|
The client said, "Should I go on down there and, uh, get undressed?"
"You might want to wait," Allison told him. "They’re not quite
ready yet."
"All right," the client said. "Whatever you say."
"It’s just that, you might have noticed, it’s pretty cool in here,"
Allison said. "Have to keep it that way. The equipment, you know."
"Yes." The client nodded. "It is a little chilly."
Actually there was a visible sheen of sweat on his face, but that
almost certainly had nothing to do with the temperature.
"They’ll let us know when it’s time," Allison assured him. "Won’t
be long now."
At the other end of the main control console, the man named Burns
silently damned Allison for a mealy-mouthed fool. It wasn’t going
to hurt this overprivileged jackoff to stand around the tank room
naked and shivering for a few extra minutes. Now he’d be hanging
out in here, asking questions and generally being a pain in the
ass, for that much longer. Trust Allison, though, to suck up to
the clients.
"I have to admit I’m a little nervous," the client admitted in
a voice that suggested in fact he was a lot nervous. He rubbed
his hands together and then shoved them deep into the pockets
of his expensive-looking gray suit.
He was a medium-sized man, a little on the short side; Burns,
remembering the TV and netzine shots of a decade or so ago, had
thought he’d be bigger. But then the pictures hadn’t been very
clear, or given much time, the news people no doubt figuring that
the public wasn’t interested in yet another incomprehensible financial
scandal. Considering how he’d gotten away with it, they must have
been right.
He looked no older than thirty-five or forty, though Burns knew
he had to be well past that bracket. His thick dark wavy hair
showed no gray, and his wide evenly tanned face was without lines
or wrinkles. That didn’t mean anything, though. Nowadays people
wore the faces and bodies they could afford.
And it went without saying that this one could afford plenty;
otherwise he wouldn’t be here. There were very few people in the
country who could pay for a private timetap, even the ordinary
passive–and legal–variety. As for the kind of specialized service
Mr. Tedesco offered his clients . . .
The door from the hallway slid open and a stocky dark-faced man,
dressed in white coveralls, stepped into the control room. "Devereaux,"
Allison greeted him. "I believe you’ve met–"
"Yeah." Devereaux nodded perfunctorily in the client’s direction
without really looking at him. "They in yet?" he asked Burns.
Burns shook his head. "Should be any minute."
Almost immediately the speaker on the wall said, "Control, this
is Projection. We have a tap."
"Ah," Allison said. "Here we go."
He touched a couple of keys. One of the two big viewscreens mounted
above the console came to blurry black-and-gray life, quickly
resolving into a view of a good-sized room, rather plainly appointed, where a number of people were seating themselves at
a long table.
"St. Joseph, Missouri. Monday morning, April third, eighteen eighty-two.
Like to take a look?" Allison asked.
The client moved eagerly to stand beside Allison, watching the
screen, where the picture was now panning from right to left,
giving glimpses of a couple of young boys and then a middle-aged
woman in a high-collared dress, before settling on a gaunt bearded
man who sat at the head of the table. "My God," the client said,
"it’s him, isn’t it?"
The bearded man’s lips moved. The picture blurred again, cleared
briefly in a close-up of a blue-patterned plate on a plain white
surface, and then suddenly went black. Allison said, "Shit!" and
Devereaux said, "What the hell?"
The client bent forward, staring at the darkened screen. "What’s
wrong?" His voice had gone up almost an octave.
Burns was studying the bank of instruments next to the screen.
"Let’s have the sound," he told Allison.
Allison touched another key and a high nasal voice filled the
room: "–we give thanks for the food with which you have blessed
us–-"
"It would appear," Burns said dryly, "that our man has merely
bowed his head and closed his eyes."
"–in Jesus’ name, amen." The screen lit up again and the voice
added, "Zee, would you pass the biscuits, please?"
"Praying," Allison said. "I’ll be damned. Guy kills people, holds
up banks and trains, but he says prayers at the breakfast table
righteous as you please. How about that?"
The client was still staring at the screen, which now showed food
being loaded onto a plate. He said, "Could you show him again?"
Devereaux snorted. Burns said, "This isn’t a TV show. What you
see on that screen is what the host sees, nothing more or less.
We have no control over what he chooses to look at."
"Not until we have an active tap," Allison added.
"Oh. Right. Sorry." The client flushed slightly. "Mr. Tedesco
explained all that. I don’t know what I was thinking."
