The light changed as Mr. Long reached the corner. He raised his eyes over the roofs of the cars, seeking the blue dress along the next block.
She was not there. Martha Macnamara was nowhere along the street between Mayland Long and the James Herald Hotel. Nor was she in the lobby.
Nor in her room.
She was gone.
Chapter 5
The early sun pried silently into the window. It counted the books in Mayland Longs sitting room. The black statue against the side wall drank in the sun’s light, reflecting it only through the eyes.
One of the two armchairs in the room had been turned toward the bare window; the chair was dull gold. So was the skin of the man asleep in that chair, his head resting in the angle of the wing-back. The dark silk suit-jacket he had worn the day before was thrown across the chair arm; one empty sleeve dragged upon the wooden floor.
In sleep, Mr. Long’s strange hands and features asked no explanations. They merely were: facts of nature like tangled tree roots, like the face of a tiger, like the odd, water-washed stones on the cold beach visible from his high window.
The edge of bright light finished with the bookshelf and crawled across the carpet to the chair. It touched his face and hands, and the sleeping man relaxed into it. His head slipped against the fabric and his eyes cracked open to receive the dazzle of sunlight. He blinked. Yawned. Twisted left and right in the chair. Finally he peered behind him at the still, uncluttered room, as though it could tell him why he found himself in the sitting room, fully dressed.
Then he remembered, and with the arrival of memory his hands groped for the chair arms. The padded wood protested with small creaks.
Yesterday evening had been the phone call to the San Francisco police. The polite, endlessly repeated explanation of who he was, who Martha Macnamara was, and why he believed she had met foul play. He had not told them all he knew, because it had been necessary to balance his concern—no, give it its true name—his fear for Martha against the woman’s own determination not to involve her daughter with the police. He could only repeat that Mrs. Macnamara had been walking along Van Ness with him, and had vanished at the corner of Fell Street. That she had not yet returned to her room, though she was still registered at the James Herald Hotel, that the desk clerk had not seen her.
That she had been worried about something.
It was hardly a compelling story. It -carried the implication that Mrs. Macnamara had dropped out of sight to avoid him, and his call to the authorities further intimated that he was the sort of importunate busybody a person might well want to avoid.
The officer had told him that they would have to wait at least a day before they could regard the woman as missing. The policeman had taken down name and address.
He had realized the uselessness of the attempt then, and had tried no further to interest the police. He knew the disparity between his voice and person; if his words could not convince, then his face and form would be of no help.
Besides, if Martha Macnamara had been killed by whoever it was who snatched her up—no one in the bus, surely. The black Lincoln?—then she was dead, and neither police nor power could bring her back.
And if she was alive, spirited away somewhere, then she was kept alive for a purpose, and would doubtless remain that way until the purpose was fulfilled. In that case, the police were still not much help, but another power might be. Without conscious arrogance Mayland Long applied that title to himself. Another power.
And he was sure with a granite certainty that Martha Macnamara was not dead. He would know if she were.
For if she were dead, then hope was dead, and his own existence turned to ashes.
And, looking at the gray, waking city, the quiet mirror of the bay, the jangled mirror of the sea, he did not feel dead nor burnt out. He felt—he turned the unfamiliar emotion over in his mind with intellectual curiosity, trying to identify it—he felt angry.
He rose from the chair and brushed at the crumpled jacket without seeing it. He was trying to remember the last time he had felt anger. Three years in San Francisco. One in Kyoto. Before that, Taipei—two years. There came grief and loss. Even fear. Anger? No. No one to be angry at, that evening in Taipei. Not even himself.
And before Taipei there had been no need at all for anger.
He stopped this raking of memory No need. He knew what anger was. It was hot.
Like Carlo Peccolo, Floyd Rasmussen was a fair, stocky man, but there the resemblance ended. Peccolo kept his credentials under glass, while Rasmussen had a wall stuck full of clippings from the Sunday funnies, along with three Kliban cats. Peccolo was sober, but Rasmussen laughed. He rattled the windows with his laughter. He laughed when Long introduced himself. He chuckled at the name of Dr. Peccolo. He let loose gales of laughter when Mr. Long brought forward the subject of Liz Macnamara, and with his wiry yellow beard and wiry yellow hair spreading out from his face, Floyd Rasmussen was the image of some Aztec sun god, graved in gold.
“Liz? She’s done work for me. I hope she will again, though the money she’s asking now… Oh Lord, yes, I know Liz Macnamara. That’s like asking me how well I know Blanco, my cat. Liz is a warrior, bright, spunky, ambitious. She brought life to RasTech…”
Coolly Mayland Long wondered how much more life the company called RasTech could bear. Floyd Rasmussen seemed to fill all available comers with his own vital substance. Mr. Long pulled at the tiller of the conversation.
“Bright? Then you would say her level of technical ability was above average?”
