24

 

 

That jolted Murray from apathy to impatience. If he hadn’t been so bemused, he’d have thought of it himself—he had in fact done so, then forgotten the matter of questioning the so-called ‘playwright’ in the all-excluding need to rescue the other members of the company.

He was almost frantic by the time Cromarty had checked the man over and confirmed that he was only slightly hurt. In this case—whatever was true of the rest of the people carried from the house—paleness was due to simple shock, and the routine administration of first aid had already brought him round before Cromarty reached him. Now, he was shivering with terror, his eyes enormous, his skin taut over his teeth so that his lips would not quite meet, and the noise of his repeated swallowing was so loud it could be heard over the racket of the firefighting.

On Cromarty’s nod of permission, Wadeward dropped to one knee beside him and identified himself, then demanded an explanation of the story Murray had told.

The only response was a terrified moan and another attempt to make his lips close.

‘Bastard!’ Murray thundered at him. ‘Talk, damn you! Talk!’

He was so furious he would have kicked the prostrate man, had a pang from his burned sole not prevented him. Cromarty was preoccupied and hadn’t noticed Murray walking on the bandages, or he would doubtless have ordered him to lie down again.

‘It’s no good keeping quiet,’ Heather said suddenly. ‘It won’t help you. They left you to die—don’t you realize that?’

A spark of interest. The terror subsided for an instant and Delgado cocked his head, eyes on her face.

‘They left you to die in room thirteen,’ Heather insisted. ‘Valentine, and—and Victor, and Walter! We don’t know where they are, but they said they weren’t going to stay and be roasted alive. They ran away and left you, and if it hadn’t been for Murray you’d have been burned alive. Don’t you understand? Your bloody stinking friends left you to burn, and Murray saved your worthless dirty horrible disgusting life!’

She was almost crying from the intensity of her emotion when she reached the last word. It broke through Delgado’s armour of fear and naked hatred showed in his grimace.

‘Is that true?’ he whispered, and didn’t wait for the answer. ‘Yes—yes, I remember! I was going to make up that tape Valentine wanted, and then there was a—a shock, and something sparked, and I touched the console and—’

He forced himself abruptly into a sitting position and stared wildly in all directions. His darting gaze settled finally on Murray’s face.

‘You—brought me out of there?’ he croaked.

Murray gave a dispirited nod.

‘But I thought …’ He lapsed into silence, and when he spoke again the anger in his voice was so feral it was frightening to hear it from such a small man, as though one called kitty—kitty! and in response a tiger came purring through the night.

‘Those dirty perverted mother-loving sons of radiated ova. Those heartless gutless sewer-brained sadists. Left me. To burn.’ The words were as level as a machine’s, but they blazed with his rage. ‘Then I’ll leave them something. Let them try and explain this away when the temporegs get hold of them. Let them just try. I’ll bury them to their necks in radiating garbage. I’ll have them wiped till they can’t do more than drool pabulum down their chins. I’ll have them blanked into substates and forbidden redukes. I’ll—’

Substates? Redukes? Triplem? Concentrape? Murray leaned forward and spoke harshly.

‘Save your breath. They can’t hear you. What’s triplem, Delgado?’

The playwright closed his eyes, leaning back on his elbows and letting his body go slack in absolute resignation to his fate.

‘Triplem? That’s micro-miniaturized multicore cable. The stuff you kept tearing off your mattress. You wouldn’t have recognized it—it won’t be developed until 1989.’

There was an instant of absolute discontinuity. At first Murray was able to believe he hadn’t heard correctly—there was, after all, so much row coming from the firefighters around the house …

Then it dropped into place. He had heard right, and it fitted. By God, it fitted exactly. Incredible or not, it made everything into a sensible pattern. So far he was only groping after it, but that one clue made him feel he was on the trail of a solution instead of a multitude of baffling questions.

He said very slowly, ‘And—temporegs? I think that’s what you called them.’

‘Temporal regulators,’ muttered Delgado. ‘A sort of police. And when they catch up with Valentine I hope they—’

‘Substate?’ Murray snapped, leaning forward.

‘An incorrigible adult criminal who’s had his personality wiped because he’s too far gone for psychotherapy.’

‘Redukes?’

‘Re-educational tapes, used to impress a social personality in place of a criminal one.’

‘Concentrape?’ Murray glanced around his other listeners; Cromarty and Wadeward were completely bewildered, but Heather was hanging on his every word with shining eyes.

