The Jagged Orbit (20 page)

But he said nothing, merely moved aside to let them pass. And waited, not getting into the car.

The reason, instantly. Lying out in the corridor, the recognizable belongings. Books heaped. The stained bed on end propped against the wall. The less attractive miscellanea of a doomed household, including the Lar for which no doubt a debt-collection order had been filed today. And the door to the apt shut tight, locked, with a hundred-kilo deadfall beyond.

The Gottschalk sniggered. "Too bad, Lyla!" he said. For commercial reasons Gottschalks used first names, preserving the illusion that they too constituted a family such as a man was seeking to preserve (it says here) when he bought from them guns, grenades and mines. "They didn't shut the door behind you this morning, and it
was
kind of tempting for anyone who came by, wasn't it? Did your mack make a will leaving you the lease?"

"I—" Lyla's mind was frozen, sluggish as congealed old porridge. "I don't think he made a will for anyone."

"Too bad," the Gottschalk said again, his tone a sneer, and stepped into the elevator car to ride it down.

"Him I don't like," Madison said musingly, with a jerk of his head. "However, that's not important. Is this your apt, the one with all the furniture and stuff heaped up outside?"

"Yes, but—" Lyla was having to drive her nails deep into her palms, stiffen her muscles everywhere to save herself from screaming. "But someone's moved in, someone's squatting there! When the busies dragged me off today they didn't lock the door and—and what can I do? It wasn't my lease, it was Dan's, and ..."

She turned blindly and crumpled against the wall. "And I haven't even got a
key!"

There was a long time of nothing happening. Eventually she recovered and was able to lift her forehead from the corridor wall where she had been leaning it and blink away confusing tears from her eyes. Madison was still standing where he had been, bag slung over shoulder, one dark stubby hand conspicuous against the gray oversuit where he had reached up to grip the strap. She felt horribly ashamed of herself from years of being taught that one must not not not reveal one's weaknesses, eight months a year from age ten onward in the school from which she had ultimately run away.

But all Madison said was, "Punch lock, I guess—hm?"

"What—? Oh. Oh, yes. A Punch lock, of course." Almost no other kind was fitted to modern apt doors; any lock with an exterior hole for the key to be inserted was far too vulnerable.

"I see," Madison was saying in a musing tone, having turned to look at the jamb alongside which was propped up the broken bed with Dan's blood on it, drying now to a foul brown crust that attracted a buzzing fly. "Mm-hm—it's a one-two-eight code, I think. . . . Right, Miss Clay?"

She stared at him in bewilderment.

"I mean it's got one-two-eight in it somewhere? Like the first three digits, or the next-to-first maybe?"

"Ah..." She swallowed enormously, not understanding but giving what seemed to be the most sensible answer. "Yes, I guess it does start with one-two-eight. But I never memorized it."

She hesitated, intending to ask how he'd known, but he had turned his back and was doing something she couldn't see because his body concealed his movements. What she did see was the door opening, and a chink of light across its top.

"There's a deadfall!" she screamed, and in the same heartbeat someone said from inside the apt something about
goddamned . . .
and the door was slammed back on its hinges so fast she couldn't see it go, it was
here
and it was
there
and Madison was standing in the opening with one hand over his head to catch the hundred-kilo deadfall barely descended in its grooves. Beyond him, a staring white-faced man coming out of the living room, holding a chair like a shield, whose jaw fell as he saw the intruder carefully raise the deadfall back to storage height and put over the catch to neutralize it.

"Do you know this person, Miss Clay?" Madison said in a bored kind of voice.

"Y-yes," Lyla whispered, and had to draw another breath before she could finish the statement. "It's a friend of Dan's—my mackero's. It's Berry."

"I..." Berry's Adam's apple bobbed on his lean throat; he was tall and stringy, and she was suddenly reminded of the policeman at the rapitrans terminal who had tried to trip Madison. "I came to take back my vuset!" he improvised. "I found I needed it after all. And when I saw the door was open I ..." The words trailed away and he gave a shrug.

