That was deliberate, of course. The Harkers knew what they were doing.
Sam stopped the newscast and thought. He would have to rearrange his tentative plans, but not much. He still needed money—fast. He swallowed dryly against the drug-thirst. The cached money was gone. What remained? Only himself, his experience, his priceless secret that must not yet be squandered—and what else? The old land charter issued in his name forty years ago was still on file, he assumed, since the charters were irrevocable. He couldn’t claim it in his own name, and in any other name it would be invalid. Well, deal with that later.
Right now—money. Sam’s lips tightened. He got up and left the library, walking lightly, seeking a weapon and a victim. He couldn’t get two or three thousand credits by robbery without taking long risks, but he could manage a simple blackjacking up an alley for twenty or thirty credits—if he was lucky.
He was lucky. So was the man he stunned, whose skull didn’t crack under the impact of a sock filled with pebbles. Sam had taken careful stock of himself, and was surprised to find that physically he seemed to be in better shape than he had any right to expect Most dream-dust victims are skin-and-bone mummies by the time they die. It raised another mystery—what sort of life had he been leading during these forty dreaming years?
Memory of the man in the alley where Sam woke returned baffling. If he had only been clear-headed enough to keep his grip on that collar until he could shake the information he needed out of the watcher who had stood waiting above him. Well, that would come, too, in its time.
With forty-three credits in his pocket, he headed for a certain establishment he had known forty years ago. The attendants there kept their mouths shut and worked efficiently, in the old days, and things did not change fast in the Keeps. He thought they would still be there.
On the way he passed a number of big new salons where men and women were visible being embellished to a high point of perfection. Apparently the demand had increased. Certainly more foppery was evident in the Keep now. Men with exquisitely curled beards and ringlets were everywhere. But privacy and discretion were necessary to Sam’s purpose. He went on to his semi-illegal establishment, and was not surprised to find it still in business.
His nerve shook a little as he paused before the entrance. But no one had recognized him on the Ways, apparently. Forty years ago his televised face had been thoroughly familiar in the Keeps, but now—
Rationalization is a set pattern in men’s minds. If they looked at him and saw familiarity, they decided automatically that it was a remarkable likeness, no more. The unconscious always steers the conscious toward the most logical conclusion—the one grooved by channels of parallel experience. Sometimes striking resemblances do occur; that is natural. It was not natural to see Sam Reed as he had looked forty years before, moving along a Way. And many of those he passed had been unborn at the time of the Colony fiasco, or had seen Sam Reed with the indifferent eyes of childhood. Those who might remember were old now, dim-sighted, and many faces in public life had superimposed themselves on these failing memories since then.
No, he was safe except for random chance. He went confidently through the glass door and gave his orders to the man assigned to him. It was routine enough.
“Permanent or temporary?”
“Temporary,” Sam said, after a brief pause.
“Quick-change?” There was a call for emergency quick-changes of disguise among the establishment’s clientele.
“That’s right.”
The artist went to work. He was an anatomist and something of a psychologist as well as a disguise expert. He left Sam’s pate bald, as directed; he dyed and bleached the red brows and lashes to pepper-and-salt that could pass for either dark or light, depending on the rest of the ensemble. With the beard, they passed for grimy white. The beard was a dirty, faded mixture.
He built up Sam’s nose and ears as time would have built them had it touched Sam. He put a few wrinkles in the right places with surrogate tissues. The beard hid most of Sam’s face, but when the artist had finished eighty years of hard living looked out above its grayish mask.
“For a quick change,” he said, “take off the beard and change your expression. You can’t remove the surrogate quickly, but you can iron out those wrinkles by the right expression. Try it, please.” He wheeled Sam’s chair around to the mirror and made him practice until both men were satisfied.
“All right,” Sam said finally. “I’ll need a costume.”
