Single Combat

by Dean Ing

  "I have a lot of spare time. I spend it reading," she said as if explaining her differences away.

  "Hmm. Jim Street, you think?" He asked while savoring the idea, fearing it too. Then belittling it: "Maybe he wants an introduction to Boren Mills. I could do that much, for sure."

  "Or maybe he wants to throw in with a winner, Mr. McCarty."

  "I'm not trained to it. Besides strummin' a mean guitar, what can I offer folks that smarter politicians don't?"

  "Honesty. Compassion for the luckless. Reform. All the things religions put up front, and some governments used to work for."

  "That's not enough, Sandy. We've had Presidents who had those things aplenty without the savvy to get anything done. And a lot of folks know that, too. Making me the Indy candidate is the same as giving Young four more years in office."

  Sandy reached for his plate, paused as their faces drew level. "I think the Feds are counting on just what you said," she murmured, adding softly, "and I think they could be making a very, very dangerous mistake."

  Chapter 39

  Sandy's journal, 4 Sep'

  I seem to be running a small hotel. No complaints so long as Lufo is a frequent guest as he was again yesterday. Mr. 'Gold' was a rare entertainment, a man of plain tastes & good will who traveled far during Labor Day weekend. He & Lufo set out this morn on hovercycles that would be pretentious if not for their last-legs appearance. I notice they moved out much faster than horses & a man rides low in the saddle, vanishing quickly with little commotion. Sandy Albeniz Sandra Albeniz Mrs. Lufo Albeniz Sra. Albeniz—wonder if there is already a Senora Albeniz. Or several? I'm silly to think of it until he asks me. But lordy, he's asked for everything else & I have yet to refuse him! & when he asks about him, what then? Childe would never forgive me if I took her from her only companion—might even refuse. It isn't the same as for some domestic pet. Even Schreiner ranch wouldn't hold him, especially with the things they attribute to him. Mowgli could have more easily ridden Shere Khan into the marketplace…

  Chapter 40

  The unconscious rover was moved twice; first to Elko, Nevada under the false bed of a truckload of corn where he was treated for days in a LockLever warehouse. He would have died there without the aid of Dr. Keyhoe—the man who had seen Sanger die, who had abandoned Streamlined America upon seeing the implications of her death. Fellow Masonics in LockLever's employ had helped make their escape possible.

  LockLever did not maintain spies throughout all its companies to root out Indy sympathizers. Small wonder that a unique cargo like Quantrill would be routed through such conduits as L. L. Produce and then Midas Imports by men hostile to the current administration. That news was particularly welcome to rebels near the Texas coast.

  Quantrill regained consciousness in a well-lit room without windows and saw that he was not only strapped down, but instrumented. Not much hope in pretending deep sleep, he thought, but it might be his only option. Soon enough the bastards would be taking his mind apart unless he could make them kill him first—by taking a few of them out. Footfalls sounded outside the door. He closed his eyes; the door opened to admit cool air and a suggestion of echoes.

  "Nope. Still out," he heard a twangy female voice declare. "I'm not very sharp on that monitoring equipment of Doc Keyhoe's. You suppose he'll let us keep it?"

  A gruff male in a rumbling near-whisper: "Not a chance, Claire. It doesn't belong to the doc. We wouldn't have it now if this young fella wasn't a V.V.I.P. Soon as he's up and around, back it goes to the clinic in Burns."

  The door eased shut again. As his head cleared, Quantrill realized that furious mental effort would show on some monitors. He had no idea what kind of ruse they had readied for him. He hoped only that some fleeting chance would come—and that his damnable headache would subside before that.

  Testing the straps that bound him to the bed—not even a real hospital bed, and the other furnishings looked too makeshift for a government facility—he found that he could easily slide his hands free. His signet ring had been taken. He used up five minutes freeing his hands, trying to imitate the motions of a sleeper. But when he turned his head to study the nearby table, a localized pain whacked him behind the ear.

