by Joe Haldeman
Harold Ingram stood on the platform, looking smug. “It’s wartime, Professor Harding. The government is everywhere.”
“If you tapped a public phone without a warrant—”
“Not necessary. There are hidden cameras in all train and bus stations. If you are wanted by the federal government, the cameras look for you.”
“I haven’t committed any crime.”
“I don’t mean ‘wanted’ in the sense of a wanted criminal. Just desired. Your government desires you. So it found you. Come with me, now.”
Amelia looked around. Running was out of the question, with robot guards and at least one human policeman watching the area.
But then she saw Julian, in uniform, half hidden behind a column. He touched a finger to his lips.
“I’ll go with you,” she said. “But this is against my will, and we’re going to wind up in court.”
“I certainly hope so,” the major said, leading her toward the terminal. “My natural habitat.” They passed Julian and she could hear him fall into step behind them.
They passed through the terminal and walked toward the lead cab in line outside.
“Where are we going?”
“First flight back to Houston.” He opened the cab door and helped her in, not too gently.
“Major Ingram,” Julian said.
One foot in the cab, he half-turned. “Sergeant?”
“Your flight’s been canceled.” He had a small black pistol in his hand. It fired almost inaudibly, and as Ingram slumped, Julian caught him and appeared to be helping him into the cab. “1236 Grand Street,” he said, feeding it a chit from Ingram’s book. He pocketed the book and closed the door. “Surface roads, please.”
“It’s good to see you,” she said, trying to sound neutral. “We know someone in Omaha?”
“We know someone parked on Grand Street.”
The cab worked its zigzag way across town, Julian watching behind for a tail. It would have been obvious in the sparse traffic.
When they turned onto Grand Street he looked ahead. “The black Lincoln in the next block. Double-park next to it and we’ll get out there.”
“If I am ticketed for double-parking, you will be liable, Major Ingram.”
“Understood.” They pulled up next to a big black limousine with North Dakota “clergy” plates and opaque windows. Julian got out of the cab and hauled Ingram into the back seat of the Lincoln. It looked like a soldier assisting a drunken comrade.
Amelia followed them. In the front seat was the driver, who was a rough-looking gray-haired man with a priest’s collar, and Marty Larrin.
“Marty!”
“To the rescue. Is that the guy who served you the papers?” Amelia nodded. As the car started, Marty held out his hand to Julian. “Let me see his ID.”
He handed over a long wallet. “Blaze, meet Father Mendez, late of the Franciscan order and Raiford Maximum Security Prison.” He flipped through the wallet as he talked, holding it up to a small dashboard light.
“Dr. Harding, I presume.” Mendez held a hand up in greeting while he steered with the other one, the automobile under manual control. In the next block a chime sounded and Mendez let go of the wheel and said, “Home.”
“This is annoying,” Marty said, and switched on the overhead light. “Check his pockets and see if he has a copy of his orders.” He held up the wallet and scrutinized a photo of the man with a German shepherd. “Nice dog. No family pictures.”
“No wedding ring,” Amelia said. “Is that important?”
“Simplify things. Is he jacked?”
Amelia felt the back of his head while Julian rifled his pockets. “Wig.” She lifted the back of it with a painful ripping sound. “Yes, he is.”
“Good. No orders?”
“No. Flight manifest, though, for him and up to three others, ‘two prisoners plus security.’”
“When and where?”
“Open ticket to Washington. Priority 00.”
“Real high or real low?” Amelia asked.
“The highest. I think you might not be our only mole, Julian. We need one in Washington.”
“This guy?” Julian said.
“After he’s been jacked with the Twenty for a couple of weeks. It’ll be an interesting test of the process’s effectiveness.” They didn’t know how extreme a test it would be.
* * *
we hadn’t brought handcuffs or anything, so when he started to stir halfway to St. Bart’s, I gave him another pop with the trank gun. Searching for his papers, I’d found an AK 101, a small Russian flechette pistol that’s a favorite of assassins everywhere—no inconvenient metal. So I didn’t want to sit in the back seat and chat with him, even with his gun safe in the glove compartment. He probably knew some way to kill me with his pinky.
It turns out I was close. When we got him to St. Bart’s—tying him to a chair before administering the antitrank—and jacked him one-way with Marty, we found out he was a “special operator” for Military Intelligence, assigned to the Office of Technology Assessment. But there was little else there, other than memories of his childhood and youth, and an encyclopedic knowledge of mayhem. He hadn’t been treated to the selective memory transfer, or destruction, that Marty had said I would need for my own mole burrowing. It was just a strong hypnotic injunction, which wouldn’t hold up for long, after he was jacked two-way with the Twenty.
Until then, all he and we knew was what room in the Pentagon he was to report to. He was to find Amelia and bring her back—or kill her and himself if it came to a desperate situation. All he knew about her was that she and another scientist had discovered a weapon so powerful that it could win the war for the Ngumi if it fell into the wrong hands.
That was an odd way of characterizing it. We used the metaphor “pressing the button,” but of course for the Jupiter Project to proceed to its final cataclysmic stage, you needed a team of scientists, doing a sequence of complicated actions in the proper order.
