Dr. Bloodmoney (2 page)

And evidently they had been correct.

“I came to America,” Mr. Tree was saying, “in order to escape the Communist agents who wanted to murder me. They were after me even then … so of course were the Nazis. They were all after me.”

“I see,” Stockstill said, writing.

“They still are, but ultimately they will fail,” Mr. Tree said hoarsely, lighting a new cigarette. “For I have God on my side; He sees my need and often He has spoken to me, giving me the wisdom I need to survive my pursuers. I am at present at work on a new project, out at Livermore; the results of this will be definitive as regards our enemy.”

Our
enemy, Stockstill thought. Who is our enemy … isn’t it you, Mr. Tree? Isn’t it you sitting here rattling off your paranoid delusions? How did you ever get the high post that you hold? Who is responsible for giving you power over the lives of others—and letting you keep that power even after the fiasco of 1972? You—and they—are surely our enemies.

All our fears about you are confirmed; you are deranged—your presence here proves it. Or does it? Stockstill thought, No, it doesn’t, and perhaps I should disqualify myself; perhaps it is unethical for me to try to deal with you. Considering the way I feel … I can’t take a detached, disinterested position regarding you; I can’t be genuinely scientific, and hence my analysis, my diagnosis, may well prove faulty.

“Why are you looking at me like this?” Mr. Tree was saying.

“Beg pardon?” Stockstill murmured.

“Are you repelled by my disfigurations?” Mr. Tree said.

“No-no,” Stockstill said. “It isn’t that.”

“My thoughts, then? You were reading them and their disgusting character causes you to wish I had not consulted you?” Rising to his feet, Mr. Tree moved abruptly toward the office door. “Good day.”

“Wait.” Stockstill came after him. “Let’s get the biographical material concluded, at least; we’ve barely begun.”

Mr. Tree, eyeing him, said presently, “I have confidence in Bonny Keller; I know her political opinions … she is not a part of the international Communist conspiracy seeking to kill me at any opportunity.” He reseated himself, more composed, now. But his posture was one of wariness; he would not permit himself to relax a moment in Stockstill’s presence, the psychiatrist knew. He would not open up, reveal himself candidly. He would continue to be suspicious—and perhaps rightly, Stockstill thought.

As he parked his car Jim Fergesson, the owner of Modern TV, saw his salesman Stuart McConchie leaning on his broom before the shop, not sweeping but merely daydreaming or whatever it was he did. Following McConchie’s gaze he saw that the salesman was enjoying not the sight of some girl passing by or some unusual car—Stu liked girls and cars, and that was normal—but was instead looking in the direction of patients entering the office of the doctor across the street. That wasn’t normal. And what business of McConchie’s was it anyhow?

“Look,” Fergesson called as he walked rapidly toward the entrance of his shop. “You cut it out; someday maybe you’ll be sick, and how’ll you like some goof gawking at you when you try to seek medical help?”

“Hey,” Stuart answered, turning his head, “I just saw some important guy go in there but I can’t recall who.”

“Only a neurotic watches other neurotics,” Fergesson said, and passed on into the store, to the register, which he opened and began to fill with change and bills for the day ahead.

Anyhow, Fergesson thought, wait’ll you see what I hired for a TV repairman; you’ll really have something to stare at.

“Listen, McConchie,” Fergessson said. “You know that kid with no arms and legs that comes by on that cart? That phocomelus with just those dinky flippers whose mother took that drug back in the early ’60s? The one that always hangs around because he wants to be a TV repairman?”

Stuart, standing with his broom, said, “You hired him.”

“Yeah, yesterday while you were out selling.”

Presently McConchie said, “It’s bad for business.”

“Why? Nobody’ll see him; he’ll be downstairs in the repair department. Anyhow you have to give those people jobs; it isn’t their fault they have no arms or legs, it’s those Germans’ fault.”

After a pause Stuart McConchie said, “First you hire me, a Negro, and now a phoce. Well, I have to hand it to you, Fergesson; you’re trying to do right.”

Feeling anger, Fergesson said, “I not only try, I do; I’m not just daydreaming, like you. I’m a man who makes up his mind and acts.” He went to open the store safe. “His name is Hoppy. He’ll be in this morning. You ought to see him move stuff with his electronic hands; it’s a marvel of modern science.”

