The Jagged Orbit (28 page)

"Not if he has a record of mental instability," Reedeth said wearily. "But the bail is automatically doubled."

"It's a system, I guess," Diablo sighed

Reaching for another carton of beer, Conroy tore the plastic opener strip and cursed as the pressure of gas inside sprayed him with fine drops. He wiped his beard and took a swig.

"If you've finished the sociological survey, I'd like to follow up the point you were about to make when you wandered away from the subject," he said to Diablo. "What would have made you take this prophecy of Harry's seriously?"

"Prophecy?" Diablo repeated. "Yes, I guess it is one, isn't it? Well, this reference to some new product of the Gottschalks', you see. There is one in the pipeline, something new and very special, and I believe it's due for introduction in the spring of next year."

"How would you know about it?" Reedeth inquired skeptically.

"That's a hell of a question for a blank to ask," Diablo countered. "Don't you know how the Gottschalks set you up as customers? They issue their ultra-late weaponry to the black enclaves, at not much over cost, knowing you're so scared of us even spitting your way that you'll pay whatever they ask to keep the balance of terror. Even so, it's not very impressive, is it? Talking about a 'Gottschalk coup of 2015' doesn't have to mean anything more than that Harry got word of what's circulating among the enclaves."

"Is there something?" Flamen demanded, his professional instincts alerted.

"I just told you!"

"What specifically?" Flamen persisted.

"Blazes, don't you follow the news out of Blackbury? I did a program myself about the latest equipment Anthony Gottschalk handed us for trials, and it's due on the beams tomorrow over three of the black-owned satellites. There's a 250-watt laser with five-hundred-shot capacitance—some new breakthrough in accumulators, I was told, though they're designed so you can't take them to pieces without melting down the parts and up to the time I left I hadn't heard that our engineers had figured out the principle. There's a hand-launched self-propelled grenade with a micronuke head with a range of a thousand yards and power to bring down an average block of apts. There's a whole gang of stuff, all being introduced at once. Though I never heard of it being given any such name as—what did you call it, Miss Clay?"

"I didn't call it anything," the pythoness said obstinately. "But Harry said 'System C integrated weaponry' and talked about equipping one man with the power to raze a city."

"I don't get this," Flamen said after a pause. "I never knew the Gottschalks to be secretive about their products before. In the R&D stages, yes of course, but not after samples have been issued for use."

"Policy difference in the cartel?" Conroy suggested.

Flamen looked blank for a moment, then snapped his fingers. "Christ, I really
am
losing my touch! It never happened before, but it could just be that it's concerned with this fight that's going on among them." He jumped to his feet. "I'm going to comp that right away, if you don't mind. It fits entirely too well."

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand," Lyla ventured.

Approaching the first and most worn of his computer input boards, Flamen glanced at her. "No? But you have heard that there's a major disagreement among the Gottschalks? It's been going on for weeks, and it climaxed the other day when Marcantonio celebrated his eightieth birthday and a bunch of high-level pollies deliberately stayed away. It just might be due to an argument about introducing these nasty new gimmicks Diablo's been describing to us. You go ahead talking if you like; I've finally got something out of all this chitter-chatter which I can make use of." His fingers were coding orders to the automatics as he spoke. "That would be a story to gladden your heart, wouldn't it,

Prof?" he added to Conroy. "The Gottschalks disagree* ing about a new line of weaponry and a splinter group of them going ahead against the old man's wishes!"

"I don't see any reason to be pleased about that!" Conroy snapped. "They're gangsters, as far as I'm concerned, and how will you like it if they start last-century-style gang warfare with modern equipment? It'll be infinitely worse than anything the X Patriots have yet done!"

Flamen declined to answer, and in a moment he was lost in the series of cryptic probability ratings which glowed on the screen before him.