The process could be automated, in theory, after the first careful walk-through. But then once you’d done it, there would be no one left to automate it.
So someone on the Astrophysical Journal jury was linked to the military establishment—no surprise. But then was the jury’s rejection because of pressure from above, or had they actually found an error in our work?
One part of me wanted to think, well, if they actually had disproved our theory, there would be no reason to go after Amelia, and presumably Peter. But maybe Intelligence thought it would be prudent to get rid of them anyhow. There’s a war on, they keep saying.
There were four of us in the plain conference room, besides the jacked couple: Amelia and me, Mendez, and Megan Orr, the doctor who checked out Ingram and administered the antitrank. It was three in the morning, but we were pretty wide awake.
Marty unjacked himself and then pulled the plug out of Ingram’s head. “Well?” he said.
“It’s a lot to assimilate,” Ingram said, and looked down at his bound arms. “I could think better if you untied me.”
“Is he safe?” I asked Marty.
“You’re still armed?”
I held up the trank pistol. “More or less.”
“We could untie him. Under some circumstances he might make trouble, but not in a locked room, observed, under armed guard.”
“I don’t know,” Amelia said. “Maybe you ought to wait until he’s had the sweetness-and-light treatment. He seems like a dangerous character.”
“We can deal with him,” Mendez said.
“It’s important to talk with him while he’s just had interrogational contact,” Marty said. “He knows the facts of the matter, but he hasn’t been engaged at a deep emotional level.”
“I suppose,” Amelia said. Marty untied him and sat back.
“Thank you,” Ingram said, rubbing his forearms.
“What I’d like to know first is—”
What happened next was so quick that I couldn’t have desc
ribed it until after I saw the record from the overhead camera.
Ingram shifted his chair slightly, as if half-turning toward Marty as he spoke. Actually, he was just getting leverage and clearance.
In a sudden move worthy of an Olympic gymnast, he twisted out of the chair and up, clipping Marty on the chin with his toe, and then making a complete spin halfway down the table to where I was sitting, the pistol in my hand but not aimed. I got off one wild shot and then he slammed into my chest with both feet, breaking two ribs. He snatched the gun out of midair and shoulder-rolled off the table, landing feet-first with a balletic spin that ended with his foot catching me in the throat as I fell. It was probably intended to kick my brains out, but nobody’s perfect.
I couldn’t see much from my vantage point on the floor, but I heard Marty say “Won’t work,” and then I passed out.
I woke up back in my chair, with Megan Orr withdrawing a hypodermic gun from my bare forearm. A man I recognized but couldn’t name was doing the same to Amelia—Lobell, Marc Lobell, the only one of the Twenty I hadn’t jacked with.
It was as if we’d gone back a few minutes in time and had been given a chance to start over. Everybody was back in their original positions; Ingram safely tied up again. But my chest hurt with every breath and I wasn’t sure I could talk.
“Meg,” I croaked. “Dr. Orr?” She turned around. “Can I see you when this is over? I think he broke a rib or two.”
“You want to come with me now?”
I shook my head, which hurt my throat. “Want to hear what the bastard has to say.”
Marc was standing at the open door. “Give me half a minute to get situated.”
“Okay.” Megan went over to Ingram, the only one not awake now, and waited.
“Observation room next door,” Mendez said. “Marc watches what’s going on and can flood the room with knockout gas in seconds. It’s a necessary precaution, dealing with outsiders.”
“You really can’t do violence, then,” Amelia said.
“I can,” I said. “Mind if I kick him a few times before you revive him?”
“We can defend ourselves, actually. I can’t imagine initiating violence.” Mendez gestured at me. “But Julian presents a familiar paradox—if he were to attack this man, there’s not much I could do.”
“What if he attacked one of the Twenty?” Marty asked.
“You know the answer to that. It would be self-defense, then. He’d be attacking me.”
“Should I go ahead?” Megan asked. Mendez nodded and she gave Ingram his shot.
He came to, instinctively pulling at his bonds, jerking twice, and then he settled back. “Quick anesthetic, whatever it was.” He looked at me. “I could have killed you, you know.”
“Bullshit. You did your best.”
“You better hope you never find out what my best is.”
“Gentlemen,” Mendez said, “we’ll agree that you two are the most dangerous people in this room—”
“Not by a long shot,” Ingram said. “The rest of you are the most dangerous people under one roof in the whole world. Maybe in all of history.”
“We’ve considered that viewpoint,” Marty said.
“Well, consider it some more. You’re going to make the human race extinct in a couple of generations. You’re monsters. Like creatures from another planet, bent on our destruction.”
Marty smiled broadly. “That’s a metaphor I hadn’t thought of. But all we’re really bent on destroying is the race’s capability for self-destruction.”
“Even if that could work, and I’m not convinced it could, what good is it if we wind up being something other than men?”
“Half of us aren’t men to begin with,” Megan said quietly.
“You know what I mean.”
“I think you meant just what you said.”
