III
I stood by the window of Harry's den, holding a glass of brandy which I had not yet tasted. Beyond the window: a copse of trees, snow-covered grass, white-bearded hedgerows. The stark, wintry vista matched my thoughts, as I considered what Harry had told me on the way over.
Melinda had become engaged in writing pamphlets for some revolutionary group and had been under surveillance. Upon the magazine publication of the first part of her biography of my life-the childhood years in the AC complex-she had been arrested for questioning in connection with the death of a copper and the destruction of a howler some two weeks before. Whether there had been any questioning or not, no one would know; she was still under arrest.
The magazine article had not merely been a biography, but had contained scorchingly anti-military, anti-AC anecdotes which neither of us had decided, before my entombment in Child's mind, whether we should risk using or not. She had risked it.
"When is the trial?" I asked him now. We had postponed further discussion until we were warm and comfortable in his den-at his insistence.
"A date has been docketed before the Military Court of Emergency. Next September."
"Seven and a half months!" I turned from the window, furious, slopping brandy over my wrist.
"When the act is labeled treason, there are laws that permit it."
"What's her bail?" I asked.
"There is none."
"Is none?"
"What I said."
"But the law allows-"
He held up his pudgy hand to stop me. He looked terrible, as if telling me this was worse on him than on me. "This is no longer a republic, remember. It is a military state where men like the junta councilmen decide what laws there shall be. For sedition, they now say, there is no bail, and the rule of preventive detention has been extended indefinitely."
"Fight them!" I bellowed. "You fought them for me when-"
"It's different now," he interrupted. "You still don't grasp the situation. I worked the law on them before to get you free. But now they are the law and they can change it to counter one. It's like dancing on quicksand."
I took a chair, and again I was afraid, just a little, down deep where it hardly showed. This was beginning to feel like the inner world of Child's mind, where everything was solid and tangible, but where nothing could be trusted, where solidity could disappear, where liquid could become solid ground beneath the feet.
"She's not the only one," he said, as if mass suffering made her individual plight less important. It only made it more important.
"Let me have the phone," I said, reaching for it.
"Who?"
"Morsfagen."
"This might be a mistake."
"If the sonofabitch wants my esp, wants my work, then he is just going to have to see that she gets out of the Tombs!"
I found the number in Harry's private directory of unlisted phones, dialed it, and waited while a soldier called a noncom to the phone-while the noncom went and got a major who stuttered-and while the major finally went and summoned Morsfagen.
"What is it?" he asked. Cold. Deadly. Forceful. The sound of the well-trained bill collector.
"There's a girl being kept in the Tombs, charged with sedition, for god knows what reason. She-"
"Melinda Thauser," he said, cutting me short. He seemed to enjoy that. Like putting thumbscrews on me.
"I see you're up on things all around. Well, catch this, then. I want her released, and I want all charges dropped against her."
"That's beyond my control," he said-he did.
"It better not be."
"It is."
"It better not be, because you've just lost yourself an esper if it is."
"Services that can be commandeered in time of warlike an esper's services-are never lost," he said. Color him infuriatingly calm, cool, and collected. I wanted to kick his damned teeth in. He probably would still have smiled at me with that smile.
"Services cannot be commandeered unless the craftsman can be found," I said.
"Is this a threat to withhold services from the government in a time of national crisis?" he asked, smiling through every word. Snapping turtle mouth there, looking for one of my incautious fingers.
"Look," I said, trying another tack, "suppose we let the charges ride for the time being. Suppose the only thing that you concede is the bail. A low bail, but she'll still stand trial."
"Out of my control," he said again. But the tone of his voice said that nothing was ever out of his control.
"Like hell!"
"I'm not on the junta, you know."
"Look, Morsfagen, suppose she also destroys the damn book. Now it's the book she's in trouble for, isn't it? The first part of it?"
"With or without the book," he said, "the trouble remains for us. The danger does not lie within the printed page, but within the mind of the man setting words to paper. Or woman, as the case may be. But there isn't any use discussing it. I haven't any say about it. Besides, I've seen her picture, and I'm certain you can wait seven months for that kind of stuff." Voice of the obscene telephone caller, yet still authoritarian. In the back of his throat: unvoiced laughter that will explode when I hang up.
"I know why you're in the military now," I said, my voice deceptively neutral.
"Why is that?" he asked, walking into it.
"When your own manhood is negligible, a gun must at least be a little consolation." And I hung up on the creep.
"That was definitely a mistake," my mentor said.
I picked my coat up and worked into it. "Maybe."
"No maybe about it. Where are you going now?"
"Home, pack some things, and get out. Look, I'll get a message to you so you'll know where I'm at. Wait. Scratch that. I've got a key to Melinda's apartment. If it's still unoccupied, I'll stay there. They'll check hotels right away, so maybe her place is safer. Maybe I'm not as potent a wedge as I think I am. Maybe they really don't need my esp. But I rather think they'll come crawling after a while; it's the only way I can help her."
"You love her?" he asked.
I nodded. I couldn't really say it. Maybe it was still a hangover from my delusions of godhood. Or maybe I was just afraid that her affection did not run as deep as mine.
Perhaps, in a month, she had forgotten me.
"Then hurry," he said. "You might not have much time."
I left his Tudor home under the trees, took one of his two hovercars, and pressed the accelerator half through the floor on the way home. The craft veered from one side of the road to the other as clouds of snow kicked up and stuttered through the blades of the air cushion mechanism, but I didn't hit anyone.
Perhaps the sole reason for Melinda's arrest was her own actions. But I thought not. It seemed too clever a hook in my side to hold me should I ever return from the noman's-land inside of Child. Melinda was the perfect insurance policy, they must have thought, against my temper and foolishness.
I parked the car on my patio and entered the house through the double glass doors, packed two suitcases, and folded the healthy amount of cash in my library lockbox into five different wads in five different pockets. It was all in Western Alliance poscreds, so the rise or fall of any one government could not much affect its value. I took two game pistols out of the collection in the shooting range downstairs, grabbed a box of ammunition for each, and put everything in the car.
As I drove off the patio and down the lane alongside the cliff which overlooks my segment of the Atlantic Ocean, the police made their appearance. At the foot of the drive, eight hundred feet below, a howler pulled into sight, lumbering upward in all its armored glory.
IV
I stopped the hovercar and watched the approaching vehicles, three in alclass="underline" the howler which I had first seen, a crimelab truck full of detection equipment (though what they hoped to find here, I could not guess), and a regular patrol car with two plainclothesmen inside. They were sending heavy guns for a single man, and they had not wasted any time about it. I looked across the road at the woods, the sloping hill leading to other houses in the development, and knew the hovercar would never hold up on that terrain. The beaters need an even surface to work on. In hilly country, the four heavy blades would chew through a rise in the land, twist, slice up through the floor of the cabin and make it nasty for me, to say the least.