But nothing was going to happen here, in a crowd of admiring tourists and onlookers. Rob smiled easily at the cameras and promised Mr. Baskin he’d come back tomorrow. When Edwin pulled up Rob noticed the ripple of astonishment instantly—a car rolling along with no driver! Hastily he dropped the tarnhelm effect. With luck nobody would believe their eyes. “You’re visible,” he told Edwin as he climbed into the front seat. “Wave at the nice doorman!”
Edwin waved and grinned. “This is a gas,” he laughed. “Don’t laugh too soon. This is where we start being paranoid.”
“You didn’t stay in their hotel, you didn’t get into the limo. How else can they get their claws in you?”
“Well, they could follow this car and catch us at the motel.”
“I never thought of that!” Edwin slowed down to look in the rearview mirror. “Do you want to drive then?”
“No, you do it. I might need to do other stuff. Let’s tour the town a bit.”
It was fully dark now, but the garish neon signs pushed back the night. The side streets and minor avenues were sleazier than ever. Rob stared through the window without seeing them. He was sure someone was following their car. It would be what he would do in the same situation. The only problem was pinpointing it. A slight effort, though, and in a few minutes he said,
“Got them. That blue sedan.”
Edwin looked. “What do they have in mind?”
“Oh, they just want to know where we’re staying.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“Hmm. Driving is so complex, there are lots of possibilities. Usually I have the driver confuse the brake pedal with the gas for a while.” The blue sedan suddenly stopped with a screech in the middle of an intersection.
Edwin kept on driving. “Can we go to the motel now?”
“Fine. But park across the street, in that little shopping center. Driving a car like this is better than wearing your own neon sign. Oh, and if you feel nervous about sharing a room again, I’m sorry—but we really should stay together.”
“I do not either feel nervous,” Edwin said indignantly.
The following morning, Rob commandeered the motel bill and paid it from his winnings. “You would never have had to come here, but for me,” he pointed out.
“But you’ll need that money,” Edwin argued as he tossed his bag into the back seat. “You’re homeless and jobless.”
“That’s not a problem if you have money, and now I do. Oh, and your stake.” He passed Edwin two fifties. “You remember at NIH that first day, Ed—when I told you I might just give you a parcel of the power?”
Edwin stared at him across the glossy low-slung roof of the sports car. He looked utterly horrified. “You wouldn’t really, would you? You haven’t already begun, with that invisibility?”
“No, no—that was just a tiny loan, very temporary! I wanted to say that you were right that day, with the arm wrestling. People don’t have to be equal. Diversity is a strength. I could never have done this alone. I needed your insight. It took the two of us, together, to get this going.”
Edwin blushed visibly under his tan and ducked into the car. “Don’t let’s get excited till we see how it works out, okay? We’re still only assuming that you can control the ‘leak’ at all. Have you thought about how you’ll do it?”
“No,” Rob admitted. “I’m going to have to experiment with it. That’s why I think we should simplify things today. No more James Bond stuff. If I cash in every time I’m ahead a couple grand, I’ll never be holding a flashy mountain of chips. And I’ll modify the tarnhelm trick a little, and just tell everyone in the entire building they don’t recognize either of us.
That should cover us completely. No more veiled confrontations with the management. You won’t have to slink around like a ghost.”
“Aw, that was kind of fun.” Edwin shook his head in mock disappointment. “And the laptop?”
“They won’t recognize that either. If anyone asks you, say it’s jewelry.”
“Did you learn to be such a great liar?” Edwin asked laughing. “You sure have me beat! Or is it a gift?”
“I, I learned it,” Rob said, flushing with shame. “In New York.”
With the pressure from the casino management removed, and the novelty of blackjack worn off, it was a calm day. Rob spent a lot of his time at the tables in a brown study, fumbling for control. Images, he thought. For me the weirdness is image and metaphor—as if it’s too big, or too strange, for a regular person to fully understand. I have to choose the right picture and impose it on the power.
