Emperor

of the last

Days

Ron GoularT

POPULAR LIBRARY « NEW YORK

Chapter 1

The man plummeted straight down past Dan Farleigh’s only window.

“Hey!” Dan had been chatting with his central computer. He only got a flashing impression of the silentiy screaming man out of the corner of his eye.

“Only some guy doing the Dutch ” said the computer’s voice box. “Nothing to—”

“He must have jumped from some office di-

rectly above this one.” Dan was running toward the oval plexiwindow.

Police aircruisers were already hooting someplace down below when the long lanky young man got across the huge, high and hollow FaxCentral Office to take a look out.

“I can see him sprawled on a pedramp at about level thirty-two,” said Dan, craning his neck and pressing his forehead against the soft, tinted window. The walkramps and towering buildings of Manhattan made multicolored zigzag patterns across the morning. “That means he fell something like thirty floors, Barney. Yeah, we’re on sixty-one and he came from someplace up above.” Turning away from the window, he went walking back across the enormous room, past the walls of built-in compact computers, the banks of data retrievers. “First time I ever saw anybody kill himself.”

“You didn’t see much of it.”

“I saw his face, just for an instant.” Dan thrust his hands in the trouser pockets of his two-piece lycra daysuit. “Wonder who he was.”

“Want me to find out?” offered Barney, the central computer, who sat smack in the middle of the immense room.

Dan frowned, narrowing one eye. “I’m trying to break the habit of using FaxCentral equipment to play games.”

“A sincere interest in the passing of a fellow human isn’t playing games, Daniel,” the wide, man-high computer told him. “Besides … have they ever caught us before?”

“Well, no, they haven’t, but—”

“I’m the best damn computer in the state of Manhattan, am I not? And you, Daniel, if not the most brilliant employee of FaxCentral, are nonetheless the only one on this entire wing of our giant United States Fact System. So who’s to catch on?”

“Yeah, but the National Security Office was due to run a shakedown inspection of us before last Christmas,” said Dan as he approached Barney. “Here it is April 2029 and they still haven’t showed. It’s bound to be any time now.”

“My hunch is they probably won’t at all. Even if they do, I can keep them from tumbling to anything.”

“Of course, there’s really not exactly anything illegal about what we’ve been doing,” continued Dan, mostly to himself. “Being Chief of the Personal Data Wing of FaxCentral … well, since you and the equipment do most of the work, there isn’t much to take up my time. I feel, mostly, like a watchman. So naturally when you suggested we play a few games to pass the time I—”

“As I recall, Daniel, it was you who—”

A police airship went hooting by at their level.

Dan said, “Okay, find out who the poor bastard was.”

“Nathan Jaxon,” replied Barney. “I’ve been

tracking it down while you’ve been soul-searching.”

“Nathan Jaxon?” Dan raised his eyes toward the ceiling. “He’s the head of the Spaceport Authority and an important man in the Third Party nationally. He has offices up on sixty-three of our Grand Central Tower. Why would he kill himself? He’s always smiling when you see him on the news.”

“Family troubles and concern over failing health.”

“Failing health? He won the Men’s AirSld Championship out in California North only last month.”

“All I know is what I read in the suicide notes.”

“You got a look at his suicide note already?”

“Scanning it right now,” replied the computer. “I’m buddy-buddy with all the cop computers and most of the forensic androids. They’re letting me siphon off a peek at the note Jaxon left.”

“He wrote it?”

“Spoke it into his typer. Voice prints match. No possibility of a fake, they say. ‘The burden of failing health coupled with pressing family problems is too much. Please try to understand, Helen . . Helen would be the recently acquired new young wife. ‘Love to you and all our …’ Ends there, in midsentence. More dramatic that way, huh?”

Dan dropped into the floating Incite chair in

front of the computer. “You hinting at something, Barney?”

“Who me? Not at all,” said the blocky computer. “Does seem a wee bit odd, though, that the late Mr. Jaxon is the fourth high-ranking member of the Third Party to kill himself in the past six months.”

“Lots of pressure in politics.” Dan left the chair, began roaming the big gray-walled room. The data retrievers were humming, as usual; tiny red and green blisters of light were blinking off and on. Dan yawned. That continual humming, mixed with the regular pattern of blinking, always made him drowsy. And it wasn’t even lunch yet.

“Be something to do,” said Barney.

“What?”

“We could investigate the suicide on our own, for fun.”

Dan turned toward the mechanism. “Don’t take this personally, Barney, but I’m … well, restless. Playing armchair detective … and all the other games we’ve been filling our shift with … well, I’m still restless.” , “You’ve got a Rest & Recreation leave due in five weeks,” the computer reminded. “Why don’t you hop over to the Alps.”

“I’m always hopping over to the Alps. I do that almost every R & R leave,” said Dan. “Except when I went down to Texas2 for my uncle’s cremation last year.” “He was in the Third Party too, now I think of it.”

“Uncle Rex? He died from complications of the Martian flu. That’s not a frequently used method of committing suicide.”

“They may be killing them off in different

ways.”

“They?”

Barney said, “Don’t know who they are yet.”

Dan pointed a forefinger at him. “You’re getting a little strange, Barney. Really. At least I get out of here two shifts a day and can teleport to my place in Boston. You, you’re here all the time. It’s making you … well, strange.”

“Maybe I should go to the Alps.”

“Okay, I realize you’re stuck here,” said Dan. “By the way, do you and Snelling play games on the Swing Shift?”

“Need you ask? Snelling isn’t the type.”

Dan wandered back to the chair. “Let’s forget Jaxon and his suicide.” Sitting once again, he locked his hands behind his head and made a try at relaxing. “Do you know something about my uncle’s death you never told me?”

“Me? I share everything I find out with you, Daniel,” the mechanism assured him. “I did tell you the para-physician who attended your late uncle had vanished, didn’t I?”

Dan sat up. “No, you didn’t tell me that.”

“Oh, thought I had.”

“If you know … Nope, forget it. I’m not

going to go poking into stuff like that,” said Dan. “I don’t want the National Security Office and the American Police getting annoyed with me.”

“I do have a couple computers I’m chummy with on the Texas2 State cops. I could very easily—”

“No.”

A yellow bubble of light flashed on Barney’s bright chrome surface. “We’re going to have company.”

“Human beings?”

“Yes, a girl. She’s out getting her permits cleared with that twit of a robot in the Reception Lobby.”

“Is she police?”

“Media. Not bad-looking, if you like them on the thin side.”

Dan left his chair and went quickly to the visitor’s door. “We haven’t had a human being up here to see us since February.”

The door buzzed, hummed, and then slid open.

A pretty and slender dark-haired girl was standing there. She smiled, tentatively, at Dan. “I’m Janis Trummond from Newz Magazine,” she said. “I’d like to talk to you about the suicide.”

Dan beckoned her to come on in, said something. He could never remember afterward what it was he said.

Chapter 2

The long, high room was filled with images, hundreds of foot-square images running from floor to domed ceiling.

“This is the SlugSis monitor room,” Dan explained to the girl as he guided her through, “we can shortcut this way to the caff.”

It was like an alive art gallery, each image moving and chattering. On this tiny screen a cattle barons naked daughter being raped by

a half dozen shaggy sheep men, on that screen the Pope in his jeweled helicopter blessing the crowds thronging the silver and gold pedways of New Rome, on that screen three airfloat wrestlers stomping a fourth two hundred feet above a crowd of gleeful Eskimos, on that screen an expedition cutting its way through the density of the Lost Brazil jungle, on that screen a nude ballerina dancing to the ragtime version of one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, up there the Boston All-Robot Symphony in concert at an underground beer garden, down there a revival of The Front Page with a cyborg cast, up there a lecture on ponic gardening, across there continually unwinding pictures of the American Police Office’s Most Suspicious Characters, down there—“Peter the Hermit,” said the dark-haired Janis, halting and pointing to a waist-high monitor screen.

Dan hunched to look. “Yeah, that’s him. Typical West States lunatic with—”

“Listen to him for a minute.” She brought up the sound on that particular monitor.

The old man seemed incredibly tall and narrow, seven feet high at least. Hie hot, gritty desert wind was whipping at his flowing gray beard and hair and at the homespun robe he wore. “… is coming and there is no way to avoid it, my friends,” he was saying in his harsh, dry voice. “The Last Days roll ever closer, the pillars of your world grow ever shakier. Soon, very soon, all across the world it will come. All will collapse and be blown away, blown away as the wind blows grains of sand across this benighted land. Then, my friends, the Last Days will be here and then will come the Great Transformation and then will come one thousand years of peace, peace, contentment and fulfillment. One thousand years, my friends, a millennium. There has never been anything like it, and it is going to happen in your lifetime. Soon. Soon!” The image of the old man vanished from the screen, replaced by a smiling Chinese.

“Let’s update the weather picture,” said the smiling Chinese anchor man, “with Peaches and Daddy up in the puppet weather room.”

“This must be SlugSis’ Continuous News,” said Dan. “They give quite a bit of time to quirky people like—”

“What Peter the Hermit’s saying is true,” said Janis.

Dan took a step back from the girl. “Oh, so? You mean the world’s going to end, angels are going to—”

“Not that way,” she told him. “No magic or miracles, but it’s going to happen. Unless somebody does something about it.” Giving a final glance to the screen where Peter the Hermit had been, she started moving for the far door.

Swallowing, coughing, Dan followed her. She was a very pretty girl, seemed intelligent. But

you couldn’t really believe in someone like Peter the Hermit, an old nitwit with whiskers down to here. “SlugSis offers its customers one hundred shows to pick from,” he said as he caught up with the girl. “It’s the largest multiple choice pay television system in the—”

“You can stick SlugSis,” she said over her shoulder. “And I’m not goofy.”

“Okay, you’re not.” The door opened for them. “Down the green ramp to the left.”

The green ramp curved and turned down to another inner-tower level and faded into shadows and then darkness. Floating in the darkness were the illuminated words Chez Ambiance.

Dan took hold of Janis’ arm, which made him swallow again, and led her into the blackness. A door opened in the dark and a silver robot, surrounded by pale light, smiled out at them.

“Booth for three?” inquired the robot.

“Two,” corrected Dan.

“Excuse it, my sensors need a tuneup.” A wider smile cut across the silver ball-head of the greeter. “You can have either twenty-six or fifty-one.”

“We’ll take twenty-six.”

When they were inside the square white-wall cubicle Janis hopped, suddenly, up on the table. Taking a silver rod from her shoulder bag, she pointed its tip at the plain, bare ceiling and walls. “No bugs,” she said.

“It’s illegal under the Public Privacy Act of 2016 to install eavesdropping equipment in—”

“You’re sitting on all the information in the world and you don’t know from nothing.” She, slim long legs flashing, climbed down to sit in a plain white body-fit chair.

“I know journalists have to goad some people to get them to talk, but with me you—” “Okay, okay. I’m sorry. Sit down, Dan.” Watching her, he took the opposite chair and picked the ambiance box off the table. “What sort of atmosphere are you in the mood for?” “This one.”

“This isn’t an ambiance. I usually dial New England Inn on a Rainy Night, although you might prefer—”

“I prefer, Dan, to talk to you. I want you to tell me about Jaxon’s suicide.”

He continued to scan the list of possible room atmospheres on the box lid. “I hear Private Dining Room in Nineteenth-Century Viennese Restaurant is quiet and—”

“Put down that insipid box and talk to me.” “Maybe I’ll go out and chat with the robot. I guess I’m not used to people. You’re pretty damn feisty for—”

“Tell me about Jaxon’s jump.” “He jumped,” said Dan. “That’s about all I know. I didn’t see him go out his window, only saw him when he went whizzing by our window. We got curious as to—”

“We?”

“Barney and me. Barney’s my central computer, you met him upstairs. He and I have gotten to be pretty good friends. See, I don’t run into many people in this particular—“What did Jaxon look like?”

“He looked like Jaxon. What do you mean?”

“Was he conscious?”

“Yeah, he was wide awake. He was screaming. At least when he passed our window he was screaming.”

“Not their usual method.” She had a habit of stroking her upper lip with her forefinger while she was thinking. “How’d they do it this time I wonder.”

“Wait now,” Dan said. “Don’t you think this was a suicide either?”

“Who else thinks it isn’t?”

“Well, Barney. He has some odd idea about the Third Party being the target of some kind of conspiracy.”

“Sounds like a very smart computer. What exactly does your pal Barney base his suspicions on?”

“Oh, he was pointing out that several important Third Party people had died by suicide in recent months.” Dan picked up the ambiance box again. “Barney even thinks my Uncle Rex didn’t die from natural causes.”

“Rex Farleigh was your uncle?”

Dan frowned. “Would you like to turn our

room into a Monterey Waterfront Bistro or maybe a Seventeenth-Century Sussex Coach House Inn? I don’t want to get involved with stuff like this. My uncle died of a respiratory ailment. That’s it.”

The girl stroked her upper lip, watching him. “Maybe so,” she said finally, “but Nathan Jaxon sure didn’t. He was made to leap.”

“And made to talktype his own suicide note?”

“Those can be faked.”

“No, they can’t.”

“You didn’t see my article in Newz six weeks back. Anything can be faked, including a voice print.”

Dan tapped his fingers on the box’s surface. “Okay, suppose somebody made Jaxon do it. What’s the reason?”

“I don’t have all the answers, Dan. I’ve been working on this thing for nearly two months for Newz; I think I’m on the edge of getting somebody to … Never mind that now,” she said. “You saw Peter the Hermit up in the SlugSis room. I think he’s intended as a diversion, to make the Millenarian Brotherhood seem like simply another West States lunatic group.”

“There are rational people who believe the world is going to end next week sometime? Those people are somehow tied in with Jaxon’s suicide?”

“I was supposed to interview Nathan Jaxon this afternoon,” said Janis. “He’d heard, through

the Ombudsman Foundation, what I was digging into. He told me he wanted very much to talk to me.”

“He was killed before he could, that’s what you think?”

“It’s not the only reason they got rid of Jaxon,” Janis replied. “Might be, though, one of the reasons.”

“The Millenarian Brotherhood,” asked Dan, “what do they get out of all this?”

“When the still-surviving countries of the world collapse, or are made to collapse, then the Millennium starts. They intend to rule then, rule not just one country but all of them.”

“An old idea, ruling the world.”

“Sure, an old idea. One with considerable appeal yet,” said the dark-haired girl. “You could help me, Dan. With the resources you and Barney have, you could find out a hell of a lot I—”

“Nope. No. I don’t think I can do anything.”

She gave a small, rueful shrug. “All right.”

“Suppose I think about the whole thing?”

“Don’t help me if it’s going to get you into—”

“What I want to do, Janis, is see you again after today,” Dan said. “Could we do that while I’m wrestling with this?”

“Yes, we could,” the girl answered. “I five out in Reconstituted Brooklyn. We might have dinner tomorrow night.”

“We certainly might,” said Dan.

Chapter 3

They were all at once in San Francisco.

The actual San Francisco, on a plateau above the darkening Pacific where rocky cliffsides went sliding down to gray sand and foamy surf.

Janis had taken hold of Dan’s hand when they’d stepped onto the teleport platform back in the Safe Sector of Reconstituted Brooklyn. She kept her fingers, warm and smooth, tight around his as they stepped off the San Francisco platform. “Still unsettles me,” she said, “even though I’ve teleported just about everywhere. Keep thinking I’m not going to come out the other end.”

“Yeah, I used to get a sort of roulette feeling when I first started commuting between Boston and Manhattan. I’ve, I think, adjusted.”

The walkway led, slanting mildly, to a castlelike restaurant built at the edge of the cliff. A high, towering structure of amber-tinted neoglass bricks. Smiling people in bright clothes seemed to be floating up there in the foggy twilight.

“That’s not where you’re from originally, Boston?” asked the girl.

“Not exactly, no. I’m from MidWest2.”

“I know, I looked you up on the Newz databank.”

“You did? I found out some things about you, too, with Barney’s help. Your father was Morris Trummond. I remember reading his books when

was—

“I inherited my crusading bent from him, no doubt. Did Barney inform you how my noted father died?”

“Yeah …” The neoglass doors opened in front of them.

“Maybe I’ve inherited that trait, too.”

A human waiter with a one-piece scarlet ca-sualsuit greeted them, escorted them to an alcove on the seethrough castle’s second level.

Janis sat for a moment watching the blue fading away out of the sea, the night and the fog come sweeping in. Her cheekbones were prominent, there was a trace of shadow beneath each eye. “You’ve been working with FaxCentral nearly four years,” she said finally.

“Longest I’ve been anywhere. I almost didn’t get hired, because the Employment Bureau computers had me down as too restless to hold a job like this.” He watched not the growing night, but the girl. “My Uncle Rex had enough influence to get a few of my biotapes edited slightly. And later I found out Barney worked a few tricks.”

“He sensed you were someone who’d share his interest in games and puzzles.”

“Yeah, he did,” said Dan. “Could be he senses I was a little scared, too. We’d been on Between Job Scrip for almost a half year and I lost … Did you come across the fact I was married once?”

“Yeah, and saw her picture. Pretty girl.”

“She was, still is. I’ve never seen her since I came with FaxCentral.” Dan smoothed out a very small wrinkle in the opaque plyo tablecloth. “I have a son, too. He’s seven now. Don’t see him either.”

“Why not?”

“There’s no legal reason. I wonder … sometimes I wonder about him. They live in Lower Florida, I could teleport there easy enough. But better he doesn’t know me. He hasn’t seen me since I was … since he was about four. Things that happen so early in your life, you never remember.”

“So you probably don’t remember your own father?”

“No, hardly at all,” Dan said. “Nobody can remember that far back, that young. Not unless you make use of therapy machines or memory pills. I’ve never felt the need to—”

“You remember your Uncle Rex, though.”

“Well, sure. I used to see him two three times a year.”

Resting her elbows on the table, she leaned closer to him. “Will you,help me, Dan? With the facilities FaxCentral has, and with Barney to help … I know we could get a hell of a lot more on the Millenarian Brotherhood. I know it.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me. If they’re doing away with the Third Party people, then obviously there’s a political motive involved. Which means either the Federalist Party or the Constitutional Party is involved.”

“Or both,” said the girl. “And it isn’t, Dan, only members of the Third Party who’re being killed off. I’ve got a list of over a hundred important figures, from all over the country.”

“You think even President Hibbler might be involved?”

“Yes, he could be. He’d be a logical candidate for the role of Emperor of the Last Days. Some of his more enthusiastic foreign policy speeches indicate he thinks of himself as more than simply the President of the United States.”

“Sitting here and looking at you, I want to believe you,” Dan said. “Barney goes along with some of this, too … I don’t know.”

“The Ombudsman Foundation funds our magazine, you know. They’re a nonprofit organization set up to oversee the government. They’re interested in what I can find out, they don’t believe I’m a lunatic.”

“I didn’t suggest you were a—”

“Adam McAdam is paying me a damn good salary to work on the story.”

“Your editor believes in you, that’s natural.”

“Adam McAdam is more than an editor, Dan. He’s got a background in politics, his family has been prominent in—”

“Yeah, I know. We looked him up, too. Very admirable guy.”

“Since Nathan Jaxon was killed,” said Janis, “I’ve been approached by somebody else.”

“Who?”

“Rather not tell you right yet. It’s possible, though, I can get the information Jaxon had and wanted to pass along.”

The fog was closing in on the castle, pressing against the seeout walls, swirling and spinning.

