Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede - Bradley Denton (best thriller books to read TXT) 📗

class="calibre1">“You can’t be surprised, Richter. Did you think that I would speak with you via an unsecured telephone line if I were going to say anything else?”

“No,” Richter said. He tried to keep the anger out of the word and did not succeed.

The tone of his superior’s voice became consoling. “Sometimes the simplest-looking jobs turn out to be the most complicated, my friend. This one wasn’t your type, anyway. Come home, and I promise something good for you. You aren’t so old that we’re putting you out to pasture. There’s an individual representing a certain foreign company who has been taking advantage of the current social disorder to engage in unfair business practices. You may be able to persuade him to desist. Yes?”

Richter almost said “Yes,” but stopped himself.

You aren’t so old that we’re putting you out to pasture.

It was a lie, but it contained the truth.

They weren’t going to give him a sanction when he had failed at an apprehension. An operative only failed once, and then he was no longer an operative. Usually that was because he was dead, but there were a few who survived and were merely considered incompetent.

“Problem,” Richter said. His throat began hurting.

“What is it?”

“Leg’s hemorrhaging. Request two days recuperation.”

There was a long silence. At last his superior said, “Very well. We’ll assign another man to the business problem. I assume you’ll be coming home for your R and R.”

“No. Possible concussion. Dizziness. Don’t want to fly until it’s gone.”

Another silence. “Your order to return home will be in force in forty-eight hours.” The line clicked.

Richter hung up the phone. Whatever happened now, his career was over. His life was over.

They had done it to him. Vale. The woman. The dog.

The dog that could catch bullets in its teeth and spit them out again.

Richter didn’t care. Nobody did to him what they had done. Nobody made him look like a fool.

He limped down the hall to Emergency and struggled through the packed bodies again. He had paid the men in the tow truck quadruple their usual rate in exchange for a promise that they would replace the Jaguar’s blown tires and bring the car to the Emergency parking lot. He found that they had fulfilled that promise.

Richter slid behind the wheel and sat for a few minutes until the throbbing in his leg subsided to a tolerable level. Then he reached under the seat and took his weapon and shoulder holster from the compartment where he had hidden them. He removed the pistol from the holster, ejected its ammunition clip, and checked the action. Then he replaced the clip and started the Jaguar.

Amphetamines would not relieve his fatigue now, so he would take some time to recuperate, just as he had said he would.

But not much.

CATHY AND JEREMY

Jeremy sat on his haunches in the passenger seat of the Datsun and scratched himself behind an ear. “We should’ve had this car fumigated when we bought it,” he said.

“Which way at the next light?” Cathy said, holding her nose with one hand and steering with the other. The stench of crude oil was heavy even thought it was Sunday morning.

“Left,” Jeremy answered. “Past the refinery.”

“Wonderful,” Cathy muttered, taking the corner and accelerating.

“Sorry. This is the way Ringo went.”

Cathy’s eyebrows rose. “I just had a thought. Can you see where he is now?”

Jeremy closed his human-eye and opened the other. “He’s caught up with Vale again. He’s lying among some trees and watching the house where Vale’s hiding.”

“Great. Let’s buy a road map and just go there. There’s got to be a more direct route.”

Jeremy shook his head. “I can see what Ringo sees, so in one sense I know where he is—but I don’t know where he is. I couldn’t even figure out his current location by trying to trace his route on a map, because he doesn’t care about north or south, east or west. He just follows the motorcycle and occasionally looks at the scenery. So the scenery’s all I’ve got to go by.”

They came up on the oil refinery tower, its flame burning bright orange in the gray dawn. Cathy shuddered. “How can they stand it? All these odors flooding their senses for their entire lives….”

“Human beings can get used to anything.” Jeremy stiffened as he spoke and looked to the east.

“What?” Cathy asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Pull onto the shoulder and stop.”

Cathy did so, then looked out to see what Jeremy saw.

“Can you feel them?” he asked.

She nodded. “I knew they were here somewhere, but the stink kept my senses occupied.”

“So this is SkyVue,” Jeremy said.

“Not an impressive place.”

“Impressive enough. Read the marquee.”

Cathy did, and grimaced. “Bill Willy? Here? Are the pro-fleshies trying to defeat themselves?”

“Sort of looks that way. Should we drop in and say hello?”

Cathy steered the Datsun onto the road again. “Why? To gloat? With all that’s happened in the past two days, our point’s been proven. The fleshbound peoples of Earth aren’t ready for the responsibility of noncorporeality. All that you and I have to do now is see to it that Vale remains unharmed, and our consciences are clear.”

“What about the rest of the world?” Jeremy asked. “A lot of people besides Vale stand to get hurt. Some already have been.”

Cathy jerked her left thumb at the receding drive-in theater. “That’s the responsibility of our two cousins back there. The only part of it that you and I have had anything to do with is Vale. And he’s going to be fine. Right?”

