“You’ve got it all worked out,” said Jim neutrally.
“The best defence against Death,” observed Weinberger quite suddenly, “is war and murder and accidents. The very best defence of all would be a hydrogen bomb.”
“Oh, I see."
“No, you don’t. I know perfectly well how you classify that sort of remark. ‘Wars and riots indicate our decreasing ability to face death with acceptance and dignity.’ Unquote. But maybe there’s more than one kind of death.”
‘‘Well, of course there is —”
‘‘Death as per the Houses, and the unregulated, anarchic sort of death? No, it isn’t that simple.”
‘‘Tell me then, Nathan.”
Weinberger gazed into the phantom forests opening from his prison. He shook his head.
‘‘I weary, Guide Todhunter. I despair. Go and hunt Death yourself, somewhere else. And just hope that you don’t find it, till the big surprise comes along. Then you’ll have led a rewarding, well-balanced, if moronic life — just as Norman Harper did. I saved Harper from himself. One owes a duty to fools. Go on, now. And get that spy-eye switched back on.”
‘‘The camera’s perfectly understandable, isn’t it?” Jim picked up the phone and spoke briefly. The red light blinked on again. ‘Don’t argue with the dying,’ he thought. ‘I’ve accomplished enough for one visit. Weinberger sends me away now — but only so that we can carry on when I return.’
‘‘I’ll be back. Tomorrow morning, if I may?”
‘‘Do you know, I really ought to have shot myself, not him? But that wouldn’t have worked out at all — unless I could have taken myself by surprise! That camera’s quite unnecessary. You could fill this whole room with knives and ropes and bottles of poison. I wouldn’t touch them.”
‘‘I think we’ll stick with the camera, hmm? Now, what time should I call back in the morning?”
‘‘Oh, the consolations of choice! Okay, let’s play it by the book! Make it ten-thirty.”
Once he had left the room and locked it, Jim realized that he had forgotten to ask Weinberger about the gun. Yet this hardly seemed important, compared with his client’s incredibly distorted view of life and death which — somehow — Jim had to get straightened out.
SIX
Promptly at ten-thirty the next morning Jim knocked on Weinberger’s door. He had found nothing on Weinberger’s cassette to account for his behaviour, beyond his unexplained defection from the House of Death some ten years earlier. He had checked, too, that his client had already been fed and medicated and had his bed made up, just in case the staff felt inclined to shun the murderer or give him short shrift. However, this had not happened.
Silence greeted his knock. But Jim still waited a moment, considerately, before unlocking the door. He walked in to meet Weinberger’s expectant stare. The man said nothing, though.
After phoning for privacy, Jim sat down.
The scene-screen showed the same rolling forests as on the previous day. Jim toyed with the idea of asking Weinberger whether he would care for a change of scene. It would be a weak gambit, he decided. Anyway, the last thing that a dying man should crave was the stimulation of novelty. If Weinberger felt likewise, surely this was one good sign.
Jim opted for a strong gambit, instead.
“I’m not going to play this by the book, Nathan.”
The book in question being Good Death: The Guidance of the Dying — by now in its twelfth revised edition. No doubt Weinberger would have some earlier edition practically by heart.
“I want you to tell me exactly what you meant, yesterday: ‘Go and hunt death, and just hope you don’t find it.’ But I shall tell you my own feelings first. Frankly, I have my own reservations about what’s going on in the Houses these days. For instance, I suspect there’ll be a crackdown on any kind of afterlife studies for political reasons. It’s as though any proof of an afterlife would throw society off course, so that we mustn’t even entertain the idea.
Myself, I don’t think an afterlife is something that can ever be proved. It’s a grey area, like the question of where the universe came from, or where it will go after it collapses. But I really believe the afterlife option should be kept open — whilst we still guide people to good deaths as the final end of life.”
“That sounds like one almighty contradiction,” said Weinberger. Jim noted the interest in his voice.
