Our Friends From Frolix 8 (4 page)

The central bedroom door opened and a slim, tall, well-dressed gentleman with a short beard strode briskly into the room, briefcase in hand. Horace Denfeld, who always dressed this way.

‘Do you know what I read in Eric Cordon’s mind just now?’ Gram said. ‘Subconsciously, he wishes he’d never joined the Under Men, and here he is, the leader of it – to the extent that they have a leader. I’m going to obliterate their existence, starting with Cordon. Do you approve of my ordering Cordon’s execution?’

Seating himself, Denfeld unzipped his briefcase. ‘According to Irma’s instructions, and my professional advice, we have changed several clauses – minor ones – in the separate maintenance agreement. Here.’ He handed a folio, a document, to Gram. ‘Take your time, Council Chairman.’

‘What will happen when Cordon is gone?’ Gram asked as he unfolded the legal size sheets of paper and began reading here and there; in particular he scanned the passages marked in red.

Denfeld said offhandedly, ‘I couldn’t even manage to guess, sir.’

‘“Minor clauses”,’ Gram mocked with bitterness as he read. ‘Jeez Christ, she’s upped the child support from two hundred pops a month to four.’ He shuffled among the pages, feeling the edges of his ears glow with wrath – and with stunned dismay. ‘And the alimony up from three thousand to five. And—’ He reached the last sheet; it was strewn with red lines and sums penciled in. ‘Half my travel expenses – she gets that. And
all
of what I make for paid speeches.’
His neck had become grimy and soggy with warm, stinging sweat.

‘But she’s allowing you to keep all your earnings from written material which you—’

‘There isn’t any written material. Who do you think I am, Eric Cordon?’ He tossed the papers brusquely onto the bed; for a time he sat steaming… partly from what he had just now read and partly because of the attorney, Horace Denfeld, who was a New Man; low as he was in the general New Man standings, Denfeld considered all Unusuals – including the Council Chairman – merely a pseudo evolvement. Gram could pick it up from Denfeld’s mind: that low, constant level of superiority and contempt.

Gram said, ‘I’ll have to think it over.’ I’ll show it to my own attorneys, he said to himself. The best government attorneys there are: those in the tax branch.

‘I want you to consider one thing, sir,’ Denfeld said. ‘In a way, it may seem to you that it’s unfair of Mrs. Gram to ask so—’ He searched for the word. ‘So large a share in your property.’

‘The house,’ Gram agreed. ‘And the four apartment buildings in Scranton, Pa. All that, and now this.’

‘But,’ Denfeld pointed out smoothly, his tongue flitting about his lips like a paper streamer dancing in the wind, ‘it is essential that your separating from your wife must at all costs be kept secret –
for yourself.
For the fact that a Council Chairman of the Extraordinary Committee For Public Safety cannot let a breath of… well, shall we say
la calugna
—’

‘What’s that?’

‘Scandal. There can’t be a scandal for any high-ranking Unusual or New Man anyhow, as you well know. But this, plus your position—’

‘I’ll resign,’ Gram grated, ‘before I sign that. Five thousand pops alimony a month. She’s insane.’ He raised his head and scrutinized Denfeld. ‘What happens to a woman when she’s getting a separate maintenance or a divorce? She – they – want everything, nailed down or otherwise. The house, the apartments, the car, all the pops in the world—’ God, he
thought, and rubbed his forehead wearily. To one of his servants he said, ‘Get me my coffee.’

‘Yes sir.’ The aide fiddled with the coffee maker, handed him his black, strong espresso cup.

To the aide, and to everyone in the room, Gram said, appealing to them, ‘What can I do? She’s got me.’ He placed the folio of documents in the drawer of his bedside desk. ‘There’s nothing more to discuss,’ he said to Denfeld. ‘My attorneys will let you know my decision.’ He glowered at Denfeld, whom he did not like at all. ‘Now I have other business.’ He nodded to an aide, who put his firm hand on the attorney’s shoulder and guided him toward one of the doors leading out of the bedroom.

