Vertigo

by Bob Shaw

  Hasson sat down, thoughtfully stoking his chin, and turned his attention to the food his stomach so urgently craved. The main course was built around a spiced meat loaf which he found enjoyable, and he further disconcerted Ginny Carpenter by giving it lavish praise. Dessert was gin-flavoured ice cream with lychees, a combination he found slightly sickly, but he asked for a second helping and had developed a comfortable tightness around his middle by the time coffee was served.

  “When somebody tells you to build yourself up you don’t fool around,” Werry commented jovially. “It seems to me …” He broke off and muttered with irritation as the police radio on his wrist emitted a shrill bleep. There was a moment of silence, during which he sat shaking his head, then the radio sounded again.

  “Sorry, folks.” Werrv touched a button on the communicator and spoke into it. “Reeve Werry here. What’s your problem?”

  “Al, this is Henry Corzyn,” the radio said in a thin, urgent voice. “I’m at the Chinook. You’d better get over here as fast as you can.”

  “Henry, I said I’d be there nine o’clock. Can’t you wait till I…”

  “This won’t wait, Al. There’s been some kind of explosion on the bottom floor of the hotel section — and I think there’s a fire starting.”

  “A fire?” Werry looked around the table with arched brows. “There’s nothing to burn up there, is there?”

  “The place is full of lumber and scaffolding and partitions, Al. The contractor just walked off and left the place full of stuff”

  “Well, have you called the fire service?”

  “Victor did that, but it isn’t going to help. The hotel’s four hundred metres up, and our hoses and sonics haven’t got a hope in hell of reaching that far.”

  “You’re right! Know something, Henry? You’re dead right!” Unexpectedly, a peaceful, beatific smile spread across Werry’s features. “Do you think we stand any chance of saying goodbye to our local landmark?”

  There was a pause before Corzyn spoke again, and this time his voice was curiously hesitant. “I don’t know about that, Al — I only saw a bit of a flare-up and it might die down again, for all I know.”

  “We’ll just have to hope for the best,” Werry said.

  “This is serious, Al,” the radio came back. “It looks like some people have been hurt bad.”

  “People?” Werry sat up straight. “What in hell are you talking about? What people?”

  “I told you there was an explosion, Al. Leastways, that’s what it seemed like to me. Some kid got blown right out of an elevator shaft and he’s hurt pretty bad.”

  “Christ Almighty!” Werry sprang to his feet, sending his chair tumbling behind him, snatched his tunic from another chair and ran to the door. Hasson saw May staring after him, both hands pressed to her mouth, then he too was out in the hail and running behind Werry. They burst out into the breezy, star-crowned darkness surrounding the house and sprinted for Werry’s cruiser parked in the street.

  Hasson paused at the car as an unnerving idea occurred to him. “Al, are you flying or driving?”

  “I was going to fly.” Werry glanced into the car where his harness lay on the rear seat. “Hell, by the time I get strapped up I could be three-quarter way to the Chinook. Jump in!”

  Hasson slid into the front passenger seat and in a few seconds the car was broadsiding out on to the main road which ran to-. wards the centre of Tripletree and the south side. As it plunged towards the massed lights and the whorls of glowing aerial highways Werry called up Corzyn on the car radio.

  “I’m on my way, Henry,” he said briskly. “Give me that again about somebody falling out of an elevator shaft. Is he dead?”

  “He isn’t dead, Al — broke up a bit and concussed. I’ve called an ambulance for him.”

  “But if he fell four hundred metres…”

  “No, he was up there when the explosion happened — sounds like a bomb to me, Al — and as far as I can tell he got blasted into the elevator shaft and hit the wall. Lucky for him his CG unit was all right and he had enough savvy left to switch it on. He was floating down the wind like a soap bubble when Victor and me put a line on him and brought him down.”

  “Get an ID on him as soon as you can.” Werry drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “How did he get in there, anyway?”

