Michaelmas

by Algis Budrys

  And in fact, Clementine Gervaise herself was so casual, despite the glances and the exposition from knees to ankles, that it seemed the whole business was only a pro forma gesture to days perhaps gone by for both of them. But just before he poured the last of the coffee from the chased silver pot into the translucent cup with its decoration of delicately painted violets, he found himself listening with more than casual attention to the intonations of her voice, and finding that his eyes rested on the highlights in her washed blond coiffure each time she turned her head.

  For content, her conversation was still no more than politeness required, and his responses were the same. But there was a certain comfortable relaxation within him which he discovered only with a little spasm of alertness. For the past minute or two, his smile of response to her various gambits about European travel and climate had been warming. He had begun thinking how pleasant it all was, sitting here and looking out over the mountains, sipping coffee in this air; how very pleasant it was to be himself. And he found himself remembering out of the aspect of his mind that was like an antique desk, some of its drawers bolted, and all the others a little warped and stiff in their sides, so that they opened with difficulty: You come upon me like the morning air

  Rising in summer on the dayward hills.

  And so unlock the crystal freshets waiting, still,

  Since last they ran in joy among the grasses.

  He looked down into his cup, smiled, and said: "Dregs", to cover the slight frown he might have shown.

  "Oh, I'm so sorry," she said as if she also worked in the Excelsior kitchen. It was this little domestic note that did it.

  He continued to be charming, and in fact disarmingly attentive for the next few minutes until she left, saying: "I shall be looking forward to seeing you later today." And then when he had closed the door to the suite behind her, he walked back out on to the balcony and stood with his hands behind his back, his cheeks puffing in and out a little.

  "What is it about her?" he said to Domino.

  "There's a remarkable coincidence. She's very much as I'd expect your wife would have been by now."

  "Really? Is that it?"

  "I would say so. I have."

  "Like Clementine Gervaise?" He turned back inside the parlour, his hands still clasped behind him. He placed his feet undecidedly. "Well. What do you think this is?"

  "On the data, it's a coincidence."

  Michaelmas cocked his head towards the machine. "Are you beginning to learn to think beyond actuarials?" he said with pleasure.

  "It may be a benefit of our continuing relationship, O Creator."

  "Long time coming," Michaelmas said gruffly. He straight-ened and began to stride about the parlour. "But what have we here? Has someone been applying a great deal of de-ductive thought to what profession a man in my role would choose in these times? My goodness, Dr. Limberg, is all this part of a better mousetrap? Domino, it seems I might also have to watch behind me as I beat a path to his door."

  "You are not more than part of the whole world, Mighty Mouse," Domino said.

  "You know it," Michaelmas answered, kicking off his shoes as he stepped into the bedroom.

  "Well, I'm going to take an hour's nap."

  He slept restlessly for thirty-seven minutes. From time to time he rolled over, frowning.

  Five

  Domino woke him from a dream. "Mr Michaelmas." He opened his eyes immediately.

  "What? Oh, I'm afraid to go home in the dark," he said.

  "Wake up, Mr Michaelmas. It's nine twenty-three, local."

  "What's the situation?" Michaelmas asked, sitting up.

  "Multiple. A few moments ago, I completed my analysis of where the capsule crash site must be. I based my think-ing on the requirements of the premise—a low trajectory to account for the capsule's escaping radar notice following the shuttle explosion; the need to have the crash occur within reasonable distance of Limberg's sanatorium, yet in a place where other people in the area would not be likely to notice or find it; and so forth. These conditions of course would fit either the truth or your hypothesis that Limberg is a resourceful liar.

  "At any rate, I called the network, as you, and asked for a helicopter to investigate the site. I learned that they were already following Melvin Watson, who had recently taken off. Checking back on his activities, I find that just before catching the plane in New York last night he placed a call to a Swiss Army artillery major here. That officer is also on the mailing lists of a number of amateur rocket societies. On arrival here, Mr Watson called the Major again several times.

