The Jagged Orbit (25 page)
"Are you Mr. Flamen?" she said.
"Yes—yes, I am!" Flamen drew himself up; it was very reassuring to be recognized by a stranger right now.
"Well, you've been being paged for the last ten minutes," the woman said, and pointed to the screen over the public comweb at the end of the bar. The name matthew flamen was flashing red at two-second intervals.
"Ten minutes!"
"Well, you seemed to be busy, and I wasn't sure it was you," the woman said, stepping back defensively as though afraid he might strike her.
"Ah . . . Yes. Well, thank you anyway." Flamen rose, scowling, and the woman retreated with a timid nod. "Excuse me," he added to Conroy, who shrugged.
Heading for the comweb, he wondered furiously who could have tracked him down here; he had hoped to be uninterrupted at least long enough to consult Conroy about a joint approach to Prior. The latter was dubious about having Celia packled according to parameters of Conroy's—he judged everything by externals, and what counted for him was that Mogshack was in charge of the Ginsberg whereas Conroy was a failure driven to teaching in an obscure college. Worst of all, as Celia's present legal guardian he could theoretically forbid Convoy to come anywhere near her.
Ripping the fax paper which bore his name out of the message slot, he saw it was Dr. Reedeth who was trying to get in touch with him. His heart sank. What had happened now?
He punched for the Ginsberg, and the screen lit to show Reedeth in the office which Flamen had seen before, looking harassed; his hair was tousled and there were dark rings under his eyes.
"At last!" he snapped. "Get over here and take charge of your ward, will you? Fast! I don't like people who welsh on their promises the very day they make them— least of all when they expect me to pick up the pieces!"
"What in hell are you talking about?" Flamen blazed back. "And I don't like your manner—"
"Didn't you contract to act as legal guardian for Harry Madison yesterday?" Reedeth broke in.
"Why ... Why, of course I did."
"Didn't take it very seriously, did you?"
"What do you mean? You assured me he was perfectly sane and able to look after himself, so—"
"So you decided to wait for him to show at your office on Monday morning?" Reedeth's lip curled. "I should have known. Do you realize he nearly got thrown in the Undertombs? Or don't you care?"
"Now look here! If he did something criminal while the ink still wasn't dry on his certificate of sanity, that's a breach of contract on your side, not on mine!" Flamen felt sweat spring out prickly on his skin, but at the back of his mind was a hesitant jubilation: could this too be a stick to beat Mogshack with?
"Know what a sibyl-pill is?" Reedeth snarled "You ought to—you watched Lyla Clay performing here the other day."
"Of course I do. What's that got to do with Madison?"
"Last night he and Lyla Clay were kidnapped by a gang of bully-boys from a party of, Michaela Baxendale's. Do you know her?"
"Oh my God," Flamen said All the color suddenly vanished from the world.
"Seems she'd sent them out to drag in a mixed-race couple to play some kind of game with. Only it wasn't a game. They forced one of the sibyl-pills down Madison's throat and he went berserk. He wound up throwing a man out of a forty-fifth story window."
There was a terrible silence. Eventually Flamen said feebly, "But if they were kidnapped ..."
"If you'd kept your word it needn't have happened!" Reedeth roared. "I've been stalling the busies all morning with that argument and it's damned nearly worn out!
I
know what a sib does to the mind—I'm in that line of business. But Madison's a knee, and the busies are still furious about the X Patriot riots the other night It's a blind miracle they sent him and the girl back here instead of straight to jail. I can get the girl out, but I'm damned if I'm going to hang myself for Madison when you're legally responsible for him. Move it over here, fast!"
"Good God," said Conroy from behind Flamen. "It
is
Jim Reedeth! I thought I recognized the voice. How are you?"
Beaming, he marched up to the comweb.
Reedeth looked totally blank. He said "Prof, what in heaven's name are you doing there?"
"Flamen invited me to New York for the weekend So what's the trouble and can I help at all?"
