Vertigo

by Bob Shaw

  “Ah… no.” Hasson realized he had made a mistake in reviving the subject of flying in the presence of a sky-struck boy. “I don’t fly at all, as a mater of fact.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” The apology showed the boy felt a shameful admission had been made, and in spite of all the dictates of his common sense Hasson was suddenly unwilling to let the matter drop. “There’s nothing wrong with travelling in comfort, you know.”

  Theo shook his head and spoke with bland certainty. “You’ve got to fly. When I can see again I’m going to live up there. It’s the only way.”

  “Who says?”

  “Barry Lutze, for one — and he knows. Barry says you can tell a good airman just by looking at him.”

  Hasson recognised a disturbing echo of the angels” aced, the unsystematic and semi-instinctive mode of thought — too primeval to be classed as a philosophy — which was born in the minds of some who flew like supermen far above the drowsing earth. It was a dangerous aced, and one he seemed to have been fighting for the whole of his life. He recalled noticing the condensation on Lutz’s flying suit and once again, entirely without volition, the policeman in him began to test patterns of ideas.

  “Barry seems to tell you lots of things,” he said. “Do you know him well?”

  “Pretty well: Theo replied with simple pride. “He talks to me a lot.”

  “Was he doing a bit of cloud-running this afternoon?”

  Theo’s face altered. “Why do you want to know?”

  “No special reason,” Hasson said, realising he had given himself away. “I’m just interested. Was he aloft?”

  “Barry spends most of his time aloft.”

  “It’s not the sort of weather I’d pick to go drilling holes in clouds.”

  Who said he was flying in cloud?”

  “Nobody.” Hasson, now anxious to abandon the subject, scanned the twin lines of unfamiliar buildings ahead of the car. “I’m not sure if I remember the way home from here.”

  “Is there a sort of brown glass building at the next intersection?” Theo said. “A furniture store with a projection of a big armchair on the roof?” “Yes — just ahead of us.”

  “Make a left there and follow the road till you pick up the north freeway. It’s a bit longer that way, but it’s easier when you don’t know the place too well.”

  “Thanks.” Hasson carried out the instruction and glanced curiously at his passenger, wondering if Theo still possessed some degree of sight.

  “I can just about tell night from day,” Theo said, “but I’ve got a good memory.”

  “I wasn’t going to. …”

  Theo smiled. “Everybody’s surprised to find I’m not completely helpless. I keep a map of the city in my head and I check off my position on it. I move a little dot along the streets.”

  “That’s really something.” Hasson was impressed by the boy’s fortitude.

  “The system doesn’t work in the air, that’s all.”

  “No, but you’ll be fine in a couple of years, won’t you?” Theo’s smile hardened. “You’ve been talking to my father.” Hasson gnawed his lower lip, having learned yet again that Theo was a highly perceptive person with no interest in making small talk. “Your father did tell me you’d be having an operation or something like that in two years” time. Perhaps I picked him up wrong.”

  “No, you picked him up right,” Theo said easily. “I’ve only got to wait another two years — and that’s nothing, is it? Nothing at all.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Hasson mumbled, wishing the conversation had never got starred, wishing he could be alone in his room, secure, with the door locked and the curtains drawn and all the world a television stage. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and concentrated on following the traffic markers on the road which looped northwards around the outskirts of the city. The road passed through a cutting which enclosed it between steep snowy banks, shutting off all signs of habitation and creating the impression that he was driving in a wilderness.

  Hasson was watching a slaty triangle of sky opening out to receive him when something struck the car with enough force to make it rock slightly on the suspension. The impact appeared to have been on the roof, but nothing that could have caused it bounced down on to the pavement.

  Theo sat up straight. “What was that?”

