The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (6 page)

“Pete,” she said.

The man limped toward them, his cane staccato on the paving.

“Pete, this is Dr. Ladde. He's heard about Dr. Amanti and he wants to—”

Pete ignored Eric, stared fiercely at Colleen. “Don't you know we have a show tonight? Where have you been?”

“But, it's only a little after nine; I don't—”

Eric interrupted. “I was a student of Dr. Amanti's. I'm interested in your musikron. You see, I've been carrying on Dr. Amanti's researches and—”

The thin man barked, “No time!” He took Colleen's arm, pulled her toward the dome.

“Pete, please! What's come over you?” She held back.

Pete stopped, put his face close to hers. “Do you like this business?”

She nodded mutely, eyes wide.

“Then let's get to work!”

She looked back at Eric, shrugged her shoulders. “I'm sorry.”

Pete pulled her into the dome.

Eric stared after them. He thought, “He's a decided compulsive type … very unstable. May not be as immune to the Syndrome as she apparently is.” He frowned, looked at his wrist watch, remembered his ten o'clock appointment. “Damn!” He turned, almost collided with a young man in busboy's coveralls.

The young man puffed nervously at a cigarette, jerked it out of his mouth, leered. “Better find yourself another gal, Doc. That one's taken.”

Eric looked into the young-old eyes, stared them down. “You work in there?”

The young man replaced the cigarette between thin lips, spoke around a puff of blue smoke. “Yeah.”

“When does it open?”

The young man pulled the cigarette from his mouth, flipped it over Eric's shoulder into the bay. “We're open now for breakfast. Floor show doesn't start until seven tonight.”

“Is Miss Lanai in the floor show?”

The busboy looked up at the script-ring over the dome, smiled knowingly. “Doc, she
is
the floor show!”

Again Eric looked at his wrist watch, thought,
I'm coming back here tonight.
He turned toward the nearest unitube. “Thanks,” he said.

“You better get reservations if you're coming back tonight,” said the busboy.

Eric stopped, looked back. He reached into his pocket, found a twenty buck piece, flipped it to the busboy. The thin young man caught the coin out of the air, looked at it, said, “Thank
you.
What name, Doc?”

“Dr. Eric Ladde.”

The busboy pocketed the coin. “Righto, Doc. Floorside. I come on again at six. I'll attend to you personally.”

Eric turned back to the unitube entrance again and left immediately.

*   *   *

Under the smog-filtered Los Angeles sun, a brown-dry city.

Mobile Laboratory 31 ground to a stop before Our Lady of Mercy Hospital, churning up a swirl of dried palm fronds in the gutter. The overworked turbo-motor sighed to a stop, grating. The Japanese psychologist emerged on one side, the Swedish doctor on the other. Their shoulders sagged.

The psychologist asked, “Ole, how long since you've had a good night's sleep?”

The doctor shook his head. “I can't remember, Yoshi; not since I left Frisco, I guess.”

From the caged rear of the truck, wild, high-pitched laughter, a sigh, laughter.

The doctor stumbled on the steps to the hospital sidewalk. He stopped, turned. “Yoshi—”

“Sure, Ole. I'll get some fresh orderlies to take care of this one.” To himself he added, “If there are any fresh orderlies.”

Inside the hospital, cool air pressed down the hallway. The Swedish doctor stopped a man with a clipboard. “What's the latest count?”

The man scratched his forehead with a corner of the clipboard. “Two and a half million last I heard, doctor. They haven't found a sane one yet.”

*   *   *

The Gweduc Room pointed a plastine finger under Elliott Bay. Unseen by the patrons, a cage compressed a high density of sea life over the transparent ceiling. Illumabeams traversed the water, treating the watchers to visions of a yellow salmon, a mauve perch, a pink octopus, a blue jellyfish. At one end of the room, synthetic mother-of-pearl had been formed into a giant open gweduc shell—the stage. Colored spotlights splashed the backdrop with ribbons of flame, blue shadows.

Eric went down the elevator, emerged in an atmosphere disturbingly reminiscent of his nightmare. All it lacked was the singer. A waiter led him, threading a way through the dim haze of perfumed cigarette smoke, between tables ringed by men in formal black, women in gold lamé, luminous synthetics. An aquamarine glow shimmered from the small round table tops—the only lights in the Gweduc Room other than spotlights on the stage and illumabeams in the dark water overhead. A susurration of many voices hung on the air. Aromas of alcohol, tobacco, perfumes, exotic seafoods layered the room, mingled with a perspirant undertone.

