What to do with the grappler? If he jumped down with the rope in his hands, he might not be able to get the thing free, up in the branches.
He yanked on the rope. Leaves rustled, branches swayed.
Another yank. Careful. Another—louder, too loud.
Time for a calculated risk. He whispered a prayer and stepped off into space, hands wrapped in the rope. It creaked as he swung down and in. Leaves rustled, branches popped. Just before his feet hit the ground, he felt the pressure go on the line. He let his knees take the fall and rolled forward, curling his shoulders, going all the way over. He flopped onto thick grass, face up. Something flickered across his enhanced vision and thumped down by his right knee. It was the grappler.
George got unsteadily to his feet, thinking about how close the grappler had come to driving its steel hooks into him. But divine grace had prevented that, would shelter him here.
Now the thick lip on the outer wall was a help. In two tosses he got the grappler secured on the lip, tested it with his weight, and left the line dangling. He measured with his eye the distance from the oak, so that he could find the line at a dead run if he had to.
George stood in the shadows of the oak tree and studied the big, rambling Spanish-style house. Blueprints did not capture the impressive mass of it. Tile roof, heavy wooden beams, deep walls. It spoke of money, ease, stature. There were several smaller side buildings, probably for servants, and a garage near the driveway. Bushes crowded the lawn here. What he wanted was in the main house. As he started toward it, his mind swarmed again with questions.
What had drawn him here? Why?
In the days since Karen’s death he had been skating over a deep pit of fear and dread, panic welling up in his throat, bitter tastes invading his mouth from his churning belly. But he had to keep on. The Lord was driving him, had taken George’s tiny life into the great stream of His plan.
He studied the house, ticking off details he knew from the blueprints. His mind tumbled with skittering thoughts, and he almost missed the sound.
A low gruff grunt. Nails scrabbling on a stone walkway. Something running fast.
It came around a thick bottlebush that had hidden its approach. George saw the bunched muscles and sleek skin as its stubby legs ate up the remaining distance. It was all muscle and bone, white teeth bared beneath an ugly nose, a snarling pit bull.
For a slice of a second a terrible fear seized him. The dogs he had killed as a boy had seldom fought. When they did, he had learned to deal with them swiftly, for there was a moment when an attacking dog was vulnerable. The memory flashed in his mind. Then the fear washed away. He felt his own power gather. He set himself, balanced on the balls of his feet.
The pit bull might go for his arms. George drew them back, at the same time crouching slightly to bring his face down. Dogs lined up on an outstretched arm. A pit bull would go for the throat if it could. It wanted to bowl him over, slash open the jugular, rip and shred in the vital seconds before you could recover your surprise.
The pit bull gathered itself, a bundle of swift sinew. It leaped. This was the instant when it was committed. And open.
Its forepaws stretched out before it, first to arrive. George pivoted on his left foot, bringing both hands up to grasp the dog’s right foreleg.
He threw himself to the side, grabbing the leg hard, his hands only inches from the jaws. The dog’s own momentum carried it around, helping the tight pivot.
George fell back, yanking hard. The sudden snap slammed the dog forward. It could not get its head around and down to close on his hand.
The leap, the pivot and swing, the heave—all combined in a centrifugal whirl that slung the dog over George as he himself went down. He felt something snap in the dog’s leg. He let go. The pit bull sailed over him with a startled, small yelp.
George slammed into the grass. He heard a solid thud, a clack as jaws snapped shut. A soft thump as the dog hit the grass.
He scrambled up and to the side, fished for the knife on a scabbard at his belt. His breath whistled with a cold fear.
He crouched, knife forward and low. Ready. But the pit bull did not bound back up, turn, and charge again. Sweat had filmed his eyes, and it was a long moment before George could blink away the moisture caught by the goggles to see that the dog lay at the base of the oak tree.
He approached it, rolled it over. The skull was dented in. Clear fluid oozed out. It had hit the oak tree square on.
