Immediately preceding Nim was Lunch Break’s own “House Doctor.”
“He’s on every day and has a tremendous following,” the program assistant confided in a whisper. “People tune in especially, which is why, when you follow him, they’ll be listening to you.”
The doctor, in his fifties, graying and distinguished, was a solid performer who knew every trick in television’s manual, including how to smile disarmingly, when to act the fatherly physician, and at what point to use a simplistic diagram of a stomach. “My subject today,” he informed his unseen audience, “is constipation.”
Nim watched and listened, fascinated.
“… Many people worry needlessly. What not to do is take laxatives. Millions of dollars’ worth are sold each year—a waste; many are damaging to your health … Most constipation is ‘imagined.’ A daily bowel movement can be a needless fetish … Let your natural cycle have its way. For some, five to seven days without is normal. Be patient, wait … A real problem: Some folks don’t heed the call of nature immediately. They’re busy, they postpone. That’s bad. The bowel gets discouraged, tired of trying … Eat high roughage food, drink lots of water to stay moist …”
Van Buren leaned across. “Oh God, Nim! I’m sorry.”
He assured her softly, “Don’t be. Wouldn’t have missed it. I only hope I’m not an anticlimax.”
The doctor was faded out, a commercial in. The program assistant took Nim’s arm. “You’re on, Mr. Goldman.” She escorted him to the center of the set, where he was seated.
While the commercial continued, Nim and the interviewers shook hands. Jerry, frowning, cautioned him, “We’re running late. Don’t have much time, so keep your answers short.” He accepted a sheet of notes from a stagehand, then, as if a switch had been snapped, his smile went on and he turned toward a camera.
“Our last guest today knows a great deal about electricity and oil. He is …”
After the introduction, Jean asked Nim brightly, “Are we really going to have electricity cuts, or is it just another scare, something which in the end won’t happen?”
“It’s no scare, and it will happen.” (You want short answers, Nim thought; so, okay.)
Jerry was consulting the sheet he had been given. “About that alleged oil shortage …”
Nim cut in quickly. “It is not alleged.”
The interviewer’s smile widened. “Well let you get away with that one.” He went back to his notes. “Anyway, haven’t we had a glut of oil recently in California—oil coming in from Alaska, from the pipeline?”
“There have been some temporary local surpluses,” Nim agreed. “But now, with the rest of the country desperately in need of oil, any extra will disappear fast.”
“It seems selfish,” Jean said, “but can’t we keep that Alaska oil in California?”
“No.” Nim shook his head. “The federal government controls it, and already has an allocation program. Every state, every city in the country, is pressuring Washington, demanding a share. There won’t be much for anyone when the available domestic oil is spread around.”
“I understand,” Jerry said, referring to his notes once more, “that Golden State Power has a thirty-day supply of oil. That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“The figure is true in one sense,” Nim acknowledged, “but misleading in another. For one thing, it’s impossible to use oil down to the bottom of every tank. For another, the oil isn’t always where it’s needed most; one generating plant may be without oil, another have enough in storage for several days, and the facilities to move big quantities of oil around are limited. For both reasons, twenty-five days is more realistic.”
“Well,” Jerry said, “let’s hope everything is back to normal before those days run out.”
Nim told him, “There’s not the slightest chance of that. Even if agreement is reached with the OPEC oil nations, it will take …”
“Excuse me,” Jean said, “but we’re short of time and I have another question, Mr. Goldman. Couldn’t your company have foreseen what has happened about oil and made other plans?”
The effrontery, the injustice, the incredible naivety of the question astounded Nim. Then anger rose. Subduing it, he answered, “Golden State Power & Light has been attempting to do precisely that for at least ten years. But everything our company proposed—geothermal plants, pumped storage, coal burning, nuclear—has been opposed, delayed or thwarted by …”
“I’m truly sorry,” Jerry interrupted, “but we just ran out of time. Thank you, Mr. Goldman, for being with us.” He addressed a zooming lens. “Among the interesting guests on Lunch Break tomorrow will be an Indian swami and …”
On their way out of the TV station building, Teresa Van Buren said dispiritedly to Nim, “Even now, no one believes us, do they?”
