Martian Time-Slip (13 page)

The girl put her arm within his.

“I never told anybody before,” Jack said, “not even Silvia, my wife, or my son David. You know, I watch him; I look every day to be sure it isn't showing up in him too. It's so easy for this stuff to get passed along as with the Steiners. I didn't know they had a boy at B-G until Glaub said so. And they're neighbors of ours for years back. Steiner never let it out.”

Doreen said, “We're supposed to go back to the Willows for dinner. Do you want to? I think it would be a good idea. You know, you don't have to join Arnie's staff; you can stay with Mr. Yee. That's a nice ’copter you have. You don't have to give all that up just because Arnie decides he can use you; maybe you can't use him.”

Shrugging, he said, “It's an interesting challenge, building a conduit for communication between an autistic child and our world. I think there's a lot in what Arnie says. I could be the intermediary—I could do a useful job there.” It doesn't really matter why Arnie wants to bring out the Steiner boy, he realized. Probably he's got some solid selfish motive, something that will bring him a profit in cold hard cash. I certainly couldn't care less.

In fact I can have it both ways, he realized. Mr. Yee can lease me to the Water Workers’ Union; I'd be paid by Mr. Yee and he'd be paid by Arnie. Everyone would be happy, and why not? Tinkering with the broken, malfunctioning mind of a child certainly has more to recommend it than tinkering with refrigerators and encoders; if the child is suffering some of the visions that I know—

He knew of the time-theory which Glaub had trotted out as his own. He had read about it in
Scientific American;
naturally, he read anything on schizophrenia that he could get his hands on. He knew that it had originated with the Swiss, that Glaub hadn't invented it. What an odd theory it is, he thought to himself. And yet, it rings true.

“Let's go back to the Willows,” he said. He was very hungry, and it would no doubt be a bang-up meal.

Doreen said, “You're a brave person, Jack Bohlen.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because you're going back to the place that troubled you, to the people that brought on your vision of, as you said, eternity. I wouldn't do that, I'd flee.”

“But,” he said, “that's the whole point; it's designed to make you flee—the vision's for that purpose, to nullify your relations with other people, to isolate you. If it's successful, your life with human beings is over. That's what they mean when they say the term schizophrenia isn't a diagnosis; it's a prognosis—it doesn't say anything about what you have, only about how you'll wind up.”
And I'm not going to wind up like that,
he said to himself. Like Manfred Steiner, mute and in an institution; I intend to keep my job, my wife and son, my friendships—he glanced at the girl holding on to his arm. Yes, and even love affairs, if such there be.

I intend to keep trying.

Putting his hands in his pockets as he walked along, he touched something small, cold and hard; lifting it out in surprise, he saw it was a wrinkled little object like a tree root.

“What in the world's that?” Doreen asked him.

It was the water witch which the Bleekmen had given him that morning, out in the desert; he had forgotten all about it.

“A good luck charm,” Jack said to the girl.

Shivering, she said, “It's awfully ugly.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “but it's friendly. And we do have this problem, we schizophrenics; we do pick up other people's unconscious hostility.”

“I know. The telepathic factor. Clay had it worse and worse until—” She glanced at him. “The paranoid outcome.”

“It's the worst thing about our condition, this awareness of the buried, repressed sadism and aggression in others around us, even strangers. I wish to hell we didn't have it; we even pick it up from people in restaurants—” He thought of Glaub. “In buses, in a theater. Crowds.”

Doreen said, “Do you have any idea what Arnie wants to learn from the Steiner boy?”

“Well, this theory about precognition—”

“But what does Arnie want to know about the future? You have no idea, do you? And it would never occur to you to try to find out.”

That was so. He had not even been curious.

“You're content,” she said slowly, scrutinizing him, “merely to do your technical task of rigging up the essential machinery. That's not right, Jack Bohlen; that's not a good sign at all.”

“Oh,” he said. He nodded. “It's very schizophrenic, I guess…to be content with a purely technical relationship.”

“Will you ask Arnie?”

He felt uncomfortable. “It's his business, not mine. It's an interesting job, and I like Arnie, I prefer him to Mr. Yee. I just—haven't got it in me to pry. That's the way I am.”

