“Oh, my dear God in Heaven, Aron!” the President lamented, his voice thick and clotted with pain. “What am I going to do? What am I going to tell my wife?” He caught the Vice President’s startled glance, and he shook his head fiercely and corrected himself. “I’m losing my mind, Aron! Of course I’m not going to tell my wife! But what am I going to do?”
Somewhere off in the distance Aron Strabida heard the sound of trumpets high and clear, and they were playing a fanfare for him. He was profoundly aware of his surroundings, aware of all the trappings of this ancient room, one of the half dozen places on Earth not constructed entirely of synthetics. The rows of books—real books, not chiplets or fiches, but pages bound for the turning, in handsome covers. The huge desk, made of real wood, brought back from the Smithsonian’s attics to replace the various monstrosities that had been briefly installed here during less sophisticated administrations, glowing in the light from the tall windows. The rich draperies, the magnificent rug, the paintings … the flags! The glorious flags, that were really there, their fabric frayed almost to a thinness you could see through, so that they, too, glowed in the light. It was like a museum; to go into this room was to step back into time. It was a room either loved or hated, depending on how you felt about government; it was a room so famous that even little children could describe it to you inch by inch. And the Vice President was there; he was, as they say, only a heartbeat away from sitting at that desk.
And this was the President of the United States of America of Earth, asking him what to do! This was a man struggling with a skyful of planets run by what the Vice President would have described as an assortment of psychotics and sociopaths, each world trying to outdo all the others in the unspeakableness of its actions, each world looking toward this President. Not to actually do anything, of course. It had been centuries since an expectation of that kind would have made any sense. But they did look toward him to serve as a center to be rallied round or struggled against. Because the President and his office were symbols of such antiquity, symbols of the very heart of what it meant to be Terran, to be of Earth, even if your family’s feet had not touched Earth’s soil for a hundred years. Here was this man whose name was a household word to untold billions of people. This man around whom a carousel of civilizations, mired deep in the consequences of centuries of blunders, revolved. And he was saying: “Aron—what am I going to do?”
Aron wanted the moment to go on and on; he wanted to savor it, to make certain that every detail of it was etched permanently on his memory, so that he could return to it in recollection for the rest of his life. But he gathered himself together, aware that he must not hesitate any longer, that he must bring it to an end in spite of his reluctance to do so. He felt taller. Taller. Stronger. Wiser. It reinforced the old verse, he thought; the Lord did indeed move in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. Who would ever have thought it? A mad passionate interlude, however brief, however sudden, between President Tobias Antonio Dellwilder and Miss Marthajean Brown? He could not think of anything more mysterious.
Aron drew himself up, threw back his shoulders, gave his hair one careful toss, and clasped his hands behind his back. “Mr. President,” he said, hearing the trumpets again in the distance, “don’t you worry about a thing. I will take care of it.”
“You will?” The President’s eyes were filled with tears, and his voice was quavering.
“Indeed I will,” said Aron solemnly, intensely. “I want you to concentrate on forgetting that it ever happened. I want you to convince yourself that it didn’t happen! You must, Mr. President. Worlds are counting on you; humankind cannot afford to have you distracted; humankind cannot spare you. Not now. Not with the intolerable crises we face at this moment in time. Put it out of your mind, Mr. President, once and for all. Tell yourself: It did not happen! And,” he concluded, thinking that he was doing very well considering that he’d had no warning he would have to make a speech, much less a speech of such tremendous significance, hoping he would be able to remember it until he could transfer it to his private journal, “I will take care of everything!”
“God bless you, Aron,” said Dellwilder. “God bless you.”
“Thank you, Mr. President!”
And the Vice President, glowing with the awareness that his moment of greatness was upon him and that he was living up to its demands, laid one reassuring hand on his trembling chief’s shoulder, gave him a smart salute that seemed called for by the occasion, and went off to secure his destiny.
When he looked back on that moment later, he did it wistfully. He wished—not idly, but with all his heart—that something could have happened right then, right then when he was at the peak of his entire existence. A stroke. A heart attack. An assassin’s chemdart. Anything that would have let him exit his life like that, splendid and confident and with the President of the United States of Earth looking after him in gratitude and admiration.
It hadn’t happened that way. It has been downhill all the way from there. Despite his care. Despite his meticulous care! He had gone to Miss Brown’s apartpod on an errand no one could have questioned, his docpouch conspicuous on his hip, all his movements clocked in and fully accounted for by the security robots accompanying him. The poison he gave her had been his own, issued to him as part of the equipment of the Vice Presidency—a poison that was odorless and tasteless, that acted in seconds, and that could be traced only if the body were found in five minutes or less. He had waited fifteen minutes by the clock (going back into the hall three times during that period to reassure the waiting robots of his safety) before he touched her, to be absolutely sure. He had bathed Marthajean and dressed her, working quickly, in her finest nightgown, a thing of some sumptuous shining fabric the color of jonquils, frothing with lace, as unexpected as the breasts that turned out to be just as extraordinary as the President had said they were. He had laid Miss Brown in her bed on spotless sheets and arranged her hair; he had turned down the coverlet to her waist and settled her clasped hands upon it. He had left a vacuous little dignified suicide note on her computer: “I am growing old, and I can see that I will never marry; I cannot bear to go on like this, all alone, into the twilight of my life,” it had read.
