Stalking the Nightmare Part 19

On that day, when Rondell had been a tall boy--even for that age--when the Professor had looked at him across dwarf-grapefruit and a flowering napkin under the fat man's chin, the thing had begun in earnest.

"Good breakfast, boy?"

"Um," Rondell managed to mumble around a chunk of grapefruit.

"Do you want to make me happy, Rondell? Would you like to do me a favor?" He posed the questions lightly, almost airily, and the boy smiled, the grin denting dimples in his cheeks.

The fat man pulled the napkin from under his chin, settled back in his chair which slid a few inches away from the breakfast table on its rods to allow for the extra bulk, and began twining his fingers.

He wheezed a long breath of contemplation, gazed at the far upper comer of the gigantic dining room (a room that said wealth, then said it again, never quite subsiding into silence, but offering and re-offering the evidence of it), and cleared his throat.

He clearly enunciated: "Do you know the lady we visited last night?" He spoke with an elaborate simplicity.

His tones and manner were directed with exaggerated evenness, even for a child of twelve. He spoke as though it were the most important thing he had ever said; he wanted the boy to miss no part of it.

"Yes, I remember," Rondell said, without fully waiting to think whether he remembered or not.

The Professor was careful. "No, I mean do you really remember? Do you remember the beautiful red jewel she wore in her forehead?"

The boy considered for a moment, then nodded quickly. He recalled the flash of the jewel as it had glowed like a third eye in the center of his hostess's forehead.

"Well, Rondell, that was the Lady Cindy of Upper Pittsburg, and I want you to get me that jewel."

It had been let out at last. Now Rondell began to realize why he had been taught such things as walking catlike on the b.a.l.l.s of the feet, how to dress to blend with his surroundings, how to scale a gla.s.s-smooth wall, how to use a vibroblade and a disruptor. The Professor was a clever man, and this had been a clever plan. Step by step, taking time and caution, it had come to this, and the boy was ready.

When she returned from the orgy at Prinzmetal's, with a used and exhausted body and a head filled with thoughts only of endless sleep, the Lady Cindy of Upper Pittsburg was shocked to find a hooded, completely black-garbed man of indeterminate age curled up comfortably on the balcony outside her cas.e.m.e.nt. Idly running his skin-gloved fingers down the barrel of a disruptor. Her amazement was doubled as he commanded in a youthful, shaking voice, "Open your wall vault. The lock is located in the upper right k.n.o.b of your bedpost. I want your ruby."

Her eyes widened, and then she realized it must be a joke. No one stole these days. Not for a long time had anyone stolen anything. Not with the government cornucopias so available. Why, that was where she had gotten the ruby originally.

She shrugged out of her radium-dyed heliotrope mink stole, letting it fall to the deep pile rug, and answered, "I have no idea how you got there, my good lad, but I suggest you leave at once!" Her accent was a queer half-snort, half-haughty command, the product of unauthorized interbreeding.

Then her eyes drew down, and her lashes fluttered. "On the other hand... if you want to stop this foolishness about my ruby, you can come in, and we can have a drink and..."

Her eyes wandered to the deep foam-pile bed.

That was the first time Rondell glimpsed the utter decay of his world... without fully realizing what it meant.

Her body was encased in a tight silkene sheath that more set off her physical attributes than hid them. She strained against the sheath, and a fire of excitement and challenge burned in her heliotrope eyes--dyed to match her mink.

Rondell had been too young, but even so... something had made him uneasy inside. "I'm not fooling..." His voice was slightly unsure, unsteady; his first job. "... I want that ruby. Now!" The Lady Cindy of Pittsburg had a sudden realization: this--it had to be--boy was not here for her erotic pleasure at all. Nothing of the sort. It was not a joke. Her eyes widened incredulously.

"Well! I--I--am I to take it that this is a--a--" she struggled with a nearly-forgotten word, "--a robbery?"

The boy nodded his head, and through the eye-slits she could see a confused desperation in his eyes.

"But--but why? You can get one just as good--though I confess, not better--from the cornucopia. You have a Key, haven't you? There's no need for you to take it from me. I get such pleasure from it. Why?" She was now flinging her arms about in exaggerated bewilderment, her voice rising.

The thief seemed unnerved by her reactions. "Stop that! Stop screaming!" But she did not, and he leaped agilely through the window, brandis.h.i.+ng the disruptor.

"The vault. The vault. Get the ruby for me or I'll kill you." There was a hardness in his youthful voice thattold her she was faced by a boy not quite a boy, but much more.

She turned, and looking over her shoulder at the thief, walked slowly to the bed. Reluctantly she twisted the ornate ball atop one bedpost. The ball split in the center, revealing a voice-control sphere. She spoke into it softly, and watched with creases lining her forehead as a portion of the wall slid up to reveal an elaborate set of bureau drawers.

