The Demolished Man

by Alfred Bester

  Powell to staff: We’ve flushed Reich’s man into the open. Jordon must be our lead on the Rhodopsin angle. He’s the only Visual Physiologist to disappear after Crabbe’s announcement. Pass the word to Beck to tail him to Callisto and handle it. What about that girl?

  Meanwhile, the slick side of operation Rough & Smooth was quietly in progress. While Maria Beaumont was occupying Reich’s attention with her squawking flight, a bright young attorney from Monarch’s legal department was deftly decoyed to Mars and held there anonymously on a valid, if antiquated, vice charge. An astonishing duplication of that young attorney went to work for him.

  Tate to Reich: Check your legal department. I can’t peep what’s going on, but something’s fishy. This is dangerous.

  Reich brought in an Esper 1 Efficiency Expert, ostensibly for a general check-up, and located the substitution. Then he called Keno Quizzard. The blind croupier produced a plaintiff who suddenly appeared and sued the bright young attorney for barratry. That ended the substitute’s connection with Monarch painlessly and legitimately.

  Powell to staff: Damn it! We’re being licked. Reich’s slamming every door in our face… Rough & Smooth. Find out who’s doing the legwork for him, and find that girl.

  While the squadman was cavorting around Monarch Tower with his brand new mongolian face, one of Monarch’s scientists who had been badly hurt in a laboratory explosion, apparently left the hospital a week early and reported back for duty. He was heavily bandaged, but eager for work. It was the old Monarch spirit.

  Tate to Reich: I’ve finally figured it. Powell isn’t dumb. He’s running his investigation on two levels. Don’t pay any attention to the one that shows. Watch out for the one underneath. I’ve peeped something about a hospital. Check it.

  Reich checked. It took three days and then he called Keno Quizzard again. Monarch was promptly burgled of Cr. 50,000 in laboratory platinum and the Restricted Room was destroyed in the process. The newly returned scientist was unmasked as an imposter, accused of complicity in the crime, and handed over to the police.

  Powell to staff: Which means we’ll never prove Reich got that Rhodopsin stuff from his own lab. How in God’s name did he un-slick our trick? Can’t we do anything on any level? Where’s that girl?

  While Reich was laughing at the ludicrous robot search for Marcus Graham, his top brass was greeting the Continental Tax Examiner, an Esper 2, who had arrived for a long delayed check on Monarch Utilities & Resources’ books. One of the new additions to the Examiner’s squad was a peeper ghost-writer who prepared her chiefs reports. She was an expert in official work…mainly police work.

  Tate to Reich: I’m suspicious of that Examiner’s squad. Don’t take any chances.

  Reich smiled grimly and turned his public books over to the squad. Then he sent Hassop, his Code Chief, to Spaceland on that promised vacation. Hassop obligingly carried a small spool of exposed film with his regular photographic equipment. That spool contained Monarch’s secret books, cased in a thermite seal which would destroy all records unless it was properly opened. The only other copy was in Reich’s invulnerable safe at home.

  Powell to staff: And that just about ends everything. Have Hassop double-tailed; Rough & Smooth. He’s probably got vital evidence on him, so Reich’s probably got him beautifully protected. Damn it, we’re licked. I say it. Old Man Mose would say it. You know it. For Christ’s sake! Where is that goddamn missing girl?

  Like an anatomical chart of the blood system, colored red for the arteries and blue for the veins, the underworld and overworld spread their networks. From Guild headquarters the word passed to instructors and students, to their families, to their friends, to their friends’ friends, to casual acquaintances, to strangers met in business. From Quizzard’s Casino the word was passed from croupier to gamblers, to confidence men, to the heavy racketeers, to the light thieves, to hustlers, steerers, and suckers, to the shadowy fringe of the semi-crook and near-honest.

  On Friday morning, Fred Deal, Esper 3, awoke, arose, bathed, breakfasted, and departed to his regular job. He was Chief Guard on the floor of the Mars Exchange Bank down on Maiden Lane. Stopping to buy a new commutation ticket at the Pneumatique, he passed the time with an Esper 3, on duty at the Information Desk, who passed Fred the word about Barbara D’Courtney. Fred memorized the TP picture she flashed him. It was a picture framed in credit signs.

