01. Labyrinth of Dreams (30 page)

I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sudden turning on of my hospital room light and the entrance of two men who looked about as natural on Grand Cayman as Brandy and I at a Ku Klux Klan convention. They were both white, young, well built and trim, and wearing suits and ties. They looked like Secret Service agents.

"Sorry to awaken you, Mr. Horowitz," said one, "but I thought you'd want the details as soon as possible. We're working with the local authorities now to get the release of both your wife and our agent, and hopefully the outworld girl, too. I'm Bill Markham and this is Tod Symes. We're with headquarters security."

"I assume you mean the headquarters in Davenport."

He chuckled. "Where else? Or, then again, is that a question I should ask, all things considered? We are who and what we say, I assure you. There are ways to determine that, and you and your wife as well."

That was news. "Oh? How?"

"It's a small encoded implant. Don't worry— we'll show you all that sooner or later. We're on the same side in this, after all."

I was beginning to wonder who was on whose side anymore but I let it pass. "You run down this Gritch character?"

"As much as we could. As soon as the call came in, we hopped a Company jet and got here. We've tracked a Sol Gritch here in the Philadelphia area, but he died nine years ago and was a real-estate speculator and slumlord. We're now running a trace on him in other probability lines, but we don't have much close to this one, so it'll take some time. That's where they can get us easy. They go into worlds we don't cover that are pretty close, and do some development of their own. There's over sixteen hundred lines in which all the principals in this case exist in roughly the same positions, so you can see how needle-in-a-haystack it has to be when you don't have anybody there, not even a station."

The concept was staggering. Sixteen hundred lines in which there was a me, and a Brandy, and a Whitlock, and a Little Jimmy, and maybe all the others. Not the same, maybe. Maybe we weren't married, and not to each other, in all sixteen hundred, but we all existed there. Of course, the opposition would have, if anything, a worse manpower problem than G.O.D., Inc. There was probably only one of those they were using, the one in which they also found the gay Whitlock and the Nkrumah clone, but it would still take time.

"Mr. Horowitz," Markham said, sitting in the lone chair, letting his silent partner stand leaning against the wall, "do you have any idea now what this is all about?"

"As much as I can, without knowing the full facts of this Company opposition," I answered truthfully. "This is no band of radical nuts or malcontents. You know it and I know it. They have free access to the Labyrinth, so they have probably got the right Company credentials, and their moves are being dictated by somebody high up within the Company structure. We might sneak in and get trapped in that thing without you knowing it, and we could have even gotten out of that monastery if we'd had to, but something this elaborate can't depend on sneaking into warehouses, monasteries, castles, or whatever, whenever somebody needs to be moved. Besides, we could get in, and out, but not control where we were going. These people can. You want to tell me just what the hell is
really
going on? Maybe if you do, I can give you the rest."

Markham sighed. "You're right, it's bigger than a few rebels and it's nastier. The fact is, why does anybody want to be a senator, or congressman, or the cabinet secretary? The pay's good, but it's not great, and almost all of them can do better in private business. And I hope you're not going to say to serve the public or advance ideals. Otherwise, I'll have to tell you the truth about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy."

"Power, pure and simple," I answered. "That's why so many of them quit when they reach their limits. I'm not dumb. I grew up in the U.S.A."

"General Ordering and Development is probably the largest corporate structure in human or nonhuman history, but that's still what it is. A corporation. It runs as a business. The kind of people who run it run it because they like the power. They enjoy it. They
need
it. But there can only be one president, one chairman of the board, only so many board members, and even a limited number of vice presidents, although it looks like an infinite number to me. As in most corporate structures, the old men remain and refuse to give up power until they drop dead, and others are promoted as much on family or connections as on merit. In fact, often at the
expense
of merit. It's a familiar structure to all large corporations."

I nodded. "So somebody's trying to hasten things along, or get even with the top boys for not noticing them. They're the most dangerous, because they're smart and motivated more by revenge than even greed."

"Exactly, although we think this is very much a strictly business situation. You see, in many cases such large numbers of people would simply go out and form a competitive group. Often their new ideas and new slants would be so good they'd eventually sweep the old company aside, although not without a lot of nasty fighting. The problem here is that it's of necessity a monopoly business. The Company controls the Labyrinth, and there is only one Labyrinth. As far as we know, there can
be
only one Labyrinth, according to the physics involved."

"Huh! Seems to me that if you knew how it worked, all it'd take is a big machine hidden in a deep hole with lots of power to it and a camouflage structure on top."

Markham shook his head. "No, it isn't that way at all. Mr. Horowitz, there
are
no great machines under those warehouses and castles. If you think a little, you'd realize that, since you escaped the botanical station through a flag access stop in the middle of land with no buildings, people, or anything much else. They had to open the flag because you weren't at a dead end; you were in the way, and a switch point needed to be created that spanned thirty-seven worlds, in order to get somebody from here to there. You said it yourself: power. It takes incredible power. The lone master machine exists in a universe where there is almost limitless power—and nothing much else. All the rest are the mechanics needed to make the process a controlled network. Stations to channel access. Switch points to save time and increase accuracy. The worlds aren't in a straight line. They are at all angles to one another, including angles we can't even imagine."

I saw the problem. One machine, one network, and the competition couldn't really touch that network without fouling themselves up as well. "Then the only thing you can really do is try and take over the Company."

"Exactly. What they're doing now is running a competitive operation on our own network, using worlds we haven't touched, and building an organization of people recruited from those worlds. An organization that is now well organized enough to start hitting us in vital spots. It's not a general war; it's an endless series of little wars. The operation here is fairly large, but it's not vital. It's on the periphery, so it's lightly defended compared to some other worlds, where, naturally, the bulk of personnel and resources are channeled. Because we depend heavily on organized crime in the West here, it makes it even easier to go in and make alterations at the level where things actually get done. If they succeed here, then we have to either divert major resources and personnel here to fight them off, and leave a more vital point undefended, or we have to declare them a winner and abandon further development. Either way, they win. Corporate heads roll. Things are reshuffled. Key people move up."

