Nemo Page 8

  The words Another Torchy Bathhouse To Serve You! were written large in glow-strips across the landing area. The bald android landing attendant had a similar message inscribed on his scalp.

  “Best to keep moving,” Ted told himself as his ship settled into a roof slot. “Perlberg must have realized by now it was you who caused him all that trouble in Nightown. You shouldn’t have . . . never mind. I wanted to get back at that son-of-a-bitch. Yeah, he’s sure to have reported to TSA that Agent Nemo is at large in Florida. What’ll the Total Security people do? Come looking for me obviously.”

  “This isn’t a real bathhouse, you realize,” said the hairless andy as he opened the door for Ted.

  “I realize.”

  “You’ll pardon my saying this, but you don’t look much like a man of the sort. . . . What I’m getting at is, you seem a man of some integrity,” said the android. “A fellow, meaning no offense, of good moral character.”

  “Well, I’m on vacation,” Ted told him. “I want to enjoy myself. I’ve heard a lot about the Torchy operation and I want to . . . to have fun. See, notice what I’m wearing.”

  “An oversize funsuit.”

  “I had to select my wardrobe in somewhat of a hurry,” explained Ted. “Still this funsuit ought to indicate to you that I’m here with fun in mind.” This was, more or less, Ted’s real purpose. His neighbor McAlpin had touted the Torchy Bathhouse chain often enough. Now, to prove to Haley she wasn’t me only one who could enjoy herself outside the home, he’d visit one of the places.

  “Most of our fun-seeking patrons don’t wear such glum expressions, if you forgive my mentioning the fact.”

  “Well, I’m far from glum. I want the deluxe treatment.” Ted crossed the roof to a downtube.

  “They’ll fix you up on Floor 6, Mr. . . .”

  “Edmund Bierhorst, Junior.” Ted stepped into the tube.

  There were girls scattered all around the stepout. Because of the thick, tinted, scented steam Ted couldn’t determine how many girls there were exactly, nor how many were real as opposed to mechanical.

  “Welcome aboard. Welcome to another friendly Torchy Bathhouse.

  Come on over and sit down,” invited a husky voice.

  Ted couldn’t see who was talking. He didn’t see any empty chairs in the swirling mist either. “Keep talking, I’ll try to find you.”

  “The steambath pavilion is a trifle on the blink today. Nothing serious.”

  “Allow me to guide you, sir.” A tall, attractive red-haired girl caught Ted by the hand.

  A chair loomed up out of the scented fog, a licorice-color lucite desk was floating next to it.

  Behind the desk sat a fat woman wearing a see-through bathrobe. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Bierhorst,” she said in her husky voice.

  The redhead placed Ted in the chair and then was lost in the pink mist. “You have an interesting voice,” Ted told the fat woman.

  “It’s this farbing steam. Gets into my voicebox.”

  “Oh, you’re an andy?”

  “Cyborg.” She whacked her fat upper arm, causing a tiny door to open. From the compartment within she took a deck of pink file cards. “First off, Mr. Bierhorst, you’ll have to sign a release.”

  “Release?”

  “First time in a bathhouse, huh?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact—”

  “No need to apologize. We need a release to show the United Medical Bureau boys in case you kick off here.”

  “You mean I’m likely to die?”

  “No, no. It doesn’t happen very often at all, but we have to play it safe.”

  Ted brought the form close to his face so the steam wouldn’t blur it.

  “. . . ‘absolve the Torchy Bathhouse ® Corporation of all blame in case of my death by misadventure, ecstasy, overzealous. . . .’ You get many ecstasy deaths?”

  “Had an old gentleman in from Madeira Beach last month who went that way. Young lad like yourself, I wouldn’t worry.”

  Ted signed his current alias to the form. “I’d like Mrs. Bierhorst, that’s my mother back home in Bridgeport, to have my voxwatch and my—”

  “Cheer up, lad, the odds are against your cashing in,” said the husky-voiced cyborg. She reached under her desk, slapped her knee, and took a brochure out of the compartment this action had revealed. “If you’ll hand over your multicard I’ll sign you up for what you want.”

