The Jagged Orbit (13 page)

FIFTY
THE GRAPH IS ALWAYS GREENER WHERE THE DESERT BLOSSOMS LIKE A ROSE

Conservative—perhaps because elderly—Marcantonio Gottschalk the grandfather of the clan based on the traditional Mafiareas of the New Jersey seaboard; not so Anthony or Vyacheslav or any of the other transistorized/computerized/dynamized younger generation. For them the ultimately defensible heartland, the Nevada desert: indrawn like a closing sea-anemone, waiting for the sooner-or-later moment when
boom.

And here, right on schedule, boom! Anthony Gottschalk whose picture had not for five years found its way onto any official file, whose polysyllabic praenomen was not household knowledge like Marcantonio's but who was already thinking of possible extensions to suit the eventual dignity of headship (current favorite: Antonioni; lying second: Antoniescu for no particular reason except he liked the sound of it), in his Nevada fortress with noises underfloor to signify work proceeding ace-apace on apace-in-the-hole
Robert
Gottschalk—name deliberately chosen to mislead since it was impossible to hide the project completely from the scrutiny of Federal computers, capable of interpretation as some preternaturally gifted new recruit vulnerable to a gun or a grenade....

But Robot Gottschalk was vulnerable to virtually nothing. At his quasi-father Anthony's fortress home he grew like an embryo seventy meters below the lowest basement, deep in the living rock; sounds from work on him were channeled via tunnels which would later be closed with armored doors; you'd have to risk contaminating or firing the whole western half of the continent to make sure of shattering his solid-state circuitry.

Thick-set, dark-haired but very pale with milky eyes, Anthony Gottschalk stood breathing the clean desert breeze wafting off his estate, scented with oranges, lemons, bougainvilleas, frangipanis, uncountable varieties of lovely trees and shrubs. Coup after coup shed rosy glows in his mind: sales to Blackbury of weapons stick-in-the-mud old Marcantonio wouldn't risk for fear of Federal clampdown (and who among
that
gang of clowns would risk action when they found out? asked Anthony Gottschalk)—hinting in Detroit how to solve the Morton Lenigo impasse—solved today and coming along nicely, with insurrection almost on Marcantonio's doorstep by God, wonderful!—and stacked up in the pipeline the biggest and most profitable of all, of all, of all....

His mind calmed a little; he had been growing manic on no stronger drug than knowledge of his own impending success. Marcantonio was eighty count the years
eighty!
Should have been retired years ago. All very well to head the cartel in days of bow-and-arrow, now in modern age useless, short-sighted, over-cautious. Report from Robert already to hand, installation nearly complete, partial evaluations already recoverable by punching the proper code on the keyboard here . ..

Turning, he bent to the board and checked on late developments. Probability of sales tomorrow in New York State: $12,000,000 plus or minus $1,500,000. Sales index for whole country 35%. Grand Project realizability rating up by three points in the past hour!

Anthony Gottschalk performed a little tapdance of joy. The Lenigo revolution was well on the way. If only one could arrange for Marcantonio to catch a misdirected shot.. .

But no. Alas no. There in his New Jersey estate he was at least as well protected as Anthony here, Vyacheslav upstate, any other polly. It would take Robert to figure out a breach in the defenses.

He would. There was nothing else on the continent, nothing on the
planet
to match Robot Gottschalk: the Federal government bled white (horse laugh) by its own massive purchases from the Gottschalk cartel as the hydra of insurrection burst out like a dormant forest fire here today, there tomorrow, the day after in fifty cities at once, could never have afforded him. The nearest approach would be Oom Paul at Capetown, the computer which for over a generation had enabled five million whites to dance mocking rings around the knees who hated them. That would obviously be the second market zone for the Grand Project; he'd thought of Britain but since the destruction of Whitehall you could forget Britain. Over there people could barely afford shotguns.

And once Marcantonio had been buried—at the head of a five-mile cortège, naturally, for he had in his day been a great man—there was almost no limit to the possibilities open to the Gottschalks. Bapuji could sell to Asia and Olayinka to Africa faster than their plants could keep up. Chop-chop like a butcher's cleaver, the slashing lines of demarcation between man and man, woman and woman, man and woman . . . Hmmm! Maybe not that; necessary to breed to keep up the consumer-level. ... High birth-rate in Latin America still. ..

