Shadrach in the Furnace

10

Was Mango really murdered, though? Avogadro, waiting for Mordecai in the hallway when the doctor finally leaves Genghis Mao, is not so sure of that. The security chief, a big-boned, thick-bodied, quick-witted man with cool eyes and a wide, quizzical mouth, draws Shadrach aside near the entrance to Surveillance Vector One and says softly. “Is he on any medication that might be making him mentally unstable?”

“Not particularly. Why?”

“I’ve never seen him as upset as this before.”

“He’s never had his viceroy assassinated before, either.”

“What leads you to think there’s been an assassination?”

“Because I — because Ionigylakis said — because — ” Shadrach pauses, confused. “Wasn’t there one?”

“Who knows? Horthy says he saw Mangu fall out the window. Period. He didn’t see anyone pushing him. We’ve already run playback checks on all personnel scanners and there’s no record of any unauthorized individual entering or leaving the entire building this morning, let alone having reached the seventy-fifth floor.”

“Perhaps somebody was hiding up here overnight,” Shadrach suggests.

Avogadro sighs. He looks faintly amused. “Spare me the amateur detective work. Doctor. Naturally, we’ve looked through yesterday’s records too.”

“I’m sorry if I—”

“I didn’t mean to be sarcastic. My point is simply that we’ve considered most of the obvious possibilities. It’s not easy for an assassin to get inside this building, and I don’t seriously believe that any assassins did. Naturally, that doesn’t rule out the chance that Mangu was pushed by someone whose presence within the building would not seem unusual, as for example General Gonchigdorge, or you, or me—”

“Or Genghis Mao,” Shadrach offers. “Tiptoeing from his bed and tossing Mangu through the window.”

“You get the idea. What I’m saying is that anyone up here might have killed Mangu. Except that there’s no evidence that anyone did. You know, whenever someone passes through a door up here, it’s recorded. No one entered Mangu’s bedroom this morning, either on the interface side or the elevator side. The tracking cores are absolutely blank. The last one to go in was Mangu himself, about midnight. Preliminary inspection indicates no traces of intruders in the room, no strange fingerprints, no flecks of someone else’s dandruff, no stray hairs, no bits of lint. And no sign of a struggle. Mangu was a strong man, you know. He wouldn’t have been easy to overpower.”

“You’re suggesting it was probably suicide?” Shadrach asks.

“I am. Obviously. No one on my staff takes any other theory at all seriously at this point. But the Chairman is certain it was an assassination, and you should have seen him before you got here. Almost hysterical, wild-eyed, raving. You know, it doesn’t look good for me and my men if he believes there’s been an assassination. We’re supposed to make assassinations impossible up here. But it goes beyond whether I lose my job, Doctor. There’s this whole fantastic purge that he’s instituting, the arrests, the interrogations, restrictive measures, a tremendously messy and unpleasant and expensive enterprise, all of it, so far as I can see, absolutely useless. What I want to know,” Avogadro says, “is whether you think there’s some chance the Chairman will be willing to take a more rational attitude toward Mangu’s death when he’s further along in his recovery.”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think so. I’ve never seen him change his mind about anything.”

“But the operation—”

“Has weakened him, sure. Physically and psychologically. But it hasn’t greatly affected his reason in any way that I can perceive. He’s always had this thing about assassins, of course, and obviously he’s assuming Mangu was murdered because it fulfills some kind of inner need for him, some fantasy projection, something very dark and intricate. I think he’d have made the same assumption even if he’d been in perfect health when Mangu went out the window. So his recovery per se isn’t going to be a factor in getting him to reevaluate Mangu’s death. All I can suggest is that you wait three or four days until he’s strong enough to be getting back on the job and go in there with the findings of your completed investigation, show him conclusively that there’s no evidence whatsoever of murder, and count on his basic sanity to bring him to an acceptance of the fact that Mangu killed himself.”

“Suppose I bring him the report this afternoon?”

“He’s not really ready for all this stress. Besides, is such a speedy investigation going to be plausible to him? No, I’d recommend waiting at least three days, preferably four or five.”

