"Rufus, dammit!" the beggar said, louder this time.
Thomas reluctantly swung his horse around and halted beside the ragged, slumped figure that had hailed him. This is probably a trap, he thought anxiously. He should keep moving and give this letter to Gladhand. Then in the unsteady light from a street lamp, he noticed blood glistening on the beggar's chest.
"You're hurt," he whispered, sliding off the horse.
The figure, whose face was shadowed under a wide cardboard hat, nodded matter-of-factly. "That's an accurate statement," the hoarse voice allowed.
Thomas recognized the hat. It was Ben Corwin's.
"Ben?" he said, pulling aside the hat; and then he froze. The face under its ragged brim, pale and beaded with sweat, was Spencer's.
Thomas dropped to his knees. "Spence!" he whispered urgently. "What happened? How bad are you hurt? Hang on, I'll get you to the Bellamy—"
"No." Spencer seized Thomas's wrist with a hand sticky with blood. "Listen. Don't talk. I've been waiting here for a half hour, and I don't have a lot of time left. The cops are wise to you. They know Rufus Pennick the actor is Thomas the monk. I guess… one of those cops last night lived… remembered Albers's guess. I don't know." He coughed violently and spat blood onto the sidewalk.
"Spencer, let me—"
"Sh. Listen. They've got the Bellamy staked out— north, south, east and west. Waiting for you. I stole some… old things of Corwin's and tried to sneak past them… put a sword through me, they did, but I got clear anyhow. Also—finally—Evelyn found out… why they're looking for you. They know you were sky-fishing last Thursday night, and they suspect you got an android's memory bank in the haul from the bird-man you caught. For some reason everyone wants it very badly."
"What android? I didn't find any—"
"I don't know what android. I can't imagine why they should go to all this trouble." He shuddered. "I don't understand any of it."
"Well how bad are you hurt? Spence? Spence!" Thomas leaned over Spencer's pale face, but could hear no breathing. "Spencer, answer me!" He put his fingers to the young man's throat. There was no pulse. "Oh no." Despairingly he slumped against the bars of the bridge rail and drove his fist savagely at one of the concrete pillars. His hand started bleeding again. Tears of impotent, confused rage and grief coursed down his cheeks.
"Here now!" intruded a flat, quacking voice. "What's going on?"
Thomas wearily lifted his head and saw, through the blurring of his tears, the stern face of an android policeman gazing at him. The creature held a nightstick at the ready and twitched it at Thomas. "What's going on?" it repeated.
Thomas leaped at the android with a snarl, and his fingers were at the thing's eyes even as the nightstick cracked down across his ribs. The sheer maniacal force of his attack knocked the officer backward, and Thomas was on its chest as soon as it hit the pavement.
His fingers were locked in its hair, and he pounded the moaning head against the curb again and again and again, until muscle fatigue rendered his arms incapable of continuing.
Thomas rose on unsteady legs. The crowd that had gathered regarded him with fearful, timid approval. Thomas wiped a few clinging strands of hair from his hands and ran.
When he stopped, completely winded but exorcized of the berserk fury that had possessed him earlier, he was in front of an old two story building; on a lamp-lit sign in front were painted the words ROOMS FOR RENT. There's the hand of Providence at work, he thought as he staggered up the walk and knocked at the door. After a minute an old woman opened it.
"Yeah?" she growled. "I got a big knife here, so don't try anything."
"All I want… is a room," Thomas panted. "How much for a room for the night?"
She looked him up and down through suspicion-narrowed eyes. "Twenty solis."
Thomas pulled out the ten-soli bill Gladhand had given him. "Ten's all I have," he said.
"Ten'll have to do, then," she said grudgingly as she snatched it from his hand. "You get room four. Round back." She made as if to close the door.
"Wait a minute. Isn't there a key?"
"No." The door slammed, followed by the rattle of a chain being drawn across it.
He shrugged and went "round back" to find room four. It proved to be a narrow, low-ceilinged cubicle that Thomas suspected had been designed as a closet. It possessed a wide range of disagreeable organic odors, and when he struck a match to the nearly exhausted oil lamp, Thomas saw that some madman had painted the warped walls in patches of bright green and orange.
He closed the door and shot the cheap, nailed-on bolt.
The bed consisted of a pile of old curtains, strewn with greasy oyster shells. Lord help me. When I hit the skids I don't mess around. If this isn't the absolute pit of creation, I hope I never see what is.
He pulled the crumpled envelope out of his pocket and sat down gingerly on the floor. The seal was already broken, and he lifted the flap and unfolded the ten-year-old letter:
12 January, 2179
Lawrence D. Hancock Majordomo,
City of Los Angeles
Dear Mr. Hancock:
I was deeply shocked to hear of the grenade attack Thursday last upon Joseph Fowler Pelias, the mayor of your city. I was, though, sir, even more shocked to see the telecast of the "recovered mayor" delivering a speech from a hospital bed on Saturday morning.
I, Mr. Hancock, am the inventor of the artificial constructs known as "androids," and I have done more work with and upon them, I suppose, than any other man. Did you, sir, really expect me—or anyone else who had dealt with them—to fail to recognize this "recovered" Pelias for the construct that it is? Those twitches about the eyes, the difficulty in pronouncing nasals and voiced fricatives, the long pauses between switched ideas—the very pallor, mottled around the temples—branded that creature as a newly surfaced android fake, not ten hours out of the vat.
I do not know, and will not speculate about, your motives in this matter; whether you have made this gross switch out of concern for your city or for the advancement of your personal career. It doesn't matter: your deed must be undone. Announce that complications developed; pneumonia set in; a stray bit of shrapnel reached the heart; hell, man, tell them assassins climbed in through the hospital window and hid vipers among his blankets; but get rid of that android.
You must realize that androids, though they can with the aid of padmus, think rationally and behave according to preset priorities, have no intrinsic moral sense. They cannot distinguish right from wrong, any more than a colorblind man can distinguish red from green. An android's actions will reflect only the morals of the person who prepared its padmu, and don't assume the creatures can't prepare padmus for their fellows.
The use of androids as policemen is dubious; the idea of one holding a high political office is as ridiculous as it is terrifying.
Therefore, Mr. Hancock, I am forced to issue to you a threat: if this false "Pelias" is not officially declared dead, and disposed of, within 24 hours of your receipt of this letter, I will share my observations with the press.
Yours for more rational uses of science,
J. Heinemann Strogoff
Hmm, Thomas thought. Jenkins had said Strogoff died a day or so after writing this letter? He thought he knew why and by whose order.
So, for the last ten years, Mayor Pelias had been an android. He wondered what the real Pelias had been like, then recalled the "stroke" Pelias the second alledgedly suffered a week ago, after Gladhand's bombs blew the floor out of his chambers. Perhaps the android was totally destroyed in the explosion and the stroke story was a stall to buy time until the androids brewing in the vats reached maturation. Then one of them would be chosen to serve as a replacement. A replacement of a replacement.