Hot Sky at Midnight

by Robert Silverberg

  She embraces him then, cradles him against her breasts, strokes his hair, whispers soft words. Making it all good again. My God, he thinks, my God, my God.

  Rhodes hears Paul Carpenter’s voice, suddenly, in his mind.

  —She’s a disturbed woman, Nick.

  —No, she’s simply deeply committed to—

  —Listen to me. She’s emotionally disturbed. So is her friend Jolanda, who you were kind enough to toss into my bed the other night. These are very sexually gifted women, and we who wander around looking for the solace of a little nookie are highly vulnerable to the mysterious mojo that throbs out at us from between their legs.

  Right. Right. If he had any courage, he’d flee. He knows that. But such things have never come easily to Rhodes. He is fiercely retentive, desperately eager to hang on to anything that gives even the promise of some sort of solace.

  Eventually Rhodes drifts off into troubled sleep. About five he awakens, kisses the sleeping Isabelle lightly on the tip of her nose, and goes home.

  By a couple of minutes after eight he is in the office. The miasma of the night still hovers over him, but he hopes somehow to lift himself out of grim depression through a hard day’s work. At least, Rhodes thinks, in all of last night’s horrors they hadn’t gotten into yet another brawl over his research. But that was a very small comfort at best.

  He held off Van Vliet as long as he could, well into mid-morning. Van Vliet gave him a headache in his gut. The authorization for upgrading of Van Vliet’s hemoglobin-research budget had gone along to New Tokyo four days ago, and in all likelihood it would sail through without any objections, given Rhodes’ high standing with upper-level Company management.

  Until it did, though, Van Vliet would just have to sit tight. But the kid didn’t seem capable of sitting tight. Two or three times a day he was on the horn to Rhodes, wanting to tell him about this or that exciting new corollary to his preliminary theoretical statement. Rhodes didn’t have much appetite for another dose of that just now, not after last night, at least not so early in the day.

  He killed as much time as he could, rummaging doggedly through both his virtual desks and all the clutter on his real one, signing papers without even reading them, flipping some documents down into dead storage unsigned, working mindlessly, shamelessly. Gradually Rhodes began to feel some of the newer abrasions in his soul starting to heal a little.

  A couple of drinks helped him get through the bad time. The first one tasted strangely tinny—some residue from the evening before, he thought, damage to his palate from drinking too much of Isabelle’s God-knows-what brand of algae-mash Scotch—but the second drink made things better. And the third went down without any problems at all.

  Finally, feeling reasonably well fortified and aware he could duck his meeting with the younger man no longer, Rhodes thumbed the annunciator and said, “I’m available to talk with Dr. Van Vliet, now.”

  “Does that mean you’ll be taking calls again, Dr. Rhodes?”

  “I suppose. Have there been any for me?”

  “Just one,” the android said.

  Isabelle! She’s sorry that everything became such a mess last night!

  No. Not Isabelle. “A Mr. Nakamura called,” said the android.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Nakamura, of East Bay Realty Associates. About the house in Walnut Creek that you are interested in buying.”

  Rhodes didn’t know anyone named Nakamura. He wasn’t planning to buy a house in Walnut Creek or anywhere else.

  “It must have been a wrong number,” Rhodes said. “He’s looking for some other Nicholas Rhodes.”

  “He said that you were likely to think so. But he said to tell you that it was no mistake, that you would understand the terms of the offer right away and would be very pleased by them if you spoke to him.”

  Nakamura?

  Walnut Creek?

  It made no sense. But all consideration of the matter would have to wait. Van Vliet was on the line again, now.

  He wanted to bring some new charts to Rhodes’ office, right away. Big surprise, Van Vliet coming up with yet another batch of charts.

  Rhodes sighed. “Charts of what?”

  “Some new atmospheric extrapolations, the projected hydrogen cyanide levels and how we plan to cope with their special implications.”

  “I’m terrifically stacked up here, Van. Can’t this wait a little?”

  “But it’s tremendously exciting stuff.”

