The Fellowship of the Hand (3 page)

“What’s this building?” he asked, pointing to a white rectangle with a smokeless stack on top.

Judy consulted the coordinate list. “Mains Brothers. A crematorium.”

“Of course,” Crader said softly, letting out his breath. “It had to be.”

“Be what? It only burns bodies, and they’re not radioactive.”

“Not usually, but in this case I’ll bet they are. Last year nearly a million Americans were implanted with heart and brain pacemakers powered by plutonium capsules. Theoretically, all crematoriums are supposed to check with the medical registry in Washington before burning a body, so that any such atomic device can be removed first. But in actual practice they sometimes slip up. It appears that the Mains Brothers have been slipping up a great deal.”

“Here’s the reason,” Judy said, checking her coordinates again. “They’re only three blocks from the Sunnyside Rest Pavilion, and they’re getting all the old people who die—the ones most likely to have implanted pacemakers.”

Crader flipped off the viewing table lights. “That’s it, then. Contact the Health Bureau in Washington and fill them in. It’s their baby now, not ours.”

The day entangled Carl Crader in such a variety of tasks that it was late afternoon before he again remembered the election computer and the names of Blunt and Ambrose. He ran a check on his desk unit and found there were two Jason Blunts and four Stanley Ambroses in the master file:

Jason Blunt, astronomer, New York City

Jason Blunt, oilman, Gulf of Mexico

Stanley Ambrose, space lawyer, Philadelphia

Stanley Ambrose, clone biologist, Paris

Stanley Ambrose, retired director of Venus Colony, Address Unknown

Stanley Ambrose, naturalist, Polar Colony

Crader scanned the list and sighed with frustration. “We need more information, Judy. If there was a secret election of some sort, the candidates could have been any of the men on this list—or any of a hundred other Blunts or Ambroses we know nothing about.”

“But if thousands of people voted for them, even secretly, they must be well known,” Judy said.

“True enough.” He pondered the list again. “Stanley Ambrose’s present address is unknown, according to this. In fact, I’ve heard nothing about him since he retired from the Venus Colony. That might be significant. If he’s gone with HAND or some other secret group, he may have dropped from sight.”

“What about Jason Blunt? There are only two on the list.”

“That might be easier to pin down, provided we can believe the computer that there are only two Jason Blunts well-known in public life.”

“Our memory bank includes all listings in every major biographical reference work. Blunt is not that common a name.”

“Very well. Let’s try the local Mr. Blunt first. The astronomer.”

It took Judy only a few minutes to locate Blunt and put in a vision-phone call. She returned shaking her head. “He’s eighty-two years old and confined to a rest home upstate. I think we can cross him off the list.”

Crader nodded. “That leaves Jason Blunt, the oilman. Know anything about him?”

“I can find out.”

He glanced at the digital wall clock. “It’s pretty late now, Judy, I suppose it can wait till tomorrow.”

It had been a long day, and he could see she wasn’t about to argue with him. As she retreated to the outer office he spun around in his chair to gaze out at the Jersey flatlands and the distant Nixon International Jetport. The sun was low in the western sky, a reminder that autumn had begun and the long winter nights would soon be upon them. Crader wished that daylight could be controlled somehow, the way the climate was. He enjoyed the winters almost completely free of snow, and the summers when most showers came at night. This night, like many others, he’d putter a bit in his suburban garden. Perhaps he might even help his wife plant a new crop of winter flowers. If only there was a bit more daylight …

“Mr. Crader, I thought you should see this.”

He pulled himself back to the present and glanced up at Judy. Her face was white as she held an urgent message-form out to him. “It just came through.”

He scanned the words quickly.
“Computer engineer Harry Rogers slain in office. Unknown man hunted.”

“Rogers?” He looked up quizzically.

“Rogers was the man who first reported the irregularities with the FRIDAY-404 election computer. He’s the one Earl talked to.”

“All right,” Crader said, suddenly decisive. “It looks as if we work late tonight after all. Get me that printout on Jason Blunt, and send Mike Sabin over to the hospital to stay with Earl. They just might have another try at him.”

