Clarke County, Space

by Allen Steele

  When I die and they lay me to rest,

  Gonna go to the place that’s the best …”

  Down on the floor, encircled by a ring of little round tables, Jenny danced all by herself. Arms lifted high, long blond hair drifting around her face, skirt lifting around her knees, her booted feet glided across the black and white tiles as she pirouetted gracefully in time to the insistent beat. She was beautiful; he longed to join her, but she did not see him.

  At the opposite end of the room, Henry Ostrow was seated at the bar, an emerald-green bottle of Mexican beer resting on a paper coaster next to him. The Golem was watching him, smiling at him. Then his eyes moved hungrily towards the woman dancing between them, and as he looked at Jenny, his hand slowly went to the beer bottle.…

  You are going to die, Coyote said, squatting on his haunches at his side.

  He glanced down at Coyote, then as the electric guitar solo wailed through its melancholy riffs, he looked back at Ostrow. The Golem had picked up a gun instead of a bottle.

  Still grinning at him, the Golem carefully balanced the silenced pistol in both hands and drew a dead bead on Jenny. He could not move, he could not breathe, he could do nothing but watch.…

  Bigthorn awoke to bright lights, soft cool sheets, and a dull itching pain which ran from the right side of his face down his right arm and side. From somewhere above his head, he could hear the beeping of biomonitors. Recognizing the sound, he knew immediately where he was: the emergency ward of Clarke County General.

  He heard a soft whirring to his left, and he slowly turned his head to look. Alerted by his movement, a robot intern was shuttling closer to his bedside. Relax, please, Mr. Bigthorn, a soothing feminine voice said from the speaker grate on the front of its spherical body. You’ve been through much stress. Let me administer a sedative.

  One of its four arms lifted. It ended in a wicked-looking compressed-air syringe loaded with God-knows-what. Bigthorn’s mind felt fuzzy, but his reflexes were working half-decently. He batted at the needle with the back of his left hand, and although the intern easily dodged, it did move back a couple of feet. “Gedoutta here,” the sheriff muttered through parched lips. “Gemme a doctor.”

  Dr. Witherspoon has been summoned and will be along shortly, the robot responded. In the meantime, I insist that you be treated. You’ve received some terrible burns.

  As it spoke, the robot trundled around the foot of the bed to his right side, where it had obviously calculated it would meet less resistance from its patient. Looking to his right, Bigthorn could see the strategy. His right arm was swathed in sterile bandages from his shoulder down to the tips of his fingers, and he had trouble peering around the bandages on the right side of his face. The robot’s syringe-arm lifted again.…

  Bigthorn hastily searched his memory for the emergency command Jack Witherspoon had programmed into his interns for what he had termed mitigating circumstances. He once told the sheriff about it during a very long poker game. Just as the robot maneuvering its double-jointed arm to use the syringe, he recalled the command. “Emergency override code Andrew Jackson Hermitage,” he said as distinctly as he could manage. “Cease operation at once.”

  The intern’s arm instantly stopped, but the device hovered a few inches above Bigthorn’s neck. Emergency override code received, it announced, it seemed a little bitchily. Please confirm by stating the physician’s identity number. Countdown: fifteen … fourteen … thirteen …

  As he glared at the intern, Bigthorn heard an amused chuckle from his left. Looking around, he saw Clarke County’s chief emergency ward physician leaning against the door, hands tucked in the pockets of his white coat. “Finally stumped you on a move, didn’t I, John?” he said in his down-home Southern drawl.

  “Jack, dammit, shut down the ’bot!” Bigthorn rasped through his dry throat.

  Nine … eight … seven … the robot continued.

  “Is it important?” Witherspoon asked warily.

  “Yes! Just do it!”

  Four … three …

  “Emergency override code Andrew Jackson Hermitage,” Witherspoon repeated calmly. “Physician ID number nine-four-eight-eight-one, execute.”

  The countdown ceased abruptly as the robot lifted the syringe-arm and quietly backed away. Dr. Jack Witherspoon III, a young man with an anachronistic pencil-thin mustache tracing his upper lip, walked into the room, eyeing the monitor above Bigthorn’s bed. “You don’t think I’d give away all my secrets, do you?” he said. “What kind of a card shark would I be?”

