by David Drake
"It's now a warehouse for the county. The truck is parked under cover out back. It's him."
R.C. knew it was my play and he was backup, so I was sure he wouldn't go in before me.
"Thanks. I'm on the way." I started to hang up but realized he should have hung up first and hadn't. "What?"
"He's not this stupid. He kept the truck. He came here. He's expecting you."
It didn't change a thing, but I was still embarrassed for not realizing it earlier. "Yeah."
"I'm here," R.C. said, and then the phone went dead. I smiled; for R.C., that was a positively tender moment.
"Do you know where James Peterson is?" Greg asked.
"I think so," I said.
"Then drive me there," Greg said, "and we will take him and the materials we require." Greg stuck the upper arm on each side into his suit and withdrew in each one of the bagel-sized weapon disks. "Your job will then be done."
"No. I have to go there to be sure. If he is there, I'll need a little time alone with him to learn where the materials are. Then he's yours." I pointed at the weapons. "You've got the firepower to take us both. A little time won't hurt you, and it might make the difference between getting back the materials and having Jim leave them where someone else—maybe others from your guild—could find them."
I waited while Greg thought about it.
At length, he said, "That is acceptable."
I nodded, then got my bag out of the trunk and crawled into the backseat. I changed into a pair of shorts, a sleeveless sweatshirt, two pairs of socks, and my high-tops.
"What are you doing?" Greg asked.
"Jim's expecting me. The most comfortable ritual for us is to shoot—" I realized how Greg might misinterpret that just as I said it and quickly corrected myself "—play some basketball, so I figured I might as well be comfortable. It also gives me an excuse to carry a bag." I put the stubby shotgun in the gym bag, then covered it with a couple of small sweat towels and the basketball. I left the gym bag in the backseat, tossed the duffel back into the trunk, and climbed into the front.
I turned to face Greg. "What will you do with Jim when I give him to you?"
"As we have discussed," Greg said, "we are operating beyond the guild rules. That fact must not come to the guild's attention. So we must not allow James Peterson to be accessible."
"Let's talk about ways to make that happen," I said.
Greg listened as I talked, and when we had a deal, I headed the car up Sixteenth Street to the old community center.
* * *
After the lunch at the Mexican restaurant I didn't see Louise or Jim again until she surprised me by calling and asking me to join Jim and her for dinner at her place. Her home was a small but lovely old brick ranch house not far off Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. I knew no post-doc paid enough for her to afford the place, so I figured her parents were still helping her out. I felt the same mixture of disdain and envy I always experienced when I learned that other people's parents were helping them pay their way.
I arrived on time. Jim pulled in behind me just as I was getting out of my car. We walked up to the door together and knocked.
When Louise answered we were both so visibly shocked that she had to speak to get us to move. "Will you two stop staring and come in, please? I'm not contagious or anything like that."
Louise looked like a skeleton wrapped in parchment. Gone was the hair I had always adored, her scalp now completely bare. Her cheeks and eye sockets were sunken, and she moved slowly, carefully. I had thought she was thin in high school, but compared to now she had been plump then.
She led us to a living room with a sofa, a couple of chairs, a granite-topped fireplace, and framed photos on all the walls. I recognized many of the people in the photos, found myself in quite a few, and also noticed some with her and men I didn't know. I knew I had no right to the quick flash of jealousy and suppressed it.
After we all sat, I asked, "What's wrong, Louise?"
"That depends on what you're talking about," she said. "If you're talking about the way I look, the answer is the combination of radiation, chemo, and drug therapies I've been taking for the last four months. If you're talking about what's really wrong, it's the cancer."
"What kind do you have?" Jim asked.
She laughed. "I wish it were only one kind. The doctors don't know what came first or why, but I have both ovarian and renal cell."
She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and she looked so frail I was afraid her arms would crumble under her own weight. "I don't want to make a big deal out of this. I'm at peace with it, or at least I'm at peace with it most of the time. I've already stopped the therapies because I couldn't bear them any more. I didn't want to spend however many more days I have going to the hospital for therapy and then feeling sick afterward. I called you guys because I didn't want you to find out later, and because I wanted to see you while I was sure I could still have a decent time."
I wanted to scream, but I didn't know exactly why or at what. Instead, I felt myself go cold inside, the way I had trained myself to do when I was working, and I asked, "How long?"
