She gazed at his image with such intensity he fancied for a moment he could see himself from her point of view: a lean dark man with a broken nose, wearing a black jerkin and a white collar ornamented with little gilt crosses. Eventually she shook her head, as though her mind were too full of recent horror to leave room for any new shocks.
Gently he explained again, and this time she connected.
“You mean,” she forced out, “you’ll call the croakers?”
“Of course not. But they must be looking for you now in any case. And since you’ve admitted what you did over my mikes … Do you understand?”
Her face crumpled. She let fall her knife with a tinkling sound that the pickups caught, faint as fairy bells. A few seconds, and she was crying anew.
“Wait there,” he said. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”
RECESS
A sharp wind tasting of winter blew over the hills surrounding Tarnover and broke red and gold leaves off the trees, but the sky was clear and the sun was bright. Waiting his turn in line at the best of the establishment’s twenty restaurants, redolent of old-fashioned luxury up to and including portions of ready-heated food on open display, Hartz gazed admiringly at the view.
“Beautiful,” he said at length. “Just beautiful.”
“Hm?” Freeman had been pressing his skin on both temples toward the back of his head, as though attempting to squeeze out overpowering weariness. Now he glanced at the window and agreed, “Oh—yes, I guess it is. I don’t get too much time to notice it these days.”
“You seem tired,” Hartz said sympathetically. “And I’m not surprised. You have a tough job on your hands.”
“And a slow one. Nine hours per day, in segments of three hours each. It gets wearing.”
“But it has to be done.”
“Yes, it has to be done.”
HOW TO GROW DELPHINIUMS
It works, approximately, like this.
First you corner a large—if possible, a very large—number of people who, while they’ve never formally studied the subject you’re going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.
Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epidemic which followed World War I, or how many loaves were condemned by EEC food inspectors as unfit for human consumption during June 1970.
Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks and statistical returns.
It’s rather as though this paradox has proved true: that while nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.
Well, if it works for the past, why can’t it work for the future? Three hundred million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees.
Unfortunately most of them are running scared from the awful specter of tomorrow. How best to corner people who just do not want to know?
Greed works for some, and for others hope. And most of the remainder will never have any impact on the world to speak of.
Good enough, as they say, for folk music …
A MOMENT FOR MILLSTONES
On the point of undogging his trailer’s sealed door and disconnecting the alarms, he hesitated.
Sunday. A moderately good collection, if not a record-breaker. (He sniffed. Hot air. From the smelter.)
And she might be a precociously good actress …
He pictured a tribe raiding, looting, vanishing before the croakers swooped, leaving behind no one but a minor immune from police interrogation, hysterical with laughter at the success of her “practical joke.”
Therefore, prior to shutting down the alarms, he activated all the church’s electronics except the coley music system and the automated collection trolleys. When he rounded the base of the altar—ex-screen—it was as though fire raged in the whale’s-belly of the dome. Lights flashed all colors of the rainbow and a few to spare, while a three-vee remote over his head not only repeated his image monstrous on the face of the altar but also stored it, minutely detailed, in a recorder buried beneath a yard of concrete. If he were attacked, the recording would be evidence.
Moreover, he carried a gun … but he was never without it.
These precautions, slender though they were, constituted the maximum a priest was expected to take. More could easily worry the federal computers into assessing him as a potential paranoid. They’d been sensitive on such matters ever since, last summer, a rabbi in Seattle who had mined the approaches to his shul forgot to turn off the firing-circuit before a bar mitzvah.
Generally the Fedcomps approved of people with strong religious convictions. They were less likely than some to kick up a fuss. But there were limits, not to mention mavericks.
A few years ago his defenses would have been adequate. Now their flimsiness made him tremble as he walked down the wall-less aisle defined by the black rubber streaks car tires had left over decades. Sure, the fence at the base of the dome was electrified except where access had to be left for the confessional, and the booth itself was explosive-resistant and had its own air supply against a gas attack, but even so … !
Memo to selves: next time, a role where I can take more care of life and limb. Privacy is fine, and I needed it when I arrived here. But this place was never meant to be operated by a single individual. I can’t scan every shifting shadow, make sure no nimble shivver is using it for cover!
Thinking of which as I stare around: my vision is unaided. At forty-six??? Out of three hundred million there are bound to be some people that age who have never bought corrective lenses, most because they can’t afford them. But suppose the Bureau of Health or some pharmo-medical combine decided there were few enough middlers without glasses to organize an exhaustive study of them? Suppose the people at Tarnover decided there must be a genetic effect involved? Ow.
Memo to selves, in red italics: stay closer to chronological age!
At that point in his musing he entered the confessional—and found that through its shatterproof three-centimeter window he was not looking at a little girl in a dress spattered with blood.
Instead, the exterior section of the booth was occupied by a burly blond man with a streak of blue in his tightly curled hair, wearing a fashionable rose-and-carmine shirt and an apologetic smile.
“So sorry you’ve been disturbed, Father,” he said. “Though it’s a stroke of luck that little Gaila found her way here… My name’s Shad Fluckner, by the way.”
This poker looked too young to be the girl’s father: no more than twenty-five, twenty-six. On the other hand, his congregation included women married for the third or fourth time and now to men as much as twenty years younger. Stepfather?
In that case, why the smile? Because he’d used this kid he didn’t give a plastic penny for to rid himself of a rich but dragsome older wife? Fouler things had been admitted in this booth.
Foggily he said, “Are you kin to—ah—Gaila, then?”
“Not in law, but you could say that after what we’ve been through together I’m closer to her than her legal kinfolk. I work for Anti-Trauma Inc., you see. Very sensibly, the moment Gaila’s parents detected signs of deviant behavior in her, they signed her up for a full course of treatment. Last year we cured her sibling rivalry—classic penis-envy directed against her younger brother—and right now she’s working into her Electra complex. With luck we’ll progress her to Poppaea level this coming fall. … Oh, incidentally: she babbled something about you calling in the croakers. You don’t need to worry. She’s on file with the police computers as a non-act case.”