by neetha Napew
“Ticket,” I repeated, finally producing our stubs and handing them over without so much as a single nervous tremor.
“You’re paid up clear into Roosha,” he said, looking us over again. He had apparently never been taught that it was rude to peruse a person as thoroughly as you did a book. “Do you know that you’re paid up clear into Roosha? Why pay up clear into Roosha if you were going to get off here?”
“A last minute change of plans,” I said. I was feeling the strain of two days and nights without sleep and without benefit of honest-to-Hippocrates warm food except for that meal we had gotten at the backstreet restaurant in San Francisco. I didn’t know if my lies were coming out like lies or whether he would accept what I said at face value. Apparently, there was some degree of verisimilitude to my rantings, for he shrugged and carefully entered the numbers of our stubs in the departure book. If the World Authority crashed the fake names we were now using—and they certainly would, eventually—here was a record, a set of clerical footprints for them to seize upon and follow.
“That capsule at the end,” he said. He consulted a pendant watch that hung on a fine chain around his neck. “We’ll be dropping you in eleven minutes.”
We moved down the line of egg-shaped, crimson globes that nested in the bays in the floor. The officer came after us, slid back the heavy cover on the last egg. “Dropped before?” he asked, obviously hopeful that we would say no and allow him to show his superiority with a long, detailed, condescending lecture.
“Many times,” I said. I wondered what he would have done if I had said fourteen times in the past week.
“Remember to strap tight. Grip the padded wheel until the beam contact is made, and don’t unstrap until ground control directs you to.”
I waited until He moved into the capsule and took the left seat, then I squeezed through the oval entrance-way and climbed into the right. The officer frowned. “Let’s see you grip the wheel,” he snapped. We gripped it, though there was no need to prepare this far ahead. “That’s better,” he said. He eyed me suspiciously, obviously trying to remember something. “Don’t let go of that wheel until beam contact,” he repeated. He was getting to be a bore.
“We won’t.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. You people never seem to learn. Lots of people drop without gripping the wheel. Then, when freefall surprises them, they get excited and grab for anything, cut themselves on file console— And when the jolt from beam contact comes— Brother! Fireworks! They jump and throw their arms around, break their fingers on things—“
“We’ll grip the wheel,” I said, feeling as if I were confronted with a broken record. I longed to reach out and swat him so that he could get on with other parts of his speech.
“Be sure to.”
“We will.”
“We sure will,” He said, smiling at the officer with that winning grin of His.
The officer nodded, hesitated as if there were something he wanted to say. And, of course, there was something he wanted to say. Down deep in the sticky mud of his brain, there was a little voice telling him just who we were and what he should do about it. Fortunately for us, the voice was muffled by so much mud that he could not understand what it was saying. Finally he shrugged again, slid the cover shut and turned the latches on the outside, locking us in. I knew that his mind was struggling to make connections. I had come to know that look by now, the gaze of someone who is sure he knows us. Sooner or later, this drop officer would remember who we were. I only hoped it was not until we were out of Cantwell Port and on our way.
“Don’t worry, Jacob,” He said, flashing His chalk-white teeth in a broad, flawless smile and eating into me with those ice eyes of His.
He was trying to cheer me.
So I smiled.
Suddenly, lights flashed and buzzers bleeped. We dropped. . .
II
Down . . .
Dropping from a high-altitude passenger rocket is not uncommon. Thousands of capsules are discharged every day, millions in a year, though I suppose the process will remain a marvel to the earth-bound masses for another twenty years. When you have an overcrowded world with billions of people who want to move often and rapidly, you cannot have a transportation system that stops at every station on the route. Not too many years ago, the answer was to change flights. Take a regular major airline into the nearest big city to your destination, then transfer to a smaller company for the last leg of the journey. But the ports grew too crowded, the air controllers too frantic. With the coming of the rockets, the best answer was found swiftly and employed even faster. You encapsulate the passengers who want off at backwater places and shoot them, like a bomb, out of the rocket’s belly without lessening the speed of the mother ship. They fall for a mile, two, three, then are caught by a control beam broadcast from the alerted receiving station and lowered gently into the receptor pod. But those first few moments of freefall . . .
After what seemed like an overlong fall, we were gripped by a control beam. For a moment, I had the fleeting paranoid fear that they had recognized us and deemed to eliminate us simply by letting us smash unbraked into the unyielding earth of Cantwell, Alaska. Then we were safe, floating softly, being drawn down. The beam settled us into a pod, and the officers there, a wizened old gentleman surely past retirement age and a young trainee who watched and listened to his superior with carefully feigned awe, unlatched the hatch and slid it back, helped us out. We signed our arrival forms with our fake names, waited while the old man copied our stub numbers in a ledger (the boy looking eagerly over his shoulder but unable to completely mask his boredom), and we were on our way.
From the capsule pods, we walked down a long, gray fluorescent-lighted service tunnel and into the main lobby of the Port Building. I found the passenger service desk and inquired about a package I had mailed myself when we had first set foot in San Francisco just a day earlier. We had gone to a ski shop and purchased complete arctic rigging, packaged it in two boxes, and mailed it from Kenneth Jacobson to Kenneth Jacobson, the pseudonym I was then using, to be held for pickup at the passenger service desk in Cantwell. I had to sign a claim check and wait while the clerk checked the signature with that on the stub. When he was satisfied, he handed over the packages. We each took one and moved outside to the taxi stalls.
