'Wow,' Molly said, and let out her breath raggedly. 'What the hell was that?'
'Expect more,' Nat said briefly.
'Goodness god in heaven,' Molly said. 'Kongrosian must be nutty as they say, living here. I wouldn't live up here in this swamp for anything. I wish I hadn't come. Let's record him at the studio, okay? I feel like turning back.'
The auto-cab crawled along, passed under trailing vines, and then all at once they were facing the remains of a town.
A rotting sequence of wooden buildings with faded lettering and broken windows, and yet not abandoned. Here and there, along the weed-split sidewalks, Nat saw people; or rather, he thought, chuppers. Five or six of them making their way haltingly along, on their errands, whatever they might be; god knew what one did here. No phones, no mail. Maybe, he thought, Kongrosian finds it peaceful here.
There was no sound, except that of the mist-like rain falling.
Maybe once you get used to it -- but he did not think he could damn well ever get used to it. The factor of decay was too much at work, here. The absence of anything new, of any blossoming or growing. They can be chuppers if they want or if they have to be, he thought, but they ought to try harder, try to keep their settlement in repair. This is awful.
Like Molly he wished, now, that he hadn't come.
'I would think a long time,' he said aloud, 'before I'd plunk my life down in this area. But if you could do it you'd have accepted one of the most difficult aspects of life.'
'And what's that?' Jim asked.
'The supremacy of the past,' Nat said. In this region the past ruled thoroughly, entirely. Their collective past: the war which had preceded their immediate era, its consequences. The ecological changes in everyone's life. This was a museum, but alive. Movement, of a circular sort ... he shut his eyes. I wonder, he thought, if new chuppers are born. It must be genetically carried; I know it is. Or rather, he thought, I'm afraid it is. This is a waning sporting, and yet -- it continues on.
They have survived. And that's good for the real environment, for the evolutionary process. That's what does it, from the trilobite on. He felt sick.
And then he thought, I've seen this malformity before.
In pictures. In reconstructions. The reconstructions, the guesses, were quite good, evidently. Perhaps they had been corrected through von Lessinger's equipment. Stooped bodies, massive jaw, inability to eat meat because of a lack of incisor teeth, great difficulty speaking. 'Molly,' he said aloud, 'you know what these are, these chuppers?'
She nodded.
Jim Planck said Neanderthal. They're not radiation freaks; they're throwbacks.'
The auto-cab crept on, through the chuppers' town.
Searching in its blind, mechanical way for the nearby home of the world-famous concert pianist Richard Kongrosian.
CHAPTER 9
The Theodoras Nitz commercial squeaked, 'In the presence of strangers do you feel you don't quite exist? Do they seem not to notice you, as if you were invisible? On a bus or spaceship do you sometimes look around you and discover that no one, absolutely no one, recognizes you or cares about you and quite possibly may even --'
With his carbon dioxide-powered pellet rifle, Maury Frauenzimmer carefully shot the Nitz commercial as it hung pressed against the far wall of his cluttered office. It had squeezed in during the night, had greeted him in the morning with its tinny harangue.
Broken, the commercial dropped to the floor. Maury crushed it with his solid, compacted weight and then returned the pellet rifle to its rack.
'The mail,' Chic Strikerock said. 'Where's today's mail?'
He had been searching everywhere in the office since his arrival.
Maury noisily sipped coffee from his cup and said, 'Look on top of the files. Under that rag we use to clean the keys of the typewriter.' He bit into a breakfast doughnut, the sugarcovered type. He could see that Chic was behaving oddly and he wondered what it signified.
All at once Chic said, 'Maury, I've got something I wrote out for you.' He tossed a folded piece of paper on to the desk.
Without examining it Maury knew what it was.
'I'm resigning,' Chic said. He was pale.
'Please don't,' Maury said. 'Something will come along. I can keep the firm functioning.' He did not open the letter; he left it where Chic had tossed it. 'What would you do if you left here?' Maury asked.
'Emigrate to Mars.'
The intercom on the desk buzzed, and their secretary, Greta Trupe, said, 'Mr Frauenzimmer, a Mr Garth McRae to see you with several other gentlemen, in a group.'
