Stalking the Nightmare (30 page)

He slid back in the seat, mute appeal on his oily face.

Rondell sat watching, not knowing
why
he was watching, nor why he had bothered to come here to even the score. It was hopeless; his whole life was hopeless. He had always been forced to come to the Professor when he hit snags too difficult to maneuver on his own—though those had been few and far between—but this time he knew the Professor had tipped off the cops. Why?

A slow, frightening smile slid over the thief’s face. “Tell your boys to close up shop for the day.”

“But I just opened. The first shift isn’t even here an hour.”

“I said close. Now, close.”

The Professor’s eyes bulged. “C-close up the Casino. But I’ll— I’ll lose a fortune.”

“You’ll lose your life if you don’t.”

There was no arguing with that frightful smile, that hand on the disruptor. The Professor started to rise from behind his desk, paused as Rondell pointed at him.

“Use the emergency clear-out button. No personal contact.”

The Professor smiled thinly. “You remember that.”

“I remember a lot of things. I should. You brought me up in this sinkhole.”

The Professor sank down again heavily. He hesitated a moment longer, nervously pulling at his pendulous lower lip. Rondell added, softly, “Go ahead,
Dad,
we don’t want to waste all the credits spent on that elaborate rig, do we?”

The Professor ran a hand through the air above a light-brown block set into the desktop, and a square section slid up, with a button set in one side. He pressed the button. The thief watched with narrowed eyes. The fat man kept his finger on the button a moment longer, finally sagged in complete defeat. His hands went back to the finger-twining movements. “It’s done.”

Rondell’s skin itched. After twenty-eight years of calculated corruption on the part of the Professor … the score was going to be evened.

“Like to lay odds on how fast you’ll die?”

The Professor did not answer.

“How long will it take? To clear out?”

The Professor was breathing hard. Rondell was afraid natural causes would cheat him of his revenge. “It took less than fifteen minutes, a fire scare three weeks ago.”

The fat man was hunched forward, his belly indented by the curve of the desk; his eyes never left the thief’s hands. Not the face … the hands. Rondell sat back, idly toying with the disruptor; each twirl and stroke caused the fat man to tremble, and a strange flame to dance higher in the younger man’s eyes.

“Why don’t you just kill me and have done?”

“You mean here? Now?”

“It’s soundproofed! You know that! Why are you tormenting me?”

Rondell stopped his idle movements, leaned forward and fixed the huge man with an uncompromising glare. “Because you found me in an orphanage when I was too young to do anything about it, and turned me into the most worthless thing on Earth. So I’m going to get full measure, Professor. Full fathom five to pay me back for twenty-eight years. Nineteen years of your careful training. Three years of stealing jewelry 1 could get from the cornucopia with less trouble. One year in preparation for the Change Chamber, before I escaped, and five years hiding in Sumatra.

“It’s hot there, Professor.
Very
hot there.”

“They should have the main play-rooms cleared by now,” the fat man said, incongruously.

His perspiring fingers clung madly to one another, twining.

“Remorse doesn’t look so good on you, Professor,” Rondell said. “It looks belated. Twenty-eight years belated.” He was making idle conversation till the casino was emptied of its first shift patrons, but there was more, there was an urgency in his voice. As though he had to know the answers before it was too late.

“Why did you do it, Professor? Why pick
me
off an orphanage floor and louse up my life? What’s the motive?”

The Professor remained silent.

A mute pleading wallowed in his eyes.

Rondell lapsed into silence; he turned the answers he had found himself—unsatisfactory answers, wrong answers—over and over in Ms mind. Like a ribbon of flickfiim the incidents of his childhood fled before his mind.

His memory before the orphanage—not the cr6che, so he obviously had had a mother and father—was a blank. He had no recollection of mother, father, home, or early days. He knew there was
something
back before the age of three, but whatever shadowy images remained had been worn smooth by the endless numbing routine of the orphanage.

Then the Professor had come, had seemed to know just whom he was seeking. Then the years with the Professor. There had never been another name. Neither first nor last—merely the Professor. The Professor, omnipresent, omniscient.

Rondell remembered the day of Ms twelfth birthday. He had learned many strange dungs from the fat man: the use of a length of black silkene cord, disruptor firing with great accuracy, boxing, the rigors of seven different Oriental martial arts, deep-breathing body-control and exercises that made him tough as plasteel. Many things that did not seem to make sense to the twelve-year-old Rondell. But on that day, something began to take form.

On that day, when Rondell had been a tall boy—even for that age—when the Professor had looked at him across dwarf-grapefruit and a flowering napkin under the fat man’s chin, the thing had begun in earnest.

“Good breakfast, boy?”

“Um,” Rondell managed to mumble around a chunk of grapefruit.

“Do you want to make me happy, Rondell? Would you like to do me a favor?” He posed the questions lightly, almost airily, and the boy smiled, the grin denting dimples in his cheeks.

The fat man pulled the napkin from under his chin, settled back in his chair which slid a few inches away from the breakfast table on its rods to allow for the extra bulk, and began twining his fingers.

He wheezed a long breath of contemplation, gazed at the far upper corner of the gigantic dining room (a room that said
wealth,
then said it again, never quite subsiding into silence, but offering and re-offering the evidence of it), and cleared his throat.

He clearly enunciated: “Do you know the lady we visited last night?” He spoke with an elaborate simplicity. His tones and manner were directed with exaggerated evenness, even for a child of twelve. He spoke as though it were the most important thing he had ever said; he wanted the boy to miss no part of it.

