Ballroom of the Skies (11 page)

“I don’t think any part of it is over your head.”

“I stick to my own line. Prono, and supplying the fleng joints, and the tridi franchises. Hell, so long as I can keep making a fast rupee, I should sweat up the world? I
should live so long? Nice having you around, Dake. Let me know how you make out.”

“You sound like a friend of mine. She has the same approximate philosophy. She calls me a do-gooder. Patrice Togelson.”

“I know about her. She and me, we’d make a good team. Bring her around some time.”

“She thinks she’s a team all by herself. I’ve got to take this money back to her. She loaned it to me. To make a damn fool of myself with.”

“Good luck, boy. Don’t take any wooden rupees.”

Dake went up and picked up his suitcase, went the rest of the way up to the lobby. He nodded at Johnny, the desk clerk, told him he was leaving for good. As he turned toward the door he heard his name called.

He turned. Karen was running toward him from the elevators. Her eyes were wide with alarm. “You’re not going?”

“Yes, I am. And thanks for everything.”

“But you haven’t seen Miguel! He doesn’t know you’re going.”

“I just said good-bye to him, Karen.”

She half turned away from him. There was an odd expression on her face, as though she were listening for a sound that was just beyond his hearing range. Her face changed then, screwed up like the face of a child about to cry.

“Good-bye, Dake.” She held her hand out. He took it.

“Good-bye, Karen.”

When he was outside the door he glanced back. She stood inside, watching him through the glass. She was not standing in the casual, slumped, hoyden posture of Karen Voss. She stood slim and straight, with a sort of forlorn dignity on her face. He walked to the corner, turning once to wave. She did not respond. A charcoal-burning cab picked him up and clattered its desolate way toward the CIJ terminal. He had a twenty-minute wait for the next Philadelphia shuttle jet. The newspapers arrived barely in time. He bought two copies and took them onto the aircraft with him. Aside from two typos, the article
was exactly as he had written it. And they had bannered it
SECRET
DEALS
REVEALED
, with the sub-head
BRANSON
’
S
DEPUTY
IN
FOUR
-
POWER
AGREEMENT
CLAIMS
IRANIAN
DOUBLE
-
CROSS
SHAPING
UP
.

The coin was up in the air, he thought. It could land heads or tails. Heads would be a new agreement, a lessening of international tension. Tails would merely quicken the war which more than half of the world now called “inevitable.”

He read it through twice, quickly, and then glanced at the rest of the news. Massacre in a religious encampment in Iowa. Fire razes abandoned plant of Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Gurkha Airforce takes long-term lease on Drew Field in Florida, in conjunction with the missile launching stations at Cocoa. Maharani kidnap attempt foiled. Skyrocketing murder statistics blamed on prono addiction, yet growers’ lobby thwarts legislative control. Bigamy legalized in California after Supreme Court review. Tridi starlet found dead in bed. New North China conscription planned. Brazil develops deadly virus mutation. New soil deficiency isolated at Kansas lab. Texas again threatens secession. Enfield KeyWesting.

Dake frowned as he read the last item. With the publication of his article, he would be poison to anyone except Enfield himself, and perhaps with him too, but at least it was a chance. There were a few more minutes of the flight left. During the last two days he had come to avoid all introspective moments, to busy his mind with activity—any kind of activity—just so it kept him from thinking.

Stream of thought was like a swift river that ran smoothly down a channel and then broke suddenly against a rock. That rock was the flaw he had seen in Branson, and the manner of his “death.” After striking the rock, the current boiled into an eddy, circling aimlessly. A thousand times he had tried to dismiss it by telling himself that he was mistaken. Auto-hypnosis. A tiny flaw in the mind, a wrinkle resulting from strain. For the first time in many days he thought consciously of his wife. The dull feeling of loss lingered always in his subconscious, ready to be brought to the surface. A quiet,
bright-eyed girl who had loved him. There had been for a long time an inability to believe that she was dead. He would meet her around the next corner. Maybe the strain had started when he had at last faced the fact that she was utterly and incredibly gone. Wife and father—and both, somehow, killed by different aspects of the same thing. Father killed by a small corruption, and wife by a vaster one—yet the difference was only in degree.

