Like sailors lashed to masts, the two men clung to their frail sanctuaries. Inevitably, and quite soon, their weight bore the furled trees over, dipping lower and lower.
Jim felt resigned. This was the ocean, after all. And they were going to drown in it. He was going to drown again.
Weinberger whimpered. He had never drowned before.
Both men were sinking into the water: thigh deep, waist deep. . .
‘Peace,’ thought Jim. Relaxing his grip upon the tree, he raised both arms above his head and let himself go under.
And felt himself wrenched back violently by the scruff of the neck, like a rubber ball on elastic . . .
EIGHTEEN
Noel Resnick, Alice Huron, Ananda and Somebodyson clustered around the open cage door, staring in at the waterbed. The glass walls were transparent. The entry side was hinged wide open. Sally Costello moved away, clutching an empty hypodermic syringe.
“Good morning to you both,’’ said Resnick tartly.
“I hope you had sweet dreams?” enquired Alice. Her chin jutted as she peered through the wire mesh above the door, not deigning to stoop. She looked down her nose at the two men as though inspecting them through an old-fashioned lorgnette.
Jim sat up.
“Dreams? No, not dreams ...”
Beside him, Weinberger sat up too.
“Visions, perhaps? And you, Client Weinberger, I trust that you feel closer to the noble art of dying?”
Ananda laid a restraining hand on Alice’s arm, while Resnick shuffled about, looking embarrassed.
Weinberger blinked at Alice and the Master; then he simply laughed.
Alice nodded to Ananda, acknowledging the growing pressure of his hand. She stepped back, impatiently clunking the rings on her fingers together.
Resnick gestured at the clothes draped over the two chairs.
“Would you two care to get dressed?” To Somebodyson he said, “When Client Weinberger is ready, kindly escort him to his room.”
“What time is it, Noel?” Jim asked. He had left his watch in his jacket pocket.
“Going on for eleven. That’s eleven a.m., in case you’ve completely lost track of time.”
“Damn it, that means I’ve missed ...”
“Correct. Not that a couple of missed appointments are —”
“— a matter of life and death?” put in Weinberger, acidly.
‘‘Even though I seem to recall that it was you, Jim, who was going to concentrate on everyone alike!”
“You promised not to interfere,” said Jim. “You gave me your word.”
“Did I? Yes, I suppose ...” Resnick looked unhappy.
“The point is,” butted in Alice, “you’ve been in here for about twelve hours. And it looked as though you were going to stay here almost for ever — till you wasted away.” She cast a derisive glance at Weinberger in his vest and shorts.
“So don’t blame Sorensen,” said Resnick quickly. “He’s halfway through his second shift by now. He gave you a lot of time.”
Sorensen yawned dutifully.
“But it isn’t up to a duty attendant to decide —”
“Be reasonable, Jim. As Alice says, you were going to stay here for ever.”
“Like Sleeping Beauties,” said Sally Costello sweetly.
“Bewitched, entranced. Right.” Resnick smiled gratefully.
The two men scrambled out of the cage and began to pull on their clothes. Promptly Alice Huron sat down on one of the vacated chairs. ‘Sitting in judgement,’ thought Jim. Resnick gripped the back of the other chair and pivoted about that fulcrum from side to side, like a nervous lion tamer.
Any notion of privacy had obviously disappeared, so far as Alice Huron was concerned. Now that Weinberger had been led away, she questioned Jim relentlessly, while Resnick bobbed about, allowing it.
“A dangerously interesting set of fantasies,” she said at last. “Just what the hell did you expect, taking Neo-H with that nut?”
“Truth,” replied Jim coldly. “The truth.”
“And do you really think you found the truth? Did you discover the secret master plan of Death, about which nobody else knows one blue damn?”
“You found that place because you looked for it,” said Ananda gently. “But it was indeed no-place, an illusion of your mind. You were both alive, Jim. Had you been dead, there would have been no such illusion. A philosopher once said, ‘Death is not an experience in life; death is not lived through.’ Nor did you live through death, my friend. Nor did you come back to life. You were alive all the time. So how could you know anything about death?”
