The Visible Man and Other Stories (4 page)

Quivering with tension, Rowan put his ear to the thin plastic door-panel. The only sound he could hear was the rhythmical snoring. He’d have to chance it. Carefully, he tried the door. It wasn’t locked. He inched it open until a hinge gave a loud rusty squawk, then he pulled the door wide and stepped briskly into the room.

It was a small chamber with faded opalescent walls, smelling of sweat and old clothes and
bozuk
. Two walls were covered with dials, meters, readouts and tell-me-twices. A dusty computer terminal and a slave board stood in that corner. Most of the room was taken up by a dilapidated sink-cooker combination and a scarred folding table heaped with filthy biodegradable plates that had been re-used instead of catalyzed. In another corner was a much-patched waterbed. Flies drummed noisily against the walls, seeking a way out.

As Rowan entered the room, the snoring cut abruptly off. A man-shaped dent in the waterbed began to work itself back to level. Someone was getting up. “What?” said a cracked, quavery voice: another old man. “Whatta’y’want? Who—” The dent disappeared; the man must be on his feet now. “Inspection, jobbie,” Rowan said slyly, “special orders from the manager,” using the custodian’s resultant hesitation to get a few steps nearer. Then he leaped.

The custodian screamed. Rowan ended up with a double-handful of cloth—a shirt?—which immediately tore away in his grasp, lunged again and felt his hand close around a bony wrist. He twisted it. The custodian screamed again. Rowan felt the custodian’s free hand pound against the side of his head, and then they were wrestling each other in a drunken circle across the floor. The table went over with a great smash and clatter of plates. The custodian was still screaming. What a racket they were making! “Shut up, you!” Rowan shouted inanely, then managed to get a hand around the custodian’s invisible throat. Ignoring a rain of wild windmill blows, Rowan throttled him into submission.

When the custodian went limp, Rowan let him slide to the floor. Suddenly everything was amazingly quiet. Swaying and gasping for breath, Rowan was washed over by a prickly wave of shame. He was pretty good at beating up old men, wasn’t he? Suppose he’d killed the old guy? Apprehensively, Rowan crouched and felt about until he located the custodian, touching long invisible hair the texture of matted straw, and a scraggly beard—some ancient hippie given a makework job by the complex then, a
bozuk
addict probably. Rowan felt for a heartbeat. It was there—papery and labored, but there.

Relieved, Rowan began to search the custodian. Nothing—he was wearing some kind of frilly smock or dress without pockets. But on a night-stand near the waterbed Rowan found an odd leather object, and realized after a moment’s thought that it must be a “wallet.” Inside the old wallet were several unusual photographs, an identification card—with an embossed picture of the old man on it, unfortunately—a credit strip, and a nearly exhausted monthly commuter ticket. Rowan examined the credit strip and bit his lip in frustration. The custodian didn’t have much of a debit margin, not nearly as much as Rowan had hoped for. Not enough to buy a ticket out of the country or even out of the state, not enough to rent a car, or get an identity-scramble or an apartment to hole up in, so that was the end of those particular fantasies. And there wasn’t enough left of the commuter ticket even to get him to Boston.

The custodian began to moan. Rowan paced over, located him again, and lifted his fist to clip him. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it—the old man was so frail, it might kill him. Swearing at his squeamishness, Rowan dragged the feebly-struggling custodian to a closet, muscled him into it, and braced a chair against the door to keep it closed. “Hey!” the custodian shouted, and began to rattle the doorknob furiously. “Shut up,” Rowan growled in self-conscious toughness, “or I’ll come in there and tear your head off.” The custodian shut up.

Rowan returned to the computer terminal. He’d have to do the best he could with what he had. He thought for a minute, then activated the terminal and dialed for the catalog of one of the big stores overhead. He computed sums in his head. Just enough. He inserted the coded credit slip into the slot and carefully punched out an order on the keyboard. The computer winked an acknowledgment light at him, and printed
Five Minutes
across the readout in green phosphorescent letters.

