Nobody who didn’t know and understand Sam
Horowitz wouldn’t’a guessed that he was depressed,
upset, or anything but in heaven that evenin’. And it
weren’t faked or nothin’; he really was supercharged
and as excited as a little kid, and he would be until this all was
done. Only then, maybe a few days later, would he come
crashin’ down. That was the bottom line for me; this was the
climax of his whole life, and once you done passed the climax,
baby, and there’s nobody around to share with and care about,
what’s the use of livin’?
See, when Sam was a little boy he us’ta see all them old
detective movies—only they wasn’t all that old, then.
Between the neighborhood B movies and the early days of TV, though,
he musta seen every Thin Man, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Sherlock
Holmes, Charlie Chan—you name it. And he went to the library
in Baltimore, which is a real big one, and got out and read
everything there was by Chandler and Hammett and all the rest.
Now, don’t get him wrong. He never did much thinkin’
’bout bein’ no cop, let alone no private eye, except
maybe in his fantasies. In fact, he hated police work, thought it
was the dullest, least thrillin’ job in the world. Hell, he
didn’t even like guns. After four years with the Air Force
police and a few more on the Bristol vice squad, he was still
scared of ’em, wouldn’t have one around unless the
safety of somebody innocent—not himself—demanded it. He
wasn’t even a particularly good shot.
No, what Sam was in love with in the work was pretty much what I
got trapped by, too: not the way it was, but the way it
shoulda been. The way Marlowe and Spade and the
Continental Op and Nick and Nora Charles did it.
Now, there was several ways we coulda settled this case, at
least, mostly just with a big set of moves and then explain
everything in the paperwork and to the legal boys who’d have
to prosecute and punish the bad guys. Hell, I coulda
explained it and wrapped it myself. But the Company owed him, owed
us for this, and they was willin’ to indulge us.
So, there we was at headquarters, at Mayar Eldrith’s
palatial lodge, where it all began, and we was hostin’ a
party. Yeah, a real party, too—with all sorts of fancy
delicacies and drinks and all the rest. Since Mayar had done the
invitin’, there wasn’t no way to get out of it,
neither.
All his life, since he was a kid, Sam had dreamed of
havin’ all the suspects together in one room while he, the
brilliant detective, explained the whole thing to them and unmasked
the guilty. Now, finally, he was gonna get his chance, and while I
helped fill in a lot of gaps and details and explain a bunch of
stuff, by general agreement it was gonna be Sam’s show.
I was dressed in this incredibly beautiful soft and satiny
violet and golden sari, with fancy open-toed heels. I had a
complete makeover for it from experts here, matchin’
everything just right, and they had trimmed and shaped my natural
bush just right, like one of them gardeners shapes a bush into a
piece of art, and they’d streaked it with brown and gold. I
had the jewelry to match, and I never looked better or more
glamorous in my whole life.
Sam said he’d be damned if he was gonna do his number in a
toga; he had the tailors here—mostly computers once the
designer got through—make him a good, old-fashioned
forties-style white suit, with just the right shirt and tie, and a
pair of shiny black patent leather shoes. We was a beautiful,
glamorous couple, and we acted just right, but I could feel his
sadness and sorrow every time we talked or our eyes met, Kinda,
this is it, baby, but we’re going out in style.
The guests started arrivin’ and things was about to get
underway. All of’em, I think, sensed somethin’ was up,
and maybe a few guessed it was all up, but since they didn’t
know for sure and still were pretty arrogant and secure, they came
anyways. The rest—well, they had to come along if asked.
So here they come, ready or not. Here was Dringa Lakuka,
division chief of research and development, followed by Mukasa
Lamdukur, who ran the day-to-day operations of the Security
Committee, then the cold and brusk ex-monk, Basuti Alimati, who was
chief of Labyrinth communications, and, finally, among the
Committee members, Hanrin Sabuuk, the security division’s
comptroller. Also invited and present was my other self, this time
in crimson and silver and with her hair styled differently but
still lookin’ great; Dakani Grista, the real young acting
chief of security operations, and his old boss, now forcibly
retired, Aldrath Prang. Last, but not least, was the Security
Committee’s chief medical advisor, and the man who made me
less than I us’ta be, Jamispur Samoka.
It was a chummy men’s club; besides me and Brandy Two, the
only other women around was Mayar’s wife Eyai, who acted as
hostess, and a bunch of female servants.
Eyebrows was raised at Sam, dressed the way he was, but the only
indignation was at the presence of Aldrath Prang, who clearly was
in the doghouse in spades. Seems what done him in was
Dakani’s toadyness, which also got him a bunch of gold stars.
He got nervous and tipped off Lamdukur that Aldrath was
tappin’ the private lines of the Committee members
themselves, and the outrage hadn’t died down yet. It was
kinda like discoverin’ that the head of Scotland Yard was
tappin’ and tapin’ the Queen and the whole damned royal
family. Maybe he did; maybe he just didn’t have no young,
ambitious son of a bitch to rat on him.
I got the idea that these guys didn’t see much of each
other normally; they spent a lot of time talkin’ among
themselves and swappin’ stories and information, mostly
gossip from the look of it. Couldn’t go by us—we
wasn’t the elite; we couldn’t speak their singsong
language.
They all spoke English, though, thanks to their machines, so Sam
could wander in and out and make nice comments while sippin’
a bourbon and soda. Finally, though, we had them all seated on this
big central couch that was sunk into the livin’ room and
formed a kinda U, and provided a perfect audience for anybody
standin’ in front of the old-fashioned fireplace, which was
just where Sam was.
“I know you’re all curious as to why we’ve
come together like this,” he began, “so maybe we should
get this over with. It’s been a very long, tough road, even
though most of the perpetrators were obvious from the start. I
admit there are still one or two details I’m hazy about, but
I think perhaps we can fill those in over time.”
“We are here only because we respect Mayar Eldrith,
sir,” Basuti responded in his usually cold manner, kinda
remindin’ me of Addison at her normal self. “If we have
come here to listen to the blatherings of some other-worldly
egomaniac who has delusions that he has a greater mind than we
have, then I, for one, feel insulted.”
“Then you will have to be insulted,” Sam shot back,
cool and casual. “The kind of attitude you just displayed is
at least partly at the root of this whole thing. However, I will
put you to the test. I have assured Vice President Mayar that here,
tonight, I can show him the traitor—or traitors—in his
own ranks, explain the entire plot against the Company, and put an
end to that threat. I can do this for several reasons. For one
thing, I am this ignorant, primitive baboon, but I’m
very good at what I do. Because I am totally unrestricted by your
culture, class, or racial attitudes, I can cut through them. And,
because my wife was willing to put herself into the living hell of
a nasty and addictive alien substance, I have the additional
details I needed. The plot is not stopped. In fact, it is right now
underway. You can dismiss me now, go home, and it will come to pass
and it will succeed. In fact, they’d have gotten away with it
anyway if they hadn’t made it so complex that at least one
major mistake was inevitable. Anybody want to leave and let the
plot go on?”
They sat and stared at him.
“I thought not. So let’s proceed, shall we? This is
such a complex plot, although at its root it’s as simple a
set of motives as all crimes, that it will take some time to put
all the pieces together for you, and with your help and
cooperation. I beg your indulgence.”
“This is intolerable!” muttered Hanrin Sabuuk.
“Eldrith, must we put up with this? Why, the man is not even
an employee!”
“Let the man begin,” the vice president said
impatiently. “There is money riding on this. He claims he can
solve that which has troubled us most these past three years and
indisputably. I told him I did not believe he could do what we
failed to do. The amount is substantial; would any of you stake
your own fortunes with mine?”
“Bah! What do we have to gain if he cannot?” asked
Mukasa.
“You wager money, which you value dearly but won’t
really miss,” Sam told them. “My stake is my life,
which is forfeit if we fail tonight. It is, I admit, of no value to
you but it makes it a very sporting proposition, does it
not?”
I gasped. “Sam! No!” But he paid no attention, and
the others looked at each other and nodded.
“Very well, continue with this foolishness,” said
Dringa wearily. “At least it will be amusing.”
“Interesting, yes, Director, but amusing—I’m
afraid not. Not unless you have a very odd sense of humor.
Let’s begin right at the beginning. I’m afraid some of
what I have to say isn’t all that flattering to you all, but
bear with me.
“First of all,” Sam continued, “let’s
picture a corporate structure whose positions are basically
inherited. This has some advantages if you’re one of the
lucky families, but it also has disadvantages considering that the
only way to gain a position, let alone move up in it, is by
somebody above you dying. With near perfect health and a
two-hundred-and-fifty-year lifespan, this can be a problem. I
hadn’t considered this relevant until I was informed about
you, Director Basuti. A monk, a dedicated holy man committed to his
faith, you literally were forced into corporate politics
by some unexpected premature deaths in your family line.
“Now, if you’re eighty, or a hundred, when this
falls on you, and you really like the job, that’s probably
all right and the way it was intended to be when it was set up. But
when it was set up, the average lifespan was only a hundred and
twenty and families were much larger. You sow your wild oats among
the worlds, work at various jobs within the Company, or do what
your heart dictates, as Director Basuti did. Now, suddenly, we have
a number of high-ranking men in positions while still relatively
young for your people and society. You are all fifty to
seventy-five. It might well be another twenty or thirty years
before you move up. In the meantime, you have great
responsibilities but not great powers. You carry out policy, but
you not only do not initiate it you don’t even get to argue
about it. It must be very frustrating to have to do a job and be
expected to do it well, since you can be skipped over for making
mistakes when the openings finally come, yet not be able to change
or reform policy at all to meet real needs.”
They didn’t say nothin’, but I could see a couple of
’em nodding. He had their attention.
“About four years ago, our subjective time, a small
exploiter team was sent far up into Type One territory in the minus
direction. It was one of a number sent out all the time by the
Office of Exploration and Evaluation, which, I believe, comes under
you, Director Dringa. ‘Research and
development’—such a nice, all-encompassing
term.”
“It is mine now, but not four years ago,” Dringa
responded.
“I know, we’ll get to that. At any rate, one of
these teams, in search of a rare and needed natural substance,
blundered into a world with a very nasty trap in the form of a
symbiotic viral creature. It didn’t show up in the
preliminary medical checks or even the quarantine and volunteer
example because it is strictly a sexually transmitted organism. You
can’t even get it by an injection of an infected
person’s blood. It trades superb health and immunity from
virtually any nongenetic disease in exchange for feeding off the
host—a harmless amount, too. This, quite naturally, also
produces over a period of millennia a totally homogeneous and
incredibly long-lived race and creates a situation where a very low
birth rate is mandated.”
Quickly, Sam filled them in on the background of the world where
it was found, and how the expedition caught it and was trapped by
it.
“Now, then, they followed all the established procedures.
They went to their force point and they sent a report as soon as
they could of all that they knew. They also requested quarantine
and medical study in a safe world and started out, only to suffer
the nightmarish and eventually fatal withdrawal. They got back in
time on the hope that there was something in that world that would
reverse it. They made it, just in time, but not without a couple
suffering some fairly dramatic and permanent brain damage. One of
the women is partially paralyzed; one of the men has the active
intelligence of perhaps a five-year-old child. They sent this
report, too, and it was followed up with research instruments and
requests for samples.”
“Wait a moment,” Hanrin Sabuuk broke in.
“I was head of R & D at that time, and no such
report ever reached me.”
“No, it didn’t,” Sam agreed. “Instead,
the reports that reached you and were subsequently fed into your
computers listed this world as hostile to human habitation and
fatal, and the exploiter team were all declared dead. The supplies
and other equipment sent up there, and the samples sent back, were
all credited to different teams working in the same region. It was
spread out well enough that nothing would have been obvious or
flagged. What had happened was this. Someone had to receive the
initial signals in the routing, and then see in there something
that caught his eye. At first, it was probably no more than petty
corruption—the idea of controlling a disease or substance
that was highly addictive, perhaps. This person needed to know
more, so he enlisted the aid of another, highly ambitious man, a
medical scientist in the managerial classes who felt frustrated and
confined by the narrow limits imposed on him by the Company. He, in
turn, had done some work in a couple of worlds and there had met
and recruited to the Company’s employ some young scientists
in one of those worlds, the most brilliant and impressive of whom
was a young man of whom we know very little except that he uses the
name Dr. Carlos.”
“We do not recruit scientists,” Dringa commented.
“We have an oversupply as it is.”
“Perhaps you don’t, but the Company has
thousands of locals in the worlds on which they have stations, as
well as bankers, crime lords, and even private investigators. We
don’t know what chord was struck between them, but Carlos
learned well. He is at least as proficient as his mentor on the
medical machines and many other machines of the Company. With these
three men, we have the beginnings of a conspiracy. It was Carlos
who was set up in a safe world with all the medical and analytical
equipment he required. I’m sure we’ll be able to
discover how they hid the requisition of these machines and their
distribution when we trace the serial numbers through the computer
network. Carlos, however, was still limited. He didn’t have
access to the best machines and brightest minds in the Company, and
he was woefully short of manpower. I can’t prove it, but I
believe that it was he who came up with the idea of locating a
Nazi-style world, a world in which experimentation on humans
existed and a party elite answerable to no one if they held on to
power reigned. There was such a world with a Company station. The
stationmaster was impersonating a powerful party leader named
Rupert Conrad Vogel.”