Jim shrugged.
“Nothing is known about death, because death is nothing,” went on Ananda. “It is no-knowledge. Which is why there is nothing to fear, or to know.”
“You were conditioned by Weinberger,” said Alice firmly.
“That’s all too likely,” nodded Resnick. “I think it’s high time you dismantled this nonsensical device. ” He rocked his chair about violently as though he wanted to pitch it through the glass walls, smashing them and buckling the filigree cage for ever.
Ananda disagreed, however.
“It isn’t a nonsensical device. No, I wouldn’t say that. On the contrary! It amplifies the sense of death as something to experience. So it is a means, a pathway. Oh, it is most certainly the wrong path if you tread it in that direction — into the fantasy projections of your own mind. But perhaps it is the right path when you retrace your steps, back into yourself — and see yourself revealed as an illusion too.”
“Pretty words! ” snapped Alice. Yet Jim darted the man a glance of thanks — if indeed Ananda was trying to help him; and Jim believed that he was.
“Have you got any more Neo-H tablets?” asked Resnick, sounding casual. Falsely casual.
“No,” Jim lied. In fact there were half a dozen tablets in his pocket. He avoiding smoothing his coat down or doing anything similar to betray himself.
“I wonder,” began Alice. But she was not wondering whether Jim was lying. “I wonder: Client Weinberger’s vision of death has given him the glimpse of a path, as Lama Ananda says: a pathway through to safety and salvation. If Client Weinberger doesn’t get ‘captured* — if he dies ‘surprised* — then he’s safe. In his opinion! Right? So I wonder whether we should not, with his consent, arrange for him to die by surprise? For him not to know the moment? For it to come suddenly — as suddenly as a gunshot? We might make a bargain, Noel. If Client Weinberger will make public atonement — arrange his peace with the world — then later, at some time unknown except to . . .” She hesitated.
“Except to Dr Menotti?” asked Sally sharply.
Alice shook her head. “Ordinary euthanasia is too ‘slow’.”
“Except to the assassin,’’ said Resnick bluntly. “Who would that be? Jim? Yourself? Will you, Alice, leap out pointing a gun and pull the trigger?’’
“Where is the gun, by the way?’’ asked Alice.
“I handed it over to a Peace Officer,’’ Jim told her. “I was close to Weinberger at the ceremony. Everyone else seemed paralysed.’’
“You do have a lot to do with all this. You didn’t, by any chance, bring the gun from Gracchus in the first place, to slip into Weinberger’s paw?’’
“Don’t be absurd!”
“So the gun’s locked up in the Octagon. That’s a shame. Perhaps.”
“We can’t start shooting people,” said Resnick faintly. “What sort of good death would that be?”
“ ‘If any word of this got out,’ ” sneered Alice.
“Frankly, you sound like an agent provocateur, even to suggest it,” Jim said gladly to the woman.
Alice inclined her head his way.
“Oh, very clever. Now you all listen to me. Weinberger won’t die, except by surprise. We’ll take that as read. So if that’s his idea of a good death, well, why shouldn’t we in this one instance oblige?”
“It could be interpreted as reveng
e,” Ananda pointed out mildly. “Tit for tat.”
“Oh, but / don’t put forward any claim to do the deed. I’ll tell you who ought to do it by any natural logic. Noel already named him as the prime candidate — and that’s Weinberger’s own trustworthy guide, the same guide who nursed that man’s fantasies into full bloom!”
“Once it has bloomed, the flower can wilt,” said Ananda. “Not before.”
Alice ignored Ananda’s aphorism, if indeed it amounted to such.
“Since the guide in question seems to have swallowed this whole rigmarole,” she went on, “you can bet that he would shoot straight and true! For his client’s sake, he’d have to!”
“He would be setting a terrible precedent,” said Resnick. “The role of guide as friendly mediator, and the role of the euthanaser should be kept quite distinct.”
Jim flared up.
