"Well, you'll lose some weight, but with luck you shouldn't be uncomfortable until the last few weeks. You'll know when it happens. You'll have to come into the hospital then."
"No I won't."
'The pain will be considerable, Dale. You'll want to. The drugs can make it pretty easy at the end."
"All right. But there's no shame in wanting to escape pain." The doctor shook his head. "I'm sorry, I really am. I've never gotten used to giving news like this, and God knows I've had the practice." He smiled thinly. "It's probably cold comfort, but I've seen so many people die in the past few years. You look at it in one way, you've been lucky, you and Eddie."
Anger roiled inside Dale. "No, Tom," he said. "We haven't been lucky. We've been faithful."
He walked the thirty blocks that lay between the doctor's office and his and Eddie's apartment. He wanted the time to be alone and think.
Making up for lost time. Maybe that was exactly what was happening. Maybe he should have died seventeen years before, as he had in that time he only vaguely recalled—the lassitude that had overcome him, the trip to the hospital in the ambulance, the poking and prodding, and, so quickly, the fading away, what must have been dying, dying so young and so ignorant, before he had even known what life and he were.
And now restored, if what Eddie and Woody and the others said was true. Restored, like Tracy, into a world in which he had never died, a world in which those who had restored him were alien, a world that was the same as their old one, except for three things—the presence of Dale, the presence of Tracy, and the presence of Pan.
Dale had been astounded when Eddie told him of Pan's absence in the life he had lived without Dale. Dale's memory had contained the reality of Pan for over twenty years, and to know that Eddie's did not was disturbing. They were both quick to come to the conclusion that either Tracy or Dale's survival had somehow caused the existence of the terrorist. But then Eddie had pointed something out.
"What if," he said, "we're not the only ones who've gone through something like this? What if other people have too, and haven't said anything for the same reason we haven't—that people would think they were crazy? I mean, mightn't this world, this life, this . . . track that we're in now be the result, not only of us bringing you and Tracy back, but of somebody else doing the same thing, independent of what we did?"
"It's . . . possible," Dale had said, and he supposed it was, though highly improbable. The odds of what happened to them happening to other people was too great to be considered. People simply didn't walk through time every day as through doorways, bringing their dead friends along with them as easily as picking up the kids at day care. In fact, Dale wasn't so sure it all hadn't been a mass hallucination. That was certainly the simplest explanation.
But now here was this death sentence hanging over him, the same fatal malady that eight people vividly recalled (and he dimly remembered) had killed him years before. Had it lain in wait all this time, remained dormant for the twenty years in which it could not kill him because he had not existed? And if so, were all his memories fabrications, constructs devised in order to rationalize the gap in his existence? Then what would happen to Tracy? Would some explosion seek her out so that a dishonest fate could be expiated?
It was all so confusing, so enigmatic. It had shaken his concepts of life and time and space, had even undermined his thoughts of God. What was reality? And was there a being called God that was a part of it? Dale had been raised staunch Roman Catholic, and had kept the faith all his life, going to Mass twice a week. But since the knowledge had come to him that he had lived two different lives, his attendance had tapered off. If there were indeed two tracks of existence in which he lived, did God exist in both? And if he did, didn't that oddly make God less than he was? Didn't it show that there was something more than just God at work here? Or did it, on the contrary, prove the infinite nature of God, world without end and worlds without end? Whatever the answer, it was nothing that he could talk about to his priest. Father Jim would think him mad.
But crisis of faith or not, right now Dale Collini felt the need for the church and its assurances of spiritual, if not temporal, constancy. When he reached St. Bartholomew's, he entered its welcoming darkness, knelt near the rear of the chapel, and prayed for a long time. When he walked out again into the sunshine, he had decided that he would not tell Eddie about his sickness, for it would only add cruelty to unfairness. Eddie did not have the strong memories of their shared past that Dale did, so Dale decided to make the time they had left together as happy and free of care as possible. That could happen only if Eddie remained ignorant of the inevitable. There would be enough time, at the end, to say goodbye and speak of love and weep. But for now, they would be happy.
That night, while Eddie was sleeping, Dale kept his arm around him and thought long into the night.
Chapter 19
And very early the following morning, Keith Aarons, his arm around Sally, lay awake thinking about how hard it was to wait.
He had done a lot of waiting in his life, waiting for conditions to be right, waiting for the moment when the gun could speak, the knife could strike. His life was a series of peaks and valleys, periods of inaction punctuated by mighty climaxes that shook countries, awed populaces. Still, he was never bored. Even sitting for four days in darkness, waiting for Reagan, he had not been bored, for he had written and read and written again on that endless ream of convolutions, the parchment of his brain, the book of his mind.
He read it now, as the sun pressed its first, insistent rays around the edge of the trailer's curtains. He had been reading it a great deal in the two weeks he had been waiting to hear from Goncourt. When Sally was at Red's, he went to his apartment and continued to absorb the contents of the technical books and journals he had brought to Bone. But that information was now loaded within his mind as tightly as a full clip in an automatic pistol. When he grew bored, he again hacked into computer networks, learning more about the friends who had returned him to life, and what they were doing with their own lives.
