To Ride Pegasus (21 page)

“Daffyd here, Sally. You rang me?”

“Oh, Daffyd!” She sounded surprised and a tinge embarrassed. “I’m not really certain if I should bother you …”

“My great-grandmother used to say, ‘If it’s doubtful, it’s dirty.’ ”

“I’m not talking about a shirt, Daffyd,” and Sally’s usual levity was missing. “I’m talking about people.”

“Which people?” It was like pulling screws from wood: intriguingly un-Sallyish.

“Well, Daffyd, I’d hate to prejudice you. But … well, would you take me out tonight? There’s a place I want you to feel. I
can’t
figure out what it is myself and I know something happened.”

“Curiouser and curiouser. You’ve hooked me …”

“Oh, damn. I don’t want to
hook
you. I’ve gone and done what I shouldn’t ta oughta.”

Daffyd laughed. “Sally, all you’ve done is arouse my very considerable, insatiable curiosity.”

“All right, elephant’s child. Pick me up at nine; you’ll need the copter and
money.”
Her voice darkened with baleful implications of wild spending and debauchery, but there was a rippling undercurrent of laughter which told Daffyd that Sally was herself again.

“With as many bundles as Lester will allow me. At 9!”

He depressed the comset button just as the door opened to admit Lester Welch.

“What’s on Iselin’s alleged mind?”

“I can’t ’path over a phone,” Daffyd replied, deliberately misinterpreting Lester.

The man swore and glared sourly at his boss. “All right, so you won’t talk either. Maybe I’ve no Talent but I don’t need it to know something’s got Sally excited. She’s so careful to sound calm.”

Daffyd shrugged his shoulders and reached for the in-tapes. “Soon as I know, you will. Anything else bothering you this fine morning? And Sally says I need bundles tonight.”

Lester eyed him in surprise for a moment and then snorted. He pointed to the finance-coded blue tape among the urgent flags Daffyd was fingering.

“Some local yokel from East Waterless Ford up-state wants to tax the Center’s residential accommodations, same as any other apartment block. Claims the revenue on such ‘high income residents’ would reduce the state’s deficit by 9%.”

Daffyd whistled appreciatively. “He’s probably right but for the fact that this is a registered restricted commune and those high-income residents turn every credit of their salaries over to the Center.”

“Listen, Dave, he’s building a pretty good case.”

Op Owen sighed. There was always something or someone or some committee picking away at the Center, trying to disrupt, destroy or discredit it despite all the careful publicity.

“They did the same thing in New Jersey, you know,
when the Princeton University Complex put up those academician villages to counteract the high price of real estate and taxes,” Lester reminded him sourly.

“I’ll listen, I’ll listen. Now, go away, Les.” Daffyd inserted Welch’s tape in the console.

Lester growled something under his breath as he left. And Daffyd op Owen listened. He didn’t like what he heard but the State Senator had certainly done some of his homework. Revenues from the Center’s residential buildings would indeed be a tidy pile in the State’s chronically anemic Treasury. Only the Center was in Jerhattan proper by a mile and a half and therefore its revenues were the City’s, if anyone’s.

“Get me Julian Pennstrak, please,” Daffyd asked his secretary.

The City Manager might be of some assistance here. Certainly he’d be interested in what this up-state character, Aaron Greenfield (am I always to be “fielded,” Daffyd wondered wryly, remembering his battle with the US Senator Mansfield Zeusman) is proposing. If Julian didn’t already know. Not much slipped past Pennstrak’s affable eagle-eye. Pennstrak wasn’t available but his secretary tactfully put Daffyd through to Pat Tawfik, Pennstra’s speech writer who was, in actual fact, his Talent guard.

“Yes, Dave, Julian’s been keeping an eye on Greenfield’s proposal,” Pat told him. “In fact, Julian had him in here for a long cozy chat when we first got wind of the scheme. Greenfield’s like Zeusman: suspicious and scared of us supermen.”

“Julian told him that the residential buildings are communal …?”

“Yes and Julian showed him the figures the Center files every year, plus the auditors’ reports. Cut no ice! In fact, if anything,” and Pat grimaced, “it only confirmed Greenfield’s notion that the Center is a rich source of additional income.”

“The Center is also in Jerhattan proper.”

