Sam seemed as happy to see me as I was to see
him, but he looked real tired and not up to keeping on the go the
rest of the night. He wasn’t at all happy to hear about our
appointment with Markham, not just ’cause he didn’t
feel like doin’ anything much but also ’cause he felt
it had to be bad news.
We quickly got his stuff in the car and I drove him into town.
He’s not too thrilled about the way I drive, so if he let me
he was real tired.
“He didn’t say what it was about?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Only that it was me he wanted.
You’re just there ’cause he knows I won’t do it
if you say no.”
He sighed. “Yeah, that bothers me, too. I don’t like
this, babe, not one bit. If this is anything like the mess we had
last time it might be real bad. We can’t always luck out of
these things.”
“I been thinkin’ the same thing. Look, Sam, do we
have to take it? I mean, I’d kinda like to see some of them
other worlds sometime, I admit, when we know what they are and what
the hell is goin’ on, but gettin’ back into that shit
they get themselves into—that’s somethin’
else.”
“Well, we have to go to the meeting, anyway,” he
replied. “Look, we gotta face facts. We’re doing real
good right now. Real good. And the whole business is growing. Thing
is, though, it’s doing good and growing only because the big
boys have us on the approved list. One word from good old Godawful,
Incorporated and we’re back in Camden fighting roaches if
we’re lucky. You remember The Godfather?”
“Sure. Saw it three times.”
“Well, that’s what it’s all about. We did them
a favor, mostly by accident, and they offered a favor back.”
He went into his Brando impression. Sam was great for impressions.
“Someday, and that time may never come, you might be
asked to do a small service for me in return. Well, this time
G.O.D. is Godfather, Inc. We been called.”
“I think that considerin’ what all we done for them,
we’re even.”
“So do I, but all that does is mean we’ll get to
live our natural lives out. Once you take, you get taken.
There’s no such thing as a little graft. Still, I
don’t feel any obligation to get my head blown off for them,
and even less obligation to let them get your head blown
off. They set us up, but Spade and Marlowe isn’t a subsidiary
of G.O.D., Inc., although, Lord knows, everything else seems to be.
We been down before, we can be down again. I love this now, yeah,
but I love you and life more.”
I woulda kissed him for that if I could keep from crashin’
the car, ’cause he meant it. Still, I’d been
doin’ some figurin’ of my own.
“Look, Sam—suppose it is a big risk? You
know I been feelin’ kinda trapped, and even though
we’re livin’ good, we ain’t got no reserve and if
we have to make the agency bigger we’ll have ta put most of
our money there for a while. Ain’t neither of us
gettin’ no younger, so this might be a chance for a score.
We’ll hear the man out, but I promise that if we both
don’t go for it then I won’t go it alone.
Fair?”
“Fair,” he agreed.
Bill Markham was one of them tall, good-lookin’,
sandy-haired guys who usually is the sales director of some company
on the way up or maybe some jock sellin’ running shoes on TV.
I knew he was older’n me, maybe closer to Sam’s age,
but he looked real young and he talked real smooth.
Knowin’ Sam was tired and we both was curious, though, he got
straight to the point. There was just us in his office, door
locked, everything off. Real private.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a little box, and put his
thumb on a small square just about big enough for it. The box
opened, and he took out a small opaque cube about the size of a
thumbnail. It looked like cheap polished plastic, and ’cept
for a brown circle on the bottom there was nothin’ to mark
it.
“This is what’s known as a parium capsule. I
don’t know where the name comes from, but they all look
pretty much like this except for the color and sometimes the size.
Basically, it’s a needle—a substance is sealed inside
in some kind of suspension when it’s made, then you put it
where you want to inject it on bare skin, with this little circle
down flat against the skin, and press real hard. Anything inside is
injected directly into the bloodstream. It even has a little bit of
logic, so if it needs to find an artery it’ll do it. No
needle marks, no pain, no infection, not even much sensation except
a little suction feeling when it fires. Then you toss it away. The
Company’s field medics and others with a need for it have
them around. They’re small, stackable, easy to store, and you
can have a whole pharmacy in a shoe box. This one’s used, so
feel free to take a look at it, but don’t touch the little
spot.”
We both looked, but neither of us felt like handlin’ it.
You didn’t know what had been inside, and none of them
gadgets get a hundred percent out; leastwise, none I ever knew.
“The machine for loading them is small and very portable
and has its own internal power. It’s a highly restricted
device, but as with all highly restricted devices it’s not
impossible to get one or many if you really want them and you have
Company or home world contacts.”
Home world. That was the world that was supposed to be some
kinda paradise off what it ripped off of all the other worlds. They
didn’t invent nothin’, but what he was showin’ us
wasn’t of this world for sure.
“It’s real handy. You can take something—a
drug, for instance—and transport it almost any way you like
in bulk, then just load it into the little machine, load a bunch of
these in as well, and press start. At the other end, the little
capsules come out filled with whatever dosage you put in as the
load, all precise, stacked and arranged like sugar cubes. These
things themselves are tricky to perfect, but once you have the mold
in silicon anybody can turn them out.”
“I never liked shots much, but so what?” Sam asked.
“It’s not too far off what might be around here in a
few years.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Think about what this might do in, say,
the heroin racket, or freebase, or anything like that. Measured
doses, different strengths, all safe, and everybody gets their own
fresh needle every day so there’s no chance of infection or
contamination.”
“I’d make a guess they already have,” I put
in. “Otherwise, why tell us about it?”
He shrugged. “They haven’t come in here, anyway.
There was a move to get them into the narcotics trade here simply
as a safety measure, something we could do, but that talk’s
all but died out now. But elsewhere, we’re facing something
new, something even the opposition is a little nervous
about.”
The opposition. That meant any folks in the Company or
workin’ for it or on the home world who didn’t like
things the way they was and wanted changes, by fair means or not.
Control of the whole multi-universe business was really in the
hands of just a very few people, nameless and faceless to us, who
were called the Board of Directors, and from what they told us this
Board was basically one big family. It was kinda like a kingdom,
with the same few families holdin’ all the top jobs and top
power, and that always left other folks unhappy. Anytime you had
this much power in so few hands you was bound to have a lot of
lower-downs after your hide. That was one reason why gettin’
in to the home world was so hard and so restricted, and why them
Directors never left.
“A drug?” I prompted him.
“Yeah. A drug and more than just a drug. You two have been
around. You know what the usual drugs will do. There’s a fair
number of addicts who couldn’t get off if they wanted to, and
if they need a fix bad enough they’ll kill their own
grandmother.”
We both nodded. We knew that all too well.
“There’s a new drug. At least we call it a drug,
although it doesn’t act like any drug anybody has ever seen.
It acts a little like it’s alive, although if you saw it
under a microscope you couldn’t believe it could be. It looks
almost like water, maybe just a touch brownish, and if it is
injected anywhere into a Type Zero human it heads straight for the
brain, checks it out, takes over, then moves in and starts doing
its thing. It actually manufactures duplicates of enzymes in your
brain and then replaces your natural enzymes with its duplicates.
The duplicates are of the same sort, but not exactly. They’re
purer, actually more efficient. When they first take over control,
whatever those enzymes control gets a pure jolt of what it likes
and so do you. There are pleasure centers in the brain. When
stimulated, the body sticks in these enzymes and you feel pleasure.
In this case, the pleasure would be prolonged and
absolute.”
“That’s a fairly simplified description of the way
drugs like heroin work, Bill,” Sam noted. I got to admit I
got a little lost with all them enzymes but I figured the
result.
“That’s true, but that’s because the plant
enzymes, highly refined, are injected directly. In this case, the
process is indirect. We have a controller, almost a control center,
that uses the body’s own materials to make what it needs, but
it controls things. With heroin, rejection sets in, the
plant substances or chemicals are expelled, and it’s kind of
like an engine suddenly losing its oil. Unlike the engine, your
body will eventually replace and start making those chemicals
again, leaving only the memory of the stimuli, but between the time
the enzymes or chemicals are expelled and the time the body needs
to replenish and regear it’s like running an engine with very
little oil. It gets very, very sick.”
That was the best way to explain withdrawal to a lay person I
ever heard.
“It does pass, though, without killing or doing
real harm to the body,” Sam pointed out. “You only
wish you’d die.”
“True. But a lot of what we do is based on pleasure-pain
stimuli. The memory of the rush, just how great you felt, remains,
and a fair number are inclined to get hooked again even if
they’re forced off. Now this stuff is different. It’s
more like a parasite. It spreads over your body, but doesn’t
duplicate itself to the extent of harming any part of it. It gets
what it needs from the body, and it’s pretty stable once
it’s complete, but it knows you. Don’t ask me how
that’s possible, but it does. If it gets into the brain it
sort of takes over. The body abruptly considers it natural and
normal. Your body’s defenses won’t fight it. It survives by
controlling that chemical balance, the blockers and the enzymes, in
your brain. If it needs sugars and starches for some reason,
it’ll stimulate its host to eat particular things. Ditto for
things rich in various minerals and whatever. It can suppress
urges, emotions, desires, or heighten them to near
compulsion.”
I got to admit I was gettin’ a real sick feelin’
inside. “You mean it takes over, makes the body a slave? It
thinks?”
“No. I doubt if anything like this ever could think as we
understand thought. And it just manages the body and stays where it
is and gets what it needs and it’s happy, leaving the host to
still be him or herself, subject to its requirements. There
actually are some microscopic life forms like this here on Earth,
but all in the lower animals and all known here so far in marine
organisms. We think this is a natural organism. We think that on
some world, somewhere, it was allowed to evolve so that it reached
a very high state and operated on the highest life forms, and on
land as well. You can’t just catch it, like a disease. A
specially organized cluster—still microscopic but
definite—must invade the new host. Its remote cousins here
reproduce by sex between two hosts—and it can compel its host
to have sex, and does. The trouble is, from its point of view, it
doesn’t work that way in Type Zeros, so we think this is from
a world quite different from ours.”
I didn’t remember much from our lessons on the Company,
but I remembered what he meant by Type Zero. That was the type that
the home world was—which also happened to be the type
we were, too. Just plain folks. The further away you got
from us, though, on both sides, the more real strong differences
came on. Humans developed in different places than here, or with
maybe different ancestors. Some of ’em was ugly as sin and
looked like folks from a bad horror movie, but they was still
basically human anyway. They just went to show how different we
could have turned out with just one little thing goin’
another way. Those they called Type One, and no matter how weird
they looked, they was all close enough to us that we could probably
have sex and produce somethin’ neither of us would really
like to claim. Sorta like you can breed a lion and a tiger, or a
cow and a buffalo; like that.
Type Twos came from different ancestors and weren’t close
enough to breed with us. At best they’d produce sterile
offspring—like mules—and mostly nothin’ at all.
Type Threes and beyond were so far off us that they might as well
be from Jupiter or somewheres for all we had in common. We
couldn’t even catch their colds.
Trouble was, there was millions of worlds side by side that was
only different in smaller things, then millions of Type Ones on
both sides of them, and so on. A lot more than the Company could
count, let alone know everything about.
“So we can catch it but we can’t give it,” I
said. “That’s somethin’.”
“Yeah. It means real addiction. We think it’s a Type
One organism, but we haven’t been able to locate where it
came from and considering the number and range it might take years,
even decades, if all resources were put on doing just that.
It’s a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. On our own,
we’ll find this one only by the kind of luck you have hitting
the lottery. Now it does a nice, neat job inside of us, but
we’re not what it evolved in and it runs into problems.
Something in our air, or our body chemistry, or whatever gets to it
after a while. It begins to slow down, then break down. The only
thing that can restore it is a fresh module of itself. What it does
inside the body is very complicated; suddenly it can’t handle
the task. It starts cutting back. It starts to die and it tells you
about it by hitting the pain centers. It also becomes a massive
infection in the brain, fighting off all comers and struggling to
survive one more minute. The withdrawal becomes the ultimate
agony—and the host dies before the parasite does.”
Sam was kinda disturbingly clinical, but, then, he’d been
a vice squad man. “How long before this breakdown?”
“About thirty hours, give or take with the individual.