But there was little else to do that was constructive except to read his book again, read it and thus impress it even more firmly into his brain.
He enjoyed the looking back. Since the time was coming when it would end, he found it pleasant to gaze backwards upon a life well lived, years full of noble goals finally coming to ultimate fruition.
The beginning had been difficult. After the assassination of Mrs. Thomas Feeley, he had almost changed his mind about his vocation. The reaction to his statement left with the body had been unthinking and unreasoned. The Pittsburgh press named him Pan as a result of the symbol with which he had signed the note, and both the media and the authorities assailed him as the worst kind of murderer, playing up the two young children left motherless. Keith was appalled to see that there was not a word about the lives of entire generations to come who would be left far worse than motherless by the depredations of Thomas Feeley and his kind. They would be left landless, airless, waterless, and there was no double indemnity life insurance to assure their survival.
He had not expected to be hailed as an ecological Robin Hood, but neither had he expected the universal outcry against him as a merciless slayer. The papers had not even printed his message, but had described it in the words of a police psychiatrist as "the ravings of a violent paranoid revolutionary with a persecution complex, extremely dangerous and likely to strike again."
What Keith's note had said was:
This act grieves me, but it is necessary. There must be no safety for those who dishonor the earth, or for their families. As they would kill without thinking let them be killed. It is no longer safe to defile Gaia.
And he signed it with the symbol that was taken to be a hoof print, and for which he was named Pan.
What was even more disheartening than the response of the public was the fact that the assassination seemed to have no effect on either Thomas Feeley or his associates. Six months later Feeley
was taken back into court, where he pleaded guilty on charges of pollution, and paid his fine. This time, however, he made no comments to the press as he left the courtroom.
Slowly, Keith Aarons grew to realize that people like Thomas Feeley could not do what they did if society—the courts, the government, and the people who approved and elected those leaders—did not allow them to.
~*~
December 19, 1972:
Everyone is guilty. Everyone who stands by and allows these things to happen must bear the guilt.
But some people are more guilty than others.
The store owners who stock the paint that Thomas Feeley's company produces, the clerks who sell it, even the people who use it, must share in the guilt. The executives in Detroit who decide to make big cars that devour the world's fossil fuel and spew out carbon dioxide are aided and abetted by the people who buy those cars and drive them.
Attacking those who actively pollute—people like Feeley and his family—does nothing to change the attitudes of the typical consumer. But what if there was a risk to the consumer himself, or to those just further up the chain, the individual auto worker or car owner, the salesman, the clerk, the delivery boy?
What if no one was safe?
What if the most tenuous supportive connection between the citizen and the despoiler was punished with death, and what if people were made aware of that, given fair warning?
Then it wouldn't take long for things to stop.
Look at it this way—if you have a bag with a thousand pieces of candy, and just one of those pieces is filled with cyanide and will kill you a few seconds after you eat it, will you have a piece of candy? I don't think so. So if you are one of a thousand store owners who stock a certain brand of paint, and one of those store owners has been assassinated for that very thing, and the person who did it is still at large, will you continue to stock that paint?
That remains to be seen. I don't think people are that stupid, but I might be wrong. They may like the candy so much that they'll just keep eating.
There's only one way to find out.
~*~
There was another, more practical reason for Keith Aarons to lower his sights to the merchant and working class, and that was that the anonymous and weak were far more accessible targets than the well-known and powerful. However, he was not willing to admit that to himself until much later, when he decided that the pawns were victims rather than malefactors, that their collaboration was born of ignorance, not greed, that the only people truly worth killing were the vultures who profited directly and obscenely from their crimes.
These future revelations did not come, however, until some time after he killed John Reyminster.
~*~
February 8, 1973:
I tried to keep in mind what the Duke yells at the end of the film of Romeo and Juliet: "All are punished!" to remember that the man was guilty. But it really didn't work.
I pitied him. I almost spared him, but it had gone too far by then. He saw my face, he could have identified me. But it was so hard to do. I never used a knife before today. It's quiet, but that's all I can say for it. I thought he would die quickly, but it must have struck bone. He howled so, even through the gag, that I had to pull it out and cut his throat right away, and that was very unpleasant, with all the blood. And even then he didn't die right away. It's not at all like the movies, even the Peckinpahs. There's nothing really pretty about it. I guess it's what being a butcher must be like, killing an animal because it's your job.
I had to push back the feelings, shut out the pity. I left him in the alley, the note pinned to his chest. But as I was walking back to where I parked my car, I passed someone on the street who stopped and said something to me. I kept going, of course, didn't turn back and look at her, didn't want her to see my face any more than she had, and I only glimpsed her face for a second, but I know, damn it, I know, that I've seen her before, probably at Iselin, and I think she must have recognized me.
