Orbit 3 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Night

  “Somebody’ll be there who knows the score. Come on, Cassius, get the car.”

  As they wormed through the stunned throng on the piazza, voices rippled suddenly in excitement. Cassius and Joy craned around. Down the performer’s ramp a sleek, expensive Rolls-Fujica air limousine was gliding, fast. People were crossing the ramp now. The chauffeur was forced to apply the brakes. That was when the yellow-cheeked bootboy, probably the son of some Chinese war refugee, fell off the piazza balustrade.

  The lad had been up there brushes in hand, chanting in a singsong about shining the dress boots of gentlemen. Somehow he slipped, just as the Rolls-Fujica came to a halt.

  “He’s dead,” a woman cried. The crowd, herd-like, shifted. Joy couldn’t resist. Cassius was dragged along.

  For a moment the scene was very vivid to him. The drop from the balustrade to the main ramp was twenty feet or more. By some twist of fate the bootboy had hit skull first on the prestressed poly. He lay with his red and gray brains smashed out. Meantime the Rolls-Fujica had started up.

  The performer’s ramp crossed the main one, on which the bootboy lay, at the piazza corner. A blur of motion in the aircar tonneau caught Cassius’s eye. He saw Madame Kagle order her chauffeur to stop again. Her face strained to the window. Of all the curious who were gasping and oh-ing over the accident, she alone seemed truly moved.

  The Rolls-Fujica sped on. Cassius shuddered. The woman’s eyes had mirrored some pure hell even he couldn’t see.

  “Wonder if there’s a human interest bit in it,” Joy said.

  “Joy, for God’s sake don’t be so callous.”

  She smiled. “It is one of my failings, isn’t it, sweets? All right, first things first. But let’s hurry. We don’t want to miss the reception.”

  * * * *

  The reception, they discovered, was already going full blast in one of the larger private function halls of The Hotel of the Three Presidents. Passing under an arch decorated with a bust of one member of the trio—they were entering the Edward Room—Joy grabbed his arm.

  “Cassius, look! The old girl’s here. And drunker than a hoot owl, it seems.”

  “I don’t like this a damn bit,” he muttered.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, why not?”

  “It just seems like a wake before you have a dead body.”

  “Don’t be so squeamish. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

  Joy pulled and tugged until they were past the coat robot, through the champagne line and lurking at the fringe of a small crowd surrounding Madame Kagle. The lady virtuoso was indeed pretty well gone. She staggered around like a scarecrow off its pole. Nobody was laughing, though. Not the socialites, not the critics. The mood was one of acute embarrassment.

  Madame Kagle seemed to be centering most of her remarks on a ruddy-faced priest of middle years. Joy whispered that the priest was a well-known expert on sacred music. Madame Kagle was waving her champagne glass back and forth under the priest’s long-suffering nose. Each wave threatened to douse him.

  “—and I say you still haven’t answered my question, Father Bleu.”

  “Haven’t I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning of—”

  “No, no, no!” Her voice was high as a harpy’s. “Don’t go all gooey and metaphysical. I mean to ask, what is death the act, the situation, the moment?”

  She watched him foxily. The priest in turn struggled to remain polite. “Madame, I’m not positive I follow.”

  “Let me say it another way. Most people are afraid of dying, yes?”

  “I disagree. Not those who find mystical union with the body of Christ in—”

  “Oh, come off it!” Madame Kagle shrilled. “People are frightened of it, Father Bleu. Frightened and screaming their fear silently every hour of every day they live. Now I put it to you. Of what are they afraid? Are they afraid of the end of consciousness? The ultimate blackout, so to speak? Or are they afraid of another aspect of death? The one which they can’t begin to foresee or understand?”

  “What aspect is that, Madame Kagle?”

  “The pain.” She glared. “The pain, Father. Possibly sudden. Possibly horrible. Waiting, always waiting somewhere ahead, at an unguessable junction of time and place. Like that bootboy tonight. How it must have hurt. One blinding instant when his head hit, eh? I suggest, Father Bleu, that is what we’re afraid of, that is the wholly unknowable part of dying—the screaming, hurting how, of which the when is only a lesser part. The how is the part we never know. Unless we experience it.”

  She slurped champagne in the silence. She eyed him defiantly.

  “Well, Father? What have you got to say?”

  Discreetly Father Bleu coughed into his closed fist. “Theologically, Madame, I find the attempt to separate the mystical act of dying into neat little compartments rather a matter of hairsplitting. And furthermore—”

  “If that’s how you feel,” she interrupted, “you’re just not thinking it out.”

  “My good woman!” said Father Bleu gently.

  “Pay attention to me!” Madame Wanda Kagle glared furiously. “I say you pay attention! Because you have never stopped to think about it, have you? If death resembles going to sleep, why, that’s an idea your mind can get hold of. Isn’t it? You may be afraid of it, yes. Afraid of the end of everything. But at least you can get hold of some notion of something of what it’s like. Sleep. But can you get hold of anything of what it must feel like to experience the most agonizing of deaths? Your head popping open like that bootboy’s tonight, say? A thousand worms of pain inside every part of you for a second long as eternity? Can you grasp that? No, you can’t, Father Bleu. And that’s what death is at its worst—the unknown, the possibly harrowing pain ahead.”