They settled on three things only—hat, cloak, shoes. Simplicity and speed were the factors behind the choice. Each item was a special article. The hat could be completely altered in shape by a pull and a twist. The cloak was opaque, but of a texture so thin it could be crumpled and stuffed into a pocket. It was weighted to hang straight when worn, to hide the fact that the body beneath was not an old man’s body. Sam had to practice the proper gait. And the shoes were nondescript in color, like the hat, but their large, dull buckles could be opened to release puffy blue bows.
Sam went out by a back way. Moving stiffly, like one who felt the weight of his eighty years, he returned to the library. He was a remarkably well-preserved eighty, he concluded, watching his reflection in windows as he passed, a hale and hearty old man, but old—old. It would do.
Now he wanted to study the current crime news.
In a way the criminal classes are agrarian—if you look at them over a span as broad as Sam’s. They move as they feed, drifting from pasture to greener pasture. The Blue Way had been a skid-row forty years ago, but no more, Sam realized, listening to reports from the telecast. As for the crimes themselves, they hadn’t altered much. That pattern was basic. Vice, through the ages, changes less than virtue.
Finally he located the present green pasture. He bought a vial of water-soluble red dye and a high-powered smoke bomb. The instructions on the bomb told how to use it in hydroponic gardens to destroy insect pests. Sam didn’t read them; he had used these bombs before.
Then he had to locate the right place for his trap.
He needed two alleys, close together, opening on a Way not too well-traveled. In one of the alleys was a cellar Sam remembered. It was deserted now, as in the old days. He hid near the entrance several fist-sized chunks of metal he had picked up, and he made a hiding-place for the smoke bomb in the cellar. After that he was ready for the next step.
He did not let himself think how many steps the stairway contained altogether. When he thought of that, he remembered that he had all the time he needed—now!—and that sent him into drunken, elated dreams far divorced from the immediate necessity of redeeming his future. Instead, he reminded himself of his drug-addiction and the need for money and curative treatment.
He went to the current green pasture and drank rotgut whisky, the cheapest available. And he kept in mind always the fact that he was a very old man. There were little tricks. He remembered never to fill his lungs with air before speaking; old men are short of breath and their voices lack resonance. The result was convincing. Also he moved slowly and carefully, making himself think of each move before he made it. A hobble doesn’t indicate age, but action that is the result of old thought-processes does indicate it. The old have to move slowly because it’s necessary to consider whether the stiff legs and weak muscles can manage obstacles. The world is as dangerous to the very old as to the very young, but a baby doesn’t know the peril of gravity.
So Sam didn’t creak or hobble. But he didn’t seem to have much breath and he apparently wasn’t conditioned to fast moving any more—and it was an old man who sat in Gem o’ Venus drinking rotgut and getting quietly drunk.
It was a dive. A colorful dive, just as many of the dives of Imperial Rome must have been, the jetsam of costumes and customs drifting down from the higher levels, so that the eye caught here and there the flash of a gilded belt, the blood-brilliant scarlet of a feather-pierced cap, the swirl of a rainbow cloak.
But basically Gem o’ Venus was for drinkin
g and gaming and more sordid uses. In the upper levels men gambled with fantastic devices, tricky so-called improvements on the ancient games of chance. There you might encounter such dubious streamlined tricks as roulette which employed a slightly radioactive ball and Geiger counters; there you had the game of Empire with its gagged-up cards and counters, where men played at winning imaginary galactic empires.
In Gem o’ Venus there were some gadgety games too, but the basics remained constant—dice and cards. Faces were not familiar to Sam here, but types were. Some of the customers didn’t care where they sat; others always faced the door. These interested Sam. So did a card game on the verge of breaking up. The players were too drunk to be wary. Sam picked up his drink and kibitzed. After a while he slid into the game.
He was rather surprised to find that the cards they were using were not the familiar pipped and face cards of the old days. They were larger, patterned with the esoteric pictures of the tarot. The old, old cards of Earth’s cloudy past had been drifting back into favor in Sam’s earlier life, but it was a little surprising to find they had reached such depths as these in forty years.
