At the same time the strongest, the smartest, the most ruthless of the exiles clawed their ways to the top of these four strange worlds, until they controlled them and their own trade. Lilith, where nothing physical could be stored, was the perfect place for storing such information as special bank account numbers, official secrets even the Confederacy had to be kept ignorant of, things of that sort—the kind of information one never put into a computer because all computers are vulnerable to a genius technician. No matter how foolproof the machine, the foolproof system was devised by someone and could therefore be broken by someone else.
So these great criminal kings—the Four Lords of the Diamond, alien now from their -ancestral race, geniuses all yet bitterly exiled nonetheless—had the secrets, the stolen goods, the blackmail of the Confederacy, and their influence extended throughout the Confederacy even though they were forever barred from seeing it.
“Then the Four Lords are selling us out,” the young man sighed. “Why not simply destroy all four worlds? Good riddance anyway, I’d say.”
“So would I,” Commander Krega agreed. “Only we can’t. We let them go on too long—they’re politically invulnerable. Too much wealth, too much power, too many secrets are there. There is simply no way to get them any more—they have the goods on just about anybody who would be high up enough to make those decisions.”
The young man cleared his throat. “I see,” he responded a little disgustedly. “So why not place agents on those worlds? Find out what’s what?”
“Oh, that was tried from the first,” Krega told him. “It didn’t work, either. Consider—we’re asking someone to exile himself permanently and allow himself to be turned, equally permanently, into something not quite human. Only a fanatic would agree to that—and fanatics make notoriously poor spies. The Four Lords are also not exactly easy marks, you know. They keep track of who’s coming in, and their own contacts here tell them just about everything they want to know about any newcomers. We might sneak one agent, one really good agent, in on them—but a lot? Never. They’d quickly catch on and just kill the lot, innocent and guilty alike. They also are supremely confident of human psychology—the agent is going to have to be damned good to get away with such an assignment. Anybody with that much on the ball is also going to realize that he is trapped there and that he’ll have to live there, on the Four Lords’ worlds, until he dies. Loyalty conies hard, but even the most loyal and committed agent is going to have the brains to see which side his future bread will be buttered on. So he switches sides. One of the current Lords is in fact a Confederacy agent.”
“Huh?”
Krega nodded. “Or was, I should say. Probably the best infiltrator in the business, knew all the his and outs, and found the Diamond not threatening but fascinating. The Confederacy bored him, he said. We dropped him on Lilith just to worm his way into the hierarchy—and he sure did. In spades. Only we received almost no information from him while feeding him a great deal—and now he’s one of the enemy. See what I mean?”
“You have a tough problem,” the young man sympathized. “You don’t have any reliable people on the Warden worlds, and anybody capable of doing what has to be done winds up on the other side. And now they’re selling us out to an alien force.”
“Exactly.” Krega nodded. “You see where this puts us. Now, of course, we do have some people down there. None are a hundred percent reliable, and an of them would slit your throat in an instant if doing so was in their best interests. But we find occasional inducements—small payoffs of one sort or another, even a little blackmail on ones with close relatives back in the Confederacy—that give us a little edge. A little, but not much, since the Four Lords are pretty ruthless when it comes to what they perceive as treason. Our only advantage is that the worlds are still fairly new to us and so therefore relatively sparsely settled. There is no totalitarian control on any of them, and there are different systems and hierarchies on each.”
The young man nodded. “I have the uneasy feeling that you are leading up to something—but I must remind you of what you told me about past agents, and also that, even kicking and screaming, I’d be but one man on one world.”
Commander Krega grinned. “No, it’s not quite like that at all. You’re a damned good detective and you know it. You’ve tracked down and upset rocks in places nobody else looked at twice; out-maneuvered and outguessed sophisticated computers and some of the best criminal minds ever known, even though you are still quite young. You are the youngest person with the rank of Inspector in the history of the Confederacy. We have two different problems here. One, we must identify this alien force and trace it back to its origin. We must find out who they are and where they are and what their intentions are. Even now it may be too late, but we must act as if it were not. Two, we must neutralize their information conduit, the Four Lords. How would you do it?”
The young man smiled thoughtfully. “Pay the Four Lords more than the aliens do,” he suggested hopefully. “Put ’em to work for us.”
“Impossible. We already thought of that,” the commander responded glumly. “It’s not profit—they have more than they need. And it’s not power—that, too, they have in abundance. But we have cut them off forever from the rest of the universe, trapped them there. Before, they could do nothing—but now, with an alien force as then* ally, they can. I’m afraid such people are motivated by revenge, and that we cannot give them. We can’t even commute their sentence, short of a scientific breakthrough—and nobody has more people working on that angle than they do. No, making a deal is out. We have no cards.”
“Then you need somebody good down there on each world, looking for clues to the aliens. There has to be some sort of direct contact: they have to get their information out and their little play-toys, like that fancy robot, programmed and in. An agent might turn traitor, but if he was a volunteer he wouldn’t be motivated by revenge and would sure as hell feel closer to humanity than to some aliens of unknown appearance and design.”
