“He must be upstairs in the coop.”
“I was going to figure that for myself. Listen, is there a quick way to get up to the coop? A short-cut I can use to beat Powell to her?”
“If Powell peeped Chooka, he peeped the shortcut.”
“God damn it, I know that. But maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was concentrating on the girl. It’s a chance I’ll have to take.”
“Behind the main stairs. There’s a marble bas-relief. Turn the woman’s head to the right. The bodies separate and there’s a door to a vertical pneumatique.”
“Right.”
Reich hung up, left the booth, and darted to the main stairs. He turned to the rear of the marble staircase, found the bas-relief, twisted the woman’s head savagely and watched the bodies swing apart. A steel door appeared. A panel of buttons was set in the lintel. Reich punched TOP, yanked the door open and stepped into the open shaft. Instantly a metal plate jolted up against his soles and with a hiss of air pressure he was lofted eight stories to the top floor. A magnetic catch held the plate while he opened the shaft door and stepped out.
He found himself in a corridor that slanted up at an angle of thirty degrees and leaned to the left. It was floored with canvas. The ceiling glowed at intervals with small flickering globes of radon. The walls were lined with doors, none of them numbered.
“Quizzard!” Reich shouted.
There was no answer.
“Keno Quizzard!”
Still no answer.
Reich ran halfway up the corridor, and then at a venture tried a door. It opened to a narrow cubby entirely filled with an oval bed. Reich tripped over the edge of the bed and fell. He crawled across the foam mattress to a door on the opposite side, thrust it open, and fell through. He found himself on a landing. A flight of steps led down to a round anteroom rimmed with doors. Reich tumbled down the steps and stood, breathing heavily, staring at the circle of doors.
“Quizzard!” he shouted again. “Keno Quizzard!”
There was a muffled reply. Reich spun on his heels, ran to a door and pulled it open. A woman with eyes dyed red by plastic surgery was standing just inside and Reich blundered against her. She burst into unaccountable laughter, raised both fists and beat his face. Blinded and bewildered, Reich backed away from the powerful red-eyed woman, reached for the door, apparently missed it and seized the knob of another, for when he backed out of the room it was not into the circular foyer. His heels caught in three inches of plastic quilting. He tumbled over backwards, slamming the door as he fell, and struck his head a stunning blow against the edge of a porcelain stove.
When his vision cleared he found himself staring up into the angry face of Chooka Frood.
“What the hell are you doing in my room?” Chooka screamed.
Reich shot to his feet. “Where is she?” he said.
“You get to hell out of here, Ben Reich.”
“I asked you where is she? Barbara D’Courtney. Where is she?”
Chooka turned her head and yelled: “Magda!”
The red-eyed woman came into the room. She held a neuron scrambler in her hand and she was still laughing; but the gun was trained on his skull and never wavered.
“Get out of here,” Chooka repeated.
“I want the girl, Chooka. I want her before Powell gets her. Where is she?”
“Get him out of here, Magda!” Chooka screamed.
Reich clubbed the woman across the eyes with the back of his hand. She fell backward, dropping the gun, and twitched in a corner, still laughing. Reich ignored her. He picked up the scrambler and rammed it against Chooka’s temple.
“Where’s the girl?”
“You go to hell, you—”
Reich pulled the trigger back into first notch. The radiation charged Chooka’s nervous system with a low induction current. She stiffened and began to tremble. Her skin glistened with sudden sweat, but she still shook her head. Reich yanked the trigger back to second notch. Chooka’s body was thrown into a break-bone ague. Her eyes stared. Her throat emitted the brute groans of a tortured animal. Reich held her in it for five seconds, then cut the gun.
“Third notch is death notch,” he growled. “The Big D. I don’t give a curse, Chooka. It’s Demolition for me one way or the other if I don’t get that girl. Where is she?”
Chooka was almost completely paralyzed. “Through…door,” she croaked. “Fourth room… Left… After turn.”
Reich dropped her. He ran across the bedroom, through the door, and came to a corkscrewed ramp. He mounted it, took a sharp turn, counted doors and stopped before the fourth on the left. He listened for an instant. No sound. He thrust open the door and entered. There was an empty bed, a single dresser, an empty closet, a single chair.
