Health Agent

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Mutant shit.”

  “It isn’t. It isn’t, Monty.”

  “You’re baiting me.”

  “Toby,” Nedland ordered one of the agents, “go find somebody with a VT with a paper subscription, go back to two days ago and bring me back a hard copy. We’ll just wait here nice and calm until you return.”

  “You could fake that,” Black called.

  “For God’s sake, man!” Nedland replied. Toby dashed out, hunched over. “Why are you so paranoid? We’re not here to harm you or even arrest you! We came to take you to be cured!”

  “I used to be one of you, remember? Health hazards are to be done away with. I’m a health hazard.”

  “Right. Which is why I’m here to take you to be cured.”

  “I was in the mall today. I didn’t see anything about a cure.”

  “You didn’t look. So there’s a cure—what’s the difference? The whole world is gonna stop and talk about it? The fun is over…the fear, the human interest stories, the dead. The cure is the dull part.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “You’re dying, though. What have you got to lose coming out here, man? You’re gonna die anyway!”

  A long pause. “I want to see that paper.”

  “Alright.” Nedland felt he had a hand-hold now. “Are you ready for the next good news?”

  “Speak.”

  “Toll Loveland is dead.”

  Silence. Blank blistered door. Finally a soft, muffled, “How?”

  “It all makes sense, now. It was M-670.”

  “How did you find him?”

  “A man in the Blueflame Apartments on Convex Ave. complained to the super that his neighbor’s VT was running too loud, night and day. The super went in. The police were called. There was Toll Loveland, dead for four days, wasted to skin and bones by M-670. His face looked like a skull. That was why he hid his face at the show you saw, obviously…only appeared on the VT monitor. He was already showing it. Like I said, it all makes perfect sense now. Motivation and all. It wasn’t just art—it was revenge. Against Auretta Here, at first…the prosty he must have hooked up with and originally caught it from. Then it was revenge against the healthy, the people who would outlive him, who weren’t suffering with him. A drowning man likes company, right? So he pulls you with him.”

  “I don’t believe it…”

  “I’m not lying to you, damn it!”

  “I believe you. I didn’t mean it like that. I mean…I don’t believe it.”

  “Oh…oh, I see. Yeah, I know. I’d liked to have blown his face off, too, Monty, believe me. But it’s better this way. If we’d caught him we’d have to cure him. He died good and slow.”

  “Yeah—like Opal.”

  “I know how you feel. Anyway…case closed.”

  They waited for Toby. There was no exchange for a while. Then Black asked, “How’s Vern?”

  “Not too good. He’s alive. That was stupid, Monty. Very stupid. You should have passed your info on to us. When this is over…and it is, believe me or not…I’m sorry, but you aren’t getting your old job back.”

  “Oh well,” said Black.

  “What’s he gone out for, a coffee?” one of the forcers grumbled five minutes later. His gun rested across his leg now, no longer trained so keenly on the door. They all knew it was over. Even Black. When Toby came and the print-out was slipped under the bathroom door, it was just a formality. Black merely glanced at the page. They were right—what did it matter if he stepped out and was hit with a plasma bullet, anyway? Better than becoming the one-eyed creature he had glimpsed on the vidphone.

  “I’m coming out,” he announced, stepping back into his clothing from that day. He placed the gun on the floor. When he opened the door, saw the guns aimed at him, he kicked the pistol across the kitchen tiles, hands held up empty.

  Nedland straightened, holstered his weapon. “Stupid, Monty, but I appreciate the strain you’re under. I’ve been your friend all along whether you care to acknowledge that or not. I told them I didn’t want you arrested or charged for endangering the public. I wanted to be here myself when they took you. And I’ll be there when they give you the cure tonight. Until we get there I’m afraid we’ll have to take you in cuffs, though. Now this is the HAP labs, Monty, not a furnace. Trust me.”

  Black did. He wasn’t concerned anymore. He said, “Eight days.”

  “What?”

  “She died eight days before they found the cure.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Just over a week. How sad and ironic, huh?”

  “Yeah,” said Black. He let a forcer cuff him.

