First published in Writers of the Future, Vol. 5, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Jamil Nasir. All rights reserved. Any redistribution, copying, alteration, or use other than personal reading is expressly forbidden.

THE NOMALERS

by Jamil Nasir

     On a bright October morning Ralph Jennings and I, wearing gray pinstripe suits, rattled over the rolling brown fields of Southeastern Iowa in an airport rental car.

     Ralph was driving and giving me instructions: "Remember not to stare. The clients are self-conscious about being different, and they don't like strangers. Let me do the talking. No matter what strange things you may see, don't stare." He added as an afterthought: "And don't let the Old Nomaler fool you. He's a smart old bird."

     I tried to look grave. Meeting The Client is the first tiny step they let you take toward being a real lawyer.

     A town posted "Priopolis Speed Limit 25" came and went in a flash of hamburger joint, gas station, and trailer-size white houses. A few miles later we turned on a bumpy road with a sign that said "Private Keep Out" and stopped at a shack with a wire fence stretching into the distance in both directions. A man came out of the shack.

     He was on the short side of medium height, thin, with lank brown hair. His nose dropped in a thin, straight line from forehead to lip, and his eyes were so close together he looked cross- eyed. Big teeth stuck out crookedly between thin lips. He was like something you would see in an aquarium, on the other side of the glass.

     "Ralph Jennings and Blaine Ramsey to see Mr. Nomaler," Ralph said, and gave the man his driver's license. The man looked at me. I dug out my driver's license. He took both of them into the shack.

     "Security," Ralph explained.

     A few minutes later the man brought our licenses back.

     "OK," was all he said.

     A few miles on we came over a rise, and there was an enormous three-story farmhouse with a jumble of additions, wings, annexes, enlargements, connecting buildings, barns, outbuildings, garages, even a shingled tower, all weathered into a gray fortress that looked like it would hold a hundred people. Smoke drifted from several chimneys. Ralph pulled up to a leaning porch darkened by fir trees and stacked with boxes and junk. Two young men came out onto the porch. They looked like twins of the man at the security shack.

     "Mr. Jennings?" one asked, and they led us into a big front hall without shaking hands.

     Comfortable domestic things were going on in the hall. An aproned woman chased a baby who was running away with someone's shoe. Three ten-year-olds made a terrific noise playing cards on the threadbare carpet. A middle-aged man smoked a pipe in a greasy armchair. There was a smell of lunch cooking.

     Everyone, from the baby to the man, had the same thin, flat nose, squeezed-together eyes, buck teeth, lank hair.

     I tried not to stare. Everyone was staring at us. The baby started to cry and dropped the shoe , and the aproned woman swept him away to another room.

     "The Old Nomaler's busy," said one of the young men. "He wants you to wait."

     "We'll be glad to," said Ralph, who hates waiting for anything.

     They led us up some stairs and down a narrow passage to a small, dim room. Ralph set his briefcase on a swaying coffee table with a strip of Formica missing, and asked: "Can you show me the bathroom?" They led him off like a prisoner. I sat on a bloated vinyl sofa and tried not to breathe a sour smell. After a minute, I opened a window and leaned out of it. Fir trees growing almost against the house gave me a breath of cool, aromatic air.

     Down in the yard, a boy was yelling: "Train coming! Train coming!"

     Train tracks ran two hundred yards behind the house. Seven or eight little boys, some almost babies, quickly gathered by a rusted tractor below my window. An older boy, about twelve , balanced on the tractor's seat. As the train rumbled past, he called out numbers. It took me a minute to figure out that they were the four- and five-digit identification numbers painted on the sides of the train's boxcars. The little boys sat on the ground rigid with concentration.

     When the fifty-odd cars had passed, the older boy yelled: "Total!"

     "Five hundred and twenty thousand, two hundred and twenty-three!" hollered back the little boys almost in unison.

     Steps in the passage announced the two Nomalers marching Ralph back from the bathroom. Both of them stared at the open window, then at me. One brushed past me and shut it severely. Then they stalked off without a word.

     "You shouldn't touch anything," Ralph murmured, sitting on the sofa with a creak. "They don't like it." He pulled his briefcase next to his feet like a protective talisman.

     Half an hour later the two Nomalers led us through a maze of halls, rooms, stairways, foyers, ramps, basements, balconies, and passages. When we finally reached the Old Nomaler's room there was no way to tell what part of the house we were in.

