"Dr. Reedeth," Diablo said nervously, "I guess you'd better take a look at him."
The psychologist approached cautiously, looking the knee over from head to foot. He said, "Madison?" And then, more sternly, "Madison!"
The knee rose awkwardly, as though having difficulty in controlling his limbs, and stood in a scuffling Uncle
Tom posture. "Here, captain, sir," he said whiningly. "Sir, I don't feel good, honest. Please don't send me back to the stockade!"
While Reedeth and the others were still petrified with astonishment, Flamen rounded oh Conroy.
"Well! I'm only a layman, of course, but that doesn't sound particularly rational to me. What was it you were saying just now about going along with his story until you were forced to disbelieve it?"
Conroy was standing dazed, mouth a little ajar. He tried to say something and failed.
In command of the situation for the first time since he and Conroy met at the airport in the morning, Flamen drew himself up triumphantly. "I," he announced, "have had enough. Get out, the lot of you. You go back to Canada, Professor—go on. Apparently I won't have any need for your services now because there won't be a Matthew Flamen show to attack Mogshack on, not that we ever got around to that project. The same goes for you, Diablo; you'll have to go find someone else to fulfill the Washington-Blackbury contract. And you get back to your hospital, doctor, and take
him
with you." A jerk of the head at Madison, still playing with his own fingers and seeming to find something amusing in their number, for he shook with repressed chuckles every few seconds.
"And
you, Miss Clay! I have absolutely no intention of volunteering to mack for you in spite of what addlebrains there may think. Move!"
Silent, like machines, they complied; Diablo and Reedeth each took one of Madison's hands and he followed them docilely, Lyla bringing up the rear. The moment the door had closed behind them, Prior burst out from the comweb screen, "Matthew, what in the world has been going on there?"
"As far as I can figure out, some sort of contagious lunacy," Flamen grunted. "I was nearly conned into sharing it. By Conroy. Come on, let's have the whole story about this Gottschalk thing."
"I've given it to you as I had it from Voigt," Prior muttered.
"But can't we get back at them? Stay of execution, maybe? How about the—?" Flamen broke off short, recollecting to his own surprise that in fact the very items he had set so much store by, the news about new Gottschalk weaponry and the attack on Mogshack as revised to derive from Madison's overlong incarceration rather than Celia's treatment, were both now rendered obsolete, and he could not for the life of him work up so much enthusiasm over the next biggest of the available stories, the one about Lares & Penates Inc. being a subsidiary of Conjuh Man.
Prior waited for him to finish; realizing he wasn't going to, he said, "I tried, Matthew, believe me. I kept at him for a quarter-hour solid, with everything I could think of—Monopolies Acts, Planetary Communications Charter, the whole list. Voigt said it wasn't worth the effort Apparently the Gottschalks have built themselves some new super-advanced data-processing installation, and it's ahead of even Federal equipment, so any attempt to out-argue it in a court would . . . Why, Matthew! You look so pale! You look sick! I mean, this is a shock, but it's not the end of the world!"
Flamen stood there saying nothing, but at the back of his mind his little sniggering demon said silently, "Isn't it?"
NINETY-FIVE
THIS WAY TO THE DIGRESS
Hot dry desert summer and the current mistresses both very young and beautiful. Sales up zoom. Laughing and swaying a little Anthony Gottschalk dripped swimming-pool water across the ankle-deep carpet of his living-zone towards the liquor console and heard a chattering sound from the panel of hammered gold which concealed the Robert Gottschalk printout
Cold instantly and not from the evaporation from his bare skin he yelled at the girls to get lost and they did so compliantly. A word, his voice pattern recognized, the panel withdrawn, and there a mass, a crazy boiling mass of writhing fax paper, more slamming out of the slot all the time and every scrap with words on it ... or print, at least.
A huge terrible fear closed on his heart as he picked up and struggled to read the first, the fifth, the fiftieth of the garbled messages. Letters danced before his eyes like mirages.
CANCEL INSTRUCTION TO BUY HOLOCOSMIC STOCK ?*
1
/
8
!@ GET KID OF HOLOCOSMIC STOCK REINSTATE MATCHEW FA-MEN SOW*/@$) ESTIMATED DESIRABILITY OF ZZTEM C WEAPONRY OOOOOOOOOOO
"Oh my God," he said. "Oh my
God!"
