The Tomorrow File

by Lawrence Sanders

  “Oh sure,” he said hastily. “Nick.”

  I doubted he had ever heard of that regulation. But it was operative.

  “So I must be in attendance before this object is treated in the Welcome Ward,” I said solemnly. “From that moment on, he will be my responsibility.”

  “Will he be injured?”

  “Not at that point in time. But he will be unconscious.”

  I then explained what would be required of him. His features grew increasingly bleak as I related details. He was spooked. It was understandable. Nothing in his conditioning had prepared him for activities of this nature.

  “Of course,” I said offhandedly, “if you would feel safer if you had a direct order, signed by me, to account for your actions, I’ll be happy to oblige.”

  “No no no,” he said hurriedly. “That won’t be necessary. I just don’t see—”

  I leaned forward, grasped his arm, lowered my voice.

  “Seth," I whispered, “I’d like to tell you more. I really would. But there are certain things you have no need to know. And believe me, it’s better that way. Just let me make one thing perfectly clear: If you do this, you’ll be performing a valuable service for the Department of Bliss. And for your country. I can’t make you any promises, but I’m sure you’ll find, a few weeks from now, that your Department and your country are not unappreciative.”

  I thought then I had touched all bases. And so I had. He was bewildered, shaken, frightened. But he was in.

  1640: Paul Bumford and Mary Bergstrom arrived. They had come down from the GPA-1 compound in my limousine. No chauffeur; Mary did the driving. The heavy equipment was locked in the trunk. Paul was carrying the drugs and small devices in a plastic shopping bag advertising “Maxine’s Smoked Salmon and Imported Delicacies. ” I remembered Leon Mansfield sleeping in a laundry van and using subway toilets. It’s the bizarreness of existence that continually bemuses me.

  They settled in at Transient Quarters and made their presence known around the Hospice. Paul seemed charged, brittle, almost fatalistic. He didn’t smile or laugh very often. But recently he had become increasingly serious. If not solemn.

  Mary Bergstrom I never could compute. I had no input on her self-interest. Paul said he controlled her, and had proved it. But to me, she was essentially an unknown quantity. I thought her cold, introverted, frustrated. Unattractive and rather dull. None of this, of course, affected her usefulness.

  1900: I treated us all—Maya, Mary, Paul, myself—to dinner at a restaurant recommended by Dr. Luke Warren.

  It was a crowded room; we didn’t discuss business. But afterward, we drove to the scene of the crime. We parked; Paul, Maya, and I got out and took a look. We couldn’t see any difficulties. Paul approved. We were there almost five minutes, and not a single car passed on the road.

  We drove back to the Hospice. Maya transferred to her sports car. We followed her back to her apartment. She pulled into the driveway that curved around to the back entrance. We parked right behind her. Paul and I got out and joined her. He handed over the drugs. They were in three small plastic containers. Color-coded caps: red, white, and blue. Red held the anaphrodisiac, white the instant narcotic, blue the thirty-minute narcotic.

  Then I showed her the matches. Apparently an ordinary packet of paper matches. An ad on the cover for an IUD with the legend: “Close cover before striking.”

  “The moment he lights up,” I told Maya, “turn your head away. Have your window down. Get your head outside and breathe fresh air deeply. Got that?”

  “Sure,” she said. “How long does it take?”

  I looked at Paul.

  “Probably within thirty seconds,” he said. “A minute at the most. Make certain he doesn’t fall forward and hit his head on the dash. We don’t want him to injure himself.”

  He meant it seriously. Maya and I laughed.

  I tore two matches from the folder. Holding them at arm’s length, I struck them. They flared. I turned my head away. They both burned halfway down, then went out when the saturation was

  consumed. I dropped them onto the gravel driveway.

  Then I placed the match folder on the shelf over the dash.

  “You’ll drive?” I asked Maya.

  She nodded.

  I positioned the matches directly in front of the passenger’s seat. I bent the cover open.

  “Don’t use them by mistake,” I cautioned her. “We want you wide awake.”

  We went back to the Transient Quarters barracks. I thought sleep would come easily; I had done everything that could be done. But at 0200 I shoved a six-hour Somnorific up my nose.

  October 18.

