Watson, Ian - Novel 10

by Deathhunter (v1. 1)

  This was, perhaps, an optimistic assessment.

  “Could you be a bit more specific?”

  “Not at this stage, if you don’t mind. I might still be getting a partial picture. 1 might distort his view of things if I tried to put it into words so soon. Pd certainly distort my own view of him.” “Quite right, Jim. But he hasn’t got much time left. He mustn’t . . . simply die.”

  “Unredeemed? Don’t worry, we’ve got several weeks — and with someone really listening to his point of view ...”

  “And playing along with it? He’ll hang on?”

  “I’m sure he will.”

  “Is it wise to play along with major delusions?”

  “Sometimes we play along with the delusion of an afterlife,” said Jim.

  “That isn’t his delusion ... is it?”

  “It might be involved. Pm not sure yet.”

  “A dying person must face the truth of death.”

  “But to resist Nathan’s delusions at this stage would be to alienate him. It would harden his shell. He’d retreat.” And at that very moment Jim made up his mind about Weinberger’s abandoned deathtrap. The cage had never been intended as a sexual playpen at all. It was precisely what Weinberger said it was. And Jim made up his mind, too, about what he would do with it.

  “I’m going to play along with Weinberger all the way. By doing that he’ll realize that the way leads nowhere. He’ll turn aside, on to the true path.”

  “I really hope so. I hope he can appear in public, a little before the end, as ... a changed person.” Resnick waggled his fingers. “We’d be discreet. He wouldn’t be traumatised or set back. It’s because of what he did, and the echoes he set up — do you see? I know it’s unusual. But if some clients can share their death experience in seminars, well, we’ll hold a small public ceremony, of reconciliation, eh? In effect, he’ll become Norman Harper. He’ll take Norman’s place. That’ll cancel out the tragedy.”

  “We’re still some way off that happy day.”

  “Okay, Jim, handle it any way you like. You have carte blanche from me. Just get Weinberger there. This is important. Norman was a major figure, and for him to be cheated of his death by somebody in our care ...”

  Resnick waved his hand, emphasizing a whole lake of importance. The mercury river had withdrawn into the sun, which was about to slip behind a hill. Looking across the lake, Jim thought of the intense feeling of identification, of oceanic unity, which he had experienced when he drowned. Once, in Gracchus during their mimicry of the death encounter, he had recaptured that blissful feeling.

  ‘Shall I really help Nathan build a cage for Death?* he wondered. There was an odd and slightly ugly fascination in the notion. It was an absurdity, rather as though a modern chemist should decide to build alchemical apparatus to transmute lead into gold. It was the direct opposite of everything the Houses stood for.

  ‘When Nathan catches nothing in it, obviously we’ll be home and dry. Still . . .

  ‘I’m treading on eggs,’ he thought. And, for some perverse reason — perhaps because Resnick was so fatuously and politically anxious to conclude this sorry episode serenely — ‘I want to.’

  ‘They robbed meoisomething too,’ thought Jim. ‘They robbed me of the chance of navigating the Ocean of Unity, when Mike Mullen imitated death all too well in Gracchus, and genuinely died . . .’

  Should he convey Officer Bekker’s greetings to Resnick?

  “I’d like you to take on a few other cases,” went on Resnick, before Jim had time to decide. “There’s a young kid — she’s just eleven — who was transferred from the Hospital yesterday. They diagnosed leukaemia. The white blood-crab. Needs sympathy, but she’s well-adjusted.”

  Jim nodded.

  “And a middle-aged woman with severe heart disease. She’ll be glad to go. And a farmer who developed multiple sclerosis. He’ll be retiring. No problem. Three or four others, too, including a couple of voluntary retirements — you won’t have any trouble there. So you’ll still be able to focus upon Weinberger.”

  “I’ll focus on them all,” said Jim firmly. “Everybody’s death is equally precious.”

  “Of course.”

  “Chow time!” called a cheery voice. Marta Bettijohn came bustling through the junipers. “You mustn’t let your trout get cold!’’

  Both Mary-Ann and Alice Huron became tipsy later on, largely because Noel Resnick freshened their drinks in a lordly manner.

