GOLEM 100

by Alfred Bester

“I always thought the word was ‘spontooneous.’”

  “Oh hush, Mary,” Regina laughed. “Yes, they were sewn by hand and we can make one, if you like.”

  “I like, Regina.” Yenta Calienta looked shrewd. “But which of us gets it when we’re finished?”

  “None of us. We’ll sell it to a museum and buy gallons of lovely scent for all of us.”

  “Heaven! Count me in, brrr!” Nell Gwyn shivered. “Anybody else in favor? Hands, please. Not you, Pi, you don’t get to vote. One, two, three, four… Six out of eight. Oodgedye and Udgedye dissenting, as usual.”

  “We’re not dissenting. We’re recusing.”

  “What does that mean? Is it dirty?”

  “Another time, Priss. So what now, Regina?”

  “The problem is cloth patches, Nell. Colorful ones, and real cloth; nothing recycled.”

  “No problem, Regina. My Droney has a fantastic collection of antique silk ties. There are lots of dupes he’ll never miss. I’ll pinch them.”

  “Beautiful, Nell. There’s a fascinating design in one of my wicked books, and we’ll start next session. Pi! The coffee! I must say, a quilting bee will be a relief from trying to get in touch with silly old Satan.”

  Skip-Trace Associates, Inc. was furious. It was the first time the firm had failed for a valued client, and somehow they felt they had been deceived. After two weeks the general manager threw the case back into CCC’s lap, asking for nothing more than expenses.

  “Why in hell didn’t you tell us we were assigned to a pro, Mr. Chairman, sir? Our tracers aren’t trained for that. We only handle deadbeats.”

  “Just a moment, please. What do you mean by ‘pro’?”

  “A professional rip.”

  “A what?”

  “A ripjack. Gorill. Gimp. Crook. Geek. Goon.”

  “Our Dr. Shima a crook? Preposterous!”

  “Look, Mr. Chairman, sir, I’ll frame it for you and you draw your own conclusions. Yes?”

  “By all means.”

  “It’s detailed in this report anyway. We put a double-trace—that’s two tails, shadows, ops—on Shima every day outside your shop. You didn’t need us inside. When he left, they followed him. He always went straight home. No meetings, outside of girls. No contacts, outside of girls. No nothing. Yes?”

  “Go on.”

  “We staked his Oasis in double shifts. It’s got prime protection, so that was easy. He had dinner sent in every night from the Organic Nursery, which is a legit place on a pure-food-nothing-added gig. Our ops checked the delivery boys. Legit. They checked the meals—sometimes for one, mostly for two. Legit. No tincts, no chromes, no mords, no tinges, no nothing.”

  “Excuse me. I don’t understand what you’re referring to.”

  “That’s all right, sir. It’s street language; Guff talk for the squeams—that’s drugs—they’re tripping on these days.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Our ops tailed the girls who left his penthouse and checked them. All clean. So far all clean. Yes?”

  “And?”

  “Now here’s the crunch. Couple of nights a week he leaves his place and goes out into the Guff. He leaves around midnight and doesn’t come back until four, more or less, give or take half an hour.”

  “Where does he go?”

  “Ah! That’s the unch in the crunch. We don’t know. We don’t know because he shakes his tails like the pro that he is. He weaves through the Guff like a whore or a faggot cruising for trade, and he always shakes our ops. I’m not putting them down. They’re good, but he’s better. He’s smart, shifty, quick, a real pro, and he’s too much for Skip to handle.”

  “Then you have no idea of what he does or who he meets between midnight and four these several nights a week?”

  “No, sir. We’ve got nothing, and you’ve got a problem. Not ours anymore. Sorry to let you down. Expenses is all we ask.”

  “Thank you. Now, contrary to the popular conception, corporations are not altogether callous. CCC understands that negatives are also results. In fact, it was Dr. Shima himself who taught us that. You have given us results, and I’m satisfied. You’ll receive your expenses and the agreed fee as well.”

  “Mr. Chairman, sir, I can’t—”

  “No, no. Don’t feel that you haven’t earned it. You’ve narrowed it down to those missing four hours. Now, as you say, they’re our problem. I’m afraid we’ll have to call in a rather strange specialist; but then, Dr. Shima has also taught us that strange problems require strange solutions.”

