Watson, Ian - Novel 10 (8 page)

 
          
Jim
nodded.

 
          
“And a middle-aged woman with severe heart disease.
She’ll
be glad to go.
And a farmer who developed multiple sclerosis.
He’ll be retiring. No problem. Three or four others, too, including a couple of
voluntary retirements — you won’t have any trouble there. So you’ll still be
able to
focus
upon Weinberger.”

 
          
“I’ll
focus on them all,” said Jim firmly. “Everybody’s death is equally precious.”

 
          
“Of course.”

 
          
“Chow
time!” called a cheery voice. Marta Bettijohn came bustling through the
junipers. “You mustn’t let your trout get cold!’’

 
          
Both
Mary-Ann and Alice Huron became tipsy later on, largely because Noel Resnick
freshened
their drinks in a lordly manner.

 
          
By
now the cirrus clouds were thickening in a darkening sky. The air grew humid.
The breeze was freshening to a wind from off the water.
Battery
lamps were brought from the chalet and
switched on.

 
          
The
two women, one tall, one small, linked
arms
, confusing
their glasses.

 
          
“ The
day is over, perfect day,’ ’’
Alice
sang out in a maudlin way. She blinked down
at Mary-Ann; perhaps there were tears in her eyes.

 
          
Perhaps
there were tears, too — of sentiment — in Mary-Ann’s.

 
          
“ ‘Now
the day is over,’ ’’ Mary-Ann recited, but then she
forgot, or swung off course. Her voice was slurred. Glancing up at the sky,
where dark horses’ manes blew out below the first cold prickling stars, she
found confused inspiration. “Now the day is over, nightmares drawing nigh . .
.’’ She giggled.

 
          
A
few spots of rain struck the party, and hissed on the hibachi.

 
          
The
party broke up.

 
          
Only
when a dozen or more people had crowded into the one minibus and it was moving
off with Marta Bettijohn at the wheel beside him, did Jim realize that Resnick
and the other minibus — and the two tipsy women — had stayed behind. As their
own minibus departed, lights blinked on in the chalet then cut down to chinks
as shutters were closed against the storm which might soon break: against the
hot stabbing electricity of the sky.

 
          
Crowding
Jim’s other side was Claudio Menotti, who hummed to himself more noisily than
the electric motor. Jim leaned against Marta. He nodded back towards the
chalet.

 
          
And
quoted, humorously,
“ ‘Too
much in love with easeful
death’, eh, Marta?’’

 
          
“I
hate those morbid old poems,’’ she said sharply. “I’m glad nobody spoils their
minds with them any more.’’

 
          
“But
didn’t death produce good poetry?’’ asked Jim. He realized that he had gone too
far; he must be rather drunk too.

 
          
“So
how do
you go about building a cage
for Death, Nathan? I’m perfectly serious. I want to help you build one. I have
to see this with my own eyes.”

 
          
“Don’t
patronize
me.”

 
          
Jim
had not expected instant gratitude. Deep down, Weinberger probably did not
believe that his cage would work. Jim’s instinct had been right: build the
cage, use it, prove it useless — then Weinberger would be free of his delusion.

 
          
Weinberger
had changed the scene in the wall screen. In one way, this was a bad sign.
Dying people, who had accepted their death, tended to absorb themselves wholly
in a single landscape of choice: a landscape, of course, without human
characters or any living creatures, a landscape of eternal vegetative nature,
or better still, pure ocean.

 
          
The
new scene was arctic, as though its coldness might act to slow down the decay
of Weinberger’s body. Great white icebergs like mountainous teeth — molars and
incisors — floated in blue fluoride waters. The scene was sterile and aseptic,
and beautiful too. It also conveyed a certain frozen violence: of icy jaws,
locked in a total stoppage of time. If those jaws were ever to move, what a
grinding and crashing there would be! But they couldn’t, and didn’t.
So all was serene.
Which was, perhaps, a
good sign.

 
          
“I
am certainly
not
patronising you.”

 
          
“No?
Well, Mr Todhunter, let’s just prove it, hmm?”

 
          
“I’ll
prove it one way, right now. I’ll tell you a secret. Noel Resnick has given me
absolute
carte blanche
to handle your
case — so that you can work things through and see the light.”