Never less than twenty-four and never more than forty as near as we
can tell. Our samples have been very limited, our information
mostly second-hand or eavesdrop or observations by people not
trained in this sort of thing. Withdrawal takes another six to
eight hours of increasing agony before you pass out and the heart
stops. Brain tissue disruption or destruction begins shortly after
the pain button is pressed, though, and accelerates from there. We
think that’s what kills, eventually. The autonomic nervous
system—heart, breathing, whatever—is disrupted. Let it
go too long and a fresh infusion will get the body going again but
it won’t repair whatever brain damage you get. The effects
are wide ranging and inconsistent from individual to individual.
There could be memory loss, or some sensory loss—vision,
hearing, taste, smell—or some motor function problems or
intelligence, talents, abilities—you name it. But
pain’s the last to go.”
I listened, not understandin’ all the biology shit but
understandin’ the effects on the people good enough.
“Bill—how do you know this?” I asked him.
“The only way you could know this is if it was done on
people.”
“It was,” he said softly. “But not by us. This
isn’t something we’d ever fool with.
It’s too scary.”
“Can you kill it?” Sam asked. “Without killing
the addict, I mean?”
“Sure. You can kill anything. If we had enough cases, we
could easily isolate whatever starts breaking it down. Without
tipping off the opposition and letting them know we’re on to
them, we just don’t know for sure if we could cure it or not
and if so what the price would be. We got hold of some raw samples,
strictly by accident, and ran them through every test and every
expert and computer the home world has. We have been unable to make
it grow in the lab, and it ignores test animals, even chimps. The
only way it’ll reproduce is inside a human, and since the
reproductive clusters humans produce lack something it needs and
can’t get, they aren’t any good, either.”
With that kind of setup, Bill Markham then let us have the whole
load.
I got to admit I don’t understand the Labyrinth, and I
ain’t sure nobody really does. I sure can’t figure out
how them early scientists guessed it was there, let alone built
this network, this inter-world railroad. I been in it a few times,
but I still can’t figure what’s happenin’ in
there. It’s like a real long tunnel, stretchin’ out in
all directions, only you’re inside a cube with windows.
Windows up top, windows beneath, and on all sides ’cept the
ones that keep you in the Labyrinth. That means you always got a
choice of four worlds to exit to. Every once in a while,
there’s a switch junction, with a control room and Labyrinth
in all directions. That switcher punches his buttons and you go
which way he decides, into a whole set of new cubes in all
directions until you get to other switch points.
Sam and me we went to a bunch of ’em, and we always
walked, but there’s enough room in there to drive a truck
through—if you could figure out how to make a truck go up or
down instead of just forward, back, left, and right. Of course, it
probably ain’t left or up in there; none of the usual rules
mean much inside there, ’cause you’re outside
everyplace else. They must have some kinda trucks or flyin’
saucers or whatever they use, though, ’cause they move
trainloads of shit through that thing.
Three guilds, which I guess are sorta like unions or
somethin’, run the thing. One controls the switch points, one
runs the stations, and a third moves the cargo through from one
point to another. Ain’t no way the biggest, baddest computer
in creation could look at all that stuff all the time, though, so
security mostly monitors the switches ’cause just about
everybody and everything has to pass at least one of ’em.
The first way they check is that everybody who has any real
business in there’s got some kind of code thing in your
bones. Fact is, there might be a whole hell of a lot of Brandys,
even with the same fingerprints and eyes and all that, but they
ain’t the same person no matter how alike they are. I got a
code planted somewhere inside my bones—don’t ask me how
or where. They stuck me in a thing like an iron lung, punched a
bunch of buttons, I didn’t feel nothin’, and that was
it. But now any switchman can look at his or her board as soon as
I’m inside that cube and read out not only who I am but
which I am. The code’s big, random, and total
nonsense. It’s all in computers, of course, but they tell me
that even if you got into the computer you couldn’t find the
numbers.
If you don’t have no number, and you look suspicious, they
shoot you off to some siding, someplace on a world where people
just never came about, and you sit there till they’re ready
for you, if they ever are. We had that happen. If you don’t
have no coding but you sound like you know what you’re
doin’, you can sometimes bluff ’em with a
convincin’ destination, but they can send messages at about
the same speed as they can send you, and they call security on both
ends. At least, you could, ’cause we did it, but I’m
told they tightened that up now. No code, and you get dumped no
matter what.
They tightened up a lot of other shit when we breezed through
their system. Now before you go in you got to file a destination
and any stops with the stationmaster who sends it to the security
computer, and you’re checked as you go along. Guess they were
kinda sloppy and cocksure of themselves till we screwed
’em.
Still, somebody first found the world with this drug disease
thingie, whatever it was, then figured out how to bottle or can it
or whatever and brought it down the line to the Type Zero—our
type—area. There ain’t a lot of switches up in Type One
and Two territory, and lots of unexplored worlds in between them,
so it was possible that somebody could be goin’ from one
legit point to another and stop off just long enough to pick up the
goods.
That meant there had to be somebody who knew just what they was
doin’ in the world where this shit came from, then somebody
who could get messages back and forth without security
knowin’ to set up the deal and the pickups, then somebody in
the transport guild to actually pick up and carry the stuff,
disguised as part of legitimate cargo, and drop it off at
its destination, where other big plotters would make use of it.
Pretty complicated stuff.
The Company didn’t know who discovered it, or how, and how
they managed to both figure out what they had and keep it quiet,
even settin’ up this scheme. They didn’t know how long
it had taken to set up. They did know that it was well
organized and involved some real bigwigs someplace and lots of
corruption, but that was it. They just bumped into it, when they
had an accident or something in one of the cargo haulers or
whatever that they use and found it strictly by luck. They
didn’t let on they knew, and it seemed like the transport
guild worker was innocent. They’d already switched it and he
was now on a legit run. They put a tracer on it to see who’d
pick it up, and somebody did.
“Rupert Conrad Vogel,” Bill said, showin’ us a
photo of a guy who looked like a fugitive from a cheap World War II
movie. “He’s a stationmaster, which means
administration and a Company man, or so we thought. He got the
shipment, took a lot of it, then sent some back disguised as
something else, again looking very routine. The pickup courier was
legitimate, but he encountered another courier along his route and
somehow that second courier got the package and dropped it
clandestinely at a world where we didn’t have a station but
did know. We picked this courier up, stuck him in a hypnoscan, then
erased any memories he had of being picked up and discovered and
let him continue. He didn’t know much. He just got some nice
little extras all in things he and his family could enjoy but we
wouldn’t particularly notice, and for that he got a message
slip passed into his pocket now and then that a shipment—he
didn’t even know what it was, nor cared—would be with
so-and-so as unlisted or misaddressed cargo. He’d meet the
other courier, either get the parcel or note that it was wrong and
offer to take it back to headquarters for resorting, then drop it
when his route took him near this other world. That was
it.”
“You dead sure this ain’t just the tip of the
iceberg?” I asked him.
“Pretty sure. Their supply is limited. There’s no
clear routine as to when the shipments come, but that’s
probably just to disguise their origins. Vogel’s their
dispatcher. He gets it, he holds on to it, and then he sends it out
in measured amounts. As far as we can tell, he’s handling the
real experimentation himself, and very effectively and ruthlessly.
He’s well placed to be able to do so, as you’ll see in
a minute.”
“And the other place?” Sam asked.
“A world not too far from this one and very similar in a
lot of ways. They’re getting only about three thousand doses
every twenty to thirty days, so there’s only enough to
sustain maybe a hundred people. They appear to be going to a local
organized crime underboss who’s never had any known
connection with us and shouldn’t even know about the
Labyrinth. He, in turn, has one man supervising it and they seem to
be using it in a very low-level way, to maintain a group of young
women as prostitutes. This thing’s ready-made for that on a
petty level—I mean, this thing compels you to have
sex a lot. We don’t know what connection they have to Vogel,
or why they were picked, or why they’re being allowed to use
something like this for such a petty and ordinary thing. Company
people don’t go there, except our wayward courier, of course,
and we’ve had a monitor on that gate ever since and nobody
but that courier ever approached. We sent in a small team of
agents, and they couldn’t find anything odd, either.
There’s a connection there, but we can’t find
it.”
“But they know about the Labyrinth,” Sam noted.
“Yeah, they do—but not many,” Bill replied.
“The big boss has had a lodge up near the central
Pennsylvania weak point for years, and this place happens to be one
of those on the way from here to there that’s weak enough
that when we open that Labyrinth route it can be accessed without a
station—like the dead end you two were shoved into that
time.”
“Yeah, only here nobody jumps in but something gets tossed
out.”
“All we could find was that they were being paid off to do just
what they’re doing and ask no questions. There’s lots
of ways you can do it when you have a crime boss on the hook,
including checking close other worlds, getting inside information
he can use, and feeding it to him. You can feed him just enough,
wrapped around the parcel, to keep him quiet and on the
hook.”
“You mean,” I said, “that somebody just pops
up once and bribes this crime boss into this? We’ll pay you
if you find fifty or more girls and hook ’em on
this?”
“That’s about it. We don’t know why. Makes no
sense on its face, and except for the fact that most but not all of
the girls they hooked are relatively young, there’s no
connecting thread between them. None. There’s no reason to
think they know much. Just hired help, like the courier—but a
lot harder to snatch and interrogate. You see what kind of a bind
we’re in?”
We could see, too. “You can’t snatch any addicts for
information ’cause they’d be dead in two days,” I
noted. “You can’t take out the courier without
killin’ all them girls and lettin’ whoever’s
doin’ this know you’re on to ’em. Ain’t
nobody in this chain that knows anything worth knowin’
’cept this guy Vogel.”
“Yeah. Vogel. He knows a lot, even if he doesn’t
know it all. He had to be directly contacted if only to corrupt
him. He had to be sold on becoming a traitor, which is much harder
considering the risks. He’s got one hell of a racket where he
is that fits his peculiarities to a T, and he’s got a
reliable reputation. He’d have to be offered something really
big to switch. He also knows exactly what he’s got because
he’s in charge of the experimentation, and as a stationmaster
he’s well positioned to move people and goods when he
wants.”
“Why not just take him out, then?” Sam asked.
“Get him out of there on a pretext, fry his brain, and then
take what results he has as well?”
Bill Markham sighed. “I wish it were that easy, Sam, but
it’s not. This is a class A operation all the way.
They’re very good, whoever they are. Vogel will spook and run
at the first suspicion, and probably has people there working for
him even he doesn’t know about whose only job is to
take him out if he gets nabbed or exposed. The labs, the whole
place he’s got, are wired for one hell of a big explosion
should anything go wrong, and we don’t even know who might
trigger it or how. We could kill him, of course, anytime, but that
only buys us time until they can set up another site like his that
we don’t know about. We’ve tried tricking him out, but
he’s always come up with a plausible excuse not to leave. If
we press too hard, he’ll blow that joint and split to a safe
line.”
Bill sat back in his chair and sighed. “You see,” he
continued, “he’s our only real lead and he’s
eggshells. He’s no good to us dead. And we have to
know what the hell is going on. We don’t know what this stuff
is, where it comes from, who’s bringing it in and how, and,
worst of all, we don’t know what they plan to do with it. We
have a lot of pieces, very few real live suspects, and none of them
fit. Why go to all this risk? What’s it all about? All we
know is that clearly they can’t synthesize it, either, so
they’re pretty limited, and that means they have a very
specific plot in mind—but what? Something big, real big, or
they wouldn’t take all these risks. Very big people are
involved just to do what they’ve done. Who are they? How did
they manage it? What are they planning? You see?”
I did see. Bill had one hell of a problem on his hands.
“But, Bill—you got agents, all that technology, all
that power. Surely you can do a snatch-and-grab with this
guy,” I said.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The trouble is,
this guy’s stationmaster and he’s smart. He
wouldn’t have turned traitor without taking that into
consideration. He knew what he was up against, and who. Cranston
was a stationmaster, too, you remember, and he’d even set up
a resort on a weak point with a Labyrinth substation in his
basement, and he came damned close to getting away.”
We remembered. We had to chase the bastard through the Labyrinth
and he still almost killed us.
Markham slipped some switches and the room went dark and a panel
came down in back of his desk. Another button, and some slides
appeared on the back, the first of a really enormous
mansion that looked like a cross between a fancy home in the
country and Fort Apache.
