Two minutes earlier Jake had felt compelled to use a disabler on the andy because she was asking questions he wasn't prepared to answer. That sometimes happened on rush impersonations.

"What the heck's wrong, Irma?" the curly-haired young man asked, going up on tiptoe and staring across the counter at her.

"Gulp gulp gulp."

"This is all very vexing," observed Jake in an annoyingly nasal voice. "I didn't fly in from the Tijuana Sector of Greater LA to be delayed by a mechanism that's obviously gone flooey."

"Why are you here, Dr. Bushw.a.n.ger?"

"Hasn't your Chief of Staff, Dr. Erringer, notified the entire crew that he was brining me in to consult on the Marsha Roebeck case?"

"I thought Dr. Erringer was on a second honeymoon in the Safe Zone of Argentina."

"Be that as it may, he sent for me." Jake impatiently jiggled the medical bag he was carrying. "I happen to be the leading expert on lunar viruses in this hemisphere."

"Patient Roebeck is in an Extreme Isolation room, Doctor, and you can't-"

"I'd hate to have to file a Negative Performance Report on you, Gribble."

"My name is Gibbons."

"Have your ID tag refonted then, Gibbons," suggested Jake, even more impatiently. "But first, take me to my patient immediately."

Gibbons glanced at the still gulping android nurse. "Very well, Doctor," he said resignedly. "I can't afford to have another black mark on my record. Comealong."

Using the compact needle gun on the plump woman's upper arm, Jake said, "This stuff ought to counteract the control drugs they've been shooting into you, Miss Roebeck."

"I am completely happy here. I will make no trouble for anyone," she droned. Wearing a polka dot hospital gown, she was sitting up in a gray floating bed at the center of the small gray room. "I will forget all that . . . What the h.e.l.l is this?" Marsha blinked, scowled at Jake. "Are you one of those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who want to hurt Marijane?"

"On the contrary," Jake a.s.sured her. "I've disabled the monitoring gear in your room, but they'll tumble to that fairly soon. So tell me what you know about-"

"And who the Billy Jesus might you be, jocko?" "Jake Pace from Odd Jobs, Inc.," he told her. "What we-" "So Tom did get to you."

"That he did. Now what do you know about what's happened to Marijane?"

"After I smuggled that little dingus out of there, I did some nosing around on my own," she said. "That wasn't, as it turned out, so very smart. They grabbed me, dumped me in this hole, and diddled with my coco so that I was about three steps away from being a vegetable." "Who put you here?"

She answered, "It was that prissy Ethan Greenway. I tried to tell poor Marijane that he wasn't on the up and up, but she sort or felt sorry for the gink. I found out, too late, that Greenway's a company spy. He reports directly to McKey, and he found out that Marijane was on to something. When she took off for Ohio to dig further, they alerted them back there to detain her." "What was she on to?"

Marsha shook her head. "All I know is that it has something to do with a shipment of 1,500 TomCat bots that were sent to Eagleman, the dictator of the Republic of Ohio," she answered.

"I'm pretty sure, too, that they have a clandestine R&D department, one they never told Marijane or me about."

"Anything different about that shipment?"

"I suspect they'd been modified some, but I don't know how."

Jake stood. "Can you pretend you're still in a stupor?"

"Easy."

"Soon as I talk to Greenway, I'll send a crew of local trouble-shooters in to spring you from this joint," he promised. "The guy leading them will probably be a mercenary name of Oskar Tor-tuga, just back from New Guatemala."

"Is he cute?"

"Not to me, but you may react differently." He eased out of the gray room.

This is neat," observed Leon Bismarck, a rotund man of fifty clad in a three-piece yellow bizsuit with sinfur trim. "Our truth disks are much bulkier."He was gazing with admiration at the tiny silver oval she'd just slapped onto his fat left wrist.

Hildy, sitting with long legs crossed on the edge of his wide tin desk, said, "You're supposed to answer my queries, Bismarck, not comment on the equipment."