  Bigthorn sighed and let his head fall back on the pillow. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” The doctor switched on a scanner which looked through the bandages at Bigthorn’s skin. He studied it for a few moments before nodding his head in satisfaction. “Not bad. You’re healing nicely. Derma Four-ten has taken care of the worst of it, so you probably won’t be needing skin grafts. We’ll cut the bandages off and you’ll be out of here in a couple of hours.” He looked down at Bigthorn. “How do you feel?”

  “Like dogshit,” Bigthorn answered honestly. Then he stopped himself and lied. “Fine.”

  “Do you remember what happened?” the doctor asked.

  “A bomb?… my house blew up.” Then Bigthorn’s memory came back. “Jenny … Jenny Schorr was with me, she …”

  “You received second-degree burns on your face and most of your right side,” Witherspoon said. “It was a bomb of some sort, but most of its brunt missed you. The fire team found you about ten feet away, so it knocked you clear of …”

  “Jenny.”

  Jack paused, rubbing the corners of his eyes with his hand. “How strong do you feel, John?” he asked, not so much a doctor now as a friend.

  “Is she dead?” Bigthorn whispered.

  Jack shook his head. “No, she’s not, but she took the worst of it. We’ve got her in the ICU on life support. Third-degree burns, internal hemorrhaging, right lung punctured, three ribs, right forearm and shoulder bones broken, severe concussion …” He sighed, looking away from Bigthorn. “It’s an old cliché, buddy, but you’re both lucky to be alive. The bomb wasn’t …”

  “Jack … you’re not telling me the worst of it.”

  Witherspoon shoved his hands in the pockets of his coat and brought his eyes back to meet Bigthorn’s gaze. “If she’s lucky,” he said quietly, “she’s got a fifty-fifty chance of pulling through.”

  He hesitated again. “If she’s lucky,” he repeated.

  His face was reflected in the observation window of the ICU cell. He stared with shrunken eyes through his bandages at Jenny, who was all but invisible under the dome of the life-support tank.

  Only her closed eyes and the top of her forehead could be seen above the slick plastic gauze of the burn-bandages, the tubes leading from her nose and mouth, and the layers of white plaster that mummified her body. Blood and glucose ran down through IV tubes into her arms. Two robots stood ready on either side of the bed. Above the bed the red and blue LED lights of the bio-monitors moved and changed as they recorded her condition. A holographic monitor depicting a diagram of her body’s circulatory system showed the gradual progress of the microscopic nanorobots which had been injected into her bloodstream as they moved through her veins and arteries, repairing the breaks in her blood vessels.

  In a few minutes she would be wheeled back into surgery for a second operation, a lung transplant. Down the corridor, Dr. Witherspoon and another physician were scrubbing outside the operating room; Bigthorn could hear water running, their quiet murmurs as they reviewed the case and the procedure they planned to follow.

  Another face appeared in the window, next to his own. “John …?”

  The sheriff didn’t take his eyes away from Jenny. “What did you find out?” he asked.

  “Not much.” Wade Hoffman stared past him at the woman in the bed. “Ostrow didn’t check out of the hotel, but when Bellevedere and D’Angelo went to his room, he had moved out some time during t
he night. His bags were gone. He had also stolen some cleaning supplies off a housekeeping cart and scrubbed down everything in the room. Clean as a whistle.”

  “He’s a pro,” Bigthorn said coldly. “He probably had everything figured out in advance. He just made one mistake, that’s all.…”

  His voice trailed off. A mistake that the Golem couldn’t have anticipated, that someone besides him would be opening the door to his house, pulling the trip-wire that set off the bomb. The explosion and the resultant fire had taken off the entire back of Bigthorn’s house, and the rest probably would have burned to the ground if the fire-control team had not quenched the blaze. So Henry Ostrow had missed his intended target. Bigthorn wondered if this was a first for the Golem.

  His deputy was saying something else, which Bigthorn missed. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t catch that.”

