The Children of Hamelin (27 page)

But not quicker than the All-Seeing Eye of The Man in Black, knows all, sees all, kills all.
Two
would face each other across the nexus in the Big Shootout.

The Man in Black moved to the rear edge of the crowd and stood there projecting the blackest of vibes as the Dark Lady held his hand and whispered into his ear: “Kill... kill... kill....”

Up at the front of things, Ted had planted one boot up on the dais, and was saying: “Come on, Harvey, why not?”

With a butter-would-not-melt-in-my-mouth look on its face, the Smoker of Souls said: “Are you really serious about this, Ted?”

“Of course I’m serious,” Ted said. “It’d be easy if we all did it together.”

The Man in Black and his Lady drifted closer to the front of the crowd; elbows and knees were not necessary as a wavefront of black vibes parted the sea before them.

“Move the Foundation to San Francisco?” said the Smoker of Souls.

“Sure,” said an alternate voice of the Smoke of Souls through the speaking-mechanism of the Ted-thing. “All together, like a commune. We could set up committees—one to find jobs, one to find pads, one to find a house for the Foundation. It’d work—”

Way in a far corner of the room, Arlene was standing apart from it all with her body but sucking it up with her eyes—New York patriotism conflicting with her San Francisco sub-program.

“You’re assuming that we really want to move to San Francisco,” Harvey said. Ah, the master’s touch: the Devil playing Angel’s Advocate, knowing how well his San Francisco piano rolls had programmed his creatures. Gotta admire confidence.

“You mean you wouldn’t go?” said Bill Nelson.

“I didn’t say that,” said Magnanimous Harv. “How many of you would seriously consider going to San Francisco if the Foundation moved? I don’t mean
would
move, I just want some idea of how many would take the idea seriously.”

The Cuckoo clock chimed the hour of doom with a great murmur coming off the vocal piano rolls of all the loose ones that weren’t nailed down (Ted, Linda, Rich, Weeping Willy, Bonnie Elbert, Tod and Judy, like that): just pure affirmative noise on cue, essence of the Piano Roll Blues.

“Well, I believe in coming to a consensus on things like this,” the Smoker of Souls said. “You could bring this up at a meeting, Ted. We could kick it around for a couple of weeks or even longer, and if the group consensus favored a move to San Francisco, I’d probably go along with it.”

“Go... go... go...” Robin whispered in my ear. She was right: it was time for The Man in Black to make his move.

“LIAR!” I shouted. One huge knife-edged word that cut through the murmuring like flame through smoke.

The silence held; it was my ally since the next move was Harvey’s and I intended to force him to make it. I pulsed heavy black vibes at Harvey. He sucked them in and transmuted the energy to a thin Buddha-smile.

“You apparently want to say something, Tom,” Harvey finally said softly. “Why don’t you go ahead and say it?” The smile broadened into a leer and the moment broke: the animals giggled. “Aw shit, he’s stoned out of his mind,” Bill Nelson said.

“Stoned into his mind,” Robin said, stepping up beside me.

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m stoned and you suckers aren’t. If you were, you’d see the game that’s being played here.”

“Crazy junkie!” Linda-uptight-Kahn shouted to approving murmurs. “Gibbering—”

“SHUT UP, CUNT!” I roared, resorting to Tactical Nuclear Gross-Out Weapons. They were bombed back into Stone Age Silence.

“Whose idea was this San Francisco thing, Harvey?” I said.

“It’s my idea,” Ted said. “I—”

“SHUT UP, TED! Come on Harv, WHOSE IDEA?”

“It’s Ted’s idea, apparently—” Harvey said.

“WHOSE IDEA, HARVEY?”

“Stop yelling, Hollander,” Charley Dees said.

“Hey, what is this, Tom,” Ted said sincerely. “You
heard
me talking about it before, man. You
know
it’s my idea. So why are you—”

“Who put the idea in your head, Ted?”

“Nobody did,” Ted said indignantly. “Are you calling me a liar? If you weren’t my friend and if you weren’t stoned—”

“Harvey programmed the idea into your head,” I said. “Didn’t you, Harvey?”

Harvey looked out over his congregation, smiled at them, shrugged, looked at me. “I’m afraid none of us have any idea of what you’re talking about,” he said. “You seem to be suffering from severe paranoid—”

“LIAR!” I shouted. “Who’s got a wife and kids in San Francisco, Harvey, you or Ted?” Something flickered for a moment behind Harvey’s watery eyes. Then the spark went out.