"Fire away, sister. You sure are cute, and that's the truth."

"Where's Marijane Kraft?"

Bismarck's official t.i.tle was Press Secretary to Dictator Eagle-man, but some information Hildy had obtained from an informant of her own while flying out here to the Republic of Ohio had alerted her to the fact that he was also in charge of intelligence operations. Posing as a reporter with Militant Chic eager to interview him about the new paramilitary uniforms he'd helped design for all the republic's schoolchildren had, as she'd antic.i.p.ated, enabled her to get an immediate interview.

After, very skillfully, incapacitating the Press Secretary in his private office, Hildy had slapped a truth disk on him.

"She ain't here," he said now, his b.u.t.tery voice taking on a slight drone.

"Where then?"

"We shipped her back to Greater Los Angeles for a mindwipe."

"Shipped her where?"

"To the Thorpe Private Hospital in the Santa Monica Sector of GLA. They do very good work, and we often send political dissidents out there. Eventually I hope to build our own-"

"What did Marijane find out?"

Bismarck chuckled. "Well, now, ma'am, that's an interesting story."

"Tell me," she suggested.

Jake was heading toward the Malibu Sector in his rented landcar when the skyvan full of Ethel Mermans crashed a few dozen yards ahead of him on the yellow stretch of reconst.i.tuted beach.

The big blue-and-gold van had come wobbling down out of the blurred yellow afternoon sky, producing raspy wailing noises. It hit the sand on its belly, sliding and bouncing and sending up swirls of beach grit mingled with sooty smoke, and rattled to a halt. When the twin doors at the rear of the beached skyvan flapped open, at least a dozen android replicas of the twentieth century Broadway singer Ethel Merman came spilling out.

Jake had, by this time, pulled his vehicle to the side of the highway, parked, disembarked and gone running toward the crashed van.

As the Ethel Merman andies. .h.i.t the sand, some of them were activated and, staggering to their feet, began singing. The majority were belting out Cole Porter's Anything Goes, but at least two were rendering Irving Berlin's Doin'

What Comes Naturally.

When Jake was a few feet from the pilot compartment, he head a faint cry,all but drowned out by the chorus of Ethel Mermans. 'Help, please," requested a female voice.

Jake approached the compartment door, carefully opened it. "Anything broken?"

There was a slim blonde young woman of no more than nineteen slumped in the pilot's seat. She was wearing a two-piece, short-skirted flysuit. "I don't think so, except rny ankle . . . that one ... feels funny."

"Unhook your safety gear. I'll lift you out."

"That's awfully kind of you. I feel like such an enormous vhipjack crashing this way." She unbound and unzipped.

He hefted her out. "Want to try to stand?"

She grimaced. "Okay, if you hold me up." Very gingerly she planted both booted feet on the stirred up sand. "That doesn't hurt much. I'm guess I'm all right. My name's Bermuda Polon-sky, by the way,"

"Jake Pace." He stepped free of her.

"Not Jake Pace the internationally renowned private investigator and musical great?"

"I'm a pretty good detective, yeah," he admitted. "Music, however, is simply a hobby."

"You played at the Moonport Jazz Festival last autumn, didn't you? A marvelous bebop medley, consisting of wonderful renditions of jazz tunes in the style of Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, and Elmo Hope."

"That was me. How'd you hear about it?"

"I was going with the fellow who played oboe in the Julliard Neobop Ensemble and I was up there," explained Bermuda. "It's a wonder you didn't notice me, the way I was jumping up and down and applauding wildly after you'd . . . Oh, s.h.i.t."

"Something?"

"I just now noticed that my vanload of Ethel Mermans is scat-tered all to hither and yon and bunged up."

"They can be repaired and-"

"Oh, I'm certain they can," agreed Bermuda. "But, you see,I was supposed to deliver them to the Malibu Sector Bop & Jazz Festival by three this afternoon."

"It's nearly three now."

