The Jagged Orbit (24 page)

Oh, sure! But no mention of the fact that there were kids in there, hm? No mention of the fact that 'I' happened to be sitting safely a hundred meters up in a gun-ship armed with self-seeking missiles and thousand-watt laser-guns! I'd like to see some of the killers brought down to ground level and turned loose with hands and feet and teeth against the people who were mashed to pulp in that block of apts! That's what
I'd
call 'being an individual'!"

Dismayed by Conroy's fierceness, Flamen said, "Ah —yes, but surely the safety of the greatest number is a primary ..."

The words sounded mealy-mouthed after Conroy's vehemence, and ran dry.

"Well?" Conroy said, turning to face him. "I must say I didn't expect to hear you, a spoolpigeon, speaking out in favor of the established order."

"But this is the world we've got," Flamen said faintly. He could not recall being so much at a loss since he was in college and had to deal with an instructor who bullied rather than led his students towards knowledge. "We have to try and decide what is and what isn't worth keeping, and if we do think something's worth keeping we have to try and protect it."

"So name what's worth keeping," Conroy countered. "This convenience we're riding in—this skimmer? Sure, but did it have to be manufactured in Detroit by people whose skins guarantee they can't market their skills anywhere else in the country? How secure do you feel in your annual skimmer when you take off in it for the first time? How certain are you that some melanist fanatic hasn't been around the dispatch field sabotaging the skimmers destined for blank purchasers, so that they'll crash after the first thousand miles? What's going to protect you against that? The police can't! Neither can your local Gottschalk, for all the guns he can offer you. No wonder people hardly talk to their friends face to face any more, but call up to save going across the street in case they get shot by a passing knee."

A bleep signifying they were over their destination, the Hilton Undertower, saved Flamen from having to reply at once, and he was grateful all over again. It was years since he had come up against anyone with such strong feelings as Conroy's, and he was obscurely troubled, as though the battering words had struck a long-forgotten chord in his memory.

A few minutes for checking in and having his bag sent to his room, and Conroy was holding forth anew in the hotel's main bar, his rodomontade proof against any attempt by Flamen to interrupt with more details of his plot to undermine Mogshack.

"As I said earlier, even up in relatively civilized Canada I find the traces of Mogshack's teachings regardless of who actually formed the last link in the chain of communication to my students. How do you feel, for example, about murders on campus?"

"Well, I—"

"We've had two this year: a jealous homosexual boy stabbed his lover because he was seen with a girl, and a crazy father came up and shot his daughter because a friend of hers—some friend!—told him she was sleeping with a boy who had some Indian blood. Iroquois, to be exact. Me, I'd have been rather pleased; they were a distinguished tribe in their day, the Iroquois. But thank goodness I don't have a daughter and my sons are both safely married. Irrelevant I was talking about campus murders. What's happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don't give me that hog-wash about students at college haying to be treated as adults—there's nothing adult about playing with guns and grenades!"

He had dialed a beer and now poured the whole of it down his throat in a single thirsty gobble as though washing away an unpleasant taste. Flamen said, caught up in the discussion in spite of his own preoccupations,

"Yes, but adolescence has always been the most emotionally disturbing time, and—"

"Who sold that crazy father a gun to go shoot his daughter with?" Conroy interrupted. "Some 'emotionally disturbed' adolescent at the corner store where he cobbles together lasers in a one-man workshop? The hell! That was a late-model Gottschalk gun; I saw it myself in the dean's office, later."

"I'm lining up something on the Gottschalks at present, too," Flamen said. He heard something close to timidity in his tone. Granting that Conroy was old enough to be his father, it was still ridiculous to find himself reacting in this fashion. Against all odds, he was running a five-slots-weekly show on the Holocosmic network, whereas in his own field Conroy had failed so signally he was reduced to teaching, not even in his native country.

"Ah-hah?
That
won't work," Conroy said, replacing his glass for a fresh beer. "And that's another reason I detest Mogshack, by the way. I never knew him to try and wean a patient away from dependence on guns. Yet he has two, three thousand a year of the population of New York State through his hands. By this time, if he'd done his job properly, he'd have created a glut of second-hand weaponry and cooled the temperature in this city past the flashpoint."