I wonder who they are, Maury wondered. 'Don't send them in yet,' he said to Greta. 'I'm in conference with Mr Strikerock.'
'Go ahead and conduct your business,' Chic said. 'I'm going. I'll leave my resignation letter there on your desk. Wish me luck.'
'I wish you luck.' Maury felt depressed and ill. He stared down at the desk until the door opened and closed and Chic had gone. What a hell of a way to begin the day, Maury thought. Picking up the letter he opened it, glanced at it, folded it once more. He pressed a button on the desk intercom and said, 'Miss Trupe, send in -- the name you said, McRae or whatever it was. And his party.'
'Yes, Mr Frauenzimmer.'
The door from the outer office opened and Maury drew himself up to face what he recognized at once to be government officials; two of them wore the grey of the National Police, and the leader of the group, evidently McRae, had the bearing of a major official of the executive branch; in other words a highly-placed Ge.
Rising clumsily to his feet, Maury extended his hand and said, 'Gentlemen, what can I do for you?'
Shaking hands with him, McRae said, 'You're Frauenzimmer?'
'Correct,' Maury answered. His heart laboured and he had difficulty breathing. Were they going to close him down? As they had moved in on the Vienna School of psychiatrists? 'What have I done?' he asked, and heard his voice waver with apprehension. It was one trouble after another.
McRae smiled. 'Nothing, so far. We're here to initiate discussion of the placing of an order with your firm. However, this involves knowledge of a Ge level. May I rip out your intercom?'
'P-pardon?' Maury said, taken aback.
Nodding to the NP men, McRae stepped aside; the police moved in and swiftly made the intercom inoperative. They then inspected the walls, the furniture; they examined scrupulously every inch of the room and its equipment and then they nodded to McRae to continue.
McRae said, 'All right. Frauenzimmer, we have specs with us for a sim we'd like constructed. Here.' He held out a sealed envelope. 'Go over this. We'll wait.'
Opening the envelope, Maury studied its contents.
'Can you do it?' McRae asked, presently.
Raising his head, Maury said, 'These specifications are for a der Alte.'
'Correct.' McRae nodded.
Then that's it, Maury realized. That's the piece of Ge knowledge; I'm now a Ge.
It's happened in an instant. I'm on the inside. Too bad Chic left; poor goddam Chic, what bad timing, bad luck, on his part. If he had stayed five minutes longer ...
'It's been true for fifty years,' McRae said.
They were drawing him in. Making him as much a part of this as possible now.
'Good grief,' Maury said. 'I never guessed, watching it perform on TV, making its speeches. And here I build the damn things myself.' He was staggered.
'Karp did a good job,' McRae said. 'Especially on the current one, Rudi Kalbfleisch. We wondered if you'd guessed.'
'Never,' Maury said. 'Not one time.' Not in a million years.
'Can you do it? Build it?'
'Sure.' Maury nodded.
'When will you start?'
'Right away.'
'Good. You realize, naturally, that initially NP men will have to be kept here, to ensure security maintenance.'
'Okay,' Maury murmured. 'If you have to, you have to. Listen, excuse me a moment.' He edged past them, to the door and through, to the outer
office; taken by surprise they permitted him to go. 'Miss Trupe, did you see what way Mr Strikerock went?' he asked.
'He just drove off, Mr Frauenzimmer. Towards the autobahn I guess he went back home to The Abraham Lincoln where he lives.'
You poor guy, Maury thought. He shook his head.
The Chic Strikerock luck; still functioning. Now he began to feel elated.
This changes everything, he realized. I'm back in business; I'm caterer to the king -- or rather, I supply the White House. Same thing. Yes, it's the same thing!
He returned to his office, where McRae and the others waited; they eyed him rather darkly. 'Sorry,' he said. 'I was looking for my sales chief. I wanted to pull him back due to this. We won't want to take any new orders for a while, so we can be free to concentrate on this.' He hesitated. 'As to the cost.'
'We'll sign a contract,' Garth McRae said. 'You'll be guaranteed your costs plus forty per cent. The Rudi Kalbfleisch we acquired for a total net sum of one billion USEA dollars, plus of course the cost of perpetual maintenance and repair since the acquisition.'
