Ten Tomorrows

by Roger Elwood

  “It could still have been revenge,” Bera suggested. “Loren and Anubis knew each other. We know that much. They set up the boundary between their territories at least twelve years ago, by negotiation. Loren took over Anubis’ territory when Anubis retired. And you killed Loren.” I scoffed. “And Tiller the Killer gave up his cover to get me, two years after the gang broke up?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t revenge. Maybe Anubis wants to make a comeback.”

  “Or maybe this Tiller just flipped. Withdrawal symptoms. He hadn’t killed anyone for almost two years, poor baby. I wish he’d picked a better time.”

  “Why?”

  “Taffy was with me. She’s still twitching.”

  “You didn’t tell me that! She wasn’t hit, was she?”

  “No, just scared.”

  Bera relaxed. His hand caressed the interface where his hair faded into air, feather-lightly, in the nervous way another man might scratch his hand. “I’d hate to see you two split up.”

  “Oh, it’s not . . .” anything like that serious, I’d have told him, but he knew better. “Yah. We didn’t get much sleep last night. It isn’t just being shot at, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Taffy’s a surgeon. She thinks of transplant stocks as raw material. Tools. She’d be crippled without an organ bank. She doesn’t think of the stuff as human . . . or she never used to, till she met me.”

  “I’ve never heard either of you talk about it.”

  “We don’t, even to each other, but it’s there. Most transplants are condemned criminals, captured by heroes such as you and me. Some of the stuff is respectable citizens captured by organleggers, broken up into illicit organ banks and eventually recaptured by said heroes. They don’t tell Taffy which is which. She works with pieces of people. I don’t think she can live with me and not live with that.”

  “Getting shot at by an ex-organlegger couldn’t have helped much. We’d better see to it that it doesn’t happen again.”

  “Jackson, he was just a nut.”

  “He used to be with Anubis.”

  “I never had anything to do with Anubis.” Which reminded me. “You did, though, didn’t you? Do you remember anything about the Holden Chambers kidnapping.”

  Bera looked at me peculiarly. “Holden and Charlotte Chambers, yah. You’ve got a good memory. There’s a fair chance Anubis was involved.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “There was a rash of kidnappings about that time, all over the world. You know how organlegging works. The legitimate hospitals are always short of transplants. Some sick citizens are too much in a hurry to wait their turns. The gangs kidnap a healthy citizen, break him up into spare parts, throw away the brain, use the rest for illegal operations. That’s the way it was until the Freezer Law cut the market out from under them.”

  “I remember.”

  “Some gangs turned to kidnapping for ransom. Why not? It’s just what they were set up for. If the family couldn’t pay off, the victim could always become a donor. It made people much more likely to pay off.

  “The only strange thing about the Chambers kidnap was that Holden and Charlotte Chambers both disappeared about the same time, around six at night.” Bera had been tapping at the computer controls. He looked at the screen and said, “Make that six twenty. March 21, 2123. But they were miles apart, Charlotte at a restaurant with a date, Holden at Washburn University attending a night class. Now why would a kidnap gang think they needed them both?”

  “Any ideas?”

  “They might have thought that the Chambers trustees were more likely to pay off on both of them. We’ll never know now. We never got any of the kidnappers. We were lucky to get the kids back.”

  “What made you think it was Anubis?”

  “It was Anubis territory. The Chamber kidnap was only the last of half a dozen in that area. Smooth operations, no excitement, no hitches, victims returned intact after the ransom was paid.” He glared. “No, I’m not proud of Anubis. It’s just that he tended not to make mistakes, and he was used to making people disappear.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “They made themselves disappear, the whole gang, around the time of that last kidnap. We assume they were building up a stake.”

  “How much did they get?”

  “On the Chambers kids? A hundred thousand.”

  “They’d have made ten times that selling them as transplants. They must have been hard up.”

  “You know it. Nobody was buying. What does all this have to do with your being shot at?”