  4

  CCC summoned Salem Burne, the professional Warlock, which is to say, witchmaster. Mr. Burne always insisted that he was neither a necromancer nor a psychiatrist; he was a combination of both and called himself a psychomancer. He made the most penetrating analyses of disturbed people through his remarkable perception of somatic language and his acute interpretation of that silent tongue. The witchcraft he pretended to practice was merely a device to awe and disarm his patients.

  Mr. Burne entered Blaise Shima’s immaculate laboratory with a winning smile. Dr. Shima let out a howl of anguish.

  “I told you to sterilize before you came!”

  “But I did, doctor. Faithfully.”

  “You did not. You reek of anise, ylang-ylang, and methyl anthranilate. You’ve polluted my day. Why?”

  “But Dr. Shima, I assure you that I—” Suddenly Mr. Burne stopped. “Oh. My. God,” he groaned. “You’re right. Unclean! Unclean! I used my wife’s towel this morning.”

  Shima laughed and turned the ventilators up to full exhaust. “I understand. A natural mistake and no hard feelings, but let’s get your wife out of here. I’ve got an office a safe mile down the hall. We can talk there.”

  They sat down in the office and inspected each other. Shima saw a careful, controlled man approaching fifty, slender and smooth-skinned, moving and speaking with guarded polish, and yet always with light humor.

  Mr. Burne saw a pleasant, youngish man, compact and muscular, with the balance of a middleweight boxer or, more likely, a karate champion. Cropped black hair, small expressive ears, high cheekbones, slitty eyes that would need careful watching, and a generous mouth and graceful hands that would be dead giveaways.

  “Now, Mr. Burne, how can I help you? Mills Copeland, our chairman, said he’d be most obliged for the favor and I’m delighted to oblige him,” Shima said while his hands asked, “Why in hell have you come pestering me, you damned quack?”

  “Dr. Shima, I’m a colleague, in a sense. As I told you, I’m a psychomancer, a necromancer of psychiatry, so to speak. One crucial part of my diagnostic technique is the ceremonial burning of incense, but the scents are all rather conventional. I was hoping that your expertise might suggest something unusual for the ritual, which quite honestly is merely window-dressing.”

  Shima was charmed by Burne’s frankness. “I see. Interesting. You’ve been using stacte, onycha, galbanum… that sort of thing?”

  “If that’s their names. I’m no chemist. But they’re all quite conventional, and my patients become unimpressed after too many exposures.”

  “Most interesting. Yes. I could, of course, make a few suggestions for something different, even unusual, such as—” Here Shima broke off abruptly and stared into space.

  After a long pause, the psychomancer asked, “Is anything wrong, Dr. Shima?”

  “Look here,” Shima burst out. “You’re on the wrong track.”

  “Am I? How?”

  “It’s the burning of incense that’s conventional, and trying different odors won’t help. Why not experiment with an entirely novel approach?”

  “And what might that be?”

  “The Odophone principle.”

  “Odophone?”

  “It’s a bastard term from Greek and Latin roots. (I wish I could get rid of my education.) There’s a scale that exists among scents, similar to the scale in music. Sharp smells correspond to high notes, and heavy smells to low notes. For instance, a
mbergris is in the treble while violet is in the bass. I could draw up a scent scale for you, running a couple of octaves, and then it would be up to you to compose the ritual music and figure out how to play it.”

  “Dr. Shima! This is positively brilliant!”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Shima grinned. “But in all honesty I must point out that we’re equal partners in brilliance. I could never have come up with the idea if you hadn’t presented a most original and fascinating challenge.”

  They made contact on this generous note and talked shop enthusiastically. They lunched together (raw vegetables and distilled water for Shima) and told each other a little about themselves and their odd professions. They even made plans for the incense experiment in which Shima volunteered to participate despite the fact that he ridiculed diabolism and devil lore.

  “And yet the irony lies in the fact that he is indeed devil-ridden,” Salem Burne reported.

  The chairman considered this, rather like a sleepy saurian, but could make nothing of it.

