Nemo

by Ron Goulart

  “Someplace else.” It stopped.

  Ted attempted to move, found no one on top of him. With a very painful pushup motion he reached his knees. “I’m really . . . going to have to . . . get over these notions . . . about fighting fair.” Finally he made it to a standing position.

  Lang had toppled from the chair during the fight with Shamba. She lay, sprawled and limp, on the loft floor.

  Ted ran, as best he could, to her and got an arm behind her shoulders. “Lang, hey, Lang.”

  “Don’t,” she said in a faraway voice, “know anything.”

  “It’s me, Ted. I’m sorry they—”

  “Oh, I’m happy to see you again, Ted. I really expected we’d never meet again. People always say they’ll keep in touch, but that rarely works out.”

  He smiled. “You’re recuperating.”

  “Because I’m able to talk in my usual fashion? Yes, I suppose that is a good vital sign.” With his help she sat up. “Did you get rid of the pair of them? They were, especially the one in the white suit, certainly anxious as to your whereabouts.”

  “Yeah, they’re out of the way for awhile, a good while,” Ted assured her. “I didn’t expect they’d come after you, must have traced one of those damn cards I swiped.”

  “They want you very much, Ted. If they did this to me. . . . You have to get to your wife. They might—”

  “That’s my next stop, Lang. I just all of a sudden got a flash you were in trouble up here.”

  “That was a true flash all right.”

  “Okay now,” he said. “I’ve already talked to your friend Lemon, before I showed up here. He’ll be able to look after you. TSA probably won’t send anyone else to question you.”

  “Yes, and you’d better . . . teleport or whatever it is to your wife,” suggested the girl. “But first. . . .” She put, gingerly, her arms around Ted and kissed him.

  Chapter 21

  He arrived. There he was in a stand of decorative trees near his house. “Something . . . something isn’t quite right around here,” Ted told himself as he stood there on the night street. Not moving, he studied his house. Lights showing, nothing unusual.

  “Yeah, that’s it. They haven’t got anybody watching the place.” Ted was certain of that. Nowhere, not within a square block of his house anyway, were there any Total Security agents. “What’s it mean?”

  Someone in the house. It was Haley, Ted sensed that. “She’s alone, too.” Nobody watching for him outside, nobody waiting inside.

  “Unless they’re counting on her letting them know if I turn up. No, Haley wouldn’t do that. She might sleep with that nerd Perlberg, but she wouldn’t hand me to TSA.” Besides, the Total Security people knew he was capable of teleporting her out of the house if he chose.

  “So why aren’t they more worried?”

  Somewhere inside his head a hunch was trying to form, a sensing of why the agency could afford to let his wife sit there in their house unguarded and unobserved.

  “Something electronic . . . is that it?”

  Ted wanted more time. To watch his house, to think this out, to develop his hunch. He was still getting used to his abilities. He’d been feeling that some of the hunches he’d had lately were linked in with his extrasensory abilities.

  “Wally,” he thought. “I can trust Wally Klennan. Sure, he’s one of the few friends I’ve got hereabouts.”

  Ted was standing in the unlit recroom of the Klennan house. From the unblanked window he could see the front of his home. “Looks too normal, everything is too normal.”

  Ted moved to the doorway, listened. Connie’s voice from the kitchen. Talking with Wally? No, she was complaining to the house computer about something.

  “. . . flasks all spotted.”

  “This is a hard-water area, ma’am. We haven’t yet found a. . . .” Wally’s house had a much pleasanter voice, was a hell of a lot politer, too. “Ted!”

  Wally had come around a bend in the corridor.

  “I don’t know if you know what’s been going on, Wally, but—”

  “Get back in there.” His friend pushed him into the recroom. “Let me blank the windows. There.”

  “Wally, I—”

  “One more thing first.” From a tunic pocket he took a tiny silver bubble. After bringing it close to his eyes, Wally said, “No eavesdropping gear in here.”

  “Why would anyone want to listen in on you? You mean because you know me?”