He stared at the ghostly image of the dog and thought about his childhood terrors. Things with teeth and claws that come at you out of the night. He had defeated those horrors by venturing into that blackness, finding the foe, gutting it. And yet now here it was again, still coming at him, unrelenting, Godless, still horrible.
Into his mind crowded the image of Susan Hagerty’s dog, and of the devil dog he had killed at Immortality Incorporated. They were all agents of dark forces, like this one. He had conquered them. This had been yet another test. A challenge to his Calling.
This man Lomax took a stern view of uninvited visitors. There might be other dogs, maybe a mate for this one. That shook him. He had managed to catch this one just right, kill it without even much noise. He wouldn’t be so lucky the second time.
There might be worse waiting. He let this thought strum through him, echoing. Grimly he got control of it. Think.
The dog’s body was too close to his grappler line. If anybody—or anything—found it, they would locate the rope, too. Be waiting when he returned.
He did not like touching the dog. Its bowels had let go, cutting the air. That left a smear behind as he dragged it fifty yards along the wall and dumped it in a plot of cactus.
Swiftly he trotted across the broad lawn, taking advantage of the bristly bushes. Adrenaline popped through him. Every time he stopped, he looked back and memorized landmarks. He might have to return this way on the run.
Most windows in the big house were dark. A group on the ground floor blossomed with rich, yellowish light. He was in a heavily gardened area of the estate, and there was a thirty-yard swath between the last bush and the walls of the house. The goggles made the windows blaze with a strange, superheated glare. He took them off and let his eyes adjust. Still he could see nothing through the windows from this angle. Somebody could be standing in there, a few feet into the room.
He looked the other way and saw a one-ton truck pulled up to a side door. Parked, engine off, nobody nearby. He wondered why a heavy truck was making deliveries to a house.
He knew it was dumb to delay. Caution would crowd in on him, taking his edge away.
He ran across the space and flattened himself against the wall. Peeked in a window, just a second’s glimpse. A big dining room, polished mahogany table, high-backed chairs. Nobody. He ducked beneath that window and stopped at the next. This gave a view into a small tiled bathroom. Deserted.
Next were two tall French doors. Gauzy curtains like clouds of heaven framed the tall side panels. He squatted down and bobbed his head around the bottom pane.
A sumptuous den. Deep leather armchairs with upholstered footstools. A desk of black wood, absolutely clear except for a slim white telephone. Cedar bookshelves soaring into a vaulted ceiling. High up among the thick beams, broad wood panels were crowned by a black skylight. In the exact center of the room sat a man wearing a maroon dinner jacket and sleek gray slacks. His lightly frosted hair framed a pale face dominated by bushy white eyebrows. He was engrossed in a leather-bound volume.
Something in the jawline, the eyes… Had he seen him before? Was he related to someone George knew?
He felt his heart thud with leaden dread. Yet he knew he had to go into that room and stand before that man.
Why? His mind answered only with a gray blank.
To his surprise the French doors were not locked. He closed them behind him with a slight click. The man looked up. Surprise flickered in the shrewd face for only a moment. Then he looked back down at the volume, slid a le
ather bookmark in place, and put it aside with care.
“I see,” the man said in a deep, almost hoarse voice.
“Dr. Lomax?”
“Since you have managed to get by my guard and my dog, I expect you have taken the trouble to learn my name.”
“They weren’t hard.” No need to tell Lomax anything more.
“I expect he’s watching television somewhere,” Lomax said sardonically. “There is a delivery in progress, and he takes every opportunity to shirk his duties.” A sigh. “I expect you are here to take, not to deliver.”
A whirlwind roared through George, but he could barely get out his cramped words. “Can—can I ask you some questions?”
“You already have.”
George stepped closer. Lomax’s calm unnerved him. “You told Karen Bocelin something about me.”
“Yes.”
“How come you even know who I am?”
“I am a good friend of the Reverend.”