Thank God I'm dead.
~*~
From February of 1973 through August of 1975, Keith Aarons killed fourteen people throughout the United States. With one exception, he left notes explaining the dead person's transgressions. The texts of these notes were never published in the papers or read over the air. All the public knew about Keith's motives was what the police allowed them to know, that the terrorist named Pan was responsible, and that the murders were committed due to some warped and misplaced sense of ecological justice on the part of the killer.
In early 1975, Keith sent a manifesto to Rolling Stone, where it was printed only in part. Rolling Stone's once angrily radical pages now seemed quaint, and he was considered a villain there as well.
There were no changes in environmental policy.
After giving it a great deal of thought, and reading several columns in counter-culture magazines and newspapers, Keith reluctantly came to the conclusion that the assassinations were too random to be seen as threatening, and thus be effective. By the end of 1975, he had decided to put an end to these low-scale, symbolic killings, but not to his goal.
~*~
December 29, 1975:
I may have done more harm than good. The public looks more negatively upon environmentalists now because of my actions. So be it. The ineffectiveness of these groups is remarkable. Those who try to effect change through minor pressure will bring about none. The only language polluters understand is violence. I have not changed my mind on that subject, and I never will. I intend to give them violence the likes of which they've never seen.
One thing that my assassinations of the past few years have done is inure me to destruction. I am ruthless now, for ruthlessness is necessary when you kill men and women simply because of the brand of products they stock in their stores. I killed people solely for that reason, and I looked into their faces as they died and knew that they had no understanding of their guilt or my motives, but I killed them anyway. I felt guilt, but I suppressed it. I cannot afford emotion. I have never enjoyed killing, but it has been necessary. Those deaths by example could save thousands, perhaps millions of lives.
And the missions have produced in me more than ruthlessness. They have given me confidence, knowledge that I can be a ghost, a phantom, the dead man I am, moving unknown among people, striking, moving on unseen. No one has described me, no one has seen me except for that first time, and that error on my part has long since been corrected.
Now, with this new confidence, I feel as though I can proceed to larger targets, both in terms of size and fame. I can vanish, reappear, wait, strike. And all of it alone, with no one to betray me. Only the machines, and they remain silent. There were never more faithful co-conspirators.
~*~
Even before the spate of bombings for which he was responsible from 1976 to 1979, Keith Aarons had begun to study computer language. He continued his research into biochemistry out of interest in the ways the science both conceivably endangered and gave promise to the environment. But biochemistry remained a hobby, while computer science became an indispensible part of his vocation.
He had been quick to see that those who controlled computers and the vast networks that tied one to another could control many things, such as money, knowledge, power. Through textbooks and several audited university courses, he learned the basic languages quickly, and read everything he could find about protection devices. What money he needed came to him over the silicon webs, and so, after a while, did identities.
By cross-indexing a number of pertinent factors from data sources such as the I.R.S., credit companies, and employer records, Keith was able to find single, unattached men in solitary jobs whose identities he could commandeer for as long as he needed them. Physical attributes were of little consequence. Although Keith was able to change his appearance to some extent, he was also able to change the data to correspond to his own. Among those changes were eye and hair color, and often weight. Keith could gain as much as thirty pounds and lose as muc
h as fifteen off his normal weight of 180, if it was necessary.
What was nearly always necessary was the death of the man whose identity Keith assumed. The ideal candidate was a man about to move from one city to another, whose disappearance would cause little concern. It was remarkable how many people fit Keith's requirements, and from 1976, when he began these computerized identity switches, to the time he drove into Bone, Texas, he had become 34 people, of whom he had killed 31. Of the others, two had been heavily in debt and had disappeared, undoubtedly to assume their own new identities, while the third had committed suicide. Keith found and hid the body, not caring that the man's medical history revealed AIDS. He needed to become him only long enough to assassinate two people.
Explosives were his modus operandi for three years, and by 1979 he had destroyed six corporate headquarters and seventeen branch offices of offending corporations. At first he had used only homemade explosives, creating crude but powerful plastique from bleach, salt, aspirin, and other household items, as well as gelatine explosive from antifreeze. But eventually, after several of his improvised blasting caps failed to detonate the explosives, he made contacts through several different identities to purchase professionally manufactured products in what remained of the underground.
Because terror was his chosen weapon, he set the charges to go off when employees and chief executives were in the buildings. 148 people died in the 23 explosions. Many more were injured or maimed. Keith sent out press releases that arrived in the mail the same day as the explosions occurred, and signed them with his usual symbol. Only portions of the messages were ever printed.
In their September 18, 1978 issue, Time did a cover story on Pan, in which they discussed some of the identities he had used and discarded, and described him from his past identities as "a white male in his late twenties or early thirties, between 5'9" and 6'2" and weighing from 165 to 205 pounds. Color of eyes and hair unknown. As is apparent," Time dryly stated, "the list of suspects is a long one."
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