Chaos enfolded him.
He was swept away by a terrible tide—down, down, down-out of control—helpless—and with his last conscious thought he asked himself how this could be happening, when a blanking was supposed to be such a trivial thing. Then he was swallowed up in darkness.
This was her moment, Elena thought. Jim was downstairs undergoing his blanking; afterwards, he’d be resting for a few hours. Now was her chance to add Roditis to her collection.
She hadn’t felt like telling Jim that one of her motives in accompanying him to Evansville was to seduce John Roditis. Newly returned to corporate status by her scheming, Kravchenko would not understand that he was not going to be the only man in her life. She loved him passionately; but she wanted Roditis. Two hours ago, when she and Kravchenko had arrived here, Elena had met Roditis for the first time. They had exchanged perhaps ten words; Roditis had hardly seemed to take notice of her. He was too preoccupied with the maneuvers surrounding the St. John discorporation, as was only natural. But she had taken notice of him. That muscular, powerful body held promise of physical delight; and the strength of the man was unmistakable. To Elena, a connoisseur of strong men, Roditis seemed an ideal mixture of raw power and intuitive intelligence. Santoliquido and Mark Kaufmann and the others had palled on her; Kravchenko, now that he was back, offered many pleasures, but he was shallow, a floater, a playboy; new adventures beckoned to her. With Roditis.
She said, “I’ve always been curious about you. It’s strange we never had occasion to meet before.”
“I don’t move in your high-society circles.” Roditis seemed distant, even bored.
“You really should, you know. We aren’t such ogres. A man of your vigor, your enterprise—you’d inject some new vitality into our group.” Surreptitiously she moved closer to him. Elena regretted that she was not dressed for her purpose; she had flown to Evansville in workaday travel clothes, and there had been no chance to change into something more clinging, something more revealing. In this drab garb she felt, as though locked into armor. Yet it was a handicap she felt she could overcome.
Roditis said, “I object to snobbery, Miss Volterra. I am a wealthy man, yes, but no playboy. My values are not those of your set. I have work to do every day.”
“You ought to let yourself enjoy the benefits of your work,” she purred. She stood beside him now, at his desk, examining the sonic sculpture. “How beautiful!” she said. As she reached forward to caress the piece the soft hill of her breast pressed into Roditis’ elbow. It was hardly a subtle gesture, but she did not regard Roditis as a subtle man.
He moved smoothly away, breaking the contact.
Elena nibbled her lip. She threw him a coquettish glance; she asked him about the sculpture, found that it had been made by one of his personae, praised it extravagantly; she adopted a posture so sensual it might almost have been self-parody. Roditis seemed unmoved. What’s the matter with the man, she wondered?
Her approach became even more direct. She flattered him; she told him how thrilled she was to have met him at last; she cornered him behind his own desk and filled his ears with praise. She could not have made it more obvious if she had stripped and sprawled out spreadlegged on the carpet. And Roditis grew more brusque, more withdrawn, as she fought to reach him.
It was a dismal moment. Elena sensed that she was being refused, which had never happened to her before, and she could not imagine why. From what she knew of Roditis he was unmarried, heterosexual, promiscuous. Why, then—?
To hell with it, Elena told herself.
She thrust herself into his arms.
Her breasts crushed up against him. Panting, eager, she hunted for his lips, while her hands clawed the muscular ridges of his back. By now she was so angry that she felt only the counterfeit of desire; but she came on in seemingly uncontrollable passion, determined to sweep Roditis off his feet. He would have her on the floor, she resolved. A wild bestial coupling. She’d show him her abilities, and afterwards he’d need less coaxing.
His hands went to her breasts. Not to caress, though, but to shove. He pushed her back, disengaged himself, adjusted his clothing. He looked ruffled; his eyes were steely. In a frosty voice he said, “This is no pleasure palace, Miss Volterra. This is a workingman’s office. I’m not in the mood for a wrestling match now.”
