by Dean Koontz
"I think I know the man you need," she said.
"When can I get in touch with him?" He was not happy with the way she slumped now, with the way he had broken her spirit.
"I can't just go phone him, if Jon is as deadly as people say. It will have to be—discreet."
"Tomorrow," he said. "Make an excuse to see him if you must. But I can't wait longer than tomorrow. I might be dead if you don't help me soon." He laid a card with his comscreen number on it on the coffee table. "Call me as soon as it's arranged."
"Tomorrow," she said dismally.
He felt terrible. The yearning and the hollowness in him had been augmented now by a feeling of brutishness, of insensitivity. But, damn it, this was the only way to reach the girl, and through her was the only way to reach someone within the Brethren structure who might be willing, for the proper consideration, to turn over information that would send Jon Margle up the river. "Tell him the money is unlimited. Almost any price he names within reason."
He found his own way out. It seemed like several thousand miles . . .
Almost twenty-four hours later to the minute, in the middle of Wednesday afternoon, she called him. Her face, larger than life on the comscreen, was painfully beautiful, though in no way as fascinating as it had been in person. She avoided his eye, staring at points beyond him in the room, staring down at her own hands which—he thought—twitched and intertwined in her lap. She spoke softly, almost inaudibly, like a small, embarrassed child. He could not understand this. Had she been frightened, he could have reasoned why. But embarrassment? "In an hour," she said. "My place again."
"I'm afraid not," he countered, wishing that she would look him in the eyes just once so that he could see that marvelous, shimmering sea-green once again. "That could be too easy a trap. It has to be someplace public."
She seemed confused, but then she flipped her long yellow hair out of her face and said, "Huzzah Amusement Park," as if the informer was sitting beside her, giving her instructions out of camera range. "Around the—around the fountain. Where they throw coins and make wishes. An hour."
"I'll be there," he assured her.
She rang off, blanking the screen, though he stared at it for some minutes longer, retaining a vision of buttery hair, tan skin, and a quick flash of green . . .
Timothy was oblivious to the stares he elicited as he entered the amusement park. He had long ago learned to live with the attention he drew, ignore it and rise above it. The sign of an ignorant and tasteless man, Taguster had once told him, was the tendency to stare at someone else who was different, whether they were abnormal in form or only in the clothing they chose to wear.
A number of people stood at the mammoth pool into which the fountain emptied its water and drew more to spout. They tossed coins into the blue water, trailed hands in the coolness of it. Then he caught sight of Polly London. She was wearing a relatively expensive pants suit and a large and floppy hat with great, round sunglasses. Her hair was black—she was wearing a wig—but even that change in coloration could not camouflage her beauty. She seemed, in fact, even more stunning than before.
"He's around the fountain," she said. "It's not so public on the other side."
"Let's go," he said.
The pool had a diameter of two hundred feet, and to walk around its circumference required a good deal of nudging, jostling and—in Polly's case—trampled feet. In a few minutes, they broke out of the worst of the crowd, through scattered tourists, to the far back of the pool where the bench that rimmed it looked out onto woods and was screened from the other side by the rock tower of the fountain and the huge spray of water. Here there was only one couple, arms around each other, watching the rise of the water, and a small, thin, intense man in a dark suit. He rose as they approached, then sat down when Polly did. Ti hovered before them, very close so that whatever was said could be kept from the ears of the young lovers.
Introductions were made, and Ti discovered the man was Mr. Kealy; he thought it likely this name was a cover identity. The thin man was nervous, looking about as if he expected someone to jump from one of the trees. "I doubt your friends would be here," Ti said, trying to reassure the man. "It's hardly their form of entertainment."
Kealy nodded, looked at Polly; their eyes locked a short moment. She seemed to wince, and Timothy wondered what the two of them had just exchanged without benefit of words. "Timothy," Polly said, drawing his attention to her lovely face. "Mr. Kealy wants to talk money first. He—" She abruptly stopped talking, raising a tightly clenched fist from her lap toward her mouth, and the look on her face gave Timothy almost enough warning.
He whirled as Kealy slipped the hypodermic syringe into his hip, just above the silver cap of his mobility system. Had it been a narcodart, he might still have had time to deflect it.
But it had all the force of the small man's arm behind it—and was therefore unmoved by the ESP talent.
Kealy depressed the syringe plunger; icewater flushed into Ti's hip.
He wanted to scream.
And he wondered if it were too late to bother . . .
CHAPTER 7
His body was no longer a smoothly functioning machine, but twitched and shivered as the drug flushed through it. He felt strangely hot and cold at the same time. He fancied he could even feel his blood surging through the tight walls of his veins and arteries; it was icy, nearly frozen, and the flesh it moved through was dry and hot as if it had been baked in an oven. His facial features seemed numb and twisted so that his countenance must have been more horrible than usual. He knew, if he had had feet and hands, those limbs would have been immobile, useless, semi-paralyzed as was his face.
He tried to ask them what they had done to him.