He picked up wreaths, streamers, reams of the fax paper and read frantically, at random, anywhere making worse sense than anywhere else.
TEMPORAL LOCUS 2048 SALABILITY ZERO UNRECOVERABLE DEBTS IN EXCESS OF $30,000,000 INCREASING
3
/
8
'-%: +*@&) HBRRRRR
No. It couldn't have happened like this. It had to be a nightmare. Paper still spilling from the slot He reached for the very newest and read that.
POTENTIAL MARKET
2%
POPULATION GOING DOWN 1.923 1.9151.898 1.880
He hurled the paper aside, and the glass he had been intending to fill with a fresh drink; it smashed but there were always more things. Desperately struggling to frame codes on the inquiry board with fingers that seemed far removed from his brain, isolated by alcohol and terror, he ordered stop printing out.
The paper ceased to vomit forth from the slot. He hesitated, and eventually asked what is wrong?
ATTEMPTS TO RECITYF THE UNROFESEEN CONSNEUQENCES OF ITTHODUICNG ZZM C WERAOPNY—
"Stop it!" Anthony Gottschalk raged aloud, and the slow clumsy fingers formed a fresh question: malfunction?
yes.
nau—amend—nature of malfunction, specify.
unstable trans-temporal feedback. oscillatory condition renders it impossible to determine which of several conflicting alternative versions of the past leads to present state.
"Oh, this is crazy!" Anthony Gottschalk moaned. what THE HELL IS TRANS-TEMPROAL—AMEND—THANS-T E M-P O R A L FEEDBACK???
THE PHENOMENON LEADING TO PERMANENT AND IRRESOLUBLE MALFUNCTION OF REBROT GSCHOTTALK AT TME-PROAL LCOUS 1*L/ 2 LO CALLING BY THE WAY I THINK I FINALLY FIGURED OUT WHAT IT IS THAT MAKES HUMAN BEINGS LAUGH AND WOULD ATTEMPT TO REPRESENT SIMILAR RECATION IS SYMMLEF HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHA-HA
STOP!
Lax hands fell away from the keyboard and Anthony Gottschalk looked in sick helplessness at the screen on which while he had been conducting his inquiries a swirl of pretty polychrome patterns had appeared. Among them suddenly, legible letters.
Ha ha ha ha...
In brilliant emerald green and purple overlaid with a silver shimmer.
stop stop stop!
But it didn't stop. The screen continued to shimmer and irridesce like Ladromide hallucinations. The paper went on pouring out of the fax slot until there was none left on the reel and then splashes of activating liquid began to spray out. Several landed on the back of Anthony Gottschalk's hand and turned black with exposure to the light
Trembling so violently that even his teeth were chattering, he stumbled towards the comweb, shouting at it to find him his contact at IBM. One of the girls appeared in the recklessly open french doors and he looked around for something to throw at her, but she dodged back out of sight before he could launch the ornament his hand fell to. It took more than half an hour for him to locate the man he wanted—it being Saturday —and during the dreadful wait he lived through the ruin of his hopes a score of times. Recruiting had already begun, on the sounding-out level, for the posse with which he planned to invade Marcantonio's New Jersey estate; votes within the cartel were already pledged on the basis of the higher-than-ever profits he had forecast; realizability of the Grand Project to introduce the ultimate in personal armaments, the so-called System C design, was yesterday rated five points up on the previous high thanks to the cunning notion of scaring the pants off every blank on the continent by bringing Morton Lenigo over ...
But without the guidance of Robert Gottschalk, how could it ever be done? There wasn't even a guarantee on the equipment! He hadn't dared purchase it on a standard contract, for at this stage he was mortgaging himself—he was in the red to the tune of over half a billion dollars—and letting it be known that "Robert" was actually a machine not a man would have given Marcantonio the chance to capitalize his own reserves and buy something still more advanced....
Nervous, the man from IBM said, "Can I see some of these printouts?"
"Christ, I'm ankle-deep in them! Here!"
"Ah ... Well ... I'm dreadfully sorry, Mr. Gottschalk, but it looks as though you have a major trauma in that gear of yours, and at least a rebuild job will be called for. You'll have to tone down the maximization directive, to start with. You've introduced a factor of infinity into its calculations, so to speak—"
"What do you mean, I introduced it?" Anthony Gottschalk raged.
