“Did you say that was one of Quizzard’s killers.”
“Sure. He owns a squad of psychgoons. Every time we round ’em up and send ’em to Kingston, Quizzard gets another batch. They follow the dope trail to his place.”
“But what have they got against you? I—”
“Clever-up, Jerry. They’re Ben’s deputies. Ben’s getting panicky.”
“Ben? Ben Reich? But it was in my shop. I might have been here.”
“You were here. What the hell difference did that make?”
“Reich wouldn’t want me killed. He—”
“Wouldn’t he?” Image of a cat smiling.
Church took a deep breath. Suddenly he exploded: “The son of a bitch! The goddam son of a bitch!”
“Don’t feel like that, Jerry. Reich’s fighting for his life. You can’t expect him to be too careful.”
“Well, I’m fighting, too, and that bastard’s made up my mind for me. Get ready, Powell. I’m opening up. I’m going to give you everything.”
After he finished with Church and returned from Headquarters and the Tate nightmare, Powell was grateful for the sight of the blonde urchin in his home. Barbara D’Courtney had a black crayon in her right hand and a red crayon in her left. She was energetically scribbling on the walls, her tongue between her teeth and her dark eyes squinted in concentration.
“Baba!” he exclaimed in a shocked voice. “What are you doing?”
“Drawrin pitchith,” she lisped. “Nicth pitchith for Dada.”
“Thank you, sweetheart,” he said. “That’s a lovely thought. Now come and sit with Dada.”
“No,” she said, and continued scribbling.
“Are you my girl?”
“Yeth.”
“Doesn’t my girl always do what Dada asks?”
She thought that one over. “Yeth,” she said. She deposited the crayons in her pocket, her bottom on the couch alongside Powell, and her grubby paws in his hands.
“Really, Barbara,” Powell murmured. “That lisping is beginning to worry me. I wonder if your teeth need braces?”
The thought was only half a joke. It was difficult to remember that this was a woman seated alongside him. He looked into the deep dark eyes shining with the empty brilliance of a crystal glass awaiting its fulfilling measure of wine.
Slowly he probed through the vacant conscious levels of her mind to the turbulent preconscious, heavily hung with obscuring clouds like a vast dark nebula in the heavens. Behind the clouds was the faint flicker of light, isolated and childlike, that he had grown to like. But now, as he threaded his way down, that flicker of light was the faint spicule of a star that burned with the hot roar of a nova.
Hello, Barbara. You seem to—
He was answered with a burst of passion that made him backtrack fast.
“Hey, Mary!” he called. “Come quick!”
Mary Noyes popped out of the kitchen. “You in trouble again?”
“Not yet. Soon maybe. Our patient’s on the mend.”
“I haven’t noticed any difference.”
“Come on inside with me. She’s made contact with her Id. Down on the lowest level. Almost had my brains burned out.”
“What do you want? A chaperone? Someone to protect the secrets of her sweet girlish passions?”
“Are you comic? I’m the one who needs protection. Come and hold my hand.”
“You’ve got both of yours in hers.”
“Just a figure of speech.” Powell glanced uneasily at the calm doll face before him and the cool relaxed hands in his. “Let’s go.”
He went down the black passages again toward the deep-seated furnace that was within the girl…that is within every man…the timeless reservoir of psychic energy, reasonless, remorseless, seething with the never-ending search for satisfaction. He could sense Mary Noyes mentally tiptoeing behind him. He stopped at a safe distance.
Hi, Barbara.
“Get out!”
This is the spook.
Hatred lashed out at him.
You remember me?
The hatred subsided into the turbulence to be replaced by a wave of hot desire.
“Linc, you’d better jet. If you get trapped inside that pleasure-pain chaos, you’re gone.”
“I’d like to locate something.”
“You can’t find anything in there except raw love and raw death.”
“I want her relations with her father. I want to know why he had those guilt sensations about her.”
“Well, I’m getting out.”
The furnace fumed over again. Mary fled.
