One result of travel restrictions was that the environs of airports were not as choked as they used to be in the days when anyone could go joyriding on planes whenever they wanted to. Jarrow and Rita soon cleared Midway—heading toward the city, Jarrow saw from the traffic signs—and then turned north onto an avenue posted as Cicero.
“Do you know Chicago?” Rita asked.
“Oh, I’ve visited from time to time. It’s not that far from Minneapolis.”
“Is Minneapolis where you’re from originally?”
“Yes.…Well, close. Do you know a part called Brooklyn Center?”
“Not really.”
“It’s to the north, a little farther up the river.”
“Oh.”
“How about you? Is this where you’re from?”
“No, from California originally.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m with the state government. That’s how I was able to get down to Atlanta so fast on Monday. I traded merit points with one of the other girls. You can redeem them for travel passes.”
“That’s handy.”
A few seconds of uncomfortable silence fell. They were still evading the subject that eclipsed all else in both their minds.
Rita carried on, mainly to fill the void, “It’s not right though, really. I hate the whole setup. That was why I got out of California—because of the politics. They debit your taxes straight out of your bank there. It’s always too much, so you have to file for a refund. All the returns come in right on time.”
Jarrow didn’t see anything especially wrong with that. “Sounds efficient,” he replied. “Spreads out the burden and cuts costs. The state has to have revenue. It’s probably cheaper for everyone that way.”
“The drug squad can come into your house on suspicion, even if you’re not there,” Rita countered. They were both venting their frustrated expectations on each other. He had come looking for understanding. She had been half hoping to find Demiro. “I mean, no warrant or anything—just if they feel like it.”
“It’s a menace that has to be fought by its own rules. Would you rather live in the FER? Private armies of thugs shooting it out on the streets.”
Rita emitted an exasperated sigh. “You don’t believe all that stuff, do you? Those troubles were over years ago. It’s all…” Her voice broke off. “Tony, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get used to this. You really do sound like a total stranger.”
“But I am,” Jarrow replied. “That’s what I was trying to tell you on the phone.”
She shook her head, tight-lipped. “No.…Look, I accept that it might seem that way to you, but things like that don’t happen. You’re Tony, with some kind of problem. You’ve been away, and something very strange has been going on. But you’re back now, and I’m still here.” She looked across the car and flashed him a look that was meant to say everything would straighten itself out now. “We can work on it together. Okay?”
Jarrow brought his hands up to his face and massaged his eyes wearily.
“Okay, Tony?”
“Please don’t call me that.”
Rita drew a long breath and exhaled it slowly, making it plain that it was his decision—but she’d tried to make it easy. “All right. What should I call you, then?”
“I said when we talked earlier, my name is Jarrow: Richard Jarrow.” The tenseness between them crackled like the air around a power line. Jarrow didn’t need a confrontation on top of everything else. He added, forcing a mellower tone into his voice, “‘Dick’ would be fine.”
“Dick?”
“Yes.”
Rita stared ahead, digesting it slowly with a long slow nod to herself. “Okay,” she pronounced finally. “Let’s talk some more about him, then.”
“Go ahead.”
“He’s this teacher who woke up in Atlanta.”
“Yes.”
“On Tuesday.”
“Right.”
Rita bit her lip, hesitating. “Now don’t get mad, because I’m only trying to understand and help. But I have to ask this. Is it possible—you know, in your opinion, if you take a totally open-minded attitude toward this—that this Richard Jarrow could be somebody you invented in your head? I mean, things like that have happened before. Sometimes, when a person—”
There was no point in continuing with that line. “No, he’s not a figment of my imagination,” Jarrow interrupted. “I’m a real person. Go to Minneapolis and check it out if you want. There are plenty of records, people I worked with.”
Rita conceded with a nod. “Okay. Sometimes people think they’re somebody else who’s real too.”
Jarrow couldn’t contain a wry smile. “You mean it makes a change from Napoleon?”
“I didn’t say you were crazy.”
“You couldn’t have come much closer.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jarrow tossed out a hand dismissively. “I’ve got memories, complete memories of personal things, little things.…It’s not just a case of knowing a few facts. I’ve lived Jarrow’s life. Hiking as a kid, around the lakes in Minnesota. Birthdays, Christmases, the house I grew up in. Other people in the family. How could Tony Demiro know about things like that?”
By unconsciously inventing them to fill in the gaps, he could see her thinking to herself—but she wasn’t about to press the issue right now. Approaching it, instead, from a different angle, she said, “But if Jarrow doesn’t look like Tony, then where’s the person that he does look like? See what I mean? If this guy Jarrow is real, then the person who all these people in Minneapolis know must still be walking around somewhere. If you’re him, then who’s he? Where does he fit in?”
“He’s not walking around,” Jarrow said. “I tried talking to those people, but all I got was a hard time.” He realized then, with a sinking feeling, that he could have an even tougher problem convincing Rita. She, after all, had her own explanation worked out. And it was irrefutable.
“Why?” Rita asked, glancing across at him again. Her tone was challenging, as if he had just made her point for her. “If they know the guy, how come they couldn’t buy that they were talking to him?”
Jarrow sighed hopelessly. “Richard Jarrow died of a stroke in May,” he replied.
After traveling a few miles north on Cicero they exited eastward, toward the upthrust of skyline massed behind the Sears Tower and the Federal Center. Relics from an age of bygone affluence, the monuments glittered like frosty cliffs in the last light of day against the sky darkening over Lake Michigan.
They entered an older part of the city, south of center and west of the Ship Canal and south branch of the Chicago River, from what Jarrow could remember. The streets were mainly of solid, high-built, stone and timber row houses, bearing the signs of transformation over the years as successive waves of fad or commercial promise came and went. There were cinemas that had been bowling alleys, then supermarkets, and had now become miniature malls of sandwich shops and oddments stalls, or capacious used-furniture emporiums piled with Brobdignagian discards—symptomatic of a time when three-car-garage villas in Du Page and Lake counties were being traded for renovated duplexes within walking distance of the Loop. Brick-formed Carlsbads originally built as warehouses had been transformed first into light engineering factories; then later, as industry declined, into antique galleries to professional offices; and were now cellularized into studios and singles apartments. Like butchers who took pride in using everything from the ears to the hoof, it seemed that people loathed letting any part of their cities go to waste.
The street that Rita finally pulled into consisted of two rows of faded, four-floor brownstone walkups facing each other across a short length of pavement with snow heaped along the sides. A group of noisy, heavily muffled children who were playing halfway along moved aside as the car squelched past. Past them, a group of youths was standing around a fire burning in an oil drum by a wooden fence that closed off the far end of the street. Rita parked on the right almost at the end, and led Jarrow up one of the flights of wide, iron-railed steps leading to the front doors. She found her key and let them into a hallway that smelled of cats and musty carpet, from where they went up to one of what appeared to be two flats on the second floor. She shared with a girl called Margaret, she told him, more for the sake of saying something, as they went in.
Feeling more like an intruder than a guest, Jarrow followed her into the living room and looked around. The place was cramped, but cleanly kept and appealingly feminine, with fresh, warm colors, soft furnishings, and flowery decor. Before he had a chance to take off his coat, he was startled to see a picture of himself staring from a niche in the corner, in T-shirt and jeans, grinning and leaning with folded arms against a red pickup.
Then he remembered that, no, that was not him. It was Tony Demiro.
Rita took off her scarf and coat and hung them behind the door, revealing a chunky beige sweater and black slacks. She shook her head, and her hair tumbled free in a bouncy red cascade, filling out the face that had seemed tight and strained outside. Her mouth still had the firmness that had struck Jarrow when he saw her on the phone that afternoon, although softened by an earthy femininity that was more pronounced at close quarters. Her eyes were a light greeny-gray, and her skin had a spattering of faint freckles that hadn’t shown on the screen. Jarrow’s impression was of a woman who would not be easily deflected from her opinions once she had formed them, and from their brief crossing of swords in the car it was evident that on some matters those opinions put her in a very different camp from his own.
But things like that didn’t have to affect matters one way or the other. He was here for one reason only: so that Rita could tell him more about where Demiro fitted in. He had no interest in dragging this out any further than was necessary to learn whatever she knew. At the same time, he was under no illusions that all would be as simple as that. For it was already clear that Rita saw the situation in another light, and that she was motivated by very different hopes as to its outcome.
“I hate quiet,” Rita said. “Mind if we have some noise?”
“I don’t mind. It’s your place.”
She went over to a crystal-player—so called because the holoplate cartridges looked like postage-stamp-size tiles of glass—and touched a button to start a preset selection of tunes. Then she moved to the window, which looked out over the rear of the house, and closed the drapes. “How about some coffee after that cold out there?”
“Do you have coylene?” He was referring to the soy-derived substitute that people were being encouraged to switch to.
“Coylene?” Rita looked surprised. More evidence that he wasn’t Tony. “No, I’m afraid we don’t. How about decaf?”
“That’ll be fine.”
She went over to the kitchen area that formed one corner of the living room and began filling the pot. “How do you take it?”
“A splash of cream, no sugar.”
“You might as well take off your coat.”
Jarrow hung his coat by hers and sat down on a couch by a low table near the window. While Rita busied herself with mugs, dishes, and spoons, using movement to keep herself occupied, his eyes roamed over the flat. There were two other doors, one open, obviously the bathroom, the other probably a bedroom. More pictures of Demiro adorned the walls, some showing him and Rita together, others of another girl whom he guessed was Margaret, fair and slightly pudgy-looking; a pile of women’s magazines on a shelf, the kind that featured fashion, pop psychology, and sexual titillations disguised as advice; more shelves with racks holding music crystals, along with books, mainly fiction; posters from New York and the Grand Canyon; an old computer, which from the stuff piled around and on top of it was either seldom used or not working; a framed picture of Demiro in uniform, with an Army cap-badge fixed at the top of the frame.
“I, ah, I get the feeling you and Tony were kind of close,” Jarrow said, looking back at Rita.
“We were planning on getting married, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh, God. I really had no idea.”
“How about a cookie as well?”
“Not really.”
“Cheese or something? We’ve got potato chips and other munchies.”
“No, thank you.” Jarrow stared fixedly at the table, feeling his mind gluing in its search for a line to continue, as he had known would happen. His chronic discomfort with women had long ago become sufficiently a part of his life to have this self-fulfilling quality about it. The suspicion of possibly invading her private space, intimate surroundings that she might have shared with her dead fiancé, didn’t help matters. He seized upon the thought for something to say and waved a hand vaguely at the surroundings. “Did you and Tony, I mean…”
“No. We had a mobile home out at Hodgkins. That’s on the way to Kankakee, where he was based.”
“So you’ve been here, how long?”
“Since August. I moved into the city after you…” Rita checked herself and picked up a pack of cigarettes that she had taken from her coat pocket, “after Tony was reported killed.”
Jarrow stared down at his interlaced fingers, exhaled heavily, then looked up. “Listen, Rita…I know how you must feel. This has got to be a lot tougher for you than it is for me.”
She stared at him for a moment; then her face softened, and she nodded to acknowledge that he was trying and she appreciated it. “I’m not too sure about that,” she replied. “I don’t wake up finding I’m someone else every morning.”
They looked at each other, both feeling the first flicker of real communication. It seemed to say that in this much at least, they were on the same side. And with that, a part of the oppressiveness that had been hanging over the room since they came in lightened. Rita lit her cigarette and came over with two mugs to sit down in a cane chair facing the table. Jarrow reached out and pushed the ashtray closer to her.
“What are we going to do?” she sighed.
“All we can do: just keep sifting through what we know to see what comes out of it,” he said. She nodded. Jarrow picked up his coffee and took a sip. “When was Tony supposed to have died, exactly?”
“June sixteenth. I was notified about a week later.”
“By the Army?”
“Yes.”
“They notified you, not his family?”
“Tony didn’t have any family that he’d ever traced. He was an orphan. I was listed as his nearest relative-equivalent.”
“What happened…as far as you were told?”
“Around a year ago—I think it was early last October—he volunteered for a special assignment. It was all secret. I didn’t know what it was about, not then. But it seems it was something to do with a new technique for speeding up military training by transplanting whole patterns of things into somebody’s head that other guys had already learned.”
Jarrow looked up sharply. “How did you find out if it was so secret? Did he tell you?”
Rita drew quickly on her cigarette and shook her head. “Tony didn’t blab about things he shouldn’t, and I didn’t press him to. You told me, on Monday—when we were in Atlanta.”
Of course. That was when he was supposed to have been Demiro, Jarrow reminded himself. “Did you hear from him in all that time?”
“At first he used to come back on leave about once a month, but as I said he didn’t talk then about what was going on. Later I got letters that had been censored.” Rita sighed, shrugged, and took a drink of coffee in a way that said there really wasn’t much more to tell. “Then this officer called at the place in Hodgkins one day and said Tony had been killed in a helicopter accident. Regrets and condolences and all that stuff. There was an official letter later, confirming it…and his things arrived in a plastic bag a couple of weeks later. That’s what happens to your dreams.” Rita’s voice caught; her hand quivered as she set the mug down on the table. “And half a year later the phone rings, it’s you…no, you were Tony on Monday…and you’ve just woken up in Atlanta.”
At last Jarrow was getting information. He didn’t want her going off into reminiscences right now. Another mystery that this might shed some light on was the change that had come over him the night before, after he left the bar in Minneapolis.
“What did Tony do in the Army?” he asked. “Was he involved in hand-to-hand combat, or with some elite fighting unit, maybe—anything like that?”
Rita looked surprised and shook her head. “Tony? Hell no. His whole idea of army life was that it would have been great if you didn’t have to go and fight people sometimes.”
“So what did he do?”
“He ran an office full of clerks in a transport depot.”
“I see.” Jarrow was perplexed. “How about hobbies and sports? Was he interested in martial arts, gymnastics…anything like that, athletic?”
Rita shook her head again. “He liked to enjoy life, sure, but that kind of hard work wasn’t his idea of enjoyment. He partied a lot and had fun when he was in one kind of mood; then he’d maybe go off and like to be by himself and read when he was in another. He just wasn’t a violent kind of person.” She let her eyes flicker over Jarrow for a second, then added, “Although I have to say, you look as if you’ve been in training. That’s a leaner, tougher body than the one I remember—and Tony wasn’t exactly what you’d call flabby.”
Jarrow blinked in surprise. He had never been described that way before. “What kind of things did Tony read?” he asked.
“Oh, science fiction, sports mags, westerns, sometimes. When he was in one of his serious moods, maybe history and politics. Arguing politics was the only kind of contest he got into with other guys. It got him into trouble sometimes at the base.”
“What were his politics?”
Rita sighed. “I think you already have an idea. I don’t think you and he would really have gotten along. I hear you as”—she made a we-are-being-frank-aren’t-we, rocking motion with her head—“well, kind of straight and uptight, all for the system. That’s what they’d want a teacher to be like, right?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, Tony wasn’t that way. He thought all this environmental stuff is crap, and the things you hear all the time about we’ve-got-to-control-this and we-have-to-regulate-that are just pretexts for keeping one bunch of people on top and the rest of us down here. But in the long run it can’t last. It’s just digging itself deeper into the ground. He figured the only way left to go was out.”
“Out? You mean to somewhere else?”
Rita exhaled a stream of smoke away from him and stubbed her cigarette. “Right, FER. Offworld, maybe. Well, nobody’s going to change down here, are they?”
Jarrow sat back. He didn’t agree, but that kind of thing could wait until another time. Demiro couldn’t have picked anyone more unlike himself to have transformed into; or Jarrow couldn’t, to have taken over—whatever had happened. There was an ironic side to it all, he had to admit.
“I must sound like the perfect Jekyll and Hyde,” he said. “Is that what you’re thinking too? I bet you’ve got some kind of a theory that Jarrow is an opposite personality that Tony created in his head to resolve some kind of conflict or something.” He saw the resigned look starting to form around her mouth. “Yes?”
A nod, accompanied by a slightly sheepish smile. “Something like that,” she agreed.
The music stopped, marking a short pause before the next number. Rita didn’t notice, but just at that instant a soft creak came from the landing outside the apartment door. That in itself wouldn’t have been enough to make Jarrow’s head whip around like that of a pointer catching a sudden scent, but the way the sound stopped abruptly a split second after the music ceased triggered deep-seated alarm responses, tuned and sensitized to stealth; responses that weren’t his.
And then came a barely audible double click that would have meant nothing to Richard Jarrow…but which something inside him registered instantly as the slide-action of an automatic pistol, loading a round into the chamber.
He was at the door before Rita had even reacted to the first movement of his head. While his hands slammed home the security bolt and engaged the chain, his eyes raced over the room’s contents, estimating sizes and weights. The door handle turned, there was an ineffective shove, then a series of loud raps. Jarrow heaved a bookcase over sideways to fall onto a hall table on the far side of the door, blocking it diagonally, then pushed an armchair behind it. Rita rose to her feet, knocking the table and spilling her coffee in her haste, her eyes wide.
“Tony, what the fuck do you think—”
The door rattled ineffectually, then a voice yelled from the other side. “Samurai, it’s okay. It’s us: Marty and Hank. It’s okay, understand? We just want to talk. Open the door, willya?”
Jarrow moved the kitchen table behind the armchair, a cabinet behind that, and then turned the couch from the window around to form a chain of objects butting up against each other to the far wall. Rita watched, petrified.
The door shook under a louder thud, accompanied by a splintering noise. “Samurai, for Christ’s sake, it’s okay! Open the goddam door.”
