Demons (19 page)

So that’s it.
Stephen maintained what he hoped was an interested, impartial expression. But inside he writhed. He was going to be fired after all. Maybe Winderson thought he had to fire him personally, for his father’s sake.

Researching new products, Stephen had learned that Dirvane 17, a pesticide soon to be marketed by West Wind, had been called seriously carcinogenic and neurologically toxic by independent researchers. Remarkably small amounts of it would cause convulsions in children and liver damage in adults. There were also indications of neurological complications. And it persisted in the environment. But it killed the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter, the bug that threatened California’s wine industry, more rapidly and definitely than any other pesticide.

“You pointed out the downside of Dirvane 17.”

“Yes, sir—I was only concerned that—” He broke off as Winderson raised his hand.

“I know, son—you were concerned about the company. That we’d face lawsuits. That it’d generate a big backlash—bad publicity—that in the long run it’d cost us more in settlements than we’d make in profits.”

Stephen exhaled through his nose, in relief. “Exactly . . . Dale.”

“Very sharp. I’ve asked that the stuff be reviewed. Maybe we can cover our asses with some sort of warning label and special handling instructions—more of that kind of thing than usual, I mean—before we market the stuff.”

Winderson went to stand in front of the window, his back to Stephen, striking a pose with one hand in his Giants jacket, the other holding the mug in front of him. “Look at that big ol’ world out there. Steve, you ever ask yourself which way is up or down?”

“Um—well success is up, and to get there . . .”

“Don’t need that speech either, Steve. No, I mean—morally. Is there a moral up and down?”

“Well—sure.”

“Sure there is—yet it’s all relative. Personally, I think of the moral good as being the greatest good for the most people. Now this world of ours—did you ever consider that
up
—the literal
up
, toward the sky—isn’t up? You’d know if you were an astronaut. Those guys know. See, it’s all relative to where you stand. It’s
up
if you’re on the ground. But in space there is no up. I mean—why don’t you fall off the Earth? Looking toward the South Pole, why, that’s down, right? So why don’t you fall toward the South Pole and then out into space? Gravity. But that’s all that prevents you going one way or another. Get out into the Solar System, the galaxy, there’s no up or down. We orient ourselves according to what works, son.”

What’s the point of all this?
Stephen wondered. But he said, “Um—sure, I can see that.”

“So . . . gravity . . . where’s
our
center of gravity, so to speak? Yours and mine? Where’s our
moral
center of gravity? Like I said, it’s whatever’s the most good for the most people. I have my own notions of what that is. Have to operate by my own notions—they’re all I’ve got.”

He turned to face Stephen but didn’t look at him; he put his coffee mug down very carefully on his glass-topped desk beside the computer terminal and the speaker phone, frowning with concentration, as if putting the mug down was a matter of life or death. “Stephen, you remember the so-called Demon Hallucinations about nine years ago?”

“The Demon Hallucinations?”

“Yes. What’s your notion of what happened?”

Stephen hesitated. “Um—I really don’t have one. I was doing graduate work, helping create a business in Thailand—a computer-manufacturing base.” He chuckled, trying to sound like an experienced fellow businessman. “We did all of the work and got none of the profits. I wasn’t much more than an intern then, and it wasn’t much more than a sweatshop, as it turned out. I couldn’t wait to leave. It was an island just off the Thai mainland, very isolated. They could avoid the international labor laws there. But I was stuck there for a while. I wasn’t in the States when any of the—the demon hysteria went down. I saw some of it on TV, but it all looked like a hoax to me, special effects, that, uh—”—

“Yes, no doubt,” Winderson interrupted with a dismissive wave. “So you thought it was a hoax, and later—hallucinations, you said?”

“Right—they said there was a terrorist attack, with hallucinogens—all these people went nuts and wrecked the—”—

“Yes, all right,” Winderson broke in again, briskly this time. He gazed blankly down at Stephen. His eternal smile had seamlessly melted into a grimace of strain.

I said the wrong thing,
Stephen thought.
But how?

Winderson gave a soft grunt that sounded like cynical amusement. “Well, some of our people were accused of being involved in spreading the poison gas, or whatever, that caused the hallucinations. I wanted to know where you stood on it. There are lawsuits pending. Groundless, I assure you. It was pulled off by terrorists, who put rye-mold-based hallucinogens in the water around the world. Of course, a great many people still believe . . .” He shrugged as if waiting for Stephen to finish the thought for him.

“Uh, yeah, a lot of people seem to think it really happened, in some literal way—but there’s no TV footage of actual demons. At the time I saw some clips—but they were all sort of blurry. . . . After a while, they stopped showing them. I’ve always wondered what happened to that footage.”

“Do you know how much footage there was out there? Too much to find and erase. Yet all the people who claimed to have home video footage of the demons, or to have taped news reports about them, came up with erased tapes. Digital stuff was blotted out, too. So—they were lying.”

“But how could there be footage of hallucinations in the first place?”

“There wasn’t—there was some footage of people hallucinating, rioting, killing one another, some of them in bizarre costumes. Many of them with extraordinary strength—a side effect of the drug.”

“Costumes. I saw some of that—people parading around in homemade demon costumes, their bodies all painted up. . . .”

“Right. It was mass hysteria, fueled by the attack. Some people succumbed, and some didn’t. The footage was confiscated, taken for the government investigation. Anyway, the terrorist cell was wiped out so that’s that.”

