CHAPTER 13
The man behind the door was smaller than Cal had expected. Jerry Lopez was barely one and a half meters tall, with wiry arms, a small chest, short black hair, and a toothy grin.
“Where have you been?” Lopez asked, motioning Cal into the apartment. He didn’t seem angry.
“Real busy,” said Cal.
“I’m afraid I don’t have time now. I’m expecting someone else in half an hour.”
Time for what, Cal wondered, but said nothing. Until he knew more about the nature of his relationship with Domingo, he didn’t care to divulge anything about his recent activities. So far, Lopez could be a homosexual prostitute, but that didn’t fit anything Cal believed about himself. He could be a doctor seeing patients, except that his apartment didn’t look clinical enough. Maybe he dealt in drugs. That could be why he was expecting someone else.
“I tried to reach you,” Lopez continued.
“I know. I saw your message, but I couldn’t do anything about it right then.” Cal didn’t tell him the reason he couldn’t.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“Fine. Fine.” Cal must have misinterpreted the message about missing him. So far, although he didn’t know what the link between Lopez and himself was, it didn’t seem to be a blackmailer-victim relationship.
“Maybe we should talk for a few minutes before my next client arrives,” Lopez said. “You look like you could use it.”
“I probably could.”
Lopez began to walk toward a door set in the far wall. He turned when he reached the center of the room and said, “Are you coming?”
Cal followed. Lopez’s living room looked as green as the courtyard outside. Potted ferns were everywhere. Cal stepped through the doorway, surprised.
Lopez sat behind a desk. In front of it were two massive visitor’s chairs. On the wall were several certificates in frames.
Cal moved to one of the certificates and struggled momentarily with the calligraphy. He turned abruptly and said, “You’re a counselor?”
Lopez said nothing for a moment. More of the whites of his eyes showed. “How much do you remember?” he asked at last.
Cal sat in one of the chairs. “Nothing inside your office.” So all this mystery existed simply because he had been seeing a counselor.
“Just a minute. I want to reschedule my next visitor.” Lopez pulled out a keyboard and typed a few characters. “Okay. Where do you think we should start?”
Cal gave the man a greatly abbreviated summary of his last few days, leaving out everything involving violence and his suspicions. That made it easy to skim over. “So,” he said when he finished. “Why don’t we start with you telling me why I’ve been seeing you. And why I’ve been paying you anonymously.”
Lopez steepled his fingers. “For the first part, you’ve been seeing me to try to learn more about how to handle some emotional problems. You’ve been unjustifiably allowing yourself to feel quite guilty about the death of your daughter. That guilt had been creating pressure on your marriage, and you were afraid of losing your wife because of it. In addition, you were experiencing strong guilt feelings about your job, which you wouldn’t discuss in specifics. That was compounding the problem.”
“That’s all?” Cal saw the startled expression on Lopez’s face and quickly added, “Sorry. Just a tasteless joke.”
“That’s really quite interesting, Cal. One of the side effects of all you were going through is that I never knew you to exhibit the slightest signs of having a sense of humor. Maybe this blanking served as a catharsis. You might not be as bad off as I thought.”
Cal still didn’t volunteer the fact that someone was trying to kill him. “But I never told you what was bothering me about work?”
“I got the feeling you had been asked to do something you didn’t like to do, that maybe it went against your feelings of—oh, I don’t know—fairness, or justice—I really couldn’t tell. I just saw that you were upset by it.”
“But I wouldn’t discuss it?”
“Never. I tried. As for your paying me anonymously, that was another source of discussions for us. Your sense of pride was a little overblown. The idea that you might need personal counseling bothered you—as though you were ashamed at what you perceived to be a mark of personal failure.”
“I take it you don’t think so?”
“No two people are identical. No two people respond exactly the same to external circumstances. We all have our private fears and unique reactions to stress. I had hoped with our talks to help you see that you weren’t alone in having difficulty coping with pressure. By learning the danger signs associated with stress, we can all get better at dealing with it, by reducing it or avoiding it or living with it.”
“Do you see me as someone who might have gone down to Forget-Me-Now to get away from it all?”
Lopez scratched an itch on his nose. “No. I wouldn’t have predicted that.”
“Tell me more about what may have been bothering me at work.”
“I’m not sure I know much more. Whatever it was apparently started about four months ago. I didn’t detect any signs of it earlier.”
“Could it have been simply a result of the guilt about Lynn getting stronger for some reason?”
