Don't want to get too close to the perimeter guards, he reminded himself. He punched the release button, splashed into the water, and sank to the bottom.
"WHAT WAS that?" the patrolwoman said, lifting her head. She put down her coffee, unstrapped her varigun, and stepped out the door onto the pier to look out onto the calm Mediterranean ocean. Her partner went out the other door. Themistocles Haloulakous raised his massive, curling eyebrows up on his Sun-weathered forehead until they almost touched his orange Cap of Contact. A well-deserved self-satisfied smile spread over his face. He glanced at the clock. Right on time. And he had lured the patrol inside so they didn't see anything.
It had taken months of cajoling and flirting with the patrol-women to get them to include a stop at his pierside taverna in their patrol routine. But he had once trained show-horses to dance, and if you can teach a horse to dance, you can certainly teach a dumb patroler to drink on stimulus. He came out from behind his counter and walked out onto the pier. The patrol-woman had placed her varigun on the rail and was scanning the surface of the water with her infrared binoculars.
The other patrolwoman came over from the opposite side of the pier. "Do you think we should report it, Sergeant?"
The sergeant hesitated. They should not have been in the cafe for longer than it took to get a cup of coffee and use the toilet. Even then, one of them should have stayed outside looking.
"It was probably just some dolphins fooling around," Themistocles said, smiling broadly at the sergeant. "One of the male dolphins must have had a horny dream, and when he woke up, he tried to take advantage of some sleepy little virgin girl dolphin." He grinned and leered at the sergeant, twisting his large curly mustache in an exaggerated fashion. The sergeant blushed, then turned stern.
"Must have been dolphins, Private," she said to the other patrolwoman. "Whatever made that splash would have had to be big, and there's nothing out there now. Let's get back onto patrol."
"Au revoir, Michelle. Sayonara, Michiko," Themistocles said. "See you tomorrow night. I will have a new espresso with cream and chocolate in it for you next time."
He bustled around their patrol wagon, opening the doors for them and helping them into their seats, implanting a gallant kiss on the backs of their hands as he did so. He stayed at the end of the dock, waving them good-bye until they were out of sight. It was nearly midnight and there were no customers in the taverna, so he sent the busboy home and locked the door. Just before he turned out the lights he looked around the taverna one last time. He would not miss it.
Themistocles' home was under the taverna. It was a lousy place to live, with no view during the daytime except that of the sides of boats unloading food supplies during the morning and taking away garbage in the afternoon. Damp, too. But at least he didn't live in the city where his every move would be observed by the Watchers.
He had video cameras in his apartment, of course. Everyone on the Island of God had cameras in his apartment, even the bathrooms. The salt water was hard on the cables and equipment, though, and the occasional failures had given Themistocles many opportunities over the years to get work done when the cameras were not reporting his activities back to the Watchers and their monitor computers.
As he opened the door at the bottom of the steps leading to his rooms, his elbow pushed firmly on a decorative tile set in the wall and a video recorder interrupted the signal coming from the Watcher camera inside the living room and replaced it with a video picture of Themistocles entering his apartment, fixing a snack, and after a long yawn and stretch with his head tilted way back looking at the ceiling, finally sitting down to watch a late-night movie on the television. Themistocles had written the script, so he went through the identical motions of making the snack, so that the eye in his Cap of Contact would report the same actions the substitute video signal was reporting. During the long stretch, when the cap eye was looking at nothing but ceiling, he deftly took the bust of Homer from his bookshelf, slipped the cap from his head to Homer's, and placed Homer comfortablv on the back of his easy chair in front of the television. He backed away from the chair and into the walk-in closet at the opposite end of the room, quietly closing the door behind him.
He turned on the closet light and opened a small secret panel in the wall at eye level. There was a small mirror and in front of it was a pair of small scissors and a safety razor. As his hands reached to pick up the scissors they trembled a little, but it was not fear that made them tremble, it was rage.
"I will never forgive that blasphemous usurper of the Mountain of the Gods for making me do this. May Zeus blast him with a thousand thunderbolts!" He picked up the scissors, hesitated, then snipped off one magnificent half of his mustache. Another snip and his upper lip was quivering under two hacked-up patches of hair. He tossed the scissors back into the hole in the wall, picked up the safety razor, and finished the job dry. He ended with a small cut in the upper left corner of his mouth. He had forgotten to include some kind of astringent, but he was not about to go back to his bathroom, so he had to keep dabbing at the blood with his handkerchief.
He next removed from the hole a cap that had the purple and white pattern of the employees of the Household of God, but its electronics were useful for other things than sending video to and from the Watchers. He put on the cap and looked in the mirror. He looked naked, but not naked enough. Rage was still on his face and his eyebrows glowered most unlike a true devotee of the God Alexander. He sighed. It must be done. He picked up the scissors and trimmed his thick handsome eyebrows to a pusillanimous patch. He made faces at the mirror until he found a combination of wide eyes and drawn-down mouth that made him look sufficiently stupid to be a workingman-devotee of the Great God Alexander. A white working-man's smock-coat completed the change. Lastiy, he took out a set of keys, a small, battery-powered metal ball, and a bundle of painted cloth with shaping wires. These went into his cavernous coat pockets.
