Meeting at Infinity

by John Brunner

  He looked back through the hangings. The burly man’s introductory speech was almost over. He was vilifying the name of Tacket, and his frequent use of it was producing catcalls and laughter from the youths and girls in the audience to whom Tacket had never meant anything except a rather vague obscenity.

  Suddenly a group of colored lights came on in the room. Each one picked out an individual sitting on the stage. Gaffles could not see any of the targets clearly, but one of the lights was green, and he could indistinctly discern the outline of a man within its beam.

  Time for action!

  He thrust aside the hangings to give himself a wider field of view. By shielding his eyes with his hands, he could see past the spears of light on the stage into the body of the hall.

  On the right, near the back, a commotion had started. Someone was standing up on the benches, shouting incoherently and hurling handfuls of smoke powder from his pockets. Two other figures got up near him and began to scream hysterically. The audience’s attention at once moved from the stage to this new and far more interesting show.

  About a quarter of a minute passed, within the space of which Gaffles managed to glance rapidly at the two groups in the audience which had puzzled him—the pugs and the prosperous ones. He saw from the corner of his eye that Tad had signaled the yonder boys ready in the front rows to storm the stage and carry Erlking off.

  He poised to get down from his chair. And there was the blinding flash, followed by a reek of ozone, indicating that an energy gun had been fired.

  At once Gaffles was filled with blind anger—had he or had he not told Tad to make this measured? But it vanished swiftly in the same moment as he realized that the gun had been fired from the point where the pugs were sitting.

  Screams—real ones, of genuine terror—began to boil up through the hall.

  The gun fired again, and its bolt seared into the roof over Gaffles’ head, splashing on the hangings and ripping them apart like a red-hot sword. The hangings crashed to the floor and began to smoke and melt. Gaffles dropped from his chair and charged forward onto the stage.

  The cultists waiting to speak, and the burly man, were too thunderstruck for the moment to cause any difficulty. Gaffles ignored them. The yonder boys who should have come swarming up over the edge of the stage by now were still trying to do that. But the group of pugs had decided to stop them, and were each coping with about three of the boys. A panicky movement towards the entrances was surging up like a tidal wave. About the only people present who were not touched by it were Jockey’s boys, near the back, who were involved in their own side-issue—a lot more smoke powder had been thrown, and the air was getting thick and murky—and the prosperous ones, who seemed to be conferring together.

  The energy gun fired a third time, wildly, and snapped a bolt over the stage. Briefly, a section of the wall glowed red-hot, and the hangings which had fallen burst into flame, sullenly. Then the pug wielding the gun was rushed simultaneously from behind and both sides by three of the yonder boys, and went down howling under violent blows from their whangee sticks. When they got him down, the boys stamped on his wrist to make him release the gun. Unless someone else was that well armed, there was no further danger.

  The prosperous ones now came to a decision, rose from the bench where they were sitting, and came scurrying forwards to the stage. The green light still played on Erlking. Gaffles saw suddenly that they were heading for him and no one else.

  The cultists were still cowering back in their chairs. He could expect no assistance from them—and didn’t much want it, anyway. He threw back his head and bellowed, “Tad! On stage!”

  And went forward prepared to fight.

  Gaffles had had a harder time on the way up, he sometimes had said, than Jockey Hole; not having all of Jockey’s gifts he’d been compelled to fight more. He was still good at it. He ducked forward as the first of the newcomers lifted his foot over the edge of the stage, caught his ankle, and heaved. The man flung up his arms and went hurtling backwards coming to rest with a crash against the front bench. The man just behind him was bowled over by the impact.

  Next in line, the third oncomer made the mistake of trying to come onto the stage fighting. He’d never heard that fighting uphill was hard work. Gaffles seized him by the wrist and hauled him forwards; he lost his footing and sprawled headlong. Then Gaffles rolled him over and trod on his solar plexus, leaving him doubled up with agony and incapable of interfering for a good couple of minutes.

