Oh, yes, there was.
He could have cut Ruiz up and put her down the garbage dispenser. That, however, he would not do.
Together, Cabtab and Duncan pulled and pushed the very heavy body to Duncan’s personal closet. After they had removed some materials and goods from the shelves and stacked these in a corner, they took out shelves and piled them on top of the stuff. Then, grunting and sweating and swearing a little, they got Ruiz into the space they had made.
“That’s just temporary,” Duncan said. “If they start looking for her, and they will, we can’t have her here. We’ve got to get rid of her very soon.”
Cabtab wiped the sweat from his forehead. “How soon?”
“The next ten minutes would be fine.”
“We might get her out through the window by then. But there’s too much danger somebody’d see her fall. Anyway, I think the ganks would drag the bottom around the tower as a matter of routine.”
“They won’t like it,” Duncan said, “but we have to contact RAT. They’ll have the people and the means to make her disappear.”
“Izimoff’s our only contact, and I know by God’s little green apples he won’t like it.”
“Too bad,” Duncan said. He activated a wall screen and put in a call to Izimoff’s apartment address.
“How’d you know that?” Cabtab said. “I thought we were only supposed to get to him at his store.”
“I asked the city directory. I thought we might have an emergency.”
After a minute, Duncan gave up. “He’s either not home or using a sleep machine.”
He hesitated for several seconds, then called Izimoff again. Though he did not like doing it, he left a message for Izimoff to call him at his apartment. Since he and the padre had to wait for the return call, he decided to get breakfast for both of them. They ate and showered and then sat around talking about various ways to transport Ruiz far from this area. None seemed to have much chance of working.
“The ganks won’t bother getting individual warrants for house search,” Duncan said. “They’ll get a blanket warrant. They’ll apply the override code to all the door locks in a certain area and turn that inside out. This section may be the first they’ll go to.”
“We got until nine before they’ll know she hasn’t checked in at her office,” Cabtab said. “We might have another hour or so after that while they’re trying to find out why she hasn’t reported in.”
“I’d say more like twenty minutes. They don’t screw around.”
Duncan thought fiercely for a minute, then said, “I don’t like to do it, but we have to rouse Izimoff. After all, there’s no reason for anybody seeing us there to make a connection between us and Ruiz. Anyway, we have to do it.”
Even at this very early hour, buses were available. They took one to within four blocks of Izimoff’s and walked the nest of the way. Number 566, Fong Avenue, was a scarlet-and green-striped door in a curving row of apartments. Duncan pressed the bell-button and tried to look nonchalant as some pedestrians passed. So far, he had seen ten people on the street. One of these was, statistically, a gank in civilian clothes. One out of ten.
Duncan kept his finger on the button. After sixty seconds, he said, “Either he’s gone or he’s out like a candle in a windstorm. Or he sees us but doesn’t want to let us in.”
Cabtab glanced up and down the street to make sure no one was watching him. Then, standing where he would be seen by Izimoff’s monitor, he gestured frantically. If the man was watching, he would know that his visitors were not here to just pass the time of day.
“Let’s go,” Cabtab said. “Maybe he’s dead.”
They went back to Duncan’s apartment. Over coffee, Duncan said, “It’s up to us. There has to be some way.”
The doorbell gonged. Duncan put on the monitor and saw outside the door a woman with a high coiffure and wearing a scarlet cloak. Her face was long and narrow but good-looking. Her lipstick was black.
He said, “Who is it?”
“It’s a big E,” she said. “Let me in.”
Duncan told the door to unlock. He met the woman before she had gotten a few paces into the front room. “Who’re you?”
She smiled swiftly and said, “Best you don’t know.”
She pulled a card from the pocket of her cloak, looked at it, and said, “You’re Beewolf. And he’s Jeremiah Scanderbeg Ward, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“Never mind that. I can’t stay long. I’ve been sent to say that your message to Izimoff has been deleted, so don’t worry about that. And…”
She wet her lips.