"Ah, the hell," Conroy grunted. "It must surely be better for people to have some kind of warning about that sort of thing, even though not many of us pay attention to warnings any longer. Half the time we don't even trust ourselves, not enough that we rely on our judgment without a second opinion, preferably a mechanical one, so why should we listen to other people's advice?"

"You really are the most cynical son-of-a-bitch I ever met," Diablo said, tacking a wink on to the words to amplify his meaning.

"That I will take as a compliment." Conroy glanced at his watch. "I've spent a hell of a lot of time on this by now, though, and I don't seem to have got anywhere. Let's see if we can stick to the point, shall we? You were saying you wanted to review what you'd heard and make sure you'd taken it all in."

"Stick to the point!" Diablo parodied a grin. "If I could find one worth sticking I'd cheerfully do so. I feel more like I'm dredging through mud for bits of salable scrap. Used to do that when I was a kid . . ." He briskened. "Okay, let me take it from the top in chronological order to make sure I haven't missed anything. It starts with you being invited to perform at the Ginsberg for an audience of patients due to be discharged, doesn't it, Miss Clay?"

Lyla nodded.

"And this performance was remarkable for two things that had never happened to you before. First off, your late mackero had to slap you out of an echo-trap, which as I understand it is due to the presence in the audience of some especially dominant personality, from whom your subconscious can't tear itself away."

"That's what I've been told," Lyla agreed cautiously. "As I said, it had never happened to me before."

"Okay, then. We'll set aside for the moment the content of the oracle which developed into an echo-trap, which Mr. Flamen has down on tape so we can check it later. We'll go on to the second remarkable point, which was that you had a—did you call it a hangover?"

"That's right. On the way home in Mr. Flamen's skimmer."

"Ah-hah. You spoke what amounted to another oracle in the waking state instead of in trance."

Lyla shivered. "It was weird! I had this momentary sense of total certainty, and I heard the words coming out of my own mouth without knowing what they were going to be when they finished."

"There are processes very much akin to these in voudoun work," Diablo said offhandedly. "You might check on some of the current field-leaders in the enclaves, like Mama Echo in Chicago or the girl I've been working with in Blackbury, Mama Fey. However!" He cleared his throat "You played over your oracles with Mr. Flamen, right? And you didn't come to any clear conclusions about them."

"We were both kind of distracted," Lyla muttered. "I'd had a quarrel with Dan, and this thing about taking you on had come up too—though I didn't know it was you they were talking about when Mr. Prior called with the news. All we figured out was this vague notion that maybe Mrs. Flamen was concerned, but—no, forget that Mr. Flamen asked me in the skimmer why I'd mentioned his wife, so that one must have been exceptionally clear."

She looked surprised. "I'd forgotten about that!"

"And your automatics at the hospital"—Diablo turned to Reedeth—"comped out probable subjects for each of the three oracles Miss Clay had managed to issue before she was slapped awake, and the one which developed into an echo-trap was allegedly concerned with Harry Madison. Correct?"

Reedeth nodded, face strained. "At the time, of course, I didn't know what an echo-trap implied. I heard the term for the first time when I spoke to Dan Kazer directly after Miss Clay's performance, and it wasn't until later that I followed it up. After what's happened today, though, I'm beginning to wonder whether I was a fool to believe what the automatics told me."

"Why so?"

"Well . . ." Reedeth made a helpless gesture. "Just before we came away from the hospital, there was this thing we told you about: Mr. Flamen asked why these computers here predicted failure of the Federal computers to solve the problem of interference on his daily show, and the answer we got was transparent nonsense."

"Jim, what's happened to the open mind I tried to encourage in you when you were studying with me?" Conroy said.

"Open mind! Christ, if I'm going to be told to believe in women patients who can interfere at a distance with a three-vee broadcast, the next stop will be raising the devil and doing duty to a plastic idol!"

"Don't exaggerate." Conroy loaded the words with frosty reproof. "Life is a matter of probabilities, not certainties. You were prepared to believe what your desketary told you about Mogshack, for instance?"

