Authors: Lawrence Sanders
“Paul, break the news gently to the Chimerism Team here. | Better yet, just don’t mention it. Reduce their love gradually over a
j
period of a year. Eventually, they’ll get the message.”
“That’s what I planned to do,” he said crossly. “How about a ! serveout and swim later today?”
“Fine. At the DIVSEC gym. Meet you about 1700.”
At 1630,1 left my office and walked over to the small gym and j swimming pool on the compound grounds. It was not the large communal gym-pool, available to servers of all ranks, but was located in what had formerly been the headquarters building of the Division of Security & Intelligence.
When Angela moved DIVSEC to Washington, leaving behind only a guard company for compound security, their offices were I assigned to objects from other divisions who' required more room for their service. The small gym and swimming pool that had J formerly been reserved for the exclusive use of DIVSEC had now, by my decree, become a private facility for the use of PS-4 rank and | higher.
Paul was serving out in the gym when I arrived. He was using the horizontal wallbars. Arms stretched over his head, he had suspended his body a few inches above the floor. With his back pressed against the bars, he was slowly raising and lowering his legs from ! the hips.
I had changed to plastilast briefs in the locker room. Paul was wearing a plastilast clout. His body had always been androgynous. . But now he had lost weight; he had a waist; I could see his rib cage. He was no longer pudgy. I fancied even his skin tone had changed.
It was no longer blushed. And it was taut. Plump curves had disappeared. Muscles were discernible.
“You’re looking good,” I said.
I jumped up to grab a bar alongside him. I began to replicate his ! exercise, lifting my legs from the hips, slowly, then slowly lowering them.
“Nancy Ching?” I said. “What’s your input?”
“Superior,” he gasped. “Elegant brain. Good ruler. Her servers follow.”
“Use her?” I asked. “After I left?”
“Yes,” he said. “At her cottage, north of La Jolla Bay.”
I felt something.
“Fine.” I exhaled. “She’s profitable.”
“Election,” he said, trying to breathe deeply as he exercised. “Off-year election out there. Local Congressmen.”
I turned my head to look at him. His lovely body was sheened, “Don’t tell me Nancy is involved? She’ll stop her career.” “No, no. She just mentioned this obso in office will probably be returned. She said he’s a clunk.”
“So?”
“His support is mostly from obsos. This is for the Tomorrow File. My idea. Nick, why should obsos have the vote? No one under sixteen has it. Why objects over, say, fifty or sixty? It’s not right. They don’t produce, and their consumption rate is nil.”
“Disenfranchise the obsos? Good. Solve the political problem of their conservatism. Excellent thinking, Paul. Add it to the File. Let’s go to the bikes.”
They were bicyclelike mechanical contrivances bolted to the floor. You could adjust the tension on the pedals. An odometer showed meters and kilometers. Paul and I mounted onto the saddles.
“Set it at five,” I told him. “One new dollar on a kilometer.” “You’re on,” he said.
We began to pedal madly.
“That thing in Denver,” I said. “Printout from brain signals.” “Yes.”
“I coded it Project Phoenix.”
“Oh?”
“The computerization was mucked.”
I told him what Phoebe Huntzinger had told me, how the computer vocabulary had been shorted.
“Oh, God,” he groaned.
“Get rid of Peter Stanley. He’s the Team Leader.”
He turned his head sideways to glance at me.
“Terminate him with prejudice?” he said slowly.
“Not permanently, you idiot. Transfer him. A tsetse fly station in darkest Africa—something like that. Just get rid of him.”
“All right, Nick.”
“I want you to go to Denver and check out the in-brain technology. There may be a balls-up there, too.”
“Nick, for God’s sake, I’ve got a full plate.”
“Then send Mary Bergstrom. She can compute what’s going on.”
He was silent. We were both pedaling our stationary bicycles as hard as we could. Gripping handlebars with sweaty hands. Knees plunging up and down. Leaning forward. Gasping. Striving. “What’s, stressing you?” I panted.
“You,” he said. “What you’re doing. Goddamn it, Nick, it’s
my
Division. I rule it. I’m AssDepDirRad. Can’t you let me make the decisions?”
“You object to my decisions?”
“No, but let
me
make them. Your decisions are operative, but I want to make them first. You’ve been acting like a—like a—” He paused in fury and frustration. “Like a mogul!” he burst out, pedaling crazily.
