The Jagged Orbit Page 9

  “So it occurred to me,” Voigt put in, “that the services of one of the most brilliant talents ever to handle the visual media might not inappropriately be engaged by the nearest surviving counterpart on blank-run channels of the programs he has been accustomed to prepare in his—ah—former environment. Especially since our computer analyses, Mr. Prior, indicate that some time around now your principal’s temperament is liable to get him into a certain amount of trouble with the Holocosmic directorate.”

  The sly old fox! Prior shook his head in reluctant admiration. The PCC might be a dead letter, but Eugene Voigt certainly was not. There were so many possibilities inherent in the proposal just made to him that his head was spinning. If worse came to worst and Flamen stupidly involved himself in a quarrel with Holocosmic, it would be a marvelous lifeline to be associated with Diablo; talent like his would remain salable indefinitely. In point of fact, however, it seemed unlikely things would come to such a pass. Assuming Diablo really was as angry with his former boss as Campbell believed, why shouldn’t a joint Flamen-Diablo show become the only program which could tackle knee scandals as well as blank ones? That would bring the audience rushing back by the tens of millions—people like Nora, for instance, and his neighbors, half-fascinated and half-repelled by the walking talking aliens against whose depredations they had to be on guard night and day. …

  And with a prospect like that before them, the Holocosmic directorate would change their minds instantly about trying to squeeze the Flamen show off the beams.

  But Prior retained his professional presence of mind. Aloud he said, “Well, naturally, Mr. Voigt, it’s always a privilege to cooperate with a request from a governmental agency. However, you’ll understand that I can’t commit myself to anything without consulting my principal, and I’ll certainly need a rundown on the legal situation before I—”

  “If you need computer time,” Campbell interrupted, “just ask. Candidly, Mr. Prior, we want to get Diablo off our backs fast—I mean, of course, we want to see him settled into a slot where no court in the world could deny that he was being offered the sort of opportunities to pursue his profession which the wording of the Blackbury contract might have led him to expect. Salary is no problem; if we had to, we could cheerfully pension the entire population of all the enclaves at the income level they can currently command. But as I told you, it’s not just a matter of salary.”

  Prior swallowed hard. He had a vaguely dream-like sensation, as though he had inadvertently imbibed a very small dose of a hallucinogen.

  He tossed caution to the winds and came straight out with the nub of his problem.

  “Mr. Voigt, Matthew thinks that Holocosmic is—uh—conniving at the interference with our show because they’d like to have another all-advertising slot in its place and would welcome a chance to break the contract they have with us. I wonder whether this offer of Federal computer time might extend to assisting us in our attempts to evaluate the trouble?”

  “Why, by all means, Mr. Prior,” Voigt said blandly. “To exceed their present advertising schedule would be to infringe the Planetary Communications Charter, and that we could not possibly permit.”

  Exultantly Prior made a private promise to buy Voigt his next pair of ears.

  “It’s a deal,” he said aloud. “Yes, sir—it is most definitely a deal.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  MANNERED SCRIPT, FOUND ON A BOTTLE

  Active Ingredient

  R 250 mg. per capsule di-psycho-coca-3,2-parabufotenine tartrate hexitol complex in an anhydrous buffering medium and neutral gelatin shells

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  IF YOU’RE STUCK WITH A FIASCO YOU MIGHT AS WELL MAKE SPECTACLES OF YOURSELVES SO THAT AT LEAST YOU’LL HAVE SOME GLASSES TO POUR THE CONTENTS INTO

  Following the departure of Lyla and Flamen there was a dejected silence. Eventually Dan said, with a desperate air of salving what he could from a wreck, “Well, Dr. Spoelstra, I can only assume it was the special conditions of working in a mental hospital which threw Lyla out of her regular orbit. I hope you won’t judge—”

  “Hello! Why such long faces? I thought the show was a tremendous success!”

  They all turned to see who had spoken. Reedeth had appeared in the doorway and was advancing with fingers bunched to blow a kiss at Ariadne.