"Funny," Madison said with a glance at Lyla. "I don't see a vuset out there in the corridor. See a gang of other stuff, though. Yours?"

"Mine and Dan's!" Lyla burst out before Berry could reply.

"Ah-hah." Madison walked forward, brushing past Berry as though he didn't exist, and peered into the living room. "It's very kind of your friend, Miss Clay! I see he's given you a working bed in place of the broken one out there on the landing, and the place looks all kind of neat and clean and tidy. Must be a relief to know you have friends like this, when you were expecting to come home and find everything had been smashed by kids, or pilfered, because the busies didn't lock up behind them when they took you to the Ginsberg. Place looks fine!"

"You goddamned—!" Berry began, raising the chair as though to make a club of it instead of a shield. But Madison freed the hand steadying his bag long enough to jerk the thumb towards the deadfall which he had so casually caught and lifted, all one hundred kilograms of it, and the movement spoke clearer than words. Berry lowered the chair very slowly to the floor.

Sidling, all the blood drained from his face, he moved towards the door where Lyla stood like a marble statue. When he came within arm's reach, he said tentatively, "It's great to find that it wasn't true about your being shut up in the Ginsberg—"

At that point she lost control and slapped his face; the noise was like a gunshot.

"Bitch!" he shouted, and his fist came up bound for the point of her jaw—and missed, because while it was still coming Madison had kicked him accurately at the base of the spine and lifted him bodily past Lyla, through the door and across the corridor to slump against the opposite wall, moaning.

Carefully he closed the door and turned to her.

"Is there anything out there you'd like brought back in?" he inquired.

"Leave it," Lyla sighed. "I don't—oh, yes. There's two thousand to come back on the Lar! I don't dare let him corner me on that, the bastard. The
bastard!
And I thought he was a friend of Dan's! He must have heard Dan was dead and I'd been arrested and thought he'd grab the chance to move in—he's been living with his girl in one room for months and this place does at least have a separate kitchen though it's pretty crummy otherwise.... What are you doing?"

Madison had his head bent close to the door, listening. A moment more, and he whipped it open, one hand poised to strike in precisely the right spot. Berry yelled as his wrist was seized and pressure applied on nerves which sprang his fingers open. A Punch key fell tinkling and Madison said ironically, "Good of you to return the key—I guess Miss Clay will be needing it."

But in the other hand Berry held a knife, and that he disposed of with neither irony nor delay; the frantic upward blade destined for his belly ended against the armor of the metal door, skidded with a squeal, and was twisted economically by the hilt out of Berry's grasp into his own. For the second time in less than a minute Berry's jaw gaped in disbelief. A long moment they stood face to face; then his nerve broke and he ran blindly for the elevator.

Madison slid the knife into his bag and said, "Tell me what you want brought back in, Miss Clay."

Staring at him, she essayed a laugh. It wasn't a great success. "You weren't kidding when you said you knew how to look after yourself, were you?" she said. "Did the Army teach you all that?"

"I haven't had too much to do in the Ginsberg," Madison shrugged. "Time to think about it, and practice."

"But—but you got through that door without a key!" Lyla persisted. "It was locked, wasn't it?"

"Ah . . . Yes, it was locked." Madison's dark face betrayed no emotion.

"But you can't open a Punch lock without the right key! I mean, not without blowing the door down!"

Madison didn't say anything.

"All right, I guess you can. You just did it What did you use?"

Silence.

"Okay, trade secret. But tell me this, then." She hesitated, a listening look on her face as though she were hearing her own words and doubting that they could possibly make sense. "Do they use Punch locks in the Ginsberg?"

Madison nodded.

"And you could have opened them any time you wanted to? Just walked out?"

"I guess so."

"Then why in hell didn't you?" Her voice grew ragged with hysteria.

"I wasn't meant to, Miss Clay," Madison said. "Not till I got the legal certificate that I'd been discharged and had a guardian to answer for me for the first twelve months, you see."

