The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories (49 page)

Probably it was, Johnny decided. It was in many respects a generous offer; Harvey was not trying to bilk Kathy.

“Speaking for Mrs. Sharp,” Johnny began. But Kathy cut him off.

“No,” she said in a quick, brisk voice. “I can’t sell. He says not to.”

Johnny said, “You’ve already given me authority to negotiate, Kathy.”

“Well,” she said in a hard voice, “I’m taking it back.”

“If I’m to work with you and for you at all,” Johnny said, “you must go on my advice. We’ve already talked it over and agreed—”

The phone in the office rang.

“Listen to him yourself,” Kathy said. She picked up the phone and held it out to Johnny. “He’ll tell you.”

Johnny accepted the phone and put it to his ear. “Who is this?” he demanded. And then he heard the drumming. The far-off uncanny drumming noise, as if something were scratching at a long metal wire.

“…imperative to retain control. Your advice absurd. She can pull herself together; she’s got the stuff. Panic reaction; you’re scared because she’s ill. A good doctor can fix her up. Get a doctor for her; get medical help. Get an attorney and be sure she stays out of the hands of the law. Make sure her supply of drugs is cut. Insist on…” Johnny yanked the receiver away from his ear, refusing to hear more. Trembling, he hung the phone back up.

“You heard him,” Kathy said. “Didn’t you?
That was Louis.”

“Yes,” Johnny said.

“He’s grown,” Kathy said. “Now we can hear him direct; it’s not just the radio telescope at Kennedy Slough. I heard him last night, clearly, for the first time, as I lay down to go to sleep.”

To St. Cyr and Harvey, Johnny said, “We’ll have to think your proposition over, evidently. We’ll have to get an appraisal of the worth of the unimproved real estate you’re offering and no doubt you want an audit of Wilhelmina. That will take time.” He heard his voice shake; he had not gotten over the shock of picking up the telephone and hearing the living voice of Louis Sarapis.

After making an appointment with St. Cyr and Harvey to meet with them once more later in the day, Johnny took Kathy out to a late breakfast; she had admitted, reluctantly, that she had eaten nothing since the night before.

“I’m just not hungry,” she explained, as she sat picking listlessly at her plate of bacon and eggs, toast with jam.

“Even if that was Louis Sarapis,” Johnny said, “you don’t—”

“It was. Don’t say ‘even’; you know it’s him. He’s gaining power all the time, out there. Perhaps from the sun.”

“So it’s Louis,” he said doggedly. “Nonetheless, you have to act in your own interest, not in his.”

“His interests and mine are the same,” Kathy said. “They involve maintaining Archimedean.”

“Can he give you the help you need? Can he supply what’s missing? He doesn’t take your drug-addiction seriously; that’s obvious. All he did was preach at me.” He felt anger. “That’s damn little help, for you or for me, in this situation.”

“Johnny,” she said, “I feel him near me all the time; I don’t need the TV or the phone—I
sense
him. It’s my mystical bent, I think. My religious intuition; it’s helping me maintain contact with him.” She sipped a little orange juice.

Bluntly, Johnny said, “It’s your amphetamine psychosis, you mean.”

“I won’t go into the hospital, Johnny. I won’t sign myself in; I’m sick but not that sick. I can get over this bout on my own, because I’m not alone. I have my grandfather. And—” She smiled at him. “I have you. In spite of Sarah Belle.”

“You won’t have me, Kathy,” he said quietly, “unless you sell to Harvey. Unless you accept the Ganymede real estate.”

“You’d quit?”

“Yes,” he said.

After a pause, Kathy said, “My grandfather says go ahead and quit.” Her eyes were dark, enlarged, and utterly cold.

“I don’t believe he’d say that.”

“Then talk to him.”

“How?”

Kathy pointed to the TV set in the corner of the restaurant. “Turn it on and listen.”

Rising to his feet, Johnny said, “I don’t have to; I’ve already given my decision. I’ll be at my hotel, if you should change your mind.” He walked away from the table, leaving her sitting there. Would she call after him? He listened as he walked. She did not call.