He laughed. What was the good of relying on his own insight any more? It had got him Robert, and Robert even before he was finished had blackmailed Morton Lenigo into the country, something the melanists here had been failing to manage for two years or more, and within hours of his arrival the sales probability graph soaring, just
soaring!
From this point on—mockingly Anthony Gottschalk removed an imaginary hat—Robert/Robot Gottschalk was the actual head of the cartel, regardless of who might be the titular grandfather.

Of course, Lenigo could hardly be relied on to achieve here what he had managed in Britain: the knee patrols on street-corners, armed, black and brown faces scowling at the blanks shuffling shabby to their low-paid daily grind, saving desperately even if it meant denying their children food in order to buy weapons from Gottschalk air-drops made on lonely ground in the Welsh mountains, the fens of East Anglia, the moors of Devon and Yorkshire, smuggled by blank commando units across city borders for resale at inflated prices.

Nonetheless, if his mere presence could provoke this sort of instant panic—"just add Lenigo!"—Robert would have paid for himself the day after his scheduled completion.

What more could anyone ask?

FIFTY-ONE
IF YOUR NUMBER COMES UP THEN YOUR NUMBER COMES UP AND THAT'S ALL THERE IS TO IT SO WHAT'S THE USE OF WORRYING THAT'S WHAT I ALWAYS SAY

Along about one when the troubled city was quieter and the gunships had been withdrawn without more than two or three blocks having to be razed Lyla discovered that she had fallen asleep on the floor under the folding table which with legs properly braced might serve as protection against flying glass or bits of the ceiling falling on her. She was very stiff and very cold and what had woken her was the shrill complaint of their comweb indicating that there was a call awaiting her or Dan at the end of the corridor.

It was a common trick to get doors opened in blocks like this one during riots. She ignored the noise, hating its insistence and wishing it would stop.

When after a long long time it did so, she thought about it being used to determine whether the apt was empty or not, and crawled into the kitchen where their gun was kept, dusty at the back of a closet. It was very old—Dan said it had been used in the Blackbury insurrection of the eighties—but in those days things had been built to last and it had still worked when Dan checked it just before Easter.

Straining her ears, discovering that the effect of the joylets had worn off and she could now hear normally again, she detected footsteps outside, and then there was a groan and something she couldn't place, a verbal sound without content, and then there was a bang on the door and a voice she recognized said, "Miss Clay!"

She pointed the gun, looking to make sure the deadfall catch was set.

"Miss Clay! Ah—Bill here! I talked to you this morning, remember? I've got Mr. Kazer here and he's hurt!"

What?

Moving slowly, as though through deep water, she secured the deadfall, chained the door, looked out through a crack on its right side with gun leveled and there was a lean, serious-faced young man in a black oversuit holding up Dan with both hands and blood running, dripping, streaming from his belly, down his legs, puddling, smearing, stinking in the hot night air.

He put his hand out weakly to catch the jamb and she couldn't push the door shut enough to release the chain and the Gottschalk had to drag him back and he screamed faintly and when Lyla got the door open at eternal last he almost fell through. Together she and Bill guided him to the broken bed and laid him on it; he wouldn't straighten at first so that they could see the wound in his belly but when eventually he overcame the pain enough to roll on his back with a bit of help it could be seen that there was a monstrous gash with the shape of organs bulging through. His eyes were shut and his face was paper-white and after a moment his breathing faded.

"Get a doctor!" Lyla said with colossal, incredible effort past the need to vomit.

"No doctor will come out tonight," Bill said. "There's a curfew."

"But we can't just let him die!" Lyla spun on her heel, ran to the bathroom, looked for disinfectant, dressings, anything useful, came back empty-handed and weeping, the tears welling out of her eyes with a curious dry tickling like flies crawling down her cheeks.

"I'm afraid he is dead," the Gottschalk said, and let go the wrist at which he had checked the pulse.

"What?"

"I'm very sorry." Himself pale, the Gottschalk avoided her eyes, looking down at the blood which had splashed on his black oversuit. "He must have been hit with an axe, I guess, or maybe a sabre. It's a miracle he was able to get in the elevator and shout loud enough for me to hear when he made it to this floor."

