Collected fiction, p.586
Collected Fiction, page 586
Sam went out by a back way. Moving stiffly, like one who felt the weight of his eighty years, he returned to the library. He was a remarkably well-preserved eighty, he concluded, watching his reflection in windows as he passed, a hale and hearty old man, but old—old. It would do.
Now he wanted to study the current crime news.
In a way the criminal classes are agrarian—if you look at them over a span as broad as Sam’s. They move as they feed, drifting from pasture to greener pasture. The Blue Way had been a skid-row forty years ago, but no more, Sam realized, listening to reports from the telecast. As for the crimes themselves, they hadn’t altered much. That pattern was basic. Vice, through the ages, changes less than virtue.
Finally he located the present green pasture. He bought a vial of water-soluble red dye and a high-powered smoke bomb. The instructions on the bomb told how to use it in hydroponic gardens to destroy insect pests. Sam didn’t read them; he had used these bombs before.
Then he had to locate the right place for his trap.
He needed two alleys, close together, opening on a Way not too well-traveled. In one of the alleys was a cellar Sam remembered. It was deserted now, as in the old days. He hid near the entrance several fist-sized chunks of metal he had picked up, and he made a hiding place for the smoke-bomb in the cellar. After that he was ready for the next step.
He did not let himself think how many steps the stairway contained altogether. When he thought of that, he remembered that he had all the time he needed—now !—and that sent him into drunken, elated dreams far divorced from the immediate necessity of redeeming his future. Instead, he reminded himself of his drug-addiction and the need for money and curative treatment.
He went to the current green pasture and drank rotgut whisky, the cheapest available. And he kept in mind always the fact that he was a very old man. There were little tricks. He remembered never to fill his lungs with air before speaking; old men are short of breath and their voices lack resonance. The result was convincing. Also he moved slowly and carefully, making himself think of each move before he made it. A hobble doesn’t indicate age, but action that is the result of old thought-processes does indicate it. The old have to move slowly because it’s necessary to consider whether the stiff legs and weak muscles can manage obstacles. The world is as dangerous to the very old as to the very young, but a baby doesn’t know the peril of gravity.
So Sam didn’t creak or hobble. But he didn’t seem to have much breath and he apparently wasn’t conditioned to fast moving any more—and it was an old man who sat in Gem o’ Venus drinking rot-gut and getting quietly drunk.
It was a dive. A colorful dive, just as many of the dives of Imperial Rome must have been, the jetsam of costumes and customs drifting down from the higher levels, so that the eye caught here and there the flash of a gilded belt, the blood-brilliant scarlet of a feather-pierced cap, the swirl of a rainbow cloak.
But basically Gem o’ Venus was for drinking and gaming and more sordid uses. In the upper levels men gambled with fantastic devices, tricky so-called improvements on the ancient games of chance. There you might encounter such dubious streamlined tricks as roulette which employed a slightly radioactive ball and Geiger counters; there you had the game of Empire with its gagged-up cards and counters, where men played at winning imaginary galactic empires.
In Gem o’ Venus there were some gadgety games too, but the basics remained constant—dice and cards.
Faces were not familiar to Sam here, but types were. Some of the customers didn’t care where they sat; others always faced the door. These interested Sam. So did a card game on the verge of breaking up. The players were too drunk to be wary. Sam picked up his drink and kibitzed. After a while he slid into the game.
He had rather surprised to find that the cards they were using were not the familiar pipped and face-cards of the old days. They were larger, patterned with the esoteric pictures of the tarot. The old, old cards of Earth’s cloudy past had been drifting back into favor in Sam’s earlier life, but it was a little surprising to find they had reached such depths as these in forty years.
He had chosen these players carefully, so he was able to win without making it obvious, though the cards were distracting enough to lend verisimilitude to his game. It was confusing to play with pentacles and cups instead of diamonds and hearts, though, when you thought of it objectively, no more exotic.
