by John Brunner
His mouth very dry, he nodded. “Henry Lilleberg,” he said in a croaking voice. “Neurophysiologist. Contracted degenerative myelitis in the course of a research program and died about four years ago.”
“That’s right.” She was moving toward the animal, hand outstretched. “I’ll introduce you, and after that you needn’t worry.”
Somehow he found himself scratching the beast behind his right ear, and the menace he had originally read in those opal eyes faded away. When he withdrew his hand Bagheera heaved an immense sigh, laid his chin on his paws and went to sleep.
“Good,” Kate said. “I expected him to like you. Not that that makes you anything special. … Had you heard about him from Ina, by the way? Is that why you weren’t surprised?”
“You think I wasn’t? She said you had a cat, so I assumed—Never mind. It all comes clear now.”
“Such as what?”
“Why you stay on at UMKC instead of sampling Other universities. You must be very attached to him.”
“Not especially. Sometimes he’s a drag. But when I was sixteen I said I’d accept responsibility for him, and I’ve kept my word. He’s growing old now—won’t last more than eighteen months—so … But you’re right. Dad had a license to transport protected species interstate, but I wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting one, let alone a permit to keep him on residential premises anywhere else. I’m not exactly tied hand and foot, though. I can take vacations for a week or two, and the girls downstairs feed and walk him for me, but that’s about his limit, and eventually he gets fretful and they have to call me back. Annoys my boyfriends … Come on, this way.”
She led him into the living room. Meter-high freehand Egyptian hieroglyphs marched around three of its walls; over the fourth, white paint had been slapped.
“I’m losing this,” Kate said. “It’s from the Book of the Dead. Chapter Forty, which I thought was kind of apt.”
“I’m afraid I never read the …” His voice trailed away.
“Wallis Budge titles it ‘The Chapter of Repulsing the Eater of the Ass.’ I bleat you not. But I quit repulsing that fiercely.” She gave a mocking grin. “Any how, now you see what you can lend a hand with.”
No wonder she was wearing a layer of dust. The whole apartment was being bayquaked. In the middle of the floor here three piles of objects were growing, separated by chalked lines. One contained charitable items, like clothing not yet past hope; one contained what was scrapworthy, like a last-year’s stereo player and a used typewriter and such; one contained stuff that was only garbage, though it was subdivided into disposable and recyclable.
Everywhere shelves were bare, closets were ajar, boxes and cases stood with lids raised. This room had a south aspect and the sun shone through large open windows. The smell of the city blew in on a warm breeze.
Willing to play along he peeled off his shirt and hung it on the nearest chair. “I do what?” he inquired.
“As I tell you. Mostly help with the heavier junk. Oh, plus one other thing. Talk about yourself while we’re at it.”
He reached for his shirt and made to put it back on.
“Point,” she said with an exaggerated sigh, “taken. So just help.”
Two sweaty hours later the job was finished and he knew a little about her which he hadn’t previously guessed. This was the latest of perhaps five, perhaps six, annual demolitions of what was threatening to turn from a present into a past, with all that that implied: a fettering, hampering tail of concern for objects at the expense of memories. Desultorily they chatted as they worked; mostly he asked whether this was to be kept, and she answered yes or no, and from her pattern of choice he was able to paradigm her personality—and was more than a little frightened when he was through.
This girl wasn’t at Tarnover. This girl is six years younger than I am, and yet …
The thought stopped there. To continue would have been like holding his finger in a flame to discover how it felt to be burned alive.
“After which we paint walls,” she said, slapping her hands together in satisfaction. “Though maybe you’d like a beer before we shift modes. I make real beer and there are six bottles in to chill.”
“Real beer?” Maintaining Sandy Locke’s image at all costs, he made his tone ironical.
“A plastic person like you probably doesn’t believe it exists,” she said, and headed for the kitchen before he could devise a comeback.
