Karp turned and strode off. He was trembling.
Grinning, McRae lit a cigar. An American, not a German-Dutch, variety.
4
EME’s top recording technician watched in amazement as Nat Flieger carried the Ampek F-a2 to the ‘copter. ‘You’re going to catch him on that?’
Jim Planck groaned. ‘My god, the F-a2 was obsolete last year!’
‘If you can’t operate it — ‘ Nat said.
‘I can,’ Planck muttered. ‘I’ve run wormies before; I just feel that — ‘ He gestured in dismay. ‘I suppose you’re using an old-tune carbon type mike along with it.’
‘Hardly,’ Nat said. Good-naturedly, he spalled Planck on the back; he had known him for years and was used to him.
‘Don’t worry. We’ll get along fine.’
‘Listen,’ Planck said in a low voice, glancing around. ‘It is really a fact that Leo’s daughter is coming with us on this trip?’
‘It’s really a fact.’
‘That Molly Dondoldo always meant complications — you know what I refer to? Naw, you don’t. Nat, I don’t have any idea what your relationship to Molly is these days, but — ‘
‘You worry about recording Richard Kongrosian,’ Nat said shortly.
‘Sure, sure.’ Planck shrugged. ‘It’s your life and job and your project, Nat; I’m just a wage-slave, doing what you tell me.’ He ran a nervous, shaky hand through his thinning, slightly shiny black hair. ‘Are we ready to go?’
Molly had already got into the ‘copter; she sat reading a book, ignoring the two of them. She wore a brightly coloured cotton blouse and shorts and Nat thought to himself how inappropriate her dress would be for the rain-drenched forests into which they were going. Such a radically different climate; he wondered if Molly had ever been north before. The Oregon-Northern California region had lost much of its population during the fracas of 1980; it had been heavily hit by Red Chinese guided missiles, and of course the clouds of fallout had blanketed it in the subsequent decade. They had in fact not entirely dissipated yet.
But the level had been pronounced by NASA technicians as lying within the safe tolerance.
Lush growth, tangled variants created by the fallout … the forestation had an almost tropical quality now, Nat knew. And the rain virtually never ceased; it had been frequent and heavy before 1990 and now it was torrential.
‘Ready,’ he said to Jim Planck.
An unlit Alta Camina cigar jutting from between his teeth, Planck said, ‘Then away we go, us and your pet worm. To record the greatest handless piano player of the century. Hey, I got a joke, Nat. One day Richard Kongrosian is in a pub-trans accident; he’s all battered up in the wreck, and when they take the bandages off he’s grown hands.’
Planck chuckled. ‘And so he can never play again.’
Lowering her book, Molly said frigidly, ‘Be entertainment, is that what it’s going to be on this flight?’
Planck coloured, bent to fumble with his recording gear, checking it automatically. ‘Sorry, Miss Dondoldo,’ he said, but he did not sound sorry; he sounded chokingly resentful.
‘Just start up the ‘copter,’ Molly said. And returned to reading her book. It was, Nat saw, a banned text by the twentieth-century sociologist C. Wright Mills. Molly Dondoldo, he reflected, no more a Ge than he or Jim Planck, had no anxiety over publicly reading an item forbidden to their class. A remarkable woman in many ways, he thought with admiration.
He said to her, ‘Don’t be so harsh, Molly.’
Without glancing up, Molly said, ‘I hate Be wit.’
The ‘copter started; guiding it expertly, Jim Planck soon had them in the air. They moved north, over the coastal highway and the Imperial Valley with its criss-crossed endless miles of canals stretching as far as one could see.
‘It’s going to be a cosy flight,’ Nat said to Molly. ‘I can make that out already.’
Molly murmured, ‘Don’t you have to sprinkle your worm or something? Frankly I’d prefer to be left alone if you don’t mind.’
‘What do you know about the personal tragedy in Kongrosian’s life?’ Nat asked her.
