The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories tcsopkd-5 Read online

  “I’ve never taken Frohedadrine,” John Cupertino said remotely; he stared straight ahead. “I know I’m on Earth. But there’s something wrong with me. Look.” Reaching out, he put his hand through the heavily-padded dashboard; Officer Myers saw the hand disappear up to the wrist. “You see? It’s all insubstantial around me, like shadows. Both of you; I can banish you by just removing my attention from you. I think I can, anyhow. But—I don’t want to!” His voice grated with anguish. “I want you to be real; I want all of this to be real, including Dr. Hagopian.”

  Officer Myers switched his throat-transmitter to line 2 and said, “Put me through to a Dr. Hagopian in San Jose. This is an emergency; never mind his answering service.”

  The line clicked as the circuit was established.

  Glancing at his fellow officer Myers said, “You saw it. You saw him put his hand through the dashboard. Maybe he can banish us.” He did not particularly feel like testing it out; he felt confused and he wished now that he had let Cupertino speed on along the freeway, to oblivion if necessary. To wherever he wanted.

  “I know why all this is,” Cupertino said, half to himself. He got out cigarettes, lit up; his hand was less shaky now. “It’s because of the death of Carol, my wife.”

  Neither officer contradicted him; they kept quiet and waited for the call to Dr. Hagopian to be put through.

  His trousers on over his pajamas, and wearing a jacket buttoned to keep him warm in the night chill, Gottlieb Hagopian met his patient Mr. Cupertino at his otherwise closed-up office in downtown San Jose. Dr. Hagopian switched on lights, then the heat, arranged a chair, wondered how he looked to his patient with his hair sticking in all directions.

  “Sorry to get you up,” Cupertino said, but he did not sound sorry; he seemed perfectly wide-awake, here at four in the morning. He sat smoking with his legs crossed, and Dr. Hagopian, cursing and groaning to himself in futile complaint, went to the back room to plug in the coffeemaker: at least he could have that.

  “The police officers,” Hagopian said, “thought you might have taken some stimulants, by your behavior. We know better.” Cupertino was, as he well knew, always this way; the man was slightly manic.

  “I never should have killed Carol,” Cupertino said. “It’s never been the same since then.”

  “You miss her right now? Yesterday when you saw me you said—”

  “That was in broad daylight; I always feel confident when the sun’s up. By the way—I’ve retained an attorney. Name’s Phil Wolfson.”

  “Why?” No litigation was pending against Cupertino; they both knew that.

  “I need professional advice. In addition to yours. I’m not criticizing you, doctor; don’t take it as an insult. But there’re aspects to my situation which are more legal than medical. Conscience is an interesting phenomenon; it lies partly in the psychological realm, partly—”

  “Coffee?”

  “Lord no. It sets the vagus nerve off for four hours.”

  Dr. Hagopian said, “Did you tell the police officers about Carol? About your killing her?”

  “I just said that she was dead; I was careful.”

  “You weren’t careful when you drove at one-sixty. There was a case in the Chronicle today—it happened on the Bayshore Freeway—where the State Highway Patrol went ahead and disintegrated a car that was going one-fifty; and it was legal. Public safety, the lives of—”

  “They warned it,” Cupertino pointed out. He did not seem perturbed; in fact he had become even more tranquil. “It refused to stop. A drunk.”

  Dr. Hagopian said, “You realize, of course, that Carol is still alive. That in fact she’s living here on Earth, in Los Angeles.”

  “Of course.” Cupertino nodded irritably. Why did Hagopian have to belabor the obvious? They had discussed it countless times, and no doubt the psychiatrist was going to ask him the old query once again: how could you have killed her when you know she’s alive? He felt weary and irritable; the session with Hagopian was getting him nowhere.

  Taking a pad of paper Dr. Hagopian wrote swiftly, then tore off the sheet and held it toward Cupertino.

  “A prescription?” Cupertino accepted it warily.

  “No. An address.”

  Glancing at it Cupertino saw that it was an address in South Pasadena. No doubt it was Carol’s address; he glared at it in wrath.