Janis continued, “If you, with your computer’s

help, could find out what was left behind among Jaxon’s papers and—”

“Nothing,” Dan told her. “Nathan Jaxon, as part of his preparations to knock himself off, destroyed all his personal papers, letters, records, talkspoqls, voxdiscs, everything. Put everything through his office destroyer. Same thing for his files at home in the Bahamas.”

Jam’s smiled, slowly and carefully, at him. “You’ve already started, started investigating.”

“Barney did the nosing around.”

“Then you can help me, Dan.”

“No Because I don’t want to get involved.

This job, I want to hold on. Three or four years back I might have … now, Janis, I

j, »

cant.

She nodded her head. “All right, don’t worry. I’ll get what I want by other routes.”

“I’d like to keep seeing you.”

“Yes, we can continue.”

Another human waiter appeared beside the table. “I notice your intense conversation is at an end,” he said, “and I intrude to present menus. My assumption is correct?”

Dan took a large plyopape menu. “Correct,” he said.

Chapter 4

! “Stop whistling,” Dan told the computer.

“A sentimental, romantic tune from a bygone era.” Barney continued his slightly hissing whistling. “Since we’re in a romantic mood around here of late.”

Dan was circling the vast room, clutching a handful of faxmemos. “Let’s get these bios put together for the Academic Security Bureau,

huh? First one they want is Anderson, Robert W. ‘Andy’ Anderson. Next is—”

“Whole pile won’t take ten minutes,” said Barney, abandoning his whistling. “For a fellow in love you’re awfully business-like, Daniel. I suspect you—”

“You know what your trouble is, Barney?” He approached the squat computer, shoulders hunching. “I see it plain now, you’re jealous. This past week, ever since I met Janis, you’ve been sulky and—”

“A computer is incapable of jealousy or the sulks.” Barney whistled for a moment. “What’s nagging you is the fact you’re too cowardly to help the girl, too weak-hearted to lend a—”

“Listen, you mechanical son of a bitch!” Dan charged toward the machine, fist raised.

“Too craven to utilize our marvelous facilities to aid the girl you claim to love, too jelly-spined to—” Wham!

“Owl” Dan had struck the computer’s bright front, which resulted in his hurting his hand.

“You ought to know I’m invulnerable, Daniel.”

Rubbing his aching fist up and down against his chest, Dan said, “What do you want me to do? If I get caught investigating all this lunatic Millenarian stuff I’m going to lose my job. You know what they did to me the last time I was out of work.”

“They? They who? You mean maybe the Millennium gang?”

“No, I mean … they.” He made a lopsided circle in the air with some of his sore fingers. “They … the world in general.”

“The world in general is absolutely and completely indifferent to you, Daniel. I can run you off several charts to prove you’re insignificant.”

“Oh, really? We put ourselves smack in the middle of opposition to these Emperor of the Last Days fans and you don’t think that’ll attract attention? You guarantee I won’t end up doing a dive off a high place?”

“Which fate are you afraid of? Unemployment or sudden death?”

“Both,” answered Dan. “I’m afraid of being out of work and I’m afraid of getting killed and … I’m afraid of a lot of other things. Not the right kind of guy for Janis at all probably. She needs a crusading fearless guy like that boss of hers, Adam McAdam.”

“Ah, it’s a good thing computers can’t shed tears,” remarked Barney. “Otherwise I’d be bawling like a babe at such a sad—”

“Screw you!” Dan turned away from the glistening computer. “You’re like that goddamn cricket in the story, trying to be my conscience. Just quit, Barney.”

“Nobody,” the machine told him, “will find out if we work on this problem for Janis. Have

we ever been discovered before in any of the diversions we indulged in?”

“This isn’t a game, this isn’t fooling around with unsolved crimes and things. I … I’m … I really like her.” He spun, faced the central computer. “Suppose what Janis suspects is true? Suppose they did make Nathan Jaxon take the jump? Okay, if she keeps digging maybe they’ll hurt her, too.”

“With us helping, Daniel, the danger to the young lady will be less, not more.”

Dan shook his head, saying, “No, what I have to do is convince Janis to drop the Millenarian Brotherhood thing completely. Forget it.”

“Dropping it doesn’t mean they’ll forget her.”

“What do you mean?” Dan pressed one hand, palm flat, against the computer’s bright surface. “Do you know something, have you been poking into this on your own?”

“I’m stating the obvious, Daniel,” replied Barney. “Naturally I won’t begin working on the Last Days problem until you give the okay.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Dan assured the machine.

Three of them.

Three men in one-piece gray worksuits, materializing in the center of the living room. Each with a small green box strapped to his chest and the third man, larger and wider than the others, carrying an extra green box in his left hand. It dangled from its plyostrap, ticking against his knee.

Janis was in the kitchen area, kneeling in front of the built-in cooking unit, talking to it, cajoling. “Surely, schmuck, you know by now the difference between medium and well-done. I don’t mind your screwing up my lunchtime soyburger, but I’m having Daniel here for dinner tonight and I’ve got two realmeat steaks. Should you futz those …” She ceased talking, stood carefully up.

“Don’t go anywhere, honey,” the biggest one suggested. He was in the kitchen entryway, smiling. The odd-shaped blue pistol in his right hand was pointing at her.

“They can’t be that stupid,” the girl said. “You kill me and Newz is still going to—”

“Nobody wants to kill you, honey.” He pulled the gun’s trigger.

The weapon hummed. Janis felt as though she’d been rammed in the stomach, her arms went wide. Some new kind of stungun which— She tumbled down to the floor. The other two men entered. One took the dangling green box from the big man with the gun. On one knee, he strapped it to Janis’ chest, observing, “She hasn’t got much in the way of—” “Don’t fool around with her. Set the thing.” “Who’s to know if I—”

“I’m to know, and I say leave her alone,” tlie big man ordered. “You got it set right now?”

“Yeah, I know how to turn dials.”

“Flip the switch then.”

“There. But I—”

“Enough. Let’s go.”

The small green box they’d attached to the unconscious girl began to make a very gentle whirring sound. After twenty seconds of that Janis’ body grew dim, another ten and she vanished from the room.

Chapter 5

Rain poured down on the neoglass roof of the the phone cubicle, sluiced along the walls and hid most of Reconstituted Brooklyn from Dan. After listening once more to his voxwatch, he thrust his unicard into the pixphone slot, punched out the special number.

The small oval screen remained blank, but Barney’s voice came out of the speaker grid.

“Why aren’t you dining at your young lady’s, Daniel?”

“Is Snelling there?”

“Certainly. He doesn’t, however, know a blessed thing about the private phone we installed deep within my bowels. You sound distraught.”

“I think I am.” From up here on the pedramp Janis’ three-story rebuilt brownstone apartment house would be visible if the heavy rain weren’t screening it out. “Janis isn’t there, at least she doesn’t answer.”

“You don’t think she’s simply stood you up, Daniel?”

“Nope, I don’t. After all this talk about the Millenarian Brotherhood, I’m … I want you to find out something for me.”

“Happy to oblige. Snelling’s got me doing pre-obits for famous people again. Very tedious.”

“Janis’ front door has a Steadfast 9-Number lock,” Dan told his computer friend. “The serial number is 759121WCA9.”

“Are you hinting I find out, from some of my industrial computer cronies, the right nine numbers for opening the door?”

“Yeah, or check with the Reconstituted Brooklyn Police machines. They should have it too.”

“I’d be contributing to—”

“Cut the crap, Barney. I want to look inside her place, to make sure she’s not—”

“The number sequence you want is 492026719.”

“492026719?”

“That’s it. Want to find out if she’s been hurt, arrested, or—•”

“Later on, Barney, after I see what’s at her apartment.” He broke the connection, shoved out into the rainy night.

The right-hand ramp gutter was clogged, causing water to puddle in large slippery patches. The rain beat at Dan, quickly soaking his rain cape and his two-piece eveningsuit. He didn’t notice.

Janis’ apartment was on the top floor, the door level with the ramp he was on. Dan tried the buzzer once again, knocked, called the girl’s name into the speaktube. The silence and darkness inside continued.

Dan punched out the number combination Barney had acquired for him. The lock clicked, the heavy pseudowood door hummed and swung inward. “Janis,” he announced into the darkness. “It’s me.”

No answer.

He crossed the threshold, the door shutting behind him. Remembering that the girl had a voxlight system, he said, “Lights, please.”

The wide strips crosshatching the living room ceiling came glowing on. Dan let out his breath. Jan wasn’t here, not sprawled on the floor, not dead.

There were other rooms, four other rooms. He went into each, ordering, “Lights, please,” and hoping in the instant between dark and light that he wouldn’t find her dead in any of them.

In the kitchen he found the built-in cooking unit was still on, its red light flashing, its tiny metallic voice repeating and repeating, “Done. Done.”

Soyburgers inside the upper oven, being kept warm. She’d said something about realmeat for dinner, so this stuff must be from lunch or an afternoon snack. No, Janis wasn’t one for between-meal snacks. Lunch then.

“Done. Done,” the oven’s little voice continued.

Dan turned it off.

Something sparkled on the neolin flooring near the dishprocessor. A washer of some kind, made of an alloy. An odd silvery blue in color, about the size of a decem-piece, and with JS13 engraved on it. Dan dropped it into a wet pocket.

“Hey, Jan! Hey, how about a stewbrew or two?” Someone out on the ramp, pounding on the door and hollering into the speaktube. “Jan, you doing anything tonight? Don’t keep old Steamboat out in the storm.”

That would be the guy who lived down on the first floor. Or would it?

“Easy now,” Dan told himself, “don’t go suspecting everything. This guy might know sometiling.” He crossed to the door, activated the juclas hole.

A large young man with a two-piece rainsuit on over his loungingsuit was hopping from one foot to the other out on the rainswept ramp. “Jan, it’s old Steamboat getting drenched out here.”

Dan opened the door, stepping back. “Okay,

yeah?”

Steamboat entered, a plyosack of stewbrew blisters swinging in his right fist. “You the new tad?” he asked, glancing around. “Where’s our bessy?”

“Do you know?”

“Jan’s not here? I saw all the lights on and figured … How’d you get in? Never mind, I know. She gave you the combo. Won’t trust old Steamboat with it … she’s not here?”

“Not here. We had a date for nine.”

Steamboat let his sack fall to the thermal rug. “Kind of funny,” he said. “Jan’s very dependable that way, doesn’t scam you.”

“Did you see her today?”

“In fact, I did.” He, without getting out of his rainsuit, sat in a floating lucite chair. “See, I’m not working at the health spa anymore, since I took a swing at one of the massage robots, which is how come I’m home daytimes of late. I saw Jan go out about eleven this morning. Shopping, I deduce, because she was down on my level. She came back around lunchtime and I didn’t think she went out again. Course she could have taken her airhopper and I wouldn’t have no-j ticed. Reason I saw her this morning is I’ve taken to sitting beside my living room window listening to—”

“The hopper! I forgot about that. She parks ! it up on the roofpad.” He sprinted to the kitchen again, opened the door of the ascend closet, and jumped in.

“I’ll come along.” Steamboat squeezed in with him.

A neoglass dome covered half the flat roof. Three hoppers were parked under it.

Janis’ aircraft, a pale-green sporthopper, was nearest the stepout of the ascend closet. Dan approached it slowly, hunched a bit, and looked in at the windows.

“You don’t expect her to be sitting in there, do you?” asked Steamboat.

“No, not actually.”

“You’re, hope you don’t mind my mentioning, awful edgy. Like something worse than being scammed has happened. Has something worse happened?”

“I don’t,” said Dan, “know.”

Chapter 6

Adam McAdam’s desk chair spun him around to face Dan. “I’m afraid,” he said while shaking hands across the sparkling aluminum top of his boomerang-shaped desk, “England’s on the edge.”

“Edge of what?” A blue chair came rolling at him, nudged at the backs of his knees.

“Collapse, total collapse.” McAdam grinned. “But you’re not here, Dan, to talk about world

events. Although I sometimes think everyday-people don’t realize how events in the remotest spots of the world can affect us more than intimate everyday concerns’.” He waved a hand at the dozen moderately large wallset video screens he’d been scanning when Dan entered his Netoz office.

Nodding at the assorted scenes of famine, chaos, and imminent collapse, Dan sat in the urging blue chair. “Do you know where janis Trummond is?”

“Jannygirl?” McAdam grinned, waved at the sampling of world events on his wall. “Out there someplace.” He was a big man, handsome, and extremely clean-looking. His modestly curly black hair was touched with gray, a few tiny wrinkles forked out from his sky-blue eyes whenever he grinned. “She’s a restless one, our Jannygirl.”

“You know for a fact she’s on a specific assignment?”

“I’m certain she’s following some sort of lead,” answered the handsome editor. “Jannygirl’s job with us—don’t know if she ever spelled this out for you, Dan—the job is very unstructured. That is to say, if she wants to hop off to, say, London to watch the place come falling down, why she does. Doesn’t need permission, doesn’t even have to tell me.”

“Janis has done this before, gone away without any notice at all?”

McAdam grinned. “I’m afraid you don’t know our lovable Jannygirl as well as I do, Dan. When she’s with you it’s very easy to get the notion you’re the most important thing in her young life. Let an important story break and Jannygirl’s gone.”

Dan scratched his chin, watched the Vatican exploding on the third screen in the top row. “This story Janis is working on now is—”

“She’s always involved in half a dozen different news yarns, Dan.”

“The Millenarian Brotherhood,” Dan said, “the Emperor of the Last Days. That story.”

McAdam laughed. “I can see she’s got you as convinced as she is.”

“You don’t think there’s any such organization?”

“Oh, yes, there’s a brotherhood,” answered the handsome McAdam. “I don’t, though, believe it’s anywhere near as vast and powerful as Jannygirl does. One more lunatic outfit.”

“Janis thinks they’re powerful enough to have murdered Nathan Jaxon.”

McAdam dropped his hands to the bright top of his uncluttered desk, twined his blunt fingers together. “Here’s what I think about Nathan Jaxon’s death, Dan. Because of Jaxon’s jump you and Jannygirl met. So that’s a good thing. As to there being a plot to kill off the Third Party … well, she’s convinced me of some things I initially thought were wacky before. This isn’t, I don’t feel, going to be another ‘ of those times.”

“Then why are you letting her dig into—”

“As I mentioned earlier, Dan, I know the lass damn well,” the handsome Newz editor told him. “Janis Trummond is a darn good writer. I let her follow her nose and for every ten impossible notions she comes up with there’s always one which turns into a terrific news yarn.”

“Okay, suppose Janis is someplace looking into a story. Is she likely to let you know where she is eventually?”

“Jannygirl might, and if she does I’ll sure be on the pixie to you,” said McAdam. “My guess is she’ll come teleporting home in a day or so. You’re likely to see her again even before I do, Dan.” His chair gave a small squeak and turned him again toward the news screens.

Dan stood. “Okay, thanks.”

Over his wide shoulder the handsome McAdam said, “I admire your taste in women, Dan. She’s a very exceptional girl, is Jannygirl. You do right by her.”

Dan asked, “Do you call her that when you’re with her?” as he walked to the way out.

McAdam apparently didn’t hear him. “I’m afraid,” he said, “England’s at the edge.”

“A blank,” said Barney.

Dan was at their window. “Nothing?”

“I got a look at the Greater Manhattan Travel Authority records,” the central computer told liim. “Janis Trummond didn’t leave from the island, Brooklyn, or the boroughs yesterday by any conventional mode of transportation, Daniel. Under her own name or any other. Now, as you know, those silly Japanese machines they’ve got keeping records for the Teleport Wing aren’t too accurate. Still, they’ve got no record of the girl teleporting out, either.”

“Hey,” said Dan suddenly, “they blew up the Vatican.”

“Several hours ago, yes.”

“Yeah, I saw it on one of McAdam’s news screens and it just now registered,” Dan told his computer friend. “England’s on the edge of collapsing, too. Maybe the Millennium people are right, Barney, and things are falling apart.”

“England won’t go under,” the computer said. “As for the Vatican, the Pope did that himself. To keep the Antipapists from seizing it. Italy’s no shakier than it has been for the past hundred years or so.”

“I should take more interest in world affairs, while there’s still a world,” Dan said. “This McAdam guy obviously knows what’s going on everywhere. With a girl like Janis it’s important to—”

“McAdam doesn’t know where she’s gone, huh?”

“So he says.”

“Believe him?”

“He seems honest enough, and he obviously likes her.”

“But … ?”

“Well, guys that handsome always unsettle me. Plus which he kept calling her Jannygirl. Now if anybody isn’t a Jannygirl it’s Janis. She isn’t even a Jan.”

“She didn’t tell him, under any name, where she might be heading?”

“No, not a word, which McAdam says isn’t unusual. She’s done this before, gone off without even leaving word for anyone at Newz.”

“Not so,” said the computer.

Dan approached the machine. “Huh?”

“I took the liberty, while you were paying your call on McAdam, to have a look at Janis Trummond’s personnel file. One of the Newz computers is a cousin of mine. In the last two years, whenever Janis left the Manhattan area on a Newz story she either phoned or sent a mailgram to McAdam. It’s all in her file. She always, by the way, signed the messages Janis.”

“McAdam lied to me then. Why?”

“This morning, after several unsuccessful attempts to get in touch with Janis, McAdam called in the Pinkerton-Burns Detective Group.

‘Iliey’ve got two of their highest priced opera-lives hunting for the girl.”

“So the grin and all were mainly bullshit?”

“Apparently.”

“Yeah, but even if he lied to me, McAdam doesn’t know where she is. He wouldn’t hire ops to find her if he did.”

“Possibly. However, a fellow who’ll He to you might lie to others.”

“Meaning?”

“Let us keep an open mind about Adam McAdam.”

Dan nodded. “Imagine being that handsome all your life, having all that family money behind you, being able—”

“She’s not in the Citizens Morgue,” said Barney. “Not in the Reconstituted Brooklyn Private Morgue, not in the Writers & Artists Morgue or—”

“She’s not dead. Who said Janis was dead?”

“We’re making a thorough investigation,” the computer reminded. “I’m checking out every possibility.”

“You’re right, yeah. You did all the hospitals, too?”

“Hospitals, hotels, motor inns, clinics, asylums, religious retreats, skyinns, and so forth. No

Janis.”

Dan commenced pacing. “What about that Steamboat guy?” “Dwight ‘Steamboat’ Mickens seems to be exactly what he claims, an unemployed nitwit.”

“I don’t know what else we … The washer!”

“Beg pardon?”

Dan got it out of a pocket. “I forgot about this thing, probably nothing.” He held it up to the computer’s visual scanner. “Found it on the floor in Janis’ kitchen last night. It’s not off any appliance and … well, there’s something a little odd about it.”

Barney was silent for nearly a full minute. “It’s odd all right,” he said at last.

“Can it help us find Janis?”

“I think it can,” answered the computer. “You’re not, though, going to like how.”

Chapter 7

Somebody had murdered a robot.

The remains crackled underfoot as Dan made his way along the underground pedway toward his apartment. Dan slowed, frowning down at the chunks of brownish plastic innards across which silvery circuitry was scribbled, at twists of red wire and yellow tubing, at the spills of thick rainbow oil. And there was the powdered wig.

“One of the security ‘bots,” Dan said to himself.

All the guard and policing robots down here in Boston UnCom wore powdered wigs and semihistorical costumes. Boston was like that, even fourteen levels below ground.

Dan, treading gingerly through the torn-apart and strewn security robot, glanced around. There was no one else in sight. He’d seen dead robots before, but that had always been above. Things were better regulated here under the Common. That someone had been able to batter a security guard to pieces in broad daylight, or what passed for it in UnCom, was strange. That nobody was out here nosing around was strange.

