Dr. Bloodmoney (7 page)

With a glance at her, Stockstill said, “Well, you can be community leader next month.”

“I think June needs a little psychoanalysis,” Bonny said to him. “She’s so aggressive, so masculine; it’s not natural. Why don’t you draw her aside and give her a couple of hours’ worth?”

Stockstill said, “Sending another patient to me, Bonny? 1 still recall the last one.” It was not hard to recall, because it had been the day the bomb had been dropped on the Bay Area. Years ago, he thought to himself. In another incarnation, as Hoppy would put it.

“You would have done him good,” Bonny said, “if you had been able to treat him, but you just didn’t have the time.”

“Thanks for sticking up for me,” he said, with a smile.

Mr. Austurias said, “By the way, Doctor, I observed some odd behavior on the part of our little phocomelus, today. I wanted to ask your opinion about him, when there’s the opportunity. He perplexes me, I must admit, and I’m curious about him. The ability to survive against all odds—Hoppy certainly has that. It’s encouraging, if you see what I mean, for the rest of us. If he can make it—” The school teacher broke off. “But we must get inside.”

To Bonny, Stockstill said, “Someone told me that Dangerfield mentioned your old buddy the other day.”

“Mentioned Bruno?” Bonny at once became alert. “Is he still alive, is that it? I was sure he was.”

“No, that’s not what Dangerfield said. He said something caustic about the first great accident. You recall. 1972.”

“Yes,” she said tightly. “I recall.”

“Dangerfield, according to whoever told me—” Actually, he recalled perfectly well who had told him Dangerfield’s
bon mot
; it had been June Raub, but he did not wish to antagonize Bonny any further. “What he said was this. We’re
all
living in Bruno’s accident, now. We’re all the spirit of ’72. Of course, that’s not so original; we’ve heard that said before. No doubt I’ve failed to capture the way Dangerfield said it … it’s his style, of course, how he says things. No one can give things the twist he gives them.”

At the door of the Foresters’ Hall, Mr. Austurias had halted, had turned and was listening to them. Now he returned. “Bonny,” he said, “did you know Bruno Bluthgeld before the Emergency?”

“Yes,” she said. “I worked at Livermore for a while.”

“He’s dead now, of course,” Mr. Austurias said.

“I’ve always thought he was alive somewhere,” Bonny said remotely. “He was or is a great man, and the accident in ’72 was not his fault; people who know nothing about it hold him responsible.”

Without a word, Mr. Austurias turned his back on her, walked off up the steps of the Hall and disappeared inside.

“One thing about you,” Stockstill said to her, “you can’t be accused of concealing your opinions.”

“Someone has to tell people where to head in,” Bonny said. “He’s read in the newspapers all about Bruno. The newspapers. That’s one thing that’s better off, now; the newspapers are gone, unless you count that dumb little
News & Views
, which I don’t. I will say this about Dangerfield: he isn’t a liar.”

Together, she and Stockstill followed after Mr. Austurias, with George and Edie following, into the mostly-filled Foresters’ Hall, to listen to Dangerfield broadcasting down to them from the satellite.

As he sat listening to the static and the familiar voice, Mr. Austurias thought to himself about Bruno Bluthgeld and how the physicist was possibly alive. Perhaps Bonny was right. She had known the man, and, from what he had overheard of her conversation with Stockstill (a risky act, these days, overhearing, but he could not resist it) she had sent Bluthgeld to the psychiatrist for treatment which bore out one of his own very deeply held convictions: that Doctor Bruno Bluthgeld had been mentally disturbed during his last few years before the Emergency—had been palpably, dangerously insane, both in his private life and, what was more important, in his public life.

