Up Jumps the Devil (35 page)

Clara stopped grinding.

Work thoughts sometimes popped into Clara's head, too, when they were making love. She'd just always felt it wise to keep them to herself. So even though she was a little miffed, she understood.

“Go on,” she said.

“There are internets all over the place, right?” he said. “The military has them. Different companies have them, and colleges and so on. But they all run on different languages and protocols, so we can't get one internet to talk to another internet. Right?”

“Duh.”

“What if I had suddenly figured out a way to design a digital ‘package' that would travel between systems and …
ignore
… the system boundaries and go straight from one file to another? If the package could establish a link between the documents, it could build a web between systems, and systems could talk to each other even if they were programmed with different languages. We could build an internet that could be used by regular people, all over the world.”

“You make it sound easy,” said Clara.

Zachary moved his hips a little. He was still hard.

“Not easy,” he said. “But possible. I'm sure it's possible. I'm going to put the whole lab on it tomorrow.”

“Good. Are you finished?”

Zachary nodded. He moved his hips again, and the grinding picked up where it left off. Work thoughts jumped like popcorn in both of their heads, but they kept quiet about it.

THAT NIGHT BORE
two earthshaking fruits.

One was the World Wide Web, which would take five years to build and propagate, and would land Zachary's face on the cover of
Time
, over the words “Connecting the World.”

The other was a child. A boy, Seth, who came along within months.

Zachary, gloved and gowned, pretended to help with the delivery, the way they let men do.

They let him hold the baby for a couple of minutes. Those two minutes became the center of his life.

He had to admit the baby was hardly a movie star. Like most babies, he had a frightening, undercooked look about him. Most of him was wrapped up and hidden in a blue cocoon anyhow, but all it took was the soft scrap of weight against Zachary's forearm, the tiny roundness of the head in his palm, and Zachary was lost.

Seth didn't cry. He never would, much. He lay there with his two moon-pool eyes unblinking, and it seemed to Zachary that his whole life and his whole world vanished into those eyes and was multiplied, as if he had magically become ten times the Zachary he'd ever been before. He understood why Clifton Michael had been so desperate, and seemed so small compared to his daughter. He understood why people with families had an easier time dying than people without. He understood why almost everything that ever happened to him, no matter how wonderful it was, felt secretly hollow compared to this.

This
was how you changed the world.

He understood this without thinking it, without thinking anything at all, really, because his nerves chose that moment to have one of their electronic hiccups, and the nurses took the baby away before his father could drool on him.

STILL GLOVED AND GOWNED
, honorably bloody, Zachary was walking in a daze down a long, bright, hospital-smelling corridor when he found the Devil crouched on the floor with his arm halfway up inside a snack machine.

“Hey,” said Zachary.

“Congratulations,” grunted the Devil.

“What's up?”

“Goddamn bag of pretzels didn't drop. A dollar for a bag of pretzels with maybe nine pretzels in it.”

“Move your arm. Get your arm out of there.”

The Devil extricated himself and hopped to his feet. He watched expectantly as Zachary's giant hand gripped the top corner of the machine, wobbled it once, and let go.

The pretzels fell. The Devil retrieved them.

“I mean,” said Zachary, “what are you doing
here
?”

“Looking out for things.”

Zachary didn't know what that answer meant, and he didn't like having the Devil in the same building as his son. Things were different now.

“What are the chances,” he asked, “of getting my soul back?”

The Devil had eaten all nine pretzels already, and was cleaning up the loose salt with a long, thrashing tongue.

“None,” he replied, licking his lips.

Zachary pursed his lips. Struggled not to say anything more. Now wasn't the time. He felt dirty. Now that his son was here, now that Clara was here, he wanted a new past to go with his new future. Knowing that wasn't possible, he resolved that the new future would at least be complete, and be clean.

The Devil walked away.

Zachary let him go.

The Devil might be the Devil, but
he
was Big Zach, the man who was going to connect everybody in the world.

He tore off his scrubs as if changing into Superman.

Tall Timbers Minimum Security Correctional Facility for Men, 1987

FOUR YEARS DRAGGED OUT
in court. Four years of sleepless nights and throwing up and almost shooting himself, all for nothing. He was convicted and packed off to the kind of prison they pack naughty businessmen off to.

It wasn't so bad.

“It's not so bad,” Fish whispered in the night to his cellmate, Charles, on the lower bunk, a former vice-president of the Coca-Cola Corporation.

“That's because it's not real prison,” said Charles.

Charles was a Harvard man. This seemed to be a prison for Harvard men. Yale guys went someplace else. If you were a self-made man like Fish, and had not completed college, you rubbed shoulders with the Ivy League felons, but they didn't have to talk to you or pretend you had the right to be there among them.

“If it's not a real prison,” said Fish, “then walk out and go home after roll call tomorrow. I dare you.”

Silence.

You can't dare a Harvard man unless you're a Harvard man yourself.

YOU COULD WORK
, if you wanted to, at Tall Timbers. Most inmates wanted to. It passed the time and earned them money.

Fish lucked into a job in the prison library. The library was a nice assignment, because you had a lot of outside contact. Interlibrary loans, requests for articles, ordering new material, dealing with new technology.

For a week, Fish shelved books, and pushed a magazine cart around the various cells and dayrooms. The jobs no one else wanted to do. The other library clerks were mostly guys in their fifties. They winked at him and made “new guy” jokes.'

