Last Gasp (43 page)

His little jaunty whistle was cut short when he found that the bathroom light wasn’t working. He detested inefficiency, especially when it was to do with anything mechanical, and he jerked the switch uselessly and spitefully several times. Then he tried the fluorescent strip above the mirror, which, thankfully, was still functional. By its light he hung up his dressing gown, opened the shower door with its nymphs and cherubs, and hopped into the tiled cubicle.

He set the controls at seventy-two degrees, medium jet and pushed the stainless-steel lever to the right.

The fourth note of “La Vie en Rose” became a startled gasp as the needle spray stung his scalp and streamed down his goosefleshed body. His eyes smarted terribly. The taste on his lips was bitter, the smell making his nostrils pinch and wrinkle it was so vile.

What the hell was this? Sewer water? Had the bastards gone on strike again?

Cursing, Lautner fumbled blindly for the handle of the door. The dense gasoline vapor now filling the bathroom ignited on the exposed live wires in the overhead light fixture, from which the pearled glass globe and plastic cover had been removed. A blue-edged sheet of flame streaked into the cubicle just as Lautner was emerging and transformed him into a human torch. His mouth yawned to its fullest extent in a scream of agony that never came out because the fierce heat instantly consumed the air in his lungs, suffocating him, and he fell clawing the air with fiery fingers, his own funeral pyre.

Lautner was dead before he landed on the tiled floor of the bathroom. In a few minutes nothing was left except a blackened, smoking, shrunken heap, unrecognizable as something once human, lying in a spreading pool of fat shimmering with little dancing orange and blue flames.

PORTLAND, OREGON

The chairman of the reception committee handed Chase an urgent message the moment they met in the arrivals hall at the airport. It had been cabled ahead by Chase’s New York publisher and contained a telephone number and a request to call it immediately.

He did so from the public phone and found himself talking to somebody (he didn’t catch her name) from the executive office of the secretary-general of the United Nations. Would he be on the first available flight to New York? No, she was sorry, she couldn’t give reasons. She would like him to know that the matter was very important and highly confidential. Please call this number again the instant he landed in New York. Thank you so much.

“It must be important, Gavin, for them to have traced you. You have to go.” Cheryl smiled. “Leave the rest of the schedule to me, I can handle it. And take Dan with you; it’s probably his one and only chance to see New York before they close it down.”

The connecting flight to Salt Lake City left two hours later, at 4:30
P.M.
Pacific time, father and son aboard: Chase bemused, Dan ecstatic.

A throbbing reverberation rose up and filled the shafts and tunnels and chambers with its deep mournful sound.

Mara raised himself from the straw pallet, instinctively obeying the gong that called the adepts to the evening meal. He came out of his cell and joined the line of figures in their black robes, silent except for the whispered shuffling of sandaled feet on smooth rock.

He had been fourteen when he first came, five years ago. Shy and withdrawn, given to dark moods, he had been one among thousands who started out on the pilgrimage, in his case from Kettering, near Dayton, Ohio. He had been six weeks on the road, sleeping rough, begging for food, when he met up with two other guys and a girl in a Buick Century that was falling apart at the seams. The girl and one of the guys had decided—even before they reached the settlement—that the Faith wasn’t for them. Of the thousands who embarked on the trek to Nevada, and actually made it, few stayed longer than a month or two, and fewer still were accepted.

Mara was glad to see them go. Anyone who didn’t possess the qualities of iron will and total dedication, the “right stuff” as they were taught, had no right to be there. The Faith had no room for them. Cast them out as weak and unworthy. Let them perish along with the rest.

The gong boomed as the adepts shuffled below. The sound filled Mara’s heart with peace. He belonged. His life had purpose.

The mountain they lived in was perfect: a honeycomb of old mine workings converted into a sealed, self-contained environment, hidden from the outside world. In the upper tunnels were the sleeping quarters—tiny cells burrowed out of the rock—while farther below the larger chambers and galleries housed workshops, the generator plant, and areas adapted for eating, study, and meditation. Natural springs deep underground had been tapped for fresh water. They had electric power. At the lowest level, several hundred feet down, a vast cavern held a reservoir of oil which fed the boilers, producing steam to power the generators.