  “What more could you ask of a pythoness,” he went on, “than oracles so clear you don’t have to crack your skull over them? You must be Dan Kazer, I guess—the mackero? Glad to meet you. My name’s James Reedeth and I work here. I gather your young lady friend was a big hit with Matthew Flamen, hm? Seeing that they left together, I forecast a personal appearance on three-vee, planetwide exposure, and as a result—”

  “Jim, you’re manic!” Ariadne exclaimed. “What’s got into you? Freeze it! I’m not in the mood.”

  “Wrong. You think you’re not, but actually you are. I should have guessed that myself but it took a pythoness to show me the truth. Regardless of whether Ariadne is in touch with you again, Mr. Kazer, I assure you I will be.”

  “Jim, shut up!” Ariadne cried.

  “I will not. It’s your own fault. You forbade me to attend the session in person, didn’t you? If you’d allowed me to join in you might have found out something as revealing about me as I did about you. Tell me, though, Mr. Kazer, why did you slap her face and bring her out of trance?”

  Horribly embarrassed because it was obvious from Ariadne’s expression how upset she was by Reedeth’s behavior, Dan said uncertainly, “Well—ah … Well, you noticed how after the first couple of oracles she lapsed into a recurrent cycle: ‘as I was doing such and such I met a man who this and that’? That’s what they call an echo-trap. You can’t let that kind of thing go on. I’ve heard of pythonesses who got stuck in one of those and never came out again.”

  “I see,” Reedeth nodded. “Funny—I’d never thought of pythonesses being subject to professional hazards before. But then, I guess I never took them very seriously. After today, though, I assure you I won’t underestimate them again.”

  Dan gave a wan smile of appreciation. There was a pause. When it was clear nothing further was going to be said, he gathered up his recorder and addressed Ariadne.

  “I take it the fee for—”

  “It’ll be forwarded as arranged,” Ariadne snapped.

  “Well … Well, then that’s all, I guess. Good afternoon.”

  The moment he had disappeared, Ariadne spun to face Reedeth. “And what’s got into you?” she blazed. “Don’t I have enough problems without you acting like a fool? Flamen just threatened to take his wife away!”

  “Why should that bother you? She’s here under private contract, isn’t she? So we’d make a fat profit on the deal. Besides, any man who genuinely cared about his wife would feel the same way after she’d had a few months of treatment here.”

  “Jim!” Horrified, she went white. “Dr. Mogshack may be listening!”

  “Not to what we’re saying, he isn’t. I had Harry Madison in to repair my desketary this morning, and he’s fixed it up with some interesting new gimmicks. Go on—get it off your chest without worrying. There’s no one to hear you but me.”

  She stared at him for long moments, mouth ajar. When he put out his hand to take hers and lead her away, she followed him like a trusting child.

  THIRTY-NINE

  THOUGHT PASSING REPEATEDLY THROUGH THE MIND OF CAPTAIN GORDON K. LORIMER ON HIS WAY HOME AFTER SUPERVISING THE AFTERNOON EXERCISE OF THE CITIZENS’ DEFENSE GROUP TO WHICH LIONEL PRIOR BELONGS

  “What in the hell is the good of trying to maintain internal security if Immigration goes and does something as stupid as letting Morton Lenigo into the country? And when you run across a bunch of half-assed incompetents like I did this afternoon …”

  FORTY

  THE FLIGHT OF THE SPOOLPIGEON

  I’m the one who’s out of his skull, Flamen thought as he keyed the controls of the skimmer to the state traffic computers and waited for the
m to find him a slot in the pattern. What was the penalty tag for breaking the month-to-month contract for Celia’s hospitalization—a quarter-million, wasn’t it?

  “As though I didn’t have enough trouble already,” he muttered.

  Beside him, shrunk back into the corner of the seat like a frightened bird, Lyla played with the hem of her yash and either failed to hear or ignored him.

  When the skimmer lifted clear of the encircling towers, however, she exhaled loudly and relaxed. Flamen glanced at her.

  “What made you decide to mention my wife?” he demanded.

  “When? Oh, you mean while I was prophesying. Did I?”

