Dying Space td-47

by Warren Murphy

  "What's the Volga going to do that's so terrible? Bomb us? Don't we have rockets and things to stop that?"

  "Bombing is the least of the Volga's functions," Smith said. "I've arranged for your passage on a special diplomatic envoy plane at 11:45 tonight. It'll take you there faster than any commercial

  jet." "I can't leave yet," Remo said. 'I'm not working

  right. My balance is off."

  "How long will it take you to correct that?" Smith asked uncertainly.

  "Chiun," Remo called. "How long before I'm well?"

  "Ten years."

  "He says ten years, Smitty," Remo said.

  Smith snorted into the phone. "Get to Russia. Now." And hung up.

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  CHAPTER TWELVE

  "What's the matter with you? The oscilloscope needle just went off the scale." The professor checked all the electrodes hooked into Mr. Gor-dons's exposed metal chest cavity, blowing away clouds of talcum that fell from her artificially white hair.

  "They're activated."

  "What's activated?" the professor asked, alarmed.

  "My dormant memory banks," he said.

  "Which circuit?" She milled around the maze of wires excitedly.

  "F-42,1 think. To the right."

  "That's it, that's it!" She held the delicate little wire reverently. "Your creator was a genius." She beamed, the penciled-in wrinkles of her face radiating serenely. "A genius. Now, if I can modify the connection with F-26 . . ."

  She joined two fuses with a tiny soldering iron

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  and replaced them in Mr. Gordons's circuitry. "And if these new silver transistors melt with the heat of the fusion between D-641 and N-22 • . ." She fiddled with a mass of small wire terminals at the rear of Mr. Gordons's chest.

  "How long will they take to melt?"

  "Can't tell. Maybe never. It'll depend on the amount of use you give your higher intelligence centers. If you spend a lot of time thinking—you know, resolving problems, things like that—you'll activate the heat anodes."

  Mr. Gordons blinked in confusion. "I don't understand, Mom. What will happen?"

  The professor took a step back to admire her work. "Why, you'll start developing creativity, bird brain. What do you think I've been slaving over these transistors for?"

  "Creativity?" Mr. Gordons's hands began to tremble. "I can have creativity? Really?"

  "Maybe. No promises. But your memory banks—that's a definite. You should be able to remember everything now."

  "Oh, Mom," Mr. Gordons said. "You're the genius. Did you know that the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg has a population density of 360.36 persons per square mile?"

  The professor stared at him, dumbfounded. "So what?"

  "I remembered. I'm remembering all kinds of things. Cheddar cheese has a food energy count of 115 calories per ounce. Julius Caesar subdued the native tribes of Gaul from 57 to 52 b.c. The cube root of 1,035 is 10.12, to two decimal places. French explorer Jacques Cartier is gener-

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  ally regarded as the founder of Canada. I have to kill Remo Williams."

  "What? Who?"

  "That's the name of that man I thought looked familiar. Remo Williams. He threatens my survival. Therefore, I must kill him. Thanks for the memory."

  She snapped the wire out. "Look, you're a nice little robot that tracks missiles. Period. If you keep going around bumping off people, we're not going to have any time to monitor the Volga. Just forget all this murder business."

  Mr. Gordons snapped the F-42 wire back in. "No," he said coldly. "I cannot forget, now that my memory banks are repaired. Remo Williams is a dangerous man. He and another named Chiun twice dismembered me. The last time, they burned my parts."

  "Commie bastards," the professor said.

  "They are not Communists. They work for— shhh." Suddenly Mr. Gordons shot out of his chair and stood bolt upright. "He is traveling."

  "That's a relief," the professor said. "Now maybe the little nebshit'11 leave us alone, and we can all get to work. He was awfully cute, though," she remembered wistfully.

  "The transmitter I planted in his back is broadcasting from the air. He is moving very quickly. Far away."

  "Well, easy come, easy go."

  "I must seek him out," Mr. Gordons said. On, come on.

  "I must kill him."

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  His words sent shivers up her spine. "But you can't leave," she cried.

  "I must."