But there had really been no question of that. The public, in its own fashion, had been conscious that something fundamental was wrong with the man; in his public statements there had been an obsessiveness, a morbidity, a tormented expression that had drenched his face, convoluted his manner of speech. And Bluthgeld had talked about the enemy, with its infiltrating tactics, its systematic contamination of institutions at home, of schools and organizations—of the domestic life itself. Bluthgeld had seen the enemy everywhere, in books and in movies, in people, in political organizations that urged views contrary to his own. Of course, he had done it, put forth his views, in a learned way; he was not an ignorant man spouting and ranting in a backward Southern town. No, Bluthgeld had done it in a lofty, scholarly, educated, deeply-worked-out manner. And yet in the final analysis it was no more sane, no more rational or sober, than had been the drunken ramblings of the boozer and woman-chaser, Joe MacCarthy, or of any of the others of them.

As a matter of fact, in his student days Mr. Austurias had once met Joe McCarthy, and had found him likable. But there had been nothing likable about Bruno Bluthgeld, and Mr. Austurias had met him too—had more than met him. He and Bluthgeld had both been at the University of California at the same time; both had been on the staff, although of course Bluthgeld had been a full professor, chairman of his department, and Austurias had been only an instructor. But they had met and argued, had clashed both in private—in the corridors after class—and in public. And, in the end, Bluthgeld had engineered Mr. Austhrias’ dismissal.

It had not been difficult, because Mr. Austurias had sponsored all manner of little radical student groups devoted to peace with the Soviet Union and China, and such like causes, and in addition he had spoken out against bomb testing, which Doctor Bluthgeld advocated even after the catastrophe of 1972. He had in fact denounced the test of ’72 and called it an example of psychotic thinking at top levels … a remark directed at Bluthgeld and no doubt so interpreted by him.

He who pokes at the serpent, Mr. Austurias thought to himself, runs the risk of being bitten … his dismissal had not surprised him but it had confirmed him more deeply in his views. And probably, if he thought of it at all, Doctor Bluthgeld had become more entrenched, too. But most likely Bluthgeld had never thought of the incident again; Austurias had been an obscure young instructor, and the University had not missed him—it had gone on as before, as no doubt had Bluthgeld.

I must talk to Bonny Keller about the man, he said to himself. I must find out all she knows, and it is never hard to get her to talk, so there will be no problem. And I wonder what Stockstill has to offer on the topic, he wondered. Surely if he saw Bluthgeld even once he would be in a position to confirm my own diagnosis, that of paranoid schizophrenia.

From the radio speaker, Walt Dangerfield’s voice droned on in the reading from
Of Human Bondage
, and Mr. Austulias began to pay attention, drawn, as always, by the powerful narrative. The problems which seemed vital to us, he thought, back in the old days … inability to escape from an unhappy human relationship. Now we prize any human relationship. We have learned a great deal.

Seated not far from the school teacher, Bonny Keller thought to herself, Another one looking for Bruno. Another one blaming him, making him the scapegoat for all that’s happened. As if
one man
could bring about a world war and the deaths of millions, even if he wanted to.

You won’t find him through me, she said to herself. I could help you a lot, but I won’t, Mr. Austurias. So go back to your little pile of coverless books; go back to your hunting mushrooms. Forget about Bruno Bluthgeld, or rather Mr. Tree, as he calls himself now. As he has called himself since the day, seven years ago, when the bombs began to fall on things and he found himself walking around the streets of Berkeley in the midst of the debris, unable to understand—just as the rest of us could not understand—what was taking place.

Overcoat over his arm, Bruno Bluthgeld walked up Oxford Street, through the campus of the University of California, bent over and not looking about him; he knew the route well and he did not care to see the students, the young people. He was not interested in the passing cars, or in the buildings, so many of them new. He did not see the city of Berkeley because he was not interested in it. He was thinking, and it seemed to him very clearly now that he understood what it was that was making him sick. He did not doubt that he was sick; he felt deeply sick—it was only a question of locating the source of contamination.

It was, he thought, coming to him from the outside, this illness, the terrible infection that had sent him at last to Doctor Stockstill. Had the psychiatrist, on the basis of today’s first visit, any valid theory? Bruno Bluthgeld doubted it.

