The Dark Mind - The Transfinite Man Part 1

The Dark Mind.

The Transfinite Man.

Colin Kapp, 1965.

ONE.

Failway Terminal cut across the old sector of the city like an ugly red house-brick thrown by a vandal on to a Lilliputian town. Almost a square mile of the old town had been obliterated to make room for the monstrous hundred-storied hulk of architectural impotence which was the Terminal building. Streets and parks alike ended with a plaintive suddenness short of this monumental reminder that money can buy anything. Its shadow secured a shroud of almost permanent gloom across the tenements still cringing between it and the river. Failway Terminal, thought Ivan Dalroi, was a headache from any point of view.

A ground-cab set him down at the main entrance, and he lingered for a while watching the faces of the trippers and the sensation seekers who flocked to the Terminal in search of the pleasures only Failway could provide. The sight made him slightly sick. Failway was strictly impartial: the customers got what they paid for - pleasures simple, exciting, exotic or erotic according to their wishes. The trouble was that people tended to graduate ...

The girl at the reception desk took his card and scanned it with disfavour.

"You have an appointment?"

"No," said Dalroi. "Only people who expect to live a long time make appointments. I want to speak to Peter Madden."

"Would you care to state the nature of your business?"

"Right now it hasn't got a name, but unless I get a few good answers I shall probably call it murder."

The girl dialled a number and spoke briefly into an acoustic chamber. Then she turned back to Dalroi.

"Mr. Madden was expecting you to call. He will see you immediately."

Dalroi scowled. Only a selected few knew he was planning a visit to Failway Terminal. Only one other person knew his purpose. Somebody was guessing, or ... A sudden stab of panic clawed at his vitals and he rejected it savagely.

Peter Madden was a mild-seeming man with a careful, suave calm born more of rigid self-discipline than inner content. The man's balance and control was almost perfect, thought Dalroi, but the tell-tale top line frown betrayed the power and the conflict locked within the skull. Peter Madden was not a man to be crossed lightly.

"Failway Public Relations at your disposal, Mr. Dalroi. We aim to serve you."

"I doubt it!" said Dalroi. "I'm not exactly increasing the good-will of the establishment."

Madden looked him firmly in the eyes, a slight smile on his lips, and motioned him into a chair. "Knowing your reputation for trouble, I take it this isn't a social visit?"

"If you were expecting me, you know d.a.m.n well it isn't. For the record I'll pretend you don't know who I am or why I'm here." He searched carefully around the room for the concealed microphones he knew were recording every word he spoke. "I'm a private investigator working on behalf of Baron Cronstadtand the Cronstadt committee. Four weeks ago three members of the committee visited Failway on a fact-finding tour. I know they went in because I watched them. They never came out again."

"That's a sweeping statement," said Madden gently. "You don't suppose we lose people in Failway, do you?"

"I do mean just that."

"It's scarcely policy, Mr. Dalroi. Failway is devoted to offering patrons whatever they choose to seek. If they came looking for facts, I have no doubt they found them."

"And if they came looking for trouble?" asked Dalroi. "Let's stop fencing, Mr. Madden. The Cronstadt committee is out to break the Failway monopoly. The fact that three members don't return after a Failway visit is highly suggestive of a little foul play. I'd be interested to hear your explanation."

Madden laughed quietly. "My dear Dalroi, we're not afraid of the Cronstadt committee, and we've nothing to hide. There've always been cranks against Failway and there always will be - it's part of the cross we bear for being in advance of the times. Why should we trouble ourselves with the maunderings of three old men?"

Dalroi looked up. "Who said they were old?"

Peter Madden spread his hands. "Prohibition is an old man's occupation. Do you mind if I offer you a little advice, Mr. Dalroi?"

"Call me Ivan," said Dalroi insolently. "It sounds less formal."

Madden controlled himself. "Very well - Ivan. I advise you to drop this case. You've a big reputation as an investigator. I suggest you wouldn't want to ruin it by starting something you have no hope of finishing."

"Is that a threat?"

"No, simply a prediction."

"Then your crystal ball is tuned in to the wrong channel. I've never yet walked out on a case."

"Not even when the price was right?" Madden watched him closely.

"No," said Dalroi, "not even then. First of all a man has to live with himself. Besides which, I have a personal score to settle with Failway."

Madden fingered a file of papers on his desk then pushed it aside with a hint of impatience. "I was afraid of that," he said. "I don't suppose it does any good to repeat that you have no chance at all of succeeding?"

"No," said Dalroi. "Win or lose, there isn't enough room for Dalroi and Failway to live together. One of us is going to have to go."

"At least we reach a point of complete agreement," said Madden quietly.

