by Ron Goulart
She studied him. “I hope you don’t mind my saying this, Mr. Smith,” she said. “But your face doesn’t exactly inspire faith and confidence in me.”
“He’s trustworthy,” said Cruz.
“You I can believe in, Mr. Cruz. Therefore, I suppose if you vouch for him, then—”
An enormous explosion sounded outside, and the van shook and wobbled.
“Let’s save the character reference stuff,” said Smith. “We’ve arrived at our destination.”
* * * *
“…the scene here is one of mishap and calamity. The once proud and palatial resort that bloomed here amidst the harsh starkness of the mighty Red Desert, in the very shadow, as it were, of the planet-renowned Shrine, now stretches out before our unbelieving eyes, smoking ruin. Dedicated Qatzir Militiamen are locked in mortal combat with equally dedicated Mizayen Commandos amidst the pathetic pile that was once the majestic Oasis Dinner Theater and…”
From a weaponproof glaz booth up in the domed roof of the parked newsvan, Jazz was describing the battle going on in front of them. A robot camera was prowling outside, circling the fighting.
Smith was crouched, lifting a round panel in the van floor.
“You’ve still got to cover maybe ten yards in the open out there,” said Cruz.
“But not where they’re fighting.”
“The way these exuberant lads do battle, a stray shot from a kilrifle might—”
“The trapdoor to the underground hideaway ought to be directly beyond that hunk of wall yonder,” said Smith. “I’ll drop out, scoot over there and get below to Ruiz.”
“May well be that everybody in that underground nook is dead and done for, old chum.”
“Place is supposed to be fortified, according to Rocky Jordan.”
“Well, okay.” Shrugging one shoulder, Cruz went back to the driveseat. “Good luck.”
Nodding once, Smith dropped down to the broken ground beneath the newsvan.
Smith raised a swirl of dust when he hit. Since he only had about three feet of clearance under the van, he had to belly along over the rubble.
When he reached the nose of the vehicle, he took a cautious look out from under.
Some three hundred yards to the left two dozen commandos were strung out, firing at the Oasis casino. Their kilrifles sizzled and crackled in the desert air.
Part of the front wall of the plaz and glaz casino suddenly came exploding out. Besides thousands of glittering shards, hundreds of playing cards fluttered and scattered across the rutted courtyard.
Smith turned his attention on his destination. The trapdoor entrance he wanted was just on the other side of the rear wall of what had been the cocktail lounge’s storeroom. The fighting made Smith’s task easier in one sense—he wouldn’t have to break into the place. All he had to do was jump over the remainder of the wall, which was less than four feet high.
He waited, watching and listening. Then he eased out into the open and rose to a crouch. The two opposing factions, intent on wiping each other out, didn’t notice him.
Smith sprinted. He vaulted the brix wall, landing with one booted foot in a tumbled crate of shattered sparkling water flasks. He slipped and slid into a fallen servobot.
“…name your poison,” gurgled the sprawled mechanism.
Rubbing at his knee, which had bonked against the robot’s elbow, Smith edged over to the spot where the hidden door was supposed to be. The freezer that had masked it was splintered in half, its contents, fruitballs and rainbow ices, melting into a colorful slush on the floor.
“Here we are.” Spotting the handle, Smith cleared aside debris and rainbow slurp and took hold of it.
He yanked, hard, and the trapdoor came silently open. A curving ramp led down to the hidden level below.
Smith stepped onto it and descended. When he closed the door behind him, all the furor of the battle died away.
CHAPTER 14
The six-armed green guard held five pistols, all aimed at Smith. With his sixth hand he was wiping at his tearful eyes with a plyochief. “Come no farther, pal,” he advised.
Recognizing the green man, Smith said, “How long’ve you been working here, Sadsack?”
Lowering his plyochief and shifting his grip on his three kilguns, one lazgun and one stungun, Sadsack Swingle eyed him. “Jared Smith…what brings you to this cesspool of iniquity?”
“Paying a call on an old school chum.”