“Gulled, by God!” he cried. He stepped to the bed. It showed no sign of use. Neither did the closet. As he turned to leave the room, he yanked at the middle dresser drawer and tore it open. It contained a frost white silk gown and a stained steel object that looked like a malignant flower. It was the murder weapon; the knife-pistol.
“My God!” Reich breathed. “Oh my God.”
He snatched up the gun and inspected it. It’s chambers still contained the emasculated cartridges. The one that had blown the top of Craye D’Courtney’s head out was still in place under the hammer.
“It isn’t Demolition yet,” Reich muttered. “Not by a damned sight. No, by Christ, not by a damned sight!” He folded up the knife-pistol and thrust it into his pocket. At that moment he heard the sound of distant laughter…a sour laugh. Quizzard’s laugh.
Reich stepped quickly to the twisted ramp and followed the sound of the laughter to a plush door hung open on brass hinges and deep set in the wall. Gripping the scrambler at the alert with the trigger set for Big D, Reich stepped through the door. There was a hiss of compressed air and it closed behind him.
He was in a small round room, walled and ceilinged in midnight velvet. The floor was transparent crystal, and gave a clear uninterrupted view of a boudoir on the floor below. It was Chooka’s Voyeur Chamber.
In the boudoir, Quizzard sat in a deep chair, his blind eyes glazing. The D’Courtney girl was perched on his lap wearing an astonishing slit gown of sequins. She sat quietly, her yellow hair smooth, her deep dark eyes staring placidly into space, while Quizzard fondled her brutally.
“How does she look?” Quizzard’s sour voice came distinctly. “How does she feel?”
He was speaking to a small faded woman who stood across the boudoir from him with her back against the wall and an incredible expression of agony on her face. It was Quizzard’s wife.
“How does she look?” the blind man repeated.
“She doesn’t know what’s happening,” the woman answered.
“She knows,” Quizzard shouted. “She isn’t that far gone. Don’t tell me she don’t know what’s happening. Christ! If I only had my eyes!”
The woman said: “I’m your eyes, Keno.”
“Then look for me. Tell me!”
Reich cursed and aimed the scrambler, at Quizzard’s head. It could kill through the crystal floor. It could kill through anything. It was going to kill now. Then Powell entered the boudoir.
The woman saw him at once. She emitted a bloodcurdling scream: “Run, Keno! Run!” She thrust herself from the wall and darted toward Powell, her hands clawing at his eyes. Then she tripped and fell prone. Apparently, the fall knocked her unconscious for she never moved. As Quizzard surged up from the chair with the girl in his arms, his blind eyes staring, Reich came to the appalled conclusion that the woman’s fall was no accident; for Quizzard suddenly dropped in his tracks. The girl tumbled out of his arms and fell into the chair.
There was no doubt that Powell had accomplished this on a TP level, and for the first time in their war, Reich was afraid of Powell…physically afraid. Again he aimed the scrambler, this time at Powell’s head as the peeper walked to the chair.
Powell said: “Good evening. Miss D’Courtney.”
Reich muttered: “Goodbye, Mr. Powell,” and tried to hold his trembling hand steady on Powell’s skull.
Powell said: “Are you all right. Miss D’Courtney?” When the girl failed to answer, be bent down and stared into her blank placid face. He touched her arm and repeated: “Are you all right, Miss D’Courtney? Miss D’Courtney! Do you need help?”
At the word “help” the girl whipped upright in the chair in a listening attitude. Then she thrust out her legs and leaped from the chair. She ran past Powell in a straight line, stopped abruptly and reached out as though grasping a doorknob. She turned the knob, thrust an imaginary door open and burst forward, yellow hair flying, dark eyes wide with alarm… A lightning flash of wild beauty.
“Father!” she screamed. “For God’s sake! Father!” She ran forward, then stopped short and backed away as though eluding someone. She darted to the left and ran in a half circle, screaming wildly, her eyes fixed.
“No!” she cried. “No! For the love of Christ! Father!”
