Nemo

by Ron Goulart

  NEMO

  By Ron Goulart

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright © 2013 / Ron Goulart

  Copy-edited by: Anita Lorene Smith

  Cover images courtesy of:

  http://stiks-1969.deviantart.com/

  http://castock.deviantart.com/

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Born in 1933, Ron Goulart has been a professional author for several decades and has over 180 books to his credit, including more than fifty science fiction novels and twenty some mystery novels. He’s twice been nominated for an Edgar Award and is considered one of the country’s leading authorities on comic books and comic strips. Ron lives with his wife Frances, also a writer, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

  Book List

  A Graveyard of My Own

  After Things Fell Apart

  Even the Butler Was Poor

  Hellquad

  Nemo

  Now He Thinks He’s Dead

  The Enormous Hourglass

  Upside Downside

  For a more complete bibliography visit his page at ISFDB on the Internet.

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  NEMO

  Chapter 1

  Ted Briar screamed.

  His narrow bed jiggled him gently and asked, “Another nasty dream?” Not really a bad dream, no. Not something you’d bother a psychotherapist like his wife’s with, or even one of those coin-operated ‘bot analysts they have in airport and hotel lobbies. Yet every time Ted had the dream, he fought, breathing hard and thrashing, to get out of it.

  Ted sat up, eyes and mouth wide open, and looked around his gunmetal-gray sleeping pit.

  What was there in the damned dream to do this to him, two or three times a week lately? Actually it was more a comedy than a horror dream. Ted would be walking down a street in some impossibly pleasant small town in a last-century town, the kind of town which had vanished long before he was born. It was always a warm summer day and he’d be wearing an ankle-length old-fashioned nightgown. Nobody seemed to notice. And he was carrying some kind of heavy suitcase.

  The thing was, if he ever delivered that suitcase where it was supposed to be delivered somebody was going to die. That was why he always had to scream himself away from there.

  Shaking his head, Ted mumbled to himself, “Don’t be stupid.” He squinted in the direction of the wall clock.

  A thin wire arm snaked up from under the bed, and after squirting two squirts of a liquid, poked Ted’s contact lenses into place on his eyeballs. “It’s six-seventeen a.m. if it’s the chronometers you’re trying to see,” said the soft narrow bed. “Six-seventeen going on six-eighteen, that’s the time.”

  Ted rasped his tongue over his upper teeth. “Is Haley home yet?” He found he had a strong compulsion to blink.

  “No, nope, she’s not,” replied the speaker mechanism in the computerized bed. “Would you like a cup of coffee-like cereal beverage or perhaps some nice warm soymilk?”

  Ted kept blinking, rubbing at his eyes. “What the hell did you spray in my eyes instead of antipollution mist?”

  “Golly, I’m not sure. Could it have been, maybe, protein-rich hair conditioner? I’m doing my best, but I really do need a tuneup. You haven’t had a house mechanic in for a long time, you know.”

  “We’re on the damn waiting list. They can’t come till April 22, 2021. Next year.”

  Another thin metal arm appeared, holding a cup of something steaming. “Sniff this and see if it’s coffee-like cereal beverage, will you?”

  Ted sniffed. “Nope.”

  “Listen, how about you go back to sleep for maybe fifteen minutes while I get myself straightened out?”

  “No, I never sleep very well the nights Haley’s working up at the Dynamo Hill Children’s Hospital.” When Ted swung his feet over the edge of the bed, his furry slippers came scurrying toward his bare feet.

  He’d had the dream even nights when Haley was home. What could be in the damn suitcase that would kill somebody?

  “Forget it,” he told himself aloud. “It’s stupid.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.” Ted walked slowly over the pit floor, climbed the ladder up into the earth-colors bedroom. He was a lean blond man of just over thirty, average looking though slightly quirky around the edges. He shuffled across the thermal floor to glance down into his wife’s sleeping pit. No, she wasn’t there.