"Two or three thousand out of how many many million?" Flamen snapped.

"Out of how many who are unstable enough to lose their marbles and start shooting at random into the street?" Conroy countered. "You don't start riots, I don't start riots, the politically educated leaders of the X Patriots don't start riots. Paranoids start riots and other people are tipped over the edge by contagious hysteria. Your typical insurrectionary sniper isn't a revolutionary or a fanatic—he's someone who's so devoid of empathy he can treat the human beings below his window as moving targets conveniently offered for his skill. And by clever exploitation of the public's insecurity the Gottschalks have managed to put over a gang of lies equating gunmanship with masculine potency, which do even more damage than Mogshack's pernicious dogmas. Damn it, man: anyone who can treat another human being as an object for target practice is stuck even further back in the infantile stage than somebody who's frightened to move on from the masturbation phase and go to bed with a girl! Do you own a gun?"

"Ah . . ." Flamen gulped at Jus own drink. "Yes, naturally. But I don't belong to any gun clubs or anything. I have a riot-defense system around the house with mines and electrified fences, and if the need arises I just switch them on. The rest is automatic."

"Fair," Conroy said in a clinical tone.

"How do you mean,
fair?"

"The sane response is to site your home where your neighbors aren't going to come calling with guns."

"So name somewhere!" Flamen gibed. "Don't the Gottschalks buy time on Pan-Can too?"

"Yes, damn it," Conroy admitted with a sigh. "What's more I caught one of them actually on our campus during the spring semester. Got rid of him, luckily, but only because the killing I told you about—the student who knifed his boyfriend—was fresh enough in the dean's mind to make him vulnerable to my arguments. At that one of my colleagues said all the students ought to be armed to teach them responsibility in the use of weapons. Hah! I wonder how long he'd last in front of an armed class—the kids hate him!"

For the first time since their arrival in the bar, there was a pause longer than a few seconds. Flamen exploited it to gather his scattered thoughts, and said eventually, "Coming back to business, Professor, may I take it you'll cooperate with me even if you disagree with the packling principle in the abstract? Of course, this will only be the start of a long and difficult process; later there may have to be a lawsuit, perhaps a State inquiry, but for the sake of my wife I'm prepared to . . ."

Once more his words trailed away as he found Conroy gazing steadily at him.

"Mr. Flamen," the psychologist said at length, "I've told you why I detest Mogshack as a person and why I think his influence on the field of mental health is downright dangerous. Accordingly I'll be very happy to help you torpedo him. But I will not swallow the line you just fed me. I don't believe you're motivated by altruism and love for your wife. I believe you're going after Mogshack because the targets that most demand your attention, like the Gottschalks, are out of reach. Gottschalks are like ghouls; they live off the carrion of our mutual distrust and bribe us with symbols that equate hatred with manhood. So— No, please don't interrupt! I'd rather think of you as a frustrated man who would far sooner expose some disgusting truth about the Gottschalks than about a man who is, after all, one teacher among many and probably wouldn't be so highly regarded if it weren't for the post he occupies. You—"

"But just a moment!"

"Shut up and hear me out, will you? You can't expect me to believe you're going after Mogshack for your wife's sake, when you've admitted that you'd drifted so far apart you didn't even realize she was taking Ladromide —hm? Oh, I'm not blaming you! Marriage isn't compulsory and making a success of it is even less so, and anyhow marriage doesn't conform with Mogshack's celebrated ideal that can always be approached more closely 'like a mathematical limit.' Your motives don't much concern me, so let's forget them for the moment, hm?"

Flamen buried his scowl in his glass.

