Isle Of The Dead Page 5

  "Twenty percent is all I can let you in for, and it will cost you five millions--"

  I laughed.

  So for the next hour I haggled, out of pure cussedness, resenting the estimation he'd placed on me and refused to disbelieve. I lived up to it, too. Like twentyfive and a half percent for four million, which required a phone call to Malisti to swing the financing. I really hated to wake him.

  And that's how I nailed down a piece of the briar business on Driscoll. Ridiculous is a better word than strange, but then everyone lives in the shade of the Big Tree, remember?

  After it was all over, he slapped me on the shoulder and told me I was a cool dealer and that he'd rather have me with him than against him, made us another round of drinks, sounded me out on getting Martin Bremen away from me, as he'd never been able to hire a Rigelian chef, and asked me once again who had tipped me off.

  He dropped me at Bartol Towers, the uniform moved my car a few feet and held the door for me, got its money, turned off its smile and went away. I drove back to the Spectrum, wishing I'd eaten there and gotten to bed early instead of spending my evening autographing leaves.

  The radio in the sled played a Dixieland number I hadn't heard in ages. That, and the rain that came a moment later, made me feel lonely and more than a little sad. Traffic was light. I hurried.

  * * *

  The following morning, I sent a courier-gram to Marling of Megapei, telling him to rest easy in the knowledge that Shimbo would be with him before the fifth season, and asking him if he knew a Pei'an named Green Green, or some equivalent thereof, who might in any way be associated with the Name Belion. I asked him to reply by courier-gram, reverse-charge, and send his answer to Lawrence j Conner, c/o Homefree, and I didn't sign it. I planned on leaving Driscoll for Homefree that same day. A courier-gram is about the fastest and one of the most expensive ways there is of sending an interstellar message; and even so, I knew there would be a lapse of a couple of weeks before I received a reply.

  It was true that I was running a small risk of blowing my cover on Driscoll by sending a message of that class with a Homefree return on it, but I was leaving that day and I wanted to expedite things.

  I checked out of the hotel and -drove to the place on Nuage, to give it a final once-over, stopping for a late breakfast on the way.

  I found only one thing new at the Raspberry Palace. There was something in the message-slot. It was a wide envelope, bearing no return address.

  The envelope was for "Francis Sandow, do Ruth Laris." I took it inside with me and did not open it until I'd satisfied myself that there were no lurkers. Then I repocketed a tiny tube, capable of producing instant, silent and natural-seeming death, seated myself and opened my mail.

  Yes.

  Another picture.

  It was Nick, my old friend Nick, Nick the dwarf, dead Nick, snarling through his beard and ready to leap at the photographer, standing there on a rocky ledge.

  "Come visit Illyria. All your friends live there," said a note, in English.

  I lit my first cigarette of the day.

  Malisti, Bayner and DuBois knew who Lawrence John Conner was.

  Malisti was my man on Driscoll, and I paid him enough so that he was, I thought, above bribery. Admitted, other pressures can be brought to bear on a man--but he himself had only learned my true identity the day before, when _Baa-baa blacksheep_ had provided the key for the decoding of a special instruction. Not much time had passed in which to apply pressure.

  Bayner had nothing, really, to gain by bugging me. We were partners in a joint venture which represented one of those drops in those buckets people talk about. That was all. Our fortunes were such that, even if our interests did conflict on occasion, it was a very impersonal thing. He was out.

  DuBois didn't impress me as the sort to give away my name either, not after the way I'd spoken in his office concerning my willingness to resort to extreme means to obtain what I wanted.

  Nobody at Homefree had known where I was going, except for S & F, whose memory of the fact I'd erased prior to my departure.

  I considered an alternative.

  If Ruth had been kidnapped, forced to write the note she had written, then whoever had taken her could safely assume I'd receive this latest if I responded, and if not, no harm done.

  This seemed possible, probable.

  So it meant there was somebody on Driscoll whose name I'd like to know.

  Was it worth sticking around for? With Malisti on the job, I might be able to ferret out the sender of the latest picture.