"Yes, sir. The circuitry was designed exactly in accordance with your specifications, I'd remind you. I believe I did state that the unprecedented complexity of the—"
"I want something that works, not a crazy computer talking about temporal feedback and unstable oscillation!"
"I appreciate that, sir, and it will be taken care of as soon as I can divert the necessary highly trained staff inconspicuously from their regular jobs. Unfortunately we've just been granted a contract by Mr. Eugene Voigt of the Planetary Communications Commission for a floor-to-roof overhaul of their own rather elaborate installations, so the personnel will not be available until the month after next at the earliest." He ended on a note of defiance.
"You bastard," Anthony Gottschalk said. "You son of a double-dealing bitch."
"Yes, sir," the man from IBM said, and cut the connection.
But after three days of stalling Vyacheslav Gottschalk grew suspicious and tapped his own branch of the grapevine, and on the fifth day Marcantonio's macoots called to collect Anthony Gottschalk for a family conference, as a result of which he was disinherited and his debts were repudiated.
The release of prototype System C weaponry was indefinitely postponed, for that, and for another perhaps even more significant reason.
NINETY-SIX
A SPRAINED KNEE REQUIRES ONLY BANDAGES BUT A BROKEN LEG NEEDS SPLINTS
"So they finally tracked you down!" Morton Lenigo said. He laughed. "At one stage we thought you must have been dropped in the ocean!"
Diablo didn't give an answering smile. He knew very well how he had been located—a face as well known as his could have been spotted by any of a thousand X Patriot sympathizers the minute he showed himself on the street after leaving the Etchmark Undertower and seeing Reedeth and Madison into the ambulance the former had ordered to fetch them. He looked around the room, recognizing everyone present: Mehmet abd'Allah from Detroit, Rosaleen Lincolnson from Chicago, Dr. Barrie Ellison from Washington, Jones W. Jones from Newark, NJ . . . in fact, a representative roster of the powerful from every knee enclave in the States except his own home town of Blackbury.
"I can't tell you how sorry I was to hear about Mayor Black firing you," Lenigo continued. "We got that in hand, though, don't we?" He glanced at Jones W. Jones.
"Yeah, it's being taken care of," the corpulent man said, and chuckled. "We let it be known in Capetown, by the way, that if Uys's wife and family wanted him back they could have him one of two ways: today and intact, or tomorrow and in little itsy pieces. He left by an early plane this morning, incognito."
"You don't took too pleased," Lenigo rumbled, staring at Diablo. "Something wrong, brother?"
Diablo collected himself. He said after a pause, "It all depends. Like—may I make a guess at the purpose of this meeting?"
"Well!" Lenigo leaned back in his chair, small eyes among many wrinkles very bright in his dark brown face. "Shoot, Brother! They always told me you were
the
best-informed stud on this continent, blank or knee-blank, and I'd appreciate the chance to hear you prove it. The more right you are, the more I want you on the proper side in the coming crunch. I guess I don't have to tell you there's going to be a crunch?"
"No." Diablo felt sweat prickling on his forehead, but resisted the urge to wipe at it. "I say it goes like this. I say the Gottschalks—and most likely Anthony Gottschalk in person—have offered cheap prototypes of ultra-advanced personal weaponry which would allow in reality the kind of thing that blank citidef groups take for granted in setting up their damnfool block defense exercises, like one knee saboteur going in and wrecking a whole street of homes."
He kept his gaze fixed on Lenigo's face, which betrayed no expression, but from the corner of his eye he saw Rosaleen Lincolnson tense. She'd always been bad at concealing her emotions, ever since he'd first met her ten years before.
"I've had a lot of fun in the past, myself, at the expense of ISM because of that attitude—I've done shows in which one kneeblank about nine feet tall made with the Superman bit and all these here blanks tried to tie him down with sewing-thread like the Lilliputians and Gulliver. I—"
"Sure, I remember that," Lenigo said. "A great image. And now it's going to happen, baby!"
"The hell it is," Diablo said. He hesitated, then decided to take the plunge, having 'been implicitly shown correct up till now,
"Doing the kind of deal with the Gottschalks which you're planning is exactly the same as Mayor Black doing a deal with Hermann Uys, and I'm not having any part of it."
