Total Recall (15 page)

The retro rockets fired for the shuttle’s vertical descent. On the boulder-strewn plain of Chryse, the spaceport roof opened up, revealing a landing pad inside. The shuttle dropped into the spaceport, and the roof closed over it. Such mechanisms were necessary because the air of Mars was far too thin to permit external unloading.

Quaid, in the guise of the fat lady, exited with the tourists. He showed his passport, the one provided by Hauser in the satchel, and an official seal stamped down on it.
MARS FEDERAL COLONY
/
CONFEDERATION OF NORTHERN NATIONS
. No one was really checking the papers; Mars wanted both tourists and colonists, and so kept the red tape to a minimum. That meant that a person could normally be processed through within a couple of hours.

It would be better, of course, if they got it down to two minutes. But bureaucracy was incapable of that. Even if there was only one little bag to check, containing no more than a Mars candy bar, that justified an hour’s delay. On other planets, where they didn’t care about making a good impression, it would justify four hours’ delay, and more if the victim fussed. Bureaucrats were little tyrants in their domains, never able to understand why visitors didn’t like them.

Fortunately, the Mars gravity made standing in line easy. Even a fat lady like him could handle it.

In the Immigration Hall of the spaceport the travelers were queued up in three long lines, waiting to be processed by the three immigration officers on duty. Why didn’t they have a dozen officers there, doing other chores between ships? Richter smiled knowingly. Because that would be too efficient. Visitors needed to feel the power of the bureaucracy, which was demonstrated by wasting their time. He approved of this. It was right that civilians be constantly reminded who had control.

He looked around. An imposing picture of Cohaagen hung on the front wall, greeting all visitors. Soldiers stood ready, armed, in case anyone should think of protesting. He remembered seeing a video about the ancient days, when the Nazis added vicious attack dogs to the lineup, and loosed them if anyone gave them a pretext. Lovely!

He saw the fat lady standing in line behind a mother with a baby slung over her shoulder and his lip curled in disgust. Thank God, Lori never gained weight! The thought that he would see her soon raised his spirits even more.

An escort of soldiers appeared. They shoved people aside to make room for Richter and Helm, who were escorted to the front of the nearest line. As they passed, they jostled the fat lady, who was playing cootchy-coo with the smiling baby. Richter recoiled at the touch.

Two agents in suits approached, greeting Richter and Helm like VIPs. Well, why not!

“Welcome home, Mr. Richter,” the first agent said enthusiastically. “Mr. Cohaagen wants to see you right away.”

Richter walked past the two, hardly deigning to notice them. “What the fuck is that?” He pointed to graffiti on the wall:
KUATO LIVES
. A painter was in the process of cleaning it up.

“Things have gotten worse,” the agent said tightly. “The rebels took over the refinery last night. No turbinium going out.”

Richter and his entourage proceeded down the hallway. He was disgusted. The last thing they needed was messages from the mythical leader of the Mars Liberation Front! It was enough of a pain dealing with that traitor Hauser without running afoul of imaginary characters. The worst problem with nonexistent folk was that they couldn’t be killed.

“Any news about Hauser?” he asked, reminded of his mission.

“Not a word.”

Bothered about something he couldn’t quite nail, Richter paused and looked back at the patiently waiting people. He saw the baby playing with the fat lady’s hair. The fat lady had rearranged her outfit, but it still didn’t do a thing for her. Then the baby pat-a-caked the woman’s face with some force, not knowing its own strength.

“Where’s my cabin?” the fat lady asked incongruously.

Richter focused on her, vaguely disturbed. Was that the only thing she knew how to say?

The fat lady opened her mouth, seemingly horrified. The baby laughed.

Oh. She was doing it for the baby. Richter turned away, dismissing his concern. The entourage had almost exited the Immigration Hall.

“Where’s my cabin?” the fat lady asked again.

Richter stopped and turned again. Suddenly his vague concern was clarifying into a sharp suspicion. Was it possible?

The fat lady was evidently trying to stifle herself, holding her face as if it were talking without her volition. The baby laughed and laughed at this exhibition. The other people were looking at her now, including the soldiers, who found her behavior strange but not dangerous. Women did tend to get sappy about babies; it was one of the annoying things about them.

