Lessing shuddered. A picture of the corpse-packed waiting room in Israeli police headquarters on Derekh Shekhem Street swam up to the top of his memory, then was gone again. He wasn’t over that yet. He probably never would be.
Ice-blue.
An open, staring, dark-lashed eye.
“There’re mutant fungi down in the subways,” Wrench stated with macabre relish. “All colors, and poisonous as hell. Some can even move… crawl along a pipe and drop down on your head.”
“Oh, bullshit!” Morgan jeered. “You been reading the tabloids at the checkout counter!”
“I swear it’s true! Dr. Vasilev, that Russian biologist we picked up from New Moscow, said so. He’s seen ‘em. Big, green, blue, white… icky, wriggly.”
“Go gub yourself!”
Wrench grinned sweetly up at Mrs. Mulder, who had been standing behind them in the doorway for some time.
Morgan had the grace to blush, like a schoolboy caught pulling the girls’ pigtails. It was funny how attitudes stayed the same, Lessing thought, even when everything else had changed beyond recognition.
“Good morning!” The Fairy Godmother chose to ignore Morgan’s obscenity. “You’ve had breakfast?” She twitched the sleeve of her feathery, blue housecoat in the direction of “the morning room,” as she called it.
They chorused that they had. She peered at Morgan, and he wriggled his toes to show that his clean, white socks would not soil her expensive furniture. She then went to Wrench and substituted a dark-grey cushion for the delicate, lavender bolster. Cleanliness enjoyed a decided edge over godliness in the Fairy Godmother’s household.
“Herman’s waiting for you in the study,” she told Lessing.
As he got up to leave, the TV screen cleared to show a hall hung with American flags and Party banners. Black and brown uniforms mingled with an artist’s palette of multi-colored civilian garments. Trumpets sounded and drums thuttered as a procession began to wend its way down the center aisle.
Wrench cried, “Hey, look, there’s AbnerHand…!”
As he spoke, the announcer said, “And it was at this moment that the grenade was thrown.”
The screen erupted in noise and smoke. Mrs. Mulder gasped and covered her eyes. The others watched, stunned.
“Five members of the Party of Humankind were killed outright, and seven were wounded. Two people in the audience also died, and four more are in the hospital with injuries ranging from minor to critical. No one has yet claimed responsibility, and it is not yet known “
“Crap, God damn it, crap!” Wrench shouted. “Of course, they know who did it! They just won’t say!”
Mrs. Mulder fluttered ivory fingers. “Please… oh, dear…”
The imperturbable voice from the screen continued: “Cadre-Captain Abner Hand, apparently the bomb’s main target, will recover, a hospital spokesperson has said.”
“It’s time we did something.” Morgan snarled.
Lessing said, “I told you: Goddard’s PHASE isn’t enough. What’s he got? Ex-cops, vets, private security men, meres… and sixty-year-old night watchmen. But he’s no soldier. He can’t hack this kind of thing. The Party needs teeth.” He fixed Wrench and Morgan with a grin. “The Party needs me. I’m teeth.”
He left them staring after him.
Mulder’s office-study was very different from the one in India. This was “Party palatial,” designed to awe, to overwhelm, and to make power brokers quail. The vista of sweeping lawns and precisely trimmed gardens behind the monumental, teak-and-black, marble-topped desk at the north end of the room was real, but the west wall was another holo-vid mural. Depending upon a visitor’s psychological profile, displayed on a hidden screen behind Mulder’s desk, the holo-vid presented near-three-dimensional scenic panoramas, Classical statuary, Aztec art, abstract sculptures, mobiles of metal or chiming stained glass, or — for all Lessing knew — a hero-size photo-bust of the First Führer himself!
The room breathed opulence. The floor was buried three centimeters deep beneath lush, maroon carpeting; the ceiling was creamy ivory; and the walls were paneled with matched-grain cherry wood, polished to satin brilliance. TV hookups, telephones, computer consoles, and communications gear occupied the south wall, together with the visitors’ entrance, while doors in the east wall led to secretarial offices, to a private lounge and bar, and to a tiny “war room” with its own bed and bathroom, vital in case of an emergency. Somewhere here, too, was a secret elevator that would drop Mulder and his staff a hundred meters to an underground bunker where they could presumably survive anything short of God’s Fickle Finger.
Mulder’s desk was inundated with clutter. Party reports, files, proposals, financial projections, and data summaries were neatly arranged at one end of the four-meter-long monstrosity, while bills pending in Congress, correspondence, summaries marked “Top Secret” for Mulder when he wore his Secretary of State hat, and the “paper blizzard” of top-heavy government were stacked on the other. The overflow was heaped untidily on the floor nearby.
Colored light from the desk TV screen rainbowed Mulder’s bald head and made prisms of the reading glasses he now regularly wore. He pursed his lips and scowled.
“I know,” Lessing said. “We were watching downstairs.”
“Abner’ll be all right. I’ve been in touch with the doctors in Boise, where it happened. We lost Johansen, Partridge, Carter, Colbert, and that boy from Ohio… what was his name?”
“Amsler, Keith Amsler. Anything I can do?”
“No. Not now. Maybe contact their relatives later… you knew Johansen and Carter on Ponapc, didn’t you?” Mulder glowered down at his reflection in the polished desktop. “God, Alan, our opponents believe in free speech only when it’s their speech. Freedom only when it’s their freedom. To them, whatever we do is ‘bigotry’ and ‘oppression’ and ‘evil’! When they do the same things to us it’s ‘justice.’ And they dare to blame us!”
“Still, the Party’s come a long way.” Mulder needed soothing; he looked like a man about to explode.
“Yes…. Well, I never thought I’d see Party schools side by side with public schools… and more popular because we offer a better education. Nor open rallies, nor elections won by Party candidates, nor newspapers that… once in a while… tell it the way it is.”
“Except for Home-Net, the TV networks still don’t like us.”
Damn it, he hadn’t meant to say that. It would remind Mulder of Abner Hand.
It didn’t. Mulder depressed a button with a pudgy finger. “The networks? Let me show you something.” The west wall cleared to show a complex flow-chart: a maze of colored lines and boxes and oblongs filled with text. “Eighty-Five?”
“Yes, Mr. Mulder?”
Lessing hadn’t known there was a corn-link in this office. Mulder was having terminals put in everywhere, like condom-vending machines!
“Show us the chain of takeovers, buy-outs, bankruptcies, and stock purchases that will result in our acquiring Omni-Net and possibly Yama-Net by next July.” He nodded Lessing toward one of the capacious leather chairs on the visitors’ side of the desk.
Boxes lit up, lines connected them, and dots of colored light travelled from one to another as Eighty-Five laid out the future. A section of the diagram broke off and hung suspended in midair: a distant probability chain whose effects had no immediate relevance. Bar graphs in reds, blues, and yellows appeared beside their respective boxes, indicating investments, personnel, resources, and likely profits or losses. Overlays replaced sections of the chart, and portions vanished entirely. A time scale at the top blinked off days and months.