Powell teetered around the edge of the pit, feeling, exploring, sensing. It was like an electrician gingerly touching the ends of exposed wires to discover which of them did not carry a knock-out charge. A blazing bolt surged near him. He touched it, was stunned, and stepped aside to feel a blanket of instinctual self-preservation choke him. He relaxed, permitted himself to be drawn down into a vortex of associations and began sorting. He struggled to maintain his frame of reference that was crumbling in that chaos of energy.
Here were the somatic messages that fed the cauldron; cell reactions by the incredible billion, organic cries, the muted drone of muscletone, sensory sub-currents, blood-flow, the wavering superheterodyne of blood pH…all whirling and churning in the balancing pattern that formed the girl’s psyche. The never-ending make-and-break of synapses contributed a crackling hail of complex rhythms. Packed in the changing interstices were broken images, half-symbols, partial references… The ionized nuclei of thought.
Powell caught part of Plosive image, followed it to the letter P…to the sensory association of a loss, then by cross circuit to the infant’s sucking reflex at the breast…to an infantile memory of…her mother? No. A wet-nurse. That was encrusted with parental associations… Negation. Minus Mother… Powell dodged an associated flame of infantile rage and resentment, the Orphan’s Syndrome. He picked up P again, searched for a related Pa… Papa… Father.
Abruptly he was face to face with himself.
He stared at the image, teetered on the verge of disintegration, then scrambled back to sanity.
Who the hell are you?
The image smiled beautifully and was gone.
P… Pa… Papa… Father. Heat-of-love-and-devotion-associated-with… He was face to face with his image again. This time it was nude, powerful; its outlines haloed with an aura of love and desire. Its arms outstretched.
Get lost. You embarrass me.
The image disappeared. Damn it! Has she fallen in love with me?
“Hi, spook.”
There was her picture of herself, pathetically caricatured, the blonde hair in strings, the dark eyes like blotches, the lovely figure drawn into flat, ungracious planes… It faded, and abruptly the image of Powell-Powerful-Protective-Paternal rushed at him, torrentially destructive. He stayed with it, grappling. The back of the head was D’Courtney’s face. He followed the Janus image down to a blazing channel of doubles, pairs, linkages and duplicities to—Reich? Imposs—Yes, Ben Reich and the caricature of Barbara, linked side to side like Siamese twins, brother and sister from the waist upward, their legs turning and twisting separately in a sea of complexity below. B linked to B. B & B. Barbara & Ben. Half joined in blood. Half—
“Linc!”
A call far off. Directionless.
“Lincoln.”
It could wait a second. That amazing image of Reich had to—
“Lincoln Powell! This way, you fool!”
“Mary?”
“I can’t find you.”
“Be out in a few minutes.”
“Linc, this is the third time I’ve tried to locate you. If you don’t come out now, you’re lost.”
“The third time?”
“In three hours. Please, Linc… While I’ve got the strength.”
He permitted himself to wander upward. He could not find upward. The timeless, spaceless chaos roared around him. The image of Barbara D’
Courtney appeared, now a caricature of the sexual siren.
“Hi spook.”
“Lincoln, for the love of God!”
In momentary panic, he plunged in any direction until his peeper training reasserted itself. Then the Withdrawal Technique went into automatic operation. The blocks banged down in steady sequence; each barrier a step backward toward the light. Halfway up, be sensed Mary alongside him. She stayed with him until he was once more in his living room, seated alongside the urchin, her hands in his. He dropped the hands as though they were red hot.
“Mary, I located the weirdest association with Ben Reich. Some kind of linkage that—”
Mary had an iced towel. She slapped his face with it smartly. He realized that he was shaking.
“Only trouble is… Trying to make sense out of fragments in the Id is like trying to run a qualitative analysis in the middle of a sun…”
The towel flicked again.
“You aren’t working with unit elements. You’re working with ionized particles…” He dodged the towel and stared at Barbara. “My God, Mary, I think this poor kid’s in love with me.”
Image of a cockeyed turtle dove.
“No bidding. I kept meeting myself down there. I—”
“And what about you?”
“Me?”
“Why do you think you refused to send her to Kingston Hospital?” she said. “Why do you think you’ve been peeping her twice a day since you brought her here? Why did you have to have a chaperone? I’ll tell you, Mr. Powell…”
“Tell me what?”
“You’re in love with her. You’ve been in love with her since you found her at Chooka Frood’s.”