"You know each other," Flamen muttered.
"Sure," Conroy nodded. "A former student of mine. Bright too—except that he fell in behind Mogshack and gave up thinking for himself. So anyway: what's wrong?"
"Ah . . ." Reedeth glanced past him at Flamen. "I'm not sure whether I ought to—"
"The hell with it!" Flamen snapped. "My private life is going to be all over the hemisphere by Monday anyway, so what's the difference? Tell him! Tell him everything! Maybe he'll come up with some brilliant idea."
He turned his back, scowling.
At first reluctantly, then with fluency, Reedeth recounted what had happened to Lyla and Madison. He concluded, "And now here they are, back in the hospital, and if Mogshack discovers I discharged a patient into the care of someone who completely disregarded his obligations, I'll be ruined!"
With a look of terrible distress, Conroy said "Oh, Jim, you are following in your boss's footsteps, aren't you? I'd have hoped that any student of mine would talk first about the patient's plight and then about his own. . . ." Then, hastily as Reedeth bridled: "Never mind, never mind! Just tell me honestly—in your judgment, is this man Madison fit to be let loose or not?"
Reedeth bit back an angry retort. Shrugging, he said, "I think he was fit for release months ago. In fact I sometimes wonder if he was ever as crazy as they claimed when they committed him."
"Good start," Conroy nodded. "And you could plead in any court in the world that forcing a sibyl-pill down someone's throat is enough to cause temporary insanity. I've been looking into that; I gave the pythoness phenomenon to my students as a class assignment a few days ago. Presumably there are witnesses to the kidnapping?"
Reedeth was looking a little more cheerful. "Only the girl herself. But I'm sure we could impeach the testimony of the kidnappers. For instance, she has a stab-mark on her thumb, and Madison has one on his shoulder. They took them by surprise on the street and gave them each a shot of Narcolate."
"Hmmm!" Conroy rubbed his beard with the back of his hand. "Tell me, Mr. Flamen, can even such a—well
—notorious
poetess as Michaela Baxendale get away with drugging and kidnapping strangers to amuse her guests?"
"I can make damned sure that she doesn't," Flamen assured him. "I've been looking for an angle on her for months, because she revolts me so much. And I don't care what kind of a "broken home' she came from, being raped by her brother and all that garbage."
"Gould you talk about that later?" Reedeth said impatiently from the comweb. "I've spent the whole morning staving off the busies, and I'm exhausted!"
"Just hold the fort a while longer," Conroy said equably. "No doubt Mr. Flamen will have to make some arrangements—defenestration is a fairly serious offense even nowadays."
"What?" Reedeth looked blank.
"Throwing people out of windows. Now if it had been done with something out of the Gottschalks' current catalogue . . . Never mind! But I'm thinking about bail, contacting a lawyer, swearing out a warrant against Miss Baxendale and her confederates, that kind of thing."
"It's all set up! I just haven't been able to get hold of Flamen to sign the documents!"
"I'll be there as soon as possible," Flamen sighed, and cut the circuit. Turning to Conroy, he added, "I'm sorry about this, but I guess I have to go. I'll see you back here in a couple of hours, with luck."
"Oh no you won't," Conroy said. "I'm going to ride along with you. I've always wanted to see the inside of that mausoleum of Mogshack's, and I'm not likely to get another chance."
Taking Flamen's arm, he led him briskly towards the door.
SEVENTY-NINE REPRINTED FROM THE MANCHESTER
GUARDIAN Of
13TH MARCH 1968
Seven burned to death
Mr David Lumsden, aged 26, stood outside his burning home in Toronto and screamed at passing motorists to stop and help as his wife and six children were burned to death. All the drivers ignored his calls.
EIGHTY
ASSUMPTION CONCERNING THE FOREGOING MADE FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY
It would have been even worse if they'd stopped to watch the fun.
