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

  "I find it a shame," he said, "that you no longer hold one of the leading roles."

  "I find it restful!" she snapped back.

  She was wearing red leotards and a red top: crimson lady. A cinnabar duchess. Her hair flashed wildly in contrast.

  "Oh, I guess so. The day-to-day routine would get tiring."

  To say the least." She picked up a drink, sipped it without offering him one. In fact, she had yet to offer him a seat.

  God, he thought. He had never seen her cutting, sarcastic like this. She had always been rather meek when speaking with anyone but himself. She was dissatisfied, and she let it be known. It made him feel good. She would be willing to run.

  "Perhaps when one of the current Performers matures, you can be brought back into the script."

  "I sincerely hope not."

  "But you'd be a major star again. You'd have a leading man."

  "I have a leading man at the moment," she said, looking to the black dots of the microphones. "He is more than enough, thank you. He is more than enough—to endure."

  His mind spun madly. She had a leading man? What was that supposed to mean? It had been aimed directly at the microphones; she had spoken the last few words especially loud. Stopping his frantic thoughts before they whirled him into actions he could not afford, he decided it was time to get her into the hall so that they might speak without fear of being overhead. "I think our roof is leaking," he said, trying to sound as sincere as possible.

  She turned to look at him directly for the first time. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

  He flushed. "Nothing obtuse. I meant that the snow seems to be melting and leaking through the roof. There is a water stain in the ceiling of the hallway. Look here." He stepped into the hall, motioned to her.

  "Water stains interest only contractors and psychiatrists."

  "No. Look here," he said. "See if I'm imagining things."

  She sighed and walked into the hall. "Where?"

  His heart skipped a beat, hit one, skipped another. "I'm Mike," he said quietly, steadily.

  "What?"

  "Mike Jorgova. I have had plastic surgery, a voice change, blood index altering. The real Malone is dead. I—killed him."

  Her eyes flashed anger, deep and black. She stared a moment longer, and she allowed her eye to soften as she found no hint of a betrayal in the words he had spoken. "You're trying to trick me," she said unsurely.

  "Lisa, please listen and try to understand. I am Mike. I have come back to get you out of here. I must have your cooperation fast!"

  "Even if you are telling the truth, how could you free me?"

  "Tonight, in the basement garage, there will be a floater and a driver waiting. The floater is one of ours; a switch will be pulled this afternoon in a Show parking area in another part of the city. The driver will be in the trunk when the floater is parked; he will let himself out and be ready for us."

  She wanted to believe him. He could see that written clearly in the wrinkles of exasperation at the corners of her eyes, in the furrows of her troubled forehead. "I'll have a— guest tonight," she said.

  "Who?"

  "Anaxemander Cockley."

  He choked. Things rapidly swirled into clarity within his mind. "Your—leading man?"

  "Yes." Her voice was tiny again, the voice of the old Lisa.

  "I'll kill him!"

  "I won't stop you."

  He was breathing hard. "I'll come tonight at midnight. Leave your doors slightly ajar."

  "We would be in bed then," she said bitterly, the words coming between her lips almost as steam gushing from a pipe.

  His eyes stung. He clenched his fists. "Midnight. I'll kill him." It was no longer an explanation; it was an oath.

  "You are Mike," she said, running her hand over his face, letting the fingers linger at his lips and eyes.

  "You had better get inside. We don't want to arouse their suspicions."

  She stepped back into the living room, raising her voice to be sure the mikes caught it all, every phony word. "The whole damn roof can cave in for all I care. All the snow in the world could leak through, Mr. Malone, and I would not give one little damn." The door slid shut to her command. But she smiled at him before she was gone from sight.

  He turned, found the elevator, and went down, the boy chirping in his ear about all the police in the lobby. When the doors opened, he stepped into the large, busy room where uniformed men scurried about, operating strange and ominous detection machines looking for a trace of anything —odor, powder, old chewing gum. He had taken only a few steps when the dog ran from behind a couch, snipping at his ankles and snarling.

  He tried to move.

  The dog would not let him. It was the tenant's dog, the dog on the stairs.

  "Hey!" a policeman shouted, kicking at the dog. "Get away from there!"

  The dog gave ground reluctantly, its teeth still bared, its throat still bubbling with anger.

  "Thank you," Mike said, fighting to stop the trembling in his hands.

  "That's okay, Mr. Malone. His owner was killed last evening here on the stairs. Suppose you heard about it?"

  "Yes. Just now in the elevator."

  "Messy. Certainly was messy. Blood and parts of people all over the place."

  "Any clues?" he asked.

  "None yet. Thought about turning the dog loose to see if he could turn up anything, but his going for you sort of rules out his reliability, don't it?"

  "Unless I've taken to killing in my sleep," Mike answered.

  The policeman laughed. "I think it was a shoot-out and that all parties were killed," he said a moment later, growing serious again. "The chief didn't agree at first, but even he's coming around now. This tenant met these two strangers coming into the building for God knows what reason and they drew a gun on him. He fired back, a little faster, but got his future eaten too."