Jarrow snatched his coat and threw Rita’s at her as he crossed to the door of the bedroom. He flung it open, and pertinent facts registered themselves like data being tagged in a computer: one window, drapes open, facing rear from same wall as in living room; dark outside; recollection of street layout: elevated row houses with rear yards back-to-back; probable mode of approach: frontally up main stairs, with backup positioned halfway along street, rear of building staked out from the neighboring yards.
He moved to the window and peered through, keeping himself in the dark to one side. The yards were separated by wooden fences, with toolsheds and garden structures in places, indistinct in the gloom. The row of houses on the far side of the intervening yards was split halfway along by a narrow alley. That was where he would have positioned the backup team at the rear, he decided: kept back to avoid setting all the dogs off. Possibly they’d have sent two men forward as stakeouts. His eyes scanned the layout like search radars, following the line that the stakeout pair would have taken from the end of the alley, picking out the patches of shadow that they would have made for. A few feet below the window was the smaller roof of an extension from the house. The crash came from the next room of the lock giving way and the door jamming into the barricade.
Rita was beside him, shaking with terror. “Who are they? What—”
He made a chopping motion with one hand: his manner, in contrast to that of the mild schoolteacher with whom she had entered, carrying such total authority that she fell silent at once. He looked up at the light: bedroom, probably low wattage. Better chances with something brighter. “Light bulbs,” he snapped. “Where are they?”
“K-kitchen,” she stammered.
“Fetch the biggest you’ve got.” She nodded and disappeared back through the doorway. From beyond it, more splintering sounds came, of the front door being pried off its hinges. Jarrow took out the bulb in the room and tossed it onto one of the beds, then went to the window, released the catch, and checked that it moved freely.
Rita was back. “Hundred fifty. Biggest there is.”
“Screw it in.” While Rita complied, Jarrow locked the door and made another barricade from the beds and vanity, at the same time speaking rapidly. “Do exactly as I say. Turn the light on, then go to the window. Talk back into the room in a loud voice for five seconds, as if I’m behind you. Then go back to the switch and turn it off, but keep talking. Wait until I call, then get down onto that roof. If those guys get to this door, get out anyway.”
She nodded tightly. Jarrow dropped to the floor and crawled to below the window. “Now,” he told her.
Rita turned on the light and moved to stand silhouetted in the window frame. “What are you doing over there?” she called back. “Look, I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m…” She went back to the door and flipped the switch.
As darkness filled the room again, Jarrow opened the window and flowed as if his body were liquid, silently over the sill and down onto the annex roof beneath, blending into its cover in the second or two that eyes watching from below would have taken to readjust from the brief glare. He wormed his way to a projecting corner cloaked in the shadows of a tree, and straightened up cautiously to explore around with his fingers. They found a down pipe, but to get to it he would have to stand on a sliver of roof only inches wide extending beyond the corner, and then make a long step to a pipe end sticking out of the wall. He made the move deftly and effortlessly with the ease of a Yosemite climber, lowered himself by the down pipe, and dropped noiselessly behind a fence skirting the rear patio.
In a patch of darkness in the yard of the house behind, agent Barney Costello of the Federal Security Service craned his neck trying to make out what was happening. First the light had come on in the window, and the Chilsen girl appeared, shouting to somebody else who had to be Samurai. Then the light had gone off again.
“She’s still yelling at the window,” Costello muttered into his radio. “I can’t figure what it’s about.”
“Keep watching,” came the reply. “Two of the guys from Pearse are in the front door, but there’s nobody there. Samurai and the girl must be in the back room.”
They’re coming out this way, Costello thought to himself. All he had nearby was Kopel, posted in the adjacent yard. Better bring some of the backup guys forward from the alley on the next street…
And that was the last thing he thought for more than the next hour. Jarrow caught the limp form as it fell, frisking it quickly and taking the gun, ammunition clip, radio, and set of car keys on a ring with a remote button.
Fifty feet away in the next yard, Kopel, crouched behind a toolshed, heard a muffled movement. “Barney?” he hissed. “Is everything okay over there?…Barney?”
An arm slid around his neck from behind, tightening like a steel band to cut off the main artery to the brain and causing him to slump senseless after a few seconds.
At the back of the house, Rita clambered out onto the annex roof as banging came from inside the window behind her. She moved warily to the edge and peered down into the darkness. “They’re getting into the bedroom. Are you there?”
Jarrow materialized below her. “Turn around and let yourself drop,” he hissed.
Across the way, drapes were parting in some of the windows. “What the hell’s going on out there?” a voice yelled. Somebody else let out a dog, which erupted in a frenzy of barking.
Jarrow caught her as she dropped, and steered her to the fence separating the next yard. He guided her over, then vaulted after her, repeating the process a number of times to move them several houses along the row. Behind them, a figure appeared in the window of Rita’s flat and leaned out, peering into the darkness. “They musta come out this way. Anybody down there?”
Jarrow and Rita were in the concrete yard of a house showing a light in the ground-floor rear window. Jarrow knocked sharply on the back door. A pause. Nothing. He knocked again. “Who is it?” a voice demanded inside. “What’s going on out there?”
“Police,” Jarrow snapped. “Open up. Emergency.”
The door rattled and opened as far as the security chain would permit. “Got some ID?” the voice inquired.
“Right here.”
A man’s face appeared close to the crack. Jarrow shot one hand through, grabbing him by the shirtfront, and rammed the gun that he had taken hard up under his chin with the other. “We just need to come through, okay? Open the door and nobody gets hurt. We have to get to the street.”
The door opened. Jarrow shoved the man back against the wall and sent Rita on through with a curt nod, ignoring the woman who was cowering against a countertop on the far side of a table with dishes and two half-eaten meals. “Just sit tight and enjoy the rest of your dinner,” he murmured to the couple as he closed the door. Then he followed quickly through after Rita.
They emerged from a side door below the front steps of a house about halfway along the street. The car that Rita had borrowed was parked back outside the front of her place, which was where most of the backup squad would be, following the lead men inside or waiting. So they couldn’t use that. The computer still working inside Jarrow’s head told him that they didn’t want to, anyway: her car had probably been bugged with a locator device ever since Rita left it at the airport. He looked the other way along the street and picked out the three cars that belonged to whoever was after them. Two were empty; the other had a couple of figures inside.
“Wait here,” he murmured into Rita’s ear. “Be ready to move fast.”
He came out onto the sidewalk and walked rapidly toward the cars, at the same time taking out the keys he’d collected and pressing the remote button. The lights of one of the empty cars flashed in response, and Jarrow headed toward it. It was pointing the wrong way, toward the street’s dead end, whereas the car with the two figures in it was turned around. But he’d just have to take his chances.
He was inside and starting the motor before the two men in the other car realized what was happening. As Jarrow pulled away, one of them got out and called at him. “Hey! Who is that? What’s going on?”
Jarrow whirled the wheel, sending the car skidding across the street into a snow mound, then back into reverse for a turn, wheels screeching.
“What the hell? Hey, stop!”
The agent just managed to leap clear as Jarrow came out of the turn. But the driver in the other car had thought quickly and was already moving. Jarrow cut in toward the sidewalk, throwing open the passenger door as Rita ran from the gate of the house they had come out of. As she tumbled in, the other car came up alongside and angled across their front to block them off, its front inside wheel plowing into the snowbank in the gutter. Front-wheel drive model, Jarrow registered. He slammed into reverse again, backed up, and changed to forward to go around the outside. As he’d figured, it took the other car a few vital seconds of wheel-spinning and lurching to unstick, which was all he needed to pull past it. But as they got to the end of the street he saw in his mirror that it was free and accelerating to follow them. Farther back behind it, figures were running out into the street from Rita’s house.
“Hunch your back. Grip your neck hard with both hands,” Jarrow ordered tersely.
Judging his moment, he hit the brakes and at the same time kicked into reverse again. The driver of the other car closing behind had no chance to avoid the impact. They hit with a loud rending crash that echoed along the short street. Leaving the other car immobilized with a stoved-in radiator, Jarrow accelerated forward once more, spinning the wheel first one way, then the other to take the corner like an unleashed rocket sleigh.
But a known car with a crumpled rear end wasn’t exactly the most likely thing to have hopes of vanishing in for very long. They ditched it a half mile west, hailed the next passing cab, and Jarrow told the driver to take them to Union Station, which was the first place to come to mind in the opposite direction, toward the city. There, they changed to another cab, the driver of which would have no reason to connect them with the area where the ditched car would be found—if it hadn’t been already.
“Where to?” the cabbie asked.
“Just go south on Lake Shore,” Jarrow said.
Rita sank back in the seat and exhaled a long, quavering breath. Ever since Jarrow’s first sudden move back at the flat, things had been happening too fast, and her mind had been in too much of a turmoil for a shred of coherent thought to form. Beside her, he was silent.
“Okay,” she said, when her shaking had abated sufficiently for her to speak. “So, what kind of a school do you teach at? Tell me again that it’s junior high.”
But then to her surprise she saw in the passing streetlights that Jarrow too was trembling, and his face was wet with perspiration.
“I don’t understand.” His icy control and commanding manner were gone, and in their place his voice was barely a croak. “Something like this happened before.…Look, I can’t explain now. We have to find somewhere to stay out of sight. Are there any people who you can trust?”
Rita thought for a moment, then nodded. “I think I know a place. Want me to take us there?”
“Drop us somewhere close. Don’t give him the location.”
Rita leaned forward and opened the driver’s partition. “Driver, could we make that Clybourn, please?”
“You know that’s completely the other way?”
“I know. We’ve had a change of plan.”
The cabbie shrugged. “You’re paying.”
They turned at a gap in the center divider of the road and began heading back, toward the north end of Chicago. Jarrow now reverted once more to his “normal” self, and the first thing he did after the cab dropped them off was lose the gun and the other items that he had taken down a storm drain on the side of the road.
They walked to a corner of a street of older redbrick houses standing opposite some shops, mostly closed by this time of night, and a bar standing beside a drab restaurant. It was quiet and deserted, with mist swirling in the glow of a few watery yellow streetlights.
“It’s just along here, on this side,” Rita said, pointing.
“Who are these people again?” Jarrow asked.
“Their names are Sandy and Bruce. They’re old friends. Tony and I knew them for years.”
“And you’re sure they’re reliable?” Jarrow was his normal hesitant self again. Just as in Minneapolis, the transformation had reversed itself as quickly as it had happened. Now, the knowledge that they were being hunted added more to his uncertainty and confusion.
“They’re both okay,” Rita assured him. She looked along the row of houses and thought for a moment. “Look, maybe it would be better if I go on ahead and talk to them first to give them some idea of what to expect.…I mean, this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day. Can you wait here?”
Jarrow nodded.
“I’ll be back in two minutes. Just give me a chance to explain first, okay?” She waited until he nodded again, then walked away and merged into the shadows of one of the doorways a short distance away in the gloom. Jarrow turned and moved a few paces away around the corner, exhaling white vapor into the chilly night air and stamping his feet against the cold seeping up through his shoes. That was something else he should have bought. Gordon’s choice of footwear might have been fine in Georgia, but Chicago in November at this time of evening was something else.
What did it mean, this sudden change that had taken place in him twice now? It seemed to be triggered reflexively when danger threatened, as if from some depth of his being over which he had no voluntary control. And according to Rita, Demiro had been involved in a secret experimental program to transplant ready-learned behavior as an aid to military training. Furthermore, a conditioning to violence seemed to fit with the pointers that Jarrow had found in Atlanta to the kind of person Maurice Gordon was—or, more likely, he was beginning to suspect, had been a cover for. A cover for what? What had the men who had broken into Rita’s called him?—”Samurai.” It sounded like a code name. And they had acted as if they knew him. Jarrow pulled his coat tighter and stared at the murky outlines of the buildings across the street. As discomforting as he found the thought, there could be no denying that in a grisly but compelling kind of way that had to be faced, the pieces were starting to fit together.
Inside the house, Bruce, looking surprised but pleased, brought Rita into the kitchen, where Sandy was trying to introduce more baby cereal into their eight-month-old daughter, Alice, than was already plastered in her hair, ears, and nose and all over her hands and clothes. The piles of dishes, laundry, and food still not put away told of one of those days when entropy had won out.
“It’s Rita,” Bruce said unnecessarily. “Come on in. It’s a hell of a cold night to take a walk. I thought it was one of those college kids from the welfare department, checking to make sure we know which end to put the diaper on.”
“Hi,” Sandy said. “Grab a chair if you can find one. Alice is having one of her frisky days. Isn’t that right, Alice?…There, tastes good, huh? It might work better if I made this into pies and threw ’em at her. Bruce, put on some coffee for us, would you, hon?”
“Thanks,” Rita said. “You’d better make it four.”
At the clipped note in her voice, Bruce turned his head, then saw her face properly for the first time. “Hey, what’s up?”
Sandy straightened up, forgetting her encrusted daughter for the moment. “Rita, what is it? What’s happened?”
“Anybody got a cigarette?” Rita hadn’t had one since she was at the flat, having left hers behind in the rush to get out. Bruce produced a pack from a drawer after some searching. He used them occasionally, and there were only a few left. Rita took one and held it steady with some effort while he lit it. “Thanks.” She looked up at him, across at Sandy, and exhaled. “Tony isn’t dead. He’s come back.” They stared incredulously. Bruce started to say something, but Rita stopped him with a quick motion of her hand. “I don’t know where he’s been or what’s been going on. He arrived in town today from Minneapolis.”
“Tony? Alive? But, but…” Sandy shook her head. “Is he okay?”
“Where is he?” Bruce asked, similarly astounded.
“That’s the whole point. He’s got some kind of amnesia…but not only that. It’s not just that he doesn’t know who he is. He thinks he’s someone else completely. I mean it’s total, a completely different personality. But apart from that he seems quite rational.” Rita looked at Bruce. “He’s outside, just along the street.…Look, we had some trouble back at the flat. There are some guys after him. I mean heavy stuff, with guns. I don’t know who they are. They came busting into the place.”
“Jesus Christ!” Bruce exclaimed.
“What happened to them?” Sandy asked, horrified.
“We got out and managed to lose them. That’s another story. But we need to get inside off the streets, and we can’t go back there tonight.” Rita looked around at the room and gestured imploringly. “So what I’m saying is, is there any way we could…”
“Well, sure.” Bruce’s tone conveyed that she should have known better than to ask.
“It’s so weird that I thought I ought to come in first and let you know how he is. And he agreed—I mean, he’s not acting crazy or anything. But he’s convinced he’s somebody called Jarrow, Dick Jarrow. That’s what I’ve been calling him. So just try and, kind of, go along with it for now, okay? Tomorrow will be a better time to figure out what to do.”
“Get him inside,” Sandy said. “He’ll freeze out there.”
Rita brought Jarrow in a few minutes later. There were some awkward preliminaries. Hard as they tried, Sandy and Bruce found it impossible to disguise the strangeness of being introduced to somebody they had known closely for years. “Don’t feel too bad about it,” Jarrow told them. “I know how this must feel. I’ve had a couple of days to get used to this, and I’m still having a problem.”
They talked for a while over coffee, self-consciously at first, more or less repeating what Rita had already said in brief, but it gave Sandy and Bruce a chance to adapt. Then Sandy excused herself and went to get Alice washed and put to bed. Bruce began a brave attack upon the havoc of the kitchen and Rita rose to help, while Jarrow remained at the table, hands clasped around his mug.
“What were you doing in Minneapolis?” Bruce asked him as he moved to clear the table.
“It’s where I live. I went back to where I’m from,” Jarrow told him.
“Yeah.…Right,” Bruce agreed, but still with detectable absence of conviction. “And you’ve no idea who these guys were who broke into Rita and Margaret’s place?”
“No. They must have been watching either Rita or the place. The only thing I can think of is that they followed her from Atlanta.”
“He called me from Atlanta on Monday,” Rita explained.
“But there was no mention of any Dick Jarrow then. He was Tony, his old self. He’d woken up in a hotel there, and that was all he knew.”
“But Georgia was where he transferred to last year, when he went on that special assignment,” Bruce observed. “Where was it?”
“A place called Pearse,” Rita said.
“Right. So there has to be some connection.”
Rita went on, “The last thing he remembered was being at Pearse sometime last May. There was nothing then about anything that had to do with flying in helicopters.”
Bruce turned toward Jarrow from the sink, where he had been stacking dishes. “Any idea what you were doing in Atlanta on Monday?”
Jarrow shook his head. “No.”
The door opened and Sandy came back in. “Well, there’s some justice in life after all. She went out like a light. Little snot—must run on some infinite energy source that science hasn’t discovered yet.…Oh, thanks, Bruce.”
“Needs a man’s touch,” Bruce grunted.
“How are we doing?” Sandy inquired, looking around.
“It’s the strangest story I’ve heard for a long time,” Bruce said. “No, wrong. It’s the strangest story I’ve heard anytime. I don’t know what to make of it. But I’m just an out-of-work machine operator. What do I know about any of it?”
“What happened to Margaret in all this?” Sandy asked.
Rita put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Christ, I forgot about Margaret. She was out. What’s she going to come back to? The place looked like it had been bombed.”
“Will those guys still be around?” Bruce asked.
“How would I know?”
“Try giving her a call,” Sandy suggested, indicating a traditional audio-only phone hanging over the half-height refrigerator.
Bruce lifted it off the hook and was about to tap in the number, then hesitated. “We don’t know who they were,” he said, looking at the others. “Do you think it might be tapped? Could they trace a calling number back to here?”
Rita glanced at Sandy. They both shrugged.
“I wouldn’t risk it,” Jarrow said from the table. “With computers they can do anything.”
A few seconds of baffled silence ensued. Then Sandy said, “I guess we could always call from someplace else. Does that sound overdramatic, you know, too much like the movies?”