“I fail to see—”

“THE FUCK YOU DO! You want to go back to San Francisco and you want all your suckers to follow you. That’s why you put the idea in their heads.”

Harvey smiled a great shit-eating smile. “Is there anyone who thinks I... put the idea of moving the Foundation to San Francisco in his mind?” Silence, aside from a few snickers. “See, Tom?” Harvey said. “You’re imagining things. If you’re high on drugs, you may even be hallucinating. It’s not surprising that your hallucinations are taking paranoid form, considering—”

“Don’t you see what he’s doing?” Goddamit, couldn’t they see? Wasn’t there
anything
protoplasmic alive out there? “He’s got your minds so controlled you don’t even know you’re controlled! Don’t you see? Can’t any of you see?”

I turned and stared the whole lot of them in their nonfaces. Doris, Ida, O’Brien, Charley. Dead fish-eyes. Linda, Rhoda Steiner, Bill Nelson. Corpses animated by clockwork. Blum, Chester White, Mannie Davis. Swiss music-box zombies. Rich, Tod and Judy, Frieda Klein. I stared at them all and a million glass eyes seemed to stare blindly back.

I looked into Ted’s face, inches from my own—dead, dead! Harvey had scooped him out hollow and filled the shell with himself.

“Ted, Ted, for Chrissakes, can’t you see? It’s a fucking Cuckoo clock! You’ve been programmed! WAKE UP, DAMN YOU, WAKE UP!”

“Hey man, take it easy... Maybe you should lie down and—”

“And die?
Lie down and die like the rest of you?”

I looked around the room trying to find a human face. Zombies. Robots. A million dead eyes. But... but off in her corner, Arlene’s eyes seemed to be wet with tears. She was crying—for me? But that was all wrong, I should be crying for her, for Ted, for Doris, for a roomful of corpses who had sold their souls for a mass of clockwork.

I whirled around, screamed at Harvey: “YOU FUCKING MURDERING SON OF A BITCH! Give them back their souls! GIVE THEM BACK THEIR SOULS!”

I looked out into a forest of eyes. Cold glass eyes of animated corpses reflecting the neon-light of mechanical nonbeing. Millions of unblinking dead eyes whirling, whirling, whirling...

The room started to spin around me. I felt Robin’s hand of warm real flesh in mine, my only anchor to flesh-and-blood reality.

“Take it easy, man,” she said. “They’re just not worth it. Don’t let them freak you out. There’s nothing alive in here to care about, anyway.”

I stared at Harvey, with his pseudo, plastic concern painted on his lying face. At Ted, shaking his head at his freaking friend. At a roomful of deaf clockwork.

I was beaten.

Disgusted, infuriated, frustrated, saddened beyond hope, I let Robin lead me out of the room and into the dark hallway. Behind us, there was a short moment of dead silence, and then I heard the machinery of the Cuckoo clock whirring back into an imitation of life behind me.

Everyone is a sucker for something for nothing, but as I climbed the stairs to the Foundation on Monday night, I wondered whether it wasn’t possible to carry the great American tradition of never looking a gift horse in the mouth a bit too far.

A special group for the benefit of little old me, just because you need it and we care, no extra charge, was how Harvey had put it to me on the phone last night. Oh sure. A bunch of the Senators are throwing a little party for you at the Forum, Caesar, just because we dig you, baby. I’ll be there with bells on Brutus, old buddy.

No man, I knew damn well that I was about to walk into Harvey’s version of a Court of the Star Chamber. No question about it, I had really grossed them all out Saturday night, if nothing else.
Probably
nothing else. It had been a long time (well, anyway, since my acid trip) since I had been that stoned. Too stoned to make sense to unstoned Foundation-heads.
Not
too stoned to remember all events that had occurred. But too stoned to remember how I had really felt during those events.
Not
too stoned to retain the vision of Foundation-as-Cuckoo-clock. But too stoned to be sure whether or not
in hash veritas.

Which, of course, was why I had decided to answer Harvey’s subpoena. Dope can give you a vision that seems realer than real, but you can’t
know
that it’s true until you take a second look at things straight. Works like binocular vision: take a look stoned (left eye), then straight (right eye). Either eye sees only a two-dimensional halftruth, but put them together and you see reality three-dimensionally, which should be closer to the way things really are. That’s why this trip was necessary: looking at something
only
stoned is no better than looking at it only straight. Truth is in the intersection between stoned and straight realities.