The words would not come; there seemed to be fingers around his throat, crushing it shut . . .
Kealy rose, gripped him, and began to turn him around, away from the fountain. Ti tried desperately to order his servos to attack the little man, but the artificial hands just floated to either side of him, locked to their "hold" pattern. They would go wherever his grav-ball went, but would not follow his directions. Then he tried to flip switches inside his grav-plate mechanism, to make it lift up and up, to its limit of eighty feet, up where they couldn't touch him. But there was no response from the ball when he tried this.
It was then that he realized they had given him something that blanked out his psionic ability . . .
He was helpless as he had not been since he had left that hospital and had been educated by the weapons-hungry generals. He wanted to scream and Jack and shout and swing his servos, not so much to attack those who had done this to him, but to work off some of the energy of terror that adrenalin was pumping through his twisted hulk.
Kealy turned him completely about and started pushing him toward the trees. Ahead, the young couple stood, watching them. Ti wanted to shout, cry out, scream at them for help. He concentrated on saying something, anything that would clue them in to what was happening. He stopped resisting with his body, stopped trying to control the grav-plate mechanism, stopped trying to use his servos. With every ounce of strength in him, he managed to shatter the drug's control long enough to issue a weak cry for help.
The young couple came forward, grabbed hold of him, and for a moment he was set to rejoice.
Then Kealy let go of him, hurried ahead toward the woods, and said to the young couple: "Make it fast before anyone comes around from the other side of the pool."
The sweet kids propelled him toward the trees and into the forest, moving quickly along a footpath that twisted and wound. Soon they were out of sight of the fountain and the midway and anyone who might possibly help him.
The footpath ended at a small lane along which a darkly painted grav-car rested on its rubber rim. When Kealy opened the door, the girl and boy muscled him into the backseat, arranging themselves on either side of him, fencing him in and keeping anyone outside from looking through the windows and getting a good look at him.
Kealy and Polly London sat up front, the dark man behind the wheel. In a moment, they lifted and hummed down the dirt path, the trees flashing swiftly by on all sides. Reluctantly, Polly turned and looked at him, her face lined and tired, as if she had been up all night. "Don't be scared," she said.
He wanted to scream at her.
He could not.
"Don't be frightened. Really. It's nothing that can hurt you very badly. It's only PBT. They aren't going to kill you. You might have a few bad delusions, since it was a massive dose, but that's the worst of it. Do you believe me?"
He did not respond. She could not know that the PBT had paralyzed that section of his brain that gave him his psionic ability—and that without his ESP he was not a man, not anything but a helpless, useless hulk. She could never conceive of how terrified that made him. Without his ESP, he might just as well be dead.
Kealy took the car onto a main highway, punched out to traffic control for an upper level pathway, received one, and took the craft soaring into the perfectly cloudless blue day.
As they rose, the PBT illusions struck Ti with the force of a hammer blow and catapulted him from the real world into a never-never land of surreal fantasies which he could taste and touch and smell and feel . . .
There were women, at first, an abundance of them that made the dreams good and thrilling. In the dream, he drifted down a river of wine on a grass mat that was cool and green. He had arms and legs just as any normal man, had a face that was not twisted and perverted but wonderfully handsome. He was whole, and the world was perfect. As he progressed down the winding waterway, dipping his hands into the fluid to obtain sweet refreshing drinks, the women began to descend from the lightly clouded sky. At first, they were leaves on the wind, nothing more than bits of autumn scattered by a breeze. Then each of the leaves underwent a metamorphosis.
The first to approach his raft was a hugely breasted, long-legged blonde who looked strikingly like Polly London. She circled over him, lighter than air, then sank onto the raft with him. She was naked, and her tanned flesh quivered enticingly before him.
He touched her: his hands sang along her flesh as they picked up the subtle harmony of her warm body.
He kissed her: and felt for the first time the sweet commingling of tongue and tongue . . .
He made love to her as the wine burbled against the rocks on either shore.
Then other women drifted down, changing from leaves into stunningly attractive bedmates who came to him willingly, hungrily. The world was flesh and to hell with the devil. Every piece of the world, from the grass of the raft to the air itself was sensual in touch and smell and taste.
Then the women began to change . . .
Their arms stretched into wings, leathery appendages that spread around the raft, blocking out the sunlight. Their lush-ness gave way to a bony toughness; their beauty rapidly withered into an ugliness that sparked some unspeakable horror in him. Their faces became long, wolflike, their eyes sunken beneath shelves of bone. Their mouths split wide and were crammed with razor-edged teeth that glittered yellowly. He screamed, tried to rise up; they fell upon him, ripping and tearing . . .
It was a night of ugly dreams interspersed with short stretches of sound, deep sleep in which his body attempted to recover from the spasms that shook it while awake—and during which his mind fought to gain a hold on sanity after the mad visions that fled through it in moments of wakefulness.
