Algis Budrys - Michaelmas

“Ah,” Michaelmas chuckled. “If Horse had only been modern enough to call the university centre here and get his data from their computer. You would have been on to him in a flash.” Michaelmas patted the cold black top of the machine sitting on the nightstand. He knew exactly what had happened. Somewhere in the back of Watson’s mind had been the name of an acquaintance of a friend of someone he’d worked with, the man to call if you were ever in Switzerland and had a ballistics problem. The name might have been there for years, beside the telephone number of the only place in Madrid that served a decent Chinese dinner, the memory of a girl who lived upstairs from a cafe in Luxembourg, a reliable place to get your shirts done in Ceuta, and the price of a second-class railway ticket from Ghent to Aix. “You’ve been out-newsmanned, my friend. What do you want to bet Horse is headed straight as a die for the same place you’ve got marked with an X on your map?”

“Not a farthing. Precisely my point,” Domino said. “There is more to the situation.”

“Go on.”

“Following an exchange of phone calls with the sanatorium, UNAC Star Control has authorized a press conference for Norwood at any time no later than one o’clock p.m. local. One of the men they sent in here last night was Getulio Frontiere.”

“Check.” Frontiere was a smooth, capable press secretary. The conference would go very cleanly and pretty much the way UNAC wanted it. “No later than one o’clock. Then they want to say their say in time for the breakfast news on the east coast of the United States. Do you think they smell trouble with more heads like Gately?” He got to his feet and began to undress.

“I think it’s possible. They’re very quick to sense changes in the wind.”

“Yes. Horse said that last night. Very sensitive to the popular dynamic.” Stripped, Michaelmas picked up the machine, carried it into the bathroom, and set it down near the washbowl as he began to splash water, scrubbing his neck and ears.

“There’s more,” Domino said. “By happenstance, Tim Brodzik last week rescued the California governor’s teenage daughter from drowning. He was invited to Sunday dinner at the governor’s house, and extensively photographed with the grateful parents. He and the girl had their arms around each other.”

Michaelmas stopped with his straight razor poised beside one soap-filmed cheek. “Who’s that?”

“The beachboy Stever was involved with.”

“Oh.” He took a deep breath. Last year, he and Domino had invested much time in getting the governor elected. “Well—you might as well see if you can intercept that note to Sam Lemoyne. It would only confuse things now.”

“Done. Finally, a registered airmail packet has cleared the New York General Post Office, routed through St. Louis. Its final destination is Cape Girardeau, Missouri. It was mailed from Berne, clearing the airport post office here yesterday afternoon. I think it’s going to US Always.”

“Yesterday afternoon? Damn,” said Michaelmas, feeling his jaw. His face had dried, and he had to wet it and soap it again. “Who from?”

“Cikoumas et Cie. They are a local importer of dates, figs, and general sweetmeats. But there is more to them than that.”

“Figs,” Michaelmas said, passing his right forearm over his head and pulling his left cheek taut with his fingertips as he laid the razor against his skin. “Sweetmeats.” He watched the action of the razor on his face. Shaving this way was one of those eccentric habits you pick up when away from sources of power and hot water.

He was remembering days when he had been a graduate engineering student helping out the family budget with an occasional filler for a newspaper science syndicate. His wife had worked as a temporary salesclerk during December and sent him a chrome-headed, white plastic lawnmower of a thing that would shave your face whether you plugged it into the wall or the cigarette lighter of your car, if you had a car. He remembered very clearly the way his wife had walked and talked, the schooled attentive mannerisms intelligently blended from their first disjointed beginnings at drama classes. She had always played older than her age. She was too tall and too gaunt for an ingénue, and had had trouble getting parts. She had not been grown inside yet, but she had been very fine and he had been waiting warmly for her maturity. By the time the Department of Speech would have graduated her from Northwestern, she would have been fully co-ordinated. But in 1968 she’d had her head broken in front of the Conrad Hilton, and then for a while she’d vegetated, and then after a while she’d died.

When he was even younger, and had to work on the East Coast because he wanted to take extension courses at MIT, he had called his wife often at Northwestern, in Evanston, Illinois. He would say: “I can get a ride to Youngstown over Friday night with this fellow who lives there, and then if I can get a hitch up US 30, I could be in Chicago by Saturday late or Sunday morning. I don’t have any classes back here until Tuesday, and I can call in sick to work.” She would say: “Oh, that sounds like a lot of trouble for just a few hours. And I think I have a singing job at a coffee house Monday anyhow.” He would say : “But I don’t mind,” and she would say: “I don’t want you to do it. It’s more important for you to be where you are.” And he had said more, patiently, but so had she. That had been back when Domino had just been a device for making telephone calls. He had barely been a programme at all. And now look at him.

He rinsed the glittering straight razor under the tap, and rinsed and dried his face. He dried the razor meticulously and put it back into its scarred Afghanistani leather-and-brass case. “Figs,” he said. “Figs and queened pawns, savants and astronauts, world enough, but how much time? Where does it go? What does it do?” He scrubbed his armpits with the washcloth. “Boompa-boompa, boompa-boompa, boompa-boom, pa-pa-pa-peen, herring boxes without topses…”

“I don’t like it. I don’t like it,” he said to Domino as he put the fresh room-service carnation in his buttonhole. “These people must mean something by this manoeuvre with the package. What’s the idea? Or are you claiming Cikoumas is a coincidence?”

“No. There’s a definite connection. They’ve even recently opened a branch in Cité d’Afrique. Of course, that would be a logical move for an importer, but, still…”

“Well, all right, then. But why do they mail the package via that route? Maybe they want something else.”

“I don’t understand your implication. They simply don’t want postal employees noting Limberg’s return address on a package to US Always. Something like that would be worth a few dollars to a media tipster. The Cikoumas front is an easy way around that.”

“Ah, maybe. Maybe that’s all. Maybe not.” Michaelmas began striding back and forth. “We’ve spotted it. Maybe we’re meant to spot it. Maybe they’re laying a trail that only a singular kind of animal could follow. But must follow. Must follow, so can be detected, can be identified, phut, splat !” He punched his fist into his palm. “What about that, eh? They want me because they’ve deduced I’m there to be found, and once they know me and have me, they have everything. How’s that for a hypothesis?”

“Well, one can arrive at the scenario, obviously.”

“They must know! Look at the recent history of the world. Where’s war, where’s what was going to be an accruing class of commodities billionaires in a diminishing system, what’s taking the pressure off the heel of poverty, what accounts for the emergence of a rational worldwide distribution of resources? What accounts for the steady exposure of conniving politicians, for increasingly rational social planning, and reasonably effective execution of the plans? I must exist!”