“Looks like a federal penitentiary with a nice house in
the middle,” Sam noted. “Are those machine gun towers
on that outer wall?”
“They are, and you have three rows of fence before you
even get to the wall. The distance between the first two
fences is wide enough for men with nasty dogs to go through, which
they do, and there are sensors on the fences for any kind of
disturbance. Even a rabbit brings the dogs running. The third fence
line is electrified with enough juice to fry anybody. Then
there’s the wall, which has both machine gun coverage and is
thick enough for riflemen to stand between the towers. A hundred
and eighty-six guys held a far less secure wall against five
thousand infantry for twelve days at the Alamo.”
“But they eventually lost,” Sam pointed out.
“Yeah, they lost—but you could hold this place for a
while, anyway. Long enough to realize you were going to be overrun,
burn the papers, get out of there and blow the whole complex. The
entire estate is honeycombed with tunnels packed with explosives
that would leave a crater half a mile wide.”
“There’s gates front and back,” I noted.
“Not much better. Built like Sam’s prison.
Reinforced metal and concrete and heavily defended so that any
assault on the gates would have to be over open ground. We could
use a small missile to blow them, but we’d never get enough
people inside without tremendous losses and, of course, enough time
to blow the place.”
“Air drop?” Sam suggested.
“Again, possible, but he’s got radar and air
defenses that could pick up a pigeon at half a mile. A small force
could get in, we think, but it would be hamstrung. It’d have
to move to get him, and to do that it would have to pass a
spider’s web of television monitors wired to a central
security control in the basement of the place. We can get them in,
but we can’t get to him and take him out without discovery no
matter how hard we figure it.”
“Bill—if he don’t know you know he’s
gone bad, why this fort?” I wondered. “I mean, this
ain’t what the average station has.”
“You’re right, of course. That’s the station
there, to the back and left of the main house. Maybe fifty yards.
The other outbuildings are quarters for the guards and supply
houses and—other things. The reason it is the way it is is
basically because Vogel lives in a world where that kind of thing
is necessary for the health of somebody in his position. In fact,
we helped set up some of the defenses initially to protect the
station, and we figure he’s made a lot of changes since then
to protect against us as well.”
In the world of Rupert Vogel, it seemed, we lost World War II. I
ain’t too clear on the history, neither, but it goes
somethin’ like this: the Germans didn’t get bogged down
in Russia because they attacked in the spring and won before winter
set in, finally gettin’ the Japs to attack Siberia and put
the squeeze on. Then they turned back to England and with so many
men and airplanes they finally wiped out the air defenses and
invaded. We, on the other hand, spent almost all our time
goin’ against Japan. We mighta done somethin’, too, but
the Germans got their missiles goin’ and managed to use the
time to perfect the A-bomb ahead of us. We got it about the same
time they did, but they had the way to deliver it, off ships and
from friendly places in South America or somethin’. They
nuked Norfolk and San Diego and places like that and that was the
end of it.
Not that it weren’t real messy and bloody when they came
in, but we never had to face this kind of army before, one that
didn’t care who it killed or what it had to do. Everybody got
IDs and papers, and couldn’t sneeze without bein’
checked. Then folks got classified, kinda South Africa style. The
Jews all got shipped to camps in Georgia and Nevada and it was
pretty clear what happened to them there. The folks with good
German or Italian or even English names and backgrounds, they got
the best treatment if they was cooperative, and lots were. We was
beat good. These folks got to be the managers and bosses if they
wasn’t already. Then the rest of the Europeans, they got a
second-class thing and they did the work in the factories, mines,
you name it. All the Orientals got shipped to Japan or China or
someplace.
That left the ten percent who was black, and there was a lot
more of us than there were Jews or Orientals. They put us in the
camps like the rest, and millions died, but they also used us. It
was like they turned the clock back a hundred years. We became the
lab animals for their experiments and medical stuff, others were
trained as personal servants—slaves, really—to the big
boys, and some of ’em, the big Nazi lords, even kept us like
pets and bred us. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach, and
Sam wasn’t lookin’ none too good, neither. He sure
wouldn’t survive in this new world, and his parents woulda
been gassed. Thing was, a Bill Markham woulda come put pretty good
unless he was one of them patriotic principled types. With his
name, looks, and background he would probably be headin’ up a
storm trooper division at least.
“The Nazi-style culture is based on conflict, competition,
and combat,” he was sayin’. “They’ve had a
lot of tension with the Japanese over the years but no real wars
with them mostly because they just don’t have enough people
to manage all the lands they have now. Eventually they’ll go
to war for the rest of the world, but there is just no way the
Germans and all those whom they’ve conscripted can both hold
their control and expand. Taking over a continent and population
this size was almost more than they could chew. When that kind of
thing happens to people like these, they start going at each
other’s throats. Tiny putsches, minor coups, knocking off the
local statenfuehrer and his boys and replacing them with a
new lot just as bad or worse. The Reich allows it, since it bleeds
off steam and there’s a feeling that anybody who’s
sloppy enough to get knocked off or overthrown deserved
it—the strong replacing the weak. How much power and strength
you have is the sole measure of importance there after racial
background, and they can get pretty hazy on that if they need
people.”
“So he’s trapped inside his own fortress, afraid of
his own people,” Sam noted. “Some paradise.”
“It’s not as bad as all that. Probably no worse than
guarding the President here against nuts. But when he’s at
home and in control, he wants to make sure that nothing happens to
him and his, and, of course, we couldn’t allow a station to
fall into the hands of somebody we didn’t control.
That’s why we went along with the mining and explosives part.
As usual, our people set ourselves up as the standard. If we
can’t crack it, then it’s safe, and we did a good job
here. Trouble is, we never allowed for having to crack it
ourselves. We can blow him and the Labyrinth station to hell, of
course, but that won’t get us anywhere. We need Vogel
alive. He knows the results of the experiments. He knows the
plot, at least the outlines of it. He might know just about all of
it.”
“You’re sure he’s not the ringleader?” I
asked him.
“No, he can’t be. He’s never had any
experience outside Type Zero lines, and he hasn’t been
involved with anybody who has. He’s also a field man; he
works stations, not the Labyrinth. He wouldn’t have the
knowledge or ability to set this off, although he’s an
important man in making it work.”
“You think this is actually the competition, or is it
maybe either an attempt by some Type One culture to take over down
here?” Sam asked him. “Or, could it be some internal
plot among the bigwigs of the company for control?” The
‘competition’ is what Company types liked to call
anybody not workin’ in their best interests.
Markham shrugged. “Who knows? Whoever this is is certainly
in league with the competition. Vogel may know. That’s why we
need him so badly.”
I shifted in my chair. “Look, Bill, I see this puzzle of
yours and it’s kinda interestin’, but what’s it
hav’ta do with us?”
“I was getting to that. I’ve described to you how
it’s impossible to make an unobserved entry to Vogel’s
lair. Even inside the manor house, there’s TV cameras, hidden
monitors, you name it, and security all over the place. There’s only one place where the snatch could be put on
Vogel, and that’s a medium-sized room that’s dead
center of the second floor of the house. It’s called the Safe
Room, and its double-insulated, soundproofed, and unmonitored.
It’s entered, if you can believe this, through Vogel’s
private bathroom, and the door itself can be locked and secured
from the inside. You could live through a bomb blast in there, and
you could also not hear a full-scale invasion. It’s his
retreat—the one place in there where he feels totally safe.
It’s reinforced top and bottom as well, and is as secure as a
bank vault. He spends a lot of time in there. We built it that way
because the records and codes for the Company and Labyrinth that
are the sole privy of the stationmaster must be kept somewhere safe
and it was the easiest and safest point at which we could modify
the place and install such a thing without ripping the old building
down.”
“Yeah, but so what?” Sam said a little cynically.
“Even if you had some way of getting somebody in there with
him, somebody who could take Vogel—and I’m not sure you
can—then what? You can’t get him out. I’m sure
the place has no windows. So, anybody would have to take the leader
out the only door, and all he’d need to do was give some
signal, some indication, and you were dead.”
“Give us some credit. We weren’t going to build a
place like that where the stationmaster, in a crisis,
couldn’t get put before it all blew. There’s another
door—an exit only, in the floor. Not even Vogel can use it to
get in—it’s booby-trapped and designed to jam and trap
somebody inside who tried it. One way only. An emergency exit. It
leads down through the walls to the basement area, then into a
tunnel that runs out back of the house and all the way to the
station, coming up here, near the control room stairway. The final
defense is very simple, really—a bunch of rods that support a
particular part of the tunnel ceiling. Even try opening or blowing
your way through from the station end and the rods
collapse—and so does half the tunnel. From inside, though,
you only have to throw a few levers to move the rods to a safety
position, allowing the door to open. When it closes again, the rods
slip back into place. One way only, as I said.”
This was suddenly gettin’ interestin’, although I
still wasn’t too sure I liked where it was goin’.
“What we propose is this,” Markham went on.
“Two separate actions both timed to the second. One is a
diversionary attack on the wall from outside. That’ll draw
security’s attention and most of the security personnel. At
the same time, our team will use a command force from the Labyrinth
to enter the station even if it’s not operating. With the
gate open, we can tap whatever power and forces we need.
We’ll be in our element. We could hold that place for an
incredible length of time, even against direct bomb hits and
worse.”
“How long?” Sam pressed. “If you need a
diversion it means they’ll know they’ve been had even
if they can’t get to you. How long can you hold it before
you’ll have to withdraw or risk being blown up?”
“I doubt if they’ll blow up the whole complex with
an external attack jeopardizing their escape routes, but we figure
thirty, maybe forty minutes tops.”
“Uh huh. And what about Vogel? He’s not going to
know there even is an attack if he’s as isolated as
you say, but if he does learn it, he’s also going to know
that it’s the Company because they have the station and
he’s not going to exit that way. He’ll hotfoot it out
of there a different way and make for a hidden substation just like
Cranston did.”
“No, it won’t be as easy for Vogel as it was for
Cranston, who built one of his houses over a weak point and
assembled a substation there. This isn’t Oregon, it’s
Pennsylvania—central Pennsylvania. The nearest weak point he
could make for that would be accessible to him would be hundreds of
miles away at either a point near Asheville, North Carolina, or
even further away up in Newfoundland. Des Moines is too small, and
too well covered inside. You’re right, though. He’d try
and get out overland to one of those points somehow if he knew the
station was taken, but he won’t know. We egged on and
supported an overambitious major—I think his name was
Ryland—to move against Vogel, and we studied the drill. If
they’re attacked and Vogel isn’t in the Safe Room, he
goes there immediately. If he’s in there, he stays there, and
gets sent a blinking light alarm. Then he can plug in a phone that
connects through a direct wire to security in the basement and get
the details and decide on a course of action from almost complete
safety.”
“Neat,” I said. “This Ryland—I guess he
didn’t make it.”
“His people got a pretty fair way, but they eventually
were killed or captured. Vogel had the captured ones hung up alive
on hooks suspended from the outer wall and left there until they
died. He left the bodies to rot as an object lesson. Ryland tried
to get away in a helicopter and they shot it down with a
surface-to-air missile.”
“Nice guy you got there,” I said sourly. “No
wonder he went bad.”
“Uh uh. It is a wonder he went bad, and part of
the puzzle. It takes an ugly, brutish, but smart man to survive and
hold on to power in that kind of society. He was carefully picked
because our Vogel was so much like their Vogel,
all the way through, only our Vogel was stuck as a
low-level administrator. Thing is, he’s exactly right for
that kind of role in that kind of world and he has everything he
ever dreamed of. If he finally was tired of the price in lack of
privacy and whatever that the position demanded, he could always
have asked to be replaced as stationmaster and retired to a world
that still fit him. Now, he’s forbidden to ever be a member
of the Reich Council or Fuhrer—in spite of his German name
and lineage he was born in Pittsburgh, and you have to be a
native-born European German to get those kind of posts, or even get
into the position where you might get them. He might well become
Leader of the Western Reich someday, though, if he plays it right
and survives, so he has a lot to lose by crossing us. What could he
gain?”
“The only way you can pay that kinda dude is with power.
Real big power,” I pointed out. “What’s he care
’bout bein’ no new Hitler when he knows how many worlds
there are?”
