“I won’t sign any paper!” cried Jan.
“I am afraid,” said the psychiatrist, “that it is out of your hands.”
“My wife won’t sign any paper!”
“I phoned your wife before I came to call on you. Your company asked me to look you over. I told your wife strong means, maybe an operation, was in order. And she wept and said it was too bad but if a psychiatrist said so, it must be so. There is only one cure for these rages you indulge yourself in. And that is a transorbital leukotomy!” He was getting quite purple.
“Do you mean to tell me I have no civil rights left?” cried Jan.
“Look at your rage! You think you are being persecuted right this minute!” said the psychiatrist. “You think people are against you. You think I am against you! That’s insanity! Who supposes anyone has any civil rights when he is insane? Who has any say-so about insanity but a psychiatrist? You claim that is a denial of democracy and an invasion of private liberty. That proves you are a paranoid! You think you are being persecuted! That proves it! You think I am against you! You’ll see who has the say now!” And he ground his teeth. He reached out to grab Jan and Jan, humanly, struck back.
The psychiatrist fell against the bars.
“Guard!” he screamed. “Guard!” And Dr. Dyhard’s knees were shaking in terror. “Let me out of here! Let me out! I’m caught! I’m trapped! Let me out! He’s a maniac!”
The guard hastily let Dr. Dyhard out. Dyhard, safe on the other side of the bars, straightened himself up with vicious jerks. He glared at Jan, with eyes bloodstained with anger. “I’ll call an ambulance from the state hospital!” said Dyhard. “This man is hopelessly insane. A classic paranoid schizophrenic.”
Down at the Friends of Russia Communist International Objectors Social Hall where the conservatives of Moscow met, Lucar told his story several times. It is not often that a Communist can succeed in getting a capitalist in jail and all were interested. A couple of fellow travelers, men who spread the word without getting paid in rubles for doing it like Lucar and Davies, heard the embroidered tale and, being employed on newspapers, saw that the word was spread on page one of the evening dailies.
But though all Seattle may have read about it, only one pair of eyes, scanning that bit of gratuitous propaganda, leaped and shifted with interest. Chan Davies, who had been hiding in terror all day, certain that the diamond had been stolen from him in sleep, sure that somebody knew, writhed and wriggled happily at this news and came out from under a culvert near Redmond and hooked a ride into town.
He went boldly, if crabwise, up to the back door of the Palmer mansion and coaxed the Swede girl out into the dark. Just as he had originally convinced her that the Swedes were discriminated against as a minority in America and thus that all Swedes should invest savings with Communist organizations because only Communism could protect them, now he convinced her that he had been the victim of Jan’s racist rages.
After all, it said right in the story that Jan was frothing about Communism and had attacked every Communist in sight and it also mentioned a diamond which he had in his possession. It became obvious that the diamond was something Jan had tried to pin on Davies just to persecute Communism.
He was soon explaining all over again to Alice what had happened. Alice, weeping, assured him that if any charges existed they would be dropped. She was very upset by Jan’s suddenly going mad and this strange persecution complex he had. She had just now signed commitment papers and a slip giving Dr. Dyhard the right to do all within his power to make Jan tractable. And she was now on her way down to the jail to pick up Jan’s possessions.
Chan Davies writhed and wriggled and said he would be happy to go along and act as bodyguard. Alice accepted his offer with thanks.
But Law, when they had arrived at the station house, forestalled any plot Davies might have had afoot. The sergeant in charge of prisoners’ possessions was courteous but to the point.
“I am sorry, Mrs. Palmer,” he said, “but it so happens that your husband’s possessions were, if I may say so, a little funny. He had a diamond on him as big as my palm.”
“Yes, of course,” said Alice. “And he bought it, I suppose, for a present for me. I have come for whatever he left here.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Palmer,” said the sergeant, “unless you’ve got a bill of sale for that diamond or can tell me where it was bought, I’m afraid we’re going to have to hold it.”
“What?” said Alice.
