The Long Twilight (32 page)

"Maybe. What's it got to do with me?"

A man with a face as round and soft as a saucer of lard spoke up: "The upcoming elections are the most important this planet has ever faced." He had a brisk, thin voice that gave me the feeling it should be coming from a much smaller, leaner man, possibly hiding under the table. "The success of the Senator, and of the policies he represents, spell the difference between chaos and another chance for our world."

"Does the other party get equal time?"

"It goes without saying, Mr. Florin, that your loyalties lie with legal government; with law and order."

"But you said it anyway. I get the feeling," I went on before he could step on me, "that we're dancing around the edge of something; something that wants to get said, but nobody's saying it."

"Perhaps you've noticed," the plump man said, "that in recent days the Senator's campaign has suffered a loss of momentum."

"I haven't been watching much telly lately."

"There have been complaints," the bird-man said, "that he's repeating himself, failing to answer his opponents' attacks, that the dynamism is gone from his presentations. The complaints are justified. For three months now we've been feeding doctored tapes to the news services."

They were all looking at me. Silence hummed in the room. I glanced along the table, fixed on a man with bushy white hair and a mouth that was made to clamp onto a bulldog pipe.

"Are you telling me he's dead?" I said.

The white head shook slowly, almost regretfully.

"The Senator," he said solemnly, "is insane."

The silence after the punch line hung as heavy as a washer-load of wet laundry. Or maybe heavier. I shifted around in my chair and listened to some throat-clearing. Faraway horns tooted on a distant avenue. Wind boomed against the picture window with its view of lights laid out on the blackness all the way to the horizon.

"The burdens under which he's labored for the past three years would have broken an ordinary man in half the time," Lard Face said. "But the Senator is a fighter; as the pressure grew, he held on. But the strain told on him. He began to see enemies everywhere. In the end his obsessions hardened into a fixed delusional system. Now he thinks every hand is against him."

"He believes," Big Nose said, "that a kidnap plot is afoot. He imagines that his enemies intend to brainwash him, make him their puppet. Accordingly, it becomes his duty to escape."

"This is, of course, a transparent rationalization," said a lath-thin man with half a dozen hairs slicked across a bald dome; his eyes burned at me hot enough to broil steaks. "He avoids the pressure of the election—but for the noblest of reasons. By deluding himself that in sacrificing his hopes of high office he prevents his being used, he relieves himself of the burden of guilt for his failure to measure up to the challenge."

"Tragic," I said, "but not quite in my line. You need a head doctor, not a beat-up gumshoe."

"The finest neuropsychologists and psychiatrists in the country have attempted to bring the Senator back to reality, Mr. Florin," Big Nose said. "They failed. It is therefore our intention to bring reality to the Senator."

"Our plan is this," the bird-man said, leaning forward with what was almost an expression on his face. "The Senator is determined to venture out incognito to take his chances alone in the city. Very well—we'll see to it that he carries off his escape successfully."

"He imagines that by slipping free from his role as a man of great affairs—by casting off the restraints of power and position—he can lose himself in the masses," said Hot Eyes. "But he'll find matters are not so simple as that. The analysts who've studied his case assure us that his sense of duty will not be so easily laid to rest. Difficulties will arise, conjured from the depths of his own mind. And as these imaginary obstacles confront him—he will find that they're not after all imaginary."

"A man who believes himself to be persecuted by unseen enemies, threatened with death, is, by definition, psychotic," Lard Face said. "But if he is, indeed, hunted?
What if his fears are true?
"

"You see," said the hot-eyed man, "at some level, the man in the grip of hallucination knows the illusion for what it is. The victim of hysterical blindness will casually skirt a footstool placed in his path. But—when the imaginary dog
bites
—the shock will, we believe, drive him back from his safe retreat—not, after all, so safe—to the lesser harshness of reality."

"We'll make him sane by definition, Mr. Florin," Big Nose said. "And having established a one-to-one relationship with reality, we will lead him back to sanity."

"Neat," I said. "But who provides the pink elephants? Or is it silver men in the closet?"