Markham nodded. “And that means that this whole business
is real big, about as big as can be. They’re careful, really
patient, limiting their experiments, getting it right even if it
takes years.”
I thought a moment. “If they could hook whole worlds on
this shit, you’d have the ultimate power trip.”
“You would, but I doubt if that’s their intention.
We have—what? Four, maybe closing in on five billion people
just here alone, right? That’s four billion doses a day,
every day, forever. The distribution and supply alone would drive
you bananas. Somehow, though, it’s an attack against the
Company, probably near its heart to go through all this. Think of
men like Vogel, all of them, in total control of the technology,
the knowledge, and the Labyrinth itself. I don’t know what or
how, but I feel at in my bones. Something very dangerous is going
on here and Vogel’s the only key. We think we finally figured
one way to nab him.”
I looked over at Sam and he looked back at me, and I guess we
both thought at the same time, here it comes at last.
“Vogel is a man of heavy sexual needs, but he’s also
a total paranoid because he has to be to survive. He has a project,
a hobby, that’s highly offensive to anybody but something he
does anyway. It’s called schwartzenbrood, or
something like that. He acquires, trains, and even breeds black
women. He picks them according to rigid criteria, acquires them
only from other area gruppenfuehrers, and they alone are
his personal household staff. They prepare his meals, and test them
first, and they make his bed, dress him, even bathe him. He treats
them more like pets than people. When he gets new women, he always
spends some time with them in the Safe Room.”
I got that ugly twinge in the pit of my stomach. “You want
to slip me in as one of them? And take him in the Safe
Room and get him to the Labyrinth through the tunnel?” He
didn’t say nothin’, so I added, “You got
to be jokin’.”
“He’s arranged to purchase three women from a man
he’s done business with many times before down in southern
Virginia. He trusts this man as much as he trusts anyone, because
he’s got concrete evidence that the man is both a thief and a
traitor, which he is. This man’s under constant watch by the
secret police; he only lives from day to day at Vogel’s whim.
We, however, can pull a substitution there thanks to our own agents
and resources. Vogel’s men then pick them up and take them,
and you, to the manor. One of the girls is nearly a dead ringer for
you—not identical and probably not related, but so close that
it’s mostly a matter of switching fingerprint cards. You get
in, and he takes you to the Safe Room. We’ll be monitoring
you all the way thanks to a tracer we can put inside your body that
even Vogel’s best won’t discover.”
“He’d never buy it,” I told him. “Hell,
Bill, I’m kinda fat and without my glasses I couldn’t
see you behind your desk, there. I know I don’t talk
real good, but I sure as hell can’t keep up no Gone With
the Wind act for maybe days or weeks. If he’s as careful
as you say he’s gonna check anyways. And even if I got that
far, how am I gonna take him? He looks like a pretty big guy in
that picture there.”
“You forget our technology. When we snatched that courier
and interrogated him, we had to make him forget that he was ever
found out, let alone questioned, and do it so that even somebody
else with our technology couldn’t discover it. Otherwise, we
couldn’t have taken even that risk with him. You will be
absolutely authentic so that even drugs and hypnoscans will not
show you as anything other than what we want you to appear. Only
when you are actually in his rooms will everything suddenly come
back to you, clearly, completely, and thoroughly. At that point,
you’ll be able to switch the persona on and off as
needed or required—but, of course, you wouldn’t stand
hard interrogation from that point. We’ve done it before. We
also might be able to temporarily increase your vision by certain
techniques, at least for a week or two. Not twenty-twenty, but much
better than now. We don’t dare apply any sort of contact or
surgical correction, of course. Somebody there might notice. What
do you think?”
“I think it stinks,” Sam growled. “How big is
Vogel, anyway?”
“About six feet, maybe two hundred thirty
pounds.”
“You think he takes ’em in there to play house? How
does she get a weapon? Brandy’s pretty strong and she’s
okay in the chop-chop stuff, but you can’t depend on that in
this case.”
“We don’t intend to. We have capsules that will defy
a dentist’s examination and X-rays. We’ll put one or
two in, immunize her against the agents, and all she has to do is
kiss him and within two minutes or less he’ll be the most
cooperative, docile sort of fellow you ever want to meet. The
cruder, less certain methods would be strictly backup.”
“And I’d have like twenty minutes to lay this guy
low, then at most another half hour to get him through the tunnel
to you, right? That ain’t much of a margin when anything
might go wrong,” I noted. “What if he decides to stick
one of them little cubes on me? Or has somethin’ done to my
brain before he takes me up there? We got a lot of chances
for things to go wrong for good here, and only real short margins
for it all if it goes right. Maybe if them Nazis were
invadin’ here right now, and Sam and me are both candidates
for the gas chambers, then this would be worth the risk, but it
ain’t. I’m sorry ’bout this world, but
it ain’t my world and it’s gonna be just as
shitty with or without me or Vogel. It’s my life or at the
luckiest the rest of my life as a slave. My ancestors was slaves
once, but they sure as hell didn’t volunteer.”
Sam nodded. “She’s right, Bill. The puzzle’s a
good one, and I’d like to help solve it, but you’re
asking her to risk everything in a very slim chance of this in the
name of saving some company bigwigs from an eventual threat that,
if it affects us at all, probably won’t until we’re old
and gray. The last time they were working our city in
our world. I’m sorry for these people, but I just
can’t believe this kind of James Bond plan has a ghost of a
chance.”
Markham hardly blinked. “I’m authorized to offer one
million dollars cash, taxes paid, no strings, to take the case. All
money up front, win or lose.”
I got startled and just stared. A million bucks tax
free . . .
“What good’s the money to me, Bill?” Sam asked
him. “Damn it, Brandy’s worth more than that. If
she’s not here to spend it with me it’s sure as hell
not worth it.”
I really loved Sam for that, but Bill really got me in my greedy
part. A million bucks, cash, tax paid. ’Course, a million
ain’t what it used to be, but it’s pretty good. I was
beginnin’ to wonder just how possible this thing
was.
“I can’t pretend this is risk free,” Markham
kindly admitted, “but I can cover some of the bases. If
she’s in there more than five days we’ll come in, take
her out, and blow the joint and the hell with Vogel. Guaranteed. We
can also set what’s known as an anxiety threshold on the
tracer. We can get her pulse and blood pressure from it. If
she’s threatened with anything like surgery or this drug,
it’ll trigger her out of the persona and her pulse
rate and blood pressure will shoot sky high and then we go in and
get her right then and there and bye-bye Vogel. If we’re down
to ten minutes and holding the station and she doesn’t show,
we’ll blow through that place and force whoever’s in
that Safe Room to come out one way or the other. I don’t say
you can’t get hurt or killed, Brandy, but we’ll do
everything to keep it from happening, that I swear—and under
no circumstances will we strand you there.”
I looked over at Sam. “If it was you and not me, would you
seriously give it some thought? Honest, now, Sam!”
He sighed. “If it was me going in, I have to honestly say
I’d give it some thought, yes,” he admitted,
knowin’ he couldn’t fake that kind of stuff with me.
“But a million bucks is not worth losing you,
babe.”
I looked at Bill. “You wanta leave us alone for a couple
of minutes?”
Markham took the hint and left. I think he figured on it right
off. I don’t even think he was listenin’ in
someplace.
“I won’t let you risk it. Not alone!” Sam said
as soon as Bill was out of the room.
“We’re good, Sam. We proved that.”
“Yeah, we’re good. As a team. He was
painting the best damned picture of this cockeyed plot he could and
he still made it sound like a sure march to the guillotine. And
even if it worked, the odds are you’re gonna get beaten or
raped or all of the above. The only thing worse than losing you
would be having you come back looking the same but not there
inside. This is the kind of guy who trims your fingernails starting
at the knuckles when he needs a few laughs, and he’s
surrounded by hordes of like-minded individuals. We’re doing
good now.”
“Yeah, now,” I echoed. “But not if we say no
and you know it. We’re makin’ more now than we ever
dreamed we’d have, and we’re in hock up to our neck and
you’re workin’ twelve-hour days and I’m a kept
woman with nothin’ to do on her own and less and less to do
with the business. And don’t give me no bullshit about my
bein’ a vital part of the business. It ain’t true and
you know it. I was happier and felt more like a real, useful person
when we was in the damned slums starvin’ to death,
’cause it was a real partnership and we was
together, damn it. You got what you want now, but this is
my chance to break out without losin’ what we
already got.”
“You really think this thing has a chance? That
you do?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I only know
that we been lucky for two born losers. Every time one of us sunk,
somethin’ happened in the nick of time to save us and make
things better. You remember what we found out. There’s
hundreds of us out there, someplace, but none of us are
havin’ this talk now but you and me. I’m the only
Brandy that married you. I’m the only one that didn’t
wind up some whore or junkie or dead. Just you and me gettin’
together at the right time, and hittin’ it off, or Little
Jimmy showin’ up and offerin’ us that case, or
gettin’ stuck in a siding world that just happened to be
between one world and another so the Labyrinth opened up and we saw
and heard it and got out. What’s the word? Implausible.
Unbelievable. All of it. Everybody’s got all sorts of shit in
their lives that changed them for better or worse and they’re
all implausible, impossible, unbelievable. That’s what this
whole parallel worlds thing is about. I’m the one so
far who done everything right. The only
one.”
He stared at me. “But those things just happened, one at a
time. This is different. This is a clear choice of very high risk
and for you alone. The other times, it was both of us.”
“Well, you sure as hell can’t get in the way
I can, and probably not any other way, neither. I
wouldn’t risk my toenail for the damned Company and
to hell with any threats, real or not, but this is a big score,
Sam. Look, say we get outta here and I get hit by a car out front.
What you got?”
“Ten grand from Home Beneficial Life Insurance. Okay, but
the odds against that are a lot better than the odds here, and you
wouldn’t jump in front of the car.”
“Maybe not. Know what I done while you was off in
Pittsburgh? Went down and scored some high grade pot and sat around
that apartment starin’ at the walls and keepin’ high as
a kite and eatin’ a ton of chocolate candy and I was
still depressed. Now gimme that million and we hire on
’nuff people to take the caseload and we get us a big, fancy
house way up the Main Line with lots of room ’n trees
’n luxury, and we get some kids and we enjoy life a little.
Maybe I even set up my own business.”
He looked at me hard. “Things really that bad for you? I
knew you had some problems, but I never had any idea it was this
bad. I guess I just wasn’t looking at the flip side. Damn it,
I’ll quit the business. We’ll move somewhere with
whatever we’ve got and start a security business or something
far away from here and G.O.D., Inc. I mean that.”
“I know you do. Hey—you think I like this
shit? I mean, gettin’ killed, that’s always a risk when
you’re after a real bad dude, but what you said, ’bout
bein’ beat or raped or have my brain
scrambled—that’s scary. But if I can do it, if
I can really do it, really pull it off, then I ain’t never
gonna doubt myself again.” I stopped a moment.
“Besides, anytime before they put me under I have real
doubts, really think that there’s no way this can be pulled
off, I’ll pull out. And I want you there to make sure they
listen. Hear?”
He sighed. “Okay. It’s not that I don’t trust
and have full confidence in you, babe—it’s just that I
don’t trust or have any confidence in them.
And I’ll be there—all the way through, just to make
sure they hold up all the ends of their bargain, and Bill’s
gonna be there as well. He’s gonna pay if it goes wrong
because of his end.”
Sam went out and found Markham and brought him back in.
“We made a decision, and it’s firm,” I told
him. “Five million, same terms.”
I was afraid Bill was gonna choke. “You have to
be kidding!” he managed.
“It’s chicken feed to the company if this is really
that important, and if it ain’t, then I ain’t gonna do
it.”
I never saw a white guy turn red before, but he finally got hold
of himself. “All right. By shifting some here and some there
I can come up with it. Five million. But not as before. Two and a
half now and free and clear, come what may. The other half only
when a live Vogel is turned over to my security agents.”
“Done,” I told him. “And both Sam and you are
along on the scene from the word go. That’s the other
part.”
He looked puzzled. “I figured Sam would want in on the
action, but why me?”
Sam looked up at him and gave a really evil grin. “So if
your people act with the incompetence and unreliability that
they’ve shown in the past and because of it anything happens
to Brandy, I won’t have to go far to wring your fucking
neck.”
