The Tomorrow File Read online

  I couldn’t compute it through. Too many variables. I thought of Grace Wingate. What she . . . What I ... I couldn’t compute it through. Insufficient input.

  I came around to Lewisohn’s suggestion for a new Department of National Assets. His Grand Plan was becoming increasingly evident. I should have seen it before. Opening the United States to foreign nations. A national bank. Converting Social Security to conventional insurance. And now centralizing the management of the nation’s real property. The leukemic dwarf was creating a corporate state. Eventually, a corporate world. It was that simple and elegant.

  I could live with it, I decided I moved to the other bedroom. Undressed slowly. I could live with it. Every successful corporation, conglomerate, multinational company depended on research and development for growth. Enter Nicholas Bennington Flair. Machiavelli in a silver zipsuit.

  I inhaled an eight-hour Somnorific and plunged out.

  Y-6

  In the forty-eight hours following my return to GPA-1 from Washington, I made a number of administrative decisions that were to have far-reaching effects important in this account.

  I constituted a “Group Lewisohn” that would be responsible for the continued creative functioning of our famous patient. The Group would be headquartered at Rehabilitation & Reconditioning Hospice No. 4 at Alexandria, Virginia, and would be under the nominal rule of Dr. Seth Lucas. Second in command would be Maya Leighton. I transferred her to GPA-2 and briefed her on what I expected from her. In the treatment of Lewisohn . . . and in the treatment of Art Roach.

  I informed Angela Berri of the creation of Group Lewisohn (later, Maya Leighton was to refer to it, in my presence only, as “Grope Lewisohn”) via a conventional, low-priority mailed memo.

  I flashed Seth Lucas, told him his new assignment, and instructed him to proceed with the construction of a suite designed for the parabiotic treatment of Hyman R. Lewisohn as he, Lucas, had described it during the colloquy at Hospice No. 4.

  I also remembered to have his security clearance raised to Red-2.

  I had a heavy four-hour meet with Paul Bumford. We dealt with a plan for drawing and storing an Individual Microbiological Profile for every object in the US, as a means of positive and precise identification. Then our discussion turned to our project for developing UP, the Ultimate Pleasure pill. We agreed basic research fell into three gross areas: physiological, psychological, mental. Overlapping, of course. There was a fourth, worrisome research area: metaphysical in nature. But we could not define it and postponed action until more input was available.

  We decided to organize three miniteams in our field offices: physiological in Houston, psychological in Spokane, mental in Honolulu. None would be aware of the final goal of their service. Simply that we wanted to determine the origins of pleasure.

  Paul had an additional matter to discuss. In the most recent bulletin of the Bureau of Public Security on current crime statistics, he had noted that the arrest rate for use, sale, or possession of restricted drugs was up 0.4 percent.

  “It’s statistically insignificant,” he admitted. “But I think it’s large enough to justify action. In fact, action might be a plus if someone in Congress or the media picks up on it.”

  “So?” I asked him. “What do you suggest?”

  ‘ ‘A study of possible chromosomal damage due to habitual use of hallucinogens. Having Nancy Ching set up a team out in San Diego

  With increased need for hallucinogens for research. From Scilla Pharmaceuticals, of course.”

  “Paul,” I said, “I’m proud of you. And when you send out your directives on the UP Project, be certain to mention the use of hallucinogens as one possible approach.”

  On the evening of the second day I picked up a long coded message from Simon Hawkley at my mail drop. I spent most of the night decoding it with the aid of his book on the early monasteries of California. I completed the service about 0430, and fell into bed. Exhausted.

  I was awakened at 0740 by a flash from my father in Grosse Pointe. My mother had stopped in her sleep the previous night.

  I gave the orders I had to give. I didn’t anticipate being absent more than three days.

  “Can I come with you?” Paul Bumford asked.

  He had met my parents. Once. My mother had liked him. My father had not.

