Nemo

by Ron Goulart

  “Come along, Nemo.”

  The wall had opened, Jay Perlberg had stepped into the room. Ted was sitting in his chair, staring at the drawing of the boy in the nightshirt. Now came a difficult part, convincing Perlberg he was in the expected cooperative state. The mental defenses Goodanyetz had planted were successful so far, the triggering picture hadn’t worked this morning. Ted remained himself, aware of everything going on. He’d have to feign docile compliance.

  “Nemo, come along,” repeated the handsome Perlberg. He tapped Ted on the back.

  Ted stood up, and without quite meeting Perlberg’s gaze, headed for the opening in the wall. “How can anybody go to bed with a guy like this?” Ted said to himself. “He’s not bad looking, but in such a conventional way and . . . wait now. Let’s concentrate on what’s going to happen next, so you can report the setup to Reverend Ortega.”

  With Perlberg beside him Ted walked down the ramp which curved underground to the Total Security facility. The walls of the corridor were a fog gray, the air smelled of oiled metal and chemical cold and . . . chocolate. No, that must be Perlberg who smelled like chocolate cake. Some new kind of body lotion? Or maybe the Evriman was on the fritz again and—

  “I trust your charming wife is well, Nemo, old chum.”

  Ted suspected the handsome, chocolate-scented Perlberg didn’t expect an answer. In this early phase of his Nemo processing he was probably supposed to go along quietly wherever he was taken.

  “I’m especially worried about Haley’s tit, the left one I think,” continued Perlberg as they descended through the twisting gray corridors. “I bit it so hard the other night I’m afraid I bruised it. She kept thrusting it into my mouth, so I felt I had to oblige.”

  Ted clenched the hand furthest from his boss. He kept his face under control, open and touched with a minimum of expression.

  “By now she’s sprung this week’s excuse on you,” said Perlberg. “It’s interesting how your extrasensory abilities aren’t coupled with any common sense. The average guy would have tumbled to what’s been going on long ago.”

  Ted pressed his fingers harder into his palm. The gray walls continued to unfold. “He must do this every time he brings you down here for an assignment,” Ted told himself. “Don’t do anything, don’t react, don’t hit the farbing bastard.”

  “The way she strokes my schtook when I first meet her, I can tell she believes there’s not another one like it anywhere.” Perlberg grinned.

  “So I’m looking forward to our long weekend down in High World, Florida. Haley’s so enthusiastic, all those extra little favors and tricks. Even in an enlightened age such as ours, you’d be surprised how many women still believe all sorts of things are perverse.”

  The walls changed color. Everything was pale green now.

  “If I know Haley, she’ll want to spend most of our week in and around the sack,” Perlberg said. “But I’m going to High World for more than just good, enjoyable farbing. Haley and I are going to do a lot more than just that. Not that she isn’t a damn good. . . .”

  They reached what seemed to Ted to be a dead end. His handsome boss rubbed the fingertips of his left hand across the pale-green wall at eye level.

  Without a sound a panel rolled aside. An enormous room was revealed, brightly lit with floating strips of light. There were desks, huge ID boxes, scanners, a great clutter of complex-looking equipment Ted couldn’t identify but which seemed medical in nature. There were eleven people in the room, all seated in scattered chairs and all looking out toward Ted. Four women, seven men, each in a one-piece pale-green worksuit.

  “Come in, Nemo,” said a round-faced man. “We have a terribly interesting job for you this time.”

  Chapter 10

  He shouldn’t have juggled.

  But Ted was feeling somewhat euphoric by this time, realizing all his telek abilities were under his conscious control. When the round-faced technician with the pseudonylon hair pointed at the third, and heaviest, metal ball resting on the lucite table and said, “Now this one, if you please, Nemo,” Ted had caused the ball— it was the size of a melon— to float up to the ceiling of the huge processing room. Then he elevated the other, earlier, test balls, caused all five of them to whirl around in a circle in the air, as though invisible hands were juggling them.

  The bewigged technician frowned. “What’s this, Nemo?”

  Ted added the man’s blond hairpiece to the whirling balls before bringing everything in for a landing on the table top.

