The Best of John Jakes, page 8
The world too was one bland custard, blandly happy. Except not really, as Finian, horrified, discovered.
No plant could function at total efficiency, at complete peak year after year. A low percentage of chronic unemployment had never been whipped by the eyelid theorists. Strange wild caravans of men and wives and children, human wolves almost passed Finian occasionally on red-leafed back-roads in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He almost fell into the hands of one such band. Thereupon he decided he must possess a weapon of self-defence at all costs. His belly he could protect by shovelling in wild berries and an occasional stolen chunk of honeycomb. But his life, against such a seething pack of wild creatures as he had fled from on that lonely road, needed more dependable protection.
Difficult problem. Under law, weapons were prohibited except upon special occasions. What necessity for weapons when all was pleasant cooperation.
Yet the G/S guards carried weapons. So did the TTTC internal force. Finian was beginning to believe he knew why that might be so. Too early to tell, however. And the other problem pressed him to concentration upon it.
Weapon-devotees were even more suspect than pedestrians in the lonely country between metropolises. Occasionally Finian glimpsed a wire .compound, acres and acres, against the sunburnt horizon. Manhattan Prison was too far for local DOCs to send recalcitrant Hoosier or Buckeye anti-obsols, so they were thrown into smaller country compounds, together with those few madmen who settled disputes with fists. Such compound inmates were described as juves, Finian remembered, passing one such wire enclosure on a white moonlit night and shuddering. He didn’t recognise the term juve, but it obviously meant the middle-aged or geriatric specimens huddled within the cages, a few defiantly wearing ancient gaudy jackets with mottoes stitched on them, forgotten anarchist slogans like Pfluger’s Idle Hour Pin Barons.
On the outskirts of South Bend, Finian luckily came upon an obsolescence carnival.
Several thousand people swarmed across a treeless ter- rain in a housing project smash. Motorized workgangs stood at the development’s fringe, waiting to set up new prefab Moorish Manors to replace obsolete Five-Bedroom Geneva Chateaux.
Finian infiltrated the wild carnival crowd, ripping draperies and smashing furniture with feigned laughter ringing from his lips. When the carnival wore itself out near dawn and the workgangs rolled in through clouds of soy-fuel smoke, Finian filched a shiny flick-blade knife from a Boy Scout chopping up a last slab of plastic plaster and lath.
The Scout shrieked for the DOCs on duty. Finian was away and running through a hydroponic cornfield before he could be caught.
Now, dressed in his only presentable suit, last year’s G/S Nubby Oppenheimer, he flashed his personal identification card before the computer rid in the empty green marble rotunda of the National Record Office. Personal identity was one quantity Pushkyn couldn’t revoke.
Finian felt his fingers tingle as the grid scanned the card.
“Investigator Smith, Bond Number PA-5006, you are recognized.”
“Permission to examine ownership statements for corporations over one billion, please.”
“What year?” buzzed the mechanical voice.
“Not certain,” Finian replied. “Could be as far back as 1980 or even 1970.”
“Second tier from lowest level. Tube nine, your left.”
It gave Finian a weird sensation, plummeting in the air-tube and realizing he was dropping eighty storys into the depths of the nation’s largest insane asylum. But legal transactions had proliferated so in the past decades, as had neurotic behavior, that only a combined institution and record office was feasible for saving space and offering a less-than-fatal end for hopeless maniacs.
The reading room below ground smelled of mold. Grey block walls heightened the unpleasant mood. Finian sat at the call-out console. He manipulated the controls and spoke into the unit:
“Let me have the volume covering Goods/Service corporation for—ah—1974, please.”
Several minutes passed. A door slid aside. A white male, perhaps seventy, with yellow-rimmed lack-luster eyes and a lantem jaw, shuffled in and waited with docile manner. The creature wore a seedy twill uniform, anciently cut.
“What do you have on any asset transfers for Goods I Services, please?” Finian asked.
The elderly gentleman did not so much as blink. He hesitated only a moment as the index system in his sick skull, instilled by hypnolearning, turned over record after invisible record. Finally he said vacantly, “No asset transfers.”