"We're not without resources," Big Nose said grimly. "We've arranged for a portion of the city to be evacuated, with the exception of certain well-briefed personnel. We've set up highly sophisticated equipment keyed to his cephalic pattern, responsive to his brain. His movements will be tracked, his fantasies monitored— and appropriate phenomena will be produced accordingly, matching his fears."

"If he conceives of himself as beset by wild beasts," Hot Eyes said, "wild beasts will appear. If he imagines the city is under bombardment—bombs will fall, with attendant detonations and fires and flying debris. If he dreams of assassins armed with knives, knife-wielding killers will attack. He will overcome these obstacles, of course; it's inherent in his nature that he'll not fantasize his own demise. And in facing and overcoming these dangers he will, we're convinced, face and defeat the real threat to his sanity."

I looked along the table at them. They seemed to be serious.

"You gentlemen are expecting a lot from some stock Trideo footage," I said. "The Senator may be as batty as Dracula's castle, but he's no fool."

Big Nose smiled bleakly. "We're prepared to offer a demonstration, Mr. Florin." He moved a finger and I heard the growl of heavy engines, and a crunching and grinding that got closer and louder. The ashtrays rattled on the table. The floor trembled; the chandelier danced. A picture fell off the wall, and then the wall bulged and fell in and the snout of a 10-mm infinite repeater set in the bow of a Bolo Mark III pushed into the room and halted. I could smell the stink of dust and hot oil, hear the scream of idling turbines, the thud and rattle of bricks falling.

Big Nose lifted his finger again and the tank winked out and the wall was back in place, picture and all, and the only sound was me, swallowing, or trying to.

I got out my hanky and wiped my forehead and the back of my neck while they smiled at me in a nasty, superior way.

"Yeah," I said. "I take back that last crack."

"Believe me, Mr. Florin, everything the Senator experiences on his foray into the city will be utterly real—to him."

"It still sounds like a nutty scheme to me," I said. "If you brought me here to get the benefit of my advice, I say forget it."

"There's no question of forgetting it," Lard Face said. "Only of your cooperation."

"Where do I crawl into the picture?"

"When the Senator sets out on his adventure," Big Nose said, "you'll go with him."

"I've heard of people going crackers," I said. "I never heard of them taking a passenger along."

"You'll guard him, Florin. You'll see him through the very real dangers he'll face, in safety. And, incidentally, you'll provide the channel through which we monitor his progress."

"I see. And what, as the man said, is in it for me?"

The bird-man speared me with a look. "You fancy yourself as a soldier of fortune, a man of honor, a lone warrior against the forces of evil. Now, your peculiar talents are needed in a larger cause. You can't turn your back on the call of duty and at the same time maintain your self-image. Accordingly, you'll do as we wish!" He sat back with a look that was as pleased as a look of his could get.

"Well, maybe you've got a point there, counselor," I said. "But there are a couple of other things I pride myself on besides being Jack Armstrong-to-the-rescue. One of them is that I choose my own jobs. Your gun-boys wear clean shirts and don't pick their noses in public, but they're still gun-boys. It seemed like a good idea to come along and hear your pitch. But that doesn't mean I'm buying it."

"In spite of your affectation of the seamy life, Mr. Florin, you're a wealthy man—or could be, if you chose. What we're offering you is a professional challenge of a scope you would never otherwise have encountered."

"It's a new twist," I said. "You're daring me to take your dare."

"The choice is simple," Big Nose said. "You know the situation. The time is now. Will you help or will you not?"

"You warned me you had the advice of some high-powered psychologists," I said. "I should have known better than to argue."

"Don't denigrate yourself, Florin," Big Nose said. "It's the only decision you could have made in conscience."

"Let's have one point clear," I said. "If I sign on to guard the Senator, I do the job my way."

"That's understood," Big Nose said, sounding mildly surprised. "What else?"

"When does the experiment come off?"

"It's already under way. He's waiting for you now."

"He knows about me?"

"He imagines your arrival is a finesse devised by himself."

"You've got all the answers, I see," I said. "Maybe that's good— provided you know all the questions."

