But the idea passed quickly.
Long ago Cassius had recognized and accepted his limitations. He seldom dreamed any more of writing the news story or series that would catapult him to fame.
There were eight hundred reporters on the Capitol World Truth. Out of these, a top dozen received around eighteen thousand credits per annum. They wrote all the expose pieces of the type Cassius was imagining. Cassius himself earned a meager twelve two, almost the Guild minimum. Years ago he’d been slotted by Hughgenine, his editor, as a competent man to handle a section of the vast Alexandria suburban news beat. The Parent and Teaching Machine Association was his bailiwick. Well, he said to himself, the expose was a good thought, anyway.
Dread came then.
The rain-soaked handler blinked at the receipt. “I seen it here a while ago, okay. But there ain’t many items left and I don’t see it now.”
Cassius stared around the open shed. “I was delayed in the terminal. It must be here. It’s a coffin.”
“I know, I seen it. We had a real mess out here tonight, mister. Some jerky new driver rammed into a couple of the other pickup rigs. Maybe Elmo knows. Hey, Elmo?”
Elmo was fat and officious. “Sure, I seen it. The driver picked it up.”
“What driver?” Cassius snapped.
“Just who the hell are you, mister?”
“The man’s brother.”
“Oh, okay. Keep your pants on.” Elmo thumbed his flash. He riffled his tickets. Then he extended the packet, less blustery. “Ain’t that the nuts? The part of the ticket showin’ the name of the carrier is torn off. Oh boy, things are sure screwed up tonight, man, oh man.”
Cassius raged and fumed and promised official vengeance for a full fifteen minutes. He turned out half the minor bureaucracy of the receiving department, to no good end. The coffin was gone.
Someone had stolen his brother’s corpse.
“It’s crazy!” he sputtered. Cowlike faces ringed him. “Who would steal a preacher’s body? It’s absolutely senseless.”
No one answered. Cassius looked past the rain-lashed men. They were strangely nervous. Perhaps because of a theft; the rain; the accident and mix-ups and their obliviousness to the pickup driver. Or perhaps they were quiet because the situation had been further complicated by death.
Out beyond the concrete beds where the Sino-Russian Line was preparing to launch its evening shipment, Cassius saw the multileveled tangle of roads leading from the field, rising to merge with the ten broad lanes of the Washington Belt. Up one of those ramps and onto that highway had gone an unknown truck, carrying a stolen corpse.
“Crazy,” Cassius said again. “You’ll hear about this.” He stalked off in the rain.
What indecent maniac would take such elaborate pains to pilfer the corpse of a man of God from a public place? Cassius was at once afraid he’d come in contact with some sinister group of madmen. Only later, when hindsight began to operate, did he analyze his reaction more deeply. He knew later that what had really troubled him was the fear that those who’d stolen the body were not crazy but perfectly, if esoterically, sane.
Lurching along in the rain, Cassius didn’t know what he was going to do about the theft. But he was positive he was going to do something.
* * * *
II
The trip to his apartment in Alexandria would require the better part of an hour. Cassius decided to put the time to use.
After he jockeyed his Ford Aircoupe to the hook-on with the magnetic strip, he dialed the tinted shell. The shell closed around the seat blister, shutting out the dazzle of thousands of headlamps in the oncoming lanes. Cassius rang up the headquarters of the Ecumenical Brothers in downtown Washington. The paper had paid for installing the minimum-screen visor in his car.
Presently a sleepy, clerical-collared face appeared.
“This is Reverend Tooker speaking. Yes?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Reverend.”
“Quite all right. Tonight’s my shift in the B-complex free kitchen. How can I help you?”
The cleric was unfamiliar. But so was Timothy’s whole life, practically. Cassius hadn’t seen his brother in twelve years. That didn’t lessen his sense of duty and outrage:
“Reverend, I’m Cassius Andrews. I just came from Dulles where I planned to pick up Timothy’s body. There seems to have been a mixup. Did you by any chance send a hauler from your building to fetch it?”
“No, Mr. Andrews. We understood you wished to take delivery. Wasn’t our departed brother on the rocket?”
“He was. But somebody stole the coffin.”
Reverend Tooker at once launched into theologically tinged commiseration. Cassius listened politely. But he knew he’d get no help from the white-haired divine. Most of Tooker’s sincere and sympathetic talk about Timothy’s service on the Moon, his dying a violent death in the service of the Creator and His Son, to Cassius was neither here nor there. Long ago he’d abandoned any concern with religion.
While the Reverend eulogized Timothy, Cassius drifted off into other realms. Timothy had been a shy, dreamy boy in their childhood. He had been passionately religious, in contrast to Cassius who was passionately secular. For no special reason, Cassius was stung with somber recollections of his boyhood dreams of becoming a famous newsman and correspondent.
“—can only suggest you contact the police,” Reverend Tooker concluded.