  There was a sputtering silence. “Well … Victor and me got cold up there and we didn’t see any harm in calling in at Ronnie’s place for a cup of something to warm us up. I guess he could have got in then.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Werry said. “That’s really wonderful, Henry.”

  “Al, there’s fourteen Goddamn floors in the Chinook and it’s four or five hundred metres all round. Two of us flitting around in the dark can’t seal up a place that big. There could be a whole Goddamn procession going in and out, for all we would know about it.” Corzyn sounded hurt and aggrieved.

  “All right, all right.” Werry glanced at Hasson and pulled a face. “What’s all this about a bomb?”

  “That’s what it seems like to me, Al. What else would cause an explosion? I found out there’s a lot of paint stored on some of the floors, but that would only burn, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t blow up.

  “You could be right. Do you think the kid who got hurt was fooling around with explosives and blew himself up by accident?”

  “He’s out cold now, Al, but it doesn’t look that way to me.”

  “What do you say, then?”

  There was an even longer crackling pause. “Victor saw Buck Morlacher at the hotel this morning.”

  “Aw, no,” Werry groaned, shaking his head. “Henry, don’t say things like that over the air. In fact, don’t say them at all. Hang on-I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

  Werry accelerated past a group of slow-moving cars and the dark hulk of Weisner’s furniture store came into view ahead. The bilaser projector on its roof had created a gigantic dining table which glowed against the night sky. The sight of it caused an uneasy stirring in Hasson’s memory, but his thoughts were completely dominated by the conversation he had just heard. On the night of the barbecue Morlacher had seemed dangerously near his limit of control, and from what Hasson knew of the big man it seemed entirely possible that he would go as far as planting booby traps to clear his property of what he regarded as vermin.

  “I don’t like the sound of this, Rob,” Werry said thoughtfully. “I don’t like it one bit.”

  Hasson gave him a sympathetic glance. “You think Morlacher would have gone that far?”

  “Buck thinks he can get away with anything.”

  “So what’l1 you do?”

  “Who says I’ve got to do anything?” Werry demanded, hunching his shoulders like a man warding off blows. “We don’t even know that Buck had anything to do with this. It seems to rue that I’ve got to have some kind of proof before I think about arresting a man like Buck.”

  “Nobody’s going to argue with you on that one,” Hasson said, resolving not to raise the matter again. The flashing lights of an ambulance expanded out of the distance and momentarily washed the interior of the police car with ruddy brilliance as the two vehicles passed. The bleat of the ambulance’s siren dopplered away into a low growl. Werry swung his car into the cross-street from which the ambulance had emerged and the Chinook Hotel came into view as a vertical thread of grey light surrounded by a vague smudge of weak radiance.

  Hasson, who had been looking out for something spectacular, had to remind himself that the hotel building itself was four hundred metes above ground, that a person standing on its lowest floor could have looked down on the old Empire State Building. The fantastic structure, made feasible only by 21st century materials and engineering techniques, was a monument to one family’s megalomania and arrogance. He could visualise, and almost condone, the poisonous rage which boiled through Morlacher’s mind each time he looked at the edifice which had annihilated the parental fortune and which, instead of repaying the investme
nt with profit and prestige, had made him the butt of local humour and created a safe refuge for the gangs of delinquents he hated so much. It was even possible to imagine him reaching an extremity in which he was prepared to destroy the building altogether…

  The police car abruptly slowed down as the street ahead of it became congested with other vehicles and groups of pedestrians all, as though taking part in an animal migration, converging on the site of the hotel. Werry swore and rolled down his window as he came to an intersection where a uniformed police officer was absent-mindedly controlling traffic while exchanging banter with two girls.

  “Arnold,” he shouted, “stop trying to fix yourself up and get this street cleared right up to the hotel entrance. Do you hear me?”

  Arnold gave him a friendly wave. “I hear you, Al. Some fun, eh?”