Sighing, Rowan leaned back in the chair to wait. Now that the immediate pressure was off, he realized how exhausted he was, how sore and battered and torn. His split lip ached fiercely, as did his lacerated cheek and his scraped arms. But most of all, he was tired. The room seemed to blur in and out of existence, and Rowan pulled up out of the nod just in time to keep his head from cracking against the terminal board. He’d almost fallen asleep. Stiffly, he got up. He was still rubber-legged, and very weak. Hunger was part of it. He literally could not remember the last time he’d eaten—sometime during his stay at the Newburyport jail, he supposed, but his memories of that ordeal were murky and confused. It could have been days. And he was intolerably thirsty.

He rummaged through the cubicle in search of food, but found nothing except a bar of VitaGel and a half-empty bottle of Joy. Grimacing with distaste, he ate the gluey bar, and then cautiously tried a sip of Joy. The euphoric effect hit him instantly, making him lightheaded and giddy. Reluctantly, he put the bottle aside—he couldn’t afford to get frazzled. There didn’t seem to be any cups at all in the place, but he polished a small plate as well as he could with his sleeve and used it to get a drink of rusty water from the tap. The Joy was making his head buzz. He had an odd feeling of unreality and déjà vu, and a sudden strong intuition that the old custodian was about to speak. Just at that moment, the custodian said “Hey, man, you’re never going to get away with this, you know that?” and Rowan subvocalized the last few words along with him, the feeling of déjà vu returning ten-fold. “Shut up, jobbie,” Rowan growled, still with the feeling that he was reading something from a prepared script, “I really shouldn’t be keeping you alive at all, scan?” The old man quieted again, but Rowan’s head remained full of odd echoes, as if everything were doubled or tripled, crowding the room with ghosts and reflections. He never should have touched that goddamned Joy.

The terminal flashed its mauve warning light while Rowan was washing his face in the sink basin. His order thumped down the pneumatic shute into the hopper. Rowan quickly dried his face with his shirt. The water had cleared his head a little, and he looked much more presentable with the dirt and dried blood washed away. Feeling almost jaunty, he stripped off the rest of his clothes and padded over to pick up the package.

The package contained a nondescript shirt, some cloth pants, an overcoat, a hat, a pair of dark glasses, and a cane. If he must cope with being “blind,” then let him be a “blind man.” One of the hard-core blind, too low-caste to qualify for a TVSS. He would attract much less suspicion that way—the pose would explain why he was continually bumping into people, and he hoped that the Purloined Letter syndrome would also work to his advantage. At the least, he would be more difficult to spot.

Rowan dressed hurriedly and left the room. He wouldn’t have much time to get clear of the complex before an alarm was raised. The chair he’d braced under the doorknob was only made of hard plastic, and already, as Rowan hesitated in the corridor, he could hear the custodian attempting to break out of the closet. He really should have killed the old man—later he would probably have cause to regret that he had not. He set out through the warren of basement corridors.

He’d decided that it would be best to try to retrace his steps, but within a few moments he was hopelessly lost. A series of locked doors and blocked-off corridors gradually herded him in an entirely different direction, and he wandered through the old stone maze for what seemed like hours. Finally, just as he was beginning to despair, he located an unlocked service stairway.

At the top of the stairway, he stepped through a door and found himself in another of the fluorescent upper corridors. He struck out along it, remembering to tap the floor in front of him with his cane, and bumped into someone almost immediately.

“Oh, excuse me!” a voice said; a woman this time. “I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“That’s perfectly all right, missy,” Rowan said politely, and started to tap his way along again. There was no interference, no alarm.

Goddamn, it was going to work after all, wasn’t it!

A few yards further on, he found one of the main stairways, and followed it up. He was suddenly claustrophobic, the whole subterranean complex pressing down on him with miles of corridors and stairs, steel, concrete, rock, plastic, dead black earth. God, to get
out
—

Sunlight struck him in the face.

It was still the same day, Rowan realized bemusedly, staring at the sky. Just a little while ago he had been on his way to Boston for the execution of his sentence. That had been years ago, it seemed. Decades ago. A lifetime. But the position of the sun showed that it had been barely four hours. Time enough, Rowan thought. Surely an active hunt for him was underway by now.

