Terminal Man (15 page)

The automobile was important to Los Angeles, a city more technology-dependent than any in the world. Los Angeles could not survive without the automobile, as it could not survive without water piped in from hundreds of miles away, and as it could not survive without certain building technologies. This was a fact of the city’s existence, and had been true since early in the century.

But in recent years Ross had begun to recognize the subtle psychological effects of living your life inside an automobile. Los Angeles had no sidewalk cafés, because no one walked; the sidewalk café, where you could stare at passing people, was not stationary but mobile. It changed with each traffic light, where people stopped, stared briefly at each other, then drove on. But there was something inhuman about living inside a cocoon of tinted glass and stainless steel, air-conditioned, carpeted, stereophonic tape-decked, power-optioned, isolated. It thwarted some deep human need to congregate, to be together, to see and be seen.

Local psychiatrists recognized an indigenous depersonalization syndrome. Los Angeles was a town of recent emigrants and therefore strangers; cars kept them strangers, and there were few institutions that served to bring them together. Practically no one went to church, and work groups were not entirely satisfactory. People
became lonely; they complained of being cut off, without friends, far from families and old homes. Often they became suicidal—and a common method of suicide was the automobile. The police referred to it euphemistically as “single unit fatalities.” You picked your overpass, and hit it at eighty or ninety, foot flat to the floor. Sometimes it took hours to cut the body out of the wreckage.…

Moving at sixty-five miles an hour, she shifted across five lanes of traffic and pulled off the freeway at Sunset, heading up into the Hollywood Hills, through an area known locally as the Swish Alps because of the many homosexuals who lived there. People with problems seemed drawn to Los Angeles. The city offered freedom; its price was lack of supports.

She came to Laurel Canyon and took the curves fast, tires squealing, headlamps swinging through the darkness. There was little traffic here; she would reach Benson’s house in a few minutes.

In theory, she and the rest of the NPS staff had a simple problem: get Benson back before six o’clock. If they could get him back into the hospital, they could uncouple his implanted computer and stop the progression series. Then they could sedate him and wait a few days before relinking him to a new set of terminals. They’d obviously chosen the wrong electrodes the first time around; that was a risk they accepted in advance. It was an acceptable risk because they expected to have a chance to correct any error. But that opportunity was no longer there.

They had to get him back. A simple problem, with a relatively simple solution—check Benson’s known haunts. After reviewing his chart, they’d all set out to
different places. Ross was going to his house on Laurel. Ellis was going to a strip joint called the Jackrabbit Club, where Benson often went. Morris was going to Autotronics, Inc., in Santa Monica, where Benson was employed; Morris had called the president of the firm, who was coming to the offices to open them up for him.

They would check back in an hour or so to compare notes and progress. A simple plan, and one she thought unlikely to work. But there wasn’t much else to do.

She parked her car in front of Benson’s house and walked up the slate path to the front door. It was ajar; from inside she could hear the sound of laughter and giggles. She knocked and pushed it open.

“Hello?”

No one seemed to hear. The giggles came from somewhere at the back of the house. She stepped into the front hallway. She had never seen Benson’s house, and she wondered what it was like.

Looking around, she realized she should have known.

From the outside, the house was an ordinary ranch-style house as unremarkable in its appearance as Benson himself. But the inside looked like the drawing rooms of Louis XVI—graceful antique chairs and couches, tapestries on the walls, bare hardwood floors.

“Anybody home?” she called. Her voice echoed through the house. There was no answer, but the laughter continued. She followed the sound toward the rear. She came into the kitchen—antique gas stove, no oven, no dishwasher, no electric blender, no toaster. No machines, she thought. Benson had built himself a world without any sort of modern machine in it.

The kitchen window looked out onto the back of the
house. There was a small patch of lawn and a swimming pool, all perfectly ordinary and modern, Benson’s ordinary exterior again. The back yard was bathed in greenish light from the underwater pool lights. In the pool, two girls were laughing and splashing. She went outside.

The girls were oblivious to her arrival. They continued to splash and shriek happily; they wrestled with each other in the water. She stood on the pool deck and said, “Anybody home?”

