“Don’t exaggerate.” Conroy loaded the words with frosty reproof. “Life is a matter of probabilities, not certainties. You were prepared to believe what your desketary told you about Mogshack, for instance?”
Reedeth wavered. “That’s not the same thing,” he muttered.
“It’s the same automatic complex using the same data banks,” Conroy insisted. “Furthermore, when you had the oracles comped you were prepared to accept that they applied to-among others-Harry Madison, even though you wouldn’t have guessed that for yourself?”
“Ah.” Reedeth licked his lips. “Yes, damn it, of course I took that on trust! It fitted once I’d thought it over. But this ridiculous thing about Mrs. Flamen hadn’t come up then!”
“We haven’t got to it in this review of our problem,” Conroy said. “Let it go for the moment and tell me just what you mean by saying that Madison ‘fitted’ the oracle supposed to be concerned with him.”
Reedeth glanced uneasily at the subject of the conwho was sitting to one side of the group, taking virtually no part in the discussion except to anpolitely when he was directly addressed.
“The morning before Miss Clay’s show,” he muttered, “I’d reached the conclusion, because he’d fixed the trouble I was having with the censor-circuits on my desketary without my asking outright, that Madison’s trouble couldn’t be termed insanity. Nonconformity, maybut that’s not the same thing.”
“Hmm! Working under Mogshack hasn’t completely petrified your mind, then,” Conroy rumbled. “In an age when eccentricity has almost been made a major crime, that’s a remarkable insight.”
“Whichever way we dig through this heap of confuDiablo said, “we seem to wind up with Harry again. Hey, Harry!”
Madison turned an emotionless gaze to him.
“What is all this, man? Like I keep hearing you can open Punch locks without the key-and fix a desketary in ways the designer didn’t dream of-and you were stuck in the Ginsberg in spite of not being crazy-and having a sibyl-pill forced down your throat did things to you that aren’t in the literature-and here’s this pysays she watched you beat nine opponents in a row and she got all these visions of weird fights and she says she wasn’t just dreaming.” He spread his hands.
“You missed a couple of things,” Conroy said. “When I got hit by this hunch, just before leaving Reedeth’s office, I started to ask Madison who the hell he is, only someone said something else and it distracted me.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I was thinking partly of all these visions that Miss Clay had-which make me want to ask how the hell did all that detail get packed in. You haven’t studied history, have you?” he shot at Lyla.
“Not to specialize. Just regular school lessons. And I never enjoyed it much. Got low marks all the time.”
“But what you told us about-oh-being ill from bad meat in a Roman arena, finding it hard to see clearly because your eyes were bleary from dust and bright sunlight in the Egyptian bit-”
“Egyptian bit?” Diablo cut in. “Man, you’re losing me all the time!”
“The man with the whip and the coarse linen kilt, and the bit about picking up an adobe brick shaped like a loaf! It’s all so goddamned three-dimensional!” Conroy pounded fist into palm. “This isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to remember from a mere hallucination. It’s the kind of fiddling little detail that sticks in your mind in real life, like trudging to the top of a mountain and being less impressed with the splendid view than by the blister you’ve rubbed on your heel. Do you see what I mean?”
“I surely do,” Diablo nodded. “It’s a point I overlooked, and I shouldn’t have. It’s the kind of touch I’ve always prided myself on adding to my own reconstructions for propaganda shows, the little striking bit which all by itself makes the scene appear real” He clawed at his beard so vigorously it looked as though he might tear out the roots. “Go on. What else was it that made you ask Madison who he is?”
“The fact that when Miss Clay asked him straight out, was it him who fouled up her prophesying at the hospital, he said yes. Correct, Miss Clay?”