Dr. Adder

by Jeter, K W

  Endpoint tossed the canvas bag holding his skin-diver suit into a closet. “This way,” he said, opening a door onto a small bathroom. He turned on the taps over the tub, pulled out towels and a robe from a cupboard. “Try to be quiet, won’t you?” he said. “Everybody’s asleep, you know.”

  Limmit waited a few minutes after Endpoint had left, steam rising from the water gurgling into the tub. He cautiously opened the bathroom door and looked around. No one. He stepped forward quietly through the kitchenette and into the little entranceway. He turned the front door’s handle experimentally—locked. Someone cleared his throat behind Limmit, and he spun around to see Endpoint standing in the doorway of the kitchenette, leveling a minuscule pistol at him.

  “The shot must’ve worn oflF,” said Endpoint. He had changed into striped pajamas. “I hoped you were going to be reasonable about this whole thing.”

  “I wanted to be on my way again,” said Limmit sullenly. “Before I lost too much time.”

  “Come on, son. What’s a couple of days? Is that too much to ask, to make a bunch of old men happy? Besides, that’s lot less time than you’ll lose if I have to shoot you in the leg, or if we have to track you down again.” He laid the gun down on a counter and wrapped a paternal arm around Limmit. “You might as well face it, my boy,” he said genially, “you’re stuck with being our prodigal son for a little while. Realizing your responsibilities is part of growing up. Afterward, you can go back to what you were doing down in the sewers.”

  “All right,” said Limmit. The compulsion to flee, to descend back into the warm, dark world of the sewers, ebbed from him as quickly as it had struck. I guess I can use the rest, he thought. “Bring on the fatted calf.”

  After the bath, Endpoint escorted him to another door. He pushed it open, revealing a small room with two beds. In the dark, a figure lay on one beneath a blanket, sleeping. “My son Edgar,” said Endpoint, pointing to the occupied bed. “Our older boy ... left, you know. You can use his bed while you’re with us.” Limmit felt a momentary twinge of pity for the older man. “And in the morning,” Endpoint continued, “don’t tell him anything about why you’re really here. My wife and son don’t know about the SPS—I told them before I left I’d be bringing back the son of a friend of mine for a visit.” He hesitated for a moment, as if he were going to say something more, but instead stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him.

  In the room’s still darkness, Limmit shed the bathrobe and slipped beneath the empty bed’s covers, luxuriating for a moment in their softness. I haven’t slept in a clean bed since I left Phoenix, he reflected. There’s something to say for the bourgeoisie.

  He heard the figure in the other bed roll over and switch on the lamp standing on the table between the two beds. The light revealed a small-boned, narrow-faced teenager sitting up and smirking at him. “How does it feel,” the youth asked, “to be the prodigal son?”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to know about that,” said Limmit. What next? he said to himself. Everybody out here seems to have hidden sides except me. The Secretless Man.

  “My mother might be fooled with that ‘vacation’ crap my father hands us,” said the teenager Edgar. “But that’s only because she’s swacked out on tranks and TV all the time. What the hell kind of a vacation trip can you disappear for a month on, in Orange County? Camp out in some other complex’s recreation center? Fuck that—all my friends know about their fathers and their little SPS.”

  “Yeah?” said Limmit. His eyes closed involuntarily, then flicked open again. “Is what your dad says about it on the level?” “Ohh,” said Edgar craftily, “maybe it is. Maybe I know something, though, about it that most people don’t.”

  Disturbing. “Like what?” asked Limmit. He snapped his nodding head erect.

  Edgar shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, whatever your name is. Maybe I’ll tell you later.” He reached up and switched off the light. “School day tomorrow,” came his voice in the darkness. “Lots of business to take care of.”

  Limmit didn’t hear, having already fallen asleep.

  He watched himself in the bathroom mirror, peeling the bandage from the side of his face. There was no blood underneath, only a few fading pink lines. My face, thought Limmit. He grasped the corners of the sink and leaned closer to the mirror to inspect it. A mirror’s another thing I haven’t seen since Phoenix. He had caught glimpses of himself, distorted and somehow alien, in the storefront windows of the Interface and the grime-coated windowpanes of Rattown. But now he saw that not even the trek along the Sump Line had done anything to him. Had not made his face as narrow and sharp as it had appeared in L.A.’s reflecting surfaces. Splashing cold water against the skin, he felt, in an indefinable way, disappointed.

