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his quarters. Fraffin allowed the drop field to catch him and propel him past
the seamless projections of hatchways in a gentle blur.
It's almost possible to feel sorry for Kelexel, he thought.
The man had been so obviously repelled at first confrontation with the idea of
single violence, but oh, how he'd lost himself in the native conflict when
shown it.
We identify with individual acts of violence so easily, Fraffin thought.
One might almost suspect there were real experiences of this kind in our own
pasts.
He felt the reflexive tightening of the armor that was his skin, a sudden
turmoil of unfixed memories. Fraffin swallowed, halted the drop at the
hatchway outside his salon.
The endlessness of his own personal story appalled him suddenly. He felt that
he stood on the brink of terrifying discoveries. He sensed monsters of
awareness lurking in the shadows of eternity directly before him.
Things loomed there which he dared not identify.
A pleading rage suffused Fraffin then. He wanted to slam a fist into eternity,
to still the hidden voices gibbering at him. He felt himself go still with
fear and he thought:
To be immortal is to require frequent administrations of moral anesthesia.
It was such an odd thought that it dispelled his fear. He let himself into the
silvery warmth of his salon wondering whence that thought had come.
7
THURLOW SAT SMOKING HIS PIPE, HUNCHED OVER THE wheel of his parked car. His
polarizing glasses lay on the seat beside him, and he stared at the evening
sky through raindrops luminous on the windshield. His eyes watered and the
raindrops blurred like tears.
The car was a five-year-old coupe and he knew he needed a new one, but he'd
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fallen into the habit of saving his money to buy a house ... when he'd thought
of marrying Ruth. The habit was difficult to break now, although he knew he
clung to it mostly out of perverse hope that the past year might yet be erased
from their lives.
Why does she want to see me?
he wondered.
And why here, where we used to meet?
Why such secrecy now?
It had been two days since the murder and he found he still couldn't assemble
the events of the period into a coherent whole. Where news stories mentioned
his own involvement, those stories read like something written about a
stranger -- their meaning as blurred as the raindrops in front of him now.
Thurlow felt his whole world invaded by Joe Murphey's psychotic ramblings and
the violent reactions of the community.
It shocked Thurlow to realize that the community wanted Murphey dead. Public
reaction had struck him with and the violence of the storm which had just
passed.
Violent storm, he thought.
A
violence storm.
He looked up at the trees on his left, wondering how long he'd been here. His
watch had stopped, unwound. Ruth was late, though. It was her way.
There'd been the storm. Clouds had grown out of a hard gray sky with rain
crouched low in them. For a time the eucalyptus grove around him had been
filled with frightened bird sounds. A wind had hummed through the high boughs
-- then the rain: big spattering drops.
The sun was back now, low in the west, casting orange light onto the treetops.
The leaves drooped with hanging raindrops. A mist near the ground quested
among scaly brown trunks.
Insect cries came from the roots and the bunchgrass that grew in open places
along the dirt road into the grove.
What do they remember of their storm?
Thurlow wondered.
He knew professionally why the community wanted its legal lynching, but to see
the same attitude in officials, this was the shocker. Thurlow thought about
the delays being placed in his path, the attempts to prevent his own
professional examination of Murphey. The sheriff, district attorney George
Paret, all the authorities knew by now that Thurlow had predicted the
psychotic break which had cost Adele Murphey her life. If they recognized this
as a fact, Murphey had to be judged insane and couldn't be executed.
Paret already had shown his hand by calling in Thurlow's own department chief,
the
Moreno State Hospital director of psychiatry, Dr. LeRoi Whelye. Whelye was
known throughout the state as a hanging psychiatrist, a man who always found
what the prosecution wanted. Right on schedule, Whelye had declared Murphey to
be sane and
"responsible for his acts."
Thurlow looked at his useless wristwatch. It was stopped at 2:14. He knew it
must be closer to seven now. It would be dark soon. What was keeping Ruth? Why
had she asked
him to meet her in their old tryst-big place?
He felt suddenly contaminated by this way of meeting.
Am I ashamed to see her openly now?
he asked himself.
Thurlow had come directly from the hospital and Whelye's unsubtle attempts to
get him to step aside from this case, to forget for the moment that he was
also the county's court psychologist.
The words had been direct: " ... personal involvement ... your old girlfriend
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... her father
... " The meaning was clear, but underneath lay the awareness that Whelye, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]