 
          
‘The
arctic light,’ thought Jim.
‘The everlasting stillness and
silence of the ice wastes where nothing lives . . . (Untrue!
Fish live
there, and seals, and great whales ... Do any equivalent creatures inhabit the
realm of death? Is that what Nathan imagines?)’ “That’s how 1 can go along with
you. And equally, here’s your chance, because I’m going to use that
carte blanche
to the full.’’ The sick man
licked his lips. “They won’t like it.’’

 
          
“They
needn’t know, particularly. Of course, we can’t do it
here.
This room’s unsuitable, what with attendants and nurses
dropping in. I’ll commandeer a spare room in the basement.’’ Weinberger’s face
drained of trust.

 
          
“1
won’t be fooled by a masquerade. Me locked up here, you in the basement — so
you say.’’

 
          
“I’ll
take you down there along with me. I’ll obey all your directions. Anything you
want from outside, I’ll fetch. Any other equipment you need, I’ll get hold of
somehow.’’

 
          
Jim
stuck out his hand.

 
          
“Is
it a deal?’’

 
          
Weinberger’s
grip was surprisingly strong. It felt as though he was diverting all the
remaining strength of his body into his right hand, in order to grasp something
beyond Jim’s own hand: something invisible, elusive and mighty.

 
          
Weinberger
grinned. “You can’t make deals with Death. But you can catch it, and clobber
it.”

 
          
“Whatever you say.
And 1
mean
that.”

 
          
One
week later, Jim stood in the blue-painted basement room with Weinberger, surveying
the ‘machine’ which he had assembled according to the dying man’s directions,
and with his occasional assistance.

 
          
Apart
from the cage and a pair of chairs, the room was bare. It was the same
experimental room that Resnick had told him about. Soundproofing baffles
scalloped and fluted the walls, so that being in here was like being in some
large rectangular lung which breathed through silent, hidden air ducts.

 
          
The
machine consisted of the waterbed which Bekker had described. Within its strong
pine frame it was raised off the ground on rubber-buffered, insulated legs, and
entirely surrounded by a delicate filigree Faraday cage which could block out
any electromagnetic radiation from outside, or isolate any radiation arising
from within. So much for the ‘harem grille’ notion! It occurred to Jim to
wonder whether Weinberger had been sleeping inside the

 
          
Faraday
cage for many months prior to his enforced retirement
with the current switched on
as a way of insulating and isolating
himself from the power that he feared. Perhaps this had contributed in some
obscure way to the onset of his illness!

 
          
Using
the authority of the House to over-ride Public Disposal, and with a waiver
signed by Weinberger, Jim had had no difficulty in entering Weinberger’s former
abode to remove whatever he chose.

 
          
With
the aid of an attendant from the House he had also brought back the polarisable
glass screens which Weinberger had told him he would find stacked in the
bedroom, as he already knew from Bekker. These were actually adapted
scene-screens. Bolted together around the sides and roof of the cage, these
screens would no longer display illusions of African savannah or Amazonian
forest. They acted instead either as a perfectly clear five-fold window, or
else they could be rendered opaque. Then, from inside the cage, they became a
maze of mirrors reflecting mirrors. So much for the sex tape idea! Though, of
course, one could always readjust the screens . . .

 
          
A
hooded optic fibre periscope allowed one to spy into the cage from outside
while the glass walls were opaque. Two tiny automatic cameras were mounted on
silver rods inside. A drip-feed led from a tiny vacuum flask, looking like a
spout for feeding humming birds on the wing. This flask supposedly contained
the ‘corpse sweat’ which Weinberger had synthesized like a home alchemist.
Strapped beside this was an industrial chemi-sniffer, apparently rejigged to be
sensitive to one part in a billion per volume of the pheromone.

 
          
Cannibalised
by Jim from the neighbouring Hospital, and from the House, were other pieces of
equipment that had been beyond Weinberger’s means. Medi-sensors were taped
across the surface of the waterbed, connected to vital signs monitors outside.
A skullcap sensitive to the ‘thanatos’ brain rhythm of the ‘death plateau’ —
to be worn by the occupant of the bed — was linked with an oscilloscope
outside. From outside, too, a remote- controlled stimulant syringe could be
operated.