She was silent a moment and then she said, ‘It has something to do with the fallout of the late ‘90s. I think it’s his son. But no one knows for certain; I have no inside information, Nat. They say, though, that his son is a monster.’
Once more Nat felt the chill of fear which he had experienced at the idea of visiting Kongrosian’s home.
‘Don’t let it get you down,’ Molly said. ‘After all, there’ve been so many special births since the fallout of the ‘90s. Don’t you see them meandering about all the time? I do. Maybe, though, you prefer not to look.’
She shut her book, marking the place with a dogear. ‘It’s the price we pay for our otherwise unblemished lives. My god, Nat, you can adjust to that thing, that Ampek recorder, and that positively gives me the creeps, all shimmering and alive like it is. Perhaps the child’s deformation is due to factors derived from his father’s Psionic faculty; maybe Kongrosian blames himself, not the fallout. Ask him when you get there.’
‘Ask him!’ Nat echoed, appalled.
‘Certainly. Why not?’
‘It’s a hell of an idea,’ Nat said. And, as frequently in the past in his relations with Molly, it seemed to him that she was an exceptionally harsh and aggressive, almost masculine woman; there was a bluntness in her which did not much appeal to him. And on top of that Molly was far too intellectually oriented; she lacked her father’s personal, emotional touch.
‘Why did you want to come on this trip?’ he asked her. Certainly not to hear Kongrosian play; that was obvious. Perhaps it had to do with the son, the special child; Molly would be attracted to that. He felt revulsion, but he did not show it; he managed to smile back at her.
‘I enjoy Kongrosian,’ Molly said placidly. ‘It would be very gratifying to meet him personally and listen to him play.’
Nat said, ‘But I’ve heard you say there’s no market right now for Psionic versions of Brahms and Schumann.’
‘Aren’t you able, Nat, to separate your personal life from company business? My own individual tastes run to Kongrosian’s style, but that doesn’t mean I think he’ll sell. You know, Nat, we’ve done rather well with all sub-types of folk music for the last few years. I’d tend to say that performers like Kongrosian, however popular they may be at the White House, are anachronisms and we must be highly alert that we don’t step backward into economic ruin with them.’ She smiled at him, looking lazily for his reaction. ‘I’ll tell you another reason I wanted to come. You and I can spend a good deal of time together, tormenting each other. Just you and me, on a trip … we can stay at a motel in Jenner. Did you think of that?’ Nat took a deep, unsteady breath.
Her smile increased. It was as if she were actually laughing at him, he thought. Molly could handle him, make him do what she wanted; they both knew that and it amused her. ‘Do you want to marry me?’ Molly asked him. ‘Are your intentions honourable, in the old twentieth-century sense?’
Nat said, ‘Are yours?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe I like monsters. I like you, Nat, you and your worm-like F-a2 recording machine that you nourish and pamper, like a wife or a pet or both.’
‘I’d do the same for you,’ Nat said. All at once he felt Jim Planck watching him and he concentrated on watching the earth below them. It obviously embarrassed Jim, this exchange. Planck was an engineer, a man who worked with his body — a mere Be as Molly had called him, but a good man. Talk of this sort was tough on Jim.
And, Nat thought, on me. The only one of us who really enjoys it is Molly. And she really does; it’s not an affectation.
The autobahn fatigued Chic Strikerock, with its centrally-controlled cars and wheels spinning up invisible runnels in massed procession. In his own individual car he felt as if he were participating in a black-magic ritual — as if he and the other commuters had put their lives into the hands of a force better left undiscussed. Actually it was a simple homeostatic beam which justified its position by making ceaseless references to all other vehicles and the guide-walls of the road itself, but he was not amused. He sat in his car reading the morning New York Times.
He kept his attention on the newspaper instead of the grinding, never-stopping environment which surrounded him, meditating on an article dealing with a further discovery of unicellular fossils on Ganymede.
Old-time civilization, Chic said to himself. The next layer down, just on the verge of being uncovered by the autoshovels operating in the airless, near-weightless void of midspace, of the big-planet moons.