Hasson nodded, mildly intrigued by Werry’s steadfast practice of referring to everybody, even men he had reason to hate or despise, by their first names. He gave the impression of regarding all human failings, from the trivial to the most serious, with the same kind of careless tolerance, and it was a characteristic which Hasson found difficult to square with the profession of law enforcement. He sat quietly, coping with minor aches in his back and hip, until Werry brought the car to a halt outside a bar near the centre of Tripletree’s shopping area.
“Ben’s Holotronics is just round the corner,” Werry said. “You go off and get your cassettes and I’ll set up a couple of halfs.” He went into the brownish dimness of the bar, walking with the jaunty lightness of a boxer in peak condition. He gave no sign of having anything preying on his mind. Hasson watched him disappear and made his way along the block through fierce sprays of reflected sunlight. Shadows flitted across his path every few seconds as fliers drifted down from the sky and landed on the fiat roofs of buildings all around. It was the standard arrangement in modern cities, because CG fields broke up when any massive object, such as a wall, intersected their lines of force. That was the reason there were no aircraft powered by counter-gravity engines, and it was also the reason for modem public buildings having flat roofs or being surrounded by wide landing strips. Any flier who went too close to a wall found himself to be a flier no longer, but an ordinary mortal, fragile and afraid, hurtling towards the ground at an acceleration of close to a thousand centimetres per second squared. The same effect occurred when two CG fields interfered with each other, which was the reason for Air Police Sergeant Robert Hasson taking the big drop over the Birmingham Control Zone, the endless screaming drop which had almost…
Wrenching his thoughts back into the present, Hasson located the store where he had bought his television set and went inside. The owner, Ben, greeted him warily, but brightened up on learning that he had not returned with a complaint. It transpired that he had a good selection of six-hour programme cassettes and was able to supply Hasson with a number of complete runs of British comedy and musical shows, some of which had been recorded only the previous year.
Hasson, like an alcoholic contemplating a well-stocked cupboard, felt a comforting glow within himself as he left the store carrying a bulging plastic bag. He was now self-reliant, self-sufficient, equipped to live his own life. The evocative scent of dried hops and malt reached his nostrils and an impulse made him glance curiously into the window of the next store along the block. The proprietor, the oddly named Oliver Fan, had been an interesting and sympathetic character with an unusual line of sales talk. You are not at ease within yourself. That part was certainly true, Hasson mused. As a snap diagnosis it had been a hundred per cent accurate, but perhaps it was one of those all- purpose pieces of patter such as used by fake fortune-tellers, designed to make the general sound like the particular. Perhaps it applied equally well to everybody who ever strayed through Oliver’s door. Believe me, I can help. Would a charlatan say that? Would he not be inclined to use a more ambiguous form of words which would give him latitude for twisting and turning under legal scrutiny? Hasson hesitated for a long moment and then, filled with a curious timidity, went into the health food store.
“Good morning, Mr Haldane,” Oliver said from his position behind the glass counter. “It is good to see you again.”
Thank you.” Hasson looked uncertainly around the laden shelves, breathed the mixture of heady aromas and felt lost for words, as though he had come to ask for a love philtre. “I . … I wonder if…”
“Yes, I meant what I said — I can help you.” Oliver gave Hasson a knowing, compassionate smile as he slid off his stool and moved along the counter. He was small and middle aged — of exactly the same size, build and coloration as millions of other Asians- and yet he had an individuality which impressed Hasson as being as durable as the bedrock of China itself. His eyes, by contrast, were as homely, accessible and humorous as Laurel and Hardy or Mark Twain.
“That’s a fairly sweeping statement,” Hasson said, testing his ground,
“Is it? Then let’s put it to the test.” Oliver took a pair of iodine- tinted glasses from his breast pocket and put them on. “I already know you’ve been seriously hurt in a driving accident, and you probably know that I know, so we can take all that as given. There’s no question of my using special powers or being able to see your aura the way some of those alternative medicine freaks claim to do. But — simply by looking at the way you walk and stand — I can tell that your back is giving you considerable pain. I would say that you also smashed up your left knee in the accident but that it is fairly well on the mend and that it’s your back that’s causing all the trouble. Am I right?”
Hasson nodded, refusing to be impressed.
“So far so good — but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? The physical injuries were bad, the spell in hospital was bad, the convalescence is long and painful and boring — but there was a time when you would have taken all that in your stride. Now you can’t. You feel you’re not the man you used to be. Am I right?”
“You’re bound to be right,” Hasson countered. “Is there any-. body the man he used to be? Are you?”
“Too general, eh? Too woolly? All right, you know your specific symptoms better than anybody, but I’ll go over some of them for you. There’s the depressions, the irrational fears, the inability to concentrate on simple things like reading, the poor memory, the pessimism about the future, the dozing like a lizard during the day followed by the inability to sleep properly at night unless you’ve had pills or booze. Am I right?”
“Well…”
“Is it difficult for you to meet strangers? Is it difficult for you to talk to me now?” Oliver took off his glasses as though to make confession easier, dismantling barriers.
Hasson wavered, tom between a cautious reserve and the urge to unburden himself to the stranger who seemed as though he could be more of a friend than any friend. “Supposing all those things were true, what could you do about it?”
Oliver appeared to relax a little. “The first thing to realise is that you and your body are a unity. You are one. There’s no such thing as a physical injury that doesn’t affect the mind, and there’s no such thing as a mental injury that doesn’t affect the body. If both aren’t right, both are wrong.”
Hasson felt a pang of disappointment — he had heard similar things from Dr Colebrook and a series of therapists, none of whom seemed to realise that he had lost the ability to deal in abstracts, that words which did not have a clear-cut, one-to-one correspondence with concrete realities were completely meaningless to him.
“What does it all boil down to?” he said. “You said you could help. What can you do to stop my mind feeling pains in my back?”
Oliver sighed and gave him a look of rueful apology. “I’m sorry, Mr Haldane — it looks as though I may have blown this one. I think I’ve let you down by saying the wrong things.”
“So there’s nothing you can do.”
“I can give you these.” Oliver took two cartons — one small and inscribed with Chinese characters in gold on a red background, the other large and plain — from the shelves behind him and placed them on the glass counter.
This is what it had to come down to, Hasson thought, his disillusionment complete. Doctor Dobson’s Famous Herbal Remedy And Spleen Rejuvenator. “What are they?”