“And the fact the door of my apartment is wide open is odd too,” he said aloud, noticing.

The pseudoak door hung open at an odd angle, one of the nearbrass hinges was twisted and askew. While Dan stood watching, a few yards off, one of his servomechs came sailing out of his apartment.

It was his cocktail mixer, and it bounced twice across the pebbled surface of the ramp before coming to rest on its side. “Spong,” it gasped.

His collection of vidiscs followed, a disc at a time.

“God damn .it.” Dan sprinted, jumped over the fallen mixer, and dodged three flying discs. 50

I Te planted himself on the threshold of his apartment. “God damn it.”

Two men were doing it to his living room area. Big in three-piece synhide suits with silver rivet trim. Young, broad, and both shaved completely hairless.

“Go away, prig,” advised one of the youths. He was stomping on Dan’s once-floating coffee table with his thick-heel boots.

“Fug yourself,” advised his companion, who was pulling the vidiscs out of their protective sleeves before frisbeeing them.

“Stop screwing around in my apartment,” ordered Dan. “Who the hell are you anyway?”

“Sug a cog,” suggested the stomping one.

The other said, “Hey, Nils.”

After considerable crunching and smashing, a third huge hairless young man came in from the bedroom area. He was tangled in the tattered remnants of an allseason bedquilt. “Who’s this dig?”

“Cogsug says this is his place.”

Nils» laughed. “Is that true, mufug?”

“Damn right it is.” Dan was crossing the threshold now. “All you bastards clear outl” He was too angry to be cautious.

Nils said, “You dumb prig.”

“We’ll fix you just like your stuff,” explained one of the others.

“Hell you will!” Dan came stalking across the ruined room and grabbed up the pixphone from

out of its alcove. “Maybe you got the security ‘bot out there, but—•”

“Dumb fug.” Nils kicked the phone out of Dan’s hands.

It flew right up to the beamed ceiling, smashed.

“Now you, pegger.” Nils kicked Dan, viciously hard, in the kneecap.

“Hey!” Dan went stumbling sideways, limping, until he fell against the wall.

The table-stomper got him next. He leaped, slammed into Dan. “Peggerhead.”

Dan hit the wall again. His right arm went numb, all the bones in his skull began to ache. “You guys can’t—”

“Fugger.” One of them kicked him in the pit of the stomach.

All the pain rushed to the spot. Gagging, gasping, Dan doubled, clutching at himself.

Another boot caught him. From behind. At the tip of the spine.

Bent, choking for air, he went hobbling forward. Stars of pain filled his vision.

In the ribs this time. So hard, and unexpected, Dan couldn’t tell if it was a fist or a foot that’d done it.

“Don’t kill the little mufug,” warned Nils.

“We can have a lot more good time without him dying.”

Another blow. It drove Dan ahead and down.

lie went flat out on his thermal rug. The fabric sanded skin off his face and hands.

“That’ll more than do, gents.”

A new voice, soft and gentle. A girl.

“Who asked you in, cund?”

“I’ve been employed to look after Mr. Farleigh’s interests.”

“Mr. Fairy?” Nils laughed. “You mean that dumb little fug there?”

Dan was operating on some new kind of time. Everything, each painful move he made, took an infinite amount of time. He had to think about each small task, to execute each took a great long stretch of time. Push against the floor with your bloody hand, keep pushing until your scraped face is off the rug. Now push with the elbow. Jesus, that hurts. Keep at it, keep putting pressure. Use the knees, too. Jesus, that hurts. Go easy on that one knee, favor the other one. That’s it, keep pushing.

After a vast stretch of time had passed Dan was in a kneeling position on his rug. He grabbed the arm of a floating rocker, clutched as tight as he could. Gradually he became more aware of himself, realized how many places he hurt. He fought to stay conscious, to keep from throwing up, to get in enough air.

“Here, I’ll help you.” A sparkling silver arm appeared in front of his face. Silver fingers took, gently, hold of his arm and helped him to sit in the rocker.

Sitting brought new hurt places to his attention, but it seemed slightly better than kneeling. “Thanks,” he mumured.

“I knew this darned business was going to happen, but I got stuck in one of your dropcars for ten blessed minutes,” the girl said. “I’m sorry.”

“Those guys … where are they?”

“Piled up over there.”

“Piled up? What happened to them?”

“I took care of them,” explained the girl.

He could see somewhat better now, though his vision was still fuzzy. She was a long tall girl, blond with her hair woven into one long braid. She couldn’t be more than eighteen, dressed in a sleeveless pullover tunic and flared white trousers. Her right arm, from just below the elbow down, was made of highly polished, silvered metal. “You mentioned … long time back … being hired … to protect me.”

“That’s right, Mr. Farleigh,” said the blond girl. “Which makes me feel so blessed stupid at not getting here on time. My name is Elizabeth Seldon, but most everyone calls me Tin Lizzie. Because of the arm and leg. Used to bother me, but now I’m grown I use the name myself. You can call me that.”

“Okay, Liz.” Very slowly Dan turned his head. The three large and hairless youths were indeed piled up. Near the door, tied and r.ngged, each looking chagrined as well as bat-lered. “You did that?”

Tin Lizzie nodded, smiling a bit shyly. “When I finally accepted the fact I was going to be a cyborg for life,” she said, “I decided to get the best enhanced fake limbs I could. Limbs plus a few internal gadgets. Gives me exceptional strength.”

Dan concentrated on trying to breathe normally again. When he’d, roughly, achieved that he asked, “You knew this was going to happen?”

She bent, straightening a fallen disease. “That’s another blessed knack I have, Mr. Farleigh,” she said, talking at the rug.

“What do you mean?”

“I get hunches,” said Tin Lizzie. “About what’s coming up, things that’ll maybe happen.”

“So you’re a super strong cyborg with precog powers?”

“That about sums it up,” she replied. “Sort of explains the botched-up life I’ve lived for most of my eighteen years. Though a person is obviously responsible for what he makes of his life, no matter what his handicaps.”

“Those aren’t exactly handicaps,” Dan told her.

Lizzie’s eyes met his. “You think so? Boy, I wish you’d tell that to Uncle Earl and Aunt Helen.”

“That who you live with?”

“Used to. Been pretty much a loner the past

couple years. Been drifting around New England, doing odd jobs. I suppose that’s how your friend got hold of my name, from one of the Work Board applications I’ve left scattered in my wake.”

“A friend of mine hired you?”

“He believes it’s time you had extra protection, and my particular blend of … talents seems suited,” Lizzie said. “I hope you’re going to agree.”

“You’ve done pretty well so far. What’s the name of this guy who hired you?”

“I’m getting the feeling this is a surprise to you. Didn’t Mr. Maze discuss me with you?”

“Mr. Maze?”

“Mr. Bernard Maze of Manhattan. He sounds very pleasant,” Lizzie said, “and he’s obviously well off.”

“Sounds? You didn’t actually see him?”

“Pixphone screen remained blank while we chatted. Likes his privacy, I guess.”

“Barney,” said Dan. “So now Barney thinks I can’t even take care of …” Moving had brought on a new sequence of pains. “Well, maybe he’s right.”

Lizzie touched at her braid with the fingers of her real hand. “Do I still have a job, Mr. Farleigh?”

“You do,” he said.

Chapter 8

“You’re hobbling,” noticed Barney.

“It’s an after effect of getting booted in the ass,” replied Dan as he halted in front of the computer. “Anything new on those guys who jumped me last night?”

“Three freelance goons,” said the computer. “Hired by an anonymous phone caller. I’m tracking that down, but we may not get more than the UnCom cops did.”

“Those guys got through security, smashed a robot, and didn’t attract any attention.” Very slowly and carefully he lowered himself into his chair. “How’d they do that?”

“Some bribing took place, Daniel. I’m also working on that angle,” Barney said. “Murdering the robot was an idea of their own it seems. That little festivity on your pedway was sufficient to keep your near neighbors indoors.”

Dan knuckled a mended section of his face. “Obviously nothing new on Janis?”

“Not on the whereabouts of the girl herself, no. However, I have a lead on that little washer you found.”

Dan sat up as straight as he could manage. “You mean it was dropped by whoever took her?”

I’d say yes.

“Okay, what is it from?”

The computer said, “Before we go into that, Daniel, I want to discuss something else.”

“There’s nothing more important than finding-“

“This has to do with locating Janis,” said the computer. “Now I’m aware you’re in love with the girl, that you’d no doubt like to rescue her from whatever trouble she’s in all by yourself, singlehanded.”

“I’m working with you, which isn’t exactly—”

“We have to hire a crew.”

“A crew? Look, it’s bad enough having a girl for a bodyguard, but what—”

“Having a girl, an innocent-seeming young girl, as a bodyguard is quite smart, Daniel. Nobody expects it,” said Barney. “I screened thirty-five other girls before I settled for Elizabeth. Did the child come to Manhattan with you?”

“Yeah, I put her up last night in what was left of my apartment,” answered Dan. “She teleported in with me this morning. Says Mr. Bernard Maze has arranged for her to reside at I lie Sheraton-Y around the corner.”

“Good. She can tail you whenever you leave here and if she gets a vision of impending danger she can simply pop over. I sense a great deal of untapped potential in this girl.”

“She sure decked those three skinheads,” said Dan. “Why have you taken to calling yourself Bernard Maze?”

“It seems to me wiser than approaching people as Barney the computer. Also, a computer can’t have a bank account in this country.”

“You have a bank account?”

“I do a little speculating now and then, using tips some of my Wall Street chums supply. I’ve been able to put away a tidy sum. Who do you think is paying Elizabeth’s salary?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. I appreciate your—”

“We’re going to need other kinds of help before this is over, Daniel,” the computer said. “You don’t fully realize what a position we’re in here for recruiting. We have access to the file of every employable person in America, in the whole round world if need be. Any ability, any knack, the wildest combination of wild talents … we have them within our reach. I can find us a person with any sort of ability you can imagine. I want to take advantage of that.”

Dan said, “Okay, fine. I’m not against getting help to find Janis.”

“Good, you can take care of hiring the next member of our crew.”

“Sure, who is it?”

“He calls himself Professor Supermind. He’s been traveling with a robot circus, which is stranded at the moment in the vicinity of New Lisbon, Portugal.”

“What special ability does he have?”

“He hypnotizes machines.”

Dan blinked. “What the hell do we need him for?”

“I’ll explain,” said Barney.

The skycab pilot said, “O circo.”

Dan looked down through the dirty seethrough bottom of the flying cab. He saw no circus, just more of the ruins of old Lisbon, with the sleety rain slapping down on crumbles of si one walls and sprawled piles of bricks and liles. “Where?”

“Ali.” The pilot pointed with his bare foot.

Their cab was transcribing an arc through the cold wet sky, dropping toward a relatively clear place among the ruins.

Shifting in the passenger seat, causing a twinge in his injured knee and one in his injured side, Dan made another try at spotting the robot circus Professor Supermind was supposed to be traveling with. He noticed now someone turning handsprings across a pile of rubble. It was a clown, dressed in a yellow suit rich with glaring blue polka dots.

Through a nearly complete doorway in a fragment of standing wall an old man came running. He was short, chubby, pink. Apparently he was pursuing the flipping clown.

With a grating bounce the cab landed. “Cento ‘scudos,” requested the pilot, with a nod at the meter.

“I want you to wait,” Dan told him as he unfastened the rusty safety gear. “I’ll probably be bringing someone back from the New Lisbon teleport station with me.”

“Muito bem.” The pilot leaned back in his seat, slipped a discviewer over his head.

The hard, cold rain pushed Dan back against the side of the cab when he was outside. Regaining his balance, he started for the spot where the old man and the clown were wrestling. There wasn’t anyone else around, anyone who might do harm to Dan. Tin Lizzie had predicted that, which is why she’d remained in Manhattan.

“Pay attention, ninny,” the pink old man was hollering into the ear of the clown. “I am your master, you are my slave.”

“Flapdoodle,” replied the clown in a squeaky 1 voice. “Also applesauce.”

“I am your master. You must do what Professor Supermind commands.”

“Banana oil. Plus—”

Click!

The clown’s body went rigid, polka-dotted arms and legs straight out. The sleet, hitting him, made pinging noises.

Professor Supermind rubbed his white-gloved hands together. He stood up, smoothed and brushed at his one-piece black worksuit and then made a slight bow in Dan’s direction. “There were a great many ninnies among this particular model of mechanical clown,” he said. I “Manufactured back in ninety-nine, and they had to recall scores of them that year. All due to a faulty ratchet stock, but they don’t listen to you when you tell them. It’s more profitable to make faulty clowns and then people will have to keep buying new ones every few years. Where has that taken the circus business?”

Dan noticed packing crates piled here and j there among the ruins. Behind a piece of cathedial lurked two large ground vans. “I’m Dan Farleigh,” he said.

“Ah, yes, the representative of the philanthropic Bernard Maze.” Professor Supermind executed another small bow. “I am of course Professor Supermind. Scattered about you are I he remains of the Kaminsky Brothers Circus. In fact, one of the Kaminsky Brothers himself Is buried near that busted fountain over there. His physician had a ninny of an andy-nurse and that’s what finished old Kaminsky off. I told liim they make these ninny nurses with cheap Yugoslav parts, but he put his—”

“This clown here,” said Dan, hunching against the driving rain. “You had trouble controlling—”

“Let’s get inside or we’ll both fall into the hands of some drooling quack and his mechanical ninny.” The professor went sloshing away in the direction of one of the vans. “Are you decent?” he yelled while banging on the van’s rear door.

“What difference, what difference?”

“A once striking woman.” Professor Supermind tugged the door open. “Let herself go unfortunately. How old would you guess I am?”

Dan climbed inside the dim van after the old man. “Seventy-five.”

“I’m seventy-five.”

“Spare us that yarn.” A gaunt woman inside

a very large green frock was seated at a lucite table in the van’s center.

“This young man represents the noted financier Bernard Maze,” announced Professor Supermini “Mr. Farleigh, allow me to introduce Fat Franny.”

The frail woman said, “I’ve fallen on evil days, Mr. Farleigh.” She indicated a poster pasted on the wall.

FAT FRANNY! it read. 600 POUNDS OF LOVABLE FLESH!

“I told you those ninny Kaminskys were skimping on your meals, Franny, but you failed to take—”

“Falling from greatness is hard to bear, Mr. Farleigh,” said Fat Franny. “Coupled with the extra burden of having to five with Supermind—”

“I shall be leaving you, Franny dear,” the old professor told her. “Bernard Maze, the celebrated multimillionaire, has summoned me. I depart for Manhattan as soon—”

“About that clown,” put in Dan. “You didn’t control him too well, professor.”

“An aging and defective mechanism, with a faulty ratchet stock installed by greedy manufacturing ninnies who—”

“The tiling is,” Dan persisted, “we have to have a man who can control machines perfectly. The whole success of … of our mission depends on it.”

“I assure you, Mr. Farleigh, there is no one in the known world who has better mind control over machines than Professor Supermind,” the professor told him. “Fat Franny will testify to that.”

The gaunt woman nodded, shoulders bobbing inside her vast green dress. “You have to give him that,” she said. “It’s truly incredible the way he can make them do his bidding. If it hadn’t been for the professor we wouldn’t have been able to keep this dreadful, bleak robot circus going as long as we did.”

Professor Supermind paced around the former fat lady’s table. “Bimbo is an exception.”

“Bimbo’s the clown?”

“Exactly, and you must admit that even a defective ninny like Bimbo finally succumbed to my mental efforts.”

“Bimbo likes to cavort,” explained Fat Franny. “He’ll break out of his crate every so often for that purpose, to cavort.”

“You saw me cut his cavorting short,” said the professor.

This old guy was going to help them follow up one of the very few leads they had on what had happened to Janis. If he screwed up … “I don’t know, professor.”

Professor Supermind tapped his cloth-covered fingertips together. “There are not that many people with my abilities floating about, Mr. Farleigh,” he said. “My impression, from the brief phone conversation I had with your employer, is that my record speaks for itself.”

That was so. All the data Barney had access to did indicate Professor Supermind was the best prospect for the job which had to be done. “Okay,” Dan said, “we’ll go back to Manhattan and you’ll be briefed on your assignment. Before you undertake it, though, you’re going to have to convince me you can do what you claim.”

“Professor Supermind never fails,” he said.

“Rarely,” added Fat Franny.

Chapter 9

“How about another generous wedge of fruit-sub pie, master?” inquired the robot waiter.

Professor Supermind said, “Don’t mind if I do, lad, and plop a hearty scoop of neosherb smack on—”

“Enough,” said Dan. “We don’t want to attract any more attention.” “There’s nobody watching us, Danny,” Tin

Lizzie assured him. “I mean nobody dangerous or governmental.”

“Even so,” said Dan. The three of them were sharing a floating circular table at an outdoor rampside cafe down on level twenty-three of midtown Manhattan. It was past two in the afternoon, there were few other customers in the robot-staffed restaurant.

“Shall I bring further pie or not, master?”

“Do indeed,” the old professor said. “In my declining years sweets are one of my few surviving vices. And make that two ample scoops of neosherb.”

A broad smile touched the robot’s round copper head. “Your will is my command, master.”

As the hypnotized machine trotted away Professor Supermind said, “You’re sure, Mr. Farleigh, that Bernard Maze isn’t going to be able to join us?”

“No, nope, he won’t be here. He’s, like many another rich man, something of a recluse.” Dan had spent the hours since he and Professor Supermind had teleported back from New Lisbon on the fiftieth floor of Central Park. There, among the trees and robot animals, the old man had demonstrated his ability to control mechanical devices. Dan, convinced, had halted the demonstration just before the professor had caused the robot elephant to do a headstand.

Lizzie leaned to the left, trying to get a glimpse of the sun through the crisscross of

rairiDS and walkways. “That’s a darned exceptional talent you’ve got, professor.”

“Yes, it is,” agreed Professor Supermind. “Now that we’ve had our pleasant little luncheon, Mr. Farleigh, perhaps you can explain what it is Bernard Maze wishes of me.”

Dan was more anxious than either of them to get on with the search for Janis. When he’d phoned in to Barney an hour ago, the computer had told him nothing new had turned up. Barney had also assured Dan no one had as yet missed him from his FaxCentral job. Barney implied they wouldn’t for weeks probably. He could devote all the time he needed to finding the girl. “Okay,” he said to the other two, “here’s … Liz, you’re sure nobody’s eavesdropping on us?”

The blond-braided girl shook her head. “My hunch system says no, Danny. And that gadget Mr. Maze sent me agrees. No people, no gimmicks listening.”

“All right then,” Dan continued. “We’re going to be teleporting to New Mexico this afternoon.”

“Ah, the great American Southwest,” sighed Professor Supermind. “I toured through there in ninety-seven with Colonel MacQuarrie’s Combined Robot—•”

“No more nostalgia,” said Dan. “We’re going to a place called Rancho Viva. It’s a community

for the elderly, specifically for people over eighty.”

Tin Lizzie asked, “What does that have to do with this poor missing girl?”

“Yum, yuml Doesn’t that look good?” The robot snapped a slice of pie a la mode down in front of the old man.

“Delightful, lad. Now, you will return to the kitchen, tear up our checks, and forget all about us.

“As you bid, master.”

“Haven’t paid a check since late in the twentieth cent—”

“We’ve traced a machine that seems to have been used in the abduction to a factory in Rancho Viva,” Dan said.

“Blessed funny place for a factory.” The girl drummed her metal fingers on the tabletop.