  Following the last call, which was rather lengthy, Mr Watson immediately boarded one of his client's helicopters and departed, leaving Campion to watch the sanatorium."

  "Ah," Michaelmas chuckled. "If Horse had only been modern enough to call the university centre here and get his data from their computer. You would have been on to him in a flash."

  Michaelmas patted the cold black top of the machine sitting on the nightstand. He knew exactly what had happened. Somewhere in the back of Watson's mind had been the name of an acquaintance of a friend of some-one he'd worked with, the man to call if you were ever in Switzerland and had a ballistics problem. The name might have been there for years, beside the telephone number of the only place in Madrid that served a decent Chinese dinner, the memory of a girl who lived upstairs from a cafe in Luxembourg, a reliable place to get your shirts done in Ceuta, and the price of a second-class railway ticket from Ghent to Aix. "You've been out-newsmanned, my friend. What do you want to bet Horse is headed straight as a die for the same place you've got marked with an X on your map?"

  "Not a farthing. Precisely my point," Domino said. "There is more to the situation."

  "Go on."

  "Following an exchange of phone calls with the sana-torium, UNAC Star Control has authorized a press confer-ence for Norwood at any time no later than one o'clock p.m. local. One of the men they sent in here last night was Getulio Frontiere."

  "Check." Frontiere was a smooth, capable press secretary. The conference would go very cleanly and pretty much the way UNAC wanted it. "No later than one o'clock. Then they want to say their say in time for the breakfast news on the east coast of the United States. Do you think they smell trouble with more heads like Gately?" He got to his feet and began to undress.

  "I think it's possible. They're very quick to sense changes in the wind."

  "Yes. Horse said that last night. Very sensitive to the popular dynamic." Stripped, Michaelmas picked up the machine, carried it into the bathroom, and set it down near the washbowl as he began to splash water, scrubbing his neck and ears.

  "There's more," Domino said. "By happenstance, Tim Brodzik last week rescued the California governor's teenage daughter from drowning. He was invited to Sunday dinner at the governor's house, and extensively photographed with the grateful parents. He and the girl had their arms around each other."

  Michaelmas stopped with his straight razor poised beside one soap-filmed cheek. "Who's that?"

  "The beachboy Stever was involved with."

  "Oh." He took a deep breath. Last year, he and Domino had invested much time in getting the governor elected. "Well—you might as well see if you can intercept that note to Sam Lemoyne. It would only confuse things now."

  "Done. Finally, a registered airmail packet has cleared the New York General Post Office, routed through St. Louis. Its final destination is Cape Girardeau, Missouri. It was mailed from Berne, clearing the airport post office here yesterday afternoon. I think it's going to US Always."

  "Yesterday afternoon? Damn," said Michaelmas, feeling his jaw. His face had dried, and he had to wet it and soap it again. "Who from?"

  "Cikoumas et Cie. They are a local importer of dates, figs, and general sweetmeats. But there is more to them than that."

  "Figs," Michaelmas said, passing his right forearm over his head and pulling his left cheek taut with his fingertips as he laid the razor against his skin. "Sw
eetmeats." He watched the action of the razor on his face. Shaving this way was one of those eccentric habits you pick up when away from sources of power and hot water.

  He was remembering days when he had been a graduate engineering student helping out the family budget with an occasional filler for a newspaper science syndicate. His wife had worked as a temporary salesclerk during Decem-ber and sent him a chrome-headed, white plastic lawnmower of a thing that would shave your face whether you plugged it into the wall or the cigarette lighter of your car, if you had a car. He remembered very clearly the way his wife had walked and talked, the schooled attentive mannerisms intelligently blended from their first disjointed beginnings at drama classes. She had always played older than her age. She was too tall and too gaunt for an ingénue, and had had trouble getting parts. She had not been grown inside yet, but she had been very fine and he had been waiting warmly for her maturity. By the time the Depart-ment of Speech would have graduated her from North-western, she would have been fully co-ordinated. But in 1968 she'd had her head broken in front of the Conrad Hilton, and then for a while she'd vegetated, and then after a while she'd died.

