The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [49]
Lucky bastard, this Koo-kowski. None of his relatives had ever left the clerk anything except misery.
In the hallway on the sixth floor the old man pressed the keystress to the center of Room 684’s handleless door. A synth voice warbled “Recognized” and the barrier obediently slid aside. The internal room lights came on as he entered. There were not many of them and they were weak. This the visitor expected.
“Hello?” he called tremulously. “Whispr? Archie Kowalski?”
In the absence of a reply he began a slow search of the living area. It was not spacious enough to qualify as modest. Tiny, perhaps. There was one living room and a bathroom. A cooking unit sat on a table next to an old food preserver that hummed too loudly. Nothing in the cubicle was elaborate enough to qualify as décor. Painted with receptors, the blank wall opposite the narrow, pushed-apart twin beds served as the sole viewing monitor. Inspecting the room’s electronics the old man could not find evidence of a proper projector. Primitive accommodation indeed, whose sole virtue was its cheapness.
He checked the single built-in closet. It held a change of clothing, some personal items remarkable only for their insignificance, and little else. As he peered into the depths of the food preserver the visitor’s nose wrinkled. The fare was all of a piece with everything else in the cubicle.
It was unfortunate that the Meld called Whispr was not there, but the oldster was a patient man. Settling himself on one of the beds and stretching out his legs he activated the cheap house monitor and leaned back to watch a nature documentary. The natural world was a particular love of his, be the subject matter unmelded or otherwise.
Long after night had fallen he still had not eaten. That did not trouble him. He was used to going long periods without eating. Around eleven p.m. the door announced an arrival and the old man rose from the bed. He would surprise the renter. Moving off to one side he stood against the wall and waited. As he did so, his spine unbent. A professional acrobat’s trick, it would have astonished the sleepy-eyed desk clerk.
A figure entered, carrybag in hand. Moving slowly and clearly tired from the day’s exertions, he set the carrybag down on the table beside the cooker and turned. As he did so his eyes widened slightly.
“U’af, who are y …?”
Melded muscle-twitch fibers contracted throughout the old man’s body as he cleared the space between them in a single bound. When the startled resident reached for something in his left pocket the quartet of tentacles that extended from the four fingers of the oldster’s left hand snapped whiplike around the man’s left arm and wrenched it violently sideways. Crying out as the intruder closed on him the resident used his other hand to pull a knife from a scabbard under his shirt and thrust wildly forward. It skittered off his attacker’s chest, the fine point unable to penetrate the flesh-toned organic Kevlar meld.
“Harami!” the resident screamed. “Itassal bil bulees!”
Even as he worked to bind the younger man’s hands the suddenly uncertain intruder wondered why he should be calling for the police in Arabic. Was the use of that language some sort of code he shared with someone elsewhere in the building? Or was it being employed to trigger a defense mechanism or activate a concealed communicator? While his earlier search of the tiny apartment had turned up neither potentially problematic installation it was always possible something had been overlooked.
Slapping sealant over the man’s mouth the oldster threw him down on one of the beds. When he tried to struggle back to a sitting position his assailant wrapped two finger-tentacles around his neck and drew a thumb-sized cylinder from a shirt pocket.
“This is only a simple neuralizer. You can buy one in many stores or via the consumer box. You know what it does. Delivers an incapacitating electric shock.” He leaned toward the man thrashing around on the bed. “However, if I were to press it against your left eye and fully discharge it