“What’s that?”
“Scandal. There can’t be a scandal for any high-ranking Unusual or New Man anyhow, as you well know. But this, plus your position—”
“I’ll resign,” Gram grated, “before I sign that. Five thousand pops alimony a month. She’s insane.” He raised his head and scrutinized Denfeld. “What happens to a woman when she’s getting a separate maintenance or a divorce? She—they—want everything, nailed down or otherwise. The house, the apartments, the car, all the pops in the world—” God, he thought, and rubbed his forehead wearily. To one of his servants he said, “Get me my coffee.”
“Yes sir.” The aide fiddled with the coffee maker, handed him his black, strong espresso cup.
To the aide, and to everyone in the room, Gram said, appealing to them, “What can I do? She’s got me.” He placed the folio of documents in the drawer of his bedside desk. “There’s nothing more to discuss,” he said to Denfeld. “My attorneys will let you know my decision.” He glowered at Denfeld, whom he did not like at all. “Now I have other business.” He nodded to an aide, who put his firm hand on the attorney’s shoulder and guided him toward one of the doors leading out of the bedroom.
After the door had shut behind Denfeld, Gram lay back, meditating and drinking his coffee. If only she’d break a law, he said to himself. Even a traffic law—anything to get her behind in her relationship to the police. If we caught her jaywalking we could make it stick; she could resist arrest, use foul and obscene language in public, be a public menace by virtue of the fact that she had deliberately flouted the law . . . and, he thought, if only Barnes” people could catch her on a felony rap; for example buying and/or drinking alcohol. Then (his own attorneys had explained this) we could hit her with an unfit mother suit, take the children, put the blame on her in a true divorce action—which, under those circumstances, we could make public.
But, as it stood, Irma had too many things on him. A contested divorce would make him look bad indeed, what with what Irma could scrape together out of the gutter.
Picking up his line-one fone he said, “Barnes, I want you to get hold of that cop dame, that Alice Noyes, and send her in here. Maybe you should come along, too.”
Police occifer Noyes headed the team which had been trying, for almost three months, to get something on Irma. Twenty-four hours a day, his wife was monitored by police video and audio gadgetry . . . without her knowledge, of course. In fact, one video camera scanned the happenings in Irma’s bathroom, which unfortunately had not turned up anything to speak of, Everything Irma said, did, everyone she saw, every place she went—all on reels of tape at PSS Central in Denver. And it added up to nothing.
She’s got her own police, he realized gloomily. ExPSS flatheads who roamed about with her when she went shopping or to a party or to Dr. Radcliff, her dentist. I’ve got to get rid of her, he said to himself. I should never have married an Old Man wife. But it had happened long ago, when he did not hold the high position which had become his later on. Every Unusual and every New Man sneered at him in private, and he did not like it; he read thoughts, lots of them, emanating from many, many people, and buried there somewhere lay the contempt.
It was exceptionally great among the New Men.
While he lay waiting for Director Barnes and occifer Noyes, he examined the Times once again, opening it at random to one of its three hundred pages.
And found himself confronted by an article on the Great Ear project . . . an article which called the byline of Amos Ild, a very well-placed New Man: someone Gram could not touch.
Well, the Great Ear experiment is just rolling merrily along, he thought sardonically as he read.Thought to be beyond the scope of probability, work on the first purely electronic telepathic listening device advances at a reassuring rate, officials of McMally Corporation, the designer and builder of Great Ear, as it has come to be called, said today in a press conference attended by many skeptical observers. “When Great Ear goes into operation,” Munro Capp opined, “it will be capable of telepathically monitoring the thought-waves of tens of thousands of persons, and with the ability—not found among Unusuals—to unscramble these enormous flood-tides of . . .
He tossed the newspaper away; it fell with a noisy thump to the deep pile of the carpeted floor. Those New Men bastards, he said savagely to himself, his teeth grinding impotently. They’ll pour billions of pops into it, and after Great Ear they’ll build a device which can replace precog Unusuals, then all the rest, one by one. There’ll be poltergeist machines rolling along the streets and buzzing through the air. We won’t be needed.
And . . . instead of the strong and stable two-party government which they now had, there would be a one-party system, a monolithic monster with New Men holding all key posts, at all levels. Goodbye to Civil Service—except to tests for New Man cortical activity, that double-domed neutrologics with such postulates as, A thing is equal to its opposite and the greater the discrepancy, the greater the congruity. Christ!
Maybe, he thought, the whole structure of New Man thought is a gigantic put-on. We can’t understand it; the Old Men can’t understand it; we take their word for it that it’s a whole new step upward in the evolution of human brain-functioning. Admittedly, there are those Rogers nodes, or whatever. There is a physical, different structure of their cerebral cortex. But . . .
One of his intercoms clicked on. “Director Barnes and a woman police occifer are—”
“Send them in,” Gram said. He leaned back, made himself comfortable, folded his arms and waited.
Waited to tell them his new idea.
Chapter 5
At eight-thirty in the morning, Nicholas Appleton showed up at his job and prepared to begin the day.
The sun shone down on his shop, his little building. Therein he rolled up his sleeves, put on his magnifying glasses, and plugged in the heating iron.
His boss, Earl Zeta, stumped up to him, hands in the pockets of his khaki trousers, an Italian cigar dangling from his overgrown lips. “What say, Nick?”
“We won’t know for a couple of days,” Nick said. “They’re going to mail us the results.”
“Oh yeah, your kid.” Zeta put a dark, large paw on Nick’s shoulder. “You’re cutting the grooves too light,” he said. “I want them down into the casing. Into the damn carcass.”
Nick, protestingly, said, “But if I go any deeper—” The tire will blow if they back over a warm match, he said to himself. It’s equal to shooting them down with a laser rifle. “Okay,” he said, the fighting strength oozing out of him; after all Earl Zeta was the boss. “I’ll go deeper,” he said, “until the iron comes out the other side.”
“You do that and you’re fired,” Zeta said.
“Your philosophy is that once they buy the squirt—”
“When their three wheels hit the public pavement,” Zeta said, “our responsibility ends. After that, whatever happens to them is their own business.”
Nick had not wanted to be a tire regroover . . . a man who took a bald tire and, with the red hot iron, carved new grooves deeper and deeper into the tire, making it look adequate. Making it look as if it had all the tread it needed. He had inherited the craft from his father, who had learned it from his own father. Down the years, father, to son; hating it as he did, Nick knew one thing: he was a superb tire regroover and always would be. Zeta was wrong; he already burned deeply enough. I’m the artist, he thought; I should decide how deep the grooves should go.