Dying Space td-47

by Warren Murphy

  "What are you talking about?" Dickey shrieked from across the room, still afraid to move. "He's from Washington. He's here to.help us find the LC-111."

  "He's a friend of mine," the professor piped quickly. Dickey sucked in a gulp of air in surprise.

  "Professor—"

  "Shut up! Go to one of the other labs. Leave us alone."

  "But I was only trying—"

  "Get out of here, Dickey. Now!"

  The assistant slinked out of the lab, his face a mask of bewilderment.

  "Look, whoever you are . . ." the woman said.

  "Remo. Call me Remo."

  "Hi, Remo," the garbageman said happily. "Did you like that?" he asked.

  Remo winced. Something was stirring in his memory, something long forgotten except for a faint twinge of an emotion something like . . . He searched his mind for what it was, but it had escaped him. Still, there was something familiar about the man in the garbageman's clothes. Familiar and ... dreadful.

  "Your voice sounds familiar," Remo mused aloud.

  "I feel I know you, as well," the garbageman said, his eyes riveting on Remo's. His voice sounded strangely flat.

  "Listen, Remo," said Dr. Payton-Holmes. "If you want to find that LC-111, you talk to that

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  goddamn faggot, Dickey. He didn't have his entry pass when he showed up today. He probably gave it to some other fag in a leather bar, and they sneaked in here to take my computer and do unspeakable things to it." She lowered her voice. "The little pansy's a fellow traveler. Find out whose toes he was sucking last night and you'll find my LC-111. Hurry. Before he escapes."

  "Okay," Remo said. He walked to the door. Outside in the hallway, Ralph Dickey was waiting for him.

  "Something fishy is going on here," Dickey said.

  "I had the same idea," Remo said.

  "Look, let's go someplace and talk," Dickey said.

  "Sweet," said Remo.

  Dickey took Remo to the university cafeteria. Shouting above the din of rock music, clanking plates, and a food fight at the next table, he told Remo that he didn't trast the professor and he didn't trust that garbageman.

  "And another thing. The garbage is always picked up around here on Wednesday. That's today. But somebody took it last night."

  "Where's it go?" Remo asked. "The city dump?"

  "No. We've got a private service. The Hollywood Disposal Service."

  "Like that guy in the lab?" Remo said.

  "Right."

  Dickey's manicured fingers were twirling the hair on Remo's wrists. "I think we ought to talk this over a lot," he said.

  "What happened to your entrance card?" Remo said.

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  "I lost it last night. I'll take you to a place with quiet nv'Sic and paper lanterns."

  "I think I'm going to be busy being heterosexual," Remo said.

  "I was only trying to be friendly," Dickey said. .

  "I've got too many friends as it is," Remo said.

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  Í

  CHAPTER SIX

  "I am Mr. Gordons. I am an android. I was created four years ago by a woman scientist. I am a survival machine."

  "You're a bullshit artist," said Dr. Frances Pay-ton-Holmes. "But you're cute. I'll admit that. Got a drink on you, Gordons?"

  "I do not drink beverages. They are harmful to my components. But I understand your craving for alcohol. My creator was also an alcoholic; I seem always to be involved with females who are alcoholics. My creator named me for her favorite libation. My predecessors, Messrs. Seagrams and Gilbeys, were less perfect mechanisms than me," he said proudly.

  "Must be great to be so wonderful," the professor muttered.

  "I must have been programmed to be wonderful," Mr. Gordons mused. "Otherwise I wouldn't

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  be. You see, I can only perform what I was programmed to do."

  "Yeah, yeah," she said. "See here. I don't know about this android stuff, but I want to know about that writing on your foot."

  "I am troubled," Mr. Gordons said.

  "Join the club."

  "The man who was just here, the one in the black T-shirt," he began.

  "What about him?"

  "I know him from somewhere, but I cannot recall where."

  "Oh, to hell with him. Where's the frigging LC-111?"

  "Let me explain from the beginning," Mr. Gordons said. "I was somehow disassembled at a point in time I no longer recall, due to certain damaged mechanisms in my memory banks."

  The professor looked ceilingward.