After the door had shut behind Denfeld, Gram lay back, meditating and drinking his coffee. If only she’d break a law, he said to himself. Even a traffic law – anything to get her behind in her relationship to the police. If we caught her jaywalking we could make it stick; she could resist arrest, use foul and obscene language in public, be a public menace by virtue of the fact that she had deliberately flouted the law… and, he thought, if only Barnes’ people could catch her on a felony rap; for example buying and/or drinking alcohol. Then (his own attorneys had explained this) we could hit her with an unfit mother suit, take the children, put the blame on her in a true divorce action – which, under those circumstances, we could make public.

But, as it stood, Irma had too many things on him. A contested divorce would make him look bad indeed, what with what Irma could scrape together out of the gutter.

Picking up his line-one fone he said, ‘Barnes, I want you to get hold of that cop dame, that Alice Noyes, and send her in here. Maybe you should come along, too.’

Police occifer Noyes headed the team which had been trying, for almost three months, to get something on Irma. Twenty-four hours a day, his wife was monitored by police video and audio gadgetry… without her knowledge, of course. In fact, one video camera scanned the happenings in Irma’s bathroom, which unfortunately had not turned up anything to speak of, Everything Irma said, did, everyone
she saw, every place she went – all on reels of tape at PSS Central in Denver. And it added up to nothing.

She’s got her own police, he realized gloomily. ExPSS flatheads who roamed about with her when she went shopping or to a party or to Dr. Radcliff, her dentist. I’ve got to get rid of her, he said to himself. I should never have married an Old Man wife. But it had happened long ago, when he did not hold the high position which had become his later on. Every Unusual and every New Man sneered at him in private, and he did not like it; he read thoughts, lots of them, emanating from many, many people, and buried there somewhere lay the contempt.

It was exceptionally great among the New Men.

While he lay waiting for Director Barnes and occifer Noyes, he examined the
Times
once again, opening it at random to one of its three hundred pages.

And found himself confronted by an article on the Great Ear project… an article which called the byline of Amos Ild, a very well-placed New Man: someone Gram could not touch.

Well, the Great Ear experiment is just rolling merrily along, he thought sardonically as he read.

He tossed the newspaper away; it fell with a noisy thump to the deep pile of the carpeted floor. Those New Men bastards, he said savagely to himself, his teeth grinding impotently. They’ll pour billions of pops into it, and after Great
Ear they’ll build a device which can replace precog Unusuals, then all the rest, one by one. There’ll be poltergeist machines rolling along the streets and buzzing through the air.
We won’t be needed.

And… instead of the strong and stable two-party government which they now had, there would be a one-party system, a monolithic monster with New Men holding all key posts, at all levels. Goodbye to Civil Service – except to tests for New Man cortical activity, that double-domed neutrologics with such postulates as, A thing is equal to its opposite and the greater the discrepancy, the greater the congruity. Christ!

Maybe, he thought, the whole structure of New Man thought is a gigantic put-on.
We
can’t understand it; the Old Men can’t understand it; we take their word for it that it’s a whole new step upward in the evolution of human brain-functioning. Admittedly, there are those Rogers nodes, or whatever. There is a physical, different structure of their cerebral cortex. But…

One of his intercoms clicked on. ‘Director Barnes and a woman police occifer are—’

‘Send them in,’ Gram said. He leaned back, made himself comfortable, folded his arms and waited.

Waited to tell them his new idea.

At eight-thirty in the morning, Nicholas Appleton showed up at his job and prepared to begin the day.

The sun shone down on his shop, his little building. Therein he rolled up his sleeves, put on his magnifying glasses, and plugged in the heating iron.

His boss, Earl Zeta, stumped up to him, hands in the pockets of his khaki trousers, an Italian cigar dangling from his overgrown lips. ‘What say, Nick?’

‘We won’t know for a couple of days,’ Nick said. ‘They’re going to mail us the results.’

‘Oh yeah, your kid.’ Zeta put a dark, large paw on Nick’s shoulder. ‘You’re cutting the grooves too light,’ he said. ‘I want them down into the casing. Into the damn carcass.’

Nick, protestingly, said, ‘But if I go any deeper—’ The tire will blow if they back over a warm match, he said to himself. It’s equal to shooting them down with a laser rifle. ‘Okay,’ he said, the fighting strength oozing out of him; after all Earl Zeta was the boss. ‘I’ll go deeper,’ he said, ‘until the iron comes out the other side.’

