The Eleventh Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by F. L. Wallace

  The pseudo-flesh that he had used on Emily was not for him. In a way, it was the best disguise, but he was playing this one to live, as much as he could, all the way. A standard semi-durable cosmetic would do; that is, it would when he finished altering it to suit his purpose.

  The chief addition was a flaky metallic powder, lead. However the signal worked, radar or not, that should be effective in dampening the signal. He squeezed the mixture into a tube and attached the tube to a small gun which he plugged into a wall socket. Standing in front of the tiny mirror, with everything else cramped in the sleep locker, he went over his face and hands. He had trouble getting it on his scalp and under his hair, but it went on.

  He looked himself over. He now appeared older, respectable, but not successful, which fitted neatly into the greatest category on Venus—or anywhere, for that matter. He stuffed the clothing he’d worn back into the bag and walked out. He’d been in the sleep locker half an hour.

  He was operating blind, but it was all he could do. He had to assume that the metallic fiber in his clothing and the lead flakes in the cosmetic would scramble the circuit signal. If they didn’t, then he was completely without protection.

  He’d soon know how correctly he had analyzed the problem.

  * * * *

  He walked out of the transportation terminal and hailed an air cab which took him over the city and left him at the edge of a less reputable section.

  It was not an old slum—Venicity hadn’t endured long enough to have inherited slums; it built them quickly out of shoddy material and then tore them down again as the need for living space expanded outward.

  He checked in at a hotel neither more nor less disreputable than the rest. The structure made up in number of rooms what it lacked in size and appearance.

  This was the test period and he had to wait it out. If he passed, he was on an equal footing with any other person wanted by the police. He’d take his chances on that, his wits against their organization; he could disappear if he didn’t carry a beacon around with him. This was the best place to spend the interim period, crowded together with people coming and going to and from the wild lands of Venus.

  But if he didn’t pass the test—

  He refused to think about it.

  He walked aimlessly in the grayness of the Venusian day. Different people from those in the bright new sections of Venicity, quieter, grimmer, more bewildered. Tough, but not the hardness of the criminal element. These people had no interest in either making or breaking the law.

  After nightfall, he loitered on the streets for a few hours, watching faces. When policemen began appearing in greater numbers, he checked into his room.

  It was a grimy, unpleasant place. Considering the comfort it offered, the rate was exorbitant. Safety, however, if it did afford, and that was beyond price. He lay down, but couldn’t sleep. The room, apparently, was designed on the acoustical principle of an echo chamber or a drum.

  The adjacent room on one side was occupied by a man and woman. The woman, though, was not a woman. There was a certain pitch to the laughter that could come only from a robot. The management obviously offered attractions other than sleep.

  The room on the other side was quieter. Somebody coughed twice, somebody sniffled once. Two of them, decided Jadiver, a man and a woman, both human. They weren’t talking loud or much. He couldn’t hear the words, but the sounds weren’t gay.

  In the hall, other voices intruded. Jadiver lay still. He could recognize the way of walking, the tone of voice. Cops. His test period wasn’t lasting as long as he’d hoped.

  “What good is it?” grumbled one, down the hall, but Jadiver could hear distinctly. “We had him dead center and now we’ve lost him. If I had my way, we’d have taken him sooner.”

  * * * *

  Jadiver’s reasoning was not so good if the police were this close. He got up and crept noiselessly toward the door, fully dressed, as he had to be at all times if he expected to scramble the circuit signal.

  The companion of the first policeman was more cheerful. “He’s not lost. We’ve just mislaid him. We know the direction he’s in. Follow the line and there he is at the end of it.”

  “Sounds good, but have we got him?”

  “We will.”

  That was the fallacy. He’d scrambled the signal, but he hadn’t eliminated it. He still showed up on the police instrument as a direction. He could imagine a technician sitting in front of a crazily wavering screen. The instrument could no longer pick up what he saw through his eyes, but it hadn’t lost him altogether.

  Jadiver clutched the tangle gun.

  “Better check where we are,” said the first officer.

  “Going to,” answered the second. Jadiver couldn’t see, but he could visualize the pocket instrument. “This is Lieutenant Parder. How close are we?”

  The voice came back, almost inaudible. What he could hear, though, was disturbing. It sounded like someone he knew, but not Doumya Filone. “You’re off a hundred yards to your left,” said the voice. “Also, he’s a mile farther out. Either that or a hundred and fifty miles.”

  “He’s really moving,” said the lieutenant. “A hundred and fifty miles is in the middle of the swamp.”

  “I know that,” said the tantalizing familiar voice. “I can’t choose between outside and inside the city. If he’s inside, I want him to move. That motion, extended a hundred and fifty miles, by simple mathematics will indicate a distance he couldn’t possibly travel in the jungle.” The voice paused. “We’ll send a party to check the swamp. You go to the point a mile farther on. We want him tonight. If we don’t get him, we’ll probably have to wait until tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll find him,” said the lieutenant. “Report when I get there.”