Then the fat lady looked his way. She locked eyes with Richter.

Now he knew! “That’s Quaid!” he rasped. “Stop him!”

The fat lady broke from the line and ran to the front, moving with surprising alacrity for her size. She opened her face, which peeled away on either side.

The soldiers were shocked, thinking she had some kind of loathsome disease. She charged them, and they almost fell over each other getting out of the way, not wanting to be infected. That enabled her to run away from Richter.

Richter scrambled after Quaid, drawing his gun, but couldn’t get a shot. The damn lines of stupid people, now scattering across the hall, ruined any decent line of sight.

Another soldier pulled a gun at close range to the fugitive. But Quaid swatted his arm, shoved him into another soldier, then smashed a third soldier in the face. Richter would have admired the man’s finesse if it hadn’t been so important to nail him. Agency training sure showed!

But Quaid couldn’t stay clear for long. He was confined to the spaceport, and the people were clustering at the sides of the hall. In a moment he would be a fair target.

Quaid ran down a corridor. Now, there was a mistake! He had lost his interference. Six soldiers were racing after him, and Richter and Helm after them. They’d corner the rat in a moment!

There was a large window by an intersection. Through it the barren Martian landscape could be seen. It was near-vacuum out there; the man couldn’t escape that way!

Quaid was about to dodge around a corner, but a young soldier blocked the intersection. Quaid tossed the deflated mask to the soldier, who caught it instinctively. The mask snapped together and said, “Get ready for a big surprise.”

The soldier gaped—and the mask exploded!

The explosion shattered the window. It fragmented outward, driven by the pressure of the Earth atmosphere.

This created an instant tornado, as the air funneled out. The spaceport was depressurizing in the manner of a balloon let go. Everybody grabbed onto anything handy and hung on for dear life.

The idiot!
Richter thought. They had just about cornered the rat, and Quaid had to pull a stunt like this! Now they were all in trouble.

He saw Quaid grab the railing around an open staircase leading down. Trust the man to be able to handle this better than most! He was going to haul himself away while the soldiers were helpless.

One of the soldiers who had been closest to the window was sucked through the aperture into the near-vacuum. Quaid’s clothes and padding were sucked off his body and followed the soldier out the window. Quaid was left in the short-sleeved shirt and rolled up trousers he wore under the costume, and with the ludicrous high-heeled shoes. And clutching his purse, yet!

An immigration officer struggled to a control panel and managed to activate the emergency alarm.

Metal barriers started sliding down in sequence, covering all the windows and doorways to the left, the right, behind, and ahead. SQQRRCHANG! SQQQRRCHANG! SQQQRRCHANG!

Good! Not only would that stop the loss of air, it would trap Quaid inside, so they could finish the job. Nothing would smash any of those barriers!

He saw Quaid looking frantically around.
Yeah, look, you shit! You’re cornered now! And I’m the one who’s going to—

A barrier started to lower over the staircase passage nearest to Quaid. SQQQRRRRR!!!

Quaid pushed off and rolled under just before—

CHANG! He was through.

No!
Richter thought, anguished.

A metal sheet slammed over the shattered window. Had the system had any brains, it would have closed that one first and saved them all a hassle.

The tornado instantly dissipated. Now the tourists had breath to scream, gaspingly. Fuck them!

Richter sprinted to the staircase barrier. “Open it! Open it!”

“I can’t,” the nearest soldier said. He was a young twerp, obviously inexperienced. “They’re all connected.”

Frustrated and furious, Richter backhanded him across the face with his gun.

CHAPTER  16
Venusville

T
he noisy, old-fashioned train, probably a refugee from a condemned twentieth-century New York subway, pulled out of the station and entered a dark tunnel. Outside were clattering sounds and flashing lights, as if the thing were about to fly off the tracks and smash into a pillar. That, combined with the crowding, created a feeling of anxiety.