  She clamped her lips together smugly. She held out her champagne glass for a refill. A woman in furs clapped a hand over her fashionably green lips and rushed from the group. Though puzzled, Joy was still all eyes and ears.

  “Even your blessed St. Paul bears me out, Father.”

  The priest glanced up, startled. “What?”

  “The first letter to the Corinthians, if I remember. The grave has a victory, all right. But it’s death that has the sting.”

  In the pause the furnace doors behind her eyes opened wide, and hell shone out.

  “I know what I’m talking about, Father. I’ve been there.”

  Slowly she closed her fingers, crushing the champagne glass in her hand. Weeping, blood drooling from her palm down her frail veined arms, she had to be carried out.

  The party broke up at once.

  The gloom was even deeper than at the Dome. “Wait’ll Greeheim gets a load of this dirty linen!” Joy whispered as they left.

  * * * *

  Later, when Cassius escorted Joy to the door of her flat, she held out her cheek for a routine buss. But her mind was elsewhere. “I certainly wonder what Greeheim will make of that nutty harangue. Artistic temperament?”

  “It’s an interesting notion, anyway.”

  “What is?”

  “Oh, there being two elements in death. The sleep and the pain. I wonder which one you really do fear most. I never thought about it before.”

  She patted his cheek. “And because you never think about really sensational story material like funeral rackets or sewage control graft, Cassius my love, you’ll never get anywhere in our particular little rat-race. But that’s all right. I like you just the same. Good night. Thanks for a fantabulous evening.”

  Waiting for the tube to take him down, Cassius was struck again by an eerie feeling. It wasn’t so much the peculiarity of Madame Kagle’s statements. They were pretty obtuse, after all. It was the queer resemblance he saw, or thought he saw, between her attitude and that of R. Ripley Flange. Somehow his mind wanted to equate the jerked plug with the dart case. It was almost as though the pair of them had had exactly the same lunatic vision, whatever it might be.

  But the matter really had no relation to th
e problem still nagging him, he realized. The problem of Timothy’s disappearance.

  I’ve been there. The woman’s words stayed in his mind the rest of the evening. What could they possibly mean?

  Dutifully he recorded the unusual affair in his diary, then put in some time on the notes for his book. The dream of the dog at his heels was even more intense than usual. He awoke near dawn, wringing with sweat. Three cups of caffeine water were required before he was fully awake and free of the grip of the nightmare.

  As he went to work he remembered once having read something about Madame Kagle’s brother. Later in the day he had to go to the paper’s morgue on another story. He looked up the Kagle name just out of curiosity. In addition to much material on Madame Wanda, there were several clips on her younger brother. The last of them stated that Dr. Frederic Kagle, a renowned neurosurgeon, had resigned from the World Institutes of Health to enter private practice. The clip was three years old.

  Maybe, Cassius laughed to himself, the poor old woman had been put through the wringer by her brother in the cause of science. He laughed again, envisioning the usual horrific collection of apparatus, electrodes and blue lightnings that leapt from point to point while the demon doctor looked on and tittered.

  The wool-gathering did have one solid result, surprisingly. It got Cassius to speculating again about a new angle on Timothy’s fate.

  Originally Cassius had wondered whether the body had been purloined by some unspeakable sex ring. Now he had another notion, no doubt equally off base but at least remotely possible. There was no connection with Dr. Frederic Kagle. It was only that Kagle’s obscurity suggested scientists who, for one reason or another, were forced to work in absolute anonymity.

  A third time Cassius laughed at himself in the gray loneliness of the morgue’s reading cubicle. The medical body-snatcher bit in this day and age? Ridiculous.

  Or was it?

  Was the government, for instance, preparing some new superweapon in fear of possible disintegration of the tenuous Sino-Caucasian Peace? Something compelled him to take down the morgue index book. He leafed through until he located the proper heading.Disappearances, Unsolved.

  He used the keyboard to code the paper tape. The tape vanished down a slot. A humming. Cassius was startled when not one but three microfilm spools popped from the tube.

  There was always a routine number of unexplained disappearances within any given period. Distraught offspring. Erring husbands. Crimes that never saw the light of day. So he expected one spool at the most. He fed the first spool into the view box.

  He did find that customary expected number of accounts of vanishing humanity. He also found thirteen instances of the disappearance of dead bodies within the last twenty-four months.

  His brother Timothy was the last of the thirteen. He was represented by his obit and a two-paragraph item in theCapitol World Truth. The item covered the jetport incident. Cassius had seen it several times.

  He double-checked each spool again. He hadn’t misread. The thirteen who were gone had died in a uniform way.

  By violence.

