UPSIDE DOWNSIDE

By Ron Goulart

Digital edition published by Crossroad Press

Copyright 2013 / Ron Goulart

Copy-edited by: Anita Lorene Smith

LICENSE NOTES

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.  This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.  If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.  If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy.  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Meet the Author

Born in 1933, Ron Goulart has been a professional author for several decades and has over 180 books to his credit, including more than 50 science fiction novels and 20 some mystery novels. He’s twice been nominated for an Edgar Award and is considered one of the country’s leading authorities on comic books and comic strips. Ron lives with his wife Frances, also a writer, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Book List

A Graveyard of My Own

After Things Fell Apart

Even the Butler Was Poor

Hellquad

Nemo

Now He Thinks He’s Dead

The Enormous Hourglass

Upside Downside

For a more complete bibliography visit his page at ISFDB on the Internet.

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UPSIDE DOWNSIDE

Chapter One

He didn’t know they’d killed him.

It had happened on Thursday, 13 Jan 2033, up in the Coldzone, but he didn’t have so much as a hint until weeks later. And even then he didn’t immediately realize a line had been drawn through his life, that the sand was running out of his hourglass and he was on a downhill rush toward death. He was still feeling fine, had absolutely no idea how rough and painful things were going to get.

So when the buzzer went off inside his skull on that warm hazy afternoon in March, Zack Tourney had figured it was just another routine summons from his chief.

Zack, who was between FPA assignments, had been stretched out on a slim-bed beside an incredibly lovely naked, platinum-haired girl whose long slender body was every inch of it tanned.

Her name was Timpany Quarls; she was the heiress to the entire Downside Fried Tempeh franchise fortune and she was murmuring in Zack’s right ear.” . . . Or we might ‘port to New Acapulco, Father has a very well-appointed Eatnsleep Hostelry there. Perhaps, though, you’d prefer the Paris Redoubt, Zackery, where Father’ll be opening an Eatnsleep bistro next week. No, actually, I might be more in the mood for White Africa, somewhere around. . . .”

Zack moved and settled into a state very close to a snooze, with his dark head resting against her sleek warm side just below her small sharp left breast. The nipple tickled as the lovely young woman talked on.

“. . . Probably you see enough snow in your work, but, myself, I’m wondering if I’m not ready for skiing in the Arabian Alps. I mean, ever since Sheikh Rachis Sigar bought much of Switzerland and refurbished. . . .”

Sleep was taking hold of him, pulling him down into slumber. The murmur of her soft CalNorth voice, her even breathing and the warm tan flesh, the gentle swaying of the thin floating sheet of plaz which made up his bed were all conspiring to lull him. Lately, too, during the past few weeks anyway, Zack found he seemed to need more sleep. Eight, nine hours some nights.

“. . . Feel about the Colonies? Are you in the mood for space? Because Father’s always willing to loan us one of his private shuts. We could hop out to Colony 26 or maybe 27, both of which I find myself quite fond of. You, Zackery, are somewhat of a cynic and may not relish their themes. We opened a really nice Eatnsleep Hostelry there last month, out in 27, with Frontier Style decor and over. . . .”

His eyes were drifting shut and across the swell of her left breast he sighted the perked nipple of the right. It rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and—

Brrrtzzz!

The noise, which only he could hear, sounded inside his head.

Zack was used to it now; he didn’t start or jump when it hit him. His eyes opened wide, though, and he ceased enjoying the warmth and decor of Timpany’s impressive body. “Paris Redoubt gets my vote,” he said, rising to a sitting position.

“Oh, then you have been listening, Zackery.”

“I was rapt.”

“Your rapt is close to other men’s sound sleep.”

“You’ve been fooling around with too many junk food execs.” He swung off the floating bed and onto the soft cream-color plaz floor of his sleepod. “I’ve got to use the pixphone.”

Timpany asked, “Did that awful gadget they planted inside your poor head start bonging again?”

“You’re not supposed to know about my implanted Federal Police Agency buzzer,” he told her, bending from the waist to pick up his left arm from the bare thermoflooring. “And the sound isn’t a bong, it’s more a melodic—”

Brrrrtzzzzz!

“. . . and gentle tinkling. Like fairy bells in a distant and serene temple of—”

“You always make a funny face when the damned thing goes off. It’s just about like having a damned alarm clock built in.”

“Didn’t I ever show you my built-in alarm clock?” Zack attached his synthetic arm to his stump. His real left arm ended two and a half inches below the elbow. “Wasn’t any more room in my head, so they inserted it in—”

“You did tell me the truth about your arm, didn’t you?” the silver-haired girl asked, looking elsewhere while he hooked the arm up.

“Truth is part of my code,” Zack assured her as he flexed the metal fingers and then used them to pluck his one-piece loungesuit from the uncluttered floor.

“I’ve heard, you know, stories as to how a lot of augies volunteer to let them chop—”

“It doesn’t actually work that way,” he said, getting into his clothes. “Well, at least not in my case it didn’t, Timpany. I didn’t become an augmented agent until after I’d been with the Federal Police Agency for three and a half years. My arm, believe me, I gave up very reluctantly and by accident.”

“FPA has a slew of augies. I can’t believe they all had accidents which—”

“You weren’t talking about all their augmented agents. You were talking about me.”

She nodded. “Don’t be gruff with me, Zackery,” she said, trying to smile. “It’s only that I do have a sort of special interest in you.”

It was a fantastic smile. He had to react to it, return it in part. “Okay, I know. Stay here, it won’t take—”

Brrrrrtzzzzz!

“Three times,” she said, reacting to the look on his face. “Must be important. You’ll probably have to ‘port off to the damned Coldzone right away.”

“Unlikely. I’m still on freetime.”

“Even so. . . .”

He crossed the sparsely furnished oval room, stepped through a touchdoor into a smaller room. Zack Tourney was, back then anyway, a large dark man, wide-shouldered, tanned and with his black hair worn in a fashionable short crop. He was two months past thirty-one.

This smaller podroom was as simply furnished as his bedchamber. There was a floating glaz chair facing a blanked section of wall, three globelamps drifting up at the peak of the dome. There was no color except buff and cream.

The unblanked one-way windows showed a hazy stretch of bright yellow beach, gleaming blue water and real palm trees expertly blended with synths. Farther off you could make out, blurred, the towers of Ft. Miami’s Upside area. Even though you couldn’t hear the sound, you could tell there was some shelling going on. Fuzzy crimson splashes were forming between the pastel towers and spires.

“Cubes from Downside,” Zack muttered to himself.

Genuflecting, he pressed his real hand, which contained the only set of fingerprints he possessed, against a slightly depressed patch of the smooth flooring.

A panel opened near his bare feet; a pixphone and stand came whirring up out of the floor. When its pedestal had extended to its full three-foot height and clicked to a stop there, Zack settled into the chair and punched out a special number on the phone panel with his real forefinger.

The platter-size screen turned from gray to black and out of the voxbox came, “Guess who?”

“C’mon, Busino, put me through to Courtney.”

“You tagged my voice right off, huh, Zack?” asked the black screen. “I’ve been practicing disguising it. I fooled one of our portable voiceprint uni—”

“Do the rest of your practicing in the privacy of your own home, young man,” suggested Zack. “Court wants me.”

“That he does,” acknowledged the FPA special switchboard man. “Want to hear me do Millie Moskowitz, the undisputed Queen of the Scroodisks? I do a great sultry female voice without ever causing you to have doubts about my own virility. That’s—”

“I never had any doubts, Busino. Put me through.”

“Okay, okay. You don’t have to browbeat a guy for trying to better himself,” said the black screen. “We can’t all be augies.”

Zack said nothing.

A beautiful blond man holding a lyre appeared on the screen.

Letting out his breath, Zack said, “Hey, Court, where are you?”

“Oops, haven’t got the darn phone focused right, have I? There we go, that’s better.” Courtney Chezbro was a pale, lanky man in his early forties. Right now he was clad in a thermal greatcoat, wulmittens and a synfur hat. He sat huddled behind his wing-shaped tin desk. “What’d you think of the allegory?”

“Which allegory?”

“The painting you just got a glimpse of on the pixie screen.”

“All I saw was a pansy in a straw-colored wig.”

Chezbro frowned. “Damn it, Zack, that’s supposed to be Orpheus,” he explained, nodding in the direction of the huge off-screen canvas. “When he goes into the Underworld to find his girlfriend. I see it as a terrific opportunity to take a stand on our current attitudes toward material objects as opposed to—”

“Why are you bundled up?”

“Why else? This is the Manhattan Sector and it’s cold.”

“Inside?”

“Don’t ask me to explain what happened to our thermosyst, Zack,” said his boss in the FPA’s main office. “It has, more or less, to do with a frumus between the International Brotherhood of Robots and Computers and the Hire An Ethnik League. Basically . . . well, don’t ask me to explain. Very intricate, worse than political espionage. Ever try to paint a vast canvas in the style of the late nineteenth-century Victorian masters while wearing mittens?”

“Not while wearing mittens, no,” admitted Zack. “Why’d you buzz me?”

“You ought to think about acquiring a hobby.”

“My life takes up all my time. About the buzz?”

“Just routine, I think.” Chezbro stuck a hand into his armpit to yank off one of his mittens. With shivering fingers he felt at the cluttered top of his tin desk. “Ah, here we go.”

“I’m on freetime,” reminded Zack.

“This isn’t an assignment. Is it frostbite when your fingers turn a funny green color like this?”

“Nope. What’s that piece of fax say about me?”

The flimsy memo rattled in Chezbro’s naked hand. “Nothing special. They merely want you to report to the Augmentation Clinic, which is practically in your back—”

“Whoa,” cut in Zack, making a stop-a-second motion with his flesh hand. “I was over there for my regular three-monther a shade over two months ago.”

“You were?”

“Look it up.”

“Too cold over by the computer terminal, I’ll take your word for it.” A minor frown touched his forehead. “All it says on this form is you’re to report to the AC today for a routine Augment FPA Agent Physical Scan. They want you no later than 4 p.m. Eastern Warmzone Time today.”

“Has to be a foul-up, Court.”

Nodding, Chezbro promised, “I’ll check it out. It well could be a mistake.”

But it wasn’t.

Chapter Two

“Routine,” burly Dr. Wayman Roach assured, him, pointing toward the far end of the plazwalled target range. “Now let’s see how your middle finger’s working.”

“Routine would be coming here to the Augmentation Clinic every three months.” Zack lowered his metal hand. “That would be routine.”

Dr. Roach shrugged his broad shoulders. “Gripe to the schedmex, they’re the ones who told us to do some recheck on you,” he said. “Middle finger next, please.”

“Rechecking what? In the three hours since I teleported in here you people have tested everything, from brainwaves to bloodcount. I can’t be that much off kilter.”

“We have a habit of being thorough, that’s all. Shoot with your lazfinger when the next target bobs up.”

Reluctantly he swung his arm waist high. “And how come all the target dummies are Latinos today?”

“Aw, the Hire An Ethnik League made a stink,” explained the big cyborg-expert. “So we have to use sixty-four percent Cubes and Ricans for our target practice.”

“Sixty-four percent sounds a shade—”

Zzzattt!

A swarthy, moustached figure had leaped up from behind the authentic-looking shrubbery at the other end of the long and narrow shooting range. Zack sent a laser beam knifing out of the tip of his metal middle finger. That sliced the dummy clean in half; cogwheels, plaztubing, fine wire all went sailing in a multitude of directions as the target figure collapsed back into the believable brush.

Roach mumbled something into his built-in handik mike. “Looking good, now give us the thumb.”

Zzzummm!

“Did the HAEL people tell you to rig them all with those droopy moustaches?” Zack clutched his stungun thumb with his metal fingers.

“When HAEL does a surprise check, the moustaches make it easier to prove we’re complying. We also used sarapes for awhile but they kept tangling with the greenery.” Dr. Roach shrugged massively again. “I’m a genblend myself, but if I were an Ethnik I’d resent this Hire An Eth—”

“Which area did your machines say I was shaky in, Wayman?”

“They never confide in me,” replied Dr. Roach. “Imagine that, my whole and entire adult life’s been given over to working with mechanisms and augmented personnel, yet I simply can’t get along with your average everyday computer. Even when I was attending Boston Tinkers College up in the lousy Coldzone I—”

“But I’m in tiptop shape.” Zack was watching the target zone through slightly narrowed eyes. “Outside of a touch of drowsiness some—”

Bang!

A Chinese target dummy had leaped into view, wielding a machete. Zack shot him with a slug from his little finger pistol.

“A machete isn’t exactly a Chinese weapon,” he remarked.

“Tell, that to the Equal Time For Chinamen nitwits. They say if we give machetes to the Filipino dummies we—”

“Allan was pretty evasive when he put me through the medix part of this business.” Zack absently slipped his metal hand into a slashpocket of his two-piece daysuit.

“He’s having some personal problems,” explained Dr. Roach as he clicked off the mike built into his hand. “Nothing to do with you. Allan insists on falling in love with women taller than he.”

“When you’re four feet eleven that sort of thing is pretty much inevitable,” said Zack. “Listen, what I seemed to sense while the medix machines were probing and—”

“Allan’s five feet two now, had himself augmented since you were here last. Even so, Jimmi is five eleven.”

“That’s the girl who’s causing him anguish?”

“Like all the rest, she persists in borrowing his skyjag.” The large doctor motioned Zack to follow him off the range. “Jimmi zipped down to Yucatan to hunt for half of her dog.”

“All day I’ve been getting tangled up in conversations like this. I’m not going to ask why only half a dog,” he said. “Wayman, I keep getting the feeling my visit here isn’t just routine.”

“Jimmi’d shipped her pooch, which makes sense, I suppose, since it’s some sort of Mexican hairless, down to Yucatan by way of fourth-class teleport and only half of it reassembled on the ‘port pad down there. Well, in order to give the creature the decent burial she insists on its having, she first has to locate—”

“You’ve never conned me.” Zack caught the larger man’s arm in a metal grip. “Far as I’ve been able to check. But, shit, Wayman, I get the feeling you are now.”

“Thought about transferring to the Wild Talent Division? You’ve obviously taken to reading minds.” Roach shook his big head from side to side, touched a touchdoor with his palm. “I’m being candid with you, Zack. Word came down from above that a few things about you needed rechecking. Christ, you’ve been with the FPA long enough to know how they dote on checking and double-checking and then checking it all over again.”

“My gut hurts.”

“That’s Allan’s department.”

“It hurts the way a gut hurts when something is going on wrong.”

They had moved into a gently inclining corridor, were surrounded by yellow and scarlet walls and no windows or other people. The aircirc system murmured and whispered like an old woman at prayer.

Slowing, Roach said, “I’m not some top-bracket Upside medic, Zack, and I don’t have to lay on the bullshit. If there were anything seriously wrong with you, involving either your body or the implanted additions, I would tell you flat out. There simply isn’t.”

Zack said, “Then I can depart now?”

“Far as I—” Dr. Roach suddenly grimaced, slapped his fingers against his temple. “Got to adjust this frigging buzzer.” He let his eyes go half shut and appeared to be listening to something inside his head, nodding slowly, lips flickering. “Huh, wonder what this is all about.”

“Pertaining to me?”

“Yeah, they say they want you to stick around.”

“How long?”

“Few hours, apparently, something about reevaluating certain of the testing data,” said Roach, grinning. “Didn’t I tell you. these bastards love to check, double-check, triple—”

“Data from the physical tests?”

“Must be, Zack, since nothing I ran through is in anything but shipshape.”

“Then I’d like to talk to Allan again, find out what’s going on.”

“Sure, he’ll be talking to you shortly. Meantime, I’m supposed to install you in a suite up on Level B until—”

“C’mon, those aren’t suites, Wayman. They’re rooms, rooms where you dump clinic patients who have something seriously wrong.”

“Two rooms with a vidwall and a kitchenservo is my idea of a suite.”

“Now that I’ve got your ideas of architecture,” said Zack, lips thinning across his teeth, “how about explaining away the fact that I’m being tossed in with people who are sick, seriously sick.”

“God damn it, Zack, I don’t run this frigging place,” said Dr. Roach, voice louder. “They buzz me inside the head, tell me what they want done with you. I do it. Don’t bitch to me, I’m only a cop in this merry-go-round.”

Zack took control of himself. “Sorry,” he said. “We’re both feeling sort of coglike right now. I’ll cooperate. Lead me to my cell.”

“Suite,” corrected Roach.

Chapter Three

The vidwail said, “Today the Earth, tomorrow the Universe. Yes, that’s exactly how we feel at Downside Fried Tempeh. You see, the entire Earth has taken our decidedly delicious soyfood to its heart and we’re also branching out into the exciting world of Space Colonies, where more and more folks are finding. . . .”

Zack pressed the red dot on his metal palm, got a reading off the tiny digital screen that winked absolutely correct time at him. “Shit, nearly midnight,” he said aloud.

The room was twelve feet square, too full of furniture and color. There were three pastel-tinted lucite sling chairs, a crimson slumpcouch, a yellow plaz hamukbed, five green end tables and a watchful chromed nursebot standing straight and silent in the far corner.

The damned thing had already asked him twice if he was feeling any better.

Zack tried to slouch in the slumpchair, distract himself with the nightnday news channel. This commercial, though, with its montage of Sleepneat Hostelries, only served to remind him of the exquisite Timpany Quarls.

“. . . Whether you find yourself in New Paris or the Arabian Alps or out in one of the exciting SIS colonies, you’ll be happy in the notion you’re never very far from a Sleepneat and our justly famous Downside Fried Tempeh, fast becoming this old world’s favorite fast food. . . .”

There was nothing wrong with him, Zack was certain of that. He yawned, rubbed at his chin with his real hand. Except for these drowsy spells, and that couldn’t possibly be anything serious.

“Want me to tuck you in now, sir, and then fetch you a steaming cup of—”

“I want you to maintain total and absolute silence,” Zack told the nursebot as it took three slow, ominous steps in his direction.

“Take your temp? I have a thermometer built into my thumb, so it’s really no—”

“No, nope, nothing.”

“As you wish, tuan.” The large silvery mechanism subsided into its corner.

“. . . Once again to cut through the heart of the news with the keen machete of his intellect and serve up the whole truth and nothing but, here is the planet Earth’s foremost fearless newsman, Headless Ortmann.”

“Here’s a guy who’s really augmented,” said Zack. Ortmann’s hefty torso was decked out in a sincere one-piece tweedsyn newsuit. His large elbows, which rested in a completely relaxed way atop his porcelain desk, were capped with patches of real-leather. He was, as his nickname implied, missing a head. The stump of his neck was crowned with a steel lid rich with dials, knobs and plugs. Multicolor wires and plaztubes snaked and swirled from the steel lid to the three opaque plaz canisters resting on the desk top to the left of the newscaster. One canister held Ortmann’s brilliant brain, another his seeing and talking mechanisms and the third, as far as Zack had ever been able to tell, was a decoy.

“Sure, they’re always trying to kill Ortmann,” Ortmann said out of his canister, newscopy on colored faxpaper clutched firmly in his stubby fingers. “Don’t need to tell you that. But I am like, folks, that mythical hydra I saw recently in a terrifico allegorical painting by the up and coming Vic-style painter, Courtney Chezbro. Every time you lop a head off this bugger, he grows two more to replace it. Granted I didn’t exactly grow a new cabeza after they tried to punch my ticket a couple years back, but I did bounce back damned well. Thanks in no small part to those mucho gifted guys and gals at the Augmentation Clinic down—”

“See?” said the nursebot.

Zack turned to scowl, briefly, at the robot. “Hush.”

“. . . Wallowing in self-pity doesn’t do us mucho goodo. Let’s get on with the news.” Ortmann’s sincere voice had a rumbling, rattling quality. “There’s something lotso wrongo out in CalSouth, although they’re gonna deny it and send a gang of high-price assassins after Ortmann probably. Nevertheless, I can tell you true that E. Zorro Ortega, the noted agbiz multi-millionaire who owns sixteen percent of this land of ours, is mucho sicko. His overpriced doctors deny it hotly, yet I assure you this Mexam tycoon is ailing in a largo way, sinking fast and going down for the third time. My sources, and as always they’re of the impeccable and unimpeachable sort, assure me the sand is running out of Ortega’s hourglass and he’s on a downhill rush to the boneyard.” Headless Ortmann set aside the faxpage he’d been holding in front of the six little eyecells in his middle canister. “They say the once robust forty-seven-year-old land baron now looks mucho like his own granpappy. And what does the powerful Ortega clan say? ‘No comment, Headless.’ We’ll, you can bet, I’ll keep on top of this one. Elsewhere in the news the President’s brother continues his, to my way of thinking, ill-advised career as a zero-g wrestler. Earlier this very evening, folks, out in the Cleveland Ruins Sector of Heartland, beefy Buddy Benson defeated the brutish and unattractive Colonial Angel two falls out of three. What does the voluptuous President of the United States have to say about her wild younger brother’s far from inspiring activities? When I pixed her in her Washington D.C. Upside offices, Miss Benson gave me one of her dazzling smiles while remarking, ‘No comment, Headless.’ And do these old orbs fool me, or is our first fem prez looking older than her admitted two score and three? We’ll keep right on top of this one, too. Now, here is Tickles Tremayne up in our orbiting weather satellite to tell you about what sort of day you can expect in every part of the civilized world come mañana, folks. I’ll—”

Zack kicked the green off-tab with one booted foot. Headless Ortmann caved in on himself until he was only a minute dot of glaring light on the vast vidwall.