“Oh no.” Lopez shook his head emphatically. “I don’t know what caused it, but it was new and not associated with home. You were quite secretive. We had established what I thought were fairly good communications until that time, but suddenly you were harder to talk to, flatly refusing to talk about anything related to work.”
“Did I—” Cal started, but felt a catch in his voice, so he cleared his throat. “Did I seem to be worried about Nikki dying?”
“No,” said Lopez slowly. “You were worried that she might leave you, but you never seemed to think she might die. Why? Are you worried about that now?”
“I’m not sure.” Cal saw the puzzled expression on Lopez’s face and added, “There’s nothing I’m aware of consciously. As my memories start to return, I seem to be aware of feelings before I remember actual events or people.”
Vincent broke in with the message that Michelle was calling.
“Tell her I’ll call back in five or ten minutes unless it’s an emergency,” Cal said. To Lopez he said, “I assume that I never told Nikki about the sessions with you?”
“As far as I know you never told her. It was hard for you to admit something to her that you didn’t want to admit to yourself. That was part of the problem. We were just beginning to talk about barriers—personal barriers—last time.”
“What do you think the chances are that I might have used the erasure parlor deliberately?”
“Very small. You seemed to feel that going into a parlor was some form of suicide. Whatever other mistakes you might have made from time to time, whatever things you might have done to try to fix problems that plagued you, I don’t see you going in there freely. You’re what I call a survivor. I think you’ve got a lot of inner strength—enough that you can eventually overcome almost any obstacle.”
“Like getting Nikki back?”
Lopez didn’t flinch from his gaze. “Not necessarily obstacles like that. Just the ones that are in your power to influence.”
“Meaning I have no influence over her?”
“No. It’s just that you have no direct power over her. It would all be so simple if you could just command her to love you and stay with you.”
Cal thought for a moment. “Did I ever mention specific names of people at work who might have been involved in something that made me feel uncomfortable?”
“Sorry.”
Cal decided he wouldn’t learn any more, so he paid Lopez the usual fee, not anonymously, thanked him, and left.
The courtyard lacked adequate privacy, so he waited until he left the building and then called Michelle.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Domingo.” Michelle looked worried. “The police say they found a cache of weapons and drugs, after a second search of his apartment.”
“They what?”
“That’s what it says here. The report says they compared building plans against what they saw in his apartment, and realized that his closet was smaller than it was originally. The closet floor was about a meter square, but the plans said two square meters. Behind a fake wall, they found all the equipment.”
Cal stood for a moment, visualizing the sizes she had mentioned and the closet he had seen. “Something’s wrong here,” he said slowly. “When I was in his apartment, the closet was full-size.”
“But that would mean the police had to have known this before you were there. Or—”
“Or they’re lying,” finished Cal. “Or I’m lying.”
“I wasn’t going to list that possibility,” she said. “You’re going to have to put some faith in me.”
“Sorry. But why would the police hold the information or lie about it?”
“To flush out people who knew him? His accomplices?”
“I’m baffled. Earlier I had myself almost talked into believing that Domingo and I had been acting as police spies. Now I don’t know what to think.”
“Police spies? Spying on whom? And why?”
“My very questions. I don’t know.”
“Well, what next?” she asked.
Cal explained about learning he had been lied to at the erasure parlor. “So I think it’s worth another visit. Maybe after that, I can spring Edmund’s name on a few people and see what reactions I get.”
Michelle hung up a moment later. Cal was getting close to the tubeway station, so he sat on a bench and called Nikki.
“You’re okay?” she asked.
“No damage. Lopez is my analyst. I’ve been seeing him to work out a few problems.”
“You were seeing an analyst?”
“Nikki, don’t give me a hard time about it. It doesn’t indicate I was going crazy or anything. It just means I thought maybe it would help me. Help us.”
“I didn’t intend to criticize. I was just surprised. You’ve had this aura of invincibility. You’re always so self-sufficient, so independent.”
“Maybe it was hard for me to tell you I needed you.”
Nikki’s face looked out at him from the screen for a long moment. “Cal, I—” she began. “Cal, I’ve got to go. There’s another call coming in.”
“Right. I’ll talk to you later.” Cal fought to keep his voice calm. He wondered what she had been going to say, wishing desperately she had been going to soften, to tell him that maybe she needed him.
After a short journey Cal was within sight of the erasure parlor. He called Michelle and let her know he was about to go in.
He hesitated before the door, determining what approach he would use, and then entered.
The front office was vacant. Cal took a quick look around, trying to remember the proprietor’s name. Paulo Frall, that was it.
Cal could have pushed the service button on the desk, but he wanted to see Frall’s reactions when he had no advance notice of his visitor. He opened the door in the back of the shop.