It was not hiding the jewels from the world, protecting them, but merely an evidence of possession, a feeling of I know where they are, but no one else does. Old habits die hard.

Now the boy stepped forward nimbly, began to open the jewel drawers. Abruptly, the Lady Cindy decided something she had been pondering for several minutes.

She was not going to be robbed by this uncertain child.

She moved back to the voice-control sphere, quietly.

Before she could whisper the words that would lower the plasteel wall, sealing the thief into the airtight vault, Rondell turned and saw her. "Stop!"

The Lady Cindy's words were half out of her mouth when the boy pressed the disruptor stud. His face, under the hood, went sick and white as he saw the result. The Lady Cindy soundlessly exploded into a million fragments...

The boy ripped the mask from his face, and leaned against the bedpost. He became violently ill, vomiting agonizingly at what he had done. The Professor had never been graphically explicit about what a disruptor would do.

Block-targets were not blonde, statuesque women. The Professor had merely said it would stop opposition. It certainly did.

When the sickness pa.s.sed, keeping his eyes from what ran on the walls, he found the ruby, slid it into his seal-pouch, and left by the window as he had come.

The Professor received the ruby with grat.i.tude.

"Excellent, my boy. Excellent. What's that? Dead? Oh, well, I'm sure these things happen. Now, for your next a.s.signment..."

The years of running, the years of programmed destiny had begun.

Rondell's memories collapsed inward violently. He was in the present, and the Lady Cindy of Upper Pittsburg was many years dead. He was sitting in the Professor's office in the casino where he had spent nineteen years of his life. He was holding a disruptor on the man who had first taught him to kill. The ruby, too, was long-since gone.

Poured down some invisible drain, no benefit gained from the theft, nothing bettered by killing an innocent woman.

Nothing derived from it all, but that Rondell had taken the first step in a life comprised of senseless theft, hiding, running.

A gong sounded in the desk.

Rondell sat up straight. The casino was empty; the staff and all the Professor's bully-boys had gone. The robot-sealers had examined the place, and it was empty.

"Let's go," Rondell said, motioning with the disruptor.

The Professor slid the chair back on its tracks, and got up heavily.

The air stank with death.

The casino never closed, and to facilitate the handling of pleasure-bent patrons, everyone possessed a s.h.i.+ft-card, designating what times they might play. Had the cards not been issued, the casinos would have been permanently swamped; they were anything but mere gambling halls. The players bet against their opposite numbers, who were androids. If they won, the android was killed by them, in anyone of a hundred different, clever ways...

artificial blood spurted, shrieks were emitted. Androids looked real, and really died. But fair is fair: human losers really died, also.

Unfortunately (though they didn't know it), humans only had a three-to-one chance of winning. The games were stacked. Behind every casino was the government agency that supervised the action... and rigged the odds. It was a painless way of decreasing the staggering population. Let them play themselves to death, for with the age-r.e.t.a.r.dant drugs, few people died of anything but violent death.

So give them their taste... let them kill or be killed... and they would die gladly. Well, perhaps not gladly; but, then, no one likes a poor loser.

The casino was dead silent. The Professor walked ahead of the creature he had created, and the cold fear had solidified; his chest was filled with Arctic ice. If he had thought, at first, that there would be any escape, all hope was now lost. He had not expected this. Everything had gone wrong. He had built too well.

The sound of their footfalls was stark and loud in the empty casino. With the crowds gone, with the hypnolights and adverts shut off, it was a dead, hungry, waiting place. The Professor s.h.i.+vered; he had never seen it like this. The place never closed, it was always full.

It was closed, it was empty.

He was going to die.

Over thirty years; the plan; wasted.

Warning lights high up the filigreed walls cast light silver shadows along the floor. Signs of occupancy from a few minutes before still remained: crushed joy-sticks littered the floor (and as they walked, the scurryers slipped from their wall-nests, began sucking up the debris), stacks of chips made crazy pillars on the tables, bits of simulated cartilage from the gaming-androids remained plastered to the betting-boards. Even as they walked into the center of the gaming-room, the last trickle of fake blood swirled down the flensing troughs with a final gurgle. The casino was hung about with multi-colored drapes that changed color constantly under the silver warning lights. The furnis.h.i.+ngs were rich and padded. Just like the customers. thought Rondell wryly. He spat on the floor, and a scurryer swept up, sucked it spotless in an instant. He kicked at it viciously, then swung on the fat man. "No move.

I'll forego my fun and take you out right here."

They paused in front of the deadly bingo game.

The Professor drew back, and Rondell grasped him tightly by his flabby bicep. "Eh?" Rondell suggested nastily, c.o.c.king a thumb at the table. "What do you say to a game of bingo, Professor? What do you say to that?"