He had chosen these players carefully, so he was able to win without making it obvious, though the cards were distracting enough to lend verisimilitude to his game. It was confusing to play with pentacles and cups instead of diamonds and hearts, though, when you thought of it objectively, no more exotic.
These stakes weren’t high, but Sam didn’t expect to make his killing here. Cards were too uncertain, in any case. He needed only enough money to make an impression, and he managed to put over the idea that he had quite a lot more tucked away in his pockets. Shabbiness was no criterion of a man’s financial status in this fluctuating half-world.
He let the game break up presently, protesting in his thin old voice. Then he made his way slowly out of Gem o’ Venus and stood considering, letting himself sway a trifle. To the man who followed, it must have appeared as though libation had induced libration.
“Look, grandpa—want to sit in on another game?”
Sam gave him a wary glance. “Floater?”
“No.”
Sam was pleased. The backer of a floating game might be too penny ante for his needs. He let himself be talked into it, remaining obviously wary until he found the destination wasn’t a dark alley, but a third-rate gambling-and-pleasure house he remembered as a restaurant forty years past.
He was steered into poker, this time with more familiar cards. Playing against sober men, he tried no tricks, with the result that he lost what money he had and ended up with a stack of chips he couldn’t pay for. As usual, Sam Reed had sold three hundred percent of his stock issue.
So they took him to a man named Doc Mallard, a short, neckless man with curly fair hair and a face bronzed with scented skin-oil. Doc Mallard gave Sam a cold look. “What’s this about? I don’t take IOU’s.”
Sam had the sudden, strange realization that forty years ago this man had been a raw kid, learning the angles that he himself had mastered long before that. He knew a queer moment of toppling, almost frightening psychological perspective, as though, somehow, he looked down at Mallard from the enormous height of years. He was immortal—
But vulnerable. He let the drunkenness die out of his voice, but not the age. He said, “Let’s talk privately.” Mallard regarded him with a shrewdness that made Sam want to smile. When they were alone he said deliberately, “Ever hear of Sam Reed?”
“Reed? Reed? Oh, the Colony boy. Sure. Dream-dust, wasn’t it?”
“Not exactly. Not for very long, anyhow. I’m Sam Reed.”
Mallard did not take it in for a moment. He was obviously searching his memory for details of that long-ago scandal of his boyhood days. But because the Colony bubble had been unique in Keep history, apparently he remembered after a while.
“Reed’s dead,” he said presently. “Everybody knows—”
“I’m Sam Reed. I’m not dead. Sure, I dream-dusted, but that can be cured. I’ve been landside for a long time. Just got back.”
“What’s the angle?”
“Nothing’s in it for you, Mallard. I’ve retired. I just mentioned it to prove I’m good for my IOU’s.”
Mallard sneered. “You haven’t proved a thing. Nobody comes back rich from landside.”
“I made my money right here, before I left.” Sam looked crafty.
“I remember all about that. The government found your caches. You haven’t got a penny left from that.” Mallard was goading him.
Sam made his voice crack. “You call seventy thousand credits nothing?” he cried in senile anger.
Mallard grinned at the ease with which he was trapping the old fool.
“How do I know you’re Sam Reed? Can you prove it?”
“Fingerprints—”
“Too easy to fake. Eyeprints, though—” Mallard hesitated. Clearly he was of-two minds. But after a moment he turned and spoke into a mike. The door opened and a man came in with a bulky camera. Sam, on request, looked into the eyepiece and was briefly blinded. They waited in silence, a long time.
Then the desk-mike buzzed before Mallard. Out of it a tinny voice said, “O.K., Doc. The patterns check with the library files. That’s your man.”
Mallard clicked the switch and said, “All right, boys, come on in.” The door opened and four men entered. Mallard spoke to them over his shoulder. “This is Sam Reed, boys. He wants to give us seventy thousand credits. Talk him into it, will you?”
The four moved competently toward Sam Reed.
