Stretching up to his feet, Thad went into the next room. This one was a little larger, equally dusty and damp. A freckled man in a pin-stripe tunic was sitting in an inflated sofa chair, a dictet unit resting on his knee. "Mr. Ferber?" Thad asked.
The freckled man glanced up. In a low voice he said, "Go on through that door on your right." As Thad went by him, the man asked, "How many more of those crumbums out there?"
Thad said, "I'm the last."
"Ah, great, splendid." The freckled man tossed the dictation machine to the floor. Rubbing the back of his neck, he said, "This kind of subterfuge always bores the . . . well, better get in there."
Thad went through the indicated doorway into another dusty, rain-damaged room. A short, stocky man was pacing the bare floor, hands locked behind him. "How you feeling, McIntosh?"
"Hungry," answered Thad. "What kind ofjob is this going to be?"
"It's going to be a son of a bitch," the short, dark man said. "I'm Crosby Rich."
"Oh, so?"
"You don't know me, but a lot of people do, off Manhattan," said Rich, still pacing. "Which is why we had to play all these dumbbell games with you. Would you like a sandwich? I brought a half dozen with me."
"Sure." Thad watched Rich put a stubby hand into an imitation wicker hamper on the floor. "You mean you're not interested in hiring any of these guys?"
"No, I'm not interested in hiring anybody. Except you, McIntosh," said Rich. "How about sealoaf on millet bread?"
"Anything's O.K."
"When'd you eat last?"
"Lunch yesterday."
"Here." Rich tossed him the plyowrapped sandwich. "I've seen a lot of descents, McIntosh, but I really—"
"Talk about the job." Thad unwrapped the sandwich, took a bite. "Lectures I can always get."
The stocky man had his hand back in the hamper. "Huh, that was the last one. Did I down five sandwiches while I was waiting for you? Huh, going to have to watch that," he said. "I'm with the Opposition Party, McIntosh, working as a sort of troubleshooter."
Thad nodded, went on eating.
"We believe neither the Republican-Democrat Party nor the Democrat-Republican Party can do much for the country. The RDs, since they've come into power, don't seem to be able to avoid a war with the South American Organization of States. We're headed right for it," Rich said. "You were a registered OP member."
"Back then," said Thad, chewing. "Before."
"So you probably agree with our positions on things. You no doubt share the goals which we—"
"Is this leading up to what you want to pay me two hundred dollars for?"
Rich sighed through nose and mouth. "Isn't your curiosity aroused at all, McIntosh? We go through all this dumbbell foolery in order to contact you quietly and covertly. Don't you wonder why?"
"Not particularly," Thad said, finishing the last bite of the sandwich. "You said you didn't have any more to eat? Tell you, Rich, after you've lived on Manhattan for a while you learn to exist in very small segments of time. To be curious much you have to think of your life as extending some way in all directions."
"I still can't understand why you gave it all up," said Rich. "You were in a—"
"Got tired of it." Thad put his hands in his jacket pockets, leaned against the dust-smeared wall with one elbow. "What do you have in mind, Rich? You hoping to rehabilitate me?"
"Yes," admitted Rich.
"Put me back on my feet, exactly where I was before?"
The OP troubleshooter shook his dark head. "Not at all. I don't really give a rat's ass about that, McIntosh. Oh, I'm curious, but I didn't come here to do you a good turn. I'm here to see if you can do one for me. In order to do that you're going to have to stop being a deadbeat for a while."
"Only a while? Not permanently?"
"Once you do my job you can come back here and roll in any gutter you please."
"And it pays two hundred dollars."
"No, it pays fifty thousand dollars," said Rich. "To start. And if you live through it you'll get another five hundred thousand, at least."
Thad straightened, rubbed both hands through his tangled hair. "A half million? That's not bad," he said. "But it sounds like this isn't going to take only the few hours your street man promised."
"It may take the rest of your life."
"You're implying the rest of my life may not be very long if I go to work for you?"
"Yes, there's that possibility. The plan we have in mind may not succeed."
