Going into the bedroom of the apartment he asked Carol, “How are you feeling?”
She sat by the window, wearing a gaily-colored cotton print dress, listlessly watching the street below. “I’m okay, Joe.”
The detective E. B. Black had temporarily gone out of the apartment, so Joe Schilling shut the bedroom door and said to Carol, “I know something about the McClains that the police aren’t to know.”
Raising her eyes, Carol regarded him. “Tell me.”
Joe Schilling said, “She’s mixed up in some kind of extra-legal activity, has been apparently for some time. That would fit in with the murder of Hawthorne. I’ll make a guess; I think it’s connected with her being a Psi. And her husband, too. But other than that, and it isn’t much, I can’t account for them murdering, especially a police detective. Now look what they’ve got on their hands: a nation-wide search by all police agencies. They must be desperate.” Or fanatic, he thought to himself. “There’s no one the police hate more than a cop-killer,” he murmured. “It was a stupid thing to do.” Fanatic and stupid, he thought. A bad mixture.
The vidphone rang and said, “Your party, Mr. Schilling. The attorney Laird Sharp.”
Schilling at once snapped the screen on. “Laird,” he said. “Good.”
“What’s happened?” Sharp said.
“Your client’s gone, Pete Garden.” He explained, tersely, what had happened. “And I have an intuitive distrust of the police,” Schilling said. “For some reason it seems to me they’re not trying. Maybe it’s because of the vug, E. B. Black.”
The instinctive aversion of the Terran was there, operating within himself, he realized.
Sharp said, “Um, let’s make a run up to Pocatello. What did you say the psychiatrist’s name is?”
“Philipson,” Joe Schilling said. “After all, I’m getting everything third-hand, but I have a hunch. I’ll fly to San Rafael and meet you there; stay put for another ten minutes. I’m in San Francisco.”
“Right,” Schilling said, and broke the connection.
“Where are you going?” Carol asked him as he started for the door of the apartment. “You told Pete’s attorney you’d meet him here.”
“I’m going to get a gun,” Schilling said. He shut the door after him and hurried down the hall. I only need one, he realized. Because if I know Laird Sharp he’s carrying his own at all times.
As he and Sharp flew northeast in Sharp’s car, Schilling said, “On the vid last night Pete said some strange things. First, that this situation was going to kill Pete, as it had killed Luckman. That he should be especially careful of Carol’s safety. And—” He glanced at Sharp. “Pete said that Doctor Philipson is a vug.”
“So?” Sharp said. “There are vugs all over the planet.”
“But I know something about Philipson,” Joe Schilling said, “I’ve read his articles and read about his therapeutic techniques. There’s never been any mention of him being a Titanian. Something’s wrong. I don’t think Pete saw Doctor Philipson; I think he saw someone or something else. A man of Philipson’s stature wouldn’t be available in the middle of the night, like a common G.P. And where did Pete get the one hundred and fifty dollars he remembers paying Philip-son? I know Pete; he never carries money on him. No Bindman does; they think in terms of real estate deeds, not cash. Money is for us non-Bs.”
“Did he actually say he had paid this doctor? Possibly he simply ran up a bill for that amount.”
“Pete said that he had paid him, and paid him last
night. And he said he’d gotten his money’s worth.” Joe Schilling brooded about it for a moment. “In Pete’s condition, drunk and drug-stimulated and in a manic phase because of Carol’s pregnancy, he wouldn’t have known what he really saw, if it actually was Philipson or not that sat facing him. And it’s always possible that he hallucinated the entire episode. That he never went to Pocatello at all.” He got out his pipe and his pouch of tobacco. “The whole episode doesn’t ring right. Pete may be one sick cookie; that may be the root of the whole problem.”
“What do you use in your pipe these days?” Sharp asked. “Still nothing but white burley, rough-cut?”
“Not any more. This is a mixture called Barking Dog. It never bites.”
Sharp grinned briefly.
