"Would you like a drink?" Cockley asked.
Mike had expected to get right down to business. It irked him to put it off, but he realized that the old man's whims were his commands. "Yes thank you."
"A bit of synthe-scotch and a bit of the real stuff. Synthe is actually better than the real thing, you know."
"I didn't."
"It is. Much better. No chance of hitting a bad batch. No worries about a too tangy strain. No contamination. Always perfect and always with that bittersweet quality that makes it so distinctive." He shook the golden mixer bottle vigorously. "Would you bring me three glasses?"
Mike did as told. "Who is the third for?"
Cockley talked as he poured. "One for you . . . one for me. Would you please take that chair there by the desk, Jake?" He set the mixer bottle down. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he gently lifted the empty glass, carried it to the doorway. A messenger appeared, took the glass, holding it by the cloth-covered portion, and disappeared. Cockley turned, took his drink and sank into his swivel chair, sighing heavily. "Do you know what fingerprints are, Jake?"
There was something ominous in that phrase. He searched the corners of his mind; he looked at his fingers. But there was no answer he could find. "No, sir," he said at length.
"Look very closely at the tips of your fingers," Cockley advised.
Cockley was being too conversational, too friendly. He had better be sharp and aware, ready to jump. He looked, meantime, at his fingertips.
"Notice the whorls."
He looked closely. All sorts of fine lines swirled, nearly parallel to one another, looping over the ball of his finger, curling down again.
"Fingerprints," Cockley said.
He failed, still, to see the importance.
"No man's fingerprints are the same as another man's, Jake. Long ago, in pre-Show days, the police used fingerprinting as their chief means of identification. It was a very valuable aid in crime-fighting. When you touch anything, you leave a pattern—your fingerprints. Dusting the surface you touch brings these out. You touched the scotch glass. . . ."
Mike was beginning to get the implications, and he did not like what was shaping up.
"Fingerprinting died out long ago. No one even remembers it anymore. It came to my attention a dozen years ago as the sidelight of an investigation into the written records. In this day and age, when surgery can wipe off a man's face and put a new one on, change his blood and his retina pattern, this might be a good thing to know about, this fingerprinting. If the surgeon did not know of such a thing, then he could not think to change the prints of a patient. I now have a file on every employee, with fingerprints for each. Fingerprinting is a form of reading, and no one reads now—except my translator machines. And now they can tell me whether your prints match those of the Jake Malone we printed a day or so ago."
"But I am Jake Malone," he said, forcing confusion into his voice though he was no longer confused—just frightened.
"Of course you are. At least, I hope you are. But explain this. I had the computer repeat all the info it had gathered for you. It was time consuming, but I eventually found something important—quite important—that you had left out. The Appalachian shelter."
Mike remained expressionless.
"If you are not Jake Malone, you are very adept at imitating his calm."
"I am Malone," Mike said evenly.
"Anyway, Malone is an apple polisher and a hard worker. It was not like him to leave anything out of the report that might possibly lead to a successful mission. Now, maybe this is just a mistake on your, Malone's, part. However, the computer informed me of the fact that Jake had drawn up two sets of card-tapes. And the one set was a card shorter than the other, lacking the Appalachian shelter card. Jake had listed it, then dropped it. And Jake had also attempted to wipe it from the computer's memory. Someone had tried it, anyway. Someone, in Jake's name, told the computer to destroy its memory cells relating to the shelter. And the computer did. But there are other things besides memory cells. The master computer beneath this city not only remembers everything it researches, but it also has a tape-file where it records all key phrases which help it to activate the correct memory cells when necessary. Appalachian Presidential Bomb Shelter was the key phrase in this report. All the little facts, in other words, have been erased, leaving only the skeleton. We do not know where the shelter may be, but with its approximate location, we have been able to set the computer on a second search of the written records. It should find the material in the same time it found it for Jake Malone. Tomorrow morning, we should know where the Revolutionaries are hiding."
"If I'm not Jake Malone. But I am."