  By now, Tad’s boys had disposed of the pugs, who were lying draped over the benches in limp sack-like postures, and were turning their attention to the stage again. Gaffles called out urgently, and the remaining members of the prosperous group were at once tackled by twice their number. That left only the basic problem to attend to.

  Gaffles spun round and made towards Erlking. The green light was still on, though by now smoke from the burning hangings behind the stage and the powder the rioting boys at the back of the hall had thrown was clouding the air and making eyes sting and noses smart. He dropped on one knee beside the former Remembrancer, his heart sinking.

  The first bolt the armed pug had fired must have struck very close indeed to Erlking. It had melted away one leg of the chair he sat on, and he had then fallen right into it. His clothes smoldering, his pasty, loose-lipped face inert, he lay slumped on the floor.

  “Tad!” shouted Gaffles again. At once the yonder boy came scurrying. “Help me get him back stage—and handle with care!”

  The burly man who had opened the speeches seemed suddenly to come to life again. He started forward.

  “Hey!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing? Were you responsible for breaking up the meeting? Take your hands off that man! I’ll demand an accounting of this—”

  On the last word he made the mistake of grabbing Gaffles’ arm. Gaffles didn’t feel in a mood to make long explanations. He butted the burly man in the wind as he pretended to get to his feet; the burly man sat down violently, making a sound like “oof!”

  No one else attempted to interfere as they picked up Erlking carefully and carried him across the stage. In front of the burning hangings they paused; Gaffles exchanged a glance with Tad and said, “Don’t waste time on the way through, gold?” Then they rushed across the sullen blaze and were backstage.

  The proprietor was there, his euphoric stick forgotten, his face a mask of misery and anger. He called out as soon as he saw Gaffles.

  “You said there wouldn’t be any damage—!” he began.

  “Go travel with Tacket!” snapped Gaffles. “The firemen and the law will be here in nothing flat! Get me to the place where we store this number Erlking—fast!”

  The bluster went out of the proprietor with a rushing sigh, and he pointed into the mouth of a travolator tube almost facing them. “Up there,” he said wearily. “Second level, gold? Go along the walkway from there and enter the second room. It’s a lighting control booth. Under the control panel there’s a concealed cavity. Lay him in there for now. I’ll see to the law. But Gaffles! If he dies on the premises, I don’t know anything, gold?”

  “He’d better not die!” Gaffles said shortly, and nodded Tad forward again.

  They humped their human burden into the control room and found the concealed cavity’s door standing open, as the boss had promised. Gently they slid Erlking into it; it was long and wide enough for him to lie comfortably enough. He was regaining consciousness, though, and moans passed his limp lips.

  “Tad, get someone to get the news to Jockey, gold?” Gaffles said quietly. “Likewise, get the string about the pugs and that other crowd who started after Erlking.”

  Tad nodded. His gaudy jacket was soiled and torn from the fighting, and his face was bruised. “How bad do I say this number is?”

  “Most bad,” Gaffles grunted. “Move, now!”

  He occupied himself, while Tad was gone, with cutting away the burnt fabric from Erlking’s wounds and making him lie as comfortably a
s possible on chairs and drapes. There was no more he could do without regenerants; Erlking’s chest and belly were badly scorched, and so was his right arm.

  Tad came back, grunting from the effort of running. “The news went to Jockey,” he said. “And we already pieced together who the other interested parties were. The pugs were from Lyken—ordered to shut Erlking’s mouth. And the other crowd was on the staff of The Market. We got a long, thick string this time!” His eyes were bright with excitement.

  “It’s fraying fast,” said Gaffles morosely, looking down at Erlking’s lax face.

  15

  WITH A presence of mind Gaffles had not looked for, Tad had in fact done more on his return trip to the hall than to send someone after Jockey and ask a few questions. He had arranged for the pugs and the prosperous ones to be carried backstage and hidden away as Erlking had been hidden in the bowels of the ’drome. For a few minutes before the arrival of police and fire services, the web of gangways and corridors was alive with people; Gaffles felt a twinge of nervousness for fear they might take too long over hiding the captives. But everything turned out in their favor.