“I’m with a customer right now,” called a man in a white lab coat. “I’ll be out in just a minute.” The man was not Paulo Frall.
Cal signaled acknowledgment and went back into the waiting room. He had a brochure in his hand and was examining it when the door opened and the man he had seen a moment ago entered.
The man was younger than Frall by quite a bit. He was perhaps in his mid-twenties.
“Well, sir,” he said. “I should be able to start on you within a half hour. We’ll clean away the last year, and it won’t hurt a bit.”
“That’s not why I’m here,” Cal said. “I’ve already been through it.”
“Oh,” the man said, frowning slightly and readjusting. “What can I do for you then? Was everything satisfactory?”
“No. But that’s not your fault.” Cal gave him the benefit of the doubt. “I wanted to talk to the fellow who was here before. Paulo Frall. Does he work a different shift?”
“I’m afraid you just missed him.”
“I could try back later.”
“No. Sorry,” said the man. “What I mean is you just missed him before he went on vacation. He’s been thinking about it for a while now, and this morning he decided he’d been postponing it long enough.”
“How about if you give me his home address?”
“It wouldn’t do you much good. He’s gone to Luna for his holidays. He won’t be at home. But he’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”
“A couple of weeks?” Cal realized too late that he sounded shocked. “I mean, are you sure he’ll be gone that long?”
“That’s what his plans are. Of course, he has a tendency to change his plans abruptly. I could have him call you when he gets back.”
“No. That won’t be necessary. But, while I’m here, could I see your records for four nights ago? I’d like to see if anyone I know was in that night.”
The man was reluctant at first, but Cal smiled broadly and offered a substantial bribe, whereupon the man acquiesced.
In a moment, Cal realized why the attendant was so willing to take the bribe. The record told him almost nothing. He had been the only “patient” between 21:00 and 11:00 the next morning. The transaction seemed just like the ones near it.
“Sorry I couldn’t help you,” the attendant said.
“Maybe you can. Would you mind doing one thing for me? I’d like to—to make sure Paulo is the same person I think he is. I’d really appreciate it if you would call him and ask him something about the shop. It doesn’t matter what. You could tell him you misplaced something.”
The man resisted until Cal smiled again and said he would pay even more for the favor.
Standing out of the range of the desk camera, but where he could see the received image, Cal watched the attendant make the call.
It took Frall a long time to answer. Cal supposed the call had to be relayed through comm links not normally required for communications local to Daedalus. When he did answer, it was obvious that he wasn’t on the colony. He was in a passenger seat aboard a ship.
“Yes, Anville. What is it?”
The attendant asked him a brief question, and Frall gave him the answer before hanging up. Frall had seemed annoyed at the call.
“Will that do it?” the man asked.
“It sure will. It’s the same man.” Cal paid him. “Oh, one last question. Is your equipment portable? I mean, could you take it out of here to treat someone?”
“I suppose so,” the man said. “It would be a bother, but it could be done.”
Cal thanked him and left. “Vincent?” he said, once he was out on the street. “I want to see you blow up one or two of the frames with Frall in them. The upper right section.”
“Coming up.”
Cal examined the image carefully. Finally he said, “I don’t see any trace of image imperfections. What about you?”
“Nope. Picture perfect.”
“So it appears Frall is not the one who gave my picture to Edmund. But why would he have left just this morning? If he was afraid of me coming back, why not earlier?”
“Ask your doctor.”
“I asked you. If you’re as smart as you act sometimes, you should know everything.”
“Bovine excrement.”
“Vincent, I’m shocked. How about if you call Michelle?”
She answered and asked, “What happened?”
“I’m back out with my memories still intact, such as they are. The guy I saw here the day I woke up is on his way to Luna for a vacation.”
“What miserable luck.”
“I wonder if luck is any part of it. For all I know, someone is following me, or one of the people I’ve talked to has seen someone else afterward.”
“You told me earlier you were going back to Forget-Me-Now. Are you saying—”
“No. I’m not. I don’t believe you told anyone. It must simply be a coincidence that he left today. I don’t like coincidences, but they do happen once in a while.”
“What next then?”
“It’ll probably be too late to do anything about it, but would you check on Paulo Frall? Maybe he has a criminal record.”
“Sure.”
Cal caught himself examining Michelle’s image on Vincent’s screen. There were no image imperfections, but she was using her desk computer rather than her wristcomp, so that told him nothing. He forced his attention back to the conversation. He didn’t believe she could be responsible, but it was hard to shut off the suspicious thoughts.