“Good friend? Why—”
“Your struggle against the heresy embodied in Immortality Incorporated is a holy battle. My company deals in the good side of this technology, the freezing and recovery of tissues, even whole organs such as kidneys and livers, for purposes of transplantation. I have a great deal of pride in my company’s work, and I despise the empty promises of the cryonicists. You are a hero to me, George.”
The masterful voice drew him forward. Lomax’s words were like warm, liquid reassurance, lapping around him.
But vagrant images pestered him. Moist. Dark. Cold.
He shook off the sensations and suppressed a sudden, yearning moan that caught in his throat.
With unsteady step he came closer, hands open and held up, as if about to receive a benediction. “I—I thought Reverend Montana was going to keep this just between the two of us.”
Lomax rose with athletic grace. He was shorter than George but possessed a compact energy. A thin smile illuminated the pale face, then was gone. “I am no danger to you, George. The Reverend saw in you the ideal person to act where he—where I—could not.”
“But he told me—”
“Circumstances change, George.” Lomax gestured amiably at a sideboard crowded with tall bottles bearing an elaborate silver brocade. “Drink?”
“I don’t touch alcohol.”
“Pity. If you don’t mind, I’ll have a little something.”
Lomax went to the sideboard with obvious relish and selected a bottle. He poured amber fluid into a squat crystal glass, sniffed it, and sipped. George could smell the opulent aroma from five feet away.
“I don’t get it, how you and the Reverend—”
“It is really quite simple. I stand with him in opposing this corpse-freezing heresy. I fight it as I can, because it gives my entire profession a bad name. Through Vitality Corporation, I support research at respectable medical institutions—UCI, for example. I also had some men I hired keep track of I2, but they were inept. One nearly got caught when he was trying to plant a miniature television snooper in their facility. Such people are unreliable and too easily traced back to me. You have been much more steady, though the Karen matter…”
Lomax let his voice trail away significantly. George had come to terms with the Lord over Karen, and he shrugged off this man’s insinuating manner. The heat of this room curled up around him, making it hard to think. Better counterpunch, to keep the initiative. “Look, fella, how do I know you’re not freezing people yourself?”
Lomax laughed. “You mustn’t think that everyone interested in the preservation of organs is the same, George.”
“Yeah? How do I know?” Stifling in here.
Lomax fiddled with the tinkling bottles and glasses. He sipped the liquor again, turned toward George with an assessing gaze, and said mildly, “With the same certainty that tells me that you killed Karen.”
George gaped. He saw Lomax’s sharp, cold eyes and then Karen’s breasts, soft slopes alive with heat. And an instant later, flaring in him, the blaring light and waxy faces of his dreams—
He did not have a chance to say a single word before Lomax lifted a slim steel cylinder. He must have had it hidden among those bottles, George thought quickly, starting to move.
Lomax pointed it carefully at George and sprayed him in the face with a hissing cloud.
18
ALEX
Amid the chaos of legal matters, Immortality Incorporated had gotten word that a long-term member was terminal. Alex was unavailable, so Ray Constantine, Bob Skinner, and several others in the backup team had done the job. The patient lived in Lahaina, Hawaii. The Kaiser clinic there wanted nothing to do with cryonics. So the wan, brave old man had to spend his last days wasting away in a distant hospital, Maui Memorial.
Their patient had finally fallen to the liver cancer that had shriveled him. He had not been rich, a brilliant philosopher, or a saintly philanthropist. Some critics of cryonics, when not maintaining that it was impossible, seemed to believe it should be available primarily to the unusually deserving. Alex bristled at such sentiments. The long-shot promise of cryonics required pioneering resolve, not the admiration of society. It was a right, not a privilege, Alex thought—but it had to be won, by taking action while you were alive.
The suspension went through without a hitch. The team got their patient into a subzero traveling case, through the long flight back and the skeptical shipping department at Los Angeles International, and then into one of the “bigfoot” liquid nitrogen cylinders in the I2 main bay. Job done.
