The Free Lunch

by Spider Robinson

  Mike sat quite still and listened to his pulse roar. After what seemed a long time he said, “What are your views on kids drinking whiskey?”

  She looked at him for almost as long. “I can’t say,” she said finally. “I’ve never seen one. Why don’t you have some of this, and tomorrow I’ll tell you what I thought.” She handed him her cup, and he took a sip as large as the two she had taken.

  It changed the flavor of the coffee in a way he was not sure he liked, tickling the roof of his mouth. But the warmth spread even faster than usual from his esophagus through the rest of his body. After a while his pulse slowed, and soon it was once again possible to fully inflate his lungs. As the symptoms of fear receded, so did the fear. Now he understood why grown-ups drank the stuff.

  “If you stop right there,” Annie said, “you’ll stay calm, but you won’t get stupid.”

  He nodded. “Why don’t people always stop here, then?”

  She grimaced. “Generally because they were stupid to begin with and don’t notice any change.”

  He didn’t want to think about that now. “Annie, what do we do?”

  She sighed. “Silly as it sounds, I think we kill time until we start getting sleepy, and then fall asleep.”

  “How?”

  “Reading is always good. Or you can Web-crawl, or play some game with the computer. And there’s always laundry to be—” She saw his expression and stopped. “Okay. I know that’s not how you meant the question. We get a good night’s sleep because that’s the only thing we can do. And it happens to be the smartest thing we can do as well, just now. We’re not going to get any new information tonight, so we may as well maximize our ability to take advantage of the new information we’re going to get tomorrow.”

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  She got up, went to the bed, and lay down. “Sure. Nothing wrong with fretting: it must be a good thing to do sometimes or the instinct wouldn’t be so powerful. But I’ve done my fretting. I used it up. I fretted for over an hour and still didn’t think of anything brilliant, so it’s time to stop, before it becomes counter-productive.” She gestured toward the coffee cup she’d abandoned. “Like booze: a little bit makes you smarter, a little bit more makes you stupider.” She turned on the reading light over the bed, took a book from her bedside table, and settled herself more comfortably. “So the same rules apply: if you want to get drunk on it, it’s all right with me. Just don’t be noisy about it.” She opened the book and began reading.

  Mike opened his mouth, closed it again.

  After a while he got up and put the cups in the sink. He decided to wash them, and when the sink was empty he decided to do the laundry and kept the water running. He was still fretting when he was done, but calm enough to consider reading. He decided he knew Cuppy too well; he needed novelty, so he picked up the Perry he’d been reading, found his place, and lay down beside Annie with it. At first he had to read each sentence two or three times to grasp its meaning, but within a page or two he was captured.

  Presently he noticed that his eyelids were heavy and his focus blurry. He had read nearly sixty pages. He realized Annie had been asleep beside him for some time, not snoring but with a whistle in her breathing on the exhale that she would have suppressed if she’d been awake. She had fallen asleep with her clothes on. Okay, then he could, too. He glanced around, saw nothing within reach that would serve as a bookmark. He started to fold over the page corner—remembered it was Annie’s book. Instead he tried to memorize the number of the page he was on. Page 83. An 83 is an 88 with a couple of pieces busted off the second digit. A busted 88 is a broken piano. What page am I on? Broken piano. The mnemonic was just goofy enough that he knew he would remember it. He closed the book, set it aside, flipped off the reading light, and was asleep before he had time to remember exactly what it was he wasn’t fretting about.

  BUT HE WAS not used to drinking coffee at night and woke after an hour or two of uneasy dreams. He could not remember their specifics, but the substance had been that he was in terrible danger. He seemed to recall a lot of fleeing from a Troll with Conway’s face—nightmare fleeing, in which no amount of effort will widen the gap.

  Mike emphatically did not believe that bad dreams were precursors of reality. He’d had many bad dreams that had failed to come true. But he knew he would not get back to sleep until he had exorcised the murky images somehow. Reading was always good in such cases, but if he turned the reading light back on he’d probably wake Annie. He considered playing Maelstrom on the computer, with the screen darkened and the sound turned low—but it seemed to him the computer had been shut down with its volume set all the way up: if he booted it now there would be a loud bong chime before he could turn the sound down.