“Not really. The least likely thing about any afterlife would be continuity of personal experience. Why? Because it’s the person who dies. Just suppose that all the memories of everything you experienced in life survived: in what context would they survive? As a sort of tape-loop repeating itself endlessly with no fresh input? A sort of animated scene-screen of your life? Hardly! On the other hand, if there is new experience, how long would it be before you were totally swamped with this fresh input — which had no connection with this life of ours? So there may be something after death, but it isn’t a continuation of all this. And it isn’t a repetition. We have to accept the closure of the here and now.”
“You saw the light of bliss when you drowned. And now that’s what you expect, isn’t it? A sort of eternal orgasm?”
“I’d rather call it an enlightenment. But I’m glad you mentioned eternity. Our time sense depends upon the metabolic rate of the body, doesn’t it? So a child experiences an hour as a much larger span of time than an adult does. Time shrinks as we grow older. The higher up the pyramid of life we are, the narrower it becomes. Now, what if there’s a sudden reversal at the moment of death? Or what if we reach a point of no-time, and all-time? What if the instant of death is an eternal moment to the person experiencing it? What if it goes on and on forever, for us, even though the ordinary world cremates us and moves on at its usual average pace?”
“So the afterlife would be the last fading second — but it just goes on and on? What a mad idea! Listen, fellow, Death waits for us — but sometimes we get past it. Sometimes we’re too fast for it.”
“Too fast?”
“Norman Harper went too quickly — thanks to me. So he got through.”
Jim shook his head in bewilderment.
“Through whatV'
“Have you ever heard of corpse-sweat, Mr Todhunter? Alias: the pheromone of death?”
“I know what pheromones are,” said Jim. “They’re chemicals which living creatures secrete to influence other living creatures. For instance, sexual attractor pheromones: those attract males or females — and then they switch off the opposition.”
Weinberger sat up. “They’re the most powerful substances in nature. A single molecule five miles downwind will bring a moth flying to the female that released it. Let me tell you something, fellow. There’s a pheromone of death: a substance which people release when they’re close to dying. It attracts Death to them. And Death harvests them. Originally I guess it evolved as a warning signal. It tells other members of the species, ‘Something’s dying here. Danger! Clear off!’ It had survival value. And then carrion eaters learned how to home in on it. How do you suppose that vultures know when to gather? No one ever explained that to my satisfaction. The answer’s obvious, if there’s a pheromone of death. And there is. That’s what corpse-sweat is: the stuff released by the dying body, and the dying mind. Of course, you begin releasing it before you’re actually a corpse. But we’re damn poor as a species at reading body signals, so nobody has ever really noticed it. Not consciously.”
Weinberger’s eyes were wild, obsessed.
“The pheromone warns — but it attracts as well. It attracts Death to the dying. Death is the soul-vulture, Jim.”
Jim noted the use of his first name, but he was too stunned by Weinberger’s fantasy to feel really thankful.
“You’re saying that there’s a parasite — a creature that feeds on our deaths? A thing that eats souls? And because we prepare everyone for death in the Houses, no one is getting through its net?”
“The victims of sudden accidents get through.
The victims of murder. Maybe I ought to be saying the ‘beneficiaries’ of murder and accident.”
“That’s a pretty wild assertion.”
“Oh, I can prove it. Or rather, I was getting to the point of proving it. Then the crab got me by the claw. Now there isn’t time.”
“Have you told this to anyone else?”
Weinberger laughed dismissively.
“People are too banal. They’re too ordinary, to accept that their world’s really upside-down and inside-out.”
“I’m glad you feel you can confide in me.”
“Do you know why I quit the House? To pursue my own research! They would never have let me do it here. It’s the same with you. Where have your afterlife studies got to? And you aren’t even looking in the right ball court.”
“Do you suppose that Death — Mister D — is somehow censoring research into his nature?”
