The Immortals by James Gunn Page A

conquistador beard caught a taxi outside the station and left it in the middle of a traffic jam in the business section, walked quickly between the immovable cars until he reached the adjacent street, where he caught a second taxi going in the opposite direction. At the airport, he picked up a no-show reservation on the first outgoing flight.
    At Detroit he caught a jet to St. Louis. There he changed to a slow, two-dozen-seat transport to Wichita. There he hired an old, two-seater jet, filed a flight plan, and proceeded to ignore it. Two hours later he set down at Kansas City’s nearly deserted International Airport and caught a decrepit bus down the old interstate and across the crumbling New Hannibal Bridge to the downtown shopping district.
    The section was decaying. Business had followed the middle class into the suburbs. Buildings and shops had not been repaired for a decade. Only a few people were on the street, but the young man with the beard did the best he could, ducking through arcades, waiting in doorways,and finally edging into a department-store elevator just before the doors closed. The car creaked upward. When it reached the fifth floor, only the young man was left. The young man walked swiftly through the floor to the men’s room.
    Two minutes later he flushed an ugly, black mass of hair down the toilet, buried a hat under a heap of paper towels, and grinned at his reflection in the mirror. “Greetings, Mister Sibert,” he said gaily. “What was it Locke said to you?”
    â€œYou were an actor, weren’t you, Sibert?”
    â€œOnce. Not a very good one, I’m afraid.”
    â€œWhat made you quit?”
    â€œIt couldn’t give me what I want.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œIf your psychologists didn’t find out, I won’t tell them. That would make your job too easy.”
    â€œYour mistake, Sibert. A live actor—even a poor one—is better than a dead adventurer. That’s what you’ll be if you try to set up something on your own. We’ve got you, Sibert—trapped in plastic, like that solidograph, and in measurements and film and ink. Wherever you try to hide, we’ll dig you out. . . .”
    â€œIf you can find me, Locke,” Sibert said to the mirror. “And you’ve lost me for the moment.”
    He raced down the firestairs to the Main Street entrance, went through the used-clothing stores, up the escalators, down the stairs, and out a side entrance onto Twelfth Street. As an eastbound bus elevated itself on its pads and pulled away from the stop, Sibert slid betweenthe closing doors. A mile past City Hall he got off, ran through two alleys, and swung into a cruising taxi.
    â€œHead west. I’ll tell you when to stop,” he said, a bit breathlessly.
    The cabby gave him a quick, sharp glance in the rearview screen, swung the creaky ’44 Mercedes around on a forward wheel, and started west. In that glance Sibert compared the man’s features with the picture in the rear seat’s holographic projection. For whatever assurance it brought, they matched.
    When he dismissed the taxi, he waited until it rolled out of sight before he turned north. The street was deserted; the sky was clear. He walked the five blocks briskly, feeling a sick excitement grow as the apartment buildings of Quality Towers grew tall in front of him. He couldn’t see the Y where the Kansas River flowed into the Missouri. Smoke from the industrialized Bottoms veiled the valley.
    In the early days of the city, the bluff of Quality Hill had been a neighborhood of fine homes, but it had made the cycle of birth and death twice. As the city had grown out, the homes here had degenerated into slums. They had been razed to provide space for Quality Towers, but fifty years of neglect and declining revenues and irresponsible tenants had done their work. It was time to begin again, but there would be no new beginning. A wave