They noticed her then, and moved apart from each other. “Looking for Harry?” one of them said.

“Yes.”

“You a cop?”

“I’m a doctor.”

One of the girls got out of the pool lithely and began toweling off. She wore a brief red bikini. “You just missed him,” the girl said. “But we weren’t supposed to tell the cops. That’s what he said.” She put one leg on a chair to dry it with the towel. Ross realized the move was calculated, seductive, and directed toward her.

“When did he leave?”

“Just a few minutes ago.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About a week,” the girl in the pool said. “Harry invited us to stay. He thought we were cute.”

The other girl wrapped the towel around her shoulders and said, “We met him at the Jackrabbit. He comes there a lot.”

Ross nodded.

“He’s a lot of fun,” the girl said. “A lot of laughs. You know what he was wearing tonight?”

“What?”

“A hospital uniform. All white.” She shook her head. “What a riot.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Sure.”

“What did he say?”

The girl in the red bikini started back inside the house. Ross followed her. “He said not to tell the cops. He said to have a good time.”

“Why did he come here?”

“He had to pick up some stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Some stuff from his study.”

“Where is the study?”

“I’ll show you.”

She led her back into the house, through the living room. Her wet feet left small pools on the bare hardwood floor. “Isn’t this place wild? Harry’s really crazy. You ever heard him talk about things?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know. He’s really nutty.” She gestured around the room. “All this old stuff. Why do you want to see him?”

“He’s sick,” Ross said.

“He must be,” the girl said. “I saw those bandages. What was he, in an accident?”

“He had an operation.”

“No kidding. In a hospital?”

“Yes.”

“No kidding.”

They went through the living room and down a corridor toward the bedrooms. The girl turned right into one room, which was a study—antique desk, antique
lamps, overstuffed couches. “He came in here and got some stuff.”

“Did you see what he got?”

“We didn’t really pay much attention. But he took some big rolls of paper.” She gestured with her hands. “Real big. They looked like blueprints or something.”

“Blueprints?”

“Well, they were blue on the inside of the roll, and white on the outside, and they were big.” She shrugged.

“Did he take anything else?”

“Yeah. A metal box.”

“What kind of a metal box?” Ross was thinking of a lunchbox, or a small suitcase.

“It looked like a tool kit, maybe. I saw it open for a moment, before he closed it. It seemed to have tools and stuff inside.”

“Did you notice anything in particular?”

The girl was silent then. She bit her lip. “Well, I didn’t really see, but …”

“Yes?”

“It looked like he had a gun in there.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No.”

“Did he give any clue?”

“No.”

“Did he say he was coming back?”

“Well, that was funny,” the girl said. “He kissed me, and he kissed Suzie, and he said to have a good time, and he said not to tell the cops. And he said he didn’t think he’d be seeing us again.” She shook her head. “It was funny. But you know how Harry is.”

“Yes,” Ross said. “I know how Harry is.” She
looked at her watch. It was 1:47. There were only four hours left.

T
HE FIRST THING THAT
E
LLIS NOTICED WAS
the smell: hot, damp, fetid—a dark warm animal smell. He wrinkled his nose in distaste. How could Benson tolerate a place like this?

He watched as the spotlight swung through the darkness and came to rest on a pair of long tapering thighs. There was an expectant rustling in the audience. It reminded Ellis of his days in the Navy, stationed in Baltimore. That was the last time he had been in a place like this, hot and sticky with fantasies and frustrations. That had been a long time ago. It was a shock to think how fast the time had passed.

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the incredible, the lovely,
Cyn
thia
Sin
-cere. A big hand for the lovely
Cyn
thia!”

The spotlight widened onstage, to show a rather ugly but spectacularly constructed girl. The band began to play. When the spotlight was wide enough to hit Cynthia’s eyes, she squinted and began an awkward dance. She paid no attention to the music, but nobody seemed to mind. Ellis looked at the audience. There were a lot
of men here—and a lot of very tough-looking girls with short hair.

