He walked up behind them, knuckled them both gently under the ears and caught them, one in each arm as they fell.
The lad's coverall fitted well enough and Hook pulled and wriggled the worst rips into shape. Then he looked at the girl. She did not only look pathetic, lying there with the near-translucent lids of her eyes closed above those brutal blue bruises, she was pathetic.
Hook took off her coverall too, and looked without change of expression on the way her ribcage protruded, the flabbiness of her young breasts, the thinness of her waist. He draped the naked girl and boy neatly together, hands so, lips touching, and stood back and took not a whit of humour from it. Let them get what love they could while they still lived.
He hoped they'd have the sense to get on with it when they woke up from where he'd left them off.
A patrol flier went howling down the street, five metres off the pavement, and people turned to look and wave. Hook waved right along with the other zombies.
Just how the Boosted Men running this show would break the news to their dupes that a dangerous man was loose among them had intrigued Hook. If everything down here on Locus was so hunky-dory, how come anyone could be dangerous? Or loose? That meant there were other people here who weren't loose.
But they were Boosted Men and they'd flick into speed time and figure a way.
Hook glanced up the metalloy skeleton mast with its dish aerial focused on this area. If there were spy eyes up there they'd know he was here. If there were not, they wouldn't. The matter did not admit of argument.
Hook shinned up the latticework. Had Shaeel been able to see him now, for all the suns in space ve'd say something like: `You great hairy Terran-spiderman, 'ook!'
Shaeel could be very cutting at times.
Perched on the top cross bar, Hook dug down into his boot again. He produced a tiny power-loop. This was just about the most simple and effective way of discovering just where energy was flowing. It didn't tell him what kind, though; just at the moment Hook felt he already had that information.
He held the loop angled and swung it in sweeps before the aerial dish. The air was filled with energy. Beamed energy, of course, had its drawbacks; the chief obstacle to successful use of beamed power which would do away with pylons and power lines had been the sheer enormousness of the power, the frying-power of the energy. Nowadays there was no danger in Hook perching himself in the path of mega-amps to the nth power.
The loop tingled and indicated a direction. Hook stared that way. Certainly, a building which might be a power station bulked over there, hidden beyond trees. They were real trees for he could see them and he was not hypnotised. A dome flashed in the sunlight striking through the outer dome above. That might be the place. He'd need a cross-fix to make sure.
'Hey! You up there! You'll injure yourself!'
Hook looked down.
A guard had walked out from beyond the bar and, just for the moment, was hidden by the rubbish heap from the two naked potential lovers. Hook stowed the loop and waved.
`Lovely day, officer! Admiring the view.'
He shinnied down halfway.
He squinted down past his legs. The guard had unlimbered his gun. It was a Tonota Forty. So the guard was not a fool, then.
At least, not a complete fool. He must guess this was the man Hook they were supposed to be looking for and no doubt had already called that information out to his headquarters. He had the sense to draw his gun. He didn't have the sense to steer well clear of Ryder Hook.
Hook pushed and sprang and fell on top of the guard. He had no need to hit him. Hook stood up and pulled his coverall straight. The guard lay folded up, like a badly-made sausage. Hook took his gun and transceiver but didn't stay around to swap uniforms.
He took off along the street, diagonally across the pedway, aiming for a right-angled fix on the possible power station. He slowed to a walk and looked idiotically cheerful when a flier went past. They'd have ident kits issued soon, and then he might have more difficulty in avoiding observation.
The gun and transceiver he'd stowed in his tool kit. That looked authentic, a sight common on a million planets.
When he reached a pylon supporting a dish that he figured would be near-enough a right-angle — that was in a sense a council of perfection as he had no intention of using a three-way fix — he climbed up. If speed was a weapon it had always been cracked up to be, then speed was necessary now.
He swung the loop, aligning it between the dish and the distant gleam of the power-station dome. The loop refused to tingle. Hook cursed. He swung it about and when he felt the tingle, sighted, and admitted that he did feel surprise.
Between the power station and the first dish he had looped of its telenergy lay a single park-like expanse unique in the city under its dome. The loop tingled exactly on line with the centre of the park.
All Hook could see there was a clump of trees — and he didn't even know their names, let alone what planet they had been brought from.
He climbed down fast and belted across the pedway and into a side-alley between a refrigerated store and an apartment house.
Two guards paced across the mouth of the alley and Hook froze. When they had gone he relaxed. At first he had wondered why, with this magical hypnosis going for them, the Boosted Men bothered with guards. One reason was obvious. People all over the galaxy were accustomed to having their social life looked after and guarded by police. One econorg looked after its own, and goons and enforcers made sure their econorg wasn't pushed around. So the stalemate existed, in which peace was the norm. Had there been no guards here the people might have complained.
And no one ever complained about lily-white Locus.
