by Jerry
There was a sudden flurry of shots, and then silence.
I took another quick peek and got the shock of my life.
The four police officers were crumpled on the ground, shot down by the patrol robot from the Lodge. One of them—the one holding the blaster—wasn’t quite dead yet. He gasped something obscene and fired the weapon just as two more slugs from the robot’s turret hit him in the chest.
The turret exploded in a gout of fire.
I didn’t get it, but I didn’t have time to wonder what was going on. I know a chance when I see one. I swung from the branch I was on and dropped to the ground, rolling over in a bed of old leaves to take up the shock. Then I made a beeline for the police car.
On the way, I grabbed one of the helmets from a uniformed corpse, hoping that my own tunic was close enough to the same shade of scarlet to get me by. I climbed in and got the machine turned around just as the second patrol robot came into sight. It fired a couple of shots after me, but those patrol jobs don’t have enough armament to shoot down a police car; they’re strictly for hunting unarmed and unprotected pedestrians.
Behind me there were a couple of flares in the sky that reminded me of my own exploding flitter, but I didn’t worry about what they could be.
I was still puzzled about the robot’s shooting down the police. It didn’t make sense.
Oh, well, it had saved my neck, and I wasn’t going to pinch a gift melon.
The police car I was in had evidently been the only ground vehicle dispatched toward the Lodge—possibly because it happened to be nearby. It was a traffic-control car; the regular homicide squad was probably using Hitters.
I turned off the private road and onto the highway, easing into the traffic-control pattern and letting the car drift along with the other vehicles. But I didn’t shove it into automatic. I didn’t like robots just then. Besides, if I let the main control panels take over the guiding of the car, someone at headquarters might wonder why car such-and-such wasn’t at the Lodge as ordered; they might wonder why it was going down the highway so unconcernedly.
There was only one drawback. I wasn’t used to handling a car at a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles an hour. If something should happen to the traffic pattern, I’d have to depend on my own reflexes. And they might not be fast enough.
I decided I’d have to ditch the police car as soon as I could. It was too much trouble and too easy to spot.
I had an idea. I turned off the highway again at the next break, a few miles farther on. There wasn’t much side traffic at that time of night, so I had to wait several minutes before the pattern broke again and a private car pulled out and headed down the side road.
I hit the siren and pulled him over to the side.
He was an average-sized character with a belligerent attitude and a fat face.
“What’s the matter, officer? There was nothing wrong with that break. I didn’t cut out of the pattern on manual, you know. I was—” He stopped when he realized that my tunic was not that of a policeman. “Why, you’re not—”
By then, I’d already cut him down with a stun gun I’d found in the arms compartment of the police car. I hauled him out and changed tunics with him. His was a little loose, but not so much that it would be noticeable. Then I put the helmet on his head and strapped him into the front seat of the police vehicle with the safety belt.
After being hit with a stun gun, he’d be out for a good hour. That would be plenty of time as far as I was concerned.
I transferred as much of the police armory as I thought I’d need into the fat-faced fellow’s machine and then I climbed into the police car with him. I pulled the car around and headed back toward the highway.
Just before we reached the control area, I set the instruments for the Coast and headed him west, back the way I had come.
I jumped out and slammed the door behind me as the automatic controls took over and put him in the traffic pattern.
Then I walked back to Fatty’s car, got in, and drove back to the highway. I figured I could trust the controls of a private vehicle, so I set them and headed east, toward the city. Once I was there, I’d have to get a flitter, somehow.
I spent the next twenty minutes changing my face. I couldn’t do anything about the basic structure; that would have to wait until I got back. Nor could I do anything about the ID plate that was bolted on my left ulna; that, too, would have to wait.
I changed the color of my hair, darkening it from Gifford’s gray to a mousy brown, and I took a patch of hair out above my forehead to give me a balding look. The mustache went, and the sides of the beard, giving me a goatee effect. I trimmed down the brows and the hair, and put a couple of tubes in my nostrils to widen my nose.