The table nestled in the second row, crowded on all sides. The waiter extricated a chair; Eric sat down.

“Something to drink, sir?”

“Bombay Ale.”

The waiter turned, merged into the gloom.

Eric tried to move his chair into a comfortable position, found it was wedged immovably between two chairs behind him. A figure materialized out of the gloom across from him; he recognized the busboy.

“Best I could get you, Doc.”

“This is excellent.” Eric smiled, fished a twenty-buck piece from his pocket, pressed it into the other's hand.

“Anything I can do for you, Doc?”

“Would you tell Miss Lanai I'm here?”

“I'll try, Doc; but that Pete character has been watching her like a piece of prize property all afternoon. Not that I wouldn't do the same thing myself, you understand.”

White teeth flashed in the smoke-layered shadows. The busboy turned, weaved his way back through the tables. The murmuring undercurrent of voices in the room damped out. Eric turned toward the stage. A portly man in ebony and chalk-striped coveralls bent over the microphone.

“Here's what you've been waiting for,” he said. He gestured with his left hand. Spotlights erased a shadow, revealing Colleen Lanai, her hands clasped in front of her. An old-fashioned gown of electric blue to match her eyes sheathed the full curves.

“Colleen Lanai!”

Applause washed over the room, subsided. The portly man gestured with his right hand. Other spotlights flared, revealing Pete Serantis in black coveralls, leaning on his cane.

“Pete Serantis and—”

He waited for a lesser frenzy of clapping to subside.

“… The Musikron!”

A terminal spotlight illuminated a large metallic box behind Pete. The thin man limped around the box, ducked, and disappeared inside. Colleen took the microphone from the announcer, who bowed and stepped off the stage.

Eric became aware of a pressing mood of urgency in the room. He thought, “For a brief instant we forget our fears, forget the Syndrome, everything except the music and this instant.”

Colleen held the microphone intimately close to her mouth.

“We have some more real oldies for you tonight,” she said. An electric pressure of personality pulsed out from her. “Two of these songs we've never presented before. First, a trio—‘Terrible Blues' with the musikron giving you a basic recording by Clarence Williams and the Red Onion Jazz Babies, Pete Serantis adding an entirely new effect; next, ‘Wild Man Blues' and the trumpet is pure Louis Armstrong; last, ‘Them's Graveyard Words,' an old Bessie Smith special.” She bowed almost imperceptibly.

Music appeared in the room, not definable as to direction. It filled the senses. Colleen began to sing, seemingly without effort. She played her voice like a horn, soaring with the music, ebbing with it, caressing the air with it.

Eric stared, frozen, with all the rest of the audience.

She finished the first song. The noise of applause deafened him. He felt pain in his hands, looked down to find himself beating his palms together. He stopped, shook his head, took four deep breaths. Colleen picked up the thread of a new melody. Eric narrowed his eyes, staring at the stage. Impulsively, he put his hands to his ears and felt panic swell as the music remained undiminished. He closed his eyes, caught his breath as he continued to see Colleen, blurred at first, shifting, then in a steady image from a place nearer and to the left.

A wavering threnody of emotions accompanied the vision. Eric put his hands before his eyes. The image remained. He opened his eyes. The image again blurred, shifted to normal. He searched to one side of Colleen for the position from which he had been seeing her. He decided it could only be from inside the musikron and at the instant of decision discerned the outline of a mirror panel in the face of the metallic box.

“Through a one-way glass,” he thought. “Through Pete's eyes.”

He sat, thinking, while Colleen finished her third number. Pete emerged from the musikron to share the applause. Colleen blew a kiss to the audience.

“We'll be back in a little while.”

She stepped down from the stage, followed by Pete; darkness absorbed them. Waiters moved along the tables. A drink was placed on Eric's table. He put money in the tray. A blue shadow appeared across from him, slipped into the chair.

“Tommy told me you were here … the busboy.” She leaned across the table. “You mustn't let Pete see you. He's in a rage, a real pet. I've never seen anybody that angry.”

