Code to Zero (7 page)

After a moment, Pete answered. “We, uh . . .” He swallowed. “We’ve lost him.”

The
Jupiter C
has been built for the Army by the Chrysler Corporation. The large rocket engine that propels the first stage is manufactured by North American Aviation, Inc. The second, third, and fourth stages have been designed and tested by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena.

Luke was angry with himself. He had handled things badly. He had found two people who probably knew who he was—and he had lost them again.

He was back in the low-rent neighbourhood near the gospel shop on H Street. The winter daylight was brightening, making the streets look more grimy, the buildings older, the people shabbier. He saw two bums in the doorway of a vacant store, passing a bottle of beer. He shuddered and walked quickly by.

Then he realized that was strange. An alcoholic wanted booze anytime. But to Luke, the thought of beer this early in the day was nauseating. Therefore, he concluded with enormous relief, he could not be an alcoholic.

But, if he was not a drunk, what was he?

He summed up what he knew about himself. He was in his thirties. He did not smoke. Despite appearances, he was not an alcoholic. At some point in his life he had been involved in clandestine work. And he knew the words of “What a Friend we have in Jesus.” It was pathetically little.

He had been walking around looking for a police station, but he had not come across one. He decided to ask for directions. A minute later, as he passed a vacant lot fenced with broken corrugated-iron sheeting, he saw a uniformed cop step through a gap in the sheeting onto the sidewalk. Seizing the chance, Luke said to him, “How do I get to the nearest precinct house?”

The cop was a beefy man with a sandy moustache. He gave Luke a look of contempt and said, “In the trunk of my cruiser, if you don’t get the fuck out of my sight.”

Luke was startled by the violence of his language. What was the man’s problem? But he was tired of tramping the streets and he needed directions, so he persisted. “I just need to know where the station house is.”

“I won’t tell you again, shitbrain.”

Luke was annoyed. Who did he think he was? “I asked you a polite question, mister,” he snapped.

The cop moved surprisingly fast for a heavy man. He grabbed Luke by the lapels of his ragged coat and shoved him through the gap in the sheeting. Luke staggered and fell on a patch of rough concrete, hurting his arm.

To his surprise he was not alone. Just inside the lot was a young woman. She had dyed blonde hair and heavy makeup, and she wore a long coat open over a loose dress. She had high-heeled evening shoes and torn stockings. She was pulling up her panties. Luke realized she was a prostitute who had just serviced the patrolman.

The cop came through the gap and kicked Luke in the stomach.

He heard the whore say, “For Christ’s sake, Sid, what did he do, spit on the sidewalk? Leave the poor bum alone!”

“Fucker has to learn some respect,” the cop said thickly.

Out of the corner of his eye, Luke saw him draw his nightstick and raise it. As the blow came down, Luke rolled to one side. He was not quite fast enough, and the end of the stick glanced off his left shoulder, numbing his arm momentarily. The cop raised the nightstick again.

A circuit closed in Luke’s brain.

Instead of rolling away, he threw himself toward the cop. The man’s forward momentum brought him crashing to the ground, and he dropped the nightstick. Luke sprang up nimbly. As the cop got up, Luke stepped close to him, waltzing inside his reach so that the man could not punch him. He grabbed the lapels of the uniform coat, pulled the man forward with a sharp jerk, and butted him in the face. There was a snapping sound as the cop’s nose broke. The man roared with pain.

Luke released his grip on the lapels, pirouetted on one foot, and kicked the man in the side of the knee. His battered shoes were not rigid enough to break bones, but the knee has little resistance to a blow from the side, and the cop fell.

A part of Luke’s mind wondered where the hell he had learned to fight like this.

The cop was bleeding from the nose and mouth, but he raised himself on his left elbow and drew his gun with his right hand.

Before it was out of the holster, Luke was on him. Grabbing the man’s right forearm, he banged the hand on the concrete once, very hard. The gun immediately fell from his grasp. Then he pulled the cop upright and twisted the arm so that he rolled onto his front. Bending the arm up behind the man’s back, he dropped, driving both knees into the small of the man’s back, knocking the breath out of his lungs. Finally, he took the forefinger and bent it all the way back.

