THE MAN WHO JAPED

CHAPTER 3

In the hall outside Myron Mavis' office, the Telemedia workers were winding up their day. The T-M building formed a connected hollow square. The open area in the center was used for outdoor sets. Nothing was in process now, because it was five-thirty and everybody was leaving.

From a pay phone, Allen Purcell called his wife. "I'll be late for dinner," he said.

"Are—you all right?"

"I'm fine," he said. "But you go ahead and eat. Big doings, big crisis at the Agency. "I'll catch something down here." He added, "I'm at Telemedia."

"For very long?" Janet asked anxiously.

"Maybe for a long, long time," he said, and hung up.

As he rejoined Sue Frost, she said to him, "How long did Luddy work for you?"

"Since I opened the Agency." The realization was sobering: three years. Presently he added: "That's the only person I've ever let go."

At the back of the office, Myron Mavis was turning over duplicates of the day's output to a bonded messenger of the Committee. The duplicates would be put on permanent file; in case of an investigation the material was there to examine.

To the formal young messenger, Mrs. Frost said: "Don't leave. I'm going back; you can go with me."

The young man retired discreetly with his armload of metal drums. His uniform was the drab khaki of the Cohorts of Major Streiter, a select body composed of male descendants of the founder of Morec.

"A cousin," Mrs. Frost said. "A very distant cousin-in-law on my father's side." She nodded toward the young man, whose face was as expressionless as sand. "Ralf Hadler. I like to keep him around." She raised her voice. "Ralf, go find the Getabout. It's parked somewhere in back."

The Cohorts, either singly or in bunches, made Allen uncomfortable; they were humorless, as devout as machines, and, for their small number, they seemed to be everywhere. His fantasy was that the Cohorts were always in motion; in the course of one day, like a foraging ant, a member of the Cohorts roamed hundreds of miles.

"You'll come along," Mrs. Frost said to Mavis.

"Naturally," Mavis murmured. He began clearing his desk of unfinished work. Mavis was an ulcer-mongerer, a high-strung worrier with rumpled shirt and baggy, unpressed tweeds, who flew into fragments when things got over his head. Allen recalled tangled interviews that had ended with Mavis in despair and his staff scurrying. If Mavis was going to be along, the next few hours would be hectic.

"We'll meet you at the Getabout," Mrs. Frost said to him. "Finish up here, first. We'll wait."

As she and Allen walked down the hall, Allen observed: "This is a big place." The idea of an organ—even a government organ—occupying an entire building struck him as grandiose. And much of it was underground. Telemedia, like cleanliness was next to God; after T-M came the secretaries and the Committee itself.

"It's big," Mrs. Frost agreed, striding along the hall and holding her manila folder against her chest with both hands. "But I don't know."

"You don't know what?"

Cryptically, she said: "Maybe it should be smaller. Remember what became of the giant reptiles."

"You mean curtail its activities?" He tried to picture the vacuum that would be created. "And what instead?"

"Sometimes I toy with the idea of slicing T-M into a number of units, interacting, but separately run. I'm not sure one person can or should take responsibility for the whole."

"Well," Allen said, thinking of Mavis, "I suppose it cuts into his life-expectancy."

"Myron has been Director of T-M for eight years. He's forty-two and he looks eighty. He's got only half a stomach. Someday I expect to phone and discover he's holed up at the Health Resort, doing business from there. Or from Other World, as they call that sanitarium of theirs."

"That's a long way off," Allen said. "Either place."

They had come to the door leading out, and Mrs. Frost halted. "You've been in a position to watch T-M. What do you think of it? Be honest with me. Would you call it efficient?"

"The part I see is efficient."

"What about the output? It buys your packets and it frames them for a medium. What's your reaction to the end result? Is the Morec garbled along the line? Do you feel your ideas survive projection?"

Allen tried to recall when he had last sat through a T-M concoction. His Agency monitored as a matter of routine, collecting its own duplicates of the items based on its packets. "Last week," he said, "I watched a television show." The woman's gray eyebrows lifted mockingly. "Half hour? Or entire hour?"

"The program was an hour but we saw only a portion of it. At a friend's apartment. Janet and I were over playing Juggle, and we were taking a break."

"You don't mean you don't own a television set."

"The people downstairs are domino for my block. They tumble the rest of us. Apparently the packets are getting over."

They walked outside and got into the parked Getabout. Allen calculated that this zone, in terms of leasing, was in the lowest possible range: between 1 and 14. It was not crowded.

"Do you approve of the domino method?" Mrs. Frost asked as they waited for Mavis. "It's certainly economical."

"But you have reservations."

"The domino method operates on the assumption that people believe what their group believes, no more and no less. One unique individual would foul it up. One man who originated his own idea, instead of getting it from his block domino."

Mrs. Frost said: "How interesting. An idea out of nothing."

"Out of the individual human mind," Allen said, aware that he wasn't being politic, but feeling, at the same time, that Mrs. Frost respected him and really wanted to hear what he had to offer. "A rare situation," he admitted. "But it could occur."

There was a stir outside the car. Myron Mavis, a bulging briefcase under his arm, and the Cohort of Major Streiter, his young face stern and his messenger parcel chained to his belt, had arrived.

