The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories (51 page)

There was silence.

“You know a lot,” Harvey said finally. “Where’d you learn this, anyhow?”

“From listening to the phone and the TV. But I don’t know where the hospital is. It could even be off Earth, on Luna or on Mars, even back where she came from. I got the impression she’s extremely ill. Johnny’s abandoning her set her back greatly.” He gazed at his employer somberly. “That’s all I know, Phil.”

“Do you think Johnny Barefoot knows where she is?”

“I doubt it.”

Pondering, Harvey said, “I’ll bet she tries to call him. I’ll bet he either knows or will know, soon. If we only could manage to put a snoop-circuit on his phone… get his calls routed through here.”

“But the phones,” St. Cyr said wearily. “All it is now—just the gibberish. The interference from Louis.” He wondered what became of Archimedean Enterprises if Kathy was declared unable to manage her affairs, if she was forcibly committed. Very complicated, depending on whether Earth law or—

Harvey was saying, “We can’t find her and we can’t find the body. And meanwhile the Convention’s on, and they’ll nominate that wretched Gam, that creature of Louis’s. And next we know, he’ll be President.” He eyed St. Cyr with antagonism. “So far you haven’t done me much good, Claude.”

“We’ll try all the hospitals. But there’s tens of thousands of them. And if it isn’t in this area it could be anywhere.” He felt helpless.
Around and around we go,
he thought,
and we get nowhere.

Well, we can keep monitoring the TV,
he decided.
That’s some help.

“I’m going to the Convention,” Harvey announced. “I’ll see you later. If you should come up with something—which I doubt—you can get in touch with me there.” He strode to the door, and a moment later St. Cyr found himself alone.

Doggone it,
St. Cyr said to himself.
What’ll I do now? Maybe I ought to go to the Convention, too.
But there was one more mortuary he wanted to check; his men had been there, but he also wanted to give it a try personally. It was just the sort that Louis would have liked, run by an unctuous individual named, revoltingly, Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang, which meant, in German, Herbert Beauty of the Bird’s Song—a fitting name for a man who ran the Beloved Brethren Mortuary in downtown Los Angeles, with branches in Chicago and New York and Cleveland.

When he reached the mortuary, Claude St. Cyr demanded to see Schoenheit von Vogelsang personally. The place was doing a rush business; Resurrection Day was just around the corner and the petite bourgeoisie, who flocked in great numbers to just such ceremonies, were lined up waiting to retrieve their half-lifer relatives.

“Yes sir,” Schoenheit von Vogelsang said, when at last he appeared at the counter in the mortuary’s business office. “You asked to speak to me.”

St. Cyr laid his business card down on the counter; the card still described him as legal consultant for Archimedean Enterprises. “I am Claude St. Cyr,” he declared. “You may have heard of me.”

Glancing at the card, Schoenheit von Vogelsang blanched and mumbled, “I give you my word, Mr. St. Cyr, we’re trying, we’re really trying. We’ve spent out of our own funds over a thousand dollars in trying to make contact with him; we’ve had high-gain equipment flown in from Japan where it was developed and made. And still no results.” Tremulously, he backed away from the counter. “You can come and see for yourself. Frankly, I believe someone’s doing it on purpose; a complete failure like this can’t occur naturally, if you see what I mean.”

St. Cyr said, “Let me see him.”

“Certainly.” The mortuary owner, pale and agitated, led the way through the building into the chill bin, until, at last, St. Cyr saw ahead the casket which had lain in state, the casket of Louis Sarapis. “Are you planning any sort of litigation?” the mortuary owner asked fearfully. “I assure you, we—”

“I’m here,” St. Cyr stated, “merely to take the body. Have your men load it onto a truck for me.”

“Yes, Mr. St. Cyr,” Herb Schoenheit von Vogelsang said in meek obedience; he waved two mortuary employees over and began giving them instructions. “Do you have a truck with you, Mr. St. Cyr?” he asked.

“You may provide it,” St. Cyr said, in a forbidding voice.

Shortly, the body in its casket was loaded onto a mortuary truck, and the driver turned to St. Cyr for instructions.

St. Cyr gave him Phil Harvey’s address.