“Ah, yes, we know about him,” Mukasa said.
“You do and you don’t. You see, they were very
clever. Vogel received orders to carry out experiments using
supplies of this viral agent with his normal company mail, under a
Most Secret clearance. The orders came from very high in the
Company hierarchy. He had no reason to doubt them, or that he was
doing what the Company wanted. Vogel’s own projects were
equally clever. The virus was represented as something discovered
on that world only recently. They were put to work analyzing it,
diagramming it, and, of course, seeing what it would do to human
subjects, both its powers and limitations. Vogel got his supplies
of the agent—actually the semen of both the trapped humans
and males of the native race there, repacked into injection
capsules in minimal doses—with his normal Company pouches. He
had no idea they were being smuggled into the mail system by Carlos
and those few he had recruited to help him, with the aid of some
corrupt people in the transport union. It was perfect, as far as it
went, since Vogel supplied the raw data and Carlos could then
reinterpret it in light of knowing its true origins.”
“But we know all this,” Mayar Eldrith pointed out.
“You are only filling in the details.”
“I asked for patience. During the experimentation, it was
discovered that the viral agent reproduced only sexually, but
created microscopic, specialized reproductive units. These units
were present in male and female subjects, but they were malformed,
weak, and tended to break up when expelled from the body. This was
very fortunate considering the heightened promiscuity of all the
infected subjects, since a few could quickly create a plague, but
it also indicated that the reason the thing broke down was because
it lacked some certain chemical element. Vogel’s people
searched for that missing link but couldn’t find it, and I
doubt if they would have used it if they had. But this very fact
turned what had begun as basically an illegal side operation with
potential business uses to something else.”
“Now we’re finally getting somewhere,” Basuti
grumbled. I noticed, though, that all the others was
listenin’ real good, and ones like Dakani and Jamispur
hadn’t said a word.
“Now, I won’t take up any of your time detailing the
viral agent or how it works. We all know that. But our man back
here, the one who started it all, began to think along more
ambitious lines. In my world, we once had a woman who became
infamous in history as Typhoid Mary. Typhoid was a particularly
virulent killer disease, easily transmitted and quite fatal. Mary
was found to be literally infested with the disease, but she
didn’t catch it. She was a carrier, immune herself to its
awful effects but able to give it to almost anyone she touched. Now
this fellow started to wonder what a Typhoid Mary, or perhaps many
Typhoid Marys, would do to this world. Suppose they were introduced
as professional courtesans at a party like this one, for the high
and mighty. Not everyone would partake, of course, but some would,
and there would be other opportunities. Now you begin to go into
withdrawal, but someone, an agent for the top man, could offer you
not a cure, perhaps, but a daily fix that would keep you going and
even cure what you might catch. Ask your doctors—no mind can
tolerate that withdrawal, not even any of yours. Right,
Jamispur?”
The doc nodded. “It is true. Within a few hours of the
onset of withdrawal you would kill your family and cut off your leg
for it. It is not a matter of will; the thing is in control of your
mind and its sole imperative is survival.”
“They wouldn’t snare Basuti,” Mukasa chuckled.
“He has a permanent vow of celibacy.” He stopped a
moment. “Say—that’s
right . . . ”
Eyes went to Basuti, all lookin’ at him funny, but he
ignored them. “The plot is an infantile concoction of this
madman,” he said. “First, you would have to find the
missing agent. Second, you would have to get that agent into this
world, something I find impossible to believe. Third, you would
have to have some way of continuing to import it.”
“Oh, once they had enough people—most of you, say,
and some key security people, they wouldn’t need subterfuge.
They could get all of it in they wanted,” Sam pointed out.
“But, you’re right. The thing was, that original,
stranded exploiter team finally figured it out. It was literally
under their noses all the time but it was so obvious and yet so
alien they failed to recognize it. The staple food here is
haipi, and pardon my mispronunciation. There’s some haipi in
these snacks right here. Where I come from, it’s potatoes,
rice, beans—you name it. The rainbow weed was the number-one
staple of the origin world. It grew like wildfire all over the
place and was eaten all the time in every imaginable way by just
about everybody. They long suspected it was something in the diet
or something in the forms and balance of radiation in sun, soil, or
water, and they very courageously self-experimented to find what it
was, but rainbow weed was the last thing they tried because it was
everywhere.
“When they discovered this, they sent the seed pods down
to Carlos to analyze and grow others, and our man went into action.
Under a cover, he had agents on the colonial worlds of your people
recruit, perhaps even kidnap, young women under twenty years of
age, and, by virtue of his committee authority, flagged their
Labyrinth IDs as security recognized and moved them out. Carlos had
already prepared a place for them, a camp in a world without
Company personnel but near the so-called stroke seven worlds like
mine, in a primitive jungle where there was an uncharted weak spot.
There the girls were hypnoscanned to be unable to access
their entire past, and a new, simpler, rougher past consistent with
that world was brought forward. They were given cosmetology
treatments to change their hair, alter their eyes, vary their skin
color, and the rest. They were hooked on the drug, which made them
quite suitable as prostitutes and dancers. The only problem was,
Carlos had few people and a lot of other work to do. There was no
way he could handle up to fifty girls, as there eventually were,
about the limit for the amount of the agent, or
‘juice,’ that the team up in the origin world could
produce and ship, allowing for accidents and unexpected losses. In
the end, it was decided to take a leaf from the Company’s own
method of operation.”
They was all ears now, and all of ’em looked downright
uncomfortable. I begun to worry that maybe they was all in
it.
“Oh, I forgot to mention Addison. I shouldn’t,
she’s a key player and there are things even the one here who
knows her well doesn’t know about her. She had relatives in
one of the colony worlds, and she was a mistress of a Security
Committee member so she had a security code and legitimate reason
to go back and forth. She was, then, the liaison between our man
here, who couldn’t leave, and Carlos. She had a safe world
where she could undergo a rather startling metamorphosis into a
cold, plain-looking woman who had only superficial resemblance to
the women of this world, and she did it all without high tech
machines. She came from a family of professional performers and she
knew just how to do it and do it right. She was also a quite
accomplished method actress, who, when Addison, was really a
different personality. Colored contact lenses and tinted glasses
added the final touch. She approached Arnie Siegel, a major
criminal boss in the northern hemisphere, about the girls. He was
big and powerful enough to cover for her, and she was able to hand
him some Company gadgets and secrets that made it easy for him to
evade the law and gave him an edge on possibly knocking over his
own boss, a fellow named Wycliffe, who was ignorant of the affair.
The only ones he let in on it were people he owned, body and soul,
such as the master pimp Edward ‘Fast Eddie’ Small, who
would take over Siegel’s position when Siegel moved up, and
gunmen personally loyal who would oversee the project’s
security.”
“You mean they turned fifty girls of our race
into whores for this—this—filthy world?” Hanrin
Sabuuk seemed real angry and upset at that.
“Yes, because this not only assured them the preservation
of the fifty with no effort on their part, and also because by then
Aldrath, here, had by sheer accident stumbled into the very
existence of this agent, or drug, and knew just from its existence
that the plot had to be very ambitious and go very high. His big
attention was on Vogel, since that’s where the experiments
were and he knew Vogel had to know who was behind it, but he sent a
couple of agents to scout around this other world and set something
up just in case. The agents went completely by the book and
followed absolutely standard procedures; as a result, they were led
by the nose by ones who already knew the book to Lindy Crockett, a
New York private eye with mob connections, and were highly
impressed with her. They should have been. She was carefully
coached on what to say and do to impress them. She was more than
connected; she was the chief private eye agency handling the
Wycliffe mob’s investigations. From that point on, there was
a constant flow of information from Crockett, all of it written by
the very people she was supposed to be investigating. It checked
out and was mostly truthful; it was just worthless. She gave
Aldrath Addison and Carlos, which was safe enough, but said they
couldn’t be photographed and gave slightly distorted
descriptions and sketches so they wouldn’t be recognized even
if they were next to the sketches. She sent the news of
Carlos’s operation in Guiana, but only after it had served
its purpose and was already pretty well closed down. And you,
Aldrath, took that information and fed it into the computer and
came to all the conclusions they wanted you to.”
Aldrath shrugged. “A detective is only as good as his
information.”
“But you were so certain that this was a sideline, a minor
offshoot, that you didn’t even keep permanent security
personnel there to independently check it out. You see,
you’re vulnerable to this because you all have sealed
yourself off here, away from the action. All of you are only as
good as your information, and your computers believe what
they’re told to believe. The origin world was listed as
lethal and useless, so you ignored it. Nobody even dared poke their
head in and check it out. The data banks were sacred,
couldn’t be tampered with. Maybe they can’t
be—but all that means is that you tamper with the data you
feed into them. You were had. You’ve got thousands of
stations out there. Who’s going to check to see if a
hypnoscanner was really ordered by a station authorized to get one
and that they received it? So long as the order is proper and
lawfully entered, and so is the receipt, you don’t really
know where that damned equipment went.”
“A physical audit of everything is impossible in so vast a
system,” Mukasa noted. “We know there’s a certain
amount of built-in graft, but we try to keep it to acceptable
levels.”
“Uh huh. The trouble is, you don’t know when that
level’s reached unacceptable. So, now we’re set up.
They are rolling and they have their active agent. The rainbow weed
even grows well and apparently normally in worlds more in our line.
Its molecular structure and balance seem identical to the
parent’s. The trouble is, it doesn’t work. The addicts
like it, but they still need their shot. It grows quickly, so you
plant it every damned place you safely can—on the hundreds
and hundreds of safe worlds. Nobody cares about the safe worlds
except as havens and rest stops, so nobody ever bothers to look,
say, ten, or perhaps a hundred, miles from the rest areas and
supplies. I’ll bet if you do you’ll find this
crazy-looking stuff multiplying like crazy. It’s going to be
the kudzu of parallel worlds.”
“What is this kudzu?” Hanrin asked.
“Never mind. You’ll see what I mean in time. At just
this time, we threw them a real curve. Aldrath revealed that he was
going to kidnap Vogel and had sealed off access to Vogel’s
world. Now Vogel couldn’t be reached without betraying a
hand. You know that story, too, in gruesome detail. We went crazy
trying to figure out how in hell you could know the precise instant
from three different parallel worlds that some specific person
would be going through the particular entrance cube. Then it hit
us. Vogel gave us the slip but took Brandy with him; as a result,
we could track him because her security code included a tracker and
was superimposed over her old code. The ambush was painfully
simple. They simply waited until their devices, set to
Brandy’s tracking broadcaster, all went beep together
and moved. The object was first and foremost to kill Vogel, of
course, but if they could they were also told to spare Brandy. She
got away with a wound, since in that confined space it was
impossible to guarantee anything. I got a head wound, which was
real bad but not fatal. They couldn’t do much, but they were
prepared in case anyone survived except Brandy, since they would
certainly be rushed to the Center—after quarantine and
examination. That gave them, ahead of time, the names of any
survivors, namely me, and the nature and extent of the wound.
Again, they pulled their favorite trick.
“Care at the Center for most things is automated and
computer controlled and monitored. The physician with his
diagnostic computer just puts in the treatment and the like and
it’s done. Knowing it was a head wound and which doctor was
alerted, they used the standard security taps on all medical
emergencies and intercepted the doctor’s instructions, adding
a small extra detail, a slightly higher level of a support drug
that would keep me comatose indefinitely. It was such a fine
difference it took months before any doctor noticed it and
questioned it.”
“Who could tap into the medical line with such knowledge
and finesse?” Mayar asked.
“In a minute, sir. First, why Brandy? Well, first of all,
they’d just lost their experimental subjects and the heat was
on. It was going to be dangerous to bring in more than small
quantities of the needed semen in the future. My death—or, as
it turned out, my coma—sent her into severe depression. They
knew her well, had her entire mental profile. She would go in after
the only lead left. This did them several favors. First, since
Brandy went in and would be giving detailed, inside reports,
Aldrath would hold off on a major commitment there pending what she
found. Second, they could control those reports, via Crockett, and
keep Aldrath more concerned about Brandy’s safety than about
what was actually there. Finally, they already had a Brandy of
their own, one taken in the usual manner from a world close to ours
but where the duplicate’s life was, shall we say, less
fortunate and the individual more opportunist.”
Brandy Two smiled. “How sweet.”