“Nothing in the way of stock, even?”
“No asset transfers, no asset transfers.”
“Thank you, that’s all.”
But the man had already departed, needing no thanks. Finian turned to the console again wondering whether he could endure as many days as it might take:
“Let me have the volume covering Goods/Services corporation for 1975.”
A total of eighteen hours went by, relieved only by three short naps above ground, Finian sleeping in a magnolia bush on Rolla’s outskirts, before he found what he wanted.
He’d worked through Goods/Services from its 1969 inception to 1997, interviewing assorted madmen and women who shuffled in, reeled off figures and names or lack of them, then shuffled back out. Asset transfers exhausted itself as a lead. He tried register of directorship as well as deposition of tangible real-estate sale. Useless, useless. Only then did it slip back.
In some dim time in the past—Pushkyn had mentioned it once—public stock of G/S had been called off the market.
Once more he began with a different set of volumes, working his way down the years. In 1992, he located it: All certificates redeemed.
The scent overpowered the must of the underground box like the smell of blood. He called out the volume covering Things to Come Incorporated for the same year. It was a naturalized Japanese weighing close to three hundred pounds.
One month after the G/S redemption came a callback by the board of TTIC. Finian almost wished the poor Japanese could appreciate tea. He’d have bought him a bucket, had he the money.
Tensely his fingers flew to the console.
’Two volumes, please. For 1992 and 1993. Covering Flotations without tangible assets.”
When 1992 arrived (a mulatto with his face fixed in a perpetual grin) Finian was disappointed. Nothing. The volume for 1993 (a strikingly voluptuous red-haired girl who had eyes that made him think hauntingly of Dolly) was another case entirely. Finian trembled:
“Give me what you have on holding companies, please.” The third was it, the redhead staring through him: “Holders Limited. Ten thousand shares privately issued.”
Finian was on his feet, sweating, his empty belly a-churn. “Officers, please.”
“Chairman of the board, Alvah Pharoh.”
’There must be some mistake. Uh—recheck, please. What is the name?”
“Full legal name Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh.”
A florid old gentleman with dewlaps and blue, vaguely crossed—by heaven!
Finian almost forgot to return the volume to its detention cell after he got the names of the other registered corporate executives, which meant nothing to him. But Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh most certainly did.
Finian wondered, as he left the National Record building and turned his face east again, what had possessed the old man to think it safe to occasionally appear as head of both companies. Not that he appeared often, mind you. The painting must have been a slip. So too the appearance on the hydrofoiler, displeasing his underlings. Senility? Senility and a strength that had refused to completely drain away, as the dewlaps lengthened?
Hungry and tattered though he was, Finian felt renewed as he threw himself into the weary tramp back to Manhattan. The flick-blade knife armed him. So did the knowledge that even the most mighty, even those who kept the plant running at all costs, including the cost of sloth, could occasionally slip.
And they still had Dolly.
V
Ahead in the gloomy purple twilight, giant rats were squealing after blood.
Quickening his step, Finian unshipped the flick-knife. Making headway was hard. This particular section of the Hudson Bluffs National Dump was a miniature mountain range of discarded but eminently serviceable—except for the usual engineered-to-fail tubes and cracked cabinets—solido sets. To the east behind the rubble the towers of Manhattan Prison thrust into the darkening sky.
Finian walked rapidly away from the squee-squee of the rats. He’d glimpsed a pack of them earlier, down by the Tunnel at the far end of the hundred-thousand-acre junk tract. They were nearly three feet long from drinking the waste spewed out by the pharmaceutical factories upriver. Hoping to avoid a meeting with needly fangs, Finian was suddenly arrested by a fresh sound.
A human voice, in fright.
He doubled back in his tracks, cold sweat all over him. The vitaminized beasts were attacking a real person!
Finian rounded a solido heap. A little wisp-haired balloon of a man in a ragged grey smock was backed against a trash peak, trying vainly to swing at three of the rats, armed only with a plastic leg broken from a solido console. The man’s left trouser leg was shredded, black-shining with blood. The blood maddened the rats. They danced and snapped and squee-squeed and made the little man even more pale.
