Meeting at Infinity (4 page)

C
URDY
W
ENCE
was in the front rank of the crowd when Nevada got taken up into Lyken’s cruiser. He was seventeen years old, born rankless, determined not to stay that way, and as measured as anything, as measured as a foot-rule, as measured as time. He was everything the yonder boys admired about themselves. And he was on the way up.

So far, working for Jockey Hole was the only upward path he’d found. And that was strictly piecework. Still, if you were good at it, it paid all right. Curdy Wence was better than good at it. He was born lucky. That was why he, and not another of Jockey’s hangabouts, was in this particular crowd at this particular time.

There were dozens like him assembled to watch Lyken’s departure—young dregs in artificially broad-shouldered jackets of dull gold, maroon or sage green and high boots decorated painstakingly by hand with chrome appliqué work. Their barberclips were personalized with tints of carrot-red or white; they moved with a gangling gait designed to suggest huge reserves of strength. Some of them actually had strength. Not many of them were measured the way Curdy was. Thinking was what counted. Everybody knew there were people working for Jockey Hole who could take him to bits one-handed, but it was Jockey who figured out things to be done. That was where Curdy was going. He’d made up his mind.

Now this little event here, this minute. That was curio, it was indeed.

The commotion died slowly; Lyken’s big cruiser hummed away down the Avenue Columbus, bound for his base. Curdy waited, changing occasionally from foot to foot and chewing on a pad of tranks. Everybody knew that Jockey Hole had got where he was because he was measured like anything. He never got flustered or worked up about anything. Maybe to him that came naturally. Maybe not. Curdy thought he probably used tranks like everyone else.

Waiting, he let the words he had heard revolve slowly in his mind. Had the pug got anything to do with it? Curdy knew him by sight, had heard accounts of him from places. Thickhead, was the account. Stupid like stone. All that connected him with the affair, odds were, would be the baton Lyken’s bodyguard had used to crack his head. Also to be weighed: whether Breaker Bolden would be capable of talking any other way than with his fists just now. Curdy could look after himself. Most of the yonder boys had to know how. Difference was, Curdy reflected, that a pug of Breaker Bolden’s kind didn’t care about looking after himself at all. What he wanted was to take care of the other guy.

“Lyken! Remember Akkilmar!”

It should mean something. It meant something to Lyken. Curdy slipped his whangee stick out of the sewn slot in his right high boot and began to curve it back and forth, considering. Jockey would want to know about this.

He tossed a mental coin to decide whether he should sell the news at once, and hope to get a bonus for speed in delivery, or whether he should fish around a while and try and get details of what Akkilmar actually meant, thus earning his bonus for giving all and more.

The mental coin landed on its edge and teetered as a further idea struck him: the chances were good that if Akkilmar meant anything significant, Jockey would know already. The coin toppled and said for immediate delivery.

The crusted clot of faceless corpuscle-people about the entrance of The Market had dispersed. As usual, the stream of humanity moved by. Still bending and flexing his whangee stick, Curdy moved with it.

Across the entrance the cultists had come back, the altar high-heaped with tracts. The nail-studded effigy of Tacket loomed behind the green light. The cultist who did the pitch was limping over to Breaker Bolden with a nail and a mallet in his hands, a collection can rattling on his belt.

Curdy watched and grinned without amusement. The cultists had it figured all wrong, as usual. They expected the pug, sullenly nursing his battered head, to be an easy touch; he’d want to buy a nail and drive it into Tacket, they thought. Not measured at all, those cultists—wild aiming always.

The pug just snarled at first. The cultist persisted. A few people gathered around, keeping out of arm’s reach. Bolden told the persistent cultist to go away. The cultist went on trying. He tried once too many times. Bolden reached out and grabbed his mallet, and hit him with it on the top of the head. The other two cultists came limping up to protest. Curdy didn’t stay to see any more. But when he was thirty yards down the street he could still hear the row.

There was a police cruiser parked outside The Market. It was empty. Maybe it had something to do with the Lyken problem. Curdy saw it when he glanced back. But there was no one in sight who might make the connection.