“I would be setting a precedent? Me? As though I even suggested this, let alone. . .! Phew. A precedent, indeed! Precedents! I'd say that we’re all getting just a bit too bureaucratic hereabouts. The time was, when a man who had just been miraculously cured would have merited some kind of. . . oh well, nevermind! Okay, he’s still a murderer. And the time was, too, when even a murderer — who was out of his wits at the time of the killing — would have just been isolated from society till such time as he could be eased gently back . . .”
“. . . on to the motorway of murder,” Alice finished for him. “As though he only had a flat tyre that needed changing and patching up.”
“Oh, aren’t we a Roman society now?” Weinberger had compared the present world to ancient Egypt because of the new pyramids of death. But Egypt was the wrong comparison entirely. The ancient Egyptians had been obsessed with the afterworld, with the land of the living dead. Whereas nowadays. . . “That’s it, isn’t it? No Gods but the State — society. We retire when the time seems ripe. We compose our farewell ode, in rhyming couplets — because they’re easier to write — and we climb into a hot bath accompanied by our faithful razor. As it were.”
“You aren’t suggesting, by any chance, that we’re all murderers in this House?” asked Alice quietly.
“You certainly seem to want me to be an executioner, not a guide!”
It was a lame retort. Everyone, even Ananda, was staring at him as though he was some alien visitor disguised as a man.
“Dr Menotti is no executioner!” cried Sally Costello indignantly.
“We’re simply discussing this, Jim,” said Resnick evenly. “Perhaps you’re unused to democratic decisions: the free play of opinion, after which one settles on a common course. Coming from a larger House, as you do.” After a moment’s thought, he added, “But yes, we are a Roman society. That’s quite a neat comparison! And Norman Harper was our finest patrician. But there’s one little difference. Nowadays everybody is equally a patrician.”
Mention of the poet utterly riled Jim. A poem broke from his lips like a belch.
“The Aztecs did it with an axe,
The Romans with a razor.
We do it with a silver needle — Needles take longer to go blunt!
“If he’s a poet, then so am I. Equally, and democratically.** Resnick shook his head sadly.
“It seems you have little real feeling for the humane collective spirit.”
“In my view,” said Alice, “we have more pressing matters to discuss than literary criticism, or Mr Todhunter’s qualifications as a poet.”
“Ah yes,” said Jim, “we have a killing to plan. All right. Very well. Bravo! I shall put it to Nathan Weinberger that we will give him the surprise of his own sweet life. In return for which he will compose a farewell oration for us. Or something of the sort. If that will please you, Alice. We all want to please you, don’t we?”
“Jim,” warned Resnick.
“Oh, I’m perfectly serious. Excuse me for feeling some slight resentment at not being allowed to carry out my duties as a guide — as I truly see them.”
“You’ve been doing all right in other respects.”
“Except for a few missed appointments.”
“Except for.”
“Let’s get this heap of junk taken apart for starters, eh? Who’ll give me a hand?”
“One of the attendants can see to that, Jim. I’ll send someone down right after lunch.”
“Ah, no public penance for me, then.” Jim laughed. “Only for Nathan. My penance will be quite private. To pull the trigger at dead of night. If I can get the gun back!”
“I’ll give you a note for the Peace Office. Take it down to the Octagon this afternoon. But beyond that, we don’t know anything about this, remember.”
“And more than Nathan will? Maybe the dead of night’s too obvious. The dead of day might be more surprising.”
“None of us know, Jim. That way, no precedent exists.”
“Oh, now I see. I, who have no feeling for the humane collective spirit, will naturally be the kind of maverick who couldn’t possibly set a precedent.”
‘Ideally,’ he thought grimly, ‘after shooting Nathan I should do the decent thing and turn the gun on myself! I should stick the barrel . . . somewhere . . . and end this chain of murder before it spreads any further like a replicating virus. Incidentally, where do I point the gun? At my forehead? Or stick it under my ribs? Shall I ask Nathan for advice? ‘‘Nathan, how did you know just what part of Norman Harper’s anatomy to aim at? Wasn’t it a little risky shooting him in the throat first, just because you hated his poems? Such a tiny target! Or were you just firing wild, and lucky?” ’
‘‘You’d better send two attendants down,” Jim told Resnick. ‘‘This junk is bulky. I should know.”