  But if there was a man behind the man and he was smart, his subordinate would know very little, might even be a totally innocent party. I resolved to put Malisti on the trail and have him send his findings to Homefree. I'd use a phone other than the one at my right hand, however.

  In just a few hours, it wouldn't matter who knew that Conner was Sandow. I'd be on my way, and I'd never be Conner again.

  * * *

  "Everything that's miserable in the world," Nick the dwarf once said to me, "is because of beauty."

  "Not truth or goodness?" I'd asked.

  "Oh, they help. But beauty is the culprit, the real principle of evil."

  "Not wealth?"

  "Money is beautiful."

  "So is anything else you don't have enough of--food, water, screwing ..."

  "Exactly!" he announced, slamming his beer mug down so heavily on the tabletop that a dozen heads were turned in our direction. "Beauty, goddamn it!"

  "What about a good-looking guy?"

  "They're either bastards because they know they've got it made, or they're self-conscious because they know other guys hate their- guts. Bastards are always hurting other people, and the self-conscious guys screw themselves up. Usually they go queer or something, all because of that goddamn beauty!"

  "What about beautiful objects?"

  "They make people steal, or feel bad because they can't get at them. Damn--!"

  "Wait a minute," I said. "It's not an object's fault that it's beautiful, or the pretty people's fault that they're pretty. It just happens that way."

  He shrugged.

  "Fault? Who said anything about fault?"

  "You were talking about evil. That implies guilt somewhere along the line."

  "Then beauty is guilty," he said. "Goddamn it!"

  "Beauty, as an abstract principle?"

  "Yes."

  "And in individual objects?"

  "Yes."

  "That's ridiculous! Guilt requires responsibility, some kind of intent--"

  "Beauty's responsible!"

  "Have another beer."

  He did, and belched again.

  "Take a look at that good-looking guy over at the bar," he said, "that guy trying to pick up the broad in the green dress. Somebody's going to bust him one in the nose sometime. It wouldn't have to happen if he was ugly."

  Nick later proved his point by busting the guy one in the nose, because he'd called him Shorty. So maybe there was something to what he said. Nick was around four feet tall. He had the shoulders and arms of a powerful athlete. He could beat anybody I knew at wrist-wrestling. He had a normal-sized head, too, full of blond hair and beard, with a couple blue eyes above a busted nose that turned off to the right and a mean smile that usually revealed only half a dozen of his yellow-stained teeth. He was all gnarled below the waist. He'd come from a family lousy with professional soldiers. His father'd been a general, and all of his brothers and sisters except for one were officers in something or other. Nick had grown up in an environment alive with the martial arts. Any weapon you cared to name, he could operate it. He could fence, shoot, ride, set explosive charges, break boards and necks with his hands, live off the land, and fail any physical examination in the galaxy because he was a dwarf. I'd hired him as a game hunter, to kill off my experiments that went bad. He hated beautiful things and things that were bigger than he was.

  "What I think is beautiful and what you think is beautiful,"
I said, "might disgust a Rigelian, and vice-versa. Therefore, beauty is a relative thing. So you can't condemn it as an abstract principle if--"

  "Crap!" he said. "So they hurt, rape, steal and screw themselves up over different things. It's still because beauty sits there demanding violation."

  "Then how can you blame an individual object--"

  "We do business with Rigelians, don't we?"

  "Yes."

  "Then it can be translated. Enough said."

  Then the good-looking guy at the bar who'd been trying to pick up the broad in the green dress passed by on his way to the Men's Room and called Nick Shorty when he asked him to move his chair out of the way. That ended our evening in that bar.

  Nick swore he'd die with his boots on, on some exotic safari, but he found his Kiimanjaro in a hospital on Earth, where they'd cured everything that was bothering him, except for the galloping pneumonia he'd picked up in the hospital.

  That had been, roughly, two hundred and fifty years ago. I'd been a pallbearer.

  * * *

  I mashed out my cigarette and made my way back to the slip-sled. Whatever was rotten in Midi, I'd find it out later. It was time to go.