From outside the sound of the gong was a faint rhythmic murmur, hardly more than a vibration in the ocher flanks dotted with scrub and rocks encircling the bare granite peak of Mount Grafton.

The tables buzzed with the news of yet another successful mission. Mara listened to the excited chatter but didn’t take part. Such frivolous behavior was degrading and unseemly. How could one attain Optimum Orbital Trajectory without discipline and absolute self-control? This was vain, idle, not the “right stuff” at all.

Devadatta, sitting opposite, said, “I wish it had been me. What about you, Mara?”

“To wish for anything is to have egoism,” answered Mara shortly. “You obviously haven’t ironed that bug out of your system.”

“I know the law as well as you do,” Devadatta protested, though he was slightly shamefaced. “But my wish is to serve the Faith to the best of my ability. Nothing wrong in that.” He looked along the table, seeking support.

Most of the others were unsure and unwilling to commit themselves, mainly because Mara had achieved Special Category Selection and Devadatta hadn’t. This gave the small thin-faced youth with the bulbous eyes behind the wire-frame spectacles the stamp of seniority.

“Perhaps Mara is afraid to serve,” said Virudhaka, a young man with red hair who was noted for being argumentative. “Fear is an unironed bug as well as egoism.”

Mara was unruffled. “Why mention fear? Because you haven’t conquered it yourself, Virudhaka?”

“What if I haven’t? At least I’m prepared to admit it.”

“Do you want to overcome it?”

“Sure—don’t we all?”

“How will you know when you have?”

Virudhaka was confused. He blinked slowly and frowned. “Well, I—I’ll just know, I guess.”

“You mean an inner voice will tell you,” Mara said, staring at him, unsmiling. “One day an inner voice will say, ‘No more fear,’ and that’ll be that.”

Virudhaka gave an uneasy half-shrug.

“That isn’t the way it happens,” Mara told him. His piping treble voice might have been comic had not his manner been so severe, uncompromising, deadly certain. “You will still experience fear, you will still suffer, but such things no longer matter. Emotion has been put in its rightful place, the servant of the self rather than its master.”

“But how do you know when that happens?” Devadatta asked. “Does it follow naturally with selection or is it a matter of psychological self-conditioning?”

Heads on either side of the table craned forward, shaven knobs of bone anxious to hear the answer from an adept who had achieved selection, which was the first important step toward the goal of briefing.

“You don’t and you never do. Every day the battle is fought anew. The struggle is endless.”

Virudhaka was heard to remark skeptically, “That’s easy to say. Such talk is cheap, and it still doesn’t answer the question.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Mara agreed, surprising them all. “Talk is cheap.”

He removed the long steel pin that secured his robe and pushed it with a slow, steady pressure through his right cheek until the steel point appeared through his left cheek. After a moment he slid the pin out and fastened his robe with it. On his cheeks, were tiny bloodless punctures.

Devadatta had turned pale. Virudhaka too was silent, unable to drag his eyes away. There the discussion ended.

As they were filing out of the chamber one of the base controllers touched Mara’s sleeve and indicated that he should stand aside. Mara waited, spindly arms folded inside his black robe. With clinical detachment he knew he was to be punished for breaking the rule of self-aggrandizement. He had yielded to petty temptation. Such empty posturing should be beneath him. He might even lose status.

Mara followed the base controller down a winding flight of steps cut into the rock and they emerged into the original main tunnel of the mine. This led from what had been the entrance—now blocked off— into the heart of the mountain. The tunnel was high and wide with smooth walls and lit by globes in wire cages. The air was cool and fresh, wafted against their faces by hidden fans.

Down more steps, the tunnel narrower this time, into the lower depths where Mara had never been before. This was “access restricted” to all adepts.

Finally they entered a short tunnel that ended in a wooden door. The base controller pushed the door open, stood to one side, and Mara squeezed past him. Once inside the small gloomy cell the door was shut and he was left alone in darkness and silence, the shuffle of sandaled footsteps fading away to nothing.

Was this his penance, to be locked away? For how long? Not that time was important, providing his status wasn’t rescinded; that was his greatest fear.

