Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (13 page)

“No.” Waldo pointed to his mouth, then to the crematorium. “The phial was here. I found it. I swallowed what was in it, and I threw the empty container in there.”

“You
found it!
Where, for heaven’s sake?”

“In the blue box there. With Carlo Moolman’s personal effects.”

“But we went through all those, as soon as he was killed. We didn’t find a thing. Can you describe what you found?”

“Certainly.” Waldo’s stomach gave a premonitory rumble. “A little plastic tube, about this long. It was nearly full of green liquid. Tasted horrible.”

“Oh, that.” Imre Munsen gave a casual laugh. “Sorry, Mr. Burmeister, but we already took a good look at that when we were going through his things. We put it back. It’s certainly not an immortality serum.”

“Then what is it?” A terrible thought struck Waldo. “Is it poison?”

“No, no. It’s medication. You see, when Carlo Moolman arrived here on the Moon, he developed an upset stomach. Change of food, change of water, the usual thing, it gave him awful diarrhea. So he went to a doctor and got something for it. He took a dose every morning, and he had no more problem.”

“A
dose
. How big is a dose?”

“Three drops a day of the green fluid. Four, for a really bad case. Mr. Burmeister, are you feeling all right? You’re looking a bit pale.”

* * *

Well, all that was nine days ago. There has still been no sign of Carlo Moolman’s immortality serum. The Luna City rumor mill has shifted to another Elvis sighting, and this morning Imre Munsen called to thank me and Waldo, and tell us that he is going to change the Carlo Moolman case description to simple murder.

The other good news is that Waldo’s relatives have gone. The bad news is that Waldo himself has not, despite the employment of a whole arsenal of powerful purgatives.

He lives in hope. He says it could happen any day now. I am encouraging him to work at home.

Afterword to “Fifteen-Love on the Dead Man’s Chest”

In the late 1970s when I was just starting to write fiction, my young children (young back then, grown-ups now) ordered me to produce stories about every funny or disgusting thing in the world. They made the list for me. It had on it items of comic low appeal to them—sewage, visits to the dentist, mushrooms, fat aunts, opera singers, flatulence (I think they used a different word), comic Germans and Italians, fad diets, pigs, morticians, and head lice.

Not an easy assignment, but I did my best. Over the years I have published ten politically incorrect stories tackling one or more of the listed topics. For the avid collector, I will mention that the stories are, in order of publication: “Marconi,
Mattin
, Maxwell”; “The Deimos Plague”; “Perfectly Safe, Nothing to Worry About”; “Dinsdale Dissents”; “A Certain Place in History”; “The Dalmatian of Faust”; “Parasites Lost”; “Space Opera”; “The Decline of Hyperion”; and “Fifteen-Love on the Dead Man’s Chest.” Together they form what I think of as my “sewage” series. They feature my two favorite lawyers, Henry Carver and Waldo Burmeister, and they are depressingly easy to write.

Purists have argued that this tale makes tennis on the Moon sound just like tennis on the Earth, and that is implausible. I reply by asking them if that is the most implausible feature of the story.

Deep Safari

Tradition calls for a celebration on the evening that the hunt is concluded.

The hunters will be tired, some will be hurting, some may even have died. There will be a party anyway, and it will go on for most of the night. Tradition is the younger sister of ritual. Rituals are better if they do not make sense.

I do not like to attend the parties. I have seen too many. The theory is that the hunters should be permitted to overindulge in food, in drink, in sex, in everything, but particularly in talk, because on hunt night they want to relive the glorious excitement of the chase, the shared danger, the deeds of valor, the climactic event of the kill.

Sounds wonderful. But for every hero or heroine flushed with quiet or noisy pride there will be three or four others, drinking and talking as loud as any but glancing again and again at their companions, wondering if anyone else noticed how at the moment of crisis and danger they flinched and failed.

I notice. Of course. I couldn’t afford not to notice. My job is to orchestrate everything from first contact to
coup de grâce
, and to do that I have to know where everyone is and just what he or she is doing. That is much harder work than it sounds, so when a hunt is over all I want is sleep. But that relief is denied to me by my obligatory attendance at the posthunt party.

