The Last Master

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Oh, you’ve seen the matches?” said St. Onge. “We know about that sort of thing, of course. Actually, something like that lies in a sort of gray area as far as the regulations go—though of course we keep a quiet but steady eye on it. The duelists are all volunteers, of course. The gambling establishments like to foster the rumor that people are kidnapped, or drugged, or otherwise forced to duel. But drugging, of course, would make a good fight impossible; and kidnapping we’d crack down on right away. And in fact, who could be forced into such a thing? It’s impossible to lose more dividend units gambling than you have, these days, due to instantaneous record keeping. So there couldn’t be any such thing as paying off losses to the casino by risking your life the way legend has it that some duelists are doing.”

  “But who’d volunteer for something like that?” Ett asked.

  “Why, people bent on suicide, for example,” said St. Onge. “As long as they register the intent to do away with themselves, it’s all perfectly according to regulations. Or—more common—someone who considers himself a very good fencer and wants to risk an encounter with real weapons to test his skill. Again, if he’s registered his intent, that makes the duel simply a dangerous sport. Someone like that, matched with another such sportsman who’s equally skilled—or a would-be suicide, untrained, matched with another like himself—breaks no regulations.”

  St Onge gave another of his heatless smiles.

  “In fact,” he said, “I might tell you that I’ve tried the sport once or twice myself. I’m really rather good as a fencer. Do you fence?”

  “No,” said Ett.

  “Ah,” said St. Onge.

  “All right, then,” said Ett. “Since these Folk of Good Will are harmless, why bring me here to talk to me about them?”

  “Oh, just a word of caution,” said St. Onge. “As I say, we want the R-Master to have all the funds he wants. On the other hand—and I’m afraid my department has had to crack down on Master Malone in this respect—we can’t have him becoming a funnel by which funds reach other citizens, or groups of citizens, that aren’t really entitled to them. You understand I’m sure… Is there something the matter? Are you all right?”

  “Warm in here, isn’t it?” said Ett.

  The room about him, Ett thought, had been becoming steadily warmer since his arrival. He had become accustomed, in the weeks since he had first woken from the RIV reaction, to ignoring the minor discomforts to which the drug had rendered him sensitive. But the present heat was raising his feelings of illness above their normal level. He felt feverish and weak. His customary small headache had become a pounding sledgehammer just behind his temples, and the air he drew into his lungs now felt thick and unnatural.

  “Is it?” said St. Onge, jumping to his feet. “I hadn’t noticed. Let me open the window.”

  He stepped across to the side of the window opening and punched at the control button there. The curtain of upflowing air died, and a cool breeze from the outside atmosphere swept into the room. At first its chill touch was a relief to Ett, but in seconds all heat fled from him and he began to shiver uncontrollably.

  “Good Lord, you are having trouble,” said St. Onge, watching him. “You should remember how frail you are nowadays. Maybe we’d better get you back to your island as soon as possible.”

  “Don’t you,” said Ett, between teeth he barely kept from chattering, “—don’t you feel that the air from the outside is cold?”

  “No.” St. Onge shook his head. He stepped across the room again, touched the window control—and immediately the room started to heat up for Ett once more. “To tell you the truth, no,” St. Onge continued. “Not really. I’m afraid it’s that RIV reaction making you vulnerable to little changes in temperature like this. Damned shame, but you’ll have to get used to keeping yourself protected carefully at all times from now on. That’s a good reason by itself for your staying clear of political and other matters. You really should start letting Dr. Hoskides take care of you with the proper medicines. A lot of this sort of thing can be shunted off with the correct drugs, they tell me. You’d be much more comfortable under Hoskides’ care.”

  “No, thanks,” said Ett, getting unsurely to his feet.

  “Here, let me help you to the door… Oh, Cele!”

  “Ett! What’s the matter?” she cried, appearing from somewhere behind Ett and running to him. She put her arms around him. “Here, let me help. What’s wrong?”

