Again he put his credit card into the slot, and this time asked only for an address. His fifth cousin Radamand was supervisor of District Napa–3. A good position not more than an hour by tube from Jas's home district.
Nice to know that a relative had done well with himself.
It was 1600, and Jas figured he'd have time to get there before the man left work — and get back before his mother had Mother's Little Boys out looking for him. So he got on the tube, wondering all the time if this wasn't a wild goose chase. And then in the part of his mind that always took over when he was worried, he free associated, and tried to calculate what in the world the phrase wild goose chase meant.
Radamand Worthing had his name on the outer door of the office complex, and no name at all on his private door. Jas was aware enough of status symbols to be impressed.
The secretary was also impressed — by Radamand, not by Jas.
"Do you have an appointment, little boy?"
"I don't need one," Jas said, putting on his most irritating voice.
"Everyone needs one," she said, getting just as irritated as he wanted her to get.
"Tell him his blue–eyed cousin Jason is here to see him," Jas said, sneering — a facial expression he had long since learned infuriated adults.
"I have instructions not to bother him."
"Tell him or you'll have new instructions to be out of here with your desk left empty behind you."
"Listen, little boy, if you've disturbed me unnecessarily —"
"The noise of the disturbance opened Radamand Worthing's door. "What's going on out there?" the portly, middle–aged man with bright blue eyes demanded. Bright blue eyes, Jas noted. His grandfather's holo had blue eyes. His mother's memory of his father had those same bright blue eyes. "Uncle Radamand," Jas said affectionately. At the same moment he focused on the spot just behind Radamand's eyes.
What he read there was Radamand's immediate fear — and the fact that Radamand was also seeing Jas's fear. Their bright blue eyes locked.
"You're impossible," the older man said. "You can't be."
"Apparently you're hallucinating," Jas said.
"He just broke in here and demanded —" the secretary said, righteously indignant.
"Shut up." Radamand was sweating.
So was Jas. Because he could hear in the man's mind the decision that Jas had to die.
"Is that the way to greet a long–lost relative?" Jas asked.
"Get out of my —" Radamand stopped, but Jas knew he had been about to say —
"Mind?" Jas asked.
"Office." Radamand bit the word, and then Jas heard/saw/felt Radamand's panic, his rage —
"Why are you afraid, Uncle Radamand?" Jas asked in his sweetest voice.
In the older man's mind he found the answer: Because you have it too, and if they catch you, they might catch on, they might realize it's hereditary on the male line, and they'll trace the genealogies and find me —
And as Jas heard Radamand's thoughts, he realized that Radamand had heard what leaped into Jas's thoughts: that assistant professor Hartman Tork already suspected he was a Swipe, was laying traps for him.
"I'm afraid for you," Radamand said sweetly, through gritted teeth. "I'm afraid you might fall into a trap somewhere."
"I'm smarter than they are," Jas said.
But not smarter than me, Radamand thought loudly, fearfully, angrily.
Jas saw the laser in Radamand's mind before Radamand could find it in his pocket. Jas dropped to the floor, rolled. The laser seared the floor behind him. A moment while the weapon recharged, and in that moment Jas was out the door, running down the corridor.
An alarm sounded somewhere in the complex.
The door ahead of him slammed shut. A guard stood in front of it. Jas stopped and frantically searched the man's thoughts for another way out, another exit. Where were the doors? He found them just behind the guard's eyes, even as the guard noticed Jas's fugitive appearance. The gun raised — Jas was already gone.
Through this? No, this door. Out and down the stairs. And through this last door and into corridors branching off into the endless underground city of Capitol , which stretched in an unplanned and unplannable labyrinth from pole to pole to — Home? Not home, Jas thought, because the plan already forming in Radamand's mind was to arrest Jas on some charge or other — breaking and entering? Resisting inquiry? For someone at Radamand's level, and with his obvious influence and prestige, it shouldn't be hard to get Jas put away forever behind bars.
Or in a little plastic box in the cemetery.
Jas's mind kept wandering as he loped down corridors, losing himself in the turns and the rises, putting as much as possible of three dimensions between him and his cousin. He smiled to think of how Radamand had probably acquired his influence and prestige: for he could easily spot a superior's guilty secrets and then drop subtle hints — not enough for blackmail and the subsequent murder, just enough to let the superior know that Radamand shared his secret. And understood. Would never tell; could be trusted; was a friend who knew all and loved anyway.
And so promotion. And so power. And so all of the wealth and position that Radamand was afraid he would lose because now someone shared his guilty secret.
Jas came to the tube and got on going away from his home.
Then he got off at the second stop and changed to the first tube leaving for anywhere.
Then got off and caught another.
And another.
And then left the tubestop and went to a computer terminal and pushed in his card. Dangerous? Perhaps — but access to the master files of the computer was closely guarded by Mother's Little Boys, and Jas doubted that Radamand's consider able influence was quite that considerable. No, it would be the constables that Radamand had on his trail, not the computer police, not the listeners in the walls.
So probably the computers were safe.
Jas punched for a readout on criminal law. He specified. And specified again. "Exemptions from all class 2–8b felonies and all misdemeanors."
Then Jas specified for exemptions accessible to juveniles. There were only two: the Service and the Colonies.
Never the Colonies. Not the one shot of somec, and then waking up fifty light–years away on an empty planet, doomed to live out the normal hundred or so years of life and then die, with neither fame nor power nor hope of the somec doses of immortality. Colonies were for the despairing, not for the merely desperate. Jas still had hope.
Had to be the Service. There at the end of the somec sleep through space the captains awoke, fought a battle or did a short term of duty and then went back under the somec to return to Capitol, where they were heroes — at least the successful ones — and wealthy, whether spectacularly successful or not; and, most important, the captains were on somec, waking only one year out of every thirty or forty or fifty, watching the centuries slip by and laughing at time —
The Service then. And it would be ironic, too; for his father had been a ship captain, before the Swipe crisis that killed him. It would be somehow appropriate to follow in his father's footsteps.
And then Jas remembered his mother's warning that sons of Swipes tried to expiate guilt. Maybe, he thought. Maybe after all I'm just trying to relive my father's —
A hand gripped his shoulder.
"Jason Worthing, age thirteen, number RR3njw–4, status juvenile, state your business in this district."
Jason leaned limply against the wall, and the man made sure he wouldn't leave the wall abruptly. The man's voice sounded official, but he wasn't in uniform. A constable not in uniform? Behind the man's eyes Jas learned that he was one of Mother's Little Boys. Then he must have guessed wrong, and Radamand did have that much influence.