Lyla felt for a chair without looking and lowered herself to its seat, very carefully. "Are you serious? Yes, of course you are—you give me the impression you couldn't be anything
but
serious."

Another pause.

"Well . . . Well, thanks very much, anyway. I don't know what I'd have done if that bastard Berry had been here and I'd arrived on my own. I mean, if I'd just found the door locked and got no reply I'd have gone looking for him first because I thought he was Dan's best friend." She put her head in her hands and rocked back and forth. "Do you have any friends, Harry? Can I call you Harry? I don't
like
calling people mister and missus and miss all the time."

"Sure, you call me what you like," Madison said, peering through the door to see that the corridor was empty, then briskly going to bring back the things Berry had tossed out. Carrying the bed cautiously through the door, he said, "Like I should clean this up and fix it? You wouldn't want to be indebted to him for that one he brought in, would you?"

"No!" Lyla raised her head. "No, sling everything out that he brought here—let him drag it home, if he still has a home!"

"So you just tell me what's his and what's yours," Madison invited, and propped the bed against the nearest wall.

The job was done in twenty minutes, the door closed, the deadfall set again for fear Berry might return with reinforcements, the bed thoroughly washed down with hot.water—for once the supply was plentiful, and among the things Berry had brought which had not been dumped in the corridor was some detergent—and the gash in the cushion repaired with adhesive tape from Madison's bag. It was like a Santa Claus sack, Lyla thought, detachedly watching him at work; she could believe that if she opened it at random and enumerated its contents she'd find only what might be expected: clothing, toilet articles, perhaps a few books or souvenirs. But whatever the problem, if Madison himself reached in, he would produce the necessary article to cope....

Tested, reinflated, the bed was back in place and the Lar was in its niche and everything else was as it had been. Madison slung his bag over his shoulder again and headed for the door.

"Glad to have been of help, Miss Clay," he said. "I'll go locate that hotel now, I guess."

"No, wait!" Lyla jumped up. "Please don't go. I . . ." She had been about to reach out and catch hold of his arm; she canceled the gesture in mid-air. Some knees were very sensitive about blanks touching them without permission, and she was frightened of this man who could open locks without explosives and walk under a heavy deadfall to catch it with one arm. To cover her abortive
faux pas
she started to talk very rapidly and randomly.

"You see, like I was saying, if I hadn't found out it was Berry here I'd have turned to him because I thought he was Dan's friend and I don't come from New York, not even from inside the state, so I don't have too many friends and . . .
Do
you have any friends, Harry?"

"No."

"None? None at all? Family, anything?"

He shook his head.

"You come from this part of the country?"

"Nevada."

"You're a long way from home, then, aren't you? I only come from Virginia, but either way, it's not New York . . ." She bit down hard on her lower lip; it was trembling like an advance warning of tears.

"Suppose Berry waits to catch me alone," she said finally.

"You know him," Madison said. "Do you think he might try?"

"I don't know!" The words peaked in a cry. "I never even thought of him as an enemy before! He's the last person in the world I'd
ever
have thought of as an enemy! Oh God, why can't we have friends any more like they used to in the old days?"

"I don't know the answer to that," Madison said. "I expected that the doctors at the Ginsberg might, but they don't."

"Yes, I guess you would expect psychologists to be able to answer it," Lyla said, falling into the game with a lightheaded, floating sensation like the very late stages of a Ladromide trip. "What did they put you in there for, anyway—if you don't mind my asking?"

"For too many questions," Madison said. "That kind of question you just asked. They put a gun in my hand and said go kill that naked savage with a stone spear, he's the enemy, and I said why is he the enemy and they said because he's been got at by the communists and I said does he even have a word in his language for 'communism' and they said if you don't go kill him you'll be under arrest. So they arrested me. I went on asking questions and I never got an answer, and I didn't feel inclined to stop until I did. So they discharged me and put me in the Ginsberg—or rather, in another hospital first off, but when the Ginsberg was opened they transferred me. Because I'm a knee, I guess. It was a time when it wouldn't have looked right to have a black man in a bad old-fashioned hospital."