The Jagged Orbit (14 page)
FIFTY-THREE
ASSUMPTION CONCERNING THE FOREGOING MADE FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY
Either it wasn't done or it didn't work.
FIFTY-FOUR
DIVISION STREET, EARTH
Lyla Clay possesses a supernormal talent.
Dan Kazer has been her lover for between two and three years.
Matthew Flamen is horrified at what's been done to his wife Celia.
Celia Prior Flamen turned to drugs because she felt neglected and ignored.
Lionel Prior manages the last of the spoolpigeons who specializes in exposes.
Pedro Diablo is world-famous for his anti-white propaganda.
Harry Madison
is
a
patient in a mental hospital. Lyla Clay works at being a pythoness like any regular job.
Dan Kazer has been marketing her as a successful product.
Matthew Flamen let months go by without going to call on his wife in the hospital.
Celia Prior Flamen welcomed her incarceration because it gave her the chance to be a nun.
Lionel Prior likes to keep up appearances at all costs.
Pedro Diablo has more white ancestry than Negro ancestry.
Harry Madison is uniquely gifted in the maintenance of complex circuitry.
James Reedeth is worried about keeping Madison in the hospital unjustifiably.
Ariadne Spoelstra is in love with Reedeth.
Elias Mogshack is dedicated to the ideal of mental health.
Hermann Uys is a white South African expert on race.
Morton Lenigo is determined to overthrow the white United States.
Xavier Conroy once wrote that Division Street, Earth, runs straight through the middle of people.
Man is a gregarious animal: he builds cities.
The above-named are human beings. James Reedeth has never actually tried to get Madison released.
Ariadne Spoelstra maintains that "love is a dependent state" and dangerous for a psychiatrist
Elias Mogshack hoards his patients like a miser.
Hermann Uys is in fanatically melanist Blackbury.
Morton Lenigo waited nearly three years to be granted an official entry permit to the United States.
Xavier Conroy, unable to compromise, has been driven to teaching in an undistinguished Canadian college.
Man is not a social animal: he fights wars.
The above-named are human beings.
FIFTY-FIVE
BUSINESS AS USUAL, MORE OR LESS
Bad-tempered, sour-mouthed, queasy-stomached from lack of sleep, Matthew Flamen sat scowling in his skimmer and counted the wasting minutes as diversion after diversion was fed to the controls from the Ninge traffic computer. It was a clear still hot day and from the five-hundred meter level he could see a long way. Of the three LR's mentioned in the morning news—last resort strikes where it had been deemed necessary to bring a whole block tumbling around the ears of snipers —the Harlem and East Village ones had been doused, but over the one in the Bronx a column of smoke was rising like a straight stone pillar. The cause of the diversion, though, was the stream of Federal ships shuttling back and forth from the city to the Westchester internment camps; everything else was being routed around their reserved airlane.
At one point he found himself heading in the diametrically wrong direction.
He swore under his breath, wondering what had possessed him yesterday when he was compiling the show. He'd had that high reading on the Lenigo case, and he'd dismissed it as ridiculous, and within half an hour of his noon slot the kneeblank stations were slamming out gleeful flashes and the X Patriots were assembling in their thousands at Kennedy.
"Got to get to the
bottom
of that!" he declared aloud.
"I
mean, no one takes the government seriously these days, but this is lunacy!"
Half-embarrassed at uttering such a stale platitude, not even party-handy any more, he fell silent, tugging his beard. The question stood, nonetheless: what could have possessed the Immigration Service to let Lenigo have his visa? Blackmail? It had to be, in the strict contemporary sense of one of the knee enclaves holding a knife to the Federal neck. What, who, where? Black-bury? Impossible. Mayor Black was becoming steadily more paranoid, as witness his firing of Pedro Diablo for mere genetic reasons, and on Uys's say-so too. . . .
The problem which had preoccupied him over breakfast returned briefly: whether or not, with Diablo turning up at the office today, he could make a story out of Uys's presence in the country. Was Campbell eager enough to overlook a breach of what had obviously been meant as a confidence, according to Prior's judgment, in return for full cooperation in the Diablo case?
And what was this man Diablo like as a person, anyhow? As a public figure, anybody in communications of any kind had a preconceived image of him, a brilliant, savage, wholly destructive propagandist whose canned programs were seized with cries of delight in Africa and Asia. But that was essentially irrelevant. Back in the pioneering days of the media, almost immediately after the crude and primitive radio era dominated by Dr. Goebbels, that instinctive genius of the borderline period Joe McCarthy had allegedly greeted a former acquaintance at a party, having secured his dismissal from his job, the loss of most of his friends and the acquisition of several million new enemies, with the cry, "Haven't seen much of you lately—you been avoiding me?"
Flamen nodded. Yes, he'd had insight into the pattern of the future, that man: the splits /files/01/28/32/f012832/public/private, knee/blank, rich/poor, left/right, conformist/nonconformist, everything. But after so long being identified with Blackbury policies could Diablo have maintained that essential division within himself which would enable them to meet as craftsmen on a common level?
He shrugged. Only time would tell, and despite all the delays he was suffering it looked as though he would only be a matter of twenty minutes late at the Etchmark Undertower.
And, like it or not, he was going to spend the rest of the time contemplating the mystery of Lenigo's admission. Granted blackmail, eliminating Blackbury, what was left? A wealthy enclave, for sure, which meant a northern one. . . . Chicago? Hell, no. Perhaps one with especially good political
nous—
Abruptly he snapped his fingers, looking in dismay at his own obtuseness at the maker's plaque on the dash of his own skimmer. Detroit, of course! Must be! The only knee enclave with an absolute pistol held to the head of the Federal government, the city nicknamed "Black South Africa" in allusion to their willingness to trade with the enemy as the Afrikaners had been doing for decades, coiners of the slogan "We
negrotiate
from a position of strength!"