  “I’m going to try this,” Dr. Hagopian said. “I want you to go there and see her face to face. Then we’ll—”

  “Tell the board of directors of Six-planet Educational Enterprises to see her, not me,” Cupertino said, handing the piece of paper back. “They’re responsible for the entire tragedy; because of them I had to do it. And you know that, so don’t look at me that way. It was their plan that had to be kept secret; isn’t that so?”

  Dr. Hagopian sighed. “At four in the morning everything seems confused. The whole world seems ominous. I’m aware that you were employed by Six-planet at the time, on Ganymede. But the moral responsibility—” He broke off. “This is difficult to say, Mr. Cupertino. You pulled the trigger on the laser beam, so you have to take final moral responsibility.”

  “Carol was going to tell the local homeopapes that there was about to be an uprising to free Ganymede, and the bourgeois authority on Ganymede, consisting in the main of Six-planet, was involved; I told her that we couldn’t afford to have her say anything. She did it for petty, spiteful motives, for hatred of me; nothing to do with the actual issues involved. Like all women she was motivated by personal vanity and wounded pride.”

  “Go to that address in South Pasadena,” Dr. Hagopian urged. “See Carol. Convince yourself that you never killed her, that what happened on Ganymede that day three years ago was a—” He gestured, trying to find the right words.

  “Yes, doctor,” Cupertino said cuttingly. “Just what was it? Because that day—or rather that night—I got Carol right above the eyes with that laser beam, right in the frontal lobe; she was absolutely unmistakably dead before I left the conapt and got out of there, got to the spaceport and found an interplan ship to take me to Earth.” He waited; it was going to be hard on Hagopian, finding the right words; it would take quite some time.

  After a pause, Hagopian admitted, “Yes, your memory is detailed; it’s all in my file and I see no use in your repeating it—I frankly find it unpleasant at this hour of the morning. I don’t know why the memory is there; I know it’s false because I’ve met your wife, talked to her, carried on a correspondence with her; all subsequent to the date, on Ganymede, at which you remember killing her. I know that much, at least.”

  Cupertino said, “Give me one good reason for looking her up.” He made a motion to tear the slip of paper in half.

  “One?” Dr. Hagopian pondered. He looked gray and tired. “Yes, I can give you a good reason, but probably it’s one you’ll reject.”

  “Try me.”

  Dr. Hagopian said, “Carol was present that night on Ganymede, the night you recall killing her. Maybe she can tell you how you obtained the false memory; she implied in correspondence with me that she knows something about it.” He eyed Cupertino. “That’s all she would tell me.”

  “I’ll go,” Cupertino said. And walked swiftly to the door of Dr. Hagopian’s office. Strange, he thought, to obtain knowledge about a person’s death from that person. But Hagopian was right; Carol was the only other person who was present that night… he should have realized long ago that eventually he’d have to look her up.

  It was a crisis in his logic that he did not enjoy facing.

  At six in the morning he stood at Carol Holt Cupertino’s door. Many rings of the bell were required until at last the door of the small, single-unit dwelling opened; Carol, wearing a blue, pellucid nylon nightgown and white furry slippers, stood sleepily facing him. A cat hurried out past her.

  “Remember me?” Cupertino said, stepping aside for the cat.

  “Oh God.” She brushed the tumble of blonde hair back from her eyes, nodded.
“What time is it?” Gray, cold light filled the almost deserted street; Carol shivered, folded her arms. “How come you’re up so early? You never used to be out of bed before eight.”

  “I haven’t gone to bed yet.” He stepped past her, entered the dark living room with its drawn shades. “How about some coffee?”

  “Sure.” Listlessly she made her way to the kitchen, pressed the HOT COFFEE button on the stove; first one, then a second cup appeared, giving off fragrant steam. “Cream for me,” she said, “cream and sugar for you. You’re more infantile.” She handed him his cup; the smell of her—warmth and softness and sleep—mixed with that of the coffee.

  Cupertino said, “You haven’t gotten a day older and it’s been well over three years.” In fact she was even more slender, more supple.

