Job was making his automatic assessment of the man's voice. It was standard English, with the open vowels and clipped consonants that he had noticed in Stella. But there was a subtle difference, a suggestion that this was not Wilfred Dell's first language.
"What makes you think that I would ever try to touch her hand?" Job threw the question in rapid chachara-calle.
Dell pursed rosebud lips. "Mmm. Very good." He replied in the same argot of the central city. "And quick. It's nice to know that not everything in the data banks is rubbish. We'll get to that later. How do I know about you and Stella? I don't know, in the sense of absolute proof. I cannot ask her, and if I could she would not tell me. But I do my homework, and I make good guesses. When Stella arrived at the Mall Compound she went to the bathroom. By that time the central data bank had turned up some interesting material about you, so I made sure that we obtained a urine sample as the toilet she used was flushed. And what do you know? There was semen in it. Now, I've known Stella for a long time, and I'd be the first to admit that if you put her lovers in line, you'd have enough men to fight a fair-sized war . . ."
Wilfred Dell shook his head at Job's expression. "I'm sorry if I'm upsetting you. But I must go on. If I were to take a specimen of your semen and do a DNA mapping, I might find that it was nothing like the sperm sample we took from Stella's wee-wee. Or I just might find that you and Stella have been playing rub-the-rhubarb. That's my guess. Stella's not above plucking a wildflower, even if it happens to be growing in a dung-heap.
"So let's take the next step. Reginald Brook is delighted that Stella has been found. He knows that she has no idea of danger. He's not surprised to learn that she wandered off through the city and stayed away overnight; it's just the sort of thing she would do. End of episode. The matter goes no further. Unless someone were to put the evidence of what really happened right under poor Reggie's nose. Now, it's not my job to cause Reginald pain or discomfort. I wouldn't dream of showing him what you did . . . if your name was not Job Napoleon Salk, and if I did not have other needs."
"How do you know my name?"
"From Stella. No, don't have any silly thoughts that she 'betrayed' you. If you don't want something passed on to others, you don't tell it. You know that rule as well as I do. But once I had your name, I thought I'd run it through the data banks, just for the fun of it. From your address I didn't expect much. Maybe a little petty theft, or an addiction or two. But instead I got this."
Wilfred Dell reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a sheaf of paper. " 'Job Napoleon Salk, aged eighteen. Born in the Aeterna Lux charity ward of the L Street hospital. Should have been stillborn, and nearly was. Birth report shows numerous physical problems." Dell looked up. "You seem to be managing them pretty well, but they'll cause trouble later. If you have a later. Let's continue: Raised in Cloak House until age ten. One of just a handful of children who did not die in a contaminated food incident there." Dell raised his fair eyebrows. "Smart?"
"Lucky. They wanted to starve me, not poison me."
"We all need luck. But then you escaped, and the record is blank for a month or so until you were caught running drugs to the Mall Compound. Taking a bit of a chance, weren't you?"
"I was. But I didn't know it."
"Just like today. Were you a virgin, by the way, until the fair Stella came along?" Wilfred Dell nodded at Job's sick look. "Well, never mind. One consolation, virginity is a one-off deal. You can't get fooled again that way. Let's go on. J-D'd, and sent back to the Cloak House detention center. But you escaped again." Dell laid the papers in his lap. "No one ever escaped from the Cloak House detention center before, and they couldn't figure out how you did it. Like to give me a hint?"
Job shook his head.
"Well, no matter. You can tell me later. But at the next point in your record I became very interested. After Cloak House there's another gap, almost nine months. Then your name appears in a roundup of dissident scientists. One of them had tested you as a possible recruit. So far as he was concerned, you failed. But the results of the test are in the files, and it's obvious that your scientist friend must be a bit of a moron. He was so busy looking for what he wanted to see, he missed the most important point: you were only ten years old, with next to no education, but you spoke seven languages fluently. More than that, the tests showed you had absolute pitch, a near-perfect word memory, and an amazing ear for language." He looked up at Job. "You still have that, I assume?"