  By now the cirrus clouds were thickening in a darkening sky. The air grew humid. The breeze was freshening to a wind from off the water. Battery lamps were brought from the chalet and switched on.

  The two women, one tall, one small, linked arms, confusing their glasses.

  “ The day is over, perfect day,’ ’’ Alice sang out in a maudlin way. She blinked down at Mary-Ann; perhaps there were tears in her eyes.

  Perhaps there were tears, too — of sentiment — in Mary-Ann’s.

  “ ‘Now the day is over,’ ’’ Mary-Ann recited, but then she forgot, or swung off course. Her voice was slurred. Glancing up at the sky, where dark horses’ manes blew out below the first cold prickling stars, she found confused inspiration. “Now the day is over, nightmares drawing nigh . . .’’ She giggled.

  A few spots of rain struck the party, and hissed on the hibachi.

  The party broke up.

  Only when a dozen or more people had crowded into the one minibus and it was moving off with Marta Bettijohn at the wheel beside him, did Jim realize that Resnick and the other minibus — and the two tipsy women — had stayed behind. As their own minibus departed, lights blinked on in the chalet then cut down to chinks as shutters were closed against the storm which might soon break: against the hot stabbing electricity of the sky.

  Crowding Jim’s other side was Claudio Menotti, who hummed to himself more noisily than the electric motor. Jim leaned against Marta. He nodded back towards the chalet.

  And quoted, humorously, “ ‘Too much in love with easeful death’, eh, Marta?’’

  “I hate those morbid old poems,’’ she said sharply. “I’m glad nobody spoils their minds with them any more.’’

  “But didn’t death produce good poetry?’’ asked Jim. He realized that he had gone too far; he must be rather drunk too.

  NINE

  “So how do you go about building a cage for Death, Nathan? I’m perfectly serious. I want to help you build one. I have to see this with my own eyes.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  Jim had not expected instant gratitude. Deep down, Weinberger probably did not believe that his cage would work. Jim’s instinct had been right: build the cage, use it, prove it useless — then Weinberger would be free of his delusion.

  Weinberger had changed the scene in the wall screen. In one way, this was a bad sign. Dying people, who had accepted their death, tended to absorb themselves wholly in a single landscape of choice: a landscape, of course, without human characters or any living creatures, a landscape of eternal vegetative nature, or better still, pure ocean.

  The new scene was arctic, as though its coldness might act to slow down the decay of Weinberger’s body. Great white icebergs like mountainous teeth — molars and incisors — floated in blue fluoride waters. The scene was sterile and aseptic, and beautiful too. It also conveyed a certain frozen violence: of icy jaws, locked in a total stoppage of time. If those jaws were ever to move, what a grinding and crashing there would be! But they couldn’t, and didn’t. So all was serene. Which was, perhaps, a good sign.

  “I am certainly not patronising you.”

  “No? Well, Mr Todhunter, let’s just prove it, hmm?”

  “I’ll prove it one way, right now. I’ll tell you a secret. Noel Resnick has given me absolute carte blanche to handle your case — so that you can work things through and see the light.”

  ‘The arctic light,’ thought Jim. ‘The everlasting stillness and silence of the ice wastes where nothing lives . . . (Untrue! Fish live
there, and seals, and great whales ... Do any equivalent creatures inhabit the realm of death? Is that what Nathan imagines?)’ “That’s how 1 can go along with you. And equally, here’s your chance, because I’m going to use that carte blanche to the full.’’ The sick man licked his lips. “They won’t like it.’’

  “They needn’t know, particularly. Of course, we can’t do it here. This room’s unsuitable, what with attendants and nurses dropping in. I’ll commandeer a spare room in the basement.’’ Weinberger’s face drained of trust.

  “1 won’t be fooled by a masquerade. Me locked up here, you in the basement — so you say.’’

  “I’ll take you down there along with me. I’ll obey all your directions. Anything you want from outside, I’ll fetch. Any other equipment you need, I’ll get hold of somehow.’’

  Jim stuck out his hand.

  “Is it a deal?’’

  Weinberger’s grip was surprisingly strong. It felt as though he was diverting all the remaining strength of his body into his right hand, in order to grasp something beyond Jim’s own hand: something invisible, elusive and mighty.