  Seating herself at the kitchen table, her arms still modestly folded, Carol said, “Is that suspicious?” Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright.

  “No. A compliment.” He, too, seated himself. “Hagopian sent me here; he decided I should see you. Evidently—”

  “Yes,” Carol said, “I’ve seen him. I was in Northern California several times on business; I stopped by… he had asked me to in a letter. I like him. In fact you should be about cured by now.”

  “ ‘Cured’?” He shrugged. “I feel I am. Except—”

  “Except that you still have your idée fixe. Your basic, delusional, fixed idea that no amount of psychoanalysis will help. Right?”

  Cupertino said, “If you mean my recollection of killing you, yes; I still have it—I know it happened. Dr. Hagopian thought you could tell me something about it; after all, as he pointed out—”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “but is it really worth going over this with you? It’s so tedious, and my God, it’s only six A.M. Couldn’t I go back to bed and then sometime later get together with you, maybe in the evening? No?” she sighed. “Okay. Well, you tried to kill me. You did have a laser beam. It was at our conapt in New Detroit-G, on Ganymede, on March 12, 2014.”

  “Why did I try to kill you?”

  “You know.” Her tone was bitter; her breasts pulsed with resentment.

  “Yes.” In all his thirty-five years he had never made another mistake as serious. In their divorce litigation his wife’s knowledge of the impending revolt had given her the dominant position; she had been able to dictate settlement terms to him precisely as she wished. At last the financial components had proved unbearable and he had gone to the conapt which they had shared—by then he had moved out, gotten a small conapt of his own at the other end of the city—and had told her simply and truthfully that he could not meet her demands. And so the threat by Carol to go to the homeopapes, the news-gathering extensors of the New York Times and Daily News which operated on Ganymede.

  “You got out your little laser beam,” Carol was saying, “and you sat with it, fooling with it, not saying much. But you got your message over to me; either I accepted an unfair settlement which—”

  “Did I fire the beam?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it hit you?”

  Carol said, “You missed and I ran out of the conapt and down the hall to the elevator. I got downstairs to the sergeant at arms’ room on floor one and called the police from there. They came. They found you still in the conapt.” Her tone was withering. “You were crying.”

  “Christ,” Cupertino said. Neither of them spoke for a time, then; they both drank their coffee. Across from him his wife’s pale hand shook and her cup clinked against its saucer.

  “Naturally,” Carol said matter of factly, “I went ahead with the divorce litigation. Under the circumstances—”

  “Dr. Hagopian thought you might know why I remember killing you that night. He said you hinted at it in a letter.”

  Her blue eyes glittered. “That night you had no false memory; you knew you had failed. Amboynton, the district attorney, gave you a choice between accepting mandatory psychiatric help or having formal charges filed of attempted first-degree murder; you took the former—naturally—and so you’ve been seeing Dr. Hagopian. The false memory—I can tell you exactly when that set in. You visited your employer, Six-planet Educational Enterprises; you saw their psychologist, a Dr. Edgar Green, attached to their personnel department. That was shortly before you left Ganymede and came here to Terra.” Rising she went to fill her cup; it was empty. “I presume Dr. Green saw to the implanting of the false memory of your having killed me.”

  Cupertino said, “But why?”

  “They knew you had told me of the plans for the uprising. You were supposed to commit suicide from remorse and grief, but instead you booked passage to Terra, as you had agreed with Amboynton. As a matter of fact you did attempt suicide during the trip… but you must remember this.”

  “Go on and say it.” He had no memory of a suicide attempt.

  “I’ll show you the clipping from the homeopape; naturally I kept it.” Carol left the kitchen; her voice came from the bedroom. “Out of misguided sentimentality. ‘Passenger on interplan ship seized as—’ ” Her voice broke off and there was silence.

  Sipping his coffee Cupertino sat waiting, knowing that she would find no such newspaper clipping. Because there had been no such attempt.

  Carol returned to the kitchen, a puzzled expression on her face. “I can’t locate it. But I know it was in my copy of War and Peace, in volume one; I was using it as a bookmark.” She looked embarrassed.