Job had nothing to lose. "I think that would be a fairly safe assumption." He spoke as Wilfred Dell spoke, the same broad vowels overlaid on the faint residue of a street accent. "I also do my homework. And in the area of language, at least, it is not necessary for me to make many guesses."
The other man listened closely. "Do it again. Some more." And then, after another few sentences from Job, "I've heard enough recordings of myself to know how accurate that is. Do you realize how useful you could be in the right situation?"
"I'm in the wrong situation."
"We'll see. How many languages do you speak now?"
"I'm not sure." Job frowned. "I'd have to sit down and count."
"Some other time. Let me continue. There was a scientist roundup—but no sign of little Job Salk. Where did he go? How did he know to run for it, when the others didn't? How could he disappear so cleanly? None of the prisoners could tell, even when they'd been dosed with drugs that squeeze your memory like a wet sponge. So. Job Salk disappears again. And this time he stays vanished. For nearly nine years. Until this afternoon."
"I was a fool. I deserved to be caught."
"Perhaps. But you would prefer not to be killed? Or even castrated? Then let me spell it out for you. You can assist me with one of my current little problems. Or I can give these records"—Wilfred Dell tapped the papers resting on his paunch—"to Reginald Brook, together with the results of a comparison between your semen and that taken from Stella's pee. And then I can walk away and busy myself on other matters."
Job stepped closer, peering into Dell's eyes. "Who are you?"
"I am Wilfred—"
"No. You know what I mean." Job studied the chubby face, in repose like a Buddha in meditation. "Who are you?"
Wilfred Dell stood up. "I will give you an answer. But not here and now. Come on."
"Where are you going to take me?"
"To a place where our conversations can have more meat. And where you can see how the other half lives—or rather, one-tenth of one percent." Wilfred Dell was smiling his half-smile. "We are going to the Mall Compound."
* * *
One persistent rumor of the city concerned the true size of the Mall Compound. The aboveground area, with its barricades and watchtowers and searchlights, was little more than a mile long and less than half of that wide. But the Compound was said to continue underground, stretching its tentacles out through subterranean tunnels of unknown extent.
Job had seen the evidence long ago, when he was taken from inside the compound to Bracewell Mansion. But he had been too young and too overwhelmed to note much of what he saw or where he went, and his underground journey had been mainly in darkness.
This time he was in a better position to observe, but again he was distracted. His mind ran far afield. He noted that he and his guards walked eight long blocks to the gaudy heart of the bordello district, entered a red brick building, and descended for many seconds in an elevator before emerging in a brightly lit tunnel. He climbed into the car that waited there, sitting silent next to Wilfred Dell. The man did not try conversation. He sensed that Job needed time for his own thoughts.
The sheer stupidity of it, that was what Job could not get over. It seemed that the moment he had set eyes on Stella Michelson, every thinking part of his brain had turned to mush. He had lived totally in the present, like an animal, with no thought of future consequences. And the idiocy had not finished yet. He knew that Stella had behaved without a shred of responsibility, doing exactly the opposite of what he had
asked her, and leading Wilfred Dell and his assistants straight to Job's home.
But with all that, he could not feel angry with her. He felt anger at himself, for forgetting the lessons that had shaped his whole life. She had never pretended that Job was her first or her only lover. He had just invented the idea that he was and acted as though wishing made it so.
Job's brooding ended when they left the car and began a journey through the labyrinth of the Mall Compound's interconnected buildings. Useless as it might be, he began to study the path they were taking, counting turnings and noting coded wall colors. The buildings had once been discrete units, each with its own external wall. There must still be doors that led to the outside.
Wilfred Dell watched Job with that little smile on his face. "Never say die, eh? I like that. But this is not Cloak House. The chance of escape from the Compound is quite negligible." He glanced at the guards and switched to chachara-calle. "Negligible, chico-terco. without my help. Believe me."
They entered a glass-sided elevator and went slowly up, higher and higher in a tall, square-sided tower that rose above all other structures of the Mall Compound. Job had seen it many times from far away, wondering what it was and how it came to be there. He had never in his life expected to be inside it. The windows that they passed in their ascent faced southwest. As the car rose, Job saw the dark and quiet river, then the lights of airport runways. Beyond that, the dimly lit city went on forever.