“Not ‘his’ nature. I’m not that dumb. I don’t know the answer to that question — except maybe. All I managed to do in this House was collect enough corpse-sweat, secretly, to work with. Really small amounts, but I finally managed to synthesize some. Again, not very much. I have to keep it shielded, of course.”
“Of course.”
“In a vacuum flask dispenser. A small electromagnetic cage might be even safer. I’m not sure. This kind of research is like groping in the dark ...”
The interview had gone extremely well so far. Superficially, that is. On any other level it had gone preposterously, and Jim hardly knew what to do. He was a death-guide, not an abnormal psychiatrist — though he knew enough psychiatry to realize that Weinberger was definitely paranoid. And no House book covered such a case, for drugs, not guidance, helped the dying of the incurably insane.
Paranoid, yes. Weinberger had set up a self-consistent system based on the most outrageous of premises — a blend of persecution, private knowledge of The Truth (which nobody else knew), and a supposedly practical plan for proving the equivalent of day being night, or light being darkness. All because he was dying.
No, that couldn’t be the reason. Weinberger had started on this mad course a whole decade ago . . .
Mad. And Jim had to guide him, notwithstanding, because the man in his madness had murdered Norman Harper and now he was too important simply to be drugged towards a peaceful death.
Somehow Weinberger’s duties in the House of Death a decade ago must have unbalanced his mind. His mind had flipped into a new and unique configuration of beliefs utterly at odds with everything taught and known in this country.
“How did you first discover all this? What set you on the trail?”
“I sat with a lot of my clients right through euthanasia. As they began to fade out — as the EEG began to pick up the pre-death ‘thanatos’ rhythm — well, I began to see something in the room. Only, I couldn’t ever quite see it. I couldn’t get a direct look. It was as though it was out of the corner of my eye.”
‘Out of the corner of your mind’s eye,’ thought Jim.
“No one else saw it?”
“Oh believe me, I was cautious about asking! I dropped a few hints — ‘Is there a mosquito in the room?’ ‘Is there a moth in here?’— but I didn’t want that on my records. Then I began seeing it all the time, while people were about to die. Almost seeing it, but never quite. It was there, though. It needed bringing out — like computer enhancement of a photograph. Yeah, it needed focusing. Then one day I happened to be present when there was an accident on the Bead way. Somehow an empty pod got detached. It fell right down and crushed one fellow and badly injured another. It nearly got me! And I wish it had! The first fellow died immediately, and I didn’t see anything beside him. But the other fellow lingered on for five or ten minutes. The ambulance was delayed. And I saw this thing arrive — the same thing that I saw in the euthanasia room. I almost saw it.”
So Weinberger had decided that he was the Galileo of Death . . . But where was his telescope, to see the mountains of the Moon? There couldn’t be one.
“What did you plan to do with this corpse-sweat, as you call it? What was the big scheme, which the crab aborted?”
Oddly, Weinberger seemed to appreciate the almost brutal thrust of Jim’s question. He was not quite as protective of his fantasy as Jim had imagined.
“Oh, how we hid ourselves from death in the old days! How we sheltered! What a wealth of resources we poured into shelters, once! Nuke shelters, right?”
“They’re still okay for growing mushrooms in.”
“But there’s another sort of hide, Jim.” Weinberger glanced up at the dead camera, mounted under the ceiling. “That’s the photographer’s hide — to snap the bird of death on the wing. I wasn’t just going to build a tripwire camera, though. Oh no, I was a good deal more ambitious than that! I was going to build a cage — to trap that bird and hold it. I know how to do it, Jim. I got started, too. I almost finished. I can build ... a cage for Death.”
A Cage for Death.
“You’ll have to give me time to think about that one, Nathan.”
“Be my guest,” said Weinberger smugly — smug in the certainty that Jim could never accept the notion?
Obviously, if Jim resisted it, this would only serve to reinforce Weinberger’s fantasy. On the other hand, if Jim encouraged it much further at this moment, it might well bloom hysterically — giving Weinberger a massive set-back.