He stood up to signify that the interview was at an end. Dalroi rose also, puzzled by a curious undercurrent in the P.R.O.'s manner. Madden showed him out with the usual courtesies and a final handshake. As their hands clutched, Dalroi became aware that a piece of folded paper was being pressed into his palm. A glance at Madden's eyes cautioned him to silence. He trapped the paper deftly beneath his thumb, and set off down the corridor without once looking back.He was deep in the heart of the old town before he slipped the note carefully into his pocket. Glancing round to make sure he was not being followed, he entered Mortimer's cafe-bar and went straight to the telephone. This was a tactical move. Mortimer saw him enter and nodded to the boy to watch the door.

Dalroi and Mortimer had a mutual pact to protect each other's right to privacy, a remnant of the old gang-fights of their youth.

The note read: FAILWAY G2. 12:00 MUST SPEAK. MADDEN.

Dalroi frowned. Failway G.2, was the heavy goods entrance on the river side of the Terminal. It was situated in the wharfing area in the toughest and most vicious district of the old town. Dalroi knew. He had spent his youth in the shadows of the brothels and bars around the mouldering wharves. That scar on his forehead was no accident.

He dropped some coins into the meter and dialled his office. Zdenka, his secretary, answered the phone.

"Dalroi here, Zen. Anything new come in for me?"

"Nothing - unless you count the gas bill."

"File it," said Dalroi. "Under miscellaneous. Look, I want you to get on to our police contacts and see if you can get information on any unidentified bodies found in this area in the last four weeks. I'm specifically interested in three, male, in the fifty to sixty-five age group."

"That sounds ominously like the members of the fact-finding party who went into Failway."

"Precisely," said Dalroi. "I'm tempted to wonder if I've been looking for them in the wrong place.

Something's very curious about this whole affair. There's a h.e.l.l of an undercurrent behind everything."

"Speaking of undercurrents," Zdenka said, "somebody named Dutt was on the phone."

"How long ago?"

"Thirty seconds, perhaps."

"Right!" said Dalroi. "You can go home if you want to. I shall probably be late."

He broke the connection hastily. He knew n.o.body named Dutt. The message was a prearranged code.

DUTT ... Don't Use The Telephone. It meant that the personal-privacy meter in the office had detected a wire-tap on the line. His interest in Failway had somebody worried, and that somebody was going to a great deal of trouble to keep informed of his movements. Things were beginning to warm up.

He left the phone, nodded to Mortimer, then changed his mind about going out of the front entrance and went through the kitchens at the back. Turning uptown he ignored two ground-cabs and selected a third.

Thus it was he was just re-pa.s.sing Mortimer's bar in time to see the front blown out by a bomb which exploded within.

He halted the cab, half inclined to plough into the wreckage to look for Mortimer and the boy, but the angle of the beams told him the floor had collapsed into the cellar. That made it a job for the fire-service rescue squad and the police - especially the police. Mortimer's hobby was printing, and the presses lived in the cellar - so did the plates which produced such highly accurate counterfeit banknotes.

With a sick heart he ordered the cab to drive on. He had no doubt that the bomb had been intended forhimself. Obviously he had been followed from Failway by someone who was not only a master of his trade but was also prepared to kill and was not particular as to how he did it. That triple qualification narrowed the field quite a bit. He could not recall more than half a dozen men in the country who could fit the post - and they were all very expensive.

He began to sense the power and complexity of the web stretched out across the city. Somebody at Failway was displeased or frightened or both, and Failway never stopped at niceties to remove a thorn beneath the flesh. It had always been the same - the vast concentration of power scaled down to the fine operating edge of the professional killer; the knife in the dark, the body in the river - nice inconspicuous deaths with no witnesses, no convictions and nothing to connect them with Failway save the tenuous threads of suspicion.

Failway tolerated no opposition. It was ruthless, thorough and invariably fatal to its opponents. Why not, when it was prepared to spend a million pounds to ensure a man was dead?

Cronstadt himself had chosen Dalroi for the job; 'Iron-fist' Cronstadt, the Steel and Paper Baron, a man of fierce ambitions and bitter, uncompromising drives. Around him he had drawn a committee of helpers as bizarre and unorthodox as himself: Presley, head of the United Churches Militant Action Group; Hildebrand, psychologist and intellectual; and the fantastic Doctor Gormalu, whose scientific genius had first made Failway possible. Also backing Cronstadt was the government-appointed fact-finding group whose disappearance had given Dalroi his first operating part in the game.

Three streets from the office Dalroi dismissed the cab on a swift impulse. It occurred to him that the bomb in Mortimer's bar had left him with an unsought advantage. For a few hours at least Failway would be unable to tell if their murder bid had been successful. That gave him a few hours to locate the killer who had followed him, and to extract a little vengeance.