“Fine day you picked,” said Swingle in his mournful voice. “Bands of crazed zealots clashing up above our very heads. This once proud resort complex a smoldering ruin and the pollen count the highest it’s been in weeks. You maybe don’t think there’s much pollen in the desert, but the damn winds across the—”
“Looking for Oscar Ruiz.”
“That sourpuss.” Swingle shook his head. “You know what really gets my grout is a guy who’s all the time complaining. Granted living down here is about three steps worse than residing in a sewer, but even so there’s no reason to—”
“Ruiz is still around?”
“Where could the poor sap go? They’d hunt him like a snerg if he ever fled the sanctuary of—”
“Where cant find him?”
Gesturing with the hand that held the stungun, Swingle said, “Down that corridor on the left. Geeze, they’ve got a lousy aircirc system in that one. Instead of filtering out gunk, it sucks in pollen, spores—”
“You given up your career?”
“I had to,” answered the green guard. “When you knew me during your law enforcement days I was struggling to be a successful shoplifter. You’d figure a guy with six arms’d be a natural for that line of work, but I was always the most obvious suspect. I tried to work as a blackjack dealer for Rocky Jordan for a spell, but the customers were always getting the idea I had a card up my sleeve. Basically, it’s a mean old world to—”
“I’ll drop in on Ruiz.”
“He’ll squawk. That guy can complain about company or—”
“He won’t mind seeing an old friend.” Grinning, Smith headed along the corridor with the defective aircirc system.
* * * *
Smith said, “There’s not much upstairs anymore.”
Oscar Ruiz said, “So? This setup is self-contained. Two hundred people can live down here indefinitely.”
He was a middlesized humanoid of thirty, moderately overweight.
“Consider, then, this aspect of your situation.” Smith, arms folded, leaned against a yellow wall of the underground suite’s living room. “If I found you, others will.”
“Hooey,” commented Ruiz from his plaz rocker. “You’re better at this sort of thing than most, Jared. It’s one of your few real talents, hunting hapless people.”
“Guys with a hundred thousand trubux don’t qualify as hapless.”
“Listen, you think it’s fun being a fugitive? Or cheap? If I didn’t have my religious faith to sustain—”
“Oscar, it isn’t just your chagrined former bosses who’re concerned over your present whereabouts,” Smith said. “I was hired by people who are interested in you for entirely different reasons.”
“So you claim. I’ve heard, though, that you’ve been on the skids since Jenny came to her senses and ditched you.” Ruiz was ticking slowly back and forth. “For all I know, you’ve reached such a low peak in your seedy career that you’d even hire out to those bastards at the casin—”
“We weren’t especially close at Horizon House, but—”
“You were a loner, didn’t make many friends. Except for Jenny, and I was pretty sure you only played up to her so her father, Doctor Westerland, would give you extra little—”
“Oscar, I have to get you out of here quick.” Smith moved closer to him. “Before my mode of transportation gets blown up. Gather up your loot and we’ll depart.”
“No, I’m not interested in decamping. You haven’t even really explained why I should risk—”
“Okay, there’s one gro
up that wants to get you, find out what you know and then kill you,” said Smith evenly. “The Trinidad Law Bureau wants you, too, but I’m not sure if they just mean to detain you or maybe knock you off. Myself, I was hired to bring you back to Horizon House.”
“Horizon House? Why the hell would anybody want—”
“Our client claims it’s for a reunion, but—”
“Jared, you must be goofy. You think I’d risk my neck, not to mention my hard-earned—”
“I didn’t say our client was being completely honest. The truth is you know part of an important secret.”
Ruiz blinked. “This doesn’t make any—”
“I don’t know what the secret is,” Smith told him, “and neither do you. It was planted in your sconce, by way of electrohypnosis, by Westerland. Ten Horizon Kids were used.”
Slowly Ruiz got to his feet. “What’s this client of yours willing to pay me for my part of whatever the hell this is?”
“That you’ll have to negotiate.”
