The Complete Short Stories

He noticed that the room was full of smoke. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked Kaldren.

‘I came over to invite you to lunch.’ He indicated the bedside phone. ‘Your line was dead so I drove round. Hope you don’t mind me climbing in. Rang the bell for about half an hour. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it.’

Powers nodded, then stood up and tried to smooth the creases out of his cotton slacks. He had gone to sleep without changing for over a week, and they were damp and stale.

As he started for the bathroom door Kaldren pointed to the camera tripod on the other side of the bed. ‘What’s this? Going into the blue movie business, doctor?’

Powers surveyed him dimly for a moment, glanced at the tripod without replying and then noticed his open diary on the bedside table. Wondering whether Kaldren had read the last entries, he went back and picked it up, then stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

From the mirror cabinet he took out a syringe and an ampoule, after the shot leaned against the door waiting for the stimulant to pick up.

Kaldren was in the lounge when he returned to him, reading the labels on the crates lying about in the centre of the floor.

‘Okay, then,’ Powers told him, ‘I’ll join you for lunch.’ He examined Kaldren carefully. He looked more subdued than usual, there was an air almost of deference about him.

‘Good,’ Kaidren said. ‘By the way, are you leaving?’

‘Does it matter?’ Powers asked curtly. ‘I thought you were in Anderson’s care?’

Kaldren shrugged. ‘Please yourself. Come round at about twelve,’ he suggested, adding pointedly: ‘That’ll give you time to clean up and change. What’s that all over your shirt? Looks like lime.’

Powers peered down, brushed at the white streaks. After Kaldren had left he threw the clothes away, took a shower and unpacked a clean suit from one of the trunks.

Until his liaison with Coma, Kaidren lived alone in the old abstract summer house on the north shore of the lake. This was a seven-storey folly originally built by an eccentric millionaire mathematician in the form of a spiralling concrete ribbon that wound around itself like an insane serpent, serving walls, floors and ceilings. Only Kaldren had solved the building, a geometric model of and consequently he had been able to take it off the agents’ hands at a comparatively low rent. In the evenings Powers had often watched him from the laboratory, striding restlessly from one level to the next, swinging through the labyrinth of inclines and terraces to the roof-top, where his lean angular figure stood out like a gallows against the sky, his lonely eyes sifting out radio lanes for the next day’s trapping.

Powers noticed him there when he drove up at noon, poised on a ledge 150 feet above, head raised theatrically to the sky.

‘Kaldren!’ he shouted up suddenly into the silent air, half-hoping he might be jolted into losing his footing.

Kaldren broke out of his reverie and glanced down into the court. Grinning obliquely, he waved his right arm in a slow semi-circle.

‘Come up,’ he called, then turned back to the sky.

Powers leaned against the car. Once, a few months previously, he had accepted the same invitation, stepped through the entrance and within three minutes lost himself helplessly in a second-floor cul-de-sac. Kaldren had taken half an hour to find him.

Powers waited while Kaldren swung down from his eyrie, vaulting through the wells and stairways, then rode up in the elevator with him to the penthouse suite.

They carried their cQcktails through into a wide glass-roofed studio, the huge white ribbon of concrete uncoiling around them like toothpaste squeezed from an enormous tube. On the staged levels running parallel and across them rested pieces of grey abstract furniture, giant photographs on angled screens, carefully labelled exhibits laid out on low tables, all dominated by twenty-foot-high black letters on the rear wall which spelt out the single vast word: ******YOU******

Kaldren pointed to it. ‘What you might call the supraliminal approach.’ He gestured Powers in conspiratorially, finishing his drink in a gulp. ‘This is my laboratory, doctor,’ he said with a note of pride. ‘Much more significant than yours, believe me.’

Powers smiled wryly to himself and examined the first exhibit, an old EEG tape traversed by a series of faded inky wriggles. It was labelled: ‘Einstein, A.; Alpha Waves, 1922.’

He followed Kaldren around, sipping slowly at his drink, enjoying the brief feeling of alertness the amphetamine provided. Within two hours it would fade, leave his brain feeling like a block of blotting paper.

Kaldren chattered away, explaining the significance of the so-called Terminal Documents. ‘They’re end-prints, Powers, final statements, the products of total fragmentation. When I’ve got enough together I’ll build a new world for myself out of them.’ He picked a thick paper-bound volume off one of the tables, riffled through its pages. ‘Association tests of the Nuremberg Twelve. I have to include these..