“I’ve seen,” Stuart said.

“And it pains you.”

Gesturing, Stuart said, “It’s—unnatural.”

Fergesson glared at him. “Listen, don’t say anything along the lines of razzing to the kid; if I catch you or any of the other salesmen or anybody who works for me—”

“Okay,” Stuart muttered.

“You’re bored,” Fergesson said, “and boredom is bad because it means you’re not exerting yourself fully; you’re slacking off, and on my time. If you worked hard, you wouldn’t have time to lean on that broom and poke fun at poor sick people going to the doctor. I forbid you to stand outside on the sidewalk ever again; if I catch you you’re fired.”

“Oh Christ, how am I supposed to come and go and go eat? How do I get into the store in the first place? Through the wall?”

“You can come and go,” Fergesson decided, “but you can’t loiter.”

Glaring after him dolefully, Stuart McConchie protested, “Aw cripes!”

Fergesson however paid no attention to his TV salesman; he began turning on displays and signs, preparing for the day ahead.

The phocomelus Hoppy Harrington generally wheeled up to Modern TV Sales & Service about eleven each morning. He generally glided into the shop, stopping his cart by the counter, and if Jim Fergesson was around he asked to be allowed to go downstairs to watch the two TV repairmen at work. However, if Fergesson was not around, Hoppy gave up and after a while wheeled off, because he knew that the salesmen would not let him go downstairs; they merely ribbed him, gave him the run-around. He did not mind. Or at least as far as Stuart McConchie could tell, he did not mind.

But actually, Stuart realized; he did not understand Hoppy, who had a sharp face with bright eyes and a quick, nervous manner of speech which often became jumbled into a stammer. He did not understand him
psychologically
. Why did Hoppy want to repair TV sets? What was so great about that? The way the phoce hung around, one would think it was the most exalted calling of all. Actually, repair work was hard, dirty, and did not pay too well. But Hoppy was passionately determined to become a TV repairman, and now he had succeeded, because Fergesson was determined to do right by all the minority groups in the world. Fergesson was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP and the Help for the Handicapped League—the latter being, as far as Stuart could tell, nothing but a lobby group on an international scale, set up to promote soft berths for all the victims of modern medicine and science, such as the multitude from the Bluthgeld Catastrophe of 1972.

And what does that make me? Stuart asked himself as he sat upstairs in the store’s office, going over his sales book. I mean, he thought, with a phoce working here … that practically makes me a radiation freak, too, as if being colored was a sort of early form of radiation burn. He felt gloomy thinking about it.

Once upon a time, he thought, all the people on Earth were white, and then some horse’s ass set off a high-altitude bomb back say around ten thousand years ago, and some of us got seared and it was permanent; it affected our genes. So here we are today.

Another salesman, Jack Lightheiser, came and sat down at the desk across from him and lit a Corina cigar. “I hear Jim’s hired that kid on the cart,” Lightheiser said. “You know why he did it, don’t you? For publicity. The S.F. newspapers’ll write it up. Jim loves getting his name in the paper. It’s a smart move, when you get down to it. The first retail dealer in the East Bay to hire a phoce.”

Stuart grunted.

“Jim’s got an idealized image of himself,” Lightheiser said. “He isn’t just a merchant; he’s a modern Roman, he’s civic-minded. After all, he’s an educated man—he’s got a master’s degree from Stanford.”

“That doesn’t mean anything any more,” Stuart said. He himself had gotten a master’s degree from Cal, back in 1975, and look where it had got him.

“It did when he got it,” Lightheiser said. “After all, he graduated back in 1947; he was on that GI Bill they had.”

Below them, at the front door of Modern TV, a cart appeared, in the center of which, at a bank of controls, sat a slender figure. Stuart groaned and Lightheiser glanced at him.

“He’s a pest,” Stuart said.

“He won’t be when he gets started working,” Lightheiser said. “The kid is all brain, no body at all, hardly. That’s a powerful mind he’s got, and he also has ambition. God, he’s only seventeen years old and what he wants to do is work, get out of school and work. That’s admirable.”