“Yes, I planned to do that next.”
“Please come into the chapel at any time if we can be of help in your hour of trial,” the Reverend said.
“Yes, I’ll do that too, thanks.” That was a lie. Cassius rang off. There was no point in telling the gentle, simple old fellow that he was becoming convinced Timothy’s body had been pilfered by some sort of sex ghoul cult. A cult which—God help his brother—must be massively organized.
The Ford Aircoupe whizzed along on its thin pillars of air, halfway to Alexandria now. Cassius dialed the central police switchboard.
They were officially receptive, properly angry. Somehow, though, the conversation seemed routine. Cassius doubted the police would learn anything new when their operatives visited the freight sheds. The rain, the accident caused by the inexperienced driver, the resulting confusion, all had worked together to effectively blot out the trail of the body snatchers.
The Aircoupe was on the less crowded feeder belt over the polluted Potomac. The hour was growing late. In spite of that, Cassius dialed another number. He didn’t want to be completely alone tonight. He found that Joy was home.
“That’s terrible, Cassius,” she said. He thought she was sincere. Joy was nearing forty, rather chubby-faced and a little ferret-eyed in the wrong light. Basically she was pretty, if grown stocky now that she’d given up hope of marriage and settled on a career. “Would you like me to come over?”
Rain hammered black, lonely, on the Aircoupe bubble.
“Could you, Joy? It’ll take you an hour, I know. I really would like company. I can cook some eggs. You can stay the night.”
“I wish I might, sweets. But the piece I’m working on is due tomorrow. I’ve unearthed some positively fantabulous little gimmicks in re what to do with leftover paper undies. They make the cutest buffers for a dusting robot and—oh dear. Forgive me. This is a terrible time to talk shop.”
“That’s all right.” He forgave her. One of Joy’s failings was a kind of compulsion to seek editorial paydirt in any situation, even lovemaking. Once in the middle of the night Joy had: suddenly interrupted everything, sat up and jotted down some notes on a simply fantabulous position a housewife might use to relax her calf muscles. He added, “You don’t have to stay the night, then.”
“I can’t, dear. As I say, this little piece is due. Cassius!”
“What, Joy?”
“You don’t suppose there’s anything in this theft, do you? Oh, I realize the moment is very trying for you. But could we make anything out of it?”
“I doubt that it’s Jo
y de Veever’s cup of tea,” he replied. “Nor mine either. I also have a sinking feeling the cops are going to get nowhere. To tell the truth, Joy, this business has some nasty overtones. I’m not sure I want to pursue it myself.”
The screened face grew bright-eyed. He might have been irritated if he hadn’t understood that her query sprang from her compulsive professionalism. But only in part. He knew from their years of pleasant liaison that she was, at bottom, kindly.
“But you will pursue it, won’t you, Cassius?”
“Yes, I suppose I must. Provided I can figure out where to turn next.”
“We’ll think of something. See you in an hour, sweets.” And the screen blurred out.
Cassius occupied a one-room flat on the eighty-seventh floor of one of fifteen cluster buildings in a small Alexandria development. Decelerating for the hook-off, Cassius saw a familiar sprawl of towers just this side of his own project. The towers dwarfed the other units in the district. They were the local project of the Securo Corporation.
Securo, a private firm started ten years ago by a contractor and a professor of psychology, provided co-op living for young marrieds but added a fillip: all conceivable services, including mortgage, burial and educational insurance were included in one payment for the benefit of the occupants, who signed a lifetime contract. All across the country and everywhere abroad, Securo was building similar projects, but not fast enough for the demand.
Down at the paper, the boys, fancying themselves rather independent souls, referred to a Securo flat as a womb to tomb room, since many young parents were already willing their living space to their infants, to provide them maximum protection against the buffetings of fate.
Now, riding in the dark rain, Cassius shuddered a little as the lights of the Securo tract flashed past. There was something to be said for knowing you were protected, especially on unpleasant nights like this. And the newsmen weren’t all that independent, either. The last Guild negotiations had lasted eighteen weeks, because management initially refused to include podiatry benefits in the package. Everyone wanted to be safe. Sometimes Cassius clucked his tongue, but sometimes too he sympathized.
Unlike Securo, Cassius’s landlords offered only the standard auto, theft and major medical insurance with their flats. Cassius’s place was a litter of books and the other paraphernalia of bachelor untidiness.
He opened two packages of Birdseye Brawny Breakfasts, watched while the fried eggs and bacon began to mushroom from the tiny white capsules. Joy wouldn’t be arriving for a while yet. He drew the curtain around the cook unit and went to the bookcase to get his diary.
Faithfully he recorded the events of the evening. As a younger man he’d imagined he might be a latter-day Pepys. Now he wrote in the book out of habit more than anything, though occasionally he admitted to himself that what he was doing was hoping with words and phrases that a third-rate newspaperman could gain a slim remembrance after he died.
