by Ben Bova
“Can I? Can I now?”
“Sure. As long as you finish your breakfast after you’ve called them.”
Rickie was off his chair and dashing to the phone in the kitchen before Jo could finish the sentence. She leaned her elbows on the glass-topped table and sipped at her steaming coffee. The psychologists said that Rickie was adjusting healthily to the traumatic shock he had gone through. He slept through the night now, and claimed that he no longer had nightmares. His appetite seemed normal enough, and the guardians that Jo had surrounded him with, in the guise of household servants, reported that he did not seem to be overly fearful or nervous.
Twice since that horrible night, Jo had taken her son to the Vanguard research laboratory where tissue from murdered Cathy’s body was being treated in the plastic womb of a cloning tank. She carefully explained that Cathy was going to be born again, a new little baby who would grow up to be the sister he had known.
“She’s not gone from us forever, Rickie. She’ll come back to us.”
Holding his mother’s hand, Rickie had smiled up at Jo and said, “Only I’ll be her big brother and she’ll be my little sister, right, Mom?”
Jo had laughed. “Right.”
His smile was replaced by a worried, “Will Dad come back to us, too?”
Jo felt her heart constrict within her. “Yes,” she promised. “Your father will return to us.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, Rickie. All I know is that somehow he’ll come back to us.”
True to his word, Janos sent in the serving robot the next morning with a tray of breakfast.
“Good morning, Dr. Stoner. I trust you slept well,” said the squat little robot, as if nothing had happened since the last time it had come into the room.
Stoner did not reply. The robot placed the breakfast tray on the little table in the corner of the room opposite the medical monitoring equipment and rolled out the door without another word. The guard stood out in the hallway; it had not moved a millimeter since Stoner had first challenged it more than a week earlier.
Eggs, sausages, half a melon, thick slabs of bread, a pot of honey, and a large glass of milk. Stoner broke his imposed fast with a will. The food disappeared quickly.
All morning long he was left alone in the room. No voices from the ceiling speakers. No robots coming in to test him. Or slice him up. Stoner probed with his mind but could sense no other human beings. Alone? he wondered. Have they packed up and left?
That didn’t make sense. But for a few moments he pondered the possibility of being abandoned to die in the deserted emptiness of Old Beirut. Nobody left but me and that stupid, stubborn pile of transistors outside the door. It would be an odd way to die.
As he began to wonder if he could break through one of the walls into another room, and get into the hallway and out of the hotel that way, the ceiling speaker crackled.
“Dr. Stoner,” said Janos’s voice, “I have news for you. We will be leaving this place shortly.”
The Hungarian’s voice sounded unhappy. He’s being forced to stop his experiment, Stoner told himself. Ilona got to his boss, whoever that is, and now he’s got to stop playing with me.
“Where are we going?” Stoner asked aloud.
“That is of no consequence to you.”
Yes, Janos was definitely miffed. Stoner smiled. Wherever they were going, it would be better than this. And he might get an opportunity to get away from this maniac.
Hours passed, then finally one of the tall many-armed robots came into his room, pulled Stoner’s arms behind his back and snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Then it slipped a burlap hood over Stoner’s head. The bag smelled of coffee. It effectively blocked his vision, although the robot did not tie it tight around his neck, so some light filtered in and Stoner could see a sliver of the floor at his feet.
Almost immediately he realized what was happening. They have to move me, and it will probably be by plane. They won’t have room for the robots. They’ll have to come into fairly close contact with me. Janos is afraid that I’ll be able to control him and the others, and he thinks that my ability to manipulate people depends on my being able to see them—like a hypnotist.
He almost danced down the hallway as the robot led him out of the room. That’s Janos’s mistake! He thinks he’ll be safe as long as I can’t see him. How wrong he is!
Relief and a strange, bitter form of elation flooded Stoner. I don’t have to see him, I don’t have to touch him. Just let me get close enough to talk to the sonofabitch without an intercom system between us. Just let me into the same room with him and I’ll bend his brain into pretzels. I’ll twist his guts inside out. I’ll snap his bones, each and every one of them!