“The idea was an eventual switch. Brandy Two would be
primed and sent back as Brandy One. They were very impressed by
our Brandy, and none too sure that she could or would
carry out their orders implicitly, hooked or not. There were a few
circumstances in the Vogel tests where people committed suicide
rather than face an impossible alternative. They couldn’t
take the chance. Brandy Two, as Brandy One, would have
Aldrath’s confidence here and Bill Markham’s at home.
She would also be an effective test case if they found the right
element for their plot, since she could walk right into this world
of yours on a security pass.”
“Impossible!” Mukasa shouted. “You go too far.
It is precisely because such twins exist that we have our unique
security codes. Even twins from adjacent worlds who have precisely
the same history and development will show up as different
individuals under our system.”
“And so would both of them—but they don’t.
They don’t, because Brandy One’s original code still
has the security code and tracker superimposed on it and that
drowns out and supersedes the old code. That code is intended to be
temporary and so it’s not in the master identification system
as such.”
“But only the security medical technician who imposed it
would know that specific code and be able to provide it for
duplication!” Mayar pointed out.
“Exactly so. Isn’t that right, Chief Medical
Security Advisor Jamispur?”
The doc jumped. “Look here, if you’re implying that
I’m a part of this conspiracy—”
“I apologize, sir. I was not implying anything. I am
saying that you are the medical technician who knew and took Carlos
under your wing when you were younger. I am saying that you were
the ambitious and frustrated scientist tapped by our man to set
this all up. That’s why you got promoted to Chief Medical
Security Advisor, so you could be in the best position for
this.”
“Now, hold on! I picked Jamispur!” Mayar
said.
“How?”
“Why—computer records, job performance and
proficiency, medical and psychiatric evaluations. The usual. He was
the best man for the job.”
“Of course he was. Because for several years our man had
been letting the computer know all about Jamispur—exactly
what they both wanted. He probably scored ninety-nine out of a
possible hundred. Doesn’t pay to be absolutely perfect. Your
computer picked him from among the staff after that tragic flyer
‘accident’ killed his predecessor. Garbage in, garbage
out. How does it feel to be garbage, Doc?”
“This is outrageous!” Jamispur stormed. “I
will not sit here and allow any more of this insanity to
continue!”
“Oh, yes, you will,” said young Dakani softly,
speaking for the first time. The tone left no doubt that the doc
was gonna stay, whether tied up and muzzled or comfortable. Dakani
and he was the same class; no political or jurisdictional problems
there.
“It had to be Jamispur all along. He was the only one who
could duplicate the security code. He was the only one who could
feed that code to Carlos and his accomplices, via Addison, so that
they could set their own tracers for the ambush. He was the only
one who had the complete medical and psychiatric history of Brandy
One and even had the opportunity right from the start to plant the
seed in her mind that if anything happened to me she’d do
what she did. As chief medical security advisor, he could tap into
any of the Center’s lines as well as just call security at
the station and know exactly what to do to neutralize me—all
by phone, or its equivalent, here, with his trusty little computer
and all those wonderful access codes a top security position gives
you. What was it, Doc? Ambition? Blackmail? Or did they just keep
refusing to let you experiment on your own with people?”
“I have rights here. I do not have to answer to the likes
of you,” the doc responded kinda surly.
“No doubt. And no doubt you’re good enough to have
booby-trapped your own mind and memories. We start probing and
prying and it all goes away. Don’t worry, Doc. We’re
not even gonna try that stuff. We’ll just walk you
down to this little room, strip you, tie you to the bed so you
can’t hurt yourself, and give you as many jolts of this stuff
you seem to love so much as it takes until you’re hooked.
We’ll let the two ladies, here, handle it all. They know all
about how to do it, thanks to you. All we need is a name.
It’s a name we already know, but your supporting testimony
will give Dakani, here, the right of immediate arrest. I’m
sure our big man hasn’t booby-trapped his brain.
We’ll learn the rest from him.”
Jamispur was sweatin’ somethin’ awful. I
didn’t even know these people could sweat till then,
and it looked mighty sweet to me. “Don’t,” he
managed, his voice just a hoarse whisper. “I’ll
tell.”
“Sorry, Doc, that ain’t enough,” Sam told him.
“You could give any name here and then stall for time, hoping
that you’d get sprung. It has to be our route, while
these gentlemen here remain as the vice president’s pampered
guests.”
Suddenly Jamispur leaped from the couch toward Sam. Me, my twin,
and Dakani all moved ’bout the same time, shovin’ him
back so he fell right into that whole mess of Directors. There was
absolute chaos, everybody strugglin’ with everybody and
shoutin’ curses in two languages, nobody clear what was what,
when, just like in one of them thirties thrillers, the lights went
out and plunged the room into darkness.
There was more shouts, but the lights was back on in maybe a
minute and we finally untangled. Well, most of us did.
Considerin’ how much melodrama we seen so far, I really
wasn’t all that surprised to see that Jamispur didn’t
get up. He had one of them fondue forks right through his throat,
and he was gaspin’ for air but not makin’ a sound. By
the time we did what we could, he was dead.
Sam looked over at Dakani, who was lookin’ back at
someplace in the hall. The young man then turned back. “Did
you get it?” Sam asked him.
“I got it. But I kind of hoped it wouldn’t be
fatal.”
“Sorry,” Sam replied with an apology. “I
thought he’d use one of the butter knives. I’m out of
the wrong society to even think of fondue
forks.”
Basuti turned, sweatin’ too, and wiped his face nervously.
“All right—you’ve convinced us there’s a
true traitor here, but you’ve just lost your only
identification of him. You’ll never get any prints off
that fork handle. It’s a rough-grip
handle.”
“Nice of you to notice that. You might be a detective yet.
Well, I admit I didn’t really expect more than an
attempt, but this will do nicely. I regret not being able
to deliver a smoking gun, but I think a smoking fondue fork will do
just as well, although from the sound of it I can see why nobody
ever used it in the old stories.”
I watched Dakani Grista vanish back into another room, then come
back, lookin’ real grave. I had to hand it to Sam. I never
woulda believed that anybody this slick woulda ever gone for it. I
mean, our man still had lots of friends around. Bide your time
while the doc got juiced and make your getaway.
“I’m afraid you’ve all been the victim of a
very melodramatic setup,” Sam told them. “The fact was,
though, I really couldn’t lose by it. If Jamispur
hadn’t lunged at me, or tried for a getaway, we
wouldn’t have pulled it and we’d have taken three to
five days to get our absolute evidence. Fortunately, none of you
have ever seen a vintage detective thriller movie. I presented the
motive, opportunity, and method to commit a murder here tonight,
and after all was chaos, partly aided and abetted by my two lovely
cohorts in crime here and the very dubious Dakani, we even killed
the lights, an obvious setup if ever there was one, but since we
had our man backed into a corner and made certain we didn’t
give him enough time to think about good fortune, he took what
appeared to be a wondrous stroke of luck to do away with the only
witness who could credibly finger him. And so we can all let Dakani
do his duty and get it out in the open now, by fingering the man
we—Brandy and I, at least—have known was behind this
from the start.”
“Mukasa Lamdukur,” said the security man, “I
hereby suspend your rights under the Security Act on the grounds of
treason and murder.”
Mukasa stared at him. “You are both insane. You have no
right to do this.”
“Well, it wasn’t hard to figure out once both Brandy
and I were thinking straight again,” Sam told him. “At
that first, brief, dinner meeting in this very room, before the
Vogel affair, you made a slip and had to cover it. You betrayed a
fairly complete knowledge of my world, something you
shouldn’t have known unless it had been of particular study
and interest to you.”
“I told you—I was there, or very near there, when I
was young.”
“Yes. World War II, I believe. But we were told that no
one from your class is allowed to go to any world that does not
have a full station and Company operation, for obvious security
reasons. The Company wasn’t even there in the forties. It
didn’t establish its first outpost there until the
mid-fifties, ten years after the war, and it didn’t establish
a full station until the sixties. We had been discussing war, so
when you made your slip you covered with a war. The war
Vogel’s side won in his world and lost in ours. Why lie,
unless you had something to hide? Unless you had been personally
researching the world of Brandy and me with the idea of making a
switch and eliminating a number of possible irritants at once? It
wasn’t enough to hang anything on you that would stick, but
it was enough to tell us which one of you it was. When I was able
to check, I discovered that, four years ago, you had the
communications post now held by Director Basuti, the newest member
and the cause of the musical chairs in the group.
Communications—who would get the first frantic messages from
that exploiter team. Communications—which, by its very
nature, is the post that gets all the information fed into the
computers first. And now, operations, where you can issue
clearances, monitor all security personnel, and get any question
answered with no problems.”
“You are guessing. You can prove nothing,” he
snarled.
“Dakani?”
The security man clapped his hands, and a big paintin’ on
the wall over the fireplace winked out, much to my surprise. It was
like some kinda big, flat, square TV screen. The scene on it was of
lousy quality but it was clear enough. All of our clearly
recognizable outlines was there, and then Jamispur lunges, we go
into our act, forcin’ him between Basuti and Mukasa, and
there is Mukasa’s hand, almost by accident, hittin’ the
fondue fork, takin’ it out, and then rolling and
stabbin’ the doc in the throat while he pushed against the
doc’s head with his other hand. Then he rolls away.
“I’m not against high tech when it’s
useful,” Sam told them. “We often use infrared and
other means to get photos and information in the dark back in my
world. I figured they’d have an even more improved model
here. We mounted it last night behind the mantelpiece. At least
five technicians in various places caught it independently on their
own machines. Two were witnessed by representatives of the
President and the Chairman.”
Mukasa seemed almost to wilt. In a flash he’d gone from
the most confident man around to a scared little boy.
“Oh, relax, Mukasa,” Sam told him. “The truth
is, you just did yourself a favor. When is your mistress, Ioyeo,
due back from visiting her sisters and mother in the
colonies?”
“S—she’s back. Oh, the curses of the Nine
Hells, she’s dead, damn it all. I had to do it.
Don’t you see? She showed herself to Brandy, here. They
knew she was Addison. But Ioyeo played around, as she was
told to. She’s serviced everybody here except
Basuti.”
“Maybe it was all for the best,” I put in.
“For her sake, too. Then she never got to make love to you
one last time.”
He looked strange. “Yes, she did. Last night. That’s
when I . . . Oh, gods! She just looked up at
me, her eyes wide, and even in death she had this look of total
surprise.”
“Not half as surprised as you gonna be in a few hours,
honey,” Brandy Two noted sourly.
Dakani was quick. “Did you make love to any other woman
since? Or anybody else where semen was exchanged?”
“Why, yes. I felt—charged up. It was the first time
I ever had to do anything like that myself and I got—a
thrill. It was exciting. It was pure power. I slept like a log
afterward, and after I woke up today I had the longest, most
passionate session with my wife I’ve had in years. If
she’d turned me on like that in the past ten years I’d
never have even had Ioyeo.”
Dakani was already on the communicator. I just hoped his missus
wasn’t feelin’ so turned on she had a few boy whores on
the side. Hell, this scheme of theirs might work anyways!
Sam looked at him. “It’s almost a fitting
punishment. You never knew just how much she hated you. You never
even guessed how much she hated all of you, this Company, this
world, this whole system. She was the fifty-first Typhoid Mary, and
the first to come in. She hated you so much that she was willing to
destroy her own mind, kill that brilliant if tragic intellect, just
to make you the first victim. To spread it beyond any hope of
containment. This thing thinks that humans are only turned on for a
few days a year, so every day it sees we can screw profitably, it
forces us to do just that, early and often. It’s just a
virus; it doesn’t think. Every day is just one of those few
to it.”
“Oh, my gods and demons!” Mukasa moaned. He knowed
now what we already did.
“Carlos, too, sacrificed much,” Sam continued.
“You see, she loved him. He was—is—a genius, a
brilliant man from apparently a very poor and very oppressed race.
He had passion, commitment, and was everything she ever dreamed of
in a man. He loved her dearly, yet he did this to her, at her
request. He is one hell of a man, and, after this, if we
can’t track him down and pick him up through the agents here,
he will be the most dangerous and deadly human being in all the
universes.”
An obviously shaken Mayar Eldrith got some of his composure
back. “But—so she was double-crossing him?
Why? She had everything. Everything!”
I looked around at all them silver-spoon, upper-class, First
Royal Family types and I felt sick. “They ain’t never
gonna understand, Sam. Let ’em eat cake.”
“But what, exactly, was the plot?” Basuti asked us
when all had been calmed down. “I can understand motive, yes,
on both their parts, but I just can’t see how they were going
to take control and get that substance in.”
“First of all, it didn’t matter to
Addison—Ioyeo—or Carlos if they did get the
substance in. They had thirty hours from their last drink of the
rainbow weed pulp to get the girls in after the setup and party was
all arranged and infect as many upper-class types as possible.
Because of Mukasa’s last embrace with Ioyeo, we wound up with
six cases so far and maybe more. Imagine what half a dozen initial
ones would have done. The cornerstone of security and the corporate
classes would have been devastated before they knew what hit them.
