The Computer Connection Page 6

“I can see it. You’ve made a quantum jump. Let’s go.”

  Sequoya’s sanctum was a large conference room with a long table and heavy armchairs. It was cluttered with books, journals, tape cartridges, computer software. The walls were hung with ten by ten-foot orbit-tracking charts. The Group had seated Guess in a chair at the far end of the table and was eyeballing him with concern. I closed the door on the curious secretaries in the anteroom.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “He has lost his marbles,” M’bantu said.

  “Oh, come on, McBee. He had a fit, that’s all.”

  “Watch this,” Scented Song said. She took Sequoya’s hand and raised it high. When she let go, it remained where it was. She took Guess by the shoulders and gentled him out of the chair. The Chief came to his feet obediently. When the princess walked him around the conference room, he accompanied her like a sleepwalker, but when she released her hold, Sequoya came to a dead stop in midstride. His hand was still high in the air.

  “This is a fit?” M’b asked.

  “Put him back in his chair,” I said. Fee was whimpering. I wasn’t exactly joyful myself.

  “It’s a washout,” Nemo said. “We’ll never get to him.”

  “You’ve got to help him,” Fee cried.

  “We’ll do our best, love.”

  “What’s happened to him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long will it last?”

  “No idea.”

  “Is it permanent, Guig?”

  “I couldn’t say. We need an expert. Princess, call Sam Pepys. Borgia is to come to my house with all despatch.”

  “Wilco.”

  “Why bother?” Edison wanted to know. “He’s blown his fuses. Forget him.”

  “Out of the question. First for Fee’s sake. Second, he’s still my candidate; we’ve got to bring his marbles back. Third, plain humanity. He’s a brilliant guy and we’ve got to preserve his prestige.”

  “Just save him,” Fee pleaded.

  “We’ll do our best, love. The first problem is how to get him out of here to my place. I can hear the U-Con stockholders clustering in the anteroom. How do we get him past them?”

  “Moving him is no problem,” M’b said. “He handles like a baby. We can walk him anywhere.”

  “But how do we make him invisible?” I thought hard. I’m sorry to say I was enjoying the crisis. I love a challenge. “Ed, what’s your current identity?” Edison jerked his head at Fee. “Never mind her. We’re beyond that.”

  “I know all about the group,” Fee said, not show-off, just trying to keep it moving.

  “We’ll discuss that later. Who are you nowadays, Ed?”

  “Director of the RCA Plasma Division.”

  “Got identification on you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Gung. Go out there. You’re a distinguished colleague of Dr. Guess who invited you to witness the event. You’re fully prepared to discuss anything and everything with the stockholders. Fake it and don’t stop faking until we’ve got the bod out of here.”

  Edison de- after giving each of us a sharp glance plus a long look at Guess- parted. I heard him start his spiel outside. It sounded like, “u(x + h) - u(x) = 2x + 1.” Most enlightening. I thought some more. “Fee and princess. Take the biggest chart off the wall. Each of you take a corner and hold it as high as you can.” They obeyed without asking questions and I gave them good marks for that. “Hold it taut.” The bottom of the chart just touched the floor. “M’b, you’re the strongest. Put Guess over your shoulder.”

  “The hell he is,” Nemo blurted.

  “Only physically, captain,” M’bantu said in soothing tones. “Never intellectually. No one can compare to you in that department.”

  I plotted the scene for them and opened the door to the anteroom. The two women walked out holding the chart as high as they could reach. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Fee said to the assembled. Then they sailed the chart out of the anteroom. Behind that screen M’bantu was carrying Sequoya.

  When we got to my place Borgia was waiting (I swear I never saw Scented Song making the call) looking like a Sicilian Florence Nightingale, which indeed she is; Sicilian, that is, not a nurse. She’s the damned best doctor I know. Since 1600 she’s taken medical degrees at Bologna, Heidelberg, Edinburgh, Salpetriere, Cornell, and Standard Oil. Borgia believes in keeping up with the times.

  She had a goongang slaving in the house. “Found them starting to rip the place,” she reported. “Your door doesn’t hold. So I put them to work.” She had indeed. Sabu was lushing it up on a bale of hay. Laura was chasing goldfish in the drawing room pool and absorbing them. The house was cleaned and immaculate. A most notable woman.