  Two new men entered the apartment. They wore baggy black rubbery suits, black hoods with face plates, orange tanks on their backs connected to orange spray guns.

  “Don’t hurt my snail,” Black warned them as he was taken away.

  Part Two:

  Meathearts

  ELEVEN

  The Fekahs wore red-tinted fish-bowl helmets, not so much to protect their sensitive eyes as to protect human ears from the sound of their respiration, which was nearly deafening otherwise. Monty had heard one breathing off in the night, once—far away—and had pitied those close by. Human ambassadors on their world had to wear helmets at all times also. To remove these in a city full of Fekahs would mean instant deafness, perhaps even death. Monty sold this one its newspaper and watched it waddle clumsily away like a giant albino toad on two legs, the lacy pink gills vibrating inside the helmet. It rolled its paper into a tube and stuffed it into its handbag for the ride to wherever it was headed.

  Two teenage human girls browsed the teen music and movie star mags. No doubt in emulation of one, or many, of the predigested celebrities inside, they both wore their hair in a wild, spiky disarray they spent hours weekly to make appear so disorderly. They both used Swell, a lipstick that harmlessly caused the lips to bloat to sexy overstated fullness. Black leotards on one, leopard-spotted on the other, and both with T-shirts with plastic toy propellers over their nipples. Monty had seen a lot of these lately. When those wearing such shirts stood close to the edge and a train passed, the propellers twirled and the girls would laugh.

  Their spiky hair in all directions seemed to work as antennae, for these girls would glance up to catch him eyeing them, as such girls always did, guaranteed. And Monty would feel guilty for looking. Even with the leopard spots and nipple propellers.

  Of course, antennae can’t receive unless there are transmissions. Yesterday he’d been outside his booth, squatting to arrange magazines, and that new teenage girl who worked at the food stand had walked by, and glanced back at him over her shoulder to catch him drinking in her eye-level ass. He’d felt guilty, but also excited that she’d caught him. Did she glance at him from the food stand so often because she was disturbed at his glances, or to attract them? He was consciously transmitting to her, trying to catch her eye—though he’d then look away. One minute he thought they had a flirtation growing…the next he felt like a dog with its nose in her crack.

  Today, only a year or so older than the propellor twins, still present and giggling, she wore a leopard top and tight black dress slacks while she served food at the counter—no white smock. Thick curly dark hair, a pretty face with heavy eyebrows. He might have eyed her all day had there not been so very much else to look at during his shift, from three-thirty to midnight.

  He fell in love (all right, lust—but a lust so intense and greedy and possessive that it seemed very much like love) at least once a day. Today it had been that blond. A curly mane down the back of her white business suit. Skin as pale and flawless as porcelain. A delicate, serious face—sexy because she looked tired. Glamorous, radiating intelligence. Then yesterday it had been that Hispanic teenage girl in the canary yellow mini-skirt and black turtleneck jersey, white socks bunched around her brown ankles and a yellow bow in her lush black curls. She’d glanced at him several times, where the blond hadn’t noticed him. Both had left him with a twitching hollowness i
n his groin when their trains whisked them away, leaving him bolted down here in his pen.

  His eyes flitted from one to the next to the next ceaselessly, barely noticed, an eager fly’s presence at best. It had been over a year since Opal Cowrie had died.

  Even during the periods of slow traffic he spread pornography in front of him on the counter, or trashy tabloids with photos of celebrities taken by terrorist photographers with sniper cameras that could pierce through their clothing. Many celebrities now, though, wore material the cameras couldn’t penetrate. The technology was ever improving on both sides in a kind of arms race.

  He read women’s magazines. Fashionable faces, fashionable bodies. In one, a fourteen-year-old finalist in the magazine’s annual contest to discover a new cover model from among its readers sighed that modeling could be such hard work, all that waiting for camera set-ups. Daily, Monty watched people coming off trains between three-thirty and five who looked like they’d been dredged up from the bowels of hell. That poor tormented model.

