The Jagged Orbit (27 page)

EIGHTY-FOUR
ONE KNEE SPRAINED, ONE TIME BADLY OUT OF JOINT

What exactly was going on Flamen had no idea, but Conroy seemed persuaded that it was far more likely to lead to the collapse of Mogshack's authority than the original plan, and clinging optimistically to that he allowed himself to be swept along by events. Followed by his ill-assorted gaggle of companions, he rode the pediflow in the Etchmark Undertower from the elevator to the door of his office, feeling in his pocket for the Punch key to admit them.

But when he applied it, he realized that the door was already unlocked.

"What the hell?" he said under his breath. The panel moved aside at a touch, before he had time to consider that if there was an intruder in the office it would make more sense to steal quietly away and send for the busies than to walk in and confront him. In spite of the fact that his occupation exposed him to the potential fury of a great many of his victims, he had never carried a gun to protect himself, and he doubted whether anyone else in his party was armed at the moment.

While he was still in the grip of his initial surprise, however, one of the internal doors slid back and a dark face appeared, wearing an embarrassed expression like a kid caught stealing candy.

"Good God!" Conroy said over Flamen's shoulder; he was the taller by half a head. "Aren't you Pedro Diablo? Well, you seem to have landed on your feet after being so unceremoniously thrown out of Blackbury!"

Diablo gave a distracted nod, eyes on Flamen. "Ah ... I hope you don't mind," he said. "IBM couldn't get me one of the practice units you suggested until Monday at the soonest, and having seen what your equipment is capable of I simply couldn't resist the temptation of coining in to play around with it. I did get the code to isolate the unit, of course—it didn't need special wiring after all—and I promise I haven't done it any harm."

"You might have had the courtesy to let me know!" Flamen snapped. "I damned near mistook you for a burglar, and I was all set to sneak off and send for the police! Right now, though, we have more important uses for our computers, so I'd appreciate it if you'd get lost." Ill-temperedly, he strode past Diablo and into his own office.

"Nonsense," Conroy said, following.

"What?"

"I said nonsense. For one thing I've wanted to meet this man for years—he's probably the best intuitive psychologist on the planet, and I regularly use recordings of his shows as study themes, to illustrate how a determined individual can manipulate the mass audience. And for another thing, you're angry and frustrated, I'm pretty much manic, and we have to contend with a hell of a complex problem. It'll be very damned useful to have someone around with a detached point of view, and I can't think of anyone much more detached than someone who never wanted to be in New York at all and would far rather still be home in Black-bury. Right?" he added to the knee.

"Who in the hell are you?" Diablo demanded in astonishment.

"Oh—I'm sorry! I'm Xavier Conroy."

"You are?" Diablo's verge-of-hostile manner changed magically. He held out his hand. "Damn it, I've been hoping to meet you for years, too! Why in the world did you let them chase you off to that backwater teaching job in Manitoba?"

"I'm excessively fond of my own opinions," Conroy said wryly. "Students are generally sufficiently overawed not to shout their professors down, even these days, and it gives me a false sense of achievement when I see my own doctrines coming back at me in their term papers. But I had no business taking it for granted you'd want to stick around here, of course. It's just that—well, like I said, we have a problem, and . . . Do you get hunches, Mr. Diablo?"

"I guess I do, now and then. Not that they amount to real premonitions, if that's what you're driving at Or else I'd still be at home and a lot happier. But one gets a feel for the propaganda potential of any given news-item, for example."

"That's the kind of thing I'm talking about," Conroy nodded. "Over the past hour or two I've been seeing and hearing some absolutely extraordinary things, and there's a tantalizing sense of a pattern growing out of them. You got the same feeling, didn't you, Flamen?"

A little annoyed at being shuffled to the sidelines on his home ground, Flamen gave a curt nod; a heartbeat later he repented and amplified it, looking puzzled.

"Yes, back there at the hospital I had this momentary fit of—of excitement, I guess it was. It was so strong it made me feel dizzy."

"I'm still getting it," Lyla said, very pale. She was standing in the doorway as though shy about entering. "I never felt anything like it before—at least, not since I was a kid and everybody around me was busy preparing for war to break out I didn't understand what was happening, of course, but I distinctly associate to the same mixture of fear and excitement."

"Miss Clay is a pythoness," Conroy said to Diablo. "How do you feel about pythonesses?"

There was a pause. At length, with a chuckle, Diablo drew up the left sleeve of his smart New York-styled oversuit and revealed that just below the elbow he was wearing a Conjuh Man Inc. juju bracelet: an intricately braided ring of hair from a lion's mane.

"It's the kind of thing I guess we know more about than blanks do," he said. "You take sibyl-pills, Miss Clay?"

"Ah-yes."

