by Joe Haldeman
I got up to help him carry, but winced with the pain in my chest. “You sit down,” Megan said. “Don’t lift a pencil until I get a look at you.”
Everybody else hustled out with Ingram, leaving Amelia and me alone.
“Let me look at that,” she said, and unbuttoned my shirt. There was a red area at the bottom of my rib cage that was already starting to turn bruise-tan, on its way to purple. She didn’t touch it. “He could have killed you.”
“Both of us. How does it feel to be wanted, dead or alive?”
“Sickening. He can’t be the only one.”
“I should have foreseen it,” I said. “I should know how the military mind works—being part of one, after all.”
She stroked my arm gently. “We were just worried about the other scientists’ reactions. Funny, in a way. If I thought about outside reaction at all, I assumed people would just accept our authority and be glad we had caught the problem in time.”
“I think most people would, even military. But the wrong department heard about it first.”
“Spooks.” She grimaced. “Domestic spies reading journals?”
“Now that we know they exist, their existence seems almost inevitable. All they have to do is have a machine routinely search for key words in the synopses of papers submitted for peer review in the physical sciences and some engineering. If something looks like it has a military application, they investigate and pull strings.”
“And have the authors killed?”
“Drafted, probably. Let them do their work with a uniform on. In our case, your case, it called for drastic measures, since the weapon was so powerful it couldn’t be used.”
“So they just picked up a phone and had orders cut for someone to come kill me, and another one to kill Peter?” She whistled at the autobar and asked it for wine.
“Well, Marty got from him that his primary order was to bring you back. Peter’s probably in a room like this somewhere in Washington, shot full of Tazlet F-3, verifying what they already know.”
“If that’s the case, though, they’ll know about you. Make it sort of hard for you to sneak into Portobello as a mole.”
The wine came and we tasted it and looked at each other, thinking the same thing: I was only going to be safe if Peter had died before he could tell them about me.
Marty and Mendez came in and sat down next to us, Marty kneading his forehead. “We’re going to have to move fast now; move everything up. What part of the cycle is your platoon in?”
“They’ve been jacked for two days. In the soldierboys for one.” I thought. “They’re probably still in Portobello, training. Breaking in the new platoon leader with exercises in Pedroville.”
“Okay. The first thing I have to do is see whether my pet general can have their training period extended—five or six days ought to be plenty. You’re sure that phone line’s secure?”
“Absolutely,” Mendez said. “Otherwise we’d all be in uniform or in institutions, including you.”
“That gives us about two weeks. Plenty of time. I can do the memory modification on Julian in two or three days. Have orders cut for him to be waiting for the platoon in Building 31.”
“But we’re not sure whether he should go there,” Amelia said. “If the people who sent Ingram after me got ahold of Peter and made him talk, then they know Julian collaborated on the math. The next time he reports for duty they’ll grab him.”
I squeezed her hand. “I suppose it’s a risk I’ll have to take. You can fix it so that they won’t be able to learn about this place from me.”
Marty nodded, thoughtful. “That part’s pretty routine, tailoring your memory. But it does put us in a bind . . . we have to erase the memory of your having worked on the Problem, in order for you to get back into Portobello. But if they grab you because of Peter and find a hole there, instead of a memory, they’ll know you’ve been tampered with.”
“Could you link it with the suicide attempt?” I asked. “Jefferson was proposing to erase those memories anyhow. Couldn’t you make it look like that’s what had been done?”
“Maybe. Just maybe . . . may I?” Marty poured some wine into a plastic cup. He offered it to Mendez, and he shook his head. “It’s not an additive process, unfortunately—I can take away memories, but I can’t substitute false ones.” He sipped. “It’s a possibility, though. With Jefferson on our side. It wouldn’t be hard to have him supposedly erase too much, so that it covered the week you were working up in Washington.”