“Well . . .” Stephen stood, assuming the interview had come to an end.

“Not so fast, son! That’s not the only reason you’re here! I was just wondering what you thought about all that. No, there’s something more we have to discuss. You have a special opportunity ahead of you.”

Stephen sat down again, a little too heavily, his mouth dry.

At last, here it was.

“They’ve asked for you, Stephen.”

“Who has?”

“That’s not what you need to know. You should ask
why
they’ve asked for you—that’s far more important.”

Is it?
Stephen wondered. Some survival instinct stirred in him.

“Yes,” Winderson went on, perhaps reading the doubtful expression on Stephen’s face. “Yes . . .
Why you?
is the question. It’s because you’re a kind of tabula rasa, it seems. You have special qualities. . . .” He seemed to be thinking aloud. “And I can only envy you . . . but—” He shrugged, then turned to the speaker phone, and hit a button. “Latilla?”

As he straightened up, an older woman in a gray-blue suit bustled into the room through a side door.

The woman from Stephen’s dream.

“I’ve got to make some phone calls. Take Stephen to see his opportunity, Latilla,” Winderson said. “I’ll be along.”

At the back of the penthouse office, a door opened onto a stairwell: a dusty stairwell that spiraled upward.

Heart hammering, Stephen found himself following Latilla exactly as he’d followed her in his dream, though she had been dressed differently then. She didn’t say anything as they ascended, just hummed tunelessly to herself as they came to a narrow landing, a door.

Stephen felt himself close to hyperventilating as she put her hand on the knob. The faces in the tray.

She looked at him quizzically. “Are you all right, Mr. Isquerat?”

She pronounced his name almost like
Issk-rat
. Making him think of
muskrat
. He wanted to correct her, tell her it should be closer to
Iss-carrot
.

No. There was something else it was more important to say:
Don’t take me into that room!

“Yes—yes, I . . . but perhaps, really, I’m . . .” He wanted to say he wasn’t right for this. But he wasn’t supposed to know what was there.

She gave her head a little shake of puzzled impatience, then turned the knob and stepped into the room, holding the door open for him.

Inside was another short hallway to a small office just big enough to hold its five workstations.

Stephen looked around.
Just an office.
He shivered.

He was dizzy with relief. The dream had been just a dream. He blew out his breath, relaxing a little.

The cubicles weren’t cubicles, really—though partitioned with the usual white soundboard, they were oddly shaped, each one a triangle, with the point outward, the computer operator sitting at a desk with his back to the center of the room, where Stephen and Latilla stood. It was a windowless room; vaguely New Age Muzak oozed from hidden speakers. A sixth man joined them, his smile somehow the same quality as the music. He was a pale man with a high forehead and fishy lips, wearing a white lab coat. He carried a digital clipboard.

“This is H. D.—Harrison Deane,” Latilla said, squeezing Deane’s shoulder hard enough to make the man wince.

H. D. blinked at Stephen. “This is . . . ?”

“Yes, this is
him
,” Latilla said.

“Really! And he’ll be starting here with me soon?”

“First there’s a plan for, ah, some kind of fieldwork. Just the way Dale likes to do things.”

“Fieldwork?” H. D. looked at her in confusion. Then something seemed to dawn on him. “Oh, yes, of course . . .”

“I’m a little at sea, here,” Stephen said, trying to laugh it off. It was as if they were two people who knew about a surprise party and were trying to talk about it without clueing him in.

“H. D. is George Deane’s son,” Latilla said, as if that explained things. “George started psychonomics.”

“Psychonomics . . .” Stephen couldn’t quite bring himself to admit he didn’t know what it was.

Latilla smiled. “The use of psychic power in business, which in turn increases your psychic influence over the world.
If
you’ve developed your ability with psychonomics.”

Stephen wasn’t sure he’d heard her rightly. Had she said “psychic”?

“So this room is for . . . psychonomics training?” Stephen asked.

More urgently, he wanted to ask
Where’s the men’s room?
He needed to pee badly. But somehow it didn’t feel like the right moment.

“Ye-es,” said H. D., noncommitally. “Have a look at Al in station number three. I think he’s got some kind of groove going here today.”

They went to stand behind a gangly, round-shouldered man with thinning brown hair, stooped before a flat-screen monitor. He was staring intently at the screen. There was
no
keyboard.

The screen itself was divided into two columns of numbers, scrolling jerkily down. “On the left,” H. D. said, “you see numbers generated, as you might suppose, by a random-number generator. On the right side, Al is trying to induce in the stream of random numbers consistent patterns—increases, especially. When he succeeds, the computer chimes.”

As if eager to demonstrate, the computer chimed, and numbers flickered in bright green on the right side of the screen.

“It rewards me,” Al said. His voice seemed distant, as if he spoke in his sleep. “The computer rewards me. I can feel it.”

“How does that happen?” Stephen asked, shifting from one foot to the other. He tried not to squirm, though he increasingly had to pee. “The reward part?”

But H. D. went briskly on, “So you see, he’s changing the pattern by the power of his mind alone. Something like this might be used to influence the stock market, for example, one way or another.” He droned on, and Stephen glanced around for a men’s room door.

“Are you quite all right?” Latilla asked.

“Yes, well, actually I was sort of wondering if I could just pop into the men’s room.”

“Right out that door and to the right. You can’t miss it,” H. D. said, pointing. He turned his attention back to his clipboard.