The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  She tried to think herself into the correct frame of mind, then bunched her mouth tightly and gave a brief nod. “If it was absolutely necessary and there was no other way, I think so… But how can you know?”

  There was a long silence while the others looked at each other. Howard stubbed the butt of his cigar in an ashtray. To the side, Stephanie was aware of Seybelman emitting a long breath. She waited, but already something undefinable in the air told her that their impressions were favorable.

  Then, completely unexpectedly, Wilson Clines laughed loudly, got up, and walked over to the bar. Still chuckling to himself, he refilled his glass, helped himself to a cigarette from the box at one end, and turned back toward the fireplace. “Well,” he said as he retraced his steps to his chair, “it’s nice to know you’re so determined, but we’re not asking you to do anything like that.” Howard and Pat were smiling too, now, inviting her to share the joke. Clines sat down. “We don’t want you to kill anybody. But what we do want to do is cause our friends a certain degree of embarrassment that will contribute to undermining their position politically.” He stopped and waited, studying her face for signs of her reaction.

  She nodded. “Go on.”

  “Do you use drugs, Eva?” Howard asked suddenly.

  She turned her head sharply. “No, I never have.” It was true, too, as they probably knew already. Eva used to describe herself as probably the only person in California who had never smoked a joint. It was something that had simply never interested her, and that was that. Eva had never been a follower of any fashion. She had always been totally her own person.

  “What do you think of them?” Howard asked.

  Stephanie shrugged. “People’s lives and bodies are their own business.” Again all Eva, through and through.

  “Some people say that if the twenty-eighth amendment goes through, then by the terms of it all drug sales will have to be legal,” Howard said. “A lot of people don’t like the sound of that. How do you feel about it?”

  “It’s a long and involved argument, but basically I wouldn’t mind,” Stephanie said. “I think that with what we’ve got, the cure’s worse than the disease.”

  “Hm, I must say you don’t sound as if you’ve changed your Constitutional views very much,” Alan said, sounding dubious.

  “I never claimed I had. I said, it’s a good ideology. I’m just through with working myself into an early grave for nothing over it.”

  “But suppose that the real reason the Constitutional leaders wanted to legalize the trade turned out to be that they themselves are among the biggest traffickers in it?” Howard continued. “What would you think then?”

  The suggestion was so unexpected that Stephanie had to pause to absorb it. Finally she shook her head. “It’s too ridiculous… I couldn’t buy it.”

  “But just suppose…” Howard persisted.

  “I… I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.”

  “How do you think the public would feel?” Clines asked.

  This time her answer came more readily. “Oh, there’s no question. The party would be in trouble.”

  “Finished politically, do you think?” Clines asked her pointedly.

  “Maybe not quite that bad, but they’d certainly have a hard time…” Stephanie’s voice trailed off as the implication registered. A large proportion of the opium that heroin came from was grown in the Middle East. “This has got something to do with why you wanted me to replace Kirkelmayer, hasn’t it?” she said.

  Clines nodded curtly and drew on his cigarette. The humor had gone. Now his manner was all business. “You will be traveling as a member of a delegation which formally represents the new administration. The party will naturally be accompanied by a considerable amount of baggage, both official and personal, which will enjoy diplomatic immunity from examination.” Clines paused and scratched his chin delicately. “But suppose that just before it left Jerusalem to return to this country, a member of that party were to take advantage of that privilege to attempt the concealment of a large—and in money terms, I mean a very large—quantity of such narcotics…” He let it hang there, inviting her to make her own completion.

  “That’s what you want me to do?” she said.

  “More than that,” Clines said. “As I said earlier, the object is to implicate the party, not just you. You see, the customs authorities will have received a tip-off. We want you to get caught. ” Stephanie’s jaw dropped. Clines ignored it and went on, “We want you to stand trial, and in court and in full public view, to confess that you were operating under the instructions of and with the full knowledge of the Constitutional leadership; that it was they who stood to profit personally, and with the connivance of senior members of the Israeli government. In fact, if the truth be known, their big aim in maneuvering to get the traffic legalized was to make personal fortunes. Now if that isn’t enough to sink them, at least it will put a pretty big torpedo into their midships.”