These stakes weren’t high, but Sam didn’t expect to make his killing here. Cards were too uncertain, in any case. He needed only enough money to make an impression, and he managed to put over the idea that he had quite a lot more tucked away in his pockets. Shabbiness was no criterion of a man’s financial status in this fluctuating half-world.
He let the game break up presently, protesting in his thin old voice. Then he made his way slowly out of Gem o’ Venus and stood considering, letting himself sway a trifle. To the man who followed, it must have appeared as though libation had induced libration.
“Look, grandpa—want to sit in on another game?”
Sam gave him a wary glance. “Floater?”
“No.”
Sam was pleased. The backer of a floating game might be too penny-ante for his needs. He let himself be talked into it, remaining obviously wary until he found the destination wasn’t a dark alley, but a third-rate gambling-and-pleasure house he remembered as a restaurant forty years past.
He was steered into poker, this time with more familiar cards. Playing against sober men, he tried no tricks, with the result that he lost what money he had and ended up with a stack of ships he couldn’t pay for. As usual, Sam Reed had sold three hundred per cent of his stock issue.
So they took him to a man named Doc Mallard, a short, neckless man with curly fair hair and a face bronzed with scented skin-oil. Doc Mallard gave Sam a cold look. “What’s this about? I don’t take IOU’s.”
Sam had the sudden, strange realization that forty years ago this man had been a raw kid, learning the angles that he himself had mastered long before that. He knew a queer moment of toppling, almost frightening psychological perspective, as though, somehow, he looked down at Mallard from the enormous height of years. He was immortal—
But vulnerable. He let the drunkenness die out of his voice, but not the age. He said, “Let’s talk privately.” Mallard regarded him with a shrewdness that made Sam want to smile. When they were alone he said deliberately, “Ever hear of Sam Reed?”
“Reed? Reed? Oh, the Colony boy. Sure. Dream-dust, wasn’t it?”
“Not exactly. Not for very long, anyhow. I’m Sam Reed.”
Mallard did not take it in for a moment. He was obviously searching his memory for details of that long-ago scandal of his boyhood days. But because the Colony bubble had been—unique in Keep history, apparently he remembered after a while.
“Reed’s dead,” he said presently. “Everybody knows—”
“I’m Sam Reed. I’m not dead. Sure, I dream-dusted, but that can be cured. I’ve been landside for a long time. Just got back.”
“What’s the angle?”
“Nothing’s in it for you, Mallard. I’ve retired. I just mentioned it to prove I’m good for my IOU’s.” Mallard sneered. “You haven’t proved a thing. Nobody comes back rich from landside.”
“I made my money right here, before I left.” Sam looked crafty.
“I remember all about that. The government found your caches. You haven’t got a penny left from that.” Mallard was goading him. Sam made his voice crack. “You call seventy thousand credits nothing?” he cried in senile anger.
Mallard grinned at the ease with which he was trapping the old fool.
“How do I know you’re Sam Reed? Can you prove it?”
“Fingerprints—”
“Too easy to fake. Eyeprints, though—” Mallard hesitated. Clearly he was of two minds. But after a moment he turned and spoke into a mike. The door opened and a man came in with a bulky camera. Sam, on request, looked into the eyepiece and was briefly blinded. They waited in silence, a long time.
Then the desk-mike buzzed before Mallard. .Out of it a tinny voice said, “O.K., Doc. The patterns check with the library files. That’s your man.”
Mallard clicked the switch and .said, “All right, boys, come on in.” The door opened and four men entered. Mallard spoke to them over his shoulder. “This is Sam Reed, boys. He wants to give us seventy thousand credits. Talk him into it, will you?”
The four moved competently toward Sam Reed.
Third-degree methods hadn’t changed much. Here along Skid Row you depended on the basic, physical pain, and generally it worked. It worked with Sam. He stood it as long as an old man might, and then broke down and talked.
