Our Friends From Frolix 8 (19 page)

The MPs, however, were not rabbits. He made out the kind of grip they had on her – where they held her and how tightly. She couldn’t move. And they would outlast her.

‘I could have you tranquilized again,’ he said to her, in a conciliatory tone. ‘But I know how you hate it.’

‘You white bastard,’ she said.

‘“White”?’ He did not understand. ‘But there’s no more white and yellow and black. Why do you say white?’

‘Because you’re the king of the tracks.’

One of the MPs said brusquely, ‘“White” is still an insult in certain low-income strata.’

‘Oh,’ he said, nodding. He was picking up thoughts from her mind, now, and what he found amazed him. On the surface she was straining, taut, stationary only because four MPs held her. But inside—

A frightened, small girl, fighting in the manner of a child terrified of, say, going to the dentist. An irrational, abreactive return to prerational mentational processes.
She does not see us as human
, he realized. She distinguishes us as vague shapes, dragging her one way, then, almost at once, another, then doing this: forcing her – four big professional men forcing her – to stand in one spot, for God knows how long
and what for. Her mentational processes were, he estimated, on about the three-year-old level. But perhaps he could get somewhere talking with her. Perhaps he could drain off some of her fear, allowing her thoughts to resume a more mature quality.

‘My name is Willis Gram,’ he said to her. ‘And do you know what I’ve just done?’ He smiled at her, raised his hand, pointed at her, augmented his smile. ‘I’ll bet you can’t guess.’

She shook her head. Briefly. Once.

‘I’ve opened up all those relocation camps on the moon and in Utah, and all the people inside will come out.’

Her eyes huge and luminous, she continued to stare. But, in her thoughts, the data registered; it sent bewildering flows of psychic energy traveling throughout her cerebral cortex as she tried to understand.

‘And we’re not going to arrest anyone anymore,’ he said. ‘And so you’re free.’ At this, a wave of oceanic relief flooded through her mind; her eyes dimmed and then one tear spilled out, sliding down her cheek.

‘Can—’ She swallowed with difficulty and her voice shook. ‘Can I see Mr. Appleton?’

‘You can see anyone you want. Nick Appleton is free, too; we kicked him out of here two hours ago. He probably went home. He has a wife and child whom he’s very fond of. He’s undoubtedly gone back to them.’

‘Yes,’ she said distantly. ‘I met them. The woman is a bitch.’

‘But his thoughts about her – I spent quite a bit of time with him today. Fundamentally, he loves her; he just wants to have a bit of wild oat sowing… you realize I’m a telepath; I know things about other people that a non—’

‘But you can lie,’ Charlotte said, between clenched teeth.

‘I’m not lying,’ he said, although, as he well knew, he was.

Charlotte said, now suddenly calm, ‘Am I really free to go?’

‘There is one matter.’ Gram felt his way carefully, his mind tuned to her thoughts, trying to pick them up before they turned into speech or action. ‘You realize that we gave you a medical examination after PSS occifers brought you
out of the ruins of the 16th Avenue printing plant… do you remember that?’

‘A – medical exam?’ She looked at him uncertainly. ‘No, I don’t remember. All I remember is being dragged by my arms through the building, with my head hitting the floor, outdoors, and then—’

‘Hence the physical exam,’ Gram said. ‘We did this with everyone we captured at 16th Avenue. We also made cursory psychological exams. You registered rather badly; you were completely traumatized and in nearly a catatonic stupor.’

‘So?’ She eyed him mercilessly. The hawk-stare, it had never left her eyes.

‘You need bed rest.’

‘And I’m going to get it here?’

‘This building,’ Gram said, ‘contains probably the finest psychiatric facilities in the world. After a few days of rest and therapy—’

The hawk eyes flamed up; thoughts shot through her mind, emanations from the thalamus which he could not follow, and then, all at once, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of the last trumpet, she contorted herself, limp, then, stiff, then spinning. Spinning! All four MPs had lost their holds on her; they reached out, and one of them brought forth a plastic club weighted with shot.

She backed lightning-fast, hunched over, squirming, opened the door behind her, ran down the hall. A PSS occifer, coming toward her, saw Willis Gram and the four MPs; sizing up the situation, he made a grab for her as she shot past him. He managed to get a grip on her right wrist… as he pulled her round she kicked him in the testicles. And he let go. She plunged on, toward the wide entrance doors of the building. No one else tried to stop her — not after they had seen the PSS occifer crumple to the floor in acute pain.