  "You are a robot, do you hear me? My robot, my LC-111. I am not letting you out of my sight again. The Volga's due to launch any day. I've got to be with you to adjust the coordinates."

  Mr. Gordons's voice was cold and chilling, and for the first time since he had walked into her laboratory, Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes felt a tinge of fear.

  "I am not your LC-111. I am a survival machine, created to assimilate all materials necessary so that I may prevail. This Remo Williams is a threat to my survival, and so I will follow him to his destination and I will destroy him. I will do it now before he knows of my existence and is expecting my attack. I think this is a very creative approach to this problem. If you insist upon monitoring me, there is only one possible solution. You go with me. I will let you watch me pull his arms out of his sockets. Mom."

  "Oh, no," the professor said, backing away. "I'm not taking off on any wild goose chase. He's probably just on vacation, anyway. Be back in a day or so."

  "Then I must go alone."

  The professor exhaled deeply. "I'll go pack," she said.

  "You're the greatest," Mr. Gordons shouted, rumpling her old-lady hairdo affectionately. The professor choked on the swirling talcum. "Go to bed, Gordons."

  "But we have to leave."

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  "Tomorrow. I'm beat."

  "Now."

  The professor looked at her watch. "It's after midnight. I've got all this mother crap on me. I haven't even had my evening cocktail yet."

  "Then I must go alone," Mr. Gordons said for the second time in thirty seconds.

  "Sheesh," the professor said, rolling her eyes. "Okay. Just let me get my bag." She took one look at the lab, a blizzard" of papers and spilled concoctions since the death of her assistant, then abandoned the idea of retrieving her purse; it was a lost cause. She grabbed a bottle of Tanqueray instead and tucked it under her arm. "Let's go, you spoiled brat," she said.

  In the parking lot of Los Angeles International Airport, Mr. Gordons looked to the sky and turned one full revolution, his arms spread wide like a radar tracker. "He is headed due northeast," he said. "He is headed for Russia."

  "How can you know that?" the professor said.

  "His speed and altitude rule out a nearer landing. And if he were going anywhere else in Europe, he would not be following so northerly a path."

  Dr. Payton-Holmes chugged three fingers from the gin bottle she held and belched. "I want to know how we are going to get on a plane going due northeast or anywhere else," she said. "There are things in there called metal detectors." She waved the bottle toward the main international terminal. "You're 97.6641 percent stainless steel, you know. Their detection systems will light

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  up like Christmas trees when they see you coming. Not to mention the fact that we have no money for tickets."

  "We have no need for tickets," Mr. Gordons said. He took her hand and walked with her to the far end of the terminal building. A heavy chain-link fence sealed off the outside world from any connection with the runway area. As she watched in horror, Mr. Gordons extended his right hand toward the fence. Before her eyes, his fingers seemed to shudder and then change from apparent flesh and blood to two hard steel claws. Faster than she could follow, he used the snippers to cut through the links of the fence. When there was a hole big enough for them to walk through, the clippers changed back to a hand.

  "I don't believe it," she said. "I saw it but I don't believe it."

  Up ahead, a Laker Airways DC-10 was slowly pulling
away from the terminal building.

  "You wait here for a moment," Mr. Gordons said.

  A moment later, she saw Mr. Gordons walking along the wing of the DC-10. So did the pilot because the plane screeched to a stop.

  "My God," she gasped, clutching at her hair with both hands. Clouds of white billowed from her head.

  As she watched, Mr. Gordons yanked open the plane's door. He vanished inside, and a moment later, the plane began slowly rolling back toward the loading area. Dr. Payton-Holmes, frightened but unable to fight her curiosity, walked toward the plane.

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  J r

  It rolled up to the passenger entrance chute, then stopped. Above her head, she could hear passengers walking from the plane, through the enclosed canvas rampway, back to the terminal. The back door of the plane opened, and a folding ladder was dropped down to the tarmac. In the doorway, she saw Mr. Gordons, resplendent in a pilot's uniform.

  "Hurry, Mom," he said.

