“Hold your fire!” Mallard’s voice shouted. “Head for the door. Pollard! Don’t come in here! Stop Reed—”
Sam was already at the door and had opened his eyes. He could see nothing at all in the thick smoke that was billowing across the threshold, but he could hear a plaintive query from the lookout—Pollard. He crouched, searching for the jagged lump of metal he had planted here. It was gone. No—he touched it; his fingers curled lovingly around the cold, hard alloy, and he brought his arm up and back as, through the thinning edges of the smoke, he saw Pollard.
The man’s gun was out. Sam said, “Where’s Reed? Did he—”
That was enough. It made Pollard’s finger hesitate on the trigger button, as he tried to make certain of the identity of the vague figure emerging from the smoke. Sam’s weapon was already poised. He smashed it into Pollard’s face. He felt the crunching of bone and he heard a muffled, choking bleat as Pollard arched backward and began to fall. Sam hurdled the body before it struck. He ran fourteen feet and whipped around the corner. Instantly he snatched off his cloak and beard. They went into his pockets, making no noticeable bulges. He was still miming. He tore off his hat, twisted it deftly, and thrust it back on his head. It had a new shape and a different color. He dropped to the pavement and spun around, facing in the direction from which he had come. Two hasty motions opened the buckles on his shoes so that the bright bows leaped out, disguising them. There was no need for the surrogate red dye; he had blood on his hand—not his own. He wiped this across his mouth and chin.
Then he twisted his head and looked behind him, until he heard thudding footsteps.
Doc Mallard and one of his associates burst out of the alley mouth. They paused, staring around, and, as they saw Sam, sprinted toward him. Another man came out of the alley and ran after Mallard. His gun was out.
Sam dabbed feebly at his chin, blinked, and made a vague gesture behind him. He said, “Wh … what—” His voice wasn’t senile any more.
The fourth man came out of the alley. “Pollard’s dead,” he called.
“Shut up,” Mallard said, his mouth twisting. He stared at Sam. “Where’d he go? The old man—”
“That passage up there,” Sam said, pointing. “He-bumped into me from behind. I … my nose is bleeding.” He dabbed experimentally and eyed his wet fingers. “Yes. That passage—”
Mallard didn’t wait. He herded his men on and turned into the alley Sam had indicated. Sam glanced around. The Way wasn’t crowded, but one man was coming crosswise toward Sam.
He got up and waved the good Samaritan back. “It’s all right,” he called. “I’m not hurt.” Wiping the blood from his face, he started to walk away.
He turned back into the alley from which he had emerged. There was no special hurry. Mallard would be chasing an old man, and feeling certain he could overtake the slow-moving octogenarian. Later he would return to the cellar, but not immediately, Sam decided.
Smoke was still billowing out. He stumbled over Pollard’s body, and that gave him the location of the door. Inside the cellar, he oriented himself in the darkness and then found the loose brick. He pried it out, removed the korium box, and replaced the brick. Carrying the korium, he went out, and thirty seconds later was on the fastest Way-strip, moving rapidly away from Doc Mallard and company.
What next?
Korium was negotiable. But not on a no-questions-asked basis. This loot would have to be disposed of through illegal channels. Sam was no longer recognizable as the old man who had bilked Mallard. Nevertheless, he dared not appear in this transaction—not until he had fortified his position. Mallard would be watching for an underground korium sale, and he would check back.
What channels would have remained unchanged after forty years?
The same ones—but administered by different individuals. That was no help, since in such transactions it was vital to know the right people. The right ones wouldn’t be at the top any more—after forty years. Except, of course, the Harkers—the Immortal Families. Sam grimaced and licked his lips, conscious again of the dry thirst under his tongue.
Who, then?
He rode the Ways for three hours, increasingly furious at this simple, easy problem that had him stopped cold. He had swindled Doc Mallard out of several thousand credits. He had the korium under his arm. But he had lost all his contacts.