"After you." The elevator finally stopped. Wilfred Dell had the gun in his hand again. He gestured to his armed assistants to descend in the elevator, and directed Job forward through a heavy wooden door. "You will sleep up here tonight, in guest quarters. Turn around." He watched closely as Job turned to face him. "How are you? Exhausted?"
"I've felt better. But I'm all right."
"Lively enough to absorb information? If not, we'll postpone this until morning."
"Try me." Job was tired, but he was taking in everything around him. Dell's office was furnished with a luxury that Job had never seen, not even in the most opulent chambers of Bracewell Mansion where only senators and congressmen were received. This room reeked of wealth: massive wooden desk, discreet recessed ceiling lights, coffee tables with delicate cups and saucers and glasses upon them, oil paintings on the walls that subtly enhanced the rest of the furnishings . . .
"You can look around some other time." Dell seemed to see and understand everything. "I brought you here," he went on, "because I want you to do a job for me. To be specific, I want to send you into the Nebraska Tandy." He smiled. "There. Now you're awake, right?"
Job was very much awake.
"The Nebraska Tandy," repeated Wilfred Dell. "You know the jingle?"
"T-A-N-D—"
"Not that one. That's the kiddy version. This one's a bit more grown up:
"So twice ten miles of sterile ground,
With walls and towers were girdled round.
In Xanadu, the sky burns black.
If you go in, you don't come back.
"How much do you know about the Great Nebraska Tandy?"
"Enough. I'd be better off handed over to Reginald Brook, right now."
"He might send you there anyway. And if he sentenced you, you wouldn't come back. Whereas if you go for me, the whole point of your trip is that you will come back, or it's not worth your going." Dell gestured to a white chair built of strips of stout cloth and metal bars. "Sit down. It's a lot more comfortable than it looks. I can see you're baffled, and you should be. Why would anyone care what's happening inside a Tandy?" He sat down behind the desk, opened a carved jade box that sat on the corner, and pushed it towards Job. "Help yourself."
Job glanced at the assortment inside and shook his head. "I don't use any of those."
"Good," Dell closed the lid. "Do you use alcohol?"
"Not normally. I did with Stella."
"I'll bet you did. But you're sober now? I have to tell you a few things. You may think you know them already, but you don't. While I was waiting for you I took a look around your place. Lots of books. Have you read any of them?"
"Some. Most."
"So you read about the Great Crash—the Quiebra Grande?"
"A bit."
"Then don't believe a word of it. What the books say caused the crash, that's pure fiction. They follow the official line, what the government wants you to believe. I'm going to tell you the truth."
Dell paused. The lights in the room were unobtrusive, but they were four times as powerful as the bare bulbs in Job's room. Job could see the lines around Wilfred Dell's eyes, and furrows in the high brow. The baby face was deceptive. The man behind the desk was in his forties, perhaps in his fifties. And he was an enigma, a type of personality that Job had never met before.
"I thought that you were the government," he said.
"The Quiebra Grande." Dell ignored the implied question. "I still lived in the city in those days, not too far from where we found you. And not much richer." He flashed Job a look. "There are ways out, you know, just a few. I used to read the papers, too. I remember when it began.
"It was like a smelly fart at the duchess's tea party. At first, all the governments ignored it. They pretended that it didn't exist, that nothing had happened.
"Then things got worse. The stink became terrible, too bad to ignore. And all the governments turned and accused each other. You did it, one said, when you cut down all your forests. No, it's your fault, said the next one, you spent more money than you had, and you pulled down all the world's financial markets. But you were burning the high-sulfur coal, ruining the air. And you were fouling the oceans with your wastes. And you had the bad reactor meltdown, and quadrupled the background radioactivity.
"Everything was going to hell. But there's one other thing to remember about a high-class tea party: no matter what happens, the Duchess won't be blamed for the fart. And no matter who gets hurt, the Duchess herself won't suffer. In our case, the Michelsons and the Brooks and the big land-owning families were the Duchess. They were not about to lower their living standards. Other people could do that.
