Orbit 3 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Night

  Cassius chewed his lip. “I don’t know who could set it up for me.”

  “I tell you, Charlie Pelz said no one had to set it up! Flange was so unbusy even a bootboy could get in to see him.”

  Although he rejected the idea as slightly ludicrous, Cassius nevertheless filed it away. He and Joy finished their caffeine water with a rehash of the mysterious events out at Dulles. It got them nowhere. She kissed him neatly and rather moistly on the cheek, squeezed his arm, and he ushered her to the door.

  “Must run, sweets, but I do hope you sleep well. Try not to fret over what’s happened.”

  “I have to find out what happened to Timothy, Joy. I must.”

  “Of course. Take my suggestion, though. Thinking about the W.B.I. And Cassius—” Again the eyes, rimmed in purple mascara, glittered. Consolation went out the window, replaced by professionalism. “—if there is anything in it, a hot tidbit either one of us could use—oh, I know I sound terribly crass, but after all, you have only one life to live and you have to make the best of it.”

  “That’s right,” Cassius said, hiding laughter. “Good night, Joy. And thanks.”

  Poor girl, he thought when she’d gone. Imagines one day the story will fall into her lap. He’d never had the courage to tell her, as she repeatedly told him, that her talent was small.

  Oh, she could do a major story, all right. But the material for the story would have to drop from heaven. She’d never find it picking around among new uses for paper undies in the home. Perhaps he’d continued their liaison so long because, unlike Joy, he had realized his personal limits and therefore could feel gently, privately superior.

  After a vigorous rubdown with a pre-wetted shower cloth he pulled a switch. His bed rose from the floor. He awoke an hour later, snuffling and breathing violently, an ache in his chest.

  The dream had returned.

  * * * *

  III

  It was a dream of himself running, mile after slow-motion mile, while the dog snapped at his heels.

  The dog was twice as long as a man. Its claws were like sharp iron files. Its fangs were like white spikes. Its yellow eyes were the only two blazes of color in the gray waste where he was pursued.

  He’d dreamed the dream regularly for about six years. It had begun about the time he had first noticed at cocktail parties that people were talking with low voices and embarrassed laughter about how short all the days seemed, how rapidly they flew. People his own age. He knew what the dog represented.

  Knowing, however, didn’t relieve the after-effects of the nightmare. It only intensified them.

  Hastily Cassius threw back the coverlet. He turned on the lights and started to work cross-indexing notes and snippets for his book. The project was probably futile, as Joy maintained. Twelve books had been published on the same subject already.

  The book was to be a biography of Colonel Robin Delyev. He was the officer responsible for leading the combined American-Russian shock forces which repelled the initial invasion of Puerto Rico by the Chinese, sixty years ago. All Delyev and his thousand troops had to work with was a storehouse full of antiquated U.S. personal missile launchers.

  Poring and poking at the National Archives, Cassius had stumbled across some new materials. They had been misfiled: seven hitherto unpublished letters, four long, three no more than notes but revealing nonetheless, written by Delyev to the Pentagon just before the Colonel’s death. Headily Cassius had realized that none of the other twelve biographers had included the letters. And they added fresh insights into Delyev’s brilliant deployment of his meager forces.

  The majority of the book Cassius planned to draw from the secondary sources, re-slanting it to his own rather scholarly, restrained style of writing. The volume would contain most of the anecdotes already available, such as the one about the night in the Chinese consulate in Chicago, before the war, when Delyev drank too much and made the epigrammatic speech which earned him the nickname “Old Rattling Rockets.” But the book, his book alone, would also contain the seven letters. Provided he finished the draft fairly soon, and got it submitted to a publisher.

  Cassius knew that even when the volume was published, if it ever was, it would be relatively obscure in the crowded market; read only by those faithful who would always buy one more work on a subject that interested them. Cassius had no illusions. But he did believe that the fresh insights contained in the letters might add one small grain of truth to the world’s accumulation as it related to the dead Delyev.

  Besides, the book almost demanded to be written, worthy or not. It demanded writing especially in the lonely hours after he dreamed about the slavering dog who ran so slowly, yet so remorselessly, at his heels.

  He labored on, a lonely figure in his small box of an apartment, alone in the night, alone in the rain, ignored but uncaring, until he finally crawled back to bed around four and slept untroubled until dawn.

  Next day, he conferred personally with the Washington police.

  They were investigating, yes, certainly. But to be honest, they’d interviewed several dozen people at Dulles and gotten nowhere. They would certainly keep trying, yes. There might be something decidedly sinister behind the theft. They would call him.

  At lunch in the newspaper mess, Joy reminded him about the W.B.I. Cassius felt a little silly. But the obvious impending failure of the local police angered him. He took the afternoon off and rode the belts over.

  As Charlie Pelz had promised, he was admitted to the Director’s office without question or hesitancy. And to fulfill the rest of the prophecy, Cassius actually felt exactly like falling over on his face in utter surprise.

  Not over getting in. Over what he saw after he got there.

  * * * *

  IV

  R. Ripley Flange, the mastiff-chinned Director of the World Bureau of Investigation, was sitting at his broad desk, feet up, throwing darts.