  He thought, Sanger, the bitch! I love you; trust me. Su-u-re. What kind of game had she been playing? And what worthless ribbon would she get for playing him out on such a long leash for S & R? Well, that was her job—he could even grudgingly admire her. And love her. Well, fuck that. You see where it got you…

  On the table: steel basin, towel, and holy God in heaven, a disposable razor! The holo monitor? Nowhere to be seen but that proved nothing. When he moved, it would have to be with no wasted motion. And if the door wouldn't open for him? He would wait, and whoever did open it would harbor only the briefest of regrets.

  He saw no clothes, no shoes. A sheet for a toga would only impede him and in any case he didn't expect to last long enough to need clothing. He peeled back the torso restraint and had the razor before he reached the door. Stupid assholes; didn't even lock it!

  Down a corridor wearing only his briefs, sheet wrapped around his right arm for a pitiful shield that might parry an edged weapon, the razor in his lethal left hand. He would have fallen had the corridor been wider, a limp staggering parody of himself. All color, then shades of gray, began to fade. Whiteout: he had no choice but to kneel and tuck his head, or faint dead in his tracks.

  Jesus, every footstep was a thump behind his ear. He had a bandage there too. Running footsteps behind him compelled him to try again, and he turned with the corridor as a woman cried, "Sir! Sir, omigod, the man's gone crazy! Mr. Caufield!!"

  He slammed out of the corridor, missed his footing in enveloping blackness, fell headlong into some yielding stuff. Now two voices clamored behind him. He found a carpet of wood chips beneath his fingers, reeled up again, saw that the trail led through a smooth-walled tunnel in solid rock. In the far distance, the faintest suggestion of a glow. He ran toward it, more by the feel of wood chips than by the light ahead, keeping his bare feet off the cold hard stone.

  Behind him, a heavy masculine shout, echoes booming: "Mr. Quantrill! It's okay, we're friends! Let us help you." Oh yes indeed, he'd heard that one before…

  Unbelievably, he thought, they were letting him get away. If boxed at the end of this nightmarish stone intestine, he could turn on the two behind him and retrace leaving a couple of deaders in his wake. They weren't gaining on him, but the man couldn't be more than twenty meters behind.

  Quantrill could pull a rolling one-eighty if his head didn't fall off in the process.

  He tripped as the tunnel swerved to the left, rolled against a rounded stone outcrop. The pain in his head and the internal sunburst that accompanied it beggared the distant oval of sunlight. But it was sunlight, pouring into the oval mouth of a tunnel with no bars, no door, without any hint whatever of a secure facility.

  The entrance was less than three meters high and nearly ten wide. Quantrill zigzagged in sudden sunlight to avoid marksmen, labored up the rock pathway. He welcomed the loose stones underfoot because they were better ammo than anything he had on him, but stooping to fill his hands with them he lost the razor, snatched dizzily at it, fell hard. Near collapse, he lacked the coordination to use his body as a killing machine. He would be lucky even to draw blood.

  The man was still shouting as he emerged into the bright morning sun, hands out and innocent of weapons, the woman saving her breath as she followed. Quantrill tossed one stone in high trajectory, part one of the rockfighter's one-two punch, the one they were supposed to watch while he bifurcated the nearest sucker with number two, a bullet of stone hurled as though from a pitcher's mound.

  He missed, nearly grazing the woman's head with number two, and saw her mouth grow round in anger and astonishment. He scrabbled for more rocks, heedless of pain, watching the man who made no move to gather stones but raised his hands aloft instead. Then he paused to listen.

  "Will you stop
? Can't you understand, for God's sake? If you keep on like this you're going to hurt yourself, you stupid idiot!"

  He might hurt himself, the man said. An incomparable jest under the circumstances. But the circumstances were no longer clear to Quantrill. No one else approached. The entrance to the tunnel was a natural one, and carefully painted on its stone brow was, of all things, a weathered Masonic emblem.

  Faint traces of an unsurfaced road undulated in grass across the brown prairie nearby, and the velvet breeze off the hills above was softly pungent with scents of dry weed and sage.

  Through the pounding in his head, Quantrill tried to fit pieces of his puzzle together. He had gone down in the kitchen of a Catholic Church in arid coal country, and come up in what was evidently a natural lava tube in open range country. Central New Mexico? He gestured at the ancient pathway, managed to croak, "Where does that lead?"

  "To Route seventy-eight. In a couple of days, if you're up to it, I'll take you there."

