Koontz, Dean - The Fall of the Dream Machine Read online

  "Follow me," McGivey said. "Showing is better than telling"

  He walked behind the big man, down the hall, into an elevator. They dropped like a stone, landed like a feather.

  This is an underground installation, isn't it?"

  "Yes," McGivey said as the doors slid open. "But how did you know?"

  "You're operating against Show, which is tantamount to working against the Government itself. You wouldn't be holding your offices in a skyscraper, yet we dropped a great number of stories. That leaves only one possibility."

  "Very good. Andrew told me you were bright, sensitive."

  Mike looked for sarcasm on the man's face, but he found none. The remark had been sincere.

  They stepped from the elevator into a room filled with machines.

  Machines of blue steel, cold . . .

  Machines of brass . . .

  Machines clinging to the ceiling like flies . . .

  Machines crouched on the floor and next to the walls like roaches ready to flee . . .

  "Well spend a great deal of time in this room, Mr. Jorgova."

  "Mike," he corrected, remembering McGivey's similar kindness of a few minutes before.

  "Okay, Mike. We'll spend a great deal of time here— changing your identity."

  Somehow, he did not like the phrase. He stiffened.

  "Oh," the doctor hastened to reassure, "not your personality or your concept of yourself. That won't be touched. But other things. Your retina pattern, the exact composition of your blood. Other things. When you leave here, all police files on you will be useless. You will be able to walk by a hundred robo-detects without activating any of them."

  Mike felt his muscles relaxing. Here it was, assurance that he would return to the real world. They would be sending him after Lisa. They would not be spending all this time and money on him if he were only being stuck behind a desk somewhere. His life was in his own hands; his life was his own for the first time. A few changes, a few erasures, a few new etchings on his body, and he would be the sole master of himself and what he did. And the knowledge was frightening.

  The me blade smashed through the door, withdrew, smashed again. There was shouting outside: firemen ordering other firemen about, police hollering at a curious crowd, a man—hysterical.

  The door gave, toppled inward.

  They dashed through the darkened entrance foyer, into the shadow-filled living room where shades of night hid everything.

  The couch stood in blackness.

  The new-mod striped chair was a sleeping zebra.

  The civilian, the hysterical one, led the others to the winding stairway and upward.

  They found her in the bedroom, sitting under the aura. Her eyes were two gray and motionless circles slashed out of a storm sky and pasted to her withered face.

  "My sweet God!" the man cried, grabbing her hands, dropping them instantly with distaste.

  "How long?" one of the firemen asked.

  "I’ve been out of town on Show business for eight days. It was only last night that 1 noticed her answers to my questions over the phone were very limited in vocabulary—"

  "Which indicated a robo-answerer," the fireman finished.

  They turned off the aura. Her eyes moved not at all. Her lips quivered, however. Gray, vacant eyes . . . They put her on a stretcher, covered her with a blanket, rushed her outside through the people and the snow to the waiting ambulance. He crawled in beside her. She looked sixty; she was thirty. A latent Empathist. An Empathist! If Show ever found out that his wife was an Empathist, he would be fired—even though it had been Show that made her what she was. In a way, it would be better if she died.

  She was an Empathist. She had become so involved in the toto-experience of Show that she had lost touch with reality, become—almost—a Performer. A vegetable. A zombie.

  The siren wailed.

  Snow smashed onto the windscreen, was wiped off.

  And she died before they could begin intravenous feeding. . . .

  There were a great many dark-skinned Mexicans in the white-walled room. It made Farmer nervous. Dark people always made his skin crawl. He wished he could go into the rec room and sit under the aura, but he had used up his four hours a day viewing time. Show employees were restricted in the use of the aura. He thought that was ridiculous. After all, he was working for Show! Yet the special privileges appealed to him, the position and the money. And if one did not work for Show, one did not work, for Show was the owner or controller of all industries and all businesses. The great majority sat in their homes, living on Dole (which was now a considerable sum per individual per year), functioning as the buyers of society, responding to the subliminals. There was not enough challenge in that for him. Even though there was the use of unrestricted aura in civilian life,

  A tape-pellet spun out of the metal console before him, rolled down a gleaming aluminum tube into the player. The machine spoke to them. Every dark eye in the room faced the desk. "These have been found as acceptable draftees: Gonzales, Pedro; Hebiva, Alonzo; and Gonzales, Maria."

  The metal voice clicked off.

  "Will the proper parents step forward to receive their monies," he droned.

  Six dark people came. The others, moaning and whispering, walked slowly, tiredly to the exit. They were poor people, unable to subscribe to Show. All Show meant to them was a fortune in return for yet another unwanted child. And they had lost; their child was not good enough. Most of them would take it out on their children, on the children that had lost them the fortune.

  Leonard Farmer opened the center of his drawer and withdrew the money cards, slipping each into a player and letting it cry out its denomination: "Five!" and "Thousand!" and "Hundred!" He looked up at the dark faces. It was time to buy some babies. . . .

  V

  The next day was Tuesday.

