The Media Candidate (31 page)

Elliott imagined the swift attack and lethal
injection. The sequence flashed through his mind—the monster
sinking its teeth into him, standing over him patiently until it
was sure of his death, reporting back to COPE on another successful
mission, going to a spider shop for repairs, then ready for another
mission. “Just a goddamned machine. Following orders, that’s all.
Some coward bureaucrat.” He watched the spider tug at a piece of
glass. “This is total bullshit!”

As the last word rolled off his lips, he looked
down and found himself on his feet. With no thought for his pain,
he ran, away from the creature that was now delivering its last
blow to the door. His running was a grotesque mixture of stumbling
and plunging, but he was moving. As he reached the steps rising
into the stands, he looked back. The spider had three legs and the
remnants of its fourth inside the lobby and was negotiating its
body through the hole. It was just a matter of seconds now.

Elliott limped up the stairway. He heard the
clatter of seven legs scurrying across the marble floor toward him.
It’ll fly up these stairs in three steps
, he thought.
Got
to get to the top
.

At the top of the steps was a wide aisle running
all the way around the swimming pool and about twenty feet above
it. At this end, there were no seats below the aisle, which was
over one end of the pool. A lone jogger in a black swimsuit and
earphones was running laps around the aisle as Elliott struggled to
the top of the steps. The jogger arrived at the stairway just as
Elliott reached that point. He was shocked to see anyone else
there, especially the indigent-looking Elliott.

At that moment, the spider surged up the
stairway. It took two steps on the stairs and leaped at Elliott
just as he reached the top and just as the jogger arrived. The
spider landed with all its might on the figure in its site and sank
its fang deep into his neck as they both propelled forward with the
force of the impact—a force so great that both spider and prey
smashed against the railing and flipped over it. The two were
locked together, man and robot, as they flew through the air and
landed in the pool below.

Elliott looked over the railing from where he’d
been knocked down by the jogger. Two bodies were interred below.
One, dressed for swimming, had the physique of a swimmer, but made
no attempt to move through the blue water. It bobbed in lane five,
its arms and legs moving in spastic motions until it ceased
altogether. The other body was clearly out of its element. It was a
land creature and was sinking slowly with its seven legs thrashing,
trying to reestablish its coordinate space in this new environment.
No one had ever taught it how to interpret an absence of landmark
data. By the time the spider reached the bottom, some bubbles had
started rising from it and bright blue flashes emanated from
several body and leg positions. The random leg motions continued as
flashes and bubbles escaped. It finally became as motionless at the
bottom of the pool as the other body was at the top.

Elliott sank back to the floor. Suddenly he
remembered why he’d left his house. “Got to get to her before one
of them does.”

Elliott arrived at the entrance gate of the Lab
in the back seat of a taxi, and the guard waved the car in when he
showed his ID. Once at the main science building, he paid the
driverless cab, and it sped away. He was glad to have met no one in
the hall, for his sorry appearance would have led to unwanted
attention. He collected the printed files on his way to his office
and plopped himself with a loud sigh on the sofa.

He was on excellent terms with this sofa. It had
been with him for nearly a quarter century, during which time he’d
napped on it when he’d chosen the comfort of his work over his old
family. It provided comfort all those years, and now he needed that
comfort more than ever. The day’s events had exhausted him so much
that everything seemed to dissolve into the background as he
sprawled there. This was his first chance to relax in several
hours. And those hours had been the most demanding of his life.

His thoughts began drifting aimlessly as in the
final stage before sleep. But he sat up with a start. “Guinda!”

A cold hand gripped his stomach with the fear
that it might be too late. He reached for his phone and caught
himself in mid dial. What would he say to her? What if another
spider had already gotten to her? Her only safety would be to join
him here at the Lab, but how could she do that if a spider was
waiting for the right time to strike?

I have to get her back here. We can study the
rest of those files … and plan what to do next
. He uneasily
completed her phone number. As it rang, he prepared himself for the
worst. He clenched the receiver and bit his lip.

“Hello,” came the response finally.

“Guinda! Thank God you’re okay! COPE knows
everything. We’re both in danger! Can you talk?”

“Yes.”

“I found some really wild stuff in those
Halvorsen files last night. I think there’s a plot going on to
substitute holographic images for the real candidates. I think the
networks are trying to control the candidates.”

“Yes?” came the less than enthusiastic response
from Guinda.

“Not only that, they tried to kill me this
morning. And I’m sure they know about you, too.”

“Are you okay now?” Guinda asked.

“Yeah, but I had some really close calls with
this spider thing. I guess I was pretty lucky. It died and I
didn’t.”

“Where are you?” Guinda asked automatically.

“At my office at the Lab. Security is pretty
good here, and I think I’m safe … at least for a while. But I don’t
think you are, Guin. In fact this call is probably being monitored.
I think you’re in very great danger.”

“I don’t think I am, Elliott. I’m okay. I don’t
think I have to worry.”

“You don’t understand, Guin. They know about you
and me, and they tried to kill me. You may be next.”

“Don’t worry about me, Elliott. I can assure you
that I’m all right. Just stay where you are, and I’ll come to you
in about an hour. We need to talk about what’s going on and figure
out what to do next. Just stay where you are, okay?”

Elliott paused for a long time and then
responded, “Okay.”

He stood motionless beside the telephone. The
words comforted him, but her voice boiled in him like an inferno.
The conversation didn’t make sense. She’d seemed almost drugged
when they first met at her office. He’d decided that her humanity
was probably just repressed by the inhuman environment. He could
taste the oppression of the setting himself and thought it must
have an even more devastating effect on Guinda, working there day
after day. But now at her home, she aired the same detachment.
What’s going on? I wonder if COPE is there
.

