To Live Again and The Second Trip (22 page)

“Still, can’t you hire some thug—program a robot—”

“I need someone I can trust. There’s only one person in the world I can rely on for this, Charles. You’ve been with me on every stage of the operation.”

“But—”

“You’ll do it, Charles.” Roditis came over, standing above Noyes’ chair, and put his hands on Noyes’ shoulders just alongside the clavicles. His thick, powerful fingers dug sharply into the flesh. His eyes, compelling, almost hypnotic, sought for Noyes’ and locked on them. Noyes knew he was being coerced, but he had never been able to resist Roditis’ pressures before, and he doubted that he would succeed this time.

Earnestly Roditis said, “Do you have moral objections?”

“Well, in a way.”

“Look at it this way. You aren’t actually taking life. The real Martin St. John was discorporated long ago. The only intelligent thing in that body is the persona of Paul Kaufmann, which has no right to be there. Kaufmann’s had one life already, one body. That’s all he’s entitled to on an autonomous basis. Now he’s supposed to be riding as a passenger, as a persona. You dispose of the St. John body and Kaufmann reverts to his proper status, minus the illegal nonsense Santoliquido has invented out of cowardice. You’ll actually be performing a pro-social act, Charles. You’ll be canceling out an anomaly. Do you follow that?”

“I think so. I—”

“You can’t kill something that’s already dead. Both Martin St. John and Paul Kaufmann are already dead: one because his persona ejected him, one because his natural span was over. What you’ll be doing is disposing of some superfluous protoplasm. Nothing else. You’ll do it for me, Charles. I know you will.”

“How will I do it?”

Roditis straightened up, went to his desk, ran his fingers over the protruding green studs of a safety cache. The cache door sprang open and he thrust his hand inside, pulling out a lemon-colored box less than an inch in diameter. Roditis popped the box onto his palm and stuck his hand under Noyes’ nose. A touch of his finger and the box fissioned along its vertical axis to reveal a minute capsule containing a few drops of some turquoise fluid.

“This,” said Roditis, “is cyclophosphamide-8. It’s an alkylating agent that has the effect of breaking down the body’s fail-safe system for tolerating its own chemical components. Let a little of this get inside a man and he rejects his own organs, the way he’d reject an organ graft from another person without proper chemical preparation.”

“Some kind of carniphage?” Noyes asked uncertainly.

“Not exactly, but close enough. Your true carniphage causes the cells of the body to destroy themselves through autolysis, through enzyme release. This stuff has the effect of turning the body into a conglomeration of alien components that can’t function homeostatically any more. Gland secretions become poisons; organ coordination ceases; antigens are poured forth to attack the very tissues they ought to be defending. The loveliness of it all is that nothing the medics can do can possibly save the patient. The more they meddle, the more quickly the rate of destruction accelerates. Death comes in less than an hour usually.”

“Carniphage is quicker,” Noyes pointed out.

“But carniphage is too obvious. When a man turns to a puddle of slime inside of fifteen minutes, it’s a clear case of carniphage dosing. But with cyclophosphamide-8, the cause of death remains in doubt. It’s an ambiguous finish.”

“How is the drug administered?”

“In the fine old Borgia fashion. Conceal the box in your palm, like so. Offer your victim a glass of water. Pass your hand over it, squeeze the muscles together. The box opens, the capsule drops in. It dissolves in a microsecond. The turquoise color is lost upon contact with any other fluid. No taste. No odor. It’s that simple.” Roditis closed the lemon-colored box. He presented it gravely to Noyes. “Get aboard the next flight to New York and find Martin St. John. I’ve never needed your help more, Charlie-lad.”

Dazed, Noyes shortly found himself high above Indiana, eastward bound. One of Roditis’ secretaries had booked the flight for him; he himself seemed incapable of taking any positive action at the moment. He carried the capsule of poison in his lefthand breast pocket. In his righthand breast pocket there nestled, as always, the flask of carniphage with which he proposed to end his own miserable life just as soon as he found the courage to do it.

This would be an excellent moment, Noyes told himself morosely.