“Not to me it doesn’t,” Rita answered.
“I’ll get Eric to call her,” Bruce said. “He’s on the other side of town.”
“Who’s Eric?” Jarrow asked.
“Another friend, student at University of Chicago,” Bruce replied. “He’s okay.”
“Don’t you call him, Bruce,” Rita said. “Let me do it. If he hears from you, it’ll be obvious where I’ve gone. If I call him, it could be from anywhere. People can’t give away what they don’t know.”
Bruce nodded, picked up the phone again, and handed it to her.
“I just want him to let Margaret know that I’m okay, I know about the mess there, and I’ll explain later,” she said, taking it.
The others waited, keeping silent while Rita made the call. She kept it brief, told Eric that she’d call again in the morning, and hung up. The four of them exchanged looks that agreed there was nothing more that they could do now.
Sandy sighed and stretched out her arms to relieve aching muscles. “Whew, what a day. Well, now that the demolition machine’s asleep, maybe we can get to eat too. Can I get you guys a sandwich or something? When did you last have a bite?”
“I don’t know. It feels like sometime last week,” Rita said. Now that her nerves were recovering, she was beginning to realize how much all the tension had taken out of her.
Jarrow had glimpsed how bare the refrigerator was while Bruce was putting the things away. “Is there a pizza place or anything like that near here?” he asked.
“A block and a half away,” Sandy answered.
Jarrow felt inside his jacket for Gordon’s wallet. “Then order a couple of big ones,” he said. “And a six-pack or two to go with them. It’s on me.”
Pearse Psychological Research Laboratories lay a little under fifty miles northwest of Atlanta, hidden among the wooded valleys forming the edge of the Dahlonega Plateau, the southern end of the Appalachians. What was now the Main Complex, containing the major laboratory and administration blocks, had been built originally as the research facility of private genetic engineering interests, closed down by animal-rights lobbying. Since its takeover as a military facility, a patchwork of more sprawling extensions had attached themselves in a succession of uncoordinated additions. The establishment oversaw and instituted programs connected with various aspects of military psychology and psychological warfare, stresses of combat environments, maintenance of morale, optimization of training methods, and a few other things that weren’t publicly talked about.
Names only would be used for the volunteers, Demiro had been told; ranks would not be disclosed. He arrived with another soldier who gave his name as Schott, and a black called Lowe, who had been collected at the airport by the same shuttle bus. They had exchanged the usual basic data on the ride back to Pearse. Lowe was from Mississippi, had had postings in Venezuela and Alaska, had been a bugler, still played jazz trumpet, would lay odds on any sport, and thought that being in bed with a woman was the most natural thing in the world because he’d been born that way. Schott was more taciturn, but from the few things he said he came from New York State and thought that one thing to be said for army life as opposed to civilian was that at least you didn’t have to choose who got to push you around. Neither of them had any more idea than Demiro did of what the assignment at Pearse was about. Lowe had volunteered to escape an amorous entanglement involving a sergeant’s wife; Schott said he was just curious to find out what kinds of things happened on programs that volunteers were invited for.
They checked in at a guardhouse by the main gate, where IDs and security clearances were verified, and were escorted to one of several regular army-style billet huts in a compound on one side of the main complex, which they were told would be their assigned quarters. A number of other volunteers for the same program were already unpacking kits into lockers and settling in, having picked the best bunk spaces. A Sergeant Eades, from Pearse itself, was in charge, standard Army product, stiff-backed, pressed and creased, and would evidently be handling routine administrative and day-to-day matters.
They had lunch, eleven of them, plus the sergeant and a couple of other NCOs that they’d be working with, in a canteen located outside an internal security perimeter that was designated the Restricted Zone and included most of the Main Complex. That was where the classified work went on, and anyone without high-level clearance required escort at all times. This was when people competed in the heats for first impressions, and the initial forays were made to rough out whatever pecking order would finally assert itself. Demiro tended to a lower-profile role, keeping eyes and ears open. As an old cowhand turned bar owner had told him once when he was a kid growing up in Denver, “Y’ don’t learn nuthin’ while yer talkin’.”
After lunch the shuttle bus returned from another pickup at the airport, bringing the total number of recruits up to twenty. When the newcomers had been installed and given a chance to clean up, they were all taken to a room in the Facilities Block, again still outside the Restricted Zone, for a preliminary briefing.
The warm-up man was a Major Gleavey: a smiling Mr. Personality, everybody’s friend—perhaps a frustrated talk-show host or prime-time variety MC. He welcomed the company to the establishment, enthusing about it as if it were a Boy Scout camp, stressed the importance of team spirit and making the effort to fit in, and promised them some “truly fascinating and exciting things” if they stayed with it. He wanted this to be a happy place. The secret of success in anything was to learn to work together. And of course, “…if you’ve got any problems, come to me, okay?”
He then introduced Colonel Wylvern, who, as most of the men present had already discerned for themselves, would be in ultimate charge of things while Gleavey did the legwork and fronting. He didn’t make any especially spectacular impact: the kind of CO whom they’d all seen a dozen times before, square-set and solid, with wavy hair, a touch of floridness about the features, sufficiently aloof and remote to maintain a distance of militarily proper impartiality. He delivered a set-piece recitation on the importance of security, a warning that infractions of discipline would not be tolerated, and some words about the privilege of having an opportunity to serve the nation in this way. Nothing new or interesting there. Wylvern ended, “This may look like a small-time, backwater project from the scale of it and the number of you here, but I can assure you that it has national importance. In fact, it’s under the personal direction of a general, who’ll be making himself known in due course, after we’ve made some initial progress.”
Then it was the turn of the civilian in a dark gray suit who had been sitting listening without change of expression through all this, and drawing curious looks from the troops. He was tight about the face and lean-jawed, which drew his mouth into a thin-lipped line that hinted of humorlessness, determination, or both, an impression strengthened by the narrow, thinly knotted necktie—constraining his person, as he perhaps did his emotions—and the cold eyes staring out through rimless bifocal spectacles. “Economy” was the word to summarize what everything about him seemed to project. He expended no unnecessary effort in his movements; there was no pointless expressiveness in his manner, nor sartorial elegances in his dress. Gleavey, who Demiro had already dubbed inwardly as “Glee-show,” introduced him as Dr. Nordens. And it quickly turned out that Nordens didn’t waste anything in words, either.
“We’ll be exploring a new territory of science, concerning the mind and how it functions. We are looking for a particular type of subject to help in these researches, and the first part of the program will consist of further testing and selection before we move on to the program itself. For obvious reasons I can’t go into details at this stage. But I can say that those of you who remain can expect to acquire skills and abilities that you never thought possible. The rest of today is available for you to relax and settle in. We begin work tomorrow morning, at eight-thirty sharp. The schedule will be posted. Thank you.” He sat down.
The official designation of the project they were now part of, the men learned, would be “Southside.”
The house had been subdivided into several family units, so space was limited. Bruce cleared away some junk and boxes in a small room that would eventually be Alice’s and set up a folding bed there for Rita, while Jarrow made do with a couple of blankets on the living-room couch. It was comfortable enough, but he slept fitfully, unable to disengage his mind from continual replays of the things that had happened since his awakening in Atlanta. It didn’t seem possible for it to have been only two days. What amazed him most was the uncanny way in which he knew just where the men who had come for him at Rita’s would be and how they would react. It was almost as if he himself were one of them, and had known how people who did that kind of work would think. But he was unable to summon up any glimpse of a wider framework of associations, of which such knowledge would surely be a part.
The next morning Rita called Eric again while Sandy was scrambling eggs for breakfast. He had talked to Margaret the night before, who had sounded shaken but was otherwise all right. She had arrived home to find the street full of police, who had been called by the neighbors, taking statements everywhere. There was no sign by then of the men who had caused the disturbance. Whether that meant that they hadn’t been from one of the law-enforcement agencies, or had, and were simply covering their tracks after a botched job, there was no way of telling. Eric had just called Margaret again that morning. The police had been keeping an eye on the street and there had been no further incidents. Apart from having the clearing up to do and some repairs to arrange with the landlord, Margaret was okay. Rita said she appreciated his help, promised to explain it all one day, and hung up before he could start pressing her with questions.
There was really nothing new to be said over breakfast. Rita and Jarrow must have been followed from the airport; it was obviously Jarrow that these people were interested in, since he was the one that all the strange things had been happening to; neither he nor Rita had any better notion than they’d had last night of what to do now. They couldn’t go back to the apartment now, Rita said. It would be exactly what the police would be waiting for, and once they got involved with them there’d be no end to it.
Sandy wanted to know why the police wouldn’t be the best people to get involved with. If guys were breaking down doors and coming after her, that would be the first place she’d go. That was what police were for. Rita explained about the Maurice Gordon mystery, and the guns and other questionable items that Jarrow had been carrying in Atlanta—which she knew all about, since they’d been there when Jarrow was Tony and she was with him, the night before he woke up as Jarrow. Who knew what Gordon had been mixed up in?
“True,” Sandy agreed.
And even more to the point, Jarrow reminded them, as far as the rest of the world seemed to be concerned, he was Tony Demiro. But Demiro was supposed to be dead. The official Army records said so. So something very strange and distinctly malodorous had been going on involving official departments.
“Do the police talk to the Army?” Sandy asked.
“They all talk to everybody,” Rita said. “They’ve all got lines into each other’s computers. Anything that carries what’s called a general public service code can be fished out anywhere. That includes a summary listing of most routine police reports.”
Bruce glanced at the clock. “Well,” he announced, “it doesn’t seem as if we’re any nearer to settling anything. I have to go and see a guy in fifteen minutes about some part-time help that might bring in a few bucks.”
“Oh, right. I’d forgotten about that,” Sandy said. “We could sure use it.”
“I should be back in under an hour.”
“You go ahead,” Jarrow told him. “Don’t let us keep you. As you say, we aren’t really any closer to settling anything.”
Bruce got up and went to put on his coat. Just then the phone rang. “Ten to one it’s Eric,” he muttered. It was what they expected. Naturally, after Eric got the story from Margaret, he would be calling around, trying to find out where Rita had contacted him from.
“I’ll get it,” Sandy said, crossing the room. She picked up the receiver. “Hello?…Oh, Eric, hi. What’s up?…No, why?…she did?…You’re kidding!…Oh, my God, is she all right?…” The gist of the conversation was clear from Sandy’s responses. Had she seen or heard anything of Rita? Rita had called Eric last night and again just now, but wouldn’t say from where. Eric then went on to relate the story, which Sandy of course had to listen through to be credible. She ended by assuring Eric that she’d let him know if they heard anything.
“The things I do for friends,” Sandy sighed after she’d hung up.
“I won’t forget it,” Rita promised.
Bruce finished putting on his coat. “Anything you two need while I’m out?” he asked Rita and Jarrow. “I guess it would probably be better if you stayed inside.”
“I could use some cigarettes,” Rita replied. The few that Bruce had found hadn’t lasted the previous evening.
“How about a paper?” Jarrow said. “There might be something about last night.”
“I’ll see to it,” Sandy told them. “I’ve got to go out myself in a few minutes anyhow—do a few things and take the Wretch out for some air.”
“Okay, take care.” Bruce kissed her lightly and turned to the door. “See you later.” He left, and they heard the front door close out in the hallway.
“You go ahead if you want,” Rita told Sandy. “I can clear up in here.”
Sandy grinned. “You’re just jumpy for a cigarette, right?”
“Right.”
Sandy hauled Alice out of the baby chair and wiped off the worst of the morning’s devastations. “Okay. We shouldn’t be more than half an hour. I need to stock up on a few groceries. Anything in particular you’d like?”
Jarrow took out a couple of twenties and held them out to her without asking. “Here’s a contribution. We’re not asking for a free hotel.”
“What are you talking about?” Sandy protested. “I don’t want that. You’re friends of the family, for chrissakes.”
“But I’m not,” Jarrow reminded her.
Sandy and Rita caught each other’s eye in a brief hiatus. Rita pursed her lips silently and looked down at the table. “Okay, we’re not proud.” Sandy took the bills and nodded appreciatively. “Thanks, Dick. It’ll be a big help.”
Sandy picked up Alice again and carried her out to the hallway, where she unfolded a stroller from its storage space by the closet.
“Winston,” Rita called after her, to remind her of the brand.
“Got it.” Sandy closed the door and began the routine that she was sure she went through at least a thousand times every week of buttoning, buckling, and tying Alice into a panoply of quilted pants, coat, bonnet, furry boots, mittens, and restraining straps that would have defied Houdini.
In the kitchen, Jarrow refilled his mug and raised his eyebrows at Rita. She nodded, and he poured her another too.
“We didn’t exactly get a chance to find out much about each other yesterday,” he said.
Rita added a spoonful of sugar and stirred it in. “I can’t imagine why not.”
“You seem to know something about official data networks.”
“Right, that’s what I do.”
“You said something about having a government job.”
“I’m just a clerk—with the state Economic Coordination Bureau here. That’s why I moved back into the city when you…when Tony disappeared. We process the permits that companies get limiting production of indexed materials to conform to the quota assignments from the Resource Allocation Agency. I’m with a section called Petroleum-Derived Plastics. So it doesn’t matter how much a customer’s prepared to pay for, you can’t ship more than our people say. Guess why Bruce doesn’t have a job.”
“You don’t sound as if you approve,” Jarrow commented.
“It started as part of what was supposed to change industry into putting service to the public good in place of private profit,” Rita said.
“Well, that’s a pretty desirable thing to strive for, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know, is it? Is that what you teach the kids?”
“I teach them what ought to be obvious to anyone: that industrial activity is basically damaging and polluting, and anything beyond the minimum that we have to put up with should be discouraged,” Jarrow replied stiffly. He didn’t like the undertone in her voice, which sounded mocking, nor did he like being cross-examined by somebody who still came across as half his age, however different it might look physically.
“But that isn’t how it works,” Rita said. “There’s still a lot of profit to be made from giving out the permits. And I’m talking about private profit. When you can close down a billion-dollar plant, you make friends real easy.”
“That would be illegal,” Jarrow objected.
Rita laughed delightedly. “I don’t believe this.” Jarrow’s face tightened defensively. Rita laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Sorry, don’t get me wrong. You seem like a nice enough person, but you buy all this brainwashing that they pump out. Nobody down here in the real world—” The phone rang again and interrupted her.
She swung her head away to look at it. “Don’t answer it,” Jarrow murmured, lowering his voice instinctively, as if it might catch his voice even while still on the hook.
Rita looked back toward the door. “Has Sandy gone yet?”
She got up from her chair just as the door opened and Sandy reappeared. “Okay, I heard it.” A wail went up from beyond the door. “Go and keep an eye on Wretch, or strangle her or something.”
“Sure,” Rita said, and hurried out. The wailing abated.
Sandy picked up the phone. “Hello?…Yes it is. Who’s this?” She frowned as she listened. Then her eyes widened. Her expression changed suddenly, and she looked unconsciously at Jarrow with a confused, fearful expression. “No, I can’t. He’s dead. He was killed in an accident.” Jarrow, startled, set down his mug and waited tensely. Sandy shook her head as she listened. “But, that’s impossible.…I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” She listened some more, then nodded. “All right, if I do. One moment.” She unhooked a tethered pen from its clip on the wall and pulled over the memo pad lying on top of the refrigerator. “Okay.…Yes, I said I would, if I hear anything, Good-bye.” She hung up and stood staring down at what she had written.
“What is it?” Jarrow asked.
Sandy looked up bemusedly. “It was a woman—she didn’t give any name. Said she wanted to get in touch with Tony Demiro. She understood we were friends of his. I told her he was dead. She said that was impossible, because she saw him two days ago in Atlanta. There’s a number here to call if I hear anything.”
Jarrow took the pad from her hand and looked at it. The number meant nothing to him.
“But there was more to it than that,” Sandy said. “Something in her voice, I could tell. It wasn’t just a casual inquiry. She knew.”
Jarrow’s main concern was that despite their precautions, they had been traced, somehow, to Bruce and Sandy’s. He could only conclude ruefully that his ideas on how to lose tails left a lot to be desired.
“We have to get away from here,” he said to Bruce and Sandy when they talked things over after Bruce was back. “This isn’t your problem. You’ve already done more than enough, and you’ve got other considerations to worry about. It’ll be best all around if we just go now, and don’t give any leads.”
He was right, of course, and nobody went through the motions of arguing with him. “What are you going to do?” Sandy asked.
Jarrow spread his hands. “Call the number. It’s the only way we’re ever going to learn anything. Why else did that woman mention Atlanta than as a way of signaling that whoever she’s with knows a lot that I’m interested in?”
But Bruce was still uneasy. “It has to be a trap,” he insisted. “If they get you to a phone, they’ll trace where you are. And we already know the kind of people we’re talking about.”
“What about public phones or vehicle phones?” Rita asked. “Can they trace those?”
“I don’t know. I just know that if it were me, I wouldn’t trust anything,” Bruce replied.
“But they must know already where Rita and Dick are,” Sandy said to him. “Why else would they call here?”
“Then why bother calling first at all?” Bruce said, “If they know, they could have sealed off the whole block by now.”
“Maybe they’re just not sure,” Rita suggested. “They can’t go around tearing the whole city apart on guesses—especially after last night.”
“So if Rita and Tony…Dick, I mean…if they return the call, then it would confirm their location,” Bruce said, feeling that it made his point.
Silence fell while everyone went over the same questions again in their minds, and came up again, inevitably, with the same answers. Finally Rita said, “There isn’t any other way.” Jarrow looked across, and she showed a hand imploringly. “Either we call the number and take whatever risk is involved; or we turn ourselves in to the cops and wait for whatever happens then; or we carry on hiding off the streets for the rest of time.”