  She ran up the steps, and Mr. Gordons retracted the ladder and closed the door behind her. Almost all the passengers were off the plane now. A few looked at Mr. Gordons quizzically.

  "Had a little problem with one of them there red lights on the control panel," he drawled.

  "Why are you talking like that?" the professor asked.

  "All pilots are Southern," Gordons said. "Don't you watch TV?" He turned back to the mike. "Y'all be back on just soon as Ah check out that there light," he said.

  In the cockpit, Dr. Payton-Holmes was shocked to see the bodies of the pilot and copilot stuffed unceremoniously in a corner. The pilot was unclothed. It was his uniform that Mr. Gordons wore.

  "They resisted," he said. "They did not understand how important it was for me to follow this Remo Williams now."

  He put the professor in the copilot's seat, then sat alongside her. He used his pilot's voice again to call the tower.

  "Tower," he drawled, "this is Laker One-Niner. Sorry, a little slow getting into that takeoff pat-

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  tern, but let's try it again, fellas." He nodded to a voice that crackled back into earphones he was wearing, powered up his engines, and began to back the plane away from the passenger ramp.

  As he moved smoothly toward the runway, the professor said, "You ever fly one of these before?"

  "No," Mr. Gordons said.

  "You know how?"

  "It is a machine. I am a machine. I understand it."

  "You know everything about it?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you know where they keep those little bottles of liquor?" Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes asked, just as, with a squeal of burning rubber, the plane sped down the runway for takeoff.

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  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Major Grigori Seminov walked past the twenty-four armed guards outside the imposing white marble building that was Moscow Center. His breath puffed out in clouds in the cold October air as he polished his monocle on the lapel of his army overcoat.

  The monocle had been a present from his uncle, one of the hordes of peasant revolutionaries whose claim to fame in the blossoming People's Party of 1917 consisted of assisting in the raid on the mansion of Count Yevgeny Vladishenko, after murdering the count, his family, their servants, and all their dogs and horses. And two canaries.

  To show the unenlightened skeptics of the region that the revolution represented a new era for the common man, the newly assembled Bolshevik brigade left the dismembered bodies of the slain aristocrats on the open road to rot. To demonstrate that the new order did not need the

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  decadent wealth of landowners like the count, they burned his fields and storehouses. As a result, disease and famine swept the conquered grounds, and the victors faced deaths far worse than their victims had.

  For his part in the bloody battle, the elder Sem-inov received a new home, comprised of one room in the Vladishenko mansion, which he and his wife shared with twelve other families who sang songs to the glory of Lenin.and the conquering Bolsheviks while their children succumbed to starvation and typhus.

  Before he himself died of tuberculosis in the squalid room, Seminov dispatched his wife to warn his brother's family in Moscow to leave Russia.

  "We have made a great mistake," were his dying words.

  It took Maria Seminov several weeks to reach Moscow. October turned to November, and all the horses had either been butchered for meat or confiscated by the new Red Army. Her feet blistered with the cold.

  When finally she reached the small house of her husband's brother, his wife, and their son, Grigori, she wept tears of joy. They welcomed her proudly. The news of the takeover of the Vladishenko estate had already spread as far as Moscow, although the gruesome fate of the diseased and dying families now occupying the mansion was never mentioned in the reports.

  "My brother died a hero," Grigori's father said, swollen with pride and Russian grief on hearing of Seminov's death.

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  "No, no. You've got it wrong. There is nothing heroic about dying from filth and stupidity." Maria Seminov told them of the rampant disease in the mansion, about the lack of doctors or medicine or food or horses.

  "Not in front of the boy," Grigori's mother said.

  "He should know," Maria said stubbornly. "This revolution in the name of the people is just another military game. Common folk like us are dying everywhere, without even our own beds to die in. They will take everything, these Bolsheviks . . . make slaves of us all. We must leave Russia before it is too late."

  "Excuse me," Grigori said. "I have to go to sleep now."