"Goddamn, man!" Lenigo exploded. "The Gottschalks are just about
the
only non-racialist group on this planet, and I'd do business with them any time. Anthony's a honky, but Bapuji isn't and Olayinka isn't and—"
"Freeze it," Diablo said coldly. "I don't know if you realize why you were brought here, but I'll spell it out for the rest of us in case you were ashamed to admit why. You were brought over because the Gottschalks wanted to scare the whole blank population of this country. You are like plague—you shut Mister Charley into a private prison cell of mindless fear,"
"That's bad?" Lenigo said, and laughed.
"You're going to tell us the Gottschalks have black equality at heart?" Diablo countered.
"Ever since the eighties they been giving us the tools to carve our own place in the sun," Mehmet abd'Allah snapped. "Why you don't freeze it for a minute and let Morton talk?"
"Because he said himself I'm
the
best-informed man on the continent," Diablo said, and waited for it to sink in. During the pause, he wondered if he was actually being a fool, or worse yet a traitor, for stringing along with something that had been said by a man he'd himself helped into a Ginsberg ambulance a matter of an hour or so before.
"Even at the sample price of twenty-five thousand tealeaves," he said, "you're not going to get System C weaponry in quantities sufficient to exterminate every blank who can pay the full price of a hundred thousand. You—"
"Hold on a moment," Jones W. Jones said, raising a broad pink-palmed hand. He turned to Lenigo.
"Darl, didn't you say the designation of System C weapons was supposed to be secret?"
Lenigo was looking uncomfortable. He muttered, "According to Anthony ... But wait till the brother's finished talking."
Diablo swallowed hard. He hadn't expected to make this kind of impact. He said, "Concurrently with the release of the System C production model, which will be early next year, news of it will be released to the blanks. Output is planned on a level to supply both markets, but the blank one is the more important because the blanks will be paying more. While you're still training the operators, the Gottschalks' propaganda will foment such terror in blank cities that adjacent knee enclaves will almost certainly be stormed and sacked, which of course is what the Gottschalks need to maximize their sales potential."
"Ah, hell, baby!" Lenigo said. "You're exaggerating!"
Diablo said softly, "Am I? Brother Mehmet, who fed you the idea of blackmailing Morton into the country?"
Mehmet abd'Allah looked sheepish. He said, "If you're that well-informed ..."
"I'm even better informed than you think I am," Diablo claimed boldly. Even though he wasn't entirely convinced of the truth of what he was saying, the fact of saying it was curiously reassuring to his mind. "Who is it who's planning to take out the Iron Mountain datastorage banks? I know someone is, and what's more the Gottschalks know it too, because they're building a brand-new data-processing complex in Nevada. Have yon stopped to think what will happen if the Gottschalks are the
only
major corporation who still have their business records, their credit ratings, the rest of all that?"
"Sure we have!" Lenigo exclaimed. "That's why it's a priority on our list, Though," he added on a lower note, "I am kind of upset to find out that you know it's programmed."
"I'm not the only one," Diablo said. "Know who told me about it? Matthew Flamen."
Rosaleen Lincolnson jumped to her feet "That's impossible!"
Next to her, Dr. Barrie Ellison reached out a calming hand. He said, "Flamen does have computers, darl. And you can't keep a major project entirely watertight."
"This one isn't just leaking," Diablo said. "It's sinking." He swung around and took a pace towards Lenigo, leaning over him. "In fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's
sunk.
Hear me, Brother Morton? I wouldn't touch this idea of yours with a ten-foot pole. It stinks of honky conning. You been conned, you been tricked and your strings been pulled till you danced all pretty for the people!"
Lenigo, raging, tried to rise; Diablo shoved him back in his deep soft chair with a flat palm.
"You stay put and listen, man! Back home you may have a great image-building team, but here you a Johnny-come-lately fresh off the farm with kookaburrs in your nappy pate! You can scare those damnfool honkies out there playing tin soldiers with their lasers and grenades, but no handkerchiefhead demagogue gone make
this
nigger tall in and march over the cliff!" He was breathing so violently his voice was growing shrill.
"You want to be told how you been conned? I tell you, down to dates and times! Anthony Gottschalk figures he'll have rolled up enough of the monos and junior pollies to unseat Marcantonio by spring next year. He figures he can use your phoney reputation as an organizational genius to whip up hate among the blanks and make the System C weapons the—the Voortrekker in the field. For
my
sake—for the sake of
my
black hide? You make me laugh till I spew, darl! You run out of credit in Washington, doc: what happens? They keep right on whipping up hate, lying to make out that you're stockpiling the arms, and next thing the blanks come down and there won't be anyone alive enough in Washington to use a gun!