Lyla stood like a waxwork, registering the words but not reacting.

"Oh, if only people took notice of the warnings we give them!" the Gottschalk went on sorrowfully, shaking his head. "He should have been armed—he should have been able to defend himself! You don't need training to use things like Blazers, and no" one with a mere axe or sword can get within striking distance against one of them."

"What did you say?" Lyla brought out very slowly.

"I said if he'd been armed, able to protect himself—" The implications of Lyla's expression belatedly penetrated the Gottschalk's mind and he broke off in alarm.

"Get out. You're a ghoul. You're disgusting. You're not human."

"Now look here, Miss—!"

"You're a devil!" Lyla was half-choking on her own sobs; proper words wouldn't come to match the hate that had exploded in her mind. She had dropped the gun on the table in the kitchen when she put her arm around Dan, or she would have shot the Gottschalk where he stood. Lacking that, what for a weapon? The Lar was in arm's reach; she caught it up and threw it and it struck him on the forehead. He cried out and put up his hands, foolishly, much too late.

"Out!" Lyla screamed at him, and raised the big brass tray in both hands, rushing at him. His fist warding it off made it sound like a cracked gong, and her voice rose to a shrill peak of loathing.

"Gottschalk! Gottschalk! Gottschalk!"

Whirling, she ran to the kitchen to retrieve the gun and he came after her, snatching at her arm, dragging her off balance, getting past her and making it to the door, tugging it open and—leaping back as the deadfall jarred down its overdue-for-greasing grooves with a slam that shook the building.

"I wish it had squashed you," Lyla said, picking herself off the floor. "You need to be stomped, like a bedbug." She tried for the gun again, still on the table, but he was faster—he wasn't trembling with the shock of a lover's death. It was his hope and ambition to cause many deaths. He was an arms salesman by choice, calm and even a little happy to see his products in such demand, capable of trying to clinch a sale at the bedside of a fresh corpse. He tripped her as she reached for the gun, caught it up himself and turned the butt into his palm with a practiced flip. Back on the floor she looked at him with hate in her eyes.

Breathing hard, he sidled to the winch and one-handed raised the deadfall, fixed the catch by touch, gun leveled, watching Lyla intently. He opened the door, glanced to make sure the corridor was empty, vanished and slammed it behind him.

"Oh Christ," Lyla said. Then, as she realized she was sitting in a patch of Dan's wet new blood, sticky on her bare thigh, she said again, "Oh Christ."

There was no answer.

FIFTY-TWO
REPRINTED FROM THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN OF 11TH JANUARY 1968

Danger of 'guerrilla' war
in US

New York, January 10

A retired United States Army intelligence officer has suggested that unrest in America's cities could lead to full-scale prolonged guerrilla warfare involving large army units, which could be as difficult to quell as guerrilla activities in South-East Asia.

In the January issue of the "Army Magazine" Colonel Robert B. Rigg writes:

"So far, the causes of urban violence have been emotional and social. Organisation, however, can translate these grievances into political ones of serious potential, and result in violence or even prolonged warfare.

"Man has constructed out of steel and concrete a much better 'jungle' than nature has created out of Vietnam. Such cement-and-brick jungles can offer better security to snipers and city guerrillas than the Vietcong enjoy in their jungles, elephant grass and marshes."

Guerrilla warfare in the cities might be fomented by Communist China or Cuba, he says. Some US intelligence circles were aware that the more dangerous conspirators in ghettoes were being prompted by members of the pro-Chinese wing of the US Communist Party.

Neither full application of fire-power nor political negotiation was likely to be effective against urban guerrillas, he says.

"There are measures that offer a better solution if we are to keep our cities from becoming battle-grounds: penetration by police and reliance on traditional FBI methods. Such efforts must begin now so as to prevent organised guerrilla violence from gaining momentum.

"A whole new manual of military operations, tactics and techniques needs to be written in respect of urban warfare of this nature. Army units must be oriented and trained to know the cement-and-asphalt jungle of every American city."

Colonel Rigg says that manoeuvres carried out in large cities could prove a deterrent to urban insurrection. —Reuter.