The Crack in Space (1966)
Page 3
Because Jim Briskin represented Whites and Cols alike.
‘We’re there, sir,’ the ‘ab driver, a Col, informed him. The ‘ab slowed, came to rest on the breast-shaped vehicle port of the satellite, a dozen yards from the pink nipple which served as a location-signal device. ‘You’re Jim Briskin’s campaign manager?’ the driver said, turning to face him. ‘Yeah, I recognize you. Listen, Mr Heim; he’s not a sell-out, is he? I heard a lot of folk argue that, but he wouldn’t do it; I know that.’
‘Jim Briskin,’ Heim said as he dug for his wallet, ‘has sold out nobody. And never will. You can tell your buddies that because it’s the truth.’ He paid his fare, feeling grumpy. Grumpy as hell.
‘But is it true that—’
‘He’s working with Whites, yes. He’s working with me and I’m White. So what? Are the Whites supposed to disappear when Briskin is elected? Is that what you want? Because if it is, you’re not going to get it.’
‘I see what you mean, I guess,’ the driver said, nodding slowly. ‘You infer he’s for all the people, right? He’s got the interest of the White minority at heart just like he has the Col majority. He’s going to protect everybody, even including you Whites.’
‘That’s right,’ Salisbury Heim said, as he opened the ‘ab door. ‘As you put it, “even including you Whites”.’ He stepped out on the pavement. Yes, even us, he said to himself. Because we merit it.
‘Hello there, Mr Heim.’ A woman’s melodious voice. Heim turned—
‘Thisbe,’ he said, pleased. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m glad to see that you haven’t stayed below just because your candidate disapproves of us,’ Thisbe Olt said. Archly, she raised her green-painted, shining eyebrows. Her narrow, harliquin-like face glinted with countless dots of pure light embedded within her skin; it gave her eerie, nimbus-like countenance the appearance of constantly-renewed beauty. And she had renewed herself, over a number of decades. Willowy, almost frail, she fiddled with a tassel of stone-impregnated fabric draped about her bare arms; she had put on gay clothes in order to come out and greet him and he was gratified. He liked her very much - had for some time now.
Guardedly, Sal Heim said, ‘What makes you think Jim Briskin has any bones to pick with the Golden Door, Thisbe? Has he ever actually said anything to that effect?’ As far as he knew, Jim’s opinions on that topic had not been made public; at least he had tried to keep them under wraps.
‘We know these things, Sal,’ Thisbe said, ‘I think you’d better go inside and talk with George Walt about it; they’re down on level C, in their office. They have a few things to say to you, Sal. I know bcause they’ve been discussing it.’
Annoyed, Sal said, ‘I didn’t come here—’ But what was the use? If the owners of the Golden Door satellite wanted to see him, it was undoubtedly advisable for him to come around. ‘Okay,’ he said, and followed Thisbe in the direction of the elevator.
It always distressed him - despite his efforts to the contrary - to find himself engaged in conversation with George Walt. They were a mutation of a special sort; he had never seen anything quite like them. Nonetheless, although handicapped, George Walt had risen to great economic power in this society. The Golden Door Moments of Bliss satellite, it was rumored, was only one of their holdings; they were spread extensively over the financial map of the modem world. They were a form of mutated twinning, joined at the base of the skull so that a single cephalic structure served both separate bodies. Evidently the personality George inhabited one hemisphere of the brain, made use of one eye: the right, as he recalled. And the personality Walt existed on the other side, distinct with its own idiosyncrasies, views and drives - and its own eye from which to view the outside universe.
A uniformed attendant, a sort of cop, stopped Sal, as the elevator doors opened on level C.
‘Mr George Walt wanted to see me,’ Sal said. ‘Or so Miss Olt tells me, at least.’
‘This way, Mr Heim,’ the uniformed attendant said, touching his cap respectfully and leading Sal down the carpeted, silent hall.
He was let into a large chamber - and there, on a couch, sat George Walt. Both bodies at once rose to their feet, supporting between them the common head. The head, containing the unmingled entities of the brothers, nodded in greeting and the mouth smiled. One eye - the left - regarded him steadily, while the other wandered vaguely off, as if preoccupied.
