For the first time Amber looked at himself and his voice shook as he muttered, “Forget it.” Laser burns welted across his chest and legs. Blackened tissue, crisped skin, ragged blood vessels, and the round white ends of bones protruded from his arm. His clothes hung in shreds, fabric imitating the frizzed madness of his tossed hair. Scarlet-shot bruises of black and blue peered through the rags, like he’d just had an intimate tête-à-tête with a giant squid.
“You should feel what it’s like inside,” he replied.
“Emergency, kid,” Fowly said. “This is our body he’s wearing. He rented it yesterday. The man’s here to get his own body back. No time to waste—gotta hustle.” Beckoning, he strode hurriedly toward the back room. “C’mon. I’ll show you where we stashed the original. Top secret stuff, Halpine. You needn’t gab about it if you want to continue subbing here. And if you don’t want us to bring down the mortgage on that body you’re wearing. Seems to me I remember seeing your original. Won’t have much luck with that, now will you?” Fowly gruffly pounded past the gurney and pointed a stubby finger at it. Promptly, like an eager puppy, Halpine grabbed the wheeled table and pushed it after his employer. Amber kept up as best he could, shambling along like a corpse halfheartedly returning from its grave.
“Oh yeah,” said Fowly, bashing through the swinging doors into the gurgling storage chamber. “Halpine, we got some kind of muscle relaxer around here, along with the rudiments for a decent disguise. That should distort your features, Captain. Gangs won’t be able to read your head, so lack of recognition will get you past, I think.”
Amber sighed with pain, nodded tiredly. For the first time in countless brain switches he was actually looking forward to surgery. Or the blank limbo of unconsciousness, anyway.
Fowly had always been a good ace. They’d been close pals back on Fortunata. The difficult nature of the conflict there had quickly severed the natural schism of rank between them—perhaps Fowly had become his longest lasting friend. Thank God he was here on this crap planet... thank the sadistic Fates he was handling the operation.
“Sure, Mr. Fowly. I think I can handle it.” Halpine responded dutifully.
Slip into the new body... haul his luggage out and get his ass out of here ...
Fowly huffed up the aisle, eyes searching. He halted a moment. “Chiro didn’t want to keep a hot body separate, you know. Could be trouble he said. Stuck it in with the rest—camouflage.” He forged on a few strides, located a side aisle, and strode down it. But a couple steps later, he stopped cold.
“Hurry up, Sarge,” gasped Amber, not sure how long he could keep erect. “I’ve got the police on my tail too. What’s wrong?”
Fowly’s features were slack in disbelief. Halpine had just wheeled the gurney up. Fowly turned to him and indicated an empty tank with a blunt forefinger. “What happened to the body in this tank, for God’s sake?”
Halpine scratched his chin a moment, regarding the tank his employer had referred to. And then, as he turned to confront Amber and Fowly again, realization showed.
His face went quite pale.
* * *
The taxi ride was the most enjoyable Todd had ever taken. Until the driver pulled a gun on him.
His seat seemed to hold him in a loving embrace. Tiny massage motors hummed beneath him, thrummed delicately on his skin. The barely detectable dope-incense that rose from the dashboard relaxed him blissfully. The crisp new smell of the car’s interior was curiously plush and well-appointed, it seemed, for a cabbie’s vehicle. But no matter, Todd had given himself over to absolute pleasure. The cab strode away from tacky streets into the glossy modernistic avenues of the upper class. New-minted stuff, this. Just like Todd. He chuckled softly at that notion. And there, my lord, there it was... just hovering into view on the horizon. The Deadrock Spaceport, spires rearing, bravely pointing toward Todd Spigot’s destination. Yes, all facets of his life had assumed a new sparkle, a fresh glitter from this vantage point.
Indeed, he had never felt such optimism—until that woman raised the gun.
It was a sleek Campbell needier with a bore that held darkness and death, and the opposite of all his optimism.
Todd stared blankly at the gun. A joke, surely. A prank. “Is this a rape?” He smiled dazzlingly. An excited flicker-smile, nervous and hopeful.