  “Shape up,” she ordered. The gang lined up before her timidly. “Now hear this. You two have incipient embolisms. You three are on bot, which has lethal side effects. All of you are faggots and need a proctal. I want you back here tomorrow afternoon for a full medical. Hear?”

  “Yassuh, medico.”

  “R. Out.”

  They out. A most forceful woman. “Evening, Guig,” she said in XX. “Evening, all. Who’s that thing? She doesn’t belong to the Group. Get her out of here.”

  By God, Fee stood up to her. “My name is Fee-5 Grauman’s Chinese. I live here and your patient is my guy. Next question?”

  “She talks XX.”

  “And she knows about the Group. Quite a gal.”

  “It’s the Maori strain,” M’bantu interjected. “A magnificent people.”

  Borgia grinned a mile wide, went to Fee, and shook her hand like it was a pump handle. “You’re my kind, Fee,” she said. “There aren’t enough of you around these days. We’ve megabred the backbone out of existence. Now let’s have a look at the patient. Got somewhere more intimate, Guig? This is like a zoo, and that python keeps belching.”

  We walked the Chief into my study and Fee put him down in a chair at the desk. The others excused themselves to look after their pets, and Edison went to repair the door which he’d ruined. “Fill me in, Guig.” I described the Chief and the disaster that had overtaken him while Borgia prowled around him and examined him. “Yes,” she said. “All the basic symptoms of postepileptic delirium; mutism, passive negativism, catatonic stupor. Easy, Fee, I’ll drop the clinical jargon. Probably sounds to you like I’m depersonalizing your guy. I’m not. Now, exactly what’s the urgency? How much time have I?”

  “We’ve managed to lose the U-Con brass for a little while, but they’ll be howling for Guess tomorrow and a full status review. About seventy million went into the experiment and—”

  “Eighty-five,” Fee said, “and I can hear them howling for him now. They’re in a panic and they want the Chief. Explanations or his scalp.”

  “They have any suspicions about what’s happened to him?” Borgia asked Fee.

  “Not yet. Most of them are saying he’s chickcopped.”

  “ESP?” Borgia asked me, much interested.

  “No, bug-tap. So you can see everything’s at stake. We have to pull him out fast or he’s sunk.”

  “What’s in it for you, as if I didn’t know.”

  “Later, Lucy. Not in front of his girl.”

  “I’m not his girl,” Fee said. “He’s my guy.”

  Borgia ignored the semantics. She prowled around Sequoya again, sensing him with invisible antennae. “Interesting. Very interesting. The resemblance to Lincoln. See it, Guig? Is it a pathogenic type? I often wonder. You know, of course, that young Lincoln went into a cataleptic collapse after the death of Ann Rutledge. He never recovered. Remained a manic-depressive for the rest of his life. Now let’s try a shortcut. Have you got any writing tools? Handwriting-type.”

  Fee pulled a pad and a stylus out of the desk.

  “Is he righthanded, Fee?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll try a trick that Charcot showed me in his clinic.” Borgia put the stylus in the Chief’s right hand and placed the pa
d under it. “Sometimes they want so desperately to communicate with us, but we must find the way for them.” She bent over Guess and started to speak in Spanglish. I stopped her. “He’s more comfortable with XX, Borgia.”

  “Oh, he’s that educated? Encouraging.” She spoke smoothly to the Chief. “Hello, Dr. Guess. I’m a physician. I would like to have a talk with you about JPL.”

  Sequoya’s face didn’t alter; it gazed placidly into space, but after a moment his right hand trembled and wrote:

  hello

  Fee let out a little yell. Borgia motioned for quiet. “Dr. Guess,” she went on, “your friends are here. They are very much concerned about you. Won’t you tell them something?”

  The hand wrote:

  doctor guess your friends

  are here they are very much

  concerned about you wont

  you tell them something

  “So.” Borgia pursed her lips. “Like that, eh? Will you try, Fee-5? Say something personal.”

