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21

 

Cainsville, April 11

LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT Cedric was summoned by an anonymous voice on the com. He headed for the spiralator with his mind churning an immiscible mixture of relief and apprehension. There was no more nonsense of flashing lights. He was borne swiftly and silently down to ground level.

He was at once surrounded by an armed escort. They were all large-economy gorillas; even the women among them looked tough enough to snap him with one hand. Nor were they an honor guard—they gave him a thorough body search. He could almost find that amusing—him, dangerous? He knew none of the faces, but he saw some of those faces register shock when they recognized his, for he was a celebrity. He had died tragically on world holo the previous day, lost on a nightmare planet of a distant star. His presence back on Earth was a physical impossibility.

The mixture of uniforms told him who was going to be at the meeting. Four bulls wore Institute red, four grass green, and four shiny gold. The greens bore shoulder-patch logos of a stylized, five-line house containing a globe, and that was the symbol of the World Chamber. The golds' shoulders said simply BEST.

He was more surprised to see that the visitors were armed. That was a major breach of standard practice. That explained why the four Institute bulls were glowering so resentfully, why hands hovered so obviously near holsters. Eight Daniels and four lions—and all of them so tense that they almost crackled.

He had expected to be led to a meeting room, but nothing like that happened at all. He was crushed into a two-man golfie, with a gold bull on one side and a green on the other. He tried making conversation, and neither would speak a word.

Soon he was in unfamiliar territory. The streets and corridors were deserted. He would have expected to see at least a few people around, even at that hour. He wondered if Cainsville could be under martial law.

Other golfies raced ahead and behind and, when the road was wide enough, kept pace on either side. He found such celebrity treatment ridiculous, and in a brighter moment would likely have found it amusing. Of course, he was not being guarded for his own sake, but rather to protect others, as if one moment's lapse in vigilance might let someone turn him into a walking bomb.

Ridiculous or not, the possibility was being taken seriously. His destination turned out to be a medical facility like the one when he was first admitted to HQ, back in Nauc. He groaned loudly and said, "Not again?" No one registered that he had spoken. The reception room held at least twenty people in lab coats, but even they were color-coded, with green and gold outnumbering red. They all turned to look at him and waited expectantly. Resignedly, Cedric began to unzip.

If possible, the ensuing examination was even more thorough than his ordeal of four days earlier. The visitors took at least an hour to satisfy themselves that there was nothing inside Hubbard Cedric's skin except Hubbard Cedric and one earpatch. They struck a piece of shiny metallic tape over that to inactivate it. When at last they could find nothing more to scan, poke, or measure, they reluctantly allowed him to dress himself again. His clothes had a rumpled look, and he could guess that they had been inspected also. When he asked for a comb, his request was brusquely debated and then refused. Not only did the greens and golds distrust the reds, they obviously distrusted each other also. Who could say what infernal machine might be hidden inside an innocent-seeming comb?

After that nasty tribulation, he was taken to a waiting room and told to sit. He sat on a hard bench and leaned against a hard wall while another half hour dragged by in sickening small-hours lethargy. His questions were ignored. His only diversion was dabbing tissue at his wretched nose, which had started dribbling blood again. The medics had done that while exploring his sinuses.

He had known that there was another victim being examined at the same time as himself, for he had heard voices from cubicles he had recently vacated, but he had not been sure who it was. Finally the door opened, and he saw Gran standing outside. She was thin-lipped and flushed, much less spruce and poised than usual. Sauce for gander is sauce for goose now? Cedric began to grin, shaping a wittily catty remark, but the look she gave him caused it to die of an attack of discretion.

Again he was crushed into an overloaded golfie as an enlarged procession took off on an even longer journey. Again the road was unfamiliar to him, and deserted. The hour was late, the lighting dim. The prospect of meeting two of the world's most powerful men held no attraction. He was sleepy and hungry.

He mooned gloomily over Alya. The window to Tiber might be open at that very moment. She might already have departed, never to return. He remembered the look in her eye when she spoke of her new world. He hoped it had checked out well. He hoped she had not been so stupid as to wait around for him. He did not think he was going to see that new world again.

Then he felt cold air on his face. The corridors had taken on a functional, echoing, rivets-and-hard-shadows look, and the temperature had dropped. The train of golfies trundled through a high metal doorway and Cedric snapped alert, astounded at what lay before him. The great dome was huge, larger even than de Soto or David Thompson, but it could not be a transmensor facility, for the floor was flat. In icy air, under a hard actinic glare, stood three great winged monsters. The smallest was a Boeing 7777, and the other two were supers, a Hyundai Six and a Euro Starscraper. All loomed enormous. He felt like a mite on the bottom of a bird cage, but it was not their size that astonished him as much as their mere presence. He had always understood that there was no airport at Cainsville.

With wheels drumming on rows of rivets, the golfies raced across the steel prairie of the floor toward the Boeing, which bore the house-and-globe logo of the World Chamber on its green tail. By the time Cedric was delivered to the steps, his grandmother was already halfway up. He thought despairingly of Alya and wondered where he was going to be taken.

The answer, apparently, was "nowhere." The plane was outfitted like a home, or even a palace. He followed his grandmother through to a very luxurious lounge and there folded himself into a thick-pillowed armchair. Red, gold, and green guards all remained standing, all watching one another as much as the prisoners.

Prisoners?

"Gran? What the hell is going on?"

His grandmother pursed her lips, as if he were speaking out of turn. Then she said, "Look!" and pointed at a window.

Cedric swung around and peered. He was just in time to see the great exterior doors slide open. Snow and even darkness itself seemed to pour into the hangar and swirl around the floor—or at least the snow did. He watched the guards stagger as the wind struck at them. He moved to a closer chair and, in his eagerness, jostled his tender and swollen nose against the plastic. In a moment another giant Boeing emerged from the night, advancing under its own power. It was painted gold and bore BEST's logo. The doors slid shut. A rumble of titanic motors died away. Even with four such monsters present, the dome was still not full.

Steps were wheeled forward; guards took up position. Cedric saw two men descend, saw them board golfies, saw those carts head off in procession through the interior door. One of the two men had been squeezed between a red guard and a green, the other between a red and gold.

Cedric sat back to study his grandmother's coldly angry face across the room. "We're hostages?"

She nodded.

"That's crazy!" he said.

"Of course it is." She smiled grimly. "Bulls are worse than lawyers."

That remark had been aimed at the guards, obviously, but Cedric asked, "How?"

She sighed. "Everyone does it. Accountants did it to bookkeeping, lawyers did it to the law, teachers to education."

"Did what?"

"Tangled it all up so it became meaningless," she said sourly. "It's the search for indispensability—and ninety percent of them are busy playing job politics most of the time, anyway. When I was younger—" She stopped, with a brief glare at the nearest guard. "We have two guests here tonight, but if I wanted to kill one of them during his visit, I could do so easily, in spite of all this tomfoolery."

And that remark, although directed at Cedric, had been most certainly intended for the guards. Even her own reds scowled.

"How?" asked the one she had looked at, a bull-necked gold.

The director smiled frostily. "Watch closely and maybe I'll show you."

That ended the conversation.

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Framed