Sam seemed as happy to see me as I was to see
him, but he looked real tired and not up to keeping on the go the
rest of the night. He wasn’t at all happy to hear about our
appointment with Markham, not just ’cause he didn’t
feel like doin’ anything much but also ’cause he felt
it had to be bad news.
We quickly got his stuff in the car and I drove him into town.
He’s not too thrilled about the way I drive, so if he let me
he was real tired.
“He didn’t say what it was about?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Only that it was me he wanted.
You’re just there ’cause he knows I won’t do it
if you say no.”
He sighed. “Yeah, that bothers me, too. I don’t like
this, babe, not one bit. If this is anything like the mess we had
last time it might be real bad. We can’t always luck out of
these things.”
“I been thinkin’ the same thing. Look, Sam, do we
have to take it? I mean, I’d kinda like to see some of them
other worlds sometime, I admit, when we know what they are and what
the hell is goin’ on, but gettin’ back into that shit
they get themselves into—that’s somethin’
else.”
“Well, we have to go to the meeting, anyway,” he
replied. “Look, we gotta face facts. We’re doing real
good right now. Real good. And the whole business is growing. Thing
is, though, it’s doing good and growing only because the big
boys have us on the approved list. One word from good old Godawful,
Incorporated and we’re back in Camden fighting roaches if
we’re lucky. You remember The Godfather?”
“Sure. Saw it three times.”
“Well, that’s what it’s all about. We did them
a favor, mostly by accident, and they offered a favor back.”
He went into his Brando impression. Sam was great for impressions.
“Someday, and that time may never come, you might be
asked to do a small service for me in return. Well, this time
G.O.D. is Godfather, Inc. We been called.”
“I think that considerin’ what all we done for them,
we’re even.”
“So do I, but all that does is mean we’ll get to
live our natural lives out. Once you take, you get taken.
There’s no such thing as a little graft. Still, I
don’t feel any obligation to get my head blown off for them,
and even less obligation to let them get your head blown
off. They set us up, but Spade and Marlowe isn’t a subsidiary
of G.O.D., Inc., although, Lord knows, everything else seems to be.
We been down before, we can be down again. I love this now, yeah,
but I love you and life more.”
I woulda kissed him for that if I could keep from crashin’
the car, ’cause he meant it. Still, I’d been
doin’ some figurin’ of my own.
“Look, Sam—suppose it is a big risk? You
know I been feelin’ kinda trapped, and even though
we’re livin’ good, we ain’t got no reserve and if
we have to make the agency bigger we’ll have ta put most of
our money there for a while. Ain’t neither of us
gettin’ no younger, so this might be a chance for a score.
We’ll hear the man out, but I promise that if we both
don’t go for it then I won’t go it alone.
Fair?”
“Fair,” he agreed.
Bill Markham was one of them tall, good-lookin’,
sandy-haired guys who usually is the sales director of some company
on the way up or maybe some jock sellin’ running shoes on TV.
I knew he was older’n me, maybe closer to Sam’s age,
but he looked real young and he talked real smooth.
Knowin’ Sam was tired and we both was curious, though, he got
straight to the point. There was just us in his office, door
locked, everything off. Real private.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a little box, and put his
thumb on a small square just about big enough for it. The box
opened, and he took out a small opaque cube about the size of a
thumbnail. It looked like cheap polished plastic, and ’cept
for a brown circle on the bottom there was nothin’ to mark
it.
“This is what’s known as a parium capsule. I
don’t know where the name comes from, but they all look
pretty much like this except for the color and sometimes the size.
Basically, it’s a needle—a substance is sealed inside
in some kind of suspension when it’s made, then you put it
where you want to inject it on bare skin, with this little circle
down flat against the skin, and press real hard. Anything inside is
injected directly into the bloodstream. It even has a little bit of
logic, so if it needs to find an artery it’ll do it. No
needle marks, no pain, no infection, not even much sensation except
a little suction feeling when it fires. Then you toss it away. The
Company’s field medics and others with a need for it have
them around. They’re small, stackable, easy to store, and you
can have a whole pharmacy in a shoe box. This one’s used, so
feel free to take a look at it, but don’t touch the little
spot.”
We both looked, but neither of us felt like handlin’ it.
You didn’t know what had been inside, and none of them
gadgets get a hundred percent out; leastwise, none I ever knew.
“The machine for loading them is small and very portable
and has its own internal power. It’s a highly restricted
device, but as with all highly restricted devices it’s not
impossible to get one or many if you really want them and you have
Company or home world contacts.”
Home world. That was the world that was supposed to be some
kinda paradise off what it ripped off of all the other worlds. They
didn’t invent nothin’, but what he was showin’ us
wasn’t of this world for sure.
“It’s real handy. You can take something—a
drug, for instance—and transport it almost any way you like
in bulk, then just load it into the little machine, load a bunch of
these in as well, and press start. At the other end, the little
capsules come out filled with whatever dosage you put in as the
load, all precise, stacked and arranged like sugar cubes. These
things themselves are tricky to perfect, but once you have the mold
in silicon anybody can turn them out.”
“I never liked shots much, but so what?” Sam asked.
“It’s not too far off what might be around here in a
few years.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Think about what this might do in, say,
the heroin racket, or freebase, or anything like that. Measured
doses, different strengths, all safe, and everybody gets their own
fresh needle every day so there’s no chance of infection or
contamination.”
“I’d make a guess they already have,” I put
in. “Otherwise, why tell us about it?”
He shrugged. “They haven’t come in here, anyway.
There was a move to get them into the narcotics trade here simply
as a safety measure, something we could do, but that talk’s
all but died out now. But elsewhere, we’re facing something
new, something even the opposition is a little nervous
about.”
The opposition. That meant any folks in the Company or
workin’ for it or on the home world who didn’t like
things the way they was and wanted changes, by fair means or not.
Control of the whole multi-universe business was really in the
hands of just a very few people, nameless and faceless to us, who
were called the Board of Directors, and from what they told us this
Board was basically one big family. It was kinda like a kingdom,
with the same few families holdin’ all the top jobs and top
power, and that always left other folks unhappy. Anytime you had
this much power in so few hands you was bound to have a lot of
lower-downs after your hide. That was one reason why gettin’
in to the home world was so hard and so restricted, and why them
Directors never left.
“A drug?” I prompted him.
“Yeah. A drug and more than just a drug. You two have been
around. You know what the usual drugs will do. There’s a fair
number of addicts who couldn’t get off if they wanted to, and
if they need a fix bad enough they’ll kill their own
grandmother.”
We both nodded. We knew that all too well.
“There’s a new drug. At least we call it a drug,
although it doesn’t act like any drug anybody has ever seen.
It acts a little like it’s alive, although if you saw it
under a microscope you couldn’t believe it could be. It looks
almost like water, maybe just a touch brownish, and if it is
injected anywhere into a Type Zero human it heads straight for the
brain, checks it out, takes over, then moves in and starts doing
its thing. It actually manufactures duplicates of enzymes in your
brain and then replaces your natural enzymes with its duplicates.
The duplicates are of the same sort, but not exactly. They’re
purer, actually more efficient. When they first take over control,
whatever those enzymes control gets a pure jolt of what it likes
and so do you. There are pleasure centers in the brain. When
stimulated, the body sticks in these enzymes and you feel pleasure.
In this case, the pleasure would be prolonged and
absolute.”
“That’s a fairly simplified description of the way
drugs like heroin work, Bill,” Sam noted. I got to admit I
got a little lost with all them enzymes but I figured the
result.
“That’s true, but that’s because the plant
enzymes, highly refined, are injected directly. In this case, the
process is indirect. We have a controller, almost a control center,
that uses the body’s own materials to make what it needs, but
it controls things. With heroin, rejection sets in, the
plant substances or chemicals are expelled, and it’s kind of
like an engine suddenly losing its oil. Unlike the engine, your
body will eventually replace and start making those chemicals
again, leaving only the memory of the stimuli, but between the time
the enzymes or chemicals are expelled and the time the body needs
to replenish and regear it’s like running an engine with very
little oil. It gets very, very sick.”
That was the best way to explain withdrawal to a lay person I
ever heard.
“It does pass, though, without killing or doing
real harm to the body,” Sam pointed out. “You only
wish you’d die.”
“True. But a lot of what we do is based on pleasure-pain
stimuli. The memory of the rush, just how great you felt, remains,
and a fair number are inclined to get hooked again even if
they’re forced off. Now this stuff is different. It’s
more like a parasite. It spreads over your body, but doesn’t
duplicate itself to the extent of harming any part of it. It gets
what it needs from the body, and it’s pretty stable once
it’s complete, but it knows you. Don’t ask me how
that’s possible, but it does. If it gets into the brain it
sort of takes over. The body abruptly considers it natural and
normal. Your body’s defenses won’t fight it. It survives by
controlling that chemical balance, the blockers and the enzymes, in
your brain. If it needs sugars and starches for some reason,
it’ll stimulate its host to eat particular things. Ditto for
things rich in various minerals and whatever. It can suppress
urges, emotions, desires, or heighten them to near
compulsion.”
I got to admit I was gettin’ a real sick feelin’
inside. “You mean it takes over, makes the body a slave? It
thinks?”
“No. I doubt if anything like this ever could think as we
understand thought. And it just manages the body and stays where it
is and gets what it needs and it’s happy, leaving the host to
still be him or herself, subject to its requirements. There
actually are some microscopic life forms like this here on Earth,
but all in the lower animals and all known here so far in marine
organisms. We think this is a natural organism. We think that on
some world, somewhere, it was allowed to evolve so that it reached
a very high state and operated on the highest life forms, and on
land as well. You can’t just catch it, like a disease. A
specially organized cluster—still microscopic but
definite—must invade the new host. Its remote cousins here
reproduce by sex between two hosts—and it can compel its host
to have sex, and does. The trouble is, from its point of view, it
doesn’t work that way in Type Zeros, so we think this is from
a world quite different from ours.”
I didn’t remember much from our lessons on the Company,
but I remembered what he meant by Type Zero. That was the type that
the home world was—which also happened to be the type
we were, too. Just plain folks. The further away you got
from us, though, on both sides, the more real strong differences
came on. Humans developed in different places than here, or with
maybe different ancestors. Some of ’em was ugly as sin and
looked like folks from a bad horror movie, but they was still
basically human anyway. They just went to show how different we
could have turned out with just one little thing goin’
another way. Those they called Type One, and no matter how weird
they looked, they was all close enough to us that we could probably
have sex and produce somethin’ neither of us would really
like to claim. Sorta like you can breed a lion and a tiger, or a
cow and a buffalo; like that.
Type Twos came from different ancestors and weren’t close
enough to breed with us. At best they’d produce sterile
offspring—like mules—and mostly nothin’ at all.
Type Threes and beyond were so far off us that they might as well
be from Jupiter or somewheres for all we had in common. We
couldn’t even catch their colds.
Trouble was, there was millions of worlds side by side that was
only different in smaller things, then millions of Type Ones on
both sides of them, and so on. A lot more than the Company could
count, let alone know everything about.
“So we can catch it but we can’t give it,” I
said. “That’s somethin’.”
“Yeah. It means real addiction. We think it’s a Type
One organism, but we haven’t been able to locate where it
came from and considering the number and range it might take years,
even decades, if all resources were put on doing just that.
It’s a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. On our own,
we’ll find this one only by the kind of luck you have hitting
the lottery. Now it does a nice, neat job inside of us, but
we’re not what it evolved in and it runs into problems.
Something in our air, or our body chemistry, or whatever gets to it
after a while. It begins to slow down, then break down. The only
thing that can restore it is a fresh module of itself. What it does
inside the body is very complicated; suddenly it can’t handle
the task. It starts cutting back. It starts to die and it tells you
about it by hitting the pain centers. It also becomes a massive
infection in the brain, fighting off all comers and struggling to
survive one more minute. The withdrawal becomes the ultimate
agony—and the host dies before the parasite does.”
Sam was kinda disturbingly clinical, but, then, he’d been
a vice squad man. “How long before this breakdown?”
“About thirty hours, give or take with the individual.
