THE MAN WHO JAPED

CHAPTER 10

As he entered his office at the Agency, Doris appeared and said: "Mr. Purcell, something has happened. Harry Priar wants to tell you." Priar, who headed the Agency's art department, was his pro-tem assistant, taking Fred Luddy's place.

Priar materialized, looking somber. "It's about Luddy."

"Isn't he gone?" Allen said, removing his coat. Malparto's drugs still affected him; his head ached and he felt dulled.

"He's gone," Priar said. "Gone to Blake-Moffet. We got a tip from T-M this morning, before you showed up." Allen groaned.

"He knows everything we've got on tap," Priar continued. "All the new packets, all the current ideas. That means Blake-Moffet has them."

"Make an inventory," Allen said. "See what he took." He settled drearily down at his desk. "Let me know as soon as you're finished."

A whole day was consumed by inventory-taking. At five the information was in and on his desk.

"Picked us clean," Priar said. He admiringly shook his head. "Must have spent hours. Of course we can attach the material, try to get it back through the claims court."

"Blake-Moffet will fight for years," Allen said, fooling with the long yellow pad. "By the time we get the packets back they'll be obsolete. We'll have to dream up new ones. Better ones."

"This really tough is," Priar said. "Nothing like this ever happened before. We've had Blake-Moffet pirate stuff; we've lost stuff; we've been beaten to ideas. But we never had anybody at top level go over bag and baggage."

"We never fired anybody before," Allen reminded him. He was thinking how much Luddy resented the firing. "They can do us real harm. And with Luddy there they probably will. Grudge stuff. We've never run into that before. The personal element. Bitter, to-the-death tangling."

After Priar left, Allen got up and paced around his office. Tomorrow was Friday, his last full day to decide about the directorship of T-M. The statue problem would still be with him the rest of the week; as Malparto said, therapy would drag on indefinitely.

Either he went into T-M as he was now or he declined the job. On Saturday he would still be the same elusive personality, with the same switches to be pulled from deep within.

It was depressing to consider how little practical help the Health Resort had given him. Doctor Malparto was off in the clouds, thinking in terms of a lifetime of test-giving, reaction-measuring. And meanwhile the practical situation floundered. He had to make a decision, and without Malparto's help. Without, in effect, anybody's help. He was back where he started before Gretchen gave him the folded slip.

Picking up the phone he called his apartment.

"Hello," Janet's voice came, laden with dread.

"This is the Mortuary League," Allen said. "It is my duty to inform you that your husband was sucked into the manifold of an autofac ship and never heard from again." He examined his watch. "At precisely five-fifteen."

A terrible hushed silence, and then Janet said: "But that's now."

"If you listen," Allen said, "you can hear him breathing. He's not gone yet, but he's pretty far down."

Janet said: "You inhuman monster."

"What I want to find out," Allen said, "is what are we doing this evening?"

"I'm taking Lena's kids to the history museum." Lena was his wife's married sister. "You're not doing anything."

"I'll tag along," he decided. "I want to discuss something with you."

"Discuss what?" she asked instantly.

"Same old thing." The history museum would make as good a place as any; so many people passed through that no juvenile would single them out. "I'll be home around six. What's for dinner?"

"How about ‘steak'?"

"Fine," he said, and hung up.

After dinner they walked over to Lena's and picked up the two kids. Ned was eight and Pat was seven, and they scurried excitedly along the twilight lane and up the steps of the museum. Allen and his wife came more slowly, hand in hand, saying little. For once the evening was pleasant. The sky was cloud-scattered but mild, and many people were out to enjoy themselves in the few ways open to them.

"Museums," Allen said. "And art exhibits. And concerts. And lectures. And discussions of public affairs." He thought of Gates' phonograph playing "I Can't Get Started," the taste of sherry, and, beyond everything else, the litter of the twentieth century that had focalized in the water-soaked copy of Ulysses. "And there's always Juggle."

