by Ron Goulart
When the young man was at last seated Karew pointed a metal forefinger at him. “We have an emergency situation here at TAS,” he told him. “I’m putting several plans into operation at once. I’m even going to give some of our less than one-hundred-percent successful agents such as yourself a chance to help out.”
“Hey! I appreciate that, sir,” exclaimed Moriarty. “I do possess an extraordinary amount of telekinetic ability, and despite all my parents’ efforts to discourage me, I’m better at it every day. Why, just moments ago I—”
“The problem we face involves an agent with powers similar to yours, Moriarty. He may even be as goofy as you,” Karew said. “He has decided to desert us, to go out on his own.”
“That’s really awful, sir.”
“It’s possible, should all our other plans fail, that a fellow telek such as yourself can capture this wandering agent.”
“I’m sure I can, sir. And once I locate him I’ll pop him right back here to you.”
Karew put his hands behind his back, producing a clang. “I’m confident the plans I’m setting in motion will capture Nemo for us. However, I want you to work on this, too, Moriarty, as a backup.”
“His name is Nemo?”
“His code name. That briefing machine will give you all the backgrounding you need.”
“Which briefing machine would that be, sir?” Moriarty’s gaze followed the direction of Karew’s pointing finger. “You mean the pile of scrap metal in yonder corner?”
“I forgot I had a little disagreement with the nerfing thing while I was waiting for you,” said Karew. “We’ll get another one. Now, you’ll be working with another of our extrasensory agents on this. She should—”
“I’m pretty much a loner, sir. On all the other assignments I’ve undertaken for TSA I’ve always—”
“Which is probably why you farbed most of them up, Moriarty. For instance, the Professor Allen business where—”
“I didn’t exactly screw that up, sir,” defended Moriarty. “Granted the placebo ended up in Yonkers rather than—”
“Never mind, Moriarty. You’re going to cooperate with Mrs. Seuss on this,” the District Director of the Total Security Agency told him. “She’s what you might call a seer, she can predict things. I’m hoping she’ll be able to predict where Nemo is, get a vision. Not that we’re relying only on her, since I’ve got the full tracking facilities of TSA mobilized for . . . what is it?”
“Would Mrs. Seuss be a stocky, somewhat masculine woman in her middle fifties, sir?”
“She would. Why?”
Moriarty ran his tongue over his upper lip and then his lower lip. “Well, I saw her lurking around upstairs near the concealed entrance. She looked very suspicious to me, like the mother of a friend of mine. So I . . . well, teleported her.”
Karew’s fingers made a gritting squeek as he twisted his hands together. “You teleported my seer?”
“Afraid so, sir. Being anxious to test my mettle I—”
“Where?”
“Up near the concealed entrance to—”
“Where did you teleport the old broad to, you peabrain nerf?”
Moriarty watched a trickle of syncarf working its way across the floor. “Only over to Long Island, I think.”
“You think?”
“No, no, I’m actually certain.” He cleared his throat, making his Adam’s apple rattle. “Would you, sir, like me to get her back?”
“That would be pleasant.”
Moriarty closed his eyes, clenched his fists, rocked in his chair, grunted, “Is she here?”
“Not so you’d notice.”
The tempo of Moriarty’s grunting picked up. “Here she is.” He opened his eyes.
A husky woman with short-cropped gray hair was standing on the floor next to Karew. “I had a hunch something like this was going to happen,” she announced. “‘Ella Seuss,’ I told myself, ‘you’re going to meet a tall young man and go on a trip across the water.’ It all came true.”
“I want you to find somebody for me, Mrs. Seuss.”
“That won’t be any problem.”
Chapter 15
The blonde girl let out her breath, dropping the tangle of clothes she’d been clutching to her front. “How did you . . . rather how did we . . . what I mean is. . . .” She bent, from the waist, to gather up her fallen garments. “Oh, now I’ve got mayosub all over my singlet. I keep meaning not to leave the dregs of sandwiches about my lodgings, but . . . how exactly did you get us both from Torchy’s to here?”
Ted let go of her arm. “It’s a . . . knack I have.”
“That is certainly some knack.” She began dressing. “I guess if it didn’t bother you to see me unclothed at the bathhouse, it won’t hurt you to witness my clothing myself. Would you care to look at the bayou instead? One of the advantages of Bayou Village is each cluster of stilt-cottages has its own separate bayou. Sometimes from my balcony I even can see a flamingo, but—”
“Where do you keep your landcar?”
“I forgot about it. That’s the reason we’re here.” She tugged a pair of allseason panties up over her hips. “Car’s down in the carpad. The six cottages in this cluster share the same pad, like we share the bayou.”
“You told me there was a disabler on your car, to keep you from driving it.” Ted stepped over a pile of vidiscs, skirted a plyowrapped half-loaf of soybread, and reached the window of the cottage living room. “Unless you catch up on the payments within forty-eight hours they’ll leave the disabler on until they come and haul your landcar off. Which one is it, that green one?”
“Yes, how’d you pick it?”
“It’s dustier and more dented than the others.”
The girl rubbed fingertips over the new stain on her singlet. “I’m lackadaisical about household routines. Watch out, don’t back into the roast.”