Never less than twenty-four and never more than forty as near as we
can tell. Our samples have been very limited, our information
mostly second-hand or eavesdrop or observations by people not
trained in this sort of thing. Withdrawal takes another six to
eight hours of increasing agony before you pass out and the heart
stops. Brain tissue disruption or destruction begins shortly after
the pain button is pressed, though, and accelerates from there. We
think that’s what kills, eventually. The autonomic nervous
system—heart, breathing, whatever—is disrupted. Let it
go too long and a fresh infusion will get the body going again but
it won’t repair whatever brain damage you get. The effects
are wide ranging and inconsistent from individual to individual.
There could be memory loss, or some sensory loss—vision,
hearing, taste, smell—or some motor function problems or
intelligence, talents, abilities—you name it. But
pain’s the last to go.”
I listened, not understandin’ all the biology shit but
understandin’ the effects on the people good enough.
“Bill—how do you know this?” I asked him.
“The only way you could know this is if it was done on
people.”
“It was,” he said softly. “But not by us. This
isn’t something we’d ever fool with.
It’s too scary.”
“Can you kill it?” Sam asked. “Without killing
the addict, I mean?”
“Sure. You can kill anything. If we had enough cases, we
could easily isolate whatever starts breaking it down. Without
tipping off the opposition and letting them know we’re on to
them, we just don’t know for sure if we could cure it or not
and if so what the price would be. We got hold of some raw samples,
strictly by accident, and ran them through every test and every
expert and computer the home world has. We have been unable to make
it grow in the lab, and it ignores test animals, even chimps. The
only way it’ll reproduce is inside a human, and since the
reproductive clusters humans produce lack something it needs and
can’t get, they aren’t any good, either.”
With that kind of setup, Bill Markham then let us have the whole
load.
I got to admit I don’t understand the Labyrinth, and I
ain’t sure nobody really does. I sure can’t figure out
how them early scientists guessed it was there, let alone built
this network, this inter-world railroad. I been in it a few times,
but I still can’t figure what’s happenin’ in
there. It’s like a real long tunnel, stretchin’ out in
all directions, only you’re inside a cube with windows.
Windows up top, windows beneath, and on all sides ’cept the
ones that keep you in the Labyrinth. That means you always got a
choice of four worlds to exit to. Every once in a while,
there’s a switch junction, with a control room and Labyrinth
in all directions. That switcher punches his buttons and you go
which way he decides, into a whole set of new cubes in all
directions until you get to other switch points.
Sam and me we went to a bunch of ’em, and we always
walked, but there’s enough room in there to drive a truck
through—if you could figure out how to make a truck go up or
down instead of just forward, back, left, and right. Of course, it
probably ain’t left or up in there; none of the usual rules
mean much inside there, ’cause you’re outside
everyplace else. They must have some kinda trucks or flyin’
saucers or whatever they use, though, ’cause they move
trainloads of shit through that thing.
Three guilds, which I guess are sorta like unions or
somethin’, run the thing. One controls the switch points, one
runs the stations, and a third moves the cargo through from one
point to another. Ain’t no way the biggest, baddest computer
in creation could look at all that stuff all the time, though, so
security mostly monitors the switches ’cause just about
everybody and everything has to pass at least one of ’em.
The first way they check is that everybody who has any real
business in there’s got some kind of code thing in your
bones. Fact is, there might be a whole hell of a lot of Brandys,
even with the same fingerprints and eyes and all that, but they
ain’t the same person no matter how alike they are. I got a
code planted somewhere inside my bones—don’t ask me how
or where. They stuck me in a thing like an iron lung, punched a
bunch of buttons, I didn’t feel nothin’, and that was
it. But now any switchman can look at his or her board as soon as
I’m inside that cube and read out not only who I am but
which I am. The code’s big, random, and total
nonsense. It’s all in computers, of course, but they tell me
that even if you got into the computer you couldn’t find the
numbers.
If you don’t have no number, and you look suspicious, they
shoot you off to some siding, someplace on a world where people
just never came about, and you sit there till they’re ready
for you, if they ever are. We had that happen. If you don’t
have no coding but you sound like you know what you’re
doin’, you can sometimes bluff ’em with a
convincin’ destination, but they can send messages at about
the same speed as they can send you, and they call security on both
ends. At least, you could, ’cause we did it, but I’m
told they tightened that up now. No code, and you get dumped no
matter what.
They tightened up a lot of other shit when we breezed through
their system. Now before you go in you got to file a destination
and any stops with the stationmaster who sends it to the security
computer, and you’re checked as you go along. Guess they were
kinda sloppy and cocksure of themselves till we screwed
’em.
Still, somebody first found the world with this drug disease
thingie, whatever it was, then figured out how to bottle or can it
or whatever and brought it down the line to the Type Zero—our
type—area. There ain’t a lot of switches up in Type One
and Two territory, and lots of unexplored worlds in between them,
so it was possible that somebody could be goin’ from one
legit point to another and stop off just long enough to pick up the
goods.
That meant there had to be somebody who knew just what they was
doin’ in the world where this shit came from, then somebody
who could get messages back and forth without security
knowin’ to set up the deal and the pickups, then somebody in
the transport guild to actually pick up and carry the stuff,
disguised as part of legitimate cargo, and drop it off at
its destination, where other big plotters would make use of it.
Pretty complicated stuff.
The Company didn’t know who discovered it, or how, and how
they managed to both figure out what they had and keep it quiet,
even settin’ up this scheme. They didn’t know how long
it had taken to set up. They did know that it was well
organized and involved some real bigwigs someplace and lots of
corruption, but that was it. They just bumped into it, when they
had an accident or something in one of the cargo haulers or
whatever that they use and found it strictly by luck. They
didn’t let on they knew, and it seemed like the transport
guild worker was innocent. They’d already switched it and he
was now on a legit run. They put a tracer on it to see who’d
pick it up, and somebody did.
“Rupert Conrad Vogel,” Bill said, showin’ us a
photo of a guy who looked like a fugitive from a cheap World War II
movie. “He’s a stationmaster, which means
administration and a Company man, or so we thought. He got the
shipment, took a lot of it, then sent some back disguised as
something else, again looking very routine. The pickup courier was
legitimate, but he encountered another courier along his route and
somehow that second courier got the package and dropped it
clandestinely at a world where we didn’t have a station but
did know. We picked this courier up, stuck him in a hypnoscan, then
erased any memories he had of being picked up and discovered and
let him continue. He didn’t know much. He just got some nice
little extras all in things he and his family could enjoy but we
wouldn’t particularly notice, and for that he got a message
slip passed into his pocket now and then that a shipment—he
didn’t even know what it was, nor cared—would be with
so-and-so as unlisted or misaddressed cargo. He’d meet the
other courier, either get the parcel or note that it was wrong and
offer to take it back to headquarters for resorting, then drop it
when his route took him near this other world. That was
it.”
“You dead sure this ain’t just the tip of the
iceberg?” I asked him.
“Pretty sure. Their supply is limited. There’s no
clear routine as to when the shipments come, but that’s
probably just to disguise their origins. Vogel’s their
dispatcher. He gets it, he holds on to it, and then he sends it out
in measured amounts. As far as we can tell, he’s handling the
real experimentation himself, and very effectively and ruthlessly.
He’s well placed to be able to do so, as you’ll see in
a minute.”
“And the other place?” Sam asked.
“A world not too far from this one and very similar in a
lot of ways. They’re getting only about three thousand doses
every twenty to thirty days, so there’s only enough to
sustain maybe a hundred people. They appear to be going to a local
organized crime underboss who’s never had any known
connection with us and shouldn’t even know about the
Labyrinth. He, in turn, has one man supervising it and they seem to
be using it in a very low-level way, to maintain a group of young
women as prostitutes. This thing’s ready-made for that on a
petty level—I mean, this thing compels you to have
sex a lot. We don’t know what connection they have to Vogel,
or why they were picked, or why they’re being allowed to use
something like this for such a petty and ordinary thing. Company
people don’t go there, except our wayward courier, of course,
and we’ve had a monitor on that gate ever since and nobody
but that courier ever approached. We sent in a small team of
agents, and they couldn’t find anything odd, either.
There’s a connection there, but we can’t find
it.”
“But they know about the Labyrinth,” Sam noted.
“Yeah, they do—but not many,” Bill replied.
“The big boss has had a lodge up near the central
Pennsylvania weak point for years, and this place happens to be one
of those on the way from here to there that’s weak enough
that when we open that Labyrinth route it can be accessed without a
station—like the dead end you two were shoved into that
time.”
“Yeah, only here nobody jumps in but something gets tossed
out.”
“All we could find was that they were being paid off to do just
what they’re doing and ask no questions. There’s lots
of ways you can do it when you have a crime boss on the hook,
including checking close other worlds, getting inside information
he can use, and feeding it to him. You can feed him just enough,
wrapped around the parcel, to keep him quiet and on the
hook.”
“You mean,” I said, “that somebody just pops
up once and bribes this crime boss into this? We’ll pay you
if you find fifty or more girls and hook ’em on
this?”
“That’s about it. We don’t know why. Makes no
sense on its face, and except for the fact that most but not all of
the girls they hooked are relatively young, there’s no
connecting thread between them. None. There’s no reason to
think they know much. Just hired help, like the courier—but a
lot harder to snatch and interrogate. You see what kind of a bind
we’re in?”
We could see, too. “You can’t snatch any addicts for
information ’cause they’d be dead in two days,” I
noted. “You can’t take out the courier without
killin’ all them girls and lettin’ whoever’s
doin’ this know you’re on to ’em. Ain’t
nobody in this chain that knows anything worth knowin’
’cept this guy Vogel.”
“Yeah. Vogel. He knows a lot, even if he doesn’t
know it all. He had to be directly contacted if only to corrupt
him. He had to be sold on becoming a traitor, which is much harder
considering the risks. He’s got one hell of a racket where he
is that fits his peculiarities to a T, and he’s got a
reliable reputation. He’d have to be offered something really
big to switch. He also knows exactly what he’s got because
he’s in charge of the experimentation, and as a stationmaster
he’s well positioned to move people and goods when he
wants.”
“Why not just take him out, then?” Sam asked.
“Get him out of there on a pretext, fry his brain, and then
take what results he has as well?”
Bill Markham sighed. “I wish it were that easy, Sam, but
it’s not. This is a class A operation all the way.
They’re very good, whoever they are. Vogel will spook and run
at the first suspicion, and probably has people there working for
him even he doesn’t know about whose only job is to
take him out if he gets nabbed or exposed. The labs, the whole
place he’s got, are wired for one hell of a big explosion
should anything go wrong, and we don’t even know who might
trigger it or how. We could kill him, of course, anytime, but that
only buys us time until they can set up another site like his that
we don’t know about. We’ve tried tricking him out, but
he’s always come up with a plausible excuse not to leave. If
we press too hard, he’ll blow that joint and split to a safe
line.”
Bill sat back in his chair and sighed. “You see,” he
continued, “he’s our only real lead and he’s
eggshells. He’s no good to us dead. And we have to
know what the hell is going on. We don’t know what this stuff
is, where it comes from, who’s bringing it in and how, and,
worst of all, we don’t know what they plan to do with it. We
have a lot of pieces, very few real live suspects, and none of them
fit. Why go to all this risk? What’s it all about? All we
know is that clearly they can’t synthesize it, either, so
they’re pretty limited, and that means they have a very
specific plot in mind—but what? Something big, real big, or
they wouldn’t take all these risks. Very big people are
involved just to do what they’ve done. Who are they? How did
they manage it? What are they planning? You see?”
I did see. Bill had one hell of a problem on his hands.
“But, Bill—you got agents, all that technology, all
that power. Surely you can do a snatch-and-grab with this
guy,” I said.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The trouble is,
this guy’s stationmaster and he’s smart. He
wouldn’t have turned traitor without taking that into
consideration. He knew what he was up against, and who. Cranston
was a stationmaster, too, you remember, and he’d even set up
a resort on a weak point with a Labyrinth substation in his
basement, and he came damned close to getting away.”
We remembered. We had to chase the bastard through the Labyrinth
and he still almost killed us.
Markham slipped some switches and the room went dark and a panel
came down in back of his desk. Another button, and some slides
appeared on the back, the first of a really enormous
mansion that looked like a cross between a fancy home in the
country and Fort Apache.
