Today, he told himself, he would hunt up Freddy Munson somehow and get that cash from him, and buy the tools he needed, and start working again. Let the world outside go crazy; so long as he was working, all was well. If he couldn’t find Freddy, maybe he could swing the purchase on Carole’s credit. She was legally divorced from him and none of his credit taint would stain her; as Mrs… Peter Castine she should surely be able to get hold of a couple of bigs to pay Metchnikoff. Possibly the banks were closed on account of the memory crisis today, Mueller considered; but Metchnikoff surely wouldn’t demand cash from Carole. He closed his eyes and imagined how good it would feel to be making things once more.
Carole was gone an hour. When she came back, carrying groceries, Pete Castine was with her.
“He followed me,” Carole explained. “He wouldn’t let me alone.”
He was a slim, poised, controlled man, quite athletic, several years older than Mueller—perhaps into his fifties already—but seemingly very young. Calmly he said, “I was sure that Carole had come here. It’s perfectly understandable, Paul. She was here all night, I hope?”
“Does it matter?” Mueller asked.
“To some extent. I’d rather have had her spending the night with her former husband than with some third party entirely.”
“She was here all night, yes,” Mueller said wearily.
“I’d like her to come home with me now. She is my wife, after all.”
“She has no recollection of that. Neither do I.”
“I’m aware of that.” Castine nodded amiably. “In my own case, I’ve forgotten everything that happened to me before the age of twenty-two. I couldn’t tell you my father’s first name. However, as a matter of objective reality, Carole’s my wife, and her parting from you was rather bitter, and I feel she shouldn’t stay here any longer.”
“Why are you telling all this to me?” Mueller asked. “If you want your wife to go home with you, ask her to go home with you.”
“So I did. She says she won’t leave here unless you direct her to go.”
“That’s right,” Carole said. “I know whose wife I think I am. If Paul throws me out, I’ll go with you. Not otherwise.”
Mueller shrugged. “I’d be a fool to throw her out, Pete~ I need her and I want her, and whatever breakup she and I had isn’t real to us. I know it’s tough on you, but I can’t help that. I imagine you’ll have no trouble getting an annulment once the courts work out some law to cover cases like this.”
Castine was silent for a long moment.
At length he said, “How has your work been going, Paul?”
“I gather that I haven’t turned out a thing all year.”
“That’s correct.”
“I’m planning to start again. You might say that Carole has inspired me.”
“Splendid,” said Castine without intonation of any kind. “I trust this little mixup over our—ah—shared wife won’t interfere with the harmonious artist-dealer relationship we used to enjoy?”
“Not at all,” Mueller said. “You’ll still get my whole output. Why the hell should I resent anything you did? Carole was a free agent when you married her. There’s only one little trouble.”
“Yes?”
“I’m broke. I have no tools, and I can’t work without tools, and I have no way of buying tools.”
“How much do you need?”
“Two and a half bigs.”
Castine said, “Where’s your data pickup? I’ll make a credit transfer.”
“The phone company disconnected it a long time ago.”
“Let me give you a check, then. Say, three thousand even? An advance against future sales.” Castine fumbled for a while before locating a blank check. “First one of these I’ve written in five years, maybe. Odd how you get accustomed to spending by telephone. Here you are, and good luck. To both of you.” He made a courtly, bitter bow. “I hope you’ll be happy together. And call me up when you’ve finished a few pieces, Paul. I’ll send the van. I suppose you’ll have a phone again by then.” He went out.
“There’s a blessing in being able to forget,” Nate Haldersen said. “The redemption of oblivion, I call it. What’s happened to San Francisco this week isn’t necessarily a disaster. For some of us, it’s the finest thing in the world.”
They were listening to him—at least fifty people, clustering near his feet. He stood on the stage of the bandstand in the park, just across from the De Young Museum. Shadows were gathering. Friday, the second full day of the memory crisis, was ending. Haldersen had slept in the park last night, and he planned to sleep there again tonight; he had realized after his escape from the hospital that his apartment had been shut down long ago and his possessions were in storage. It did not matter. He would live off the land and forage for food. The flame of prophecy was aglow in him.
“Let me tell you how it was with me,” he cried. “Three days ago I was in a hospital for mental illness. Some of you are smiling, perhaps, telling me I ought to be back there now, but no! You don’t understand. I was incapable of facing the world. Wherever I went, I saw happy families, parents and children, and it made me sick with envy and hatred, so that I couldn’t function in society. Why? Why? Because my own wife and children were killed in an air disaster in 1991, that’s why, and I missed the plane because I was committing sin that day, and for my sin they died, and I lived thereafter in unending torment! But now all that is flushed from my mind. I have sinned, and I have suffered, and now I am redeemed through merciful oblivion!”
A voice in the crowd called, “If you’ve forgotten all about it, how come you’re telling the story to us?”
“A good question! An excellent question!” Haldersen felt sweat bursting from his pores, adrenalin pumping in his veins. “I know the story only because a machine in the hospital told it to me, yesterday morning. But it came to me from the outside, a secondhand tale. The experience of it within me, the scars, all that has been washed away. The pain of it is gone. Oh, yes, I’m sad that my innocent family perished, but a healthy man learns to control his grief after eleven years, he accepts his loss and goes on. I was sick, sick right here, and I couldn’t live with my grief, but now I can, I look on it objectively, do you see? And that’s why I say there’s a blessing in being able to forget. What about you, out there? There must be some of you who suffered painful losses too, and now can no longer remember them, now have been redeemed and released from anguish. Are there any? Are there? Raise your hands. Who’s been bathed in holy oblivion? Who out there knows that he’s been cleansed, even if he can’t remember what it is he’s been cleansed from?”