“You’ve got another message coming in,” said Vincent.
Cal said good-bye to Michelle and answered the other call.
To his surprise the caller was Pastor Welden from the Presodist church. She had let down her gray hair and looked more casual than during the service.
“Yes,” said Cal, puzzled.
“I’ll try not to take up too much of your time, Mr. Donley,” she said. “You came to one of our services yesterday. I thought perhaps I could answer some of your questions about the church, to encourage you to visit us again.”
“Thanks, but I came out of curiosity more than anything else. I think you’d be wasting your time on me.” Cal didn’t say that, more to the point, she’d be wasting his time.
“My time is never wasted,” she said. “I may just not realize immediately to what purpose it is being put.”
“Well, I do have one question.”
“And that is?”
“Is the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah particularly central to your church? I mean, do you devote five Sundays a year to sermons about that story, or give it any other special attention?”
“No, I wouldn’t say so. Easter and Christmas are the two biggest church holidays. Almost all the other areas of study are treated only occasionally, with no special attention. Why do you ask?”
“Just runaway curiosity. I’ve heard that story mentioned several times recently, and I wondered if it was especially significant to the church.”
“There are people who feel that God destroyed the Earth because the people there had done so much damage to the planet.”
“Do you?” Cal asked.
“Certainly not. We teach of a loving and understanding God, not a vengeful and angry one. The old testament is still quoted, but most of us don’t take it literally.”
“What kind of people do believe theories like that?”
Pastor Welden hesitated for the first time. “I’m not actually sure,” she said slowly. “Our church doesn’t officially promote that belief. You might have better luck finding people in other churches.”
“But surely some of your members must think that too.”
“Perhaps, but I wouldn’t know who.”
The woman wasn’t an accomplished liar. Cal was sure from the flicker of her eyes that she did know a few names. Yet he still had the impression she was telling the truth about everything else. He believed her when she said the Presodists as a whole didn’t hold that among their beliefs.
“Thanks for calling, Pastor,” Cal said. “I may get back to church.”
Before she hung up, Cal saw a look in her eye that must have meant something like “Once a heathen, always a heathen,” but she quite politely thanked him for his time and asked him to call her if he had any more questions.
Cal had an idea for another call. After having Vincent verify that Russ Tolbor was not at his apartment, he said, “Get him on the phone, will you?”
“Okay,” said Vincent. “But haven’t you got anything better to do than sit around all day phoning people?”
“Just do it, you little anthropomorphidite.” Cal grinned down at Vincent’s screen.
“Such language,” Vincent said, but when he finished speaking, Russ came up on the screen. “Yes, Cal. What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering if you might have time to talk for a little while sometime before you leave.” Cal wanted to get the man’s reactions to a few questions without having to deal with a small screen.
“I might be able to, but it’s getting very hectic around here, with all the last-minute preparations. We could always talk more leisurely after the Vittoria leaves. The communications equipment works quite well, thanks to you.”
“Okay. I’ll do that.” Cal’s irritation grew. “Oh. I ran into someone who knows you. Fargo Edmund.”
“Edmund? Sorry, the name doesn’t seem familiar. Where did he say I knew him from?” Tolbor’s face and voice showed no indications of nervousness.
“That’s funny. He said he went to the same church.”
“I go to a big church. I really can’t place the name. Was it important?”
“No. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Okay, Vincent,” Cal said after Tolbor had hung up. “Let’s see some blowups of Tolbor’s picture.” The man had been using his wristcomp.
“Nothing I can see,” said Vincent, displaying the upper right portion of the video received moments earlier.
“Me neither. Damn. He could be the wrong person. It could be a conspiracy with him being only one of the members. Or it could be someone else entirely. Leroy Krantz. Tom Horvath. Maybe Paulo Frall. Maybe, maybe, maybe.” Maybe even someone closer, he thought, but he couldn’t accept the idea.
Cal got up from the bench. It would do him no good just to sit there. As he began walking he realized how hungry he was. It was mid-afternoon, and he hadn’t stopped for a meal. By the time he approached the tubeway, he knew what he would do.
The news station was on the way to where he wanted to go next. A few minutes later he knocked on Michelle’s office door.
“Want to buy me a steak in your lunchroom?” he asked when she answered his knock.
“How about a sandwich?”
“Terrific.”
“How about if we eat back here, though?” she asked. “I’ve got something you might want to hear.”
They got their food, Michelle taking only a container of orange juice, and returned to her office.
“Tolbor got back to his office a little while ago,” she said. “I take it you called him recently?”
