Warren Murphy: Dying Space

"What's wrong with her?"

"Nothing, Lew, I swear. Hey, you one suspicious Polack, you know that?"

"There's got to be something wrong with her, or you wouldn't be asking a Polack to take her out."

"It ain't nothing serious," Gonzalez said. "Maybe she just got a broken collarbone, that's alL"

"A what?"

"You know, a broken collarbone. Her boyfriend messed her up. But he's back in T J. You got nothing to worry about from him."

"Oh, brother," Verbanic said.

"Hey, tomorrow's my night with Rosa, and she won't see me unless I can fix up her friend."

"The one with the broken neck."

"Collarbone. Anyway, she got a great personal-lty.

6

"She in a brace?"

"Kind of. Rosa says it's real cute." "

"No, thanks," Verbanic said.

"Aw, come on. Do it for me, pal. I ain't seen Rosa in two weeks, on account of my mother's birthday last Wednesday. I need it, Lew. Don't forget I lost these teeth for you," he said, pointing at the gaping hole in the middle of his uppers.

"You lost those from picking a fight with Fats Ozepok," Verbanic said.

"Well, you was there," Gonzalez said sullenly. "Fats coulda stepped on your sneakers."

Verbanic waved him away. "We can't go tomorrow anyway," he said. "That's the UCLA pickup. We won't get through till after midnight." He looked at the road signs. "Hey, where are you going? We made the last pickup. The dump's that way." He jerked his thumb toward the right.

'1 got it all figured out," Gonzalez said, smiling. "We pick up the UCLA load tonight. That way we get time and a half for the couple of hours overtime, and we get off by ten tomorrow. Plenty of time to give the. girls some real heavy pipe. How's that?" he said, beaming triumphantly.

"We're supposed to hit UCLA on Wednesdays," Verbanic insisted stubbornly. "What if somebody there calls the dump and complains?"

"Are you kidding? Those college professors wouldn't look at garbage if they was ass deep in it." "Nobody's going to notice if we come a day early. Stop worrying."

Verbanic sighed. "What am I going to do with a girl in a neck brace?"

Gonzalez grinned. "Anything you want, gringo."

By the time Verbanic and Gonzalez reached the software lab, the truck was practically overflowing. With an effort they crushed the last of the dumpster contents into the grinding, sticking maw of the truck.

Lew Verbanic leaned against the truck and mopped the dirt and perspiration from his face with a grimy handkerchief. "I'm beat," he said.

"That's the end of it, pal." Gonzalez turned off the crusher and leaped out of the truck. "Oh, shit, we forgot something."

"What?" Verbanic peered out over his handkerchief.

"That," Gonzalez said, gesturing with his head toward a metal cube half covered by a tarpaulin beside the dumpster.

Verbanic walked up to it and removed the tarp. "This thing?" He explored it with his toe. "You sure we're supposed to pick this up? It looks like some kind of equipment," Lew said as the two men strained to lift the cube into the truck.

"People throw out all kinds of stuff," Gonzalez reassured him. "Remember that time a couple of years ago we picked up that 200 pounds of junk at Colossal Studios? It was some kind of a thing like this, too, a computer or something. Wires and tubes all over the place. This ain't nothing new."

"That stuff at Colossal was all smashed and burned. This looks brand new."

"Maybe it don't work," Gonzalez offered. "Like in the space shuttle. They had four computers in

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that thing. Supposed to talk to each other, you know, tell each other how to run the spaceship."

"How do computers talk?"

"How am I supposed to know? Maybe they got metal lips. Anyhow, the space shuttle computers didn't do no talking. They clammed up at the last second, after the astronauts were all strapped in and everything, and they had to scrub the mission for two days.

"They get 'em to talk?"

"Guess so."

"Hey, Marco, you think this thing can talk?"

"I'm telling you, it can't do nothing. That's why it's in the garbage. Upsy daisy."

At the Hollywood Disposal Center, directly behind a yellow and red plastic banner reading "Garbage of the Stars," Lew Verbanic leaned against the truck as its contents rumbled onto a ten-foot-high pile of debris. Marco Gonzalez walked toward him in the moonlight, snapping the lids off two cans of beer.

"Here you go, champ," he said, thrusting a cold, wet can into Lew's palm. The two men drank greedily. "Man, this is my last year in California," Gonzalez said.

"How come?"

Gonzalez tapped his watch. "Almost one a.m.," he said between gulps. "Eleven hours' work. You know what we made for eleven hours' work?"

Verbanic tried to calculate it in his head.

"Less than eighty bucks. Hell, waiters make more than we do during lunch hours In New York

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the sanitation guys get $36,000 a year, and most of the time, they're on strike anyway."

"You moving to New York?" Verbanic asked incredulously.

"Hey, man, don't knock New York. I got an uncle lives in New York. He say it's the best place in the world not to work. You got welfare, CETA, food stamps, unemployment—anything for a little bribe. If that don't work, you can always get a job at the MTA—the subway—and then you don't have to do nothing. You can buy guns in New York, get free dope at the methadone clinic, whatever you want. It's the land of opportunity, man."

Verbanic wasn't listening. His gaze was riveted on the pile of garbage beyond the banner.

"Hey, what's with you, Lew? You look like you seen a ghost," Gonzalez said.

"It moved." Verbanic stared at the pile of garbage. His face was drained of color and glowed a pearly green in the moonlight.

"The dump? You kidding, man?"

"It's moving now."

Gonzalez turned toward the dump slowly, his head tucked between two hunched shoulder blades. "I don't see nothing," he said with relief.

"It stopped."

Gonzalez patted Verbanic on the back. "Well, okay. That's good, pal. Look, man, it's late. We're both tired, and like maybe you're seeing things—"

"It's moving again."

Gonzalez whirled around. The dump was as still as a grave. "I tell you, there ain't nothing moving in there!" he shouted. "See? Not a cockroach. Nothing."

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A tin can tumbled down the side of the mound. Gonzalez jumped straight into the air. Then the entire hillside of debris began to shiver and rumble, sending an assortment of objects clattering to the earth.

Deep below, in the decomposing rubble of the mound, a bolt maneuvers through the silt and ¦funk, drawn by magnetic impulses toward a metal cube.

"Let's get out of here, man," Gonzalez whispered.

"What if somebody's alive in there?"

"In that? Hah . . ." Gonzalez tried to laugh, but the sound caught and died in this throat.

Another bolt, a microfilm type cylinder, an unbroken anode...

"It's an earthquake, that's what it is," Gonzalez said.

"Then how come the ground isn't shaking?"

With a crack, the casing of the LC 111 flies apart and tears through the dirt, down, down through two years of waste. ... A click, the squeal of rust being stripped from metal threading ...

"We got to go, Lew," Gonzalez said somberly.

Verbanic didn't move.

"I'm serious. We're leaving."

"Why?"

" 'Cause I just peed my pants."

"Whoever it is, we've got to help get them out," Verbanic said.