Algis Budrys - Michaelmas

Limberg looked at him, overwhelmed. But he saw something in Michaelmas’s face and nodded. He ran his hands over the controls and all of them went steady red. He bowed his head.

“I’m in. I’m here,” Domino said. “I’ve got their household systems. Where’s the rest?”

“Wait,” Michaelmas said. Limberg had left the panel and gone over to where Cikoumas lay. He sat down on the floor beside him and with his fingers began combing the lank hair forward over the wound. He looked up at Michaelmas. “He was attempting to protect humanity,” he said. “He couldn’t let the astronauts reach Jupiter.”

Michaelmas looked back at him. “Why not?”

“That’s where the creatures must be. It is the largest, heaviest body in the Solar System, with unimaginable pressures and great electrical potentials. It is a source of radio signals, as everyone knows. Kristiades discussed it with me increasingly after he saw all your broadcasts with the astronauts. ”Such men will find the race of Zusykses,“ he said. ”It will be a disaster for us.“ And he was right. We are safe from their full attentions only as long as they think we are not real. We must remain hidden among all the accidental systems.”

“Yes,” Michaelmas said. “Of course.”

“He was a brilliant genius!” Limberg declared. “Far worthier than I!”

“He sold out his fathers and his brothers and his sons for a striped suit.”

“What will I tell his family?”

“What did you tell them when you said you’d send the grocer’s boy to Paris ?”

Limberg’s upper body rocked back and forth. His eyes closed. “What shall I do with his body?”

“What was he going to do with mine?” Michaelmas began to say. Looking at Limberg, he said instead: “Your systems are being monitored now, and you mustn’t touch them. But a little later today, I’ll call you, and you can begin to reactivate them step by step under my direction.”

“Right,” Domino said.

Michaelmas watched Limberg carefully. He said: “When you’ve re-established contact with Fermierla, you can shift out this Cikoumas and shift in —”

Limberg’s creased cheeks began to run with silent tears.

“For his family,” Michaelmas said. He turned to go. “For their sake, find one who’s a little easier to get along with, this time.”

Limberg stared. “I would not in any case have it want to be here with me. I will send it home to him.” He said: “I felt when first you began here with us that you were a messenger of death.”

“Domino,” Michaelmas said, “get me a cab.” He pushed through the door and out into the hall, then along that and past the auditorium, where convalescent ladies and gentlemen were just chattily emerging and discussing the psychically energizing lecture of the therapy professor, and then out through the double doors, and waited outside.

He said little to Domino on the ride to the airport, and less on the flight back to New York City. He made sure the Papashvilly interview was going well; otherwise, he initiated nothing, and sat with his chin in his hand, staring at God knew what. From time to time his eyes would attempt to close, but other reflexes and functions in his system would jerk them open again.

From time to time Domino fed him tidbits in an attempt to pique his interest:

“Hanrassy has reneged on her promise to grant EVM an interview.” And a little later:

“Westrum’s speaking to Hanrassy. Should I patch you in?”

“No. Not unless she takes charge of the conversation.”

“She’s not.”

“That’s good enough, then:” He thought of that tough, clever woman on the banks of the Mississippi, putting down her phone and trying to reason out what had happened. She’d alibi to herself eventually—everyone did. She’d decide Norwood and Gately and Westrum were conspiring somehow, and she’d waste energy trying to find the handle to that. She’d campaign, but she’d be a little off balance. And if it seemed they might still need to play it, there was always the ace in the hole with the income tax official. And that was the end of her. Somewhere among her followers, or in her constituency, was the next person who’d try combining populism and xenophobia. It was a surefire formula that had never in the entire history of American democracy been a winner in the end.

They come and they go, he thought. He rubbed the skin on the backs of his hands, which seemed drier than last year and more ready to fold into diamond-shaped, choppy wrinkles, as if he were a lake with a breeze passing across it.

The EVM crew staked out in Gately’s anteroom finally found him consenting to receive them.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to announce to the world,” Gately said, “that we are to have the honour, the privilege, and the great personal gratification to welcome Colonel Norwood to these shores on his impending visit.” He had changed out of his sweatsuit and was wearing a conservatively cut blue vested pinstripe that set off his waistline when he casually unbuttoned his jacket. He looked almost young enough to go back on active status himself, but his eyes were a little too careful to follow every movement of every member of the interview crew.

Time passed. President Fefre had a mild attack interpreted as indigestion. A man in Paris attempted to leave a flight bag of explosives in the upper elevator of the Eiffel Tower, but police alerted by a fortuitous tap into a political conversation arrested him promptly. Another man, in Florence, was found to have embezzled a huge amount of money from the fluids of the provincial lottery. He was the brother of the provincial governor; it seemed likely that there would be heightened public disillusion in that quarter of the nation. Rome, which had been a little dilatory in its supervision, would have to be a bit more alert for some time, so who was to say there was not some good in almost anything? And most of the money was recovered. Also, a small private company in New Mexico, composed of former engineering employees striking out on their own, applied for a patent on an engine featuring half the energy consumption of anything with comparable output. The president of the company and his chief engineer had originally met while coincidentally booked into adjoining seats on an inter-city train. Meanwhile, a hitherto insignificant individual in Hamburg ran his mother-in-law through the eye with a fork at his dinner table, knocked down his wife, went to the waterfront, attempted clumsily to burn his father-in-law’s warehouse, and professed honestly to have lost all memory of any of these preceding events when he was found sitting against a bollard and crying with the hoarse persistence of a baby while staring out over the water. But not all of this was reported to Michaelmas immediately. Domino thought and thought on what the world might be like when a completely even tenor had settled over all its policies, and there was nothing left for the news to talk about but the incessant, persistent, perhaps rising sound of individual people demanding to assert their existence.

Two trains were inadvertently switched on to the same track in Holland. But another switch, intended to stay closed, opened fortuitously, and the freight slid out of the path of the holiday passenger express.

In the systems of the Limberg Sanatorium, there was nothing overt.

“All right, then,” Domino said, “if you don’t want to listen, will you talk? What happened at the sanatorium? Limberg’s keeping everybody out of the room with Cikoumas’s body, seeing no one, sitting in his office, and obviously waiting for someone to tell him what to do next.”

Michaelmas grunted. He said: “Well, they were laboratory curiosities and the person in charge of them is sentimental and intrigued. When they proposed something ingenious, such as moving something coherent from one arbitrary frame of reference into a highly similar frame, they were indulged. Why not? The experiment may be trivial, or it may be taken as proof that there are no orders of greater or lesser likelihood among sets, but in either case it was suggested by a member of the experiment. You have to admit that would intrigue almost anyone, let alone a poet in heat.” Michaelmas smiled as though something had struck his mouth like a riding whip. “Poke around, now that you’re inside Limberg’s system. Open one part of the circuitry at a time. You’ll meet what’s been chasing you. Be careful to keep a firm hold on the switching.”