Dying Space td-47

by Warren Murphy

  "You two will follow me," Seminov said. He turned to walk away and Remo said, "Hey. You from the Moscow Center?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. That's what we're looking for. We're filthy capitalist spies."

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  "Three of those words aptly describe him," Chiun said. "None of them describe me."

  "You will follow me. We will find out who is who," Seminov said.

  Chiun snorted at the Russian and walked up the stairs to the white building, close to Remo's side.

  But inside the building, there was another cadre of armed guards, and Seminov quickly waved them into position, where they encircled Remo, then slowly shoved him away from Chiun's protection.

  "For the white man's sake, you will cooperate," Seminov said. Chiun stared at him, then nodded, and seconds later, both he and Remo were wearing handcuffs and being prodded forward.

  "I have captured the enemy agents single-handedly," Seminov announced. "Alert the high commander I am on my way."

  "What does this buffalo chip think he is doing now?" Chiun said as he placed Remo into a walking position.

  "Go along with it," Remo whispered in Korean. "We've got to get a look at the cells. Gonzalez is probably in here someplace. We can always get out."

  "I can get out," Chiun corrected.

  Far down a long corridor, two double doors opened onto a large room furnished in Early Revolutionary Russian cinderblock. In the center of the room sat an oversized desk and a swivel chair facing away from the doors.

  "Your Excellency, High Commander of the So-

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  viet People's Republic," Seminov intoned in Russian, "I bring you two dangerous alien enemies of the state. I caught them single-handedly, at great personal risk."

  Chiun's narrow eyes strayed, amused, toward Remo.

  "Thank you, Comrade Major," a female voice said as the chair swiveled around to reveal a strikingly beautiful woman. "You may leave, Seminov. I wish to speak to these two alone."

  "Yes, Commander." Seminov said. "They speak English." He strode purposefully toward the door.

  The high commander's mouth was lush, but twisted into a permanently sadistic sneer. Her wide eyes shone beneath dramatic flared eyebrows, and her hair was pulled into a wavy crescendo high on her head, highlighted by two streaks of white flashing upward from her temples like lightning bolts.

  She sat silently for several minutes, studying the tiny, frail-looking old Oriental who had caused all the damage outside and the strange young man who was inexplicably tap dancing on her rug.

  Chiun elbowed Remo to stop, but Remo only shrugged. "I can't," he whispered. "It's in my blood."

  "Why are you here?" the commander snapped, her accent thick.

  "Why are any of us here?" Chiun said serenely. "It is the whim of fate, a fluttering breeze in the void of eternity."

  "That was last chance to give information vol-

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  untarily," she said. "But no matter. Voluntary information very boring. We here use more interesting methods to find information."

  She pressed a buzzer and said something in Russian into her intercom. "I want you to meet someone," she said to the two men.

  When the doors opened again, five guards walked in a wedge behind a battered, bruised young man with olive skin and two missing front teeth. His sldn was striped red from flogging, and he had no fingernails. His eyes barely opened in his sagging, bobbing head.

  "That's him," Remo told Chiun aloud. "Gonzalez. The other garbage man."

  "I thought you might know each other," the high commander said triumphantly. "Spies often do. Perhaps you cooperate more than he does." She gestured contemptuously toward the tortured Gonzalez.

  The telephone rang. She picked it up languidly with an obviously bored expression on her face, but then began to speak animatedly. When she hung up, she was smiling.

  "Aha. Yet more spies come. Is capitalist CIA trying to open Moscow office?"

  "What more spies?" Remo asked. He felt his right fingertips twitching. The guards who ringed the room noticed, and they tightened their grips on their rifles.

  "Will you stop tap dancing?" Chiun hissed. "It will be the final obscenity of your life to get me killed by twitching."

  "What more spies?" Remo repeated.

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  "A plane full of them has landed. They will be here any minute." The buzzer on her desk sounded, and she picked it up, said "Da" and then told the room, "They are here now."

