by David Drake
When we weren't playing basketball, we were talking. We talked about everything. We endlessly analyzed what it would take to transform ourselves from the geeks we knew we were to the cool juniors and seniors who somehow managed to actually date girls and not merely wonder what happened on dates. We found we were both only children and speculated what it would be like to have a brother or a sister or both. We learned we both hated our fathers: I hated mine for abandoning my mother and me before I was born, and he hated his for not leaving, for staying to smack him and his mother around whenever the guy had a bad day. We confessed our big, ill-formed dreams; Jim loved science and wanted to win the Nobel Prize in something, while I wanted to somehow change the world, to make a big difference.
We were brothers.
We began the new summer with two goals: To play our way onto the wood floor before school started again, and to put some muscle on our skinny frames. To reach our goals, we created a ritual of work and swore we'd make each other keep to it until the summer ended.
We started each morning by hitting the center right when it opened so we could get a jump on the weight benches. We worked out most of each morning, until we were too sore to continue. Then we'd eat an early lunch, stretch a bit, and hit the courts. We'd play until dinner, go to one or the other of our houses to eat, then head back to the courts and more games until the outside lights cut off at ten. By the time we got home it was all we could do to collapse into bed until the next morning.
The gym was where we discovered just how hard we could push one another, and where I found for the first time a constructive way to express the anger that was always roiling inside me.
We were at the end of our Thursday leg workout, a particularly brutal routine in which we did twenty-rep leg sets with heavy weights: first extensions, then squats, and finally leg presses. I was on the incline leg-press machine, in my third and final set of twenty heavy reps, fighting a weight I had been stuck on for a month. Each time I had tried this weight, I had grunted out the first two sets, but I had failed to make the third. I couldn't even come close. I'd never made it past fifteen reps on that set, and the exercise now loomed as a demon in the gym, a dragon that always slayed me.
Jim had gone first and pounded out his third set, setting a personal best. He was sitting on the bench next to the machine as I strapped myself in. "You can do this, Matt," he said.
"I know I can," I lied. I didn't know it all. Sure, my head knew it was possible, but in my heart I could already feel the incredible pain that hit around the tenth rep, already see the image of myself getting up from the machine having failed yet again.
"No," he said. "You don't know it, you don't believe it, but you're wrong. You can do it, but have to believe it and you have to pay the price."
I nodded, took a couple of deep breaths, and started the set.
The first nine reps were good and relatively painless, my body a machine, my legs pistons the weight could not stop. The tenth was everything I had feared, as much a blast of pain as the previous nine had been routine. I paused after it, legs extended, sucking air.
"Push it," I heard Jim say.
I pounded out two more reps without pause and then had to rest for air. I looked at my legs and was surprised to find they were shaking. I shook my head no.
"Bull," Jim said. "Don't you give up."
I nodded yes and ground out the thirteenth and fourteenth repetitions, then stopped again for air. It was over. My legs knew it. My head knew it. My heart knew it. I might get the fifteenth, though even that was doubtful, but I surely wouldn't get another. It was over.
"No!" Jim shouted in my ear. "You are not giving up! Not this time." Out of the corner of my eye I saw him stand. "Hey," he yelled, "you guys want to see a real wimp? This loser's been stuck on this same rep for a month and he's about to wuss out again."
I sucked air and shook my head at him, anger filling me faster than air. In the mirrors on the side walls I saw a few guys stop what they were doing and look at us. I hated them for it, hated them for all the crap they and others like them had given me, hated them for having fathers they could go home to, hated them for all the times they knew how guys were supposed to behave and I didn't, hated them for already having the kind of body I wanted, hated them for everything I wasn't and didn't have.
"Go ahead, Matt," Jim said. "Fail. Just get out of there fast so somebody else can use the machine."
I wanted to kill him. The rage formed into a single word, first in my brain and then in a hiss from my lips: "No." I beat my head against the back support, hit it and hit it and hit it again until the pain in my head overwhelmed the pain in my legs, and then I let the weight down and slammed it back up, then down again, no pause, my legs almost throwing the weight. The rep numbers appeared in red in my mind. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. I couldn't stop, couldn't give them the satisfaction of doing only the minimum. Twenty-one. That would show them. I pushed the twenty-second rep up so hard the weights actually left contact with my feet for just a second, slammed up the supports, and unstrapped my hands as the weight fell back onto the supports. I jumped up, seeing only red, ready to kill, anger with no goal or target, just anger.