“You see, when it comes to a stone that big being in the hands of a nut—excuse me—of a prisoner, we can’t take too many precautions. Do you know where he bought it?”
“Why, no. Can’t you contact him?”
“Ma’am, he’s out of reach now. They took him up to the spin-bin.”
“But surely you can’t hold property just on suspicion!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, maybe we can’t but we’re doing it. The United Jewelers of America list a flock of big stones as stolen and we’re checking with them. It’ll take a few days. If we can’t find out if it was stolen, then we’ll have to return it, of course. But as long as we’ve got it, we’re checking.”
“That’s illegal,” said Alice.
“That’s good sense,” said the sergeant. And as far as he was concerned the interview was over.
Alice shrugged, put the wallet and small possessions in her purse and, guarded by a tragically disappointed Davies, drove back home again.
Chapter Nine
Buckaroons
For nearly the entire day Tiger was too busy with ships to worry about diamonds. Once upon a time these renegades had had a purpose. Escaped slaves all, they had sought to form a revolution against the rule of the jinn. With headquarters on a small island called Denaise, they had for many years recruited and plotted. But the jinn were many and the temptations were great and they had slipped away from their original plan, misguided by the ease with which they gained loot and blunted by the tenacity of the jinn to control the world.
Their original emperor had been named Lenny. A dreamer and an organizer, he had yet lacked the ability to execute his plans when execution was due. Lenny had had on his staff several talented and worthwhile officers but he had also had one Stahlbein. Stahlbein had made himself extremely useful; he seemed to be much in sympathy with all plans as drawn. He attended to all correspondence and legal work and gradually, since he was efficient, details became more and more left in his hands. One day he could suddenly carry out his own plans. Seeing the folly of the idealism of Lenny and sharing none of the human sympathies of the initial planners, Stahlbein knew no remorse for what he did. Lenny and his closest officers were taken ill suddenly and as suddenly they died. Announcing the fact as an act of the jinn, Stahlbein, all innocence, stepped into command, a command he had long organized and shaped to his own designs, which had nothing to do with idealism. Stahlbein had seen that he had a powerful and rapacious group in these escaped slaves. He had chosen piracy, masking it under the name of vengeance, and, assuming the vain-glorious name of the Thunderbolt, had sailed forth on expeditions of avarice and rapine. He had murdered and ravaged where Lenny would have saved. He had enslaved when Lenny would have freed. He had used Lenny’s doctrines to pervert and blind his crews. And, degenerated at last into mere buckaroons, they had abandoned themselves to slaughter for the sake of slaughter.
Tiger knew some of this. He learned more. He found that there were still able people in these crews and these he promoted to proper station. He rid the ships, by launching them in a cutter to make their way home, of eighteen malcontents with the new order. And likewise he rid the vessels, but with vinegar and sulphur, of other vermin.
There was a furious energy about Tiger when he had a job to do. True, when his talents were insufficiently occupied and when life was apparently a joke, he could waste himself gloriously. But with a purpose and a need, so long as they lasted, there was no better man than Tiger for any job. In another world he had stabil
ity and constancy but no strength or direction. But with the strength and direction in this one, he could and did on occasion work miracles.
By the first dogwatch he had wrought marvels. The magazines had been overhauled. Powder had been repackaged into new cartridges. Stores had been sorted, and fouled or spoiled items had been jettisoned. And two general drills had been held.
He had spoken aboard each ship, giving them in tough sailor language sentiments which might have been couched in much more flowery terms.
“You wanted freedom, you swabs,” he had said. “You wanted to master the jinn. You scrubbed the dog and lined your bellies and forgot your goals. Well, I’m here to remind you. Anybody that’s against doing what you originally set out to do, over the side and homeward bound in whatever boats we can spare. The rest of you, if you’ve got the guts, may be standing up to a jinn-officered fleet in a day or two and outnumbered a dozen to one. There’s a chance the human crews will sit down on the job for the jinn. But there’s a chance they’ll fight. You’ve monkeyed the deal for years. Now’s the time to sling hot pitch. You’re for it or agin it. What’s it to be? Mastery of the world or a boozing ken on Denaise and sometime dancing on Gallows Key? Which is it?”