"You may be." But his tone said You are not.
"I decided the Appalachian shelter was a false lead."
"Why go to the extreme of blotting it completely from the computer's memory? Why not just tear up the card?"
"I thought erasure was standard procedure."
"Did you always erase what you didn't need when you were head of Research?"
He had blundered. He could only try to enforce that blunder now. "Yes."
"We'll see," Cockley said. He smiled. But it was not really a smile, not really a smile at all.
Mike sat wrapped in silence. He sipped the drink once, but his mouth was too dry and the alcohol burned too harshly against his fear-parched lips. and gums. He found himself staring into the tropical Tri-D window, hardly thinking, nearly numb. He was slipping into the refuge of reverie now when he most needed to plan his actions. Certainly, when his fingerprints were examined, it would be found that he was not Jake Malone. He had to think. There were only minutes left.
Less than minutes.
The door buzzed.
Cockley called it open; it slid back on oiled feet.
The messenger entered, whispered something to the old man, departed. Cockley turned to stare at Mike. "Who are you?"
"Jake Malone."
There was no longer anything but hatred and anger in Cockley's voice. "I said, Who are you?"
"Jake Malone, damnit! Your bloody fingerprints are wrong!" His only chance was to bluff even harder.
"You might as well tell me. You're as good as dead anyway."
"Bastard," he hissed, thinking of Lisa and wondering what she would think and how she would feel when Cockley was there at midnight but he was not.
There was a fire consuming everything in Cockley's eyes, raging behind them.
The door buzzed again, interrupting them. The same messenger delivered a card-tape from the labs. Cockley accepted it, waited until the employee had left, then popped it into the player. "Human remains—skeletal fragments, hair, and flesh particles—found in Cockley Towers Number Two incinerator shaft leading from Malone apartment." It ceased its echoing indictment.
"That's the real Jake Malone," Cockley snapped. "Bone fragments and scraps of charred flesh. Nothing more. You killed one of my best men!"
"And there will be more," he said, suddenly reckless now that there was no escape.
The remark incensed Cockley even more. He tried to control himself. The doctors said that was his major personality problem—his quick temper, his inability to control his basest emotions. He argued that it was something he must have gained from one of the operations, from one of the parts of someone else's body. Another man's eyes, he argued, might shift his perception of the world. They said, politely, that his reasoning was very unscientific. But they did not really argue; they did not dare. And now the anger was rushing up in him, boiling closer and closer to the critical point, when he would do something irrational. He knew it, but he could not stop it. This man had killed Jake Malone. He should hold him for interrogation, but there was a surging, crying need for something more than interrogation, something a great deal more violent than the asking of questions.
Mike backed around the chair he had been sitting in. His fear was great. His mind was filled with half-pictures of his only other encounter with this
old man, pictures of a long ago struggle in which he had been the loser. Cockley leaped with surprising agility, even swifter than Mike remembered. Nevertheless, Mike had time to grab the chair, thrust out with it. Cockley grabbed the legs. They muscled each other for a moment. Mike vaguely remembered a lesson with Pierre and the words "Never muscle a man stronger than you are. Run and dodge until he leaves himself open." But by then, the chair was out of his hands, raised and crashing down against his shoulder. Stars exploded in his head, winked out.
Everything winked out.
There was darkness.
V
A dragon growled at him. The dragon of consciousness.
His head was roaring with pain, belching fire clouds of agony that permeated his thoughts, flickered, flashed, fumed, burned. His head was an aching, water-filled blister on his shoulders. He tried to ignore the dragon, but its breath lit the night more and more. . . .
He opened his eyes. Part black and part light, the room swirled madly for a moment. Before he could straighten things out, he felt hands on him, felt himself being moved, carried. He coughed. Suddenly he was being thrust through an opening into a narrow place where the air was hot and heavy against his face. Then the hands were off him.
He was falling!
Cockley's laugh echoed from above, hollow and ugly.
Falling . . .