  Remo turned to look at the door, which swung open. Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes was led in by armed guards. Behind her was Ralph Dickey, her assistant. But he was wearing a pilot's uniform. Why? Remo wondered. And Dickey seemed somehow wrong. Remo looked and saw that the young man's fingernails weren't polished. And he was walking straight, his hips hardly moving, totally unlike Ralph Dickey's mincing walk.

  The troop of soldiers and prisoners stopped. Dickey looked at the woman behind the desk.

  He smiled and said, "Hello is all right."

  "It's him!" Gonzalez shouted, his watery eyes strained in their deep and tortured hollows. "That's what he said before he killed Lew. 'Hello is all right.' The robot!"

  Everything happened fast. The strange, mechanical-sounding man crossed the office and was on the emaciated Gonzalez. With a quick snap, the prisoner's neck broke, and he slumped to the floor.

  Mr. Gordons's next move was to lunge toward Remo. Since his haywire nervous system was compelling him to practice the breast stroke at the time, Remo tried to dodge Mr. Gordons's unexpected attack. He couldn't.

  Instead, his handcuffed arms shot out in perfect competitive form and connected with Mr. Gordons's outstretched hand, slicing off the robot's

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  arm at the shoulder. Mr. Gordons froze in his tracks. The arm dangled for a moment from his body, a mass of wires and shiny electrodes. His eyes, fixed and glassy, stared straight ahead, unblinking.

  There was an audible gasp from the O-mouthed high commander as the metal arm clanked to the floor. At the same time, a loud, piercing shriek issued from across the room.

  "Stop," the professor screamed, her arms flapping wildly while she ran to embrace Mr. Gordons.

  Chiun buried his face in his hands. "The shame," he muttered. "You were completely off center. An arm. How disgraceful. Even with these restraints."

  But Remo wasn't watching Chiun. He was focused on the man he thought was Ralph Dickey, who was standing immobile in his captain's hat, his inner metal workings exposed. And he remembered. Another time, another fight, a mechanical man who could change shape and form at will, an enemy Remo had thought was vanquished.

  "Mr. Gordons," Remo said softly. "He's back."

  The high commander snapped her head toward the professor. "What is this thing?" she said slowly, more a threat than a question. She poked a probing finger into Mr. Gordons's eye. Her fingernail produced a little click as it tapped Mr. Gordons's glass eyeball.

  "I ask what this is."

  The professor said nothing.

  "Level your weapons," the commander instruct-

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  ed the guards in the room. Instantly they dropped to firing position around the inert Mr. Gordons.

  The professor looked around frantically. "You're not going to—"

  "Aim."

  "Stop. Don't shoot. He's the LC-111." The professor's hand flew to her mouth as she stifled a sob. "My baby," she said.

  The high commander took a tentative step forward to examine the one-armed statue. "Is true?" she whispered, her face barely able to contain her

  joy.

  "It's true." The professor wearily explained Gor-dons's transistorized workings, opening his shirt to reveal a sliding panel covering an array of sophisticated circuitry. "His motor functions are in his arms. That's why he's not moving."

  The high commander smiled slightly. "I am surprised, professor. I know how you feel about Communists. Why you stop my guards from destroying this machine? If it no work, we n
o can steal principle of precious NASA computer."

  The professor picked up the fallen arm from the floor and placed it into Mr. Gordons's shoulder. "Because to me he's more than a NASA computer," she said. She twisted a couple of wires together to keep Mr. Gordons's arm in place. "I'll need time to repair him."

  The high commander laughed. "Oh, you have plenty of time. You will show us everything about your LC-111."

  "Commie dyke," the professor grumbled.

  "Put them all in cells," the high commander

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  1

  said. "And get rid of this body." She pointed toward Gonzalez.

  As the guards moved in, the dead eyes of the unmoving android rolled into focus for a brief instant. His jaw creaked open a crack. He uttered one muffled word.

  "Mom."

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  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As soon as they were put into the cell, Chiun ripped the handcuffs off his wrists. Then, with a flick of his fingers, he snapped the cuffs on Remo's wrists into a million metal shards that tinkled as they hit the floor.