But the once-friendly eyes seemed to instantaneously transform into deadly, crazy snake-pits, darker than the gun muzzle. “Just don’t move a single sinew, Mr. Amber,” the woman spat in low staccato. Carefully, keeping the weapon trained, she locked her controls into a predetermined course. “Stay still,” she continued. “Maybe you’ll live a little longer.”
An inkling of thought flashed to Todd. Memories of the folder he had poured over so intensely, the description of the glorious fun that awaited him. “I know that the Star Fall voyage is supposed to be full of adventure and romance.” He gave her a weak, hopeful grin. “Is this part of that?”
“My God!” The left side of her mouth contorted into a disbelieving smirk. “Rape? Adventure? Romance? What’d they do, Amber? Work so fast, they stick your brain in upside down? No way, buster, Mr. Philip Foxglove Amber. I’ve read up on you. Our reports have it that you used to be pretty good.”
Astonished, Todd could barely speak. Finally his words managed to crawl over a stutter: “Ph… Ph ... Philip Am... Amber? My name is Todd Spigot. I’ll… I’ll show you my ID if you’ll let me move.”
Her cold eyes mocked. Her moist lip curled into a sneer of disgust. “I just bet you’d like to show me your ID. Along with your libido, right?” She shook her downfall of dark hair. “Pig.” Her finger tightened on the trigger of the gun.
Todd said, “There must be some mistake. I’ll admit that this ... “
“Your mistake, Amber. Lucky for me I intercepted you. You shouldn’t have killed Theodor Durtwood, Amber.” Her jet eyes misted, somehow growing softer. “He was my father.” A soft sigh. “I ... I think.” She shivered as though with a chill, and then began to mutter over and over to herself like a chanting liturgy.
“I’m telling you— ” Todd raised his hands for emphasis. Her eyes snapped back to focus. “Shut up.” Her gun was shaking. A small tic quivered from the left side of her face. She snapped open a glove compartment in front of her and snatched an unwrapped Hershey bar from a crinkly plastic bag. After gulping the bar down, she continued. “So, Amber,” her voice once again cold and confident. “You thought you would trick us with this body-switch business. It’s really old. I mean really old.” Delighted fires danced in her eyes. “We’re going to have some fun with you at Central!”
Todd was growing frantic. This crazy woman was serious! What had he gotten himself enmeshed in? Who was Philip Amber and why would he want to kill Theodor Durtwood, whoever the hell Theodor Durtwood was. “Listen, lady, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Honest!”
“I said cut it, Amber. Can the crap. I don’t wanna hear it! When I think of Daddy laying there, his brain splattered against the wall.” She gritted her perfect teeth, and they looked like side-to-side white tombstones.
The building-clustered city streets flowed past in swishing monotony. Inside, Todd felt sick and numb. A terrible error had been made. That much he knew. And he was dead-center embroiled in the consequences. The thing to do now, he told himself, was to stay calm. Think this thing out ... Don’t make her pull that trigger. Wait for the right moment to get away from this madwoman.
That is, he thought, if I can manage to defrost this fear-frozen body when the time comes.
The sickly-sweet smell of the car’s interior was beginning to turn his stomach. Anxiety and his usual paranoia were pretzeling his mind, showing him all manner of dire possibilities that the future might hold.
But the woman seemed to be relaxing now. She ate another Hershey while checking the course-computer’s meters. “Just a couple more minutes to
Central. Amber. I guess you can talk. I’m just a little uptight, know what I mean?”
Todd’s new heart was pounding, hard. “You’ve got to listen to me. Clearly you think I’m some sort of murderer. How can I make you believe that this isn’t my real body…?”
She smiled knowingly. “Of course it’s not your real body. I daresay you use it in transit to the planets you do your hits on. But this is not what I wanna talk about, my friend.” She kept her weapon steadily trained on him. “Actually, in the time remaining, I wouldn’t mind hearing your side of your notorious exploits.”
“Exploits?”
Her smile turned lopsided. “Yeah.”
