Darkman Read online

  Now or never, he thought in his native Japanese as he repositioned his monster Mr. Ed glasses and rapped on the door. While he waited for a response he polished the tips of his Oxfords on his pants. Someone had told him that Dr. Westlake was notorious for dressing casually: cutoff jeans in the summer, a ratty field jacket in the winter. Still, Yakky had no desire to make a bad first impression. The grant that funded Westlake’s research was due for renewal in December, three months from now. In the last six months he had had three different lab assistants; all of them had gotten fed up with this or that and ran screaming into the night. There were rumors of a failed experiment that Westlake had become obsessed with and would not let die. Some spoke of spending hideously long hours staring at a stopwatch. None of it really mattered to Yakky. He needed the credit hours and he needed the money. Postgrad hours for out-of-state students had been jacked up to the sixty-two-dollar mark. Pretty bad, especially when your dad drives a garbage truck in Osaka.

  He knocked again. In the distance he could hear some kind of machinery whining. Curiosity gnawed at him, but he did not give in to the urge to take a peek. Besides, it looked dark inside.

  Time passed. He knocked again, harder now, as hard as his inbred sense of decency would allow. Sweat trickled down his neck. September in Michigan was an odd mishmash of too much heat or too much cold; nobody was ever satisfied, Yakky included.

  Something clunked. Somewhere above, wood crunched. It began to rain sawdust on Yakky’s head. He looked up, squinting against the sawdust and the hot afternoon sun.

  The boards on one of the windows were being wrenched apart. Yakky stepped back, his eyes behind the Mr. Ed glasses growing large. He saw hands. He saw the cuff of a white lab coat. He saw a large kitchen clock sail out the window and crash on the hard-packed mud near the river’s edge. It burst apart in a noisy explosion of glass and springs. Yakky looked on in horror.

  A fist stuck itself out of the window, followed by a head. The fist was shaking angrily up and down. The head was screaming.

  “You rotten stupid son of a bitch!”

  The fist began to hammer the head, pounding it silly. Yakky blanched. Even for Americans this was strange behavior. He stepped farther back, hoping to dodge any other clocks that might come sailing his way. The man who was upstairs busily knocking himself over the head looked down at him. Yakky tried to force a smile. No good. All he did was grimace.

  The man upstairs quit hitting himself. He smiled down at Yakky.

  “Yakitito Yanagita, I presume?”

  Yakky looked around quizzically, pointing a finger at his own chest. No one else was there. He had a strong urge to deny any knowledge of the poor slob named Yakitito Yanagita, and run away. He had a quick mental glimpse of himself sprinting the eight blocks back to campus while this lunatic hurled clocks at him. For a sensitive soul named Yakky it was a vision straight from hell.

  “Come on in,” the man upstairs shouted, and Yakky knew, as his heart sank into his shoes, that this was Dr. Peyton Westlake and nobody else. He shuffled back to the door and grasped the knob. It fell off in his hand.

  “Minor setback,” Peyton shouted above him. “I’ll plug it back in later. Watch the steps, though. They might be wobbly.”

  Yakky pushed the door open, wishing he had not worn this shirt and tie because the shirt was threatening to suffocate him and the tie was about to strangle him, and who really cared when the next three months—longer if the grant was funded—were spent in the company of this madman?

  He went in, ready to jump at shadows. It was dim inside, the air heavy and hot. Crates and boxes bulked to the ceiling on the far wall, most of them bearing the IBM logo. A staircase loomed in the dark on the right. Yakky put a hesitant foot on the first step, bouncing a little on the springy, eroded wood, testing it while visions of various fractures flitted through his mind like ghosts. He made it to the fifth step before the wood gave out with a dry snap, and he plunged downward, his hips wedging themselves between the riser and the fourth step. He suppressed a howl as sharp wood splinters dug through his pants; a man with thick glasses wearing a brown polyester suit, up to the waist in stairs.

  “Watch the fifth one,” Peyton sang out from somewhere up above. “It might give out on you. Death trap.”