"The doctors say that if I'm lucky, I might have as much as three more months. I'm more likely, though, to have only three or four more weeks. I've done a living will and worked everything out with my doctors and my family, because once my brain is gone I want them to let me go."
Jim appeared lost, staring into space, not able to look directly at her. "Have you tried everything?" he said.
"Everything I'm willing to try," she said. She stood. "And that's all I want to say about that. Now, if you can stand to be with the world's thinnest hairless woman, I've ordered some tasty Chinese take-out, and we can eat. I'm really enjoying my food now that the drugs and chemo have worn off, though my throat is still sore. I definitely don't worry about calories anymore."
I don't remember much about that dinner. I know I didn't eat much, and for all her talk of enjoying food, Louise ate even less. Louise and I did most of the talking, and Jim either listened or pretended to listen as he stared off into space. We talked about her house, about places I'd seen, about old times, and when she got tired, Jim and I cleaned up for her and headed for our cars.
He stopped me at the door to my car, grabbed my arm as I was reaching for the door handle. "Are you just going to let her die?" he asked.
The question uncorked the rage I'd bottled when she first told us, and I wanted to scream at him and hit him. Instead, I kept my voice level and asked, "What else can we do?"
"We can make her try more treatments, keep fighting, not give up," he said.
"No," I said, "we can't. We could try to talk her into it, but you heard her: she's endured all she's willing to take, and none of it has done any good. She's made her choice, and she's at peace with it, and that's it, that's all there is."
He threw my arm aside in disgust. "I cannot believe you're just giving up like that," he said. "You want to watch her die because you blew it with her and she dumped you? Is that it?"
I grabbed him by the throat and took him down to the road before he could even raise a hand to stop me. I fought to keep myself from crushing his larynx and quickly released my grip. "Jim, you know better than that, and you're lucky, very lucky, that I know you know better. Yeah, I blew it with her, but I've never wished her harm, and I never will. I don't have any choice but to respect her choice—and neither do you." I got into my car and drove off.
* * *
The truck I had seen in the security video at The Cat House was right where R.C. had said it would be, so I parked behind it and sat for a moment.
"Don't blow this, Greg. Wait for me, and I'll come back."
"And if you do not?"
"Then do what you want with him. The only way I won't come back is if I can't."
The truck was tucked under an overhang that had once protected a loading dock. The wall in front of it had provided rolling doors for the loading dock, but now boards covered where t
he doors had been. I carried the gym bag around to the right side, where I knew some courts stood outside one of the center's side doors, and walked over to the nearest hoop. I put the bag just off the court under the basket, grabbed the ball, and started shooting.
I was just beginning to work up a light sweat from some lay-up drills when Jim, dressed in some still-new gym clothes, came out of the door. He was more muscular than I remembered, but after his time in jail that only made sense. He rebounded one of my shots, dribbled out past where the foul line had once been, and took a shot. His form was as beautiful as ever: effortless leap, good extension at the ball's release, wrist held too long forward in the playground show-off mode he'd never outgrown, great rotation on the ball. Swish. I caught the ball as it was coming through and tossed it back to him. You make it, you get to take another; playground rules, the way we'd grown up.
We went back and forth that way for a while, just like old times, each always knowing where the other's shot would go. I felt my body relax into the rhythms of the court, and I enjoyed it for a few minutes. I could almost forget why I was there, all that had happened before. Almost.
The sun was going down when Jim spoke.
"Did they pay you in diamonds, too, Matt?"
"Yeah. When did you figure it?"
"The moment I got away. Who else could they call? It's a good thing for you they didn't know enough to realize you would have done it for free."
"I suppose so," I said. "You know more about this whole mess than I do."
He tossed me the ball and stared at me.
"You don't know what this is all about, do you?"
I walked over to the gym bag, put the ball inside, and grabbed a towel. As I dried my face, I said, "Not really. I know it's about putting you back in jail. That's enough for me."
He laughed. "That's amazing. Come on; I'll show you what your new friends were up to."
I dropped the towel into the bag and pulled out the shotgun. "Hold up, Jim."
He turned and looked first at the gun, then at me.
"You couldn't kill me before. You had to rely on the cops to take me where someone else could kill me." He shook his head, then turned around again and started walking. "Bring your toy and come see just what you're rescuing."
I kept the shotgun pointed at him and followed him into the building.