  1000: Dr. Seth Lucas reserved two rooms in the Welcome Ward, as I had instructed. Into one, he moved a portable laserscope and the other equipment we’d need. He locked the door. I had told him if he got any flak, refer it to me.

  Sure enough, Dr. Luke Warren found me in the offices of Group Lewisohn. He asked why it was necessary to reserve two of his precious rooms. He was unexpectedly determined. I think he was astonished by his own temerity.

  “Departmental business,” I told him. It had worked once; I tried it again: “If you want a signed order, I’ll give you one.”

  “Butbutbut. . . .’’he stammered.

  “You have no need to know,” I said coldly.

  1930: I phoned Maya Leighton’s apartment from the Hospice.

  She answered: “Hello?”

  “Is Jack there?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” she said, “you’ve got the wrong number.” And hung up.

  Signal. Our pigeon was in the coop.

  Paul and I departed in my Rover. Mary Bergstrom took the plastic shopping bag up to the locked room.

  20'30: We were parked down the block from Maya’s apartment. All our lights were out. I had a feeling of inexorableness and could wait patiently. Paul was in a voluble mood. He may have popped an energizer. I let him talk.

  2140: The lights behind the shades of Maya Leighton’s apartment went out. Paul and I straightened in our seats, peering.

  “She’s got him,” I said softly. “Clever ef.”

  2145: Maya’s tooty little sports car backed swiftly out of the driveway, swung around in the street, paused, headed off.. We followed, well back. Paul had the infrared binoculars out, pressed

  to his eyes.

  2150: “Normal,” he reported. “She’s driving. Normal. Normal.”

  “All right, Paul,” I said. “Just tell me if anything happens ”

  2205: “There!” Paul cried. “Flare of match on his side. He’s lighting up! He’s using the matches! He’s using the matches!”

  “We’ll soon know,” I said.

  2210: The red sports car slowed appreciably. We pulled up until we were trailing by twenty meters. A bare arm came out of the driver’s window. A hand flapped at us languidly.

  “Marvelous, marvelous ef!” I laughed. “He’s out.”

  “Oh, yes!” Paul giggled. Almost hysterically. “Oh, yes! Oh, yes!”

  2235: She pulled off the deserted road, into the shadow. Her car was tilted downward, hanging up on the steep shoulder. We parked right behind her. Paul and I got out, hurried up to her car. I was on the driver’s side.

  “Go?” I asked her.

  She was lighting a cigarette. With her own lighter.

  “Cake,” she said. “You manipulated him beautifully. Clunked almost instantly. Dropped cigarettes and matches in his lap. I’ve got them. He started to fall forward, but I pulled him back.”

  Paul had the door open on the passenger’s side. Feeling for a pulse in Roach’s neck. Lifting his eyelids.

  ‘‘Pulse slow," he reported in a low voice. ‘‘He’s under deep. ’’

  I went around and helped haul Art Roach from the car. We finally got him unfolded, lying on the shoulder of the road.

  Maya Leighton got out and joined us. She left the driver’s door open. She took a final puff of her cannabis, dropped it to the gro
und, rubbed it to shreds under her foot. She looked at her car.

  “Good-bye, sweetie,” she said.

  “I’ll pay all expenses, ’ ’ I assured her. “It’ll be as good as new. ”

  The three of us got behind the car and pushed it over the shoulder of the road. It crunched down into the trees. The right front fender crumpled. The car tilted crazily.

  We hauled Art Roach down there, dragging him on pavement, gravel, short scrub. To mess him up. We arranged him artistically. On his back, arms flung wide, one ankle hooked over the sill on the passenger’s side. The door had sprung and he had been thrown out of the car. What else?

  We climbed back onto the shoulder of the road.

  “Let’s have the drugs, Maya,” Paul said. He was tracking now.

  She gave him the fiddled matches. Roach’s cigarettes were tossed down atop his corpus. Paul inspected the three plastic containers before he slipped them into his purse. There was one an-aphrodisiac capsule missing. Maya had slipped that into Roach’s' first drink. To cool his ardency. Make him more willing to leave the apartment. If he had refused to leave, the instant narcotic would have smashed him in the apartment. Then Paul and I would have wrestled him out of there into Maya’s car, and the plan would have proceeded on schedule. If he had agreed to visit the King’s Pawn, but hadn’t used the narcotized matches en route, Maya still had the thirty-minute narcotic pills to fiddle his last drink at the roadhouse. He’d have clunked on the trip back. Fail-safe.