He did not want to be a catspaw for John Roditis any longer. He was tired of rushing around compromising himself for the sake of fulfilling the little entrepreneur’s ambitions. Committing murder now. True, true, Roditis had produced a pack of sophistries to persuade him that supping cyclophosphamide-8 into Martin St. John’s drinking water was not murder in any valid sense, and so persuasive was Roditis’ glibness that Noyes had been nearly taken in. Nearly. Yet he knew that the quaestors would take a harder line with him if he were caught before Roditis could blank the crime from his mind. They’d accuse him of deliberate discorporation, and there was no more serious crime. He’d be erased. A small loss, maybe, to the universe and even to himself; but nevertheless humiliating. A man should destroy himself, not allow others to destroy him.

Gulp the carniphage now, he thought. You’ll make a mess in the plane, and the stewardess will throw up, but at least you’ll die an honest death.

His hand stole toward his righthand breast pocket.

—Go on, Kravchenko urged. Why don’t you do it and get it over with? I’m so sick of being stuck in your lousy head, Noyes, you can’t possibly imagine!

The hand halted short of its goal.

Some lingering Puritan sense of obligation assailed him. To kill himself now would be cowardly; he’d be running out on Roditis’ assignment. He had no right to do that. Roditis trusted him; Roditis relied on him. And Roditis had given him employment and a purpose in the world for many years past. Sure, Roditis was overbearing, tyrannical, self-centered, and all the rest. Sure, Roditis had bullied him into compromise after compromise, until at the end he was even crashing parties on the man’s behalf and sleeping with strange women to win a nugget of useful information. Nevertheless, those were the conditions of his employment. He had accepted them. He could not spurn them now. He owed it to Roditis to carry out this final assignment, this meaningless discorporation, this destruction of a body already dead and tenanted by a dead man’s ghost. After that, if he wished, he could swallow his carniphage at last, with even more justification than now. Running out on unfinished business was surely not in the Noyes tradition.

Noyes realized that he had just made use of his New England heritage to justify an act of murder.

So be it, he told himself. So be it.

The decelerating rockets whined. They were landing in New York. Kravchenko, mocking as always, set up a clamor of derision as Noyes moved his hand away from the carniphage. But Kravchenko, Noyes knew, could not have followed the complex inner processes of decision-making. The persona was simply trying to keep him off balance and unsettled. It was not really in Kravchenko’s interest to goad him into actually drinking the carniphage; merely to get him so rattled that he’d be vulnerable to the sudden swift strike of a counter-erasure, the violent ejection by a triumphant dybbuk.

He wondered how he was going to find Martin St. John.

He could not simply look him up in the master directory. St. John was an Englishman, and wouldn’t be listed here. Of course, Santoliquido would know where St. John was staying. But Noyes wanted to avoid tipping his hand to Santoliquido. It was too obvious that Roditis had an interest in getting Paul Kaufmann out of his present carnate form, and if Roditis’ known confederate Noyes were suddenly to begin making inquiries about St. John, any chance Noyes might have of gaining access to St. John would disappear.

Noyes decided to ask Elena.

Elena seemed to know everything about everyone. She was at the center of the nexus, tentacles reaching toward Mark Kaufmann on the one hand, toward Santoliquido on the other, toward Noyes on the third. And she still had a tentacle or two left to extend in Roditis’ direction. She’d be a likely source of information.

She had a small apartment registered in her own name in New Jersey. Noyes scarcely expected to find her there, but it was the logical place to begin. He called from the airport and was surprised to find her answering.

Her privacy code appeared on the screen. Noyes identified himself. The screen cleared, and Elena came into view. She was nude, but the scanner cut her off at the breasts, and in any case the tiny screen in the booth did not give him much of a view.

“I’ve just come back from a visit to Roditis,” he said. “In Indiana.”

“You told him about—”

“St. John? Yes.”

“He must have been furious!”

“Actually, he was quite cool about it,” Noyes said. “He seemed to be expecting some sort of fast shuffle of that kind, and he was braced. Listen, Elena, how soon can I get to see you?”

“Why not right now?”

“You’re free this evening?”

“Very much so. Would you like to take me to Jubilisle again?”

“No,” he said. “I’d just like a quiet visit. There are—some questions I’d like to ask.”

“Questions, questions, questions! Very well. Come to my apartment. When should I expect you?”

“How about an hour from now?”