“This is looking more and more fragile,” Amelia said. “I mean, I know almost nothing about being jacked—but if these powers that be tapped into you or Mendez or Jefferson, wouldn’t the whole thing come tumbling down?”
“What we need is a suicide pill,” I said. “Speaking of suicide.”
“I couldn’t ask people to do that. I’m not sure that I would do it.”
“Not even to save the universe?” I meant that to be sarcastic, but it came out a simple statement.
Marty turned a little pale. “You’re right, of course. I have to at least provide it as an option. For all of us.”
Mendez spoke up. “This is not so dramatic. But we’re overlooking an obvious way of buying time: we could move. Two hundred miles north and we’re in a neutral country. They’d think twice before sending an assassin into Canada.”
We all considered that. “I don’t know,” Marty said. “The Canadian government wouldn’t have any reason to protect us. Some agency would come up with an extradition request and we’d be in Washington the next day, in chains.”
“Mexico,” I said. “The problem with Canada is it’s not corrupt enough. Take the nanoforge down to Mexico and you can buy absolute secrecy.”
“That’s right!” Marty said. “And in Mexico there are plenty of clinics where we can set up jacks and do memory modification.”
“But how do you propose getting the nanoforge there?” Mendez said. “It weighs more than a tonne, not even counting all those vats and buckets and jars of raw materials it feeds on.”
“Use the machine to make a truck?” I said.
“I don’t think so. It can’t make anything bigger than seventy-nine centimeters across. In theory, we could make a truck, but it would be in hundreds of pieces, sections. You’d need a couple of master mechanics and a big metalworking shop, to put it together.”
“Why couldn’t we steal one?” Amelia said in a small voice. “The army has lots of trucks. Your pet general can change official records and have people promoted and transferred. Surely he can have a truck sent around.”
“I suspect it’s harder to move physical objects than information,” Marty said. “Worth a try, though. Anybody know how to drive?”
We all looked at each other. “Four of the Twenty do,” Mendez said. “I’ve never driven a truck, but it can’t be that much different.”
“Maggie Cameron used to be a chauffeur,” I recalled from jacking with them. “She’s driven in Mexico. Ricci learned to drive in the army; drove army trucks.”
Marty stood up, moving a little slowly. “Take me to that secure line, Emilio. We’ll see what the general can do.”
There was a quick light rap on the door and Unity Han opened it, breathless. “You should know. As soon as we jacked with him two-way, we found out . . . the man Peter, he’s dead. Killed out of hand, for what he knew.”
Amelia bit a knuckle and looked at me. One tear.
“Dr. Harding . . .” She hesitated. “You were going to die, too. As soon as Ingram was sure your records had been destroyed.”
Marty shook his head. “This isn’t the Office of Technology Assessment.”
“It’s not Army Intelligence, either,” Unity said. “Ingram is one of a cell of Enders. There are thousands of them, scattered all through the government.”
“Jesus,” I said. “And now they know that we can make their prophecy come true.”
* * *
what ingram revealed was that he personally kne
w only three other members of the Hammer of God. Two of them were fellow employees of the Office of Technology Assessment—a civilian secretary who worked in Ingram’s office in Chicago, and his fellow officer, who had gone to St. Thomas to kill Peter Blankenship. The third was a man he knew only as Ezekiel, who showed up once or twice a year with orders. Ezekiel claimed that the Hammer of God had thousands of people scattered throughout government and commerce, mostly in the military and police forces.
Ingram had assassinated four men and two women, all but one of them military people (one had been the husband of the scientist he was sent to kill). They were always far from Chicago, and most of the crimes had passed muster as death from natural causes. In one, he raped the victim and mutilated her body in a specific way, following orders, so the death would appear to have been one of a chain of serial killings.
He felt good about all of them. Dangerous sinners he had sent to Hell. But he had especially liked the mutilation, the intensity of it, and he kept hoping Ezekiel would bring him another order for one.