  One whizzed perilously close to Cassius’s head as he closed the door. Cassius flinched. The iron spike of the dart thudded into the door. On it a paper bull’s-eye had been nailed, the large nails carelessly driven into the lustrous patina of the obviously antique and priceless wood. Even the newly-refurbished White House had been pannelled in polystyrene. For a genuine wood door to be pocked with thousands of dart and nail holes amounted to desecration.

  “Sorry,” Flange said. He grinned in a sleepy way. “I’m rather on the track of a big one. Fourteen bull’s-eyes this morning. Best yet.”

  Edgily, Cassius sat down. The Director sighed, laid aside his dart case and tented his hands. He tried to frown with interest. Cassius had the uncanny feeling that the Director was peering straight through him, as though he were one of those model-kit men, wholly transparent.

  “What can I do for you, sir? Care to apply for a position as a special operative? We have dozens of openings.” The heavy lips, which had once sneered so heroically out of simulcast screens during the lectures on Chinese subversion in the bedding industry, now pursed out in what Cassius could only describe as a careless, thoroughly lazy way.

  “No, sir, I didn’t come about a job.”

  “Some crime then, I’ll bet.” Flange sounded unhappy. “Isn’t that it?”

  “I hate to bother you, sir. The local police seem so overburdened, and unable to make any headway. You see, sir, my brother’s body has disappeared.”

  “Pity.” Flange was restlessly eyeing a wall bookcase in which stood nearly a hundred copies of the inexpensive five-credit polybound edition of Flange’s magnum opus, Alert! The Yellow Underground Is Attacking. “I’m certain we can help you. Many more resources open these days. Laboratories, so forth. International crime, I take it?”

  “I’m not sure what it is, sir. Perhaps I should talk to someone else in the Bureau.”

  “No, no, I’ll handle it.” Flange frowned. “I suppose it is my responsibility, after all. Now where are those damned forms?”

  And he grumbled and rumbled through his desk, his hands shaking i
n a palsied way. Cassius fidgeted. He felt hot, embarrassed. There was something wrong with the old fellow. Where was the lion’s roar for justice, the eagle’s scream for watchfulness? Gone was the ferocity that had made Flange a legend, whether you cared for his style of operation or not.

  At last the Director produced a paper, incredibly frayed.

  “Well, I found one report form, anyway. I’d send you to someone else, except my deputy director has gone to Las Vegas and I haven’t heard from him in four months. That’s all right, though. He needed a rest.”

  Cassius had an urge to bolt and run. Had the W.B.I, turned into a rest home for its obviously mentally infirm chief?

  “Something about a brother’s body, wasn’t it?” said Flange.

  The peculiar situation would have been laughable had Cassius not suspected there was something unpleasant lurking just under the surface. Flange’s weird mood made it impossible for him to generate very much righteous rage as he rattled off a bare sketch of the mixup at Dulles Interplanetary, the theft of Timothy’s remains. Once in a while Range’s pen jerked, marking appropriate box or space.

  “Distressing,” Flange said at the end, with patent insincerity. “Yes, I see. Body theft.”

  “I thought it might possibly have some international implications. That’s why I came to you. Of course I’m also anxious personally to make whoever did it pay up.”

  “Naturally. We’ll put our best men on it right away. What’s your office digit?”

  Cassius repeated the eighteen numerals which included his extension. While Flange wrote down the figures with his right hand, his left strayed like a spider over to the dart case, then drummed on the edge. Cassius rose abruptly. He couldn’t stand any more. The old man was senile and no one had the heart to remove him from office, that was it.

  Also, Cassius felt with a certainty that stoked his determination to a new height, that R. Ripley Flange had no intention of putting his best men on it. Or maybe even any men, period. The Washington police wanted to try but were overworked. Flange simply didn’t care.

  “Visor you as soon as we have anything. Get right on it, yes we will.” Flange was slumped in his throne chair like a punctured balloon. His hand drummed on the dart case, drummed.

  “Don’t you want any more details? I only gave you the essentials a minute ago.” Flange, though obviously sick, was beginning to infuriate him.

  “We have enough, we have plenty, best men. Visor you.”

  * * * *

  After several weeks Cassius even gave up hoping. He discussed it over vitamins with Charlie Pelz one afternoon. Charlie agreed that things were sure strange at the W.B.I. The place appeared understaffed. Moribund. He could offer no explanation other than the one Cassius had already come up with—Flange was such a fixture that the government was almost conscience-bound to await his death with something like unquestioning reverence.

  Cassius agreed. He thought privately that it was distressing to watch the disintegration of a person’s drive as old age crept in.

  But Cassius didn’t badger Flange or the W.B.I. Indeed, he forgot them. At the end of the fourth week following Timothy’s disappearance, a few other curious things had pushed their way into his mind. They had no bearing on Timothy, probably. But they were the kinds of things which he, on the paper, was in a position to pursue a bit without the aid of sad old men who were once mighty tigers but who were now all gums and no guts.

  What first put Cassius on the trail was the peculiar and shocking concert of Madame Kagle.