  “Psychiatry and diabolism use different terms for the same phenomena, Mr. Copeland,” Burne said, taking the sting out of his lecture with a light tone, “so perhaps I’d better translate. Those missing four hours are fugues.”

  The chairman was not enlightened. “Do you mean the musical expression, Mr. Burne?”

  Burne shook his fair head. “No, Mr. Copeland. A fugue is also the psychiatric term used for an advanced form of somnambulism.”

  “What? Blaise Shima walks in his sleep?”

  “It’s more complicated than that, sir. The sleepwalker is a comparatively simple case. He is never in touch with his surroundings. You can speak to him, shout his name at him, even fire a cannon over his head, and he remains totally oblivious.”

  “Yes. And the fugue?”

  “In the fugue, the subject is in touch with his surroundings, but always within his fugue, and only within the fugue. He can hear you and converse with you while he is inside his fugue. He has awareness of and memory for events that take place within the fugue, but nothing outside it. When he’s outside his fugue, he has no knowledge of anything that took place within it.”

  “I’m beginning to understand. He’s two different people?”

  “Exactly, and neither knows nor remembers anything about the other.”

  “So when he’s himself he can tell us nothing of what transpires during his lapses?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nor why he suffers them?”

  “No.”

  “Can you?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir. There’s a limit to my powers. All I can say is that he’s driven by something. A sorcerer might say that he’s possessed by the Devil, but that’s merely the cant of witchcraft. A physician might say that he’s suffering from obsessions or drives, but that’s merely the cant of psychiatry. The terminology is unimportant. The basic fact is that something is compelling Dr. Shima to go out into the Guff, nights, to do— What? I don’t know. All I do know is that this compulsion is the most probable cause of his creative block.”

  “Then what would you suggest that we do to solve the problem, Mr. Burne?”

  “Since you’ve told me the constraints that make the situation delicate, Mr. Copeland, all I can suggest is that you pray.”

  “Pray? Good heavens!”

  “To heaven, if you like, or to hell. Pray to anything you choose, sir. Perhaps best would be to pray for a miracle. Your problem is so unusual that you’ll need a miracle to solve it.”

  “Surely you’re not serious, Mr. Burne.”

  “I most certainly am, sir. Why? Don’t you believe in miracles?”

  “I’ll believe in them when I see them.”

  “How odd, when we have a professional miracle-worker practicing in the Gulf today… Gretchen Nunn.”

  “Gretchen Nunn? Never heard of her.”

  “A most distinguished colleague, Mr. Copeland, although I’ve not yet had the honor of meeting her. I call myself a psychomancer because I work on the subliminal level. Ms. Nunn’s skill is psychodynamics on the architechtonic level. She perceives designs and constructs in what seems to be utter confusion and devises miraculous solutions. She’s a psytech. I suggest that you summon Gretchen Nunn and pray to her.”

  “Regina! What a heaven design for a quilt!”

  “But what is it?”

  “The Seal of Solomon.”

  “The seal of who? Whom? Whose?”

  “King Solomon, Mary. You must remember his name.”

  “Oh, of course. He had a thing with Libra.”

  “That’s Sheba, darling. We used to sing sexy songs about them at school.”

  “Not sexy Solomon this time, Nell; wizard Solomon from my wicked books. We put in enough time memorizing his wicked spells.”

  “In obscene languages.”

  “What does his seal do, Regina?”

  “It’s heavy magic that’s supposed to like make Satan do a number.”

  “Oh Lord! Not that false alarm again!”

  “Perish the thought. No, this is just something different from

  those kitsch designs you see in the museums; cutesy cottages and schools and barns and birds and flowers; that whole Pennsylvania Dutch schmeer. We’ll repeat it in big squares. Pi, light all the lamps. Come, ladies, to work, to work.”

  But one does not summon Gretchen Nunn, not even if you’re the chairman of CCC. You work your way up through the echelons of her staff until you’re finally granted an audience. This involves much backing and forthing between your staff and hers, and ignites a good deal of exasperation, particularly in applicants who are pressed for time. Consequently, Mills Copeland was understandably provoked when at last he was ushered into Ms. Nunn’s cluttered workshop.

