The Fall Of The Dream Machine Part 9

Mike was perspiring. After the encounter with c.o.c.kley, he felt that he had a right to sweat. He wiped it from his forehead, his chin and neck. Slouching even further into the deep folds of his heavily-padded swallow-all swivel chair, he shuddered. The computer was digging up everything it could. If he could hand c.o.c.kley enough to keep him busy for the next several hours, he would be safe. Just enough to keep them guessing until midnight. Even if the last several tips were wild as all h.e.l.l, they would distract the investigators long enough for him to grab Lisa and run for it.

The computer beeped, and a card-tape popped out of the slot. He immediately slipped it into the player, listened intently. Presidents had been known for their restful retreats in the past; they had them spread all over the country. Most of them were known today. That was the problem. For instance, neither c.o.c.kley nor his investigators would believe the Revolutionaries were hiding out in Hyannis Port, not after a history of three Presidents permeated the place. But they might just believe that a certain Texas ranch, now parceled up and all but forgotten, held a secret shelter. He could keep a crew of investigators tied up all night on that one. It was just romantic enough to sound like a good lead-a secret shelter with a secret entrance which had never been set down in words. The latest card-tape finished. There was nothing worthwhile on it, nothing like the ranch story. He tore it up, threw it in a waste slot, and demanded better data, more thorough checks and crosschecks by the computer.

While he waited, he ruminated on the ent.i.ty that was dredging up all these facts for all these cards. It was rumored that the computer extended beneath the entire city, miles deep and miles square. But no one ever elaborated on the rumors. No one found it fascinating. Machines had long ago ceased to fascinate anyone. Machines were too reliable, too sure, too perfect to fascinate. It was like the dawn: you hardly notice it because It never fails to happen. And machines never failed. Still, the concept of such a vast set of wires and tubes and memory cells excited him. Perhaps it stemmed from some of the old books he had been taught to read. He remembered a story about a computer that went insane and took over the world. That made machines more fun, more interesting. They had more personality if one could fear them. Previously, machines and computers had been great, gray things of mist-matter indistinguishable from walls and streets and other gray things. Now they held wonder for him.

There was a bleep, but no new card flopped out to be heard. Mike peered up into the slot, stuck a finger in and felt around before he realized the noise was coming from the phone. He picked it up. "h.e.l.lo?"

"c.o.c.kley here, Jake. I think we have something important. Could you come up right away?"

"Certainly, sir."

"And don't worry about those new reports. Junk them."

"Yes, sir."

Click.

He stood, sat down again. Had c.o.c.kley really found something? How? Were they now rounding up Nimron, Pierre, and the others, closing the Appalachian shelter? But how could they have found out? Abruptly, he decided it was not advisable to sit and work himself into a frenzy about things which might not even be happening. He stood, left his office, and went upstairs to see c.o.c.kley.

Konrad Giver was.

He was not.

He was.

Fighting something he did not understand, Konrad Giver slid up and down coils of light, slithered through purple rings of fire into ocher light.

Orange . . . . . .

Green pyramids...

Trees of black with red and gold leaves ... ...

He was. Was not. Was again.

There was not even the sensation of being part of the Performer. There was a flickering of feeling when he knew he was within his own body and the blankness of all but sight when he was in the other place-the totally alien place.

He managed to overcome his panic and tried to ascertain, logically, his whereabouts. But there was no logic to it. He had slipped into his chair, turned on the aura. Minutes later, he had lost control of his mind. He went beyond the mind of the Performer into a land of light and shapes of light. Some of the colors were beyond his limited vocabulary to describe even to himself. Still, he could not pull himself back into his body long enough to switch off the aura.

And that was the nightmare.

He thought of the Empathists.

But that took days, not minutes!

Colors exploded around him! Suddenly he could not sense his his body at all. He was completely divorced from it. He was sliding up, up, up and over the edge of a chrome yellow strip into a copper sea streaked with silver. And now there were voices all about him, babbling and moaning and weeping as bodies in Purgatory body at all. He was completely divorced from it. He was sliding up, up, up and over the edge of a chrome yellow strip into a copper sea streaked with silver. And now there were voices all about him, babbling and moaning and weeping as bodies in Purgatory...

"Would you like a drink?" c.o.c.kley asked.

Mike had expected to get right down to business. It irked him to put it off, but he realized that the old man's whims were his commands. "Yes thank you."

"A bit of synthe-scotch and a bit of the real stuff. Synthe is actually better than the real thing, you know."

"I didn't."

"It is. Much better. No chance of hitting a bad batch. No worries about a too tangy strain. No contamination. Always perfect and always with that bittersweet quality that makes it so distinctive." He shook the golden mixer bottle vigorously. "Would you bring me three gla.s.ses?"

Mike did as told. "Who is the third for?"

c.o.c.kley talked as he poured. "One for you... one for me. Would you please take that chair there by the desk, Jake?" He set the mixer bottle down. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he gently lifted the empty gla.s.s, carried it to the doorway. A messenger appeared, took the gla.s.s, holding it by the cloth-covered portion, and disappeared. c.o.c.kley turned, took his drink and sank into his swivel chair, sighing heavily. "Do you know what fingerprints are, Jake?"