  Shaking his head, Wally replied, “I’d better tell you who I’m really working for, Ted.”

  Running his tongue over his suddenly dry lips, Ted said, “You’re not with the Total—”

  “Do I look like a TS agent?”

  “I don’t know. Lately . . . I’m not sure who anybody really is. Turns out my early-morning hero, Dr. Perola, is a TS man.”

  “I could have told you that,” said Wally. “I’m working with Reverend Ortega.”

  Ted said, “So you told him about the TF session, about my dream, lifting the damn machine and all?”

  “Yeah, I’ve known for several months about your career as Nemo, but—”

  “You could have let me know that.”

  “Ortega didn’t think you were ready back then.”

  “Jesus, the way people go around making decisions about me, about my life.”

  Wally put a hand on Ted’s shoulder. “There’s something more important I have to tell you,” he said. “We can, hopefully, go into the details of some of this other stuff later. You came back on account of Haley, didn’t you?”

  “I decided I wanted to see her, that I shouldn’t have simply dumped her here. Maybe that’s a mistake. She may want to go on like always with. . . . You know about Perlberg?”

  “Yeah, that, too.”

  “You might have mentioned at least—”

  “Ted, listen. They got to Haley, did something.”

  “What do you mean? Did what?”

  Wally said, “Perlberg set it up, came over here and used a stungun on Haley—take it easy and listen. Then a TSA team, headed by Dr. Dix, came in. I haven’t all the details, but it involves implanting.”

  “They operated on Haley, hurt her?”

  “This kind of implanting is painless, the subject usually doesn’t even remember it was done.

  You ought to know. . . . No, you wouldn’t. I keep forgetting you’ve only been aware of—”

  “What did they implant?”

  “An alarm device with a tracker, whole gadget the size of a grain of rice. If you show up over there it’ll warn them, and if Haley leaves, on her own or by way of teleportation, they’re alerted and can pick up her exact location no matter where she’s gotten to.”

  “That’s not,” said Ted, “really so bad.”

  “Well, no. . . .”

  “That’s not all they did though, is it? Something in your voice. What else?”

  Wally moved to the blanked window. “This one I don’t have the details on,” he said. “But it’s . . . a microminiaturized bomb.”

  Ted went striding to him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Total Security’s had these things for a couple of years. A bomb, no bigger than your fingernail, which can be implanted. There are, far as Reverend Ortega’s been able to find out, several varieties. One which works along the lines of a traditional time bomb and explodes a given number of hours after its planted. Another type, more sophisticated, can be activated at any time they want.”

  Ted said, “Since they want to get me, what they’ve used on Haley must be the one they can set off at will.”

  “You’ve got to remember that TSA probably wants you alive, Ted. This bomb thing is just extra protection, maybe something to use to bargain with you,” said Wally.

  “They’d kill me as a last resort.”

  “Rather than allow you to keep running free, yeah.”

  “Okay, suppose I simply remove their gadgets? Use my telek powers to take them out of Haley’s body?”
>
  “Since they don’t expect you to know about the implanting, it’s possible you can do that,” said Wally. “But it’s also possible the removal will set off an alarm or . . . maybe even cause the bomb to go off. I’m sorry, Ted, that I haven’t been able to find out more about the specific type of gadgets they’ve used.”

  “Dr. Dix knows. You said he was in charge of what they did to Haley.”

  “Sure, obviously, he knows. But it’s not safe for you to—”

  “He’ll tell me.”

  “Ted, you’d better not try to get to him.”

  “Don’t worry. Ted Briar they might be able to stop, but not Nemo.” Before Wally could say anything further, Ted vanished from the room.

  Chapter 22

  “I never thought much about aging before.” Jay Perlberg studied his reflection in the chrome surface of the monitor machine. “Now I detect wrinkles, ravages of time. We shouldn’t have done anything to Haley.”