Gradually it came to him that he wasn’t alone—the other’s black robes made him impossible to see, but Mara’s heightened senses detected another presence in the whisper of a breath and the distinctive odor of another human being. So he had been locked away with another penitent. What wrongs, in deed or thought, had the other committed? What rules had he broken?

“Sit down, Mara.”

Staring hard, Mara’s weak eyes were just able to make out a faint shadow that resolved itself into a narrow bony head on a stalk of a neck. His breathing quickened. Was it possible? Could it really be ... ?

“Sit down, Mara,” Bhumi Bhap repeated.

He obeyed, sitting cross-legged on the cool sandy floor of the cell.

Ever since the day he had been given the name of
Mara
he knew that he had been specially chosen. Mara, his namesake, the Evil One, lord of the upper sky, god of transient pleasures in heaven and hell—the name was his because they had seen his promise from the beginning, as a shy, intense kid who never smiled. He had fulfilled that promise and now he was ready.

Mara exulted. This was his briefing!

“You are the youngest to be chosen, Mara, which means that we expect more of you. Your purpose must be keener, your resolve stronger. Age brings disillusionment and the prospect of failure, but at nineteen such things can’t touch you. You copy?”

“I copy,” Mara replied.

“Your briefing schedule has been finalized,” Bhumi Bhap went on. “Times and movements have been monitored and an optimum termination point selected. Follow the mission plan as closely as possible—but not to the detriment of the OTP. Use your own initiative as the situation requires. You’re out there on your own, so the final decision to achieving successful accomplishment rests with you. We at Mission Control can’t make it for you. Is that clear?”

“Affirmative.” Mara could now make out Bhumi Bhap’s face in more detail. The eye sockets were deep black holes, the skin shiny and tight like vellum. Mara had never been so close to him before. He had never known that Bhumi Bhap reeked of death.

“This mission is one of many, but each is vital to our ultimate goal. I know you won’t fail us, Mara.”

“ ‘To be reborn it is necessary to die first,’ ” said Mara, intoning the litany.

“One last thing.” A note of warning in Bhumi Bhap’s voice. “The Faith must be protected. If for whatever reason you find yourself in a no-go situation—abort. You know the procedure. You have been well trained and you’re the right stuff. Do I need to say more?”

“Negative, Earth Father.”

“You will receive documentation at dawn tomorrow, including mission plan, log sheets, and termination pack. Questions?”

Mara was too excited to think straight. He shook his head giddily, the wire frame of his glasses faintly catching the dim light. His own mission at last!

“Get a good night’s sleep. Meditate on rising and pray for a successful termination. I won’t see you again before you leave, so I’ll wish you good luck. I have a hundred-and-one-percent confidence in you, Mara. A-OK?”

“A-OK,” Mara confirmed.

Chase was searched three times even before he got to the reception hall at the UN. When he finally made it, his ID was scrutinized by a surveillance operative behind a bulletproof glass shield while a red-capped guard stood nearby cradling a snub-nosed automatic pistol in the crook of his arm.

The operative fed the serial index into the terminal and read off the instant dossier that flashed onto the screen. Carefully he compared the two mug shots—the one on the ID with the one on the screen—then punched a button and in seconds a facsimile photograph was spat through the slot. This he affixed to a green-bordered security pass, ran it through a magnetized coder, and handed the pass and the ID over, waving Chase through the electronic barrier.

There must have been several hundred people milling about in the hall with its gigantic mosaic murals and marble columns and the spotlit fountain as its centerpiece. The continual movement of feet on the marble floor slurred into a sibilant sound that scraped at the nerves. Chase had never understood why the sight of crowds of people hurrying about should unsettle him. Each one had a purpose, presumably, a reason for being here, yet in places like this he felt uneasy because there were so many people on secret errands—not like at airports where everyone’s reason for being there was obvious.

“Are you lost, Dr. Chase?”

He swung around and looked down into the brown eyes of a woman with dark curly hair. He frowned and snapped his fingers. “Ruth ...” He remembered. “Patton.” They shook hands and Chase said, “You recognized me after all this time?”