He’d had the jack installed three years before. His fellow Enders wouldn’t have approved of it, and neither did he approve of the hedonistic ways they were normally used. He only used his at the jack chapels and sometimes the snuff shows, which also qualified as a kind of religious experience for him.
One of the people he’d killed was an off-duty mechanic, a stabilizer like Candi. It made Julian wonder about the men, maybe Enders, who had raped Arly and left her for dead. And the Ender with the knife, outside the convenience store. Were they just crazy, or part of an organized effort? Or were they both?
* * *
the next morning i jacked with the bastard for an hour, which was more than fifty-nine minutes too long. He made Scoville look like a choirboy.
I had to get away. Amelia and I found bathing suits and pedaled to the beach. In the men’s changing room two men watched me in a strangely hostile way. I supposed black people are rare up here. Or maybe bicyclists.
We didn’t do much swimming; the water was too salty, with a greasy metallic taste, and surprisingly cold. For some reason, it smelled like cured ham. We waded out and dried off, shivering, and walked for a while on the odd beach.
The white sand wasn’t native, obviously. We’d come in pedaling over the actual crater surface, which was a kind of dark umber glass. The sand felt too powdery underfoot, and made a squeaking sound.
It seemed really strange compared to the Texas beaches where we’d vacationed, Padre Island and Matagorda. No seabirds, shells, crabs. Just a big round artifact full of alkaline water. A lake created by a simpleminded god, Amelia said.
“I know where he could find a couple of thousand followers,” I said.
“I dreamed about him,” she said. “I dreamed he had gotten me, like the one you talked about.”
I hesitated. “Do you want to talk about it?” He had opened the victim from navel to womb, and then made a cross-slash through the middle of the abdomen, as a kind of decoration after cutting her throat.
She made a brushing-away gesture. “The reality’s more frightening than the dream. If it’s at all like his picture of it.”
“Yeah.” We’d discussed the possibility that there were only a few of them; maybe only four deluded conspirators. But he seemed to be able to draw on an awful lot of resources—information, money, and ration credits, as well as gadgets like the AK 101. Marty was going to talk to his general this morning.
“It’s scary that their situation is the opposite of ours. We could locate and interrogate a thousand of them and never find anyone involved in the actual planning. But if they jack with any one of you, they know everything.”
I nodded. “So we have to move fast.”
“Move, period. Once they track him or Jefferson up here, we’re dead.” She stopped walking. “Let’s sit here. Just sit quietly for a few minutes. It might be our last chance.”
She crossed ankles and drifted into a kind of lotus position. I sat down less gracefully. We held hands and watched morning mist burn off the dead gray water.
* * *
marty passed on what Ingram had revealed about the Hammer of God to the general. He said it sounded fantastic, but he would make cautious inquiries.
He also found for them two decommissioned vehicles, delivered that afternoon: a heavy-duty panel truck and a school bus. They turned the conspicuous army green into a churchly powder blue, and lettered “St. Bartholomew’s Home” on both vehicles.
Moving the nanoforge was no picnic. The crew that had delivered it long ago had used two heavy dollies, a ramp, and a winch to get it into the basement. They used the machine to improvise duplicates, jacked it up onto the dollies and, after widening three doors, managed to get it into the garage in one backbreaking day. Then at night they snuck it out and winched it into the panel truck.
Meanwhile, they were modifying the school bus so that Ingram and Jefferson could stay jacked continuously, which meant taking out seats and putting in beds, along with equipment to keep them fed and watered and emptied. They would stay continually jacked to two of the Twenty, or Julian, working in staggered four-hour shifts.
Julian and Amelia were working as unskilled labor, tearing out the last four rows of seats in the bus and improvising a solid frame for the beds, sweating and swatting mosquitoes under the harsh light, when Mendez clomped into the bus, rolling up his sleeves: “Julian, I’ll take over here. The Twenty need you to jack with them.”
“Gladly.” Julian got up and stretched, both shoulders crackling. “What’s up? Ingram have a heart attack, I hope?”