“And meanwhile,” Avogadro says, “suspects will be rounded up, minds will be pried into, the innocent will suffer, my staff will be wasting its energies on a foolish pursuit of a nonexistent assassin—”

“Can’t you delay the purge a few days, then?”

“He ordered us to start at once, Doctor.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“He ordered us to start at once. We’ve done so.”

“Already?”

“Already. I understand the meaning of an order from the Chairman. Within the past ten minutes the first arrests have taken place. I can try to stretch out the process of interrogation so that as little harm as possible will come to the prisoners before I can bring my findings on Mangu’s death to the Chairman, but I have no authority to sidetrack his instructions altogether.” Quietly Avogadro adds, “I wouldn’t want to risk it, either.”

“Then there’ll be a purge,” Shadrach says, shrugging. “I regret that as much as you do, I suppose. But there’s no way to stop it now, eh? And no real hope that you’ll persuade Genghis Mao to swallow the suicide theory, not this afternoon or tomorrow or next week, not if he wants to think Mangu was murdered. I’m sorry.”

“I am also,” Avogadro says. “Well. Thanks for your time, Doctor.” He begins to move away; then, pausing, he gives Shadrach a deep, uncomfortably appraising look, and says, “Oh, one more thing. Doctor. Is there any reason you might know of for Mangu to have wanted to kill himself?” Shadrach frowns. He considers things.

“No,” he answers after a moment. “No. Not that I’m aware of.”

He goes on into Surveillance Vector One. The big room is crowded with high staff personnel. He begins to feel a little odd, wandering around headquarters without a shirt. General Gonchigdorge sits at Genghis Mao’s ornate throne, jabbing with stubby fingers at the enormous keyboard that controls the whole vast spy-eye apparatus. As the general pounds the buttons, images of life out there in the Trauma Ward swing jerkily in and out of focus, zooming into view and vanishing rapidly. The scene on the screens looks just as dizzyingly random as when the machine is left to its own whims; not surprising, for Gonchigdorge really does seem to be tapping the keys without system, without purpose, in a kind of sullen petulance, as though he hopes to uncover a revolutionary cadre ouf there by some stochastic process of nondirected scoops — dipping down into the world here and there until he comes upon a band of desperados waving a banner, we are conspirators. But the screens reveal only the usual human story, people working, walking, suffering, quarreling, dying.

Horthy, appearing silently at Mordecai’s left elbow, says, with a certain glee, “The arrests have already begun.”

“I know. Avogadro told me.”

“Did he tell you that they have a prime suspect?”

“Who?”

Horthy delicately prods his thumbs into the corners of his bulging, bloodshot eyes. A psychedelic effluvium still hovers about him. “Roger Buckmaster,” he says. “The microengineering man, you know.”

“Yes. I know. I’ve worked with him.”

“Buckmaster was heard making wild statements at Karakorum last night,” Horthy says. “Calling for the overthrow of Genghis Mao, yelling subversion at the top of his lungs. The Citpols picked him up, finally, but they decided he was just drunk and let him go.”

In a low voice Shadrach says, “Is that what happened to you?”

“Me? To me? I don’t understand what you mean.”

“At the tube-train station. I saw you there, remember? While they were running the tape of Mangu’s speech. You made some remarks about the Antidote distribution program, and then the Citpols—”

“No,” Horthy says. “You must be mistaken.” His eyes fix on Shadrach’s and lock there. They are intimidating eyes, cold and hostile, despite all their dissipated bleariness. With great precision Horthy says, “It was someone else you saw at Karakorum, Dr. Mordecai.”

“You weren’t there last night?”

“It was someone else.”

Shadrach chooses to take the crude hint, and decides not to press the issue. “My apologies. Tell me about Buckmaster. Why do they think he’s the one?”

“His eccentric behavior last night was suspicious.”

“Is that all?”

“You’ll have to ask the security people for the rest.”

“Was he found near Mangu’s apartment at the time of the murder?”

“I couldn’t say. Dr. Mordecai.”

“All right.” On the surveillance screens, in repellent close-up, the image of a girl vomiting. It is the crimson puke of organ-rot, in glistening lifelike color. Horthy seems almost to smile at the sight, as though nothing horrid is alien to him. Shadrach says, “One more thing. You saw Mangu fall, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And then you notified Genghis Mao?”