“I tell you, I haven’t had any. My name is Todd Spigot. I rented this body to take on the Star Fall cruise because my true body is fat and ugly... and, oh God, how can I make you believe me. I’m just an average Joe. A schlemiel! A bozo, a nerd, a shmoe. I would never kill anybody, truly, least of all your father.”
“You expect me to believe that? What do you think I am? One of your zilch-brained conquests?”
Todd cringed. A fantastic nightmare come true, this domination by a beautiful woman. He had feared them all his life, and all his dread was proving to have foundation.
“What are you going to do to me?” he asked meekly.
At that she smiled her prettiest and most innocent smile. “I really don’t know. The fellows back at the shop will probably have a few ideas. They’re very creative with things like death and torture.”
The woman seemed calmer now. Much calmer... which somehow seemed scarier. She was smiling still while her eyes began to roam his body.
Despite his fear, Todd was even now responding to her evident interest. The mixture of the emotions—lust and terror—was somehow exhilarating.
She was a beautiful woman.
An idea hit Todd, born half of terror, half of lust. “Why not get your kicks in now,” he blurted. Somehow the tremor in the voice ruined the needed suggestiveness.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Amber. Anyway, it’s too late now.” She looked up to confirm her prognosis and grinned. “We’re here. Maybe I’ll take that offer up sometime—but it won’t be with you behind those eyes, I can tell you that.”
The car hushed up to a curb. With a click, it automatically switched itself into park. Obviously, they were expected. The spotless sidewalk fronted a clean, sprawling house of late Arkan-style architecture, sprouted around with well-clipped hedges and immaculately cut grass lawn. A rococo-arched awning sheltered a pair of turtleneck-clad men from the sun. With barely a quiver of expression beyond dutiful boredom they strolled casually down a fence-flanked walkway to meet the halted car.
The woman said, businesslike again, “Okay, Amber. Out we go.” Smoothly she jerked the control of her own door and held it cracked open, waiting for the man to open his own. Her booted foot was firmly on the pavement.
Feeling despairingly helpless, Todd reached for the manual door handle as instructed.
Then things changed.
It happened all at once, and yet there seemed so many aspects of the phenomenon that later Todd wondered how they could have possibly happened all at once.
A keening in his ears—diving down into a thin whine... and suddenly he could hear the minutest sound.
A linear grid snapped across his vision, like a coordinate graph.
Other things, beyond his comprehension ...
It was as though all of his sense of touch and feeling, indeed his entire sense of self, suddenly was sucked up into a little ball of being that sat claustrophobically behind his eyeballs, between his ears, lacking any sensory contact save seeing and hearing with any other part of the body.
He felt nightmarishly detached, as though someone had severed his head and it floated now, just above this strange body.
The hands, though, still moved. However, it was as if they belonged to someone else, not him. They reached out and pushed the hovercar’s door off its hinges.
Maintaining a hard grasp on the chunk of metal, his body sprang out, violently plowing down the nearest thug with a loud crunch of breaking bones and tearing skin. Todd’s body swung the door around in time to shield itself from a laser blast. Noxious smoke feathered up, veined with flame and sparks. In the same fluid motion, it hoisted the door higher and sprinted toward the next goon, ramming him with the half-molten slab.
The man screamed, writhed, and died.
Todd’s body dived down almost immediately to the previous victim, his hand scooping up the fallen laser. It swerved to cover the woman, who had just stepped from the car, dropping her chocolate bar.
Which she slipped on. She flung her hand out to prevent crashing into the pavement. Her fingers lost their grasp on the gun, which skittered beyond her reach into the gutter. She scrambled over to regain the weapon—with a quick motion, Todd’s body sprinted over and planted a heavy foot atop it. Todd found his arm aiming its gun direct at the woman’s face.
Looking up, hair disheveled, she smiled sheepishly and apologetically and said, “I guess you are pretty good after all.” She picked herself up and frantically dashed down the street.
Todd tried to close his eyes to what he knew would happen.
But it didn’t happen.