'Oh yeah,' Maury agreed. 'You wouldn't want it to stop working in the middle of a speech.' He tried to chuckle but found he could not.
'How does that sound, roughly? Say between one bill and one-five.'
Maury said thickly, 'Um, fine.' His head felt as if it were about to roll off his shoulders and plunge to the floor.
Studying him, McRae said, 'You're a small firm, Frauenzimmer. You and I are both aware of that. Don't get your hopes up. This will not make you a big firm, such as Karp und Sohnen Werke. However, it will guarantee your continued existence; obviously we're prepared to underwrite you economically speaking for as long as is necessary.
We've gone exhaustively into your books -- does that petrify you? -- and we know that you've been operating in the red for months now.'
'True,' Maury said.
'But your work is good,' Garth McRae continued. 'We've minutely inspected examples of it, both here and where it actually functions on Luna and Mars. You display authentic craftsmanship, more so, I feel, than the Karp Werke. That of course is why we're here today instead of there with Anton and old Felix.'
'I wondered,' Maury said. So that was why the government had decided this time to let the contract to him, not Karp. He thought, did Karp build all the der Alte simulacra up to now? Good question. If this were so -- what a radical departure in government procurement policy this was! But better not to ask.
'Have a cigar,' Garth McRae said, holding an Optimo admiral out to him. 'Extra mild. Pure Florida leaf.'
'Thank you.' Maury gratefully -- and fumblingly -- accepted the big greenish cigar. Both he and Garth McRae lit up, gazing at one another in what all at once had become calm, assured silence.
The news posted on The Abraham Lincoln's communal bulletin board that Duncan & Millar had been chosen by the talent scout to perform at the White House astounded Edgar Stone; he read the announcement again and again, searching for the joker in it and wondering how the little nervous, cringing man had managed to do it.
There's been cheating, Stone said to himself. Just as I passed him on his relpol tests ... he's got somebody else to falsify a few results for him along the talent line. He himself had heard the jugs; he had been present at that programme, and Duncan & Miller, Classical Jugs, simply were not that good. They were good, admittedly ... but intuitively he knew that more was involved.
Deep inside him he experienced anger, a resentment that he had ever falsified Duncan's test-score. I put him on the road to success, Stone realized; I saved him. And now he's on his way to the White House, out of here entirely.
No wonder Ian Duncan had done so poorly on his relpol test. He had been busy practising on his jug, obviously; Duncan had no time for the commonplace realities which the rest of humanity had to cope with. It must be terrific to be an artist, Stone thought with bitterness. You're exempt from all the rules and responsibilities; you can do just as you like.
He sure made a fool out of me, Stone said to himself.
Striding rapidly down the second-floor hall, Stone arrived at the office of the building skypilot; he rang the bell and the door opened, showing him the sight of the skypilot deep in work at his desk, his face wrinkled with fatigue. 'Uh, father,' Stone said, 'I'd like to confess. Can you spare a few minutes? It's very urgently on my mind, my sins I mean.'
Rubbing his forehead, Patrick Doyle nodded. 'Jeez,' he murmured. 'It either rains or it pours; I've had ten presidents in today so far, using the confessionator. Go ahead.'
He pointed wearily to the alcove which opened on to his office. 'Sit down and plug yourself in. I'll be listening while I fill out these 4-10 forms from Berlin.'
Filled with righteous indignation, his hands trembling, Edgar Stone attached the electrodes of the confessionator to the correct spots of his scalp, and then, picking up the microphone, began to confess. The tapedrums of the machine turned slowly as he spoke. 'Moved by a false type pity,' he said, 'I infracted a rule of this building. But mainly I am concerned not with the act itself but with the motives behind it; the act is merely the outgrowth of a false attitude towards my fellow residents. This individual, my neighbour Mr Ian Duncan, did poorly on his recent relpol test and I foresaw him being evicted from The Abraham Lincoln. I identified with him because subconsciously I regard myself as a failure, both as a resident of this building and as a man, so I falsified his score to indicate that he had passed. Obviously a new relpol test will have to be given to Mr Ian Duncan and the one which I scored will have to be marked void.' He eyed the skypilot, but there was no evident reaction.