“Agreed. And it would have to be the very best for all four. Someone who could survive, even prosper under their conditions while having the ability to collect enough data and get it out. But how do we buy the time we also need?”
The young man grinned. “Easy. At least easy to say—maybe nearly impossible to do. You kill all four Lords. Others would take their places, of course, but in the interim you’d buy months, maybe years.”
“That was our thinking,” Krega agreed. “And so we ran it through the computers. Master detective, loyal, willing to volunteer, and with an Assassin’s License. Four needed, plus a coordinator, since they all would have to be put to work simultaneously and would obviously have no likely reason or means to contact one another. Plus for insurance, of course, spares that could be sent in if something happened to one or more of the originals. We fed in all these attributes and requirements and out you popped.”
The young man chuckled dryly. “I’ll bet Me and who else?”
“Nobody else. Just you.”
For the first time the man looked puzzled. He frowned. “Just me?”
“Oh, lots of secondaries, but they were slightly less reliable for one reason or another, or slightly weaker in one or another way, or, frankly, were engaged on other vital business or located halfway around the Confederacy.”
“Then you’ve got two problems,” the young man told Krega. “First, you have to figure out how the hell I’d volunteer willingly for an assignment like this, and, second, how you’re going to make…” His voice trailed off and he suddenly sat up straight. “I think I see…”
“I thought you would.” Krega sounded satisfied and confident. “It’s probably the most guarded secret in the Confederacy, but the Merton Process works now. Almost a hundred percent.”
The other nodded absently, thinking about it. When he’d received his promotion to Inspector over a year ago, they’d taken him into an elaborate and somewhat mystifying laboratory and put him into some sort of hypno
tic state. He was never quite sure what they had done, but he’d had a headache for three days and that had aroused his curiosity. The Merton Process. The key to immortality, some said. It had taken a hell of a lot of spare-time detective work to come even that close to it, and all he’d been able to determine in the end was that the Confederacy was working on a process wherein the entire memory, the entire personality, of an individual could be taken, stored in some way, and then imprinted on another brain, perhaps a clone brain. He had also learned that every time it had been tried, the new body either had become hopelessly insane or had died. He said as much.
“That used to be the case,” Krega agreed, “but no more. The clone brains just couldn’t take it. Raised in tanks, they had developed different brain patterns for the autonomic functions, and those were always disrupted in the transfer. Still, we had been able to remove all the conscious part of the brain from someone and then put it back just the way it was in the original body while also keeping the original information on file. That led, of course, to trying it with other bodies —remove the cerebral part, as it were, just like erasing a recording, then put someone else’s personality and memories in there. It’s a ticklish business—only works once in a while, when loads of factors I don’t understand very well, and maybe Merton doesn’t either, match. The new body has to be at least two years younger than the original, for example. On the other hand, some important factors like sex or planetary origin seem to be irrelevant. Still, we get a perfect transfer about one in twenty times.”
He stirred uneasily. “What happens to the other nineteen?”
Krega shrugged. “They die, or are nuts and have to be destroyed. We use only minor antisocials anyway, those who would have to be psyched and programmed or simply eliminated. We took your print fourteen months ago—you must know that. Now we can make four of you. Different bodies, of course, but you inside in every single detail. More than four, if necessary. We can drop you on all four planets simultaneously, complete with criminal record and past history. We can drop you on all four and still keep you here, as you are, to correlate the data from the others.”
The young man said nothing for almost a minute, then: “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Four times damned, yet also not damned at all,” the commander came back. “So you see, there’s no risk. We already have your imprint.”
He considered the facts. “Still, there’d have to be a more recent one,” he noted. “It wouldn’t do to have four of me wake up en route to the Warden Diamond in different bodies with no knowledge of the last fourteen months, not to mention this conversation.”
Krega nodded. “You’re right, of course. But I have mine updated annually, anyway. Except for the headache, if the process worked the first time it’ll work ever after.”
“That’s reassuring,” the man replied uncomfortably, considering that they had done it to him without his knowledge before—and the commander’s words implied that sometimes it didn’t work. Dismissing that idea from his mind, he asked, “But how do I get the data to correlate? Even supposing that these four versions of me are able to ferret out everything you want to know—how do / know it?”
Krega reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a small box. He opened it gingerly and pushed it over to the young man. “With this,” he said flatly.
The man looked at the object. “This” turned out to be a tiny little bead of unknown substance so small it could hardly be seen with the naked eye even in its black velveteen setting.
“A tracer implant?” The young man was sceptical. “What good does that do us?” The device was familiar to all cops; it could be implanted anywhere on a body with no chance of detection and with no operation necessary. Once in place, someone could follow its signal to just about anywhere—a common police tool.