  Yakky pulled himself free while searching his English vocabulary for new and exciting curses. Things ripped as he struggled out, but he was at the point of no longer caring. He crawled on hands and knees to the top, muttering, while his sweaty hair—so perfect before—draped itself over his eyes and glasses like black seaweed. He got on his feet and scrubbed an arm across his forehead. The heat was even worse up here, but at least it wasn’t dark. There seemed to be a breeze of sorts, cooling Yakky below the waist.

  He looked down, puzzled. His pants were in tatters. His zipper had burst. His belt had opened and hung down from this disaster like a defeated snake. He was covered with dust.

  Peyton came out of nowhere and grabbed his hand. He began to pump it. “Yakitito! I’m so glad to see you. What this project needs is new faces, fresh input. What the hell happened to you? Together I think we can lick this thing, make it work. Bomb go off or what? Doesn’t matter. Come on in.”

  Yakky staggered after him into the depths of the second floor, which was nothing at all like the first. It was a little lighter, made that way by a single bulb hanging from a wire. It was spotlessly clean, unlike below. Lab equipment—some of it familiar to Yakky, some of it not—was jammed into shelves that rose to the raftered ceiling. A pale blue centrifuge idled in one corner; in another was a rackfull of beakers and test tubes. Two large tanks, one labled OXYGEN, the other ACETYLENE, sat like squat soldiers, guarding these puzzling treasures. Things were humming. The place seemed alive with electricity. Yakky spotted a strange glass tank about the size of an aquarium set on a metal stand with electrodes jutting out from its sides. It was filled with a weird pink liquid. Yakky thought of mad scientists.

  “Have you been told the nature of my experiments here?” Peyton asked while Yakky gaped at the various devices that were the workhorses of this undertaking. Yakky nodded and turned to him.

  “Manufacture of synthetic skin. Something about burns.”

  Peyton smiled. “I’d hardly call it manufacturing, but that will come later, after I’ve—we’ve—succeeded here. The burn part is fairly correct.”

  “Sorry,” Yakky mumbled. “Nobody seems to know exactly what you do here.” He waved an arm to indicate the whole floor. “Why do you do this on the riverfront, anyway?”

  Peyton raised a finger. His blue eyes twinkled. “Yakita—Yatiko—oh, hell, can I call you Alphabet?”

  “Most people call me Yakky.”

  Peyton deliberated on this, tapping his chin with a finger. “Anyway, Yakky, this ramshackle hut helps me keep expenses down. Plus people tend to leave me alone.”

  I don’t blame them, Yakky thought, but simply nodded. There was a moment of awkward silence between them.

  Then Peyton spoke up. “Let me give you a brief overview of what we’re doing here.” He stooped over and hauled a white lab smock out of a plastic bag. “Better put this on. It might get messy.”

  Yakky put it on, beginning to feel that first tickling of anticipation, the same feeling he always got when embarking on a new project. Of course, this project was hardly new; in fact, it was more than a year old, but for Yakky it was barely a minute old. He put the smock on, glad to cover the ruin of his pants with something decent.

  Peyton walked over to a space between the equipment, where a small camera with some decidedly exotic hardware protruding from it was perched on a tripod. In front of it was a chair. “Want to have your picture taken?” he asked, grinning.

  Yakky shrugged. Better than having clocks thrown at him. He sat on the stool while Peyton fiddled with the camera.

  “Nose, lips, cheek, chin . . . which will it be?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Turn sideways, please.”

&nbs
p; Yakky did, wondering now if that strange camera were some sort of ray gun. Weirder things than that were being invented every day.

  The flash snapped. For a millisecond Yakky was deluged with hot white light. He blinked against it.

  “Turn the other way, Yak, old boy.”

  He turned. What the heck.

  Foof!

  “Now look straight at me. Don’t wiggle.”

  Foof!

  Yakky stood up. Peyton moved in front of the camera, which fed him three small photographs on strange, waffly-textured paper. He hurried over to a large IBM computer that was linked with wires to a dozen or so other machines. Yakky tried to make sense of them. No dice.

  “I feed them in here,” Peyton said, pushing the photos one by one into a slot on the side of the computer. Yakky frowned. This was weird stuff, indeed. The slot in the computer looked as if it had been cut there with a hacksaw.

  “Now we get our digitization. See?”