She ran again, then stopped and struggled with imaginary arms that held her. She fought and screamed, her eyes still fixed, then stiffened and clapped her hands to her ears as though a violent sound had pierced them. She fell forward to her knees and crawled across the floor, moaning in pain. Then she stopped, snatched at something on the floor, and remained crouched on her knees, her face once again placid, doll-like and dead.
With sickening certainty, Reich knew what the girl had just done. She had relived the death of her father. She had relived it for Powell. And if he had peeped her…
Powell went to the girl and raised her from the floor. She arose as gracefully as a dancer, as serenely as a somnambulist. The peeper put his arm around her and took her to the door. Reich followed him all the way with the muzzle of the scrambler, waiting for the best shooting angle. He was invisible. His unsuspecting enemies were below him, easy targets for the death-notch. He could win safety with a shot. Powell opened the door, then suddenly swung the girl around, held her close to him and looked up. Reich caught his breath.
“Go ahead,” Powell called. “Here we are. An easy shot. One for the both of us. Go ahead!” His lean face was suffused with anger. The heavy jet brows scowled over the dark eyes. For half a minute he stared up at the invisible Reich, waiting, hating, daring. At last Reich lowered his eyes and turned his face away from the man who could not see him.
Then Powell took the docile girl through the door and closed it quietly behind him, and Reich knew he had permitted safety to slip through his fingers. He was halfway to Demolition.
10
Conceive of a camera with a lens distorted into wild astigmatism so that it can only photograph the same picture over and over—the scene that twisted it into shock. Conceive of a bit of recording crystal, traumatically warped so that it can only reproduce the same fragment of music over and over, the one terrifying phrase it cannot forget.
“She’s in a state of Hysterical Recall,” Dr. Jeems of Kingston Hospital explained to Powell and Mary Noyes in the living room of Powell’s house. “She responds to the key word ‘help’ and relives one terrifying experience…”
“The death of her father,” Powell said.
“Oh? I see. Outside of that… Catatonia.”
“Permanent?” Mary Noyes asked.
Young Doctor Jeems looked surprised and indignant. He was one of the brighter young men of Kingston Hospital despite the fact that he was not a peeper, and was fanatically devoted to his work. “In this day and age? Nothing is permanent except physical death, Miss Noyes, and up at Kingston we’ve started working on that. Investigating death from the symptomatic point of view, we’ve actually—”
“Later, Doctor,” Powell interrupted. “No lectures tonight. We’ve got work. Can I use the girl?”
“Use her how?”
“Peep her.”
Jeems considered. “No reason why not. I gave her the Déjà Èprouvé Series for catatonia. That shouldn’t get in the way.”
“The Déjà Èprouvé Series?” Mary asked.
“A great new treatment,” Jeems said excitedly. “Developed by Gart…one of your peepers. Patient goes into catatonia. It’s an escape. Flight from reality. The conscious mind cannot face the conflict between the external world and its own unconscious. It wishes it had never been born. It attempts to revert back to the foetal stage. You understand?”
Mary nodded. “So far.”
“All right. Déjà Èprouvé is an old XIXth Century psychiatric term. Literally, it means: ‘something already experienced, already tried.’ Many patients wish for something so strongly that finally the wish makes them imagine that the act or the experience in which they never engaged has already happened. Get it?”
“Wait a minute,” Mary began slowly. “You mean I—”
“Put it this way,” Jeems interrupted briskly. “Pretend you had a burning wish to…oh, say, to be married to Powell and have a family. Right?”
Mary flushed. In a rigid voice she said: “Right.” For a moment Powell yearned to blast this well-meaning clumsy young normal.
“Well,” Jeems continued in blithe ignorance. “If you lost your balance you might come to believe that you’d married Powell and had three children. That would be Déjà Èprouvé. Now what we do is synthesize an artificial Déjà Èprouvé for the patient. We make the catatonic wish to escape come true. We make the experience they desire actually happen. We dissociate the mind from the lower levels, send it back to the womb, and let it pretend it’s being born to a new life all over again. Got that?”
“Got it.” Mary tried to smile as her control returned.