Outside, it was snowing. The wind howled across the broad promenade and echoed like hungry wolves in the thrusting beams of the porch roof. It carried puffs of snow with it that clogged in the window ledges and drifted against the walls. The drop officer aboard the high-altitude rocket had been right. Cantwell was a place of cold and snow and, most of all, wind. Still in all, the place has an undeniable charm, especially if you were addicted to Jack London Yukon stories when you were a boy.
We went down a set of stairs into the auto-taxi docking area and found a four-seater in the line. The taxis were fairly busy with arrivals, and I realized we had been unlucky enough to arrive just before a scheduled rocket landing and pickup. I opened the back door of the taxi and put my box in, turned to take His. Just then, a taxi bulleted into the stall next to us and flung open its doors.
“Quick!” I said to Him, grabbing his box of gear and sliding it onto the back seat alongside my own.
A tall, elegantly dressed man got out of the other car and pushed past us toward the stairs without even an “excuse me” or a “pardon.” I didn’t really care, just so he kept going and left us alone. But that was not to be the way of things. He went up two steps and stopped as if he had just been knifed. He whirled, his mouth open, his hand fumbling for a weapon beneath his bulky coat.
He must have been employed by World Authority in some capacity, for he could not otherwise have possessed a weapon. But I had worked for World Authority too. I drew my narcodart pistol and sprayed him with six low-velocity pins in the legs where the bulky coat could not deflect them. He staggered, went down on his knees. He plucked at the darts, then realized it was too late for that;
the drugs they contain, chiefly Sodium Pentothal, react much too fast to be torn free. He was a big man, and he was fighting the drowsiness as best he could, though it was just a matter of time until he would be out of action. I fired again, fast, but before he passed out, he managed to get in a weak but audible call for help. It echoed through the Alaskan night.
I opened the front door of the taxi and grabbed Him by the elbow to usher Him in. A spatter of pins broke across the roof, inches from my face, ricocheting away like little slivers of light. The gunman had been trying for the back of my neck but had misjudged and fired slightly to the left. I whirled, searched the taxi stalls for the gunman.
Ping, ping, ping . . . Another burst rattled over the roof of the car, nowhere near us this time.
“I saw movement to the right,” He said, crouching with me. “Back there by that blue and yellow two-seater.” He had drawn His own dart pistol, one He had “procured” in that sports shop where we had gotten the arctic gear, lifting it and an ammunition clip from the shelf while I distracted the clerk with our big order. “Do you see which one I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps I should—“
“Wait here,” I said, lying on my stomach and slithering along the retaining wall, keeping under the cars parked there, working my way toward the vehicle He had pointed out. There was a hard-packed layer of snow on the lot and my front side nearly froze as I slithered over it. Now and then, the snow was melted into slush where a warm taxi engine had rested near it. I felt absurd, like some cheap movie actor, but I was also afraid, which blotted out any embarrassment I might otherwise have felt. Fear can work miracles. I had hitched my star to His. If they caught us now, before He had finished His revolutionary evolution, I had no idea what they might do to me.
Behind me, He stood and fired a barrage toward our enemy, drew an answering hail for His trouble. That helped me pinpoint the location of our gunman. I moved cautiously, trying to make as little noise as possible. Still, my shoes dragged on the snow and the pavement and gave off little scraping noises that carried well in the cold air.
I circled around him, always beneath taxis except for the short spaces between them when I had to wriggle across three or four feet of exposed territory. When I had gone a row beyond him, I came out in the open and moved in on his rear. I slid along behind a limousine taxi for large parties until I felt I was directly behind his position. Raising my head carefully—narcodarts could blister and scar delicate facial tissues, puncture an eye and sink into the vulnerable brain—I looked around. Our target was a Port guard in World Authority uniform. I could not tell whether he had recognized us as the first man had or whether he was shooting just because he had seen me take out the other fellow. Either way, I had to stop him. I stepped out into the open and aimed at his buttocks.
I must have made some noise, for he turned in the last second, almost lost his balance on the slippery surface.
I struck him with a dozen pins, and he toppled to the left, grasping at the taxi. For a moment, it appeared that he was going to make a valiant effort to rise and return my fire. Then he slid noisily to the pavement and laid still, breathing softly.
For a moment, I felt good.
Then bad luck returned.
The watchman patrolling the taxi lot via closed-circuit television must have spotted some of the action. It was pure bad luck, for if he had been occupied with any of the other dozen cameras that scanned other portions of the port, he would not have found anything until we were long gone. Overhead, the big arc lights came on so that filming could proceed. If there was to be a court case, the film, taken by sealed cameras, would be admissible. I dropped behind the taxis and laid panting, trying to think. In minutes, that watchman would have sent someone out to investigate, someone with weapons, and we would have to handle them too if we expected to get out of here as free men. But our luck could not continue forever, not as it had through all the narrow escapes of the last week. So what was I mad about? Why not just give up? I could say to Him, in way of explanation: “Well, you know how luck changes. You can’t expect luck to stay good for long.” And He would smile, and that would be that. Like hell! I didn’t fancy going back with World Authority guards to some trial where my chances were, simply put, miserable. Still, I wasn’t a fighting man. I would make a mistake when I came up against the professionals. Several mistakes. One mistake too many. Then it would be all over. Perhaps forever . . .