  “I think we’ve got company,” Hasson said. He trod gently on the brake pedal and at the same instant a flier made a swooping descent to land on the road about a hundred metres ahead. The flier was a big man who was wearing a black suit, a harness with fluorescent orange straps and — in spite of the fading light conditions — mirror-lensed sun glasses. Hasson immediately recognised Buck Morlacher and made a simultaneous guess that his partner, Starr Pridgeon, was at that moment perched on the roof of the car, having matched velocities in the air and dropped on to it. A wave of irritation, rather than anger, caused him to react as his former self. The car was still losing speed gradually as it neared Morlacher, but Hasson kicked down on the brake and jolted the vehicle to a halt. A blue-suited figure tumbled down the sloping windshield, struck the nose of the car and slid the rest of the way down on to the road.

  Hasson, now regretting his impulsive action, sat perfectly still as the figure sprang to its feet and he saw the thin, venomous face of Starr Pridgeon coming towards him. Pridgeon wrenched open the driver door and his eyes widened in surprise.

  “Hey, Buck,” he called. “This ain’t Werry — it’s his Goddamn cousin from Goddamn England.”

  Morlacher paused briefly, then continued his approach to the car. “I’ll talk to him, anyway.”

  “Right.” Pridgeon put his head right inside the car until his face was almost touching Hasson’s. “What was the idea?” he whispered. “What was the idea puffin” me down on the road like that?”

  Hasson, numb with apprehension, shook his head and somehow chose the exact words Pridgeon had used earlier when he had felled Al Werry. “It was a pure accident.”

  Pridgeon’s expression became murderous. “You want me to drag you out of there?”

  “It was an accident,” Hasson said, gazing straight ahead. “I’m not used to this sort of car.”

  “If I thought you had enough…”

  “Come out of there,” Morlacher said to Pridgeon, appearing at his elbow. Pridgeon withdrew, scowling, walked round to the other side of the car and stared in at Theo Werry. The boy remained motionless, his face calm.

  Morlacher stooped to look in at Hasson. “What’s your name? Halford or something like that, isn’t it?”

  “It’s Haldane.”

  Morlacher appeared to digest the information for a moment, the two triangles of red glowing on the pink background of his face. “Where’s Werry?”

  “Over on the east side,” Hasson said, submitting to the interrogation. “There was an AC.”

  “A what?” Morlacher demanded suspiciously.

  “An aerial collision. Two people dead. He had to be there.”

  “He should have been there before somebody got killed.” Morlacher was speaking in tones of barely suppressed rage, a fact which Hasson noted and found slightly puzzling — Morlacher had not struck him as being particularly humanitarian or public spirited in his outlook. He was pondering the matter when he heard a click on his right and turned his head to see that Pridgeon had opened the passenger door and was peering in at Theo with a kind of brooding, clinical interest. Theo, although he must have heard the noise and felt the influx of cold air, did not move in any way.

  Hasson tried to put aside the distraction. “It’s hard to show up before an accident.”

  “Accident my ass,” Morlacher growled. “That was no accident. Those hopped-up young punks get away with murder. We let them get away with murder.”

  “One of them got killed as well.”

  “You think that makes things right?”

  “No.” Hasson had to concede the point. “But it shows
…” “The other man who got hit wasn’t just anybody, you know. He was an important visitor to our country. An important visitor — and look what happens to him!”

  “Did you know him?” Hasson’s attention was distracted from the subject of the dead flier by the fact that Pridgeon had spread one of his hands out and was holding it a bare centimetre away from Theo’s nose. The boy sensed its presence almost at once and jerked his head back. Pridgeon’s mouth twitched with amusement behind the wispy tendrils of his moustache and he repeated the experiment, this time holding his hand a little further away. Hasson stared down at his own hands gripping the steering wheel and tried to comprehend what Morlacher was saying.

  “… in all the media tonight,” the big man thundered, “and what will the message be? I’ll tell you what the message will be. They’ll be saying it isn’t safe to fly north of Calgary. They’ll be saying this is cowboy country up here. I tell you, it’s enough to make a man…” Morlacher’s peg-like front teeth came together with an audible click, shutting off a flow of words as his anger went beyond the limits of articulation.

