A Song Called Youth (128 page)

Jock nodded. “Very good, sir. How can I be of service?”

A minute later, Watson returned to the boy, waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “Hold on here a moment, Jock will explain the top-secret procedure for seeing Rick. Maximum security these days, you see.”

The boy did a poor job of hiding his skepticism. “But why the video animation . . . ”

“It was a security procedure. Rick will explain. Actually—best you come forward with me a minute. See if we have time to arrange this now.”

The boy frowned, not quite believing Watson, but following him up the ladder. They went to the small crowd at the forward rail. Wind and fine spray on their faces. The others greeted them. Clearly saw Watson arriving with the boy. Watson looked around as if gauging the boat’s whereabouts, then nodded to the boy, pointed his chin aft.

Puzzled, the boy shrugged and returned to the aft deck. Alone.

Right,
Watson thought,
you wanted to see Rick, boy, you’re going to see him.

No one but Watson, who was listening for it, heard the faint sound of a cry, and then a splash coming from the rear of the boat. The others were a little tipsy, and busy drinking.

All but Giessen, who was watching Watson closely.

• 11 •

London.

The loading dock at the lab was a drafty place. It was a chilly, damp evening, an unseasonal mockery of summer, and Cooper wanted badly to be indoors. He didn’t take to cold well. He fantasized again about moving to some place warm. Gibraltar, say. Only, in a warm clime the hot sun was dangerous for an albino. There was always something wrong with any place he chose to live.

Where was the sodding bastard who was bringing his supply?

Cooper hugged himself, glaring at the bugs, bugs dusty white as an albino, banging themselves against the single two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. The insta-platform was barren; the alleyway was empty but for a few bits of gravel. There was nothing to look at. One could only wait, growing more impatient with each passing second.

He wished he could have brought his coat, but they’d have noticed that in the lab.

For the fifth time in five minutes, he thought of getting past the checkpoint at the other end of the alley by sneaking out with his supplier, hide in the back of his truck. But he was frightened to try it. Frightened of the SA, frightened of what the supplier might do later. Might blackmail him, hold him hostage or something. Some sort of criminal drug dealer, after all. Capable of anything, he supposed.

Soon the Security chief would check up on him and notice he was not in the building.

Cooper tried to think of his projects—of his triumphs on two fronts.

Experiments in crowd control through activation of socio-biological triggers; development of the primary Racially Selective Virus. And then there were the “puppies.”

He was a bloody Renaissance man, a Da Vinci, is what he was, with these interdisciplinary triumphs, and no one appreciated it! Of course, he was only a partner on the Viral Program and the development of the subhuman work force, not too terribly hands-on. But he’d helped conceive it, helped guide it, and he was head of department. They were his projects too.

But not only was he underappreciated, he was in effect incarcerated. Had been under house arrest in the lab living quarters for weeks. It was enough to drive a man dotty.

They might kill him, because of the Barrabas thing, if he became less than vital to their plans . . . 

And suppose they found out that he’d been selling some of the earlier viral gen-codes through the supplier? God only knew who was buying them on the other end. Some wog terrorist, he supposed. Probably use them on another faction, kill more of their own people, do everyone a spot of good.

It was not as if he’d sold the calibrations for the Racially Selective Virus. No, indeed. That was sacred, don’t you know. He’d sold them a failure, really. A virus that was short-lived but non-racially selective. A throwaway.

But would Rolff appreciate that? No. Would they be furious with him, perhaps punish him dreadfully, if they found out he’d sold the S1-L? Yes. Dreadfully, don’t you know.

He began to pace, whining faintly to himself to relieve the tension, the chill. The frustration.

He needed to get
off.
It was that simple. He needed to get out of himself. To have the orgasm of the nervous system that would get him free for a while. Open the spillway, let the pressure drop.

But where was the supplier?

The whir of the electric fence opening, down the alley. Headlight beams pooling on tarmac. The lights swinging toward him. Relief and exhilaration.

The supplier left the panel truck’s headlights on, its electric motor humming. He got out of the car . . . 

Who the bloody hell?

Not the usual chap. Not the little cockney fellow this time. Damn damn damn. Someone delivering lab supplies, he supposed—and
only
lab supplies.