  “A wild idea. Could Anubis be interested in the Chambers kids again?”

  Bera gave me a funny look. “No way. What for? They bled them white the first time. A hundred thousand UN marks isn’t play money.”

  After Bera left I sat there not believing it.

  Anubis had vanished. Loren had acted immediately to take over Anubis’ territory. Where had they gone, Anubis and the others?

  Into Loren’s organ banks?

  Bera couldn’t see Anubis being suckered like that. Maybe he had too high an opinion of Anubis. But Anthony Tiller had hunted with Anubis, and now Tiller had surfaced again. . . .

  I didn’t like the idea that any random ex-organlegger might decide to kill me the instant he saw me. Finally I did something about it. I asked the computer for data on the Chambers kidnapping.

  I scanned it fast. There wasn’t much Bera hadn’t told me. I wondered, though, why he hadn’t mentioned Charlotte’s condition.

  When ARM police found the Chambers kids drugged on a hotel parking roof, they had both been in good physical condition. Holden had been a little scared, a little relieved, just beginning to get mad. But Charlotte had been in catatonic withdrawal. At last notice, she was still in catatonic withdrawal. She had never spoken with coherence about the kidnapping, nor about anything else.

  Something had been done to her. Something terrible. Maybe Bera had taught himself not to think about it.

  Otherwise the kidnappers had behaved almost with rectitude. The ransom had been paid, the victims had been returned. They had been on that roof, drugged, for less than twenty minutes. They showed no bruises, no signs of maltreatment . . . another sign that their kidnappers were organleggers. Organleggers aren’t sadists. They don’t have that much respect for the stuff.

  I noted that the ransom had been paid by an attorney. The Chambers were orphans. If they’d both been killed, the executor of their estate would have been out of a job. From that viewpoint it made sense to capture them both . . . but not all that much sense.

  There couldn’t be a motive for kidnapping them again. They didn’t have the money. Except—

  It hit me joltingly. The Second Freezer Bill.

  Holden Chambers’ number was in the basement computer. I was dialing it when second thoughts interrupted. Instead I called downstairs and set a team to locating possible bugs in Chambers’ home or phone. They weren’t to interfere with the bugs or to alert possible listeners. Routine stuff.

  Once before, the Chambers kids had disappeared. If we weren’t lucky, they might disappear again. Sometimes the ARM business was like digging a pit in quicksand. If you dug hard enough, you could maintain a noticeable depression, but as soon as you stopped . . .

  The Freezer Law of 2122 had given the ARM a field day. Some of the gangs had simply retired. Some had tried to keep going and wound up selling an operation to an ARM plant. Some had tried to reach other markets; but there weren’t any, not even for Loren, who had tried to expand into the asteroid belt and found they wouldn’t have him either.

  And some had tried kidnapping; but inexperience kept tripping them up. The name of a victim points straight at a kidnapper’s only possible market. Too often the ARMs had been waiting.

  We’d cleaned them out. Organlegging should have been an extinct profession this past year. The vanished jackals I spent my days hunting should have posed no present threat to society.

  Except that the legitimate
transplants released by the Freezer Law were running out. And a peculiar thing was happening. People had started to disappear from stalled vehicles, singles apartment houses, crowded city slidewalks.

  Earth wanted the organleggers back. No, that wasn’t fair. But enough citizens wanted to extend their own lives, at any cost . . .

  If Anubis was alive, he might well be thinking of going back into business.

  The point was that he would need backing. Loren had taken over his medical facilities when Anubis retired. Eventually we’d located those and destroyed them. Anubis would have to start over.

  Let the Second Freezer Bill pass, and Leviticus Hale would be spare parts. Charlotte and Holden Chambers would be heirs to . . . how much?

  I got that via a call to the local NBA news department. In one hundred and thirty-four years, Leviticus Hale’s original three hundred and twenty thousand US dollars had become seventy-five million UN marks.

  I spent the rest of the morning on routine. They call it legwork, though it’s mostly done by phone and computer keyboard. The word covers some unbelievable long shots.