There had been one bad moment when he was afraid his beard would come off. But the artist knew his business. The surrogate tissue stuck firm and would continue to do so until Sam used the contents of the bottle in his pocket, the bottle that looked like the stub of a stylus.
Breathing short and hard, he answered Doc Mallard’s questions.
“I had—double cache. Opened with a korium key—”
“How much?”
“One point . . . one point three four—”
“Why haven’t you got that seventy thousand before now?”
“I just . . . just got back from landside. They’d found—all the other caches. All but that—and I can’t open it without the korium key. Where can—I get that much korium? I’m broke. Seventy thousand credits—and I can’t buy the key to open the lock!” Sam let his voice break.
Mallard scratched his ear. “That’s a lot of korium,” he said. “Still, it’s the safest kind of lock in the world.”
Sam nodded with an old man’s eager quickness at the crumb of implied praise. “It won’t open—without the exact amount of radioactivity—focused on the lock. I was smart in the old days. You’ve got to know just the right amount. Can’t stand the exposure—hit-or-miss. Got to know—”
“One point three four, eh?” Mallard interrupted him. He spoke to one of his men. “Find out how much that would cost.”
Sam sank back, muffling his smile in his beard. It was a cold smile. He did not like Mallard or Mallard’s methods. The old, familiar anger with which he had lived his forty earlier years was beginning to come back—the familiar impatience, the desire to smash everything that stood in his path. Mallard, now—he curled his fingers in the depths of his cloak, thinking how satisfying it would be to sink them into that thick bronze-oiled neck.
And then a strange new thought came to him for the first time. Was murder satisfactory vengeance—for an immortal? For him other methods lay open now. He could watch his enemies die slowly. He could let them grow old.
He played with the idea, biding his time. Time—how much of it he had, and how little! But he must take it step by step, until he could use his immortality.
One step at a time he went with the gang to the cache.
One stiff, eighty-year-old step at a time.
In the cellar, Sam reluctantly showed Doc where to expose the korium key. Korium was U233—activated thorium—and definitely not a plaything. They didn’t have much of it Not much was needed. It was in a specially-insulated box, just too big to fit in a man’s pocket, and Doc had brought along a folding shield—the only protection necessary against a brief one-time exposure. He set it up at the spot Sam indicated.
There were four men in the cellar besides Sam—Doc Mallard and three of his associates. They were all armed. Sam wasn’t. Outside, in the alley, was another man, the lookout.
The only preparation Sam had been able to make was to seize an opportunity to rub the “defixer” liquid into the roots of his beard. That appendage would come off at a tug now.
It was so silent the sound of breathing was very audible. Sam began taking long breaths, storing the oxygen-reserve he would probably need very soon. He watched Mallard’s careful adjustment of the shield and the korium box, which looked like an old-fashioned camera, and, like a camera, had a shutter and a timing attachment.
“Right here?” Mallard asked, jabbing his finger at the plastibrick wall.
Sam nodded.
Mallard pressed the right button and stepped back, behind the shield. Click—click!
That was all.
Sam said hastily, “The cache is over here, where I said. Not by the clock.” He stumbled forward, reaching, but one of the men caught his shoulder.
“Just show us,” he said. “There might be a gun stashed away with the dough.”
Sam showed them. Mallard tested the loose brick with his fingertips. He exhaled in satisfaction.
“I think—” he began—and pulled the brick toward him.
Sam drew a long breath and kept his eyes open just long enough to see the smoke-cloud begin to explode outward from the cache. With the tail-end of his glance he made certain of the korium box’s location. Then he moved.
He moved fast, hearing the sound of startled voices and then the explosive sssssh-slani of a gun. The beam didn’t touch him. He felt the sharp comers of the korium box against his palm, and he bent and used his free hand to pull another loose brick from the wall. The korium went into this emergency cache, and the brick slipped back easily into its socket.
