The Barons of Behaviour Page 3

  “What happens if I don’t happen to have a little white stick with me?”

  “They cost about five dollars a dozen. You can carry one stuck in your belt under your jacket anywhere you go and nobody’ll ever notice it.”

  “Just like a well-trained agent for the Japanese Board of Trade.”

  “It’s one of the handiest defense systems the Japanese ever came up with. I made Peggy take it up when she started studying karate and I’ve never regretted the extra money it cost me.”

  “Can they give me the one-hour lesson tomorrow morning at ten?”

  “The head man at the dojo will call you himself. I’ll call him right away. I had him put the whole order on standby.”

  “I always did want to feel like a well-dressed hoodlum.”

  “Thank God for something. If I had any sense I’d probably have you kidnapped and condition you into staying away from that damned place myself.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you, Robert. Do you have any more little tidbits?”

  “Don’t be afraid to quit, damnit. Don’t get irrational about this. Nobody will ever hold it against you if you quit.”

  “I’ll consider the idea seriously every time it occurs to me.”

  “If we had any sense, we’d both probably be considering a few good old-fashioned assassinations.”

  “Or a one-way trip to the moon.”

  “The bastards will probably be pushing buttons up there in a few years, too. I’ll see you later, Ralph. Call me right away if you need any help.”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as anything significant happens. Let me know if you get any good bribes.”

  “I’ll send you your usual commission.”

  He stepped across the room and reached for the tranquilizers as soon as the screen blanked. Somebody knocked on the door and he turned around with one of the pills in his palm.

  “Who is it?”

  “Your wife.”

  He hesitated with the pill in his hand. He had called Dazella first partly because he had wanted to put off talking to Sue.

  He forced the pill down his throat and put the jar back on the shelf.

  “Come in, love. Come in.”

  The door slid open as he turned around. She slipped inside and they eyed each other across the room.

  “I thought I’d better talk to you alone,” Sue said. “Do you still feel like taking Nancy to the fun house?”

  “Sure. I’ve been assuming shell be ready to go as soon as I get my clothes changed.”

  “I told her you might not. She was very brave about it

  The tranquilizer flowed through Nicholsons consciousness. Muscles relaxed all over his body. A thick, mushy wall rose between him and his emotions.

  “I just wanted to talk to Bob Dazella first I knew he’d want to hear how it went right away.”

  “You looked like you had an interesting day when you came in.”

  A numb guilt about the tranquilizer penetrated the mushy wall. She would have taken a tranquilizer herself if she had been in his position but that didn’t change things. He was hiding inside a shelter and she was out in the open.

  “I ran into a little trouble. It didn’t do me any great harm personally, but I stumbled on something that really caught me off guard.”

  “They tried to stop you already?”

  “That’s only part of it. You may want to change your mind about helping me when you hear the rest of it.”

  “The first time anything happens?”

  “They’re doing something that took me completely by surprise. It isn’t quite as bad as it looks at first sight, but it isn’t the kind of thing I like to think about late at night either. It even shocked Bob.”

  “It must be pretty awful if it even shocked him. What are they doing—organizing a campaign to make people hate Italian politicians?”

  “They tried to set a mob on me. They stirred up the mob with a gimmick they’ve got and I managed to figure out the gimmick while I was under the drug and turn it against them. I had to stop at the hospital on the way back and get a few bruises wiped off but I managed to figure out the gimmick and stop the show before they did anything serious. The main thing is the damned gimmick. They’ve set up a surburban development in which every damned personality in the area is the same Gruber type—every man, woman, and child in a place that must have two thousand people in it.”

  Her eyes widened. Her hand moved toward her mouth as if she were a twenty-year-old ingenue.

  “There’s no doubt about it,” Nicholson said. “I had the sec push me all over the Goddamned area after we got away from them, and you can look at the stuff scattered on the lawn and see it, once you know what to look for. I used a noise and odor stimulus that’s guaranteed to work on this particular G-type and every personality in the mob responded like I was putting on a demonstration in the classroom.”

  “They’ve gotten that far? They’re pushing people around like that?”

  “It looks like an organization with that much money and power can do almost anything it Goddamn wants to nowadays. I’m not trying to talk you out of helping me, love, but it looks like you’re going to be in a lot more danger than we thought you’d be. We can’t assume you’ll be safe just because you’re supposed to stay on this side of the Delaware River most of the time.”

  He settled his shoulder against the wall and watched her adjust to it as if he were dealing with a patient. He would be very surprised if she backed out of this now that she had agreed to do it. She had argued with him for two months when he had told her he wanted her to help him with this project, but now that she was committed to it, he was certain she would fight for her personal freedom with the same hunger with which she had fought for everything else she had ever wanted. She had hated the advertising work she had been doing when he had first met her, but she had gone on doing it because it had been the only trade in which she could pull down an upper middle class salary and enjoy the life style that went with it. She had been a hungry young woman who had wanted everything the world had to offer, and her appetite had been so strong she had been willing to satisfy it with weapons that revolted her. And now that she knew people like Boyd were threatening her freedom, he was certain she would go after Boyd’s throat with the same intensity with which she had gone after all the baubles on the Christmas tree.

