A Yuletide Universe Read online

  “Not much.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Down the hall.”

  “Come on over.”

  “In the afternoon!?!”

  “A healthy mind in a healthy body.”

  “See you in ten minutes.”

  “Wear the Réplique.”

  VI

  Dressed entirely in black, the Webley in an upside-down breakaway rig, its butt just protruding from his left armpit, Kris pulled himself across the open space between the electrified fence and the dark, squat powerhouse, his arms and legs crablike in the traditional infantryman’s crawl.

  Inside that building, Daley had been pinpointed by Ten- Nineteen’s tracking equipment. He had been there for almost two days, even through the riots.

  Kris had asked Freya what he was up to, there in the powerhouse. She had not known. The entire building was damped, impenetrable to any sensors she had employed. But it was S.P.I.D.E.R. business, whatever it was—that had to be for dead certain. For a man in his position to be closeted away like that, while his city went up in flames—that had to be for dead certain.

  Kris reached the base of the powerhouse. He slid along its face till he could see the blacked-over windows of the el above him. They were nearly a foot over his head. No purchase for climbing. He had to pull a smash&grab. He drew three deep breaths, broke the Webley out of its packet and pulled the tape wound round the butt. It came loose, and he taped the weapon into his hand. Then three more deep breaths. Digging hard he dashed away from the building, thirty feet into the open, sucked in breath again, spun, and dashed back for the powerhouse. Almost at the face of the building he bent deeply from the knees, pushed off, and crossed his arms over his head as he smashed full into the window.

  Then he was through, arching into the powerhouse, performing a tight somersault and coming down with knees still bent, absorbing the impact up through his hips. Glass tinkled all around him, his blacksuit was ripped raggedly down across the chest. His right arm came out, straight, the Webley extended.

  Light suddenly flooded the powerhouse. Kris caught the scene in one total impression: everything.

  Daley was hunched over an intricate clockwork mechanism, set high on a podiumlike structure at the far end of the room. Black-light equipment throughout the room still glowed an evil rotting purple. Three men, wearing skintight outfits of pale green, were starting toward him, pulling off black-light goggles. A fourth man still had his hand on the knife-switch that had raised the interior lights. There was more.

  Kris saw great serpentine connections running from Daley’s clockwork mechanism, snaking across the floor to hookups on the walls. A blower system, immense and bulky, dominated one entire wall. Vats of some bubbling dark substance, almost like liquid smoke, ranked behind the podium.

  “Stop him!” Daley screamed.

  Kris had only a moment as the three men in green came for him. And in that instant he chose to firm his resolve for what was certainly to come. He always had this instant, on every assignment, and he had to prove to himself that it was right, what he must do, however brutal. He chose, in that instant, to look at Daley; and his resolve was firmed more eloquently than he could have hoped. This was an evil old man. What might have been generous old age in another man, had been cemented into lines of unspeakable ugliness. This man was evil incarnate. Totally owned by S.P.I.D.E.R.

  The three green men lumbered forward. Big men, heavily muscled, faces dulled with malice. Kris fired. He took the first one in the stomach, spinning him back and around, into one of his companions, who tried to sidestep, but went down in a twist of arms and legs as the first green man died. Kris pumped three shots into the tangle and the arms and legs ceased moving, save for an occasional quiver. The third man broke sidewise and tried to tackle Kris. He pulled back a step and shot him in the face. The green man went limp as a Raggedy Andy doll and settled comically onto his knees, then tumbled forward onto the meat that had been his head.

  As though what had happened to his companions meant nothing to the fourth man, he stretched both arms out before him—zombielike—and stumbled toward Kris. The agent disposed of him with one shot.

  Then he turned for Daley.

  The man was raising a deadly-looking hand weapon with a needle-muzzle. Kris threw himself flat-out to the side. It was only empty space that Daley’s weapon burned with its beam of sizzling crimson energy. Kris rolled, and rolled, and rolled right up to the blower system. Then he was up, had the Webley leveled and yelled, “Don’t make me do it, Daley!”