  "I was deposited in a repository for unusable artifacts." He glanced down at Verbanic's uniform and picked at the Hollywood Disposal Service emblem on its pocket. "This one."

  "The dump? You were living in a dump?"

  "I was disassembled, and my necessary components destroyed. Not until your computer was placed in the same location could I amalgamate its parts and become functional again. You see, I am an assimilator."

  "A what?"

  "An assimilator. As long as one of my components remains intact, I have the capability to reassemble myself. My creator programmed this

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  capability into me. As I've said before, I am a survival machine."

  The professor was stunned. "The LC-111 is part of you?"

  He nodded. "I assimilated it."

  The professor shrieked. "My baby! My darling LC-111 in a garbage dump!"

  "Fortunately, your computer was in excellent repair, and I was able to use all its parts."

  She looked at him askance. "Do you expect me to believe that you're really a robot?"

  "An android. I have human features."

  "And what do you know about the LC-111?" she asked suspiciously.

  "I know everything about it."

  "Liar. No one knows everything about that computer. Not even me, and I built it."

  "I do. For example, I know that the fourth cathode in the laser transmission is faulty, which accounts for a 1/250-per-second lapse. Unaware of the cause of this problem, you undoubtedly corrected for it by connecting an entire new terminal." He pointed at one of the three remaining computers on the table. "That one, most likely."

  The professor was incredulous. "The fourth cathode? How could that be?"

  "Moisture absorption through a hairline crack at the base."

  "Of course!" she exulted. "That could have done it. It took two years of work on that booster terminal—hey, why am I telling you this? How did you know about the frigging fourth cathode?"

  Mr. Gordons stared at her blankly. "I have already told you. I am the LC-111."

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  She clasped the back of her chair. "You can't be. You've got to be some kind of Commie. . . ." She tested him. "What is the binomial sequence of the tape labeled 23-1002?" she asked slyly.

  He cocked his head to the side.

  "See? A fake. I knew it—"

  "01, 0110, 0001, 1100, 010, 001001, 100, 11 ..."

  The professor's gasp swallowed up the silence in the room. "How could you? How could you know that?"

  "000,1010, 0110,00110," he said.

  She threw her arms around him. "Darling, you've come home!"

  A glimmer formed in Mr. Gordons's depthless eyes. "You understand. No one since my creator has been able to understand me."

  "I understand, baby. Listen—01, 11001, 01111."

  "Please," Mr. Gordons said, blushing. "No one's ever said that to me before."

  "Don't be silly. I'm your mother. I changed your transistors when you were just a little batch of wires. 10010,00110-"

  "Oh, Motherl"

  "There, there," she said, patting his hair. "No one will ever take you from me again."

  "Can you fix my memory data transceivers?"

  "Of course, baby. Mothers can do everything."

  "Everything?"

  "Everything."

  "In that case, there is one other thing I've always wanted," Mr. Gordons said shyly.

  "Tell m
e, darling."

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  Mr. Gordons looked up to her hopefully. "Creativity," he said. "I want to be creative. I want to think independently. I want to be free."

  The professor scratched her head thoughtfully. "I don't know if that's possible," she said. "And even if it were, what would happen if I gave you creativity? You wouldn't follow your programming."

  The android cast his eyes downward. "I thought you'd say something like that."

  The room returned to silence. Awkwardly, the professor put her arm around Mr. Gordons's shoulders. "Aw, I've always been a sucker for an ugly face," she said. "I'll see what I can do."

  "Really?"

  "No harm trying."

  Slowly he took her hand in his. When he spoke, his voice was scratchy. "Thank you, Mom," he said.

  The sound of soft footfalls brought them both to attention. "Dickey, is that you?" the professor called.

  "Yes," he answered from the corridor. Dickey strode into the lab defiantly. "That cute man from Washington knows everything. I don't know what kind of hocus pocus you're into with this garbage-man, but he's going to put a stop to it."

  Mr. Gordons rose. "This man must not continue talking about me," he said. "It will endanger my survival. I must stop him."

  "Over my dead body, you will," Ralph Dickey said.

  Mr. Gordons walked toward him. "Precisely."