  “Having to breathe hydrogen cyanide is exciting?” Rhodes asked. “Yes, I guess it would be. But not for very long.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Nick,” said Van Vliet. He had suddenly begun calling Rhodes “Nick,” ever since the budget requisition had gone up to New Tokyo a few days before. Rhodes didn’t like it much. “You see, Nick, we’ve come up with a really awesome set of equations that indicate the likelihood of oceanic amino-acid formation. New amino acids. If I could just have five minutes to show you what I’m talking about—”

  “Okay,” Rhodes said. “Five minutes.”

  Van Vliet took fifteen. Mostly that was Rhodes’ fault: he let himself get interested. What Van Vliet’s projections seemed to show was that the upcoming chemical configuration of the ocean might be going to duplicate, to some small and largely unpredictable degree, certain aspects of the nutrient-soup composition of the primordial sea. After hundreds of years of cheerfully filling the whole biosphere with all manner of deadly waste, mankind apparently was about to generate still another terrific surprise for itself that had to do with life instead of death: a mixed package, unexpected biogenesis along with the expectable morbidity, a seaborne reprise of the original chemical forces that had initiated the appearance of Earth’s first living things, a hodgepodge of purines and adenylates and aminos stirring around and rearranging themselves into intricate polymers, some of them self-replicating, out of which might come—

  Almost anything.

  A shitstorm of random genetic information brewing in the depths of the twenty-fourth century’s seas.

  “Do you see it?” Van Vliet cried. “The potential for new life-forms emerging, Nick? Creation starting all over again!”

  Rhodes summoned a hearty chuckle from some recess of his soul. “A second chance for the trilobites, eh?”

  Van Vliet didn’t seem amused. He gave Rhodes a reproachful look. “I mean one-celled organisms, Nick. Bacteria. Protozoa. An unpredictable pelagic micro-biota spontaneously evolving that could raise hell with the life-forms already present on the planet Such as us.”

  Right, Rhodes thought. A load of strange evolutionary garbage hauling itself up out of the waters to plague an already quite adequately plagued planet.

  It was an interesting speculative jump, and Rhodes said so, in all sincerity. In all sincerity, though, he didn’t understand what any of this had to do with the work of Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, at least not right away. Carefully he said, “I admire the care with which you’re working out all the implications of the situation, Van. But I’m not sure I could get budgetary approval for a study dealing with diseases caused by microorganisms that haven’t evolved yet.”

  A cool, almost supercilious grin from Van Vliet. “On the contrary, Nick. If we can project the potential consequences of a quantum jump in natural evolutionary processes, we might be able to build in defenses against new and hostile kinds of—”

  “Please, Van. One step at a time, okay? Okay?”

  One step at a time, obviously, wasn’t the Van method. And plainly Rhodes’ failure to whoop with enthusiasm over this new angle was, for Van Vliet, one more example of the associate director’s hopeless conservatism. Rhodes pacified him, though, by congratulating him heartily on the new line of work, asking to see further studies, promising to take the topic of renewed biogenesis up at the very next meeting of the directors. And smoothly showed him to the door.

  When Van Vliet was gone, Rhodes had one more drink, just a small one, to e
ase him through the transition into the day’s next problem.

  Which was to ponder the Nakamura call again. Rhodes was still certain that Mr. Nakamura, whoever he might be, had called the wrong number. But how odd that Nakamura would have thrown in that business about there being no mistake, exactly as though he was anticipating Rhodes’ puzzled response. Something in that nagged at him, demanding resolution.

  About that house in Walnut Creek that you are interested in buying.

  The thought flashed through Rhodes’ mind that that might be some sort of code phrase—that it referred to some secret enterprise into which Nakamura meant to inveigle him, the sale of corporate secrets, or an intricate counterespionage ploy, something like that. Things like that went on in the megacorp world all the time, Rhodes knew. Though he had never had any firsthand experience of them.

  Rhodes put through a call to Ned Svoboda in Imaging and Schematics.

