Montezuma Strip

by Alan Dean Foster

He let Hypatia drive him back to her place and put him to bed. He fell asleep fast but he didn’t sleep well.

  A psychomorph was chasing him; a gruesome, gory nightmare dredged up from the depths of someone else’s disturbed subconscious. Frantically he tried to find the kill strip to shut down the power, but someone had removed them all from the control panel in front of him. And there were screens all around him now, and on the ceiling, and beneath his feet, each one belching forth a new and more horrible monstrosity. He curled into a fetal ball, whimpering as they touched him with their filthy tendrils, hunting for his psychic core so they could enter and drive him insane. One used a keyword to open the top of his skull like a can opener.

  He sat up in bed, sweating. Beneath his buttocks the sheet was soaked. A glance at the holo numerals that clung like red spiders to the wall behind the bed showed 0934. But it was still dark outside. Then he noticed the tiny P.M. to the right of the last numeral. He’d slept the whole day. His mouth confirmed it, his tongue conveying the taste of old leather.

  “Hypatia?” Naked, he slid slowly off the hybred and stumbled toward the bathroom, running both hands through his hair. Water on his face helped. More down his throat helped to jump-start the rest of his body. He used one of her lilac towels to dry himself, turned back to the bedroom.

  “Hypatia? Charliebo?”

  She wasn’t in the kitchen, nor the greeting room. Neither was the shepherd. Both gone out. Maybe she’d taken him for a walk. Charliebo was well trained, but his insides were no different from any other dog’s. He’d go with her. Dog and Designer had grown close to each other this past week.

  He knew she was worried about him. While he would have preferred to have spared her the concern, he was pleased. Been a long time since anyone besides Charliebo had really cared about Angel Cardenas, and Hypatia had better legs than the shepherd. Sure he was stressing himself, but he could take it. All part of the job. Experience compensated for the lack of youthful resilience. He could handle any traps Crescent and Noschek had left behind, even if she didn’t think he could.

  He stopped in the middle of the room. Concerned about him, yeah. About his ability to deal with another psychomorph or worse. Under those circumstances what would a caring, compassionate woman do? What could she do, to spare him another dangerous, possibly lethal confrontation? Couldn’t an experienced, younger Designer follow the path he’d already found and thus keep him from possible danger?

  Shit.

  He was wide awake now; alert, attuned, and worried. He didn’t remember getting dressed, didn’t recall the short elevator ride to the subterranean garage. Sure enough, her little three-wheeler was gone. She wasn’t out for an evening stroll with Charliebo, then. His lungs heaved as he raced for the nearest induction station. It would be faster than trying to call for police backup.

  Besides, he might be getting himself all upset over nothing. If he was wrong, he’d end up looking the prize fool. If he was right, well, Hypatia was highly competent. But he’d much rather play the fool.

  The only thing that saved him was his three decades on the force. Thirty years experience means you don’t go barging into a room. Thirty years handling ninlocos and juice dealers and assorted flakes and whackos says you go in quietly. Go in fast and loud and you might upset somebody, and they might react before you had time to size things up.

  Thirty years says Hypatia would have secursealed the door to the office. When he discovered it wasn’t, he opened it as slowly as possible.

  The lights were on low. The wallscreen was alive with flaring symbols and muted verbal responses. In the center was the tunnel, twisting and glowing like an electrified python. He picked out the desk, the muted holo portraits of Wallace Crescent’s abandoned, innocent family.

  Hypatia was on the floor. There was enough light to illuminate the figure bent over her. Enough light to show the still, motionless lump of Charliebo lying not far away.

  Quiet as he’d been, the figure still sensed his presence. It turned to face him. The blend suit melted into the background but he recognized the triple lenses that formed a multicolored swath across the face instantly. All three primaries were down and functioning now.

  Cardenas saw that Hypatia’s jumpsuit was unzipped all the way to her thighs. A handful of secrylic had been slapped across her mouth, muffling her as it hardened. More of the so-called police putty bound her ankles and wrists. She tried to roll toward him but found it hard to move because the figure had one knee resting on her hip.

  His gaze flicked to Charliebo. The shepherd’s chest was still, the eyes vacant. Cardenas’s vision blurred slightly and his teeth moved against each other.

