Hot Sleep (2 page)

But then he realized that he didn't want to attract too much attention with this. Because if rumor got around that he was suspected to be a Swipe, the doors would start to close to him. His unmeasurable intelligence would be worth as much as a moron rating.

No, let them sweat, but don't make too many waves.

Somehow the tests had all come out negative. But Jas knew he had the Swipe. And they might have other tests that would discover it.

"Insightful," his mother had said, "just like your father's father."

Father. And me. And grandfather?

But grandfather was dead.

Jas went to a directory and found the listing: "Genealogical program, G55Nxy3. He put his credit card (nearly worthless for purchasing, but good enough for this) into the computer outlet and punched in the program.

"Genealogy: Name research, 4n; inheritance tie–ins, 4i; name similarities..." Finally Jas found what he wanted, punched in his own name and birth date, and waited for the reading.

"Male relatives of common descent by male lines only." and then came a list of names that threatened to go on all day. Jas interrupted the readout and punched in a new instruction. Now the screen flashed, "Five nearest male relatives by common descent by male lines only."

First on the list was Talbot Worthing. He lived on a planet only forty–two light–years away.

Next on the list was Radamand Worthing. GE–44h rating government employee on the district management level.

Again he put his credit card into the slot, and this time asked only for an address. His fifth cousin Radamand was supervisor of District Napa–3. A good position not more than an hour by tube from Jas's home district.

Nice to know that a relative had done well with himself.

It was 1600, and Jas figured he'd have time to get there before the man left work — and get back before his mother had Mother's Little Boys out looking for him. So he got on the tube, wondering all the time if this wasn't a wild goose chase. And then in the part of his mind that always took over when he was worried, he free associated, and tried to calculate what in the world the phrase wild goose chase meant.

Radamand Worthing had his name on the outer door of the office complex, and no name at all on his private door. Jas was aware enough of status symbols to be impressed.

The secretary was also impressed — by Radamand, not by Jas.

"Do you have an appointment, little boy?"

"I don't need one," Jas said, putting on his most irritating voice.

"Everyone needs one," she said, getting just as irritated as he wanted her to get.

"Tell him his blue–eyed cousin Jason is here to see him," Jas said, sneering — a facial expression he had long since learned infuriated adults.

"I have instructions not to bother him."

"Tell him or you'll have new instructions to be out of here with your desk left empty behind you."

"Listen, little boy, if you've disturbed me unnecessarily —"

"The noise of the disturbance opened Radamand Worthing's door. "What's going on out there?" the portly, middle–aged man with bright blue eyes demanded. Bright blue eyes, Jas noted. His grandfather's holo had blue eyes. His mother's memory of his father had those same bright blue eyes. "Uncle Radamand," Jas said affectionately. At the same moment he focused on the spot just behind Radamand's eyes.

What he read there was Radamand's immediate fear — and the fact that Radamand was also seeing Jas's fear. Their bright blue eyes locked.

"You're impossible," the older man said. "You can't be."

"Apparently you're hallucinating," Jas said.

"He just broke in here and demanded —" the secretary said, righteously indignant.

"Shut up." Radamand was sweating.

So was Jas. Because he could hear in the man's mind the decision that Jas had to die.

"Is that the way to greet a long–lost relative?" Jas asked.

"Get out of my —" Radamand stopped, but Jas knew he had been about to say —

"Mind?" Jas asked.

"Office." Radamand bit the word, and then Jas heard/saw/felt Radamand's panic, his rage —

"Why are you afraid, Uncle Radamand?" Jas asked in his sweetest voice.

In the older man's mind he found the answer: Because you have it too, and if they catch you, they might catch on, they might realize it's hereditary on the male line, and they'll trace the genealogies and find me —

And as Jas heard Radamand's thoughts, he realized that Radamand had heard what leaped into Jas's thoughts: that assistant professor Hartman Tork already suspected he was a Swipe, was laying traps for him.