  Jadiver could hear footsteps receding down the hall.

  He breathed in relief. The makeshift shield hadn’t been a total failure. They knew the direction, but not the distance from some central location. The scramble had affected the strength of the signal and they couldn’t be sure.

  The impromptu visit told him this as well: there was only one instrument on him. With two, they could work a triangulation, regardless of the signal strength.

  He could hazard a guess as to why they had to get him at night. During the day, there were radiological disturbances originating in the atmosphere that made reception of the signals difficult. That meant that the day was safest for him.

  * * * *

  He went back to the bed and lay down, to puzzle over the familiar voice, to sleep if he could. Sleep didn’t come easily. The man and the female robot had left, but the quiet couple on the other side had been awakened by the noise in the hall.

  The woman sniffled. “I don’t care, Henry. We’re going back to Earth.”

  It was not an old voice, though he couldn’t be sure, not seeing her. Thirty-five, say. Jadiver resented the intrusion at a time like this. He was trying to sleep, or think, he wasn’t sure which.

  “Now, hon, we can’t,” Henry whispered back. “We’ve bought the land and nobody’s going to buy it back.”

  “We bought it when they told us there would be roses,” said the woman, loud and bitter. “Great big roses, so big that most of the plant grew below ground, only the flower showing. So big, no stem could support them.”

  “Well, hon—”

  “Don’t hon me. There are roses, ten feet across, all over our land, just like they said.” Her voice rose higher. “Mud roses, that’s what they are. Stinking mud roses that collapse into a slimy hole in the ground.”

  She sniffled again. “Did you notice the pictures they showed us? People standing by the roses with their heads turned away. And you know why the pictures were like that? Because they didn’t dare show us the expressions on those people’s faces, that’s why.”

  “It’s not so bad,” said the man soothingly. “Maybe we can do something about it.”

  “What can we do? The roses poison cattle and dogs run away from th
e smell. And we’re humans. We’re stronger, we’re supposed to take it.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Henry quietly. “I could take a long pipe and run it at an angle to the roots. I could force concrete through the pipe and seal it off below ground. When it collapsed, the rose wouldn’t grow back.”

  The woman asked doubtfully, “Could you?”

  “I think so. Of course I’d have to experiment to get the right kind of concrete.”

  “But what would we do with the hole it left?” There was a faint tremor of hope.

  “We could haul away the slime,” he said. “It would stop smelling after a while. We might even be able to use it for fertilizer.”

  “But there’s still the hole.”

  “It would fill with water after the next rain. We could raise ducks in it.”

  “White ducks?”

  “If you like.”

  The woman was silent. “If you think we can do it, then we’ll try,” she said. “We’ll go back to our farm and forget about Earth.”

  Henry was silent, too. “They’re kind of pretty, even if they do smell bad,” he said after a long interval. “Maybe I could pump a different kind of cement, real thin, directly into the stem. It might travel up into the flower instead of down.”

  “And make them into stone roses,” enthused the woman. “Mud roses into stone. I’d like that—a few of them—to remind us of what our farm was like when we came to it.” She wasn’t sniffling.

  They had their own problems, decided Jadiver, and their own solution, which, in their ignorance, might actually work. He’d been like that when he first came to Venus, expecting great things. With him it had been different. He was an engineer, not a farmer, and he didn’t want to be a farmer. There was nothing on Venus for him.

  He couldn’t stay much longer on Venus in any capacity. Earth was out of the question. Mars? If he could escape capture in the months that followed and then manage to get passage on a ship. It wasn’t hopeless, but his chances weren’t high.

  The puzzling thing was why the police wanted him so badly. He was an accessory to a crime—several of them, in fact. But even if they regarded him as a criminal, they couldn’t consider him an important one.

  And yet they were staging a manhunt. He hated to think of the number of policemen looking for him. There must be a reason for it.

  He had a few days left, possibly less. In that time, he would have to get off the planet or shed the circuit. Without drastic extensive surgery, there was not much hope he could peel off the circuit.

  Unless—

  He had received a message from someone self-identified as a friend. And that friend knew about the circuit and claimed to be willing to help.

  He kept seeing gray eyes and a strong, sad, indifferent face, even in his sleep.

  * * * *

  He awakened later than he intended. Since daylight was safest for him, that was a serious error. He wasted no time in regret, but went immediately to the mirror. Under the makeup, his face was dirty and sweating. He didn’t dare to remove the disguise for an instant, since to do so would be to expose himself to the instrument. He sprayed on a new face, altering the facial characteristics as best he could. His clothing, too, had to stay on. He roughed it up a bit, adding a year’s wear to it.

  For what it was worth, he didn’t look quite the same as yesterday. Seedier and older. It was a process he couldn’t keep extending indefinitely. He would not have to, of course. One way or the other, it would be decided soon.

  He shredded the bag and his extra clothing, tossing them into the disposal chute. No use giving the police something to paw over, to deduce from it what they could. The tiny spray gun he kept, and the tube of makeup. He might need them once more.

