“What sort of person do you find in this Privacy League?”
“That’s just it—you couldn’t say that any special group or subdivision supports the League. We pick up college professors, clerks, cab-drivers, school kids…right across the board.”
Garrod leaned back in the deep upholstery and stared thoughtfully into the distance. He was learning things on his excursion into the world that still existed and struggled and changed outside his library windows. Manston had been right when he said the tide of public opinion was turning against Retardite, but it appeared that even he was underestimating the speed and growing power of the reaction.
“Personally, I don’t quite understand the public’s antipathy,” he said. “How do you feel about it?”
“Personally,” Pobjoy replied, “I would say it’s a fairly predictable reaction.”
“But what about the drop in crime figures? And the big jump in successful detections and prosecutions? Don’t the public care about that?”
“They do.” Pobjoy grinned with what could have been malice. “You see, it’s the public who break all the laws.”
“Nobody likes to be spied on,” Gilchrist put in unexpectedly.
Garrod opened his mouth to say something, then he remembered that Esther was watching and listening from his lapel, and that he hated her for it. A silence descended over the four men and remained virtually unbroken while the vehicle made its effortless climb into mountain and lake country.
“If you begin to lose money with slow glass,” Pobjoy said in a jovial voice at one point, “you could try that kind of investment, Al.”
Garrod opened his eyes and looked out. They were passing the entrance to a vacation centre, the curving fence of which bore a freshly-painted sign: “HONEYMOON HEIGHTS—100 idyllic acres guaranteed free from slow glass, spyglass, glass eyes, etc.” He closed his eyes again, and the thought entered his mind that where slow glass was concerned the natural order of things was reversed, the legend giving rise to the event. One of the first folk-stories to spring up after the introduction of Retardite was about a salesman who gave a newly-wed couple a Scenedow at a ridiculously low price, then called back a week later and replaced it with an even better one, free of charge. The classically simple-minded couple in the story, pleased at their good fortune, did not know that Retardite worked in both directions, nor that subsequently they were going over big at stag parties. Childish as the yarn was, it illustrated humanity’s basic fear of being watched at those times when, for sound biological as well as social reasons, they wished to be apart from their fellows and unseen.
The limousine stopped for a time in Bingham, where the three members of the expert panel were introduced to representatives of the county police and then had coffee. It was late in the afternoon when they reached the scene of Wescott’s assassination. A section of the road and nearby hillside had been roped off, but the ruined vehicle had been removed and there was little to see apart from heat scars gouged deeply into the surface.
Garrod’s conviction that the investigation was futile returned to him. He spent the best part of an hour tramping around the site, picking up odd droplets of metal under the watchful gaze of a group of reporters who were not allowed inside the roped enclosure. As he had expected, the entire exercise—including a little lecture from Pobjoy about the probable type and positioning of the laser cannon—was valueless. Garrod expressed his growing impatience with the proceedings by sitting on a low outcropping of rock and gazing into the sky. Far above him, in virtual silence, a small white aircraft of the type used in crop-spraying drifted across the blueness.
On the drive back to Augusta somebody switched on a radio and picked up a news broadcast, two items of which were of particular interest to Garrod. One was to the effect that the state attorney’s office had announced substantial progress towards establishing the identity of Senator Wescott’s killer; the other said that the postal workers’ unions had taken their long-expected industrial action over the installation of Retardite monitors in the sorting centres, and therefore no mail was being handled.
Garrod looked squarely at Pobjoy. “What progress has been made?”
“I didn’t say anything about progress,” Pobjoy protested.
“That eager-beaver publicity man again?”
“I expect so. You know how it is.”
Garrod snorted and was about to criticize the organization of some parts of the attorney’s office again when the personal implications of the newly announced postal strike came home to him. The arrangement he had with Esther was that he would send her a set of eye discs by the stratocourier service each night, which meant they would be in Portston every morning in time for her nurse to slip them under the corneas before breakfast. His anger at the degree of neurosis Esther had displayed in forcing the scheme on him made it all the more important that he make some overt effort towards an alternative arrangement. He took a communicator stick from his pocket, turned the slides to Lou Nash’s code and pressed the call button.
Nash’s voice was heard almost immediately. “Mr. Gar-rod?”
“Lou, there’s a post office strike on, so I’m going to have to use you as a mailman while I’m in Augusta.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Garrod.”
“It means flying to Portston every night and coming back in the mornings.”
“No problem—except for the low and slow injunction. Portston Field won’t stay open any later than midnight, which means I’ll have to get out of Augusta by about 19.00 hours.”
Garrod opened his mouth to insist on the airfield being held open, regardless of expense, but an uncharacteristic mood of slyness came over him. He arranged to meet Nash at six o’clock in the hotel, and sat back in his seat with a pleasurable sense of guilt. An evening on his own, off the hook, in a strange city. Esther would demand to know why he had not worn eye discs for the evening but he could argue that her eyes for that day were absorbing the images of Nash’s flight back to Portston, and there was no way she could cram an extra six hours of seeing into a twenty-four hour day. All he had to do now was decide what he would do with this bonus of time, free time. Garrod considered several possibilities, including the theatre or a straightforward mind-annihilating drink, then realized he was deceiving himself—and if he was going to start cheating his wife it was important that he be honest with himself about it.
What he was going to do that evening was, if circumstances permitted, to do his best to bed down with John Mannheim’s silver-lipped secretary.
Garrod pinned the brooch-like disc-holder on to Lou Nash’s lapel, smiled a farewell into the sentient black beads, and watched the pilot walk away across the hotel lobby. It seemed to him that Nash was walking differently, self-consciously, and he got a sudden insight into how his own marriage must look to an outsider. Nash had passed no comment when he learned what the discs were for, but he had been unable to conceal the mystification in his eyes. Why was it, the unspoken question had been, that a man who was in a position to have a beautiful new woman each week, each day, until all strength and desire were sucked out of him remained subject to Esther? Why indeed? Garrod had never thought much about it, usually considering himself a natural monogamist, but supposing the truth was that Esther—money-wise and value-seeking in all transactions—had been clever enough to buy exactly the sort of man she required?