She was gone. The screen was blank.
Angry, he punched out her number again. “I’ve got to talk to her directly.”
A different robot appeared. A polished chrome one with a vaguely humanoid face. “Good evening, I’m WC/1587, your Pacific Vidphone operator,” it said. “How may I be of service?”
“I’m trying to reach this number.”
“That particular phone is no longer in service, sir.”
“I was just talking to it.”
The gleaming robot replied, “That’s possible, but it is presently out of service. In fact, vidphone communication will not be resumed on that number for the immediate future.”
“Is there an alternate number?”
“None whatsoever, sir,” answered the robot operator. “We can, however, send you a faxgram notification if and when the number does go back into service. Would you care to have us do that?”
“You might as well.”
“The standard charge for faxgram notification is twenty-five dollars, Mr. Cardigan. That will automatically be billed to your account.”
Nodding and ending the call, he left the alcove.
Jake paced again. “Okay, it sounds like the marriage is definitely over and done,” he said. “The best thing for me to—”
“Is there something I can do for you, sir?” asked the computer terminal.
“Yep, you can quit asking me if there’s something you can do.”
“Keep in mind that it’s my duty to—”
“Just shut up for now.”
Jake went over and sat on the sofa. He got up to pace. He sat in an armchair. He got up to pace.
“What you’re going to have to do is leave her alone,” he told himself finally. “At least for a while. Eventually you’ll have to work out something so that you can see Dan—and since when did she call him Danny?”
He wandered down the hall and into the bedroom. Kneeling, he shouldered the wide round bed aside. There was the same small worn patch in the carpeting.
“No, you’re through with this damn stuff. Even if it is still there.”
He got up, sat on the edge of the bed.
“But who would it hurt?”
It would hurt Jake. And he’d given his word to himself that he wasn’t going to use the stuff anymore.
“Hell, it’s probably not even there. Kate must’ve tossed it all out years ago.”
Except the little hidden compartment wouldn’t open for anyone but him.
“Even so, some of the SCSP investigators must’ve long since found it and confiscated it.”
If they had, how come it hadn’t shown up as evidence at his trial? They’d showed plenty of other evidence pointing to his involvement with Tek.
“Okay, all right. Let’s find out.”
Back on his knees, he pressed his palm flat on the worn spot. The recognition ping sounded and the expertly concealed panel in the rug popped up open to reveal a small compartment hidden in the bedroom floor.
And everything was there. He saw his spare Brainbox, the plastiglass vial that still held three good usable Tek chips and the electrodes to attach to his head.
Remaining in the kneeling position, Jake stared down into the hole.
7
JAKE HAD SHOVED THE bed back into place and was sitting atop it, boots off and feet up, leaning back against the wall. Arranged alongside him was his Tek gear, which he hadn’t used in several weeks—
“It’s been four years,” he reminded himself.
Intellectually he knew he’d been up in the Freezer all that time, but he still didn’t feel as though he’d been away at all. He’d said goodbye to Kate at the spaceport that morning—Dan had been left at home—and boarded the prisonbound shuttle. They’d put him to sleep about two hours after he got up there, pausing only for a quick physical and a quick psychiatric evaluation. Then he was awakened and told it was four years later.
And, yeah, it really was April 3, 2120. He’d confirmed that from the vidnews a little while ago.
He scowled. “There was something I dreamed about, something important.” He tried again to remember, but couldn’t retrieve it.
Jake picked up his Brainbox. It was black and silver, fitting comfortably in his hand, and was shaped something like an old-fashioned pocket calculator. The headset, which Jake picked up next, consisted of a ring of flexible alloy and three contact-electrodes. You just plugged the headset cord into the side of the box. Jake did that now, then swung the trio of electrodes back and forth a few times in his left hand.
“What difference would it really make?”
There was no one here, and the apartment wasn’t bugged. He’d determined that before taking the gear out of its hole. He had enough chips, three of them, for at least three hours on the box.
“I’ll only do one, though.”
One would be enough. He’d do an hour of Tek and then quit. Quit for good probably. That would prove he could handle the stuff and wasn’t dependent on it anymore.
“I think I can state, without fear of contradiction, that this has been one hell of an exceptional day.”
If you only used Tek once in a while—at times like now, when the stress level started rising—then you weren’t actually hooked at all.
“Bullshit.” He dropped the gear to the bed. “You can’t let yourself start again at all.”
He was breathing more rapidly now, starting to sweat.
A single Tek chip wasn’t going to do him any harm.
“Besides, you’ve only got three in all. Once those are used up, that’ll be it. You sure as hell aren’t going to buy any Tek after that.”
Picking up the small plastiglass vial between thumb and forefinger, Jake held it up and gave it a gentle shake.
“Just three.”
He opened the vial, extracted a chip, shut it and dropped it onto the bed.
The silicon chip was roughly the size of an average cockroach and had two rows of five tiny spikes along its underbelly. You inserted it into the chip-socket on the top side of the Brainbox. That powered the box, providing you with the opportunity for any sort of fantasy you desired.
Casually Jake picked up the Brainbox. He clicked the chip into place and rested the box on his lap.