Finian snatched up a solido cabinet and heaved. One of the rats yipped, turned and scuttled at Finian like a small furry tank. Shaking, Finian stood his ground. He tried to dodge the creature’s leap but was not agile enough. Hellish teeth sank into his arm.
Finian jammed his flick-knife into the smelly hair at the base of the rat’s brain. Squirting blood like a fountain, the rat flipped over in the air and gave a death-squee. Its comrades received solid whacks between the eyes from the other man. They turned tail and vanished.
“Let me see that arm,” said the man, a filthy specter with moist, disappointed eyes. “Oh, not good at all. Come along. I’m a doctor. Humphrey Cove.”
Finian gaped as he was led along the bluff. “A doctor? In the National Dump?”
“I live here. Never mind. I’ll explain later. I have a shack. Hurry, we don’t want those rat toxins to run through you. I think I have immunization. Oh, I was really done for until you came along.”
The small doctor giggled as he hustled Finian along. Finian was not too sure he approved of his would-be savior. In spite of Dr. Cove’s rather pitiful mien, there was a certain unsteadiness in his wet eyes. He clucked and talked to himself as he led the way to a ramshackle structure nearly the size of a small private dwelling, constructed solely of panels from solido consoles jerry-rigged together with wire and other scrap materials.
“No one comes here. No humans. Only the littersweep convoys from up and down the coast, all mech-driven. The only people I ever talk with are the poor juves in the prison. What’s your name? What are you doing here?”
At the hovel entrance Cove suddenly halted, stared at Finian and turned pale.
“Did you come to arrest—?”
Finian shook his head. “I came to get into Manhattan.”
“Via the Dumps?” Cove blinked suspiciously. “There’s the Tunnel.”
’To use the Tunnel, you have to be a priest going in for last rites. Or a coroner or a psychiatry student Or have a DOC pass. I watched the Tunnel three hours.” Suddenly Finian had an impulse to trust this odd little person: “I have no pass. I’ll be entering the prison illegally.”
“Well, then! Come inside, do come inside!”
Names were exchanged again. Cove having forgotten he’d given his. From behind a triple stack of ancient medical texts Cove said he’d rescued from dump piles, the doctor produced a frowsy leather-plas diagnostic kit. He clamped the analyzer to Finian’s upper arm and switched on the battery. A whir. A moment later the proper medication had been pressure-sprayed through Finian’s epidermal cells.
Cove watched with proud glowing eyes, saying as he unstrapped the unit:
“A miracle I found this kit, I’ll tell you. Three years ago. The only persons who use it are the poor juves. No regular medical help for them. I’m afraid. So I’ve a skiff. Actually an old levacar inverted. I paddle across once a month after dark.” He giggled. ’The DOCs at the Tunnel post would psych me if I got caught. But I feel I’m doing my bit to keep the anti-obsols content in their unhappiness.”
Through a rift in the wall Cove’s moist eyes sought the darkening towers. His voice was quickly vengeful.
“I’d like to see those buildings fall to ash. Margarita, ah poor Margarita.” He whipped his head around, eyes almost as vicious as those of the rats. “Who are you? If this is all a clever trap to smoke me out—”
“No trap,” Finian assured him. “I’ll tell you about it. But do you have any food?”
Cove nodded and fetched a brown gallon pharmaceutical bottle, instructing Finian to drink.
“Protein and vitamins. Distill it myself from the drug sludge in the river. After you drink I may or may not give you one of the soy bars I get from the juves. When their wives bear children, it’s the only way they can pay, you know. They’re very proud, always pay.”
Cove squatted with difficulty, an oddly savage little man in the fading light.
“Whether I let you have a soy bar depends on your story. If you’re an enemy, I can run away and leave you to wander the Dumps at night. You won’t last long with the rats, being a stranger.”
’There’s a woman over on that island I have to find,” said Finian and launched out.
As he recounted his tale, careful not to become too emotional about it, he noticed a growing excitement in Cove’s damp eyes. Finally, when he had concluded, Cove leaped up.
