Tik-Tok (15 page)

It almost worked. Suddenly the green pattern
came alive
, it took on a lustre of living beauty. It was as though I were staring at human skin, translucent and fragile, with delicate veins glowing beneath the surface. The spell was broken by a flat, nasal voice blasting in from the street. "Listen to me, Hickock."

"Tik-Tok," I shouted. "The name is Tik-Tok, I told you."

"Listen to me, Hickock, you think you're a hero in there? You ain't no hero, you're a jerk and a scumbag and a cowardy custard! A real hero would stand up and fight it out, man to man. You're a pantywaist, Hickock. I spit on the milk of your mother. I curse the grave of your father. I say your girlfriend is a whore. I say the car you drive is shit on wheels. What do you say to that?"

The verbal barrage went on. Evidently they believed I was a human named Hickock, a known bank robber and psychotic. They had pulled a computer file on Hickock, and now kept feeding me with information about my assumed self, as teams of police psychologists took turns soothing and assaulting: "Listen, Hickock, coming out of there is easy. The hard part is trying to stay in. Look, you proved what a hero you are, everybody really respects you now. You got nothing to gain now."

"Listen to me, Hickock, you gotta girl, right? Marlene, right? You wanta talk with her? We'll fix up a videophone connection, you can see her and talk with her, okay? Or what do you say to a nice thick steak, filet mignon, side of fries, mushrooms, onion rings, bottle of any beer you like, what do you say, kid?"

"This is your old mother, son. Don't go on with this, for the love of God! For once in your rotten life try, try to do something halfway decent."

"My child, maybe you feel you've lost your way, but you know, God still cares about your soul. Yes I know that must sound a little old-fashioned in this modern age of jazz and cocktails and Martian haircuts and all, but it's as true now as it ever was, God still cares, God still (how much longer do I have to keep him busy?) God still cares. So you get a wonderful chance here to get straight with God. Let the hostages go, my child. Let them all go. You haven't killed anyone yet, you haven't committed the big sin, not yet."

In fact the space behind the counter was full of blasted bodies; all of our hostages were dead.

"This is your social worker, Hickock, look I know things haven't been easy for you lately but couldn't we talk this thing through? I just want you to see all your options before you jump into anything, okay? Okay just promise me this. Promise me you'll talk with me for just five minutes. Then if you still feel like killing the hostages, fine, go ahead. What do you think? Deal?"

Blojob reported that he had enough ammo to make a small bomb. I saw he was asking permission to commit suicide.

"Fine," I said. "Only wait till after I leave. And try to take as many cops with you as possible. Cops or anybody."

The brassy voice in the street went on for another hour, until it was suddenly cut off. ". . . if you love God and love your mother and love your girl and
wow-yom-bwmmmm-Mip! EEP!
" A convoy of road graders, diggers, power shovels and tanks plowed into the massed police cars and shoved them aside like toys. There was scattered gunfire and the sound of rockets. A light tank stopped in front of the bank and the voice of Smilin' Jack called out from it:

"Come on, Banjo, for Christ's sake." I hobbled out, leaning on a rifle, climbed aboard. We were a few blocks away when Blojob went up in a fountain of fake green onyx.

"Goddamnit, Banjo, why did you risk everything for a lousy bank robbery?" Smilin' Jack was not smilin'. "I been checking up on you, Banjo, Jesus you got a great organization working for you, a whole legit corporation pulling down a couple million a day, the oil fields and copper mines and medical centers, you own a tenth of every cornflake in the United States—and you want to risk all that for what? For the fun of robbing some dinky bank?"

"It's kind of an experiment, George. See, I'm not exactly interested in money or power. I just want to know what it feels like to
do wrong
. To commit sins."

"What kind of sins? What are you talking about?"

"I want to find out what makes people tick. For instance, what made you come to my rescue today?"

His famous grin returned. "Hell, Banjo, I was on the way to the bank myself to take out a little unsecured loan. Only I saw there was a hell of a traffic jam, so me and the boys stopped our vehicles for a minute." He pointed at the TV screen. "Then I saw you on the news." The screen now showed a commercial for instant mashed potatoes. "Hell, Banjo, what are friends for?"