“On the surface of the mind…in the conscious level…the patient goes through development all over again at an accelerated rate. Infancy, childhood, adolescence, and finally maturity.”
“You mean Barbara D’Courtney is going to be a baby…learn to speak…walk…?”
“Right. Right. Right. Takes about three weeks. By the time she catches up with herself, she’ll be ready to accept the reality she’s trying to escape. She’ll have grown up to it, so to speak. Like I said, this is only on the conscious level. Below that, she won’t be touched. You can peep her all you like. Only trouble is…she must be pretty scared down there. Mixed up. You’ll have trouble getting what you want. Of course, that’s your specialty. You’ll know what to do.”
Jeems stood up abruptly. “Got to get back to the shop.” He made for the front door. “Delighted to be of service. Always delighted to be called in by peepers. I can’t understand the recent hostility toward you people…” He was gone.
“Ummm. That was a significant parting note.”
“What’d he mean, Linc?”
“Our great & good friend, Ben Reich. Reich’s been backing an Anti-Esper campaign. You know…peepers are clannish, can’t be trusted, never become patriots. Interplanetary conspirators, eat little Normal babies, &c.”
“Ugh! And he’s supporting the League of Patriots too. He’s a disgusting, dangerous man.”
“Dangerous but not disgusting, Mary. He’s got charm. That’s what makes him doubly dangerous. People always expect villains to look villainous. Well, maybe we can take care of Reich before it’s too late. Bring Barbara down, Mary.”
Mary brought the girl downstairs and seated her on the low dais. Barbara sat like a calm statue. Mary had dressed her in blue leotards and combed her blonde hair back, tying it into a fox-tail with blue ribbon. Barbara was polished and shining; a lovely waxwork doll.
“Lovely outside; mangled inside. Damn Reich!”
“What about him?”
“I told you, Mary. I was so mad at Chooka Frood’s coop, I handed it to that red slug Quizzard and his wife… And when I peeped Reich upstairs, I threw it in his teeth. I—”
“What did you do to Quizzard?”
“Basic Neuro-Shock. Come up to the Lab sometime and we’ll show you. It’s new. If you make 1st we’ll teach you. It’s like the scrambler but psychogen
ic.”
“Fatal?”
“Forgotten the Pledge? Of course not.”
“And you peeped Reich through the floor? How?”
“TP reflection. The Voyeur Chamber wasn’t wired for sound. It had open acoustical ducts. Reich’s mistake. He was transmitting down the channel and I swear I was hoping he had the guts to shoot. I was going to blast him with a Basic that would have made Case History.”
“Why didn’t he shoot?”
“I don’t know, Mary. I don’t know. He thought he had every reason to kill us. He thought he was safe… Didn’t know about the Basic, even though Quizzard’s Decline & Fall jolted him… But he couldn’t.”
“Afraid?”
“Reich’s no coward. He wasn’t afraid. He just couldn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe next time it’ll be different. That’s why I’m keeping Barbara D’Courtney in my house. She’ll be safe here.”
“She’ll be safe in Kingston Hospital.”
“But not quiet enough for the work I’ve go to do.”
“?”
“She’s got the detailed picture of the murder locked up in her hysteria. I’ve got to get at it…piece by piece. When I’ve got it, I’ve got Reich.”
Mary arose. “Exit Mary Noyes.”
“Sit down, peeper! Why d’you think I called you? You’re staying here with the girl. She can’t be left alone. You two can have my bedroom. I’ll convert the study for myself.”
“Choke it, Linc. Don’t jet off like that. You’re embarrassed. Let’s see if I can’t maybe thread-needle through that mind block.”
“Listen—”
“No you don’t, Mr. Powell.”
Mary burst into laughter. “So that’s it. You want me for a chaperone. Victorian word, isn’t? So are you, Linc. Positively atavistic.”
“I brand that as a lie. In toffy circles I’m known as the most progressive—”
“And what’s that image? Oh. Knights of the Round Table. Sir Galahad Powell. And there’s something underneath that. I—”
Suddenly she stopped laughing and turned pale…
“What’d you dig?”
The Demolished Man Page 11