  On Friday morning, Snim Asj was awakened by his landlady, Chooka Frood, with a loud scream for back rent.

  “For chrissakes, Chooka,” Snim mumbled. “You already makin’ a frabby fortune with ’at loppy yella head girl you pick up. You runnin’ a golmine withat spook stuff down-inna basement. Whaddya want from me?”

  Chooka Frood pointed out to Snim that: A) The yellow-headed girl was not crazy. She was a genuine medium. B) She (Chooka) did not run rackets. She was a legitimate fortune teller. C) If he (Snim) did not come through with six weeks roof and rolls, she (Chooka) would be able to tell his fortune without any trouble at all. Snim would be out on his asphalt.

  Snim arose, and already dressed, descended into the city to pick up a few credits. It was too early to run up to Quizzard’s and work the sob on the more prosperous clients. Snim tried to sneak a ride uptown on the Pneumatique. He was thrown out by the peeper change clerk and walked. It was a long haul to Jerry Church’s hockshop, but Snim had a gold and pearl pocket-pianino up there and he was hoping to cadge Church into advancing another sovereign on it.

  Church was absent on business and the clerk could do nothing for Snim. They passed the time. Snim told the sob to the clerk about his bitch landlady crowning herself every day with the new spook-shill she was using in her palm-racket and still trying to milk him when she was rolling. The clerk would not weep even for the price of coffee. Snim departed.

  When Jerry Church returned to the bookshop for a brief time-out in his wild quest for Barbara D’Courtney, the clerk reported Snim’s visit and conversation. What the clerk did not report, Church peeped. Nearly fainting, he tottered to the phone and called Reich. Reich could not be located. Church took a deep breath and called Keno Quizzard.

  Meanwhile, Snim was growing a little desperate. Out of that desperation arose his crazy decision to work the bank teller graft. Snim trudged downtown to Maiden Lane and cased the banks in that pleasant esplanade around Bomb Inlet. He was not too bright and made the mistake of selecting the Mars Exchange as his battlefield. It looked dowdy and provincial. Snim had not learned that it is only the powerful and efficient institutions that can afford to look second-rate.

  Snim entered the bank, crossed the crowded main flood to the row of desks opposite the tellers’ cages, and stole a handful of deposit slips and a pen. As Snim left the bank, Fred Deal glanced at him once, then motioned wearily to his staff.

  “See that little louse?” He pointed to Snim who was disappearing through the front door. “He’s getting ready to pull the ‘Adjustment’ routine.”

  “Want us to send him, Fred?”

  “What the hell’s the use? He’ll only try it on someone else. Let him go ahead with it. We’ll pick him up after he’s got the money and get a conviction. Stash him for keeps. There’s plenty of room in Kingston.”

  Unaware of this, Snim lurked outside the bank, watching the tellers’ cages closely. A solid citizen was making a withdrawal at Cage Z. The teller was passing over big chunks of paper cash. This was the fish. Snim hastily removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and tucked the pen in his ear.

  As the fish came out of the bank, counting his money, Snim slipped behind him, darted up and tapped the man’s shoulder.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said briskly. “I’m from Cage Z. I’m afraid our teller made a mistake and short-counted you. Will you come back for the adjustment please?” Snim waved his sheaf of slips, gracefully swept the money from the fish’s fins and turned to enter the bank. “Right this way, sir,” he called pleasantly. “You have another hundred coming to you.”

  As the sur
prised solid citizen followed him, Snim darted busily across the floor, slipped into the crowd and headed for the side exit. He would be out and away before the fish realized he’d been gutted. It was at this moment that a rough hand grasped Snim’s neck. He was swung around face to face with a Bank Guard. In one chaotic instant, Snim contemplated fight, flight, bribery, pleas, Kingston Hospital, the bitch Chooka Frood and her yellow-headed ghost girl, his pocket-pianino and the man who owned it. Then he collapsed and wept.

