“I owe you my life. That still doesn’t make me love you in the way you want.”
“Friends?” he said.
“We’re more than just that.”
“O.K.,” he said. “We’re more than just that. That’s good enough for me. The subject won’t come up again…unless you wish to bring it up.”
She rose, turned, and walked out into the forest.
He felt very rejected, though he really had no right to do so. Right? What did that mean?
At that moment, the face of a child drifted across his mental wallscreen. It was the same face that had flashed before him not long ago. Now, he recognized it as his when he was about five years old. The first time he had seen the face, it had seemed to be that of a ten year old and he had not been certain that it was his. The features were definitely his own but now those of an infant of five. The face was very sad.
He shook his head after the face had faded away.
What the hell did the hallucination, or whatever it was, mean?
Was it the beginning of a mental breakdown?
He did not know, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Thursday, an hour before daybreak, the airboat slipped from the forest into the eastern waters of the basin. Submerged until the surface was level with its pilot’s chin, the boat moved slowly toward the La Brea Tower Complex. The sky was still cloudy but was expected to be clear a few hours after dawn. Duncan saw no gank airboats, but he did pass several large surface craft bringing in goods from the freighters anchored in the harbor outside the basin. The transfer craft were on their way to the docks at the bases of the towers. There they would unload their cargoes.
He slowed the boat as it approached a dock. This was formed of two breakwaters running out from the base of the tower and a curved one half-guarding the opening. The boat slipped into the smooth water where dozens of small sailboats and powercraft and two big yachts were anchored. Above it was the overhang of the second level of the tower. He guided the boat between two yachts and to a floating landing dock. Beyond was the entrance, an arch forty feet wide and twilight lit.
No one was here in this place reserved for the upper class citizens who could afford such expensive craft and dock fees.
While the water bumped the side of the boat against the landing, Snick scrambled out. Duncan verbally programmed the boat, then got out. Its canopies open, the boat sank beneath the water. It would stop when it touched bottom, fifty feet or so, and would turn its power off.
They stood there for a moment, both in organic uniforms, looking like two officers who had every right to be there.
The entrance at the base of the tower was a huge archway beyond which was a big gymnasium. They passed through its bleak walls into a long and towering hall. Doors along this gave access to large rooms. The few that were open showed conference chambers, a large number of stoner cylinders to be used for emergency stayovers or accidents, dining rooms, a chess room, and a handball court. When they got to a suite of offices, Duncan went into the nearest, Snick close behind him. But she said, “Someone’s coming!”
He spun around. Snick’s hand was on the butt of her gun, still in its holster. He heard a man’s voice. A few seconds later, a woman’s voice.
He said, softly, “We could hide in here, but they might be heading here. Better to step out as if we’re ganks searching for the fugitives.”
“They might be ganks, too.”
He shrugged, and he walked out the door into the hallway. The woman stopped talking, gasped, and put her hand on her chest. The man looked startled.
“You scared me!” the woman said. “Popping out like that!”
“Anything wrong, officers?” the man said.
Both had halted.
“I’d like your IDs, please,” Duncan said.
“Hey!” the man said. “We just came down to go sailing! It’s our day off so we’re getting an early start!”
Duncan held out his right hand, his left poised above his gun. “It’s necessary to see your IDs.”
“Do you know who we are?” the man said loudly. His face was red.
“IDs, please,” Snick said.
“They don’t know,” the woman said. “They must have a good reason. Go ahead, Manny, cooperate.”
She lifted the five-pointed starshape hanging from a necklace around her neck and held it out to Duncan. The man, his face even more flushed, opened and closed his mouth several times, then removed his starshape. Like many citizens, they wore breast-pieces in which the ID card formed the center.
“I want to see your IDs, too!” the man said. “It’s my right, you know!”
“Of course,” Duncan said smoothly. “After we’ve checked you out.”