  “All right,” I said. “Thank you. I may stay on a day or two, but you come back right after the funeral. Let’s take the Bullet Train. A few more hours will make no difference. We’ll try for a compartment. I have a lot to tell you. In camera.”

  I had time to make some purchases in the enormous compound PX before we left. I wondered if Lewisohn had included the worldwide PX chain in his list of the US Government’s real property. Probably. At eighty-six new dollars for a middy blouse, it had to be a lovable enterprise.

  Aboard the Bullet Train to Detroit, we sprawled comfortably, uniforms unzipped, shoes kicked off. We pulled the shades; the landscape en route was not inspiring. I told Paul first about my establishing Group Lewisohn in Alexandria.

  “Advance toward the guns,” he remarked.

  “Exactly,” I said approvingly. “Paul, you’re becoming very perceptive. Washington is where the action is, and we need a base there. Maya’s proximity to Art Roach can do us no harm. She’s been instructed to supply me with a profile on him. Everything: personal habits, sexual kinks, daily routine, prejudices, speech patterns. And so forth.”

  “What do you hope to learn?”

  “Anything. Maybe after he uses, he talks. Some eras do. Is he left-handed? What pills does he pop? Does he use a lighter or matches? I want to know everything about him. Now take a look at this. ...”

  I took a paper from my briefcase and handed it across to him. It was my decoding of Simon Hawkley’s long message.

  Yes, Scilla Pharmaceuticals in San Diego would probably be amenable to a takeover, if the love was right. The current owner, Anthony Scilla, was fifty-two and had recently suffered two mild strokes. His family was urging his retirement. The company had strong union contracts with two years to run. Scilla himself had even stronger loyalties to his executive staff. Terms of sale would probably include rank security for top management.

  Paul Bumford scanned this financial kaka quickly. But when he came to the bottom line, he slowed. Lips pursed. He emitted a low, hissing whistle. Then he looked up at me. I was suddenly aware he had stopped using eyeshadow. His makeup was much more subtle than it had been.

  “Nick,” he said, “I was going to offer to help out. To throw my little pittance into the pot if it would help buy Scilla. But my contribution would be pissing in the sea. You can’t manage this, can you?”

  “I couldn’t last night,” I admitted. “After I decoded, I was ready to reject the whole thing and try to concoct a new plan. That was last night. Then this morning I woke up, my mother has stopped, and I’m her sole heir. That’s what I mean by chance and luck. Who could have computed. ...”

  “A sweet ef,” he said in a low voice. “I took profit from her. Very much.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And she profited from you. ‘Terminal nostalgia,’ she said. She knew. It’s true. Nostalgia is desperation. When you can’t cope. It’ll probably take a year for probate. Mother had the faith of a French peasant or Chinese shopkeeper: Paper is no good, put everything in gold or diamonds. So it will take time to realize. But I know my father will lend against it.”

  “A sweet ef,” he repeated faintly.

  “Yes, yes,” I said impatiently. A little angry, perhaps, that his grief should seem greater than mine. “But I now have the funds. Zero in on that. Let’s futurize. . . . Assuming Angela takes the bait, and assuming we’re able to obtain hard evidence that she’s on the suck, where do we go from there?”

  “Go?” Paul said. “Why, we take her.”

  “Take her? How? Go to Art Roach, the ruler of Security and

  Intelligence, and demand her arrest? No way. He’s her creature. He’d have us both in a Cooperatio
n Room so fast we wouldn’t know what happened until we were given the Informed Consent Statement to sign.”

  “Then, if we have the evidence, don’t go down. To Roach. Go up. To the Chief Director.”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “That’s logical. But life isn’t logical. Politics isn’t logical. No, strike that. Politics is logical. But a different kind of logic. No value judgment implied, but different. Not the linear logic of science. Infinitely more complex. More input. More variables. Angela and the Chief Director are users.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” He groaned.

  I told him about the dinner with the Wingates at the Georgetown White House. He interrupted once.