“I don’t want to get involved with the police,” Jarrow said. “Not until I know something more about who Gordon is and what he’s been doing, anyway.”
Rita was already nodding. “Exactly. I know. And option three isn’t a way to spend a life. So we’re left with option one. That’s why I said there isn’t any other way.”
Jarrow nodded, resigning himself. They would have to deal with whoever the mysterious woman caller had spoken for. “But you don’t have to get mixed up in this,” he told Rita. “Whatever’s been going on has had to do with me. I called your number from Atlanta, that’s all.”
The words needed saying, but he was unable to inject much conviction into them. He already knew what her answer would be.
“Look,” she said. “Whatever else you may think, as far as I’m concerned you’re Tony. And if you think I’m just going to let you walk out of my life again after you come back from being dead, you’re out of your mind. So let’s go.”
They took the Howard/Englewood el into the city center and found an open shopping arcade off State Street with a line of nonscreen pay-phone booths. Jarrow made the call, while Rita stood watching the door.
A gruff voice answered after a couple of rings. “Quincy’s bar.”
“Bar? Er, look, I don’t know if I’ve got this right. I got a message. The name’s Demiro. Somebody wanted me to call, but didn’t give a name. She left this number.”
“That’s Tony, right?”
“Yes.” Jarrow’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. So he had got it right.
“Well, she ain’t here, but I can get her to call you,” the voice told him. “What’s your number?”
“I’m not sure I want to say,” Jarrow replied warily.
“What’s up?” Rita hissed.
“It’s just a bar,” Jarrow whispered, raising a hand to stall her as the voice spoke again.
“Then I can’t help ya. Look, I’m just doing the lady a favor, okay? I don’t know what this is all about. If you want to talk to her, she’ll call you. I got better things to do, you know. I run a bar, not a dating service.”
“He wants this number so that she can call here,” Jarrow whispered to Rita. “I’m not sure I like it.”
“Tell him two minutes.” Rita said.
“Just two minutes,” Jarrow said into the phone. “Tell her I’ll be here for two minutes, then I leave.”
“Whatever you say,” the voice answered in the kind of tone usually reserved for humoring psychotics. “I’ll see what I can do.” The line went dead.
“I don’t understand it,” Jarrow muttered as they waited, looking anxiously along the arcade and back at the entrance from the street. “If they had an idea we were at Bruce and Sandy’s, they could have been waiting there. It’s almost as if they are worried about being traced.”
The call came in less than a minute later. But the voice was a man’s. It had what sounded to Jarrow like an Eastern European accent, strengthened by the acoustics of the phone. He introduced himself as Josef.
“Where did you get our message?” Josef asked. Which meant that whoever they were, they had left it at a number of places and hence didn’t know everything.
Jarrow wasn’t about to reveal that it had been at Bruce and Sandy’s. “I just heard it,” he answered.
“Where are you? In the city?”
“Pretty central,” Jarrow said vaguely.
“Are you anywhere near the Bismarck Hotel?”
“Wait a second.” Jarrow covered the mouthpiece. “Where’s the Bismarck Hotel?” he hissed at Rita.
“Not far. A couple of blocks.”
“Pretty close,” Jarrow said into the phone.
“Can you be there in fifteen minutes or so, say at ten-thirty?”
“Who is this? Why should I trust you?”
“I suspect that you are having some serious problems, and I think we might be able to help. Besides, who else can you trust? The people who nearly got to you last night won’t give up.”
“What do you want from me?” Jarrow asked.
“We need to find Ashling, urgently. I think you might be the key.”
“I don’t know anyone by that name,” Jarrow said.
Josef seemed to have been half expecting it. “We need to talk,” he said.
Jarrow drew a long breath. “Very well. I’ll be at the Bismarck at ten-thirty.”
“Come to the tenth floor. Somebody will meet you there.”
“One more thing, I have somebody with me. Is that okay?”
“You mean Ms. Chilsen? Yes, bring her too, by all means.”
There was nothing else for it, Jarrow decided. In those few sentences Josef had shown that he knew more than they had any hope of uncovering in weeks. And for some reason Jarrow believed him when he said that he wasn’t connected with the men who had broken into Rita’s the previous night.
They got to the Bismarck early and walked around the block to bring them back to the main doors at exactly ten-thirty. Inside, they crossed the lobby to the elevators. Jarrow glanced furtively around while they waited, feeling conspicuous and jittery like an amateur investigator on his first assignment, but nobody seemed to be paying them any attention. Just as the car arrived, a bearded man in a tweed hat and tan parka appeared from a side passage and got in with them. Jarrow pressed 10 and glanced inquiringly at the stranger.
“Two, please,” the man said. Jarrow complied.
The three of them stared at the inside of the door in silence as the elevator ascended. It arrived at two, and the bearded man moved forward. Suddenly he turned and announced, “I am Josef. We get off here. Come with me, please.”
Jarrow and Rita looked at each other uncertainly. But there was nothing else for it. They followed Josef out onto the landing and along one of the corridors, then through a door to a concrete stairway and back down to ground level. From there a service passage and rear door led out to a side yard where a closed van was waiting, aged and battered, painted a drab shade of brown. Josef thumped on the rear doors, which were opened from the inside by a man in a light overcoat. Another man appeared with him, and together they helped Jarrow and Rita up, and over to one of the wooden boards serving as bench seats along the sides. Up front of them, a woman was sitting in the driver’s seat.
“Go,” Josef said tersely. They moved off.
As the van turned onto the street, Josef peered out through the small windows set high in the doors, apparently worried about being followed. It reinforced the suspicion that Jarrow had already begun to form that these people were as nervous about trusting Jarrow as Jarrow and Rita were about them. The two men who had been in the van were sitting well apart on the seat opposite, watching them warily and, Jarrow couldn’t help but notice, keeping their right hands very close to the fronts of their coats.
“See anything?” Josef called to the woman.
“Looks clean to me,” she replied, checking her mirrors.
Josef seemed satisfied and sank down on the seat opposite, next to the man in the light overcoat. “Dear me. I’m getting too old for this. An unorthodox way of introducing oneself, but I’m sure you understand the necessity, sometimes, in this questionably sane world of ours.” He indicated his companions. “You know my name already. These are Leon and Arnold.” Jarrow nodded noncommittally. “The lady driving us is called Susan.” At the front, Susan acknowledged by momentarily raising a hand. “And you, of course, are Warrant Officer Demiro.”
Jarrow frowned, unsure of how to respond. If these people were going to be of any help, they might as well all get the situation straight right from the start. “I’m not sure,” he replied.
“What do you mean?” Josef asked.
“I’m not sure who I am.”
Josef seemed surprised, as if part of something that had been carefully planned and thought out was already coming apart. “Who do you think you are?” he asked cautiously.
“As far as I’m aware, my name is Richard Jarrow.”
Josef looked taken aback. “Jarrow? I don’t think I’ve ever heard the name. Who is Richard Jarrow?”
“I’m a schoolteacher, and I come from Minneapolis,” Jarrow told him.
Josef stared at him for several seconds and seemed nonplussed. He had a ruddy, snub-nosed face with light-colored eyes that seemed to glitter, and was maybe in his late forties. Behind the eyes, Jarrow sensed a quick and adaptable mind, already racing to make sense out of a revelation that had been totally unexpected.
Finally Josef said, “Oh, dear. I have a suspicion that this could be even more complicated than we thought.”
They drove for a little under an hour. Josef moved up front to take the passenger seat beside Susan, where they talked intermittently in lowered voices. In the back, Arnold and Leon continued watching Jarrow and Rita vigilantly in silence. As far as Jarrow was concerned that was just as well; until he had more of an idea of what was going on, and in particular whether they had fallen into hands that were friendly or otherwise, he was in no mood for making conversation anyway. Rita evidently shared his sentiments.
When the van finally stopped, they got out to find themselves in the driveway of a typical small house in a neighborhood of mixed family dwellings spaced generously apart amid scattered pines. It could have been anywhere within fifty miles of the Chicago city limits. This place was painted a dark, ugly blue with white trim that was starting to flake. The yard was overgrown, and some of the clapboards needed replacing. Another car was parked ahead of them, alongside the porch.
“Not quite home, of course, but it does for now,” Josef remarked, reading their expressions. “Shall we go inside?”
They followed him up the steps and across the porch, into a living room opening directly behind the front door, where another woman and a man were waiting. “Oh, just one thing,” Josef said as Jarrow was about to move on into the room. He motioned with a hand for Jarrow to raise his arms. Jarrow did so, and Leon checked his person quickly but thoroughly for weapons. “Sorry, but one can’t be too careful, as I’m sure you agree,” Josef said. Susan did the same with Rita. “And now we can proceed with more customary civilities,” Josef said.
The other woman had risen and come over to meet them. She was fortyish, Jarrow guessed, slender and fairly tall, with wavy blond hair and alert, inquisitive eyes that gave the impression of already having absorbed all there was to be learned about the newcomers from their appearance. Her face, though not unattractive, lacked color and showed traces of strain, which a straight, thin nose and high, hollow cheeks did nothing to disguise. She was wearing a heavy woollen sweater with jeans and ankle-high boots.
“This is Kay,” Josef informed them, for what it was worth—from the melodramatics of the whole situation, Jarrow had already dismissed all the names as pseudonyms. The man that Kay had been with remained sitting in an armchair, one leg resting lazily on the other knee, seemingly not wanting to be sociable. He was hefty with hair cropped short, wearing a regular jacket over a black, crew-neck sweater. Josef didn’t seem perturbed and left him alone. “Do you both take tea? Can we offer you something to eat?” he asked, looking at Jarrow and Rita.
Jarrow glanced at Rita. She nodded. “I could use something.”
“Fine,” Jarrow said.
“Get some tea on would you?” Josef called behind them. “And maybe a few sandwiches. I’ll have one, cheese—oh, and some of that canned ham if there’s any left.” Susan went out through another door, and Arnold went with her. Leon stayed in the living room, leaning against the wall by the front door to the porch, through which they had entered. Josef gestured for them to sit down. The room was drab and scantily furnished, with unadorned walls and the bareness that comes with an absence of ornaments. A woodstove standing in a brick surround halfway along one wall was putting out a good heat. Several chairs and a couch formed a rough semicircle facing it, one of the chairs being occupied by the silent man. There was another couch beneath a window, a table with several rough upright chairs, and couple of small side tables and a cabinet. Jarrow and Rita sat on the couch by the stove, Kay took one of the chairs opposite them, while Josef paced over to a window, turned, and remained standing.
“Very well,” Jarrow said. “We’ve trusted you. Now will someone tell us what’s going on? But before we start I warn you that I don’t think I’m going to be able to help much with whatever you want. I don’t know anything.”
“If you wouldn’t mind, first, just answering some questions,” Josef said from the window. “Don’t wonder about them. Then we’ll fill you in on as much as we know—which I admit isn’t everything. Were it otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Okay,” Jarrow agreed. That was what they had come here for. Kay reached over to where she had been sitting when they arrived and drew across a folder of papers. She opened it on her knee and stared down at the contents as if collecting her thoughts.
“I’ve already asked him about Ashling,” Josef told her. “The name doesn’t mean anything.”
“We thought that might be the case,” Kay said.
“Ah, but there’s more. Apparently he hasn’t reverted to Demiro. He’s somebody else entirely. Who was it?” He looked across at Jarrow.
“Richard Jarrow,” Jarrow supplied.
“Jarrow,” Josef repeated. “He says he’s a teacher and comes from Minneapolis.”
Kay sat back in her chair. “You don’t know Conrad Ashling?” she said again, as if to make sure.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
Kay closed the folder slowly. “That does put a different light on things.” She lapsed into thought, staring at Jarrow fixedly.
Josef resumed. “You were in Atlanta last weekend, isn’t that correct? You stayed at the Hyatt there.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you go to Atlanta?”
“I don’t know. I woke up on Tuesday morning with no memory of going there at all.”
“You’d been there since Saturday.”
“So I discovered when I checked out. I didn’t know anything about it.”
“What is the last thing you remember before that?” Josef asked.
Jarrow hesitated, looked at Kay, who was still watching him, then back at Josef again. “I’m not sure if you’re going to believe this…but I don’t remember anything since last April. You see, I’m supposed to be dead. I’ve even seen the certificate that was filed. I think I’m normal, but nobody recognizes me.” He raised a hand to indicate Rita. “Except Rita here, who says I’m this person Tony Demiro—which is what you seem to think.…I don’t know what’s happening.” He shook his head helplessly.
Kay turned her head to look at Josef. There was still doubt on her face, as if she was of two minds as to whether to believe this.
“When did you leave Atlanta?” Josef asked Jarrow.
“Tuesday morning, first thing.”
“Why?”
“Why?…I was confused. I didn’t know what I was doing there. There was nobody around when I woke up. I just wanted to get out and go home.”
Josef glanced at Rita. “I’d gone for an early swim while he was still asleep,” she said in answer to his unasked question.
Josef nodded and looked back at Jarrow. “So you went back to Minneapolis?”
“Yes.”
“Then what brought you to Chicago?”
“I found Rita’s phone number on a pad I picked up in a hotel. Nothing else was making any sense, so I called it. Nobody else I’d talked to recognized me.”
“But she did?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Jarrow and Rita answered together, then stopped, confused.
“But not as anyone called Richard Jarrow,” Rita said.
“As Warrant Officer Demiro, supposedly killed five months ago?” Josef said.
Rita swallowed visibly and gave a quick nod. “Yes.”
Josef looked to Kay as if for a verdict. “It sounds like a complex reversion,” she said. “Jarrow must be an original transfer source. Somehow the complete associative net has reactivated.”
Josef chewed his lip for a moment. “And you’ve never heard of Ashling?” he asked again.
“Never,” Jarrow said.
“How about a Maurice Gordon?”
Ah, so they did know something about that too. Jarrow reached inside his jacket and produced Gordon’s wallet, opening it to show the ID. “I had this and other things with me when I woke up. None of it means a thing. I presume the clothes there were his as well.”
Kay took the wallet and examined it, while Josef continued. “Very well. So why did you go to Atlanta the day before, on Monday?” he asked, indicating Rita with a nod.
Rita replied, “He called me that morning. It was the same story: he’d woken up in the hotel and didn’t know what he was doing there. But it was different. He was Tony then. And when I got there that evening he was Tony. Only Tony didn’t remember anything since last May. I stayed, got up early the next morning to go for a swim as I said, and when I got back to the room he’d gone. Then I got this call from Minneapolis a day later”—she waved a hand—“only now he says he’s this teacher.”
“So I came to Chicago,” Jarrow completed. “And then, last night…”
“Yes, we know about that,” Josef told him.
“Were they anything to do with you?” Jarrow asked.
“No.”
Jarrow sat back against the couch. So at least he didn’t have to go through all that. A long silence followed. Kay folded the wallet and handed it back. “I think he’s on the level,” she pronounced. “We’re not going to get anywhere by staying clammed up.” The man in the jacket removed a hand that had been resting in his pocket and returned the gun he had been holding to a holster below his arm. Jarrow felt slightly pained as well as startled, not having realized that his word had been in question all the time.
“Sorry about that. One must take precautions,” Josef said matter-of-factly. He was in a different world, Jarrow told himself. He mustn’t let himself get rattled by this kind of thing.
Josef gave a quick smile behind his beard and came forward a pace from the window, reversing one of the upright chairs and straddling it to regard them with his arms folded loosely along the back. “You have been very cooperative. Now, I think, we owe you something in the way of explanation.
“We are from an organization called Pipeline, which I hope you have never heard of. Its purpose is to recruit talent and ability for the Offworld enterprises, particularly skilled industrial personnel, engineers, and scientists. Our function is getting them out of here and the European Consolidation states, and offplanet via the FER. All strictly illegal here, of course, so I suppose you could call us an underground operation of sorts. Ashling is an important scientist who was about to be processed, but he has disappeared.”
Rita was listening openmouthed. “Are you saying that you’re from there? You’re actually Offworlders, infiltrated down here?”
“Not all of us. But Kay and myself are, yes,” Josef replied.
Jarrow frowned, trying to reconcile all this with the events of last night. There was still no hint of where Ashling fitted into anything.
“So who were those men who came to the apartment?” he asked. “You said they weren’t anything to do with you?” Hardly a necessary question. It would have been a strange way, to say the least, for an underground operation to have conducted itself.
“I can’t say for certain,” Josef replied. “But we’re pretty certain that at least some of them were from a clandestine government research program, and had been sent to bring back one of their agents, a subject of the program, who had run amuck.”
The code name, Jarrow thought. Didn’t agents usually have code names in this kind of business? Another piece fell into place. “Was this agent known as Samurai?” he ventured.
Josef glanced briefly at Kay, who returned a shrug. “I’ve not heard that name before,” he confessed. “But it seems possible. Where did you hear it?”
“They yelled it a couple of times before they started breaking down the door.”
“That must be what he went by internally,” Kay said.
Josef nodded. “Maurice Gordon was the name he was operating under,” he told Jarrow. “That was what we had identified him as.”
“Ah, yes, okay.” Jarrow had suspected something similar himself. “So Maurice Gordon was Samurai’s cover.”
“So it seems.”
Jarrow looked at Josef and Kay in turn. Now they were getting somewhere. “So far, so good, then,” he said. “But what do we know about the person himself. Who is this Samurai?”
Josef gave him a long, penetrating look, as if inviting him to see the obvious. Jarrow frowned. The new revelations had come pouring in too quickly for him to have it all sorted out yet in his mind.
