Tek Vengeance

by William Shatner

  “Out of the way, you lopeared ninny,” suggested Eva, giving the zealous vendor a shove that cleared her from their path. “Your chum was up on Level 2, Gomez, when she flung her wingding.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Hey, you elephantine bimbo, you knocked six of my calculators out of my mitt with that brutal and uncalled for shove.” The woman was on hands and knees, patting wildly at the floor. “Finding six of the tiniest calculators in the world is no easy task. Why not simply pay me the $50 each that they’re worth and we’ll call—”

  “Don’t be a walleyed simp. I don’t owe you a damn thing.” Eva halted and glared down at the woman. “Jenny was near the mechanical doll sellers, Gomez, when—”

  “How about you pay for just three of my fly-speck calculators and I’ll absorb the cost of—”

  “How about I detach your nose from your pudding face?”

  “I’ll trot on up to Level 2, Eva,” said Gomez. “Join me when you’re finished with this fracas.”

  “It’ll only take a moment or two.” The husky detective started to roll up her sleeves. “Now, let’s ... ”

  Gomez hurried up the ramp to the next level. He came first to the sellers of household gadgets.

  “Talking vacuum cleaners,” offered a shaggy man in a small lopsided booth. “The perfect companion for a lonely bachelor such as yourself, sir.”

  “I’m happily wed,” Gomez assured him, continuing along.

  “Pocket icecube maker! No one should be without this handy device. How about you, sir?”

  “You’re absolutely right. And I happen to have one in my pocket already.”

  There were about thirty dealers in mechanical dolls and robot toys. At a large table on Gomez’s right a dozen identical 2-foot-high blonde little girl dolls were tapdancing in unison. As he passed the table, one of the curly-headed dolls danced right off the edge and fell to the floor.

  Bending, he retrieved it. “Talk to your choreographer, chiquita,” he advised. “You’re ... ow!”

  Something jagged beneath the doll’s frilly skirt had scratched at his hand. He set the doll back on the counter, fished out a plyochief and dabbed at the small bleeding scratch and then moved on.

  He hadn’t noticed before that the next vendor was trying to unload SnoHounds. Six of them sat on the floor surrounding the plump man.

  “What a treat,” exclaimed one of the dogs, “encountering you once again, Herr Gomez.”

  He stopped, frowning. “I didn’t know you guys could talk.”

  “Talk and sing,” another assured him. “Also tapdance.”

  “And do math.”

  “Well, nice meeting you.” Gomez took his leave.

  The next fleamarketeer had a counter covered with foot-high dolls that were modeled after Jenny Keaton.

  “Now this hombre must know something,” said Gomez aloud.

  “What’s the matter, mein herr?”

  “I’m trying to locate the mujer who posed for these,” he explained, noticing that the dolls had grown larger.

  “Why don’t you simply ask me, Gomez?” inquired one of the dolls. “Can’t you do a darn thing right?”

  “Why not indeed.” He picked it up, brought it close to his face. “Where have you gotten to?”

  “Mein herr, please, put that down. You’re liable to break it.”

  “But this is a friend and associate of mine, so it’s perfectly okay ... Anyway, grizzly bears aren’t allowed to conduct business in Austria. They can waltz, that’s perfectly all right, but—”

  “I must insist,” growled the huge bear, who was coming around from behind the counter.

  Gomez ducked, got in under the swinging paws and started punching the bear’s furry midsection. “It’s okay, folks,” he shouted, “I’ll take care of this critter. No need to panic.”

  “Another crazy person,” cried the bear. “Help!”

  “Better summon the market patrol again.”

  “I’ll fetch them. Ach, such a day we’re having!”

  As he struggled with the shaggy bear, Gomez thought, “Deus, is it possible that I’m flinging a wingding?”

  Then someone used a stungun on him.

  Dan scanned the front page of the morning GLA Fax-Times as it came rolling out of the wallslot. Before the second page was completely printed, he was dressed and leaving the apartment.

  Rex/GK-30 groaned and lurched up out of his wicker rocker when the young man came hurrying into the Background & ID room. “Geeze, what a day this is shaping up to be,” he complained. “Now what?”