Someone big as a house. Big, bulky, dark silhouette behind the headlight glare. “Dr. Cooper, I presume.” A husky woman’s voice, with an American accent. Southern States, he thought.

She came into the light. An enormous black woman. Good God! Why had the guards let her through?

But of course they were used to seeing Negroes in service jobs. She was supposed to be delivering chemicals for the lab. Same truck as usual.

“Yes . . . ?” he said tentatively.

“I got yo’ supplies. You know? Sarky couldn’t make it. Sent me over. I work wid him. Know what I mean? De whole deal.”

She was carrying Sarky’s little black belt pouch in her hand. Sarky usually wore it, but this woman would have a bit of a struggle getting it around a leg, let alone her middle.

She climbed the insta-steps with some effort, grunting and cursing under her breath. “Oughta make you come down to me,” she muttered. But she came up, and simply handed him the belt with his drugs on it. “It’s all dere. Some lab supplies in de truck too, natcherly, make it look good.”

He stared at her. An American? A black? A woman? He took a nervous step back from her. “What’s happened to Sarky?”

“Got inna tussle, couldn’t make it. I’m doin’ de deal for him, is all. It’s the righteous shit, man, jus’ de same zalways.”

His heart was banging in his chest. This felt wrong. But he wanted to get off ever so badly. And this woman couldn’t be a revolutionary agent, or a police agent. She was too odd to fit the profile. The New Resistance used the inferior races for their cannon fodder, he was quite sure, but never, he assumed, in so sensitive a position as an undercover agent of some kind. They didn’t have the brains to pull it off.

Fingers shaking, he zippered the canvas pouch open, found the little bottle and the balancer-charging unit. Without the one-shot unit, the bottle was useless—he couldn’t get another charge for his balancer without leaving here. And Security was supposed to monitor his balancer, officially, while he was under house arrest. And they wouldn’t let him get really high.

Addictive that way, they said. Made you prone to unsound decisions, they said.

Sod ’em. He gave her the cred number for this week, for the floating account he’d set up for this sort of thing, and she turned and waddled away, making an inordinate amount of noise. She began to unload a few cardboard boxes from the back of the truck, for the sake of appearances.

“Just leave them on the dock,” he said, hurrying to the door. “I’ll get them later.”

He went eagerly into the building, directly to the men’s restroom and locked himself in. With fingers that worked all on their own, so exactingly and quickly they were almost a blur, he charged the balancer on his thigh.

Oh, yes. There it was. Yes. His friend was back. Yes, yes, there it was, that’s it, that was . . . 

Was something else. Something different.

There was something else in with the euphoric. Something . . . What was it? Some minor impurity. It would pass.

But it made him restless. Normally he got off in the bathroom, stayed there for the rush. But it seemed so cramped now, cramped like his life under this bloody house arrest. Trapped in the lab like one of his own lab mice. Suddenly he was claustrophobic. Needed badly to get
out.

Cooper found himself stalking down the hall, his pants not even done up properly. Not caring, feeling a tidal push behind him, a growing swell of inchoate rage.

How dare they treat him like this. A Da Vinci, a Newton, a Mendel. A genius. Treat him like a half-breed, like some pathetic wog who’d cocked things up.

He’d straighten them out. Knew just the thing.

He had the presence of mind to put on the protective helmet before he smashed the vial containing the universal-kill virus in the coffee room, where the others were on their break. Had the pleasure of watching the virus take effect immediately—that immediacy was his own addition to the molecular design—watching them writhe on the floor, screaming.

Spitting blood. Dying.

But then realized he hadn’t done up the protective helmet properly, either.

Oh, bugger.

Paris, the old Metro station.

“I shot this in the tunnels,” Roseland said.

He held up what looked like a smashed electronic clock. Aluminum and silicon and glass and a lot of micromotor parts: a machine the size of a small bird, lying in the palm of his hand.

“It’s a bird’s eye,” Steinfeld said. “Where did you spot it?”

Torrence walked up then, into the monitoring office, looking around. “Anyone seen Pasolini? She’s late for her watch. Not like her. “

Steinfeld was distracted by the bird’s eye. “Pasolini? No. Look at this, Dan. Roseland shot it like a quail.”