He went quickly—but careful not to give the appearance of hurrying—to a crosstown travolator stage. Noon. The chances were good that Jockey was inspecting his manor, the Eastern Quarter where something like one and a half per cent of the population were said to owe him allegiance. Curdy always thought of it that way, the measured way. Converted into terms of individuals, it was staggering—made his eyes unfocus and sliced down his self-control.

He got back on the sidewalk at the East Hundredth stage—East Hundredth being the street the yonder boys called Holy Alley because it was Jockey Hole’s, from the lodging blocks at the southern end to the warehouses at the northern. He dropped questions at the pleasure pad called the Venus, simply because it was the first hangout he passed. No one important was around.

Four doors along, he tried the Octopus Bar, which was a spare headquarters of Jockey’s, the place where he was to be found most evenings. The boss wasn’t in. Someone said to try the Pleasuredrome because they were rehearsing a new historical pageant and Jockey had an interest. The Pleasuredrome was on Holy Alley.

The Pleasuredrome, though, was closed when Curdy got down to it, it being the middle of the day and the ’drome being a nighttime haunt. It took Curdy a fair amount of searching to find a side entry; when he did, and when he emerged into the dark echoing empty interior, he ran into a one-eyed gorilla.

The gorilla could have been a pug, only he looked more alert than pugs usually did. Curdy stood quite still, hands relaxed at his sides. He said, “Jockey Hole here?”

The gorilla nodded, his one eye sharp and bright like a diamond. “So?”

“So I bring news. Hot news. He’ll want to hear!”

“Okay, so spit the string an’ I’ll spin it along.”

Curdy would have spat in the diamond eye at that. Was he going to be cheated of his bonus? No gorilla going to take a split of it. But the gorilla was six foot three and his shoulders were naturally broad; Curdy was five eleven and his shoulders were padded. He weighed and measured and started talking persuasively. He was still at it when Jockey came out from the arena.

Gaffles was with him, and six bodyguards; they weren’t matched up the way Lyken’s six giants were, but they still made a pretty impressive retinue. They paused when they came into the passage that Curdy and the gorilla were blocking; a word and a sign from Jockey, and Gaffles came forward alone. He was Jockey’s right hand; he was the gorilla’s size and if you hadn’t known you’d have said he had status, from the way he dressed, the way he spoke. Only not now. He barked at the gorilla in dregtalk.

“Chay, Redeye! What’s with, what’s with?”

The gorilla half-turned, sullenly, sensing opportunity slipping away. He grunted and drew back. Curdy addressed Gaffles.

“I bring news, Gaffles. It was hot, but Redeye let it cool awhile. I been fifteen minutes here now.”

“Hot hot he says!” The gorilla broke in contemptuously. “Prolly not worth a trip with Tacket!”

Gaffles ignored him. His careful eyes studied Curdy’s face.

“You’re Curdy Wence, ain’t that right?” he said. “Ah-hah. What’s the news, then? What’s it with?”

“Lyken,” said Curdy succinctly.

“With Lyken, that’s hot.” Jockey’s quiet voice cut in from the background, and he came forward with his guards. “Yes, Curdy—spit the string.”

Curdy still hadn’t quite got over his automatic nervousness at speaking to Jockey face to face. The first time he’d nearly stammered with excitement. This time he measured it, all of it, and the words came smooth and easy.

“Ahmed Lyken was in The Market this morning around eleven-forty. He left a few minutes after noon. He looked fury-o!”

“Ah-hah! Something happen?”

“There was this one in the crowd. Brown coverup, average height, automat barberclip, brown hair plain, all like anyone. But he didn’t look like a dreg, didn’t smell like a dreg, and when he shouted out to Lyken he didn’t sound like a dreg. In my tapes, that’s curio.”

“In mine too.” Jockey stood, looking measured as all time, with hands in pockets, his head a little back. “And said—?”

“Sounded this way: ‘Remember Akkilmar!’ ”

Having fired the shot, Curdy watched for signs that the last word meant something already to Jockey. It didn’t show if it did. Maybe he should have hung on and pried around to bring in more details. Still.… He went on.

“That stopped Lyken with all brakes, bang! He gets his bodyguard to disentangle this number from the crowd and put him in his cruiser. Went off. That’s the string spun.”