The Professor said nothing, and Rondell nudged him sharply with the disruptor. "Sit."

The Professor stepped up to the table. It was a huge circular canister affair, six and a half meters high. The sides were sealed, and a small stairway led up to the seats and the tabletop proper. The game was arranged so that if the android opponent--operated by robot-brain--won the bingo card, the chair dropped away beneath the human, sending him into the lower five meters of the canister.

Filled with piranha fish.

Rondell walked the fat man up the steps, and strapped him into a chair without ceremony. "I think I'll even give you a fighting chance, fat man," Rondell said, as he found the control box for the game.

He smashed it open with the heavy handle of a vibroblade taken from his boot-top, and fingered several dials.

The game board lit up, and the selection panels came on. But the robot-brain remained inactive.

Rondell switched on the selectron that called the numbers from random sequences. He took a seat. He did not strap in. "I'm going to play you, instead of an android, Professor. That way you'll have a real incentive to win." Then he switched on the robot-brain.

The Professor put up a shaking hand. "No. You must not! I--I..." He subsided into silence, and nodded. The game Began!

Rondell punched out a code on the selector before him. A,, card" of numbers appeared in the plate beneath his hand. He sat back and watched the Professor as the fat man did the same. The Professor seemed to want to say something, but he pursed his lips and was silent.

The robot-brain clicked its patterns, and ran the codes through, and then the speaker in the center of the game table spoke sharply, harshly: "I-16.".

Rondell looked down. Nothing. That was not on his card. He glanced across at the Professor. The fat man had also come up empty.

The robot-brain ran through its patterns again, clicked and spoke, "O-33."

Again, nothing. Rondell looked up. The Professor had one. Upper right hand corner. That was a start, and for the first time, Rondell suspected he might lose. But it didn't matter. If the Professor got too close, he would use the disruptor.

"B-7.".

Nothing lit on Rondell's board, nothing lit on the Professor's board-mirror. The fat man leaned forward against the playing edge, and his fingers twined madly. He strained against the plasteel bonds that held him in the game. In the center of the tabletop was a clear frame of plastic, and through it, by a clever series of lights, could be seen the deadly fish swimming below.

"O-40.".

Rondell now had a glowing square in the center of the end-row on his card.

Rondell went for broke. He pressed a stud for lowered odds. If his number came up, he was in good shape... if it didn't, he was one score down. Down toward the tiny teeth. But since he couldn't lose, because he would cheat, it didn't matter what chances he took.

He rang the odds down to 3-to-l which was as good as a human could ring in the entire casino. The brain clicked its patterns, chuckled to itself, said, "O-12." It was a hit. That made two out of five in a vertical stripe down the right hand side.

"Rondell! Listen to me! It's not--not just my dying I'm trying to prevent. You've got to hear me out!"

"O-29." Nothing.

"You want to know why I did it to you. You must want to know. I can tell you, only stop this game now!"

"I-58. ".

"Keep talking, Professor," Rondell said softly, trying to play the card and listen to the fat man at the same time. He wanted to know, all right. But the smell of death was invigorating.

"The answer, Rondell! Let me go, and I'll tell you where you can get the answer! There's reason to it, boy.

Believe me, there's reason to it."

"I-26." The Professor now had three laterals lit. One had rung while Rondell had been distracted thinking, but the third one didn't matter. It was out of the pattern.

"You've got to get off the game, Rondell! Listen to--"

"G-38.".

"--listen do me. Do it now."

Their boards were lit with many squares, and now Rondell's mind was a tangled ma.s.s. He could not figure it all out. All the weight of the universe pressed down on him. Tied in with his overwhelming hatred for the fat man, andhis desire for revenge. He had come half across the world to get the fat man. He had been double-crossed again; how the fat man had known he was in town, how he'd known he was in that hotel, why he'd tipped off the cops, was something Rondell didn't understand. But the Professor had turned the police loose, and they had made him run again. Now he wanted to stop running. Now he wanted to find out why he had been persecuted so studiedly. What his past was, and why it tied in with this fat man, and what his future held.

He slipped out of the chair.

It was two short steps to the brain-box, but before he got there, a final click and ding! sounded from above, and the chair where he had been seated dropped away.

He s.h.i.+vered at the sound of water splas.h.i.+ng from below, and turned off the game. The Professor had been one square short of losing, himself, but... he had filled a line completely, and Rondell would have gone into the tank.

Bingo!

He went back up and held the disruptor near the fat man's nose. "Tell me."

"Go to the Slum. Find a woman named Elenessa on Broad Street. Number 6627A."

"If this is a trick, Professor, if this is something to get me captured, if this is a stall for time... I'll get back here.

I'll get back, you know that. I did it once, I can do it again."

Then he was gone.