The Man Who Lost the Sea (20 page)

Lashed to the projecting lower end of the main thrust control is a silver can with a small cylinder at the near end
.

FLANNEL:
(pointing stupidly)
Is that … that the same thing that …

KEARSARGE: A little smaller, but then you don’t need as much cyanide for a boat.

FLANNEL:
(angry)
Who the hell put it there? You?

KEARSARGE: Not me, feller. I just found it.

HOROWITZ: It’s been there all along, Flannel. Kearsarge is right: you belong to the club too. You sure it was Heri Gonza told you to take the boat?

FLANNEL: Sure it was. He couldn’t have nothing to do with this.
(Suddenly it hits him)
Jesus! I mighta …

HOROWITZ: We’ll have plenty of time to talk this over. Let’s pack up the testing stuff and haul out of here.

FLANNEL:
(to no one)
Jesus.

Heri Gonza lay back in the projection room and sipped his beer and watched the stock shot of a Fafnir taking off from a rock plain. “You really get all that glop out of that book, Burcke m’ boy?”

“Every bit of it,” said Burcke, watching the screen.

“You know how it is in space, a fellow’s got to do something with his time. Sometimes he writes, and sometimes it’s fairy tales, and sometimes you can get a pretty good show out of a fairy tale. But where you do that, you call it a fairy tale. Follow me?”

“Yup.”

“This was really what went out on the air tonight?”

“Sure is.”

Very, very softly, Heri Gonza said, “Poor Burcke. Poor, poor ol’

Burcke.”

Close-up, hands turning pages in rough logbook. Pull back to show Burcke with book. He looks up, and when he speaks his voice is solemn
.

BURCKE: Time to think, time to talk it over. Time to put all the pieces in the same place at the same time, and push them against each other to see what fits.

Fade to black; but it is not black after all: instead, starry space. Pan across to pick up ship, a silver fish with a scarlet tail. Zoom in fast, dissolve through hull, discovering foredeck. The four lounge around, really relaxed, willing to think before speaking, and to speak carefully. Horowitz and Kearsarge sit at the table ignoring a chessboard. Iris is stretched on the deck with a rolled-up specimen sack under her head. Flannel kneels before a spread of Canfield solitaire. Horowitz is watching him
.

HOROWITZ: I like to think about Flannel.

FLANNEL: Think what?

HOROWITZ: Oh … the alternatives. The “ifs.” What would Flannel do if this had been different, or that.

FLANNEL: There’s no sense in that kind of thinkin’—if this, if that. This happened, or that happened, and that’s all there is to it. You got anything special in mind?

HOROWITZ: I have, as a matter of fact. Given that you had a job to do, namely to cut out and leave us with our cyanide bomb at the start of the trip—

FLANNEL:
(aroused)
I tol’ you and
tol’
you that wasn’t a job. I didn’t know about the damn cyanide.

HOROWITZ: Suppose you had known about it. Would you have come? If you had come, would you have tipped us off about it? And here’s the question I thought of: if the first bomb had failed—which it did—and there had been no second bomb to tell you that you were a member of the Exit Club, would you have tried to do the job on the way home?

FLANNEL: I was thinkin’ about it, about what to do.

HOROWITZ: And what did you decide?

FLANNEL: Nothin’. You found the bomb in the boat so I just stopped thinkin’.

IRIS:
(suddenly)
Why? Did that really make a difference?

FLANNEL: All the diff’nce in the world. Heri Gonza tol’ me to get in the lifeboat before fourteen an’ a half hours and come back and tell him how things went. Now if there was just
your
bomb, could be that Heri Gonza wanted you knocked off. There was an accident and it din’t knock you off, and here I am working for him and wonderin’ if I shoon’t take up where the bomb left off.

IRIS: Then we found the second bomb, and you changed your mind. Why?

FLANNEL:
(exasperated)
Whata ya all, simple or somepin? Heri Gonza,
he tol’ me to come back and tell him how it went
. If he tells me that an’ then plants a bomb on me, how could I get back to tell him? A man’s a fool to tell a guy to do somethin’ an’ then fix it so he can’t. He’s no fool, Heri Gonza I mean, an’ you know it. Well then: if he din’t plant my bomb, he din’t plant your bomb, because anyone can see they was planted by the same guy. An’ if he din’t plant your bomb, he don’t want you knocked off, so I stopped thinkin’ about it. Is that simple enough for ya?

