THE DECEIVERS

by Alfred Bester

  “But I did. I did! Every tank in the network was sending the message.”

  “What message?”

  “That I was safe. Didn’t you get it?”

  “I got nothing. What’d you send?”

  “That I was okay.”

  “The only okays I got were from the zoo and a bank and a consulate.”

  “What were they?”

  “That your psycat could share half a cage—that the bank could only allow me half the money I wanted—that a half-year visa permit for Triton was okay. Wait a minute. Yes. Also that I could share half a cabin on the jet to Ganymede.”

  “What did the computers say? Exactly?”

  “One-half O.K. The ‘half’ was the printed number.”

  “Oh Rogue, Rogue, darling Rogue! Where were your wits?”

  “Planning the Triton hit. For your sake.”

  “Yes, yes, and thank you, my love, thank you. But. Well… What’s a small cup of coffee? A half cup? Or, what’s a half-man-half-god?”

  “Why, a demitasse, of cour—” His voice faltered. “And. A. Demi. God…? Oh jeeze! Sweet jigjeeze! So it was ‘Demi O.K.’ all along. Demi from the French for half.” he burst out laughing, all anger gone. “I’m the world’s prize ass.”

  “You had more important things on your mind.”

  “But I should have—” he sputtered. “I, Ich, Moi, the late, great synergist, to miss an obvious clue like that! How the mighty have fallen.”

  “Not in my eyes.”

  “Oh you! You’re queer for me. But why didn’t you use your name in the message, love?”

  “And announce it to the world? The code was specified only for you, FWO, For Winter Only, in the command sent out to the network.”

  “Only for me? Then how did the Duke of Death know you were safe, and a computer could tell me where?”

  “His tank must have overridden the command and released it to him. Apparently the Manchu’s loving trick is a blabbermouth.”

  “Trick? Ah-ha! So you know about that sick fag scam too, eh?”

  “Us tanks know everything.”

  “How’d you know the hassle was cooled and it was safe to come out? The network again?”

  “Nig Englund’s zoo tank input all. I must say, darling, what you did to To-ma Yung was so fiendish that I’m a little scared of you.”

  “Not such a simple arithmetic clown after all?”

  “Oh, I did hurt you!” She reverted to the original Demi of Solar Media, frightened and on the verge of tears. “I knew it would, but what could I do? You had to have an answer and I had to tell the truth. You’d have seen through any lie and been twice as angry. Please, Rogue, try to understand. Please? Rogue? Friends?” She stuck out a hand and began to resemble a trustworthy, loyal, naked girl scout.

  He looked at the hand, at her tortured face, suddenly grinned, leaped up and dashed into the workshop. He returned almost immediately and sat down again alongside her. She hadn’t changed her pose or expression. She seemed frozen in anguish.

  “Since you and the computer fantasized about it so erotically,” he said, “we might as well make it real.” He slid the pink-gold seal ring onto the third finger of her left hand. “Want me to light a fire, love? I don’t know whether there’s any champagne in the fridge.”

  She looked at the ring, squealing, every inch the Virginia debutante. “Oh Rogue! Rogue! Rogue!” She flung herself on him and smothered his mouth with hers.

  He accepted his reward with pleasure, then, “R. Ls gtbd. Cmn Stsp.” He freed his lips. “Right. Let’s go to bed. Come on, Starsprite.”

  But her muffled adoration had turned to muffled pain and surprise.

  “Demi! What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Ex-excuse m-me,” she faltered, “but I think I’m going to shell a pea.”

  “What!”

  “I think so.”

  “It’s only two months.”

  “Yes, b-but…”

  “And you don’t show anything up front.”

  “Yes, b-but it’s all new and different. The f-first time ever. I… I seem to be b-breaking all the rules of civilized warfare.”

  “Holy saints preserve us! I’ll call Odessa. Don’t move. Don’t do anything.” He raced to the phone, wildly excited. “Another brand-new pattern, by God! Another brand new crisis. Never a dull moment with a Titanian. I wonder what in the world we’re going to prod—Hello, Odessa? Rogue Winter here. Help!”

  Odessa Partridge here. I began this lunatic love story, so I’ll wrap it up.

  We’re holding the Manchu in strict secrecy for several reasons. One of them is that he’s burned out, as Nig Englund warned, and we’re trying an interesting experiment. You know how patients with failed livers are attached to an apparat which restores their blood. We’re trying to restore the Manchu’s mind the same way, using dolphins.