The morning that Everett Halston called, the hunt celebration the previous night had been even harder to take than usual. The group had consisted of a dozen rich merchants, neophytes to hunting but in spite of that—because of that?—determined to show their nerve by tackling one of the animal kingdom’s most efficient and terrifying predators.

I had warned them, and been overruled. When we finally met the quarry, all but two of my group had frozen. They were too overwhelmed by fear to advance or even to flee. Three of us stepped forward, stood our ground, and made a difficult kill. A
very
difficult kill. Without a little luck the roles of hunter and prey could easily have been reversed.

Perhaps because of that near-disaster the hunt party had been even noisier and wilder than usual. My group of twelve participants was augmented by an equal number of male and female partners, none of them the least tired and every one ready to dance ’til dawn.

About four-thirty I managed to slip away and collapse into bed. And there I found not the calm and peaceful sleep that I had looked forward to for twelve hours, but a dream-reprise of the hunt finale as it might have been.

I had managed to move the whole group to the bottom of the pit in good order, because they had not so far had a sight of the living prey. I anticipated trouble as soon as that happened. Before we entered
Adestis
mode we had studied the structure and actions of the spider, but I knew from previous experience that wouldn’t mean a damn during live combat. It’s one thing to peer at an animal that’s no bigger across the carapace than the nail on your index finger, to study its minute jaws and poison glands and four delicate tubelike spinnerets, and plan where you will place your shots for maximum effect; it’s another matter when you are linked into your
Adestis
simulacrum, and the spider that you are supposed to hunt and kill is towering ten paces away from you like a gigantic armored tank, its invincible back three times as high as the top of your head.

Before I had the group organized to my satisfaction, our quarry took the initiative. The spider came from its hiding place in the side of the pit and in that first rush it came
fast.
I saw a dark brown body with eight pearly eyes patterning its massive back. The juggernaut drove forward on the powerful thrust of four pairs of seven-jointed legs. Those legs had seemed as thin and fragile as flower stamens in our studies, but now they were bristly trunks, each as thick as a simulacrum’s body. The
chelicerae,
the pointed crushing appendages at the front of the spider’s maw, were massive black pincers big enough to bite your body in two.

Without taking the time to see how my group was reacting, I did what I had explicitly warned them not to do. I lifted my weapon and sprayed projectiles at the three eyes that I could see. I think I got one of them, but the carapace itself was far too tough to be penetrated. Ricocheting projectiles flew everywhere. The spider was not seriously injured
—
I knew it would not be. But maybe it wondered if we were really its first choice for dinner, because it halted in its forward sweep. That gave me a little breathing space.

I scanned my group. Not reassuring. For ten of them the sight of the advancing spider had been more than they could take. Their personal simulacra stood motionless, weapons pointed uselessly at the ground.

These
Adestis
units were not furnished with sound generation or receiving equipment. Everything had to be signaled by our actions. We had rehearsed often enough, but unfortunately this was nothing like rehearsal. I ran forward waving at my group to lift their weapons and follow me, but only two of them did. They moved to stand on either side and just behind me.

I glanced at their two helmet IDs as I turned to urge the rest to advance and deploy in a half-circle as we had planned. Even though I would never reveal the information to anyone, I liked to know who the cool ones were
—
they might play
Adestis
again some day. None of the others moved, but a second later the weapon of the simulacrum on my right was lifting into position, while his other arm reached to tap my body in warning.

I spun around. Forget the half-circle. The spider was coming forward again, in a scuttling rush that covered the space between us at terrifying speed.

Before I could fire the predator had reached us. I saw the maw above me, the dark serrated edge of the carapace, the colonies of mite and tick parasites clinging to the coarse body bristles. Then I was knocked flat by the casual swat of one powerful leg.

I sprawled under the housewide body and saw the chelicerae reach down, seize one of my companions at midriff, and crush until his simulacrum fell apart into two pieces.

He writhed but he did not scream—here.

(I knew that his real body, coupled by its telemetry headset to control his simulacrum and receive its sensory inputs, would be writhing and screaming in genuine agony.

