Michaelmas (11 page)

"Ah? What? Oh. Yes. I'm sure you have good direc-torial talent, and I know you have excellent qualities. There'll certainly be future opportunities."

"Thank you. If you get a chance to review the footage, I think you will find it was good. Crisp, documentary, and with no betrayals that the event was essentially a farce."

"How do you mean?" he asked quickly.

"There are obvious things missing. As if UNAC and Limberg each had very different things they wanted made known, and they compromised on cutting all points of disagreement, leaving little.

They were all very nice to each other on camera, yet I think it may have been different behind closed doors. And why did Sakal leave without so much as a public exchange of toasts with Limberg? But I was not talking business, Laurent. I was suggesting perhaps dinner."

That, it seemed to him, was just a little bit much. What would they talk about? Would they discuss why, if Clemen-tine Gervaise had been able to see something, hadn't the great Laurent Michaelmas delved into it on camera? What might a man's motives be in such a case? All of that so she could wheedle him around into some damaging half-admission or other and then run tell her Kiki about it?

He smiled and said: "That would be an excellent idea. But I expect to be leaving before dinner time, and I also have some things I must do first. Another time, it would be a very pleasant thing."

"Dommage,"
Clementine said. Then she smiled. "Well, it will be very nice when it happens, don't you think so?"

"Of course." He smiled. Smiling, they reached the front of the Excelsior and he thanked her and got out. As the car drew away, she turned to wave to him a little through the rear window, and he waved back. "Very nice," Domino said in his ear. "Very sophisticated, you two."

"I will speak to you in the suite," Michaelmas sub-vocal-ized, smiling to the doorman, passing through the lobby, waiting for the elevator, holding up his eyelids by force of the need to never show frailty.

In the cool suite, Michaelmas took off his suitcoat with slow care and meticulously hung it on the back of a chair beside the drawing-room table. He put the terminal down and sat, toeing off his shoes and tugging at the knot of his tie. He rested his elbows on the table and undid his cuff-links, pausing to rub gently at either side of his nose. "All right," he said, his eyes unfocused. "Speak to me."

"Yes. We're still secure here," Domino said. "Nothing's tapping at us."

Michaelmas's face turned involuntarily towards the ter-minal. "Is that suddenly another problem to consider? I've always thought I'd arranged you to handle that sort of thing automatically."

There was a longish pause. "Something peculiar happened at the sanatorium."

Michaelmas tented his fingertips. "I'd gathered that. Please explain."

Domino said slowly: "I'm not sure I can."

Michaelmas sighed. "Domino, I realize you've had some sort of difficult experience. Please don't hesitate to share it with me."

"You're being commendably patient with me, aren't you?"

Michaelmas said: "If asked, I would say so. Let's pro-ceed."

"Very well. At the sanatorium, I was maintaining excel-lent linkages via the various commercial facilities available. I had a good world scan, I was monitoring the comm cir-cuits at your terminal, and I was running action pro-grammes on the ordinary management problems we'd dis-cussed earlier. I was also giving detail attention to Cikoumas et Cie, Hanrassy, UNAC, the Soviet spaceflight command, Papashvilly, the Watson crash, and so forth. I have reports ready for you on a number of these topics. I. really haven't been idle since cutting away from your terminal."

"And specifically what happened to make you shift out?"

There was a perceptible diminution in volume. "Some-thing."

Michaelmas raised an eyebrow. He reached forward gently and touched the terminal. "Stop mumbling and digging your toe in the sand, Domino," he said. "We've all filled our pants on occasion."

"I'm not frightened."

"None of us are ever frightened. Now and then, we'd just like more time to plan our responses.

Go on."

"Spare me your aphorisms. Something happened when I next attempted to deploy into Limberg's facilities and see what there was to learn. I learned nothing. There was an anomaly."

"Anomaly."

"Yes. There is something going on there. I linked into about as many kinds of conventional systems as you'd expect, and there was no problem; he has the usual assort-ment of telephones, open lines to investment services and the medical network, and so forth. But there was some-thing—something began to happen to the ground under-foot."

"Underfoot?"