“They’ll believe soon enough,” Nim said. “When they all keep flipping switches and nothing happens.”
While preparations for widespread blackouts went ahead, and a sense of crisis pervaded GSP & L, incongruities persisted.
One was the Energy Commission hearings on Tunipah which continued, unchanged, at their original maddening pace.
“A stranger from Mars, using commonsense,” Oscar O’Brien observed during lunch with Nim and Eric Humphrey, “would assume, in view of our present power emergency, that licensing procedures for projects like Tunipah, Fincastle, and Devil’s Gate would move faster. Well, Mr. Commonsense Mars would be dead wrong.”
The general counsel moodily ate some of his lunch, then continued, “When you’re in there at those hearings, listening to testimony and the same old rehashed arguments about procedure, you’d think no one knows or cares what’s going on in the real world outside. Oh, by the way, we have a new group fighting us on Tunipah. They call themselves CANED, which, if I remember it right, means Crusaders Against Needless Energy Development. And compared with CANED’s accusations about Golden State Power & Light, Davey Birdsong was a friend and ally.”
“Opposition is a hydra-headed monster,” Eric Humphrey mused, then added, “The Governor’s support of Tunipah seems to have made little, if any, difference.”
“That’s because bureaucracy is stronger than governors, presidents, or any of us,” O’Brien said. “Fighting bureaucracy nowadays is like wrestling a sea of mud while you’re in it up to your armpits. I’ll make a prediction: When the blackouts hit the Energy Commission building, the hearings on Tunipah will continue by candlelight—with nothing else changed.”
As to the Fincastle geothermal, and Devil’s Gate pumped storage plant proposals, the general counsel reported that dates to begin public hearings had still not been set by the responsible state agencies.
Oscar O’Brien’s general disenchantment, as well as Nim’s, extended to the bogus Consumer Survey distributed in the city’s North Castle district.
It was almost three weeks since the carefully planned questionnaire had gone out and it now appeared as if the attempt to entrap the terrorist leader, Georgos Archambault, had been abortive, a waste of time and money.
Within a few days after the bulk mailing, hundreds of replies poured in, and continued to do so through the following weeks. A large basement room at GSP & L headquarters was set aside to deal with the influx and a staff of eight clerks installed there. Six were borrowed from various departments, the other two recruited from the District Attorney’s office. Between them, they painstakingly examined every completed questionnaire.
The D-A.’s office also sent photographic blowups of handwriting samples from Georgos Archambault’s journal, and the clerks worked with these in view. To guard against error, each questionnaire was examined separately by three people. The result was definite: Nothing had come in which matched the handwriting samples.
Now, the special staff was down to two, the remainder having returned to their regular duties. A few replies were still trickling in and being routinely examined. But it seemed unlikely, at this stage, that Georgos Archambault would be heard from.
T
o Nim, in any case, the project had become a lot less important than the critical oil supply problem which occupied his working days and nights.
It was during a late evening work session about oil—a meeting in Nim’s office with the company’s Director of Fuel Supply, the Chief of Load Forecasting and two other department heads—that he received a telephone call having nothing to do with the subject under discussion, but which disturbed him greatly.
Victoria Davis, Nim’s secretary, was also working late and buzzed from outside while the meeting was in progress.
Annoyed at the interruption, Nim picked up the telephone and answered curtly, “Yes?”
“Miss Karen Sloan is calling on line one,” Vicki informed him. “I wouldn’t have disturbed you, but she insisted it was important.”
“Tell her …” Nim was about to say he would return the call later, or in the morning, then changed his mind. “Okay, I’ll take it.”
With an “Excuse me” to the others, he depressed a lighted button on the telephone. “Hello, Karen.”