“You weren’t supposed to tell me this part of it, were you, Jared? They’re going to be—”
“I’m telling you so you’ll realize how important it is to get your ass out of here.” Impatience was showing in Smith’s voice. “The other lads who want you are much less cordial than I am. When they caught up with Hal Larzon they gathered in his piece of the secret, then killed him.”
“Hal? But he and I were pretty close at Horizon House. Not big buddies, but we got along well and. he’s dead?”
“Yep, and that could happen to you, Oscar.”
“Suppose I come with you…how do you keep me any safer than—”
“I’ve got a couple places in mind to stash you,” Smith answered before the question was finished. “I’ll get you to one of them.”
“Doesn’t your client want me back as soon as—”
“Since our client hasn’t been completely open,” said Smith, “I’m using my own judgment until I have more details. The important thing is to keep you, and the other missing Horizon Kids, alive.”
“You sound like you really mean what—”
“Pack.”
Ruiz took a few deep breaths, glanced around the yellow room. “I never much liked you back then, but you weren’t a liar or a conman.”
“I’m not now. Let’s move.”
“All right, okay.” Ruiz headed for the door to the bedchamber. “I’ll get my gear.”
Then the living room door hissed open. “You’re not bad,” said Deac Constiner from the threshold. “You found this damn nitwit even quicker than I did.” He showed Smith the kilgun in his leathery right hand.
CHAPTER 15
Ruiz made a gulping sound. “Listen, Constiner,” he said, stopped still on the thermocarpet, “I haven’t actually committed any crime. What I mean is, taking money from a crook like MacQuarrie, a gambler who fleeced poor—”
“Oscar, Oscar,” said the Trinidad Law Bureau agent, “I don’t give a snerg’s ass about your halfwit dipping into that casino’s petty cash.”
“As I already mentioned,” reminded Smith.
“Nope, I want you for entirely different reasons,” said Constiner. He tugged a stungun from beneath his tunic with his left hand. “You, Smith, I don’t need, and so—”
“Are you the one, Deac, who caught up with Hal Larzon?”
Snorting, the lawman said, “Don’t talk like a schmuck. I don’t work that way and neither do you.”
Smith said, “If you want Larzon’s piece of the puzzle, you’ve got to find the folks who bumped him off.”
“I’ll tell you, Smith, this whole frumus is getting to be a pain in the toke,” admitted Constiner. “It was already too cute going in and it keeps getting trickier and trickier.”
“TLB figures the secret belongs to them and not to Westerland’s next of kin?”
“Westerland worked for the three-planet government when he cooked this particular notion up,” he replied. “All we’re talking about is a simple legal point here. Any invention you come up with while working for somebody is naturally the employer’s. Fact is, I’m the only one in this whole mess who has any real right to—”
“Jennifer Westerland doesn’t agree with—”
“Aren’t you cured of that broad yet? Don’t tell me you still believe the crap she—”
“What about me?” intruded Ruiz. “You two are squabbling and cutting up touches while I’m suffering a hell of a lot of anxiety and discom—”
“You’re coming with me,” Constiner explained, “and Smith’s going to stay here.” He aimed the stun-gun at Smith.
Zzzzzzummmmmm!
It was Constiner who stiffened and then fell to the floor.
“Forgive me, one and all.” Smiling, Cruz appeared in the doorway where the TLB lawman had been. “I find I sometimes can’t resist these melodramatic entrances.”
“Allowable under the circumstances,” said Smith, stooping to take both guns away from the fallen man.
Ruiz’ breath came sighing out. “I take it this guy’s on your side, Jared?”
“He is. Cruz, Oscar Ruiz.”
Cruz gave him a lazy salute with his metal hand. “Reason I dropped down was to urge one and all to speed things up. The battle is spilling ever closer to our position.”
Smith told Ruiz, “Grab your stuff.”
“Violence,” muttered Ruiz, trotting into his bedchamber, “my whole damn life has been ringed with violence.”
CHAPTER 16
Jack Saint frowned and his broad green nose wrinkled. He rose from his seat in the nearly empty shuttle ship, extracted his orange display handkerchief from his pocket and dusted the cracked plaz cushion he’d been sitting upon. He squinted down at it disapprovingly, then dusted it once again.