  Before Stephanie could reply, Challin spoke for the first time. “Eva, it probably seems odd to you that Graham and his colleagues should have risked meeting you and revealing themselves like this. That was done quite deliberately. You see, we wanted you to have some idea of the kind of influential people who’d be on your side. Even though you would stand trial and might even be convicted, you’d have the right people behind the scenes to make sure of a very light sentence, or even, maybe, to get you off completely. And after that… Challin sat back and waved a hand expansively to take in the room, the whole house, the world, luxury and whatever you want for life. That’s the deal.”

  “And a hundred thousand dollars up front, in your bank within a week, with no interest on the part of the IRS, guaranteed,” Clines said.

  “What exactly—” Stephanie began, but Clines waved a hand.

  “That’s all you need to know for now. You’ll be contacted with further details after you arrive in Jerusalem. All we need to know, Eva, and we need to know right now, is: Will you do it?”

  CHAPTER 41

  Ostensibly because of her place on McCormick’s staff, Stephanie, as Eva, had officially been reassigned to report directly to Washington. After her meetings in California, this arrangement also provided a cover for her to return to the capital for an evaluation of the situation so far. Mel returned with her. After spending a day with Landis, he left Stephanie there to continue analyzing the information they had obtained. He himself arranged another visit to Denver, to convey to Ed Gilman the contents of the blue file that Eva had procured.

  • • •

  There was a crowd of maybe two or three hundred people outside the gates of General Plasma Dynamics when the cab that Mel had taken from the airport turned into the end of the road. Some of them were carrying placards saying no hybrid babies here and any dose is too much dose, while a woman standing on a makeshift rostrum was leading some kind of chant. Several Denver City Police Department cruisers were parked in the background, and policemen were stationed at the plant gate and in a loose string around the periphery of the crowd, keeping an eye on things.

  “What’s happening?” Mel asked the cabbie.

  “Aw, it’s the radiation from the thing they’re building in there. People don’t want it around, see. There was a lot in the papers and on TV about how it causes cancer, deformed babies… stuff like that.”

  Mel had heard it all before from Stephanie. Yes, sometimes the plant did emit some radiation. But no adverse effects on humans had ever been detected below a radiation dose of a hundred rem. A person standing on GPD’s perimeter fence for a whole year would absorb a maximum of one tenth of one thousandth of one rem. Mel himself had absorbed five times as much that very morning from the more intense cosmic rays at high altitude, just flying from Boston. And everyone experienced thirty times as much in a year from the isotopes occurring naturally in their own body tissues.

  “How do you feel about it?” he asked the cabbie.

  “Me? Sure, I say get rid of it. The
y don’t know what they’re doing with that shit. I had an aunt over on the other side of town die from cancer last year. How do I know it wasn’t because of this place? It could be killing thousands of people all around. They wouldn’t tell you.”

  “But people have been dying of cancer all over the world for thousands of years,” Mel pointed out. “It has a latency period of thirty years. This place hasn’t been running for ten.”

  “Yeah? So what does that mean? It’s just numbers. Whenever they’ve got something to cover up, they snow you with numbers. I saw it on the TV. Even the president of this place admitted it could blow up the whole town.”

  The main gates were closed and locked when Mel got out. A plant security guard opened the pedestrian gate at the side for him, while police officers cordoned back the crowd. A murmur went up at the sight of his camel-hair overcoat, general business attire, and leather briefcase. “Look at him,” a voice shouted. “There’s a fascist!”

  “Fascist! Fascist!”

  “Go fry your own babies, not ours.”

  From the midst of them somewhere, a bottle sailed over the gate and smashed on concrete. Somebody cheered.

  “Okay, let’s move it back,” one of the officers called out.