Hunger grew, and thirst grew. He had no money at all. He had lost it all at the gaming table. To be distracted by such a trivial matter as hunger was infuriating. He was an Immortal!
Nevertheless Immortals could starve.
These petty details! There was so much to do, so much he could do now—an endless road opening down for his feet—and he couldn’t do a thing till he got cured of the dream-dust addiction.
So, groping, he came at last to the one man who had stood in loco parentis to him many years before.
It was not surprising that the Slider still lived in the same dingy apartment in a corner of the Keep. What was surprising was the fact that the Slider still lived.
Sam hadn’t expected that. He had expected it so little, unconsciously, that he hadn’t put on his disguise again.
The Slider was in bed, a monstrously corpulent figure sagging the mattress, his dropsical face bluish. He sniffed painfully. His malevolent little eyes regarded Sam steadily.
“All right,” he wheezed. “Come on in, kid.”
The room was filthy. In the bed the old man puffed and blinked and tried to prop himself upright. He gave up the impossible task and sank back, staring at Sam.
“Give me a drink,” he said, breathlessly.
Sam found a bottle on the table and uncapped it. The invalid drank greedily. A flush spread over the sagging cheeks.
“Woman never does anything I tell her,” he mumbled. “What you want?”
Sam regarded him in distance and amazement. The monstrous creature seemed almost as immortal as the Immortals themselves, but a Tithonian sort of immortality that no sane man would covet. He must be close to a hundred years old now, Sam thought, marveling.
He stepped forward and took the bottle from the Slider’s lax hand.
“Don’t do that. Give it back. I need—”
“Answer some questions first.”
“The bottle—let’s have it.”
“When you’ve told me what I want to know.”
The Slider groped among his dirty bedding. His hand came out with a needle-pistol half engulfed by the flesh. The tiny muzzle held steady on Sam.
“Gimme the bottle, kid,” the Slider said softly.
Sam shrugged and held it out, feeling reassured. The old man hadn’t quite lost his touch, then. Perhaps he had come to the right place, after all.
“Slider,” he said, “do you know how long since you saw me last?”
The shapeless lips mumbled a moment. “Long time, son. Long time. Thirty—no, close on to forty years, eh?”
“But—you knew me. I haven’t changed. I haven’t grown older. And you weren’t even surprised. Slider, you must have known about me. Where have I been?”
A subterranean chuckle heaved the great wallowing bulk. The bed creaked.
“You think you’re real?” the Slider demanded. “Don’t be a fool. I’m dreaming you, ain’t I?” He reached out and patted an opalescent globe the size of a man’s fist. “This is the stuff, kid. You don’t need to feel any pain no matter what ails you, long as you got Orange Devil around.”
Sam stepped closer, looking down at the bright powder in the globe.
“Oh,” he said.
The Slider peered up at him out of little shrewd eyes in their fat creases. The eyes cleared a bit as they stared. “You’re real, ain’t you?” he murmured. “Yes, I guess you are. All right, son, now I’m surprised.”
Sam eyed the orange powder. He knew what it was, yes. A drug of sorts, weakening the perception between objective and subjective, so that a man’s mental images and ideations became almost tangible to him. The hope that had ro
used for a moment sank back in his mind. No, he was not likely to learn from the Slider where he had spent that vanished forty years.
“What’s happened to you, Sam?” the Slider wheezed. “You ought to be dead long ago.”
“The last thing I remember is having dream-dust blown in my face. That was forty years ago. But I haven’t changed!”
“Dream-dust—that don’t keep you young.”
“Is there anything that will? Any sort of preservation at all that could have kept me—like this?”
The bed heaved again with the enormous chuckling.
“Sure,” he said. “Sure! Get yourself born of the right stock—you live a thousand years.”