  "I'm up to it now!"

  The woman, heavy-bodied and sunbaked like the man, strode near with folded arms. "I wouldn't be barking out demands if I were you, sonny," she said, dull anger smoking in her face. "You managed to survive getting a hunk cut out of your skull, you nearly got meningitis from an infection in what's left of your mastoid, you're all but mother-naked, and all you can think of is throwing rocks at us. Now I know what I agreed to do for the Masonics but as far as I'm concerned, you throw one more fit like that and you can go to hell. Wander back to Streamlined America for all I care."

  Back? What was left of his mastoid? Quantrill's puzzlement must have shown in his face. The man said, "He's still confused, Claire. Mr. Quantrill, a young woman cut a tiny radio out of your head over a week ago, and managed to explain who you were, and naturally the Masonic brotherhood was interested in helping. This is Malheur Cave, Mr. Quantrill. You're in Oregon Territory. You're a free man." Oblivious to thistles and to the two strangers, Quantrill sat down, hugged his knees, and let the storm of tears overtake him.

  Chapter 41

  Ted Quantrill wasn't entirely convinced of his freedom until an hour later as he sat in one of the small rooms far back in Malheur Cave. He would never learn who had taken his signet ring, but focused on something far more important. He held the clear plastic container between thumb and forefinger and peered through light cotton packing at the device inside. "Doesn't look very potent now. How can we be sure my critic isn't listening to us?"

  "I only know what Doc Keyhoe told me," shrugged Ed Caufield, a thirty-second-degree Mason who knew a little veterinary medicine but little of high-tech electronics. "This came out of your head and half of it blew up a minute later. They put it in cotton inside this vacuum vial to make sure it wouldn't receive conducted sound. And to make double-sure, somebody in Elko wrapped the vial in metal foil. Anyway, we're under thirty meters of rock here. I reckon it's pretty safe."

  "I'd like to grind it to powder," Quantrill growled. "S & R won't rest 'til it's back in their hands."

  "I don't think so." Claire Connor had spent long days and nights tending Quantrill, had listened carefully to the men discuss their unconscious patient. "Doc Keyhoe knew he'd have to abandon his practice once he got involved with you, so he risked his skin and rigged some false evidence. Even conked a poor old priest and tied him up so the good Father wouldn't seem part of it." Supposedly, she added, Quantrill had fallen into the machinery that fed pulverized coal into the steam plant after his head burst open from detonation of the critic.

  Haunted by his earlier fury at Marbrye Sanger, Quantrill asked, "And you're certain the woman didn't make it?"

  "We weren't there," said the Connor woman. She'd needed half an hour to overcome her anger at Quantrill but found herself warming to him. He reminded her of her youngest boy, lost during the Bering Shoot before Oregon became a Canadian protectorate peppered with U.S. Army deserters.

  "Doc Keyhoe was there," said Caufield as if apologizing. "I think it was seeing, um, well, seeing her die that got his dander up. Close friend, was she?"

  Quantrill could find no words to explain how far that phrase fell short of the truth. He nodded, looked at the ceiling, brushed moisture from his cheeks. He could not yet appreciate that his tears were talismans of human emotions which Control had sought to drive from him, and that Control had failed.

  Finally he pointed at the encapsulated solid-states of the critic and said, "Whatever comes of this, we owe to Marbrye." Then with a quick sad smile: "You have no idea what it's like to talk freely after six years with that thing in your head. I can say anything I like, recite poetry, even say, 'I love you, Marbrye.' Only she can't hear it," he finished.

  "I think she might," the woman replied, but saw that Quantrill fought bitter tears. "Let's get you back to bed now, Ted Quantrill. You won't be ready to travel for awhile yet. I don't know what you have in mind, but Doc Keyhoe is in touch with some people who want very much to meet you."

  "But that's all up to you," Caufield chimed in. "You're in Oregon Territory now and you can do as you damn' please. That's something to sleep on, son"

  In time Quantrill did sleep, but only after he had cried for Sanger, and for himself for having lost her. Yet his tears could not wash all his accumulated poisons away; his last waking thoughts were of personal combat against those who were twisting Streamlined America into a daily twenty-four-hour nightmare.