“Mary!”
She stung him with a vivid picture of himself and Barbara D’Courtney and that fragment she had peeped days ago… The fragment that had made her turn pale with jealousy and anger. Powell knew it was true.
“Mary, dear…”
“Never mind me. To hell with me. You’re in love with her, and the girl isn’t a peeper. She isn’t even sane. How much of her are you in love with? One tenth? What part of her are you in love with? Her face? Her subconscious? What about the other ninety per cent? Will you love that when you find it? Damn you! I wish I’d let you stay inside her mind until you rotted!” She turned away and began to cry.
“Mary, for the love of—”
“Shut up,” she sobbed. “Damn you, shut up! I… There’s a message for you. From headquarters. You’re to jet for Spaceland as soon as possible. Ben Reich’s there, and they’ve lost him. They need you. Everybody needs you. So why should I complain?”
12
It was years since Powell had last visited Spaceland. He sat in the police launch that had picked him off the luxury ship “Holiday Queen,” and as the launch dropped, Powell stared through the port at Spaceland glittering below like a patchwork quilt worked in silver and gold. He smiled as he always did at the identical image that came to him each time he saw the playground in space. It was a vision of a shipload of explorers from a far galaxy, strange creatures, solemn and studious, who stumbled on Spaceland and researched it. He always tried to imagine how they’d report it and always failed.
“It’s a job for Dishonest Abe,” he muttered.
Spaceland had started several generations back with a flat plate of asteroid rock half a mile diameter. A mad health cultist had raised a transparent hemisphere of Air-Gel on the plate, installed an atmosphere generator, and started a colony. From that, Spaceland had grown into an irregular table in space, extending hundreds of miles. Each new entrepreneur had simply tacked another mile or so onto the shelf, raised his own transparent hemisphere, and gone into business. By the time engineers got around to advising Spaceland that the spherical form was more efficient and economical, it was too late to change. That table just went on proliferating.
As the launch swung around, the sun caught Spaceland at an angle, and Powell could see the hundreds of hemispheres shimmering against the blue-black of space like a mass of soap bubbles on a checkered table. The original health colony was now in the center and still in business. The others were hotels, amusement parks, health resorts, nursing homes, and even a cemetery. On the Jupiter side of the table was the giant fifty-mile hemisphere that covered the Spaceland Nature Reservation which guaranteed more natural history and more weather per square mile than any natural planet.
“Let’s have the story,” Powell said.
The police sergeant gulped. “We followed instructions,” he said. “Rough Tail on Hassop. Slickie following him. The Rough got taken out by Reich’s girl…”
“It was a girl, eh?”
“Yeah. Cute little trick named Duffy Wyg&.”
“Damnation!” Powell jerked bolt upright. The sergeant stared at him. “Why I questioned that girl myself. I never—” He caught himself. “Seems like I did some lousing myself. Shows you. When you meet a pretty girl…” He shook his head.
“Well, like I say,” the sergeant continued, “she takes out the Rough, and just when the Slickie moves in, Reich jets into Spaceland with a commotion.”
“Like?”
“Private yacht. Has a crash in space and limps in hollerin’ emergency. One killed. Three injured, including Reich. Front of the yacht stove in. Derelict or meteor stray. They take Reich to the hospital where we figure he’s planned for a little. When we turn around, Reich’s gone. Hassop too. I grab a peeper interpreter and go looking in four languages. No dice.”
“Hassop’s luggage?”
“Gone likewise.”
“Damnation! We’ve got to pinch Hassop and that luggage. They’re our Motive. Hassop is Monarch’s Code Chief. We need him for that last message Reich sent to D’Courtney and the reply…”
“Monday before the murder?”
“Yes. That exchange probably ignited the killing. And Hassop may have Reich’s financial records with him. They can probably tell a court why Reich had a hell of a motive for murdering D’Courtney.”
“Such as, for instance?”
“The talk around Monarch is that D’Courtney had Reich with his back to the wall.”
“You got Method and Opportunity?”