When she returned with two foam-capped mugs, he had some sort of remark ready, anyway. Pointing at the hieroglyphs, he said, “It’s a shame to paint these over. They’re very good.”
“I’ve had them up since January,” was her curt reply. “They’ve furnished my mind, and that’s what counts. When you’ve drunk that, grab a paint-spray.”
He had arrived at around five p.m. A quarter of ten saw them in a freshly whitened framework, cleansed of what Kate no longer felt to be necessary, cleared of what the city scrap-and-garbage team would remove from the stoop come Monday morning and duly mark credit in respect of. There was a sense of space. They sat in the spacefulness eating omelets and drinking the last of the real beer, which was good. Through the archway to the kitchen they could see and hear Bagheera gnawing a beefbone with old blunt teeth, uttering an occasional rrrr of contentment.
“And now,” Kate said, laying aside her empty plate, “for the explanations.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a virtual stranger. Yet you’ve spent five hours helping me shift furniture and fill garbage cans and redecorate the walls. What do you want? To plug into me by way of payment?”
He sat unspeaking and immobilized.
“If that were it …” She was gazing at him with a thoughtful air. “I don’t think I’d say no. You’d be good at it, no doubt about that. But it isn’t why you came.”
Silence filled the brightly whitened room, dense as the feathers in a pillow.
“I think,” she said eventually, “you must have come to calibrate me. Well, did you get me all weighed and measured?”
“No,” he said gruffly, and rose and left.
INTERIM REPORT
“Bureau of Data Processing, good afternoon!”
“The Deputy Director, please. Mr. Hartz is expecting my call. … Mr. Hartz, I thought you should know that I’m approaching a crisis point, and if you care to come back and—
“Oh. I see. What a pity. Then I’d better just arrange for my tapes to be copied to your office.
“Yes, naturally. By a most-secure circuit.”
IMPERMEABLE
It was a nervous day, very nervous. Today they were boarding him: not just Rico and Dolores and Vivienne and the others he had met but also august remote personages from the intercontinental level. Perhaps he should not have shown a positive reaction when Ina mentioned the corp’s willingness to semiperm him, hinted that eventually they might give him tenure.
Stability, for a while at any rate, was tempting. He had no other plans formulated, and out of this context he intended to move when he chose, not by order of some counterpart to Shad Fluckner. Yet a sense of risk grew momently more agonizing in his mind. To be focused on by people of such power and influence—what could be more dangerous? Were there not at Tarnover people charged with tracking down and dragging back in chains Nickie Haflinger on whom the government had lavished thirty millions’ worth of special training, teaching, conditioning? (By now perhaps there were other fugitives. He dared not try to link up with them. If only …!)
Still, facing the interview was the least of countless evils. He was preening prior to departure, determined to perfect his conformist image to the last hair on his head, when the buzzer called him to the veephone.
The face showing on the screen belonged to Dolores van Bright, with whom he had got on well during his stay here.
“Hi, Sandy!” was her cordial greeting. “Just called to wish you luck when you meet the board. We prize you around here, you know. Think you deserve a long-term p
ost.”
“Well, thanks,” he answered, hoping the camera wouldn’t catch the gleam of sweat he felt pearling on his skin.
“And I can strew your path with a rose or so.”
“Hm?” Instantly, all his reflexes triggered into fight-or-flight mode.
“I guess I shouldn’t, but … Well, for better or worse. Vivienne dropped a hint, and I checked up, and there’s to be an extra member on the selection board. You know Viv thinks you’ve been overlooked as kind of a major national resource? So some federal twitch is slated to join us. Don’t know who, but I believe he’s based at Tarnover. Feel honored?”
How he managed to conclude the conversation, he didn’t know. But he did, and the phone was dead, and he was …
On the floor?
He fought himself, and failed to win; he lay sprawled, his legs apart, his mouth dry, his skull ringing like a bell that tolls nine tailors, his guts churning, his fingers clenched and his toes attempting to imitate them. The room swam, the world floated off its mooring, everything everything dissolved into mist and he was aware of one sole fact:
Got to get up and go.