It didn’t have to be that way. I would have been quite happy to do without pain signals altogether, useful as they might be as a warning for simulacrum injury. But any proposal to eliminate pain was consistently vetoed by the paying customers for
Adestis.
They
wanted
referred pain when their simulacrum was injured. It was part of the
macho
(male and female) view of the game. The
Adestis
hunt had to feel
real,
as real as it could be; occasional deaths, from the heart failure that can accompany terror and intense agony, were an important part of what they were paying for.)

And at the moment my own body, the gigantic form that somewhere infinitely far above us sat motionless in the
Adestis
control theater, was within a split second of its own writhing, screaming agony. The spider knew I was underneath it
—
knew it not from sight, which was a sense it did not much rely on, but from touch. The legs, in spite of their power, were enormously sensitive to feel and to vibration patterns. The spider was backing up, questing. It wanted me. I was shaking with fear, my hands trembling and my belly so filled with icy terror that the muscles of my whole midsection were locked rigid.

And then came the single precious touch of good luck, the accident of position that saved me and the rest of our group. As the spider moved over me I saw the pedicel; there it was, the thin neck between cephalothorax and abdomen, the most vulnerable point of the whole organism. It was directly above my head, impossible to miss. I lifted my weapon. Fired. And blew the spider into two clean halves that toppled like falling mountains on either side of me.

But not this time. In my dream, the pedicel moved out of view before I could squeeze off a shot. I was staring up at the hard underside of the cephalothorax—at the head section—at the doomsday jaws and glistening poison glands as they lowered toward me. They would engulf me, swallow me whole, to leave me struggling and hopeless within the dark interior cavern of the spider’s body.

I knew, at some level of my mind, that spiders do not swallow their prey. They inject enzymes, predigest their victims, and suck them dry. But we select our own personal nightmares. I would die slowly, in the night of the spider’s body cavity.

I braced myself for the unendurable.

And came to shuddering wakefulness at the loud, insistent ring of my bedside telephone. I realized where I was and groped for the handset, almost too relieved to breathe.

“Fletcher?” The voice in my ear was familiar. It ought to have suggested a face and a name, but in my dazed condition it was just a voice.

“Uh-uh.” I squinted at the clock. Seven-fifteen. Two and three-quarter hours of sleep. Although I had eaten little and drunk nothing last night, I felt hung over and a hundred years old. Seven-fifteen
p.m.
was what I’d had in mind as a decent wake-up time.

“
Clancy
Fletcher?” insisted the voice.

“Uh-uh.” I cleared my throat. “Yes. That’s me. I’m Clancy Fletcher.”

“Don’t sound like him. This is Everett Halston. I need to talk to you. You awake enough to take anything in?”

“Yes.” I’d found the face, and the name, even before he gave it. He sounded older.

Palpitations and inability to breathe came back, worse than when I woke.
Everett Halston.
He really was old. The Pearce family’s professional aide and confidant for three generations. And Miriam’s personal lawyer.

“Did Miriam—” I began.

“Listen first, Mr. Fletcher, then you can ask questions.” The brisk, salty voice was oddly reassuring. Its next words were not. “Dr. Miriam Pearce left a tape with me, some time ago, and gave me specific instructions. I was to play that tape only if, in my judgment, she was in very serious trouble and unable to act on her own behalf.

“Late last night I played the tape. I played it because Miriam is unconscious, and no one seems able to tell me when or if she is likely to awaken.”

“Where is she?”

“I’ll get to that. You were always a good listener. Listen now. Miriam is at New Hanover Hospital, on the fifth floor.
Don’t hang up, Mr. Fletcher. I know you want to.
Wait until I am finished. She was moved to an intensive care unit two days ago, from her own research facility, a few hours after she was discovered unconscious. Her vital signs are stable and she is being fed intravenously. However, the attendant physicians are much concerned about her condition. They state—insofar as one can persuade a physician to make any firm statement whatsoever—that they have ruled out all forms of stroke, tumor, and subdural hemorrhage. CAT and PET scan show no abnormalities, although they plan to repeat those today.