Josef gestured, indicating the side of Jarrow’s coat to which he had returned the wallet. “But you’ve seen Gordon’s ID,” he said. “I don’t think it could be any plainer than that. Why do you think we’ve been so nervous about you?” He nodded at the stunned look that came over Jarrow’s face as the message finally percolated. “Yes, that’s right. You are!”
The first week at Pearse was devoted practically in its entirety to batteries of psychological tests, and a series of brain scans and physiological measurements to look for irregularities in neural functioning. Two of the original twenty volunteers were found unsuitable and returned to their units.
The second week consisted of protracted interviews held individually with the remainder, by Major Gleavey, Dr. Nordens, and several other civilians. The style of the interviews was free and rambling, ranging across a whole gamut of topics that covered hobbies, sports, personal lives, home backgrounds, ambitions and aspirations, and the men’s views on everything from sex and religion to the political implications of the Western consolidation, the nature of the FER, and the future of the Offworld expansion. Guessing the purpose of this was a continual subject of discussion and speculation back in the billet block during the evenings. The general consensus was that the range of subjects had been made wide and confusing deliberately, to obscure whatever it was that the program designers were really interested in.
Lowe dismissed the whole thing as a market-research exercise to find ways of increasing the appeal of service life, because the Europeans were allegedly losing a lot of defectors to the FER. Parker, a small, wiry tank man from Arizona, thought it might be a prelude to some kind of mood-altering-drug testing, aimed at restoring old-fashioned standards of discipline and dedication in an age when old-fashioned methods wouldn’t work. Demiro didn’t expound any theory. But there was one thing he’d noticed whenever the talk drifted into politics, which it tended to do more often than he’d have thought normal for a typical barracks-room mix: an underlying attitude, varying from vague disquiet to open cynicism toward the existing system, was something they all seemed to share.
Four of the group were rejected as unsuitable in this phase, and a further two as security risks, reducing the original twenty to a dozen. At the end of the second week, they assembled in the briefing room again, where Colonel Wylvern, Major Gleavey, and Dr. Nordens were waiting.
Nordens walked over to a metal shelf with a button panel underneath that hinged out from the wall on one side of the room to serve as a podium. The lights dimmed, and the screen facing the audience from behind him came to life. As usual, Nordens wasn’t wasting any time on preliminaries. There was a shuffling and muttering of interest. After two weeks of interminable testing and talking, this was more like it.
The screen showed a chimpanzee squatting on one side of a barrier consisting of metal bars, like the side of a cage. The chimp was fiddling with some wooden rods, pushing them together end to end, watching them fall apart again, fingering its chin in growing exasperation, screeching, then trying again. Some distance away beyond the barrier was a bunch of bananas.
Nordens half turned to watch, commenting at the same time, “The rods are too short to reach the reward, but they can be joined together to form a single length that will. However, the ends are fitted with specially shaped key-pieces that will mate only with the correct counterpart. Hence the rods must be assembled in the correct order, with the large hook—you can see it there—at the far end to retrieve the prize. This animal has not been trained to perform the task, but she has been allowed to observe others that have.
The chimp tried once again with several rods in turn, one at a time, got nowhere, and vented its frustration in a burst of screeching and whooping. Then it began vainly trying to join them together again. Nordens resumed, “As you can see, she hasn’t a clue. She knows that the task is possible, but she has no idea of the detailed procedure necessary to accomplish it.” This was confirmed a few moments later, when the chimp gave up, smashed all the rods in a rage, and proceeded to dance up and down on the pieces.
“Now, gentlemen, observe this,” Nordens said.
The scene now was of a chimp lying apparently asleep strapped to a couch with its head in the center of a complicated machine, surrounded by elaborate equipment. “The process you are observing is in no way harmful or uncomfortable, “ Nordens remarked, anticipating the unvoiced question of many of the audience. “Sedation is necessary simply because chimpanzees are not very good at following instructions. This is the same female as you saw before. Now let’s see her again, shortly after this was taken.”
Next they were back at the setup for the problem with the rods. But this time the chimp assembled the pieces deftly and unerringly, hooked the bananas, and settled down contentedly to enjoy the feast. Some murmurs of surprise and a whistle of appreciation came up from the watchers.
“I must stress that the recording was not doctored,” Nordens went on. “The subject underwent no form of training whatsoever between the previous attempt that you saw, and the time we are observing here. Yet as you can see, she is now able to solve the problem easily.” Nordens cut the screen, brought the lights up again, nodded curtly to Major Gleavey, and sat down.
Gleavey turned in the center of the room in front of the screen, his arms extended like a ringmaster announcing the star act. “When you input something to a computer, the electronic codes inside the computer are changed, right? The changes reflect the new information. Well, the same kind of thing holds true inside your head. When you learn something, something somewhere has to change. Something that’s there after has to be different from what it was before.” He looked around to check that they were all following, as if he were presenting quantum physics to ten-year-olds—not slow, but naturally new to this—and nodded. “Well, what you’ve just seen is that it’s possible not only to identify what that ‘something’ is, but to extract it as a pattern, and transfer it into another brain.”
A murmur of interest ran around the room. Lowe’s voice came through above it, telling the man next to him, “And tomorrow somebody’ll find it causes cancer.”
Gleavey went on, “That’s right. You can transfer it.” He raised a warning finger. “Now, it’s not quite the same as happens in a computer, but the principle’s the same.” He gestured briefly at the screen. “That’s what the machine you saw does. First the monkey”—to one side, Nordens flinched visibly at the choice of word—“couldn’t figure out how to get the bananas. Then the machine transferred into its head the patterns that it got from another monkey that had been taught how to do it. And then it could do it, no problem…without having to have any kind of regular training itself.”
He held up a hand to stop anyone interrupting him there and breaking the flow. “Okay, well, I won’t beat about the bush. This is what you’re all here for. The next step is to take this to the human level. It has all kinds of potential benefits in all kinds of areas, and we—the Army, that is—have been asked to carry out the first tests. And it’s something that the Army could be very interested in for its own reasons too. For instance, the modern Army is becoming increasingly labor and skills intensive. That means that compared to how things used to be, more and more time and effort and money goes into training soldiers to do their jobs. At one time it was good enough just to know how to shoot and strip a rifle, which part of the grenade you throw and which part you hold in your teeth, and the right way to clean your boots. Now you have to know all about battlefield computers, lasers, satellite grids, air coordination, as well as a hundred different kinds of ammunition and a different Barbie doll outfit for every kind of combat environment from chemical attack, to choppers, to digging in on glaciers.…Hell, you guys all know what I’m talking about.
“So…think what a difference it could make if what you saw with the monkey could be adapted for military training. For any skill that you need lots of people to have, you take just one person, one who’s a natural, anyway, then trained until he’s the best there is, and then what he can do gets copied into everyone else.” Gleavey pointed randomly at several of the men one after another. “So suppose you’re the best shot in the outfit—or the brigade, the division, or even the whole Army—you’re a top radio man, you’re an auto mechanic.…” An appealing gesture to the whole room. “Get the idea? We can combine all of that into every single person in a few sessions on the machine, without everyone having to spend hundreds of hours out on the range, going through communications school, or taking the same motors apart over and over, and still getting average grades. And think what that means if you extend it to the whole Army.…We’re talking who-knows-how-many millions of man-hours every year—plus top performance all around.”
He stood and waited, indicating that they were now free to respond. The pitch had had an effect. A buzz of excited muttering came up from the room. The men were impressed. In the back row of chairs, Demiro sat back and rubbed his chin. Yes, he was impressed too, he decided.
At the front, Gleavey raised his hands. “Well, that’s what it’s all about. Anyone who wants to opt out can do so now. But before anyone who might be thinking that way decides, let me suggest that you consider the benefits. During the program you’ll learn a lot of good stuff the easy way, things that you maybe thought you’d never do because you’re not made the right way to learn them, or things that you’d have to spend all your money and half your life finding out about at college. Well, you get to keep it all. And there’s no charge. How could anyone turn down a deal like that?” He looked around. Nobody seemed about to drop out. “Questions?” he invited.
For a moment there was a confused exchange of mutterings and looks. Then Parker, the small, wiry tank man from Arizona, spoke up. “Yeah, I got one. You’re talkin’ ’bout switchin’ what some other guy’s learned, like bein’ a crack shot, maybe?” Gleavey nodded. “Well, what happens if I don’t happen to have the same good eye as he’s got? Are you sayin’ it’ll still work just as good for me? If so, I can’t see how.”
“Good question,” somebody else said. Gleavey looked to Nordens.
“That’s one of the aspects that we intend to explore,” Nordens answered.
“Next?” Gleavey said.
Lowe followed. “Just how safe is all this? I mean, that machine there looked pretty terrifying to me. Not sure I’d want to stick my head in that thing.”
Again a look from Gleavey to Nordens. “Extensive animal tests give complete assurance that there are no adverse effects whatsoever,” Nordens said.
“How long is this program scheduled to take?” someone else wanted to know.
Gleavey took that one himself. “We don’t have a fixed limit on that as of this point in time. Our policy is to take things slowly, keep it careful, and get it right. So I’d be lying to you if I said it wasn’t going to be a while.”
Demiro stuck up a hand and got Gleavey’s nod. “So what kind of leave allowances can we expect?” he asked.
“None for the first month at least. After that a weekend every two or three weeks, maybe more later.” That didn’t go down so well. Gleavey explained, “We don’t want you attracting attention out there by showing off your new abilities until we’ve a better idea of what to expect. But I can tell you that the pay will be better than was indicated.” That seemed to mollify them some.
“It sounds pretty great all around,” Lowe said. “So why so much secrecy?”
“Prudence,” Gleavey replied. “It sounds pretty weird, doesn’t it? Imagine the version you’d get after the papers and the TV got ahold of it. There’s enough objectors and protesters out there already, causing trouble for anything you can name. We just want to be left alone to concentrate on the work.”
Lowe nodded that he was satisfied and looked back at Demiro. “Sounds to me like it could be fun. I’m sold. How about you?”
“You’ve got it,” Demiro said.
“Conrad Ashling is a mathematical neurophysiologist. For many years he has specialized in the study of human memory and the mechanics of learned behavior. In fact, he’s probably one of the world’s top half-dozen authorities on the subject.”
Jarrow had already got the feeling that Kay was some kind of scientist, whereas Josef came across more as an organizer and leader: the kind of person that most people would associate with an organization like Pipeline. They had eaten a lunch of cheese-and-ham sandwiches with strong tea, brewed European style in a pot. Kay was at last explaining some of the background to Jarrow and Rita around the woodstove in the room that they had first entered. Josef was with them. The silent man had left with Arnold in the van. Leon and Susan were in the kitchen.
Kay continued, “He was with MIT for a while, but when official interference in his work became intolerable he quit and set up a research company of his own, still in Massachusetts, called Memco.”
Jarrow had read bits and pieces that sounded as if they related to that kind of thing. “I take it we’re talking about the actual physical apparatus of learning?” he said. Kay nodded.
Rita thought she followed. “You mean that when you learn something new, it has to be stored somehow,” she said.
“Exactly.” Kay nodded. “Well, to put it shortly, Ashling developed a way of transferring that learning from the brain of one individual into the brain of another. So the second individual acquired the knowledge instantly, without having to go through the learning process itself.”
In normal circumstances Jarrow would have been flabbergasted by such a suggestion. But after the things that he had been forced to come to terms with in the course of the last few days, he was already half prepared for something like this. He sat back in the chair, frowning, jumping ahead in his mind and trying to anticipate how a possibility like that might explain his present condition.
“You mean like the electronic codes in a computer? The way you can copy a file out of one machine and into another,” Rita said.
“I thought some people were starting to say it’s chemical,” Jarrow murmured distantly. “Coded into complex molecules.…Don’t ask me how, though.”
“You’ve got the general idea,” Kay told them. “In fact, both processes enter into it. But the way the brain works can’t be thought of in the same way as computers—which is what sent most mainstream research up the wrong path for a number of years. No two human brains contain the same configuration of neural connections. Therefore the same information isn’t stored in the same way, as it would be in different computers that are designed the same way to handle the same data representations. What happens is that genetic directions lay down a general pattern that has certain commonalities in the embryonic nervous systems, but the actual configuration that’s realized is a result of selection and reinforcement between competing neural subnets as they develop, guided by experiences and to a certain degree by chance. Then, later, after a unique connectivity is established at the physical level, a secondary process of adaptive modification is superposed on it, essentially in the form of selective reinforcement of preferred pathways, based on the variable sensitivity of synaptic receptors.”
Jarrow looked away, shaking his head. “Sorry. I teach social adaptability, not biology.” Rita just stared glazedly.
“It means that the computer model of the brain isn’t really accurate,” Kay said. “Brains aren’t wired to any preexisting design that’s stored somehow in the chromosomes. They develop through a process of competition and selection among complex neuronal groups, and they’re all different. So you can’t just take the same pattern out of here and put it in there.”
At least Rita followed that part. “Okay,” she accepted. “So what do you do?”
“I think of it in terms of high-level languages,” Josef offered. “They let you move the functionality of a program between machines—in other words what the program does, even though the machines are different and might operate in different ways. But you still get the same results, which is what matters.”
“Yes,” Kay agreed. “And the concepts that people think and communicate in are indeed high-level constructs. What Ashling did was find a way of reprogramming the synaptic pathways to emulate the mode of high-level symbolic synthesis derived from another brain, even though the underlying micro-operations supporting it are quite different. You could think of it as emulating a part of one person’s mind inside another, with the wiring that’s already there.”
To Rita, that sounded pretty much like what she’d said in the first place. If scientists wrote cookbooks it would take a hundred pages to tell you how to make a pancake.
Jarrow was seized by a sinking feeling. Did that mean that he really was Demiro, somehow emulating Jarrow? That he was really dead?…But what else did the facts of the last two days tell him, if he faced up to them? Weren’t the records in Minneapolis enough? Or the physical discrepancies between the person he remembered being and the one who stared back at him from a mirror now?
But until now, there had been the hope, however irrational and unsupportable, that somehow there might be a different answer. He hadn’t realized how much he had been hiding from himself until now. Rita understood it too, but with her the effect was different. He could see it shining in her eyes.
Kay didn’t want to dwell on this point, and went on, “Ashling’s thought was of the commercial potential. He saw Memco as the forerunner of a whole new industry, as one day becoming the IBM of a new technological field. Imagine what it would mean to become an instant chess player, musician, speak a new language overnight, or become a skier and really do something different this vacation—as long as you remember to tone up the muscles first. Probably all kinds of things you’d never think of. Who knows?”
Kay shrugged and emitted one of those sighs with which people dismiss a daydream. “But the corporate empire and personal fortune that Ashling envisaged never happened. Certain agencies of the government began showing an interest in all this, and soon afterward his operation was taken over and classified.”
Josef interjected, “They persuaded him of the defense implications, its potential as an aid to military training, for example, and painted a specter of what would happen if something like this became the object of an arms race with the Offworlders. Better to keep it out of sight, under control.…And, of course, they could tempt him with the thought of virtually unlimited funding and resources. Ashling was a more or less loyal and patriotic kind of person—then, anyway—and he agreed to continue working for them secretly, under government direction.”
“In any case, he was under no illusions about the kind of harassment he’d be inviting if he wouldn’t cooperate,” Kay added. “So his private venture was finished either way.”
Rita lit a cigarette. “You talked about that in Atlanta,” she said, nodding toward Jarrow.
“You mean when I was Tony?”
“Yes. About some of the things you’d found you could do after you went on the program.…I guess I should say ‘Tony’ could. He’d never talked about any of that before—when he came back on leave, I mean. He just used to say he was involved with new training methods. Nothing at all about mind implants, or whatever you’d call them.”
“A good soldier, observing security,” Josef commented. “A bit of a rebel underneath, maybe, but not irresponsible.”
“That was Tony,” Rita agreed.
“What kinds of things did he tell you about in Atlanta?” Jarrow asked her curiously. By now he had gotten used to using the third person when they talked about Demiro.
“He could strip down weapons he’d never seen before, and put them together again. He found he could work all kinds of equipment that he’d never been trained in. Understood all kinds of mathematical stuff—and that wasn’t Tony’s thing at all. But he said it seemed to work. What else was there?”
“I think we know the kind of thing you mean,” Josef said. “But it doesn’t really matter much, because that was all just a cover.” Jarrow and Rita looked surprised. Josef explained, “The real aim of the project, code-named Southside, was political. You see, what somebody, somewhere, had glimpsed when they looked into this new technology of Ashling’s was the possibility of being able to reprogram somebody’s political beliefs.” He gave them a moment or two to think about that. Jarrow found it hard to accept. Surely governments wouldn’t do something like that?…Anyway, not our government?
Kay picked it up again from there. “People in this society aren’t repressed by overt force, or any of the other cruder methods of days gone by.”
Jarrow’s face tightened as he listened. He didn’t accept that this was a repressive society at all, and didn’t think the presumption should go unchallenged, but at the same time he didn’t want to go making a fuss about it right now. Who did these Offworld people think they were, running what amounted to a spy network and now making insinuations like this?
Kay went on, “It’s done by control and manipulation of information. And it follows that the main threats to such a regime come not from traditional bullets-and-barricades revolutionaries, but from effective purveyors of counter-information: public figures, celebrities, trendsetters, and so on, who challenge the conventional wisdoms that ‘everyone knows’ to be true. They become the nuclei from which waves of undesirable thought are likely to spread, and therefore where any destabilization would begin.”
“Somebody like Daparras for instance?” Rita said.
“Good example,” Josef agreed. “And look where he ended up.” It should have been jail, Jarrow thought to himself. The man was a menace, a cult hero among half his students, and an out-and-out terrorist.
