I knew that wasn’t it; but right then I didn’t care what it was. I tongued the switch to cut off reception. And shoved out one leg, caught myself with a jerk just before I fell.
It was over. The pain disappeared. Just like that.
I was woozy with relief. There was a ringing in my ears that made it hard for me to keep my balance. Seconds passed before I could focus well enough to look around. Not think—just look.
I was in a bare office, a place with no frills, not even any curtains on the windows to keep out the dankness of the rain. I was almost in reach of a long counter.
Behind the counter stood a man. He was tall and fat—not overweight-fat, but bloated-fat, as if he were stuffing himself to feed some grotesque appetite. He had the face of a boar, the cunning and malicious eyes of a boar, and he was looking at me as if he were trying to decide where to use his tusks. But his voice was suave and kind. “Are you all right?” he asked. “What happened?”
With a lurch, my brain started working again.
Power feedback. Something had caused a feedback in my transceiver. Must’ve been some kind of electronic jamming device. The government used jammers for security—a way of screening secret meetings. To protect against people like me.
Sharon’s Point was using a security screen.
What were they trying to hide?
But that was secondary. I had a more immediate problem. The fat man had been watching me when the jammer hit. He’d seen my reaction. He would know I had a transceiver in my skull. Unless I did something about it. Fast.
He hadn’t even blinked. “What happened’?”
I was sweating. My hands were trembling. But I looked him straight in the eye and said, “It’ll pass. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
Nothing could’ve been kinder than the way he asked, “What is the matter?”
“Just a spasm,” I said straight at him. “Comes and goes. Brain tumor. Inoperable. I’ll be dead in six months. That’s why I’m here.”
“Ah,” he said without moving. “That is why you are here.” His pudgy hands were folded and resting on his gut. “I understand.” If he was suspicious of me, he didn’t let it ruffle his composure. “I understand perfectly.”
“I don’t like hospitals,” I said sternly, just to show him I was back in control of myself.
“Naturally not,” he assented. “You have come to the right place, Mr.—?’.
“Browne,” I said. “Sam Browne.”
“Mr. Browne.” He filed my name away with a nod. Gave me the uncomfortable impression he was never going to forget it. “We have what you want here.” For the first time, I saw him blink. Then he said, “How did you hear of us, Mr. Browne?”
I was prepared for that. I mentioned a couple names off the Preserve’s list of dead, and followed them up by saying squarely, “You must be Ushre.”
He nodded again. “I am Fritz Ushre.” He said it the same way he might’ve said, “I am the President of the United States.” Nothing diffident about him.
Trying to match him, I said, “Tell me about it.”
His boar eyes didn’t waver, but he didn’t answer me directly. Instead, he said, “Mr. Browne, we generally ask our patrons for payment in advance. Our standard fee is for a week’s hunting. Forty thousand dollars.”
I certainly did admire his composure. He was better at it than I was. I felt my face react before I could stop it. Forty—! Well, so much for acting like I was rich. It was all I could do to keep from cursing myself out loud.
“We run a costly operation,” he said. He was as smooth as stainless steel. “Our facilities are the best. And we breed our own animals. That way, we are able to maintain the quality of what we offer. But for that reason we are required to have veterinary as well as medical facilities. Since we receive no Federal money-and submit to no Federal inspections”—he couldn’t have sounded less like he was threatening me—”we cannot afford to be wasteful.”
He might’ve gone on—not apologizing, just tactfully getting rid of me—but I cut him off. “Better be worth it,” I said with all the toughness I could manage. “I didn’t get where I am throwing my money away.” At the same time, I took out my credit card and set it down with a snap on the counter.
“Your satisfaction is guaranteed.” Ushre inspected my card briefly, then asked, “Will one week suffice, Mr. Browne?”
“For a start.”
“I understand,” he said as if he understood me completely. Then he turned away for a minute while he ran my card through his accounting computer. The accomputer verified my credit and printed out a receipt that Ushre presented to me for validation. After I’d pressed my thumbprint onto the identiplate, he returned my card and filed the receipt in the accomputer.
In the meantime, I did some glancing around, trying nonchalantly (I hoped I looked nonchalant) to spot the jammer. But I didn’t find it. In fact, as an investigator I was getting nowhere fast. If I didn’t start finding things out soon, I was going to have real trouble explaining that forty-thousand-dollar bill to Accounting. Not to mention staying alive.
So when Ushre turned back to me, I said, “I don’t want to start in the rain. I’ll come back tomorrow. But while I’m here I want to look at your facilities.” It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could do without giving away that I really didn’t know those two dead men I’d mentioned. I was supposed to know what I was doing; I couldn’t very well just ask him right out what kind of animals he had. Or didn’t have.
Ushre put a sheaf of papers down on the counter in front of me and said again, “I understand.” The way he said things like that was beginning to make my scalp itch. “Once you have completed these forms, I will ask Dr. Paracels to show you around.”
I said, “Fine,” and started to fill out the forms. I. didn’t worry too much about what I was signing. Except for the one that had to do with cremating my body, they were pretty much standard releases—so that Shares’s Point wouldn’t be liable for anything that might happen to me. The disposal-of-the-body form I read more carefully than the others, but it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. And by the time I was done, Dr. Avid Paracels had come into the office.