  Ted began to go through the brochure. “This number fourteen,” he said. “Total massage. What is that exactly?”

  “A massage.”

  “Yeah, but what else.”

  “We rub you all over your body with neobutter, two Norwegian cyborg bimbos with specially built massage hands come in and slap you around.”

  “I know, but . . . isn’t this total-massage designation a cover for—?”

  “Turn to page fourteen.”

  Ted did that. “Oh, here we are. ‘Kinds of Intercourse You Can Try!’ See, I was expecting you wouldn’t be this explicit about—”

  “Some states we have to be a little coy. Here in Florida we can call a spade a spade. If you have any idea what a spade is. Supposedly it was some kind of shovel which—”

  “I guess I’ll try number forty-two.”

  The fat woman blinked. “That’s all?”

  “Well, for a start.”

  She plucked the multicard from between his fingers. “Suit yourself, Mr. Bierhorst,” she said. “You’re absolutely certain you want merely number forty-two? With only one girl?”

  “One’ll be enough,” he said, “for a start, anyway.”

  “Any preference as to the girl? You can get them in fourteen different hair shades, eighteen different body styles, twelve different religious creeds, sixteen—”

  “Doesn’t matter, although I’d prefer a real girl to an android.”

  The fat woman snapped her fingers. “We have a new little girl starting in just today. She’s a slight bit . . . how shall I phrase it? Inexperienced perhaps. However, she’s well-intentioned, lively, and cute as a button. Would you mind—?”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  She tossed him a key-glove. “Room 6Y.”

  The red-haired girl reappeared to take him there. “I had you down for a much more experimental sort,” she said. “I bet myself you’d go for at least a number thirty-seven, and probably an eighty-one after that.”

  Ted thumbed through the brochure. “A number thirty-seven? Really? Do you see me as—?”

  “Here’s 6Y. Good luck.”

  It wasn’t as steamy inside the circular blue-walled room. He could see the girl on the bed quite clearly. She was a slim blonde, not more than twenty. Naked, hands pressed against her temples, crying.

  Ted approached the bed. “What’s wrong?”

  Without looking up the girl answered, “I’m never going to earn enough money in time.”

  “In time for what?”

  “To keep the Repo people from taking back my landcar,” she said.

  Chapter 14

  “This has got to be him.” The shaggy-browed man brought his memo-filled fist down hard on the neowood desk.

  The desk cracked across the middle.

  “I hate,” said Dr. Dix, “to keep cautioning you, Karew, but now that you have metal hands you really ought to curtail some of your more extreme gestures.”

  J. Edward Karew, District Director of the Total Security Agency, was a large man of fifty-one. Scowling now, he made a short, muttering attempt to get the two halves of the desk top back together. He rumbled across the office. “As I was saying, I’m convinced all these things were done by the missing Agent Nemo. What do you think, pretty boy?”

  Jay Perlberg was sitting, stiff and uneasy, in a floating neoprene chair. He’d been watching the stapler slide across the ruined desk top. “Most of the incidents, yes, probably.”

  “Yes, probably?” bellowed Karew. He swung his free hand angrily back, making a large dent in the metallic wall of this underground office
.

  “You’re supposed to be our expert on Nemo. You’re supposed to know him intimately, know every little twist and turn of his mind. That is why you’ve been dorking his wife, isn’t it?”

  “Basically, yes, though I am very fond of Haley.”

  “Philip Van Horn,” read the District Director off the top memo of his fistful. “Philip Van Horn reported to the police of Iveyville, Florida, that his multicard disappeared from his billfold with an ‘uncanny implosive noise.’ That was our boy at work.”

  “Yes, it does sound like him.”

  “Now we also know this spurious Philip Van Horn spent a night at the Howard Johnson in the Daytown sector of High World,” continued Karew. “For dinner he had mockduck, soy patties au pseudogratin, a large serving of homemade-style deep-dish applesub pie, topped off with—”

  “Spare us the menus,” put in Dr. Dix.

  “I’ll spare you not a farbing thing.” The memos turned to a crackling wad as his metal fingers tightened. “TSA is nothing, Doctor, if not thorough. That’s how we’ve managed to remain so completely clandestine all these many years.”