  Mike woke to the music that filtered in through unseen grids in the wall. At first it was soft, the gentler parts of Scheherazade. Then it was the storm scene from the same piece." When he was completely awake, yawning his last yawns, Bolero swept in, pulling him along in its greater and greater pools of intensity. Finally, string music—undefined—sang beautifully in the background.

  The entire room was constructed to cater to any demand —a mechanical genie whose storehouse was endless. He could get drinks, alcoholic and non-alcoholic, food of every description and some kinds it was best not to describe, music tapes, education tapes, the newstapes from all seven major news centers, even books, though he could not read them. Reading was a lost art. Everything spoke to the modern citizen, nothing merely showed. He punched for orange juice, a raw egg, and a serving of toast. When these things came, he broke the egg in the glass of juice, sipped the concoction between bites of crisp, browned bread.

  The message grid went ding-dong. He activated it. "Yes?"

  "Art here." McGivey's voice came through brittle and unreal. "We'll be starting work on your blood composition in an hour"

  "I'll be there."

  "Dial for a morning newstape," the doctor added. "Andrew Flaxen has been busy planting rumors everywhere."

  When the newstape came, Jorgova stopped eating long enough to drop it into the player. "Show star missing?" the newstape asked dramatically. The story went on to say that rumors were spreading that a second Performer was kidnapped from Show. Anaxemander Cockley, the story said, was keeping mum on the whole affair. It was noted that a replacement had already been put into Mike's old spot. A young, half-trained boy, the tape lamented. It made note that Lisa Monvasa was not on either, but a younger girl was double-billed with the new boy. Evidently, the tape went on, this substitution was necessary because of the age difference between Lisa and the new leading man.

  He shut off the tape, trembling a bit. He wondered just what Cockley would do to him if he ever caught him. And he was also terribly worried about what Cockley might do to Lisa if he suspected her of having knowledge of Mike's escape.

  It was a natural thing to worry
about Lisa. He had worried about her since they were children, through adolescence, and through years of Show. He had always, he now saw, loved her. And when he heard the story that came next on the tape, his worry grew stronger. A. Limey, chief Show officer, would be buried that afternoon, in a closed coffin ceremony. . . .

  "What we have to do," McGivey said, "is change a few of the chemical agglomerations in your blood, change your genes and the very marrow of your bones to insure that slightly different blood will be produced from now on, to be certain that your new blood index is permanent."

  He was resigned to things like this. Though the machinery frightened him and the words the doctor spoke were unnerving, he had accepted the fact that he must undergo whatever they asked of him. His mind was busy trying to answer other questions now. "Why did Flaxen break the story of my escape?"

  "He has been fighting Show for too long not to gloat on a success."

  "But doesn't Cockley own the newstapes? I thought Show had the country in a vise grip."

  "Cockley did try to take over the newstapes once, but it only resulted in the rise of little, underground tapes that challenged him more strongly than the giants had. He has found it easier to subsidize the seven major newstapes and let them tape a little that is unkind than to fight them and give rise to genuine anti-Show sentiment. You will notice the tone of the news story is such that Show seems the underdog, trampled upon by mysterious bulllies. That tone is intentional."

  "But why does Flaxen want to hurt Show? I'm still confused about the reason for this Revolution."

  McGivey smiled. "Andrew is an aesthetic man. We all are, we Revolutionaries. Romanticists. Show offends his sensibilities, the world Show has created offends his sensibilities. He is against it just as people long ago were against television."

  "But he can't win. No one did away with television."

  "We have no television now," McGivey said smugly. He injected some pink liquid into Mike's arm. It stung for only a second.

  "But Show replaced television—and Show is worse!"

  "And Show can be replaced too, perhaps by something better this time."

  He tried to think about that for a moment, but the drug pulled him down into blackness. . . .

  It was Tuesday morning.

  It came to Lisa that if Mike could get away, so could she. If Mike could leave Cockley and all his detectives confounded, she could too. She had packed a small bag with the essential clothes, a few synthe-ham sandwiches that she had punched for that morning, and a knife she had retained from the dinner tray. The last was only heavy plastic, but it was sharp, and it was deadly.

  Her only large window looked across the landscaped lawn that surrounded Cockley Towers. It was open now on the pretense of her liking fresh air and not the machine-cooled, machine-flavored, machine-scented stuff that seeped through the little metal wire mouths in the ceiling. There was a blacony on the apartment below hers; they did not trust balconies to everyone, and especially not to those who might run away. She could crawl out of the window, drop to the balcony below. From there, she could reach out to the branches of a large weeping willow—branches that were firm and steady. Then she would have the great city in which to lose herself. And perhaps in which to find Mike.

  She was certain it would be easy.

  She was dressed in stretch slacks, a tight and comfortable black sweater, and a dark brown suede jacket. Hefting the small bag of what she considered essentials, she drew the drapes completely away from the open window . . .

  Chunk!

  Eight thick bars of steel slammed out of the top of the window, embedded themselves in the bottom, sending cement chips and dust mushrooming up in an ugly little cloud. Somewhere in the hallway outside there was a soft ding-ading-ading. There were the footfalls of running men.

  She suddenly wondered what she would do with all those ham sandwiches.

  And she wept.