Kay continued, “But suppose that instead of making martyrs out of such people, you could convert them?” She paused to let them reflect on the proposition. “By changing the underlying belief structure that was responsible for their views.…Slowly, a little at a time, so that it would look like a process of deeper insight and enlightenment taking root, rather than smack of their being ‘got at,’ as would be the case if it happened too suddenly. You’d be able not only to eliminate such inconvenient people as problems, but actually transform them into assets who’d bring their followers around with them as their own conversion progressed. No fuss. No ugly confrontations. Just what governments like.”
“And Ashling’s system could really do that?” Rita said. Her face looked pained, as if she were having trouble accepting the enormity of it.
“That was what they wanted to find out,” Kay answered. “And the even nicer thing was that if just the beliefs that were of concern could be modified, leaving the rest of the personality intact, outward appearances would remain normal. So your former adversary could continue exerting his or her own brand of charisma, only working this time in your interests instead of against them.”
“Neat, eh?” Josef commented.
“Are you sure you’re not imagining a lot of this?” Jarrow challenged, unable any longer to prevent himself from putting up some defense.
Josef waved a hand casually in his direction. “What about you? Do you think you’ve been imagining things?” he countered. Jarrow subsided disconsolately.
Kay moved on more briskly, before they could bog down on such issues. “The project was set up under the code name Southside at the Pearse military psychological labs in Georgia, about fifty miles from Atlanta. Demiro was one of the volunteers selected. But something very strange happened in his case. It must have been somewhere around six months ago. Exactly what went wrong, we don’t know. But it was enough to warrant a faked death certificate as a cover-up.”
Jarrow looked suspiciously at her and Josef in turn. “You seem to know a hell of a lot, all the same,” he remarked. “How come?”
“And where does this scientist, Ashling, fit in?” Rita asked.
“Advance neuroresearch is also being conducted Offworld,” Kay replied. “In fact, I’m connected with it myself, part of a group headed by a man you’ve probably not heard of: a Russian called Ulkanov. Science usually works that way—if different people are heading along the same road, you’d expect them to get to the same place, though not necessarily at the same time. In fact, Ulkanov and Ashling got to know each other quite well during Ashling’s MIT days—before the restrictions on scientific exchange visits were tightened up. Ashling was ahead, though. There’s no question he’s a genius. That’s why we were more than interested when Josef’s people contacted us with the news that Ashling wanted out.” She turned to Josef. “Why don’t you tell your side of it from there.”
Josef leaned forward to toss a couple more logs into the stove, closed the iron door on the front, and settled back again. “Ashling was told that the purpose of Southside was to assess the feasibility of using his technique as a way of accelerating military training. He agreed to cooperate on that basis. However, he’s one of those methodical people who believe in knowing everything thoroughly. He did his own quiet probing around at Pearse, and in the process discovered that the training story was just a cover for the political objectives that Kay described a moment ago. That side of it was being handled by another scientist, called Nordens, who supposedly was there to assist Ashling.”
Kay looked inquiringly at Rita. “Out of curiosity, did Tony seem different in any way sometimes, when he came back on leave?”
Rita looked uncertain. “Different?…How? I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Was Tony what you’d call a political kind of person? Did he talk about things like that? Have strong opinions?”
“Well…yes, in some ways I guess you could say he did. It used to get him into trouble at the base sometimes—at Kankakee, before he went to Georgia.”
“Did any of those views seem to have changed at all, in the later months, after he’d been there for some time?”
Rita tried to think back, but shook her head. “It’s been so long. Such a lot’s happened. I really can’t remember.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kay said.
“But you can see why he’d be an ideal subject,” Josef said.
“You see, to maintain the cover, they did experiment with all the volunteers on implanting some genuine technical and other skills, of the kind that the program was supposed to be about. But the real work went on behind that. All of the volunteers were picked for having strong, offbeat political opinions, to see if they could be modified. Ashling found out, and was horrified. That was when he decided that he wanted nothing more to do with it. He knew of Pipeline—there is an amazing network of jungle drums among scientists—and through means that I have no intention of revealing was able to make contact with us and indicate that he wanted to defect. As a sign of good faith, he provided us with copies of some of the secret records from Pearse on the subjects who were undergoing political processing.”
“How long ago did he contact you?” Jarrow asked.
“Early in September, I think it was.” Josef glanced across at Kay. She returned an affirmative nod. He went on, “We fed the information back through the system, and as Kay said, the Offworlders were very interested. News found its way to Ulkanov, and he was behind the decision to bring Ashling out. All that took time, of course, and then there were the arrangements to make, but by last Saturday all was ready. With some help from us, Ashling slipped the surveillance that he was kept under all the time, and we installed him in a room at the Hyatt in Atlanta with three of our men to await a courier who would arrive the next day to take him through. But something went wrong. Early the next morning we received a message from Ashling on a number that we had given him to be used in emergencies.” Josef glanced at Kay. “Do you have it there?”
Kay produced a message text and handed it to Jarrow. It read:
Unforeseen developments have resulted in drastic change of situation. Regret am unable to proceed with plan. Imperative you clear your suite at Hyatt immediately. Also convey following to Ulkanov. Will explain all when opportunity permits. Grateful for your efforts. Ashling.
“What was with it?” Jarrow inquired, passing the text to Rita.
Kay handed him several sheets packed with mnemonics and scientific jargon that conveyed absolutely nothing. “I’ve seen this kind of thing before, when I was with Ulkanov on Luna,” she commented, “It’s an encryption technique that some scientists have developed among themselves for getting things past censors in the Consolidation countries.”
“So you don’t know what it means, either?” Jarrow checked. Kay shook her head.
Rita handed back the message text. “So what did you find at the Hyatt?” she asked Josef.
“Ashling was gone. Our three guards were all unconscious, knocked out with a drug. Whoever did it had come in via a shaft in the bathroom from the room upstairs. We got our people out, cleared everything up, and vacated the room. That was on Sunday, the day after Ashling disappeared.”
“Was this the room I woke up in?” Jarrow asked. But even as he said it, he realized that it couldn’t have been. The desk clerk said he’d been checked in since Saturday.
Josef shook his head. “No. It was in another part of the hotel.”
“So where do I fit in?” Jarrow asked.
“Obviously we’d been blown,” Josef replied. “We just took everything out through a side door and decided to stay out of sight for the rest of that day. Then on Monday, when we figured things would have blown over, I went back with Leon, who was one of the three men who had been there on Saturday, to settle with the hotel. And to our amazement, he recognized the agent who had broken in and knocked them out—and who had presumably taken Ashling—still there, walking around the hotel. Leon got out of sight quickly, and we moved in a couple of our other people that the agent hadn’t seen before, to see what he did.” Josef looked at Jarrow, and although Jarrow knew what was coming next, still he could only stare back disbelievingly. Josef confirmed, “He turned out to be staying in room 1406, and was registered as Maurice Gordon.
“We watched him, hoping for a lead back to Ashling. Then on Monday evening he was joined by a woman.” Josef nodded at Rita. “Yourself, of course. But early on Tuesday morning Gordon took us by surprise and vanished himself.”
Rita was shaking her head in bewilderment. “Are you saying that Tony was turned into some kind of secret agent or something? Was that part of this training? I can’t believe it. It’s just not him.”
“We don’t know,” Josef replied frankly. “The only other lead we had was you. We traced you back to Chicago, and watched your house there in the hope that Gordon, our only lead to Ashling, would show up. But it turned out that we were not the only ones. Federal Security Service agents were staking the place too, presumably also having tracked you back from Atlanta. They watched the house and we watched them, and while this was going on, some of our other people were trying to establish who you were and what connection you had with Southside. Your name didn’t mean anything until we found it mentioned in the records that Ashling had from Pearse, given as the former fiancée and nearest relative-equivalent of Warrant Officer Demiro, since listed as killed in an accident.” Josef showed his palms briefly. “That was intriguing enough. But what did it mean? What was Maurice Gordon doing there?” He glanced at Rita, then Jarrow. “The real shock came when I looked at the pictures from the Southside files and found that Gordon was Demiro!”
Josef stared at Jarrow, as if to invite comment. Jarrow just stared back, now wanting only to hear whatever might be left to tell.
“Then you appeared suddenly in Chicago. We observed the attempt by the FSS men to grab you at the house, how you dealt with them, and we saw you get away. But get away to where, we didn’t know.”
Kay came in again at that point. “That was when we concluded that something very serious had gone wrong with the Southside project. We speculated that maybe Gordon-Demiro, whoever—the agent who had been chasing Ashling in Atlanta—might be having second thoughts about where he stood in all this. Why else would he quit, go back to his girl in Chicago, and be chased by the FSS? If so, we reasoned that he might be approachable. That was where Josef and his people helped again. They really are amazing.”
Josef permitted a quick grin. “You’d be surprised how many contacts who have Offworlder sympathies we have been able to cultivate in this country,” he replied. “We compiled a list of Demiro and Rita’s known friends, and short-listed a half dozen or so that we thought they’d be likely to head for. That was a long night’s work. In the morning we called each of them, leaving a message that we hoped Demiro-Gordon would respond to. And the rest you both know.”
Which brought them all up to the present. Except for one thing. Jarrow was the obvious one to ask it. “So…where do I appear in all this—Richard Jarrow?”
“That’s the part that’s still missing,” Kay said. “Now it’s your turn to do the talking. I want you to go over your story again, from the beginning, in detail. Don’t leave anything out.”
Jarrow gave her a long, uncertain stare. In this new light, the business of his visits to Valdheim was starting to take on a whole new significance. “Okay,” Jarrow agreed.
“So, let’s go back to the last thing you remember, before you woke up in Atlanta on Tuesday.”
Jarrow described his last visit to Valdheim’s, giving as much detail about the machine there as he could recall. Kay listened intently, evidently very interested. Very interested indeed.
It was late evening in the billet block at Pearse, and the troops were relaxing. Niderinsky, Jones, Halliman, and Zwinny had got the poker school going at the end table as usual. Thorben was on his bunk, writing a letter. Polk, Yerks, and Irvine were by the TV, arguing politics, which was also getting to be pretty usual. Schott was reading, and Demiro and Lowe, the black PFC that Demiro had met on the first day, were watching Parker fan out a deck of cards while Major Gleavey, who had stopped by on one of his social visits, looked on with interest.
“The darnedest thing is that I never used to be able to pick up an egg without crackin’ it,” Parker told them. “Now watch this.” He ripple-shuffled the deck in midair, extended a forearm and spread the cards out in a smooth run from elbow to palm, flipped the end one over with his fingers, causing the whole line to flip in a wave motion that flowed back to the first, dropped his arm vertically to let the cards fall into a neat stack in his hand, and then spread it one-handed into a perfect fan. “Pick one, somebody. I’ll show you sump’n else.”
Demiro obliged, showed it to Lowe, and returned it to the deck. Parker mixed it into the deck; gave the deck to each of them to shuffle in turn, then executed a deft series of cuts and passes, resulting in the card being materialized magically out of thin air. Lowe whooped appreciatively.
The scientists—mainly Nordens, but also another called Ashling, who seemed to be more a theoretician in the background and only appeared from time to time—had been looking into the transference of complex motor skills that week. The cardsharping routine was a “something extra” that they’d included in Parker’s program that day, on top of the officially scheduled items. The men enjoyed this kind of unexpected bonus, and keeping up their enthusiasm was an important part of the work.
“Hey, guys,” Lowe called across to the poker game. “Get a load of this. You wanna deal Parker in over there? He’ll take your shirts, an’ I’m ready to place bets.”
“Shove it,” Halliman muttered back, studying his cards.
“You see, guys,” Gleavey told them, beaming. “I told you on the first day you’d be doing things you never thought possible. Never say we don’t deliver, eh?” He nodded at Parker. “The man that came from is a stage magician. He had to practice four hours a day for five years to do what you’re doing now.”
Demiro had to admit that he was impressed. That same day, after a session on the machine, he himself had been introduced to a new, joint-services logistics-processing computer program. He’d been able to work effortlessly through complicated materials and parts scheduling routines that would previously have taken weeks of operator training and poring over manuals to master. He could also, to his astonishment, pick a pretty good tune out of a guitar.
Lowe turned to regard the major with a thoughtful look. “Say, do you think we could get to bring a friend or two in on this?”
“What do you mean?” Gleavey asked suspiciously.
“Well, I was just thinking. See, I’ve got this chick back home who’s okay in a lot o’ ways, but she ain’t been around too much, if you know what I mean. Could use a little more, what you might call, worldly education.’ Well, see, there’s this place in L.A. called Pussy in Boots, and man, what it’d do for Nancy if she could pick up a few tips from some of the girls in there. I’d be set for life.”
Gleavey shook his head in mock despair. “I guess that’s a bit further down the line. I’ve got things to do. I’ll see you men tomorrow.” He left.
Lowe shrugged. “Sounded like a great idea to me. Don’t you reckon so, Tony?”
Demiro, who was in the process of standing up to leave the group, stopped to think about it for the moment. “I think I’d pick the brains of whoever runs that place,” he said. “Find out what he knows that I don’t know. Then I could make lots of money, and have a good time.”
“You can’t take money with you, man,” Lowe said as Demiro turned away.
“Where can you get to without it?” Demiro threw back.
He went back to his bunk and sat down on the edge to look for something in a magazine he’d left there. Schott was lying reading on the adjacent one. He regarded Demiro over the top of his book for a while, then murmured, “I like your thinking. That’s what I’d do too, if I had the choice: learn about making money. Then I’d take it to a place where business isn’t a crime, the way it’s getting to be here. Know what I mean? Someplace where people might actually be appreciated for doing something worthwhile.”
“Not a lot of that around these days,” Demiro agreed.
Schott set his book aside and leaned on an elbow. His voice fell to a more confidential note. “No wonder the ones who are really smart get out. You know what I’m talking about?—out of this whole mess.”
Demiro frowned. “Out?…You mean to the FER?”
“And more than that. Offworld. That’s where it’s all happening.”
“Is it?” Demiro said guardedly. “I never really thought about it.”
“It’s not like some lawn out there, where all the grass has to be the same height. Down here they say we all have to be the same. You stick your head up, and someone comes along with a lawn mower. But there, they let everybody grow to whatever they can. That’s how it oughta be.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Demiro settled back and opened the magazine, not wanting to be drawn into this. On the other bunk, Schott picked up his book again and resumed reading.
Talking about things like that with people you didn’t really know wasn’t smart. For all he knew, Schott could be a plant, put there to sound out hidden loyalties. Demiro would have been surprised if there weren’t at least one in a group like this.
In fact he had been thinking a lot more about defecting, and had talked to Rita about it again during his last leave. Their dream wasn’t of anything really farfetched or ambitious. Demiro had always wanted to run his own bookstore—with lots of offbeat titles that you couldn’t find in the regular chains, and a section for used books. Rita wanted a coffee shop, one with a feel of quality instead of the usual noisy, plastic-and-glass goldfish bowl, always filled with sloppy-mannered kids—with a score of different blends of coffee, and Viennese pastries, she’d said, and maybe playing classical music. Their latest thought had been to combine the two into one venture. Nothing really fancy. It would just be a way of making a living. And leave enough time to raise a family—a large one, without needing anyone’s permission.
But you didn’t talk about such things in a place like this. The way was to keep a clean nose and a straight record, make your plans quietly, and wait for the right opportunities.
Dr. Nordens had followed Schott and Demiro’s brief exchange on a screen in a monitor room in part of the Main Complex. He’d have to talk to Schott a bit more, he decided. Schott’s job was to bring out the men’s political opinions and get them to talk about them, not go probing for possible subversiveness or tendencies to defect. Nordens was interested in identifying optimum subjects, not purging the service. But he had already tagged Demiro as one of the first candidates. His very wariness at being drawn into such matters showed that he had the intelligence.
Nordens thought some more, and then summoned a file onto another screen and entered his decision. So now they’d be able to make a start on the real business at hand. There was no indication that Ashling suspected anything. But they’d have to watch him. Ashling was no fool.
He switched the screen to communications mode and entered a Minneapolis number. Ten seconds later he was talking to Dr. Valdheim. “I’ve selected the first subject,” Nordens advised. “So we’re practically ready to go. What’s the situation there?”
The gaunt, bespectacled face on the screen nodded. “Everything is looking well. Jarrow is responding successfully. We should have some extracts processed and sent down to you by tomorrow.”
“Let’s hope so,” Nordens replied.
Josef said they had to wait for more Pipeline people to join them before they could make any further plans. These people had some distance to travel, so it would take time. Jarrow thought it probable that they were involved in the scheme to extract Ashling, and would therefore be coming up from Atlanta, but it didn’t seem the place or time to be inquisitive.
He and Rita were given rooms to use for the night, which like the rest of the house were bare and on the drab side, but adequate. Although they weren’t captives as such, Josef made it plain that they were to stay out of sight and not go wandering around the neighborhood—which was fine by both of them, in any case. Jarrow had no incentive to go anywhere else, and Rita was reluctant to go back to her apartment. Susan went out to do some shopping, returning with changes of clothes for both of them. There were books to read, a collection of movies, and the evening passed with pleasant uneventfulness.
The tensions of the past twenty-four hours must have exhausted both of them more than they realized, for Josef and his companions were all up and about and had eaten by the time Jarrow and Rita surfaced. They had a late breakfast alone together in the kitchen.
“You mightn’t believe it, but I wanted to be a biochemist once,” Rita said over the table. “I even started a degree. But it got to be disheartening. Everybody these days seems to think that anything in that line has to be involved with engineering viruses that might escape, or putting things into food that cause cancer—which is stupid anyway, because natural pesticides that plants make themselves are thousands of times stronger. We’ve got so many laws now protecting the rights of malaria viruses that making a career fighting disease seemed pointless.”