There was something ominous in that phrase. He searched the corners of his mind; he looked at his fingers. But there was no answer he could find. "No, sir," he said at length.

"Look very closely at the tips of your fingers," c.o.c.kley advised.

c.o.c.kley was being too conversational, too friendly. He had better be sharp and aware, ready to jump. He looked, meantime, at his fingertips.

"Notice the whorls."

He looked closely. All sorts of fine lines swirled, nearly parallel to one another, looping over the ball of his finger, curling down again.

"Fingerprints," c.o.c.kley said.

He failed, still, to see the importance.

"No man's fingerprints are the same as another man's, Jake. Long ago, in pre-Show days, the police used fingerprinting as their chief means of identification. It was a very valuable aid in crime-fighting. When you touch anything, you leave a pattern-your fingerprints. Dusting the surface you touch brings these out. You touched the scotch gla.s.s..."

Mike was beginning to get the implications, and he did not like what was shaping up.

"Fingerprinting died out long ago. No one even remembers it anymore. It came to my attention a dozen years ago as the sidelight of an investigation into the written records. In this day and age, when surgery can wipe off a man's face and put a new one on, change his blood and his retina pattern, this might be a good thing to know about, this fingerprinting. If the surgeon did not know of such a thing, then he could not think to change the prints of a patient. I now have a file on every employee, with fingerprints for each. Fingerprinting is a form of reading, and no one reads now-except my translator machines. And now they can tell me whether your prints match those of the Jake Malone we printed a day or so ago."

"But I am am Jake Malone," he said, forcing confusion into his voice though he was no longer confused-just frightened. Jake Malone," he said, forcing confusion into his voice though he was no longer confused-just frightened.

"Of course you are. At least, I hope you are. But explain this. I had the computer repeat all the info it had gathered for you. It was time consuming, but I eventually found something important-quite important-that you had left out. The Appalachian shelter."

Mike remained expressionless.

"If you are not Jake Malone, you are very adept at imitating his calm."

"I am Malone," Mike said evenly.

"Anyway, Malone is an apple polisher and a hard worker. It was not like him to leave anything out of the report that might possibly lead to a successful mission. Now, maybe this is just a mistake on your, Malone's, part. However, the computer informed me of the fact that Jake had drawn up two sets of card-tapes. And the one set was a card shorter than the other, lacking the Appalachian shelter card. Jake had listed it, then dropped it. And Jake had also attempted to wipe it from the computer's memory. Someone had tried it, anyway. Someone, in Jake's name, told the computer to destroy its memory cells relating to the shelter. And the computer did. But there are other things besides memory cells. The master computer beneath this city not only remembers everything it researches, but it also has a tape-file where it records all key phrases which help it to activate the correct memory cells when necessary. Appalachian Presidential Bomb Shelter was the key phrase in this report. All the little facts, in other words, have been erased, leaving only the skeleton. We do not know where the shelter may be, but with its approximate location, we have been able to set the computer on a second search of the written records. It should find the material in the same time it found it for Jake Malone. Tomorrow morning, we should know where the Revolutionaries are hiding."

"If I'm not Jake Malone. But I am."

"You may be." But his tone said You You are not are not.

"I decided the Appalachian shelter was a false lead."

"Why go to the extreme of blotting it completely from the computer's memory? Why not just tear up the card?"

"I thought erasure was standard procedure."

"Did you always erase what you didn't need when yon were head of Research?"

He had blundered. He could only try to enforce that blunder now. "Yes."

"We'll see," c.o.c.kley said. He smiled. But it was not really a smile, not really a smile at all.

Mike sat wrapped in silence. He sipped the drink once, but his mouth was too dry and the alcohol burned too harshly against his fear-parched lips and gums. He found himself staring into the tropical Tri-D window, hardly thinking, nearly numb. He was slipping into the refuge of reverie now when he most needed to plan his actions. Certainly, when his fingerprints were examined, it would be found that he was not Jake Malone. He had to think. There were only minutes left.

Less than minutes.

The door buzzed.

c.o.c.kley called it open; it slid back on oiled feet.

The messenger entered, whispered something to the old man, departed. c.o.c.kley turned to stare at Mike. "Who are you?"

"Jake Malone."

There was no longer anything but hatred and anger in c.o.c.kley's voice. "I said, Who are you Who are you?"

"Jake Malone, d.a.m.nit! Your b.l.o.o.d.y fingerprints are wrong!" His only chance was to bluff even harder.

"You might as well tell me. You're as good as dead anyway."

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he hissed, thinking of Lisa and wondering what she would think and how she would feel when c.o.c.kley was there at midnight but he was not.

There was a fire consuming everything in c.o.c.kley's eyes, raging behind them.

The door buzzed again, interrupting them. The same messenger delivered a card-tape from the labs. c.o.c.kley accepted it, waited until the employee had left, then popped it into the player. "Human remains-skeletal fragments, hair, and flesh particles-found in c.o.c.kley Towers Number Two/ incinerator shaft leading from Malone apartment." It ceased its echoing indictment.

