Mindkiller

by Spider Robinson

  Silence came for answer.

  “You’ve got my attention, damn your flabby heart! Now what the fuck are you trying to tell me? I’m listening!” He swayed on the balls of his feet, shoulders hunched, breathing heavily. His head ached, his fingers throbbed, his throat was torn by the violence and volume of his challenge. “Well?” he shrieked, damaging it further.

  At this third provocation the woman living above Norman called out to her husband. That man’s name was Howard, but there was a floor and a ceiling and a perfunctory attempt at insulation between the woman and Norman, so that the word he heard filtering down to him from on high was:

  “—coward?”

  His eyes bulged. The blood drained from his head.

  “—coward, what’s he doing?”

  He bent and grabbed the IBM, heaved it up to chest height. But the cord had his ankle now, so he yanked his right foot out from under him; he lost the IBM and went down howling. He saw the great gray bulk coming down at his face, rolled convulsively out of the way, and smacked his skull solidly into a leg of the coffee table. It was excuse enough to lose consciousness.

  His awakening was strange, only partial. He had no recollection of the incident, did not ask himself how he came to be lying on his living room floor with a sore head and assorted aches. He simply got up, moved the typewriter to where he kept the trash, and made coffee. Thoughts of any kind came slowly and far apart. One fragment of the metaprogramming part of his mind recognized that he was in shock, but did not care. Decisions were handled by something like a random-number generator somewhere in the murky cavern of his brain; Norman went along for the ride, his consciousness on hold, or perhaps “on standby” would be more accurate.

  He found himself seated at his desk, rubbing a finger uselessly over the new scar as though it could be erased. His coffee was cold. He recalled that there was an immersion coil in one of the desk drawers and looked for it. He got sidetracked: the desk badly needed straightening out. Been meaning to get this organized, he thought, and began weeding out superfluous items.

  One of the first was the address book.

  It was quite out of date. Norman had built his Other Head on his honeymoon, with wedding money; both he and Lois had fed their address and phone files into it and dumped the original books and lists. This was an old one that had been overlooked. Norman was about to trash it—it was surely obsolete—and then he hesitated. Some part of his somnolent mind decided that he might just run across the name of some forgotten old friend or lover he could call or look up, as a means of harmlessly killing some time. There might be one or two other items worth adding to his computer files. He opened the book and began browsing.

  The first twenty pages were just what he could have expected: a mildly bemusing, mildly depressing trip down memory lane. I wonder if she ever forgave me. Say, I remember that jerk. And Ed, so promising, yeah, dead in the Second Riot in Philly. Old Ginny, wow, what are the odds she’s still single? On and on for twenty pages—right up through the J’s. There was nothing worth salvaging.

  Then he turned the page and saw Madeleine’s old address and phone code in Switzerland.

  The violence was all internal this time, too titanic to escape his skull in any form whatever. The full recollection of the evening past came crashing out of its cage, the surface of his soul fissured and split to reveal something disgusting, the last seven years of his life snapped suddenly into meaningful pattern, agonizing pattern, he understood at once that he must now undo every single day of that seven years and that their undoing would almost certainly bring his death to him within a period measured in days—and an unobservant person seated across the room would probably have failed to notice a thing. Norman did not so much as flinch. He sat quite still for perhaps ten seconds, forgetting to breathe. Then, very gently, he sighed.

  “All right,” he said, looking straight ahead at nothing. “I hear you.”

  Then, sitting bolt upright, the address book still perched on his lap, he fell asleep in the chair.

  Some hours later his eyes opened. It was just morning. He rotated his head on its socket three slow times, cracked his spine, put his hands on the desk, and stood carefully. The book fell unnoticed from his lap; he would never notice it again. He knew what he needed to do and what he needed to learn and much of how to do it. Most of all he knew how much it would cost him—and was only glad he had the price.

  It was quite simple. Somewhere in the African bush he had decided to hell with self-worth, given it up as a lost cause, settled for mere pride. A villain or a coward may have pride. Academic life had gradually eroded most of that pride—not because he failed at it but because he succeeded at it, turning out generations of students whose imaginations had been stimulated precisely where the department chairman wanted them stimulated and nowhere else. He had sold everything for security, gelded himself for security. Small wonder his wife had left him for someone more dangerous. When he had failed to learn from that lesson, life had, with the infinite patience of the great teacher, spent more than a year kicking him repeatedly in the heart, brain, and balls. You didn’t need to catch Norman Kent between the eyes with the million-pound shit-hammer more than forty or fifty times before he got the message:

  Pride is not enough to get you through this world. You have to have self-worth too, or you won’t be able to take the gaff.

  Sam Spade had hit the nail squarely, more than half a century before. When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. Madeleine Kent had been, for a brief time but in full measure, Norman’s partner, and someone had come and taken her away, and Norman was supposed to do something about it. Self-worth required it.