Someone might come across the diary among his effects, for instance. Recognize the burning perceptiveness and, lo! long after he was buried, elevate the name of Cassius Andrews to the heights of—
Rats. He knew it was idle foolishness. The prose was clear but mundane. It in no sense burned. Still, he wrote in the diary every night.
Joy de Veever arrived within an hour. Her evening wig, slightly awry, was an exotic purple to match her lip rouge. She hugged him briefly. They sat down to eat, Joy rather noisily and untidily. It was comforting to have her present.
Her real name was Joy Gollchuk. The editors believed, probably rightly, that Joy de Veever was the sort of byline housewives preferred in a helpful hints column. She shared a cell at theCapitol World Truth with a pert sixty-year-old grandmother named Mrs. Swartzmore, who reviewed films under the name Ma Cine.
“Really (munch munch), Cassius (swallow), this is the most despicable type thing I’ve ever (swallow) heard of. Stealing a body indeed! A Holy Joe’s body, too.”
“I don’t get mad about the minister part so much as over the fact that he was my brother. I feel an obligation not to let the whole thing pass.”
“Maybe (swallow) it’s some sort of obscene ring operating.”
“I’ve wondered that. It’s actually the reason I’m slightly leery of pushing too far. But I know in the long run I can’t let the possibility stop me.”
“Tell me again what the police said.”
“That they’ll do their best. I don’t doubt it. But I was there tonight, Joy. The handlers felt sorry about it, sure. Things were obviously in such a confused state that they could do nothing beyond what they did. Which was, admit someone drove in, picked up Timothy’s coffin with false papers, then drove away again.”
Joy’s eyes glittered. She leaned near. “Did you ask for police cooperation?”
“Didn’t I just tell you?”
“Not about that, silly. I mean cooperation in case there’s a juicy story behind—oh. You’re offended.”
“No I’m not.”
“Juicy was a bad word. I’m sorry, sweets. But there might be a piece in it for you, Cassius. Sort of a memorial to your brother, you might say,” hastily justifying herself. “After all, dear, let’s face it. You’re not the world’s hottest reporter. You could use some self-promotion.”
“Joy, after a while a man knows what he is and isn’t.”
“Oh come on, Cassius! Don’t you have any drive to assert yourself?”
He thought of the diary. He glanced at a collection of file card holders on the self-suspending bookshelves. He frowned.
“Of course. But it doesn’t come out in trying to make hay from what’s happened to Timothy.”
Joy crunched a last morsel of bacon. “Well, you certainly won’t do yourself any good with that silly biography you’ve been working on for six years. The poor man’s been written about in eleven different volumes.”
“Twelve,” Cassius corrected. “As you know, I’ve discovered some new angles which might—”
“Enshrine you with posterity?” Joy smiled. “Cassius, really.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“It’s what you meant, though.”
“Joy, I like working on the book,” he said. “How did we get on this subject?”
For a moment anger sparked in his rather downturning brown eyes. He controlled the anger. Not a major effort at all. He gripped her hand across the fold-up table.
“Joy, if I didn’t know so well that you can’t help hunting for angles any more than a cat can help chasing a mouse, I’d get damned mad at you sometimes.”
“Yes, you do understand me,” she said gently. “Which is more than I do for you most of the time, I must confess.”
He squeezed her hand. “Thanks for coming tonight.”
“I apologize for calling your book silly, dear.”
“I don’t mind. So long as you realize I’ll keep right on working on it.”
For a moment Joy’s eyes were shadowed. “Still have the dream?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the reason for the book, isn’t it?”
“Um, partly, I guess.”
“I don’t have any dreams like that, Cassius. But I suppose I run after stories for the same reason too.”
“Yes.”
Suddenly she snapped her fingers. The cocktail zircon on her right hand flashed back the rays of the solar panels which lit the room. “I just had the most marvelous idea. If you get no satisfaction from the police, why don’t you go right to the W.B.I?”
“Are you out of your mind? I don’t know anybody down there.”
“What difference does that make? Go straight to the director himself! If you ask me, Cassius, this theft sounds downright sinister. Maybe the Neo-Leninists are making a comeback.”
“And you suggest I waltz right in and state my case to Flange himself?”
“That’s not as impossible as it sounds. I was talking to Charlie Pelz yesterday over morning vitamins.”
“Ch
arlie Pelz?”
“Oh, you know. He does those Black Museum pieces on Sundays for the true-crime nuts. Charlie said he was down to the W.B.I. Building last week and it’s practically turned into an old people’s home. Offices empty. Men sitting around doing nothing. He asked whether he could see Flange’s assistant a moment, to get a comment on a story he was writing, and he almost dropped over when the secretary said Flange had no appointments all day, why didn’t Charlie talk to him? So you try him. Maybe this unstable world peace is more stable than we think.”
Orbit 3 - [Anthology] Page 17