A Talent For The Invisible (v1.1) Page 11

  Out beyond everything stretched muddy fields. Here and there bonfires, made from building siding and smashed up cartons, burned. One fire, burning a thin pale yellow, illuminated a huddle of squatting old men.

  Another fire, further along, had been built by a cluster of mud-colored young people. Just outside the glare of the fire a young girl cried out, “Jesus, don’t let these guys do this. Please!”

  Conger continued on his way.

  Finally he came to a house-size pile of junked landcars. A single derelict sat on a fat life-time tire, holding his hands to a small cook fire. As the man shifted his position the fire flashed on the blaster hanging under bis raggedy coat.

  Conger pushed a truthbug against the man’s dirty neck. The monitor box indicated Big Mac’s car had gone further underground at this spot.

  “Yes, buddy,” said the fake derelict when the truthbug took him over.

  “How can I oblige you?”

  “I want to go down below.”

  “I’m only supposed to let authorized personnel do that,” explained the dazed guard. “Anyone else I send on their merry way. The scum who live around here, they’re no trouble to keep away. More persistent people I shoot.” He moved a convincingly filthy hand to tap at his gun. “Should the law approach, which, thank your lucky stars, they haven’t to date, I push the alarm button.” He pointed an ancient shoe in the direction of a partially concealed silver button.

  “That’s a nice job resume,” said Conger. “Now how do you open the passage down, without setting off any alarms?”

  “Easy as pie. Throw the switch beneath the bluebell blue fender right over there. After first inserting all your fingers in the whorl pattern indentifier under the portion of tractor right next to it.”

  Conger clutched the guard up, dragged him to the tractor. “I’ll need your fingers. Stick them in where they’re supposed to go.”

  The guard reached under the tipped over tractor. “Only to happy to be of service. Anything else I can do to please you? Do you have time for a bowl of slumgullion? I was about to brew …”

  Conger dropped him beside the fender concealing the switch. The guard began sleeping. Conger located the switch, threw it.

  The pile of metallic junk groaned. A stack of six mangled cars swung out toward him. A hood ornament, liberty holding two torches, snapped free and banged against his shoulder. After the doors of cars opened, he saw a ramp heading downward.

  When Conger stepped onto the ramp the junk closed tight behind him.

  CHAPTER 25

  Everything was clean. The pale green walls, the soft-lit floors of the corridors. The air was cool, smelling of mild soap.

  The tracks of Big Mac’s car showed plainly, a chalky brown, on the otherwise spotless corridor floor.

  Around the next bend a guard, dressed in a one-piece uniform which matched the walls, sat in a realwood chair. He didn’t notice Conger.

  Big Mac’s black landcar was parked in an alcove further along the corridor. The cool green hallway slanted downward beyond the alcove. A ramp forked into three new corridors.

  From the middle corridor drifted the sound of voices and the sharp odor of antiseptics. Conger took that route.

  Soon on his left he came to a large operating room with two-way see-through walls. The body of State Senator McSherry was on a white table under hanging lamps. He’s been stripped and a Chinese girl in a white jumper and mask was going over the body with a small-nozzle air hose. Two other men stood by. Neither fit the description of Sandman.

  Across the hall a door swung open to let Big Mac out. “Make sure you don’t bump the price no higher,” he warned back into the room. “China II is pretty close to solving the resurrection problem on their own, doc.”

  Someone inside the room laughed.

  Conger knew the laugh. He waited until Big Mac went by, then stepped through the doorway.

  “Something more to bitch about, my boy?”

  Conger had his pistol out. He became visible, saying, “Hello, Vince.”

  Vincent X. Worth, the former Wild Talent Division scientist, grinned up from the copper chair he was lounging in. He’d grown a dropping moustache since Conger’d seen him last, his face was more tanned. He was long and lean, wearing a dark two-piece suit. “Hello, Jake.”

  “You son of a bitch,” said Conger. “I sent flowers to your memorial service.”

  “Sit down, my boy,” suggested Worth. “I’ll tell you something about the resurrection trade. You don’t meet too many people you feel like having an intelligent talk with.” He kept on grinning. “You’re one of the few people I could confide in while I was with WTD.”

  “You didn’t confide much about your plans to fake your death so you could start playing Sandman.”

  “No, I didn’t, my boy.” Worth reach a boney hand toward a low table beside his chair.

  “Keep your hands in your lap.”

  “I’m only getting this bottle of rose hip tablets, Jake. See?” He picked up the container. “Have you tried these? I’ve been taking a dozen each day and they …”

  “You really are Sandman, huh?”

  “Of course, my boy,” said Worth, taking three tablets.

  “I thought you might be another decoy, like Sir Thomas Anstey-Guthrie.”

  “Not very likely. I quit, made it look like I was lost in an accident, because I hate to work under anyone. Sit down, won’t you, my boy? We haven’t had a get-together in … how long has it been?”

  “Since before you died.”

  Worth laughed. “Jake, suppose I’d told you what I was planning to do. You’re too honest and upright to have kept quiet. You would have told Geer, who in turn would have told Sinkovec or Tiefenbacher or whatever buffoon he has to report to. Eventually the President of the United States would even have known about it. My process would be one more property of the American stockpile. I’d have spent the rest of my days bringing self-indulgent senators back to life, with possibly now and then, to avoid criticism, a Pulitzer prize winning playwright or two.”

  “Can’t you do it on a large scale?”

