But
he
did, Artie thought. Talbot had been a member of another species that shared the planet with them. And that species would do anything to remain hidden. Murder? Sure. What would happen if people knew about them?
Something
had shown him just what had happened thirty-five thousand years ago. For an hour he had been a member of the Tribe; he had been one of the Old People. But the Tribe had been ambushed, slaughtered to the last man, woman, and child, and then butchered. Could it happen again? On a bigger scale?
Why not?
Homo sapiens
wasn’t about to share its world.
Artie got out a scratch pad and started listing points he wanted to remember, wishing to God he’d taken a course in anthro in college. Comparisons of William Talbot to … what? Shea would have drawn his control group from his own patients. But Larry’s graphs and charts had been Greek to Artie. All he knew was what he remembered from what Paschelke had told him and what he had gathered from his interview with Hall. Talbot had shown great strength in extremis. So might anybody. Heavy bones, thick pads of cartilage for a man his age …
If Hall was right and Larry had been full of shit, maybe it was because Talbot had been a health nut, watching his diet and working out regularly.
The other things that Hall had said—the Old People in many ways could have been just as advanced as the New People. If anything, they could have been more “human” in some respects. And what if they’d had bigger brains? What would they have used them for? And finally, they might not have been as good hunters as the New People.
But certainly good enough.
Artie thought of the last scene with the Tribe, of the butchering. Could you call it cannibalism if it was another species? He vaguely remembered a photograph he’d seen in
National Geographic
of an African native roasting a too-human-looking monkey. The resemblance hadn’t bothered the native—after all, the monkey had been another species.
Hall had been right on one score. The Old People would probably go to any length to remain hidden. Even to committing murder. It would never be traced back to them because the police would be fed the suspect who’d actually held the knife or fired the shot, or it would be a suicide, or “death from natural causes,” or simply an accident.
And they were after
him
, Artie thought. He knew more than anybody else about Shea’s research. Larry was dead and so was Paschelke, and he wouldn’t bet a dime on Hall’s life, even if the man hadn’t believed the research he’d read. When it came to himself, they’d missed once—Mark had saved him then—but they’d try again. And sooner or later, they’d succeed.
Unless he got to them first.
The doorbell rang and Artie answered. He gave the delivery boy a two-dollar tip, walked back to the kitchen, and cleared the notes off the table. He got out several plates and the silver, then glanced at his watch.
Seven-thirty. Mark still wasn’t home.
Goddammit, Mark knew they had an answering machine. If he wasn’t coming straight home, he should have phoned and left a message. He always had before.
Artie called one of Mark’s friends, a neighborhood kid who went to the same school and caught the same van. No, a friend had driven Mark right home—he hadn’t stayed behind at school. When? About four-thirty, right after phys ed and a dozen laps in the pool.
Artie sat there, staring at the wall, the containers of chicken lo mein and moo shu pork untouched, his mind a blank. Then he spotted it out of the corner of his eye, the closet door off the kitchen—ajar. He got up very quietly and walked over to it, yanked it open, and stood there while a chill started in his chest and settled in the pit of his stomach.
Mark’s wheelchair, neatly folded up and pushed against the back of the closet. He couldn’t possibly have gone anyplace without it.
Artie. searched the house then, even doing frantic, stupid things like looking under beds, sick to death that he would find a body someplace.
Nothing.
At nine o’clock, he called up Susan.
“I’m sorry, that number is out of service … .”
Twenty-four hours, Artie thought. It would be twenty-four hours before he could report either one as missing. The police would ask if he’d called all of Mark’s friends, if he’d checked with the school, if he’d talked with the van driver. Sure, they could understand his worries about Mark, but he wouldn’t be the first parent who’d sweated it out all for nothing. As for Susan, there were winter storms in northern California, nothing unusual about it. During the winter the phones went out all the time.
But Artie knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mark, at least, wasn’t coming back.
By three in the
morning Artie had called every friend of Mark’s for whom he had a phone number, checked in with the police—who sounded sympathetic but not very helpful, and questioned the neighbors on both sides of Noe and Twentieth Streets who might have seen or heard something.
He finally crashed on the living room couch, the windows and doors locked and a brown-painted, seventy-pound plaster elephant placed by the front door where anybody trying to enter would knock it over. The automatic was on the floor beside the couch, fully loaded. He slept only fitfully and when he woke at six, he called Mitch. A helluva time to be calling and Mitch had been sound asleep, but when Artie told him about Mark, he was instantly alert. He would be over as soon he could get there. Give him, say, half an hour.
Mitch lived across town—he rented a small house on Telegraph Hill—but there wouldn’t be much traffic this early. And Christ, Artie thought, he desperately needed somebody he could talk to.
He went into the kitchen and made coffee, then called Susan again and got the same message he had the night before. He took in the morning paper and skimmed it, skipping the political and foreign news to read the small stories at the bottom of the inside pages of the second section where the paper chronicled the deaths of the petty criminals and the poor who lived in the rabbit warrens of the city, people whose names you forgot the moment you read them and people with no names at all.