  "Yes, of course." Maria kissed the child and gave him the monocle his uncle had looted during his misguided moment of military fervor. "He wanted you to have this," she said. "It once belonged to a great man, a man who fed and cared for all the people who worked his lands. Perhaps one day you will be a great man, too."

  "I'd like that," the boy said. In his room, Grigori climbed out the window and slid silently to the drifted snow beneath. It was night. The streets were nearly empty of civilians. Only the-soldiers clomp-clomped back and forth across the snow-packed streets, their rifles at

  the ready.

  Grigori approached one cautiously.

  "What do you want?" the soldier demanded.

  "There is a traitor to the revolution in my house," Grigori Seminov said.

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  After his aunt had been dragged away screaming, Grigori stood before a small mirror in his bedroom and placed the monocle in his eye for the first time. And in the enlarged, fisheye view of himself he saw with satisfaction a cruelty that would make him among the most feared men of the Party.

  Seminov breathed deeply as he took in the view of Red Square from the top of the steps leading to Moscow Center. The great revolution must have begun on a day just like this one, he mused. Cold, clear, still except for a distant buzzing in the square. A buzzing that was growing louder.

  He squinted through his monocle at the widening cluster of people. He sprinted down the steps. The officials at Moscow Center would not tolerate sudden outbursts of the populace. They knew well what happened the last time the masses were permitted to express discontent with those in power.

  "Move aside," he commanded, kicking his way through the crowd. The throng parted, and Grigori Seminov stepped into the inner circle of activity.

  The source of the commotion appeared to be two men dancing with one another and yelling in foreign tongues. One of them, jittering and swaying crazily, wore only a pair of American-style trousers and a cotton T-shirt in the twenty-degree October chill. The other, an aged Oriental, was garbed in flowing orange silk robes and clutching at the other angrily.

  "Breathe, fool," Chiun shrieked, shaking Remo

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  by the shoulders. "I knew we shouldn't have made this trip. No country in the world will hire an assassin who sounds as if he has castanets for joints."

  Seminov shouted an order at the two men, the Russian equivalent
of "No loitering."

  Chiun snapped out the Korean equivalent of "Get away, mongoose dung."

  "Will you guys please quiet down?" Remo said in English. "I'm trying to concentrate."

  "You are American," Seminov said with disdain. , "Show your papers."

  "I don't have time," Remo said. "I'm breathing."

  "You will take time, imperialist warmonger," the Russian said, preparing to boot the young American to attention. He never got the chance. Just as he began to pull his foot backward for the swing, Remo's leg shot wildly into the air, of its own volition, and landed with a thwack in Semi-nov's midriff. The Russian's head snapped upward. His monocle popped into the air. As his mouth opened wide to let out a whoosh of breath, the eyepiece spiraled into his gullet. Seminov sputtered it out, his eyes round and furious.

  "You will pay for this," he snarled. "You and your Japanese capitalist friend."

  Chiun's mouth dropped open. "Japanese? Did I hear this fat person in the horse blanket call me a Japanese?"

  "Help me up, Chiun," Remo said, coiling and uncoiling weirdly on the ground.

  "Japanese?" he asked again as the twenty-four

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  Red Guards came running, their weapons trigger-ready. He walked up to one of the guards, who was kneeling and getting a bead on Chiun. "Stop waving that thing at me," he said irritably. The guard didn't pay attention. That was his first mistake.

  He squeezed the trigger. That was his next and last mistake.

  In a flash of billowing orange, Chiun leaped into the air and took off the soldier's head with his toe. Another raised the butt of his rifle to lunge at the old man, but gave up when the bayonet on the barrel passed through his own chest.

  "Hold, old man," Seminov said in his best field commander's voice. Chiun turned to look at him.

  "Perhaps my men cannot kill you. But they can certainly kill that piece of carrion behind you." He nodded toward Remo. "Is that what you wish?"

  Involuntarily, Chiun took a step back toward Remo as if to shield him with his own body. The twenty-two remaining guards raised their rifles and took aim at Remo.

  "Looks like they got us," Remo whispered to Chiun.

  "I hope they keep you," Chiun said, "so I can return to living a life of peace and dignity."