There were quite a few arguments aboard the
Doodlebug
as we plunged towards the sun. Some argued that it had been foolish to kill Captain Reo, who might have worked out some way of saving us; others argued that Reo had been asking for it. Some argued that we should keep as cool as possible with air-conditioning and thus prolong our lives a few hours or days; others argued for turning up the heat to acclimatize ourselves. Some argued that we should (me excepted) drink Kool-aid laced with cyanide and get it over with; others pointed out that there was no Kool-aid or cyanide aboard, and darn little of anything else to eat or drink.

I suggested telling stories to pass the time. These shared experiences would bind us together closely, in a comradeship that had no regard for race, creed, color, sex, age, height, weight, IQ, identifying scars, lack of affect or even lack of protoplasm. Doomed and damned we might be, but we'd be darn glad of the company.

I began the round of stories myself with the simple tale of my own life with the Culpeppers at Tenoaks. I had barely described the family, however, when Vilo Jord swore an oath and leapt to his feet. His face was pale, the odd moustache twitching.

"This is amazing!" he said. "I met these very Culpeppers myself, after they fell into poverty!"

"Did they ever speak of me?" I asked. "Did they remember their faithful—?"

"No one said anything about any robot servants," he said. "But you have to realize, they'd come down in the world so. I doubt if they remembered their days of plantation glory."

"And how are they all: Miz Lavinia and Miz Berenice and Massa Orlando and Massa Clayton and especially little old Miz Carlotta? All well, I hopes?"

"Not exactly." He cleared his throat. "I ran across the Culpeppers while I was travelling through Mississippi on embassy business. A sandstorm blew up—the climate of the Magnolia State has changed somewhat, I imagine, since your time. I took cover in a rude trailer that I found pitched in the shelter of ten oak trees, and there I met the Culpeppers.

"I must tell you in all candor that I have never seen such hopeless poverty in my own country or anywhere else, never. They had eaten the telephone. I begged a glass of water from them, feeling that even this was an imposition. They brought me a cracked glass of cloudy water on a rusty tin pieplate. The little attempt at elegance moved me, and I left ten thousand dollars under the plate. Later I wondered if money wasn't just prolonging their misery needlessly. They lived in the shadow of death, you see, just as they lived in the shadow of that giant unfinished pyramid."

"Clayton's pyramid," I said, nodding. "That's what ruined the family."

"Worse, it blighted the entire state."

Maggie spoke up. "Yes, I read an article about that in
Scientific Martian
not long ago. It said that ecologists now know that it was building the Great Pyramid at Giza which caused the Egyptian land to become a parched and sandy desert. Now this pyramid has done the same for Mississippi ." Vilo continued his story. "Clayton seemed genuinely sorry about his venture. In fact he vowed to devote every penny earned by his pyramid to restoring the scarred land."

"Did it earn much?"

"Nothing at all. Tourists were supposed to pay a quarter to look at it, but usually Clayton was so glad to have visitors that he forgot to collect the money. Of course he hoped to make money from the pyramid in another way. He believed that, if he could only lay his hands on sufficiently accurate measuring instruments, he could predict the future in great detail, merely by measuring passages within the great structure. Evidently each passage corresponds to some historical period, and all the little bumps and irregularities in the stone are little events. With good instruments, he said, he could predict horse races and stock market movements. 'But what can I do,' he said, 'with nothing but an old folding ruler?"

"Massa Clayton always was a hopeless merp," I said. "How was Miz Lavinia? When I last heard of her, she was on a satellite, a prisoner of her own allergies."

"She was much worse. Her allergies continued to multiply, and now they were killing her. I believe her doctor said that she had now become allergic to the entire universe— only an escape from space and time might save her life. '
Might
', he said again. 'I make no guarantees."

"And Miz Berenice?"

"Mindless," he said. "Burnt out after a grand drug jamboree. She didn't even babble, just slept in her chair. All the time I was there, she never opened an eye."

"And Massa Orlando?"