  “That’s what I have to work with,” Werry muttered as he switched on the car’s warning lights and forced his way at dangerous speed up to the hotel grounds and across the line of the perimeter fence. Several other cars and two fire vehicles were parked in a loose cluster a short distance away, their headlights streaking the grass. Werry slid his cruiser into place beside them and got out, smoothing his tunic as he craned his neck to look up at the hotel. Hasson joined him as he was met by the bear-like, sag-bellied figure of air patrolman Henry Corzyn.

  “It doesn’t look like there’s much happening up there, Werry”.

  “You can’t see anything till you get up high.” Corzyn lowered his voice and moved closer to Werry. “I haven’t said anything to the television people, but I think there’s a bunch of angels still in the building, Al. I got as close as I could and shone a light in, and I think I saw somebody skulking about. Couldn’t be sure, though.”

  “Why don’t they pull out? Aren’t they worried about being roasted?”

  “Who knows what goes on inside their pointed little heads?” Corzyn shifted his position until he had his back to a man who was standing nearby aiming a television camera at the sky. “Besides, if there’s anybody dead up there…”

  Werry looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Are you trying to make me feel good?”

  “It was one hell of an explosion, Al. Most of the glass is gone out of the first floor windows on this side — and those kids don’t go around singly, you know. A whole bunch of them might have got clobbered all at once.”

  Werry walked three paces away from Corzyn, stood for a moment with a hand on his brow, then came back. “That isn’t very likely, is it? I mean, some of the others would have sent for help.”

  Corzyn shrugged. “Young Terry Franz from the TV station is up there now with a big spotlight. Maybe he’ll be able to see more’n I could.”

  “You better get up there with him, Henry. Try to check the place out. Take a megaphone with you.”

  “Got one here.” Corzyn touched his breast pocket, revealing the square outline of an electronic voice magnifier, and shifted his hand to the control panel of his CG harness. Hasson turned away, chilled, unable to watch the take-off. He waited a moment and when he directed his gaze skywards Corzyn’s shoulder and ankle lights were like a small group of tracer bullets speeding towards the dim-glowing target of the hotel. The dinner Hasson had eaten became an unwanted mass in his stomach.

  “Where’s Quigg?” Werry bellowed, striding towards the nearest knot of onlookers. “Has anybody seen Victor Quigg?”

  “Here I am, Al.” Quigg, managing to appear thin and adolescent even when wearing a flying suit, detached himself from a group which was standing at a portable television transmitter. Werry gripped his arm and drew him into a private triad with Hasson.

  “Victor,” he said quietly, “are you making unauthorised statements to the gentlemen of the press?”

  Quigg glanced at Hasson, obviously wondering how he fitted into the picture. “You know me better than that, Al.”

  “Okay. Did you tell anybody you saw Buck up at the hotel today?”

  “Nobody “cept Henry. He was the only one I told.”

  Are you sure it was Buck you saw?”

  Quigg nodded vigorously, jiggling the magnifying visor of his flying helmet. “It was Buck, all right. I had a second look at him because he was all rigged up with panniers and he don’t usually like to load hisself down that way. He was taking something into the hotel.”

  Werry made a clicking noise with his tongue. “But you didn’t try to find out what.”

  “It’s his place, Al,” Quigg said reasonably. “I figured he was entitled.”

  “You did right.” Werry gave the young policeman a sombre stare. “I want you to keep quiet about this till I say it’s all right to talk. Okay?”

  “Sure, Al. By the way, nobody has contacted Lutze’s folks yet- do you want me to do it?”

  Werry frowned. “Lutze? Lutze?”

  “Yeah — the kid who got hisself blown up. Didn’t Henry tell you?”

  “Is that Barry Lutze?”

  “No such luck,” Quigg said. “This is his cousin Sammy. The family lives out Bettsville direction. They probably didn’t even know he was out of his own back yard tonight.”

  “Probably not,” Werry agreed. “Call the station and get somebody down there to notify the Lutzes. I want you to stay here and…”

  “Hey, Al!” One of the men at the television unit beckoned to Werry. “Come over and have a look at this, for God’s sake — old Henry’s trying to get into the hotel.”