Weak-limbed, sour-bellied, half-blind with terror he could no longer resist, he stumbled out of his apartment (Mine? No! Their apartment!) and headed for his rendezvous in hell.
THE CONVICTION OF HIS COURAGE
After pressing the appropriate switches Freeman waited patiently for his subject to revert from regressed to present-time mode. Eventually he said, “It seems that experience remains peculiarly painful. We shall have to work through it again tomorrow.”
The answer came in a weak voice, but strong enough to convey venomous hatred. “You devil! Who gave you the right to torture me like this?”
“You did.”
“So I committed what you call a crime! But I was never put on trial, never convicted!”
“You’re not entitled to a trial.”
“Anybody’s entitled to a trial, damn you!”
“That is absolutely true. But you see you are not anybody. You are nobody. And you chose to be so of your own free will. Legally—officially—you simply don’t exist.”
BOOK 2
THE DELPHI CORACLE
SHALLOW MAN IN ALL HIS GORY WAS NOT DISMAYED BY ONE OF THESE
Take no thought for the morrow; that’s your privilege. But don’t complain if when it gets here you’re off guard.
ARARAT
With a distant … Too weak a word. With a remote part of his mind he was able to observe himself doing all the wrong things: heading in a direction he hadn’t chosen, and running when he should and could have used his company electric car, in sum making a complete fool of himself.
In principle he had made the correct decisions. He would turn up for his appointment with the interview board, he would outface the visitor from Tarnover, he would win the argument because you don’t, simply don’t, haul into custody someone who is being offered permanent employment by a corporation as powerful as G2S. Not without generating a continental stink. And if there’s one thing they’re afraid of at Tarnover, it’s having the media penetrate their guise of feigned subimportance.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. His were fine. They simply had no effect on his behavior.
“Yes, who is it?” In a curt voice from the speaker under the veephone camera. And then, almost in the same breath, “Sandy! Hey, you look sick, and I don’t mean that as a compliment! Come right on up!”
Sound of antithief locks clicking to neutral.
Sick?
He pondered the word with that strange detached portion of his awareness which was somehow isolated from his body at present, yet continued to function as though it were hung under a balloon trailed behind this fleshly carcass now ascending stairs not by legs alone but by arms clutching at the banister to stop from falling over. Legs race combines with arms race to make brain race and his brain was definitely racing. An invisible tight band had clamped on his head at the level of his temples. Pain made him giddy. He was double-focusing. When the door of Kate’s apt opened he saw two of it, two of her in a shabby red wrap-around robe and brown sandals … but that wasn’t so bad, because her face was eloquent of sympathy and worry and a double dose of that right now was to be welcomed. He was sweating rivers and imagined that he could have heard his feet squelching in his shoes but for the drumming of his heart, which also drowned out the question she shot at him.
Repeated louder, “I said, what the hell have you taken?”
He hunted down his voice, an elusive rasp in the caverns of a throat which had dried like a creek bed in a bad summer all the way to his aching lungs.
“No-uh-thing!”
“My God. In that case have you ever got it strong. Come quickly and he down.”
As swiftly and unreally as in a dream, with as much detachment as though he were viewing these events through the incurious eyes of old Bagheera, he witnessed himself being half-led, half-carried to a couch with a tan cover. In the Early Pleistocene he had sat on it to eat omelets and drink beer. It was a lovely sunny morning. He let his lids fall to exclude it, concentrated on making the best use of the air, which was tinted with a faint lemony fragrance.
She drew drapes against the sun by touching a button, then came in twilight to sit by him and hold his hand. Her fingers sought his pulse as expertly as a trained nurse.
“I knew you were straining too hard,” she said. “I still can’t figure out why—but get the worst of it over and then you can tell me about it. If you like.”
