The Ware Tetralogy - Rudy Rucker (popular ebook readers .TXT) 📗

counter. His head hit a sharp edge and yellow light bloomed. “Shit fuck piss,” Mooney muttered, stumbling back into the cottage’s single room. His bald-wig had slipped back from the blow.

He returned to the lumpy armchair, moaning and readjusting his rubber dome. He hated coming off base and looking around pheezer territory. But he’d seen Anderson breaking into a freight hangar at the spaceport last night. There were two crates emptied out, two crates of bopper-grown kidneys. That was big money. On the black market down here in pheezerland you could sell kidneys faster than hot-dogs.

Too many old people. It was the same population bulge that had brought the baby boom of the forties and fifties, the youth revolution of the sixties and seventies, the massive unemployment of the eighties and nineties. Now the inexorable peristalsis of time had delivered this bolus of humanity into the twenty-first century as the greatest load of old people any society had ever faced.

None of them had any money… the Gimmie had run out of Social Security back in 2010. There’d been hell to pay. A new kind of senior citizen was out there. Pheezers: freaky geezers.

To stop the rioting, the Gimmie had turned the whole state of Florida over to the pheezers. There was no rent there, and free weekly food drops. The pheezers flocked there in droves, and “did their own thing.” Living in abandoned motels, listening to their crummy old music, and holding dances like it was 1963, for God’s sake.

Suddenly the dark screen-door to the beach swung open. Reflexively, Mooney snapped his flash into the intruder’s eyes. Old Cobb Anderson stood there dazzled, empty-handed, a little drunk, big enough to be dangerous.

Mooney stepped over and frisked him, then flicked on the ceiling light.

“Sit down, Anderson.”

The old man obeyed, looking confused. “Are you me, too?” he croaked.

Mooney couldn’t believe how Anderson had aged. He’d always reminded Mooney of his own father, and it looked like he’d turned out the same.

The front screen-door rattled. “Look out, Cobb, there’s a pig in there!” It was the old girl from next door.

“Get your ass in here,” Mooney snarled, darting his eyes back and forth. He remembered his police training. Intimidation is your key to self-protection. “You’re both under arrest.”

“Fuckin Gimmie pig,” Annie said, coming in. She was glad for the excitement. She sat down next to Cobb on his hammock. She’d macraméed it for him herself, but this was the first time she’d been on it with him. She patted his thigh comfortingly. It felt like a piece of drift wood.

Mooney pressed a key on the recard in his breast pocket. “Just keep quiet, lady, and I won’t have to hurt you. Now, you, state your name.” He glared at Cobb.

But the old man was back on top of the situation. “Come on, Mooney,” he boomed. “You know who I am. You used to call me Doctor Anderson. Doctor Anderson, sir! It was when the army was putting up their moon-robot control center at the spaceport. Twenty years ago. I was a big man then, and you… you were a little squirt, a watchman, a gofer. But thanks to me those war-machine moon-robots turned into boppers, and the army’s control center was just so much stupid, worthless, human-chauvinist jingo jive.”

“And you paid for it, didn’t you,” Mooney slipped in silkily. “You paid everything you had… and now you don’t have the money for the new organs you need. So last night you broke into a hangar and stole two cases of kidneys, Cobb, didn’t you?” Mooney dialed up the recard’s gain. “ADMIT IT!” he shouted, seizing Cobb by the shoulders. This was what he’d come for, to shock a confession out of the old man. “ADMIT IT NOW AND WE’LL LET YOU OFF EASY!”

“BULLSHIT!” Annie screamed, on her feet and fighting-mad. “Cobb didn’t steal anything last night. We were out drinking at the Gray Area bar!”

Cobb was silent, completely confused. Mooney’s wild accusation was really out of left field. Annie was right! He hadn’t been near the spaceport in years. But after making plans with his robot double, it was hard to wear an honest face.

Mooney saw something on Cobb’s face, and kept pushing. “Sure I remember you, Dr. Anderson, sir. That’s how I recognized you running away from Warehouse Three last night.” His voice was lower now, warm and ingratiating. “I never thought a gentleman your age could move so fast. Now come clean, Cobb. Give us back those kidneys and maybe we’ll forget the whole thing.”

Suddenly Cobb understood what had happened. The boppers had sent his mechanical double down in a crate marked KIDNEYS. Last night, when the coast was clear, his double had burst out of the crate, broken out of the warehouse, and taken off. And this idiot Mooney had seen the robot running. But what had been in the second crate?

Annie was screaming again, her red face inches from Mooney’s. “Will you listen to me, pig? We were at the Gray Area bar! Just go over there and ask the bartender!”

Mooney sighed. He’d come up with this lead himself, and he hated to see it fizzle. That had been the second break-in this year at Warehouse Three. He signed again. It was hot in this little cottage. He slipped the rubber bald-wig off to let his scalp cool.

Annie snickered. She was enjoying herself. She wondered why Cobb was still so tense. The guy had nothing on them. It was a joke.

“Don’t think you’re clear, Anderson,” Mooney said, hanging tough for the recard’s benefit. “You’re not clear by a long shot. You’ve got the motive, the know-how, the associates… I may even be getting a photo back from the lab. If that guy at the Gray Area can’t back your alibi, I’m taking you in tonight.”