  “Don’t,” said the flashman. He didn’t sound uncertain tonight. He glanced down at Hypatia, then smiled up at the federale. “Worried about baby? No need to. Maybe. Come in, close the door behind you. If I’d sealed it you would’ve gone for help. This way I only have to deal with you, right?” He leaned slightly to his left as if to see behind Cardenas.

  “Right.” Cardenas kept his hands in view, his movements slow and unambiguous. Hypatia stared at him imploringly. He saw that she’d been crying. Easy, he told himself. Keep it easy.

  But it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy at all.

  “You so much as twitch the wrong way, Federale, and she’ll be sorry.” The flashman was grinning at something only he found amusing. “You should’ve stayed in bed, man.”

  No hurry. No emergency. Not yet. He moved off to his right. “Why’d you have to kill my dog?”

  He didn’t get the response he expected. The flashman let out a short, sharp laugh. “Hey, that’s funny! You don’t know why it’s funny, do you? I’ll tell you later, after I’m through here. Or maybe I’ll let her tell you.” He glanced quickly at the screen, not giving Cardenas any time. “Got to be an end to this damn tunnel soon.”

  “All I have to do,” Cardenas said softly, “is shout, and Security’ll be down on you like bad news.”

  Again the unhealthy, relaxed laugh, a corrugated giggle. “Sure they would, but you won’t shout.” He held something up so Cardenas could see it.

  A Scrambler. Military model, banned for private use. Of course, banning was only a legal term. It didn’t keep things from falling into the hands of people who wanted to have them. When everything else failed the police used less powerful versions of the same device to subdue juice addicts who outgrabed. It put them down fast but it didn’t do permanent damage. Fourth world military types used powered-up models for less reputable purposes. The flashlight-shaped device scrambled nerve endings. The federale issue paralyzed. The military model could break down neurons beyond hope of surgical repair. In hand-to-hand combat it was much more efficient than a knife or bayonet and a lot easier to use. You didn’t have to penetrate. All you had to do was make contact.

  “Go ahead and shout, if you want to.” The flashman calmly touched the Scrambler to Hypatia’s exposed left breast.

  She thrashed. Hard, but not hard enough to break the secrylic. She whined loud enough to penetrate the slightly porous gag. The flashman showed the Scrambler to Cardenas again, ignoring the heavy, gasping form beneath him.

  “See here? No safety. A simple modification.” Cardenas bit down on his lower lip hard enough to draw blood but he kept his hands at his sides, his feet motionless. “You shout, you move funny, and I’ll shove this between her legs. Maybe it won’t kill her, but she won’t care.”

  “I won’t shout.” Only practice enabled him to reply calmly, quietly. His fingers were bunched into fists, the nails digging into the flesh of his palms.

  “That’s a good little sponger.”

  “How long?”

  Again the grin. “Since Crescent vacuumed himself. Since the investigation started.” He looked ceilingward, toward the low-key incandescents. “One bulb up there’s got an extra filament. Records and holds. Can’t broadcast each pickup. Security would track it. Just a five-second high-speed burst when a receive-only passes outside the doo
r. Me. Just enough range to clear the room. Not real noticeable, if you know what I mean. I walk by once a day, stop long enough to sneeze, move on. Hardly suspicious. Then playback at normal speed when I’m home. Nothing very entertaining until you showed up.”

  “You’ve been monitoring her place, too.”

  The flashman chuckled. “Sure now. You think I knew she’d be coming here tonight via e.s.p.? Expected you to snore on. Been getting some custom design work of your own?”

  He took a step forward. The flashman lowered the Scrambler slightly. Cardenas saw Hypatia’s eyes widen, her body tense.

  “Ah-ah. Don’t want to make me nervous, Federale.” Cardenas took back the step, his expression bland, screaming inside. “Glad you started pushing your hypothesis here, man. I would’ve been in a world of hurt if you’d started down this tunnel over at Parabas. Guess I’m just lucky.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Don’t games me. I want whatever’s at the end of this tunnel. A subox, resonance, miracle crunch. Access. Same thing you’ve been after. ‘Morphological resonance’. That’s wild, man. Immortality? Wilder still. Relax. You’ll cramp your head.”

