by Ron Goulart
Gentle furrows formed on Ted’s forehead. Why did the Brazilian war remind him of that stupid dream he kept having?
“This is Ed Skeet in front of the Church of Sao Norberto in downtown Rio de Janeiro, where a special mass for the speedy location of the much-loved Bishop of Rio is now in progress.” Skeet was a tiny, unattractive red-haired man. “United States Ambassador Plaut was expected to appear but he has since disappeared and it is feared in government circles that he, too, has fallen victim to the dreaded pro-Brazil guerrillas who have unleashed a veritable reign of terror here in recent months.”
Ted switched channels.
“Here, for a change, is a piece of good news,” said the black newsman on the dash screen. “The Department of Agriculture announces the price of soybeans has risen only 4.4 percent in the past thirty days. This new increase, while seemingly larger than last month’s figure of 2.7 percent, is actually a sign of better times and lower prices. This according to Presidential Publicity Chairman Bobby Bolden, who issued the statement late yesterday from the summer White House in Barbados. Now here’s Happy the Clown with today’s weather.”
“Forty days of rain,” said Ted as he clicked off the news once again. “Leave it off,” he told the car. “I’m informed as I want to be for today.”
His dash pixphone made a peeping sound.
When Ted answered his pretty, coltish wife showed on the screen. “Is everything okay, Haley?”
“Yes, more or less. I had a call from Captain Beck and—”
“Captain Beck?”
“You know, Bill Beck.”
“Listen, I went out and measured the pseudo-grass again last night. It doesn’t exceed the official Brimstone Way of Life Authority height. In fact . . . why’s he a captain now?”
“Seems they’ve changed the Way of Life Authority Team into the Way of Life Patrol. Mainly, I guess, so Bill and his people can wear these skin-tight one-piece sky-blue uniforms with a white stripe all down here.” Ted asked, “Has he got some new complaint?”
“Bill says our cruiserport is leaning.”
“It’s not leaning. Listen—”
“Argue with him. He reports several complaints about its unsightly list.”
“Nobody’d complain about a list—”
“It’s okay, Ted, I already called an outfit in Old Danbury. They specialize in straightening up leaning ports.”
“But if it’s not actually leaning, there’s no reason to spend—”
“That isn’t really why I called you anyway,” Haley said. “I’m also sorry I wasn’t in the mood to talk to you when I came home. I’m sorry, really, you’re having these bad dreams still. I wish I knew what to do to help you.”
“It’s something I have to work out,” he said. “Don’t worry. How did things go at the kid hospital last night? How’s little Terry Malley doing?”
“Who?”
“Little Terry. You told me he was having bad dreams, too.”
“Oh, little Terry.” Haley tangled one finger in her long dark hair. “He slept like a log.”
After a few silent seconds Ted said, “We ought to talk more than we do, Haley.”
“Sometimes. . . .”
“Sometimes what?”
“I wish I hadn’t taken that five-year birth-control capsule the day before we got married. We’ve still got a year and a half to run on the damn thing.” She turned her head. “Mr. Swedenberg seems to be back on. . . . Ted! That’s not Swedenberg. Hold on a sec.”
“What?” Ted asked the now empty screen. He could hear his wife asking anxious questions over the public-address mike.
When Haley reappeared she said, “It was a black man, Ted, all muffled up in black clothes.”
“Must be the guy Swedenberg scared off. Did you get a good look at him?”
“No. All I can say for sure is he was black and muffled,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “And he was carrying some kind of portable monitoring device. When I asked him what he was doing he ran off.”
“If he turns up again, call the cops. Don’t go out and try to befriend him or anything. Don’t be sympathetic, call the police. Then call me and I’ll try to get off work.”
“You don’t have to screw up your job over a simple prowler. I can handle it.”
“He’s not a prowler if he’s carrying around bugging equipment. So phone the police if there’s any sign of him again. You might also try to find out why the stupid house isn’t giving us any warnings.”
“Yes, I will, don’t get upset—”
Beep! Beep!
The car horn was tooting itself.
