By evening, the Ear would have migrated up Pomrath’s arm to some nice warm fatty deposit where it could settle down and transmit its signals.
“Clumsy of me,” Brogg muttered. He moved away. Pomrath did not show any sign of being aware that something had been affixed to him.
Returning to the office, Brogg examined the flow from the monitor device. Pomrath had left the job-machine building now, it appeared. The tracer line on the Oscilloscope showed the minute neural explosions that told of footsteps. Pomrath walked for ten minutes. Then he halted. Complex muscular actions: he was entering a building with a manually operated door. Now came a voice pick-up.
POMRATH : Here I am again, Jerry.
STRANGE VOICE : We got a couch all ready for you.
POMRATH : With a nice goddam hallucination, okay? Here I am fighting off the Crab People, you see, and there’s this naked blonde panting to be rescued, while Kloofman is waiting to give me the Galactic Medal of Honour.
VOICE: I can’t pick the effect for you, Norm. You know that. You pay your pieces and you get what comes. It’s all what’s stirring around inside your head that settles the picture for you.
POMRATH: There’s plenty stirring around inside my bead, pal. Where’s the mask? I’m going to dream a beauty. Norm Pomrath, the destroyer of worlds. Disrupting time and space. The devourer of continua.
VOICE : You sure got a crazy imagination, Norm.
Brogg turned away. Pomrath was in a sniffer palace, evidently. Nothing meaningful was going to turn up on the monitor now—nothing but Pomrath asleep on the couch enjoying or perhaps not enjoying his hallucination.
In another room, Leeward was still interrogating the hapless prolet Brand. Brand looked disturbed. Brogg listened in for a while, found little of significance going on, and checked out for the day. Quellen had already gone home, he observed. To Africa, maybe, for the evening.
Brogg reached his own apartment in a short while. As required, he had a room-mate—a legal assistant in one of the judiciary divisions—but they had managed to work things out so that their paths rarely crossed. You had to make the best accommodation you could to the existing living conditions.
Tired, Brogg got quickly under the molecular bath and cleansed himself of the day’s grime. He programmed dinner. Then he selected a book. He was pursuing a fascinating theme in his favourite subject, Roman history: Tiberius’s handling of the rebellion of Sejanus. The interplay of character was irresistible: Sejanus, the sly favourite of the sinister old Caesar, overreaching himself at last and being cast down from the heights of power by Tiberius, the Capri-dwelling old goat.
Easily, Brogg drifted into contemplation of those distant and violent events.
If I had been Sejanus, he thought, how would I have handled the situation? More tactfully, no doubt. I would never have provoked the old boy that way. Brogg smiled. If he had been Sejanus, he knew, he would ultimately have come to hold the throne in his own name. On the other hand—
On the other hand, he was not Sejanus. He was Stanley Brogg of the Secretariat of Crime. More’s the pity, Brogg thought. But we must make do with what we have.
Ten
Night was closing in like a clamped fist. Quellen changed his clothes after a leisurely shower that used up nearly his entire week’s quota of washing water. He dressed in clothes that were a bit on the gaudy side, in sullen rebellion against the sort of evening that Judith was going to inflict on him. The people who came to these communions of social regurgitation tended to be drab, consciously so. He despised their puritanical austerity. And so he donned a tunic shot through with iridescent threads, gleaming red and violet and azure as he shifted the angles of refraction.
He did not eat dinner. That would be an unpardonable faux pas, in view of this evening’s planned ceremony. Still, he needed to keep his glucose level up after the tensions of the day. A few tablets took care of that. Refreshed, Quellen sealed his apartment and went out. He was meeting Judith at the communion. Afterwards, perhaps, he might go home with her. She lived alone since she had joined him in Class Seven. It would be an act of good citizenship, Quellen knew, to marry her and combine their living quarters. Quellen was not prepared to be so patriotic just yet.
The cult session was being held, Judith had informed him, at the Class Four home of a certain Brose Cashdan, an administrator of the intercontinental stat nexus. It was interesting to Quellen that a transportation tycoon like Cashdan would get involved in such a cult. Of course, the cult of social regurgitation wasn’t on the proscribed list. It might be aesthetically distasteful, but it wasn’t subversive like some of the others. Still, Quellen’s experience with high administrators had taught him that they tended to be guardians of the status quo. Maybe Cashdan was different. In any case, Quellen was curious about the house. He had not seen many Class Four homes.
Brose Cashdan’s villa lay just within the inner zone of the Appalachia stat radius. That meant that Quellen could not reach it by the instantaneous transmission of the stat, but had to take a quickboat. A pity, that; it was a waste of half an hour. He programmed his course northward. The screen within the quickboat gave him a simulated view of what was below: the Hudson River, silvery and serpentine in the moonlight, and then the furry hills of the Adirondack Forest Preserve, a thousand acres of unspoiled wilderness in the middle of the sprawl of the city, and finally the floodlit glitter of the landing ramp. Local transport took Quellen speedily to Cashdan’s place. He was a little late, he knew, but it did not bother him.
It was quite a villa. Quellen was not prepared for such opulence. Of course, Cashdan was required to live in just one location, unlike the Class Two people who could have several homes in scattered parts of the world. Still, it was a magnificent establishment, constructed mainly of glass with axial poles of some spongy, tough-looking synthetic. There were at least six rooms, a small garden (!), and a rooftop landing stage. Even from the air the place had a warm, inviting glow. Quellen stepped into the vestibule, peering ahead in hopes of catching sight of Judith.
A portly, sixtyish man with a starched white tunic came out to greet him. Diagonally across the tunic was emblazoned the golden sash of power.
“I’m Brose Cashdan,” the man said. His voice was deep, the voice of authority. Quellen could see this man making brisk decisions all day long and scarcely bothering to get a recommend from a High Government official.
“Joseph Quellen. I was invited by—”
“Judith da Silva. Of course. Judith’s inside. Welcome, Mr Quellen. We’re honoured that you’ve chosen to join us. Come in. Come in.”
Cashdan managed to sound ingratiating and commanding at the same time. He propelled Quellen into an inner room twenty feet long and at least thirty feet in width, carpeted wall-to-wall with some grey foamy substance that possibly had a degree of pseudolife. There was certainly nothing austere or drab about this shining palatial residence.
Eight or nine people sat clustered on the floor in the very middle of the room. Judith was among them. To Quellen’s surprise, Judith had not chosen to dress in the piously self-effacing manner that most communicants of this cult preferred. Obviously this upper-class gathering had different norms. She was wearing a highly immodest sprayon dress, blue with green undertones. A strip of fabric passed between her breasts, which otherwise were bare, and wound about her hips and loins. Her nakedness was covered, more or less, but since the covering was nothing but pigment she might just as well have come nude. Quellen understood that such extreme fashions were permissible only in sophisticated circles where the mode was Class Six or better. It was a trifle pushy, then, for Judith, a Class Seven, to expose herself this way. Quellen sensed that he and Judith might well be the only Sevens in the room. He smiled at Judith. She had small breasts, the desirable kind to have these days, and she had called attention to them by pigmenting her nipples.