Psykogeddon (24 page)

"Speaking of the miserable old bugger," said Terry, "he's looking for you."

"What?" said Detective Judge Treasure Steel. "Why would he be looking for me? He knows where I am. The order to guard the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber came from his office."

"That's news to him, apparently," said Terry. "His precise words to me were 'what the - Bzzzt! - is that silly bitch doing in Mega-City One? Tell her to pull her head out of her arse and - Bzzzt! - call me!' Then the language got more extreme."

Some small part of Detective Judge Steel idly wondered why the Mega-City comms-console would leave the words
bastard
,
bugger
and so forth alone but buzz out the F-word. Admittedly, some words could be considered worse than others, if you were of a mind to make the distinction, but to make the distinction seemed to go against the Mega-City Justice Department's all-or-nothing attitude and its sledgehammer way of going about things.

The far larger part of her, however, recognised the above as merely the displacement-activity of one who is suddenly very worried indeed, and can't quite bring oneself to think about why in one go.

"Listen, Terry," she said. "I'm gonna have to go. There's another call I really have to make."

"He's toying with us," said Efil Drago San as his floater powered down a corridor, dragging Dredd behind it, sec-system plasma bolts from an ejector in the ceiling hitting the floor less than a metre behind them. "This is all low-yield stuff, if I'm any Judge - with a small capitalisation, naturally. If he wanted to kill us outright, he'd have set the countermeasures to full lethality."

"That's good to know," Dredd managed, the effort of speaking costing him dearly.

The various forces involved in making it back to the elevator in time to evade the zombie-like clutches of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam, riding it down until the sec-system cut its power, and then barrelling off through the Psyko-Block corridors had battered his already damaged body to hell and back. It was almost a relief that his nervous system was shot so he couldn't feel how bad it was.

"That's not going to last," Drago San continued. "Sooner or later he'll get tired of it, and come after us, and simply kill us. I know I would. What's needed, here, I feel, is some modicum of an edge to... aha! This'll do."

The floater pulled up to a stop before a door marked "MED STATION", Dredd smacking face-first into it from the momentum.

"Let's just see if our Robert hasn't remembered to rescind my biometric clearances," said Drago San, trying the door's control panel.

It had occurred to Dredd more than once to wonder just what had happened to the vast majority of the Psyko-Block population during the months and years that Doctor Bob had been building up his private little world.

The short answer was that the lives and work of the inmates and personnel - those inmates and personnel not intimately involved with rewiring the minds of latent psionics into one big mind-bomb, in any case - had simply carried on as normal. The micro-societal hierarchies of med-techs and their patients were in place and self-sustaining, after all, and there was no particular reason to know or care that the man at the top was a complete homicidal loon.

In this respect, of course, the Mega-City Psyko-Block had the same kind of relationship with Doctor Bob as corporate employees throughout history have had to their CEOs, or countries with their ostensibly elected presidents: happily splashing about in the pond, completely oblivious to the bloated, poisoned toad squatting in the centre.

The Med Station was simply a first aid point for dealing with any physical injury the Psyko-Block inmates might cause, either to those who were in the business of treating them or to themselves. It was currently occupied by a Med-Division tech and an orderly - one in a paramedic uniform reminiscent of a Judge's, though with medical-based insignia and a hypo-gun instead of a Lawgiver, the other in a white if somewhat grubby smock.

"What's happening?" the med-tech asked, automatically and a little slow on the uptake. "The level's locked down, there's no contact with Justice Department control and... uh..."

The med-tech trailed off as he belatedly realised the nature of these new arrivals and the state they were in. He had no time to react any further, because Efil Drago San reached out a hand - the hand on the arm not currently cuffed to Dredd - grabbed his face, and smacked his head into that of the orderly. There was a crunch of bone from a blow so powerful as to be instantly, and mutually, lethal.

"I do so abhor getting my hands dirty," said Drago San conversationally. "Ah, well, needs must, I suppose."

"You didn't have to do that," Dredd croaked. "There was no reason to drokking kill them."

"Oh, can that really be so?" said Drago San, in utterly mortified tones. "Have I really sunk so low as to take human life without cause? Why, it's as if I were a mass-murderer whose every impulse is to kill if I can possibly get away with it."

All the while he was busily scanning the medical equipment on offer in the Med Station.

"Stasis and anaesthesia field emitters," he said, as though compiling a small mental list. "Dermal-regeneration unit for those minor and unavoidable little scrapes. Micropore and microsurgical sutures and - ah, yes, what do we have here? A good heavy-duty laser saw. Just the very ticket!"

In addition to these items was a wheeled gurney suitable for transporting the physically injured. With his massive upper body strength, Drago San hauled Dredd off his feet and heaved him onto the gurney.

Dredd gasped for breath and attempted to struggle, but his debilitations were such that it was all he could do to flop weakly.

"The time has come," said Efil Drago San, "to do something that I've been putting off. Believe me, Dredd, hard though it might be, this is something I really do not wish to do. But the fact is, amusing as your company might be in your present state, you've become something of an unsupportable dead weight.

"Now just you lie back. You might feel a bit of a brief sting."

Detective Judge Treasure Steel kicked open the door of the strato-platform lounge, barrelled through, slipped on blood to pitch back and landed on her backside. Fortunately, though blood-soaked, the carpeting was lush and thick: a rare Justice Department consideration for visiting dignitaries.

The lounge was awash with blood, other fluids and certain... items that were definitely not fluid at all. There were various items of human anatomy, but they were not connected to each other or, indeed, anything much at all.

In fact, the only relatively intact human item was cowering in a corner and whimpering to itself. Treasure Steel recognised him: Barnstable Wheems.