“Oops,” said Ted. “Almost at the New Westport Jumpoff. I’ll call you from work.”
“‘Bye. Love.”
The slotway shunted him off onto a manual side road. His car’s electric engine came back on and Ted resumed control of the machine as it disengaged completely from the NE Slotway.
Was that what was in the dream suitcase? Spy equipment. No, Ted thought, but you’re getting close.
Then he blinked, wondering why he’d thought that.
The Federal Repossession Bureau Office complex consisted of seventy-five domed rooms of various sizes, all connected by enclosed opaque ramps. It looked something like a giant sprawl of tangled dumbbells. Ted’s section stood out over the mucky waters of the Sound, balanced on pastel-shaded pilings.
When Ted came trotting into his office the handsome, impatient face of young Jay Perlberg was already on the wall of the pixphone screen. “Had a nice leisurely breakfast, huh?” inquired his Skip Division boss. “Lingered perhaps over a second cup of nearcaf with your wife?”
Ted watched a gaggle of sooty seagulls flat-footing around on the sticky sand beneath his office windows rather than look his immediate boss in the eye. “I’m only eight minutes late.” Seating himself at his boomerang-shape desk, he clicked on the readers, ID boxes, and mappers. “One of the reasons is that a spade with a—”
“We,” the handsome, tanned Perlberg said, “don’t care if you’re a half hour late, Ted, so long as you—”
“Eight minutes.” Tiny faces were rolling by on the screens of the three ID boxes, red Xs were commencing to flash on the mapper maps.
“My main concern is that you’re happy,” said Perlberg. “Are you happy?”
“Yeah, as a lark.”
“Getting along with your wife?”
“Everything is splendid.”
One of the desk-top readers commenced talking to him. “. . . Robert Able tentatively located in the Andes Mountains of South America, unpaid for skycar tentatively located parked across the street from a mate-house . . . .”
“Okay, I can see you’re anxious to make up for all that lost time,” said his boss, “so I’ll sign off.”
“Eight minutes,” Ted told the now blank screen.
Another reader, after making a metallic throat-clearing noise somewhere within its speaker grid, told him, “We’ve tentatively located Leon Rovics at a synthetic-chicken ranch on the outskirts of Burlingame, California. The allegedly unpaid for jetractor is overparked across the square from the local Grange dome. . . .”
Picking up an electric pencil, Ted made a notation on a fresh deadbeat chart. “Rovics is pretty good,” he said to himself. “Been elusing us since 2018. What with depreciation that stupid jetractor isn’t going to be worth more than thirty-five hundred dollars now.”
Bleep! said an ID box. A glowing red circle appeared around one of the faces. The crawl had ceased.
Ted squinted at the face. That stuff the bed had swished into his eyes was causing him to see things a little fuzzy up close. “Hey, that’s Roosevelt Nixon Thomas, the guy with the six unpaid-for electronic jukeboxes. Do we have a location on him?”
A new red X appeared on one of the mapper screens.
“Tentative loke. Man answering description of Roosevelt Nixon Thomas is employed as a waterski mender in Mystic, Connecticut. Five of the six allegedly unpaid for electronic
jukeboxes are supposedly reposing in the loft of an imitation clam-chowder factory in the vicinity. . . .”
“Five out of six isn’t bad.” Ted reached out to punch a repo order on his pickup box.
More faces went rolling by on the ID machines. Then another of the boxes said Bleep!
A new face halted on the screen. “Hey, don’t tell me he’s mixed up with us?” Ted asked.
“This is the notorious Reverend Jose S. Ortega, commonly known as Rev O,” explained a reader. “Long sought by the federal government for a multitude of seditious and near-seditious acts, the infamous cleric has now fallen into our jurisdiction by neglecting to keep up the payments on a stungun purchased from a Gunmartz outlet in Cambridge, Mass., under a flimsy alias.”
Rev O was about forty, long-faced and heavy-jawed. A pleasant-looking guy, though. Especially for a deadbeat.
Ted had often seen footage about Ortega on the news. Usually the reverend would surface to commit some antigovernment act or to protest some government abuse. A dedicated man, brave certainly, but somehow not as interesting a person as Dr. Norvell Perola. Ted started a file on Rev O by punching a green button on the edge of his desk.