  He decided a short night walk might do the trick. Go up Johnny’s Tree, watch the little blue microbots cleaning everything up, healing all the little accidental wounds inflicted on Dreamworld today by those who loved it a bit too hard—visible reminders that nothing in here could go wrong for very long. He slipped silently out of bed, located his shoes in the dark. He had to pee, badly, but there was no need to use Annie’s sink—lots of places out there to pee; he’d made a study of them. Before leaving, he did his best to scribble a note—Gone for a walk—in the dark and left it on the table, just in case she woke while he was out.

  He held his breath as he used his wristband to disable the door’s security system—but the chirp sound, even though it sounded twice as loud as it did in daytime, did not wake Annie up. He stepped out into the alcove and decided against rearming the system until he’d come back from his walk. That way if it woke her the second time it chirped, he’d be there in person to reassure her. He checked his Command Band to make sure the corridor outside was empty, and stepped through the hologram wall and out into the corridor, squinting against the sudden comparative brightness. He felt very weary, but there was a mild exhilaration in being alone and footloose in Dreamworld, after hours.

  Five minutes later he came to the service elevator that led up to the top of Johnny’s Tree. He was so groggy he walked a few steps past it before snapping out of the fog. He turned and retraced those steps, and as he did so he heard a pair of odd sounds. A sort of chuff! in the distance, followed by a closer sound he vaguely recognized, just behind him. The sound of a dart sinking home in the dartboard. He glanced over his shoulder, saw a small dart sticking out of the corridor wall where none had been a moment ago. It made no sense to him, but even so his brain insisted on extrapolating its trajectory and forcing his eyes toward its probable point of origin, a branch corridor about ten meters distant. For a second he saw nothing there. Then he noticed a shoe tip.

  He spun and raced down the corridor, took the first turn he could, banged through a door and sprinted up metal stairs, threw open another door at the top and exited at high speed. He was at ground level now, out in Dreamworld proper, customer country. Good news: dozens of directions to run. Bad news: the ground he was trying to run on was a seething carpet of blue cleaning microbots. They were programmed to recognize and avoid moving humans—but not running humans. Within five strides he was crunching them beneath his shoes. He knew they were only mindless machines, but he hated to destroy anything of Dreamworld’s, and besides, their crushed remains would make it absurdly easy to track him.

  He realized he was just passing the public elevator that led to the top of Johnny’s Tree. Since he had just been spotted trying to take the service elevator to the same destination, it was probably the dumbest place he could make for now. That made it good misdirection. And at least he wouldn’t be leaving an obvious trail anymore. He leaped for the elevator door, slapped at the button. The door hissed open at once and he thundered in, rebounded off the back wall, heard running footsteps outside, frantically slapped the button to close the door. It seemed to close in nightmare slow motion, while he fought not to pee in his pants. Just before it could close all the way, fingers appeared in it. At once it stopped closing and bega
n opening again. Mike sank into a crouch. The doors parted to reveal a short broad man dressed entirely in black from head to foot, only his eyes showing. His right hand came up with some sort of sidearm in it, and Mike stopped breathing. Oddly, the man did not meet Mike’s eyes. His weapon made a sound like a sewing machine and sprayed about a dozen more darts in a left-to-right pattern. Every one of them struck the back wall of the elevator—half a meter above Mike’s head.

  Of course—in this elevator, he was invisible! The magic was all turned off for the night, but there was no need to turn off the invisibility effect, since it only activated when it detected retinas.

  He knew the shooter would realize his mistake in another moment. And once he stepped into the elevator, he would be invisible, too. Without hesitation Mike launched himself forward with all the power of his thighs and calves, ducking his head at the last instant. The top of his skull impacted the shooter’s groin with great force; the shooter dropped his weapon and flew back out into the corridor, clutching at himself. Mike rebounded from him and collapsed on the floor. The doors slid shut again, unopposed this time. The elevator began to ascend.

