Stalking the Nightmare (31 page)

Rondell sat up straight. The casino was empty; the staff and all the Professor’s bully-boys had gone. The robot-sealers had examined the place, and it was empty.

“Let’s go,” Rondell said, motioning with the disruptor.

The Professor slid the chair back on its tracks, and got up heavily.

The air stank with death.

The casino never closed, and to facilitate the handling of pleasure-bent patrons, everyone possessed a shift-card, designating what times they might play. Had the cards
not
been issued, the casinos would have been permanently swamped; they were anything but mere gambling halls. The players bet against their opposite numbers, who were androids. If they won, the android was killed by them, in any one of a hundred different, clever ways …

artificial blood spurted, shrieks were emitted. Androids looked real, and really died. But fair is fair: human losers really died, also.

Unfortunately (though they didn’t know it), humans only had a three-to-one chance of winning. The games were stacked. Behind every casino was the government agency that supervised the action … and rigged the odds. It was a painless way of decreasing the staggering population. Let them
play
themselves to death, for with the age-retardant drugs, few people died of anything but violent death.

So give them their taste … let them kill or be killed … and they would die gladly. Well, perhaps not
gladly;
but, then, no one likes a poor loser.

The casino was dead silent. The Professor walked ahead of the creature he had created, and the cold fear had solidified; his chest was filled with Arctic ice. If he had thought, at first, that there would be any escape, all hope was now lost. He had not expected this. Everything had gone wrong. He had built too well.

The sound of their footfalls was stark and loud in the empty casino. With the crowds gone, with the hypnolights and adverts shut off, it was a dead, hungry, waiting place. The Professor shivered; he had never seen it like this. The place never closed, it was always full.

It was closed, it was empty.

He was going to die.

Over thirty years; the plan; wasted.

Warning lights high up the filigreed walls cast light silver shadows along the floor. Signs of occupancy from a few minutes before still remained: crushed joy-sticks littered the floor (and as they walked, the scurryers slipped from their wallnests, began sucking up the debris), stacks of chips made crazy pillars on the tables, bits of simulated cartilage from the gaming-androids remained plastered to the betting-boards. Even as they walked into the center of the gaming-room, the last trickle of fake blood swirled down the flensing troughs with a final gurgle.

The casino was hung about with multi-colored drapes that changed color constantly under the silver warning lights. The furnishings were rich and padded.
Just like the customers,
thought Rondell wryly. He spat on the floor, and a scurryer swept up, sucked it spotless in an instant. He kicked at it viciously, then swung on the fat man, “No move. I’ll forego my fun and take you out right here.”

They paused in front of the deadly bingo game.

The Professor drew back, and Rondell grasped him tightly by his flabby biceps. “Eh?” Rondell suggested nastily, cocking a thumb at the table. “What do you say to a game of bingo, Professor? What do you say to that?”

The Professor said nothing, and Rondell nudged him sharply with the disruptor. “Sit”

The Professor stepped up to the table. It was a huge circular cannister affair, six and a half meters high. The sides were sealed, and a small stairway led up to the seats and the tabletop proper. The game was arranged so that if the android opponent—operated by robot-brain—won the bingo card, the chair dropped away beneath the human, sending him into the lower five meters of the cannister.

Filled with piranha fish.

Rondell walked the fat man up the steps, and strapped him into a chair without ceremony. “I think I’ll even give you a fighting chance, fat man,” Rondell said, as he found the control box for the game.

He smashed it open with the heavy handle of a vibroblade taken from his boot-top, and fingered several dials. The game board lit up, and the selection panels came on. But the robot-brain remained inactive.

Rondell switched on the selection that called the numbers from random sequences. He took a seat. He did not strap in.
“I’m
going to play you, instead of an android, Professor. That way you’ll have a real incentive to win.” Then he switched on the robot-brain.

The Professor put up a shaking hand. “No. You must not! I— I …” He subsided into silence, and nodded. The game Began!

Rondell punched out a code on the selector before him. A “card” of numbers appeared in the plate beneath his hand. He sat back and watched the Professor as the fat man did the same. The Professor seemed to want to say something, but he pursed his lips and was silent.

The robot-brain clicked its patterns, and ran the codes through, and then the speaker in the center of the game table spoke sharply, harshly:

“1-16.”

Rondell looked down. Nothing. That was not on his card. He glanced across at the Professor. The fat man had also come up empty.

The robot-brain ran through its patterns again, clicked and spoke, “0-33.”

Again, nothing. Rondell looked up. The Professor had one. Upper right hand corner. That was a start, and for the first time, Rondell suspected he might lose. But it didn’t matter. If the Professor got too close, he would use the disruptor.

“B-7.”

Nothing lit on Rcndell’s board, nothing lit on the Professor’s board-mirror. The fat man leaned forward against the playing edge, and his fingers twined madly. He strained against the plasteel bonds that held him in the game. In the center of the tabletop was a clear frame of plastic, and through it, by a clever series of lights, could be seen the deadly fish swimming below.

“0-40.”

Rondell now had a glowing square in the center of the end-row on his card.

Rondell went for broke. He pressed a stud for lowered odds. If his number came up, he was in good shape … if it didn’t, he was one score down. Down toward the tiny teeth. But since he couldn’t lose, because he would cheat, it didn’t matter what chances he took.

He rang the odds down to 3-to-l which was as good as a human could ring in the entire casino. The brain clicked its patterns, chuckled to itself, said, “0-12.” It was a hit. That made two out of five in a vertical stripe down the right hand side.

