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for ever more. But you, Frank, will possess right of attorney to change
corporate basics on my say-so from here.
But you can t trust an employee with something like that! I might be a boring
driver, but
With certain qualifications, Frank. There are code-words for each possible
event. You ll receive them from me, and pass them on. That s if I can t be
bothered to pick up a phone to call KEB myself. Or physically can t pick up a
phone. And here, and King burrowed in his lumber jacket, are sealed
instructions for various wild-card events.
Frank leafed through the packet. The enclosed envelopes were labelled:
Inthe Event of Death, Inthe
Event of Brain Death, In the Event of Homicidal Insanity
&
From here on in, I wish to define what constitutes sane behaviour on my
part. In the envelope headed
In the Event of Apparent Insanity
you ll find a special sanity test I ve had drawn up, with precisely this in
mind. You ll appreciate that sanity for me isn t necessarily the same thing as
sanity for the next fellow.
Frank nodded brightly. He glanced back at the Mercedes, forlornly unattended
with two doors wide open and the breeze blowing through. He noticed faint
fumes puffing from the exhaust pipe.
I m depositing duplicates of this package with Ohira and Maccoby.
Christ, sir, I wouldn t give Maccoby !
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Reuben owes me deep loyalty, Frank. So deep, it s almost embarrassing what
he d do for me.
Frank swallowed.
Well, so long as you re
Oh, I am. I ve deposited a further copy with John Schaeffer at KEB. So it s
all tied up, and it s knotted tight into the silicon guts of the KEB
computer.
I just realized, I left the engine running, said Frank in anguish.
Sort that out later. Right now, I wish to get changed.
But it might start off on its own.
Leave it. Life s too short, Frank.
Frank noticed that Craig McKinnon was sprinting along past the maze, heading
towards the limousine.
Reaching the Mercedes, he leapt in and gunned the engine, bringing the vehicle
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round with a howl of tyres in a neat manoeuvre which successfully slammed the
passenger door shut en route, before skidding to a halt outside the medical
centre.
More like that, said King softly. You see? He walked on in.
You couldn t park a poodle, sneered McKinnon, as he caught up with Frank and
shoved him inside.
Why don t you get your eyes tested again?
Shazam
, swore Frank forlornly. Oh, shazam it!
Don t you blaspheme at me in Hindu.
In Hindi. The language is called Hindi. Anyway, that wasn t Hindi.
I know what it was.
Captain Marvel.
I read comics too.
Do you read anything else?
Frank felt the flat pressure of McKinnon s holstered pistol up against his
spine. He walked faster.
More respect for the King s attorney, please, he called over his shoulder.
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McKinnon sniggered.
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Go to Contents
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Chapter 9
Now that he was stripped off, Bruno King may have reminded the two Japanese of
an origami figure: he was a man made of tightly-folded, pinkish-white paper.
Ohira and Shiba, of course, were far more interested in what he would look
like when he was folded &
un
King was duly put to sleep on the white bed; he was connected up and injected.
Three days later, while Geneva continued to thrash ebulliently around the
estate, the changes began.
Like Jean, King proceeded to go through what Frank now thought of as the stage
of banal caricature. Yet whereas Geneva had seemed for a while merely fat,
stupid and sly, during the corresponding period of his change Bruno King
actually shrank, becoming very reminiscent of an Egyptian mummy, he dried up
and shrivelled. It seemed that not only were the catheters draining fluid from
his body, but that the feeding tubes were emptying him too. He was regressing
into some wizened, primitive monkey-man.
Frank viewed this with concern as did the two bodyguards, for they were
watching the body they were paid to guard evaporate before their very eyes.
McKinnon and Maccoby had worked out a rota between them so that one or the
other would always be in the observation room, playing solitaire or studying
comic books. From here on, Geneva had to be left to her own devices.
Then, King stabilized.
Yet he did not build back. Instead weighing by now less than fifteen kilos,
and measuring just a metre long from head to foot he became something
ineffably beautiful: a sprite, an elfin creature, fairy-like, angelic.
Frank was consumed with wonder, mingled with anxiety.
Ohira took him aside one day, out of hearing of McKinnon.
This can t be the future of the human race, Mr Caldero. Giant ladies, and
tiny males! It wouldn t work, not with our species. We aren t spiders! I
believe that what s really happening is a peculiar kind of psychobiological
change. The subject becomes what he really wishes to become, deep down in his
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soul.
This is how he really feels he is. It s his ideal of himself. Man as metaphor,
rather than meat. A dream figure.
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There s plenty of meat on Geneva, said Frank.
So that was her secret dream. To be an Amazon, a titan. It was her soul s
dream, unknown even to her.
And Mr King s dream was to be a fairy?
That was his soul s dream. He wished to be utterly beautiful and, gosh,
for Shiba favoured slipping one or two British idioms into his speech, he is
too. But not by any ordinary standards of good looks. No, this is the beauty
of a humming-bird, or a butterfly. I ll wager that if you, Mr Caldero, were
injected with the virus then you wouldn t turn out to be anything like either
of them. You might become a werewolf or & oh, I don t know what! Something
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