  Hasson gazed up at him, mute, helpless, baffled, wondering what was coming next, wondering if the predatory strangers would resort to violence against a sick man and a blind boy. Beside him, Theo was rocking his head from side to side in an effort to escape the unseen proximity of Pridgeon’s hand. “When you see Werry tell him I’ve had enough,” Morlacher said at last. “You tell him I’m full up to my back teeth with this sort of thing, and that I’m coming over to his place to see him. Got that?”

  “I’ll tell him,” Hasson said, relieved to see that Morlacher’s hand was now resting on the flight control panel on his belt.

  “Come on, Starr — we’ve got work to do.” Morlacher moved a switch and was hurled upwards into the sky, disappearing from Hasson’s restricted field of view in a fraction of a second. On the other side of the car, Pridgeon snapped his fingers loudly in Theo’s face, causing the boy to flinch, then performed his intimidatory trick of suddenly fixing Hasson with a bleak, hostile stare. He backed away from the car, still staring, leaped upwards and was gone. There was a silence disturbed only by the flustering of the breeze in the car’s open doors.

  Hasson gave an uncertain laugh. “What was all that about?”

  Theo compressed his lips, refusing to speak.

  “It was nice of them to drop by and see us,” Hasson said, trying to make light of his sense of inadequacy and shame. “Friendly people you have around here.”

  Theo put out his right hand, pulled the passenger door shut and shifted slightly in the seat, signalling that he wanted to go home. Hasson took a deep breath as he closed his own door and set the car rolling again. They emerged from the cutting. Scattered houses, some of them already showing lights, became visible far off to one side. In all other directions a vast unfamiliar land stretched away to the dimness where the snow was turning as grey as the sky. Hasson felt totally alone.

  “I wasn’t quite sure what to say back there,” he ventured. “Only having been in town a few hours … not really knowing anybody… I wasn’t quite sure how to handle the situation.”

  “It’s all right,” Theo replied. “You handled it exactly the way my father would have done.”

  Hasson weighed the comment and understood that he had been insulted, but he decided against trying to put up a defence. “I can’t understand why Morlacher is so upset — is he the city mayor or something?”

  “No, he’s just our friendly local gangster.”

  “Then what’s on his mind?

  “You’d better ask my father about that. He works for Morlacher, so he should know.”

  Hasson glanced at Theo and saw that his face was pale and stern. “That’s going a bit far, isn’t it?”

  “You think so? All right, let’s put it this way.” Theo spoke with a bitterness which made him sound like a much older person. “Mr Morlacher put my father into the reeve’s job, and he did it because he knew he would be completely ineffectual. The idea was that Mr Morlacher would be able to do anything he wanted around Tripletree without being inconvenienced by the law. Now the situation has changed and Mr Morlacher needs some hard-nosing done on his behalf — and there’s nobody to do it for him. I’m sure you can appreciate the humour in that. Everybody else in town does.”

  The boy’s words came across like a carefully planned and rehearsed speech, one which had been repeated many times to many people, and Hasson realized he had dipped his toes into a deep dark pool of family relationships. Shocked though he was by Theo’s cynicism, he made up his mind to backtrack before getting involved in other people’s problems. He was in Canada for no other reason than to rest and recuperate, and at the end of his allotted time he was going to flit away, as free and unencumbered as a bird. Life, he had learned, was difficult enough…

  “I think we’ll be home in a few minutes,” he said. “There’s a road ahead which looks like the northbound motorway, freeway.”

  “Make a right there, then take the third on the right,” Theo replied, an odd inflection in his voice making him sound almost disappointed over Hasson’s failure to respond to his set piece. He changed his position in the seat several times, looking moody and intelligent, giving the impression that his mind was far from being at ease.

  “The accident this afternoon,” he said. “Was it a bad one?”

  “Bad enough — two people dead.”

  “Why was Mr Morlacher talking about murder?”

