01. Labyrinth of Dreams (24 page)

I shrugged. "Forty, maybe forty-five?"

"Seventy-one! That's the kind of stuff they got, Sam."

I swallowed hard. I was nearly perfect now, but if I looked like Cranston at sixty, let alone seventy-one, I'd feel more than happy.

"Then I asked him why they abandoned the Garden. He said the stuff was too unpredictable and had some side effects, like my extra-big boobs and all that fur on you. They got better, more reliable stuff now. The old boy only meant to stash us for a few days. Still, I'm almost glad, now, that we got stuck awhile, now that we got out. Bein' forced to eat healthy foods, exercise, get in condition. We'd never have done that on our own. Still, I can't handle that time thing."

I nodded. "Yeah, I'm still finding that one hard to swallow. A year there and we haven't even come up to our trial date back home. If that's so, I'd sure like to see the look on people's faces if we showed up there looking like this! Nobody said how fast this one runs, though. It's between the Garden and home, that's for sure, so it's probably fast, too. Not that it makes any difference now, I guess."

A butler emerged from the house bearing a silver tray with two drinks. "A light liqueur before bedtime, sir and madam?" he asked politely. "It is the master's own special stock."

We shrugged, and took them, and the butler went back into the house. We sipped the drinks and relaxed, sitting on a redwood love seat on the patio.

"You know," I remarked casually, "one thing's really bothering me. That Garden made your vision worse, yeah, but you had lousy vision to begin with. How the hell did you ever drive that car without cracking up?"

She chuckled and yawned. "I always had my old pair of glasses in my purse. They weren't much for everyday—gave me headaches—and I never liked their looks, but I could drive with em."

I clinked glasses with her and we downed the rest of our drinks. "Well," I told her, "you make sure you keep wearing those. I like 'em just fine, but I like somebody who can see even more. You take 'em off in bed, when you don't need to see well." I yawned, too, and started feeling dizzy. The world started spinning. "Brandy?"

She slumped over into my lap, out cold, but before I could do anything I slumped over, too, and all was darkness.

If you ever had general anesthetic at the dentist's, you know how we felt for a considerable time. You're vaguely awake and aware that things are going on, that questions are being asked and being answered, things are being done to you, but you don't remember what, and you're only vaguely aware that any time is passing. Then, slowly, you come out of it, but you feel like you're drowning in the bottom of a well and you rise up, try and break the surface, and gasp for air as the real world breaks around you.

I sat up and opened my eyes in one quick reflex action. I was in bed, naked, in a bedroom that was smaller than the one at Cranston's beach house but still quite pleasant. It was still on the beach somewhere; I could hear pounding surf and the cries of seabirds outside.

I looked around, head still pounding, and saw Brandy lying there, still out, but murmuring agitatedly and occasionally kicking or pushing away in her sleep. My head ached, but I figured that was the mickey working its final revenge. A pair of French doors led out of the room to my left; a regular door led, I thought, to the rest of the house. I managed to get up and walk over to the French doors and look out.

We had certainly been moved a great distance. There was a small balcony out there, and beyond was the ocean, but not the rocky cliffs and chill foam of the northwest's Pacific; white, sandy beach led gently down to it here, and the breakers crashed onto a nearly pristine beach. Well out in the water, I thought I could see sailboats or something like them, and the whole place looked warm and summery in contrast to the chill of Oregon. I didn't know a whole lot about the Pacific coast or more than one little corner of Oregon, but I had the sneaking suspicion that we'd changed worlds again. How, and why, I didn't know. They certainly hadn't lugged us all this way down to Cranston's place just to take us back to McInerney.

I looked in the drawer and found clothes there, and in the closet. Not funny clothes like we'd been given at Cranston's but real clothes. Shirts, socks, pants, even jockey shorts with the label in them. Another drawer had women's clothes, including panties and large bras, and the closet had others, from informal to a couple of dresses that looked like they could be real interesting if filled with a warm body. Maybe there was a different reason why they only gave us one set of funny clothes.

