“I guess,” Priar said, “I didn’t get here in time.”
“How’d you come? On your hands?” Some of the chaos was dying down. The Blake-Moffet people, and their equipment, were being forcibly ushered out. They were all smiles. His own staff was gathering in gloomy bunches, glancing at him and exchanging mutters. A T-M repairman was inspecting the hole in the office door where the lock had been. Blake-Moffet had carried the lock off with them, probably as a trophy.
“Invasion,” Priar said. “I never would have thought Luddy had the guts.”
“Blake’s idea,” Allen said. “And Luddy’s vendetta. So now it comes full cycle. I got Luddy, now he gets me.”
“Did they—I mean, they got what they wanted, didn’t they?”
“Drums of it,” Allen said. “I did the ultimate; I stamped on a juvenile.”
“Who was the girl?”
Allen grimaced. “Just a friend. A niece visiting from the country. My daughter. Why do you ask?”
CHAPTER 18
Late that night he sat with Janet in the darkness, listening to the noises filtering through the walls from other apartments. The murmur of voices, faint music, rattle of dishes and pans, and indiscriminate globs of sound that could be anything. “Want to go for a walk?” he asked. “No.” Janet stirred a little beside him. “Want to go to bed?”
“No. Just sit.”
Presently Allen said: “I ran into Mrs. Birmingham on my way to the bathroom. They brought the reports in a convoy of Getabouts. Six men guarding it. Now she’s got it all hidden somewhere, probably in an old stocking.”
“You’re going into the block meeting?”
“I’ll be there, and I’m going to fight with everything I’ve got.”
“Will it do any good?” He reflected. “No.”
“Then,” Janet said, “we’re washed up.”
“We’ll lose our lease, if that’s what you mean. But that’s all Mrs. Birmingham can do. Her authority ends when we leave here.”
“You’ve resigned yourself to that,” Janet said.
“I might as well.” He searched for his cigarettes, then gave up. “Haven’t you?”
“Your family worked decades for this lease. All those years your mother was with the Sutton Agency before it merged. And your father in T-M’s art department.”
“Pooled status,” he said. “You don’t have to remind me. But I’m still Director of Telemedia. Maybe I can wangle a lease out of Sue Frost. Technically I’m entitled to one. We should be living in Myron Mavis’ apartment, within walking distance of my work.”
“Would she give you a lease now? After this business today?”
He tried to imagine Sue Frost and the expression on her face. The sound of her voice. The rest of the day he had hung around his office at T-M expecting her to call, but she hadn’t. No word had arrived from above; the powers had remained mum.
“She’ll be disappointed,” he said. “Sue had the kind of hopes for me only a mother could invent.”
Up the ladder generation by generation. The schemings of old women, the secret ambitions and activity of parents boosting their children one more notch. Exhaustion, sweat, the grave.
“We can assume Blake-Moffet briefed her,” he said. “I guess it’s time to tell you what happened last night at her apartment.”
He told Janet, and she had nothing to say. There wasn’t enough light in the apartment to see her face, and he wondered if she had passed out with wretchedness. Or if some primordial storm were going to burst over him. But, when he finally nudged her, she simply said: “I was afraid it was something like that.”
“Why the h–l why?”
“I just had a feeling. Maybe I’m clairvoyant.” He had told her about Doctor Malparto’s Psionic-testing. “And it was the same girl?”
“The girl who got me to the Health Resort; the girl who helped kidnap me; the girl who leaned her bosom in my face and said I was the father of her child. A very pretty black-haired girl with a big lovely house. But I did come back. Nobody seems to care about that part.”
“I care,” Janet said. “Do you think she was in on the frame-up?”
“The idea entered my mind. But she wasn’t. There was nothing to be gained, except by Blake-Moffet. And the Resort isn’t part of Blake-Moffet. Gretchen was just witless and irresponsible and full of feminine vigor. Young love, they call it. And the idealism of her calling. Her brother’s the same way: idealism, for the benefi [sic], of the patient.”
“It’s so sort of crazy,” Janet protested. “All she did was walk into your office, and all you did was kiss her when she left. And you’re completely ruined.”