“Capital, Smith, that’s capital. Let me help. Let me ferry you across.”
Finian smiled grudgingly. “Okay. I was prepared to swim it.”
“The sludge would poison you before you got halfway.”
“What’s your stake in this, Cove? I mean, this food pays me back for the rats.”
Cove’s little eyes were miserable.
“Margarita. My wife. She died over there.”
Painfully the story came out, dredged from an unhappy past:
Cove had been a plastic surgeon by speciality, in the employ of TTIC at its Bangor Personality Salon. But a quirk in his nature made him rebel against the work, permitted him to fall prey to dangerous Galbraither notions. His wife had informed on him.
Cove discovered it before the TTIC police could arrest him. He fled to the outskirts of Bangor, hiding there in the woods while a few reluctant friends supplied him with food. TTIC industrial police combed the woods wth talk-homs, threatening to psych his wife into anti-obsol attitudes if he didn’t surrender.
“The filth!” Cove rocked on his haunches. “I thought it was a trick, a lever. I ran away. Margarita, poor thing, was on their side. She couldn’t help what she did. She came of a respected family. TTIC middle management. But a year later I found out. They did it anyway. Oh, they smile and smile and treat the mob kindly. But underneath, when they’re opposed—I learned Margarita had been sentenced to Manhattan. It took me another nine months to get here and find means of crossing. By that time she’d died of pneumonia. No antibiotics allowed the juves, you see. Juves are worthless. She died.” Cove rocked and rocked, wild-eyed. “Died, died.”
“Doctor Cove, will you help me get across?”
“Of course, of course. But to hunt that pilot plant, a knife won’t be much good. The moment you’re discovered they’ll set on you like wild dogs.”
“Then I’ll need something else.”
Finian’s brain ran rapidly with his career wth G/S. He recalled Leveranz, an unfortunate operative charged with a dangerous penetration of the TTIC Marketing Office in Beirut.
“I knew a man once who was bombed. Is there anything here—?” Finian’s gesture swept the shack and dump beyond. “Do you remember enough, even if we could find an explosive source, to bomb me?”
The moist eyes of Cove widened with malicious delight. “Blow them up?”
Now Finian himself felt hard and cold.
“I just might, if they’ve hurt her.”
“Possibly we could use the charger pack from an old solido.” Cove was warming to the challenge. “Yes, we very well might. Extremely miniaturized. I’d have to check the formula but I think I have a chem text in that pile. And a military medicine volume, too.” He began to tear through the books. “No anesthesia, or precious little. Perhaps I could knock you out.”
“What for a trigger?” Finian questioned. He showed his mouth. “I have this empty socket where I carried a camera once.”
Chortling, Cove scuffled among his belongings and produced a cardboard carton full of ivory chips of all sizes.
“Why, that ought to work. Smith. The miserable juves aren’t fluoridated either. I do quite a few extractions. Imagine a plastic surgeon doing extractions! Let’s see, give me a minute to find the chem text…”
Dr. Humphrey Cove unearthed the text in two minutes. The rest took four days.
Finian suffered excruciatingly, especially during the operation. Cove kept smacking him on the head with a solido leg when the pain grew too hideous. Finian dug his nails into his palms and thought of murmurous summer evenings on the back porch in Bala Cynwyd, and vowed in his pain-streaked mind the hurt was worth it if only he had a means to strike at them if they’d hurt Dolly, his own Dolly.
When he was ready to enter the prison, his left foot flesh carried a small capsule that would detonate an explosive force when the yellowing tooth in his dead socket was turned a proper one-half turn in its clumsily hand-chiselled housing.
An old trick, bombing. A relic of the Triple Play War. But it gave Finian a little more courage to go hunting death.
In an unpleasant mist-clammy midnight, Dr. Cove pad-died the improvised skiff through the sticky penicillin waste forming a crust on the Hudson, to the dilapidated pier that once belonged to the Cunard division of G/S. Off down black, ruined streets distant reddish lights pulsed. Cove shook his hand fervently. “I hope you kill them. I hope you don’t cooperate and kill them all.”