Jockey didn’t react. He never reacted. He just turned the news over in his mind.

“Is it hot?” demanded Curdy eventually. Jockey seemed to come back from a great distance.

“Can’t say,” he answered, and gave a shrug. “As of now, I can’t say. But because
you
gave it to me, Curdy, I’m going to lay on it. I think you’re born lucky, Curdy. You better watch yourself, or you’ll get to thinking luck is everything in this world. Still, like I say, I’ll bet this time.”

He gestured to Gaffles. “Give Curdy a Rate One, Gaffles,” he commanded.

Tranks or no tranks, that was enough to shake anyone off
the measured way, Curdy decided. In Jockey’s scale Rate One meant a flat thousand—more than he’d got for his previous jobs put together. He said, “That’s gold, Jockey! Will take.”

“Not so speedy!” said Jockey with a crooked smile. “Measure it! You didn’t earn a Rate One yet, Curdy. I’m going to lay on you, that’s all. I’m laying on your finishing the job. Now you go detect for me what that word means, that word—Akkilmar! You’re staked to expenses with that Rate One. Gold?”

Curdy grunted. So okay, it was flattering to get the job. He took the thousand bill Gaffles passed him and folded it up small.

“I thought it would mean something to you,” he said.

Again the crooked smile. “You angle for clues, yonder boy? You’re a good boy as they go, so okay, so words of guidance. Now you start to ask who could be in a position to know something that means something to Ahmed Lyken. It’s free fall!”

It didn’t sound that way to Curdy; it smelled of hard work into the bargain. He turned to go. Jockey called after him.

“One thing too, Curdy! Like I say, you’re going to stretch that luck too far. Don’t stretch it with Tacket, that’s all.”

Curdy spun round. “And how?” he demanded.

“Word came the other minute that Lyken’s out recruiting—large scale. The way the filters let it through, they’re passing wooden credits. Not yet, I don’t know what’s brewing. I just guess. I guess poison. So don’t sign with Lyken, Curdy boy, not even if they offer you Rate One a day.”

Some yonder boys weren’t measured; they dreamed of getting to be merchant princes and didn’t touch smaller stuff. Hands clean, pockets empty, they stayed where they were. Curdy was going where Jockey was; Jockey had shown
that could be done. He said so. Jockey’s smile came back without the crook in it.

“Weigh and measure, boy!” he said. “And fall straight.”

T
HERE WERE
ways of postponing the inevitable; Athlone used all of them up, and the inevitable still came upon him too soon. Arrangements for the dismissal of Benny, for the hypnolocking of his mind, for other routine precautions, absorbed a little time. But much too quickly postponement became impossible, and he had to go unwillingly, almost fearfully, to the penthouse on top of a lodging block where his nemesis sat in darkness.

Only three people had access to the penthouse; one of them was a girl servant, one was himself, and the third was the greatest living doctor, Jome Knard. When he came into the foyer of the penthouse, Athlone found Knard awaiting him.

The doctor was a small man with a barking voice who wore a sterile mask night and day; to the patients he treated, and especially the present patient, the greatest danger was from unfiltered human breath. Athlone greeted him curtly.

“How is she?” he added. It was a meaningless question; there would be no change. No change was possible, except at a rate so slow the passage of a day was imperceptible.

Knard didn’t answer directly. He said, getting out of the chair where he had been waiting, “What’s happened, Athlone? Something disastrous?”

Athlone felt a shuddering wave work its way through his bowels, but contrived to keep his voice steady. “Do I look
as though there’s been a disaster?” he countered. He felt it was possible; Knard knew him well and was more astute than most people.

But the doctor shook his head. “I didn’t get it from you,” he said. “I had it from—her.” And he jerked his head in the direction of the room next to the foyer.

“What did she say?” Athlone snapped.

“So there has been trouble.” Knard’s voice shook noticeably, and there was a movement behind his sterile mask which suggested he was passing his tongue over his lips. “You’d better hear what she said, then. Over here.”