  To die in pursuit of self-worth is much better than to live without it. So said all his life since the jungle days, now that he had the wit to read it. The supersaturated solution had at last crystallized, all at once. Norman caught himself humming as he headed for the door, and realized on some preconscious level that he was happy for the first time in a long while.

  He walked south to Point Pleasant Park while he planned his campaign. The horrid cold sharpened his thought.

  Known for certain: Madeleine was gone. Period.

  High probabilities, in order: Maddy was dead. She had been killed by a man known to her and perhaps named Jacques, or by agents of that man. Jacques was very puissant and very clever, possessed of enormous resources.

  Slightly lower probability: Jacques had been a colleague or business associate of Madeleine in Switzerland. Perhaps not—he could be a tennis pro she had met in a bar, or the man who came to fix the microwave. But would she then have felt it necessary to leave her job, leave the career she had built so painstakingly, leave her ten-year home in Switzerland, and come to Canada to avoid Jacques?

  She had not left Switzerland because she feared Jacques, of that Norman was certain. She had not been even half expecting to be kidnapped or harmed. During her stay with Norman, Maddy had sometimes slipped and showed hurt; she had never shown fear.

  Assuming all this, she must without realizing it have possessed information that Jacques considered damaging to him. No other motive made sense; a lover spurned does not take on Interpol and the RCMP. Norman yearned mightily to possess information that Jacques would consider damaging.

  How do you approach an enemy ten times your size?

  In disguise, smiling.

  First step: locate Jacques. Without being caught at it. Norman did not intend to underestimate Jacques; he assumed that his Other Head and his credit account were bugged and monitored. He could not afford to access information about Maddy’s firm from any terminal in Halifax Metro, for that matter, if he wanted to be certain of coming up on Jacques’s blind side. There must be no evidential record even hinting at Norman’s interest in Jacques. One day soon Jacques might have reason to wonder if someone was taking a bead on him, and if he could learn that someone in Metro had been asking questions about him at or shortly after the time that Norman Kent had
dropped out of sight, he would add two and two. Norman needed information that had already been accessed, which left only one way to go, and so he gave ten dollars to the first wino he met at Point Pleasant Park.

  He stood outside the phone booth, watching a filthy superfreighter belly up to the containerport across from the park, while the wino phoned up the city police and asked for Sergeant Amesby. Norman kept better track of missing-persons stories than most citizens, had discussed most of them at length with Amesby. Thus briefed, the wino was able to convince Amesby that he was in possession of important information regarding a recent case quite unconnected with Maddy’s, and demanded a face-to-face meeting at a remote spot near St. Margaret’s Bay, many kilometers to the west. He had corroborative data not known to the general public. Amesby went for it. The drunk hung up grinning, and Norman gave him the additional twenty he had promised for a successful job. With three of Norman’s ten-dollar bills in his hand, the unshaven and tattered man asked Norman for a quarter. He used it to call a cab, to take him to the Liquor Commission store.

  Norman walked to police headquarters. Amesby was gone when he arrived. Norman was known there, and had long ago made it a point to be liked there; they brought him to Amesby’s office and let him wait.

  Thank goodness for the cheapness of the voters! Amesby’s files were actual files of paper, in big bulky drawers, rather than electrical patterns on tape or disc. Norman used gloves, and within half an hour he knew everything that Amesby knew about Maddy’s situation in Switzerland, her acquaintances, and the firm she had worked for. He used Amesby’s battered IBM to note down a few addresses, phone numbers, and bits of information.

  Amesby was efficient, and had paid attention when Norman told him about Maddy’s single cryptic mention of the name Jacques. In the web of acquaintances that Amesby had had Interpol draw up for Madeleine, there were two men named Jacques, with dossiers for each.

  The first and seemingly most obvious candidate was her immediate superior at Harbin-Schellman, Jacques DuBois. But Norman rejected him at once when he saw the photograph. Maddy could not have become emotionally involved with that face. The second was a man named Jacques LeBlanc. Norman could read nothing at all from his face; the man was nondescript. He was executive vice-president of Psytronics International, the much larger consortium that had absorbed Harbin-Schellman in the last year. He apparently had had extensive contact with Maddy in the course of the takeover, would have been an ideal candidate for a lover, save that Interpol could not turn up even a rumor of a romance between the two. What made that lack of evidence significant was that LeBlanc was not married. If he and Maddy had become involved, there would have been no reason to conceal it. Unless…could he have been using Maddy for secret leverage in the takeover? No, she would not have played along; Maddy had old-fashioned ideas about loyalty.

  All right. Jacques’s last name was LeBlanc, until events proved otherwise.

  Amesby’s copier was down the hall, useless to Norman. He typed an abbreviated version of LeBlanc’s dossier, removed all traces of his work, and left. On his way out he told the desk man it was nothing important, not to bother telling Amesby to phone him.

