by Mel Gilden
The air got cool as we hurried down the stairs. By the time we got to the bottom we had the flashlight and the eyelights working again. We were at the end of a tunnel with finished stone walls like the ones in the Castle of Android Progress. It angled downward. At the lowest point was a puddle that we had to leap over. We angled up for a while and came to an empty room. One wall was made of dull black metal, but somebody had taken the trouble to cut a hole in it with a torch, proving again that human curiosity would bear a lot of weight. Something with no more reality than black smoke covered the other side of the hole.
Danny Macabre walked to the hole and pointed to it as if he were a TV weatherman. He said, "Go in through here. You'll be in a big stone room. In the middle of the room is a hydraulic lift. Against the wall near the lift is a narrow ladder. You can take that up to the meeting."
"What about you?"
"I'll wait here."
"For how long? A minute? Three?"
Danny shook his head and said, "I'm not a bad person."
I took a good look at him. He didn't look like a bad person, but the idea that you could tell the good guys from the bad guys by the heft of their eyebrows was a notion I'd gotten only from television. "Not bad," I said. "But looking out for yourself like anybody else."
"I'll come with you, then."
He'd suggested it too quickly, but I had to admit we didn't have a wide range of choices. It had to be one or the other. He had to come or stay. The mental coin flipped and came down. I took a deep breath and said, "OK. We've come this far."
He grinned for some reason and stepped through the hole. There was light on the other side, then darkness again. I told Bill, "Squawk if anything looks wrong to you."
It was a dangerous order, but Bill said, "Right, Boss," and went through. The light faded in and out again. No squawk. No clang as Bill hit the deck. I swallowed and went through myself.
I had to push aside a curtain heavy as the chairman of the board's carpet and came out in another stone room, this one wide enough to comfortably fit a commercial jet and long enough to make that width look narrow. Light came from behind, coping about halfway up the walls, higher than a gorilla could reach. In the center of the room was the shiny steel pillar of a hydraulic lift. I followed it up with my eyes and lost it in shadow. Around the pillar were lab benches set up for heavy-duty experimentation. Beyond the benches was a vat with a catwalk over it and a big machine leaning over it like a cat over a fishbowl. The smell told me it was a vat of android ur-glop. On the wall next to the hydraulic lift was a metal ladder so narrow and fragile it looked as if a monkey would have trouble climbing it. Across from the ladder was a wall with bars in it—a line of three cells with stout stone walls between them. Sniffling and moaning came from one of the cells. The sounds made my flesh crawl.
I stood motionless next to Danny and Bill, trying not to apply too much meaning to the squeamish sound. Behind us was a midnight blue curtain embroidered with a picture of a pearly white horse that had a horn in the middle of its forehead and a beard like a swirl of whipped cream. It was sitting among stiff artificial trees and small woodland creatures that would look more natural with wind-up keys in their backs.
"The lab," I said in a voice like the stirring of dead leaves.
"Yeah," said Danny. "There's your ladder. I'm not going up it, not for you or for Darken or for anybody."
"You must know what's at the top."
He spoke in the flat tone of a man repeating a bus schedule that he'd memorized, not because he wanted to, but just because he'd said it so often. "I told you," he said. "Mr. Will's conference room. I went up once just out of curiosity, and looked in through an air duct in the wall. It's a long way up and a longer way down." He shuddered. "I don't want to climb it again."
"Hello, out there," came a voice. Danny and I jumped a little, I'm afraid. No one in our party had spoken.
Unless someone was playing hidey-hole under a lab bench the voice had to have come from one of the cells. Danny and Bill stayed by the curtain while I sidled across the room, my hearts banging against each other like castanets. I knew that voice and it meant I had been right about a few things for a change.
Standing in the center of any of the cells, a big man would not quite be able to touch both side walls at once with his fingertips. Worked into the door of each cell was a square panel of black metal the size of a paperback novel. In the center of each panel was a keyhole big enough for my fist.