  The youngest of the women technicians, Dr. Hatcher they’d called her, came cautiously up to Ted’s processing chair. Lips pursed, forehead lined, the pretty girl began checking over all the wires and cables which had been attached to various parts of Ted. “There shouldn’t be any puckishness,” she said as she squatted to tug at the coils attached to his legs and ankles.

  Dr. Dix, the tall, sad-faced man who apparently was in charge, watched Ted, his head tilted to the right, eyes narrowed. “Are you feeling especially puckish, Nemo?”

  “No, sir, not very.”

  Tilting his head to the left, Dr. Dix approached the complex chair Ted was entangled with. “Do you have any notion why you made Dr. Emerson’s toupee fly around in the air?”

  “It’s not a toupee actually,” said Emerson, who had it back in place. “That is to say, I do still possess some hair of—”

  “Well then, Nemo?”

  “Really can’t explain it,” answered Ted. He shouldn’t have juggled. Nobody down here expected Agent Nemo to fool around.

  “Perhaps you feel,” suggested Dix, “some resentment against Dr. Emerson.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Young Dr. Hatcher had eased around behind Ted to check the wires and tubes there. “Nothing amiss,” she announced. “Suppose we continue?”

  Dr. Dix’s left eye very nearly closed, his lean face drifted close to Ted’s. “You’ve never evidenced any sense of whimsy before, Nemo.”

  “There’s nothing to stew and steam about,” said the heftiest of the women technicians, a Dr. Babbs. “Let’s unhook the little ferp and give him his assignment. Who gives a fig about whimsy.”

  “We can’t have,” said Dr. Hatcher, “an assasin going around snatching off people’s wigs.”

  “It’s not actually a wig,” corrected Dr. Emerson, “merely a small little—”

  “We’ll move on to the final steps of the processing routine,” said Dr. Dix, stepping away from Ted and the intricate chair. “I’m moderately concerned over this unusual display of whimsicality on Agent Nemo’s part. It’s probably not serious enough, however, to delay us.”

  Hefty Dr. Babbs said, “He’s about the only little ferp we have available at the moment to handle this particular type of assassination.”

  Ted forced himself to maintain his relaxed appearance in the chair. They were going to make him kill someone else. The total would rise to. . . . “Wait,” he told himself, “they can’t make you do anything. Not anymore, thanks to Goodanyetz. You’ve got hold of your telekinetic powers, you don’t have to do what the Total Security Agency wants.”

  He’d been down here nearly two hours, undergoing a series of electronic and psychological processes. Most of them he didn’t quite understand. But right now he was in full control of abilities he’d hardly realized he possessed. “All you have to do,” he reminded himself, “is go along with them until they’ve finished here. When you get sent out on your mission, you pull out before any assassinating gets done. You report to Rev O what went on down here and after that. . . . Yeah, what do I do after that?”

  Once TSA realized Ted was no longer a docile telek agent they’d . . . he wasn’t certain what they would do. “They sure as hell won’t keep you on in the Repo Bureau,” he told himself. “You’ll be out of a job. What else’ll happen? Will they grab me, try to reprocess me? Listen, don’t worry so much. Make your report to Ortega. He’ll have some ideas about what to do next.”

  Dr. Emerson was say
ing something. “Don’t feel up to the cabinet, Nemo?”

  There was a pale-green metal cabinet next to the wigged technician. Ted concentrated. The cabinet rose several feet into the air.

  “Very good, Nemo,” said Emerson as he patted at his synthetic hair. “Carry it over to the wall and deposit it in front of Dr. Texton.”

  Dr. Texton? There were three technicians by that wall, two men and one woman. As Nemo, Ted would have known them all. As himself, though, he. . . . “Easy,” he said inside his head. “Let your special talents handle this. Somewhere in my brain I know which one of them is Texton. Relax, relax, and float the cabinet over to . . . there.”

  “Very good,” said Emerson, “very good.”

  Dr. Texton was the woman, a moderately attractive face on top of a very chunky body.

  “He’s ready for the briefing room,” said Dr. Babbs. “You can unhitch the little ferp, Lissa.”