  The dead are too much with us.

  * * *

  For two weeks, I puzzled over what I'd found and I kept myself fit. When I entered the Homefree system, my life was further complicated by the fact that Homefree had picked up an additional satellite. Not a natural one, either.

  WHAT THE HELL, EXCLAMATION, I sent ahead in code.

  VISITOR, came the reply. LANDING PERMISSION REQUESTED STOP DENIED STOP STILL CIRCLING STOP SAYS HES AN EARTH INTELLIGENCE MAN STOP

  LET HIM LAND, I said, HALF A HOUR AFTER IM DOWN STOP

  There came the acknowledgment, and I swung into a tight orbit and pushed the _Model T_ down and around and down.

  After a frolic with the beasts, I repaired to my home for a shower, shucked my Conner face, then dressed for dinner.

  It would appear that something finally meant enough to the wealthiest government in existence for someone to at last authorize a trip on the part of some underpaid civil servant in one of the cheapest interstellar vehicles available.

  I vowed to at least feed him well.

  III

  Lewis Briggs and I regarded one another across the remains of dinner and the wide table they occupied. His identification papers informed me that he was an agent of Earth's Central Intelligence Department. He looked like a shaved monkey. He was a wizened little guy with a perpetually inquisitive stare, and it seemed as if he must be pushing retirement age. He'd stuttered just a bit when he'd introduced himself, but the dinner appeared to have relaxed him and the falter had halted.

  "It was a very pleasant meal, Mister Sandow," he acknowledged. "Now, if I may, I'd like to discuss the business that brought me here."

  "Then let's adjourn to the upstairs, where we can get some fresh air while we talk."

  We arose, taking our drinks with us, and I led him to the elevator.

  Five seconds later, it admitted us to the roof garden, and I gestured toward a couple lounging chairs set beneath a chestnut free. "How about there?" I asked. He nodded and seated himself. A cool breeze came out of the twilight and we breathed it in and gave it back.

  "It's quite impressive," he said, looking around the garden shadows, "the way you satisfy your every whim."

  "This particular whim in which we're relaxing," I said, "is landscaped to make this place virtually undetectable by means of aerial reconnaissance."

  "Oh, the thought hadn't occurred to me."

  I offered him a cigar, which he declined. So I lit it for myself and asked him, "So what is it you want of me?"

  "Will you consent to accompany me back to Earth and talk to my chief?" he asked.

  "No," I said. "I've answered that question a dozen times, in as many letters. Earth grates on my nerves, it gives me a big pain these days. That's why I live out here. Earth is overcrowded, bureaucratic, unhealthy, and suffering from too many mass-psychoses to bother classifying. Whatever your chief wants to say, you can say for him; and I'll answer you, and you can take it back to him."

  "Normally," he said, "these matters are handled at the Division level."

  "Sorry about that," I replied, "but I'll foot the bill for a coded courier-gram from here, if it comes to that."

  "The reply would cost the Department too much," he said. "Our budget, you know."

  "For Chrissake, I'll pay it both ways then! Anything to stop cluttering my incoming basket with what is still strangely referred to as surface-carrier mail."

  "God! No!" A tone of panic clung to his words. "It's never been done before, and the man-hours involved in determining how to bill you would be prohibitive!"

  Inwardly, I wept for thee, Mother Earth, and the prodigies that had been wrought upon thee. A government is born, it flourishes, strong is its nationalism and great its frontiers, then comes a time of solidification, division of labor unto specialization, and the layers of management and chains of command, yes, and Max Weber spoke of this. He saw bureaucracy in the necessary evolution of all institutions, and he saw that it was good. He saw that it was necessary and good. While it may be necessary, put a comma after that word and after the last one add "God" and an exclamation point. For there comes a time in the history of all bureaucracies when they must inevitably parody their own functions. Look what the breakup of the big Austro-Hungarian machine did to poor Kafka, or the Russian one to Gogol. It drove them out of their cotton-picking minds, poor bastards, and now I was looking at a man who had survived an infinitely more inscrutable one until the end of his days was in sight. This indicated to me that he was slightly below average intelligence, emotionally handicapped, insecure, or morally suspect; or else he was an iron-willed masochist. For these neuter machines, combining as they do the worst of both father-image and mother-image--i.e., the security of the womb and the authority of an omniscient leader--always manage to attract the nebbish. And this is why, Mother Earth, I wept inwardly for thee at that moment of the immense parade called Time: the clowns were passing, and everybody knows that inside, somewhere, their hearts are broken.