  “And if you find it?”

  The flashman nodded toward the side of the desk. Cardenas saw the metal and plastic plug-in lying there. He couldn’t see the cable link but knew it must be present, running to jacks beneath the desk.

  “One sequence. I finalize, then do a quick store-and-transfer. Anything valuable and there ought to be plenty.” He licked his lips. “Never seen a tunnel like this. Nobody has. Construction crunch alone’s worth all the trouble this has taken.”

  “But you want more.”

  The flashman smiled broadly. “Man, I want it all.”

  “You’ll take it and leave?”

  The man nodded. “I’m a thief. Not a vacuumer. Not unless you make me. I get what I’ve been after for months and I waft.” He gestured with the Scrambler. Hypatia flinched. “I’ll even leave you this. Memories can be so much fun.”

  “Assuming there’s even anything in there to steal, what makes you think you can transfer a resonance?”

  “Don’t know unless you try, right? If you can get something in you ought to be able to get it out. It’s only crunch. Key the box, key the transfer, and it’s off to friends in the Mid East.”

  “Immortality for the petrochem moguls?” Cardenas’s tone was thick with contempt.

  “That’s up to them to figure out. Not my department. I just borrow things. But they’ll have the subox, if there is one. Our farseeing pinkboys are going on another trip. Suppose they can slip in and out of any box they’re introduced to? My employers could send them on lots of vacations. A little crunch out of First EEC Bank, some extra out of Soventem. With that kind of access petrochems will seem like petty cash stuff.”

  Cardenas shook his head. “You are crazy. Even if they’re in there in any kind of accessible shape what makes you think you can force Noschek and Crescent to do what you want?”

  “Also not my job. I’m just assured it can be done, theoretically anyway. But then this is all theory we’re jawing, isn’t it? Unless I find something to transfer.” He turned to the screen. “Starting to narrow. I think maybe we’re getting near tunnelend. Stay put.” He rose, straddling Hypatia. He wasn’t worried about her moving. The Scrambler assured that.

  The petitpoint pusher in Cardenas’s shirt pocket felt big as a tractor against his chest. The little gun would make a nice, neat hole in the flashman’s head, but he couldn’t chance it. If he missed, if he was a second too slow, the man could make spaghetti of half Hypatia’s nervous system. Thirty years teaches a man patience. He restrained himself.

  But he’d have to do something soon. If there was a subox holding a resonance named Crescent and Noschek he couldn’t let this bastard have it.

  The flashman removed a vorec, still clutching the Scrambler tight in his other hand. He was trying to watch Cardenas and the wallscreen simultaneously. Hypatia he wasn’t worried about. As Cardenas looked on helplessly the man spoke softly into the vorec. Patterns shifted on the wall. The steady thrum of the aural playback became a whispery moan, an electronic wind. The tunnel continued to narrow. They were very near the end now and whatever lay there, concealed and waiting. The flashman smiled expectantly.

  Teeth began to come out of the wall.

  The flashman retreated until he was leaning against the side of the desk, but it was an instinctive reaction, not a panicky one. Clearly he knew what he was doing. Now he would use the key Cardenas had concocted following his own previous confrontation, use it to dry up the power to the psychomorph. Then he could continue on to the end of the tunnel, having bypassed the psychic trap. Cardenas watched as he spoke into the vorec.

  The teeth were set in impossibly wide jaws. Above the jaws were pupilless crimson eyes.

  The flashman spoke again, louder this time. A third time. The psychomorph swelled out of the wall, looming over Hypatia. She lay on her back staring up at it. It ignored her as it concentrated on the flashman.

  “No. That was the key.” He turned toward the federale and Cardenas saw stark terror in the man’s eyes. “I took it off the filament. THAT WAS THE KEY!” He screamed the words into the vorec. They were the right words, the proper inflection. Then he threw the Scrambler at the opaque shape and turned to run.

  The psychomorph bit off his head.

  As a psychic convergence it was the most realistic Cardenas had ever seen. The decapitated body stood swaying. Blood appeared to fountain from the severed neck. Then the corpse toppled forward onto the floor.