I couldn’t do much about the eyes; my little pocket kit didn’t carry them. But, all in all, I looked a great deal less like Gifford than I had before.
Then I proceeded to stow a few weapons on and about my person. I had taken the sleeve gun out of the scarlet tunic when I’d put it on the fat-faced man, but his own chartreuse tunic didn’t have a sleeve holster, so I had to put the gun in a hip pocket. But the tunic was a godsend in another way; it was loose enough to carry a few guns easily.
The car speaker said: “Attention! You are now approaching Groverton, the last suburb before the city limits. Private automobiles may not be taken beyond this point. If you wish to bypass the city, please indicate. If not, please go to the free storage lot in Groverton.”
I decided I’d do neither. I might as well make the car as hard to find as possible. I took it to an all-night repair technician in Groverton.
“Something wrong with the turbos,” I told him. “Give her a complete overhaul.”
He was very happy to do so. He’d be mighty unhappy when the cops took the car away without paying him for it, but he didn’t look as though he’d go broke from the loss. Besides, I thought it would be a good way to repay Fat-Face for borrowing his car.
I had purposely kept the hood of my tunic up while I was talking to the auto technician so he wouldn’t remember my new face later, but I dropped the hood as soon as I got to the main street of Groverton. I didn’t want to attract too much attention.
I looked at my watch. 0111. I’d passed back through the time-change again, so it had been an hour and ten minutes since I’d left the Lodge. I decided I needed something to eat.
Groverton was one of those old-fashioned suburbs built during the latter half of the twentieth century—sponge-glass streets and sidewalks, aluminum siding on the houses, shiny chrome-and-lucite business buildings. Real quaint.
I found an automat and went in. There were only a few people on the streets, but the automat wasn’t empty by a long shot. Most of the crowd seemed to be teenage kids getting looped up after a dance. One booth was empty, so I sat down in it, dialed for coffee and barn and eggs, and dropped in the indicated change.
Shapeless little blobs of color were bouncing around in the tri-di tank in the wall, giving a surrealistic dance accompaniment to “Anna from Texarkana”:
You should have seen the way she ate!
Her appetite insatiate
Was quite enough to break your pocketbook!
But with a yeast-digamma steak,
She never made a damn mistake
What tasty snythefoods that gal could cook!
Oh, my Anna! Her algae Manna
Was tasty as a Manna-cake could be!
Oh, my Anna—from Texarkana!
Oh, Anna, baby, you’re the gal for me!
I sipped coffee while the thing went through the third and fourth verses, trying to figure a way to get into the city without having to show the telltale ID plate in my arm.
“Anna” was cut off in the middle of the fifth verse. The blobs changed color and coalesced into the face of Quinby Lester, news analyst.
“Good morning, free citizens! We are interrupting this program to bring you an announcement of special importance.”
He looked v
ery serious, very concerned, and, I thought, just a little bit puzzled. “At approximately midnight last night, there was a disturbance at the Lodge. Four police officers who were summoned to the Lodge were shot and killed by Mr. Edgar Gifford, the creator of the disturbance. This man is now at large in the vicinity. Police are making an extensive search within a five-hundred-mile radius of the Lodge.
“Have you seen this man?”
A tri-di of Gifford appeared in place of Lester’s features.
“This man is armed and dangerous. If you see him, report immediately to MONmouth 6-666-666. If your information leads to the capture of Edgar Gifford, you will receive a reward of ten thousand dollars. Look around you! He may be near you now!”
Everybody in the automat looked apprehensively at everybody else. I joined them. I wasn’t much worried about being spotted. When everybody wears beards, it’s hard to spot a man under a handful of face foliage. I was willing to bet that within the next half hour the police would be deluged with calls from a thousand people who honestly thought they had seen Edgar Gifford.
The cops knew that. They were simply trying to scare me into doing something foolish.