"I have to anthropomorphize if I'm going to make sense to you. It was as if I'd take a stride of normal length and discover that my leg had become a mile long, so that my foot was set down out of sight far ahead of me. And my next step, with my other foot, might be done with a leg so short that the step was completed with incredible swiftness. Or it might again be one of the long steps

— somewhat shorter or longer than other long steps. Yet I didn't topple. But I would be rushing forward one moment and creeping the next. Nevertheless, I proceeded at an even pace. The length of my leg was always appropriate to the dimensions of the square on which I put down my foot, so that I always stepped to the exact centre of the next square. All the squares, no matter what their measurement in space, rep-resented the same-sized increment of time."

Michaelmas sucked his upper teeth. "Where were you going?" he finally asked.

"I have no idea. I can't track individual electrons any more readily than you can. I'm just an information pro-cessor like any other living thing. Somewhere in that sana-torium is a crazy place.

I had to cut out when it began echoing."

"Echoing."

"Yes, sir. I began receiving data I had generated and stored in the past. Fefre, the Turkish Greatness Party, Tim Brodzik . . . that sort of thing. Sometimes it arrived hol-lowed out, as if from the bottom of a very deep well, and at other times it was as shrill as the point of a pin. It was coded in exactly my style. It spoke in my voice, so to speak. However, I then noticed that minor variations were creep-ing in; with each repetition, there was apparently one electron's worth of deviation, or something like that."

"Electron's worth?"

"I'm not sure what the actual increment was. It might have been as small as the fundamental particle, whatever that might turn out to be. But it seemed to me the coding was a notch farther off each time it... resonated. I'm not certain I was detecting a real change. My receptors might have been changing. When I thought of that, I cut out. First I dropped my world scan and my programmes out of the press links, and then I abandoned your terminal. I was out before the speaker actually started vibrating to tell you I was leaving. I felt as if I were chopping one end of a rope bridge with something already on it."

"Why did you feel that? Did you think this phenomenon had its own propulsion?"

"It might have had."

"A ... resonance .. . was coming after you with intent to commit systematic gibberish."

"It does sound stupid. But this . . . stuff ... was — I don't know. I did what I thought best."

"How long were you exposed to it?"

"Five steps. That's all I can tell you."

"Hmm. And is it lurking in the vicinity now?"

"No. It can't be. Simply because I dropped the press links first. I was worried it might somehow locate and hash up all my data storages. But since then it's occurred to me that if I hadn't, it could have taken any number of loop routes to us here. I consider we were just plain lucky. It's back in whatever Limberg equipment it lives in."

"Well, I'm glad of that. That is, if it
was
true that you were being stalked by the feedback beast of the incremental spaces."

"That's gauche. It's simply that there's some sort of totally unprecedented system in operation at Limberg's sana-torium."

"We've been assuming since last night that he has access to some peculiar devices."

"I've encountered malaprop circuitry a fair number of times in this imperfect world. What I'm concerned about is not so much what sort of device Limberg has access to. It's what the device has access to."

Michaelmas sighed. "I don't see how we can speculate on that as yet. I
can
tell you what happened. Not why, or how, but what. You ran into trouble that set upon you as fast as you can think. A condition common among humans. Even more common is having it advance faster than that."

"Well, there at least I'm secure; unless of course, some-thing begins to affect speeds within the electromagnetic spectrum."

"Son, there is no man so smart there is no man to take him."

"I wouldn't argue
that
for a moment."

"It's nice to have you back." Michaelmas pushed himself slowly away from the table and began walking about the room in his stockinged feet, his hands behind his back "The Tass man," he said.

"The Tass man?"

"At the press conference. He didn't ask whether Norwood was being reinstated in command of the expedition. No-body else did, either—Sakal had thrown a broad hint he wouldn't be. But if you were the correspondent of the Soviet news agency, wouldn't you want it nailed down specifically?"

"Not if I'd been instructed not to show it was on my mind."

"Exactly. They've made all their decisions, back there. Now they feel prepared to spring traps on whichever per-fidious option the immoral West chooses to exercise. You know, even more than playing chess, I dislike dealing with self-righteous chess players." Michaelmas shook his head and dropped down into the chair again. He sat heavily. It was possible to see that he had rather more stomach than one normally realized, and that his shoulders could be quite round.