  Dr. Hatcher went to work on disconnecting him from the chair. Dr. Dix hovered nearby, hand on chin, watching. “That flare-up of cuteness bothers me, sincerely bothers me.”

  “Go off somewhere and brood,” Dr. Babbs told him. “I want this boy briefed and on his way to Deathless, Florida, with Agent Roscoe by no later than midafternoon.”

  Deathless, Florida? That was some sort of retirement town down there. Ted had heard of the place. It wasn’t more than a hundred miles from High World.

  “I’d rather not look.” Dr. Hatcher pressed her hands over her eyes, turning her head away from the briefing-room view wall. She was in the seat immediately next to Ted, close enough for her hair to brush at his face.

  It was faintly scented, smelling of wild flowers and forest mist. Ted suddenly felt he ought to put his arm around the upset girl. He overcame the impulse, kept his attention on the pictures being shown.

  “Nothing but a bunch of old mips,” said Dr. Babbs. “We all get old and die, Lissa.”

  “Yes, and that should be the end of it. Those . . . ugh . . . creatures.”

  “My very own maternal grandmother lives in Deathless,” said Dr. Emerson. “She’s just as sweet and jolly as when she was alive.”

  “Ugh, ugh.” Dr. Hatcher rested her head on Ted’s shoulder.

  Up on the view wall a sun-drenched midday street. The street, curving through the clear air some hundred feet above a shimmering blue lagoon, was itself of a lagoon-blue noryl plastic. Old people were walking slowly along the suspended walkway, most of them in shorts and tunics. Only one of them, a very old man, had a deep tan. All the rest were a pale, bluish white. No one spoke. The only sounds coming out of the ceiling talkboxes were gull cries, an occasional cough, and the rasping scuffle of the old people’s shoes on the lagoon-blue pebbled plastic street. “You’re certain your grandmother is pert and lively?” Dr. Dix asked Dr. Emerson.

  “She’s spry, has all her faculties,” replied the technician, “even though she’s been dead since 2011.”

  “They all look . . . fishy to me,” said Dix. “This Homan Method still has, I’d venture to say, a few kinks. That woman there, for instance, note how her mouth doesn’t quite close and her left arm hangs limp at her side.”

  “Zombies, that’s what they are, zombies.” Dr. Hatcher burrowed her sweet-smelling head against Ted’s chest.

  “Nothing to be afraid of.” He ventured to give her hand a reassuring touch.

  “So maybe Homan’s method of keeping a lot of rich old ferps going after they’ve kicked the bucket isn’t one-hundred percent terrific,” said Dr. Babbs. “It’s his other inventions TSA is concerned over, particularly the antiplague-detection system. If some ferp on the wrong side down in Brazil got hold of that. . . . Nemo!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Watch this next section of spyfilm especially closely. Here . . . this is Homan’s mansion in the heart of Deathless, designed the house himself. Reminds me of a watermelon that fell downstairs, but they say it’s very innovative. Watch the balcony.”

  The striped dome had a balcony circling it. A door slid open, a tall, sun-brown old man stepped out onto the balcony and spit in the moat two hundred feet below.

  “That’s the old blip himself,” said Dr. Babbs. “All you have to do is cause him to fall off his balcony into that moat. You can do that with no trouble, can’t you?”

  “Of course,” answered Ted.

  Chapter 11

  Agent Roscoe took another bite of his nearbeef sandwich. “So it worked, Ted?”

  “Yeah, the—oops!”

  Roscoe chuckled. “You got to be a little more careful,” he said. “TSA might try the same thing on you sometime.”

  The skycar was passing over artificial, decorative swamps and bayous.

  “What do you mean? You’re TSA, aren’t you?”

  “I’m an agent for Total Security, sure. My primary loyalty is to Rev O.”

  “You’re on his side?”

  “As much as I can be without getting knocked off by TSA.”

  “He told me . . . Reverend Ortega told me he wanted a man inside the organization. If he already has you I don’t see—”

  “Naw, I’m only on the fringes. I don’t have a top clearance. You, though, since they think you’re in a stupor all the time, you’ll hear a lot more than a C-2 rating agent like me.”