"That's the real Jake Malone," c.o.c.kley snapped. "Bone fragments and sc.r.a.ps of charred flesh. Nothing more. You killed one of my best men!" the real Jake Malone," c.o.c.kley snapped. "Bone fragments and sc.r.a.ps of charred flesh. Nothing more. You killed one of my best men!"

"And there will be more," he said, suddenly reckless now that there was no escape.

The remark incensed c.o.c.kley even more. He tried to control himself. The doctors said that was his major personality problem-his quick temper, his inability to control his basest emotions. He argued that it was something he must have gained from one of the operations, from one of the parts of someone else's body. Another man's eyes, he argued, might shift his perception of the world. They said, politely, that his reasoning was very unscientific. But they did not really argue; they did not dare. And now the anger was rushing up in him, boiling closer and closer to the critical point, when he would do something irrational. He knew it, but he could not stop it. This man had killed Jake Malone. He should hold him for interrogation, but there was a surging, crying need for something more than interrogation, something a great deal more violent than the asking of questions.

Mike backed around the chair he had been sitting in. His fear was great. His mind was filled with half-pictures of his only other encounter with this old man, pictures of a long ago struggle in which he had been the loser. c.o.c.kley leaped with surprising agility, even swifter than Mike remembered. Nevertheless, Mike had time to grab the chair, thrust out with it. c.o.c.kley grabbed the legs. They muscled each other for a moment. Mike vaguely remembered a lesson with Pierre and the words "Never muscle a man stronger than you are. Run and dodge until he leaves himself open." But by then, the chair was out of his hands, raised and crashing down against his shoulder. Stars exploded in his head, winked out.

Everything winked out. There was darkness.

Chapter Five.

A dragon growled at him. The dragon of consciousness.

His head was roaring with pain, belching fire clouds of agony that permeated his thoughts, flickered, flashed, fumed, burned. His head was an aching, water-filled blister on his shoulders. He tried to ignore the dragon, but its breath lit the night more and more...

He opened his eyes. Part black and part light, the room swirled madly for a moment. Before he could straighten things out, he felt hands on him, felt himself being moved, carried. He coughed. Suddenly he was being thrust through an opening into a narrow place where the air was hot and heavy against his face. Then the hands were off him.

He was falling!

c.o.c.kley's laugh echoed from above, hollow and ugly.

Falling...

He was falling into the incinerator! He screamed; it came out as a thick gurgle. Lashing out with hands and feet, smashing violently against the walls, he grasped for something to hold to. His fingers flashed past rungs. Rungs... Rungs... He grabbed at them, caught one after several tries, almost jerked his arm from its socket when his fall was so abruptly cut short. He hung from that single rung, two dozen yards above the glowing grill where fire licked through in eager tongues.

c.o.c.kley had sentenced him to death by fire. It would have taken him several minutes to die on the grill. Several horrible minutes. The workmen's rungs stopped twenty feet from the bottom. With the fire biting at him with acid teeth, he would not have been able to jump for them, to even try to climb out.

Perspiration dripping from his head, his armpits, he reached up with his free arm and found the rung. Searching with his feet, he found the lower rung, braced his feet in it and leaned against the wall, heaving out a great quant.i.ty of air held tightly in his lungs through the entire maneuver. The dragon wanted to sleep. Blackness lurked in the background, anxious and ready to envelop him. But he had to fight it off. If he could not cling to consciousness, he would fall.

Below, the fire crackled red...

Yellow and orange...

The heat swept up in visible waves, washed over him, grew chillier as it rose. Somewhere above there was coolness-and a door out.

Crimson flickering...

Yellow ...

He clutched at the rung, reached up with one hand, found the next. It was warm to his touch. It seemed as if every drop of his vital resources had been leaked through his pores. But, forcing himself onward, he found more liquid-the waters of hope and revenge. They sustained him. He rose from the hot place to the place of coolness.

Rung by rung, there were visions with him. Sometimes there was a laughing girl. Sometimes, a very old man. But the old man wore a false face. Then the old man became a wolf; the false face became the mask of a sheep. Then the girl with the sky eyes and sun hair... At times, both phantoms were blended grotesquely, superimposed on each other like bad photographs.

Still he climbed. Step by step from the hot to the cool. There, at the top, he rested and lauded himself. There was a blunt, featureless cement ceiling above with only a minor air shaft the width of two fingers breaking its smooth facade. In the shadows and darknesses around him, he saw lesser darknesses which were the recesses of the rungs and the hatch which led into c.o.c.kley's office. The hatch recess was deep. By perching on it, and propping his feet against the rungs on the opposite wall, he could sit bent up in the quiet with only the roaring of the fire and wait for the office to empty. He could afford to wait. Moments ago, he had only seconds left of life. Now he might have years. All of it would be borrowed time. Two or three hours was as nothing to him.

Meanwhile, the world went on...

It was all so public. There were hospital men in white, emergency squad men in red. There was a fire truck and an ambulance. And they were not going to need any of those things. There was no patient for the hospital men, no fire for the fighters of blazes. Their truck could pour no water. The ambulance would go back slow-and mute.