A moment later he was out of the restaurant, standing on the sidewalk. She had called his bluff, and so it ceased to be a bluff; it became the real thing. He actually had quit.

Stunned, he walked aimlessly on. And yet—he had been right. He knew that. It was just that… damn her, he thought. Why didn’t she give in? Because of Louis, he realized. Without the old man she would have gone ahead and done it, traded her controlling, voting stock for the Ganymede property. Damn Louis Sarapis, not her, he thought furiously.

What now?
he asked himself. Go back to New York? Look for a new job? For instance approach Alfonse Gam? There was money in that, if he could land it. Or should he stay here in Michigan, hoping that Kathy would change her mind?

She can’t keep on,
he decided.
No matter what Sarapis tells her. Or rather, what she believes he’s telling her. Whichever it is.

Hailing a cab, he gave the driver the address of his hotel room. A few moments later he was entering the lobby of the Antler Hotel, back where he had started early in the morning. Back to the forbidding empty room, this time merely to sit and wait. To hope that Kathy would change her mind and call him. This time he had no appointment to go to; the appointment was over.

When he reached his hotel room he heard his phone ringing.

For a moment Johnny stood at the door, key in hand, listening to the phone on the other side of the door, the shrill noise reaching him as he stood in the hall.
Is it Kathy?
he wondered.
Or is it
him?

He put the key in the lock, turned it and entered the room; sweeping the receiver off its hook he said, “Hello.”

Drumming and far-off, the voice, in the middle of its monotonous monologue, its recitation to itself, was murmuring, “…no good at all, Barefoot, to leave her. Betrayal of your job; thought you understood your responsibilities. Same to her as it was to me, and you never would have walked off in a fit of pique and left me. I deliberately left the disposition of my body to you so you’d stay on. You can’t…” At that point Johnny hung up, chilled.

The phone rang again, at once.

This time he did not take it off the hook.
The hell with you,
he said to himself. He walked to the window and stood looking down at the street below, thinking to himself of the conversation he had held with old Louis years ago, the one that had made such an impression in his mind. The conversation in which it had come out that he had failed to go to college because he wanted to die. Looking down at the street below, he thought,
Maybe I ought to jump. At least there’d be no more phones… no more of it.

The worse part,
he thought,
is its
senility.
Its thoughts are not clear, not distinct; they’re dream-like; irrational. The old man is not genuinely alive. He is not even in half-life. This is a dwindling away of consciousness toward a nocturnal state. And we are forced to listen to it as it unwinds, as it develops step by step, to final, total death.

But even in this degenerative state, it had desires. It
wanted,
and strongly. It wanted him to do something; it wanted Kathy to do something; the remnants of Louis Sarapis were vital and active, and clever enough to find ways of pursuing him, of getting what was wanted. It was a travesty of Louis’s wishes during his lifetime, and yet it could not be ignored; it could not be escaped.

The phone continued to ring.

Maybe it isn’t Louis,
he thought then.
Maybe it’s Kathy.
Going to it he lifted the receiver. And put it back down at once. The drumming once more, the fragments of Louis Sarapis’s personality… he shuddered.
And is it just here, is it selective?

He had a terrible feeling that it was
not
selective.

Going to the TV set at the far end of the room he snapped the switch. The screen grew into lighted animation, and yet, he saw, it was strangely blurred. The dim outlines of—it seemed to be a face.

And everyone,
he realized,
is seeing this.
He turned to another channel. Again the dully-formed features, the old man half-materialized here on the television screen. And from the set’s speaker the murmur of indistinct words. “…told you time and again your primary responsibility is to…” Johnny shut the set off; the ill-formed face and words sank out of existence, and all that remained, once more, was the ringing phone.

He picked up the phone and said, “Louis, can you hear me?”

“…when election time comes they’ll see. A man with the spirit to campaign a second time, take the financial responsibility, after all it’s only for the wealthy men, now, the cost of running…” The voice droned on. No, the old man could not hear him. It was not a conversation; it was a monologue. It was not authentic communication.