  We were investigating every member of every Citizen’s Committee to Oppose the Second Freezer Bill in the world. The suggestion had come down from Old Man Garner. He thought we might find that a coalition of organleggers had pooled advertising money to keep the corpsicles off the market. The results that morning didn’t look promising.

  I half hoped it wouldn’t work out. Suppose those committees did turn out to be backed by organleggers? It would make prime time news, anywhere in the world. The Second Freezer Bill would pass like that. But it had to be checked. There had been opposition to the first Freezer Bill, too, when the gangs had had more money. We’d have to check that too.

  Money. We spent a good deal of computer time looking for unexplained money. The average criminal tends to think that once he’s got the money, he’s home free, the game is over.

  We hadn’t caught a sniff of Loren or Anubis that way.

  Where had Anubis spent his money? Maybe he’d just hidden it away somewhere, or maybe Loren had killed him for it. And Tiller had shot at me because he didn’t like my face. Legwork is gambling, time against results.

  It developed that Holden Chambers’ environs were free of eavesdropping devices. I called him about noon.

  There appeared within my phone screen a red-faced, white-haired man of great dignity. He asked to whom I wished to speak. I told him and displayed my ARM ident. He nodded and put me on HOLD.

  Moments later Holden Chambers smiled distractedly at me and said, “Sorry about that. I’ve been getting considerable static from the news lately. Zero acts as a kind of, ah, buffer.”

  He was wearing a minimum kilt, a knee-length towel meant to be snatched up and fastened around the waist when a man is sitting around naked and his phone rings.

  He was lean and undermuscled, ascetic. The intellectual look was spoiled by a receding chin. Past his shoulder I could see a table, piled high: a tape viewer, a double handful of tape spools, a hand-sized voice recorder, two pens, and a stack of paper. I say, “Sorry to interrupt your studying.”

  “That’s all right. It’s tough getting back to it after Year’s-End. Maybe you remember.” He studied my face, thoughtfully. “Haven’t I seen you—Oh. The floating cigarette.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I’ve got an imaginary arm.” And it’s a great conversational device, an ice-breaker of wondrous potency. I was a marvel, a talking sea serpent, the way the kid was looking at me. “I lost an arm once, mining rocks in the Belt. A sliver of asteroid rock sheared it off clean to the shoulder.”

  He looked awed.

  “I got it replaced, of course.” And found out later that the replacement had come out of a captured and illicit organ bank. Some innocent bystander had once been attached to my right arm; but I didn’t tell many people that. “But for a year I was a one-armed man. Well, here was a whole section of my brain developed to control a right arm, and no right arm. I started developing psychic powers: psychokinesis and extra sensory perception. I started using them like an imaginary arm. Psychokinesis is easy enough to develop when you live in a low-gravity environment.” I paused just less than long enough for him to form a question. “Somebody tried to kill me outside Midgard last night. That’s why I called.”

  I hadn’t expected him to burst into a fit of the giggles. “Sorry,” he got out. “It sounds like you lead an active life!”

  “Yah. It didn’t seem that funny at the time. I don’t suppose you noticed anything unusual last night?”

  “Just the usual shootings and muggings, and there was one guy with a cigarette floating in front of his face.” He sobered before my clearly deficient sense of humor.

  “Look, I am sorry, but one minute you’re talking about a meteor shearing your arm off, and the next it’s bullets whizzing past your ear.”

  “Sure, I see your point.”

  “I left before you did. I know censored well I did. What happened?”

  “Somebody shot at us with a hunting laser. He was probably just a nut. He was also part of the gang that kidnapped—” I saw his stricken look. “Yah, them. There’s probably no connection, but we wondered if you might have noticed anything. Like a familiar face.”

  He shook his head. “They change faces, don’t they?”

  “Usually. How did you leave?”

  “Taxi. I live in Bakersfield, about twenty minutes from High Cliffs. Where did all this happen? I caught my taxi on the third shopping level.”

