BURDEN the Hand

"Aren't you boys sort of biting the hand that feeds you?" asked Nikki Varden, staring complacently down the barrel of a Lundhurst Twelve while she kept both hands high above her head.

Van Ostrand was big and fat and had sleepy eyes and an oily manner about him that nobody with half a brain could fall for. I, personally, would have picked him as the villain of a vidicast the first time he walked on the screen. He could have played the part to a T. The trouble with somebody who looks that much like the heavy is that your mind rejects the idea. You think to yourself, "I'll watch that guy because I don't trust him, but I doubt if he could really be as bad as he acts—nobody could."

Van Ostrand was. He gave a smooth, hardy chuckle and said: "You have a way with words, my dear. However, I have learned that it's perfectly possible to bite the hand that feeds one, provided it is bitten off cleanly at the wrist. Then, you see"—again that chuckle—"you can feed off the hand."

"My! What you can't do with a metaphor!" said Nikki Varden admiringly.

Van Ostrand said nothing but, "You will oblige me by turning around, my dear."

I had to admire the girl, even though she was being an insufferable little prig, acting as though she had too much money, too much beauty, too much talent, and not enough common sense.

There were five of us in the big house—Miss Varden, Van Ostrand, the mouse-faced Giles Jackson, the too handsome Bob North, and me. Van Ostrand herded the girl into the big living room; Jackson, North, and I tagged along behind. While the rest of them went on in, I stayed at the door, listening.

"Take care of her, North," Van Ostrand said smoothly.

North laughed in his rich, hearty way. "Just how do you mean that, Van?"

Van Ostrand looked painfully exasperated. "Please, Mr. North; I am much too old and too fat to be amused by your lascivious humors. Put the handcuffs on her before she does something young and foolhardy and forces me to shoot her."

"Shoot me?" There was a sneer in Nikki Varden's voice. "You wouldn't."

I knew what she was thinking, and I hoped she wouldn't try to act on it, because she was wrong. If she wasn't careful, she'd be dead wrong.

Bob North jerked the girl's hands around and snapped a set of magnetic cuffs on them. She said something in a low tone that I didn't get, but it probably referred to either North's ancestry or his questionable birth. North just laughed and pushed her into a chair.

"I don't get you, Bob North," she said. "You and your good looks had me fooled. You should have married me for my money instead of pulling something like this."

Van Ostrand's chuckle came bubbling up from deep within his great, soft belly. "My dear Nikki, you are wrong on at least two counts. In the first place, if he attempted to go anywhere near a Registry Office for a mating certificate, he would be nailed for bigamy and desertion."

North looked suddenly angry, like a schoolboy faced with a tattletale. "That's enough, Van!"

Van Ostrand's piggish eyes and his soft voice both became suddenly cold. "Remember your place, Mr. North."

North subsided.

"In the second place," Van Ostrand went on, his voice soft and oily again, "we are all of the persuasion that there are more important things in life than money."

Nikki Varden had been basing her actions on the obvious fact that in order to get her to sign anything and get it through any of her big holding corporations, they would have to keep her definitely and indisputably alive and conscious. But if it wasn't her money that was wanted....

Her face went suddenly white. "What do you want?" she said, in an almost inaudible voice.

"For the nonce," said Van Ostrand, "only your continued co-operation. Believe me, dear child, we have no desire whatever to dispatch you untimely from this, our present sphere of corporal existence. On the other hand, we have no compunctions against it, either. Our choice will depend on your choice."

"What do you want?" she repeated. Her color was beginning to come back.

"Right now, you can just sit comfortably and relax. If you wish, I would be happy to turn on the tri-di. You can watch a program and take your mind from your troubles."

"No thanks," she said.

She had only a small idea of what she was up against. I knew exactly what Van Ostrand was up to, and, for the moment, I was glad Nikki Varden didn't. She was scared enough as it was.

Jerome Van Ostrand was a lawyer, and a good one. Presumably, he worked for Marcus Varden Enterprises; I say "presumably," because obviously he didn't work for the company, but against it. Or at least, for himself only. I didn't know how much control he now had over Marcus Varden Enterprises, but I suspected that it was more than he was entitled to have. Nikki had gotten wise to him just a little too late.

But Van Ostrand had been prepared, even for that eventuality. Without Bob North inside to shut off the great mansion's electronic defenses, he would never have made it into the house alive, nor would he have been able to manhandle Nikki the way he had. But the way things stood, Jerome Van Ostrand was in complete control.

The silence became heavy. Giles Jackson, the mouse-faced little triggerman, shoved his gun into his pocket holster and sat down. He lit a cigarette and stared at the tips of his shoes.