“Yes and no. I opened up Jerry Church and got everything, but it’s ticklish. We can show Reich had the opportunity. It’ll stand if the other two stand. We can show the murder method. It’ll stand if the other two stand. Same goes for Reich’s Motive. They’re like three wigwam poles. Each of them needs the other two. No one can stand alone. That’s Old Man Mose’s opinion. And that’s why we need Hassop.”
“I’ll swear they ain’t left Spaceland. That efficient I still am.”
“Don’t hang your head because Reich outsmarted you. He’s outsmarted plenty. Me included.”
The sergeant shook his head gloomily.
“I’ll… I’ll start peeping Spaceland for Reich and Hassop at once,” Powell said as the launch drifted down for the passage through the air-lock, “but I want to check a hunch first. Show me the corpse.”
“What corpse?”
“From Reich’s crash.”
In the police mortuary, displayed on an air-cushion in the stasis-freeze, the corpse was a mangled figure with dead white skin and a flaming red beard.
“Uh, huh,” Powell muttered. “Keno Quizzard.”
“You know him?”
“A gimpster. Was working for Reich and turned too hot to be useful. What’ll you bet that crash was a cover-up for a killing.”
“Hell!” the cop exploded, “those two other guys are hurt bad. Reich might have been faking. Admitted. But the yacht was ruined, and those two other guys—”
“So they were hurt. And the yacht was ruined. So what? Quizzard’s mouth is shut for keeps and Reich’s that much safer. Reich took care of him. We’ll never prove it, but we won’t have to if we locate Hassop. That’ll be enough to walk friend Reich into Demolition.”
Wearing the fashionable spray-gun-tights (Spaceland sport clothes were being painted on,
this year), Powell began a lightning tour of the bubbles… Victoria Hotel, Sportsman’s Hotel, Magic, Home From Home, Ye New Neu Bablesberg, The Martian (very chic), the Venusberg (very bawdy), and the other dozens… Powell struck up conversations with strangers, described his dear old friends in half a dozen languages, and peeped gently to make sure they had the precise picture of Reich and Hassop before they answered. And then the answers. Negative. Always negative.
The peepers were easy…and Spaceland was fined with them, at work and at play…but always the reply was negative.
A Revival Meeting at Solar Rheims…hundreds of chanting, genuflecting devotees participating in a kind of hopped-up Midsummer Morn festival. Reply Negative. Sailing Races in Mars From Home… Cat boats and sloops skipping over the water in long hops like scaled stones. Reply Negative. The Plastic Surgery Resort…hundreds of bandaged faces and bodies. Reply Negative. Free-Flight Polo. Reply Negative. Hot Sulphur Springs, White Sulphur Springs, Black Sulphur Springs, No Sulphur Springs… Replies Negative.
Discouraged and depressed, Powell dropped into Solar Dawn Cemetery. The cemetery looked like an English garden…all flagged paths and oak, ash and elm trees with tiny little plots of green grass. Muted music from costumed robot string quartets sawing away in strategic pavilions. Powell began to smile.
There was a faithful reproduction of the Notre Dame Cathedral in the center of the cemetery. It was painstakingly labeled: Ye Wee Kirk O Th’ Glen. From the mouth of one of the gargoyles in the tower, a syrupy voice roared: “SEE THE DRAMA OF THE GODS PORTRAYED IN VIBRANT ROBOT-ACTION IN YE WEE KIRK O TH’ GLEN. MOSES ON MT. SINAI, THE CRUCIFIXION OF CHRIST, MOHAMMED AND THE MOUNTAIN, LAO TSE AND THE MOON, THE REVELATION OF MARY BAKER EDDY, THE ASCENSION OF OUR LORD BUDDHA, THE UNVEILING OF THE TRUE AND ONLY GOD GALAXY…” Pause, and then a little more matter-of-factly: “OWING TO THE SACRED NATURE OF THIS EXHIBIT, ADMISSION IS BY TICKET ONLY. TICKETS MAY BE PURCHASED FROM THE BAILIFF.” Pause. Then another voice, injured and pleading: “ATTENTION ALL WORSHIPERS. ATTENTION ALL WORSHIPERS. NO LOUD TALKING OR LAUGHTER… PLEASE!” A click, and another gargoyle began in another language. Powell burst out laughing.
The Demolished Man Page 14