“Julian made that point but Greenfield’s one of those allocation goons: all for one and one for all … all monies being in one kitty—his. He’s State Budget Chairman, you see.”

Daffyd nodded.

“I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily, Daffyd,” Pat went on apologetically.

Daffyd suppressed a tart rejoinder and sighed instead.

“Pat, it’s easier to pull a weed if it’s small.”

“A weed? That’s a good one. Greenfield’s a weed all right.” Pat sounded unusually acerbic. “I’ll tell Julian you called and that you’re worried.”

“No. I’m not worried, Pat. Not yet.”

“I would be if I were you,” she said, all gloom.

“Is there a precog?”

“No specific ones. But frankly, Dave, I’m far more worried about the city’s climate than anything old Aaron Leftfield perpetrates. And so is Julian. He’s street-walking today.” She gave a reassuring wave of her hand. “Oh, I sent one of the LEO sensitives with him. I can’t move so fast these days.” She glanced down at her gravid abdomen. “You’ve seen my report?”

“You sent one in?” Daffyd began riffling through the tapes.

“It should be on your desk. It’d better be on your desk.”

Daffyd found the purple-backed City Admin tape and waved it at her.

“It is. Lester Welch had first crack at me.”

“And he didn’t mention our tape?” She made an exasperated noise. “Look, Dave, listen to it now because, believe me, it’s more important than Greenfield even if Lester doesn’t think so.”

“Is that a precog, Pat?”

“You tell me it’s my condition,” she said, suddenly angry, “the way Julian does or a vitamin deficiency like my OB and I’ll resign.” The anger as suddenly drained from her face. “God, don’t I just wish I could!”

“Pat, d’you want a few weeks relief?”

Daffyd op Owen caught the shifting emotions on her face: sullen resentment giving way to hope, instantly replaced by resignation. “Don’t, Dave.”

“I wouldn’t and you know it. I can send out a may-day …”

“And overwork some other poor Talent?” Pat’s chin lifted. “I’ll be all right Dave. Honest! It’s just that … well, hell, listen to the report. And remember, it’s a pan-ethnic problem this year.”

“
This year?
” Another loaded phrase. Daffyd op Owen inserted the City Admin tape and his concern over the Greenfield proposal faded to insignificance as he recognized the more imminent danger of a disturbed City. He began to wonder who else had thought to save their dear Director trouble by not reporting the grim facts he now heard. Because if the Correlation Staff had slipped up on reading precogs, he’d downgrade the lot.

Brief, violent inter-ethnic quarrels over contract employment during the winter had been mediated but, within the City’s ethnic sectors, the truce had been uneasy: each segment certain that another had received what plums existed. (Most of the spot employment during the winter had been make-work, paid for by funds pared from other pressing needs to give the proud their sop.) Most of the agitation could be traced to a young Pan-Slavic leader, Vsevolod Roznine. The report noted that Roznine was more feared than popular with his constituents and, although several attempts had been made to cool or placate the agitator, he had neatly avoided the traps. The report dosed with the note that Roznine might have latent Talent. However, the only mental contact made had been so distasteful to the Talent that he had broken it off before he could implant any suggestion to go to the Center for testing.

“The man’s public mind is a sewer,” was the final comment.

Daffyd op Owen made a steeple of his fingers and,
twirling his swivel chair, gazed out his window to the-orderly grounds below. He felt unaccountably depressed yet he could be justifiably proud of what Talent in general and Eastern American Center in particular had been able to accomplish in the past decades. Op Owen could appreciate, and it was no precog, how much more had to be done on numerous levels: public, private, civic, clinical, military, spatial, and most important, inner. No matter what the dominant Talent, precog, telepath, teleport, kinetic, empathic, the Talented were still very human people, above and beyond their special gifts which so often complicated adjustment therapy.

They had professional immunity at long last, for all registered Talents. Another giant step forward. They had had acceptance on a commercial level for many years where Talent could steadily show profit to management. Since the first body-Talents had been able to point out assassins in crowds (even before precogs were accepted and acted on by key personnel), they’d been accepted by intelligent people. But the suspicious were the majority and they still had to be convinced that the Talented were not dangerously different.

