Bach sighed. “I wanted to take her alive, Jorge. I thought I could. But when she came at me with the knife . . .” She let him finish the thought, not caring to lie to him. She'd already done that to the interviewer. In her story, she had taken the knife from her assailant and tried to disable her, but was forced in the end to kill her. Luckily, she had the bump on the back of her head from being thrown against the wall. It made a blackout period plausible. Otherwise, someone would have wondered why she waited so long to call for police and an ambulance. The barbie had been dead for an hour when they arrived.
“Well, I'll hand it to you. You sure pulled this out. I'll admit it, I was having a hard time deciding if I'd do as you were going to do and resign, or if I could have stayed on. Now I'll never know.”
“Maybe it's best that way. I don't really know, either.”
Jorge grinned at her. “I can't get used to thinking of
you
being behind that godawful face.”
“Neither can I, and I don't want to see any mirrors. I'm going straight to Atlas and get it changed back.” She got wearily to her feet and walked toward the tube station with Weil.
She had not quite told him the truth. She did intend to get her own face back as soon as possibleânose and allâbut there was one thing left to do.
From the first, a problem that had bothered her had been the question of how the killer identified her victims.
Presumably the perverts had arranged times and places to meet for their strange rites. That would have been easy enough. Any one barbie could easily shirk her duties. She could say she was sick, and no one would know it was the same barbie who had been sick yesterday, and for a week or month before. She need not work; she could wander the halls acting as if she was on her way from one job to another. No one could challenge her. Likewise, while 23900 had said no barbie spent consecutive nights in the same room, there was no way for her to know that. Evidently room 1215 had been taken over permanently by the perverts.
And the perverts would have no scruples about identifying each other by serial number at their clandestine meetings, though they could do it in the streets. The killer didn't even have that.
But someone had known how to identify them, to pick them out of a crowd. Bach thought she must have infiltrated meetings, marked the participants in some way. One could lead her to another, until she knew them all and was ready to strike.
She kept recalling the strange way the killer had looked at her, the way she had squinted. The mere fact that she had not killed Bach instantly in a case of mistaken identity meant she had been expecting to see something that had not been there.
And she had an idea about that.
She meant to go to the morgue first, and to examine the corpses under different wavelengths of lights, with various filters. She was betting some kind of mark would become visible on the faces, a mark the killer had been looking for with her contact lenses.
It had to be something that was visible only with the right kind of equipment, or under the right circumstances. If she kept at it long enough, she would find it.
If it was an invisible ink, it brought up another interesting question. How had it been applied? With a brush or spray gun? Unlikely. But such an ink on the killer's hands might look and feel like water.
Once she had marked her victims, the killer would have to be confident the mark would stay in place for a reasonable time. The murders had stretched over a month. So she was looking for an indelible, invisible ink, one that soaked into pores.
And if it was indelible . . .
There was no use thinking further about it. She was right, or she was wrong. When she struck the bargain with the killer she had faced up to the possibility that she might have to live with it. Certainly she could not now bring a killer into court, not after what she had just said.
No, if she came back to Anytown and found a barbie whose hands were stained with guilt, she would have to do the job herself.
INTRODUCTION TO
“The Phantom of Kansas”
I have a little experience of weather.
I was born in Austin, Texas, along with my sister, Francine, but I don't remember much of Austin except for the time some guy came by the house with a donkey and Mom paid to let me sit on it in a cowboy hat and have my picture taken. I still have the picture. God, am I cute, though already my legs are starting to dangle longer than they should for a kid my age. Probably the last time anyone ever called me cute.
Then we moved to Fort Worth, where Dad worked for Consolidated Aircraft assembling B-36 bombersânot single-handed, as I thought then, but with a few other guysâand later for the Magnolia Petroleum Company, in a refinery. If you're old enough you might remember the “flying red horse” on the gas station signs. Now it's “Mobil.” If you think that's a better name, I don't want to know you.
We stayed there long enough for my other sister, Kerry, to be born. I remember her in Mom's arms coming home from the hospital. Other than that, I remember Mrs. Rosequist's first-grade class, the incredible roar of the ten-engine B-36s flying over, and chasing what we called “horney toads” around the backyard. They are the only lizards I know of that are fat and slow enough to catch easily. They are covered with spines, and will spit blood at you when you pick them up.
Then Dad got laid off and the nearest job he could find was in Port Arthur, Texas. I hated the place from the first time I saw it. It was always hot and humid at the same time. The mosquitoes would feed on you at night until they were too fat to fly; you could turn on the light and watch them try to crawl away over the sheets. Most of the town was about six inches above sea level, and all the houses seemed to be set up on blocks. You could look right under them and see the pools of stagnant water where the skeeters bred. It rained almost every day. We figured that was the reason for the blocks.
Not long after that we found out the real reason. Hurricane Audrey blew through with not a lot of advance warning (no weather satellites in those days, which is a big
reason why eight thousand people died in Galveston, sixty miles down the coast, in 1900). It was a Category 4 blow, and it hit smack-dab on our new hometown.
We had never seen anything like it, didn't really have a realistic idea how dangerous it was. I remember trying to step outside the house when the winds were blowing about 100 mph to see what it was like, and being blown right back inside. It got worse after that, and it seemed to go on for hours. It's one thing to see it on television, something else to be cowering in your house as the trees wave back and forth and come crashing down, believe me.
The eye passed over us, and we all went outside in the unearthly quiet. We didn't know it at the time but about thirty-five miles to the east of us as the crow flies (if any crows had been stupid enough to fly that day) in Cameron, Louisiana, 390 people were dying in a storm surge. The town was virtually wiped off the planet.