IRIS: I don’t know that it’s simple, but it sure is beautiful.

HOROWITZ: Well, one of us is satisfied of Heri Gonza’s good intentions. Though I still don’t see what sense it made to go to all the trouble of putting you aboard just to have you get off and go back right at the start.

FLANNEL: Me neither. But do I have to understand everything he tells me to do? I done lots of things for him I didn’t know what they was about. You too, Kearsarge.

KEASARGE: That’s right. I drive this can from here to there, and from there to yonder, and I don’t notice anything else, but if I notice it I forget it, but if I don’t forget it I don’t talk about it. That’s the way he likes it and we get along fine.

IRIS:
(forcefully)
I think Heri Gonza wanted us all killed.

HOROWITZ: What’s that—intuition? And … shouldn’t that read “wants”?

IRIS: “Wants,” yes. He wants us all killed. No, it’s not intuition. It formulates. Almost. There’s a piece missing.

FLANNEL: Ah, y’r out of y’r mind.

KEARSARGE: Doubled.

HOROWITZ:
(good naturedly)
Shut up, both of you. Go on with that, Iris. Maybe by you it formulates, but by me it intuits. Go on.

IRIS: Well, let’s use as a working hypothesis that Heri Gonza wants us dead—us four. He wants more than that: he wants us to disappear from the cosmos—no bodies, no graves, no nothing.

KEARSARGE:
But why?

HOROWITZ: Just you listen. We start with the murders and finish with the why. You’ll see.

IRIS: Well then, the ship will do the removal. The cyanide—both cyanides—do the actual killing, and it hits so fast that the ship keeps blasting, out and out until the fuel is gone, and forever after that. We three are on it; Flannel crashes in a small craft and if anybody wonders about it, they don’t wonder much. Is there any insignia on that boat, by the way, Kearsarge?

KEARSARGE: Always.

IRIS: Go look, will you? Thanks. Now, what about the traces we leave behind us? Well, we took off illegally so notified no one and filed no clearances. You, George, were already in hiding from Heri Gonza’s persecutions; Kearsarge here is so frequently away on indeterminate trips of varying lengths that he would soon be forgotten; Flannel here—no offense, Flannel—I don’t think anyone would notice that you’re gone for good. As for me, Heri Gonza himself had me plant a story about going off secretly for some solitary research for a year or so. What’s the matter, Kearsarge?

KEARSARGE: I wouldn’ta believed it. No insignia. Filed off and sanded smooth and painted. Numbers off the thrust block. Trade-name off the dash, even. I … I wouldn’ta believed it.

HOROWITZ: Now you’d better listen to the lady.

IRIS: No insignia. So even poor Flannel’s little smashup is thoroughly covered. Speaking of Flannel, I say again that it was stretching credibility to put him aboard that way—unless you assume that he was put aboard like the rest of us, to be done away with. I certainly came under false pretenses: Heri Gonza not only told me he needed an astrogator for the trip, which he didn’t, but had me bone up on the subject.

Now we can take a quick look at motive. George Horowitz here is the most obvious. He has for a long time been a thorn in the flesh of that comedian. Not only has he concluded that Heri Gonza doesn’t really want to find a cure for iapetitis—he says so very loudly and as often as he can. In addition, George is always on the very verge of whipping the disease, something that frightens Heri Gonza so much that he’s actually hoarding patients so George can’t get to them. Also, he doesn’t
like
George.

Why kill Flannel? Is he tired of you, Flannel? Did you boggle something he asked you to do?

FLANNEL: He don’t have to kill me, Miss Iris. He could fire me any time. I’d feel real bad, but I wouldn’t bother him none. He knows that.

IRIS: Then you must know too much. You must know something about him so dangerous he won’t feel safe until you’re dead.

FLANNEL: So help me lady, there ain’t a single thing like that I know about him. Not one. Not that I know of.

HOROWITZ: There’s the key, Iris. He doesn’t know he knows it.

KEASARGE: Then that’s me too, because if there’s a single thing I know that he’d have to kill me for then I don’t know what it is.

IRIS: You said “key.” Lock and key. A combination of things. Like if you put what Flannel knows with what Kearsarge knows, they will be dangerous to Heri Gonza.

Flannel and Kearsarge gape at each other blankly and simultaneously shrug
.