‘‘The material still belongs to the client,” pointed out Ananda, adopting the prim tone of a legal adviser.
Resnick rubbed his hands.
‘‘Soon, it won’t.”
Jim nodded.
‘‘No, he won’t be needing it. Not any more.”
Indeed he wouldn’t be. Not while Jim had the hypno-tape and the pills. This cage was out of date already. Who wanted to cage Death, when you could follow Death home to its native haunts instead? Which they had done together — almost. The behaviour of any caged creature was usually quite different from its behaviour in the wild.
This gilded cage was quite irrelevant now. Weinberger was trapped in a cage labelled ‘Room 203’. And Jim was being trapped too, by circumstances and intrigues. Let the House pull Weinberger’s invention to pieces. It would reassure them. The important thing was for Jim — and Nathan — to escape from their cages.
‘‘I wonder what life and death are like these days in China and Russia and other assorted places?” said Jim on impulse.
‘‘You mean former places,” Resnick corrected him. “I’d say: hot — from isotopes. Skinny, from starvation. Pocked, with plague — and as cratered as the Moon. Quiet, really quiet on the whole. You can’t call those ‘places’, Jim. They’ve fallen off the map.”
‘And where else is off the map?’ Jim wondered.
NINETEEN
Jim accompanied Resnick to his office, where the Master scrawled a very brief note on House stationery and tucked it into an envelope which he didn’t bother to seal.
“Give this to Toni Bekker, at the Octagon.”
Jim pocketed the envelope.
“Bekker, eh? I’ve met him.”
“Oh have you really? Would you mind telling me how?”
“He was the officer I gave the gun to, at the ceremony.”
“And he took time off to tell you his name?”
“No, it was when I went down to the Octagon to register. I happened to make some enquiries about Weinberger.”
“Did you indeed?”
“I was shunted on to Officer Bekker. He’d been out to Weinberger’s apartment. He thought it was some sort of sex pervert’s den, with the cage and screens and whatnot.”
Resnick snorted.
“A pervert’s den is about the size o
f it, downstairs right now! Not a sex pervert’s, though — a death pervert’s.”
“By the way, Bekker sent you his regards. I forgot to pass them on.”
Resnick’s eyes narrowed.
“You do get around, don’t you, Jim? A couple of days in Egremont, and you know everyone in town, and you’ve even paid a visit to the afterlife. It would be a real shame to lose so versatile a guide.”
“Look, I’m just trying to do my job. But I keep on feeling as though I’ve walked into a performance of Macchiavelli’s The Prince. And no one has bothered to tell me my lines.”
“Ah, innocence is the best shield for any man, I always say.”
“I thought you usually said, ‘If any of this gets out.’ Alice seems to have put her finger on that.” Disregarding Resnick’s obvious anger, Jim ploughed on: “Any of what?”
“Damn your impertinence! You’ve been planted here, haven’t you? By Gracchus? No, not by Gracchus — it goes further than that! Who are you really, Jim?’’
“Huh? I’m Jim Todhunter, and I’m an ordinary guide, that’s all.”
“And yet you indulge in sly jibes at the very basis of society! We all heard you.’’
“I thought I heard you say something about the free play of opinion ...”
“What’s more, you wheedle your way in with Weinberger, who is our ultimate hot potato.’’
“But you asked me to . . . This is insane! You told me to guide him.’’
“Ah, I had to, didn’t I? Who else was available? And so conveniently, too! Who else happened to arrive on the very day — and at the very hour! — when Weinberger was planning his big surprise for us? As though your arrival was a signal to him! Poor Norman, he was one of the most innocent men alive ...”
“If innocence was his shield, then it certainly wasn’t bulletproof!’’ Jim hastily checked his tongue, but the harm was done.
“So Norman isn’t good enough for you. But you’ll hole up with that bastard Weinberger, and build his mad machine, and arrange for his miracle cure! How was that part engineered, eh? The cure’s real all right, I’ll give you that, //'his illness was ever genuine in the first place!’’
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