[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
oil-lease thing? He could not remember.
He could not remember.
He could not remember.
Each transaction had been in its own compartment. The
partitions were down, suddenly. Numbers were spilling about
in his mind as though his brain were in free fall. All of today's
deals were tumbling. It frightened him. He began to gobble
his food, wanting now to get out of here, to get rid of Helene,
to get home and try to reconstruct his activities of the after-
noon. Oddly, he could remember quite clearly all that he had
done yesterday the Xerox switch, the straddle on Steel
but today was washing away minute by minute.
"Are you all right?" Helene asked.
"No, I'm not," he said. "I'm coming down with something."
"The Venus Virus. Everybody's getting it."
"Yes, that must be it. The Venus Virus. You'd better keep
clear of me tonight."
They skipped dessert and cleared out fast. He dropped
Helene off at her flat; she hardly seemed disappointed, which
bothered him, but not nearly so much as what was happening
to his mind. Alone, finally, he tried to jot down an outline of
his day, but even more had left him now. In the restaurant
he had known which stocks he had handled, though he wasn't
sure what he had done with them. Now he couldn't even recall
the specific securities. He was out on the limb for millions
of dollars of other people's money, and every detail was in his
mind, and his mind was falling apart. By the time Paul Muel-
ler called, a little after midnight, Munson was growing des-
perate. He was relieved, but not exactly cheered, to learn that
whatever strange thing had affected his mind had hit Mueller
a lot harder. Mueller had forgotten everything since last
October.
"You went bankrupt," Munson had to explain to him, "You
had this wild scheme for setting up a central clearing house
for works of art, a kind of stock exchange the sort of thing
only an artist would try to start. You wouldn't let me dis-
courage you. Then you began signing notes, and taking on
contingent liabilities, and before the project was six weeks
old you were hit with half a dozen lawsuits and it all began
to go sour."
"When did this happen, precisely?"
"You conceived the idea at the beginning of November, By
Christmas you were in severe trouble. You already had a
bunch of personal debts that had gone unpaid from before,
and your assets melted away, and you hit a terrible bind in
your work and couldn't produce a thing. You really don't
remember a thing of this, Paul?"
"Nothing."
"After the first of the year the fastest-moving creditors
started getting decrees against you. They impounded every-
thing you owned except the furniture, and then they took the
furniture. You borrowed from all of your friends, but they
couldn't give you nearly enough, because you were borrowing
thousands and you owed hundreds of thousands."
"How much did I hit you for?"
"Eleven bigs," Munson said. "But don't worry about that
now."
"I'm not. I'm not worrying about a thing. I was in! a bind
in my work, you say?" Mueller chuckled. "That's all gone,
I'm itching to start making things. All I need are the tools
I mean, money to buy the tools."
"What would they cost?"
"Two and a half bigs," Mueller said.
Munson coughed. "All right. I can't transfer the money to
your account, because your creditors would lien it right away.
I'll get some cash at the bank. You'll have three bigs tomor-
row, and welcome to it."
"Bless you, Freddy." Mueller said, "This kind of amnesia
is a good thing, eh? I was so worried about money that I
couldn't work. Now I'm not worried at all. I guess I'm still
in debt, but I'm not fretting. Tell me what happened to my
marriage, now."
"Carole got fed up and turned off," said Munson. "She
opposed your business venture from the start. When it began
to devour you, she did what she could to untangle you from
it, but you insisted on trying to patch things together with
more loans, and she filed for a decree. When she was free,
Pete Castine moved in and grabbed her."
"That's the hardest part to believe. That she'd marry an
art dealer, a totally noncreative person, a a parasite,
really "
"They were always good friends," Munson said. "I won't
say they were lovers, because I don't know, but they were
close. And Pete's not that horrible. He's got taste, intelli-
gence, everything an artist needs except the gift. I think
Carole may have been weary of gifted men, anyway."
"How did I take it?" Mueller asked,
"You hardly seemed to notice, Paul. You were so busy with
your financial shenanigans."
Mueller nodded. He sauntered to one of his own works, a
three-meter-high arrangement of oscillating rods that ran
the whole sound spectrum into the high kilohertzes, and
passed two fingers over the activator eye. The sculpture began
to murmur.
After a few moments Mueller said, "You sounded awfully
upset when I called, Freddy. You say you have some kind of
amnesia too?"
Trying to be casual about it, Munson said, "I find I can't
remember some important transactions I carried out today.
Unfortunately, my only record of them is in my head. But
maybe the information will come back to me when I've slept
on it."
"There's no way I can help you with that."
"No. There isn't."
"Freddy, where is this amnesia coming from?"
Munson shrugged. "Maybe somebody put a drug in the
water supply, or spiked the food, or something. These days,
you never can tell. Look, I've got to do some work, Paul. If
you'd like to sleep here tonight "
"I'm wide awake, thanks. I'll drop by again in the morn-
ing."
When the sculptor was gone, Munson struggled for a fe-
verish hour to reconstruct his data, and failed. Shortly before
two he took a four-hour-sleep pill. When he awakened, he
realized in dismay that he had no memories whatever for the
period from April 1 to noon yesterday. During those five
weeks he had engaged in countless securities transactions,
using other people's property as his collateral, and counting
on his ability to get each marker in his game back into its
proper place before anyone was likely to go looking for it. He
had always been able to remember everything. Now he could
remember nothing. He reached his office at seven in the
morning, as always, and out of habit plugged himself into
the data channels to study the Zurich and London quotes,
but the prices on the screen were strange to him, and he knew
that he was undone.
At the same moment of Thursday morning Dr. Timothy
Bryce's house computer triggered an impulse and the alarm
voice in his pillow said quietly but firmly, "It's time to wake
up, Dr, Bryce." He stirred but lay still. After the prescribed
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]