“Jacob!” He called in a loud whisper.
Staying behind cars and away from the line of sight of the two mounted cameras, I hurried back to Him where He crouched at our taxi. We would have to move damned fast now. The watchman might know who had been causing the trouble, but the stranger in the greatcoat would most definitely have an alarm out for Dr. Jacob Kennelmen and His Fearsome Android within five minutes of his revival.
Rotten luck, rotten luck, rotten luck, I cursed to myself. If we could have left that lot unnoticed, we would have been perfectly in the clear—at least for a few months, long enough for Him to develop into a complete creature. Now World Authority would have police and soldiers swarming over Cantwell by morning. Yes, I could have killed the elegant stranger lying there on the steps, pressed the barrel of the narcodart pistol against his eyeballs and shot pins into his brain. But that was not the purpose of kidnapping Him and giving Him a chance to develop. The purpose was to eventually save lives. There was no sense in starting out by destroying a few with the excuse that He could make up for it later. We climbed into our taxi and were about to scoot out of there when I thought of something.
“Wait here,” I said, slipping out of the car.
“Where are you going, Jacob?”
I didn’t take time to answer. There were police on their way, perhaps only a minute or two until they would be on us. I moved quickly among the three nearest taxis, opening their doors, slipping five cred bills into their pay slots and punching out random destinations on their keyboards. When they started to purr and pull away, I ran back to our car, jumped in, slammed the door before the automatic closing device could do the job for me, and punched the keyboard for Mount McKinley National Park—and held my breath until we were out of the parking area.
Snow pelted the windscreen, and wind moaned eerily along the sides of the teardrop craft. I was reminded of my childhood in Ohio with drifts mounting against the windows, being tucked in bed where I could look out and watch the snow pile up and up as if it would never cease. But memories could not hold me for long. We were in the clear—for now, at least—and we had many things to do if we were to continue to enjoy our freedom.
We changed clothes as we drove until we were both decked out in insulated suits, gloves, goggles, boots, and snowshoes lashed across packs that we carried strapped to our backs.
“How’s the arm?” I asked Him.
“All healed,” He said, grinning broadly. “Just like I said it would be.” There was no sense of the braggart in his voice, just the tone of a happy child who has learned something new.
“All healed,” I echoed numbly. I was feeling numb all over, as if the constant brushing with Death over the last seven days had acted as sandpaper to wear down my receptors until life was a slick, textureless film through which I slid on greased runners. A doctor, of course, knows of Death and understands the prince. But the context in which he knows and understands him is different than what I had been encountering in this long chase. The physician sees Death in a clinical sense, as a phenomenon of Nature, as something to be combatted on a scientific level. It is something else altogether when Death sets out to claim you and you are fighting, only with your cunning and guile, to keep him from claiming you.
The auto-taxi glided to a halt before the gates of Mount McKinley National Park, the gray shape of the twin-peaked, towering colossus a lighter dark against the night. A pine forest loomed directly ahead through which the road wound in a carefree, unbusinesslike manner. “This taxi is prohibited from making runs into th
e park after eight o’clock at night. Please advise.” The car’s voice tape had been recorded by a nasal-toned woman in her late twenties or early thirties, and its metallic yet feminine quality seemed out of place coming from the wire speaker grid in the dashboard. I cannot get used to machines sounding like the sort of woman you might want to seduce. I was born and raised before the use of the Kelbert Brain. I like silent machines, mute computers. Old-fashioned, I guess.
I stuffed four poscred bills in the payment slot, two to cover our trip and two more to pay for what I was about to request. “Drive at random for the next half-hour, then return to your stall at the Port.”
“At random?” it asked.
I should have realized that, even with the Kelbert
Brain, it was too stupid to carry on much of a conversation. It was limited in scope to the sort of thing a customer might ask or propose, not something out of the ordinary. Just like, I thought, most of the women I had seduced whose voices were similar to the machine’s. I leaned over the keyboard and punched a random series of numbers and, finally, the code series for the Port as it was listed on the directory chart beside the console. “That should do,” I said. “Let’s go.”
The doors sprung open when we touched the release panels, and we clambered out into the night, taking our bundle of old clothes with us. The car closed up, thrummed like a hummingbird for a moment, then executed a swift turn and whizzed back the way we had come, its amber lights receding and leaving us alone in the darkness.
“What now?” He asked, coming up beside me, shifting the weight of the pack on His back until it settled just as He wanted it to.
“We hide these clothes we had on,” I said, moving to a drainage ditch and pushing my bundle back into the culvert, out of sight. He followed my example, reaching even farther with His longer arms. “And now we climb the fence into the park.”