The Missing Man (v4.1) (6 page)

“Once was enough,” Ahmed said.
“Paranoia, and war among the communes. What do those nuts think they are
doing with that tape?”

“Making money,” Judd Oslow sipped his
coffee, carefully staying calm. “They mailed one to each commune in the
city area, and only two have turned in the entire tape, or admitted receiving
it. Only one has turned in his address. The others must be keeping their
addresses, planning to ask attack, or defense, questions.”

“Armageddon,” said Ahmed.

Judd said, “George, why don’t you get off
your rump and bring in Carl Hodges? These nuts can’t sell his brains if we get
him back.”

Ahmed said, “You just gave George the: job
last night. He almost had him this morning, but we were reassigned when
Brooklyn Dome blew, and had to get off Carl Hodges’ trail to go to Jersey
Dome.”

“So there’s some of the day left. George
has spoiled me with success. I’m used to instant results. Come on, George. Carl
Hodges, right here in this office, packaged and delivered.”

George looked up at him, eyes round and puzzled.
“I’m supposed to help people. Every time I start trying to help Carl
Hodges something bad happens. It doesn’t come out right. Maybe he likes being
in trouble. Bodies all over the place! You don’t want me helping, with my
luck!”

“Snap out of it, George. This is no time
for pessimistic philosophy. Get together with Ahmed and hypnotize yourself and
tell me where Carl Hodges is.”

“What’s the use?” George ran his hands
over his head in a weary gesture that was not typical of him. “Brooklyn
Dome people are dead already. Jersey Dome people are mostly dead already.
Everybody that ever died is still dead. Billions of people since the beginning
of time. How are you going to rescue them? Why not let a few more die? What
difference does it make?”

“Let’s not have an essay on Eternity,
George. Nothing makes any difference to Eternity. We don’t live in Eternity, we
live in now. We want Carl Hodges now.”

“What’s the use? My advice just makes
trouble. I didn’t save those people in Jersey Dome. I wasn’t smart enough to
understand that they’d want to break their own air locks. No, it wasn’t the
panic, it was the depression. The air changed its charge. Lab animals act
irrational when you reverse the ground-to-air-static charge gradient. I should
have-“

Judd shouted, “George, I’m not interested
in your bad conscience. If you want to help people, just answer the
question.”

George winced at the loudness and squinted up at
him with his eyes seeming crossed. “George?”

“Wow!” Ahmed stepped forward.
“Wait a minute. George did it already. That was Carl answering you.”

Judd hesitated between confident forward and
back motions. He started and stopped a gesture. His confusion reached his
expression. He shouted, “Get out of here, you kooks. Go do your lunacy
somewhere else. When you bring back Carl Hodges, don’t tell me how you did
it.”

“Affirmative,” Ahmed said. “Come
on, Carl.”

In confusion and guilt George followed and found
himself on the open sidewalk, standing under a row of maple trees. The wind
blew and the trees shed a flutter of green winged seeds about him. He knew he
had failed his job somehow, and couldn’t figure out how to get back to it. He
walked to a bench and sat down.

“Do you understand what was just
happening?” Ahmed asked.

“Yes.” He felt in his mind and found
confusion. “No.”

“Shut your eyes. You seem to be on a bench
in a park. It is an illusion. This is not where you are. Where are you
really?”

George had shut his eyes. The voice went in
deeply to a place in his mind where he knew he was in a room, a prisoner, and
it was his fault. He did not like that knowledge. Better to pretend. He opened
his eyes. “I want to be here in the park. Pretend you are real.” He
bent and touched some green vetch at his feet and felt the tiny ferns.
“History doesn’t matter. Sensation matters,” he said earnestly.
“Even these illusions are real because they are happening now. We live in
now. Memory isn’t real. The past doesn’t exist. Why should we feel anything
about the past, or care about it?”

Ahmed computed that it was a good probability
that Carl Hodges was speaking through George and looking through his eyes as a
form of escape. The rationalization was fluent, the vocabulary not George’s.
Vocabulary choice is as constant as fingerprints.

The person speaking had to be Carl Hodges.

“Carl Hodges. Do you want to get away from
where you are and lie down in this park?”

“You are a questioner. I should not
speak.”

“Is it wrong to answer questions?”

“Yes; answers kill. People are dead. Like
Susanne, they are all dead. Does mourning one person kill others? They drowned
too, and floated. Saw girl in water … Connection … ?”

George had been speaking dreamily, eyes wide and
round and sightless. He closed his eyes and every muscle in his face and body
tightened in a curling spasm like pain. He slid off the bench and fell to his
knees in the soft vetch. “Get me out of this. Make it unhappen. Reverse
time. Wipe me out before I did it.” The spasmed crouch—was it pain or
prayer?

Watching the figure of misery, Ahmed made urgent
calculations. The shame-driven need to escape memory was there to work with.
Use it.

“Carl, you are in a green field in a small
park on East E Avenue and Fifth Street. This is a future scene. Two hours from
now, you will be rescued and free, without guilt, relaxed and enjoying being
outdoors. We are the police, we are getting into a sky taxi to come and get
you. What directions are we giving the driver?”

“Amsterdam Avenue and Fifty-third Street to
Columbus Avenue, the wrecked blocks, one of the good cellars near the center of
the flattened part of the ruins. Buzz it twice. Thanks. I think I can knock
down a kid when I hear you and come out and wave. Land and pick me up
fast.”