  Flamen sighed. “I wish I knew what to make of all this! Are you just a clever actress? Is it all a first-rate con job? I knew I’d heard the name Dan Kazer before somewhere, and I placed it as we were coming away. He used to mack for Michaela Baxendale, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “He parlayed her into a fortune, but she stayed a phoney. Always will. Looks like she didn’t even have the grace to share a slice of her profits with the guy who launched her. Ever met her?”

  “No. Dan doesn’t even like talking about her very much.”

  “That I’m not surprised at. She purely and simply disgusts me.” For the latest of many times he considered, and dismissed, the idea of doing a piece about her on the show. There was nothing he could reveal about her, no matter how nasty, which didn’t accord with the image the public already had of her.

  Anyway, if things went on as they were going at the moment there wouldn’t be a Matthew Flamen show for long. What it would be like trying to deal with Prior tomorrow morning when, on top of today’s quarrel, he discovered that there was material scheduled about which he hadn’t been consulted, and which hadn’t even been comped for acceptability before it was put down, he hardly dared to think.

  But he was still determined to use the item. He’d got some excellent tape; it should be worth a good four minutes.

  Besides, being offered such publicity might help to mollify Mogshack and his colleagues if they’d been offended by his crack about Celia.

  And yet: Celia … He shook his head. It was no good trying to pretend he was heartbroken at their separation, nor even making out that he had been surprised when it proved necessary to commit her. For months she had seemed to come alive only when a fight broke out between them, and that wasn’t normal on anyone’s scale of values. Nonetheless, it had come as a terrible shock to find that she was as chilly with him, still her husband, as she might have been with a total stranger who was trying to pick her up.

  Beside him, Lyla was fidgeting with something. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her remove from the pocket of her Nix the small flat bottle he had caught a glimpse of earlier and make to slip it into the pouch of her yash.

  “What’s in those things?” he demanded.

  “You mean the sibs?”

  “Sibs?”

  “Short for ‘sibyl-pills.’ Here you are.” She handed him the bottle. It bore a gaudy yellow label on which was printed the name of a famous pharmaceutical company.

  Flamen read the wording slowly.

  “My God! If that’s what I think it is—! You honestly mean you took two-fifty mg’s of this stuff less than an hour ago and you walked out on your own two feet?”

  “It sort of gets burned up during the trance, I guess. But it is pretty fierce for someone who isn’t used to it. Dan tried one once and went into such a high orbit I thought he’d never come down. Maybe he didn’t. Slapping me out of trance—the damned fool!”

  “And you buy this stuff at the drugstore?”

  “Well, it’s not something I’d care to home-brew on the kitchen stove!” Lyla said tartly. “It’s supposed to have been made up to the formula of Diana Spitz, the first of the great pythonesses—back before the turn of the century, someone told me.”

  Genuinely awed, Flamen passed the bottle back. “Okay, I believe you. You don’t know what you’re saying when you’re in trance. Nobody could stay conscious under a load like that.”

  “So tell me what I’m supposed to have said about your wife. And why should I have mentioned her, anyway?”

  “She was right there in the audience.”

  “You mean the doctor who …? Oh, no!” Lyla’s eyes rounded enormously. “Oh, Lord! I’m dreadfully sorry, Mr. Flamen. I was—uh—distracted. It simply didn’t register. Is it something very serious?”

  “When they took her in, they assured me it wasn’t. But—but damn it! I know my own wife better than any doctor ever could, and experts or no experts I say she’s not better since she went into the Ginsberg, but worse. Come to think of it …”

  Now what would be the consequences if it were shown that one of Mogshack’s patients had actually deteriorated as a result of his treatment? A rising tide of excitement filled Flamen’s mind. He hadn’t tackled a sacred cow of that size since—well, perhaps since the affair which had secured him promotion from local station work to network transmissions, five years ago.

  “Yes,” he said aloud. “Yes, I’m going to do that! It’s high time someone tore the beard off Dr. Mogshack!”

  “Then you can start by telling people there’s a man in the Ginsberg who’s more rational than the director.”

  “What? Who?” Flamen jerked his head around.