Van Ostrand rolled an expensive, pungent cigar in his round, fat face, while Bob North contented himself with looking at Nikki with obvious thoughts showing on his face. I just stayed at the door, being very quiet and wishing I could do something else.

Nikki couldn't take it. "For the love of God!" she shouted finally. "Say something! Tell me what you want!"

Bob North started to open his yap and make the obvious remark, but Van Ostrand cut him off with a wave of his pudgy hand.

"Your father," he said, after removing the cigar from between his heavy lips, "is a very great man. Indeed, one might almost say, a genius."

"What's my father got to do with this?" Nikki asked with irritation. "My father's been dead for seventeen years."

Van Ostrand looked at his cigar-end, approved of the ash, and looked back up at the girl. "Only legally," he said.

She gazed back at him uncomprehendingly.

"Your mother," Van Ostrand continued, "was, shall we say, something of a schemer."

"From you," snapped Nikki, "that's very funny."

The fat man chuckled hugely. "Indeed it is! I admit the beauty of your penetrating witticism, my dear. No, compared with me, your mother was practically the epitome of virtue and guilelessness. But she had her path made easy, while I did not. I hardly think I could have managed to marry the great Dr. Marcus Varden!" He chuckled jovially at his own wit.

However, I had to agree with his last remark. I don't think he could have passed the physical.

"At least my mother was married to my father," Nikki said bitingly.

"Hoho!" the fat man laughed hugely. "You improve, my dear, really you do. Yes, indeed she was. And when she married Dr. Varden, she married a man who was already a millionaire several times over. He was not only capable of doing basic research into the laws of the universe, but of capitalizing on them. He was one of those truly rare persons, the all-around genius. It was as if Newton had been able to invent and use an antigravity device, or if Einstein had perfected the atomic bomb and sold it to the United States Government."

"Why are you telling me things I already know?" Nikki asked sarcastically.

The fat man looked astonished. "Why, my dear child! You screamed at me just a few moments ago, wanting me to talk, to explain. I am explaining, but we have plenty of time"—he gestured at the big ornate clock on the wall—"so I'm taking plenty. Otherwise, I might finish the story too soon, and you would become bored again."

He took a puff from his cigar and blew a cloud of blue-gray smoke slowly toward the ceiling. "But if you insist on new data, dear girl, you shall have it. Did you know that your mother blew up your father's spaceship seventeen years ago?"

Even I perked up my ears at that one. It was a bit of Varden family history that I hadn't been aware of.

"Mother killed Dad?" Nikki laughed shortly. "You lie."

"I admit the charge," chuckled Van Ostrand. "I do. Frequently. Not this time, however. Besides, I didn't say she killed him; I said she blew up his ship, which is quite a different thing. Indeed, my dear, I am happy to say that your father has been alive for these seventeen years and is alive at this very moment."

Nikki looked at him silently for a long moment, then leaned back and closed her eyes. "I don't believe you, of course," she said calmly.

"Of course not," said the fat man. "Why should you? But it's true, nonetheless. You see, your father—"

"Time, boss," interrupted the rodentish little Giles Jackson suddenly, pointing at the clock on the wall.

"So it is," said Van Ostrand. "You are very observant, Giles, my boy." He heaved his ponderous bulk out of the chair into which he had lowered himself and strolled rollingly over to the visiphone. He dialed a number. The screen lit up, but no face appeared. "Yes, Mr. Van Ostrand?" said a voice at the other end.

"Ah, you're there on time, I see," said the fat man. "Very good. We'll synchronize, then, for exactly twenty-five seconds after three. Understood?"

"Twenty-five seconds after three. Yes, sir." There was a click, and the screen faded.

The fat man looked even more jovial than ever. "All is going according to schedule, my children," he said as he lowered his bulging body again into the chair.

"Boy, I sure hope this works," said Bob North suddenly, as though he had thought about it for the first time.

"It'll work," said Giles Jackson sharply. "Mr. Van Ostrand figured it out, and he's got more brains than you and me put together."

"Your loyalty is touching, Giles," said Van Ostrand gravely, "and well within the bounds of truth." He dropped the remains of his cigar into a dispenser and watched it vanish. "I have worked on this ever since I found those papers ten years ago. And I have waited patiently for Dr. Marcus Varden to return. Nikki, my dear, when we first came in here after Mr. North had so kindly shut off the house's ingenious defenses, you thought I was going to force you to hand over to me the rest of the stock shares in Marcus Varden Enterprises, did you not? And for that reason, you were not in the least afraid that we would kill you. Why not?"

"You know perfectly well," said Nikki, "If I die or even become unconscious, my brain pattern won't register on the recorder at the Exchange Commission, and the transfer wouldn't be valid."

