Tangle Hold Part 9

As long as they could see what he saw.

But there was such a thing as a shield. Any known kind of radiation could be shielded against.

He was working with intangibles. He didn't know the nature of the phenomenon he had to fight. He had to extrapolate in part, guess the rest. One thing was certain, though: If he was successful in setting up a shield against the circuit, the police would arrive soon after.

Arrive here.

His value to them was obvious. Through him they could make an undetected contact with the shadowy world of illegality. If that contact was cut off or if he seemed about to escape, his usefulness came to an end and they would want one more arrest while they could get it.

Once he started to work on the shield, he would have to work fast.

Jadiver went to the screen. There could be no hesitation; the decision was ready-made.

The bank robot appeared on the screen and Jadiver spoke to him briefly, requesting that his account be cleared. He scribbled his signature and had it recorded.

While waiting, he began to pack, sorting what he wanted to take. It wasn't much, some special clothing. His equipment, except for a few small tools, he had to leave. No matter. With luck, he could replace it; without luck, he wouldn't need it.

In a few minutes he was ready, but the money hadn't arrived. He sat down and nervously scrawled on a sc.r.a.p of paper. Presently the delivery chute clattered and the money was in it, crisp new bills neatly wrapped, the total of his savings over the years. He stuffed the money in his pocket.

The sc.r.a.p of paper was still in his hand. He started to throw it away, but his fingers were reluctant to let it go. He stared curiously at the crumpled wad and on impulse smoothed it out.

There were words on it, though he hadn't remembered writing any. The handwriting was shaky and stilted, as if he were afflicted with some nervous disease; nevertheless, it was unmistakably his own.

There was a message on it, from himself to himself. No, not from himself. But it was intended that he read it. The note said:

RUN, JADIVER. I'LL HELP.

YOUR FRIEND

He sat down. A picture rose involuntarily in his mind: The face was that of Doumya Filone.

He couldn't prove it, but it seemed certain that she was the one. She knew about the circuit, of course, had known long before he did. He remembered the incident when his skin had itched.

He had called her about it and she hadn't seemed surprised. She had left the screen for some time--for what purpose? To adjust the mechanism, or have someone else adjust it. The last, probably; the mechanism was almost certainly at the police end, and at the time he called she had been at home. In any event, the mechanism had originally been set too strong and she had ordered the setting to be reduced. That suggested one thing: the power to activate the circuit came from the mechanism--a radarlike device.

Then what? His skin had momentarily become translucent, allowing him to see the circuit. How she achieved that, he didn't know, but the reason was obvious. It had been her way of warning him and it had worked.

The message in his hand told him one thing. He had known about the danger, but he hadn't guessed that he didn't have to face it alone.

Something else was evident: her control was limited--perhaps she could step in at a critical moment, but the greater part was up to him.

He moved quickly. He opened the delivery chute and put in the small bag that held his clothing, then punched a code that dispatched it to the transportation terminal. In return, he received a small plastic strip with the same code on it. The bag could be traced, but not without trouble, and he should be able to pick it up before then. At this stage he didn't want to be enc.u.mbered.

He took a last look around and stepped into the hall. He leaped back again.

A heavy caliber slug crashed into the door.

That had been meant to kill. He was lucky it hadn't.

Who was it? Not the police. By law they were restricted to tangle guns, though they sometimes forgot. In this case, their memory should be good--they'd have difficulty explaining away the holes in his body. Not that they'd have to, really; if they wanted, they could toss him into an alley and claim they had found his body later.

Still, there was no particular reason why they should want to kill him outright when they could do it by degrees scientifically and with full legal protection. They didn't call it killing. There was another term: converting.

The converting process was not new; the principles had existed for centuries. The newness lay in the proper combination of old discoveries.

Electric shock was one ingredient, a prolonged drastic application of it during the recreation of a situation that the victim had a weakness for.

In the case of an adulterer, say, the scene was hypnotically arranged with the cooperation of a special robot that wouldn't be short-circuited. At the proper moment, electric shock was applied, repeatedly. Rigorous and somewhat rough on the criminal's wife, but the adulterer would be saddled all his life with an unconditional reflex.

That was only one ingredient. There were others, among them a pseudo-religious brotherhood, membership in which was compulsory.

C. C.--Confirmed Converters. _They_ kept tab on one another with apocalyptic fervor. Transgressions were rare. Death came sooner.

Jadiver stood there thinking. It wasn't the police, because they had converting with which to threaten him. It wasn't Cobber, either. He could have killed Jadiver earlier and hadn't.

Cobber might have talked, though. There were enough people who now regretted that Jadiver had once given them new faces. As far as they were concerned Jadiver was in the hands of the police.

The ident.i.ty of the man outside didn't matter. He was not from the police, but he did want Jadiver dead.

Jadiver stood back and pushed the door open. Another slug crashed into it, tiny, but with incredible velocity.

He knelt, thrust his hand outside the door near the bottom and fired a random fusillade down the corridor. Then he took his finger off the trigger and listened. There wasn't a sound. The man had decided to be sensible.

Jadiver stepped out. The man was crouched in an inconspicuous corner and he was going to stay in that position for a long time. He couldn't help breathing, though, and his chest was a tangle of wires. There were some on his face, too, where his eyelids flickered and his mouth twitched.

The gun was in his hand and it was aimed nearly right. There was nothing to prevent his squeezing the trigger--except the tangle extruded loosely over his hand. And he could move faster than it could. Once, at any rate.

"I wouldn't," said Jadiver. "You're going to have a hard time explaining that illegal firearm. And it'll look worse if I'm here with my head wrapped around a hole that just fits the slug."

The man reaffirmed his original decision to be sensible about it by remaining motionless. Jadiver didn't recognize him. Probably a hired a.s.sa.s.sin.

The man paled with the effort not to move. He teetered and the tangle stuff coiled fractionally tighter.

"Take care of yourself," Jadiver said, and left him there.

Jadiver headed toward the transportation terminal. The police could trace him that far. Let them; he intended that they should. It would confuse them more when he walked right off their instruments.

Once inside the underground structure, he lost himself in the traffic.

That was just in case he had been followed physically as well as by radiation. People coming from Earth, fewer going back. They arrived in swarms from the surface, overhead from the concrete plain where rockets roared out on takeoff or hissed in for landing. Transportation shunted the mob in one direction for interplanetary travel, in another for local air routes.

Jadiver reclaimed his bag, boarded the moving belts and hopped on and off several times, again just in case. The last time off, he had coins ready. He slipped around a corner and walked down a long quiet corridor.

There were doors on either side, a double deck with a narrow balcony on the second story. At intervals, stairs led to the balcony.

He walked a third of the way down the corridor, inserted coins in the slot, and a door opened. He went inside the sleep locker and the door closed behind, locking automatically.

It was miserable accommodation if he intended to sleep, but he didn't.

It was also a trap if the police were trailing him. He didn't think they were--they were too certain of him. Nevertheless, the sleep locker had one advantage: it was all metal. Considering the low power that probably went into the circuit, it should be a satisfactory temporary shield.

He changed into clothes that looked ordinary--out of style, in fact, though that was not noteworthy in a solarwide economy--but the material, following a local terrestrial fad of a few years back, contained a high proportion of metallic fiber. That solved only part of the problem, of course. His hands and his head were uncovered.