Delos 2 - Futureworld Read online

  DELOS

  the multi-billion dollar adult playground that offered the ultimate in almost-live entertainment before its deadly breakdown, has reopened with new fail-safe guard factors and even more fabulous realms of automated pleasure.

  Those who can afford it act out their fantasies in absolute security. And among those who can afford it are the world’s most powerful leaders.

  But something is happening at Delos, something evil, something that Chuck Browning and Tracy Ballard have to find out before it’s too late-for them . . . and the world . . .

  Where nothing can go wrong . . . go wrong . . . go wrong . . .

  IN SEARCH OF DANGEROUS SECRETS . . .

  WARNING TO ALL MODELS 400-700.

  THIS AREA IS ABOVE HUMIDITY TOLERANCE LEVELS.

  CONTROL PERMISSION REQUIRED BEFORE ENTERING.

  Tracy put her mouth to Chuck’s ear and whispered, “I thought they shut down for six hours a night.”

  “Not the power house,” he answered softly, his eyes studying the entrances to the lower tunnels.

  “What do we do?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder nervously. The whole thing didn’t seem like such a great idea now.

  Chuck pointed to the robots moving through the machinery on several levels, on catwalks and aisles. “They’re only Four Hundreds. I don’t think they’re programmed to stop us.”

  “Are you sure,” Tracy whispered.

  “. . . No.”

  SAMUEL Z. ARKOFF PRESENTS

  AN AUBREY COMPANY—PAUL N. LAZARUS, III PRODUCTION

  PETER FONDA • BLYTHE DANNER

  in

  FUTUREWORLD

  Also Starring

  ARTHUR HILL

  STUART MARGOLIN

  JOHN RYAN

  and

  YUL BRYNNER

  as “The Gunslinger”

  Music by

  Fred Karlin

  Executive Producer

  SAMUEL Z. ARKOFF

  Produced by

  PAUL N. LAZARUS, III and JAMES T. AUBREY

  Screenplay by

  MAYO SIMON and GEORGE SCHENCK

  Directed by

  RICHARD T. HEFFRON

  An AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL Picture

  Copyright© 1976 by

  American International Pictures.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Ballantine Books of Canada, Ltd., Toronto, Canada.

  ISBN 0-345-25559-3

  First Edition: September 1976

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For

  Isaac Asimov

  and all his components

  • • •

  The roaring presses of a city newspaper have a thunder all their own. It isn’t just noise, it’s excitement. The massive black machines sit like burned skeletons of dinosaurs and within them whirl wide rollers, feeding newsprint as broad as the reach of a man’s arms. Under and over, down and up, the endless newsprint races, mysteriously picking up ink in the bowels of the machines, becoming photographs and text, blaring headlines, box scores, red-squared FINAL, comic strips, advertisements for new cars and deodorant, white sales and movies.

  Ink-stained printers, almost indistinguishable from their brethren of a hundred years before, tend the presses with casual expertise. They watch with their eyes for the mistake, listen with their ears for the malfunction deep within and out of sight. When all is well they hear nothing, see nothing. But let one thing malfunction—let the paperfeed start to creep sideways, let a gear go unoiled, let a semicircular printing plate loosen—and they are there in seconds.

  Chuck Browning came into the huge pressroom, uncowed by the thunderous noise, enjoying the vibrations beneath his feet. In his mind this was where it happened. Not at the typewriters up in the newsroom, not in the ad department, not in the clickety-click of the wire-service teletypers. It happened here, in the pressroom. This is where it all came together: ink from a factory; pulp paper from the forests of Georgia, Oregon, or the Midwest; type set by the flying fingers of the typesetters on the third floor, sitting before their altar-like machines, composing, justifying into neatly edged columns; text from reporters; ads from the stores; photographs from hard-worked photographers trying to seem aloof from blood that ran out of crushed cars and bodies mutilated beyond recognition, trying to keep their interest in the repetitive pronouncements of politicians and the banal blatherings of actors plugging their newest picture.