  In the kitchenette, the Endpoint family was grouped around three sides of the room’s central table. Between Edgar and his father, a middle-aged woman in a bright floral robe sat smiling vacantly. As Limmit sat down in the empty chair on the table’s fourth side, the elder Endpoint said, “Good morning,” and Edgar mumbled something around a mouthful of food; the woman said nothing. Something about her face disturbed him —he tried to study it unobtrusively as Endpoint placed items on the plate in front of him.

  A connection within his memory completed itself. Suddenly he knew of what the woman’s face reminded him. When his mother had died, the egg ranch’s resident mortician had filled out the corpse’s sagging, dissipated facial flesh with injected plastics. Limmit, ten years old, from simple curiosity had prodded with one finger the sleeping face in the coffin—she had looked younger than he could remember having seen her. Her pink cheeks had been as stiff and rigid to the touch as the hardened plastics beneath the skin. Now, he felt that if he were to lean across the breakfast table and feel Mrs. Endpoint’s face, it would be the same.

  “You’ll have to excuse my wife,” said Endpoint stiffly, noticing Limmit’s fascinated stare. “She’s not very talkative in the morning.” He jogged her elbow and she dreamily raised a forkful to her mouth, all the while looking through space at nothing.

  Limmit broke away his gaze and looked down at his plate. A waffle and several sausagelike cylinders lay on it. After a bite of each, he recognized them as processed egg from the Phoenix ranch.

  “After I get off work today,” continued Endpoint, “I’ll start showing you around. Maybe you can watch TV with Muffy, Mrs. Endpoint that is, until I get home.”

  “Hey,” said Edgar, grinning up from his plate. “Why not let him come with me to old Buena Maricone High this morning? You know, sort of take him around, make him feel at home in Orange County.” He winked at Limmit, who had told him further details a few minutes earlier about the SPS’s adoption decision.

  “That’s not a bad suggestion,” said Endpoint thoughtfully. He turned to Limmit. “I’ll give you a note for the principal. He’s a ... friend of mine.” Edgar snickered but was ignored. “He’ll give you permission to sit in on Edgar’s classes. How about it?”

  Limmit shrugged. “All right with me,” he mumbled around a mouthful of ersatz waffle. He took another quick look at Mrs. Endpoint, still smiling at the wall behind him.

  After Edgar had loaned him some of his clothes, Limmit descended with him to the complex’s parking area. From the multicolored rows of vehicles, Edgar selected what appeared to be a streamlined armored tank with windows. It was painted fluorescent blood-red. Limmit was driven back into its plush black imitation leather by the accelerating G-forces as Edgar careened down the parking area’s ramps and sprang without looking into the thick of the morning traffic emerging from the residential complexes.

  Edgar patted the vehicle’s dash as he maneuvered it through the traffic. “What a machine,” he said with fierce pride. “Paid for it all myself, too. Expensive as shit.”

  “Where’d you get the money?” asked Limmit, unnerved by the near-collisions as they sped along.

  “Where else?” laughed Edgar. “Peddling goodies.” He
did not elaborate.

  Once beneath Buena Maricone High School’s single, all-encompassing roof, after Edgar had found a spot in the school’s enormous parking lot and a bored entrance guard had directed Limmit to the administrative office concerned with the note Endpoint had given him, Edgar led him to the school’s main hallway. For a moment Limmit felt, as he looked around the windowless expanse, that he was back in one of the Sump Line’s tunnels, only lined with vending machines and milling teenagers. “Some cavern, huh?” said Edgar, pushing his way through the crowd. He finally took a position by one wall, between a vending machine that spelled out EGGOBARS on its front and another that said ERGOTONE. “Just wait,” said Edgar, propping one foot against the wall.