The two necks joined the head in such a way that the head and face were tilted slightly back. George Walt tended to look slightly over whomever they were talking to, and this added to the unique impression; it made them seem formidable, as if their attention could not really be engaged. The head was normal size, however, as were both bodies. The body to the left - Sal did not recall which of them it was - wore informal clothing, a cotton shirt and slacks, with sandals on the feet. The right hand body, however, was formally dressed in a single-breasted suit, tie and buttoned gray cape. And the hands of the right body were jammed deep into the trouser pockets, a stance which gave to it an aura of authority if not age; it seemed distinctly older than its twin.
‘This is George,’ the head said, pleasantly. ‘How are you, Sal Heim? Good to see you.’ The left body extended its hand. Sal walked toward the two of them and gingerly shook hands. The right hand body, Walt, did not want to shake with him; its hands remained in its pockets.
‘This is Walt,’ the head said, less pleasantly, then. ‘We wanted to discuss your candidate with you, Heim. Sit down and have a drink. Here, what can we fix for you?’ Together, the two bodies managed to walk to the sideboard, where an elaborate bar could be seen. Walt’s hands opened a bottle of Bourbon while George’s expertly fixed an old fashioned, mixed sugar and water and bitters together in the bottom of a glass. Together, George Walt made the drink and carried it back to Sal.
‘Thanks,’ Sal Heim said, accepting the drink.
‘This is Walt,’ the common head said to him. ‘We know that if Jim Briskin is elected he’ll instruct his Attorney General to find ways to shut the satellite down. Isn’t that a fact?’ The two eyes, together now, fixed themselves on him in an intense, astute gaze.
‘I don’t know where you heard that,’ Sal said, evasively.
‘This is Walt,’ the head said. ‘There’s a leak in your organization; that’s where we heard it. You realize what this means. We’ll have to throw our support behind Schwarz. And you know how many transmissions we make to Earth in a single day.’
Sal sighed. The Golden Door kept a perpetual stream of junk, honky-tonk stag-type shows, pouring down over a variety of channels, available to and widely watched by almost everyone in the country. The shows - especially the climactic orgy in which Thisbe herself, with her famous display of expanding and contracting muscles working in twenty directions simultaneously and in four colors, appeared - were a come-on for the activity of the satellite. But it would be duck soup to work in an anti-Briskin bias; the satellite’s announcers were slick prose.
Downing his drink he rose and started toward the door. ‘Go ahead and stick your stag shows on Jim; we’ll win the election anyhow and then you can be sure he’ll shut you. In fact, I personally guarantee it right now.’
The head looked uneasy. ‘Dirty p-pool,’ it stammered.
Sal shrugged. ‘I’m just protecting the interests of my client; you’ve been making threats toward him. You started it, both of you.’
‘This is George,’ the head said rapidly. ‘Here’s what I think we ought to have. Listen to this, Walt. We want Jim Briskin to come up here to the Golden Door and be photographed publicly.’ It added, in applause for itself, ‘Good idea. Get it, Sal? Briskin arrives here, covered by all the media, and visits one of the girls; it’ll be good for his image because it’ll show he’s a normal guy - and not some creep. So you benefit from this. And, while he’s here, Briskin compliments us.’ It added, ‘A good final touch but optional. For instance, he says the national interest has—’
‘He’ll never do it,’ Sal s
aid. ‘He’ll lose the election first.’
The head said, plaintively, ‘We’ll give him any girl he wants; my lord, we have five thousand to choose from!’
‘No luck,’ Sal Heim said. ‘Now if you were to make that offer to me I’d take you up on it in a second. But not Jim. He’s - old-fashioned.’ That was as good a way to put it as any. ‘He’s a Puritan. You can call him a remnant of the twentieth century, if you want.’
‘Or nineteenth,’ the head said, venomously.
‘Say anything you want,’ Sal said, nodding. ‘Jim won’t care. He knows what he believes in; he thinks the satellite is undignified. The way it’s all handled up here, boom, boom, boom - mechanically, with no personal touch, no meeting of humans on a human basis. You run an autofac; I don’t object and most people don’t object, because it saves time. But Jim does, because he’s sentimental.’