“Sounds like nobody’s in good shape in this old world,” Zack reflected, real fingers massaging metal ones.

The door of the suite opened behind him with only a trace of sound, not more than a single dead leaf makes skittering across a stone patio.

Yet Zack was on his feet and facing the doorway an instant after it started to open, metal hand hovering hip-high. “You were going to fill me in, Allan.”

“Here I am to do exactly that, Zack.” Dr. Allan DePriest was indeed, now he looked closely, a few inches higher than he had been on Zack’s last visit eight weeks before. He was a slight, wiry man with tight-curling dark hair, eyes deepset and shadow-rimmed. Only a year or so older than Zack, he radiated a considerable seniority. “Got sidetracked, had to teleport down to Yucatan. Nothing medical, a self thing.”

“Tall women.” Zack let his lethal hand swing down to his side.

“It’s a mild obsession, admitted.” The doctor limped farther into the room, stopping near a pale-wine lucite chair. “Without quirks we’d be no better than machines.”

Zack ran his tongue over his lower lip. “Some time in the far future we can have a lengthy and fruitful conversation about long-legged ladies and all they symbolize,” he told the head of the Augmentation Clinic. “Prior to that, Allan, can we, for Christ’s sake, talk about why the hell you people are keeping me here? I think I’m aware of just about every damned thing that can go wrong with an augmented agent. Nothing like that is bothering me, really.”

Dr. DePriest watched the gaudy floor. “It’s very . . . very tough telling you this.”

“Then there is something wrong? With me?”

New rings formed under the little doctor’s eyes. “I’ll, naturally, be reviewing all the tests with you soon, explaining the situation in detail,” he said slowly. “Also, we have to discuss what we plan to do for you, as well as what you have to do for us.”

Zack’s eyes narrowed. “You sound like you ought to have mournful organ music playing behind you. What’ve I got?”

“It’s new, very rare,” answered DePriest. “Only a handful of cases have been reported, all of them within the past year and a half. I’m not even at liberty to tell you who the other victims are.”

“Okay, what is it, a disease or what?”

“We think we know what it is, but thus far we have absolutely no idea how to stop it,” he said. “It looks very much like a slow virus disease.”

Zack inhaled. “No cure?”

“Not so far, somebody may come up with one. No idea when.”

“From the way you’re talking, I assume this slow virus is going to kill me.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Three of the victims have died up to now,” replied DePriest. “The one who lasted the longest lived seven and a half months.”

Zack asked, “How the hell did I get it?”

“That’s what we’d very much like to know.”

Perching on the edge of the yellow humukbed, Zack said, “You’d better give me some more background.”

“Let me tell you how a slow virus disease works,” Dr. DePriest said, lowering himself into the chair. “It infects you, gets into your system and then waits. Usually there are no initial outward symptoms. The virus waits months, years in some cases, then triggers a diseas.e A disease which is nearly always fatal, having as its target the central nervous system.”

“Don’t you know enough about them to come up with a cure?”

“We know a real slow virus is one that’s a naked core of DNA without a protein coat,” the small doctor replied. “For most of this century we’ve been able to control and cure most of the vicious slow virus diseases in man with lab-created monoclonal antibodies.”

“Bo,” asked Zack, “how about dosing me with that stuff?”

“We’ll try everything, sure. The problem is, we happen to be dealing with a synthetic slow virus,” he said. “Something cooked up in somebody’s lab. It has thus far resisted every known and even every speculated-on cure for similar diseases.”

“When you say we, you’re not just talking about the folks here in the clinic.”

“The Global Health Agency is working on this, along with a whole stewpot of other agencies and police organizations.”

“And I’m not the only one who’s got it?”

“There are several other cases.”

“Involving important world figures, huh?”

DePriest rubbed at his augmented ankle. “Yes,” he admitted. “Until you came down with this, we’d concluded it was being used only as a weapon against top political and financial figures in the world.”

“But not us common folks.”

“You’re a valuable police agent, Zack, but not on a par with . . . well, they don’t want the names of the victims mentioned.”

“Would one of them be E. Zorro Ortega?”

The doctor blinked. “What prompts you to ask that?”

“Heard he was sick.”

“Yes, they found this particular slow virus in him two months ago,” answered Dr. DePriest. “GHA labs determined he’s had it about four.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“There the big question. What we’re dealing with here. . . .” He paused, drew a vague shape in the air with one hand. “It’s as though a hidden assassin were to fire his kilgun in, say, October, but the blast didn’t hit the victim until April or May. By that time your killer can be plenty long gone. With a man like Ortega, a man who sees all sorts of people and travels all over Warmzone West, it’s hard to zero in on the specific source of infection. We can pinpoint the week he picked up the slow virus and started carrying it, that’s about all. A hell of a lot of very intense medical detective work has gone into this. Same is true with each of the victims.”

“What about me. . . . Any notion how I picked up my dose?”

“The prelim data indicate you were infected in mid-January of this year, short time before you were in for your last checkup here,” said the small doctor. “GHA will run further tests on you when their boys arrive from the Swiss Enclave and we may, this time, be lucky enough to come up with a day and time. We’ll also probably use—”

“Meaning I’m stuck here at the clinic?” He stood.

“Afraid so.”

“Damn it, I’ve got to work on this,” Zack told him, moving closer to the seated doctor. “It’s my murder we’re trying to solve.”

“It isn’t simply you, though, it’s a half dozen or more key people worldwide. We have no way of knowing how many more will be infected over the coming weeks and months.” DePriest, wobbling some, rose to face him. “Working with you here ought to give us our first big break.”

“As long as I’m helping a worthy cause.”

“With you, don’t you see, we may be able to isolate the source of the damned thing. Once we do that, we’re closer to a cure.”

“If there is one.”

“Has to be. Nobody’s wacky enough to invent a slow virus that can’t be halted. Too risky and dangerous.”

“To your way of thinking, anyway.” Zack paced in front of the dead TV wall. “How did I pick this up? Is it a contact thing?”

“There are several possibilities. They may have designed a human carrier, someone who’s immune but can pass the disease and give it to people on contact.”

“You, think I got mine that way?”

“We don’t know. This stuff can also be transmitted through the air, meaning even an aircirc system could deliver it to you. With you we can really probe—something tough to do with the other victims—and get at the exact source.”

“Why me?” Zack asked. “I’m not being philosophical. I just want to know why I’m important enough to be on anybody’s shitlist.”

“You may not be, you may have picked this up by accident,” DePriest told him. “Which is why it’s so damned important to run sufficient tests, mind-probes if need be to—”

“Circumlocution. Look, I’m good at tracking things down. Let me go out to—”

“Do you know where you contracted the disease? Is that it? Don’t try to keep this kind of information back and go playing vigilante or—”

“All I know is I was working on a case up in the Coldzone in the middle of January . . . and that’s about when I must’ve picked it up, right?”

“Yes, nine or ten weeks ago.”

“So I go back there and dig—”

“Impossible, Zack, because you’re too damned important here. We have to keep test—”

“For how long?”

“Until we have the answers.”

Zack halted, watching the wrinkle-etched face of the little doctor. “Why’d you suspect I might have this thing?”

“It really was routine,” he answered. “Ever since this synthetic slow virus first showed up, all government labs and similar facilities have running tests to detect any sign of it. On a routine recheck of your last examination two months back, a small hint turned up. It was decided to call you in and well, you’ve definitely got it. I’m sorry as hell, but from our point of view you can be very valuab—”

“Yeah, that’s splendid,” said Zack, dropping down on the edge of the humukbed. “When can I expect the unpleasant symptoms to commence? And what are they?”

Looking away, DePriest said, “It’ll be like growing old at an incredibly accelerated rate. I’d estimate you’ll go along about as usual for, oh, as long as another couple of months. After that you’ll begin to age, ever and ever more rapidly. Within four or five months you’ll feel and look like a man of something over one hundred and twenty years of age. Death comes fairly soon after that.”

“Two months,” said Zack.

“You may have three, and if we can come up with a—”

“Give me the names of the other victims. Maybe I can see a pattern and—”

“We already see a pattern,” DePriest said. “Unfortunately, it points to a great many possible instigators. Obviously all the possible aspects are being investigated.”

“I’m not contagious? I can’t pass this?”

The doctor shook his head. “No.”

“Then let me roam free and work on the thing.”

“Even if I wanted to, the government wouldn’t let us,” said Dr. DePriest. “You’re the best source of potential information we have. Everybody’s going to want to work with you. Global Health, the National Security Office, World—”

“They’re just going to waste my damned time. You guys have already had months to work on—”

“You’re going to stay here. That’s final,” the doctor said firmly. “We’ll make you as comfortable as possible.”

“Will you let me know in plenty of time to pick out my last meal?”

“Try to be optimistic,” advised the doctor. “Even when a disease as deadly as this, your attitude can—”

“I’ve got more contacts out there than most anybody else in the FPA, because I work in an unconventional and eclectic way, Allan,” Zack said. “People in the Downside sectors of the world. Crooks, spies, double agents, sneaks, wild talents, freaks, mewts. Let me contact them. Let me work outside.”

“You’re going to have to remain here,” said DePriest. “Things’ll flow smoothly for all concerned if you cooperate.”

“Otherwise?”

The doctor made his way to the door, touched it. “Rhetorical question, since you already know the answer,” he said. The door whispered open and he limped out of the room.

Chapter Four

Zack should’ve awakened as soon as the beefy man came slipping into the room.

He didn’t, though.

It wasn’t until Falcon O’Brian punched him in the ribs that he came back from sleep.

Zack sat up, metal arm swinging out.

“Holy shit, are you slow,” croaked O’Brian, chuckling and stepping back from the floating cot. “You really are in piss-poor shape, old buddy.”

After checking the time on his metal palm, it was 7:47 a.m., Zack dropped off the cot. While getting into his clothes, he glanced over at the nursebot. “You’re supposed to announce visitors.”

The glittering mechanism, didn’t respond.

“Aw, I blanked him before I popped in, old buddy.” O’Brian was heavyset, nearly forty, dressed in a bright orange three-piece bizuit. “Our little confab’s going to be private.”

“Did Court assign you to this case?”

O’Brian’s voice was low, growly. “Courtenay Chezbro had to. The higher-ups insisted,” he answered. “Court doesn’t care much for me, mostly because I’m one hundred percent flesh and blood. Not one single spare part to my name, even got all my own teeth.” He plopped down in a bright blue chair, crossed his chunky legs. “So you’re dying, old buddy?”

Studying his Federal Police Agency peer, Zack settled into a chair facing him. He felt slightly wobbly, but strove to mask that. “Nice of you to drop in to pay your respects.”

Reaching into his vest pocket, O’Brian extracted a scarlet and yellow snuff box. “I never cared for you,” he assured him. “Thing is, FPA wants to be the first to crack this slow virus case, and you’re a dandy place to start.” He took a pinch of greenish snuff from the box, thrust it into his left nostril.

“What’s that smell?”

“Must be cinnamon. New blend of snuff I’m . . . excuse . . . Achoo! Achoo!” He shook his head, contentedly, from side to side.

“I smell something besides cinnamon.”

“Could be my cologne. Brand new product called Downside, which mixes all the most distinctive masculine odors of the lower depths,” explained the Federal cop. “Sweat, pot, sewage and—”

“Does Allan DePriest know you’re here?”

After tamping snuff up into his right nostril, O’Brian replied, “Sure. I’m no sneak.”

“How long have you been working on this slow virus business?”

“Two days, but I’m already—”

“Any idea as to who—”

“Hold it, old buddy. I’m the one . . . excuse. . . . Achoo! Achoo! Achoo!” He gave another pleased shake of his head. “I’m here to ask you questions.”

“But I’m the one who’s dying. If you know—”

“Your living or dying is just a piss in the ocean.” O’Brian rubbed the back of his hand across his nostrils. “Holy shit, Zack, there are big people suffering from the same damned thing you got.”

“Including the President?”

“You’re not supposed. . . . Naw, what makes you say a dippy thing like that?”

“Been hearing rumors she’s ill.”

“She’s hunky dory. It’s not exactly patriotic, you know, spreading gossip about such a swell-looking broad.”

Zack said, “Who else besides E. Zorro Ortega then?”

Giving a negative shake of his hand, O’Brian said, “Let’s get going on what I want to know from you.” From a side pocket of his orange suit he drew out a flat plaz-covered notebook. “Not having a built-in computer terminal up my toke, like some of you augies, I got to make notes.” He patted himself until he located an electropen.

“Who’s behind this, do you have any notion yet?”

“Sinister forces,” answered the FPA man as he uncapped the pen. “I’ve been going over your field reports, Zack, and your daily logs. Every spare style you got. Damned few useful details did you pass along concerning the crucial period you spent up in the Coldzone.”

“Which period is that?”

“12 Jan 2033 to 14 Jan 2033 inclusive. That’s when you picked up this thing.”

“Does Allan have the date pinned down that—”

“I use him and other sources.” O’Brian tapped his pen on a blank page. “In your accounts of those fateful days, old buddy, you left several gaps.” He flipped to a scribbled page. “‘Tailed suspect into Downside of Boston . . . Lunch Upside. . . . Brawl Downside at approx sundown. . . . And so to bed. . . .’ That, my friend, is a piss-poor account of fourteen hours in the life of a crack Federal Police agent. Your other two days aren’t much richer in color and detail.”

“I’m saving the best stuff for my memoirs.”

“Clown while you can, because your memoirs’ll be issued posthumously, old buddy,” said O’Brian. “I’ve scanned footage of some of the other victims. When this really starts to smack you, you quit making wise-ass remarks.”

“Which victims did you study?”

“I’m not going to spill any details to you. So let’s start with 12 Jan up in Boston. Fill in all those damned blanks for me.”

“Be a lot simpler, Falcon, if we went up there together,” suggested Zack. “Working as a team we—”

“We’d make a piss-poor team. We’re both loners,” said O’Brian. “Besides which, you aren’t exactly a full-fledged FPA man anymore, you’re more a human guinea pig. They’ll study you and probe you while you’re alive; when you’re defunct they’ll slice you up.”

Zack’s metal forefinger pointed at the cop. “Suppose we depart from my suite now.” He cocked his head toward the door. “You escort me to the parknland area so—”

“Won’t work, old buddy.” He chuckled.

“Ought to. If need be, I can stun you right now and use your ID packet to con my way through the simpleminded guardbots they’ve—”

“Try it,” invited O’Brian. He remained seated, shut his notebook and spread his chunky arms wide.

Zack did. He aimed his stungun thumb at the FPA agent and activated it.

Nothing occurred.

“Should you want to know what time it is or want to scratch your ass, that you can still use, your tin arm for,” O’Brian told him. “All the dangerous stuff has been deactivated and it’ll stay that way.”

“You arranged that?”

“Didn’t have to, since Doc DePriest had already taken care of it,” answered O’Brian. “They did it by remote control, while you were snoozing the night away.” He chuckled once more. “You’d better face facts, old buddy.”

“I’m a prisoner,” said Zack slowly.

“Absolutely correct,” said O’Brian.

Chapter Five

“. . . and neojello for dessert. It’s purple flavor, with an attractive glop of sincream atop. . . .”

Zack opened his eyes, found himself staring at the colorful floor of his cell. He had no immediate notion why he was sprawled there.

“. . . At least try a few spoonfuls of the kelp soup,” the nursebot was droning. “Even though you’re dying, Tack, you don’t want to neglect—”

“Zack. Front name is Zack.” Words came out of him with great difficulty. “Help me up, huh?”

“Want some soup first?”

“No, I want to be upright.”

The gleaming robot slid a hand under Zack’s real elbow and tugged. “Upsy daisy, Jack.”

“Zack.” The room went spinning, floor climbing up the gaudy walls, ceiling pressing down and then up.

Images of a snowy landscape flickered through his mind. The glaz towers of Boston, the dark lanes of its Downside.

“Falcon O’Brian,” remembered Zack, leaning unsteadily against the chill side of the nursebot. “He used a mindbug on me. Yeah, stunned me first and. . . . Where the hell were you while that was occurring?”

Settling Zack into a slingchair, patting his knee, the mechanism replied, “I was nonfunctioning, sahib. Dreadfully sorry. Some lunch now?”

A plaz tray of food was sitting on a three-legged servotable.

“What meal did you say this was?”

“Lunch.”

“Lunch of the same day as Falcon’s social call?”

“To the best of my knowledge, yes.”

“That bastard came in here and used truth gear on me.” Zack massaged the spot at the base of his skull where the parasitic mindbug had been clamped. “Did you report all this to Allan?”

“Everything which occurred herein was sanctioned by the clinic.” The robot made a silvery gesture at the tray. “Do you, tuan, wish me to spoon some of this enriched soup into your gob? If you’re too ill to—”

“I’m not ill,” Zack told him. “I may be dying, but I’m not sick. You use a stungun and a mindbug on the healthiest of individuals and that guy’s going to feel a shade wobbly. Get away with the damned spoon.”

Kelp soup splashed on the suite floor as the robot took a few quick steps back to avoid the swing of Zack’s metal hand. “There’s also a delicious, so I am told, salad. Seaweed, lettuce-like protein sub, fakebacon bits, a thick, creamy—”

“What did O’Brian get out of me?”

“That, I am unable to tell you, marse. Being blanked during his entire visit, I can’t recall—”

“I’d better talk to Allan.”

“He’ll be here for a look-in at 5 p.m.”

“I want to see him sooner than that.”

“I’m afraid . . . af . . . af. . . .” The nursebot went rigid, straightening up, dropping the plaz soupspoon.

Zack stood, carefully, up. “Now what’s going on?”

A faint sizzling sound commenced at the center of the room’s floor. The air above the spot went milky, then opaque. In less than a minute Timpany Quarls seemed to be standing there.

“Timpany?”

“Now?” She was looking back over her shoulder. “Zack? Listen, I can’t hear or see you. This is a one-way projection, and even so you wouldn’t believe what it’s costing.” The tips of her slender fingers and the ends of her platinum hair throbbed with tiny specks of intense white light. “I know, I made it my business to find out when you didn’t come back that they’re keeping you there and that you’re very sick. I really feel, considering the medical experts I can muster, you’ll be much better off letting me help you. On the outside I—”

“Damned right,” he agreed.

“. . . Things have been arranged so you can slip out of there tonight. If you so wish I do hope you’re up to it, Zack. Come a half mile straight south into that tacky synthetic bayou behind that awful place they’re keeping you. I’ll be waiting for you in my favorite skycar, you know the one. At exactly 1 a.m., that’s one in the morning, you’re to make your way out of your room and head for the rendezvous spot. Okay? Everything’s set for you to have an easy time of getting out. I hope you decide to come, because . . . well, you know how I feel about you. See you tonight. . . . Bye.”

The three-dimensional image of the lovely young woman faded. The air crackled for a few seconds.

Zack, watching the nursebot, settled into the slingchair. He took up a spare plaz spoon and took a sip of the soup.

The robot came back to life a half minute later, asking, “How’s the soup?”

“Cold,” answered Zack.

Chapter Six

The girl on the wall smiled an enormous apologetic smile. “Looks, like we won’t be having the special live report from Free Africa 3 on starvation and widespread famine in that struggling new nation,” she said. “Special African Affairs Correspondent Burt Frick has apparently been eaten by the locals. Elsewhere in the news there’s word from Upside Detroit about an alarming dip in private bomber sales. . . .”

Zack stretched up out of a too-colorful chair, turned his broad back on the beautiful green-haired newscaster and consulted his handwatch yet again.

Still six minutes shy of 1 a.m.

The nursebot yawned. “What say you hit the sack, bwana? A man in your precarious state of—”

“I’m developing a keen interest in world events. Can’t seem to get enough news.”

“Somewhat futile, isn’t it?” The glittering robot produced another false yawn. “Soak up all this info, tuan, and to what end? Few months hence you’ll be pushing up daisies, the grave worms’ll be snacking on your—”

“Aren’t you supposed to be more cheerful?”

“We believe in reality-based therapy in this wing,” answered the mechanical nurse. “If a patient is going to croak, we help him face the fact.”

“Commendable.”

It was now three minutes short of departure time.

“Here’s Headless Ortmann with a special bulletin,” the green-haired vidwall girl said.

Her giant image faded, was replaced by a shot of the headless newscaster. He was sprawled on a rumpled bed, wearing the top half of a pair of candy-striped lycraflan pajamas. His trio of plaz canisters was arranged on his bedside table.

“Like I tell you, chums, old Headless never sleeps,” his voice canister intoned. “That is why I am always able to beat the competish and bring you mucho fresho news. And here’s a hot one. Although nobody’s talking openly, I can tell you that the awful disease that’s got ag tycoon E. Zorro Ortega on a downhill rush to extinction has struck again. Righto, Mr. and Mrs. Audience, none other than the aggressively gorgeous Millie Moskowitz, star of . . . awk. . . .”

The vidwall snapped to blank.

Zack took three steps toward it. “Hey, I want to catch this.”

The nursebot didn’t respond.

Checking his built-in palm watch, Zack found it was thirty seconds in front of 1 a.m. Taking a deep breath, he crossed to the exit door. As he reached out to touch it, the door pushed open.

Zack hesitated on the threshold five or six seconds before stepping out into the corridor. There was only silence out there.