  “Every single person in that place is the same type, every member of every family?”

  “It looked to me like they managed to attract monotype couples most of the time. They can’t control the kids that closely, but people with this type of personality tend to establish a family pattern that molds their kids into the same type.”

  “And they can hire some clever little ad maker and have her zero in right on that one spot, knowing she can ignore the side effects and come up with something that’s exactly right for every damned person there.”

  “Right.”

  “And you think I’d quit on you now that we know we’re dealing with people who can do something like that?”

  “You decided you’d help me when we thought they were a lot less powerful than it looks like they really are. I’d be pretty damned surprised if you quit anything you started. But this isn’t the project you volunteered for.”

  “I’m not going to drop out on you right at the start. I may not have whatever it takes to last the whole distance, but I’m not going to drop out now.”

  The numb guilt about the tranquilizer penetrated the chemical wall again. She would have looked like she was chatting with a guest at a party if anybody had taken a picture of her, but he knew he would have picked up the odors of fear if he had been spying on her with an odor detector.

  He moved toward her mechanically. The tranquilizer was still numbing his emotions, but he had been living with himself for forty-four years now and he could usually play the part from memory.

  “It’s up to you, love. It’s a filthy thing to ask your own wife to help you with, but I’d rather have you working
with me than anybody else that’s ever been in the business.”

  III

  Albert Mead lived in one of the richest developments in the Fifth Congressional District—a sprawling complex in which all the houses were built on small islands and electric boats hummed along a complicated network of canals and lakes. The houses looked like they probably cost a million to buy and fifty a year to maintain and the land around them was crowded with proof that the developer had used every modem technique that would add to their value. Birds ‘squawked above the water with voices that had been selected by behavioral psychologists and built into their physiology by genetic engineers. Specially designed fish and water animals splashed in the canals. Plants bloomed and faded in a constantly changing, custom-made pattern that had been programmed by the best ecologists and genetic engineers in the northeast. Air purifiers and specially designed plants kept the air fresh and clean in spite of the presence of enormous sources of pollution only a few miles away.

  The developer’s commercials claimed the development was a “pure, controlled landscape only a few miles from a major modem city. A home in Country Islands is like a time machine that takes you back to the unspoiled countryside of the eighteenth century.” And Nicholson had to admit the commercials were almost right. Only the sky reminded him he was still in Windham County, New Jersey, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The human eye could see stars of the sixth magnitude when the air was truly clean, but the dimmest stars above his head were stars of the third magnitude. The developer could clean the air seventy feet above a limited area, but the air above that was just as dirty as it had been when he had been a young dandy in the eighties.

  He hummed along the canals with the top down and sucked in the chilly autumn air that always reminded him of the first semester of school and all the Octobers and Novembers in which he had worked in political campaigns. Music reached him from half the islands he passed. Winged, propeller-driven “fireworks” soared above the development, with their lights weaving patterns in the sky. A pleasure boat loaded with singing men and women pulled up beside him and a woman threw a cornstalk at him and curtsied in her seat when he automatically raised the stalk to his lips and blew a kiss at her. For fifteen years now the people who sold party gadgets and fancy clothes had been gradually turning the autumn into a festival that stretched from early October to the beginning of the Christmas season on Thanksgiving Day. People danced and sang and gorged themselves on big meals, as if the harvest really was a brief interlude of plenty, and the winter was really going to bring cold and hunger instead of a festival that was even bigger. He would have been singing himself if Sue had been with him and he had been paying a social call.

  The automatic guidance system picked up Albert Meads landing code. The taxi boat slipped through the traffic and turned toward a medium-sized island and a simple, two-story house that had been sculptured out of glass and shiny white plastic. A white plastic wall surrounded most of the island and a rocky path connected the front gate with the house.

  The boat eased up to the landing. The bow swung back and forth as the guidance system positioned the hull beside the steps. The boat stopped two inches from the landing and Nicholson stood up.

  A loudspeaker murmured beside his chair. “We have arrived at the home of Dr. Albert Mead. Please be careful when you disembark. Please call for a taxi ten minutes before you are ready to leave.”

  Nicholson stepped onto the landing. A light blinked beside a television camera above the gate and he turned toward it and let the people inside the house see his face.

  A motorboat swerved toward him out of the darkness. Three young rocks piled out of it while it was still moving and jumped onto the landing. His taxi turned around ten feet from the landing and hummed down the river toward its next call.

  Two rocks jumped between Nicholson and the gate before he could move. Two arrogant young faces smiled at him. The delicate odor of violet perfume spread across the dock.

  His hands rose toward his belt. The rocks were all shorter than he was but their hands looked big and hard.

  The third rock posed on the edge of the dock with his hands on his hips. He was a little older than the other two and his balanced, stocky body looked like it had been shaped by years of judo and karate.