Two right arms gestured at Sal menacingly as the head said loudly, ‘The hell with that! We’re as sentimental up here as you can get! We play background music in every room - the girls always learn the customer’s first name and they’re required to call him by that and nothing else! How sentimental can you get, for chrissakes? What do you want?’ In a higher-pitched voice it roared on, ‘A marriage ceremony before and then a divorce procedure afterward, so it constitutes a legal marriage, is that it? Or do you want us to teach the girls to sew mother hubbards and bloomers, and you pay to see their ankles, and that’s it? Listen, Sal.’ Its voice dropped a tone, became ominous and deadly. ‘Listen, Sal Heim,’ it repeated. ‘We know our business; don’t tell us our business and we won’t tell you yours. Starting tonight our TV announcers are going to insert a plug for Schwarz in every telecast to Earth, right in the middle of the glorious chef-d’oeuvre you-know-what where the girls … well, you know. Yes, I mean that part. And we’re going to make a campaign out of this, really put it over. We’re going to insure Bill Schwarz’ reelection.’ It added, ‘And insure that Col fink’s thorough, total defeat.’
Sal said nothing. The great carpeted office was silent.
‘No response from you, Sal? You’re going to sit idly by?’
‘I came up here to visit a girl I like,’ Sal said. ‘Sparky Rivers, her name is. I’d like to see her now.’ He felt weary. ‘She’s different from all the others … at least, all I’ve tried.’ Rubbing his forehead he murmured, ‘No, I’m too tired, now. I’ve changed my mind. I’ll just leave.’
‘If she’s as good as you say,’ the head said, ‘it won’t require any energy from you.’ It laughed in appreciation of its wit. ‘Send a fray named Sparky Rivers down here,’ it instructed, pressing a button on its desk.
Sal Heim nodded dully. There was something to that. And after all, this was what he had come here for, this ancient, appreciated remedy.
‘You’re working too hard,’ the head said acutely. ‘What’s the matter, Sal? Are you losing? Obviously, you need our help. Very badly, in fact.’
‘Help, schmelp,’ Sal said. ‘What I need is a six-week rest, and not up here. I ought to take an ‘ab to Africa and hunt spiders or whatever the craze is right now.’ With all his problems, he had lost touch.
‘Those big trench-digging spiders are out, now,’ the head informed him. ‘Now it’s nocturnal moths, again.’ Walt’s right arm pointed at the wall and Sal saw, behind glass, three enormous iridescent cadavers, displayed under an ultraviolet lamp which brought out all their many colors. ‘Caught them myself,’ the head said, and then chided itself. ‘No, you didn’t; I did. You saw them but I popped them into the killing jar.’
Sal Heim sat silently waiting for Sparky Rivers, as the two inhabitants of the head argued with each other as to which of them had brought back the African moths.
The top-notch and expensive - and dark-skinned - private investigator, Tito Cravelli, operating out of N’York, handed the woman seated across from him the findings which his Altac 3-60 computer had derived from the data provided it. It was a good machine.
‘Forty hospitals,’ Tito said. ‘Forty transplant operations within last year. Statistically, it’s unlikely that the UN Vital Organ Fund Reserve would have had that many organs available in so limited a time, but it is possible. In other words, we’ve got nothing.’
Mrs Myra Sands smoothed her skirt thoughtfully, then lit a cigarette. ‘We’ll select at random from among the forty; I want you to follow at least five or six up. How long will it take for you to do that?’