I studied him as Ushre introduced us. I would’ve been interested to meet him any time, but right then I was particularly keen. I knew more about him than I did about Ushre—which meant that for me he was the key to Sharon’s Point.
He was tall and gaunt—next to Ushre he was outright emaciated. Scrawny and stooped, as if the better part of him had been chipped away by a long series of personal catastrophes. And he looked a good bit more than thirty years older than I was. His face was gray. like the face of a man with a terminal disease, and the skin stretched from his cheekbones to his jaw as if it were too small for his skull. His eyes were hidden most of the time beneath his thick, ragged eyebrows, but when I caught a glimpse of them they looked as dead as plastene. I would’ve thought he was a cadaver if he wasn’t standing up and wearing a white coat. If he hadn’t licked his lips once when he first saw me. Just the tip of his tongue circled his lips that once—not like he was hungry, but instead like he was wondering in an abstract way whether I might turn out to be tasty. Something about that little pink gesture in that gray face made me feel cold all of a sudden. For a second I felt like I knew what he was really thinking. He was wondering how he was going to be able to use me. And how I was going to die. Maybe not in that order.
“Dr. Paracels,” I said. I was wondering if he or Ushre knew there was sweat running down the small of my back.
“I won’t show you where we do our breeding,” he said in a petulant way that surprised me, “or my animal hospital.” The whine in his voice sounded almost deliberate, like he was trying to sound pathetic.
“We never show our patrons those facilities,” Ushre added smoothly. “There is an element of surprise in what we offer.” He blinked again. The rareness of that movement emphasized the cunning and malice of his eyes. “We believe that it i
mproves the sport. Most of our patrons agree.”
“Rut you can see my clinic,” Paracels added impatiently. “This way.” He didn’t wait for me. He turned around and went out the inner door of the office.
Ushre’s eyes never left my face. “A brilliant surgeon, Dr. Paracels. We are fortunate to have him.”
I shrugged. The way I was feeling right then, there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do. Then I went after the good doctor.
That door opened into a wide corridor running through the complex. I caught a glimpse of Paracels going through a set of double doors at the end of the corridor, but there were other doors along the hail, and they were tempting. They might lead me to Ushre’s records—and Ushre’s records might tell me what I needed to know about Sharon’s Point. But this was no tame for taking risks. I couldn’t very well tell Ushre when he caught me that I’d blundered onto his records by mistake-assuming I even found them. So I went straight to the double doors and pushed my way into the surgery.
The registration inspector was right: Sharon’s Point was very well equipped. There were several examination and treatment rooms (including x-ray, oxygen, and ophthalmological equipment), a half dozen beds, a pharmacy that looked more than adequate (maybe a lot more than adequate), and an operating theater that reminded me of the place where I was made into a cyborg.
That was where I caught up with Paracels. In his whining voice (was he really that full of self-pity?), he described the main features of the place. He assumed I’d want to know how he could do effective surgery alone there, and that was what he told me.
Well, his equipment was certainly compact and flexible, but what really interested me was that he had a surgical laser. (I didn’t ask him if he had a license for it. Is license was hanging right there on the wall.) That wasn’t common at all, especially in a small clinic like this. A surgical laser is very specialized equipment. These days they’re used for things like eye surgery and lobotomies. And making cyborgs. But a while back (twenty-two years) they were used in genetic engineering.
The whole idea made my skin crawl. There was something menacing about it As innocently as I could, I asked Paracels the nastiest question I could think of. “Do you save any lives here, Doctor?”
That was all it took to make him stop whining. All at once he was so bitter I half-expected him to begin foaming at the mouth. “What’re you,” he spat, “some kind of bleeding heart? The men who come here know they might get killed. I do everything for them that any doctor could do. You think I have all this stuff just for the hell of it?”
I was surprised to find I believed him. I believed he did everything he could to save every life that ended up on his operating table. He was a doctor, wasn’t he? If he was killing people, he was doing it some other way.
4
Well, maybe I was being naive. I didn’t know yet. But I figured I’d already learned everything Paracels and Ushre were likely to tell me of their own free will. I told them I’d be back bright and early the next morning, and then I left.
The rain was easing, so I didn’t get too wet on the way back to my car, but that didn’t make me feel any better. There was no doubt about it: I was outclassed. Ushre and Paracels had given away practically nothing. They’d come up with neat plausible stories to cover strange things like their vet hospital and their independence from the usual animal breeders. In fact, they’d explained away everything except their policy of cremating their dead hunters—and that was something I couldn’t challenge them on without showing off my ignorance. Maybe they had even spotted me for what I was. And I’d gotten nothing out of them except a cold sweat. I had an unfamiliar itch to use my blaster; I wanted to raze that whole building, clinic and all. When I reactivated my transmitter, I felt like telling Inspector Morganstark to pull me off the case and send in someone who knew what he was doing.
But I didn’t. Instead, I acted just like a good Special Agent is supposed to. I spent the drive back to town talking to the tape decks, telling them the whole story. If nothing else, I’d accomplished something by finding out Sharon’s Point ran a security screen. That would tell the Inspector his hunch was right.