Nobody fitting Mark’s description was among them.
Mitch showed up ten minutes after Artie had finished the paper and was staring through the kitchen window at a city half hidden in morning mist, his mind fogged with a sense of helplessness. Mitch hadn’t shaved and his coat still smelled faintly of wet wood ashes. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat in silence at the table, waiting for Artie to begin.
Artie told him about Mark’s failure to return home and his own failure when he tried to contact Susan.
When he’d finished, Mitch said quietly, “Mark’s seventeen, almost a legal adult.”
Artie shook his head in frustration. “How the hell can he go anyplace without his chair?”
“Maybe he didn’t need it. You said Susan wanted him up in Willow. If one of his instructors at school found that out, he probably told Mark to get his ass up there and make up the school time after the holidays. So a friend took him to the airport, helped him board, and Mark gave him the keys to drop the chair back here. Susan would’ve had one waiting at the other end.”
Artie sipped at his coffee, not meeting Mitch’s eyes. “Try and be helpful, for Christ’s sake.”
Mitch shrugged. “Okay, we’ll check again with the cops this afternoon and remind them that Mark’s missing. They’ll contact the hospitals, his description will go out to all the beat cops to watch for him. They’ll log him in as a runaway and wait for something to turn up. He’s too old for them to put his picture on a milk carton or for your neighbors to hang yellow ribbons on their fences.”
“Violence—” Artie started.
“I doubt it,” Mitch interrupted. “He wouldn’t have gone with anybody but a friend.”
But somebody could have taken him away by force, Artie thought. He tried to block thinking about that possibility and concentrated on his coffee.
Mitch said gently, “Any friction, Artie? Any arguments with him? Anything that would make him run away? Any girlfriend who would shove him into her van and light out for a week of romance in Palm Springs?”
“There was no friction,” Artie said finally. “If anything, I wanted to be more of a father. And I wanted him to be more of a son.”
Mitch looked uncomfortable. “Chances are Mark will call within the next day or so; runaways usually do. A better guess is that he’s with Susan up north and she doesn’t know you’re stewing down here. She’ll contact you when the phones come back on line—probably complaining because you didn’t insist he pack an extra pair of underwear.”
“What’s he going to do for money?”
“You ever give him a credit card?”
He’d forgotten. “Yeah, for his last birthday.”
“Then we can trace him through the card.”
Artie started to make another pot of coffee while Mitch watched him, an almost clinical look on his face. “You said you talked with some anthropologist at the museum?”
Mitch was trying to get Artie’s mind off Mark. It took an effort.
“A Richard Hall. The Grub printed out the floppy and I took Hall the printout. Paschelke was right—Larry didn’t think Talbot was human and he had a lot of measurements to prove it.”
Mitch looked away, staring through the glass doors of the porch at the streets below. “Jesus Christ, our caveman again.”
“The Old People, Hall called them,” Artie said dryly. “He didn’t believe it either. Said seeing might be believing so I went to the med center to see the body for myself. The relatives had already claimed it—I told you. Larry and Paschelke tried to convince one of Paschelke’s colleagues and he didn’t buy it any more than Hall did.”
Mitch studied him for a moment.
“But you did.” Artie nodded. “Why?”
How could he tell Mitch about his dream? About the Tribe? No more than he could have told him about Watch Cap or his almost suicide off the back porch. He remembered the look on Mark’s face when he’d told him about Larry and what had happened on the porch, how he’d felt. Mark had been frightened; he hadn’t understood. Would Mark have left because of that? He didn’t know; he hoped not. But he couldn’t think of any other reason. Except, of course, the obvious one. That somebody had Mark and might be willing to trade him for Shea’s diskette and printout.
“No particular reason.”
Mitch sighed. “Jesus, Artie, I’m your best friend and you’re not willing to level with me.” He opened the door of the refrigerator and started rummaging around. “What do we have for breakfast? Chinese … Chinese is good. No cold pizza, but you can’t have everything. Leftover potato salad—not the season for it but that’s good, too … .”
He found a plate and started serving himself. Artie stared at the mounds of food, wondering what the hell seemed strange. He knocked Mitch’s arm away when he started to spoon out the potato salad.
“What’s wrong?”
“Susan didn’t make that. I never saw it before.”
“Didn’t make what? The potato salad?”
“She doesn’t care for it. Neither does Mark.”
Mitch stuck his finger in the salad to taste it. Artie grabbed his hand. “Don’t do it.”
Mitch frowned. “Come on, Artie, maybe a neighbor brought it over. Maybe it was on sale—why the hell else would it be in the fridge?”
Artie shook his head. “She wouldn’t have bought it; no neighbor would have brought it over.”
Mitch shrugged, wiped his hand on a paper towel, and pushed the plate away. “You’re being paranoid but—Got a plastic sandwich bag?” Artie found him one and Mitch spooned some of the salad into it, then sealed it. “A friend of mine’s a chemist—he can test it. If it turns out like you obviously think it will, then you’re in deep shit, buddy. Somebody wants you dead.”
“You’re the one who was going to eat it,” Artie said.
