places. “Excuse me,” Haldersen said serenely. “Excuse me. Excuse me.” He left the hospital, unmolested, by the front door. The air outside was as fresh as young wine; he felt like weeping when it hit his nostrils. He was free. Redemption through oblivion. The disaster high above the Arctic no longer dominated his thoughts. He looked upon it precisely as if it had happened to the family of some other man, long ago. Haldersen began to walk briskly down Van Ness, feeling vigor returning to his legs with every stride. A young woman, sobbing wildly, erupted from a building and collided with him. He caught her, steadied her, was surprised at his own strength as he kept her from toppling. She trembled and pressed her head against his chest. “Can I do anything for you?” he asked. “Can I be of any help?”
Panic had begun to enfold Freddy Munson during dinner at Ondine’s Wednesday night. He had begun to be annoyed with Helene in the midst of the truffled chicken breasts, and so he had started to think about the details of business; and to his amazement he did not seem to have the details quite right in his mind; and so he felt the early twinges of terror.
The trouble was that Helene was going on and on about the art of sonic sculpture in general and Paul Mueller in particular. Her interest was enough to arouse faint jealousies in Munson. Was she getting ready to leap from his bed to Paul’s? Was she thinking of abandoning the wealthy, glamorous, but essentially prosaic stockbroker for the irresponsible, impecunious, fascinatingly gifted sculptor? Of course, Helene kept company with a number of other men, but Munson knew them and discounted them as rivals; they were nonentities, escorts to fill her idle nights when he was too busy for her. Paul Mueller, however, was another case. Munson could not bear the thought that Helene might leave him for Paul. So he shifted his concentration to the day’s maneuvers. He had extracted a thousand shares of the $5.87 convertible preferred of Lunar Transit from the Schaeffer account, pledging it as collateral to cover his shortage in the matter of the Comsat debentures, and then, tapping the Howard account for five thousand Southeast Energy Corporation warrants, he had—or had those warrants come out of the Brewster account? Brewster was big on utilities. So was Howard, but that account was heavy on Mid- Atlantic Power, so would it also be loaded with Southeast Energy? In any case, had he put those warrants up against the Zurich uranium futures, or were they riding as his markers in the Antarctic oil-lease thing? He could not remember.
He could not remember.
He could not remember.
Each transaction had been in its own compartment. The parti tions 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 afternoon. 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 Mueller called, a little after midnight, Munson was growing desperate. 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 discourage 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 everything 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 tomorrow, 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, intelligence, 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 morning.”
When the sculptor was gone, Munson struggled for a feverish 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