  You could carry a bomb in that suitcase. No, it wasn’t a bomb. It was heavy, but not a bomb. He shook his head, hoping to make the last shreds of the dream fade.

  Ted looked toward the draped windows. The drapes snapped open, pleasant rustic music drifted down out of the main overhead audio speaker. “Looks like another mighty fine day here in Brimstone, Connecticut,” announced the house computer. “A brisk, autumnal Wednesday, September 8, 2020. You’ll especially enjoy today’s predicted temperature of—”

  “Who the hell’s that guy?” There was an overweight man crouching on the front lawn with a self-operating movie-disc camera cradled in his lap. Ted loped closer to the wide gently curved window to grab up the public-address mike for his lawn area. “Who the hell are. . . . Oh, is that you, Mr. Swedenberg?”

  The overweight man in the two-piece green travelsuit nodded, smiling sadly toward Ted. The outdoor monitoring system gave his voice a mildly squeaky tone. “I’m only here in the United States for eight more hours this trip,” he explained to Ted. “I craved another look. Also, if you don’t object, I’m shooting some full-color tri-op to show Mrs. Swedenberg and the children.”

  “No, that’ll be okay,” Ted told him. “How’s the fishmeal business over in China-3?”

  “Can’t complain,” replied Swedenberg while his camera went on taking pictures. “You’re still prospering with the Federal Repossession Bureau Office over in New Westport?”

  “Still with FRB, yeah.”

  “And your attractive young wife, Haley?”

  “She’s fine. How are Mrs. Swedenberg and the kids? I guess Lars must be in college now.”

  “His name is Nils, and yes, he is,” said Swedenberg. “We’re all doing as well as can be expected. Fortunately, the starvation rate among the locals in China-Three is much lower than it is in China-Two. So Mrs. Swedenberg and the children aren’t exposed to as many dead and dying people.” He watched his camera scamper over the pseudograss. “We do, of course, still miss our little house here in Brimstone very much.”

  “Well, your fishmeal company will probably transfer you back to Connecticut someday. Then you’ll be able to buy another place pretty much like this one.”

  “Oh, not like this one.” Swedenberg sighed. “There’ll never be another Sixty-three Limestone Hills Road, which is why I appreciate your allowing me to drop by now and then when I’m in America.”

  “That’s okay. But listen, Mr. Swedenberg. Haley and I bought this house from you three years ago, right after I started working for the Repo Bureau. I’ve been thinking maybe you’re too sentimental about this place, too attached to it still.”

  Swedenberg dism
issed the idea with a slow shake of his head. “By the way, I hope I didn’t scare your friend away. My arrival sent him flying, I’m afraid.”

  “What friend?”

  Buzz! Buzz!

  “And I hope his pictures won’t be spoiled.”

  Buzz! Buzz!

  “That’s the telephone,” reminded the house.

  Ted scowled up at the speaker grid. “Stay right there, take more movies, Mr. Swedenberg. I have a phone call.” He ran, skirting the sleep pits, to the bedroom phone alcove. Sobbing was coming out of there. “Shit,” muttered Ted, slowing.

  The pink-faced old man who showed on the oval pixphone wallscreen was dressed up as Uncle Sam, except that his shaggy gray beard was stuck under his nose and not on his chin. He was wiping his eyes on a star-spangled sleeve.

  “Good morning, Mr. Woodruff.”

  “Would it make you retch to call me Father or Dad or even Pop?”

  “Probably, yes. You’re not my father, Mr. Woodruff, you’re Haley’s father. And your beard’s fastened on the wrong place.”

  “A lot you know about American history and the question of where Uncle Sam’s beard goes.” Haley’s father was calling from a street-corner booth. Outside on the early morning Florida street was parked a landtruck with a huge lollipop of plastic mounted on top. “Where’s my little girl?”

  “Not here.”

  “Drove her from the house again with your foul behavior?” Woodruff removed his stars-and-stripes hat. A plastic bubble of bourbon was concealed within the hat. He took a long swig.