  The peeper guard flung him to another uniform and shouted: “Take him, boys. I’ve just made myself a mint!”

  “Is there a reward for this little guy, Fred?”

  “Not for him. For what’s in his head. I’ve got to call the Guild.”

  At nearly the same moment late Friday afternoon, Ben Reich and Lincoln Powell received the identical information: “Girl answering to the description of Barbara D’Courtney can be found in Chooka Frood’s Fortune Act, 99 Bastion West Side.”

  9

  Bastion West Side, famous last bulwark in the Siege of New York, was dedicated as a war memorial. Its ten torn acres were to be maintained in perpetuity as a stinging denunciation of the insanity that produced the final war. But the final war, as usual, proved to be the next-to-the-final, and Bastion West Side’s shattered buildings and gutted alleys were patched into a crazy slum by squatters.

  Number 99 was an eviscerated ceramics plant. During the war a succession of blazing explosions had burst among the stock of thousands of chemical glazes, fused them, and splashed them into a wild rainbow reproduction of a lunar crater. Great splotches of magenta, violet, bice green, burnt umber, and chrome yellow were burned into the stone walls. Long streams of orange, crimson, and imperial purple had erupted through windows and doors to streak the streets and surrounding ruins with slashing brush strokes. This became the Rainbow House of Chooka Frood.

  The top floors had been patched and subdivided into a warren of cells so complicated and confused that only Chooka understood the pattern of the maze, and even Chooka herself was in doubt at times. A man could drift from cell to cell while the floors were being searched, and easily slip through the meshes of the finest dragnet. This unusual complexity netted Chooka large profits each year.

  The lower floors were given over to Chooka’s famous Frab joint, where, for a sufficient sum, a consummate expert graciously MC’d the well-known vices for the hungry and upon occasion invented new vices for the satiated. But the celler of Chooka Frood’s house was the phenomenon that had inspired her most lucrative industry.

  The war explosions that had turned the building into a rainbow crater had also fused the ceramic glazes, the metals, glasses, and plastics in the old plant; and a molten conglomerate had oozed down through the floors to settle on the floor of the lowest vault and harden into shimmering pavement, crystal in texture, phosphorescent in color, strangely vibrant and singing.

  It was worth the hazardous trip to Bastion West Side. You threaded your way through twisting streets until you reached the streak of jagged orange that pointed to the door of Chooka’s Rainbow House. At the door you were met by a solemn person in XXth Century formal costume who asked: “Frab or Fortune, sir?” If you replied “Fortune” you were conducted to a sepulchral door where you paid a gigantic fee and were handed a phosphor candle. Holding the candle aloft, you walked down a steep stone staircase. At the very bottom it turned sharply and abruptly disclosed a broad, long, arched cellar filled with a lake of singing fire.

  You stepped onto the surface of that lake. It was smooth and glassy. Under the surface glowed and flickered a constant play of pastel borealis. At every step the crystal hummed sweet chords, throbbing like the prolonged over-tones of bronze bells. If you sat motionless, the floor still sang, responding to vibrations from distant streets.

  Around the rim of the cellar, on stone benches, sat the other fortune-seekers, each holding his phosphor candle. You looked at them, sitting silent and awed, and suddenly you realized that each of them looked saintly, glowing with the aura of the floor; and each of them sounded saintly, their bodies echoing the music of the floor. The candles looked like stars on a frosty night.

  You joined the throbbing, burning silence and sat quietly, until at last there came the high chime of a silver bell repeated over and over. The entire floor took up the resonance, and the strange relationship of sight and sound made the colors flare up brilliantly. Then, clothed in a cascade of flaming music, Chooka Frood entered the cellar and paced to the center of the floor.

  “And there, of course, the illusion ends,” Lincoln Powell said to himself. He stared at Chooka’s blunt face; the thick nose, flat eyes, and corroded mouth. The borealis flickered around her features and tightly gowned figure, but it could not disguise the fact that although she had ambition, avarice, and ingenuity, she was utterly devoid of sensitivity and clairvoyance.

  “Maybe she can act,” Powell muttered hopefully.