“Well, this factory is a clandestine one,” Dan explained. “It’s an experimental hardware facility which looks to be funded by the government. Barney can’t … that is, our sources of information can’t dig up all the details of ownership and funding.” In fact, Barney had encountered a very intricate info-block when he’d tried to dig into all the details of the secret plant. He was able to trace the washer to a new experimental portable teleport unit being manufactured at the facility in New Mexico. Nothing about the operation had as yet been made public. But the people who apparently took Janis from her Reconstituted Brooklyn apartment had used the portable teleport units.

“In other words,” said Professor Supermind between gobbles of imitation pie and imitation sherbet, “we may well be going up against the government of the United States of America?”

“That’s light, which is why the fee you’re getting is—”

“Oh, I have no qualms about tweaking the nose of the authorities.” The old man licked Iris spoon. “What exactly am I to use my exceptional powers to accomplish?”

“Rancho Viva is staffed by robots and androids, there’s no human staff at all,” said Dan. “This hidden factory is underneath the main administration building, right in the center of the community. First off, you’ve got to get through the building and down into the factory below. We’ve been able to get a few sketches of the layout.”

Sucking on a lump of neosherb, Professor Supermind said, “A seemingly simple task so far.”

“We think this hidden facility is also completely robot-manned. Once you’re down there you’ve got to hypnotize those machines and find out to whom a specific teleport unit was issued. We’ll give you the serial number. Liz and I are going to travel down to New Mexico with you, posing as a couple interested in buying our great-grandparents space at Rancho Viva.

You’ll tackle the robots on your own. You think you can handle it?”

Professor Supermind removed the glove from his right hand, ran his forefinger around the edge of the pie plate to catch the last of the juice. After licking his fingertip, he said, “Professor Supermind never fails.”

“Yeah, so you told me,” Dan said.

He was a half a block ahead of them when the rickety elevator hailed him. “Hey, pal, c’mon in here.”

/

He slowed, peering into the shadowy doorway of the dingy Tenderloin6 building. “Snuff yourself,” said Deadend. He was small, not more than five feet four, young, about twenty-six, and curly-haired and dark. “I already walked into one heaping trap today.”

“This is no trap, pal. Now get your ass in here before those guys kill you. C’mon, Deadend, trust me.”

“Don’t scrap me. I’m not—

Arf! Arf! Growl!

The bunch chasing him was using ‘bot dogs now. Deadend, giving one of his slouching shrugs, sprinted into the old ground-level building. “How’d you know my—•”

“Enough gab. Climb in,” suggested the cage elevator out of its rusty voice box.

Deadend entered, the doors rattled shut, and they were climbing before the first of the metal-toothed tracking dogs came snarling into the lobby.

He heard it howling and protesting down there. “Holy snarf, those guys are serious,” he realized. “See, that’s the whole heaping trouble fritzing around with sentimental crooks. You telek a little silver and it turns out it’s the scrapping guy’s mother’s. Everywhere you turn—”

“Top floor coming up. Take the escaramp to the roof.”

“Like fritz I will. Then I’m stuck out in the ope—”

“Go on, get your ass up there, schmuck. We got transportation waiting.”

C’rri 1 ‘ V’

io where r

“Away from these sentimental bastards.” The elevator clanged to a stop. “That’s enough to know for now.”

Deadend hesitated, then dived out of the opening cage and hit the ramp.

Out on the swayback, puddled roof of the six-story building a bunged-up skycar was hovering. “You Mr. Deadend?” inquired the robot pilot through his smashed window.

“Yeah. So?”

“Mr. Maze hired me to pick you up.”

“Who the burk is Mr. Maze?”

Growl! Bark! Arf!

The ‘bot dogs were rumbling up the side of the building by way of the fireramps.

Deadend decided to accept Maze’s offer. He jumped into the car. “Haul on out,” he said as his seat buckled him in.

The robot pilot, a semihumanoid, took the car swiftly up above the dilapidated rooftops of Tenderloin6.

“This Maze guy,” said Deadend, after a final look at the angry dogs and men who were converging on the increasingly distant roof, “how’d he hear about me?” He threw his diminishing pursuers a farewell finger.

“You will shortly find out.”

“What the burk does that mean?”

“Mr. Maze has arranged for you to journey to Manhattan,” the robot explained. “Once there his representatives will contact you in the suite he’s arranged for you at the Waldorf-Hostel.”

Deadend gave an unhappy laugh. “Oh, sure. He’s so fond of me he’s going to spend a bogpot

full of money just for the fun of talking to me. What’s really going on? Is this some new idea of Maori’s? Because he’s not going to get the silver back, I explained that to those heaping bastards. I teleked the stuff out to the West States, from there it went out of the country. My range isnt—“Bernard Maze is, as I understand it, a well-known eccentric millionaire. He is in no way connected with the criminal elements of the Chicago-Tenderloin Complex.”

“No scrap?” Another glum laugh, another ducking shrug. “Yeah, we’ll see.”

With a joggling bounce the skycar landed in a green field of lush pseudograss. “This is the Evanston Sector teleport depot,” announced his pilot. “Go in and step onto platform sixteen, give them Mr. Maze’s name, and you’ll be ‘ported to Manhattan. Do you want me to explain how to find your hotel once you—“Snuff it. I can get to a heaping hotel without any help from a bitched-up t)Ot.” The seat let him go and Deadend scrambled out of the sky-car. “If this is a trap of Maori’s,” he called at the slowly rising car, “IH remember you and I’ll come back and … oh, snuff it.” Thrusting his fisted hands into the pockets of his dusty one-piece synyl suit, Deadend went stalking into the teleport depot.

Everything smelled better in this part of

Greater Chicago. Everything was brighter, cleaner.

“Sure, these heaping bastards are well off. They don’t have to put up with all—”

“May I aid you, sir?”

Deadend scowled at the girl who’d stepped into his path. “Why?”

“I’m with Teleporters Aid,” the girl said. “You seemed disoriented.”

“Snuff yourself. I’m never disoriented,” he told her. “Get out of my way and let me get on to platform sixteen.” He pushed her aside, continued on across the black and white mosaic flooring.

“Sir?”

“What now?”

“Platform sixteen is up that ramp over there.”

“Dumb quiff.” Deadend kept on for a few more paces in the direction he’d been going, then, acting as though he’d thought of it himself and snapping his fingers, he veered to the left and allowed the ramp to carry him up toward the platform he needed. She had nice legs, long and tan. “Sure, she can ‘port out of this scraphole whenever she wants, sprawl around • on a beach. Why shouldn’t she look good? Wouldn’t pay any attention to you unless—”

“There’s a line, chum.” A wide cyborg caught Deadend by the elbow as he was about to climb onto platform sixteen.

“Get your heaping hooks off me, burkhead.”

He jerked free of the grip of the aluminum fingers. There were six people on the blue and green mosaic arrow which pointed at the teleport platform. “I bet you got a tin diddler.”

“I lost my arm defending our country’s honor in Brazil, you little—”

“So did a million other scrapheads.” Dodging the big man’s swing, Deadend got to the end of the line. “It’s a wonder he doesn’t have the Stars and Stripes painted on his heaping arm.”

The gray-haired woman immediately in front of him turned to smile at him over her shoulder. “I imagine your hostility is due to an unhappy home life as a child.”

“I never had a home life, granny,” Deadend told her. “And keep your eaglebeak out of my business.” Chuckling, he nodded at the small noryl suitcase she was carrying.

The suitcase leaped out of her hands, somersaulted over the level railing, and bounced to a stop near the long legs of the TA girl who’d offered to direct Deadend.

“How did you … ?” said the woman.

“Snuff yourself, you mildewed old quiff. I never touched your heaping suitcase,” Deadend said. “Now you better shake your withered old towkas and fetch it back for yourself.”

“No need, that pleasant young lady is bringing it up.”

Deadend shrugged. “I’ve got no more time

for you. I’m on my way to an important job in Manhattan.” “Perhaps it will help you.” “I don’t need anybody’s help,” Deadend said.

“Hello, the Bernard Maze residence.” “Damn it, Barney, this isn’t one of the games we used to play,” Dan said at the blank pixphone screen. Outside the seethrough booth the late afternoon desert glowed in a hundred shades of brown and gold.

“What would you like me to say, Daniel? ‘Hello, this is the insides of a government computer which is being used for unauthorized—’” “I’m in New Mexico with Liz and your protege,” said Dan, impatient. “Anything new on Janis? I’m starting to—“She’s still missing,” the FaxCentral computer

told him. “But I’ve got another lead to follow

»

up.

“What? Something more tangible than this New Mexico business?”

“That teleport unit was used to carry your Janis wherever she was carried. I’ll bet on that,” said Barney. “I know you’re anxious. This affair, though, is going to require patience and—”

“Yeah, patience while those Millennium bastards kill her.”

“Listen, Daniel, if they intended to kill Janis

they’d have done it right off. The way they’ve knocked off all their other opponents. Accidents, illnesses, suicides … quick and efficient. Janis is alive.”

“Okay, yeah, I think so too,” said Dan. “What’s this new lead?”

“Just before Janis disappeared a voxgram was sent to her at the Newz offices,” said the computer. “It came from a freelance reporter named Musante, and was sent from the Los Angeles Sector of the West States.”

“You got this from tapping the Newz files?”

“That’s just it, Daniel. I didn’t. Newz has no record of it. My copy comes from a buddy of mine at International VoxCom.”

“Why wouldn’t … never mind. What did it say?”

“It was in code, a fairly sophisticated scramble. I cracked it of course.”

“Congratulations. What did it say?”

“Musante had important new information for Janis on the Millennium bunch. He wanted her to teleport out to the Los Angeles Sector.”

Dan exhaled sharply. “Maybe that’s what she did.”

“No, Daniel. I’m afraid she was grabbed before she ever got the gram.”

“Whoa now, Barney. You mean somebody at Newz diverted the message?”

“Looks like. I’m nosing into that. Meanwhile

“We’ve got to contact this Musante guy.”

“Too late, Daniel. Musante was killed in a skytram crash late yesterday afternoon. Along with seventeen other people.”

“Jesus, they wouldn’t kill all those people just to get Musante?”

“Wouldn’t they?”

“Jesus,” repeated Dan, staring out at the bright New Mexico countryside. “Okay, so what do we do? How do we find out what Musante knew?”

“All of his notes and talkspools were taken by the Greater Los Angeles American Police Office. Stuff is still there. We’re going to get a look at it.”

“Can you tap the office?”

“None of the AP equipment has even looked at the material yet,” said Barney. “I think the local AP boys are holding it for a possible pickup by a Millenarian Brother.”

“We have to get it first.”

“Exactly,” agreed Barney. “I’ve signed up another crew member. His name is Deadend and—”

“Deadend? He doesn’t sound too reputable.”

“He’s a thief,” explained the computer. “However, I sense, having gone over his records as well as those of some hundred similarly gifted individuals, that he’s a good boy at heart.”

“A thief with a heart of gold. Honestly, Barney, you’re—”

“You’ll have to trust my judgment, Daniel.

The important thing about Deadend is he’s one of the best telekinetic thieves in the country. If it weren’t for his dreadful persona he’d be a millionaire several times over.”

“A telek, huh? He can get us all of Musante’s stuff out of the AP office.”

“He’ll be teleporting out to-the Los Angeles Sector within the hour,” said Barney. “How’s your end of the operation going?”

“We’re landriving out to Rancho Viva soon as I hang up.”

“Good luck. Remember, they probably killed seventeen extra people just to get rid of Musante.”

“No, I won’t forget,” said Dan.

Chapter 11

. . wind howled and whooped and roared along the dark beach, snatched up sand and sent it spinning across the night,”’ read the wheelchair.

“Tripe,” remarked the 106-year-old woman attached to the chair. They were parked on a sunny patio next to a huge cup-shaped sky-blue building.

“Eh?” inquired the metal and plastic tube

chair. “This book is deemed a classic, Mrs. Speegle.”

“So much baloney,” said the old woman, who was connected to the wheelchair with an intricacy of twisting wires, curling tubes. “I want you to read me that other twentieth-century author, that delightful tragic genius … what was his name?”

“Mrs. Speegle, good literature soothes your poor old nerves, whereas pulpish drivel from the past only—”

“Harlan Ellison! That’s his name. Read to me from Gentleman Junkie, you nitwit contrivance.”

“I’ll have to get authorization from the Med-Mac, Mrs. Speegle.”

“And what are you staring at, you google-eyed twerp?” The ancient woman pointed a dry yellow hand.

Professor Supermind, a neostraw derby on his head and a plyocloak over his shoulders, bowed to the 106-year-old woman. “I am in the process, dear lady, of taking a leisurely inspection stroll across the spacious acres of Rancho Viva, with the thought in the back of my mind that when I retire I’ll—”

“There are one hundred and three other acres for you to go poking into.”

“Ah, yes,” said the professor, gesturing with his derby, “but this structure looming over us happens to be the very administration building which I seek.”

“Then I suggest—”

Sput! Sput! Futz!

The chair had begun to wobble, and smoke was puffing out from under the seat.

“Summon a nurse ‘bot at once,” gasped Mrs, Speegle, clutching at the wires and tubes. “This nitwit chair is going blooey again.”

“No need for that.” Professor Supermind placed a gloved hand on the chair’s tubular back. “You will straighten yourself out. Do you understand?”

“Yes, master. I’m repairing myself right this minute.”

“Very well. Let’s not have this happen again.” As the smoke scattered away in the late afternoon air the professor tipped his new hat and walked away from the couple.

“Wait, you twerp,” called Mrs. Speegle. “How did you do …”

Professor Supermind walked up to the escaramp which led into the main administration building of Rancho Viva. The tinted neoglass doors opened for him. The reception lobby was thick with robots, semihuman and servo, most of them bolted to the floor.

“Welcome to the Administration Wing of comfortable and palatial Rancho Viva,” greeted the ball-headed robot nearest the door. “State your business.”

The professor scanned the area. Two other humans, both residents from their doddering,

mechanically augmented appearance, were all he spotted.

“State your business,” the robot doorman said again, louder, less cordial.

“A quite important errand brings me to this sun-drenched paradise.” Professor Supermind tucked his neostraw beneath his arm. “You will do nothing to hinder me. Do you understand?” He had begun the hypnotizing process, eyes holding the robot.

“Yes, master.”

Running his tongue over his desert-dried lips, the old man continued, “I want to get to Section Four. How many more of these machines have to pass me?”

“Three, master. Once I alert them to the fact of your mission and its legitimacy. You’ll have to show your ID packet to the Security Desk. See him across the way there, red with blue trim? He’ll pass you to the corridor guard, who has to finger-and voice-print you. Then you’ll have to show your Roaming Pass to the guard in front of the entry to Section Four.”

“Where do I acquire this pass?”

“Here it is, master.” A rectangle of crisp yellow plyopape popped out of a slot in the machine’s chest. “I’ve taken the liberty of answering the purpose of visit line with the words urgent & confidential. Most of our government visitors use that phrase.” “Have a good many government visitors, do you?”

“Yes, it must be the climate.”

“Any of them drop in on you today?”

“Not a one, master, sir.”

Professor Supermind took his pass, wended his way through the administration building system. In under ten minutes he was inside Section Four. More corridors, all a quiet gray. He moved carefully along, alert for any new machines which might challenge him.

“Appears to be another triumph for Professor Supermind,” he muttered to himself.

According to the sketches Bernard Maze’s young associate had shown him, tbe secret entrance to the underground factory was in the room on the other side of this green door he was approaching. “Open up,” Supermind told the door, resting a hand against it.

The door complied, sliding silently out of his way.

A guard robot, large and gunmetal color, stood against the far wall. “Credentials, permits, password of the day.”

Professor Supermind, eyes narrowing, walked up to the guard. “Listen to me, my friend.”

“I must have a password within thirty seconds or—”

“Hear me, I am in complete control of you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand.” “Splendid. Open up the wall then, I wish to see this factory of yours.”

“As you command.” The robot’s dark arm tapped the metal wall.

A large section of it swung inward.

“You’ll remain my servant until I am safely away from here. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

Nothing but robots on the other side of the wall. They were working in seethrough neoglass rooms, bent over gleaming white benches and sparkling silver machines. A dozen different kinds of mechanical hummings. Very sophisticated work mechanisms, but not programmed to notice intruders.

Professor Supermind whistled, tongue against his upper teeth. Two more corridors and he’d—

“Hey, what the devil are you doing here?”

A man, a large young man reaching a blaster pistol from under his coat, had come around a bend. Not an android, a human.

“When did you get here?” the professor asked him.

“Yesterday, if it’s any of your business.”

“Ah, yesterday. I should have thought to ask about that,” said Supermind.

Chapter 12

“Porn Tours! Porn Tours!” shouted the sunny-faced blond girls, waving their pompoms and megaphones exuberantly. “See a porno being produced, witness incredible scenes of the vilest kind of physical degradation! Still only fifty bucks! Still only fifty bucks!”

There were five of them, all pretty and young and tan and naturally blond, circling the exit of the teleport depot.

“See the homes of the top porno stars! See how they live in savage splendor, committing vile acts in the broadest daylight! Take the Greater Los Angeles Skytram Porno Tour now!”

Deadend shouldered his way through the pretty girls. “Snuff yourselves.”

“Crump in your lid,” suggested one of the girls, giving him a whack in the crotch with the stick end of her pompom.

Deadend, when he’d recovered somewhat, chuckled. “Just like I figured,” he said. “Every quiff is a bimbo underneath. Sweet on the outside, rotten inside.” His eyes continued to water even after his groin ceased to ache. There was, the curly-haired young man noticed, something brown swirling through the streets of Greater Los Angeles.

“Smogmasks! Smogmasks!” offered a sidewalk vending machine.

“Is that what that scrap is?” Coughing, Deadend eyed the squat machine. He thought about a smogmask and one appeared in his hand. Putting it on, he continued along the ground-level walkway. “Never noticed, burkheaded bastard.”

He’d covered a block when he was hailed again. “Hey, gringo, how’d you like some fun?” A smiling Mexican boy of sixteen was leaning against a coin-operated church, beckoning to Deadend.

He went over to the boy. “Hey, scraphead, how’d you peg me as a tourist?”

“The mask, gringo. Nobody but a turista would wear one.”

“You local bastards actually breathe this shit?”

“Get used to it. How’d you like to have your way with any one, or the whole batch, of those blondies back there?”

“How much?”

“One hundred dollars each, or only four hundred for the whole set. Can’t go wrong at these prices, gringo.”

Chuckling, Deadend pulled off his smogmask. “I figured they were available, but not so cheap.”

“Hard times hereabouts. We’re slashing prices on everything. For instance, if you rather have a handsome young—”

“Snuff yourself.” Deadend resumed his journey. The thick, mud-colored smog made him cough and sneeze.

The American Police Office was a ten-story building on stilts. You had to climb up a special walkramp to reach the entrance, which was a hundred feet up from the ground. In the shadowy rectangle below the stilt building, vendors and peddlers were doing business.

Deadend went, casually, over to a soydog wagon. “A dog with everything,” he told the one-armed vendor.

“You want that to include sweet and sour kelp and antibiotic sauce?”

“Everything means everything.”

“Some people don’t care for the antibiotic sauce, even though the government suggests our soydoggies may be dangerous to your health without it,” explained the vendor while preparing the soydog. “I imagine you’re curious as to how and where I lost my arm.”

“In Brazil defending your country’s honor.” Deadend grabbed the soydog out of the man’s only hand, tossed a dollar on the tacky food-wagon top and walked off. He took up a position near one of the thick police building stilts.