Eric leaned toward her, caught a delicate exhalation of sandalwood perfume. It dizzied him. “I want to talk to you,” he said. “Can you meet me after the show?”

“I guess I can trust you,” she said. She hesitated, smiling faintly. “You're the professional type.” Another pause. “And I think I need professional advice.” She slipped out of the chair, stood up. “I have to get back before he suspects I didn't go to the powder room. I'll meet you near the freight elevator upstairs.”

She was gone.

*   *   *

A cold breeze off the bay tugged at Eric's cape, puffing it out behind him. He leaned against the concrete railing, drawing on a cigarette. The glowing coal flowed an orange wash across his face, flaring, dimming. The tide rip sniggled and babbled; waves lap-lap-lapped at the concrete beneath him. A multi-colored glow in the water to his left winked out as the illumabeams above the Gweduc Room were extinguished. He shivered. Footsteps approached from his left, passed behind him—a man, alone. A muffled whirring sound grew, stopped. Light footsteps ran toward him, stopped at the rail. He smelled her perfume.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I can't be long. He's suspicious. Tommy brought me up the freight elevator. He's waiting.”

“I'll be brief. I've been thinking. I'm going to talk about travel. I'm going to tell you where you've been since you hooked up with Pete in Honolulu.” He turned, leaned sideways against the railing. “You tried your show first in Santa Rosa, California, the sticks; then you went to Piquetberg, Karachi, Reykjavik, Portland, Hollandia, Lawton—finally, Los Angeles. Then you came here.”

“So you looked up our itinerary.”

He shook his head. “No.” He hesitated. “Pete's kept you pretty busy rehearsing, hasn't he?”

“This isn't easy work.”

“I'm not saying it is.” He turned back to the rail, flipped his cigarette into the darkness, heard it hiss in the water. “How long have you known Pete?”

“A couple of months more or less. Why?”

He turned away. “What kind of a fellow is he?”

She shrugged. “He's a nice guy. He's asked me to marry him.”

Eric swallowed. “Are you going to?”

She looked out to the dark bay. “That's why I want your advice. I don't know … I just don't know. He put me where I am, right on top of the entertainment heap.” She turned back to Eric. “And he really is an awfully nice guy … when you get under that bitterness.”

Eric breathed deeply, pressed against the concrete railing. “May I tell you a story?”

“What about?”

“This morning you mentioned Dr. Carlos Amanti, the inventor of the teleprobe. Did you know him?”

“No.”

“I was one of his students. When he had the breakdown it hit all of us pretty hard, but I was the only one who took up the teleprobe project. I've been working at it eight years.”

She stirred beside him. “What is this teleprobe?”

“The science writers have poked fun at it; they call it the ‘mind reader.' It's not. It's just a means of interpreting some of the unconscious impulses of the human brain. I suppose some day it may approach mind reading. Right now it's a rather primitive instrument, sometimes unpredictable. Amanti's intention was to communicate with the unconscious mind, using interpretation of encephalographic waves. The idea was to amplify them, maintain a discrete separation between types, and translate the type variations according to thought images.”

She chewed her lower lip. “And you think the musikron would help make a better teleprobe, that it would help fight the Syndrome?”

“I think more than that.” He looked down at the paving.

“You're trying to tell me something without saying it,” she said. “Is it about Pete?”

“Not exactly.”

“Why'd you give that long recitation of where we'd been? That wasn't just idle talk. What are you driving at?”

He looked at her speculatively, weighing her mood. “Hasn't Pete told you about those places?”

She put a hand to her mouth, eyes wide, staring. She moaned. “Not the Syndrome … not all of those places, too?”

“Yes.” It was a flat, final sound.

She shook her head. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“That it could be the musikron causing all of this.”

“Oh, no!”

“I could be wrong. But look at how it appears. Amanti was a genius working near the fringe of insanity. He had a psychotic break. Then he helped Pete build a machine. It's possible that machine picks up the operator's brain wave patterns, transmits them as a scrambling impulse. The musikron
does
convert thought into a discernible energy—sound. Why isn't it just as possible that it funnels a disturbing impulse directly into the unconscious.” He wet his lips with his tongue. “Did you know that I hear those sounds even with my hands over my ears, see you with my eyes covered. Remember my nightmare? My nervous system is responding to a subjective impulse.”