DESTROYER #47: DYING SPACE
Warren Murphy
For Susan D.,
who masterminded
THE GREAT POLISH TOW-AWAY
SCAM, and for the
House of Sinanju,
P.O. Box 1454
Secaucus, N. J. 07094
CHAPTER ONE
It was, welllll, awful, just awful, to have to work for Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes.
"I mean, welllll, I don't have to tell you, but the woman is a bitch, an absolute bitch. An octopus. She's always grabbing at me, and if she's not drunk—absolutely smashed—she's trying to get absolutely drunk. And if I try to stop her, she calls me a 'faggot fascist.' I don't care if she does have two Nobel prizes. If they gave out Nobels for drinking or being a disgusting sex maniac, the woman would have a closet full of them, an absolute closet full."
Ralph Dickey confided this to the man with the pleasant blue eyes, the open-throated shirt, and the two gold balls hanging from a chain around his neck.
The man understood. Really understood. "It must be awful," he said. "Still, you're a wonderful
symbol for all of us. A gay astrophysicist. How wonderful."
Dickey nodded. "If only I didn't have to work with that moray eel. I mean, truly, if she grabs me just one more time, I'm going to bite her breasts off."
"It must be terrible," the blue-eyed man said.
"The pits. The absolute pits. Yes, I know they hired me to be a nursemaid for this vampire because, God, they know she isn't my type. But really, I didn't think it would be like this. And who can I tell about it? Do you think anybody here knows astrophysics from anal sex?"
The man with the blue eyes understood. Really understood. Ralph Dickey could see that by the compassion in his absolutely wonderful, smashing blue eyes. It had been so long since Ralph had found someone to talk to—really talk to—somebody who understood.
And so Ralph Dickey talked, he really talked. About the special computer software lab on the UCLA campus that was so ugly. "I mean, it is really tacky. It looks like a roadside restroom, but you know how they are, worried about spies and everything. But it is deeeepressing. And then trying to get in in the morning, and you need a special magnetic card—I mean, it's right out of a James Bond movie, and all because of that stupid computer she's invented. But who cares about it?" And did the man with the smashing blue eyes want to dance?
No. Unfortunately, the man with the blue eyes had pulled a muscle in his leg at his modern dance class, but Ralph should go ahead; it would
give him pleasure to see Ralph dancing, and Ralph found a nice young man in a leather vest without a shirt and walked to the dance floor with him.
And when Ralph Dickey's back was turned, the man with the smashing blue eyes, Mikhail Andreyev Istoropovich, rifled Ralph's wallet, which was in his shoulder bag under the table, took out the magnetic pass for the computer lab, and left.
He waited in the parking lot outside the UCLA software center until he saw Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes reel out of the building. She seemed to identify cars by feel because she bumped into four of them before she found what she was looking for, a brown Edsel whose tailpipe and muffler were dragging on the ground under the car. After three minutes, she found her car key, and four minutes later she had the door open. The Edsel started with a roar like a B-52, and then there was the screech of burning rubber as the professor peeled away. Her window was down and as her car roared by Istoropovich's, he heard her singing in a lusty baritone:
Gotta get me some
And I don't care what.
Five minutes of silence later, Istoropovich let himself into the lab using Ralph Dickey's pass card. He moved quickly. In the center of the room, resting atop a long steel table, sat four metal cubes the size of orange crates. The supercomputer, the LC 111—so-called because there had been 110 primitive models before Payton-
Holmes perfected it—would be one of them. He scanned the serial numbers of the metal cubes, looking for the LC-111, the only instrument that could destroy the most important Soviet invention of the decade: The Volga. The Volga was 200,000 pounds of victory that would assure Soviet domination of space, and only the LC-111 could render it harmless.
He saw it. The computer was the second cube from the right, and it had no serial number stamped on it. It bore the legend: personal
PROPERTY OF DR. FRANCES PAYTON-HOLMES, UCLA.
Very clever, Istoropovich thought, to identify the LC-111 as her personal property. Clever and inaccurate. It's not yours anymore, he thought.
Because of the constant police patrols, he could not take a chance on trying to get the computer off the center's grounds. Instead, using a handtruck, Istoropovich carefully wheeled the computer to a tall Dempsey Dumpster that stood next to the cement block building. It was Tuesday, and he had learned that garbage pickups were scheduled for Wednesday evenings. It would be safe, next to the overflowing garbage bin, until he came back for it at 5:30 a.m., when the campus police were changing shifts and he could get through them without difficulty.