  It was close to noon when he left the room. There were lots of people on the streets and only a few policemen. Again he had an advantage.

  He found a pay screen and began the search. Doctor Doumya Filone wasn’t listed with the police and that seemed strange. A moment’s reflection showed that it wasn’t. If she were officially connected, she might not show the sympathy she had.

  Neither was she listed on the staff of the emergency hospital in which he’d been a patient. He had a number through which he could reach her, but he resisted an impulse to use it. It was certain the police wouldn’t confine their efforts to the instrument check. They knew he had that number and they’d have someone on it, tracing everyone who called her.

  Noon passed and his stomach called attention to it. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday. He took a short break, ate hurriedly, and resumed the search.

  Doumya Filone was difficult to find. It was getting late and he had ascertained she wasn’t on the staff of any hospital not listed for private practice.

  He finally located her almost by accident. She had an office with Medical Research Incorporated. That was the only thing registered under her name.

  Evening came early to Venus, as it always did under the massive cloud formations. He got off the air cab a few blocks from his destination and walked the rest of the way.

  Inside the building, he paused in the lobby and found her office. Luckily it was in a back wing. He wandered through the corridors, got lost once, and found the route again. The building was almost empty by this time.

  Her name was on the door. Dr. Doumya Filone. Research Neurological Systems, whatever that meant. There was a light in the office, a dim one. He eased the door open. It wasn’t locked, which meant, he hadn’t tripped an alarm.

  * * * *

  No one was inside. He looked around. There was another door in back. He walked over to it. It didn’t lead to a laboratory, as he expected. Instead, there were living quarters. A peculiar way to conduct research.

  The autobath was humming quietly. He sat down facing it and waited. She came out in a few minutes, hair disarranged, damp around her forehead. She didn’t see him at first.

  “Well,” she said coolly, staring at him. There was no question that she recognized him through the disguise. She slipped quickly into a robe that, whatever it did for her modesty, subtracted nothing from the view. He wished he was less tired and could appreciate it.

  She found a cigarette and lighted it. “You’re pretty good, you know.”

  “Yeah.” But not good enough, he thought.

  “Why are you here?” she asked. She was nervous.

  “You know,” he said. She had promised him help once before. Now let her deliver. But she had to volunteer.

  “I know.” She looked down at her hands, long skilled hands. “I put in the circuit. But I didn’t choose you.”

  He began to understand part of it. The ‘Medical Research’ business was just a cover. The real work was done at the police emergency hospital. That was why she had no laboratory. And the raw material—

  “Who did choose me?”

  “The police. I have to take what they give me.”

  There were certain implications in that statement he didn’t like. “Have there been others?”

  “Two before you.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They died.”

  He didn’t like where this was taking him. His hand slid toward the tangle gun in his pocket. “Maybe I should die, too.”

  She nodded. “That would be one solution.” She added harshly: “They shouldn’t have taken you. Legally speaking, you’re not a criminal. But I couldn’t investigate you personally before I put the circuit in.”

  Why not? Was she an automaton that reacted in response to a button? In a way she was, but the button was psychological.

  “That doesn’t help me,” he said tiredly. “The police wanted to catch Burlingame through me. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  She indicated that it was.

  “I did, without knowing what I was doing,” he went on. “Now I want out. Even if I cooperated with the cops, which I’m not going to do, I’m of no further value to them. Every criminal on Venus knows about me by now.”

 
; “That’s part of it,” she said. “But there’s more. You’ve tied up the machine and neither I nor the police can use it.”

  * * * *

  Explanations were coming faster. It was no wonder the police wanted him badly. They had a perfect device to use against criminals, which was all they were concerned with, and they couldn’t use it as long as the circuit was in him. It made sense, but that kind of logic was deadly—for him.

  “I’ll face it,” he said. “I’ll take whatever charge they hang on me. It shouldn’t be more than a few years. You can use the time to take this damn thing out of me. Only I want a guarantee first.”

  She got up and stood with the light behind her. It was deliberately intended to distract him. Under other circumstances, it would have.

  “If it were a small circuit, over just a fraction of your body, I could cut it out,” she said. “But the way it is, I can’t. It would kill you.”

  At least she was honest about it. And he still didn’t know what she meant when she had written, with his hands in the apartment, that she would help him. He would have to find out.

  “I can smash the machine,” he said. “That’s the other solution.”

  She leaned against the wall. “You can’t. And neither can I, though it’s technically my machine. It’s in the police department with an armed guard around it at all times. Besides, the machine can defend itself.”

  He looked at her without understanding. It didn’t sound right. He was sweating under the makeup and part of it was coming loose.

  “Then what did you mean when you said you’d help?” he asked. “You promised, but what can you do?”

  “I never promised to help.” It was her turn not to understand. Her hand slipped down and so did the robe.

  She was lying to him, had been lying all along. She never intended to help, though she said she would. The purpose? To lead him into a trap. She’d been successful enough. He looked up in anger, in time to see an object hurtling from her hand.