Ben fled, his face burning, while the janitor shouted after him, ‘—pitchers of guys fuckin’ clocks, watches maybe, guys wid moustaches? Yeah? And what’s that mean, DALI LAID DIAL, what the fuck’s that m—?’
Sounds of pain, sounds of rain. O’Smith opened his eyes to the sight of two people in white, arguing.
‘…wasn’t on duty when he came in, doctor. So if you want to blame somebody…’
‘Not a question of blame, it’s just procedure, that’s all. We send all John Does to City…’
‘Yes but Nancy said…’
‘Not as if we’re not overcrowded as it is what with the flu epidemic… AH! HOW’S IT GOING, FELLA?’
O’Smith automatically reached out to shake his hand and found that he was not reaching after all. His right arm was missing.
‘Where’s my durn arm?’
‘Your ah, prosthesis, well we had a little problem there, the car pretty much wrecked it. But don’t worry, get you fixed up with a new one just as soon as—’
‘Where is it? Where’s my durn arm?’
‘Are you insured, sir?’ The nurse was shoving a form in front of his eyes, wasn’t that his arm she was holding it with? ‘If we could just have your name and policy number — God! Ow! Jesus!’
Someone shouted, crepe soles came flapping down the street, arms holding him, hands prying his jaws away from his own arm the nurse was wearing, what was a nurse doing inside this form anyways? Stabbed, he fell back, take it slow boy, wait your time, Brazos grinning at him as he heard some folks talking clear over in Galveston…
‘…gave him fifty ccs, doc, okay?’
‘Great, yeah, Nora, how’s that thumb?’
‘I’m… all right, doctor… guess it’s my own darn fault, mine and Nancy’s…’
Galveston, gal-with-a-vest-on, where was the durn armhole, he couldn’t get his arm through, what was that durn muzzle velocity…
‘Galveston,’ he said.
‘Better send this joker up to Section 23, right? Before he kills somebody, getting ’em all this week, you see the girl in B ward, the cast change? Hysterics, you’d think we were talking her leg off… said it took her ages to get all those names on the old one… Give him another fifty, Al, he’s still twitching. Talk about prosthesis overdependency, a paradox, Nora, a para…’
‘Oh you and your paradoxes! Dr Coppola, sometimes I think you read just a little bit too much…’
‘Like to keep up, right? Sure the admissions procedure is paradoxical but isn’t life itself?’
‘…’
‘…like in this Graham Greene yarn I’m reading… offers to sacrifice his own soul for the salvation of souls, but does that include his own or what?’
‘…always springing these egghead stories…’
‘…same with admissions… uninsured creep gets in we end up keeping him until he pays, only how can he pay if he can’t get out to work? Fairer not to let ’em in in the first pl…’
‘Have you looked at the corner patient, doctor? Nancy says either something’s wrong with the monitor or he has a temperature of 2 million…’
‘…try to get any maintenance done around here, might as well be asking for… yeah when I checked it read minus 3 million, B.P. 80 over zero…’
Fighting his way through Galveston one arm tied behind him, only it was somebody else’s arm, that old body in Florida reaching for his 12-gauge, Brazos looking surprised as the fully-automatic armhole opened up, bap you’re dead, bap you’re dead again…
They watched him sink into sleep and then made their way to Reception, where the pretty receptionist with all the hair was saying to a black doctor:
‘Sure, but I mean it don’t hardly seem fair, two doctors on the same ward with the same darn name almost!’
‘It’s easy, though, look: I’m Dr De’Ath, he’s Dr D’Eath. I’m black, he’s white. I specialize in epidemiology, he specializes in cardiology. I—’
‘Yeah I know but—’
‘Look: he’s building a robot to test artificial hearts, I don’t know one end of a soldering iron from the other, okay? So what’s the problem? What’s the big problem?’
Chief Dobbin opened the press conference by reading from a prepared statement that began: ‘I took one look and knew she was trouble with a capital T. This little lady happened to be very, very dead.’
A reporter in the back groaned and turned off his recorder. ‘Here we go, another literary treat.’
‘With a capital T,’ said his neighbour. ‘Ain’t we gonna get a look at the suspect?’ He cupped his hands and called, ‘SUSPECT!’
‘All in good time, boys. “I asked myself why? Why would any sane human being…’”
‘Probably be a chapter in his book,’ said the first reporter, punching buttons on his pocket reminder. ‘Never heard of a fucking deadline.’
His neighbour, who was older, stopped picking his teeth to say, ‘Deadline? I thought you was on the Caribou, since when they meet deadlines on that shit-sheet? You wait till you graduate and try meeting a real deadline on a real paper.’
The boy was silent for a moment, pretending to study his reminder while Dobbin droned on. ‘Okay,’ he whispered finally. ‘How about a little help from an expert then, okay? Like what angle you got on this?’
‘Angle? Sex, of course. It’s a natural here, this Fong guy is ethnic, a creepy scientist, what more do you want?’
‘I meant, uh, you think he really—?’
‘What the hell difference does that make, look, they found the dead girl with her leg cut off, blood all over the place, and in her hand was this book covered with his finger-prints, may not be enough for a court-room but it sure as hell works out fine on the front page. Forget about did he do it, get down to work on why? Why, why, as our police colleague likes to say.’ He picked a morsel from a back tooth and examined it before flicking it away. ‘Listen you try this for size: I’m doing a think piece to go with this story, on how all these cybernetics guys are repressed faggots, sadists and what have you. This a.m. I picked up a coupla their magazines, got a list here somewhere of some of the kinky words they use, strong sex angle running right through it, listen to this, bit, byte, RAM, how about those?’
‘I don’t know, they ain’t got much on him—’
‘Gang punch, flip-flop, input, what do you think that really means, huh? Stand-alone software, how about that? Debugger, you can’t make it plainer, and even the company names, how about Polymorphic Systems, how about The Digital Group? Or Texas Instruments, ever wonder what a Texas Instrument is? Or a Honeywell? IBM, says a lot there…’
Someone held up a little camera. ‘Keep it down, you guys, just while I get this live, he’s gonna show us the book.’
O’Smith woke up feeling just fine, sitting in a fine little parlour with a lot of fine folks, still no arm but what the hell. There was Chief Dobbin’s face beaming at him from the teevee, life wasn’t so bad.
This is the book that cracked this caper wide open. Learning Systems, we thought at first it was an educationalism book but we got our library experts to work on it and — here, I’ll show you a page — pure computers. So then we traced it to Dr Lee Fong of the Computer Science Department, found out he was on campus on the night in question. We put him under blanket surveillance, must of surveilled him for a week before he made a false move. He burned some documents and tried to make a run for it. We got him at the airport.