That was all Addison and Carlos wanted. The destruction. But they
did have a way, and they made Brandy prove it would work by walking
through.”
“What? How’s that?”
“Once they found the one that worked, or actually a way to
get almost any normal rainbow weed to work, they gave it to both
Brandys and took samples from their vaginal areas. They found live,
complete viral reproductive units there. They gave them pulped but
not pureed bulbs that grow on top of the stalks—the seed
pods. They contain millions of tiny seeds and they are resistant to
tremendous amounts of things. They are, among other things,
indigestible but harmless. Only some of those fifty girls, restored
to their original looks, being the correct race, would be used to
spread the infection. The first, small group, only a couple, would
be brought in as mistresses from the colonies under their original
codes. Everyone of your race has the right to come here, at least
for visits. The families are too closely interrelated. The scanners
would pick up swallowed balloons, and even just clusters of foreign
things where they shouldn’t be. But they were not set to pick
up addicts alone—a very complex process, finding one virus
that you could only kill by killing the person—but only
unusual things. Each of the girls would be fed till they burst with
seed pods. Once away, they would be given diarrhetics. The human
feces, with the seeds, would have been spread in a private
greenhouse. The girls could then conveniently be discovered to be
addicts in withdrawal and sent to the Center.”
“Yeah,” I added. “In just two or three weeks
that greenhouse would be up to its armpits in rainbow
weed.”
“With all the alien races coming in and out and all the
field people, it was impossible to scan the normal food and wastes
that might show up in the scan, even if that scan showed odd
material. It usually did, since people have different foods and
diets,” Sam pointed out. “Short of forcing everyone,
regardless of race or class or what, to take an enema and have
their stomach pumped, there’s no way to guard against
this.”
“And what was the secret of the plant’s missing
ingredient?” Mayar asked.
“It wasn’t soil, certainly, nor geographic position.
The thing was a plant that converted sunlight into food without
chlorophyll. It was sunlight-dependent if it didn’t need much
else. There are differences in the amount of solar radiation, and
the type and degree, even within one world, and they subtly vary
every world away. The exact balance of the origin world was
required for maximum efficiency. Any variations and it was below
maximum photosynthesis. It was actually a slight excess of one of
those chemicals that made the difference. You’ll have to get
the chemists to tell you just why it’s not obviously
different in analysis, but I think it’s the same stuff as on
the other worlds, only when it has an excess it converts it somehow
into an allied chemical, and that’s the one. No excess, no
biochemical waste. Any good greenhouse with special lights and the
exact radiation balance of the origin world can duplicate it,
giving you perfect rainbow weed that will sustain this virus
indefinitely.”
“Yeah, and if they hadn’t made two big mistakes,
it’d all worked and most of this world would have been under
’em in a couple of weeks,” I pointed out. “One
was fallin’ for the same trap y’all was in here. Things
was goin’ so good, and they was so dedicated and radical and
ruthless they got real cocky, started doin’ side deals they
didn’t have to do. Me, for example. They figured when I come
back from Vogel’s place they’d stick me under
Jamispur’s machines and he could restore me and program me
and all the rest. But I got shot, and Sam wasn’t dead, so I
went to the Center instead, and I had them do it. But not all of
it. I ain’t never been able to have straight hair in my life
and I hate cornrows with a passion. Friend of mine went
bald wearin’ them things. And we girls spend
millions a year tryin’ to get our complexion creamy smooth
and totally even. I kept the hair and the complexion. When I
finally showed up down there, I didn’t look like my twin.
They couldn’t make no switch, so they had to nab me and hook
me, too.”
“Then, when they knew they were near, they got
arrogant,” Sam said. “They did a quickie search and
recruitment for a down-and-out Sam Horowitz who was corrupt as
hell. We didn’t think they’d do it, but we were ready
for them when they did. There aren’t very many of me.
I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or depressing. I
nailed him in the Labyrinth. I talked to him first, because I just
wasn’t sure I could kill myself. I forced him into an
available world and we had a talk. He had Nazis and concentration
camps in his world, too. He lost the same relatives I had. It
didn’t bother him a bit. Not a bit. Before I knew it,
I’d blown his fucking face in.”
“That meant they thought they had Sam Two when they
actually had Sam back home,” I added. “We had a real
go-round. He finally showed us that only by helpin’ him did
we guarantee our supply. He turned us in and our job was to press,
finagle, or in some way get one or both of us to the origin world.
See, that was their final and biggest mistake. More’n once
they used that damned trackin’ gizmo inside me for their own
ends, includin’ wastin’ Vogel. Carlos was so busy and
so sure of himself, and Addison had so much on her mind and one
corner of it on the clock, they never bothered to take it out or
turn it off. Since we was the only two addicts they had left not of
their own race, Sam and Bill felt sure that they wouldn’t do
nothin’ bad to us till they had their cure, their agent. We
was the only guinea pigs they had.”
Sam sighed. “Well, that about wraps it all up.” He
downed the last of his drink.
“Uh uh. You forgot one thing. Who killed Siegel and then
helped me escape into the Labyrinth? That’s the only part
that has me completely confused,” I said.
“Oh, Addison killed Siegel, just as you thought. The only
thing unusual was the reason for that argument. It was
you.”
“Huh? Me?”
“Yeah. She wanted you for experimental or sentimental or
whatever purposes; she had personally dropped off the load of
filled shot capsules earlier in the evening. That’s why the
Labyrinth was running when you first saw it. The guards knew her,
so they didn’t think anything was wrong with it. Then she
went into town to make some phone calls, probably to discover why
Carlos, who should have been there, was not. She was just going
back, but saw the office light on and went in to have a talk with
him. She had seen you earlier out running, so she knew you were
here, and decided to take you with her, probably to their safe
world hideout, until the rest of the plans played out. Siegel
refused. They got into a bad argument in which Siegel revealed
inadvertently how much he knew and understood about all this, which
was far more than he should have. Whether this was just his people
monitoring Carlos closely and the Brandy Two project or what
we’ll never know. She lost her temper and shot him. She was
used to being in charge, but suddenly it occurred to her that she
was in a very bad position in a house completely surrounded by
Siegel’s most trusted bodyguards. She did a force on the
Labyrinth with a remote device, which drew the guards, and she
couldn’t get away.
“In the meantime, you’d discovered the body, gotten
rashly accused of the murder—you know better than to pick up
a murder weapon, damn it!—and tried to shoot your way out.
Addison had no choice when she saw this. You polished off a number
of the guards, and she picked off the rest. This meant you would
get away, something she hadn’t planned on, but also cleared
the way for her to come out, blame you for the crime, and take a
leisurely exit of her own.”
“Uh huh. Two things wrong there, though. First, where did
the rest of the juice go? I shoulda had hundreds of capsules in
that case. And, second, how do you know all this? Everybody who was
there ’cept me is dead, and I didn’t know.”
“The rest of the capsules had gone directly into
Siegel’s office wall safe, of course, to be picked up and
sent down to Fast Eddie the next day by plane. The remaining
package was yours. He planned on you being around awhile. For some
reason, he wanted you bad enough to risk Addison. In the end, for
all his power and money, Arnie Siegel was a very lonely man whose
own success required him to be totally paranoid at all times. He
couldn’t have the shadow dancers permanently. You were
probably the only human being in his whole world he could trust
absolutely. As for my source of information—you’re
still a hell of a detective. You figure it out.” He got up
like he was goin’ someplace.
“Sam—”
“Not now, Brandy. We’ll talk tomorrow.” And,
with that, he made his excuses and left. I started after him, but
Aldrath stopped me, then took me over in a corner.
“I think you proved conclusively tonight that it was time
I retired,” he said. “It was a rather stunning and
embarrassing collection of deduction, hard work, and theatrics, but
the root cause was my own failures.”
I kept lookin’ after where Sam disappeared.
My mind wasn’t on no more small talk.
“Don’t you know how he knew, Brandy?”
I started and turned to him. “Huh?”
“He was there. Once he recovered here and then found out
what had happened to you from me, there was no stopping him. He
wanted no one notified, not even Crockett. He trusted nobody and
nothing. In the close to a year you were shadow dancing, he managed
to research and even worm his way into confidences. He had a fair
amount of money—he took it in in precious metals and
converted it—and he knew his job. In only three months he
managed to get a job with the Crockett agency. I have no idea what
sort of means he used to come up with the credentials and
background, but I suppose he knew just what she would look for and
how she’d find it, being in the business himself. He watched
over you, Brandy. And he kept me from going in full tilt with
squads and invading the operation. He felt we could get far more by
letting it run.”
“He was sure right.”
Sam . . . there all the time.
We was fast approachin’ that time I didn’t want to
think about. “What will happen to us? And to the shadow
dancers?”
“The events of tonight will not be kept under wraps very
long. When Carlos hears that the plot is compromised, he will
undoubtedly finish off the shadow dancers and regroup. When he
hears that Ioyeo, his Addison, is dead, he will redouble his
efforts. He has no clearance to headquarters, but he has a lot of
skill and knowledge and equipment and at least a small
organization. As Sam said, until we capture or kill him, he will be
the most dangerous man alive. Undoubtedly they will be going
through every single detail of Jamispur’s life trying to
figure out the connection. They must have been together quite some
time. At least we’ll find out who he is and where he came
from.”
“And us?” We’d been in on everything, but both
Brandy Two and me had been kept under close watch and restrictions.
We was Typhoid Marys, too.
“Well, everyone with the live reproducible virus will be
under strict quarantine restrictions. You will be kept with your
double here tonight and locked in, as before. Tomorrow, you both
will be transferred to the Center for tests, after which you will
have some hard decisions to make.”
“What kinda decisions?”
“Options for the future. Someday, perhaps soon, we might
be able to stabilize this thing, but its very nature will require
taking something every day for life. Wait for the doctors.
They’ll explain it.”
“Aldrath—promise me. Promise me that you won’t
let Sam leave till I made them decisions. Will you do that much for
me?”
“I think I can guarantee that much. Farewell, Brandy. You
and Sam cost me my job, but you saved my world. I have children. I
can’t be angry with you for that.”
Then they came to take me back up to my comfortable prison I
shared with my twin. I didn’t see Sam till the next day, and
it was clear he was comin’ off a real drunk. Still, they let
me have some time with him.
“Sam—I heard what you done back at Siegel’s.
Damn it, I do love you, Sam. There’s gotta be a way
for this to work out. For us.”
“How?” he managed, his head poundin’
somethin’ awful. I could tell. I knowed they had hangover
cures here and I got the idea he just didn’t want one.
“Brandy, they’re going to convert Carlos’s old
safe world into a quarantine colony. Any who have the full virus,
and any who for some reason wish to join them, will be able to do
so. They will be researching this thing for years to come. In a
short time that colony will be able to provide a small supply of
the semen for capsules, allowing some people limited mobility
elsewhere so long as they take the capsules and can’t
transmit the virus. It’ll be a leper colony, but a very
pleasant and self-governing one. Owl” He felt his
head.
“Sam—you know how hard it is. The only way out for
me is to take the cure, and you saw all them folks who took the
cure. Not a one of ’em is right. I love you, Sam. I really
do. Come with us to this place. It ain’t so bad, and
we’d still be together. Maybe they need a private
eye.”
“Forget it, babe. I can do a car chase at a hundred and
ten miles an hour through city traffic but I can’t stand
roller coasters. Know why? I can’t stand not to be in full
control. Besides, it wouldn’t be the way you imagine. You
have your full intellect, but it’s untempered. You have no
inhibitions and no brakes except what is necessary for your own
survival. You know that even now you’re only being civilized
because they’ll shoot you if you aren’t. You
aren’t human anymore. Love and lust are synonyms to you. The
only meaningful concept of right and wrong you have is that what
gives pleasure to you or is necessary for your survival is right.
It won’t let you get hurt, it won’t let you get
depressed for long, and there’s no guilt, no sense of
responsibility. That’s why I couldn’t take the stuff
myself. A Jew without guilt is just a Unitarian. The Almighty would
strike me dead for it. Right now, you want me, and you have that
cultural and intellectual knowledge of right and wrong, but
there’s no sense on the gut level. I can’t handle
that.”
“Damn it, Sam! Then I’ll take the capsules. Move
back in to Philadelphia and our world. It can be like it was
before.”
“Really? You’d be picking up the cab driver and the
laundry man and every jock you met at the health club or on the
streets while you exercise. I wouldn’t have a wife, I’d
have a wildly promiscuous and uncontrollable daughter I
couldn’t depend on personally or professionally.”
“Look—you control the capsules. I’d have to do
just what you said, act just the way you wanted.”
He looked appalled. “My god! You can’t even see how
that sounds. I don’t want to own somebody. I
don’t want a slave. I want an equal partner who sticks with
me and puts up with me because she loves me.” He looked up at
the security guards and made a motion. “Good-bye, babe. I
need a drink.”