As I approached the nearest cell a dozen hands reached out of the center one and gripped the bars, followed by the surprised faces of six women. Two of them didn't know whether to be horrified or encouraged. One woman was a blonde and the other was a brunette. The brunette was old and had not brooked much nonsense in her life. The blonde might ordinarily have been pretty, but at the moment her face looked like an empty sandbox. Their hair had not been done that morning. "Who are you?" the brunette called as if she was used to getting answers.
I knew the other four women. They were the surfer girls. Bingo cried, "Zoot!" The other surfer girls did the same. The two strangers looked at them as if somebody had lost her mind.
I tipped my hat at them and looked into the cell on the near end. It was big, but no larger than Mr. Will's private office. Inside the cell were five men, a Toomler, and a camel. I knew from the smell the camel would be there. Zamp and the men were wearing what they'd had on when they were picked up. Max Toodemax wore a short-sleeved knit shirt with a green worm on the pocket. His fawn gray pants had once been cleaner and less wrinkled. The three missing surfers were dressed in the uniform. Captain Hook grumbled something about it being about time. Knighten Daise, very much the camel, still wore his Foreign Legion hat.
I stepped toward the cell, dreamy as a guy in a hair dye commercial. Zamp stood three feet away from me on the other side of the bars. He said, "So?"
I said, "So, nu, already?" I was very glad to see him. He reached for the bars and I put my hands over his. He was shaking. I probably was too.
"I'm all right. Get us out of here."
I didn't move. I just said, "I guess you got to see terrible old Earth after all."
"Yeah." He nodded, giving me my philosophical point.
While he was doing that another man stepped forward. He was wearing a dark suit, but his tie was off and his white shirt was open. It was Iron Will, Whipper Will's father, the man who a lot of people thought was behind this mess. Of course I hadn't thought that for a while.
I could see everybody's neck. I didn't see any blue plastic collars. The case was shaping up nicely.
"Marlowe," Mr. Daise said in his thick flat camel voice.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Daise," I said. I patted Zamp's hands, said, "I'll be right back," and moved down to the third cell. I immediately wished I hadn't. This was where the sniffling and moaning came from, and it smelled as if someone had been sick very thoroughly there, and for a long time.
Quite a crowd was in that cell, but I had difficulty sorting them out. The truth is, I didn't try very hard. One creature had an extra arm growing from a shoulder. Another had two heads, one fairly normal, the other with teeth like tombstones, a nose like a mashed turnip, and wild red eyes. The sniffing came in wet waves from the nose. One of the things in the cell was barely a puddle, an unbaked cookie of a person. The moaning came from a thing like a knot of snakes that struggled against the eight shackles holding it against the wall. Maybe I wasn't enough of a humanitarian. Maybe they should have sent Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, or Dr. Christian. I turned away.
Bill and Danny were gawking into the cells. Danny glanced into the third one and came back looking a little green. I let Bill look, but what he saw seemed to have no effect on him. The three of us stood where everybody could see us. Danny kept looking between me and Zamp as if we were a Ping-Pong match. He didn't ask if we were related, but he wanted to.
To Danny, I said, "You should have told me they were here. I would have walked a little faster."
> "You didn't say you wanted them. You just talked about Mr. Will's big meeting."
"Who does that fellow in the suit look like to you?"
He took a good look for what must have been the first time, and his face went from green to pasty white. His mouth fell open wide enough to take in a candlestick. Then he swore softly.
"Take it easy, Danny. He'll probably give you your very own android for helping save him."
Mr. Will almost choked on a short, cynical laugh.
Mr. Daise said, "Are you planning to let us out anytime soon?"
Mr. Will said, "A key should be in a niche beyond the third cell."
I went to look for it, being very careful to stare straight ahead and not breathe too deeply till I had gotten past the monsters.
I found the key behind a small wooden box hung on the wall. It was a big cast-iron job that should have been hanging on the wall of the sheriff's office in Dodge City. I went back and let everybody out. They had no luggage. Zamp and I rubbed noses until we both became embarrassed and stopped.