“Roast? Where?”
“Under that nonethnic serape,” she said. “Did I tell you my name? It’s Lang Strayton.”
Ted was concentrating on the car. “There,” he said as a small, square metallic box appeared in his palm. “You can drive it now. I’ve fixed the regional Repo computer, too. For awhile they’ll think you paid up.”
“You did?” asked Lang. “You did all that while merely viewing my bayou? Is that the disabler in your hand?”
“Uh huh. They still seem to be using the S72 model down here.” He dropped it into a dispose hole in the corner of the room.
Lang shook her head. “This is all very unusual, Mr. Bierhorst.” She slapped a plastic hat off a floating chair and sat.
“I’m not really Bierhorst.”
“Oh? That was the name they gave me back at Torchy’s. I was told Mr. Bierhorst was on his way, you appeared, and when you learned of my plight you offered to help and I invited you to . . . teleportation!” She snapped her fingers. “That’s what it is, isn’t it? Teleportation. That’s what you did, what we did. We traveled from that bordello to here in seconds.”
“Yep, that’s right.”
“I’ve heard of teleportation, even rumors that there were people wandering around who could do it, but I thought you could only move little things. Such as flower pots and billiard balls.”
“I can move those, too.”
“But this is much better.” The girl’s eyes were glistening. “What do you do . . . ? Is your profession going around hunting up nitwit girls such as myself who’ve gotten themselves into financial binds and are about to have their landcars taken away by the Repo people and have their landlord association bounce them out on their casters and so have to half-heartedly resort to turning tricks to keep body and soul together? Or what?”
Ted picked a synfeather boa and several foodsax from a lucite rocking chair. He seated himself, saying, “I used to work for the Repo Bureau. When you told me you were being bothered by them I decided it’d be fun to help you outwit them.”
“Is that one of the qualifications for employment by the Repo ou
tfit, telekinetic powers? I didn’t know that.”
“Didn’t know it myself till the other day,” he told her. “My real name is Ted Briar, by the way. I never got around to mentioning it.”
“People often have some trouble mentioning things to me, since I tend to talk at great length most often,” said Lang. “If I continue at Torchy’s that’s going to prove a handicap, although my first customer, and the only one prior to you, told me he rather enjoyed my keeping up a steady stream of inane banter, as he phrased it. Seems his wife never speaks at all during their increasingly rare moments of sexual congress. She prefers to remain stiff and silent, lips pressed tight, arms at sides, eyes scrunched tight. That’s not much of a way to make love, even in situations where you’re being paid. Why were you at Torchy’s?”
“I’d heard about the places, wanted to try one.
“You didn’t get much of a sample. Besides which, with the steam so thick you could hardly enjoy the decor. I haven’t seen much of it myself, although they tell me the place is quite charming and has a wonderful ambience. What now?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What I meant was . . . after you teleported me here and saved my car,” said Lang, “I feel grateful, obviously. So possibly before I get back to Torchy’s we could—”
“You plan to go back there?”
“There’s still the rent to pay, plus a few other bills, and, to be frank, your Repo friends are anxious about some other of my belongings.”
“I can loan you some money,” said Ted. “Unless you really want to go back.”
“Not especially, no,” said the girl. “I came down to Florida-5 six months ago to forget an unfortunate affair. It was either Florida or moving in on some friends who live up in Black Boston. I selected Florida because I thought they’d appreciate a caricaturist more in these parts. Would you like to see some of my work? My samples are . . . I think they’re under the floating sofa over there. You’ll have to lift the sofa because the mechanism which causes it to remain floating went bad, as you probably noticed but were too polite to mention since the poor thing is sitting right on its caster there.”
“I’ll look in awhile,” said Ted. “Listen, I can provide you with enough money to take care of the bills and all. After that you can do whatever you want.”
“Why me?”
“You’re the first person in trouble I’ve noticed since I . . . since I quit my previous job.”
Lang watched him silently for a moment. “You can tell me about what you really did and why you quit,” she said. “With the abilities you have, you had to have been more than some sort of repossession clerk. What were you?”
“I was an assassin,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about it at the time, but that’s, basically, what I was.”
“Tell me.” He told her.
The day had faded, the bayou was turning a deep blue, the decorative moss on the trees hung black, the flamingo had returned.
“Maybe,” put in Lang when she realized Ted wasn’t going to say anymore, “you ought to go away someplace, you and your wife.”
“Nope.” Ted shook his head. “No, she can stay where she is, keep seeing Perlberg for all I care.”
“You’re mad at her because you were stupid,” the girl said. Twilight shadows surrounded her where she sat. “I don’t believe she knew anything about your real job. As far as the business with your handsome boss, she made it pretty obvious what she was up to.”
“I’m not a detective, I don’t have to solve mysteries. Haley’s not supposed to—”
“People can do anything. What’s important is how you handle it.”
“What I know is I’m not going back to Haley now. I don’t intend to be a spy for Reverend Ortega either.”
“I can understand that. You feel this Total Security Agency’s been using you, exploiting you, and then along comes Rev O asking you to do the same thing for his side of the fence. Which is why I suggested—”
“Quiet a minute.” Ted silently left his chair, eased toward the window. Nearly there, he stumbled over a tin hassock. He fell against the window, head thumping it.