The bearded man was on screen again, seeming to look directly
at them. He had deep-set eyes and a keen, rather disturbing gaze.
"More gravy?" he asked.
Another voice, male and deeper, replied from somewhere outside
the host’s field of vision: "Thanks, Jesse, don’t mind if we do.
Do we, Bob?"
Burns pushed himself back from the console and swung around in
his chair. "Better get on down there," he advised the client.
"Yes." The client, however, made no move to leave. "Uh, does anyone
ever, well–" He cleared his throat. "You know. Not make it back."
Burns sighed. "There’s no question of ‘making it back,’ " he said
patiently. "Remember, you’re not actually going anywhere. You’ll
be right down the hall, in the tank, the whole time. I’m sure
Mr. Tedesco went over this with you."
"Well, sure." The client made a fidgety face. "I know I don’t
go anywhere physically. But my mind, my identity, is going to be off in the past, well
over a century before I was born–"
"We don’t really know that," Allison interjected. "It may be a
telepathic link of some sort. Nobody really knows how it works."
"Whatever." The client waved an impatient hand. "I’m going to
be inside the host’s head, right? I’m going to be taking over
Robert Ford’s mind and body, for a little time. I’ll be him."
"What you’re asking," Burns said, "is what if the host gets killed
while you’re still on tap."
The client nodded. Burns said, "Then the answer is, we don’t know.
It’s never happened, here or anywhere else. And we go to great
lengths to make sure it doesn’t happen. That’s why we’ll be monitoring
vital signs, ready to yank you out if anything goes wrong." He
indicated Devereaux with a tilt of his head. "That’s also why
you’ll have backup along."
"Anyway," Allison put in, "there’s nothing to worry about in this
case. Nothing’s going to happen to your host, because history
records that nothing did. Not on this particular day."
That, Burns thought, was a neat bit of reassuring rubber-science
bullshit. Maybe the past was nailed down and maybe it wasn’t;
there were people ready to argue either way–but so far nobody
had been crazy enough to take a pry-bar to history in order to
find out. In fact that was the best single reason for protecting
the client at all costs: lose the poor bastard back there, and
you might somehow lose yourself and your whole world as well.
The client continued to stand there, looking unhappy. "I tell
you what," Burns said, thinking screw this. "If you don’t want
to do it, it’s not too late to cancel. Just say the word."
He gestured at the screen. "Or we can do a regular passive tap,
if you like. Instead of going into the tank, you can go to the
VR room and put on the helmet, and we’ll jack you through to Projection.
You’ll get almost the same trip–see everything the host sees,
hear everything he hears, experience almost all his sensations.
No risk at all," Burns said, keeping his voice absolutely neutral.
"Elderly history professors and wimpy little graduate students
do it all the time. It’s even legal."
He folded his arms and stared at the client. "Of course, you’ll
only be an observer, along for the ride. At the end, you still
won’t know what it’s really like to do it. Will you?"
For a moment Burns thought he’d blown it, pushed too hard. The
client’s face went red and then pale. But then he said, "You’re
right." His head moved in a jerky nod. "Not much point in doing
it, really, if there’s no risk."
He turned toward the door. Halfway there he paused and looked
once more at the bearded man on the viewscreen. "You know," he
said, "I’ve always felt a certain kinship with him."
When the door closed behind the client Burns said, "Sure. He made
his pile ripping off banks, too."
Devereaux was laughing soundlessly, his shoulders shaking. Allison
let out his breath with a soft whistling sound. "Burns, you crazy
son of a bitch. One of these days you’ll give a client too much
shit and he’ll walk. Then you’ll be doing some walking of your
own, while Mr. Tedesco makes sure you never work in timetaps again.
What then?"
He gave Burns a mean little grin. "You won’t like unemployment.
They work your ass off in those compulsory labor camps."
Devereaux came across the room and studied the big screen, where
the bearded man was now ladling something onto his plate.
"So that’s Jesse James," he mused. "Bad-looking mother. You know,
I never pictured him with a beard."
"He may have grown it as a disguise," Burns said. "He was doing
that sort of thing at the time. Calling himself Thomas Howard,
and the like."
"You’ve got to quit letting the clients get to you," Allison said
to Burns. "I know they can drive you crazy. Like this one Mr.