No plant could function at total efficiency, at complete peak year after year. A low percentage of chronic unemployment had never been whipped by the eyelid theorists. Strange wild caravans of men and wives and children, human wolves almost passed Finian occasionally on red-leafed back-roads in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He almost fell into the hands of one such band. Thereupon he decided he must possess a weapon of self-defence at all costs. His belly he could protect by shovelling in wild berries and an occasional stolen chunk of honeycomb. But his life, against such a seething pack of wild creatures as he had fled from on that lonely road, needed more dependable protection.
Difficult problem. Under law, weapons were prohibited except upon special occasions. What necessity for weapons when all was pleasant cooperation.
Yet the G/S guards carried weapons. So did the TTTC internal force. Finian was beginning to believe he knew why that might be so. Too early to tell, however. And the other problem pressed him to concentration upon it.
Weapon-devotees were even more suspect than pedestrians in the lonely country between metropolises. Occasionally Finian glimpsed a wire .compound, acres and acres, against the sunburnt horizon. Manhattan Prison was too far for local DOCs to send recalcitrant Hoosier or Buckeye anti-obsols, so they were thrown into smaller country compounds, together with those few madmen who settled disputes with fists. Such compound inmates were described as juves, Finian remembered, passing one such wire enclosure on a white moonlit night and shuddering. He didn’t recognise the term juve, but it obviously meant the middle-aged or geriatric specimens huddled within the cages, a few defiantly wearing ancient gaudy jackets with mottoes stitched on them, forgotten anarchist slogans like Pfluger’s Idle Hour Pin Barons.
On the outskirts of South Bend, Finian luckily came upon an obsolescence carnival.
Several thousand people swarmed across a treeless ter- rain in a housing project smash. Motorized workgangs stood at the development’s fringe, waiting to set up new prefab Moorish Manors to replace obsolete Five-Bedroom Geneva Chateaux.
Finian infiltrated the wild carnival crowd, ripping draperies and smashing furniture with feigned laughter ringing from his lips. When the carnival wore itself out near dawn and the workgangs rolled in through clouds of soy-fuel smoke, Finian filched a shiny flick-blade knife from a Boy Scout chopping up a last slab of plastic plaster and lath.
The Scout shrieked for the DOCs on duty. Finian was away and running through a hydroponic cornfield before he could be caught.
Now, dressed in his only presentable suit, last year’s G/S Nubby Oppenheimer, he flashed his personal identification card before the computer rid in the empty green marble rotunda of the National Record Office. Personal identity was one quantity Pushkyn couldn’t revoke.
Finian felt his fingers tingle as the grid scanned the card.
“Investigator Smith, Bond Number PA-5006, you are recognized.”
“Permission to examine ownership statements for corporations over one billion, please.”
“What year?” buzzed the mechanical voice.
“Not certain,” Finian replied. “Could be as far back as 1980 or even 1970.”
“Second tier from lowest level. Tube nine, your left.”
It gave Finian a weird sensation, plummeting in the air-tube and realizing he was dropping eighty storys into the depths of the nation’s largest insane asylum. But legal transactions had proliferated so in the past decades, as had neurotic behavior, that only a combined institution and record office was feasible for saving space and offering a less-than-fatal end for hopeless maniacs.
The reading room below ground smelled of mold. Grey block walls heightened the unpleasant mood. Finian sat at the call-out console. He manipulated the controls and spoke into the unit:
“Let me have the volume covering Goods/Service corporation for—ah—1974, please.”
Several minutes passed. A door slid aside. A white male, perhaps seventy, with yellow-rimmed lack-luster eyes and a lantem jaw, shuffled in and waited with docile manner. The creature wore a seedy twill uniform, anciently cut.
“What do you have on any asset transfers for Goods I Services, please?” Finian asked.
The elderly gentleman did not so much as blink. He hesitated only a moment as the index system in his sick skull, instilled by hypnolearning, turned over record after invisible record. Finally he said vacantly, “No asset transfers.”
“Nothing in the way of stock, even?”