"We kneeblanks were used to tapping the same kind of mental forces long before they got around to synthesizing the drugs you use in a clean modem laboratory. I have—I mean I had—a seeress on my staff back home who could do almost everything these computers do except build up reconstructed scenes for transmission. Used her a lot, like about one story a month regularly whereever we needed more data than we could get through official channels. She was right, too, four times out of five. Matter of fact I'm kind of glad to see how blank society has been turning back to human insights these past few years instead of sticking to machines exclusively."

"That's fascinating," Conroy said. "I never heard about that."

Diablo's lip curled. "You weren't intended to. We've been running the Fed authorities in little circles trying to trace leaks which don't exist. Which they will continue to do, I don't doubt, even if you go straight to the comweb and tell them what I just said. It's what happens when you rely too much on machinery—you wind up following the same old mechanical grooves all the time. Automatics don't make allowances for like differences of personality. You lay down hard-and-fast principles for them, and they follow them blindly to the most absurd conclusions, and eventually they drag you along in their wake."

"Damned right," Conroy said. "I knew you were a thinking man, Mr. Diablo, and I'm even more glad to have met you than I expected to be. Look, why don't we sit down and talk about this thing we seem to have got involved in?"

"Sure," Diablo nodded. "If you take it seriously I'm willing to bet on my being interested too." He glanced at his watch. "I would kind of like some lunch, though— I didn't eat breakfast today."

"I'm sure we can send out for some. Flamen?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake! Yes, of course we can!" Scowling, Flamen moved around his desk and sat down in his regular chair. "I warn you, though, Professor, that if this turns out to be the waste of time I half expect I'm going to be very damned angry."

"That's one thing which doesn't worry me," Conroy said with perfect composure. "But I grant there's a chance of it not being a waste of time in a way which we are too shortsighted to figure out, and if
that
happens you certainly won't be the only one who's annoyed."

EIGHTY-SIX
ASSUMPTION CONCERNING THE FOREGOING MADE FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY

He's not unique.

EIGHTY-SEVEN
CONFUSION WORSE CONFOUNDED

The clock said sixteen-ten and they sat among a welter of empty beer- and milk-cartons and multicolored sandwich wrappings.

"It doesn't make
sense."
Pedro Diablo said in an aggrieved tone, as though the world were conspiring to hide the secret from him. "It just keeps fanning out and fanning out, and every time it branches into some crazy new absurdity. I need to recapitulate—I have this feeling that I haven't taken in everything I've been told because my subconscious thinks so much of it is silly."

"Is there anything which does make sense?" Conroy demanded.

"Ah ..." Diablo hesitated. "Well, odd bits, I guess. But even those are so buried in among other things which sound ridiculous!"

"For instance?"

"Oh . . ." Another moment of doubt; then: "No, damn it! The things I want to take seriously are all wrapped up in garbage! Like what Harry's supposed to have said after he'd finished chopping down those macoots of Mikki Baxendale's."

"How do you mean?" Lyla put in."How's this supposed to be 'wrapped in garbage? Don't you believe me?"

"I'd believe Harry much more readily," Diablo said. "No offense. But on your own admission you'd had a sub-critical dose of a very powerful drug, and you can't have been functioning properly on all mental levels. And Harry won't or can't remember saying what you tell us he said, so ..." He spread his hands. "By the way, how does it happen that after throwing a man out of a forty-five story window Harry Madison is here instead of in the Undertombs?"

Reedeth sighed, leaning back in his chair to let his legs stretch out straight "What do you think I was doing before Flamen and Conroy came to collect him from the hospital? I was just about perjuring myself to prevent that, snowing the busies under with so many fully-comped reports of the effect on a man of swallowing a 250-milligram sibyl-pill they had to grant bail on grounds of temporary derangement. I'm used to dragging Ginsberg's patients out from under, and nowadays it's second nature for me to slam in counter-charges, whether or not they're as well documented as the kidnapping charge against Mikki Baxendale and her macoots. All I've done is postpone the reckoning, though. It may be for weeks because I know for a fact that the courts are thirty days behind schedule even on their first-degree murder hearings, but the crunch will come sooner or later."

"Did you lay on lawyers?"

"On a Saturday? You're joking! But the Ginsberg retains a computerized legal aid service we can plug into direct over the regular comweb lines. I used that"

Diablo shook his head wonderingly. "It really is a different world out here, you know. I mean, regardless of whether or not he'd been drugged, someone who threw a man off the top of the Zimbabwe Tower back in Blackbury would be in jail and more than likely in chains for however long it took Judge Dennison to reach his case. Your way may be more tolerant, but it sure as hell doesn't seem to be so efficient. He doesn't even have to go into court before he gets this bail, huh?"