Dark things chased him down long corridors, things that loped and gibbered, things that had blood-reddened eyes and howled eerily in the confines of the stone-walled hallways. Some of them flew, and some of them crawled along the walls like spiders, amber eyes flashing and hair-feathered limbs trembling in anticipation of the moment when they would leap upon him. In one of these nightmares, as he was running from a slavering, featureless creature that groaned like a man and yet very much unlike a man, one of his legs began to dissolve under him. In moments, he was hobbling on a single leg—when that disappeared and he crashed to the floor. He tried crawling, but both arms vanished. Helplessly immobile, the smell of the slimed floor in his nostrils, he listened to the faceless beast gibbering and chuckling insanely as it approached him at its leisure . . .
He woke from that dream screaming louder than ever, his throat cracking and sore, trickling blood down to his stomach from dry, rasped membranes.
He dreamed the same thing several times, always waking into another drug "reality" of a different nature just before the beast pounced. The dream following might be horrible in its own right, but it offered some degree of succor before he had to repeat that worst one again.
Finally, only two hours before dawn, better than half a day since the delusions had begun in the grav-car on the way from the amusement park, the dreams ceased abruptly, leaving him dizzy, exhausted, and nauseated. With his senses at least partially restored, he found he floated above a bed, his servos swaying back and forth before him. He reached into the ball of the grav-plate system, shut it down, and dropped to the soft mattress where he found instant and protracted sleep of the same deep nature of the transitory moments of rest he had gotten throughout the ordeal. It never once became clear to him that his psi power had returned.
Some five hours later he was awakened by something prodding his neck, something blunt and cold. For a moment, he was afraid to open his eye for fear that one of the creatures from the drug-delusions would be kneeling next to him, poking him with its snout, its teeth gleaming wickedly in a demonic smile. But the prodding grew harder and more insistent until he decided it would be worse not knowing what manner of creature this was than opening his eye and coming face-to-face with it. But his eye was gummed with sleep, and he had to blink it several times to be able to see clearly.
"Good morning, sleeping beauty," a heavy voice said.
He looked up into a heavily jowled face that bore the scars of a number of fights that had not been waged in friendly camaraderie. His eyes were small and squinting, and they were veiled with the dull sheen of dimwittedness. This man was not a drug-delusion, but he might be far more dangerous than a snouted demon if he were turned loose on anyone.
"You've judged him correctly," a smooth, well-modulated voice said, a voice that spoke of education, of self-assurance that transcended mere ego.
Timothy shifted his gaze to the right, behind the brute, and saw a tall, slender man in his mid-thirties: lots of dark hair combed over his ears, a square lantern-jawed face, impeccable clothes dark and sharply cut. In short, this was a man of authority, not a muscleman.
"He likes to hurt people," the gentleman said. "Name's Baker. He doesn't like films and books, as you and I might. He prefers physical excitement."
"You've scared me," Ti said. He was being perfectly honest. "You can stop now."
"Good," the gentleman said, smiling and rocking a little on his heels.
Baker held the projectile gun, slapping it from one palm to another, grinning. Timothy was not certain whether the man had been born with a low IQ and little interest in anything but violence, or whether the Brethren had taken a healthy man and done this to him. Such things were possible. The military had experimented with brain operations in which a man's interests in life were restricted to obeying authority and conforming to the norm—and killing. Such men made magnificent soldiers. And the Brethren would certainly have access to those surgical techniques, considering the money available to them with which they could bribe surgeons or researchists associated with the project.
"What do you want with me?" Timothy asked the gentlemanly one.
"Out of our hair. You made a mistake going to Miss London for this. She just has no concept of how to be devious. Sure, Kealy hates me, but he fears me more. There were other men who would have sold me out. You have to be taken care of so you won't find one of them next time."
At first Ti was intensely pleased at the implication that they were not going to kill him. Then he realized that they would forgo that alternative only if J
on Margle had come up with something even more frightening. "You're not killing me?" he asked, hoping he would hear the alternative now, would not have to lie here and wonder about it.
"That was the original intention. But you seem adept at thwarting the most sophisticated techniques. And if we were to kill you here, we might be implicated. The only other possibility is to addict you to PBT."
Instantly, Ti flicked on his grav-plates and sent a servo streaking at the gentleman. Baker rammed a fist into Ti's chest. He crashed backward against the wall, banging his head on the windowsill set high in the partition. The servo stopped a dozen feet from the Brother as Timothy forgot about controlling it and fought to maintain consciousness.
"Foolish," the Brother said. "You won't be given a killing addiction. With some people, we've put them on it until they need it in massive doses and their bodies begin to deteriorate. It's a slow and painful way to go. But you don't have to fear that."
Ti hung over the bed, drifting, trying to regain his wits and think of some way out of this. Addiction to PBT meant a loss of his ESP and a return to the helplessness of his childhood. Inside, he was screaming . . .
"Not as light doses as your friend Taguster took, though. Somewhere in between, so you won't run to the police to swap information for legalized status as an addict. Now and then, we'll hold out until you're screaming for it—just to keep you aware of who is master here."