The cop screamed. Luke bent the finger farther. He heard it snap, and the cop fainted.

“You won’t beat up any more bums for a while,” Luke said. “Shitbrain.”

He stood up. He picked up the gun, ejected all the shells, and threw them across the lot.

The whore was staring at him. “Who the fuck are you, Elliott Ness?” she said.

Luke looked back at her. She was thin, and under the makeup her complexion was bad. “I don’t know who I am,” he told her.

“Well, you ain’t no bum, that’s for sure,” she said. “I never saw an alky that could punch out a big fat prick like Sidney here.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

“We better get out of here,” she said. “He’s going to be mad when he comes round.”

Luke nodded. He was not afraid of Sidney, mad or otherwise, but before long there would be more cops on the scene, and he needed to be elsewhere. He stepped through the gap in the fence onto the street and walked away quickly.

The woman followed him, stiletto heels clicking on the sidewalk. He slowed his pace to let her catch up, feeling a kind of camaraderie with her. They had both been abused by Sidney the patrolman.

“It was kind of nice to see Sidney come up against someone he couldn’t push around,” she said. “I guess I owe you.”

“Not at all.”

“Well, next time you’re feeling horny, it’s on the house.”

Luke tried not to show his revulsion. “What’s your name?”

“Dee-Dee.”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“Well, Doris Dobbs, really,” she admitted. “But what kind of name is that for a good-time girl?”

“I’m Luke. I don’t know my surname. I’ve lost my memory.”

“Wow. That must make you feel, like . . . strange.”

“Disoriented.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the word was on the tip of my tongue.”

He glanced at her. There was a wry grin on her face. He realized she was making fun of him, and he liked her for it. “It’s not just that I don’t know my name and address,” he explained. “I don’t even know what kind of person I am.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wonder if I’m honest?” Maybe it was foolish, he thought, to pour out his heart to a whore on the street, but he had no one else. “Am I a loyal husband and a loving father and a reliable workmate? Or am I some kind of gangster? I hate not knowing.”

“Honey, if that’s what’s bothering you, I know what kind of guy you
are already. A gangster would be thinking, am I rich, do I slay the broads, are people scared of me?”

That was a point. Luke nodded. But he was not satisfied. “It’s one thing to want to be a good person—but maybe I don’t live up to what I believe in.”

“Welcome to the human race, sweetheart,” she said. “We all feel that way.” She stopped at a doorway. “It’s been a long night. This is where I get off the train.”

“So long.”

She hesitated. “Want some advice?”

“Sure.”

“If you want people to stop treating you like a piece of shit, you better smarten yourself up. Have a shave, comb your hair, find yourself a coat that doesn’t look like you stole it off a carthorse.”

Luke realized she was right. No one would take any notice of him, let alone help him discover his identity, while he looked like a crazy person. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “Thanks.” He turned away.

She called after him, “And get a hat!”

He touched his head, then looked around. He was the only person on the street, male or female, without a hat. But how could a bum get a new suit of clothes? The handful of change in his pocket would not buy much.

The solution came fully formed into his head. Either it was an easy question, or he had been in this situation before. He would go to a train station. A station was generally full of people carrying complete changes of clothing, together with shaving tackle and other toiletries, all neatly packed in suitcases.

He went to the next corner and checked his location. He was on A Street and Seventh. On leaving Union Station early this morning, he had noticed that it was near the corner of F and Second.

He headed that way.

The first stage of the missile is attached to the second by explosive bolts wrapped around with coil springs. When the booster is burned out, the bolts will detonate and the springs push the redundant first stage away.

The Georgetown Mind Hospital was a red-brick Victorian mansion with a flat-roofed modern extension at the back. Billie Josephson parked her red Ford Thunderbird in the parking lot and hurried into the building.

She hated to arrive this late. It seemed disrespectful of her work and her colleagues. What they were doing was vitally important. Slowly, painstakingly, they were learning to understand the mechanisms of the human mind. It was like mapping a distant planet, the surface of which could be seen only through breaks in the cloud layer that were tantalizingly brief.

She was late because of her mother. After Larry left for school, Billie had gone to get the heart pills and returned home to find Becky-Ma lying on her bed, fully dressed, gasping for breath. The doctor had come right away, but he had nothing new to say. Becky-Ma had a weak heart. If she felt breathless, she should lie down. She must remember to take her pills. Any stress was bad for her.

