He could not answer; he could only stand. Inert, hearing the sounds but not the meaning. Of it.
“For a year Felix was legally in charge of one-fourth of Terra’s forced-labor camps. He discovered that by virtue of an obscure law passed years ago when the forced-labor camps were more like death camps–with a lot of blacks in them– anyhow, he discovered that this statute permitted the camps to operate only during the Second Civil War. And he had the power to close any and all camps at any time he felt it to be in the public interest. And those blacks and the students who’d been working in the camps are damn tough and strong, from years of heavy manual labor. They’re not like the effete, pale, clammy students living beneath the campus areas. And then he researched and discovered another obscure statute. Any camp that isn’t operating at a profit has to be–or rather had to be–closed. So Felix changed the amount of money– very little, of course–paid to the detainees. So all he had to do was jack up their pay, show red ink in the books, and barn; he could shut down the camps.” She laughed.
He tried to speak but couldn’t. Inside him his mind churned like a tattered rubber ball, sinking and rising, slowing down, speeding up, fading and then flaring brilliantly; the shafts of light scampered all through him, piercing every part of his body.
“But the big thing Felix did,” Alys said, “had to do with the student kibbutzim under the burned-out campuses. A lot of them are desperate for food and water; you know how it is: the students try to make it into town, foraging for supplies, ripping off and looting. Well, the police maintain a lot of agents among the students agitating for a final shootout with the police . . . which the police and nats are hopefully waiting for. Do you see?”
“I see,” he said, “a hat.”
“But Felix tried to keep off any sort of shootout. But to do it he had to get supplies to the students; do you see?”
“The hat is red,” Jason said. “Like your ears.”
“Because of his position as marshal in the pol hierarchy, Felix had access to informant reports as to the condition of each student kibbutz. He knew which ones were failing and which were making it. It was his job to boil out of the horde of abstracts the ultimately important facts: which kibbutzim were going under and which were not. Once he had listed those in trouble, other high police officers met with him to decide how to apply pressure which would hasten the end. Defeatist agitation by police finks, sabotage of food and water supplies. Desperate–actually hopeless–forays out of the campus area in search of help–for instance, at Columbia one time they had a plan of getting to the Harry S Truman Labor Camp and liberating the detainees and arming them, but at that even Felix had to say ‘Intervene!’ But anyhow it was Felix’s job to determine the tactic for each kibbutz under scrutiny. Many, many times he advised no action at all. For this, of course, the hardhats criticized him, demanded his removal from his position.” Alys paused. “He was a full police marshal, then, you have to realize.”
“Your red,” Jason said, “is fantidulous.”
“I know.” Alys’s lips turned down. “Can’t you hold your hit, man? I’m trying to tell you something. Felix got _demoted_, from police marshal to police general, because he saw to it, when he could, that in the kibbutzim the students were bathed, fed, their medical supplies looked after, cots provided. Like he did for the forced-labor camps under his jurisdiction. So now he’s just a general. But they leave him alone. They’ve done all they can to him for now and he still holds a high office.”
“But your incest,” Jason said. “What if?” He paused; he could not remember the rest of his sentence. “If,” he said, and that seemed to be it; he felt a furious glow, arising from the fact that he had managed to convey his message to her. “If,” he said again, and the inner glow became wild with happy fury. He exclaimed aloud.
“You mean what if the marshals knew that Felix and I have a son? What would they do?”
“They would do,” Jason said. “Can we hear some music? Or give me–” His words ceased; none more entered his brain. “Gee,” he said. “My mother wouldn’t be here. Death.”
Alys inhaled deeply, sighed. “Okay, Jason,” she said. “I’ll give up trying to rap with you. Until your head is back.”
“Talk,” he said.
“Would you like to see my bondage cartoons?”
“What,” he said, “that’s?”
“Drawings, very stylized, of chicks tied up, and men–”
“Can I lie down?” he said. “My legs won’t work. I think my right leg extends to the moon. In other words”–he considered–“I broke it standing up.”
“Come here.” She led him, step by step, from the study and back into the living room. “Lie down on the couch,” she told him. With agonizing difficulty he did so. “I’ll go get you some Thorazine; it’ll counteract the mes.”
“This is a mess,” he said.
“Let’s see . . . where the hell did I put that? I rarely if ever have to use it, but I keep it in case something like this . . . God damn it, can’t you drop a single cap of mes and be something? I take five at once.”
“But you’re vast,” Jason said.
“I’ll be back; I’m going upstairs.” Alys strode off, toward a door located several distances away; for a long, long time he watched her dwindle–how did she accomplish it? It seemed incredible that she could shrink down to almost nothing–and then she vanished. He felt, at that, terrible fear. He knew that he had become alone, without help. Who will help me? he asked himself. I have to get away from these stamps and cups and snuffboxes and bondage cartoons and phone grids and frog’s legs I’ve got to get to that quibble I’ve got to fly away and back to where I know back in town maybe with Ruth Rae if they’ve let her go or even back to Kathy Nelson this woman is too much for me so is her brother them and their incest child in Florida named what?
He rose unsteadily, groped his way across a rug that sprang a million leaks of pure pigment as he trod on it, crushing it with his ponderous shoes, and then, at last, he stumbled against the front door of the unsteady room.
Sunlight. He had gotten outside.
The quibble.
He hobbled to it.
Inside he sat at the controls, bewildered by legions of knobs, levers, wheels, pedals, dials. “Why doesn’t it go?” he said aloud. “Get going!” he told it, rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat. “Won’t she let me go?” he asked the quibble.
The keys. Of course he couldn’t fly it no keys.
Her coat in the back seat; he had witnessed it. And also her large mailpouch purse. There, the keys in her purse. There.
The two record albums. _Taverner and the Blue, Blue Blues_. And the best of them all: _There’ll be a Good Time_. He groped, managed somehow to lift both record albums up, conveyed them to the empty seat beside him. I have the proof here, he realized. It’s here in these records and it’s here in the house. With her. I’ve got to find it here if I’m going to. Find it. Nowhere else. Even General Mr. Felix What-Is-HeNamed? he won’t find it. He doesn’t know. As much as me.
Carrying the enormous record albums he ran back to the house–around him the landscape flowed, with whip, tall, tree-like organisms gulping in air out of the sweet blue sky, organisms which absorbed water and light, ate the hue into the sky. . . he reached the gate, pushed against it. The gate did not budge. Button.
He found no.
Step by step. Feel each inch with fingers. Like in the dark. Yes, he thought. I’m in darkness. He set down the muchtoo-big record albums, stood against the wall beside the gate, slowly massaged the rubberlike surface of the wall. Nothing. Nothing.
The button.
He pressed it, grabbed up the record albums, stood in front of the gate as it incredibly slowly creaked its noisy protesting way open.
A brown-uniformed man carrying a gun appeared. Jason said, “I had to go back to the quibble for something.”
“Perfectly all right, sir,” the man in the brown uniform said. “I saw you leave and I knew you’d be back.”
“Is she insane?” Jason asked him.
“I’m not in a position to know, sir,” the man in the brown uniform said, and he backed away, touching his visored cap.
The front door of the house hung open as he had left it. He scrambled through, descended brick steps, found himself once more in the radically irregular living room with its million-mile-high ceiling. “Alys!” he said. Was she in the room? He carefully looked in all directions; as he had done when searching for the button he phased his way through every visible inch of the room. The bar at the far end with the handsome walnut drug cabinet . . . couch, chairs. Pictures on the walls. A face in one of the pictures jeered at him but he did not care; it could not leave the wall. The quad phonograph.