They cheered him and worked with a will, for the most of them were sick of idleness. And they began to shape up ships where wrecks had floated before.
Back aboard the Terror, Tiger sat down to dinner in the cabin. Wanna, big-eyed and wondering, sat cross-legged on a cushion and watched him eat. She several times seemed to be on the verge of asking a momentous question and several times held her words. At last when Tiger had finished his food she ventured to speak.
“Tiger—” and there was honey in it, “Tiger, when we’re home again, will you—”
“Well?”
“Will you let me wear the diamond?”
Tiger grinned. He reached into his sash. He fumbled for a moment. Then he reached again and searched further. He looked around him on the deck and then, shooting out an arm, grabbed Muddy. But with a very few pats he ascertained that Muddy, who stood the while wailing and slopping soup from the serving tureen he had carried toward the door, was innocent.
With a frown Tiger sank back. He pulled off his headsilk and let his tawny locks into his eyes. He thought. Now and then he pointed a finger in one direction or another as though tallying up his thoughts by cracks in the planking.
“Huh,” he said at last. “That’s a funny thing. The diamond’s playin’ games. It’s gone, then it’s here.”
“Maybe it has a spirit that carries it,” said Wanna thoughtfully. “In the temple we had three talismans that had spirits which took them around. I remember one of the girls had the office of feeding one of the spirits.”
“Probably it was a priest,” said Tiger, who cared little for superstitions of the jinn.
“No, they were real spirits. One of them sang awfully cute.”
“I’ll bet he did,” said Tiger. “But that isn’t solving where that diamond goes.”
All day long he had had a headache. When they sank the Graceful Jinnia he had taken quite a drubbing but afterwards he had never felt quite so carefree. Today he had been far more thoughtful and cautious. Dim recollections of things he felt he had never seen or done were stirring in him. Blast this headache! That wound should have ceased troubling him some time back.
Absently he felt in his sash again. The problem of the diamond weighed upon him. He was sure that anything that valuable, with the three-dimensional Seal of Sulayman in it, had marvelous powers. He had counted on those powers more than he had realized but now, with the diamond missing, he began to understand some of his bravado anent the fleets of Zongri and Arif-Emir. He had planned on the morrow to make a few simple tests. He was sure that it had unexploited possibilities as witness the way it seemed to have transported Wanna to this ship and Tombo and Malek away from it. There was no lack of evidence that the diamond had abilities. Probably it had latent abilities he did not even suspect.
Suppose it did not come back. That struck home. A sense of anxiety, quite foreign to Tiger, was upon him. He felt as though there was a part of him which had come back to him after an absence and he felt also that that part was in trouble. And he felt, suddenly, that he might lose in this contest with Zongri or Arif or both, a thing which had not before entered his head. How much he had counted upon that diamond. He had not known it until this instant when, thinking upon the shoddy ships he now commanded, he realized how much he needed the aid the diamond might have given.
He stepped out through the stern ports to the small walkway and from this gallery looked down upon the purling white and blue of the wake. He was very thoughtful, a strange thing for Tiger.
He looked toward the even and unmarred horizon. That way lay Tarbutón. He changed his gaze. At a further distance lay Balou. From Tarbutón or Balou a fleet would come forth. Left to join, the fleets of Tarbutón and Balou would soon decide where their mutual interest lay.
Denaise, the stronghold of the buckaroons, lay a hundred leagues to the south, a palm and pine island with a landlocked harbor. Any reduction of it would be expensive to a fleet. Its surrounding cliffs were too high to admit scaling parties; the only attack point was through the harbor mouth. A few guns there could stop an enemy with ease. But when it came to a booty such as this diamond must be, when it came to Tarbutón and Balou joining forces, that attack might be dared and, further, might well succeed. The buckaroons of Denaise had, until now, been a matter of small moment to the jinn, who looked on piracy as no great crime considering the crimes to which they lent themselves in their ordinary courses of action. No, Denaise, attacked by thirty-five or forty ships of the line, would fall. Besides, a fort was a kind of trap. He could not retire to Denaise.
