Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (12 page)

13

In the living room of Ruth Rae’s lavish, lovely, newly built apartment in the Fireflash District of Las Vegas, Jason Taverner said, “I’m reasonably sure I can count on forty-eight hours on the outside and twenty-four on the inside. So I feel fairly certain that I don’t have to get out of here immediately.” And if our revolutionary new principle is correct, he thought, then this assumption will modify the situation to my advantage. I will be safe.

THE THEORY CHANGES
—

“I’m glad,” Ruth said wanly, “that you’re able to remain here with me in a civilized way so we can rap a little longer. You want anything more to drink? Scotch and Coke, maybe?”

THE THEORY CHANGES THE REALITY IT DESCRIBES
. “No,” he said, and prowled about the living room, listening…to what he did not know. Perhaps the
absence
of sounds. No TV sets muttering, no thump of feet against the floor above their heads. Not even a pornochord somewhere, blasting out from a quad. “Are the walls fairly thick in these apartments?” he asked Ruth sharply.

“I never hear anything.”

“Does anything seem strange to you? Out of the ordinary?”

“No.” Ruth shook her head.

“You damn dumb floogle,” he said savagely. She gaped at him in injured perplexity. “I know,” he grated, “that they have me.
Now. Here
. In this room.”

The doorbell bonged.

“Let’s ignore it,” Ruth said rapidly, stammering and afraid. “I just want to sit and rap with you, about the mellow things in life you’ve seen and what you want to achieve that you haven’t achieved already…” Her voice died into silence as he went to the door. “It’s probably the man from upstairs. He borrows things. Weird things. Like two fifths of an onion.”

Jason opened the door. Three pols in gray uniforms filled the doorway, with weapon tubes and nightsticks aimed at him. “Mr. Taverner?” the pol with the stripes said.

“Yes.”

“You are being taken into protective custody for your own protection and welfare, effective immediately, so please come with us and do not turn back or in any way remove yourself physically from contact with us. Your possessions if any will be picked up for you later and transferred to wherever you will be at the time.”

“Okay,” he said, and felt very little.

Behind him, Ruth Rae emitted a muffled shriek.

“You also, miss,” the pol with the stripes said, motioning toward her with his nightstick.

“Can I get my coat?” she asked timidly.

“Come on.” The pol stepped briskly past Jason, grabbed Ruth Rae by the arm, and dragged her out the apartment door onto the walkway.

“Do what he says,” Jason said harshly to her.

Ruth Rae sniveled, “They’re going to put me in a forced-labor camp.”

“No,” Jason said. “They’ll probably kill you.”

“You’re really a nice guy,” one of the pols—without stripes—commented as he and his companions herded Jason and Ruth Rae down the wrought-iron staircase to the ground floor. Parked in one of the slots was a police van, with several pols standing idly around it, weapons held loosely. They looked inert and bored.

“Show me your ID,” the pol with stripes said to Jason; he extended his hand, waiting.

“I’ve got a seven-day police pass,” Jason said. His hands shaking, he fished it out, gave it to the pol officer.

Scrutinizing the pass the officer said, “You admit freely of your own volition that you are Jason Taverner?”

“Yes,” he said.

Two of the pols expertly searched him for arms. He complied silently, still feeling very little. Only a half-assed hopeless wish that he had done what he knew he should have done: moved on. Left Vegas. Headed anywhere.

“Mr. Taverner,” the pol officer said, “the Los Angeles Police Bureau has asked us to take you into protective custody for your own protection and welfare and to transport you safely and with due care to the Police Academy in downtown L.A., which we will now do. Do you have any complaints as to the manner in which you have been treated?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Enter the rear section of the quibble van,” the officer said, pointing at the open doors.

Jason did so.

Ruth Rae, stuffed in beside him, whimpered to herself in the darkness as the doors slammed shut and locked. He put his arm around her, kissed her on the forehead. “What did you do?” she whimpered raspingly in her bourbon voice, “that they’re going to kill us for?”

A pol, getting into the rear of the van with them from the front cab, said, “We aren’t going to snuff you, miss. We’re transporting you both back to L.A. That’s all. Calm down.”

“I don’t like Los Angeles,” Ruth Rae whimpered. “I haven’t been there in years. I
hate
L.A.” She peered wildly around.

“So do I,” the pol said as he locked the rear compartment off from the cab and dropped the key through a slot to the pols outside. “But we must learn to live with it: it’s there.”

“They’re probably going all through my apartment,” Ruth Rae whimpered. “Picking through everything, breaking everything.”

“Absolutely,” Jason said tonelessly. His head ached, now, and he felt nauseated. And tired. “Who are we going to be taken to?” he asked the pol. “To Inspector McNulty?”