  The weapon in Daley’s hand tracked, came to rest on Kris, and the agent fired at that moment. The Webley barked ferociously. The needle- nosed weapon shattered under the impact of the steel-jacketed round, and Daley fell backward off the podium.

  Kris was on him in a moment.

  He had him up on his feet, thrust against the podium, and a two-fingered paralyzer applied to a pressure point in the clavial depression before Daley could regain himself. Daley’s mouth dropped open with the pain, but he could not speak. Kris hauled him up on the podium, a bit more roughly than was necessary, and threw him down at the foot of the clockwork mechanism.

  It was incredibly complex, with timers and chronographs hooked in somehow between the vats of bubbling smoke and the blower system on the wall. Kris was absorbed in trying to understand precisely what the equipment did, when he heard the sigh at his feet. He glanced down just in time to see something so hideous he could not look at it straight on—emerge from Daley’s right ear, slither and scuttle onto the floor of the podium, and then explode in a black puff of soot and filth. When Kris looked again, all that remained was a dusty smear; what might be left should a child set fire to a heap of powdered magnesium and potassium nitrate.

  Daley stirred. He rolled over on his back and lay gasping. Then he tried to sit. Kris knelt and helped him to a sitting position.

  “Oh, my God, my God,” Daley mumbled, shaking his head as if to clear it. The evil was gone from his face. Now he was little less than a kindly old gentleman who had been sick for a very very long time. “Thank you, whoever you are. Thank you.”

  Kris helped Daley to his feet, and the old man leaned against the clockwork mechanism.

  “They took me over . . . years ago,” he said.

  “S.P.I.D.E.R., eh?” Kris said.

  “Yes. Slipped inside my head, inside my mind. Evil. Totally evil. Oh, God, it was awful. The things I’ve done. The rotten, unconscionable things! I’m so ashamed. I have so much to atone for.”

  “Not you, Your Honor,” said Kris, “S.P.I.D.E.R. They’re the ones who’ll pay. Even as this one did.” The black splotch.

  “No, no, no . . . me! I did all those terrible things, now I have to clean it all up. I’ll tear down the South Side slums, the Back o’ the Yards squalor. I’ll hire the best city planners to make living space for all those black people I ignored, that I used shamefully for my own political needs. Not soulless high-rises wherein people stifle and lose their dignity, but decent communities filled with light and laughter. And I’ll free the Polacks! And all the machine politics I used to use to assign contracts to inadequate builders . . . I’ll tear down all those unsafe buildings and have them done right! I’ll disband the secret gestapo I’ve been gathering all these years, and hire only those men who can pass a stringent police exam that will take into account how much humanitarianism they have in them. I’ll landscape everything so this city will be beautiful. And then I’ll have to give myself up for trial. I hope I don’t get more than fifty years. I’m not that young any more.”

  Kris sucked on a tooth reflectively. “Don’t get carried away, Your Honor.”

  Then he indicated the clockwork machine.

  “What was this all about?”

  Daley looked at the machine with loathing. “We’ll have to destroy it. This was my part of the eight-point plan S.P.I.D.E.R. put into operation twenty-four years ago, to . . . to . . .”

  He stumbled to a halt; a confused,
perplexed look spread over his kindly features. He bit his lower lip.

  “Yes, go on,” Kris urged him, “to do what? What’s S.P.I.D.E.R.’s master plan? What is their goal?”

  Daley spread his hands. “I—I don’t know.”

  “Then tell me . . . who are they? Where do they come from? We’ve battled them for years, but we have no more idea of who they are than when we started. They always self-destruct themselves like that one—” he nodded toward the sooty smear on the podium, “—and we haven’t been able to capture one. In fact, you’re the first pawn of theirs that we’ve ever captured alive.”

  Daley kept nodding all through Kris’s unnecessary explanation. When the agent was finished, he shrugged. “All I remember—whatever it was in my head there, it seems to have kept me blocked off from learning anything very much—all I remember is that they’re from another planet.”