  Weinberger grinned. “You can’t make deals with Death. But you can catch it, and clobber it.”

  “Whatever you say. And 1 mean that.”

  One week later, Jim stood in the blue-painted basement room with Weinberger, surveying the ‘machine’ which he had assembled according to the dying man’s directions, and with his occasional assistance.

  Apart from the cage and a pair of chairs, the room was bare. It was the same experimental room that Resnick had told him about. Soundproofing baffles scalloped and fluted the walls, so that being in here was like being in some large rectangular lung which breathed through silent, hidden air ducts.

  The machine consisted of the waterbed which Bekker had described. Within its strong pine frame it was raised off the ground on rubber-buffered, insulated legs, and entirely surrounded by a delicate filigree Faraday cage which could block out any electromagnetic radiation from outside, or isolate any radiation arising from within. So much for the ‘harem grille’ notion! It occurred to Jim to wonder whether Weinberger had been sleeping inside the

  Faraday cage for many months prior to his enforced retirement with the current switched on as a way of insulating and isolating himself from the power that he feared. Perhaps this had contributed in some obscure way to the onset of his illness!

  Using the authority of the House to over-ride Public Disposal, and with a waiver signed by Weinberger, Jim had had no difficulty in entering Weinberger’s former abode to remove whatever he chose.

  With the aid of an attendant from the House he had also brought back the polarisable glass screens which Weinberger had told him he would find stacked in the bedroom, as he already knew from Bekker. These were actually adapted scene-screens. Bolted together around the sides and roof of the cage, these screens would no longer display illusions of African savannah or Amazonian forest. They acted instead either as a perfectly clear five-fold window, or else they could be rendered opaque. Then, from inside the cage, they became a maze of mirrors reflecting mirrors. So much for the sex tape idea! Though, of course, one could always readjust the screens . . .

  A hooded optic fibre periscope allowed one to spy into the cage from outside while the glass walls were opaque. Two tiny automatic cameras were mounted on silver rods inside. A drip-feed led from a tiny vacuum flask, looking like a spout for feeding humming birds on the wing. This flask supposedly contained the ‘corpse sweat’ which Weinberger had synthesized like a home alchemist. Strapped beside this was an industrial chemi-sniffer, apparently rejigged to be sensitive to one part in a billion per volume of the pheromone.

  Cannibalised by Jim from the neighbouring Hospital, and from the House, were other pieces of equipment that had been beyond Weinberger’s means. Medi-sensors were taped across the surface of the waterbed, connected to vital signs monitors outside. A skullcap sensitive to the ‘thanatos’ brain rhythm of the ‘death plateau’ — to be worn by the occupant of the bed — was linked with an oscilloscope outside. From outside, too, a remote- controlled stimulant syringe could be operated.

  To Jim’s eyes Weinberger’s machine looked like an old piece of Dada art, something reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s Great Glass: a machine for pursuing an enigma in the realm of the irrational, of the wholly imaginary. It was a machine for hunting a

  Snark. It was an insane satire, translated into rubber and steel, wire, glass and wood, on the techniques of adjustment to the Inevitable which was life’s fulfilment, not its catastrophe or betrayal.

  ‘Mozart wrote all his symphonies, didn’t he?’ thought Jim. ‘Which unwritten ones did he fail to write?’ And yet, and yet . . .

  But there was nothing absurd about the machine to Weinberger. He quite glowed to see it all assembled, with the extra medical facilities to which he could never have gained access. In a sense, Jim realized, Weinberger was indeed approaching the culmination of his life, in the shape of this ‘machine’. Jim had been quite right to play along with the man’s fantasies. Here was Weinberger’s vision of death, and quite soon Weinberger was going to enter into it and become one with it.

  The only snag was that the machine would do nothing. Nothing at all. Merely purr, or hiss, or crackle, and render itself opaque, and drip minute amounts of something into the air within.

  Yet that, too, would be excellent. ‘Look, Nathan, it doesn’t hurt. There isn’t anything. Death is nothing.’