  Mike let his breath out in a great sigh of relief and got to his feet. He was safe now: he knew several ways down from Johnny’s Tree, including a few unknown to the general public.

  The elevator lurched to a halt.

  The lights did not flicker, but somehow—instantly—there was someone there in the elevator with Mike. He leaped away, slammed against the wall, slid down into a defensive crouch again—and only then realized the new arrival was his own reflection in the elevator’s mirrored wall. He was visible again! They’d shut down not just the motor but the invisibility effect as well.

  Mike was wide awake now. Whoever was after him had the power to hack into Dreamworld engineering control systems, on short notice. Any minute somebody would be rappelling down the elevator cable from above, to catch him as he popped the emergency hatch and climbed out. If he tried to stay put, they could pop the hatch, train a gun on him, and make him climb up. He had read enough adventure stories to know what a “choke point” was, and realized now with shame that he had let himself be driven into one, herded like a sleepy cow into the chute, just like the clueless nimrod protagonist in any one of a hundred—

  —wait a minute.

  Mike had the power to hack into Dreamworld engineering control systems on short notice! His right index finger flew to his Command Band—paused centimeters away. Time came to a stop while he considered. His first instinct was to send the elevator hurtling skyward again, faster than normal, and try to get whoever was up there while they were on the way down. But…he might kill somebody that way. So far nobody had done anything worse than fire tranquilizer darts at him.

  Who the hell was after him, anyway? Conway’s men? Or the time-travelers? The man he’d just head-butted had been short, might have been either a short normal person or a tall dwarf. Mike hadn’t noticed his face much, hypnotized by his weapon during the second or two he’d been visible. Mike was willing to risk killing one of Conway’s men…but less willing to kill a time-traveler. And a third possibility occurred to him then: it was just barely possible that he himself had screwed up in some small way on the way here, dialed some lock code wrong or something out of fatigue—that could be Dreamworld Security out there hunting him! He couldn’t risk killing or even injuring a Dreamworld employee, he just couldn’t. Why, if it was them, they were just doing their job: he was an unauthorized intruder.

  All this went through his head in a second or two. He would have dithered even longer, but heard faint noises overhead that he knew meant someone was coming down the cable. His finger stabbed at his Command Band. He left motor control carefully alone—but restored the elevator’s special effects. His reflection on the walls went away.

  Someone would lift the hatch and poke his head and the snout of a weapon down into the elevator, expecting to control Mike at once with it. In the second or two the guy would waste trying to figure out where the hell his quarry was, Mike would leap up and yank the weapon out of his hands, and then…well, then there’d probably be a standoff, but that would constitute an improvement in the situation.

  Footsteps on the roof overhead. Mike crouched and got ready to spring.

  The hatch opened.

  But only a few centimeters. Nothing at all came through the crack.

  Mike waited, heart pounding, gaze fixed intently on that slender gap. He wondered if he ought to leap up now, hit the hatch and smash it up into the face of whoever was up there. But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed that he had been so clever and brave and resourceful so far, nobody could possibly fault him if he took the opportunity to rest his eyes for just a second…well, just a minute or two…no need to open them until he heard the hatch move again, really…he was perfectly safe until then…in fact, now would be a good time to deal with that pesky pressure he’d been feeling in his bladder…yes, that felt good, no matter what Mommy said…

  Preoccupied with the good warm feeling, so long absent, he never felt his face hit the floor.

  C H A P T E R 14

  BAD TIMES

  “Broken piano,” Mike said.

  “What?”

  “Broken piano,” he repeated irritably.

  “Hell is that supposed to mean?” the voice asked, but somehow Mike knew it was not asking him.

  “He’s just babbling,” said another voice, just beyond the first one. “Takes them a while to come out of it.”