“And…?”
“Izimoff is dead.”
That startled him. Cabtab said, “My God!”
“Died early this morning. The authorities don’t know that yet. I’ve been sent to inform you of this because of your message to him. Do you have something that should be passed on to your superior?”
“I’ll say!” Cabtab blurted. “Only…how’d he die?”
“I wasn’t told anything about that. What’s the message?”
“There’ll be hell to pay,” Duncan said. “Two people disappear on the same day…the ganks’ll be frothing at the mouth.”
“Two?” the woman said. “What do you mean two? And what do you mean disappear?”
“I’m not entirely a dummy,” Duncan said. “The RAT killed Izimoff, didn’t they? They distrusted him, he was getting too nervous, and he was too unstable.”
Cabtab said, “You’re jumping to conclusions, Andrew. How…?”
“Maybe,” Duncan said. “But I’ve had some experience with subversives. Izimoff behaved as if he was insecure and afraid. He was a weak tool, if appearances can be trusted.”
“You’re paranoid,” the woman said.
Duncan shouted, “Maybe I am! But I’ll bet…!”
“Take it easy,” Cabtab said softly, but gripped Duncan’s shoulders from behind with hands like a robot’s. “You’ll make them think you can’t be trusted either.”
Duncan took in several deep breaths and envisioned sunny green meadows on which fauns and nymphs gamboled. The flush gone from his face and his breathing slower, he said, “Yeah. OK. Maybe I am too suspicious. You’ll have to admit that with the kind of life we lead suspicion breeds like bacteria in pus.”
“Very poetic, my friend,” Cabtab said. He took his hands away. “What’s the message, woman?”
“I’m authorized to give it only to Beewolf,” she said. “You’ll have to go into the next room, and you, Beewolf, must promise you’ll not reveal it to him.”
“Promised,” Duncan said, thinking, it depends on what you have to tell me. Also on whether or not it’ll put Cabtab in jeopardy.
The padre, looking indignant, his mouth moving soundlessly, left the apartment.
“Here’s what I was told to tell you,” the woman said. She spoke for approximately a minute. Duncan’s eyes widened while listening. Otherwise, he gave no sign of the effect her words were having on him.
“Repeat that,” she said.
He gave it back to her word for word.
“Good,” she said. “Now, what is the emergency?”
Her eyes widened, and she became somewhat pale under her dark skin. When he had finished, she said, “My God! I don’t know! This is something my superior’ll have to decide! I’m not authorized to take any action in this kind of situation. Besides, I don’t have the slightest idea what to do!”
“Then you’d better get your ass in gear,” Duncan said. “Can you get in contact with your superior at once? We can’t stand any delay.”
“I think I can.”
She wheeled and started for the door, then stopped, and turned again. “What time do you go to work?”
“In two hours and five minutes.”
“Wait here. If you don’t hear from us, make some excuse not to go to work.”
19
Cabtab strode into the room like a disheveled and cross lion loo
king for a fight.
“Is the bitch gone?”
“She’s just doing her job,” Duncan said, “though I doubt she knows what it really is. But then I don’t either.”
“Perhaps I was too hard on her, unjust,” the padre said. “I’ll search my soul and determine if I was. If so, then I’ll have to find some means for forgiving myself. And forgiving her for provoking me.”
“There are more important things to consider.”
“Nothing is more important than the state of the soul.”
“With the possible exception of the belly,” Duncan said, looking at Cabtab’s huge paunch.
“Soul and belly are inextricably twisted together,” Cabtab said. “He who untangles them is free.”
“Of what?” Duncan said, gesturing impatiently. “Listen. She said a crew from the Transportation-and-Shipping Bureau will be here soon. At least, they’ll seem to be T-and-S workers. Maybe they really are. That doesn’t matter. We have to get Ruiz ready for them. They don’t want to spend any more time here than absolutely necessary.”