His star brother said nothing, but Stoner sensed the alien presence’s cool disapproval. Slowly, slowly as the robot led him carefully into an ancient elevator that wheezed and groaned as it descended and then out across a wide expanse that must have been the hotel’s lobby and finally through a creaking set of boards that served as a door and into the hot brightness of real sunlight—slowly Stoner’s exhilaration died away.
Patience, he told himself. Remember the story of the young bull and the old bull. He felt the touch of his star brother’s curiosity. Smiling inwardly, Stoner explained, The young bull sees a herd of cows grazing in the distance and says to the old bull, “I’m going to run over there and grab a cow for myself.” The old bull says, “Let’s walk calmly and get all of them.”
His star brother smiled back. Let Janos take us to his superiors. Then we will find out who is behind all this.
Yes, Stoner said. Let him take me to those who are responsible for Cathy’s murder. He saw his daughter’s body floating in the swimming pool again, saw her blood spreading across the lighted water. His elation turned to pain.
He was bundled into a car of some sort, probably a van from the way he had to climb up and slide into a padded bench. Not much light, despite the brilliantly sunny day. The van either had no windows in its rear or they had been painted over to conceal whoever sat in back. Couldn’t be a limousine, Stoner told himself. Even blindfolded he knew that.
No one said a word to him, but he sensed the presence of Ilona Lucacs sitting in front of him. Stoner remained silent, realizing that Ilona had indeed called Janos’s superiors as he had asked her to. Did Janos know that she had done this? Stoner sensed that he did, and he was furious with her.
Janos was not in this vehicle. Stoner made himself as comfortable as he could with his hands cuffed behind him as the van lurched and careened along the empty streets of Old Beirut. Soon they were on a highway, and within a quarter hour Stoner began to hear traffic noises. The shrill whine of a jet plane screeched overhead. They were approaching the airport.
Out to a big hangar they drove. Stoner heard an overhead door rattle shut behind them and, as they helped him out of the van, voices echoing inside the closed hangar. He smelled machine oil and the cold metallic tang of cryogenic piping and pumps that handled the liquid hydrogen used to fuel airplanes.
Standing in the midst of a small knot of people he counted six huddled around him, one of them Ilona, the others strangers. No robots. No Janos.
As he wondered what would happen next, the door clattered open again and another car drove in. Stoner sensed Janos, and then heard his voice speaking in English to the others. He felt an immense wave of relief. He wanted Janos with him.
They led him carefully up the aluminum ladder of a small transport plane and moved him back toward the rear. Without a word, the men who were guiding him pushed his head down slightly so he would not bump it on the narrowing ceiling panels. They went through a partition, sat him in a seat, and buckled a seat belt across his lap.
“Can’t you take off these handcuffs?” Stoner asked through his burlap hood. “It’s damned uncomfortable.”
The two men with him said nothing. They left him alone, closing the partition door behind them.
The plane
lurched into movement. Since the engines had not yet started, Stoner realized they were being towed to the runway. He heard voices through the flimsy partition, all of them speaking in English, although the accents told him none of the speakers were natives of the language.
That means they come from different countries, Stoner thought. Their native tongues differ, so they speak the international language: English. Which means that they’re not all Hungarian. Whoever Janos is working for, it’s not the president of Hungary anymore. Nor the Hungarian government.
Maybe it never was. The thought startled him.
Li-Po Hsen eased back in the sunken Japanese hot tub and allowed the nearly scalding water to cover him almost to his chin.
Of all the luxuries that one could have on the Moon, abundant water was still the most precious. The engineers could manufacture water out of oxygen from the lunar rocks and hydrogen from the solar wind, imbedded in the top few centimeters of the soil. But it took so much energy to harvest the hydrogen and to extract the oxygen that water was literally more expensive than titanium on the Moon.