  “Nick,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. Wingate. Chief Director Michael Wingate. Phoebe Huntzinger’s Executive Assistant is Pomfret Wingate, the em who’s going to play King Lear in the nude. I thought he might be related to the Chief Director. Remember Franklin Ferguson and Lydia Ann? But there’s nothing to it. They’re not related. Chief Wingate is an NM, and Pommy is an AINM.”

  “Good,” I said. “Glad you thought to check.”

  But I was disturbed. The possibility should have occurred to me. I continued describing the dinner with the Wingates. Paul listened intently, bent forward, head lowered. I related everything except the final armed attack against the Chief Director. Paul had no need to know.

  “What’s your reaction?” I asked when I finished. “Involved,” he said. “But more plus than minus, I think. We should be able to manipulate Grace Wingate. She asked for help. She might provide more to us than we can offer her.”

  “Well . . . equal, certainly. One hand washes the other. But I agree with you that she’s an important factor. Or will be when we go to the Chief Director with evidence of Angela’s snookering.”

  “Beism, you said?”

  “Yes, Beism. Not Deism.”

  “Sounds wild. And with a New York chapter?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  ‘ ‘Nick, suppose I look them up and join the group. Wouldn’t that help?”

  I didn’t like it. I didn’t know why at that point in time, but I instinctively rejected the idea.

  “I could do that, Paul.”

  “No, no,” he said earnestly. “Too obvious. You told her your objections to Beism. You came on strong for science. She wouldn’t accept a sudden conversion. Nor would her husband. It would look exactly like what it was: opportunism. But I could do it.”

  “To what purpose?”

  He grinned at me.

  “If you want a precise scenario, I can’t supply one. But it might help. Nick, I want to help.”

  He half-rose to his feet, leaned across to me, kissed my lips. The caress surprised, pleased me.

  “Long time since we’ve done that,” I breathed. “Too long.” “Yes,” he said. “All right then if I become a Beist?”

  His reasoning was valid. But still. . . .

  “All right,” I said reluctantly. “But keep it pillowed.”

  “Sure. Now, Nick, about this Department of Creative Science— where did that come from? It’s not in the Tomorrow File.”

  “I know it isn’t. But the Chief Director asked me for ideas on how to bring scientists into government. I winged it.”

  “And brilliantly,” he said. “Have you prepared the prospectus yet?”

  “No. Who’s had time?”

  “Can I provide some input? Wild ideas? Include them or not, as you like.”

  “Of course. All contributions gratefully accepted.”

  I think we both dozed. When finally, slowing for the Detroit terminal, I opened my eyes, Paul Bumford was awake and staring at me.

  Later, when I was to recall the events of those two days, scenes and images were remembered in short takes. Out of sequence. A badly spliced film. I thought at first it was an extended attack of Random Synaptic Control. Then I realized that, because of emotional strain, the alcohol I drank, the pills I popped, those two days were recollected as a discontinuous series of incidents. In my memory a time frame did not exist.

  Paul and I were elevated to the roof of the high-rise crematorium surmounting the Detroit terminal. My father’s helicopter was awaiting us. A new ef pilot: dark, thin. Petulant mouth.

  Paul glanced at plane and pilot. Then looked sideways at me, raised his eyebrows.

  “My father’s toy,” I said.

  I had resolved to take no drugs before her funeral. It was to be a kind of penance. The only penance I was capable of. I was not capable of it.

  After the burial of the urn, after my weeping father, weeping Mrs. McPherson, weeping Miss Catherine, and weeping Charles had stumbled back to the house, Paul and I stood staring at the freshly turned earth.

  Through the trees, drifting, came the two young ems, neighbors who had so amused my mother. Wispy creatures from the adjoining estate. Both barefoot, wearing identical plasticot caftans decorated in an overall pattern of atomic explosions.

  They were carrying armloads of natural flowers: something longstemmed and purple. They asked if they might leave them on my mother’s grave. I nodded. They put them down gently.

  “She was a beautiful human being,” one of them said. The one with a ring in his nose.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Who were they?” Paul breathed when they ran away. Startled fauns.