"Well - tell me about Fefre and all the rest of them. Tell me about the girl and the dolphin."

"Fefre is as he was, and I don't know what dolphin you're talking about."

"Well, thank God for that. What do you know about Cikoumas et Cie?"

"It's owned by Kristiades Cikoumas, who is also Lim-berg's chief assistant. It's a family business; he has his son in charge of the premises and making minor decisions. He inherited it from his father. And so forth. An old Bernaise family. Kristiades as a younger man made deliveries to the sanatorium. One day he entered medical school on grants from Limberg's foundation. The Sorbonne, to be exact."

"Why not? Why not settle for the very best? What a for-tunate young man! And what a nice manner he's acquired in the course of unfolding his career."

"You've met him, then?"

"Yes, I've met him. It's been a while since he last shoul-dered a crate of cantaloupes. That package he's slipped off to Missouri could be arriving almost any time, couldn't it?"

"It's been offloaded at Lambert Field and is en route to the Cape Girardeau postal substation.

It's addressed to Hanrassy, all right — it passed through an automatic sorter at New York, and I was able to read the plate. It can be in Hanrassy's breakfast mail. It's already a big day for her; she's scheduled to meet all her state campaign chairmen for a decision on precisely when to announce her candidacy. Her state organizations are all primed, she has several million new dollars in reserve beyond what's already com-mitted, more pledged as soon as she wins her first primary, and two three-minute eggs, with croutons, ordered for break-fast. She will also have V-8

juice and Postum."

Michaelmas shook his head. "She's still planning to use that dinosaur money?" A lot of Hanrassy's backing came from people who thought that if she won, the 120-mile-per-hour private car would return, and perhaps bring back the $120,000-per-year union president with it.

"Yes."

"Damn fool."

"She doesn't see it that way. She's laundered the money through several seemingly foolproof stages. It's now greyish green at worst."

"And her man's still in the United States Treasury De-partment?"

"Ready and waiting."

"Well, that's something, anyway." Treasury was holding several millions for her party, as it was in various other amounts for various others. It was check-off money from tax returns, earmarked by her faithful. As soon as she filed her candidacy, it was hers—subject to a certain degree of supervision. Hanrassy's plan was to meld-in some of the less perfectly clean industrial money and then misrepresent her campaign expenditures back to her Treasury official. He'd certify the accounts as correct. Michaelmas's plan was to make him famous as soon as he'd certificated the ledger print-out.

Domino said: "What we can do to her next year won't help today."

"I know." There weren't that many exploitable openings in US Always's operations. "She's quite something, really," Michaelmas said. "But perhaps we'll be able to manage something with whatever Cikoumas has sent her."

"Whatever it is can hardly be meant for the good of anyone but Limberg and his plans."

"Of course." Michaelmas said. "Nevertheless: I would like to think this is a world for the hopeful."

"Well, one certainly hopes so," Domino said.

"What about the Watson crash?" Michaelmas asked care-fully.

"Negative. The European Flight Authority has taken juris-diction. That's expectable, since the original crash notifica-tion appeared in their teleprinters with an Extra Priority coding added.

They've autopsied the pilot and Watson; both were healthy and alert up to the time of impact. The flight recorder shows power loss without obvious cause. It reports Watson's last words as "Son of a bitch!" The crash site has been impounded and the wreckage taken to an AEV hangar here.

It's too soon for their examiners to have generated any inter-office discussion of findings.

"Meanwhile, I find no meaningful defect pattern in the history of that model. It crashes, but not often, and the reasons vary. I'm now approaching it another way. On the assumption that something
must
have been done to the helicopter, I'm compiling a list of all persons on Earth who could conceivably have gotten to the machine at any time since its last flight. Then I'll assign higher priority to anyone who could have reached it after it became clear it would be used in connection with Norwood. I'll weight that on an ascending scale in correlation with general technical aptitude, then with knowledge of helicopters, then specific familiarity with the type, and so forth. This will yield a short list of suspects, and I expect to be able to cross-check in several ways after the flight authority in-vestigation generates some data." Domino paused. "If the crash was not truly accidental."