Scratching his stubbled chin, Thad asked, "O.K., what is it you want me to do?"
"Basically," replied the stocky Rich, "you have to find out the nature of something called the Hellhound Project."
"And just how do I do that?" asked Thad.
"By being somebody else," Rich told him.
III
The olive-green air cruiser flew clear of the rain and into bright afternoon sunlight. In the control seat Rich said, "I'm glad you agreed, McIntosh. It saves me from hunting down the other seven possibilities. You're the only one in the East. One fellow's out in what's left of Flint, Michigan, but we suspect the plague may have left him something of a dumbbell. The others are scattered all over the map."
"I haven't accepted the job." Thad was slouched in the passenger seat drinking a cup of syncaf. This one was hot. "I agreed to come over to Westchester with you to discuss the thing further. Long as you're going to pay me five hundred dollars merely for that, I'm agreeable."
"Look down on your left. We're flying over your old home . . . no, too late. Missed it."
Thad hadn't turned his head. "How come your cruiser says 'Olexo & Balungi, Para-Attorneys at Law' on the side and not 'Opposition Party'?"
"Because if anybody found out what we're up to they'd probably kill me before I can do anything."
"Oh." Thad drank more of his imitation beverage. "Would they include me?"
"You especially."
"This Hellhound Project is so important?"
"Apparently," replied Rich. "We've lost five OP people this year. So far all we know is the name of the operation and the fact that it's a new weapon of some sort being developed by one of the branches of Walbrook Enterprises."
"Took you five men to find out only that," said Thad. "And me, all alone, I'm going to uncover the whole story and come out alive."
There were new lines on Rich's low dark forehead. "I don't guarantee you'll come out alive," he said. "Though if you ask me you're not alive now, McIntosh. Huh, I've read up on you. An IQ of 185, a brain potential score of . . . O.K., I promised no lectures." One stubby-fingered hand reached out to punch a landing pattern. "A fellow with your abilities, though, I still don't see why you—"
"I got tired." Thad slouched further into his seat. "In fact, I have a feeling I may get tired of your job any minute now."
The olive-green cruiser drifted down through the clear sunshine, leveled and went skimming over the tops of decorative all-weather imitation pines. "Westchester Country Club Number 26," said Rich as the cruiser circled over the pink-paved landing area.
"They'll never let me in."
"The place is temporarily shut. OP is using it as a briefing depot, until the government catches on. Then we move again."
The cruiser bounced slightly twice, grew silent. The seat released Thad. Rising up, he asked, "What about food? Is there anybody around to fix lunch?"
Rich jumped free of the cruiser. "The servomechs are all shipshape," he said.
"What's today, Tuesday?"
"I think so, why?"
"Tuesday is Mexican-American style food. Each day is different, they're set that way. Do you like—"
"My tastes have become catholic in the last couple of years."
Two young men casually holding stunguns nodded at Rich from inside the main dome of the country club.
"Any trouble?" he asked, stepping inside.
"Nothing," one of them answered. "Dr. Rosenfeld called to say he'll be an hour late."
"Hu
h." Rich led Thad up a twisting pastel ramp.
Thad asked, "Who's Dr. Rosenfeld?"
"Your family doctor."
"From what family would that be? I never heard of the guy."
Rich stuck his thumb and little finger into a print-lock on a corridor door. The door slid to one side. "I'll be briefing you in one of the dining rooms. You'll appreciate that."
"Don't get too feisty about my being hungry," suggested Thad as he followed the squat OP troubleshooter into a bubble-shaped room. "If I wasn't hungry I wouldn't have come to you at all."
"Then we would have gone to you," Rich assured him. "Some subtle way or other." He marched to a long white table at the end of the room. It was the only rectangular table in a roomful of round ones. All the windows in the big room were set at black. "Sit down, we'll get started."
Thad took a tin chair two seats over from Rich and, without waiting to be told, dialed a meal on the order panel at his place. "Can I get you something?"