  Mel felt a chill at the mindless hatred he could feel being directed at him from complete strangers. People had been killed in situations like this, and with no better reason.

  The chanting started up again behind him as he went inside. “GPD, Don’t zap me!… GPD, Don’t zap me!… GPD…”

  He eventually found Gilman, wearing oily coveralls and a baseball cap, in a maintenance pit surrounded by pipes and girderwork underneath a piece of machinery in the reactor hall. A chest was open to one side of him, with various tools and instruments laid out around it. He had removed the casing of a piece of machinery, exposing a rotating assembly inside. “Some of the staff were intimidated by what’s going on outside and stayed out today,” he explained, ducking out and wiping his hands with a piece of rag. “We’ve got some urgent tests to get through, and this centrifuge needs a new seal.” He shrugged. “So I figured what the heck. There isn’t a lot else happening today. Anyhow, it’s good to keep your hand in.” Mel marveled at his coolness. At the same time there was a tiredness in Gilman’s eyes that Mel hadn’t seen on his earlier visit. The pressures were clearly building up. Mel was struck by the contrast between this picture and the neo-Luddites outside: knowledge versus ignorance; reason versus superstition. The creator; the destroyers.

  “What’s it all about?” Mel asked, although he pretty well knew.

  “The media are going through one of their frenzies. An ass from the state university who calls himself a professor has discovered he can be a celebrity by telling housewives they’re agoing to have two-headed babies.”

  “I saw the piece they did about it on TV,” Mel said. “They didn’t exactly give you equal time.”

  “Oh, God, that was a horror story.” Gilman tossed the rag down and hauled himself up out of the pit. “Do you believe the things they tell you?”

  “No, but I’ve talked to Stephanie.”

  “How is she?”

  “Just fine.”

  “That’s good. Come on, let’s go upstairs. Could you use a coffee?”

  “After flying from Boston? Sure. It sounds great.”

  They began walking. “And that’s not all of it,” Gilman said. “We’ve got union trouble, too.”

  “Just what you needed. What’s their problem?”

  “Somehow they found out that we had an offer of private funding if we agreed to forget the hybrid program and went to windmills. I turned it down. They’re threatening to shut us down, anyhow, unless we change our minds. Can you imagine it?”

  “How would they get hold of information like that?”

  “Somebody somewhere leaked it. I don’t know. Cut bono?”

  Several people were in the staff cafeteria, trying to hide their nervousness and talk as if it were just a normal day. Gilman exchanged a few morale-boosting words with them, then he and Mel got two cups of coffee and took them to Gilman’s office for privacy.

  Gilman’s first concern was for Stephanie, and he listened intently while Mel updated him on developments since their last meeting, or at least as much as he felt comfortable divulging. Then they got around to the current situation with GPD and its problems. “Do you think that it’s a safety issue pure and simple?” Mel asked. “Or might there be more to it?”

  Gilman rubbed his nose. “Well, I’ve always thought so. People are worried because of what they hear, and you can’t really blame them when you look at the garbage they’re fed. I’ve tried to do something about it, but the system’s against you. It conditions people to want ever greater sensation, not facts. I don’t know how you go about fighting it.”

  “But could it go deeper than that?” Mel persisted. “Suppose that were just the front, and the real reasons were more political.”

  “Well, I’ve heard theories like that, of course… but what would be the point? We’re being told every day that the country’s got energy problems. Why would anyone want to sabotage a solution if they really knew it was workable? What sense would it make?”

  “Oh, nothing especially new in the world,” Mel said. “Unlimited energy means unlimited prosperity, and that would mean freedom—for everybody. Not everyone would like that. The ones who want to control other people’s lives wouldn’t like it. The godlike power they crave requires childlike dependence on the part of everyone else.”

  Gilman eyed him dubiously. “Maybe… I don’t know. I’ve never had much time to worry about things like that,” he said.

  “But you’ve told me yourself that all the scares about proliferation are really a sham to keep nuclear production technology out of the hands of Third World competitors,” Mel replied. “Isn’t that the same thing: keep the little guys in their place and preserve privilege where it belongs?”