“Oh, come on. Aren’t you exaggerating?” Jarrow said.
“Am I? There are people dying today from malaria and viral encephalitis in California. And don’t tell me I read too many campus propaganda sheets, because I had a cousin who was one of them. Things like that were wiped out once in this country.” Rita tossed salt liberally over her plate of eggs, hash browns, and bacon and poured a glass of orange juice. “So, I went and worked for a company that made coolants for power transformers. Then they got banned, the owner closed down, sold everything, and moved out to Malaysia.” She paused, looking oddly at Jarrow as the sight of him across the breakfast table triggered old memories. “Know what I’d really like to do?”
“What?” he asked.
“We used to talk about it: run a coffee shop. Have a family and run a coffee shop. I don’t know why, especially. I think maybe it’s the thought of having lots of people stopping by, who you’d get to know and never be short of friends. I just like people, I guess. I hate all these restrictions, as if humans were pollution or something. It shouldn’t be that way.”
“Well, now, I’m not so sure,” Jarrow replied. “You have to admit that overpopulation is a real problem. And if the Southern World and the FER states don’t fall into line pretty soon, it’s going to turn into a real catastrophe.”
Rita shook her head. “I don’t believe it.…Oh, sure, I agree there are places that have got local problems. But most of the world’s still empty. People produce more than they use—at least they can, if they’re let. They solve problems. Having more of them around ought to make things better, not worse.”
“Surely it’s elementary,” Jarrow said, feeling more like a teacher for the moment. “More people use up more resources. Therefore they’ll run out sooner.”
“But they make resources too,” Rita objected. “Foxes and people both eat chickens. With foxes it means less chickens, but with people you get more chickens. See what I mean? It’s the same with everything else.” She stared down at the muesli and fruit on his plate and smiled faintly to herself.
“What’s funny?” Jarrow asked.
“Oh, I’m sorry.…It just seems strange to watch you—sorry, but I can’t help thinking of Tony—eating that kind of food. He was always meat, potatoes, and everything fried.”
Jarrow maintained a cold, defensive look. “Why? Didn’t he believe in keeping healthy?”
“Look,” Rita said, gesturing at him generally. “How does it feel? Looks okay to me. From the way you talk, it sounds as if you’re the one who had problems. He didn’t believe any of that garbage. I don’t either.”
“It’s all been scientifically proved,” Jarrow assured her loftily.
Rita snorted. “Stuff a rat till it bursts, then wonder why it got sick? You don’t call that science. It’d be like testing a piano with a sledgehammer and saying it’s equal to ten years of playing. I mean, you just can’t do that.…Those people aren’t scientists, not real scientists. They’re paid propaganda hacks. They start out with the answers they want to prove. Science doesn’t work like that.”
It seemed they were about to get into another of their arguments, when Josef came into the room and rescued the situation. “Oh, you’re still eating,” he said.
“That’s okay. What is it?” Jarrow answered.
“I thought you’d like to know, Rita’s place is still under surveillance by federal security agents,” he informed them. Which meant they had done the right thing at Sandy and Bruce’s by deciding not to risk going back there. All the same, Sandy and Bruce would no doubt be wondering what had happened to them, Jarrow thought. The same thing evidently occurred to Rita.
“Could I call the people that we stayed with, just to let them know we’re okay?” she asked, looking at Josef. There was a phone upstairs somewhere that Jarrow and Rita didn’t have ready access to, doubtless intentionally. They hadn’t seen any reason to disclose which of the names, from the list of possibilities that the Pipeline people had compiled and called, they had sought refuge with after fleeing the apartment, and Josef hadn’t asked them.
“The number could have been tagged,” Josef cautioned. “If we were able to come up with some likely guesses, so could the FSS.”
“I wasn’t going to call them direct,” Rita told him. “There’s another friend who’ll pass it on,” meaning Eric.
Josef smiled. “I see you’re starting to think like a professional. We’ll end up recruiting you yet. Very well. Come this way.” He glanced at Jarrow. “Excuse us for a moment.”
“Go ahead.”
Josef and Rita left the room. Jarrow finished his meal, rose, and sauntered back into the living room. Kay was alone by the woodstove, pondering over her notes. She had spent a lot of time the day before talking to him about his background and views, and made innumerable trips up and down the stairs, calling and taking calls from mysterious people, probably the ones who were on their way.
“Feeling better?” she asked, glancing up.
“Much.”
“That’s good.”
He moved over toward the warmth and ran an eye over the files and papers strewn around her. “Are we getting anywhere?”
“Maybe,” Kay said. She put down the pad she’d been jotting in and sat back. “The Jarrow side of all this makes sense. It’s the Gordon part that doesn’t fit.”
“How come?”
“We know that the primary object of Southside was political reprogramming, not military training. And Tony Demiro would have been an ideal test subject—deep-rooted, anti-Establishment radicalism like his would be exactly the kind of thing they’d want to see if they could change. But not only that. He was an orphan, without close family connections, who joined the Army basically to have something to belong to. What was going on at Pearse was a shady, underhanded business.…You see what I’m getting at. If anything went wrong, he could quietly be made to disappear without fuss and complications—as in fact seems to have happened.”
Jarrow sat down slowly in one of the other chairs. That much made sense, certainly. “Yes, I see.”
“And that’s where you come into it,” Kay said.
He didn’t see how immediately. “Go on,” he said.
Kay made a tossing motion with her fingers. “The new patterns that were implanted had to be extracted from a suitable source.” She gestured toward Jarrow briefly. “Well, wouldn’t Richard Jarrow, the respectable, conservative schoolteacher—I’m not being impolite or offensive, am I? Is that how you’d describe yourself?”
“Well, yes, I can’t say I’d disagree,” Jarrow said, not really seeing what there was to be impolite or offensive about in that.
“Wouldn’t somebody like you have been the perfect original for the kinds of patterns they’d need to reprogram somebody like Demiro?” Kay completed.
Jarrow blinked. Now that she had spelled it out, it seemed so obvious. “Of course,” he murmured. “Of course. That’s what Valdheim was doing, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. That whole setup was a fake. Why would the Health Service use private practices to test a new technique? They’ve got enough places of their own, which they have far more control over. In any case, they’re trying to phase out private practice, not encourage it.”
Jarrow put a hand to his brow and shook his head as he strove to piece together what that meant. “So what are you saying?” he asked finally. “That something went wrong. Instead of just extracting the…the codes, patterns, whatever you call them, that they wanted, my entire…‘personality’ got dumped somehow, instead?” He stared incredulously at her, not wanting to believe it; but there was no other explanation.
“Yes, something like that.” Suddenly Kay sounded weary.
Jarrow slumped back in the chair. “So Rita’s right? I am really Demiro, just suffering from the delusion of being Jarrow?”
Kay sighed. “I don’t know if that’s the right way to put it,” she said, endeavoring to soften the impact. “After all, what is a person? If a personality is defined by a dynamic configuration of neural activity, then you’re Richard Jarrow. Is there more of Demiro underneath as well, somewhere? We have no way of knowing. And what about those strange manifestations of an alter ego that you say have happened twice now?—Rita says that Tony Demiro was nothing like that. All we can conclude is that more went on at Pearse than we’re able to account for right now.”
It didn’t help Jarrow’s discomfort. From outside there came the sound of a vehicle pulling up in the driveway. He looked away for a moment as footsteps sounded, going around to the side door of the house. Josef came down from upstairs and went through into the kitchen. They heard the back door open and close, and then voices talking indistinctly.
Jarrow faced back toward Kay. “What I don’t understand about it all is why I find nothing abnormal in my appearance,” he said. “If I think I’m Jarrow, but physically this is Demiro, then why don’t I see any clash?”
“I’ve been wondering about that too,” Kay admitted. “It’s impossible to be certain. There’s never been a case like this before.”
“But you do have an idea?” Jarrow persisted. “You said you were involved with similar work Offworld on Luna with this—what was his name, the Russian?—Ulkanov.”
“Well, possibly.…This is all very crude and speculative, you understand. But basically, it’s pretty established these days that the mind contains two distinct operating levels. First, there’s what we call the ‘data’ level, which processes fact-based information handled by the intellectual faculties: all the things that you ‘know’ and remember as representative of the real world. Then, below that, is the ‘associative’ level, which contains the structures and relationships that are invoked unconsciously by the operations of those faculties.”
It made a sort of sense. Jarrow nodded for her to continue.
“Okay. Well, what I suspect is that the patterns that Ashling’s process implants only modify the recipient’s neurochemical structure at the data level. That would mean, for example, that your intellectual personality knows itself to be Richard Jarrow, and remembers factually related details that come with that knowledge—for example, that Jarrow is forty-six and has a mustache.” Jarrow nodded again. Kay went on, “But the associative-level correlates have remained unaltered. So when the data-level Jarrow reaches down, as it were, to access the deeper associative substrate supporting that identity, the pictures that are returned to consciousness derive from the associative level of Demiro. That’s why you’re unable to recall any visual images other than the younger, darker complexioned, clean-shaven face that you see in the mirror, and you find nothing amiss.”
Jarrow swallowed visibly. “So there’s no question, then.…The person who was originally me…” He couldn’t finish it. But it really didn’t need saying.
Then he realized that Josef was at the kitchen door and had been listening to the tail end of the conversation. He came forward into the room and was followed by the new arrival, wearing a hooded, red overjacket on top of a white sweater. He was tall, bronzed, and athletically built, with curly blond hair and clear eyes. Whereas, previously, Jarrow had classed Josef as “leader” among the group at the house, the presence that the newcomer brought into the room was commanding. Here, he knew at once, instinctively, was the person who would produce a decision on where they went next.
Kay obviously knew him and was about to say something, but he raised a hand. “No, that’s all right. Please carry on.”
Kay looked at Jarrow again. “Can there really be any doubt? The records that you saw in Minneapolis are about as conclusive as you can get.” She hesitated. “We can see what must have happened. You used to see Valdheim about once a month, yes? Your last recollection is from the visit on April third. Everything was normal. Those must have been the occasions when Valdheim obtained the implants to send down to Pearse. But the visit on April third turned out to be the last, when Jarrow died unexpectedly from a stroke on May fifth—corresponding to a time about six months into the program at Pearse, which had begun in earnest the previous October.
“Then something went wrong down at Pearse, and Demiro was overwritten with an entire transplant of the Jarrow identity at its data level. To cover up what had been going on and prevent awkward questions being asked, Demiro was officially eliminated from the picture.”
And Demiro, in effect, became Jarrow. There was no point in trying to deny it any longer. Jarrow exhaled a heavy sigh. Kay showed an empty palm, indicating that there was nothing more she could say.
“But this is November,” Jarrow said. “Demiro was listed as killed in June. So what’s been happening in these last five months? Where do Samurai and Gordon come into it?”
Josef spoke for the first time since entering the room. “We don’t know. But we need to find out. Furthermore, what connection did it have with Ashling and his disappearance?”
“And we think that you, Mr. Jarrow, can enable us to find the answers to both questions,” the newcomer said.
Kay motioned toward him as he came forward to look down at where Jarrow was sitting. “Richard, this is Scipio, another of our team.”
Jarrow nodded in acknowledgment, but was too startled by the statement to let it go just then. “Me?” he said uncomprehendingly. “How can I help?”
“From the inside,” Scipio replied. “Where none of us can penetrate. But that’s where the answers are, and only you can get there.”
Jarrow’s bewilderment only increased further. “How?” he asked again. “What do you want me to do?”
“We want you to let the FSS agents who are looking for you find you, and go back to Pearse with them as Samurai,” Scipio said. “Which shouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish. After all, that’s who they seem to think you are.”
Jarrow looked from one to another of them in sudden alarm. “Now wait a minute. Whatever else you or those people at Pearse may think, I’m a schoolteacher. I don’t know anything about what Samurai was doing. I couldn’t hope to pass myself off as him. I wouldn’t last five minutes.”
Scipio sat down on an arm of one of the chairs and gazed at him intently. “It mightn’t be as bad as you assume. Think about it for a minute. The people at Pearse were tampering with minds, and they know that something strange happened in Demiro’s case. They know that he was acting unstably in Chicago. They won’t know what to expect next. They’ll be prepared for anything. You go in pleading amnesia, confusion, reversion to past personality types—whatever suits the situation. I think there’s a good chance of pulling it off. You’re the key to uncovering what’s been going on in this whole business.”
What Scipio was saying carried an implication that their problem was automatically Jarrow’s problem, and that they all saw things from the same viewpoint. But Jarrow was far from accepting that such was the case.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. His voice had a tight edge. “I don’t think it’s that simple at all. I’m sorry, but this kind of thing isn’t my line.” He stood up and turned, making a sweeping motion with his hand that took in the whole company. “You…you come up with this story about sinister brainwashing plots, then presume that I should want to get involved to elaborate it further—as if it were some duty I owe.…It could all be a paranoid invention for all I know. I mean, how do any of you know? Have you checked it? How?”
“That’s precisely what we’re asking you to help us do, Mr. Jarrow,” Scipio pointed out.
“Why should I help your subversions against my own government?” Jarrow retorted. “You are the aliens here, not me. This kind of notion might be credible where you come from, but it isn’t here. This isn’t that kind of country. We have a Constitution that gives our citizens certain rights protected by laws. I don’t suppose anybody from Offworld could comprehend things like that.”
That was too much for Kay. “Rights!” she exploded. “You talk to us about rights? What right could be more basic than the freedom to become whatever you’re capable of? And that’s just what the Offworld culture means: room for everyone to grow, and achieve, and become; with unlimited room to do it in and unlimited means to do it with, because new technologies create their own resources out of things that weren’t resources before. We’re already building industries that will make Earth’s as obsolete as the windmills and waterwheels of the Middle Ages.”
She too got up, walked over to a window, then turned to face the room again. “And what’s happening down here? This idiocy that you call the Consolidation is the final expression of closed minds and a closed system. It’s driven by this obsession with limits that exist only in its own collective imagination, dangers magnified out of all proportion until the fear of them paralyzes everything, even the capacity to think. There was a time when the West believed in itself, in reason, in its ability to carry on creating better futures. Now it’s having to put up fences to keep its people in and the truth out. How much longer do you think something like that can last? It has to cave in under its own self-doubts and superstitions. The younger people are starting to reject it already. You try to indoctrinate them with defeatism and negativism, but their instincts tell them it’s wrong.…And you talk to us about rights ?”
Jarrow looked back at her stonily. “I teach reality,” he replied coldly. “Not simple-minded pipe dreams. When your bubbles burst, then you’ll be coming back, expecting us to take you back in. Don’t think we won’t be prepared.”
“Oh, God, surely nobody really believes that,” Kay groaned tiredly.
Josef made an appealing gesture at Jarrow, trying in turn. “But surely you can’t deny the erosion of freedoms that used to be taken as basic. Even travel is restricted. Ashling had to approach us, an underground organization, to get himself out of the country.”
“Regrettable, I agree, but necessary,” Jarrow maintained unyieldingly. “Crime grows with population: vice, drugs. Terrorism is rampant everywhere. Do you think such people can be allowed to come and go whenever they please? We have to have controls.”
“What terrorism?” Josef scoffed. “Show me where it exists as anything beyond an occasional nuisance, apart from in official propaganda and in the world created by mass media.”
“Ask your friend Daparras,” Jarrow retorted.
“He’s a writer, for heaven’s sake,” Kay pleaded. “And the Offworld population centers are far more densely crowded. But their society is open. People can live their lives as they please.”
“Reckless and irresponsible,” Jarrow opined. “You’ve got uncontrolled anarchy in the making. A workable society has to be structured and directed.”
“You mean as with this environmentalist fascism that’s out of control down here, bankrupting practically the entire West?” Josef said.
“I’d call it responsible stewardship of a legacy that Offworlder mentalities are either unable to comprehend or have forgotten,” Jarrow said.
Scipio could see that this wasn’t going to get them anywhere, and held up a hand. “Maybe so, maybe not,” he said. “We’re not going to resolve any of that right now. But look at the actions of Valdheim and Nordens and whoever was behind them, and how the thing at Pearse was set up. It was hardly done in a way that you could call ethical, was it? Doesn’t that say something about the powers that are running things here?”
“And I still say you’re prejudging an issue that you know nothing about,” Jarrow replied. “I don’t know what really happened, and neither do you.” He advanced a step and pointed a finger. “But I’ll tell you one thing I do know, and that is that if whatever it was hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be standing here now. So you three can intellectualize all you want, but that fact happens to mean a lot to me!”
“But that’s what we’re asking you to do: to help us find out!” Kay said again, her voice rising uncontrollably.
Jarrow had heard as much as he was prepared to listen to. His voice rose too, and his color deepened. “Oh, is that so? Well, now let me tell you something: I too would be curious to know how I got to be this way. But it’s a lot to get mixed up in just to satisfy curiosity. I feel like an integrated, functioning person, and this body I’ve inherited seems a great improvement over what I remember. I figure that I can live with the complications. If you people want to know what went on down there in Pearse, well, that’s fine by me but it’s your problem. After being told twice in the last week that I’m dead, I’m quite starting to like the idea of being alive after all, and I’d prefer to stay that way. Who do you think you are to assume that I’m available for the asking to promote your ends? I’ve got my own. If you want to go messing with the FSS and the military, then go ahead. But I can live with the situation.”
And with that, Jarrow marched stiffly and tight-mouthed from the room.
After a silence Kay said with a sigh, “I guess we blew it.”
