Watson, Ian - Novel 10 by Deathhunter (v1.1) Page B

skipped around at the
speed of light —”
                 “Okay,
okay. But Death might be general and particular. If I kill the particular death — if I zap the bullet with this
person’s own special name on it, right out of the way, swat it, squash it,
vaporise it! — would this person,” and here Weinberger’s hand drifted over the
imaginary contours of his subject ‘volunteer’, as sensuously — thought Jim —
as some fantasizing soldier in the old days of war, stuck in a jungle hundreds
of miles from a brothel, ‘‘would this person live for ever ? Would I have invented an immortality treatment, here
in the midst of the House of Death? That would be one hell of an irony!”
                 “It
would certainly be a way of getting people to volunteer,” allowed Jim. ‘‘Roll
up, roll up! Climb into Weinberger’s Death Cage and he’ll make thee immortal
with a hiss ... of cyanide gas. Ah, but you’re forgetting something, my friend.
You’d kill the person, that way, before you nailed his death. Baby and the bathwater, Nathan. Baby and
the bathwater!”
                 Weinberger
looked crestfallen, as though he had seriously considered the possibility. As
perhaps he had. Jim was now doubly sure that the gun had been kept hidden from
long ago with just some such plan in mind. Instead of which, Weinberger had
used it to shoot Norman Harper, to save the poet — absurdly — from falling into
the clutches of Death . . .
                 ‘‘With
these medi-sensors and the ‘thanatos’ screen hooked in,” said Jim, ‘‘we need
somebody on hand who’s qualified in using the apparatus.” He wanted a witness,
for his own protection. He also wished most dearly to avoid a repetition of
what had happened in Gracchus.
                 Weinberger
nodded.
                 ‘‘I
took the liberty of having a word with Claudio Menotti — our euthanaser.”
                 ‘‘I
know who he is. He was on the
platform at the ceremony. Oh boy, was he looking
forward to his duties! Surely you didn’t tell him about —?”
                 “O /course I didn’t. I simply asked to
borrow one of his assistants to keep an eye on certain medical equipment.”
                 Weinberger’s
face showed a mixture of intense relief, and almost paranoid suspicion. Relief,
because the equivalent of a dental appointment for a deep filling was now
certainly postponed —
                 ‘‘Oh,
so we couldn’t have got started this afternoon in any case?”
                 And
suspicion: that somehow the cage might be transformed without his knowledge
into a euthanasia machine, which he would enter unwittingly.
                 To
allay the suspicion, Jim said quickly, “Noel Resnick told me he wanted you to
make a public appearance before the end. To atone. I
think we can safely put that off for a while, eh?”
                 Weinberger
smiled happily. His cage was safe. He was safe too — except from the Death
which he hoped to lure into the cage, to trap.
                 “The
assistant’s called Sally Costello. She won’t know what’s really going on. I put it to Menotti that this is a special therapy
experiment sanctioned by Resnick. Which, actually, it is.”
                 Weinberger
nodded. Jim felt sure that the man would guide himself to his own good death
with hardly a guiding touch on his arm after his flirtation with this
preposterous apparatus.
                 “We’ll
set the trap tomorrow?”
                 “Just
one tiny point,” said Jim. “Are you sure that you can ape the death state satisfactorily, without actually dying?”
                 He
knew by now that Weinberger had also been deeply interested, while a guide, in
trance states which closely approximated the actual journey into death. This
discovery had forged