Steel Beach (36 page)

She had to try four more times, in the end using an old spitball bat I found in my closet, before we got that sickening crunching sound that said we’d done the trick. I shouldn’t be too hard on her. Maybe I was acting erratic, there was probably an easier way and she deserved more explanations, but I wasn’t in the mood for them. She had a lot worse to come, and I didn’t have time.

It bled a lot, as you’d expect. I held my nose pressed in with a finger on the tip, and stuck my face in the autodoc. When it healed, a few minutes later, I had a wide, vaguely African nose with a major hook on the end and a bend toward the left.

Part of getting a story is preparation, part is improvisation, part perspiration and a little bit inspiration. There are small items I carry around constantly in my purse that I may use once in five years, but when I need them, I need them badly. A disguise is something I need every once in a while, never as badly as I did then, but I’d always been prepared for disguising myself on the spur of the moment. It’s harder now than it used to be. People are better at seeing through small changes since they’re used to having friends rework their faces to indulge a passing fad. Bushy eyebrows or a wig are no longer enough, if you want to be sure. You need to change the shape of the face.

I got a screwdriver and probed around in my upper jaw, between the cheek and gum, until I found the proper recessed socket. I pushed the tip of the blade through the skin and slotted it in the screw and started turning it. When the blade slipped Brenda peered into my mouth and helped me. As she turned the screwdriver, my cheekbone began to move.

It’s a cheap and simple device you can buy at any joke shop and have installed in half an hour. Bobbie had wanted to take it out. He’s offended at anything that might be used to mar his work. I’d left them in, and now I was glad as I watched my face being transformed in the mirror. When Brenda was done, my face was much wider and more gaunt, and my eyelids had a slight downward slant. With the new nose, Callie herself would not have know me. If I held my lower jaw so I had an overbite, I looked even stranger.

“Let me get that left one again,” Brenda said. “You’re lopsided.”

“Lopsided is good.” I tasted blood, but soon had that healed up. Looking at myself, I decided it was enough, and turned the nerve receptors in my face back on. There was a little soreness on the nose, but nothing major.

So I could have gotten some of the same effect by stuffing tissue paper into my cheeks, I guess. If that’s all I had, I’d have used it, but did you ever try talking with paper in your mouth? An actor is trained to do it; I’m not. Besides, you’re always aware it’s there; it’s distracting.

Brenda wanted to know what we were going to do, and I thought about what I could safely tell her. It wasn’t much, so I sat her down and she looked up at me wide-eyed.

“You got two choices,” I told her. “One, you can help me get ready for this caper, and then you can bow out, and no hard feelings. Or you can go along to the end. But I’ll tell you going in, you’re not going to know much. I think we’ll get one hell of a story out of it, but we could get into a lot of trouble.”

She thought it over.

“How much can you tell me?”

“Only what I think you need to know at the moment. You’ll just have to trust me on the rest.”

“Okay.”

“You idiot. Never trust anybody who says ‘trust me.’ Except just this once, of course.”

I went to the King City Plaza, one of the better hotels in the neighborhood of the Platz, and checked in to the Presidential Suite using Brenda’s
Nipple
letter of credit, freshly re-rated to A-Double-Plus. I’d told Walter I might need to buy an interplanetary liner before this job was over, but the fact was since he was paying for it, I just wanted to go first class, and I’d never stayed in the Presidential Suite. I registered us under the names Kathleen Turner and Rosalind Russell, two of the five people who’ve played the part of Hildegard/Hildebrandt Johnson on the silver screen. The fellow at the front desk must not have been a movie buff; he didn’t bat an eye.

The suite came furnished with a staff, including a boy and a girl in the spa, which was large enough for the staging of naval war games. In a better mood I might have asked the boy to stick around; he was a hunk. But I kicked them all out.

I stood in the middle of the room and said “My name is Hildy Johnson, and I declare this to be my legal residence.” Liz had advised that, for the benefit of the hidden mikes and cameras, just in case the tapes were ever brought forward as evidence in a court of law. A hotel guest has the same rights as a person in quarters she owns or rents, but it never hurt to be safe.

