“Go to hell,” I told him, walking away.
The gallery was still roaring and I felt exposed, down there on the floor. I wondered uneasily how thick the doors were, if the mob outside took it into their heads to come for me. Doug Marshall and Charles Wentworth closed around me in protective fashion. A sudden shower of orange peel descended from the gallery and the court officials began to shout for order.
“Uh … that was a pretty good thing you did there, Joe,” said Doug. “Don’t worry about those bastards. You had to tell the truth in there.”
“I’m not sure whether I told the truth or not, you know that, Doug?”
Charles said, “You told the truth. If Miss Jones had wanted to dispute what you said, she’d have had you coupled to a lie detector. But she didn’t.”
“Charles, I feel as though I’ve sentenced her.”
Rennie joined us. At the Triangle, the operator was feeding the final pieces of evidence into the compitrator. “You’ve sentenced nobody—the compitrator does that. And even the compitrator doesn’t have absolute power. Its sentence is determined by the Occupancy Factor.”
The roar from outside came, angry and threatening like the fringe thunder of an approaching hurricane. “The Occupancy Factor?” I asked, trying not to think about all those people.
“This is where the compitrator really scores over the old system of human judge and jury. The machine is programmed with the trial data as you saw—but its verdict tendency is weighted by the Occupancy Factor. Briefly, you’re more likely to get a verdict of not guilty if the state pens are full. Right now the Occupancy Factor is low; this would look bad for Miss Jones but for the fact that she’s obviously as guilty as hell, anyway. As it is, the Factor will only affect the length of her sentence.”
There was a stir of activity around the Triangle. The compitrator, which had remained thoughtfully silent for the past few minutes, suddenly chattered into life and emitted a tape. The operator tore it off, glanced at it briefly, and spoke, while the cameras zoomed in. “Miss Jones, it is with regret that I must inform you that you have been found guilty of attempted murder. As you know, you are entitled to address the Court before sentence is passed.”
“Will that affect the sentence?” I asked Rennie.
“Not one iota. It’s traditional, that’s all.”
“… avail yourself of this opportunity?” The operator glanced inquiringly at Carioca.
“I most certainly shall.” She rose to her feet and the gallery, which had been murmuring comment at the expected verdict, was silent. Dale Finlay was gesturing his cameras lower, bringing the lighting back to alleviate the harshness, playing a neutral role until the audience reaction firmed up. Carioca shook her midnight hair away from her face after a thoughtful pause with downcast eyes, then began to speak. “When I first came to the Peninsula, I knew nobody.
“I was a stranger in this country of yours, and I am a retiring sort of person who finds it difficult to make friends. In my loneliness I turned to the first two people I met—a young S. P. girl whom I took into my home and looked after like a daughter, and Mr. Joe Sagar, whom you met earlier.
“It’s an old story, and not a pretty one …”
She spoke on in quiet, sad tones, with none of her usual bombast, her usual emphasis. She was utterly convincing as she told the story of my seducing Joanne so that the girl had to be returned to the pen for her own protection; then she began to get more specific about the relationship between herself and me, and Oedipus undertones began to emerge.
“Raise the lights a fraction,” I heard Finlay whisper. “We need a slightly older image for this.”
Doug Marshall took me by the arm. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. We made our way from the arena and climbed the steps to the café, Charles following. As we sat down with our coffee, Rennie entered.
“I thought I’d find you here … Joe, I have some news from the pen about the escape. It seems that there’s just one man involved—although a guard said something about a girl, a cripple. The man is Dave Froehlich, your ex-bonded man. They say he held up the guards at gunpoint and got away in a hovercar. Uh … Would you happen to know where he got the gun from? The guards said it wasn’t a police model; it was one of those new wide-beam personal defense weapons. Like the one I gave you a license for.” He shot me one of his piercing glances.
“Sorry, Warren. I can’t help you.”
“I’d like you to put yourself in Dave’s position, Joe. You knew him better than anyone. Where do you think he’d head for? Your farm?”