“Wondrous what you can do with money,” he murmured and started for the nearest way out of the Augmentation Clinic.

He padded through sky-blue corridors, lemon yellow corridors, royal purple corridors. All the doors that needed to be open were open, the three guardbots he passed saw him not at all.

The night was warm, overcast. After easing out of a ground-level side door, Zack ran across a pink-surface exercise yard. A high forest green sewdo-stucco wall surrounded the area and an opaque glaz gate blocked the way off the grounds. The gate opened when he pushed at it. Zack stepped free.

“What the frap are you up to, chump?”

A large live male nurse was leaning against the outside wall, a nearly finished potcig held between forefinger and thumb.

“I’m Dr. Beckford, down from—”

“Like puckey you are!” The massive guard extinguished his cigarette, dropped the butt into a slashpocket of his white smock and glowered at Zack. “You’re an escaped inmate.”

Not fully escaped. “Nonsense, young fella,” said Zack affably, raising his metal arm. “If you’ll scan the ID code etched on my palm you’ll note—”

“Oof!”

The metal hand, although not functioning in any lethal or semi-lethal fashion, was still an effective bludgeon.

When the nurse leaned to inspect the hand, Zack converted it to a fist and smashed it hard into the man’s beefy chin.

This caused the nurse to totter.

Two more punches had him on the orange walkway on his knees.

Zack delivered a slashing chop to the side of the groggy man’s neck, succeeded in toppling him over into unconsciousness.

Leaping over the sprawled man, he began to run.

The imitation bayou gave off a musky, earthy smell. Mist hung heavy over it, almost masking the floating glow sign over the entryway. This swamp is a product of Walt Chezney Enterprises, creators of Chezneyland ®, Chezneyworld ®, Chezneystate ®. All animals, birds, Indians, insects, trees, plants, shrubs, muck etc., are synthetic and covered by patents and copyrights. Welcome to Chezneyswamp! ® Zach chose one of the less-traveled bayou paths to take southward. The tree branches twisted and tangled overhead, dripping with thick streamers of moss. In the fog-shrouded branches, unseen, owls hooted.

On his right a glowsign warmed Watch Out For Quicksand! ®

Leaves clattered up above; something dark and feathery came swooping down at him.

“Hoot! Hoot!”

Zack dodged the robot owl, kept moving toward the rendezvous spot with Timpany.

“A woman with her money and influence ought to be able to help me a hell of a lot more than the clinic,” he said. “Put me in touch with the private medical people who’re treating E. Zorro Ortega and the others. There’s got to be a way to at least retard the progress of this damned virus, give me more time to track down whoever’s behind it.”

Two months might be long enough, but—

Chomp!

A pair of enormous green jaws had risen up out of the scummy swamp water on his left. A robot ‘gator, trying to take a bite out of his leg.

Zack sprinted clear, kept pushing on through the mist.

“Hoot! Hoot!”

Chomp!

“Caw! Caw!”

Finally he spotted Timpany’s grey and silver skycar. It was hovering in the mist ahead, three or so feet above a patch of mossy ground. The windows of the cabin were blanked, glowing a dim yellow.

Working his way to the familiar skycar, he tapped on the drive-side door with his metal fingers. “Timpany,” he said quietly, “it’s me.”

The grey door swept slowly open.

Timpany was not inside the cabin.

Instead Zack faced two strangers, thick-set men in dark one-piece worksuits. One held a stungun aimed at Zack, the other a kilgun.

Chapter Seven

“Excuse me, I must have the wrong skycar,” said Zack, taking a step back from the hovering craft.

“Naw, you don’t, Tourney,” said the thick-set man with the stungun.

“Climb aboard,” invited the one with the kilgun. The two of them filled the entryway of the skycar, guns aimed out at him.

Zack asked, “Where’s Timpany Quarls?”

“Get in, we’ll tell you,” said the one with the stungun.

“Actually, since it’s such a pleasant, balmy night,” said Zack, “I think I’ll walk instead.”

The barrel of the kilgun swung as Zack withdrew a few more paces. “She had to go somewheres else,” the gunman said.

“A fancy dress ball,” added the other man. “Yeah, a fancy dress ball. A, you know, really ritz affair.”

“Hop on in here, Tourney.”

“So’s we can take you to her.”

“At the fancy dress ball? I’m not dressed for that.”

“Afterward, pal.”

“Right, she’s gonna meet you afterward.”

“I appreciate your offer, fellas, yet I—”

“C’mon, quit futzing around,” ordered the one with the stungun. “If I put you to sleep out there, it means we gotta bust our goonies hauling you inside here.”

“Go ahead, stun the bastard,” urged his partner. “I’m getting tired of all this badinage.”

Giving a resigned shrug, Zack approached the open door of the skycar. “Where exactly are we going to meet Timpany?”

“Elsewhere.” He made a get-in-here-quick gesture with his kilgun hand.

Zack boarded. “You lads work for the Quarls organization?”

“Yeah, we’re in Public Relations.” The one with the stungun settled into the pilot seat.

His partner goaded Zack toward a passenger seat at the far side of the wide cabin. “Park your toke over here, chum.”

This really was Timpany’s private skycar, the one she’d had specially built for herself last summer. Zack had traveled in it often; the scent of her faintly lingered.

When he was two paces from the designated chair, with the gunman directly behind him, Zack made himself stumble. His metal hand pressed against a certain plaz panel in the wall.

A whirring began underfoot.

“What’s that funny noise?” said the puzzled gunman.

Zack threw himself to the right.

Up through the floor shot a queen-size bed. It caught the kilgunner, snapped him off his feet, flipped him like a flapjack.

Spinning, Zack dived for the bed.

He caught the startled man’s gunwrist, tightened his metal fingers around it and yanked the kilgun away from him.

Zzzzzummmmm!

“Jerk,” muttered the kilgunner as the beam of his partner’s stungun caught him full in the chest instead of hitting the rolling-away Zack.

“I was trying for him,” apologized the stungunner.

Zack stretched upright on the floor space between the bed edge and the wall. “Put the stungun aside,” he suggested.

“You’re making this rescue attempt damned tough, pal.” He bent, set the weapon carefully on the cabin floor.

Edging toward him, Zack inquired, “Who sent you?”

“Timpany Quarls.”

“You really think this is a time for being whimsical?” Zack was nearer to him. He stretched out his arm, touched the man’s skull with the kilgun’s barrel tip. “Who sent you?”

“As I said before, Pal, a lady named . . . ow!”

“Truth is what we want to hear.”

“Well . . . geeze, I hate to betray a confidence ouch.” He ran his tongue over his lips. “We don’t exactly know who it was hired us.”

“Oh, so?”

“We’re not actually PR men, see. We’re more well, goons for hire. Right now we’re working out of the Ft. Miami Downside, although we expect to be moving up the—”

“Details.” Zack prodded again with the gun. “We never saw a human. We were contacted by a robot. Big gunmetal guy. Paid us $50,000 up front to come to this stinkhole and pick you up.”

“Where’d you get the skycar?”

“It was waiting for us in a landnlock lot Upside. Lot Number 203 it was. There was a flight plan, a picture of you and that kilgun on this seat here. We never—”

“Easy.”

“Was only reaching for the pic.” He produced a glossy tri-op portrait from inside his tunic.

Glancing quickly at the photo, Zack saw it was a copy of one Timpany had taken of him a few months back. “You never saw a young woman, a blonde?”

“Only this big mothering robot,” swore the hoodlum. “Hell, it’s most often like that in our line of work. All free lancing is. Our clients don’t usually like to have much direct contact with us.”

“Where were you supposed to deliver me?”

“Our orders were to stun you, truss you up and leave you in the skycar under a plyorobe. We were to leave the skycar back at the landnlock lot no later than 3 a.m. this morning.”

“What about collecting the rest of your fee?”

“Robot was gonna look us up.”

“They seem to have underestimated me, hiring lunks such as you to take me in.” Zack lowered the kilgun slightly and backed off. “Okay, gather up your colleague and depart.”

“Depart?”

“Get off this skycar. Now.”

“In the middle of a frapping swamp at 2 in the a.m.?”

“You enjoy the decor,” Zack said. “Go on, drag him on out of here.”

The man slunk out of the seat. “You knew this bed was built-in here, huh?” He gripped his stunned partner by the armpits, began tugging. “Boy, the way some people live.”

Kathump!

His unconscious associate had slipped out of his grasp, was sprawled on the cabin flooring.

“You wouldn’t consider a fee of, say, 10,000 bucks to fly us back to Ft. Miami or—”

“Nope.”

The hood got a better hold, dragged the unconscious man to the doorway. “Could I maybe leave him with you? Gonna be rough carting him through that—”

“Both of you are leaving.”

“I suppose that’s only fair.” With several grunting tugs he got the other man out of the skycar cabin and into the misty bayou. “Well, so long, Tourney. Nice meeting you.”

Zack touched the control panel. The door shut the two goons out in the night.

Taking the pilot seat, Zack said, “The folks who expect to find me in a dazed condition ought to know something about what’s going on. So I’ll head for Ft. Miami and—”

Brrrrttttzzzz!

The buzzer inside his skull was sounding.

Brrrrttttzzzzz!

“Damn, FPA knows I’m gone already.”

Brrrrttttzzzzz!

“This’ll keep up unless—”

Brrrrttttzzzz!

“But I have to find out who—”

BRRRTTTTTZZZZZZ!

Pain sizzled through his entire body, making him shake, making his hands flutter.

BRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTZZZZZZZZZ!

Zack concentrated, trying to absorb the noise and pain they were sending at him. He clutched at the control panel.

BRRRRRRTTTTTTZZZZZZ!

Slowly, painfully, he punched out a flight pattern. One that would take him not to Ft. Miami but to the Washington D.C. Downside.

BRRRRRTTTTTTZZZZZZZ!

The skycar quivered and then began to rise above the swamp.

Chapter Eight

Small patches of dawn light were able to fight their way down through the tangled darkness of the Downside street. The rusted support pillar Zack had stopped to rest against glowed a dim white. Columns and pillars rose high all around him, part of the complex system that supported the multilevel city of Washington D.C., which began some two hundred feet above. Looking up you saw a vast complex of interlacing ramps, crossways, support beams. Down here on ground level it was dark and damp.

The buzzing inside Zack’s head was almost continual now. For awhile after it had reached the peak of its intensity, he’d almost been able to cope with it. Ignoring the noise, struggling against the accompanying pain, he’d flown the skycar to the bedraggled outskirts of D.C. and ditched it. He had only two miles to cover on foot, but the journey kept growing tougher. His bones ached, his head throbbed, walking at all was difficult. He had to move in a slow shuffle, pausing often to rest. Maybe this was what it’d be like when the virus really started working at him.

The Federal Police Agency wanted him to come back, the buzzing and the pain would continue until he did. Or so they thought.

He sucked in a wheezing breath, resumed his shuffling walk.

“How’s about a blow job?”

“Huh?”

Standing on the cracked sidewalk nearby was a sweet-faced little girl of ten, golden-haired and clad in a lacy three-piece funsuit. “Blow job Special tonight. Only 100 smackers.”

All along the narrow street ahead he noticed them now, children. Scrubbed and fresh-dressed, girls and boys, standing, sitting, waiting. Each hopeful of customers. “This is new,” he said.

“Nope, we been working this block for a month and more,” replied the gold-headed little girl. “They call this stretch of Downside Kid Alley these days. You’re out of touch. I’ll give you the special Rube Discount. Ninety-five bucks and you can have our robot in to take pix while we’re doing it.”

Zack told her, “I’ll pass.”

“You a fruitcake or something? Don’t look it, but I’ve been fooled before.”

Nodding, he resumed walking.

“Too good for me, huh? Listen, jerk, I did three senators and a cabinet member from Upside last week alone.”

A bright-eyed boy of eleven stepped into his path. “How about a little of that love that dares not speak its name, mister?”

“No, thanks.” He went around the pouting boy, a spasm of sent pain causing him to bend and hunch.

He ignored half a dozen other proposals, modest and otherwise, and reached the end of the street. Turning right, he entered a littered dirt lane.

Honk! Honk!

Zack looked back over his shoulder, a painful thing to do, and saw a dirt-smeared once-white landwagon rolling in his wake.

In the cab was what appeared to be a grey-haired lady. She was thick and wide, a large black kelp cigar gripped between her teeth. “Move it, move it,” she boomed, leaning out the window. “Get out of my way, you frapping stimmer.”

Zack pressed back against a mildewed sector of stone wall, allowing the truck to pass by.

On its door was lettered Tessie the Tranz, Doing Business As The Corpse Lady. In the open back of the truck three dead men, each wearing tattered dirt-rich clothes, had been dumped.

“You appear to be on your last legs.” Tessie stopped the truck and was gazing out at him while he hunched against the wall. “You probably won’t last much longer. That’s what you get for haunting the brainstim parlors.”

“Come back in a couple of months,” he advised.

“Aw, you won’t last that long.” She shifted the unlit stogie to the other side of her wide mouth. “Why don’t you hop in with those other stiffs. Then if you conk off, you’re already collected.”

“What do you do with the bodies?”

“What’s that matter to you? You’ll be in stumblebum heaven by then.”

“Idle curiosity.”

“Well, I sell most of ‘em to medschools Upside,” explained Tessie. “Plus which, I have a few collectors who also buy. Rich bastards who’re big on corpsing. That’s quite a hobby with the moneyed classes Upside. They even, so I hear, have a big convention once a year in East Hartford. You’d be stunned and surprised to hear what some deadbeat’s cadaver’Il sell for at a con.”

“I’ve got to get on to the Oval Office.” Zack began shuffling away.

“Who you going to meet there?”

“Guy named Jocko, I hope.”

“Why the heck didn’t you say so? Get in and I’ll give you a lift, it’s still about a half mile from here.”

“You want me back there with your collection?”

“Up front with me.”

Zack, using the dented front of the landtruck to steady himself, went around and got into the cab. “Thanks.”

“Old friend of Jocko’s?”

“Yeah.”

Tessie whapped the dash with a meaty fist, tromped on the energypedal and the vehicle started rolling along the murky alley. “When he goes, Jocko’s body is going to bring a bango price. All those spare parts, the collectors’ll go goofy.”

Zack mentioned, “Your wig’s falling off.”

“It always does when I get into a heated conversation,” said Tessie, making no move to adjust the askew hairpiece. “Funniest damned thing. After I had my operation and switched sexes, I couldn’t grow hair at all. What I had fell off. A medical foulup I’m darned near sure, but who can buck the United Medical Workers and the American Federation of Quacks? On the positive side my tits blossomed really nice. It is, though, a true pain in the toke not to have thick feminine tresses cascading from my dome.”

“Everybody has a cross to bear.”

“True, too true,” agreed Tessie. “Let me give you some advice. . . . You ought to quit hitting the brain-stimulation parlors. Big handsome galoot like you . . . darn, if I were ten years younger and my hair wasn’t always sliding off, I’d go for you myself . . . anyway, you’re a personable fellow and oughtn’t to need the electronic euphoria that brainstim provides.”

“I haven’t been frequenting a stim parlor.”

“Dope den?”

“Just a bit under the weather.”

“A bit? When I spotted you jakewalking along this alley, I figured I had me a hot new cadaver about ready for loading.”

“That’s only one of the symptoms.” He turned away from her, grimacing, as more buzzing came jolting through him.

“Jocko ought to be able to fix you up,” she said. He can arrange almost anything.”

“I’m counting on that,” said Zack.

Chapter Nine

“Lemme have about twelve fingers of rye,” snickered the raggedy albino.

“Funny, very funny,” said the mutant bartender. “And don’t spill so much this time. You’re all thumbs tonight.”

“Listen, you bleached out bigot, I. . . .”

Zack halted just inside the entrance of the Oval Office, scanning the smoky egg-shaped room. This was an offhour for the saloon. Most of the all-night drinkers had departed; the daytime shift hadn’t begun drifting in. There were only three customers at the curved ebony bar at the right side of the room. The albino, a mewt with an extra eye on his low forehead and a fat lady bishop. Most of the rickety redwood booths were empty. A ruined senator, who’d recently been censured for exceeding his bribe limit, was slouched alone in one, mottled hands clutching a plaz bottle of organic white lightning.

All at once the upright yellow piano against the back wall began playing a lively march tune all by itself.

The fallen senator jerked up in his seat, the mewt blinked all three bloodshot eyes, the lady bishop blessed herself.

“Gotten into another mess I see, old boy.” A small man was peering out of the farthest booth, beckoning to Zack with his plaz left hand. The dusty light strip fixtures floating up near the cobwebby ceiling made enough light to make his metal skull top gleam and flash.

Zack went stumbling over the warped plank floor. “Tessie the Tranz sends her best.” He sat opposite the little cyborg.

“She’s made me one of the best offers for my body I’ve ever had,” said Jocko. “Were it not that I enjoy life so much, my lad, I’d cash myself in.”

“You enjoy this?”

“Yes, even though I rarely sleep with junk-food heiresses,” answered Jocko. “Life continues to be a thrill-a-minute proposition for me. I’m learning piano, for instance.”

“That’s you playing that thing over there?”

“Doing it telekinetically, with a new gadget I’ve had installed in my wondrous body, yes.” He was a bit, a small bit, over five feet in height and the flesh parts of him gave you the idea he might be in his fifties somewhere. His dapper two-piece lemon yellow funsuit didn’t quite hide the fact Jocko had acquired a good many spare parts. Metal joint hinges, tubes and wires, mysterious bumpy components could be detected pushing and poking under the bright sewdocloth. “I am developing, if I may say so, an incredible left hand. You ought to hear my walking bass when I render ‘Yancey’s Bugle Call.’ Brings tears to the orbs, my lad.”

Zack rested his elbows on the tabletop. “Jocko, can you arrange for—”

“I’ve already set up an appointment for you with Dr. Danfield.” Jocko selected one of the three nearly full glazes lined up in front of him and sipped at the clouded amber liquid. “We’ll slip over to his place of business in a nonce or, rather, he’ll be slipping over to us. Doc Danfield’s moving about Downside in a mobile home these days. One of the few Victorian-style mobile homes you see hereabouts. I’ve always been fond of spires, cupolas, weathercocks, all the—”

“How’d you know I needed a doctor?”

“Somebody has to turn off that idiotic buzzing in your head, old boy.”

“Hey, Jocko, you’re unnerving poor Senator Vetterlein,” yelled the bartender out of his smaller mouth.

“Ah, far be it from me to unsettle the poor lad further.”

The piano ceased playing.

“What else,” Zack asked him, “do you know?”

“I know many things. I even know the innermost fears of which you dare not speak,” said Jocko after another sip. “I also know you picked up a dose of a very nasty, though interesting, virus. Careless of you. We’ll discuss that aspect at length after we see the sawbones.”

The pain they were sending made him want to grind his teeth. “I came to you first,” he managed to get out. “Because you and your organization have more contacts and—”

“We are unique, especially me,” admitted the little cyborg. Tilting a glaz in his false hand, he used his flesh fingers to unseam the front of his yellow tunic. “Gander at this, if you will. Traded in the old one.”

There was a metal plate the size of a playing card embedded in the flesh of his narrow chest. It was covered with tiny dials, blips of colored glaz and a small display screen.

“Japanese?”

“Nonsense, old boy. Hungarian. They’re doing all the best work in microcomputers these days. Something even an FPA agent ought to know.” He caressed the surface of his built-in computer terminal and then seamed the tunic back up.

“Jocko, I have to get this damned buzzer turned off before I can do anything else,” said Zack. “My arm has to be putback in working order, too.”

“Doc Danfield can only fix your noggin. For the arm, old boy, you’ll have to go up to Detroit.”

“You’re not about to suggest I use—”

“Ah, but I am, my lad. Crazy Eddie.”

“Nope, he’s too much of a wild man, too touchy. I—”

“There’s very little choice,” said Jocko. “The aggressive Falcon O’Brian has put six of his best underlings to checking up on bootleg electrogeniuses. Fortunately not one in that half dozen has the nerve to go near Crazy Eddie.”

“With good reason.”

“His reputation is much exaggerated, a protective public-relations gambit.”

“I saw him eat a landcar once.”

“A man’s dietary habits have nothing whatever to do with his other capabilities. The best amorous affair of my youth was enjoyed with a young lady who existed on a diet of marshmallows and cognac. Yet she was as—”

“Jocko, can we go find this Danfield guy?”

“Of course, forgive me for waxing autobiographical, old boy. Often happens at this hour, when the world is poised twixt dark and light.” He swiftly gulped down what was left in the trio of goblets and stood. “You haven’t commented on the skull cap.”

“New?” Zack was having trouble getting to his feet, his legs had gone even more wobbly.

“Same one, but I had it buffed and chromed. Dazzling, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I was dazzled the moment I sighted you.” Jocko took hold of the bigger man’s arm and, gently, aided him up out of the booth. “I’m pleased to see you haven’t lost your snide sense of humor.”

“Not yet.”

“Didn’t hurt much, did it?”

Zack saw a fuzzy montage of brightly colored glaz diamonds. Turning away from the stained glaz of the operating room, he looked up from the table he was stretched out on and into the long-jawed face of Dr. Danfield. “Hurts a hell of a lot, as a matter of fact.”

“No kidding? Well, That’ll subside soon. Surgery would’ve been better, maybe, but you’re on a sort of tight schedule, according to Jocko.” Danfield backed off from the operating table, dropped his long, big-boned body into a flowered armchair. “Doing the deactivating from the outside with telek gear is often rougher.”