  “Chief, this is Fee-Fie-Fo. You haven’t kept your promise yet.”

  chief this is fee fie fo

  you havent kept your

  promise yet

  Borgia tore the sheet off the pad. “Guig? Maybe something about the recent disaster?”

  “Hey, Uncas, U-Con tried to sell me those naked rats. They claim they’re your soul.”

  hey uncas tried to

  sell me those naked rats

  they claim theyr your

  soul

  Borgia shook her head. “I’d hoped this might be the road to a breakthrough but it’s just echopathy.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You find it sometimes as a part of the catatonic syndrome, Guig. The patient repeats the words of another, in one form or another.”

  “He’s just parroting?”

  “That’s about the size of it, but we’re not licked yet. I’ll show you another one of Charcot’s tricks. The human psyche can be incredibly devious.” She transferred the stylus to the Chief’s left hand and placed the pad under it. “Hello, Dr. Guess. I’m a physician and I’d like to have a talk with you. Have you come to any conclusion about what happened to your cryonauts?”

  The placid face still stared into space. The left hand twitched and then began to scribble in mirrorwriting, from left to right:

  “Mirror, Fee.”

  “Don’t bother,” Borgia said. “I read dextro and levo. He’s written, ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, but—’ ”

  “But what?”

  “It stops there. ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, but—’ But what, Dr. Guess? What?”

  Nothing.

  “Failed again?”

  “Certainly not, ass. We’ve discovered that he’s functioning deep down inside. Very deep. Down there he’s aware of everything that’s going on around him. What we have to do is peel off the shock layer that’s formed over him.”

  “Do you know how?”

  “Countershock, but if it has to be quick it’s going to be iffy.”

  “It has to be quick. How will it be iffy?”

  “They’ve developed a new tranquilizer, a polypeptide derivative of noradrenalin.”

  “I haven’t understood a word.”

  “D’you know how tranquilizers work? They thicken the connections between the brain nuclei, the glial cells, and the neurones. Slow down the transfer of nerve-firing from cell to cell and slow down the entire organism. Are you with it?”

  “With.”

  “This noradrenalin derivative blocks it completely. It’s close to a nerve gas. All traffic comes to a dead stop. That’s the operative word. Dead. We may kill him.”

  “Why? Tranquilizers don’t kill.”

  “Try to cope with the concept, Guig. Every nerve cell will be isolated. Alone. An island. If they link up synapses again, he’ll be recovered and feeling like a fool for withdrawing. He’ll be countershocked out of his flight from the JPL surprise. If they don’t, he’s dead.”

  “What are the chances?”

  “Experimentally, so far, fifty-fifty.”

  “The Greek says even money is a good bet. Let’s try.”

  “No!” Fee cried. “Please, Guig. No!”

  “But he’s dead to this world now, Fee. You’ve lost him already.”

  “He’ll recover some time, won’t he, doctor?”

  “Oh, yes,” Borgia said, “but it might take as long as five years without crash treatment. Your guy is in one of the deepest catatonic shocks I’ve ever seen, and if he has another epileptic seizure while we’re waiting it out, it’ll get deeper.”

  “But—”

  “And since he’s your guy I should warn you that if he pulls out of this on his own he’ll most probably have complete amnesia for the past. That’s strongly indicated in this sort of case.”

  “For everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “His work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  Fee wavered. We waited. At last she said, “R.”

  “Then let’s shape up.” Borgia was in complete control.

  “He should come out of countershock in a familiar environment. Does he live anywhere?”

  “We can’t get in. It’s guarded by wolves.”

  “JPL is out of the question. Anywhere else?”

  “He teaches at Union Carbide,” Fee said.

  “Office?”

  “Yes, but he spends most of his time using their Extrocomputer.”

  “What’s that?”

  Fee looked to me for help. “Carbide built a limitless computer complex,” I explained. “They used to call them ‘stretch computers.’ Now they call them Extrocomputers. This job is stored with every datum since the beginning of time and it hasn’t run out of storage space yet.”

  “Gung. We’ll flog him in the computer complex.” She yanked a pad out of her toolbox and scribbled. “M’bantu! Here! Take this prescription to Upjohn and bring the ampul to the computer center at Union Carbide. Don’t let anybody mug you. Costs a fortune.”