“Yes, I remember,” Rondell said, without fully waiting to think whether he remembered or not.

The Professor was careful. “No, I mean do you
really
remember? Do you remember the beautiful red jewel she wore on her forehead?”

The boy considered for a moment, then nodded quickly. He recalled the flash of the jewel as it had glowed like a third eye in the center of his hostess’ forehead.

“Well, Rondell, that was the Lady Cindy of Upper Pittsburg, and I want you to get me that jewel.”

It had been let out at last. Now Rondell began to realize why he had been taught such things as walking catlike on the balls of the feet, how to dress to blend with his surroundings, how to scale a glass-smooth wall, how to use a vibroblade and a disruptor. The Professor was a clever man, and this had been a clever plan. Step by step, taking time and caution, it had come to this, and the boy was ready.

When she returned from the orgy at Prinzmetal’s, with a used and exhausted body and a head filled with thoughts only of endless sleep, the Lady Cindy of Upper Pittsburg was shocked to find a hooded, completely black-garbed man of indeterminate age curled up comfortably on the balcony outside her casement. Idly running his skin-gloved fingers down the barrel of a disruptor. Her amazement was doubled as he commanded in a youthful, shaking voice, “Open your wall vault. The lock is located in the upper right knob of your bedpost. I want your ruby.”

Her eyes widened, and then she realized it
must
be a joke. No one stole these days. Not for a long time had anyone
stolen
anything. Not with the government cornucopias so available. Why, that was where
she
had gotten the ruby originally.

She shrugged out of her radium-dyed heliotrope mink stole, letting it fall to the deep pile rug, and answered, “I have
no
idea how you
got
there, my good lad, but I suggest you
leave
at once!” Her accent was a queer half-snort, half-haughty command, the product of unauthorized interbreeding.

Then her eyes drew down, and her lashes fluttered. “On the other hand… if you want to stop this foolishness about my ruby, you can come in, and we can have a drink and …”

Her eyes wandered to the deep foam-pile bed.

That was the first time Rondell glimpsed the utter decay of his world … without fully realizing what it meant. Her body was encased in a tight silkene sheath that more set off her physical attributes than hid them. She strained against the sheath, and a fire of excitement and challenge burned in her heliotrope eyes—dyed to match her mink.

Rondell had been too young, but even so … something had made him uneasy inside. “I’m not fooling …” His voice was slightly unsure, unsteady; his first job. “… I want that ruby.
Now!”
The Lady Cindy of Upper Pittsburg had a sudden realization: this—it had to
be—boy
was not here for her erotic pleasure at all.

Nothing of the sort. It was not a joke. Her eyes widened incredulously.

“Well!
I—I—am I to take it that this is a—a—” she struggled with a nearly-forgotten word, “—a
robbery?”

The boy nodded his head, and through the eye-slits she could see a confused desperation in his eyes.

“But—but
why?
You can get one just as good—though I confess, not
better—
from the cornucopia. You
have
a Key, haven’t you? There’s no need for you to take it from me. I get such pleasure from it. Why?” She was now flinging her arms about in exaggerated bewilderment, her voice rising.

The thief seemed unnerved by her reactions. “Stop that! Stop screaming!” But she did
not,
and he leaped agilely through the window, brandishing the disruptor.

“The vault. The vault. Get the ruby for me or I’ll kill you.” There was a hardness in his youthful voice that told her she was faced by a boy not quite a boy, but much more.

She turned, and looking over her shoulder at the thief, walked slowly to the bed. Reluctantly she twisted the ornate ball atop one bedpost. The ball split in the center, revealing a voice-control sphere. She spoke into it softly, and watched with creases lining her forehead as a portion of the wall slid up to reveal an elaborate set of bureau drawers.

It was not hiding the jewels from the world, protecting them, but merely an evidence of possession, a feeling of
I know where they are, but no one else does.
Old habits die hard.

Now the boy stepped forward nimbly, began to open the jewel drawers. Abruptly, the Lady Cindy decided something she had been pondering for several minutes.

She was
not
going to be robbed by this uncertain child.

She moved back to the voice-control sphere, quietly.

Before she could whisper the words that would lower the plasteel wall, sealing the thief into the airtight vault, Rondell turned and saw her. “Stop!”

The Lady Cindy’s words were half out of her mouth when the boy pressed the disruptor stud. His face, under the hood, went sick and white as he saw the result. The Lady Cindy soundlessly exploded into a million fragments…

The boy ripped the mask from his face, and leaned against the bedpost. He became violently ill, vomiting agonizingly at what he had done. The Professor had never been graphically explicit about what a disruptor would do. Block-targets were not blonde, statuesque women. The Professor had merely said it would stop opposition. It certainly did.

When the sickness passed, keeping his eyes from what ran on the walls, he found the ruby, slid it into his seal-pouch, and left by the window as he had come.

The Professor received the ruby with gratitude.

“Excellent, my boy. Excellent. What’s that? Dead? Oh, well, I’m sure these things happen. Now, for your
next
assignment…”

The years of running, the years of programmed destiny had begun.

Rondell’s memories collapsed inward violently. He was in the present, and the Lady Cindy of Upper Pittsburg was many years dead. He was sitting in the Professor’s office in the casino where he had spent nineteen years of his life. He was holding a disruptor on the man who had first taught him to kill. The ruby, too, was long-since gone. Poured down some invisible drain, no benefit gained from the theft, nothing bettered by killing an innocent woman. Nothing derived from it all, but that Rondell had taken the first step in a life comprised of senseless theft, hiding, running.

A gong sounded in the desk.