EIGHTY-ONE
THE MEANING OF THIS UNWARRANTED INTRUSION
Sanctuary within a sanctuary, Reedeth thought: this office enclosed by the fortress of the hospital. Here offered temporary refuge from the impersonal gale of law-enforcement, Lyla and Madison sat opposite him on the consultation couch, side by side like frightened children—she wearing a hard mask of misery, the corners of her mouth downturned, her shoulders slumped and her hands pressed tight between her knees; he stolidly erect, no expression on his dark face.
A shiver traced down his spine as he pictured Madison's muscles bulging to hurl a man bodily through a window. How could that kind of terrible violence have escaped unnoticed during so many years of the most modern and thorough study of the man's mental condition? Even granting that sibyl-pills induced temporary insanity—that was what it amounted to whether or not one dignified it by the name of a pythoness trance-granting that they provoked bone-snapping convulsions, granting that Madison was in excellent physical condition and quite strong enough in his normal state to pick up this heavy desketary as indeed he had once done in Reedeth's presence while engaged on a repair job: the story he and Lyla told simply didn't make sense.
Oh, certainly their account of being kidnapped by Mikki Baxendale's private macoots was borne out by all lands of corroborative evidence. The clumsy stab-marks left by the injections still showed, Lyla's in the base of her thumb presumably because the yash she was wearing would have shielded her from an injection where Madison had taken his, in the top of the shoulder. There was even a detectable trace of Narcolate in a tiny scab he had removed from the knee's wound, trapped in the blood before it clotted. So far, so good.
Rut as for the rest, Madison's single-handed victory over nine assailants, and the girl's half-crazy visions of a myriad battles scattered from end to end of history, climaxing in a prediction about something supposed to happen next year—
Reedeth's jaw dropped. He felt it fall and couldn't cancel the impulse. The solid world around him suddenly seemed tenuous, like swirling mist. Only a day or two ago he'd seen for himself that a pythoness could indeed deliver comprehensible oracles about total strangers, clear enough even for impersonal automatics to relate to their subjects. As though facts he had long been aware of had been shaken, kaleidoscope-fashion, into an unexpected pattern conveying a message on a non-verbal level, he found himself considering a brand-new hypothesis. Was it possible that the synergistic effect of Narcolate and a sibyl-pill had combined to generate in Madison a talent as unsuspected as pythoness talent had been before the pioneering days of Diana Spitz? Could he—did he—know about things which hadn't happened yet?
But the whole notion seemed so absurd he gave a harsh laugh, causing Lyla to look up at him with a vague sketch for curiosity reflected on her face.
"Nothing," he sighed in reply to her unspoken question. And, before he could qualify the bald statement, the comweb buzzed. Ariadne appeared in the screen, the familiar background of her home showing behind her fair head.
"Jim, what on earth are you doing in your office on a Saturday afternoon? I've been calling you at home for the past two hours!"
"Sweeping up a mess with my bare hands," Reedeth muttered. "That's what I'm doing." He summed up what had happened, and concluded, "Just to top everything else, Miss Clay can't get back into her apt, I understand. Her only key was left behind at Mikki Baxendale's, and the fee you sent off for her performance here went direct to Dan Kazer's account, as her mackero, but since he's dead his account has been blocked pending distribution of his estate. So I gather she doesn't even have the money to pay a locksmith to let her into her own home."
"That's no problem," Lyla said with a trace of scorn. "Harry could let me in. He did it before."
Reedeth looked at her blankly.
"Someone I thought was a friend of Dan's moved into our apt while I was shut up here yesterday. Harry opened the door and let me in without a key."
"Don't you have a Punch lock on the door?" Reedeth said, mystified.
"Yes, of course we do."
From the screen Ariadne looked out with bewilderment to match Reedeth's. "Nonsense," she said firmly. "You can't get past a Punch lock without the key—not unless you smash the door down. Jim, I think you'd better reconsider what you're doing. There are some—ah— s
uspect
claims being made, don't you think?"
"I'm telling you," Lyla said, and set her mouth in a mutinous line.