  “You mean keep everybody alive forever?” Worth chewed up a few more rose hip tablets. “Not very likely, my boy. It’s much too expensive. Which is one reason why I decided to deal with clients like China II. They spend much more profusely than the US does. Besides which, Jake, for most of the buffoons in the world one life time is too much. I’ll tell you something. I originally got onto the Sandman process while I was trying to work out something to thin out the world population a little.”

  Keeping his pistol leveled at Worth, Conger sat down and then pushed his chair back against the door.

  Worth continued, “Of course I’d been fooling around with cryptobiosis for over a year before that, figuring I could switch it somehow to use for storing WTD agents when they weren’t in use. You know about cryptobiosis, it’s that death like state certain primitive animals, the tardigrade for example, can bring off. It’s a sort of suspended animation. My god, van Leeunwenhuek was messing with this kind of thing back in the 18th Century. He was handicapped, however, in that he didn’t know anything about prostaglandins. See, Jake, in general all prostaglandins are variants of a basic 20-carbon carboxylic fatty acid incorporating a five member cyclopentane … but you probably aren’t following this. What you have to remember, my boy, is that I, working all by myself in that second-rate Wild Talent Division lab, came up with a way to revive the dead.”

  “A real first for you,” said Conger. “And you’ve put it to splendid use. I’ve met a few of the guys you lifted up from the grave.”

  “Real buffoons most of them, aren’t they?” grinned the lean Worth.

  “Though I got a favorable impression of … what was his name? Yeah, old Avo Enzerto down in Urbania. He has the kind of quirky mind I admire.”

  “Enzerto is dead again.”

  “Oh? I hadn’t heard,” said Worth. “Someone must have killed him all over again, because my process d
oesn’t fail. It’s not like those brain transplants that were all the rage ten years ago. Only about 25% of those poor buffoons survived.”

  “Big Mac killed him.”

  Shrugging, Worth said, “He’s a mean bastard. He was in here trying to talk me down to $250,000 for the senator out there. I told him if he wants McSherry alive and kicking the price is $350,000. As a matter of fact, I think AngloRussia is going to agree to $400,000 per job. Think about that, Jake. Think of what I was making at WTD, my boy. I’ve done twenty-one of these resurrections so far. Multiply 21 …”

  “I heard it was less than that.”

  “Since I don’t, as Sandman, issue publicity releases, Jake, it’s hard for you to get completely accurate information.”

  “Without it,” said Conger, “I still found you, Vince. Now we’ll go back up to Greater Los Angeles.”

  After nibbling at one tablet held between two fingers, Worth shook his head. “I don’t believe so, Jake.”

  “Don’t get the idea I won’t shoot if your people try anything.”

  “I’m sure you would,” said Worth. “Mac told me about what happened earlier, Jake. I realize what you must feel.”

  “Okay, fine. Then let’s get going.”

  “Wait, my boy,” said Worth. “You’re going to let me go. You’re not going to bring in Sandman at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you let me go, my boy, I’ll bring the girl back to life.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Conger was jogging along a strip of yellow sand. He was in California North, a few miles from the state capital of San Francisco, and the quiet morning Pacific was on his left. He put a hand into a pocket of his two-piece beachsuit, drew out a bottle of kelp pills.

  From the direction of his rented houseboat a robot came trotting.

  “Phone call for Mr. Conger, phone call for Mr. Conger.”

  Conger slowed his pace, letting the robot catch up with him. A dozen gulls were spinning high overhead in the clear blue sky.

  “Long distance from Manhattan,” the robot told him as it came near.

  “Very important.”

  When the robot was alongside him on his left Conger glanced at the phone screen built into its chest. “Good morning,” he said.

  “It’s high noon back here,” Geer pointed out. “That’s why I’m trying to catch a bite of lunch while I straighten out this yoohoo Sandman business.” The boss had a hotdog-chocolate cake sandwich in one hand.

  “I’m afraid the powers that be don’t quite understand your final report, Jake. When I say powers that be, I mean Lupoff and Thompson, who have apparently replaced both Sinkovec and Tiefenbacher in the upper echelons of our respected organization. I might add while I have your attention, more or less, that I myself do not fully understand what …” Conger thrust his foot between the legs of the phone robot. The mechanism toppled over, splashed face down in the surf. Conger jogged on.

  Angelica smiled when he stepped onto the deck of the houseboat. She was wearing dark slacks and a high neck blouse which hid the small scar over her left breast. “Do your ten miles?”

  “Twelve,” said Conger. He took a shaggy towel from the boat rail to wipe his face and neck.

  “The real estate man was by a few minutes ago,” said the lovely dark girl. “With a complaint.”

  “About his phone robot?” Conger sat near her on the smooth deck.

  “Exactly. He says he found it down on the beach a half hour ago full of sand and salt water,” Angelica said. “When he turned it over a sour-faced man called him a yoohoo from the pixscreen. Was that Geer?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “He’s not happy?”

  “He wasn’t during the small portion of his conversation I heard, no.”

  “What do you think your status with the Wild Talent Division is,” she asked. “Now you’ve let Sandman go free?”

  Conger smiled. “I figure I’ve joined the ranks of yoohoos,” he said. “I’m probably fired from WTD. I may even be blacklisted.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “Nope,” he answered.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “In awhile I’ll address myself to the problem of a new station in life.” Angelica smiled, touching his shoulder with one warm slender hand.

  “I’m glad, Jake, you let Sandman talk you into making that deal.”

  “If he hadn’t suggested it,” Conger told her, “I was going to.”

  The End