Vertigo

by Bob Shaw

  “I’ll bet you,” he said, deciding to risk endangering his new- found relationship with the boy, “the leader of that outfit is called Black Hawk.”

  Theo looked surprised. “How did you know?”

  “It had to be that or Red Hawk. Those characters always have to hide behind some kind of label and it’s amazing how limited their imaginations are. Practically every town I’ve ever been in has had a Black Hawk or a Red Eagle fluttering around the place at night terrorising the smaller kids, and the funny part of it is that each and every one of them thinks he’s something special.”

  Theo stood up, carried his empty cereal dish to the recycler and returned to the table before speaking. “Anybody who wants to do any real flying has to cover up his name.”

  “That’s not the impression I get from the sports pages and TV. Some people become rich and famous through real flying.” Hasson knew from the expression on Theo’s face that his words were having no effect. The phrase “real flying’, as used by youngsters, meant flying illegally and dangerously, Throwing off all petty restrictions and flying solely by instinct, flying without lights at night, playing aerial Catch-me-if-you-can in the canyons of city buildings. The inevitable consequence of that kind of “real flying” was a steady rain of broken bodies drifting to the ground as their power packs faded, but it was a characteristic of youth that it felt itself to be immune from calamity. Accidents always happened to somebody else.

  One of the difficulties Hasson had encountered in his years of police work was that all the arguments were emotional rather than intellectual. He had lost count of the occasions on which he had interviewed members of a group who had just seen one of their number smeared along the side of a building or sliced in two on a concrete pylon. In every case there had been an undercurrent of feeling, akin to dawn-time superstition and primitive magical beliefs, that the deceased had brought misfortune down on himself by violating the group’s code of behaviour in some way. He had defied the leader’s authority, or had betrayed a friend, or had shown he was losing his nerve.

  The death was never attributed to the fact that the young flier had been breaking the law — because that would have opened the door to the notion that controls were necessary. The nocturnal rogue flier, the dark Icarus, was the folk hero of the age. At those times Hasson had begun to wonder if the whole concept of policing, of being responsible for others, was no longer valid. The CG harness, as well as inspiring its wearer to flout authority, aided and abetted by giving him anonymity and superb mobility. A Black Hawk and his aerial cohort could range over thousands of square kilometres in the course of a single night and then disappear without trace, like a single raindrop falling into the ocean of society. In almost every case, the only way to bring a rogue flier to book was to go after him and physically hunt him down through the sky, an activity which was both difficult and dangerous, and it seemed that the number of hunters would always be pitifully inadequate. And when he was faced with a sky-struck youngster like Theo, automatically predisposed to worship the wrong kind of hero, it seemed to Hasson that he wasted his entire life.

  “… thinks nothing of boosting up to six or seven thousand metres and staying up there for hours,” Theo was saying. “Just think of it — seven kilometres straight up into the sky and thinks nothing of it.”

  Hasson had lost track of the subject, but he guessed it was Barry Lutze. “He must think something of it,” he said, “otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered to tell you about it.”

  “Why shouldn’t he? It’s more than…’Theo paused, obviously refraining a sentence. “It’s more than anybody around here has done.”

  Hasson thought about his own brief sojourn on the edge of space, thirty kilometres up, but felt no desire to speak of it. “Doesn’t he think it’s a bit juvenile to go around calling himself Black Hawk?”

  “Who said Barry is Black Hawk?”

  “Have you got two top fliers around here? Barry Lutze and the mysterious Black Hawk? Do they never run across each other?”

  “How would I know?” Theo demanded with a betrayed expression on his face as he felt for the coffee pot.

  Hasson forbore to assist him, knowing that in the boy’s eyes he was guilty of prying into things an adult could never understand. For the first time in history young people could escape the surveillance of their elders, and that was a prize which was never to be relinquished. Complete personal mobility had shrunk the world, and enormously widened the generation gap. Barrie had been brilliantly prescient in his understanding of the fact that there could be no communication between Peter Pan and any member of the grown-up world.

