Orbitsville Departure

Chapter 4

On the butt of the gun there was a stud which had to be depressed and moved from one end of a U-shaped slot to the other. It had been designed that way to ensure that the weapon, a highly expensive piece of engineering, could never be decommissioned by accident. Mathieu ran the stud along its full course, causing the myriad circuits to adopt new and permanent neutral configurations, then he stripped the gun down to four basic parts and hid them in separate drawers of his desk.

The action made him feel safer, but not much. His original plan, now revealed to have been woefully inadequate, had not allowed for a still-functioning alarm system on Subkvel Three, and he could only speculate about other possible deficiencies. The gun had been rendered invisible to any detectors the police might bring in, but there was no guarantee that an existing monitor had not already tracked its course through the building and into his office. If that were the case he would know about it very soon. Behave normally in the meantime, he told himself, then came a question which was almost unanswerable to one in his state of mind. What do normal people do when an alarm sounds? He pondered it for a moment, like a man confronted by a problem in alien logic, and hesitantly reached towards his communications panel. The solid image of Vik Costain, personal assistant to Mayor Bryceland, appeared at the projection focus. Costain, who was close to sixty, made a profession out of knowing ail there was to know about the City Hall and those who worked there.

"What's going on?" Mathieu said. "What was the racket?"

"Give me a break, will you? I'm still trying to…" Costain tilted his near-hairless head, obviously listening to an important message, and nodded decisively — a sure sign he had no idea what to do next. "Call me later, Gerald."

"Don't forget to let me know if the building's on fire," Mathieu replied, breaking the connection. He breathed deeply and regularly for a minute, satisfied that he had put on a reasonable act, gone some distance towards covering his tracks, then he closed his eyes and saw Cona Dallen and her son falling… falling and folding… their eyes already bright and incurious… idiot eyes…

Mathieu leaped to his feet and walked around the perimeter of his office, suddenly unable to dredge enough oxygen from the air. He had made the circuit a second time, faster, before realising he was trying to outrace a part of himself, the pan which acknowledged that he — Gerald Mathieu — was a murderer. No amount of sidestepping or playing with definitions was going to change that fact. Continuance of personality was the sole criterion, the only one which counted, and the personalities known as Cona Dallen and Mikel Dallen no longer existed. He had blasted them away in a storm of complex radiations which had returned two human brains to the tabula rasa condition of the newborn infant, and those personalities would never exist again, no matter what therapies were employed.

Carry Dallen will fall m! Mathieu abruptly stopped walking and pinched Ac bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, trying to come to terms with the new thought. There was little that was fanciful or melodramatic about it. Dallen was a big, powerfully built, handsome man who worked a little too hard at appearing casual, who was always a little too quick with the joke or pleasantry designed to put those about him at their ease. Mathieu, a gifted people-watcher, had privately sized him up as inflexible and intolerant, with the capacity to be ruthless in pursuit of what he believed to be right. He had always been afraid of Dallen, even when there was nothing more than well-concealed graft on his conscience — now he had a chilling conviction that Dallen would took straight into his soul, know him for what he was, and come after him like a remorseless machine.

"No more than you deserve," he said, addressing his image in a wall mirror he had had specially installed. The man he saw looked surprisingly relaxed and confident, like a Nordic tennis champion on holiday, giving no indication of criminality or of the hunger which was growing more insistent in him by the minute. The thought of felicitin caused Mathieu to slip a hand into his jacket and touch the gold pen clipped in the inner pocket. It was a functional writing instrument, but with a small adjustment it dispensed a magical ink. A one-centimetre line drawn on the tongue was enough to put right everything that was wrong in Mathieu's life, not only for the present but working in retrospect, right back to the time he had come from Orbksville at the age of eight.

His father, Arthur Mathieu, had been a minor Metagov official who had followed the promotion trail to Earth and had lost his way in a maze of gin bottles and ill-starred departmental shuffles. The community of government workers in Madison City was small and close-knit, and the boy Gerald — humiliated by his father's failure — had gone through school as a solitary stroller, barely achieving grades, dreaming of the day he would return to the Big O's delicately ribbed sky and up-curving horizons. Then, when Gerald was sixteen, his father had thed in a ludicrous accident involving a hedge trimmer, and suddenly the way back had been open. His mother was returning, his younger sister was returning, but Mathieu had found he was afraid of the return journey and even more terrified of Orbitsville itself. He had claimed the right to an unbroken education and by sheer force of belated effort had built a successful career in Madison, achieving a position which no reasonable person would expect him to quit merely to return to his boyhood home.

Mathieu understood his own private strategy, however. And although one part of his mind assured him his timidity was of no consequence — another part, brooding and illogical, saw it a serious character defect, evidence of a void where there should have been the cornerstone of a personality. He had tried psychological judo, presenting his weaknesses as cute foibles. I’ve never had the slightest trace of will power-ask anybody who knows me. There is only one way to get rid of temptation — give in immediately. You can always trust me to let you down…

Then had come felicitin, bringer of the ultimate high. Felicitin, which could have been custom-designed by a master chemist for Mathieu's personal salvation, which made the user feel not only good, but right. Felicitin, at five thousand monits and more for an amount the size of a single teardrop.

For which he had become a thief.

For which he had become a murderer.

