Ron Goulart - Suicide, Inc

“Yep, and that could happen to you, Oscar.”

“Suppose I come with you…how do you keep me any safer than-”

“I’ve got a couple places in mind to stash you,” Smith answered before the question was finished. “I’ll get you to one of them.”

“Doesn’t your client want me back as soon as-”

“Since our client hasn’t been completely open,” said Smith, “I’m using my own judgment until I have more details. The important thing is to keep you, and the other missing Horizon Kids, alive.”

“You sound like you really mean what-”

“Pack.”

Ruiz took a few deep breaths, glanced around the yellow room. “I never much liked you back then, but you weren’t a liar or a conman.”

“I’m not now. Let’s move.”

“All right, okay.” Ruiz headed for the door to the bedchamber. “I’ll get my gear.”

Then the living room door hissed open. “You’re not bad,” said Deac Constiner from the threshold. “You found this damn nitwit even quicker than I did.” He showed Smith the kilgun in his leathery right hand.

Ruiz made a gulping sound. “Listen, Constiner,” he said, stopped still on the thermocarpet, “I haven’t actually committed any crime. What I mean is, taking money from a crook like MacQuarrie, a gambler who fleeced poor-”

“Oscar, Oscar,” said the Trinidad Law Bureau agent, “I don’t give a snerg’s ass about your halfwit dipping into that casino’s petty cash.”

“As I already mentioned,” reminded Smith.

“Nope, I want you for entirely different reasons,” said Constiner. He tugged a stungun from beneath his tunic with his left hand. “You, Smith, I don’t need, and so-”

“Are you the one, Deac, who caught up with Hal Larzon?”

Snorting, the lawman said, “Don’t talk like a schmuck. I don’t work that way and neither do you.”

Smith said, “If you want Larzon’s piece of the puzzle, you’ve got to find the folks who bumped him off.”

“I’ll tell you, Smith, this whole frumus is getting to be a pain in the toke,” admitted Constiner. “It was already too cute going in and it keeps getting trickier and trickier.”

“TLB figures the secret belongs to them and not to Westerland’s next of kin?”

“Westerland worked for the three-planet government when he cooked this particular notion up,” he replied. “All we’re talking about is a simple legal point here. Any invention you come up with while working for somebody is naturally the employer’s. Fact is, I’m the only one in this whole mess who has any real right to-”

“Jennifer Westerland doesn’t agree with-”

“Aren’t you cured of that broad yet? Don’t tell me you still believe the crap she-”

“What about me?” intruded Ruiz. “You two are squabbling and cutting up touches while I’m suffering a hell of a lot of anxiety and discom-”

“You’re coming with me,” Constiner explained, “and Smith’s going to stay here.” He aimed the stun-gun at Smith.

Zzzzzzummmmmm!

It was Constiner who stiffened and then fell to the floor.

“Forgive me, one and all.” Smiling, Cruz appeared in the doorway where the TLB lawman had been. “I find I sometimes can’t resist these melodramatic entrances.”

“Allowable under the circumstances,” said Smith, stooping to take both guns away from the fallen man.

Ruiz’ breath came sighing out. “I take it this guy’s on your side, Jared?”

“He is. Cruz, Oscar Ruiz.”

Cruz gave him a lazy salute with his metal hand. “Reason I dropped down was to urge one and all to speed things up. The battle is spilling ever closer to our position.”

Smith told Ruiz, “Grab your stuff.”

“Violence,” muttered Ruiz, trotting into his bedchamber, “my whole damn life has been ringed with violence.”

Jack Saint frowned and his broad green nose wrinkled. He rose from his seat in the nearly empty shuttle ship, extracted his orange display handkerchief from his pocket and dusted the cracked plaz cushion he’d been sitting upon. He squinted down at it disapprovingly, then dusted it once again.

“You can’t get rid of the snull,” said a middle-aged catwoman two seats behind him.

“Beg pardon?”

“Oh, my.” She raised up a paw, gave herself a nudge in the temple. “The smell, I meant to say. You probably haven’t guessed it yet, but I happen to be a still.”

“A what, Madam?”

“Darn, did it again.” Another fist to her head. “Shill. See, I’m not actually a catwoman. I’m a cleverly contrived simulacrum. I’m an andy.”

“I’d already suspected that,” Saint informed her. “Principally from the smell of burning wiring you give off, but also from the small pool of machine oil that’s leaked out of your left foot since our shuttle lifted off from Zegundo some minutes ago.”

“Yes, it’s embarrassing at times to be less than perfect.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“All of us aboard, except for yourself, are androids and robots.”

“Why is that, dear lady?” Saint, very gingerly, lowered his buttocks back down on the seat.

“Oh, it’s rather shameful in a way. We’re here to foot…um…I mean, fool the poor gullible public,” she answered, brushing at a thin swirl of bluish smoke that was commencing to spiral out of one furry ear. “Fact of the matter is, I wonder why you’re making this journey to our satellite.”

“Ah, it’s because I’m a dyed-in-the-neowool robot buff.” Saint smiled over his shoulder at her. “I long ago made a pledge to myself that some fine day I’d hop on a shuttle to visit the Museum of Robotics History that orbits this fair planet.”

“I hope you won’t think me disloyal if I mention that you’re wasting your dough, sir.”

“How so, my dear?”

“The place is quite rundown,” she confided. “Mostly, though I hesitate mentioning it, mostly because of Professor Bunny’s peccadillos.”

“That would be Professor Montague R. Bunny, the esteemed electronics historian?”

“He’s not all that esteemed anymore,” she said. “And don’t you feel, by the way, that it’s a little late, when a man is pushing sixty-six, to go through midlife crisis?”

“We none of us know when our final moment will come.” Saint elevated his backside, giving the seat another swipe with his handkerchief. “If, for instance, Professor Bunny lives to be one hundred and thirty-two, then-”

“He won’t make it to sixty-seven if he continues to pursue nubile maidens with the zeal and brio he’s been exhibiting the past few years.”

“Perhaps it’s difficult for you, being a mechanism,” observed Saint, “to comprehend how deuced distracting the urges of the flesh can be.”

“Having oil leaking out of your darn foot is no bed of meeches either. If the professor wasn’t so neglectful I could hold up my head and-”

Karump! Whamp! Kabump!

The shuttle had docked, none too smoothly, in the landing bay of the orbiting museum.

Saint left his seat, then bent gracefully to fetch his sewdohyde attaché case from beneath it. The case had acquired an unsightly gob of gum on its underside. “Aren’t you disembarking?” he inquired of the imitation catwoman while disdainfully plucking the wad of greenish stuff off the case with a plyochief.

“Oh, no, I just ride this thing back and forth all the live-long day. That’s what a shull… shill does, you know.”

“One’s heart goes out to you.” Bowing politely, Saint went striding along the corridor and out of the shuttle.

There was only what appeared to be a slim blonde young woman on the vast welcoming platform. Head tilted a bit forward, eyes slightly narrowed, she was watching his approach. “I’m sorry, but would you be Mr. Saint?”