Hands were starting to go up.
They were weeping, now, they were cheering, they were waving at him. Haldersen felt a little like a charlatan. But only a little. He had always had the stuff of a prophet in him, even while he was posing as a harmless academic, a stuffy professor of philosophy. He had had what every prophet needs, a sharp sense of contrast between guilt and purity, an awareness of the existence of sin. It was that awareness that had crushed him for eleven years. It was that awareness that now drove him to celebrate his joy in public, to seek for companions in liberation—no, for disciples— to found the Church of Oblivion here in Golden Gate Park. The hospital could have given him these drugs years ago and spared him from agony. Bryce had refused, Kamakura, Reynolds, all the smooth-talking doctors; they were waiting for more tests, experiments on chimpanzees, God knows what. And God had said, Nathaniel Haldersen has suffered long enough for his sin, and so He had thrust a drug into the water supply of San Francisco, the same drug that the doctors had denied him, and down the pipes from the mountains had come the sweet draught of oblivion.
“Drink with me!” Haldersen shouted. “All you who are in pain, you who live with sorrow! We’ll get this drug ourselves! We’ll purify our suffering souls! Drink the blessed water, and sing to the glory of God who gives us oblivion!”
Freddy Munson had spent Thursday afternoon, Thursday night, and all of Friday holed up in his apartment with every communications link to the outside turned off. He neither took nor made calls, ignored the telescreens, and had switched on the xerofax only three times in the thirty-six hours.
He knew that he was finished, and he was trying to decide how to react to it.
His memory situation seemed to have stabilized. He was still missing only five weeks of market maneuvers. There wasn’t any further decay—not that that mattered; he was in trouble enough—and, despite an optimistic statement last night by Mayor Chase, Munson hadn’t seen any evidence that the memory loss was reversing itself. He was unable to reconstruct any of the vanished details.
There was no immediate peril, he knew. Most of the clients whose accounts he’d been juggling were wealthy old bats who wouldn’t worry about their stocks until they got next month’s account statements. They had given him discretionary powers, which was how he had been able to tap their resources for his own benefit in the first place. Up to now, Munson had always been able to complete each transaction within a single month, so the account balanced for every statement. He had dealt with the problem of the securities withdrawals that the statements ought to show by gimmicking the house computer to delete all such withdrawals provided there was no net effect from month to month; that way he could borrow io,ooo shares of United Spaceways or Comsat or IBM for two weeks, use the stock as collateral for a deal of his own, and get it back into the proper account in time with no one the wiser. Three weeks from now, though, the end-of-the-month statements were going to go out showing all of his accounts peppered by inexplicable withdrawals, and he was going to catch hell.
The trouble might even start earlier, and come from a different direction. Since the San Francisco trouble had begun, the market had gone down sharply, and he would probably be getting margin calls on Monday. The San Francisco exchange was closed, of course; it hadn’t been able to open Thursday morning because so many of the brokers had been hit hard by amnesia. But New York’s exchanges were open, and they had reacted badly to the news from San Francisco, probably out of fear that a conspiracy was afoot and the whole country might soon be pushed into chaos. When the local exchange opened again on Monday, if it opened, it would most likely open at the last New York prices, or near them, and keep on going down. Munson would be asked to put up cash or additional securities to cover his loans. He certainly didn’t have the cash, and the only way he could get additional securities would be to dip into still more of his accounts, compounding his offense; on the other hand, if he didn’t meet the margin calls they’d sell him out and he’d never be able to restore the stock to the proper accounts, even if he succeeded in remembering which shares went where.
He was trapped. He could stick around for a few weeks, waiting for the ax to fall, or he could get out right now. He preferred to get out right now.
And go where?
Caracas? Reno? São Paulo? No, debtor sanctuaries wouldn’t do him any good, because he wasn’t an ordinary debtor. He was a thief, and the sanctuaries didn’t protect criminals, only bankrupts. He had to go farther, all the way to Luna Dome. There wasn’t any extradition from the Moon. There’d be no hope of coming back, either.
Munson got on the phone, hoping to reach his travel agent. Two tickets to Luna, please. One for him, one for Helene; if she didn’t feel like coming, he’d go alone. No, not round trip. But the agent didn’t answer. Munson tried the number several times.
Shrugging, he decided to order direct, and called United Space-ways next. He got a busy signal. “Shall we wait-list your call?” the data net asked. “It will be three days, at the present state of the backlog of calls, before we can put it through.”
“Forget it,” Munson said.
He had just realized that San Francisco was closed off, anyway. Unless he tried to swim for it, he couldn’t get out of the city to go to the spaceport, even if he did manage to buy tickets to Luna. He was caught here until they opened the transit routes again. How long would that be? Monday, Tuesday, next Friday? They couldn’t keep the city shut forever—could they?
What it came down to, Munson saw, was a contest of probabilities. Would someone discover the discrepancies in his accounts before he found a way of escaping to Luna, or would his escape access become available too late? Put on those terms, it became an interesting gamble instead of a panic situation. He would spend the weekend trying to find a way out of San Francisco, and if he failed, he would try to be a stoic about facing what was to come.