  Relived, he waited for Jockey.

  To look at Jockey no one would have guessed he was concerned about anything that had happened tonight. His dark coat and breeches were appropriate to the calm composure of his face; his voice, too, was as level as usual even after he had seen Erlking’s injuries.

  “Has he talked yet?” was his only question to Gaffles.

  Gaffles shook his head. “He’s barely conscious. I think he’s pretty bad, Jockey.”

  Jockey dropped on one knee and reached into the cavity, his thin fingers seeking Erlking’s pulse. It was irregular, and his breathing was very faint. He rolled back one of the injured man’s eyelids with professional gentleness. Then he stood up, dusting his hands.

  “We can’t move him out of here till the law is through,” he said. “But he’ll have to be shifted soon, and doctored. That must be close to third-degree burning he has.”

  He glanced at Tad. “How about the numbers you took in?” he inquired.

  “Stored in various places,” Tad was beginning, when the door of the control room opened and a yonder boy put his white-tinted hair in, to speak gaspingly.

  “Law!” he said. “Working this way. Figure you best not be here when they look in.”

  Jockey reached out thoughtfully and shut the concealing panel over Erlking. “Take me someplace where they’ve been already,” he said. “I want to talk with some of the pugs and the numbers from The Market.”

  They slipped noiselessly from the room, leaving no sign of their presence and made their way through the weaving maze of corridors and travolators out of sight of the police. In a room piled with scenery and costumes, Tad showed them two pugs bound and gagged in a wooden crate. One of them was moaning painfully.

  “That’s the one with the gun,” Tad explained. “We busted his wrist to make him let go.”

  Jockey nodded. “Open his mouth,” he said.

  But it was clear after only a few moments that the pug had his mind thoroughly hypnolocked, and if one of them was, they all were proof against questioning. Jockey shrugged.

  Again they stole through the ’drome, avoiding the police without difficulty, dodging from level to level and room to room. The men from The Market had been put away in the animal cages, wrapped in dark sacking against a prying eye. No better luck, however, was to be had here. They had not been hypnolocked, but Jockey decided at once that when they said they were only under orders to capture Erlking and didn’t know why, they were probably speaking the truth. Again, he shrugged.

  “That leaves Erlking,” he said. Gaffles nodded.

  “Do I send for a doc?” he proposed. “We could rout out a dozen if we had to—”

  Jockey’s upraised hand interrupted him. “Not just a doc,” Jockey said. “The doc. Erlking’s too important to be risked. Gaffles, go get me the number one. Get me Jome Knard.”

  Gaffles had thought he was used to Jockey’s ambitious ideas. This was one ahead of anything before. He said dubiously, “But he’s—”

  “He’s the top in his line. He cures burnt people more than anyone. These days he isn’t in regular practice, Gaffles. He lives in Athlone’s penthouse and looks after Nevada’s wife. Go get him. Handle him gently. But bring him to the Octopus not later than a half hour from now. Gold?”

  One of these days, thought Gaffles a trifle sourly, that Jockey will look so far above him he’ll bust his neck.

  True enough, a patient treated by Jome Knard had the odds on his side. But Knard was a name in his line; he was one of the dozen medical men to whom a concessionary would take an important aide injured in exploring a new franchise. He wouldn’t look at minor cases. Anything short of rebuilding three-quarters of a corpse into a living person was too undemanding to be worth his notice.

  Even if they succeeded in getting him to Jockey by force, how in hell would they make him co-operate?

  But that was Jockey’s worry.

  Gaffles’s attention was snatched back to the present with a jerk. He had spent ten minutes assembling a small team of talented operators—a young lock artist, a reliable ex-pug whose brains hadn’t been battered silly before he quit, and a getaway man—and they had piled into a cruiser belonging to Jockey and headed for Athlone’s penthouse. What had arrested Gaffles’s attention was a cry from the driver.