  They’re very bright, perhaps more so than most humans, and we link them with the Duke in neural series and run a cerebral charge through them. We’re hoping that the dolphin’s circuits will open up the Manchu’s; he’s too brilliant to waste.

  Perhaps I’d better explain that for the types who just switch on a lamp and don’t ask any questions. I’ll use Xmas tree lights as an example. When they’re wired in parallel you have a pair of lines coming from the outlet, and each bulb is connected to both these parallel lines, like this:

  When a string of lights is wired in series they’re like a string of beads. A single line passes the current through each bulb in turn and they all light up when the circuit is completed:

  ——O——O——O——O——

  We did this with the dolphins and the Duke; he’s the final brain in the series. Of course, if and when he recovers his marbles he may start thinking like a dolphin and take to the sea, and if he turns deadly again the fishing industry may be in tor a hard time.

  While we’re holding the Manchu, the Meta negotiations with Triton promise to turn realistic. Oparo and his Merry Mafia aren’t too happy about that, and Jay Yael is struggling to cool it. I had to send Barb back to Ganymede to help. Incidentally, she pulled off a coup; she enlisted Winter’s teenyzapper for Intelligence training. That young demon will make one hell of a Garda op.

  The Titanian sprite was right; she shattered all the rules. She gave birth to a pair of twin boys without any trouble, just shelled them out like peas. They weighed five pounds each, ten pounds in all, and she never showed it, before, behind, between, above or below. And how could she have produced ten pounds (10) of hybrid in two months (2)? The Solar Medical Association is panting to get at her and them, particularly because the boys are fully developed and don’t need incubation.

  They’re perfectly normal, conventional Terran kids; nothing Titanian about them, we all thought, and their mum and dad are perplexed by that… secretly disappointed, I think. They’re not fraternal, they’re identical twins named Tay and Jay, and they’re tagged with anklets so we can tell them apart. However, they’re not completely, absolutely, one-hundred-percent identical.

  You may recall Cluny Decco’s mentioning that she and Damon Krupp had been monitoring the dreams of their experimental baby while it was undergoing the maser generated fetal amplification by syndetic emission of radiation which resulted in Rogue Winter. We did the same with his and Demi’s kids as soon as they were born, and discovered that they were isomers, mirror-image twins, which is unusual but by no means unique.

  People often wonder what a fetus could possibly dream about. After all, they have no material, no experiences to draw on. The answer is the “cultural unconscious.” They’re charged with the eons of cultural accumulation which went into the development of modern man, and they think and dream in these powerful evolutionary surges.

  Exempli gratia: all of us, at one time or other, have been attacked by a vague fear, an unaccountable terror without any source or object. Psychiatrists try to rationalize this in terms of inhibitions and insecurities, but the truth is this is a blind surge out o
f our collective deposits, a bequest from Stone Age generations who survived on the fear of the unknown.

  On the other hand, birth is a shocking experience for a creature that has been cloistered in a womb, and provides ample material for its bewildered dreams. It did for Demi’s twins and this is how we discovered that they were dextro and levo mirror-images. Their confusions were bonded together by “c,” the symbol for the speed of light and also, today, the multivalent speed of concept. Their thoughts were sometimes specific, other times inchoate, and curiously rotated to the right and left:

  Jay, the dextro

  Tay, the levo

  Philosophers today sometimes suggest that the true reading of E = Mc2 should be, “Evolution is equal to Man multiplied by the speed of concept raised to the second power.”

  All normal and serene, yes? Except that I dropped in today to keep an eye on the staff, as promised. (Demi’s taken Rogue on his first visit to Virginia, to show her conquest off with pride, I’m sure.) Then I had a look at the kids in their bassinets. Damn if Jay, the righty, wasn’t clutching at a crib rail with his left hand, and Tay, the lefty, was clutching with his right. I checked their I.D. anklets to make sure. Yep, no doubt of it, they’d reversed their roles. I had to let them know that I knew they were doing a number.

  “Hey! Smartass kids, wake up,” I said. “This is your powerful godmother grilling you. You may not be able to speak but I’m damn sure you half-pint prodigies can hear and understand. You’ve transformed and switched, haven’t you? Jay’s become Tay, and vice versa. Very funny. Very funny.”

  The tiny Terranian devils rolled over on their backs and gave me such a look of gay mischief that I couldn’t help laughing.

  Naughty baby deceivers, half Terran, half Titanian, and God only knows which half of which will be up to what! The Sprite and the Synergist have one hell of a brand-new pattern on their hands. So does the Solar.