“Right. But it was meant for you … . Exactly what was it that Hall said about the Old People?”
“That they didn’t exist—and if they did, they died out thirty-five thousand years ago. If any modern versions are around today, Hall thought they’d go to any lengths to keep us from knowing about them. Larry knew about them and Paschelke knew everything that Larry did. And now so do I.” He hesitated. “And so do you.”
“Larry was killed by a pack of feral dogs,” Mitch said slowly, “and some homeless nut did in the Paschelke family.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Mitch shrugged. “Okay, I see the connection you’re trying to make. I sure as hell don’t know how they’d work it, but maybe the important thing at the moment is how you feel about it.”
Artie was puzzled. “I don’t follow you.”
Levin slipped into his professional role. “Remember when you returned from ’Nam? Besides having served in my unit, you were one of the first patients I worked with—though not for long; you really didn’t need that much help.”
“Post-traumatic stress syndrome,” Artie said carefully. “One of the souvenirs I brought back with me.” The war was a long time ago; he hadn’t thought about it for years.
“You said you hated the war, Artie: Your problem was that you really didn’t, and you were deeply ashamed because you didn’t. You didn’t like killing people, you didn’t like the idea of death, but just the same … it was the ultimate test of whatever it was that was you, and you finally admitted you had never felt more alive. You said you felt like a hunter in the middle of the hunting season.”
“I wasn’t proud of it,” Artie said stiffly. “What’s your point?”
“Just a thought, Artie. Something has scared you shitless, but if I were that something, I think I’d be afraid of you.”
By the time Artie
got to work, Connie had already loaded the desk with a dozen books and what looked like a hundred pages of computer printout. She held up a finger when he came in, finished the page she was reading, then looked up.
“Top of the morning, Artie—” Then: “What the hell happened? You look like shit.”
Artie leaned his umbrella against the wall and struggled out of his coat. “Mark took off last night. I’ve no idea where to.”
“So call the police.”
“I already did. They said they’d check with the hospitals and have the beat cops watch for him. They think he might just have split—it’s a little difficult to call a seventeen-year-old a runaway.”
“He’s still a minor and he’s handicapped, for God’s sake!”
“I can’t prove he didn’t leave willingly.”
“A kid in a wheelchair shouldn’t be that hard to find.”
“He didn’t take it with him,” Artie said dryly. “Which means he’s sitting in a car someplace or in somebody’s house.”
She struggled with it a moment, then gave up. “I don’t know what to say, Artie. You want to take the day off, I’ll cover for you with Hirschfield.”
Artie didn’t want to talk about it; it hurt too much.
“I’ve done everything I can, Connie.” He pointed at the books. “What’s up?”
“Research for the series.” She looked relieved at the change in subject. “I’ve been doing my homework.”
Artie looked at some of the titles, then thumbed the stack of computer printouts. Greenpeace apparently had a Web site.
“Anything interesting?”
“All of it—but depressing as hell. You read all the time about the ozone layer and then it becomes old news and you lose interest. But this winter it’s thinned by half over Greenland, Scandinavia, and western Siberia: That’s the worst it’s been. Serious stuff.”
“Wrong season for a suntan,” Artie joked, then waited for Connie to come back with a snapper for his first and probably only yuck of the day.
She stared at him, sober-faced. “Not funny, Artie. The ultraviolet stands a good chance of frying the plankton in the Arctic ocean. That’s the bottom of the food chain. No plankton, no krill, and pretty soon no fish, no seals, no sea lions, no whales.”
Artie pulled out his yellow pad. “The world’s going to hell,” he muttered.
Connie slid one of the printouts across the table. “That’s only the beginning of the bad news. Most of the forests will be gone within fifty years, ditto the animals that depend on them.”
Artie read a few paragraphs.
“We’re not going to do a once-over-lightly, are we?”
She looked offended. “Hell, no. Not when we’ve got a chance to make a difference.”
The last time Artie had heard the phrase was fifteen years before, when he had dropped four hundred on an est seminar—the seminar assistants had chirped it like a mantra. Connie still wasn’t Connie, he thought clinically, but it was more subtle this time, less confrontational.
Artie waved at the books. “That’s a lot to absorb for the series.”
Connie had gone back to reading. “Meaning am I going to be the one who’s stuck with the research? Probably—but I don’t mind. Really.”
“Believe me, Connie, I didn’t plan—”
“Hey, it’s not my kid who’s gone AWOL.”
Artie’s phone suddenly started ringing and he picked up. A confused Richard Hall asked why he’d changed his mind and taken the printout with him. Artie denied it and Hall was silent for a moment, then said he’d talked to the secretary for the department, who claimed that Artie had returned and told her he’d left the manuscript behind in Hall’s locked office and that he needed it. She’d checked his ID, then sent a guard back with him.
“It wasn’t me,” Artie said slowly.
Hall now sounded angry. Both the secretary and the guard had given a detailed description, down to the clothes Artie had been wearing. It didn’t matter a rat’s ass to him if Artie wanted to keep the printout, he just didn’t want to be jerked around.