"No breakfast," said Cobber. "I'm going to take your advice and get out
of here." He went to the door, opened it a fraction and listened.
Satisfied, he closed it and turned back to Jadiver. "Tell that cop I
know a few tricks with a tangle gun he never heard of. I'll show him
what they are."
"I won't see him, I hope."
"You don't have to. They're taking everything down. They'll tell him.
That is, I hope they do."
He slipped out the door and was gone.
* * * * *
The Kitch-Hen tired of waiting for Jadiver to come out. It cackled
disgustedly and sent a table into his room. Mechanically he sat down and
began to eat.
Not only how far but also what kind of data did the circuit transmit?
That was one unanswered problem. If he couldn't outrun it, he might
outthink it.
First, the data was transmitted to the police with some degree of
accuracy. They had been able to anticipate the robbery. Not completely,
but they did know it was Burlingame and how many men he was using. They
also knew the approximate date. From that, it was a matter of logic to
determine what specific society event he was aiming at. Jadiver had been
able to do the same.
Thoughts, visual and auditory impressions, tactile and other sensory
data--that was the sum of what the circuit could transmit,
theoretically.
He could almost positively rule out thoughts. It had never been proved
that thoughts could be transferred from one person to another,
mechanically or otherwise. But that was not his reason for rejecting it.
If they could read his thoughts, it was useless for him to plan
anything. And he was going to plan ahead, whether it was useless or not.
Tactile sensations, temperature, roughness, and the like were
unimportant except to a scientist. He doubted that police were that
scientifically interested in him. He could forget about the sense of
touch.
Sight and hearing. Neither of these could be eliminated at present. They
could see what he saw, hear what he heard. As long as they could, escape
was out of the question. It wouldn't take much to betray him--a street
sign glimpsed through his eyes, for instance, and they knew where he
was.
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 scrap 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 scrap 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 encumbered.
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 identity 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
assassin.
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.
The pseudo-flesh that he had used on Emily was not for him. In a way, it
was the best disguise, but he was playing this one to live, as much as
he could, all the way. A standard semi-durable cosmetic would do; that
is, it would when he finished altering it to suit his purpose.
The chief addition was a flaky metallic powder, lead. However the signal
worked, radar or not, that should be effective in dampening the signal.
He squeezed the mixture into a tube and attached the tube to a small gun
which he plugged into a wall socket. Standing in front of the tiny
mirror, with everything else cramped in the sleep locker, he went over
his face and hands. He had trouble getting it on his scalp and under his
hair, but it went on.
He looked himself over. He now appeared older, respectable, but not
successful, which fitted neatly into the greatest category on Venus--or
anywhere, for that matter. He stuffed the clothing he'd worn back into
the bag and walked out. He'd been in the sleep locker half an hour.
He was operating blind, but it was all he could do. He had to assume
that the metallic fiber in his clothing and the lead flakes in the
cosmetic would scramble the circuit signal. If they didn't, then he was
completely without protection.
He'd soon know how correctly he had analyzed the problem.
* * * * *
He walked out of the transportation terminal and hailed an air cab which
took him over the city and left him at the edge of a less reputable
section.
It was not an old slum--Venicity hadn't endured long enough to have
inherited slums; it built them quickly out of shoddy material and then
tore them down again as the need for living space expanded outward.
He checked in at a hotel neither more nor less disreputable than the
rest. The structure made up in number of rooms what it lacked in size
and appearance.
This was the test period and he had to wait it out. If he passed, he was
on an equal footing with any other person wanted by the police. He'd
take his chances on that, his wits against their organization; he could
disappear if he didn't carry a beacon around with him. This was the best
place to spend the interim period, crowded together with people coming
and going to and from the wild lands of Venus.