  Hasson maintained a contrite silence while Theo, aided only by memory and the thin ray from a sensor ring on his right hand, located a cup and poured himself some coffee. He was wondering how best to open peace negotiations when Al Werry entered the kitchen from the rear of the house in a flurry of cold air. Werry was breathing deeply, apparently as a result of his snow-clearing activities, Hasson was slightly taken aback to see that he had kept his uniform on while performing the household chore, but he forgot about the idiosyncrasy when he noticed that Werry was looking strangely flustered.

  “Go upstairs, Theo,” he said without preamble. “Some people are coming to talk business.”

  Theo tilted his head enquiringly. “Can’t I finish my…?”

  “Upstairs,” Werry snapped. “Move it.”

  “I’m going.” Theo was reaching for his sensor cane, which was propped against the table, when there was a sound of the house’s front door being thrown open, followed by heavy footsteps in the hail. A moment later the kitchen door opened and Buck Morlacher and Starr Pridgeon came into the room. Both were wearing flying suits and harnesses which bulked out their figures and made their presence in the domestic environment seem alien and hostile. Red patches glowed like warning pennants on Morlacher’s slabby cheeks as he advanced on Werry, while behind him Pridgeon examined the contents of the room with an amused, semi-proprietary interest. Hasson felt a mixture of outrage, sadness and panic.

  “I want to talk to you,” Morlacher said to Werry, tapping him forcefully on the chest with a gloved finger. “In here.” He nodded towards the front room and strode into it without turning to see if Werry was following. Werry, after one stricken glance at his son, followed him, leaving Pridgeon behind in the kitchen with Hasson and Theo.

  “You know why I’m here,” Morlacher’s voice was thick with anger, filling both rooms.

  Werry, in contrast, was almost inaudible, “If it’s about that AC yesterday, Buck, I don’t want you to think…”

  “One of the reasons I’m here is that you’re never in your God… damn office where you’re supposed to be, and the other one is about that murder on the east approach yesterday. It wasn’t an AC, as you put it — it was a Goddamn murder, and I want to know what you’ve done about it.”

  “There isn’t much more we can do,” Werry said placatingly.

  “Isn’t much more we can do,” Morlacher mimicked. “A VIP comes to this city on business and gets murdered by some crazy shit-head punk, and there isn’t much more we can do!”

  Hasson, driven by the expression on Theo’s face, stood up with the intention of closing the interconnecting door. He turned without having made sufficient preparation for the move, and froze as his back locked with a sensation like a glass dagger having been thrust between his vertebrae. He leaned on the table for a second, then carefully extended his hand to the door knob.

  “Now, Buck, he wasn’t really a VIP,” Werry said in the other room.

  “When I say the son-of-a-bitch was a VIP,” Morlacher ground out, “that means the son-of-a-bitch was a VIP. He came up here to…,

  Hasson slammed the door shut, reducing the overheard exchanges to a background rumble, and did his best to stand up straight. Pridgeon, who was walking around the room picking up small objects and replacing them, watched him with a kind of amiable contempt.

  “Boy, you’re really
in a mess, Al’s cousin from England,” he said, smiling through the wisps of his moustache. His teeth had the almost-greenish tinge that comes from a permanent accumulation of food residue, and there were charcoal-coloured pockets of decay close to the gums between the incisors. “Car smash, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right.” Hasson fought to keep back a conciliatory smile. Pridgeon shook his head and hissed in his breath. “Shouldn’t have been fruiting about in a car, Al’s cousin from England. You shoulda been treading sky like a full-grown man. Look at young Theo! Theo’s going to show “em something as soon as he’s able. That right, Theo?”

  Theo Werry tightened his lips, disdaining to speak.

  “Theo was on his way up to his room,” Hasson said. “I think he had finished breakfast.”

  “Bull ! He hasn’t touched his coffee. Drink your coffee, Theo.” Pridgeon winked at Hasson, pressed one finger to his lips in a silencing gesture and poured a thick stream of sugar from the stainless steel dispenser into the boy’s cup. He stirred the resultant sludge and guided the cup into Theo’s hand. Theo, his face alert and suspicious, gripped the cup but did not raise it to his mouth.