  Gilman raised a half-open hand and seemed about to say something, then changed his mind as the pragmatist in him reasserted itself. “Anyhow, Mel, we’re getting a bit speculative and academic. You said you had something serious that concerns the company. Let’s get down to that.”

  But Mel seemed unwilling to leave it quite there. “Would you say that Hermann Oberwald knows the truth about your work here and its ultimate potential?” he asked. “Or does he believe the popular myths too?”

  Gilman looked taken aback. “Well, there’s no question… Of course he knows the real story. He’s a national adviser, for heaven’s sake. I mean, what kind of a question is that?”

  “So if he said differently, he’d be lying?”

  “Well, yes, I’d have to say so.”

  “Why might he want to do that?”

  Again Gilman looked perplexed. “Look, what is this, Mel? Quit playing riddle games with me and get to the point, would you, please?”

  In answer, Mel withdrew from his briefcase a copy of the blue-bound report that he had found in Eva’s apartment in California. “I think when you read this, you’ll agree that what I said a moment ago was far from speculative and academic,” he said, passing it across. “Multiply what’s in there by a factor of thousands to give you what’s been going on across the whole country, and then tell me what it adds up to.”

  CHAPTER 42

  The snow from the north had reached Washington, and the city was getting ready for a white Christmas. At the Constitutional party headquarters on K Street, Stephanie had been working with Landis and Bassen since early morning. The large table in the center of the room where she was sitting was buried in a litter of files, papers, styrofoam coffee cups, and the remains of a take-out hamburger lunch, and computer screens on all sides glowed with reports and personal profiles of the people they were interested in.

  She had identified the house in Malibu easily from photographs transmitted from the LA office. It belonged not to Wilson Clines, as Stephanie had speculated, but to a man called Bertram Sl
essor, who owned a publishing group that was largely financed by Clines. This connection was interesting but not especially surprising. Slessor was known to have a high opinion of his own political astuteness, and harbored something of an obsession to go down in history as a shaper of great events. He cultivated friends in high places and maintained many connections abroad. Landis thought that it was conceivably through him that “Pat” had come into the picture.

  Pat turned out to be Mahmoud Salayah, an Iranian exile from the revolution in the seventies, now living in Zurich. Finding him in such company had come as a surprise. Salayah held a high-power, low-visibility position in the upper hierarchy of the UN, which explained Challin’s remark about his international connections. It also accounted for the vast flows of money that he had been said to direct—not out of the U.S. through its aid programs, as Stephanie had supposed, but at the receiving end. The UN had largely degenerated into an international platform for anti-Western propaganda, with America still graciously footing most of the bill. Salayah, an outspoken anticapitalist, was noted as an advocate of socialism for the masses and vigorously supported the nationalization of Western-owned assets by developing nations. All of which made his liaison with a banker like Wilson Clines and an energy mogul like Groveland Maddock—“Howard,” whom Stephanie had recognized herself when she was at Malibu—intriguing, to say the least.

  Stephanie had been nearer the mark with her guess about “Alan.” His real name was Duncan Forstner, and he was highly placed in the rarefied levels that decreed the regulatory policies of the Washington bureaucracies—some of which had come close to driving Ed Gilman insane.

  That was another of the subjects that she’d had to undergo a crash course on in the process of becoming Eva. The popular belief that state-regulated industries, such as the railroads in the nineteenth century, and later the telephone and electrical utilities, had been brought to heel to protect the populace against exploitation was, for the most part, erroneous. Rather, it had been the owners themselves who had fomented the public outcries for government intervention—to protect themselves from competition. For the first step in response to such demands was invariably to appoint an expert committee to investigate and recommend on the legislation to be passed. And where else could the experts who understood an industry be obtained other than from within the industry itself? The inevitable outcome was that the foxes would be left in charge of the hen coop, while the reformers, heady with success, moved on in search of new dragons to conquer.