“Hold your fire!” Mallard’s voice shouted. “Head for the door. Pollard! Don’t come in here! Stop Reed—”
Sam was already at the door and had opened his eyes. He could see nothing at all in the thick smoke that was billowing across the threshold, but he could hear a plaintive query from the lookout—Pollard. He crouched, searching for the jagged lump of metal he had planted here. It was gone. No—he touched it; his fingers curled lovingly around the cold, hard alloy, and he brought his arm up and back as, through the thinning edges of the smoke, he saw Pollard.
The man’s gun was out. Sam said, “Where’s Reed? Did he—”
That was enough. It made Pollard’s finger hesitate on the trigger button, as he tried to make certain of the identity of the vague figure emerging from the smoke. Sam’s weapon was already poised. He smashed it into Pollard’s face. He felt the crunching of bone and the wet, warm splattering of blood, and he heard a muffled, choking bleat as Pollard arched backward and began to fall. Sam hurdled the body before it struck. He ran fourteen feet and whipped around the corner.
Instantly he snatched off his cloak and beard. They went into his pockets, making no noticeable bulges. He was still running. He tore off his hat, twisted it deftly, and thrust it back on his head. It had a new shape and a different color. He dropped to the pavement and spun around, facing in the direction from which he had come. Two hasty motions opened the buckles on his shoes so that the bright bows leaped out, disguising them. There was no need for the surrogate red dye; he had blood on his hand—not his own. He wiped this across his mouth and chin.
Then he twisted his head and looked behind him, until he heard thudding footsteps.
Doc Mallard and one of his associates burst out of the alley mouth. They paused, staring around, and, as they saw Sam, sprinted toward him. Another man came out of the alley and ran after Mallard. His gun was out.
Sam dabbed feebly at his chin, blinked, and made a vague gesture behind him. He said, “Wh . . . what—” His voice wasn’t senile any more.
The fourth man came out of the alley. “Pollard’s dead,” he called.
“Shut up,” Mallard said, his mouth twisting. He stared at Sam. “Where’d he go? The old man—”
“That passage up there,” Sam said, pointing. “He—bumped into me from behind. I . . . my nose is bleeding.” He dabbed experimentally and eyed his wet fingers. “Yes. That passage—”
Mallard didn’t wait. He herded his men on and turned into the alley Sam had indicated. Sam glanced around. The Way wasn’t crowded, but one man was coming crosswise toward Sam.
He got up and waved the good Samaritan back. “It’s all right,” he called. “I’m not hurt.” Wiping the blood from his face, he started to walk away.
He turned back into the alley from which he had emerged. There was no special hurry. Mallard would be chasing an old man, and feeling certain he could overtake the slow-moving octogenarian. Later he would return to the cellar, but not immediately, Sam decided.
Smoke was still billowing out. He stumbled over Pollard’s body, and that gave him the location of the door. Inside the cellar, he oriented himself in the darkness and then found the loose brick. He pried it out, removed the korium box, and replaced the brick. Carrying the korium, he went out, and thirty seconds later was on the fastest Way-strip, moving rapidly away from Doc Mallard and company.
What next?
Korium was negotiable. But not on a no-questions-asked basis. This loot would have to be disposed of through illegal channels. Sam was no longer recognizable as the old man who had bilked Mallard. Nevertheless, he dared not appear in this transaction—not until he had fortified his position. Mallard would be watching for an underground korium sale, and he would check back.
What channels would have remained unchanged after forty years?
The same ones—but administered by different individuals. That was no help, since in such transactions it was vital to know the right people. The right ones wouldn’t be at the top any more—after forty years. Except, of course, the Harkers—the Immortal families. Sam grimaced and licked his lips, conscious again of the dry thirst under his tongue.
Who, then?
He rode the Ways for three hours, increasingly furious at this simple, easy problem that had him stopped cold. He had swindled Doc Mallard out of several thousand credits. He had the korium under his arm. But he had lost all his contacts.
Hunger grew, and thirst grew. He had no money at all. He had lost it all at the gaming table. To be distracted by such a trivial matter as hunger was infuriating. He was an Immortal!
