Part 24 (1/2)

”I'll take care of it,” Herb said.

”Okay.” Buckman nodded. ”I'll go home.” He placed the pistol back in its box, back on its red-velvet cus.h.i.+on, closed the box, then opened it once more and dumped the twentytwo bullet from the barrel. Herb Maime and Phil Westerburg watched. ”The barrel breaks to the side in this model,” Buckman said. ”It's unusual.”

”You better get a black-and-gray to take you home,” Herb said. ”The way you feel and with what's happened you shouldn't be driving.”

”I can drive,” Buckman said. ”I can always drive. What I can't do properly is kill a man with a twenty-two slug who's standing directly in front of me. Somebody has to do it for me.”

”Good night,” Herb said quietly.

”Good night.” Buckman left them, made his way through the various offices, the deserted suites and chambers of the academy, once more to the ascent tube. The Darvon had already begun to lessen the pain in his head; he felt grateful for that. Now I can breathe the night air, he thought. Without suffering.

The door of the ascent tube slid open. There stood Jason Taverner. And, with him, an attractive woman. Both of them looked frightened and pale. Two tall, handsome, nervous people. Obviously sixes. Defeated sixes.

”You are under police arrest,” Buckman said. ”Here are your rights. Anything you say may be held against you. You have a right to counsel and if you cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed for you. You have a right to be tried by a jury, or you can waive that right and be tried by a judge appointed by the Police Academy of Los Angeles City and County. Do you understand what I have just said?”

”I came here to clear myself,” Jason Taverner said.

”My staff will take your depositions,” Buckman said. ”Go into the blue-colored offices over there where you were taken before.” He pointed. ”Do you see him in there? The man in the single-breasted suit with the yellow tie?”

”Can I clear myself?” Jason Taverner said. ”I admit to being in the house when she died, but I didn't have anything to do with it. I went upstairs and found her in the bathroom. She was getting some Thorazine for me. To counteract the mescaline she gave me.”

”He saw her as a skeleton,” the woman--evidently Heather Hart--said. ”Because of the mescaline. Can't he get off on the grounds that he was under the influence of a powerful hallucinogenic chemical? Doesn't that legally clear him? He had no control over what he did, and I didn't have anything to do with it at all. I didn't even know she was dead until I read tonight's paper.”

”In some states it might,” Buckman said.

”But not here,” the woman said wanly. Comprehendingly. Emerging from his office, Herb Maime sized up the situation and declared, ”I'll book him and take their statements, Mr. Buckman. You go ahead on home as we agreed.”

”Thank you,” Buckman said. ”Where's my topcoat?” He glanced around for it. ”G.o.d, it's cold,” he said. ”They turn the heat off at night,” he explained to Taverner and the Hart woman. ”I'm sorry.”

”Good night,” Herb said to him.

Buckman entered the ascent tube and pressed the b.u.t.ton that closed the door. He still did not have his topcoat. Maybe I should take a black-and-gray, he said to himself. Get some junior-grade eager cadet type to drive me home, or, like Herb said, go to one of the good downtown motels. Or one of the new soundproof hotels by the airport. But then my quibble would be here and I wouldn't have it to drive to work tomorrow morning.

The cold air and the darkness of the roof made him wince. Even the Darvon can't help me, he thought. Not completely. I can still feel it.

He unlocked the door of his quibble, got inside and slammed the door after him. Colder in here than out there, he thought. Jesus. He started up the engine and turned on the heater. Frigid wind blew up at him from the floor vents. He began to shake. I'll feel better when I can get home, he thought. Looking at his wrist.w.a.tch, he saw that it was twothirty. No wonder it's so cold, he thought.

Why did I pick Taverner? he asked himself. Out of a planet of six billion people . . . this one specific man who never harmed anyone, never did anything except let his file come to the attention of the authorities. That's it right there, he realized. Jason Taverner let himself come to our attention, and as they say, once come to the authorities' attention, never completely forgotten.

But I can unpick him, he thought, as Herb pointed out.

No. Again it had to be no. The die was cast from the beginning. Before any of us even laid hands on it. Taverner, he thought, you were doomed from the start. From your first act upward.

We play roles, Buckman thought. We occupy positions, some small, some large. Some ordinary, some strange. Some outlandish and bizarre. Some visible, some dim or not visible at all. Jason Taverner's role was large and visible at the end, and it was at the end that the decision had to be made. If he could have stayed as he started out: one small man without proper ID cards, living in a ratty, broken-down, slum hotel-- if he could have remained that he might have gotten away. . . or at the very worst wound up in a forced-labor camp. But Taverner did not elect to do that.

Some irrational will within him made him want to appear, to be visible, to be _known_. All right, Jason Taverner, Buckman thought, you are known, again, as you were once before, but better known now, known in a new way. In a way that serves higher ends--ends you know nothing about, but must accept without understanding. As you go to your grave your mouth will be still open, asking the question, ”What did I do?” You will be buried that way: with your mouth still open.

And I could never explain it to you, Buckman thought. Except to say: don't come to the attention of the authorities. Don't ever interest us. Don't make us want to know more about you.