  Chiun's fingernails tapped the steel and concrete walls of the cell. It was a strange cell, with no bars and no fixtures of any kind. A buzzer beside a small intercom was the prisoners' only contact with the rest of the prison, except for an inch space between one wall connecting the cell with the next. Through the inch clearance could be seen odd tracks, like those of sliding doors. On the ceiling a large circle was cut to let in air and artificial light.

  "Well, what now?" Chiun said. "You have managed to have us arrested, break your computer's arm with one of the sloppiest attacks ever ex-

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  ecuted in the history of Sinanju, and make a fool of yourself in the process/What now?"

  "He's not the LC-111," Remo said. "That's Mr. Gordons, that damned robot that we killed twice, and he's still alive."

  Chiun stared at him, unimpressed. "You are in wonderful condition to fight him now," he said sarcastically. "Perhaps you can get him to die laughing."

  "Gordons. My little baby Gordons," the professor wailed from behind the cell wall.

  Remo tapped on the wall. "Professor, are you there?"

  "Why, yes," she said. "Are you the nice boy from Washington?"

  "Yeah," Remo said.

  "Got a drink?"

  "No."

  "Commie pinko. My baby," she cried. "My baby Gordons."

  "Your baby Gordons just killed a man. And he tried to kill me," Remo said.

  "Tsk, tsk," the professor muttered. "He's got such a temper. He came over here to kill you, actually. I tried to talk him out of it, but once he's made up his mind, he's really determined," she said indulgently. "He really didn't want to kill that other fellow, I don't think. He's just very touchy about people calling him a robot. He wants to be human, sweet thing. Gordons is so neurotic about that. Now I don't know where they've taken him."

  "He's a survival machine," Remo said. "Hell be aU right."

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  "So he tells me. I hope you won't take it personally."

  "We never take killing personally, madam," Chiun said.

  "I take it personally," Remo said. "I come to help you find your computer, only you give me the runaround while you fool around with that garbageman, who, incidentally, turns out to be dead...."

  "That was Gordons, too, I'm afraid. That's when he first came to me. He'd already offed that poor fellow Verbena or whatever his name was."

  "Verbanic," Remo said. "Wait a second, if he's Mr. Gordons, why did you tell Lucrezia Borgia in there that he's the LC-111?"

  "Because he is," the professor explained. "He's an assimilator. If materials for his construction are available, he can repair himself. The last time he was damaged—by you, he tells me—he was left at the dump in Hollywood. Apparently that's where the LC-111 was taken when it was stolen."

  "By a Russian agent."

  "I wouldn't know. It didn't matter, once I got the computer back. By then, though, Gordons had already assimilated it. That's why I couldn't talk to you. Gordons didn't want you to know who he was. The LC-111 and Mr. Gordons are the same thing."

  "That's why you couldn't let the guards shoot him," Remo said.

  "I suppose, partly. I didn't want them to shoot Gordons, really, now that I've grown to care for him. But I suppose Gordons can repair his arm

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  himself within an hour or so. He assimilates very quickly. He's quite indestructible, you know." "So it seems."

  "But the LC-111 isn't. It would take years to reassemble if the Commies deeided to blow Gordons apart. I've destroyed my notes for security purposes. That computer is one of a kind. It simply must be saved. The future of our country depends on it."

  "I thought it was just a missile tracker."

  "It's not the tracker that's important," she said. "It's the missile. The Volga is the most advanced Soviet missile ever designed. It sends out high-frequency emissions that disperse after the vehicle leaves our atmosphere. The signals scramble themselves automatically. The Volga can't be tracked by conventional methods. Once NASA got this information, I began work on the LC-111."

  "Where's the Volga going?"

  "To the moon," the professor said.

  "The moon? It's not even going to hit us?"

  "If the Russians succeed, the Volga moon drop will be worse than any bomb," she said.

  "But we've already been to the moon."

  "That's exactly it. Since the Apollo moon landing, the U.S. has been making extensive plans for moon mining, satellite construction on the moon, weigh stations for future transport vehicles, things like that. The moon is our springboard into space. It's all been planned so that by the time we build the vehicles for space travel, we'll be prepared to conduct operations from the moon."

  "So what do the Russians want with it? None of

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  that stuff's up there yet. There's nothing to destroy."

