“Yeah, I heard it,” Lydia smirked. “Your friend’s a peeper, a drunk, and a nut. That’s three strikes.”
“I’ll admit he’s a little off track; his girlfriend just dumped him, he’s been drinking heavy. But he’s not the kind of guy to make something like this up. Plus, there’s something else…”
“What?”
“It’s better if I tell you later. Just trust me.”
What was he talking about? Was he nuts too?
“There’s no harm in looking into it, is there?” Wade persisted, and got dressed. Lydia said nothing, but she supposed he was right.
««—»»
She felt like a complete ass, knocking on a student’s door at five thirty in the morning, but only for a second. Her first rap on room 208 edged the door open an inch. The doorknob was squashed, just like at the clinic. The latch bolt was mangled, the strike plate half dug out—
“Just like the clinic,” Wade said.
Score one for Jervis the Drunk, Lydia thought.
The faintest ring of dust clung in a circle on the floor, as might be left by a hastily removed throw rug. Hmmm, she thought. The bed was sloppily made; guys made their beds like that, not girls. Hmmm, she thought again.
The hamper was stuffed full of clothes. Among the garments was a pair of men’s jeans. The jeans contained a wallet. The wallet contained a driver’s license: David Ubel Willet.
“Believe me now?” Jervis asked.
Lydia was stumped. “I believe you may have witnessed a break in,” she replied. “I don’t, however, believe you witnessed anything more than that.”
Jervis said three clipped words. “Bathtub. Blood. Everywhere.”
The three of them squeezed into the bathroom. They all looked down at the tub.
“Where’s the blood?” Wade asked.
“Tom must’ve cleaned it up,” Jervis was quick to answer. “There was so much, though. It must’ve taken him an hour.”
“Forget it, Jerv,” Wade said. “The tub’s clean.”
Too clean, Lydia thought. She’d had Jervis tote along her field kit. From it she removed a tiny amber bottle with an eyedropper cap. “This is a detection compound called Malachite Reagent V; it reacts with protein components in hemoglobin. Blood contains free protein electrons which bind to almost any surface. You can wash off the blood, but you can’t wash off the electrons.”
“So if someone got murdered in this tub,” Wade said, “the stuff in that bottle will prove it?”
“Yep. It turns turquoise on contact.” Lydia let a tiny drop fall from the eyedropper into the middle of the tub.
“Nothing,” Wade observed.
“Wait.”
In a second, the drop turned turquoise.
Lydia sprinkled more drops around, all over the inside of the tub, the ledge, the tiled back wall. They all turned turquoise.
Jervis looked unsurprised. Wade looked ill.
This guy’s not bullshitting, Lydia thought, and it was a ghastly thought indeed. There’d been blood all over this tub.
Blood. Everywhere.
««—»»
“I instructed you to be careful!” Professor Dudley Besser bellowed within the cove of pointaccessmain #1. “I told you!”
“I know, sir,” Tom mumbled.
“You left their wallets! Their keys! Everything!”
“It slipped my mind, sir. We had to get out of there. It took me a long time to clean up the mess the sister made. I mean, Christ, can’t they eat here?”
Besser recessed back into the strangely etched darkness. Inaudibly the labyrinth hummed, a vibration more than a sound. The sisters had told Tom that it was the Supremate thinking, but Tom had begun to doubt that, along with many other things. Sometimes he wondered if there even was a Supremate. The huge loving voice that sometimes filled his head seemed phony, an overdone charade.
Besser’s disapproval drew crevices into his bulging moonface. “This better not break before we leave. Who knows what the Supremate will do?”
The premise was not a pleasant one. Tom remembered the chasms he’d seen. He remembered the squat factories whose winding winze belts hauled slabs of black meat.
“I don’t want any problems with your next task,” Besser said. “The Supremate needs a holotype. Winnie and I have agreed; it shall be Wade St. John. This should please you.”
“It does, sir.” You ain’t kidding it does!
“We only have a few more days; I want Wade secured in the unit hold well beforehand. He works at the sciences center at nine A.M. Bring him in today.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And let me emphasize that the quality of your future within the family may depend on the success of your remaining procurements.”
“I understand that, sir. You can count on me.”
Besser dismissed him, the moonface disappearing into the egress. Tom followed the dimensionless servicepass to the acclimationprepchamber. He didn’t need directions; the labyrinth had its own sort of telepathic directory called mindsigns. Ahead, one such sign read EMWGUIDANCETRACKINGPOINT. Besser had explained it wasn’t really a power plant but just a simple stabilization mechanism, like a keel on a sailboat. The Supremate controlled it, along with everything else, by instinct.
The next mindsign glowed in nonexistence: GERMINATIONWARREN. Tom used the key around his neck and prolapsed through the egress. This was some security system they had here; no one without a key could escape the labyrinth’s solid walls, nor could entry be gained by any outsider. The labyrinth was, fully and ultimately, impenetrable.
Within the acclimationprepchamber, the Erblings lay stretched on the levitationslats. Before antirejectorybifertilization could be initiated, certain biological changes had to be made. Tom knew the Erblings were conscious despite complete paralysis. He grabbed two infusers containing optimized doses of calciumdecimationliquefactor. All fissionizationvessels needed proper softening before they could safely disbirth their interspecielmetis units. Tom had wandered around the biomaintenancegrowthaccelerationvaults once or twice, and some of the things he’d seen down there were as big as sunfish! The Erblings both jerked once when he activated the infusers against their throats. The injection attacked only fossilized CaCo compounds. Besser and Winnifred had taken blood samples from Lois Hartley and Penelope, to ascertain the most effective serum absorbability levels for humans. The Erblings would be pudding in an hour.
Liddy’s fingers and toes twitched, and Stella was blinking. The sister’s neurohemolyticpyrrolizicvenom was wearing off. Tom pushed the levslats through the next extromitter. Besser had told him that the slats had an unlimited load capacity. Theoretically you could push an aircraft carrier around on one of these things. You could push worlds.
But no worlds today. Just a pair of naked coeds. Tom could feel the warmth of the sensorpost behind him. They were everywhere in one way or another—hybridized into the sisters’ eyes, in the sensor rings that Besser and Winnie wore, even in Tom’s transceptionrod. Through such sensor circuits, the Supremate saw and heard everything. The sensorpost was merely a black rod above the keypass. It reminded Tom of the Orwell novel.
He flipped the Erblings off their slats onto the carbonized floorwall. “If you think Do Horse was hot stuff,” he joked, “wait’ll you see what’s waiting for you in the next room. You’ll be the only gals in town with boyfriends from another planet!” Tom laughed. “I’ll be right back, and in the meantime, you’ll be trying on some new genes, and I don’t mean Levi’s.”
He extromitted to the pointaccess of the xyholotypehold. The exposed unit read #1003WADEST.JOHN. The hold was empty, but not for long. In sisterspeak the hold was called a carbonmassrepulsiondiodedeflectiveenergybarriersecuritynodule. In Tomspeak, it was called a fuckin’ jail. It reminded him of the brig on Star Trek. Nothing could penetrate its repulsion screen. A TOW missile wouldn’t dent it. A sixteen inch naval shell would bounce off its transparent face like a tennis ball.