WHILE-YOU-WAIT

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1979)

When the multinational conglomerate took over the firm Neil Purley had helped build into something worth taking over and told him, in effect, “Sorry, Social Security No. 129-03-7652, but there’s nothing you can do that a computer can’t do better and more cheaply,” Purley burned with a cold flame. If man was no match for the computer’s speed, the computer was no match for man’s tricky mind.

He would show them. It went deeper than that. He would show himself as well. A man’s insight, intelligence, intuition should not go for nothing, be of nothing worth, wither for want of use.

With his severance pay he rented space, leased equipment, ran an ad. And waited for his first client.

The conglomerate would be his unwitting ally. He would be using the conglomerate’s identifying codewords to gain illegal access to the computer. He nicened it up by thinking of it as “timesharing in an unauthorized manner.” Still, the upholders of law and order would not look kindly on that. So for safety’s sake he had set up his office on the cheesebox principle.

Just as bookies interpose unmanned phones, Purley interposed closed-circuit television. The office the ad directed you to held only a cathode-ray-tube screen, a TV camera, and a client’s chair. Purley himself sat at a time-division multiple-access data link in another part of town. The connection would break at the first sign of trouble. The law would never catch Purley red-handed—or touch-tone-fingered.

And that was why his first client seemed slightly puzzled when an image on the screen welcomed him. Parenthetically, the image looked nothing like Purley.

“Please sit down.”

The man did not sit down. He held a clipping up to the camera eye. “This mean what it says?”

It said:

WHILE-U-WAIT.

Computerized Detecting. One-hour maximum per case. The lost found. Fee: (includes all expenses) $500 certified check. Satisfactory job or your money refunded.

and gave the address.

The image smiled. “It means what it says. Let me add up front, though, that we’re not a detective agency and don’t have a license to operate as such. We don’t send operatives gumshoeing around. We’re purely and simply a data-processing service that specializes in retrieving information from data banks to help clients retrieve persons, places, and things. We locate, in other words; the physical retrieval is up to you.”

The man nodded. “That’s all I want you to do for me—locate someone, and fast.”

“You’ve brought your certified check for five hundred dollars? Kindly place it in the escrow slot. That’s it.” Purley scanned the signature, saw the man’s name was Albert Uhl. “Now, Mr. Uhl, take note of the time. If we fail to locate your someone inside one hour, you get your check back. All right, Mr. Uhl, who are you looking for?”

Uhl sat down before the visual display. He gave the image a slightly dubious smile, as though suspecting WHILE-U-WAIT relied more on theatrics than on technology. But his need appeared greater than his doubt. He wanted to believe WHILE-U-WAIT would help him. And if he had to pay extra for his need by submitting himself to showmanship, he was willing to do so. But he looked a man who would demand results. He leaned forward.

“I’m trying to locate a friend of mine. He’s playing around with another man’s wife.” He paused. “This is all just between us?”

“Of course. Privileged communication. Go on, Mr. Uhl.”

“My friend went abroad to meet the woman. What he doesn’t know is that the husband knows about them. This husband can be violent. He has a temper—and a gun to go with it. I’m anxious to get in touch with my friend and head him off before he runs into trouble. Only my trouble is I don’t know just where he is or what name he’s using.” He leaned back.

Purley kept the image smiling but in his own person he grimaced in dismay. “We have to have something to go on, Mr. Uhl. There can’t be feedback without input.”

“Sure, I realize that.” Swiftly and smoothly Uhl produced a snapshot. “That’s why I brought this. It came from somewhere abroad about a week ago. All you have to do is figure out the exact spot it shows. I’ll do the rest.”

The snapshot, amateurishly blurry, showed a man standing in front of a thatch-roofed cottage. Purley zoomed in on the snapshot. That gave him a bigger blur. He grimaced again, then tapped out instructions for the computer to enhance the snapshot electronically, sharpen it up to make the man’s features and those of his surroundings as clear as possible. While the computer worked on the snapshot, Purley picked up on his client.

“That’s all you have to go on?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s try it from the other angles of the triangle. I gather the husband is shadowing the wife to the rendezvous. We can trace them through plane or ship bookings and hotel reservations. You can take a fast jet there and be on the lookout for your friend to warn him. What’s the husband’s name?”

Uhl frowned. He shook his head. “I don’t know that. If I did I wouldn’t need you.”

“I see.” Purley did not see anything but a total blur. If all his cases were going to be like this first one, maybe he had bitten off more than he could chew. “All right, let’s see if you can give me a description of your friend.”

Uhl’s frown deepened. “You have the snapshot.”

The image smiled patiently. “It doesn’t tell me his age, eye color, height, weight—a few little details like those.”

Purley presented a display on the screen in place of the image. The display consisted of a list of physical and social characteristics—sex, race, age, marital status, height, build, weight, complexion, eye color, hair color, scars, and so on. He asked Uhl to take up the light pen attached to the set and tick off his friend’s profile.

