The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories (20 page)

“I’m bonded,” Humphrys said, with pride. “If any of the material you tell me gets into the hands of security organizations, I forfeit approximately ten thousand dollars in Westbloc silver—hard cash, not paper stuff.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Sharp said, and began. “I’m an economist, working for the Department of Agriculture—the Division of War Destruction Salvage. I poke around H-bomb craters seeing what’s worth rebuilding.” He corrected himself. “Actually, I analyze reports on H-bomb craters and make recommendations. It was my recommendation to reclaim the farm lands around Sacramento and the industrial ring here at Los Angeles.”

In spite of himself, Humphrys was impressed. Here was a man in the policy-planning level of the Government. It gave him an odd feeling to realize that Sharp, like any other anxiety-ridden citizen, had come to the Psych Front for therapy.

“My sister-in-law got a nice advantage from the Sacramento reclamation,” Humphrys commented. “She had a small walnut orchard up there. The Government hauled off the ash, rebuilt the house and outbuildings, even staked her to a few dozen new trees. Except for her leg injury, she’s as well off as before the war.”

“We’re pleased with our Sacramento project,” Sharp said. He had begun to perspire; his smooth, pale forehead was streaked, and his hands, as he held his cigarette, shook. “Of course, I have a personal interest in Northern California. I was born there myself, up around Petaluma, where they used to turn out hens’ eggs by the million …” His voice trailed off huskily. “Humphrys,” he muttered, “what am I going to do?”

“First,” Humphrys said, “give me more information.”

“I—” Sharp grinned inanely. “I have some kind of hallucination. I’ve had it for years, but it’s getting worse. I’ve tried to shake it, but—” he gestured—“it comes back, stronger, bigger, more often.”

Beside Humphrys’ desk the vid and aud recorders were scanning covertly. “Tell me what the hallucination is,” he instructed. “Then maybe I can tell you why you have it.”

He was tired. In the privacy of his living room, he sat dully examining a series of reports on carrot mutation. A variety, externally indistinguishable from the norm, was sending people in Oregon and Mississippi to the hospital with convulsions, fever and partial blindness. Why Oregon and Mississippi? Here with the report were photographs of the feral mutation; it
did
look like an ordinary carrot. And with the report came an exhaustive analysis of the toxic agent and recommendation for a neutralizing antidote.

Sharp wearily tossed the report aside and selected the next in order.

According to the second report, the notorious Detroit rat had shown up in St. Louis and Chicago, infesting the industrial and agricultural settlements replacing the destroyed cities. The Detroit rat—he had seen one once. That was three years ago; coming home one night, he had unlocked the door and seen, in the darkness, something scuttle away to safety. Arming himself with a hammer, he had pushed furniture around until he found it. The rat, huge and gray, had been in the process of building itself a wall-to-wall web. As it leaped up, he killed it with the hammer. A rat that spun webs …

He called an official exterminator and reported its presence.

A Special Talents Agency had been set up by the Government to utilize parabilities of wartime mutants evolved from the various radiation-saturated areas. But, he reflected, the Agency was equipped to handle only human mutants and their telepathic, precog, parakinetic and related abilities. There should have been a Special Talents Agency for vegetables and rodents, too.

From behind his chair came a stealthy sound. Turning quickly, Sharp found himself facing a tall, thin man wearing a drab raincoat and smoking a cigar.

“Did I scare you?” Giller asked, and snickered. “Take it easy, Paul. You look as if you’re going to pass out.”

“I was working,” Sharp said defensively, partially recovering his equilibrium.

“So I see,” said Giller.

“And thinking about rats.” Sharp pushed his work to one side. “How’d you get in?”

“Your door was unlocked.” Giller removed his raincoat and tossed it on the couch. “That’s right—you killed a Detroit. Right here in this room.” He gazed around the neat, unostentatious living room. “Are those things fatal?”

“Depends where they get you.” Going into the kitchen, Sharp found two beers in the refrigerator. As he poured, he said: “They shouldn’t waste grain making this stuff… but as long as they do, it’s a shame not to drink it.”