These, he thought, were poor years for a constructive idealist. The dream was always the same. Do a little bit, to the limit of your strength, and it will become a better world, after you have gone. If each man does a little bit … Maybe, back in the eighteen hundreds that dream had a little validity. Men could believe, back there, that the world became a little bit better each year. But then, following the first two world wars, the dream had somehow become reversed. Men of good will began to believe that the world was getting worse. Thought became nihilistic, or existentialistic. Praise the gods of nothingness.

Yet somehow there had been more vitality in thinking the world was getting worse than in the tepid philosophizings of the middle sixties when it was believed that the world never gets better or worse—it remains always on an even keel of disorder, Christ played off against Dachau, with the game always ending in a draw. A bad time for functional idealism. Patrice and Miguel were the inevitable products of the culture. Let me get mine—fast.

How much simpler to fall into their way of life. The devil take my grandchildren. Corruption is always with us. The game always ends in a draw, and all the efforts of one man cannot affect that immutable decision.

Patrice provided the easy doorway. She had always urged him to come in with her. “There are so many things you could do, darling. I need someone to handle public relations, to deal with some of my compadres who seem to resent dealing with a woman. Some of the Indians look at me as though they thought I should be in purdah. I could pay you well, but it wouldn’t be charity or a gift or anything, because I
do
need you.”

Not quite yet, Patrice. Not until I can recognize the
inevitability of defeat. And maybe I’ll never recognize that.

As the aircraft dipped over Philadelphia he saw that there had been another one of the power failures which seemed to become more frequent each year. Angular sections of the city were blacked out. Nobody screamed with outraged indignation anymore. With enough technicians, money and standby equipment, there would be no power failures. But Philadelphia, as all other cities, lacked all three factors. Standard correctional procedure was to appoint a committee to look into the findings of the committee which had been appointed to make a survey. The answer was always the same. We lack oil and coal and ore and copper and zinc and tin and timber and men.

He caught a cab, had to transfer to another when the first one broke down. He felt uneasy riding through the dark streets with the money in his wallet. Philadelphia was infested with child gangs. The dissolution and decay of the school system had put them on the streets. They had the utter, unthinking ruthlessness of children in all ages. The guerrilla days had filled the land with weapons. Put an antique zip gun in the hands of an eleven-year-old child from a prono-saturated home, and you had an entity which thought only in terms of the pleasing clatter of the gun itself, with imagination so undeveloped as yet that the adults who were ripped by the slugs were not creatures capable of feeling pain, but merely exciting symbols of an alien race. They were like the children he had read about who had lived in caves in the rubble of Berlin after the Second World War.

He got out of the cab in front of Patrice’s house, saw the lights and felt secure again. The cab drove away as he started up the walk. The faint movement of a shadow among shadows startled him. He saw it from the corner of his eye. He turned quickly, saw nothing. He waited for a few moments and then turned toward the house. The pretty Japanese maid opened the door and gave him her usual welcoming smile, glinting with gold.

“Good evening, Mr. Lor—–”

He had stepped into the hall. She stared at him and her
face changed, grotesquely. She put one hand to her throat. She took a step backward and her eyes bulged in a glassy way as though, at last, after years of nightmare, she now faced the ultimate horror.

“What’s wrong with you?”

She took another step and suddenly crumpled, to lie still on the hall rug. He leaned over her. Patrice came out into the hall.

“Dake! What on earth happened to Molly?”

“I don’t know. She just stared at me and looked horrified and fainted. I guess it’s a faint.”

Patrice knelt by the small frail figure, began to rub her wrist, pat her wan cheek. “Molly! Molly dear!”

She frowned and then glanced up at Dake. “I don’t know what—–” She stopped and stared at him intently, and her face suddenly looked like chalk. “God,” she whispered softly. “God!” She shut her eyes tightly, squinching up her face. She swayed on her knees as though she would topple over the figure of the maid.

