Tek Vengeance

by William Shatner

“You can’t be content with all those wrinkles, pouches and—”

  “They give me a seasoned look. How old do you think I am, anyway?”

  “Well, it seems to me it would take you at least forty years to do that much damage.”

  Gomez, frowning, lifted his elbows from her desk. “I’m a few years shy of forty,” he said. “Now let’s return to the true reason for my visit.”

  “We can usually help people in advanced stages of trouble such as you, Mr. Sanchez.”

  “Gomez. I’m not in trouble.”

  She swung the small vidscreen mounted on her desk around so it was facing him. “I can, at no charge, show you exactly how NuFaz, Inc., can redo your entire face so that you’ll look years and years younger and feel more confident about—”

  “If I felt any more confident they’d have to strap me down.”

  “At your age—”

  “You’re thirty yourself, that’s not all that far from—”

  “I’m twenty-six.”

  “C’mon, I’ve already looked you up.”

  “Why would you have done that? Just to come in to consult about a makeover doesn’t—”

  “I don’t want a makeover,” he insisted. “I’m perfectly satisfied with my visage.”

  “Here. I’ll draw your old face on the screen and then demonstrate how we can improve it.”

  “I’m looking for Susan Ferrier,” he said as calmly as possible. “Her talent agency says they’ve lost touch, but that you, as her current roommate, would know her whereabouts.”

  “Then you are in the movie industry?”

  Gomez eyed the ceiling and made himself look sheepish. “Okay, I guess I’m not too good at concealing it,” he said ruefully. “It’s important that we locate Susan immediately.”

  “A part?”

  “I can only say that it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”

  “I look a good deal like her. Except not quite as dark.”

  He cocked his head, studied her. “You know, Amber—By the way, you wouldn’t object, would you, to changing your name?”

  “Not at all. To what?”

  “Something besides Amber. Anyway, you might be perfect, near perfect at least, for another role in this project. Yes, I can see you as Sister Jonquil.”

  “This is a religious film, is it?”

  “It’s inspirational, but not without sufficient sex and violence,” he explained. “The thing is, Amber, we can’t go ahead until we sign Susan. She’s pivotal to the entire costly venture.”

  “Boy, she’s sure been having a lot of luck lately. First that part in Brazil and then that other job.”

  “What other job?”

  “The one she’s working on right now.”

  “Where?”

  “On location.”

  “Pin it down a bit more.”

  “She’s in NorCal. She got a great part on Jungle Commandos. That’s a new big budget Brazil War film that Ampersand is doing.”

  “Ampersand, of course.” He nodded sagely. “Where exactly in NorCal?”

  “I think she’s at the Dickerson Jungle Park in Sonoma, Mr. Gomez,” answered Amber. “That’s where they’re shooting the jungle warfare stuff. She was supposed to go up there two days ago, but I haven’t heard from her since.”

  “The jungle will serve as a good starting point.” He stood. “In case she contacts you, don’t mention my interest.”

  “But if you’re anxious to—”

  “I don’t want anyone talking about the project until I can nail down her participation.”

  “Can you send me a script?”

  He patted his chin. “Do you really think my face needs improving?”

  “No, not really, Mr. Gomez. I was only kidding with you earlier.”

  “I’ll be in touch.” He hurried from the office.

  Rian O’Hearn, eyes closed and breathing in short choppy gasps, was sprawled faceup on the replica of his boyhood bed.

  A naked female android sat, hands folded in her lap, in a chair near the foot of the bed. “It wasn’t my fault, Aunt Elsie,” she was saying. “It happened, really, before anything happened.”

  Jake was standing close to the white-enameled medibot who was administering an injection to the ailing man, using the needlegun built into his forefinger.

  “How serious?” asked Jake.

  “A mild heart attack, brought on by nostalgia mixed with sexual excitement,” replied the robot.

  “O’Hearn.” Jake leaned close.

  “It’s wiser, sir, not to try to talk to him until the ambulance arrives.”

  “I only have a few questions.”