From where they stood, reaching idly back and forth, the r’yals of any ship putting out from Tarbutón would be visible. And any vessel approaching Tarbutón from Balou would also be in sight. It had been Tiger’s audacious intention to plunge down on either fleet, the moment it showed, and disorganize it. He had hoped to learn to make the diamond help him. If he could master a few ships he was sure that their human crews, advised of the nature of the plans, would desert to the buckaroons. With these ships he might conquer the remainder. With a fleet thus taken and redirected, he had hoped to attack the remaining fleet and so come into command of the sea lanes of the jinn world. Command of those lanes meant command of the jinn, whose traffic was all by sea.
He sighed. His head ached. He felt unnatural, as though he was also somewhere else. He reached in his sash again for the diamond on the chance that it might have come back. But it had not. Moodily he stared at the wake.
For several days Tiger repeated that gesture; for several days he paced the gallery across the Terror’s stern and watched for the coming of the fleets. Each morning he searched Muddy and Walleye in case the diamond had come to them. Each morning he made Wanna look through her flimsy clothes to make sure she did not have it. But the diamond stayed away. Time passed. Soon, all too soon for the state of these vessels and the undrilled condition of the gun crews, a fleet would appear. And then, diamond or no diamond, he had no choice but to attack.
Idly the buckaroons stood on and off the coast of Tarbutón, reaching, waring, reaching, watching for the fleets.
Chapter Ten
A Fashionable Operation
How many fingers do you see?” And Dr. Dyhard held up one.
With a dismal sigh, Jan said, “One.”
This was an obvious source of aggravation to Dr. Dyhard. He had been conducting these tests for two and one-half hours and he had been getting right answers.
He had had Jan transferred to Balmy Springs up toward Bellingham, for Alice had pleaded with him, when she understood how serious the case was, to take every possible step and spare no expense. The last phrase had its own particular appeal to Dr. Dyhard. All his reputable colleagues had adopted Dianetics sometime since and were prospering. Dyhard had never pro
spered. Too thoroughly bad a surgeon to remain in the AMA, he had taken up neurosurgery and from this had degenerated into county work and was almost outlawed for his belief that socialized medicine should be adopted by all his brethren. They, feeling that Dyhard’s type could not support a personal practice and must therefore lean on the state, spoke to Dyhard on professional occasions only. But Dyhard was somehow not averse to maintaining his own side practice whenever he could get a patient and had therefore short-circuited Jan from the state institution to Balmy Springs, where, with skill, he could run up a considerable bill. The Palmers, everyone knew, were rich. Mrs. Palmer, Dyhard had found out, was credulous where medicine was concerned. Jan Palmer, Dyhard knew very well, was going to get a ten-thousand-dollar neurosurgical operation if it killed him.
“What do the hands of my watch say?” said Dyhard grimly.
“Three-thirteen,” said Jan with patience. He sighed. The room was small, barred and padded. The guard did not appear to be bribable, not that he was honest but only that he was stupid.
Jan raised himself a trifle on the bed, the better to look at Dyhard—and a strange thing happened. Jan’s elbow slipped and he bumped his head on the bed upright. Since arriving here some days before he had been remarkably docile aside from some vague stirrings of rebellion. His head hurt furiously for a moment, for the wound was still tender. But instead of seeing stars he saw, strangely, a swinging hurricane lantern, turned low and suspended from an overhead beam. For an instant after the blow he could definitely feel the lift of a ship under him and hear the purl of a wake and the creak of spars in a light wind. The odor of pitch and salt lingered with him a moment, then the image faded. The room, the bars and Dyhard steadied into reality and three dimensions. But something had changed. The feeling that he was somewhere else was strong in Jan, the feeling that he was strong was stronger.
Slaves of Sleep & the Masters of Sleep Page 24