 
          
To
Jim’s eyes Weinberger’s machine looked like an old piece of Dada art, something
reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s
Great
Glass
: a machine for pursuing an enigma in the realm of the irrational, of
the wholly imaginary. It was a machine for hunting a

 
          
Snark.
It was an insane satire, translated into rubber and
steel, wire, glass and wood, on the techniques of adjustment to the Inevitable
which was life’s fulfilment, not its catastrophe or betrayal.

 
          
‘Mozart
wrote all his symphonies, didn’t he?’ thought Jim. ‘Which unwritten ones did he
fail to write?’
And yet, and yet . . .

 
          
But
there was nothing absurd about the machine to Weinberger. He quite glowed to
see it all assembled, with the extra medical facilities to which he could never
have gained access. In a sense, Jim realized, Weinberger was indeed approaching
the culmination of his life, in the shape of this ‘machine’. Jim had been quite
right to play along with the man’s fantasies. Here was Weinberger’s vision of
death, and quite soon Weinberger was going to enter into it and become one with
it.

 
          
The
only snag was that the machine would do nothing.
Nothing at
all.
Merely purr, or hiss, or crackle, and render
itself
opaque, and drip minute amounts of
something
into the air within.

 
          
Yet
that, too, would be excellent. ‘Look, Nathan, it doesn’t hurt. There isn’t
anything. Death is nothing.’

 
          
“I
built little pilot models, you know,” confided Weinberger. ‘‘Prototype
death-traps, to catch whatever vectored in on the pheromone. But they didn’t
work. Death wasn’t fooled. Obviously there had to be an actual dying body
there. So I bought some rabbits —”

 
          
‘‘You
should be ashamed of yourself. That was what was so
sick
about medicine in the old days: the slaughter, the mutilation,
the agony of so many poor creatures so that people could keep alive for five
minutes longer! It was just another symptom of our whole death sickness, which
would have burnt the planet bare.”

 
          
“Okay,
I know the spiel too. And I
was
disgusted, believe me. It seemed as if I was
sacrificing
to Death.”

 
          
It
began with rabbits. It ended up with Norman Harper. Weinberger spread his hands
placatingly.

 
          
‘‘No
result. Then I got the idea that maybe the death of animals and the death of
people
is
different in essence ...”

 
          
‘‘That’s
the old Catholic doctrine that animals have no souls.
The
idea that animals are automatic objects.
That
was another part of the whole sickness — the disrespect.”

 
          
‘‘Sure.
Now nothing has a soul, so everything is holy.”

 
          
To
which Jim said nothing. Afterlife studies necessarily implied that something
outlasted death, even if it wasn’t a bundle of memories and personality in the
old sense of a soul . . . And certainly the radiant unity that Jim had
experienced when he drowned must be classed as holy.

 
          
Weinberger
frowned.

 
          
“It
appears to be ready . . .” Jim said.

 
          
Like
a virgin actor who had forgotten his lines, Weinberger froze. He stalled.

 
          
“Could
we make a start tomorrow
?*
* he asked apologetically.
“We’ve worked damn hard today.’’

 
          
Jim
smiled sympathetically.

 
          
“Would
you rather I lay down in it instead of you?’’

 
          
Abruptly,
Weinberger grinned back. “Then I release the nonexistent whiff of cyanide gas?
To zap
your
death?
Ah, there’s nothing like that in my machine! Maybe there ought to be.”

 
          
Jim
pressed home.

 
          
“Is
that why you had the gun? Was it to shoot Death with when it came into your
cage? But you’d only smash the glass, and let it out. What did you have in that
gun: silver bullets?”

 
          
“It
was an old . . . souvenir.
The gun.’’

 
          
And
maybe that was why Weinberger had hung on to it.
To shoot
Death.
Death was the mugger who broke into your apartment. Death was the
rapist, who took you by force.
At least, in the old way of
looking at it.

 
          
“You
can try it for size if you like,” Weinberger offered. He was in a ‘bargaining’
mode, thought Jim. “Go ahead — I’m not proprietorial. This’ll be a famous bed
soon.
Far more famous than any of your beds where Good Queen
Bess or Abraham Lincoln slept.”

 
          
“Well,
thanks but no thanks.”

 
          
“If
I
could
equip it with cyanide gas ...
I really wonder whether I’d be killing Death in general, or just the personal
death of whoever was in the
machine?
”