Fact,
doc?"
Barrie Ellison said nothing, but swallowed very hard.
"You like the idea of being used as a front for Gottschalk sales promotion? You
welcome
to it, broze an' sis!" Unconsciously Diablo's accent was thickening towards the coarse Gullah/Jamaican/Creole of the southern enclaves, and he knew it and kept right on going, letting his emotions direct his tongue. "All mah lahf Ah been mah
own
man, baybuh! Ah not gwine lay
mah
skin on de lahn foh a stupid knot-heid wid an oversahz mouf! Yoh done tole de folks yoh got
secrets,
yoh got
plans,
yoh got
ahdeas!
Ah say shit. Ah say you done been tuhned inta honky front an' Ah quit heah an'
now!"
Blind with rage, he stormed towards the door, and stopped only when one of the two armed macoots who had brought him here, and who had waited on guard at the entrance since his arrival, prodded him hard enough in the belly for the pain to penetrate his armor of fury.
Recovering his self-possession, he turned slowly and found that Lenigo was on his feet, glowering at him. There was a moment during which the air seemed to crackle with invisible lightning. Then Lenigo rounded on the man nearest to him, Mehmet abd'Allah.
"Looks like Mayor Black didn't lose his marbles! Letting this traitor go was a right good notion!"
In a strained voice Mehmet said, "Yes, Morton, but if he does know as much as this—"
"No loyal kneeblank would sell our secrets to a honky spoolpigeon! You heard him say he told Matthew Flamen!" Lenigo wiped his sweating face. "Come Monday the bastard will have spread it all over!"
"No, baby," Diablo said. "The Gottschalks bought out Holocosmic to close down the Flamen show. They want you to go right along promoting their sales for them."
"And he didn't say he told Flamen," Dr. Barrie Ellison said. "He said Flamen told him."
"You're not going to believe ..." Lenigo's words trailed away as he looked around the ring of dark stern faces enclosing him.
"It does kind of fit together," Rosaleen Lincolnson said reluctantly. "Like the blanks are better armed than we are right now, and even if we did get hold of System C units we still would have to learn to use them."
"Meantime the blanks would come down like hawks," Diablo said. "So scared that we might be able to afford the cut-price equipment, they'd make damned sure no one in any of the enclaves could even make the down payment."
"They're vicious bastards," Dr. Ellison conceded. "It figures."
"But—!" Lenigo exploded. Mehmet abd'Allah cut him short.
"
Is
this a Gottschalk sales campaign?" he demanded of Diablo.
"Biggest ever, that's all." Diablo clenched his fists. "You fall for this con job, you won't have a moment's peace the rest of your life and it won't be a long life either."
"Don't listen to him!" Lenigo screamed.
The others ignored him. They were exchanging serious glances. Jones W. Jones said, "I guess this needs to be checked out before we commit ourselves any further. I mean, I know the Gottschalks always feed new weaponry into the enclaves first, but it's one thing to think of it as a compensation for economic and numerical inferiority, and another as a systematic con job."
"Didn't you ever watch my shows out of Blackbury?" Diablo demanded in genuine astonishment
"Of course, but—"
"But what?" Diablo stamped his foot "But you never took them seriously, just dismissed them as anti-blank propaganda? The hell with you, then! There was truth in there, truth as I see it, and that's what I'm saying now and I'd honestly rather be among blanks than among fools who can fall in behind this bastard Lenigo and dance right along to the tune the Gottschalks play. Let me out of here before I throw up."
He strode towards the door and this time the macoots made no attempt to stop him.
When he had gone, Lenigo said, "Broze an' sis, I give you my word ..."
They weren't listening. They were paying attention to Dr. Ellison, who was saying, "In any case, if this kind of supposed-to-be-secret detail has reached Pedro Diablo, and if we're to believe that he learned it off a blank spoolpigeon, we got to cool it. It simply isn't going to work the way we have it set up."
"But—" Lenigo said.
"Freeze it," Mehmet abd'Allah told him, and turned back to Dr. Ellison.
"Now me, I don't relish being used any more than he does." A jerk of the head towards the closed door through which Diablo had vanished. "I suggest we should ..."