I looked at my watch. Ten-seventeen. I made a vague motion at Bill and Danny and said, "I'm going to send all of you back to my motel with these two gentlemen." I guess I still didn't trust Danny Macabre. "Wait for me there while I take a look upstairs."
"I'll come with you," Zamp said.
"Haven't you had enough?"
"More than enough. It's slopping over the sides and making dirty on the floor. But I want to see this through."
I didn't have time to argue with him. And the energy I had I'd probably need. I said, "No."
"Why?" "What are you going to do, Zamp? Stow away in my pocket?"
He began to get angry, then changed his mind. He smiled as if bearing up well under pain and walked across the room to ostentatiously study the fancy curtain we'd come through. "You know what's up there?" Mr. Will said. I nodded and said, "I'm kind of a detective." "You must be. You're also an optimist." He smiled. It had warmth and looked as if it belonged on that face, a pleasant change from what I had been getting from somebody who looked like him.
Flopsie (or was it Mopsie?) pointed into the third cell without looking at it and said, "What about them?"
"Mistakes," Mr. Will said, his mouth set into a line.
Mopsie (or was it Flopsie?) had proposed a difficult ethical question. I took the easy way out. I said, "Leave 'em." Nobody argued with me.
I gave Bill the key to my motel room and told him to let everybody in. They could all watch each other. While they congregated by the curtain Danny Macabre came up to shake my hand. While he did it, he whispered, "What about the camel? There's no room for him in the tunnel. How will I explain him if we get caught in the locker room?"
"It's a men's locker room, isn't it? I'd worry more about the women."
He gulped and his eyes got wide. I said, "Go. A lot of clever people will be with you. You'll figure out something."
He let go of my hand and went. I watched them go behind the curtain one by one and be gone as if by magic. Even Mr. Daise made it, though he complained all the while about the tight fit. When I was alone I went to the narrow ladder, the one Danny Macabre said he never wanted to climb again. I had saved Zamp and my friends. Now it was time to see if I was good enough to save Los Angeles. I grabbed a rung and started up.
Chapter 25
Room At The Top
I CLIMBED in light for a while, working up a sweat. The ladder had been built for Earth people so the rungs were a little too far apart for me to be comfortable using them. But I was a tough guy. I kept climbing. The silver column of the hydraulic lift was with me, looking very much the same at this level as it did below.
Just before I entered the shadow at the top of the room I looked down on the laboratory, on the light tubes behind their coping, on the two empty cells and the one full one, on the vat. I could hear the things in the full cell breathing noisily and moving around. Somebody's failed experiments. Somebody without enough guts to put them out of their misery, but with too much of what some people might think was compassion. It was a judgment call. I didn't have an easy answer myself. I just hoped they weren't in pain.
After that I climbed in darkness with the lighted square of the laboratory getting smaller and smaller below me, like a night game beneath the Goodyear Blimp. That tower must have been some kind of whispering gallery because even at the top I continued to hear the creatures in the third cell.
But the top was far away from where I was at that moment. I climbed mechanically, without thinking about it. While my body did that I dumped out all the clues in my shoe box again, only this time they made a picture. It wasn't pretty, but it was just about complete.
Mr. Will had started bothering Whipper at about the same time as Max Toodemax sent his letter announcing that he was throwing everybody into the street. I forgave myself for not being tipped off by the timing; at that point I had no case, let alone suspicions. The credulity gas should have helped me along, but sometimes I can be kind of thick.
It wasn't until I had gone to see Mr. Knighten Daise about Mr. Will's high-toned list that the fog in my brain began to clear. Mr. Daise liked to hide in the bodies of animals because, he said, he had many enemies and this would throw them off. He might be right. I had dealt with him as a lobster and, most recently, as a camel. But that afternoon Mr. Daise had been in a reckless mood. He'd been human. And a very strange kind of human at that. He was no longer righteously indignant at Iron Will for somehow making every breeze whisper with a credulity gas breath; he even liked androids well enough to stop competing with them with his Surfing Samurai Robots.