  It was five-thirty now, already slowing down greatly. From here on it would be mostly dinner- and theater-goers, the theater district being close by along with Punktown’s major museums. The slowest traffic would be from ten to twelve; people getting out of movies, plays, restaurants. From eleven to twelve it was people getting off their own second shift jobs. There was no third shift at the newsstand. There were some paper machines nearby for the late denizens, though hardly of the variety Monty offered. He carried news from other planets. The Kodju in their other dimension were represented.

  Monty hadn’t had time to slow down for two hours, and waited impatiently for a late flux of Japanese businessmen to exhaust itself before he left his circular booth to buy a coffee at a nearby stand that sold pretzels and dilkies, a fried native root. The hotdog stand the cute new girl worked at was farther away, and he wasn’t ready for speaking with her anyway. He lit a black-papered herb cigarette as he waited for his coffee, keeping an eye on his neglected station.

  Two people at the pretzel stand, two or three at the hotdog stand, but he didn’t envy them their company. He liked it this way. When he needed a little socializing he could come here for a coffee, chat a minute. Funny how few people struck up a casual conversation with him at the booth; very little bartender patter. People in a hurry. He was mostly just a human dispenser machine.

  “Need to take a leak?” chirped Midge, the Choom woman behind the counter.

  “Nope; all set, thanks.” Midge or her male Choom partner Belly would keep an eye on his stall…fill in for him, if it was busy, when he had to go. He had never really become too friendly with the crew over at the hotdog/food stand but that was okay—he hadn’t taken the job to make friends. Hadn’t intended Midge and Belly.

  “How many dispersers are you taking?”

  “One a day…mom.” The pills controlled the need to urinate and defecate by doing away with the wastes while still within the body. He would have felt nervous and vulnerable having to deal with people on a full bladder, and felt funny about bothering these two all the time, but the three dispersers a day he’d been taking had started giving him an upset stomach, cramps. His body had been through a lot.

  “You watch yourself,” Midge threatened him.

  “Just give me my freakin’ coffee, huh? Man, the service in this place.”

  “That’s the thanks I get for worrying about you. No cards, no flowers, no love limo in my greasy garage.”

  Monty laughed, a little embarrassed. Belly, busy, was chuckling. A year, and Monty still couldn’t tell how much of Midge’s racy talk was just joking around and how much might be flirtation. Invitation. She was cute enough—with her glossy black bowl haircut, large hazel eyes behind big cosmetic eyeglasses with yellow frames, a short perky body—but Monty just could never find the ear-to-ear Choom grin attractive. It was too huge a factor to ignore. So Midge was appealing enough to want to bed, and yet she wasn’t enough to make him want to form a relationship. Maybe personality-wise. Not physically. That made him feel somewhat ashamed—but hey, he reasoned, if he wanted a friend, appearance didn’t matter. Lovers had to stir the blood, not make you reluctant to look at them squarely, right? He didn’t ask for perfection, but a mouth that when gasping in ecstasy would appear like it might swallow his head was hard to overlook. Other human men took Chooms as girlfriends, wives. Despite his artistic inclinations and sensitivities, however, Choom women simply didn’t appeal to his sense of aesthetics.

  He sipped his coffee, kept his eye on a lingering Japanese businessman who was paging through a child bondage mag at the booth. You couldn’t trust anybody; not suits, not old ladies. Every day he lost magazines and papers right under his nose, and when it was busy he probably lost twice the amount behind his back. Stupid, a circular stand, but he hadn’t designed it.

  The businessman peered over the abandoned counter, then from side to side. Monty waved at him. “Right here. What’s it say for price?”

  “Three ninety-five,” the man called shyly.

  “Throw four munits behind the counter, on the floor. I’ll get it in a minute.”

  The man held up the bills for Monty to see, tossed them and scurried off with the magazine in his briefcase.

  Midge had just sold a bagel and coffee to a customer, now turned to Monty and said, “There’s some of your buddies here again.”

  Monty swivelled around to peer between Midge and Belly. Hissing sounds. A figure had appeared around the escalator banks, and another could be heard back there. Baggy black rubbery suits, hoods with face plates, orange tanks and orange spray guns. Ghosts, haunting him.