The entire left side of his head ached. “At least the buzzer’s stopped.”

“Oh, yes, that won’t bother you anymore. It’s dead. Later on, if you have more time, you might come back and let me remove it entirely. As of now, though, the FPA can’t razz you electronically or shoot any pain through your carcass.” He reached over one wide shoulder to adjust the frilly antimacassar behind his head. “Only thing I worried about on this job was the possibility of an explosion.”

Zack sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the table. “What explosion is that?”

“Didn’t you know? Sure, the FPA sometimes plants a charge in there, so whoever’s trying to fritz the darned thing causes it to go boom,” replied the doctor. “Eliminates the agent and the physician. You’re probably not important enough for that extra touch. None of my scans showed any sign of a minibomb inside your skull, but the FPA can be very foxy. They’ve been known to use detection-proof explosives.”

“Why’d you risk going ahead, then?”

“I’m a doctor. It’s my duty to relieve pain.”

“Even at the risk of blowing up?”

Dr. Danfield gave a massive shrug. “I took a chance,” he said. “Besides Shark didn’t have any negative hunches.”

“Who’s Shark?”

“Oh, that’s right, you haven’t met her. She’s going to be taking you up to Detroit. Very nice young lady,” said the doctor. “More or less. I’m certain you’ll like her.”

“I’ve never liked anybody named Shark so far,” Zack told him.

Chapter Ten

Jocko rocked slowly in the bentwood rocker. “It is time, old boy, you seriously considered joining our organization.”

“I don’t want to join anything new just yet.” Zack was sitting alone on a loveseat, across the mobile parlor from the little cyborg. “I’m still adjusting to having quit the Federal Police Agency.”

“You can’t compare the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to that gaggle of bullyboys you wasted your youth with, my lad,” Jocko informed him. “The SDUK, as I may have mentioned previously, is unique. Over the past few years, ever since I resigned from the hustle and bustle of Upside life, I’ve been setting up a network of gifted—”

“Yeah, I know. Wild talents and misfits,” said Zack. “I’ve availed myself of your SDUK people, during my Federal cop days.”

There was a faint creaking sound as Jocko leaned forward. “Do I note a tone of regret, old boy? Surely you can’t be sorrowful over leaving that—”

“Of course I am,” answered, Zack. “Or at least I’m angry. I spent several years with the FPA, doing a good job. Then once I came down with this damned slow virus, they dumped me in a cell and started treating me like one of Tessie the Tranz’s lesser cadavers. When I got out of there, they used my built-in buzzer to try to incapacitate me. All in all, Jocko, it has not been the most joyful of severances.”

“But the Feds have been that way all along, as I have often strived to point out to you. When a slight turn of the wheel of fortune put you in a new position, you were able to see them true.”

Zack rubbed at the left side of his head, which still hurt some. “Have you found out anything about Timpany Quarls yet?”

Jocko’s real fingers tapped at his concealed comuter terminal. “She appears to be languishing in the Arabian Alps.”

“Doing what?”

“Recovering, so the cover yarn runs, from a sudden complete nervous collapse. She’s staying at a remote and prestigious sanitarium.”

“Somebody’s holding her there against her will. I’ve got to—”

“There’s no indication the lass went there against her will,” the cyborg told him. “Your first job, my lad, now that you’re a completely free free lance operative, is to salvage your own ass. You’ve got, unless the SDUK can run down a cure on its own, maybe three months left on this planet to find out who did this to you and how to stop it. Don’t throw your time away chasing after some—”

“She helped me escape.”

“Perhaps.”

“Quit being coy. What are you hinting at?”

“I’ve got a fellow looking into the manifestation you described, into the entire alleged escape.”

“You think I was allowed to break out of there,” said Zack.

Jocko shook his head. “Someone arranged for you to slip out with relative ease.”

“If not the FPA, who?”

“Possibly your Timpany really did have something to do with it. Her skycar was used after all.”

“That projection of her, it was authentic. I know enough about intrusion images to be able to spot a fake,” insisted Zack. “What I think is this. She set up the escape for me, then someone else stepped in. That’s why I think I have to get to her—”

“You have to save yourself,” said Jocko. “The SDUK is investigating her setup over there. Should she be in any real danger, you’ll be among the first to know. Now let’s move on to related matters. We’ve traced the robot who hired the two louts who tried to grab you last evening in that picturesque swamp.”

“I never told you about—”

“While you slumbered through the deactivation of your built-in doorbell, my lad, you also talked some.”

Zack came to his feet. “What the hell did you use to get me to do that?”

“I’m as committed to finding the source of this new virus as you are,” Jocko said slowly. “I’ll do what needs to be done to get at the rascals. That includes using a truthshot on an old chum. As to the aforementioned robot who hired your would-be abductors—he seems to have been manufactured by the Ajax Robotics Corporation of Orlando Redoubt, Fla.”

“Seems to have been?”

“He suffered an unfortunate explosion, apparently, some twenty minutes after your chums failed to deliver you to that lot in Ft. Miami,” said Jocko. “We’ll pursue this further, of course.”

Zack sat again. “Why is the SDUK so interested in—”

“Perhaps, from the somewhat distorted view of a loyal FPA agent, you’ve been thinking of us only as an underground group that exists only to pull off sundry shady deeds on the fringes of polite society. Admittedly, the SDUK has engaged in smuggling, robbery, burglary, sundry con games and a multitude of other crimes and misdemeanors. Our basic purpose, however, is to improve the condition of most of the poor bastards who have to live on this seedy planet. The most useful knowledge you can pass anybody is the plain and simple truth. Muckraking, exposing scoundrels, tracking down crooks. This slow virus business is one of the rottenest things to come along in quite a spell. The SDUK intends to stop it.”

“Actually then, Jocko, you guys are just like the FPA. You want to use me to get what—”

“Listen, my lad, unless a solution is reached within a matter of weeks you’re going to be graveyard dead,” said Jocko. “You have a few flaws, yet I’d hate to see you quit this particular patch of reality quite yet. I am rooting for you to beat this virus. I also want to stop them, whoever they may be, from using it on anyone else.”

Zack settled back in his seat. “Then you’ve had people digging into this before I ever—”

“You’ve only known about this for a couple of days,” his friend reminded him. “The Society’s been gathering data for nearly two months.”

“I’d like to look at what you’ve got.”

“You will before embarking for the wilds of Detroit,” he promised. “Thus far, alas, we’ve got considerable material on the victims and the symptoms and damned little on who’s passing the virus around.”

“E. Zorro Ortega’s on the list, isn’t he?”

Jocko nodded, his chromed skull flashing in the light from a dangling Tiffany lamp. “All the folks Headless Ortmann’s mentioned in his broadcasts are actual victims.”

“He’s with you?”

“A charter member.”

Zack rested a palm on his knee. “You have proof that Mrs. Benson, the President of the goddamned USA, has this?”

“She does, trust me. Had it nearly a month.”

“What’s the link between the victims? What do Ortega and the President and Millie Moskowitz have in common?”

“When you add the other two known victims, the picture clears up some. Hints at who’ll be next as well,” said Jocko. “They are Sheikh Rachis Sigar and Sir Randolph Cox-Melville.”

“Except for Mrs. Benson, they all own sizable chunks of the United States,” Zack said. “Sure, Ortega controls around sixteen percent; Millie Moskowitz bought Greater Los Angeles last year with the excess, profits from her Scroodisks; the Sheikh is rumored to own New Jersey, Michigan and most of Rhode Island; Sir Randy has been buying up Alaska for the past several years.”

“Mrs. Benson, although she put it all in her nitwit brother’s name, is the real owner of most of the Midwest.”

“That’s not legal. The President of the United States.”

“If people actually did what was legal, old boy, you’d never have had to join that merry band of jackbooters.”

Zack said, “Okay, so somebody knocks off the major stockholders of America. Why?”

“Traditionally, heirs are easier to deal with. That’s one obvious possibility. Eliminate the owners, deal with the greedy legatees and buy the whole nation cheap,” said Jocko. “An equally plausible notion is that someone will offer the victims the chance of a cure. The price being all their shares.”

“Then we’re looking for someone, some conglomeration maybe, who wants to own the country.”

“Exactly, old boy. The SDUK has drawn up a prelim list of suspects. Unfortunately it fills several single-spaced sheets of legal-size paper.”

“I don’t own a share in anything. Why’d I get tapped?”

“Your infection has to have been accidental. We agree with the FPA conclusion there.”

“Meaning I had to be somewhere near a source?”

“Yes, that’s the reason so many would like you to be their own.”

“What about the possibility of arriving at a cure independently? Dr. DePriest told me nobody he’s aware of has had any luck at all.”

“I have two clandestine labs, one in Utah and one down Argentine way, working full time.”

“With what results?”

Jocko sighed forlornly. “None yet.”

“Then I still have to track down the people behind this,” Zack said. “If I want to stay alive.”

“We have to track them, yes.”

Zack held up his real hand, palm toward the other man. “I want to work alone, do my own fieldwork, Jocko. That’s why I quit the FPA.”

“I’m not suggesting you don’t. You’re very good at digging out obscure bits of helpful information,” Jocko said. “By all means, my lad, work on this. Long as you can.”

Nodding, Zack said, “They told me at the clinic I can expect to go for maybe two months or so before it gets really rough.”

“Somebody in your shape may stretch it to three. I wouldn’t, honestly, anticipate any more time than that.”

“Ninety days at best.”

“Plenty of time.”

“You mentioned the possibility of extortion,” Zack said. “Have any demands been made thus far?”

“We know of none. Although it is possible, considering that all the victims except you live in conditions of extreme security, that a message or two has been delivered from the other side.”

“Even with all that security, the virus got through.”

“One more reason we’d like to catch the chaps behind it.”

“Boston. That’s where I was when I picked it up.”

“Soon as Crazy Eddie puts your arm back in working order, you’ll be smuggled to Boston and you can get to work,” Jocko said. “Since the people behind this must know you’re on the loose, I doubt they’ll be sticking around Beantown. Nevertheless, you’ll surely be able to pick up valuable leads.”

Zack rose again. “I can get to Detroit on my own. There’s no need of—”

“Ah, but conditions have grown worse up that way. There’s a full-blown ethnik war going on between Upside and Downside,” explained Jocko. “You’re very, much going to need a SDUK guide to get you safely to Crazy Eddie.”

“It’s not bad enough I have to rely on somebody like Crazy Eddie, you insist on sticking me with a guide name of Shark. A girl, is it?”

“A very gifted young woman.” There was more creaking as Jocko left the rocker. “Her name is Shark Egan, she’s one of the best precogs and mind readers in the whole blinking Society. She also knows Detroit better than most anyone, you included.”

“She sounds like she’s got shoulders like an airball halfback and smokes black cigars.”

“On the contrary, old boy, she’s quite petite,” said Jocko, moving toward the door of the rolling parlor. “Come along and meet her.”

“Where is she?”

“Shark’s been driving this mobile home while Doc works away in his surgery.”

“A truck driver, too,” muttered Zack as he followed the cyborg.

Chapter Eleven

Thirty feet ahead of them a section of rutted roadway exploded. Chunks of paving, swirls of grit, shreds of smoke, all went climbing high.

“They’d like us to stop.” Shark Egan braked the rattletrap landcar they were traveling in.

Zack said, “We may as well oblige.”

They were on a dim ground-level street, hemmed in by the tall support beams of Upper Detroit. The thick midday shadows between the columns and the tumbledown tenements were thick with lurking and huddled figures. Silent, unmoving women sat on the remnants of doorsteps; sooty, listless children lolled on the curbs; thin dogs didn’t bother to bark.

“The car we can leave here.”

“That safe?” he asked.

Opening her door, the thin young woman slid out into the shadowy street. “Nobody messes with a SDUK car.” She was about five feet two inches high, very slim, her skin pale and dotted with faint freckles, her wide grey eyes underscored with smears of shadow. Shark wore grey trousers and a grey pullover; her long chestnut-colored hair was tied back with a strand of thin grey ribbon. The gunbelt cinched around her narrow waist held two holsters, one for her stungun and one for the kilgun.

Easing out of his side of the car, Zack shut the door and glanced around. “You can hear shooting.”

“There’s a fracas going on about six blocks north,” the girl answered. “The Downies have been running lots of terrorist raids over the past month. The Upsiders finally decided to send troops down here.”

“That’s not usual.”

“Happens now and then, if you push the Upsiders rough enough. Come along.” She took hold of his real arm, led him away from their abandoned landcar and along a buckled stretch of sidewalk.

“We’ve been together several hours now, Shark,” he said as they walked along. “So far you—”

“Haven’t lived up to my name. I know.”

“I forgot you can read—”

“Your thoughts.” She readjusted the rimless spectacles she wore by pushing them up along her freckled nose. “Because lenzes make me cry.”

“Hum?”

“You were wondering why I wear such old-fangled specs.”

He nodded. “Suppose you just—”

“Let you finish your own sentences? Okay, excuse the showing off.”

“How come you’re—”

“My late father’s idea of a joke,” said Shark. “Oh, forgive me, I just promised not to anticipate you, didn’t I? You were curious about my first name. Well, when I was a kid I was pretty mousey and timid. Pop’s idea of humor was to give me a name that was the exact opposite of what I was. It’s Frances Ann.”

“Your real—”

“Real name, yes. Frances Ann. Darn, it’s gotten to be a real bad habit, anticipating. No, I’m straight.

“What’s that the answer to?”

“When you first heard of me from Jocko, you wondered if some lady with a name like Shark Egan, who also drives trucks, might be a dyke. I’m not. Very straight and trad, don’t even fool around with marrieds. Holdover from my NeoCath upbringing.”

“How about the precog side of your wild talent. Can you—”

“No, that’s not as reliable. The premonitions I don’t con. . . . Hit the deck, Zack!” She shoved him toward the nearest gutter, whipped out her stungun, and fired up at a rooftop on their left.

Zzzzzzummmmm!

Rolling off the bumpy sidewalk and into the refuse and offal, Zack managed to look up in time to spot the sniper.

The beam of Shark’s stunner hit the long, lanky black man in the crotch. Both his arms flapped up, his blazrifle went spinning back over his head and then he slumped over sideways on the tarpaper.

“Dumbbell,” she said, dropping the stungun back into its grey holster.

Zack arose and brushed garbage from his knees. “Very fast,” he said. “Your reflexes are—”

“Oh, I caught his thoughts. ‘Gonna kill that big mother and that skinny bitch. They’s Upsiders for sure!’ Not too flattering a description of my persona.”

“What side’s he on?”

“A Downie, but overzealous. Some of the guards they’ve posted hereabouts get that way. You’ve got a big glob of gunk on your boot.”

“So I have.” He knocked it off into the dismal street. “Had I been alone, Shark, that guy well might—”

“He’d have fried your ass, yes.” She grinned up at him. “Excuse the foul language. When I get excited I forget my sedate upbringing and my education in the best schools of Upside New Buffalo. Shall we proceed?”

“How many more gunmen are we likely to encounter?”

“Five,” she answered, rubbing her fingertips across her forehead. “All the rest of them have positive thoughts about us, however. In fact, one of the guys watching us finds me attractive. He’s thinking, ‘She’d be sort of cute without those ridiculous glasses.’ Not bad.”

“You have to work at upgrading your self-image, Shark.” He took hold of her arm and they resumed their walk.

“Who’s the girl with the perky . . . breasts? Oh yes, I’m getting it. Timpany Quarls. You’ve been comparing me off and on ever since we met,” said Shark. “Thus far she’s winning.”

“There’s a question of personal taste involved, which has nothing to do with basic—”

“You really think she set you up?”

“Was I wondering that?”

“Quite a bit, although you’re trying to push the notion down. Must be. . . . Oh, hello, Dolores.”

From a narrow alleyway a voice replied. “Hi, Shark.”

“One of the lookouts,” explained Shark. Three more to pass and then we’ll be at the checkpoint for Crazy Eddie’s neighborhood.”

Zack said, “How long have you known Crazy—”

“You still might live, you know,” she cut in. “Under all this small talk, that’s what’s running around in your head. ‘How long before I die?’ Of course, everybody’d like to know the answer to that one, I guess. Although the surprise element, the suspense, is one of the things that makes life so exciting, I think. Excuse me once again, Zack. I promise not to go poking around in your private thoughts anymore.”

“Were you gifted as a kid?”

“I could always read minds.” Shark pushed up her glasses. “The precognition stuff started up about a week after my first period. When I was eleven. So it may be linked with maturation. Sure, it can be a handicap. Sorry.”

“I was wondering . . . comparing your wild talents to my fake arm, huh?”

“In a way there’s a parallel, I guess, since neither of us had any control over what happened,” she said. “Once you get an ability thrust on you, it’s what you do with it that’s important. Hey, that sounds like fortune-cookie talk.”

“Bit profounder than that.”

“Did you freeze Rosco?”

A tall young man in a dirt-colored one-piece worksuit had stepped out of a doorless doorway. A kilgun dangled in his left hand.

“To keep the idiot from killing us, yes, Mell,” Shark answered.

“He does get exuberant,” Mell admitted. “Means well, though. Very dedicated, loyal to the cause. Who’s this guy, Shark?”

“Zack Tourney,” she said. “Just quit the Federal Police Agency.”

Mell took a step back, gun moving into a fire position. “Sure he’s not still with them?”

“Completely severed,” Zack said.

“Mell, I can read what’s in his mind, remember? He is not on their side anymore. Really.”

Mell lowered the kilgun again. “You’re always right about people, Shark,” he said, smiling. “What can we do for you two?”

“We have an appointment with Crazy Eddie.”

The Downside guerrilla shuddered. “You absolutely have to?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

“Okay, you know the way. Pass on, nobody’ll bother you. Good luck. Both of you.” After nodding at each of them, he drifted back into the doorway’s deep shadows.

Chapter Twelve

Crazy Eddie said, “It’s certainly a pleasure to see both of you again. And, Zack, I’ll be glad to do anything I can to help you. Come on in, won’t you?” He was a chubby young man of twenty-eight, middle-sized and wearing a too-large tan greatcoat over a one-piece suit of workalls. With a polite bow, he stepped aside so Zack and the young woman might enter his underground apartment.

Zack followed first, frowning. “How’ve you been, Eddie?”

Bouncing down a twisty stone stairway, Crazy Eddie laughed and replied, “I’ve been in tip-top shape, thank you.”

“Still dabbling in your . . . hobby?”

“Nope.” he said. “Haven’t eaten a machine in . . . um, must be three months at least.” He halted in the middle of a neat laboratory and ran his hand over his plump cheeks. “Notice the absence of a beard? I shave twice a day now. Reason I couldn’t before, I was always eating my razors. Sit down, Shark.”

She chose a milky glaz slingchair. “I hadn’t heard about your change,” she told him. “Although when we were approaching I started getting some unexpected thought emanations from down here.”

“That was me, sure.” He tapped the side of his head. “I’m rational all the time now. So, Zack, let’s have a look at the arm.”

Rolling up the sleeve of his tunic, Zack unfastened the arm. “What caused this transformation of yours, Eddie? On the way here I got the impression you were still your old—”

“Aw, that’s just public relations.” He took the synthetic arm, carried it to a spotless white worktable. “My business requires privacy and people automatically shy away from a fella dubbed Crazy Eddie. Whereas if I were known as Perfectly Rational Eddie, visitors would be barging in at all hours.” He pulled up a stool, sat and took a look at the arm. “Nothing too much wrong with this, a very simple disabling job was done. You probably could’ve gotten it working again yourself, Zack, with time.”

“I’ve been preoccupied.”

“So I hear, quitting the FPA and all. Smart move.” After fitting a jeweler’s glaz into his left eye and hunching farther over the disabled arm, Crazy Eddie said, “As to what caused this astounding change in my character. The answer is simple. Diet.”

“You mean once you stopped eating machines, you—”

“No, the machine eating was simply one symptom,” explained Crazy Eddie as he began, deftly, to take the arm apart with a small electroscrewer. “I, fortunately, did a repair job on the artificial nose of a highly respected renegade allergist who was passing through en route to Mexam 2. He spotted my problem right off. Soon as I started wailing like a banshee and nibbling at my antique jukebox collection, he knew what the malady was.”

Shark asked, “And what was it?”

“Can’t you get the answer simply by reading my mind?”

“Sure, but I also see you get a kick out of talking about it.”

“I do,” admitted the electronics genius. “People, the few I’ve confided in so far, always enjoy such a yarn. Miracle cures always go over big. At any rate, I turn out to have been suffering from a rare allergic malady known as Ellison’s Syndrome.”

Zack said, “Never heard of that.”

“It’s a whole package of bizarre actions and behavior, triggered by a rare allergic reaction to certain ingredients in the tacky diet I’d been on,” said Crazy Eddie. “As you may recall, I used to subsist almost entirely on takeout orders from the nearest Downside Tempeh restaurant. Thing is, I’m violently allergic to soy.”

“But soy’s good for you,” said Shark. “Lot more—”

“Not good for me. On the contrary.” He continued working on the arm. “All the strange things I used to do—jumping atop tables and ranting, continually babbling about my abilities and how marvelous I was, insisting on giving public exhibitions of my repair work, gobbling up machinery—that was all due to Ellison’s Syndrome. Thank goodness, I am completely cured.”