  Chapter 42

  For the record, health service officials announced that Father Matthew Klein died of a particularly virulent form of paranthrax. Off the record, he died from the effects of virulent questioning methods by Search & Rescue after he admitted under torture that Quantrill still lived. The paranthrax cover story became a blanket explanation for inoculation teams that flew into the mining community and, one at a time, hyposprayed two categories of the locals: members of Klein's parish, and patients of the missing Dr. Keyhoe.

  As inoculations, the hyposprays were useless. Each patient and parishoner returned home ignorant and safe. Ignorant that they had babbled honest answers to all queries put to them by Howell's rovers; safe because none had guilty knowledge of Quantrill or of any other conspiracy against the system. With Sanger dead and Keyhoe beyond its grasp, S & R had to proceed with what little the priest could tell them. That little was enough.

  Lon Salter called his meeting exclusively for top-level staff and eventually found it necessary to send out for sandwiches. The decisions were not reached quickly or easily. But then, their latest data had not come without painstaking legwork and two more missing persons.

  At one point, Salter raised a hand to ward off more data. "Stop right there, Reardon, I don't need to know what you did with the teamster's body. If you say he admitted hauling those two into Elko it's good enough for me."

  Mason Reardon was a medium man, a man so average in appearance and mannerism that he could move almost unnoticed in a business suit or a coverall. Long before, he had taught surveillance methods to Quantrill, Sanger, and many others. More recently he had moved into the comm center as one of the voices of Control. Very recently he had made a quick trip afield, tracing Quantrill's route.

  Old Lasser could afford a more detached view, with his medical restrictions against field ops. "LockLever's harboring a lot of these people, Lon. They're cozying up to the Indys."

  Salter: "Exactly why we can't ask White House Deseret to lean on them. We can't afford to let our suspicions show. What we've got to do is find all the terminals of this escape route, this—this underground railroad; emplace bugs on every truck and hoverbus owned by L. L. Produce and Midas Imports; find out how serious our problem is."

  A cynical laugh from little Marty Cross, who still wore a sling for his right arm. The most irritating part of his job, thought Salter, was the insolence of Cross and his crony, Howell. Both were nominally his subordinates—and both often justified a charge of insubordination. They knew what Salter knew, i.e., without them Search & Rescue would no longer have a flinty core of
sociopathic readiness. In rover terms, they were the last of the best.

  Now Cross shared his dark amusement. "Here's how serious the problem is. See me? Pretend I'm S & R; I've got my good arm in a sling because that fucking Quantrill got loose. If he's still alive and out of the country, I can mend. If he links up with rebels in this country, I might get both arms in slings and my ass in another one. Cripple me and you cripple the Lion of Zion—and if he goes belly-up, not a man in this room will have a hidey-hole deep enough to suit him.

  "Look: we've had these Catholics and Masons and liberal Mormons all along—no worse than a bad cold, right? But Quantrill's a bad fracture just waitin' to happen. There's too many ways he could hurt us—"

  "All right, all right," Salter interrupted; "get to the point."

  "The point," said the whiskey tenor of Seth Howell, "is a top-level effort to find him; take him out. Track him down in Canada or wherever, make an example of him. Pretend we've bought that amateurish yarn about him getting graunched in machinery, keep a sharp eye out in case he tries to turn other rovers—and see to it that we're the machine that graunches him."

  "I agree," said Lasser, who knew Quantrill better than any of them. "If he's abroad, we might try talking Smetana out of retirement."

  "Negative," Howell rapped. "That's one of the ways he can hurt us! We have other linguists who can pass as foreign, and Smetana's female. She used to have a letch for Quantrill—hell, find a cunt in S & R who didn't! He snuck Sanger right out from under me—"

  Lasser, recalling Sanger's admissions: "Now that's just too freudian to let pass, Seth," intended as a jolly reproof.

  Howell, his ruddy face blackening with rage, scanned their faces one at a time: Lasser, Reardon, Cross, Salter. "Anybody here think that little turncoat sonofabitch is a better man than I am?" Dutiful headshakes and, from Lasser, an abstention. "Then that settles it. We need a team ready to respond the instant we learn where Quantrill is. The very best S & R team ever mustered. That's me—"