  Dr. Dix was dictating into the voicehole of the talkwriter on the floating lucite desk in front of him. “. . . final stage of Reverend Ortega, alias Rev O, removal procedure will occur at six a.m. tomorrow. The renegade cleric has fallen for the subterfuge completely, and will show up in Shantytown at dawn fully expecting to be handed a bundle of damaging antigov material. He will instead meet poor obese Totter, who believes he is a rising young Total Security double agent and not simply the walking bomb we know him to be. Yes, once again—”

  “You’ve become very fond of implanted bombs,” said Perlberg as he stretched the tan skin beneath his left eye with a forefinger. “Nobody’s safe.”

  “Perhaps you have one up your ass.” Dix looked up from his dictation. Automatically Perlberg patted his backside. “Your sense of humor is growing increasingly gross.”

  “Too much contact with the likes of Chief Agent Karew,” replied the doctor. “None of you, I must say, truly appreciate the potential of my baby bombs. If we could implant one in every complaining antigov nerd in America we wouldn’t have any more worries. Stay in line or . . . boom! That’s a message even a fanatic can understand. Very humane, too. After the first few booms everybody would stay in line.”

  “That’s a rotten idea,” said Perlberg. “What you’re doing already is rotten enough, but—”

  “President Hartwell didn’t take that view at all.” Dix relaxed in his chair. “I’m a little concerned about you, Jay. You’ve been bitching and complaining a good deal of late.”

  “Spare me the veiled threats, Dix. I’m as loyal to TSA as you are.” The handsome agent crossed to consult the dials of the machine which was monitoring Haley. “You got Karew to agree with you about doing what you did to Haley Briar. That doesn’t mean I have to approve of any of it. While you may have the ear of the president, though that seems doubtful, I have several supporters on the Central Review Board. They’re not as inhuman—”

  “Jay!”

  Perlberg had left the floor. He went rocketing straight up to the ceiling. His head smashed against the metal ribbing a half-dozen times, a half-dozen more. He plummeted down, slammed into the floor, went limp and unconscious.

  “Now we can have a talk, Dr. Dix.” Ted appeared next to the sprawled Perlberg.

  “Ah, Nemo, so you’ve decided to—”

  “Don’t move, don’t touch anything,” warned Ted, “or I’ll rip your heart right out of your goddamn body and stomp on it.”

  “I suppose you could at that.”

  Ted said, “I was out in the corridor a few minutes before I came in. What are you planning to do to Reverend Ortega?”

  “Nothing at all, Nemo. What you apparently overheard was— Ah!” Dr. Dix clutched his chest.

  “That was just a little telekinetic tug on your heart, Dix. Don’t bullshit me.”

  Dr. Dix slumped, massaging his chest and ribs, his pale face flecked with perspiration. “Reverend Ortega is going to be killed at six a.m. tomorrow in a place called Shantytown. It’s almost directly across Long Island Sound from here.” He stopped talking, to concentrate on his breathing. “A young idiot named Totter has a bomb implanted in his carcass. It’s set to go off as soon as the reverend is within two feet of Totter.

  “Does the one you put in my wife work the same way?”

  “Nemo, my boy. . . . No, the bomb used on Mrs. Briar has to be activated from here.” He nodded at the monitoring machine. “You must understand that in your case it isn’t part of any assassination plan, Nemo, but rather a safeguard in case you—”

  “I want to remove it, and the alarm.”

  “You’ve learned a good deal about what are supposed to be clandestine operations. Might I ask—?”

  “I want to remove it!”

  Dix wiped his forehead with his palm. “The surgical procedures are relatively simple, requiring not more than an hour.”

  “What happens if I take them out with my telek powers?”

  After a second Dr. Dix answered, “I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, I suppose that’s perfectly possible.”

  “There are no extra safeguards? If I take the bomb out my own way it’s not going to explode?”

  “No,” Dix assured him, “you won’t have to worry about that.”

  “We won’t have to worry.”

  “Eh?”

  Grabbing the lank doctor by the arm, Ted said, “You’re coming along with me.”

  “That’s not—”

  “But it is.”

  “Ted!”

  “And this is Dr. Dix,” said Ted a second after they’d materialized in his living room.

