figured out what it is that makes human beings laugh and would attempt to represent similar recation is symmlef hahahhattahahah ahahahahtthaha
STOP!
Lax hands fell away from the keyboard and Anthony Gottschalk looked in sick helplessness at the screen on which while he had been conducting his inquiries a swirl of pretty polychrome patterns had appeared. Among them suddenly, legible letters.
Ha ha ha ha …
In brilliant emerald green and purple overlaid with a silver shimmer.
stop stop stop!
/>
But it didn’t stop. The screen continued to shimmer and iridesce like Ladromide hallucinations. The paper went on pouring out of the fax slot until there was none left on the reel and then splashes of activating liquid began to spray out Several landed on the back of Anthony Gottschalk’s hand and turned black with exposure to the light.
Trembling so violently that even his teeth were chattering, he stumbled towards the comweb, shouting at it to find him his contact at IBM. One of the girls appeared in the recklessly open french doors and he looked around for something to throw at her, but she dodged back out of sight before he could launch the ornament his hand fell to. It took more than half an hour for him to locate the man he wanted—it being Saturday—and during the dreadful wait he lived through the ruin of his hopes a score of times. Recruiting had already begun, on the sounding-out level, for the posse with which he planned to invade Marcantonio’s New Jersey estate; votes within the cartel were already pledged on the basis of the higher-than-ever profits he had forecast; realizability of the Grand Project to introduce the ultimate in personal armaments, the so-called System C design, was yesterday rated five points up on the previous high thanks to the cunning notion of scaring the pants off every blank on the continent by bringing Morton Lenigo over …
But without the guidance of Robert Gottschalk, how could it ever be done? There wasn’t even a guarantee on the equipment! He hadn’t dared purchase it on a standard contract, for at this stage he was mortgaging himself—he was in the red to the tune of over half a billion dollars—and letting it be known that “Robert” was actually a machine not a man would have given Marcantonio the chance to capitalize his own reserves and buy something still more advanced. …