Collected Short Fiction, page 160
“Then I can’t help you.” Barbara’s voice was brittle and bellclear. “Wounded men are not my specialty. I like them like you, officer—strong and able. But,” she added carelessly, “you can look if you want to.”
The policeman chucked. “Don’t tempt me. You’re not hiding him under your skirt, I bet. And there’s not much else in this buggy but engine. What’ll she do on a straightaway?”
“I’ve had her up to two hundred myself,” Barbara said casually.
“I don’t believe it.” There was awe in his voice.
“Watch this!”
The car took off like a rocket. In a few seconds the tires began to hum. Sibert felt the car lighten as air rushing past the stubby, winglike stabilizer fins gave them lift. The acceleration continued long past the time he was sure it would stop.
Was it going to be that easy? he thought.
The acceleration eased. They cruised along, wheels whining. It made a kind of lullaby that sang Sibert back to sleep.
He woke with a start that hurt his chest. The car had stopped again, and the whine was gone.
For the second time, he thought: I’m going to die. The doctor had said so. With a clarity he had not known since the bullet had hit him, he thought: Mrs. Gentry’s bullet went through a lung. I’m bleeding to death inside. Every movement makes it more certain.
He felt a petulant anger at Barbara, who held his life so lightly, who cared so little if he lived or died, who made him stagger blindly in search of a hiding place, dying on his feet.
Prompt medical attention could have saved him. That’s what the doctor had implied.
She had given him blood, true. But what was one pint of blood when the thick, red life fluid was leaking from him so persistently, so inevitably. Even the blood of an immortal.
Futile anger rose higher. Damn her! he thought. I am dying, and she will live forever.
Dying was a strange thing, much like birth, filled with long drowsings and gray, half-conscious awakenings. Each time the grayness lifted for a moment, Sibert was surprised that he was still alive. The remnants of life drifted away in a long doze, until at last he came finally, completely, to full, cool wakefulness.
Gray light drifted through a dusty window pane and lay across the many-colored squares of the heavy comforter that pressed down on him. I am going to live, he thought.
He turned his head. Barbara was asleep in a heavy chair beside his bed. Its old upholstery was ripped and torn; stuffing had pushed through, gray and ugly.
Like Barbara. She was asleep. Her face was haggard with fatigue and unattractive. Her clothing was wrinkled and dirty. Sibert disliked looking at her. He would have looked away, but her eyes opened. Sibert smiled.
“You’re better,” she said huskily. Her hand touched his forehead. “The fever’s gone. You’re going to get well.”
“I think you’re right,” he said weakly. “Thanks to you. How long?”
She understood. “A week. Go back to sleep now.”
He nodded and closed his eyes and fell into a deep, dark, refreshing pool. The next time he woke, there was food, a rich chicken broth that went down smoothly and warmly. With it went strength.
There was strength for more talk.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“An old dirt farm. Abandoned ten years or more, I imagine.” She had found time to wash and change her clothing for a dress she must have discovered in a closet; it was old, but at least it was clean. “Hydroponics probably drove the farmer out of business. This road’s pretty deserted. I don’t think anyone saw me drive in. I hid the car in the barn. There’s chickens nesting there—half wild but not too bright. Who were those people you shot?”
“Later,” he said. “First—do you remember your father?”
She shook her head puzzledly. “I didn’t have a father. Not a real father. Does that matter?”
“Not to me. Didn’t your mother tell you anything about him?”
“Not much. She died when I was ten.”
“Then why did you insist that the doctor use your blood for the transfusion?”
Barbara studied the old wooden floor for a moment. When she looked back at Sibert, her lightbrown eyes were steady. “One thing my mother told me—she made me promise never to tell anyone. It seemed terribly important.”