Giller accepted his beer greedily. “Must be nice to be a big wheel and have luxuries like this.” His small, dark eyes roved speculatively around the kitchen. “Your own stove, and your own refrigerator.” Smacking his lips, he added: “And beer. I haven’t had a beer since last August.”

“You’ll live,” Sharp said, without compassion. “Is this a business call? If so, get to the point; I’ve got plenty of work to do.”

Giller said: “I just wanted to say hello to a fellow Petaluman.”

Wincing, Sharp answered: “It sounds like some sort of synthetic fuel.”

Giller wasn’t amused. “Are you ashamed to have come from the very section that was once—”

“I know. The egg-laying capital of the universe. Sometimes I wonder—how many chicken feathers do you suppose were drifting around, the day the first H-bomb hit our town?”

“Billions,” Giller said morosely. “And some of them were mine. My chickens, I mean. Your family had a farm, didn’t they?”

“No,” Sharp said, refusing to be identified with Giller. “My family operated a drug store facing on Highway 101. A block from the park, near the sporting goods shop.” And, he added under his breath: You can go to hell. Because I’m not going to change my mind. You can camp on my doorstep the rest of your life and it still won’t do any good. Petaluma isn’t that important. And anyhow, the chickens are dead.

“How’s the Sac rebuild coming?” Giller inquired.

“Fine.”

“Plenty of those walnuts again?”

“Walnuts coming out of people’s ears.”

“Mice getting in the shell heaps?”

“Thousands of them,” Sharp sipped his beer; it was good quality, probably as good as pre-war. He wouldn’t know, because in 1961, the year the war broke out, he had been only six years old. But the beer tasted the way he remembered the old days: opulent and carefree and satisfying.

“We figure,” Giller said hoarsely, an avid gleam in his face, “that the Petaluma-Sonoma area can be built up again for about seven billion Westbloc. That’s nothing compared to what you’ve been doling out.”

“And the Petaluma-Sonoma area is nothing compared with the areas we’ve been rebuilding,” Sharp said. “You think we need eggs and wine? What we need is machinery. It’s Chicago and Pittsburgh and Los Angeles and St. Louis and—”

“You’ve forgotten,” Giller droned on, “that you’re a Petaluman. You’re turning your back on your origin—and on your duty.”

“Duty! You suppose the Government hired me to be a lobbyist for one trivial farm area?” Sharp flushed with outrage. “As far as I’m concerned—”

“We’re your people,” Giller said inflexibly. “And your people come first.”

When he had got rid of the man, Sharp stood for a time in the night darkness, gazing down the road after Giller’s receding car. Well, he said to himself, there goes the way of the world—me first and to hell with everybody else.

Sighing, he turned and made his way up the path toward the front porch of his house. Lights gleamed friendlily in the window. Shivering, he put his hand out and groped for the railing.

And then, as he clumsily mounted the stairs, the terrible thing happened.

With a rush, the lights of the window winked out. The porch railing dissolved under his fingers. In his ears a shrill screaming whine rose up and deafened him. He was falling. Struggling frantically, he tried to get hold of something, but there was only empty darkness around him, no substance, no reality, only the depth beneath him and the din of his own terrified shrieks.

“Help!” he shouted, and the sound beat futilely back at him. “I’m falling!”

And then, gasping, he was outstretched on the damp lawn, clutching handfuls of grass and dirt. Two feet from the porch—he had missed the first step in the darkness and had slipped and fallen. An ordinary event: the window lights had been blocked by the concrete railing. The whole thing had happened in a split second and he had fallen only the length of his own body. There was blood on his forehead; he had cut himself as he struck.

Silly. A childish, infuriating event.

Shakily, he climbed to his feet and mounted the steps. Inside the house, he stood leaning against the wall, shuddering and panting. Gradually the fear faded out and rationality returned.

Something had to be done. This was worse than ever before, even worse than the time he had stumbled coming out of the elevator at the office—and had instantly been reduced to screaming terror in front of a lobbyful of people.

What would happen to him if he
really
fell? If, for example, he were to step off one of the overhead ramps connecting the major Los Angeles office buildings? The fall would be stopped by safety screens; no physical harm was ever done, though people fell all the time. But for him—the psychological shock might be fatal.
Would
befatal; to his mind, at least.