He was falling into the incinerator! He screamed; it came out as a thick gurgle. Lashing out with hands and feet, smashing violently against the walls, he grasped for something to hold to. His fingers flashed past rungs. Rungs . . . Rungs . . . He grabbed at them, caught one after several tries, almost jerked his arm from its socket when his fall was so abruptly cut short. He hung from that single rung, two dozen yards above the glowing grill where fire licked through in eager tongues.
Cockley had sentenced him to death by fire. It would have taken him several minutes to die on the grill. Several horrible minutes. The workmen's rungs stopped twenty feet from the bottom. With the fire biting at him with acid teeth, he would not have been able to jump for them, to even try to climb out.
Perspiration dripping from his head, his armpits, he reached up with his free arm and found the rung. Searching with his feet, he found the lower rung, braced his feet in it and leaned against the wall, heaving out a great quantity of air held tightly in his lungs through the entire maneuver. The dragon wanted to sleep. Blackness lurked in the background, anxious and ready to envelop him. But he had to fight it off. If he could not cling to consciousness, he would fall.
Below, the fire crackled red . . .
Yellow and orange. . . .
The heat swept up in visible waves, washed over him, grew chillier as it rose. Somewhere above there was coolness—and a door out.
Crimson flickering . . .
Yellow . . .
He clutched at the rung, reached up with one hand, found the next. It was warm to his touch. It seemed as if every drop of his vital resources had been leaked through his pores. But, forcing himself onward, he found more liquid—the waters of hope and revenge. They sustained him. He rose from the hot place to the place of coolness.
Rung by rung, there were visions with him. Sometimes there was a laughing girl. Sometimes, a very old man. But the old man wore a false face. Then the old man became a wolf; the false face became the mask of a sheep. Then the girl with the sky eyes and sun hair . . . At times, both phantoms were blended grotesquely, superimposed on each other like bad photographs.
Still he climbed. Step by step from the hot to the cool. There, at the top, he rested and lauded himself. There was a blunt, featureless cement ceiling above with only a minor air shaft the width of two fingers breaking its smooth facade. In the shadows and darknesses around him, he saw lesser darknesses which were the recesses of the rungs and the hatch which led into Cockley's office. The hatch recess was deep. By perching on it, and propping his feet against the rungs oh the opposite wall, he could sit bent up in the quiet with only the roaring of the fire and wait for the office to empty. He could afford to wait. Moments ago, he had only seconds left of life. Now he might have years. All of it would be borrowed time. Two or three hours was as nothing to him.
Meanwhile, the world went on. . . .
It was all so public. There were hospital men in white, emergency squad men in red. There was a fire truck and an ambulance. And they were not going to need any of those things. There was no patient for the hospital men, no fire for the fighters of blazes. Their truck could pour no water. The ambulance would go back slow—and mute.
But they would need the funeral director and the doctor who was filling out the notice of death.
He sighed. He would not miss her. Their marriage had been a flop. She was only someone to sit next to for Show programs, an extra mouth to feed.
The rotting corpse was lifted out of the chair. The chunks of brown, thick, bloated flesh that stuck to the arms and seat were sluiced loose with alcohol. The seat was sterilized. Already, the air purifier had dissipated the stench.
He had gone away for two weeks.
He had hoped she would go Empathist, and she had.
He watched, nodded sadly as they covered her and carried her out.
It was snowing again.
The fire truck left. The ambulance drove away with its useless burden. The house was empty, except for him—and the aura. He wondered, briefly, what it would be like to spread out under her aura and his. But considering the space between the two machines, that was a physical impossibility. He would have to be content with one.
The rooms were dark.
The aura came on to his touch—oil dropped on water. A rainbow of slippery, shimmering color.
He thought he heard her screaming at him as Show flooded his senses. But that was impossible, for she was dead. He had seen her molding meat.
Still, in the distant background, there was a cry.
In fact, there were a great, great many cries. . . .