“I think you're afraid. But I don't see why—you're brave, and yet in some deep way you're terribly, terribly frightened.”

“Maybe so,” he said, feeling sad.

Together, they walked on back to the Willlows.

That night, after everyone had gone, including Doreen Anderton, Arnie Kott sat alone in his living room gloating. What a day it had been.

He had snared a good repairman who had already repaired his invaluable encoder and who was going to build an electronic wing-ding to tap the precog faculties of an autistic child.

He had milked, for nothing, the information he needed from a psychiatrist, and then managed to get rid of the psychiatrist.

So all in all it had been an exceptional day. It left only two problems: his harpsichord was still untuned and—what the hell else? It had slipped his mind. He pondered as he sat before his TV set, watching the fights from America the Beautiful, the U.S.A. colony on Mars.

Then he remembered. Norb Steiner's death. There was no source of goodies any more.

“I'll fix that,” Arnie said aloud. He shut off the TV and got his encoder out; seated before it, mike in hand, he delivered a message. It was to Scott Temple, with whom he had worked on countless important business ventures; Temple was a cousin of Ed Rockingham, and a good egg to know—he had managed, through a charter arrangement with the UN, to gain control of most of the medical supplies entering Mars, and what a top-notch monopoly that amounted to.

The drums of the encoder turned encouragingly.

“Scott!” Arnie said, “how are you. Hey, you know that poor guy Norb Steiner? Too bad, I mean, his dying and all. I understand he was mentally you-know-what. Like the rest of us.” Arnie laughed at that long and hard. “So anyhow, it leaves us with a little problem—I mean, one of procurement. Right? So listen, Scott, old man. I'd like to talk it over with you. I'm in. You get me? Stop by here in around a day or two, so we can work out the exact arrangements. I think we should forget the gear that Steiner was using; we'll start out fresh, get our own little bitty field in an out-of-the-way place, our own slave rockets, whatever else we need. Keep those smoked oysters rolling in, like they ought to.” He shut the machine off and tried to think if there was more. No, he had said it all; between him and a man like Scott Temple, no more had to be said; it was a deal then and there. “O.K., Scott, boy,” he said. “I'll expect to see you.”

After he had removed the spool it occurred to him to play it back just to be sure it had gone into code. God, what a calamity if by some freak chance it came out in clear!

But it was in code, all right, and his dearest: the machine had put the semantic units into a catfight-like parody of contemporary electronic music. Arnie, hearing the whistles, growls, beeps, hoots, hums, laughed until tears ran down his cheeks; he had to go off to the bathroom and slap cold water on his face to stop himself.

Then, back at the encoder, he carefully marked the box into which the spool went:

S
ONG OF THE
W
IND
S
PIRIT,
A C
ANTATA BY
K
ARL
W
ILLIAM
D
ITERSHAND

That composer, Karl William Dittershand, was the current favorite back on Earth among the intellectuals, and Arnie detested the man's electronic so-called music; he was a purist, himself: his tastes stopped firmly at Brahms. Arnie had a good laugh at that—marking his encoded message proposing his and Scott's going into the black-market importation of foodstuffs as a cantata by Dittershand—and then rang up a union Goodmember to convey the spool up north to Nova Britannica, the U.K. colony on Mars.

That, at eight-thirty in the evening, wound up the business of the day, and Arnie returned to his TV set to see the finish of the fights. He lit himself another Optimo extra-mild Admiral, leaned back, broke wind, relaxed.

I wish all days could be like this, he said to himself. I could live forever, if they were; days like this made him younger, not older. He felt as if he could see forty come by again.

Imagine me going into the black market, he said to himself. And for little stuff, little tins of wild blackberry jelly and slices of pickled eel and lox. But that was vital, too; for him especially. Nobody is going to rob me of my treats, he thought grimly. If that Steiner thought by killing himself he could cut me off where it hurts—

“Come on,” he urged the colored boy taking a licking on the TV screen. “Gut up, you bugger, and give it to him.”

As if he had heard, the Negro fighter scrambled back up, and Arnie Kott chuckled with deep, keen pleasure.