“I doubt it. My guess is, either he’ll head up-island or, if it’s a calm sea, he’ll try for the mainland.”
He left, obviously dissatisfied and thinking I had something to do with it. We finished our coffee and looked at one another uncertainly, wondering what to do next. Nobody wanted to return to the courtroom; neither did anyone relish the idea of going outside. We wandered along the corridors while Carioca’s speech and the crowd’s reaction boomed away dully in the distance. Eventually we came to a window overlooking the street.
Through the glass, the tragic face of Carioca Jones stared at me.
On the far side of the street a battery of projectors had been set up, and the back of the improvised platform extended upward to form a huge 3-V alcove, almost as tall as the four-story building itself.
Within this alcove a giant Carioca postured and wept.
Charles opened the window.
“… guilty, of course I’m guilty. If fighting for the freedom of slaves is wrong, then I’m guilty. If defending the weak against the might of the unthinking bureaucratic robot is a crime, then I’m a criminal. If unmasking the villainy of those who seek to sell our bodies for cash is a sin, then imprisoned I must be. If struggling to save the sight of one little child—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, will you listen to that crap?” muttered Doug disgustedly as the voice boomed on and the crowd chanted in agreement. “At least she’s stopped talking about you, Joe. Shall we go outside now?”
We made our way to the main entrance and left the building unnoticed. All eyes were on the mammoth figure of Carioca Jones which, from this viewpoint, seemed to loom up at us from the very sky. Behind her, faint and ethereal, was the outline of a cross.
Glancing around, I saw Gallaugher standing against the wall, half-concealed by a pillar. He looked frightened, staring up at the mighty image as though it were about to step on him. Rennie walked across and spoke to him and he nodded, biting his lip. Most of the police were around the courthouse door now; people had left the public gallery to watch the spectacular street show which was so much more exciting than the real thing indoors. The courthouse had become little more than a studio.
I joined Gallaugher and Rennie. “Have they caught Dave yet?” I asked. Rennie shook his head. The fear in Gallaugher’s eyes was pathetic as he looked from me to the Carioca image and back again, his lips trembling. “There was a minivid,” I said to rattle him further. “The illegal donors are all on record, Gallaugher.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said primly, almost crying.
“They are the murderers, they are the butchers of human flesh,” roared the massive figure from the sky, finger stabbing in accusation. It appeared that the great finger pointed directly at Gallaugher and me… . Gallaugher whimpered, and a few people actually turned around and looked at us.
Carioca spoke on, gradually and skillfully progressing from a sad, defeated martyr to a vociferous, rampant evangelist; condemning the Pool, bondage, the state pen, the police, the Government, and a number of individuals besides. As before, my name was mentioned. Then suddenly she stopped, staring beyond us with some surprise. I felt as though I wanted to turn too, to establish the object of her astonishment.
Then she smiled slowly. “Thank you all. Thank you very much for listening,” she said quietly, and disappeared.
The compitrator appeared in the alcove, the operator l
eaning over it, tearing off a strip of tape. The applause for Carioca died away as he waited, eyes on the tape while its significance dawned on the audience. When all was still, he looked up with deep-set eyes. He looked much more impressive on 3-V than in the flesh.
“Miss Carioca Jones, the sentence of this Court is that you be detained in the state penitentiary for a period of ten years excluding remission.”
The roar of protest at the severity of the sentence had hardly died down before another figure appeared in the alcove and I recognized the dour face of Dave Froehlich. “Friends!” he shouted. “I’ve just escaped from the state pen!”
As the audience gaped at this astonishing announcement Gallaugher turned on Rennie, who was whispering to one of his men.
“Arrest him, Rennie! What the hell are all these police here for? Get on with it, man! He’s in front of the courtroom cameras!”
Rennie said something more to his man and turned back to Gallaugher, who was bouncing about frantically, sweating. “I’m sorry about this, Bob,” he said quietly. “I’ve just had orders from the mainland to conduct an immediate search of the pen. I’m sure you understand; politicians get a bit edgy when this sort of adverse publicity gets around. They just want to clear the air, that’s all.” As he said this his eyes met mine, and he showed no expression whatever.