He turned to the corner which served him as an office, where he had his cupboards of equipment, his electronic desk, his diagnostic and therapeutic devices on racks almost to the ceiling. His quick, deft fingers touched a series of switches; a familiar, breathy, impersonal voice came from twin speakers mounted on the desk and aligned to give full stereo to Knard when he sat in his adjustable chair before it. Athlone felt that voice, all down his nape and back, like claws dipped in acid. He moved forward into the focus of the speakers, closing his hands to stop his fingers trembling.

“—Tell you a thing or two about this man who’s hired you, doctor. Something you ought to know. This resounding title he makes so much play with—vice-sheriff of the Eastern Quarter! I’m sure you know why he hides behind it, don’t you?”

Knard had presumably said something placatory but out of reach of the pickup; there was a brief interlude of hissing. Then there was a scornful interruption.

“No! Behind it he’s no better than a dreg. He’s so petty and incompetent he has to have someone still more incompetent to take out his own inferiority on—this knuckleheaded man Benny, for example. I wonder how he’s going to find someone even stupider than Benny, now that he’s got rid of him. And even Benny was—”

Athlone’s exclamation of horrified bewilderment caused Knard to switch off. The voice died. Knard uttered a silent question with his eyes.

“How does that hellish machine of yours work?” Athlone demanded in a strangled voice.

“You mean you have dismissed your bodyguard?” Knard seemed to be as much disturbed as Athlone.

“Yes! But—but—damnation! I only decided to do it a short while ago; I only just gave instructions. I didn’t mention it to anyone except my staff—” He broke off, and his face hardened into a suspicious glare. “Knard, are you trying to hoax me? I warn you, it’s a dangerous pastime. If I find out that someone called you from my headquarters and told you—”

Knard’s face, above the mask, remained impassive. Athlone broke off, spreading his hands.

“All right. You wouldn’t. You haven’t any interest in doing a thing like that. Just tell me: how did
she
know?”

Knard shut off the speakers. “There was more, but you’ll hear it direct,” he muttered as he turned away. “As to how she knew—look, Athlone, you’ve asked me twenty times how the rho function field perceptor works, and I’ve told you at least as often that unless you study the math involved, you
can’t
understand it. I suppose I’ve used it with a dozen patients before this case, at least. And even now I can’t say more than that the information comes from the analogue of reality which the perceptor supplies.”

“But that’s just meaningless noise!”

“So it’s noise!” The doctor’s nerves seemed to be frayed; he passed his hand across his face. “I’ve never experienced it myself, because normal sensory input heterodynes the data the user gets from it. You have to be almost completely cut off from reality before you can use it. So all I can tell you is what recovered patients have told me. Why do you think I undertook your case, Athlone? Sold you my exclusive services?
For the money? I’ve made four times what you can pay me, without half trying. No, simply because I wanted to explore to the ultimate the interaction between a patient and a perceptor.”

“Did you know this was going to happen?” demanded Athlone. “Did you know she could know things without being present?”

“Something of the sort was highly probable,” admitted Knard after a pause. “But she’s had far more experience of the perceptor now than anyone else I’ve treated, and she’s got more skilled in using it—”

A shrill bell, impatiently sounded, interrupted him. He glanced around automatically.

“She was expecting you,” he said. “Better go on in.”

In another epoch, Allyn Vage would not have lived. That was a fact which Athlone often had to repeat to himself, when sanity and detachment threatened to break through his obsession.

He had to begin repeating it now.

He came into her presence and stood with his head bowed. Although the room was almost completely dark, he did not want to let his eyes pass across the face that was not there.

It was worse than killing,
he said to himself.
That is why I must hound down Luis Nevada.
His mind was still spinning from the impact of the information Knard had given him.

The voice like claws in acid, breathy and inhuman, came to him.

“You must
not
have failed,” it said. “Tell me about it.”

Athlone hardly heard. He was struggling to order his thoughts coherently, but they contained so many impossibilities.
Consider the facts,
he told himself. Consider that before him, supported precisely by shaped pads and air cushions, Allyn Vage rested in a sitting position on a structure half chair, half box, the base of which was a pedestal three feet on a side containing the rho function field perceptor Athlone had
to fear because he did not understand it. She did not—could not—move. If there had been light, her inflated body would have seemed to glisten: all of her, her desirable thighs and the breasts that had been so firm, the flat, muscular belly—

Athlone chopped off the mental inventory because of its overtones of despair. No one saw her in the light any more, of course, except Knard when he was checking her slow progress towards recovery. But Athlone had seen her, twice, before she was sufficiently improved to give orders; he had also seen other cases in personalized cocoons. That was how he knew of the wet glistening. But he had never seen another case as grave. Perhaps, said Knard who ought to know, there had never been such a grave case in medical history, that survived.