Reedeth was framing a reply, when another signal began to flash on the desketary, and he brightened. "Excuse me," he said to Ariadne, and switched to another circuit. When his image reappeared on her screen, he wore an expression of dismay.
"What happened?" she demanded.
"Flamen got here."
"But I thought that was what you were waiting for— why should it make you look so sour?"
Reedeth sighed. "No reason, I guess. It's just that he's brought Conroy with him."
"Conroy?
Xavier
Conroy? But I thought he was in Canada!"
"Flamen had him flown to New York for the weekend. I get the impression he wants a second opinion about his wife, and you certainly couldn't pick anyone more opposed to Mogshack, could you?"
"No more than Mogshack's opposed to him. Watch yourself, Jim! You realize what'll happen if Mogshack finds out you've—" She hesitated, searching for a word.
"That I've been 'trading with the enemy'?" Reedeth supplied with a bitter smile. "If he takes what's actually sheer coincidence as a personal insult, I'll have had proof of what the automatics told us about him, and I won't wait to be fired. I'll resign. I wouldn't much care to go on working for a lunatic."
"Oh, for God's sake!" Ariadne said. "Jim, if you're happy with the company you have right now, you're welcome to them—but I tell you this! The way you're going, you're likely to wind up viewing the Ginsberg from the inside of a retreat yourself!"
She broke the connection with an ill-tempered snort, and Reedeth was left with his mouth half open to utter an abortive counterblast.
What a crazy predicament, to have got hung up on Ariadne of all the available women in the world!
But events were crowding in on him too rapidly to allow time for anger. Already Flamen and Conroy were on the pediflow towards his office. He started to rise with the intention of going to greet them, but canceled the movement and felt his features deform into a scowl.
Ariadne had been perfectly right. He was going to be in trouble if Mogshack learned about all this—not just Conroy's intrusion, but Madison's commitment into the guardianship of someone who promptly disregarded his
obligations. He hated the idea of confronting his visitors: Flamen because right now he was furious with the man for landing him and Madison both in a mess; Conroy because ...
Well, making an honest if silent confession: because at the back of his mind he felt vulnerable to Conroy's contempt, and in their brief exchange over the comweb, half an hour ago, there had been the long shadow of the scathing irony with which Conroy had treated juvenile inanities in his students' arguments, back in the days when Reedeth was working under him.
He hoped desperately that neither Lyla nor Madison had seen through his carefully maintained mask.
And then there they were, at the door, being admitted, Conroy shaking hands with every appearance of affability; a mechanical routine of introduction had to be gone through, which gave a short respite from awareness of depression—and while Reedeth was still trying to formulate his next remarks, Conroy had sat briskly down and taken charge.
"Well! From what I've been able to pick up by talking to Flamen on the way here, you've got some serious problems, Jim, and so have our two friends here. I'm particularly interested to meet you, Miss Clay, because one of my students asked about the pythoness phenomenon in class the other day and I gave them the subject as an assignment—which naturally meant I had to investigate it myself before correcting what they turned in. I hadn't taken it very seriously before, but I have found that some remarkable authorities vouch for its authenticity. What's your view, Jim?"
Reedeth stumbletongued. "Why . . . Why, I've been compelled to react the same way, I guess. I never took pythonesses seriously until Miss Clay put on a performance here."
"I heard about that from Flamen," Conroy injected.
"Yes, of course: he recorded the show." Reedeth swallowed. "But it was having the automatics analyze the oracles she delivered which convinced me, not the performance itself. I—"
Lyla sat up sharply. "You didn't tell me you'd had my oracles comped!" she said in an accusing tone. "Christ, if I'd only known you were going to do that... ! What did the automatics tell you?"
"Later, please, Miss Clay," Reedeth said in a frigid tone. "Right now I have some business to clear up with Mr. Flamen, which shouldn't have been necessary, and as soon as that's straightened out I propose to go home. My arrangements for the weekend have been completely fouled up by what I can only call an absolute lack of consideration."