In terms of human life lost, it was the fourth worst American hurricane of the twentieth centuryâbearing in mind that 1900 was the last year of the nineteenth century.
In terms of damage, Audrey didn't even make the Top 50. If you've ever been to Port Arthur you'd conclude, as I did, that there wasn't all that much of value there
before
the winds started to blow. But the people down there must have known something about storms, because most houses that didn't have a tree fall on them were not badly damaged. After a few days with the chain saws, the area called, for no rational reason I can see, the “Golden Triangle” of Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange was pretty much back to normal . . . but always with the horror of Cameron on our minds.
Janis Joplin got out of Port Arthur the first chance she got. I had never heard of her then, but I made the same decision. I decided that as soon as I finished school I'd go to California, where there's nothing to worry about but earthquakes.
I've just been through my first earthquake, and it was a piece of cake compared to Audrey.
Â
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This story is another personal favorite. It came about as a case of one thing leading to another. In the Eight Worlds, I wondered, where there was no “natural” environment humans could survive, what would they do if they wanted to go outside? Some people, I figured, would prefer the security of artifice, as many city dwellers do today. Rooms, corridors, limited open spaces like stadia and arenas, none of those messy plants and animals.
But there would be the adventurous, just as there are today, eager to venture out into the “wild” on their bikes and be mauled by mountain lions (as two people were just a few days ago, not far from where I live). These could be the people who cherished hopes of someday reclaiming Lost Earth from the invaders. They would like parks.
Why not some very
big
parks?
I assumed the existence of a vast genetic library so that the big underground bubbles I came to call “disneylands” could be populated with the appropriate flora and fauna. But you wouldn't go on simulated rides or roller coasters in these disneylands. The terrain and the wildlife and the sheer novelty of being able to use the long-range vision evolution had adapted your primate eyes for would be the thrill here.
And it need not be the kind of place adventurers or vacationers go today. A prairie could be as exciting to them as simulated mountains or jungles. And where are the most boring prairies I've ever seen? Why, Kansas, of course, home of Dorothy and Toto.
You'd need weather in a place like that. Rain and sunshine . . . and why not tornadoes? If people will pay good money to get the wits scared out of them at Magic Mountain, why not a carefully controlled, safe and sane, sanitized-for-your-protection twister? And thus the story grew.
Â
When I first began in the movie business I decided to write a screenplay, just to see if I could do it. I asked John Foreman for copies of screenplays, since I'd never seen one. I watched the movies on video, pausing as I read the screenplays. Didn't look too hard, to me. So I sat down and, in four feverish days, wrote a 120-page adaptation of “The Phantom of Kansas.” I
loved
it. I mean, I loved the process; the screenplay itself could have used some work, it was full of beginner's mistakes. But John liked it, too, and I think to this day that with a rewrite it could make a darn good motion picture.
It has been optioned several times, without result (not at all unusual in the movie business), and as of now the man who wrote
Changing Lanes
has been working on it for five years. His option expires in July 2004, and if he throws in the towel I hope somebody else will step in and take another crack at it.
THE PHANTOM OF KANSAS
I DO MY banking at the Archimedes Trust Association. Their security is first-rate, their service is courteous, and they have their own medico facility that does nothing but take recordings for their vaults.
And they had been robbed two weeks ago.
It was a break for me. I had been approaching my regular recording date and dreading the chunk it would take from my savings. Then these thieves break into my bank, steal a huge amount of negotiable paper, and in an excess of enthusiasm they destroy all the recording cubes. Every last one of them, crunched into tiny shards of plastic. Of course the bank had to replace them all, and very fast, too. They weren't stupid; it wasn't the first time someone had used such a bank robbery to facilitate a murder. So the bank had to record everyone who had an account, and do it in a few days. It must have cost them more than the robbery.
How that scheme works, incidentally, is like this. The robber couldn't care less about the money stolen. Mostly it's very risky to pass such loot, anyway. The programs written into the money computers these days are enough to foil all but the most exceptional robber. You have to let that kind of money lie for on the order of a century to have any hope of realizing gains on it. Not impossible, of course, but the police types have found out that few criminals are temperamentally able to wait that long. The robber's real motive in a case where memory cubes have been destroyed is murder, not robbery.
Every so often someone comes along who must commit a crime of passion. There are very few left open, and murder is the most awkward of all. It just doesn't satisfy this type to kill someone and see them walking around six months later. When the victim sues the killer for alienation of personalityâand collects up to 99 percent of the killer's worldly goodsâit's just twisting the knife. So if you really hate someone, the temptation is great to
really
kill them, forever and ever, just like in the old days, by destroying their memory cube first, then killing the body.
That's what the ATA feared, and I had rated a private bodyguard over the last week as part of my contract. It was sort of a status symbol to show your friends, but otherwise I hadn't been much impressed until I realized that ATA was going to pay for my next recording as part of their crash program to cover all their policy holders. They had contracted to keep me alive forever, so even though I had been scheduled for a recording in only three weeks they had to pay for this one. The courts had ruled that a lost or damaged cube must be replaced with all possible speed.
So I should have been very happy. I wasn't, but tried to be brave.
I was shown into the recording room with no delay and told to strip and lie on the table. The medico, a man who looked like someone I might have met several decades ago, busied himself with his equipment as I tried to control my breathing. I was grateful when he plugged the computer lead into my occipital socket and turned off my motor control. Now I didn't have to worry about whether to ask if I knew him or not. As I grow older, I find that's more of a problem. I must have met twenty thousand people by now and talked to them long enough to make an impression. It gets confusing.