  Yakky saw. The computer blipped. A picture of his nose appeared on the monitor screen, then dissolved into thousands of dots.

  “Next we transfer it to the Imager.”

  “Imager?”

  “Holographic. Nothing fancy.”

  A round aluminum plate crudely wired to the IBM began to vibrate. Two inches above its surface, multiple rainbows began to dance and merge. They swam into each other and became a three-dimensional picture of Yakky’s own nose, in living color. He stared at it. So what? Holography was not exactly headline news anymore.

  Peyton had moved off to another table and another machine. He motioned for Yakky, telling him to come over. Yakky went.

  “This baby is my Bio-Press,” he said, and indicated a squat machine about the size of a suitcase. Yakky saw that its surface was crammed full of tiny blunt pins. Again, so what?

  “Each pin has a tiny servo motor underneath, in the guts of the Bio-Press. Feeding off the Imager, they rise in conformation with the holograph and the computerized digitization. The pink fluid in the tank over there soups itself onto the face of the Bio-Press, in direct contact with both the Imager and the computerized version.”

  Soups itself? Yakky felt a sudden and desperate need to fly home to Osaka and never set foot on American soil again.

  “Like this.” Peyton pressed a touch pad on the side of the suitcase thing. Across the room, the electrodes at either side of the tank that looked like an aquarium began to hum.

  “Builds a bullet charge of two thousand volts,” he said over the growing noise. “Amperage follows with no drain. Don’t ask me where I get the juice. The lights blow at Michigan Power every time I do this.” He grinned wickedly. The pink fluid began to surge through coils of glass pipe into the Bio-Press. Yakky watched with a mixture of revulsion and excitement as the liquid boiled across the top of the Bio-Press like waffle batter being dumped on a hot waffle iron, sizzling. Blue sparks danced on its surface. In the center the pins rose up to create a perfectly shaped Yakky nose. A twist of smoke rose into the air, smelling badly of burned pork. The fluid turned from pink to flesh color as it cooked. Yakky’s stomach gave a lurch.

  “You’ll get used to the smell. What’s happening is that the synthetic skin is being formed at the same time it’s solidifying. That way we get maximum time from it.”

  Yakky frowned. “Time?”

  Peyton smiled grimly. He pulled a drawer open and riffled through it, finally coming up with a stopwatch on a twist of string. He hung it around Yakky’s neck. Yakky fingered it, frowning.

  Peyton nodded. “You saw the clock? No sweat. Before the year’s over, you’ll be tossing that stopwatch out the window too. Click it on as soon as the Bio-Press indicates sufficient cooling. Red light there on the side.”

  Yakky squatted a bit and found the light. It went on, and he hurried to start the watch. Peyton lifted the sheet of what now looked like soft pale rubber off the press. He bounced it from hand to hand, wincing. “Hot little honker. Looks just like your nose, eh?” He fished a pair of old blackframed glasses out of a pocket and slipped them on. “Hah,” he said after a moment. “How’d you get that scar on your septum?”

  “Septum?”

  Peyton rubbed a finger between his nostrils. “The thing that differentiates us from the apes but not from pigs.”

  Yakky touched his own. There was a tiny scar there from a huge zit that had struck him in this unlikely place when he was fifteen. “Acne,” he told Peyton. “You know.”

  Peyton smiled. “Afraid I’ve never had the teenage curse. This pretty face has never been marred.”

  “Lucky you. Now, what am I timing?”

  Peyton’s smile disappeared. He put his glasses back, laid the nose sheet on the table, and went to the computer. He tapped the keys, then looked glumly at Yakky. “Take a look at this.”

  Yakky went over beside him and bent to read the screen. It said:

  AMINO ACID CONTENT—64.0%

  MEMBRANE POTENTIAL—120 millivolts

  DNA CONTENT—00.047 millimoles

  COLLAGEN CONGENERS—22.8%

  ELECTROLYTES—Physiologic

  Yakky frowned. “This reads a lot like a human tissue sample. Skin tissue.”

  “Quite right. When your stop watch reads ninety-nine minutes, you’ll see what it turns into. That’s when I need your input. Myself, I’m stumped.”

  “Stumped?”