  * * * *

  V

  By intermission the shock was profound. Cassius noted its beginnings in the unusual amount of head-turning while Madame Kagle ran through The Joint M.I.T. Faculty Sonata, never missing a note but missing the fire of it altogether.

  No one was so impolite as to gasp during the second selection, Oodner’s Peripheral Stimuli. But Cassius saw mouths hanging open all up and down his row. No music critic, Cassius had nevertheless seen plenty of photos of the celebrated Kagle attack. At its best it was a savagely bow-shaped posture above the keyboard of the harpsivac. It emphasized the woman’s boniness and made her resemble, some said, a fairy-tale witch maniacally searching for the touchstone in a casketful of junk beads. Out of such agonized personal involvement, great music was wrenched.

  Except this evening.

  Madame Wanda Kagle sat perfectly straight. She was watching the one hundred thirty-six keys, all right. But she was glass-eyed. Her mouth, like many in the audience, hung open in a peculiar slack-lipped indifference. The applause at the end of the first half of the program was thin.

  Stumbling and shoving up the aisle for a quick smoke, Cassius and Joy heard all around them whispered comments such as: “Unbelievable.” “Lackluster.” “Crushingly disappointing.” They pushed out into the vast foyer of the Sports Dome. The roof was rolled back to the stars and warm night breezes. Joy waited for her smoke to pop fire, inhaled and said:

  “The old babe must be close on sixty. Wonder if she’s slipping. Maybe she has to key up with amphets, and forgot.”

  “That’s a bad pun,” Cassius said. “I’d guess she was loaded with booze if it wasn’t common knowledge that she very nearly lives like a saint. I read somewhere that she’s even tried hypnotism to push everything out of her mind but her music.”

  “She certainly succeeded,” Joy answered. “That was pure claptrap in there. She couldn’t have been less interested.”

  “This puts a little different complexion on going to the reception afterward,” Cassius mused. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t be much interested in using those chits Greeheim gave you along with the tickets. I don’t know beans about music. Or about how to get along with musical coteries, either.”

  Joy’s eyes glittered. “For God’s sake, Cassius, you can pretend, can’t you? You could even make ‘em think you’re the regular critic. Fake it a little. Just sneer. Greeheim isn’t that well known yet. He’s only been with the paper a few months. I certainly don’t want to insult him when he gets over his illness by telling him we used the tickets but not the party passes.”

  The crowd was beginning to stir, pushing back to the entrance ramps for the second half. “You won’t have to tell him,” Cassius grinned. “In the light of that first half, I wouldn’t miss seeing Madame K. close up for anything. Maybe we’ll get a hint of what’s wrong with her.”

  “Now you’re talking!” Joy said, eyes sharp as awls.

  As they fought the aisle battle on the way to their seats, Cassius considered telling Joy the real reason for his curiosity. She was on one of her imaginary scents again, hoping she’d unearth some hot exclusive. While Cassius, on the other hand, had stared at Madame Kagle and seen something else entirely—

  A ghostly twin image of the vast, weary indifference of R. Ripley Flange.

  Lights dimmed. Madame Kagle appeared from the wings. She seemed to stumble. Like a sleepwalker she approached the bench of the harpsivac. She sat down. She dry-washed her hands, as if warming them. Joy was noisily rippling the pages of the program, twisting it to get light. She hissed, “Oh boy, this’ll be fantabulous. The Algebraic Suite. It’s one of my favorites.”

  But there was to be no Algebraic Suite. Madame Kagle seemed frozen at the console. A look of supreme sorrow came onto her aging features. It was immediately replaced by a sly, mocking smile. Moving with the painful lethargy of the arthritic—which she definitely was not— Madame Kagle rose. She circled the harpsivac and yanked the plug from the floor socket. The thousands of tiny multicolored lights on the banked tonal computers simultaneously went black.

  Madame Kagle cast a tired glance at the shocked audience. She lifted her right shoulder in the smallest shrug. She sauntered off the stage.

  Once the curtain dropped and the impossible became a fact, the crowd was as silent as mourners entering a mortuary. There were hushed little speculations about narcotics, insanity, sex, religion, gall bladder, dropsy, thrombosis, poor investment counseling and so for
th. People seemed reluctant to move from the foyer onto the broad piazza outside the Sports Dome. Only a few drifted from the piazza toward the parking docks.

  “Wow,” Joy whispered, “I can’t wait to get the dirt at the reception.”

  Cassius was about to speak when the annunciator horn of a newsvend machine rolling through the crowd blared that everyone mustn’t forget that next Monday was D-Day, and that details on the free city-wide immunizations against scaling scalp could be had by inserting a coin in the slot. The contraption dinned the fact that its papers contained a full list of the twenty-two hundred dispensaries which would be set up to distribute the free capsules lo inoculate the populace against the dread scourge. The drive was the latest work of the ancient March of Quarters Foundation. Details, details inside—

  Blaring, the machine trundled on. Rubbing his ear, Cassius answered Joy by saying, “Suppose we don’t find out. Suppose Madame Kagle doesn’t show up. Perhaps she’s ill.”