His second week, though, he decided enough was enough. Time for these old sacks to learn some respect. He might be a new guy, but he was still Mark Fish, goddammit. He had taken insurance to a whole new level! He was friends with the Devil!

So on Monday morning, he sat himself down at the front desk, and started stamping returned books.

Fish was on his tenth book when someone gave him a poke from behind and said, “My spot there, son.”

Fish cast an irritated eye over his shoulder.

“Huh?”

There stood Harry Truman, or someone who looked a lot like him, in a prison jumpsuit accented with a massive gold Rolex.

“You're in my spot,” said Truman.

Fish told Harry to blow it out his ass, and went back to stamping.

The day came and went. Nothing more was said.

Fish thought, Somebody must have told him who I am.

THE PEOPLE WHO CAME
and got him in the middle of the night did not wake him up. They just yanked his mattress off the top bunk, spilling him against the wall.

He struggled to his knees, but was kicked down by flying wingtip shoes, and held motionless by invisible fat hands, some with gold rings.

He blinked, trying to clear his eyes, trying to see who held him, but all he could discern were jumpsuits and leather shoes and a few strong but manicured hands. How many, he couldn't tell. But they laughed together, a low, collective rumble. The sort of fraternal laugh you hear over the tinkling of ice in Scotch glasses. Mostly, they were just shadows. Strong shadows, faceless judges, and their contempt for him needed no words.

The shadows shuffled and parted, and a separate shadow, shorter and bespectacled, entered the cell with its hands in its pockets, and looked down its nose at Fish.

“Harry Truman,” coughed Fish, speaking aloud before he could get a grip on things.

“Sure,” said Truman, softly.

A wingtip lashed out and stabbed at Fish's kidney. He threw up a little, in his mouth, but didn't scream.

Truman crouched down and looked Fish in the eye, and told him who he was. He wasn't Harry Truman, of course. But he had been famous once, and Fish finally recognized him. His name didn't matter, really. Fish continued to think of him as Truman, in his head. What mattered was that the guy was scary, now. He was the kind of guy who, in another time and place, might have been a famous Nazi. In this time and place, he was a certain kind of businessman.

“I'll tell you the same thing I told Nixon,” said Truman.

“You disrespected me publicly, so you're going to be punished publicly.”

Fish, Truman said, would have to apologize at breakfast, in front of the entire general population. He would buy Truman subscriptions to the
Robb Report
and the
Wall Street Journal
. He would clean Truman's cell and do his laundry for a year—

“A
year
?” coughed Fish.

A flurry of wingtips wrecked his solar plexus. This time he screamed.

He would have to carry Truman's tray in the cafeteria, the voice continued, and find a way to download stock apps on the library computers. And if there was anything else Truman wanted, anything at all …

The low, rumbling laugh made another round.

The dim corridor light made eyeless disks of Truman's glasses, but behind the lenses, one eyebrow moved, and Fish understood that Truman had winked at him.

Bracing himself against another wingtip attack, Fish cleared his throat and spat in Truman's face.

Tried to, anyhow. He missed.

They didn't kick him. They didn't laugh.

“Slow learner,” pronounced Truman, rising.

Something gritty was shoved into Fish's mouth. He gagged, and avoided vomiting by plain force of will. His hands and ankles were tied, and they—whoever they were—dragged him down the hall, downstairs, down something like a steam tunnel until it seemed they couldn't possibly still be on prison property, and then they tossed him up on a steel table and wrapped him in a clean, white sheet. Wrapped him tight. He could breathe fine, except for the gag in his mouth.

Then, as they flipped and turned him, wrapping him up, he glimpsed a dead man, half blue, cut open on the next table.

A morgue, he thought.

He tried not to scream.

He was going to have to control himself. He tried some of the crazy breathing tricks he'd heard about through the years, trying to calm himself. Didn't they want to talk to him? If they would only unstrap the gag.

They never said a word to him, and that was almost the scariest part. What really got his attention was the open square in a wall of what looked like minifridge doors, and a metal drawer extended.

More screaming. More gagging. They slid him in headfirst, slid the drawer into the wall, and shut the fridge door down by his feet, and left him there for a long time.

FISH DISCOVERED CLAUSTROPHOBIA
.

If he could only go mad or die.

But he could not stand this confinement. For the first time in his life, he understood and felt sorry for people who said they were claustrophobic. He longed to move his arms, to sit up. To run and move freely, and being trapped like this was like being trapped beneath the earth itself.

At first, he squirmed and shrieked, knocking his feet against the door, hoping to attract someone's attention.

That made him hot and feverish. He lay still, and was faced with rivers of warm saliva and mucus trying to run down his throat, down his windpipe.

His mind was a cruel accomplice. Every time they opened the fridge door down there and pulled him into the cool air, it was a dream, and he snapped awake in darkness, in the stifling air.

Then, one time, it wasn't a dream. They yanked him out by his feet, cleaned him up with rough hands, and made him choke down something like oatmeal. Before he could get his eyes to focus or his mouth to form words, they shut him up in the drawer again. Did it matter if it was a dream or not? The cruelty staggered him. He tried to scream, but only produced a dull rattle.

Days passed. Not imaginary, hallucinatory days. Actual, whole days. He could tell. He fouled himself, but only a little. His dehydrated body stopped making urine.