Our Friends From Frolix 8 (14 page)

A uniformed police occifer appeared beside the two of them. ‘Get out of here and get this man to the Council Chairman.’ His tone was nasty.

‘Yes sir,’ the rep said, and led Nick down a corridor to a wide, transparent plastic front door. ‘Barnes,’ the rep said, half to himself; he frowned with disarrayed dignity. ‘Barnes is the closest man to the Council Chairman,’ he said. ‘Willis Gram has a council of ten men and women, and who does he consult? Always Barnes. Does that indicate adequate cerebral processes to you?’

Another case of a New Man putting down an Unusual, Nick realized; he made no comment as they got into a shiny red squib, which had been decorated with the official government seal.

In a small, modern office, with one of the new spider mobiles dangling above him, Nick Appleton listened listlessly to piped in music. Right now the damn thing was playing selections from Victor Herbert. Oh, Christ, Nick thought wearily; he sat hunched over, his head in his hands. Charley, he thought. Are you alive? Are you hurt, or are you okay?

He decided that she was okay. Charley wouldn’t get snuffed by anyone. She would live to a full life span: to well
over one hundred and twelve years, the population average.

I wonder if I can get out of here, he thought. He found himself faced by two doors, one through which they had come, the other leading to inner, more esoteric offices. Cautiously, he tried the knob of the first door. Locked. So, with utter stealth, he approached the door leading to the inner offices; he turned the knob, held his breath, and found it locked, too.

And it set off an alarm. He could hear it clanging. Damn, he said savagely to himself.

The inner door opened; there stood Police Director Barnes, impressive in his well-decorated green uniform, the lighter green variation worn by top police circles only.

They stood staring at each other.

‘3XX24J?’ Director Barnes asked.

‘Nick Appleton. “3XX24J” is an apartment address, and not even my own. Or it was. Your men have probably looted it by now, looking for Cordonite material.’ He thought, then, for the first time, about Kleo. ‘Where is my wife?’ he demanded. ‘Was she hurt or killed? Can I see her?’ And my son, he thought. Him especially.

Barnes twisted his head, called back over his shoulder, ‘Check 7Y3ZRR and see if the woman’s in good condition. The boy, too. Let me know at once.’ He turned back to confront Nick. ‘You don’t mean that girl you had with you in that room at the 16th Avenue printing plant? You mean your legal wife.’

‘I want to know about both of them,’ Nick said.

‘The girl with you at the plant is just fine.’ He did not elaborate, but there it was, Charley had survived. He thanked God for that. ‘Do you have any more questions you want to ask me before we meet with the Council Chairman?’

Nick said, ‘I want an attorney.’

‘You can’t have one because of the enabling legislation passed last year forbidding legal representation to anyone already arrested. An attorney couldn’t have helped you anyhow, even if you had seen him before your arrest, because your crime is political in nature.’

‘What’s my crime?’ Nick said.

‘Carrying Cordonite literature. That’s ten years in a relocation camp. Being in the presence of other – known – Cordonites. Five years. Found in a building where illegal written material—’

‘I’ve heard enough,’ Nick said. ‘About forty years in all.’

‘As it stands in the books. But, if you’re helpful to me and the Council Chairman, perhaps we could run your sentences simultaneously. Let’s go in.’ He pointed at the open door and Nick, wordlessly, passed on through, into a gloriously decorated office… or was it an office? A huge bed filled half the room, and in the bed, propped up on pillows, lay Willis Gram, supreme ruler of the planet, his lunch on a tray resting on his middle. Scattered over the bed was every kind of written material possible; he made out the color-codes of a dozen government departments. It did not appear that they had been read — they were too perfect in condition: mint.

‘Miss Knight,’ Willis Gram said into the face microphone adhering to one flabby jowl, ‘come take these chicken a la king type dishes away, I’m not hungry.’

A slender, almost bosomless woman entered and whisked the tray away. ‘Would you like some—’ she began, but Gram cut her off with a chopping motion of his hand. She became instantly silent and continued on out of the room with the tray.

‘Do you know where my food comes from?’ Willis Gram asked Nick. ‘The building cafeteria, that’s where. Why the hell—’ He was speaking now to Barnes. ‘Why the hell didn’t I set up a special kitchen for myself alone? I must be insane. I think I’ll resign. You New Men are right — we’re just freaks, we Unusuals. We’re not forged from the right material to rule.’