And what could Detroit have used as a lever? Well, the computers would certainly be able to make a guess at that. Momentarily pleased, he bent a smile on the approaching city, and it vanished instantly as he realized the skimmer was being ordered to make yet another diversion, this time for a flight of Federal gunships in a show of strength, firing rockets into the East River where they fountained up columns of steam. And the martial law warning lights were flashing on all the tallest buildings including the stump of the Empire State, which had been shortened by seventeen stories during the insurrection of 1988 but remained a conspicuous landmark.
I hate martial law days, he thought. I really do. It's worse than living in a hurricane zone.
FIFTY-SIX
PRESS CONFERENCE GIVEN BY THE SUCCESSOR OF THE LAST CHIEF EXECUTIVE CAPABLE OF SPANNING THE CREDIBILITY GAP WITHOUT SPLITTING HIS PANTS
President Gaylord:
Morning, laze an' gemmun.
Reporters:
By God, it is too! Right on the ball so far today, Prexy!
President Gaylord:
(chuckles)
Dean of reporters*
: First off, Prexy, your comments on the decision to admit Morton Lenigo to this country in view of his known participation in the dynamiting of Cardiff Castle, Wales, the expulsion of the Lord Mayor of Manchester, England, and the knee seizure of the city of Birmingham, England, and additionally in view of the insurrection mounted in New York City overnight by X Patriots and other extremist groups which have reacted to the decision as a confession of weakness in face of threats from Ghana, Nigeria, and other knee-blank powers.
President Gaylord:
Ah—yeah, that one was comped for me, I think . . . just a second. (Shuffles documents on desk.) Here we are. "The decision to admit Morton Lenigo was taken in full cognizance of the allegations made against him by racialist spokesmen in his home
*Martin Luther Spry, Holobeam-Reuters
country of Britain, and in pursuance of the ideals of the Great Society which is designed to maintain a homo —ah—homo-genius?—ah . . ."
Dean of reporters:
"Homogeneous," maybe, Prexy?
President Gaylord: I
guess so. "—balance between the justifiably independence-desirous colored citizens of the planet and their fellows who by accident of circumstances have found themselves in a position of greater good fortune."
Reporters:
(laughter)
Unidentified reporter:
Keep pitchin', darl—that one swerved like a (last word indecipherable, laughter)
Myramay Welborne, Pan-Can:
Comments on the all-stations from Capetown recommending that you should nuke out the black enclaves starting with Detroit and shoot Lenigo while he's off his turf and his bullies can't come after?
President Gaylord:
Well, Myramay! Good to see you back! Did you shed that long wet creep you got married to?
Myramay Welborne:
I did not. It was a great honeymoon and it sort of stretched, that's all. How about an answer?
President Gaylord:
Yeah, I guess I have something here which will fit. . . . Yeah. "It is well-known that the blank extremists of South Africa will stop at nothing to discredit the ideals of a multi-racial society. Beyond that I have no comment to make on this disgraceful suggestion."
Dean of reporters:
Wish I could afford comping to your standards, Prexy. That's (emphasized) eminently usable. So what you doing tonight—?
Phyllis Logan Quality, Ninge:
Excuse me, Martin, I have one more—
Dean of reporters:
Sorry, thought we'd exhausted that one.
Phyllis Logan Quality:
Well, with the overnight death-count at twelve hundred eleven—
Reporters:
(laughter)
Phyllis Logan Quality:
—and sixteen thousand arrests to be processed things are bad in my district, damn it!
Reporters:
Oooh! Bad language yet! (Laughter)
Phyllis Logan Quality:
It isn't funny! Our own studios were—
President Gaylord:
When you've finished the commercial, Phyllis—
Reporters: (laughter)
Unidentified reporter:
Give her a break, she's new around here. What's more she's kind of pretty.
President Gaylord:
Better tell the automatics you want an "unidentified reporter" credit on that,—. You wouldn't want people to think you're getting susceptible after all these years, would you?
Unidentified reporter:
It's all right for you, Prexy. My son Tom came home last night with a third-degree burn on his shoulder. Sniper caught him.
President Gaylord:
I got a comped statement for that one too, right here somewhere. . . . Yeah. "Much as one regrets the damage to property caused by extremist—"
Unidentified reporter:
The hell with property! This was my son!
President Gaylord:
Ah, we got too damned many people in this country anyway.
Dean of reporters:
Can we quote that?
President Gaylord:
You quote what's comped for you! That does not include off-the-cuff and off-the-record remarks! You want to quote, you pick up a heap of printouts like you ought to. Is that the lot for today? I got a date at the gun club.
Dean of reporters:
Sure, Prexy, wouldn't want to keep you from an important engagement. (Ends)
FIFTY-SEVEN
PICKING UP THE PIECES
The sorting process at the Westchester camps started around five-thirty and by seven the arrestees with verifiable mental disorder records were being shipped into the Ginsberg and the automatics were humming with ward-of-the-state applications. They didn't call out Mogshack to attend to routine matters like this, but Reedeth was junior staff grade and they sent for him with a police skimmer at seven-ten. Officially on reserve for the month, Ariadne heard an early-morning newscast and came in at seven-fifty, and with the aid of three police psychiatrists they broke the back of the problem within a couple of hours; there were a mere seven hundred or so suspected mental cases this time. The State government had been clamping down recently, and were no longer admitting that proof of incarceration was equivalent to proof of disorder; they'd secured a Supreme Court ruling that a current doctor's certificate was essential.