He made a mental note: no more going out on the ramps. Under no circumstances. He had been avoiding them for years, but from now on, ramps were in the same class as air travel. Since 1982 he hadn’t left the surface of the planet. And, in the last few years, he seldom visited offices more than ten flights up.

But if he stopped using the ramps, how was he going to get into his own research files? The file room was accessibly only by ramp: the narrow metallic path leading up from the office area.

Perspiring, terrified, he sank down on the couch and sat huddled over, wondering how he was going to keep his job, do his work.

And how he was going to stay alive.

Humphrys waited, but his patient seemed to have finished.

“Does it make you feel any better,” Humphrys asked, “to know that fear of falling is a common phobia?”

“No,” Sharp answered.

“I guess there’s no reason why it should. You say it’s shown up before? When was the first time?”

“When I was eight. The war had been going on two years. I was on the surface, examining my vegetable garden.” Sharp smiled weakly. “Even when I was a kid, I grew things. The San Francisco network picked up exhaust trails of a Soviet missile and all the warning towers went off like Roman candles. I was almost on top of the shelter. I raced to it, lifted the lid and started down the stairs. At the bottom were my mother and father. They yelled for me to hurry. I started to run down the stairs.”

“And fell?” Humphrys asked expectantly.

“I didn’t fall; I suddenly got afraid. I couldn’t go any farther; I just stood there. And they were yelling up at me. They wanted to get the bottom plate screwed in place. And they couldn’t until I was down.”

With a touch of aversion, Humphrys acknowledged: “I remember those old two-stage shelters. I wonder how many people got shut between the lid and the bottom plate.” He eyed his patient. “As a child, had you heard of that happening? People being trapped on the stairs, not able to get back up, not able to get down …”

“I wasn’t scared of being trapped! I was scared of falling—afraid I’d pitch head-forward off the steps.” Sharp licked his dry lips. “Well, so I turned around—” His body shuddered. “I went back up and outside.”

“During the attack?”

“They shot down the missile. But I spent the alert tending my vegetables. Afterward, my family beat me nearly unconscious.”

Humphrys’ mind formed the words: origin of guilt.

“The next time,” Sharp continued, “was when I was fourteen. The war had been over a few months. We started back to see what was left of our town. Nothing was left, only a crater of radioactive slag several hundred feet deep. Work teams were creeping down into the crater. I stood on the edge watching them. The fear came.” He put out his cigarette and sat waiting until the analyst found him another. “I left the area after that. Every night I dreamed about that crater, that big dead mouth. I hitched a ride on a military truck and rode to San Francisco.”

“When was the next time?” asked Humphrys.

Irritably, Sharp said: “Then it happened all the time, every time I was up high, every time I had to walk up or down a flight of steps—any situation where I was high and might fall. But to be afraid to walk up the steps of my own house—” He broke off temporarily. “I can’t walk up three steps,” he said wretchedly. “Three concrete steps.”

“Any particular bad episodes, outside of those you’ve mentioned?”

“I was in love with a pretty brown-haired girl who lived on the top floor of the Atcheson Apartments. Probably she still lives there; I wouldn’t know. I got five or six floors up and then—I told her good night and came back down.” Ironically, he said: “She must have thought I was crazy.”

“Others?” Humphrys asked, mentally noting the appearance of the sexual element.

“One time I couldn’t accept a job because it involved travel by air. It had to do with inspecting agricultural projects.”

Humphrys said: “In the old days, analysts looked for the origin of a phobia. Now we ask:
what does it do?
Usually it gets the individual out of situations he unconsciously dislikes.”

A slow, disgusted flush appeared on Sharp’s face. “Can’t you do better than that?”

Disconcerted, Humphrys murmured: “I don’t say I agree with the theory or that it’s necessarily true in your case. I’ll say this much though: it’s not falling you’re afraid of. It’s something that falling reminds you of. With luck we ought to be able to dig up the prototype experience—what they used to call the original traumatic incident.” Getting to his feet, he began to drag over a stemmed tower of electronic mirrors. “My lamp,” he explained. “It’ll melt the barriers.”