Brandy woke up with the same suddenness that I had, and looked around, then groaned and held her head. I turned and went over to her. "It passes pretty quickly, babe. How you feeling?"

"Oooh!
Badder than I felt in a long time!"

I let her come out of it, got up and walked back over to the dresser. Her glasses were on top, and I picked them up and brought them back to her. She put them on, and started to look around. "New place again, huh?"

"Yeah, more to our style, anyway," I told her.

In a few more minutes she was examining and then checking out some of the clothing. She found two boxes, one containing an assortment of jewelry and a cosmetic case, the other had a pair of watches along with a beard trimmer and comb set. Both watches were the digital-alarm type, one for men and one for women. They both said it was 10:34 on August 1. If that related at all to home, it had us gone less than two and a half weeks.

"Of course, it don't say what year," Brandy noted.

We slipped the watches on our wrists and began to get dressed, since that seemed the thing to do. Since we still seemed to be at the beach and the watches said it was August, Brandy went for shorts and a tee shirt and I decided on some slacks and a sport shirt. Shoes still felt wrong, but we both figured we'd better get used to them again. There was a pair of slip-on moccasins that fit nicely on my feet, and Brandy found some sandals. She debated the bra and decided not to, for now; although she'd always worn one and even slept with one for support, it had been a very long time.

"You tried the door?" she asked me.

I had to admit that I hadn't. "It just didn't occur to me," I told her, walking over and turning the knob. The door opened,, without a problem, on a narrow hallway. There was a bathroom right there, with clean linen, and we took the opportunity to wash our faces and get generally straightened out. Then it was time to see just where we were and what this was all about.

There was a modern kitchen with patio doors that led out to a patio, of all things. A girl was sitting out there in a skimpy bathing suit, relaxing in a lawn chair and sipping on a drink. She saw us and motioned for us to come out. It took me several seconds to realize that the girl was Jamie. She still had that short haircut, and I think
I
have bigger breasts than she's got, but her body was lean, curvaceous, and unexpectedly feminine shorn of those boyish Robin Hood clothes. She had on sunglasses, which weren't a bad idea in that sun.

"Well, hello! Back from the dead, I see," the security agent said cheerfully in that London-cultured stage accent of hers. "There's coffee and tea on, if you like, or cold drinks in the 'fridge. If you're hungry I could do up some eggs and bangers or hunt up some fruit or sweet rolls. Won't take a moment."

Brandy looked at me. "Bangers?"

"I think they're sausages." I turned to Jamie. "I think some coffee and those rolls would do me. I think I've had my fill of apples and stuff like that for a while." ,

"Maybe some iced tea and some of that fruit," Brandy told her. "After what fruit did for me, I'm not gonna switch off."

Jamie hopped up and ran into the house while we took seats around a round lawn table shaded with an umbrella stuck up through the center. This was quite nice, but it sure didn't make any sense at all.

Jamie was back in less than five minutes with a tray that included what I wanted, and not only the iced tea but a whole bowl of fruit—apples, oranges, bananas, you name it. I tried the coffee and it tasted very bitter. I was about to complain about it, when I suddenly realized just how long I'd been between cups, even though I used to run on the stuff. I was always a black-coffee man, but this time I added some cream and sugar from a nice little tea service there and got it palatable.

Jamie took another chair at the table and relaxed. "So, how do you both feel?"

"Let me get something straight first," I responded. "You
are
the same Jamie that came with us south on the train?"

She laughed. "Oh, yes. Mr. Cranston recommended me for assignment to you for a while, and no one who is ambitious ever turns down a promotion."

"I thought you couldn't stand the modern worlds," Brandy put in.

"Oh, it's not standing or not standing, it's that one never has the choice of where to work if she wants the good jobs. I certainly wouldn't like to
retire
here, or spend the rest of my life here, but I certainly don't mind working here for a while. I admit I could get to like
this
sort of place very easily."

I nodded. "Just where is this sort of place, if I may ask, and what was all that about slipping us both mickeys?"