  Werry mouthed an obscenity and ran towards the group who were gathered around a television monitor. Hasson, beginning to feel bemused, hurried in his wake. The console of the television unit was illuminated with greenish light, but recessed into it were three wells of blackness which housed solid-image monitors. In the centre one was a small vivid projection which showed Henry Corzyn moving against a background of the hotel’s unevenly lit outer surface. The image was drifting slightly, due to the fact that it was coming from a camera held by a flier, but it clearly showed a window whose lattice bars had been cut away to make an aperture large enough to admit a man.

  Hasson watched in fascination, trying to ignore the queasiness in his stomach, as Corzyn swooped towards the window. The policeman went in fast, came within field interference distance of the wall and immediately began to drop. Hasson pressed his knuckles to his lips. Corzyn made a grab for the window frame, managed to get a handhold and checked his fall.

  “That’s his second shot at it,” somebody commented admiringly. “Who’d have thought old Henry had it in him?”

  The miniaturised Corzyn clung to the frame for a moment, breathing heavily, and dragged himself through the opening into the interior of the building. A second later his head and shoulders reappeared and he waved his hand at the camera, grinning like a sports idol. Hasson tilted his head back and tried to see the actual event, but he could discern only a tiny star-like glimmering in the remote high darkness.

  Werry raised his wrist communicator to his lips. “Henry, what do you think you’re doing? I sent you up there to look the place over — not to rupture yourself.”

  “It’s all right. Al — I’m doing just fine.” Corzyn sounded breathless but triumphant. “This window I’m at is on the second floor, so I’m above the fire. It doesn’t seem like much of a fire, anyway — I might even be able to put it out.”

  “That’s not your job.”

  “Relax, Al. I’m going to have a quick look around and make sure the place is empty. I’ll have plenty of time to bail out if the fire gets worse. See you around!”

  Werry lowered his wrist and stared accusingly at the man who had summoned him to the television unit. “This is your fault, Cec. Henry’s way too old and tubby to be making grandstand plays. He’d never have done it if you hadn’t been here.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Cec replied carelessly. “We’ll give him an on-the-spot interview to himself when he comes down. Make his day for him.”

  “You’re all heart.” Werry moved away from the group, taking Hasson with
him, and looked up into the night sky where aerial spectators had begun to congregate, swarming like fireflies.

  “Here they come,” he said. “The long-nosed rubbernecks — noted for their habit of gathering in large numbers at scenes of accidents, making loud honking noises and getting in everybody’s way. It looks like the whole city will be here in a couple of minutes.”

  Hasson spoke in a low voice, choosing his words with the utmost care. “One citizen is notable by his absence.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.” Werry scratched the back of his head, a gesture which made him look boyish and handsome in the uncertain light. “Rob, there’s no two ways about this, is there?”

  Hasson shook his head, feeling a dreadful responsibility. “After the evidence you’ve heard, the very least you can do is talk to Morlacher.”

  “I guess it had to come to this some day.” Werry glanced up at the hotel. “Things seem pretty quiet up there — I’ll go and have a word with Buck now.” He turned and walked away through the battery of golden headlight beams, casting multiple shadows on the broken ground.

  Hasson stood and watched him depart, recounting to himself every one of his reasons for not getting involved, then he too walked towards the waiting police car.

  eight

  During the drive to the Morlacher house Al Werry produced the peaked and braided cap of his office — apparently it was a reserve he kept in the car for emergencies — and positioned it carefully on his head, leaning sideways to look at himself in the rear view mirror. It seemed to Hasson, watchful in the passenger seat, that he derived more reassurance from the resplendent headgear than from the pistol strapped to his side.

  No other cars were visible when they emerged from the tunnel of shrubbery and crunched to a halt near the house’s panelled front door, but rays of light slanting from the tall windows showed the place was occupied. Hasson got out of the police cruiser with Werry and stood for a moment looking around him. The view from the low crest was exactly as he had seen it before — the Chinook Hotel was not even visible beyond the heaped embers of the city — but to his imagination the atmosphere was entirely different. He had a disturbing sense of being watched.