And yet the old man knew what was occurring on Earth; he seemed to understand, to somehow see, that Johnny had quit his job.

Hanging up the phone he seated himself and lit a cigarette.

I can’t go back to Kathy,
he realized,
unless I’m willing to change my mind and advise her not to sell. And that’s impossible; I can’t do that. So that’s out. What is there left for me?

Going to the window once more he stood looking down at the street below.

At a newsstand, Claude St. Cyr tossed down coins, picked up the newspaper.

“Thank you, sir or madam,” the robot vender said.

The lead article… St. Cyr blinked and wondered if he had lost his mind. He could not grasp what he was reading—or rather unable to read. It made no sense; the homeostatic news-printing system, the fully automated micro-relay newspaper, had evidently broken down. All he found was a procession of words, randomly strung together. It was worse than
Finnegans Wake.

Or was it random? One paragraph caught his eye.

St. Cyr said rapidly to Harvey, who stood beside him, “Johnny Barefoot’s in a room at the Antler Hotel about to jump, and this is old Sarapis telling us, warning us. We better get over there.”

Glancing at him, Harvey said, “Barefoot’s on our side; we can’t afford to have him take his life. But why would Sarapis—”

“Let’s just get over there,” St. Cyr said, starting toward his parked ‘copter. Harvey followed on the run.

All at once the telephone stopped ringing. Johnny turned from the window—and saw Kathy Sharp standing by it, the receiver in her hand. “He called me,” she said. “And he told me, Johnny, where you were and what you were going to do.”

“Nuts,” he said, “I’m not going to do anything.” He moved back from the window.

“He thought you were,” Kathy said.

“Yes, and that proves he can be wrong.” His cigarette, he saw, had burned down to the filter; he dropped it into the ashtray on the dresser and stubbed it out.

“My grandfather was always fond of you,” Kathy said. “He wouldn’t like anything to happen to you.”

Shrugging, Johnny said, “As far as I’m concerned I have nothing to do with Louis Sarapis any more.”

Kathy had put the receiver to her ear; she paid no attention to Johnny—she was listening to her grandfather, he saw, and so he ceased talking. It was futile.

“He says,” Kathy said, “that Claude St. Cyr and Phil Harvey are on their way up here. He told them to come, too.”

“Nice of him,” he said shortly.

Kathy said, “I’m fond of you, too, Johnny. I can see what my grandfather found about you to like and admire. You genuinely take my welfare seriously, don’t you? Maybe I could go into the hospital voluntarily, for a short period anyhow, a week or a few days.”

“Would that be enough?” he asked.

“It might.” She held the phone out to him. “He wants to talk to you. I think you’d better listen; he’ll find a way to reach you, in any case. And you know that.”

Reluctantly, Johnny accepted the phone.

“…trouble is you’re out of a job and that depresses you. If you’re not working you feel you don’t amount to anything; that’s the kind of person you are. I like that. The same way myself. Listen, I’ve got a job for you. At the Convention. Doing publicity to make sure Alfonse Gam is nominated; you’d do a swell job. Call Gam. Call Alfonse Gam. Johnny, call Gam. Call—”

Johnny hung up the phone.

I’ve got a job,” he told Kathy. “Representing Gam. At least Louis says so.”

Would you do that?” Kathy asked. “Be his P.R. man at the nominating convention?”

He shrugged. Why not? Gam had the money; he could and would pay well. And certainly he was no worse than the President, Kent Margrave.
And I must get a job,
Johnny realized.
I have to live. I’ve got a wife and two children; this is no joke.

“Do you think Gam has a chance this time?” Kathy asked.

“No, not really. But miracles in politics do happen; look at Richard Nixon’s incredible comeback in 1968.”

“What is the best route for Gam to follow?”

He eyed her. “I’ll talk that over with him. Not with you.”

“You’re still angry,” Kathy said quietly. “Because I won’t sell. Listen, Johnny. Suppose I turned Archimedean over to you.”