Nobody who didn’t know and understand Sam
Horowitz wouldn’t’a guessed that he was depressed,
upset, or anything but in heaven that evenin’. And it
weren’t faked or nothin’; he really was supercharged
and as excited as a little kid, and he would be until this all was
done. Only then, maybe a few days later, would he come
crashin’ down. That was the bottom line for me; this was the
climax of his whole life, and once you done passed the climax,
baby, and there’s nobody around to share with and care about,
what’s the use of livin’?
See, when Sam was a little boy he us’ta see all them old
detective movies—only they wasn’t all that old, then.
Between the neighborhood B movies and the early days of TV, though,
he musta seen every Thin Man, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Sherlock
Holmes, Charlie Chan—you name it. And he went to the library
in Baltimore, which is a real big one, and got out and read
everything there was by Chandler and Hammett and all the rest.
Now, don’t get him wrong. He never did much thinkin’
’bout bein’ no cop, let alone no private eye, except
maybe in his fantasies. In fact, he hated police work, thought it
was the dullest, least thrillin’ job in the world. Hell, he
didn’t even like guns. After four years with the Air Force
police and a few more on the Bristol vice squad, he was still
scared of ’em, wouldn’t have one around unless the
safety of somebody innocent—not himself—demanded it. He
wasn’t even a particularly good shot.
No, what Sam was in love with in the work was pretty much what I
got trapped by, too: not the way it was, but the way it
shoulda been. The way Marlowe and Spade and the
Continental Op and Nick and Nora Charles did it.
Now, there was several ways we coulda settled this case, at
least, mostly just with a big set of moves and then explain
everything in the paperwork and to the legal boys who’d have
to prosecute and punish the bad guys. Hell, I coulda
explained it and wrapped it myself. But the Company owed him, owed
us for this, and they was willin’ to indulge us.
So, there we was at headquarters, at Mayar Eldrith’s
palatial lodge, where it all began, and we was hostin’ a
party. Yeah, a real party, too—with all sorts of fancy
delicacies and drinks and all the rest. Since Mayar had done the
invitin’, there wasn’t no way to get out of it,
neither.
All his life, since he was a kid, Sam had dreamed of
havin’ all the suspects together in one room while he, the
brilliant detective, explained the whole thing to them and unmasked
the guilty. Now, finally, he was gonna get his chance, and while I
helped fill in a lot of gaps and details and explain a bunch of
stuff, by general agreement it was gonna be Sam’s show.
I was dressed in this incredibly beautiful soft and satiny
violet and golden sari, with fancy open-toed heels. I had a
complete makeover for it from experts here, matchin’
everything just right, and they had trimmed and shaped my natural
bush just right, like one of them gardeners shapes a bush into a
piece of art, and they’d streaked it with brown and gold. I
had the jewelry to match, and I never looked better or more
glamorous in my whole life.
Sam said he’d be damned if he was gonna do his number in a
toga; he had the tailors here—mostly computers once the
designer got through—make him a good, old-fashioned
forties-style white suit, with just the right shirt and tie, and a
pair of shiny black patent leather shoes. We was a beautiful,
glamorous couple, and we acted just right, but I could feel his
sadness and sorrow every time we talked or our eyes met, Kinda,
this is it, baby, but we’re going out in style.
The guests started arrivin’ and things was about to get
underway. All of’em, I think, sensed somethin’ was up,
and maybe a few guessed it was all up, but since they didn’t
know for sure and still were pretty arrogant and secure, they came
anyways. The rest—well, they had to come along if asked.
So here they come, ready or not. Here was Dringa Lakuka,
division chief of research and development, followed by Mukasa
Lamdukur, who ran the day-to-day operations of the Security
Committee, then the cold and brusk ex-monk, Basuti Alimati, who was
chief of Labyrinth communications, and, finally, among the
Committee members, Hanrin Sabuuk, the security division’s
comptroller. Also invited and present was my other self, this time
in crimson and silver and with her hair styled differently but
still lookin’ great; Dakani Grista, the real young acting
chief of security operations, and his old boss, now forcibly
retired, Aldrath Prang. Last, but not least, was the Security
Committee’s chief medical advisor, and the man who made me
less than I us’ta be, Jamispur Samoka.
It was a chummy men’s club; besides me and Brandy Two, the
only other women around was Mayar’s wife Eyai, who acted as
hostess, and a bunch of female servants.
Eyebrows was raised at Sam, dressed the way he was, but the only
indignation was at the presence of Aldrath Prang, who clearly was
in the doghouse in spades. Seems what done him in was
Dakani’s toadyness, which also got him a bunch of gold stars.
He got nervous and tipped off Lamdukur that Aldrath was
tappin’ the private lines of the Committee members
themselves, and the outrage hadn’t died down yet. It was
kinda like discoverin’ that the head of Scotland Yard was
tappin’ and tapin’ the Queen and the whole damned royal
family. Maybe he did; maybe he just didn’t have no young,
ambitious son of a bitch to rat on him.
I got the idea that these guys didn’t see much of each
other normally; they spent a lot of time talkin’ among
themselves and swappin’ stories and information, mostly
gossip from the look of it. Couldn’t go by us—we
wasn’t the elite; we couldn’t speak their singsong
language.
They all spoke English, though, thanks to their machines, so Sam
could wander in and out and make nice comments while sippin’
a bourbon and soda. Finally, though, we had them all seated on this
big central couch that was sunk into the livin’ room and
formed a kinda U, and provided a perfect audience for anybody
standin’ in front of the old-fashioned fireplace, which was
just where Sam was.
“I know you’re all curious as to why we’ve
come together like this,” he began, “so maybe we should
get this over with. It’s been a very long, tough road, even
though most of the perpetrators were obvious from the start. I
admit there are still one or two details I’m hazy about, but
I think perhaps we can fill those in over time.”
“We are here only because we respect Mayar Eldrith,
sir,” Basuti responded in his usually cold manner, kinda
remindin’ me of Addison at her normal self. “If we have
come here to listen to the blatherings of some other-worldly
egomaniac who has delusions that he has a greater mind than we
have, then I, for one, feel insulted.”
“Then you will have to be insulted,” Sam shot back,
cool and casual. “The kind of attitude you just displayed is
at least partly at the root of this whole thing. However, I will
put you to the test. I have assured Vice President Mayar that here,
tonight, I can show him the traitor—or traitors—in his
own ranks, explain the entire plot against the Company, and put an
end to that threat. I can do this for several reasons. For one
thing, I am this ignorant, primitive baboon, but I’m
very good at what I do. Because I am totally unrestricted by your
culture, class, or racial attitudes, I can cut through them. And,
because my wife was willing to put herself into the living hell of
a nasty and addictive alien substance, I have the additional
details I needed. The plot is not stopped. In fact, it is right now
underway. You can dismiss me now, go home, and it will come to pass
and it will succeed. In fact, they’d have gotten away with it
anyway if they hadn’t made it so complex that at least one
major mistake was inevitable. Anybody want to leave and let the
plot go on?”
They sat and stared at him.
“I thought not. So let’s proceed, shall we? This is
such a complex plot, although at its root it’s as simple a
set of motives as all crimes, that it will take some time to put
all the pieces together for you, and with your help and
cooperation. I beg your indulgence.”
“This is intolerable!” muttered Hanrin Sabuuk.
“Eldrith, must we put up with this? Why, the man is not even
an employee!”
“Let the man begin,” the vice president said
impatiently. “There is money riding on this. He claims he can
solve that which has troubled us most these past three years and
indisputably. I told him I did not believe he could do what we
failed to do. The amount is substantial; would any of you stake
your own fortunes with mine?”
“Bah! What do we have to gain if he cannot?” asked
Mukasa.
“You wager money, which you value dearly but won’t
really miss,” Sam told them. “My stake is my life,
which is forfeit if we fail tonight. It is, I admit, of no value to
you but it makes it a very sporting proposition, does it
not?”
I gasped. “Sam! No!” But he paid no attention, and
the others looked at each other and nodded.
“Very well, continue with this foolishness,” said
Dringa wearily. “At least it will be amusing.”
“Interesting, yes, Director, but amusing—I’m
afraid not. Not unless you have a very odd sense of humor.
Let’s begin right at the beginning. I’m afraid some of
what I have to say isn’t all that flattering to you all, but
bear with me.
“First of all,” Sam continued, “let’s
picture a corporate structure whose positions are basically
inherited. This has some advantages if you’re one of the
lucky families, but it also has disadvantages considering that the
only way to gain a position, let alone move up in it, is by
somebody above you dying. With near perfect health and a
two-hundred-and-fifty-year lifespan, this can be a problem. I
hadn’t considered this relevant until I was informed about
you, Director Basuti. A monk, a dedicated holy man committed to his
faith, you literally were forced into corporate politics
by some unexpected premature deaths in your family line.
“Now, if you’re eighty, or a hundred, when this
falls on you, and you really like the job, that’s probably
all right and the way it was intended to be when it was set up. But
when it was set up, the average lifespan was only a hundred and
twenty and families were much larger. You sow your wild oats among
the worlds, work at various jobs within the Company, or do what
your heart dictates, as Director Basuti did. Now, suddenly, we have
a number of high-ranking men in positions while still relatively
young for your people and society. You are all fifty to
seventy-five. It might well be another twenty or thirty years
before you move up. In the meantime, you have great
responsibilities but not great powers. You carry out policy, but
you not only do not initiate it you don’t even get to argue
about it. It must be very frustrating to have to do a job and be
expected to do it well, since you can be skipped over for making
mistakes when the openings finally come, yet not be able to change
or reform policy at all to meet real needs.”
They didn’t say nothin’, but I could see a couple of
’em nodding. He had their attention.
“About four years ago, our subjective time, a small
exploiter team was sent far up into Type One territory in the minus
direction. It was one of a number sent out all the time by the
Office of Exploration and Evaluation, which, I believe, comes under
you, Director Dringa. ‘Research and
development’—such a nice, all-encompassing
term.”
“It is mine now, but not four years ago,” Dringa
responded.
“I know, we’ll get to that. At any rate, one of
these teams, in search of a rare and needed natural substance,
blundered into a world with a very nasty trap in the form of a
symbiotic viral creature. It didn’t show up in the
preliminary medical checks or even the quarantine and volunteer
example because it is strictly a sexually transmitted organism. You
can’t even get it by an injection of an infected
person’s blood. It trades superb health and immunity from
virtually any nongenetic disease in exchange for feeding off the
host—a harmless amount, too. This, quite naturally, also
produces over a period of millennia a totally homogeneous and
incredibly long-lived race and creates a situation where a very low
birth rate is mandated.”
Quickly, Sam filled them in on the background of the world where
it was found, and how the expedition caught it and was trapped by
it.
“Now, then, they followed all the established procedures.
They went to their force point and they sent a report as soon as
they could of all that they knew. They also requested quarantine
and medical study in a safe world and started out, only to suffer
the nightmarish and eventually fatal withdrawal. They got back in
time on the hope that there was something in that world that would
reverse it. They made it, just in time, but not without a couple
suffering some fairly dramatic and permanent brain damage. One of
the women is partially paralyzed; one of the men has the active
intelligence of perhaps a five-year-old child. They sent this
report, too, and it was followed up with research instruments and
requests for samples.”
“Wait a moment,” Hanrin Sabuuk broke in.
“I was head of R & D at that time, and no such
report ever reached me.”
“No, it didn’t,” Sam agreed. “Instead,
the reports that reached you and were subsequently fed into your
computers listed this world as hostile to human habitation and
fatal, and the exploiter team were all declared dead. The supplies
and other equipment sent up there, and the samples sent back, were
all credited to different teams working in the same region. It was
spread out well enough that nothing would have been obvious or
flagged. What had happened was this. Someone had to receive the
initial signals in the routing, and then see in there something
that caught his eye. At first, it was probably no more than petty
corruption—the idea of controlling a disease or substance
that was highly addictive, perhaps. This person needed to know
more, so he enlisted the aid of another, highly ambitious man, a
medical scientist in the managerial classes who felt frustrated and
confined by the narrow limits imposed on him by the Company. He, in
turn, had done some work in a couple of worlds and there had met
and recruited to the Company’s employ some young scientists
in one of those worlds, the most brilliant and impressive of whom
was a young man of whom we know very little except that he uses the
name Dr. Carlos.”
“We do not recruit scientists,” Dringa commented.
“We have an oversupply as it is.”
“Perhaps you don’t, but the Company has
thousands of locals in the worlds on which they have stations, as
well as bankers, crime lords, and even private investigators. We
don’t know what chord was struck between them, but Carlos
learned well. He is at least as proficient as his mentor on the
medical machines and many other machines of the Company. With these
three men, we have the beginnings of a conspiracy. It was Carlos
who was set up in a safe world with all the medical and analytical
equipment he required. I’m sure we’ll be able to
discover how they hid the requisition of these machines and their
distribution when we trace the serial numbers through the computer
network. Carlos, however, was still limited. He didn’t have
access to the best machines and brightest minds in the Company, and
he was woefully short of manpower. I can’t prove it, but I
believe that it was he who came up with the idea of locating a
Nazi-style world, a world in which experimentation on humans
existed and a party elite answerable to no one if they held on to
power reigned. There was such a world with a Company station. The
stationmaster was impersonating a powerful party leader named
Rupert Conrad Vogel.”