Oddly, the arm lowered. It could easily have shot the woman in the back, but it did not. Instead, the legs quickly pulled him to the car, put him behind the controls. Of their own seeming volition, the hands closed the door and then punched out a course-plot that would take him to the Starport.
This, at that time, was the last place that Todd Spigot wanted to go.
Todd Spigot arrived at the Deadrock Starport at 10:14.
The Starport was to have been the opening of a stairway to heaven. But as the jumble of buildings loomed he felt more like Dante being dragged through hell with this enigmatic body his mute Virgil.
He just hoped he survived to write an epic poem about it all. This was a paradoxical situation. He felt like a paralyzed paraplegic. But, quite plainly, his body was capable of movement and reaction all of its own accord. Plainly, an intelligence other than his operated it—seeing from his eyes, hearing from his ears, and feeling with his skin. But not in communication with Todd. Yet it was doing a more graceful and competent job of running his body than Todd was capable of.
PERSONAL TRANSPORTATION UNIT PARKING signaled a blinking red light.
Immediately, the body responded by taking the car into manual and climbing the indicated ramp that led into the cavernous garage, echoing with car sounds and no doubt redolent of exhaust fumes that Todd could not smell.
Desperately he thought.
There had been times when he had been out of control of a situation. Physically, emotionally, mentally. But never before had his own body deprived him so completely of free will. Now it was as though he were strapped helplessly at the top of some robot juggernaut that had unknown and doubtful intentions.
Not that the body—or whatever ran it—(remote control perhaps?) was doing anything terribly insane. True, it had accomplished a few superhuman feats in its escape from the woman and her cronies. And why should it head for the spaceport, Todd’s original destination?
Any sort of guess was hopeless. The only thing to do was to try and compose his mind (and that, after all, was all he had left to him in this situation) until such time as this body saw fit to return reins of control.
Nevertheless, his thoughts had a tendency to veer close to panic. But as they had no physical outlet, they soon calmed.
What he really should do, he thought, what he really would do if he had control was to go to the police. The previous owner of the body—Amber, the woman had called him—was a wanted criminal in an ungodly stew of trouble. That much he could surmise from his encounter with the lunatic woman who wanted to kill him. If he could somehow wrest control back, he would sim
ply turn himself and this body into police headquarters, regain his old body, and chalk this sad business up as a lesson straight from the pen of a God he hadn’t thought about much lately.
Yes. That was what he had to do, he decided even as the car slipped into a parking stall. Mechanical clamps reached down to grab it and hoist it into storage after Todd got out. As his body quickly retrieved his luggage and moved away, Todd screamed out with his mind.
“Okay, Hunk.” By this time he had come to think of this body as entirely separate from himself and labeled it with a suitable name to emphasize the body-mind dichotomy. He found it helped him maintain his rationality.” You can’t do this. We have to go to the police, don’t you understand? I demand that you return control, immediately.”
The spidery metal hands hauled the car up into its web of stored vehicles. Hunk paced quickly to the escalator that led to the exit.
I’m not kidding. Listen, I’m the guy up in your head. You’re supposed to be listening to me.”
He was taking the escalator steps five at a time, reaching the top in moments, breathing quite normally. He (it?) breezed toward the appropriate check-in stall of the starport terminal. The station was a semicircular expanse of linked buildings bordering the wide expanse of the permacrete landing field where the numerous support frameworks for the rockets reared like tremendous skeletal digits clawing up from the ground. People hurried about the terminal in their random ways, their footsteps on the tile melding into one steady, humming, alive sound, stepped up into a sepulcher hollowness by the high, vaulted ceiling. The impersonality of these halls always put a frightened chill into Todd. But now he was merely frightened, for he could feel no chill in his backbone or any sensation at all.
Todd found himself at Booth 21. Low-slung above it a computer screen lettered out: STAR FALL FLIGHT/ / SHUTTLE DEPARTURE 11:00 HOURS.
“I said stop! I don’t want to go on the Star Fall now,” thought Todd with all the mental force he could muster.
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