Something in the tigerish way Uhl moved, the man’s reflexes, plus his almost willful lack of helpful input, the failure to supply the husband’s name, gave Purley to think again. He did not let the light pen work.

“Sorry, Mr. Uhl. The light pen seems to be out of order. But the computer can sense it just as well if you use your finger.”

Uhl hesitated a fraction of a second, then touched his finger to the screen to indicate his friend’s characteristics.

“Fine.” Purley winked out the display and presented his surrogate image again. “While we work on what we have, you can relax and listen to music. Do you have any preferences?”

The man stared. “No, no preferences.”

“All right.” Purley faded the image from the screen and let Uhl enjoy Montevani and colored lights that pulsed to the soothing strains.

Purley himself felt far from relaxed. Uhl bothered him. While working on locating Uhl’s friend, it would not hurt to get a make on Uhl.

Besides recording Uhl’s state of tension in his finger tremors as he touched the screen, the computer had registered Uhl’s fingerprint. Uhl seemed the right age and the right physique to have served in Vietnam. Subsidiaries of the conglomerate that had found Purley redundant did national defense work. If you knew the codeword, you had access to Department of Defense files. Purley knew the codeword. He had the computer classify Uhl’s fingerprint and look for the print’s match among the whorls, loops and arches of all those who had served in the armed forces.

It took two minutes. The fingerprint matched the right index finger of one Steve Kinzel.

Purley retrieved Kinzel’s service record. Kinzel had received a less-than-honorable discharge from the Army—but not before winning every sharpshooting award the Army had to offer.

Using the conglomerate’s plant-security contact with the FBI—another codeword—Purley patched into the National Criminal Identification Center in Washington.

Steve Kinzel’s FBI yellow sheet showed that the FBI’s anti-syndicate task force suspected Kinzel of being a hit man with a long string of contracts to his credit. Never caught in the act.

Purley eyed Uhl-Kinzel through the camera. The man sat seemingly relaxed, sound-bathing.

A sunning snake looks relaxed. Purley felt a hollow tightness in his belly.

The hit-man angle would seem to rule out the possibility Purley had been considering—that his client was the husband in the story he had fed Purley.

But the purpose in hiring WHILE-U-WAIT remained the same. Even stronger. To locate and waste the “friend.”

Purley turned to the enhanced snapshot on one of his screens. The computer had made a number of identifications and deductions.

The architecture put the cottage in the British Isles. The thatched roof was not of the kind you find in Suffolk, Essex, or Cambridgeshire; there the roof cocks up at the gable end. This cottage stood rather in a western or southwestern county, where the gables droop or have hipped hoods. That narrowed it down to Cornwall, Devon, or Somersetshire.

The gentle swells of land visible in the distance further narrowed it down to Somersetshire. Purley blew up white dots on the nearest slope into grazing sheep—Southdown breed, the computer said after a nanosecond’s glance at its memory banks.

A speck in the snapshot’s sky blew up into a seagull. The computer gazed at its gazetteer. The hills would be the Mendip Hills, the seagull’s drink would be the Mouth of the Severn.

In short, the cottage stood on property near a Southdown sheep pasturage some five miles southeast of Weston-super-Mare.

The front of the cottage had a freshly whitewashed look. The man posing in front of it had probably just recently taken possession. The foliage of the oak tree dominating the grounds told Purley the man had taken possession of it in early spring. The shape of the oak tree also showed the orientation—the northern branches reaching for light, the southern branches taking it easy. Therefore the road the cottage faced on ran east and west.

Shadows showed it to be mid-afternoon; they also helped Purley and the computer, using the man’s height as a yardstick, to determine the dimensions of the cottage. Only the man’s identity remained in shadow.

Purley turned to his “blue box,” an electronic device for placing overseas calls without paying for them. He put through a call to Taunton, the county town of Somersetshire.

There Purley found an obliging records clerk. The important sound of “overseas call,” plus Purley’s tone of urgency, proved contagious. Inside of five minutes she identified the property from Purley’s detailed description and came up with the name of the present owner of Oak Cottage.

Roger Nugent.

It was all over. Investigation successfully completed, fee earned. He had not bitten off more than he could chew. Purley now had all the information his client wanted. All that remained was to astonish the client by letting the image smile modestly and say, “Your man is Roger Nugent, at Oak Cottage, between Weston-super-Mare and Axbridge, in Somerset, England.”

Purley stole another look at Uhl-Kinzel. He saw beneath the relaxed form the unsoothed beast. Purley glanced at the hour. He decided to stall the man another ten minutes.

Through the computer of a correspondent bank obligating and obligated to the conglomerate, Purley determined that Roger Nugent had paid for Oak Cottage with funds from a Taunton bank account. Purley backtracked the deposits, following a suspiciously complex trail.