H
ER NAME ORIGINALLY WAS
Masha Konya, and she’d grown up in one of the thriving industrial cities of central Turkey. But she’d never been fully content there, not since she was twelve and a boy tried to rape her and she realized in a full flash of illumination that she was both beautiful and desirable.

After that, the city of her childhood was too small for her. Masha left home before her fifteenth birthday and journeyed to New Istanbul, a gleaming city of towers and bridges that straddled the Bosporus like some twenty-first-century Colossus of Rhodes. She dreamed of dancing in the great golden pleasure mosques, where wealthy men from all over the world came to gamble and sin. This was to be the life for her—not the stifling regularity of an industrial city, where she might end her days with festering lungs and flabby thighs.

The entrepreneurs of New Istanbul were quick to recognize Masha Konya’s charms. A man named Fizel arranged for her to study the nearly forgotten art of belly dancing, and by the time of her fifteenth birthday she was working nights in a little club called The Last Century, dancing and hustling drinks between numbers. That was where she met a man named Stevro and, later, Jason Blunt.

In a very real sense, Stevro won Masha from Fizel one night over the gaming tables. They were playing electronic roulette for thousand-dollar chips, and when Fizel’s money ran short Stevro offered to stake him, in exchange for the young dancer Masha. In the heat of the moment Fizel agreed, certain he would win back his money and the girl. He didn’t, and that night after the last show Stevro collected his prize.

Masha was fearful of Stevro at first. He was a bulky, jerky sort of man with a habit of smoking soilweed, a synthetic, mind-expanding drug much used in the Near East. Gazing down at Masha as she sat on the edge of the bed that first night, he said, “You are very beautiful, my dear. Very beautiful indeed.”

She already knew what he wanted, and she started to remove her dancer’s costume. “I belonged to Fizel,” she said. “You had no right to take me.”

He inhaled on the harsh little soilweed cigar, and his eyes seemed to glaze over a bit. At first she thought the drug was getting to him and that she would sleep alone at least for this night. But then as the last of her garments fell away he put down the cigar and stepped back to fully admire her naked beauty.

“Yes,” he said softly. “And how old are you, my dear?”

“Fifteen.”

“How many men have you been with?”

“A boy back home, and Fizel, and two of his customers. That is all.”

“Are you wise in the ways of lovemaking? Do you know the functions of the solanum, and the electric lance, and the pigeon eggs?”

“I … no,” she admitted. “It has always been the same, except for the last man. He wanted to beat me first, before we made love.”

“I will teach you,” he said. “I will teach you all there is to know. And someday you will sail away on one of those big atomic yachts that harbor here. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“We will begin tomorrow.”

He came to her then, very gently, as if he were handling valuable merchandise. He came to her, and took her in a way she had not known before.

The very next day, strolling with Stevro along the docks where the big yachts berthed, she heard him begin his course of instruction.

“You see, my dear, there are very wealthy men who own these ships. Some of them have made their money in space exploration, or in undersea oil wells. They are men of middle age, often already married and divorced. They come here to New Istanbul to recapture their lost youth, most often in the arms of a young girl like yourself. But you have seen those pigs who work for Fizel. No rich man could bear the sight of them for more than a single night. You, my dear, you are different. To possess you, a man would even marry you.”

“Marry?”

Stevro nodded. “I am not training you to be some rich man’s mistress, my dear. I am training you for a wifely role.”

And for a year Stevro did just that. She attended ballet classes and studied the space sciences by day, learning all there was to know about the life around them in the middle of the twenty-first century. (“Wealthy men are most interested in space,” Stevro explained.) Then by night he took over her education personally, initiating her in the many ways of love and lust, showing her how the beauty of her body could be used to please one man.

“This,” he told her one night, “is solanum, a form of nightshade which can serve as a powerful aphrodisiac. When your husband is low, a bit of this will rouse his spirits without fail.”

“I see,” she said, fingering the dusky powder.

“And here is an electric lance. Have you ever seen one before?”