“I hope so. When the Fed tried to shoot him, I was afraid that we’d waited too long, but—”

“But Ringo responded to your commands, as I predicted.”

Jeremy frowned. “Maybe….”

“Whattaya mean ‘maybe’? He stopped the attack, didn’t he? He gave Vale the chance to escape and hide, didn’t he?”

Jeremy began scratching his ear again. “Yes. But it felt as if he might be acting on his own.”

“He’s not smart enough to do that,” Cathy said. “The hardware didn’t include any free-will circuits, and the rest of him is plain old dog.”

“Maybe ‘plain old dog’ has more to it than we thought. I didn’t tell him to put a bullet into the Fed’s leg.”

“That was just a reflex, and no real harm done. Vale escaped, and the G-man survived. All’s well that ends well.”

“It hasn’t ended yet. The agent won’t quit.”

“But he won’t get to Vale again before we do.”

“Assuming our car holds up.”

Cathy pounded on the dashboard. “Damn it, why’d you have to say that? The heater’s stopped again! What an existence—putrid stenches, bodies that ache and collapse, machines that don’t work. How do the fleshbound stand it?”

Jeremy shrugged. “By taking one day at a time, I suppose, so the agony doesn’t accumulate. That’s no more than a guess, mind you.”

Cathy gritted her teeth. “Just a little longer,” she said. “Just a little longer, and then we can go back to taking life the civilized way—one millennium at a time.”

Jeremy squirmed and began biting his shoulder. “Right now,” he said around a mouthful of his shirt, “I’d settle for taking life with no fleas.”

8

OLIVER

In 1974, when I was fourteen and Mother was working on Volume V, we moved to the house south of the city where I still live. The move came as a surprise to me, for I had always assumed that Mother’s salary barely covered necessities and record albums. Somehow, though, she had saved enough in nine years at the radio station to cover a down payment. (Of course, a down payment in 1974 was somewhat less than the fortune required now.) We moved in the spring, right after the end of the school year. I had finished junior high, and it was a good time for change.

The Apollo program was over, and while the Skylab missions had been fascinating, they hadn’t been as exciting as the lunar adventures, and my interest in space exploration had waned. That waning, however, wasn’t entirely due to the change in NASA’s priorities, because my own priorities had shifted. By the end of my ninth-grade school year, if a genie had given me the choice of becoming either the first man on Mars or the first man to fornicate with Valerie Frackner from my English class, I would have agonized for about six seconds and then tackled Valerie.

It was a good summer. I was old enough that Mother trusted me to take care of myself while she was at work, and I was young enough that I didn’t have to find a job of my own yet. I spent my mornings either reading in my new room or shooting a basketball at the hoop over the garage door, and on every sunny afternoon I changed into swim trunks and rode my bicycle nine miles to the community pool on the city’s south side. There I could lounge with three or four other males my own age, drinking soda pop and swimming, but mainly ogling the seventeen-year-old female lifeguards.

I had been wearing black-framed glasses for over a year, but those afternoons at the pool made me yearn for contact lenses. For one thing, I was the only boy my age who knew, or cared, who Buddy Holly had been, and the fact that my glasses made me look like him was an irrelevancy in my social circle. For another thing, the guys told me that the glasses were dorky, and that the girls thought so too.

Mother told me that what with house payments and everything, contact lenses were just too expensive, especially since our optometrist said that my eyes were still changing. She was afraid of spending a few hundred dollars just to have to do it all over again. “Besides,” she said, “your glasses make you look like Buddy.” Mother and Buddy had been on a first-name basis ever since he had died.

I was beginning to resent the dominating influence of Charles Hardin Holley in my life in much the same way that other adolescent males resented the dominating influence of their fathers in theirs, and sometimes at night I would lie awake and curse him. I wanted to live in 1974, not 1958; I wanted to be Oliver Vale, not an avatar of a man who had been dead for fifteen years.

And yet, just as the adolescent male who resents his father will fight when his father is slandered, so I fought when Buddy was slandered. One afternoon at the pool, someone had a transistor radio tuned to KKAP’s Oldies Hour, and one of the oldies was the original version of “Rave On.” A guy I didn’t know asked what sort of crap that was supposed to be, and the radio owner answered that it didn’t matter because the singer was dead.

“Good riddance,” answered the other guy.

I shoved him into the water. Neither of the lifeguards saw me do it, but they did see him come up out of there and punch me in the face, busting my glasses at the bridge. He was thrown out and forbidden to return for the rest of the summer, and a bikinied lifeguard named Shelley came to me while I was holding my nose, put her hand on my arm, and asked if I was hurt.

I was struggling to keep the pain from bringing tears to my eyes. “Nah, he didn’t hit me hard,” I said, leaning close so that Shelly’s left breast touched my shoulder. What I wanted to do then was drop my hand from my nose and gaze into her eyes, but what I had to do instead was