Master of Life and Death, Robert Silverberg [ready player one ebook TXT] 📗

alarm, and thereby let the world know that there was such a thing as Lamarre's formula. That would be catastrophic.

Walton slammed the cabinet shut and spun the lock. Then, heavily, he dropped into his chair and rested his head in his arms. All the jubilation of a few moments before had suddenly melted into dull apprehension.

Suspects? Just two—Lamarre, and Fred. Lamarre because he was obvious; Fred because he was likely to do anything to hurt his brother.

"Give me Sellors in security," Walton said quietly.

Sellors' bland face appeared on the screen. He blinked at the sight of Walton, causing Walton to wonder just how ghastly his own appearance was; even with the executive filter touching up the transmitted image, sprucing him up and falsifying him for the public benefit, he probably looked dreadful.

"Sellors, I want you to send out a general order for a Dr. Lamarre. You'll find his appearance recorded on the entrance tapes for today; he came to see me earlier. The first name is—ah—Elliot. T. Elliot Lamarre, gerontologist. I don't know where he lives."

"What should I do when I find him, sir?"

"Bring him here at once. And if you catch him at home, slap a seal on his door. He may be in possession of some very important secret documents."

"Yes, sir."

"And get hold of the doorsmith who repaired my office door; I want the lock calibration changed at once."

"Certainly, sir."

The screen faded. Walton turned back to his desk and busied himself in meaningless paper work, trying to keep himself from thinking.

A few moments later the screen brightened again. It was Fred.

Walton stared coldly at his brother's image. "Well?"

Fred chuckled. "Why so pale and wan, dear brother? Disappointed in love?"

"What do you want?"

"An audience with His Highness the Interim Director, if it please His Grace." Fred grinned unpleasantly. "A private, audience, if you please, m'lord."

"Very well. Come on up here."

Fred shook his head. "Sorry, no go. There are too many tricky spy pickups in that office of yours. Let's meet elsewhere, shall we?"

"Where?"

"That club you belong to. The Bronze Room."

Walton sputtered. "But I can't leave the building now! There's no one who—"

"Now," Fred interrupted. "The Bronze Room. It's in the San Isidro, isn't it? Top of Neville Prospect?"

"All right," said Walton resignedly. "There's a doorsmith coming up here to do some work. Give me a minute to cancel the assignment and I'll meet you downstairs."

"You leave now," Fred said. "I'll arrive five minutes after you. And you won't need to cancel anything. I was the doorsmith."

Neville Prospect was the most fashionable avenue in all of New York City, a wide strip of ferroconcrete running up the West Side between Eleventh Avenue and the West Side Drive from Fortieth to Fiftieth Street. It was bordered on both sides by looming apartment buildings in which a man of wealth might have as many as four or five rooms to his suite; and at the very head of the Prospect, facing down-town, was the mighty San Isidro, a buttressed fortress of gleaming metal and stone whose mighty, beryllium-steel supports swept out in a massive arc five hundred feet in either direction.

On the hundred fiftieth floor of the San Isidro was the exclusive Bronze Room, from whose quartz windows might be seen all the sprawling busyness of Manhattan and the close-packed confusion of New Jersey just across the river.

The jetcopter delivered Walton to the landing-stage of the Bronze Room; he tipped the man too much and stepped within. A door of dull bronze confronted him. He touched his key to the signet plate; the door pivoted noiselessly inward, admitting him.

The color scheme today was gray: gray light streamed from the luminescent walls, gray carpets lay underfoot, gray tables with gray dishes were visible in the murky distance. A gray-clad waiter, hardly more than four feet tall, sidled up to Walton.

"Good to see you again, sir," he murmured. "You have not been here of late."

"No," Walton said. "I've been busy."

"A terrible tragedy, the death of Mr. FitzMaugham. He was one of our most esteemed members. Will you have your usual room today, sir?"

Walton shook his head. "I'm entertaining a guest—my brother, Fred. We'll need a compartment for two. He'll identify himself when he arrives."

"Of course. Come with me, please."

The gnome led him through a gray haze to another bronze door, down a corridor lined with antique works of art, through an interior room decorated with glowing lumi-facts of remarkable quality, past a broad quartz window so clean as to be dizzyingly invisible, and up to a narrow door with a bright red signet plate in its center.

"For you, sir."

Walton touched his key to the signet plate; the door crumpled like a fan. He stepped inside, gravely handed the gnome a bill, and closed the door.

The room was tastefully furnished, again in gray; the Bronze Room was always uniformly monochromatic, though the hue varied with the day and with the mood of the city. Walton had long speculated on what the club precincts would be like were the electronic magic disconnected.

Actually, he knew, none of the Bronze Room's appurtenances had any color except when the hand in the control room threw the switch. The club held many secrets. It was FitzMaugham who had brought about Walton's admission to the club, and Walton had been deeply grateful.

He was in a room just comfortably large enough for two, with a single bright window facing the Hudson, a small onyx table, a tiny screen tastefully set in the wall, and a bar. He dialed himself a filtered rum, his favorite drink. The dark, cloudy liquid came pouring instantly from the spigot.

The screen suddenly flashed a wave of green, breaking the ubiquitous grayness. The green gave way to the bald head and scowling face of Kroll, the Bronze Room's door-man.

"Sir, there is a man outside who claims to be your brother. He alleges he has an appointment with you here."

"That's right, Kroll; send him in. Fulks will bring him to my room."

"Just one moment, sir. First it is needful to verify." Kroll's face vanished and Fred's appeared.

"Is this the man?" Kroll's voice asked.

"Yes," Walton said. "You can send my brother in."