Quaid looked around, alert to potential danger. He wasn’t exactly well dressed at the moment; he had barely been able to hang on to his purse when his unsecured clothing got blown off. He was doing his best now to make that purse seem like a package. But no one seemed to notice. Blasé Mars natives (anyone who had been here more than a year was a native) were talking among themselves, and he overheard snippets of conversations.

“While you were gone,” one Martian said, “Cohaagen raised the price of air.”

“Again?” her companion asked, resigned. “That’s the third time in the past two months.”

“Yes, and meanwhile our pay stays the same.”

Interesting, Quaid thought. They never mentioned the price of air when they offered the sizeable bonuses to potential colonists from Earth.

The woman was speaking again, in a lowered voice. “And did you hear about the Hamiltons?”

“I noticed that their place was dark last night.”

“And the night before, and the night before that.”

“Gone on a trip?”

“You could say so,” the woman said with a knowing smile. Her voice became scarcely more than a whisper and Quaid strained to hear her. “We’ll see how long the Administrator lasts when all of his workers have ‘gone on a trip.’ ”

Quaid followed the woman’s eyes as she looked pointedly at the posters that plastered the interior of the car. The posters proclaimed a huge reward for the capture of the mysterious leader of the rebel forces, Kuato. The name was spelled out in large, clear letters.

But there was no picture.

Here was something else that got short shrift in the emigration brochures. Quaid had had no idea that the Mars Liberation Front had such a broad base of support. The newscasts made it sound as though the rebels were just a few, disaffected troublemakers. Yet they had the obvious approval of the ordinary-looking, middle class couple on the train. It certainly didn’t sound as though Vilos Cohaagen was universally beloved. Hardly surprising, if he was gouging the populace for the very air they breathed. He filed the information away for future reference.

Red light flooded the car. The clattering diminished as the subway emerged onto the surface of Mars. Quaid peered out the window at the weird landscape, drinking it all in. It was barren, it was awful, but it was the land of his dream!

He crossed to the other side of the car as the reverberations faded. He stared, fascinated, experiencing a rush of emotion.

There was the pyramid-shaped mountain of his dream! There was a mining facility on its side. His dream was real! The things in it really were here on Mars!

After a moment he turned and tapped the nearest Martian on the shoulder. “Excuse me. What’s that?”

The man glanced at him, then out the window. “You mean the Pyramid Mine?” Then he saw Quaid staring fixedly at it. “I used to work there, till they found all that alien shit inside. Now it’s closed.”

Alien artifacts?
Then that, too, was true. He had been there, and his dream was a true memory, not idle fancy! But if he had fallen in, how could he have survived unscathed? Unless the fall had been broken, and he had taken a bash on the head that gave him amnesia. But that wouldn’t explain why others wanted to kill him, or why Hauser wanted to get even with Cohaagen. He still knew far too little!

“Can you visit?” he asked, rapt.

“Ha. Can’t get within ten miles.”

So there was some secret there. Why were they keeping people away? Certainly they weren’t going to keep
him
away! One way or another he would get there, and unravel his past.

And find his woman.

The Pyramid Mine was as impressive from another angle, as seen from the hall leading to Cohaagen’s office. Richter stared through the glass wall at the mining complex, wishing that he rated a stunning facility like this. He entered the office and faced the back of Cohaagen’s chair across his desk.

“Mr. Cohaagen,” he said. “You wanted to see me?”

Cohaagen swiveled around in his chair. He smiled silently for a moment. “Richter,” he said finally. “Do you know why I’m such a happy person?”

Because you’re the top man, Richter thought, with subordinates to chew out. He let none of this show through the dutiful expression on his face.

“No, sir,” he said respectfully.

“Because I’ve got a great fuckin’ job,” Cohaagen said calmly. “As long as the turbinium keeps flowing, I can do anything I want. Anything. Nobody’s looking over my shoulder. Nobody cares how I live. Nobody gives a shit if a few Martians have to suffer.” He paused.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he continued. “I wouldn’t trade places with the Chairman.” It was difficult for him to keep a straight face. He had the Chairman by the short hairs and he knew it, but it wouldn’t do to give that kind of information to Richter. No, the masquerade would go on. For the time being.