“What do we have to do?”
Duncan told him, and they set to work. After destoning Ruiz, they bent her body so that she was in a fetal position. After taping her so that she could not straighten out if she suddenly regained consciousness, they put her into the cylinder and turned the power on. Then they dragged her out, wrapped her with a sheet, and put tape around that.
During the time-oozing fifteen minutes that followed, Duncan saw an organic patrol car pass slowly down the courseway. The TV camera on top of the vertical pole set in the rear of the vehicle revolved like the head of a one-eyed owl. The driver and his buddy were talking animatedly about something.
Duncan was glad that the law permitted only government monitoring cameras at courseway junctions and on patrol cars. If, as the government desired, every block had a monitor camera, the incident with Ruiz and the visit of the RAT agent would have been recorded. As it was, the presence of the T-and-S crew would be seen at various intersections and possibly noted by patrol car cameras. However, he was sure that authorization data for the crew would have been put into the gank data bank. Just how much investigation the authorization could bear he was not sure. He would just have to trust that it looked authentic. Of course, it was highly possible that no gank would bother to check it out.
“We’re not just walking a tightrope,” he muttered. “We’re running on it.”
“What?” Cabtab said.
Duncan did not have time to repeat. The doorbell gonged. After looking at the door screen, Duncan spoke the open-sesame that admitted the crew. This was two men and two women in the orange-and-black coveralls of the Transportation-and-Shipping Bureau. They had arrived in an orange-and-black zigzag-striped van, and two were carrying a large wooden box between them. They had to stoop to get the top of the box under the top of the doorway. One of them was operating a four-wheeled semirobot carrier. When it had passed through, Duncan closed the door.
It took a few seconds to load the sheet-wrapped body into the box. Duncan did not have to say a word. Apparently, the crew had been given instructions on their task before leaving their HQ. Whether they had also been told not to talk or were just surly because of the early hour, Duncan did not know. Even the crew chief was silent when she held out her hand for Duncan’s ID card. He, also wordless, handed it to her. She inserted the card into the flat case hung from a long chain around her neck, held it there for less than a second, and handed the card back to him.
Duncan watched the door screen as the box containing Ruiz was hoisted up on the platform to the level of the van floor. The van had been drawn up far enough to one side so that he had a partial view of its interior from the rear. He could see half of another object, covered by a sheet, on the floor. That, he was sure, was Izimoff, also in a fetal position. When the van got back to the T-and-S HQ—if it was going there—Izimoff would be put into the box with Ruiz. Where the box would go from there, he did not want to know. He had enough to worry about. It might be a few hours before the ganks learned that Ruiz and Izimoff had disappeared. After that, this tower, and especially this level, would swarm with organics. Now that he reconsidered it, it seemed inevitable that they would wonder just what was in the box. And they would also be calling on him to ask why he had shipped out something in a big box.
He inserted his card into a slot in a wall-panel control board. Per his spoken instruction, the screen displayed the data recorded during the T-and-S transaction. It showed what he should have expected and also revealed that his superior had expected him to be intelligent enough to get his instructions from the card itself. Someone in the organization had used a card identical to his to petition for an apartment closer to his work. According to the card, his petition had been granted, and he was to move into his new apartment before he went to work.
Somebody in a high position in the government had moved very swiftly this morning. He must have had a duplicate of Duncan’s card handy. Probably he had duplicates of everyone’s in the RAT. Predating the data, he had made it appear that Duncan had put in his request the previous Tuesday and that it had been reviewed and passed the same day.
So, Citizen Andrew Vishnu Beewolf, like it or not, had to move. Immediately. His personal possessions would supposedly be in the box furnished by the T-and-S Bureau. The crew would have taken it to his new apartment. There, they would have waited just long enough for the supposed personal property to have been removed from the box and placed on the floor. Then, with Izimoff and Ruiz still in the box, the crew would have taken the box on out to some government warehouse. He still had a problem. His PP, his personal possessions, had to be gotten out.