  Hasson slowed down at the intersection. “As far as I know some mental subnormal started bombing the east approach — with the inevitable result.” “Who says it’s inevitable?”

  “A character called Isaac Newton. If somebody is crazy enough to switch off in mid-air it only takes him seven seconds to reach terminal velocity of two-hundred kilometres an hour, and no matter what sort of vector he tries to add …” Hasson paused as he became aware of Theo’s unseeing eyes being turned towards him. “We get to know about that sort of thing in the insurance business.” “I suppose you would,” Theo said thoughtfully.

  Hasson fell silent, wondering if the stories he had heard about the uncanny perceptiveness of some blind people could be true. He followed the directions given him by Theo and brought the car to a halt outside Al Werry’s house. Theo made an adjustment to the control on his cane bringing life to the inset ruby beads, got out of the car and began walking towards the house. Hasson lifted his television set out of the rear seat and followed him, glad to turn his back on the darkening world.

  The hall seemed smaller than before due to the fact that Theo was struggling out of his coat in the centre of it, and this time the aroma of coffee had been added to the background smells of wax polish and camphor. Hasson’s anxiety level increased at the prospect of having to go into the back room, there and then, and sit making conversation with a group of near-strangers. He made immediately for the stairs, fighting off the urge to go up them two at a time before the door to the back room was opened.

  “Tell your folks I’ve gone up to unpack,” he said to Theo in a low voice. “Then I’m going to freshen up a bit.”

  He reached the landing just as the sound of a door handle turning came from below. He made a panicky rush into his own room, set the television on the bed and locked the door behind him. The room looked dim and strange in the twilight. Faces in framed photographs stared at each other in silent communication, agreeing among themselves that the intruder in their midst should be ignored. Hasson drew the curtains together, switched on a light and busied himself with setting up the television on a table beside the bed. He switched it on, bringing into existence a miniature proscenium under which tiny human figures strutted and strove in a perfect simulation of life.

  Hasson doused the light, hurriedly stripped off his outer clothing and — with his eyes fixed on the technicoloured microcosm — got into the bed. He pulled the covers up until they almost covered his head, creating yet another barrier between himself and the u
niverse outside. The coolness of the bedding coming into contact with his back produced painful spasms which caused him to twist and turn for a full minute, but eventually he was able to find a comfortable position and began relaxing his guard. Using the remote control panel, he instructed the set to sample any British television programmes that were available by satellite and promptly discovered that, due to the difference in time zones, he had access to nothing but early morning educational broadcasts. In the end he settled for a holofilm that was being put out by a local station and promised himself he would go back to the store at the first opportunity and buy some library spools of British situation comedies and drama series. In the meantime, he felt warm, tolerably secure, free from pain, absolved from the need to act or think… Hasson was recalled from his electronic demi-world by a persistent tapping on the bedroom door. He eased himself into an upright position and surveyed the room, which was now in darkness, reluctant to leave the cocoon of bedding. The tapping noise continued. Hasson got to his feet, went to the door and opened it to find Al Werry advancing upon him, still in full uniform.

  “You can’t see a thing in here,” Werry commented, switching on the lights as he spoke. “Were you asleep?”

  “Resting, anyway,” Hasson said, blinking.

  “Good idea — you’ll be in good shape for the party tonight.”

  Hasson felt something lurch in his chest. “What party?”

  “Hey! I see you went ahead and got yourself a TV.” Werry crossed to the television and hunkered down to examine it, a doubtful expression appearing on his face. “Dinky little thing, isn’t it? When you get used to a two-metre job like the one we have down in the front room anything else hardly seems worth bothering with.”

  “Did you say something about a party?”

  “Sure thing. It won’t be too big — just a few friends coming round to meet you and have a few drinks — but I promise you, Rob, you’ll get a real Albertan welcome. You’re really going to enjoy yourself.”

  “I …” Hasson gazed into Werry’s eager face and realized the impossibility of putting him off. “You shouldn’t have gone to any trouble.”