  He stepped from the police station into the incredible wall of wind that howls past Citadel Hill in winter, and leaned into it. With the wind-chill factor, the sudden temperature differential was on the order of a hundred and ten Fahrenheit degrees; Norman ignored it and plodded on, making plans.

  On his way home he got twenty dollars worth of change from a bank. He fed some into a sound-only pay phone in the quiet basement of a moribund restaurant and called Zurich, where it was now three o’clock in the afternoon.

  It was necessary to locate Jacques; according to Interpol, he traveled a lot. It would be difficult enough for Norman to get to Switzerland untraceably—but it would be stupid to manage it and find that his quarry was in Tokyo or Brasilia. The dossier mentioned an interest that Jacques shared with Norman, and it gave Norman an idea. They both collected classic jazz. He summoned up the New York accent that he had by now almost succeeded in obliterating, and located in his wallet the number of the illegal New York tie-line that one of his faculty wives had told him about.

  “DiscFinders, N’Yawk, callin’ long distance for Mr. Jock Le Blank.”

  “One moment, please.”

  So Jacques was in Switzerland. That was all Norman wanted to know—but he was curious to hear his enemy’s voice. He decided to try and sell Jacques a rare Betty Carter side.

  But the next voice was female. “Monsieur LeBlanc’s office, may I ’elp you?”

  “Hullo, this is DiscFinders in N’Yawk, lemme speak to Masseur Le Blank, please.”

  “I yam sorree, Monsieur LeBlanc is out of the city at present.”

  Norman was glad he had waited. “When’s he comin’ back?”

  Slight hesitation. “Not for some time. May I ’elp you?”

  “Well, where is he?”

  “I yam sorree, I cannot give out that—”

  “Listen here, sister, what I got here is a mint copy of Betty Carter’s birthday album, on her own label, there can’t be another one mint inna world. Five thousand bucks expenses Mr. Le Blank fronted us to find it, another fifteen on delivery. I think he wants to hear this record, what do you think?”

  “If you will send it ’ere, we—”

  “Bullshit, lady, didn’t you hear me? Fifteen grand, New dollars, the day Mr. Le Blank gets this record in his hand. You think I’m gonna ship it over there and let some clown in your mailroom leave it on the rad for a week before he forwards it fourth class? I send it direct to Le Blank by courier, personally, or I peddle it elsewhere.”

  “Monsieur, I yam afraid I must—”

  “I am the best record finder in the world,” Norman roared, desperate. “I don’t need this bullshit. I know three other people, old customers, ’ud buy this fuckin’ thing in a minute, I’ll send Le Blank a registered letter tellin’ him where his expense money went, how did you say you spell your last name?”

  “Monsieur LeBlanc is vacationing in Nova Scotia, in a place called Phinney’s Cove. The postmaster in the town of ’Ampton can direct your courier. ’Ave him say that Madame Girardaux approved it. You understand this information is to be absolutely confidential?”

  “That’s more like it. Pleasure doin’ business wit’ ya, Miss Jeerado.” Dueling Accents. He hung up.

  His first reaction was elation at his lucky break. Jacques was right here in the province, a scant hundred and fifty kilometers away. Norman owned a small cottage and a couple of acres not twenty klicks from Phinney’s Cove—which community comprised perhaps fifteen homes along the Fundy Shore—and knew the area fairly well.

  He had not been looking forward to stalking Jacques on the latter’s home ground, in an unfamiliar country, and he was immensely cheered to find Jacques on something like his own turf.

  Then he had second thoughts. The hair prickled on the back of his neck. Jacques had been standing unseen just behind his back for an indeterminate time; perhaps this was not wonderful news after all. Could Jacques be wondering if Maddy had passed on something incriminating to her brother before she’d been killed? If so, he must by now have concluded that Norman did not know he had anything incriminating…mustn’t he? Or was he even now deciding to play it safe and have Norman killed too? Norman went from joy to fear like a speeding car thrown suddenly into reverse.

  Then he had third thoughts. He remembered what the two psychics had told him about Maddy’s surroundings after her disappearance. The descriptions given would fit Phinney’s Cove—the city lights on the horizon would be St. John, New Brunswick, across the Bay of Fundy. Perhaps Maddy was not dead!

  He forced himself to leave the restaurant at a slow walk. A block away, after satisfying himself that he was not being tailed, he did run the remaining three blocks to his home.

  He had to take a small risk, then. He needed information he could only obtain from his own Other Head. But it was not
the sort of information that Jacques would be likely to find significant, even if he learned of the accessing. From long years of living with Lois, Norman still had a line to the data banks of the hospital just up the street. To play it safe, he charged the tap to Lois’s code; someone reviewing the record might reasonably suppose that she had made a routine retrieval while visiting her ex-husband.