“Ah, yes, we know about him,” Mukasa said.
“You do and you don’t. You see, they were very
clever. Vogel received orders to carry out experiments using
supplies of this viral agent with his normal company mail, under a
Most Secret clearance. The orders came from very high in the
Company hierarchy. He had no reason to doubt them, or that he was
doing what the Company wanted. Vogel’s own projects were
equally clever. The virus was represented as something discovered
on that world only recently. They were put to work analyzing it,
diagramming it, and, of course, seeing what it would do to human
subjects, both its powers and limitations. Vogel got his supplies
of the agent—actually the semen of both the trapped humans
and males of the native race there, repacked into injection
capsules in minimal doses—with his normal Company pouches. He
had no idea they were being smuggled into the mail system by Carlos
and those few he had recruited to help him, with the aid of some
corrupt people in the transport union. It was perfect, as far as it
went, since Vogel supplied the raw data and Carlos could then
reinterpret it in light of knowing its true origins.”
“But we know all this,” Mayar Eldrith pointed out.
“You are only filling in the details.”
“I asked for patience. During the experimentation, it was
discovered that the viral agent reproduced only sexually, but
created microscopic, specialized reproductive units. These units
were present in male and female subjects, but they were malformed,
weak, and tended to break up when expelled from the body. This was
very fortunate considering the heightened promiscuity of all the
infected subjects, since a few could quickly create a plague, but
it also indicated that the reason the thing broke down was because
it lacked some certain chemical element. Vogel’s people
searched for that missing link but couldn’t find it, and I
doubt if they would have used it if they had. But this very fact
turned what had begun as basically an illegal side operation with
potential business uses to something else.”
“Now we’re finally getting somewhere,” Basuti
grumbled. I noticed, though, that all the others was
listenin’ real good, and ones like Dakani and Jamispur
hadn’t said a word.
“Now, I won’t take up any of your time detailing the
viral agent or how it works. We all know that. But our man back
here, the one who started it all, began to think along more
ambitious lines. In my world, we once had a woman who became
infamous in history as Typhoid Mary. Typhoid was a particularly
virulent killer disease, easily transmitted and quite fatal. Mary
was found to be literally infested with the disease, but she
didn’t catch it. She was a carrier, immune herself to its
awful effects but able to give it to almost anyone she touched. Now
this fellow started to wonder what a Typhoid Mary, or perhaps many
Typhoid Marys, would do to this world. Suppose they were introduced
as professional courtesans at a party like this one, for the high
and mighty. Not everyone would partake, of course, but some would,
and there would be other opportunities. Now you begin to go into
withdrawal, but someone, an agent for the top man, could offer you
not a cure, perhaps, but a daily fix that would keep you going and
even cure what you might catch. Ask your doctors—no mind can
tolerate that withdrawal, not even any of yours. Right,
Jamispur?”
The doc nodded. “It is true. Within a few hours of the
onset of withdrawal you would kill your family and cut off your leg
for it. It is not a matter of will; the thing is in control of your
mind and its sole imperative is survival.”
“They wouldn’t snare Basuti,” Mukasa chuckled.
“He has a permanent vow of celibacy.” He stopped a
moment. “Say—that’s
right . . . ”
Eyes went to Basuti, all lookin’ at him funny, but he
ignored them. “The plot is an infantile concoction of this
madman,” he said. “First, you would have to find the
missing agent. Second, you would have to get that agent into this
world, something I find impossible to believe. Third, you would
have to have some way of continuing to import it.”
“Oh, once they had enough people—most of you, say,
and some key security people, they wouldn’t need subterfuge.
They could get all of it in they wanted,” Sam pointed out.
“But, you’re right. The thing was, that original,
stranded exploiter team finally figured it out. It was literally
under their noses all the time but it was so obvious and yet so
alien they failed to recognize it. The staple food here is
haipi, and pardon my mispronunciation. There’s some haipi in
these snacks right here. Where I come from, it’s potatoes,
rice, beans—you name it. The rainbow weed was the number-one
staple of the origin world. It grew like wildfire all over the
place and was eaten all the time in every imaginable way by just
about everybody. They long suspected it was something in the diet
or something in the forms and balance of radiation in sun, soil, or
water, and they very courageously self-experimented to find what it
was, but rainbow weed was the last thing they tried because it was
everywhere.
“When they discovered this, they sent the seed pods down
to Carlos to analyze and grow others, and our man went into action.
Under a cover, he had agents on the colonial worlds of your people
recruit, perhaps even kidnap, young women under twenty years of
age, and, by virtue of his committee authority, flagged their
Labyrinth IDs as security recognized and moved them out. Carlos had
already prepared a place for them, a camp in a world without
Company personnel but near the so-called stroke seven worlds like
mine, in a primitive jungle where there was an uncharted weak spot.
There the girls were hypnoscanned to be unable to access
their entire past, and a new, simpler, rougher past consistent with
that world was brought forward. They were given cosmetology
treatments to change their hair, alter their eyes, vary their skin
color, and the rest. They were hooked on the drug, which made them
quite suitable as prostitutes and dancers. The only problem was,
Carlos had few people and a lot of other work to do. There was no
way he could handle up to fifty girls, as there eventually were,
about the limit for the amount of the agent, or
‘juice,’ that the team up in the origin world could
produce and ship, allowing for accidents and unexpected losses. In
the end, it was decided to take a leaf from the Company’s own
method of operation.”
They was all ears now, and all of ’em looked downright
uncomfortable. I begun to worry that maybe they was all in
it.
“Oh, I forgot to mention Addison. I shouldn’t,
she’s a key player and there are things even the one here who
knows her well doesn’t know about her. She had relatives in
one of the colony worlds, and she was a mistress of a Security
Committee member so she had a security code and legitimate reason
to go back and forth. She was, then, the liaison between our man
here, who couldn’t leave, and Carlos. She had a safe world
where she could undergo a rather startling metamorphosis into a
cold, plain-looking woman who had only superficial resemblance to
the women of this world, and she did it all without high tech
machines. She came from a family of professional performers and she
knew just how to do it and do it right. She was also a quite
accomplished method actress, who, when Addison, was really a
different personality. Colored contact lenses and tinted glasses
added the final touch. She approached Arnie Siegel, a major
criminal boss in the northern hemisphere, about the girls. He was
big and powerful enough to cover for her, and she was able to hand
him some Company gadgets and secrets that made it easy for him to
evade the law and gave him an edge on possibly knocking over his
own boss, a fellow named Wycliffe, who was ignorant of the affair.
The only ones he let in on it were people he owned, body and soul,
such as the master pimp Edward ‘Fast Eddie’ Small, who
would take over Siegel’s position when Siegel moved up, and
gunmen personally loyal who would oversee the project’s
security.”
“You mean they turned fifty girls of our race
into whores for this—this—filthy world?” Hanrin
Sabuuk seemed real angry and upset at that.
“Yes, because this not only assured them the preservation
of the fifty with no effort on their part, and also because by then
Aldrath, here, had by sheer accident stumbled into the very
existence of this agent, or drug, and knew just from its existence
that the plot had to be very ambitious and go very high. His big
attention was on Vogel, since that’s where the experiments
were and he knew Vogel had to know who was behind it, but he sent a
couple of agents to scout around this other world and set something
up just in case. The agents went completely by the book and
followed absolutely standard procedures; as a result, they were led
by the nose by ones who already knew the book to Lindy Crockett, a
New York private eye with mob connections, and were highly
impressed with her. They should have been. She was carefully
coached on what to say and do to impress them. She was more than
connected; she was the chief private eye agency handling the
Wycliffe mob’s investigations. From that point on, there was
a constant flow of information from Crockett, all of it written by
the very people she was supposed to be investigating. It checked
out and was mostly truthful; it was just worthless. She gave
Aldrath Addison and Carlos, which was safe enough, but said they
couldn’t be photographed and gave slightly distorted
descriptions and sketches so they wouldn’t be recognized even
if they were next to the sketches. She sent the news of
Carlos’s operation in Guiana, but only after it had served
its purpose and was already pretty well closed down. And you,
Aldrath, took that information and fed it into the computer and
came to all the conclusions they wanted you to.”
Aldrath shrugged. “A detective is only as good as his
information.”
“But you were so certain that this was a sideline, a minor
offshoot, that you didn’t even keep permanent security
personnel there to independently check it out. You see,
you’re vulnerable to this because you all have sealed
yourself off here, away from the action. All of you are only as
good as your information, and your computers believe what
they’re told to believe. The origin world was listed as
lethal and useless, so you ignored it. Nobody even dared poke their
head in and check it out. The data banks were sacred,
couldn’t be tampered with. Maybe they can’t
be—but all that means is that you tamper with the data you
feed into them. You were had. You’ve got thousands of
stations out there. Who’s going to check to see if a
hypnoscanner was really ordered by a station authorized to get one
and that they received it? So long as the order is proper and
lawfully entered, and so is the receipt, you don’t really
know where that damned equipment went.”
“A physical audit of everything is impossible in so vast a
system,” Mukasa noted. “We know there’s a certain
amount of built-in graft, but we try to keep it to acceptable
levels.”
“Uh huh. The trouble is, you don’t know when that
level’s reached unacceptable. So, now we’re set up.
They are rolling and they have their active agent. The rainbow weed
even grows well and apparently normally in worlds more in our line.
Its molecular structure and balance seem identical to the
parent’s. The trouble is, it doesn’t work. The addicts
like it, but they still need their shot. It grows quickly, so you
plant it every damned place you safely can—on the hundreds
and hundreds of safe worlds. Nobody cares about the safe worlds
except as havens and rest stops, so nobody ever bothers to look,
say, ten, or perhaps a hundred, miles from the rest areas and
supplies. I’ll bet if you do you’ll find this
crazy-looking stuff multiplying like crazy. It’s going to be
the kudzu of parallel worlds.”
“What is this kudzu?” Hanrin asked.
“Never mind. You’ll see what I mean in time. At just
this time, we threw them a real curve. Aldrath revealed that he was
going to kidnap Vogel and had sealed off access to Vogel’s
world. Now Vogel couldn’t be reached without betraying a
hand. You know that story, too, in gruesome detail. We went crazy
trying to figure out how in hell you could know the precise instant
from three different parallel worlds that some specific person
would be going through the particular entrance cube. Then it hit
us. Vogel gave us the slip but took Brandy with him; as a result,
we could track him because her security code included a tracker and
was superimposed over her old code. The ambush was painfully
simple. They simply waited until their devices, set to
Brandy’s tracking broadcaster, all went beep together
and moved. The object was first and foremost to kill Vogel, of
course, but if they could they were also told to spare Brandy. She
got away with a wound, since in that confined space it was
impossible to guarantee anything. I got a head wound, which was
real bad but not fatal. They couldn’t do much, but they were
prepared in case anyone survived except Brandy, since they would
certainly be rushed to the Center—after quarantine and
examination. That gave them, ahead of time, the names of any
survivors, namely me, and the nature and extent of the wound.
Again, they pulled their favorite trick.
“Care at the Center for most things is automated and
computer controlled and monitored. The physician with his
diagnostic computer just puts in the treatment and the like and
it’s done. Knowing it was a head wound and which doctor was
alerted, they used the standard security taps on all medical
emergencies and intercepted the doctor’s instructions, adding
a small extra detail, a slightly higher level of a support drug
that would keep me comatose indefinitely. It was such a fine
difference it took months before any doctor noticed it and
questioned it.”
“Who could tap into the medical line with such knowledge
and finesse?” Mayar asked.
“In a minute, sir. First, why Brandy? Well, first of all,
they’d just lost their experimental subjects and the heat was
on. It was going to be dangerous to bring in more than small
quantities of the needed semen in the future. My death—or, as
it turned out, my coma—sent her into severe depression. They
knew her well, had her entire mental profile. She would go in after
the only lead left. This did them several favors. First, since
Brandy went in and would be giving detailed, inside reports,
Aldrath would hold off on a major commitment there pending what she
found. Second, they could control those reports, via Crockett, and
keep Aldrath more concerned about Brandy’s safety than about
what was actually there. Finally, they already had a Brandy of
their own, one taken in the usual manner from a world close to ours
but where the duplicate’s life was, shall we say, less
fortunate and the individual more opportunist.”
Brandy Two smiled. “How sweet.”