"I'm afraid for you," Radamand said sweetly, through gritted teeth. "I'm afraid you might fall into a trap somewhere."

"I'm smarter than they are," Jas said.

But not smarter than me, Radamand thought loudly, fearfully, angrily.

Jas saw the laser in Radamand's mind before Radamand could find it in his pocket. Jas dropped to the floor, rolled. The laser seared the floor behind him. A moment while the weapon recharged, and in that moment Jas was out the door, running down the corridor.

An alarm sounded somewhere in the complex.

The door ahead of him slammed shut. A guard stood in front of it. Jas stopped and frantically searched the man's thoughts for another way out, another exit. Where were the doors? He found them just behind the guard's eyes, even as the guard noticed Jas's fugitive appearance. The gun raised — Jas was already gone.

Through this? No, this door. Out and down the stairs. And through this last door and into corridors branching off into the endless underground city of Capitol
, which stretched in an unplanned and unplannable labyrinth from pole to pole to — Home? Not home, Jas thought, because the plan already forming in Radamand's mind was to arrest Jas on some charge or other — breaking and entering? Resisting inquiry? For someone at Radamand's level, and with his obvious influence and prestige, it shouldn't be hard to get Jas put away forever behind bars.

Or in a little plastic box in the cemetery.

Jas's mind kept wandering as he loped down corridors, losing himself in the turns and the rises, putting as much as possible of three dimensions between him and his cousin. He smiled to think of how Radamand had probably acquired his influence and prestige: for he could easily spot a superior's guilty secrets and then drop subtle hints — not enough for blackmail and the subsequent murder, just enough to let the superior know that Radamand shared his secret. And understood. Would never tell; could be trusted; was a friend who knew all and loved anyway.

And so promotion. And so power. And so all of the wealth and position that Radamand was afraid he would lose because now someone shared his guilty secret.

Jas came to the tube and got on going away from his home.

Then he got off at the second stop and changed to the first tube leaving for anywhere.

Then got off and caught another.

And another.

And then left the tubestop and went to a computer terminal and pushed in his card. Dangerous? Perhaps — but access to the master files of the computer was closely guarded by Mother's Little Boys, and Jas doubted that Radamand's consider able influence was quite that considerable. No, it would be the constables that Radamand had on his trail, not the computer police, not the listeners in the walls.

So probably the computers were safe.

Jas punched for a readout on criminal law. He specified. And specified again. "Exemptions from all class 2–8b felonies and all misdemeanors."

Then Jas specified for exemptions accessible to juveniles. There were only two: the Service and the Colonies.

Never the Colonies. Not the one shot of somec, and then waking up fifty light–years away on an empty planet, doomed to live out the normal hundred or so years of life and then die, with neither fame nor power nor hope of the somec doses of immortality. Colonies were for the despairing, not for the merely desperate. Jas still had hope.

Had to be the Service. There at the end of the somec sleep through space the captains awoke, fought a battle or did a short term of duty and then went back under the somec to return to Capitol, where they were heroes — at least the successful ones — and wealthy, whether spectacularly successful or not; and, most important, the captains were on somec, waking only one year out of every thirty or forty or fifty, watching the centuries slip by and laughing at time —

The Service then. And it would be ironic, too; for his father had been a ship captain, before the Swipe crisis that killed him. It would be somehow appropriate to follow in his father's footsteps.

And then Jas remembered his mother's warning that sons of Swipes tried to expiate guilt. Maybe, he thought. Maybe after all I'm just trying to relive my father's —

A hand gripped his shoulder.

"Jason Worthing, age thirteen, number RR3njw–4, status juvenile, state your business in this district."

Jason leaned limply against the wall, and the man made sure he wouldn't leave the wall abruptly. The man's voice sounded official, but he wasn't in uniform. A constable not in uniform? Behind the man's eyes Jas learned that he was one of Mother's Little Boys. Then he must have guessed wrong, and Radamand did have that much influence.

"Well, little boy, your mother's worried about you. Seems you didn't come home after school."

