“What are the advantages?”
He looked at me quizzically. He’d caught himself running on and suddenly thought better of it. I was afraid he’d clam up completely, but he said: “I don’t know what it is I’m getting myself into.”
“You’re not getting yourself into anything. I’ll walk out of here and you’ll be two bills richer. What are the advantages of the modifier?”
He rubbed at his forehead with pinched fingers, and I could see him swallow hard. “Your man is a doctor, or he’s got a doctor helping him out. Or he’s very stupid. Anytime you try to regulate Forgettol, it’s a delicate balancing act. Someday they’ll work it out, but they haven’t yet.” He smiled a funny smile. “If he’s doing it right, he can eradicate whole portions of his experience with the make, then sew up the gap for a sense of continuity. That would be the point: to be busy at things you don’t want ever to think about. No return of what’s repressed. That’s if he’s doing it right, which he isn’t. Because it can’t be controlled like that.” He looked at me angrily. “If that’s all…”
“Not quite.” I dug in my hip pocket and came up with the folded hundred-dollar bill full of make scooped off Pansy Greenleaf’s night table. It was a payoff and a container all in one. “Take a look at this,” I said, sliding it across the counter.
His goggle eyes darted from my face to the packet a couple of times, and then his curiosity or greed got the better of him, and he took it to the microscope. I leaned across the counter and watched. He glared up at me from the eyepiece of the microscope and then started flipping through a reference volume that was open on the table. He went from viewer to book to monitor, then scooped the make into a manila envelope and put it back on the counter. The hundred had vanished.
“I wouldn’t go showing that around if I were you,” he said carefully.
“What is it?”
“Blanketrol. A controlled ingredient. Put it away.”
“What does it do?”
The lines on his forehead doubled. “I’ll tell you about Blanketrol,” he said, “and then I want you to take it and go. I’ll pretend I don’t think you know all about it already.”
“Whatever makes you happy.”
“Blanketrol is very crude stuff,” he said. “It was the original prototype for Forgettol. They withdrew it when they found out it was completely hollowing out the inner life of the test subjects. The users went on functioning, but just by rote.” He pinched at the nose of his glasses again. “Think of it as the opposite of déjà vu—nothing reminds you of anything, not even of itself.”
“Lovely.”
“I’m glad you think so. Now put it away, give me my money, and get out before I call the Office.”
I looked up into his magnified eyes, and they blinked away from the contact. I took the packet and put it in my pocket. The makery sickened me suddenly, and nothing seemed lower or dirtier than this owl-eyed little germ of a maker sententiously deeming one ingredient more legitimate than another. I reached across the counter and got him by the collar before either one of us had any idea what I was doing.
I improvised. “Keep your half of the money,” I said. “And I’ll keep mine. I’ll need your help again before too long. If you want to call the Office, go ahead. I think we both understand why that wouldn’t be such a bright idea. See you in a day or two.” I pushed him away from the counter, then buttoned up my coat and went outside without giving him a chance to say anything back.
When I got into my car, I rolled down the window and sat there for a minute, the wind whistling through the grille and pushing a series of brittle leaves over the hood and away up into the hills. My mood was sour. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of a case where the only thing I had to go on was the different drugs the principals took. Reminded me too much of my life.
I felt in my pocket for the new vial of make, just to be sure it was there. It was—and so was the packet of Blanketrol. I thought for a long, bleak minute about using it, and then I took it out and opened the car door and scattered it into the gutter.
CHAPTER 16
THE ADDRESS PHONEBLUM HAD GIVEN ME TURNED OUT TO be a house in the hills, and this house in particular had one hill all to itself. It was pretty impressive. But as I walked up to it in the darkness, I saw the luminous glow of holographic projectors on both sides of the pathway, and when I crossed the beam, the house dissipated into the night, to reveal a tin-roofed stairwell jutting out of the ground like a subway entrance. I turned the handle and opened the door. The steps were carpeted with orange Astro Turf, and there was illegible graffiti scrawled and then rubbed out on the walls. Phoneblum disappointed fast. I might have stopped and scrawled something myself, but I was already late for my appointment, and besides, I couldn’t think of anything to write. Maybe on the way out.
At the bottom of the steps was a harshly lit concrete floor. I could make out a shadow crossing back and forth in front of what must have been an unshaded bulb, nothing more. I went halfway down the steps, and a pair of feet came into view, peeking out from underneath some kind of table or desk. They tapped out a lackadaisical rhythm on the concrete. I went the rest of the way down the steps.
The guy behind the desk couldn’t have been more than fifty, but his face was all blossomed with red, as if his veins were working their way out of his skin in some sort of escape bid. Once I caught a whiff of his breath, I didn’t blame them. The smell infiltrated my nose and started tugging on my nostril hairs. If this was Phoneblum, our conversation wasn’t going to last very long, and if it wasn’t, I understood why the guy had been retired to an underground desk. He wouldn’t have been much use in the field: the breath was an unmistakable tattoo, the ultimate fingerprint. The guy smiled to let more of it out of the corners of his mouth, and I almost fainted. He looked pleased to see me, and when the gun muzzle bumped into my spine, I understood his confidence.
The gun turned out to be attached to the kangaroo. He kept the nose of it pressed into my back while he worked over my pockets with his front paw. I lifted my arms and waited for him to finish. When he came to the pocket with the vial of make, he reached in and drew it out. I watched over my shoulder as he tried to read the label, his furry brow knit in concentration, his throat bobbing as he worked out the syllables subvocally. I grabbed it and slipped it back in my pocket to put him out of his misery.
He pushed me forward with a thump on the shoulder and said: “He’s clean.” I think he was disappointed at not finding an excuse to kick me in the stomach.
“Good,” said the man at the desk, smiling again. “Take him down.”
The kangaroo put his hand on the back of my neck and guided me down the hallway and through a couple of doors and into a waiting elevator. We got in and turned around to face the door, ignoring each other like real passengers in a normal elevator—except for the gun in his hand. After his humiliation at the front of my apartment building, the kangaroo was pretending he didn’t know me. It suited me fine.
We sank slowly past a couple of levels and hit bottom with a grinding of gears and a rattle of chains. The door opened, and the kangaroo pushed me out into the living room of what had to be Phoneblum’s hideaway.
The place was mocked up to suggest the house that must once upon a time have existed on top, where now there was only the hologram. Antique furniture was arranged in a broad circle around an authentic-looking fireplace, and there were even logs piled to one side, so maybe it wasn’t just for show. The ceiling was scrolled with ornate plasterwork, but I couldn’t avoid the feeling that this was just an attentive detail on an old-time movie set. It was more thorough than most fakes, that’s all. There were curtains, but I could see there weren’t any windows behind them. If there had been windows, they would have opened onto dirt and earthworms, like a science-class diorama. It would have been interesting, but I guess it wasn’t quite the effect they were after.