“Harry Benson?” the manager said, at his elbow. “Yeah, he comes in a lot.”

“Have you seen him lately?”

“I don’t know about lately,” the manager said. He coughed. Ellis smelled sweet alcoholic breath. “But I tell you,” the manager said, “I wish he wouldn’t hang around, you know? I think he’s a little nuts. And always bothering the girls. You know how hard it is to keep the girls? Fucking murder, that’s what it is.”

Ellis nodded, and scanned the audience. Benson had probably changed clothes; certainly he wouldn’t be wearing an orderly’s uniform any more. Ellis looked at the backs of the heads, at the area between hairline and shirt collar. He looked for a white bandage. He saw none.

“But you haven’t seen him lately?”

“No,” the manager said, shaking his head. “Not for a week or so.” A waitress went by wearing a rabbitlike white fur bikini. “Sal, you seen Harry lately?”

“He’s usually around,” she said vaguely, and wandered off with a tray of drinks.

“I wish he wouldn’t hang around, bothering the girls,” the manager said, and coughed again.

Ellis moved deeper into the club. The spotlight swung through smoky air over his head, following the movements of the girl on stage. She was having trouble unhooking her bra. She did a sort of two-step shuffle, hands behind her back, eyes looking vacantly out at the audience. Ellis understood, watching her, why Benson thought of strippers as machines. They were mechanical, no question about it. And artificial—when the bra
came off, he could see the U-shaped surgical incision beneath each breast, where the plastic had been inserted.

Jaglon would love this, he thought. It would fit right into his theories about machine sex. Jaglon was one of the Development boys and he was preoccupied with the idea of artificial intelligence merging with human intelligence. He argued that, on the one hand, cosmetic surgery and implanted machinery were making man more mechanical, while on the other hand robot developments were making machines more human. It was only a matter of time before people began having sex with humanoid robots.

Perhaps it’s already happening, Ellis thought, looking at the stripper. He looked back at the audience, satisfying himself that Benson was not there. Then he checked a phone booth in the back, and the men’s room.

The men’s room was small and reeked of vomit. He grimaced again, and stared at himself in the cracked mirror over the washbasin. Whatever else was true about the Jackrabbit Club, it produced an olfactory assault. He wondered if that mattered to Benson.

He went back into the club itself and made his way toward the door. “Find him?” the manager asked.

Ellis shook his head and left. Once outside, he breathed the cool night air, and got into his car. The notion of smells intrigued him. It was a problem he had considered before, but never really resolved in his own mind.

His operation on Benson was directed toward a specific part of the brain, the limbic system. It was a very old part of the brain, in terms of evolution. Its original
purpose had been the control of smell. In fact, the old term for it was
rhinencephalon
—the “smelling brain.”

The rhinencephalon had developed 150 million years ago, when reptiles ruled the earth. It controlled the most primitive behavior—anger and fear, lust and hunger, attack and withdrawal. Reptiles like crocodiles had little else to direct their behavior. Man, on the other hand, had a cerebral cortex.

But the cerebral cortex was a recent addition. Its modern development had begun only two million years ago; in its present state, the cerebral cortex of man was only 100,000 years old. In terms of evolutionary time scales, that was nothing. The cortex had grown up around the limbic brain, which remained unchanged, embedded deep inside the new cortex. That cortex, which could feel love, and worry about ethical conduct, and write poetry, had to make an uneasy peace with the crocodile brain at its core. Sometimes, as in the case of Benson, the peace broke down, and the crocodile brain took over intermittently.

What was the relationship of smell to all this? Ellis was not sure. Of course, attacks often began with the sensation of strange smells. But was there anything else? Any other effect?

He didn’t know, and as he drove he reflected that it didn’t much matter. The only problem was to find Benson before his crocodile brain took over. Ellis had seen that happen once, in the NPS. Ellis had watched it through the one-way glass. Benson had been quite normal—and suddenly he had lashed out against the wall, striking it viciously, picking up his chair, smashing it against the wall. The attack had begun without warning,
and had been carried out with utter, total, unthinking viciousness.