     The room opened off a landing at the top of a dark, creaking staircase. A confused babble came from half a dozen TVs ranged around an old man propped in a king-size bed. When he saw us he nodded to another man, who started turning the TVs off. The old man looked like all the other Nomalers except that he was wrinkled and bald, with a winglike fringe of white hair. He wore dirty pajamas, and a quilt was pulled up to his middle. Around his bed were cardboard boxes full of papers, broken lamps, old bicycle parts, moth-eaten stuffed animals, and other things. Piles of papers lay on ancient desks pushed against the walls. Three worn black rotary telephones sat on one desk next to an obsolete desk-top calculator. A dozen folding chairs were set around.

     "Lawyer Jennings," the old man honked, ducking his head and waving. "Brought somebody with you, I see." He held a pair of bifocals against his vertical nose.

     "This is Blaine Ramsey," said Ralph, patting my shoulder warmly, "one of our most competent and trusted associates." I had been the only associate not busy when the Nomaler matter came in.

     "How do you do, sir," I said.

     "Of course. Hello, Derek," said Ralph.

     "Lawyer Jennings," said the man.

     We took two folding chairs. I got out a note pad and tried to look competent and trustworthy. Derek Dan Nomaler sat where he could read what I wrote down.

     "You've heard about this here new rule making up in St. Paul," said the old man. "The shipping insurance regulation for the Mississippi River?"

     "What do you make of it?"

     Ralph gave him a couple of paragraphs of jargon that sounded good without meaning anything. When he was done, the Old Nomaler said: "I want you to get rid of that regulation, put things back to the way they were before."

     Ralph appeared judicious. "Well, there may be grounds for doing that. Federal pre- emption, perhaps other jurisdictional problems. The difficulty, of course, is standing to appear before the Minnesota Commission. Since the rule by its terms affects shipping interests only, we would effectively have to own a Minnesota shipping company to be an aggrieved party under the appeals statute."

     "We'll buy one," said the Old Nomaler.

     Ralph took that like a man, even nodding as if he had thought of it first.

     The Old Nomaler gave a honking laugh.

II

     The Nomalers' shipping company purchase went through a month later, Ralph hinting darkly that they had overpaid almost a million dollars to close the deal that fast, and in February our appeal came up for hearing before the Minnesota Public Service Commission, Docks Division. The sky in St. Paul was like dirty snow propped just out of reach, the sidewalks cordoned off below twenty-foot ice stalactites that loomed from the parapets of tall buildings. But the streets were almost deserted: everybody with sense walked in their shirtsleeves through the glassed-in "skyways" that ran at second-story height between most of the buildings. There was even a roundabout way to walk all the way from our hotel to the Public Service Commission, which Ralph took, I puffing behind with two bursting litigation bags. An hour later I sat next to him in a small, dingy hearing room as he spoke emotionally about the great water- ways of our nation, the free commerce that had always moved on those waterways, the humble men whose dreams created that commerce, the dangers of governmental strangulation of free enterprise . . . my attention wandered after awhile. The regulation we were seeking to overturn was about as far as you could get from interesting: it simply required shipping using Minnesota docks to carry a particular kind of liability insurance. The only interesting thing about the whole case, as far as I was concerned, was why the Nomalers cared about it in the first place. I glanced idly around the hearing room.

     From the last row of seats provided for interested members of the public, someone was staring at me. A woman.

     Ralph got done with his argument and sat down, and an Associate Commission Counsel stood up and launched into an even more boring argument supporting the rule. I studied the woman out of the corner of my eye. She seemed to watch me with a weird, hungry stare. She was an interesting specimen herself: in a perfect world she might have been beautiful, with a mane of black hair and large, burning eyes, but some stress or sorrow of this world had streaked her hair gray, hollowed out her cheeks, eaten away the flesh of her bone-thin body.

     The Associate Commission Counsel's voice finally droned away to silence. There was a pause, during which the few retirees in the public seating dozed and the room's radiators could be heard faintly ticking out heat; then Administrative Law Judge Sneed roused himself to turn over a sheet of paper and clear his throat and say: "Finally, on behalf of the Council Against Domination, a consumer group certified under Commission Rule 846.C.ii.(j), we will hear from Mr. Timothy Nolan."

     The hungry-looking woman pulled a sheaf of papers out of a black vinyl case and handed them to the man next to her. He came forward. He was fat, with jiggly cheeks, a bulbous nose, and hair worn in a kind of Afro. His face had an injured, anxious look, like a boy spanked for things he didn't do. Something about him was oddly familiar.

