“Think someone did?” Lenigo suggested after a pause.
There was a silence crowded with the stench of deEventually the man said, “I’ve been avoiding that idea. But someone who could hire in that honky devil Uys.”
“Yes,” Morton Lenigo said. He relied on his reputation to complete the statement for him. Shortly the other man got up and went away.
“The logical thing,” Diablo said after reflection, “is to comp out the things which seem the craziest, hm? Like maybe see if there’s anything in the literature about having prophetic visions under the influence of a sibyl-pill. And this will give us a handle to grab hold of the rest by, like what you say these automatics at the hostold you about Mrs. Flamen.” He rose. “Flamen, could you show me how to-?”
“Now just a moment!” Flamen’s cheeks were redden”I need to use my computers right now. Weren’t you listening to what I just said?”
“And don’t you realize how you were put on to what you just discovered?” Conroy cut in forcibly. “You owe it to Madison-which means you owe it to Reedeth-which means you owe it to his colleague Dr. Spoelstra for inviting Miss Clay to perform at the hospital, and to her too for providing the oracles we’ve been discussing, and-”
“Oh, there won’t be any end to this!” Flamen gibed. “I suppose I owe it to my brother-in-law too, for perme to let Celia stay on in the Ginsberg instead of being transferred to a private sanitarium! But I wouldn’t feel inclined to thank him for doing her that parfavor.”
“I was wondering when you’d remember that yon theoretically brought me to New York for the weekend to set up parameters for her padding,” Conroy said with deliberate acerbity.
The fire of Flamen’s incipient fury blazed up. “DamnaIf we hadn’t got sidetracked into this stupid busiabout Madison we’d have been out to the Priors’ place by now and you’d have met Celia and probably the whole thing could have been tied up in a few hours!”
“And you wouldn’t have got what you wanted out of it,” Conroy snapped. “Using her case as a basis for atMogshack could be dismissed as a personal grudge. You’ve got something far better, I can tell you that right now! Get Diablo to ground it on Madison’s delayed release, demand padding of Mogshack himself to locate this megalomania the Ginsberg’s automatics have diagnosed, and you’ll have him down by the end of the year. And that’s not the only thing you’ve been given, handed to you on a silver platter! You’ve got the item about the Gottschalks tool”
“So I’m supposed to make a list of everybody who did anything to get me where I am, go down them checking each one off when I’ve said thanks for doing me the favor?”
“Yes, yes and yes!” Abruptly Conroy’s fraying conover his own temper failed, and he jumped to his feet, confronting Flamen from the vantage point of his greater tallness. “What the hell good is it going to do anyto move someone like Mogshack off his petty little pedestal if the people who do it haven’t even noticed that he’s pulling their strings and making them dance? Are you so dumb, witless, shortsighted you’re willing to put up with the worst of all the things that are wrong with our poor sick planet?”
“Why, you-!”
“Shut up!” Conroy thumped fist into palm with such force it made a sound sharp as a gunshot. “Why in hell should I have to tell you this, a spoolpigeon who must have seen it happen hundreds of times? You’ve never got at the people who matter, the people it might help us if we got rid of them. You’ve got at the people who were trapped and cornered by circumstances, who like took a risk one time and it didn’t work so they had to take another and another, or pocketed a bribe and found they liked the higher standard of living, or whatever the hell.
“One thing leads to another in this world, Flamen, and we human beings get dragged along like-like dead leaves spinning in the wake of a skimmer. Diablo was saying a while back how you fine down your princiso that a machine can handle them, and pretty soon the person using the machine comes to imagine that this is how it’s always been-there never was a subtler way of thinking. That’s some of where it’s at, but it’s not all by any means. Take the fine expensive home you live in, with its automatic defenses and its mines sown under the lawn like daffodil-bulbs. You shut yourself up behind armor-plate, you shut your mind too. You advertise Guardian traps on your show, don’t you-those steel bands spiked like an Iron Maiden? What’s the mentality of someone who’s prepared to come home from visiting neighbors and find a corpse hung up in the doorway? I say he’s already insane when he comhimself to that course of action, and you don’t have to wait for him to lose his marbles under an overof Ladromide before he stops thinking as a responmature person ought to! And what’s the reason that’s advanced for acting this way?” He rounded on Reedeth.