The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (28 page)

Screaming at one another noiselessly in the din, the three companions pulled at the lab door, their only refuge. It budged open only an inch or two, just enough for Cal to glimpse the two robots pulling it shut. The screen of one displayed a picture of the amused features of Karl; the other showed his twin. Their metal muscles moved, and the door closed against all the efforts of the three humans.

Daisy whirled on Brian and mouthed the words, ‘Well, get ready for another helping of poetic justice.’

The three backed up against the end wall of the corridor, watching Old Number 666 roll towards them.

A
DDISON

At times it seemed to Suggs as if the man across the Monopoly board from him were not Vetch, but someone else. The little Russian’s bearded features would gradually blend themselves into those of someone long forgotten, some agent Suggs had killed, or wanted to kill … but now it was himself Suggs wanted to kill, and the enemy agent who prevented him from doing it.

Suggs had been thinking all day of secret suicide, of killing himself in some way right in front of Vetch by opening a vein inside his suit, or—but it was no use, the Russian caught on too fast. Neither man dared sleep, for fear the other would annihilate himself. Vetch hadn’t blinked for hours.

Sleeplessness was affecting Sugg’s own mind, he knew, and weightlessness irritated his body. He chafed himself against the straps, or pressed hard against the soft cushion, almost as if to prove his own existence. He felt no more substantial than a spectre.

Haroun Al Raschid took his seat across from him and began talking at once, moving his fat bejewelled hands expressively but making no sound. They were taking a ride on the Reading, Suggs supposed, or the Orient express.

‘I’m disoriented,’ he explained to Haroun. But the fat man went on talking, talking, unaware that his words made no noise, unaware, too, of the purple stain spreading across the front of his pale silk shirt.

Vetch had landed on
Chance
. Had that been the last turn? Suggs found he couldn’t remember; he couldn’t even remember how many days had gone by since … since what?

Vetch’s face kept changing to that of Scotty, his broken features spattered with blood and bits of bone.

‘You really faked me out with that typewriter shotgun, old buddy,’ he murmured. ‘It was a good trick, Suggsy.’

If he talked to Vetch, he thought, maybe Scotty would go away.

‘Have I told you how I killed my first partner in Marrakech?’

‘No, I don’t believe so. Tell me.’

‘It was pretty funny. I had this portable typewriter rigged up so the carriage was also a sort of hollow tube that could shoot a shotgun shell. It fired by pressing the question mark.’

Scotty spoke, forming sticky bubbles of blood. ‘The question is, why?’

‘He double-crossed me,’ Suggs said shrilly. ‘I knew it was him got the other half of that photo of Brioche from Haroun. They were trying to swindle me and sell out to the—to you guys.’

‘Not to us,’ said Vetch. ‘I thought you knew there never was another half to that photo. Brioche’s vanity, you see. He never let anyone have a photo of what he called his “bad side”. I thought you knew that.’

‘You did know it, Suggsy, but you don’t want to remember,’ Scotty chuckled. ‘That’s the funny part of it. You really just wanted an excuse to kill a couple of people, didn’t you?’

‘My partner,’ said Suggs, affecting not to hear him, ‘would like to weasel out of his death even yet. But I won’t let him get away with it. I’m glad I killed him, and if he were alive today, I’d kill him again. I think it must have been him who put her up to it.’

‘Put who up to what?’ asked Vetch.

‘Put my wife up to divorcing me.’

Laughing, Scotty faded imperceptibly into scowling Vetch. Suggs developed an uncontrollable tremor in his left leg. He thought of his trenchcoat back in Marrakech, and cursed himself for leaving it there. There was cyanide sewn into one epaulet.

Through the tinted faceplate of his helmet, Vetch’s savage gaze bored into Suggs’s eyes. Vetch did not appear to hear the knock at the door.

The door opened and Barthemo Beele, eyeshade in hand, came in. He had to crouch for the low ceiling, as he moved right over to the chair where Vetch was sitting and sat down
in
him. Grinning self-consciously, he began to crush the brim of the eyeshade.

‘I never killed you, at least.’ Suggs snarled.

‘You would have, if you had stayed around long enough, chief,’ said the earnest young man. He dropped a press card, and it fluttered to the floor.

‘That was a mistake, Beele,’ said Suggs with a nasty laugh. ‘You forgot there is no gravity here. Things don’t fall.’

‘
I
forgot? If it comes to that, it was
your
mistake,’ Beele said politely. ‘Am I a figment of your sleepless imagination or not?’

‘I could find out.’ Suggs reached for his gun, then relaxed and laughed again. ‘No, you’d like that wouldn’t you? I’d be killing Vetch, which is just what you, my unconscious mind, want me to do.’

‘Guess again,’ said Beele, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Vetch has been dead for hours, and you know it.’

His smile faded to Vetch’s scowl, and the press card in his ringers became an orange
Chance
card. The Russian’s face was blue, and there were poison blisters on the lips.

‘I’ll be damned !’ Suggs slapped his knee. ‘Vetch, you did it, and right in front of me !’

The corpse looked contempt at him. ‘The question is, what are you going to do?’ it said. ‘You poor son of a bitch.’

‘I’m gonna radio the news of your death back, and then I’m gonna … I’m not sure.’

He encoded his message and sent it: ‘
IVAN DEAD, FOLLOWING ARE PERFORMANCE TAPES ON EQPT
.’

There was no need to wait for a reply. He knew what it would order him to do. Go
to hell. Go directly to hell. Do not pass God
. He closed up his suit, hooked in a fresh tank of oxygen, and climbed out of the ship. After straddling it for a moment indecisively, he pushed himself free. At this distance the moon was brighter, but it looked as boringly hieroglyphic to him as ever. He drifted off to sleep, wondering if he were falling away or towards the moon.