HOROWITZ: I can give you one example of a piece of knowledge we all have that would be dangerous to him. We now know that the disease virus does not originate on Iapetus. Which means that poor Swope was not responsible for bringing it to earth, and, further, the conclusion that the little Tresak girl—the first case—caught it from the wreckage of the space ship, was unwarranted.

FLANNEL: I brung that picture of that little girl standing in the wreck, I brung it to Heri Gonza. He liked it.

IRIS: What made you do that?

FLANNEL: I done it all the time. He told me to.

HOROWITZ: Bring him pictures of little girls?

FLANNEL: Girls, boys … but pretty ones. I got to know just the ones he would like. He liked to use ’em on his show.

Iris and Horowitz lock glances for one horrified second, and then pounce all but bodily on Flannel
.

IRIS: Did you ever show him a picture of any child who later contracted the disease?

FLANNEL:
(startled)
Wh … I dunno.

IRIS:
(shouting)
Think! Think!

HOROWITZ:
(also shouting)
You did! You did! The Tresak girl—that photograph of her was taken before she had the disease!

FLANNEL: Well yeah, her. And that little blond one he had on the telethon that din’t speak no English from Est’onia, but you’re not lettin’ me think.

FLANNEL: What?

KEARSARGE: I remember that little blond girl. I flew her from Esthonia.

IRIS: Before or after she had the disease?

KEARSARGE:
(shrugging)
The kind of thing I never noticed. She … she looked all right to me. Real pretty little kid.

IRIS: How long before the telethon was that?

KEARSARGE: Week or so. Wait, I can tell you to the day.
(He rises from the chess table and goes to a locker, from which he brings a notebook. He leafs.)
Here it is. Nine days.

IRIS:
(faintly)
He said, on the telethon, three days … first symptoms.

HOROWITZ:
(excitedly)
May I see that?
(Takes book, riffles it, throws it on the table, runs to lab, comes back with cardboard file, fans through it, comes up with folder.)
Iris, take Kearsarge’s book. Right. Now did he fly to Belem on the ninth of May?

IRIS: The sixth.

HOROWITZ: Rome, around March twelfth.

IRIS: March twelfth, March—here it is. The eleventh.

HOROWITZ: One more. Indianapolis, middle of June.

IRIS: Exactly. The fifteenth. What is that you have there?

He throws it down in front of her
.

HOROWITZ: Case files. Arranged chronologically by known or estimated date of first symptom, in an effort to find some pattern of incidence. No wonder there was never any pattern. God in Heaven, if he wanted a clinic in Australia, cases would occur in Australia.

FLANNEL:
(bewildered)
I don’t know what you all are talkin’ about.

KEARSARGE:
(grimly)
I think I do.

IRIS: Now do you think you’re worth murdering—you who can actually place him on the map, at the time some child was stricken, every single time?

KEARSARGE:
(huskily)
I’m worth murdering. I … didn’t know.

FLANNEL:
(poring over the case file)
Here’s that one I seen in Bellefontaine that time, she had on a red dress. And this little guy here, he got his picture in a magazine I found on the street in Little Rock and I had to go clear to St. Louis to find him.

Kearsarge hops up on a chair and kicks Flannel in the head
.

FLANNEL:
(howling)
Hooo—wow! What you wanna hafta do that for? Ya little …

HOROWITZ: Cut it out, you two.
Cut it out!
That’s better. We don’t have room for that in here. Leave him alone, Kearsarge. His time will come. Heaven help me, Iris, it’s been in front of my nose right from the start, and I didn’t see it. I even told you once that I was so close because I could synthesize a virus which would actually cause the disease—but it wouldn’t maintain it? I had this
idée fixe
that it was an extra-terrestrial disease. Why? Because it acted like a synthetic
and no natural terran virus does
. Serum from those kids always acted that way—it would cause a form of iapetitis which would fade out in three months or less.
All you have to do to cure the damn thing is to stop injecting it!

IRIS: Oh, the man, the lovely clever man and his family all over the world, the little darlings, the prettiest ones he could find, whom he never, never failed to visit regularly … 
(Suddenly, she is crying)
I was so s-sorry for him! Remember the night he … tore himself open to tell us he c-couldn’t have k-kids of his own?

KEARSARGE: Who you talking about—Heri Gonza? For Pete’s sake, he got an ex-wife and three kids he pays money to keep ’em
in Spain, and another ex-wife in Paris France with five kids, three his, and that one in Pittsburgh—man, that comedian’s always in trouble. He
hates
kids—I mean really hates ’em.