One of the four MPs brought out a 2.56 Richardson laser pistol, raised it, barrel ceiling-pointed. ‘Shall I snuff her, sir?’ he asked Willis Gram. ‘I can get off one good shot if you tell me immediately.’

‘I can’t decide,’ Gram said.

‘Then I won’t, sir.’

‘Okay. Don’t.’ Willis Gram moved back into the office, slowly seated himself on the bed; he hunched forward, staring sightlessly at the patterns of the flooring.

‘She’s flurped, sir,’ one of the MPs said to him. ‘I mean, she’s witless. Completely snurled.’

Gram said hoarsely, ‘I’ll tell you what she is — she’s a gutter rat.’ He had picked that phrase out of Nick Appleton’s mind. ‘A real one.’ I can sure pick ’em, he thought. And so can he.

He told me, Gram thought, that he would see her again. And he will; she’ll locate him somehow. He’ll never go back to his wife.

Rising, he heavily made his way over to Margaret Plow’s desk in the inner work cubicle. ‘May I use your fone?’ he asked.

‘You can use my fone; in fact you can use my—’

‘Just the fone,’ he said. He dialed Director Barnes’ private priority line; it would link up with Barnes wherever he was: in the bathroom taking a squat, on the freeway, even at his desk.

‘Yes, Council Chairman.’

‘I want one of your — special troops. Maybe two.’

‘Who?’ Barnes said stolidly. ‘I mean, who do you want them to snuff?’

‘Citizen 3XX24J.’

‘You’re serious? This isn’t a whim, a mood? You really mean it? Remember, Council Chairman, you just now released him on the basis of him receiving complete amnesty along with everybody else.’

Gram said, ‘He took Charlotte away from me.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Barnes said. ‘She’s gone.’

‘Four MPs couldn’t hold her; she becomes a maniac when she’s trapped. I caught something in her mind about an elevator once, in her childhood, which wouldn’t open; she was all alone. I think she was about eight. So she’s got some variation of claustrophobia. Anyhow, she can’t be restrained.’

‘That’s hardly 3XX24J’s fault,’ Barnes said.

‘But,’ Gram said, ‘it’s to him she’s going.’

‘Should it be done quietly? And made to look like an
accident? Or do you simply want the special troopers to merely walk in and do it and then walk out again, despite who sees them?’

‘The latter,’ Gram said. ‘Like a ritualistic execution. And the freedom he’s enjoying now’ — and, he thought, his moment of joy when he finds Charlotte again — ‘that’s going to have to serve as the last meal they give condemned prisoners.’

‘That isn’t done any more, Council Chairman.’

‘I think I will add one stipulation for your troopers,’ Gram said. ‘I want him snuffed while
she is there.
I want her to see it happen.’

‘All right, all right,’ Barnes said, nettled. ‘Anything else? What’s the latest about Provoni? One of the TV stations said that a picket ship detected the
Gray Dinosaur.
True?’

‘We’ll deal with it when we come to it,’ Gram said.

‘Council Chairman, that statement makes no sense.’

‘Okay, we’ll deal with that when we come to that.’

Barnes said, ‘I’ll let you know when my people have completed the exercise. With your permission, I’ll send three men, one to have a tranquilizing gun ready for use on her, if, as you say, she becomes maniacal at times.’

‘If she fights you,’ Gram said, ‘don’t hurt her. His snuffdom will be enough. Goodbye.’ He hung up.

Margaret Plow said, ‘I thought you shot them afterward.’

‘Girls, yes. Their men-friends, before.’

‘How candid you are today, Council Chairman. There must be a terrible strain on you, the business with Provoni. That third message; he said six days. Just six days! And you’re opening the camps and granting the general amnesty. It’s too bad Cordon isn’t alive to see this day; too bad his kidney ailment or liver ailment or whatever it was caused him to succumb just hours before—’ She stopped abruptly.

‘“Just hours before victory was in sight,”’ he finished for her, reading the rest direct, like an iron oxide tape, from her basically empty mind. ‘Well, he was a bit of a mystic. Maybe he knew.’ Yes, maybe he did, Gram thought. He was an odd person. May be he’ll rise from the dead. Oh, well, hell — we’ll simply say he never died; it was a cover story. We wanted Provoni to think—

Good God, he thought. What am I thinking? Nobody’s risen from the dead in 2100 years; they’re not going to start to now.