  “Happy Halloween, psychman. Meet your new teachers. We’re going to give you a little lesson in staying away from the Fifth Congressional District of the state of New Jersey, and we’re going to use the best principles of psychology to do it. First we tell you what you’re supposed to leam. Then we give you a little reinforcement to help you remember it.”

  The two rocks in front of the gate stepped forward. He turned his head and the other rock skipped toward him.

  A punch jarred his side. He pulled his scrambler out of his belt with his left hand and jerked the stick out of its holster with his right The older rock started to hit him again and he swung at the incoming arm with his stick and waved his scrambler at the other two.

  The stick stabbed into a forearm. The two rocks he had swept with the scrambler gasped and fell back with their hands over their faces. His reflexes swung the scrambler toward the third rock.

  Somebody splashed into the water. The older rock swung as he brought the scrambler around and a fist slammed into his heart An edge of the hand blow jarred his left arm. The scrambler flew out of his fingers.

  His right hand snapped back to his waist and shot out. The stick rammed into stomach muscle. The rock doubled over and he pulled his hand back and struck him in the side of the head.

  The rock sank to one knee. He clutched his head with his hands and Nicholson stepped back and looked down at him with his guard wide open. He had never knocked a man down before.

  The gate opened half a foot. A voice boomed out of a loudspeaker. “Get inside! Hurry!”

  The rock who had stumbled into the water was clutching the landing and staring up at him defiantly. The rock he had hit with the stick had slipped to both knees and looked like he might be getting ready to keel over. The third rock was leaning against the wall with his hands on his face.

  The gate swung open another foot as he stepped toward it. It slammed home as soon as he squeezed through it and the older rock raised his head and stared at him through the iron bars.

  The rock who had stumbled into the water crawled onto the landing. The other two rocks stood up and eyed Nicholson through the gate.

  The rock who had stumbled into the water stood up and pushed back his hair. Water ran down his waterproof clothes as if they had been made out of Sheet-rock.

  “I should have known a cancer like you would use a Goddamned scrambler. Don’t push your luck, psych-man. Next time we’ll know what to watch for.”

  “This is a bad place to come, psychman. You’re heading straight for a nice bed in the hospital.”

  Nicholson’s hand gripped the gate. He stared back at them with the stick poised near his waist and the leader jerked around and stepped into the boat. The other two rocks climbed in after him and they skidded away from the landing and hummed down the canal with their fists raised.

  Nicholson sagged against the gate. He had been waiting for something like this for three months, but they had still caught him by surprise.

  He stuck the stick in its holster and straightened up. The clean air in his lungs felt as exhilarating as a drug. He had knocked a man down in a fair fight! They had attacked him by surprise and he had still managed to swing the stick like a veteran. The rock he had knocked down had looked like he was a trained fighter. And he had been twenty years younger, too.

  His built-in monitor smiled wryly. He shook his head and pushed himself away from the gate.

  A bald, heavy man hurried down the path with his hand out. “Are you all right, Dr. Nicholson? What’s going on?”

  Nicholson wiped the sweat off his forehead. He had talked to Albert Mead on the phone but this was the first time they had met in person.”

  “I’m fine. I was just
stopping to get my nerve back.”

  “It looks like you really gave the little cancers a rough time.”

  “I had a scrambler with me.”

  “It looked like you clobbered one of them with your bare hands, too.”

  “I gave him a couple of taps with the little stick—the little six-inch stick the Japanese have a system for. Are you familiar with that?”

  “That’s what it was. It looked like you knew how to handle it.”

  “I put some money into a practice dummy a couple of months ago and got my reflexes programmed. The guy that sold me on it told me it’s the easiest self-defense system you can leam and it looks like he was right”

  “It’s getting so you practically have to carry a damn gun around here. You didn’t manage to get the license number of the little cancers’ boat, did you?”

  “I didn’t even think about it”

  “That’s too bad. The cops may be able to track them down anyway, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if we had the license number.”

  Nicholson hesitated. The TV camera had probably been turned on when the rocks had jumped onto the landing, but Mead could have missed the rock’s first words. And Mead could have been heading for the door when the rocks had been shouting at him through the gate.

  “I’d just as soon leave the cops out of it if we can do it. I’d rather not get involved in a lot of red tape.” “They won’t keep you on the phone more than ten minutes. They aren’t the most efficient cops in the United States but it’s probably worth a try.”

  “I’d rather let it ride. I can’t explain it right now without going into a lot of detail, but it has something to do with the reason I’m here.”

  Mead frowned. His eyes studied Nicholson’s face. “You’re sure? They jumped you because of that?”

  “They made it pretty clear.”

  “Let’s go inside.”

  A flute solo was rising toward a peak as they entered the house. A woman was leaning against a chair in the center of the living room and the wall behind her was filled with a life-size, three-dimensional broadcast of a ballet that was obviously being performed on the moon. Six dancers had just jumped twenty feet off the floor and a camera was tracking them from above as they glided down.