Either somebody had gotten to Mr. Daise or this wasn't him. Even then I was inclined to think it wasn't him. Irv Doewanit had told me that androids are grown from the cells of real people. Even in the shape of a camel Mr. Daise would still have human cells. The android grown from those cells would be human and look like the original article. Caria DeWilde or Whipper Will could have told me if my theory was right, but I didn't need them. I had a human at Mr. Daise's house drinking his hooch, and a camel in the lab beneath the Sign of the Times Sign Cemetery, a subsidiary of Will Industries. That told me all I wanted to know.
Seeing and talking to Max Toodemax at the neighborhood meeting, I began to understand what was going on. The hot air was wild and crazy that night, full of romance and credulity gas. Everybody felt it. Everybody would believe anything. Everybody but Mr. Toodemax. It helped that he had been wearing an outfit that covered his neck, but that was a clue I didn't really need.
Somebody was replacing important people with androids, growing them from sample cells. Eventually this person would have all his androids in position and he could run Los Angeles through them. He needed Whipper Will because this person didn't want his androids to go stale. The kidnapping of my friends had originally been in aid of forcing Whipper to work. The mastermind would also want to know why Zamp and the surfers weren't affected by the credulity gas. That would be important to him but not as important as making the replacements.
I had met three prominent men, all of whom wore suits every time I saw them, despite the event, despite the heat. Somewhere other than Los Angeles, that might not have meant anything, but here in laid-back Lala Land men didn't wear ties at any but the most formal occasions. Even so, by itself this business with the ties meant very little. But Iron Will had threatened his son and kidnapped his son's friends. Knighten Daise was human again and suddenly a great appreciator of androids. Max Toodemax wanted to make more money by putting up condos. Not like any of them. Not like them at all.
I looked at the way my picture fit together, enjoying it the way a tired housewife enjoys gazing at a drainer full of clean dishes. I enjoyed it now because I figured that later somebody might object to my enjoyment and object with force behind it. I put everything back into the shoe box and kept climbing.
I climbed for so long I thought maybe I'd missed the top. That was silly, of course, but I think a lot of silly things
when I'm exhausted. I heard a noise and stopped. My limbs tingled and burned and felt no stronger than sausage links. My breath came quickly, taking in the smell of oil on the silver pillar and of the dry warm stones in the walls. The familiar insult of smog and the very faint sharpness of furniture wax prodded me.
The vague shuffling and hissing of Mr. Will's failed experiments came up the chimney, but that wasn't what stopped me. The new noises came from above, the indistinct sound of polite conversation in words I could not make out.
It was one of the most difficult things I ever did, but I began to climb again. The conference room was closer than I'd thought, and I really did almost miss it because my eyes were closed. The ladder passed it, leaving me just enough room to get by. It must have been quite a squeeze for Danny. An authoritative male voice saying, "And so I said to the mayor..." stopped me. I opened my eyes.
I was on a level with the duct Danny Macabre had told me about. I hooked my arms around the ladder, leaned closer to the one slit that was a little wider than the others, and looked through.
The room was small for Will Industries, only big enough to hold a sock hop. Tasteful paintings of smoky shapes hung on the pigeon-gray walls. The table in the center of the room was a heavy glass slab shaped like the lid of a coffin. The wooden chairs had backs in the same shape. So did the thin blocks of paper at each place. The pencils were just pencils. The only other thing on the table was a model of a Melt-O-Mobile that was bigger than a bread box. Everybody looked good in the soft designer lighting.
Most of the men wore dark suits and shirts of varying shades of white—from hen's egg to oyster. Em Shannon was wearing what he always wore for the papers, a pilly old tan sweater and gray pants that made him look, from the waist down, like an elephant. His dark hair was not quite combed and his glasses were not quite on straight. He probably had pens in a plastic holder in his shirt pocket, but I couldn't see them because of the sweater. The surfers would have called him a full hank even if they'd known he was worth eighty million bucks.