  “It’s okay, doc,” said Aunt Elsie as she draped a flowered robe over the android’s shoulders.

  “O’Hearn,” repeated Jake.

  “Yeah?” he murmured.

  “Your son—Len. Where is he?”

  “He’s a dolt.”

  “I don’t doubt it, but where is he?”

  “Running off, when he was supposed to go on a job interview. Dolt.”

  “Where did he run off to?”

  “NorCal. With that gang of movie idiots.”

  “Where in NorCal?”

  “Sonoma. Some jungle park or other.” O’Hearn began shivering, coughing.

  The medibot urged Jake aside. “That’s all for now, sir.”

  “It’s sufficient,” said Jake.

  45

  GOMEZ WAS WHISTLING, SITTING comfortably in the passenger seat of the borrowed skyvan. “There’s a real difference between NorCal air and SoCal air,” he observed as their craft flew through the sunlit morning.

  Jake was piloting the craft. “Who used to own this van?”

  “I told you, some musical friends of mine,” answered his partner. “It’s the perfect cover for us to use in penetrating into Northern reaches.”

  “It smells very odd.”

  “The group is somewhat old-fashioned. They smoke antique products like marihuana—and they sometimes indulge in bouts of gourmet cooking.”

  “And the van is gaudy.”

  “Exactly, sí,” agreed Gomez. “Pickfair will expect us to come slinking in, all grey and inconspicuous. We, however, arrive in a purple and crimson skyvan.”

  Jake said nothing.

  Gomez stretched, patting the large crate that rested on the floor behind his seat. “I truly think, amigo, that you don’t fully appreciate my abilities as a scrounger,” he said. “I acquired this impressive van for us, plus the valuable contents of this crate—and that latter chore took much deft dickering.”

  “You’re the ideal partner,” said Jake. “Beyond a doubt.”

  “What’s needed on this case is someone capable of outthinking Roddy Pickfair.”

  “Seems pretty likely that he’s got Dan and Molly up there with him in Sonoma,” said Jake. “According to the plans of Dickerson’s Jungle that we were able to sneak a look at—”

  “Again because of one of my connections.”

  “Yep. According to those, there’s an entire complex built underground beneath the jungle,” continued Jake. “Dan is probably being kept there.”

  “Mousetrap,” said Gomez. “With the kids as bait.”

  “That’s what Pickfair must be feeling at this point.”

  “We’ve got to convince the cabrón,” said Gomez, “that we’re mice.”

  The walls were quiet again.

  But there was, as always, no way of telling for how long.

  Dan and Molly sat side by side on the floor of the enormous room. He had an arm around her shoulders.

  The darkhaired young woman had fallen into an uneasy sleep, head resting against his chest, a moment earlier.

  Dan’s eyes were starting to drift shut. He hadn’t slept for more than a few minutes at a time since they’d been put here. However the hell long that was.

  Molly was breathing uneasily, making small moaning sounds.

  He could feel her heart beating and it seemed to him that it
was beating much too rapidly.

  Then the pictures came back.

  First on the lefthand wall, next on the right. Then the wall in front of them, then on the one in back.

  The pictures weren’t the worst part, because you could just shut your eyes. But when the sound kicked in there was no escaping.

  Sometimes it was so intense that clamping your hands over your ears, even after you’d packed them with wads of torn plyochief, didn’t help at all.

  The noise level, though, varied. At times the sound was so loud it shook the walls. At others it sank to barely audible.

  What the room kept showing them, over and over, was pictures of Beth Kittridge. Pictures of the final minutes of her life.

  Closeups, long shots, regular speed, slow motion.

  On the righthand wall now Beth was moving toward the android replica of Jake—extremely slowly, seeming to float in his direction. On the lefthand wall loomed a giant image of just her face.

  Dan tightened his grip on the fitfully slumbering Molly and closed his eyes.

  On the walls Beth was probably moving nearer to the kamikaze android. The one who looked just like Dan’s father.