Fred seemed a little dazed by the opulence. He sat gingerly on the edge of the foamweb couch, obviously attempting to appear blasé and painfully conscious of his failure to do so.

"This is quite a place," he said finally.

Walton smiled. "A little on the palatial side for my tastes. I don't come here often. The transition hurts too much when I go back outside."

"FitzMaugham got you in here, didn't he?"

Walton nodded.

"I thought so," Fred said. "Well, maybe someday soon I'll be a member too. Then we can meet here more often. We don't see enough of each other, you know."

"Dial yourself a drink," Walton said. "Then tell me what's on your mind—or were you just angling to get an invite up here?"

"It was more than that. But let me get a drink before we begin."

Fred dialed a Weesuer, heavy on the absinthe, and took a few sampling sips before wheeling around to face Walton. He said, "One of the minor talents I acquired in the course of my wanderings was doorsmithing. It's really not very difficult to learn, for a man who applies himself."

"You were the one who repaired my office door?"

Fred smirked. "I was. I wore a mask, of course, and my uniform was borrowed. Masks are very handy things. They make them most convincingly, nowadays. As, for instance, the one worn by the man who posed as Ludwig."

"What do you know about—"

"Nothing. And that's the flat truth, Roy. I didn't kill FitzMaugham, and I don't know who did." He drained his drink and dialed another. "No, the old man's death is as much of a mystery to me as it is to you. But I have to thank you for wrecking the door so completely when you blasted your way in. It gave me a chance to make some repairs when I most wanted to."

Walton held himself very carefully in check. He knew exactly what Fred was going to say in the next few minutes, but he refused to let himself precipitate the conversation.

With studied care he rose, dialed another filtered rum for himself, and gently slid the initiator switch on the electroluminescent kaleidoscope embedded in the rear wall.

A pattern of lights sprang into being—yellow, pale rose, blue, soft green. They wove together, intertwined, sprang apart into a sharp hexagon, broke into a scatter-pattern, melted, seemed to fall to the carpet in bright flakes.

"Shut that thing off!" Fred snapped suddenly. "Come on! Shut it! Shut it!"

Walton swung around. His brother was leaning forward intently, eyes clamped tight shut. "Is it off?" Fred asked. "Tell me!"

Shrugging, Walton canceled the signal and the lights faded. "You can open your eyes, now. It's off."

Cautiously Fred opened his eyes. "None of your fancy tricks, Roy!"

"Trick?" Walton asked innocently. "What trick? Simple decoration, that's all—and quite lovely, too. Just like the kaleidowhirls you've seen on video."

Fred shook his head. "It's not the same thing. How do I know it's not some sort of hypnoscreen? How do I know what those lights can do?"

Walton realized his brother was unfamiliar with wall kaleidoscopes. "It's perfectly harmless," he said. "But if you don't want it on, we can do without it."

"Good. That's the way I like it."

Walton observed that Fred's cool confidence seemed somewhat shaken. His brother had made a tactical error in insisting on holding their interview here, where Walton had so much the upper hand.

"May I ask again why you wanted to see me?" Walton said.

"There are those people," Fred said slowly, "who oppose the entire principle of population equalization."

"I'm aware of that. Some of them are members of this very club."

"Exactly. Some of them are. The ones I mean are the gentry, those still lucky enough to cling to land and home. The squire with a hundred acres in the Matto Grosso; the wealthy landowner of Liberia; the gentleman who controls the rubber output of one of the lesser Indonesian islands. These people, Roy, are unhappy over equalization. They know that sooner or later you and your Bureau will find out about them and will equalize them ... say, by installing a hundred Chinese on a private estate, or by using a private river for a nuclear turbine. You'll have to admit that their dislike of equalization is understandable."

"Everyone's dislike of equalization is understandable," Walton said. "I dislike it myself. You got your evidence of that two days ago. No one likes to give up special privileges."

"You see my point, then. There are perhaps a hundred of these men in close contact with each other—"

"What!"

"Ah, yes," Fred said. "A league. A conspiracy, it might almost be called. Very, very shady doings."

"Yes."

"I work for them," Fred said.

Walton let that soak in. "You're an employee of Popeek," he said. "Are you inferring that you're both an employee of Popeek and an employee of a group that seeks to undermine Popeek?"

Fred grinned proudly. "That's the position on the nose. It calls for remarkable compartmentalization of mind. I think I manage nicely."

Incredulously Walton said, "How long has this been going on?"

"Ever since I came to Popeek. This group is older than Popeek. They fought equalization all the way, and lost. Now they're working from the bottom up and trying to wreck things before you catch wise and confiscate their estates, as you're now legally entitled to do."

"And now that you've warned me they exist," Walton said, "you can be assured that that's the first thing I'll do. The second thing I'll do will be to have the security men track down their names and find out if there was an actual conspiracy. If there was, it's jail for them. And the third thing I'll do is discharge you from Popeek."

Fred shook his head. "You won't do any of those things, Roy. You can't."

"Why?"

"I know something about you that wouldn't look good if it came out in the open. Something that would get you bounced out of your high position in a flash."

"Not fast enough to stop me from setting the wheels going. My successor would continue the job of rooting out your league of landed gentry."

"I doubt that," Fred said calmly. "I doubt it very much—because I'm going to be your successor."

X

Crosscurrents of fear ran through Walton. He said, "What are you talking about?"

Fred folded his arms complacently. "I don't think it comes as news to you that I broke into your office this morning while you were out. It was very simple: when I installed the lock, I built in a canceling circuit that would let me walk in whenever I pleased. And this morning I pleased. I was hoping to find something I could use as immediate leverage against