  Chooka stopped in the middle of the floor, looking much like a vulgar Medusa, then lifted her arms in what was intended for a sweeping mystic gesture.

  “She can’t,” Powell decided.

  “I am come here to you,” Chooka intoned in a hoarse voice, “to help you look into the deeps of your hearts. Look down into your hearts, you which are looking for…” Chooka hesitated, then ran on: “You which are looking for revenge on a man named Zerlen from Mars… For the love of a red-eyed woman of Callisto… For every credit of that rich old uncle in Paris… For…”

  “Why, damn me! The woman’s a peeper!”

  Chooka stiffened. Her mouth hung open.

  “You’re receiving me, aren’t you, Chooka Frood?”

  The telepathic answer came in frightened fragments. It was obvious that Chooka Frood’s natural ability had never been trained. “Wha…? Who? Which is…you?”

  As carefully as if he were communicating with an infant 3rd, Powell spelled it out: “Name: Lincoln Powell. Occupation: Police Prefect. Intent: To question a girl named Barbara D’Courtney. I have heard she’s participating in your act.” Powell transmitted a picture of the girl.

  It was pathetic the way Chooka tried to block. “Get…out. Out. Out of here. Get. Get out. Out…”

  “Why haven’t you come to the Guild? Why aren’t you in contact with your own people?”

  “Get out. Out of here. Peeper! Get out.”

  “You’re a peeper, too. Why haven’t you let us train you? What kind of a life is this for you? Mumbo Jumbo… Picking sucker brains and turning it all into a Fortune Act. There’s real work waiting for you, Chooka.”

  “Real money?”

  Powell repressed the wave of exasperation that rose up in him. It was not exasperation with Chooka. It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.

  “We’ll talk about that later, Chooka. Where’s the girl?”

  “No girl. There is no girl.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Chooka. Peep the customers with me. That old goat obsessed with the red-eyed woman…” Powell explored him gently. “He’s been here before. He’s waiting for Barbara D’Courtney to come in. You dress her in sequins. You bring her on in half an hour. He likes her looks. She does some kind of trance routine to music. Her dress is slit open and he likes that. She—”

  “He’s crazy. I never—”

  “And the woman who was loused by a man named Zerlen? She’s seen the girl often. She believes in her. She’s waiting for her. Where’s the girl, Chooka?”

  “No!”

  “I see. Upstairs. Where, upstairs, Chooka? Don’t try to block, I’m deep peeping. You can’t misdirect a 1st—I see. Fourth room on the left of the angle turn. That’s a complicated labyrinth you’ve got up there, Chooka. Let’s have it again to make sure…”

  Helpless and mortified, Chooka suddenly shrieked:

  “Get out of here, you goddam cop! Get the hell out of here!”
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  “Excuse it, please,” said Powell. “I’m on my way.”

  He rose and left the room.

  That entire telepathic investigation took place within the second it took Reich to move from the eighteenth to the twentieth step on his way down to Chooka Frood’s rainbow cellar. Reich heard Chooka’s furious screech and Powell’s reply. He turned and shot up the stairs to the main floor.

  As he jostled past the door attendant, he thrust a sovereign into the man’s hand and hissed: “I wasn’t here. Understand?”

  “No one is ever here, Mr. Reich.”

  He made a quick circuit of the frab rooms. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun. He brushed past the girls who variously solicited him, then locked himself into the phone booth and punched BD-12,232.

  Church’s anxious face appeared on the screen.

  “Well, Ben?”

  “We’re in a jam. Powell’s here.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Where in hell is Quizzard?”

  “He isn’t there?”

  “I can’t locate him.”

  “But I thought he’d be down in the cellar. He—”

  “Powell was in the cellar, peeping Chooka. You can bet Quizzard wasn’t there. Where in hell is he?”

  “I don’t know, Ben. He went down with his wife, and—”

  “Look, Jerry. Powell must have found the girl’s location. I’ve got maybe five minutes to beat him to her. Quizzard was supposed to do that for me. He isn’t in the cellar. He’s nowhere in the Frab Joint. He—”