Farmer, Philip José - Traitor to the Living (26 page)

I'm going to have to stay in this body a long time, until I get legal ownership of MEDIUM, anyway, and I'm going to get me a stable of young studs you wouldn't believe."

"I suppose a queer would make the transition to a woman easier," Carfax said.

She stared at him a moment and then broke out into laughing again.

"You say that to me. Old Stallion Clan? Why, man, I was notorious for my string of Broadway beauties. Three-times-a-night-Dan, they called me, among other things not so complimentary. I was keeping the great Josie Mansfield and three other showgirls at the same time. And none of them ever complained. You don't understand. Carfax. I'm an adapter. I can fall into any situation and come out on top, except..."

She frowned, and Carfax said, "Except..."

"Well, there's always the crazy nut who goes ape.

You can't foresee him. Old Stokes shot me, and I wasn't expecting that. And then there was that Houvelle with his plane full of dynamite. But I still came back, didn't I?"

"Stokes?"

"Yeah, Stokes. A business associate of mine whom I'd shafted. I had a little talk with him one night in L.A. I told him what had happened and what he was missing. I threatened to bring him back just so I could torture him. I don't intend to, but he'll be sweating it out for eternity!"

"And what happened to Pat? In Dennis's body?"

"I was able to drive by nightfall, though I had to do it carefully. I moved her car out of the garage and drove mine in. I closed the garage doors and shoved her on ahead of me through the door between the house and the garage. I made her get into the trunk, and I doped her up again. I drove back to the farmhouse, took her into the room where MEDIUM was, told her how much trouble you and she had caused me and how I was going to fool you. Then I turned on the power and shoved her so she fell against the exposed transformer. I removed her tapes, washed on the tape-marks with water and alcohol, and rode my motorcycle north to Streator. I had to leave my car at the farmhouse, of course, and I wasn't going to be seen in Pontiac. I didn't want anybody in Pontiac to remember seeing a woman who looked like Patricia Carfax.

"I abandoned the motorcycle, it was registered in a fake name, and took the INTO and a bus back to Busiris. And I took the MT from downtown to the Sheridan Village stop and walked home. Home sweet home. And there you have it."

And I'm about to get it. Carfax thought.

"You died in 1872?" he said. "You must have had a hell of a time adjusting. There were no cars, planes, TV, electronics, almost none of the technology of today. Everything must have seemed so strange, even terrifying. You must not have been able to understand half the vocabulary of the people you had to meet."

"I adjust quickly, fella," she said. "I laid doggo for two weeks, playing sick, while I studied things that seem simple to you, like learning how to operate a viewphone. I went down to the L.A. library, what an experience that was, my first time out of the apartment, and I got a lot of books to study up on. I made many mistakes, like I found out when I got to the library that I could have read all the books on my TV with a simple request to the library. But I learned, oh, how I learned!"

"One of the mistakes you made was killing Uncle Rufton," Carfax said. "You should have switched him with some cooperating semb, and you'd never have had trouble with Pat. That's what started the whole thing."

"That was a mistake," she said. "But it turned out all right, didn't it?"

She stood up and said, "Well, we might as well get down to business."

"You haven't told me who you are."

"You sure like to talk to me, don't you?" she said, grinning. "I'll tell you in just a minute. First, I have to get the helmet."

"Helmet?"

She stopped and said, "Of course. It's for better control.

A semb can be extracted, or summoned, or whatever you want to call it, through the CRT itself. It's not only a visual apparatus, it's a door-opener. A wall- breacher. But it's a dangerous step to use it for that because it's not one hundred percent certain. The semb might possess one of the innocent bystanders instead of the person for whom it's intended. And also sembs, some of them, can't make it through. Only the strong- willed ones, the tigers, can get through. Your uncle almost made it when you were talking to him, but he didn't have the drive. So I had my scientists design a channeling device, the helmet."

"How the hell can a person's will determine the action of an electronic being?" Carfax said.

"I don't know," she said. "But it can, to some extent, anyway. As for the sembs being electronic, that's only a term used to cover up our ignorance of their real essence.