The young woman gave a forlorn sigh. "These androids make up the Ethel Merman Choir, and they're scheduled to perform a medley of jazz standards at 3:15," she told him. "Whatever am I to do since . . . Hey, wait a sec. Can I prevail upon you to subst.i.tute?"

"I can't sing like even one Ethel Merman."

"No, I meant could you do your bebop piano medley," she asked hopefully.

"Unless, of course, you were en route to some important rendezvous."

Jake considered. "I suppose I can spare you an hour," he decided. "Be a shame to have a gap in the program.""Oh, that's marvelous," Bermuda said, smiling up at him. "I'll just pop into the cab and phone the ... d.a.m.n." Her left leg gave out suddenly, and she dropped to her knees on the yellow sand.

Jake lunged to help her up.

Bermuda, smiling again, put an arm around his neck to steady herself.

There was something sharp in her hand. It jabbed into Jake's neck.

Before he could express his chagrin at once again allowing his vanity about his music to lead him astray, he pa.s.sed out.

Hildy tried to contact Jake again. She was less than an hour away from SoCal and this was her third attempt since leaving the Republic of Ohio. Her skycar was carrying her toward Greater Los Angeles, where she was a.s.suming she and her husband could work out a plan for rescuing Marijane Kraft from the Thorpe Private Hospital.

But he was answering neither his skycar phone nor his portable communicator.

Hunching slightly in the pilot seat, she tapped out a call to John J. Pilgrim's GLA offices.

TomCat answered the call. "Ah, the competent side of the Odd Jobs team," he said, his silvery tail switching. "Well, sister, have you found my pal Marijane?"

"We know where she is."

"Where, pray tell?"

"At the Thorpe Private Hospital. They're planning, if they haven't already, to use a mindwipe on-"

"There's a coincidence for you," said the robot cat. "That happens to be where your halfwit hubby is locked up even as we speak."

"What are you-"

Scram, get away from the d.a.m.n phone." The rumpled attor-ney had appeared in the background to scoop Tom off the phone chair. "If you're hiding out here, you shouldn't be answering calls."

"Hey, I've got built-in caller ID, so I knew-" "What's happened to Jake?"

Hildy asked John J. Pilgrim. The lawyer made one of his sour faces. "It appears he walked into some kind of trap, Hildy."

"I bet somebody asked him to play trombone in a Dixieland band or piano in-"

"Don't have the details on that," said the lawyer. "Steranko called me about an hour ago. While he was digging up some information for Jake, he came across the fact that Jake himself was being held at Thorpe now."

"Steranko's not all that reliable."

"The Siphoner doesn't much like you either, kid, which is why he pa.s.sed the information on to me," said Pilgrim. "I was just about to call you."

"I'll be arriving out there in less than an hour, John," she told him. "Get floorplans of the hospital and send them to me. I'll work out a-"

"I already printed out the Thorpe floor plans, sis," put in the robot cat, jumping up onto Pilgrim's rumpled lap. "And I've got a pretty neat plan figured out. The two of us can-"

"That's not wise. Tom. Somebody's liable to recognize you."

"Didn't I get around to telling you I was an expert at disguise? When next you see me, you'll think I'm an everyday alley cat," he a.s.sured her. "Plus which, I've got all sorts of built-in weapons. And although I'm not all that enthusiastic about your mate, I really have to be in on rescuing Marijane."

After a few seconds, Hildy said, "All right, we'll work together. But I'll cook up the plan"

Jake awakened in an uncomfortable gray restraining chair. "This is not the Malibu Sector Bop & Jazz Festival," he realized.

"A fine champion you turned out to be." Marsha Roebeck was strapped into another chair across the small gray room from him. "Tell me to expect some thug named Tortuga to come rescue me and then get tossed in here yourself."

"I apologize," said Jake.

"I'm sure Mr. Pace meant well," said Marijane Kraft, who was restrained in the third chair a few feet to Jake's right. "And he; hasn't been any stupider than I was by barging into-"