  It was Tuesday afternoon.

  "All the tips came from public phones," the small dark man who was Howard Connie, Show detective, said. He picked nervously at the goatee that dotted his chin, looked up at his boss, back down at his folded hands.

  "That tells me absolutely nothing," Cockley snapped. "What about the dead helicopter guards?"

  "Were still working on that. The helicopter lights were knocked out with a vibra-beam, standard model, untraceable. Fredrick's body yielded no clues. His past was carefully constructed to fool the computer. When the machine was set upon it without any duty but to discover its flaws, it canceled the thing out in four minutes. Maybe we should process position applications one at a time instead of by the thousands, a maximum check instead of a minimum. The guards were killed by a floater. It must have been vibra-negative."

  "That should narrow it down," Cockley said, edging forward on his seat.

  "It does. To thirty-six thousand, three hundred and twelve. There are that many vibra-negative cars around, counting this country only."

  Cockley stood, leaned across the desk. "I want to narrow that list down. Code the names of the owners of those cars; use a computer. I want all the names of those who were obviously somewhere else deleted from the list. Scratch the names of those whose cars were in garages for repairs or in storage."

  Connie stood. "Yes, Mr. Cockley." He crossed to the door. "Oh, and it was a black floater. Some of the paint chips we found on the one corpse were black."

  "Then rule out all but black floaters before you start," Cockley said, smelling a quick end to the search. "I want that car found in twenty-four hours!"

  It was Tuesday evening.

  President Roger Nimron looked through the stacks of info-tapes there. When he found what he wanted, he turned to go back to his easy chair and its player, but his eye was caught by the movement of the falling snow. He walked to the window. The White House lawn was covered by a calcimine blanket. The trees drooped—all those different trees from all over the world, subjected to Nature's most beautiful paint brush. Winter meant a lot of things to him. It was during the winter months that his wife had brought him a daughter. It was during the winter that the last President had died, leaving him in office.

  The useless office; the antiquated office.

  He stood considering the history of his position in relationship to its present importance and was somewhere up near Eisenhower when the thing struck the windows. He realized he had been vaguely aware of it as it had come spinning through the air above the lawn, ramming snow-flakes that got in its way, roughly the size of a football. But it had not drawn his attention, what with his mind wrapped in reverie and in watching the chiaroscuro patterns of snow against darkness. Then, wuff! it had struck the window very softly, its suction cup legs tightening against the pane. It was a great ugly spider thing, belly swollen. A small extension slid from its underside and began burning an entrance in the window.

  Nimron backed to his easy chair, his voice caught and lost somewhere in the bottom of his throat, unable to pass constricted muscles.

  The spider machine gobbled a hole in the glass, stuck a leg through.

  Another leg . . .

  Then it was inside the glass and onto the wall. Its head swiveled, stopped when it caught him. A dart spun from its mouth instead of silky web matter. The dart buzzed slowly, seeking. He brought the chair pillow up just in time, used it as a shield.

  The spider fired again.

  Again, he blocked the dart.

  And finally he was able to scream.

  The door burst inward, admitting two Secret Service guards.

  The spider went up in a puff of smoke. But not before it detonated itself, blasting out part of the wall and killing one of the guards who had ventured too close.

  Snow drifted in through the charred plaster. . . .

  It was Tuesday night.

  Mike was fed intravenously and put to bed, with his new blood.

  Lisa undressed in the dark and stood by the window bars, looking at the snow, at the city. . . .

  Roger Nimr
on felt safer now. He and his family were three miles below the Appalachians in quarters that Anaxemander Cockley had never heard of.

  Here and there, dotted in different towns and villages, thirty-nine Empathists were being discovered, being rushed to hospitals, recovering or dying. Mostly dying. Fifteen thousand Empathists a year now. But what are fifteen thousand to seven hundred million?

  The snow was still falling. It was getting deep. . . .

  VI

  "Well?" Cockley asked.

  Howard Connie fingered the card-tape of figures, facts, and conclusion—all machine calculated, drawn, and imagined. "There are only nine thousand, two hundred and two black floaters equipped with vibra-negative. One hundred and twelve of these were known to be in garages. Ninety-four were stored for vacationing owners. Seven thousand, three hundred and forty-one were too distant to have been involved in the kidnapping. One thousand, two hundred and fifty-four were sitting in used floater lots or junkyards. That leaves four hunded and one black, vibra-negative floaters to choose from."

  "I want every one checked," Cockley said. "Look for missing scraps of paint, dents on air systems where bones might have struck, dried blood in the air system. You might have to steal some of them to examine them closely enough."

  "We have a blanket search warrant that covers the nation."

  "Don't use it. I want this done secretly. I don't want the rabbit running before we have him in our sights."

  "Yes, Mr. Cockley." Connie exited, leaving the old man to himself.

  Cockley turned to the player on his desk, flipped it on and settled down to review a problem that was defying solution. The words of the machine hummed past his ears. The president had disappeared. And the spider had not killed him. Somehow, Nimron had gotten away to some sordid little hole which even Show detectives could not uncover. It was infuriating. He had tried to kill the man but had only succeeded in scaring him into hiding.