"Good job, Matt," Jim said from somewhere not far away.
The anger receded like the tide flowing away from the beach, leaving me breathing hard, legs shaking, the back of my head pounding, and I sat down hard on the bench where Jim had been.
"I could have killed you," I said between gasps.
"Nah," Jim said. "You couldn't have caught me, not with those legs after that monster set."
We both laughed. Even though I didn't think I could stand I felt so good, so happy to have cracked that barrier, so free of any anger—for the first time, even if only for just that moment—that I laughed again, and Jim laughed with me.
* * *
I parked the BMW in back of the gym near the employees-only entrance, next to R.C.'s enormous truck. I put down the window to give R.C. a good look at me; after this morning, he'd have all the defenses activated and be monitoring the security cameras, ready for bear and heavily armed.
"I have one of them with me," I said. "I also have these." I held the bag out the window in my left hand and twisted my body so I could pull out a diamond with my right. "I'm working."
The gym's metal security door clicked three times and popped open. I got out of the car and Greg followed, unfolding more quickly than I would have thought he could. We walked inside, and the door closed automatically, leaving us in total darkness. I stood while R.C. finished the scans and satisfied himself that all was well, then the door a few feet in front of me opened to our office. R.C. was off to the side, his eyes and a shotgun trained on the alien.
I handed R.C. the diamonds. He took them but kept his eyes on Greg.
"What's the job?" he asked.
"Apparently, Jim really is alive. I have to find him, and then Greg here will take him and some stuff of theirs away."
R.C. raised an eyebrow and asked, " 'I'?"
I watched Greg's arms, but nothing moved. Their translators had worked well enough so far that I had to assume he was following everything now. "Yes," I said. "I have to do this on my own. I think Greg here and his people would be a lot more comfortable that way."
"That is correct," Greg said.
I looked R.C. in the eyes. "You need to stay here and cover the business. The gym's been busy enough that you'll have plenty to do." Our gym had over two thousand square feet of workout space, another three thousand square feet of living space, all the latest fitness equipment, thousands of pounds of free weights, and more than twenty-five hundred members on its books. It also sat nearly empty almost all of the time, a convenient cash business. All but a few of its members were just names we bought from friends at local hotels, out-of-state travelers who had passed through Raleigh at one time or another. R.C. and I were the only people with permanent access cards, though from time to time we would give temporary cards t
o others working on jobs with us. R.C. would be covering something, but it would be my back, not the business.
He nodded, grabbed the bag of diamonds, and left through the door opposite the one we had entered. I knew he'd monitor the room until I left, and that from then on he'd be there if I needed him—but I also knew I'd never see him, and neither would Greg.
"Tell me about what Jim was doing for you guys," I said, "and about how he escaped and when."
"I cannot discuss that," Greg replied.
I pulled over a chair and sat down in front of him. I motioned to another chair, but he didn't take it. Instead, he folded his legs and sank slowly to the floor.
"If you don't," I said, "finding him will take a lot more time. Your leader said you wanted to get both him and some materials back. The most logical assumption is that those materials are related to what he was doing. Right?"
"That is correct."
"If he took them, it was almost certainly either to sell them or to continue the work you were doing that involved them and then sell the result of that work. Otherwise, he'd have no reason to take them. If I don't know what he was doing for you guys, I can't know whether he's likely to be looking to sell something or to hole up for a while, and so I can't know how to track him. Understand?"
"Yes." Greg paused long enough that I wondered if I'd have to push him again to get him to talk. Finally, though, he resumed. "Our race belongs to a trade guild that includes many other races. The guild's rules are quite strict and very expensive to disobey. They limit the technologies guild members can use and the products they can offer when they operate on nonguild planets, such as yours. The overt mission of our visit to this planet is in accordance with those rules; we and others have guild permission to begin preliminary trade talks. The project for which we took James Peterson is not, however, in accordance with those rules. Thus our increased need for discretion and my unwillingness to answer your questions."
"So you were smuggling?"
"If I understand the term correctly, the answer is, somewhat. It is not that simple."
"Then cheer up, Greg, because I don't care about smuggling." I pulled my chair a bit closer. "What I do care about is earning those diamonds, which means I have to find Jim, which means I need to know what he was doing. So, one more time: What was he doing?"
