“A juvenile saw something.”
“Not that. They’d have picked you up. It must have seen something else.”
Allen said: “I wonder how long it’ll be.”
“Why should they find out? They’ll think it’s some person who lost his lease, somebody who’s been forced back to the colonies. Or a noose.”
“I hate that word.”
“A supplicant, then. But why you? Not a man going to the top, a man who spent this afternoon with Sue Frost and Ida Pease Hoyt. It wouldn’t make sense.”
“No,” he admitted. “It doesn’t.” Truthfully he added: “Even to me.”
Janet walked over to the table. “I wondered about that. You’re not sure why you did it, are you?”
“I haven’t an idea in the world.”
“What was in your mind?”
“A very clear desire,” he said. “A fixed, overwhelming, and totally clear desire to get that statue once and for all. It took half a gallon of red paint, and some skillful use of a power-driven saw. The saw’s back in the Agency shop, minus a blade. I busted the blade. I haven’t sawed in years.”
“Do you remember precisely what you did?”
“No,” he answered.
“It isn’t in the paper. They’re vague about it. So whatever it was—” She smiled listlessly down at him. “You did a good job.”
Later, when the baked “Alaskan salmon” was nothing but a few bones on an empty dinner platter, Allen leaned back and lit a cigarette. At the stove Janet carefully washed pots and pans in the sink attachment. The apartment was peaceful.
“You’d think,” Allen said, “this was like any other evening.”
“We might as well go on with what we were doing,” Janet said.
On the table by the couch was a pile of metal wheels and gears. Janet had been assembling an electric clock. Diagrams and instructions from an Edufacture kit were heaped with the parts. Instructional pastimes: Edufacture for the individual, Juggle for social gatherings. To keep idle hands occupied.
“How’s the clock coming?” he asked.
“Almost done. After that comes a shaving wand for you. Mrs. Duffy across the hall made one for her husband. I watched her. It isn’t hard.”
Pointing to the stove Allen said: “My family built that. Back in 2096, when I was eleven. I remember how silly it seemed; stoves were on sale, built by autofac at a third of the cost. Then my father and brother explained the Morec. I never forgot it.”
Janet said: “I enjoy building things; it’s fun.”
He went on smoking his cigarette, thinking how bizarre it was that he could be here when, less than twenty-four hours ago, he had japed the statue. “I japed it,” he said aloud. “You—”
“A term we use in packet assembly. When a theme is harped on too much you get parody. When we make fun of a stale theme we say we’ve japed it.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I know. I’ve heard you parody some of Blake-Moffet’s stuff.”
“The part that bothers me,” Allen said, “is this. On Sunday night I japed the statue of Major Streiter. And on Monday morning Mrs. Sue Frost came to the Agency. By six o’clock I was listening to Ida Pease Hoyt offer me the directorship of Telemedia.”
“How could there be a relationship?”
“It would have to be complex.” He finished his cigarette. “So roundabout that everybody and everything in the universe would have to be brought in. But I feel it’s there. Some deep, underlying causal connection, not chance. Not coincidence.”
“Tell me how you—japed it.”
“Can’t. Don’t remember.” He got to his feet. “Don’t you wait up. I’m going downtown and look at it; they probably haven’t had time to start repairs.”
Janet said instantly: “Please don’t go out.”
“Very necessary,” he said, looking around for his coat. The closet had absorbed it, and he pulled the closet back into the room. “There’s a dim picture in my mind, nothing firm. All things considered, I really should have it clear. Maybe then I can decide about T-M.”
Without a word Janet passed by him and out into the hall. She was on her way to the bathroom, and he knew why. With her went a collection of bottles: she was going to swallow enough sedatives to last her the balance of the night. “Take it easy,” he warned.
There was no answer from the closed bathroom door. Allen hung around a moment, and then left.