     He stood awkwardly in front of Judge Sneed's table, shuffled through his papers for an uncomfortable time, then started in a high, quavering voice: "Yes, your Honor. I'm coming before this Commission, because it's my painful duty to . . . to correct the gross, distorted view of this case offered by the appellants." He glanced at Ralph and me with a mixture of wrath and apprehension.

     "This issue is nothing like what they say it is. They have mischaracterized it. They are wrong on every single point they have brought out. This rule ought to stand just the way it is. It's an abomination it's a shameful But why do you think these appellants have come before this Commission to try to strike down this rule? Mr. Jennings," the word was spat out with much quivering of the cheeks, "has made a lot of fancy arguments which which But let me tell you the real reason, your Honor, the real reason."

     He shuffled through his papers with trembling hands, then started in a dramatic voice: "Your Honor, the shipping insurance rates are going up. Yes, the only two companies offering the exact kind of insurance required by this rule have taken big losses in a harbor accident in the mosquito-infested area of Malaysia. Only a few people know that. Mr. Jennings' clients know it, but they aren't telling. No, your Honor. They haven't presented it to this honorable Commission. The insurance rates will go up by a factor of ten in the next few months.

     " I was uncomfortably aware of the thin woman's eyes on me.

     "If their insurance rates go up that much, barge companies using the Mississippi River will have to raise their freight tariffs. To avoid the higher tariffs, farmers will start moving their produce by rail instead of barge, as a result of which the Minnesota and Southern Railroad Company will start making a profit for the first time in 24 years, prompting a consortium of Australian investors who are looking for railroads to buy, to try to acquire a controlling share in it, causing the Federal Government, which has to approve sales of railroads to foreign interests, to require Australia to lift trade barriers on U.S. farm produce in return; when Australia does that, the selling price of U.S. corn will rise 2-1/2 cents a bushel, making it profitable for Southeastern Iowa farmers to switch from wheat to corn as their preferred crop, slowing the chromium phosphate depletion of their soil and thus making their crops less vulnerable to a grain blight that is spreading now from Mexico." He looked up to shake his fist. Judge Sneed watched him, wide-eyed. "If the Southeastern Iowa farmers keep growing wheat, the blight will wipe them out in five years, and they'll have to sell their land at bankruptcy prices. To Mr. Jennings' clients the Nomalers!"

     He stalked back to his seat, quivering.

     Judge Sneed let go of the edge of his table and took a breath.

     "Thank you, Mr. Nolan," he said. "Any rebuttal?"

     "No, your Honor," Ralph said sweetly.

III

     After the hearing adjourned, Ralph made important noises into a pay phone in the lobby, then said to me: "We've located a potential Minneapolis buyer for the Nomalers' shipping company. I have to do a hearing in Florida tomorrow on the Hess matter; I want you to stay here for a day or two so you can ferry the papers down to the Nomalers if this Minneapolis company makes us an offer."

     He was already reading the Hess pleadings when a cab took his gray profile off in the direction of the airport.

     I got lost in the skyway maze on the way back to the hotel. After I had gone through the second-floor lobby of the First Bank Building for the third time, I put my litigation bags down in front of a fast food place to get my bearings. That was when I saw Timothy Nolan of the Council Against Domination.

     He didn't see me. He was sitting by the window of the fast-food place, gorging himself and crying. As I watched, he stuffed a hamburger, yogurt, fried chicken, chocolate cake, french fries, cole slaw, a pickle, and a grilled cheese sandwich into his mouth until his cheeks ballooned, tears streaming from eyes that stared into a fearful distance.

IV

     Later I slouched on my hotel bed and tried to read a science fiction magazine. The gray light outside my window was getting grayer when someone knocked at the door.

     It was the Council Against Domination woman, gray eyes burning in a gaunt face, long, bony hands twitching on the same black vinyl case she had brought to the Docks Division hearing.

     After I had stared at her for a good long time, she murmured: "Can I come in? I have something to discuss with you."

     I got out of the way, closed the door and my mouth behind her.

     "Sure," I said stupidly. "Come in."

     She gave me what was probably supposed to be a smile, threw her coat on the bed, and walked stiffly to look out at where snow was starting to filter out of a gray sky onto the gray city of St. Paul.

     I cleared my throat. She whirled in alarm, then gave me another emotionless smile, tossed a lock of graying hair out of her eyes.