He traced the laundered money in Nugent’s account ultimately to a U.S. Justice Department special fund. The pattern of payments told him Roger Nugent’s name had been Larry Shedd.

Now Purley knew why his client had been shy about telling WHILE-U-WAIT the missing man’s name up front. Anyone who kept up with the news would have recognized the name Larry Shedd and have realized the phoniness of the love-triangle tale.

Larry Shedd, before disappearing and surfacing as Roger Nugent, had testified before a Senate committee looking into the activities of a leading crime-syndicate figure, Vincent Minturn. Minturn, according to “reliable sources,” had put an open $500,000 contract out on Larry Shedd.

Because of this contract, the Justice Department had paid for plastic surgery on Larry Shedd, spirited him out of the country, and set him up under a new identity. Away from hit men, away from front pages.

WHILE-U-WAIT’s client was not a newspaperman. His reason for discovering Shedd’s present identity and whereabouts was not to expand on Shedd’s life story but to contract Shedd’s life span.

WHILE-U-WAIT’s client’s client had to be Vincent Minturn.

Purley glanced again at the hour and quickly followed up the Minturn lead.

A search of the computerized morgue of the largest wire service—the conglomerate whose facilities Purley was borrowing owned newspapers and radio and TV stations—turned up that Minturn, like Shedd, was hiding out under another name somewhere overseas.

Minturn had slipped out from under FBI and Interpol surveillance to evade a grand jury investigation arising out of the Senate hearings. Minturn had often voiced his love for the American way of life and his scorn for all other ways, but he dared not risk returning as long as Shedd lived to testify against him. The $500,000 contract was a measure of that love.

Purley smiled an unlovely smile. It had hit him that Minturn and the conglomerate had a lot in common. Money was root, stem, and flower of the evil they did. He had no self-pity, but he thought poor Shedd.

While he was at it, he had the computer look up everything the wire-service morgue had on Shedd. The latest reference to the vanished Shedd appeared in an item about a minor burglary a week ago at a Chicago nursing home. The minor burglary had a major outcome. Larry Shedd’s aging and ailing mother had died of shock shortly after the intrusion, though as far as anyone knew, nothing of any worth was missing.

Purley knew what was missing.

The snapshot.

Shedd-Nugent had mailed it to his failing and fearful mother to reassure her that he was alive and well and doing fine…somewhere. He must have had sense enough to arrange for the envelope to bear a misleading postmark. Otherwise, Uhl would not have needed WHILE-U-WAIT’s help.

A thought burned bright in Purley’s mind. But for it to become deed required Minturn’s present identity and whereabouts.

Purley had not even a blurred amateurish snapshot to help him locate Minturn. A glance at the hour told him time was running out.

He staked all on his only handle on Minturn—Minturn’s yearning for America.

According to news accounts, Minturn had haunted the hangouts of the show-biz crowd. He would be homesick for those haunts, eager for some reminder or taste of them.

Again Purley twitched the conglomerate’s tentacles. He traced all overseas air shipments of Lindy’s cheesecake, Nathan’s hot dogs, and Stage Door Delicatessen pastrami in the past month. He narrowed the field to one Frank Fratto in Rome.

Fratto’s Rome bank account led back to a Stateside account of Vincent Minturn’s that Minturn had cleaned out just before disappearing. Fratto’s handwriting on his bank signature card matched Minturn’s on his—there were distinctive t’s. The computer gave it as a 98.6666 percent probability that Frank Fratto was Vincent Minturn.

The man’s checking account gave Purley the man’s present address—a Rome hotel. The checks led Purley to invoices of places where Fratto shopped. Among the earliest purchases were a red-brown wig and prescription sunglasses. Best of all, the measurements on file at the leading Rome tailor’s for Fratto’s new suits reassured Purley that Fratto had roughly Nugent’s build.

Purley switched off Montevani and the lights and threw his smiling surrogate image at his client.

Uhl leaned forward. “The hour’s up. Do you have a name and a place?”

Purley gave him a name and—“He’s not where you might think he’d be”—a place.

Uhl sat staring at the image. “Are you sure you got the right man?”

The image drew itself up. “We’re 98.6666 percent sure.”

Uhl smiled. “That’s good enough for me.” He got up to go but stopped to shake his head. “I wish I knew how you—” He shrugged. “No time. I have to catch a plane. So long.”

“Good-by.”

Purley watched Uhl set out toward his doom. He sat bemused awhile, then stirred himself to forge and send an IPCQ alert—Interpol Paris to all national bureaus—warning the carabinieri in Italy to be on the lookout for the arrival of Steve Kinzel, a.k.a. Albert Uhl, suspected hit man. The Italian police would tail him and should catch him red-handed, trigger-fingered, gunning down Frank Fratto, a.k.a. Vincent Minturn.

WHILE-U-WAIT awaited its next client.