“Rondell! Listen to me! It’s not—not just my
dy
ing I’m trying to prevent. You’ve got to hear me out!”

“0-29.” Nothing.

“You want to know why I did it to you. You
must
want to know. I can tell you, only stop this game
now!”

“1-58.”

“Keep talking, Professor,” Rondell said softly, trying to play the card and listen to the fat man at the same time. He wanted to know, all right. But the smell of death was invigorating.

“The answer, Rondell! Let me go, and I’ll tell you where you can get the answer! There’s reason to it, boy. Believe me, there’s reason to it.”

“1-26.” The Professor now had three laterals lit. One had rung while Rondell had been distracted thinking, but the third one didn’t matter. It was out of the pattern.

“You’ve
got to get off the game, Rondell! Listen to—”

“G-38.”

“—listen to me. Do it now.”

Their boards were lit with many squares, and now Rondell’s mind was a tangled mass. He could not figure it all out. All the weight of the universe pressed down on him. Tied in with his overwhelming hatred for the fat man, and his desire for revenge. He had come half across the world to get the fat man. He had been double-crossed again; how the fat man had known he was in town, how he’d known he was in that hotel, why he’d tipped off the cops, was something Rondell didn’t understand. But the Professor
had
turned the police loose, and they
had
made him run again. Now he wanted to stop running. Now he wanted to find out why he had been persecuted so studiedly. What his past was, and why it tied in with this fat man, and what his future held.

He slipped out of the chair.

It was two short steps to the brain-box, but before he got there, a final click and ding! sounded from above, and the chair where he had been seated dropped away.

He shivered at the sound of water splashing from below, and turned off the game. The Professor had been one square short of losing, himself, but… he had filled a line completely, and Rondell would have gone into the tank.

Bingo!

He went back up and held the disruptor near the fat man’s nose. “Tell me.”

“Go to the Slum. Find a woman named Elenessa on Broad Street. Number 6627A.”

“If this is a trick, Professor, if this is something to get me captured, if this is a stall for time … I’ll get back here. I’ll get back, you know that. I did it once, I can do it again.”

Then he was gone.

The Professor was still tied to the seat, but his face had settled back into a shrewd, relieved smile. He had stalled it just long enough. Let Rondell run some more … just as he had forced him to run for twenty-eight years.

The running would soon come to an end.

“Now, boss?” It was the voice of a casino worker, from behind the draperies.

The Professor called out, “Yes. Get me off here.”

The worker came out; a thin-faced little man with a bobcut hairdo. “I got the signal on the clear-out sequence. I knew you wanted someone to wait behind and keep watch. I had
this
on him all the time.” He held up an ancient projectile weapon. “Could’a plugged him any time. But I figured you knew I was watching.”

“No, I didn’t know you were watching.”

“Jeez, I could’a swore you knew I was watching.”

The Professor looked at him. He said, softly, “I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, I guess you didn’t. You sure looked scared as hell, Perfesser. You was really sweatin’. But, see, I
thought
you must of known I was watching. That’s why I din’t punch him all that time.”

“Clever of you.”

“But, Jeez, if you
din’t
know, then, Jeez, you could of been really tore up by them piranhas, huh?”

“Yes. I could, huh.”

“You want I should get the cops on him, Perfesser?”

The Professor’s voice was low and nasty. “No, I don’t want you to do anything. Just go home. And forget what happened tonight if you want to keep your shift-card.”

The thin-faced little man hobbled his head anxiously. “Yessir, Perfesser, yessir indeed. Whatever you say.”

He walked away quickly, and as the drapes parted to swallow him, the fat man heard him say, “But, Jeez, you sure was sweatin’.”

The Professor went back into the office and passed his fingertips over a section of wall. His prints were instantly recognized, and a section slid up, revealing a private vid. He studded out a number, left the vision off, and said succinctly:

“It will have to be tonight. Three
a.m.
Have Dirt get to them. At her place, in thirty minutes.”

A short sharp word acknowledged the message.

“Thirty years and more, and almost done,” the Professor said to no one at all, clicking off the vid. The wall slid back down, and he fell into his seat. It rocked beneath him, and held him as he sat in misery and loneliness. His fat a bulwark against the chill that crept in softly.

In an age where wealth and opulence were commonplaces, the people had maintained the Slum for kicks. It was fake and japery from one end to the other. It made people feel good to think there were still areas of mystery and intrigue, places where people poorer than themselves lived. The governmental system that always kept the Slum fully inhabited was too involved for any one man to understand, but Rondell knew one family out of every four got the “call” to go to the Slum for a one year term on a demographic rotational basis. Heavy casino losers also were domiciled in the Slum. Phony dives and trumped-up excitement.

Rondell stalked through this sideshow Slum.

He found 6627A Broad Street without difficulty. It was a walk-up next to a place laughingly called The Hang-Dog House. He went up quickly, having found the name he sought on a plate downstairs. The door to the apartment was no trouble … an old-style slide-bolt he cut with the vibroblade.

Moonlight streamed down through a high window, and he could see the squalor typical of these artificial dumps. In the bed, a woman with dark-black-almost-blue-black hair slept, lying on her arm.

He crept toward the bed and hardly realized for a moment after the needle-nose was aimed at his head, that the disruptor was in her hand.

“Who are you?” she said softly. “Who sent you? What are you doing here?”

Her face was half-shadowed by the moonlight’s angle, but even in the partial light he could see she was hard-featured. Not particularly good-looking at all…in fact rather eagle-nosed and high-browed, but her naked body gleamed in the dusk of the flat She had deep lines in her face, much like his own; and he could see a familiar narrowing of her eyes.