“You don’t do any of that anymore?” asked Zack.

“Nary a bit,” he said. “In some ways, it’s been very dull lately. I’ve had to become much more reclusive because, as I noted earlier, I don’t want too many knowing I’m calm and rational.” He blinked, let the glaz fall from his eye and into his palm and stepped away from the back-together arm. “All fixed.”

“So soon?”

“When you deal with someone as gifted as Crazy Eddie, my. . . .” He halted, shook his head. “Why did I do that?”

“Pride in your work isn’t craziness,” Shark told him.

He carried the arm proudly back to Zack and helped him hook it up. “Yes, but once you’ve been cured of Ellison’s Syndrome, you get awfully afraid if you suspect even a trace of an old symptom is coming back.”

Zack flexed the metal fingers. “We’d better test this now, Eddie.”

“To be sure,” agreed Crazy Eddie. “Come along into the next room. In anticipation of your visit, I set up a target.” He crossed to an opaque glaz door.

“Want to see the test?” Zack asked of the still seated girl.

She shook her head and pushed her spectacles up. “I’ll park here.”

“That’s the target?” asked Zack when he’d joined Crazy Eddie in a long, narrow hail.

At its end was an antique motorcycle.

After closing them in, Crazy Eddie replied, “Actually I want to get rid of the damned thing. Mostly to remove the temptation. Back when I was still suffering with my malady, motorcycles, especially twentieth-century Japanese ones, were among my favorite snacks. Before I was cured I devoured every one in my collection except this one. Let’s start testing with—”

Zzzzzzzizzzzzzle!

The sound had come not from Zack’s reactivated arm, but from the lab where they’d left Shark.

“That was a kilgun!” Zack spun, grabbed at the door handle.

Chapter Thirteen

Shark was standing, legs apart, with her back to them. “It’s all right now,” she said without turning. “Who’s he?” inquired Crazy Eddie.

A man with no head was spread-eagle on the smooth white floor some fifteen feet in front of the girl.

Zack went over and placed his real hand on the girl’s slim shoulder. “Shark?”

She let her kilgun drop into its holster. “Free lance op, working for the FPA,” she said quietly. “Hired by your old associate, Falcon O’Brian. Seems Jocko was right about their not wanting to risk one of their own boys here.”

“I’m flattered.” Crazy Eddie came over and took a slow walk around the corpse. “This proves my reputation as a terror is still flourishing. Although I don’t like the idea of this fella sneaking right into my lair.”

Zack turned her half toward him. “You sensed this guy was coming?”

“Yes, while Eddie was finishing up your arm.”

“Been better if you’d warned me instead—”

“I took care of him. It was more important that you get fixed up.”

“Killing the guy isn’t my—”

“I wasn’t intending that,” she said. “But when he came barging in, he had his kilgun drawn and I . . . well, I sensed he meant to kill me.”

“On orders?”

She nodded once. “Falcon O’Brian wanted you stunned and hauled in,” she said. “Me there was a bonus of $10,000 for. Dead.”

“Aw, you’re worth much more than that,” Crazy Eddie told her. “Zack, we’re not going to have time for testing your arm out further. “You’ll simply have to take my word that it’s functioning in tip-top shape.”

Zack asked, “Any more of them outside, Shark?”

“Nope, this fellow was a loner.”

“Even so,” advised Crazy Eddie, “I’ll have to get rid of this one and tidy up quick. It’s possible the FPA’ll risk nosing around when he doesn’t report in.”

“Yeah,” said Zack. “We’ll depart, Eddie.”

Making a beckoning gesture, he moved toward another door. “Just to be on the safe side, you’d better use the back exit,” he said. “You’ll have to travel through a sewer, but it’s not all that much worse than Downside Detroit.” The doorway led to a stonewalled passway.

“How about our landcar?” Zack asked the girl as they entered the musty passage. “Think it’s safe to go back for?”

“This fellow was watching Crazy Eddie, not tailing us,” Shark replied. “Still, we’d be better off switching transportation. I’ll take us to a place where we can get a skycar.”

Down at the passage end Crazy Eddie was tugging aside a section of the rock wall. “Ingeniously concealed entrance, if you’ll excuse the flair-up of vanity on my part,” he said. “Smell is relatively foul from here on, yet it’s safer than the streets. You’ll come out three blocks to the southward in the basement of a defunct National Welfare office. Been empty for years, except for a few stimmers who nap there between shocks.”

Extending his metal hand, Zack shook hands with Crazy Eddie. “Thanks.”

“A distinct pleasure.” He stood aside as they crossed over into the dim, foul-smelling tunnel.

Shark kicked aside an empty plaz winepouch in her path on the night street. “Darn, wish we had time to freshen up.”

“Nobody’ll notice.”

“Not in Detroit, no,” she admitted. “But I have personal standards which are—”

“Relax, let’s concentrate on acquiring the skycar.”

“Let me do the negotiating,” she cautioned. “Fingers is somewhat awed by me, since he knows I can read his mind.”

“He’s not with the SDUK?”

Two tattered five-year-old girls were wrestling at the mouth of an alley, kicking, biting, ripping each other’s already forlorn dresses.

“What a world,” sighed Shark. “You fix one thing and two flooey. Hey, kids, quit that roughhousing.”

She glanced at the squabbling, cursing pile of children. “What were you asking me?”

“About Fingers Ackroyd, the hot skycar dealer.”

“He used to work with us, except he’s too restless,” she said. “Also selfish. A shame, since Fingers is a very gifted telek.”

“That how he gets his stock?”

“Right, he teleports skycars down from Upside. A very valuable gift, if only he’d use it for a good cause.”

“Helping me get to Boston is a good cause.”

“I was speaking in the. . . . Wait now.” She swung out an arm, hitting him across the middle.

“Trouble?”

“Quick, head down that alley over there.” He sprinted after her. “What?”

“Darn, it’s the Upside Commandos.”

“That an official group?”

“No, vigilante. They’re, as I mentioned, much more aggressive in Detroit Upside.” They jogged side by side along the dark narrow lane between grey apartment buildings. “Send raiding parties down now and then. This batch of Commandos, a dozen of ‘em, are hunting for an arms cache in this particular neighborhood. Very trigger-happy, the whole lot. Better for us if we don’t meet up with—”

“We’re meeting,” he said, slowing.

Coming into the alley mouth they were approaching were three husky men in two-piece warsuits. Each carried a blasterifle.

“Wow, we got us a couple!” exclaimed one delighted Upside Commando.

“Yeah!! They’re obviously Downside guerrillas.”

“Let’s cook ‘em!”

Shark suddenly executed a left-leaning somersault, landing behind a spilled trashbot that was lying on its side with its garbage maw agape. Both her guns were in her hands and she fired them.

Zzzzzizzzzzle!

Zzzzzzummmmm!

Zack, meantime, had thrown himself to the right. While still in midair he swung up his metal arm, activated the stunfinger. “Let’s hope this is all functioning.”

Zzzzummmm!

The middle Commando took the stunbeam from Zack’s thumb smack in his broad chest. He gave a sad bark before falling over backwards at the alley edge.

His two compatriots were already down.

“Yes, I am.” Shark came over to him. “And so what?”

“The first reply is to my thought that you are a damned good shot,” he said, rising. “The other one?”

“You’re also thinking I kill too fast and too much.” She dropped both guns away. “Maybe so.”

“You keep using expediency as an excuse.”

“Those weren’t stunners these bastards had,” she reminded. “If I hadn’t been fast, they’d have blown holes clean through both of us.”

“I might have been able to—”

“‘Part of my darned job is to keep you alive,” she told him. “Could be you don’t want to face certain facts, although I know you think about them a lot, Zack. You’re starting to slow; your reflexes are still pretty good but not what they were. The virus is already getting to work on you. I was nowhere near sure that arm of yours would work as well as Crazy Eddie claimed. The way things turned out, we’re both still around. Okay!”

Zack watched her pale, freckled face for a few silent seconds. “Let’s go buy that skycar,” he said.

Chapter Fourteen

The prickly weeds of the Boston Common were knee-high; the late afternoon sunlight that got down through the Upside City was thin and chill.

“Oops! Mind’s wandering.” Shark had almost tripped over a sprawled derelict. “This guy was too long at the stim parlor.”

Stepping around the ragged blotchy man, Zack said, “Nope, he’s in the last stages of a Mummydust stupor. He’ll wake up in another few hours.”

She sniffed as they continued across the overgrown Downside park area. “You’re right, I can get that sweet-sour MD smell now,” she said. “You were working on an MD case here last January, weren’t you?”

“We rounded up a Mummydust ring, put most of them out of business,” he answered. “Though, obviously, you can still buy the stuff in Boston and environs.”

Shark shook her head. “Spooky stuff, Mummydust. Kills you and brings you back to life, that sounds like not much fun.”

“It gives you the illusion of death and resurrection,” he said. “Both experiences are mildly erotic, it turns out.”

“You’ve tried MD?”

“At the Federal Police Drug Center in D.C.; yeah. So I’d know as much about it as possible,” he replied. “Little did I know how close I was to experiencing the real thing.”

“Hey, no more gloom. Anyway, I have a hunch you’re going to survive.”

“While we were en route I made a fairly detailed record of everything I did during those three days in January,” Zack said. “This Dust ring involved several high-rank BosCops, also executives in the Space Industries System who arranged for the drug to be manufactured in an illegal lab out in a space colony, plus some hoods fairly high in the World Drug Pushers Guild. While I was here I was in Dustshops, in Upside offices, all over. I even went to a Mummydust party in New Beacon Hill. They call those Wakes.”

“How long does it take? To die and come back?”

“Depends on the dosage,” Zack said. “A spoonful kills you for about an hour. Apparently the sensation of death is very exciting to a goodly number of people. After they try it once, they want to keep on dying. I interviewed one ex-addict who had been dying seven times a day. Cost him $180,000 per day.”

“The main thing wrong with MD, besides its being addictive, is that it pretty often works too well.”

“About twenty percent of the time it really kills the user.”

She touched his arm. “We turn up Boylston here.” She pointed.

They left the Common and started along a ruined street that had once held shops and restaurants. Most were dark and gutted now.

“Putting all those MD people out of business,” said Shark, “made you lots of enemies.”

“It’s possible one of them gave me the slow virus to get even,” he said, thoughtful. “Just doesn’t seem a very easy or economical way for them to work.”

“Meaning you favor the notion you were infected by accident?”

“I don’t think the BosCops and the drug gangs did it.”

“This is where we want.”

The shop had Pornutopia lettered in peeling gilt on its narrow tease window. The thick metal door had break-in attempt marks of various ages on its set of locks. When the window sensed they were near, it lit up and started spieling out of a rusty talkbox.

“. . . You’ll witness delights you hardly dared dream of as plump, exotic Millie Moskowitz commits vile and disgusting acts of degrading sexual perversion with a crazed and lustful Buddhist hockey team. Yes, you’ll reach new heights of exotic viewing when you see Millie Does Mongolia. Here’s what Upside New Yorker had, to say: ‘A sheer delight! Shows a keen perception of the intricacies of the Mongolian form of Buddhism. Good of this kind!’ The. . . .”

The grey-clad young woman had been pressing her palm print against the various lock scanners. “I’m one of just sixteen SDUK people who can use this place any time.”

“There’s a hideout apartment inside?”

“A very cozy one, yes.”

The door chirped open; a wave of foul air came tumbling down the rickety stairs that led up from the threshold.

“It smells sweeter upstairs,” Shark said.

It did. The small living room, although too bright with basic colors, was clean and pleasant.

“We’ll be safe using this as a base,” she assured him as she wandered around the room. “When the fellow who runs Pornutopia is in town he actually does run a thriving smut business. The Downside BosCops leave it alone, since there’s always plenty of extra money for bribes.”

Zack found himself yawning. He was feeling tired, fuzzy. “I’ll go over my notes. Then we can--”

“Call Jocko.”

He was about to lower himself onto a floating sofa. “Right now?”

“He wants to talk to you. I just had a strong hunch.”

Glancing around, Zack located the pixphone alcove. “He ought to be at the Oval Office.”

“You can direct dial to the computer terminal built into his chest, ever since he got the new one. Number is 1-700-663-8991-134.”

Seating himself in front of the phone unit, Zack punched out the number.

The oval phone screen turned a deep black. “Jocko here. Ah, it’s you, Zack, old boy. I had to unseam to get a look at my chest screen. Since I don’t as yet have a built-in scancam, you can’t feast your eyes on—”

“You want to talk to me?”

“I do, my lad,” replied the cyborg. “Firstly, I have a warning. Falcon O’Brian is afoot in Beantown, partaking of a little pilgrimage to all the spots you visited during that fateful spell January last. Avoid him if you can.”

“Such is my intention.”

“The Federal Police Agency, your lovable erstwhile employer, is offering a bonus to any agent who bags you and drags you back to the Augie Clinic,” continued Jocko.

“How much?”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

“Cheap.” Zack shrugged. “Anything else?”

“No new breakthroughs on this slow virus thing, I’m sorry to say. No one the SDUK is in touch with is any closer to a cure. We have confirmed that Timpany Q is indeed in the Arabian Alps,” Jocko said. “Have you, old boy, arrived at any insights as to when you contracted the disease?”

“No, I’m just now—”

“You’d better get in touch with Karl Kosmo, since we’re all working against time. Yes, I’ll set up an appointment for this very night.”

“Who the hell is—”

“Shark will fill you in. Farewell for now.”

The screen returned to its usual pale green.

“Karl Kosmo lives Upside,” the girl said.

“Doing what?”

“He’s one of us, don’t worry. He’s planted, to get information,” she explained. “Karl is also a very good Total Recall therapist.”

“It’s Jocko’s idea that this guy ought to poke around in my mind, apparently.”

“Karl can link you up with various very impressive gadgets,” she said. “You can whiz through a whole stewpot of memories and impressions very fast.”

Zack left the alcove. “How do we get through the Upside border guards?”

“Simple.” She grinned. “We’ll be making a Pornutopia delivery. The shop has lots of Scroodisk customers up there.”

Chapter Fifteen

“Come with me, then, on a voyage of discovery,” the tall blond man in the white two-piece docsuit was saying. “A journey deep into the most mysterious country of all . . . the human mind. Yes, your very own mind, that fearful yet exciting place wherein are hidden, in the heart of darkness as it were, the innermost—”

“Karl, he’s one of us,” interrupted Shark. “Forget the patter.”

Karl Kosmo snapped his long fingers. “Bad habit, addicted to hard sell. Overlook it,” he said.

The therapy suite was done in a dozen shades of white. From its high, wide seeout windows the glittering towers of Boston were visible, along with thousands of lights and stars in the clear night sky. Skycars drifted by, pedestrians hurried along pastel walkramps, soft music spilled in from outside.

Zack was sitting, uneasy, in a black glass patient-chair in the room’s exact center. Six machines of varying sizes circled him in. “How exactly does—”

“Through the wonders of the latest, and most costly, mind-scanning machines,” said Karl Kosmo, “we may journey along the dazzling—”

“Hey!” said Shark.

“Doing it again. Too bad.” He began hooking Zack up to the machines. “The big screen on yonder wall. Shows us your memories.”

As he spoke a six foot by six foot came to life on the eggshell-white wall some fifteen feet in front of Zack.

“Control panel here allows me to direct your remembering somewhat,” said Karl Kosmo. “Dull stuff we can fast forward, important material we can freeze frame. We can also rewind and replay. Your recollections get transferred to plaztape by this psychographix camera. Attaching it to your skull now.”

“Ow.”

“Too tight around the temples. Here. Readjust for size seven and a half.”

“Suppose I start remembering something I did when I was ten?”

“There’ll be a bit of random junk first. Once the gear is adjusted, I can guide you. Lead you along paths of explorations where few men have been brave enough to tread in all the eons since—”

“Start the darned show,” urged Shark, sitting on the edge of a glazchair.

“Few more connections to make.” Kosmo strapped a rubberoid band around Zack’s arm, plugged its trailing cord into a squat, quietly humming machine. “Relax. Remember anything at all, so I can get a level reading.”

Up on the big screen Zack saw himself running along an autumn lane, cutting down through a gently sloping hillside. Golden, scarlet, orange leaves were swirling around him. He was no more than four feet high, thin. Both arms were his own.

“You were cute back then,” said the girl.

“How come I see myself? I should only be recalling what I saw.”

“Putting yourself in your visual recollections is a common phenomenon,” the recall therapist told him.

“Dreams frequently work in a similar way. We are as yet but humble pioneers in the awesome exploration of the fabled lost continent known as—”

“He’s about ten years old in this sequence,” Shark pointed out. “How’s about goosing him along to January of this year?”

“Working on that,” said Kosmo as he hunched slightly over the panel of dials on the face of a man-high machine. “Zack, it’s January 12, 2033. You’re in Boston. Working on the Mummydust case.”

Zack was watching the screen., absorbed in the boyhood footage. “That’s the Fairfield Enclave, in Connecticut. We lived there until. . . .” He let the memory die and concentrated on the important days of the past January.

Fleeting images flickered and jumbled across the memory screen. A low-ceilinged pub in Downside, a fat blonde woman tending bar and leering at Zack . . . Timpany slipping off a realsilk singlet . . . a prosperous-faced man in a sincere-black three-piece bizsuit holding a Banx card toward Zack, tapping it with his beringed middle finger . . . snow dropping across the night sky. . . .

“Slow down,” suggested Kosmo. “Give me the morning of January 12. From awakening on.”

The screen showed instead a bright afternoon, an urban Upside landscape seen from the crystal-clear high window of a vast executive office in a Boston tower building.

Zack turned away from the view, went walking across the room toward an automatically opening door.

On the threshold, stunning in a beaded white cazsuit, stood Timpany. She smiled, held out her arms and came hurrying to him.

They embraced, kissing.

“Mush,” murmured Shark.

“Something’s bothering you, Zack,” said Kosmo quietly.

“No, nothing.”

“Watch this then.”

The embracing couple froze, blurred, seemed to go dancing backward at an incredible speed.

“Here’s the shot. Watch as you move toward her.”

Zack was crossing the large office again. A few steps short of Timpany he broke stride, glanced to his right, touched at his side with his metal fingers. He froze in that action.

“What’s wrong here?” asked the therapist.

Zack leaned as far forward as the attachments would allow. “Can you give us a close-up of the hand?”

“Sure. Here.”

The metal fingers seemed to come rushing toward them until they had filled the wide screen.

“Your hand’s glowing,” said Shark. “Faintly, but a glow.”

“There’s a built-in warning system, glows when you’re in any chemical-biological danger zone,” Zack said. “For some reason, whatever triggered this warning didn’t set off a strong enough alarm. It faded out and I missed it.”

“Pawing that doxie distracted you.”

Kosmo brought the original scene back to the screen. “I noted something besides the hand, Zack. You were frowning off to your right. Can you remember anything more about that?”

Zack concentrated and a new shot appeared on the screen. He was frowning toward the wall of the office. At eye level ran a six-inch-wide band of silvery grid. “The aircirc system,” he said. “Yeah, it was making a small, unusual noise.”

“Malfunctioning?”

“Didn’t sound too serious at the. . . . Damn! That must be how I contracted this. By way of a defective aircirc system. Sure, there was an unexpected leak from some other part of the building. My arm almost sensed it, but something inhibited it.”

Shark stood, jerking a thumb toward the screen. “Where was this?”

“The Boston office of the Quarls enterprises,” he answered slowly. “The building has offices and a plant where they manufacture the basic soy tempeh food used in their restaurants and hotels. Timpany had to talk to a subtreasurer about getting a one hundred thousand dollar advance on her weekly allowance. I waited for her in the empty office for about a half-hour.”

“One hundred thousand dollars,” muttered Shark. Kosmo walked in front of the screen. “Does something else occur to you, Zack?” he asked. “It seems probable you picked up the virus there, although we’ll run a good many more-memory scoops before we accept the theory. If you did become infected in the Quarls building. . . .”

Zack said, “Yeah, why didn’t Timpany come down with it, too? She was in the same damned office, standing with me next to the defected aircirc outlets.”

“Exactly,” said the therapist. “It’s possible she’s naturally immune or wasn’t exposed long enough. And no virus will take hold of everybody it touches. Still—”

“There’s another possibility,” said Zack. “I haven’t seen Timpany since I went down to the clinic. She’s over in the Arabian Alps now. Could be she’s got the slow virus as well.”

“You don’t,” said Shark, “really believe that.”

“I’ve no proof she—”

“I can read your thoughts.”

Kosmo said, “You’ve seen the young lady unclothed. Can you recall her in that state for us, at some date after the January 12th visit to her family’s facility?”

“I can, but—”

“Do it.”

Zack settled back in the chair and remembered.

The silvery-haired blonde appeared as she looked the day he’d been summoned to the clinic. Standing naked beside his floating bed and dropping her singlet to the floor.

“Sort of flat-chested,” remarked Shark.

‘We’ll hold this frame, come in close,” said Kosmo. The image of the lovely young heiress filled the screen.

“Inside of the upper left arm,” said Zack glumly, spotting what the therapist was searching for.

“Yes, that’s it.” He caused a close-up of that portion of the girl’s tanned arm to grow. “A fresh scar from a needlegun injection. Judging by the condition of the flesh surrounding the pockmark, she was immunized sometime late in 2032.”

“But not necessarily to make her immune to the slow virus,” said Zack.