Cal nodded.
“You may not like this, but here it is.” Michelle touched a switch, and a new collection of random environmental noises joined the ones in her office.
Then Tolbor’s voice sounded. “I know. He’s done a fine job. I wish he could be part of the team on Vittoria. We could use people with his drive and talents. But I’m a little worried about him.”
The other voice, male, sounded as though it came from the communications console in Tolbor’s office rather than from inside the room. There weren’t any of the soft random sounds associated with the second person. “What makes you say that?” he asked.
“He called me a little while ago. Said he wanted to talk but was real vague. Not like Cal. Then he mentioned some friend of his I’d never heard of and seemed not to want to let the topic go.”
“Maybe there’s just a lot on his mind.”
“Maybe,” Tolbor said. “Or maybe all the pressure’s getting to him finally. It can happen to the best of us.”
From there the conversation turned toward final preparations for the journey. Michelle switched it off.
Cal sat silent for a moment, looking at her. Her eyes were slightly puffy, as though she was not sleeping much better than Cal. “So,” he said at last. “Am I cracking under pressure?”
“Don’t be silly. I’m not trying to back out or anything stupid like that. I’m just wondering if we might have the wrong man.”
Cal took a deep breath. He was absolutely certain he was not going crazy. But it would have hurt for Michelle to back out. “I’ve been wondering that myself. I guess I’ve been hanging on to him because he seemed to fit all the constraints. If it’s not him, then we’re that much farther away from the real answer.”
“Maybe Paulo Frall?”
“Maybe. But I don’t get that feeling about him. Oh, I’m sure he lied to me, and probably gave me the treatment himself, but I don’t see him as an instigator. Just an assistant.”
“But you don’t have anything to back that up?”
“No.”
“I think we’d better concentrate on anyone else you can think of besides Tolbor. Everyone on the Evangeline will be resurrected before he does something illegal.”
“The Evangeline? That name sounds vaguely familiar.”
“Oh, that’s right. It was the last ship to leave Earth. It’s in Earth orbit—’Earth obit’ as the jokers say. It would have been destroyed, but the biologists still plan to see if they can develop some means of protection against the bacteria, without having to go back down to Earth.”
Cal considered the information for a moment and then let it drop. “Okay. I’ve got to agree with you about Tolbor. But let’s keep monitoring him, just in case. Thanks for not losing faith.”
“Would you stop that?” said Michelle, smiling to let him know she wasn’t angry. “What next, then? I can start a database inquiry into relationships that include Domingo, the Presodist church, and drugs.”
“That sounds good. Listening to Tolbor makes me think my next attempts to try Edmund’s name on people, or check on image peculiarities, better be slightly more subtle. If I do talk to whoever’s responsible, I need to be less transparent. I’ll start with Leroy Krantz. He has an office near mine. I don’t have any good reason to check up on him, but I don’t have any better reason for anyone else.”
“So you’re going back over to Vittoria?”
“Right. I’ll keep you posted.”
“You do that,” Michelle said. She smiled at him as he left, but he could tell she was as worried as he was. By now they should have found some indications of who was responsible. Departure time was all too close.
It seemed like each trip to Vittoria took longer than the last. Finally Cal was walking down the hall in his office building.
Leroy was in his office, and alone, so Cal stopped in.
“You still want to go for that drink, Leroy?” he asked.
Leroy was obviously not terribly interested. He hesitated for just a moment before apparently deciding he should go, since he had suggested it. “Well, okay,” he said. “But let’s hurry a little. I’ve got a lot to do here.”
“Fine. Let’s just not hurry as much as Fargo Edmund.”
Just as Leroy’s gaze met Cal’s, Vincent interrupted. “You’ve got a call coming in.”
Damn. Leroy’s eyes had focused on Vincent, and Cal had lost the opportunity of seeing his expression unaltered by any external events. “I’ll answer it in just a minute,” Cal said.
“Who’s Fargo Edmund?” Leroy asked calmly.
“A jogger who died this morning. He was evidently in a big hurry and fell off a tier in Machu Picchu.”
“I hadn’t heard the news today. I didn’t realize jogging was so dangerous.”
“Neither did I. Can you wait just a minute while I answer this call?” Cal retreated to his office, annoyed at having lost the opportunity.
It was Michelle. She looked disturbed, her lips pressed tightly together. “Are you sitting down?” she asked.
“Damn it, I hate it when people start out conversations like that,” Cal said, feeling suddenly weak. “Give me the bad news.”
She swallowed hard. “A bomb just destroyed your office on Daedalus. And it killed someone.”