  Chuck grinned at the blue-and-orange-trimmed Goss presses, patting one as he cut through, now, from the parking lot to the newsroom. Coming down the aisle, he saw Shorty bending over and craning his neck to look up the line of racing paper, squinting at the set of the rollers. The old-time printer pulled back, took off his paper hat, worn in the traditional cap-fold of pulp, and started to wipe his forehead. He saw Chuck and grinned at the tall, casually dressed reporter.

  Chuck shouted over the thunder of the presses, pitching his voice to cut through the noise. “Hey, Shorty, how many points are you giving on the Colts?”

  The printer widened his grin and pulled a rag of waste from his back pocket to scrub at his hands. “Seven!” he shouted back.

  Chuck stuck his hand in his pocket. “I got fifty bucks that says you’re wrong,” he bellowed, pulling out a folded clump of money and counting out some bills.

  Shorty smiled. “You ain’t never gonna get rich being stupid.”

  The tall, brown-haired reporter held out the money. “I got a hunch,” he said, grinning at his own gambler’s cliché.

  The printer took his money, counted it, put it in a pocket of his blue overalls and took out a slip of paper. He punched a ballpoint pen, frowned at it, punched again, then wrote something on the paper. “I read your column today.” His voice was casual as he wrote.

  Chuck raised his eyebrows. The printers rarely commented on what they printed unless they had caught someone in a gross error of fact—or in jest. “How did you like it?” he asked carefully.

  Shorty handed him the slip of paper, smiling as he said, “It’s gonna wrap a lotta garbage.”

  Pleased at catching the reporter, the printer sauntered away, chuckling at his own cleverness. Chuck shook his head and deftly snatched a copy of the newspaper from the mechanical stream that flowed past. Fipping the paper to the top fold, he scanned it quickly as he trotted up the steps and out the thick doors of the pressroom.

  • • •

  The newsroom was like most newsrooms of any big metropolitan daily: large, flatly lit by fluorescent tubes, a sea of cluttered desks set around thick, square, support columns taped with scores of pieces of paper. At the room’s end were the glassed-in offices of the editors, with water coolers, filing cabinets, and wastebaskets set around where they fitted and were out of the stream of traffic. Hunched over desks, hurrying down aisles with long slips of typeset copy, pecking at typewriters, or talking on phones were editors, reporters, rewrite men and a few “civilians.” Most of the employees were male, but some—the best and the worst and the in-between—were women.

  A pair of skis leaned against a column by the assistant sportswriter, who was taping an interview with a coach in Detroit, who was saying almost the same things the coach in Los Angeles had said earlier that day and two coaches in San Francisco had said the day before. The sportswriter was scribbling on a piece of paper as he listened with half an ear, trying to think up new synonyms for “win” and “lose.”

  A row of books about film, acting, and theater were sitting across the back of the drama critic’s desk, but he wasn’t in. A copy boy was robbing
his desk drawer of the chewing gum everyone knew he kept there. A reporter doing a series on computer crime was hunched over his typewriter, staring blindly at the paper, his fingers poised but unmoving.

  Chuck threaded his way through the organized chaos and threw himself into his chair, flinging the copy of the paper onto his desktop. A reporter at the facing desk looked up as the wind from the flung copy stirred his own random stacks of copy sheets.

  “Are you behind on your bills?” he asked without preamble.

  “And a good morning to you!” Chuck answered, flipping the newspaper over to the lower half of the front page.

  His fellow-reporter shook his head, as if to say he wasn’t kidding. “Some guy’s been calling for you,” he said, gesturing toward the telephone. “Every five minutes for the last two hours. He’s driving me nuts.” The reporter slapped a hand down on the papers before him. “This Ackerman Library story is confusing enough without—”

  “Did he leave a number?” Chuck asked, cutting in. This guy was always irritated, and Chuck had learned to ignore most of the man’s blatherings. The reporter was about to answer Chuck when the phone rang on Chuck’s desk. He picked it up with hardly a pause. “City room. Browning.”