“What do you mean?” Suddenly Sam found that he was shaking. Until now he had had no time to reason the thing out. He awoke, he was young when he should have been old—ergo, he was immortal. But how and why he had not yet considered. Out of some unconscious well of sureness, he had assumed that like the long-limbed Immortals, he, too, was the heir of a millennium of life. But all Immortals until now had been slender, tall, fine-boned….
“You’ve always been bald?” the Slider asked obliquely. At Sam’s mystified nod he went on. “Might of been sickness when you were a baby. Then it might not. When I first knew you, you had a few little scars here and there. They’re mostly gone now, I see. But the Slider’s smart, kid. I heard some talk a long time ago—didn’t connect it with you till now. There was a woman, a medic, who did some work on a baby once and got herself a happy-cloak for pay.”
“What kind of work?” Sam asked tightly.
“Mostly glands. That give you any ideas?”
“Yes,” Sam said. His voice was thick. His throat felt tight and the blood throbbed in his temples and his neck. He took two forward steps, picked up a plastic chair and broke it across his knee. The tough plastic broke hard, cutting his hands a little, bruising his knee. The final snap as the chair gave way was satisfying. Not enough, but satisfying. With a tremendous effort he choked back his useless rage, fettering it as Fenris Wolf was fettered, to bide its time. Carefully he set down the chair and faced the Slider.
“I’m an Immortal,” he said. “That’s what it means. I’d have grown up like them if … if someone hadn’t paid that medic. Who paid her?”
A vast seismographic shrug rippled the bedding. “I never heard.” The Slider wallowed restlessly. “Give me another drink.”
“You’ve got the bottle,” Sam pointed out. “Slider—forget about this immortality. I’ll take care of—everything. I came to you about something else. Slider, have you still got your contacts?”
“I’m still with it,” the Slider said, tilting the bottle.
Sam showed him the box he had taken from Mallard’s men. “This is korium. I want two thousand credits. Keep all you get above that. Make sure the transaction can’t be traced.”
“Hijacked?” the Slider demanded. “Better give me a name, so I can play it close.”
“Doc Mallard.”
The Slider chuckled. “Sure, kid. I’ll fix it. Shove that visor over here.”
“I’m in a hurry.”
“Come back in an hour.”
“Good. One thing more—you’re the only one who knows I’m young.” Sam pulled the ragged beard from his pocket and dangled it.
“I get it. Trust the Slider, kid. See you in an hour.”
Sam went out.
At the hospital he would have to give a name. Would they recognize him as the old-time Colony swindler? Someone might. His eye-pattern records were on file, so must his other identifying marks be recorded. The average man, seeing a baffling familiarity in Sam, would chalk it up to some accidental resemblance. But in the sanitarium he would be under much closer observation. Too close to maintain the octogenarian disguise—that was certain.
Suddenly it occurred to Sam that there was one man who could very logically resemble him and yet seem the age he looked now. His own son.
He had none, it was true. But he might have had. And everyone knew that short physiques weren’t Immortal, couldn’t tap the fountain of youth. He could preserve his precious secret and get by with a minimal disguise as Sam Reed’s son.
What name? Out of the depths of his omnivorous reading in those years which still seemed hardly an hour ago he dredged up the memory of the prophet Samuel, whose eldest son was Joel. Now the name of his firstborn was Joel.
As good a name as any. He was Joel Reed….
Thirty-five minutes after that he stood before the hospital reception desk, shocked into immobility with surprise, able only to stare, while the circuits of his brain tried frantically to close their contacts again. But the disorientation was too abrupt and complete. All he could do was stand there, repeating stupidly, “What? What did you say?”
The competent young man behind the desk said patiently, “We discharged you as cured early this morning.”
Sam opened his mouth and closed it. No sound came out.
The young man regarded him thoughtfully. “Amnesia?” he suggested. “It hardly ever happens, but—do you want to see one of the doctors?”
Sam nodded.
