“Vaguely.”
“They potentiate each other. Did you have a psychotic episode, tonight?”
“Not by a long shot. I had a moment of absolute truth. Here, I’ll read it to you.” To Carol, Pete said, “Hand me back that match folder.” She passed it to him and he read from it. “That was my revelation, Joe. My experience. ‘There are vugs all around us.’ ”
Schilling was silent a moment and then he said, “About this Doctor Philipson in Idaho. Did you go to him? Is that why you ask?”
“I paid one hundred and fifty dollars to him tonight,” Pete said. “And in my opinion I got my money’s worth.”
After a pause, Schilling said, “I’m going to suggest something to you that’ll surprise you. Call that detective, Hawthorne.”
“That’s what I wanted to do,” Pete said. “But Carol won’t let me.”
“I want to talk to Carol,” Joe Schilling said.
Raising to a sitting position in the bed, Carol faced the vidscreen. “I’m right here, Joe. If you think Pete should call Hawthorne—”
“Carol, I’ve known your husband for years. He has suicidal depressions. Regularly. To be blunt, dear, he’s a manic-depressive; he has an affective psychosis, periodically. Tonight, because of the news about the baby, he’s gone into a manic phase and I for one don’t blame him. I know how it feels; it’s like being reborn. I want him to call Hawthorne for a” very good reason. Hawthorne has had more to do with vugs than anyone else we know. There’s no use my talking to Pete; I don’t know a damn thing about vugs; maybe they are all around us, for all I know. I’m not going to try to argue Pete out of it, especially at five-thirty in the morning. I suggest you follow the same course.”
“All right,” Carol said.
“Pete,” Joe Schilling said. “Remember this, when you talk to Hawthorne. Anything you say may turn up later on in the prosecutor’s case against you; Hawthorne is not a friend, pure and simple. So go cautiously. Right?”
“Yes,” Pete agreed. “But tell me what dp you think; was is the mixture of methamphetamines and alcohol?”
Joe Schilling said, sidestepping the question, “Tell me something. What did Doctor Philipson say?”
“He said a lot of things. He said, for one, that he thought this situation was going to kill me as it had Luckman. And for me to take special care of Carol. And he said—” He paused. “There’s little I can do to change matters.”
“Did he seem friendly?”
“Yes,” Pete said. “Even though he’s a vug.” He broke the connection, then, waited a moment and dialed the police emergency number. One of the friendly ones, he said to himself. One who’s on our side, maybe.
It took the police switchboard twenty minutes to locate Hawthorne. During that time Pete drank coffee and felt more and more sober.
“Hawthorne?” he said at last, when the image formed. “Sorry to bother you so late at night. I can tell you who killed Luckman.”
Hawthorne said, “Mr. Garden, we know who killed Luck-
man. We’ve got a confession. That’s where I’ve been, at Carmel headquarters.” He looked drawn and weary,
“Who?” Pete demanded. “Which one of the group?”
“It was nobody in Pretty Blue Fox. We moved our investigations back to the East Coast, where Luckman started out. The confession is by a top employee of Luckman’s, a man named Sid Mosk. As yet we haven’t been able to establish the motive. We’re working on that.”
Pete clicked off the vidphone and sat in silence.
What now? he asked himself. What do I do?
“Come to bed,” Carol said, lying back down and covering herself up with the blankets.
Shutting off the lamp, Pete Garden went to bed.
It was a mistake.
XI
HE AWOKE—and saw, standing by the bed, two figures, a man and a woman. “Be quiet,” Pat McClain said softly, indicating Carol. The man beside her held the heat-needle pointed steadily at Pete. He was a man Pete had never seen before in his life.
The man said, “If you make trouble we’ll kill her.” The heat-needle, now, was aimed at Carol. “Do you understand?”
The clock on the bedside table read nine-thirty; bright, pale, morning sunlight spilled into the bedroom from the windows.
“Okay,” Pete said. “I understand.” Patricia McClain said, “Get up and get dressed.” “Where?” Pete said, sliding from the bed. “Here in front of the two of you?”