     "I'm hungry," she said. "Can you buy me dinner?"

     "I can tell you about the Nomalers," she said. "I know you're curious about them."

     "What about them?" I asked stiffly, aware of the rules against Discussing Client Confidences.

     "Everything. How they're planning to drive all the other farmers out of business, dominate the whole country. Everything."

     "You don't really believe that fairy tale Nolan told at the hearing?"

     "It's the truth."

     "Computers can only think about numbers. Nomalers can think about things."

     The telephone on the bed stand rang. She answered it before I could move.

     "Hello?" she murmured in a languid, steamy voice. "I'm sorry, he's busy. Can you call back?" Then: "Oh." She held the phone out to me.

     It was Ralph, in Florida. He sounded a little funny, but he only said: "I just heard from our Minneapolis buyers. They're going to make us an offer. You can pick up the papers tonight. The Kristensen Transport Company." He gave me the address. "I'll call the Nomalers to set up a time when you can take the papers down."

     "Uh-huh."

     "Yes. You see, he used to be one of them."

     That stopped me. I suddenly realized why Nolan looked familiar: the narrow forehead, close fish-eyes, bobbing Adam's-apple but force-fed fat, with a cheap nose job and a permanent.

     "They sent him to college as an experiment. Their young don't go to school they bribed some state education officials to certify a home program. Tim was one of their best trainees. But in college he found out how evil they are, turned against them. He's been fighting them ever since."

     The pride in her voice made me wonder: "He met you in college?"

     She shrugged.

     "I think you're both a couple of nuts," I said. "How "

     There was a knock at the door and a muffled voice said: "Room service."

     The woman had a sudden urge to use the bathroom.

     I opened the door and a cheerful kid wearing pink and gold with epaulets wheeled in a hot cart and set the little table by the window. He was taking the covers off the plates when he stopped in the middle of asking me had I seen the basketball game, and his face got red. The Council Against Domination woman had come out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel. A small towel.

     "Darling, is dinner oh, excuse me," she said, and smiled winningly at the kid. When he had left, still red, I closed my mouth far enough to ask: "What are you ?"

     The phone rang. We both dived for it. I got it, but not before she had delivered a very sexy giggle into the mouthpiece.

     "Hello, Blaine Ramsey? This is Derek Dan Nomaler," came a staticky, faraway voice.

     "Hello, Mr. Nomaler!" I said, trying to sound cordial and businesslike. The woman was crawling on me, breathing like a locomotive. Her towel had gotten lost. She put her mouth near the telephone and panted: "Come on, baby, let's do it some more "

     I got my hand on her face and pushed. She bit me.

     "Ramsey," came the distant, crackly voice. "Are you there?"

     "Yes, sir!"

     The woman was doing her best to kick a hole in my rib cage, laughing wildly.

     "I'll be there! Thank you, sir!"

     "I have to dress," she said, and ran into the bathroom, slamming the door.

     In thirty seconds I went through a range of emotions, settling finally on wild curiosity.

     The woman's black vinyl case was lying on the bed. I unzipped it.

     An inner ID tag said: "If Lost, Please Return To: Ms. Jessica Ann Leighton, 301 Elm Street, Minneapolis, Minn. 52217," written small and neat. Nolan's notes from the hearing were in a different hand, wavering and scribbly. The only other thing in the case was a big diagram made of pieces of note paper scotch taped together. I unfolded it and laid it on the bed.

     It was some kind of flow chart, drawn in ball-point pen, with hundreds of square, round, triangular, and diamond-shaped boxes connected by lines, arrows, and symbols. I read the writing in some of the boxes. One said: "Piedmont 351, vel. 345 mph, alt. 18500 ft., acc. .05 g, vect. 87/108/??" and a lot of other even less comprehensible stuff. Another said: "Precip. 82 %, vis(alt)=" and ended in something like the General Theory of Relativity. In the very center, with many lines and arrows leading to it, was a big red magic marker star.

     The bathroom door opened, there was a sharp drawn breath, and then the woman was between me and the diagram, pushing me away with one hand and folding it up with the other. When she had it and Nolan's notes back in the case, she tossed back her hair and looked me in the face. She was breathing hard, and in her eyes was exultation and hatred. "Goodbye, Mr. Ramsey," she spat, and ran out of there.