Time passed. The slam of his heart lessened. The sweat streaming from his pores turned from hot to cool, made his smart clothing clammy. He began to shiver and then, with no warning, found he was sobbing. Not weeping—his eyes were dry—but sobbing in huge gusting gasps, as though he were being cruelly and repeatedly punched in the belly by a fist that wasn’t there.
At some stage she brought a thick woolen blanket, winterweight, and laid it on him. It had been years since he felt the rough bulk of such a fabric—now, one slept on a pressure bed, insulated by a directed layer of air. It evoked thousands of inchoate childhood memories. His hands clamped like talons to draw it over his head and his knees doubled into the fetal posture and he rolled on his side and miraculously was asleep.
When he awoke he felt curiously relaxed. He felt purged. In the … How long? He checked his watch. In the at-most hour since he dozed off, something more than calm had occupied his mind.
He formed a word silently and liked its taste.
Peace.
But—!
He sat up with a jerk. There was no peace—must be none—could be none! It was the wrong world for peace. At the G2S HQ someone from Tarnover must now be adding—correction, must already have added—two plus two. This person Sandy Locke “overlooked as kind of a national resource” might have been identified as the lost Nickie Haflinger!
He threw aside the blanket and stood up, belatedly realizing that Kate was nowhere to be seen and perhaps Bagheera had been left on guard and …
But his complicated thought dissolved under a wave of dizziness. Before he had taken as much as one pace away from the couch, he’d had to lean an outstretched hand against the wall.
Upon which came Kate’s voice from the kitchen.
“Good timing, Sandy. Or whatever your real name is. I just fixed some broth for you. Here.”
It approached him in a steaming cup, which he accepted carefully by the less-hot handle. But he didn’t look at it. He looked at her. She had changed into a blue and yellow summer shirt and knee-long cultoons also of yellow with the blue repeated in big Chinese ideograms across the seat. And he heard himself say, “What was that about my name?”
Thinking at the same time: I was right. There is no room for peace in this modern world. It’s illusory. One minute passes, and it’s shattered.
“You were babbling in your sleep,” she said, sitting down on a patched old chair which he had expected her to throw out yet
perversely had been retained. “Oh, please stop twitching your eyes like that! If you’re wondering what’s become of Bagheera, I took him downstairs; the girls said they’d look after him for a while. And if you’re trying to spot a way of escape, it’s too soon. Sit down and drink that broth.”
Of the alternatives open, the idea of obeying seemed the most constructive. The instant he raised the cup he realized he was ravenous. His blood-sugar level must be terribly debased. Also he was still cold. The warmth of the savory liquid was grateful to him.
At long last he was able to frame a one-word question.
“Babbling …?”
“I exaggerate. A lot of it made sense. That was why I told G2S you weren’t here.”
“What?” He almost let go of the cup.
“Don’t tell me I did the wrong thing. Because I didn’t. Ina got them to call me when you didn’t show for your interview. I said no, of course I haven’t seen him. He doesn’t even like me, I told them. Ina would believe that. She’s never realized that men can like me, because I’m all the things she didn’t want her daughter to be, such as studious and intelligent and mainly plain. She never dug deeper into any man’s personality than the level she dealt with you on: looks good, sounds good, feels good and I can use him.” She gave a harsh laugh, not quite over the brink of bitterness.
He disregarded that comment. “What did I—uh—let slip?” he demanded. And trembled a little as he awaited the answer.
She hesitated. “First off … Well, I kind of got the impression you never overloaded before. Can that be true?”
He had been asked often by other people and had always declared, “No, I guess I’m one of the lucky ones.” And had believed his claim to be truthful. He had seen victims of overload; they hid away, they gibbered when you tried to talk to them, they screamed and struck out and smashed the furniture. These occasional bouts of shaking and cramp and cold, aborted in minutes with one tranquilizer, couldn’t be what you’d call overload, not really!