In the small hotel room, where he traditionally stayed weekend nights in Bunchewood Park when on call, Jack Bohlen sat by the window smoking a cigarette and pondering.

It had returned, after all these years, that which he dreaded; he had to face it. Now it was not anguished anticipation, it was actuality. Christ, he thought miserably, they're right—once you have it you've got it for keeps. The visit to the Public School had set him up for it, and at the Willows it had appeared and smitten him, as intact and full as if he were in his twenties again, back on Earth, working for Corona Corporation down in Redwood City.

And I know, he thought, that Norbert Steiner's death figured into it. Death upsets everyone, makes them do peculiar things; it sets a radiating process of action and emotion going that works its way out, farther and farther, to embrace more people and things.

Better call Silvia, he thought, and see how she's making out with Frau Steiner and the children.

But he shrank from it. There's nothing I can do to help anyhow, he decided. I have to be on twenty-four-hour call here in town, where Mr. Yee's switchboard can get hold of me. And now, too, he had to be available to Arnie Kott at Lewistown.

There had been, however, compensation. A fine, deep, subtle, highly invigorating compensation. In his wallet he had Doreen Anderton's address and phone number.

Should he call her tonight? Imagine, he thought, finding someone, a woman, too, with whom he could talk freely, who understood about his situation, who genuinely wanted to hear and was not frightened.

It helped a lot.

His wife was the last person in the world he could talk to about his schizophrenia; on the few occasions he had tried she had simply collapsed with fear. Like everybody else, Silvia was terrified at the idea of it entering her life; she herself warded it off with the magic charms of drugs…as if phenobarbital could halt the most pervasive, ominous psychic process known to man. God knew how many pills he himself had swallowed during the last decade, enough to pave a road from his home to this hotel and possibly back.

He decided after some reflection not to call Doreen. Better to leave it as a way out when the going got exceptionally rough. Right now he felt fairly placid. There would be plenty of time in the future, and plenty of need, to seek out Doreen Anderton.

Of course, he would have to be incredibly careful; obviously Doreen was Arnie Kott's mistress. But she seemed to know what she was doing, and certainly she knew Arnie; she must have taken him into account when she gave out her phone number and address, and, for that matter, when she got up and left the restaurant.

I trust her, Jack said to himself. And for someone with a streak of schizophrenia, that is something.

Pondering that, Jack Bohlen put out his cigarette, went and got his pajamas, and prepared to go to bed.

He was just getting under the covers when the phone in his room rang. A service call, he thought, leaping up automatically to get it.

But it was not. A woman's voice said softly in his ear, “Jack?”

“Yes,” he said.

“This is Doreen. I just wondered—if you were O.K.”

“I'm fine,” he said, seating himself on the edge of the bed.

“Do you think you'd want to come over tonight? To my place?”

He hesitated. “Umm,” he said.

“We could play records and talk. Arnie lent me a lot of rare old stereophonic LP records from his collection…some of them are awfully scratchy, but some are terrific. He's quite a collector, you know; he has the largest collection of Bach on Mars. And you saw his harpsichord.”

So that's what that had been, there in Arnie's living room.

“Is it safe?” he asked.

“Yes. Don't worry about Arnie; he's not possessive, if you know what I mean.”

Jack said, “O.K. I'll be over.” And then he realized that he couldn't, because he had to be available for service calls. Unless he could switch it through her phone.

“That's no problem,” she said, when he explained it to her. “I'll call Arnie and tell him.”

Dumbfounded, he said, “But—”

“Jack, you're out of your mind if you think we can do it any other way—Arnie knows everything that goes on in the settlement. Leave it to me, dear. I'll call him right now. And you come right on over here. If any calls come through while you're on your way I'll write them down, but I don't think there will be any; Arnie doesn't want you out fixing people's toasters, he wants you for his own jobs, for making that machine for talking to the Steiner boy.”

“O.K.,” he said, “I'll be over. Goodbye.” He hung up the phone.

Ten minutes later he was on his way, flying the bright and shiny Yee Company repairship through the night sky of Mars, to Lewistown and Arnie Kott's mistress.