The man was about his own height though older and rather beefy. The woman was several inches taller than Snick. Since both wore loose-fitting robes, that difference in size between the women did not matter much. If he and Snick had to do so, they could wear the robes.
While Snick stayed with the two, Duncan went back into the office. He found a slot on the wall and voice-activated the screen above it. He asked for a printout, took out the man’s card, and put the woman’s into the slot. A moment later, with the printouts in his right hand, he went back into the hall. Going to Snick, he said, quietly, “I think we’re in luck.”
Albert Park Lair and Genevre Tomata Kingsley were executives in DIET, the Department of Import-Export Transportation. DIET was concerned mainly with the traffic of food and manufactured goods into and out of Los Angeles. Lair was First Assistant to the First Director of DIET. Kingsley was head of the Statistics Flow Section of DIET.
They were man and wife and lived in a suite on the 125th level. Their only child was twenty subyears old and was a student at the Berkeley College of Economics in San Francisco State.
“Do you have house servants?” Duncan said.
“Yes,” Kingsley said.
“Are they in your apartment today?”
Kingsley, her voice quavering, said, “No.”
Duncan returned the necklaces and the ID cards to Lair and Kingsley. Then he and Snick herded Lair and Kingsley into the chessroom. These stood in one corner, looking nervous by now. Their captors were in another corner talking quietly.
“This place is the Foremast Club,” Duncan said, “reserved, I suppose, for the elite.”
The man glared and said, “I demand that you account for your abominable behavior and ID yourselves!”
“We’re going straight up to your apartment,” Duncan said. “If we run across anyone you know, you’ll act normally. Don’t try to warn anybody. You’ll both be killed.”
Lair’s face got red again, and he opened his mouth but could not get the words out. He sounded as if he were choking. Kingsley gasped and became even paler.
“You’re not ganks!” Lair finally said.
“Not another word,” Duncan said, “unless you’re greeted by someone.”
“You can’t get away with this!” Lair said. “I’ll…”
Duncan slammed his fist into Lair’s stomach. Lair bent over, clutching himself, and he gurgled. When he stood up, he snarled soundlessly, but he went along with the others down the hallway quietly. He was trembling, and so was Kingsley.
They got to the elevator reserved for the 125th-floor dwellers and went into it. So far, so good, Duncan thought. There would be no stops until they got to the top level unless the elevator was halted for some reason by the organics. He could think of no cause for that, but there might be ganks at the top end of the shaft. And there were.
He saw them as he stepped out of the cage after telling Snick to hold the two inside until he checked the hallway out. They were two, a male and a female, in patroller uniforms. Their holster straps were velcro-closed, and they did not seem to be in a hurry.
He half-turned and spoke softly enough so that the ganks, a hundred feet away, could not hear him.
“Tweedledee and Tweedledum coming,” he said. “Routine, apparently. Come
on out. Drill these two if they cause any trouble. I’ll take care of T and T.”
Snick spoke to Lair and Kingsley. “Act like your lives depend on your acting, which they do.”
The ganks had slowed down when they saw Duncan. He turned back to face them as the others left the cage. He smiled tightly at them and fell in with Snick behind their prisoners. Lair’s and Kingsley’s necks and backs were very stiff; they moved like robots.
“No winks, no facial expressions, nothing to attract their attention,” he said.
The two were very frightened and close to panic. They might scream for help or grab the ganks or just start running. Then they had passed the ganks, who looked at the two captives and nodded their heads in greeting. Did Lair and Kingsley know them by sight? Would the failure of the two to return the greeting puzzle—or even alert—the ganks?
Duncan nodded at them and walked on. He felt his back prickle when he was by them. It was as if a phantom hand had painted a target on his back, the bull’s-eye on his spine.
Though he wanted to turn his head to look behind him, he did not. He noted that the apartment entrance-doors all had holes with blackened edges where the locks had been burned out. The wallscreens on the wide and lofty-ceilinged corridor displayed many designs and landscapes and, here and there, historic scenes from TV dramas. These had been programmed by today’s tenants as hallway decorations. Tomorrow, the displays would be different.