"I forgot about you," Mrs. Frost said to her cousin, as the two men got in. The Getabout was small, and there was barely room for all of them. Hadler was to drive. He started up the motor—powered by pile-driven steam—and the car moved cautiously along the lane. Along the route to the Committee building, they passed only three other Getabouts.

"Mr. Purcell has a criticism of the domino method," Mrs. Frost said to Myron Mavis.

Mavis grunted unintelligibly, then blinked bloodshot eyes and roused himself. "Uhuh," he muttered. "Fine." He began pawing through a pocketful of papers. "Let's go back to five-minute spots. Hit ‘em, hit ‘em."

Behind the tiller, young Hadler sat very straight and rigid, his chin out-jutting. He gripped the tiller as a person walked across the lane ahead. The Getabout had reached a speed of twenty miles an hour, and all four of them were uneasy.

"We should either fly," Mavis grated, "or walk. Not this halfway business. All we need now is a couple of bottles of beer, and we're back in the old days."

"Mr. Purcell believes in the unique individual," Mrs Frost said.

Mavis favored Allen with a glance. "The Resort has that on its mind, too. An obsession, day and night."

"I always assumed that was window dressing," Mrs. Frost said. "To lure people into going over."

"People go over because they're noose," Mavis declared. Noose was a derisive term contracted from neuro-psychiatric. Allen disliked it. It had a blind, savage quality that made him think of the old hate terms, nigger and kike. "They're weak, they're misfits, they can't take it. They haven't got the moral fiber to stick it out here; like babies, they want pleasure. They want candy and bottled pop. Comic books from mama Health Resort."

On his face was an expression of great bitterness. The bitterness was like a solvent that had eaten through the wasted folds of flesh, exposing the bone. Allen had never seen Marvis so weary and discouraged.

"Well," Mrs. Frost said, also noticing, "we don't want them anyway. It's better they should go over."

"I sometimes wonder what they do with all those people," Allen said. Nobody had accurate figures on the number of renegades who had fled to the Resort; because of the onus, the relatives preferred to state that the missing individual had gone to the colonies. Colonists were, after all, only failures; a noose was a voluntary expatriate who had declared himself an enemy of moral civilization.

"I've heard," Mrs. Frost said conversationally, "that incoming supplicants are set to work in vast slave-labor camps. Or was that the Communists who did that?"

"Both," Allen said. "And with the revenue, the Resort is building a vast empire in outer space to dominate the universe. Huge robot armies, too. Women supplicants are—" He concluded briefly: "Ill-used."

At the tiller of the Getabout, Ralf Hadler said suddenly: "Mrs. Frost, there's a car behind us trying to pass. What'll I do?"

"Let it pass." They all looked around. A Getabout, like their own, but with the sticker of the Pure Food and Drug League, was nosing its way to their left side. Hadler had gone white at this unforseen dilemma, and their Getabout was veering witlessly.

"Pull over and stop," Allen told him.

"Speed up," Mavis said, turning in his seat and peering defiantly through the rear window. "They don't own this lane."

The Pure Food and Drug League Getabout continued to advance on them, equally uncertain of itself. As Hadler dribbled toward the right, it abruptly seized what seemed to be its chance and shot forward. Hadler then let his tiller slide between his hands, and two fenders scraped shatteringly.

Mavis, trembling, crept from their stopped Getabout. Mrs. Frost followed him, and Allen and young Hadler got out on the other side. The Pure Food and Drug League car idled its motor, and the driver—alone inside—gaped out at them. He was a middle-aged gentleman, obviously at the end of a long day at the office.

"Maybe we could back," Mrs. Frost said, holding her manila folder aimlessly. Mavis, reduced to impotence, wandered around the two Getabouts and poked here and there with his toe. Hadler stood like iron, betraying no feeling.

The fenders had combined, and one car would have to be jacked up. Allen inspected the damage, noted the angle at which the two metals had met, and then gave up. "They have tow trucks," he said to Mrs. Frost. "Have Ralf call the Transportation Pool." He looked around him; they were not far from the Committee building. "We can walk from here."

Without protest, Mrs. Frost started off, and he followed.

"What about me?" Mavis demanded, hurrying a few steps.

"You can stay with the car," Mrs. Frost said. Hadler had already strode toward a building and phone booth; Mavis was alone with the gentleman from the Pure Food and Drug League. "Tell the police what happened."

A cop, on foot, was walking over. Not far behind him came a juvenile, attracted by the convocation of people.

"This embarrassing is," Mrs. Frost said presently, as the two of them walked toward the Committee building.

"I suppose Ralf will go up before his block warden." The picture of Mrs. Birmingham entered his mind, the coyly sweet malevolence of the creature situated behind her table, dealing out trouble.

Mrs. Frost said: "The Cohorts have their own inquiry setup." As they reached the front entrance of the building, she said thoughtfully: "Mavis is completely burned out. He can't cope with any situation. He makes no decisions. Hasn't for months."

Allen didn't comment. It wasn't his place.

"Maybe it's just as well," Mrs. Frost said. "Leaving him back there. I'd rather see Mrs. Hoyt without him trailing along."

This was the first he had heard that they were meeting with Ida Pease Hoyt. Halting, he said: "Maybe you should explain what you're going to do."

"I believe you know what I'm going to do," she said, continuing on.

And he did.