At last he settled on the idea of a laser. This thing has been like a light bulb, shooting out energy all over, Rob thought. I’ve tried lampshades and wimpy stuff like that as it’s gotten stronger and brighter. Now I want to contain and focus the light, shoot it out in one direction only. It was the first time he’d ever tried to apply his own template to the situation. He
realized the only lasers he’d ever seen were on TV and in movies. He’d have to read up on them at the library to get a detailed idea of how they worked.
At the end of the day, however, Rob felt he had made a little progress.
“Only twelve thousand-some dollars,” he reported with pride as they walked to the car.
“That might just be within statistical variation,” Edwin said. “We have to crunch the numbers some.”
“I want to tinker with your software in there. It’s just the standard spreadsheet, right?”
Edwin handed him the laptop. “Mess with it while I drive home. It’ll be good to get back to the lab.”
“Next time I’ll come by myself, Ed—now that you’ve got me started.”
“You think this’ll really do it?”
“I don’t know, but …” Rob found he was grinning like an idiot through his beard as he got into the car. “I think I have a chance!”
“That’s great!”
“And I think I’ll have to move out of the Open Door Center. It’d be dumb to live in a homeless shelter with more than twenty grand stuffed in my duffel bag. I’ll rent a room someplace.”
“I knew you’d turn around,” Edwin said happily. “We’ll stop for dinner in Delaware to celebrate!” He pushed the buttons on the CD player, and Gwen Verdon began to sing songs from “Sweet Charity.”
It was a nippy evening for October, frosty-clear and smelling of snow. Traffic east on Route 40 was moderate. Thinking about the future, Rob felt the approaching malice only at the very last instant. “Ed!” he shouted.
Edwin jumped. “What?”
There was no time to explain, no time to even grab the wheel of the Mazda. Rob resorted to his Kmart remote trick. He shoved Edwin out of the saddle of his brain and seized control of his hands and feet. The sports car rocketed forward as Edwin’s foot pushed the gas pedal, and Rob made his hands spin the wheel. The Mazda screamed across all four lanes of the highway, right into oncoming traffic. The headlights were blinding. Horns blared and tires screeched before the Mazda went roaring back again. A crash came as a side rear window shattered. The winter wind suddenly shrieked through the interior.
“Don’t lose control, Ed,” Rob snapped, twisting around in his seat. “I’m letting you have yourself back.”
The Mazda jerked and slowed as Edwin took charge of it again. “What the heck are you doing, Rob? What’s happened to the window?”
“Someone’s shooting at us,” Rob said furiously, looking back. Their assailants’ car had dropped well behind, hiding in traffic. “Give me a second to get onto them … Oh damn it, am I stupid! I forgot they’d recognize your car! They noticed it in the casino lot and followed us.”
“But they can’t know we did anything!”
“They knew we were doing something, and why bother to analyze it? Just pump a few rounds of automatic rifle fire into the car and the problem goes away.” Rob was so angry he could hardly see. But he had a hold of them now, the driver and the gunman in the attacking car. “
I’ll fix them,” he said between his teeth.
“Oh my God!” Edwin gasped. The car came zooming up from behind with headlights glaring. It swept past at eighty miles an hour, the engine howling in protest. “Rob, what are you doing?”
“An accident.” Rob smiled a small savage smile as he turned around again and sat back. “Excessive speed and spin out, right through the rail of that overpass up there.”
“You’re going to kill them?” The Mazda lurched as Edwin pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. “Rob, no!”
“They were going to do us.” Coldly Rob watched the tail-lights wink out of sight ahead.
Edwin gripped his arm, the strong fingers digging in hard. “No, Rob! Are you insane? You can’t murder them!”
Rob wrenched free. In an icy whisper he said, “You dare?”
Edwin hesitated for only a fraction of a second. Then he glared back, bristling. “Of course I dare! Who else is going to tell you this is wrong?”
“You idiot!” Rob’s vision suddenly seemed to clear as he said the words. With a sharp exhalation of breath he relaxed. “Okay … they’re off the hook.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Edwin leaned on the steering wheel, gulping. “You wouldn’t have really done it?”