Reedeth wavered. "That's not the same thing," he muttered.

"It's the same automatic complex using the same data banks," Conroy insisted. "Furthermore, when you had the oracles comped you were prepared to accept that they applied to—among others—Harry Madison, even though you wouldn't have guessed that for yourself?"

"Ah . . ." Reedeth licked his lips. "Yes, damn it, of course I took that on trust! It fitted once I'd thought it over. But this ridiculous thing about Mrs. Flamen hadn't come up then!"

"We haven't got to it in this review of our problem," Conroy said. "Let it go for the moment and tell me just what you mean by saying that Madison 'fitted' the oracle supposed to be concerned with him."

Reedeth glanced uneasily at the subject of the conversation, who was sitting to one side of the group, taking virtually no part in the discussion except to answer politely when he was directly addressed.

"The morning before Miss Clay's show," he muttered, "I'd reached the conclusion, because he'd fixed the trouble I was having with the censor-circuits on my desketary without my asking outright, that Madison's trouble couldn't be termed insanity. Nonconformity, maybe, but that's not the same thing."

"Hmm! Working under Mogshack hasn't completely petrified your mind, then," Conroy rumbled. "In an age when eccentricity has almost been made a major crime, that's a remarkable insight."

"Whichever way we dig through this heap of confusion," Diablo said, "we seem to wind up with Harry again. Hey, Harry!"

Madison turned an emotionless gaze to him.

"What
is
all this, man? Like I keep hearing you can open Punch locks without the key—and fix a desketary in ways the designer didn't dream of—and you were stuck in the Ginsberg in spite of not being crazy—and having a sibyl-pill forced down your throat did things to you that aren't in the literature—and here's this pythoness says she watched you beat nine opponents in a row and she got all these visions of weird fights and she says she wasn't just dreaming . . ." He spread his hands.

"You missed a couple of things," Conroy said. "When I got hit by this hunch, just before leaving Reedeth's office, I started to ask Madison who the hell he is, only someone said something else and it distracted me." He leaned forward in his chair. "I was thinking partly of all these visions that Miss Clay had—which make me want to ask how the hell did all that
detail
get packed in. ... You haven't studied history, have you?" he shot at Lyla.

"Not to specialize. Just regular school lessons. And I never enjoyed it much. Got low marks all the time."

"But what you told us about—oh—being ill from bad meat in a Roman arena, finding it hard to see clearly because your eyes were bleary from dust and bright sunlight in the Egyptian bit—"

"Egyptian bit?" Diablo cut in. "Man, you're losing me all the time!"

"The man with the whip and the coarse linen kilt, and the bit about picking up an adobe brick shaped like a loaf! It's all so goddamned three-dimensional!" Conroy pounded fist into palm. "This isn't the kind of thing you'd expect to remember from a mere hallucination. It's the kind of fiddling little detail that sticks in your mind in real life, like trudging to the top of a mountain and being less impressed with the splendid view than by the blister you've rubbed on your heel. Do you see what I mean?"

"I surely do," Diablo nodded. "It's a point I overlooked, and I shouldn't have. It's the kind of touch I've always prided myself on adding to my own reconstructions for propaganda shows, the little striking bit which all by itself makes the scene appear real" He clawed at his beard so vigorously it looked as though he might tear out the roots. "Go on. What else was it that made you ask Madison who he is?"

"The fact that when Miss Clay asked him straight out, was it him who fouled up her prophesying at the hospital, he said yes. Correct, Miss Clay?"

"Harry seemed to know what I meant without my explaining," Lyla said, glancing nervously at the knee. "But—ah—should we be talking about him as if he wasn't in the room?"

"Harry seems to be committing the crime of silence," Diablo said without humor. "We've been trying to get a straight yes or no out of him all afternoon; maybe if we annoy him sufficiently by talking about him this way we'll provoke a few useful comments. Hey, Harry?"

Madison gave a very faint smile and still said nothing.