  Gradually, one after another, Edgar’s classmates approached him, staring suspiciously for a few seconds at Limmit by his side. Edgar and his customer would exchange a few whispers, then a wad of money would be passed to Edgar in exchange for a thickly padded manila envelope Edgar pulled out of his pocket from a seemingly infinite supply. Limmit watched silently as the clot of bills in Edgar’s hip pocket grew steadily larger.

  “Who’s your friend?” asked one girl as she handed Edgar her money. She eyed him speculatively, the same bruise-purplish makeup surrounding her eyes and the nipple of one exposed, barely pubescent breast. Limmit smiled wanly back at her; he had noticed that half the girls in the crowd were like this one, and the others like Mrs. Endpoint, dazed and rigid. The latter had only drifted by in front of them, not stopped.

  “Don’t you know?” said Edgar. “He’s the prodigal son, he is.” “Really?” said the girl. She ran a forefinger lightly up the fly of Limmit’s pants. “Welcome home.” She merged back into the crowd and disappeared.

  “Just what is it you’re selling?” asked Limmit finally, after seeing several more rapid transactions.

  Edgar looked out over the throng of students. “I used to sell dope,” he said. “But there’s no money in that. Any kid can get all the downers he wants from his parents’ medicine chest. And stuff like bovaine and kainine only make it in L.A., you know? The right atmosphere. Who ever heard of an Orange County cowhead? So now I sell ’em this.” He pulled out an envelope like the others and handed it to Limmit.

  Limmit tore it open and unfolded the contents, a sheaf of odd, slick-feeling paper. The top sheet was a photo of Dr. Adder mounting his motorcycle, obviously taken without his knowledge by a telephoto lens. Limmit leafed through the other sheets. Most of them were photos, either of Adder taken unaware, or posed shots of the various Interface hookers who had undergone his services. The results of the operations and the amateurish snake’s-head tattoos the hookers had added themselves were prominently featured. The few remaining sheets were interviews of the whores or other Interface denizens, describing their impressions or relating anecdotes of Adder. Limmit folded the sheets and placed them back in the envelope. “You mean to tell me,” he said, “that there’s a market for this stuff?”

  Edgar nodded. “It’s printed on a special paper. Goes blank in a week. Also you can’t photostat or Xerox it—the reflective surface just flares out. I’m the only source.”

  “Where do you get them? I mean, you can’t just go up to L.A. yourself and take them.”

  A shake of the head. “A fellow up there prepares ’em, and then meets me at a prearranged point in the Sump Line below. I pick up the envelopes, and then later give him his percentage of the haul.”

  “What’s this guy’s name?”

  “He said Droit.”

  Limmit nodded to himself. Another of the ubiquitous social researcher’s sidelines; putting his “research” to good use. “And people are that interested here in Adder?”

  “The kids are,” said Edgar. “Every week, I sell as many as I’ve got. It’s like, you know, an act of devotion. You can’t split for L.A. until you’re eighteen, otherwise the police usually intercept you at the county limits and haul you back. So these little bulletins kind of keep the flames alive.”

  “You’re not a pusher,” said Limmit, laughing harshly. “You’re a fuckin’ evangelist.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Listen,” said Limmit. “Don’t you get any news here? Didn’t you hear of a little raid on the Interface by Mox’s MFers?” “Sure,” said Edgar. “But Adder escaped. Naturally. The official word may be that he’s dead, but he’s alive, running the Siege Front. Otherwise, would I still be getting these from Droit?” He waved the manila envelope.

  It dawned on Limmit. That fuckin’ Droit is sending out old pictures of Adder, and the kids in Orange County aren’t able to tell the difference. The myth lived on. Limmit snorted in derision. “I could tell you something about your beloved invincible Dr. Adder.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  Limmit smiled at him. “Oh, nothing. Don’t worry about it.” He paused for a moment to watch Edgar’s face as he comprehended the situation. “Sure you don’t want to tell me more about the SPS?”

  The youth turned away, irritated. “Forget it,” he said. “What could you know about Adder?” The crowd had thinned out in response to the officious clanging of bells several minutes ago and no more customers had approached while they had been talking. “Come on,” said Edgar, pushing himself away from the wall. “I usually don’t bother with my English class, but you might get a laugh out of it.”

  The class had already begun when they entered the room.