V

     I paced the room a little, watching dinner for two congeal on the table by the window and trying to make any sense at all of Ms. Jessica Ann Leighton. Finally, I figured I needed professional help. I called the firm's Washington number. It was pretty late, but one of the paralegals, Edward Bolingbroke III, was still in the office. He wasn't happy about the assignment I gave him, but an hour later he called back.

     "There's a lot in the Nomaler files," he told me. "I haven't been able to review all of it, but I can give you a start. First thing we handled for them was a tort case wrongful death. About twenty years back. One of the Nomaler boys had a car accident with a gasoline truck that made weekly deliveries to a gas station down there. Freak impact flipped the truck into somebody's wheatfield. Both drivers got out, nobody hurt, but some gas spilled and caught fire, started a pretty bad brush fire. It was late summer dry. The wind was blowing in such a way that the fire burned up to a big chemical storage tank owned by a local company, full of methy methy-iso no, methyl iso anyway, something poisonous they use for making pesticides. The tank caught fire and blew up, and a cloud of poison smoke blew almost a mile and settled smack onto a local farmer's house. Killed the farmer and most of his family. It just happened that he was a big wheel around there, had organized local opposition to the Nomalers, boycotting their wholesale outfits, refusing to sell them land and so forth. Survivors brought suit in county court. Your friend Jennings got the venue changed, and the jury denied liability for lack of proximate cause: unforeseeable freak chain of events. The case of Leighton v. Nomaler, affirmed by the Iowa Court of Appeals at "

     "Leighton?"

     "Samuel Arthur Leighton was the farmer's name."

     I was silent until Eddie said: "You still there? Want to hear the next one?"

     "Yeah."

     "Or what?"

     "Or nothing. They're just damn lucky. That's as far as I've gotten so far."

     The next afternoon I flew to Iowa City with the Kristensen purchase contract papers and rented a car. I took Interstate 80 west, turned south on state highway 149, and west again on a county route. Between country songs and ads for hog wormer and feed corn, the radio weatherman was predicting light snow and twenty degrees below zero.

     The twenty degrees below zero I could believe, but by the time I reached Priopolis it was pitch dark and the light snow had turned heavy. I could barely see the "Private Keep Out" sign marking the Nomaler's road. I crawled along at 10 mph past the dark guardhouse. By the time I saw the lights of the main house, it was almost nine-thirty. A hundred yards away, my car stuck in a snowdrift and I couldn't get it unstuck. I trudged to the porch Ralph and I had used before. The wind through my overcoat was numbing. I pounded on the door with a hand that felt like a piece of wood.

     I worked my frozen lips. "I'm the lawyer "

     "What do you want?" rasped the skinny, fishlike man holding it.

     "I'm the lawyer from Minneapolis I brought the papers "

     "Where's your car?"

     "Got stuck up the road."

     "Let's see your I.D."

     "Can I come in?"

     "Not yet."

     Heat flowing out of the door brought some feeling back into me. By the time the other man came back with my license, I was warm enough to be mad as hell.

     But since these folks were Ralph's clients, I limited my remarks to "I appreciate your hospitality," as they let me in. They ignored me. The one with the shotgun locked it in a closet, bolted and chained the porch door. Then they all went off without a word. The hall was still, empty, warm, and smelled of dust and firewood. Now and then a floorboard creaked somewhere. I stood on the doormat, snow melting off my coat and hair. I noticed the mat didn't say "Welcome" on it.

     Finally two Nomalers came down the hall. One said: "The Old Nomaler's ready to see you." We took the scenic route to his room, and soon I was again basking in his beneficient gaze, Derek Dan hanging around behind my chair close enough to pick my pockets.

     "No offense," honked the Old Nomaler, waving a hand at me. "Folks got to be careful who they let in these days."

     I got the Kristensen papers in order and handed him a set, explained the details of the purchase offer. I could feel Derek Dan's eyes over my shoulder, could hear the moaning wind banging something loose against the side of the house. I felt suddenly alone and vulnerable, like a diver in the kingdom of the fish-people. I missed Ralph, with his gray head, opaque eyes, careful hands, his steadfast refusal to believe in anything but winning cases.

     After I explained the deal, the Old Nomaler signed each paper in exactly the right place.

     "Mr. Nomaler," I said as I put them away, "I'd like to ask a favor. The weather's pretty bad out. My car's stuck in the snow, and I don't think I could possibly get back to Iowa City tonight anyway. Could you put me up for the night?"