Tedesco told me about, wanted to do Jack the Ripper. Mr. Tedesco
said he must have talked for an hour, going over it again and
again, explaining all the different reasons it couldn’t be done–starting
with the basic impossibility of tapping a host who’s never been
identified–"
"They still don’t know who old Jack was, huh?" Devereaux asked.
Allison shook his head. "Besides, there are no really accurate
time-and-place coordinates for any of his murders. Anyway," he
said, "at the end, all this silly asshole said was, ‘All right,
how much is it going to cost me?’ "
Burns was watching one of the secondary monitor screens, which
showed a not very clear view of the tank room. The client was
standing beside one of the tanks, unbuttoning his shirt. A coverall-clad
attendant stood by, holding the suit jacket, waiting for the rest.
"Looks like he’s going through with it," Burns remarked.
"Sure. With the money he’s put down for this little adventure,
he’s not going to back out now. Mr. Tedesco doesn’t give refunds."
Allison shook his head again, more slowly. "Why do they do it?"
he said, surprising Burns. "Guys like this–" He jerked a thumb
at the monitor, where the client could now be seen peeling off
his underwear. "They’ve got the brains to make the big scores,
money to do anything they want. Wouldn’t you think they could
find something smarter to do?"
"It’s the rush," Burns said. "The rush they hope they’ll get from doing something clear off the
normal scale. They’re already at the top of whatever they do professionally,
so there’s not much of the old rush left there. And they’ve already
tried just about everything else they ever wondered about."
"You ask me," Devereaux said, "they’re trying to prove how long
their dicks are."
"That too," Burns agreed.
The tank-room monitor screen now showed a nude figure struggling
into a shiny one-piece suit, aided by a couple of attendants.
"Well," Allison said, "it’s their money. If it was me, though,
I sure as hell wouldn’t waste it playing cowboys. If I could afford
to spring for a private timetap, I’d tap Jack Kennedy while he
was screwing Marilyn Monroe."
Burns winced. Even Allison ought to know better–
"Control," the speaker called, "this is Projection. We have acquired
backup tap. Repeat, we have backup tap."
The second big viewscreen lit up, displaying a picture almost
identical to the first, except that the viewpoint appeared to
be a meter to the right and a little lower. Devereaux said, "Okay,
time to do it," and headed for the door.
When he was gone Burns said, "Damn it, Allison, don’t ever mention Kennedy in front of Devereaux."
"Because of Dallas? For God’s sake," Allison said irritably, "I’m
getting so tired of that shit. Whatever he did in Dallas–"
"What Devereaux did in Dallas," Burns said in a hard flat voice,
"was what had to be done. The client flipped out, the hit was
falling apart, maybe the whole world was about to come unwrapped,
who knows? All right, things got messy, there were some tracks
that didn’t get cleaned up. I’m telling you, Devereaux did what
had to be done. You weren’t there. You weren’t even here."
He picked up his headset and slipped it on, shutting out any reply.
After a moment Allison shrugged and put on his own headset, switching
off the speaker. He could speak to Burns now, via the headset’s
built-in microphone, but he made no attempt to do so.
There was no time left for conversation anyway. Down in the tank
room the attendants were fitting the bulbous black helmet over
the client’s head, while over by the second tank Devereaux was
suiting up unassisted. Burns watched the monitor as both men,
now indistinguishably suited and helmeted, climbed into their
tanks and were sealed in.
Now the attendants busied themselves at the control panels on
the wall. There was a quick loud beep in the headset and the instrument
panel between the main viewscreens began to come alive with flickering
digital readouts. Burns studied the display for a couple of minutes
and then keyed his microphone. "Control to Projection," he said.
"Okay to activate backup."
He watched Devereaux’s display carefully–you always sent the backup
man through first, just in case there was something nasty and
unprecedented waiting back down the line; if anything ever did
go wrong, it was understood that the backup man was more expendable
than the client–until the voice in the headset said, "Projection
to Control. Backup tap now active."
Burns waited. After a moment the view on the right screen dropped
suddenly to the tablecloth, and a quick barking cough sounded
in the headset. Jesse James’s voice said, "You all right, Charlie?"
"Backup confirms control," Burns said into the mike. "Send in
the client."