  Maya Leighton looked at me, squared her shoulders, lifted her chin.

  “All right, Nick,” she said crisply. “Let’s have it.”

  Without pausing to reflect, not wanting to reflect, I slammed her in the jaw with the heel of my hand. She went flying back down into the gully, one hand out to break her fall.

  She sat up on the ground, shaking her head groggily. She looked at her palm. It was scraped raw, beginning to ooze blood. She wiped it on her blouse. Ripped two buttons open. Took clips from her hair, let it fall free. She climbed to her feet. Came up the bank to us. Rubbed a bloodied palm across her face.

  “You’ll pay for all this, you bastard.” She grinned at me.

  “Any time,” I told her. “A profit.”

  I made certain she had small coins in her purse. Then she started walking down the road to the public phone. Paul and I got into the Rover, drove back to the Hospice, undressed, slid into our cots in Transient Quarters. I may have been whistling.

  2350: A nurse came down between the two rows of cots. She was carrying a flashlight. A puddle of white light jerked along at her feet. I closed my eyes.

  She leaned over me, shook my shoulder.

  “Dr. Flair,” she whispered. “Dr. Flair, wake up.”

  “Wha’? What?” I sat up suddenly. “What is it?”

  “Dr. Lucas asks you to come to Emergency. At once, doctor.”

  “What’s wrong? Is it Lewisohn?”

  “No, not Lewisohn. The ambulance just brought in two accident cases. Maya Leighton and an em. Dr. Lucas says it’s urgent, doctor.”

  I began to dress. I waited until she had left the barracks. Then I tapped Paul and Mary Bergstrom. Their cots were side by side.

  “They’re here,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  The interne ruling Emergency was completely confused. The night dispatcher had sent an ambulance in answer to Maya’s phone call. By the time it returned with Maya, bruised but conscious, and Art Roach, unconscious, Dr. Seth Lucas was on the scene. After Maya had identified Roach as Chief of Security & Intelligence, DOB, Lucas had refused to touch the case and warned the befuddled interne not to interfere. At that moment he sent for me.

  “You did exactly right, doctor,” I told him. In a loud voice. Everyone listening. “This em can only be treated by me. Regulations. Let’s get them upstairs. Paul, you and Mary assist. Dr. Lucas, please give us a hand. We’ll take them on the wheeled stretchers.”

  “I can walk,” Maya protested.

  “Just lie still,” I told her sternly. “You may have internal injuries.”

  We wheeled the two stretchers rapidly into the elevator. On the second floor, we paused in the corridor outside one of the reserved rooms. The unlocked room.

  “Mary, Seth,” I said, “you two take Maya in, get her cleaned up. A big bandage around that hand. Hospital gown.”

  “No way,” Maya said. Climbing off her stretcher. “I’m mobile. And I’m not going to,miss the fun.”

  It didn’t seem the right moment to assert my authority over her. If I had any.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s get on with Roach.”

  The five of us got in each other’s way getting him off the stretcher onto the hospital bed. Finally, I made the two efs and Paul stand clear. Seth Lucas and I stripped Roach down. Maya’s first report had been accurate: The em was blessed.

  “It looks like a baby’s arm with an apple in its fist,” I said. The standard encomium. “Paul, let’s have the syringe first.”

  He took his plastic shopping bag from the closet, extracted a hypogun. There was a sealed vial in the case. Actually a cartridge to fit the gun.

  “I’ll do it,” Paul said.

  If he wanted to demonstrate his complicity, fine.

  “In the neck,” I told him.

  He loaded the gun expertly, cocked it by pulling back the springoperated plunger. He placed the muzzle on the side of Roach’s neck, pulled the trigger. There was an audible “Pflug!” sound. The indicator on the gun showed empty. Paul replaced it in the shopping bag.

  We had decided on a purazine compound in a liquid that could be subcutaneously injected. We administered two cc’s. It would produce a temporary memory block for approximately eight hours prior to the time of injection. The memory erasure with this particular compound was not permanent. Within a week or two, Roach would remember everything. By then, we hoped, it would make no difference.