Bleep!
Something odd had turned up on one of the ID boxes. It wasn’t a photo of a face. There was a drawing on the screen, a large pen-and-ink sketch of a vaguely familiar little boy in an old-fashioned ankle-length nightgown.
Ted’s eyebrows raised. He said, “Hey, of course! This is what the dream is all. . . .”
Then he forgot. He could no longer speak. He sat staring at the drawing.
Slowly he fell asleep, eyes remaining open.
After he’d sat that way for nearly ten minutes a door gently opened. This door wasn’t where any door was supposed to be.
Someone Ted knew arrived in the doorway. Quietly he said, “Come along, Nemo.” Ted rose up, stepped through the door in the wall.
Chapter 3
Friday morning. Two days later.
Ted had been able to take nearly two pages of notes on Dr. Perola’s lecture, uninterrupted, this morning. It was raining, cold and damp outside. The decorative room-center electric fireplace pit kept switching itself on, which sent tiny flecks of black light zigzagging across the TV wall. Not serious enough to interfere with Dr. Perola and what he was saying about Selfism.
“We don’t need a lot of stupid books to be happy. In fact, chums, the less we know about the past, the more we know about the future.” The giant bald professor was poised next to an open window in his study at Utopia East. It didn’t seem to be raining in Massachusetts. At his feet sprawled a plyosack full of books. Bending from the waist, Perola snatched out another book. “What have we next? Giambattista Vico. Stupid. Who needs him?” He flung the book out the window. “What’s this one? Benedetto Croce. Stupid. Toss it.”
A loud crackling suddenly sounded outside. Ted sat up, asking the house, “What’s that?”
“Nothing alarming,” replied the speaker directly over his head. “Merely the police making what looks to be a routine arrest.”
“On our lawn?” Ted ran to the door. It didn’t open for him. “You sure you want to get involved?” the house asked him. “Open the stupid door.”
On the wet lawn a lanky black man threw his arms high, crying, “Nerds! Fugheaded farbs!”
Two men in blue Connecticut Police daysuits were stalking him, circling closer. Each held a fat gray gun.
The Negro noticed Ted now and tugged his dark muffler away from his mouth. “So you’re in with them, too? You’re helping—”
Expanding circles of light blossomed from the barrels of the police guns. The loud crackling was repeated.
The black man froze, arms still above his head. Then he collapsed in on himself, arms and legs jerking as he fell down slowly through the rain to splash flat out on the short synthetic grass.
Ted asked, “What the hell did you use on him?”
“Good morning, Mr. Briar,” said one of the uniformed men. He was a chubby, grinning man, redheaded and with a face dotted with hollow-center freckles. “Just a routine police matter. You can go back inside and watch your program.”
Walking down the thermal path from his front door, Ted said, “Is he dead or what? What kind of guns are those?”
The red-haired man grinned. “I’m Sergeant Nestley. Pronounced the same way as the famous pseudochocolate, although spelled N-e-s-t-l-e-y. My partner is Officer Knudsen.”
“This is merely a new type of stungun,” explained the thin, blond Knudsen. “The Brimstone police force is giving them a field test this week.”
“It’s a lot rougher than the usual stungun, from the looks of this poor guy.” Ted stepped onto the soggy lawn. Fallen beside the man was a black mechanism about the size of a brick. Ted reached for it.
“Don’t touch anything,” cautioned Nestley. “Lars, get the med handy.” While Knudsen walked to a hovering blue skycar, Ted asked, “What exactly is this all about, Sergeant? You know, I think this guy was here the other day and he might be a peeping—”
“A little more complicated than that.” The freckled Nestley grinned. “I can assure you, Mr. Briar, we’ll set everything to right.”
“Will we have to testify, my wife and I, or file a complaint?”
“Not at all, Mr. Briar. We have more than enough on this fellow already.”
“Who was he anyway?” Ted didn’t recognize the stunned black man. “What was he up to exactly?”