Cabtab was about to leave, but Duncan told him what he had to do. They began removing the stuff from his closet and from his PP bathroom cabinet. When these were put into two large duffel bags, they washed the cups and dishes, put them in a kitchen cabinet, and walked out. By then the courseways were beginning to fill up with people on the way to work. The two got onto a bus, rode to the new apartment, and went inside it. Duncan’s card had the new entry code; the old one would be erased today in the data bank.
Cabtab dropped the duffel bag on the floor.
“You should look around,” Duncan said. “It might pay you to be familiar with the layout some day. You never know.”
Cabtab grunted, but he did walk slowly through the rooms. Duncan put the bags into his PP closet; he would arrange the stuff therein on the shelves later. The wainscoting and the furniture were lemon-yellow, the choice of Monday’s occupant. Duncan would turn the controls to select the colors he wished. The walls were blank; it was up to him to display whatever he wanted on the screens. He could pick designs or scenes from tapes or create his own still or moving pictures. The uncarpeted floors were cloned oak, but a twist of a control could give him the shade of varnish he preferred. Decorating was simple and swift unless the decorator had trouble making up his mind.
The chairs, tables, and sofas could be quickly altered in color or mixtures thereof, though reshaping all of them would take at least half an hour. And they had to be put back into the conventional form before stoning time. Duncan seldom bothered with that. He rather liked the frail and delicate appearance of neo-Albanian furniture.
The living room had French windows that opened onto a balcony. The view from here was as good as from his old apartment, which in no way except a slightly different angle of sight differed from the new. That this place was closer to his job was the only advantage. If he had tried on his own to get a transfer, he would have had to wait for a subyear or more. Getting it so quickly, even if he had not wanted it, proved that one needed connections in this society to obtain something ordinarily unobtainable. It had always been so in every society and age.
“So long,” Cabtab said. “My blessings, son.”
“Thank you, Padre. I’ll meet you at the Snorter unless I can’t make it because something comes up.”
“Blessings
on your sex life, too,” Cabtab said, and he left.
Duncan lingered a moment to look at the faces of those he shared the apartment with but would never talk to. Then he hurried to the bureau. The next phase of his task was correlating the self-centeredness indices of chess players, TV actors, and electronic engineers. While engaged in this, he glanced often at the wall screen displaying the news channel. By quitting time, he had seen nothing on it about Izimoff and Ruiz. That, he well knew, though he did not know how he knew it, meant nothing. The ganks were probably sitting on the news. Probably. Ever since he had escaped from the Takahashi Institution, his life had been an obstacle road of probablys, perhapses, and ifs, all looming up suddenly in the dark. He knew almost nothing about the organization for which he was expected to die if it was necessary. It might kill him if he did not carry out its orders satisfactorily. Murky and uncertain described his situation as it had been and now was.
He tensed. Here came another uncertainty, a dangerous one. The man who had just been talking to a coworker was now heading his way. Though Duncan did not know what the man was thinking or what he intended to do, he was sure that he was an organic. Though in civilian clothes, he had that cold, hard, and somewhat withdrawn nimbus. It was a thin cloud that only long-time criminals and other organics could see.
I should be charitable, Duncan thought. That look comes partly from self-defense. Your typical gank is always wary, suspicious, cynical, and coiled to respond to attack. Though, statistically, very few are physically or verbally threatened. Most citizens are too afraid of them. With good cause.
Duncan rose from his desk as the man, shorter than Duncan but massively muscled, approached. Stopping at the rim of the circular desk, the man said in a frogdeep voice, “Citizen Andrew Vishnu Beewolf?”
Duncan nodded and said, “Yes.”
The man held up the ID card suspended from a purple chain around his columnar neck. “Officer Rhodes Terence Everchuck, First-Class Detective-Sergeant, Domestic-Immigration Bureau. Do you wish to run off the data for verification?”