"But the Quiebra Grande was too bad to ignore. So the powers in this country and elsewhere did what rulers in trouble have done for centuries: they looked for a group to blame.
"And they found one, people easy to identify and too naive to defend themselves. The air was dirty and radioactive, the water was foul, the topsoil was blowing off the land. There was no money to repair roads or runways or cities, and the transportation system was collapsing. What was the common denominator of all the problems?"
"Technology," said Job quietly. "And behind the technology, science."
Wilfred Dell had not been expecting an answer. He stared at Job. "You really did read those books, didn't you?"
It was nice to know that Dell's records were not perfect. "I did, but not until I was sixteen years old. I knew the official position long before that. A scientist told me about it when I was ten. Alan Singh. He was one of those they rounded up. I've often wondered what happened to him."
"I could find out. But I hardly need to look. The Toxic And Nuclear Disposal sites started growing before the turn of the century. By the time of the Quiebra Grande there were hundreds of Tandies, all around the world. The biggest in this country is Xanadu, out in Nebraska—over twenty miles square. It holds the most toxic chemical wastes, the highest radioactivity levels. And when the scientist pogrom began, Reginald Brook and friends decided that the punishment must fit the crime. Scientists should go to the Tandies. The vast majority of them were sent to the Nebraska Tandy." Wilfred Dell smiled pleasandy at Job. "So your friend Singh probably landed in Xanadu. And he is certainly long-dead."
That was where Father Bonifant had been sent, uncomplaining. The assignment to the Nebraska Tandy thus carries a great responsibility, and I choose to regard it as an equally great honor. Job recalled the calm face of Mister Bones. There was no hint in his expression that he had just been sentenced to a terrible d
eath.
Dell had seen Job's expression, and misunderstood it. "I know what you are thinking: if Xanadu is fatal to Singh and anyone who goes there, why should it be any different for Job Salk? If you were to stay for a long time in the Nebraska Tandy, or any other—I'm told that the Mongolian Tandy makes Xanadu look like a pleasure palace—you would be right. But that's not what I'm proposing. You will make a short trip. How short? Depends on how efficient you are at collecting information. As soon as you have what you need, you come out."
"And as soon as you have whatyou need, you kill me?"
"Now then! Such an idea." Wilfred Dell clucked his tongue. "I don't mind your suggestion, it shows that you think along the appropriate lines. But you happen to be quite wrong. I always need first-rate people, as many of them as I can get. And my staff are well-treated. Don't take my word, ask any of my assistants. All I require in return is loyalty. Of course, this will help." He picked up Job's folder from the desk. "Little things like this are held in a safe place. If anything happens to me, they will be delivered to where they will do the most good. Like, to Reginald Brook."
"You might as well give it to him now. I can't do your job. You must have people better suited for it than I am."
"Three months ago I might have agreed with you. Four of my staff went into Xanadu. Two men, two women. None came out, or sent messages. Our spaceborne imaging systems remain in position, of course, but—now what's the matter?"
"Spaceborne systems. I thought nothing had gone into space since 2003."
"That was just the dissolution of NASA. There are other programs, always have been. The remote collection systems keep on looking; but there is a limit to what spaceborne or airborne observing systems can hope to see. A person with the right contacts on the ground, inside Xanadu, can be far more flexible."
"I don't know anything about the inside of the Nebraska Tandy. And I don't know anyone there."
"That's not necessary. You have this going for you." Dell tapped Job's folder. "Before you get there, we'll make sure that the people who run Xanadu have your records. The place wasn't intended to have anyone running it when it started out. Criminals were supposed to go there and just die, nice and quiet. But once people began to be sent in they set up their own internal power structure within a few months." He sighed. "Sometimes I think about dying. And then I wonder about going to hell. And then I think that if and when I go there, the place will be completely organized and run by lost souls, with a council and a works committee and an ethics panel, and I'll feel right at home. Anyway, you have impeccable credentials for Xanadu. J-D marks still on your wrist and forehead, drug-running conviction, high scores on the science aptitude test."
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