They needn’t have done that; I was perfectly capable of doing something foolish without their help.
I thought carefully about my position. I was about fifteen miles from safety. Question: Could I call for help? Answer: No. Because I didn’t know the number. I didn’t even know who was waiting for me. All that had been erased from my mind when the Director hypnoed me. I couldn’t even remember who I was working for or why!
My only chance was to get to Fourteenth and Riverside Drive. They’d pick me up there.
Oh, well, if I didn’t make it, I wasn’t fit to be an assassin, anyway.
I polished off the breakfast and took another look at my watch. 0147. I might as well get started; I had fifteen miles to walk.
Outside, the streets were fairly quiet. The old-fashioned streets hadn’t been built to clean themselves; a robot sweeper was prowling softly along the curb, sucking up the day’s debris, pausing at every cross street to funnel the stuff into the disposal drains to be carried to the processing plant.
A few people were walking the streets. Ahead of me, a drunk was sitting on the curb sucking at a bottle that had collapsed long ago, hoping to get one last drop out of it.
I decided the best way to get to my destination was to take Bradley to Macmillan, follow Macmillan to Fourteenth, then stay on Fourteenth until I got to Riverside Drive.
But no free citizen would walk that far. I’d better not look like one. I walked up to the swiller.
“Hey, Joe, how’d you like to make five?”
He looked up at me, trying to focus. “Sure, Sid, sure. Whatta gotta do?”
“Sell me your tunic.”
He blinked. “Zissa gag? Ya get ’em free.”
“No gag. I want your tunic.”
“Sure. Fine. Gimme that five.”
He peeled off the charity brown tunic and I handed him the five note. If I had him doped out right, he’d be too drunk to remember what had happened to his tunic. He’d be even drunker when he started on that five note.
I pulled the brown on over the chartreuse tunic. I might want to get into a first-class installation, and I couldn’t do it wearing charity brown.
“LOOK OUT!”
CLIK LIK LIK LIK LIK LIK LIK!
I felt something grab my ankle and I turned fast. It was the street cleaner! It had reached out a retractable picker and was trying to lift me into its hopper!
The drunk, who had done the yelling, tried to back away, but he stumbled and banged his head on the soft sidewalk. He stayed down—not out, but scared.
Another claw came out of the cleaner and grabbed my shoulder. The two of them together lifted me off the ground and pulled me toward the open hopper. I managed to get my gun out. These cleaners weren’t armored; if I could only get in a good shot—
I fired three times, blowing the pickup antenna off the control dome. When the claws opened, I dropped to the sidewalk and ran. Behind me, the robot, no longer under the directions of the central office, began to flick its claws in and out and run around in circles. The drunk didn’t manage to get out from under the treads in time.
A lot of people had stopped to watch the brief tussle, a few of them pretty scared. It was unheard of for a street cleaner to go berserk like that.
I dodged into an alleyway and headed for the second level. I was galloping up the escalator full tilt when the cop saw me. He was on the other escalator, going down, but he didn’t say there long.
“Halt!” he yelled, as he vaulted over the waist-high partition and landed on the UP escalator. By that time, I was already on the second level and running like mad.
“Halt or I fire!” he yelled.
I ducked into a doorway and pulled out the stun gun. I turned just in time to see one of the most amazing sights I have ever been privileged to witness. The cop was running toward me, his gun out, when he passed in front of a bottled goods vendor. At that instant, the vendor opened up, delivering a veritable avalanche of bottles into the corridor. The policeman’s foot hit one of the rubbery, bouncing cylinders and slipped just as he pulled the trigger.
His shot went wild, and I fired with the stun gun before the cop could hit the floor. He lay still, bottles rolling all around him.
I turned and ran again. I hadn’t gone far before another cop showed up, running toward me. I made a quick turn toward the escalators and went down again toward street level.
The cop wasn’t prepared for what happened to him when he stepped on the escalator. He was about halfway down, running, when the belt suddenly stopped and reversed itself. The policeman pitched forward on his face and tumbled down the stair.