He awoke trying to remember if he had finished balancing his bank statement. He did so now, visualizing the neat, meaningful rows of expenditures like a lattice …

He realized he was looking at a tower, very like the Eiffel Tower, sliding by him slowly. Amazingly real it was. On the top platform he could even make out the tiny, frosty figure of a man, gripping the rail with both hands. For no apparent reason, the man was wearing an eyeshade. Suggs went to sleep.

He awoke trying to remember whether he had finished balancing his bank statement or not. He did so now, wisely deciding not to postpone it. His oxygen was giving out, he supposed; thinking was becoming difficult.

He unsheathed his knife and held it at arm’s length. It was

a moment to make a fine, self-sacrificing speech, but his oxygen-starved mind was slowing. There was only one speech Suggs could remember:

‘Take that, you dirty—!’

The postcards were so banal they just
had
to be code—yet the plain fact was that they weren’t. After tearing off the stamps for his nephew’s collection, the Russian code clerk consigned Bubby to the incinerator.

Cal felt a handle on the wall behind him. He twisted it, and a firedoor rolled back smoothly, revealing a new section of hallway. The three companions scrambled into it, the locomotive following at a more dignified pace.

The first door they tried was open. As they ducked into it, Daisy and Cal grinned at one another with relief. Brian’s brow remained puckered, however, as he stared at the oncoming engine’s wheels and feet.

The wheels were reversing to throw grindstone sparks. Behind the engine, a seemingly endless line of cars creaked and groaned to a halt. Out of the hissing vapour an engineer in goggles descended, pulled off one oily gauntlet, and handed down an attractive young woman.

‘Whew !’ The engineer whistled. ‘You people were nearly demised on the spot. That could have been a most unfortuitous vicissitude.’

‘Dr. Trivian !’ Cal shouted, peering at the sand-caked, goggled face. ‘Is it really you?’

‘By gad, it is Calvin Potter !’ Trivian seized his hand. ‘This is indeed an audacious occasion, my boy.’

‘But what are you doing here? So far from MIT?’

‘I am realizing my lifelong dream of driving a steam loco-

motive. That is, the little grey box does the actual driving, but I am entitled to make suggestions—which are never heeded.

‘But I forget myself, or I forget my passenger, which is not the same thing at all, eh? Dr. Aurora Candlewood, may I present my former pupil, Calvin Potter?’

She was nearly Cal’s height, slim, with small hands and feet and the shallow breasts and slender, arching neck of a dancer. Yet there was a decided awkwardness about her movements, as if she deliberately chose to disguise her natural grace by holding her body always in stiff, unlovely positions. Her hand was cold.

Cal became depressingly aware of his own uncombed hair, muddy clothes and dirt-grained face. A sudden fiery itch stung his chin where a neophyte beard, tough and patchy, clung desperately as lichen to a crumbling rock. Mechanically he introduced Aurora and Trivian to his companions.

Brian was morose and silent as a watchmaker over Aurora’s hand.

‘Strangers call me Miss le Due,’ said Daisy to the engineer. ‘My friends call me Daisy. But to remain my friend is to resist the temptation to call me
you know what
.’

Aurora explained to them her interest in Project 32 and her purpose in coming to the Wompler Lab. She was relieved at finding in Cal someone who knew something about the functioning of the Reproductive System, from the individual cell level upwards.

Brian announced that he was going to ‘find out what time it is’, and left, by a door leading to a second corridor.

‘Yes,’ said Trivian. ‘We’ll leave you two scientificians to your palaver. Miss le Due, my arm?’ They set off after the gangster.

Aurora and Cal avoided looking at one another as she related to him her adventures with Smilax at NORAD, and told him that the mad dentist was in control of the Reproductive System.

‘Smilax in control. Hmm. Wonder how he does it.’

Cal defined his own experience with the System, at its inception, in Las Vegas, and on the road back. After mentioning its apparent transmission of acquired characteristics, its occasional abortive mutations, and its manifest kenogenetic tendencies, he added that he thought he loved her.

‘I see.’ She prepared to consider all aspects of the matter gravely. Had he any data on the System’s reproduction rate? On its learning limitations, if any? And was it not true that many who thought themselves in love were not?

He told her what he knew about QUIDMAC, and that he hoped to win her hand in marriage.

Aurora, blushing, discussed operant and respondant conditioning, and how the modification of one kind of behaviour might send ripples spreading throughout all of an organism’s behaviour, as in the learning of abstract reasoning.

She expressed her hope that the system might be coerced into ‘behaving itself’ by (1) establishing rapport; (2) becoming a kind but stern parent to it; (3) channelling the System’s functions to humanly useful ends; (4) establishing models of behaviour and a routine of rewards and punishments to guide the System. Of these, (1) would be the hardest.

‘If we only knew how Smilax controls the System,’ Cal said, ‘we could somehow impersonate him.’

‘Recognition is a difficult kind of behaviour to analyse,’ she explained. ‘Because it goes on, in most people, at the edge of consciousness. We recognize a friend seen in different light, at odd angles, at a distance, or with an added moustache.’

‘Or aged for fattened, yes. But the literal-minded System can’t possibly cope with all that. I’m inclined to think that Smilax uses some kind of badge or password identification—something unique.’

Aurora was not so sure. ‘It wouldn’t do to have some cue-object that anyone else might get hold of, or that might be lost. I tend to believe it’s something more positive, like fingerprints, ear configurations, retinal pattern.’

She added that she would consider his offer of marriage and that she would rather answer later.

Cal was about to point out that there might not
be
a later, when from far away, Daisy screamed.