He relocked the laboratory and went back to his car, fingering the gold balls around his neck. The gold balls had a purpose, one he had been prepared for since his earliest days as a deep-cover agent. But he would not need them, not yet, not this time. He was.going to get out of this one
alive, and in Moscow Center, the headquarters of the Soviet spy network, where men were waiting for word from him on this mission, he would be an instant hero. Nothing could go wrong now.
The moon was full but the sky was cloudy, so that the moonlight fell only occasionally on a few objects dotting the landscape. While most of the vehicles on the highway were shrouded in darkness, a garbage truck bearing the legend "Hollywood Disposal Service . . . Garbage of the Stars" lit up, shimmering in the moonglow like the Holy Grail.
Before it disappeared back into the clouds, the moon also illuminated the figure of a ripe-looking teenage hooker on the side of the highway. She waved to the two men in the truck. Marco Gonzalez, the driver, honked his horn and leered in appreciation, displaying two missing front teeth.
"Enow her?" asked Lew Verbanic from the passenger side of the cabin. Lew was tall, nearly six and a half feet, and very thin. As a result, he stooped whenever he spoke, even when he was sitting down. He was stooping now. "She looks kind of like that Mexie girl you go with. That Rosa."
"That a slur on the Chicano race?" sniffed Gonzalez, peering out of eyes formed into tight slits.
Verbanic laughed softly. "Chícanos aren't a race," he said.
"Oh, yeah? What you call us, then? Huh?"
Verbanic patted him on the shoulder. "Short," he said.
Gonzalez snorted, and they drove^down a quiet
stretch of highway in silence. "So you like her or what?" Gonzalez said finally.
"Who?"
"The chippie on the road."
"Why do you want to know if I like the way she looked?" He rolled down the window and spat outside.
" 'Cause Rosa's got a friend looks kind of like her. Only she ain't no chippie. A good Mexican girl, come over last week from Tijuana with her family." He shook his head sadly. "They come over the barbwire. Had to leave everything behind. Her mother's casserole dish, everything. Big house, too. Almost three rooms." He brightened as his mind veered back onto the subject. "You wanna meet her? Rosa says she's real hot."
"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
8
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
9
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."
10
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.
The form growing larger, more complete, adding to itself as it shudders, buried, waiting to be bom anew...
11
"Help them out? You got to be kidding."
The mound shifted again, widening as a hole formed in the top, with dust spouting upward like a restless volcano. "Huh-uh," Gonzalez said, "No way. Count me out."
"All right," Verbanic said. He walked purposefully toward the dump.
A spinal column, limbs, optical receivers. Speech tapes, transistorized memory banks, sensory data, logic.
"You nuts?" Gonzalez yelled. "Come back!" His face was contorted in fear, his buttocks cramping in trembling spasms. "We don't know what's in there. It could be anything. Werewolves, anything."
Verbanic was digging with his hands, shoveling away armfuls of festering decay.
And the new microfilm tapes, coded in binomial sequences. New, strange information once stored in the LC 111, now a part of the creature that created itself from a single directive programmed into its manmade intelligence. A single voice, a command overriding all others: SURVIVE.
It creaked in its deep grave, shifting its weight onto its lower limbs. High above, Lew Verbanic dug frantically, moving aside earth with a discarded box as sweat poured down his face and darkened the back of his uniform. SURVIVE. "I see something!" Verbanic shouted.
"W-what?" Gonzalez inched toward his partner. Spinning effortlessly through the debris, whole now, rising toward the light by its own momentum. SURVIVE.
12
"It's . . ." Verbanic's eyes opened wide as he saw the spinning metal thing nearing the surface.
"What is it, Lew? Lew?"
"My God," Verbanic whispered.
"My God." The words entered the thing's aural transceivers. They were fuzzy and faraway-sounding, but they triggered a series of circuits that flashed to life:
NEED . . . INCOMPLETE . . . LIFE FORM PRESENT . . . IMMEDIATE . . . NEED . . . SURVIVE . .. SURVIVE . . .
One by one the hundreds of thousands of minuscule tapes began to wind and thread. The orbital receivers rolled upward, registering a life form the memory banks identified as Human, Adult Male....
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