The other reason lay in a vague rumour Hook had picked up in a bar — a real, brawling, disgusting spaceman's bar — out past the Rockington Cluster — a bunch of hard-cases out there — which a one-eyed wart had told him in a confidential whisper in between the strips. There was a bunch operating in the galaxy who didn't give a damn for econorgs. At first Hook had thought the little guy had in some way caught a whisper of the Boosted Men. But it wasn't like that. The wart mentioned a name — Untergods — then looked over his shoulder and clammed up. But if such a group did exist and the Boosted Men knew of them; maybe they posed threat enough for this secret project to be guarded as it was.
Having not nearly settled where the hypnosis signals were being beamed from, Hook, disgruntled enough to rip Rafflans' fool Krifman arms and legs off first, trundled off to find the Krifarm expert.
The weapon shops were guarded, of course, and Hook prowled. Had the guards not been there he wouldn't have gone within a kilometre of the place, and Rafflans could have gone hang. As it was he took a guard between his fingers, dropped him senseless on the stones, slid his knuckles behind the ear of the fellow's comrade and then walked boldly, smiling all over his face, through the entrance way.
He would have very little time inside.
The ident kits would be issued by now — had he been running security he'd have been toppling heads if they weren't — and they'd be programmed to sniff, scent and detect him by means of matches with what the computer said were Ryder Hook's bodily secretions . . .
Men and women worked here in much the same way they worked in the electronics bay. Robots were everywhere. Hook pushed through, smiling, carrying a snatched-up box full of components. He didn't bother with the lower echelons. If Rafflans was all he said he was, he'd have been put in charge of something important. Hook found the Krifman poring over the three-dimension illuminated cube of a blueprint. The old name was still used. Rafflans looked up.
'Why, hullo, Alf! Great to see you!'
Hook lowered the unconscious body of Rafflans' woman assistant to the floor. He slid the door of the little cubby-hole office shut. Rafflans gaped.
`What — what happened to Queenie?'
`Rafflans, you great Krifman twit! Put this in your ear.' Rafflans objected; but Hook grabbed him by the neck, twisted his
head, smacked the ladybird in.
Hook stepped back.
Rafflans shook his head. He reached up — and then he looked at the crumpled form of Queenie in her threadbare orange coverall, smothered in gun-grease and chemicals, ripped down one leg, disgusting, like them all. Rafflans choked.
`Queenie! What in hell's going on! Alf — no, Hook!'
`Yes. Hook. And when you look around you, just keep that great idiotic Krifman grin on your ugly puss.' Hook spoke fast. He spoke with a controlled fury that sobered the Krifman. He explained all he considered necessary. Rafflans said: 'I was going to rip — '
Hook said: 'Later. I've got to go to the spaceport. Here's a ladybird for Anthea. If you take one from an overseer or a guard and try to open it, you'll blow your fingers off.'
`You forget, Hook. I'm a weapons expert.'
`So all right, then. It's a dinky little twist on the Marden-reef trembler — five stages — each one lethal.'
Rafflans nodded. 'I know it. I can defuse that junk.'
`Don't say I didn't warn you. The circuit to rip is easy to spot.' Hook checked the Krifman out, and added: 'There may not be time. This place is scheduled to fall to pieces soon. They've got one more batch of women to process.' He had told Rafflans that they were programming women for a purpose far different from Boosting. The fight between him and the Boosted Men was one for him, and if anyone, including a bunch of mythical Untergods got in the way he'd shoo them off, too.
`I'll sort out a few heavies, Hook. Are you coming back from the spaceport?'
Hook knew what the Krifman meant.
'Yes. We'll get away together, all of us. And there's another little chore I have unfinished here—'
A siren began to wail.
'That's you, Hook.'
'Right. Remember to carry on acting like an idiot.' Hook stepped over Queenie, who was groaning and beginning to come around. 'That should be dead easy, you stupid great Krifman twit.'
'Sure, you black bastard of an Earthman. All I need do is copy you.'
Hook ran out feeling much better.
Chapter Eleven
Ryder Hook could count on the unpredictability of Shaeel.
The transceiver he had taken from the guard was useless. He might fix it to operate within this solar system; it just wouldn't carry into interstellar space. He went hunting for a set that would do what he wanted.
He had the advantage in this hide and seek that he looked just like any other hypnotised worker on the street and the sniffer ident kit detectors needed a little time to gather sufficient data on which to come up with a positive.
If he kept on the move and didn't do anything stupid he could avoid capture at least until he'd rigged a set and reached Shaeel.
He went down to the flier park and knocked out a couple of guards. They both wore Tonota Forties and he took them both. The flier he selected had been locked; but he jimmied the panel with a sweet little tool from his boot and climbed in. He took off and drove dangerously low and fast towards the airlocks. He had chosen the guards' own flier, of course, and when the guard on the airlocks came on he half-turned his face away from the screen and snarled in a vicious tone: 'Open up, you morons! Don't you know there's an emergency on?'
The airlocks valved.
He went through with scarcely a pause between opening and closing and if anyone had the temerity to accost him he guessed they thought better of it. He knew only too well the way Boosted Men treated their underlings.
For whatever reason the spaceport had been sited away from the city dome, it was inconvenient for him; but he had to be on hand in case — that was the way Ryder Hook played the odds — and he'd combine that greeting with the use of an interstellar set.