  Cupertino said, “I’m not the only one who has a false memory. If that’s what it is.” He felt, for the first time in over three years, that he was at last making progress.

  But the direction of that progress was obscured. At least so far. “I don’t understand,” Carol said. “Something’s wrong.”

  While he waited in the kitchen, Carol, in the bedroom, dressed. At last she emerged, wearing a green sweater, skirt, heels; combing her hair she halted at the stove and pressed the buttons for toast and two soft-boiled eggs. It was now almost seven; the light in the street outside was no longer gray but a faint gold. And more traffic moved; he heard the reassuring sound of commercial vehicles and private commute wheels.

  “How did you manage to snare this single-unit dwelling?” he asked. “Isn’t it as impossible in the Los Angeles area as in the Bay area to get anything but a conapt in a high-rise?”

  “Through my employers.”

  “Who’re your employers?” He felt at once cautious and disturbed; obviously they had influence. His wife had gone up in the world.

  “Falling Star Associates.”

  He had never heard of them; puzzled, he said, “Do they operate beyond Terra?” Surely if they were interplan—

  “It’s a holding company. I’m a consultant to the chairman of the board; I do marketing research.” She added, “Your old employer, Six-planet Educational Enterprises, belongs to us; we own controlling stock. Not that it matters. It’s just a coincidence.”

  She ate breakfast, offering him nothing; evidently it did not even occur to her to. Moodily he watched the familiar dainty movements of her cutlery. She was still ennobled by petite bourgeois gentility; that had not changed. In fact she was more refined, more feminine, than ever.

  “I think,” Cupertino said, “that I understand this.”

  “Pardon?” She glanced up, her blue eyes fixed on him intently. “Understand what, Johnny?”

  Cupertino said, “About you. Your presence. You’re obviously quite real—as real as everything else. As real as the city of Pasadena, as this table—” He rapped with brusque force on the plastic surface of the kitchen table. “As real as Dr. Hagopian or the two police who stopped me earlier this morning.” He added, “But how real is that? I think we have the central question there. It would explain my sensation of passing my hands through matter, through the dashboard of my wheel, as I did. That very unpleasant sensation that nothing around me was substantial, that I inhabited a world of shadows.” Staring at him Carol suddenly laughed. Then continued eating. �
�Possibly,” Cupertino said, “I’m in a prison on Ganymede, or in a psychiatric hospital there. Because of my criminal act. And I’ve begun, during these last years since your death, to inhabit a fantasy world.”

  “Oh God,” Carol said and shook her head. “I don’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry; it’s just too—” She gestured. “Too pathetic. I really feel sorry for you, Johnny. Rather than give up your delusional idea you’d actually prefer to believe that all Terra is a product of your mind, everyone and everything. Listen—don’t you agree it’d be more economical to give up the fixed idea? Just abandon the one idea that you killed me—” The phone rang.

  “Pardon me.” Carol hastily wiped her mouth, rose to go and answer it. Cupertino remained where he was, gloomily playing with a flake of toast which had fallen from her plate; the butter on it stained his finger and he licked it away, reflexively, then realized that he was gnawingly hungry; it was time for his own breakfast and he went to the stove to press buttons for himself, in Carol’s absence. Presently he had his own meal, bacon and scrambled eggs, toast and hot coffee, before him.

  But how can I live? he asked himself.—Gain substance, if this is a delusional world?

  I must be eating a genuine meal, he decided. Provided by the hospital or prison; a meal exists and I am actually consuming it—a room exists, walls and a floor… but not this room. Not these walls nor this floor.

  And—people exist. But not this woman. Not Carol Holt Cupertino. Someone else. An impersonal jailer or attendant. And a doctor. Perhaps, he decided, Dr. Hagopian.

  That much is so, Cupertino said to himself. Dr. Hagopian is really my psychiatrist.

  Carol returned to the kitchen, reseated herself at her now cold plate. “You talk to him. It’s Hagopian.”