  He stood without moving, uncertain whether to run, shout for Security, or reach for the petitpoint. The psychomorph turned slowly to face him. It was a thousand times more real, more solid than any convergence he’d ever seen. He thought it stared at him for a moment. Since it had no pupils it was hard to tell. Then it whooshed back into the wall, sucked into the holodepths that had given it birth. As it vanished, the tunnel collapsed on top of it.

  It was quiet in the office again. The wallscreen was full of harmless, flickering symbology. The speakers whispered of mystery and nonsense. On the floor behind the desk the flashman lay in a pool of his own blood, the expression on his face contorted, his eyes bulged halfway out of their sockets. His ragged nails showed where he’d torn out his own throat. Cardenas searched through bloodstained pockets until he found the applicator he needed. Then he turned away, sickened.

  The applicator contained debonder for the secrylic. First he dissolved the gag, then went to work on Hypatia’s wrists. She spat out tasteless chunks of the pale green putty. She was crying, brokenly but not broken. “Jesus, Angel, Jesus God, I thought he was going to kill me!”

  “He was. Would have.” He ripped away sagging lumps of putty and carefully began applying debonder to her bound ankles. “After he’d finished his transferring. Nothing you or I could have said would have mattered. He couldn’t leave any witnesses. He knew that.” He glanced up at the innocuous wallscreen. “You saw it?”

  “Saw it?” She sat up and rubbed her wrists, then her chest where the Scrambler had been applied. There was a painful red welt there but no permanent damage. She was breathing in long, steady gasps. “It was right on top of me.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “It was a psychomorph, Angel. The worst one I ever saw. The worst one anyone ever saw.” She was looking past him, at the torn body of the flashman. “Talk about tactile. It really got inside him.”

  He finished with her ankles. “Don’t try to stand yet.”

  “Don’t worry. Jesus.” She moved her legs tentatively, loosening the cramped muscles. Behind her was harmless holospace. If you put out your hand you’d touch solid wall. Or would you? Could they be sure of anything anymore? Could anyone?

  “Another trap.” Cardenas too was studying the wall. “The last trap. Why’d he kill Charliebo? He said he didn’t.” He found he couldn’t look at the pitiful gray shap
e that lay crumpled alongside the desk.

  Hypatia inhaled, coughed raggedly. “He didn’t.”

  That made him look down at her. “What?”

  “He was telling the truth. He didn’t kill Charliebo. The tunnel did. Or the subox working up the tunnel. I don’t know.” She rubbed her forehead. “The psychomorph was the last trap, but there was one inserted in front of it. It—it was my fault, Angel. I thought I knew how to protect myself. I thought I was being careful, and I was. But there’s never been a tunnel like that one. Part of the tunnel, before the psychomorph.

  “I was worried about you, Angel. I thought maybe you were working too hard, too long. You don’t see yourself, sitting there, reciting in that unbroken monotone into that damn vorec. It’s like it becomes an extension of your own mouth.”

  “It does,” he told her softly.

  “So I thought I’d do some tunneling myself. Before the psychomorph there’s… I don’t know what you’d call it. Not a psychomorph. Subtler. Like a reciprocal program. It vacuumed the first thing it focused on.” Maybe he couldn’t look at the shepherd’s corpse, but she could. “If Charliebo hadn’t been where he was it’d be me lying there instead of him. The tunnel, the program—it vacuumed him, Angel. Sucked him right out. It was quick. He just whimpered once and fell over on his side. The look in his eyes—I’ve seen that look on people who’ve been vacuumed. But I didn’t know you could do it to an animal.

  “The crunch consumption figures went stratospheric. Maybe it was the same program Crescent and Noschek used to vacuum themselves. I guess they figured that’d be one way to make sure anybody who got this close to them wouldn’t bother them.”

  “Charliebo wasn’t an animal.”

  “No. Sure he wasn’t, Angel.” It was quiet for a long time. Later, “I cut power and figured out a key to get around the trap. I thought it was the last one. That’s when he came in.” She indicated the flashman. “But it wasn’t the last one. The psychomorph was. There were no warnings, no hints. I never would’ve seen it coming. Neither did he.”