Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (2 page)

Alan didn’t notice Detective Jenkins following him in an unmarked car. Once Jenkins had determined where Alan and Zeno were bound, he put in a call to the party who’d engaged his services. The matter was out of Jenkins’s hands now.

The sex was even more enjoyable than Alan had hoped. He and Zeno slept till mid-morning, Zeno’s leg heavy across his, the two of them spooned together in one of the room’s twin beds. Alan awoke to a knocking on the door, followed by a rattling of keys.

He sprang across the carpet and leaned against the door. “We’re just now
arising
,” he said, striving for an authoritative tone. But his voice rose and fluted on the final word.

“The dining room’s about to close,” whined a woman’s voice. “Might I bring the gentlemen their breakfast in the room?”

“Indeed,” said Alan through the door, speaking more slowly than before. “A British breakfast for two. And please be quick. We have a train to catch rather soon.” Earlier this week, he’d had his housekeeper send his bag ahead to Cumbria in the Lake District. And his wallet held more than enough cash for his and Zeno’s expenses.

“Very good, sir. Full breakfast for two.”

“Wash,” said Zeno, sticking his head out of the bathroom. At the sound of the maid, he’d darted right in there and started the tub. He looked happy. “Hot water.”

Alan joined Zeno in the bath for a minute, and the dear boy brought him right off. But then he grew anxious about the return of the maid. He donned his clothes and rucked up the second bed so it would look slept in. Now Zeno emerged from his bath, utterly lovely in his nudity. Anxious Alan shooed him into his clothes. Finally the maid appeared with the platters of food, really quite a nice-looking breakfast, with kippers, sausages, fried eggs, toast, honey, marmalade, cream and a lo~vely great pot of tea, steaming hot.

Seeing the maid face to face, Alan realized they knew each other; she was the cousin of his housekeeper. Although the bent little woman feigned not to recognize him, he could see in her eyes that she knew exactly what he and Zeno were doing here. And there was a sense that she knew something more. She gave him a particularly odd look when she poured out the two mugs of tea. Wanting to be shut of her, he handed her a coin and she withdrew.

“Milk tea,” said Zeno, tipping half his mug back into the pot and topping it up with cream. He raised the mug as if in a toast, then slurped most of it down. Alan’s tea was still too hot for his lips, so he simply waved his mug and smiled.

It seemed that even with the cream, Zeno’s tea was very hot indeed. Setting his mug down with a clatter, he began fanning his hands at his mouth, theatrically gasping for breath. Alan took it for a joke, and emitted out one of his fun-house laughs. But this was no farce.

Zeno squeaked and clutched at his throat; beads of sweat covered his face; foam coated his lips. He dropped to the floor in a heap, spasmed his limbs like a starfish, and beat a tattoo on the floor.

Hardly knowing what to think, Alan knelt over his inert friend, massaging his chest. The man had stopped breathing; he had no pulse. Alan leaned over and pressed his mouth to Zeno’s, planning to resuscitate him. But then he smelled bitter almonds—the classic sign of cyanide poisoning.

Recoiling as abruptly as a piece of spring-loaded machinery, he ran into the bathroom and rinsed off his lips. Surely this was the work of Her Majesty’s spy-masters. A secret agent had been sent to murder Alan and Zeno both. In the authorities’ eyes, Alan was an even greater risk than a rogue atomic scientist. His cryptographic work on breaking the Enigma code was a
secret
secret—the very existence of this work was unknown to the public at large.

His only hope was to slip out of the country and to assume a new life. But how? He thought distractedly of the ear-shaped form he’d recently grown in the Petri dish at home. Why not a new face? His recent progress with experimental morphogenesis had been extreme. The maddest notions seemed within reach.

He leaned over Zeno, rubbing his poor, dear chest. The man was very dead. Alan went and listened by the room’s door. Was the agent lurking without, showing his teeth like a hideous omnivorous ghoul? But he heard not a sound. The likeliest possibility was that the operative had paid the maid to let him dose the tea—and had then gotten well out of the way. Perhaps he had a little time.