“Nimrod,” Karen said without preliminaries, her voice sounding strained, “my father is in serious trouble. I’m calling to see if you can help.”
“What kind of trouble?” Nim remembered that the night he and Karen went to the symphony she had said much the same thing, but without being specific.
“I made my mother tell me. Daddy wouldn’t.” Karen stopped; he sensed she was making an effort to regain composure. Then she went on, “You know that my father has a small plumbing business.”
“Yes.” Nim recalled that Luther Sloan had talked about his business the day they all met in Karen’s apartment. It was the day on which both parents later confided in Nim their burden of guilt about their quadriplegic daughter.
“Well,” Karen said, “Daddy has been questioned several times by people from your company, Nimrod, and now by police detectives.”
“Questioned about what?”
Again Karen hesitated before answering. “According to Mother, Daddy has been doing quite a lot of subcontracting for a company called Quayle Electrical and Gas. The work was on gas lines, something to do with lines going to meters.”
Nim told her, “Tell me that company’s name again.”
“It’s ‘Quayle.’ Does that mean something to you?”
“Yes, it means something,” Nim said slowly as he thought: It looked, almost certainly, as if Luther Sloan was into theft of gas. Though Karen didn’t know it, her phrase “lines going to meters” was a giveaway. That and the reference to Quayle Electrical and Gas Contracting, the big-scale power thieves already exposed and still being investigated by Harry London. What was it Harry reported only recently? “There’s a bunch of new cases, as well as others developing from the Quayle inquiry.” It sounded to Nim as if Luther Sloan might be among the “others.”
The sudden news, the realization of what it implied, depressed him. Assuming his guess to be correct, why had Karen’s father done it? Probably for the usual reason, Nim thought: Money. Then it occurred to him that he could probably guess, too, what the money had been used for.
“Karen,” he said, “if this is what I think, it is serious for your father and I’m not sure there’s anything I’ll be able to do.” He was conscious of his subordinates in the room, waiting while he talked, trying to appear as if they were not listening.
“In any event, there’s nothing I can do tonight,” Nim said into the telephone. “But in the morning I’ll find out what I can, then call you.” Realizing he might have sounded unusually formal, he went on to explain about the meeting in his office.
Karen was contrite. “Oh, I’m sorry, Nimrod! I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“No,” he assured her. “You can bother me anytime. And I’ll do what I can tomorrow.”
As the discussion on oil supplies resumed, Nim attempted to concentrate on what was being said, but several times his thoughts wandered. He asked himself silently: Was life, which had thrown so many foul balls at Karen, in the process of delivering still one more?
13
Again and again, sometimes while sleeping, sometimes while awake, a memory haunted Georgos Winslow Archambault.
It was a memory from a long-ago summer’s day in Minnesota, soon after Georgos’ tenth birthday. During school holidays he had gone to stay with a farming family—he had forgotten exactly why or how—and a young son of the house and Georgos had gone ratting in an old barn. They killed several rats cruelly, using rakes with sharp prongs to spear them, and then one large rat became cornered. Georgos remembered the creature’s gleaming, beady eyes as the two boys closed in. Then, in desperation, the rat sprang, leaping, sinking its teeth into the other boy’s hand. The boy screamed. But the rat survived only seconds because Georgos swung his rake, knocking the creature to the floor, then slammed the prongs through its body.
For some reason, though, Georgos always remembered that rat’s defiant gesture before its inevitable end.
Now, in his North Castle hideaway, he felt a kinship with the rat.
It was almost eight weeks since Georgos had gone into hiding. In retrospect, the length of time surprised him. He had not expected to survive so long, especially after the outpouring of publicity, about himself and Friends of Freedom, which followed the Christopher Columbus Hotel bombing. Descriptions of Georgos had been widely circulated, and photos of him, found in the Crocker Street house, appeared in newspapers and on TV. He knew, from news reports, that a massive manhunt with himself as the objective had been mounted in the North Castle district and elsewhere. Daily since going underground Georgos had expected to be discovered, the apartment hideaway surrounded and invaded.