  Svoboda was an occasional after-hours drinking companion of his, who had the rare distinction of having worked for three different megacorps in a dozen years or so: not only Samurai Industries but also Kyocera-Merck and before that the somewhat less formidable IBM/Toshiba bunch. Svoboda was shrewd, Svoboda was about as trustworthy as anyone Rhodes could think of, and Svoboda had been around the block a couple of times. If anybody knew about corporate codes, industrial espionage, whatever, Svoboda was the one.

  “You mind if I cruise over and talk to you for a couple of minutes?” Rhodes asked. “Something odd has come up and I need a little advice.” And, Rhodes did not explicitly need to add, it was something best not discussed over the Company communications net. The wires had ears. That was common knowledge.

  Svoboda didn’t mind. Rhodes descended eight floors to Imaging and met Svoboda on the bubble-enclosed leisure terrace outside his office. He was a short, heavyset man of about forty, with dark rumpled hair and emphatic Slavic features.

  Rhodes said, “I had a peculiar phone call this morning. Fellow with a Japanese name out of Walnut Creek—a realtor, he says. Says he’d like to talk to me about the house I’m interested in buying out there.”

  “I didn’t know you were planning to move over the hill.”

  “I’m not. I don’t know this Jap from Adam.”

  “Ah so.”

  “But he realizes that. When he phoned, he went out of his way to tell my annunciator that regardless of what I might think, this wasn’t a mistaken call, that I was the Rhodes he was trying to reach and that I would really be interested in the property he had to offer. So I began to wonder, Ned—”

  Svoboda’s eyes widened. “Yeah, I bet you did.”

  “And I thought maybe it’s more complicated than it appears at first glance—something that you might be able to explain to me, some kind of cryptic message that I ought to understand but don’t quite see the—”

  “Shhh!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just don’t say anything more, okay?” Svoboda held his left arm out and let his right hand go crawling quickly across the back of it in the funny little crab-walk gesture that universally meant, There probably are bugs here. The Company had its spy eyes everywhere—even on leisure terraces, it seemed. Svoboda said, “You have a pen and a piece of paper on you?”

  “Sure. Here.”

  It was a very small piece, but it was all that Rhodes could find. Svoboda clamped his lips together and wrote with exaggerated care, running his words across and down the side of the page in his effort to get down everything he wanted to say. He kept it covered with his other hand as he wrote, to prevent any hidden camera from seeing. When he was done he folded the piece in half, and in half again, and pressed it into the palm of Rhodes’ hand.

  “Go for a little walk and read it,” Svoboda said. “Then maybe call me at home tonight if you want to talk about it any more, okay?”

  He grinned and touched two fingers to the side of his head in a quick salute, and went back inside.

  Rhodes, frowning, returned to his own area of the building. He thought of going into the washroom to read Svoboda’s note, but on reflection he considered that there was no place in the building more likely to have a secret scanner eye mounted in the wall than in a washroom. Instead he simply leaned against the wall outside his office and opened the folded scrap, cupping it in his hand, and held it up in front of his face, very close, as if trying to read his own palm.

  It said, in heavy block letters:

  THIS IS A JOB OFFER. TELLING YOU THEY WANT TO SELL YOU A HOUSE MEANS THAT THEY WANT TO HIRE YOU.

  Instantly Rhodes felt adrenaline beginning to surge. His heart was thumping with frightening force. What the hell was this?

  THIS IS A JOB OFFER.

  From whom? Why?

  He read the note again, read it two or three times, and then balled it up and stuffed it deep into his pocket.

  THEY WANT TO HIRE YOU.

  They? Who were they?

  TO HIRE YOU. THEY WANT.

  There had been a pretty good earthquake in the Bay Area three years ago, six-point-something on the Richter scale. The whole building had swayed for two and a half minutes then. This felt like that.

  Rhodes was trembling. He tried to control it, and failed.

  THIS IS A JOB OFFER.

  Forget it, he told himself.

  You don’t want to mess around with anything like this. You already have a job. It’s a good one. You have a fine department, plenty of good people working for you, nice pay, steady upward slope. You have never worked for anybody but Samurai Industries in your life. You have never wanted to work for anybody but Samurai Industries.