  “The room got a little warm and then a bit too chilly for him,” said St. Onge, on the other side of Ett. “You’re a godsend, Cele. Could you see he gets back to his ship all right? I can’t leave the office. Got an appointment in a few minutes I can’t break.”

  “Of course I’ll take care of him,” said Cele. “Come on, Ett. Let me get you into one of the inside rooms where there’s complete climate control. Then you can lie down while I arrange a way to move you without letting you have any more reactions like this.”

  She helped Ett out of the office, a short way down the corridor, and into a small room where the temperature seemed to be within comfortable limits and there were no drafts. He was left lying on a couch, alternately shivering and sweating, until she came back with two of the armed Field Examiners—a different two from those who had brought Ett here—and a floating grav surface with what looked like a transparent hood over its full length.

  “I’m not going to travel in that thing!” said Ett. “I can walk.”

  But with Cele’s perfume under his nostrils, he allowed himself to be helped in under the hood. He rode back down to the atmosphere ship and, with Carwell and Rico beside him, made the trip back to the island.

  He did not, however, improve as he went along. After a while he stopped shivering and simply ran a fever that, by the time they arrived, had made him light-headed, almost drunk. He vaguely remembered being carried to his room on the same hooded grav surface that had brought him out of the EC Western Hemisphere Center.

  Later yet, he was vaguely aware of being prodded and examined. But that, too, ended, and he sank into the oblivion and anaesthesia of a sleep for which he was as grateful as a starving man might be for a meal.

  Chapter Twelve

  He dreamed of Cele. In the beginning, in the Milan Tower, he had found himself both attracted and challenged by her—but not anything beyond that. There was something about her that seemed hidden and out of reach, but the mystery did not attract him; in fact, he did not seem to have the feeling for her that he had had for the other women he had known and wanted. In his way he had liked all of them—and in that same way, a liking for Cele was lacking in him. But this second meeting had increased that earlier measure of attraction and challenge which she presented for him. She was something like the fever that had burned him up on the way back to the island—unnatural, but momentarily intoxicating.

  His dreams of her after he got back to the island were confused dreams. He could not remember after he woke just what had been in them. But he knew that Cele had run through them all, like a darkly glittering thread leading him on beyond rational thought. And when, at last, he awoke and found himself again, he found also that his dream concern for her had vanished along with his fever. All at once, he remembered his many other concerns.

  He lay now on a grav bed in the room he had slept in since his arrival on the island. He felt weak but newly clean. Rolling on his side with some effort, he reached out to the bedside table and punched the “on” stud of the phone.

  “Anyone there?” he called.

  “Yes, Mr. Ho,” said Rico’s voice. “I’ll be right in.” A moment later, the secretary came in, accompanied by Dr. Carwell.

  “How are you feeling?” Carwell asked.

  “Limp as an oyster,” said Ett. “Otherwise not bad. In fact, better than I’ve been feeling ever since I first woke up from the RIV reaction. What happened to me?”

  “It seems,” said Carwell, “you caught a cold.”

  Ett stared at him unbelievingly.
/>   “A cold?”

  “I’m afraid that’s all it was,” Carwell said. “Evidently because of the RIV you react a lot more violently to small infections than I’d thought. In fact, I had to have Dr. Hoskides examine you.”

  “That—” Ett started to sit up in bed. Carwell gently held him down.

  “Don’t worry. All he did was examine. You’ve got my word he didn’t give you any medicines.”

  Ett relaxed.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Only a cold? I felt as if I was in the last stages of… I don’t know what.”

  “Dr. Hoskides said that to you, of course, the sensation of sickness would seem more pronounced. Just as, he said, you thought the room was a good deal hotter than that auditor—St. Onge, was it?—was actually keeping it; and the breeze you felt seemed a lot colder than it actually was.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Ett flatly. “I’ve been getting used to the way I react since I had the RIV. What I ran into in St. Onge’s office was a lot worse than anything I’ve felt so far. It was hotter and colder than normal. Either St. Onge was pretending not to feel as much of it as I did, or else he’s got a pretty powerful lack of sensitivity himself.”