Pacific Commerce had spaceport operations at each of the half-dozen bases on the Moon, no matter who owned the base itself. Hsen’s only competition in space transportation came from Vanguard Industries, and even at Vanguard’s facilities in Archimedes and elsewhere Pacific shared the transport franchise.
Hsen’s own private retreat on the Moon was at Pacific Commerce’s recreational facility at Hell, a twenty-mile-wide impact crater where Pacific had built a casino and posh tourist hotel that catered to mountain climbers and other kinds of gamblers.
It pleased Hsen that his safe retreat was in Hell, a crater named after a Jesuit astronomer, irony upon irony. He had built a modest home for himself there, deep underground, since he did not want to attract the attention of potential rivals and enemies. No one should suspect that the head of Pacific Commerce could live in comfort for as long as he wished on the Moon. Therefore his household staff was small, his quarters almost spartan when compared to his various homes on Earth.
The chambers were decorated in Japanese style, which seemed most appropriate for the setting. Spare, clean, the rooms almost empty of furniture. Except for the western conveniences such as a large, comfortable bed hidden behind wall panels. Instead of wood panelling and flooring, Hsen’s quarters used plastic manufactured on the Moon, textured and painted to resemble wood. It was not that a man of Hsen’s means could not afford to bring the necessary wood to the Moon; he used lunar plastic to avoid calling attention to a domicile he intended to keep secret.
Now he lay back in his steaming tub while two boyishly slim young women knelt at the tub’s edge, naked and silent, waiting to administer to whatever whim possessed their master.
But Hsen’s attention was focused on the screen of the telephone that had been placed on the floor at the edge of the sunken tub. Vic Tomasso’s face looked wary, evasive. The man was smiling, but his eyes were cold. Tomasso was in the tourist hotel built into Hell’s ringwall, above Hsen’s deeply-buried quarters.
“Please give me a direct answer,” Hsen said with the soft hiss of a dagger sliding out of its sheath. “Do you have the plan of Delphi base or do you not?”
“Not yet,” Tomasso said.
“You will be able to get it? You realize that the information you have given me so far concerning this so-called secret base is useless without some actual proof of its existence.”
“It’s there, all right,” Tomasso countered. “Hard to find, I know, but it’s there.”
“And the proof?”
“I can get it for you.”
“How soon?”
Tomasso’s eyes shifted away, then returned to Hsen’s gaze again. “I don’t like to be blunt, but—what’s in it for me?”
Hsen nodded once, slightly, a movement that dipped his chin into the steaming water. “A reasonable question. At the moment you are being followed by an operative from Ms. Camerata’s household—”
“What?”
Suppressing a smile of pleasure at the man’s surprise, Hsen replied, “One of the Italians from her personal staff followed you from the space station to your hotel.”
“I didn’t see…” Tomasso’s voice trailed off, his face went slightly pale.
“In payment for your information about Delphi—complete information about its location and layout—in return for that I will protect you from the bitch’s personal assassin.”
Tomasso licked his suddenly-dry lips and agreed to the bargain.
TOKYO
THE rioting had gone completely beyond all control. From the walls of the old imperial palace to the heart of the Ginza, hundreds of thousands of maddened Japanese battled the police, the army, each other. They howled and screamed. They threw stones and homemade fire bombs at the police, who crouched behind plastic riot shields as they were slowly forced to retreat. The tear gas that the police fired into the mob had no effect; there were simply too many people. Those who were gassed were trampled underfoot by those behind them.
Panic. Outright terror. The riot had started when a young woman had collapsed on the platform of a commuter train station, writhing and screaming in terrible agony. The Horror had struck once again.
But this time the others on the station platform made a mad rush for the exits. Fifty people were crushed to death in the panic. The terrified people spilled out into the streets of a heavily-trafficked shopping area, running blindly to escape the Horror.
Like an infectious agent of its own the panic swept the shopping area and spread onward at the speed of human sight and hearing. The Horror. The Horror is here! It is striking down people left and right. No one is safe. Run! Run!