Some telekinetic thieves had to see the object they were going to steal before they could teleport it. Deadend didn’t. All he had to do, he wasn’t sure why, was to get in the vicinity and think about what he was after. Inside his head would come a picture. Then he concentrated, willed the thing to move.

“A talent like that and look at you,” he said. “Down here breathing smog with a bunch of scrapheads.”

Suddenly Deadend scowled. He tossed the untasted soydog toward a dispozehole and ran out of the shadows of the American Police building.

“Yeah, there he is.” Deadend squinted up, shading his eyes with one hand.

A tall, deeply tanned man of forty was coming out thrrough the front doors of the AP headquarters. His two-piece off white cazsuit glowed faintly in the drifting smog. In his right hand he carried a bright red suitcase.

“The scrap I want’s in that suitcase,” Deadend said.

With long strides the man went walking away along the ramp.

“Shall I grab the stuff now,” Deadend asked himself, “or follow this guy?”

He thought a few seconds before running to the walkramp approach. “Follow,” he decided.

Tin Lizzie’s metal fingers tapped on the gallery railing, and she glanced around once more. “He’s taking a blessed long time.”

“Yep,” agreed Dan, still pretending to be watching the model home interiors spread out below them. “Maybe we ought to think about getting ourselves clear of Rancho Viva.”

The girl pressed her flesh hand to her breasts. “No, he’s all right,” she said. “I’m getting a … a hunch. We’ll wait.”

“… call your attention now to the many exclusive features of the model C duplex villa,” continued the voice out of the dangling ceiling speaker. Another of the models below was now illuminated. “Notice the specially designed closets to accommodate your prosthetic devices, large and roomy. You’ll note immediately inside the spacious entry hall a cut-away section which shows you the exclusive Rancho Viva floor alarm system. If you fall over at any time the system alerts at once the MedMac center and …”

“You’d like that, Virgil,” said one of the women who was taking the tour. “You’re always landing on your keaster.”

“Invasion of privacy,” said Virgil, who was about 60 per cent mechanical. “Man’s got a right to take a nosedive and not have a bunch of Tbots and andies come snooping around.”

“Yes, but something like this would have saved Uncle Oscar. Remember how he plopped over and nobody knew about it for weeks?”

“Who wanted to save Uncle Oscar?”

. . plenty of room to accommodate your portable kidney machines or …”

“Ahum.” Professor Supermind was among them, fluttering his neostraw hat so it tapped at his head. “I suggest we make haste to the teleport depot.”

“You got the information?” Dan whispered.

“I did.” The old man gave a quick nod at the nearest exit ramp. “And also had an encounter with a young fellow who apparently works for some clandestine branch of this government of ours.” He took both of them by the arm, hurrying them off.

Lizzie said, “So there were human workers there.”

“This was a visitor,” Professor Supermind said. “He was planning to do me bodily harm with a blaster.”

“You can’t hypnotize people, too, can you?”

the girl asked as they moved down toward an out doorway.

“No, but fortunately I can control any mechanism that was ever born. I ordered a pair of the worker robots to take a moment off and deck the young man. They did an excellent job, he’ll be unconscious for a bit yet. To be on the safe side, however—”

“Okay, we’ll get away from here,” said Dan. They were out in the diminishing day. “Now what about those teleport units? You found the records?”

Professor Supermind kept up with them as they hurried toward the Rancho Viva parking area. “The unit in question, as well as several in the same number sequence, was delivered to Alden Dormacker two weeks ago. Quite secretly of course.”

Dan, about to open the door of their landcar, stopped. “Alden Dormacker? The ex-president of the United States?”

“The same,” answered Professor Supermind.

Chapter 13

“He’ll have to die,” said Adam McAdam. The handsome Newz editor was pacing his living room area, eyes on the ten news screens over the imitation fireplace.

“Always the simplest answer.” The large man in the blue sling-chair held a traveling case on his lap. “You should have done it in Boston.”

“I didn’t think he’d be this persistent. Some

of Jannygirl’s other friends we’ve been able to discourage with a beating.”

“Kill him.” The big man’s name was Grosset and he’d teleported in from Washington, D.C., less than a half hour ago. “We know where he • y>

is.

“France isn’t going to last.” McAdam had halted beneath one of the jabbering picture screens. “We’ll be acting even sooner than expected.”

“Yeah?” Grosset put his flesh fingers—only his left hand was real—into the print-lock of his case. “I thought President Hibbler and the CIM had the date firmly fixed?”

“Hibbler and the Committee to Implement the Millennium don’t know all … it can be settled later. Your first concern is getting rid of Dan Farleigh.”

While taking a new hand out of his case, Grosset grinned at McAdam. “How come you know more than Hibbler and the CIM? Isn’t Hibbler going to be Emp—”

“No matter who becomes what, Grosset, you’re still a man hired to do a specific type of work. At the moment your job is Farleigh.”

Grosset replaced his metal right hand with a new one. “Like this one? Looks ordinary, but I’ve got two laser pistols built into the fingers. Can you guess which?”

McAdam’s attention had returned to the news screens. “What? No, that’s not subtle enough. I

want Farleigh to have an accident,” he said. “An accident which will also take care of these people he’s traveling with. Tin Lizzie and Professor Supermind. What a pair they sound like.”

“You know,” said Grosset, stroking his metal fingers, “you could have avoided all this extra killing, which is going to be damn expensive, if you’d been rational about the girl. We should have killed her the minute you realized she was getting too close to—”

“Jarmy-girl isn’t going to be harmed!” Mc-Adam told him. “Not in any way. If you suggest it again—”

“Fond of her, huh? That’s what fouls everybody up, getting emotional about people.” He detached his laser-hand, dropped it in the case, and frowned over his next selection.

“Yes, I am fond of Janis Trummond,” said the Newz editor. “After the Brotherhood is in control I’ll see to it that she …” He left the sentence unfinished.

“I’ll attach the stun-hand for now,” decided Grosset, taking another artificial hand from the case. “It’s a mistake to think you can change somebody’s mind. Can’t be done.”

“Certainly it can,” McAdam said. “If not by logic and reason, then by force and technical means.”

“I’m always suspicious of that kind of conversion. Easier to get rid of people who don’t agree with you.” He closed the case and dropped it to

the floor, folded his real and his mechanical fingers together. “I guess, though, you have something else in mind for this girl. What does President Hibbler say about it?”

“You’d better watch yourself, Grosset.” Mc-Adam’s face became less handsome for a moment. “I’m wondering if you have a serious enough attitude toward what the Brotherhood is going to do.”

“I’m a mercenary, remember?” the big man reminded. “It doesn’t matter who runs the country, I can work for them. There’s always a demand for killing, no matter who’s sitting on the throne.”

“You really don’t understand what’s going on all around you, do you?” McAdam jabbed a finger in the direction of the news screens. “The whole world is falling to pieces, these are the worst times civilization has known in centuries. There’s a moment coming, coming soon, when someone can put it all back together. Not back into separate entities again but into one empire. An empire which will last a thousand years. We’re the ones who can do it, Grosset, the United States.”

“Oh, is that who’s going to do it? I didn’t realize the Millenarian Brotherhood and the U.S.A. were one and the same.”

“We’ve got enough people on our side to make it work, make it work a hell of a lot better than anything else around. We’ve got President Hib bler and some of his cabinet. We’ve got enough

Pentagon people to give us control of the military.

“And the Senate and the House won’t be asked to vote on it.”

“Not everyone sees the world situation as we do, which is one reason we formed the Brotherhood in the first place. As you said, it’s often easier to eliminate your more powerful opponents. The weaker ones can be ignored and overridden.”

Nodding slowly, Grosset grunted up out of his chair. “I’ll be getting,” he said, “out West.”

“An accident taking them all out together would be best.”

“You sure it’s only these three we have to worry about?”

McAdam said, “I’m trying to find out who else may be involved. When I called Farleigh at his FaxCentral job I was told he was elsewhere in the building and couldn’t take the call. So obviously someone there is covering for him, hiding the fact he’s taken off on the trail of Jannygirl.”

“Could be somebody who knows as much as he does.”

“Yes, that’s possible,” said McAdam. “In which case you’ll have another job to do.”

“Holy scrap!” exclaimed Deadend.

Peter the Hermit had appeared, a large neo-canvas sack slung over his shoulder, in the twilight on the other side of the resort pool. The inn’s glowing Manzana Lodge sign tinted the tall, gaunt old man’s flowing hair and whiskers.

Deadend remained with one elbow resting on the robot bar, sucking at his beer-pouch. “Now this old burker has the stuff,” he said to himself, sensing what was in the sack. “In fact … it’s the same guy. Yeah, that younger bastard I trailed out here is underneath those hermit trimmings.”

Staff tapping on the tiles which bordered tire pool, Peter the Hermit walked toward the iron-grill exit gate of the desert lodge’s courtyard. “Very little time left,” he warned the scattering of guests. “Doomsday moves a day closer with each sunset.”

“This old fart is supposed to love taking long hikes across the sand,” Deadend was thinking. “Going to be tough trying to tail him on foot.” He, very casually, finished his beer and flipped the collapsed pouch into the waste-slot at the front of the bar.

Peter the Hermit was nearly across the gritty-landing yard when Deadend got out there. The curly-haired young man strolled to the skycar he’d rented to follow his prey from Los Angeles.

The car recognized him, unlocked, flipped the door open and said, “Where to now, boss?”

Deadend slid inside, narrowed his eyes to watch the retreating hermit. “Looks like he is going to walk it, at least for a while. Okay, but I can always pick him up, long as he’s lugging that sack.”

“Have you decided on a destination, boss?”

“We’ll sit here for a while,” Deadend told the car.

One skyrocket rose straight up across the sky. Then another, and a third. They exploded simultaneously to splash the night blackness with red, white, and blue stars. In the glowing white band pavilion the nineteen-piece robot band commenced playing “Hail to the Chief.” Three more rockets, another three, and then three more sparkled up and burst into color.

“A difficult place to sneak up on,” observed Professor Supermind as he took off his hat for the passing of the flag,

“They can’t possibly be holding her here, can they?” said Tin Lizzie, her right arm reflecting all the star-spangled glitter.

“Sure, they can,” said Dan. “It’d be audacious, but sure as hell possible.”

Beyond this park area, where several hundred people were gathered, rose a stone wall. Floating above the high wall, spelled out in six-foot- high letters of red, white, and blue, were the words PRESIDENTIAL ESTATE PARK. Smaller words announced VISITORS WELCOME.

A hot-air balloon with a wicker gondola dangling underneath went ticking overhead. A border of lightstrips illuminated the man who rode in the basket with a talkstick in his hand. “This is your last chance of the day to tour the impressive estate of our greatest living ex-president, Alden Dormacker. Only twenty dollars per person, kids half price, for the final tour. Please make haste to the ticket fines.”

Another salvo of rockets went screaming up into the newly dark sky.

“Hey, you assholes,” complained the balloon man, “you’re going to deflate me. Watch it!”

There were already a hundred or more people ahead of Dan and Tin Lizzie and Professor Supermind in the ticket line they chose.

“Am I correct in assuming,” asked the professor, “we can put this all on Bernard Maze’s tab?”

“I’ve got enough to cover expenses, any kind of expenses.” Dan was getting cold, odd pains in his stomach. He was starting to feel Janis wasn’t here. “When we’re inside, we’ll have to figure out some way of getting free of the other visitors. So we can search around.”

“Professor Supermind can take care of any mechanical guards we may encounter,” the old man assured them.

“Ex-President Dormacker souvenirs! Ex-President Dormacker souvenirs!” offered an enormous old woman who sat near the ticket booths. She had a left arm and a right leg made of copper. “Buy yourself a copy of My Seven Fiascos, which the Washington Post-Star called, ‘a thoroughgoing piece of blackguardism.’ Or grab the bestselling sequel A Few More Fiascos. Get a framed, framed in real Asian bamboo, copy of the incriminating motel photo which caused Dormacker to resign. Buy a whoopie cushion with Dormacker’s tearful farewell to the White House inscribed on it. Buy … hey, don’t let your handicap get you down, sis.” The old vendor was grinning at Lizzie. “I’ve had the fake arm since I was six, but it didn’t keep me from getting ahead.”

“Thank you for the encouragement,” said Lizzie.

“Let’s keep moving,” urged Dan as the ticket line made another surge ahead.

“We got Dormacker sheets and pillowslips,” the cyborg old woman shouted. “We got additive shakers of the old boy and his notorious veep.”

The estate of the former president covered nearly a hundred acres of what had once been San Diego. Inside the stone wall were vast gardens and orchards, real grass, real flowers, real trees. The house itself, illuminated on the outside with floating lightglobes, resembled a castle. There were turrets and towers and slanting tiled roofs.

“Stay within … up … within … up …

within,” a robot guard was stammering at the edge of the path leading toward the enormous presidential mansion.

Professor Supermind tapped it on the chest. “Get ahold of yourself, lad.”

“Stay within the path borders,” said the robot. “A force screen protects the lawns and grass. The shock of hitting it may prove fatal to those in delicate health.”

“You’ll have to get some of those screens turned off,” Dan told the old professor.

“Why? I’m in robust physical condition. One of the advantages, I might almost say one of the few advantages, of touring with the Kaminsky Brothers Robot Circus was that I was able to get a good deal of outdoor exercise while—”

“Even if it doesn’t kill us, it might stun us,” said Dan. “An alarm might go off anytime someone strays, too.”

“Ah, yes, you may be right.” Supermind doffed his hat, spun it around on his fingertips for a moment. “We’re going to have to get within Dormacker’s fortress itself.”

“Yeah, to find out who took delivery of those teleport units and what was done with them.”

“Oops.” Tin Lizzie stopped, brought her real hand up to her mouth.

“What?” asked Dan.

“Trouble. We’re going to have trouble.” The girl glanced anxiously around.

“What kind of—”

“It’s himl” cried someone in the crowd of visitors.

“No, can’t be.” It is.

“I heard he comes and mingles sometimes.”

“It’s him. It’s President Dormacker.”

“Ex-President.”

“He doesn’t look as well as he does in the motel pictures.”

“That was ten years ago.”

It was the former president of the United States, rolling toward them on his electric golfcart. His white hair as thick and unruly as it had been when he was in office, his small simian face more wrinkled and weather-burned.

Five large men stepped out from the shadows of various real trees, through the force screens and onto the path.

“Congratulations,” said the little ex-president. “You are the one millionth visitor of the year, young man. As such you’re being invited to dinner at the presidential table.”

“Ex-presidential,” corrected one of the tourists.

Alden Dormacker had wheeled to a stop directly beside Dan. He was grinning up at him. “You and your friends are invited,” he added.

“Well, that’s certainly a nice thought, sir. I don’t really know, though, if we can accept. We had a late lunch for—”

“Come along,” said Dormacker in a lower voice, “or these five goons will shoot you down where you stand.”

Chapter 15

Daylight came and birds began to sing. Strange birds, bright scarlet and brilliant yellow and green, which she still wasn’t used to. They sang and cried and called out in the thick jungle which walled her in. The birds and the jungle were on the other side of the oneway seethrough wall of the room Janis was kept in.

It was a large room, with sleeping alcove, a bath alcove, and a game and recreation pit.

Janis was sitting on the rim of the pit, watching the jungle brightening and coming alive.

“Surprisingly enough another day has dawned.” A wall panel had slid open to admit a middle-sized middle-aged Chinese in a two-piece fatiguesuit. “Thus I’m obliged to serve you another hot nourishing breakfast.”

“The world isn’t going to end right yet,” Janis said.

“The world as we know it.” He crossed, stomped twice on a patch of floor near the pit. A table rose up and he placed her breakfast tray on it. “The nations of the world are falling apart, people are dying. There are plagues and violence everywhere. All the signs.”

“All the signs of business as usual.” She didn’t go near the breakfast.

“This is a special year, a special time,” the Chinese said. “Very soon a force will rise to sweep away the last of the old. Then we’re going to have a thousand years of peace and plenty. Those who’ve chosen wisely, been loyal to the right causes, will have everything they wish. Everything.”

“How many of those thousand years are you planning to live through?”

“Perhaps,” he said while guiding a chair up to the table, “once the Emperor of the Last Days is ruling his world empire there will be no death.”

“Is that what they’re telling you? That’s some campaign promise.”

“You, I happen to know, can have a very satisfying life when the new world begins.”

Arms folded, foot swinging, Janis said, “Oh, really? You mean the Emperor has something in mind for me beyond an accidental death?”

“You need never die.” The Chinese backed to the wall. “If you make the right decisions.” He left her.

The girl watched the wall, then the jungle once again. Then she looked down at the large vidset in the pit. On the floating table next to it sat a large, partly spilled, plyosack of slugs to use in the SlugSis set. A program catalog was steepled next to the scatter of slugs.

Someone was trying to make this seem more like a vacation than a captivity. There’d been no violence since she awakened here in this room with the jungle all around her. The Chinese who brought her meals was the only person Janis saw. There’d been no torture, only the most veiled of threats.

“So they’re softening me up for something. But what?”

Down in the six-foot-deep pit the vidset buzzed and a picture blossomed on the screen. A pixphone call was being patched in. “Jannygirl?”

“Adam?” She hurried down the ramp. Yes, there was the handsome head of her Newz boss

on the large rectangular screen. “How’d you know I—”

“Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, I don’t sleep all that much. Adam, can you get me …” Then she realized. “No, you can’t. You’re in with them.”

“Time for a nice long talk, Jannygirl,” Me-Adam said. “I’ll explain why you’re there and why—”

“Where am I, by the way? My jailer isn’t telling.”

“Out of harm’s way,” he told her. “You were getting too close, Jannygirl. Events are moving much faster than we’d originally anticipated. Soon, very soon we—”

“Why haven’t they killed me?”

“Because I gave orders against it.”

“Oh … then you’re not just a low-rung toady, Adam? You’re a big man in the Brotherhood.”

“Obviously, Jannygirl, I’d have a high position in whatever I went into. A good deal higher in this case than you may realize.”

“If you don’t kill me I’m going to break the story eventually.”

“In a few weeks it won’t matter.”

“You figure to keep me here, wherever this is, for weeks?”

McAdam nodded. “As long as need be,” he said. “At least until you agree to come over to our side.”

The girl laughed. “You’re as goofy as Peter the Hermit.”

“Eventually, Jannygirl, you’ll come to realize—”

“What about the Ombudsman Foundation, Adam? They’re going to tumble to you.”

“I am the Ombudsman Foundation,” he said, smiling at her out of the screen. “I’m not likely to cause myself any trouble.”

“I see. Well . . ,” She lifted her hands, dropped them to her knees.

“You can stop counting on your friend Farleigh, too.”

“Dan? mat did you—”

“Dan Farleigh isn’t going to be able to help you, Jannygirl.”

She put her hands on the sides of the set. “What did you do to him, Adam?”

“Doing is the right word. We’re arranging an accident for him and his friends at this very moment.”

“He doesn’t know anything,” Janis said. “Adam, leave him alone and I’ll agree—•”

“He dies no matter what you decide. He’s not part of any bargain.” The screen went black.

The former president said, “Wait a moment, Grosset.”

“Speeches,” said the big cyborg, “that’s all I get from one coast to the other.” He scratched, impatiently, at the fingers of his stungun-hand.

They were gathered on a foggy field deep within the Dormacker estate. It was a few minutes beyond 2 A.M. The old skycab was beaded with mist.

Dan, Lizzie, and the old professor were lined up at the side of the cab. Seven of the ex-president’s personal guards were ringing the area.