And then, as he walked, he noticed that all the cross streets to the left leaned, as if the city was sinking on that side, as if gradually it was keeling over. Bluthgeld felt amused, because he recognized the distortion; it was his astigmatism, which became acute when he was under stress. Yes, he felt as if he were walking along a tilted sidewalk, raised on one side so that everything had a tendency to slide; he felt himself sliding very gradually, and he had trouble placing one foot before the other. He had a tendency to veer, to totter to the left, too, along with the other things.

Sense-data so vital, he thought. Not merely what you perceive but how. He chuckled as he walked. Easy to lose your balance when you have an acute astigmatic condition, he said to himself. How pervasively the sense of balance enters into our awareness of the universe around us … hearing is derived from the sense of balance; it’s an unrecognized basic sense underlying the others. Perhaps I have picked up a mild labyrinthitis, a virus infection of the middle ear. Should have it looked into.

And yes, now it—the distortion in his sense of balance—had begun affecting his hearing, as he had anticipated. It was fascinating, how the eye and the ear joined to produce a Gestalt; first his eyesight, then his balance, now he heard things askew.

He heard, as he walked, a dull, deep echo which rose from his own footsteps, from his shoes striking the pavement; not the sharp brisk noise that a woman’s shoe might make, but a shadowy, low sound, a rumble, almost as if it rose from a pit or cave.

It was not a pleasant sound; it hurt his head, sending up reverberations that were acutely painful. He slowed, altered his pace, watched his shoes strike the pavement so as to anticipate the sound.

I know what this is due to, he said to himself. He had experienced it in the past, this echoing of normal noises in the labyrinths of his ear-passages. Like the distortion in vision it had a simple physiological basis, although for years it had puzzled and frightened him. It was due—simply—to tense posture, skeletal tension, specifically at the base of the neck. In fact, by turning his head from side to side, he could test his theory out; he heard the neck-vertebrae give a little crack, a short, sharp sound that set up immediately the most immensely painful reverberations in his ear-channels.

I must be dreadfully worried today, Bruno Bluthgeld said to himself. For now an even graver alteration in his sense-perceptions was setting in, and one unfamiliar to him. A dull, smoky cast was beginning to settle over all the environment around him, making the buildings and cars seem like inert, gloomy mounds, without color or motion.

And where were the people? He seemed to be plodding along totally by himself in his listing, difficult journey up Oxford Street to where he had parked his Cadillac. Had they (odd thought) all gone indoors? As if, he thought, to get out of the rain … this rain of fine, sooty particles that seemed to fill the air, to impede his breathing, his sight, his progress.

He stopped. And, standing there at the intersection, seeing down the side street where it descended into a kind of darkness, and then off to the right where it rose and snapped off, as if twisted and broken, he saw to his amazement—and this he could not explain immediately in terms of some specific physiological impairment of function—that cracks had opened up. The buildings to his left had split. Jagged breaks in them, as if the hardest of substances, the cement itself which underlay the city, making up the streets and buildings, the very foundations around him, were coming apart.

Good Christ, he thought. What is it? He peered into the sooty fog; now the sky was gone, obscured entirely by the rain of dark.

And then he saw, picking about in the gloom, among the split sections of concrete, in the debris, little shriveled shapes: people, the pedestrians who had been there before and then vanished—they were back now, but all of them dwarfed, and gaping at him sightlessly, not speaking but simply poking about in an aimless manner.

What is it?
he asked himself again, this time speaking aloud; he heard his voice dully rebounding. It’s all broken; the town is broken up into pieces. What has hit it? What has happened to it? He began to walk from the pavement, finding his way among the strewn, severed parts of Berkeley. It isn’t me, he realized; some great terrible catastrophe has happened. The noise, now, boomed in his ears, and the soot stirred, moved by the noise. A car horn sounded, stuck on, but very far off and faint.

Standing in the front of Modern TV, watching the television coverage of Walter and Mrs. Dangerfield’s night, Stuart McConchie saw to his surprise the screen go blank.

“Lost their picture,” Lightheiser said, disgustedly. The group of people stirred with indignation. Lightheiser chewed on his toothpick.