  Dan had seen the pictures hundreds of times so far since they’d been brought here. He wasn’t certain exactly how long he and Molly had been in this room surrounded by the pictures.

  They’d been fed four times and he’d used the screened toilet in the corner five times.

  But that wasn’t as good a way as a clock to tell time.

  Suddenly there was an enormous explosion. It rattled the walls, shook the floor.

  Dan knew that if he looked he’d see Beth’s body being torn to pieces. On one wall she’d be turning into bloody fragments that ever so slowly scattered across that Berlin morning. On another rushing apart with accelerated swiftness.

  Maybe on one wall they would freeze at the moment she started to be ripped apart. Perhaps on another the sequence would reverse and the bloody tatters of flesh and bone and guts would miraculously reunite and form a living, smiling Beth.

  Sometimes that last happy moment of her life would repeat and repeat and that final smile would appear and reappear.

  Another explosion came, and another.

  Molly cried out, jerked awake. “How long have I been asleep?” she asked, lifting her head from his chest.

  “Few minutes.”

  Gently he let go of her. He stood up, staring up at the distant ceiling. “What the hell do you want, you bastards?”

  The pictures ceased and the walls were quiet again.

  46

  THE PALE GREEN ROBOT was wearing a coarse grey monk’s robe and carrying a portable mike. “Unlike real grapes,” he was saying to the string of fifteen tourists that was trailing him through the vast domed central building of the Pieters Brothers Winery, “synthetic grapes are not susceptible to weather, air defects, soil deficiencies or any of a multitude of other annoyances. In the vat on your immediate left we’re in the process of creating a new batch of our famous aged zinfandel. This complex process takes a full two weeks. In the next vat, ladies and gentlemen ... ”

  Jake and Gomez peeled off from the line of tourists and, keeping the huge grey vats between them and the robot guide, headed for an exit.

  “If my informant is correct,” said Jake once they were out in the late morning, “Larry Knerr is residing in the second of those five rustic cottages yonder.”

  Across a wide field of imitation grass stood five thatch-roofed cottages in a circle of tall imitation redwoods.

  Making their way downhill, the partners circled the cottage they wanted and approached it from the back side.

  Gomez scanned the back door, shifting the briefcase he was carrying from his right hand to his left. “Relatively simple alarm system,” he observed. “I can disable it in—”

  “No, let’s use the front way,” suggested Jake. “I’m sure Larry will be pleased to see us.”

  “Where in the blinking hell did you come from?” said the silverhaired reporter when he opened his cottage door and noted them on his doorstep.

  Jake pushed him back into the parlor and into a chair. “I’m looking for my son.”

  “Would I be flaming likely to know where he is? I’m working on a series on the wine country for—”

  “Where is he?”

  Gomez had entered and shut the door. “Okay, you didn’t let me use the electronics stuff,” he said. “But, por favor, allow me to try the truth kit, Jake.”

  “We won’t need it, Sid. Larry’s going to tell us exactly what—”

  “I’m going to tell you to take a flapping leap for yourself, Cardigan. I don’t know how you located—”

  “If what you’re worried about, Jake, is that last guy I questioned—Trust me, I figured out since where I went wrong.”

  “Sooner or later the Austrian police are going to find his body,” said Jake, shaking his head. “I don’t want to have to explain another foul-up by you.”

  “It was just that I had the power turned up too high on the prod.”

  “I thought you told me that what went wrong was too strong a dose of truth serum.”

  Gomez frowned thoughtfully. “Did I? Well, maybe—”

  “People don’t usually turn that pasty white color from—”

  “What,” inquired the uneasy reporter, “did you chaps want to know?”

  “Where’s Dan?”

  Knerr was watching Gomez’s briefcase as it swung slowly back and forth. “They’ve got him and the girl in an underground facility at Dickerson’s Jungle,” he told them. “Ampersand is shooting Jungle Commandos at—”

  “We’d like to get into that facility.”

  “I suppose you would, but you need a special electrokey.”

  “Loan us yours,” requested Gomez, resting his briefcase on the floor.