"We chose you for this job because he mentioned you."
I had assumed they knew about me from Jim's police records, but I should have known better than to make assumptions. "What did he say?"
"That he was looking forward to seeing you again. He laughed when he said it. Were you friends? Did he laugh from happiness?"
"Yes, we were friends once. Not any more." The anger I felt rising inside me, the anger I always felt when I thought of Jim, was not going to help me now, so I pushed it back. "No, I doubt he was laughing from happiness." I still needed to know what Jim had been doing, and I didn't want to keep dancing with Greg. "How you found me doesn't matter now. What matters now is what Jim was doing for you and when and how he escaped."
"You are aware of his work in nanotechnology."
"Of course. He loved it and was really good at it, right up to the end." Even then he was as good as anyone, just not good enough, and certainly not entitled to do what he did. I had to look away from Greg because this time the flush of anger was almost overpowering. As I so often did, I wondered what it would be like not to be made of anger, not to have it always just under the surface, a river washing over and through me and ready to boil over at any time. I know most people aren't this way, and I'm glad, but I can't really imagine what it's like inside their skins. And, of course, it was irrelevant, because I was built the way I was built, and that wasn't going to change now, if ever. "So what he was doing for you involved nanotech?"
"Yes. We had adapted a technology of ours for use here. We were unable to complete the adaptation without certain aspects of your environment that we could not get without being here. Guild rules would not allow us to bring a research team here or to test here, so we smuggled samples of the technology and recruited James Peterson to complete it for us."
Nanotech research meant an electron microscope, one or more controlling computers, and some very specialized nano-machine building tools. "How much equipment did he have?"
"Perhaps ten pieces. I am not sure. I was not involved in its procurement or setup."
"Where did he get it?"
"We gave him diamonds, as we did you, and I believe he traded them at local universities for the equipment he needed."
That made sense. He had been a researcher at UNC, and he knew every nanotech research lab in the area. A few bribes and a panel truck, and he'd be set.
"Did he transport the equipment in a truck?"
"Yes, a large white one he purchased."
"Did he take the truck when he escaped?"
"Yes."
"I don't suppose you know the truck's license number or make or anything like that?"
"No. It was white and old and tall enough inside for us to be able to sit like this but not tall enough for us to be able to fully stand without bending."
It was probably a used delivery truck. Possibly useful to know, but nothing I was going to be able to trace easily. Besides, he was smart enough to pick up another one just to be safe. "Where was he working?"
"In a warehouse not far from where we took you earlier. He arranged the use of the building."
"Was there a basketball hoop near it?" I pointed to one of my prize possessions, a framed signed poster of Dr. J dunking in the last All-Star game he had played in while still in the ABA. He was retired long before I was ever watching basketball, but in the hours and hours of videos I had studied I had always found him to be one of the most graceful players ever. "A metal rim, like that, on a pole."
"Yes. Behind the building. He threw a ball at it every day for quite some time, until we forced him to return to work. We found this activity senseless, but he insisted on repeating it."
Jim, like me, had always been a creature of habit. I was glad his time in jail hadn't worked this habit out of him, because it would help me find him.
"After you brought him back after his execution, was one of you always with him?"
"Until his escape, yes."
"Good. Did he ever go anywhere other than this building and the places he bought the equipment?"
"No. We would not allow it."
"Good. Now, back to my two remaining original questions: When did he escape, and how?"
"He left in the early morning eight days ago." Greg's lower left arm twitched slightly. "It took us a very long time to locate you."
I realized Greg was embarrassed. If I was right, a lower left arm twitch noted embarrassment, a lower right, humor.
"How did he escape?"
"We cannot be sure, because none of our people with him survived. We believe he created a solvent from some of the chemicals he acquired for his work, because the suits of all four of his guards were partially decomposed. Our suits provide us with both a breathable atmosphere and skeletal support; without them, this planet is almost immediately fatal to us." Greg touched his suit with his upper right arm. "In the last week we have changed some of the materials in the suits. I am wearing one of the newer versions." The lower right arm twitched again.
I laughed. "Don't worry; I have no desire to kill you. If I had wanted you dead, R.C. would have killed you before you made it from the car to the gym. We've made a deal, and I'll honor my part."
I stood and pushed back the chair. "Right now, though, I'm going to grab a bite to eat and take a shower. Then we'll start looking for Jim. Can I get you anything?"