“Odd coincidence, then. Young lady has long since had all her school shots and travel injections. Why a new one at such a late date?”

Shark said, “She knew, Zack.”

“Okay, maybe she knew they were working on a dangerous bioweapon. She was going to be visiting that plant now and then, they took the precaution of immunizing her. In case there were any accidents.”

“There was sure as hell an accident,” said Shark.

“Timpany couldn’t have known about that in advance,” Zack insisted. “No, she wouldn’t have set me up. She wouldn’t stand by and let them kill me.”

Coughing into his hand, Kosmo said, “Let’s do some more exploring. We may find some other possible sources of your trouble.”

“We won’t,” said Shark.

Chapter Sixteen

Zack was having trouble waking up; the circular bunk seemed to be holding onto him. He pushed against the mattress, broke the connection between himself and slumber. “It’s getting tougher,” he muttered, shifting to a sitting position on the bed edge.

Through the oval seeout window of the chalet’s bedchamber he could see a portion of snowy mountainside. Several deeply tanned Arabs, robes and burnouses flapping, were skiing swiftly downhill. The sun was too high in the clear blue of the sky.

Checking his palm watch, he found it was nearly 10 a.m. Zack dropped his metal hand to his knee, hunching some. “Let’s go,” he urged himself. “You can still function.”

Grunting twice, Zack got to his feet. The whiteness came rushing at him from outside. He swung out his real hand, steadying himself against the bunk.

After taking several careful breaths in and out, he opened his eyes again. The large circular room had stabilized, the realwood floor was not vibrating, the paneled walls quivered not at all.

When he bent to retrieve his trousers off a neofur throwrug, he was briefly dizzy again. He fought against it, got himself dressed.

At the neowood bureau Zack hesitated. Then he picked up the vial, shook out two of the rainbow-hued capsules. The SDUK doctor who’d supplied them swore they’d prevent some of the dizziness and slowing Zack had been experiencing during the past few days.

The capsules tasted like bile going down.

He made it downstairs to the living room of the borrowed chalet without having to use the railing.

“You’re looking fine.” Shark got up from a slingchair and smiled at him.

“I don’t need the ability to read minds to know you’re conning me.”

“Don’t be so—”

“And how come you let me sleep so damned late?”

“Headless Ortmann isn’t due here until two this afternoon.” She crossed to a high wide window, gazed out at the stand of pine trees. “Nothing much to do until then. Want a cup of sincaf?”

“Lately it doesn’t. . . . No, thanks.”

“Jocko wants you to phone him.”

“Something important?” He went to the phone alcove.

“Just routine. Otherwise I’d have awakened you.” Zack sat facing the pixphone unit and tapped out the little cyborg’s private number.

“You’re looking fine, old boy,” came Jocko’s voice after the screen went black.

“So I hear. What?”

“Wanted to tell you we still don’t have anything on where they moved the lab after Boston,” replied Jocko. “I’ve got two dozen Society agents around this giddy globe checking on each and every Quarls plant and office.”

“So you don’t know any more than I did when I left Boston three days ago?”

“These people are very tricky, my lad. They don’t leave a trail of bread crumbs when they do a bunk.”

“They’ve got an antidote, Jocko. Maybe I should’ve stayed in the U.S. to track—”

“Timpany knows something about the cure, since they shot some of it into her admirable body,” the cyborg reminded. “She’s still there in the Arabian Alps and by nightfall you’ll have contacted her.”

“Why,” asked Zack, “haven’t they moved her?”

“Because they don’t know the SDUK knows where the lass is stashed.”

“Maybe.”

“If this were a trap for you, old boy, Shark would have sensed it.”

“She’s not a hundred percent right on her hunches.”

“She can read, thoughts, though, and—”

“We haven’t been close enough to the sanitarium yet for Shark to get an accurate reading. She thinks Timpany is in there, but—”

“Timpany is,” Jocko assured him. “Now you concern yourself with getting inside the good doctor’s setup and finding out what she knows.”

Zack asked, “Anything else?”

“There’s been a demand made on E. Zorro Ortega.”

“That’s damned important. Why the hell didn’t you.—”

“The SDUK works a certain way. Each of us handles his own piece of an assignment. You are working on the Timpany Quarls angle; we are—”

“I’m not working for you at all, Jocko. I’m for myself. I’m the one who’s going to—”

“Listen, my lad, keeping you on this side of death’s door is a team effort. Playing lone avenger may be romantic, but you’re no longer in shape to—”

“Okay, tell me about the demand.”

“Ortega, far as we can determine, was contacted. late yesterday,” said Jocko. “The fee for curing him is, as we’ve already guessed, his share of the United States.”

“Who’s he supposed to turn it over to?”

“They call themselves Corporation X.”

“Cute,” said Zack. “Any idea about who’s hiding behind the alias?”

“We are digging into that even as you and I speak. Nothing as yet.”

“Has to be Quarls,” Zack said. “Timpany’s father must be the one.”

“An obvious conclusion. We haven’t substantiated it, however,” said the distant cyborg. “Mr. Q. is at the moment resting up on one of his space colonies.”

Zack rubbed his real fingers across his forehead. “I’ll let you know what happens at the sanitarium.”

“Zack?”

“Yeah?”

“If you’re not up to this, we can—”

“Don’t rush things, Jocko. I’m not dead or even severly incapacitated. I’ll do what I have to.” He ended the call.

Shark held her, hands out to the very believable imitation log fire. “Want to go over the floor plans again?”

Several architectural drawings were spread out on the thermorug.

Zack, sitting in a snugchair, said, “Nope, I’ve got the whole layout of Dr. Baum’s Snake Pit memorized.”

“Quaint name he picked for his business.” The girl returned to the neoleather sofa beneath the wide window.

“Baum believes the treatment of mental illness took a wrong turn back in the nineteenth century, with the advent of Freud,” said Zack. “He, therefore, runs his establishment along the lines of an eighteenth-century madhouse.”

“Only he charges a lot more.”

“Right, you have to be both rich and goofy to get in.”

Shark said, “You’re still not certain.”

“About what?”

“Her. Timpany. Whether she’s responsible for what’s happening to you or not.”

“I suppose not,” he admitted.

“Once we’re inside the Snake Pit, I’ll be able to tell. I can read her—”

“Don’t need mind readers. When I see her, I’ll know.”

Pushing her spectacles back into place, Shark made a sedate snorting noise. “It really bothers you to have to depend on. . . . Oops, company.”

Zack looked out the window and saw only snow and pines. “Where?”

“Coming soon.” She pointed upward, left the sofa and went toward the heavy door. “It’s Headless and his crew.”

A large black skylimo appeared in the afternoon sky. Blinking on its side and bottom were the words Headless Ortmann, Newshawk Extraordinary. The craft came dropping slowly down to land in the snow in front of the chalet. A passenger side door popped open and a small young man in a one-piece blue warmsuit emerged, backside first. After a careful scan of the countryside, he came jogging up toward the door of the chalet with a large satchel swinging in one hand.

Before Shark reached the door, it opened itself. “Hey, Tom, I wish—”

“Security precautions, pet,” said the small young man, smiling sweetly. “Had to make sure no ambushers were lurking behind this door.” He dropped a silvery rod back into his open satchel, fetched out a coppery one and waved it at her.

The rod made clucking sounds.

“Why don’t you people simply come on in and—”

“You’re carrying a stungun and a kilgun, according to the reading from—”

“You can see that, Tom.”

“Can’t see concealed weapons, pet.” He crossed the threshold. “Hi, I’m Tom Verity. I may look like a wispy little swish, Mr. Tourney, but I’m mean. Mean clean through when it comes to protecting one of the great newspersons of. . . . Say!” His copper rod was sputtering, giving off a tiny streamer of sooty black smoke.

Zack said, “We can trust each other without gadgets.”

“How the dickens did you. . . . Oh, yes, of course. That dreadful arm of yours,” Verity realized. “You used it to disable my weapons scanner. Now I’ll have to—”

“C’mon in,” invited Shark. “You’ve known me for nearly three years, Tom.”

“People can become turncoats overnight, pet.” He moved into the room, sneaking a glance into his open satchel. “We can’t afford any further vicious attacks on Headless. There isn’t that much left of him as it is.” He dropped the satchel to a patch of flooring. “Will you promise not to futz my bug detector, Mr. Tourney, if I pull it out? I really have to check for spymikes, spycams, spy—”

“I did all that,” said Zack.

“There’s a checklist I have to fill out,” explained Verity as he lifted a silver disk out of his bag. “Headless won’t even come in unless—”

“Might as well let him,” advised Shark.

Nodding, Zack went to the window. A massive black man was standing, arms folded, beside the landed skylimo. Next to him, holding three stacked plazboxes, was a beautiful girl of thirteen. Her long hair was a glittering gold, her lips a glowing crimson. She was wearing a slitfront two-piece sinfur warmsuit.

“That’s Margo Tanhouse,” said Shark, “and Lockjaw. She’s Headless’s . . .  um . . . girlfriend. Lockjaw’s his bodyguard.”

“He was Mr. Perfect Body in 2028,” said Zack.

“And ‘29,” she added. “Margo’s an . . . um . . . a model.”

“For Dirty Old Man magazine, yeah.”

“A calendar of hers, Grammar School Skin I think it was titled, was on the Manhattan Times bestseller list two Christmas seasons ago.”

“Cute kid,” he said, turning to watch Verity. “Satisfied?”

“With this floor,” the young man answered. “I’ll scoot upstairs, if you don’t mind. Nothing I ought not to see up there, is there?”

“We sent all the little girls off to school hours ago,” said Zack.

“Ha ha,” said Verity. “I appreciate a sense of humor. I’m too mean to possess one myself.”

After he’d scurried up the stairs, Zack said, “I’m not as enthusiastic about this Trojan Horse as I was.”

“This’ll work,” said Shark.

“You have a hunch?”

“I just know it will,” she said.

Chapter Seventeen

“I am most honored that you. . . . Back off, you halfwit!”

Thwack!

Dr. Baum swung out again with his aluminum cane, giving the shambling old woman in the faded grey dress another smack across her bent back.

Thwack!

“Mucho interesting,” said Headless Ortmann out of his voice canister. “You have a very unorthodox manner of—”

“On the contrary, Mr. Ortmann, I treat these disgusting vermin exactly as they must. . . . Back against the wall, Silly Tom!”

Thwack! Thwack!

“Meaning no offense, sir, I was merely—”

Thwack!

“You must learn to cringe, young fellow, else you’ll never get over being silly.”

Margo Tanhouse, who was carrying the newsman’s three canisters, said, “It’s smelly in this dump, Ort.”

“All part of the therapy, my dear child,” explained Dr. Baum, who was a long thin man of fifty-five with much crinkly dust-color hair. “Let these miserable wretches wallow in their own filth for weeks on end and they learn to be more tidy. Mental illness is due in large part to sloppiness. The portion not caused by demonic possession.”

“Greato notion,” said Ortmann.

They were moving through a chill, grey stonewalled ward that held over forty beds and about twice that many patients. They were a mostly forlorn lot, downcast, aimless. Some sat on the ragged, grey-sheeted beds, others wandered the cluttered lanes between the beds. Atop a particularly rumpled cot a one-legged man was dancing a clumsy jig. A fat woman rocked in a wobbly rocker and played an out of tune violin. A young man bayed like a hound.

“A few weeks of Bedlam Therapy,” Dr. Baum explained, “will see most of these depressing nitwits back to normal again. Here at Snake Pit they soon realize playing at being cuckoo gets them nothing and they shape up most wonderfully.”

“All this will make a mucho neato seg for my high-rated Probin’ With Ortmann weekly docushow.”

“Exactly how much time will. . . . What did I tell you about snatching bread crusts, young man?”

Thwack!

“You were saying, doctor?”

Dr. Baum used his cane to shove open a door leading into a long stone corridor. “I merely wondered how much air time you will devote to my little center.”

“Nine minutes,” replied Ortmann’s talk canister.

“Oog, it’s even smellier in this dumb hall,” remarked Margo, lovely nose wrinkling.

“1 do think you might. . . . Don’t leave that crutch lying about, Loony Bill!”

Thwack!

“We might give you ten or eleven minutes,” said Ortmann. “Depending on what my staffo decides as they look around.”

Bringing up the rear of the ten-person procession through the madhouse were Zack, disguised with a convincing moustache and one-piece tan techsuit, and Shark.

“What are you getting?” he asked her quietly. “Is Timpany still where she’s supposed to be?”

The girl, toying with the frame of her spectacles, said, “I’m having a heck of a time. I didn’t anticipate all the interference I’d get in here. It’s really distracting. All kinds of really insane thoughts are raining in on me. Give me a couple of minutes to sort . . . wait!”

Zack shifted his TVCam to his left shoulder. “Getting something?”

“No . . . darn, lost it,” said Shark, shaking her head. “I had a flash of a reference to you. By name. Someone in this awful place is thinking about you.”

“Has to be Timpany.”

“Can’t be sure. The din of all the other thoughts is. . . . Sorry.”

“When we hit the end of this corridor, I’m going to be dropping off to the left to head for Timpany’s wing of the Snake Pit.”

“I’d better come along, since we don’t—”

“Nope, you’ll stay with Ortmann’s bunch, as we planned. I’ll catch up with you after I talk to Timpany.”

Shark said, “You’re not going to try to get her out of here now? We agreed to wait until—”

“Today I just talk,” he promised. “After that, we’ll work out an escape plan.”

“You really ought—”

“Here’s where I fork.” Shifting the camera again, he ducked into a narrow branch corridor.

Zzzzzzzzummmmrnmm!

His arm continued to work.

A second guard stiffened, plunked down to the stone floor. His whip and his ring of heavy metal keys clattered to rest next to him.

Zack sprinted, scooped up the keys. He abandoned his decoy TVCam near the sprawled man, continued toward the corridor containing Timpany’s room.

He encountered no more Snake Pit staffers.

The see-in glaz rectangle in the door of Room 346 showed him she was indeed inside.

Timpany was sitting, hands folded, in a plain wooden chair. She wore a wrinkled grey one-piece pullover dress, her silvery hair was tousled.

Using the key marked 346, Zack let himself in. “Timpany,” he said quietly.

The young woman didn’t look up, didn’t move. He walked across the stone floor. “Timpany, are you—”

“What a piss poor op you are,” observed a voice behind him. “Mistaking a second-rate android for your own true love.”

Chapter Eighteen

Falcon O’Brian promised, “Nobody’s going to get too roughed up, pal.”

Zack eyed the stungun in the stocky Federal Police agent’s fist. “Where’s Timpany?”

“No idea,” croaked O’Brian. “She ain’t been here for two days at least. They snuck that bimbo out slick. But, shit, that’s no concern of mine. You’re the one I’m after.”

“How’d you manage to infiltrate the Snake Pit?”

“Didn’t have to come up with no fancypants dodge like you. Geeze, what a piss poor moustache,” the cop said. “Bribes always work. See, once the real Timpany Quarls was spirited away, that sadistic quack downstairs didn’t give a rat’s ass who came poking around. When I heard you was going to drop in today, I moseyed over from the cozy little chalet where—”

“How’d you know I was coming?”

“SDUK’s got leaks, pal,” answered O’Brian. “Now, I got my private skycar hovering right outside the window there. You going to climb in or do I got to use the old stungun on you once again?”

Zack backed toward the seated android replica of Timpany. Former patients had filled the stone walls with scrawled messages, boasts, complaints and aphorisms. “Was the real Timpany ever in this cell?”

“Sure, then they switched her for this andy. To fool the low-level flunkies your SDUK buddies been getting their info from. Don’t you realize, Zack, you got to bribe the top people to get anywhere?”

“I’m free lancing now, Falcon, don’t have the budget you do.”

“Aw, SDUK’s rolling in dough. They’re just tightass with it.”

Waist-high on the wall near where the silent simulacrum sat Zack noticed a scribble in a familiar hand. Between a meticulously printed Madness lies in the too acute perception of reality and a hugely scrawled Screw Baum! was something Timpany had written. In her hasty, quirky hand was Z/FS.

“Is the FPA any closer to solving the—”

“We will be when you’re back in the Augie Clinic.” O’Brian pointed at the window with the barrel of his gun. Its bars had been removed and it was a fraction open at the side. “Step out and catch hold of the boarding ladder.”

Zack leaned against the wall, facing his former colleague. He felt the chill afternoon wind from outside. “My arm’s repaired,” he mentioned.

“Sure, but I’d coldcock you before you could use it,” warned O’Brian with a tolerant smile. “Go on out, save me the trouble of decking you.” He edged across the floor.

“This arm is more than just a weapon,” Zack said. “I can use it to control all sorts of gadgets and mechanisms. Just today I fritzed a fellow’s—”

“You can’t foul up my stungun with that tin arm, pal.”

“True,” admitted Zack. “I can, without your being aware of it, activate this android.”

Before O’Brian could move, the Timpany android jumped to its feet, swung both arms up hard.

The FPA agent’s stungun was slapped from his grasp.

As he reached for his kilgun, the android hit him twice again—jabbing blows in the lower abdomen.

O’Brian gave a croaking bellow, plunking down to his knees.

The android’s lovely right leg flashed up, the point of the foot took him hard in the chin.

Thunk!

O’Brian’s teeth gnashed, his eyes snapped shut, open, shut. He groaned, sputtered, collapsed sideways.

Zack remained leaning against the wall, rubbing at his metal arm. He watched the fallen man until he was certain he was really unconscious.

Something tapped at the cell window. It was the tail end of a dangling plazrope ladder.

Opening the window wide, Zack made use of it.

Chapter Nineteen

“Get off your ox, chump!”

Zack muttered, turned from side to side on the cot.

“Get off your ox!”

He yawned, opened his eyes. Midmorning sunlight was cutting through the dingy windows of the long, narrow dormroom and making slants of light across the dusty air.

Zack rubbed at the corners of his eyes, looked toward the alarm clock floating at the foot of his cot.

“Get off your ox, chump!” the clock said once again.

Shaking his head, Zack sat up and retrieved his boots from under his thin pillow. The rest of his outfit, including the bedraggled U.S. Army overcoat he hoped would disguise him as a veteran of the last Brazil wars, he’d slept in.

Only three of his fellow guests were still occupying cots; the rest of the tenants had long since departed. The old man closest to him was not asleep but dead. Zack was certain of that.

“Nothing to do with me.” He tugged on his boots.

There was always a dizzying moment now whenever he stood up. He stayed next to the cot, letting that pass. Then he walked across the sun-streaked room to the downramp out.

As he stepped out on the street level an unseen voxbox called, “Thanks for staying at a Walt Chezney Flop House®. Remember there are over three thousand Flop Houses® across this Downside America of ours to serve all you bums, hoboes, deadbeats, crumbs, chumps, creeps, bindle stiffs, winos, geeks. . . .”

Thrusting his hands deep down into the pockets of the overcoat, Zack started along the drab morning street.

“Sign my petition?” asked a one-armed young woman as she held a clipboard and a sheet of realpaper out at him.

“To what end?”

“More sunlight,” the thin-faced girl explained, cocking her head upward. “See that hole in the Upside ramp way up there? Skyvan crashed through it last week, made the hole, and we’ve had just lovely sunshine down on this block ever since. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“I hadn’t, no.”

“We want them to leave the hole there.”

Zack brought his real hand out, picked the wood pencil off the clipboard and scrawled Nathan Hale on a signature line. “They’ll fix it anyway,” he said.

“Oh, that’s a very negative way to approach life.”

“It is,” he admitted, continuing on his way.

At the next corner five young men and women in two-piece blue and scarlet uniforms were standing around in an uneasy half-circle.

“Like to contribute to the Salvation Army band, sir?” asked a towheaded young man, tipping his visored cap.

“What band?” asked Zack, looking from one set of empty hands to the other.

“Well it’s a little embarrassing, sir,” admitted the towhead. “We got rolled last evening and they swiped all our instruments.”

“Including my tuba,” added a hefty girl.

“Shame.” Zack moved on.

Midway in the next block he stepped into a shadowy doorway.

“Yow. What’s the idea wiping your dang feet on my backside?”

Glancing down at the stretched-out midget, Zack said, “Mistook you for a doormat.”

“Cracks about my diminutive size everywhere I go,” the midget complained, scuffling over to the far side of the stairwell. “Getting so I can’t nap anywhere without gathering unsolicited abuse.”

Zack climbed the swayback stairs to the second floor. A rich blend of odors closed in around him—ancient cooking, defective plumbing, long-ago romances, ailing rodents.

He tapped, with his real fingers, on a door lettered Sniffles Glanzman, Promoter.

“Who?” inquired a voice from out the keyhole. “You know me, Sniffles.”

“Geeze, can it be? C’mon in, old buddy.”

The door creaked open.

Zack crossed into a small dusky reception room.

When he stopped midway on the cracked linoleum, the far wall began to shimmer.

It turned to see-through glaz, revealed another room beyond. This one was an office, done in the style of at least a hundred years earlier. Seated behind the wooden desk, feet up on it, was a middle-sized, middle-aged man in a two-piece checked funsuit. He hopped from the swivel chair, came bounding across to press his snub nose against the glaz. “Good to see you, Zack,” he beamed. “What brings you to Downside Chi?”

“Need a favor.”

“You still with the Federal—”

“On my own now.”

