"But what. Mister Metagov? Brain beginning to stir? How much cash does it take to buy one of those fancy toys?"
A corrosive acid was seeping through Dallen's mind, burning away one world-picture, disclosing another. "Somebody in Madison… Probably somebody in City Hall itself…"
"What were you saying about barbarism a minute ago?"
"But I can't see why," Dallen went on. "There was no reason for. it."
"Maybe a slug of this will get your head working." Sanko took a silver flask from his pocket, came round the table and poured some of its contents into Dallen's mouth. "A Luddite Special is its own reason, man. It only does one job."
"There can't…" Dallen gagged as warm neat liquor reached his throat, but the spasms seemed to accelerate the return of sensation to his limbs. He became aware of a twitching in his calf muscles.
"Your wife and kid must have known something. They must have seen something." Sanko drained the flask and tossed it to one of the armed men who caught it and left the room unbidden. "You're no Sherlock Holmes, are you?"
Dallen wasted no time in speculating who Sherlock Holmes was. He was appalled at his own lack of perception, at the weeks he had wasted, at his unconscious arrogance in assuming that he and his futile, insignificant. Earth-limited activities had been the root cause for what had happened to Cona and Mikel. The alternative theory was that there was a monster roaming loose in Madison City, enjoying the immunity that Dallen had personally gifted to it — but what had been the original crime? What could have been sufficiently serious to justify the erasure of two personalities? Had it been a murder? The circumstances did not fit — nobody had been found dead or reported missing.
"It still doesn't make sense," Dallen said. We don't have any serious crime in Madison."
"I love it!" Sanko laughed aloud, his mouth and the solitary tooth forming a notched dark circle. "Graft doesn't bother anybody in Madison and that means it isn't serious."
"There might be some petty…"
"Listen to me — Madison City is a kind of general store for all the big Independent communities in this part of the world. They come from as far away as Savannah and Jacksonville, any place that can scrape up big money, and it's from Madison they buy their generators, water purifiers, truck engines, whatever. Didn't you know?"
"I know my wife and son weren't involved."
"You're starting to bore me, Dallen. How did you get to Cordele? By car?"
"I flew."
"That's a pity — if you'd come by car we'd have taken it and let you walk back. A flier is no use to us though, so I guess you can take it away as soon as you've thawed out."
It was only then that Dallen realised he had been expecting imprisonment or worse. "You're letting me go?"
Sanko looked exasperated. "Maybe you expected to be cooked and eaten."
"No, but with what I know about Beaumont…" Dallen paused, deciding not to make a case for his detention.
"Try a little experiment," Sanko said, taking Mien's sidearm and dropping it into his own pocket. "When you get back to Madison make out a report saying you heard some non-existent people claiming to have ended the non-existence of some other non-existent people. I'd like to hear what sort of reaction you get."
It was late afternoon when Dallen reached the city. He circled in low over the south-western districts, over Scottish Hill and the immaculate, hermetically sealed suburbs which would later begin to glow in a simulation of life as the lights came on in a thousand empty streets. The tall buildings of the city centre, projecting above vivid toyland greenery, were washed with sunlight and looked impossibly clean, idyllic. A visitor winging down from space might have concluded that here was a community of contented, rational beings leading well-regulated lives — but Dallen's mood was one of disaffection as he picked out the pastel geometries of the City Hall.
His reckless dash to Cordele had, as well as providing vital information, jotted him out of grief-dominated patterns of behaviour, freed him from the emotional conviction that a craving for justice and revenge would, if strongly enough felt, bring about its own ends. He had been reminded that there was no even-handed arbiter, and that the most successful hunters were those who stalked their prey with coldness and calculation.
His ship hovered for a moment, then began its purposeful descent, its shadow a drifting prismatic blur which advanced and retreated according to the lie of the land beneath.
Chapter 9
Gerald Mathieu stood at the window of his office and watched the Bureau patrol ship slant down across the sky for a landing at Madison's inner field. The notion that Carry Dallen might be at the flying controls entered his mind, but he dismissed it and walked back to his desk. Dallen's prolonged absence from the City Hall had been welcome to Mathieu as a breathing space, but it was making him obsessive, giving his subconscious mind too much time to elaborate on the image of a dark superhuman Nemesis.
He had survived his encounter with Dallen immediately after the incident… woman and child, crumpling, fatting, idiot eyes shining… but the circumstances had been exceptional and had not quite dispelled his fear of the other man's intuitive power. Since then that fear had been growing, week by week, and now the prospect of eventually having to face Dallen again ranked with all the other great phobias of his life. There was the dread of venturing into infinite black space, of living in a wafer-thin shell of alien metal, of being exposed as a criminal, of ever having — even once — to exist for a full day without felicitin. And now there was the next meeting with Carry Dallen…
Mathieu sat down at his desk and tried to concentrate on the backlog of work. The job of mayor or deputy in an artificial city bore little resemblance to that traditionally associated with the tides. It was more akin to being executive officer for a very large theme park, and Mathieu's responsibilities ranged from public relations and tourist information to recruitment and purchasing. Even with extensive electronic assistance the job was demanding, especially as the city's annual revenue was in a steady decline, Mathieu had deferred for several days decisions about reducing engineering budgets, but on his way to the office that morning had promised himself good progress. It would be a sign that he was still functioning well, that a single unlucky accident… woman and child crumpling, going down before him, minds blown away… was not going to ruin his entire career.
He called up a set of cost analysis graphs on the desk's main screen and strove to link the varicoloured blocks and lines to external reality. Silent minutes went by. The graphs shimmered on the surface of his eyes, tantalising him by refusing to be drawn into his head. He was beginning to feel a mild panic when the internal communicator chimed and Mayor Bryce-land's features appeared at the projection focus, eyes blindly questing. Taking only a second to smooth down his jacket, Mathieu accepted the call, making himself visible at the caller's terminal.
"Let's have a talk about the conference," Bryceland said at once. "What have you got so far in the way of a programme?"
Mathieu was baffled for a moment, then it dawned on him that Bryceland was referring to a conference of museum city managers which Madison was scheduled to host in the coming November. "I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, Frank," he said. "Perhaps next week…"