Gallaugher’s shoulders sagged and he turned away. “I’ll get my coat,” he mumbled; and he was gone. Rennie watched him push his way through the crowd but made no effort to follow him.
Meanwhile Dave was talking, jerkily and awkwardly. His expression was morose but his manner seemed sincere, and I wondered what Dale Finlay was thinking. “Mr. Joe Sagar broke into the pen a while back to try to gather evidence with a minivid, which was a pretty goddamned brave thing to do,” he was saying, and I began to feel better. “And he spoke about, uh, Marigold Carassa.” Here Dave’s face reddened dreadfully, and suddenly I began to understand. “I thought about her a lot after he’d gone but I was scared, see? But last night I slipped downstairs and found everything disorganized, you know what I mean? Anyway, I found Marigold Carassa. She had a gun and a minivid hidden in the ward and I thought: Why don’t we try to get out of here? So that’s what we did. Uh … maybe we ought to show the tape, huh?” He spoke to someone off-screen. He was patently anxious to get away from the cameras.
I heard Finlay’s voice. “Get him off and get the girl on, do you read me? Forget the tapes. We don’t want the police at our throats.” He stood nearby, speaking urgently into a transceiver.
Someone gripped my shoulder. It was Rennie. “Sorry, Joe. We all make mistakes. Well,” he sighed. “I suppose it’s my duty to arrest Froehlich.”
“What about Gallaugher, for Christ’s sake!”
“I’ll think about that when we’ve searched the pen. Somehow I don’t think Gallaugher will be around anymore.”
“You mean he’s taken off? You’ve let him go?”
“I mean I’ve given him the chance to do whatever he thinks fit. Even you must agree that it wouldn’t be sound, politically, to allow Gallaugher to stand trial. It would mean a trial of the whole penal system, the Establishment, the Government, even. All because of one man.”
“Listen, Rennie,” I snarled. “I want that fat little bastard to suffer. I want him to stand trial and be convicted, and to go into the Organ Pool and be used, piece by piece, until he can’t walk and he can’t talk and he can’t see, just like those goddamned … things I saw in the Pool. That’s what I want, Rennie, and I’m going to use every means at my disposal to see it happens!”
“You mean Finlay, I imagine? I tell you this, Joe. Finlay has no say in a matter of this importance. He’s a provincial reporter, man. It might seem to you that he’s shaping national opinion, but that’s only because the authorities haven’t seen fit to intervene—yet. Right now he’s being used, just like everyone else. He’s being used because he’s useful to those higher up. You overheard the way he chickened out over the minivid tapes? When he goes too far, he’ll be stopped.”
Then there was a sigh from the crowd: a low, surprised, envious, loving sigh.…
Marigold looked down at us from the alcove.
Marigold looked beautiful. It would be possible to describe her appearance at length but it would be pointless. She was dressed in white and the picture was cut off tactfully at the waist, so all the audience saw was a calm, pretty girl with something in her eye which promised everything every man there had ever dreamed of—and yet which caused the women to smile indulgently and fondly because Marigold always looked so goddamned innocent she disarmed feminine jealousy.
“My name is Marigold Carassa and I come from a little town called Halmas, many hundreds of miles away,” she said simply, in her charming accent. “I was in love with the man Joe Sagar and I wanted to see him, and I couldn’t afford it.” I wondered at the pain in my soul, when she described her love in the past tense. “Then I heard of a new travel agency which was offering cut-rate cruises if you didn’t mind an old boat and small cabins. Well, I didn’t mind that because I wanted so much to see Joe; but what I did mind was that we all began to feel sleepy and funny when we got near this island, and we knew we’d been drugged but it was too late to do anything about it.…”
Then she went on to describe the wrecking of the Ancia Telji and the subsequent events as she recollected them, which was not very clearly. “For a lot of the time I was drugged, but there were in-between times when I could speak to those around me, and they all said the same thing. They had come on a cruise, and here they were, and some of them had been here much longer than I. And every day—” Marigold’s voice faltered at last. “Every day there was not so much of them, and pieces were being taken away. And they would change rooms or disappear altogether. We tried to find somebody in charge but we couldn’t. Nobody would listen to us—and there was this awful fat man Gallaugher.”