“You’re not even allowed to be here,” Annie flared. “It’s against the Senior Citizens Act to send pigs off base.”

“It’s against the law for you people to break into the spaceport warehouses,” Mooney replied. “A lot of young and productive people were counting on those kidneys. What if one had been for your son?”

“I don’t care,” Annie snapped. “Any more than you care about us. You just want to frame Cobb because he let the robots get out of control.”

“If they weren’t out of control, we wouldn’t have to pay their prices. And things wouldn’t keep disappearing from my warehouses. For the people still producing… ” Suddenly tired, Mooney stopped talking. It was no use arguing with a hardliner like Annie Cushing. It was no use arguing with anyone. He rubbed his temples and slipped the bald-wig back on. “Let’s go, Anderson.” He stood up.

Cobb hadn’t said anything since Annie had brought up their alibi. He was busy worrying… about the tide creeping in, and the crabs. He imagined one busily shredding itself up a soft bed inside the empty sherry bottle. He could almost hear the bills tearing. He must have been drunk to leave the money buried on the beach. Of course if he hadn’t buried it, Mooney would have found it, but now…

“Let’s go,” Mooney said again, standing over the chesty old man.

“Where?” Cobb asked blankly. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Don’t play so dumb, Anderson.” God, how Stan Mooney hated the sly look on the bearded old features. He could still remember the way his own father had sneaked drinks and bottles, and the way he’d trembled when he had the D.T.‘s. Was that anything for a boy to see? Help me, Stanny, don’t let them get me! And who was going to help Stanny? Who was going to help a lonely little boy with a drunken pheezer for a father? He pulled the old windbag to his feet.

“Leave him alone,” Annie shouted, grabbing Cobb around the waist. “Get your filthy trotters off him, you Gimmie pig!”

“Doesn’t anyone ever listen to what I say?” Mooney asked, suddenly close to tears. “All I want to do is take him down to the Gray Area and check out the alibi. If it’s confirmed, I’m gone. Off the case. Come on, Pops, I’ll buy you a few drinks.”

That got the old buzzard started all right. What did they see in it, these old boozers? What’s the thrill in punishing your brain like that? Is it really so much fun to leave your family and forget the days of the week?

Sometimes Mooney felt like he was the only one who made an effort anymore. His father was a drunk like Anderson, his wife Bea spent every evening at the sex-club, and his son… his son had officially changed his name from Stanley Hilary Mooney, Jr., to Stay High Mooney the First. Twenty-five years old, his son, and all he did was take dope and drive a cab in Daytona Beach. Mooney sighed and walked out the door of the little cottage. The two old people followed along, ready for some free drinks.

CHAPTER THREE

Riding his hydrogen-cycle home from work Friday afternoon, Sta-Hi began to feel sick. It was the acid coming on. He’d taken some Black Star before turning in his cab for the weekend. That was an hour? Or two hours ago? The digits on his watch winked at him, meaningless little sticks. He had to keep moving or he’d fall through the crust.

On his left the traffic flickered past, on his right the ocean was calling through the cracks between buildings. He couldn’t face going to his room. Yesterday he’d torn up the mattress.

Sta-Hi cut the wheel right and yanked back to jump the curb. He braked and the little hydrogen burner pooted to a stop. Chain the mother up. Gang bang the chain gang. Spare spinach change. A different voice was going in each of his ears.

Some guy stuck his head out a second floor window and stared down. Giving Sta-Hi a long, lingering leer. For a second it felt like looking at himself. Crunch, grind. He needed to mellow out for sure. It was coming on too fast and noisy. The place he’d parked in front of, the Lido Hotel, was a brainsurfer hangout with a huge bar in the lobby. Mondo mambo. Is it true blondes have more phine?

He got a beer at the counter and walked through to the ocean end of the lounge. Group of teenage ‘surfers over there, sharing a spray-can of Z-gas. One of them kept rocking back in his chair and laughing big hyuck-hyuck’s from his throat. Stupid gasbag.

Sta-Hi sat down by himself, pulled twitchingly at the beer. Too fast. Air in his stomach now. Try to belch it up, uh, uh, uh. His mouth filled with thick white foam. Outside the window a line of pelicans flew by, following the water’s edge.

There wasn’t good air in the lounge. Sweet Z. The ‘surfer kids sliding looks over at him. Cop? Wolf? Thief? Uh, uh, uh. More foam. Where did it all come from? He leaned over his plastic cup of beer, spitting, topping it up.

He left the drink and went outside. His acid trips were always horrible bummers. But why? There was no reason a mature and experienced person couldn’t mellow out was there? Why else would they still sell the stuff after all these years? Poems are made like fools by me. But only God can tear your brain into tiny little pieces.

“Wiggly,” Sta-Hi murmured to himself, reflexively, “Stuzzy. And this too. And this too.” And two three? He felt sick, sick bad. A vortex sensation at the pit of his stomach. Fat stomach, layered with oil pools, decayed dinosaur meat, nodules of yellow