“Six weeks ago,” the man in the quiet office said, “you were brought here for the regulation cure. A man who gave the name of Evans delivered you and signed you in. He gave us no permanent address—said he was a transient at one of the hotels. You can try to trace him later if you like. The fee was paid anonymously, by special delivery, just before you arrived. You seemed in good physical condition on admission.” The doctor referred again to the ledger page before him. “Apparently adequate care had been taken of you while you were dream-dusting. You were discharged this morning. You seemed quite normal. Another man called for you—not the same one, though he gave the name of Evans, too. That’s all I can tell you, Mr. Reed.”
“But”—Sam rubbed his forehead dazedly—“why have I forgotten? What does it mean? I—”
“There are a good many amnesic preparations on the underworld market, unfortunately,” the doctor said. “You left here in a suit of good clothes, with a hundred credits in your pocket. Did you wake with them?”
“No. I—”
“You were probably robbed.”
“Yes, I … of course that was it.” Sam’s eyes went blank as he thought of the many ways in which a man might be rendered unconscious—a puff of dust in the face in some alleyway, a crack on the head. Robbers rarely bothered to stuff a stripped victim into their own discarded rags, but aside from that the story was plausible enough.
Except for that man who had been waiting when he woke.
He got up, still slightly dazed. “If I could have the address the Evans man gave you—”
It would lead nowhere, he knew, looking down on the scrawled slip as the moving Way glided slowly beneath him, carrying him away from the hospital. Whoever was responsible for the chain of mysteries which had led him here would have covered any tracks efficiently.
Someone had fed him dream-dust forty years ago. Zachariah Harker—that much he knew. Kedre Walton gave the signal, but Zachariah was the man behind her. The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hand is the hand of Esau.
Had Harker watched over him these forty years? Had Kedre? Someone did a careful job of it, according to the doctor. Someone paid to have him cured at last, and discharged—and robbed and stripped, so that when he woke he possessed materially as little as he had possessed when he came into the world.
Less—for then he came with a birthright. Well, of that they had not cheated him after all. And if there were a Joel Reed, Sam realized with a sudden gust of pride, he would stand head and shoulders above his father, on long, straight legs, slender and elegant as Zachariah himself—an Immortal in body as well as in heritage.
The stretching of his mind was almost painful as he surveyed the years before him. And when he thought now of the Slider he saw him through a new temporal perspective that was almost frightening. It was oddly similar to the attitude he might have toward a
cat or a dog. There was always, and there must always be from now on, the knowledge that the life-span of an ordinary man was too short.
No wonder the Families had formed a tight clique. How could you feel deep friendship, or love untouched by pity, except for an equal? It was the old, old gulf between gods and men. Nothing—immortal—was alien.
That didn’t solve his current problem. He was here on sufferance—by grace of somebody’s indulgence. Whose? If only he had kept his grip on the collar of that man in the alley until his own wits returned to him! Someone had deliberately redeemed him from oblivion and set him free, penniless and in rags—why? To watch what he would do? It was a godlike concept. Zachariah? He looked around hopelessly at the uninterested crowds that moved with him along the Way. Did one of these faces mask an absorbed interest in his behavior? Or had his unknown guardian tired of the burden and set him on his own feet again, to go his own way?
Well, in time he would know. Or he would never know.
One excellent result of the past few hours was the money in his pocket, two thousand credits, free and clear. He had hurdled the next step without realizing it. Now there were a few old scores to settle, a few details to attend to, and then—Immortality!
He refused to think of it. His mind shrank from the infinite complexities, the fantastic personal applications of his new, extended life. Instead, he concentrated on the two men named Evans who had shepherded him to and from the hospital. The Slider would start investigations on those—he made a mental note. Rosathe. The Slider would be useful there, too. Other things he would attend to himself.
His throat was dry. He laughed to himself. Not the pseudo-thirst of dream-dust, after all. He had simply played a trick on himself. Water could have quenched his thirst at any time, had he allowed himself to believe it. He stepped off the Way at the nearest Public Aid station and drank cool water, freshly cold, ecstatically quenching, until he could drink no more.
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