Glanzman’s eyes narrowed; his head tilted to the left. “You don’t look so hot,” he observed. “Can I maybe loan you a—”

“I’m disguised.” Zack ran his flesh fingers along the two-day stubble on his cheeks. “It isn’t money I—”

“That sallow look’s makeup? Those crowsfeet digging at your peepers? Neat jpb, Zack, old buddy.” Glanzman went back to his swivel. “Excuse me for harping on health. I still happen to be, you know, preoccupied.”

“You seem to be in fine shape these days.”

“Since I got me this germproof, dustproof office, sure,” said the promoter. “You remember how lousy I was three, four years ago. I had me one of the worst cases of Ellison’s Syndrome known to. . . . So what can I do for you?”

“You’re sending a troup of wrestlers out to the Colonies.”

Glanzman said, “Six Colony tour, going to hit Number 26, Number 27, Number 28 and so on. Why?”

“I have to get to SC Number 27.”

“Be easier to let me stand you to a First Class ducat on a shuttle, old buddy. I love my pugs, but I ship ‘em Third—”

“I have to get to SC Number 27 as unobtrusively as possible.”

“Oh, I get you.” The promoter nodded. “Matter of fact, the Boston Strangler just canceled out on me, going on a tour with that Buddy Benson jerk instead. Boy, if that palooka was related to me I’d. . . . You sure you’re up to wrestling?”

“I don’t intend to wrestle, Sniffles. Only to pose as a wrestler until I reach Number 27.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Glanzman. “I sure do, you know, owe you a couple favors. When the Amateur Mafia tried to muscle in on my. . . . Listen, old buddy, I’m shipping my boys off tomorrow afternoon, from the Upside Chi Shuttleport. Can you make that?”

“I can, yeah.”

“I’ll have all the papers you need waiting for you at the Hertz Shuttle counter,” promised Glanzman. ‘What name you going to be using?”

“The Masked Marvel,” answered Zack.

Chapter Twenty

A stagecoach came clattering up to the docking area gateway. “Yipee!” cried the grizzled driver, waving his sombrero in the clear, dry air. “Welcome to Space Colony Number 27, folks. Yipee!”

“You feeling okay, Marvel?”

Zack had stumbled again crossing the plazpaved docking area esplanade. “Shuttle lag,” he said, forcing himself to grin.

“Don’t bother me anymore,” said the huge woman walking beside him. “I been playing tank towns and fleabag space colonies since I was a virgin, and that’s one hell of a long time ago. I figured, when I won the Women’s Heavyweight Zero-G Wrestling Championship belt back in ‘25, it’d upgrade me and my bookings.”

“Didn’t, huh?”

“Naw, I still. . . . Here, Marvel, let me carry that little suitcase of yours. You really do look peckish.”

“I can handle it, Mother Earth.”

“You sure?”

He nodded. “I’ll be fine soon as—”

“Howdy, folks! Welcome to Space Colony Number 27!” A chubby, smiling man in a fringed leather suit had jumped out of the stagecoach and was running over to the group of fifteen newly arrived shuttle passengers. “Shucks, we sure am right happy to have you drop in on us. Shore are, ain’t we, Fuzzy?”

The driver spat tobacco juice off toward the simulated sand, then replied, “Honest to my grandma if we ain’t.”

“The theme of Space Colony Number 27 is Frontier Style,” explained the smiling man in the fringe suit. “That means we-uns all live like as they did back on Earth in the late nineteenth century out West. You, we-uns is right wild an’. . . .”

As unobtrusively as possible Zack eased away from the group of touring wrestlers and visitors. This section of the interior of the orbiting space colony gave you the illusion you were standing in a dry desert. A short distance off were false-fronted buildings, horses, rough-hewn men in cowboy garb.

Zack headed for the Golden Bough Saloon.

One of the horses tethered to the hitching rack was real, the other a fairly believable robot sim. “You can tell when they crap,” said a bearded old-timer who was leaning next to the saloon’s louvered swinging doors.

“Which is real, you mean?”

“Yup.” He winked at Zack, returned his attention to rolling a cigarette. “See, you can fake a horse pretty easy. But faking horseshit is a real challenge. Somewheres in there is maybe a moral.”

“One at least.” Zack reached out to push the door with his real hand.

“Tourist?”

“Thinking of settling. I understand there’s a first-rate real estate agent hangs out here in the Golden Bough.”

“You’ll get bored silly in about three weeks.” The old-timer licked the cigarette paper, sealed it around the authentic-looking fake tobacco. “A very little Wild West goes one hell of a long way. I found, after I retired from being a Scroodisk wholesaler, this life wasn’t all I’d anticipated. You can’t have much fun when life’s so dang predictable. You got your gunfighters shooting it out every day about high noon, you got your wild bunch robbing the bank most every morning except Sunday, you got your new schoolmarm being molested by your town bully, you got your runaway stagecoach, your Indian uprising, your masked avenger and his trusty Indian companion being mistaken for owihoots, your deed to the lost gold mine being stolen from the widder. . . . Well sir, a few weeks of that day after, day and you get to regretting you signed a long-term lease.”

Zack said, “Sounds pretty exciting to me,” and pushed on inside.

A hand-lettered sign on an easel to his right announced: Exciting Saloon Brawl Now In Progress! No One Seated Until It’s Over.

The brawl consisted of three unkempt louts slugging it out with two clean-cut lawmen in the vicinity of the long redwood bar. Furniture and glassware were smashing.

At a small round table near the door a dapper man in a white linen suit sat reading a dime novel while he sipped at his mug of frothy beer. Hanging down from his table was a canvas sign proclaiming: Snellgrove Brothers Real Estate.

Zack crossed the sawdusted floor to him. “You one of the Sneligroves?”

“Sir, allow me to be frank, honest and plain speaking.” The dapper man steepled his novel. “I have no brothers, being, alas, an only child. Yet I have always yearned to be surrounded by loving siblings. Thus, when I arrived here and began living amid the free and easy folks of SC 27, I decided to create a few brothers for myself. I even made up names for these imaginary lads. They are Rosco, Merle and Leroy.”

“Not a fascinating batch of front names.”

“To someone named Bill, they are,” replied Bill Snellgrove. “Are you, sir, interested in buying a lot?”

“I am,” said Zack. “Before I decide, though, I want to have a real look around the colony. I want to explore it from end to end, to study all its ins and outs. Then I’ll know how best to spend the $6,000,000 my Uncle Gaspar left me.”

“That’s not such a terrific first name either,” said the real estate man. “However, the part about the money is what interests me and, sir, I shall be most pleased to show you the endless plains, the scorching deserts, the pleasant green ranches of SC 27.” He gulped down some of his beer, stood and bowed. “I am at your service, Mr. . . ?”

“Right now I’m using my professional name. I’m the Masked Marvel.”

“Come along then, Mr. Marvel,” invited the realtor as he headed out.

Zack waited until the third guard fell, face forward and with knees stiffly bent. The plank floor of the ranch house rattled, then the rattling subsided. He wended his way through the fallen cowhands, stopping next to a trapdoor.

Bending carefully, he tugged the door open. A plazramp went corkscrewing down to a walkway. Zack descended.

The pale yellow door at the walkway’s end opened fifteen seconds after he applied his lock-picking finger to it.

“Zack!” The silver-haired girl stood up swiftly, facing the door. “My God, you look just terrible.”

This was the real Timpany, not a facsimile. “Been looking for you,” he said, reaching out to steady himself against the slick green wall of the room.

“You figured out my message. I was afraid maybe they’d—”

“You know what’s happening to me?”

“Yes, of course. That’s why I tried to spring you from the—”

“Stay right there for now,” he suggested when she started to come toward him.

“Zack, I had nothing to do with your getting this,” Timpany said. “It wasn’t until—”

“You didn’t know what they were doing in your father’s Boston factory? Didn’t know about the nifty little lab they had hidden away there?”

“Not when we visited the damned place, no. I wouldn’t have risked—”

“You’re immune. You can’t get this particular slow virus.”

“I didn’t know that either, Zack, really. They told me, when they gave me the shot, that our Quarls organization was experimenting with some pretty dangerous synthetics. The shot was to protect me in case of some accident.” She took a tentative step nearer. “You really look awful. Can’t anyone help you to—”

“You can,” he said. “You’ve got the antidote to this stuff. Here in SC 27 probably.”

Timpany shook her head. “It’s not here.”

“This must be where they moved the lab, after Boston.”

“Zack, they’ve shifted the location again, back to Earth.”

He let his breath sigh out, slumping some against the too-green wall. “Where?”

“I’m not sure.” She rubbed the flat of her hand across her ribs. “I’m not exactly an honored guest here. Father has been in to talk to me a few times since his hired goons hauled me here, but I—”

“He’s behind this all.”

“Yes, I think so,” she answered. “Except I get the feeling there’s a partner. I’m not certain who. . . . Can you get me out of here? Off this damned colony?”

“Yeah, we’ll take the Snellgrove Brothers’ lectro-jeep to the shuttle dock.”

“Won’t the Snellgrove Brothers obj—”

“There’s only one, and he’s slumbering in the back of the jeep.”

“Suppose, then, we run first and talk later?”

“Any packing to do?”

“No one gave me a chance to pack. I was on my way to meet you in that dreadful swamp when an enormous robot grabbed me.” She glanced once around the room. “At first I assumed it was a kidnapping. Until I woke up here and smelled the cows and horses and all. Did my father try to kill you?”

“That was the intent of the crew he sent to greet me in the swamp.”

She joined him in the doorway. “When I wrote that message on the bughouse wall in the Alps, I was hoping you’d been able to ditch whatever Dad sent after you. That you’d be able to figure it out.”

“I interpreted Z/FS to mean, ‘Zack, I’m being taken to our space colony with the Frontier Style theme.’ ”

She laughed, hugging him. “You’re still the same brilliant Zack I love,” she told him. “How’d you locate this hole they’ve been keeping me in?”

Moving free of her, he tapped his metal arm. “I had this repaired, and there’s a very efficient bloodhound attachment.”

“I think I know where we can catch up with the antidote,” she said. “You do believe I’m not one of the people who’re trying to do you in?”

Zack took her hand and led her out onto the walkway. “Watch your step when we get upstairs,” he advised. “Don’t trip over any of the louts.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Timpany tucked her handsome legs up under her, gazed out at the vastness of space. “I don’t think I’ve ever traveled tourist class before,” she said quietly. “Everything is so dinky.”

“Makes a good cover.” Zack was in the shuttle seat next to her.

“The windows are dinky, the seats are dinky, even the meal was dinky,” the platinum-haired girl continued. “Not that I’m all that enthusiastic for Downside Fried Tempeh anymore. They fed me almost nothing else for the whole time I was locked up.”

Zack touched the control panel on his seat arm, activating the invisible privacy shield around their pair of seats. “Why’d your father have you stowed away?”

“Well, for one thing, he’s become a raving maniac,” she answered. “When you’re close to someone you don’t always notice they’re going completely goofy until it’s too. . . . I really am sorry about how awful you look, Zack. All those wrinkles and there’s a touch of grey at your temples, too. Did you know?”

“Tell me about your maniacal father.”

“Mostly I was tucked away on account of you. Somehow he and his stooges learned I was going to spring you from that awful cop clinic,” she said, her hand resting on his real one. “They didn’t want that, didn’t want you loose and poking around. I imagine they feared you’d do exactly what you’ve been doing.”

“His scheme, your father’s, is what?” asked Zack. “He wants to own America?”

“He’s always wanted it, apparently,” she said. “Funny, I was always asking him what he wanted out of life, or what he wanted on his birthdays and for Christmas. Never did he mention America.”

“Who came up with this new virus?”

“Oh, that was Dr. Hazen, one of the brightest young fellows in the Fake Food Research and Development division. To think I even dated him, went to the Junk Food Bal Masque with him two seasons ago. Handsome on the outside, but on the inside he was obviously planning to move from fake food into weaponry.” She shivered once. “He came up with the slow virus, told my father about it. That seems to have been what got this whole mess rolling.”

“This handsome Hazen,” said Zack. “Is he—”

Tap! Tap!

A red-haired shuttle stewardess was tapping on the privacy screen, smiling and holding a tray of soft drink pouches out toward them.

Zack shook his head. “No, thanks.”

Tap! Tap! Tap!

Zack cut off the screen. “We don’t want—”

“You have to have your complimentary soda pop, sir,” the stewardess said in a deep growly voice. “It’s part of the considerate service provided to all Hertz Shuttle tourist-class passengers. In first class you also have to take fresh fruit and a shot of all the essential vitamins.”

“We’re not at all thirsty,” said Timpany, reaching across Zack for the privacy switch.

“But we insist you enjoy your complimentary—”

“Fine, we’ll guzzle a couple.” Zack grabbed two plazpouches off the tray. “Now . . . say, are you a tranz?”

The stewardess fluffed her hair. “Whatever makes you ask that, sir?”

“Your hairy hands, your gravelly voice.”

The stewardess bent closer to him. “I’m a guy, but don’t spoil this, please. See, Hertz has a sex-ethnik-age-looks quota. The only way to get this particular job opening was to be a twenty-seven-year-old red-headed Armenian girl. I qualified on everything but the sex and since there wasn’t time for a tranzop before I had to report to training—”

“Your secret is safe.” Zack reinstated the privacy screen. “Now about Dr. Hazen?”

“They’ve finally persuaded E. Zorro Ortega, after letting the poor man get right up to the very brink of death, to sign over his sixteen percent of the United States to them,” Timpany said. “Once he does, he gets the injection that’ll save him.”

“That’s all it takes, one shot?”

“So Dr. Hazen and Dad assure me.” She touched his cheek. “I’ll see to it you get—”

“I’ll do that, Timpany. Where’s this exchange going to take place? At Ortega’s main ranch?”

She gave a negative shake of her head. “According to Dad, they’re meeting at one of Ortega’s other locations. Down on the CalSouth-Mexam border. Place known as . . . let me think. Yes, Rancho 57.”

“Your father confided a good deal in you.”

“He gets boastful at times, especially when he thought I couldn’t do anything about what he was telling me,” she said. “Dad never much liked you or. . . . Wait now, Zack. You don’t still believe I’ve been in cahoots with him?”

“I’ve grown less trustful,” he said. “Could be it’s a side effect of dying.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“Not immediately, not as soon as your father’d like.”

“Nobody ever told me what they were planning and I didn’t know, absolutely didn’t know, they had a lab hidden in the Boston plant.”

“Okay, I accept that.”

“I am on your side.”

Zack asked, “Have any of the other victims capitulated, agreed to sign over their shares?”

“Not so far. You have to remember Ortega’s had it longer, was in much worse shape,” Timpany said. “The final stages of this are awful, Zack. If I thought you had to go—”

“All I have to do is catch up with Dr. Hazen and persuade him to give me a shot of the antidote,” he said, rubbing at his arm. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Zack climbed the neomarble steps of the little border-town church. He paused at the turnstile, catching his breath. From a pocket of his two-piece peonsuit he took a semi-silver dollar and dropped it in the coin slot.

“Bless you,” said the turnstile, clicking him in.

On his right a font of holy water was playing a faint, tinkly hymn. 50¢ a dip! proclaimed the engraved sign on its neomarble base. 3 dips for a dollar!

Bypassing that, Zack pushed into the church proper. There were rows of coin-operated pews on each side of the wide central aisle. Light-strip signs, here and there, spoke of what the little church had to offer. Light a blessed candle . . . just 75¢; See the Stations of the Cross! Only $1 per Station. Doz. for $10. Small miracles . . . $5.

Walking through the nearly empty midmorning church, Zack made his way to the row of three confessional booths near the front.

Confessions. $2 each. Whole family for $5.

He fished out a two-dollar piece, stuck it in the slot for the middle booth.

After a click and a whirring, the black neovelv curtain of the booth whisked aside.

Zack entered, knelt on the padded knee rest, and the curtains closed on him.

“Proceed, my son.” A glaz panel on the wall in front of him had commenced glowing a pale yellow. Behind it showed the vague outline of a thick-set priest. “Hurry along, or you’ll be into overtime.”

“Is everything set?”

“Eh?” The priest’s head came close to the rectangle of glaz. “Is that you, Zack?”

“Yeah, what about the arrangements for—”

“You don’t look at all well. What’s become of your arm?”

Holding up his right hand, Zack answered, “This is it. Had it coated with sinflesh to help with my current disguise.”

“You do look like a migrant worker. There’s a forlorn, ruined cast to—”

“Did you arrange everything, Father Silva?”

“Yes, my son. It cost five hundred bucks, by the way, not the three hundred I estimated when you phoned last evening.”

Zack reached into his tunic. “Give me the details.”

“What of the young lady? I had the impression you were traveling with a—”

“She’s hiding out elsewhere in Mexam.”

“Very well, you’re to. . . . Just slip the cash, folded once, into the slot below the screen. Where it says Tips & Donations.”

Zack did that. “You fixed it for me to get onto Rancho 57 with the next load of recruited workers?”

“Be at the Plaza San Norberto—that’s the one with the Downside Tempeh restaurant—at exactly noon today,” instructed Father Silva. “You want Bus A-2, driven by Ricardo Curtiz. You are to tell him you are one of my flock. You’re not with the Federal Agency any longer, are you?”

“I’m on my own.”

“Have you thought about taking a rest? You really do appear very—”

“I’m fine, Father.” He rose, was dizzy for a few seconds.

“Zack? There is something wrong with you. Can I—,,

“Helping me get onto the ranch grounds is all you have to do,” Zack assured him. “Good-bye. Thanks.”

“I’ll remember you in my prayers,” promised the priest. “No charge.”

“Is it catching?”

“What?”

“What you got, amigo. Can I catch it maybe?”

Zack had been looking out the dusty window of the rattling landbus. They were rumbling along a narrow road through flat, dry fields. “Nothing much wrong with me,” he told the lean young man on the seat next to him.

“Your hands been shaking, amigo. Since we left the plaza.”

“First-day-on-a-new-job jitters. Nothing more.”

“Reason I ask,” said his seatmate, “I wouldn’t mind catching something. I got a Cruz Azul Job Insurance policy, amigo, that I been able to keep up payments on. If I get sick on the job I can collect more than—”

“You’re not Spanish or Mexican.”

“No, I’m Armenian. I punctuate my speech with a few Latinisms because Ortega runs a very traditional ranch system. Traditionally, hombre, Mexicans have been in the forefront of all the back-breaking, ball-busting agricultural work in CalSouth. You sabe?”

“Sí.” Zack turned to watch the countryside.

“What is it you got?”

“Jitters.”

“Merde. You look mighty sick to me, amigo.”

Zack reached across himself with his metal arm, took hold of the young man’s arm with his disguised fingers. “It’s important for me to get this job today. Don’t foul things up by harping on how I look and feel. You sabe, amigo?”

“Sure, okay. No need to get rough, hombre.” He tugged free of Zack’s grip. “They going to give you a physical at the ranch, you know, before you go to work.”

“I’ll pass that.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” He’d slipped Ricardo Curtiz $300 to make certain.

Zack and his five fellow workmen were twenty paces from their assigned agridome when its plaz door hissed open and a man on a stretcher was carried out by a pair of white medbots.

“Wait a minute, you bozos,” said the foreman who was in charge of Zack’s party. “Stop and take a gander at this gink they’re carrying by.”

The man on the stretcher was clutching at his throat, gagging, writhing from side to side. His face, beaded with sweat, had a grey-purple color.

“There you see a bird who didn’t follow simple safety rules,” said the foreman. “And what rule did he futz up?”

Zack watched the medical robots hurry the gasping man toward an opaque dome that stood off from the cluster of ten immense agricultural domes that dotted the rancho acres.

“You! What’s the answer?” The foreman was prodding Zack with the dead end of his shockstik.

“Didn’t wear his gas mask,” answered Zack.

“That’s one good reason. What else?” The tip of the stick touched the Armenian.

“You gave him a defective mask,” he replied. “I’ve seen that happen at agcamps all up and—”

“This is an Ortega ranch, pinhead,” reminded the foreman with another prod. “We don’t give you defective gear. However, once in a great while a mask with a slight flaw gets by our safety double-checking system. That’s why you clunks have to inspect your masks before you put them on. Why is that?”

“So we don’t croak like that poor bastard,” said the thin Armenian

“He isn’t going to kick off,” said the foreman. “We have the best equipped field hospital in these parts. Besides which, the growth-stimulating gas Ortega uses is perfectly safe.”

“I got an aunt in Guaymas got cancer off your tomatoes,” said one of the other workmen.

“Bullshit. She obviously got hold of a rival tomato. An Ortega tomato passes such a rigid inspection before—”

“Yeah, just like the gas masks,” said the Armenian.

“Look, wiseass, everybody loves big, round, fat, juicy tomatoes. To make the buggers grow big and round and fat and juicy we got to spray them with a special patented gas during certain stages of their growth cycle. Now, even after they’ve grown up to be big and round and fat and juicy, there’s a residue of that gas hanging around in the agdome. That’s why when you crumbs go in to pick them, you got to wear your masks. Now hustle on into the transition chamber and get geared up. Pronto!”

Before he stepped through into the huge dome, Zack took a final look back at the hospital.

Chapter Twenty-Three

He hadn’t intended to fall asleep at all. That was getting harder to control. Awakening on his cot in the workers’ sleepshed, Zack sat up quietly. Sleeping men surrounded him and just outside the plaz door of the domed shed stood a gunmetal guardbot. The night sky was clear; moonlight filled the big shed.