“I notified the guards in the lobby first.”

“Of course.”

“And then I went to the seventy-fifth floor. The security people had already sealed it, but I was able to enter.”

“Going straight to the Chairman’s bedroom?”

Horthy nods. “Which was under triple guard. I obtained admittance only by insisting on my ministerial privileges.”

“Was Genghis Mao awake?”

“Yes. Reading PRC reports.”

“What would you say was his general state of health?”

“Quite good. He looked pale and weak, but not unusually so, considering that he had just had a major operation. He greeted me and saw from my expression that something was wrong, and asked me, and I told him what had happened.”

“Which was?”

“What else?” Horthy says snappishly. “That Mangu had fallen from his window, naturally.”

“Is that how you put it? ‘Mangu has fallen from his window’?”

“Something like that.”

“Did you talk about his being pushed, maybe?”

“Why are you interrogating me. Dr. Mordecai?”

“Please. This is important. I need to know whether the Khan arrived at the idea that Mangu was assassinated by himself, or if you inadvertently put the suggestion in his mind.”

Horthy stares balefully up at Shadrach Mordecai. “I told him exactly what I saw: Mangu falling from the window. I drew no conclusions about how it had happened. Even if someone had thrown him, how much could I have seen, four hundred meters below? At that distance Mangu himself was no bigger man a speck against the sky, a doll. I didn’t recognize him until he had nearly reached the ground.” A disconcerting gleam appears in Horthy’s eyes. He leans close to Shadrach and says, almost crooning, “He looked so serene. Dr. Mordecai! Floating there above me — his eyes wide open, his hair straight out behindhim, his lips drawn back — he was smiling, I think. Smiling! And then he hit.”

Ionigylakis, who has evidently been eavesdropping, interjects abruptly, “That’s strange. If someone had just flung him from the window, would he have looked so cheerful?” Shadrach shakes his head. “I doubt that Mangu was conscious at all by the time Horthy could see his face. That serene expression was probably just acceleration stupor.”

“Perhaps,” Horthy says crisply.

“Go on,” Shadrach tells him. “You informed the Khan that Mangu had fallen. Then what happened?”

“He sat up so sharply that I thought he would break the medical machinery all around him. He turned red in the face and began to perspire. His breath came in gasps. Oh, it was very bad, Dr. Mordecai. I thought he would die from overexcitement. He started to wave his arms, to shout about assassins — suddenly he sank back against the pillow, he put his hands to his chest—”

“You thought he would die from overexcitement,” Shadrach says. “But it never occurred to you beforehand that it might be unwise to trouble him with news like that, in his state of health.”

“One doesn’t think clearly at a time like that.”

“One ought to, if one is in a position of high responsibility.”

“One’s judgment is not always perfect,” Horthy retorts. “Especially when one has nearly been killed oneself a few minutes before by a body plummeting from the sky. And when one realizes that the dead man is such an important figure in the government, in fact the viceroy. And when one suspects that his death may be murder, assassination, the beginning of revolution. And when—”

“All right,” Shadrach says. “All right. He managed to survive the unnecessary shock. But what you did was very risky, Horthy. Worse: it was dumb. Extremely dumb.” He frowns. “You think there’s some conspiracy, eh?”

“I have no idea. Clearly it’s a possibility.”

“So is suicide, though.”

Ionigylakis says, “You think so, Shadrach?”

“Avogadro certainly does.”

“But Avogadro’s men have arrested Buckmaster.”

“I’ve heard. The poor crazy devil. I pity him.”

Gonchigdorge is still jabbing buttons. The screens are full of weirdly distorted faces, as though the spy-eye lenses are getting much too close to their targets. Donna Labile, from the far side of the room, calls to Horthy, who gives Shadrach a frosty incomprehensible look and stalks away. Shadrach is altogether unable to make sense out of Horthy, but suddenly it does not matter. Nothing matters. This room is a madhouse, through which he wanders, bare-chested and feeling a bit of a chill, baffled by all the frantic activity around him. He feels too sane, too mundane, for this environment. The screens of Surveillance Vector One suddenly go blank, and then grow bright with wild jagged streaks of blue and green and red. General Gonchigdorge, in his heavy-handed pursuit of conspirators, has broken something.