I got the picture. No wonder G.O.D., Inc. took such a liking to the Mafia. Hell, it
was
the Mafia, the prototypical Mafia on the grandest of all scales. All the godfathers jockeyed for control, and if they were frustrated working with the system, they fought it, sometimes violently. Board members themselves probably double-crossed fellow members if they wanted to move one way and the old guard shot down their plans.

I sighed. "All right, all I can do is figure what happened here. They fingered Whitlock, probably when he was tabbed and investigated before being handed the east-coast coordinator's job. For some reason, they had burrowed into one of those sixteen hundred other worlds, and so they had a match—a real good one, considering their replacement Whitlock. A Whitlock loser who was common enough that he'd drool to be a winner again. And they have this State College access to the Labyrinth. It's pretty wild, real wilderness, all around there. Mind telling me why you used Oregon with a State College station?"

"We don't have a State College station. There's a semipermanent flag stop there for eastern access, but it's not a full operation and it's totally automated. We're checking out traffic to and from it now, but that takes time. See, we can't handle a full station unless we can secure it through a tremendous number of worlds. When you're dealing with truck- and boxcar-loads of stuff, you have to make sure it ships right, point to point. Other points of entry for our convenience are automated flag stops. Just sidings, as it were. Of course, if we'd wanted to get the Whitlock women
out,
we'd have used State College, but we wanted them to be followed and take pursuers as far away from the east coast as possible."

I nodded. I was feeling very weak and tired but, damn it, I'd paid for this stuff with a year of my life and some blood, and twice this other crowd had tried to shoot me.

"Tell me this," I said at last. "If Big Tony gets twenty years in Atlanta, and his organization is fragmented, who is most likely to get control of his territory? Between loan sharking, prostitution, and particularly narcotics, he controls maybe a billion dollars' worth of business, I figure. That's a hell of a lot. Enough even for a seat on the mob's own inner council." That was the board of directors, more or less, of the old-line organized-crime families.

"We thought of that. The most likely candidate is Al 'Big Nose' Norton, who has a hell of a share of Jersey and wants more. He's got the muscle, the contacts, and the resources. Of course, he isn't Italian, but that's not a hundred percent prerequisite anymore, as you know."

"Anybody named Norton who can take a hunk of Jersey can be anything he wants," I responded. "If Norton moved in without much opposition and takes over, we can assume he's the object of all this. He's theirs, whether he knows it or not. If something happens to him, or they push a dark horse in to take over, that'll be the man they wanted. He gets all that territory and power, and the only price he pays is that, with a seat on the inner council, he'll be able to figure just what the Company wants and what it's doing, and feed it to the competition. It's really pretty smart, and it involves leaving few—outworlders, you called them?—here. Maybe only one as a contact. Figure they originally thought of the replacement Little Jimmy for that, but when he got greedy on the payoff money and then didn't hit his double, he was out. Of course, they still have their original agent in place, the one that saw all this opportunity and put the wheels in motion."

Markham was interested. "What? Who?"

"The one who made Whitlock as a Company man, then was able to use the State College flag stop to get the other Whitlock—and whoever else he needed—in, and work this through. He'll be their chief agent here, with a pipeline into the Company's local operation, and organized crime as well. The one who'll eventually mastermind whatever bigger things this is leading up to. Right now we have the heads of the competition, which are untouchable because they're too removed to pin anything on. This Gritch character is obviously their agent in general charge of the operation, working with cohorts inside the Labyrinth system so he has nearly unlimited access. Those are your problem, or your superior's. Big Tony's successor is the end of the line. Sure, we can take
him
out, but will we ever really be certain that whatever successor Big Tony has isn't theirs? Only if ,we find this missing man, their resident agent."

"You know who it .is?"

"No, but there's only a handful of people it
could
be. You see, at some point he—or maybe she—had to emerge from that shell of protection because everything was going down too fast. The connections are Whitlock—and Brandy and me. If I can get a little strength, and you can spring us all, I think I can nail that agent."

Both of them were all ears. "Nail that agent and we'll know which mob leaders are theirs, now and in the future," Markham noted. "Also, we'll be able to trace and shut a nasty leak, maybe trace it right up close to the source."

"Yeah," I responded. I had some trouble with the ethics of all this—I didn't like the idea of being a mob P.I., no matter what mob it was, and it really didn't matter overall which side won to me, except that if I nailed this bastard they might stop trying to put holes in me. Still, I couldn't get out of my head this vision of a fancy Main Line home on an acre or three or four, with twin Mercedes out front, which would be a nice home for Brandy and me, or the vision of Spade & Marlowe's office suite on the top floor of the poshest office building in Philadelphia.

Damn it, I decided, Brandy had been right all along. Playing it honest and true had gotten us broke and desperate. Yeah, I don't think I could deliver innocent lives to these corporate multi-worldly mobsters, but so long as it was nailing one set of trash for the other, it didn't really matter. It was something to nail a bastard, even if other bastards were paying me to do it.

Out of ignorance, we'd been suckered into all this and fallen off a cliff. Well, we weren't ignorant anymore. We knew just who, and what, we were dealing with. It was time for Spade & Marlowe to show just what kind of detectives they really were.

By the next morning, Markham's people and money had sprung all three girls, and Nan had been taken immediately into the Company's protective custody for interrogation. She alone knew what our elusive Mr. Gritch looked like, and we wanted a composite. Brandy came to see me almost immediately, after getting a shower and a change of clothes.