She cursed him eloquently in Italian. Then, inspired, she went on to roast him in Greek; but not even that got a rise out of him. Incredulously she stared as he summoned a robosecretary and instructed it to show Miss Volterra to her lodgings.
“Dog!” she cried. “Eunuch!”
Roditis glowered, slammed fist into palm, and switched up the vents to get the reek of her perfume out of the room. Damn her! He could hardly believe what had happened—the coarseness of her, the grossness of her assault. He had known from the very first, naturally, why she was here, hitchhiking along with Noyes to get an introduction to him. All that ogling and rump-wiggling when she had first showed up had not failed to get through to him. And now, in his office, the winks, the ever broader hints, the breast nuzzling against his arm, finally the desperate lunge and clutch—he had not expected the famed Elena Volterra to be quite so blunt.
Unless, he thought, she regarded him as the sort of man who was lured with such tactics.
The episode had jangled his nerves. She was a handsome woman, yes, well up to advance word; no doubt it would have been an interesting hour or two in bed for him. But Roditis had enough handsome women to keep him busy for centuries. This was one he would not touch, though she had the beauty of Helen of Troy. He was unwilling to push Mark Kaufmann too far. He was about to get his uncle’s persona; he would not try to take his woman too. Once the elder Kaufmann was safe in Roditis’ brain, he planned to strike a truce with Mark; and it would be much harder to arrange that if Elena Volterra were in the picture too.
Of course, Roditis conceded, he had just made an undying enemy out of Elena. Hell hath no fury, etc. That could have its strategic uses too, though. What was Elena, anyway? A bed-hopper, a gossip, a seeker of vicarious power, an animated bundle of desires and greedy ambitions, a fleshy construct of breasts and buttocks and thighs and loins. Mark Kaufmann, who controlled real power, had not been able to harm him; what damage could Elena do?
She might succeed only in forging a Roditis-Kaufmann alliance. If she screamed loudly enough to Mark about the “insult” visited upon her, it might just give Mark the idea that John Roditis didn’t mean to grab everything within his reach. And that could be the beginning of the Kaufmann-Roditis détente that Roditis saw as the key to major power expansion.
So let her do her worst, Roditis thought.
There’s no way the slut can hurt me. None!
Noyes, crouching in darkness, was amazed to find light lancing through. Sudden brightness from above told him that the lid which had been crushing down on him was cracking. He stirred; he tested his strength and found that he could lift the lid.
What was happening? Why was Kravchenko losing control?
For an uncertain and perhaps infinite span of time Noyes had lain huddled in a corner of his own mind, Kravchenko’s prisoner. No sensory inputs had reached him here. He was wholly cut off; and he had assumed that eventually Kravchenko would bear down and finish the job of destroying him. First came ejection from motor control, and then loss of the voluntary brain centers, and finally the ripping away of all contacts, so that the dybbuk would be alone in the body they had formerly shared. Bleakly Noyes had awaited his fate. He could not comprehend the turn of events; but quite plainly Kravchenko’s grasp had slipped.
Noyes burst from confinement and flooded back into every lobe of his brain.
He encountered Kravchenko. The persona seemed dazed and helpless, lost in a fog. It was an easy matter for Noyes to recapture motor and sensory power from him.
He let his eyelids flutter open and took stock. He found himself lying on a laboratory table, with apparatus strapped to his skull and chest, and t
echnicians bustling about him. “He’s coming out of it,” one of them said. Noyes thought at first that he was in a soul bank, but then he recognized his surroundings: this was Roditis’ place in Indiana. What had they been doing to his body at the moment of his unexpected return to control, though?
A technician said, “You look a little shaken up, Mr. Noyes. Everything all right?”
“I—well, more or less,” he said. He sat up. It was not difficult for him to operate his body, and that was encouraging; it told him that relatively little time had passed since Kravchenko had thrust him out. Tentatively he formed a theory that this was only the day after St. John’s discorporation. According to the plan, he was supposed to have returned to Evansville to have all knowledge of the crime blanked. Presumably that was what had been taking place in this laboratory.
