Gordon R. Dickson (16 page)

He
was deadly tired. His body seemed a heavy, useless burden for his wary will to
drag forward. He went directly up to his room after registering and fell
asleep, though it was still only mid-afternoon.

He
awoke with a start about sunset. The last, thin, red rays of twilight were
coming in through the unopaqued window of his bedroom, making it a place of
strange rusty, dying light and tricky shadows. For a moment, he could not think
what had brought him so suddenly out of sleep, and then became conscious of
someone in the room with him.

He
turned his head. Someone was sitting in a chair pulled close beside his bed. In
the gloom, Kil made out the facial features with difficulty.

It
was the old man.
The same who had taken Ellen away from him.

"Hello Kil," said
the old man.

Kil
stared at him. The thought came to him that he should leap out of bed and grab
this intruder and hang on to him tightly, hold him as ransom for Ellen's
return. But his body seemed asleep and separate from his mind. Even his emotions
seemed lulled and slumbering.

"Kil," said the old
man, "you can't go on like this."

Kil
moved his hps with effort. The words came out like a sigh.

"Why
not?"

"You're trying the impossible,"
said the old man, gently. "You can't ever find us. You only hurt yourself
by searching. Look at you, worn out in body and mind, broke from your Class
A
status to an Unstab classification. Give up, Kil."

"Not," whispered
Kil, "until I find Ellen."

"You
can't, Kil. Ellen's gone 'where you can never find her. It's like hungering
after someone who's dead."

"No!" whispered
Kil, stubbornly.

"Yes, Kil.
You don't understand. Somehow, a mistake happened.
Something went wrong. Somehow you saw Ellen walk off with me. That's the only
reason I'm here now. To you, like everyone else there, it should have seemed
that she just vanished, suddenly, without a trace."

"What—happened—?"

"We
stopped time there for a moment, Kil. Or rather, we speeded it up a great deal
for ourselves, alone. You shouldn't have been able to see us go; but you
did."

"She—"
Kil struggled with the great effort of pushing the words past his lips.
"She didn't want to go."

"But
Ellen knew she had to. Kil—" the old man put his hand on Kil's shoulder.
"Ellen always knew the time had to come when she'd have to leave you. She
never really belonged to you completely. Think of her as of something you
loved very much that was merely lent to you for a while and then taken back
again."

"No," whispered Kil.
"We didn't marry that way. It wasn't
something temporary."

"It was for
Ellen."

"I don't believe
you," whispered Kil.

"It was."

"No,"
Kil struggled to make the thin thread of sound come stronger from his lips, but
could not. "And anyway, it wasn't for me. It's too late now to tell me it
was supposed to have been temporary. I should've been told at the start."

"Ellen couldn't tell
you. The secret wasn't hers to tell."

"What secret?
The Project?
Sub-E?"

The old man leaned forward
suddenly in the dimness.

"What's
that?" he said, sharply. "Where did you hear that?"

"Is it?"

"Answer me, Kil!"

"No,
you answer me.
First.
Why should it always be your
way? What do I owe you? You took Ellen."

"I didn't take her,
Kil. She went of her own free will."

"She
didn't want to go." A deep fury stirred slowly and distantly in Kil, held
down by the same thing that was sapping his strength.

"She was unhappy at saying goodby to
you," said the old man, "but she wanted to go. She knew she had to
go." "It's not true."

"Yes,"
insisted the old man. "It is true,
You
must
believe that, Kil, and stop this hopeless search of yours. You're hurting
yourself—and you're hurting Ellen."

"She—knows?"

"Yes," said the
old man, grudgingly.

A
great and powerful feeling of joy that was somehow separate from that part of
him that was being held in
thrall,
flamed up in Kil.

"Let
her come and tell me herself, then," he whispered. "Let her come and
tell me to stop trying to find her."

"She can't come."

"You mean you won't
let her come."

"She mustn't. She
knows she mustn't."

"Because she doesn't dare.
Let her come to me and she'd stay with me.
Wouldn't she?"

"No,"
said the old man. "No! For your own sake, Kil, you mustn't believe that.
She's gone from you and from this world of yours, I tell you, as surely as if
she were dead."

"She's
not dead. She's living and I'll find her. Do you hear? I'll find her if I have
to take the world apart stick by stick and stone by stone. I'll find her if I
have to blow the universe apart and hunt for her among the pieces. Do you hear
me?
Do
you
hear
me?
DO YOU HEAR ME?"

And
suddenly, all restraint
vanished,
Kil was sitting up
in the bed and shouting with the full power of his voice. His cries clashed and
echoed in the empty room.

And the old man was gone.

Quickly,
Kil began to dress. When he was through, he walked to the door of the suite and
turned the apartment's sunbeams down and out even as they were waxing against
the falling night. He paused a moment, looking into the shadows.

"I love you, Ellen," he said
softly.

Then he went out.