It was the end of the working day, the time of the homeward-bound commuter rush, a time for catching a train or driving through the impossibly heavy traffic or just sitting down at a bar and trying to relax before going home or out to an evening’s entertainment. Millions were in the streets. The word of the Horror spread like a brush fire and the millions of individual men and women, in their business suits and flowered dresses and working clothes, all those myriad minds and bodies became a single ferocious terrified wild animal desperately trying to escape the Horror and not knowing which way to run.
Within minutes riot police began pouring out into the streets, helmets buckled tight, electric stun wands and tear gas grenades clipped on their equipment harnesses. The many-faced feral animal of the mob swarmed them under. More police came out to do battle, then the army. Someone fired into the crowd, live ammunition that killed and maimed hundreds, and still the mob howled and brawled, smashing windows now, overturning cars and buses, burning and breaking in their blind fear and fury.
The huge video screens that rose ten stories high on virtually every street corner in downtown Tokyo showed the rioters scenes of themselves, taken from news helicopters buzzing overhead like busy insects seeking the nectar of sensation. The enormously enlarged video scenes pollinated the riot, nourished the mindless animal below with electronic feedback. Downtown Tokyo began to burn fiercely while the news cameras recorded its funeral pyres.
Abruptly all the news cameras turned to a single saffron-robed figure who stepped out of a police helicopter that had touched down on the lawn in front of the old imperial palace. While the police officers watched wide-eyed from behind their bulletproof visors, the slim, almost frail, saffron-robed man calmly walked across the wooden bridge that arched over the ancient moat and entered the swirling, maddened mob of terrified people.
It was as if a powerful extinguisher had been played against a rampaging fire. As if calming oil had been poured on raging waters. The rioters stopped where they were, clothing torn, faces scratched, breathing labored. The man in the saffron robe looked at them, his head turning right and then left, and raised one hand in benediction.
The people sank to their knees. A single murmur spread through the crowd. “Varahamihara.” The huge video screens all around the city showed the
same scene and everywhere the rioters stopped and gaped in awe.
“Varahamihara. Varahamihara.”
The lama walked the whole distance from the palace to the Ginza, blessing all on his way. They dropped to their knees as he approached and watched with open-mouthed veneration as the Great Soul passed by them. When he moved too far to be seen they craned their necks to watch him on the video screens. He said nothing. He made no speech. He merely turned the terrifled mindless mob back into individual human beings, who—tattered, bleeding, shame-faced—made their individual ways back to their individual homes.
CHAPTER 29
FROM his solitary seat in the rear of the plane, the burlap hood still over his head, Stoner closed his eyes and probed cautiously for the minds of those who were sitting on the other side of the partition.
It was uncomfortable sitting with his wrists tightly cuffed behind him, but his star brother constantly massaged the muscles of his arms and hands with microbursts of nerve impulses so that the blood circulated properly despite his enforced cramped position. Stoner paid no conscious attention to these ministrations; he took them for granted. All his attention was concentrated on reaching out mentally to touch the faint tendrils of fields generated by other human brains, the barely-discernible energy that comes with thought.
The human brain generates about two-hundredths of a watt of electrical power, he told himself. It would take a thousand people to light a twenty-watt bulb. His star brother replied, But it is the complexity of the fields that the brain generates, not their power, that counts. Stoner silently acknowledged the truth of it.
He felt Ilona Lucacs’s presence, easy to detect because she wanted so desperately not to be alone. Janos was sitting beside her, separated by the aisle that ran down the middle of the compartment, separated from her by his own indifference and swelling cancerous ambition.
There were four others in the plane, plus the two pilots in the cockpit up front. Stoner thought about probing Janos’s mind; he was curious to find who the Hungarian was actually working for. A good deal of money was behind Janos’s research. Obviously the president of Hungary had been a cover, a straw man to hide the real source from view. But he feared alerting Janos, making him realize that this makeshift hood they had pulled over his face was not enough to protect him. So he did not probe Janos.