  “I said, nobody’s seen him since late last night when he returned to the hotel,” Hoffman repeated. “We’re questioning witnesses, but so far we’ve …”

  “Keep it quiet,” Bigthorn interrupted. “You haven’t gone public with this, have you?”

  Hoffman looked away from the window. “John, bombs don’t go off around here every day. It’s known all over the colony that you and Jenny were …”

  “I don’t mean that, dammit!” Bigthorn said harshly. “I mean Ostrow. I don’t want his name or face made public. Not in connection with this, at any rate.”

  Hoffman shook his head, not comprehending. Bigthorn let out his breath and continued in a quieter tone of voice. “He’s too dangerous to be made public. If word gets out that a killer is running loose, people could flip out. Not only that, but if someone does see him and tries something foolish, like trying to nab him themselves, Ostrow will kill them. At any rate, putting his face on the bulletin boards will just cause him to go further underground.”

  The deputy hesitated, then nodded his head. “Okay, you’ve got a point. But how do we catch him?”

  Bigthorn was staring at Jenny again. He felt drained, yet deep down inside an unholy rage was smoldering, like an all-but-dead campfire whose buried coals were slowly awakening in the early morning breeze. Patiently, he let the fire burn. It felt warm and good.

  “The hard way,” he said. “We run him to the ground and shoot him like a dog.”

  The doctors were coming out of scrub, heading into the operating room. The robots in the ICU cell suddenly stirred and methodically began to reattach the wire and tubes to the life-support tank’s portable systems, prepping Jenny for the short trip from the cell to surgery. Before he disappeared into the operating room, Jack Witherspoon—hands held high, a nurse tying his surgical mask around his face—looked down the corridor in Bigthorn’s direction and nodded his head once. Then an iris-door whirred shut, hermetically sealing the corridor between the ICU cell and the operating room. At the same time, the observation window polarized and went opaque. Jenny disappeared from sight.

  Bigthorn stared at his own reflection in the dark glass for a moment. “Okay, put the department on full alert,” he said finally, turning away from the window. “The weekend’s over. I want every officer out on …”

  He stopped. A few feet away, standing in the corridor entirely unnoticed until this moment, was Neil Schorr.

  The sheriff took a few steps forward. “Neil …” he began.

  “The only thing,” Jenny’s husband said slowly, as if deliberately choosing his words, “that I still don’t know … is why my wife was going into your house in the middle of the night.”

  The air between the two men seemed to turn to stone. Bigthorn didn’t want to meet Neil’s eyes, but he couldn’t look away either. In that moment, any lie, any embroidering of the truth, would have been futile, and they both knew it.

  “I’m sorry, Neil,” he whispered.

  Neil stared back at him. Finally, he shook his head. “It’s too bad you didn’t open the door first,” he said. He paused, then added, “It’s also too bad you’re injured and we’re in a hospital. I’m a pacifist, but right now I’d like to …”

  He shook his head again. “I won’t think like that,” he said aloud, if only to himself. “You’re walking. I guess you’re probably going to be released today. Am I right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Schorr looked at him for another few seconds, then turned to walk away. “I have to go see about my wife. I want you at the town meeting tonight.” He took a couple of steps, then stopped to turn back again. “It’ll be helpful if you tender your resignation by then. It’ll save me the trouble of putting a motion on the floor to have you fired.”

  Hoffman started forward. “You can’t do that, Neil. He’s …”

  “You’re forgetting who’s on the board,” Schorr said, ignoring Hoffman and addressing Bigthorn directly. “I can’t fire you myself, but I can make a case for the town to vote for your dismissal. If you think you can find a way to defend yourself, you should show up at the meeting.”

  Schorr began to walk away again, heading for the observation theater above the operating room. Bigthorn found himself speechless. Not angry, but too ashamed to say anything in his own defense.

  Hoffman glanced at Bigthorn, then called out after Schorr. “Aren’t you interested in getting the person who set that bomb?”

  “I already know who did it,” Schorr replied without turning around. “We’ll talk about that tonight, too.”

  Then he was around the bend of the corridor, climbing the stairway to the observation theater. Hoffman and Bigthorn looked at each other.