"I just went — I went exploring," Jas said, using his young voice, his unintelligent voice. "I was trying to find my way home."

"Your mother asked us to run a missing persons check. You shouldn't stick your credit card into computer outlets if you want to run away," the man said.

"I don't want to run away," Jas said, longing to run away.

"Good thing," the man answered with a smile, "because you can't."

They rode in the closed compartment of the tube back to the station only a few corridors away from Jas's flat. The man didn't let go of his iron grip until Jas's mother opened the door.

"Jas, you're all right." She hugged him, acting for all the world like a parent who had been worried that her little boy might be hurt. But Jas knew what the real fear had been. Though he was already a little tired of looking into people's thoughts, it was almost reflex already, and he saw his mother's flashing memory of a visit from Hartman Tork.

"Thank you, officer," she said, tears of joy in her eyes.

"Any time, ma'am." The man left. Jas's mother closed the door. She looked at Jas in fear.

"Hartman Tork came," Jas said. She nodded, biting her lip in an exaggerated show of fear. Again, Jas was convinced for a moment that she was mad.

"Looking for you," she said. "He has proof. He said you had passed the second test, that it was proof positive —"

"Proof when I passed it?" Jas asked, surprised.

"He said it contained information that had only been fed into the computers this week, completely and totally restricted, there was no way you could have studied the information, so obviously you got the answers by —"

"But I didn't look into anyone's mind, mother. I just used logic, I just figured it out —"

"Apparently," she said bitterly, "your logic has just caught up with the latest advances in astrodynamic theory."

Jas leaned against the wall. "I thought the test went the other way. I thought that if I failed it they'd think it was proof that I'd cheated, or something else. I thought I had to get a good score."

years ago, seven–year–old Jason leading her from the park to the zoo to the dome to the cave, all the sights; and she proud, happy, following where he led, devoted to him.

But he was no longer seven years old. He was thirteen. He was frightened. He was leading his mother on an excursion that had no destination, whose only goal was escape. Where to, on a planet where there was no outside except the thin sky, no away except on starships —

Colonies.

The sign blinked. Colonies were one of the few projects the government considered important enough that they could be allowed a lighted sign.

Colonies put people on starships and sent them far beyond the reach of Mother's Little Boys. Colonies asked few questions, and answered none. To go with the Colonies was the next thing to dying.

But it was only the next thing. And when dying was the alternative... Jas stood for a moment, looking at the sign. He had the option of joining the Service. His mother didn't.

So Jas led his meekly following mother through the impressive archway leading into the plush Colonies reception room. Lighted panels on the walls depicted huge fields of a golden plant, extending to the horizon, with blue sky and a yellow sun. "Earth Colony," the panel said, in a muted, feminine whisper. "Return home again." Another panel was in motion — hundreds of tiny human beings scrambling over red rocks and black cliffs, raising a mesh of fine metal strands. The mesh began to glow. "Catch stars on Manookin," the virile masculine panel–voice said, "and bring them home as frozen light."

Bring them home — Jas laughed silently, bitterly. No one came home from a colony. A hundred years just to get established with any degree of security. Another two hundred or so before anything worth exporting could be developed in exportable quantities. And without the somec sleep, who would still be alive? None of the original colonists. None of their great–great–grandchildren, either.

"A new home," sang a chorus of children's voices, "where children have room to run and play under the sun. Carter. The children's dream planet."

And they were at the desk. "Both of you?" the woman asked.

"Just her," Jas answered. "A place where you can walk around in the open."

The woman pretended to think hard. "Capricorn? It's a yellow sun planet, just like Capitol."

Jas wasn't taken in. Obviously Capricorn was what they were pushing today. "What do they export?"

"Oh, exciting things."

"Excite me," Jas said.

"Aluminum," she said. "And platinum. And chrome."

Jas smiled wanly. "You don't do much walking in the open when you're down a mine shaft, ma'am. A planet that exports food."

"Duncan
, then. Sol–type planet, they didn't even have to terraform it. She'll love it."