Clinging wistfully to him, Janet said: "Sometimes I wish I was a kid again. Look at them go." The children had vanished inside the museum. To them the exhibits were still interesting; they hadn't wearied of the intricate tableaux.

"Someday," Allen said, "I'd like to take you where you can relax." He wondered where that would be. Certainly no place in the Morec scheme. Perhaps on some remote colony planet, when they had grown old and been discarded. "Your childhood days again. Where you can take off your shoes and wriggle your toes." As he had first found her: a shy, thin, very pretty girl, living with her nonleased family on bucolic Betelgeuse 4.

"Could we sometime take a trip?" Janet asked. "Anywhere—maybe to a place where there's open country and streams and—" She broke off. "And grass."

The hub of the museum was its twentieth century exhibit. An entire white-stucco house had been painstakingly reconstructed, with sidewalk and lawn, garage and parked Ford. The house was complete with furniture, robot mannikins, hot food on the table, scented water in the tile bathtub. It walked, talked, sang and glowed. The exhibit revolved in such a way that every part of the interior was visible. Visitors lined up at the circular railing and watched as Life in the Age of Waste rotated by.

Over the house was an illuminated sign:

HOW THEY LIVED

"Can I press the button?" Ned yammered, racing up to Allen. "Let me press it; nobody's pressed it. It's time to press it."

"Sure," Allen said. "Go ahead. Before somebody beats you to it."

Ned scampered back, squeezed to the railing where Pat waited, and jabbed the button. The spectators gazed benignly at the lush house and furnishings, knowing what was coming. They were watching, for awhile, at least, the last of the house. They drank in the opulence: the stocks of canned food, the great freezer and stove and sink and washer and drier, the car that seemed made of diamonds and emeralds.

Over the exhibit the sign winked out. An ugly cloud of smoke rolled up, obscuring the house. Its lights dimmed, turned dull red, and dried up. The exhibit trembled, and, to the spectators, a rumble came, the lazy tremor of a subterranean wind.

When the smoke departed, the house was gone. All that remained of the exhibit was an expanse of broken bones. A few steel supports jutted, and bricks and sections of stucco lay strewn everywhere.

In the ruins of the cellar the surviving mannikins huddled over their pitiful possessions: a tank of decontaminated water, a dog they were stewing, a radio, medicines. Only three mannikins had survived, and they were haggard and ill. Their clothing was in shreds and their skins were seared with radiation burns.

Over this hemisphere of the exhibit the sign concluded:

AND DIED

"Gee," Ned said, returning. "How do they do that?"

"Simple," Allen said. "The house isn't really in there, on that stage. It's an image projected from above. They merely substitute the alternate image. When you press the button its starts the cycle."

"Can I press it again?" Ned begged. "Please, I want to press it again; I want to blow the house up again."

As they wandered on, Allen said to his wife: "I wanted you to enjoy dinner. Have you?"

She clutched his arm. "Tell me."

"The whirlwind is coming back to be reaped. And it's an angry whirlwind. Luddy took off with everything he could lay his hands on, right to Blake-Moffet. He's probably vice president, with what he brought."

She nodded forlornly. "Oh."

"In a way, we're ruined. We have no backlog; all we are is a bunch of clever new ideas. And Luddy took them... roughly, us for the next year. That's how far ahead we had it. But that isn't the real problem. As an official of Blake-Moffet he'll be in a position to get back at me. And he will. Let's face it; I showed Luddy up for a sycophant. And that fun isn't."

"What are you going to do?"

"Defend myself, naturally. Luddy was a hard worker, competent, with a good sense of organization. But he wasn't original. He could take somebody else's idea—my idea—and milk a great deal from it. He used to build up whole packets from the smallest grain. But I have him on the creativity. So I can still run rings around Blake-Moffet, assuming I'm in the field a year from now."

"You sound almost—cheerful."