“Everything should still fit.” He slipped the headset on, adjusting it so the electrodes touched the three spots on his head that would allow for maximum brain stimulation.
Looking down at the Brainbox, he let his right hand hover over it. There was a key pad just below the socket. You ordered your specific fantasy that way.
A fairly simple gadget really. Most law officials agreed that the first Tek chips had surfaced about thirty years ago, but they didn’t agree on who invented the Brainbox system. The consensus was that the earliest ones had showed up near the Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan. But several of the anti-Tek agents Jake had known insisted that Tek and the box were a product—a bootleg product, of course—of a military research lab that had existed for a time on the outskirts of Sweetwater, Texas.
Didn’t really matter. The stuff worked.
Suddenly, rapidly, Jake pushed the activate switch. Next he tapped out a specific brainstim fantasy on the key pad.
Just after he did that someone called him from the living room. “Jake—are you here?”
He snatched the headset off, dumped the whole kit on the bed, dropped a pillow over it and jumped up. He tugged on his boots and went running down the hall. “Kate, is that you?”
“Well, of course.” She was standing in the center of their living room, wearing the same pale green fakesilk dress she’d had on in the vidtape. She looked fine now, though, not weary or ill.
“After I got your message, I didn’t expect to see you again for a while.” He stood smiling at her.
“I know, and I’m really sorry about that.” Very hesitantly his wife moved closer and put her arms around him. “That was all just a mistake. So I decided I’d better fly back home. I was really hoping I’d get here before
you’d seen the damn tape.”
Jake didn’t speak, just held on to her, tight, and then kissed her. Finally he said, “Then you don’t want to stay divorced?”
Pushing gently back from him, she shook her head. “No, the divorce was a mistake, too,” Kate admitted. “You know how lawyers can be. After you’d been away nearly two years—well, one of them convinced me there was no chance at all you’d come back before the fifteen years was up. I really had done everything I could think of to try to get you a parole, but nothing worked. And fifteen years seemed like such a long time.” Her head lowered and she started, very quietly, to cry. “I gave up on you, Jake, and I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Kate, it’s okay.” He took hold of his wife again.
“The important thing is—I’ve decided I don’t want to go through with it, don’t want to be away from you any longer.”
“Yeah, that’s what matters.”
“You haven’t said anything to Dan.”
“Dan? I didn’t even notice that he—”
“Hi, Dad. Welcome home.” There was a lean young man, hair lighter than Jake’s, standing just behind Kate. He was taller than Jake, by about a good inch.
“Dan! My God, you’re—Hell, you’re just about grown.”
“Four years’ll do that, Dad.” He held out something toward his father. “Here’s a present for you, sort of a welcome-home gift.”
Jake narrowed his eyes, but he still couldn’t quite make out what it was his son was offering him. He couldn’t seem to get it in focus. “What is it, kid?”
“I made it for you in one of my classes at school,” explained Dan. “I really hope you like it.”
“What class was that?”
“Metalcraft.”
“Oh, sure, metalcraft.” He could see it more clearly now. It was a small bronze statue of a rearing stallion. “It’s terrific, Dan.”
“We have a very gifted son.” Kate put one arm around Jake’s waist and one around Dan’s. “Now that we’re all back together again we can start—what’s the matter, Jake?”
“Dan’s hair. It looks darker now than when I first—”
“It’s been a lot darker than yours for nearly four years now.”
“Do you really like the matador, Dad?”
“Matador?”
Dan laughed, pointing at the statue his father held in his left hand. “My gift. I go, you know, to the bullfights a lot since we moved across the border. Mom thinks they’re brutal but I like them. That’s why I made the statue of a matador for you.”
“It’s great. Very nicely done.” Reaching over, Jake set the small statue on the coffee table. “How about your luggage—where did you leave it?”
“It’s all here, Dad. Didn’t you notice?”
Two large plastileather trunks and six assorted suitcases—including the tan one Kate had taken along on their honeymoon—were piled on the carpet near the door.
“Didn’t see them before.” Jake shook his head, laughing. “Too many distractions, I guess.”
Kate asked, “Are you two ready for dinner?”
“We can go out someplace,” suggested Jake.
“No, no—it’s cooked already,” said his wife. “I phoned the computer from the airport as soon as we arrived and told it what to prepare. I know you like Mexican food, Jake, so that’s what I ordered up.”
“Don’t both of you get enough of that every day?”
“This is your party, Jake.”
He picked up his fork. “It looks fine, my compliments to the computer.”
Smiling, Kate reached across the kitchen table to touch her husband’s hand. “I’m really glad we’re together again,” she said. “You don’t know how much I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too, Dad.”
Jake frowned at him. “I can’t get over your hair,” he said. “I thought it was much darker.”
“Sometimes it is, Dad. But, you know, you haven’t seen me for a long time and you can’t be expected to know exactly what shade it is now.”
“That makes sense, sure.” Jake refilled his wineglass, held it up. “Here’s to our family.”
“Guess what I’m feeling at this moment in time, amigo?” asked the compact, dark, curly-haired man who was sitting patiently on the far end of the bed and watching Jake. “I’ll supply the answer, since you look like your brains—what few you possess—are still addled.” He stood up. “I feel like a schmuck, Jake. Yes, indeed, because I’ve been busting my ass for months telling people you were a guy who could be trusted and that you really weren’t a tekkie at all.”