‘An illegal tape prepared in order to shift the foundations of someone’s existing personality towards another desired orientation.’ Delgado’s answers were recited tonelessly, as a child might mouth a poem memorized but not understood.

‘Conditioner?’ That was the box Valentine had hit him on the head with.

‘A device giving temporary but absolute control over the actions of someone else.’

‘Does this—this conditioner produce a state resembling a hypnotic trance?’

‘It is a hypnotic trance.’

Right. Murray drew a deep breath. ‘Manuel Delgado, when were you born?’

‘Now just a moment,’ Wadeward said, starting forward. ‘I don’t follow the—’

‘Shut up!’ Murray blazed, and repeated his question. There was a tense pause. Finally Delgado licked his lips.

‘After what I’ve told you already—and I hope it’s enough to sterilize Valentine and make his hair fall out and his gums bleed and—’

‘Delgado!’

‘Oh … I was born in year 218 of the World Calendar. By your primitive measurement that would be—uh—about 2429.’

Murray rocked back very gently on his heels. He said, ‘Then I can tell you what you’ve been doing here. You’ve been bootlegging experiences.’

Delgado jerked like a frog’s leg connected to a battery. He said, ‘Now I’m not going to—’

‘You are,’ Murray contradicted firmly. ‘You’re not going to get away with breaking the letter of your—your temporal regulations. You’re going to smash a hole in them so wide you could take one of our primitive motorcars through it—hear me?’

‘But I can’t!’ Delgado wailed. ‘I mustn’t! I—’

Murray loomed over him, projecting with all the force at his command, knowing that this was the performance of his career, with infinitely more at stake than favourable notices and a long run. He said, ‘Delgado! If you don’t tell us the whole truth, I shall pick you up and carry you into that house and put you back where I found you, and not all your futuristic gadgetry will stop me.’

He closed his hand on a fistful of Delgado’s shirt. At the corner of his eye he saw Wadeward framing an interruption, Heather laying a pleading hand to restrain him, Cromarty tapping his glasses on his palm with an air of fascinated incomprehension.

‘But you don’t understand!’ babbled Delgado. ‘If I tell you any more, the things they’ll do to me—’

‘Wipe you?’ Murray snorted contemptuously. ‘It’ll be an improvement, that’s certain! Clean out the dirty corners of that mind of yours! But they aren’t here, are they? And I am! Well, which is it to be—do you talk, or do you go back into that blazing house and roast like a leg of pork?”

‘But if I talk, then I …’ Delgado’s voice faded below audibility. Then he seemed to take a fresh grip on himself.

‘Well, what’s the alternative? There’s nothing to hope for, is there? Stuck here—damn Valentine!—among these stinking backward idiots. If I keep my mouth shut they’ll probably lock me in one of their horrible mental asylums like that girl in Paris—I couldn’t stand that, and at least this is a quick way out …’

‘A quick way out?’ Murray echoed, tightening his grasp on the other’s shirt. ‘Doc, you’d better make sure he hasn’t got a suicide pill!’

Cromarty exclaimed and stepped forward, but Delgado waved him aside with a gesture of arrogant superiority.

‘Poison? Is that what you mean? Oh, I’m not that far deviant—if I’d had suicidal tendencies they’d have wiped them while I was an adolescent. I’m not a self-killer. I’m simply a condemned man.’

He returned his gaze to Murray, and a spark of unaccountable glee flickered behind his sinister eyes.

‘Executioner,’ he said softly. ‘Well, ask away. But I make no promises as to how many questions will get answers.’

‘All of them,’ Murray threatened, ‘or I carry you back in that house as I promised. After the things you’ve tried to do to me—’

‘If you want revenge,’ Delgado sneered, ‘you’ll get it in full measure, and I hope you sleep easily when you’ve enjoyed it. You primitives must have strong stomachs to put up with your ordinary lives, but if this is too much for you then you won’t have the help I can get when I go back each time. You don’t have wipes for loathsome memories—you just have to endure them, don’t you?’

‘Shut up,’ Murray said again. His memory held too many loathsome things for him to stand this line of taunting.

‘Mr Douglas,’ Cromarty put in nervously, ‘there’s one thing I must know before you go any further. How about the others lying here? Since their condition is so—so unusual …’

‘Leave them alone,’ Delgado grunted. ‘Take them to one of your insanitary bedlams or whatever you call them and let them wake up. Nothing’s been done to them beyond reinforcing tendencies already there—they’ll recover in a few weeks or months.’ Once more he glowered at Murray. ‘Thanks to this meddler here!’