And then he had stepped back and surveyed his handiwork, making certain that Miss Brown looked as elegant as she would have wanted to look had her death, in fact, been truly her own idea. And he had gone over the apartpod one centimeter at a time, making certain that there was no trace of his actions. No fingerprints. No heatprints. Nothing. Only after he’d gone over it all, and gone over it yet one more time, using items in his kit of security gadgets that he’d never used before and never expected to use again, did he let himself out and go back to the Capitol Building to occupy himself with business until Miss Brown was found and declared a suicide.
It wasn’t fair that he had been tripped up by such a silly thing. It took away from it all. It spoiled it. It made him feel like a fool. He knew that if anyone found out he was the murderer, they would say it was just the kind of silly mistake he would make. It broke his heart; it tormented and offended him. It was not right.
He saw it in the newspapes first, before anyone came to tell him. There was the hologram of Miss Brown, as she had been in life … they were not so tasteless as to show her dead. (He was a little sorry about that, because he’d gone to so much trouble with the scene.) There was the account of the finding of the body, its surroundings, the bare statement that a suicide note had been in her hand, things like that. And then the sentence that sent him into his utility to vomit up his breakfast.
“No woman,” they quoted the official from the Washington DC Police Department as saying, “no woman, would lay herself out like that, to be found dead, in her very best nightgown, with her face all made up and her hair all freshly done … and put her nightgown on WRONG SIDE OUT.” It was murder, the official said, not suicide. And because she was who she was, with the security clearances she had, it had been turned over to the
highest law enforcement agencies for investigation.
Wrong side out? He hadn’t checked. He hadn’t even thought of it. Why would he have thought of it? It wasn’t the kind of thing a man did think of! It was a perfectly natural mistake, and he understood perfectly how it had happened.
But now it was his turn. Like the President. Like the President, who would no doubt be calling him any second, terrified, to say something like, “Aron, tell me, please tell me, that this is some terrible coincidence!”
Now he was the one who was going to have to say, “What am I going to do?”
The terror he had felt when it finally became clear to him that it had all gone wrong—and the fact that, unlike the President, he was a realist—made it easy for the men from the agency to convince him of what had to be done. Convincing the President was not so simple; it turned out to be one hell of a job. Dellwilder started by flat out forbidding it.
“In that case,” Zlerigeau said calmly, holding the President’s eyes with the black-eyed stare he was famous for, “we have no choice. In that case, what we have to do is agree with you that it’s a dumb and naughty idea, promise not to do it, and do it anyway behind your back. But we also have to work out some kind of halfass alternate plan that you will approve. And then we have to go to all the trouble and expense of carrying out that plan, too. It’s a big waste of the taxpayers’ money, Mr. President.”
“But listen, Zlerigeau,” Dellwilder pleaded, “I understand … God knows I understand … that this is a matter where national security—”
“And international security,” the Vice President put in. “And interplanetary security.”
“All of that,” Dellwilder agreed. “I understand … security has to be put ahead of normal considerations. But you’re asking me to let some ordinary citizen, some completely innocent person going about his daily life, just doing the best he can … you’re asking me to let you arrest and convict him for this murder. A murder that he had nothing … nothing! … to do with. Zlerigeau, that’s evil. That’s real, world-class evil. That’s repugnant to me. That can’t be a thing that I have to agree to.”
“Well,” Jay Zlerigeau said, “I’m with you about the evil and the repugnant. But that’s not the point. I tell you, if good and evil were relevant here, we’d just take in the Vice President and charge him—with first-degree murder and terminal stupidity.”
“The Vice President is not responsible for this mess,” said the President wearily, while Aron bit his lip and put every bit of his energy into not showing how scared he was.
“The hell he’s not.”
“Jay, it was me, not the Vice President, who went mad and ravished my own secretary—poor, sweet, hardworking, respectable Miss Brown—right there on the rug in the Oval Office. That was me, not the Vice President. I still can’t believe it, but it was me.”
“And it was the Vice President,” the agency man snorted, “who decided Miss Brown had to leave this tearsvale—which was the correct decision, no question about it—and then decided he’d just take care of that himself, instead of calling us in and letting us do it. Mr. President, my staff knows that women, dead or alive, don’t wear their nighties wrong side out.”
“If the Vice President had called you?”
“We would have sent somebody … somebody professional, who knew what he was doing … and Miss Brown would have had an accident in her utility or tripped and fallen off her balcony or some such mild thing and we would not be sitting here facing this mess today. Why the hell didn’t he call us?” He smacked his fist into his palm. “You see why we raise hell about using robots for Secret Service bodyguards? This is just exactly the kind of thing we mean, Mr. President! This would not have happened if he’d had human agents with him instead of coffeepots!”