Someday your story, the ritual and shape of your downfall, may be made public, at a remote future time when it no longer matters. When there are no more forced-labor camps and no more campuses surrounded by rings of police carrying rapid-fire submachine guns and wearing gas masks that make them look like great-snouted, huge-eyed root-eaters, some kind of noxious lower animal. Someday there may be a post mortem inquiry and it will be learned that you in fact did no harm--did nothing, actually, but become noticed.

The real, ultimate truth is that despite your fame and your great public following you are expendable, he thought. And I am not. That is the difference between the two of us. Therefore you must go and I remain.

His s.h.i.+p floated on, up into the band of nighttime stars. And to himself he sang quietly, seeking to look ahead, to see forward into time, to the world of his home, of music and thought and love, to books, ornate snuff boxes and rare stamps. To the blotting out, for a moment, of the wind that rushed about him as he drove on, a speck nearly lost in the night.

There is beauty which will never be lost, he declared to himself; I will preserve it; I am one of those who cherishes it. And I abide. And that, in the final a.n.a.lysis, is all that matters.

Tunelessly, he hummed to himself. And felt at last some meager heat as, finally, the standard police model quibble heater mounted below his feet began to function.

Something dripped from his nose onto the fabric of his coat. My G.o.d, he thought in horror. I'm crying again. He put up his hand and wiped the greaselike wetness from his eyes. Who for? he asked himself. Alys? For Taverner? The Hart woman? Or for all of them?

No, he thought. It's a reflex. From fatigue and worry. It doesn't mean anything. Why does a man cry? he wondered. Not like a woman; not for that. Not for sentiment. A man cries over the loss of something, something alive. A man can cry over a sick animal that he knows won't make it. The death of a child: a man can cry for that. But not because things are sad.

A man, he thought, cries not for the future or the past but for the present. And what is the present, now? They are booking Jason Taverner back at the Police Academy building and he is telling them his story. Like everyone else, he has an account to give, an offering which makes clear his lack of guilt. Jason Taverner, as I fly this craft, is doing that right now.

Turning the steering wheel, he sent his quibble in a long trajectory that brought it at last into an Immelmann; he made the craft fly back the way it had come, at no increase in speed, nor at any loss. He merely flew in the opposite direction. Back toward the academy.

And yet still he cried. His tears became each moment denser and faster and deeper. I'm going the wrong way, he thought. Herb is right; I have to get away from there. All I can do there now is witness something I can no longer control. I am painted on, like a fresco. Dwelling in only two dimensions. I and Jason Taverner are figures in an old child's drawing. Lost in dust.

He pressed his foot down on the accelerator and pulled back on the steering wheel of the quibble; it spluttered up, its engine missing and misfiring. The automatic choke is still closed, he said to himself. I should have revved it up for a while. It's still cold. Once more he changed direction.

Aching, and with fatigue, he at last dropped his home route card into the control turret of the quibble's guiding section and snapped on the automatic pilot. I should rest, he said to himself. Reaching, he activated the sleep circuit above his head; the mechanism hummed and he shut his eyes.

Sleep, artificially induced, came as always at once. He felt himself spiraling down into it and was glad. But then, almost at once, beyond the control of the sleep circuit, a dream came. Very clearly he did not want the dream. But he could not stop it.

The countryside, brown and dry, in summer, where he had lived as a child. He rode a horse, and approaching him on his left a squad of horses nearing slowly. On the horses rode men in s.h.i.+ning robes, each a different color; each wore a pointed helmet that sparkled in the sunlight. The slow, solemn knights pa.s.sed him and as they traveled by he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What n.o.ble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.

Felix Buckman let them pa.s.s; he did not speak to them and they said nothing to him. Together, they all moved toward the house from which he had come. A man had sealed himself up inside the house, a man alone, Jason Taverner, in the silence and darkness, without windows, by himself from now on into eternity. Sitting, merely existing, inert. Felix Buckman continued on, out into the open countryside. And then he heard from behind him one dreadful single shriek. They had killed Taverner, and seeing them enter, sensing them in the shadows around him, knowing what they intended to do with him, Taverner had shrieked.

Within himself Felix Buckman felt absolute and utter desolate grief. But in the dream he did not go back nor look back. There was nothing that could be done. No one could have stopped the posse of varicolored men in robes; they could not have been said no to. Anyhow, it was over. Taverner was dead.

His heaving, disordered brain managed to spike a relay signal via minute electrodes to the sleep circuit. A voltage breaker clicked open, and a solid, disturbing tone awakened Buckman from his sleep and from his dream.

G.o.d, he thought, and s.h.i.+vered. How cold it had become. How empty and alone he felt himself to be.

The great, weeping grief within him, left from the dream, meandered in his breast, still disturbing him. I've got to land, he said to himself. See some person. Talk to someone. I can't stay alone. Just for a second if I could--.

Shutting off the automatic pilot he steered the quibble toward a square of fluorescent light below: an all-night gas station.

A moment later he b.u.mpily landed before the gas pumps of the station, rolling to a stop near another quibble, parked and empty, abandoned. No one in it.

Glare lit up the shape of a middle-aged black man in a topcoat, neat, colorful tie, his face aristocratic, each feature starkly outlined. The black man paced about across the oil-streaked cement, his arms folded, an absent expression on his face. Evidently he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his s.h.i.+p. The black man was neither impatient nor resigned; he merely existed, in remoteness and isolation and splendor, strong in his body, standing high, seeing nothing because there was nothing he cared to see.