“Most likely no,” the pol said conversationally as the quibble van rose noisily into the sky. “The drinkers of intoxicating liquor have made you the subject of their songs and those sitting in the gate are concerning themselves about you, and according to them Police General Felix Buckman wants to interrogate you.” He explained, “That was from Psalm Sixty-nine. I sit here by you as a Witness to Jehovah Reborn, who is in this very hour creating new heavens and a new earth, and the former things will not be called to mind, neither will they come up into the heart. Isaiah 65:13, 17.”

“A police general?” Jason said, numbed.

“So they say,” the obliging young Jesus-freak pol answered. “I don’t know what you folks did, but you sure did it right.”

Ruth Rae sobbed to herself in the darkness.

“All flesh is like grass,” the Jesus-freak pol intoned. “Like low-grade roachweed most likely. Unto us a child is born, unto us a hit is given. The crooked shall be made straight and the straight loaded.”

“Do you have a joint?” Jason asked him.

“No, I’ve run out.” The Jesus-freak pol rapped on the forward metal wall. “Hey, Ralf, can you lay a joint on this brother?”

“Here.” A crushed pack of Goldies appeared by way of a gray-sleeved hand and arm.

“Thanks,” Jason said as he lit up. “You want one?” he asked Ruth Rae.

“I want Bob,” she whimpered. “I want my husband.”

Silently, Jason sat hunched over, smoking and meditating.

“Don’t give up,” the Jesus-freak pol crammed in beside him said, in the darkness.

“Why not?” Jason said.

“The forced-labor camps aren’t that bad. In Basic Orientation they took us through one; there’re showers, and beds with mattresses, and recreation such as volleyball, and arts and hobbies; you know—crafts, like making candles. By hand. And your family can send you packages and once a month they or your friends can visit you.” He added, “And you get to worship at the church of your choice.”

Jason said sardonically, “The church of my choice is the free, open world.”

After that there was silence, except for the noisy clatter of the quibble’s engine, and Ruth Rae’s whimpering.

14

Twenty minutes later the police quibble van landed on the roof of the Los Angeles Police Academy building.

Stiffly, Jason Taverner stepped out, looked warily around, smelled smog-saturated foul air, saw above him once again the yellowness of the largest city in North America…he turned to help Ruth Rae out, but the friendly young Jesus-freak pol had done that already.

Around them a group of Los Angeles pols gathered, interested. They seemed relaxed, curious, and cheerful. Jason saw no malice in any of them and he thought, When they have you they are kind. It is only in netting you that they are venomous and cruel. Because then there is the possibility that you might get away. And here, now, there is no such possibility.

“Did he make any suicide tries?” a L.A. sergeant asked the Jesus-freak pol.

“No, sir.”

So that was why he had ridden there.

It hadn’t even occurred to Jason, and probably not to Ruth Rae either…except perhaps as a heavy, shucky gesture, thought of but never really considered.

“Okay,” the L.A. sergeant said to the Las Vegas pol team. “From here on in we’ll formally take over custody of the two suspects.”

The Las Vegas pols hopped back into their van and it zoomed off into the sky, back to Nevada.

“This way,” the sergeant said, with a sharp motion of his hand in the direction of the descent sphincter tube. The L.A. pols seemed to Jason a little grosser, a little tougher and older, than the Las Vegas ones. Or perhaps it was his imagination; perhaps it meant only an increase in his own fear.

What do you say to a police general? Jason wondered. Especially when all your theories and explanations about yourself have worn out, when you know nothing, believe nothing, and the rest is obscure. Aw, the hell with it, he decided wearily, and allowed himself to drop virtually weightlessly down the tube, along with the pols and Ruth Rae.

At the fourteenth floor they exited from the tube.

A man stood facing them, well dressed, with rimless glasses, a topcoat over his arm, pointed leather Oxfords, and, Jason noted, two gold-capped teeth. A man, he guessed, in his mid-fifties. A tall, gray-haired, upright man, with an expression of authentic warmth on his excellently proportioned aristocratic face. He did not look like a pol.

“You are Jason Taverner?” the man inquired. He extended his hand; reflexively, Jason accepted it and shook. To Ruth, the police general said, “You may go downstairs. I’ll interview you later. Right now it’s Mr. Taverner I want to talk to.”

The pols led Ruth off; he could hear her complaining her way out of sight. He now found himself facing the police general and no one else. No one armed.

“I’m Felix Buckman,” the police general said. He indicated the open door and hallway behind him. “Come into the office.” Turning, he ushered Jason ahead of him, into a vast pastel blue-and-gray suite; Jason blinked: he had never seen this aspect of a police agency before. He had never imagined that quality like this existed.