  “Did you say anything to him about Ostrow?” Bigthorn asked.

  Hoffman shook his head. “Then, what the hell is he talking about?” the sheriff asked.

  15

  Live From Larry Bird Memorial Stadium

  (Sunday: 9:45 A.M.)

  Larry Bird Memorial Stadium had been christened after one of the legends of the NBA, which was appropriate; basketball was one of the few spectator sports that could be safely played within Clarke County.

  The problem with Bird Stadium was that it had been built halfway up the biosphere’s gravity grade, on the outskirts of LaGrange, where the gravity was only three-quarters Earth-normal. Thus baseball, football, and soccer were out. A fly ball or a field-goal kick could not only put the ball out of reach of the opposing players, it could also shatter a window on the other side of the biosphere. Volleyball was safer, but since it had never really caught on as a spectator sport, only a few amateur games had been played. Tennis was also feasible, but since the Coriolis effect tended to make all the shots swerve a little anti-spinward, most players ended their games in frustration.

  Basketball, though, was actually enhanced in Clarke County. The Coriolis effect made the game more challenging, since rotational drift rendered half-court passes and “Hail Mary” shots even more unpredictable than on Earth. Indeed that unpredictability made basketball games at Bird Stadium the most popular among viewers on Earth. Also, because of the lesser gravity, individual players had to adapt during the course of a game. Taller and stronger players tended to undercompensate for the lesser gravity, while smaller players found unexpected advantages.

  The colony’s distance from Earth didn’t prohibit the NBA from using Bird Stadium for season playoffs and exhibition games. Already two All-Star games had been held in Clarke County, both telecast on Earth, yielding large audience shares. Subsequently, enormous advertising revenues had been generated for the consortium. Likewise, Bird Stadium had become a choice location for non-athletic events; several rock and country acts had performed live in Bird Stadium, as had the London Symphony Orchestra; performing Handel’s The Messiah the previous Christmas Eve.

  But now, Bird Stadium was to be the venue for the performance of a different kind of messiah.

  For the Church of Elvis revival the stage at the end of the amphitheater had been done over to resemble the showroom stage of the old International Hotel in Las Vegas, the site of Elvis Presley’s comeback p
erformance of 1969. Parker’s choice was dictated not so much by history—all but rock and roll historians had forgotten about the details of the ’69 comeback show—as for the sake of showmanship. His own psychic needs had to be served as well. It had always been a difficult trick to imitate Presley, even when it was for only a hundred people. Tomorrow night he would be appearing live before an estimated audience of five million viewers, GBN’s average audience share for a weeknight. He needed the best help and the cheapest glitz money could buy.

  Five million viewers. If the Parker Principle held true, then one percent of those five million hearts and minds were potential suckers. Fifty thousand boobs. And if only half of that number were the check-writing variety of boob, then there were 25,000 tithes to be collected tomorrow night. Furthermore, if those checks averaged $100 apiece—a good night’s take—then Parker stood to gross $250,000.

  People commit murder to make that sort of money. All he had to do was convince one percent of a TV audience that he was the living incarnation of the King of Rock and Roll.

  It was not to be a complete dress rehearsal. His core of followers were in the stadium, hogging the front rows of chairs, and he had learned not to telegraph his sermons by practicing in public. The shtick needed to seem spontaneous, unrehearsed. After all, Moses didn’t practice before he parted the Red Sea. The skin-tight sequined white Nudie suit was still in his hotel suite; Elvis Parker today wore his black leather pants and jacket, with the desired effect among his faithful sheep. As he walked onto the stage their mouths hung open and they whispered among themselves. The Dark Elvis was among them. Parker restrained himself from grinning. Good. Maybe he could hit the Strip tonight, and not just to eat fried chicken.

  He strode to the mike stand, shoved his thumbs into his pants pockets, gave his best bad-boy glower at the audience. “Test? Test one, two.”

  His voice echoed hollowly from the speakers. Again, another detail that counted. He could have hidden a tiny nanomike in his jacket collar, but Presley had used his old-fashioned hand mike as a prop. You can’t caress a nanomike like a lover, and a large part of doing Elvis was learning how to make love to your microphone.