Third-degree methods hadn’t changed much. Here along Skid Row you depended on the basic, physical pain, and generally it worked. It worked with Sam. He stood it as long as an old man might, and then broke down and talked.
There had been one bad moment when he was afraid his beard would come off. But the artist knew his business. The surrogate tissue stuck firm and would continue to do so until Sam used the contents of the bottle in his pocket, the bottle that looked like the stub of a stylus.
Breathing short and hard, he answered Doc Mallard’s questions.
“I had—double cache. Opened with a korium key—”
“How much?”
“One point … one point three four—”
“Why haven’t you got that seventy thousand before now?”
“I just … just got back from landside. They’d found—all the other caches. All but that—and I can’t open it without the korium key. Where can—I get that much korium? I’m broke. Seventy thousand credits—and I can’t buy the key to open the lock!” Sam let his voice break.
Mallard scratched his ear.
“That’s a lot of korium,” he said. “Still, it’s the safest kind of lock in the world.”
Sam nodded with an old man’s eager quickness at the crumb of implied praise. “It won’t open—without the exact amount of radioactivity—focused on the lock. I was smart in the old days. You’ve got to know just the right amount. Can’t stand the exposure—hit-or-miss. Got to know—”
“One point three four, eh?” Mallard interrupted him. He spoke to one of his men. “Find out how much that would cost.”
Sam sank back, muffling his smile in his beard. It was a cold smile. He did not like Mallard or Mallard’s methods. The old, familiar anger with which he had lived his forty earlier years was beginning to come back—the familiar impatience, the desire to smash everything that stood in his path. Mallard, now—he curled his fingers in the depths of his cloak, thinking how satisfying it would be to sink them into that thick bronze-oiled neck.
And then a strange new thought came to him for the first time. Was murder satisfactory vengeance—for an Immortal? For him other methods lay open now. He could watch his enemies die slowly. He could let them grow old.
He played with the idea, biding his time. Time—how much of it he had, and how little! But he must take it step by step, until he could use his immortality.
One step at a time he went with the gang to the
cache.
One stiff, eighty-year-old step at a time.
In the cellar, Sam reluctantly showed Doc where to expose the korium key. Korium was U233—activated thorium—and definitely not a plaything. They didn’t have much of it. Not much was needed. It was in a specially insulated box, just too big to fit in a man’s pocket, and Doc had brought along a folding shield—the only protection necessary against a brief one-time exposure. He set it up at the spot Sam indicated.
There were four men in the cellar besides Sam—Doc Mallard and three of his associates. They were all armed. Sam wasn’t. Outside, in the alley, was another man, the lookout. The only preparation Sam had been able to make was to seize an opportunity to rub the “defixer” liquid into the roots of his beard. That appendage would come off at a tug now.
It was so silent, the sound of breathing was very audible. Sam began taking long breaths, storing the oxygen-reserve he would probably need very soon. He watched Mallard’s careful adjustment of the shield and the korium box, which looked like an old-fashioned camera, and, like a camera, had a shutter and a timing attachment.
“Right here?” Mallard asked, jabbing his finger at the plastibrick wall. Sam nodded.
Mallard pressed the right button and stepped back, behind the shield. Click—click! That was all.
Sam said hastily, “The cache is over here, where I said. Not by the lock.” He stumbled forward, reaching, but one of the men caught his shoulder.
“Just show us,” he said. “There might be a gun stashed away with the dough.”
Sam showed them. Mallard tested the loose brick with his finger tips. He exhaled in satisfaction.
“I think—” he began—and pulled the brick toward him.
Sam drew a long breath and kept his eyes open just long enough to see the smoke-cloud begin to explode outward from the cache. With the tail-end of his glance he made certain of the korium box’s location. Then he moved.
He moved fast, hearing the sound of startled voices and then the explosive sssssh-slam of a gun. The beam didn’t touch him. He felt the sharp corners of the korium box against his palm, and he bent and used his free hand to pull another loose brick from the wall. The korium went into this emergency cache, and the brick slipped back easily into its socket.
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