  “Until now,” said Dr. Dix.

  “. . . topped off with a foamy carob shake. Does that sound like something this nerd Briar would have for dinner?”

  Perlberg shrugged. “It’s difficult to—”

  “Didn’t you ever discuss his eating habits and food preferences with that skinny wife of his?”

  “No, we—”

  “Let it pass.” Karew consulted the next memo. “A size thirty-eight funsuit, which three conventioning nostalgia vendors swear disappeared right out of a display wall with an ‘eerie explosive hum’! Does this ferp go in for funsuits?”

  “He might,” said Perlberg. “Certainly he’s going to act against type for awhile. He’s found out, somehow or other, that he is the master of an exceptional wild talent. He’s like a schoolboy freed from the drudgery of the classroom. ‘No more pencils, no more books,’ as the ancient jingle has it, ‘no more—’”

  “Doggerel, menus,” said Dr. Dix. “None of this gets us any forwarder. What we must do is determine not where Agent Nemo has been, but where he’s going to be.”

  Karew shook his fist. It rattled. “That’s exactly what we’re attempting to do, Doctor,” he said. “We establish a pattern, which will tell us where Ted Briar is going to pop up next. I don’t have to tell you, or maybe I do considering you’re behaving like a couple of nerfs, how valuable he is to us. Of all the thousands, millions actually, of people we surreptitiously test each year, how many do we find who have any kind of real psi abilities?”

  “Roughly—” began Dr. Dix.

  “Not a hell of a lot,” Karew went on.”And of those we select for processing and indoctrination not even half turn out to be usable Total Security agents.” He hit his palm with his fist, producing a bonging sound. “With Ted Briar we’ve got somebody with a very high degree of ability, especially when it comes to heaving antigov twerps out windows and off balconies from a safe distance. The fact he has these moral scruples isn’t exactly a plus factor, but since we can process him into forgetting them when he’s at work, it’s no big thing.”

  “I’m wondering,” put in Perlberg, “if we’re going to be able to turn Ted back into a functioning agent again. This taste of freedom, coupled with his new awareness of what he can—”

  “We can process him again,” said Karew. “Once a ferp, always a ferp.” His eyebrows seemed to entwine as he stared over at Dr. Dix. “It’d be a help if we knew exactly why Ted Briar jumped the slot at all.”

  “We’ve never had a case like his before,” said Dix, wandering over to the ruined desk. “Now he was evidencing very strong traces of whimsy when we processed him last—”

  “Whimsy’s not our problem,” said the TSA District Director. “We have to worry about getting Ted Briar back before he talks to somebody, particularly somebody like Reverend Ortega. We already know Rev O had that jig watching the Briar place. An essential operation like ours can’t continue to serve the nation if it ceases to be secret. You lose the goddamn element of surprise. Nemo has got to be brought in.”

  “He’s going to be very tough to catch,” observed Perlberg. “What he did to me, he can do to anyone we send after him.”

  “If we intended to rely on force, yeah,” said Karew. “What Nemo seems to be doing is kicking up his heels. He’s going to have himself a good time for awhile. We should be able, when more facts come in, to predict exactly where he’ll be seeking his fun.”

  “Possibly,” said Dr. Dix.

  “Eventually this ferp is going to want to see his wife again. So even if we miss him on his round of hot spots, we can nab him when he tries to contact her.”

  “He doesn’t want to have anything to do with her,” said Perlberg. “I talked to Haley this morning and she’s convinced he’s—”

  “She thinks one thing now because he caught her schtooping with you, pretty boy. I think something else.”

  “Granted he may tire of his whoopee-making,” conceded Dix, “Agent Nemo is capable of teleporting people, remember? He teleported his wife back home from Florida. What’s to stop him from—”

  “Trust me,” said Karew. “We can use his wife to trap him.”

  The six votive candles—the one stuck in the plyocup was sputtering lit up a few square yards of the tunnel. Beyond that it was darkness, damp, and chill. The fifty people huddled on the cracked cement, some kneeling, others sitting cross-legged, were all watching Reverend Ortega.