  “Cheers,” said Ted.

  “Who wouldn’t take to drink with his only girl married to a raving maniac and suffering all the remorse a blighted career can bring?”

  “I didn’t blight Haley’s career. If anybody did it was you.”

  The bubble didn’t get sealed quite tight enough, and when Haley’s father slammed his topper back on, bourbon squirted onto his scalp. “She had such great potential. Do you know what her 26Q rating was?”

  “Two hundred and forty, you’ve told me before.” By twisting and hunching slightly he got a glimpse of the lawn. Swedenberg was still out there. It looked like he was crying, too.

  “Where’s my little girl?”

  “Not home yet, this is one of the nights she works up at the kids’ hospital.”

  “If Haley was happy with you, she’d stay home nights.”

  “Perhaps, Pop. Why did you say you had your beard pasted on your nose?”

  “I’m taking out one of the trucks today, helps me keep in touch.” The old man gestured at the landtruck in the background. Emblazoned on its side were the enormous words Woodruff’s Instant Patriotic Breakfast Popps! “Thousands of schoolchildren all over the South are awaiting the cheerful arrival of a friendly Woodruff truck. I don’t suppose, though, you understand a man who has a true calling, seeing as you’re stuck in a dead-end job.”

  “Do all your drivers dress up like Uncle Sam?”

  “Some are Abraham Lincoln,” said Woodruff. “Tell Haley to phone her poor infirm father soon as she gets home.”

  “I have to get back to a guy on my lawn who—”

  “If only Haley’s mother had lived. If only my little girl hadn’t left me. If only—”

  “Goodbye. God bless America.” Ted flicked off the screen. “Don’t accept any more calls from that old lush.”

  “That’s no way to refer to your wife’s poor infirm father,” observed the house.

  “If it weren’t for him. . . .” Ted shook his head, went trotting back to the window. “Hey, Mr. Swedenberg, you saw some guy on our lawn taking pictures?”

  “It may not have been a camera. Some sort of instrument, possibly a camera. Is he perhaps someone you hired to do a job for you?”

  “I haven’t hired anybody to do anything. What did he look like?”

  “I think he was a black man. He was very much bundled up for such a lovely autumnal morning.”

  To his house Ted said, “Didn’t you see the other one out there?”

  “No, sir,” replied the voice of the house computer. “We saw no one except Swedenberg, and he’s okay. Anyone strange and the alarms, I assure you, would have gone off.”

  Ted frowned for a few seconds. “Probably some kind of maintenance man— most of them have electronic immunity.” Out to Swedenberg he said, “Well, goodbye, Mr. Swedenberg, nice talking to you.” He turned off the hand mike.

  Ted made his way to the ramp leading to the primary living room. This way he’d see Haley as soon as she got back from the graveyard shift at the children’s hospital.

  An olive-green chair met him at the doorway. Ted sat, the chair rolled him over closer to the TV wall. The wall image popped on.

  Sprawled corpses, stick-thin, filled the big screen. “. . . and so another small nation, this time Angola, has starved to death. Late last night United Nations observers flew over the capital and determined that less than five percent of the population was left alive.” The telescope camera roamed along the dry twilight street, ticking off the dead.

  Ted looked away. “I don’t like to see stuff like this, not so early in the morning, anyway.”

  “How do you feel when you view scenes such as this?” asked a jovial, and deep, voice. “Guilty maybe?”

  It was Dr. Norvell Perola. This was the show Ted wanted to watch after all.

  “Well, chums, I am here to tell you you needn’t bother feeling bad,” continued Dr. Perola. A giant bald man he was, with an enormous grin and a pair of antique horn-rim spectacles. He was wearing a sleeveless tweed tunic over his one-piece lycra worksuit. “It’s not your fault, not my fault, a bunch of illiterate savages can’t manage their country. You aren’t expected to put the burden of the whole and entire stupid world on your shoulders.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” agreed Ted.