His left arm appeared to have been shattered. What with one thing and another, Detective Judge Treasure Steel was not in the best of moods, and not inclined to be kind, so she used that arm to drag him out of the corner. Wheems shrieked in agony, then stopped abruptly. The pain had crossed over the threshold where he could feel it in any human sense.

"Tell me what happened here," Treasure said curtly.

Wheems worked his mouth. It was like trying to speak of some vision that was too huge and horrible to come out.

Steel slapped him. "Tell me!"

"They exploded!" Wheems cried. "There were these injections, and they took their injections, and then they looked at each other and they swelled up and they all exploded!"

Treasure Steel glanced around the room, noting the remains of hypo-guns strewn through the mess. Wheems was not, in fact, telling her anything she didn't already know.

She shook him. "I want to know what's going on," she said. "All of it. Tell me about it now
."

It seemed that his initial hysterical outburst had somewhat calmed Wheems. Twitching with agony though he was, he twisted his head to look at her with what he probably thought of as guile, but merely came off as low cunning.

"I know my rights," he said. "I'm a lawyer. I know my rights. I surrender myself to your custody, and once I'm in your custody, you have to protect my life and you can't torture me."

Detective Judge Treasure Steel walked him over to the wall and smacked his face into it. Not hard enough to do much more damage than a broken nose, but hard enough to make it clear that she wasn't messing around.

"Wrong city-state," she said.

SEVENTEEN

"
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine - they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance - you might as well take the book along with them.
"

- Laurence Sterne

Tristram Shandy

Out in the city, the influences of the disruption increased: a single, random and apparently meaningless psychotic episode became two, then four, then eight, as incidences increased exponentially. Innocent victims were stabbed by crochet needles, pushed out of hab-block windows, flayed by cheese graters, choked by roller skates, maimed by tables, decapitated - in increments - by belt sanders, drowned in vats of malmsey, impaled by curling tongs, exsanguinated by trocars, bludgeoned by rolling pins, sliced by sharpened coins, defenestrated by pillows, choked by razor blades, buried in salt, scarred by acetic acid, dissolved by lye, trepanned by spoons, savaged by teeth and nails, skinned by filleting knives and murdered by any number of objects that were lying about the home... and more, and more, in any and every combination.

For some reason, it was later said, only the Judges of Mega-City One were immune to the influences of this disturbance. That was not strictly true. A number of Judges suffered homicidal psychotic episodes along with everybody else - they just had more opportunity to call it something else and get away with it.

And more deaths, and more, and ever more. The rate was increasing rapidly. It was not impossible to imagine, if this were left unchecked, an entire population winnowing itself down, by degrees, until a single man was left, whereupon he would, in all probability, kill himself.

In a room, hung with a variety of artificial human figures, Jonathan Michael Stobie manipulated the limbs of a genuine wooden artist's marionette into a vaguely ballet-like pose. It is a question of attitude, he thought, a question of posture. The moving of a hand through a specific and consciously thought-out trajectory.

It was simple. Life was simple, if you only supplied the correct answers, either verbally or by way of body language. He remembered, when he was a child, how the juve-psychologist had laid out all these cards with pictures on them. He had been supposed to make up a story about them.

He had been quite proud of his story, which had involved a man jumping into a pool to save a little girl, and then giving her the kiss of life... and it had been a completely different story from the one he had made up in his head.

He studied the wooden doll for a while, then turned his attention to the thing on the bed. His latest acquisition, picked up in the Sector Three Smokatorium twelve hours before. He pulled back the polythene sheet.

It twitched under his gently exploring hand, and then coughed. Its eyes opened onto black, encrusted holes. His latest acquisition whimpered, possibly in anticipation of what was going to happen next without a visual cue as to what it might be.

Jonathan Michael Stobie leaned forward, preparing to make the ham-string cuts that would make it easier to get his acquisition onto a position more or less matching that of the wooden marionette.

With enormous force, a hand shot out from the thing on the bed. It was enough to snap the straps that had restrained it, and certainly enough to plunge a stiffened finger into Jonathan Michael Stobie's exposed throat. And that was the last he knew.

"You're insane, Drago San," Dredd snarled. "You're drokking sick!"

"And this is news?" said Efil Drago San sardonically. "I seem to recall us spending several hours in a hearing to establish just that precise point. And on any level playing field, that point is in actual fact valid. When a person is innately incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, it might or might not become necessary to deal with him, but terms of actual
blame
cannot and should not be attached."

"You know what evil is," Dredd said. "You get off on it. You're stone cold drokking evil to the bone!"

"And so?" said Drago San. "Let me tell you something - and bear with me, because it really does lead to something with a bearing on an actual point. Centuries ago, before the development of clone-matter grafts and forced regeneration made the issue nonexistent, there was a significant minority of people who went in for some quite horrifying, to a certain frame of mind, elective surgeries. People who were absolutely convinced that they were occupying the wrong bodies.

"I'm not talking about gender reassignment, of course. The fluidity inherent in the processes of building a functioning phenotype from a genotype means that ending up as the wrong sex is a perfectly common event - and something that can be reset, these days, or for that matter experimented with just for the hell of it, by a short course of retrogenic tablets.

"No. I'm talking about those who were deluded to believe that the biological age of their bodies was wrong - this was before the rejuve-processes that could reset the biological clock itself - and went through procedures that altered the grosser physical aspects of age, while in actual fact accelerating the destruction of still-viable cells. Peeling off safely dead and protective layers of skin, for example, to expose apparently fresher-looking layers. They couldn't get it through their heads that a biological organism only gets so many layers in its natural span.