The closet had a secret exit. It went outside to a catwalk that ran around underneath the pier. He took the catwalk to the stairway that went up on top of the pier. Seeing no patrolwomen around, he quickly climbed the steps and walked briskly down the boards. Most of the pier was taken up with a large refrigerated warehouse where the incoming food supplies for the House of God were unloaded from ships, inspected and sorted, then loaded onto refrigerated trucks for transport up the curving expressways to the top of Mount Olympus to feed the large crowd of people in God's Castle.
The keys let him into the warehouse. Over the months it had been simple to make impressions of the keys of the warehouse foreman as he moved the keys from one part of the taverna counter to another while cleaning up the spills on the counter.
Once inside the warehouse, Themistocles acted like he belonged there. He opened a door leading to a loading dock, found the keys to a refrigerated truck on the wall inside, and drove the truck up to the loading dock. He went into the walk-in freezer and used the overhead dolly to roll a few sides of beef out of the freezer, across the room, and into the refrigerated truck. Then he rolled the overhead dolly to a door that opened out over the water at the end of the pier. The door opened automatically as the dolly approached. Making sure his back blocked the view of the Watcher cameras, Themistocles attached the small battery-powered ball to the hook and lowered the ball down into the water below. Leaving the baited hook in the water, he returned to the job of loading the truck. There were lots of boxes of frozen pheasants, and he stacked them carefully in the back of the truck so that there was a hidden space in back of them that was large enough to hold a man.
GUS HAD been making time, but slowly. His suit had been carefully adjusted with weights before he left, but they had guessed a little bit on the heavy side and it was hard going walking across the sandy bottom through the water. He stopped to check his bearings. The sonar signal from the pinger underneath the pier was right in the middle of his visor in blue. The pinger gave off a low level pseudorandom noise that was indistinguishable from wave
noise unless the receiver knew the pseudorandom code. The pingers to the right and left were also on his visor, but had been translated into yellow arrows pointing to the blue dot at the center. Suddenly, there was a brighter pulsating green dot, moving slowly down through the water, just to one side of the steady blue dot. Gus headed for the green dot as fast as he could move through the water.
THEMISTOCLES kept himself busy for an hour, then went to the door overlooking the water and tried raising the hook. The motor on the overhead dolly changed pitch as it started to pick up a load.
"I've caught a fish," Themistocles said to himself, "a big one." He raised the hook until he could see the dark shape hanging above the water in the darkness below the pier. Hiding his actions as well as he could, he unwrapped his bundle of painted cloth and shaping wires, got it around the cable, and dropped it down to cover the large shape below. Now that the cover was on, he raised what looked like a wrapped bundle of meat and used the overhead dolly to roll it across the room and onto the truck in full view of the Watcher cameras and their monitoring computers. He would soon know if the disguise was good enough.
Leaving his extraterrestrial visitor hanging, Themistocles finished loading the truck with more sides of beef until the truck was nearly full. Pretending to take an inventory, Themistocles moved through the beef carcasses to the back of the truck, where he unwrapped and unhooked the visitor, still in his insulated space suit, and restacked boxes of frozen pheasants to hide him. It was still a number of hours until dawn. He found the logbook for the trucks on the foreman's desk, forged an entry for a late special delivery to the castle, with return of the truck on the following day, and drove off into the night on the long trip up to the palace at the top of Mount Olympus.
"I hope whoever it is back there knows what he's doing," Themistocles said to himself as he drove. "Years of work getting myself established on this island, and tonight I'll be a hunted man."
IT WAS early Sunday morning when Themistocles drove up to the delivery gate at the Olympic Palace. He caught the guard dozing at her post.
"What the hell are you doing here!" the Amazonian palace guard blustered, shaking herself awake. "Why aren't you at Sunday service like everyone else?"
"Just like you—some of us must keep things going even during compulsory services," Themistocles said. "I have a special delivery of frozen food for the kitchen. Must be a party coming up."
"I don't know about any party," the guard said suspiciously.
"Just obeying orders," Themistocles said, waving his arms and raising his eyebrows. Then he remembered he had no significant eyebrows left. He put his stupid face back on. "Guess I'd better take it back."
"No! Go on in," the guard said angrily, opening the gate. "But I have to inspect the load."
Themistocles opened the door to the truck with one hand while his other hand was on a wrench hidden in his pocket. The flood of frigid air pouring from the truck raised goose bumps on the naked flesh of the thinly dressed Amazon guard. She peered in through the frosty mist at the sides of beef and stacks of cartons and passed him on.
At the delivery door to the kitchen there was a tall woman with long blond hair standing on the loading dock. Themistocles recognized her as Alex's concubine, Tanya. Her left hand was by her side, signaling the hand sign of the Mars underground, index finger straight for the spear, and the thumb and remaining fingers formed into a circle for the shield. He returned the signal and backed the truck into the dock while she rolled up a container on wheels.
"All the kitchen staff is at Sunday service," she said.
"Then the first load off the truck is the important one," Themistocles said. He rolled the covered container into the truck and shortly thereafter rolled it back out again.