  The philosopher was standing in a sunlit field of high yellow grass. In the distance rolling hills, dotted with neat thatch-roof cottages, could be seen. “Here at Utopia East we concentrate on ourselves. That’s what my doctrine of Selfism is all about, chums, about finding out what our true natures are, about discovering our true likes and dislikes and then . . . enjoying ourselves!” Dr. Perola laughed a huge laugh, took a large, hearty deep breath. “Whether you visit us here at our model community nestled in the Massachusetts countryside or simply join me each morning for these talks, the thinking of Utopia East can help you, chums. This morning’s talk, for instance, will—”

  Buzz! Buzz!

  The chair wheeled Ted over to the phone alcove. “I don’t want to talk to that cockeyed Uncle Sam.”

  Buzz! Buzz!

  He picked up the speaker unit. “Hello?”

  The plate-size screen glowed on, a freckled man of about the same age as Ted appeared. It was Wally Klennan, one of Ted’s few close friends in Brimstone. “Going to have to cancel on our lunch today, Ted.”

  Wally worked at the Repo Bureau, too, and they usually had lunch at least twice a week. “What’s happening?” asked Ted.

  “Oh, Connie’s got the Brazilian flu again,” explained his friend. “We think that’s what it is. Our medgroup android took a look at her over the phone, says she’s probably got all the symptoms of that new bug. So I’m going to stay home to give her the shots.”

  “Can’t your medical ‘bot handle it?”

  “Robot’s broken down again,” said Wally. “They can’t get out to fix it until next April sometime. I’ll see you tomorrow probably.”

  “Okay, give my best to Connie.” Ted turned off the phone. He was en route back to the TV wall when the front door wooshed open.

  Haley came in. She was a tall, coltish girl of twenty-seven. Dark-haired and pale. This morning her long hair was disordered, smudges of black underlined her wide brown eyes.

  “Little late, huh?” said Ted, standing. “Um,” said his pretty wife.

  “Don’t feel like talking?”

  “Oh, Ted. . . .”

  Getti
ng free of his chair, he went to her. “Something?”

  “No, not really. No.” Haley shook her head. “Was that Mr. Swedenberg out on the lawn?”

  “Yeah.” He touched her cheek. “Swedenberg said he saw some guy out there with a camera or some kind of listening gadget this morning. That’s sort of odd.”

  Haley made a small humming sound, saying nothing.

  “Oh, and I had the dream again, the thing about the suitcase. I don’t understand quite why—”

  “You really ought to talk to Dr. Waggoner or somebody, Ted. There’s no reason to have a dull dream like that more than once.” She exhaled, blinking. “I better get to bed now. See you tonight. Same as always.”

  “Haley, would you rather be a dancer than—?”

  “We can talk tonight or sometime.” She kissed him once on the chin— her lips were chill—and wandered away toward the ramp leading to the bedroom area.

  “Because your father called and he thinks you’d be happier if you were still—”

  Her sigh shook her slender body.”He must be doing some heavy drinking again. He always talks about my dancing when he’s. . . . We’ll talk tonight.” She went away into the bedroom.

  Ted slumped down and his chair rushed to catch him.

  Chapter 2

  Ted turned off the morning news. His car turned it back on.

  “The Bishop of Rio,” said the unattractive girl newscaster on the tiny dash screen, “is still missing in Brazil.”

  Slouching down in his contour seat, Ted took a noisy sip from his cup of vitamin-enriched beeflike broth. Outside his landcar it was all trees and sunshine up beyond the two lanes of Stem 33 of the New England Slotway.

  “The Bishop of Rio, as you know,” continued the tiny red-haired newscaster, “parachuted from a military craft over the Mato Grosso jungles of Brazil late last week. His object was to bless government troops and their United States Military Force advisers who are battling in that embattled section of rebellion-rocked Brazil. So far only his miter and some shreds of his chute have been found. Now here is Ed Skeet via satellite from Rio.”