“Mogul?” I shouted. “I haven’t heard that word in years!” “Well, that’s what you are—a mogul.”
We pedaled away furiously, glancing occasionally at each other’s odometer. We were about equal. I strained to draw ahead. “Power,” I gasped. “I recognize the symptoms.”
“Because you suffer from it yourself.”
“Right! You don’t seek it out. It seeks you. It’s a passion, a virus. It’s incurable.”
“You’ve got it and I’ve got it.”
“Yes. Can’t we serve together?”
“Sure,” he said.
“One kilometer,” I said, peering at my odometer. I stopped pedaling, swung off the saddle. I stood trembling, knees water, heart thudding. Paul stopped pumping, swung slowly from his machine.
“You win,” he said. “Owe you a dollar.”
He walked away. Steadily. Not looking back. I glanced at his odometer. It showed slightly over one kilometer.
I took one hand off the wheel and placed it delicately on her hard, tanned thigh. She was wearing a miniskirt. Fresh zipsuits and makeup were in a small overnight case on the back seat.
“Look what I have,” she said.
She unzipped her purse. I took my eyes off the road a moment to glance down. A red dildo.
“Got a jerk for Indians?” I asked her.
She laughed.
“I like the color: Come-Along Red. Nice?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Electric?”
“Ultrasonic.”
“Turn your bones to water,” I warned her.
“I don’t care.”
“Shock therapy?”
“Well ... it just feels good.”
“The endless problem of therapeutics,” I said. “Risk versus benefit.”
She laughed again and hiked her little skirt higher.
“You’re cute,” she said.
I had been certain the day would prove a disaster. It began in rain, what Hibernians call a “soft day.” Gray, wet, endless. Not gusty or sweeping; nothing as dramatic as that. Just a slow, unreeling curtain of drifting water. Polluted enough to stain cloth.
I requisitioned a hydrogen-powered sedan from the motor pool. Speed and acceleration were not the best, but it could churn out 100 kph without faltering. Just what we needed for the run south.
Except that every driver in New York was going to Alexandria, Virginia, that Friday morning. Or so it seemed. It took us an hour to get through the new Morse Tunnel to Jersey City. The freeway south was clogged, an infarcted artery: stop start, start stop.
Then suddenly, almost instantaneously, it ran free. I moved the hand accelerator switch. At the same time the curtain of rain lifted. Someone rolled it up. Just like that. The sun was there in a clearing sky. Blue. Maya Leighton sighed and pushed out her long legs. And I put my hand lightly on her bare, cool thigh. It might, I thought, it just might serve.
“Maya, where are you from?”
“GPA-5.”
I guessed Iowa.
“What made you pick geriatrics?”
“I want to live forever.”
She switched off the air conditioning and lowered the window on her side. I lowered mine. The fresh air seemed washed. Sun-warmed. She took off her jacket, unbuttoned her blouse to the waist, put her hand inside. She began to hum. Not a tune, a song. Just a hum, a not unpleasant drone. Her eyes were closed. “Maya, what do you want?”
“Excitement,” she said drowsily.
“I can give you that. Pain, too.”
“That’s excitement,” she said faintly.
I thought she might be napping. She was a lazy animal. She required long hours of sleep. I drove steadily, letting the astronauts zoom by. The wide road lulled. Suddenly, without willing it, I was at peace. We—she, I, the car—were floating and stationary. The new world revolved beneath our wheels.
I made the long curve onto the new elevated freeway that had been completed north to Mt. Holly. Eventually it would link with the Morse Tunnel to Manhattan. At that point in time, it was completed from Mt. Holly south to Washington, D.C. Once on it, you were captive. You could turn off for Philadelphia, Wilmington, or Baltimore. Otherwise, you had no place to go until you saw the Capitol.
“Good-bye, swans,” I said.
“Good-bye, roadside paradise,” she said sleepily.
“We’ll pull off,” I promised her. “They don’t let you starve. Exactly. Do you prefer a fake English tavern or a fake German biergarten?”
“You decide,” she murmured. “You say.”
Her hand flopped limply sideways. Into my lap. Her fingers tightened gently. She began to play.
