by Roger Elwood
I had wondered how he could afford a servant. The answer made me feel stupid. The secretary named Zero turned out to be a computer construct, an answering service.
Chambers was not penniless. After the ransom was paid, the trust fund had contained about twenty thousand marks. Charlotte’s care had eaten into that. The trustees were giving Holden enough to pay his tuition and still live Comfortably. There would be some left when he graduated, but it would be earmarked for Charlotte.
I turned off the screen and thought about it. He’d had a jolt. He’d recovered. Some do, some don’t. He’d been in perfect health, which has a lot to do with surviving emotional shock. If he was your friend today, you would avoid certain subjects in his presence.
And he’d thrown himself backward in blind terror when a pencil rose from his desk and started to pinwheel. How normal was that? I just didn’t know. I was too used to my imaginary arm.
Anthony Tiller was in a cold box, face up. That face had been hideously contorted during his last minutes, but it showed none of that now. He was as expressionless as any dead man. The frozen sleepers at the Vault of Eternity had looked like that. Superficially, most of them had been in worse shape than he was.
Holden Chambers studied him with interest. “So that’s what an organlegger looks like.”
“An organlegger looks like anything he wants to.”
He grimaced at that. He bent close to study the dead man’s face. He circled the cold box with his hands clasped behind his back. He wanted to look nonchalant, but he was still walking wide of me. I didn’t think the dead man bothered him.
He said the same thing I’d said two nights ago. “Nope. Not with that face.”
“Well, it was worth a try. Let’s go to my office. It’s more comfortable.”
He smiled. “Good.”
He dawdled in the corridors. He looked into open offices, smiled at anyone who looked up, asked me mostly intelligent questions in a low voice. He was enjoying himself: a tourist in ARM Headquarters. But he trailed back when I tried to take the middle of the corridor, so that we wound up walking on opposite sides. Finally I asked him about it.
I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then, “It was that pencil trick.”
“What about it?”
He sighed, as one who despairs of ever finding the right words. “I don’t like to be touched. I mean, I get along with girls all right, but generally I don’t like to be touched.”
“I didn’t—”
“But you could have. And without my knowing. I couldn’t see it, I might not even feel it. It just bothered the censored hell out of me, you reaching out of a phone screen like that! A phone call isn’t supposed to be that, that personal.” He stopped suddenly, looking down the corridor. “Isn’t that Lucas Garner?”
“Yah.”
“Lucas Gamer!” He was awed and delighted. “He runs it all, doesn’t he? How old is he now?”
“In his hundred and eighties.” I thought of introducing him, but Luke’s chair slid oil in a different direction.
My office is just big enough for me, my desk, two chairs, and an array of spigots in the wall. I poured him tea and me coffee. I said, “I went to visit your sister.”
“Charlotte? How is she?”
“I doubt she’s changed since the last time you saw her. She doesn’t notice anything around her . . . except for one incident, when she turned around and stared, at me.”
“Why? What did you do? What did you say?” he demanded.
Well, here it came. “I was telling her doctor that the same gang that kidnapped her once might want her again.”
Strange things happened around his mouth. Bewilderment, fear, disbelief. “What the bleep made you say that?”
“It’s a possibility. You’re both corpsicle heirs. Tiller the Killer could have been watching you when he spotted me watching you. He couldn’t have that.”
“No, I suppose not . . .” He was trying to take it lightly, and he failed. “Do you seriously think they might want me—us—again?”
“It’s a possibility,” I repeated. “If Tiller was inside the restaurant, he could have spotted me by my floating cigarette. It’s more distinctive than my face. Don’t look so worried. We’ve got a tracer on you, we could track him anywhere he took you.”
“In me?” He didn’t like that much better—too personal?—but he didn’t make an issue of it.
“Holden, I keep wondering what they could have done to your sister—”
He interrupted, coldly. “I stopped wondering that, long ago.”