Remember, what you see on the screen is only an electronic analog. But enough of talk. This isn't the Thousand and One Nights, Carfax, and you're not Scheherazade."

She halted again. "Oh, yes, don't try screaming.

Your neighbors on both sides are gone. Old lady Alien is off to visit her sister in Oklahoma, and the Batterdons are on vacation. Besides, with the drapes pulled, I doubt that anyone could hear you."

Carfax did not answer. As soon as she had disappeared around the corner, he bent his legs as far back as he could get them under the chair. He lifted up and bent over and began a slow and painful hopping toward the machine on the serving cart. The chair on his back was a carapace, and he was a crippled turtle trying to be a kangaroo. The coffee cart was only about two and a half meters away, but at the pace of a decimeter a hop, it seemed as if it were a kilometer. Each effort drained out half his strength. Like Achilles chasing the tortoise, he would never make it. But then Zeno's paradox didn't work in real life, and he only thought he was weakening by halves. Still, each little jump exploded pain in his head, and he was sweating before he had made three hops.

Once, he wondered if she was expecting him to make this attempt. Was she waiting around the corner to spring on him just as he completed his mission? What mission? He wasn't sure he could do what he planned.

Worse, he wouldn't know what he had accomplished when he had done it.

It would not take her long to climb the fourteen steps, go down the hallway into the bedroom, and into the attic. At least, he supposed that she had hidden the helmet in the attic. That must have been where she had concealed the MEDIUM. He did not believe he would have enough time, but he had to try. If only ... and the phone rang. He was given more time. If only it wasn't a wrong number, if only it was someone who insisted on speaking to him.

No, if it were, then she would be down at once to stand out of the field of vision of the phone and to hold a gun at his head while he spoke. If she did, then he was going to yell. He would die, but whoever was at the other end would see what was happening. And she would be in an untenable position again.

He resumed his minute progress, went past the side of the machine, turned slowly, and hopped until he was close to its rear. Panting, fearful that his legs would give way, he bent over. His face slid along the cool metal plate and then his lips touched the nearest of the two wires running from the automatic control box to the terminals on the back of MEDIUM. He shoved his head forward to get a better purchase, clamped his teeth on the wire, and jerked upward with his head.

The motion sent pain through his head again, and he almost collapsed. But the wire was torn loose from the jack.

He could no longer hear her voice. In a few seconds, she would be down, unless chance favored him again, and that was too much to expect.

He hopped backward until he was clear of the serving cart, turned slowly, and hopped back. Now he could hear the tinkle of water falling into water. Good. Chance had given him another break.

The toilet flushed as he settled back down. But the chair was only in its approximate previous position, and he had to place the ends of the chair legs exactly where they had been. Their pressure had left four square depressions in the nap of the rug. She would see these and would wonder just how far he had managed to move the chair.

It was very difficult to see the depressions, and when he moved one leg of the chair to cover one depression, he missed the others. It was impossible to see the hind depressions made by the rear legs, so he settled for an attempt at covering the front two. Then he heard footsteps, and he had to stop. He did not know whether he had succeeded perfectly, but there was nothing he could do now.

She came around the corner holding a device which looked like a large metal football helmet. Attached to it was an electrical cord about two meters long.

She looked at him as she passed him and said, "My we certainly are sweating, aren't we? That's one nice thing about being a semb, you don't sweat. Not physically, anyway."

He said nothing but watched her while she plugged the end of the helmet cord into a receptacle near the base of the front panel. Still holding the helmet, she pushed the cart with one hand to a distance of a meter from him. She put the helmet on the floor, went into the kitchen, and returned a moment later with a strip of tape.

"Any famous last words?" she said, smiling.

"I'll see you in hell."

"I may drop in on you now and then," she said.

"But I won't be staying long. And you will."

"One thing," he said. "Your promise. You said you'd tell me who you really are."

"My name was James Fisk. Do you know who I am now, or must I give my biography?"

"The Barnum of Wall Street, the Prince of Erie?" he said.

"Right!"

She slapped the square of tape over his mouth, smoothed it out, and placed the helmet over his head. It felt very heavy, and his headache increased It was the weight of doom, he thought.