Grosset and Dormacker stood inside the circle, facing Dan.

“The stream of history flows only in one direction,” the ex-president said. “We are about to see one system, many systems actually, swept away. A new and better system will replace them all, a more sensible system which takes into account the basic inferiority of most—”

“The bomb’s going to go off while we’re still standing around,” said Grosset.

The aged ex-president sighed. “There’s never enough time for philosophy,” he said. “Very well, Grosset. Get them loaded into the thing.”

“Stand by,” Lizzie whispered to Dan.

When Grosset stood between her and the circle of guards, the girl dived straight at him.

“Oof.” Grosset went stumbling backward, Lizzie’s blond head ramming into his middle.

“In here.” Dan grabbed Professor Supermind’s arm, dragged him toward the skycab’s open door. “Maybe we can all three—”

Ex-President Dormacker’s golfcart began to hum.

Two thin beams of light shot out of it. One hit Dan in the chest. He stumbled, chopped to the real grass, passed out.

“I am your master. You will obey me,” a familiar voice was saying. “You will land at once.”

“I hear, I obey.”

Dan sucked in a breath, opening gritty eyes. The skycab was dropping down through the night.

“You will land on that strip of beach I can see on the scanner,” Professor Supermind instructed the ship’s robot controls.

“It shall be so, master.”

Dan said, “Boy … what … what did that old bastard use on us?”

“New type of stunbeam, I imagine,” said the old professor. “Fortunately I was not as deeply affected as you. And, since our captors knew little of Professor Supermind’s fabled abilities, they didn’t take any precautions against my hypnotizing this skycab once I awakened.”

“Liz? Where is she?”

“Tied to the passenger seat behind you.”

Dan noticed he, too, was strapped and roped to his chair. “Hey, what about the bomb they planted in this cab?”

“It’s not due to go off for another half hour,” said Supermind. “I’ll turn my attention to it in a moment, once I get this crate landed.”

Dan got his eyes focused on the dash clock. It read three-fifteen. “We really don’t know when it’s set to blow, Dormacker and that big guy could have been—”

“No need for them to con us, lad. They assumed we were all going to fly to Mexico and our deaths.”

“Be better,” Dan said, “to land near people, or a police—”

“We don’t know whose side the police hereabouts may be on,” Professor Supermind reminded him. “If I understand the briefing given me by the estimable Bernard Maze, this particular conspiracy involves a great many official organizations, including the American Police.”

“Yeah, I forgot. I’m still living somewhat on last week’s habit patterns, when I trusted people more than I do now.”

The cab hit the gritty night beach gently. “Here we are, master.”

“What the heck did they do to you?” Lizzie had revived as the ship landed.

Dan twisted, got a glimpse of her. “New kind of stunbeam. How’d they take you out?”

“The big fellow had a stungun built right into his blessed hand. Why are we landing here?”

“Professor Supermind has the situation under control,” announced the professor.

“What about the bomb?”

“My thoughts are now turning to that.”

The girl pushed against the straps which held her to her chair. “I’ll try to bust free. Just in case. How much time we got?”

“About twenty-five minutes,” said Dan.

Professor Supermind asked the cab, “Where is that bomb attached?” “Beg pardon, master?”

“They stuck a timed bomb into your works somewhere.”

“A bomb, huh? That’s news to me. I’ll have to run a check, master.”

“Get this thing to set us down around some people,” urged Dan. “Otherwise—”

Bam! WliamI

The skycab rocked from side to side.

A huge circle of light formed and swiftly faded out over the black ocean.

Tin Lizzie asked, “What the dickens was that?”

“That was the burking bomb,” replied a voice out on the beach. “What happened over there would’ve happened right under you if I hadn’t come along.”

“Nonsense, there’s not a mechanism on this earth I can’t—”

“Snuff you. It took my—”

“Get the door open, professor,” Dan suggested.

“Do we want that cheeky young—”

“Yeah, we want him to get us detached from these damn seats.”

“Very well. Open the portal.”

“It is done, master.”

Deadend had his curly head tilted far over and was brushing sand out of it. “They talk so scrapping much about what fun beaches are. That’s a load of scrap. I’m sandy all over from—”

“How did you dispose of the bomb, young man?”

“I moved it.”

Dan said, “You must be Deadend.”

Before climbing up into the cabin Deadend tossed a sack in. “Yeah, I work for this Bernard Maze, same as you,” he said. “I been following Pete the Hermit all day, which is how I got to the old fart’s estate in time to spot them stuffing you in this cab and hooking up the bomb. I got back to my skycar and followed you. If you hadn’t set down pretty soon I was going to move the bomb out in flight. Maze probably doesn’t want you exploding.”

“How were you,” asked Lizzie, “able to get around the Presidential Estate Park without being caught?”

“Well, I’m best at moving things, but sometimes^ for short distances, I can move myself.” He gave the sack a kick. “Now let me tell you what I got in this burking bag.”

Chapter 17

A robot dog commenced barking.

Maxwell Columbus jumped up from behind his desk. He rushed to a window of his tower and scanned the circle of clearing below. “There’s somebody,” he said.

A slim black woman was coming up the trail through the forest. There was a briefcase under her arm.

“It’s the girl Bernard Maze phoned you

about,” said Columbus’ secretary, a husky young man with a stungun tucked in his belt.

“Mrs. Tucker? I never heard of her. On top of that we can’t find out anything about Bernard Maze.”

“We found out he’s wealthy,” said the secretary. “We can’t link him up with the Administration or the Brotherhood.”

Columbus fisted his wide stomach, watching the slim woman cross the clearing. “I’m the highest-ranking Third Party official left alive,” he said, puffing. “I run the only independent television news network in the country. It’s a wonder they haven’t tried to kill me before now.”

“They have,” the secretary reminded. “We’ve always stopped them.”

“Visitor entering Foyer A,” announced a talk-box on Columbus’ desk. After a moment the box added, “Cleared. Moving on to Foyer B.”

“That means no concealed weapons or explosives,” said the secretary.

“All that gear down there is fallible.”

“Hasn’t been so far.”

“Today could be the day. She could have a gun strapped to her thigh.”

“Doubtful. Not with that short skirt.”

“Cleared. Rising in Elevator Two.”

“Meet her,” ordered Columbus. “Take the briefcase away from her.”

The secretary trotted off down a corridor.

“Mrs. Tucker? I’m Bo Strathmore, Max Columbus’ private secretary.”

“Yes, I noticed the gun. I’m employed by Mr. Bernard Maze of Manhattan.”

“Sit over there,” Columbus told the pretty Negro girl when she appeared in the room. “Way over there.” He indicated a floating tin chair near the farthest window. “Mr. Maze claimed to have, during our phone conversation, information of considerable importance. Can you tell me, Mrs. Tucker, what he looks like? He blanked himself for our conversation.”

“I’ve never seen Mr. Maze,” she answered. “He hired me quite recently because of one of my knacks.”

“Which knack?”

“I can scan a good deal of material in a very short time, then make a concise report on it.”

“A computer can do that,” said Columbus.

“So Mr. Maze mentioned. He believes, however, you would be more convinced by a human being.”

“I don’t quite trust machines, no,” admitted Columbus.

“So Mr. Maze has heard.”

Strathmore placed the briefcase on his own desk, started to open it. “This report of Mrs. Tucker’s—

“Careful with that.” Columbus flinched, bringing a hand up to his face.

“Been checked out,” said the secretary.

Mrs. Tucker smiled. “We’re on your side, Mr. Columbus. Mr. Maze would like the information we’ve gathered to be brought to the attention of the public. You are his chief hope.”

Columbus approached, gingerly, the now open case. “This has to do with the Millenarian Brotherhood?”

“It has to do mainly with how the Brotherhood is being financed, that is by money siphoned off by the present administration.”

“Yeah?” Strathmore poked a finger at the bundle of papers.

“You’ll find a detailed, yet concise, account of how funds have been diverted over the past two years, Mr. Columbus, out of various governmental agencies, such as the American Police, the National Security Office, the Committee of One Hundred.”

“Then President Hibbler really does believe this crap people like Peter the Hermit are spouting?” Columbus picked up the report.

“Peter the Hermit is actually West Coast Secretary of Security, Benson Askew,” said Mrs. Tucker, smiling.

Columbus was flipping through the pages. “This stuff you quote … it’s all from the most classified kind of files. How did Bernard Maze get hold of it?”

“I infer Mr. Maze has considerable connections.”

“Can we get copies of the original source material?”

“They’re on their way here in a special security skycar,” Mrs. Tucker said. “Apparently no one yet knows we have what we have.”

“They’re going to,” promised Columbus. “I’ll get this to our studios down in San Francisco and we’ll, as soon as it’s checked out, start broadcasting—”

“Mr. Maze requests that you wait another day.”

“Why?”

“There are,” she explained, “a few more loose ends to be tied up.”

The president of the United States turned his head another inch to the right. “This is my best angle for the hidden camera over there,” he said.

“Will you pay attention to this memo?” asked Harold Prize, the Secretary of State.

President Hibbler said, “You’re part of history too, Hal. We’re all being preserved on film. Imagine how valuable these day-to-day visual accounts of my term in office will be to futur—”

“There’s trouble out West.” Prize rubbed at his spiky moustache. “Forget about posterity. Look what Ben Askew says.”

The president was a thick, broad man, a shade

under six feet. He was standing with his right hip against his oval desk. Before reaching for the memo, he checked his position again. ” ‘The jig’s up!’” he read. “Why haven’t you decoded this for me, Hal?”

“It is decoded.”

President Hibbler sagged. “Ben’s usually so optimistic, a complete contrast to that Peter the Hermit act he puts on as a diversionary dodge. Why’s he so glum all of a sudden?”

“Read on.”

““All the Musante material stolen mysteriously … Farleigh and cohorts not dead … rumors of media leaks … ‘ Why haven’t I heard these rumors?”

“I’m trying to confirm them,” answered the Secretary of State. “But the Office of Clandestine Budgeting does suspect a leak.”

“A leak? You mean, Hal, somebody who’s not in the Brotherhood knows what we’ve really been doing with the budget money?”

“I’m probing the situation.”

“We’ve got enough people on our side, haven’t we? Key people. People who realize it’s all up with the world, that it’s time for a man of infinite power and—”

“Enough people if we can bring off the coup on schedule,” said Prize. “We’re not ready to move yet, if—”

“No, Hal, I don’t think we need worry. This 128

isn’t your usual covert operation. This is … fate.”

“If too much gets out now, fate may change its course. A lot of people who are on our side now, may decide they’re not.”

“Not very likely, Hal,” insisted President Hibbler. “I’m meant to be Emperor of the whole setup. I’ve felt that for years. Emperor Hibbler. You can’t stop something like that from happening with a little bad press. The whole course of history has been moving toward this point.” He moved into range of another concealed office camera. “A great many intelligent people, don’t forget, agree with me. Take Adam McAdam, for example. He and I have had many a convers—”

“That’s another thing.”

“What’s another thing?”

“We can’t locate McAdam,” said the Secretary of State.

Chapter 18

The long white beach was strewn with waiters. They lay partially buried in sand, rusty, crusted with salt, garlanded with iodine-brown twists of seaweed. A few ailing gulls walked among them at the hissing edge of the surf. Round white tables were toppled and upended, mixed with the fallen android waiters. Once-bright umbrellas hung tattered on bent and broken poles. Huge man-high light-letters, long since gone out, were scattered along the morning beach and almost managed to spell out Puerto Paraiso Resort Skytel.

A smutty seagull hopped up onto the chest of one of the abandoned waiters, pecked at his plastic eyes.

“Something could be done with these lads,” Professor Supermind observed from the vast ruined terrace where they were gathered. He was relaxing in a chair he’d repaired, his legs crossed, hands locked behind his head, rim of his neostraw derby tilted to shade his eyes. “I could go among them, savior-like, bidding each one to rise up and walk.”

“Big scrapping deal,” said Deadend. “All you’d have for yourself then is an army of surly waiters.”

“You don’t seem to understand what it is to have a calling.”

“Like scrap I don’t. I’ve got a gift too, and its a—

“Here’s something.” Dan tapped at one of the talkwriter transcripts he’d been reading through.

Tin Lizzie looked up from the talkspool she was monitoring on the player Deadend had acquired for her. “About where Janis is?”

“It may be,” he answered, fingertips following a passage. “Musante says he traced a shipment of experimental teleport units. They came, he thought, from the Southwest somewhere. They were delivered to Dormacker, then taken out of the country.”

“To where?”

“To Rio2. That was a little over a week ago, so they must be the same units used by the guys who took Janis.”

Professor Supermind said, “A possibility, not a certainty.”

“I think they are.” Dan stood. “The guy in Rio2 who got the units is named Ambos. He’s got to know something about Janis, about where she is.”

“She could,” the old professor said, “still be in Dormacker’s domain.”

“No, I don’t get that feeling.” Dan shook his head.

“Ah, indeed? Are you developing psychic powers, lad?”

Tin Lizzie nodded, causing the single blond braid to whip at one shoulder and then the other. “I agree with Dan,” she told them. “True, most of my hunches are about bad things coming, but I don’t think Janis is at the park estate either.”

“What the snuif,” said Deadend. “Let’s go to Rio2. Mazell pay for it, won’t he?”

“Money isn’t the consideration,” said the old professor. “We don’t want to go on a fool’s errand, a snipe hunt, a wild—”

“We’re going to Rio2,” Dan said.

“Moving on is a good idea,” said Deadend. “Those burkers have found out by now you didn’t explode. They’re going to start hunting.”

“I want to check with Barn … Bernard Maze,” said Dan. “Then, unless he’s got some new information, we’ll take off.”

A robot grill was cooking fishmeal cakes just outside the pixphone stall. Dan watched the metal arms flipping and slapping while waiting for Barney to answer.

“Bernard Maze residence.” The oval phone screen turned a deep black.

“Me, Barney.”

“I’m relieved to hear from you, Daniel. There’s a move afoot to knock you off.”

“Yeah, so I noticed. Got anything more?”

“The most important thing may be the departure of Adam McAdam,” replied the computer. “He left, you might say unexpectedly, the Newz offices earlier today.”

“Know where he went?”

“To Brazil.”

“Ha,” said Dan. “Then I’m right. I’m on my way there now, to Rio2. That’s where the teleport units went.”

“Then it could be Janis is somewhere in Brazil, too. I’m just about certain McAdam is on

the Millennium gang side in this business. His destination was New Brasilia, out in the jungle. I’m glad he left, since he’d been annoying me with all kinds of pressure. Trying to find out about you, about your crew of experts, and about the mysterious Bernard Maze.”

“You could have picked me a more stable crew of experts, by the way. I admit they’ve saved my life a couple times, but—”

“That’s one of the things I hired them for, Daniel. Let’s not carp. Working up here in FaxCentral has spoiled you for ordinary human contacts. Besides, completely straight people wouldn’t work for us.”

“What else are you up to, Barney?”

“Well, I have hopes the Millenarian Brothers will be defunct in about one more day.” The computer told him about his dealings with Maxwell Columbo of the Third Party, concluding, “Soon as you pull Janis out of their clutches everything’s going to come out in the open.”

“Think that’s going to be enough to stop them?”

“It sure as hell is going to hinder them,” said the computer. “Stop in Havana before you hit Rio2, teleport there first. Even after several, aided by us, wars of liberation Brazil is a tough country to enter and travel through. I’ll have a batch of exemplary faked visas, permits, and ID packets waiting for you there. I’ve got a nephew who’s with the Banx office there. Ask for Sid.

Or SID-123J if you have to be formal. Good luck, keep in touch.”

“Okay. Thanks, Barney.”

“What are friends for?” asked the computer.

“What’s that darned noise?” asked Tin Lizzie.

“It’s gunfire,” said Professor Supermind. “Rifles.”

“Why are they using such old-fashion weapons?”

Dan said, “For the executions. General DeCompo has returned Brazil to some of the simpler ways of the past, at least when it comes to getting rid of political opponents.”

The crack and whine of the rifle fire came from the other side of the yellow, sun-splashed wall they were passing. The wall was thick with tri-op posters, mostly profile poses of General DeCompo. Between the rounds of shooting, cheers and shouts drifted over the high wall.

“Public executions,” realized Lizzie.

“We picked the wrong scrapping day to pay a visit,” said Deadend.

“They have executions every day.” Dan again consulted the Rio2 street guide Barney’s contact in Havana had provided along with the assorted spurious papers. “We want to go up this way, to the right of General DeCompo Plaza number six.”

Rio2 was a two-level city. They were using the lower-level ramps. Each ramp was a different bright jungle color and joining the two levels were seethrough columns filled with flowering plants and vines.

An intense-orange ramp directly above them started to thump. “Editor! Editor!” shouted several excited voices, in Portuguese.

“What’s that, some kind of burking fan club?”

Dan said, “General DeCompo is having another squabble with the press.”

“There he goes!”

A man swung over the edge of the ramp, threw himself at the nearest support column. He caught it, hugged it as he started sliding down. Halfway down, still ten feet from the lower level, he lost his hold and dropped. He hit the first level ramp all wrong. Crying out in pain, he tottered and fell.

“That fellow’s going to need—”

“No!” Dan caught Tin Lizzie’s real arm. “We keep moving, we have to get to Ambos.”

“But that—”

“There’s nothing we can do.”

“Yes, there is. I can—”

“Nothing we can do without screwing ourselves up.”

Five men in glowing-green uniforms were clomping down a descend ramp toward the injured editor.

“The lad’s right,” said Professor Supermind. “Let us proceed.”

The girl let them lead her away.

Ambos was swinging gently in a floating plyo-hammock. He and the hammock were shaded by the tinted neoglass awning of his patio. On a tin table sat a SlugSis TV set and the big wide man was thumbing through a catalog of available shows. “What are you in the mood for, honey?”

The plump dark-haired girl in the lucite butterfly chair tapped her plump fists on her plump knees as she considered. “I love cartoons.”

“Carmen, what did I tell you about cartoons?”

The plump girl hit her plump knees harder, trying to remember. “Something negative,” she said finally.

“Only one hour of cartoons a day, that’s the rule.”

“I haven’t watched an hour today, Am.”

“You watched all through breakfast and while we were burking afterwards. Can’t you even recall that, honey?”

Carmen pondered. “Yes, I think so. What was the name of the show I watched?”

“Woody Woodpecker Classics,” said the big man, snorting. “Now we’ll watch a surgery show.”

The plump girl puckered her face. “Surgery always gives me the wimwams, Am.”

“I like it. And I haven’t seen the new SlugSis brain transplant show yet, honey.”

“Going to keep my eyes shut tight,” Carmen warned, “if you get that on the box.”

Ambos consulted the catalog again. “We’ll compromise, honey. Maybe we can watch a cartoon about surgery. Would that suit you?” When he got no reply Ambos sat up in the hammock. “Would that …”

Carmen wasn’t there.

“Hey, honey. Don’t be mad. We’ll watch a cartoon. We’ll watch Woody Woodpecker again.” He ch opped to the bright sea-blue patio tiles, squinting toward his house.

There was no sign of the girl in there.

“She usually doesn’t move that fast.” “Sit down, Am, we want to talk to you.” The big man spun, hand sliding up under his loose tunic. He found his blaster pistol was no longer in his back holster. “Who the—”

“I’m Dan Farleigh.” Dan was sitting on the low brick wall which separated the large patio from the acre of gardens beyond. “I want to talk to you about Janis Trummond.”