“And the litigation,” Herb Schoenheit von Vogelsang was murmuring, as St. Cyr boarded the truck to sit beside the driver. “You don’t infer malpractice on our part, do you, Mr. St. Cyr? Because if you do—”

“The affair is closed as far as we’re concerned,” St. Cyr said to him laconically, and signaled the driver to drive off.

As soon as they left the mortuary, St. Cyr began to laugh.

“What strikes you so funny?” the mortuary driver asked.

“Nothing,” St. Cyr said, still chuckling.

When the body in its casket, still deep in its original quick-pack, had been left off at Harvey’s home and the driver had departed, St. Cyr picked up the telephone and dialed. But he found himself unable to get through to the Convention Hall. All he heard, for his trouble, was the weird distant drumming, the monotonous litany of Louis Sarapis—he hung up, disgusted but at the same time grimly determined.

We’ve had enough of that,
St. Cyr said to himself. /
won’t wait for Harvey’s approval; I don’t need it.

Searching the living room he found, in a desk drawer, a heat gun. Pointing it at the casket of Louis Sarapis he pressed the trigger.

The envelope of quick-pack steamed up, the casket itself fizzed as the plastic melted. Within, the body blackened, shriveled, charred away at last into a baked, coal-like clinker, small and nondescript.

Satisfied, St. Cyr returned the heat gun to the desk drawer.

Once more he picked up the phone and dialed.

In his ear the monotonous voice intoned, “…no one but Gam can do it; Gam’s the man what am—good slogan for you, Johnny. Gam’s the man what am; remember that. I’ll do the talking. Give me the mike and I’ll tell them; Gam’s the man what am. Gam’s—”

Claude St. Cyr slammed down the phone, turned to the blackened deposit that had been Louis Sarapis; he gaped mutely at what he could not comprehend. The voice, when St. Cyr turned on the television set, emanated from that, too, just as it had been doing; nothing had changed.

The voice of Louis Sarapis was not originating in the body.
Because the body was gone. There simply was no connection between them.

Seating himself in a chair, Claude St. Cyr got out his cigarettes and shakily lit up, trying to understand what this meant. It seemed almost as if he had it, almost had the explanation.

But not quite.

By monorail—he had left his ‘copter at the Beloved Brethren Mortuary—Claude St. Cyr numbly made his way to Convention Hall. The place, of course, was packed; the noise was terrible. But he managed to obtain the services of a robot page; over the public address system, Phil Harvey’s presence was requested in one of the side rooms used as meeting places by delegations wishing to caucus in secret.

Harvey appeared, disheveled from shoving through the dense pack of spectators and delegates. “What is it, Claude?” he asked, and then he saw his attorney’s face. “You better tell me,” he said quietly.

St. Cyr blurted, “The voice we hear. It isn’t Louis! It’s someone else trying to sound like Louis!”

“How do you know?”

He told him.

Nodding, Harvey said, “And it definitely was Louis’s body you destroyed; there was no deceit there at the mortuary—you’re positive of that.”

“I’m not positive,” St. Cyr said. “But I think it was; I believe it now and I believed it at the time.” It was too late to find out now, in any case, not enough remained of the body for such an analysis to be successfully made.

“But who could it be, then?” Harvey said. “My God, it’s coming to us from beyond the solar system—could it be nonterrestrials of some kind? Some sort of echo or mockery, a non-living reaction unfamiliar to us? An inert process without intent?”

St. Cyr laughed. “You’re babbling, Phil. Cut it out.”

Nodding, Harvey said, “Whatever you say, Claude. If you think it’s someone here—”

“I don’t know,” St. Cyr said candidly. “But I’d guess it’s someone right on this planet, someone who knew Louis well enough to have introjected his characteristics sufficiently thoroughly to imitate them.” He was silent, then. That was as far as he could carry his logical processes… beyond that he saw nothing. It was a blank, and a frightening one at that.

There is,
he thought,
an element of the deranged in it. What we took to be decay—it’s more a form of madness than degeneration. Or is madness itself degener
ation?
He did not know; he wasn’t trained in the field of psychiatry, except regarding its legal aspects. And the legal aspects had no application, here.

“Has anyone nominated Gam yet?” he asked Harvey.

“Not yet. It’s expected to come sometime today, though. There’s a delegate from Montana who’ll do it, the rumor is.”