  "Wrong, darling. There is something. They're going to destroy our chances of ever working the moon." She sighed in anguish. "Oh, it's all so terrible," she said. "They've developed a strain of anerobic bacteria that can breed in space. It's small enough 'to penetrate the fabric of spacesuits, and hardy enough to reproduce in a near vacuum. With this bacteria on the moon, no further exploration there will be possible."

  "They're out to spoil the moon," Remo said, rolling into an involuntary headstand.

  "Exactly. They want to get back at us for reaching the moon first. And the only thing that can stop the Volga is the LC-111."

  "Well, he's still Mr. Gordons," Remo said, "so just keep him off my back."

  "He's my poor baby," the professor wailed.

  The gold balls suspended from his necklace clicked softly as Mikhail Andreyev Istoropovich entered Dr. Payton-Holmes's cell through a section of the steel and concrete wall, which swung heavily away.

  "Finally. We meet," he said.

  "I could have waited," Dr. Payton-Holmes said.

  "We need some information from you."

  "Sure, you goddamn Bolshevik. I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the only child of a prosperous dairy farmer...."

  "I have come to speak about the robot," Istoropovich said, "and I have neither the time nor the inclination to listen to your jokes. You very nearly

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  damaged my position with Moscow Central. It was my responsibility to get the LC-111 back here."

  "Well, they should fire your ass. You never got it back here. We brought it ourselves."

  "We will discuss the robot."

  "Gordons? Why? One of you Commie faggots want to go out with him? He makes his own dates."

  "You will repair him."

  "What's in it for me?" the professor asked.

  "Anything you want."

  "How about a double martini delivered by a naked weight lifter?" she said.

  "That too, if you cooperate."

  She looked at him archly. "Can't fix him, can you?" she taunted.

 
His back stiffened. "The scientists of the Soviet Union do not waste valuable time tinkering with mechanical toys."

  "Bet you've never seen a toy like Gordons before."

  "Never mind that. I am here on behalf of the high commander to demand your services for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. You will reprogram the robot so that he can track American missiles, not the Soviet Volga. For this you will receive asylum in Russia and freedom to work in your chosen field."

  "Freedom to work until you reds decide to bump me off, you mean," she said. "No thanks. Gordons stays as he is."

  "We will destroy him."

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  She smirked. "You can't destroy him. He's a survival machine. Nothing can destroy him."

  "Then you will render him inoperative. Otherwise you will suffer great pain, Professor. Greater than you have ever known."

  "Quit the dramatics, will you?" she lunged for his trousers again. "What you need is to lie down for a while. Get your mind off things. There's a bed right in here." She indicated her bunk.

  "Come, come, Professor."

  "I'd be delighted," she said, slipping a hand into his shorts. "You may be a Bolshie, but you're still kind of cute."

  "Get away!" he shrieked, repelled by the touch of her. With a shove, he managed to get her off him and slip out of the cell. Istoropovich pressed a button and the door slid shut, muffling the professor's lewd encouragements.

  "She's crazy," the agent said, panting to his two assistants who waited outside the cell.

  Gorky scratched his bald head. "Da," he said. "She drive Edsel."

  "She wasn't even interested in her robot," Yuri said, picking a piece of lint off his creased jeans. "As soon as she gets around a man, she forgets about everything else."

  "She got around wrong man, huh, boss?" Gorky said, smirking.

  "Shut up, rubber lips," Istoropovich said. He stood up slowly. 'Tve got an idea."

  Five minutes later, the steel and concrete door to the professor's cell slid open again.

  "Oh, what is it now?" the prisoner said. Then

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  her mouth hung open, and her eyes glazed over and she was silent.

  Before her stood the most sexually inspiring man she had ever seen. He was over six feet tall and built like the Kremlin. Huge, majestic, a monument to the possibilities of the male physique, he had wavy blond hair, crystalline blue eyes, and muscles like boulders. He was wearing only a pair of tight black trousers, and on his bulging bare chest, hairless and gleaming, was a giant, torso-length tattoo of a mermaid that bumped and ground with every rippling breath he took.