  “Aliens!” Kris almost shouted, instantly grasping what Daley had said. “An eight-point plan. The other seven names on the list, and yourself. Each of you taking one phase of a master plan whose purpose we do not as yet understand.”

  Daley looked at him. “You have a genuine gift for stating the obvious.”

  “I like to synthesize things.”

  “Amalgamate.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. Go on.”

  Kris looked confused. “No, as a matter of fact, you go on. Tell me what this equipment here was supposed to do.”

  “It’s still doing it. We haven’t shut it off.”

  Kris looked alarmed. “How do we shut it off?”

  “Push that button.”

  Kris pushed the button, and almost immediately the vats stopped bubbling, the smokelike substance in the vats subsided, the blowers ceased blowing, the clockwork machine slowed and stopped, the cuckoo turned blue and died, the hoses flattened, the room became silent. “What did it do?” Kris asked.

  “It created and sowed smog in the atmosphere.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding. You don’t really think smog comes from factories and cars and cigarettes, do you? It cost S.P.I.D.E.R. a fortune to dummy up reports and put on a publicity campaign that it was cars and such-like. In actuality, I’ve been spreading smog into the atmo-sphere for twenty-four years.”

  “Sonofagun,” Kris said, with awe. Then he paused, looked cagey, and asked, “Tell me, since we now know that S.P.I.D.E.R. are aliens from outer space, does it mean

  SCABROUS,

  PREDATORY

  INVADERS

  DETERMINED TO

  ELIMINATE

  RATIONALITY

  ?” Daley stared at him. “Don’t ask me; no one tells me anything.”

  Then he jumped down off the podium and started for the door to the powerhouse. Kris looked after him, then picked up a crowbar, and set about destroying the smog machine. When he had finished, sweating, and surrounded by crushed and twisted wreckage, he looked up to see Daley standing by the open door leading outside.

  “Something I can do for you?” he asked.

  Daley smiled wistfully. “No. Just watching. Now that I’m a nice fellah again, I wanted to see my last example of random, brutal violence. It’s going to be so quiet in Chicago.”

  “Tough it out, baby,” Kris said, with feeling.

  VII

  The eight-point plan seemed to tie together in Alabama. Wallace. But Wallace was off campaigning for something or other, and apparently the eight-point plan needed his special touch (filtered through the even gentler touch of a S.P.I.D.E.R. operative, inside his head) to be tied together. Kris decided to save Wallace for the last. Time was important, but Freya was covering for Daley and the death of the smog machine in Chicago, and frankly, time be hanged! This looked like the last showdown with S.P.I.D.E.R., so Kris informed Hilltop he was going to track down and eradicate the remaining seven points of the plan, with Wallace coming under his attention around Christmastime. It would press Kris close, but he was sure PoPo was on the job at the factory; and what had to be done . . . had to be done. It was going to be anything but easy. He thought wistfully of his Arctic home, the happily buzzing toy factory, the way Blitzen, particularly, nuzzled his palm when he brought the sugar cubes drenched in LSD, and the way the little mothers flew when they got loaded.

  Then he pulled his thoughts away from happier times and cooler climes, setting out to wreck S.P.I.D.E.R. He took the remaining seven in order . . .

  VIII

  Reagan: Camarillo, California

  Having closed down all the state mental institutions on the unassailable theory that nobody was really in need of psychiatric attention (“It’s all in their heads!” Reagan had said at a $500-a-plate American Legion dinner only six months earlier), Kris found him in the men’s toilet on the first floor of the abandoned Camarillo state facility, combing his pompadour.

  Reagan spun around, seeing Kris’s reflection in the mirror, and screamed for help from one of his zombie assistants, a man in green, who was closeted in a pay toilet. (Inmates had been paid a monthly dole in Regulation Golden State Scrip, converted from monies sent to them by married children who didn’t want their freako-devo-pervo relatives around; this Scrip could be used to work the pay toilets. Reagan had always believed in a pay-as-you-go system of state government.)