“No asset transfers, no asset transfers.”
“Thank you, that’s all.”
But the man had already departed, needing no thanks. Finian turned to the console again wondering whether he could endure as many days as it might take:
“Let me have the volume covering Goods/Services corporation for 1975.”
A total of eighteen hours went by, relieved only by three short naps above ground, Finian sleeping in a magnolia bush on Rolla’s outskirts, before he found what he wanted.
He’d worked through Goods/Services from its 1969 inception to 1997, interviewing assorted madmen and women who shuffled in, reeled off figures and names or lack of them, then shuffled back out. Asset transfers exhausted itself as a lead. He tried register of directorship as well as deposition of tangible real-estate sale. Useless, useless. Only then did it slip back.
In some dim time in the past—Pushkyn had mentioned it once—public stock of G/S had been called off the market.
Once more he began with a different set of volumes, working his way down the years. In 1992, he located it: All certificates redeemed.
The scent overpowered the must of the underground box like the smell of blood. He called out the volume covering Things to Come Incorporated for the same year. It was a naturalized Japanese weighing close to three hundred pounds.
One month after the G/S redemption came a callback by the board of TTIC. Finian almost wished the poor Japanese could appreciate tea. He’d have bought him a bucket, had he the money.
Tensely his fingers flew to the console.
’Two volumes, please. For 1992 and 1993. Covering Flotations without tangible assets.”
When 1992 arrived (a mulatto with his face fixed in a perpetual grin) Finian was disappointed. Nothing. The volume for 1993 (a strikingly voluptuous red-haired girl who had eyes that made him think hauntingly of Dolly) was another case entirely. Finian trembled:
“Give me what you have on holding companies, please.” The third was it, the redhead staring through him: “Holders Limited. Ten thousand shares privately issued.”
Finian was on his feet, sweating, his empty belly a-churn. “Officers, please.”
“Chairman of the board, Alvah Pharoh.”
’There must be some mistake. Uh—recheck, please. What is the name?”
“Full legal name Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh.”
A florid old gentleman with dewlaps and blue, vaguely crossed—by heaven!
Finian almost forgot to return the volume to its detention cell after he got the names of the other registered corporate executives, which meant nothing to him. But Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh most certainly did.
Finian wondered, as he left the National Record building and turned his face east again, what had possessed the old man to think it safe to occasionally appear as head of both companies. Not that he appeared often, mind you. The painting must have been a slip. So too the appearance on the hydrofoiler, displeasing his underlings. Senility? Senility and a strength that had refused to completely drain away, as the dewlaps lengthened?
Hungry and tattered though he was, Finian felt renewed as he threw himself into the weary tramp back to Manhattan. The flick-blade knife armed him. So did the knowledge that even the most mighty, even those who kept the plant running at all costs, including the cost of sloth, could occasionally slip.
And they still had Dolly.
V
Ahead in the gloomy purple twilight, giant rats were squealing after blood.
Quickening his step, Finian unshipped the flick-knife. Making headway was hard. This particular section of the Hudson Bluffs National Dump was a miniature mountain range of discarded but eminently serviceable—except for the usual engineered-to-fail tubes and cracked cabinets—solido sets. To the east behind the rubble the towers of Manhattan Prison thrust into the darkening sky.
Finian walked rapidly away from the squee-squee of the rats. He’d glimpsed a pack of them earlier, down by the Tunnel at the far end of the hundred-thousand-acre junk tract. They were nearly three feet long from drinking the waste spewed out by the pharmaceutical factories upriver. Hoping to avoid a meeting with needly fangs, Finian was suddenly arrested by a fresh sound.
A human voice, in fright.
He doubled back in his tracks, cold sweat all over him. The vitaminized beasts were attacking a real person!
Finian rounded a solido heap. A little wisp-haired balloon of a man in a ragged grey smock was backed against a trash peak, trying vainly to swing at three of the rats, armed only with a plastic leg broken from a solido console. The man’s left trouser leg was shredded, black-shining with blood. The blood maddened the rats. They danced and snapped and squee-squeed and made the little man even more pale.