  “I built little pilot models, you know,” confided Weinberger. ‘‘Prototype death-traps, to catch whatever vectored in on the pheromone. But they didn’t work. Death wasn’t fooled. Obviously there had to be an actual dying body there. So I bought some rabbits —”

  ‘‘You should be ashamed of yourself. That was what was so sick about medicine in the old days: the slaughter, the mutilation, the agony of so many poor creatures so that people could keep alive for five minutes longer! It was just another symptom of our whole death sickness, which would have burnt the planet bare.”

  “Okay, I know the spiel too. And I was disgusted, believe me. It seemed as if I was sacrificing to Death.”

  It began with rabbits. It ended up with Norman Harper. Weinberger spread his hands placatingly.

  ‘‘No result. Then I got the idea that maybe the death of animals and the death of people is different in essence ...”

  ‘‘That’s the old Catholic doctrine that animals have no souls. The idea that animals are automatic objects. That was another part of the whole sickness — the disrespect.”

  ‘‘Sure. Now nothing has a soul, so everything is holy.”

  To which Jim said nothing. Afterlife studies necessarily implied that something outlasted death, even if it wasn’t a bundle of memories and personality in the old sense of a soul . . . And certainly the radiant unity that Jim had experienced when he drowned must be classed as holy.

  Weinberger frowned.

  “It appears to be ready . . .” Jim said.

  Like a virgin actor who had forgotten his lines, Weinberger froze. He stalled.

  “Could we make a start tomorrow?** he asked apologetically. “We’ve worked damn hard today.’’

  Jim smiled sympathetically.

  “Would you rather I lay down in it instead of you?’’

  Abruptly, Weinberger grinned back. “Then I release the nonexistent whiff of cyanide gas? To zap your death? Ah, there’s nothing like that in my machine! Maybe there ought to be.”

  Jim pressed home.

  “Is that why you had the gun? Was it to shoot Death with when it came into your cage? But you’d only smash the glass, and let it out. What did you have in that gun: silver bullets?”

  “It was an old . . . souvenir. The gun.’’

  And maybe that was why Weinberger had hung on to it. To shoot Death. Death was the mugger who broke into your apartment. Death was the rapist, who took you by force. At least, in the old way of looking at it.

  “You
can try it for size if you like,” Weinberger offered. He was in a ‘bargaining’ mode, thought Jim. “Go ahead — I’m not proprietorial. This’ll be a famous bed soon. Far more famous than any of your beds where Good Queen Bess or Abraham Lincoln slept.”

  “Well, thanks but no thanks.”

  “If I could equip it with cyanide gas ... I really wonder whether I’d be killing Death in general, or just the personal death of whoever was in the machine?”

  “A whole lot of people die every hour, Nathan. They even die simultaneously. Even if this Death of yours skipped around at the speed of light —”

  “Okay, okay. But Death might be general and particular. If I kill the particular death — if I zap the bullet with this person’s own special name on it, right out of the way, swat it, squash it, vaporise it! — would this person,” and here Weinberger’s hand drifted over the imaginary contours of his subject ‘volunteer’, as sensuously — thought Jim — as some fantasizing soldier in the old days of war, stuck in a jungle hundreds of miles from a brothel, ‘‘would this person live for ever? Would I have invented an immortality treatment, here in the midst of the House of Death? That would be one hell of an irony!”

  “It would certainly be a way of getting people to volunteer,” allowed Jim. ‘‘Roll up, roll up! Climb into Weinberger’s Death Cage and he’ll make thee immortal with a hiss ... of cyanide gas. Ah, but you’re forgetting something, my friend. You’d kill the person, that way, before you nailed his death. Baby and the bathwater, Nathan. Baby and the bathwater!”

  Weinberger looked crestfallen, as though he had seriously considered the possibility. As perhaps he had. Jim was now doubly sure that the gun had been kept hidden from long ago with just some such plan in mind. Instead of which, Weinberger had used it to shoot Norman Harper, to save the poet — absurdly — from falling into the clutches of Death . . .

  ‘‘With these medi-sensors and the ‘thanatos’ screen hooked in,” said Jim, ‘‘we need somebody on hand who’s qualified in using the apparatus.” He wanted a witness, for his own protection. He also wished most dearly to avoid a repetition of what had happened in Gracchus.