Billie wanted to say, “What about me? Isn’t stress bad for me too?” But instead she resolved anew to walk on eggshells around her mother.

She stopped by the admissions office and glanced at the overnight register. A new patient had been brought in late yesterday, after she had left: Joseph Bellow, a schizophrenic. The name rang a bell, but she could
not recall why. Surprisingly, the patient had been discharged during the night. That was odd.

She passed through the day room on the way to her office. The TV was on, and a reporter standing on a dusty beach was saying, “Here at Cape Canaveral, the question on everyone’s lips is: ‘When will the Army attempt to launch its own rocket?’ It must be within the next few days.”

The subjects of Billie’s research sat around, some watching TV, some playing games or reading, a few gazing vacantly into space. She waved to Tom, a young man who did not know the meaning of words. “How are you, Tommy?” she called. He grinned and waved back. He could read body language well, and often responded as if he knew what people were saying, so it had taken Billie months to figure out that he did not understand a single word.

In a corner, Marlene, an alcoholic, was flirting with a young male nurse. She was fifty years old, but she could not remember anything that had happened since she was nineteen. She thought she was still a young girl and refused to believe that the “old man” who loved and cared for her was her husband.

Through the glass wall of an interview room she saw Ronald, a brilliant architect who had suffered head injuries in a car crash. He was doing tests on paper. His problem was that he had lost the ability to deal with numbers. He would count with excruciating slowness on his fingers in the attempt to add three and four.

Many patients had forms of schizophrenia, an inability to relate to the real world.

Some of the patients could be helped, by drugs or electric shock treatment or both, but Billie’s job was to trace the exact contours of their disabilities. By studying minor mental handicaps, she was outlining the functions of the normal mind. Ronald, the architect, could look at a group of objects on a tray and say whether there were three or four of them, but if there were twelve and he had to count them, he would take a long time and might make a mistake. This suggested to Billie that the ability to see at a glance how many items are in a small group is a separate skill from the ability to count.

In this way, she was slowly charting the depths of the mind, locating memory here, language there, mathematics somewhere else. And if the disability was related to minor brain damage, Billie could speculate that the normal ability was located in the part of the brain that had been destroyed. Eventually, her conceptual picture of the mind’s functions would be mapped onto a physical diagram of the human brain.

At her present rate of progress, it would take about two hundred years. However, she was working alone. With a team of psychologists, she could progress much faster. She might see the map completed in her lifetime. That was her ambition.

It was a long way from her father’s suicidal depression. There were no quick cures in mental illness. But the mind was still largely a mystery to scientists. It would be much better understood if Billie could speed up her work. And then, perhaps, people like her father could be helped.

She went up the stairs to the next floor, thinking about the mystery patient. Joseph Bellow sounded like Joe Blow, the kind of name someone might make up. And why had he been discharged in the middle of the night?

She reached her office and looked out of the window on to a building site. A new wing was being added to the hospital—and a new post was to be created to go with it: Director of Research. Billie had applied for the job. But so had one of her colleagues, Dr. Leonard Ross. Len was older than Billie, but she had wider experience and had published more: several articles and a textbook,
An Introduction to the Psychology of Memory.
She felt sure she could beat out Len, but she did not know who else might be in the running. And she wanted the job badly. As Director, she would have other scientists working under her.

On the building site she noticed, among the workmen, a small group of men in business clothes—wool topcoats and homburgs instead of overalls and hard hats. They looked as if they might be getting a tour. Looking more closely, she saw that Len Ross was with them.

She spoke to her secretary. “Who are those guys being shown around the site by Len Ross?”

“They’re from the Sowerby Foundation.”

Billie frowned. The Foundation was financing the new post. They would have a big say in who got the job. And there was Len making nice to them. “Did we know they were coming today?”

“Len said he had sent you a note. He came by this morning to pick you up, but you weren’t here.”

There had never been a note, Billie felt sure. Len had deliberately failed to warn her. And she had been late.

“Damn,” Billie said with feeling. She rushed out to join the party on the building site.

She did not think about Joseph Bellow again for several hours.