against his cheek like someone had told him doctors were
supposed to do when they couldn’t think of anything
intelligent to say.
“You all right, Sim?” Harry asked.
Morsfagen pushed my lawyer/agent/father-figure out of
the way and thrust his bony face down at mine. I could see
hairs crinkling out of his flared nostrils. There were flecks
of spittle on his lips, as if he had been doing a lot of shout-
ing in rage. The dark blue of his close-shaved whiskers
seemed like needles waiting to thrust out of his tight pores.
“What happened? What’s wrong? You don’t get paid with-
out results.”
“I wasn’t prepared for what I found,” I said. “Simple as
that. No need for hysterics.”
“But you were yelling and screaming,” Harry protested,
insinuating himself between the general and myself.
“Not to worry.”
“What did you find that you didn’t expect?” Morsfagen
asked. He was skeptical. I could have cared more, but not
less.
“He hasn’t any conscious mind. It’s a vast pit, and I fell
into it expecting solid ground. Evidently, all his thoughts,
or a great many of them, come from what we would
consider the subconscious.”
Morsfagen stood away. “Then you can’t reach him?”
“I didn’t say that. Now that I know what’s there and
what isn’t, I’ll be all right.”
I struggled to a sitting position, reached out and stopped
the room from swaying. The hex signs settled onto the
walls where they belonged, and the light fixtures even
stopped whirling in erratic circles from wall to wall. I
looked at my watch with the picture of Elliot Gould on
the face, calculated the time, assumed a properly bland
expression, and said. “That’ll be roughly a hundred thou-
sand poscreds. Put it on my earnings sheet, why don’t
you?”
He sputtered. He fumed. He roared. He glowered. He
quoted the Government Rates for Employees. He quoted
the Employer’s Rights Act of 1986, paragraph two,
subparagraph three. He fumed a bit more.
I watched, looking unshaken.
He pranced. He danced. He raved. He ranted. He
demanded to know what I had done to earn any pay what-
soever. I didn’t answer him. He finished ranting. Started
fuming again. In the end, he put it down in the book and
vouchered the payment before pounding on a table in utter
frustration and then leaving the room with a warning to be
on time the following day.
“Don’t push your luck,” Harry advised me later.
“Not my luck, but my weight,” I said.
“He doesn’t take to a subordinate position. He’s a
bastard.”
“I know. That’s why I needle him.”
“When did the masochism arise?”
“Not masochism—my well-known God-syndrome. I was
just passing one of my famous judgments.”
“Look,” he said, “you can quit.”
“We both need the money. Especially me.”
“Maybe there are other things more important than
money.”
Someone pushed us aside as equipment was trundled
out of the hex-painted room.
“More important than money?”
“I’ve heard it said…”
“Not in this world. You’ve heard wrong. Nothing’s
more important when the creditors come. Nothing’s more
important when the choice is to live with cockroaches or
in splendor.”
“Sometimes, I think you’re too cynical,” he said, giving
me one of those fatherly looks, something I inherited
along with his last name.
“What else?” I asked, buttoning my greatcoat.
“It’s all because of what they tried to do to you. You
should forget that. Get out more. Meet people.”
“I have. I don’t like them.”
“There’s an old Irish legend which says——”
“Old Irish legends all say the same thing. Look, Harry,
aside from you, everyone tries to use me. They want me
to spy on their wives to see if they have been laying with
someone else. Or they want me to find hubby’s mistress.
Or I get invited to their cocktail parties so that I can
perform parlor tricks for a batch of drunks. The world
made me cynical, Harry. And it keeps me that way. So, if
we’re both wise, we’ll just sit back and get rich off my
cynicism. Maybe if a psychiatrist made me happy-go-lucky
and at peace with myself, my talent would disappear.”
Before he could reply, I left. When I closed the door