  The voice in his ear was careful. “Chuck Browning . . . ?”

  “That’s right,” he replied.

  Chuck was used to people being careful on the phone, as well as in bars, alleys, backseats of limos, rooftops, hideouts, and police stations. Often informants did not want to reveal their identity or wanted to be certain that the “leak” would not be traced to them. Chuck had built a reputation for honesty and reliability. It was any reporter’s stock in trade, but especially so for an investigative reporter whether he or she worked for a newspaper, a magazine, a wire service, or a television news department.

  Chuck did not press the person on the line. He knew they usually reacted best when allowed to proceed at their own pace, although sometimes you had to prime the pump. You always had to give them encouragement, little signs that you were actually listening. Little mmm’s and “Yeah’s” and “Go on’s” were not enough, though often used.

  The voice on his phone hesitated, then spoke warily, still questioning. “A couple of years ago, you broke a story about the trouble in Westworld. You’re the same guy, right?”

  “Right. That was me. Now, who are you?” He made his question sound natural, rather than probing or suspicious.

  “I got a story for you,” the voice said cautiously.

  “Okay,” Chuck replied noncommittally. Some people’s idea of a story was that they had planted a new lawn or that their neighbor was sleeping with his secretary. It wouldn’t be the first time Chuck had gone through a long trust-me routine to find no story waiting on the other side.

  “It’ll blow your mind right out of your head.” The voice was crafty, selling hard. “Probably get you another prize!”

  “Okay.” Chuck sighed. “Tell me.”

  How much was this going to cost him? He glanced at the glassed-in offices of his superiors. They often okayed payments for special information, but only in the case of sure-fire stories that carried a promise of big rewards. Much of the five- and ten-dollar payments came out of Chuck’s own pocket and his fudging on his minuscule expense account hardly made up for it.

  “You crazy? I ain’t giving it away,” the voice protested.

  Nothing new here. “How much?”

  There was a hesitation. “I don’t know.” (As much as you can get, of course, Chuck thought.) “All I want is for you to meet me somewhere. I’ll tell you what I got and you pay me what it’s worth.”

  Chuck sighed again. The “big” story that informants thought they could retire on were often five-dollar tips that were mainly paid just to keep open the conduits for future story material.

  “But it’s gotta be now,” the voice continued. Another hesitation. “There’s some people after me. I gotta get moving.”

  Chuck ignored the hard-sell trimmings. There was always some window dressing. An unwanted pregnancy, a Mafia connection, an irate husband, an operation urgently needed. Informants used very little imagination, Chuck mused. He preferred the “professionals,” who snitched as a straight business proposition, knowing that too many no-shows and inaccuracies would put them out of a job. Chuck dealt often with drunks, junkies, thieves, and jealous wives. Each had his price. With some it was money, with others the satisfaction of vicarious revenge: angry wives who had found their husbands had mistresses and turned them in to the Internal Revenue Service; thieves who had been crossed on a fencing operation; cops who hated a superior; a politically ambitious attorney who wanted to make the opposition look bad. Chuck had known them all in his brief but varied career as a reporter.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  Another hesitation. “Frenchy.”

  “Okay, Frenchy. I’ll meet you in”—he looked at his watch—“ten minutes, at the Hyatt House crossover. You know where that is?” Acknowledgment came in the term of a grunt. “What do you look like?”

  “I seen your picture. I’ll find you.”

  The phone went dead and Chuck looked at it.

  The reporter at the next desk gazed over. “Anything?” he asked.

  Chuck shrugged and hung up the phone. “It’s my day for long shots.”

  He opened a desk drawer and looked in it. Nothing. Paper clips, eraser, a spare ribbon for his manual typewriter that he had finagled from Store’s at great cost A little book called 20,0000 Words that was a dictionary without definitions, a handy little volume for checking spelling. Two pencils, unsharpened, and an unfinished article on zero gravity welding that he had not finished because the interview with the Hughes Aircraft engineer had taken place in a bar and they’d gotten drunk. But no note from Lola, slipped into his desk as she’d passed by. He shut the drawer. Their affair must be over. He used to be able to count on three obscene notes a day from the talented head of the women’s fashion department.