“—that they didn’t do to you. It’s more than curiosity. If the doctors knew what was done to her, if they knew what it is in her memory—”
“Dammit! Don’t you think I want to help her? She’s my sister!”
“All right.” What was I playing psychiatrist for, anyway? Or was it detective I was playing? He didn’t know anything. He was at the eye of several storms at once, and he must be getting sick and tired of it. I ought to send him home.
He spoke first. I could barely hear him. “You know what they did to me? A nerve block at the neck. A little widget taped to the back of my neck with surgical skin. I couldn’t feel anything below the neck, and I couldn’t move. They put that on me, dumped me on a bed and left me. For nine days. Every so often they’d turn me on again and let me drink and eat something and go to the bathroom.”
“Did anyone tell you they’d break you up for stuff if they didn’t get the ransom?”
He thought about it. “N-no. I could pretty well guess it. They never said anything to me at all. They treated me like I was dead. They examined me for, oh, it felt like hours, poking and prodding me with their hands and their instruments, rolling me around like dead meat. I couldn’t feel any of it, but I could see it all. If they did that to Charlotte . . . maybe she thinks she’s dead.” His voice rose. “I’ve been through this again and again, with the ARMs, with Doctor Hartman, with the Washburn medical staff. Let’s drop it, shall we?”
“Sure. I’m sorry. We don’t learn tact in this business. We learn to ask questions. Any question.”
And yet, and yet, the look on her face.
I asked him one more question as I was escorting him out. Almost offhandedly. “What do you think of the Second Freezer Bill?”
“I don’t have a UN vote yet.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He faced me belligerently. “Look, there’s a lot of money involved. A lot of money. It would pay for Charlotte the rest of her life. It would fix my face. But Hale, Leviticus Hale—” He pronounced the name accurately, and with no flicker of a smile. “He’s a relative, isn’t he? My great-to-the-third-grandfather. They could bring him back someday; it’s possible. So what do I do? If I had a vote, I’d have to decide. But I’m not twenty-five yet, so I don’t have to worry about it.”
“Interviews.”
“I don’t give interviews. You just got the same answer everyone else gets. It’s on tape, on file with Zero. Goodby, Mister Hamilton.”
Other ARM departments had thinned our ranks during the lull following the Freezer Law. Over the next couple of weeks they began to trickle back. We needed operatives to implant tracers in unsuspecting victims and to monitor their welfare afterward. We needed an augmented staff to follow their tracer blips on the screens downstairs.
We were sore tempted to tell all of the corpsicle heirs what was happening, and have them check in with us at regular intervals. Say, every fifteen minutes. It would have made things much easier. It might also have influenced their votes, altered the quality of the interviews they gave out.
But we didn’t want to alert our quarry, the still-hypothetical coalition of organleggers now monitoring the same corpsicle heirs we were interested in. And the backlash vote would be ferocious if we were wrong. And we weren’t supposed to be interested in politics.
We operated without the knowledge of the corpsicle heirs. There were two thousand of them in all parts of the
world, almost three hundred in the western United States, with an expected legacy of 50,000 UN marks or more—a limit we set for our own convenience, because it was about all we could handle.
One thing helped the manpower situation. We had reached another lull. Missing persons complaints had dropped to near zero, all over the world.
“We should have been expecting that,” Bera commented. “For the last year or so most of their customers must have stopped going to organleggers. They’re waiting to see if the Second Freezer Bill will go through. Now all the gangs are stuck with full organ banks and no customers. If they learned anything from last time, they’ll pull in their horns and wait it out. Of course I’m only guessing—” But it looked likely enough. At any rate, we had the men we needed.
We monitored the top dozen corpsicle heirs twenty-four hours a day. The rest we checked at random intervals. The tracers could only tell us where they were, not who they were with or whether they wanted to be there. We had to keep checking to see if anyone had disappeared.
We sat back to await results.