Tito calculated silently. ‘Say two days. If I have to go there and see people. Of course, if I can do some of it on the phone—’ He liked to work through the Vid-phone Corporation of America’s product; it meant he could stick near the Altac 3-60. And, when anything came up, he could feed the data on the spot, get an opinion without delay. He respected the 3-60; it had set him back a great deal, a year ago when he had purchased it. And he did not intend to permit it to lie idle, not if he could help it. But sometimes—
This was a difficult situation. Myra Sands was not the sort who could endure uncertainty; for her things had to be either this or that, either A or not-A - Myra made use of Aristotle’s Law of the Excluded Middle like no one else he knew. He admired her. Myra was a handsome, extremely well-educated woman, light-haired, in her middle forties; across from him she sat erect and trim in her yellow Lunar squeak-frog suit, her legs long and without defect. Her sharp chin alone let on - to Tito at least - the grimness, the no-nonsense aspect, of her personality. Myra was a business-woman first, before anything else; as one of the nation’s foremost authorities in the field of therapeutic abortions, she was highly paid and highly honored … and she was well aware of this. After all, she had been at it for years. And Tito respected anyone who lived as an independent business person; after all, he, too, was his own boss, beholden to no one, to no subsidizing organization or economic entity. He and Myra had something in common. Although, of course, Myra would have denied it, Myra Sands was a terrible goddam snob; to her, Tito Cravelli was an employee whom she had hired to find out - or rather to establish as fact - certain information about her husband.
He could not imagine why Lurton Sands had married her. Surely it had been conflict - psychological, social, sexual, professional - from the start.
However, there was no explaining the chemistry which joined men and women, locked them in embraces of hate and mutual suffering sometimes for ninety years on end. In his line, Tito had seen plenty of it, enough to last him even a jerry lifetime.
‘Call Lattimore Hospital in San Francisco,’ Myra instructed in her crisp, vigilantly authoritative voice. ‘In August, Lurton transplanted a spleen for an army major, there; I think his name was Walleck or some such quiddity as that. I recall, at the time … Lurton had had, what shall I say? A little too much to drink. It was evening and we were having dinner. Lurton blurted out some darn thing or other. About “paying heavily” for the spleen. You know, Tito, that VOFR prices are rigidly set by the UN and they’re not high; in fact they’re too low … that’s the cardinal reason the fund runs out of certain vital organs so often. Not from a lack of supply so much as the existence of too darn many takers.’
‘Hmm,’ Tito said, jotting notes.
‘Lurton always said that if the VOFR only were to raise its rates …’
‘You’re positive it was a spleen?’ Tito broke in.
‘Yes.’ Myra nodded curtly, exhaling streamers of gray smoke that swirled toward the lamp behind her, a cloud that drifted in the artificial light of the office. It was dark outside, now; the time was seven-thirty.
‘A spleen,’ Tito recapitulated. ‘In August of this year. At Lattimore General Hospital in San Francisco. An army major named—’
‘Now I’m beginning to think it was Wozzeck,’ Myra put in. ‘Or is that an opera composer?’
‘It’s an opera,’ Tito said. ‘By Berg. Seldom performed, now.’ He lifted the receiver of the vid-phone. ‘I’ll get hold of the business office at Lattimore; it’s only four-thirty out there on the Coast.’
‘Have you had dinner?’ he asked her, as he waited on the line.
‘No. But I never eat until eight-thirty or nine; it’s barbaric to eat any earlier.’
Tito said, ‘Can I take you to dinner, Mrs Sands? I know an awfully good little Armenian place in the Village. The food’s actually prepared by humans.’
‘Humans? As compared to what?’
‘Automatic food-processing systems,’ Tito murmured. ‘Or don’t you ever eat in autoprep restaurants?’ After all, the Sands were wealthy; possibly they normally enjoyed human-prepared food. ‘Personally, I can’t stand autopreps. The food’s always so predictable. Never burned, never…’ He broke off; on the vidscreen the miniature features of an employee at Lattimore had formed. ‘Miss, this is Life-factors Research Consultants of N’York calling. I’d like to inquire about an operation performed on a Major Wozzeck or Walleck last August, a spleen transplant.’
‘Wait,’ Myra said suddenly. ‘Now I remember; it wasn’t a spleen - it was an islands of Langerhans; you know, that part of the pancreas which controls sugar production in the body. I remember because Lurton got to talking about it because he saw me putting two teaspoonsful of sugar in my coffee.’
‘I’ll look that up,’ the girl at Lattimore said, overhearing Myra. She turned to her files.