“That was the shot I heard? I thought it was another of those fucking pipes exploding. Yeah, that’s a bird’s eye. Shit. Maybe we should just get the hell out of here now. Did it see you first?”

Roseland shook his head. “It was a quarter mile down the tunnel, on the other side of the barricade. I was on watch, thought I heard something, so I looked through the barricade and saw it looking around. Shot it from behind. They’ll figure it just ran into a wall or something. They must lose a lot of them, they break down all the time.”

“That barricade’s well camouflaged,” Steinfeld said, nodding. “Looks like shelling debris.”

“But they’re getting close,” Roseland said.

“A miss by an inch’s as good as a mile,” Torrence said. “Where’s Pasolini?”

“I really don’t know,” Steinfeld said. “We’ll probably have to move again soon anyway. Things are in place, events in motion. Latest is, our good Dr. Cooper’s dead.”

“Is he?” Torrence smiled. Something you didn’t often see.

“Bettina got onto his supplier. Decided she’d be the one to give him the stuff, figured he’d never believe someone like her was an agent. Used an OD of the Army’s aggression drug. He killed a bunch of ’em with his own virus. The S1-L. Non-racially selective. We were counting on them to shoot him, but it didn’t happen that way. Accidently exposed himself to the virus.”

“Dead is dead,” Torrence observed.

“Not only Cooper, but half a dozen other SA researchers. Plus three SA Security men.”

“Should put a crimp in their racist-virus project.”

“One hopes.”

“Maybe Smoke’ll come through in time,” Torrence said.

Absently, Torrence put a hand up to touch his new ear. Unless you looked close, it was symmetrical with the other. The skin color was a little different, but only a little. Torrence caressed it once, with the tip of his index finger.

Roseland watched in morbid fascination. Shuddered.
Weird keepsake to have.

Steinfeld glanced at the calendar on his watch. “I only wish we knew how much RSV they have in storage. In the meantime, at least, they’re going to have to put a new scientific team together, to work out the vectoring.”

“It’s just a delay,” Roseland said lugubriously. “It’s coming.”

“Where’s Pasolini?” Torrence asked again.

The other two turned to look at him. And then looked around.

Where was she?

FirStep, the Space Colony.

There were three women in Witcher’s little Colony apartment, and they were all beautiful, and all in various states of undress.

It was a little crowded, certainly, a little claustrophobic for his taste. He didn’t like being pushed in so close to them. Not this much. But then, if you have to be stuck in a small apartment with three people, Marion, Jeanne, and Aria were the sweetest kind of discomfort.

Administrative assistants, that’s what he’d called them when he’d filled out the forms to bring them to FirStep. They’d arrived a long, lonely week after he’d settled in here.

He felt so much safer now.

Speaking of filling out forms, Aria filled out hers marvelously, he thought, in that off-white negligee. It had been a good choice. Deliberately one size too small for her. She was oiling her Walther, the gun-cleaning kit open beside her. The strong smell of its solvents annoyed him in the close quarters, but it was important, today, that the gun be ready.

It had been, he reflected, more difficult getting permission to bring the girls in than it was smuggling the guns in. The colony people had strange priorities. Well, he supposed, perhaps it made sense. Guns don’t use up air or food or water.

Jeanne was in the shower. He considered going in, scrubbing her with the brush. No, she was moody this morning, best leave her alone.

And Marion. Sitting cross-legged in a corner, in her tight black neoprene skirt, neoprene bikini top with brutal uplift. Watching a minimono show on video. “Whatabuncha assholes, these minimono dwips,” she said. Clicking her black nails against the barrel of her 9mm H & K. But she didn’t turn the console off. “You know what I heard, I heard the minimonos wanta come here, think the Colony’s their intended homeland. Like the Rastas were with Ethiopia. They think they’re destined to live on the Space Colony, like, but they can’t get permission to come here because this Claire bitch, like, thinks they’re half crazy or something. Whud she say . . . ‘psychologically inappropriate.’ Fuck, that ain’t half. I mean, Gridfriend, gimme a break, they’re fucking out of their weaselly little minds.” Marion pretending to play a guitar solo on her submachine gun; like the gun was an air guitar. “Pisses me off,” she said, “they won’t let me smoke here. Couldn’t I sneak one, Dad?”