I made a few more phone calls, and spent the time waiting for some of them to be returned by going from room to room and stripping the sheets and blankets off the many beds. I chose a room with no windows looking out into the Mall, and went around draping sheets over all the mirrors in the room. There were a lot of them. The call I was waiting for came just as I finished. I listened to the instructions, and left the room.

In a park not far from the hotel I walked around for almost half an hour, which didn’t surprise me. I assumed I was being checked out. Finally I spotted the man I’d been told to look for, and sat on the other end of a park bench. We didn’t look at each other, or talk. He got up and walked away, leaving a sack on the bench between us. I waited a few more minutes, breathed deeply, and picked up the sack. No hand reached out to grab my shoulder. Maybe I didn’t have the nerves for this sort of work.

Back in the suite I didn’t have long to wait before Brenda knocked on the door, back from her shopping expedition. She’d done well. Everything I’d asked for was in the packages she carried. We got out the costumes of the Electricians Guild and put them on: blue coveralls with Guild patches and equipment belts. Names were stitched into the fabric over the left breast: I was Roz and she was Kathy. Next to the ceremonial wrenches, screwdrivers, and circuit testers dangling from the belt I clipped some of the items I’d just obtained in such a melodramatic fashion. They fit right in. We donned yellow plastic hardhats and picked up black metal lunchboxes and looked at each other in the mirror. We burst out laughing. Brenda seemed to be enjoying the game so far. It was an adventure.

Brenda looked ridiculous, as usual. You’d think a disguise on Brenda would work about as well as a wig on a flagpole. The fact is, she is not that abnormal for her generation. Who knows where this height thing is going to end? Another of many causes of the generation gap Callie had talked about was a simple matter of dimension: people of Brenda’s age group tended not to frequent the older parts of the city where so many of their elders lived…  because they kept hitting their heads on things. We built to a smaller scale in those days.

There were no human guards on the workers’ entrance to the Flack Grand Studio. I didn’t really expect to encounter any at all; according to the information I’d bought they only employed six of them. People tended to rely on machines for that sort of thing, and their trust can be misplaced, as I demonstrated to Brenda with one of the illegal gizmos. I waved it at the door, waited while red lights turned green, and the door sprung open. I’d been told that one of the three machines I had would deal with any security system I’d find in the Studio. I just hoped my trust wasn’t misplaced, in either the shady characters who sold this sort of stuff or the machines themselves. We do trust the little buggers, don’t we? I had no idea what the stinking thing was doing, but when it flashed a green light at me I trotted right in, like Pavlov’s dog Spotski.

Up three floors, down two corridors, seventh door on the left. And who should be standing there looking frustrated but…  Cricket.

“If you touch that doorknob,” I said, “Elvis will return and he won’t be handing out pink Cadillacs.” She jumped just a little. Damn, that girl was good. She was trying to pass herself off as some kind of Flack functionary, carrying a clipboard like an Amazon’s shield. The good old clipboard can be the magic key to many places if you know how to use it, and Cricket was born to the con. She looked at us haughtily through dark glasses.

“I beg your pardon,” she sniffed. “What are you two doing…  ” She had been flipping officiously through papers on her board, as if searching for our names, which we hadn’t given, when she realized it was Brenda way up there under that yellow hardhat. Nothing had prepared her for that, or for the dawning realization of who it was playing the Jeff to Brenda’s Mutt.

“Goddamn,” she breathed. “It’s you, isn’t it? Hildy?”

“In the flesh. I’m ashamed of you, Cricket. Balked by a mere door? You’ve apparently forgotten your Girl Scout motto.”

“All I remember is never let him in the back door on the first date.”

“Be prepared, love, be prepared.” And I waved one of my magic wands at the door. Naturally, one of the lights remained obstinately red. So I chose another one at random and the machine paid off like a crooked slot machine. We went through the door, and I suddenly realized what her dark glasses were for.