“The idea was an eventual switch. Brandy Two would be
primed and sent back as Brandy One. They were very impressed by
our Brandy, and none too sure that she could or would
carry out their orders implicitly, hooked or not. There were a few
circumstances in the Vogel tests where people committed suicide
rather than face an impossible alternative. They couldn’t
take the chance. Brandy Two, as Brandy One, would have
Aldrath’s confidence here and Bill Markham’s at home.
She would also be an effective test case if they found the right
element for their plot, since she could walk right into this world
of yours on a security pass.”
“Impossible!” Mukasa shouted. “You go too far.
It is precisely because such twins exist that we have our unique
security codes. Even twins from adjacent worlds who have precisely
the same history and development will show up as different
individuals under our system.”
“And so would both of them—but they don’t.
They don’t, because Brandy One’s original code still
has the security code and tracker superimposed on it and that
drowns out and supersedes the old code. That code is intended to be
temporary and so it’s not in the master identification system
as such.”
“But only the security medical technician who imposed it
would know that specific code and be able to provide it for
duplication!” Mayar pointed out.
“Exactly so. Isn’t that right, Chief Medical
Security Advisor Jamispur?”
The doc jumped. “Look here, if you’re implying that
I’m a part of this conspiracy—”
“I apologize, sir. I was not implying anything. I am
saying that you are the medical technician who knew and took Carlos
under your wing when you were younger. I am saying that you were
the ambitious and frustrated scientist tapped by our man to set
this all up. That’s why you got promoted to Chief Medical
Security Advisor, so you could be in the best position for
this.”
“Now, hold on! I picked Jamispur!” Mayar
said.
“How?”
“Why—computer records, job performance and
proficiency, medical and psychiatric evaluations. The usual. He was
the best man for the job.”
“Of course he was. Because for several years our man had
been letting the computer know all about Jamispur—exactly
what they both wanted. He probably scored ninety-nine out of a
possible hundred. Doesn’t pay to be absolutely perfect. Your
computer picked him from among the staff after that tragic flyer
‘accident’ killed his predecessor. Garbage in, garbage
out. How does it feel to be garbage, Doc?”
“This is outrageous!” Jamispur stormed. “I
will not sit here and allow any more of this insanity to
continue!”
“Oh, yes, you will,” said young Dakani softly,
speaking for the first time. The tone left no doubt that the doc
was gonna stay, whether tied up and muzzled or comfortable. Dakani
and he was the same class; no political or jurisdictional problems
there.
“It had to be Jamispur all along. He was the only one who
could duplicate the security code. He was the only one who could
feed that code to Carlos and his accomplices, via Addison, so that
they could set their own tracers for the ambush. He was the only
one who had the complete medical and psychiatric history of Brandy
One and even had the opportunity right from the start to plant the
seed in her mind that if anything happened to me she’d do
what she did. As chief medical security advisor, he could tap into
any of the Center’s lines as well as just call security at
the station and know exactly what to do to neutralize me—all
by phone, or its equivalent, here, with his trusty little computer
and all those wonderful access codes a top security position gives
you. What was it, Doc? Ambition? Blackmail? Or did they just keep
refusing to let you experiment on your own with people?”
“I have rights here. I do not have to answer to the likes
of you,” the doc responded kinda surly.
“No doubt. And no doubt you’re good enough to have
booby-trapped your own mind and memories. We start probing and
prying and it all goes away. Don’t worry, Doc. We’re
not even gonna try that stuff. We’ll just walk you
down to this little room, strip you, tie you to the bed so you
can’t hurt yourself, and give you as many jolts of this stuff
you seem to love so much as it takes until you’re hooked.
We’ll let the two ladies, here, handle it all. They know all
about how to do it, thanks to you. All we need is a name.
It’s a name we already know, but your supporting testimony
will give Dakani, here, the right of immediate arrest. I’m
sure our big man hasn’t booby-trapped his brain.
We’ll learn the rest from him.”
Jamispur was sweatin’ somethin’ awful. I
didn’t even know these people could sweat till then,
and it looked mighty sweet to me. “Don’t,” he
managed, his voice just a hoarse whisper. “I’ll
tell.”
“Sorry, Doc, that ain’t enough,” Sam told him.
“You could give any name here and then stall for time, hoping
that you’d get sprung. It has to be our route, while
these gentlemen here remain as the vice president’s pampered
guests.”
Suddenly Jamispur leaped from the couch toward Sam. Me, my twin,
and Dakani all moved ’bout the same time, shovin’ him
back so he fell right into that whole mess of Directors. There was
absolute chaos, everybody strugglin’ with everybody and
shoutin’ curses in two languages, nobody clear what was what,
when, just like in one of them thirties thrillers, the lights went
out and plunged the room into darkness.
There was more shouts, but the lights was back on in maybe a
minute and we finally untangled. Well, most of us did.
Considerin’ how much melodrama we seen so far, I really
wasn’t all that surprised to see that Jamispur didn’t
get up. He had one of them fondue forks right through his throat,
and he was gaspin’ for air but not makin’ a sound. By
the time we did what we could, he was dead.
Sam looked over at Dakani, who was lookin’ back at
someplace in the hall. The young man then turned back. “Did
you get it?” Sam asked him.
“I got it. But I kind of hoped it wouldn’t be
fatal.”
“Sorry,” Sam replied with an apology. “I
thought he’d use one of the butter knives. I’m out of
the wrong society to even think of fondue
forks.”
Basuti turned, sweatin’ too, and wiped his face nervously.
“All right—you’ve convinced us there’s a
true traitor here, but you’ve just lost your only
identification of him. You’ll never get any prints off
that fork handle. It’s a rough-grip
handle.”
“Nice of you to notice that. You might be a detective yet.
Well, I admit I didn’t really expect more than an
attempt, but this will do nicely. I regret not being able
to deliver a smoking gun, but I think a smoking fondue fork will do
just as well, although from the sound of it I can see why nobody
ever used it in the old stories.”
I watched Dakani Grista vanish back into another room, then come
back, lookin’ real grave. I had to hand it to Sam. I never
woulda believed that anybody this slick woulda ever gone for it. I
mean, our man still had lots of friends around. Bide your time
while the doc got juiced and make your getaway.
“I’m afraid you’ve all been the victim of a
very melodramatic setup,” Sam told them. “The fact was,
though, I really couldn’t lose by it. If Jamispur
hadn’t lunged at me, or tried for a getaway, we
wouldn’t have pulled it and we’d have taken three to
five days to get our absolute evidence. Fortunately, none of you
have ever seen a vintage detective thriller movie. I presented the
motive, opportunity, and method to commit a murder here tonight,
and after all was chaos, partly aided and abetted by my two lovely
cohorts in crime here and the very dubious Dakani, we even killed
the lights, an obvious setup if ever there was one, but since we
had our man backed into a corner and made certain we didn’t
give him enough time to think about good fortune, he took what
appeared to be a wondrous stroke of luck to do away with the only
witness who could credibly finger him. And so we can all let Dakani
do his duty and get it out in the open now, by fingering the man
we—Brandy and I, at least—have known was behind this
from the start.”
“Mukasa Lamdukur,” said the security man, “I
hereby suspend your rights under the Security Act on the grounds of
treason and murder.”
Mukasa stared at him. “You are both insane. You have no
right to do this.”
“Well, it wasn’t hard to figure out once both Brandy
and I were thinking straight again,” Sam told him. “At
that first, brief, dinner meeting in this very room, before the
Vogel affair, you made a slip and had to cover it. You betrayed a
fairly complete knowledge of my world, something you
shouldn’t have known unless it had been of particular study
and interest to you.”
“I told you—I was there, or very near there, when I
was young.”
“Yes. World War II, I believe. But we were told that no
one from your class is allowed to go to any world that does not
have a full station and Company operation, for obvious security
reasons. The Company wasn’t even there in the forties. It
didn’t establish its first outpost there until the
mid-fifties, ten years after the war, and it didn’t establish
a full station until the sixties. We had been discussing war, so
when you made your slip you covered with a war. The war
Vogel’s side won in his world and lost in ours. Why lie,
unless you had something to hide? Unless you had been personally
researching the world of Brandy and me with the idea of making a
switch and eliminating a number of possible irritants at once? It
wasn’t enough to hang anything on you that would stick, but
it was enough to tell us which one of you it was. When I was able
to check, I discovered that, four years ago, you had the
communications post now held by Director Basuti, the newest member
and the cause of the musical chairs in the group.
Communications—who would get the first frantic messages from
that exploiter team. Communications—which, by its very
nature, is the post that gets all the information fed into the
computers first. And now, operations, where you can issue
clearances, monitor all security personnel, and get any question
answered with no problems.”
“You are guessing. You can prove nothing,” he
snarled.
“Dakani?”
The security man clapped his hands, and a big paintin’ on
the wall over the fireplace winked out, much to my surprise. It was
like some kinda big, flat, square TV screen. The scene on it was of
lousy quality but it was clear enough. All of our clearly
recognizable outlines was there, and then Jamispur lunges, we go
into our act, forcin’ him between Basuti and Mukasa, and
there is Mukasa’s hand, almost by accident, hittin’ the
fondue fork, takin’ it out, and then rolling and
stabbin’ the doc in the throat while he pushed against the
doc’s head with his other hand. Then he rolls away.
“I’m not against high tech when it’s
useful,” Sam told them. “We often use infrared and
other means to get photos and information in the dark back in my
world. I figured they’d have an even more improved model
here. We mounted it last night behind the mantelpiece. At least
five technicians in various places caught it independently on their
own machines. Two were witnessed by representatives of the
President and the Chairman.”
Mukasa seemed almost to wilt. In a flash he’d gone from
the most confident man around to a scared little boy.
“Oh, relax, Mukasa,” Sam told him. “The truth
is, you just did yourself a favor. When is your mistress, Ioyeo,
due back from visiting her sisters and mother in the
colonies?”
“S—she’s back. Oh, the curses of the Nine
Hells, she’s dead, damn it all. I had to do it.
Don’t you see? She showed herself to Brandy, here. They
knew she was Addison. But Ioyeo played around, as she was
told to. She’s serviced everybody here except
Basuti.”
“Maybe it was all for the best,” I put in.
“For her sake, too. Then she never got to make love to you
one last time.”
He looked strange. “Yes, she did. Last night. That’s
when I . . . Oh, gods! She just looked up at
me, her eyes wide, and even in death she had this look of total
surprise.”
“Not half as surprised as you gonna be in a few hours,
honey,” Brandy Two noted sourly.
Dakani was quick. “Did you make love to any other woman
since? Or anybody else where semen was exchanged?”
“Why, yes. I felt—charged up. It was the first time
I ever had to do anything like that myself and I got—a
thrill. It was exciting. It was pure power. I slept like a log
afterward, and after I woke up today I had the longest, most
passionate session with my wife I’ve had in years. If
she’d turned me on like that in the past ten years I’d
never have even had Ioyeo.”
Dakani was already on the communicator. I just hoped his missus
wasn’t feelin’ so turned on she had a few boy whores on
the side. Hell, this scheme of theirs might work anyways!
Sam looked at him. “It’s almost a fitting
punishment. You never knew just how much she hated you. You never
even guessed how much she hated all of you, this Company, this
world, this whole system. She was the fifty-first Typhoid Mary, and
the first to come in. She hated you so much that she was willing to
destroy her own mind, kill that brilliant if tragic intellect, just
to make you the first victim. To spread it beyond any hope of
containment. This thing thinks that humans are only turned on for a
few days a year, so every day it sees we can screw profitably, it
forces us to do just that, early and often. It’s just a
virus; it doesn’t think. Every day is just one of those few
to it.”
“Oh, my gods and demons!” Mukasa moaned. He knowed
now what we already did.
“Carlos, too, sacrificed much,” Sam continued.
“You see, she loved him. He was—is—a genius, a
brilliant man from apparently a very poor and very oppressed race.
He had passion, commitment, and was everything she ever dreamed of
in a man. He loved her dearly, yet he did this to her, at her
request. He is one hell of a man, and, after this, if we
can’t track him down and pick him up through the agents here,
he will be the most dangerous and deadly human being in all the
universes.”
An obviously shaken Mayar Eldrith got some of his composure
back. “But—so she was double-crossing him?
Why? She had everything. Everything!”
I looked around at all them silver-spoon, upper-class, First
Royal Family types and I felt sick. “They ain’t never
gonna understand, Sam. Let ’em eat cake.”
“But what, exactly, was the plot?” Basuti asked us
when all had been calmed down. “I can understand motive, yes,
on both their parts, but I just can’t see how they were going
to take control and get that substance in.”
“First of all, it didn’t matter to
Addison—Ioyeo—or Carlos if they did get the
substance in. They had thirty hours from their last drink of the
rainbow weed pulp to get the girls in after the setup and party was
all arranged and infect as many upper-class types as possible.
Because of Mukasa’s last embrace with Ioyeo, we wound up with
six cases so far and maybe more. Imagine what half a dozen initial
ones would have done. The cornerstone of security and the corporate
classes would have been devastated before they knew what hit them.