That will take care of Duncan and his Classic Jug, Stone said to himself.
By now the confessionator had analysed his confession; it popped a card out, and Doyle rose to his feet to receive it.
After a long, careful scrutiny he glanced keenly up. 'Mr Stone,' he said, 'the view expressed here is that your confession is no confession. What do you really have on your mind? Go back and begin all over; you haven't probed down deeply enough and brought up the genuine material And I suggest you start out by confessing that you misconfessed consciously and deliberately.'
'No such thing,' Stone said, or rather tried to say; his voice had gone out on him, numbed by dismay. 'P-perhaps I could discuss this with you informally, sir. I did falsify Ian Duncan's test score; that's a fact. Now, perhaps my motives for doing it -- '
Doyle interrupted. 'Aren't you jealous of Duncan now? What with his success with the jug, White House-wards?'
There was silence.
'This -- could be,' Stone rasped in admission at last. 'But it doesn't change the fact that by all rights Ian Duncan shouldn't be living here; he should be evicted, my motives notwithstanding. Look it up in the Communal Apartment building Code. I know there's a section covering a situation such as this.'
'But you can't get out of here,' the skypilot persisted, 'without confessing; you must satisfy the machine. You're attempting to force eviction of a neighbour to satisfy your own emotional, psychological needs. Confess that, and then perhaps we can discuss the Code ruling as it pertains to Duncan.'
Stone groaned and once more attached the intricate system of electrodes to his scalp. 'All right,' he grated. 'I hate Ian Duncan because he's artistically gifted and I'm not. I'm willing to be examined by a twelve-resident jury of my neighbours to see what the penalty for my sin is; but I insist that Duncan be given another relpol test! I won't give up on this -- he has no right to be dwelling here amongst us. It's morally and legally wrong.'
'At least you're being honest, now,' Doyle said.
'Actually,' Stone said, 'I enjoy jug band playing; I liked their little act, the other night. But I have to behave in a manner which I believe to be in the public interest.'
The confessionator, it seemed to him, snorted in derision as it popped a second card. But perhaps it was only his imagination.
'You're just getting yourself deeper and deeper,' Doyle said, rea
ding the card. 'Look at this.' He grimly passed the card to Stone. 'Your mind is a riot of confused, ambivalent motives. When was the last time you confessed?'
Flushing, Stone mumbled, 'I think -- last August. Pape Jones was the skypilot then. Yes, it must have been August.'
Actually, it had been early July.
'A lot of work will have to be done with you,' Doyle said, lighting a cigarillo and leaning back in his chair.
The opening number on their White House programme they had decided after much discussion and hot argument, would be the Bach 'Chaconne in D.' Al had always liked it, despite the difficulties involved, the double-stopping and all. Even thinking about the Chaconne made Ian Duncan nervous.
He wished, now that it had at last been decided, that he had held out for the much simpler 'Fifty Unaccompanied Cello Suite.' But too late now. Al had sent the information to the White House A & R secretary, Mr Harold Slezak.
Al said, 'Don't for heaven's sake worry; you've got the number two jug in this. Do you mind being second jug to me?'
'No,' Ian said. It was a relief, actually; Al had the far more difficult part.
Outside the perimeter of Jalopy Jungle Number three the papoola moved, crisscrossing the sidewalk in its gliding, quiet pursuit of a sales prospect. It was only ten in the morning, and no one worth collaring had come along, as yet.
Today the lot had been set up in the hilly section of Oakland, California, among the winding, tree-shrouded streets of the better residential section. Across from the lot, Ian could see The Joe Louis, a peculiarly-shaped but striking apartment building of a thousand units, mostly occupied by very well-to-do Negroes. The building, in the morning sun, appeared especially neat and cared for. A guard, with badge and gun, patrolled the entrance, stopping anyone who did not live there from entering.
'Slezak has to okay the programme,' Al reminded him.
'Maybe Nicole won't want to hear the Chaconne; she's got very specialized tastes and they're changing all the time.'