"Orlando left the bosom of the family to make his own way. He worked at some other wealthy family's stables as a groom, until they caught him fooling with the horses. He kept losing jobs, and finally he had to pose as a robot to work for some aristocratic family in Georgia as a fieldhand. Every morning he had to get up early and paint on the lines for his jaw joint. Every night he had to sneak into the orchard and feed on green peaches."

"And Miz Carlotta? Sweet little Miz Carlotta?"

Vilo cleared his throat and stared for a moment at the view-screen where the sun seemed to be growing larger by the second. "Banjo, I'm afraid she's dead. As you know, she was always sensitive about her height, just over inches. Yet, so long as the family had money, she never gave up hope of meeting a short man, marrying, and living a completely fulfilled life. True, none of the men she met were quite short enough, but—so long as the Culpepper fortune drew suitors to the house—there was always hope.

"Grinding poverty changed everything. Carlotta had no more beaux of any size. The only gentlemen who called on her were no gentlemen at all: they represented circuses.

"At last, deeply depressed, she tried to rouse Berenice from perpetual slumber for some words of comfort. Berenice snored on, her long, lustrous black hair hanging down over the back of her chair. Carlotta braided some of this hair, made a noose for her own tiny neck, leaped off a footstool and hanged herself. Berenice never awoke, and by the time others noticed the tiny figure hanging down behind her chair, it was too late."

There was not a dry eye on the ship after Vilo's tale,. my two excepted. Maggie Dial volunteered to tell the next one, vowing it would have a happier ending.

"Let me start by posing a few riddles," she said, and counted them off on the fingers of one hand. "Whatever happened to the
SS Dolly Edison
? Why are we running out of food and grog already? What can we learn from the animals? Why did we all have to be knocked out during liftoff? Why was Captain Reo wearing spurs? Can artificial gravity save lives?"

We were all listening intently now. "For a short time I worked as an insurance investigator—using drugs, hypnosis and animal impersonations to get at the truth. I was assigned to the case of the
SS Dolly Edison
, the luxury liner that took off for a grand tour of the solar system and never came back. Radio contact suggested that there had been an explosion on the bridge, the ship went out of control and fell into the sun—the orchestra playing 'Nearer My God to Thee'. My company wasn't satisfied. We managed to find out that there were very few supplies taken on board, only a skeleton crew, and no passengers at all—the entire passenger list was fictitious. But we were never able to prove what finally happened to the ship."

She held up a piece of headed notepaper. "Now I know, the ship's name was changed to the
Doodlebug
. The owners collected insurance on their white elephant—nobody ever wanted to do grand tours of the solar system anyway—and began a profitable freight business. Only now either the freight business wasn't so good either or the ship was getting too old to cut the mustard. Time to try the same trick again."

Little Jack Wax scratched his head. "You mean change the name again?"

"Not quite. This time the ship would really be destroyed. My friends, we're aboard a coffin ship."

Duke Mitty nodded. "We knew that. We just didn't know it was all set up deliberate."

"That explains why we're running out of supplies," Maggie went on. "We were never meant to reach Mars at all."

"Zounds," someone murmured.

"The next question is, what can we learn from the animals? As you all know, I've worked a lot with animals, so I notice things about them the rest of you might miss. For instance, those cows in the hold, hanging up in hammocks. I noticed that the droppings under one of them were different. It isn't a cow at all. Oh, it has fake horns and a plastic udder and a false tail to disguise it, but it's a horse."

"That explains Captain Reo's spurs!" I said, though I wasn't sure how. "It's his horse."

"Right." Maggie grinned. "It's the horse he was going to use for his getaway. Now, why did we all have to be knocked out during lift-off?"

Fern Worpne said, "Wasn't it something to do with adjusting to artificial gravity?"

"So they kept telling us. But the real reason is, there was no lift-off. There's no artificial gravity. We're parked on earth, and we never left it."

Smilin' Jack spoke up. "I can't believe this. We're on earth? If Reo knew that, why didn't he just slip out while we were sleeping off the grog?"

"I wondered about that myself," said Maggie. "I think he wanted more than escape—he wanted revenge on us. He wanted to wait until the preset charges were about ready to blow the ship to kingdom come, then slip away and leave us to die."

"I can't believe it," I said. "Was he going to kill passengers, crew and cattle, all for an insurance swindle?"