Rowan had come out onto a landscaped mall, pyramidal buildings rearing high all around, windows flashing like hydra eyes in the sun. Hundreds of people were moving invisibly all around him; he could sense their presence as a nearly subliminal susurrus composed primarily of footsteps and voices. This type of shopping complex was potentially obsolete—the existence of house-to-store pneumatic networks should have killed them as dead as the dinosaurs. But this was an underpopulated region, where most of the homes still didn’t have computer terminals; so far, downtown Boston was the closest area to have been completely converted to the system. It took time for advanced technology to disseminate across a society. And herd instinct was also a factor. With the commercial heart eaten out of the smaller towns, people gathered at the shopping plazas as earlier peoples had gathered at wells or watering-holes or drive-in restaurants, and for the same reasons: to gossip, to court, to meet friends, or just to have someplace to go at night. On a sunny day like this, there could easily be ten thousand people circulating through the complex, and somehow Rowan would have to get by them all.

He launched himself away from the shelter of a building, like a swimmer kicking off for a race, was jostled repeatedly, and realized that he was trying to buck a stream of pedestrian traffic going in the opposite direction. Obediently, Rowan turned around and let the pressure of that stream sweep him along, trusting that people would make allowances for a blind man and not crowd him too closely. The stream hurried him through the mall and into a covered walkway between buildings. Here, suddenly confined, the murmur of crowd-noises swelled into a roar. Clacking footsteps echoed and re-echoed from the low ceiling, voices reverberated hollowly—all sound became fuzzy and directionless, as though he were in a cave under the sea. Again the air seemed full of invisible wings. He could almost feel them beating around his ears, hemming him in, wrapping him in gossamer.

Suddenly dizzy, Rowan sat down on a bench. He found that his heart was beating fast with irrational terror. His nerves were giving under the strain, he told himself as he fought down another attack of claustrophobia. He couldn’t take much more. Slowly, he calmed himself. At least his disguise seemed to be working.

Someone touched his arm. “You’re an escaped convict, aren’t you?”

Rowan gasped. He would have jumped up and bolted instantly, but now the hand was on his wrist, holding him down. He half-turned, shifting his grip on the cane so that he could use it as a club.

“Hold it!” the unseen someone said in a low, urgent voice. “Don’t run. Calm down, son—I’m on your side.”

Rowan hesitated. “This is some kind of mistake—”

“No it’s not,” the other man said dryly. “You’re pretending to be blind, aren’t you? That’s a good one, it hasn’t been used much the last few years. You might get away with it. But don’t just tap right in front of your feet, the way you’ve been doing. That’s a dead giveaway. Keep your cane swinging steadily from side to side as you tap. Remember, you’re supposed to be feeling your way along with it, like a bug does with his antennas, right? And don’t walk so fast. Be a little more uncertain about it, son, listen more, as if you’re trying for auditory clues. And for God’s sake, stop staring at things. And tracking them! It’s obvious you can see through those damn glasses. You won’t last an hour that way.”

Rowan opened his mouth, closed it again. “Who are you?” he said.

“It’s a real stroke of luck, me being able to spot you,” the other man said, ignoring him. “I hoped you’d show up in this area, and I’ve been cruising around for an hour trying to pick you up. Logical, in a way, prisoners making for a place like this, cops don’t seem to think that way though. Luckily for you. Still, we’re going to have to jump to get you out of here. But don’t you worry—you just listen to me, now, and you’ll be all right. I’m on your side, son.”

“I wasn’t aware that I had a side,” Rowan said wearily.

“You do now, son, you do now. Whether you like it or not. The enemy of my enemy, right?” As the man was saying this, Rowan had a sudden vivid mental picture of how he must look: a small, intense man of middle years with a foxy, florid face and hair like wire brush. “Listen, now,” the man said, “we haven’t got much time. You know Quincy Park in Beverly? Just down the coast a ways from Dane Street Beach?”

Rowan realized, to his own surprise, that he did know Quincy Park. He could mistily visualize it, the trees, the long grassy slope down to the seawall, the rocky beach, the ocean—he must have passed through there at one time, long ago. “Yeah, I know it,” he said.

“Well, you just get there before dark. Get there somehow, whatever you do, if you want to keep on living. It’s a station on the Underground Railroad, one we haven’t used in a long while. They won’t be watching it. I’ll call up ahead and arrange it, and there’ll be a sailboat waiting for you just offshore at Quincy Park. You get on her, they’ll take you up the coast, you’ll be safe in Canada by morning. Right? But listen—you’ve got to make the connection the first time. The boat’ll only wait until dark, and we won’t send it back there two evenings in a row. You understand? But if you make it to the boat, why, you’ll be all right then. You’ll be fine.”