After Appleton’s death, he asked himself, do I want to make a one final try for Charlotte Boyer? If I could get my government psychiatrists working on her, they could iron out that feral streak, make her passive — as a woman should be. And yet — he liked her fire. Maybe that’s the very thing about her that makes me find her attractive, he thought, that gutter rat streak, as Appleton put it. And maybe that’s what hooked Appleton. Many men like violent women; I wonder why? Not merely strong women, or stubborn or opinionated, but simply
wild.

I have to think about Provoni, he told himself. Instead of this.

Twenty-four hours later, a fourth message came from the
Gray Dinosaur
, monitored by the huge radio telescope on Mars.

Certainly terse, Willis Gram thought, as he studied the message in written form. ‘And we haven’t been able to transmit back to them?’ he asked General Hefele, who had brought him the news.

‘I think we’re reaching him, but he’s not listening, either due to faulty circuitry in his receiving apparatus or due to his unwillingness to negotiate with us.’

‘When he is approximately one hundred astronomical units out,’ Gram asked, ‘can’t you get him with a cluster-missile? One of those that is tropic to—’ He gestured.

‘To life,’ General Hefele said. ‘We have sixty-four types of missiles we can try; I’ve already had their carrier-ships deploy them in the general area in which we expect to encounter the ship.’

‘You don’t know of any “general area in which we expect to encounter the ship”. He could have come out of hyper-space anywhere.’

‘Then let’s say we have all our hardware available for use, once the
Dinosaur
is spotted. Maybe he’s bluffing. Maybe he’s come back alone. Exactly as he went, ten years ago.’

‘No,’ Gram said cannily. ‘His ability to remain in hyper-space in that old 2198 tub. No, his ship has been rebuilt. And not by any technology we know.’ A further idea struck him. ‘God — he, he and the
Dinosaur
, may be
inside
the creature; it may have wrapped itself around the ship. So of course the hull didn’t disintegrate. Provoni may be like some little internal parasite in the nonhumanoid entity, but one he’s on good terms with. Symbiosis.’ The idea struck him as plausible. Nobody, humanoid or otherwise, ever did anything for nothing; he knew that as one of life’s verities, as sure as he knew his own name. ‘They’ll probably want our entire race, six billion Old Men and then us, to fuse with him in some kind of poly-encephalic jello. Think of that; how would you like that?’

‘Everyone of us, Old Men included, would fight that,’ General Hefele said quietly.

‘It doesn’t sound so bad to me,’ Gram said. ‘And I know, far better than you, what brain-fusion is like.’ You know what we telepaths do every few months, he thought. We get together somewhere and weave our minds into a vast composite mind, a single mentational organism that thinks with the power of five hundred, six hundred men and women. And it is our joy-time, for all of us. Even for me.

Only this way, Provoni’s way,
everyone
could be woven into the web.

But that might not be Provoni’s idea at all. And yet — he had caught something in the four messages, the use of the word ‘we’. A kind of concurrence between him and
it
seemed indicated. And in harmony, Gram thought. The messages, though terse, are frosty… as the kids say.

And the one he’s bringing is the vanguard for thousands, he said morbidly to himself.
Badger’s
crew, the first casualties. There ought to be an alloy plaque set up somewhere, honoring them. They weren’t afraid to take Provoni on; they dogged the
Dinosaur
and died in the attempt. Maybe with men with that courage we might fight and win after all.
And an inter-stellar war is hard to maintain – he had read that somewhere. Thinking this, he felt a trifle better.

Nicholas Appleton, after hours of fighting his way through crowds, managed to locate Denny Strong’s apartment building. He entered the elevator, ascended to the fiftieth floor.

He rapped on the door. Silence. And then her voice, Charley’s voice, came, ‘Who the fuck is it?’

‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘I knew you would come here.’ If Willis Gram wanted us not to see each other, he thought, he shouldn’t have let both of us go.

The door opened. There stood Charley in a striped red-and-black shirt, hoop trousers, living sandals… and she had on a good layer of makeup, including enormous lashes. Even though he knew they were fake, the eyelashes got through to him. ‘Yes?’ she asked.

Denny Strong appeared beside Charlotte Boyer. ‘Hi, Appleton,’ he said in a toneless voice.