I looked around for Rennie but he wasn’t there.
“At first he treated me better than the others, but soon—” She looked down and now she was crying. “I think he became tired of me. Then at last Joe came, I think. Dave told me, after. Joe came and got caught and got away again, and the guards were very frightened, and people … began to disappear very fast. The first ones to go were the … the smallest … the ones who—Oh, Dave, please take me away from this!”
And a huge arm was suddenly around her shoulders, drawing her off-screen; but before she was able to disappear Finlay played his trump, the cameras slid downward, down past her waist.…
The bellow of anguish from the crowd was animal in its mindless, sorrowing intensity.
Rennie was beside me again. He said, “I think perhaps Finlay went too far.”
20
I was glad Joanne was safely locked away in the pen and was not able to become involved in the rioting of the next few days. Following the appearance of Marigold the crowd had rampaged through the downtown area of Louise, smashing property and beating up every official in sight. The police were powerless to control them; indeed, Rennie had dispatched half his force to the pen to seize the guards responsible for the illicit Organ Pool before there could be any further disappearances.
Having vented some of their despair the mob had paused on the northern outskirts of the city. The pen lay some miles away across fish-infested scrub. I was in Rennie’s helicopter at the time, and I could almost see them thinking with one mind as they seethed around the parking lot of the flymart warehouse and wondered what to smash next. They had no leader, and now that their impetus was temporarily spent Rennie felt they might be more tractable. He roared threats and instructions through the loudspeaker; the Foes of Bondage managed to regroup themselves around Evadne Prendergast, who climbed to the roof of a car and gave an impassioned address, pleading sanity.
It had been well into the evening before the mob finally dispersed.
Before that, Rennie took me for a quick trip across the Strait, over the archipelago of small green isla
nds. “I had a report,” he murmured. His eyes were searching the flat blue expanse below as the pilot banked the copter. “See that?” He pointed.
A tiny trail sped southward, a land hovercar taking its chances on the open sea.
Rennie sighed. “He’ll make out. He’ll get to one of those backward countries—maybe even the one where his goddamned travel agency operated—and he’ll change his name and worm his way into some position, and the next thing he’ll be running a town and those poor damned people will respect him and think how lucky they are that he came out of nowhere to protect them from the bandits in the hills. But he’ll be in cahoots with the bandits, too.”
It was a depressing picture. “Or you could take this copter down right now, and shoot him up,” I suggested.
Rennie grinned briefly. “Couldn’t we now. But that way I’d have to square the pilot, and I’d have you on my back for the rest of my life. Much better to stick to the book, Joe. Besides, I have no official knowledge of who’s in that car—and under the circumstances I’d rather not know.”
So we watched the silver wake of the hovercar extending southward as straight as a rule; and yet another bastard was getting away with it while the good guys stood by, hamstrung by their own regulations, their own consciences. The weather was set fair and the car could drive to Tierra Del Fuego on a sea like this, and the sun glared hotly through the Plexiglas dome as I eased the laser pistol from Rennie’s pocket while he was twisted away from me, staring down.
“Careful with that trigger,” Rennie murmured. “I don’t think the safety catch is on.”
I jammed the gun into the back of the pilot’s neck. “Take her down,” I snapped.
By the following morning the Foes had got themselves organized and were planning a somewhat prosaic march on the pen; since Carioca had gone out of circulation they seemed to have lost all imagination. I attended the sedate preliminaries in Louise and was gratified to find myself in the position of being a well-loved figure—an unusual situation for me. People shook my hand and complimented me on my part in Dave’s break and the consequent exposure of the Pool. I could have had the pick of the maiden ladies of the Foes, had I so desired.
The Girl With a Symphony in Her Fingers Page 20