Removing the headset, Jake said, “You’re a little late for the homecoming party, Gomez.”
8
AS HE SAT ON the living room sofa Jake asked, “How’d you get in?”
Sid Gomez settled into an armchair. “We used to be partners, remember?” He held up his right hand, palm outward. “I’m one of the happy few your condo lets in.”
“I’m not really back on Tek,” he said. “But this was my first day home and the way things ... Never mind, you’ve already heard all the excuses.”
Gomez was about ten years younger than Jake, and his tight-curling black hair seemed to have a life of its own, jiggling now as he gave a disappointed shake of his head. “Lately my current wife has taken to alluding to me as an idealistic putz,” he said. “And that is chiefly because I’ve been harboring the halfwit notion that you’re savable. But, Jesus, before you’re even thawed out from your little siesta in the Freezer, you start zapping your brains with that—”
“Are you the one who got me paroled?”
After watching his friend for a few seconds Gomez replied, “I was instrumental in getting you out.”
“Thanks then, even if you do think I’m an asshole.”
“You’re still about two or three grades from qualifying as an asshole,” said his ex-partner. “But a couple more sessions with the Brainbox and—”
“How come you didn’t contact me earlier?”
“I wanted to give you a little time to adjust to civilian life.”
Jake smiled faintly. “And you wanted to test me, see if I was still hooked,” he said. “Doesn’t look like I passed the test.”
“This wasn’t the final exam, amigo.”
“You’re still optimistic. Don’t see how you can be after all your years with the Southern California State Police.”
“I’m not a cop anymore, Jake.”
“You’re not? Then my getting out really doesn’t have anything to do with SCSP changing their mind about me and pressuring the Parole Authority?”
Gomez chuckled. “Nope, narrow-minded bastards that they are, they still think you sometimes clamp electrodes on your cabeza and have brainstim wet dreams,” he said. “You and me, of course, know how wrong they are.”
“Goddamn it, Gomez, you know I use the stuff sometimes,” he said, his voice rising. “You knew that before I ever got picked up. But you also know I never sold Tek or worked for the GLA dealers. And I sure as hell didn’t sabotage the investigation of that Laguna Sector connection. I was trying to bust them.”
“That much we agree on.” Gomez scratched his head. “For a while there, Jake, while I was still a minion of the law, I kept digging into your case—on my own time.”
“Is that why you’re not with SCSP anymore—did they dump you for trying to help me?”
“Actually, no. It’s more complicated than that,” said Gomez. “I thought I was getting close, even had a guy ready to confide in me. Then he suddenly went on to glory, helped along by a blast from a lazrifle.”
“Who was this guy?”
“One of our fellow officers—Brian Jessup.”
“Jessup.” Jake stood and began to pace. “That’s funny.”
“Share the humor of it with me, amigo.”
“Funny as in odd.” Jake halted, shrugged. “No, it’s only that I’ve been brooding about Kate and—well, Brian Jessup was interested in her. Fe
w times at parties he paid a little more attention to her than I thought was necessary. She didn’t return his interest—far as I know—and I was probably just being your typical old coot with a wife ten years younger than he is.”
Gomez was studying his booted feet. “We can talk about your wife at some future get-together,” he said. “Right now, though—”
“Is there something about Kate I ought to know?”
“Nada, nothing, not a damn thing. Just sit yourself down and attend to what I’m saying.”
Frowning, Jake returned to the sofa. “What did Jessup have to say?
“Whatever the lad knew, he took to the grave with him—or rather the urn, since his wife had him microwave-cremated,” explained Gomez. “But he’d been hinting he knew something that might just help prove you’d been set up. Jessup indicated he’d be willing to confide for a suitable financial consideration. Two days before we were going to chat, a mall sniper down in the Apple Valley Sector did him in, along with four shoppers and a show dog.”
“Coincidence?”
“It does seem a mite extravagant way of getting rid of the gent, killing four others and a dog worth more than the whole lot of them just to cover the shutting up of Jessup.”
“Tek runners aren’t noted for being sentimental.”
“That is true,” admitted his friend. “At any rate, amigo, that was about the time I came to the conclusion that a cop’s life was no longer for me. With my sterling record, plus my innate and undeniable Latino charm, I had no trouble whatsoever landing a position with the respected Cosmos Detective Agency right here in GLA.”
Jake grinned at him. “You mean you’re a private eye now?”
“I have been for the past year. Later in the evening I may even show you my badge.”
“As I recall, Cosmos is a pretty good outfit.”
“Walt Bascom runs it and he’s—if you bend your definitions some—honest and reliable,” said Gomez. “The pay is much better than a cop’s and there are considerably more fringe benefits.”
“Was Cosmos involved in getting me out?”
“It took me a long time, Jake, to realize that if I wanted justice for you, I’d have to get it the way most people do,” he answered. “By using money and influence. I don’t have quite sufficient of either, but Bascom and the Cosmos outfit do. And that’s how your Special Parole got arranged.”
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