The Multiple Man

by Ben Bova

  “… the real issue is very clear. The basic question is survival. Survival for the way of life we have worked so hard to achieve. Survival for the democratic institutions that have made us a great and prosperous people. Survival for our children and our children’s children.

  “We can no longer allow ourselves to be dependent on dwindling natural resources for the primary needs of our people. Nor need we be so dependent, when we have within our grasp—thanks to the dedication and perseverance of our nation’s scientists and engineers—new sources of energy that will eliminate forever the twin dangers that haunt us: resource depletion and pollution of the environment.

  “It is my intention, and I am sure the Congress will agree, to push ahead for the development of new energy systems, such as the orbiting solar network and the laser-fusion generators, with all the vigor that we can command.”

  They loved it. For the first time in their memories a President was treating them like an important national resource. It meant huge dollops of Federal money for the brainboys, sure. But more important to that audience on that night was the fact that the President, The Man himself, was saying to them, “We need you, we want you, we admire you.” They would have followed him anywhere, just as their fathers had followed Kennedy to the moon.

  But he seemed stiff to me. Uncomfortable. He was reading the speech, something he almost never did. Only an insider would notice it, I figured, but he looked to me as if he weren’t really all that familiar with the speech.

  Laura was sitting on the stage, just to the right of the podium, looking more beautiful than ever. The limelight of attention and public homage seemed to be making her more self-assured, more pleased with herself and the world around her. She was a goddess whose worshipers were a nation. They knew it and she knew it. So she sat there, smiling, beautiful, adored, and remote. From me.

  I pulled my attention away from her and let my eyes wander across the rapt audience. I wondered what Sam Adams and his roughnecks would have to say about this crowd. How many of these well-dressed heavily educated people would daub red clay on their faces and dress in Indian feathers to go out and defy the laws of the Government? A few, I guessed. Damned few. And I wasn’t certain I could count myself among them.

  The whole stage, up where the President and his group were, was protected by an invisible laser-actuated shield. And there were other, redundant, shields around the podium and the body of the President. If anyone tried to fire a shot from the audience, the scanning lasers would pick up the bullet in flight and zap it into vapor with a microsecond burst of energy. Sonic janglers would paralyze everyone in the auditorium, and McMurtrie’s men could pick up the would-be assassin at their leisure. Foolproof quantum-electronic security. All done with the speed of light. The President could appear to be standing alone and in the open, naked to his enemies, when he was actually protected so well that no major assassinations had been successful in years.

  Which is why I was more startled than annoyed when McMurtrie grabbed my shoulder and whispered, subtle as a horse, “Follow me.”

  I didn’t have much choice. He had already half-lifted me out of my seat in the press section. Len Ryan glanced at me quizzically. It must have looked like I was being hauled off on a drug bust.

  “I’ll be right back,” I mouthed at him as McMurtrie practically dragged me to the nearest exit.

  He waited for the big metal door to close fully before he said, “We’ve got troubles, and you’ve got to keep the news hounds out ofit.”

  Framed by the bare-walled exit tunnel that led to the alley, lit from above by a single unshielded bulb, McMurtrie looked troubled indeed. His big beefy face was a map of worry and brooding belligerence.

  “What’s happened?” I asked. “What’s the matter…”

  He shook his head and grabbed my arm. Leading me down the tunnel toward the outside door, which opened onto the alley behind the Hall, he said only, “Don’t ask questions. Just keep the news people off our backs. We can’t have a word leak out about this. Understand? Not word number one.”

  And his grip on my arm was squeezing so hard that my hand started to go numb.

  “It would help if…”

  He barged through the outside fire door and we were out in the alley. It was cold. The wind was cutting and there were even a few flakes of snow swirling in the light cast by the bulb over the door. I wished for my topcoat, silently, because McMurtrie was dragging me up the alley, away from the street and into the deeper shadows, and he wasn’t going to give me a chance to even ask for the damned coat.

  The alley angled right, and as we turned the bend I saw a huddle of people bending over something. Two of them wore Boston police uniforms. The other half-dozen were in civvies. They had that Secret Service no nonsense look to them.

  McMurtrie didn’t have to push through them. They parted as he approached. What they were bending over was a blanket. Lying there on the pavement of this dirt-encrusted alley. A blanket with a body under it. I could see a pair of shoes poking out from the blanket’s edge.

  “The doctor here yet?” McMurtrie asked gruffly. One of the Secret Service agents answered, “On his way, sir.”

  “Both ends of this alley sealed?”

  “Yessir. Four men at each end.Ambulance…”

  “No ambulance.No noise. Get one of our cars. Call Klienerman; tell him to meet us at Mass General.”

  “He’s still in Washington, isn’t…?”

  “Get him up here on an Air Force jet.” McMurtrie turned to another security man. “You get to Mass General and clear out the cryonics facility. Screen the place yourself. Take as many men as you need from the local FBI office. Move.”

  The agent scampered like a scared freshman.

  I was still staring at the shoes. Who the hell would be walking around back here? The shoes looked brand new, not a bum’s.