“Johnny Barefoot is here?”

“Yes.” Harvey nodded. “Busy as can be, lining up delegates. In and out of the different delegations, very much in evidence. No sign of Gam, of course. He won’t come in until the end of the nominating speech and then of course all hell will break loose. Cheering and parading and waving banners… the Gam supporters are all prepared.”

“Any indication of—” St. Cyr hesitated. “What we’ve assumed to be Louis? His presence?”
Or its presence,
he thought.
Whatever it is.

“None as yet,” Harvey said.

“I think we’ll hear from it,” St. Cyr said. “Before the day is over.”

Harvey nodded; he thought so, too.

“Are you afraid of it?” St. Cyr asked.

“Sure,” Harvey said. “A thousand times more so than ever, now that we don’t even know who or what it is.”

“You’re right to take that attitude,” St. Cyr said. He felt the same way.

“Perhaps we should tell Johnny,” Harvey said.

St. Cyr said, “Let him find out on his own.”

“All right, Claude,” Harvey said. “Anything you say. After all, it was you who finally found Louis’s body; I have complete faith in you.”

In a way,
St. Cyr thought,
I wish I hadn’t found it. I wish I didn ‘t know what I know now; we were better off believing it was old Louis talking to us from every phone, newspaper and TV set.

That was bad—but this is far worse. Although,
he thought,
it seems to me that the answer is there, somewhere, just waiting.

I must try,
he told himself.
Try to get it. TRY!

Off by himself in a side room, Johnny Barefoot tensely watched the events of the Convention on closed-circuit TV. The distortion, the invading presence from one light-week away, had cleared for a time, and he could see and hear the delegate from Montana delivering the nominating speech for Alfonse Gam.

He felt tired. The whole process of the Convention, its speeches and parades, its tautness, grated on his nerves, ran contrary to his disposition.
So damn much show,
he thought. Display for what? If Gam wanted to gain the nomination he could get it, and all the rest of this was purposeless. His own thoughts were on Kathy Egmont Sharp.

He had not seen her since her departure for U.C. Hospital in San Francisco. At this point he had no idea of her condition, whether she had responded to therapy or not.

The deep intuition could not be evaded that she had not. How sick really was Kathy? Probably very sick, with or without drugs; he felt that strongly. Perhaps she would never be discharged from U.C. Hospital; he could imagine that.

On the other hand—if she wanted out, he decided,
she would find a way to get out.
That he intuited, too, even more strongly.

So it was up to her. She had committed herself, gone into the hospital voluntarily. And she would come out—if she ever did—the same way. No one could compel Kathy… she was simply not that sort of person. And that, he realized, could well be a symptom of the illness-process.

The door to the room opened. He glanced up from the TV screen. And saw Claude St. Cyr standing in the entrance. St. Cyr held a heat gun in his hand, pointed at Johnny. He said, “Where’s Kathy?”

“I don’t know,” Johnny said. He got slowly, warily, to his feet.

“You do. I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me.”

“Why?” he said, wondering what had brought St. Cyr to this point, this extreme behavior.

St. Cyr said, “Is it on Earth?” Still holding the gun pointed at Johnny he came toward him.

“Yes,” Johnny said, with reluctance.

“Give me the name of the city.”

“What are you going to do?” Johnny said. “This isn’t like you, Claude; you used to always work within the law.”

St. Cyr said, “I think the voice is Kathy. I know it’s not Louis, now; we have that to go on but beyond that it’s just a guess.
Kathy is the only one I know deranged enough, deteriorated enough.
Give me the name of the hospital.”

“The only way you could know it isn’t Louis,” Johnny said, “would be to destroy the body.”

“That’s right,” St. Cyr said, nodding.

Then you have,
Johnny realized.
You found the correct mortuary; you got to Herb Schoenheit van Vogehang.
So that was that.

The door to the room burst open again; a group of cheering delegates, Gam supporters, marched in, blowing horns and hurling streamers, carrying huge hand-painted placards. St. Cyr turned toward them, waving his gun at them—and Johnny Barefoot sprinted past the delegates, to the door and out into the corridor.

He ran down the corridor and a moment later emerged at the great central hall in which Gam’s demonstration was in full swing. From the loudspeakers mounted at the ceiling a voice boomed over and over.