“Looks like a federal penitentiary with a nice house in
the middle,” Sam noted. “Are those machine gun towers
on that outer wall?”
“They are, and you have three rows of fence before you
even get to the wall. The distance between the first two
fences is wide enough for men with nasty dogs to go through, which
they do, and there are sensors on the fences for any kind of
disturbance. Even a rabbit brings the dogs running. The third fence
line is electrified with enough juice to fry anybody. Then
there’s the wall, which has both machine gun coverage and is
thick enough for riflemen to stand between the towers. A hundred
and eighty-six guys held a far less secure wall against five
thousand infantry for twelve days at the Alamo.”
“But they eventually lost,” Sam pointed out.
“Yeah, they lost—but you could hold this place for a
while, anyway. Long enough to realize you were going to be overrun,
burn the papers, get out of there and blow the whole complex. The
entire estate is honeycombed with tunnels packed with explosives
that would leave a crater half a mile wide.”
“There’s gates front and back,” I noted.
“Not much better. Built like Sam’s prison.
Reinforced metal and concrete and heavily defended so that any
assault on the gates would have to be over open ground. We could
use a small missile to blow them, but we’d never get enough
people inside without tremendous losses and, of course, enough time
to blow the place.”
“Air drop?” Sam suggested.
“Again, possible, but he’s got radar and air
defenses that could pick up a pigeon at half a mile. A small force
could get in, we think, but it would be hamstrung. It’d have
to move to get him, and to do that it would have to pass a
spider’s web of television monitors wired to a central
security control in the basement of the place. We can get them in,
but we can’t get to him and take him out without discovery no
matter how hard we figure it.”
“Bill—if he don’t know you know he’s
gone bad, why this fort?” I wondered. “I mean, this
ain’t what the average station has.”
“You’re right, of course. That’s the station
there, to the back and left of the main house. Maybe fifty yards.
The other outbuildings are quarters for the guards and supply
houses and—other things. The reason it is the way it is is
basically because Vogel lives in a world where that kind of thing
is necessary for the health of somebody in his position. In fact,
we helped set up some of the defenses initially to protect the
station, and we figure he’s made a lot of changes since then
to protect against us as well.”
In the world of Rupert Vogel, it seemed, we lost World War II. I
ain’t too clear on the history, neither, but it goes
somethin’ like this: the Germans didn’t get bogged down
in Russia because they attacked in the spring and won before winter
set in, finally gettin’ the Japs to attack Siberia and put
the squeeze on. Then they turned back to England and with so many
men and airplanes they finally wiped out the air defenses and
invaded. We, on the other hand, spent almost all our time
goin’ against Japan. We mighta done somethin’, too, but
the Germans got their missiles goin’ and managed to use the
time to perfect the A-bomb ahead of us. We got it about the same
time they did, but they had the way to deliver it, off ships and
from friendly places in South America or somethin’. They
nuked Norfolk and San Diego and places like that and that was the
end of it.
Not that it weren’t real messy and bloody when they came
in, but we never had to face this kind of army before, one that
didn’t care who it killed or what it had to do. Everybody got
IDs and papers, and couldn’t sneeze without bein’
checked. Then folks got classified, kinda South Africa style. The
Jews all got shipped to camps in Georgia and Nevada and it was
pretty clear what happened to them there. The folks with good
German or Italian or even English names and backgrounds, they got
the best treatment if they was cooperative, and lots were. We was
beat good. These folks got to be the managers and bosses if they
wasn’t already. Then the rest of the Europeans, they got a
second-class thing and they did the work in the factories, mines,
you name it. All the Orientals got shipped to Japan or China or
someplace.
That left the ten percent who was black, and there was a lot
more of us than there were Jews or Orientals. They put us in the
camps like the rest, and millions died, but they also used us. It
was like they turned the clock back a hundred years. We became the
lab animals for their experiments and medical stuff, others were
trained as personal servants—slaves, really—to the big
boys, and some of ’em, the big Nazi lords, even kept us like
pets and bred us. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach, and
Sam wasn’t lookin’ none too good, neither. He sure
wouldn’t survive in this new world, and his parents woulda
been gassed. Thing was, a Bill Markham woulda come put pretty good
unless he was one of them patriotic principled types. With his
name, looks, and background he would probably be headin’ up a
storm trooper division at least.
“The Nazi-style culture is based on conflict, competition,
and combat,” he was sayin’. “They’ve had a
lot of tension with the Japanese over the years but no real wars
with them mostly because they just don’t have enough people
to manage all the lands they have now. Eventually they’ll go
to war for the rest of the world, but there is just no way the
Germans and all those whom they’ve conscripted can both hold
their control and expand. Taking over a continent and population
this size was almost more than they could chew. When that kind of
thing happens to people like these, they start going at each
other’s throats. Tiny putsches, minor coups, knocking off the
local statenfuehrer and his boys and replacing them with a
new lot just as bad or worse. The Reich allows it, since it bleeds
off steam and there’s a feeling that anybody who’s
sloppy enough to get knocked off or overthrown deserved
it—the strong replacing the weak. How much power and strength
you have is the sole measure of importance there after racial
background, and they can get pretty hazy on that if they need
people.”
“So he’s trapped inside his own fortress, afraid of
his own people,” Sam noted. “Some paradise.”
“It’s not as bad as all that. Probably no worse than
guarding the President here against nuts. But when he’s at
home and in control, he wants to make sure that nothing happens to
him and his, and, of course, we couldn’t allow a station to
fall into the hands of somebody we didn’t control.
That’s why we went along with the mining and explosives part.
As usual, our people set ourselves up as the standard. If we
can’t crack it, then it’s safe, and we did a good job
here. Trouble is, we never allowed for having to crack it
ourselves. We can blow him and the Labyrinth station to hell, of
course, but that won’t get us anywhere. We need Vogel
alive. He knows the results of the experiments. He knows the
plot, at least the outlines of it. He might know just about all of
it.”
“You’re sure he’s not the ringleader?” I
asked him.
“No, he can’t be. He’s never had any
experience outside Type Zero lines, and he hasn’t been
involved with anybody who has. He’s also a field man; he
works stations, not the Labyrinth. He wouldn’t have the
knowledge or ability to set this off, although he’s an
important man in making it work.”
“You think this is actually the competition, or is it
maybe either an attempt by some Type One culture to take over down
here?” Sam asked him. “Or, could it be some internal
plot among the bigwigs of the company for control?” The
‘competition’ is what Company types liked to call
anybody not workin’ in their best interests.
Markham shrugged. “Who knows? Whoever this is is certainly
in league with the competition. Vogel may know. That’s why we
need him so badly.”
I shifted in my chair. “Look, Bill, I see this puzzle of
yours and it’s kinda interestin’, but what’s it
hav’ta do with us?”
“I was getting to that. I’ve described to you how
it’s impossible to make an unobserved entry to Vogel’s
lair. Even inside the manor house, there’s TV cameras, hidden
monitors, you name it, and security all over the place. There’s only one place where the snatch could be put on
Vogel, and that’s a medium-sized room that’s dead
center of the second floor of the house. It’s called the Safe
Room, and its double-insulated, soundproofed, and unmonitored.
It’s entered, if you can believe this, through Vogel’s
private bathroom, and the door itself can be locked and secured
from the inside. You could live through a bomb blast in there, and
you could also not hear a full-scale invasion. It’s his
retreat—the one place in there where he feels totally safe.
It’s reinforced top and bottom as well, and is as secure as a
bank vault. He spends a lot of time in there. We built it that way
because the records and codes for the Company and Labyrinth that
are the sole privy of the stationmaster must be kept somewhere safe
and it was the easiest and safest point at which we could modify
the place and install such a thing without ripping the old building
down.”
“Yeah, but so what?” Sam said a little cynically.
“Even if you had some way of getting somebody in there with
him, somebody who could take Vogel—and I’m not sure you
can—then what? You can’t get him out. I’m sure
the place has no windows. So, anybody would have to take the leader
out the only door, and all he’d need to do was give some
signal, some indication, and you were dead.”
“Give us some credit. We weren’t going to build a
place like that where the stationmaster, in a crisis,
couldn’t get put before it all blew. There’s another
door—an exit only, in the floor. Not even Vogel can use it to
get in—it’s booby-trapped and designed to jam and trap
somebody inside who tried it. One way only. An emergency exit. It
leads down through the walls to the basement area, then into a
tunnel that runs out back of the house and all the way to the
station, coming up here, near the control room stairway. The final
defense is very simple, really—a bunch of rods that support a
particular part of the tunnel ceiling. Even try opening or blowing
your way through from the station end and the rods
collapse—and so does half the tunnel. From inside, though,
you only have to throw a few levers to move the rods to a safety
position, allowing the door to open. When it closes again, the rods
slip back into place. One way only, as I said.”
This was suddenly gettin’ interestin’, although I
still wasn’t too sure I liked where it was goin’.
“What we propose is this,” Markham went on.
“Two separate actions both timed to the second. One is a
diversionary attack on the wall from outside. That’ll draw
security’s attention and most of the security personnel. At
the same time, our team will use a command force from the Labyrinth
to enter the station even if it’s not operating. With the
gate open, we can tap whatever power and forces we need.
We’ll be in our element. We could hold that place for an
incredible length of time, even against direct bomb hits and
worse.”
“How long?” Sam pressed. “If you need a
diversion it means they’ll know they’ve been had even
if they can’t get to you. How long can you hold it before
you’ll have to withdraw or risk being blown up?”
“I doubt if they’ll blow up the whole complex with
an external attack jeopardizing their escape routes, but we figure
thirty, maybe forty minutes tops.”
“Uh huh. And what about Vogel? He’s not going to
know there even is an attack if he’s as isolated as
you say, but if he does learn it, he’s also going to know
that it’s the Company because they have the station and
he’s not going to exit that way. He’ll hotfoot it out
of there a different way and make for a hidden substation just like
Cranston did.”
“No, it won’t be as easy for Vogel as it was for
Cranston, who built one of his houses over a weak point and
assembled a substation there. This isn’t Oregon, it’s
Pennsylvania—central Pennsylvania. The nearest weak point he
could make for that would be accessible to him would be hundreds of
miles away at either a point near Asheville, North Carolina, or
even further away up in Newfoundland. Des Moines is too small, and
too well covered inside. You’re right, though. He’d try
and get out overland to one of those points somehow if he knew the
station was taken, but he won’t know. We egged on and
supported an overambitious major—I think his name was
Ryland—to move against Vogel, and we studied the drill. If
they’re attacked and Vogel isn’t in the Safe Room, he
goes there immediately. If he’s in there, he stays there, and
gets sent a blinking light alarm. Then he can plug in a phone that
connects through a direct wire to security in the basement and get
the details and decide on a course of action from almost complete
safety.”
“Neat,” I said. “This Ryland—I guess he
didn’t make it.”
“His people got a pretty fair way, but they eventually
were killed or captured. Vogel had the captured ones hung up alive
on hooks suspended from the outer wall and left there until they
died. He left the bodies to rot as an object lesson. Ryland tried
to get away in a helicopter and they shot it down with a
surface-to-air missile.”
“Nice guy you got there,” I said sourly. “No
wonder he went bad.”
“Uh uh. It is a wonder he went bad, and part of
the puzzle. It takes an ugly, brutish, but smart man to survive and
hold on to power in that kind of society. He was carefully picked
because our Vogel was so much like their Vogel,
all the way through, only our Vogel was stuck as a
low-level administrator. Thing is, he’s exactly right for
that kind of role in that kind of world and he has everything he
ever dreamed of. If he finally was tired of the price in lack of
privacy and whatever that the position demanded, he could always
have asked to be replaced as stationmaster and retired to a world
that still fit him. Now, he’s forbidden to ever be a member
of the Reich Council or Fuhrer—in spite of his German name
and lineage he was born in Pittsburgh, and you have to be a
native-born European German to get those kind of posts, or even get
into the position where you might get them. He might well become
Leader of the Western Reich someday, though, if he plays it right
and survives, so he has a lot to lose by crossing us. What could he
gain?”
“The only way you can pay that kinda dude is with power.
Real big power,” I pointed out. “What’s he care
’bout bein’ no new Hitler when he knows how many worlds
there are?”