  Carwell shook his head. He was feeling Ett’s forehead and checking his pulse.

  “Yes,” he said, “you’re a good bit improved. But you’d better plan on resting for a day or two.”

  “Oh, no.” Ett tried once more to force himself into a sitting position on the side of the bed, and made it this time, in spite of Dr. Carwell’s efforts to push him back down. “We’ve got to move. I’ve got to move. There are things to do, with Wally and with the business of finding that RIV information we want.”

  He checked himself suddenly, looking around at the walls.

  “That reminds me,” he said to Rico. “Eavesdropping of any kind is against regulations, even for the EC itself—or so I was taught. And I know you said our particular opponents like to play by the regulations. But maybe we’d better check these premises.”

  “For listening devices?” Rico asked. “I already did, the first day I was here—and everyday since. None.”

  “All right, then,” said Ett. He stood up and was happy to find out he was stronger than he had thought, now that he was fully awake. “I’ll get dressed.”

  He turned to Carwell, who was watching unhappily from the other side of the bed.

  “Morgan, how long have I been asleep?” Ett asked.

  “About thirteen hours, since we got you home,” Carwell answered. “Obviously you feel better, but take my word for it—you don’t have the resources to go very far right now. You’ve still got the cold, even though you’re handling it a lot better now; but if you don’t take it easy—”

  “I understand, Morgan. And I plan to sleep a lot in the next few days. But first I’ve got to get some things rolling.”

  The capsule holding Wally had been moved to one wing of the buildings on the island, a wing which was now being expanded and remodeled into completely independent quarters, consisting of a revival theater, a living section, and an area that looked like a combination of a gym and a schoolroom. It would be used for training Wally, however much he might need such help, when and if he should be successfully brought back from the arrested death in which he now lay.

  “But you mustn’t expect too much,” Dr. Carwell said to Ett, as they moved among the workmen making the alterations. “I’ve been in close contact with Dr. Garranto and his staff, of course, and we’ve gotten all the equipment and personnel he wants for the procedure. But he asked me to remind you again that the odds are against any revival to any reasonable state at all—I mean, any revival above the basic immediate level of coma. And if something better is achieved, the most we can hope for is that he’ll regain a state something below the level of the moderate-to-severe mental deficiency he was showing at the time of his death. It’s true the act of his suicide was somewhat beyond what we would have expected from someone with that limited an intellectual capacity—”

  “I’m not hoping for any miracle,” said Ett harshly. “Just reasonable results!”

  He heard his own voice in his ears like the voice of a stranger and enemy. There was something in it he had never heard from himself before, something almost animal-savage.

  He was out of words. Carwell walked silently beside him as they crossed the neatly-cropped lawns of the estate, descending gently to the edge of the soft blue-green sea. Ett turned and trudged along the beach, Carwell behind, sinking into the sand on each step and making hard work of it. The effort soon made the muscles inside each thigh feel heavy and flaccid, and grimly Ett admitted to himself that his illness had taken a good deal of his strength, for the moment.

  He was panting, as well as perspiring, by the time they reached the concrete section of walkway near the dock, and he saw that Dr. Carwell was eyeing him. Ett suspected the physician was thinking of trying to order him back to bed—and Ett was not sure just what his response would be. Both of them were diverted when they rounded a corner of the rather large boathouse and saw that the atmosphere flyer belonging to Ett was rocking on the waves, apparently ready for flight. Maea was standing on the dock above it, and Rico could be seen inside the vessel, at the controls. He stepped back up to the dock as Ett and Carwell approached.

  “What is it?” asked Ett, as they came up to the other two.

  “We’ve gotten a lead to someone who may be able to tell us where the secret EC files are hidden,” said Rico. “I had to set up an appointment without waiting to talk to you, and I’ll have to leave right away to keep it. But the man doesn’t want to talk to any more people than he has to, so I can only take one more—Maea.”

  “No,” said Ett. “I’m going.”