“Standard police procedures make it impossible for me to answer right this minute.”
A white-enamel android jumped from the low-hovering skycar. Knudsen led him across the lawn to the fallen Negro. The android bent, with a slight creaking, and scooped up the stunned man.
“Thank you very much for your cooperation,” said Sergeant Nestley after Knudsen and the android had climbed back up into the skycar with the black man.
“Could I call the Brimstone police station later to find out the outcome of all this? I still don’t quite understand—”
“It would be better if you waited until you hear from us.”
“Yeah, but I’m curious as to why this guy was interested in us,” said Ted.”I’m not sure what he meant when he yelled at me.”
Nestley, chuckling, patted Ted’s shoulder. “You’ll be doing us a real favor by not talking about this morning’s little incident at all, not until we give you an official go-ahead. I can’t say more. Well, have a nice day.”
Ted stayed on his front steps in the rain until the skycar had climbed away into the gray morning.
When he went in, finally, the hatrack went over him with a hot-air nozzle to dry off his wet lounging clothes. Ted crossed the room, stopping near the TV wall. “Who was that spade?”
Dr. Perola’s show was ending, the credits were unwinding over the closing shot of the giant bald professor at his open window. An unseen announcer said, “The Konnecticut Kable Service has presented Discourse 24 in the continuing series by Dr. Norvell Perola. Viewers who are taking this course for credit are advised to throw away the following books: Scienza Nuova by Giambattista Vico. . . .”
Ted frowned at the front door. Haley still wasn’t home from the graveyard shift at Dynamo Hill. He really wanted to talk to her, about the black man and what had happened.
The door opened. Haley came in. The shadows under her eyes were deeper, the short skirt of her tan lycra jumper was wrinkled. “Morning,” she said, brushing at her hair with one slender hand.
“Later than usual,” Ted said. “Things have been happening around—”
“Oh, Ted.” Haley beckoned a chair over, lowered herself into it, and let her long legs spread wide. “I’m not up to conversation right yet.”
“Okay, so listen, then. You know that Negro guy who was skulking around the other day? Two cops were here a few minutes ago, they grabbed the guy. Before they grabbed him they—”
“Let’s wait and talk when you get home from work.” Haley kicked off h
er shoes. “We had a lot of extra emergencies at the hospital last night. I’m extra tired.”
“They shot this guy with some new kind of stungun. It knocked him right over.”
Haley bounced up, made her way to the sleepingroom ramp. “We’ll have lots of time tonight, save it for then. I am interested, but not now, Ted.”
“We won’t have any time tonight,” he reminded her. “This is our weekly TF session night. At the Jakesens’ tonight.”
“Well, I’ll call you at work.” She headed up the ramp. “Better start letting the house get you ready. Jay’s getting very concerned about your being late.”
“Huh?”
His wife turned away. “I said Mr. Perlberg probably, from what you’ve told me, won’t like you to be late again. See you tonight.” She left the room.
Ted stood watching the door she’d gone through. After a moment he turned himself over to the house.
Chapter 4
“There must have been fifty of them at least . . . what am I saying? I read the body-count report afterward. There were fifty-six of the little nerds living in this defunct sector of Bridgeport. All different kinds . . . fox terriers, collies, foxhounds, schnauzers, beagles, sheepdogs. . . . So we came in low over this side street where they were foraging. I’m piloting the skycar and Rick Marshall. . . . You know Marshall, don’t all of you? Cyborg, he and his wife live over in Redding. Rick is on the deathray. Okay, so we come in at about a hundred feet and I tip Rick the—”
“Dead dogs,” said Jessica Jakesen. “All I ever hear is dead dogs. When it isn’t dead dogs, it’s dead cats. Once last week it was dead monkeys.”
“Oh, yeah, did I tell all of you about that?” Bruce Jakesen asked the rest of them in his wide, circular living room. “Seems there were a couple dozen. . . . What am I saying? The body-count report gave the total as twenty-seven. Okay, there were twenty-seven of these little farbs living in what used to be called the Bronx. Any of you ever hear of the Bronx? Okay, so we come in low over—”