The Security Council passed the Second Freezer Bill on February 3, 2125. Now it would go to the world vote in late March. The voting public numbered ten billion, of whom perhaps sixty percent would bother to phone in their votes.
I took to watching the boob cube again.
NBA Broadcasting continued its coverage of the corpsicle heirs and its editorials in favor of the Bill. Proponents took every opportunity to point out that many corpsicle heirs still remained to be discovered. (And YOU might be one.) Taffy and I watched a parade in New York in favor of the bill: banners and placards (SAVE THE LIVING, NOT THE DEAD . . . IT’S YOUR LIFE AT STAKE . . . CORPSICLES KEEP BEER COLD) and one censored big mob of chanting people. The transportation costs must have been formidable.
The various Committees to Oppose the Bill were also active. In the Americas, they pointed out that, although about forty percent of people in frozen sleep were in the Americas, the spare parts derived would go to the world at large. In Africa and Asia, it was discovered that the Americas had most of the corpsicle heirs. In Egypt, an analogy was made between the pyramids and the freezer vaults: both bids for immortality. It didn’t go over well.
Polls indicated that the Chinese sectors would vote against the bill. NBA newscasters spoke of ancestor worship and reminded the public that six ex-chairmen resided in Chinese freezer vaults, alongside myriad lesser ex-officials. Immortality was a respected tradition in China.
The Committees to Oppose reminded the world’s voting public that some of the wealthiest of the frozen dead had heirs in the Belt. Were Earth’s resources to be spread indiscriminately among the asteroidal rocks? I started to hate both sides. Fortunately the UN cut that line off fast by threatening injunction. Earth needed Belt resources too heavily.
Our own results began to come in.
Mortimer Lincoln, alias Anthony Tiller, had not been at Midgard the night he tried to kill me. He’d eaten alone in his apartment, a meal sent from the communal kitchen. Which meant that he himself could not have been watching Chambers.
We found no sign of anyone lurking behind Holden Chambers, or behind any of the other corpsicle heirs, publicized or not, with one general exception. Newsmen. The media were unabashedly and constantly interested in the corpsicle heirs, priority based on the money they stood to inherit. We faced a depressing hypothesis: the potential kidnappers were spending all their time watching the boob cube, letting the media do their tracking for them. But perhaps the connection was closer.
We started investigating newscast stations.
In mid-February I pulled Holden Chambers in and had him examined for an outlaw tracer. It was a move of desperation. Organleggers don’t use such tools. They specialize in medicine. Our own tracer was still working, and it was the only tracer in him. Chambers was icily angry. We had interrupted his studying for a mid-term exam.
We managed to search three of the top dozen when they had medical checkups. Nothing.
Our investigations of the newscast stations turned up very little. Clark and Nash was running a good many one-minute spots through NBA. Other advertising firms had similar lines of possible influence over other stations, broadcasting companies, and cassette newszines. But we were looking for newsmen who had popped up from nowhere, with backgrounds forged or nonexistent. Ex-organleggers in new jobs. We didn’t find any.
I called Menningers one empty afternoon. Charlotte Chambers was still catatonic. “I’ve got Lowndes of New York working with me,” Hartman told me. “He has precisely your voice, and good qualifications too. Charlotte hasn’t responded yet. We’ve been wondering: could it have been the way you were talking?”
“You mean the accent? It’s Kansas with an overlay of west coast and Belter.”
“No, Lowndes has that too. I mean organlegger slang.”
“I use it. Bad habit.”
“That could be it.” He made a face. “But we can’t act on it. It might just scare her completely into herself.”
“That’s where she is now. I’d risk it.”
“You’re not a psychiatrist,” he said.
I hung up and brooded. Negatives, all negatives.
I didn’t hear the hissing sound until it was almost on me. I looked up then, and it was Luke Garner’s ground-effect travel chair sliding accurately through the door. He watched me a moment, then said, “What are you looking so grim about?”
“Nothing. All the nothing we’ve been getting instead of results.”