It
was full evening by the time he stepped out on the street. The lights of the
area were on, throwing the sky into a deeper blackness above him. He took the
moving roadway toward the part of the area where he had first gone, back in
the beginning when he had come looking for the Ace King. And, as he went, he
opened a door in his mind that had been some time closed, and set the dusty
machinery that he found there, once more to work.

Kil
was a memnonics engineer. His particular field was the formulating of memory
systems for specialized jobs; but before he had qualified for this, he had gone
through all the necessary elementary and advanced courses in memory training
that were prerequisites to the six years study of discriminative techniques in
memnonics. The associative functions and the formulae of procedure were as much
a part of him as the muscle training that enabled him to walk surefootedly upon
the earth. Now he turned these mental tools to the task of ferreting out the
secrets of whatever had taken Ellen from him. Mali had said, that, buried
somewhere in the memories of the last five years, when Kil had been married to
Ellen,
were
clues that would lead him to her. Mali
could not find these clues, even under hypnotic search. But he, Kil, could find
them. If they were there, he could find them. Because it
wa
§
his mind; and no one could know it like himself. He could not only remember,
but having remembered, he could study the memory, discovering in it things he
had not noticed the first time, until it was squeezed dry of every elemental
drop of information within it.

There
had been a breeze from the mainland, from the hills of Kowloon, that day in
Hong Kong, when he had first seen Ellen. She had been standing on the balcony
of the Hotel Royal and
she
. . .

. .
. The sights and sounds and smells of memory rose like incense in the back of
Kil's mind. Silently, he
tiptoed
his conscious
attention out of the room of his past, leaving it to work its wonders in its
own way; and closed the door upon it.

He
looked up. The more recent memory of the bar front he had seen on* his first
trip to this Unstab district clicked sharply into identification with the bar
front coming at him, down the street. He waited until the roadway brought him
opposite, then stepped off on the departure rollers to the side, walked across
the short strip of unmoving cement, and pressed his Key into the door cup. It
opened; and he entered.

The
bar had not changed.
Nor the people inside it.
Individual
faces were different, but the collective face was the same. As Kil came in,
most of the drinkers glanced up; but this time, only momentarily. Dekko's
lessons had been effective upon Kil. The faces returned to their glasses and
the pause in the conversation was buried and forgotten in a fresh wave of
murmuring voices.

There
was a new bartender behind the bar. Kil walked up to him. Neatly, out of one
compartment in his ordered memory vault, Kil selected slang terms necessary to
the occasion.

"Yeah, Chief?" said the bartender
as he came up. "What?"

He
was a man of average height with slightly lumpy features. Almost insolently at
ease, he leaned on the bar.

"Dosker
me someone," said Kil. He reached in his pocket for a roll of dollars,
tore off five of them and slid them across the bar. "The name is Dekko."

The
bartender rolled the strip of soft metal tabs up into a tight cylinder and
stuck it in his tunic pocket.

"Just Dekko?" he
said. "No nut to that bolt?"

"Dekko," said
Kil.

The
bartender moved a little down the bar and fiddled with something underneath.
"Not on," he said, after a moment. "Any other towns you want to
dosker? Give you five for twenty."

"No," Kil shook his head.
"He'll be showing.
How much for a local look?"
"How long a look?"
"For
the next week—seven days."

"Fifty for the spotter, twenty-five for the contact, and
twenty-five for me.
And the Ace'll take twenty per cent.
One-duece-and-big-O."

Kil took out a roll of twenties and tore off
a hundred and twenty dollars worth. The bartender gathered them in.

"Who's Ace now?" Kil asked.

"Garby
..
Been on three days."

Kil
felt a small relief. He had been bracing himself against contact with the Ace
he had run from before, even though Dekko had told him that such men very
seldom stayed in one area even the full length of the time allowed them by
their classification. He turned as the bartender leaned down behind the bar
and in a low voice put out the call for Dekko that Kil had just paid for. Kil
felt satisfaction. Inside of a few minutes all the public places in the Unstab
area would be notified that there was a reward for spotting the little man and
notifying Kil of his whereabouts.

He turned back to the bar
again.

"Coffee," he said to the bartender.
The lumpy features showed amazement. "You mean a stim?"

"Just
coffee," repeated Kil. The bartender stared for a second, but then turned
and dialed his selector. After a second, there was delivery beneath the bar
and he lifted a cup and thermopot up in front of Kil.

Kil
paid and, taking the two items, walked back to a table in one of the dark
little recesses along the further wall. He sat down.

He poured his coffee black, ignoring the
cream and sugar bulges on the container's side. Sipping at the dark, hot
liquid, he set himself to think.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

"Well
, do us, riggers!
Looks
like we hit the doby prize!"

Kil
came back to himself with a start and looked up. Three men had just come in the
door of the bar and were staring at him. Two of them were Unstabs he had never
seen before, but the third was the tall, blond, drunken boy who had yelled
"Big SI" at Kil the time before in this bar.

Only now the boy was sober.