  “Rev O wasn’t, exactly, telling me the truth when—”

  “No, he never lies. A priest can’t lie, but he can edit the truth some when he thinks that’s necessary.”

  “How much truth did he edit out of what he told me? What does he really have in mind for me to do?”

  “Rev O wants you to go ahead with this Homan mission. Then you—”

  “I’m not going to kill that old man. Ortega promised me—”

  “That’s right, you don’t kill Homan. But you make it look as though you tried very hard. You arrange for the old farb to have his accident, whatever it is TSA recommended, except you pull him out of danger in the nick of time.”

  “TSA won’t accept that. They think I’m infallible.”

  “Most agents slip up once in awhile, even teleks.”

  “All right, suppose I do that, botch the assassination . . . what next?”

  “More of the same, Ted. You keep right on working for TSA, learning every damn thing you can. In fact, Rev O figures when you’re a little more at ease with your powers, you can probably borrow some of the TSA files for quick copying. Same way we got the Ackroyd stuff.”

  “Ackroyd?”

  “Oh, yeah. You were still Nemo when we pulled that one off.”

  “Ortega wants me to stick with this, keep working in the Repo Bureau and all?”

  “Eventually TSA will get suspicious. You can only botch so many killings before they do.

  Before they do get wise you should be able to get us a heck of a lot of info.”

  “I thought maybe the reverend had something else in mind for me. You know, that I’d do this one thing and then he’d help me set up in some new kind of life.”

  “He’s not all that much interested in your life, Ted. He’s interested in our country, in the loss of freedom the corrupt Hartwell administration has caused. Your job is to help us get rid of Hartwell and his cronies by exposing him and the Total Security Agency and all the other—”

  “When TSA finally does realize I’m not the same old Nemo . . . will Ortega help me then?”

  “Well, sure. He’ll do what he can, hide you out till the present government is ousted. After that, things will be better all—”

  “He’ll hide me out? What about my wife?”

  “Oh, did you want to keep her? We figured, what with the way she’s been—”

  “You know about that, too?”

  “McBernie, he’s the black guy who was monitoring your place until the feds noticed him, got quite a bit of info on what . . . Haley, isn’t it? On what Haley and Jay Perlberg were up to while you were out Nemoing.”

  “Right in my house? The two of them?”

  “In
your house, in your car. Out on the back lawn once.”

  Ted put his hands on his knees, leaned back in his seat and looked up into the hazy-blue afternoon sky. “And Ortega wants me to keep right on with this, with my job and my life. Everything the same, even though I can now control all these telek powers of mine.”

  “Your part in the picture is that, Ted.” Roscoe glanced down between his legs. “There’s the ruins of Disney World. Means we’re almost at Deathless. For this job TSA wants us to land and pose as relatives. We get a visitor per—”

  “I’m not going to be a part of somebody else’s picture. I don’t have to do that anymore.”

  “Yeah, but you have to do what Rev—”

  A faint popping sound followed the disappearance of Agent Roscoe. “I hope I’ve got everything working right,” said Ted. “If so, Roscoe’s smack dab in the middle of the Disney ruins now.” He lifted the control mike off the dash panel. “New course.”

  “Yessir, boss,” said the voice of the skycar.

  “Set me down on the outskirts of High World,” ordered Ted.

  “. . . just the kind of bullshit Hartwell wants you to believe. You know damn well—”

  “Nix, nix, Rev O,” said the double-chinned man in the three-piece off-white casualsuit. “I want to use this on the ‘Family News.’”

  The priest sucked in his lean cheek. “That’s right, we have to clean up the truth so those simple-minded assholes at your network—”

  “It’s not me,” protested the newsman. “It’s the clearance people at Columbia-National. They have, you know, this notion a priest doesn’t use foul language.”

  “When most of my flock is in the gutters, don’t expect me to sound like the White House chaplain, Leo.”

  Leo O’Hearn told his robot video camera, “Stop rolling for a minute, will you? I don’t want CN to see any of this.”

  The camera, which was about three inches higher than him, continued to whir.

  “Shit, they send me the stupidest damn equipment on these hazard assignments.” He gave the machine a punch in the side. “Stop, already.”