Finian snatched up a solido cabinet and heaved. One of the rats yipped, turned and scuttled at Finian like a small furry tank. Shaking, Finian stood his ground. He tried to dodge the creature’s leap but was not agile enough. Hellish teeth sank into his arm.
Finian jammed his flick-knife into the smelly hair at the base of the rat’s brain. Squirting blood like a fountain, the rat flipped over in the air and gave a death-squee. Its comrades received solid whacks between the eyes from the other man. They turned tail and vanished.
“Let me see that arm,” said the man, a filthy specter with moist, disappointed eyes. “Oh, not good at all. Come along. I’m a doctor. Humphrey Cove.”
Finian gaped as he was led along the bluff. “A doctor? In the National Dump?”
“I live here. Never mind. I’ll explain later. I have a shack. Hurry, we don’t want those rat toxins to run through you. I think I have immunization. Oh, I was really done for until you came along.”
The small doctor giggled as he hustled Finian along. Finian was not too sure he approved of his would-be savior. In spite of Dr. Cove’s rather pitiful mien, there was a certain unsteadiness in his wet eyes. He clucked and talked to himself as he led the way to a ramshackle structure nearly the size of a small private dwelling, constructed solely of panels from solido consoles jerry-rigged together with wire and other scrap materials.
“No one comes here. No humans. Only the littersweep convoys from up and down the coast, all mech-driven. The only people I ever talk with are the poor juves in the prison. What’s your name? What are you doing here?”
At the hovel entrance Cove suddenly halted, stared at Finian and turned pale.
“Did you come to arrest—?”
Finian shook his head. “I came to get into Manhattan.”
“Via the Dumps?” Cove blinked suspiciously. “There’s the Tunnel.”
’To use the Tunnel, you have to be a priest going in for last rites. Or a coroner or a psychiatry student Or have a DOC pass. I watched the Tunnel three hours.” Suddenly Finian had an impulse to trust this odd little person: “I have no pass. I’ll be entering the prison illegally.”
“Well, then! Come inside, do come inside!”
Names were exchanged again. Cove having forgotten he’d given his. From behind a triple stack of ancient medical texts Cove said he’d rescued from dump piles, the doctor produced a frowsy leather-plas diagnostic kit. He clamped the analyzer to Finian’s upper arm and switched on the battery. A whir. A moment later the proper medication had been pressure-sprayed through Finian’s epidermal cells.
Cove watched with proud glowing eyes, saying as he unstrapped the unit:
“A miracle I found this kit, I’ll tell you. Three years ago. The only persons who use it are the poor juves. No regular medical help for them. I’m afraid. So I’ve a skiff. Actually an old levacar inverted. I paddle across once a month after dark.” He giggled. ’The DOCs at the Tunnel post would psych me if I got caught. But I feel I’m doing my bit to keep the anti-obsols content in their unhappiness.”
Through a rift in the wall Cove’s moist eyes sought the darkening towers. His voice was quickly vengeful.
“I’d like to see those buildings fall to ash. Margarita, ah poor Margarita.” He whipped his head around, eyes almost as vicious as those of the rats. “Who are you? If this is all a clever trap to smoke me out—”
“No trap,” Finian assured him. “I’ll tell you about it. But do you have any food?”
Cove nodded and fetched a brown gallon pharmaceutical bottle, instructing Finian to drink.
“Protein and vitamins. Distill it myself from the drug sludge in the river. After you drink I may or may not give you one of the soy bars I get from the juves. When their wives bear children, it’s the only way they can pay, you know. They’re very proud, always pay.”
Cove squatted with difficulty, an oddly savage little man in the fading light.
“Whether I let you have a soy bar depends on your story. If you’re an enemy, I can run away and leave you to wander the Dumps at night. You won’t last long with the rats, being a stranger.”
’There’s a woman over on that island I have to find,” said Finian and launched out.
As he recounted his tale, careful not to become too emotional about it, he noticed a growing excitement in Cove’s damp eyes. Finally, when he had concluded, Cove leaped up.