Zack eased off the cot and it produced a faint creaking.

“Dangerous,” warned a whispering voice on his left. It was Norhadian, the Armenian, and he was watching Zack “They don’t like you prowling!”

Rubbing at his arm, Zack said, “I’d like you to be quiet about this. Otherwise. . . .”

Norhadian returned his head to his lumpy pillow. “Only offering a helpful hint.”

“Thanks.” Zack went soundlessly toward the guarded doorway.

Just this side of it he crouched and fitted on his boots, eyes on the back of the big guardbot.

When he stepped out into the night, the robot swiveled its ball-shaped head. Its glaz eyes glowed at him. “You got a john inside.”

“But not all this fresh air.” Zack lifted his hand, pointed his ring finger at the robot.

“If you know what’s good for—”

Zzzzzzzattzzzzz!

The guardian mechanism straightened up, mouth biting shut, eyes dimming.

Zack moved on, zigzagging between the sleepsheds. He could see the hospital dome glowing a quarter of a mile off. Running was difficult now, painful. The extra exertion made his joints ache, his lungs feel dry and brittle.

He was between two of the darkened agdomes when the first dog caught up with him—a robot, black and multi-toothed, leaping through the night for his throat.

As Zack stumbled back, he activated the disabling finger.

Zzzzzatttzzzzz!

After one tinny yelp, the guard dog clattered down on the moonlit ground.

Zack remained beside it for a moment, watchful.

The next dog he didn’t hear until its metallic paws had smacked into his back. He fell over onto the hard ground.

The guard dog’s metal teeth tried for his neck. Zack rolled, got himself under the mechanical beast and then kicked up with both feet.

That shoved the snarling robot a few inches farther away from his throat. Twisting, he jabbed his metal finger against its carcass.

Zzzzatttzzzzz!

It yowled twice, ceased to function.

Zack lay under its defunct body, breathing hard. After a few tries, he managed to roll it off him.

When he rose to his feet, the agdome to his left seemed to come falling over at him. He stopped, where he was, fists clenched, riding out the wave of dizziness.

“I’ll make it,” he told himself. “I’ll make it.” After another full minute he was able to go plodding on.

The dark-haired girl was sitting, shoulders hunched, elbows on knees and face framed by her hands, alone on the bench. She was twenty, not very attractive, crying.

A man in an expensive three-piece grey bizsuit was pacing the waiting room, back and forth in front of the sobbing girl.

Two other men in bizsuits stood under a floating globe clock, which showed the hour was 2:12 a.m.

Next to a white swing door at the room’s end a large man with a kilgun tucked in his trouser waist was chatting with a copper-toned robot.

“. . . Never liked hospitals,” he was saying. “My Cousin Leroy, once, they got him into a hospital and he never came out again.”

“No kidding?” droned the sizable robot.

Zack, on the other side of a one-way see-through glaz wall, watched them all.

The girl on the bench began to sob more violently. “It’s terrible, it’s awful.”

“Please, Marie, control yourself,” urged the pacing man. “Your grandfather’s going to live.”

“Who cares a fig about him? It’s these bastards screwing us out of sixteen percent of the frigging United States.” She blew her unappealing nose in a plyochief. “Sixteen percent!”

“We had to give in, Marie. You can’t let a man like E. Zorro Ortega sink into the grave if there’s any sort of—”

“Sure, easy for you to say,” said Marie, sniffing. “You’re not his only living heir, Mr. Sanantonio.

When the old fart finally does kick off, there’s sixteen percent of the USA I am not going to get hold of. Do you have any idea how many acres that is? Plenty.”

One of the businessmen under the clock said, “We deliberated a long time, my dear. In years to come you’ll grow to appreciate more fully the—”

“In years to come, Mr. Betancourt, I’ll appreciate the idea of what a crummy acting chairman of the board you were,” Marie told him. “When these Corporation X bastards are building condos on Ortega land and probably selling them to Chinamen and all sorts and conditions of other inscrutable ethniks, then, Betancourt, I’ll think of what an enormous—”

“Marie, you must remain calm,” suggested Sanantonio. “This is an ordeal for all of us.”

“You aren’t having sixteen percent of the United States of America removed,” said the sole Ortega heiress. “When that old stooge comes back to life, I’m going to tell him exactly what I think of him and the whole halfwit lot of you.”

“Hospitals bring out the worst in people,” observed the Corporation X guard to his robot sidekick. “Ain’t it the truth.”

Zack smoothed his borrowed medismock and strolled to the nearest glaz door. He opened it, entering the reception room. “Awfully sorry I’m so very late,” he said, smiling around at them all apologetically.

“Who are you?” the X guard asked, dropping his hand to the butt of the kilgun.

Zack blinked. “Why, I’m Dr. Molesworth.”

“You’re in the wrong part of the hospital, doctor,” the guard informed him. “This sector is being used for a private emergency operation. Off limits to regular hospital staff.”

“Well, don’t I know that? Since I’m here for—”

“I don’t see how the other guards let you come this far.”

“Once I explained I was to assist Dr. Hazen, they quite naturally let me pass,” said Zack, coming closer to the operating-room door they were guarding. “The reason I’m late, the skybus people sent part of my luggage to Zurich instead of—”

“Nobody informed us, about any Dr. Molesworth. You’re not on my list. Is he on your list?”

“Not on mine, no,” replied the robot, his glaz eyes scanning Zack up and down and across.

“Well, this ought to explain everything.” He held out his right hand.

Zzzzzummmmm!

Zzzzzattttzzzzzzz!

The thumb and ring finger spoke simultaneously. The robot’s round head bonged back against the wall as he jerked back into a nonfunctioning mode. The human guard’s groping hand missed the kilgun and slid inside his trousers. His eyes shut, he made a faraway whistling sound and tipped over.

Spinning, Zack faced the rest of them. “I’m here for Dr. Hazen, not. . . .” The spin had been too sudden and the three businessmen and the heiress seemed to be roller-coastering around the room. He forced himself to keep talking, keep standing. “. . . not Ortega. If you’ll stay here quietly while—”

“You aren’t actually Dr. Hazen’s colleague,” accused Sanantonio.

“Of course, he isn’t, dopey,” said Marie, snuffling. “If he was on the Corporation X side, he wouldn’t have had to coldcock those two schmucks.”

“Whoever you are,” warned Betancourt, “we’ll see to it you—”

“Sorry, then.”

Zzzzzzummmm!

Betancourt went first, a victim of the stungun thumb.

Zzzzzummmm! Zzzzzummmm!

Then the other two men.

“Could you maybe knock off the old bastard before—”

Zzzzzummmmm!

The girl last.

Hand ready, Zack entered the operating room.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The needlegun and a small vial of green-gold liquid rested on a neoporcelain tray. On a floating operating table next to the tray lay a ravaged old man, his long, matted hair a dirty white, his skin scribbled with deep, many-branched lines.

A round-shouldered man in a medsmock was bent over the slow-breathing Ortega. “1 told you buffoons not to come in here unless—”

“Is the antidote working?” asked Zack.

“Of course it is. Within . . . who the hell are you?” Dr. Hazen had wheeled around, a scowl on his long jawed face.

“One of your guinea pigs.” Zack crossed the oval room. Only the wheezing Ortega and the doctor shared it with him.

“Zack Tourney.” He smiled tightly. “Looks as though you won’t last more than another two months.”

“You know about me, about what this arm can do,” said Zack, approaching the tray that held the antidote. “Behave accordingly.”

Hazen took an awkward step back away from the operating table. “Who are you working for now? Those idiotic SDUK—”

“On my own,” Zack told him. “Entirely.” He alternated his gaze between the doctor and the bedside tray holding the antidote.

The light from the overhead globe lamps made the barrel of the needlegun sparkle, found and illuminated tiny golden bubbles in the vial of fluid.

“Your motor coordination is bad, Tourney,” Hazen pointed out. “Careful you don’t drop anything.”

Zack reached for the needlegun with his real hand, eyes on the retreating doctor. “Halt right there until I—”

“That’s enough, cabron!”

A leathery hand closed tightly around his wrist before he could even touch the needlegun. The barrel of a kilgun pressed into his temple.

“Very rapid recovery,” Zack said to E. Zorro Ortega.

The old tycoon was sitting up on the operating table, Zack’s wrist caught in one knobby hand and a gun in the other. “I never had it quite so bad as I pretended,” he said with a dry, foul-smelling laugh.

“You’re the partner, huh?”

“Exactly, cabron,” replied Ortega. “Quarls and I devised the whole and entire scheme.”

“With my help,” put in Dr. Hazen.

“And tonight’s performance?” asked Zack.

“Staged for the benefit of all the sundry spies who’re so anxious over me and my condition.” Ortega poked the gun into Zack’s flesh. “Also for my colleagues and that pudding-faced granddaughter of mine. None of them is in on this.”

“You really had the damned virus?”

“Sure, cabron, we had to do that because we knew outsiders would be going over my medical reports,” said Ortega, chuckling. “It’s a real bitch of a disease, as you’ll maybe find out. If you live long enough to experience the final stages.”

“The antidote’s real?”

“Of course, and the doc really shot me a dose, to get rid of what traces of the slow virus I still have. When we fake something, we go first cabin.”

“Now that you’ve apparently given in to Corporation X,” said Zack, “the other victims will be that much more willing to capitulate, too.”

“We’re anticipating that.” Dr. Hazen rubbed a hand across his prominent jaw. “Mr. Ortega signs over his shares, he recovers completely. The message to the other victims is simple, clear-cut.”

“The lovely thing about this,” said Ortega happily, “is nobody’ll ever know I’m X.”

“A tried and true dodge,” said Zack. “One of the supposed victims turns out to be the killer.”

“Old ideas are lots of times the best. They work good.” The tip of his gun barrel was grinding at Zack’s temple.

“You already own sixteen percent of America,” Zack said. “Why go through the business of signing it over?”

“Part of the con,” said Ortega. “On top of which, cabron, I want that Marie to think I don’t own it anymore. So it won’t all the time be, ‘Gramps, can I have Carmel,’ or, ‘Granpappy, give me Glendale. You promised.’ She’s a real pain in the ass. I’m thinking of having the doc here try a little genetic engineering on that sack of—”

“We’d best be moving along,” reminded Dr. Hazen, coughing politely.

“You have also been a big pain in the butt,” Ortega told Zack.

“By accident.”

“Yeah, imagine a guy as smart as Hazen letting some of the stuff leak out of—”

“A mechanical malfunction can happen to the best managed of—”

“Doesn’t really matter,” cut in the old man. “We got him!”

“Did you use aircirc systems to deliver the virus to the intended victims?” asked Zack.

“In one case, yes,” answered the doctor. “Actually, the real challenge here, once the virus had been perfected and tested, was working out ingenious ways to deliver it. In the case of Millie Moskowitz, for instance, I came up with a very novel means of getting the virus into her system. A very well endowed actor who—”

“Let’s do something with this cabron and clear out,” urged Ortega.

“The Federal Police Agency and the SDUK aren’t that far behind me,” mentioned Zack. “Long before you and Timpany’s dad ever own America you’ll—”

“Holy shit!”

All the lights in the operating room had snapped off.

Zack pulled, ducked.

The old man, still holding onto his wrist, came clattering clean off the table.

Zzzzzizzzzzle!

The kilgun cut a brief glaring line across the darkness. Missing Zack.

But in its fleeting illumination he saw both the injection gun and the vial of slow virus antidote go flying off the tray as the agricultural tycoon fell onto him.

Zack swung out at the returned darkness with his metal hand.

“Yow!”

He connected with the old man’s chin.

The clutching of his wrist ceased, he heard the kilgun clack to the flooring.

There was still Dr. Hazen to consider.

Zzzzzzummmmm!

Someone, not Zack, was using a stungun.

Zzzzzummmmm!

Someone, not Zack, groaned, staggered, fell against the floating table and then smacked the floor.

“Don’t shoot, amigo,” called a voice out of the darkness. “We’re allies.”

Ten seconds of darkness and silence followed. Then the lights blossomed back on.

Standing just inside the doorway and grinning down at the slumped Dr. Hazen was Norhadian.

Zack watched the lean young man from the floor. “Who’re you with?”

“The Society obviously. I’m too unorthodox for a Fed,” he answered. “We got onto this a bit after you did.” He glanced up at a globe clock. “Jocko himself ought to be bringing a wipe-up team onto the rancho about now.”

Nodding, Zack said, “Thanks.”

“All for a good cause. It’s over behind you.”

Zack, still on hands and knees, turned carefully around. The vial was lying on its side a few yards from him. He picked it up, examined it. “Not broken or otherwise futzed up.”

“You absolutely sure that the right stuff, amigo?”

“Sure enough,” he answered.

“You made my job of getting inside the hospital fairly easy.”

Zack made an adjustment to his ring finger. “I was impatient.”

“You stunned and otherwise incapacitated a goodly bunch. Is that a hypo?”

“Built in. I’d rather use my own.” When a needle tip emerged from the finger, Zack inserted it into the nipple of the vial.

Norhadian came over to gaze down at the unconscious Ortega. “He and Quarls were heading this up?”

“So he said.” Zack was concentrating on filling the injector. “Figuring the bottle was full to the line when Hazen used it, a dose has to be .5 cc.”

“Sorry I stunned him, otherwise we could ask.”

“Doubt Hazen would’ve given me much useful advice.” He rolled up the sleeve on his flesh arm, found a spot and shot the antidote into himself.

“Good luck, amigo.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

On the wall Headless Ortmann was drumming his fingers on his brain canister as he delivered the news. “. . . Heard it here first, Mr. and Mrs. Newswatcher. If I may blow my own horn, allow me to point out that I was mucho righto about this whole sorry mess.” His voice canister rattled as he rapidly spoke. “There was indeed a conspiracy to infect certain key figures on the world’s stage with an insidious synthetic virus. Even though my detractors fixed it so Ortmann no longer has a nose of his own, I still managed to smell this one out for you. As I told you, our sexy prexy Mrs. Benson was given a dose of the dreadful slow virus, as was Sheikh Sigar, big-knockered Millie Moskowitz, and Limey newsmaven Sir Randolph Cox-Melville. Cunning produce plutocrat E. Zorro Ortega was also a victim of the sinister org calling itself Corporation X. Ah, but the old vegetable magnate was playing ‘possum, friends, and acting in a mucho crookedo manner to fool all us nice honest folks. Thanks, however, to the joint efforts of our top notcho Federal Police Agency—Ortmann’s always told you that for raving fascist bullies the FPA do a darned job—thanks to the joint efforts of the FDA and a Downside underground group calling themselves the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the whole Corporation X plot was defused, futzed and finished. Old man Ortega and his partner, once-respected junk food purveyor Paxton Quarls, are now languishing snugly in the bowels of one of our toughest federal pokeys awaiting trial. Taking up a nearby cell is the noted researcher, Dr. Leroy Hazen, whose warped brain first cooked up the synthetic virus that’s been giving so many prominent people a rougho time-o.” The headless newsman paused, his voice canister making a throat-clearing sound. “And so, as happens to most power-mad nurfs, the plan to put one over on the good folks came to naught. Ponder that notion, folks, while the makers of Ecological Eclairs try to hustle you into buying their dubious product. I’ll be back with you in exactly two minutos to—pulling no punches, naming names and letting the chips fall where they may—answer the libelous, slanderous, and completely baseless charges leveled at me in the vile, slimy pages of the National Intruder to the effect that I indulge in romantic relations with innocent young lasses barely into their tender teens . . . .”

Zack used the control panel on the side of his relaxchair to turn off his wall. He crossed his legs at the ankles, turned to look out at the hazy Florida afternoon.

Dr. Danfield came slouching in from the living-room area. “You’re on the road to recovery,” he announced, shutting up the black plaz medbag he was carrying. “Just made some quick tests and your blood indicates you’re no longer a victim of the virus. The antidote worked.”

“Have any of the other victims been treated yet?” asked Zack. “Ortmann didn’t mention.”

“Well, I believe they’ve been holding off, testing the antidote material and so on,” said the SDUK doctor. “Probably also waiting to see how you do. But you dosed yourself over a week ago and there’s absolutely no sign of any negative side effect.”

Zack ran his real hand through his hair. “Except this.”

“You look fine with white hair,” Danfield assured him. “Distinguished, scholarly almost. When I consulted with Dr. Hazen he mentioned the possibility of colors changes in the hair as a symptom that accelerates rather than diminishes after the use of the antidote.”

“Hazen agreed to talk to you?”

“After two guards sat on him and slammed a truthbug to his noggin,” replied Danfleld. “Brilliant man, though flawed.”

“Somewhat,” agreed Zack.

“You’re not unhappy over not getting any public credit for the big part you played in cleaning this up?”

“Nope.”

“The mention of the Federal Police Agency could be taken to include you.”

“I’m glad nobody is going to die from the slow virus,” he said. “My main concern, though, was to make sure I didn’t.”

“You won’t,” the doctor said as he moved to the doorway. “You can, by the way, start having visitors if you wish.”

“Not yet.”

“Jocko sends his best, as do Shark, Norhadian—”

“Give them my best in return.”

Dr. Danfield stood, watching him. “This sulking isn’t a side effect, is it? I don’t believe so, yet—”

“No, I’m sulking on my own,” Zack said.

Chapter Twenty-Six

His former boss said, “You look fully recovered, Zack. Your hair isn’t even grey, although I’d heard—”

“Dyed it,” he said at the phone screen image of Courtney Chezbro. “Decided I wasn’t ready to be distinguished.”

“You look absolutely fine.” The lanky Federal Police Agency director was behind his tin desk, a shawl over his huddled shoulders. “Although you seem to be breathing with a bit of difficulty.”

“I was running.”

“From someone?”

“For exercise.”

“Well, you’re looking fine.”

“So I hear.”

“I’m a person with an artist’s eye, which means I’m more perceptive than your average well-wisher. . . . I’ve been asked to tell you there are no hard feelings.”

“Oh, so?”

“On our part.” Chezbro rubbed his hands together to warm them. “The Federal Police Agency understands how you must’ve felt. There won’t be any disciplinary action taken.”

“Be difficult to apply any, since I don’t work for you anymore.”

“Technically, you do, Zack. Since you haven’t yet submitted, as required by the original oath you took, a formal resignation to—”

“I’ll attend to that.”

Chezbro said, “You needn’t. What I’m trying to convey is the fact we’re all pleased with the way you took care of the slow virus case. You worked unconventionally, true, yet you did the job.”

“I had a strong incentive.”

“We’d like you to come back, or rather to stay on, Zack.”

Zack didn’t respond.

“At a higher salary,” added his one-time chief.

Zack leaned slightly forward, resting his metal arm on his knee. “Would I have to reactivate the buzzer in my skull?”

Chezbro watched his hands. “All FPA agents have to be equipped with—”

“When I got free of your clinic,” Zack said, “somebody ordered my buzzer to send pain shooting through me. That was you, wasn’t it?”

“What was done was to follow the usual procedure in instances where—”

“I’ve come to realize I don’t want to be part of anything where that’s a usual procedure.”

“Your new salary will be—”

“Oh, go paint an allegory.” Zack killed the call. He left the phone chair, picked up the discarded plyotowel and rubbed at his face and neck.

The pixphone sounded again.

He answered it on the fifth buzz.

“Yeah?”

It was Shark Egan. “How are you?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I can’t read minds as well at this distance. I’m in Downside D.C. Jocko and I were talking about you and I—”

“New glasses,” he noticed.

She pushed the dark frames higher on her freckled nose. “I think these are more flattering.”

“They are.” He sat on the edge of the chair, towel draped over his metal arm.

“Jocko and I . . . since you’re free lancing now. . . . You did pretty well on the slow virus thing.” She pushed at the glasses again. “I’m supposed to invite, again, you to join our organization. In an executive position, which means there’s a salary as well as—”

“And free lance means I don’t work for anyone.”

“Are you still angry? . . . yes you are. I can sense that from here even. You’re angry because I had to kill a few people while we worked together.”

“That might be one of my reasons for not showing more enthusiasm over the offer,” he admitted. “Thanks for calling, Shark.”

“Could we, you and I, at least—”

“Not quite yet.” He hung up and left the alcove. The pixphone sounded once more.

He didn’t answer this call until the ninth buzz.

“Hello?”

Timpany, striking in a simple one-piece jet-black cazsuit and even tanner than before, appeared on his pixphone screen. “I love you, you know,” she began.

“I was aware.”

“You won’t see me.”

Zack shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

“Ever?”

“For now.”

“I really didn’t have anything to do with the slow virus, Zack. That was established once and for all at the hearings. And it’ll come out again when they have the trials. The truth was just exactly what I told you it was.”

“I don’t doubt you.”

“Even though it seems certain Father will be locked up for a good long while and the Quarls empire is toppling all around, I want you to know I have, in my own name, a considerable fortune,” said the lovely young woman. “Whatever happens to Father won’t affect it.”

“Comforting.”

A frown, formed on her beautiful tanned forehead. “Something’s still wrong with you. It’s as though something awful happened to you.”

“I got killed,” he told her. “Now I have to get used to being alive again.”

“I . . . would you like to go somewhere with me?”

He shook his head. “Maybe in awhile, Timpany. Right now I’m going to go away for a bit by myself.”

Her frown deepened. “Can you tell me where you intend to go?”

“Elsewhere,” he said.

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six