We were in an ordinary corridor with three doors leading off of it. Music was coming from behind one of the doors. According to the map I’d paid a lot of Walter’s money for, that was the one. This time I had to use all three machines, and the last one took its time, each red light going out only after a baffling read-out of digits on a numeric display. I guess it was doing something arcane with codes. But the door opened, and I didn’t hear any alarms. You wouldn’t, of course, but you keep your ears tuned anyway. We went through the door and found ourselves in a small room with the Grand Council of Flacks.

Or with their heads, anyway.

The heads were on a shelf a few meters from us, facing away toward a large screen which was playing
It Happened At The World’s Fair
. They were in their boxes—I don’t think they could be easily removed—so what we saw was seven television screens displaying the backs of heads. If they were aware of our presence they gave no sign of it. Though how they could have given any sign of it continues to elude me. Wires and tubes grew out of the bottom of the shelf, leading to small machines that hummed merrily to themselves.

Brenda was looking very nervous. She started to say something but I put a finger to my lips and put on my mask. She did the same, as Cricket watched us both. These were plastic Halloween type masks, modified with a voice scrambler, and I’d gotten them mostly to calm Brenda; I didn’t expect them to be any use if it came to the crunch, since security cameras in the hallways would surely have taken our pictures by now. But she was even less sophisticated in these things than I, and wouldn’t have realized that.

Cricket had had her hand in a coat pocket since we entered the first corridor. The hand started to come out, and I pointed over her shoulder and said “What the hell is that?” She looked, and I took one of the wrenches off my equipment belt and clanged it down on the crown of her head.

It doesn’t work like you see it on television. She went down hard, then lifted herself up onto her hands, shaking her head. A rope of saliva was hanging out of her mouth. I hit her again. Her head started to bleed, and she
still
didn’t clock out. The third time I really put some English on it, and sure enough Brenda grabbed my arm and spoiled my aim and the wrench hit her on the side of the head, doing more damage than if she’d left me alone, but it also did the job. Cricket fell down like a sack of wet cement and didn’t move.

“What the hell are you doing?” Brenda asked. The scrambler denatured her voice, made her sound like a creepoid from Planet X.

“Brenda, I said no
questions
.”

“I didn’t plan on this.”

“I didn’t, either, but if you crap out on me now I swear I’ll break both your arms and leave you right beside her.” She faced me down, breathing hard, and I began to wonder if I could handle her if it came to it. My record with angry females wasn’t sterling, even when I had the weight advantage. At last she slumped, and nodded, and I quickly dropped to one knee and rolled Cricket over and put my face close to hers. I felt her pulse, which seemed okay, peeled back an eyelid, checked the pupils. I didn’t know much more first aid than that, but I knew she was in no danger. Help would be here soon, though she wouldn’t welcome it. I picked up the goofball that had rolled out of her limp hand and put it in my own pocket. I showed Brenda a photo.

“Look through those cabinets back there, find one of these,” I told her.

“What are we—”

“No questions, dammit.”

I checked the fourth and most expensive electronic burglar tool I’d purchased, which had been functioning since we entered the Studio. All green lights. This one was busily confounding all the active and passive systems that might be calling for help for the seven dwarfs on the shelf. Don’t ask me how; all I know is if one man can think up a lock, another can figure out how to pick it. I’d paid heavily for the security information about the Studio, and so far I’d gotten my money’s worth. I went around the shelf and stood between the screen and the Council, saw seven of the infamous Talking Heads that had been a television feature from the very beginning. I chose the Grand Flack, and leaned close to his prim, disapproving features. His first reaction was to use his limited movement to try and see around me. More interested in the movie than in possible danger to himself. I guess if you live in a box you’d have to get fairly fatalistic about such things.

“I want you to tell me how to remove you from the shelf without doing any harm to you,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he sneered. “Someone will be here to arrest you in a few minutes.”

I hoped he was bluffing, had no way of knowing for sure.

“How many minutes can you live without these machines?” He thought it over, made a head movement I interpreted as a shrug.

“Detaching me is easy; simply lift the handle on top of the box. But I’ll die in a few minutes.” The thought didn’t seem to bother him.

“Unless I plug you into one of these.” I took the machine Brenda had located and held it up in front of him. He made a sour face.