"We've covered every eventuality we could foresee. The rest is up to you."

Two of the committee—they called themselves the Inner Council—escorted me to a brightly lit room in the basement. Three silent men with deft hands fitted me into a new street-suit of a soft gray material that Big Nose said was more or less bulletproof, as well as being climate-controlled. They gave me two guns, one built into a finger-ring and the other a reasonable facsimile of a clip-pen. One of the technicians produced a small box of the type cultured pearls come in. Inside, nested in cotton, was a flake of pink plastic the size of a fish scale.

"This is a communication device," he said. "It will be attached to your scalp behind the ear where the hair will conceal it. You will heed it implicitly."

A pink-cheeked man I hadn't seen before came into the room and conferred with Big Nose in a whisper before he turned to me.

"If you're ready, Mr. Florin . . .?" he said in a voice as soft as a last wish, and didn't wait for my answer. I looked back from the door. Four grim faces looked at me. Nobody waved bye-bye.

I had heard of the Senator's Summer Retreat. It was a modest cottage of eighty-five rooms crowded into fifty acres of lawn and garden in the foothills sixty miles northeast of the city. My pilot dropped me in a clump of big conifers among a lot of cool night air and piney odors half a mile upslope from the lights of the house. Following instructions, I sneaked down through the trees, making not much more noise than a bull elk in mating season, and found the hole in the security fence right where they'd said it would be. A booted man with a slung power gun and a leashed dog paced past me fifty feet away without turning his head. Maybe he was following instructions too. When he had passed, I moved up to the house by short dashes from shadow to shadow, not falling down more than a couple of times. It all seemed pretty silly to me; but Big Nose had insisted the approach was important.

The service door was almost hidden behind a nice stand of ground juniper. My key let me into a small room full of the smell of disinfectant and buckets for me to put a foot in. Another door let onto a narrow hall. Lights showed in a foyer to the right; I went left, prowled up three flights of narrow stairs, came out in a corridor walled in gray silk that almost reminded me of something; but I brushed that thought away. Up ahead a soft light was shining from an open doorway. I went toward it, through it into dimness and richness and an odor of waxed woodwork and Havana leaf and old money.

He was standing by an open wall safe with his back toward me; he turned as I came through the door. I recognized the shaggy blond-going-gray hair, the square-cut jaw with the cleft that brought in the female vote, the big shoulders in the hand-tailoring. His eyes were blue and level and looked at me as calmly as if I were the butler he'd rung for.

"Florin," he said in a light, mellow voice that wasn't quite what I had expected. "You came." He put out his hand; he had a firm grip, well-manicured nails, no calluses.

"What can I do for you, Senator?" I said.

He paused for a moment before he answered, as if he were remembering an old joke.

"I suppose they've given you the story about how I've gone insane? How I imagine there's a plot afoot to kidnap me?" Before I thought of an answer he went on: "That's all lies, of course. The truth is quite otherwise."

"All right," I said. "I'm ready for it."

"They're going to kill me," he said matter-of-factly, "unless you can save my life."

He was giving me the old straight-from-the-shoulder look. He was the captain and I was the team and it was time for my hidden-ball play. I opened my mouth to ask the questions, but instead I went past him to the ivory telephone on the desk. He watched without saying a word while I checked it, checked the light fixtures, the big spray of slightly faded roses on the side table, the plumbing fixtures in the adjoining bathroom. I found three bugs and flushed them down the toilet.

"A properly spotted inductance mike can still hear us," I said. "So much for privacy in our modern world."

"How do things look—outside?" he asked.

"About as you'd expect," I hedged. He nodded as if that told him plenty. "By the way," I said, "have we met before, Senator?"

He shook his head, started a smile.

"Under the circumstances," I said, "I'd think you'd want to see some identification."

Maybe he looked a little confused, or maybe not. I'm not a great reader of expressions. "You're well known to me by reputation, Mr. Florin," he said, and looked at me as if that were my cue to whip out a chart of the secret passages in the castle walls, complete with an X marking the spot where the fast horses waited outside the postern gate.