     He thought about it for a long time, eyes rolling up to look at the ceiling. Finally he said: "Well, I suppose so, I suppose so. Be murder to turn a feller out on a night like this." He honked with laughter. "Derek Dan, see to it."

     I followed Derek Dan onto the dark landing, where my two escorts stood against the wall. He took one of them into a small side room and closed the door. The other watched me like he might miss something important if he blinked.

     A low-voiced argument started in the side room. As it got heated, I caught a few words: "responsibility," "never" "Nomaler," and "murder."

     But they came out deadpan as ever. Derek Dan went back into the Old Nomaler's room. The other two walked me through the house to a small, dim room.

     "Woman's coming to make the bed," one of them said, and shut the door. A key turned in the lock

     There was a knock, the key turned, and a young Nomaler woman poked her head in.

     "I come to make the bed," she said, and flushed deeply, as if that might give me ideas.

     "I won't watch."

     "I'll get you your dinner," she said when she had turned back the cover and smoothed it.

     "It's very kind of you."

     "Well the Old Nomaler said to do it. I wouldn't dare on my own account."

     "My name's Emily Del," she said. "I'll be back to clear away when you're done."

     "Blaine," I said, and held out my hand. She shook it inexpertly, went out quickly.

     The food was odd: thin, lukewarm broth, unfamiliar vegetables, and home-baked bread, all spiced heavily with something strange. After I ate it, I felt peculiar. I was trying to pin down the feeling when Emily Del came in again. She closed the door and leaned her back against it.

     "Where are you from?" she asked.

     "Washington, D.C."

     "Is that far away?"

     "About a thousand miles."

     "Still in Iowa, though, isn't it?"

     "No. But it's still in America."

     "If I asked you to do something," she said, "would you promise not to tell anyone?"

     "I guess so."

     "Can you read her name?" she breathed, her finger on the caption.

     "Natassia Kinsky."

     I studied her narrow face, snaggled teeth.

     She got up and moved away timidly. "Thank you for reading her name to me."

     "Can't you read?"

     "The boys read better?"

     "But what's the point of it?"

     "Sure."

VI

     It was almost midnight when I got undressed, got between the covers that Emily Del's deft, skinny hands had made up; but I couldn't sleep. I lay and listened to the wind shake the house. The strange feeling from the Nomaler food had crept into my brain, making it strangely clear, thoughts ranged neatly in rows like pieces on a chessboard. After awhile I nudged one of them tentatively: my wondering about Jessica Ann Leighton and Timothy Nolan. Thought patterns built effortlessly around it.

     Unless Jessica Ann was just crazy, she had been trying to advertise yesterday that she was in my hotel room naked. She had given her pitch to anyone who would listen, but had stopped pitching right after Derek Dan Nomaler's phone call. That made it look like her public relations effort was aimed at the Nomalers. But why? Thoughts whirled like jigsaw puzzle pieces, settling finally into an odd pattern. Jessica Ann had told me that Nolan had "calculated" I was curious about the Nomalers. If you believed that, silly as it sounded, and believed that Nolan used the same methods the Nomalers did, then the Nomalers could also "calculate" my curiosity, perhaps could "calculate" that Nolan had "calculated" it and had sent Jessica Ann to take advantage of it. Derek Dan Nomaler had heard a woman in the throes of passion in my room yesterday, and could confirm who it was if he checked with the hotel and ran across a certain bellboy. With me staying in their house, the Nomalers would surely wonder whether I was loyal, or whether Jessica Ann Leighton, whose father they had killed, had turned my head with her emaciated charms. But how had Nolan known I would be staying in the Nomaler house? Could he have "calculated" the snowstorm? One of the boxes on the diagram in Jessica Ann's vinyl case had said "Precip. 82%"; did that symbolize light snow turned unexpectedly heavy? The same diagram had a big red star in the middle; what or who was that? Some calamity the Council Against Domination had prepared and sent into the Nomaler household with me? Was I a messenger of doom to my own clients? I leapt up, ran from the room and down narrow, twisting corridors. I had to see the Old Nomaler, warn him about the Red Star, tell him...

     I woke up with a start, wind howling faintly outside the window. I lay in the dark for awhile, trying to get the dream out of my head, cursing the Nomalers' strange food. Gradually I became aware of an uncomfortable pressure in my bladder. I got out of bed and dressed without turning on the light.

     "Hello?" I said to no one.