"Mickeys? Oh, some sort of slang, I suppose. We needed to know just exactly whether you were what you claimed to be or not. There was no way to check on a switch in Horowitzes, as it were, somewhere along the line, particularly since you
were
involved in some nasty business with the wrong element. We couldn't very well do much around the monastery, since if the Labyrinth is infiltrated we couldn't know who we might trust up there in case they wanted to falsify the results. The beach house was perfect, and we could get some good technicians there in a hurry without arousing suspicion or alarm. They put you through the most
awful
tests, I'm afraid, but don't feel singled out. I've been through them myself and will probably be through them again. Complete computer analysis of your entire body, psychiatric probes and analyses, various kinds of coercive interrogation, and all the rest. They know more about the two of you now than you know about each other, or yourselves. A great deal of who and what we are is in our genes and body chemistries, they tell me, and they can even read those codes."

"I gather they were satisfied," I said.

"Oh, yes. They're quite impressed with you, you know. You tracked through that whole ugly Philadelphia business all the way to the plant, and then you infiltrated the plant, even though you had no idea what you were seeing. Then, faced with the evidence of something totally unbelievable, you accepted it and worked from there, even figured much of it out. That
is
impressive. They were also fascinated with you as a pair. In spite of vast differences in education, background, culture, whatever, the two of you have minds that seem to be very much alike. So much so that you almost know what the other is thinking when you're concentrating on a common problem. What one lacks, the other has, so the fit is nearly seamless. Yet you're so unlikely a couple to ever get together that you just prove the old rule that anything that might happen has or will happen."

Both of us liked to hear that, although I suspected I'd rather skip the downside of the report.

"The proof of that is in your intelligence and aptitude measurements," Jamie continued. "Individually, you're not exceptionally above average, either of you, but together you have near-genius aptitudes in certain areas, such as puzzle solving and deductive reasoning. They like that, which is why we're all here. 'Here,' by the by, is a small island in the Bahamas group that is wholly owned by the Company. You are essentially home."

The funny thing was, I wasn't all that sure I wanted to
be
"home." There wasn't a whole lot here for us, after all. "So why the Bahamas and all this, then?" I asked her.

"We'll know more when the Company personnel arrive, but I think they are going to offer you a job with the Company. Something in the line of work you've always followed."

Brandy nodded. We had been expecting this, simply because we survived and remained in civilization. "Jamie—you've worked with them for a long time. I can't say we aren't interested, 'cause if they're as thorough as you say they are, they already have a good idea we'll take it, but what if we didn't? I mean, I want to know if this is a real proposition or if we have a gun to our heads."

She was silent for a moment, then said, "Well, it's a bit of both, I suppose. They prize loyalty highly, for example. As Mr. Cranston told you, there's a good bit of paranoia involved in this job, and you survive and prosper by not fighting it. You have already caused a lot of trouble not even knowing the facts. You could cause a lot more now that you
do
know, or, worse, you might get an offer from the traitors working against us. They probably wouldn't kill you—they really don't like people working for them under that sort of coercion since they're so easily susceptible to being turned against the Company—but they would probably open a quick and temporary flag stop on a world without a station, very primitive, the sort of desert-island situation, and implant some sort of device that would prevent you ever traveling the Labyrinth again, and forget about you. I'm afraid, though, I can't see where your reservations lie. You are being offered a great opportunity."

"Their reservations, my dear, are that they are romantics and moralists at heart," said a man's voice behind us. We all turned, and even after all this time, both Brandy and I gasped.

Martin J. Whitlock IV, male, handsome, pepper-haired and nicely tanned, dressed in a colorful sport shirt and slacks and tennis shoes, walked over and pulled out the fourth and final chair around the lawn table and sat down. "Isn't that right?"

We both continued to stare. Finally I managed, "The
real
Martin J. Whitlock the Fourth, I assume?"

He grinned. "You tracked me down at last. Not, I'm afraid, anywhere near Oregon, though."

Jamie looked at him, and then at the two of us, and frowned. "You know each other?"