Above this ghastly naked parody-body, there was what seemed to be a face that did not move. It was a mask, and its eyes were closed. It rested on a shaped support holding its chin, through which circulated a flow of nutrients and tissue regenerants.

But behind the mask was a brain, and the brain had not been physically injured in what the courts had ruled to be an accident, what Athlone declared because Allyn said so, was in fact an attempt at a brutal murder.

That brain could speak through attachments to a special voder device; the vocal cords had been damaged. It could hear, similarly, through a moving coil system stimulating the auditory centers. Likewise, it could perceive in a fashion even Knard confessed he did not totally understand, thanks to the miracle in the box beneath the chair.

Bit by bit, the ruined body would grow again; its organs would start to function, its withered muscles would eventually respond to the orders of the brain. When? Knard had said offhandedly, right at the beginning, “One or two years. With luck. If you adhere to a cult, I should recommend prayer.”

Athlone had no space in his mind for a cult, though. He had his own dedication: the destruction of Luis Nevada.

He thought: one or two
years!
And realized fatalistically that he would not have to endure more than a year of his personal torture, at most. If within a year and a day of laying his case against Nevada, he had not secured revenge, it was over; if Nevada got out of reach before that—secure in Lyken’s franchise, besieged but not surrendering, or worse yet, dead without the hand of vengeance having touched him—it was over likewise. And so was Kingsley Athlone.

He was tempted to think that that was mere romantic maundering. A griping in his guts contradicted him. To him, the Allyn Vage that had been, the Allyn Vage he was striving to bring back, meant more than his life itself.

When he came out of Allyn’s room again, he was shaking from head to foot. Knard glanced up from his great desk, and without a word dispensed a pill into a measure of water. He brought it to Athlone and held it out.

“What is it?” Athlone asked wearily.

“A trank. Just a trank. Better take it.”

Athlone hesitated; then he seized and swallowed it, and handed back the cup. He said, “Knard, the power of that gadget of yours terrifies me.”

“The perceptor?” Knard put both hands on the cup and held it before him like an offering. “I can only tell you not to fear it. I can only say that it’s just a field in a box, a rho function field, connected so as to provide sensory data to the patient, and used to counteract the sense of isolation from reality which always used to affect cocoonees. It’s just an analogue of reality—nothing more. And the longer the patient uses it, the more accurate the data yielded.”

“How the hell can you use something you don’t understand? That’s what shakes me! And if you of all people don’t—”

Knard shrugged. “Five years and the experience of a dozen or so cases isn’t all that much to go by.”

Athlone gave him a strange look. He said, “Knard, something just hit me. You say we’ve had it only five years?”

“That’s right.”

“But I didn’t think.…” Athlone’s voice tailed off uncertainly; just in time it occured to him that he might be going to insult Knard, and he didn’t want to. Knard, though, did not seem to realize. His voice betrayed wry sarcasm as he replied.

“You were going to say: you don’t think there’s been much progress in any field since Tacket.”

Athlone nodded. That was roughly it.

“Well, you’re damned right!” said Knard with unexpected emphasis. “There’s been change, but no progress. I’d like to lay claim to enough originality to have invented the rho function field myself, but I’m as secondhand as anyone in our lazybones world. All I did was figure out how to use it to advantage.”

“You mean,” said Athlone painfully, “you mean we
imported
the idea?”

“Of course we did.”

Athlone felt sweat prickle on his forehead. He had the impression of being on the verge of a terrible but significant discovery. “But—who brought it in, then?” he choked out. “Whose franchise did it come from?”

“Ahmed Lyken’s,” said Knard shortly.

“The hell you say!” Illogical, apparently groundless, fear started to blossom in Athlone’s guts, like a fireball. He repeated, “The
hell
you say!”