     There was a dim light at one end of the hall. I went that way, floorboards squeaking faintly. There was no other sound but the distant gusting of wind. I went down some stairs, along another hall, looking through open doors for a bathroom. One doorway showed a small, plain chapel with pews and an altar below a crucifix flanked by candles. For no particular reason, I went in.

     The crucifix was carved wood, and there was something strange about it: as I got closer I saw that the figure of the Messiah was dressed in farm boots, overalls, and a hat. The face was thin, with a long perpendicular nose, eyes so close together they looked crossed, buck teeth jutting at different angles between thin lips. Underneath the crucifix was a plaque: "Jacob John Nomaler, Murdered January 9, 1919." That gave me a funny feeling. I backed away, backed into the first row of pews so hard I sat down. A hymnal lay open on the pew, a rough, handsewn book crudely printed. It was open to a hymn called "Rivers of Their Blood." The first verse went:

We will swim in Rivers of their blood,
We will soar in Regions of the sun,
We will show them
What is meant to be.
We will drown them
In righteousness' sweet sea.

     I got up and walked as fast and quietly as I could in the direction of my room. It took me three or four minutes to realize I was lost. When I stopped to get my bearings, I heard voices coming faintly down a flight of stairs.

     I started to hurry in the other direction, but stopped myself. I was these folks' lawyer, for God's sake. If they wanted to practice bizarre religions, I should be glad. I would just go up and ask whoever was there to show me the bathroom. I started up the stairs.

     I stopped again almost at once. I recognized one of the voices. It was the Old Nomaler's, and I was on the staircase below his room.

     His voice was doing strange things. It droned with a stream of words, like an auctioneer singing a Gregorian chant. It was punctuated by mechanical clicking, rustling of paper, and monosyllables in other voices.

     I poked my head cautiously above the top stair. In dim yellow lamplight the Old Nomaler sat in his bed, an I.V. in one arm, face flushed and eyes flashing. On each side of him sat a middle-aged Nomaler, holding him by the hand. One was Derek Dan. A dozen others sat in a crowded circle around the bed, rifling through cardboard boxes of papers. A younger Nomaler sat a little way off talking into a telephone; another was writing furiously on a thick tablet; a third was tacking pages from the tablet onto a corked wall. An old-fashioned desk-top calculator rested on Derek Dan's lap, and his free hand flew over the keys.

     " . . . Ramseyum cognation Leightonee Nolanor in homology, apposition, cause, proportion, context," the Old Nomaler's voice droned, "opportunity, confidence factor, relation Jenningsum Jenningsee "

     "Innocence pathway," rapped Derek Dan.

     "Guilt pathway," rapped the middle-aged Nomaler on the Old Nomaler's other side.

     " rapport, intersection, eliminate below-ten, above-ten, ignore Leightonum Leightonor "

     The Nomalers with the cardboard boxes, shuffling papers rapidly, began weaving words into the Old Nomaler's canticle: "libidinous," "financial," "eighty-three," "adverse," "input need hotelus," "inhibitor guilt pathway."

     "Maximum destructive," said Derek Dan.

     "Projection," said the other middle-aged Nomaler.

     The one at the telephones was dialing.

     A few inches behind me, a voice screamed: "Emergency stop!"

     "Is there a bathroom around here?" I quavered, pulling my collar straight.

     The Old Nomaler laughed feverishly.

     "Listening?" he demanded.

     The three Nomalers who had grabbed me nodded.

     "What else?"

     "I was just looking for the bathroom," I said feebly. "I got lost, and "

     The Old Nomaler laughed again, loud and long and crazy. "Take him to the bathroom!" he screamed savagely, veins in his neck and forehead distended. Then he started his crazy laughing again, his eyes on my face staring and murderous, jagged, rotten teeth bared.

     The three Nomalers marched me to a windowless bathroom with an old-fashioned toilet you pulled a chain to flush, a bathtub standing on enameled claws, and a mirror with the silver flaking off the back. I stood over the toilet for five minutes, but nothing would come out. My face in the mirror looked wild. When I opened the door, the three Nomalers were standing in a row. They marched me through the house in dizzying spirals, and my room appeared when I least expected it. I went in meekly, the door was closed and locked, and their footsteps went away.

     The key turned and a dark streak hit the bed with a maddened keening.

     I dived on the streak.

     It was like fighting a bale of wire and sharp elbows.

     "They're going to kill us," she sobbed. "They're coming! We have to get away!"

     "Who?" I hissed.