  Thirty or so students of Edgar’s age sat around, idly talking with each other, inspecting the contents of the envelopes Edgar had just sold them, and a few were watching in a bored manner the large television screen suspended in one corner of the room. Several of the numb-faced girls sat near the walls, as if stored there.

  Edgar led him to a pair of vacant desks by one group of conversationalists. Limmit grew bored with their talk, mostly low exclamations of delight over the photos of Adder and the whores, and turned his attention to the television. On the screen, two men were sitting behind a desk, the front of which was lettered SCIENCE FICTION IN THE CLASSROOM—AN AUDIOVISUAL APPROACH.

  Speaking to the television camera was a young man, well groomed and game-show oily. The other man was short and appeared somehow incredibly ancient despite his smooth skin. He looked as if his body had been drained of its contents, refilled with paraffin, and restored to life. Like Mrs. Endpoint and the high school’s vacant-faced girls, but with a difference —there still seemed to be a spark of something unextinguished behind the figure’s eyes. A shock of white hair hung over what must have once been a living face a long time ago. Now the man sat listlessly, his face slack, the eyes staring unfocused out of camera range.

  “... all of which,” the young man on the screen was saying, a dynamic salesman of education, “insured Lars Kyrie’s position in American letters, and qualified him for special preservative treatment from the Board of Education’s Bio-Archive Section.”

  Limmit started, and leaned forward to peer closer at the screen. So that’s Lars Kyrie! He had assumed from the tattered and yellowing condition of the ancient paperback books bearing his name as author that Kyrie was long since dead.

  “You will find,” the young man continued, “one of Lars Kyrie’s disturbing science fiction stories on page fifty-eight of your text.” Limmit looked around and saw a thick volume lying on the floor by his seat. He picked it up and looked at the title. Augurs of Utopia: A Basic Reading Text for Science Fiction in the Classroom. Still listening to the young man’s voice, he quickly leafed through the book, noting familiar titles and names from his own abandoned collection back in Phoenix.

  Each story in the book was surrounded by a lengthy introduction and questions for the student. Limmit closed the book and nudged Edgar in the ribs. The boy broke off his conversation and turned to face him. “What is this, anyway?” asked Limmit, nodding sideways to indicate the television.

  Edgar shrugged, disinterested. “The educational channel. For lit classes they haul out these ol
d hacks they’ve got on ice and have ’em talk about their books. This semester we’ve been doing whatchacallit, um ... science fiction.” He turned back to his friends.

  Limmit poked him again. “Aren’t you interested?” he asked. “That’s Lars Kyrie up there.”

  “So?” said Edgar, sneering. “If he’s such dangerous shit, how come they want me to study him?” He turned away again.

  On the screen, the young man’s handsome face was in profile as he spoke to the older and shorter man. “Good morning, Mr. Kyrie,” he said. “We’re honored to have you with us today.” The author’s face did not change, but continued to stare vacantly off to one side. “Mr. Kyrie?” he repeated. There was no response. Without looking, the young man depressed some buttons on the desk before him, hidden by the camera’s angle.

  Instantly, the figure of Lars Kyrie jerked spasmodically, the eyes flaring wide, as if a surge of electricity had been sent through his body. The old writer looked around in dazed panic. The young man patted Kyrie’s hand soothingly. “There, there. Don’t be alarmed, sir. We’re here to talk about your writing, remember?”

  The aged head nodded slowly, the eyes like those of a cornered animal.

  “Now then,” the young man said briskly. “As one of society’s most eloquent warning voices of a few decades ago, when you were still writing, how do you feel about the present-day society that you have lived to see?”

  The old man licked his dry, flaking lips and fidgeted, as if trying to remember something. His interviewer’s hand hovered warningly over the hidden buttons. “It’s wonderful,” Kyrie hazarded quickly. “Uhh ... I’m sincerely grateful that America has truly taken the wuh-warnings of my juh-generation of science fiction writers to heart in buh-building—” He broke off, blinking at the camera.

  “Yes?” prompted the young man. “In building what, sir?” He flicked lightly one of the buttons, resulting in a shivering flinch on Kyrie’s part.