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  "Don't bother about him," the professor said. "Get back here, Gordons." "I'll just be a minute, Mom." "Mom?" Dickey backed away from Mr. Gordons. "What's going on here? Hey, get away from me, you. Stop him, Professor." But Mr. Gordons already had the lab assistant by the scruff of the neck and was leading him out of the lab. "Hey, quit it. ... Where are you taking me? ... Help! Professor, stop him. Help!"

  "Serves you right, you wimp. Gordons, find out where he hides the booze, while you're at it."

  There was a scuffle, then silence. After a few minutes, Ralph Dickey walked back into the lab, his anxious face now composed and blank.

  "What'd you do?" The professor leaped out of her chair. "What'd you do with my baby, you worthless bum?" Dickey wound his arms around the professor. "Get away!" she hollered. "Where's Gordons?"

  "I'm here, Mom," he said lovingly. "Don't be an ass. I know who you are." "I am Mr. Gordons," he insisted. He pulled something out of his lab coat pocket. It was a key. "I believe you requested this."

  She stared at it in amazement for a moment, then snatched the key out of Mr. Gordons's hand and ran straight for a steel and asbestos cabinet. "It works," she shrieked as the door to the cabinet flew open. With religious gravity, she lifted a gin bottle and held it aloft. "I've got the gin, Dickey," she taunted. "I'm Mr. Gordons."

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  She reached in for another bottle. "Here's the vermouth."

  "The components for a martini. My creator's favorite drink."

  The professor rooted around inside the cabinet, then began a frantic search through the laboratory. "Damn, damn, damn it to hell!" she yelled.

  «XT • "

  No ice.

  "Just a moment." Mr. Gordons went to the sink, dribbled some water into his cupped hands, and squeezed. A moment later a dozen ice cubes tinkled into a glass beaker. "For you, Mom," he said, holding out the beaker to her. She grabbed it, sniffed the vermouth, filled the beaker with gin, and downed it. "I like you better this way, Ralph. Now just find Gordons for me and I'll let you keep your job."

  "But I am Mr. Gordons," the man who looked like Ralph Dickey said. "I was given the capability to change form when my survival demands that I disguise my appearance."

  She polished off another beaker. And another. "Prove it," she said.

  As she was' pouring the fourth beaker of gin down her throat, Mr. Gordons stretched and twisted, squatted, and turned his back to her. He made sounds like metallic squeaks and crunching gears as he twirled into a blur. The professor polished off the bottle and began another as Mr. Gordons continued his strange motion. When at last he came to a stop, nothing remained of Mr. Gordons—or Dickey, or Verbanic—except a metal cube dotted with lights and wires.

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  The gin bottle shattered on the floor. "The LC-111," the professor moaned.

  "It's me, Mom," came a familiar flat voice from inside the cube.

  The professor reeled forward. "I think I'm going to be sick," she said, staggering into the corridor. From the ladies' room she emitted a Tarzanlike yell, then returned to the lab to face Mr. Gordons, who had resumed the form of Ralph Dickey. She leaned in the doorway, her face green and stricken. "There's a naked body in there," she said with hushed urgency. "It looks just like you."

  "It is your assistant, I'm afraid," he said. "The man in the T-shirt who was here earlier is of some danger to me. I cannot know what that danger is until my memory banks are repaired, but the probability is high that your assistant jeopardized my survival by speaking with him. Undoubtedly they spoke of me. For that reason, I was forced to abandon my former persona of the garbageman and adopt Mr. Dickey's."

  The professor raised a trembling hand to her forehead. "Let me get this straight. You killed Dickey—and then changed your face so that you look like him?"

  "That is correct."

  "Did you do the same thing to that garbageman?"

  "Yes. It was necessary for my survival."

  "And you're still the LC-111?"

  "Among other programming devices, yes."

  Her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Gordons," she sighed. "The garbageman was ugly enough. I

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  don't know if I can stand my son looking like Ralph Dickey."

  "Beauty is only skin deep," he said.

  "What if the cops come for you?"

  "I'll kill them too, Mom," Mr. Gordons said reassuringly.

  Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes wept in her son's mechanical arms. It was heartbreaking to be a mother.

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  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mikhail Andreyev Istoropovich was not the sort of man who enjoyed getting his hands dirty. The son of two prominent Party officials, he had been reared in an atmosphere of relative luxury, enjoying the company of the astute políticos who surrounded his father in the big Moscow apartment, and honing his mind on Lenin and chess at the family dacha on the Black Sea in the summers. When he was at university, he was recruited, as he had expected to be, into the ranks of the Moscow Center intelligence network.

  He was groomed from the first to become one of the Soviet Union's growing legion of cold-war master spies. Istoropovich came well prepared for the Center's grueling three-year training program. His English and Cantonese were as fluent as any American's or Chinese's. He had made it a point to excel in engineering and physics, his chosen fields at school, because he knew that these sub-

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  jects would be of value to the Party and, consequently, to his future. His father had tutored him in foreign affairs and economics from a young age, so that by the time the Center recruited him, he was fully conversant not only with the issues of the day, but with the full background of most of them as well. He flew through the Center's program with honors, and his young career was not hurt by the fact that he was handsome, healthy, and ambitious.

  His one flaw, if it could be called a flaw, was that he hated women. He hated their softness, their cloying sexuality. But again, his aversion for females did not affect his work for the worse. On the contrary, a spy not tempted by the spell of swelling bosoms and undulating hips was a rare and sought-after commodity in Moscow Center.

  He was perfect for his job. Mikhail Andreyev Istoropovich was born to be a star blazing under deep cover on foreign soil.

  He had not, unfortunately, expected the foreign soil to belong to the Hollywood Disposal Service. Nor had he intended his highly skilled hands to be burrowing into half an acre of damp, stinking garbage dotted with broken glass and the decomposing remains of deceased household animals.

  As he cut himself for the fifth time on the edge of a crushed can of Mallo
w-Fluff, he roundly cursed America and all it stood for, most particularly its undisciplined garbagemen, who picked up a university's trash whenever they felt like it. In Russia, picking up the garbage an hour early was grounds for dismissal; missing the schedule by an entire day would require punishment be-

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  ginning with flogging and leading to more memorable disciplinary action.

  He was not a happy man. Compounding his misery was his observation, after slipping on a mackerel of indeterminate age, that the Hollywood Disposal Service was being overrun by local citizens stepping gingerly over the rubble and exclaiming to one another as they displayed broken bits of trash with what seemed to be great pride.

  "Eek!" shrieked a young woman as she waved a swatch of gray cloth over her head. "It's Dustin Hoffman's jockey shorts! I found them! Oh, I can't believe it." One of her hands flew to her chest as the girl simulated orgasmic ecstasy. The other held the torn underpants aloft.

  Another young woman snatched the treasure away from its discoverer, examining the block printing inside the waistband. "Hey, this don't say Dustin Hoffman."

  "It says Hoffman, don't it?" the girl yelled in defense of the garment.

  "Aah, lots of guys are named Hoffman. And that's just the laundry's writing, anyway. It's in magic marker. No monogram, nothing." With disdain, she shunted the unauthenticated shorts back to the girl who had found them.

  "They're his, all right," the girl pouted.

  She was dressed mostly in makeup. Thick black and red lines outlined her eyes like a Hollywood version of Nefertiti, and her lips were slashed bright purple. Her hair was dyed a bizarre shade of electric blue, and was cropped into a USMC-style crew cut. Below the neck the girl sported a black leatherette vest, a grimy white plastic mini-

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  skirt that, Istoropovich noted, had gone out of style even in Russia, and a pair of scuffed red ankle-length boots. To Istoropovich's horror, she regained her composure and was walking straight toward him.

  He tried to right himself, but as soon as he got his footing in the mire, he slipped again and went sprawling on his face.

  "Hi," the girl said breathily. "Checking out the garbage of the stars? It's really incredible, isn't it?"

  "What's incredible?" Istoropovich asked crank-

  «y-

  She smiled vacantly. "This. Everything. Life." She extended a hand to him. "My name's Helen. Helen Wheels."