  “I think you put in too much sugar,” Hasson said lightly, sickened by his own complaisance. “We don’t want Theo to get fat.”

  The playfulness disappeared from Pridgeon’s face on the instant. He performed his intimidatory trick of abruptly fixing Hasson with a frowning, baleful voodoo stare, then came towards him, head thrust forward, moving silently on the balls of his feet. This can’t be happening to me, Hasson thought, as he found himself nodding, smiling, shrugging, backing out of the kitchen, unable to bear the idea of the other man entering his personal space. Still under Pridgeon’s threatening gaze, he reached the foot of the stairs and put his hand on the banister.

  “Excuse me,” he said, listening in fascinated dread to hear what words his mouth would utter next. “Nature calls.”

  He went up the stairs with the intention of going to his bedroom and locking himself inside, but the bathroom door was directly ahead and — spurred on by the notion of trying to make it appear that he really had needed to relieve himself — he went through it and thumbed the concave button on the handle. The silence in the bathroom beat inwards upon him.

  “Nature calls,” he breathed. “Oh, God! Nature calls!” Pressing the back of a hand to his lips to prevent their trembling, he sat down on the white-painted cane chair, remembering with a keen sense of loss the treasure trove of green-and-gold Serenix capsules he had so blithely thrown away. I’ll see a doctor and get some more, he thought. I’ll get some more Sunday morning pills, and I’ll get some television cassettes, and I’ll be all right. He lowered his head into his hands, feeling much as he had done while suspended in the high purple archways of the stratosphere — cold, remote, abandoned — and entered a period of timelessness.

  His numb reverie ended with the sound of a door opening downstairs and a corresponding increase in the relentless, pounding surf-noise of Morlacher’s anger. He waited a few seconds and opened the door just enough to give him a vertically slitted view down into the hail. Morlacher and Pridgeon were standing in it, occupying most of the floor space while they closed up their suits in preparation for flight. The door to the downstairs front room was closed and there was no sign of Al Werry. Pridgeon opened the entrance door, admitting a white blaze of snow-reflected daylight, and went outside. Morlacher was on the point of following him when there was an extra movement and a darkening of the trapezium of brilliance on the hall floor, and May Carpenter came into the house. She was carrying a net shopping bag and was dressed in a traditionally styled tweed jacket and skirt trimmed with fur which gave her an oddly demure quality. Morlacher looked down at her with evident appreciation.

  “May Carpenter,” he said, putting on a rakish grim which was totally unlike any expression Hasson had seen him use previously, “you get prettier every time I see you. How do you do it?”

  “Clean living, I guess,” May replied, smiling, apparently unperturbed by his standing so close to her in the confines of the hail.

  “That’s one for the book,” Morlacher chuckled. “All flower arranging and rug tying down at the PTA, is it?”

  “Don’t forget the cake competitions — you should see what I can do with a piping bag.”

  Morlacher laughed loud, put his hands on May’s waist and lowered his voice. “Seriously, May — why haven’t you been over to see me since you got back into town?”

  She squared her shoulders. “I’ve been busy. Besides, it isn’t a girl’s place to go calling on a man, is it? What would people say?”

  Morlacher glanced towards the room where he had been talking to Al Werry, then drew May closer to him and kissed her. She relaxed into it for a moment and Hasson saw the slight grinding movement of her hips which had thrown every organic switch in his body the night before. He remained transfixed at his vantage point, terrified of being caught spying and yet completely unable to move away.

  “I have to go now,” Morlacher said as they separated. “I’ve got urgent business in town.”

  May looked up at him through quivering eyelashes. “Perhaps it’s just as well.”

  “I’ll call you,” Morlacher whispered. “We’ll fix something up.” He turned and disappeared into the white radiance of the outside world. May watched him depart, closed the entrance door and — without pausing to remove her outdoor jacket — came straight up the stairs towards the bathroom, taking the steps two at a time. Hasson almost slammed the door shut before realising the action was bound to be noticed. Dry-mouthed and sick with apprehension, he whirled away from the door and stooped over the washbasin as though busy cleaning his hands. May passed the bathroom and went into a bedroom further along the landing.

