But his resignation had been turned in.
Had he ever, really, been deaf? he puzzled. It felt the same as always. But now he could hear; and before he couldn't. He went to Norma Lavin and put his thin arm around the shaking shoulders. "It's going to be all right," he said. She cowered against him wordlessly.
"I've got a boy coming, you know," he told her. She gave him a distracted nod, her eyes on the tower. "And if anything happens," he went on, "it's only fair that they should be taken care of. Isn't it? Sandy and Virginia, and the boy. You'll remember?" She nodded without hearing. "There was this Field Day I heard about in Bay City," he chattered. "There was a high wire with piranhas, just like this. There was a judge up on the ladder to one of the perches, a little drunk, I guess, and he missed his footing; or something—" She wasn't paying attention.
He got up and joined Mundin. "If anything happens," he said, "it's only fair that Sandy and Virginia and the boy should be taken care of."
"What?"
"Just remember,"
Shep was looking suspicious again. Norvell walked away.
The drumroll began and the M.C. fired the platform on which Don Lavin stood like a stone man. The crowd howled as the flames licked up and the boy hopped convulsively forward, his balance pole swaying.
The M.C. yelled furiously at the hecklers, "What the hell's the matter with you people? Toot! Chuck gravel! What are you getting paid for?"
One of the young toughs at the far end of the pool began to swing his rattle, glancing nervously at Shep. Hubble, beside him, snapped, "A hundred more, buster. Now calm down!" The tough calmed down and gasped at the wire-walker.
A foot, two feet, the pole swaying.
He has special slippers, Norvell thought. Maybe it'll be all right, maybe I won't have to do anything. And then I can go back to being comfortably deaf again, buying batteries for an act of contrition, turning this nausea, these people molded from blood-streaked slime, off at will.
Three feet, four feet, and the M.C. howling with rage. "Get in there and fight, you bastards! Blow your horns! Plaster him!"
Five feet, six feet, and the crowd noise was ugly, ugly and threatening. In one section a chant bad started, one of those foot-stomping, hand-clapping things.
Six feet, seven, and the M.C. was breaking down into sobs. "We paid you to heckle and this is the way you treat us," he blubbered. "Those fine people in the stand. The reputation of the Stadium. Aren't you ashamed?"
Eight feet, nine feet, ten feet. Two-thirds of the way to the second tower.
Norvell hoped. But somebody in the stands, somebody with a mighty arm and a following wind, had found the range. The half-brick at the end of its journey sailed feebly plop into the tank, and white-bellied little things tore at it and bled themselves and tore at one another. The water boiled.
Suddenly ice-cold, all business, Norvie said briskly to Mundin, "They'll have him in a minute. Be ready to haul him out, fast. Remember what I said."
He strolled over to Willkie, who was watching the stubbornly silent hecklers in numb despair.
Another half-brick. This one hit the tower. Much flailing of the balance pole and a shriek from Norma.
"No nervous breakdown this year, Willkie," Norvell said chattily to the M.C.
"What? Bligh? Bligh, they won't listen to me," Willkie sobbed.
Twelve feet, almost there, and then the brick, unseen, that tapped Don Lavin between the shoulder blades and made him flail the pole, too hard; and the hecklers were out of control. Hubble and Mundin shouted and screamed and pleaded, but the "gravel" was in their hands, and they weren't listening; it was not only the piranha that were maddened at the first taste of blood.
Norvell took one last agonized look around the arena. But there was nothing. No chair, no table, no cushion, nothing to throw to the fish, but—
"NO!" bellowed Shep from behind him, and Norvell, startled, half-turned. Just for a moment. But the moment meant that it was Shep, not Norvell, who wrapped the sobbing Willkie in his arms; Shep, not Norvell, who lunged into the tank for an eternal instant; Shep—who had an "inpounding debt worry." And who paid his debts.
First the water was cool. And then boiling.
At the far end, the quiet end, of the tank, Mundin and Hubble yanked Don out in one heave.
Chapter Twenty-Five
"I wanted to do it," Norvell Bligh was saying in a cracked voice. "I was willing to do it."
Norma had her arms around him, in the cab going back to Belly Rave. "Of course you were," she soothed him.
Mundin, riding dazedly beside them, tried to rest his brain. That was a pretty good little man, he thought. Good thing Shep took the play away from him. Well need him. But of course he can't see it that way, not yet.
Hubble was chattering vivaciously away. "Really an adventure. But the big adventure's coming up, eh, Mundin? After the piranha, Green, Charlesworth. They'll make us wish we were back with the piranha, wouldn't you say?"
Don Lavin advised him, "Shut up." Something had happened to Don Lavin. He might have learned something on the wire, Mundin thought. Funny, how you grow up after a while—after a very long while, for some people.
Reminded, he picked up the phone and asked information for a number.
Hubble, eavesdropping and irrepressible, said, "Oh, of course. The Stadium infirmary. We plain forgot about old Ryan, didn't we? And we'll need him for the big doings— when are you going to let us in on the plan, by the way? Now that we've got Don back we've got the stock. But we'll never vote it. You know that; they'll tie us up in injunctions from here to hell. I suppose—" He broke off, warned by Mundin's expression as he slowly hung up the phone. "Ryan?" Hubble demanded in a completely different tone.
Mundin nodded. "Hemorrhage," he said. "He died on the operating table." He sighed.
War was never cheap, he thought. Shep—almost Bligh— and now Ryan. Give me one more victory such as this, and I am undone, he quoted to himself, as he began to plot the final struggle that Ryan had helped to shape, and would not see.
"You'd think," grumbled Don Lavin, "that ten hours' sleep would fix a person up."
Mundin said worriedly, "It's almost time for the bell. Do you see Norvie?" They were in the Stock Exchange, waiting for the start of business. The enormous hall was packed with its customary seething, excitable throng—but not quite the customary feeling of tension, Mundin thought, putting out psychic feelers into the crowd. It was a more somber mass of speculators than the last tune he had been here, a worried bunch, fretful and disturbed. Their own publicity campaign, Mundin thought with a touch of satisfaction. There had been trading in G.M.L.; it was off a few points, over the last weeks.
Not much, but enough to shake, ever so slightly, the ironclad conviction of its stability. And if G.M.L. wasn't totally sound, the investors were wondering, almost aloud, what was?
They saw Norvie at last, inconspicuous against the far wall. He looked at them without visible recognition, then deliberately looked away. They followed his look; and there was Hubble, at a hundred-dollar window, chatting gaily with the investor at the window next to him. And then the bell rang for the first movement of the day.
"Your honor, sir," Mundin said formally to Don Lavin. Don acknowledged with an ironic bow and light-heartedly tapped out his first "sell" order:
333, 100 shares, market
The Big Board flickered and hummed, and the pari-mutuel computers totaled, subtracted, divided, and spat out their results. Mundin and Don had their glasses fixed to line 333; it flashed: