Patterson drove around the inside perimeter until he found another exit—an illegal one, a section of the fence that had been cut and peeled back. Someone had attempted to pull it back in place, but the jagged edge curled stubbornly away from the pole to which it had been attached. Patterson got out of the car and dragged the section completely open, then stepped through to explore the exit. Satisfied, he got behind the wheel and drove the rest of the way around the lot.
He stopped near a gate still secured by a chain and padlock, several yards from the rear of the building into which Bobby had walked. Patterson unlatched his trunk, then took out his cell phone. He punched a number.
“Yeah, it’s Paul. Gotta favor. Real quick, could you access an address and tell me if it’s occupied or owned and by whom? Great.” He spoke for a couple of minutes, giving the address and a few more details. Then: “Thanks, I owe you,” and broke the connection. “It should be vacant. No record of any lease or purchase since it closed down three years ago. So whatever’s happening in there probably isn’t exactly on the top side of legal.”
“Who did you call?”
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“A friend in the water department. They keep the best records on ownership and occupation, right up to the minute.”
He got out of the car. From the trunk, he pulled a pair of large bolt cutters. He went to the gate and snapped the chain. He came back and tossed the cutters into the trunk and closed the lid.
“Okay,” he said, leaning on the passenger door. “Here’s what I want you to do. Stay with the car, keep it running.
I’m going in to see what’s going on. If it doesn’t look right, I’ll get Bobby out of there. We’ll be coming out the back door, there. Be ready.” He pointed at the rolled-back fence.
“We’re exiting that way.”
“I figured that much,” Deirdre said.
Patterson smiled. “Of course you did. I’m just making sure.”
“But—”
He was gone, through the gate, and to the back door. He worked at it for a few minutes until it gave, then he slipped inside.
Stay with the car, she told herself. Don’t be like all those idiots in the movies. Stay with the car…
Bobby stared at Casse, his breathing suddenly labored.
“Excuse me?”
“Universities these days are loathe to risk funding,” Casse said. “They won’t willingly expose a fraud if it means losing the tuition from a scholarship program. So they don’t ask simple questions that are easily answered. You tell them you’re Robert L. Porter and they will accept that—unless forced otherwise.”
“I am—”
“Please, don’t. A company like Cyberdyne can’t afford to be so casual about potential employees. Our background checks are thorough.”
“My name is Robert,” Bobby said, trying to keep his voice even.
“Of course it is. Jeremiah Robert Porter. How fortunate 152
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for you that the deception was so simple. A cousin—Robert Lewis Porter—with a full grant-funded scholarship disappears inexplicably, fails to turn up, and the family takes the understandable step of replacing him in the queue with a cousin whose name is not only close, but who looks very much like the vanished relative. Understandable because they were barely out of poverty and placed a great value on a university degree. Why waste it? Someone should take advantage. I applaud the pragmatism.”
Casse spoke in calm tones. Bobby heard no threat in his voice, which scared him more. Casse seemed like man in complete control of the situation. Any argument or excuse Bobby might make, Casse doubtless anticipated.
“What—what are you going to do?” Bobby asked.
“Make you an offer. You can come to work for Cyberdyne, sign an exclusive agreement with us. Or you won’t leave this room.”
Bobby burst out laughing. “I’m sorry…I thought you said—”
“I did. Work for us or you’ll die. Right now.”
Bobby stood. “I think I’m leaving. Right now.”
He took a step toward the door. Casse appeared in front of him. Bobby staggered back as if shocked, knocking over the chair and stumbling against the desk.
“I take it your answer is no,” Casse said.
“How…?”
Casse raised his left arm. As Bobby watched, the hand seemed to grow, as if melting into a new shape, becoming thin and sharp. Within moments the hand became a foot-long blade of gleaming silver.
“Jees mother and fuck!” Bobby yelled, backpedaling around the desk. He came up against the wall next to the screen.
Casse came at him. At the last instant, he contracted upward into a compact knot of limbs that sailed easily over the desk. The body unfolded perfectly, feet hitting the floor right in front of Bobby. The left arm drew back and snapped forward, driving the blade at Bobby’s head. He felt his legs 153
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give and he dropped straight down. The hand-knife sank deep into the paneling above his head.
“Please stand still,” Casse said, jerking the blade from the wall. “This should only take a moment.”
Bobby scrambled to his left, crawling rapidly around the desk. Behind him, Casse picked one end of the desk off the floor and tossed the whole thing across the room, then leapt over Bobby to cut off his escape.
Casse slashed down at him, twice, three times. Bobby rolled reflexively, desperately, the sound of wood crunching near his ears. He got to his feet and ran toward the file cabinets. A hand took hold of his arm. He came against the savage strength and lost his balance, Casse’s grip on him like steel. The knife came again. Somehow, Bobby ducked toward Casse and the blade sliced through Casse’s right hand. Suddenly released, Bobby slid across the floor.
The hand held onto his right bicep for a moment, a detached and bloodless joke that defied his attempt to make sense of it. Then it seemed to turn to silvery mercury and dropped away, to the floor.
Casse bent down, holding his handless arm to the floor.
The mass of liquid metal scurried toward him, joined with the end of the wrist, and reformed into a hand.
“What the hell are you?” Bobby hissed.
Casse attacked again. The knife lashed back and forth, but Bobby managed each time to avoid it by inches. He finally came up against one of the file cabinets. Casse drove the blade straight at him again. This time Bobby did not move. Terror won out and froze him in place.
Casse missed.
Casse stepped back, an odd look on his face. He stared at Bobby, then at his knife-hand.
“It’s true, then,” he said.
He went to the overturned desk and rummaged for the intercom. “Oscar, come in here. We have him.”
On the other side of the file cabinet against which Bobby now trembled, the door opened. He looked over the top of the cabinet.
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Deirdre looked back at him.
“Bobby, come on!”
Bobby heard two shots from the direction of the front office. Then the other door burst inward. Oscar Cruz slammed against the floor. He dropped a pistol and tried to get to his feet.
Someone else stood in the doorway Bobby did not recognized, holding a weapon. He looked at Casse, then at Bobby, then saw Deirdre.
“Run!” he shouted.
Bobby unfroze then. He rounded the cabinet. Deirdre grabbed his hand and dragged him through the door. As they bounded down a short hallway to a rear exit that stood open, two shots cracked the air behind them.
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Cruz thought he should know the man in the doorway, but memory failed to assign a name, a place. He repeated the question.
“Who the hell are you?”
The man raised his weapon. “Please put the gun on the desk.”
“This is private property,” Cruz said. “I must ask you to leave.”
“I’m here for Bobby Porter. Is he in there?”
He gestured with the pistol toward the door to the inner office.
“What are you, a cop?”
“Put your weapon on the desk and open the door.”
Cruz became aware suddenly of the pistol in his own hand. He could raise it, aim, and shoot the intruder. Simple.
He had killed already, he understood the mechanics. But he found it difficult to do without a reason.
They put me in prison, they kept me in isolation, they left me to live with myself…myself…my…
Reason enough. He started to bring the pistol up, feeling relaxed and confident. The stranger fired first. Cruz felt the hot, sharp impact in his right shoulder, the searing tear of the bullet passing through, bruising bone and shocking muscle. It hurt.
But he continued standing. He tried to aim. The look on 156
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the intruder’s face inspired Cruz—puzzlement and fear. He had forgotten that enjoyed power like this. The man had expected him to collapse under the shot, but Cruz still benefited from the enhancements acquired from the TX-A six years ago. He felt the wound beginning to heal already, though the pain continued. Very painful, in fact. He could not manage to get his arm up high enough to kill the man.
He squeezed one off anyway. It smacked the floor at the stranger’s feet.
Instead of running, though, the man tackled him. Cruz fell across his desk, a weight on top of him. He got his good arm between them, pushing, but he lacked leverage. The intruder struck him across the jaw with the butt of his own pistol. Cruz’s vision danced with sparks. He rolled. Together they fell off the desk. Cruz got to his knees, the intruder below him. He drew back his left arm and drove a punch straight down. The man flinched aside, letting the blow splinter the floor beside his head. He drew back his fist for a second blow.
A knee in Cruz’s back sent him toppling forward to sprawl on the floor. He pushed himself up, turned, his back to the door, in time to received a powerful impact in the torso. He flew backward, against the door, which gave. Cruz spilled into the inner office.
“Run!” he heard. The stranger again. Cruz willed his shoulder to knit faster, impatient with the time the nanoware in his system took to make him whole. He thought it had slowed down during his years in prison.
A door slammed. Another shot, then Cruz sat up. The intruder backed out of the office, pistol aimed in his general direction.
As Cruz stood, another shape appeared in the doorway to the outer hall, filling the frame. The intruder sensed it before he backed into it. He turned—
Gant reached for him. Cruz admired the man’s agility.
When Gant wanted to grab hold of something—or someone—Cruz had never known him to miss. But his huge 157
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hand closed on air this time and the intruder danced away from him, bringing the pistol up.
He broke and ran past Cruz, heading for the back exit.
Casse blocked his way. Cruz watched, fascinated, as Casse’s hand grew to wrap around the man’s upper arm.
Cruz knew what would happen next, his pulse picked up speed in anticipation. Blood. Screaming, maybe. Cruz had never liked it most of his life, but this was a human, scum and danger to the future, and he had learned to appreciate the aesthetics of pain in prison, the few times he had been allowed out in the general population. He leaned forward, watching.
The intruder stuck his pistol in Casse’s face. The blast seemed loud. Casse’s head opened like a flower, silvery petals splayed out in sudden bloom.
Casse’s hand opened. The intruder slipped from his grip, bolted through the door, and was gone.
Cruz whirled around. “Stop them!” he yelled at Gant.
The big T-800 pivoted deftly and ran from the office.
Cruz stepped toward Casse. He could do nothing, but he felt an urge to help somehow. As he watched, the flower retracted, petals curling back into bud, the face quickly reforming. It took a few more seconds for Casse to recover his human-mimic expression.
“Where?” he asked.
“That way,” Cruz pointed at the back door. “I sent Gant after them.” He glanced at his right shoulder then. The pain was gone, flexibility returned. The wound was healed.
“Who was that?” Casse asked. He went around the office, righting the furniture.
“I don’t know.”
“The female was Porter’s lover, the human he shares an apartment with. Perhaps the man was a friend or possibly someone from her stepfather’s company.”
Cruz swallowed around a lump in his throat. This had been bungled. He had suggested to Casse that more personnel might be a good idea, but Casse rejected it. The fewer people around, the better.
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But…
“May I ask a question?” Cruz asked.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t we simply kill this one immediately? The time you spent on the interview, obviously someone followed him, it gave them opportunity—”
“Of course.” Casse stood very still, staring at the wall screen. Equations still covered it. “We needed to find the right one.”
“But—”
“All the others? Yes, it’s a logical question. There’s more than a little chance attached to all of this. Even the wrong one might become the right one given the proper circumstances.”
“I-I’m not sure I understand.”
“No, you don’t. It doesn’t matter. We want an opportunity to use Mr. Porter. He has a grasp of this—” he waved at the screen “—at least equal to the late Rosanna Monk. You will notice that several of our leads I personally attended to. A few were remarkable mathematicians. None grasped the implications expressed here. All required termination after the interviews since the chance existed that they might pursue these lines and stumble on something in the future.”
“But the others? The nonmathematicians?”
“Camouflage. Smoke screen. Some humans might notice a pattern sooner than later if we only terminated this type.”
“They might notice anyway.”
“Someone may already have. I’d rather limit the chance that they know why we’re terminating these people.”
“What, uh…did he grasp?”
“The nature of time, Cruz.”
Cruz waited intently, hoping for more. At one time, he remembered, he had been something of a scientist. His talent had been in management, though, more than in basic research, and he had been content with that for a long time.
But part of his satisfaction had come from being in touch with the science, with the discoveries, the new things on which the bright people worked. He still loved it, the 159
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learning, he still recognized good work when he saw it, grew excited in the presence of epiphany.
“You said you sent Gant after them?” Casse asked.
“Yes.”
The moment passed. Casse would say no more about the science. Cruz shrank a little inside, disappointed.
“Tell him to follow and find, but do not approach. I want another chance to convince Mr. Porter to work for us.”
Cruz stared at Casse, looking for any sign of irony. Seeing none, Cruz said, “Yes, sir.”
“Are we still on schedule with the deliveries from Colorado Springs?”
“Last I checked, slightly ahead of schedule. The first trucks will arrive tomorrow.”
“Very good. I want you to stay on top of that, Oscar. That is more important just now than Mr. Porter.”
“I understand.”
Casse shut down the screen, collected his papers and discs, and left the office.
Cruz stood very still for a few minutes. He went back to the front office and laid the pistol on the desktop. His shoulder felt completely healed, the pain of the bullet a distant memory. He opened a drawer and took out a small communicator.
“Gant,” he spoke into it.
“Yes.”
“Follow them, determine location, do not app
roach, await instructions.”
“Yes.”
Cruz broke the link. Since leaving prison and returning to work at Cyberdyne, he had felt more and more like a janitor. Clean up this, tidy up that, hide the bodies. There was a certain satisfaction to it, but only of the most abstract sort. It was service to Skynet. Without that, he doubted he would tolerate Casse’s arrogance. In some ways, Casse reminded him of Layton. But Layton gave him responsibil-ities; his world had possessed scope back then. Now…
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“Yes, sir,” he grumbled. “Right away, sir…as you wish, sir…where shall I kiss it, sir?”
He wondered, not for the first time, if Armageddon was worth all this humiliation.
Patterson got into the back seat. Deirdre started the engine, glancing at him in the rearview mirror. He looked pale, right hand holding his left bicep.
“Drive!” he snapped.
Deirdre mashed the accelerator. The tires barked once and the car bolted forward. She made for the opening in the fence, went through, and turned left.
“Right,” Patterson ordered. He watched out the back window.
Deirdre turned the car, bouncing over the lip marking the unfenced boundary of another parking lot. She saw the exit to El Segundo on the opposite side.
“What in the hell…” Patterson muttered.
In the mirror, Deirdre saw something—someone—emerge from building. A big man, he paused for a moment until he spotted the car. Then he began running toward them.
She made the boulevard, squealed onto the pocked concrete, and floored the pedal. She glanced up. The man sprang on the road behind him, legs pumping impossibly fast. For a few moments he seemed to be gaining.
“Move move move,” Patterson said.
The speedometer touched fifty, then sixty. The shape began to recede.
“He stopped,” Patterson whispered. “I think…”
Bobby huddled low in the passenger seat beside her. He had said nothing all the way down the back stairs to the exit. He seemed to be in shock.
Deirdre concentrated on driving.
“Where are you going?” Patterson asked.
“Dad’s house,” she said.
“Good.”
She heard him swallow heavily. He had his head back now, eyes closed.
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