  Gretchen Nunn’s business was working miracles; not miracles in the sense of the extraordinary, anomalous, or abnormal brought about by a superhuman agency, but rather in the sense of her extraordinary perception and manipulation of reality on the supraliminal level. She was a master of psychodynamics. In most situations she achieved the impossible begged by her clients, and her fees were so enormous that she was considering going public on the Big Board.

  Quite naturally, the chairman had taken it for granted that this mysterious psytech would look like one of Macbeth’s Witches of Endor, or Merlin in drag. He was flabbergasted to discover that Ms. Nunn was a Watusi princess with velvety black skin and aquiline features. She was in her late twenties, tall, slender, and ravishing in crimson. The chairman’s irritation vanished. Ms. Nunn dazzled him with a smile, indicated a chair, sat in one opposite and said, “My fee is one hundred thousand. Can you afford it?” Her accent was a lilting Jamaican.

  “I can, Miz Nunn. Agreed.”

  “Not yet. Is your difficulty worth it?”

  “It is.”

  “Then we understand each other so far. I prefer to— Yes, Alex?”

  The young secretary who had slipped into the workshop said, “Excuse me. LeClerque insists on knowing how you made the positive diagnosis of his wife’s one-month pregnancy.”

  “LeClerque? The impotent one?”

  “Yes, Miz.”

  Ms. Nunn clicked her tongue impatiently. “He knows I never give reasons; only results. I made that clear.”

  “Yes, Miz, but he is agitated. Naturally.”

  “Has he paid?”

  “Check cleared this morning.”

  “All right, I’ll make an exception in his case. Psychometry gave me the clues. Pregnancy behavior unmistakable. Strong emotional revaluations. I checked with ultralight. Her face showed the banded pregnancy mask under the skin, and she isn’t using the pill. Tell LeClerque, but no sympathy, Alex. Always cool and professional.”

  “Yes, Miz. Thank you, Miz.”

  She turned to the chairman as the secretary backed out. “In case you’re alarmed, LeClerque is a code name known only to the client and my staff, which can be trusted. I never reveal a client’s true identity.”

/>   “I understand.”

  “And you heard me? I only give results.”

  “Agreed, Miz Nunn.”

  “Now your difficulty. I’m not committed yet. If that’s understood, go ahead. Everything. Stream of consciousness and free association if necessary.”

  A half hour later, she illuminated the room with another dazzling smile. “Thank you. This one is really unique; a welcome change for me. It’s a contract… if you haven’t changed your mind.”

  “I haven’t, Miz Nunn.”

  “Consider for a moment, sir. Perhaps telling me about it has sorted it out in your mind. Then you’ll no longer need me. That happens sometimes.”

  “Not this time, Miz Nunn,” Copeland said with massive conviction.

  “You still believe you need me?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Then it’s a contract, Mr. Tinsmith.”

  “What? Tins—? Oh. Of course. Thank you, Miz Nunn. Would you like a deposit or payment in advance?”

  “Not from CCC.”

  “Expenses? Shall we arrange that now?”

  “No. My responsiblity, Mr. Tinsmith.”

  “But what if you have to— That is, if you’re required to—”

  She laughed. “My responsiblity. I never give reasons and never reveal methods. How can I charge for them? That’s why my set fee is so high. Now don’t forget, sir, I want the Skip-Trace and Burne reports.”

  A week later Gretchen Nunn took the unusual step of visiting the chairman in his office at CCC. “I’m calling on you, sir, to give you the opportunity of withdrawing from our contract. There will be no charge.”

  “Withdraw? Why?”

  “Because I believe you’re involved in something more serious than anticipated.”

  “But what?”

  “You won’t take my word for it?”

  “How can I? I must know.”

  Ms. Nunn compressed her lips, then sighed. “Since this is an unusual case, I’ll have to break my rule. Look at this, please.”

  She unrolled a large map of the Guff sector of the Corridor and flattened it on the chairman’s conference table. There was a star in the center of the map. “Shima’s Oasis,” Ms. Nunn said. There was a wide circle scribed around the star. “The limit to which a man can walk from the Oasis in two hours,” Ms. Nunn explained. “Two hours out, two hours back, four in all. This is a maximum plot allowing nothing for any events that might interrupt the walk.”