XXII

 

 

It was a long time before Morton Clarke could believe the impersonal report of the computers, so far away from this familiar desk of his, yet—electronically speaking—so close at hand that he could reach out and touch them.

They had a kind of reality to them that people never seemed to have.

He looked again at the print-outs, dangling over the automatic destruction unit, and eventually picked them up and laid them side by side, because he had to convince himself.

“The name’s the same,” he said with an access of gallows humor, and did what had to be done.

Then he waited. He didn’t wonder what Fenella was doing. He knew she was watching TV.

Channel 8.

 

The first thing the security forces did not do was notify the police that they were about to conduct a raid. It wasn’t safe to do that; the police were not secure, but jealously guarded their right to pick their own men and women, to hide their confidential files … or to try to.

So it had been years since the U. S. Security Force liaised with the police anywhere, and above all not in Lakonia or Cowville, the most sensitive of all areas in the country.

Cold, despite the outside warmth of the night, Clarke sat at his desk and dictated what must be looked out for.

 

“Apartment empty,” was the first news that reached him. He gave a nod. That figured.

Then, a few minutes later: “Looks like a foster-reb pad. Mystical books. Diagrams. Ouija board, that kind of thing. Man’s and woman’s clothes in the closets.”

“Names?” was Clarke’s only counter.

“Danty Aloysius Ward, male. Magda Hansen, née Porter. … Say, Mr. Clarke!”

“Yes?”

“What the hell are we looking for? I been in hundreds of places like this one”—a vibrating, hammering sound, the overheard passage of a hovercar—“though maybe not all quite so noisy! Bad place to plant bugs, this!”

Maybe that’s why they’re there. “Did you check the phone?”

“Sure we did. It’s unlisted, but the number corresponds.”

“Ah-hah. Then tell me what size shoes they take, will you?”

“I guess it’s Charlie who’s checking out the clothes. I’ll get him; just a moment!”

Waiting, Clarke looked again at the tape he had—well, put it politely, don’t say extracted, say—obtained from the police computers.

SOURCE: LODGED BY CLOUGH WILLIAM N., PATROLMAN #7653. LOCATION: GASTATION 132 SUPERWAY ZONE H-8. TIMED AT:

“Mr. Clarke?”

“Yes.”

“I have those shoe-sizes for you. Brand-names too, where I can read them. Most of them are pretty worn.”

“Shoot, then.” Poising pen over paper.

When he had the details before him, Clarke felt his mind congealing like fresh concrete, into new hardness, new heaviness. He was barely aware of his own voice saying, “It fits. Keep at it. Turn the apartment inside out. This one is big.”

After which he stared at the news-cutting framed on the wall and did nothing for nearly five minutes.

“Where’s Sophie?” Mrs. Gleewood demanded in the middle of a sentence uttered by the TV that she and her son-in-law were watching.

“What?” Bemused, as usual, into a semi-stupor by the polychrome images on the screen, Turpin started up in his chair. “Oh! Sophie! Well … well, I guess she went to lie down, didn’t she?”

“You mean she’s drunk again,” Mrs. Gleewood snapped. “I noticed at dinner—don’t think you can hide that sort of thing from me! I never thought when she married you she’d be driven to alcoholism, I swear I didn’t!”

She folded her bony hands and jutted her sharp chin forward. She dieted, of course, to “keep her figure,” apparently in the hope that young men would continue to find her attractive in spite of her narrow, cruel eyes with those dirty-looking dark bags under them, the chicken-skin scrawniness of her throat—which should have sported about three comfortable double chins, but instead sagged in loose pore-dotted folds—and the rasping, whining note that never left her voice. If there were any single conceivable reason to bad-mouth anyone fool enough to wander within earshot of this woman, Turpin had sometimes thought, it was beyond her powers of self-control to deny herself the pleasure of mentioning it.

Why couldn’t the stupid old bag eat a normal diet, get comfortably fat, and die young and happy—instead of hanging on until doomsday, griping about everyone and everything? Maybe she’d have kept one of her three husbands if she had!

But all he said aloud was, “Come now, mother-in-law, you can’t say that Sophie is an alcoholic! She does drink more than most people, I imagine, but she’s always been highly strung.”

Mrs. Gleewood sniffed. “And where’s your guest?” she snapped. “That Mr. Donald Holtzer, or whatever his name is?”

“I believe he—uh—he went out with Lora,” Turpin said, and tensed, his hackles bristling.

“I see,” Mrs. Gleewood said. “I see! Another scalp, hm?”