“The word is ‘vile enterprise,’ “ Allen said. “It’ll be showing up Wednesday, about nine a.m. I wonder what Mr. Wales can do in my defense. It should pose quite a challenge to him.”
But the block meeting wasn’t really important. The unknown was Sue Frost, and her reaction might not be in for days. After all, she had to confer with Ida Pease Hoyt: the reaction needed the stamp of absolute finality.
“Didn’t you say something about bringing home a quart of ice cream?” Janet asked wanly.
“Seems sort of silly,” Allen said. “Everything considered.”
CHAPTER 19
On wednesday morning the first-floor chamber of the housing unit was crammed to bursting. The gossip relay had carried the news to everybody, mostly through the wives. Stale cigarette smoke hung in its cloud and the air conditioning system was making no progress. At the far end was the platform on which the wardens sat, and they were all present.
In a freshly-starched dress, Janet entered slightly ahead of him. She went directly to a vacant table and placed herself before the microphone. The table, by an unverbalized protocol, was purposely untaken; in times of real crisis the wife was expected to aid her husband. To deprive her of that right would have been an affront to Morec.
Last time, no table had been left vacant. Last time had not been a crisis.
“This serious is,” Allen said to his wife, stationing himself behind her. “And this long is; this vindictive is; and this going to lose is. So don’t get too involved. Don’t try to save me, because I can’t be saved. As we said last night.”
She nodded sightlessly.
“When they start burying their teeth in me,” he continued softly, as if humming a tune, “don’t spring up and take them all on. This is so rigged it’s ready to burst. For example, where’s little Mr. Wales?”
The man who had faith in Allen Purcell was not present. And the doors were being closed: he was not coming.
“They probably discovered a loophole in his lease,” Allen said. Now Mrs. Birmingham was rising to her feet and ac- cepting the agenda. “Or it turned out that he’s the owner of a chain of w–e [sic] houses stretching from Newer York to Orionus.”
Janet still continued to face front, with a rigidity he had never before seen. She seemed to have created an exoskeleton for herself, a containing envelope through which nothing entered and nothing escaped. He wondered if she were saving herself for one grand slam. Perhaps it would appear when the ladies read their decision.
“It’s dusty in here,” Allen said, as the room dwindled into silence. A few persons glanced at him, then looked away. Since he was coasting downhill it was a poor idea to associate themselves with him.
At the end of the room the juveniles were surrendering their tapes. Seven tapes in all. Six, he conjectured, were for him. And one for everybody else.
“We will first undertake the case of Mr. A. P.,” Mrs. Birmingham announced.
“Fine,” Allen said, relieved. Again heads turned, then swiveled back. A murmur drifted up and joined the haze of cigarette smoke.
In a sardonic way he was amused. The rows of solemn, righteous faces . . . this was a church, and these were the members of the congregation in pious session. With long strides he made his way to the defendant’s stage, hands in his pockets. In the rear, at her table, Janet sat wooden-faced, as stiff and unyielding as a carved stick. He nodded to her, and the session began.
“Mr. A. P.,” Mrs. Birmingham said, in her noisy, authoritative voice, “did willingly and knowingly on the afternoon of October 22, 2114, in his place of business and during the working hours of the day, engage in a vile enterprise with a young woman. Further, Mr. A. P. did willingly and knowingly destroy an official monitoring instrument to avoid detection, and to further avoid detection he did strike the face of a Morec citizen, damage private property, and in every possible fashion seek to conceal his actions.”
A series of clicks bounced from the loudspeaker, as the voice warmed up. The interconnecting network was in operation: the speaker hummed, buzzed and then spoke.
“Definition. Be specific. Vile enterprise.”
Mrs. Birmingham adjusted her glasses and read on. “Mr. A. P. did welcome the young woman—not his lawful wife—into his office at the Committee Telemedia Trust, and there he did lock himself in with her, did take precautions to guarantee that he not be discovered, and, when discovered, was in the act of petting and embracing and sexually fondling the young woman about the shoulder and face, and had so placed his body that it was in contact with that of hers.”