Getting into the spaceport was so easy he knew at once he had been discovered,
The locks valved for him and he dived into reception.
That short trip across the planetary surface had revealed dun brown grass-like vegetation, a river or two — they were possibly water rivers — and scraggly trees and dispirited mountains. No doubt the poles were iced up and the equatorial regions a little more lavish with flora. Reception looked like any other reception area; smooth floor, kiosks, booths, counters for business transactions, a rest area. The flier skated through glass doors, smashed a vending machine booth into fragments. Smoke puffed. People were running and screaming in all directions.
The flier cascaded in a showering smother of glass panes and veneered plastic and scraps of once-useful machinery onward through the far wall and came to rest in the locker rooms. Dust drifted down and already flames were eating away the plastic partitions.
Hook stepped from the wrecked flier with something like an evil grin plastered all over his face. He'd enjoyed that. It wasn't often he had the privilege of bringing a flier slap bang into reception.
He went out past the hole in the far wall where the flier's nose had drilled through the plastic colour-sheeting.
He stood on the concrete of a bay where loading robots went about their work with methodical care. A human supervisor was standing staring at the wall, through which protruded the nose of the flier, like a man who sees a devil stick his head through the tridi screen.
Hook bounced over to him, said: 'Happy dreams,' and hit him. He went on, walking jauntily, well aware that he would not have felt like this had he been forced against his will to hit an innocent bystander. Those days had passed; although they might easily return.
Around the corner of the reception building where already a few lazy flames were licking up to be extinguished at once and most effectively by the sprinkler systems, he spotted what he felt might be interesting.
A robot team with a fire appliance had speeded up and were now busily unreeling in readiness to go in to support the automatics. The fire chief was a Homo sapiens. That was a break. The loading robot supervisor, although human, had been a tensor, and they were built like broomsticks, with shoulders so narrow that Hook had not a hope in hell of donning the tensor supervisor's uniform.
He ran past the fire robots with their equipment. He leaped on to the fire truck which hung a metre off the ground, shouting: 'Hurry 'em up! The automatics are overloaded.'
The man began to utter some blasphemy or other; but Hook knuckled him, not particularly gently, and his fingers were ripping the zips open before the man started to collapse.
Hook flung the uniform on. It was a smart blue, with black belt, and his own boots fitted admirably. He stuffed the limp body of the man into his borrowed orange coveralls, and bundled him under the firetruck. The antigrav field would not harm him. Then Hook, feeling that so far he had kept one step ahead of the reception committee, sprinted for the control tower.
The control tower reached up and connected at its centre point with the dome surrounding the spaceport. Four valves arranged like leaves on a tree segmented the dome down the four compass cardinal points. He slowed to a walk and went in the ground floor entranceway, where robots, men, aliens and Reakers — among others he didn't bother to categorise — were milling.
And, still, there was no thrilling sensation of being Boosted.. That might let him down, goddammit to hell!
He watched the confusion for a moment. Ryder Hook claimed he was a man who liked to play safe, and only take a chance when he was pretty sure it wasn't a real chance, when he was sure he would have things his own way. It began to look as though he'd seriously miscalculated the odds this time.
If a Boosted Man didn't show up soon, he'd be done for.
He'd felt absolutely convinced a Boosted Man would be at the spaceport. It had seemed to him one place where the Novamen would wish to keep an eye on operations.
He fretted, and walked about looking important, and occasionally shouted an intemperate order to a gang of robots or Reakers.
At that, it felt great to be back in the old familiar bad-tempered, insulting, intolerant galaxy again.
He worked his way up the storeys and on the way changed his clothes yet again, this
time into the blue uniform of a traffic controller. The poor man had climbed downstairs because the grayshafts were filled with men hunting for this character Hook, and Hook left him unconscious and stripped in a stall in the lady's washroom. Not that that would worry a modern miss of the galaxy. But it relieved the tedium.
And then, as he went through a plastic door marked: 'Communications, off-limits to non-authorised personnel,' he felt the jingling tingling ringling up his spine and down his arms and legs, and knew a Boosted Man had at last come within range of the resonances their bodies mutually set-up. He knew that a Boosted Man, being Boosted all the time even if he did not employ his boosted powers at all times, did not pick up this exchange, that the resonances which now flowed and pulsed through Hook's body flowed and pulsed through a Boosted Man's body all the time.
Lucky devil!
He felt great.
He went into speed-time at once. The people around him stood or sat in frozen stasis, barely moving in real time.
Inside the communications set-up he could select the set he wished to use; but once he began to use it he must of necessity drop down into real time. So — he selected the set farthest away from the shift section leader. He pulled the blue shirt and slacks off the operator, pulled off his own traffic control uniform, put on the shirt and slacks.
He had to work carefully within speed parameters so as not to set the clothes alight as he whipped the operator outside and propped him in the gents. Back inside he stuffed the traffic control uniform under the set with the ladybird bug he had taken from the operator. The booby trap and information channel circuit had come out so fast that he cursed as he remembered his careful handling of the deadly booby trap when he'd been in slow time.
The Boosted Man Page 9