The walls of the place were piled high with old sports and recreation equipment: disassembled trampolines, tumbling mats, broken-down pool tables and ping-pong tables, boxes and boxes and boxes of who knows what. Jim had cleared a sizable section of the concrete floor and set up some old pool tables as work surfaces. The computers and microscope, a few racks of labeled vials, and some odd gear I did not recognize sat on three of the tables. On the fourth was a man who looked like a derelict on a three-day binge and who smelled worse, his arms and legs spread and bound by rope to the legs of the pool table. When I got closer I could see the blood dried around his eye sockets, ears, and mouth.
"Dead?" I said.
"Yeah," Jim answered. "I thought I had this thing figured out, but my first cut at it was too much for the body. The head bleeds out as soon as the machines start working."
"Your first cut at what?"
"Ah," Jim laughed, "that is what our new blue friends are so eager to cover up, isn't it? What they have built is really quite remarkable. A lot of people must have died before they got it right. You see, their nano-machines infiltrate the brain and bond to all the sensory connections and the key emotion centers. The machines record what you see and how you feel, then transmit it in real time in compressed form to a receiver like this one—" he pointed to the piece of equipment I had not recognized "—which decodes it into a signal they can interpret and use." He patted the box. "I confess I don't have their encoding standard completely worked out yet, but I'll get it."
"What's the point of all this, Jim?"
He laughed again. "Don't you see? We're the product here, Matt. Pump these nano-machines into one of us, and we become a walking show for the amusement of the aliens and their customers. Set up receivers around the planet, fill us all with the nano-machines, and they've got seven billion channels that are always on!" He paced in front of the equipment, visibly excited by the pure tech aspects of it, all implications irrelevant in the face of the technical challenge.
"So why did they need you? If they had this all figured out, why not just release the machines?"
"Because though the nano-machines may work, the signal they produce is trash. Two-thirds of the manufactured goods on this planet contain a processor and a transmitter, and all those processors are talking all the time. Our atmosphere is positively drenched with transmissions. Wherever they tested must have had way fewer transmissions or transmissions at different frequencies, because when they tried out the prototype here the broadcasts from the nano-machines were garbled—total garbage."
He walked over to the table that held the dead man. "My job was to get them a clear signal. I thought I could do it just by boosting the power a little and shifting to a less frequently used band, but as I said and as you can see—" he patted the corpse on the table "—the power increase is more than a body can bear."
* * *
For the next few days after Louise told Jim and me about her cancer, she and I talked almost every day. She didn't want to get together in person, but she seemed to enjoy chatting on the phone. She called a couple of the days, and I called the others. We talked about old times, her work, her family—everything but the cancer. So I wasn't surprised to hear her voice when I picked up the phone one afternoon, but I was surprised at what she said.
"Something's wrong. I'm hurting in different ways than usual, ways I don't think I should be hurting."
"Did you call your doctor?" I asked.
"Not yet, because I just saw him this morning, and I was fine—I mean, as fine as I get these days." She paused and I could hear her sucking in air, fighting the pain. "Nothing unusual was wrong, nothing to explain all this pain I'm feeling in my abdomen."
"Did you do anything unusual?"
"Not really," she said. "After the doctor appointment I stopped and picked up some flowers, then I met Jim for lunch—he finally called, you see, so I figured what the heck—and then I came home."
I thought about my last meeting with Jim, about the talk the three of us had had that day at lunch, about his research, about his mother, and my heart sank.
"Call your doctor," I said. "I'm coming over."
"Okay," she said. "I don't think you need to, but right now I wouldn't mind the company either. This feels weird."
I drove as fast as I could from our gym to her house. Along the way I dug out Jim's card and finally got him on his cell phone.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"She called you," Jim said.
"Yes. What did you do?"
"I made a choice," he said, "that's all. I couldn't just sit by and let her die. Maybe you could do that, but I couldn't."
"That wasn't your choice to make, Jim. She had a few more weeks, maybe a few more months, and now you may have taken those from her."
"Or I may have saved her."
"For your sake, I hope you're right," I said. "But even if you are it wasn't your choice to make. I'm on the way there now; I'll deal with you after I see her." I hung up.
Louise didn't answer my knock on her front door, but it was unlocked so I let myself in.
I found her lying on the floor in her bedroom. Her eyes were bloodshot, blood was coming from her ears and her mouth, and she was barely conscious. I knelt beside her, wanting to hold her but fearing contact might infect me and so unwilling to risk my life, too.