He expected the readouts to go momentarily crazy–they usually
did on insertion–but the bounce, when it came, wasn’t as big as
he’d anticipated. No doubt this particular host was almost as
shit-scared as the client. Looking at Jesse James’s restless wary
eyes, Burns couldn’t blame either of them. He had to wait several
long seconds before the client remembered to raise his hand–or
rather the host’s–and scratch his nose, in the prearranged signal
confirming he had control of the host’s body.
"I swear," Jesse James commented, "you two been as jumpy as a
couple of old cats this morning. Didn’t you get enough sleep?"
The James family appeared to be almost done with breakfast. Country
people, brought up to the rhythms of farm life, they wouldn’t
be inclined to dawdle over the morning table, never mind that
the head of the household was now in a line of work with more
flexible hours. Allison said, "Looks like we cut this one pretty
close." He glanced up at the twin clock readouts–nowtime and taptime–and
then at Burns. "Should have started sooner."
Burns didn’t reply. Maybe Allison was right, but it didn’t matter
now. Besides, given the duration limits on an active tap–the record
so far was a little under an hour, but nobody was going to risk
taking a client anywhere near maximum–you always had to shave
the timing on the thin side. There would be unimaginable hell
to pay if a client found himself being jerked out of tap just
before the big moment.
At the head of the table Jesse James rose to his feet. "Mighty
good breakfast, Zee," he said to the woman. "Bob, Charlie, let’s
go into the front room. We need to talk some business."
The client’s readout numbers danced frantically, pulse and blood
pressure climbing almost to danger levels, as the three men went
into the next room. At least the client didn’t seem to be having
any trouble controlling the host body. It helped that he and Robert
Ford were close in height and build. Devereaux’s display hardly
flickered.
The front room evidently served a dual function of living room
and spare bedroom; there were several chairs and the usual pictures
and ornaments of a nineteenth-century parlor, but a small bed
or cot stood against one wall. It was a close, stuffy place, and
as Jesse closed the door behind them he said, "Sure is hot, ain’t
it?"
He shrugged out of his jacket, revealing a pair of holstered revolvers
hanging from a wide leather belt. "Now about that bank in Platte
City," he began, and turned to hang the jacket over the back of
a chair. "Frank thinks we ought to ride over there tomorrow and–"
He paused, staring at the far wall of the room, where a large
framed print of a black race horse was hung. "Damn," he said,
"that picture’s all dusty. Hold on."
Picking up a large feather duster from a corner shelf, he started
to cross the room. Then he stopped, peering out the windows at
the dusty street outside. There was no one in sight, but he said
uneasily, "Somebody could see me from out there, couldn’t they?
I’m trying to lay low these days, since the governor put out that
reward on me."
He began unbuckling his gunbelt. "Better not give them anything
to talk about," he said. "Don’t need folks around here wondering
what kind of man wears his guns inside his own house."
He laid the gunbelt carefully on the bed, leaving the pistols
in their holsters, and turned back to recover the feather duster.
"This’ll just take a minute," he said apologetically. "I’m awful
fond of that picture. Had me a horse like that, no law could catch
me."
But the picture hung too high on the wall, and after a couple
of ineffective dabs with the duster he pulled up a chair and climbed
onto it, standing with his back to the room, flicking the duster
through fussy little arcs. "Looks crooked," he muttered.
The client stood rooted in place; he hadn’t moved since entering
the room. Christ, Burns thought, don’t freeze, you dumb son of
a bitch, you’ve been through this a dozen times on the VR simulator,
you know exactly what to do–
The view on the client’s screen tilted slightly for a second,
while his display registered a small sharp pain spike. Burns guessed
Devereaux had kicked him. A moment later he began to move, appearing
at the edge of Devereaux’s field of view, taking slow weird sleepwalker
steps. He did have his gun in his hand, though; that was something.
Up on his chair, Jesse James had tucked his duster under one arm
and was now fiddling with the picture, evidently trying to make
it hang properly. "Say," he said without looking around, "does
this look straight to you?"
A couple of meters behind him, the client was raising Robert Ford’s
heavy revolver, holding it out at arm’s length as if on a target
range. His face was absolutely white. Beside the screen, the digital
display seemed on the verge of meltdown.
"Uh oh," Allison said softly.
The big .45 came into view at the bottom of the client’s screen.
It was wobbling like a leaf in a windstorm. The hammer was already
all the way back; a wonder the idiot hadn’t shot himself in the
foot. As the client struggled to steady the crude sights on the
man on the chair, Burns felt a chilly sinking sensation.