He imagined setting his internal computational system to double speed. Stepping lively, he exchanged clothes with Zeno—a bit tricky as the other man’s body was so limp. Better than rigor mortis, at any rate.

Finding a pair of scissors in Zeno’s travel kit, he trimmed off his friend’s pathetic, noble beard, sticking the whiskers to his own chin with smears of honey. A crude initial imitation, a first-order effect.

Alan packed Zeno’s bag and made an effort to lift the corpse to his feet. Good lord but this was hard. He thought to tie a necktie to the suitcase, run the tie over his shoulder and knot it around Zeno’s right arm. If he held the suitcase in his left hand, it made a useful counterweight.

It was a good thing that, having lost some of his muscle during his state-mandated estrogen treatments, Alan had begun training again. He was very nearly as fit as in his early thirties. Suitcase in place, right arm tightly wrapped around Zeno’s midriff and grasping the man’s belt, he waltzed his friend down the hotel’s back stairs, emerging into a car park where, thank you, oh Great Algorithmist, a cabbie was having a smoke.

“My friend
Turing
is sick,” said Alan, trying to twist the vowels into a semblance of a Greek accent. “I am wanting to take him home.”

“Blind pissed of a Monday morn,” cackled the cabbie, jumping to his own conclusions. “That’s the high life for fair. And red spats! What’s our toff’s address?”

With a supreme effort, Alan swung Zeno into the cab’s rear seat and sat next to him. He reached into the body’s coat and pretended to read off his home address. Nobody seemed to be tailing the cab. The agents were lying low, lest blame for the murder fall upon them.

As soon as the cab drew up to Alan’s house, he overpaid the driver and dragged Zeno to his feet, waving off all offers of assistance. He didn’t want the cabbie to get a close look at the crude honey-sticky beard on his chin. And then he was in his house, which was blessedly empty, Monday being the housekeeper’s day off. Moving from window to window, he drew the curtains.

He dressed Zeno in Turing pajamas, laid him out in the professorial bed, and vigorously washed the corpse’s face, not forgetting to wash his own hands afterwards. Seeking out an apple from the kitchen, he took two bites, then dipped the rest of the apple into a solution of potassium cyanide that he happened to have about the place in a jam jar. He’d always loved the scene in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
when the Wicked Witch lowers an apple into a cauldron of poison. Dip the apple in the brew, let the sleeping death seep through!

Alan set the poison apple down beside Zeno. A Snow White suicide. Now to perfect the imitation game.

He labored all afternoon. He found a pair of cookie sheets in the kitchen—the housekeeper often did baking for him. He poured a quarter-inch of his specially treated gelatin solution onto each sheet—as it happened, the gelatin was from the bones of a pig. Man’s best friend. He set the oven on its lowest heat, and slid in the cookie sheets, leaving the oven door wide open so he could watch. Slowly the medium jelled.

Alan’s customized jelly contained a sagacious mixture of activator and inhibitor compounds that he’d been tweaking and retweaking every day, adjusting the morphonic balance to match that of the womb. If he was truly on track, the latest stuff was tailored to promote just the right kind of embryological reaction-diffusion computation.

Carefully wielding a scalpel, Alan cut a tiny fleck of skin from the tip of Zeno’s cold nose. He set the fleck into the middle of the upper cookie sheet, and then looked in the mirror, preparing to repeat the process on himself. Oh blast, he still had honey and hair on his chin. Silly ass. Carefully he swabbed off the mess with toilet paper, flushing the evidence down the commode. And then he took the scalpel to his own nose.

After he set his fleck of tissue into place on the lower pan, his tiny cut
would
keep on bleeding, and he had to spend nearly half an hour staunching the spot, greatly worried that he might scatter the drops of blood. Mentally he was running double-strength error-checking routines to keep himself from mucking things up. It was so very hard for him to be tidy. As a schoolboy, he’d always had ink on his collar.

When his housekeeper arrived tomorrow morning, Alan’s digs should look chaste, sarcophagal, Egyptian. The imitation Turing corpse would be a mournful
memento mori
of a solitary life gone wrong, and the puzzled poisoners would hesitate to intervene. The man who knew too much would be dead; that was primary desideratum. After a perfunctory inquest, the Turing replica would be cremated, bringing the persecution to a halt. And Alan’s mother might forever believe that her son’s death was an accident. For years she’d been chiding him over his messy fecklessness with the chemicals in his home lab.