“That will do.” She tapped out the hopter program for reaching her house, fingers moving swiftly over the data keys. An instant later the program card came chuttering out of the data slot in Noyes’ telephone booth. He seized it and blew her a kiss. Grabbing his one suitcase, he rushed up the ramp and stepped into a traveler’s-aid station, where he underwent a vibrator bath while his clothes were being pressed and refurbished. Freed of the grime of his journey from Indiana, Noyes proceeded toward the hopter zone, pausing on the way for a short snack. He chartered a hopter and slipped Elena’s house program into the receptor slot. The vehicle took off, found itself hung up momentarily in a delay pattern over the crowded airport, then discovered an exit vector and made its way toward New Jersey.

He arrived at Elena’s place a little after nine that evening.

Noyes had never been there before. His previous meetings with Elena had taken place at his apartment. He did not know what to expect: a place of palatial luxury, perhaps, or some steamy, overdecorated temple of amour. But in reality the apartment was nothing more than a
pied-à-terre,
as simple and austere as his own little suite. Despite Elena’s known predilections for opulence, she did not seem to require it here, perhaps because it served only as a way station for her on those rare nights when she was not sleeping out. Greeting him in diaphanous, swirling pink robes that did very little to hide the exaggerated voluptuousness of her body, Elena seemed like some overblown tropical blossom blooming in a humble northern meadow.

They embraced tentatively and distantly. Elena evidently was ready for any kind of overtures he cared to make, but Noyes was too tense, too bound up in his own situation, to do more than go through a kind of ritualistic contact.

They broke away. She offered drinks. He settled into a chair; she chose a divan. Her robes parted to reveal tawny thighs. Noyes wondered if, as a matter of strategy, he should respond to her wanton unvoiced invitation. Or was she only teasing him? He was well aware that in all their relationships she regarded him only as a surrogate for other men. Sexually, she reached through him to make love to Jim Kravchenko. And when she passed secret information to him about the doings of Mark Kaufmann or Santoliquido, it was in the hope of winning favor with Roditis.

He said, “I need your help, Elena. I’m trying to find Martin St. John.”

Her eyebrows rose. Her full lips drew apart. “Roditis is after him so soon?”

Noyes made an effort to conceal his reaction. “I’d simply like to talk to the man.”

“About what?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might,” she said.

Fidgeting, Noyes improvised. “All right. Roditis is interested in working out a deal with Paul Kaufmann. As long as old Kaufmann’s back in circulation and Roditis can’t have the persona himself, he’d like to come to an understanding with him. You see, Roditis is worried that Paul and Mark will form a family alliance to crush him. So he’d like to drive a wedge between them as rapidly as possible. Does that make sense to you?”

“A great deal of sense.”

“So I’ve been sent here to make contact with Kaufmann/St. John. Only I don’t know where to find him.”

“And you think I do?”

“If anyone does, you do. Certainly Santoliquido’s aware of St. John’s location, and probably Mark as well. You’re close to both of them. So—”

“You’re right,” said Elena. “I do know.”

“Will you tell me?”

She stirred idly. Her robes opened, probably not by accident, and for a brief dazzling moment her entire body was bare to him. Noyes let his eyes rest on the huge globes of her breasts. She had mounted a fusion node in the great valley between them, and its tireless sparkle lulled him. Just as casually, Elena covered herself.

Softly she said, “Perhaps I might tell you. But there would be a price, Charles.”

“Name it. Any amount.”

She laughed. “Not money. A favor.”

“What?” he asked uneasily.

“You carry the persona of a man who once meant a great deal to me,” Elena said. “You stand between me and that man, Charles. If I lead you to Martin St. John, you will step aside and make that man available to me. Yes? I can take you to St. John tonight.”

“You mean I should have Kravchenko erased and let his persona be given to someone else?”

“Not exactly,” she replied. “I mean that you should allow him to take you over. So that I may enjoy him directly in your body.”

Noyes was thrown into such turmoil that Kravchenko nearly was able to eject him then and there. He struggled for control. Never had he experienced so direct a blow to his ego. Calmly, casually, Elena had invited him to commit suicide for her convenience! His ups worked incoherently. At length he said, “You have no right to ask that of me. It’s insane to think that I’d do any such thing!”