  A thick white ooze that smelled strongly fish-like had appeared a few weeks ago, creeping upward from the base of the escalator banks. If it had started to come back, Monty hadn’t noticed…maybe just a follow-up check. Did he know these men (women?), he wondered. Did they know him? Had they spotted him, recognized him? Why should they even look long enough to notice?

  “Vermin patrol,” Monty joked quietly.

  “Here’s one for them.” Midge jabbed a thumb toward Belly.

  Blue Station was one of the very cleanest of Punktown’s subway stations. Forcers were often in view. In some stations forcers, and these suited sprayers, might be a rare sight—though much more warranted. The spray graffiti that filled almost every available inch of wall and pillar and floor (and train, inside and out) in some areas was quite subdued here, the blue tiles of the walls and thick hexagonal support beams glowing with their glossiness. Though the station forever had the sweaty laundry smell of a gym locker room, even in the height of summer it was tolerable. The tunnel wall was decorated with huge framed advertisements for hotels, restaurants, movies and plays. The escalators worked. A robot sweeper, glossy blue, was in constant roaming motion sucking up trash. In each blue tile was an actual insect like an ant in amber, magnified by the substance of the tile. Insects from many planets, no two insects of the exact same kind represented in all these many tiles. No labels, though Monty accepted their word for it.

  Dragging on his cigarette, Monty watched the suited men spray the encased insects as if they were the infesting invaders.

  One seemed to look his way; Monty turned his head from him. He saw a human-like Tikkihotto walking off with a Tikkihotto news magazine, some of his swimming ocular tendrils taking in the complex multi-holographic hieroglyphics while others watched where he was walking. “Hey!” Monty shouted. One clear tendril looked back at the newsstand worker as the humanoid quickened his pace. Monty didn’t pursue. “Ass-wipe,” he muttered.

  His employer, who ran the booth from five to three-thirty himself, forbade Monty from using a stinger, stun gun or knock-out darts to deal with thefts. Actually, those were the terms of the contract with the Paxton Transit Authority, the rationale being that a weapon employed by Monty might inspire the thief to retaliate with a much more lethal weapon, whereas otherwise he would have just run off with his prize. Monty appreciated this point, but al
so felt that people would be less apt to steal if they thought they might get zapped or stung or knocked out for it.

  And according to his terms of probation with the Health Agency and the police, he was not permitted to carry a lethal handgun at any time. He still had Vern Woodmere’s collection at home, but could only bring them to a firing range unloaded and in a suitcase or gym bag.

  But now, as always, Monty wore two pens inside the lining pocket of his tweed turquoise jacket. One blue, one red. Remonil, a knock-out drug, in the blue. A plasma bullet in the red.

  “I should get back—I’m neglecting my job.”

  “More than a year of that and suddenly you’re worried?”

  “Need something to read to get you through the slow chunk?”

  “I’m all set, thanks.” Midge held up the disc she would stick to her temple to directly pick up VT transmissions in her brain. She would sit and “see” the program, “hear” it, but still hear if a customer came, and Belly would be there anyway. Many people on the trains used these rather than read a paper, could view the news that way but more likely chose a game show or rerun of a sitcom. A lower level setting could be adjusted so that a person could still receive the transmissions but also walk about and function fairly well simultaneously, the mind doing its best to keep its tasks separate, as when a person drives a car but daydreams or chats on the phone. Still, Monty saw people with discs on their temples or foreheads bumping into each other every day. Sometimes teenagers stumbling dazedly with three or more stuck to their foreheads. Sometimes a man with a shaved head covered in discs would sit on a tiled bench and grin at the passing trains.

  Monty preferred reading from a material object in his hands—had always loved books, libraries, magazines; no doubt a great contributor to his acceptance of this work. He seldom used a computer to read the paper, now, and didn’t subscribe to such a news service at home. He didn’t own a disc to paste to his head, rarely watched VT at all, though he enjoyed a good movie. He liked paintings painted with brushes, not computer programs. Mistakes were harder to correct with paints, the challenge thus greater—skill more necessary, whether the end result was more beautiful or not. A robot could paint a picture. If it were better than a man’s picture, Monty was not impressed. The technology might impress him…not the art.