Outside a car drove past very slowly. The assassin was wondering what was going on. Yet he hesitated to burst in, lest the neighbors learn of their government’s perfidy.

Sitting quiet in a chair, Alan wondered where he’d be right now if the killers had succeeded. All scientific logic said that death was a terminal halting that one wouldn’t even experience. But yet… The most basic question about the world was, after all, unanswerable:
Why is there something instead of nothing?
An afterlife wasn’t utterly out of the question. And if that were the case… As so many times before, his thoughts flew to his cherished, childish dream of meeting his first love in heaven. Christopher Morcom. Dead now for—good lord!—twenty-four years. Dragged into the depths of time’s sullen, heedless river.

With shaking hands, Alan poured himself a glass of sherry. Steady, old man. See this through.

He moved his kitchen chair close to the open oven door. Like puffing pastry, the flecks of skin were rising up from the cookie sheets, with disks of cellular growth radiating out as the tissues grew. He’d jolted the flecks of skin into behaving like pieces of embryos.

Slowly the noses hove into view, and then the lips, the eye holes, the forehead, the chins. As the afternoon light waned, Alan saw the faces age, Zeno in the top pan, Alan on the bottom. They began as innocent babes, became pert boys, spotty youths, and finally grown men.

Ah, the pathos of biology’s irreversible computations, thought Alan, forcing a wry smile. But the orotund verbiage of academe did little to block the pain. Dear Zeno was dead. And Alan’s life as he’d known it was at an end, at age forty-one. He wept.

It was dark outside now. He drew the pans from the oven, shuddering at the enormity of what he’d wrought. The uncanny empty-eyed faces had an expectant air; they were like holiday pie crusts, waiting for steak and kidney, for mincemeat and plums.

Bristles had pushed out of the two flaccid chins, forming little beards. Time to slow down the computation. One didn’t want the wrinkles of extreme old age. Alan doused the living faces with inhibitor solution, damping their cellular computations to a normal rate.

He carried the bearded Turing face into his bedroom and pressed it onto the corpse. The tissues took hold, sinking in a bit, which was good. Using his fingers, he smoothed the joins at the edges of the eyes and lips. As the living face absorbed cyanide from the dead man’s tissues, its color began to fade. A few minutes later, the face was waxen and dead. The illusion was nearly complete.

Alan momentarily lost his composure and gagged; he ran to the toilet and vomited, though little came up. He’d neglected to eat anything today other than those two bites of apple. Finally his stomach-spasms stopped. In full error-correction mode, he remembered to wash his hands several times before wiping his face. And then he drank a quart of water from the tap.

He took his razor and shaved the Turing face of the dead man in the bed. The barbering went faster than when he’d shaved Zeno in the hotel. It was better to stand so that he saw his face upside down. Was barbering a good career? It would be risky to work as a scientist again. Given any fresh input, the halted Turing persecution would restart.

Alan cleaned up once more and drifted back into the kitchen. Prying up a paving stone just outside the door, he removed the bills that he’d stashed there in a screw top jar. The war years had given him a lasting distrust of banks. Combining this stash with his travel funds, he had a fine wad of bills.

It was time to skulk out through the dark garden with his travel funds and with Zeno’s passport, to bicycle through the familiar woods to a station down the line, and there to catch a train. Probably his tormentors wouldn’t be much interested in pursuing Zeno. They’d be glad Zeno had posed the murder as a suicide, and the less questions asked the better.

But to be safe, Turing would flee along an unexpected route. He’d take the train to Plymouth, the ferry from there to Santander on the north coast of Spain, a train south through Spain to the Mediterranean port of Algeciras, and another ferry from Algeciras to Tangier.

Tangier was an open city, an international zone. He could buy a fresh passport there. He’d be free to live as he liked—in a small way. Perhaps he’d master the violin. And read the Iliad in Greek. Alan glanced down at the flaccid Zeno face, imagining himself as a Greek musician.