  Lyla had put her hands to her temples and was swaying giddily. “I—I don’t know. I guess maybe this time I didn’t burn the sib up, what with Dan slapping me awake. I heard myself say that, but I don’t know why I said it and I don’t know who I meant.”

  “One of the patients?”

  “I … Yes.” Lyla tried to rub her forehead, through the encumbering hood of the yash, found she couldn’t, and in a fit of rage tore the clumsy garment off. “Oh, stuff this thing! Dan says I have to wear it all the time because otherwise the insurance on me isn’t valid, but he doesn’t have to walk around half suffocated! Christ, I’m so frightened all of a sudden. I never had a hangover after a trance before. Do you have a trank on board?”

  “Sure!” Flamen punched the dispenser key. She seized the pill and choked it down.

  “Gone,” she said eventually. “Sorry. I’d have liked to tell you more but I couldn’t stand the pressure.”

  Flamen hesitated. “You disliked the Ginsberg, that’s obvious,” he said at length.

  “It makes my guts churn.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Lyla’s voice was steady again now, and she considered the question dispassionately. “I didn’t like the atmosphere there when I arrived. Dan said it had something to do with the patients’ skin-secretions, but it wasn’t so much something I could smell as … Oh, I can’t define it.”

  “Are pythonesses sensitive to things other people don’t notice, even without going into trance?”

  “Well, I guess I do sense things sometimes. But so do friends of mine who aren’t pythonesses.”

  There was a pause. During it Flamen considered various ways in which he could put a cat among Mogshack’s pigeons, and reached the depressing conclusion that if he did want to prove that the treatment she was being given had made Celia worse instead of better he’d probably have to have her packled. And personality analog computer logging was hideously expensive, ordinarily reserved for individuals such as government officials or senior executives of giant corporations on whose clear thinking depended the fate of millions.

  Still, perhaps his own computers might suggest an alternative; they weren’t the best in the world, but certainly they were exceptionally well stocked with information. And there was also that tantalizing hint Lyla had just dropped, about there being a saner man than the director in the Ginsberg. That might indicate a line to follow.

  “Can you ever figure out what your oracles mean?” he inquired.

  “Oh, sometimes. I’m pretty well acquainted with the shorthand my subconscious uses.”

  “Do you think you could identify the person you mentione
d a moment ago, the man who’s more rational than Mogshack?”

  Lyla considered the question with a doubtful expression. “I never met any of today’s audience before,” she said at last. “But I suppose I might just possibly be able to spot a useful clue. I’d have to hear the tape, of course … Say, that’s a point. Do you think I could hear yours? Lord only knows when Dan will get home with the recording he made.”

  “Surely you can. Now, if you like. I think it’s only fair to show it to you before it’s transmitted, in case there’s something you’d like me to avoid using. Ah—that is, if you don’t mind coming to my place on your own …?”

  Lyla gave a wry chuckle. “Think I’m a neo-puritan? It’s a luxury I couldn’t afford.”

  “Yes, I guess it is,” Flamen nodded. “It’s not the attitude, but the upkeep. Hmmm! I hadn’t thought of it like that, but it figures: the extra clothes you buy with more fabric in them, the extra comwebs so you never have to be alone in a room with anyone but deal with them at a distance—”

  “I wasn’t thinking of that,” Lyla interrupted. “I meant you just can’t have a puritan pythoness. The subconscious is completely amoral, isn’t it? It tells the truth, and … Well, like they say, ‘truth is a naked lady.’ If I could get away with it, I’d take that literally and never wear anything but jewelry—not even Nix like these. It’s astonishing how much it helps. … I’ll tell you something very odd to prove it. I was sent to this very proper school, with uniforms and everything—incredibly Victorian—and I never had the slightest suspicion that I might be a pythoness until I ran away from it. I came to New York, I hadn’t any money, I was sleeping on strangers’ floors, I was practically in rags because my clothes were wearing out, and all of a sudden when I was wearing more dirt than cloth, bang. There was the talent. It sort of scared me at first, but I adjusted. And eventually, after I met Dan, I started to figure out how I could encourage it.”