Дэймон Найт: Orbit 3

After a vigorous rubdown with a pre-wetted shower cloth he pulled a switch. His bed rose from the floor. He awoke an hour later, snuffling and breathing violently, an ache in his chest.

The dream had returned.

It was a dream of himself running, mile after slow-motion mile, while the dog snapped at his heels.

The dog was twice as long as a man. Its claws were like sharp iron files. Its fangs were like white spikes. Its yellow eyes were the only two blazes of color in the gray waste where he was pursued.

He’d dreamed the dream regularly for about six years. It had begun about the time he had first noticed at cocktail parties that people were talking with low voices and embarrassed laughter about how short all the days seemed, how rapidly they flew. People his own age. He knew what the dog represented.

Knowing, however, didn’t relieve the after-effects of the nightmare. It only intensified them.

Hastily Cassius threw back the coverlet. He turned on the lights and started to work cross-indexing notes and snippets for his book. The project was probably futile, as Joy maintained. Twelve books had been published on the same subject already.

The book was to be a biography of Colonel Robin Delyev. He was the officer responsible for leading the combined American-Russian shock forces which repelled the initial invasion of Puerto Rico by the Chinese, sixty years ago. All Delyev and his thousand troops had to work with was a storehouse full of antiquated U.S. personal missile launchers.

Poring and poking at the National Archives, Cassius had stumbled across some new materials. They had been misfiled: seven hitherto unpublished letters, four long, three no more than notes but revealing nonetheless, written by Delyev to the Pentagon just before the Colonel’s death. Headily Cassius had realized that none of the other twelve biographers had included the letters. And they added fresh insights into Delyev’s brilliant deployment of his meager forces.

The majority of the book Cassius planned to draw from the secondary sources, re-slanting it to his own rather scholarly, restrained style of writing. The volume would contain most of the anecdotes already available, such as the one about the night in the Chinese consulate in Chicago, before the war, when Delyev drank too much and made the epigrammatic speech which earned him the nickname “Old Rattling Rockets.” But the book, his book alone, would also contain the seven letters. Provided he finished the draft fairly soon, and got it submitted to a publisher.

Cassius knew that even when the volume was published, if it ever was, it would be relatively obscure in the crowded market; read only by those faithful who would always buy one more work on a subject that interested them. Cassius had no illusions. But he did believe that the fresh insights contained in the letters might add one small grain of truth to the world’s accumulation as it related to the dead Delyev.

Besides, the book almost demanded to be written, worthy or not. It demanded writing especially in the lonely hours after he dreamed about the slavering dog who ran so slowly, yet so remorselessly, at his heels.

He labored on, a lonely figure in his small box of an apartment, alone in the night, alone in the rain, ignored but uncaring, until he finally crawled back to bed around four and slept untroubled until dawn.

Next day, he conferred personally with the Washington police.

They were investigating, yes, certainly. But to be honest, they’d interviewed several dozen people at Dulles and gotten nowhere. They would certainly keep trying, yes. There might be something decidedly sinister behind the theft. They would call him.

At lunch in the newspaper mess, Joy reminded him about the W.B.I. Cassius felt a little silly. But the obvious impending failure of the local police angered him. He took the afternoon off and rode the belts over.

As Charlie Pelz had promised, he was admitted to the Director’s office without question or hesitancy. And to fulfill the rest of the prophecy, Cassius actually felt exactly like falling over on his face in utter surprise.

Not over getting in. Over what he saw after he got there.

R. Ripley Flange, the mastiff-chinned Director of the World Bureau of Investigation, was sitting at his broad desk, feet up, throwing darts.

One whizzed perilously close to Cassius’s head as he closed the door. Cassius flinched. The iron spike of the dart thudded into the door. On it a paper bull’s-eye had been nailed, the large nails carelessly driven into the lustrous patina of the obviously antique and priceless wood. Even the newly-refurbished White House had been pannelled in polystyrene. For a genuine wood door to be pocked with thousands of dart and nail holes amounted to desecration.

“Sorry,” Flange said. He grinned in a sleepy way. “I’m rather on the track of a big one. Fourteen bull’s-eyes this morning. Best yet.”

Edgily, Cassius sat down. The Director sighed, laid aside his dart case and tented his hands. He tried to frown with interest. Cassius had the uncanny feeling that the Director was peering straight through him, as though he were one of those model-kit men, wholly transparent.

“What can I do for you, sir? Care to apply for a position as a special operative? We have dozens of openings.” The heavy lips, which had once sneered so heroically out of simulcast screens during the lectures on Chinese subversion in the bedding industry, now pursed out in what Cassius could only describe as a careless, thoroughly lazy way.

“No, sir, I didn’t come about a job.”

“Some crime then, I’ll bet.” Flange sounded unhappy. “Isn’t that it?”

“I hate to bother you, sir. The local police seem so overburdened, and unable to make any headway. You see, sir, my brother’s body has disappeared.”

“Pity.” Flange was restlessly eyeing a wall bookcase in which stood nearly a hundred copies of the inexpensive five-credit polybound edition of Flange’s magnum opus, Alert! The Yellow Underground Is Attacking. “I’m certain we can help you. Many more resources open these days. Laboratories, so forth. International crime, I take it?”

“I’m not sure what it is, sir. Perhaps I should talk to someone else in the Bureau.”

“No, no, I’ll handle it.” Flange frowned. “I suppose it is my responsibility, after all. Now where are those damned forms?”

And he grumbled and rumbled through his desk, his hands shaking in a palsied way. Cassius fidgeted. He felt hot, embarrassed. There was something wrong with the old fellow. Where was the lion’s roar for justice, the eagle’s scream for watchfulness? Gone was the ferocity that had made Flange a legend, whether you cared for his style of operation or not.

At last the Director produced a paper, incredibly frayed.

“Well, I found one report form, anyway. I’d send you to someone else, except my deputy director has gone to Las Vegas and I haven’t heard from him in four months. That’s all right, though. He needed a rest.”

Cassius had an urge to bolt and run. Had the W.B.I. turned into a rest home for its obviously mentally infirm chief?

“Something about a brother’s body, wasn’t it?” said Flange.

The peculiar situation would have been laughable had Cassius not suspected there was something unpleasant lurking just under the surface. Flange’s weird mood made it impossible for him to generate very much righteous rage as he rattled off a bare sketch of the mixup at Dulles Interplanetary, the theft of Timothy’s remains. Once in a while Flange’s pen jerked, marking appropriate box or space.

“Distressing,” Flange said at the end, with patent insincerity. “Yes, I see. Body theft.”