Dean Koontz: Anti-Man

"We have relatives there," I said, trying to sound as natural as I could. I am not the greatest thespian to walk the boards since Burton, believe me. My feet freeze, and my head turns to mud when I have to speak to a group of interns. Perhaps that's why I am so tough and hard-boiled around them: because they scare me. Despite my shyness, I had been surprised these last few days how easily I could fool people when my life was staked on pulling the wool over their eyes. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but naked fear was the bitch that gave birth to my coolness.

"Ticket?" He looked us over thoroughly while I fumbled for the two yellow pieces of paper, the cigarette bobbling in his mouth, the ash dangerously long. I was afraid that somewhere in his simple brain-box two synapses would flop open, and he would connect pictures he had seen in the papsheet with the two rumpled men standing before him. Over the week He and I had been playing cat and mouse with the World Authority, running and running like mechanical wind-up toys, trying to gain time for Him to develop Himself to the point where He wouldn't have to run, our pictures and descriptions had graced the front pages of every papsheet in the world at least six out of the seven days. Here we were spotted in Lisbon, here in Acapulco, here in New York City. Luckily, the debarking officer on this ship seemed the type to skip the news sections and dwell on the gossip pages and the comics. For the first time in my life, I thanked the powers that be for anti-intellectualism.

"Ticket," I repeated, finally producing our stubs and handing them over without so much as a single nervous tremor.

"You're paid up clear into Roosha," he said, looking us over again. He had apparently never been taught that it was rude to peruse a person as thoroughly as you did a book. "Do you know that you're paid up clear into Roosha? Why pay up clear into Roosha if you were going to get off here?"

"A last minute change of plans," I said. I was feeling the strain of two days and nights without sleep and without benefit of honest-to-Hippocrates warm food except for that meal we had gotten at the backstreet restaurant in San Francisco. I didn't know if my lies were coming out like lies or whether he would accept what I said at face value. Apparently, there was some degree of verisimilitude to my rantings, for he shrugged and carefully entered the numbers of our stubs in the departure book. If the World Authority crashed the fake names we were now using — and they certainly would, eventually — here was a record, a set of clerical footprints for them to seize upon and follow.

"That capsule at the end," he said. He consulted a pendant watch that hung on a fine chain around his neck. "We'll be dropping you in eleven minutes."

We moved down the line of egg-shaped, crimson globes that nested in the bays in the floor. The officer came after us, slid back the heavy cover on the last egg. "Dropped before?" he asked, obviously hopeful that we would say no and allow him to show his superiority with a long, detailed, condescending lecture.

"Many times," I said. I wondered what he would have done if I had said fourteen times in the past week.

"Remember to strap tight. Grip the padded wheel until the beam contact is made, and don't unstrap until ground control directs you to."

I waited until He moved into the capsule and took the left seat, then I squeezed through the oval entrance — way and climbed into the right. The officer frowned. "Let's see you grip the wheel," he snapped. We gripped it, though there was no need to prepare this far ahead. "That's better," he said. He eyed me suspiciously, obviously trying to remember something. "Don't let go of that wheel until beam contact," he repeated. He was getting to be a bore.

"We won't."

He shook his head. "I don't know. You people never seem to learn. Lots of people drop without gripping the wheel. Then, when freefall surprises them, they get excited and grab for anything, cut themselves on file console — And when the jolt from beam contact comes — Brother! Fireworks! They jump and throw their arms around, break their fingers on things — "

"We'll grip the wheel," I said, feeling as if I were confronted with a broken record. I longed to reach out and swat him so that he could get on with other parts of his speech.

"Be sure to."

"We will."

"We sure will," He said, smiling at the officer with that winning grin of His.

The officer nodded, hesitated as if there were something he wanted to say. And, of course, there was something he wanted to say. Down deep in the sticky mud of his brain, there was a little voice telling him just who we were and what he should do about it. Fortunately for us, the voice was muffled by so much mud that he could not understand what it was saying. Finally he shrugged again, slid the cover shut and turned the latches on the outside, locking us in. I knew that his mind was struggling to make connections. I had come to know that look by now, the gaze of someone who is sure he knows us. Sooner or later, this drop officer would remember who we were. I only hoped it was not until we were out of Cantwell Port and on our way.

"Don't worry, Jacob," He said, flashing His chalk-white teeth in a broad, flawless smile and eating into me with those ice eyes of His.

He was trying to cheer me.

So I smiled.

Suddenly, lights flashed and buzzers bleeped. We dropped.

Down.

Dropping from a high-altitude passenger rocket is not uncommon. Thousands of capsules are discharged every day, millions in a year, though I suppose the process will remain a marvel to the earth-bound masses for another twenty years. When you have an overcrowded world with billions of people who want to move often and rapidly, you cannot have a transportation system that stops at every station on the route. Not too many years ago, the answer was to change flights. Take a regular major airline into the nearest big city to your destination, then transfer to a smaller company for the last leg of the journey. But the ports grew too crowded, the air controllers too frantic. With the coming of the rockets, the best answer was found swiftly and employed even faster. You encapsulate the passengers who want off at backwater places and shoot them, like a bomb, out of the rocket's belly without lessening the speed of the mother ship. They fall for a mile, two, three, then are caught by a control beam broadcast from the alerted receiving station and lowered gently into the receptor pod. But those first few moments of freefall.

After what seemed like an overlong fall, we were gripped by a control beam. For a moment, I had the fleeting paranoid fear that they had recognized us and deemed to eliminate us simply by letting us smash unbraked into the unyielding earth of Cantwell, Alaska. Then we were safe, floating softly, being drawn down. The beam settled us into a pod, and the officers there, a wizened old gentleman surely past retirement age and a young trainee who watched and listened to his superior with carefully feigned awe, unlatched the hatch and slid it back, helped us out. We signed our arrival forms with our fake names, waited while the old man copied our stub numbers in a ledger (the boy looking eagerly over his shoulder but unable to completely mask his boredom), and we were on our way.

From the capsule pods, we walked down a long, gray fluorescent-lighted service tunnel and into the main lobby of the Port Building. I found the passenger service desk and inquired about a package I had mailed myself when we had first set foot in San Francisco just a day earlier. We had gone to a ski shop and purchased complete arctic rigging, packaged it in two boxes, and mailed it from Kenneth Jacobson to Kenneth Jacobson, the pseudonym I was then using, to be held for pickup at the passenger service desk in Cantwell. I had to sign a claim check and wait while the clerk checked the signature with that on the stub. When he was satisfied, he handed over the packages. We each took one and moved outside to the taxi stalls.