Nick said, ‘I could take a cab over to a good restaurant like Flores’ and pick you up—’

‘No, no,’ Barnes said sharply.

Gram turned to glance at him with curiosity.

‘This man is here for an important reason,’ Barnes said hotly. ‘He is not a domestic servant. If you want a better
lunch, send out one of your staff. This is the man I told you about.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Gram said, nodding. ‘Go ahead; interrogate him.’

Barnes seated himself in a stiffly-upright chair of the mid-eighteen twenties period, probably French. He brought forth a tape recorder, touched the on button.

‘Your identity,’ Barnes said.

Nick, seating himself on an overstuffed chair facing Barnes, said, ‘I thought I was brought here to see the Council Chairman.’

‘You were,’ Barnes said. ‘Chairman Gram will intervene from time to time to inquire further about the matter at hand… am I correct, Council Chairman?’

‘Yeah,’ Gram said, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it. They’re all exhausted, Nick thought. Even Gram. Especially Gram. It’s been the waiting; it’s undermined them. Now that the ‘enemy’ is here, they are too enervated to respond. Except, he thought, they did do a good job on the 16th Avenue press. Perhaps the ennui did not extend down to the lower levels in the police hierarchy, perhaps only those at the top, who knew the real situation… he stopped his thoughts abruptly.

‘Interesting material circulating in your mind,’ Gram, the telepath, said.

‘That’s right,’ Nick said. ‘I forgot.’

‘You’re absolutely right,’ Gram said. ‘I’m exhausted. But I can be exhausted most of the time; the work is carried on by department heads who I have complete trust in.’

‘Your identity,’ Barnes said.

‘7Y3ZRR, but more recently 3XX24J,’ Nick said, capitulating at last.

‘Earlier today you were arrested at a Cordonite printing plant. Are you an Under Man?’

‘Yes,’ Nicholas Appleton said.

A moment of silence passed.

‘When,’ Barnes said, ‘did you become an Under Man, a follower of the demagogue Cordon and his vicious publications that—’

‘I became an Under Man,’ Nick said, ‘when we got back the results of our son’s Civil Service test. When I saw how they had managed to test him on the basis of questions he could never possibly know or understand; when I realized that all my years of trust in the government had been wasted. When I recalled how many people had tried to wake me up, and had not so done. Until the test results came in, and, in reading over the Xerox copy of the test, realized Bobby had never had a chance. “What are the components, predicted by Black’s formula, which will result in a network seizure on a single molecule-deep surface if the original entities at work are still operating, or if the original entities are operating, either alive or as if alive, in Eigenwelts that overlap only one—“’

Black’s Formula. Comprehensible only to New Men. And they required a child to formulate a resultant
pari passu
based on the postulates of the unfathomable system.

‘Your thoughts are still of interest,’ Gram said. ‘Can you tell me who administered your son’s test?’

‘Norbert Weiss,’ Nick said. It would be a long time before he forgot that name. ‘And another man’s name was on the document. Jerome something. Pike. Pikeman.’

‘So,’ Barnes said, ‘Earl Zeta’s effect on you made its appearance only after this episode with your son. Up until then what Zeta pontificated had no—’

‘Zeta never said anything,’ Nick said. ‘It was the news of Cordon’s impending execution; I saw the effect on Zeta, and then I realized that—’ He lapsed into silence. ‘I had to protest,’ he said, ‘in some way. Earl Zeta opened the door to that way. We had a drink—’ Breaking off, he shook his head, trying to clear it; the tranquilizer was still active in his system.

‘Alcohol?’ Barnes asked. He made a holographic note of that, using a small plastic notebook and a ballpoint pen which he held nearsightedly up to his face.

‘Well,’ Gram said, ‘as the Romans said,
“In vino veritas.”
Do you know what that means, Mr. Appleton?’

‘“There is truth in wine.”’

Barnes said caustically, ‘There is also the saying, “That’s the bottle talking.”’

‘I believe in
“In vino veritas
”,’ Gram said, and belched. ‘I’ve got to eat,’ he said plaintively. ‘Miss Knight,’ he said into his face microphone, ‘send out to — where did you say, Appleton? That restaurant?’

‘Flores’,’ Nick said. ‘Their Alaskan baked salmon is a divine delight.’

‘Where did you get the pops,’ Barnes asked alertly to Nick, ‘to eat in places like Flores’? On your income as a tire regroover?’