As Mike waited, he thought of Lisa. She had become his only goal now. Even the Revolution he had been trained for seemed like a dream of sorts, unreal. The sessions with Pierre were almost parts of someone else's life. The conversations with Roger Nimron were dreamlike too. All the talk of mass media, expression changed by method of expression, all of it was mumbo-jumbo in his mind. There was one burning thing: Lisa.
Finally, he could wait no longer. There was much to do. Some of his strength—if not his energy—was returning, and it urged him to action. Cautiously, he pushed upon the hatch. It was a magnetic-close panel that opened easily from either side. It swung outward into a dark room. He breathed another sigh of relief and clambered out. He walked to Cockley's desk, fell into the chair. He ordered a compact but nourishing meal from the auto-serve and had time to wipe the worst of the perspiration and soot from his hands onto his trousers before the food popped out of the delivery slot. It was mostly carbohydrate capsules but there was also a synthe-ham sandwich for bulk and a real cup of real coffee. He laced the fragrant brew with a shot of scotch from the bar. The burning sensation as it gurgled down his throat was pleasant. He felt, almost, like a new man.
The clock said it was seven when he asked it the time. There were five hours left until he would have to be at Cockley Towers to get Lisa—and to kill the old man. He set the alarm for four hours and curled up on the plasti-leather couch to sleep. He would have to be as refreshed as possible. Anaxemander Cockley would not be an easy man to overcome, let alone an easy man to kill.
When he woke to the alarm, he felt refreshed and capable once again. There was an hour remaining until midnight, enough time to reach the tower, kill Cockley, and rescue Lisa with a bit of a safety margin thrown in. He stood, stretched his arms and neck, and checked himself. He was dirty, but he could not bathe now. His clothes were torn, but he had no thread. Slicking his hair back with one hand, he checked the gas pistol with the other. The vibra-pistol was missing, but Cockley had evidently overlooked the smaller and deadlier device. He jerked
his arm down, smiled as it slammed into his palm. It still worked. Tucking it back into its smooth pouch, he walked to the desk. He had remembered that the computer was researching the Appalachian shelter, and he thought he might destroy its efforts. He was only able, however, to order it to stop researching where it was. Cockley had inserted a block that prevented erasure of already gleaned facts. He would have to be satisfied with setting them back a few hours instead of stopping the hunt altogether. Besides, it was time to stop playing with mechanical gadgets; it was time to leave.
The hall was empty, lighted only by a faint bulb at each end. He turned to the left, found the stairs down. The lobby was vacant, as were the streets.
He walked the streets, for the floaters were in the garage where there might be an attendant. And he had no floater, after all, now that he was supposed to be dead. He wondered what Cockley's expression would be when he walked into the bedroom, when he tore the old pig's guts out with a gas pellet. However, he reasoned, it would be foolish to let Cockley see him at all. It would be safer and surer to shoot the man in the back if necessary. Not very heroic, but the only safe and positive way. He turned his thoughts from the victim and the killing to thoughts of the night. Pierre had taught him never to think about the battles to come, but to prepare for those battles through tranquility. The night was tranquil enough, certainly. Light snow drifted down, fine and cold. If it kept on for any length of time, there would be great white blankets spreading over everything again, covering up the mud and the gray ice. Already, the trees were rimed, the grass an old woman's mane of hair. The streets were wet, glistening. The yellow and blue streetlamps were reflected sharply in the macadam.
The wind was sweet.
The snow struck his face, matted on his eyelashes and turned to water, blurring his vision now and then.
In time, he came to Cockley Towers. He stood by the gate to Lisa's tower, looking in at the lobby and the door-guard. He fished Malone's cards from his pocket, cards Cockley had not taken off him, and plunged the card-key into the lock. The gate swung open. He had been afraid that Malone's combination might have been removed from the lock's brain, but it evidently had not been. He continued up the shrub-bordered path toward the large double doors. The doorguard met him, pulled the heavy panel wide to let him in.
Koontz, Dean - The Fall of the Dream Machine Page 10