  He rose and waved absently at his boss through the glass of his office wall.

  The middle-aged man peered at him over his glasses, but made no gesture. The comings and goings of his reporters were often abused, he knew, but Chuck Browning was not like a lot of them, using the easy air of the office to hide afternoon drinking, lunchtime affairs in motels, or moonlighting technical writing. The editor turned again to the long list of complaints from a minority group and began dictating a letter to his secretary.

  • • •

  The Los Angeles traffic was heavy to the downtown street below the pedestrian bridge that crossed over it. Chuck leaned against the railing a moment and watched the city around him. He had grown up in L.A., seen the city change, seen the skyscrapers come—hardly a speck compared to New York’s skyline, but impressive still, in Southern California’s earthquake zone.

  The cars and trucks streamed by below him and the heavy eleven-o’clock pedestrian traffic was normal. A steady course of people walked in both directions across the bridge: lawyers with briefcases, explaining things to clients; secretaries, flirting, or reading paperbacks as they walked to an early lunch; delivery boys, eyeing the secretaries; businessmen, self-important with gray suits and barbered faces; a sauntering blue-uniformed cop, eyes watchful, in no hurry at all. In the glass covering that arched over the bridge, creating a tunnel, Chuck saw the upside-down reflections of the pedestrians and the blurred images of the cars below. His eye was caught by someone staggering.

  Chuck kept an eye on the man’s progress across the curving arc of the bridge. He had a peculiarly fixed gaze as though he were a drunk, but otherwise did not look like any of the winos who sometimes wandered into the area from nearby Skid Row.

  The man crossed to Chuck’s side of the glass tunnel, cutting rudely across in front of some gossiping mailroom youths, his fingers white upon the railing. He gave Chuck a look, then closed his eyes wearily.

  “Are you Browning?”

  Chuck turned to
ward him. “Frenchy?” The man looked sick. Chuck put out a hand as his informer started to answer, but instead Frenchy suddenly slumped.

  His fall to the floor of the bridge was swift, as though someone had cut the strings that had held him shakily up. Chuck knelt next to him and unbuttoned his coat.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, fear in his voice.

  He felt something sticky under his fingers.

  Chuck pulled back his hand where it had brushed Frenchy’s shirt. Blood was all over it, soaking through, staining the inside of his jacket, the alarm-red splattering beginning to puddle. The reporter stared at the blood, unbelieving, but feeling the fluid thickening on his fingers.

  As Frenchy tried to speak, his face contorted with pain. Chuck grabbed his shoulders, leaning close to him, trying to think of something to say, something to ask. He looked helplessly around. People were passing, but since Chuck’s body hid most of the blood, they looked at Frenchy as if he were just another drunk.

  Frenchy said something, but Chuck was waving at a passerby and didn’t hear him. “Please,” the reporter pleaded, “get an ambulance. This man is hurt!”

  The man lifted his eyebrows, but walked on, his face curious but not concerned.

  Chuck cursed and waved at another man. “Call an ambulance, will you? A man’s been hurt here!”

  The pedestrian stopped, a frown on his face. “Did he fall?”

  “No . . . I . . . No, he’s been hurt—badly!” Chuck shoved at the man. “Please—call an ambulance!”

  “Uh, yeah—okay.”

  The man walked off, not very fast, then looked back. Chuck urged him on with a wave of his hand, and the man started trotting down the curve of the bridge. Not taking any chances, Chuck hailed a man going in the other direction.

  “Hey! You! Get an ambulance! Call a cop, too!”

  The man nodded, blinked, stared, then started walking quickly toward the other end of the bridge.

  Frenchy said something and caught Chuck’s attention. He bent down to the wounded man. “What was that? What did you say?”