  * * * *

  VI

  Almost one year to the day after the theft of Timothy Andrews’ body, the sovereign and somewhat backward state of New York prepared to let Butcher Balk have five hundred thousand volts. Cassius was waiting.

  He was waiting in the prison burial ground on the Hudson bluffs, hunched down in his Ford Aircoupe. The vehicle was parked in a growth of budding maples to one side of a small service road. The time was 10:05 p.m.

  Theoretically, Butcher Balk had been dead five minutes. April snow swirled, a quaint effect, courtesy of the weather bureau. Cassius was glad for the white scatter. It would afford him extra concealment in the dark, he hoped.

  In order to be here this evening Cassius had been forced to lie both to Joy and his editor Hughgenine. He complained of a spell of male post-equinoctial depression, a common burden of urban life any more. Three other times in the year that had just passed he had also gone off following his elusive suspicions. On those occasions he had pleaded acute hangover, g.i. distress and bucket-seat hip, respectively.

  Each time he’d figured that at last he was right. Each time he had been wrong. Worse, there was nothing to suggest tonight would be different.

  But he refused to give up.

  The first time, he’d traveled all night to reach Watkins Glen. The Continental driving star Baron von Pfalz had smashed up his Sonic Special in the Grand Prix, dying in a multi-car wreck on the chicane. Cassius had felt like a ghoul loitering around the little chapel where the other racers and mechanics held a memorial for the Baron. A sobbing woman, three children in tow, took von Pfalz’s corpse away in a hearse. Cassius drove home keenly disappointed.

  The following week the sports section of the Capitol World Truth carried a photo of the little family beside the Baron’s grave plot. The woman and children, then, had not been actors.

  So it went twice more: complete failure in outguessing them. Whoever they were.

  The second occasion, no one tried to snatch the corpse of Dolly Sue Wei, the first non-American ever to register at the University of Levittown. She entered her first class flanked by the drawn pistols of U.N. marshals. Cassius had been sure the situation would produce violence. It did. Next night someone threw a sharp rock and Dolly died of brain damage.

  But she was buried in a routine way in a free cemetery in Manhattan’s Oriental ghetto. Cassius was there.

  He had also rushed to a mortuary in New Jersey just last February. The Great Rococo, a stage magician, had died with the back of his head shot off while performing the bullet catch before a convention of Moose. Buried without incident in Tenafly.

  The three blind alleys might have led another man to abandon the search. But Cassius had access to the paper’s morgue. There he convinced himself he wasn’t a lunatic.

  In the interval during which he’d guessed wrong and gone on fruitless chases, the bodies of five other men—a film star, a slum pastor, an insurance salesman pushing his car to two hundred on the Interstate, a hunter after possum in Kentucky, a suicide in Cleveland—had all disappeared before interment.

  Now, in the snowy night, Cassius brooded over his lack of success in outguessing them. Yet he was certainthey were still in operation, and it was merely a matter of time before—

  Thinking, he failed to see the drop of the translucent gray force wall of Ossining’s new Bartlow Martin wing. He saw the headlights, though. They threw yellow up the hillside. The burial gang was on its way.

  The outer wall shimmered up into place again, hiding a ghostly flag on the nine-hole therapy course. Speedy and efficient, the corpse handlers parked the truck on the other side of a low knoll. They rolled the gravedigger from the truck. They lowered the plain poly coffin containing the remains of Butcher Balk into the pre-dug hole. They turned on the digger and stood back while it went to work pitching on earth, its eight metal arms wigwagging black across a spotlight on the truck’s cowl.

  Unobserved, Cassius spied from his Aircoupe. He’d selected Butcher Balk as a likely target because the killer had received so much publicity. Of course, that might frighten them away, but the publicity said Butcher Balk had no living relatives. And that was another part of the pattern Cassius thought he’d discovered.

  In six instances the disappearing dead people had also been survivorless. In other cases Cassius couldn’t tell; no mention was made in the printed obits, but since they were wire service items, that didn’t necessarily rule out the possibility of no relatives,

  Snow swirled. The gravedigger flashed its green light and retracted its arms. Butcher Balk was a safecracker who had been rehabilitated after his first manslaughter conviction. His adjusted personality had been imperfect, had cracked, had resulted in a berserk massacre of ten men, women and children one Sunday afternoon in a hamlet on the St. Lawrence. Hence the seldom-given maximum penalty. Now Butcher Balk was only a faint mound among other mounds under
the fresh snow.

  The prison wall field sank. The truck vanished. The wall went up. Silence and the snow claimed the ghostly Hudson cliffs.

  “If Joy could see me,” Cassius said aloud, to keep himself company, “she’d think I was completely gone.”

  The hours passed. Eleven o’clock. Twelve. One. One-thirty. Cassius was convinced he’d made another wrong guess. He was ready to abandon the whole project. He took out the laminated card embossed with his personal digit, poised it over the ignition slot.

  Two red-dusky eyes opened below.

  He knuckled the weariness out of his eyesockets, looking again. The eyes were headlamps, large ones. But with reddish lenses for snow- and rain-probing radar.