Cromarty hesitated, then shrugged. He stared towards the gate, as though he could will the long-delayed ambulances to arrive.

Ignored for the moment, Delgado was running along his previous track. ‘Couldn’t stand it here anyway, so what the hell? Bad enough up there where there are still people who like this kind of thing for a forbidden thrill, but here they glorify it as “art” and talk about it openly and…’

‘What?’ Murray said stonily. There was no reply. After a brief wait, he persisted, ‘Delgado! What are you really?’

‘A—I’ll get the term in a second, they gave me a good vocabulary from the records. … A fall guy. A stooge.’ The blood had drained utterly from his face now, and he was whiter than wax. ‘Didn’t expect to find you so ready to accept the truth, I must say—thought anyone in this benighted century would dismiss it as impossible—but then, that was the trouble with picking you in the first place. I did tell Valentine, but catch him listening to advice!’

‘Stick to the point,’ Murray rapped.

‘Point, yes …’ He was definitely weakening; his words declined to the level of a whisper. ‘Well, then: you know we have means to visit the past, but it’s dangerous and insanitary and illegal and—anyhow, we have the techniques for manipulating the mind, too, and the personality. Some people say it’s the next great step forward, and some people say it’s a living death because the individuals with the greatest endowment of imagination and creativity are also often the least stable, but I don’t take sides in that argument. I’ve merely found out how much I hate the idea of having my mind made over by some official or other to conform with a socially acceptable norm—pretty soon, I guess, you’ll see just how much, too.’ He chuckled as if at some private joke, and sweat beaded his forehead.

‘Now you can’t wipe and reduke the whole population of ten billion-odd, so they do only criminals and voluntary asocial deviants. That leaves plenty who behave in public and misbehave in private. And the machinery you’ve seen is available generally and it’s used for entertainment and—well, like you’re separating from your girl and the last time you bed her you make tapes for each of you to be reminded by. And things …

‘But you can’t get some things you want if you’re a bit deviated. Talk about the healthy primitivism of the past and the sterile boredom of the modern age, and what you mean is you’d like to get drunk, or bed your own sex, or something.’ The coherence of his explanation was failing fast, and Murray felt his brows drawing together in anxiety.

‘So comes Valentine and tries to fill this gap by taping primitives like you—has access to a timer because he works in a plant making them, only two plants on the planet because the temporegs say you don’t without authority. Got one, anyway. Did a dry run, this century—earliest we can empathize with the people. Didn’t work. All that risk for nothing. Meaningless garble on the tapes. Tried next century up—no good either, too modern, too bland and civilized. No drunks, no dope addicts, no big-kick thrills for taping except in back corners of the world where we don’t empathize the people there either.

‘Me.’ He licked his lips. ‘Only clever idea I had in my life, originally as I was. This personality you’ve seen—it was taped on me. I was a mouse with ambitions when I started, and I guess that’s what I’ll be when I finish. Soon, soon …’

He winced, but waved aside Heather when she made to approach him.

‘Actors, I said to Valentine. Get actors. People who live half their lives in their imaginations. Even when they’re bedding each other it’s half to an audience. Unstable types—alcoholic, drugged, sexually fouled up. … And it worked. Tried in Argentina first, made one fortune from the tapes. Ran it in Paris, made two fortunes. Three fortunes he’d made out of my idea, the radiated pig, and leaves me to burn to death while he gets in the timer and runs squalling to safety. Pig, pig Pig!’

Cromarty would have spoken but that Wadeward hushed him.

‘Trying to find out how close we can come to modern times, you see. Next, America—or maybe Sweden. But where the trends are set. China’s too respectable already. But Japan I wanted to use. Yes, Japan …’

This time it was more than a wince that broke off the words, and Heather shuddered. Murray hesitated, not knowing if he should press the weakening man further, and into the hiatus Cromarty thrust a savage exclamation.

‘That man’s ill!’

His hand shot down and twitched aside the blanket in which Delgado had been wrapped against shock, and they saw what penalty he had brought on himself by telling the truth illegally, what he had referred to obliquely during his recital, what he had meant when he said they would need strong stomachs.

Specialist in cancer and gangrene …

Through what diabolical conditioning, through what psychosomatic technique of the future none of them could tell, his body had rotted as he talked. Under the blanket, from chest to ankles, his flesh had dissolved into a liquescent, putrid, utterly revolting slime.

In the distance, shrill and manic as the laughter of devils, there rang out the yammer of the ambulances’ bells.