[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

run-out on the glacier."
I didn't say anything. The run-out on the glacier had been no idea of mine.
God only knew whose idea it had been to have Run-stead club me, shanghai me,
and leave a substitute corpse in my place.
"You almost escaped," Taunton mused. "If it hadn't been for a few humble,
loyal servants a taxi-runner, a few others we never would have had you back.
But I have my tools, Courtenay.
"They might be better, they might be worse, but it's my destiny to dream
dreams and weave visions. The greatness of an artist is in his simplicity,
Courtenay. You say to me: 'Nobody wants to be brainburned.' That is because
you are mediocre.
/ say:
'Find somebody who wants to be brainburned and me him.' That is because I am
great."
"Wants to be brainburned," I repeated stupidly. "Wants to be brainburned."
"Explain," said Taunton to one aide. "I want him thoroughly convinced that we
are in earnest."
Page 56
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
One of his men told me dryly: "It's a matter of population, Courtenay. Have
you ever heard of Albert Fish?"
"No."
"He was a phenomenon of the dawn; the earliest days of the Age of Reason 1920
or thereabouts. Albert Fish stuck needles into himself, burned himself with
alcohol-saturated wads of cotton, flogged himself he liked it. He would have
liked brainburning, I'll wager. It would have been twenty delightful
subjective years of being flayed, suffocated, choked, and nauseated. It would
have been Albert Fish's dream come true.
"There was only one Albert Fish in his day. Pressures and strains of a very
high order are required to produce an Albert Fish.
It would be unreasonable to expect more than one to be produced out of the
small and scattered population of the period
less than three billion. With our vastly larger current population there are
many Albert Fishes wandering around. You only have to find them. Our matchless
research facilities here at Taunton have unearthed several. They turn up at
hospitals, sometimes in very grotesque shape. They are eager would-be killers;
they want the delights of punishment. A man like you says we can't hire
killers because they'd be afraid of being punished. But Mr. Taunton, now, says
we can hire a killer if we find one who likes being punished. And the best
part of it all is, the ones who like to get hurt are the ones who just love
hurting others. Hurting, for instance you."
It had a bloodcurdlingly truthful ring to it. Our generation must be inured to
wonder. The chronicles of fantastic heroism and abysmal wickedness that crowd
our newscasts I knew from research that they didn't have such courage or such
depravity in the old days. The fact had puzzled me. We have such people as
Malone, who quietly dug his tunnels for six years and then one Sunday morning
blew up Red Bank, New Jersey. A Brink's traffic cop had got him sore.
Conversely we have James Revere, hero of the
White Cloud disaster. A shy, frail tourist-class steward, he had rescued on
his own shoulders seventy-six passengers, returning again and again into the
flames with his flesh charring from his bones, blind, groping his way along
red-hot bulkheads with his hand-stumps. It was true. When there are enough
people, you will always find somebody who can and will be any given thing.
Taunton was an artist. He had grasped this broad and simple truth and used it.
It meant that I was as good as dead.
Kathy, I thought.
My Kathy.
Taunton's thick voice broke in on my reflections. "You grasp the pattern?" he
asked. "The big picture? The theme, the
message, what I might call the essential juice of it is that I'm going to
repossess Venus. Now, beginning at the beginning, tell us about the Schocken
Agency. All its little secrets, its little weaknesses, its ins and outs, its
corruptible employees, its appropriations, its Washington contacts
you know."
I was a dead man with nothing to lose I thought. "No," I said.
One of Taunton's men said abruptly: "He's ready for Hedy," got up and went
out.
Taunton said: "You've studied prehistory, Courtenay. You may recognize the
name of Gilles de Rais." I did, and felt a tightness over my scalp, like a
steel helmet slowly shrinking. "All the generations of prehistory added up to
an estimated five billion population," Taunton rambled. "All the generations
of prehistory produced only one Gilles de Rais, whom you perhaps think of as
Bluebeard. Nowadays we have our pick of several. Out of all the people I might
have picked to handle special work like that for me I picked Hedy. You'll see
why."
The door opened and a pale, adenoidal girl with lank blond hair was standing
in it. She had a silly grin on her face; her lips were thin and bloodless. In
Page 57
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
one hand she held a six-inch needle set in a plastic handle.
I looked into her eyes and began screaming. I couldn't stop screaming until
they led her away and closed the door again. I was broken.
"Taunton," I whispered at last. "Please . . ."
He leaned back comfortably and said: "Give."
I tried, but I couldn't. My voice wouldn't work right and neither would my
memory. I couldn't remember whether my firm was Fowler Schocken or Schocken
Fowler, for instance.
Taunton got up at last and said: "We'll put you on ice for a while, Courtenay,
so you can pull yourself together. I need a drink myself." He shuddered
involuntarily, and then beamed again. "Sleep on it," he said, and left
unsteadily.
Two of his men carted me from the brain room, down a corridor and into a bare
cubbyhole with a very solid door. It seemed to be night in executives'
country. Nothing was going on in any of the offices we passed, lights were
low, and a single corridor guard was yawning at his desk.
I asked unsteadily: "Will you take the cocoon off me? I'm going to be a filthy
mess if I don't get out of it."
"No orders about it," one of them said briefly, and they slammed the solid
door and locked it. I flopped around the small floor trying to find something
sharp enough to break the film and give me an even chance of bursting the
plastic, but there was nothing. After incredible contortions and a dozen
jarring falls I found that I could never get to my feet. The doorknob had
offered a very, very faint ghost of hope, but it might as well have been a
million miles away.
Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith. Mitchell Courtenay, key man of the Venus
section. Mitchell Courtenay, destroyer-to-be of the Con-sies. Mitchell
Courtenay flopping on the floor of a cell in the offices of the sleaziest,
crookedest agency that ever blemished the profession, without any prospect
except betrayal and with luck a merciful death. Kathy at least would never
know. She would think I had died like a fool on the glacier, meddling with the
power pack when I had no business to
...
The lock of the door rattled and raided. They were coming for me.
But when the door opened I saw from the floor not a forest of trousered legs
but a single pair of matchstick ankles, nylon-clad.
"I love you," said the strange, dead voice of a woman. "They said I would have
to wait, but I couldn't wait." It was
Hedy. She had her needle.
I tried to cry for help, but my chest seemed paralyzed as she knelt beside me
with shining eyes. The temperature of the room seemed to drop ten degrees. She
clamped her bloodless lips on mine; they were like heated iron. And then I
thought the left side of my face and head were being torn off. It lasted for
seconds and blended into a red haze and unconsciousness.
"Wake up," the dead voice was saying. "I want you. Wake up." Lightning smashed
at my right elbow, and I cried out and jerked my arm. My arm moved
//
moved.
The bloodless lips descended on mine again, and again her needle ran into my
jaw, probing exactly for the great lump of the trigeminal facial nerve, and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]