Kane's Odyssey by Jack M. Bickham

Author:Jack M. Bickham [Bickham, Jack M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0373720165
Publisher: Laser Books (Harlequin Enterprises)
Published: 1975-12-31T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Five days passed after the trial, and the only person Rufus saw, before the priest came, was the attorney, Davis Eight.

“We’ll appeal, of course,” Davis told him the day after the trial. “We’ll use every legal maneuver in the book. I’m confident there are extenuating circumstances that ought to assure a new hearing, at least.—And no, there’s no word on Selda. She has vanished.”

Then, four days later, Davis came back.

“We’ve lost,” he said. “I’m sorry. I tried. Goodbye.”

“I won’t see you again?” Rufus asked sharply.

“You may,” Davis said. “But you won’t know me, then.” So it was settled, and they were going to do it to him. There was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

At first he had simply been in shock, and then he had told himself that it would take a long time, all the legal maneuvering, and he had time yet. But then after Davis had gone, the evening meal came, and it was only a thin soup and bread. With a little chill, Rufus saw they were emptying his stomach; they did that before medical procedures. The stew, with a faint medical aroma about it, he poured down the drain of the recycling unit in the corner of the room.

If the last meal was doped, he thought bitterly, to make him more docile for the procedure, or treated in some way to begin the erosion of his mind, he could at least thwart them in this. Tomorrow, he knew, they would do it to him. But he had this last night, at least, to be himself. He lay on the draw-out sleep platform of the dark, featureless room and stared at the blackness.

The great and over-riding sensation of it was stark fear. It was hard to believe that tomorrow they would strap him down somewhere, attach machinery to his body and brain, perhaps cut into his head, and destroy him as Rufus—make it as if he had never lived. They would end him. But then, he saw, there would be another person down in Mexico, working on a road somewhere. He would have another name. He would have no memories, and wonder about this sometimes, but whenever he wondered dangerously, he would have horrible pains in his skull. He would, perhaps, be docile all his days, a beast of burden, smiling, working, whistling, copulating with a woman stripped of the ability to bear—

His mind recoiled from annihilation.

There had to be a way out. He was the son of the executive. He was Rufus. In an earlier life which they had ripped out of him by the bloody roots, he had had a father who directed this country. He had had wealth and opportunity and power. H had been clever. Smiling, he recalled that they said he had been a revolutionary.

And his father was still executive today. The news sheets told him this much. His father, Calvin Nine— “Wise Old Cal,” they called him in the media—had been executive longer than any man before, and no one had ever come forward to challenge him.

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