Ambos gave a snorting laugh. “Don’t know anything about her, never heard of her,” he said. “Tell you something else, Farleigh. I’m very friendly with General DeCompo and his people. If you—”

“Sit down,” Dan repeated. Ambos was lifted and dumped in the lucite butterfly chair, as though by invisible hands. “Hey, you mothering—”

“Here they are.” Deadend came out of Ambos’ house, four portable teleport units in his arms.

“Okay, Am, where did you take Janis Trummond?”

Ambos said, “You know what they can do to political prisoners in this country? Anybody who burks around with me is going to be considered a political trouble—”

“Don’t you wonder where your quiff went, scraphead?” Deadend asked him while setting the teleporters on the TV table.

“I don’t care where that dimwit bimb—”

“I moved her.” Deadend inclined his head at the SlugSis set.

The air popped. The set vanished.

“Okay, so you’re a telek.”

“That was only part of the scrapping performance.” Deadend pointed at the table and the set reappeared. A second later its inner workings were resting in his opened hands.

“A lot of burking tricks don’t—”

“Listen, Ambos.” Deadend, chuckling, came nearer to the big man. He dumped the insides of the set at his feet. “What I did to your TV, I’m going to do to you.”

“Snuff yourself.”

“First I’ll pluck out stuff which isn’t important,” explained Deadend. “If you don’t tell us about the quiff, I’ll have your liver and lights out here on the paving stones. Then I’ll jump up and down on them.”

“I never heard of a telek who could—”

“You never heard of me then.”

Suddenly Ambos doubled up, clutching at his chest and stomach. “Holy Christ!”

“Only a little tug so far, buiker. Where is she?”

“Never even heard of … Christ! Stop it!”

“Where is she?”

After nearly a minute Ambos straightened up. His broad flat face was speckled with sweat.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I did take her out of her place. I don’t know if she’s still where we delivered her, but I’ll tell you where that was.” “Tell,” urged Dan.

It was one of those last-century-type robot attorneys, tank-shaped and rolling on neorubber wheels, Down the puddle-spotted stone corridor it came rattling, ball-head spinning almost completely around. In front of a narrow barred cell the mechanical lawyer braked, clearing its tin throat. “Mr. Tarzan?”

The black man who was sitting on his metal cot so that the only sunlight cutting into the

cell from outside touched his face swung one long leg to the stone floor. His toes wiggled, the ball of his bare foot slapped the damp stones. “Depends, Jim,” he said. “Which Tarzan you looking for?”

Click! Click! went something inside the antique attorney. “Ahum … Mr. Gerald Tarzan, being held for treason against the sovereign nation of Africal6.”

“That’s me, Jim.” Tarzan stretched up off the cot. He was lean and nearly seven feet high. “We had another change of government? Could be I’m a national hero now?”

“No, Colonel Majimaji is still in power,” the robot said. “However, I am here to arrange for your removal from the Colonel Majimaji Municipal Prison for Treasonists, Anarchists & Malcontents.”

“You going to get me out?” Tarzan came closer to the bars.

“Yes, your jailer is at this very moment putting on his trousers and hunting for his keys.” A panel in the robot lawyer’s front opened and he produced a crisp document printed on real-paper. “Here is your official pardon.”

“We having us an amnesty?”

“No, sir.”

“How’d you get that then?”

“I purchased it,” replied the robot, “from Colonel Majimaji.”

“Don’t jive me,” said Tarzan. “A pardon in 146

Africal6 cost you twenty-five thousand bucks. Majimaji got about the highest rates in the African Confederation. When I was a mercenary in Africa3 I could get sprung for five hundred. Once they let me out for a hundred twenty in cash, six sacks of soymeal, and a goat.”

“Ahum,” said the lawyer, “I wish I’d known the going rate was twenty-five thousand. Colonel Majimaji assured me a full pardon cost fifty thousand.”

“You paid out fifty thousand bucks?”

“My client did, yes.”

“Why, Jack?”

“He has a job for you.”

“Yeah, where at?”

“In Brazil.”

“Brazil, huh?” Tarzan scratched his chin. “I ain’t been in jail in Brazil for must be seven, eight years.”

“That’s his real name?” asked Dan.

“It is. He claims there’ve been Tarzans in Africa for several hundred years,” Barney said.

The cooling unit inside the jungle-edge pixphone stall wasn’t quite functioning. Dan wiped his forehead with his palm. “He’s been in jail a lot?”

“He’s been a political prisoner fairly frequently,” answered the computer. “I checked

out seventy-three other possibilities, Daniel, and Tarzan seems to me the best one for the job.”

. “And he knows the Lost Brazil jungle?”

“Fought there for the rebels in 2012, worked as a guide when Lost Brazil was still open to tourists. That was before the Amazon tribes were relocated.”

“He knows how to deal with the tribes?”

“Tarzan knows how to deal with anybody.”

“How come he was locked up then?”

“Even the glibbest public relations man is bound to run into a Colonel Majimaji now and then.”

“Okay, we’ll have to use him,” said Dan. “If we knew exactly where they took Janis from this way station in Bacoro where Ambos delivered her we could simply teleport there. We borrowed those portable units, did I mention?”

“Yes,” said the computer. “Since the Bacoro gent maintains Janis was taken into the Lost Brazil jungle on foot from there, you’ll have to track her on foot.”

“Unless Lizzie gets a hunch,” said Dan. “Have you got anything new on McAdam?”

“He left New Brasilia,” said Barney. “Interestingly enough, he was on foot. He and a guide.”

“New Brasilia’s only fifteen miles south of here,” Dan said. “He’s got to be heading for Janis.” “That’s my suspicion. One thing to keep in mind, Daniel.”

“What?”

“The Millennium boys’ plans are collapsing already, and when Max Columbus puts what I gave him on the air the whole shebang’s going to topple all the way over. All of which isn’t going to make McAdam any too cheerful,” the computer said. “When you finally encounter him, he’s going to be in a vengeful mood.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

149

Chapter 21

“I ain’t just signifying,” said Tarzan, pointing. “That’s their tracks, Jack.” The long lean Negro was bent over a jungle trail. The sunlight burning down through the trees made camouflage patterns across the back of his gray one-piece junglesuit. “Went by here not more than a few days ago, one girl and two guys. Chick wasn’t walking too steady, most like she was drugged.”

“Damn,” muttered Dan.

A large map and two smaller ones rattled in Professor Supermind’s hands. “There was once, according to these excellent maps provided by Bernard Maze, a government medical station some ten miles to the north. This decaying trail would seem to be leading directly there.”

“Probably where they got her.” Deadend took a swing at a swarm of tiny silver flies who were using his head as a pylon. “You hear all about the unspoiled wilderness being so terrific, but you can have this scrapping jungle.”

“This ain’t unspoiled, Jim.” Tarzan straightened up. “Them Brazilian governments been diddling with the jungles for years. This is about all the real jungle they got left, and they been stuffing it with too many displaced tribes and patrols and—”

“Speaking of that,” said Tin Lizzie, “here comes somebody now.”

Rowr! Rotor! Arf!

Three snarling robot dogs, followed by a fat yawning man in a wrinkled glowing-green uniform broke through the underbrush. “Muito rruil,” he said around another yawn. “Oh, boy, you people are in bad trouble, trespassing where you’re not supposed to. Sic ‘em, Norberto, Joao, Miguel!”

Instead of charging, the fierce-looking robot dogs began to whimper. Then, in sequence from left to right, they fell over to lie on their metal backs with plyosole paws in the air.

Professor Supermind gave his neostraw a pat.

“Oh, boy, you really in very bad trouble now, you guys,” said the jungle patrolman. “Making my Norberto and Joao and Miguel roll over and play dead like that.” One fat-fingered hand swung toward his stungun holster. “Now I’m going to have to—”

“Snuff it.”

The gun snapped out of its container, vanished.

“Oh, boy, that really does put you on my list. I’m going to have to—•” Then he wasn’t there. He was high up in the topmost branches.

“Jim, that’s some fine talent you got.”

“You bet your burker it is.”

“Okay, let’s proceed.” Dan was certain they were getting near to Janis.

They encountered the Folgazo tribe as the day was waning.

“Trouble,” Tin Lizzie said, stroking her metal arm. “I feel trouble about to hit.”

Head cocked, Tarzan motioned them to wait. “I don’t sense nobody lurking.”

“Sometimes,” said the blonde girl, “I get my darned warning messages pretty far in advance. So it could—” Thunk!

“It’s a bulking arrow,” said Deadend. The

feather-ended arrow had struck the bole of a tree some three feet to the left of him.

“Well, Jim, it’s the Folgazos,” said Tarzan after a glance at the arrow. “Very silent boogers. I never could hear them when I was—”

Thunkl

Thunk!

“That’s enough, you burking idiots!” Deadend shouted at the darkening jungle. “I’ll teleport your bows and arrows and—”

“Hold off, Jack,” cautioned Tarzan. “You going to wear yourself down to a nub. I got an easier way to deal with these chaps.”

Dan was watching the jungle to the right of the trail they’d been following. That was where the arrows were coming from, but he still could see no one.

Tarzan, raising both his hands over his head, said in Folgazo dialect, “You motherfuyers up to a contest?”

“Let me have a crack at them,” requested Deadend.

“No, Jim, the Folgazos believe everybody got to be tested,” the black man explained. “So if we beat them in a couple tests, we’ll have safe conduct for the rest of our jaunt.”

“What kind of tests?” asked Dan.

“We accept,” announced the mammoth native who hopped onto the trail. He spoke fairly good Portuguese. “But surely you don’t expect to challenge us with the likes of these?”

More leaping, more shouting. Ten more huge brown men appeared. Each, as the first, was naked and bald.

“I am Tarzan,” Tarzan told the headman.

“Ah, to be sure, I have heard of you, my friend. You, it may be, can put up a fair show. These others, however, a girl, an old man, and two callow youths … fah!” He pinched his nose and spit on the mossy trail.

“My buddies,” explained Tarzan, “come from very special tribes, Jim. They don’t look strong, but they is. You better watch yourself.”

“That’s what it’s going to be,” asked Dan, “tests of strength?”

“Strength is just about the onliest thing the Folgazo tribe got any respect for,” Tarzan said. “You get to be chief by being the strongest, you get your wives by getting tough. The more daddies and grandpappies you can stomp, the more ladies you get.”

“What are we going to do, have some kind of scrapping Olympics?”

Tarzan strode up to the huge Folgazo headman. “My bunch is anxious to get with it, Jack. What you got in mind?”

“Butting first.” The chief backed up, lowered his head and drove it into Tarzan’s middle.

The Negro made a whooping sound, his arms flapped and he flipped back into a tree trunk.

The headman laughed, raised one fist up over

his head. “Thus I dispatch their fiercest warrior!” he announced.

“Great stuff!” shouted his companions. “That’s showing ‘em!”

“You going to get up and knock that burking bastard on his keaster?” Deadend asked the fallen Tarzan.

Tarzan was gulping, trying to get his wind back. “In a minute, Jim.”

“Can I challenge him?” Deadend asked.

Tarzan nodded.

“Hey, snuffhead.” Deadend turned to the headman. “I’m going to take you on.”

The chief laughed louder. “You will soon be flying over the treetops like a great … ooof!” The big brown man jackknifed, slapping at his middle and roaring with pain. A second later he was sailing back, bowling over three of his tribesmen.

“Hey, how’d he do that?”

“Barely lowered his head!”

“This is magnificent butting indeed!”

“You snuffers like to try it?” Deadend, shoulders hunched, teleported two of the other big Folgazo tribesmen back several feet. He thrust a fist up into the air. “Okay, I’m the champ now. Anybody want to argue?”

The chief was upright again. “I am forced to admit your side has won this first encounter, Tarzan.”

Tarzan, assisted by Professor Supermind,

stood. “It’s going to be the same way with any contest you can come up with, Jack. What say you let us go on about our business?”

“The chopping,” suggested one of the Folgazos.

“Aye, that will show our superiority.”

Laughing, the headman said, “We will have one more contest, my friends.” He moved to a tree whose thick branches hung within six feet of the trail. “Ha! Ha!” With the side of his bare hand he’d chopped two large branches from the tree. “Ha!” A third, this one with a six-inch diameter, fell.

Tarzan asked, “That your best shot, Jack?”

‘Which of your feeble associates will you.dare to match against me?”

“Let me give it a whirl,” said Tin Lizzie.

“Sure thing, baby.” Tarzan made a differing bow in her direction.

“A girl?”

“Surely this is but an attempt to mock us?”

Lizzie, tongue poked into one cheek, eyed the tree which the headman had been pruning. Its trunk was two feet thick at least. “Going to maybe take a few whacks,” she decided. After circling the tree once, she swung at it with the edge of her metal hand.

“What is she attempting?”

“Folly surely.”

Three more chops and the tree made crackling noises. It shook, quivered, then fell as far

to the right as the branches of the surrounding trees allowed.

The headman trotted to Tin Lizzie and hugged her, lifting her full off the ground. “You are truly an exceptional person,” he said as he released her. “You may all pass in peace, with the good wishes of the Folgazos.”

Tarzan said, “That’s mighty nice of you, Jack. And maybe you can give us a little information. We’re interested in a girl who was taken through here a few days back.” He gave the chief a description of Janis.

The big Folgazo nodded. “Yes, she was brought through our sector of jungle by two underlings from the old medical station. That is, the building was once used for such a purpose. Its exact current purpose is unknown to »

us.

“How come you didn’t challenge them guys to a contest or two?”

The chief dug his toes into a patch of green-blue moss. “I regret to say certain bribes have been paid,” he said in a subdued voice. “Since we were transplanted the costs of maintaining our tribe have risen to—”

“That’s okay, Jim, I understand.” Tarzan turned to Dan. “We’re on the right trail.” “I know,” said Dan.

Chapter 22

Grosset swung again and more vines and leaves went scattering into the twilight. “This one really works good,” he said, pausing to wipe sap and pulp from the blade of his machete-hand.

“You could stay on the trail and avoid that entirely.” McAdam, handsome face flushed and perspiring, was trudging along parallel to the big assassin.

“If we’d taken advantage of the teleport plat-

form at the old med station, we could have saved ourselves this hike altogether.” Shreds of flowers and brush came sprinkling out onto the trail. “Long as we didn’t, let me have a little fun.”

“The teleport setup at the station is for use in absolute emergencies only,” McAdam told him.

“Could be that’s what we got right now.”

“I don’t consider we’ve even suffered a major defeat.”

“Yeah, well, I consider the Millennium’s been here and gone. There’s not going to be any thousand-year reign, no Emperor of the Last Days.”

“Even though damaging material about the Millenarian Brotherhood is broadcast throughout the world,” said McAdam, “we won’t be stopped. The inevitable working-out of a cycle of history can’t be reversed. The world, most of the existing countries, everything is running down.”

“That much I’ll grant you,” said Grosset as he chopped a path for himself. “But you’re not going to end up wearing a crown … or whatever it is emperors wear.”

McAdam slowed. “What gives you the idea I—”

“Don’t try to con me. I know where a lot of the Millennium financing is coming from. I mean the funds that aren’t being skimmed off the U.S. budget.” Grosset wiped at his screwed-on machete again. “It’s McAdam money. Hibbler may have been lulled into thinking he was going to be the big man, was going to oversee the transition from the last days of what we got now to the first days of the bright new Millennium. A few people knew, all along, that wasn’t the script, Adam. Especially a couple of the generals who were standing by to swing the military over into the new emperor’s hands. They’ve been getting fairly fat bonuses from the McAdam fortune.”

McAdam said, “I didn’t realize you were so well informed.”

“I don’t have news screens on every wall, but I listen a lot and I nose around a lot.”

“We should have put you on the Newz staff.”

“Too sedate. What I like is—”

“Halt!”

A very large robot, fully eight feet high, was rumbling toward them along the darkening trail. It possessed four arms, each ending in a different weapon. When it was fifteen feet from McAdam a powerful beam of light came knifing out from between its eyes.

“The Book of a Hundred Chapters,” said the handsome editor.

“Yes, that is the primary password.” The giant robot turned its head, producing a rasping, grating sound, and the light beam found Grosset. “What is the subsidiary password?”

“Why don’t you get robots who’ll recognize

us?”

“The subsidiary password!” A blaster pistol and a shockrod were aiming at Grosset.

“Okay, it’s Reformation of Sigismund,” he said, returning to the trail.

“Correct,” acknowledged the robot. “You both may pass.”

“These guards,” observed Grosset as they they passed around the robot, “could do the same job if they were only five feet tall.”

McAdam said, “I enjoy the effect.”

They were challenged by two more of the giant robots, then had to break a force screen by using an electronic key. The last of the daylight was draining out of the sky when they reached the portals of the domed medical station.

Janis shoved another slug into the SlugSis set. She, with her left eye slightly narrowed, watched the screen for a few seconds. Then she whopped the set with the heel of her hand. “Hey, schmuck, this isn’t the show I ordered.”

The rumpled man on the picture screen was saying, “… delights of the twentieth century was the animated cartoon. It is unfortunate that some of the real masters of the genre have not attained as lofty position in the pantheon of celdaubing greats as their brilliant oeuvre deserves. That is not to detract from the justifiably high rank of such visual graphics masters as Walter Lantz, Chuck Jones, and John William Sparey. However, the man whose oeuvre we examine in this our . .

Janis smacked the set again. “Listen, dopey, I put a slug, three slugs in point of fact, in for the World News Hour. Not cartoon oeuvres.”

“… to appreciate the genius of Alex Anderson we must compare him to that other genius of understatement . .

Shrugging, Janis gave her back to the set. Obviously they didn’t want her to keep up with what was happening elsewhere than here.

“… no Tex Avery he …”

“Jannygirl?”

She looked up. “Oh, good evening, Adam,” she said. “It is evening, isn’t it? Or is that darkness outside fake?”

At the edge of the entertainment pit Mc-Adam, after carefully hiking up the legs of his junglesuit, squatted. “It’s good, very good, to see you again.”

“I’m debating,” the girl said. “I’m not sure whether I’d rather see you or this guy with all the cartoon archives.”

The handsome editor grinned tentatively. “I’m hoping, Jannygirl, you’re going to come around to appreciating my point of view.”

“About what?” She turned off the SlugSis set and came up the ramp.

“About what I’ve been doing, about what I believe in.”

“You believe the whole round world’s breaking down and you’re the one man on earth who can put it right,” she said to him. “That I don’t think I’m ever going to accept. Hie world will keep stumbling along, countries’ll fall and get up again. Some people will die, new ones’ll be born. You’re not my candidate for mending anything, Adam.”

He followed her, at a cautious distance, as she walked to the seethrough wall. “You’ve realized then,” he said, “I’m actually the key man in the movement.”

“Wasn’t too tough, once you confessed to being in the Brotherhood.” Arms folded, she watched the dark jungle. More and more stars were appearing above the black tree tops. “The stupid thing, Adam, was my not realizing sooner. You had Nathan Jaxon killed, because he was going to give me information. You knew that because I’d told you.”

“Feeling guilty? There’s no need to—

“All right, what about Dan Farleigh? Have you killed him too?”

McAdam said, “He’s not dead.”

Slowly she turned to face him. “From the way you say that, Adam, I know I don’t have to thank you for his being alive.” “No, I ordered him killed. We haven’t succeeded as yet.”

Nodding, Janis asked, “Why are you here?”

“There have been some unfortunate developments,” he said, “thanks in part to Farleigh and some of his friends … do you know who Bernard Maze is?”

“Bernard Maze? No, I …” Then she smiled. “Barney, of course. Has he been causing you trouble?”

“You know him?”

“He, like Dan, is a friend of mine.”