"Now my motives, on the other hand, are something I want to try and make clear to you. It may take a while, so let's go and sit down, shall we?" He turned and led the way to a nearby lounge, not allowing the distraction to brake the steamroller progress of his discourse. "To draw on medical images with which you may not be familiar, I regard people like Mogshack as counterparts of the homeopaths who used to teach, in somatic medicine, the virtues of doses of the causative agent as cures for everything from poisoning to pyorrhea. Certainly if someone is pathologically afraid of kneeblank armies marching up his front path, you may stabilize him superficially by training him to use a gun and fire it more quickly and more accurately than his potential attacker. But consider, Mr. Flamen, what is the actual, physical result?" His tone changed completely; he had been alternating between banter and self-deprecatory hectoring, but now he leaned forward with almost painful sincerity.

"It's a dead man on the path, Mr. Flamen," he said. "And it's no part of a doctor's duty to encourage the taking of life. True?"

To Flamen's surprise he found that his mouth had gone dry. He gave a wary nod.

"Now an honest cure," Conroy pursued, "would lie somewhere along the axis where the man coming up the path was invited in, and enjoyed his visit, and left his host pleased to have entertained him. Does the image get across, or are people already too isolated to consider that idea any longer?"

Cautiously Flamen said, "Well, it's obviously better to have people meeting as friends than as enemies."

"But it doesn't end there, in a platitude!" Conroy thumped the arm of the couch and raised a faint cloud of dust "Or rather, it shouldn't. When did you last do something to bring people closer together? Isn't your daily show designed to do the opposite? Spoolpigeons foment distrust in a systematic professional manner."

"Now look here!" Flamen slammed his glass down on the table before them. "I pick liars and peculators and hypocrites for my targets! I'd be ashamed to do anything else!"

"With the result that people who pay attention to you start to question the motives of everybody around them,"

Conroy said. "They take it for granted that the world is riddled with corruption and chicanery and fraud."

"You think it's better to be deceived than to be told the truth?"

"You think it's good for people to imagine that everyone who's richer or more powerful or more fortunate than themselves got there by cheating and lying and wriggling through loopholes in the law?"

For a long moment the two men stared at one another, less than arm's length apart, until Conroy gave a chuckle and reached to retrieve his beer.

"Apologies, Mr. Flamen. The last thing I want to do is attack someone who dislikes hypocrisy. So do I. But, you see, there is this paradox which bothers me terribly. Day in, day out, for—what?—forty-odd weeks of the year, I imagine, you deliver your exposes and your bits of scandal which may, I admit, achieve results like levering corrupt officials out of their jobs or something of that sort. But what you do and say isn't a function of the number of public injustices you hear about—it depends on the three-vee slot you have to fill.
Have
to, five times a week! At the very least I'm sure you must often have blown up some triviality into a grand crusade simply because nothing bigger had turned up the same day."

Flamen said, slowly, "Yes, I'd have to plead guilty on that. And . . ." He hesitated, then forced the words out, recalling what Diablo had said about gauging the success of a show by the number of suicides it provoked. "And pretty often exposes like that are regarded as especially successful, not because they were really important but because the target was exceptionally badly defended. Like you get some poor son-of-a-bitch killing himself in shame."

"Which brings me at long last to my main point," Conroy said. "I will indeed set up a bunch of parameters for the packling of your wife which will make Mogshack's vaunted cure look like a mile-wide miss—and what's more I'll be right and he'll be wrong because he doesn't care whether he suppresses originality or creativity or obstinacy or any other valuable characteristic so long as his computers predict a satisfied client. From there on it'll be up to you. But I want you to bear two things in mind."

He leaned earnestly close to Flamen. "One! I can't give you back your wife as she was when you loved her. Nobody can. It was you who changed her, and if you want her you'll have to win her back as the person she now is. Which may mean changing yourself, and that can be painful.

"And two! Don't delude yourself that just bringing down Mogshack will put the world back together all by itself. If you succeed in, say, getting him kicked out of his job, I'll be pleased—God, will I be pleased! But I'll also expect you to make use of your success, and exploit it to go after somebody really poisonous, like the Gottschalks."

He broke off to tilt the last of his beer down his gullet. Uncertain whether to make a promise he was probably not going to be able to keep, Flamen hesitated, and before he could reply there came a tap on his shoulder. Turning, he saw a strange woman leaning down to him.