"Exactly. Your brain pattern is constantly being received by one of your father's greatest inventions—the sigma brainwave pickup. Your father began working on another modification of that device seventeen years ago—a sigma brainwave sender. A device that could impress one person's sigma signal upon the brain of another. A hypnotic, telepathic control, capable of controlling the mind of anyone, over almost any distance. Can you imagine what a device like that would be worth? What it would mean in terms of power?" He looked at the girl. "Ah, I see you understand."

"Not completely," said Nikki, "Where is this device?"

"Ah," said the fat man. "That is a lovely story in itself. But, physically, the device—and the data on it—are in your father's spaceship."

"Then it was destroyed seventeen years ago," said the girl.

"No, indeed," said Van Ostrand. He gazed up at the ceiling as though he could gaze through it. "You father had two ships, my dear. One has been vaporized for nearly two decades; the other is up there somewhere, invisible and indetectable, in a satellite orbit around Earth. At precisely twenty-five seconds past three, an electronic mechanism will be activated in this house by that clock on the wall. That mechanism, in turn, will activate a corresponding device in your father's ship, if it is within range, and automatically land the ship here."

North laughed. "Only instead of landing here, he'll land at the spot we designate instead. Because five seconds before this signal is sent, our man will send a different signal keyed to another spot. The ship will come down, and we will have imm—"

"North!" the fat man bellowed.

Because Nikki had suddenly leaped to her feet and run toward the clock. She was trying to move the second hand with her head, since her hands were locked with magnetic cuffs. It didn't do any good; the steel hand went on; unperturbed.

Bob North grabbed her by the hair and jerked her to the floor. Giles Jackson was on his feet, his gun aimed at her head.

"No, Giles!" Van Ostrand snapped. Then, to the girl: "That was damnably stupid of you. In the first place, you might have been killed—accidentally. In the second place, that clock is automatically corrected every minute. It wouldn't do you any good to push it to an incorrect time, because it would be readjusted at the end of the minute. Watch." He pointed. The hand was nearing twelve. It passed it. Then, suddenly, it jerked back to twelve as the mechanism corrected it, and then went on again.

"North," said the fat man, "handcuff the wench to the sofa. We can't have any more of this."

North dragged her roughly across the floor and followed the fat man's orders. Giles Jackson settled himself to his seat again and lit another cigarette.

I had listened silently all the time, and I figured I'd heard almost enough—but not quite. I kept hoping that Nikki would ask more questions.

She didn't have to. Van Ostrand was in an expansive mood. He had become more and more jubilant as the time approached, and his jubilance loosened his tongue.

"You see, my dear, we don't want to lose a secret which may be even more important than the mind controller—the secret of immortality. Because that's why he put his ship into that orbit; that's why he surrounded it with so many protective devices; that's why he can't land it himself. Your father is in a coma, you see, and has been for seventeen years, while his body was being rejuvenated by a process known only to himself.

"If it was successful, he planned to return and rejuvenate your mother, using a process which renders the body immortal and eternally young, for all practical purposes. But your mother couldn't wait, so she had a duplicate of his ship blown up, and had the courts declare him dead. She wanted the money immediately. And a good thing it was, too; she died six years ago, when you were nineteen."

"How do you know all this?" Nikki asked. "How could you?"

The fat man smiled. "From a friend, a very dear friend. And that, for now, is all I think you need to know."

I smiled thoughtfully. I had all I needed to know, too. I knew how he had gotten his information, and where it came from. It's nice to know who you can trust and who you can't.

The clock showed that I had ten minutes to do what had to be done. I backed away from the door and trotted back in the direction from which I had originally come upstairs from the sub-basement of the house. None of the others noticed me leaving.

It was while I was in the sub-basement that I was actually surprised for the first time that night. I felt the faint vibration of a landing spaceship. But that couldn't be! It should have landed at the spot Van Ostrand had chosen unless something had gone wrong with his device.

In my own flesh this time, I headed up through the sealed tube, out of the prison where my body had lain, immobile, for seventeen years, buried, like the cicada, waiting for new life. When I reached the living room, it was empty, except for Nikki. It took every bit of will power I had to stay away from her, but I didn't want her to be able to give anything away. I slipped in carefully so that the back of the sofa prevented her from seeing me.

I could hear the fat man's voice through the French windows as he, North, and Giles pounded toward the little antigravity-powered spaceship that had landed on the front lawn.

"It shouldn't have landed here!" Van Ostrand was bellowing. "We'll be detected here! They'll follow it in no time! They—" His voice was drowned out by a bellow of thunder as the police ships dropped from the sky.