“It’s a lot to take in at once.”
“Oh, it is.”
Too, Weinberger might feel that he had shown his whole hand prematurely. Then he would resent Jim bitterly.
“I’d rather like to check the literature for anything on the death pheromone.”
“You won’t find a thing. I never did. I had to figure it all out myself.”
“There could have been some hint, some minor insight, that cropped up since you left the House. Something that didn’t warrant announcing or publicising because it couldn’t be properly demonstrated. There may be a record of it in Central Data.”
“Do you honestly imagine anybody else even guessing there was a pheromone to look for?”
“I think it’s unlikely.”
“I’ll tell you why you won’t find anything new. It’s rather important to decide the precise time of death, right? That’s why you monitor the ‘thanatos’ rhythm — which I'd say is linked to the pheromone output, but I don’t have the equipment to prove it. . . If anyone else had found out about the pheromone, you’d all be using that method routinely now! All it requires is a chemi-sniffer, sensitive to one part per billion. I rejigged one of the industrial ones — dead easy.” Weinberger grinned triumphantly.
“Since you do know how to use this method, wouldn’t it have been a nice idea to share your discovery with the Houses?”
“What? So that Death could feed on the dying even more efficiently? You must be joking. There’s only one use that I’d see the pheromone method put to. That’s as bait —”
“In a cage. For Death.”
“Right. Tell the Houses? Goodness me.”
‘But you’ve told me,* thought Jim. Was Weinberger just too crazy to care, now? Or too bitterly disappointed? Or did he feel a need to confess? Yes, that was it, decided Jim. Weinberger needed to confess. It was good to confess. And Jim was someone whom he felt he could safely confess to.
“Even so, I'll check the literature. You never know.”
“Oh, I do. It's you who don't know.”
In common with everybody else.
SEVEN
Jim returned to his room right away and switched on the TV set. Dialling Central Data over the telephone link, he added his guide code in case he was seeking restricted information.
He regularly used his guide code to call up taboo literature featuring death. To begin with, this had simply been part of his training. Later, to guide difficult clients in Gracchus he had occasionally sought material for way-out therapy from this source. And, yes, for his own interest. He supposed that most guides did th
e same.
Outside the Houses of Death nobody seemed to regret the missing literature or object to the computer-adjusted versions. Yet Jim wondered whether some people actually volunteered as guides out of purely aesthetic motives, just to gain access to morbid, forbidden texts. In medieval times only inquisitors — or whatever they were called — could be trusted to read books on the Index Expurgatorius. Perhaps that was why the keenest minds had tended to end up in the old Church . . .
If such cupboard dilettantes tried to become guides these days, surely their hypno-analysis should screen them out. Those supposed ‘aesthetic' motives would actually be wickedly erotic ones — for the only real pornography was violence and its counterpart, the dread of death.
‘My record's reasonably clean,' he thought sadly, ‘except for Mike's death in Gracchus. Was that really my fault? I merely overlooked the fact that he was actually dying, not just pretending to be.’ A very fine distinction.
‘Yes, it was my fault — as much as his, and he’s not here to blame. Someone who really knew how to read the thanatos rhythms should have been on hand.’
Poor old Mike: with his red hair, now turned to ash, and his impish chuckle, and his yearning for the beyond, where he had arrived — or not arrived — so unexpectedly . . .
Despite his slight unfamiliarity with the technical medical index Jim was fairly sure within ten minutes that nothing whatever was known about a ‘pheromone of death’. To be positive, he typed instructions for a ‘clever search’ on the touch-pad atop the TV set.
This kind of computer search was not so much clever as painstaking — and time-taking. A further ten minutes passed before the screen flashed for Jim’s attention. The upshot of the search was precisely one item of computer graffiti, which some sick-minded enemy of the Houses must have programmed into the system once.
Watson, Ian - Novel 10 Page 4