“How much does he know,” I asked, “about why this is urgent?”
“No details,” Marty said.
“‘The ultimate weapon,’ whatever that is. We’ve been surviving ultimate weapons since 1945.”
“Earlier,” Mendez said. “The airplane, the tank, nerve gas. But this one’s a little more dangerous. A little more ultimate.”
“And you’re behind it,” he said, looking at Amelia with an odd, avid expression. “But all these other people, this ‘Twenty,’ know about it.”
“I don’t know how much they know,” she said. “I haven’t jacked with them.”
“But you will, soon enough,” Mendez said to him. “Then it will all become clear.”
“It’s a federal offense to jack someone against his will.”
“Really. I don’t suppose they’d be amused about our drugging someone and kidnapping him, either. Then tying him up for interrogation.”
“You can untie me. I see that physical resistance is futile.”
“I think not,” Marty said. “You’re just a little too fast, too good.”
“I won’t answer any questions, tied up.”
“Oh, I think you will, one way or another. Megan?”
She held up the hypo gun and turned a dial on the side two clicks. “Just give the word, Marty.”
“Tazlet F-3,” Megan said, smiling.
“Now that’s really illegal.”
“Oh my. They’ll just have to cut our bodies down and hang us again.”
“That’s not funny.” Obvious strain in the man’s voice.
“I think he knows about the side effects,” Megan said. “They last a long time. Great for weight loss.” She stepped toward him and he shrank back.
“All right. I’ll talk.”
“He’ll lie,” I said.
“Maybe,” Marty said. “But we’ll find out the next time we jack. You said we were the most dangerous people in the world. Going to make the human race extinct. Would you care to amplify that statement?”
“That’s if you succeed, which I don’t think is likely. You’ll convert a large fraction of us, from the top down, and then the Ngumi, or whoever, will step in and take over. End of experiment.”
“We’ll be converting the Ngumi, too.”
“Not many and not fast enough. Their leadership is too fragmented. If you converted all the South American goomies, the African ones would step in and eat them up.”
Kind of a racist image, I thought, but kept it to my cannibal self.
“But if we do succeed,” Mendez said, “you think that would be even worse?”
“Of course! Lose a war, you can rise up and fight again. Lose the ability to fight . . .”
“But there would be no one to fight,” Megan said.
“Nonsense. This thing can’t work on everybody. You have one tenth of one percent unaffected, they’ll arm themselves and take over. And you’ll just give them the key to the city and do whatever they say.”
“It’s not that simplistic,” Mendez said. “We can defend ourselves without killing.”
“What, the way you’ve defended yourself against me? Gas everybody and tie them up?”
“I’m sure we’ll work out strategies well ahead of time. After all, we’ll have plenty of minds like yours at our disposal.”
“You’re actually a soldier,” he said to me, “and you go along with this foolishness?”
“I didn’t ask to be a soldier. And I can’t imagine a peace as foolish as this war we’re in.”
He shook his head. “Well, they’ve gotten to you. Your opinion doesn’t count.”
“In fact,” Marty said, “he’s on our side naturally. He hasn’t gone through the process. Neither have I.”
“Then the more fools you both are. Get rid of competition and you’re just not human anymore.”
“There’s competition here,” Mendez said. “Even physical. Ellie and Megan play vicious handball. Most of us are slowed down by age, but we compete mentally in ways you couldn’t even comprehend.”
“I’m jacked. I’ve done that—lightning chess and three-dimensional go. Even you must know it’s not
the same.”
“No, it’s not the same. You’ve been jacked, but not long enough to even understand the rules we play by.”
“I’m talking about stakes, not rules! War is terrible and cruel, but so is life. Other games are just games. War is for real.”
“You’re a throwback, Ingram,” I said. “You want to smear yourself with woad and go bash people’s brains out.”
“What I am is a man. I don’t know what the hell you are, other than a coward and a traitor.”
I can’t pretend he didn’t get to me. One part of me sincerely wanted to get him alone and beat him to a pulp. Which is exactly what he wanted; I’m sure he could have stuffed my foot up my ass and pulled it out through my throat.
“Excuse me,” Marty said, and tapped his right earring to pick up a message. After a few moments, he shook his head. “His orders come from too high. I can’t find out when they expect him back.”
“If I’m not back in two—”
“Oh, shut up.” He gestured to Megan. “Knock him out. The sooner we get him jacked, the better.”
“You don’t have to knock me out.”
“We have to go to the other side of the building. I’d rather carry you than trust you.”
Megan clicked the gun to another setting and popped him. He stared defiantly for a few seconds and then slumped. Marty reached to untie him. “Wait a half minute,” Megan said. “He might be bluffing.”
“That’s not the same stuff as this?” I said, holding up the pistol.
“No, he’s had plenty of that in one day. This doesn’t work as fast, but it doesn’t take as much out of you.” She reached over and pinched his earlobe, hard. He didn’t react. “Okay.”
Marty untied the left arm and it jerked halfway to his throat and fell back limp. The lips twitched, eyes still shut. “Tough guy.” He hesitated, then untied the other bonds.