“No.” She stared wide-eyed at the smooth plastic rod, imagining it penetrating her.

“Male prostitutes sometimes use them. And nymphomaniacs, of course. The tip delivers a series of gentle electric shocks.”

“How ghastly!”

“In a sense it is, because it is one more mechanization of life. But you see, my dear, we must take advantage of these tools as long as they are offered to us. If the husband I choose for you is too elderly to perform with satisfaction, you might welcome a little help from the electric lance.”

“Never! I would never marry such a man!”

He sighed and lit another of his soilweed cigars. “How old are you now, Masha dear?”

“Sixteen.”

“Yes, sixteen.” He stared out into space for a moment, as if calculating the rate of return on some investment. Then he said, “It is time we began looking for a husband.”

At the electronic casino, Masha soon became a regular sight. She would arrive on the arm of Stevro, dressed in some expensive and radiant costume that could not fail to attract attention. Her favorite among these was a long white gown of moondust, slit from neck to ankles, which fell open at every movement to reveal the pale pink bodysuit beneath. She especially liked its effect on men, liked the way their mouths dropped open when she entered a room for the first time.

She was wearing the moondust gown on the night she first met Jason Blunt. He was not the first of the millionaires to whom Stevro had been attracted, but he was the first to show real promise. Just two nights earlier, while displaying Masha’s charms to a visiting Frenchman, Stevro had been forced to break the man’s arm when he attempted to pull her away into his car.

Jason Blunt was nothing like the Frenchman. He was an American for one thing, and Masha had known very few of those. She guessed his age at about forty-five, though at the swimming pool and in the gym he displayed the muscles and endurance of a much younger man. His long black hair and trim beard were only beginning to streak with gray, and there was a twinkle about his eyes that made Masha hope from the moment she met him that he would be the one.

As the moondust gown fell away from her thighs, she saw the interest in his face, and when she happened to make some intelligent comment on the state of the Venus Colony with its continuing rivalry between the Americans and the Russo-Chinese, he reached out to touch her hand in a gesture of agreement.

“You know a great deal for one so young and charming,” he said.

“I had a good teacher.” She raised her eyes to Stevro, who at times like this never left her side.

Perhaps something in her look caused Jason Blunt to turn his head toward the bulky man with his short, foul-smelling cigars. He nodded slightly, as if he understood everything.

The following night, Blunt and Stevro dined alone while Masha anxiously awaited the verdict in her room. When Stevro joined her shortly before midnight he was smiling, and she knew it would be all right. “He wishes to spend one night with you, my dear, to verify the truth of all that I told him. If he finds I have not lied, he is prepared to pay one million American dollars for your hand in marriage.”

“A million …”

“A small sum to him. One day’s output of his undersea oil wells.”

“But to pay so much for
me
!”

Stevro came up to where she sat and ran his pudgy fingers through her hair. “You are more than worth it, my dear. Never forget, wherever life may take you, that I taught you what you know. You’re a pupil of Stevro, and that’s something to be proud of.”

“But if Jason Blunt marries me, what will you do?”

He shrugged and looked away. “Go back to Fizel’s, I suppose, and find another like you. If such a thing is possible.”

Her night with Jason Blunt was more than successful, as she knew in her newfound confidence it would be. The following morning he presented Stevro with a certified check for one million dollars, and that afternoon Masha and Jason were married in the New Church of the Moon, overlooking the Bosporus. That evening they sailed with the tide and were carried into the becalmed waters of the Mediterranean on a honeymoon voyage.

When they had been at sea five days, Masha looked up from her sunning mat and asked, “Jason, were you ever married before?”

He was exercising nude on the top deck of the atomic yacht
Strombol,
and he waited until he had lowered himself from the parallel bars before answering. “Few men in my position reach the age of forty-five without a wife or two along the way. But they were nothing like you, Masha.”

“I was just curious.”

“There were two. Both are gone now.” She did not know if he meant dead or merely divorced, and she did not ask him.

“Stevro said you are very wealthy.”