     "The Calculators! They were whispering outside my door. I talked to you and you saw the Central Processor, and they're coming! They'll fry us and eat us like they did to !"

     I put my hand over her mouth, held still. I thought a floorboard had creaked in the hall. I jumped to the door, reversed the key, locked it from the inside.

     The knob turned silently.

     "Come on," I whispered again, and dived onto one.

     It bent almost double, and I slid feet-first into snow above my knees. Emily Del came down the same way, her dress over her head. Bitter wind cut deep into me. My hands were already numb. Emily Del was wearing only her purple house dress.

     "Come on!" I yelled above the storm. I grabbed her hand and dragged her in the direction I thought my rental car must be. Fifty yards from the house she fell in the snow. When I picked her up, she was stiff with cold. I unbuttoned my coat, wrapped half of it around her, and we stumbled on. The snow cleared for a second between gusts, and I saw the car, snow drifted to the roof.

     My car keys weren't in the coat pocket where I had left them. The car doors were locked. I hadn't locked them. Suddenly I knew what had happened.

     Emily Del was slipping to the ground. I held her. "We have to get back to the house," I yelled in her ear.

     Her face was still, preoccupied, eyes almost closed.

     "I can't," she murmured.

     "We have to! They tricked us, to get us outside. They wouldn't have killed us that would mean trouble. They don't do things that way. They analyze, calculate, manipulate they can't get in trouble for this we snuck out, forgot the car keys. How do they do it? And without computers!"

     A smile of pride came into her sleeping face. "Computers can only think about numbers," she slurred, "Nomalers can think about things. Nomalers "

     And she was gone.

     I held her cold body in my arms. I could faintly see the dark hulk of the house in the snow. "You bastards!" I screamed against the wind.

     That seemed to get results. A metal shriek drowned the roar of the storm. A fiery mass plummeted from the clouds straight onto the house, and the walls burst outward in blinding flames, hurling streamers of fire and debris like a Fourth of July rocket, throwing weird shadows in the snow.

     I dived behind the car just in time to escape a shower of hot metal and burning wood that broke the windows and thudded into the snow, hissing and steaming. When I poked my head out to look, only splinters of the house were standing, and the whole area was burning fiercely, hissing and sparking.

     I picked Emily Del up and slogged nearer the fire. There was no need to get in the car now. There was plenty of heat.

VII

     I woke up next afternoon in an Iowa City hospital in a private room, bought with the firm's group health insurance. There was nothing much wrong with me. Emily Del was recovering from acute hypothermia in another room.

     An orderly brought me some stuff that was supposed to be lunch, and a newspaper. Banner headlines on the front page said: AIR CRASH KILLS HUNDREDS IN IOWA.

     "A commercial airliner collided with a private plane over Southeastern Iowa early this morning, crashing into a crowded farmhouse in what aviation officials are calling a freak accident. Blizzard conditions kept rescue teams from reaching the crash site for nearly two hours. Of the estimated two hundred people aboard Piedmont 351 and in the farmhouse, only two are known to have survived." There were gruesome details of the carnage, and descriptions of the disaster workers' heroic battle with the elements, then: "The tragedy began when Timothy A. Nolan, a Minneapolis resident, flew a rented aircraft out of a small airfield near Minneapolis. While flying conditions were marginal, according to Elstien Wiggs, flight controller at the airport, Nolan, a licensed pilot, was determined to reach Priopolis, Iowa that evening. An unexpectedly heavy snowstorm interfered with transponders carried by Nolan's plane and the air- liner, devices normally enabling air traffic controllers to track planes and warn them of danger."

     The telephone by my bed rang. It was Ralph Jennings, full of questions.

     "I hope you managed to save the Kristensen purchase papers?" was the first one.

     I admitted that I hadn't.

     "Damn it, Ramsey Does Ms. Nomaler still want to sell the company?"

     "I don't know."

     "Damn it, Ramsey, what have you been doing up there?"

     "Hello, this is Blaine Ramsey," I said when she answered.

     There was silence at the other end of the line.

     "I just wanted to tell you that I'm inclined to believe your story about the Nomalers," I went on. "And I wanted to ask whether you and Nolan set up that whole charade with me at the hotel to divert their attention, so they would be too busy to calculate what someone like Nolan might do with an airplane and a freak snowstorm . . ."

     Her voice was icy. "I have no idea who you are or what you're talking about," she said. "Please don't bother me again." And she hung up.

     I stared at the telephone. Its expression revealed nothing.

^^