  The fugitive priest stood beneath an ancient Caution sign. “What exactly was St. Paul trying to get across when he told us—?”

  “Roamers!”

  Before Casper’s warning shout had ceased echoing through the train tunnel Reverend Ortega had produced a stungun from beneath his black singlet. “Okay, flock, you’d better scatter,” he told the group. “Which way are they coming from, Casper?”

  The black young man had a talkbox held to his ear. “Uptown.”

  “Scatter downtown then.”

  The crowd fragmented, parishioners hurrying away into the underground darkness, some of them dropping off the platform onto the tracks. After extinguishing the candles and packing them in his knapsack, Reverend Ortega joined Casper. “How many Roaming U.S. Police can we expect?”

  “Linda says six.”

  “They know I’m down here?”

  “Not you specific, no. They apparently got a tip there’s some kind of illicit meeting in progress under Grand Central.” He dropped his hand into his pocket, exchanging his talkbox for a stungun. “Six armed Roamers. We’ll retreat.” Ortega took hold of Casper’s arm, led him through the tunnel blackness to a metal door. “We’ll scoot up this old repairmen’s exit stairway.”

  “We could wait around and stun two, three of them maybe.”

  “No.” He pulled him into the alcove beyond the door.

  As they climbed up the rattling stairs Casper said, “We been having bad luck, Rev. The Roamers have broken up two masses in the past week . . . and Ted’s let us down.”

  “He’ll be back eventually, and on our side.”

  “I don’t think he’s— Hey, a rat. Just brushed him with my hand. Have we got time to see if I can catch him for—”

  “No, keep climbing,” said Reverend Ortega. “It doesn’t sound as though the Roamers are going to follow us. Probably went chasing after my unfortunate midtown congregation.”

  “ZeroPet’s got a new ratgas, so it’s getting hard to even find a rat anymore,” said Casper. “You really think Ted isn’t just going to screw around, have some fun with all the telek powers he’s got?”

  “He’ll do some of that,” said Ortega. “Then he’ll come back to help.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Have faith, Casper.”

  “I got faith in some things and some people, but not much in Ted.”

  “We shall see,” said the reverend.

  J. Edward Karew hi
t the syncaf machine. “I ordered it without pseudokrim, you farbing ferp!”

  Burble!

  The man-high machine doubled up as a result of the blow from Karew’s metal fist. Neococoa began sputtering out of its side, steam spewed from its top, and little cubes of synsac came clattering out of one of its now-twisted nozzles.

  Snorting, the District Director showed the injured machine his back. A wall panel slid open a few feet to the left of the gasping syncaf machine. “Oops, hey, am I intruding?”

  Karew, eyebrows flapping, faced the lanky young man who stumbled into the room. “Ten minutes late, Moriarty,” he boomed. “I’d just about decided not to give you another chance after all.”

  Moriarty, who was two months past nineteen, jumped so the loose-fitting tunic of his two-piece studysuit didn’t get caught in the closing wall panel. His left foot hit a spreading pool of syncaf, he came sliding almost up to the scowling Karew. “I was a little delayed, sir,” he explained, “by circumstances. For instance, after I received your summons I had to outfox my parents. You know it wouldn’t do to have them let the other side know I’ve been summoned once again by the Total—”

  “What other side, nerf?”

  “My father and mother are agents for the other side in our endless struggle—”

  “Your farbing parents aren’t agents for anything. I’ve told you that many times, Moriarty. Your problem is you’re completely paranoid, which—”

  “I wish, sir, you wouldn’t use words like farbing when referring to my mother and father. Even though they’re clandestine agents for one of the great evil powers in the contemporary worl—”

  “Your parents are not secret agents for anybody, Moriarty. You’re goofy, is what it is.”

  The lank young man scratched at his ribs, grinning. “Can’t figure, sir, why you try to cover for Mom and Pop unless, as I’m coming to suspect, they are actually double agents. Working simultaneously for the great evil power and for our own—”

  “They aren’t! They aren’t double agents for any two anybodies! Now sit down in that chair there and listen to me, Moriarty.”

  “Yes, sir. No need to— Oops.” A spill of neococoa got underfoot and Moriarty went skating across the room into a wall.