  “The law got here first!” he exclaimed.

  Gaffles stared, and saw two police cruisers drawn up outside the entrance to the block they were making for. He craned his neck back and stared upwards. On the street side, the penthouse was set back, but he could just see around the corner of the roof—and what he saw was lighted windows. Not one other light except on the emergency escape levels was to be seen.

  “We go on,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “But we play it real measured, gold? Drop us around the corner,” he added to the driver. “We’ll go in slow, on foot. Keep on around the block a couple of times. Don’t come too close. When we need to be picked up, I’ll flash the room lights on and off.”

  “And if there are too many police?” the driver countered.

  “Then we’ll have to come back down without noticing and wave to you on the sidewalk,” said Gaffles sarcastically.

  Around the corner, they got out, and walked back unhurriedly to the entrance of the block. The police cruisers were empty, even of a driver, and that was reassuring. It wasn’t a major raid, just a routine inquiry. Though what was the law doing investigating its own vice-sheriff?

  “I heard rumors,” said the lock artist in a low voice. “I hear the law got angry with Athlone for telling them to let the riots brew up tonight, ’stead of icing them straight off. You think we’re going lose cuddy Athlone?”

  “Who knows?” grunted Gaffles.

  The outer doors were opened easily—there were a hundred locks like this one in the lock artist’s past experience—and after that there was nothing to stop them using the elevator. Not even a guard in the foyer. Gaffles began to feel disturbed.

  “This elevator probably opens straight into the penthouse,” he said as they got in. “Now we stop at the penthouse level and listen, gold? If we pick up more than a couple of voices, we go get more forces. If we don’t, we risk a quick look. If we’ve only got what we can handle, we move in. Gold?”

  The others nodded. The ex-pug balled his fist and kissed its knuckles with a grin.

  And everything went wrong.

  They stopped the car at the penthouse level and listened. There was a barking voice redolent of status, which Gaffles guessed to be Knard’s, complaining of the intrusion and voicing threats. There were sharp voices, with coarser accents, shouting insults about Athlone, who was presumably not present. There were noises of furniture being shifted, as though a search was in progress. Gaffles had just decided that there were too many police to be coped with, when the elevator door flew open, and he found himsel
f confronting an astonished-looking sergeant.

  There was nothing to be done except move in.

  He pushed the sergeant backward with a flat-handed blow on the chest, tripping him at the same time, and fell on him. He fell in order to get out of the way of the ex-pug, who came over him with a bound, yelling savagely, and went for another policeman who was one of three struggling with a heavy electronic desk in one corner of the foyer. He disposed of that one and turned his attention to both the others together.

  But the lock artist, still in the elevator, proved to have had more foresight than Gaffles himself. He calmly took out of his pocket a flat gas grenade and hurled it across the room, before closing the elevator doors on himself and going down.

  The room whirled around Gaffles, and he slumped on the sergeant’s prostrate body.

  When he awoke, he found the lock artist had completed the job of tying up the police, and had turned on the air conditioner to full blast to clear out the gas. The anesthetic effect was short term; within seconds of waking, Gaffles was on his feet and fully recovered.

  The only other persons still free to move were the ex-pug and Knard himself, who was shaking his head dizzily in an armchair.

  Gaffles went over to him. “Are you Dr. Knard?” he asked.

  Knard raised a puzzled face. He said, “Yes, I am. I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but”—and he looked around at the roped policemen on the floor—“I certainly approve of what you’ve done! It’s exactly what I’d have liked to do if I’d been able.”

  Gaffles grinned. Their relations were off to a good start, at least. He said, “What were they after, then?”

  “They came battering in here with some incredible accusation about unauthorized application of Tacket’s Principle.” Knard got to his feet, frowning. “Of course, they must have just been using that as an excuse, because they didn’t act as though they took the idea seriously, and when I threatened to complain to Vice-Sheriff Athlone, they almost screamed insults about him.”