“All I’ve been able to find out is that Maze is relatively wealthy. He’s decided to put a good part of his fortune into exposing the Millenarian Brotherhood.”

Janis’ smile broadened. “Good for Barney,” he said. “He’s succeeding, huh?”

“To some extent,” admitted McAdam. “A considerable amount of somewhat damaging material has been gathered by Maze and Farleigh and a rather ragtag band of associates they employ. The material will, very shortly, be broadcast to the world. Unfortunately we don’t yet control all the news outlets.”

“A pity.”

“I can assure you, Jannygirl, this is only a temporary setback.”

“No doubt, Adam. You needn’t put your throne in the attic just yet.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “I came down here to talk to you because I want—”

“No, Adam. Either kill me or keep me locked up. That’s all the options.”

“You’ve not even allowed me to—•”

“I know what you’re going to come up with,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that since I’ve been here. Underneath your nice reliable uncle surface you’re just one more horny adolescent. You’re going to ask me to share your upcoming empire with you. That’s why you didn’t have me killed right off.”

“You make it sound harsh and unsentimental,” the handsome editor complained. “I’ve always been fond of you, Jannygirl, and I know—”

“Adam, really, there isn’t a chance in the world.”

“Before this damn Farleigh came into—”

“I like Dan, yes. That has nothing to do with what I feel about you,” Janis said. “You were an okay uncle figure, but once I saw what was underneath that disguise …” She shrugged again.

McAdam made no attempt to touch her. He backed off instead. “I’ll allow you more time to think, Jannygirl,” he said. “Not a good deal of time, but some.”

Chapter 23

“In a long and colorful life dedicated to coping with the most overwhelming of problems,” Professor Supermind said, “I’ve learned that the simplest way is always the—“Quit snuffing around,” cut in Deadend, who was leaning against the immobilized giant guard robot. “We got a dozen more of these burkers to contend with, according to what this one told you.”

“A dozen, a baker’s dozen or two dozen,” the old professor said, “it makes little difference to Professor Supei-mind. I have merely to—”

“They got a force screen too, Jack,” reminded Tarzan.

“Which is controlled by a mechanism, and that mechanism I can—”

“We’ll use the teleport units,” Dan said. He was sure now Janis was inside the old medical station that was a half mile from here.

“There are only four of those, lad, whereas there are five of us.”

“I’m not,” said Deadend, “going to need one.” Tin Lizzie touched his arm with her real fingers. “You certain you can do it?”

“Yeah, no scrap,” he answered. “At least most of the time I can move myself. Only catch is, it’s not exactly what you call one hundred per cent reliable. So I don’t like to try too often. When somebody’s after me I figure it’s usually better to depend on running and dodging. When I got hired by Maze up in Tenderloin6 I was using the surer—”

“I can stay out here,” offered the blond-braided girl.

“No, I don’t need any burking favors, Lizzie. I can teleport myself inside the joint.”

After strapping on his teleport unit Dan studied one of their maps by the headlight on the hypnotized robot. “Yeah, this setting here … should put me down smack in the reception foyer.”

Professor Supermind turtled out his neck to squint at the map, muttering figures to himself. “Yes, lad, those are the co-ordinates we need for the trip.” He put his unit on a similar setting.

Tarzan said, “This tin dude says they’s seven men plus six more of these robot mothers inside. Me and the others’ll handle the humans, prof.”

“Yes, I’ll do my usually effective job on any and all mechanical men who attempt to thwart us.

Deadend took the map from Dan, brought it up very close to his face while he slapped at his face. “Yeah, I got it. I’ll see you inside.”

The Chinese saw them materialize. He was crossing the neolin flooring of the foyer, carrying a tray of cocktails when Dan and then Lizzie appeared. “Top priority emergency!” he yelled while tossing the tray aside. As the glasses were bouncing and splashing on the neolin he grabbed for his waist holster.

“Don’t use that blessed thing.” Lizzie was beside him, striking at his wrist with her metal hand.

“Mother of demons!” the Chinese exclaimed, jumping with pain.

Tarzan appeared next, stungun in hand.

“Here come some,” he said, noticing two men running down a corridor in response to the Chinese’s shout. He froze the first one with a shot from the stunner.

“Ah, and here we have some lumbering robots for the genius of Professor Supermind to handle.” He had lost his neostraw derby while teleporting.

Three giant mechanical guards were stomping toward the foyer down another corridor.

Dan, meantime, was moving for still another corridor. A corridor which should lead to the center of the station.

“That takes care of you.” Tin Lizzie had flung the Chinese into one of the white walls. After he fell in an unconscious bundle onto the floor, the girl looked around. “Where’s Deadend?”

Tarzan was atop the second human guard, delivering jabs to the chin. “Ain’t popped in yet, baby.”

“Darn,” Lizzie said, “he must have gotten himself stuck someplace between there and here.”

“I am your master,” Supermind was informing the robots. “I rule your minds.”

“We are but your servants, sir,” the three mechanisms proclaimed in unison.

“Consider that.” The professor reached for his hat and found it was gone. “Three at once. The potency of Professor Supermind has not dimmed with the passing of the years. Indeed, it has waxed rather than—”

“Where the devil is Deadend?” said Lizzie.

Dan heard the question only dimly. He was making his way farther into the medical station. The walls still indicated the former function of the place, signs reading Drugs, Therapy, Arrow Wounds were in place on the various doors off the long straight corridor.

As Dan jogged along a wailing commenced, pouring out of the speakers set in the curved ceiling. A warning alarm.

At the end of the corridor a door flapped open to let McAdam out.

“Hey!” shouted Dan.

The handsome editor looked back at Dan without stopping. He hurried around a bend.

Increasing his speed, Dan got to the turn in time to see McAdam go diving through another doorway. He could hear his heart beating in his ears, louder it seemed than the howl of the warning siren.

The room he burst into was the one Janis had been kept in. He called her name as he watched her being forced through a door in the opposite wall.

He raced across the room, skirting the entertainment pit, and through the opening before the door slid shut.

This was a different sort of corridor, low and dim, the walls a pebbled green. McAdam had

dragged the struggling girl to the midpoint of the passway and through an oval opening.

A bare room with nothing but a teleport platform in it. Dan saw Janis, with McAdam holding onto her, up on the platform.

He leaped onto the platform with them at the instant McAdam flipped the depart-switch.

Chapter 24

“Never figured to get a second try at decking you.” Grosset came charging at Tin Lizzie, artificial hand pointed toward her breasts. “This time around I got my old reliable blaster-han— “Too darn much talk, mister.” The girl sidestepped his charge, pivoted and shoved at him with her glistening silver fingers.

Grosset bammed into the foyer wall, his gun-hand went swinging wildly up and a sizzling

beam came spurting out of his middle finger. “Bitch,” he snarled.

Lizzie was right next to him. Saying nothing, she dealt him a prodding blow in the pit of the stomach. Then she closed her silver hand over his metal wrist and began to squeeze.

Tiny black flecks of the ceiling, fried by the blast from Grosset’s finger, flickered down on them as they struggled.

“You’re … all … finished,” Grosset told her, he flesh fingers grabbing for her throat.

The girl caught that hand, twisted the whole arm behind Grosset’s back, and continued to clutch his blaster-hand.

The big assassin yowled. There was a ratcheting, ripping noise and the false hand was torn away from his arm. Blood came splashing from the jagged attachment points.

Lizzie gave Grosset another shove.

He hit the wall again, skull and backside and one ankle.

But he wouldn’t fall. Growling, chest rumbling, he came back at her.

“What the snuff you doing?” Deadend had appeared abruptly next to Grosset. “Leave her alone.” He thrust out a foot.

Grosset tripped, slammed the neolin floor full face. He remained down.

Laughing, Lizzie put her arms around Deadend. “Darned if I didn’t think you were lost in limbo someplace.”

He eased away from her. “Well, I went in the wrong scrapping direction at first, landed back among those Folgazos. Impressed the fritz out of them … finally I got myself back here.” He moved a little farther from the girl. “You shouldn’t take on a guy that size all by—”

“I was ahead on points,” she said, “when you showed up.”

“That makes six.” Tarzan was poking at the sprawled Grosset with a booted foot. “Only supposed to be one more human being inside this here place.”

“Two, including Dan’s girl, let’s hope,” said Lizzie.

“Any of you fellows ever tried synchronized dancing before?” Professor Supermind was asking the six hypnotized guard robots he’d accumulated. “I do believe the sight of the set of you kicking up your—”

“Prof, we got to find Dan and the girl,” Tarzan said.

The alarm sirens had fallen silent, nothing but quiet was coming from the rest of the jungle station.

“There’s still one more guy,” said Lizzie. “Has to be that fellow McAdam, since none of these boys look handsome enough to be him.”

“None of them are,” said Deadend. “I’ve seen the fritzing bastard on the news a few times.”

“The lad charged off down this corridor,” said Professor Supermind, pointing with a gloved

finger, “at the commencement of our epic conflict.”

“Then we’ll go that way,” said Tarzan, “real careful-like.”

“Bernard Maze residence.”

“Is that you, Mr. Maze?”

“Elizabeth. Is everything going well?”

Lizzie leaned closer to the blacked screen of the pixphone which sat on McAdam’s recently abandoned work table. “It is, and it isn’t,” she said. “We’re inside the place where they were holding Janis Trummond.”

“Were?”

“She’s been here, we found plenty of evidence of that, but she isn’t now.”

“What’s Daniel think about it?”

“He’s not in this darned place anymore,” explained the girl. “Neither is McAdam.”

“McAdam took off with Janis and Daniel followed?”

“That’s what we think. We found a teleport platform, and Tarzan says two men and a girl used it real recently.”

“Well, all you have to do is check the depart-switch box—Supermind can do that—to see what their destination was. All teleport platforms have to register destinations.”

Tin Lizzie shook her head at the dark oval

screen. “Not this one here, Mr. Maze. The professor found a special obfuscation rider attached, meaning every destination’s erased.”

“That’s illegal.”

“So is overthrowing the elected government of the United States.”

“Yes, I suppose we can’t expect McAdam to play by the rules,” conceded the computer.

“We’ve dug up more records of the Millennium gang, Mr. Maze. Starting to look like McAdam had himself in mind to play Emperor.”

“Not surprising,” Barney said. “Okay, here’s what you do. Gather up everything you can, including any of McAdam’s minions left behind, and—”

“We have a bunch of his people, all hogtied out in the foyer.”

“Very nice. See what else you can come up with and wait for instructions from me.”

“Do you think you can find out where Dan went?”

“I’m going to put all the resources of the Bernard Maze organization to work on it,” Barney said.

Waves foaming up over black rocks, an intensely black sky and clear cold stars.

Dan noticed all that and then McAdam hit him. He’d materialized on this teleport platform a beat after the handsome editor. The first blow caught him on the side of the jaw, the second in the ribs.

“Do you know how much you’ve ruined?” McAdam swung again, driving Dan back into

the pliant wall of the dome which protected the platform.

“Damn it, Adam,” cried Janis, “don’t.”

The flexglass caused Dan to go bouncing back into McAdam. He managed to thrust his shoulder into McAdam’s stomach, force some of the air out of him.

Falling toward the padded platform, McAdam tugged out a stungun.

Janis kicked out, the gun left McAdam’s hand.

Dan got hold of him and the two of them went rolling across the teleport platform.

Both of McAdam’s knees pistoned up, thunk-ing into Dan’s chin, sending him swooping back.

McAdam scurried, got to his feet and hit the exit panel of the dome. He was out in the crisp clear night and running.

“Dan.” Janis genuflected beside him.

“Where’s he going?” There seemed to be a chunk out of his tongue and his mouth tasted salty.

“We’re at Adam’s Caribbean hideaway I think,” the girl said. “He’s got a house about a quarter mile from here.”

“Have to,” said Dan, pushing up to his feet, “get him.”

“There’s a civilized side of the island, we can—”

“Nope, I’ve got to go after him, Janis.” “Okay then.” She picked tip the stungun and gave it to him. “I’ll tag along.”

“He likely to have help up there?”

“The only other time I was here the house was servo staffed, no people.”

Dan ran to the out-panel, stopped and returned to her. He stuck the gun in his waistband, put his arms on her shoulders. “I’m glad I found 37

you.

“Yes, I feel that way myself.” She kissed him.

After a moment Dan said, “I guess I … I better get after McAdam.”

Straight down the main hallway McAdam ran. “Guns!” he ordered. “Blasters, lethal stuff!”

The house began to respond to his unexpected advent. Lightstrip fixtures glowed to life, mood music subtly started.

The gun room at the back of the house was whirring and humming, anticipating McAdam’s arrival.

But before he reached it to grab up something to use against Dan, the study beckoned to him.

“You ought to see this, sir,” suggested the voice of the house computer. The three rows of news screens were on, events were unfolding.

“Haven’t any time to … what is it?” McAdam slowed and stopped on the threshold of the circular room.

The same story, from different points of view, was being covered on most of the fifteen screens.

McAdam saw his own handsome face three different places.

“When did this break?” he asked, slowly crossing into the room.

“Moments ago,” his island house told him.

“Who had it first, Max Columbus’ network?”

“Exactly, sir. Soon most of the other networks around the world were repeating the allegations.”

“Has that idiot Hibbler made any statement?”

“President Hibbler committed suicide a little over an hour ago, sir.”

“Suicide? A real suicide, you mean?”

“I regret to say, sir, that your organization is in tatters,” the computer informed him. “Therefore, to the best of my knowledge, the death of President Hibbler was not arranged by any of your people. One must conclude it’s a real and legitimate suicide.”

Nodding absently, McAdam walked nearer to the screens. He concentrated on one of the news screens which was revealing his part in the Millennium plot.

He was still standing there, mouth slightly open and staring, when Dan and Janis walked in on him.

Chapter 2

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” remarked Barney.

“Most times are,” said Dan, There was a suitcase sitting next to him on the floor of the enormous FaxCentral office,

“But, Daniel, this is the time we’re living through. It’s natural to be prejudiced in favor of your own contemporary awfulness.”

“Things’!! probably be a little less dreadful

for a while. Hibbler dead, most of his cabinet in jail or resigned. An interim president running things, the House and Senate vowing increased vigilance. We could maybe have a few years before some new lunatic sets up his stand.”

“I’m inclined to believe the world will survive.”

“Janis agrees with you.”

“She’s continuing with Newz I hear.”

“The stockholders who are clean have taken over the magazine, and she’s doing the special Millenarian Brotherhood issue for them.”

“It pleases me, Daniel, that my decision to release what we had on McAdam and the rest of the Millennium rascals before you had Janis away from him turned out to be a good one. I thought it might smoke him out, since I couldn’t track him.”

“It distracted him anyway, gave us a chance to grab him.”

“You seem a little glum,” the computer said. “I expected a certain euphoria.”

“Some kind of after-the-action letdown. And I expected Janis would be able to come along on my special leave with me. But then the offer from Netvz came up.”

“Where’d you say you were going on your vacation?”

“The Alps.”

“Thought you’d come to loathe the Alps?”

Dan picked up the suitcase. “Seems like I’ve been everywhere else this past week or so.”

“Daniel, you know you have my sincere bon voyage wishes. Don’t forget to take care of the latest Bernard Maze matter for me, huh?”

“Sure, Barney.” Dan held out his hand, then remembered the computer didn’t have any of his own to shake with.

“I insist this little banquet is on me,” said Professor Supermind as he removed his gloves and slapped them down on the floating restaurant table. “There’s no need to avail ourselves of Bernard Maze’s generosity when Supermind has the ability to control machines.” He gestured at the waiter who’d come over to their private table. “You are my slave, I am your master.”

“Due chiefly to the unfortunate class system which prevails in this country, sir. Actually we are equal and, indeed, should the wheel of fortune elevate me to—•”

“No, no, you’re not concentrating. You are my slave, you will do exactly what I say.”

“I always give good service, sir, even to a caste-conscious bigot such as you who— “You are an android, aren’t you?” “We’re all androids in the vast mechanism of soci—”

“A real android, a mechanical man.”

“Ah.” The waiter straightened, tapped the side of his head and produced several clangs. “My rebuilt head has led you astray, sir. I’m ninety-four per cent human, and as such I have all the feelings and emotions of those who inhabit the loftier stations of—”

“Jim, we going to be charging this here meal to Bernard Maze, the famous millionaire dude,” Tarzan told the waiter.

“Certainly, sir. Mr. Maze has already made all the arrangements.” He moved his augmented head close to that of the old professor. “Suppose I were an android, what were you intending—”

“I was merely going to give an exhibition of one of my incredible mental powers.”

“Would you like me to send out one of the dishwashing robots?”

“It won’t be necessary,” said Professor Supermind. “You can, however, bring us a bottle of your best synchampagne.”

« a , > »

At once, sir.

Deadend was sitting next to Tin Lizzie, opposite the professor, Tarzan, and Mrs. Tucker. “Where you going after this, Elizabeth?”

Lizzie had been watching the sixth chair, as yet empty. “Not blessed sure yet, Deadend. What about you?”

“Should be safe to go back to Tenderloin6 and resume my career. I’ve been feeling lately

that maybe … but what’s the scrapping use, things never—”

“We are not to be blessed with Bernard Maze himself?” Professor Supermind inquired when he saw Dan, suitcase in hand, walk into the private dining room to take the final chair.

“Mr. Maze rarely makes public appearances,” said Mrs. Tucker.

“Like to see that joker once,” said Tarzan, “before I get back into the African political scene.”

“Barney … Bernard Maze,” said Dan, “sent me in his place.” He grinned at them all. “And I wanted to thank you for helping out so well.” No need for them to know Janis was more interested in Newz than in him. “He’s got a new proposition for everybody here, and asked me to present it.”

“Does this proposition involve a monetary consideration, lad?”

“Yep, that’s right, professor,” replied Dan. “Bernard Maze enjoyed working with you. He believes there are considerable other problems in the world which he’d like to lend a hand in solving. He’d like all of you to continue on the payroll, standing by until a new piece of trouble pops up. He’s going to, if you agree, set up headquarters for you here in Manhattan.” He paused, looking at each of them in turn.

Deadend spoke first. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

“Darned if I wouldn’t too,” said Tin Lizzie.

“The prospect of returning to New Lisbon and Fat Franny has not been a heartwarming one,” said the old professor. “Yes, lad, I’ll sign on.”

Tarzan rocked a bit in his aluminum chair. “There’ll still be plenty of opportunities for landing in jail and prison working for Maze?”

“Yeah, you can count on that.”

“Okay, Jack, I’m in.”

“I’ve enjoyed working for Mr. Maze,” said Mrs. Tucker. “It will be pleasant to continue. Has he mentioned what the salaries will be?”

“At least what you’ve been getting,” said Dan. “Bernard Maze will be talking to each of you, by pixphone, to work out the specifics. He wanted me first to—”

“There. We can place this extra chair right in here next to this young man with the suitcase on his lap. Oh, and I’d best mention, miss, that I am neither an android nor a robot.”

“Good for you.” Janis sat beside Dan, reached over to place her hand over his. “Barney told me where you were.”

“Want to interview me for your story?”

Janis said, “I decided to turn the rest of the work over to some of the other survivors on the staff. Would it be okay if I came along to the Alps with you?”

Dan smiled. “It would.”

“I must be going through some kind of change, picking people over stories.” “Well,” said Dan, “these are the times that try men’s souls.”

“Let us have that champagne at once,” Professor Supermind told the waiter.

“I wish you wouldn’t use that tone of voice,” said the waiter. “I’m not your slave.”

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