  McMurtrie had turned to the two Boston cops. “Would you mind securing the fire door, up the alley? No one in or out until we get this cleared away.” He barely gestured toward the body.

  The cops nodded. They were both young and looked scared.

  Then McMurtrie fixed me with a gunmetal stare. “You’d better go back inside the way you came out. Make sure the press people stay in there to the end of the President’s speech. Do not let any of them out here.”

  “How can I keep…”

  He laid a stubby finger against my chest. It felt as if it weighed half a ton. “I don’t care how you do it. Just do it. Then meet us at the Mass General cryonics facility after the speech. Alone. No reporters.”

  He was dead serious. And the man under the blanket was dead. My brain began to whirl. It couldn’t be an assassination attempt. One well-shod character staggers into an alley to have a heart attack and McMurtrie acts as if we’re being invaded by Martians.

  But I didn’t argue. I went back to the fire door, a couple of steps behind the two cops. Maybe McMurtrie was just overreacting. Or maybe, crafty son of a bitch that he was, he was using this accident as an opportunity to test his troops’ capabilities.

  Sure, that’s it. A practice run, courtesy of a wino whose time ran out. I was about to smile when the rest of my brain asked,Then why’s he bringing Dr. Klienerman up from Washington? And what’s he want the Massachusetts General Hospital’s cryonics facility for? He’s going to dip the wino in liquid nitrogen and make a frozen popsicle out of him?

  One look at the faces of those two Boston patrolmen drove all the levity out of me. They were scared. Not from finding a wino in an alley. Not from brushing against the President’s security team. Something was in their eyes that I hadn’t seen since the San Fernando quake—these guys were terrified of something that went beyond human control.

  They had reached the fire door a few paces ahead of me and turned to stand guard. I stopped when they looked at me. One of them had his electric prod in his gloved hands. The other had hooked his thumb around the butt of his revolver.

  “Uh… McMurtrie told me to go
back inside,” I mumbled. Somehow I felt guilty in their eyes.

  “Yeah, we heard him.” That’s all either one of them said. One of them opened the fire door and I stepped back inside the Hall.

  I was shaking. And not entirely from the cold.

  * * *

  The President’s speech was almost over as I took my seat.

  “What happened?” Ryan whispered to me. “You look awful.”

  I tried giving him a fierce glance. “Just cold. I’m okay”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “McMurtrie wanted to check the arrangements for the President’s ride back to Logan. Wanted to know if I had planned a Q and A session after the speech.”

  Ryan looked a bit puzzled, but he apparently accepted that. I felt lucky that he was a local reporter and not one of the Washington corps, who know that we never have a question period following a speech. Especially when The Man’s already given a press conference the same day.

  Halliday wound up his speech, the audience cheered mightily, and the usual round of hand-shaking started up on stage. The Hall emptied slowly, although most of the reporters raced for the nearest exits to get back to their offices and file their stories. The few who tried to take an alley exit were turned back, grumbling.

  Ryan didn’t leave, though.

  “Don’t you have a deadline to meet?” I asked him as we walked slowly toward the back of the Hall, following the emptying throng.

  He paced alongside me, stubborn faced and tweedy. “I’m doing the color piece for the afternoon edition. Got plenty of time. I was wondering… Johnny thought it might be fun to do an interview with you.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure.” He waved an arm in the air. “Local man makes good. What it’s like to work in the White House. The inside story of the most popular President since Roosevelt… that kind of stuff.”

  “Not now,” I said. “I’ve got to join the rest of the staff and get back to Washington. No time for an interview.”

  “Too bad.”

  I didn’t like the look on his face: more curious than disappointed. Or maybe I was projecting.

  “Look,” I said. “Why don’t we do the interview by phone. Give me a call early next week and we’ll set up a time. Okay?”

  He nodded without smiling. “Sure.”

  Ryan offered me a ride to the airport, once we got outside to the windy, cold street. I told him I was going to ride in one of the staff limousines; it was all set up. He took it with an air of dubious graciousness, shook my hand, and jogged off through the shadows to the parking lot. I watched the wind pluck at his coat.

  There was one cab left in front of Faneuil Hall, and I felt damned lucky to get it. I ducked inside, glad to be out of the wind.

  “Mass General,” I told the cabbie.

  “Ya know how t’get there?” he asked from the other side of his bulletproof shield.

  “Damned right I do!” I snapped. Boston cabbies have sent their kids to Harvard on the meter readings of their excursions. The city is small, but no two streets connect in any logical way. You could spend two hours circling your destination if you didn’t know where it was.

  I gave the cabbie detailed instructions on how to get there. His only response was a grumbling, “Awright, awright,” as he snapped the meter flag down and put the taxi in gear.

  * * *

  Any large hospital is a maze of haphazard corridors, buildings joined together in an unplanned sprawl of growth, cloying smells of medicine and fear and pain. It makes me nervous just to visit a sick friend.

  I finally found the cryonics unit, where they freeze clinically dead people who have enough insurance and the proper papers to be held in cold storage until some brilliant medical genius figures out a way to cure what they “died” from. It looked more like something out of NASA than a hospital facility. Lots of stainless steel, metal desks, and computer consoles lining the walls. Everything painted white, like a clean-room facility. Fluorescent panels in the ceiling overhead cast a glareless, shadowless light that somehow made me edgy, nervous. One whole wall of the main room was a long window. At first glance I thought it was an operating “theater” on the other side.