  Mike was about to answer when someone announced that the doorguard's body had been found in heavy shrubs. The lobby cleared fast as police and machines sped outside to the corpse.

  He walked after them, rounded the group, and slipped Malone's carcheck into a slot on a gray utility post. He had salvaged all the cards before dumping the body down the incinerator, and now he was glad he had had the presence of mind to think of a detail like that. The card popped back up. A moment later, a green and gray floater came up through the elevator platform. He opened the door, climbed in, flipped on the air system. The car rose shakily, then held steady. Evidently, driving outward from the tower did not activate the alarm. He had never thought of that when living in the building, but now it meant something to him. It would be important later that night. Turning the wheel, he pulled onto the drive, shifted to a higher speed, and flitted toward the studios, a day of weaving through Malone's chores without revealing himself, and Cock-ley.

  It was going to snow again. The sky was gray, low and even in texture. Somewhere above lay winter. Even while Nature commanded his thoughts, a snowflake hit the windscreen. A second. Moments later, a third.

  III

  The machines auto-parked his floater. He entered the studios through the executive door with his stolen card credentials, walked down the long corridor to the hub of the studios which was as the core of an apple—the meat being the various sets and offices of lesser officials. He rose to his own office—Malone's office—where a dozen people scurried about. A girl in a see-through blouse with excellent reasons for wearing it wiggled-slid across the floor toward him.

  "Mr. Malone," she began, batting fake eyelashes and smiling. Her perfect teeth were false too. Mike speculated that her blue eyes were probably brown beneath the hue-altering contacts she wore. Indeed, there was only one thing about her that was real. And that was very real indeed.

  "Yes?"

  "Mr. Cockley says to send you up to his office the moment you come in. He says the very moment you come in!"

  "Thank you," he said. He did not call her by name, for he did not know her name.<
br />
  "Are you getting promoted again?"

  "I doubt it," he said. "This is the highest office in Show, aside from Mr. Cockley's."

  She opened her mouth to say something more, but he turned on his heel—a very military turn—and exited the way he had just entered. There was more on his mind than the staff's interpretation of what Cockley meant by the summons. He was worried. If Cockley had checked all those false leads and found none of them valuable, what would his reaction be? It would most certainly not be jovial. And what would he do to Malone? Obviously, Connie had been done away with. Would Malone be the next to go?

  All those thoughts, all those questions were still slithering through his mind when the doors to Cockley's office parted and he stepped through them. This was more than an office, really. It was the nerve center of a world. It was here that decisions were made, policies designed and carried out that would affect the entire planet. And all of them made by this one man. There was a set of Show aura projectors sitting in the corner, the deluxe I-Have-It model of synthe-teak and hand-tooled leather. On the wall were Tri-D paint glowers. One was a winter scene with a pond of glittering blue ice set before an old house whose chimney belched flame-spotted smoke into the cold air, and children skating. There was a tropical scene of naked women and waterfalls; and there was an ocean scene. The waves in the latter actually foamed and rolled. And there was a desk. And behind the desk was Anaxemander Cockley, the man starting on his third century of life, the man with the million year old eyes.

  "Come in, Jake," Cockley said warmly.

  He decided the tone of voice could be a ploy, an attempt to throw him off balance for the attack to come.

  "Sit down."

  He chose the chair to the side of the desk. He knew the old man could still leap a desk faster than he could get out of the way. The seat directly before the massive work area, then, was a cannibal's pot which he did not care to climb into.

  "You are a very efficient young man."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "And you could go far."

  "Thank you again."

  It was all too nicey-nice. It had to end. It did. "But you won't go far with performances like this!" And Cockley threw the card-tapes across the desk. They fluttered to the floor.

  His mind was screaming! He felt like there were ponderous mythological animals, flabby and crude, weighting him down in a river he was trying to cross. The river had no bottom. He struggled to breathe and to clear his jumbled thoughts. How would Malone react in this situation? Malone, he thought, would have remained cool. He would have controlled his nerves. He would not have pandered too much. Finally, he said, "None of them helped?"

  "You're damn right none of them helped!" Cockley shouted, his face coloring purple—a shade meant to cast fear into the mind of the beholder. It did.

  "Do you want me to go back through the files again, sir?"

  The old man was burning with rage. Perhaps he was being just a bit too cool, not pandering enough. He decided on a humbler approach and said, "I'll do it all myself. I'll recheck every fact the translator gave me."'

  "You do just that."

  "When would you like it, sir?" He could see the color seeping out of Cockley's face. "By this evening, I could—"

  "You have it by the time I am ready to leave today. By four o'clock, five hours from now. Understand?"

  "Yes, sir," he said, standing. "I'll get right on it."

  "I would if I were you."

  Mike stepped into the hall, stood facing the ancient bastard as the doors slid shut between them, then hurried to his office.

  Inside, Cockley sat at the desk a moment, motionless except for the constant clenching and unclenching of his fists. After a time, he reached across the desk, flipped on the speaker grid. "Computer bank. I want to have a check run on some recent research. I want, word for word, all the information Jake Malone collected on Presidential hideaways from the ancient written files. Word for word."

  The computer answered affirmitively in its tube/circuit/ wire/voice.