“Average? You can hardly use that word in the same breath as Liz Macnamara. She’s original; Sound. Big systems, little systems, software, firmware, pc layout… Just give her a handful of bipolar visi chips and stand back. She can even, occasionally, meet a deadline. And I don’t say that for most of my friends!”
This last admission dissolved into dull rumbles. Floyd Rasmussen beamed at Mr. Long.
The office did not contain a desk. Rasmussen worked from a drafting table set against one wall. There was thus no barrier between the booming geniality of the president of RasTech and the fastidious composure of his guest. Mayland Long did not feel that the advantage was his.
“Then, it was not out of line for her to set herself up as a consultant—to go freelance?”
The big man snorted. “What else should she do? Give half her salary for a benefits package and insurance, and the other half to Uncle Sugar? She’s gone the smart way. consulting.”
Long prodded patiently. “Even at her age, without contacts? Dr. Peccolo believed…”
“… in Santa Claus. He doesn’t like knowing a young whippersnapper he was supposed to be teaching actually had more on the ball than he did.” Rasmussen’s furry eyebrows pulled together and his mouth pursed.
“Carlo’s a friend of mine. Hurts me to say it, but he’s not that good, technically.” His voice expressed no great pain.
Mayland Long digested this—both the words and the manner. “Tell me, Mr. Rasmussen. Just what did Elizabeth Macnamara do for you at FSS which convinced you to hire her services here, in your own company?”
“Eh?” Rasmussen stopped to think. A few moments of silence leaked into the office.
“She did lots of things. An interface board for teller’s terminals: Z80 based. An accounts receivable package in 6502 assembler. Half a bank security system…”
“Half a bank security system?”
Rasmussen grunted and shrugged. “We only got the contract for half. Works that way a lot. Maybe their guy quits in the middle of the job and they don’t want to train a programmer from scratch, or… Well, lots of things. Then, let’s see—she wrote a disk controller for our own use.” Rasmussen stopped. He crinkled little eyes behind sandy lashes. It was difficult to tell what color those eyes were.
“ ‘Zat the kind of thing you want to know?”
Mayland Long detached his gaze from the man and swept it once around the square, unsubtle room. One wall was orange
; that was the one dotted with comic clippings. One wall was stenciled with a single, diagonal black stripe, dipping left. Against that wall stood a model of a sailing boat, white, gleaming, intricate, its spiky rigging echoed in the tines of a set of deer antlers hung above. The carpet was looped in orange and green. The plastic chair he sat on was yellow.
Mayland Long, in his quiet gray suit, felt like a quote taken out of context.
“Yes, Mr. Rasmussen, that is part of it. And, since you do not have a current address or phone number for the lady, I shall have to be satisfied with that much.” He rose to his feet.
Rasmussen heaved his own bulk off the drafting stool. “She’ll call me once she’s settled in her new place. It always takes a month or so to let people know when you’ve moved. That’s a real problem when you’re self-employed. I know. Been there.”
He reached out to shake Mayland Long’s hand. Shaking hands was a ritual Floyd Rasmussen practiced whenever he could, and somehow his guest had begun their conversation without it. He succeeded in grabbing Long’s unresisting hand now, but there was something wrong in the gesture. This was not the usual wrongness which accompanies shaking hands: cold, wet palm, no strength in the grip, or too much. The hand he commandeered was dry and warm. It held his own securely, without squeezing the knuckles together. The wrongness was in the shape of it.
He dropped his eyes from the dusky face, but the hand had been withdrawn. Mayland Long was speaking.
“You have not asked what my interest is in Miss Macnamara. Aren’t you curious?”
Rasmussen looked up in surprise. “Your interest? You’re looking to use her, right? But you weren’t sure she was the engineer you needed. Peccola gave her sort of a lukewarm recommendation and you wanted a second opinion?”
Mayland Long smiled. It was not an English smile, but a Chinese smile. “Very close. I have need other, and am interested to know what she has been doing. I worry I may not find her in time.” He turned to leave.
“Well, I wouldn’t worry,” boomed Rasmussen down the hall. “Don’t… commit yourself to anything yet. She’ll show.”
Mr. Long found himself on Mathilda Avenue, feeling the even, flat, shadeless street and the reek of traffic as a relief after the force of Rasmussen’s joviality. He fingered the keys of his own car, a small green Citroen. He sifted among Rasmussen’s words. Gold and dross: how to tell one from the other? Turning the ignition key, his face meditative, he felt for the anger he had found within himself earlier.
It was still present, and it retained the same size and shape. Good. If he was to be angry, Mayland Long wanted that anger to de dependable.
Today there was no buzzing robot-car on the floor of Friendly Computers. Instead, Fred Frisch was involved in a lengthy discussion with a boy who appeared both too young and too poor to have business there. The subject of the dialogue was breadboards, a large assortment of which lay scattered across the counter. At least half the display machines along the wall were running, some throwing fantasies of color over their screens, while others flashed words. One unit emitted a monotonous beep, beep, beep as images of tiny rockets exploded into flame.