  Waving the fresh front page at the robot, Dan said, “There’s a charity dance tonight at the Greater LA Civic Plaza in the Westwood Sector—to raise money for the Veterans of the Brazil Wars Fund.”

  “So I’ve heard.” He sat again.

  “It says that Larry Knerr and Roddy Pickfair will be there. As well as China Vargas.”

  “Along with a thousand other prominent citizens of GLA.”

  “Exactly,” said Dan, “and some of them will be my age. A few anyway, so I won’t stand out.”

  Rex eyed him. “Let me see, kiddo, if I can hazard a guess as to what you have in mind,” he said as he rocked slowly in his chair. “You’re figuring to attend this shindig and mingle with the crush. You’ll keep an eye out for Knerr and if he gets into a conversation with anyone interesting, such as Roddy Pickfair, you’ll do a little eavesdropping. Maybe you’ll do it from a safe distance, using some sort of compact electronic listening device.”

  “Yeah, I’ll borrow one of my dad’s. It’s no bigger than ... Hey, how come you guessed all this?”

  “Guessing the obvious doesn’t take one heck of a lot of brains.” The robot tapped his metal skull with a coppery finger.

  “You could arrange everything easy, Rex, with all that you have access to,” Dan told him. “Get my name added to the guest list, print up a fake invitation that’ll be good enough to fool them. Can you? Will you?”

  “What is the purpose of all this tomfoolery?”

  “I want to help my dad, you know that. I’m certain that Larry Knerr is involved with what happened in Brazil—and probably in Beth’s murder.”

  Rex asked him, “Just one invite?”

  “Sure, for me,” answered Dan. “I don’t intend to drag Molly along to something like this. She’d simply futz up my investigation.”

  “Molly, bless her, is far more generous and thoughtful than you.” The big robot picked a square of cream-colored paper off the top of a packing case. “She had me run off two of these buggers. One for her and one for you.”

  “Molly,” he said. “She’s already been here?”

  “At the crack of dawn,” replied the robot. “She took her invite along with her and says you’re to pick her up at her dorm promptly at 8:30 tonight.” He held out Dan’s invitation toward him.

  “If I don’t take her, she’ll go anyway.”

  “Without a doubt, kiddo.”

  “I’ll take her.” He accepted the invitation.

  38

  “I’M DARNED DISAPPOINTED IN you.”

  Gomez groaned, but didn’t open his eyes.

  “Brains I wasn’t expecting, though I was sort of hoping you might use simple brute force to bust me out of here.”

  Gomez groaned again. He was lying on something cold and hard, probably a floor. Gingerly, he felt at it. Yes, definitely a floor, a metal one.

  “Instead, you let them snare you, the same as they did me. So now we’re both stuck.”

  He opened his eyes tentatively, saw Jenny Keaton crouched beside him in the small grey room. Groaning once more, he shut his eyes.

  “This is no time to play possum.” She poked him in the side with her forefinger.

  “Twice,” he muttered in a somewhat rusty voice.

  “Whatever are you babbling about?” asked the Internal Security agent.

  Unaided, he sat up. “Twice in the short time since I’ve met you, chiquita, have I been felled by
a stungun.”

  “Well, I had nothing to do with it this time.”

  “That’s a comfort.” Reaching out, he pressed his palm against the grey metal wall. “You are taking credit, I notice, for my being zapped in picturesque Bern, Switzerland.”

  “I hired a local operative to handle that.” She stood back out of his way as he began the slow, wobbly process of rising to his feet. “That was a simple field decision, Gomez, and a practical one. Sidelining you for a few hours gave me the headstart I needed.”

  “And obviously you’ve done a splendid job.” He was upright now, still holding on to the wall.

  “As you’ve also ended up here, I’d say that neither one of us has done especially well.”

  He glanced around the small room, moving his head carefully so that none of the pieces of broken crockery that seemed to be clogging his skull would rattle. “A modestly furnished hideaway this.”

  There was no furniture in the blankwalled room.

  “This is, so I was told, an isolation cell in the Berggasse Foundation.”

