I looked around, head still pounding, and saw Brandy lying there, still out, but murmuring agitatedly and occasionally kicking or pushing away in her sleep. My head ached, but I figured that was the mickey working its final revenge. A pair of French doors led out of the room to my left; a regular door led, I thought, to the rest of the house. I managed to get up and walk over to the French doors and look out.
We had certainly been moved a great distance. There was a small balcony out there, and beyond was the ocean, but not the rocky cliffs and chill foam of the northwest’s Pacific; white, sandy beach led gently down to it here, and the breakers crashed onto a nearly pristine beach. Well out in the water, I thought I could see sailboats or something like them, and the whole place looked warm and summery in contrast to the chill of Oregon. I didn’t know a whole lot about the Pacific coast or more than one little corner of Oregon, but I had the sneaking suspicion that we’d changed worlds again. How, and why, I didn’t know. They certainly hadn’t lugged us all this way down to Cranston’s place just to take us back to McInerney.
I looked in the drawer and found clothes there, and in the closet. Not funny clothes like we’d been given at Cranston’s but real clothes. Shirts, socks, pants, even jockey shorts with the label in them. Another drawer had women’s clothes, including panties and large bras, and the closet had others, from informal to a couple of dresses that looked like they could be real interesting if filled with a warm body. Maybe there was a different reason why they only gave us one set of funny clothes.
Brandy woke up with the same suddenness that I had, and looked around, then groaned and held her head. I turned and went over to her. “It passes pretty quickly, babe. How you feeling?”
“Oooh! Badder than I felt in a long time!”
I let her come out of it, got up and walked back over to the dresser. Her glasses were on top, and I picked them up and brought them back to her. She put them on, and started to look around. “New place again, huh?”
“Yeah, more to our style, anyway,” I told her.
In a few more minutes she was examining and then checking out some of the clothing. She found two boxes, one containing an assortment of jewelry and a cosmetic case, the other had a pair of watches along with a beard trimmer and comb set. Both watches were the digital-alarm type, one for men and one for women. They both said it was 10:34 on August 1. If that related at all to home, it had us gone less than two and a half weeks.
“Of course, it don’t say what year,” Brandy noted.
We slipped the watches on our wrists and began to get dressed, since that seemed the thing to do. Since we still seemed to be at the beach and the watches said it was August, Brandy went for shorts and a tee shirt and I decided on some slacks and a sport shirt. Shoes still felt wrong, but we both figured we’d better get used to them again. There was a pair of slip-on moccasins that fit nicely on my feet, and Brandy found some sandals. She debated the bra and decided not to, for now; although she’d always worn one and even slept with one for support, it had been a very long time.
“You tried the door?” she asked me.
I had to admit that I hadn’t. “It just didn’t occur to me,” I told her, walking over and turning the knob. The door opened, without a problem, on a narrow hallway. There was a bathroom right there, with clean linen, and we took the opportunity to wash our faces and get generally straightened out. Then it was time to see just where we were and what this was all about.
There was a modern kitchen with patio doors that led out to a patio, of all things. A girl was sitting out there in a skimpy bathing suit, relaxing in a lawn chair and sipping on a drink. She saw us and motioned for us to come out. It took me several seconds to realize that the girl was Jamie. She still had that short haircut, and I think I have bigger breasts than she’s got, but her body was lean, curvaceous, and unexpectedly feminine shorn of those boyish Robin Hood clothes. She had on sunglasses, which weren’t a bad idea in that sun.
“Well, hello! Back from the dead, I see,” the security agent said cheerfully in that London-cultured stage accent of hers. “There’s coffee and tea on, if you like, or cold drinks in the ’fridge. If you’re hungry I could do up some eggs and bangers or hunt up some fruit or sweet rolls. Won’t take a moment.”
Brandy looked at me. “Bangers?”
“I think they’re sausages.” I turned to Jamie. “I think some coffee and those rolls would do me. I think I’ve had my fill of apples and stuff like that for a while.”
