The Barsoom Project

Chapter Forty

Kareem Fekesh was in a frenzy.

By remote camera he had watched the entire fiasco, safe in his San Diego tower. Arbenz should have been dead, the Barsoom Project in chaos. All of the Cowles shares he had bought on margin… all of the sell orders…

Paying off wouldn’t cripple him, but he would feel the sting.

Everything had gone wrong. It wouldn’t be long before the California police would want to question him. Let them wait. He wouldn’t be available. Freight flights and tanker ships sailed and flew under the aegis of his company. Nothing could keep him in the United States if he didn’t want to be here.

But first there was a matter of personal business, of honor.

He supervised the Kismet-126 program as it searched for the fool who had broken him. Who had it been? Dream Park must have many computer technicians capable of the job. How many would Griffin trust with an assignment of such sensitivity?

Kismet-l26 had chosen twenty-two possibles. Through penetration of the Dream Park personnel files, Fekesh had access to each of their schedules for the past five days. He should certainly need no more than that.

Thus far he had found nothing. Very well. Outside contacts? Every phone call that Griffin or his assistant had made.

He was still getting nowhere. Patience. He who takes vengeance after forty years has acted in haste… but circumstances change, and haste was called for. He considered calling a guard for coffee. Later.

He set the Kismet-l26 program to tracing Griffin’s personal identification number as it moved through the Park. As it ambled through the Park. Taking its own sweet-

There, it intersected with the woman Millicent Summers. She used to be his secretary. Would she know There, Griffin had made a call from her office to Chino Men’s Prison to an Anthony McWhirter.

McWhirter. Was that name familiar?

Fekesh’s finger touched the Return key, about to start a search program. Instead, he suddenly clapped his hands and laughed aloud, delighted with the symmetry of life. He had used McWhirter against Dream Park, and now Griffin had returned the joke upon him. It was almost worth leaving the little fool his life!

But no. McWhirter’s death would serve as an immediate message to Griffin. Griffin himself could die later, but first he must anticipate. Fekesh tapped Return.

McWhirter vanished. Collia Aziz lay dead in a trash dumpster, sprawled head-down in a bed of used printout paper. Her mouth gaped slackly, and her eyes, and her throat. Dried blood crusted her hair.

Fekesh threw himself backward. The chair tipped and he somersaulted and was on his feet before any enemy could have reached him.

It was her. His fingers stabbed the keys, and the screen cleared. What could that have been? Why would he have put a record of the assassination of poor Collia in his files?

He wiped his forehead. His throat felt tight.

He set his chair in place, and sat. Now, then! He could enter the command that would cause the computer store to pass a message for the special security branch. And security would arrange for McWhirter, even safely ensconced in Chino At the touch of his fingertip the screen flashed a picture of an Oriental male sprawled against a featureless white background. An Eskimo’s fur headpiece lay half-shredded near his outflung hand. The ragged top of his head gaped against snow splashed with bright red. Izumi must have been freshly dead when this was taken.

Fekesh didn’t scream.

He pushed his chair back from the screen. He reached forward to hit Return and the image became a corpse torn almost in half by a fallen girder. Fekesh stared for some seconds, but he didn’t recognize the man at all.

Irrelevant; distracting. Fekesh stood, snatched up his briefcase, pushed his hand forcefully into one corner. The plastic shell gave, and now he was holding the pistol grip and trigger of a still-concealed spitgun.

They had penetrated him, had found him, here in his private offices. He was no longer safe. What he had considered to be beyond consideration, he must accept now: Dream Park intended to assassinate him.

Well. On his home ground they couldn’t reach him, and they could not know how many ways he had of reaching home ground.

He pushed a button on the wall. A panel slid back to expose an elevator door. Private. Safe. He heard a shshsh, the windsong of an elevator moving upward through its shaft, and then the door slid open.

He half-expected to see a crouching assassin. Too melodramatic, too practical for Dream Park. He lowered the briefcase! spitgun. He was about to take that step forward when a wave of fear hit him. In hasty paranoia he tested the floor And his toe went right through. There was nothing there.

Beyond where he perceived patterned scarlet rug, his foot turned murky, nearly invisible. Then the top and bottom edges of the door began to extrude teeth. Fekesh yanked his foot back, overbalanced, and fell on his arse, without ever taking his eyes off the elevator. Sharp teeth, dripping Dream Park stuff, Dream Park’s signature, and if they wanted his attention here, then what was happening behind him? Fekesh gathered himself and abruptly rolled backward, briefcase aimed, wait. Nothing? Look again. Nothing?

An empty office, a computer running quietly. That gory photograph onscreen must be one of the men who died in the accident that gave him control of Colorado Steel.

He hit the Escape key with savage force. The screen printed ESCAPE? in block letters across Colorado Steel’s torn work foreman.

Fekesh was sweating now, heart thundering in his chest, and his fingers ripped at his tie. He was struggling for breath, and not finding it. What was happening? What was-

He staggered back to his desk, and punched his phone line.

“I am sorry,” an operator’s disconnected, recorded voice said mockingly. “This line is temporarily out of service-”

The special security number was dead. The fire alarm circuits, dead. The elevator was alive and deadly, but what about the fire stairs?

Too damned predictably, the lock was jammed. Everything was dead, broken, jammed, and now he was gasping for breath. He staggered to the wall vents, sucking for air By Allah’s Holy Name? The vent was working. He could hear it, but there was no air pressure against his palms.

In fact He screamed. It was pumping air out of the room.

Air. Air.

He tore off his jacket and held it against the vent. Air hissed through the cloth.

He aimed his briefcase at the picture window, at the San Diego skyline, but he didn’t fire. There was a reason… what was it? A bullet fired into this glass would ricochet. He’d shoot himself. He dropped the briefcase. He heaved a chair up from beside the desk, and hammered once, gaping like a fish now, twice against the shatterproof glass, spots before his eyes, and again And it cracked. He swung again and it spiderwebbed, and the crack ran all along the glass-

And down across the floor. The floor was turning crystalline even as he watched, and then everything around him turned transparent, all of the chairs, the tables, the desks turned to broken glass and vanished, and on hands and knees he was suspended above San Diego. Then Then!

His clothing dissolved, his skin, his organs and flesh, and then his bones. He was gone. He began to understand that there was no more Kareem Fekesh.

There was time for him to say goodby to himself, a discorporate awareness suspended above San Diego. Then San Diego dropped away. Kareem Fekesh rose with the speed of a rocket. The Earth dwindled to the size of a tennis ball, and there was no air, no air. Something passed across the black starscape, flapping vast golden wings.

“Griffin… ” he whispered. Or thought of whispering.

His vision went black and red, black…

And then, nothing.