  “The fact that you’re in here is known,” he pointed out. “Sooner or later some of your agent buddies will spring you.”

  “I haven’t, because of the slightly unorthodox way I’ve been operating—”

  “They consider stungunning your lovable colleagues as unorthodox, do they?”

  “I’ve not kept in close contact with anyone,” she said. “By the time they learn I’m here, I may be elsewhere.”

  “Where will that elsewhere be?”

  “I don’t have the darndest idea,” Jenny admitted. “The only soul I’ve talked to is a rather meanminded nursebot who brought my lunch. If you want to call apple strudel and hot cocoa lunch.”

  Holding on to the wall, Gomez walked a few paces. “Did you actually get a chance to talk to the Bonecas?”

  “Poor souls, yes.” She nodded. “They were blown to glory almost immediately after our conversation.”

  “That explosion wasn’t your work, was it?”

  “Of course not. We don’t go in for murder or assassination.”

  “Very humane. Stun hapless ops, but never—”

  “This is a very rough business we’re in.”

  “Back to the Bonecas. What did you get out of them?”

  “The name of the person who acted as go-between for the person who hired them to build that android replica of Jake Cardigan,” she answered. “They claimed, by the way, that they had nothing to do with rigging the andy to function as a kamikaze. They seemed decent folks, some of their puppets were very cute and clever. In fact, it seemed to me that—”

  “Who hired them?”

  “They were contacted while they were performing here in Vienna some weeks ago. The agent’s name is Heinrich Weiner and in his daytime cover identity he sells electric cats at the Dings Flohmarkt. I was enroute to his booth, when—”

  “How’d you persuade the Bonecas to confide in you?”

  “I bribed them. They were very uneasy, sorry about what they’d gotten mixed up in and afraid that someone might eventually try to silence them.”

  “Did you talk to Weiner at all?”

  “No, I was in the process of doing that when I started experiencing some very unpleasant hallucinations. You figured in them, to give you some notion of how unpleasant.”

  Gomez sighed. “Then we don’t know who was behind Weiner.”

  “The person you want is Professor Nister,” said a voice from the ceiling speaker. “You’ll be seeing him shortly.”

  Jake walked briskly along the twilight street. He was dressed in a conservative business suit and carried a medical bag. When he was still a half block from the entrance to the Berggasse Foundation, someone called to him softly from the shadows beside a decorative tree.

  “Hey, Cardigan.”

  He stopped, frowning in the direction of the shadowy figure. “I am much afraid, dear lady, that you’ve made some mistake,” he said in passable German. “I am Dr. Witmann, enroute to visit a patient of mine at the—”

  “How’d you like to find out about Gomez?”

  Jake moved closer to the large tree. Overhead a skyvan passed, flashing bright lights and playing loud brassy martial music. He waited until it was some distance away, then said, “Is that you, Eva?”

  “Quit behaving like a nearsighted wampus, Jake,” advised the hefty detective. “You saw me in Greater Los Angeles not more than two months ago, when—”

  “Tell me about Gomez.”

  She jerked her thumb at the 5-story domed building. “They’ve got him locked up inside there someplace. Didn’t you know?”

  “I didn’t even know he was in Vienna.”

  “She’s in there, too. That skinny secret agent. Jenny Keaton.”

  Jake swung the medical bag against his leg. “I’m fairly certain a gent named Professor Nister is holed up in there as well.”

  “That polecat. I’ve long suspected he’s subsidized by one of the more successful Tek cartels.”

  Jake requested, “Fill me in, briefly, on Sid and Jenny.”

  “I’m nothing if not terse.” She gave him a concise account of what had been going on, concluding with, “I’ve been hanging around out here casing the setup. Then I was going to contact Bascom or—”

  “I’ll take care of this.”

  “Need me to tag along as backup?”

  “Nope, wait out here. I’m going in as Dr. Witmann.”

  “Let’s hope you come out again,” she said.

  39

  “MUCH COZIER THAN OUR former quarters,” observed Gomez, scanning the room where they’d just been left by two burly nursebots.

  There were a desk, three armchairs and a carpet with an animated leaf pattern. Against one wall was a holographic projection of a deep fireplace and a stack of blazing logs.

