Authors: Piers Anthony
He walked toward the hologram, which of course matched him step for step. Quaid raised an arm; the holo raised an arm. Quaid made a sudden movement, as if trying to catch the other off-guard, the way they did in the old joke routines. The holo wasn’t fooled.
The watch! He had touched a button, and the image had appeared. He touched it again. The holo-man disappeared with a
bzzzt
.
This could be a nice device! If Richter came gunning for him . . . yes. He strapped the watch onto his wrist, careful not to touch the button again.
Helm drove slowly through the abandoned industrial district. The two of them were directing searchlights onto the buildings from the roof of the car. So far, all they had spied was rain-soaked desolation.
Richter spoke into his radio. “Any sign of him?”
There were four agents in two cars on other streets, paralleling Richter’s car. “I heard a gunshot at the old Toyota plant,” one reported on the radio.
Ha! “Meet me at the loading dock,” Richter said. It was an odds-on bet that was their quarry. Maybe he had shot a rat for food, or one of the starving hounds that roamed the region.
Quaid shooed away a rat that was trying to get to his Mars bars. That was a good sign, actually; the rats were canny, and wouldn’t go for poisoned food.
There was one more item in the satchel. He brought it out: a miniature videodisc player/TV set. There was a disc in it, which meant there might be a recording for him. That was what he needed most: information. He set down the player so that its screen faced him, and turned it on.
His own face, minus the turban, appeared in close-up. It addressed the camera. “Hello, stranger. This is Hauser. If things have gone wrong, I’m talking to myself—and you’ve got a wet towel wrapped around your head.”
Quaid jumped, touching the turban.
Hauser laughed heartily. He had an air of complete self-confidence. Well, it was nice to know that someone thought he knew what he was doing. Quaid tore open a Mars bar and ate it while he listened.
“Whatever your name is, get ready for a big surprise,” Hauser continued, becoming serious. “You’re not you. You’re me.”
Quaid chomped on his bar. “No shit,” he said staring at Hauser’s face.
Richter’s car converged with the other cars at the gates of a huge abandoned factory, topped by a decaying “
TOYOTA
” sign. Richter checked the tracking device, which registered a pale glow. “Bingo!”
Inside, Quaid continued watching the little screen with rapt attention. He was finally getting somewhere!
“All my life I worked for the Mars Intelligence branch of the Agency. In other words, I did Cohaagen’s dirty work. Then a few weeks ago I met somebody—a woman. And I learned a few things. Like I’ve been playing for the wrong team.” Hauser sighed and looked guilty. “All I can do now is try to make up for it.”
Quaid threw a piece of his candy bar to a persistent rat. It was foolish, but he felt some sympathy for any creature who had to hide out in a place like this, hated and hunted by man. The rat picked up the morsel and scurried away.
Hauser tapped on his head. “There’s enough shit in here to fuck Cohaagen good—and that’s what I’m planning to do. Unfortunately, if you’re listening to this, he got to me first. And here comes the hard part, old buddy: now it’s all up to you.”
Quaid chewed, not so sure he liked this idea. If his image on the screen knew what he had been through so far, and thought that was the easy part . . .
“Sorry to drag you into it, but you’re the only one I can trust,” Hauser said apologetically.
Richter sprang up a set of stairs, leading Helm and four agents inside the building, out of the rain. This time there would be no subway passages, no elevators or trains for the quarry to use for escape. This time they would nail him. Richter wanted to hear the bastard scream before he died.
Two rats came back, looking for handouts. News traveled fast, in this rat race! Quaid grinned briefly. What the hell! He tossed each of them a chunk of candy. Now if he could only get rid of the human rats who were after him this readily . . .
“First things first,” Hauser said on the screen. “Let’s get rid of the bug in your head.” He tapped his head right between the eyes. “Take the thingy in the plastic bag—” He held up the bag, exactly like the one Quaid had. “And stick it up your nose.”
Up his nose? What joy! But probably better than a bullet in the head, which was what that bug would summon.
He opened the plastic bag and removed the surgical instrument. It looked like the metallic tentacle of an alien.