“Uh huh.” He let the chair settle. “It’s beginning to look like Tiller the Killer wasn’t on assignment.”
“That would blow the whole thing, wouldn’t it? I did a lot of extrapolating from two beams of green light. One ex-organlegger tries to make holes in one ARM agent, and now we’ve committed tens of thousands of man-hours and seventy or eighty computer-hours on the strength of it. If they’d been planning to tie us up, they couldn’t have done it better.”
“You know, I think you’d take it as a personal insult if Tiller shot at you just because he didn’t like you.”
I had to laugh. “How personal can you get?”
“That’s better. Now will you stop sweating this? It’s just another long shot. You know what legwork is like. We bet a lot of man-effort on this one because the odds looked good. Look how many organleggers would have to be in on it if it were true! We’d have a chance to snaffle them all. But if it doesn’t work out, why sweat it?”
“The Second Freezer Bill,” I said, as if he didn’t know.
“The will of the people be done.”
“Censor the people! They’re murdering those dead men!”
Garner’s face twitched oddly. I said, “What’s funny?”
He let the laugh out. It sounded like a chicken screaming for help. “Censor. Bleep. They didn’t used to be swear words. They were euphemisms. You’d put them in a book or on teevee, when you wanted a word they wouldn’t let you use.”
I shrugged. “Words are funny. Damn used to be a technical term in theology, if you want to look at it that way.”
“I know, but they sound funny. When you start saying bleep and censored it ruins your masculine image.”
“Censor my masculine image. What do we do about the corpsicle heirs? Call off the surveillance?”
“No. There’s too much in the pot already.” Gamer looked broodingly into one bare wall of my office. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could persuade ten billion people to use prosthetics instead of transplants?”
Guilt glowed in my right arm, my left eye. I said, “Prosthetics don’t feel. I might have settled for a prosthetic arm—” dammit, I’d had the choice! “—but an eye? Luke, suppose it was possible to graft new legs on you. Would you take them?”
“Oh, dear, I do wish you hadn’t asked me that,” he said venomously.
“Sorry. I withdraw the question.”
He brooded. It was a lousy thing to ask a man. He was still stuck with it; he couldn�
�t spit it out.
I asked, “Did you have any special reason for dropping in?”
Luke shook himself. “Yah. I got the impression you were taking all this as a personal defeat. I stopped down to cheer you up.”
We laughed at each other. “Listen,” he said, “there are worse things than the organ bank problem. When I was young—your age, my child—it was almost impossible to get anyone convicted of a capital crime. Life sentences weren’t for life. Psychology and psychiatry, such as they were, were concerned with curing criminals, returning them to society. The United States Supreme Court almost voted the death penalty unconstitutional.”
“Sounds wonderful. How did it work out?”
“We had an impressive reign of terror. A lot of people got killed. Meanwhile transplant techniques were getting better and better. Eventually Vermont made the organ banks the official means of execution. That idea spread very damn fast.”
“Yah.” I remembered history courses.
“Now we don’t even have prisons. The organ banks are always short. As soon as the UN votes the death penalty for a crime, most people stop committing it. Naturally.”
“So we get the death penalty for having children without a license, or cheating on income tax, or running too many red traffic lights. Luke, I’ve seen what it does to people to keep voting more and more death penalties. They lose their respect for life.”
“But the other situation was just as bad, Gil. Don’t forget it.”
“So now we’ve got the death penalty for being poor.”
“The Freezer Law? I won’t defend it. Except that that’s the penalty for being poor and dead.”
“Should it be a capital crime?”
“No, but it’s not too bright either. If a man expects to be brought back to life, he should be prepared to pay the medical fees. Now, hold it. I know a lot of the pauper groups had trust funds set up. They were wiped out by depressions, bad investments. Why the hell do you think banks take interest for a loan? They’re being paid for the risk. The risk that the loan won’t be paid back.”