  “I don’t think I know—”

  “No, he fixed it so you wouldn’t remember him.”

  Haley left the chair she’d been sitting in. “Ted, I’m glad you’re back but I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “You will. Right now Dr. Dix is going to stand by while I do something.” Dix was paler, the beads of sweat larger. “You’re making your situation even more difficult, Nemo. When my absence is noted you’ll—”

  “Nobody’ll notice for awhile. Perlberg’s out cold, you’re here. Nobody’s even going to notice the alarm. It’s signaling right now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Nemo, and there’s a backup monitor in Chief Agent Karew’s office.”

  “We have a few minutes.”

  Haley, very cautiously, took Ted’s hand. “What’s been going on, Ted?”

  “Pretty near everything,” he replied. “Okay, Dix, I’m going to remove your gadgets now.”

  Dix swallowed. “The surgical method might be—”

  “Not enough time for that.”

  “Wait!”

  “Why?”

  “The bomb will go off if either of the devices is removed without the safety switch being thrown.”

  “Oh, so? Where’s the switch?”

  “You have to flip the red and the green toggle on the monitor machine back in my office.”

  Ted closed his eyes for a few seconds. “Okay, that’s done. Is that it?”

  “Yes, yes, it’s safe now.”

  Ted eyed the pale doctor. He turned toward his wife, fists clenching. “There.” He opened his left hand to reveal two tiny silver objects resting in his palm.

  Dr. Dix bowed his head. “Point to you, Nemo.”

  Haley shook her head. “I hope this is all going to make sense to me eventually.”

  “It’ll make—”

  A new voice came out of the house speaker. “Briar, this is Chief Agent Karew. We’re aware you’re in the house and we advise you to surrender without attempting to escape.”

  “You’d better comply,” suggested Dr. Dix.

  Ted laughed. “Like hell!”

  Chapter 23

  “Ten of them,” said Ted, “all around the house.”

  “How,” asked Haley, “do you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  Dr. Dix wiped his forehead once more. “By far the simplest thing,” he said, “is to surrender here and now, N
emo.”

  Ted took hold of his wife’s hand. “I’m not through yet, doing what I have to do,” he told the doctor.

  “We’re unblanking your windows, Briar,” announced the voice of Chief Agent Karew. “Which should convince you we’re not fucking around.”

  Three TSA men could be seen out on the front lawn, each standing slightly hunched, pistol in hand.

  “You’ll be a fugitive,” reminded Dix.

  “Things will get much worse than they have been. TSA can manufacture some charges against you, fake a little evidence. That way we can see to it the Federal Police get orders to mow you down.”

  “Better do that right away,” said Ted, “because the Total Security Agency isn’t going to—”

  “Briar, Mr. and Mrs. Briar! You know the rules about lawn parties! This is an outrage, I must say.”

  “Who the hell’s the fruitbar in the fancy uniform?”

  “All of you, you’ll have to go back inside. The Way of Life Patrol doesn’t allow this sort of thing. Mr. and Mrs. Briar, I’m ashamed of you! Aren’t you ash—? Oof!”

  “Drag him over into the shrubs for now.”

  “What’s the idea . . . striking a general in the WOL Patrol—? Oof!” Haley said, “Poor Bill Beck, wrong time to be upholding our way of life.”

  “We’ll come in unless you come out at once, Briar,” Karew warned over the speaker. “Don’t try to teleport yourself or your wife clear of the house, it will have disastrous results.”

  “He doesn’t know the implants are gone,” said Ted.

  “We’ll count slowly from ten down to one, Briar. Then you’ll have to . . . oops!”

  Something thudded up on the roof.

  “That’s Karew,” explained Ted. “The rest of your boys, Dr. Dix, I think we’ll dunk in the Sound. First the batch right out there.”

  The three men rose up off the lawn and went cartwheeling away through the dark sky.

  “Now the rest of them.”

  Dix said, “You’ll seriously regret—” The air popped, Dix was no longer with them.

  “Ted, this is . . . I don’t know exactly what it is.”

  “Don’t worry, hold on to me.”