“Okay,” said Ahmed, straightening and
stepping back from the crouched praying figure.

George took his hands from his face. “Okay
what?” His voice was George’s usual voice. He got up and brushed small
green fronds from his knees.

“Okay, let’s make a raid into another kid
gang’s territory,” Ahmed said.

“Where’s Biggy?” George looked around
as if expecting to see their own gang of kids around them. “Oh, he went to
the Canary Islands. And the others, they went to the Sahara. They all went…” He shook his head as if waking up. “Ahmed, what do you mean, raid
a kid gang territory? That’s all over. We’re grown up now.”

“We’re going to rescue that kidnapped
computerman. A mixed gang of teener kids are holding him in the ruins near West
Fifty-third Street. We know how to handle a kid gang fight.”

George was not going to let go of common sense.
He settled back on the bench and looked around at the green warm comfort of the
park, and rubbed one of the bruises on his arm. “Let’s call the police,
let them do it.”

“We are the police, lunk.” Ahmed still
stood, smiling, depending on the force of his personality, the habit of
command, to get George to obey. George looked up at him, squinting into the
light of the sky, one eye half closed. Half of a bruise showed at the side of his
face, most of it hidden by the hairline.

“Ahmed, don’t be a nut. Logical thinking
doesn’t fight chains and clubs for you. I mean, your brains are great, but we
need muscle against a juv army, because they don’t know about thinking, and
they don’t listen.”

“What if they are all in their cellars,
lunk, and we want to drop them before they get in deeper and carry Carl Hodges
away? What kind of thing could get them all out into the open where a
helicopter could drop them with gas?”

George absently rubbed the dark mark on the side
of his face. “They come out when somebody gets onto their territory,
Ahmed.

Not an army of cops or a helicopter, I don’t
mean that. I mean some poor goof is crossing, looking for a shortcut to
somewhere else, and they all come out and beat him up.”

“That’s for you.”

“How did you figure … Oh, yeah, you
don’t mean yesterday. You mean strategy, like. They come out to beat me up
again and the copter drops them with a gas spray, and maybe there’s no one left
underground to kill Carl Hodges, or take him away.” George got up.
“Okay, let’s do it.”

They came up out of the subway at Fifty-third
Street and walked together on the sidewalk opposite the bombed-out shells of
old buildings. A distant helicopter sound buzzed in the air.

“Separate, but we keep in touch. Leave your
radio open to send, but shut it for receive so there won’t be any sound coming
out of it. The copter pilot will be listening. I’ll circle the block and look
in doorways and hallways for trouble. You cut across. We both act like we have
some reason to be here, like I’m looking for an address. We’re strangers.”

“Okay,” George said. “I’ve got a
story for them. Don’t worry about me.” He turned and walked nonchalantly
around the corner, across the street, past some standing ruins and into the
flattened spaces and the area that had once been paved backyard, with steps
down to doors that had opened into the cellars of gone buildings. Flattened
rubble and standing walls showed where the buildings had been.

He stood in the middle of a backyard, near two
flights of cement stairs that led down into the ground to old doors, and he
walked onward slowly, going in an irregular wandering course, studying the
ground, acting a little confused and clumsy, just the way he had acted the last
time he had been there.

The setting sun struck long shadows across the
white broken pavement. He turned and looked back at his own long shadow, and
started when another person’s shadow appeared silently on the pavement
alongside of his. He glanced sideways and saw a tall, husky teener in a strange
costume standing beside him holding a heavy bat. The teener did not look back
at him, he looked off into space, lips pursed as though whistling silently.

George winced again when a short teener with
straight blond hair stepped out from behind a fragment of standing wall.

“Back, huh?” asked the blond kid.

George felt the shadows of others gathering
behind him.

George said, “I’m looking for a pocket
watch I lost the night you guys beat me up. I mean, it’s really an antique, and
it reminds me of someone. I’ve got to find it.”

He looked at the ground, turning around in a
circle. There was a, circle of feet all around him, feet standing in ruined
doorways, feet on top of mounds of rubble, the clubs resting on the ground as
the owners leaned on them, the chains swinging slightly.

“You must be really stupid,” said the
leader, his teeth showing in a small smile that had no friendship.

Where was Carl Hodges? The area George stood in
was clean, probably well used by feet. The stairs leading down to a cellar door
were clean, the door handle had the shine of use. The leader had appeared late,
from an unlikely direction. He was standing on dusty, rubble-piled ground
which feet had not rubbed and cleared. The leader then had not wanted to come
out the usual way and path to confront George. Probably the usual way would
have been the door George was facing, the one that looked used.

It was like playing hot and cold for a hidden
object. If Carl Hodges was behind that door, the teeners would not let George
approach it. George, looking slow and confused, shuffled his feet two steps in
that direction. There was a simultaneous shuffle and hiss of clothing as the
circle behind him and all around him closed in closer. George stopped and they
stopped.

Now there was a circle of armed teeners close
around him. Two were standing almost between him and the steps. The helicopter
still buzzed in the distance, circling the blocks. George knew if he shouted,
or even spoke clearly, and asked for help the copter pilot would bring the
plane over in a count of seconds.

The blond kid did not move, still lounging,
flashing his teeth in a small smile as he studied George up and down with the
expression of a scientist at a zoo studying an odd specimen of gorilla.