Alex stood now, looking up at the cylinder and the fresh nameplate on its side. He touched the cool steel, wondering idly. Ray Constantine came by, on a single crutch now. Alex said, “Get some rest.”
“Yeah. Did Bob Skinner go home?”
“Nope, he’s bunked down in the back. Too tired to drive.” Immortality Incorporated had a three-bed dorm squeezed into a side room for tired teams during the lengthy cryonic suspensions.
“How’re things going for him at UCI, you figure?” Ray asked.
Alex frowned. “He doesn’t say much. Without Susan to advise him, I think he’s headed for trouble. That guy Blevin could hound him pretty bad.”
“Damned shame.”
Alex sighed dreamily. “The luck’s been running tough lately for all of us. Still, we saved one more.” He rapped the smooth steel cylinder. “When do you figure anyone will come back out?”
Ray shrugged. “A century? Hard to say.”
Alex thought of the inconceivable cold that waited only inches from his palm. A century or more? An immense, uncharted ocean of time. “Geez, I hope things go faster than that.”
Ray grinned. “Don’t count on the inevitable march of history. I read somewhere that a guy named Hero of Alexandria demonstrated a model steam engine sixteen centuries before James Watt built a practical one, but everybody ignored it.”
“How come?”
“Thought it was a toy, I guess. But medicine’s just as bad. Arabs were using anesthetics way back in the Middle Ages. Christians thought suffering was good for the soul—y’know, brought redemption—so we didn’t get even laughing gas until about a hundred fifty years ago.”
“Well, okay, but once it was discovered here—”
“The medical authorities brushed it off. After all, dentists discovered it—not even real doctors.”
“You’re depressing me.” His faith—he ruefully realized now that Sheila was right, cryonics did demand a kind of optimistic creed—lay in technology. But people judged technology, and they could be wrong. Society ran on good yarns, not on research reports. Frozen zombies made a better spot on the eleven o’clock news than a dry exploration of the possibilities of preservation. So the gauzy future might just ignore the possibilities of cryonics, refuse to spend the money or time or thought.
“Sorry, man,” Ray said sympathetically. “Hate to bring you down and all.”
“That’s okay. Every time we do a suspension, I wonder if we’re like
those shipwrecked clowns you see in cartoons, putting messages into bottles.”
Ray chuckled. “Sure we are. Steel bottles, frozen messages, in a sea of liquid nitrogen.”
“Have you ever picked up a bottle on the beach and found a message in it?”
“Nope. But if you’re stuck on an island—an island in time, I guess—you might as well try it. What’s the alternative?”
“Right. Right.”
“Hey, you been hassling legal stuff all day—why don’t you head on home? I’ll finish up here.”
“Nope. It’s past midnight. Good time to run some more nitrogen out to Susan.”
“Okay.” Ray shook his head in wan frustration, his shaggy hair giving him a brooding presence. “Wonder how long we’re gonna have to keep this up.”
“Hiding her?” Alex realized he had not really considered how this could end. “Years. Until they get tired, I guess.”
Ray leaned against a tall cylinder, taking some of the load off his feet, letting his crutch idle. “Somebody once said that for a new idea to take hold, it’s not enough to persuade the older generation. You have to wait for them to die.”
Alex laughed. “Die and not get frozen.”
“Yeah. Hey—” Ray was impatient with talk, preferring action; he brushed away the subject. “By the time you’re back, that Chinese takeout will be delivered.”
“I’ve got better than that being delivered,” Alex said with a hint of pride. “Kathryn’s coming by to pick me up.”
“Fine woman you got there, to come get you this time of night.” Ray looked awkward, and Alex knew he wanted to talk about something else.
“Don’t think I don’t know it.”
“She came to me, said she wanted to sign up right away.”
What was there to say about something so big, so deep? “Yeah, she gets like that.”
“Sent in the insurance money and everything.”
“She’s amazing. Changes her mind faster than her underwear.”
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