President Dellwilder said nothing about this issue; it was an old argument, and one that was settled by the budget, not by his personal preferences. There was enough money to put human security around the President himself, and that was all there was. He frowned at Zlerigeau, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and asked: “Are you saying that even if we’d called you in, an innocent person would have had to die?”
“Well … only one innocent person, Mr. President. As things stand now, it has to be two innocent persons. Your secretary, deleted by Vice President Muddle-fingers—”
The President spoke through clenched teeth. “Show some respect for the office, man!”
“—and a selected Fall Guy. And I don’t have any respect for the office, the primary qualification for which, so far as I can tell, is the absence of either backbone or brains.”
Tobias Dellwilder, who was called Toby by nobody, dropped his head into his hands and groaned aloud, saying, “You’re not helping, Jay. You’re not helping at all. This belligerent attitude toward poor Aron, who is as heartsick about this as I am … my God, he killed a woman in the mistaken belief that it was something he had to do to protect me! … it’s only making matters worse. And you’re spouting clichés … you know very well that we’ve had many distinguished Vice Presidents. This is no time for posturing, Jay; please cut it out. What we need is your help.”
The man gave them both a long measuring look. The shattered Chief Executive, moaning through his hands like a lovesick teenage girl. The furious Vice Chief Executive, going alternately white and red with mingled terror and rage, without even the guts to stand up for himself. The look made it quite clear that Jay Zlerigeau didn’t feel that the two of them together made one adult male.
There were lines the Vice President could have tossed off, if he’d been the line-tossing kind. About how much easier he would find it to murder a second time, and about how he was damn sure the agency chief didn’t sleep in a nightgown. He choked them back, along with all the rest that occurred to him. He knew his role, and it didn’t include taking the lead in a discussion when the President was present, unless he had been specifically ordered to do so. Let the man abuse him, let him insult him all he liked. Aron would remember him; and the day would come when he’d have an opportunity to demonstrate to him how deeply a man trapped in second place could hate.
“I am helping,” Zlerigeau said flatly, finally. “I am telling you that there’s only one thing to do. Just as we cannot afford to have the public know that the President of the United States of Earth had a toss with his secretary in the middle of a letter—your Veep was right about that, Mr. President!—we cannot afford to have the public know that the Vice President of the United States of Earth has murdered somebody, however incompetently. Because the victim of his incompetence was private secretary to the President, however, it can’t be one of those cases you just let wither away unsolved. The public will insist on knowing who did it, and on making the criminal pay for the crime. And the only way out of this … thanks to the Vice President’s bungling, because it could have been avoided … is to tap somebody who has no link with the Administration, no link with Washington … somebody off the wall. Some otherwise harmless tourist, or burglar, or druggo.”
“And then?”
“And then, Mr. President, we’ll haul his ass into court and we’ll provide a couple tons of manufactured evidence and get him convicted of murder one, and we’ll see that he fries—figuratively speaking, of course—and that will be the end of it. With any luck at all. And if your Veep stays out of it from now on. You will stay out of it, Mr. Vice President? For the sake of the nation? And so that you’ll only have the blood of two innocents on your hands?”
“Right!” Aron snapped. “You can count on it! And I have no blood on my hands!”
He waited to be asked to explain that; he was proud of the justification he had ready. But the agent only snorted again, like an animal at a trough, and neither of them asked him anything.
“I can’t approve this,” said the President.
“Okay.”
“You’ll do it anyway?”
“Yes. Or you could order somebody to delete me, Mr. President, to keep me
from it, and then you could try to deal with the consequences of that move.”
“Jay,” the President asked, the bewilderment in his voice obviously real, obviously painful, “why do all the answers to all the hard questions depend on some innocent person dying?”
“Because that goes with the territory, Mr. President. As long as people can’t be trusted to keep secrets … and they can’t, you know … people have to die to keep the worlds going around. It’s always been that way; it always will be that way. Do you want me to explain it all to you again, Mr. President? I have plenty of time. That is, since the real murderer has nothing to fear and our Mr. Fall Guy doesn’t know he’s been picked, nobody’s going to try to get away. We have all the time in the world. Shall I go over it again?”
“No.”
Zlerigeau sighed. “That’s progress,” he said. “How do we choose this person?” It was almost a whisper.
“What, Mr. President?”
“I asked you … how do we choose this person? This ‘Mr. Fall Guy?’”
“You don’t have to worry about that, sir. Leave that to us.”
“I want to know.”
“Okay.” Zlerigeau shrugged. “We try not to waste an opportunity of this kind, because they come along rarely. We have a list … with people on it who, for one reason or another, it would be useful to have removed. If we can find somebody on that list who’s obscure enough … somebody with no Washington connections … somebody that doesn’t have a powerful family or friends … we’ll choose him. Or her. If nobody on the list qualifies right now, we’ll go in and haul somebody in off the street—literally. Checking very carefully to be sure he’s not one of your derelicts with a wealthy daddy in the background. And you can be sure, Mr. President, that we won’t choose somebody with a wife and six little kids. There’s plenty of single trash out there, lots of them miserable enough to welcome a fatal injection just to get the last meal that goes with it, believe me.”
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