  He was lying naked, supine on the hospital bed. I pulled him across to the left side. I straightened his left arm. Now everyone was serving. Roach’s digiwatch was removed from his left wrist, placed on the bedside table.

  “The signet ring?” Mary asked.

  “No, no,” I said hurriedly. “Leave it on. Identification that it’s really his arm. He’ll recognize it.”

  The portable laserscope was brought close. The bed had to be raised electrically so that Roach’s arm could be slipped easily into the image tunnel. Then the laserscope was moved to one side. Dr. Seth Lucas wheeled over a sturdy stainless steel table covered with a towel on a square of plastirub padding. On the table were two natural-rubber blocks and a surgical mallet.

  Roach’s forearm was laid across the rubber supports. Just below his elbow and just above his wrist. The arm was supported about five cm above the table surface.

  “Seth,” I said casually, “give it a whack.”

  I had intended to break Art Roach’s arm myself. But after Paul had proved his loyalty by administering the memory inhibitor, I computed it might be wise if Dr. Seth Lucas also performed an overt act.

  Lucas picked up the surgical mallet. Suddenly his face was glistening with sweat. He looked at me. Appealing.

  “Try for the radius,” I said. “A simple break. Not a compound fracture.”

  Almost blindly, he hit Roach’s arm. Too close to the wrist, and such a light tap I doubted if it would bruise the skin.

  “Give me that,” Mary Bergstrom growled. She grabbed the mallet roughly from Seth’s nerveless hand.

  We moved in closer. Mary pursed her lips, studying the white, almost hairless arm. She pulped the flesh feeling for bone position and thickness. Then, with a look of utter concentration, she raised the mallet and smacked it down.

  We all heard it. I was convinced Roach’s arm had been shattered into a million pieces. But no, it appeared whole. No jagged splinters of bone protruded.

  “Laserscope,” I ordered.

  Paul and Lucas (breathing heavily) held Roach’s arm immobile while th
e table was rolled away and the laserscope moved close. The arm was slid into the tunnel, the set switched on. We crowded around the viewing screen. There it was: a definite hairline break in the radius, midway between elbow and wrist.

  “Beautiful, Mary,” I said. “Just what we wanted.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured. “Another tap? A light one, just to enlarge it?”

  “No, no,” I said hastily. “This will do fine. Paul, take the plates, from various angles. Make certain the signet ring shows.”

  We took a holder of 3-D holographic laserpix. Dr. Seth Lucas departed with the film to have it processed by the night crew in the lab. We wheeled the tables out of the way. Paul and I moved Roach back into the center of his bed while Mary pressed the two sections of his cracked arm tightly together.

  Paul took the inflatable arm splint out of his bag of tricks and handed it to me. I slid my hand inside, felt about cautiously.

  “The Electronics Team did a good service,” Paul said.

  He was right. The self-powered transmitter was no larger than a postage stamp, and almost as flat. What bulk it had came from the plastifoam padding in which it was encased. So it wouldn’t press into the arm and impede circulation.

  We gently pulled the limp plastic sleeve over Roach’s cracked arm. It reached from just below his elbow to the limits of the metacarpals, the large knuckles. His fingers, and that signet ring, hung free.

  We attached the bottle of compressed air provided by Dr. Seth Lucas. We began to inflate the splint. Slowly. Smoothing out the wrinkles. Pulling it taut. I kept an eye on the splint valve. When the dial showed the recommended pressure for the splint, I gave it an additional two psi, cut it off, detached dial, tube, valve nipple. The splint was rigid, hard as plaster.

  “Let’s check it out,” I said. “Paul, you go. We’ll keep talking.”

  I gave him the key to my Rover. We had put the receiver on the back seat, covered with the topcoat I had brought down from GPA-1.

  Paul left. Maya Leighton said, faintly, “I think I better sit down.”

  Mary and I whirled to look at her. She was suddenly quite pale, forehead moist. Mary got to her first, helped her into a chair, felt for her pulse. I rummaged through Paul’s shopping bag, found the half-liter of natural brandy I had asked him to provide. I poured a double dollop into a Hospice plastiglass, held it to Maya’s lips.