“You can’t get rid of the snull,” said a middle-aged catwoman two seats behind him.
“Beg pardon?”
“Oh, my.” She raised up a paw, gave herself a nudge in the temple. “The smell, I meant to say. You probably haven’t guessed it yet, but I happen to be a still.”
“A what, Madam?”
“Darn, did it again.” Another fist to her head. “Shill. See, I’m not actually a catwoman. I’m a cleverly contrived simulacrum. I’m an andy.”
“I’d already suspected that,” Saint informed her. “Principally from the smell of burning wiring you give off, but also from the small pool of machine oil that’s leaked out of your left foot since our shuttle lifted off from Zegundo some minutes ago.”
“Yes, it’s embarrassing at times to be less than perfect.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“All of us aboard, except for yourself, are androids and robots.”
“Why is that, dear lady?” Saint, very gingerly, lowered his buttocks back down on the seat.
“Oh, it’s rather shameful in a way. We’re here to foot…um…I mean, fool the poor gullible public,” she answered, brushing at a thin swirl of bluish smoke that was commencing to spiral out of one furry ear. “Fact of the matter is, I wonder why you’re making this journey to our satellite.”
“Ah, it’s because I’m a dyed-in-the-neowool robot buff.” Saint smiled over his shoulder at her. “I long ago made a pledge to myself that some fine day I’d hop on a shuttle to visit the Museum of Robotics History that orbits this fair planet.”
“I hope you won’t think me disloyal if I mention that you’re wasting your dough, sir.”
“How so, my dear?”
“The place is quite rundown,” she confided. “Mostly, though I hesitate mentioning it, mostly because of Professor Bunny’s peccadillos.”
“That would be Professor Montague R. Bunny, the esteemed electronics historian?”
“He’s not all that esteemed anymore,” she said. “And don’t you feel, by the way, that it’s a little late, when a man is pushing sixty-six, to go through midlife crisis?”
“We none of us know when our final moment will come.” Saint elevated his backside, giving t
he seat another swipe with his handkerchief. “If, for instance, Professor Bunny lives to be one hundred and thirty-two, then—”
“He won’t make it to sixty-seven if he continues to pursue nubile maidens with the zeal and brio he’s been exhibiting the past few years.”
“Perhaps it’s difficult for you, being a mechanism,” observed Saint, “to comprehend how deuced distracting the urges of the flesh can be.”
“Having oil leaking out of your darn foot is no bed of meeches either. If the professor wasn’t so neglectful I could hold up my head and—”
Karump! Whamp! Kabump!
The shuttle had docked, none too smoothly, in the landing bay of the orbiting museum.
Saint left his seat, then bent gracefully to fetch his sewdohyde attaché case from beneath it. The case had acquired an unsightly gob of gum on its underside. “Aren’t you disembarking?” he inquired of the imitation catwoman while disdainfully plucking the wad of greenish stuff off the case with a plyochief.
“Oh, no, I just ride this thing back and forth all the live-long day. That’s what a shull…shill does, you know.”
“One’s heart goes out to you.” Bowing politely, Saint went striding along the corridor and out of the shuttle.
There was only what appeared to be a slim blonde young woman on the vast welcoming platform. Head tilted a bit forward, eyes slightly narrowed, she was watching his approach. “I’m sorry, but would you be Mr. Saint?”
He considered the question as he scrutinized her.
“Why do you ask, my child?”
The blonde blushed, looking down at herself. “Am I unzipped, unseamed, unbuttoned or something? You’re staring at my body as though—”
“I was marveling at your believability,” he explained. “Yes, you’re a much better work than those rather forlorn androids aboard the—”
“Oh, hey, heck. I’m not a robot or an andy. I’m Jazz Miller and Mr. Smith sent me down to fetch you and escort you up to him, Mr. Saint,” Jazz said, smiling. “Actually, he would’ve come himself, but I felt that since I’m tagging along on this venture, for reasons of my own that we can go into later if you’re at all interested, I ought to earn my keep.”