“Fricifolia!” the general yells. “Get Frank Ficifolia up here! The machine has to be repaired!”

Ficifolia is already present, though. Cursing softly, he shoulders through the crowd toward the enthroned general. As he passes Shadrach he pauses to murmur, “Your friend Buckmaster’s in the quiz room right now. I suppose you won’t weep over that.”

“On the contrary. Buckmaster wasn’t in his right mind when he was hassling me last night. And now he’ll pay for it.”

“Avogadro himself is interrogating, I hear.”

“Avogadro thinks it was suicide.”

“So do I,” Ficifolia says, and keeps going.

Shadrach has had enough. He heads for the interface. As he reaches it, he looks back at the turmoil, the blaring jags of color on the screens, Gonchigdorge shouting like an angry child, Horthy and Labile deep in some mysterious intense discussion punctuated by fierce Italo-Magyar gesticulations, Ionigylakis looming above everyone and announcing his confusions in booming tones, Frank Ficifolia squatting by an open panel to insert a long slender wrench into a turbulent spaghetti of bubble-circuits. While somewhere in the depths of this huge building Avogadro, who does not believe a murder was committed, is nevertheless preparing to administer torture to Roger Buckmaster, suspected of having committed that murder, even though Buckmaster almost certainly could not have been capable of murdering anyone this morning. And in the great bedchamber of the Khan that old, old man, his near-fatal episode of shock all but over according to the tickety-tock pulsations and quivers running through Shadrach Mordecai’s body, lies in bed scheming with calm crazy dedication how best to make sacred the memory of the departed viceroy and how to destroy his supposed slayers. Enough, enough. More than enough: too much. Shadrach requests exit from the interface, which opens with blessed promptness and admits him to the holding chamber, and then, quickly, to his own apartment on the far side.

How peaceful it is here! Crowfoot is awake and out of the hammock; she has just taken a shower, and stands, bare, beautiful, in the middle of the room, drying herself, droplets of moisture still glittering on her smooth sleek skin, nipples puckered and taut in the coolness of the air. “I’m going to be awfully late getting to the lab today,” she says casually. “What’s been happening?”

“Everything. Mangu’s dead, the Khan nearly had apoplexy when he found out, they’ve arrested Buckmaster, a general purge of subversives has been ordered, Horthy is—”

“Wait,” she cries, blinking. “Dead? Mangu? How?”

“Fell out the window. Pushed or jumped.”

“Oh.” A little sucking intake of breath. “Oh, God. When was this?”

“Half an hour ago, more or less.”

She crumples her towel into a ball, hurls it into a corner, and begins to pace the room, striding like a splendid perplexed tigress. Whirling on him, she demands, “Which window?”

“His own,” he tells her, mystified by the drift of her question.

“Fell from the top of the building? His body must have been smashed to a ruin.”

“I imagine so. But what—”

“Oh, Shadrach! My project!”

“What about it?”

“This sounds terribly inhuman, doesn’t it? But what will happen to my project now? Without Mangu—”

“Oh,” he says dully. “I hadn’t considered that.” “He was intended for—”

“Yes. Don’t say it.”

“It’s awful of me to have that reaction.”

“Was the entire project built about Mangu as the specific particular one — the recipient?”

“Not necessarily. But — oh, to hell with the project!” She crouches near the floor, folding her arms across her breasts. She is shivering. “I don’t understand. Who would kill Mangu, anyway? What’s going on? Is there going to be a revolution, Shadrach?”

“Mangu may have killed Mangu,” he tells her. “No one knows yet. Avogadro’s men didn’t detect any sign of forced entry to his apartment.”

“Yet they’ve arrested Buckmaster?”

“Because of the nonsense he was spouting last night in Karakorum, I suppose. But they haven’t arrested Horthy, who was being just as subversive. Horthy’s right next door in Surveillance Vector One, He was the one who brought the news about Mangu to Genghis Mao. Damn near killed him with the shock of it.”

Nikki, looking up somberly, says, “Perhaps that’s what he wanted to do.”