I didn’t wait to see what happened next. I turned the corner, slowed down, and walked into a bar. I tried to walk slowly enough so that I wouldn’t attract attention and headed for the rest room.
I went in, locked the door behind me, and looked around.
As far as I could tell, there were no sensory devices in the place, so I pulled the last of my make-up kit out and went to work. This time, I went whole hog. Most of the hair went from the top of my head, and what was left became pure white. I didn’t take off the goatee; a beardless man would stand out. But the goatee went white, too.
Then a fine layer of plastic sprayed on my face and hands gave me an elderly network of wrinkles.
All the time I was doing this, I was wondering what was going on with the robots. It was obvious to me that the Lodge was connected illegally with every robot service in the city—possibly in the whole sector.
The street sweeper had recognized me and tried to get me; that was clear enough. But what about the vending machine and the escalator? Was the Lodge’s master computer still foggy from the power cutoff? It shouldn’t be; not after two hours. Then why had the responses been so slow? Why had they tripped the cops instead of me? It didn’t make sense.
That’s when it hit me. Was Rowley really dead?
I couldn’t be absolutely sure, could I? And the police hadn’t said anything about a murder. Just a “disturbance.” No, wait. The first cops, the ones whose car I’d taken. What had they said the robot reported? I couldn’t remember the exact words.
It still didn’t settle the question.
For a moment, I found myself wishing we had a government like the United States had had back in the third quarter of the Twentieth Century, back in the days of strong central government, before everybody started screaming about Citizen’s Rights and the preservation of the status quo. There wouldn’t be any of this kind of trouble now—maybe.
But they had other kinds just as bad.
This wasn’t the best of all possible worlds, but I was living in it. Of course, I didn’t know how long that happy situation would exist just then.
Somebody rapped on the door.
I didn’t know who it was, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
Maybe it was a cop. I climbed out the back window and headed down the alley toward Bradley Avenue.
If only I could get rid of that plate in my arm! The average citizen doesn’t know it, but it isn’t really necessary to put your arm in an ID slot to be identified. A sonobeam can pick up a reflected recording from your plate at twenty feet if there’s a scanner nearby to direct it.
I walked slowly after running the length of the alley, staying in the shadows as much as possible, trying to keep out of the way of anyone and everyone.
For six blocks or so, I didn’t see a soul. Then, just as I turned onto West Bradley, I came face to face with a police car. I froze.
I was ready to pull and shoot; I wanted the cop to kill me before he picked me up.
He slowed up, looked at me sharply, looked at his instrument panel, then drove on. I just stood there, flabbergasted. I knew as well as I knew anything that he’d beamed that plate in my arm!
As the car turned at the next corner, I backed into a nearby doorway, trying to figure out what I should do next. Frankly, I was jumpy and scared; I didn’t know what they were up to.
I got even more jumpy when the door behind me gave. I turned fast and made a grab for my gun. But I didn’t take it out.
The smoothly dressed girl said: “What’s the matter, Grandfather?”
It wasn’t until then that I realized how rattled I was. I looked like a very old man, but I wasn’t acting like one. I paused to force my mind to adjust.
The girl was in green. The one-piece shortsuit, the sandals, the toenails, fingernails, lips, eyes, and hair. All green. The rest of her was a smooth, even shade of pink.
She said: “You needn’t be afraid that anyone will see you. We arrange—Oh!”
I knew what she was oh’ing about. The charity brown of my tunic.
“I’m sorry,” she said, frowning. “We can’t—”
I cut her off this time. “I have money, my dear,” I smiled. “And I’m wearing my own tunic.” I flashed the chartreuse on her by opening the collar. “I see, Grandfather. Won’t you come in?”
I followed the green girl in to the desk of the Program Planner, a girl who was a deep blue in the same way that the first girl was green. I outlined what I wanted in a reedy, anticipating voice and was taken to a private room.