  “I don’t have one of the blinking things. They don’t trust me that far.”

  “How about China Vargas?”

  “Right you are, she has one.”

  Jake asked, “Where is she at the moment?”

  Gomez smiled. “Bueno, I get to use my truth kit after all.”

  “She’s staying at the Vineyard Spa. That’s about fifteen miles south of here.”

  “We’ll call on her,” said Jake. “But don’t you alert her to that fact.”

  “You have my blinking word, gents.”

  Nodding, Gomez fished his stungun out of the briefcase and used it.

  Large yellow butterflies flickered among the holographic arbors that fronted the Vineyard Spa. The musky scent of ripe golden grapes, pumped discreetly out of tiny nozzles concealed in the artificial loam, was thick in the early afternoon air.

  Jake and Gomez had parked the Central Sonoma Sheriff’s Office landcar they were now using in a vine-sheltered parking lot below and were riding one of the escalators that climbed up through the simulated grape arbors to the spa. Both wore deputy uniforms.

  “Too wide across the shoulders,” complained Gomez, moving his left elbow back and forth, “and too long in the leg.”

  “Act like a deputy sheriff,” advised Jake, “and nobody’ll notice that your borrowed uniform doesn’t quite fit.”

  The spa itself consisted of three sprawling buildings made of real adobe and roofed with authentic red tiles.

  A broadchested robot in a white smock was sitting in the sunshine near the main entrance. “You boys are new,” he commented, looking them over.

  “Just got transferred from Marin County,” Gomez told him.

  “Then you must know a buddy of mine. Alex/CR-70?”

  “Can’t place him. We’re here to see Dr. Howzinger.”

  “Sure, go on through this door, along the central corridor and it’s the second door on your right.”

  “Much obliged,” said Jake.

  “Got to stay on the good side of the law,” said the robot.

  There was a similar robot at the desk in Howzinger’s outer office. “Yes?”
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  Smiling, Gomez yanked out his stungun, fired it and disabled the mechanism.

  The robot fell forward on his desk with a loud thunk.

  Jake walked over to the inner door and tapped politely.

  “What? Now what?”

  “Dr. Howzinger, sir?”

  “Yes? What? What do you want?”

  “Sheriff’s Office, sir.”

  “Sheriff’s Office. It’s about this crime out here, sir.”

  “Crime? What the devil are you talking about?” The door was jerked open by a small man with frizzy blond hair. He was about fifty, wearing a suit of a flowery pattern. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  Jake pointed his thumb at the fallen robot. “Well, Dr. Howzinger, sir,” he said, “we got a report about this—I guess you’d classify it manslaughter, although—”

  “Manslaughter? Why, that’s only Arnie/ID-PR. He’s forever toppling over on his—”

  “Somebody phoned this in as an assault case, sir,” said Gomez. “That’s why we rushed over.”

  “No one phoned this in to anybody. I’m going to get in touch with Sheriff Wollters and—”

  “Better not,” advised Jake.

  “What’s that? Are you telling me what I can and can not do?”

  “I’m telling you that Sheriff Wollters is likely to say he’s never heard of either one of us,” Jake explained. “That we probably donned these uniforms as a way of getting in here without any fuss.”

  “What’s that? Who are you? What are you?”

  “We’re curious.” Gomez produced his stungun again.

  “And we want to chat with China Vargas.”

  “Who’s that? I’ve never heard of her.”

  “Dr. Howzinger, you can tell us what part of your fashionable establishment she’s in—or we can deck you and have your computer tell us.”

  “Are you threatening me? Is that what you’re attempting?”

  Gomez sighed and used his stungun. “Go talk to his computer, Jake.”

  47

  CHINA VARGAS STUDIED HER bald head in the oval enlarging mirror the handsome blond android was holding up to her. “Shit, it looks awful,” she remarked.

  Making a series of annoyed sounds, she uncoiled up out of the black chair she was sitting in. She walked over to the nearest of the small floating vidscreens, narrowed her eyes to near slots and scrutinized the image.