Future Man

Sample

Prologue

February 11, 1957

Joe Kluskin read to the end of the last line of the last page, pausing on the final word. The tightness in his chest slowly uncoiled and he let out a sigh that had been building for two years.

Done. At last.

His clammy hands shook as he wrapped the manuscript in brown shipping paper.

Joe took the package under his arm and donned his overcoat. It was freezing outside, but he wore pajama bottoms to the post office anyway. His first act of rebellion against a society that would soon embrace his eccentricity as a by-product of pure genius.

Smiling with his entire face as only a child could, he ascended the stairs and flung open the front door to his building. The sharp, frigid wind pierced his thinning hair and raked his scalp. No matter now. It was just a short walk, and the rest would be history.

A cold mist hung in the morning air, depositing a layer of moisture onto the windows and body panels of the cars parked along the road. Reclining in the passenger seat of a ‘54 DeSoto coupe, a small man in a slightly oversized suit and red bowtie watched as Joe crossed the sidewalk, on his way towards the curb. The man was in the miscellaneous stage of his life where he could still pass for young if it were not for his hairline’s valiant but ultimately losing battle against the bare skin of his scalp. With half of his head already exposed, it was only a matter of time before his reddish curls were pushed back towards his ears to form the characteristic half-halo around the rear of his head.

Joe stepped off the sidewalk, walked between the Ford and DeSoto parked along the curb, and died instantly.

The half-ton flatbed truck whose passenger-side mirror had crushed the side of Joe’s skull never showed its brake lights as it rounded the next corner and vanished.

As a light drizzle started to patter on the DeSoto’s sheetsteel roof, the man in the bowtie stepped out onto the curb. He avoided Joe’s body, now twitching its last involuntary synapses out on the sidewalk, and carefully lifted the brown package off the wet concrete. The wax seal had broken, and wrapping paper was torn in several places, but the manuscript inside remained whole.

PART I

Chapter 1

Most people suspected that there was no such thing as luck in Las Vegas, but Elijah was certain of it. He blinked some second-hand smoke off his eyeballs, sipped his Bloody Mary and placed a stack of chips on number 17. Black.

The dealer spun the big wheel clockwise, then fired the white ball in the opposite direction around the wheel’s perimeter. He waited for the ball to complete two full orbits, then waved his hand over the table to single the end of betting. The ball, decelerating from a blur, made another two orbits before falling out of its grove to skip along the edges of the colored slots. Bleeding more speed it bounced into and out of the black 27 slot, then into and out of the red five. As it settled into its final position, everybody at the table gasped in amazement.

Everybody but Elijah.

“Seventeen!” the dealer called, losing control and letting the last syllable land somewhere between disbelief and amazement.

A single roll, a $2000 bet and in the blink of an eye the hotel’s reserves were 70 grand lighter. The familiar uneasiness set in as Elijah felt the cameras training on him. Several levels below the floor, a team of security consultants and at least one floor manager were watching every twitch of his face, monitoring the dilation of his pupils, counting the gray hairs that were starting to metastasize into the proto-Einsteinian light brown nest growing freely on his head. But, for all their effort, there was nothing to see. At no point during the play was any part of his body within reach of the table. Elijah’s bet was clean; his demeanor downright lazy.

Elijah drained the rest of his drink and set it down on the outer lip of the table, beside the small plastic foxhole of dead cigarette butts his neighbor had produced. He took his new stack of chips—gold in place of black—and left the table. It had taken three hours of careful preparation to build up to the big role. A win there, a loss there, two steps forward, one step back, until he’d turned his $20 into the seed capital for the big roll. He could have done it much, much faster. Without restraint, just a few minutes at the very same table would have earned him several times his take for that night, but that would have been tantamount to career suicide—at least in this town. Even with the control he’d shown, the powers-that-be were already on their way, about to intercept him with all the distractions they could think of to keep him under the microscope, and if possible, on the floor where more time meant more chances to lose.