He dived into the nearest hotel, went straight through into the cloakroom and locked himself in. Then he pulled out his utility-wallet and did a hasty make-up job on himself. Under the brush and powder his hair turned darker and streaked with grey. His face tanned chestnut with the lotion and the supple skin tautened as the resins dried and contracted. Contact lenses masked the colour of his eyes, and within twenty minutes the face of Ivan Dalroi aged by thirty years.

He now turned his attention to his clothes. The trousers and shoes were nondescript but his jacket was obtrusively his own. Not far from the hotel was a third-rate tailor who made his fortune out of the sartorial necessities of underpaid office workers. Dalroi left his own jacket in a hotel locker, and by the time he stepped on to the bus he was certain that no one could have recognised the peevish, frustrated clerk as the grim-eyed private investigator who had so narrowly escaped death at Mortimer's.

He chose the bus-stop before the ruined bar, and walked on to where the knot of spectators pressed the police cordon. He pushed his way forward until he was jammed against the arm of a policeman attempting to control the crowd.

"Keep back behind there!"

"What happened?" said Dalroi.

"Explosion," said the policeman. "Now keep moving along there."

"Any survivors?" Dalroi asked.

"No, not a hope. They've got stretchers in there now but the ambulance is a waste of time. Now move along, if you please!"Dalroi worked his way slowly through the crowd. There were the usual groups of people who a.s.sembled on such occasions: the housewives complete with shopping, shift workers homing for a late lunch, the elderly and retired who had no more congenial occupation than to p.r.o.nounce judgement at an accident or a hole in the road. Mentally he catalogued the a.s.sembly one by one, looking for someone who did not quite fit. He was certain in his own mind that the bomb-thrower was still on the scene waiting for confirmation that Dalroi was dead. Finding no positive suspects he moved back to the beginning of the crowd.

"They say there's three dead bodies in there," Dalroi confided to a fellow onlooker.

"That so? Still, there might have been a lot more in a bar at this time of day."

Dalroi moved on. "They say there's three heads in there," he said to another, "but only two bodies."

"Three?" The man looked up sharply. "How do you know?"

"I was speaking to the fire-chief. He said two waiters and a big blond fellow."

"I wonder why they don't fetch them out?"

"Can't," said Dalroi. "The floor dropped in."

He moved on, spreading an occasional lie, and reckoning on inference and hearsay to spread the false rumour of his own demise. Then he saw his man. The face was disguised and unfamiliar, but the set of the shoulders and the soft cat-tread walk struck a chord in his memory. The a.s.sa.s.sin had turned from the crowd and was leaving, as though bored with the inactivity of the scene.

Dalroi followed him silently. They turned off the high-street, through the arcade, then right and on to the Black-water bridge. Halfway across the bridge the a.s.sa.s.sin paused to light a cigarette. Dalroi paused also to slip the catch on his automatic pistol. Then the two fell into step.

"Nice try, Michael Neasden," said Dalroi casually.

The other was startled. "What the h.e.l.l?"

"Keep walking," said Dalroi. "I've got a gun on your spine. This is one funeral you aren't going to miss."

The other considered this in silence for a moment. "What makes you think I'm Michael Neasden?"

"Simple," said Dalroi. "I followed your backside for two years, exercising round a b.l.o.o.d.y prison yard."

Despite the gun the other faltered in his stride. "Dalroi! But I thought ... "

" ... I was dead. And you thought that because you were just on your way to Failway to collect the fee for having murdered me. That's one mistake more than you're allowed."

Neasden shot him an agonised glance, then lunged. His fist took Dalroi in the stomach as he sprang for the parapet, then he vaulted the concrete rail and dived for the river below. A barge pa.s.sing beneath saved Dalroi having to fire at a target moving in the water. It saved Dalroi having to fire at all.

TWO.

Dalroi had no doubt his office was being watched. Any of a hundred windows in the area could be used to overlook the door to the office block. Fortunately the doorway was common to thirty offices, and hewas confident his disguise would stand up to all but the most prolonged scrutiny.

He entered the building and went straight up the stairs, suddenly aware that the light in his office was still burning although the hour was late. Through the reeded-gla.s.s panel in the corridor he could see the outline of Zdenka sitting at her desk. A darker figure stood near the door. The atmosphere held the sweet smell of trouble. He ignored his key and fingered the office doorbell. A moment's hesitation, then the door was opened by a tall stranger in a black tunic shirt.

"Mr. Dalroi?" asked Dalroi, playing again the frustrated clerk.

"At this time of night? Try again tomorrow."

"But I must see him. You see, my wife has ... "

"Good luck!" said the man. "You're probably better off without her."

But Dalroi pressed into the office, fussily insistent. One look at the half-formed hope on Zdenka's face told him all he needed to know. The stranger found his revolver, only to watch it spin from his fingers as a deft blow from Dalroi paralysed his arm. Before the amazement could register Dalroi hit him again and he fell as though pole-axed.