“No, they need some practical input about Portobello. One-way jack, for safety’s sake.”
Amelia watched Julian go. “I’m afraid for him.”
“I’m afraid for us all.” He took a small bottle from his pants pocket, opened it, and shook out a capsule. He handed it to her, his hand quivering a little.
She looked at the silver oval. “The poison.”
“Marty says it’s almost instantaneous, and irreversible. An enzyme that goes straight to the brain.”
“It feels like glass.”
“Some kind of plastic. We’re supposed to bite down on it.”
“What if you swallow it?”
“It takes longer. The idea is—”
“I know what the idea is.” She put it in her blouse pocket and buttoned it. “So what did the Twenty want to know about Portobello?”
“Panama City, actually. The POW camp and the Portobello connection to it, if any.”
“What are they going to do with thousands of hostile prisoners?”
“Turn them into allies. Jack them all together for two weeks and humanize them.”
“And let them go?”
“Oh, no.” Mendez smiled and looked back toward the house. “Even behind bars, they won’t be prisoners anymore.”
* * *
i unjacked and stared down into the wildflowers for a minute, sort of wishing it had been two-way; sort of not. Then I stood up, stumbled, and went back to where Marty was sitting at one of the picnic tables. Incongruously, he was slicing lemons. He had a large plastic bag of them and three pitchers, and a manual juicer.
“So what do you think?”
“You’re making lemonade.”
“My specialty.” Each of the pitchers had a measured amount of sugar in the bottom. When he sliced a lemon, he would take a thin slice out of the middle and throw it on the sugar. Then squeeze the juice out of both halves. It looked like six lemons per pitcher.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s an audacious plan. I have a couple of misgivings.”
“Okay.”
“You want to jack?” I nodded toward the table with the one-way box.
“No. Give me the surface first. In your own words, so to speak.”
I sat down across from him and rolled a lemon between my palms. “Thousands of people. All from a foreign culture. The process works, but you’ve only tried it on twen
ty Americans—twenty white Americans.”
“There’s no reason to think it might be culture-bound.”
“That’s what they say themselves. But there’s no evidence to the contrary, either. Suppose you wind up with three thousand raving lunatics?”
“Not likely. That’s good conservative science—we ought to do a small-scale test first—but we can’t afford to. We’re not doing science now—we’re doing politics.”
“Beyond politics,” I said. “There’s no word for what we’re doing.”
“Social engineering?”
I had to laugh. “I wouldn’t say that around an engineer. It’s like mechanical engineering with a crowbar and sledgehammer.”
He concentrated on a lemon. “You do still agree that it has to be done.”
“Something has to be done. A couple of days ago, we were still considering options. Now we’re on some kind of slippery ramp; can’t slow down, can’t go back.”
“True, but we didn’t do it voluntarily, remember. Jefferson put us on the edge of the ramp, and Ingram pushed us over.”
“Yeah. My mother likes to say, ‘Do something, even if it’s wrong.’ I guess we’re in that mode.”
He set down the knife and looked at me. “Actually not. Not quite. We do have the option of just plain going public.”
“About the Jupiter Project?”
“About the whole thing. In all likelihood, the government’s going to discover what we’re doing and squash us. We could take that opportunity away from them by going public.”
Odd that I hadn’t even considered that. “But we wouldn’t get anything close to a hundred percent compliance. Less than half, you figured. And then we’re in Ingram’s nightmare, a minority of lambs surrounded by wolves.”
“Worse than that,” he said cheerfully. “Who controls the media? Before the first volunteer could sign up, the government would have us painted as ogres bent on world domination. Mind controllers. We’d be hunted down and lynched.”
He finished with the lemons and poured equal amounts of juice into each pitcher. “Understand that I’ve been thinking about this for twenty years. There’s no way around the central conundrum: to humanize someone, we have to install a jack; but once you’re jacked two-way, you can’t keep a secret.