“Oh sure. I—I got mad, I guess … Thanks for stopping me. I’m sorry.”
Rob leaned back, shaken and sick.
“You can be one terrifying dude, Rob, you know that?” With unsteady hands
Edwin put the car in gear again.
“I’m sorry,” Rob repeated unhappily.
Edwin drove on, well below the speed limit. Incongruous Broadway show music filled the silence. A mile up the road the headlights picked out the other car slewed sideways in the median. The driver and passenger were barely visible in the bushes beside the car. “They’re begging the Virgin Mary for mercy,” Rob reported as they drove past.
“They have the right idea. Look, Rob, you try as hard as any man I know to be a decent human being. But you can’t save yourself. You need help.”
“I know it.”
“There are answers. You want me to tell you about them?”
“Not right now, Ed. I don’t think I can take it in.” Rob hardly heard him, staring wearily out the window. He was bitterly ashamed of himself. With great power comes great responsibility. He was as bad as Julianne with her White House ambitions, as contemptible as Denton MacQuie smoking hash in his Santa Festyle New York penthouse. Every time he made progress on one front things seemed to collapse somewhere else. And what about Edwin? With typical courage Edwin had ignored his own peril, but Rob knew what he had been capable of. He would have swatted his only friend like an annoying bug. The self-contempt was crushing. Even moving to Antarctica wouldn’t solve this one. The monster in the sub-basement would go with him everywhere, lying and murdering. No matter where I run, I meet myself there.
The wind blustering through the broken window rapidly made the car unbearably cold. Edwin turned into a restaurant parking lot and swept the broken crumbs of safety glass out of the back seat with his gloved hands.
Rob worked to plug the window with duct tape and a plastic garbage bag. “Here’s a little souvenir for you,” Edwin said. He held it out on the palm of his hand—a misshapen bullet. “You can see where it punched right through the side there. Don’t look so miserable, okay? You really saved our bacon.”
Rob picked the bullet up between thumb and forefinger. “You never would be in such a situation, except for me. I don’t think I’m good for you to know,
Ed.”
“Too late now—I already know you. I think we’ve gone as far as we can with duct tape. Let’s go have some dinner.”
CHAPTER 5
“… so I should be moving out in a couple days, as soon as I find a furnished room.”
“Oh Rob, I am so very glad!” Mrs. Ruppert’s eyes were moist with gentle
emotion. “You know you never were one of our more usual residents, quite a different caliber. It’s the Open Door Center’s mission to be a turning point for the homeless, and to fulfill it just moves me more than I can tell.”
“You’ve taught me things I want to hang on to,” Rob said honestly. “And that brings me to a favor I’d like to ask. I noticed that the front porch is really shot.”
“Oh, isn’t it terrible? Pastor Phillipson is worried that it’ll blow right off this winter.”
“I’d like to rebuild it,” Rob said. “Even if I’m not living here I could come over a couple days a week, maybe keep the tools here.”
“Why—that would be marvelous, but—won’t it be very difficult? And expensive?”
“It would be the biggest carpentry job I’ve ever tried,” Rob admitted. “But I’d supply all the materials, so if it’s a bust the Center won’t lose much.
The porch’ll fall off any day now, the pastor’s right about that. And if the front of the building gets spruced up, your neighbors won’t mind.”
“They’d certainly be less catty! Oh, I don’t see how we can say no, Rob!
Let me just run the idea by the church. Thank you, thank you so much!”
“Please don’t thank me, Mrs. Ruppert.” Rob smiled down at her. “It’s my pleasure, believe me.”
So that was one lifeline secured. With Edwin and Mrs. Ruppert as references, Rob had no problem renting a partly-furnished room in the back basement of a house a mile away. It was dark and prison-like, the one window barred with an iron security grille, but Rob didn’t care. For him any place that was not home was a sorry substitute, and where he slept didn’t matter. “I’ll say this for you, Rob,” Edwin said at the end of November, when he saw the Spartan room with its single bed. “You have simple needs. You’re going to embarrass me when we get to my place.”