It hadn’t happened.
At first, as the hours and days went by, Georgos’ principal emotion was relief. Then, as the days extended into weeks, he began wondering if a rebirth of Friends of Freedom might be possible. Could he recruit more followers to replace the dead Wayde, Ute and Felix? Could he obtain money, locate an outside liaison who would become another Birdsong? Could they resume, once more, Georgos’ war against the hated establishment enemy?
He had considered the idea, wistfully and dreamily, for several days. Then, facing the hardness of reality, he reluctantly abandoned it.
There was no way. No way a revival of Friends of Freedom could happen and no way, either, that Georgos could survive. The past seven-plus weeks had been an unexpected brief reprieve, a postponement of the inevitable; that was all.
Georgos knew he was near the end of the line.
He was being hunted by every law enforcement agency and would continue to be for as long as he lived. His name and face were known; his chemically stained hands had been described; it was only a matter of time before someone, somewhere, recognized him. He was without resources or help, there was nowhere else to go, and—most critical of all—the money he had brought with him to the hideaway was almost gone. Therefore, capture was unavoidable—unless Georgos chose to anticipate it by ending his life defiantly, in his own way.
He intended to do exactly that.
Like the rat he remembered from his boyhood, he would make one last fighting gesture and, if necessary, die as he had lived, doing harm to the system he hated. Georgos had decided: He would blow up a critical part of a GSP & L generating station. There was a way it could be done to cause maximum effect and his plans were taking shape.
They were based on an attack he had intended to make—aided by other freedom fighters—before Davey Birdsong’s idea of bombing the NEI convention intervened. Now Georgos was reviving the original plan, though he would have to execute it alone.
He had already moved part way toward his objective by a daring risk he had taken on the same day he went into hiding.
The first thing Georgos realized that day, on reviewing his situation, was the need for transportation. He had to have wheels. He had abandoned the red “Fire Protection Service” truck because he could not have used it without being recognized, but a substitute
was essential.
To buy a vehicle of any kind was out of the question. For one thing, it was too risky. For another, he had insufficient money because the bulk of the Friends of Freedom cash reserve had been in the Crocker Street house. So the only possibility, Georgos reasoned, was to retrieve his Volkswagen van, which might, or might not, have been discovered by the pigs and be under surveillance.
He had kept the van in a privately owned parking garage not far from Crocker Street. Aware of the risk he was taking, gambling on being ahead of the police, Georgos walked to the parking garage the same morning, using side streets as much as he could.
He arrived without incident, paid the garage owner what was owing, then drove the van away. No one questioned him, nor was he stopped on his way back to North Castle. By midmorning the Volkswagen was safely inside the locked garage adjoining the hideaway apartment.
Emboldened by his success, Georgos ventured out again later, after dark, to buy groceries and a late edition of the California Examiner. From the newspaper he learned that a reporter named Nancy Molineaux had provided a description of his Volkswagen van and that police were searching for it. The next day’s paper carried a further report on the same subject, disclosing that the parking garage had been visited by police only a half hour after Georgos left.
Knowing that a description of his van had been circulated, Georgos refrained from using it. Now he would use it only once—for what might be his final mission.
There were several other reasons why retrieving the VW had been important.
One was a secret compartment under the van’s floor. In it, carefully packed in foam rubber to prevent vibration, were a dozen cylindrical bombs, each containing Tovex water-gel explosive and a timing mechanism.
Also in the van was a small, inflatable rubber dinghy, in a tight package, just as Georgos had bought it at a sporting goods store a month or so earlier, and scuba diving gear, most of it purchased at the same time. All the items were essential to the daring attack he now proposed.
In the days which followed his recovery of the van, Georgos left the apartment occasionally, but only after dark and, when he had to buy food, was careful never to use the same store twice. He also wore light gloves to conceal his hands and, in an attempt to change his appearance slightly, had shaved off his moustache.