  “Yeah.” He made little motions in the air. “Dead end. No go. Finished. Kaput.”

  Yakky nodded, trying to look as glum as Peyton. He assumed that with time and practice he would actually feel as bad about whatever was going to happen in ninety-nine minutes as Peyton was. It was easy enough now to see what had been going on here and why the last three assistants had abandoned the project. Peyton had failed in his attempt to create artificial skin for burn victims. Such a discovery would advance medicine a hundred years, but because it didn’t work, Dr. Westlake didn’t need lab assistants, didn’t need any help at all. What he needed was a timekeeper.

  Peyton was working himself out of his lab coat. Beneath it he had on a gray suit and an honest-to-God tie. So much for the rumors about casual dress, Yakky thought. Peyton tossed the coat aside and gave Yakky an apologetic smile. “I have to go meet my fiancée—well, girlfriend, actually—I have to meet her for a late lunch before she attends some hotshot meeting. She’s a lawyer, you know. Follow me? Anyhow, on the way back I could grab you a pizza, Yak. Any preference?”

  Yakky thought about it. Crashing through the stairs must have awakened his appetite; either that or his upbringing was so ingrained that he feared for his life if he turned the invitation down. He shrugged and said, “Sushi and anchovies. Fish eyes, if they have them.”

  Peyton laughed. “At last a man with a sense of humor. Sausage and mushrooms it is. Be back soon.”

  He clumped down the stairs, probably avoiding, by instinct and habit, the ruined fifth step. The door slammed and he was gone.

  Yakky looked at the stopwatch. But that got old fast. He looked around the lab, hoping to spot a radio, maybe even a small TV. No luck. The only thing here that looked remotely interesting was a toy drinking bird on the table beside the computer. The bird was made of plastic and multicolored feathers, weighted with lead somewhere so that when you rocked it, it gradually dipped farther and farther until its beak dunked into the tiny cup of water. Yakky tapped it, making it bob. Eventually it dipped down far enough to take a drink. By then Yakky had lost interest. He stared at the stopwatch, then stared some more.

  There was nothing else to do.

  2

  Peyton

  DR. PEYTON WESTLAKE was not dressed so superbly by accident. He had not awakened that Friday and decided to change his slovenly ways. He had not peered at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and found, to his horror, that he was actually on the low side of thirty, and looking older every day. He had made no attempt to turn over a new leaf. Nothing was unusual, as far as usual things go.

  But today was a bit special.
Today he would have a late lunch with a certain blond lady and pop several surprises on her. That is, if he could find a taxi in this rotten area of town. Since leaving Yakky behind to fend for himself, he had walked nearly to the college campus, where surely there would be a taxi available. But so far, waiting at the curbside of Jackson Street, the sprawling maze work that was the campus just ahead, his luck had become just plain lousy. He stuck his thumb out at a passing car and got laughed at for his trouble: college punks bebopping around in the car Daddy’s money had bought, using Daddy’s credit card for gas, paying their tuition with Daddy’s money. Poor Daddy seemed to take a soaking every time Junior turned around, and Junior did not appear to care even slightly.

  Peyton shook his head to clear it. When he thought of things like this, he invariably grew angry inside. He had financed his own way through college less than ten years ago, financed it all the way to his doctorate. While the kids with rich daddies tooled around in new cars, Peyton drove a wobbly antique called a mo-ped. While they bought fancy clothes and kegs of beer, Peyton went to class wearing jeans gone white with age and drank nothing but water with every meal. His part-time jobs had ranged from pizza slinger to summertime corn shucker. The whole ordeal had been tough and no fun at all. Of course, now, as the local nutty professor, he made money, and then some. Enough, maybe, to finance a kid or two through college.

  He grinned at his own inanity. He disliked the kids who lived off Daddy but was quite prepared to become Daddy himself.

  If things went right today, that just might happen.

  He patted the coat pocket nearest his heart, where the big lump was. Inside was a velvet jeweler’s box, and inside that was a gold necklace adorned with five small diamonds. It looked like—and was—an expensive gift, but to Peyton’s way of thinking (as he saw the ugly yellow of a taxi coming close) the gift was something like oil, to be used to grease his way into his true love’s heart.