Sibert smiled gently. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I want to,” she said quickly. “That’s what love is, isn’t it—wanting to share everything, to keep nothing back?” She smiled shyly. “It was my legacy, my mother said. What my father had given me. His blood. There was a kind of magic to it which would keep me young, which would never let me grow old. If I gave it to anyone, it would help them grow well again or young again. But if I ever told anyone or let anyone take a sample of my blood—the magic might go away.”
Sibert’s smile broadened.
“You’re laughing at me,” she said, withdrawing. “You’re thinking that it was only a little girl’s make-believe or that my mother wasn’t quite sane.”
“No, no.”
“Maybe it was make-believe,” she said softly, her eyes distant. “Maybe it was only to keep a plain little girl from crying because she was not beautiful, because no one wanted to play with her. Maybe it was meant to convince her that she was really a princess in disguise, that under the ugly duckling was a beautiful swan. I believed it then. And when you were dying I believed in it again, I wanted to believe that I had this power to save you, that the magic was real.”
“Your mother was right,” Sibert said sleepily. “You are a princess, a swan. The magic is real. Next time . . .
Next time there was the white meat of chicken for Sibert to eat with broth that had egg drops cooked in it. He sat up for a little. There was only a twinge of pain in his chest and a muscular ache in his shoulder.
It tired him quickly, and he sank back to his pillow after a few minutes. “Your mother was right,” he repeated. “Not in any fairy tale sense. In a real, practical way, you have new blood, whose immunity factors—the gamma globulins—can repel cellular degeneration as if death itself were a disease.”
He told her the story of Marshall Cartwright, the fabulous creature who had gone secretly about the country to father an immortal race. He told her about the Institute and the men who had founded it and its purpose. He told her that he had been an unwitting part of it until he had found, by accident, what all the rest had been looking for.
“How did you find me?” she asked, her face pale.
“I was going through some old medical records, doctor’s notes, case histories, that sort of thing. One of them was for a maternity case: Janice McFarland, unmarried. She had given birth to a daughter, Barbara. She needed blood; she was dying. The attending physician was a Dr. Russell Pearce. He must have known your father.”
“Why?”
“I found this note stuck to the back of one of the lab reports: ‘Baby fine but mother dying. Contact Cartwright. Only chance.’ ”
“That seems like such a small thing.”
“When I forced the information out of Locke, I knew I was right. It all fitted together.”
“You had traced me before then,” she said.
“Yes,” he said quietly, “but a funny thing happened: I fell in love with the girl I was searching for.”
Her face changed. “Oh, thank God!” she said prayerfully. “For a little while I was afraid—”
“That I was a vampire, interested only in your blood?” Sibert shook his head chidingly. “Bobs! Bobs!”
“I’m sorry.” She squeezed his hand repentantly. “Then you came back for me,” she prompted.
“Les—that’s the only name I knew him by—was waiting for me, watching from his first floor apartment. And Mrs. Gentry was watching him, probably without knowing what his job was.”
“Then he was going to shoot you because you wouldn’t tell him my name,” Barbara asked.
“No, not that. He knew I wouldn’t tell. The shooting was to silence me quickly. As soon as I came directly back to the apartment building, they were sure they could find you. But I shot first. Mrs. Gentry shot me and was killed when I fired back. You know the rest.”
“The rest?” Slowly she smiled; her radiance seemed to brighten the room. “The rest will make up for all we have suffered. It will be so beautiful, Eddy—so lovely it seems impossible and unreal. If what you say is true, I’ll never die, and I will keep you young, and we will be together forever.”
“If it were only that simple,” he sighed.
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
“The power of wealth and the fear of death are a terrible combination. After fifty years of disappointment, the Institute smells blood. It will never leave the scent until it finds you—and eliminates me.”
“Then what can we do?”
“I keep thinking: what kind of man was your father? And I think: he was a mammal, surely, not a reptile. Mammals don’t leave the birth and survival of their children to the untender mercies of chance. He must have made some provision for protecting you, some hiding place, some help. As soon as I can travel, we’ll begin a search.”