  Dr. Carwell made a motion as if about to protest, but made no sound.

  “We’ll see you as soon as we get back,” Ett said in the direction of Maea and Carwell, as he was climbing into the flyer.

  Maea put a hand on his arm.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “How am I? Fine,” said Ett. He moved himself away from her and the touch of her hand. The sight of the capsule up on the hill had reminded him of his original feelings against her. He sat beside Rico and let him set up for take-off.

  As the vehicle began to move away from the dock, he turned his head and watched the figures of Maea and Carwell, who were watching him in turn. Ett smiled and waved, and saw Maea smile back.

  Their destination was one of the underwater, sealed-dome communities in the shallow waters just off the coast of Mexico, in the Gulf of Mexico. It had begun as a retirement community, then been taken over by a new generation of young families that could not afford the units to buy private homes ashore—and had ended up as a sort of third-rate undersea resort area, which catered to people from shore with enough spare credit to buy saltwater fishing licenses.

  Among other attractions grown up with the resort character of the community was a sort of amusement park on a high piece of bottom less than thirty meters from the surface. The amusement park offered underwater mazes, tank fishing, and various other entertainments, some of them in their way as seamy as the dueling gym Ett had stumbled into in Sunset Mountain near Hong Kong.

  “Don’t look in the tank,” said the young woman who was guiding them to the man with whom Rico had made the appointment.

  She was a local woman—perhaps a housewife—who refused to give her name, but who had been the one to meet them when they had gone to a certain restaurant according to the directions of their contact. She obviously wanted or needed the dividend units she could earn by acting as their guide, because it was clear that she despised not only what she was doing, but the person to whom she was conducting them. But for some unknown reason she had apparently taken a liking to Ett at first sight.

  “Why not?” asked Ett. They were travelling on foot through a tubular passageway, surrounded completely by the water of the thirty-meter depth in which the amus
ement park was located.

  Before he could get an answer from her, they reached the pressure door at the end of the tube. It unsealed with a sucking sound to let them through into an area containing what looked like a swimming pool, enclosed by a high wire fence at its very edge and surrounded by bleacher seats. The seats were nearly all filled, mostly by people whose heavily suntanned skins showed them to be land dwellers and probable tourists here in the undersea community. The woman led them to the end of the pool, up to a fat man of unguessable age.

  The reason the man’s age defied estimate was that he had no teeth in his mouth. Normally, people kept their adult teeth all their lives; even if his lack of them was the result of a birth defect, the man could have been fitted with dentures. It therefore had to be assumed that he preferred to go around toothless. He grinned at Ett with thick, pink lips between a nose and chin that almost touched.

  “Which one of you’s Rico?” he asked in a high-pitched voice.

  “I am,” said Rico.

  “And your friend here, who wants to be nameless, who’s he, I wonder?” The man laughed; then he sobered abruptly and jerked his head at the woman who had brought them. She turned and left.

  “Have you got some place where we can talk privately?” Rico asked.

  “Sure,” lisped the man, “but what’s your hurry? The feeding frenzy’s due in a second. That’s when we lift the barrier. Have a seat and watch, as my guests. I’m the manager here, you know. It won’t cost you a thing.”

  “We don’t have time,” said Rico.

  “You’d better have time,” murmured the fat man softly and malevolently. “You’d better have time or I won’t talk to you at all. After all, why should I? Sit down or get out!”

  He moved over on the bench to give them room.

  They sat. Looking down into the pool, Ett saw it was divided in the middle by an opaque barrier. In the section farther from him half a dozen white sharks, all about four meters in length, were swimming about. In the right-hand section three bottle-nosed dolphins were darting back and forth underwater; on the bottom of their part of the tank, dead and belly up, were two more white sharks. Ett surmised that the sharks had been introduced, perhaps one at a time, into the section containing the dolphins, and that the dolphins had battered both selachians to death. Now, however, as Ett watched, a chute opened above the shark section and disgorged a couple hundred kilos of bloody meat.