Duncan Long - Anti-Grav Unlimited

We also extracted his hollow tooth full of poison and cleaned out his mouth so he couldn’t pull a disappearing act.

In the end we had one Elijah Lincoln, the information about where and how he’d be meeting Dobrynin, and no good way to get into the Dobrynin quarters which were in the middle of Miami.

“Any ideas, Jake?” I asked into my throat mike.

“Well… Not really. We can follow the shuttle that Elijah was to have taken. That would get us to Miami. But from there, you’ve got me.”

We were all quiet for a moment while we thought.

“Hey, Phil,” Jake said. “I have an idea.”

“Yeah.”

“Look in that truth serum kit. Seems to me I saw an auto-suggest vial. I don’t know much about that but I think maybe we could get Lincoln to do a little work for us.”

“What does ‘auto-suggest’ do?”

“You can feed them ideas to act on. You plant the idea and then let him think he’s in charge.

That kind of thing.”

“So Lincoln could take Phil and me with him to Dobrynin?” Nikki said. “We could even make up some sort of excuse to get you in, Jake.”

“Funny,” I said, “Lincoln doesn’t look like a Trojan Horse.”

Nikki had the kit open and we read the different vials.

“Are there any instructions?” I asked her. Then I noticed the small speaker on the case. “Just a minute. It looks like it has a built-in guide. There. Try that ‘Help’ button.”

Nikki pressed it.

“Can I help you,” the case said in a tiny mechanical voice.

“Yeah. We were wondering just what how the, uh, ‘Auto Suggestion Hypno’ serum works.”

The little kit told us all we needed to know. Shortly we had Elijah Lincoln all primed to do an act for us.

Lincoln, Nikki, and I went back to the van after a quick call to set things up with the head man. Then we raced out of the Catacombs.

We had a rocket to catch.

Apparently, the staff of the rocket port was used to having Elijah Lincoln and his bag ladies carry arms through the check points. A uniformed security guard didn’t even blink while Nikki, Lincoln, and I walked through the detectors and set off alarm bells in our wake. The guard shifted his weight from one foot to the other and gave a salute, in the form of a yawn, as we passed.

Lincoln put his Mastivisa into a machine and paid for tickets for all three of us. “Thank you,”

the machine told us. “Enjoy your trip.”

We sauntered up the plastic ramp into the passenger compartment of the rocket, crouching as we stepped from the loading ramp into the narrow confines of the first class section of the rocket.

With some trepidation, we’d decided to leave Jake behind in New Denver. Since the rocket was taking off in the middle of the day, there was no good way for the van to follow it and we hated to leave it behind unattended. Too, we figured it would most likely be hard enough to get Nikki and me into Sammy Dobrynin’s hide-a-way, let alone a third member.

So our plan was for Jake to follow the first rocket for Miami after darkness fell and—if all went well—pick us up in Miami that night. The way Jake flew, I privately felt we’d be lucky if he landed somewhere within two hundred kilometers of Miami somewhere in the Atlantic forcing us to swim to get to the van. Making things doubly hard was the fact that none of us had ever actually been in Miami. Therefore, to simplify things, we would be forced to meet at the rocket port parking area in Miami.

I sat in my chair, reflecting that after flying in the van, rocket flight seemed crude. We were strapped into heavily padded seats inside a cabin that was the size of a large drain pipe and which imparted the same cheery interior that one would expect in a drain pipe. The first leg of the journey we spent scrunched back into the seats with our belly buttons leaning against our spines.

Then we fell weightlessly for long enough to make breakfast stumble half way into our throats, and finally enjoyed some high-G slowing down that threatened to turn our tortured navels wrong-side out. At the end of our flight, we floated into the Miami port without power—the rocket becoming just a fancy glider on the way to the landing strip. This later point making it impossible to try for a new landing approach if the computer messes up on the first pass. Not reassuring.

As the ship shivered toward the landing strip, I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the fact that all that was in the cockpit was a bot or maybe just a hunk of metal and plastic screwed into the wall somewhere.

With a bounce that I felt for sure spelled the end, we skidded to a stop. A bot built like a stewardess with a smile painted permanently to its face helped me get to my shaky feet. The bot had what might have been mistaken for a dress into which she’d been poured—and forgotten to say when. She/it guided me to the disembarking ramp and gently shoved me out the cabin.

Since the gradual warm-up of the atmosphere over the first half of the twenty-first century had melted a lot of the polar caps, Miami was another of the many cities along the coast that was ringed by a protective dike. The rocket port was an octopus-like affair to the north of the walled city with landing strips extending out from its hub over the water. With Lincoln leading us, we journeyed to the tram which sped us over the ocean into the city.

As we crossed the waves below us, I inspected the approaching city which was a sunken little island in the middle of the ocean, a strange hodgepodge of ancient high-rise buildings made of concrete and glass, new crystalline needle buildings, and—as I discovered when we stepped off the tram car into the parking lot—wall to wall humanity. When you walked anywhere in Miami, you had to be careful not to step on those sleeping—or recovering—on the plastic or concrete walkways. Doorways were beds; real beds were occupied in shifts; whole families lived on stairways. In part this was because when the poor lost their homes under water, they hadn’t left Miami, they’d just changed their addresses. Now, each person in the city had a square meter of space all his own at any given moment.

“Here it is,” Lincoln said as a large pink limousine pulled to the curb, nearly running over a puker who was lying there. The car was embellished in chrome, a vehicle that would have seemed gaudy to a pimp.

I held the door so Lincoln could climb in. Although he was acting according to our programming, he still thought he was in control and neither Nikki nor I risked crossing him for fear we might undo his performance. We weren’t sure just how far the drugs could be trusted to force him to do what we wanted.

“Take us to Dobrynin,” Lincoln said over the intercom.

“The villa?”

“Is Dobrynin there?”

“He will be after the game.”

“No. Take us to wherever he is right now,” Lincoln said. “We have important information and can’t afford to wait in his villa.”

The driver pulled away and threw us all back into the plush pink snake-skin upholstery of the car. Lincoln opened up the small bar in front of us and poured himself a drink, “You two want anything? I always take advantage of Dobrynin’s free goodies,” he confided to me with a wink as he stuffed four cigars into the breast pocket of his suit; a small vial of some type of drug followed the cigars into the hiding place.

I was thirsty. “I’d like a Pepsicoke.”

“Nothing, thanks,” Nikki said.

I nearly spilled the drink when our limo rammed a small modif-horse and rider. I had noticed the plow-like attachment on the car’s bumper; now I knew what it was for. Lincoln didn’t blink.

Apparently this was the practice followed by all polite drivers in Miami.