After a few seconds hesitation, Rich said, "Not now, thanks. Turn around so you can see those monitor screens we've hung up on the wall over there."
Thad did. The second screen in a row of five showed muddy color footage of a young man, grinning, leaning against the rail of some kind of seagoing craft. The young man was lean, lanky, about the same size and build as Thad.
"Look familiar?" asked Rich.
"Looks vaguely like me. Who is he?"
"Robert B. Walbrook."
"This must be old footage. Robert Walbrook is fifty something. At least he was the last time I saw a newscast."
Rich flicked another toggle on the control rod in his hand. The picture froze on a smiling close-up. "This is Robert Bruce Walbrook I," he explained. "This film was shot fifty-one years ago, in 1979. That's Lake St. Clair."
"Where?"
"It used to be near Detroit," said the OP man.
"Detroit I heard of," said Thad. "We lost Detroit . . . when? ... about six years ago, when that plague got loose."
"Eight years ago."
"I've lost track." Thad gestured at the smiling image on the screen. "So this Walbrook would be around eighty today?"
"No," answered Rich, "he'd be in his late twenties."
"How does he work that?"
"Robert Walbrook was dying of leukemia in 1980. The family, with Robert's consent, decided to try out a new process Walbrook Enterprises had come up with. In fact, Robert was only their third subject."
"What did they do? Freeze him? That was big back then, wasn't it."
"The Walbrooks' process was much more sophisticated," said Rich. "It involved placing the subject in a state of suspended animation, while he was still alive. Walbrook Enterprises thought of the process as something akin to cryptobiosis, a cryptobiosis which would work for human beings. Actually, the process worked quite well but it cost so damn much that it never caught on."
"Cryptobiosis. That's what some of the lower life forms can do to themselves, a kind of long-range hibernation."
"More or less. I didn't know you'd have heard of it."
"A guy with my potential?"
Rich continued, "So there was Robert B. Walbrook I, youngest of the three brothers who founded the whole Walbrook Enterprises operation. Lying in a suspension vault in a facility in one of the
riot-secured sectors of Detroit. Actually the thing was in Grosse Pointe."
"When that experimental plague virus from the Flint proving ground got loose it pretty much finished off Detroit and environs." Thad's Mexican-American meal had just popped up through a slot in the banquet table. Picking up the noryl plastic utensils, he commenced eating.
"That's why OP is going to try what we're going to try," said Rich. "Something over two and a half million people died, there were three weeks of rioting, looting and indiscriminate smashing carried on by people the plague didn't kill right off."
Swallowing, Thad said, "The vaults where Robert was stashed . . . they got destroyed?"
"Right down to the ground. The two dozen bodies stored there were never accounted for."
"So nobody knows what happened to Robert?"
"Nobody we've been able to check, nobody in the Walbrook family, certainly."
Thad set his fork down, leaned back. "And four years ago we finally got a cure for leukemia."
"Exactly. So that if Robert Walbrook's body had survived they'd now be able to revive and cure him."
"Would they really want to, the family?"
"Not all of them, but the way the resurrection laws stand at the moment, they'd have to," replied Rich. "Some of the younger members of the clan would be opposed. Especially a lad named Lon Walbrook, a grandnephew of Robert I, who's making a bid for more power. See, if Robert I shows up he's still technically one of the heads of the whole operation."
Thad rubbed at his shaggy hair. "So you Opposition Party guys are going to try to convince the whole family, the entire rich powerful Walbrook family in their fortified two-hundred-acre estate in Connecticut, that I'm their long lost boy?" He laughed, locking both hands on top of his head. "Some kind of Tichborne claimant come back from the dead. Shit. It'll never work. They'd know I'm not . . ."
"Sure, looking at you the way you are now. A broken down dumbbell from Manhattan. The smell of you alone would ruin it."
Still laughing, Thad went back to eating. "When I finish here you can give me my five hundred bucks and a lift back to my rundown contemporaries."
Rich moved to the chair next to Thad. "We'll work on you before you ever have to meet the Walbrooks, McIntosh," he said. "The physical work alone will take weeks, the operations."