But if I’ve been blanked, Noyes wondered, how is it that I still remember the discorporation?
He realized that he would have to move warily until he could draw some clues from those about him. Something very strange had taken place, and he had to be careful not to tip his hand.
Roditis entered the room, scowling, tense. He brightened as he saw Noyes, though, and said, “Well, Charles, how did it go?”
“F-fine,” Noyes said. “My ears are ringing just a little, maybe.”
“They say you sometimes have a hangover after something like that.” Roditis dismissed the technicians with an impatient wave of one hand. His face grew serious once more. In a low voice he said, “Have you heard the news, Charles? Martin St. John was discorporated last night in New York!”
So this was a test of how well he had been blanked.
Noyes said, “St. John? St. John? I’m not sure I place the name.”
“An Englishman. The persona of Paul Kaufmann had been transplanted to him. You remember, don’t you?”
“I’m afraid I’m a little hazy about all that. Discorporated, you say? Do the quaestors have any clues?”
“I doubt it,” Roditis replied. “The poor quaestors are always three jumps behind the criminals. It’s so hard to enforce the law properly when a murderer can have all sense of guilt blotted from his mind. By the way, Charles, where’d you spend the night?”
He was caught off guard. Desperately improvising, he said, “If you have to know, John, I was with a woman. I’ll give you the details if you wish, but a gentleman really doesn’t—”
Roditis chuckled. “No, a gentleman doesn’t. But she’s a hot one, isn’t she? Elena, I mean.” He slapped Noyes heartily on the back. “She’s waiting here in town. I’d like you to escort her back to New York right away, yes, Charles?”
“Whatever you say.”
“And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s exercise time.”
Roditis went out. Noyes, relieved, paced around the room as he drew together the strands of the mystery. He had discorporated St. John, and then Elena and Kravchenko had teamed up to push him out of his mind. Noyes shuddered at the recollection. Afterwards, the dybbuk-Kravchenko and Elena had flown out here, with Kravchenko obviously masquerading as Noyes. That was how it must have been, Noyes decided. And, naturally, Roditis had wanted to blank the crime from Noyes’ mind.
But the blanking had gone awry.
Noyes thought he understood why. A blanking was a simple thing, in its way, but only if no unknown factors fouled up the settings of the machine. Doubtless they had calibrated their dials for the brainwaves of Charles Noyes—and then had tried to blank the Noyes brain, unaware that they were really working on the mind of Jim Kravchenko. The clashing of Noyes’ brain waves with Kravchenko’s consciousness had driven the dybbuk into shock, permitting Noyes to resume control. But Noyes had not been blanked after all, since he had been cut off, beyond the reach of the instruments.
So I am a murderer and still unblanked, Noyes thought, and I have won out over my own dybbuk, and Roditis is sending me back to New York with Elena. What do I do now? May all the Buddhas help me, what do I do now?
Mark Kaufmann spent much of Friday afternoon patiently tracking down leads in the hope of solving the double mystery of St. John’s discorporation and Elena’s disappearance. Through various channels he was able to gain access to a great deal of information normally available only to the investigators of the quaestorate. The world was full of scanners, monitors, and other data-recording devices that took down impartial, impersonal accounts of the comings and goings of individuals, and with luck and influence one could tap this ocean of data for one’s own needs. Not all the information received was immediately relevant, but Kaufmann sifted it, searching out the patterns. He had a better-than-normal faculty for finding patterns in seemingly random data. And now he had the advantage of his uncle’s judicious, practiced eye to aid him in his examination.
He knew by now that Noyes had come in from Evansville and had made contact with Elena some hours before the discorporation of Martin St. John. Now both of them had vanished, but this was not a world in which anyone could stay vanished for long. Keying in to the data banks of the transport terminals, Kaufmann succeeded in learning that Noyes had flown to Evansville at one that afternoon. Closer examination of the passenger list of that flight showed that Elena had been with him.
—Has she been keeping company with Roditis in the past?
“No, never,” Mark told his uncle’s persona. “They haven’t even met.”
