JAKE HADN’T BEEN INTENDING to visit CalSouth.
This is how it came about.
After interviewing Grady Sunbloom, the eternal student, Jake had returned to the skycar. The car was in a parking dome up on Boston Common and as he went walking toward it a flock of robot carolers came rolling toward him.
An even dozen of them, three feet high and gilt-painted, broadcasting seasonal music out of their voxgrids and flashing their charity slots. Help The Brazil Vets! pleaded the flashsign on the clittering chest of one. Rehab Caffeine Addicts! begged another. Junk Food For Africa-26! Glaz Eyes For The Needy! Doles For Fictioneers!
“God-rest-ye-merry-gentlemen. …”
“Here, here, here,” said Jake, stuffing one-dollar Banx tokens into each of them. “Now, scoot.”
“… let-nothing-you-dismay …”
Snow was falling out in the twilight. The flakes hit the dome high above the lot, hesitated, melted, were replaced by new ones.
Jake went through the identification and delocking routine that let him into the Odd Jobs, Inc. skycar.
Settling into the drive seat, he sniffed at the air in the compartment. A vague frown touched his face. He shrugged and picked up a tokmike. “Hildy,” he said, “I’m putting this into our system so you can hear it when you’re through with the PKK louts.”
He cleared his throat away from the mike, and put his seat into a rest position. That session with Skullpopper this morning had left him feeling damned weary.
“Here’s part of what Palsy Hatchbacker was, I think, trying to tell me,” he dictated. “Dr. Dickens Barrel, financed mostly by grants from Foodopoly, was working on a new and inexpensive way to puff grain for breakfast cereals. He’s the guy who came up with the original method for making Bloaties, but that one, involving nuclear power and lasers, is somewhat expensive. What he’d dreamed up, while Palsy and some others I’ll get to in a moment were with him, was an incredible new way. One that involved a simple skull implant and the emerging of latent psi powers. Don’t chortle. It apparently worked.”
Shifting in his seat, Jake gazed up through the oneway seethru roof. He watched the Xmas Eve snow drifting down and speckling the parking dome.
“What Prof. Barrel did was train a group of the PKK undergrads to explode oats into puffed Bloaties. He reasoned that it would be quite economical to implant his gadget and then train workers who’d scored high on latent psi-powers to work in Foodopoly’s plants and puff tons of the stuff per day. No nuke power is required, not even much in the way of solar energy.” Jake grinned bleakly. “Trouble was, one of his undergrad groups had an accident, that was back in ’99, too. One spring afternoon an entire wing of the nutrition lab blew up. Blam! Just like that. Prof. Barrel was unsettled by that and seemed to shelve the whole project. He eventually, early in 2001, worked out a system somewhat less costly than his original one and sold the Foodopoly folks on that. It involves solar mirrors and no psi. That’s how they make Bloaties at the moment. A year ago the professor disappeared clean away. Also vanishing at the time was a pretty dark-haired young woman named Christina Parkerhouse. Better known to show business as Trina Twain.”
He paused, yawning.
Since climbing back into the skycar he’d been feeling increasingly drowsy.
“Hildy, this is what I think, at this stage of things anyhow,” Jake continued. “A—Professor Barrel and Trina have teamed up and are using his process to commit the Big Bang murders. If you can blow up a goodly part of a college campus, you can do the same for despots and tycoons. B—Trina made off with the prof and is herself the mastermind. I tend not to believe this one, maybe because I’d hate to accept a ventriloquist as a mastermind. C—The six students who made up the lab group that had the explosive accident are the Big Bang gang. Thus far I can not get a list of their names, but it’s likely that Palsy and Trina were among them. More on that anon. All of this, I have to admit, I got from a moderately goofy fellow that drunken sot Pilgrim put me in touch with.” He yawned again, slouching in his seat. “What I’m going to do, after checking in with Steranko the Siphoner again, is try to find Trina Twain first off. If I can’t, I’ll go for the professor and maybe the student group.”
He let the mike drop into his lap.
There were smells he should have identified earlier. One was the new plaz smell fresh made skycars always give off, the other was the faint lemony scent of sleepgas coming out of your entire aircirc system.
“Hildy … somebody pulled a switch on me … substituted a perfect replica of … damn skycar … like a sap … distracted … maybe by carolers … walked right in … our own secsystem won’t allow gas … so they switch …”
His chin tilted down, his eyelids fell shut. A moment passed, then the vehicle started itself and went rolling toward a takeoff ramp.
Reverend Gully Lomax took off his cape and hung it over a gargoyle. “No need to be shy, Miss Miller,” he said to Hildy.
They were alone in the chapel of the refurbished cathedral, late sunlight was knifing in through the stained glass windows and making kaleidoscopic patterns on the PKK chief’s white dictadesk and the stonewalled room’s six floating glaz chairs.
“Beg pardon?” She arranged herself, crossing her long tan legs, in the chair nearest to the one he was settling into.
“About my Xmas present I mean. You can give it to me now.”
Hildy put her left hand to her lips, blushing convincingly. “Hasn’t it arrived?”
Reverend Lomax moved to his feet, walked a small circle and then rested a broad, white-clad buttock on his white desk top. “Nope, it ain’t,” he forlornly informed her.