He pressed the plunger. Out came an inner tentacle with a tiny grasping claw. He thought of a snake striking from a hole in the wall, catching something and dragging it back into the wall. Up his nose?
“Don’t worry, it’s self-guiding,” Hauser said reassuringly. “Just shove real hard—all the way up to your maxillary sinus.”
Quaid remembered an ancient joke:
“When my dog misbehaves, I give him a steak.” “But surely he likes steak!” “Not up his nose, he doesn’t!”
That dog wouldn’t like this torture instrument up his nose either. But Quaid had a steak, er, stake in it: his life.
It had to be done. Gingerly, he stuck the instrument up his nose and started to push. He grimaced with the pain. He could handle regular pain, as of clobbering his fist into a wall, but there was something peculiarly discomfiting about an intrusion deep in the nose. It wasn’t just the snot; it got perilously close to the brain, up in there. He pictured one of those rotary drain cleaners, worming into the pipe, set to chew up any obstruction. But the obstruction here wasn’t a jammed turd, it was his nasal tissue!
“And be careful,” Hauser said from the screen. “It’s my head too.”
No shit! Quaid warily sat down and continued the procedure. The metal snake was indeed self-guiding; it seemed to know where it was going. All it needed was thrust. Damn, he hated this!
Richter and his men fanned out inside the cavernous factory, commencing the search. They used small but powerful flashlights. They were quiet, but rats and pigeons fled from their path. Richter hoped that wouldn’t give the quarry warning; he wanted to catch the man by surprise. For one thing, that might save some lives. He had to give that to him: eight agents taken out in one day, by a man who literally didn’t know who he was. It spoke well for Agency training! Too bad they couldn’t afford to train them all that way!
Grimacing horrendously, Quaid shoved the instrument farther in. It moved the last painful distance up his nose. He pressed the plunger.
There was a crunch of cartilage, and the pain was forgotten. It was replaced by blossoming agony. Quaid reeled, feeling faint.
Would
a bullet have felt worse? It would have been faster, anyway!
“When you hear the crunch, you’re there,” Hauser said encouragingly.
Gee, thanks for telling me that, Doctor!
Quaid leaned back against the wall and rested, with the alien tentacle still wedged up his nose. He felt blood trickling through the sinus cavity, somewhere in there, like boiling brine percolating through cold limestone caves. Oooooh, suffer! His nose felt so swollen that it seemed his eyes must be pushed to the sides of his face, like those of a frog.
Meanwhile, Hauser was still talking. He walked into a close-up on the screen. “Now this is the plan. Get your ass to Mars and take a room at the Hilton. Flash the Brubaker ID.” There was a flash shot of the fake identification in the satchel. “That’s all there is to it. Just do what I tell you, and we can nail the sonovabitch who fucked us both.” Hauser’s tone became more personal. “I’m counting on you, buddy. Don’t let me down.”
The TV turned itself off, Quaid was left in the dark, overwhelmed by more than the pain.
He had gotten his information. He was, or had been, Hauser, a Mars Intelligence agent. That explained his special abilities with hands and guns. An agent was a cleaned-up name for killer, in the name of the mission. He had been on the wrong side, and now was on the right side, so his former pals were now his enemies.
But if they had caught him after he changed sides, as obviously they had, why hadn’t they simply killed him? Why go to such extraordinary trouble to set up a man they would consider to be a traitor on Earth, with a doll like Lori and a decent if dull job? He had thought it could be to protect him until he testified about something, but it seemed to be his enemies who had set him up like this. That knocked the sense right out of it. So there was still a hell of a lot he didn’t know.
Well, at least he knew where to find the answers. He took a deep breath, took hold of the tentacle, and yanked it from his nose. It came out, streaked with blood and mucus, while the agony flared again.
Dizzy with the pain, he looked at the glistening silver pea held in the gory little claw. So this was the bug! His first thought was to throw it away, but then he had a better notion.
He unwrapped the towel from his head and used it to mop the blood from his hands and face. Then he fished out a Mars bar. He had no appetite at the moment, but didn’t need it.
He saw rats in the shadows. The word had spread again: free food. Well, he was in an obliging mood, though his nose felt as if it had been crushed in a big rattrap. “Get in line, fellows,” he murmured to the rats. “I want every one of you to have an equal chance.”