Markham nodded. “And that means that this whole business
is real big, about as big as can be. They’re careful, really
patient, limiting their experiments, getting it right even if it
takes years.”
I thought a moment. “If they could hook whole worlds on
this shit, you’d have the ultimate power trip.”
“You would, but I doubt if that’s their intention.
We have—what? Four, maybe closing in on five billion people
just here alone, right? That’s four billion doses a day,
every day, forever. The distribution and supply alone would drive
you bananas. Somehow, though, it’s an attack against the
Company, probably near its heart to go through all this. Think of
men like Vogel, all of them, in total control of the technology,
the knowledge, and the Labyrinth itself. I don’t know what or
how, but I feel at in my bones. Something very dangerous is going
on here and Vogel’s the only key. We think we finally figured
one way to nab him.”
I looked over at Sam and he looked back at me, and I guess we
both thought at the same time, here it comes at last.
“Vogel is a man of heavy sexual needs, but he’s also
a total paranoid because he has to be to survive. He has a project,
a hobby, that’s highly offensive to anybody but something he
does anyway. It’s called schwartzenbrood, or
something like that. He acquires, trains, and even breeds black
women. He picks them according to rigid criteria, acquires them
only from other area gruppenfuehrers, and they alone are
his personal household staff. They prepare his meals, and test them
first, and they make his bed, dress him, even bathe him. He treats
them more like pets than people. When he gets new women, he always
spends some time with them in the Safe Room.”
I got that ugly twinge in the pit of my stomach. “You want
to slip me in as one of them? And take him in the Safe
Room and get him to the Labyrinth through the tunnel?” He
didn’t say nothin’, so I added, “You got
to be jokin’.”
“He’s arranged to purchase three women from a man
he’s done business with many times before down in southern
Virginia. He trusts this man as much as he trusts anyone, because
he’s got concrete evidence that the man is both a thief and a
traitor, which he is. This man’s under constant watch by the
secret police; he only lives from day to day at Vogel’s whim.
We, however, can pull a substitution there thanks to our own agents
and resources. Vogel’s men then pick them up and take them,
and you, to the manor. One of the girls is nearly a dead ringer for
you—not identical and probably not related, but so close that
it’s mostly a matter of switching fingerprint cards. You get
in, and he takes you to the Safe Room. We’ll be monitoring
you all the way thanks to a tracer we can put inside your body that
even Vogel’s best won’t discover.”
“He’d never buy it,” I told him. “Hell,
Bill, I’m kinda fat and without my glasses I couldn’t
see you behind your desk, there. I know I don’t talk
real good, but I sure as hell can’t keep up no Gone With
the Wind act for maybe days or weeks. If he’s as careful
as you say he’s gonna check anyways. And even if I got that
far, how am I gonna take him? He looks like a pretty big guy in
that picture there.”
“You forget our technology. When we snatched that courier
and interrogated him, we had to make him forget that he was ever
found out, let alone questioned, and do it so that even somebody
else with our technology couldn’t discover it. Otherwise, we
couldn’t have taken even that risk with him. You will be
absolutely authentic so that even drugs and hypnoscans will not
show you as anything other than what we want you to appear. Only
when you are actually in his rooms will everything suddenly come
back to you, clearly, completely, and thoroughly. At that point,
you’ll be able to switch the persona on and off as
needed or required—but, of course, you wouldn’t stand
hard interrogation from that point. We’ve done it before. We
also might be able to temporarily increase your vision by certain
techniques, at least for a week or two. Not twenty-twenty, but much
better than now. We don’t dare apply any sort of contact or
surgical correction, of course. Somebody there might notice. What
do you think?”
“I think it stinks,” Sam growled. “How big is
Vogel, anyway?”
“About six feet, maybe two hundred thirty
pounds.”
“You think he takes ’em in there to play house? How
does she get a weapon? Brandy’s pretty strong and she’s
okay in the chop-chop stuff, but you can’t depend on that in
this case.”
“We don’t intend to. We have capsules that will defy
a dentist’s examination and X-rays. We’ll put one or
two in, immunize her against the agents, and all she has to do is
kiss him and within two minutes or less he’ll be the most
cooperative, docile sort of fellow you ever want to meet. The
cruder, less certain methods would be strictly backup.”
“And I’d have like twenty minutes to lay this guy
low, then at most another half hour to get him through the tunnel
to you, right? That ain’t much of a margin when anything
might go wrong,” I noted. “What if he decides to stick
one of them little cubes on me? Or has somethin’ done to my
brain before he takes me up there? We got a lot of chances
for things to go wrong for good here, and only real short margins
for it all if it goes right. Maybe if them Nazis were
invadin’ here right now, and Sam and me are both candidates
for the gas chambers, then this would be worth the risk, but it
ain’t. I’m sorry ’bout this world, but
it ain’t my world and it’s gonna be just as
shitty with or without me or Vogel. It’s my life or at the
luckiest the rest of my life as a slave. My ancestors was slaves
once, but they sure as hell didn’t volunteer.”
Sam nodded. “She’s right, Bill. The puzzle’s a
good one, and I’d like to help solve it, but you’re
asking her to risk everything in a very slim chance of this in the
name of saving some company bigwigs from an eventual threat that,
if it affects us at all, probably won’t until we’re old
and gray. The last time they were working our city in
our world. I’m sorry for these people, but I just
can’t believe this kind of James Bond plan has a ghost of a
chance.”
Markham hardly blinked. “I’m authorized to offer one
million dollars cash, taxes paid, no strings, to take the case. All
money up front, win or lose.”
I got startled and just stared. A million bucks tax
free . . .
“What good’s the money to me, Bill?” Sam asked
him. “Damn it, Brandy’s worth more than that. If
she’s not here to spend it with me it’s sure as hell
not worth it.”
I really loved Sam for that, but Bill really got me in my greedy
part. A million bucks, cash, tax paid. ’Course, a million
ain’t what it used to be, but it’s pretty good. I was
beginnin’ to wonder just how possible this thing
was.
“I can’t pretend this is risk free,” Markham
kindly admitted, “but I can cover some of the bases. If
she’s in there more than five days we’ll come in, take
her out, and blow the joint and the hell with Vogel. Guaranteed. We
can also set what’s known as an anxiety threshold on the
tracer. We can get her pulse and blood pressure from it. If
she’s threatened with anything like surgery or this drug,
it’ll trigger her out of the persona and her pulse
rate and blood pressure will shoot sky high and then we go in and
get her right then and there and bye-bye Vogel. If we’re down
to ten minutes and holding the station and she doesn’t show,
we’ll blow through that place and force whoever’s in
that Safe Room to come out one way or the other. I don’t say
you can’t get hurt or killed, Brandy, but we’ll do
everything to keep it from happening, that I swear—and under
no circumstances will we strand you there.”
I looked over at Sam. “If it was you and not me, would you
seriously give it some thought? Honest, now, Sam!”
He sighed. “If it was me going in, I have to honestly say
I’d give it some thought, yes,” he admitted,
knowin’ he couldn’t fake that kind of stuff with me.
“But a million bucks is not worth losing you,
babe.”
I looked at Bill. “You wanta leave us alone for a couple
of minutes?”
Markham took the hint and left. I think he figured on it right
off. I don’t even think he was listenin’ in
someplace.
“I won’t let you risk it. Not alone!” Sam said
as soon as Bill was out of the room.
“We’re good, Sam. We proved that.”
“Yeah, we’re good. As a team. He was
painting the best damned picture of this cockeyed plot he could and
he still made it sound like a sure march to the guillotine. And
even if it worked, the odds are you’re gonna get beaten or
raped or all of the above. The only thing worse than losing you
would be having you come back looking the same but not there
inside. This is the kind of guy who trims your fingernails starting
at the knuckles when he needs a few laughs, and he’s
surrounded by hordes of like-minded individuals. We’re doing
good now.”
“Yeah, now,” I echoed. “But not if we say no
and you know it. We’re makin’ more now than we ever
dreamed we’d have, and we’re in hock up to our neck and
you’re workin’ twelve-hour days and I’m a kept
woman with nothin’ to do on her own and less and less to do
with the business. And don’t give me no bullshit about my
bein’ a vital part of the business. It ain’t true and
you know it. I was happier and felt more like a real, useful person
when we was in the damned slums starvin’ to death,
’cause it was a real partnership and we was
together, damn it. You got what you want now, but this is
my chance to break out without losin’ what we
already got.”
“You really think this thing has a chance? That
you do?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I only know
that we been lucky for two born losers. Every time one of us sunk,
somethin’ happened in the nick of time to save us and make
things better. You remember what we found out. There’s
hundreds of us out there, someplace, but none of us are
havin’ this talk now but you and me. I’m the only
Brandy that married you. I’m the only one that didn’t
wind up some whore or junkie or dead. Just you and me gettin’
together at the right time, and hittin’ it off, or Little
Jimmy showin’ up and offerin’ us that case, or
gettin’ stuck in a siding world that just happened to be
between one world and another so the Labyrinth opened up and we saw
and heard it and got out. What’s the word? Implausible.
Unbelievable. All of it. Everybody’s got all sorts of shit in
their lives that changed them for better or worse and they’re
all implausible, impossible, unbelievable. That’s what this
whole parallel worlds thing is about. I’m the one so
far who done everything right. The only
one.”
He stared at me. “But those things just happened, one at a
time. This is different. This is a clear choice of very high risk
and for you alone. The other times, it was both of us.”
“Well, you sure as hell can’t get in the way
I can, and probably not any other way, neither. I
wouldn’t risk my toenail for the damned Company and
to hell with any threats, real or not, but this is a big score,
Sam. Look, say we get outta here and I get hit by a car out front.
What you got?”
“Ten grand from Home Beneficial Life Insurance. Okay, but
the odds against that are a lot better than the odds here, and you
wouldn’t jump in front of the car.”
“Maybe not. Know what I done while you was off in
Pittsburgh? Went down and scored some high grade pot and sat around
that apartment starin’ at the walls and keepin’ high as
a kite and eatin’ a ton of chocolate candy and I was
still depressed. Now gimme that million and we hire on
’nuff people to take the caseload and we get us a big, fancy
house way up the Main Line with lots of room ’n trees
’n luxury, and we get some kids and we enjoy life a little.
Maybe I even set up my own business.”
He looked at me hard. “Things really that bad for you? I
knew you had some problems, but I never had any idea it was this
bad. I guess I just wasn’t looking at the flip side. Damn it,
I’ll quit the business. We’ll move somewhere with
whatever we’ve got and start a security business or something
far away from here and G.O.D., Inc. I mean that.”
“I know you do. Hey—you think I like this
shit? I mean, gettin’ killed, that’s always a risk when
you’re after a real bad dude, but what you said, ’bout
bein’ beat or raped or have my brain
scrambled—that’s scary. But if I can do it, if
I can really do it, really pull it off, then I ain’t never
gonna doubt myself again.” I stopped a moment.
“Besides, anytime before they put me under I have real
doubts, really think that there’s no way this can be pulled
off, I’ll pull out. And I want you there to make sure they
listen. Hear?”
He sighed. “Okay. It’s not that I don’t trust
and have full confidence in you, babe—it’s just that I
don’t trust or have any confidence in them.
And I’ll be there—all the way through, just to make
sure they hold up all the ends of their bargain, and Bill’s
gonna be there as well. He’s gonna pay if it goes wrong
because of his end.”
Sam went out and found Markham and brought him back in.
“We made a decision, and it’s firm,” I told
him. “Five million, same terms.”
I was afraid Bill was gonna choke. “You have to
be kidding!” he managed.
“It’s chicken feed to the company if this is really
that important, and if it ain’t, then I ain’t gonna do
it.”
I never saw a white guy turn red before, but he finally got hold
of himself. “All right. By shifting some here and some there
I can come up with it. Five million. But not as before. Two and a
half now and free and clear, come what may. The other half only
when a live Vogel is turned over to my security agents.”
“Done,” I told him. “And both Sam and you are
along on the scene from the word go. That’s the other
part.”
He looked puzzled. “I figured Sam would want in on the
action, but why me?”
Sam looked up at him and gave a really evil grin. “So if
your people act with the incompetence and unreliability that
they’ve shown in the past and because of it anything happens
to Brandy, I won’t have to go far to wring your fucking
neck.”