  Mike knew that voice. He tried to open his eyes, discovered they were already open. Apparently the universe had turned to beige nothingness, with a slight texture to it. Then focus came back, and with it peripheral vision. The textured nothingness was a painted beige ceiling. He was lying on his back looking up at it. He tried to get up, and failed. Then he tried to move his arms and legs, and failed again, for reasons he could not analyze.

  “See?” said the second voice. “He’ll be with us anytime now. Be patient.”

  Yes, it was Conway. This was bad. Very bad. Mike’s head throbbed with the hammering of his pulse.

  “I’m not a patient guy,” the first voice said, coming closer as it spoke, and suddenly Mike was backhanded hard across the face. The blow snapped his head to the right, and when it rebounded to the left again he found himself facing the ugliest man he had ever seen in his life. Bald misshapen head, simian brows, ice green lizard eyes in wrinkled bags, greasy skin, fat jowls, tiny mouth with blubbery lips parted in a cruel smile. “Good morning, you little rat-bastard,” he said happily.

  Mike’s eyes slid away. He saw his own outflung left arm and the leather wrist cuff that restrained it, inferred the other three cuffs, and immediately felt all four for the first time. They were quite snug, securely anchored. He was restrained spread-eagled on his back on some sort of X-shaped padded leather piece of furniture, at about waist height from the floor. Like most kids his age, Mike had seen such furniture a few times, on Usenet—enough to know at least vaguely what it was for. If it is possible for total terror to double, that is what happened to him then. If it had been possible to break his bonds, his titanic whole-body convulsion would have done so.

  The ugly man laughed at him. Involuntarily Mike turned to look at him again, and again had to look away from that ghastly smile. This time he noticed Conway, standing just behind the ugly man. Conway was not smiling, had no expression on his face at all, and somehow that was even scarier.

  Too much fear to be borne; in self-preservation Mike’s brain converted it into rage, and he began screaming curses at the top of his lungs, the foulest words he knew followed by the direst threats he could concoct.

  They simply let him exhaust himself. Then the ugly man—Mike realized he had to be Haines—leaned over him, smiling, and said, “Are you done now?”

  Mike said nothing.

  WHACK! A second slap, harder than the first. “I said, ‘Are you done now?’”

  Mike saw stars an
d tasted blood. Grudgingly, he nodded.

  “Good. Before we start, here’s how this discussion is going to go, from this point. I am going to ask you questions. You are going to give me immediate, responsive, accurate answers. Anytime you don’t, and anytime I doubt one of your answers, something horrible is going to happen to you, and keep on happening until I like your answer better. You understand me?”

  Mike hesitated and nodded again.

  Haines smiled happily and shook his head. “I don’t think you do,” he said. “See, if you’d’ve understood me, you’d’ve said, ‘Yes sir, Mr. Haines sir,’ nice and loud, and right away. I don’t think you’re completely clear on what I mean by ‘something horrible.’ Conway, give him an idea of the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

  Conway stepped around Haines, lifted Mike’s hand as far as the cuff would let him, and bent Mike’s pinky backward until it popped out of the socket.

  He fainted.

  When his vision cleared, Haines’s face was still hovering over his own. “We clear now, kid?” Haines asked cheerfully.

  Mike nodded groggily. His pinky was a ball of agony; he tried to turn his head and look at it but his head would not obey him. This was worse than very bad. This was awful.

  “He still didn’t get the memo,” Haines said. “Show him again.”

  “YESSIRMR.HAINESSIR!” Mike bellowed.

  Haines giggled. “That’s better. Never mind, Conway. Now we got the ground rules straight, we can have what they call substantive discussions. What’s your name, kid?”

  “Mike.”

  He realized belatedly he hadn’t offered his last name, but Haines didn’t press him for it, so he let it ride.

  “And the midget bitch—what’s her name?”

  “Alice,” Mike said without hesitation.

  Haines sighed. “You just don’t get it, do you, Mike? See, everybody’s got a talent. Some guys can paint, some broads can sing, some guys can find oil in the middle of nowhere. Me, I always—always—can tell when somebody is lying to me.”