The two of them watched Hoppy on his cart; Hoppy was wheeling toward the stairs which descended to the TV repair department.

“Do the guys downstairs know, yet?” Stuart asked.

“Oh sure, Jim told them last night. They’re philosophical; you know how TV repairmen are—they griped about it but it doesn’t mean anything; they gripe all the time anyhow.”

Hearing the salesman’s voice, Hoppy glanced sharply up. His thin, bleak face confronted them; his eyes blazed and he said stammeringly, “Hey, is Mr. Fergesson in right now?”

“Naw,” Stuart said.

“Mr. Fergesson hired me,” the phoce said.

“Yeah,” Stuart said. Neither he nor Lightheiser moved; they remained seated at the desk, gazing down at the phoce.

“Can I go downstairs?” Hoppy asked.

Lightheiser shrugged.

“I’m going out for a cup of coffee,” Stuart said, rising to his feet. “I’ll be back in ten minutes; watch the floor for me, okay?”

“Sure,” Lightheiser said, nodding as he smoked his cigar.

When Stuart reached the main floor he found the phoce still there; he had not begun the difficult descent down to the basement.

“Spirit of 1972,” Stuart said as he passed the cart.

The phoce flushed and stammered, “I was born in 1964; it had nothing to do with that blast.” As Stuart went out the door onto the sidewalk the phoce called after him anxiously, “It was that drug, that thalidomide. Everybody knows that.”

Stuart said nothing; he continued on toward the coffee shop.

It was difficult for the phocomelus to maneuver his cart down the stairs to the basement where the TV repairmen worked at their benches, but after a time he managed to do so, gripping the handrail with the manual extensors which the U.S. Government had thoughtfully provided. The extensors were really not much good; they had been fitted years ago, and were not only partly worn out but were—as he knew from reading the current literature on the topic—obsolete. In theory, the Government was bound to replace his equipment with the more recent models; the Remington Act specified that, and he had written the senior California senator, Alf M. Partland, about it. As yet, however, he had received no answer. But he was patient. Many times he had written letters to U.S. Congressmen, on a variety of topics, and often the answers were tardy or merely mimeographed and sometimes there was no answer at all.

In this. case, however, Hoppy Harrington had, the law on his side, and it was only a matter of time before he compelled someone in authority to give him that which he was entitled to. He felt grim about it, patient and grim. They
had
to help him, whether they wanted to or not. His father, a sheep rancher in the Sonoma Valley, had taught him that: taught him always to demand what he was entitled to.

Sound blared. The repairmen at work; Hoppy paused, opened the door and faced the two men at the long, littered bench with its instruments and meters, its dials and tools and television sets in all stages of decomposition. Neither repairman noticed him.

“Listen,” one of the repairmen said all at once, startling him. “Manual jobs are looked down on. Why don’t you go into something mental, why don’t you go back to school and get a degree?” The repairman turned to stare at him questioningly.

No, Hoppy thought. I want to work with—my hands.

“You could be a scientist,” the other repairman said, not ceasing his work; he was tracing a circuit, studying his voltmeter.

“Like Bluthgeld,” Hoppy said.

The repairman laughed at that, with sympathetic understanding.

“Mr. Fergesson said you’d give me something to work on,” Hoppy said. “Some easy set to fix, to start with. Okay?” He waited, afraid that they were not going to respond, and then one of them pointed to a record changer. “What’s the matter with it?” Hoppy said, examining the repair tag. “I know I can fix it.”

“Broken spring,” one of the repairmen said. “It won’t shut off after the last record.”

“I see,” Hoppy said. He picked up the record changer with his two manual extensors and rolled to the far end of the bench, where there was a cleared space. “I’ll work here.” The repairmen did not protest, so he picked up pliers. This is easy, he thought to himself. I’ve practiced at home; he concentrated on the record changer but also watching the two repairmen out of the corner of his eye. I’ve practiced many times; it nearly always works, and all the time it’s better, more accurate. More predictable. A spring is a little object, he thought, as little as they come. So light it almost blows away. I see the break in you, he thought. Molecules of metal not touching, like before. He concentrated on that spot, holding the pliers so that the repairman nearest him could not see; he pretended to tug at the spring, as if trying to remove it.