"Hard work," he said to her. "Think I'll go for a little swim afterward."
Tanya took the container and pushed it into the walk-in freezer off the kitchen.
"Gus!" Tanya said when the helmet came off. "I missed you so!" She hugged him, chilly space suit and all.
"Tanya!" Gus said, wishing that he were not in his space suit so he could feel the hug. He was content with the shower of kisses and the nose wet with tears nuzzling his cheeks.
"You may smell like an ancient astronaut, but you look beautiful to me." She reached for a bundle she had stashed inside the freezer and handed it to him. "A large damp towel and a change of clothing," she said. "I hope you don't mind satin underwear—your brother has developed some weird tastes."
"How is Alex?" Gus said, struggling out of his space suit.
"Not good, despite everything I could do to keep him well. He doesn't know it, but I saw him suffer another small stroke last week. We've got to get him to tell Jerry to turn off the Mace."
"Can't Jerry do it himself?"
"Alex has to authorize any change to the program personally, and he won't do it. He is sure he is immortal. Can you talk to him?"
"I'll try, but I can't promise anything. How do you plan to get us together?"
"After Sunday dinner, the kitchen staff is usually let off for Sunday evening classes to study for their next level. Many times he and I have come down late in the evening and made ourselves a snack."
"Yeah," Gus said. "We used to do that when we were kids. Mom would never be sure what would be left in the refrigerator the next day."
"I'll bring him down tonight."
"While I wait in the dark inside the freezer," Gus said. Tanya silently picked out a blanket from the bundle and handed it to him.
"You'll have to," Tanya said. "It's one of the few rooms outside Alex's private quarters that doesn't have a monitor camera."
She gave him one last kiss and headed upstairs.
"STOP SNOOPING!" Alexander yelled at the monitor camera as he and Tanya came into the kitchen. The indicator light on the camera blinked off and Alexander went to the large refrigerator and opened the door.
"Cold pheasant and cold duck!" Alexander said. The Olympic Palace kitchen staff knew their master's habits well and kept the refrigerator well stocked with carefully prepared leftovers.
"Sounds delightful, Alex," Tanya said nervously. "But there is something else ... very important ..." She opened the door to the freezer and stood to one side. Gus was standing just inside the door.
"Hello, Alex," Gus said calmly. "I'd like to talk to you—brother to brother, twin to twin ..."
Alexander turned. His eyes grew wide and his face turned red with fury. He glared at Tanya, then at Gus.
"I have no brother!" he yelled. "I am the Infinite Lord! I am perfect! Look at you! Mangled! Imperfect! You're no twin of mine! You're an impostor!"
"Guards!" he bellowed. "Guards! I want this man destroyed!" Then he remembered that the monitor cameras were off. He started fumbling with his wrist communicator. Tanya ran to him and grabbed his wrist. He struggled with her, then threw her through the freezer door into Gus. She and Gus both fell to the floor while the wrist communicator went skittering across the floor and through a slot in the wooden floor grating.
"I'll do it myself!" Alex growled, running into the freezer, grabbing at Gus' throat.
"Alex," Gus said, choking. "Stop!" He got his hands up to Alex's chest and tried to push him away.
"Go ahead!" Alex gloated. "Try and choke me, you crip! You can't!" He laughed, and the laughter took on a metallic tone as Gus began to lose consciousness. The image of the Devil laughing while the world turned into a ball of molten lava returned ...
The pressure stopped ... Gus felt a heavy weight roll off his chest. Tanya's face was looking down at him.
"I gave him a shot with a hypospray I carry in my medical kit," she said, putting the empty tube back in the little belt pouch. "He'll be out for a few hours."
"That little conversation didn't turn out very well," Gus said. "What'll we do? Make a run for it before he wakes up?"
"That will still leave the world his hostage."
"We've got to get that Mace turned off," Gus said.
"We have one slim chance," Tanya said. "Alex hated to have to stop and peer into an iris scanner for identification, so the central computer has been trained to recognize him by sight. Let's see if we can get you into his quarters. Once there, we might be able to contact Jerry and turn the Mace off."
She looked at the slumped body of Alexander.
"Where will we put Alex in the meantime?" she asked.
"I know a nice warm space suit he can use—secondhand. Even has a hook to hang him up with, so he won't walk away when he wakes up."
"COLD PHEASANT and cold duck!" the handsome man in the golden tunic and tights said to the smiling woman with the long blond hair hanging on his arm.
"But it was too bad you cut your hand, sweetheart," the woman said. "It was a good thing your doctor was there to bandage it up."
They came to a large double door inlaid with golden carvings. On either side of the door was a giant Amazon guard, their helmets reporting everything they saw to the central computer. The doors swung open and the couple entered the private quarters of the Infinite Lord.
"Now for the central computer," Gus said, putting down the food.
"Let me," Tanya said, going to the control console. "I've watched him do it a couple of times." She touched a few icons and the computer spoke.
"You wish to change the operating parameters of the Mace of God?"
"Yes," Gus said.
"I beg your pardon for having to ask, Infinite Lord," the voice said. "But you did require me to request identification. Please put your hand on the globe."
Martian Rainbow Page 31