He imagined a spider or a spy car outside her
house. Maybe she was too frightened to have him come to her now.
Maybe a spider had gotten into to her house and was holding her
prisoner. Maybe it wasn’t even her he just talked to. They might’ve
killed her and installed a surrogate on her phone.
Could be
,
he thought.
COPE must have recordings of her voice and her
telephone manner at work, and a computer simulation would sound
like what I just heard
. Elliott replayed the conversation in
his mind and played it against his recall of their first meeting.
She called him Townsend then, but COPE would know they were on a
first name basis now and would expect her to call him Elliott.
“That’s it,” he muttered, “she never called me Ted this time. She
would have called me Ted … after what we … she would have called me
Ted. They got her. I know those bastards got her.”

Elliott pictured one of those terrible spiders
clutching her with its sinuous evil, pressing itself close to her
delicate breasts, not to embrace her, but to exterminate the life
in her young body. The vision of Guinda being strangled or poisoned
by one of those monsters poisoned his mind. He saw the creature
with its eight menacing legs breaking into her patio door from her
upstairs deck. “No,” he said outloud, “the skylight … she keeps
that skylight open in her bathroom. It would be easy for one of
those things to climb up her roof and drop through the skylight …
and kill her in her sleep. Those cowards are probably great at
that. They probably killed her like they killed Halvorsen. And like
they tried to kill me. How else can you explain that phone call?
That wasn’t her. Somebody tried to make it sound like her—someone
who didn’t know the real kindness in her voice.” His voice broke
off to a whisper and then died on his lips. “How else can you
explain it?”

He sank into a chair, staring at the phone. “It
wasn’t her, so it must have been them.” He rose on his uncertain
legs. “I have to find out, and if she’s dead …”

Guinda hung up the phone, turned to her visitor,
and said, “They tried to kill Townsend this morning. Did you have
anything to do with that?”

Her visitor stared unwaveringly at her.

“You at least knew about it, didn’t you?” Guinda
continued. “You just told me he’d be safe if he didn’t make
waves.”

Sherwood walked directly away from Guinda, his
face a chalky void. His movements were unwilling but precise. It
was as though there were demands being made on his body by
competing masters. He stood before the window staring in the
direction of a nearby clump of pampas grass with several wrens
riding the plumes like marionettes guided by invisible strings. But
he was conscious only of the ashen background swallowing the
scene.

A slinking cat approached the grass, forcing
Sherwood’s dormant sense of a world beyond his present mission to
spring to life. Following the cat’s eyes toward its prey reawakened
the voyeur and the predator within him. The wrens waved
complacently, unaware of the approaching menace. His eyes grew
intense, as did his need to share this moment. His hand probed a
jacket pocket where the pipe waited faithfully.

“May I smoke, Burns?” Sherwood asked
liturgically.

“I’d prefer you wouldn’t.”

Sherwood filled his pipe, his whole being now
riveted to the outdoor drama. Practiced teeth lovingly embraced the
loaded pipe. He rolled a gold-plated lighter in his right hand,
exposing a microscopic amount of the underlying brass with every
tumble. The cat stalked, its tail cocked beneath it like a
catapult. It finally sprang at the wrens, its claws defining a
killing arc, an arc it envisioned intersecting with the less lucky
of the wrens as they fled. But the cat shredded only lifeless
pampas stalks and landed beyond the grass with nothing but a shadow
of sedge clutching at its fur.

Sherwood flicked the lighter, presented it to
the pipe, and studied the glow of tobacco as smoke billowed around
his face, chastising the unworthy cat. He turned toward Guinda,
exhaling a sweet cloud that convolved into fractals. Guinda met his
gaze through the cloud just as another was born. She attempted to
play his waiting game in non-committed silence, but her skills were
not properly polished.

“What do you want?” she asked in defeat,
folding, then unfolding her arms.

Sherwood grinned faintly and sat down. A new
cloud began to evolve about him, through the suburbs of which he
watched Guinda. Her youth betrayed her as she read this message and
slowly seated herself across the room, still within range. The two
sat in silence for a while, Guinda studying the shrouded figure
before her, Sherwood seeming to study the clouds.

“Why did you come here this morning, Sherwood?”
Guinda punctuated the silence.

Sherwood crossed his legs and held his pipe in
front of him. He examined the bottom of the bowl, holding it at
various angles, rubbing it gently, fondling it, then bringing its
stem to his lips once more. His attention then strayed from the
pipe to a layer of smoke suspended motionless near one corner of
the room. No hint of thought or emotion crossed his face as he
studied this nothingness. Behind those eyes, the conscious mind was
dormant. But the instinct was responding, conjecturing, playing the
bishop against the pawn.

“Answer me, Sherwood!”

The outburst awakened his consciousness, but not
to the extinction of his instinct. Instinct always functioned at a
hundred percent, even though consciousness may have regained
control of motor and verbal skills. He had no control of his
instinct, although instinct always had priority over
consciousness.

“How long have you been with the Party,
Burns?”

She crossed her legs and fidgeted with her
hands. Her body didn’t give her an edge here as with the other men
in the Party. “Just over two years, but I’ve had—”

“I purchased this pipe from a very respected
tobacconist last week. With his endorsement and its obvious
qualities as being made of the finest briar, I had great
expectations that this would become my most treasured pipe. But
now, having shared a few reflective times together, I have
concluded that there must be some subtle flaw in the material, some
imperfection that would only manifest itself under the stress of
several glowing bowls. It might simply be a void or a crack in the
wood that prevents the uniform distribution of heat. On the other
hand, it could be so subtle as an excessively wet spring a hundred
years ago that produced a lower than usual density in one ring of
the tree whence the bowl was drawn. It is difficult to understand
how these imponderables can have such dramatic effects on the
performance of highly prized objects. Have you ever experienced
such a disappointment, Burns?”