“What do you mean?” Bridling—knowing he was expected to, because if he didn’t that would ruin her evening. But it was getting harder and harder to fill his designated rôle.

“Scalps,” Mrs. Gleewood said with satisfied deliberateness. “Pubic scalps. Not yet nineteen, I would remind you, and already she has enough of those to qualify her for a full Indian brave’s head-dress. And, while I’m considering the subject of the children you inflicted on my daughter, may I ask what you’re going to do about Peter’s haemorrhoids?”

Christ! How I’d love to take that scrawy neck and wring it! And I could, I could, I keep myself in good shape, and if I just—

He caught himself, barely in time.

Oh, that reeky turd Sheklov! If he weren’t here, if I hadn’t been compelled to cushion him, I could have rid myself for good of this loathsome, disgusting, incompetent would-be matriarch! As soon as I’m shut of him, I’ll—I’ll …

Only he wouldn’t. He knew he wouldn’t. It would be as hard as curing himself of a habit like smoking or drinking.

He said mildly, “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”

Conscious of having won the exchange. Mrs. Gleewood sniffed. “I wish you wouldn’t talk while I’m trying to watch TV!” she crowed.

And sat back, delighted with the dialogue.

 

Meantime, Turpin had something else on his mind. It was—in a paradoxical sense—unreal, because it had been real to him for so long.

Am I going to be exposed?

The afternoon, and early evening until he managed to get away, which he had spent around the reserved area, had already taken on the dimensions of a dream. Because all the time and under no matter what circumstances he had grown used to behaving exactly as someone in his position was expected to, he had obviously to limit his responses to those that a genuinely loyal and committed executive of Energetics General might convincingly display when faced by a crisis of the current magnitude.

In other words, he had to act as though—whatever he might have said, for instance to Clarke—concerning the factually known political situation within the country, and hence acknowledging the jealousy between the Army and Navy, the constant jockeying for position that never ceased between the various major corporations, always hunting for a larger slice of the Defense Department cake, he had all the right, incontrovertible assumptions. Navy would never act against the country’s best interests! Corporation X, since it draws down DOD funds, must be staffed by the most loyal of directors! The Security Force, being hand-picked, is unquestionably the court of last resort, and we can safely rely on them to clear up this mess. Of course, one has to be on guard all the time because, as was shown in South-East Asia, Latin America, the Philippines, and God knows where else, the other side is subtle, devious, cunning! But far be it from ME to lose confidence in the wisdom of those who have laid down the precepts by which we live, the experts whose love of freedom has defined the degree to which we, the laymen, and our families, must sacrifice liberty to preserve it.

But at the edge of his awareness, even though he was sure he was acting exactly as he ought to in his position, he could hear what Sheklov had said—about there being alien intelligences who could and conceivably would wipe out modern civilisation. Each time he reviewed his recollection of that incredible statement, it acquired new overtones, new resonances due to his subconscious, new implications pregnant with terror.

And here I am being polite to a stupid old woman because I have to maintain my cover. Am I crazy?

The conviction began to grow in his mind.

Yes. Absolutely crazy.

He looked now and then out of the corner of his eye at the smugly self-satisfied Mrs. Gleewood, as though he were an executioner measuring someone in advance for a garrotte.

 

It fitted. It all hung together. Morton Clarke didn’t want to have to believe it, but in the end …

He looked, one final time, at the chart he had drawn on his notepad, linked with arrows: FENELLA CLARKE to MAGDA HANSEN to DANTY WARD to LORA TURPIN to—

No, it had to stop there. It mustn’t go on! Mustn’t! Because somewhere along the line, maybe three stops from now, the chain of reasoning would close, and the name would be his own: MORTON CLARKE.

It had to be broken before it was allowed to extend that far. No one could accuse him of treason.

Slowly, like a martyr hearing the call for his turn at the Colosseum, he rose from his chair and felt inside his jacket for his gun. Government issue. Got to be proved worthy of it. Immediately, before anyone else saw the connections he had just worked out.

He went into the adjacent room, where Fenella was watching Channel 8—no, correction, Channel 9, must have changed over when the commercials came on …

“Hi, Mort honey,” she said. “Come sit down! What you been doing all this time?”

“Traitor,” he said.

“What?”

“Traitor! Fucking traitor! Fucking commie!”

Bang. Bang. Bang-bang-bang-bang.

The gun was empty. Government issue. Six official shells expended. Have to account for them. One should have been enough if he’d come close enough to make it tell.

How to explain to the authorities those five wasted shots?

He sat down beside the chair that her blood was soaking and began to cry, quite unable to think of an excuse.