“Let me guess.” Rob pulled the ill-fitting apartment door shut with a firm tug. He’d have to plane it down one of these days and install weatherstripping. “Your place looks just like your NIH office, piled with stuff. An explosion in a scientific supply warehouse.” He led the way up the steep flight of concrete steps to the street.
“It’s my co-authors’ fault,” Edwin said. “If they hadn’t sent me all their chapters to collate and organize I’d be tidier.”
“What’s the name of your book?”
“It’s a college textbook: Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes.” “Oh!”
“That’s the usual reaction,” Edwin said grinning. “I can’t imagine why.
They’re unicellular organisms. You’ve seen one—the poster in my office.
That was Euglena.”
“Was that what it was? I thought it was a close-up of food gone bad.”
Edwin laughed so hard at this that he almost missed the turn into the computer superstore. After borrowing Edwin’s laptop for a couple of solo blackjack trips Rob had decided it was silly not to buy one of his own. The salesman tried to steer him to a fancier machine than he needed but Rob knew exactly what he wanted. “Gee, you’re fast,” Edwin said. “It took me weeks to make up my mind, and I exchanged the thing twice.”
“Read up on it in Byte at the library,” Rob explained. He counted out twenty-three hundred dollars in worn fifties and handed it to the cashier.
Edwin stared. “Tell me you’re not carrying it all in cash.”
“I don’t worry about muggers, you know! But actually the money got really bulky to haul around in the duffel. I’ve made maybe sixty thousand since October. So I started a few savings accounts. As long as I spread my deposits around, the banks won’t get suspicious.”
They drove to Edwin’s apartment in Takoma. It was on the second floor of a
garden block near the park. Edwin flung open the door and said, “Behold my nemesis! If I don’t whip the manuscript into shape by the new year the publisher will strangle me.”
There did seem to be a lot of paper in the room, and also a lot of furniture and high-tech toys. A fancy motion sensor turned on the stereo automatically, so that a Wynton Marsalis septet fi
lled the room as they came in. The apartment was spacious, with a balcony and a dining ell, but it held two sofas and half a dozen tables, big and small. Edwin also had another computer, an electronic music keyboard, two CD players, and innumerable stereo speakers trailing wires everywhere. Bookcases held fat textbooks on the lower shelves and paperback science fiction on the upper ones. Near the sliding doors, a Lifecycle stood draped with damp Tshirts and jogging shorts. Out on the balcony a mountain bike hung from a rack. Packing boxes stood in towers in the corners. Everything was topped with piles of typescript and folders bulging with photographs of cells.
“Boy, I knew I didn’t want to crash with you,” Rob remarked. “How did you come by two sofas?” He tripped over a pair of rollerblades and sat down on the only clear space on a sofa.
“Oh, half this stuff is Carina’s. It didn’t make sense for her to keep an apartment when she was going to Peru for a year. And, speaking of archaeologists, I have something for you.” Edwin turned the litter on one of the tables over like hay. “Here.”
He handed over a sheet of paper. Clipped to it was Rob’s own torn-out notebook sheet with the inscription copy on it. The paper had the same wedgy characters on it, printed out big on a laser printer. Beneath them were syllables in English. “A - Kwe - Ben - Ni (Silent),” Rob read aloud. “Aqebin. Who is Aqebin when he’s at home?”
“It’s an archaeological site in the old USSR. Uzbekistan, one of those newly independent republics. During the heyday of the Empire, a team of British archaeologists began digging there in the late nineteen-hundreds.
Then the Communists came in and the Brits got tossed. Since then nobody much has worked there. So says the assistant professor of ancient Near Eastern studies who saw this on-line. He’s mailing me a xerox of the team’s preliminary survey. That was all they ever published.” Edwin looked expectantly at Rob and rubbed his hands in anticipation. “Now it’s your turn. How does a defunct dig in Asia figure in? Does a rabbit pop out of a hat, or what?”
How Like A God Page 16