  When he was even younger, and had to work on the East Coast because he wanted to take extension courses at MIT, he had called his wife often at Northwestern, in Evanston, Illinois. He would say: "I can get a ride to Youngstown over Friday night with this fellow who lives there, and then if I can get a hitch up US 30, I could be in Chicago by Saturday late or Sunday morning. I don't have any classes back here until Tuesday, and I can call in sick to work." She would say:

  "Oh, that sounds like a lot of trouble for just a few hours. And I think I have a singing job at a coffee house Monday anyhow." He would say : "But I don't mind," and she would say: "I don't want you to do it. It's more important for you to be where you are." And he had said more, patiently, but so had she. That had been back when Domino had just been a device for making telephone calls. He had barely been a programme at all. And now look at him.

  He rinsed the glittering straight razor under the tap, and rinsed and dried his face. He dried the razor meticulously and put it back into its scarred Afghanistani leather-and-brass case. "Figs," he said. "Figs and queened pawns, savants and astronauts, world enough, but how much time?

  Where does it go? What does it do?" He scrubbed his armpits with the washcloth.

  "Boompa-boompa, boompa-boompa, boompa-boom, pa-pa-pa-peen, herring boxes without topses .. ."

  "I don't like it. I don't like it," he said to Domino as he put the fresh room-service carnation in his buttonhole. "These people must mean something by this manoeuvre with the package. What's the idea? Or are you claiming Cikou-mas is a coincidence?"

  "No. There's a definite connection. They've even recently opened a branch in Cité d'Afrique. Of course, that would be a logical move for an importer, but, still..."

  "Well, all right, then. But why do they mail the package via that route? Maybe they want something else."

  "I don't understand your implication. They simply don't want postal employees noting Limberg's return address on a package to US Always. Something like that would be worth a few dollars to a media tipster. The Cikoumas front is an easy way around that."

  "Ah, maybe. Maybe that's all. Maybe not." Michaelmas began striding back and forth. "We've spotted it. Maybe we're meant to spot it. Maybe they're laying a trail that only a singular kind of animal could follow. But must follow. Must follow, so can be detected, can be identified, phut, splat

  !" He punched his fist into his palm. "What about that, eh? They want me because they've deduced I'm there to be found, and once they know me and have me, they have everything. How's that for a hypothesis?"

  "Well, one can arrive at the scenario, obviously."

  "They must know! Look at the recent history of the world. Where's war, where's what was going to be an accruing class of commodities billionaires in a diminishing system, what's taking the pressure off the heel of poverty, what accounts for the emergence of a rational worldwide distribution of resources? What accounts for the steady exposure of conniving politicians, for increasingly rational social planning, and reasonably effective execution of the plans? I must exist!"

  "It seems to me that you do," Domino said agreeably.

  Michaelmas blinked. "Yes, you," he said. "They can't know about you. When they picture me, they probably see me in a tall silk hat running back and forth to some massive console. The opera phantom notion. However, it's always possible—"

  "Excuse me, Mr Michaelmas, but UNAC and Dr. Limberg have just announced a press conference at the sanatorium in half an hour. That'll be ten thirty. I've called Madame Gervaise to assemble your crew, and there's a car waiting."

  "All right." Michaelmas slung the terminal over his shoul-der. "What if Cikoumas out in plain sight is intended to distract me from the character of the woman?"

  "Oh?"

  "Suppose they already know who I am. Then they must assume I've deduced everything. They must assume I'm fully prepared to act against them." Michaelmas softly closed the white-and-gilt door of the suite and strolled easily down the corridor with its tastefully striped wallpaper, its flowering carpet, and its scent of lilac sachet. He was smiling in his usual likeable manner. "So they set her on me. What else would account for her?" They stopped at the elevator and Michaelmas worked the bellpush.