Not until Lair and Kingsley stopped before their apartment door did Duncan look back. The ganks were gone. They might, however, recall later that they had seen two people on the 125th level who looked just like the archcriminals.
Lair had inserted his fingers in the hole in the door to move it back into its wall recess. Snick said, “You told me your servants wouldn’t be in your apartment today. You’d better not be lying.”
Kingsley turned her head. “I’m not stupid.”
The door slid aside. Snick entered first, drawing her gun. Duncan gestured to the couple to precede him. He looked up and down the corridor before stepping inside and sliding the door to shut it. No one was in the hallway.
The foyer was spacious and had a thick carpet with ancient American Indian designs. Thursday’s occupants, Lair and Kingsley, liked this. But if Friday’s did not, they could rearrange the carpet patterns and designs to suit themselves. Some work with the wallscreens and a command, and the lines and colors would change to Friday’s tastes.
Duncan had the two stand in the foyer while Snick searched the suite. Presently, a square glowed in the foyer wall, and her face, smiling, appeared. “Come on in. Everything seems to be O.K.”
They entered a living room, very large by the ordinary citizens’ standards. Its walls were gray, the displays having been turned off. Lair and Kingsley, at Duncan’s order, sat down side by side on a sofa. Snick entered the room from the dining room. “You can look for yourself if you want to, but there are two bedrooms, big PP’s, two bathrooms, a small gym, the stoner room, a child’s room with two beds and a crib—there are five children in stoners—a playroom, a game room, and a huge kitchen. Nothing as big as Ananda’s, but they’re not World Councillors.”
Duncan spoke to the two on the sofa. “You expecting company today? Have any appointments outside of this apartment? Is there anyone who might be expecting a call from you? Or might call you?”
They both shook their heads.
“You don’t go shopping today? Nobody will deliver your groceries?”
Kingsley said, huskily, “No. Today’s the final one of our three-day weekend. Could I have a drink of water?”
Duncan nodded, and he looked at Snick. She accompanied the woman to the bathroom. There was silence for a moment while Lair tried to outstare Duncan and failed. Then he said, “What’s going on? You’re not real ganks, that’s obvious.”
Instead of replying, Duncan voice-activated a wallstrip and asked for Channel 28. Two squares, each three feet wide, glowed. The left one showed the newshead giving the Thursday morning world and local news. The right square displayed the icons of Duncan and Snick and their biodata overlaid with fainter white words: REWARD FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO THEIR ARREST—30,000 CREDITS.
Lair’s eyes widened, and he became pale.
“You…!”
Duncan nodded and said, “Yes, we are.”
He was going to reassure them that they would not be harmed if they cooperated. His mouth stayed open. That child’s face, his face, had risen from the bottom of his mind like a ghost through a floor. It had been sad. Now it was twisted with…what? Grief? Horror?
Then the face faded out.
“Something wrong?” Snick said.
7
“I’m all right,” he said. “I just had a thought…it’s gone now. Maybe it’ll come back.”
Why did he not tell her about the face?
He had no idea what it meant, and she certainly could not help him with it. Moreover, she might wonder about his fitness in this struggle for survival. If the recurring face was the symptom of a mental breakdown—God, he hoped it was not!—she would not only have to be on guard against their pursuers but worry about him. That might take the edge off a very keen knife, Snick.
Should that hallucination—if it was such—become more frequent to the point where it interfered seriously with his thinking and behavior, he would tell her about it. Until then, it was best that she not have to concern herself with one more problem.
He spoke to the two “hosts.” “You. Let’s go to the stoner room. But give me your ID cards, first.”
They rose from the sofa. Kingsley said, “What are you going to do to us?” Lair said, “You’ll pay for this! We’re not just nobodies, you know!”
“Bluster,” Duncan said. “Sheer bluster. Give me your cards.”