He’d ruminated on this many times and it wasn’t solving the other pressing problems before him. A city torn by the very ethnic strife that had once been hailed as a bonding compromise to the late twentieth century’s lack of basic life-style values: summer was a-coming and, despite advances in weather controls, a hot dry spell which could cut the power available for city air-conditioning would only produce riot-breeding conditions.

So far, no major precogs of disasters had been recorded and for such a large unit as Jerhattan, a trouble precog was statistically more probable than one dealing with a small number of people or a single citizen. Scant reassurance, however.

And thank god, Talent was pan-ethnic, thought Daffyd. He didn’t have to worry about that ugly head rising against the Center.

He did tape an All-Talent alert on the city’s climate. The great minds would now have a single thought. Perhaps they’d also have an answer.

When he picked Sally Iselin up at nine at the Clinic door, she gave him a quick appraising look. Then her anxious-puppy expression changed to a radiant smile.

“I knew it. I knew it.” And she all but war-danced a circle as she inspected his costume.

“What?” he asked, turning to keep her face in view.

“You dressed just right. How’d you know? I’m sure I didn’t clue you. Are you positive you’re not a precog, too, Daffyd?”

“I’d rather not be.”

Her vivacity faded instantly. She put a hand out aborting the sympathetic gesture before she actually made a contact. He touched her fingers lightly in reassurance.

“Not to worry. I just had a tedious day. Felt like wearing glad threads.”

Sally’s eyes crinkled and her mouth tilted up as she cocked her head to one side. “You are indeed joyous,” she said saucily as her glance took in his royal blue black-trimmed coverall.

“Look who’s talking,” and Daffyd grinned down at Sally in lime green and black swing tunic and matching high boots. Sally’s puppy charm was a tonic and he wondered, as he often did in her company, why he didn’t make more opportunities to enjoy it.

As he put a helping hand under her elbow to assist her up to the passenger side of the two-spot copter, she gave him a startled sideways glance. He caught the echo of mental astonishment before she started to chatter about the day’s hopeful applicants.

“They come, Daffyd, swearing oaths that they’d had this or that perception Dorotea dosen’t tap a one. We go through the routine but even with maximum perceptol, they come over dead dumb and stone blind.”

Sally was a compulsive talker but Daffyd became aware that her present garrulity was a shield. He wondered what Sally would need to obscure. Propriety prohibited his making a quick probe but undoubtedly there’d be clues later on. Sally was entirely too open to be devious for very long.

She directed him to Sector K, northwest of the Center, where the worn hills struggled up from old swamplands: not a salubrious area despite reclamation and renovation efforts. There were still ruins of early twentieth-century factories and it was by one such structure, a sprawling half-glass and brick affair, that Sally directed him to land.

“The place seems popular enough,” Daffyd said as he had to circle several times to find a site for the copter.

Sally winced, eyeing the ranks of city-crawlers and the presence of both private and public transport copters. “Doesn’t take long, does it, for the masses to latch onto a new thrill!”

“Oh? This is new?” He’d caught the worry tone of her thoughts. “Crowd bad for the project?”

“I don’t know.” She was more than worried. “I just don’t know. It’s just that …” She broke off, firmly pressing her lips together.

They stood in a short queue for billets, paying a credit apiece to get in.

“Milking the golden cow,” Sally said with uncharacteristic bitternness as they passed the billets in at massive sliding doors which separated the outer hall from the vast factory space beyond.

“Guarding it, too,” Daffyd said, noting the strong-arm types in meshed duty-alls.

“That might make more sense than you’d guess,” Sally said in a very dark voice. Her mind was practically shouting “trouble.”

“Will we need assistance?” he asked her, estimating how many empathic Talents might be needed to control a crowd this size.

Sally didn’t answer. She was looking around the enormous open area which was filling rapidly. It didn’t require Talent to appreciate the aura of excited anticipation that emanated from the audience. The hall was by no means full yet; half the tables were still empty, but most of the couches of the inner circles were occupied. Daffyd had never seen such an assortment of styles, ages and conditions of furnishings.

“They must have been scouring the Sector,” Sally said. Then she indicated a table on the outer rim: a table, Daffyd noticed, which was convenient to one of the luminescent exit doors.

They were barely seated, Daffyd on Queen Anne, Sally on Swedish tubular, before a waiter inquired their pleasure.