"That's a nice boy," she said. "It wouldn't do any good to struggle."

And so he was to become one more victim of the no longer late and never lamented James Fisk. Born in 1834, if he remembered correctly. A native of Bennington, Vermont. Oh yes, he had been born on April 1 , April Fool's Day. Very appropriate. Fisk was no fool, but he had certainly fooled many. He had started at the lowly job of circus hand, then become, successively, a waiter, a peddler, a salesman of dry goods, and a stockbroker. He had founded the brokerage firm of Fisk and .. . Belden? And then he had gotten into the big time as a stock market operator for Daniel Drew. Drew was as big a crook and as ruthless a financier as you could find. He and Fisk and the equally corrupt Jay Gould had become partners in taking control of the Erie railroad from Cornelius Vanderbilt. Nobody had cried about this except old Cornelius, who was as rotten as the unholy three who had beaten him out.

Fisk, as vice-president and comptroller of the railroad, had used its funds to bribe public officials, produce Broadway shows, and seduce Broadway actresses and chorus girls. One of his many mistresses had been the famous Josie Mansfield. Fisk was also Gould's assistant in his attempt to corner the gold market. This had resulted in the stock market crash, the infamous Black Friday, of, when was it?, oh yes, September 24, 1869.

And then Fisk, at the age of thirty-seven or thirty-eight, had been shot by E.S. Stokes and he had died the next day. Carfax remembered the exact day on which he had been shot because it was January 6, the day on which members of the Baker Street Irregulars celebrated Sherlock Holmes's birthday.

He watched her finger approach the automatic-on button. Here it comes, he thought. His heart was hammering, and he wondered what Fisk would do if he should drop dead of a heart attack before he could activate MEDIUM. He wished he would. Fisk might be in trouble then. And he thought, no, he wouldn't. The autopsy would show that I died a natural death, and no one would suspect Fisk.

Goodby, Patricia. If only we could have died at the same time, we would at least be in the same colony.

Fisk, his finger only a centimeter away from the button, turned his head and grinned.

Be a sadist for all I care, Carfax thought. Those few more seconds of life are precious, even under these conditions. And maybe the phone will ring again.

That's one question I meant to ask him. Who called? A friend of Pat's? One of Fisk's compatriots? Senator Langer? I'll never know, and it doesn't matter.

The finger moved; the button sank inward.

Carfax felt as if he were shrinking inside himself, collapsing, falling down the well of himself.

But nothing happened except that an indicator by the automatic-on button lit up. Fisk swore and pressed the button again. The light remained illuminated. If only Fisk would decide not to trace the trouble but to switch over to manual operation. Fisk had checked the connections of the two wires at the rear just after he had brought the machine down.

There was no reason for him to check it again; they could not possibly have come loose. Not as far as he would know.

Carfax groaned inside the tape. Fisk was looking at the rear of the machine.

"Now how the hell did that happen?" Fisk muttered.

He leaned over and looked at the loose wire.

"Wet!"

He looked at Carfax and said, grinning, "You wily sneaky son of a bitch!"

Fisk plugged the end of the wire back in and returned to the front of the machine. This time, the indicator light did not come on.

And Carfax was sightless, earless, tongueless, deprived of all senses except thought. And the silent scream of horror which seemed to reverberate through nothing and back from nothing.

Fisk was right. There were no words to describe what it was like being a semb.

He was an undescribable something in nothingness.

And then he was a familiar something.

He could see, hear, taste, and feel again.

Mrs. Webster, across the table from him, was screaming, and the others were yelling or jumping up.

He looked down. His bare breasts were large and round and the thumbtip-sized nipples were painted yellow. His skirt was bell-shaped NeoCretan.

"It went into you, Szegeti!" a man howled.

Carfax wasn't too numb to understand what had happened.

Mrs. Webster was right. The walls had been weakened, and he had flashed straight toward the psychical configuration of her seance, the mental analog of MEDIUM. Like a current of electrons, he had taken the path of least resistance; a voltage hole, he had been tunneled into her presence; he had made the quantum jump from his world to embu and back to his world.