  "Perhaps simply a desire to keep tab on a famous inves-tigative reporter who might sniff out something wrong with their desired story. Perhaps nothing in particular. Perhaps she's just a country girl, after all. Why not?"

  "Are you telling me my thesis won't hold water?"

  "A bathtub will hold water. A canteen normally suffices."

  The elevator arrived. Michaelmas smiled warmly at the operator, took a stand in a corner, and brushed fussily at the lapels of his coat as the car dropped towards the lobby.

  "What am I do to?" Michaelmas said in his throat. "What is she?"

  "I have a report from our helicopter," Domino said abruptly. "They are two kilometres behind Watson's craft. They are approaching the mountainside above Limberg's sanatorium. Watson's unit is losing altitude very quickly. They have an engine failure."

  "What kind of terrain is that?" Michaelmas said.

  The elevator operator's head turned. "Bitte sehr?"

  Michaelmas shook his head, blushing.

  Domino said: "Very rough, with considerable wind gust-ing. Watson is being blown towards the cliff face. His craft is side-slipping. It may clear. No, one of the vanes has made contact with a spur. The fuselage is swinging. The cabin has struck. The tail rotor has sheared. There's a heavy impact at the base of the cliff. There is an explosion."

  The elevator bounced delicately to a stop. The doors chucked open. "The main lobby, Herr Mikelmaas."

  Michaelmas said : "Dear God." He stepped out into the lobby and looked around blankly.

  Six

  Clementine Gervaise came up briskly. She had changed into a tweed suit and a thin soft blouse with a scarf at the throat. "The crew is driving the equipment to the sanatorium already,"

  she said. "Your hired car is waiting for us outside." She cocked her head and looked closely at him. "Laurent, is something amiss?"

  He fussed with his carnation. "No. We must hurry, Clementine." Her eau de cologne reminded him how good it was to breathe of one familiar person when the streets were full of strangers. Her garments whispered as she strode across the lobby carpeting beside him. The majordomo held the door. The chauffeured Citroën was at the foot of the steps. They were in, the door was pressed shut, the car pulled away from the kerb, and they were driving through the city towards the mountain highway. The soft cushions put them close to one another. He sat looking straight ahead, showing little.

  "We have to beat the best in the world this morning," he remarked. "People like Annelise Volkert, Hampton de Courcy, Melvin Watson ..."

  "She shows no special reaction," Domino said in his skull. "She's clean—on that count."

/>   He closed his eyes for a moment. Then in his throat he said, "That doesn't prove much," while she was saying:

  "Yes, but I'm sure you will do it." She put her arm through his. "And I will make you see we are an excellent team."

  Domino told him : "The Soviet cosmonaut command has just covertly shifted Captain Anatoly Rybakov from routine domestic programmes to active standby status on the expeditionary project. He is to immediately begin accelerated training in the simulator at Tyura Tam. That is a Top Urgent instruction on highest secret priority landline from Moscow to the cosmodrome."

  Rybakov. He was getting a little long in the tooth—es-pecially for a captain—and he had never been a prime commander. He was only a third or fourth crew alternate on the UNAC lists and wasn't even in the Star Control flight cadre. But he was nevertheless the only human being to have crewed both to the Moon and aboard the Kosm-gorod orbital station.

  "What do you suppose that means?" Michaelmas asked, rubbing his face.

  "I haven't the foggiest, yet."

  "Have you notified UNAC?"

  "No. By the way, Papashvilly went out to the Afrique airfield but then back again a few minutes ago. Sakal phoned Star Control with a recall order."

  "Forgive me, Clementine," Michaelmas said. "I must arrange my thoughts."

  "Of course." She sat back, well-mannered, chic, attentive. Her arm departed from his with a little petting motion of her hand.

  "Stand by for public," Domino said. He chimed aloud. "Bulletin. UPI Berne September 29. A helicopter crash near this city has claimed the life of famed newsman Melvin Watson. Dead with the internationally respected journalist is the pilot . . ." His speaker continued to relay the wire service story. In Michaelmas's ear, he said : "She's reacting."