“Not a tracer,” the commander told him. “Based on it, 111 admit, but more a by-product of the Merton researches. It is implanted directly into a specific point in the brain—I’m sorry I don’t have enough technical biology to explain further. You’ll get one, too. It only works when two bodies have exactly the same brain pattern; otherwise you get gibberish. Using the tracer part, a special receiver can locate the wearer anywhere on a planet, then lock onto him, receive, and enonnously amplify what it receives, which then is fed to a Merton recorder. From that another imprint can be made, a ‘soft’ one, that win give its matched mate a record of just what happened after the new body awoke until we took the readout It’s soft—they tell me the sensation is kind of like! seeing a movie all at once. But it’s a record of everything your counterpart said and did. We’ll put you on a guard picket ship, very comfortable, and take almost continuous soft imprints using monitor satellites. You’ll have your information, all right. And the thing’s actually a quasi-organic substance, so even on Lilith, which hates everything alien, it will continue to function as part of the body. We know. We have a couple of people with tracers down there now—they don’t know it, of course. Just a test. Works fine.”
The young man nodded. “You seem to have thought of everything.” He paused a moment. “And what if I refuse after all this? Or to put it another way, what if I say to go ahead and my, ah, alter egos decide once down there not to cooperate?”
Krega grinned evilly. “Consider what I’m offering. We have the capacity to make you immortal—if you succeed. If you succeed, no reward would be high enough. You are an atheist. You know that when you go, you go forever—unless you succeed. Then you, and because of the soft imprints, your alter egos as well will continue to exist. Continue to live on. I think that is quite an inducement.”
The young man looked thoughtful. “I wonder if they will see it that way?” he mused, only half aloud.
Four Lords of the Diamond, pour enormously powerful, clever people to kill. Four keys to an enigma that could spell the end of humanity. Five problems, five puzzles.
Krega didn’t really have to offer a reward. The assignment was irresistible.
The base ship was seven kilometers long. It floated there off the Warden system, about a quarter of a light-year from the sun. Designed as a floating base, almost a mini-world, the ship was completely self-contained, and were it not for the feeling of isolation all around, a pretty comfortable duty.
From its lower decks sped the picket ships: one-man or often totally automated vessels that encircled the Warden system and kept the base ship in constant touch with every section of space around and inside the solar system itself. All commerce had to come here first, then be transferred to automated craft for an in-system run. No one but the military was allowed beyond the perimeter the picket ships established, and even military personnel never landed. The penalty for any violation was simple—capture if possible, elimination if not possible. Between the automatic guardians and the manned patrols a violator might get by one or two, but he would have to run a gauntlet of several hundred to get anywhere meaningful—and do so against the best defensive computers known.
For this reason, the pinpointing of the Warden Diamond as the center of some alien conspiracy was met with a great deal of skepticism by the organized military forces, most of which believed that the alien robot -had simply practiced misdirection in desperation after being discovered.
The analytical computers and strategic specialists thought otherwise. At least, they couldn’t afford not to think otherwise, which explained the arrival of a very special man at the base ship. They all knew he was special, and rumors abounded as to who he was, whom he worked for, and what he was doing there; but no one, not even the commanding admiral, really knew for sure.
With the man came a complete module that niter-locked to the building-block nature of the base ship in the security control section. Prom here the mysterious man would do whatever he was doing, away from all others, surrounded by security guards who had no idea who he was or what he was doing—and who could not enter the module any more than the admiral could. It was keyed to the man’s own brain waves, voice print, retinal pat
tern, gene structure, and just about everything else any paranoid security division had ever figured out. Anyone else attempting entry would be instantly stopped and neatly packaged for security. Any nonliving thing that tried would be instantly vaporized.
Although the man had been there for months, not a soul even knew his name. Not that he was totally withdrawn—on the contrary, he joined in the sports games in Recreation, ate his meals in the Security Mess, even wined and dined some female soldiers and civilians aboard, many of whom were simply intrigued by this man of mystery. He was likable, easygoing, relaxed. But in all those months he had not revealed the slightest thing about himself, not even to those with whom he’d been most intimate—although, security officers noted, he’d had a positive knack of finding out the most private things about the people with whom he’d come in contact. They admired him for his total self-control and absolute professionalism, and even the highest-ranking of them were scared stiff of him.
He spent several hours most days in his little cubicle, and always slept there. They all wondered and guessed at what was inside until they were almost crazy with curiosity, but they never guessed the truth.
He heard the buzzer sounding as he entered the command module and for the first tune felt genuine excitement and anticipation. Long ago he’d accomplished all he could with the physical data, but for too long now it had been a boring exercise. The computer filed what it could from the memory traces but gave him a picture that was too emotional and incomplete when examined in his own mind to make much sense. Hoping this time would be different, he headed for the master command chair and sat comfortably in it. The computer, sensing its duty, lowered the small probes, which he placed around his head, then administered the measured injections and began the master readout.
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