  Hasson, moving with the exaggerated stealth of a burglar in a stage production, left the bathroom and plunged into his own sanctuary silently locking the door behind him. The discovery that his heart was labouring like a museum-piece engine strengthened his resolve to stay in his room as much as possible and avoid direct contact with the rest of humanity. He sat on the edge of the bed, turned on his television set and tried to become part of its miniaturised and manageable world. He had been alone for some thirty minutes when there was a knock on the bedroom door, and on answering it he found Al Werry waiting on the landing. Werry had left off his uniform in favour of duracord slacks and a black sweater, and the change had made him look younger.

  “Have you got a minute, Rob?” he said in a conspiratorial undertone. “I’d like to have a word with you.”

  Hasson opened the door fully and gestured for Werry to enter. “What’s it about?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  Hasson avoided the other man’s gaze. “I’m just passing through this neck of the woods, Al. There’s no need to…”

  “I know, but it would help me if I could talk to somebody. How about stepping out for a couple of beers?”

  Hasson glanced at his television set which, once again because of time zone differences, was failing to provide the sort of programmes he wanted. “Would the television shops, stores, be open? I need to buy some cassettes.”

  “We can do that as well — no problem. What do you say to a beer?”

  “I’m dry as hell after last night.” Hasson confessed, reaching for his topcoat. Werry slapped him on the shoulder with something like his normal bonhomie and led the way down the stairs, jigging noisily on his heels. A minute later they were in the police cruiser and swishing along a street whose wet black pavement gave it the appearance of a canal cut through a field of snow. As the car picked up speed thick chunks of snow which had encrusted its hood broke off in the slipstream and shattered on the windshield without making a sound. Hasson deduced that the snow was powder dry and light, unlike the variety he was familiar with in England. The car swung out on to the main road and topped a low rise, giving him a panoramic view of the city looking arctic-pure and idyllic in the generous sunlight.
Colours had intensified in contrast to the pervasive whiteness and the windows of houses appeared as jet-black rectangles. Off to the south the fantastic pylon of the Chinook Hotel shone like a steel pin which was holding earth and sky together.

  Hasson, already becoming familiar with the general layout of Tripletree, studied the aerial sculptures of the traffic control system and used them as a guide to pick out other landmarks. Among the latter jutting up from a conglomerate of lesser buildings, was the glassy brown bulk of the furniture store where Theo had guided him on to the ring road the previous afternoon. On its roof, and glowing powerfully in spite of competition from the sun, was a huge bilaser projection representing a four-poster bed. Hasson frowned as an amber star began to wink on the computer panel of his memory.

  “Quite a sign that,” he said, indicating the building to Werry. “Yesterday it was an armchair.”

  Werry grinned. “That’s old Manny Weisner’s latest toy. He changes the image two or three times a week, just for fun.”

  “He hasn’t had it long then?”

  “About three months or so.” Werry turned his head and regarded Hasson with some curiosity. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” Hasson said, trying to extinguish the amber star. Yesterday the sign had portrayed an armchair, and Theo Werry — who was blind — had said that it portrayed an armchair. The obvious explanation was that somebody had described the sign to him on a previous occasion when the image was the same and had not told him about the owner’s habit of switching it around. Armchairs were one of the most common sale items in any furniture store, therefore the degree of coincidence involved in Theo’s being right was not very great. Hasson dismissed the matter from his mind, irritated with its lingering habit of seizing on small shards of information and trying to build mosaic pictures with them. The question of what Werry wanted to talk to him about was of more immediate interest and importance. He hoped there were to be no confessions of corruption. In the past he had known other police officers to become too closely connected with men like Buck Morlacher, and none of the stories had happy endings. The thought of Morlacher brought back an associated memory of his own humiliating encounter with Starr Pridgeon, and it occurred to him that Morlacher and Pridgeon were a strangely assorted pair. He broached the subject to Werry.