“Keep that up,” I warned her, ‘‘and the result will pop my zipper and poke up through the steering wheel. Then some idiot will cut in front. I’ll make a hard turn, and fracture my engorged penis. You, naturally, will then provide medical attention. And I will go to my very important dinner engagement this evening with my
Laternen-pfahl
in splints. Is that what you want?”
“You’re mad,” she giggled.
“I suspect so,” I sighed.
She turned sideways on the passenger seat, lying with her head in my lap, her hips turned. I took my right hand off the wheel and slid it into her unbuttoned shirt. I pinched a nipple as hard as I could “between my knuckles.
“Yes,” she breathed.
We stopped for lunch at one of the approved turnoff ‘ ‘Rest-Ur-Haunts.” This one was a fake Italian ristorante. We dined under an outside arbor, enclosed by washable plastic lattice. Overhead were clumps of purple plastirub grapes and green leaves. On the tables were imitation empty Chianti bottles, fitted with plastiwax candles and flame-shaped bulbs with flickering filaments. Battery-powered. The false bottles even had browned, peeling labels. It was swell.
We returned to the car trading small belches from the proveal, propep, natural spaghetti, red wine. Frank Lawson Harris, where are you now?
She surprised me; an uncommonly skilled driver. She was relaxed, almost negligent. Hands lightly on the wheel in the approved 10-2 position. Fast, but not careless. Skirt pulled up to her pudendum. Eyes on the road. Elbow on the window rest. Sensitive touch. But excited.
“Can I go faster?” she said.
“Sure.”
We went faster. I responded to that, remembering Millie and me whirling around that darkened track in Detroit.
“Whee!” she said.
As usual, speed took me out. I could forget my mad Potemkin’s Village scheme to hang Angela Berri by her soft heels, forget the groans of today and the moans of tomorrow. The whispers of yesterday.
“Are you wearing anything?” I asked her.
“Beneath? No.”
“Will it bother you?”
“Yes,” she said. “It will bother me.
Do it.”
I twisted my body sideways. She spread her legs eagerly. I buried my face. She tasted of . . .
“Petronac-flavored,” she said. “A new douche.”
And so we sped into the Nation’s Capital.
I took the wheel then. It cost almost two hours to get through Washington traffic, across the Potomac, down into Alexandria. But I welcomed our slow progress. It gave me time to compute the ef at my side.
There were contradictions. I knew—and Paul Bumford concurred—that she had a sharp, alert brain. But I found her, physically, a yawning animal, almost indolent, willing server to sensuality.
Her scientific discipline was geriatrics; all her conditioning had been directed toward alleviating the ills of the aged and the extension of life. Yet she had come to our attention by her suggestions for two euthanasic programs. She had told me glibly, “I want to live forever.” But my original take on her had been correct; She
was
terminally oriented.
There had been a brief moment in my life when I had believed there was still hope for the human species if there remained but one unpredictable object. But that was youthful romanticism. After I squirmed into the snake pit of national politics, I realized that a ruler must equate the unpredictable with the unreliable. The future was too important to leave to whim.
We were rolling through the lovely Virginia countryside when I decided there was less to her than met the eye. She would not be a problem.
Hospice No. 4 offered a pleasant prospect: several hectares of plastiturf surrounding small plots of natural meadowland, trees, a well-groomed orchard. The buildings were three levels high, constructed of antiqued plastibrick with plastirub ivy attached to the south walls. A curved driveway of Glasphalt led to the portico of the Headquarters Ward. A small spur of this driveway turned off to the receiving and emergency building, marked with a large sign: WELCOME WARD.
The various buildings were in a loose cluster. They were, I knew, connected by underground passageways. Utilities, power sources, computers, and classified labs were also underground. It was a design that was, with minor modifications, standard for government hospices all over the US.
Also standard was a single building that stood apart, unconnected to the others by above- or below-ground passages. It looked exactly like the other wards. The only difference was the plastisteel wire netting over the windows. The netting was molded white. You could hardly see it in the late-aftemoon sunshine.
This was the Public Security Ward. It was in this building that objects guilty of politically unacceptable behavior were rehabilitated and reconditioned. It was also where government servers guilty of activities inimical to the public interest were drained. It was also where most of our scientific research on human objects was conducted. Generally, this was limited to the testing of new pharmaceuticals. More esoteric research was the province of my Field Offices.