“Maybe some iced tea and some of that fruit,” Brandy told her. “After what fruit did for me, I’m not gonna switch off.”
Jamie hopped up and ran into the house while we took seats around a round lawn table shaded with an umbrella stuck up through the center. This was quite nice, but it sure didn’t make any sense at all.
Jamie was back in less than five minutes with a tray that included what I wanted, and not only the iced tea but a whole bowl of fruit—apples, oranges, bananas, you name it. I tried the coffee and it tasted very bitter. I was about to complain about it, when I suddenly realized just how long I’d been between cups, even though I used to run on the stuff. I was always a black-coffee man, but this time I added some cream and sugar from a nice little tea service there and got it palatable.
Jamie took another chair at the table and relaxed. “So, how do you both feel?”
“Let me get something straight first,” I responded. “You are the same Jamie that came with us south on the train?”
She laughed. “Oh, yes. Mr. Cranston recommended me for assignment to you for a while, and no one who is ambitious ever turns down a promotion.”
“I thought you couldn’t stand the modern worlds,” Brandy put in.
“Oh, it’s not standing or not standing, it’s that one never has the choice of where to work if she wants the good jobs. I certainly wouldn’t like to retire here, or spend the rest of my life here, but I certainly don’t mind working here for a while. I admit I could get to like this sort of place very easily.”
I nodded. “Just where is this sort of place, if I may ask, and what was all that about slipping us both mickeys?”
“Mickeys? Oh, some sort of slang, I suppose. We needed to know just exactly whether you were what you claimed to be or not. There was no way to check on a switch in Horowitzes, as it were, somewhere along the line, particularly since you were involved in some nasty business with the wrong element. We couldn’t very well do much around the monastery, since if the Labyrinth is infiltrated we couldn’t know who we might trust up there in case they wanted to falsify the results. The beach house was perfect, and we could get some good technicians there in a hurry without arousing suspicion or alarm. They put you through the most awful tests, I’m afraid, but don’t feel singled out. I’ve been through them myself and will probably be through them again. Complete computer analysis of your entire body, psychiatric probes and analyses, various kinds of coercive interrogation, and all the rest. They know more about the two of you now than you know about each other, or yourselves. A great deal of who and what we are is in our genes and body chemistries, they tell me, and they can even read those codes.”
“I gather they were satisfied,” I said.
“Oh, yes. They’re quite impressed with you, you know. You tracked through that whole ugly Philadelphia business all the way to the plant, and then you infiltrated the plant, even though you had no idea what you were seeing. Then, faced with the evidence of something totally unbelievable, you accepted it and worked from there, even figured much of it out. That is impressive. They were also fascinated with you as a pair. In spite of vast differences in education, background, culture, whatever, the two of you have minds that seem to be very much alike. So much so that you almost know what the other is thinking when you’re concentrating on a common problem. What one lacks, the other has, so the fit is nearly seamless. Yet you’re so unlikely a couple to ever get together that you just prove the old rule that anything that might happen has or will happ
en.”
Both of us liked to hear that, although I suspected I’d rather skip the downside of the report.
“The proof of that is in your intelligence and aptitude measurements,” Jamie continued. “Individually, you’re not exceptionally above average, either of you, but together you have near-genius aptitudes in certain areas, such as puzzle solving and deductive reasoning. They like that, which is why we’re all here. ’Here,’ by the by, is a small island in the Bahamas group that is wholly owned by the Company. You are essentially home.”
The funny thing was, I wasn’t all that sure I wanted to be “home.” There wasn’t a whole lot here for us, after all. “So why the Bahamas and all this, then?” I asked her.
“We’ll know more when the Company personnel arrive, but I think they are going to offer you a job with the Company. Something in the line of work you’ve always followed.”