“Capital, Smith, that’s capital. Let me help. Let me ferry you across.”
Finian smiled grudgingly. “Okay. I was prepared to swim it.”
“The sludge would poison you before you got halfway.”
“What’s your stake in this, Cove? I mean, this food pays me back for the rats.”
Cove’s little eyes were miserable.
“Margarita. My wife. She died over there.”
Painfully the story came out, dredged from an unhappy past:
Cove had been a plastic surgeon by speciality, in the employ of TTIC at its Bangor Personality Salon. But a quirk in his nature made him rebel against the work, permitted him to fall prey to dangerous Galbraither notions. His wife had informed on him.
Cove discovered it before the TTIC police could arrest him. He fled to the outskirts of Bangor, hiding there in the woods while a few reluctant friends supplied him with food. TTIC industrial police combed the woods wth talk-homs, threatening to psych his wife into anti-obsol attitudes if he didn’t surrender.
“The filth!” Cove rocked on his haunches. “I thought it was a trick, a lever. I ran away. Margarita, poor thing, was on their side. She couldn’t help what she did. She came of a respected family. TTIC middle management. But a year later I found out. They did it anyway. Oh, they smile and smile and treat the mob kindly. But underneath, when they’re opposed—I learned Margarita had been sentenced to Manhattan. It took me another nine months to get here and find means of crossing. By that time she’d died of pneumonia. No antibiotics allowed the juves, you see. Juves are worthless. She died.” Cove rocked and rocked, wild-eyed. “Died, died.”
“Doctor Cove, will you help me get across?”
“Of course, of course. But to hunt that pilot plant, a knife won’t be much good. The moment you’re discovered they’ll set on you like wild dogs.”
“Then I’ll need something else.”
Finian’s brain ran rapidly with his career wth G/S. He recalled Leveranz, an unfortunate operative charged with a dangerous penetration of the TTIC Marketing Office in Beirut.
“I knew a man once who was bombed. Is there anything here—?” Finian’s gesture swept the shack and dump beyond. “Do you remember enough, even if we could find an explosive source, to bomb me?”
The moist eyes of Cove widened with malicious delight. “Blow them up?”
Now Finian himself felt hard and cold.
“I just might, if they’ve hurt her.”
“Possibly we could use the charger pack from an old solido.” Cove was warming to the challenge. “Yes, we very well might. Extremely miniaturized. I’d have to check the formula but I think I have a chem text in that pile. And a military medicine volume, too.” He began to tear through the books. “No anesthesia, or precious little. Perhaps I could knock you out.”
“What for a trigger?” Finian questioned. He showed his mouth. “I have this empty socket where I carried a camera once.”
Chortling, Cove scuffled among his belongings and produced a cardboard carton full of ivory chips of all sizes.
“Why, that ought to work. Smith. The miserable juves aren’t fluoridated either. I do quite a few extractions. Imagine a plastic surgeon doing extractions! Let’s see, give me a minute to find the chem text…”
Dr. Humphrey Cove unearthed the text in two minutes. The rest took four days.
Finian suffered excruciatingly, especially during the operation. Cove kept smacking him on the head with a solido leg when the pain grew too hideous. Finian dug his nails into his palms and thought of murmurous summer evenings on the back porch in Bala Cynwyd, and vowed in his pain-streaked mind the hurt was worth it if only he had a means to strike at them if they’d hurt Dolly, his own Dolly.
When he was ready to enter the prison, his left foot flesh carried a small capsule that would detonate an explosive force when the yellowing tooth in his dead socket was turned a proper one-half turn in its clumsily hand-chiselled housing.
An old trick, bombing. A relic of the Triple Play War. But it gave Finian a little more courage to go hunting death.
In an unpleasant mist-clammy midnight, Dr. Cove pad-died the improvised skiff through the sticky penicillin waste forming a crust on the Hudson, to the dilapidated pier that once belonged to the Cunard division of G/S. Off down black, ruined streets distant reddish lights pulsed. Cove shook his hand fervently. “I hope you kill them. I hope you don’t cooperate and kill them all.”