  “Friends and neighbors,” I said.

  “The kind of ems who give homosexuals a bad name,” Paul said. “Flits.”

  “You’ve changed,” I told him. “You wouldn’t have said that a year ago. In that tone.”

  “ ‘When I was a child,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘I spake as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.’ ”

  “Now I’ll give you one," I said. "'Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?’ ”

  Paul wrote:

  In your prospectus to the Chief Director re the establishment of a Department of Creative Science, I presume you will include an introduction explicating the relationship between science and politics. Do not neglect to point out that the development of birth control pills and their wide acceptance affected the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1960-1970’s: a classic example of how science and technology influence sociological change.

  “What data banks does your company buy from?” I asked my father.

  He looked at- me curiously.

  “Consolidated or Federated,” he said. “Occasionally some of the smaller ones. Why?”

  The government’s National Data Bank was the largest, of course. It maintained a complete computerized file on every object in the US. It issued BIN cards, recorded genetic history, military service, political activity, criminal accusations and convictions, credit rating, income taxes, marital status, awards and honors. Everything. By law, information stored in the NDB could not be revealed to anyone outside the government, or inside for that matter, who could not prove a need to know.

  But private data banks had proliferated. Several attempts had been made to curb their activities by licensing, as Sweden had. But in 1998, there was little regulation of their operations. Most of the commercial data banks were specialized, dealing with such things as credit rating or personal interests or purchasing habits, etc. If you wanted a list of all seventy-year-old obsos in the US with an annual income of 10,000 new dollars and an active interest in shuffle board, there was a data bank to provide names and addresses. Or if you wanted information on a specific object, for whatever reason, enough love paid to enough data banks would buy a profile almost as complete as if you had free access to the National Data Bank.

  Sometimes I wondered how long it would be before the definition of “privacy” in your dictionary began “Obso!.” And how long before it began “Obs.”

  “I want a profile on Angela Teresa Berri,” I told my father. “Ah,” he said. “DIROB. She rules you, doesn’t she?” “Yes,” I said. “And I also want a profile on Art Roach. He’s ruler of Security
and Intelligence of the Department of Bliss. That’s why I don’t want you connected with it in any way. Can you scam it?”

  He didn’t ask why I wanted the information. My father wasn’t afraid of me, but I thought possibly he was in awe of me.

  “I think I can do it.” He nodded. “I’ll place the orders through a supplier who owes me. What do you want?”

  “Everything,” I said. “Down to the moles on her ass.”

  “She has them?” he asked.

  “She has them,” I said.

  He laughed.

  “All right,” he said. “But it’ll take time.”

  “I have patience,” I told him.

  My mother’s corpus was cremated, according to law. By custom, flaming took place following the funeral ceremony, lay or religionist. Then the plastilead um containing the ashes of the stopped would be placed in a deposit box in a high-rise crematorium. A simple marker attached to the door. The long corridors of deposit boxes were decorated with frequently changed bouquets of plastirub flowers.

  But in this case, my mother’s corpus had been flamed soon after stopping. The um had been delivered to a local church for the service. My father intended to bury her ashes on the grounds of our Grosse Pointe estate. It was illegal, but he had bribed local authorities. I approved of his arrangements.

  The service was held in an Omni-Faith church, across Mack Avenue from Sunningdale Park. It was an A-frame structure of white plastisteel panels inset with long, narrow windows of colored plastiglass in abstract patterns. Rosy light fell on the altar where the gray um had been placed. The church was crowded. I was surprised by the number of objects. I had expected her obso friends. But there were so many young objects present. Adolescents. What their relationship to my mother had been, I did not know. But they may have been strangers, their attendance due to simple curiosity in a church service.

  It was a short ceremony. The pastor said she was not gone. Though she was stopped, he said, the memory of her kindness, beauty, and good humor would endure. We would recall her many charitable deeds, he said. We would speak her name, and tell children of her. So she would remain alive. A small choir sang a rock lament.