They went silently but pale and shaking. Snick preceded the two; Duncan brought up the rear. They entered a room containing fourteen upright gray cylinders and three casket-like cases. All of them had doors with large round windows. The faces of the occupants in twelve of them looked out at the opposite wall through the glass and the three small children stared upward at the ceiling through the stoner windows. Snick opened the doors of the empty cylinders, and gestured at Kingsley and Lair to go into them.
The woman looked relieved. She was not going to be killed. The man shouted out of his cylinder just before Snick closed its door, “You stinking scum! I’ll be there when you’re stoned forever, and I’ll…”
Snick set the dials at the bases of the cylinders. Immediately, the two were statues, their molecular motion slowed down, their bodies cold and hard. The faces and the eyes were those of the dead. But when power was reapplied, they would be alive and warm and the eyes would take in light, not the darkness.
Duncan went back to the living room, where he picked up the ID cards from the sofa. Snick was searching through the personal possessions (PP) closet of their hosts. He went into the kitchen. Its back wall was against the back wall of another suite. The dial of his gun set at BURN, CR (close range), he cut through the wall to a depth of four inches. By the time that Snick, attracted by the stench of disintegrating material, came into the kitchen, he had outlined a potential exit. There would be another inch of wood and plastic to penetrate before the square could be kicked into the next room. This would undoubtedly be the kitchen of the suite behind that of their hosts.
Snick did not ask him what he was doing. She knew that he was making sure that, if they were attacked by ganks through the front door, they had a way out through the back.
“Probably a waste of power,” he said. “But every rabbit has an escape route in its burrow.”
“Brer Rabbit had more than one.”
“We’re not Brer Rabbit any more. We’re Brer Wolf.”
Duncan spoke to a wallscreen and activated a display of Data Information Channel 231.
First, he asked for the location of supply locations in the La Brea Tower Complex, where spray cans of paint were stored.
This information was apparently not available to the general public. No reason was given, only the display: DATA REQUEST DENIED.
He swore softly, stood a few seconds frowning, then inserted Lair’s ID card in the slot and repeated his request. He was given the desired display. Lair, an official of the Department of Import-Export Transportation, was authorized to receive such data.
The spraycans were stored on the 6th level in the east sector.
Duncan asked if there were any cans containing F-bond sprays. These were generally applied to bond metal to metal or metal to plastic. There were such cans, and at the moment there were 12,000 in stock, one-quarter of which contained black F-bond liquid. A moment later, a printout of the arrangement of the rooms and the security measures of the supply store was in the box.
Snick, who was getting breakfast, said, “Spraycans?”
“On just about every corner of every street in every city in the world sits a pole with a TV monitor,” he said.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Spray F-bond on the monitor screens, and they’re blind. Moreover, the paint can’t be rubbed off or dissolved. Any screen with F-bond on it has to be replaced.”
“Who’s going to do it?” she said. “Isn’t this another case of belling the cat?”
“I’ll set the example.”
“And get arrested immediately.”
“I’m fed up with running and with fighting only in self-defense!” he said, glaring, his cheeks flushed.
“Take it easy,” she said. “If you went to a street corner, a dozen, and sprayed the monitors, it’d only be a nuisance to the ganks.”
“It could become a stone thrown in the water. The ripples would spread out. Others might copycat me. Then there’d be a lot of thrown stones, and the ripples would intersect and become a storm.”
Snick placed two trays full of food on the kitchen table. She said, “Sit down. Eat. You’re going to run out of fuel.”
“I will. In a minute.”
He stopped to face her. His hands opened and closed like the wings of a big eagle just before takeoff.
“The government does its best to keep each day as isolated as possible from the other. But there’s a certain amount of unavoidable and legal communication among these. Mostly among official departments and factories. And there’s a lot of harmless communication between the days by the ordinary citizens. Like leaving messages for the next day or the previous day. Usually, this has to do with one day failing to keep its apartment clean and tidy enough.