“Are you absolutely certain?”
He nodded his wave-rich head at the white computer terminal resting on the stone floor immediately below a tongue-out gargoyle. “Not unless it got here whiles I was on the air just now,” he said. “We log ever’ dang one in.” He rested his palm on his knee, leaning in her direction. “Can you give me a hint as to what it’s gonna be?”
“I’d rather it came as a complete surprise.”
“How ’bout at least tellin’ me how much you paid? Thataway, Miss Miller, I can better judge how much time I can spare you an’ your mag.”
Smiling up at him, she answered, “The price is a four-figure one.”
He fitted his fingers into the waves of his silvery hair and gazed up at the groined ceiling. “Four?”
“High four.”
“I can chat for seventeen minutes with you. Where’s your picture takin’ feller?”
“He’ll be out later in the week.”
“What’s he plannin’ to give me?”
“A digital cuckoo clock.”
“Shit, pardon my French, but I got over nine thousand of them buggers down in the crypt already,” he said. “He ain’t goin’ to be allowed to photograph my best side. Not for no cuckoo clock.”
“Is the crypt where you store all your business records, too?”
“Is the dang interview startin’?”
“It is.”
“Then my answer is, none of your dang business.”
“I know you have all the permanent data on the PlainKlothes Klan stored in your own computer system, but I was interested in bulk data, papers, physical mementoes, gifts, things—”
“What a dumb-ass, pardon my French, way to start an interview.”
“You’re right.” Hildy smiled and fluttered her eyelashes. “Suppose you tell me how you came to found the PKK.”
“That’s more like it,” chuckled the Reverend Lomax. “Well now, it were back in the last century. Around the late autumn of 1996 it was when the idea first hit me. I was nothin’ more than a local TV evangelist then, out in CalNorth, workin’ out of East Oakland. If you know CalNorth, you know they is mostly heathens, atheists and vegetarians thereabouts. Heck, my first Xmas on the air I pulled in less than $900,000 in gifts. I was, take it from me, scufflin’.” He lifted his other buttock up onto his wide, white desk. “I’d always been a fan of the old Ku Klux Klan an’ I doted on their philosophy. Thing was, Miss Miller, I got to thinkin’ that, for all their good ideas, the KKK was no longer thrivin’ as it should. Then the answer come to me.”
“Go on,” urged Hildy, pencil flying over note-paper.
“It was them goddamn sheets,” Lomax explained. “You can’t make a dignified impression with a bed-sheet over your head. Look back through history. Did Hitler wear a sheet? Did Mussolini? Did Napoleon? Nope. Now, Julius Caesar did, but not up over his noggin with eye holes poked in it. First off I thought of creatin’ a uniformed Klan. Give us all snappy paramilitary uniforms with lots of gold trimmin’. But that might’ve made trouble, since some folks don’t like armies.”
“A pity.”
“Right.” He indicated his white suit. “Why not, I asked myself on that fateful day, why not simply go around in civvies? Dress just like ever’body, but give yourself a catchy name. The PlainKlothes Klan. If you’re with the PKK, you can go anywheres. You can pass. That’s the key. You can be a bigot an’ a racist an’ nobody can tell the difference. PKK. Best damn idea I ever did have.”
“Fascinating.” Hildy closed her notebook and reached into her handbag. “Oh, how foolish. Here I have your present right in my purse after all and I forgot all about it.”
“You got somethin’ worth maybe $9000 in that bitty little thing?” He hopped from his desk.
“Just take a look,” she invited.
Lomax rested a beefy hand on the back of her chair and leaned to peek within the open purse she was holding up to him. “I don’t exactly see no …”
Hizzzzzzzz!
Invisible mindgas came nozzling up into the PKK leader’s face.
Hildy, who was wearing special nostril filters, waited until he’d had a full dose. Smiling, she shut the purse. “Isn’t it lovely,” she said aloud. Whispering, she added, “Say it’s terrific.”
“It is terrific,” he droned.
“Make your next reply more jovial,” she instructed. “Now, go sit behind your desk and tell your security people to turn all the monitors, audio and visual, off in here. Wink, indicating you and I are going to fool around for a spell.”
“Yes, miss.” He arranged himself back of the desk. Turning toward a gargoyle high up on the wall behind him, Reverend Lomax ordered, “Blank out ever’thin’ for an hour, boys. Looks like I got me a hot one.”
Hildy asked, “Who controls Newoyl?”
“Novem, Ltd.”
“That much I knew before sitting through the Hour of Supremacy and your colorful autobiography,” she told him. “Who is Novem? Who are the people behind it?”
“I spent near sixteen million bucks tryin’ to find out.”
“And?”
“Best we got so far is a list of seventy-four folks who may or may not be part of Novem,” the mind-controlled reverend replied. “Got data, pictures, even personal effects in some instances. All stored down in the crypt, an’ I got a crew of intelligence agents asortin’ an asiftin’, tryin’ to get at the truth. Those Novem buggers are damn tough to run to ground.”
“Your crew down below now?”
“Nope, I give ’em the afternoon off ’cause it’s Xmas Eve.”
Hildy left her chair, circled the big white desk and took him by the arm. “Come along, Gully.”
“Where we goin’?”
“Into the crypt,” she said.