Brandy nodded. We had been expecting this, simply because we survived and remained in civilization. “Jamie—you’ve worked with them for a long time. I can’t say we aren’t interested, ’cause if they’re as thorough as you say they are, they already have a good idea we’ll take it, but what if we didn’t? I mean, I want to know if this is a real proposition or if we have a gun to our heads.”
She was silent for a moment, then said, “Well, it’s a bit of both, I suppose. They prize loyalty highly, for example. As Mr. Cranston told you, there’s a good bit of paranoia involved in this job, and you survive and prosper by not fighting it. You have already caused a lot of trouble not even knowing the facts. You could cause a lot more now that you do know, or, worse, you might get an offer from the traitors working against us. They probably wouldn’t kill you—they really don’t like people working for them under that sort of coercion since they’re so easily susceptible to being turned against the Company—but they would probably open a quick and temporary flag stop on a world without a station, very primitive, the sort of desert-island situation, and implant some sort of device that would prevent you ever traveling the Labyrinth again, and forget about you. I’m afraid, though, I can’t see where your reservations lie. You are being offered a great opportunity.”
“Their reservations, my dear, are that they are romantics and moralists at heart,” said a man’s voice behind us. We all turned, and even after all this time, both Brandy and I gasped.
Martin J. Whitlock IV, male, handsome, pepper-haired and nicely tanned, dressed in a colorful sport shirt and slacks and tennis shoes, walked over and pulled out the fourth and final chair around the lawn table and sat down. “Isn’t that right?”
We both continued to stare. Finally I managed, “The real Martin J. Whitlock the Fourth, I assume?”
He grinned. “You tracked me down at last. Not, I’m afraid, anywhere near Oregon, though.”
Jamie looked at him, and then at the two of us, and frowned. “You know each other?”
“Only by sight and reputation,” Brandy replied. “So we were right about the decoy business!”
“It got more and more convoluted as it went along,” Whitlock told us. “It was kind of insane to begin with, and so it fell apart in an insane way. We’ll get to that in a minute. Just now we were talking about morality, Mrs. Horowitz. You see, Jamie, she’s grown up in a pretty poor neighborhood where the pimps and the junkies battled for territory, and now she knows the relationship of that group to us. You were willing to work for that pig Nkrumah, though.”
“That was different,” she shot back. “That was crook against crook. You can’t insist your clients be perfect, but if it was Nkrumah goin’ after some poor sucker who skipped without payin’ ’cause he was scared for his wife and kids, I wouldn’ta touched it in a minute.”
Whitlock thought a moment. “You ever think of what organized crime really is today? I really didn’t, until I analyzed it from a strictly business viewpoint, because that’s just what it is—a business. It fills a gap in the system. People get up in arms about immorality, or want to legislate behavior, liberals and conservatives alike, and they outlaw all sorts of stuff—but it’s stuff that a large number of people in society want. Take loan sharking, for example. Anybody with any job at all, even a fry cook at McDonald’s, can get collateral credit for buying furniture, that kind of thing. Like any other bank, no loan shark will lend to somebody with no way or means to pay a loan back. They lend to the compulsive spenders, the compulsive gamblers, the people with long histories of stiffing credit companies, declaring bankruptcy, that sort of thing. Their own behavior has made it impossible for them to get credit. Nobody goes out on the street with a gun and says, ‘You will borrow a thousand dollars from a loan shark.’ They beat down the shark’s doors with pleas. The shark sees they have the ability to pay, but the basic collateral is fear. These are people who want or need to be coerced, frightened, forced into paying back the loan.”
“Yeah, and if you don’t, they break your legs,” she noted.
He shrugged. “That’s why the interest has to be so high. If you have to enforce the contract, you remove the guy’s ability to repay, and that cost is added on to everybody else’s loan. It’s a business, and a service people want. It’s just based on a fact of human nature the churches and politicians want to ignore or pretend isn’t there.”
“So you make crooks out of them to get the payback money,” I noted.