BEEEEP!
A bright red dot flashed on the tracking device. “I got him!” Richter exclaimed. He led the agents through the factory at a run.
Quaid began to repack the satchel. He was about to add the videodisc device when flashlight beams cut through the dusty air. He dropped the machine and ran toward a pile of rubble as a hail of bullets saturated the room. Whoever was firing was taking no chances. Quaid vaulted silently from the window and ran as fast as his legs could carry him.
Richter and his men swung left and right like heat-seeking missiles. The tracking device showed the quarry’s exact location. The fool must have forgotten how to mask the signal, if he had even been aware of it. Maybe he had done something to interfere with it without realizing, and now was doing something else.
“He’s moving,” Richter said. “In here!” He sprinted through a door, into the designated room.
Something moved. They unleashed a firestorm of bullets that tore up the room.
The shooting stopped. Suddenly it was very quiet. There was no body in sight.
What the fuck?
Richter checked the tracking device.
The red dot was there, moving. There was a sound, loud in the silence.
“There!” Richter cried.
The automatic rifles fired another burst. A tin can flew up, riddled.
He checked the tracker again. The red dot was moving away. “No, there!” He pointed under a stalled assembly line.
They ran along the line, firing under the belt.
Still no body—and still the dot was moving on the tracker, just beyond the place they had fired at last. Did the man have nine lives?
There was a skittering sound, moving across the floor in the darkness. They fired at the sound, blasting into a pile of junk.
Richter passed his light over the pile. Quaid’s body was not there.
He looked at the tracker again, puzzled. The flashing dot clearly indicated that Quaid was directly in front of them. But he wasn’t. There was only the junk.
Richter slid his light beam over the rubble, and illuminated—
A terrified rat, with a fragment of a Mars bar wrapper in its mouth. The tracker was pinpointing the rat.
Now he caught on. The asshole had fed the bug to the rat, maybe in the candy. They had been chasing the rat, while the quarry got away.
They had been outmaneuvered—again.
Infuriated, he blasted the rat to smithereens.
As a red haze of fury cleared from his eyes, Richter became aware that Helm was standing beside him, holding the remains of the videodisc player. It had been hit by a stray bullet and now squawked like a broken record. Richter slowly turned his head and watched a static-ridden snippet of the recorded message on the cracked screen.
Only a small shard of the disc remained, but there was enough to recognize Hauser’s voice saying: “. . . Get your ass to Mars
squrtrk
Get your ass to . . .”
CHAPTER 14
Ship
H
elm drove again. Richter, fuming, composed himself for a formal report. He set the videophone on record and watched as his own image appeared on the screen, as if it were a reflection.
“It’s not looking good,” he said. “He remembers all his field techniques, and he’s been getting help from, get this, Stevens, and God knows who else.” He grimaced, in the manner of a good man beset by incompetence; let Cohaagen make of that what he would. “I put all spaceports on highest alert, but if he doesn’t turn up by takeoff, I’ll grab the first shuttle and be waiting for him on Mars.”
He pressed a button. The disc reversed, then replayed: “. . . waiting for him on Mars.”
Good enough. He ejected the videodisc, turned to an agent in the back seat, and handed him the disc. “Beam this to Cohaagen,
after
I’m gone.”
The man nodded. He didn’t need to know why the message was being handled this way, he just had to follow orders. By the time Cohaagen tried to countermand, it would be too late.
Richter intended to nail his quarry, no matter who stood in the way, even if it was his boss.
Through the moving windshield wipers he saw the spaceport coming into view. Well, one thing about going to Mars: it would get him out of this fucking rain! Mars was dry, desert dry; there would never be any rain there.
Next day Richter strode through the empty lounge section of the vessel. Several security guards rushed to keep up with him. The space cycler vibrated and rumbled in preparation for takeoff.
“We’ve looked everywhere,” a security man said. “Baggage, the galley—”
“Staff quarters,” the second security man added.
“What about the landing gear housing?” Richter asked tersely.
The two security men looked at each other. Obviously this had been overlooked.