  “That kills it. We were on the first.”

  “I’m not really sorry. He might have shot at me too.”

  I’d been trying to decide whether to tell him that the kidnap gang might be interested in him again. Whether to scare the fights out of him on another long shot, or leave him off guard for a possible kidnap attempt. He seemed stable enough, but you never know.

  I temporized. “Mister Chambers, we’d like you to try to identify the man who tried to kill me last night. He probably did change his face—”

  “Yah.” He was uneasy. Many citizens would be, if asked to look a dead man in the face. “But I suppose you’ve got to try it. I’ll stop in tomorrow afternoon, after class.”

  So. Tomorrow we’d see what he was made of.

  He asked, “What about that imaginary arm? I’ve never heard of a psi talking that way about his talent.”

  “I wasn’t being cute,” I told him. “It’s an arm, as far as I’m concerned. My limited imagination. I can feel things out with my fingertips, but not if they’re further away than an arm can reach. I can lift things at the same distance. A jigger of bourbon is about the biggest thing I can lift. Most psis can’t do nearly that well.”

  “But they can reach further. Why not try a hypnotist?”

  “And lose the whole arm? I don’t want to risk that.”

  He looked disappointed in me. “What can you do with an imaginary arm that you can’t do with a real one?”

  “I can pick up hot things without burning myself.”

  “Yah!” He hadn’t thought of that.

  “And I can reach through walls. In the Belt, I could reach through my suit and do precision work in vacuum. I can reach two ways through a phone screen. Fiddle with the works, or—here, I’ll show you.”

  It doesn’t always work. But I was getting a good picture. Chambers showed life-sized, in color and stereo, through four square feet of screen. It looked like I could reach right into it. So I did. I reached into the screen with my imaginary hand, picked a pencil off the table in front of him and twirled it like a baton.

  He threw himself backward out of his chair. He landed rolling. I saw his face, pale grey with terror, before he rolled away and out of view. A few seconds later the screen went blank. He must have turned the knob from off-screen.

  If I’d touched his face, I could have understood it. But all I’d done was lift a pencil. What the hell?
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  My fault, I guessed. Some people see psi powers as supernatural, eerie, threatening. I shouldn’t have been showing off like that. But Holden hadn’t looked the type. Brash, a bit nervous, but fascinated rather than repulsed by the possibilities of an invisible, immaterial hand.

  Then, terror.

  I didn’t try to call him back. I dithered about putting a guard on him, decided not to. A guard might be noticed. But I ordered a tracer implanted in him. Anubis could pick Chambers up at any time. He needn’t wait for the General Assembly to declare Leviticus Hale dead.

  A tracer needle was a useful thing. It would be fired at Chambers from ambush. He’d probably never notice the sting, the hole would be only a pinprick, and it would tell us just where he was from then on.

  I thought Charlotte Chambers could use a tracer too, so I picked up a palm-size pressure implanter downstairs. I also traded the discharged barrel on my sidearm for a fresh one. The feel of the gun in my hand sent vivid green lines sizzling past my mind’s eye.

  Lastly I ordered a standard information package, C priority, on what Chambers had been doing for the last two years. It would probably arrive in a day or so.

  The face of Kansas was black and orange-white with great dark gaps in it, a town nestled in each gap. The weather domes of various townships had shifted kilotons of snow outward, to deepen the drifts across the flat countryside. In the light of an early winter sunset, the snow-bound landscape was orange-white, stripped with the broad black shadows of a few cities-within-buildings like High Cliffs. It all seemed eerie and abstract, sliding west beneath the folded wings of our plane.

  We slowed hard in midair. The wings unfolded, and we settled over downtown Topeka.

  This was going to look odd on my expense account. All this way to see a girl who hadn’t spoken sense in three years. Probably it would be disallowed . . . yet she was as much a part of the case as her brother. Anyone planning to recapture Holden Chambers for reransom would want Charlotte too.