Mr. Long did not attempt to interrupt the conversation, but sat down in the same chair that Martha Macnamara had graced the previous morning. The repetitive, multi color display on the nearest video screen caught his interest. Mayland Long’s experience with computing was as extensive as the books in his library and existed on no other level. He pressed the return key tentatively.
The display vanished, leaving in its place a list of available games and instructions for invoking them. He conjured up something called simply Life.
The resultant display was impressive. Small cells of white grew over the screen from dots of his placing. These expanded like lichen, and like lichen died away in the middle. Mr. Long grasped the mathematics of it, and also the metaphor. His eyes watched tiny colonies grow, proliferate, compete with one another for space, fail through mysterious inner processes, die… Like societies of men.
It was a game he was quite familiar with, watching mankind from a distance: civilizations, tribes, individuals… As always, he felt a desire to interfere.
He focused on one white speck, no different from any of its fellows. It was one of the rare stable ones, situated in a small pulsing colony. It might continue forever, or at least until the next power failure.
But wait—no. At the far edge of the screen a small, odd-shaped colony was moving sideways. A glider. It left the screen at the right and re-entered from the far left. Its path was going to impact the pulsar in… how many moves?
Mayland Long worked the puzzle in his mind. He saw each move that would bring the attacker toward the small colony. He constructed the impact, and saw in foresight the end of that tiny dot of light, no different from any other on the screen.
He sat motionless and watched, his eyes black, his face impassive. But a moment before the glider intersected the stable colony, his hand struck the keyboard of the computer, freezing the action.
“Live,” he whispered to the dot of light.
He heard movement behind him. Frisch stood there, dangling a green plastic board from his nervous hands. “Ever play that before?” he asked. “Life?”
Long looked around him at the empty store. “Not this… implementation.”
“I suppose everyone’s got one,” the young man admitted. “But this one’s faster. Most of them are written in BASIC. Would you believe that?”
Long did not answer. He stretched out an arm, found another plastic tub chair and pulled it into position beside his own.
Obediently, Frisch sat. “You haven’t found her, I guess.”
Mayland Long smiled ruefully. “Progress has been retrograde. I have now lost the mother.”
Frisch stared. “Maybe she gave up and went home.”
“If she did, she left her luggage behind.” Long’s gesture made circles in the air.
“Mr. Frisch…”
“Fred.”
“Will you answer me a few more questions? I realize you’re busy and I’m a bother…”
Frisch bit his lower lip and pulled on his moustache. “I’m not busy,” he admitted. “And I don’t mind talking. But as I said yesterday, I don’t really know Liz.”
“These are technical questions. You see, I value the breadth of your interest. You understand both methodology and personality. I imagine you know Floyd Rasmussen.”
“RasTech,” answered Frisch promptly, responding to the flattery with innocent eagerness. “I don’t know him, though. Just about him.”
“Go on, please. I know him, you see, but do not know about him.”
The young shop owner took a deep breath. “Rasmussen. He’s a mover. Sharp. Not a technical man, but a great entrepreneur. He’s made a lot of money.”
“On his own?”
Frisch nodded affirmation. “He’s started half-a-dozen firms in the last ten years.”
“Then why was he working for FSS in the position of department manager last year?”
“Oh, he’s lost a lot of money, too. His last couple of ideas went bust: small business systems.’“ Frisch began intensive demolition work upon his moustache, his eyes puckered, staring through the blank window of his shop at the street beyond.
“But I don’t think he was personally hurt either time—just the stockholders. Only I imagine it’s hard to find any more capital after two Chapter Elevens.”
“Evidently he has managed,” interjected Mr. Long. He sighed and murmured, “Interesting.
“Tell me… Fred. Why would a bank want to hire an engineer to write half a security system?”
There was no hesitation in Fred’s reply. “So the right hand won’t know what the left hand is doing. It’s often done that way. Like for the little plastic cards they use nowadays. You know? Supposedly no one knows the algorithm by which the card code is evolved out of the account number, or the customer’s name. That’s because two programmers wrote it. Each knows half
.
“A bank’ll go to a lot of trouble to randomize the choice, hiring one man on this end of the country and one in New York, taking two or even three programmers out of different segments of the field—industry, research, schools.”
“Have you ever been involved in such a project Fred?”
“No, not me.” He shook his head, releasing his moustache from its duress. “That’s big league stuff. They don’t look for a hacker with his head full of new ideas and his heart among the hobbyists.”
Frisch frowned as he spoke, but his eyes remained vague, reflecting the sky through the window: detached, speculative, feeling his grievances against the world only superficially. He was very young. Mayland Long found him interesting. His own brown eyes, watching Frisch, were anything but vague.
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