—Sure?
“Positive. Noyes must have set this up for her.”
He puzzled over the quid pro quo. He knew that Elena had developed a fascination for Roditis and was yearning to meet him. Very well. She had taken Noyes to the apartment where Martin St. John was being kept. St. John had met a mysterious death. Now Noyes had taken her to Evansville, and, presumably, to an assignation with Roditis.
It looked very much like a sellout.
—Put tracers on Elena right away, Paul advised. Get men busy in Evansville. Pick her up and bring her back here for questioning before she does any more damage.
“I’m already doing so,” said Mark.
It took him a few minutes to arrange for the surveillance, not only of Elena, but of Noyes as well. Whenever they left Roditis, they’d be watched and followed, and at the proper moment they’d be taken into custody. Elena had never done anything overtly treacherous before, but Mark knew her capabilities. He visualized a conspiracy involving Noyes, Roditis, Elena, and perhaps even Santoliquido, by which Paul’s persona was speedily liberated from the hapless St. John body, and just as speedily reincorporated into John Roditis on second application.
The phone chimed.
He switched it on and found that Risa was calling—not from Europe, surprisingly, but from the New York airport.
“You said you were coming back next week,” he told her.
“It’s a woman’s privilege to change her mind. I got bored over there. And I missed you. There’s a hopter waiting, and I’ll be home in a hurry.”
“Wonderful, Risa.”
She looked at him strangely. “Mark? Is there anything wrong?”
“Why?”
“You’re very drawn. You’ve got a peculiar expression on your face.”
“It’s been a hectic day, love. Too hectic for me even to begin explaining now. I’ll fill everything in when you’re here.”
They broke contact. Mark felt pleased at Risa’s arrival. In this time of crisis, with unexpected things happening much too swiftly, it would be good to have her around. A man had to depend on family at a time like this. Paul within him…Risa beside him…
He smiled. It was a tacit admission that Risa had crossed the borderline from childhood to womanhood these past few weeks. You didn’t think of a child as a potential ally. But she had shown him her true strength, first in the matter of obtaining a persona for herself, then by her sleuthing to find Tandy’s killer. He would cease to delude himself into thinking she was a child, now. She was a woman, a Kaufmann woman, and he wanted her with him.
She reached the apartment mo
re quickly than he expected. Her European adventures seemed to have sobered and matured her; or was it the presence of an extra mind within her own? She was the same slim, boyish-bodied girl who had left so suddenly for Stockholm not long before, but the cast of her features was different now, the set of her lips, the glow of her eyes.
Paul was astonished.
—This is Risa? he asked, as she entered. Your little girl? Mark, how long was I in storage?
“You haven’t seen her for over a year, your time,” Mark told his uncle quietly. “It’s been a big year for her.”
—She’s impressive. She has the right bearing. There’s no doubt she’s a Kaufmann, is there?
Moving gracefully, almost sinuously, in a style she must certainly have learned from Tandy Cushing, Risa crossed the room to her father, embraced him, brushed his lips with hers. Then she stepped back and eyed him searchingly.
“You’ve changed,” she said.
“I was just about to say that to you.”
“I know I’ve changed, Mark. I have Tandy with me now. But you—you’re different too!”
“In what way?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Your eyes—your whole way of standing—”
“I told you, Risa, it’s been a frightful day. I’m tired.”
She shook her head. “It’s not fatigue I see. Fatigue subtracts. You’ve got something extra. You’re standing taller. You could almost be Uncle Paul, you know, except that the face and hair are wrong. But you hold yourself the way he did.”
Mark smiled feebly. “The Kaufmann genes win out.”
“I’m serious. Mark, have you had some sort of persona transplant since I went overseas?”
“Sure,” he said. “I bribed Santoliquido and he gave me Uncle Paul.” Better to make a joke about it, he thought, and destroy the possibility that she’ll sniff out the truth.
“Really, Mark. You did get a transplant, didn’t you? Maybe not Uncle Paul, but it’s someone new. I’m sure of it.”
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