CHAPTER 5
The park was in shadows, and icy-dark. Here and there small groups of people had collected like pools of nocturnal rain water. Nobody spoke. They seemed to be waiting, hoping in some vague way for something to happen.
The statue had been erected immediately before the spire, on its own platform, in the center of a gravel ring. Benches surrounded the statue so that persons could feed the pigeons and doze and talk while contemplating its grandeur. The rest of the Park was sloping fields of wet grass, a few opaque humps of shrubs and trees, and, at one end, a gardener’s shed.
Allen reached the center of the Park and halted. At first he was confused; nothing familiar was visible. Then he realized what had happened. The police had boarded the statue up. Here was a square wooden frame, a gigantic box. So he wasn’t going to see it after all. He wasn’t going to find out what he had done.
Presently, as he stood dully staring, he became aware that somebody was beside him. A seedy, spindly-armed citizen in a long, soiled overcoat, was also staring at the box.
For a time neither man spoke. Finally the citizen hawked and spat into the grass. “Sure can’t see worth a d–n [sic].”
Allen nodded.
“They put that up on purpose,” the thin citizen said. “So you can’t see. You know why?”
“Why,” Allen said.
The thin citizen leaned at him. “Anarchists got to it.
Multilated [sic] it terribly. The police caught some of them; some they didn’t catch. The ringleader, they didn’t catch him. But they will. And you know what they’ll find?”
“What,” Allen said.
“They’ll find he’s paid by the Resort. And this is just the first.”
“Of what?”
“Within the next week,” the thin citizen revealed, “public buildings are going to be bombed. The Committee building, T-M. And then they put the radioactive particles in the drinking water. You’ll see. It already tastes wrong. The police know, but their hands are tied.”
Next to the thin citizen a short, fat, red-haired man smoking a cigar spoke irritably up. “It was kids, that’s all. A bunch of crazy kids with nothing else to do.”
The thin citizen laughed harshly. “That’s what they want you to think. Sure, a harmless prank. I’ll tell you something: the people that did this mean to overthrow Morec. They won’t rest until every scrap, of morality and decency has been trampled into the ground. They want to see fornication and neon signs and dope come back. They want to see waste and rapacity rule sovereign, and vainglorious man writhe in the sinkpit of his own greed.”
“It was kids,” the short fat man repeated. “Doesn’t mean anything.”
“The wrath of Almighty God will roll up the heavens like a scroll,” the thin citizen was telling him, as Allen walked off. “The atheists and fornicators will lie bloody in the streets, and the evil will be burned from men’s hearts by the sacred fire.”
By herself, hands in the pockets of her coat, a girl watched Allen as he walked aimlessly along the path. He approached her, hesitated, and then said: “What happened?”
The girl was dark-haired, deep-chested, with smooth, tanned skin that glowed faintly in the half-light of the Park. When she spoke her voice was controlled and without uncertainty.
“This morning they found the statue to be quite different. Didn’t you read about it? There was an account in the newspaper.”
“I read about it,” he said. The girl was up on a rise of grass, and he joined her.
There, in the shadows below them, were the remnants of the statue, damaged in a cunning way. The image of bronzed plastic had been caught unguarded; in the night it had been asleep. Standing here now he could take an objective view; he could detach himself from the event and see it as an outsider, as a person—like these persons—coming by accident, and wondering.
Across the gravel were large ugly drops of red. It was the enamel from the art department of his Agency. But he could suppose the apocalyptic quality of it; he could imagine what these people imagined.
The trail of red was blood, the statue’s blood. Up from the wet, loose-packed soil of the Park had crept its enemy; the enemy had taken told and bitten through its carotid artery. The statue had bled all over its own legs and feet; it had gushed red slimy blood and died.
He, standing with the girl, knew it was dead. He could feel the emptiness behind the wooden box; the blood had run out leaving a hollow container. It seemed now as if the statue had tried to defend itself. But it had lost, and no quick-freeze would save it. The statue was dead forever.