The twelve-cylinder Ford chugged along the highway at less than eighty miles per hour. It was a dusty, rain-spattered ten-year-old, a farmer’s car. It pulled up beside the old man plodding alongside the highway.
Unhurried, the old man with grizzled hair and beard marched forward until he reached the car. Behind the wheel was a middle-aged farmer. The old man nodded curtly as he got in. When the door slid shut behind him, he leaned against it, his head bent sullenly over his hands.
“Don’t recognize the face,” the farmer said cheerfully. “New around here or just passing through?”
“Passing through,” the old man said in a cracked voice.
“Lots of people on the road these days,” the farmer said, shaking his head soberly. “Old fellows like you, some of them. Hydroponics done ‘em in, and now this new fisheries stuff, farming the sea, they say—why a few more years and a man won’t hardly be able to pay his medical bills with what he can grub out of the dirt. Where’d you say you was from?”
“Didn’t say.”
The farmer shrugged and turned his attention to the road.
Ten minutes later the Ford passed the same spot. It was going in the opposite direction. On a crossover, it turned left and pulled to a stop. The farmer had disappeared. The old man was driving.
A girl, her hair so blond it was almost colorless, stepped from behind a clump of trees and ran quickly to the car. Before she had settled herself, the car began to move. As she turned toward the old man, the speedometer stood at 120.
“Why did you change plans?” Barbara asked. “You told me to wait an hour, hitch a ride, and we would meet in Joplin.”
“That was the smart way,” Sibert said, “but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let you get that far away from me.”
He glanced at his face in the rear view mirror and nodded. The beard and the shoe blacking had changed his appearance drastically. The illness had left his face drawn and hollow. He looked old. With his training, he walked old and talked old. He almost felt old.
Barbara’s frown faded in spite of her. “What did you do with the farmer?”
Sibert glanced at her quickly. With even less effort, she had been changed more. It was amazing what the old peroxide had done for her. The blondness changed her whole face. The contrast with her dark eyes was striking. Sibert felt his pulse stir.
“I knocked him out and left him behind some bushes. He’ll be all right. He’ll come to and get help.”
“If we were going together, we might as well have taken the Cadillac.”
“They’ve connected it with us by now, and that car could be spotted by a helicopter ten miles away. At this stage of the search, the area is blocked off in sectors. As long as we stayed still, we were safe until they started nets through. But as soon as we move we start attracting attention, setting off alarms, coming under surveillance.”
Barbara looked down at her hands, clasped in her lap. “I don’t like this business—shooting and stealing and slugging. . . .”
“Bobs!” Sibert said sharply. “Look at me!” Her eyes swung over; he held them. “Who does? But it’s something you can’t escape. It’s the times we live in. It’s you. You attract violence. You’re the princess, remember, and you’re heir to the greatest fortune on Earth—life eternal. Wherever you go, men will fight for you, lie for you, kill for you.”
“I never asked for that.”
“You got it as a gift at conception, life. Just as the rest of us inherited death as our portion. There’s nothing you can do, nothing anyone can do.”
Then there was silence.
Sibert slowed the car as they approached Joplin. “Much as I dislike it, now our only chance is to split up. They’ll be looking for two people together, probably by now a man and a woman. Get out here. Catch a taxi to the airport and get a ticket on the first plane to Washington—”
“Why Washington?” she asked quickly.
“No time to explain now. Trust me. I’ll try to be on the same plane. Don’t recognize me or speak to me. If I’m on the plane or not, take a room in Washington at the airport motel under the same name you use for the ticket—Maria Cassatta, say. You can pass for Italian. If I don’t show up within twenty-four hours, forget me. You’ll be on your own.”
Silently she climbed out of the car. It moved away. Sibert didn’t look back.
The old man hobbled toward the impatient transport as fast as his ancient arteries would let him go. As soon as he had climbed aboard, the jet taxied toward the end of the runway. Two minutes later it was in the air.