A few seconds later a loud splash came from the bayou below. Lang whispered, “What was that?”
On hands and knees Ted took a look. “Was a guy out here on your balcony? When I suddenly came hurtling at him, he flinched and went over into the water down there.”
“Somebody’s been watching us, listening? A voyeur, you mean?”
“More likely a Total Security agent.” Ted hunched further down, still watching the oncoming night. “Yeah, there’s two more guys pulling him out of the lagoon. Why don’t all you farbs go for a dip?”
The two dry secret agents went somersaulting into the air to splash down in the center of the artificial bayou.
“Good,” said Ted, watching. “Now you join them.”
The man who’d fallen in once was dragging himself toward the edge of the water. He was lifted up, tossed in with his two companions.
“Now I ought to drown all three of them.”
“Ted, don’t.” Lang was kneeling beside him.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry. I’m not going to kill anyone else. It’s only that—”
The living-room door burned away to ashes.
A fresh agent stood on the cottage threshold, blaster pistol in hand. “You can’t go dunking our boys in the—”
His gun hand was yanked behind his back. As he cried out with pain he was lifted off the floor, his head thunked against the ceiling. Again and again the agent was slammed against the ceiling. When he dropped to the floor he slumped unconscious.
“TSA’s tracked me somehow.” He held out his hand to the girl. “Would you like to visit your friends in Black Boston?”
“You mean right now?”
“Right now.”
“Yes, fine.” She took his hand.
“. . . at the pinnacle of a damn flagpole, left there for untold hours to wave in the breeze like Old Glory.”
“Should have made you happy, Dad, made you feel very patriotic,” said Haley.
“For more than a solid hour no one so much as lifted a finger to help me down. Then the Daytown boy scouts, a hard-drinking, fast-living lot from the looks of them, managed to get me to half mast,” the old man said, starting to sniffle. “Another entire hour passed before—”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Dad.”
Woodruff said, “While I was flapping in the wind, Haley, I had the very distinct impression I saw someone familiar ogling me from across the way. Do you know who I think it was?”
“Benedict Arnold?”
“Oh, Haley, living away from me has made you a terrible cynic,” said her father. “No. I’m sure Ted was standing there, smirking like a chimp, enjoying my plight.”
“Ted?” Haley reached out, touched the pix-phone screen. “Are you sure?”
“Has he run away from you? Has he come down here expressly to do me mischief?”
“When was it you saw him?”
“While I was up the damned flagpole, Haley.”
“Was that today?”
“You used to hang on my every word, sit on my knee and hang on my every word, and now you pay little or—”
“When?”
“This morning,” answered the old man. “What’s Ted up to? Has he quit that dead-end job of his? Has he run off with some floozie?”
“No, Dad, it’s the other way around.”
“I don’t quite understand what—”
“I don’t quite either. I . . . well, I guess I love Ted and I just haven’t been able to do anything to help him and it makes me so unsettled and angry that—”
“Haley, you haven’t done anything your father would be ashamed of?”
She looked at his image on the screen. “No, Dad. No, I’m still your sweet and innocent little Haley, always will be, and everything is perfectly fine,” she told him. “I’m sorry you were up a flagpole. I’m glad you got down.”
“If only you’d—”
“Goodbye, Dad.” She ended the call, stayed in the phone alcove watching the dark screen.
Chapter 16
“How do you get used to it?”
“I haven’t, exactly, yet.”
Lang, lips tight together, took in a deep breath. “We’re in Black Boston sure enough, this is Soul Food Common,” she said. “My friends live off in that direction, along the banks of the Charles.” She let go his hand to point.
Ted had set himself and the girl down on a patch of grassy field which was circled with low, narrow cafés and restaurants. There were dozens of them, pressed tightly together. “I’ll escort you over to your friends,” he offered.
“Yes, but let’s walk. Teleportation gives me very odd feelings here in my insides, not to mention the psychological and philosophical questions which arise.” She took another deep breath. “This section of town is devoted to research and study in the field of Negro Barbecue, funded by the All-Black Division of the Ford Foundation.”
They moved along the row of tiny eating places. Real Texas Bar-B-Q! We use only 100% Textured Vegetable Protein Ribs! Frisco-Style Ribs! House of Soul Soy!
“Boston’s chopped up into enclaves devoted to the study and understanding of Negro culture and history,” explained Lang as they crossed a neowood bridge out of the common.
“Yeah, I’ve heard.”
The blonde girl caught his hand again. “I appreciate your helping me, all these ways,” she said. “Do you think the Total Security people will put me on some sort of shit list?”
“It’s me they’re hunting. I don’t think they’ll bother you once I move on.”
Lang said, “It’ll be very pleasant to see Blind Lemon and Cripple Clarence again.”
“Your friends are handicapped?”
“Oh, no. They’ve simply changed their names to suit their field of study.”
A line of Negroes was forming outside a barn-shaped auditorium across the street. See Joe Louis Defend His Title Against Jack Johnson! proclaimed a lightstrip sign.
“Which is?”
