Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

“I thought it might possibly have some international implications. That’s why I came to you. Of course I’m also anxious personally to make whoever did it pay up.”

“Naturally. We’ll put our best men on it right away. What’s your office digit?”

Cassius repeated the eighteen numerals which included his extension. While Flange wrote down the figures with his right hand, his left strayed like a spider over to the dart case, then drummed on the edge. Cassius rose abruptly. He couldn’t stand any more. The old man was senile and no one had the heart to remove him from office, that was it.

Also, Cassius felt with a certainty that stoked his determination to a new height, that R. Ripley Flange had no intention of putting his best men on it. Or maybe even any men, period. The Washington police wanted to try but were overworked. Flange simply didn’t care.

“Visor you as soon as we have anything. Get right on it, yes we will.” Flange was slumped in his throne chair like a punctured balloon. His hand drummed on the dart case, drummed.

“Don’t you want any more details? I only gave you the essentials a minute ago.” Flange, though obviously sick, was beginning to infuriate him.

“We have enough, we have plenty, best men. Visor you.”

After several weeks Cassius even gave up hoping. He discussed it over vitamins with Charlie Pelz one afternoon. Charlie agreed that things were sure strange at the W.B.I. The place appeared understaffed. Moribund. He could offer no explanation other than the one Cassius had already come up with—Flange was such a fixture that the government was almost conscience-bound to await his death with something like unquestioning reverence.

Cassius agreed. He thought privately that it was distressing to watch the disintegration of a person’s drive as old age crept in.

But Cassius didn’t badger Flange or the W.B.I. Indeed, he forgot them. At the end of the fourth week following Timothy’s disappearance, a few other curious things had pushed their way into his mind. They had no bearing on Timothy, probably. But they were the kinds of things which he, on the paper, was in a position to pursue a bit without the aid of sad old men who were once mighty tigers but who were now all gums and no guts.

What first put Cassius on the trail was the peculiar and shocking concert of Madame Kagle.

By intermission the shock was profound. Cassius noted its beginnings in the unusual amount of head-turning while Madame Kagle ran through The Joint M.I.T. Faculty Sonata, never missing a note but missing the fire of it altogether.

No one was so impolite as to gasp during the second selection, Oodner’s Peripheral Stimuli. But Cassius saw mouths hanging open all up and down his row. No music critic, Cassius had nevertheless seen plenty of photos of the celebrated Kagle attack. At its best it was a savagely bow-shaped posture above the keyboard of the harpsivac. It emphasized the woman’s boniness and made her resemble, some said, a fairy-tale witch maniacally searching for the touchstone in a casketful of junk beads. Out of such agonized personal involvement, great music was wrenched.

Except this evening.

Madame Wanda Kagle sat perfectly straight. She was watching the one hundred thirty-six keys, all right. But she was glass-eyed. Her mouth, like many in the audience, hung open in a peculiar slack-lipped indifference. The applause at the end of the first half of the program was thin.

Stumbling and shoving up the aisle for a quick smoke, Cassius and Joy heard all around them whispered comments such as: “Unbelievable.” “Lackluster.” “Crushingly disappointing.” They pushed out into the vast foyer of the Sports Dome. The roof was rolled back to the stars and warm night breezes. Joy waited for her smoke to pop lire, inhaled and said:

“The old babe must be close on sixty. Wonder if she’s slipping. Maybe she has to key up with amphets, and forgot.”

“That’s a bad pun,” Cassius said. “I’d guess she was loaded with booze if it wasn’t common knowledge that she very nearly lives like a saint. I read somewhere that she’s even tried hypnotism to push everything out of her mind but her music.”

“She certainly succeeded,” Joy answered. “That was pure claptrap in there. She couldn’t have been less interested.”

“This puts a little different complexion on going to the reception afterward,” Cassius mused. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t be much interested in using those chits Greeheim gave you along with the tickets. I don’t know beans about music. Or about how to get along with musical coteries, either.”

Joy’s eyes glittered. “For God’s sake, Cassius, you can pretend, can’t you? You could even make ’em think you’re the regular critic. Fake it a little. Just sneer. Greeheim isn’t that well known yet. He’s only been with the paper a few months. I certainly don’t want to insult him when he gets over his illness by telling him we used the tickets but not the party passes.”

The crowd was beginning to stir, pushing back to the entrance ramps for the second half. “You won’t have to tell him,” Cassius grinned. “In the light of that first half, I wouldn’t miss seeing Madame K. close up for anything. Maybe we’ll get a hint of what’s wrong with her.”

“Now you’re talking!” Joy said, eyes sharp as awls.

As they fought the aisle battle on the way to their seats, Cassius considered telling Joy the real reason for his curiosity. She was on one of her imaginary scents again, hoping she’d unearth some hot exclusive. While Cassius, on the other hand, had stared at Madame Kagle and seen something else entirely—

A ghostly twin image of the vast, weary indifference of R. Ripley Flange.

Lights dimmed. Madame Kagle appeared from the wings. She seemed to stumble. Like a sleepwalker she approached the bench of the harpsivac. She sat down. She dry-washed her hands, as if warming them. Joy was noisily rippling the pages of the program, twisting it to get light. She hissed, “Oh boy, this’ll be fantabulous. The Algebraic Suite. It’s one of my favorites.”

But there was to be no Algebraic Suite. Madame Kagle seemed frozen at the console. A look of supreme sorrow came onto her aging features. It was immediately replaced by a sly, mocking smile. Moving with the painful lethargy of the arthritic—which she definitely was not—Madame Kagle rose. She circled the harpsivac and yanked the plug from the floor socket. The thousands of tiny multicolored lights on the banked tonal computers simultaneously went black.

Madame Kagle cast a tired glance at the shocked audience. She lifted her right shoulder in the smallest shrug. She sauntered off the stage.

Once the curtain dropped and the impossible became a fact, the crowd was as silent as mourners entering a mortuary. There were hushed little speculations about narcotics, insanity, sex, religion, gall bladder, dropsy, thrombosis, poor investment counseling and so forth. People seemed reluctant to move from the foyer onto the broad piazza outside the Sports Dome. Only a few drifted from the piazza toward the parking docks.

“Wow,” Joy whispered, “I can’t wait to get the dirt at the reception.”

Cassius was about to speak when the annunciator horn of a newsvend machine rolling through the crowd blared that everyone mustn’t forget that next Monday was D-Day, and that details on the free city-wide immunizations against scaling scalp could be had by inserting a coin in the slot. The contraption dinned the fact that its papers contained a full list of the twenty-two hundred dispensaries which would be set up to distribute the free capsules to inoculate the populace against the dread scourge. The drive was the latest work of the ancient March of Quarters Foundation. Details, details inside—