“Crooks don’t borrow from sharks, generally speaking. If you have to stick up a store to pay back the shark, you’re better off just sticking up the store in the first place and saving the interest.”
“Yeah, well, what about drugs?” Brandy pressed.
“Another good example. About twenty percent of the country uses illegal drugs regularly. I suspect you have. Nobody is forced to use them; they do it by choice, and sometimes through self-deception. Nobody thinks they can get hooked. But they’re so anxious to snort, smoke, or inject drugs into their bodies, they’ll buy anything from anybody. Even the amateurs get into the act—and then we have bloodletting, and innocents die. Organized, with a steady supply at a stable price, we keep the victimization generally to those who victimize themselves. We don’t force anyone to take anything; we just supply the demand because nobody legitimate would.”
“And cause a crime wave so they can feed their habits,” I pointed out.
“Yes and no. They got their drugs before there was organized crime, and they’ll get their drugs from somebody one way or the other, because that’s the kind of personalities they have. If the government legalized the stuff and doled it out, they’d stop that sort of thing. Otherwise, it’s going to happen regardless. The demand is there. It’s either a bunch of psychotic idiots or it’s a business organization maintaining a constant supply.”
He sighed and shifted in his chair. “You can do this with almost anything. No man was ever stopped on the street and had a knife put to his throat and told, ‘You will go have sex with this prostitute.’ Yeah, there are some forced into it, but you go talk to them sometime. You’ll find most took it for the easy money, or because they have no sense of their own worth, or they’re so insecure it’s a safe haven. I know you once thought about it, Brandy. I’ve read your file. Now, you were smart and attractive. You could have taken a basic job, a fry-cook job, got your GED, maybe gone to college or business school and gotten a career job. You know it. You think what your reasons were for considering going the whoring route, and you’ll see what I mean. Yeah, people get trapped in those jobs, but people get trapped in lots of ugly jobs because they’re stupid or don’t think straight or have too many romantic visions. We don’t trap them, they trap themselves.”
He was pretty good at rationalizing, and I knew the arguments from old. They were the same kind of arguments vice cops gave for going on the pad, and many of them were valid. “You mean those kids who get kidnapped and forced into kiddie porn trapped themselves?” I asked him.
“Of course not. They’re the dregs of the business and I wouldn’t have anything to do with them. I ha
ve kids, too. If I found them under a rock, I’d turn them in. The problem is, when you’re working a business that is predicated on the idea of supplying goods and services that people want but can’t otherwise get, you spawn imitators, spinoff businesses, that fill the gaps even you won’t. Somewhere there are organizations that kidnap blue-eyed blondes for the harems of Middle Eastern princes, but that’s not us. It’s just the proof that wherever there is a demand, somebody will supply it. General Ordering and Development doesn’t even do the criminal stuff. They just use it because it’s there, and it can’t be stopped until human nature is radically altered. It’s an unpleasant pattern that works well, world after world, because corruption is itself easily corrupted. There are countless worlds, and they don’t have many people for them, but they can’t take but so many natives into their confidence or their existence is blown, their operation compromised. Crooks take the money and don’t ask questions even when the requests are pretty weird. Big crooks have resources, established channels of information—connections to almost every major business, industry, and government institution—and an insular, underground economy ready to use. We use it.”
“You say ‘we,’ ” Brandy noted. “I gather you’re with the Company, but are you the native Martin Whitlock?”
He chuckled. “Sure. I am—was—one of the district managers for Company Operations. At the start, it was just the matter of getting huge accounts for the bank when we were expanding to full multistate operation. They sized me up, liked what they saw, and realized that my position was excellent for handling operations here in the east. I jumped at it, but it was pretty unnerving for a while. While I was training, they brought in another Marty Whitlock, and I mean another me. So close he knew all my friends and family. His whole life paralleled mine to an incredible degree, except for one important and glaring difference. He was gay.”
I took in a breath. “Women’s clothing, too, I suppose?”
The Labyrinth Of Dreams Page 19