  I just thought of it! Who is I? Zombie. I just realized the pattern. Remember the Village-Society-Village-Gestalt thing? Well, there is a natural end. Where do we all come from? God, of course. If you aren't deity-oriented, perhaps you say Prime Mover. If you are a complete cynic, maybe you say Chance. Anyway, we all come from this Supreme Force. We enter the world, and we are a single entity, responsible unto ourselves. We are, essentially, cavemen. And then we form cavemen unions that we call villages, and I am given life. Then, as chronicled earlier, Village becomes Society. Society becomes Village again through electronic media. Show comes along and warps the village into a household; the many are few. Performers are the world. We shrink back toward the caveman. If there is ever a single, great star of Show, the world will become one individual again. And to complete the cycle, that individual will, somehow, be uncreated and turned into Superior Force again. See? Which brings up several interesting questions, baby. First, is God merely a collected awareness of many individuals not yet created? Secondly, is God any the less superhuman because he is only an amalgam of flawed parts? Thirdly, do we really want to revert and become God again? To give up our individual identities, see? To crawl back and back and back . . . Getting chilly in here, isn't it? Maybe you better hit the heat button. Maybe you better change the subject. . . .

  IV

  Mike was perspiring. After the encounter with Cockley, he felt that he had a right to sweat. He wiped it from his forehead, his chin and neck. Slouching even further into the deep folds of his heavily-padded swallow-all swivel chair, he shuddered. The computer was digging up everything it could. If he could hand Cockley enough to keep him busy for the next several hours, he would be safe. Just enough to keep them guessing until midnight. Even if the last several tips were wild as all hell, they would distract the investigators long enough for him to grab Lisa and run for it.

  The computer beeped, and a card-tape popped out of the slot. He immediately slipped it into the player, listened intently. Presidents had been known for their restful retreats in the past; they had them spread all over the country. Most of them were known today. That was the problem. For instance, neither Cockley nor his investigators would believe the Revolutionaries were hiding out in Hyannis Port, not after a history of three Presidents permeated the place. But they might just believe that a certain Texas ranch, now parceled up and all but forgotten, held a secret shelter. He could keep a crew of investigators tied up all night on that one. It was just romantic enough to sound like a good lead—a secret shelter with a secret entrance which had never been set down in words. The latest card-tape finished. There was nothing worthwhile on it, nothing like the ranch story. He tore it up, threw it in a waste slot, and demanded better data, more thorough checks and crosschecks by the computer.

  While he waited, he ruminated on the entity that was dredging up all these facts for all these cards. It was rumored that the computer extended beneath the entire city, miles deep and miles square. But no one ever elaborated on the rumors. No one found it fascinating. Machines had long ago ceased to fascinate anyone. Machines were too reliable, too sure, too perfect to fascinate. It was like the dawn: you hardly notice it because it never fails to happen. And machines never failed. Still, the concept of such a vast set of wires and tubes and memory cells excited him. Perhaps it stemmed from some of the old books he had been taught to read. He remembered a story about a computer that went insane and took over the world. That made machines more fun, more interesting. They had more personality if one could fear them. Previously, machines and computers had been great, gray things of mist-matter indistinguishable from walls and streets and other gray things. Now they held wonder for him.

  There was a bleep, but no new card flopped out to be heard. Mike peered up into the slot, stuck a finger in and felt around before he realized the noise was coming from the phone. He picked it up. "Hello?"

  "Cockley here, Jake. I think we have something important. Could you com
e up right away?"

  "Certainly, sir."

  "And don't worry about those new reports. Junk them."

  "Yes, sir."

  Click.

  He stood, sat down again. Had Cockley really found something? How? Were they now rounding up Nimron, Pierre, and the others, closing the Appalachian shelter? But how could they have found out? Abruptly, he decided it was not advisable to sit and work himself into a frenzy about things which might not even be happening. He stood, left his office, and went upstairs to see Cockley.

  Konrad Giver was.

  He was not.

  He was.

  Fighting something he did not understand, Konrad Giver slid up and down coils of light, slithered through purple rings of fire into ocher light.

  Orange . . .

  Green pyramids . . .

  Trees of black with red and gold leaves . . .

  He was. Was not. Was again.

  There was not even the sensation of being part of the Performer. There was a flickering of feeling when he knew he was within his own body and the blankness of all but sight when he was in the other place—the totally alien place.

  He managed to overcome his panic and tried to ascertain, logically, his whereabouts. But there was no logic to it. He had slipped into his chair, turned on the aura. Minutes later, he had lost control of his mind. He went beyond the mind of the Performer into a land of light and shapes of light. Some of the colors were beyond his limited vocabulary to describe even to himself. Still, he could not pull himself back into his body long enough to switch off the aura.

  And that was the nightmare.

  He thought of the Empathists.

  But that took days, not minutes!

  Colors exploded around him! Suddenly he could not sense his body at all. He was completely divorced from it. He was sliding up, up, up and over the edge of a chrome yellow strip into a copper sea streaked with silver. And now there were voices all about him, babbling and moaning and weeping as bodies in Purgatory. . . .