‘You do that and you’re fired,’ Zeta said.

‘Your philosophy is that once they buy the squirt—’

‘When their three wheels hit the public pavement,’ Zeta said, ‘our responsibility ends. After that, whatever happens to them is their own business.’

Nick had not wanted to be a tire regroover… a man who took a bald tire and, with the red hot iron, carved new grooves deeper and deeper into the tire, making it look adequate. Making it look as if it had all the tread it needed. He had inherited the craft from his father, who had learned it from his own father. Down the years, father, to son; hating it as he did, Nick knew one thing: he was a superb tire regroover and always would be. Zeta was wrong; he already burned deeply enough. I’m the artist, he thought; I should decide how deep the grooves should go.

Leisurely, Zeta snapped on his neck radio. Cheap and noisy music – of a sort – blurred out of the seven or eight speaker-systems spread over the heavy man’s bulging body.

The music ceased. A pause, and then an announcer’s voice, speaking in professionally disinterested tones. ‘PSS spokesmen, representing Director Lloyd Barnes, announced a short while ago that police prisoner Eric Cordon, long imprisoned for acts hostile to the people, has been transferred from Brightforth Prison to the termination facilities in Long Beach, California. When asked if this meant that Cordon is to be executed, PSS spokesmen avowed that no decision as to that has been reached. Well-informed sources outside the PSS are openly saying that this heralds Cordon’s execution,
pointing out that of the last nine hundred PSS prisoners transferred at various times to the Long Beach detention facilities, almost eight hundred were eventually executed. This has been a bulletin from—’

Convulsively, Earl Zeta clutched at the switch of his body radio; he missed it, clenched his fist spasmodically, shutting his eyes and rocking back and forth. ‘Those bastards,’ he said between his teeth. ‘They’re murdering him.’ His eyes opened; he grimaced, his face showing violent and deep pain… then, by degrees, he obtained control over himself; his anguish seemed to ease. But it did not go away; his tubby body remained tensed as he stared at Nick.

Nick said, ‘You’re an Under Man.’

‘For ten years you’ve known me,’ Zeta grated. He got out a red handkerchief and carefully mopped his forehead. His hands were shaking. ‘Listen, Appleton,’ he said, managing to make his voice more natural, now. More steady. Yet the shaking continued down deep in the man, out of sight. Nick sensed it, knew it was there. Hidden and buried, out of fear. ‘They’re going to get me, too. If they’re executing Cordon they’ll just go on and wipe all of us out, all the way down to minnows like me. And we’ll go into those camps, those damn, lousy, rotten detention camps on Luna. Did you know about them? That’s where we’re going. We – my people. Not you.’

‘I know about the camps,’ Nick said.

‘Are you going to turn me in?’

Nick said, ‘No.’

‘They’ll get me anyway,’ Zeta said bitterly. ‘They’ve been compiling lists for years. Lists a mile long, even on microtapes. They’ve got computers; they’ve got spies. Anyone could be a spy. Anyone you know or have ever talked to. Listen, Appleton – Cordon’s death means we’re not just fighting for political equality, it means we’re fighting for our actual physical lives. Do you understand that, Appleton? You may not like me very much – God knows we don’t get along with each other –
but do you want to see me murdered?’

‘What can I do?’ Nick said. ‘I can’t stop the PSS.’

Zeta drew himself up, his dumpy body rigid with the agony of despair. ‘You could die along with us,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ Nick said.

‘“Okay”?’ Zeta peered at him, trying to understand him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Nick said. He felt numbed by what he was saying. Everything was gone, now: the chance for Bobby had been effectively voided, and a race of tire regroovers would go on forever.

I should have waited, he thought. This just simply happened to me; I didn’t expect it – I don’t really understand it. It must be because Bobby failed. And yet I’m here saying this, telling Zeta this. It’s been done.

‘Let’s get over to my office,’ Zeta said hoarsely, ‘and open a pint of beer.’

‘You have liquor?’ He could not imagine it, the penalty was so terribly great.

‘We will drink to Eric Cordon,’ Zeta said, and led the way.