  “I don’t feel especially cozy.” Jenny wandered along the edge of the flickering carpet.

  One of the walls made a loud, grinding noise and then a panel, rattling, slid aside.

  A gaunt, grey man came rolling into the room and the panel, with much noise, shut behind him.

  He was attached to a complex electronic wheelchair. Several colored tubes and wires coiled out of the chromed metal framework of the chair and a half dozen plazsax hung from various hooks on it. The majority of tubes and wires were connected to the flesh of the man in the chair. His stick-thin bare arms were festooned with them and there were bruises and red splotches indicating earlier insertions. Dials and gauges, buttons and lights thickly encrusted the frame of the chair.

  “Good evening, Fräulein Keaton and Herr Gomez.” His voice came out of a small speaker that dangled from the breast pocket of his sleeveless tunic. Held tightly in his skeletal left hand was a silverplated lazgun. “I am Professor Nister. Since you’re not local residents, you’ve probably never seen me on my educational—”

  “I’m an accredited agent of the United States government,” the angry Jenny told him. “You have absolutely no right to—”

  “Actually, my dear, you’re a poor disturbed young woman named, according to the ID packet you were carrying at the time of your unfortunate public breakdown, Jolline Kurtzman.”

  “You know darn well who I really am.” She moved closer to him. “And I only had that alleged breakdown because you arranged to have a rigged doll shoot me full of hallucination juice. You can’t possibly believe that my government won’t move to—”

  “Your government, child, will never find so much as a speck of you, Fräulein. You’re a loose end that will shortly be completely tidied up.”

  A small bead of light on the right side of his chair began flashing red. “Excuse me a moment, please.” He raised his gun, pointing it directly at her. With the spidery grey fingers of his other hand he reached up to squeeze a plastic sack of greenish liquid that hung on the chair frame. After a few seconds the red light ceased blinking.

  “You’re not in especially good shape, prof,” mentioned Gome
z. “A lengthy stay in the hoosegow is going to be very painful for you.”

  “I shan’t be languishing in any prison, Herr Gomez,” Nister assured him. “You’ll be vanishing as thoroughly as the Fräulein here.”

  “Possibly, but the Cosmos Agency, unlike most of the slipshod government agencies in my native land, is neither dense nor easily dissuaded,” he informed the gaunt man. “With or without my mortal remains to inspire them, they’re going to track you down and—”

  “Nonsense.” Harsh laughter trickled out of the dangling speaker. “Your partner, Herr Cardigan, is a hotheaded fool, whom we’ve been able to lead a—”

  The wall behind him made a loud grinding noise, then the panel, rattling loudly, started to jiggle open.

  Surprised, Professor Nister turned to look back at the wall.

  Gomez lunged, kicked and booted the lazgun clean out of the thin knobby hand.

  Nister yelped in pain. As he brought his injured hand up toward his chest, he managed to detach two tubes and a wire.

  Gomez snatched up the fallen gun and aimed it at the widening opening in the wall.

  “Relax, Sid,” advised Jake as he stepped into the room. “It’s me—the hotheaded fool.”

  It was a nearly smogless night and Greater Los Angeles’s multitude of lights glittered sharply below them as they flew toward the Westwood Sector.

  Leaning back in her skycab seat, Molly said, “Well?”

  Dan was sitting hunched. His right hand was in his jacket pocket clutching the small soundrod he’d borrowed from his father’s kit. “Huh?”

  “By now you ought to have commented on how terrific I look,” she told him.

  “You look terrific.”

  She was wearing a simple black gown made of Moon Base fabric. “More importantly for our cause, I look acceptably Upper Class,” the darkhaired young woman added.

  “And I don’t?”

  She waggled her left hand in the air. “Borderline,” she told him. “But with me at your side, they’ll never suspect that you’re not somebody.”

  “Thanks.”

  Molly smiled. “Actually, though there’s no reason for you to know, I truly am from a very wealthy family,” she said. “My father mentioned the last time I saw him, which was the Christmas before last, that he was getting extremely close to his third billion.”