  Kris hit the booth with a savate kick that shattered the door just as the man in green was emerging, the side of his shoe collapsing the man’s spleen. Then the agent hurled himself on Reagan, in an attempt to capture him, subdue him, and somehow keep the S.P.I.D.E.R. symbiote within Reagan’s head from self-destructing. But the devilishly handsome Reagan abruptly pulled away and as Kris watched, horrified, he began to shimmer and change shape.

  In moments it was not Reagan standing before Kris, but a seven-headed Hydra, breathing from its seven mouths a) fire, b) ammonia clouds, c) dust, d) broken glass, e) chlorine gas, f) mustard gas and g) a combination of halitosis and rock music.

  Three of the heads (c, e, & f) lunged forward on their serpentine necks, and Kris flattened against the toilet wall. His hand darted into his jacket and came out with a ball-point pen. He shook it twice, anti-clockwise, and the pen converted into a two-handed sword. Wielding the carver easily, Kris lay about him with vigor, and in a few minutes the seven heads had been severed.

  Kris aimed true for the heart of the beast, and ran it through. The great body thumped over on its side, and lay still. It shimmered and changed back into Reagan. Then the black thing scampered out of his ear, erupted and smeared the floor tiles with soot.

  Later, Reagan combed his hair and applied pancake makeup to the glare spots on his nose and cheekbones, and moaned piteously about the really funky things he had done under the stupefying and incredibly evil direction of S.P.I.D.E.R. He swore he didn’t know what the letters of the organization’s name stood for. Kris was depressed.

  Reagan then showed him around the Camarillo plant, explaining that his part of the eight-point plan was to use the great machines on the second and third floors to spread insanity through the atmo-sphere. They broke up the machines with some difficulty: much of the equipment was very hard plastic.

  Reagan assured Kris he would work with Hilltop to cover the demise of the second phase of the eight-point plan, and that from this day forward (he raised a hand in the Boy Scout salute) he would be as good as good could be: he would bring about much-needed property tax reform, he would stop nuhdzing the students at UCLA, he would subscribe to the L.A. Free Press, The Avatar, The East Village Other, the Berkeley Barb, Horseshit, Open City and all the other underground newspapers so he could find out what was really happening; and within the week he would institute daily classes in folk dancing, soul music and peaceful coercion for members of the various police departments within the state.

  He was smiling like a man who has regained that innocence of childhood or nature that he had somehow lost.

  IX

  Johnson: Johnson City, Texas

 
; Kris found him eating mashed potatoes with his hands, sitting apart from the rest of the crowd. He looked like hell. He looked weary. There was half an eaten cow on a spit, turning lazily over charcoal embers. Kris settled down beside him and passed the time of day. He thought Kris was with the party. He belched. Then Kris snapped a finger against his right temple, and dragged his unconscious form into the woods.

  When Johnson came around, he knew it was all over. The S.P.I.D.E.R. symbiote scuttled, erupted, smeared on the dead leaves—it was now the middle of October—and Johnson said he had to hurry off to stop the war. Kris didn’t know which war he was referring to, but it sounded like a fine idea.

  “Tell me,” said Kris, earnestly, “does S.P.I.D.E.R. mean

  SECRET

  PREYERS

  INVOLVED IN

  DEMOLISHING

  EVERYTHING

  RIGHT-MINDED

  or is it something even more obscure?”

  Johnson spread his hands. He didn’t know.

  Johnson told him his part of the eight-point plan was fomenting war. And butchering babies. But now that was all over. He would recall the troops. He would let all the dissenters out of prison. He would retool for peace. He would send grain to needy nations. He would take elocution lessons. Kris shrugged and moved on.

  X

  Humphrey & Nixon: Washington, D.C.

  It was a week after the election. One of them was president. It didn’t matter. The other one was shilling for the opposition, and between them they’d divided the country down the middle. Nixon was trying to get a good shave, and Humphrey was trying to learn to wear contact lenses that would make his eyes look bigger.

  “You know, Dick, the trouble is, basically, I got funny little eyes, like a bird, y’know?”

  Nixon turned from the mirror on the office wall and said, “You should complain. I’ve got five o’clock shadow and it’s only three-thirty. Hey, who’s that?”