Glancing at the man, Patricia said, “In the kitchen.” The two of them followed after him, from the bedroom to the kitchen; Patricia shut the door. “You stay with him while he dresses,” she said to the man. “I’ll watch his wife.”
Bringing out a second heat-needle, she returned stealthily to the bedroom. “He won’t make any trouble if Carol’s in danger; I can pick that up from his mind. It’s acutely pronounced.”
As the unfamiliar man held the heat-needle on him, Pete dressed.
“So your wife’s had luck,” the man said. “Congratulations.”
Glancing at him, Pete said, “Are you Pat’s husband?”
“That’s right,” the man said. “Alien McClain. I’m glad to meet you at last, Mr. Garden.” He smiled a thin, brief smile. “Pat’s told me so much about you.”
Presently the three of them were walking down the corridor of the apartment building, toward the elevator.
“Did you daughter get home all right last night?” Pete said.
“Yes,” Patricia said. “Very late, however. What I scanned in her mind was interesting, to say the least. Fortunately she didn’t go to sleep right away; she lay thinking. And so I got it all.”
Alien McClain said, “Carol won’t wake up for another hour. So there’s no immediate problem of her reporting Him missing. Not until almost eleven.”
“How do you know she won’t wake up?” Pete said.
Alien said nothing.
“You’re a pre-cog?” Pete asked.
There was no answer. But it was obviously so.
“And,” Alien McClain said to his wife—he jerked his head at Pete—”Mr. Garden, here, won’t try to escape. At least, most of the parallel possibilities indicate that. Five out of six futures. A good statistic, I think.” At the elevator he pressed the button.
Pete said to Patricia, “Yesterday you were concerned about my safety. Now this.” He gestured at the two heat-needles. “Why the change?”
“Because in the meantime you were out with my daughter,” Patricia said. “I wish you hadn’t been. I told you that she was too young for you; I warned you away from her.”
“However,” Pete pointed out, “as you read in my mind at the time, I found Mary Anne to be stunningly attractive.”
The elevator came; the doors slid open.
In the elevator stood the detective Wade Hawthorne. He gaped at them, then fumbled inside his coat.
Alien McClain said, “Being a pre-cog helps. You can never be surprised.” With his heat-needle he shot Hawthorne in the head. Hawthorne crashed back against the far wall of the elevator, then fell sloppily and lay sprawled face-first on the floor of the elevator.
“Get in,” Patricia McClain said to Pete. He got in and so did the McClains; with the body of Wade Hawthorne they descended to the ground floor.
Pete said to the Rushmore unit of the elevator, “They’re kidnapping me and they’ve killed a detective. Get help.”
“Cancel that last request,” Patricia McClain said to the elevator. “We don’t need any help, thank you.”
“All right, miss,” the Rushmore Effect said, obediently.
The elevator doors opened; the McClains followed behind Pete, through the lobby and out onto the sidewalk.
To Pete, Patricia McClain said, “Do you know why Hawthorne was in that elevator, riding up to your floor? I’ll tell you. To arrest you.”
“No,” Pete said. “He told me on the vidphone last night that they’d gotten Luckman’s murderer, a man back East.”
The McClains glanced at each other but said nothing.
“You killed an innocent man,” Pete said.
“Not Hawthorne,” Patricia said. “Hardly innocent. I wish we could have gotten that E. B. Black at the same time but it wasn’t along. Well, maybe later on.”
“That damn Mary Anne,” Alien McClain said as they got into the car parked at the curb; it was not Pete’s car. Evidently the McClains had come in it. “Somebody ought to wring her neck.” He started the car and it spun upward into the morning haze. “That age is amazing. When you’re eighteen you believe you know everything, you possess absolute certitude. And then when you’re one hundred and fifty you know you don’t.”
“You don’t even know you don’t,” Patricia said. “You just have a queasy intimation that you don’t.” She sat in the back seat, behind Pete, still holding the heat-needle pointed at him.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Pete said. “I want to be
sure Carol and the baby are all right. Whatever you want me to do—”
Patricia interrupted, “You’ve already made that deal; Carol and the baby are all right. So don’t worry about them. Anyhow, the last thing we would want to do is hurt them.”