With incredulity, Jason a moment later found himself seated in a leather-covered chair, leaning back into the softness of styroflex. Buckman, however, did not sit down behind his top-heavy, almost clumsily bulky oak desk; instead he busied himself at a closet, putting away his topcoat.

“I intended to meet you on the roof,” he explained. “But the Santana wind blows like hell up there this time of night. It affects my sinus passages.” He turned, then, to face Jason. “I see something about you that didn’t show up in your 4-D photo. It never does. It’s always a complete surprise, at least to me. You’re a six, aren’t you?”

Waking to full alertness, Jason half rose, said, “You’re also a six, General?”

Smiling, showing his gold-capped teeth—an expensive anachronism—Felix Buckman held up seven fingers.

15

In his career as a police official, Felix Buckman had used this shuck each time he had come up against a six. He relied on it especially when, as with this, the encounter was sudden. There had been four of them. All, eventually, had believed him. This he found amusing. The sixes, eugenic experiments themselves, and secret ones, seemed unusually gullible when confronted with the assertion that there existed an additional project as classified as their own.

Without this shuck he would be, to a six, merely an “ordinary.” He could not properly handle a six under such a disadvantage. Hence the ploy. Through it his relationship to a six inverted itself. And, under such recreated conditions, he could deal successfully with an otherwise unmanageable human being.

The actual psychological superiority over him which a six possessed was abolished by an unreal fact. He liked this very much.

Once, in an off moment, he had said to Alys, “I can outthink a six for roughly ten to fifteen minutes. But if it goes on any longer—” He had made a gesture, crumpling up a black-market cigarette package. With two cigarettes in it. “After that their overamped field wins out. What I need is a pry bar by which I can jack open their haughty damn minds.” And, at last, he had found it.

“Why a ‘seven’?” Alys had said. “As long as you’re shucking them why not say eight or thirty-eight?”

“The sin of vainglory. Reaching too far.” He had not wanted to make that legendary mistake. “I will tell them,” he had told her grimly, “what I think they’ll believe.” And, in the end, he had proved out right.

“They won’t believe you,” Alys had said.

“Oh, hell, will they!” he had retorted. “It’s their secret fear, their bête noire. They’re the sixth in a line of DNA reconstruction systems and they know that if it could be done to them it could be done to others in a more advanced degree.”

Alys, uninterested, had said faintly, “You should be an announcer on TV selling soap.” And that constituted the totality of her reaction. If Alys did not give a damn about something, that something, for her, ceased to exist. Probably she should not have gotten away with it for as long as she had…but sometime, he had often thought, the retribution will come:
reality denied comes back to haunt
. To overtake the person without warning and make him insane.

And Alys, he had a number of times thought, was in some odd sense, in some unusual clinical way, pathological.

He sensed it but could not pin it down. However, many of his hunches were like that. It did not bother him, as much as he loved her. He knew he was right.

Now, facing Jason Taverner, a six, he developed his shuck ploy.

“There were very few of us,” Buckman said, now seating himself at his oversize oak desk. “Only four in all. One is already dead, so that leaves three. I don’t have the slightest idea where they are; we retain even less contact among ourselves than do you sixes. Which is little enough.”

“Who was your muter?” Jason asked.

“Dill-Temko. Same as yours. He controlled groups five through seven and then he retired. As you certainly know, he’s dead now.”

“Yes,” Jason said. “It shocked us all.”

“Us, too,” Buckman said, in his most somber voice. “Dill-Temko was our parent. Our
only
parent. Did you know that at the time of his death he had begun to prepare schema on an eighth group?”

“What would they have been like?”

“Only Dill-Temko knew,” Buckman said, and felt his superiority over the six facing him grow. And yet—how fragile his psychological edge. One wrong statement, one statement too much, and it would vanish. Once lost, he would never regain it.

It was the risk he took. But he enjoyed it; he had always liked betting against the odds, gambling in the dark. He had in him, at times like this, a great sense of his own ability. And he did not consider it imagined…despite what a six that knew him to be an ordinary would say. That did not bother him one bit.

Touching a button, he said, “Peggy, bring us a pot of coffee, cream and the rest. Thanks.” He then leaned back with studied leisure. And surveyed Jason Taverner.

Anyone who had met a six would recognize Taverner. The strong torso, the massive confirmation of his arms and back. His powerful, ramlike head. But most ordinaries had never knowingly come up against a six. They did not have his experience. Nor his carefully synthesized knowledge of them.

To Alys he had once said, “They will never take over and run
my
world.”

“You don’t have a world. You have an office.”

At that point he terminated the discussion.

“Mr. Taverner,” he said bluntly, “how have you managed to get documents, cards, microfilm, even complete files out of data banks all over the planet? I’ve tried to imagine how it could be done, but I come up with a blank.” He fixed his attention on the handsome—but aging—face of the six and waited.