That was all Addison and Carlos wanted. The destruction. But they
did have a way, and they made Brandy prove it would work by walking
through.”
“What? How’s that?”
“Once they found the one that worked, or actually a way to
get almost any normal rainbow weed to work, they gave it to both
Brandys and took samples from their vaginal areas. They found live,
complete viral reproductive units there. They gave them pulped but
not pureed bulbs that grow on top of the stalks—the seed
pods. They contain millions of tiny seeds and they are resistant to
tremendous amounts of things. They are, among other things,
indigestible but harmless. Only some of those fifty girls, restored
to their original looks, being the correct race, would be used to
spread the infection. The first, small group, only a couple, would
be brought in as mistresses from the colonies under their original
codes. Everyone of your race has the right to come here, at least
for visits. The families are too closely interrelated. The scanners
would pick up swallowed balloons, and even just clusters of foreign
things where they shouldn’t be. But they were not set to pick
up addicts alone—a very complex process, finding one virus
that you could only kill by killing the person—but only
unusual things. Each of the girls would be fed till they burst with
seed pods. Once away, they would be given diarrhetics. The human
feces, with the seeds, would have been spread in a private
greenhouse. The girls could then conveniently be discovered to be
addicts in withdrawal and sent to the Center.”
“Yeah,” I added. “In just two or three weeks
that greenhouse would be up to its armpits in rainbow
weed.”
“With all the alien races coming in and out and all the
field people, it was impossible to scan the normal food and wastes
that might show up in the scan, even if that scan showed odd
material. It usually did, since people have different foods and
diets,” Sam pointed out. “Short of forcing everyone,
regardless of race or class or what, to take an enema and have
their stomach pumped, there’s no way to guard against
this.”
“And what was the secret of the plant’s missing
ingredient?” Mayar asked.
“It wasn’t soil, certainly, nor geographic position.
The thing was a plant that converted sunlight into food without
chlorophyll. It was sunlight-dependent if it didn’t need much
else. There are differences in the amount of solar radiation, and
the type and degree, even within one world, and they subtly vary
every world away. The exact balance of the origin world was
required for maximum efficiency. Any variations and it was below
maximum photosynthesis. It was actually a slight excess of one of
those chemicals that made the difference. You’ll have to get
the chemists to tell you just why it’s not obviously
different in analysis, but I think it’s the same stuff as on
the other worlds, only when it has an excess it converts it somehow
into an allied chemical, and that’s the one. No excess, no
biochemical waste. Any good greenhouse with special lights and the
exact radiation balance of the origin world can duplicate it,
giving you perfect rainbow weed that will sustain this virus
indefinitely.”
“Yeah, and if they hadn’t made two big mistakes,
it’d all worked and most of this world would have been under
’em in a couple of weeks,” I pointed out. “One
was fallin’ for the same trap y’all was in here. Things
was goin’ so good, and they was so dedicated and radical and
ruthless they got real cocky, started doin’ side deals they
didn’t have to do. Me, for example. They figured when I come
back from Vogel’s place they’d stick me under
Jamispur’s machines and he could restore me and program me
and all the rest. But I got shot, and Sam wasn’t dead, so I
went to the Center instead, and I had them do it. But not all of
it. I ain’t never been able to have straight hair in my life
and I hate cornrows with a passion. Friend of mine went
bald wearin’ them things. And we girls spend
millions a year tryin’ to get our complexion creamy smooth
and totally even. I kept the hair and the complexion. When I
finally showed up down there, I didn’t look like my twin.
They couldn’t make no switch, so they had to nab me and hook
me, too.”
“Then, when they knew they were near, they got
arrogant,” Sam said. “They did a quickie search and
recruitment for a down-and-out Sam Horowitz who was corrupt as
hell. We didn’t think they’d do it, but we were ready
for them when they did. There aren’t very many of me.
I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or depressing. I
nailed him in the Labyrinth. I talked to him first, because I just
wasn’t sure I could kill myself. I forced him into an
available world and we had a talk. He had Nazis and concentration
camps in his world, too. He lost the same relatives I had. It
didn’t bother him a bit. Not a bit. Before I knew it,
I’d blown his fucking face in.”
“That meant they thought they had Sam Two when they
actually had Sam back home,” I added. “We had a real
go-round. He finally showed us that only by helpin’ him did
we guarantee our supply. He turned us in and our job was to press,
finagle, or in some way get one or both of us to the origin world.
See, that was their final and biggest mistake. More’n once
they used that damned trackin’ gizmo inside me for their own
ends, includin’ wastin’ Vogel. Carlos was so busy and
so sure of himself, and Addison had so much on her mind and one
corner of it on the clock, they never bothered to take it out or
turn it off. Since we was the only two addicts they had left not of
their own race, Sam and Bill felt sure that they wouldn’t do
nothin’ bad to us till they had their cure, their agent. We
was the only guinea pigs they had.”
Sam sighed. “Well, that about wraps it all up.” He
downed the last of his drink.
“Uh uh. You forgot one thing. Who killed Siegel and then
helped me escape into the Labyrinth? That’s the only part
that has me completely confused,” I said.
“Oh, Addison killed Siegel, just as you thought. The only
thing unusual was the reason for that argument. It was
you.”
“Huh? Me?”
“Yeah. She wanted you for experimental or sentimental or
whatever purposes; she had personally dropped off the load of
filled shot capsules earlier in the evening. That’s why the
Labyrinth was running when you first saw it. The guards knew her,
so they didn’t think anything was wrong with it. Then she
went into town to make some phone calls, probably to discover why
Carlos, who should have been there, was not. She was just going
back, but saw the office light on and went in to have a talk with
him. She had seen you earlier out running, so she knew you were
here, and decided to take you with her, probably to their safe
world hideout, until the rest of the plans played out. Siegel
refused. They got into a bad argument in which Siegel revealed
inadvertently how much he knew and understood about all this, which
was far more than he should have. Whether this was just his people
monitoring Carlos closely and the Brandy Two project or what
we’ll never know. She lost her temper and shot him. She was
used to being in charge, but suddenly it occurred to her that she
was in a very bad position in a house completely surrounded by
Siegel’s most trusted bodyguards. She did a force on the
Labyrinth with a remote device, which drew the guards, and she
couldn’t get away.
“In the meantime, you’d discovered the body, gotten
rashly accused of the murder—you know better than to pick up
a murder weapon, damn it!—and tried to shoot your way out.
Addison had no choice when she saw this. You polished off a number
of the guards, and she picked off the rest. This meant you would
get away, something she hadn’t planned on, but also cleared
the way for her to come out, blame you for the crime, and take a
leisurely exit of her own.”
“Uh huh. Two things wrong there, though. First, where did
the rest of the juice go? I shoulda had hundreds of capsules in
that case. And, second, how do you know all this? Everybody who was
there ’cept me is dead, and I didn’t know.”
“The rest of the capsules had gone directly into
Siegel’s office wall safe, of course, to be picked up and
sent down to Fast Eddie the next day by plane. The remaining
package was yours. He planned on you being around awhile. For some
reason, he wanted you bad enough to risk Addison. In the end, for
all his power and money, Arnie Siegel was a very lonely man whose
own success required him to be totally paranoid at all times. He
couldn’t have the shadow dancers permanently. You were
probably the only human being in his whole world he could trust
absolutely. As for my source of information—you’re
still a hell of a detective. You figure it out.” He got up
like he was goin’ someplace.
“Sam—”
“Not now, Brandy. We’ll talk tomorrow.” And,
with that, he made his excuses and left. I started after him, but
Aldrath stopped me, then took me over in a corner.
“I think you proved conclusively tonight that it was time
I retired,” he said. “It was a rather stunning and
embarrassing collection of deduction, hard work, and theatrics, but
the root cause was my own failures.”
I kept lookin’ after where Sam disappeared.
My mind wasn’t on no more small talk.
“Don’t you know how he knew, Brandy?”
I started and turned to him. “Huh?”
“He was there. Once he recovered here and then found out
what had happened to you from me, there was no stopping him. He
wanted no one notified, not even Crockett. He trusted nobody and
nothing. In the close to a year you were shadow dancing, he managed
to research and even worm his way into confidences. He had a fair
amount of money—he took it in in precious metals and
converted it—and he knew his job. In only three months he
managed to get a job with the Crockett agency. I have no idea what
sort of means he used to come up with the credentials and
background, but I suppose he knew just what she would look for and
how she’d find it, being in the business himself. He watched
over you, Brandy. And he kept me from going in full tilt with
squads and invading the operation. He felt we could get far more by
letting it run.”
“He was sure right.”
Sam . . . there all the time.
We was fast approachin’ that time I didn’t want to
think about. “What will happen to us? And to the shadow
dancers?”
“The events of tonight will not be kept under wraps very
long. When Carlos hears that the plot is compromised, he will
undoubtedly finish off the shadow dancers and regroup. When he
hears that Ioyeo, his Addison, is dead, he will redouble his
efforts. He has no clearance to headquarters, but he has a lot of
skill and knowledge and equipment and at least a small
organization. As Sam said, until we capture or kill him, he will be
the most dangerous man alive. Undoubtedly they will be going
through every single detail of Jamispur’s life trying to
figure out the connection. They must have been together quite some
time. At least we’ll find out who he is and where he came
from.”
“And us?” We’d been in on everything, but both
Brandy Two and me had been kept under close watch and restrictions.
We was Typhoid Marys, too.
“Well, everyone with the live reproducible virus will be
under strict quarantine restrictions. You will be kept with your
double here tonight and locked in, as before. Tomorrow, you both
will be transferred to the Center for tests, after which you will
have some hard decisions to make.”
“What kinda decisions?”
“Options for the future. Someday, perhaps soon, we might
be able to stabilize this thing, but its very nature will require
taking something every day for life. Wait for the doctors.
They’ll explain it.”
“Aldrath—promise me. Promise me that you won’t
let Sam leave till I made them decisions. Will you do that much for
me?”
“I think I can guarantee that much. Farewell, Brandy. You
and Sam cost me my job, but you saved my world. I have children. I
can’t be angry with you for that.”
Then they came to take me back up to my comfortable prison I
shared with my twin. I didn’t see Sam till the next day, and
it was clear he was comin’ off a real drunk. Still, they let
me have some time with him.
“Sam—I heard what you done back at Siegel’s.
Damn it, I do love you, Sam. There’s gotta be a way
for this to work out. For us.”
“How?” he managed, his head poundin’
somethin’ awful. I could tell. I knowed they had hangover
cures here and I got the idea he just didn’t want one.
“Brandy, they’re going to convert Carlos’s old
safe world into a quarantine colony. Any who have the full virus,
and any who for some reason wish to join them, will be able to do
so. They will be researching this thing for years to come. In a
short time that colony will be able to provide a small supply of
the semen for capsules, allowing some people limited mobility
elsewhere so long as they take the capsules and can’t
transmit the virus. It’ll be a leper colony, but a very
pleasant and self-governing one. Owl” He felt his
head.
“Sam—you know how hard it is. The only way out for
me is to take the cure, and you saw all them folks who took the
cure. Not a one of ’em is right. I love you, Sam. I really
do. Come with us to this place. It ain’t so bad, and
we’d still be together. Maybe they need a private
eye.”
“Forget it, babe. I can do a car chase at a hundred and
ten miles an hour through city traffic but I can’t stand
roller coasters. Know why? I can’t stand not to be in full
control. Besides, it wouldn’t be the way you imagine. You
have your full intellect, but it’s untempered. You have no
inhibitions and no brakes except what is necessary for your own
survival. You know that even now you’re only being civilized
because they’ll shoot you if you aren’t. You
aren’t human anymore. Love and lust are synonyms to you. The
only meaningful concept of right and wrong you have is that what
gives pleasure to you or is necessary for your survival is right.
It won’t let you get hurt, it won’t let you get
depressed for long, and there’s no guilt, no sense of
responsibility. That’s why I couldn’t take the stuff
myself. A Jew without guilt is just a Unitarian. The Almighty would
strike me dead for it. Right now, you want me, and you have that
cultural and intellectual knowledge of right and wrong, but
there’s no sense on the gut level. I can’t handle
that.”
“Damn it, Sam! Then I’ll take the capsules. Move
back in to Philadelphia and our world. It can be like it was
before.”
“Really? You’d be picking up the cab driver and the
laundry man and every jock you met at the health club or on the
streets while you exercise. I wouldn’t have a wife, I’d
have a wildly promiscuous and uncontrollable daughter I
couldn’t depend on personally or professionally.”
“Look—you control the capsules. I’d have to do
just what you said, act just the way you wanted.”
He looked appalled. “My god! You can’t even see how
that sounds. I don’t want to own somebody. I
don’t want a slave. I want an equal partner who sticks with
me and puts up with me because she loves me.” He looked up at
the security guards and made a motion. “Good-bye, babe. I
need a drink.”