  McMurtrie was sitting at one of the desks, out-bulking it and looking grimly ominous. A covey of green-smocked hospital people worked at the other desks. The computer was humming to itself, lights flickering on its readout console as if it were telling itself a good joke. McMurtrie’s agents were standing around, looking uneasy and suspicious.

  As I stepped in, I realized that McMurtrie was talking to someone on the picture-phone. The tiny screen on the desk top showed a middle-aged man who looked rather rumpled and unhappy.

  “I’m very sorry to have to bother you at this hour, Dr. Klienerman,” McMurtrie was rumbling in a tone as close to politeness as I’ve ever heard from him. “If you agree to freezing the body we can transport it back to Walter Reed and have it ready for your examination in the morning.”

  Klienerman said something, but I didn’t hear it. My eye had caught the scene inside the cryonics “theater.”

  A long stainless-steel cylinder was lying on its side, like a section of gleaming sewer pipe. All around it were blue-painted tanks of liquid nitrogen, with lines leading from them into the cylinder. The hose lines were caked with frost, and steamy white vapor was eddying out of the cylinder’s open end. It looked cold in there; colder than Dante’s frozen hell.

  At the open end of the cylinder was a hospital table, holding the whitely lifeless body of a man. The man who had been covered by the blanket in the alley behind Faneuil Hall. He was uncovered now. Completely naked. Obviously dead.

  My knees sagged beneath me.

  The dead man was James J. Halliday, the President of the United States of America.

  TWO

  It was McMurtrie who grabbed me. He wrapped his gorilla arms around my shoulders. Otherwise I would’ve gone right down to the floor.

  “It’s not him,” he whispered fiercely. “It’s a copy, a duplicate…”

  I was having trouble breathing. Everything seemed to be out of focus, blurred. I couldn’t get air into my lungs.

  Next thing I knew I was sitting down and gulping at a plastic cup’s worth of water. McMurtrie was looming over me. But I was still looking past him, at the body lying in the cryonics chamber. Cold. Dead.

  “It’s not the President,” McMurtrie said at me. “He’s on the plane, on his way back to Washington. I talked to him ten minutes ago.” He jerked a thumb toward the picture-phone on the desk.

  “Then who…” My voice sounded weak and cracked, as if it were coming from someone else, somebody old and badly scared.

  McMurtrie shook his head, like a buffalo getting rid of gnats. “Damned if I know. But we’ll find out. Believe it.”

  I was beginning to register normally again. Taking a deep breath, I straightened up in the chair and looked around the glareless white room. Four of McMurtrie’s men were standing around. They had nothing to do, but they looked alert and ready. One of them, closest to the door, had his pistol out and was minutely examining the action, clicking it back and forth. The ammo clip was tucked into his jacket’s breast pocket.

  “Somebody’s made a double for the President,” I said to McMurtrie, with some strength in my voice now, “and your men killed him.”

  He glared at me. “No such thing. We found this… man… in the alley. Just where you saw him. He was dead when those two cops stumbled over him. No identification. No marks of violence.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Just lying there stretched out in the alley.”

  “The cops thought he was a drunk, except he was dressed too well. Then when they saw his face.

  “No bullet wounds or needle marks or anything?”

  McMurtrie said, “Go in there and examine him yourself, if you want to.”

  “No, thanks.” But I found myself staring at the corpse in the misty cold chamber. He looked exactly li
ke Halliday.

  “Are you in good enough shape to walk?” McMurtrie asked me.

  “I guess so.”

  “And talk?”

  It was my turn to glare at him. “What do you think I’m doing now?”

  He grunted. It was what he did instead of laughing. “There’re a few reporters out at the front desk. The local police and two of my people are keeping them there. Somebody’s going to have to talk to them.”

  I knew who somebody was. “What do I tell them? Disneyland made a copy of the President?”

  “You don’t tell them a damned thing,” McMurtrie said. “But you send them home satisfied that they know why we’re here. Got it?”

  I nodded. “Give’em the old Ziegler shuffle. Sure. I’ll walk on water, too. Just to impress them.”

  He leaned over so that his face was close enough for me to smell his mouth freshener. “Listen to me. This is important. We cannot have the media finding out that there was an exact duplicate of the President running loose in Boston tonight.”

  “He wasn’t exactly running loose,” I said.

  “Not one word about it.”

  “What’d he die of?”

  He shrugged massively. “Don’t know. Our own medical people gave him a quick going over, but there’s no way to tell yet. We’re going to freeze him and ship him down to Klienerman at Walter Reed.”

  “Before I talk to the reporters,” I said, “I want to check with The Man.”

  McMurtrie grumbled just enough to stay in character, then let me use the phone. It took only a few moments to get through on the special code to the President in Air Force One. They were circling Andrews AFB, about to land. But one thing the President insists on is instant communications, wherever he is. He’s never farther away from any of his staff than the speed of light.