I didn’t have any doubt his hunch was right. Something stank at that preserve. In different ways, Ushre and Paracels reminded me of maneaters. They had acquired a taste for blood. Human blood. In the back of my head a loud voice was shouting that Sharon’s Point used genetically altered people for “game.” No wonder Paracels looked so sick. The M.D. in him was dying of outrage.
So I didn’t tell Inspector Morganstark to pull me off the case. I did what I was supposed to do. I went back to the motel and spent the afternoon acting like a rich man who was eager to go hunting. I turned in early after supper, to get plenty of rest. I asked the desk to call me at 6 A.M. With the shower running, I told the tape decks what I was going to do.
When midnight came, and the sky blew clear for the first time in two days, I climbed out a window and went back to the preserve on foot.
I wasn’t exactly loaded down with equipment. I left my .30-06 and all my rich-hunter gear back at the motel. But I figured I didn’t need it. After all, I was a cyborg. Besides, I had a needle flash and a small set of electromagnetic lock-picks and jimmies. I had a good sense of direction. I wasn’t afraid of the dark.
And I had my personal good-luck piece. It was an old Gerber hunting knife that used to be my father’s. It was balanced for throwing (which I was better at than using a rifle anyway), and its edges near the hilt were serrated, so it was good for cutting things like rope. I’d taken it with me on all my visits to bunting preserves, and once or twice it had kept me alive. It was what I used when I had to kill some poor animal crippled by a trap or a bad shot. Now I wore it hidden under my clothes at the small of my back. Made me feel a little more self-confident.
I was on my way to try to sneak a look at a few things. Like Paracels’s vet hospital and breeding pens. And Ushre’s records. I really didn’t want to just walk into the preserve in the morning and find out what I was up against the hard way. Better to take my chances in the dark.
I reached the preserve in about an hour and hunched down in the brush beside the road to plan what I was going to do. All the lights in the barracks and office complex were out, but there was a bright pink freon bulb burning next to the landing area and the hovercraft. I was tempted to put it out, just to make myself feel safer. But I figured that would be like announcing to Sharon’s Point I was there, so I left it alone.
The barracks I decided to leave alone, too. Maybe that wasn’t where the handlers lived—maybe that was where Paracels kept his animals. But if it was living quarters, I was going to look pretty silly when I got caught breaking in there. Better not to take that chance.
So I concentrated on the office building. Using the shadow of the barracks for cover, I crept around until I was in back of the complex, between it and the fence. There, about where I figured the vet facilities ought to be, I found a door that suited me. I wanted to look at that clinic. No matter what Ushre said, it sounded to like a grand place to engineer “game.” I tongued off my transmitter so I wouldn’t run into that jammer again and set about trying to open the door without setting off any alarms.
One of my picks opened the lock easily enough. But I didn’t crack the door more than a few cm. In the light of my needle flash, the corridor beyond looked harmless enough, but I didn’t trust it. I took a lock-pick and retuned it to react to magnetic-field scanners (the most common security system these days). Then I slipped it through the crack of the door. If it met a scanner field, I’d feel resistance in the air—before I tripped the alarm (in theory, anyway).
Isn’t technology wonderful (said the cyborg)? My pick didn’t meet any resistance. After a minute or two of deep breathing. I opened the door enough to step into the complex. Then I closed it behind me and leaned against it.
I checked the corridor with my flash, but didn’t learn anything except that I had several doors to choose
from. Holding the pick in front of me like some kind of magic wand, I started to move, half expecting the pick to start bucking in my hand and all hell to break loose.
But it didn’t. I got to the first door and opened it. And found floor-cleaning equipment—electrostatic sweepers and whatnot. The night was cool—the building was cool—but I was sweating.
The next door was a linen closet. The next was a bathroom.
I gritted my teeth, trying to keep from talking out loud. Telling the decks what I was doing was already an old habit.
The next door was the one I wanted. It put me in a large room that smelled like a lab.
I shut that door behind me, too, and spent a long time just standing there, making sure I wasn’t making any noise. Then I broadened the beam of my flash and spread it around the room.
Definitely a laboratory. At this end there were four large worktables covered with equipment: burners, microscopes, glassine apparatus of all kinds—I couldn’t identify half that stuff. I couldn’t identify the chemicals ranked along the shelves on this wall or figure out what was in the specimen bottles on the opposite side of the room. (What the hell did Paracels need all this for?) But there was one thing I could identify.
A surgical laser.
It was so fancy it made the one in the surgery look like a toy.
When I saw it, something deep down in my chest started to shiver.
And that was only halt the room. The other half was something else. When I was done checking over the lab equipment, I scanned the far end and spotted the cremator.
It was set into the wall like a giant surgical sterilizer, but I knew what it was. I’d seen cremators before. This was just the largest one I’d ever come across. It looked big enough to hold a grizzly. Which was strange, because hunting preserves didn’t usually have animals that size. Too expensive to replace.
But almost immediately I saw something stranger. In front of the cremator stood a gurney that looked like a hospital cart. On it was a body, covered with a sheet. From what I could see, it looked like the body of a man.
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