"Why not?" He shrugged. "It merely makes a bad situation worse. Blake-Moffet have always been the inertial stone dragging us into the grave. Every time they project a boy-gets-good-girl packet they blow the breath of age on us. We have to struggle out from under the dust before we can move." He pointed. "Like that house."

The opulent twentieth century house, with its Ford and Bendix washer, had reappeared. The cycle had returned to its source.

"How they lived," Allen quoted. "And died. That could be us. We're living now, but that doesn't mean anything."

"What happened at the Resort?"

"Nothing. I saw the Analyst; I recalled; I got up and left. Next Monday I go back."

"Can they help you?"

"Sure, given time."

Janet asked: "What are you going to do?"

"Take the job. Go to work as Director of Telemedia."

"I see." Then she asked: "Why?"

"Several reasons. First, because I can do a good job."

"What about the statue?"

"The statue isn't going away. Someday I'll find out why I japed it, but not by Saturday morning. Meanwhile, I'll have to live. And make decisions. By the way... the salary's about what I'm making now."

"If you're at T-M can Luddy hurt you more?"

"He can hurt the Agency more, because I'll be gone." He reflected. "Maybe I'll dismember it. I'll wait and see; it depends on how I do at T-M. In six months I may want to go back."

"What about you?"

Truthfully, he said: "He can hurt me more, too. I'll be fair game for everybody. Look at Mavis. Four giants in the field, and all of them trying to get into T-M. And I'll have one giant with a gnat stinging it."

"I suppose," Janet said, "that's another of the several reasons. You want to tangle with Luddy head-on."

"I want to meet him, yes. And I wouldn't mind hitting up against Blake-Moffet from that position. They're moribund; they're calcified. As Director of Telemedia I'll do my best to put them out of business."

"They probably expect that."

"Of course they do. One of their packets is enough for a year; I told Mrs. Frost that. As a competitor of Blake-Moffet I could run alongside them for years, hitting them now and then, getting hit in return. But as Director of T-M we'll have a grandiose showdown. Once I'm in, there's no other way."

Janet studied an exhibit of extinct flowers: poppies and lilies and gladioli and roses. "When are you going to tell Mrs. Frost?"

"I'll go over to her office tomorrow. She'll probably be expecting me... it's the last working day. Apparently she agrees with me on Blake-Moffet; this should please her. But that's another thing only time will tell."

The next morning he rented a little Getabout from a dealer and drove from his housing unit to the Committee building.

Myron Mavis, he reflected, would be giving up his within-walking-distance apartment. Protocol required that a man lease close to his job; in the next week or so it behooved him to ask for Mavis' setup. As Director of T-M he would need to live the role. There was slight latitude, and he was already resigned to the strictures. It was the price paid for public service in the higher brackets.

As soon as he entered the Committee building, the front secretary passed him through. There was no waiting, and, within five minutes, he was being ushered into Mrs. Frost's private office.

She rose graciously. "Mr. Purcell. How nice."

"You're looking well." They shook hands. "Is this a good time to talk to you?"

"Excellent," Mrs. Frost said, smiling. Today she wore a trim brown suit of some crisp fabric, unknown to him. "Sit down."

"Thank you." He seated himself facing her. "I see no point in waiting until the last moment."

"You've decided?"

Allen said: "I'll accept the job. And I apologize for stringing it out."

Waving her hand, Mrs. Frost dismissed his apology. "You should have time." And then her face glowed in a swift, beaming warmth of delight. "I'm so glad."

Touched, he said: "So am I." And he really meant it.

"When will you be ready to start?" She laughed and held up her hands. "Look at me; I'm as nervous as you."

"I want to start as soon as possible." He consulted with himself; it would take at least a week to wind up affairs at the Agency. "What about a week from Monday?"

She was disappointed, but she suppressed it. "Yes, you should have that much time for the transfer. And—perhaps we can get together socially. For dinner some evening. And for Juggle. I'm quite a demon; I play every chance I get. And I'd like very much to meet your wife."

"Fine," Allen said, sharing her enthusiasm. "We'll arrange that."