"He’s losing it," Allison said. "He’s going to blow it."
Up on his chair Jesse James said, "Didn’t you boys hear me? I
said, does this look straight to you? I can’t tell from up here."
Any moment, Burns realized, the outlaw was going to turn around,
and then it would all go to shit. "Shoot," he whispered uselessly.
"God damn it, shoot."
"What in the hell?" Jesse’s head began to turn. "What’s wrong
with you two this morning?"
"That’s it," Allison said.
There was a big loud boom in the headset. Jesse James stopped moving. The duster fell to
the floor. His feet took a couple of aimless little half steps
and then he toppled off the chair and crashed to the floor and
lay still.
"Back of the head," Allison observed. "Right behind the ear. Damn,
I wish I could shoot like Devereaux."
The client was still holding the unfired revolver out in front
of him. His mouth hung open; his eyes were huge. He seemed not
to notice as Devereaux carefully but quickly took the gun from
his hand. "Did I do it?" he asked in a high childish voice. "I
did it, didn’t I?"
"You did it." Devereaux was now pushing the butt of Charles Ford’s
still-smoking Colt into the client’s unresisting hand. "Now we’ve
got to get out of here."
"I did it," the client said wonderingly. "I did it. I shot Jesse
James."
From the next room came the sounds of cries and running feet.
Burns hit the microphone key. "Control to Projection," he said.
"Extract client and backup, and terminate taps."
Projection came back in less than a minute: "Client and backup
recovered." Both viewscreens went blank and Projection added,
"Taps terminated. All systems clear."
Burns started to remove his headset, remembered, and keyed the
tank room. "Hey," he said, and on the monitor screen the attendants
turned to look toward the camera. "Take Devereaux out of there,"
he told them, "and give him time to get away before the client
comes out."
He pulled off the headset and tossed it on top of the console.
Allison was already punching keys and flipping switches, shutting
down the various systems, and Burns joined in. "Jesus," Allison
said, "what a mess that was."
Burns shrugged. "It’s over. Another day’s work."
"And one we’ll never have to do again. That’s one good thing about
this job, isn’t it? They’re all one-time operations. You never
have to repeat, because it’s impossible."
He stood up and stretched. "Of course that little fact is also
going to put us both out of work one of these days. We’ve sure
used up a lot of the big hits," he said. "Unless somebody finds
a way to extend the range farther back."
"They will," Burns said. "After all, ten years ago the maximum
range for a tap was twenty-four hours. It was just a curiosity."
"I hope you’re right. Even another fifty years would bring in
a bunch of good ones. Mr. Tedesco says he gets approached all
the time, guys wanting to reserve the Lincoln hit."
Allison laughed. "Could get pretty strange, though, if they stretch
it back too far. What if some day we have to do Julius Caesar?
Can Devereaux speak Latin?"
Burns turned off the last switch, checked the console once more,
and stood up. "I’m out of here," he announced.
"Not waiting for the client?" Allison asked as they walked toward
the door. "First Devereaux, now you. He’s going to be very disappointed."
"I’m sure you’ll console him."
"Hey," Allison said, "somebody’s damn well got to do it. Right
now he’s still in shock–he sort of believes he did the hit, but he doesn’t
really have a handle on it. Somebody has to do some stroking,
settle him down, make sure he leaves here absolutely convinced
that he killed Jesse James. Otherwise maybe his rich buddies hear
him voice a certain dissatisfaction with Mr. Tedesco’s services,
and that won’t do at all."
"Uh huh," Burns said, pushing open the door. "But that’s not the
only reason, is it?"
"Hell, no," Allison said calmly. "It’s a chance to do some cultivating
and bonding. What’s wrong with that? The client may be an asshole,
but he’s an asshole with money and power. I don’t plan to do this
shit for the rest of my life."
Out in the corridor Burns said, "Well, don’t stay up too late
drinking with the client and telling him what a hero he is. We’ve
got another job coming up next week, and we need to start working
on the program tomorrow."
"So soon?" Allison groaned. "I was hoping to get a little time
off. What’s this one?"
"New York," Burns said, locking the control-room door. "Guy named
Malcolm X."
"Really?" Allison’s forehead furrowed. "I thought we already did
him. Last month, wasn’t it?"
"You’re thinking of the other one," Burns told him. "In Memphis."
"Oh, yeah. Say," Allison said, "did you remember to turn off the
lights?" |