"That ship is government property! Stay away, or we shoot!"

The three men knew that they'd be safe from almost anything inside that ship, so they kept going. They'd rather take the risk than lose their chance at having immortality or a mind control machine. I walked quietly over to a window and looked out.

Giles, the triggerman, was firing, accurately but ineffectively, at the police craft. The blue-hot beam of his Lundhurst was simply spattering off their shields.

A police beam winked down, and Giles Jackson was gone.

I hadn't known the fat man could move so fast. He was already at the airlock, tugging open the emergency unlocker. Bob North was right behind him.

Again the police gunner's beam found its mark.

But this beam touched the ship, too.

I turned away from the window and ran to Nikki. Her shock at seeing me didn't last long.

"Close your eyes!" I yelled. "Get behind that sofa!"

A glare of brilliant white lit up the landscape for miles around as my ship dissolved in a blaze of silent flame. The light seemed to come through the very walls of the house as the ship burned.

"The police will be blind for a while from that," I said rapidly. "Remember that you don't know anything. You weren't even told anything by anyone. The fat man came in here and held you prisoner, but you don't know why. Got that?"

"Yes, darling! Now hide, quickly!"

I did. I headed back for my secret sub-basement, and I didn't come out again for several hours. When I did, Nikki was waiting for me. We didn't speak at first; I was too busy kissing her.

"I still don't quite know what happened, Marcus," she said afterwards. "I've thought, all these years, that you were in that ship."

"Not Marcus," I cautioned her. "Marcus Varden is as dead as his wife. From now on, you're Nikki Varden, and I'm Daniel Markell."

"Explain," she said. "The house defenses are up again. Not even the police can get in here." Then she giggled. "They were certainly surprised when that ship went up. They wanted to get the secrets of what was inside it just as much as Van Ostrand did."

"I'll bet. That's one of the reasons I did it this way. I was reasonably certain that not even the government could be trusted with a secret like this. That's why I left misleading information in the government vaults. That's where Van Ostrand got the information, by the way; he got the same mixture of truth and half-truth that I'd given them. Someone in high places is going to get burned for this."

"He thought I—or, rather, my mother—must have blown up your other ship, just to get your money."

"I know." I grinned. "I was listening all the time."

"But—how?"

"That sigma projector of mine. I used it on the cat. I just wanted to take a look around, before coming out in my own body. And it's a good thing I did."

She opened her mouth, closed it, then laughed. "You mean that all the time puss was walking around the house watching us—all the time he was sitting near the door—that was you watching out of those slitted green eyes?"

"Right. While my body was down in the basement, I was walking around up here, being a housecat. You can see why that isn't a machine to trust just anybody with."

She nodded, and her face became suddenly somber. "The government couldn't be trusted either. But why couldn't you trust me? Why didn't you tell me you were here all the time, instead of out in space?"

"Because I had no way of knowing how well you could hold on to two identities during the Change," I told her. "If they had ever caught on that you were growing younger and that you were playing the part of both mother and daughter, they might have grabbed you and psyched the whole story out of you."

She nodded. "I see. But I was so worried about your being in that ship that I almost ruined the whole thing."

"How?"

"You didn't want the ship to come down here, did you?" she asked.

"No. I wanted it to follow the signals of Van Ostrand's confederate. It would have burned when they opened the inner airlock, anyway. What did you do to bring it down here?"

"If you were the cat, sweetheart, you saw what I did." She looked suddenly very coy.

"You mean that bit with the head, when you tried to nudge the second hand? I don't quite see—"

"Magnetic handcuffs and bobby pins," she said.

Then I got it. Even a genius like me can see the obvious when you draw him a picture of it. She'd magnetized a bobby pin and let it stick to the second hand of the clock. The weight of it had been just enough to cause the clock to run fast when the hand was dropping from "12" to "6", and make it run slow when it was trying to go up the other side. The two cancelled each other out, so it was always almost correct when it was pointing straight up. But it took it only twenty seconds to get to the "6", and about forty to reach the "12".

"Very clever," I said. "I'm glad you didn't kill me with it. Once I get the sigma receiver-sender down to manageable size, we won't have to worry about either of us not knowing what the other is up to."

"Well, you're not going to work on it just yet," she said emphatically. "First you'll have to establish your new identity. And then you'll have to marry me again. Nikki Varden is a very respectable and unspoiled girl."

I thought of all the years that I had lain in that tomb, while, due to the sex-linked differences in the rejuvenation process of immortality, my wife had been fully alive. And I thought of men like Bob North who tried to push themselves onto helpless women. And then I realized that Nikki was not quite helpless. Respectable and unspoiled?

"She'd better be," I said.