Settled in his seat, Sibert glanced around with doddering curiousity. As he spotted Barbara toward the back, he suppressed a sigh of relief. Her eyes met his without changing expression and returned to the paper she was reading.
For the rest of the trip, Sibert didn’t look back. She couldn’t get off.
Although he had spotted nobody at the Joplin airport, he was morally certain that watchers had been there. As he tottered off the plane at Washington, he was equally unsuccessful in identifying any Institute men.
He settled himself with a sigh on a bench from which he could see both the motel office and the airport waiting room. He saw Barbara register and be escorted to a distant cabin. After half an hour there had been no one who loitered, no one who seemed to be watching. . . .
He shuffled up to the cabin door and knocked. Silently Barbara let him in. As soon as the door closed behind him, he straightened his bent back and caught her in his arms. “We made it,” he said gleefully.
She was stiff and unresponsive. “Did we?”
“Of course we did. What’s the matter with you?”
She pushed him away and picked up a newspaper from the table beside her. It was a Joplin paper. The headline said:
LOCAL MAN MURDERED
BESIDE OLD TOLLWAY
“You lied to me,” she said without inflection.
He nodded slowly, watching her face, gauging the depth of her disillusion.
“Why did you kill him?”
“It was the safe way. I told you how it would be. I couldn’t take the chance he’d raise an alarm before we got away?”
“Yes, you told me.”
“What I did—it was for you.”
“Was it?” She closed her eyes and opened them wearily. “I suppose it was. Tell me—I want to know now—why did we come to Washington?”
Sibert shrugged helplessly. “A wild guess, a hunch, an intuition. I tried to put myself in Cartwright’s place. He couldn’t have his kids watched; he couldn’t even keep in touch with them or let them know what they really were. Anything unusual would show up in the Institute’s files or computers, would bring down the full resources of the Institute’s search upon the very persons Cartwright was trying to shield.”
“What has that got to do with Washington?”
“Cartwright’s problem, then, was identical with the Institute’s problem: to locate his kids, who were scattered all over the United States. He had to establish his headquarters where he could keep track of nationwide phenomena: Washington. But he had no organization; the very act of organizing would alert the Institute. He had few people he could trust—one man, perhaps, surely no more than two. Where could he place one man to do what must be done? There’s only one place where one man could be effective: inside the Institute itself. As long as the Institute doesn’t locate any one of Cartwright’s children, the kids are reasonably safe. But if the Institute finds one of them—then Cartwright’s agent can act.”
Barbara nodded slowly. “It sounds logical. What are you going to do?”
“Get in touch with the agent— whoever he is. I’m going to smoke him out, and you’re the smokescreen. I’ll report in to the Institute as I promised, and I’ll offer to sell you—for a price. The agent will hear about it; he must be in a position where he’ll hear things. And he’ll get in touch with me.
“Meanwhile, as soon as I leave, check out. Get a room somewhere else—in a private home, if possible. Use another name. No, don’t tell me what it is. What I don’t know, Locke can’t force out of me. When I want to get in touch with you, I’ll put a personal in the paper. I’ll address it to Marie, not Maria. That will be our signal.”
“Why all the precautions?”
Sibert smiled grimly. “From now on, you’re my insurance. As long as you’re free, they won’t dare kill me.”
As soon as the taxi pulled to a stop in front of the monolith, Sibert was seized. From the car behind, four men poured out, guns in their hands. Four more came through the monolith entrance.
They went over him thoroughly, swiftly, and found the tiny automatic. They took him directly to Locke’s office through a subterranean passage Sibert had never suspected.
Only Sanders, the file clerk, and Liz, Locke’s secretary, were in the outer office as they passed through. They did not look at him; it was as if he did not exist.
Locke was unchanged, but the office was different. One corner was hidden behind an impenetrable barrier of blazing light. Wordlessly, Locke waved his men out.