At the outskirts of Pocatello Doctor Philipson’s psychiatric clinic lay below, a square of dazzling white surrounded by lawns and trees, and, in the rear, a rose garden. Sharp landed his car on the gravel driveway and continued by surface up into the parking lot at the side of the large central building. The place, quiet and well-tended, seemed deserted. The only car in the parking lot appeared to be Doctor Philip-son’s own.
Peaceful, Schilling thought. But obviously it’s enormously expensive to come here. The rose garden attracted him and he meandered toward it, sniffing the air and smelling the deep, heavy scent of roses and organic fertilizers. A sprinkler, homeostatic and efficient, rotated as it watered a lawn, causing him to step from the path and onto the thick, springy grass itself. Just being here would cure me, he thought. Getting the smells, feeling the textures of the pastoral community. Ahead he saw tied to a post a nodding gray donkey.
“Look,” he said to Laird Sharp, who had followed behind him. “Two of the finest roses ever developed, Peace and Star of Holland. In the twentieth century they were rated something like nine points in rose-growing circles.” He explained, “Nine was extremely good. And then of course they developed the more modern patented rose, Space Voyager.” He pointed to it, the huge orange and white buds. “And Our
Land.” That was a red, so dark as to be virtually black, with spatters of lighter dots across the petals.
While they were inspecting Our Land, the door of the clinic building flew open and a bald, friendly-looking elderly man stepped out, smiling at them in greeting. “Can I help you?” he asked, eyes twinkling.
Sharp said, “We’re looking for Doctor Philipson.”
“That’s I,” the elderly man said. “I’m afraid the rose garden needs spraying; I see grefi on several bushes.” He brushed at a leaf with the side of his hand. “Grefi, a mite that slipped in here from Mars.”
Joe Schilling said, “Where can we go that we could talk to you?”
“Right here,” Doctor Philipson said.
“Did a Mr. Peter Garden visit you late last night?” Schilling asked.
“He certainly did.” Doctor Philipson smiled wryly. “And vidphoned me even later.”
“Pete Garden has been kidnapped,” Schilling said. “His abductors killed a policeman on the way, so they must be serious.”
The smile on Doctor Philipson’s face vanished. “That so.” He glanced at Schilling and then at Laird Sharp. “I was worried about something on this order. First Jerome Luck-man’s death, now followed by this. Come in.” He held the door to the clinic building open, then abruptly changed his mind. “Perhaps it would be better if we sat in the car. So no one overhears.” He led the way back to the parking lot. “There are several matters I’d like to discuss with you.”
Presently the three of them were seated tensely in Doctor Philipson’s car.
“What’s your relationship to Peter Garden?” the doctor asked.
Schilling briefly, told him.
“Probably,” Philipson said, “you’ll never see Garden alive again. I’m deeply sorry to say that, but it’s almost certainly the truth. I tried to warn him.”
“I know that,” Schilling said. “He told me.”
“I knew too little about Pete Garden,” the doctor said. “I’d never seen him before in my Me; I couldn’t get an ac-
curate background history from him because last night he was drunk and sick and scared. He phoned me at my home; I had gone to bed. I met him in downtown Pocatello at a bar. I forget the name of it, now. It was a bar at which he had stopped. He had an attractive young girl with him but she didn’t come in. Garden was actively hallucinating and needed major psychiatric help. I could scarcely supply that to him in the middle of the night at a bar, needless to say.”
“His fear,” Joe Schilling said, “was of the vugs. Pete believed they were—closing in on us.”
“Yes, I realize that. He expressed those fears last night to me. A number of times in a variety of ways. It was touching. At one point he very laboriously scratched himself a message on a match folder and hid it—with great ceremony—in his shoe. ‘The vugs are after us,’ it said, or words to that effect.” The doctor eyed Schilling and Laird Sharp. “What do you know, at this moment, about the internal problems on Titan?”
Taken by surprise, Joe Schilling said, “Not a damn thing.”
Doctor Philipson said, “Titan civilization is sharply divided into two factions. The reason I know this is simple; I have, in the clinic here, several Titanians who hold high posts here on Earth. They’re undergoing psychiatric treatment with me. It’s somewhat unorthodox, but I discover I can work with them well enough.”