“What’s wrong!” Dake demanded. “What is it?”

She kept her eyes shut. “I don’t want to … look. It’s … your face.”

Dake instinctively lifted his hand to touch his face. He rubbed his left cheek with his right hand. It felt completely normal. He ran his hand across his mouth and suddenly stopped, his heart thudding. He gingerly touched his right cheek, his fingertips making a whispering sound against the hard polished bone. He slid his fingertips up to touch the empty ivory eye socket.

He reached the big hall mirror in three strides and stared at himself. Had a polished skull-head stared back at him it would not have been anywhere near as horrible as to see the face evenly divided between life and death. One side flushed, warm, alive. On the other side the naked teeth.

Impossibility!

Face to face with all the myriad logical answers. None of them logical. Take half a man’s face off and he bleeds to death. He looked into the mirror and saw, behind him, the reflected image of Patrice, her face in her hands,
kneeling beside the still form of Molly—the little maid who had been so proud of learning the syllable
L
that she had changed her name.

He saw a cliff in the back of his mind, and sanity clung, scrabbling with bleeding fingers, to the sheer edge. Easier to drop into nothingness, turning over and over through the endless fall. Easier to scream and giggle and destroy the two women with murderous fear.

He walked slowly to a position behind Patrice, looked down on her shining head.

His voice sounded rusty. “Would you ever try to tell anyone about this?”

“No. No!”

“Then how many others have seen things … like this, and knew they dared not speak of them, Patrice?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Are we dreaming this? Is it happening? Are you the Patrice of my dreams?”

“You’re … in my dream, Dake. In my nightmare.”

“How do we go about waking up?”

“You know we’re awake,” she whispered. “What … are you?”

“A beastie? A demon? I’m Dake. I don’t understand it any better than you do. Look at me.”

“No.”

He took the shining hair in his fist and wrenched her head back. “Look at me!” She moaned, but kept her eyes tight shut. With his free hand he thumbed back her eyelid, even as she clawed at his wrist. She did not move or breathe. The wide eye stared at him. She screamed then. A scream that tore his nerves. That final utter scream of the last panic. She jumped and spun away, staring at him, still screaming, pausing only to fill her lungs and scream again. And stopped. And stood in the echoing silence and began to laugh, bending and twisting and holding herself with laughter, running then, doubling over with laughter, running against the door and rebounding to run again and at last tearing it open, running out into the night, laughing, tripping, falling, lying there in the diagonal of light from the open door, her legs still making spasmodic running
motions, her laughter sounding as though her throat were slowly filling with blood.…

He understood. Her bold proud mind had been full of arrogance, of certainty, of the knowledge of infallibility. Faced with the hideous and inexplicable, the mind had been unable to bend, unable to accept impossibility. And so, under strain, it had broken clearly, cleanly. Her example oddly gave him an understanding of how close he was to the same fracture line, gave him that necessary increment of pliability that kept him from breaking.

He knew that they would bring her back, quickly perhaps, to a relative sanity. But that new sanity would be a weak patch on the broken mind. She would walk in uncertainty, with the morbid expectation that around the very next corner she might find … a new inexplicable horror.

Molly, the Japanese maid, was a different case. Here was no proud and rigid mind, dependent on an explicable world. Here was a willingness to accept the unknown on its own terms. It would give her bad night dreams. It would give her delicious chills from time to time. But she would not break through the necessity of having to find a reason for something that was without reason.

They came, the obsequious and silken little doctors of the very rich, murmuring their concern, manicured fingers timing the flutter of pulse, phoning in subdued voices for the very best of hospital suites, the most accomplished of private nurses, and making the deft quieting injections, cautioning the attendants who levered the still Viking body into the chrome and gold of the huge Taj ambulance for the hushed flight through the night streets of the city.

One doctor rode with the sleeping woman, and the other, with many nervous glances at his watch, questioned Dake and Molly. Dake had known from the vaguely irritable glances the doctors had given him that his face was no longer horror. He had furtively fingered his cheek to make certain.