Roger Zelazny - To Die In Italbar

He finished his drink, ground out his cigarette. The glass dropped from sight. The panel slid closed.

"Give me another of the same," he said; and quickly, "Not the cigarettes," as he remembered the new servomech's program.

The drink was replaced and he took it with him into his study. There, he dropped into and semi-reclined his favorite chair. He dimmed the lights, caused the room temperature to drop to 62 degrees Fahrenheit, moved a control which brought about the ignition of real logs in the fireplace across the room from him, dropped a tri-dee night winter scene upon the room's one window (it would have taken him several hours to arrange for the real thing), extinguished all the lights now he saw that the fire was taking and settled back into his favorite thinking environment.

In the morning, he switched on his automatic Secretary and Files unit.

"First order of business," he dictated. "I want to talk with Dr. Matthews and my three best programmers immediately after breakfast--here in my study. I want breakfast, by the way, in twenty minutes. You estimate the eating time."

"Do you wish to speak with them singly or as a group?" came the voice from the hidden speaker.

"As a group. Now--"

"What would you like for breakfast?" S & F interrupted.

"Anything at all. Now--"

"Please be more specific. The last time you said 'Anything'--"

"All right. Hamandeggsandtoastandmarmaladeandcoffee. Now, the second thing I want is for someone high up on my staff to contact the Surgeon General or the Director of Health or whatever the hell his title is, in the SEL complex. I want full access to that Panopath computer of theirs no later than tomorrow afternoon, local time, via remote input from here on Homefree. Third, have the port hands start checking over the T for distance-jumping. Fourth, find out who it belongs to and get me the dossier. That's it."

Approximately an hour and a quarter later when they had assembled in his study, he waved them toward chairs and smiled.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I require your assistance in obtaining some information. I am not certain as to the specific nature of the information or the questions I must ask in order to come by it, though I do have some vague notions. It will concern people, places, events, probabilities and diseases. Some of the things I wish to know concern happenings fifteen or twenty years past, and some quite recent. It could take a long while to come up with sufficient information for me to act upon, but I do not have a long while. I want it in two or three days. Your job, therefore, will first be to assist me in formulating the appropriate questions, and then to place those questions on my behalf before a data source which I believe capable of providing what I need. That is the general situation. Now we shall discuss specifics."

Late that afternoon, after they had departed, he realized that there was nothing more he could do for the time being, and so turned his attention to other matters.

That evening, however, as he wandered through his arsenal, it was for purposes of making a routine safety check, he told himself. But as time passed, he found that he was checking only the smaller, more lethal pieces, such as might be borne easily by one man, perhaps carried concealed and capable of striking from a distance. When he realized what he was doing he did not stop, however. As, among other things, the only living deicide in the galaxy, he felt it his bounden duty always to be prepared, just in case.

Thus did Francis Sandow spend the days before his departure for Deiba.

Anxious to test his new powers on a smaller scale before moving on to the large urban centers of Summit--a far more heavily populated world than Cleech--Heidel von Hymack orbited the world at a great altitude while he studied its maps and read statistics concerning that synthetic planet.

Then, careful to avoid the traffic control centers of the great space ports, he dropped into a thinly populated, backwoods area of its second major continent, Soris. There, in a canyon, he concealed the vessel he had used, beneath an overhang of rock. He locked its controls and its ports, and with a tiny beamer he had found in a rack, he cut brush for camouflage and arranged it about the jump-buggy.

Moving away, staff in his mottled hand, walking, he broke into song. At an earlier date, this would have surprised him, for he did not understand the words that he sang and the tune was a thing out of dream.

After a time, he saw a small farmhouse built against the side of a hill . .

The music throbbed about him as he set his laboratory in order. He cleaned, adjusted, locked down, put away everything which would not be needed for a time. His giant, ghostlike figure drifted about the ship, straightening, ordering.

I'm becoming a bit old-maidish, he chided himself, smiling inwardly. A place for everything and all of it there. What will it be like if I have the opportunity to go back, be around people again, readapt? Of course, I adapted to deep space ... Still, it would be quite a change. There is nobody who could tackle my condition yet, if H cannot do anything for me. So it would be years off. Several centuries, most likely. Discounting some unexpected breakthrough. What will it be like if it takes several centuries? What will _I_ be like by then? A ghost of a ghost? The only human alien to his own species? What will my descendants say?

Had there been functioning lungs within him, he would have chuckled. Instead, he moved forward and seated himself within the observation section of the _B Coli_. There, he watched the stars spin, as in a cosmic centrifuge, about him. A Gregorian chant provided the sound track as he hung and they wheeled, on his way to Cleech, Heidel von Hymack's last reported destination.

It was late on a rainy night when she first saw him in the flesh.

Having no customers that evening, she had descended and visited the small newsstand off the lobby. She knew that the front door of the establishment had been opened because of the sudden draft and the amplification of noises from the street and the storm. Selecting her reading materials and depositing her coins, she took her papers and turned to cross the lobby.

That was when she saw him, and the papers fell from her hand. She took a step backward, confused. It was impossible that they should ever be this near to one another. She felt dizzy, and her face began to burn.

He was big, bigger even than she had imagined. His hair was mainly black--just a few light touches of gray at the temples--she noted; but then, of course, he would have had the S-S treatments and aged more slowly than other men. This pleased her, for she would have hated to see him in his decline. And those hawklike features and those blazing eyes! He was more impressive in person than on record or in tridee. He wore a black rain garment and bore two huge pieces of luggage--one a clothing case of sorts and the other a perforated box with a handle. The rain sparkled in his hair and eyebrows, glistened on his forehead and cheeks. She felt like running forward and offering her blouse as a facecloth.

She stooped and gathered the papers. Rising, she lowered her head and raised them before her, so that her face was partly hidden. Then she moved into the lobby, as though reading, and found a chair near to the main desk.

"Room and girl, sir?" she heard Horace saying.

"That will be fine," he said, lowering his luggage to the floor.

"There are many vacancies," said Horace, "because of the weather," as he pushed the album across the counter. "Let me know what strikes your fancy."

She heard him turning the pages of the big book and she counted, because she knew them by heart: ... _Four, five_. A pause... . _Six_.