  He reached into his pocket and touched the crumpled bit of paper.

  Throw it away, Nick. Throw it away.

  Rhodes went back into his office. More things were blinking on all the inputs, but he ignored them. He poured himself a drink, a pretty significant one.

  He thought about what it might be like to work for another company.

  Certainly he was stymied at Samurai by his own ambivalences and hesitations. Just as he was, also, in his relationship with Isabelle. Only a little while ago he had been thinking about the need for change in his life, and all that came roaring back through him now, the great surge of vague resentments, something turbulent, almost explosive, stirring inside him. It hadn’t been very long ago that he had told Paul Carpenter how deeply he feared giving Samurai Industries a monopoly over human adapto technology. And Paul had come right back at him with the solution to that. Quit Santachiara and go over to somebody like Kyocera-Merck. Take your whole department with you. Turn your gene technology over to the competition. Let Samurai and K-M fight it out for world domination.

  Was he being handed a chance to do just that?

  Then he should grab it, he thought.

  At least find out what this is all about, he urged himself. Call Nakamura. Arrange to see him.

  “Get me Mr. Nakamura, at East Bay Realty,” Rhodes told the annunciator giddily.

  It was like making a date, he thought, that could lead to some kind of adulterous romance.

  It took quite a while to get through. You would think realty agents would be eager to talk with potential customers, but evidently returning a call to Mr. Nakamura wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Then finally lights began to flash and a Japanese face looked back at him from the visor. The standard inscrutability: flat inexpressive gaze, androidal smile. Somehow the face looked Japanese rather than Japanese-American, Rhodes thought, on no evidence at all. That was interesting.

  “I am Mr. Kurashiki,” the face said. “Mr. Nakamura is deeply grateful for your response to his call. He is available to see you at any of the following times today or tomorrow.”

  A menu appeared on the visor: noon, two P.M., four P.M., nine or eleven in the morning tomorrow.

  Rhodes felt a faint chill. He wondered if he ever actually would meet Mr. Nakamura, whether there was a real Mr. Nakamura at all, even whether there was a real Mr. Kurashiki. Mr. K
urashiki looked and sounded more like a simulation than a person.

  But then Rhodes told himself that he was being silly. Kurashiki was the appointments secretary, that was all; and he was real, all right, as real as any of these Japs ever could be. Svoboda had called it correctly: this was serious business, an actual job offer coming from an actual rival megacorp.

  “Noon today,” Rhodes said. He would have to leave almost at once. But that was one way to keep his legendary unpunctualily from fouling things up. It was probably wisest to be on.time for this one. “If you’ll give me the driving directions—”

  “You will be coming from Berkeley? The Santachiara Technologies tower?”

  “Yes.”

  “The trip will take you fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. As you enter Highway 24, instruct your car that the route module code is H112.03/accessWR52.”

  Rhodes tapped for thirty seconds’ worth of data recall and the number came rolling out of the annunciator’s printout slot. He thanked Kurashiki and broke the contact.

  “Cancel my afternoon appointments,” Rhodes told the annunicator. “I’m going out.”

  The Diablos were still blowing when his car came up from the garage: a tangible wind, a palpable wind, hard and knife-sharp and maybe fifty miles an hour, and he would be driving right into it. You actually could see the wind. It was traveling visibly through the larger continuum of the atmosphere. It had the form of an eerie golden aura, a kind of urinous tint: a fast-moving organic haze, a virulent phosphorescent swirl of airborne industrial contaminants sailing westward out of the factory zone on the far side ofWalnut Creek The air was so full of the stuff that it seemed fertile, capable of impregnating anything it encountered on its way toward the ocean. Rhodes thought of Van Vliet’s new theory, the floating soup of amino acids out of which wondrously virulent bacteria would be generated. Maybe this wind was the key factor that would kindle into life, this very afternoon, the jolly new chemical configuration that Van Vliet said was soon due to take form in the seas.