"Operations?"
"Facial work, fingerprints," Rich explained. "We'll have to plant some nearly foolproof caps on your eyes to fake the retinal patterns. Brainwave patterns we can't do anything about. We're not certain anybody ever got Robert I's down and filed away. Then there's the—"
"How did you come to pick me?"
"Our computers did that, using info siphoned from the national data bank. As I told you, you're one of a half dozen or so possibilities. Fellows who come near to Robert I in build, facial structure."
Thad wiped his plate clean with fold of nearcorn tortilla. "Can I order some more food?"
"Go ahead." Rich looked away. "The thing is, McIntosh, we have every reason to believe the Hellhound thing is a pretty nasty weapon. Warren Parkinson has three more years to serve."
"Who?" Thad was ordering another meal.
"Parkinson, the President of the United States," said Rich. "You know he's had two severe breakdowns since he took office. He may he in even worse shape than anyone suspects. We can't let something like the Hellhound weapon fall into the hands of a man as unstable as Warren Parkinson."
"Maybe the Hellhound Project is something harmless," said Thad. "Walbrook Enterprises turns out a lot of stuff."
"This is a weapon, and it isn't harmless."
Thad's second meal appeared out of the slot. "How long would it take to turn me into a reasonable facsimile?"
"Two months at least, that's the minimum. A lot of background info can be put in while you're asleep."
"You'll provide me a comfortable place to sleep," asked Thad, "plenty of food?"
"Sure, and we'll rehabilitate you."
"That's unlikely," said Thad. "Still, winter's not so far off. This would take care of most of my winter problems."
Rich said, "Maybe you're tired of the life over there, McIntosh. Maybe you feel . . ."
"No lectures, no sermons." After eating for a moment, Thad asked, "Suppose I turn you down.
Aren't you afraid I might talk to someone?"
"Should you turn OP down," Rich informed him, "you won't remember any of today. We have a process for that."
"I figured as much," said Thad. "Suppose the Walbrooks don't accept me, suppose they see through my great impersonation? Do I still get paid?"
"If you survive, yes."
"How do we explain where Robert . . . where
I've been all these years since the plague hit?"
"We have a relatively plausible story worked out. You'll be briefed on it, quite sufficiently briefed."
Giving a one-shoulder shrug, Thad said, "O.K., I'll try it. Doesn't make much difference I guess, riot to me anyway. Sure, O.K. When do we start?"
"Now," said Rich.
IV
Dr. Barney Rosenfeld took his hands off the controls of the land-car and locked them on the top of his grizzled head. "You're—you're on your own from here on, friend," he said. "The sound—sound pickups will be trained on us once we get through the—the gates." He was a moderately overweight man of thirty-six, his sand-colored hair speckled with gray.
Thad nodded, not saying anything. He was used to the doctor's backtracking speech pattern now. Directly ahead of them rose stone walls, made of the same large black and gray rocks you still saw throughout this part of Connecticut. Only these walls were higher, rising ten feet at least. Heavy gates, made of real wrought iron, barred their entry to the Walbrook estate. Just beyond the gates Thad could sense a force screen in operation. The light snow which was flickering down through the afternoon melted away to nothing when it came near the gates.
"I've got an identification plate implanted in the hood of the car," explained the doctor.
"They—they're reading it now."
"They?"
Rosenfeld tilted his head in the direction of the wall. "The security robots."
A low ratcheting sound commenced outside, the metal gates swung slowly inward. The landcar jerked, swaying slightly to the left before it started moving ahead.
"They—they've taken over operation of the car now," explained the Walbrook family doctor.
The landcar proceeded slowly along the black roadway. The force screen was no longer there.
When it had gone some five hundred feet, the car abruptly stopped.
"Stick—stick one of your hands out the window, friend," advised Rosenfeld.
The car windows automatically rolled themselves down. Standing on each side of the vehicle now were robots. Each of them was man-size and dun-colored.
Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology Page 55