"Jesus God," Conroy said, before the bridling Flamen could respond to the accusation. "Jim, you sound so much like Mogshack I could believe you've been taking lessons. Hold it!" he added, raising a hand to forestall a snappish answer from the younger man. "I've been talking with Flamen for the past hour or more and I agree he was entirely too casual about accepting responsibility for our knee friend here.
But,
on the other hand, you didn't make it very clear to him just what he was committing himself to, did you? You were in such a hurry to move Madison along—"
"Hurry! Lord, he's been stuck in here for months longer than necessary!"
"No excuse for not being thorough," Conroy said, in precisely the tone Reedeth remembered from bis student days. "There's never an excuse for not being thorough, especially when nowadays you can have all
the
fiddling little routine details comped out automatically. That's what computers are properly used for," he parenthesized to Flamen. "You seem to think I don't appreciate them, but believe me in their right place they're indispensable. The trouble is that people simply don't treat them the way they ought to. Now, Jim!" He leaned forward earnestly. "Let me ask you a question that I hope you'll answer honestly, and if you do you won't be in such a hurry any longer to head for home."
Reedeth sighed. "Very well, go ahead."
"Are you happy working under Mogshack?"
There was a pause. Suddenly Reedeth gave a forced laugh. "All right, I won't duck that one. No, I'm not— not any longer."
"Why not?"
Another pause, longer. During it Reedeth's eyes moved to Madison's face and stayed there, fascinated.
"I guess," he said at last, the words grinding out as though being dragged over gravel, "because I'm no longer convinced that the patients "discharged from here are properly cured."
Flamen tensed visibly, and his expression shifted from irritable to excited.
"In what sense are they not properly cured?" Conroy said, with the inflection he might have used to encourage a student to reach the logical conclusion of some argument he had propounded in an essay.
"I don't know!" Reedeth jumped to his feet and paced restlessly up and down the office. "It's just that. . . Well, over the past few days we've had two cases that troubled me dreadfully, and it was Miss Clay's oracles that tipped the balance in my mind."
Lyla's turn to draw herself up alertly. Not noticing, Reedeth ploughed on.
"Mrs. Flamen was one of them. She'd responded excellently, of course, or else she wouldn't have been released, but—but this wasn't so much
treatment
as
indulgence.
And I honestly don't think we'd have realized unless Mr. Flamen had complained about the coldness with which she behaved to him. So I've been wondering . . ." The words trailed away into a shrug. "And the other was Madison's," he concluded lamely.
"Flamen," Conroy said with an air of satisfaction, "I think you may have a proposal to put to Jim Reedeth now."
Flamen shaped words with his lips, canceled them, and shot out a hand towards the desketary. "Ah—doctor! Is what we say monitored by that thing and stored in the hospital data banks?"
Reedeth passed a weary hand through his hair, tousling it. "I could arrange for it not to be," he muttered. "Madison worked it over for me a few days ago, and it's not exactly standard any longer."
"Ah-hah!" Conroy said. "I got hints about that from Flamen too, on the way here. So make the arrangements, Jim, and hear what Flamen wants to say to you."
Reedeth gave the desketary a curt order, and glanced at Madison.
"Will that fix it?"
Madison looked ever so slightly uncomfortable; by contrast with his previous imperturbability, it was as though a mountain had trembled. He .said, "I guess so, doc."
"Damn it, you altered the thing—you must know!" Reedeth blurted, then mastered himself with an effort. "Sorry," he said. "I'm a bit on edge today. Okay, Mr. Flamen, let's hear what you want to tell me."
"You've probably figured out already that I'm sufficiently worried about my wife to have her independently packled by Dr. Conroy," Flamen said slowly. "I did warn you that if she was prematurely discharged I'd take some such steps, didn't I? But if it does turn out that she's suffered at the hands of your director, I won't stop with a simple suit for damages. I'll do my utmost to have him impeached and dismissed."
