“Gould you talk about that later?” Reedeth said impafrom the comweb. “I’ve spent the whole morning staving off the busies, and I’m exhausted!”
“Just hold the fort a while longer,” Conroy said equably. “No doubt Mr. Flamen will have to make some arrange-defenestration is a fairly serious offense even nowadays.”
“What?” Reedeth looked blank.
“Throwing people out of windows. Now if it had been done with something out of the Gottschalks’ current cata. Never mind! But I’m thinking about bail, contacting a lawyer, swearing out a warrant against Miss Baxendale and her confederates, that kind of thing.”
“It’s all set up! I just haven’t been able to get hold of Flamen to sign the documents!”
“I’ll be there as soon as possible,” Flamen sighed, and cut the circuit. Turning to Conroy, he added, “I’m sorry about this, but I guess I have to go. I’ll see you back here in a couple of hours, with luck.”
“Oh no you won’t,” Conroy said. “I’m going to ride along with you. I’ve always wanted to see the inside of that mausoleum of Mogshack’s, and I’m not likely to get another chance.”
Taking Flamen’s arm, he led him briskly towards the door.
Seven burned to death
Mr David Lumsden, aged 26, stood outside his burning home in Toronto and screamed at passing motorists to stop and help as his wife and six children were burned to death. All the drivers ignored his calls.
It would have been even worse if they’d stopped to watch the fun.
Sanctuary within a sanctuary, Reedeth thought: this office enclosed by the fortress of the hospital. Here oftemporary refuge from the impersonal gale of law-enforcement, Lyla and Madison sat opposite him on the consultation couch, side by side like frightened chil-she wearing a hard mask of misery, the corners of her mouth downturned, her shoulders slumped and her hands pressed tight between her knees; he stolidly erect, no expression on his dark face.
A shiver traced down his spine as he pictured Madimuscles bulging to hurl a man bodily through a window. How could that kind of terrible violence have escaped unnoticed during so many years of the most modern and thorough study of the man’s mental condiEven granting that sibyl-pills induced temporary insanity-that was what it amounted to whether or not one dignified it by the name of a pythoness trance-granting that they provoked bone-snapping convulsions, granting that Madison was in excellent physical condiand quite strong enough in his normal state to pick up this heavy desketary as indeed he had once done in Reedeth’s presence while engaged on a repair job: the story he and Lyla told simply didn’t make sense.
Oh, certainly their account of being kidnapped by Mikki Baxendale’s private macoots was borne out by all lands of corroborative evidence. The clumsy stab-marks left by the injections still showed, Lyla’s in the base of her thumb presumably because the yash she was wearing would have shielded her from an inwhere Madison had taken his, in the top of the shoulder. There was even a detectable trace of Narcoin a tiny scab he had removed from the knee’s wound, trapped in the blood before it clotted. So far, so good.
Rut as for the rest, Madison’s single-handed victory over nine assailants, and the girl’s half-crazy visions of a myriad battles scattered from end to end of history, climaxing in a prediction about something supposed to happen next year-
Reedeth’s jaw dropped. He felt it fall and couldn’t cancel the impulse. The solid world around him sudseemed tenuous, like swirling mist. Only a day or two ago he’d seen for himself that a pythoness could indeed deliver comprehensible oracles about total strangers, clear enough even for impersonal automatics to relate to their subjects. As though facts he had long been aware of had been shaken, kaleidoscope-fashion, into an unexpected pattern conveying a message on a non-verbal level, he found himself considering a brand-new hypothesis. Was it possible that the synergistic efof Narcolate and a sibyl-pill had combined to genin Madison a talent as unsuspected as pythoness talent had been before the pioneering days of Diana Spitz? Could he-did he-know about things which hadn’t happened yet?
But the whole notion seemed so absurd he gave a harsh laugh, causing Lyla to look up at him with a vague sketch for curiosity reflected on her face.