Mathieu drew the gold pen out of his pocket, clenched both hands around it and made as if to snap it in two. He stood that way for a full minute, changing his grip on the cylinder several times, trembling like a marksman afflicted with target-shyness, then his posture relaxed as he felt himself arrive at one of his rationalisations. There was no need to try kicking the habit. Datten would be quick to ascertain the events leading to the annihilation of his family, to leap from motive and opportunity to half-intuitive identification. Soon after that Mathieu would be going to the prison colony — if Dallen let him get that far — and in prison one did not have to struggle to escape drug dependency. The cold turkey treatment was thrown in free with the uniform and the rehab tapes.

From beyond his door there came the sound of other doors slamming, excited voices, rapid footsteps. One thing which had not changed over the centuries was the essential dullness of most administrative jobs, and on a heavy summer's morning, with the outside world shimmering on the windows like a multicoloured dream, the sense of ennui in the corridors was almost tangible. Now something out of the ordinary had happened in the building and the word was going around. This was going to be a day to remember.

Mathieu slipped his pen back into his pocket, sat down at his desk and tried to plan the next hour. He decided, having made his for-the-record enquiry, to wait where he was until someone requested his presence downstairs. Frank Bryceland, the mayor, was out of town for two days, so it was likely that Mathieu would be summoned as soon as Costain realised what had happened. As the minutes slowly filtered from future into past he felt mildly surprised at how long Costain was taking, then he began to appreciate the variance between his own informed viewpoint and those of other people in the building. An alarm had sounded without any immediately identifiable cause; a security check could be slow and tentative; and the condition of the woman and child lying on the emergency stair might take time to diagnose, especially as Luddite Specials were far from common by the end of the 23rd Century.

Prompted by impulse, Mathieu went to the window and looked down at the north side car park just as a police cruiser came slewing in from Burlington Avenue. As soon as it had stopped three men got out and ran towards the north lobby. Something gave an ky heave in Mathieu's stomach as he recognised the black-haired figure of Carry Dallen loping along with unconscious power, looking as though he could run clear through the wall of the building. Feeling cold and isolated, Mathieu returned to his desk and sat staring at his hands, waiting.

Perhaps five minutes had gone by before there was a chiming sound and Costain's head hovered before him. Errant flecks of light swarming like fireflies around the image showed the projector was losing its adjustments.

"Can you come down to the north lobby?" Costain sounded both nervous and guarded. "Right now?"

"What's the matter?"

"It looks like somebody has wiped Cona Dallen and her boy."

"Wiped them!" Mathieu conveyed puzzlement. "Do you mean…?"

"Yeah — total brain scour. Didn't you know?"

"No, I…" Mathieu paused, sensitive to the question. "How the hell would I know? I've been sitting in my…"

Costain shook his head. "It's all over the building, Gerald. You'll have to make a statement."

"I'm on my way down." Mathieu stood up as Costain's image dissolved. He went to the door, smoothing his hair and making slight adjustments to the hang of his jacket. It was important for him to look his best when going into a difficult situation, and facing up to Dallen was going to be the worst ever, the ultimate bad scene. The elevator was waiting, and with almost no lapse of time he was in the lobby, working his way through barriers of people, all of whom were facing the door of a room which had once been used by commissionaires, back in the days when Madison had been booming. Vik Costain, as though telepathically forewarned, opened the door as Mathieu reached it, quickly drew him inside and clicked the lock.

"We're all going to roast over this one," Costain said, the folds of his grey face set like rippled lava. "Frank has been griping about security for months."

"I know," Mathieu mumbled, moving further into the room to become part of its central tableau. Cona Dallen was stretched out on her back on the floor, hands making random little pawing movements in the air. Her lightweight saffron dress was in disarray, showing her conical thighs, but the display was asexual because her face was blank and serene, unmarked by identity, and her eyes were those of a baby — bright, humorous, uncomprehending. A bubbled ribbon of saliva ran from one corner of her mouth. Carry Dallen was kneeling beside her, rocking gently with his son gathered in his arms, his face hidden in the boy's hair. Mathieu said a silent farewell to joy.

Costain touched Mathieu's arm. "Who would do a thing like this?"

"I know who did it," Dallen announced in a leaden, abstracted voice. He raised his head and slowly looked around the half-dozen men in the room. Mathieu's heart juddered to a standstill as the grey, tear-lensed eyes locked with is own, but — miraculously — Dallen's gaze wandered away from him without pause. It was as if they had become strangers.

"I did this," Dallen continued.

One of the policemen in the group moved uneasily. "Carry, I don't think you should…"

Dallen silenced him with a look. "I brought my family to this place… I handled the job wrong… pushed too hard… ignored the threats…" A muscular spasm pulled his mouth downwards at the corners, producing a caricature of an urchin who had just been thrashed, and when he spoke each word was the snapping of a glass rod. "Why couldn't I have been with them? I don't deserve a brain…"

"I'm going to see what's holding the ambulance," Costain said, striding to the door.

"Good idea." Mathieu went through the doorway on the heels of the older man, anxious to leave the emotional -autoclave of the room. Instead of following Costain to the lobby's outer doors he turned right along the corridor and went into a washroom. It was cool and empty, heavily perfumed with soap. In the furtive privacy of a cubicle he took the gold pen from his pocket, reset the point and drew it across his tongue, making a line twice as long as was usual for him.

I might be lucky he thought. Perhaps I’m going to get away with it.

He closed his eyes retreating inwards, waiting for chemical absolution.