Besides, when you’re as stoned as I was, it’s pretty hard to get through to anyone who isn’t on your trip. I had made sense to me Saturday, and I still made sense to me today, but I obviously hadn’t gotten through to the poor slobs trapped in the Cuckoo-clock. Being straight now, but still in possession of the memory of the vision, I might be able to get it across now And furthermore, if those motherfuckers thought Tom Hollander wouldn’t have the balls to show his face in their creep-joint again, they had another think coming!

But as I entered the Star Chamber itself, I found that
I
had another think coming. In addition to Harvey, Arlene, Rich, Charlie, Ida, Doris and Linda—the group I had come to know and love—there was my buddy Ted sitting on the right hand of God. To Ted’s right, Doris, Rich, and Arlene; to Harvey’s left, Ida, Charley and Linda. And an empty seat for the victim encircled by the arms of the crescent and facing the judge, and Smoker of Souls, good old Harvey.

All of them very solemn and soberly concerned for the soul of the heretic. Even Arlene mirrored the group’s collective this-is-for-your-own-good expression. If I were Charles De Gaulle, I’d have gone into ecstasy at finally
really
digging what it felt like to be Joan of Arc versus the Inquisition.

I tried to see the clockwork behind their eyes, but I couldn’t quite cut that straight. So, leaping into the frying pan, I sat down in the dock, said with what I hoped was a sufficiently irritating look of contrition: “I suppose you’re all wondering why I gathered you here tonight—”

The silent inward snarls behind the earnestly-concerned masks were not ungratifying.

“This is what we call a Situational Group, Tom,” Harvey said, ignoring all the vibes in the room. “In other words, a group called together to focus on a specific problem of a particular member. By exploring a specific event, in this case your behavior at Saturday’s party, a Situational Group should give unusual insight into your internal reasons for your external behavior.”

“Yeah, I dig,” I said. “Nothing new. The same thing’s gone by other names: witch-hunt, Red Guard self-criticism session, meeting of the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

Harvey smiled professionally. “That attitude is entirely consistent with the paranoid delusions you displayed Saturday,” he said. “This paranoia would seem—”

“It’s not that I’m paranoid, it’s just that everyone’s against me.”

“Such an attempt to pass over a threatening truth with a humorous remark is clearly indicative of—”

Oh Wow. “Look Harv,” I said with a great display of misunderstood earnestness, “I didn’t mean that as a joke. What’s your definition of paranoia, anyway?”

“A paranoiac is someone who clings to a delusion system in which he is being persecuted by others—and in advanced cases, even by inanimate objects—when in fact no such persecution exists in object reality.”

Objective reality?
Is there such a thing as objective reality or is objective reality nothing more than the opinion of the middle class? Somehow I had the feeling I wouldn’t get very far challenging the existence of objective reality inside the mechanism of the old Cuckoo-clock. So:

“Okay. Now take this cat who thinks about eighty million people are out to do him in because they think he’s less than human; he thinks all kinds of monsters are out to catch him, pull out his gold teeth, kill him, and melt him down for soap. Paranoia?”

“A rather extreme example of paranoia.”

I smiled sweetly. “Forgot to tell you the cat in question is a Jew in Nazi Germany,” I said.

Ted, Doris, Rich, even Linda-uptight-Kahn, stifled laughs in spite of themselves. Two points for the defense.

“Point is,” I said, “paranoia is a relationship between what someone thinks is going on and what
is
going on. Can’t have paranoia without delusions by your own definition, Harv. If things really are as crazy as someone sees them, he’s not paranoid no matter how many monsters he sees, not if they’re really there.”

“What’s that got to do with
you?”
Linda-uptight-Kahn said. “You were gibbering about... let’s see... piano rolls... cuckoo clocks... programmers... Harvey changing people’s piano rolls... and ended up screaming and cursing. If
that’s
not paranoia, what is it?”

“Poetic imagery,” I informed her.

“Bullshit,” said Charley.

“Really? I mean
literally
bullshit? Fecal matter from a male bovine?”

“Ah, stop playing word games,” Rich said.

“How can I do that without either shutting up entirely or grunting like an ape? Isn’t this whole group nothing but one big word game?”

“All this is quite beside the point,” Harvey said.

“No man, it
is
the point. Point is, I am no paranoid. I saw a truth Saturday night and expressed it in allegory, poetic image, word game if you will. If I didn’t succeed in explaining it to you, I may be a lousy word game player, but that doesn’t make the truth I saw any less true. And if the truth I saw was a bummer, that doesn’t make me paranoid for calling a spade a spade.”