  “I will transport it in a cleft stick.”

  She smacked him lovingly. “You black bastard. Tell Up-john to bill me.”

  “May I ask in what name, Borgia?”

  “Damnation. Who am I now? Oh, yes. Cipolla. Dr. Renata Cipolla. Go, baby.”

  “Renata Onion!” I exclaimed in disbelief.

  “Why not? What are you, some kind of antisemite? Edison! Here! Fixed that door yet? Never mind. I’ll need you to rig a sterilizer for me. Also an oxygen mask. You’ll come with me and bring your tool box.”

  “Sterilizer?” Fee whispered. “Oxygen?”

  “I may have to transect and do a coronary massage. Nemo! Nemo!” No answer. She tramped to the drawing room where he was in the pool playing with Laura. All the goldfish were gone and I wouldn’t doubt that he may have eaten a few himself, just to be friendly, you understand. Borgia rapped on the perspex until he stuck his head above water. “We’re leaving. Get out of that and guard the house. Door’s a shambles. Shut up, Ed. Use force to repel force but don’t kill anybody. Just hold them. They may need medical attention. R. Let’s move it out.”

  She and Edison picked up their toolboxes. As Fee and I walked Cochise out of the house I looked down into the cellar. Scented Song was sleeping peacefully on Sabu’s back. I wanted to ask her to move over.

  4

  No trouble getting into the center; yes, doctor, no, doctor, certainly, doctor; the sleepwalker made a perfect front. There was a crowd in the center; some bright heads playing Prime against the Extro (and losing), and Spangland’s popular broadcast serial, The Rover Girls. We chased the kids but we couldn’t chase the broadcast. Serious Dick, fun-loving Tom, and sturdy-hearted Sam are now cadets at the Pentagon Military Academy (after their transsex operations in Denmark) and are buying pot, poppers, googies, hash, and uglies as refreshments for an orgy to celebrate Serious Dick’s election as Porno Procurement
officer of his company.

  “I can’t understand why this place isn’t insulated like yours,” Borgia complained.

  “It is, but the broadcasts sneak in on the high-voltage lines,” I explained. “Ignore them. What do I do with the Chief?”

  “Flat on the floor, face up. Ed, start putting together the sterilizer and oxygen mask while we’re waiting for M’bantu. Forage in the stock rooms for materials. Improvise. Go.”

  Of course, the center was open for business, as was the entire university. In the first place, a computer is never turned off. In the second place, everything these days is operating on a twenty-four-hour basis. How else can you get some work out of a jillion deserving welfare cases unless you schedule twelve two-hour shifts?

  You all know what a computer complex looks like—the hardware standing like a reunion of grandfather clocks, the satellite computers standing around them. The only difference with the Extro is that the satellites need satellites to feed them. You have to go through channels to get to the boss and he’s rather abrupt. His business is to take a small question which nobody can answer, move it around through his infinity of bits, and then come out with a curt answer.

  The Rover Girls were in a jam. Their father has been missing for a year. Ms. Stanhope, widowed mother of Serious Dick’s sweetheart, Bruce, is being romanced off her feet by the wicked Josiah Crabtree, teacher at the Pentagon. Crabtree is really after Ms. Stanhope’s fabulously rich acid farm. He also favors a Pentagon cadet, the bully, Dan Baxter, who hates the Rover Girls. The rotten Crabtree and Baxter were honks, naturally.

  Edison and M’bantu (senza cleft stick) pulled in at the same time. Ed had two heads pushing a skid loaded with gear; oxygen tank, sterilizer, plumbing, and accessories. Don’t bother to ask how he dragooned the bods into helping him or how he liberated the necessaries; the entire Group has the overpowering habit. It’s not deliberate, we just scare the Shorties. The mere fact of youth is beauty; the mere fact of longevity is authority.

  “R.” Borgia in control. “Out the heads. Set up, Ed.” She opened her toolbox which didn’t look much different from Edison’s. “Ampul, M’b. We’ll shape up and move it. Fee-5, answer a few questions and then out. His height?”