  "Then tell me what you would like of me and I'll answer you now," I said.

  He reached into his inside pocket and withdrew a sealed envelope bearing various security stamps, which I didn't bother examining too closely, even when he handed it to me.

  "Should you not consent to accompany me back to Earth, I was instructed to deliver this to you."

  "If I had agreed to go along, what would you have done with it?"

  "Returned it to my chief," he said.

  "So that he could hand it to me?"

  "Probably," he said.

  I tore it open and withdrew a single sheet of paper.

  I held it close and squinted through the dim light. It was a list of six names. I kept my face under control as I read them.

  They were all names of people I had loved or hated, and they were each of them, somewhere, the subject of a moldering obituary.

  Also, they had all figured prominently in some recent photography I had been called upon to witness.

  I puffed smoke, refolded the list, replaced it in the envelope and dropped it on the table between us.

  "What does it signify?" I asked, after a time.

  "They are all potentially alive," he said. "I request that you destroy the list at your earliest convenience."

  "Okay," I said, and, "Why are they potentially alive?"

  "Because their Recall Tapes were stolen."

  "How?"

  "We don't know."

  "Why?"

  "We don't know that either."

  "And you came to me ... ?"

  "Because you are the only link we could find. You knew all of them--well."

  My first reaction was disbelief, but I concealed it and said nothing. Recall Tapes are the one thing in the universe which I had always considered inviolate, unreachable, for the thirty days of the
ir existence--and then they were gone forever. I tried to get hold of one once and failed. Their guardians were incorruptible, their vaults impenetrable.

  And this was part of another reason why I don't visit Earth much any more. I don't like the idea of wearing a Recall Plate, even temporarily. Persons born there have them implanted at birth and they are required by law to wear them for as long as they remain on Earth. Persons moving to Earth for purposes of residing there are required to have them installed. Even a visitor must bear one for the duration of his stay.

  What they do is monitor the electromagnetic matrix of the nervous system. They record the shifting patterns of a man's being, and each is as unique as a fingerprint. Their one function is to transmit that final pattern, at the moment of death. Death is the trigger, the shot is the psyche, the target's a machine. It's an enormous machine, and it records that transmission on a strip of tape you can hold in the palm of your hand--all that a man ever was or hoped to be--weighing less than an ounce. After thirty days, the tape is destroyed. That's it.

  In a small and classified number of cases over the past several centuries, however, that wasn't it. The purpose for the whole strange and costly setup is this: there are some individuals who, dying suddenly, on the planet Earth, at crucial points in significant lives, depart this lachrymose valley with information vital to the economy! technology/national interest of Earth. The whole Recall System is there for the purpose of retrieving such data. Even the mighty machine is not sufficiently sophisticated to draw this information from the recorded matrix, however. That is why every wearer of the Plate has a frozen tissue culture, somewhere. This culture is associated with the tape and held for thirty days subsequent to death, and both are normally destroyed together. Should Recall be necessary, an entire new body is grown from the culture, in an AGT (that's an accelerated growth tank), and this body duplicates the original in all things, save that its brain is a tabula rasa. On this clean plate, then, is superimposed the recorded matrix, so that the recalled individual possesses every thought and memory which existed in the original up until the moment of death. He is then in a position to supply the information which the entire World Congress has deemed to be of sufficient value to warrant Recall. An iron-clad security setup guards the entire system, which is housed in a quarter-mile square fortress in Dallas.