Nick said, ‘Kleo and I went there once. On our first anniversary. It took a week’s pay, including the tips, but it was worth it.’ He had never forgotten it; he never would.

With a curt gesture, Barnes continued with his interrogation. ‘So smoldering resentments, which might never have risen to the level of acting out — these resentments became action when Earl Zeta presented you with a way of implementing your feelings by joining the movement. Had he
not
been an Under Man, your resentments might never have reached the surface.’

‘What are you trying to prove?’ Gram asked, annoyed.

‘That once we destroy the axle of the Under Men, once we get men like Cordon—’

‘We did,’ Gram pointed out. To Nick, he said, ‘Did you know that? That Cordon died of a long-term liver condition which was irreversible, and no transplant was available? You heard it on the radio? TV?’

‘I heard it,’ Nick said. ‘That he had been shot to death by an assassin sent to his cell.’

‘That’s not true,’ Gram said. ‘He didn’t die in his cell, he died on the operating table of the prison hospital during an attempt to put an artificial organ in him. We did everything we could to save him.’

No. Nick thought. No, you didn’t.

‘You don’t believe me?’ Gram said, reading his mind. He turned toward Barnes. ‘There’s your statistic: the embodiment of natural man, of Old Men, and he doesn’t believe Cordon died naturally. Can we extrapolate from that that
there will be a general planet-wide disbelief?’

‘Sure can,’ Barnes said.

‘Well, damn it,’ Gram said. ‘I don’t care what they believe; it’s all over for them. It’s just rats here and there in the gutter, waiting for us to zarlp them one by one. Wouldn’t you say that, Appleton? Joiners like you, you don’t anymore have a place to go and leaders to listen to.’ To Barnes he said, ‘So when Provoni lands, there won’t be anybody to greet him. No throngs of the faithful, they’ll have melted away, as Appleton here would do. Only he got caught so it’s southeast Utah for him or Luna, if he prefers. You prefer Luna, Mr. Appleton? Mr. 3XX24J?’

Nick said, choosing his words carefully, ‘I’ve heard it said that whole families have gone intact to relocation camps. Is that true?’

‘You want to be with your wife and son? But they’re not charged.’ Barnes bared a notched fang, pursuing the idea to its conclusion. ‘We could charge them with—’

‘You’ll find a tract of Cordon’s in our apartment,’ Nick said. As soon as he said it he wished, God how he wished, he hadn’t said it. Why did I do that? he asked himself. But we should be together. And then he thought of little tough Charley, with her large black eyes and her pushed-in nose. Her hard, slim, breastless body… and always her cheery smile, like a character out of Dickens, he thought. A chimney sweep. A Soho thug. Conning her way out of trouble, talking someone into something. Anyhow talking. Always talking. And always with her special lit-up smile, as if the world were, a great furry dog which she longed to hug.

Could I go with her? he wondered. Instead of Kleo and Bobby.
Should
I go with her? If it’s legally possible?

‘It’s not,’ Gram said from his bed of enormous size.

‘What’s not?’ Barnes demanded.

Gram said leisurely, ‘He wants to go with that girl we found with him at the 16th Avenue printing plant. You remember her?’

‘The one you’re interested in,’ Barnes said.

Hot fear trickled its way down Nick’s spine; his heart gave a deep shudder and a mighty heave, and, in his arms and
legs, the blood circulation speeded rapidly up. Then it’s true about Gram, he thought. What people say about his wenching around. His marriage—

‘Is like yours,’ Gram finished for him.

Presently, Nick said, ‘You’re right.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘Feral and wild.’ But he didn’t have to say aloud, he realized. All he had to do was think of her, imagine her, relive in his mind the details of their short period together. And Gram would gather it up as fast as he thought it.

‘She could be trouble,’ Gram said. ‘And this Denny, her boyfriend, he sounds psychopathic or something. The whole interaction between them, if you’re remembering it right, it’s sick. She’s a sick girl.’

‘In a sane environment,’ Nick began, but Barnes cut him off.

‘May I go on with my questions?’

‘Sure,’ Gram said, moodily withdrawing; Nick saw the heavyset old man turn his attention inward, to his own thoughts.

‘If you were released,’ Barnes asked, ‘what would your reaction be, what would you do, if — and I say
if
— Thors Provoni returned? And with monstrous help? Help designed to enslave Earth for as long as—’

‘Oh, God,’ Gram groaned.

‘Yes, Council Chairman?’ Barnes asked.