Scipio stared at the stove. “There must be a way,” he insisted. “We have to find one. He’s the only link we have to Ashling.”
Kay was in the kitchen talking to Susan, who was making coffee, when Rita came back downstairs. Josef and Scipio were still talking by the stove in the next room. There was no sign of Jarrow or Leon.
“What was that all about?” Rita asked. “It sounded like tempers were getting frayed, so I stayed out of it.”
“Very wise,” Kay said. She sat down on one of the stools at the breakfast bar. “Oh, I got a bit carried away about some things that Jarrow takes seriously. It was a mistake. I find it difficult to stay calm about matters I feel strongly about, and he’s no different. People are never more irrational than when their prejudices are under attack.”
“Welcome to the human race,” Susan murmured, setting mugs down on a piece of board to use as a tray. Kay sent her a tired smile of thanks. Susan indicated the coffees and raised her eyebrows at Rita. “You want one too?”
“Thanks, I’ll fix myself one.”
“It’s all there.” Susan picked up the board and disappeared with it back out to the living room. Rita moved over to the worktop to fill another mug.
“So where is he now?” she asked Kay over her shoulder.
“Gone out for a walk to get some air, and hopefully cool down a little. Josef sent Leon with him.”
Rita finished making her drink and sat down with it at the table. “You really are from Offworld, then?” she said, changing the subject. “You live out there?”
“Yes. Not born there, of course, although a generation is growing up now that’s genuine Offworld native.”
“Where were you from originally?” Rita asked, intrigued.
“Germany. It used to be divided once. I don’t know if you’d remember anything about that.”
“It got split up after some war, didn’t it? Was that the big war over resources, that the demands of industrializing made inevitable?”
“It wasn’t quite like that,” Kay said.
Rita shrugged. “I only know what they said at school.”
“I studied computer science at first,” Kay resumed. “I wanted to get into Artificial Intelligence and understand how the mind works. That was the latest explanation then, you see. It’s funny how people are always finding that the mind works like their latest technology. It never does, of course, but it shows how they always think that the latest technology must be the ultimate. At one time the brain was an elaborate telephone exchange of nerves going in and out. Then, after servomechanisms were developed, it worked by feedback loops and error signals. And then after that, naturally, it had to be a computer.”
“Which turned out not to be true either,” Rita said.
Kay shook her head. “It’s based on the selective training of neuronal groupings, not information storage. A brain isn’t so much a receptacle of programs as an expression of them.” She sipped her coffee. “Anyway, so I moved from computers into neurophysiological research. But everything was starting to get political by then. The Consolidation had formed and was closing its eastern borders to enforce sanctions against the FER states that weren’t following the Green initiatives, and ideological factors were hampering all fields of research. So I crossed over with some friends in the aftermath of the final Soviet breakup…probably as much from curiosity and the hope of excitement as for any reason that made sense, I suppose.” Kay smiled distantly at the far wall. “People called it the Wild East, in those days. There were so many conflicting stories coming back that no one knew what to believe. We were all young, thirsty for change and adventure. In the years that followed, I was swept along with the thrust offplanet that began from there…and now if anyone asked me where home is, I’d have to say Tycho.”
“You’ve actually been to the Moon,” Rita said dreamily.
Kay gave a short laugh. “People probably said the same kind of thing about America once.”
“What made you come back?”
“I thought that was pretty obvious. I finally did get to work in the field I’d always wanted to, and ended up associated with Professor Ulkanov, whom you heard about. He already knew that some of the things Ashling was doing were revolutionary—I told you about the communications grapevine that scientists use to evade the Consolidation controls. Ulkanov had already got Ashling’s name put on Pipeline’s target list, so when the news came through that Ashling had contacted Pipeline independently and wanted to get out, it was given top priority. I agreed to come down and help out.”
“I thought Tycho was supposed to be some kind of militarized base up there,” Rita said. “Isn’t it like an industrial gold-rush camp? You know, all violence and lawlessness. People being exploited for high pay in hazardous conditions, and that kind of thing?”
Kay laughed again, with open amusement this time. “I know that’s what people are told,” she said. “But why do you think communications are controlled here? Ours aren’t. There are over fifty thousand people at Tycho now. Three times as many at Copernicus. The Newton and Aristotle colonies are being expanded further. There are pilot bases on Mars.”
“Those are colonies, not military platforms? It said on TV the other week that they’re building a beam-gun on one of them that could incinerate Chicago.”
“They’re space habitats,” Kay assured her. “Do I look like a comic-book scientist who wants to rule the world? I’ve got three children who go to school at Tycho. They live in a warm, comfortable house below the surface”—she gestured with a hand, indicating the place they were in—“not like this box, sticking up into the cold, with wind blowing through the clapboard and bugs in the walls—which is part of a complex that includes a mall, small but it has everything, pool, and leisure center all outside the door. Their friends are just a walk away, and there’s a dome with a park in it two levels up. It’s our place, and we chose it. It wasn’t allocated or assigned, we can sell it for whatever we can get, anytime we choose, without needing a transfer approval, price clearance, or certificate of paid-up taxes. Does that sound like a shack in the Klondike to you?”
“I wouldn’t have thought you had children, somehow,” Rita said, propping her chin on a hand and staring. “How old are they?”
“Oh, Max is fifteen. He’s into all things electronic. And there are two girls, Maria, who’s twelve and wants to do the same as me, and Annette, who’s a year younger and hasn’t a clue yet. But there’s plenty of time. I’m an old relic, though, by today’s standards.”
“Oh, listen to her. Don’t say that,” Rita protested.
“Offworlders have children early. Teenage parenthood is common; in fact it’s encouraged. So I’ll probably be a granny before very much longer.”
“Who’s your husband?” Rita asked.
“His name is Joao. He is from Brazil. We met in the Ukrainian Republic.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a mathematician, involved in plasma dynamics. When the Consolidation barriers went up, it created havoc in what used to be called the Third World. The South American dictatorships fell apart, and Africa and the Islamic areas were economic shambles with the collapse of investments. The productive elements from everywhere flocked into the new FER states, and that was where the momentum came from that created a new renaissance. The irony of it all was that what drove them together were the Green policies that the West was trying to foist on the rest of the world to keep the Third World backward and stop it becoming an industrial competitor. But the frauds and hoaxes that were manufactured as pretexts for imposing political controls got out of hand, and the fanatics who believed it all ended up in charge. So while the West was shutting itself in with its own delusions, capital from East Asia and Japan was launching the expansion offplanet, from the FER. That’s why the Offworld links today are to there and not here.”
“Tony used to talk about defecting to the FER,” Rita said, staring down at her mug. “It’s funny, listening to you and thinking of some of the things he used to say. Maybe he knew more about what was going on than I realized. We always wanted a large family. He always wanted to open a bookstore.…” She looked up at Kay and hesitated. “Do you think there’s a chance that he really is still there somewhere—in Jarrow, I mean? Could he be revived somehow? Is it possible?”
“You were very fond of each other, weren’t you?” Kay said. Rita nodded mutely. Kay sighed. “I really can’t say. I wouldn’t want to raise your hopes unduly.…But if you’re looking for a way to help, then find a way of getting him to cooperate in finding Ashling. If it is possible at all, Ashling is the one who’d know how.”
“Why should he?” Rita asked. “Why should Jarrow want to do that? He’d be wiping himself out.”
Which Rita could see; so why hadn’t she been able to see it too, before she went shooting her mouth off? Kay asked herself glumly. Why was it that the most obvious things in life were always the last ones you saw?
Jarrow went straight up to his room when he returned. He was still in a sullen mood ten minutes later when a knock sounded on the door.
“Who is it?” he called gruffly.
“Rita.”
“What do you want?”
“To talk for a minute.”
He opened the door. She came in, and sat down on the edge of the bed, staring at him.
“I assume they’ve sent you up here to have a go at me too,” Jarrow said, sounding not particularly friendly.
“Somebody has to do something if we’re ever going to get out of this,” Rita replied evenly, refusing to be put on the defensive.
“That’s easy. They can simply disappear.”
“And leave you to do what?” she said, bordering on sounding derisive. “Report back to Kankakee and say you’re not dead, it was just a small case of AWOL?”
“You still think of me as Demiro, don’t you?” Jarrow said. “Well, I’m not. Why won’t you get it into your head that I’m a different person? The Army has listed him as dead. It would be a lot easier if you accepted it as meaning just that, and went back to picking up your own life the way you were. I’m sorry I intruded into it as I did, just when you were finding your feet again, but you know how it was, and I can’t change that now.” Rita said nothing. Jarrow looked across at her sourly. “Or isn’t that good enough? Have you still got hopes that I’ll revert back to being Demiro, somehow? Is that why you want me to go back to Pearse? That’s what you think might happen there? It would suit you nicely, wouldn’t it. Never mind how I might feel about it.”
Rita ignored the barbs. “They would hardly reinstate Tony, even if they could, would they? He’s officially dead. Why would they want to complicate everything by bringing him back? If they reinstated anyone, it would be Gordon, Samurai—whichever one you call him. He’s the one who showed up at the Hyatt to begin with.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Jarrow agreed. “But Ashling might know how to do it. You’d like that, wouldn’t you. You want them to find Ashling.”
For the first time, Rita’s voice took on an angry note. “And why not? What do you expect? Look, I’ve just about had enough of hearing about your problems all the time, and how you feel about everything. Now how do you think I feel, for a change? Look, mister, I’m sorry and all that, but Richard Jarrow died last May. Naturally. He had his run, and it was over. In Tony’s case it was different. His certificate had to be faked. Yours didn’t. You don’t belong here. You’re living in a stolen body.”
Jarrow’s jaw tightened obstinately. “Maybe, but it wasn’t my doing. Stolen or whatever, it happens to be the only one I’ve got. I can’t change that now, either. Do you really expect me to give it up?”
“I’m not expecting anything. I’m just asking you to help find out what the facts are. I’ll take the risk that it might mean losing Tony for good. Those people downstairs obviously believe in the things they say, and they’re prepared to back them. Why can’t you show the same conviction about the things you say you believe in? I mean, I can’t see what your problem is. If what you say is right, you don’t have anything to lose.”
Jarrow frowned at her. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Look at it this way,” Rita said. “Scipio and the others are prepared to let you go back into Pearse, thinking the way you do now. But to be any use to them, you’ll have to stay in touch, won’t you? In other words, they’ll have to set up some channel for you to communicate back to them. But once you’re among your friends, there’d be nothing to stop you from setting Pipeline up and sending them straight to the FSS. But Scipio’s saying he’ll risk that, which is another way of saying he’s pretty sure that when you find out what they’re really up to there—these people that you have so much trust in and defend so touchingly—you’ll change your mind. So what do you have to lose? How come you can’t match it?”
Jarrow stared steadily at her. Clearly this was a line of thinking that he hadn’t pursued himself.
“And anyhow, what alternative do you have?” Rita tossed in as a final word.
But although her words had made an impression, Jarrow still wasn’t of a mood to be pliable. “I’m sick of all of you,” he snapped. “I’d like to be thought of as something other than a laboratory rat for once. For your information I do have alternatives. I have contacts, back in Minneapolis. I can go west, to the mountains. I can take care of my own life without anyone at Pearse, and without you. Now please leave me alone.”
But later, after turning the thought over in his mind for some time, he had to concede that Rita had a valid point. Seriously, what alternative did he have? He obviously couldn’t stay here forever. And if he refused to cooperate and Pipeline gave up and ditched him, what then? He’d be left on the streets with some cash that would soon run out, a few credit cards that could be invalidated at any time, no job, and no ID apart from a couple of scraps relating to someone who didn’t exist. He didn’t really believe his line himself about going to the mountains with Paul—he’d met Paul only once, in a bar. At the bottom of it all, despite his talk, he was, inside, still a timid, not very adventurous schoolteacher.
Unwittingly, driven by her own misguided hopes, Rita had given him his answer. Obviously the thing to do was go back to Pearse and get among the people who had the real power to change things. Then he could forget all about Pipeline and their fantasies. There really was no immediate conflict of interests. If Kay and the others hadn’t been more interested in peddling their infantile ideals and getting him excited, instead of concentrating on the matter at hand, he’d have seen it for himself in the first place.
Very well, he told himself. So let’s get on with it.
He went back downstairs and sought out Scipio. “Tell me again how this would work?” he said.
“Very simply,” Scipio replied. “All you do is go back to the people who sent you and tell them you’ve been having blackouts and amnesia. We’ll give you details of a means of getting in touch with us later, should you wish to do so. I’m sorry if we made it sound like an elaborate espionage undertaking of some kind. I don’t really see what the problem is.”
“There isn’t any,” Jarrow told him. “Very well, I’ll do it.”
What was needed next was a believable way of making Jarrow visible again. Kay’s suggestion was to use Rita. How, Kay asked, would a woman react if her supposedly dead fiancé reappeared suddenly not knowing where he had been, and then promptly forgot who he was? Eventually, whether she liked it or not, she might be forced to take it to the authorities. That, then, would bring Jarrow to the attention of the people who wanted him back.
Rita’s story would describe his worsening condition of confusion and amnesia, and how she had come to the realization within days that this wasn’t going to be something she could cope with. Unwilling to simply abandon him, she had decided that her only choice was to seek help. She accepted that it would mean getting involved with officialdom and having to answer endless questions. Jarrow concurred readily with whatever was said, since he was only playing along, anyway. When he got free of them and back to Pearse, his intention was to tell the whole story straight and let the experts there sort it out.
Josef, with Susan and Leon, drove Jarrow and Rita back into the city. To create a false trail to account for their movements in the past forty-eight hours, Josef gave Jarrow a collection of meal tabs, subway and bus tickets, and shopping receipts from various parts of Chicago that he had assembled, to be found on Jarrow’s person when he was picked up. Gordon’s credit card, it turned out, was still valid—probably deliberately so, to provide a means of locating him. Later that night, Jarrow and Rita checked into one of the smaller downtown hotels, again to leave a verifiable trail. Jarrow remained there the next morning, while Rita went alone to the police station of the local precinct.
“Morning, ma’am. What can we do for you?” the desk sergeant inquired. She looked haggard, he noted—as if she had a lot on her mind.
“There’s a guy who’s sick,” Rita replied. “It’s a really strange situation. I can’t deal with it. He’s back in a hotel about three blocks from here, right now. It’s called the Griffin. You need to get somebody down there right away.”
The sergeant drew across a pad. “Is he okay?”
“I think so. But he wasn’t making any sense. I was scared he might get violent.”
“What’s his name?”
“Demiro. Tony Demiro.…We were engaged. He needs help.”
The sergeant went over to a desk at the rear and used a screen to check the current list of hot names, then paused and glanced at her. “Would you excuse me for one moment?” he said, and went through to a back room to notify the captain. The captain checked a number he had been given and made a call.
In an office elsewhere in Chicago, an agent of the Federal Security Service turned from his desk. “It’s the Chilsen girl. She’s just walked in off the street at the police station on Monroe to turn Samurai in. He’s at the Griffin.”
The chief stood up and reached for his jacket. “Get the team moving,” he snapped. “I want all of them over there with full backup. And nobody lets those jerks from Pearse near it, understand? There isn’t gonna be another screwup this time.”
Three agents sealed off the hotel lobby, supported by a six-man detachment of the city police. Two more agents with more police secured the rear approach, while one agent and two men were posted at each end of the corridor leading to Jarrow’s room. Three agents, guns drawn and cocked, went with the manager to open the door, followed by a police detective and four men.
They went in like Marines hitting the beach on Okinawa. “Police. Freeze!” the captain in the lead shouted.
Jarrow sat on the edge of the bed and watched indifferently.
There was a moment of anticlimactic uncertainty as the adrenaline highs dissipated.
“Are you Maurice Gordon, resident of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania?” the captain asked, producing a set of handcuffs while the others spread out around the room and covered.
“I don’t know,” Jarrow replied.
In the drab brown van, Josef and Scipio watched from halfway back along the block as the procession emerged from the Griffin and a cavalcade of unmarked cars and police cruisers formed up to move off. People on the sidewalks were stopping to stare, and faces peered from windows on both sides of the street.
“I’m not convinced that he’s genuine,” Josef muttered, shaking his head.
“Oh, of course he’s not genuine,” Scipio agreed breezily. “He’ll spill the whole story the moment he gets back. We can only hope that what he finds out later will make him come to see things differently. That makes it doubly important that every link back to Pipeline is thoroughly erased.”
Apart, of course, from a channel for Jarrow to communicate through, which couldn’t be traced. But Josef had a lot of experience in handling requirements like that. They would use a commercial answering service. The number they had given Jarrow would connect him to an answering and recording machine that could be remotely accessed from anywhere. That way, it wouldn’t matter much if he divulged the number when he got back to Pearse.
And if he did change his mind later and decided to leave a message, the security people at Pearse wouldn’t be able to call in to check, because to interrogate the machine one would need to know the right code, and every time that happened, the code would change to a new one. And only Josef had the list giving the sequence. You couldn’t be much more careful than that.
Jerry Tierney, Director of Internal Security at the Pearse Psychological Research Laboratories, took a call from the FSS agent in charge of operations in Chicago, advising that Samurai had been taken without offering resistance. First reports were that he seemed disoriented and had only fragmented recollections of events over the previous few days.
The news wasn’t especially a cause for elation. Tierney’s original hope when he sent Wesserman and the others to Chicago had been that with the help of the local FSS office, they’d be able to lift Samurai quietly and get him back down to Georgia without anyone who didn’t need to know being any the wiser. But Wesserman, or the FSS, or all of them together, had bungled it and been traced through the car that Samurai had ditched, and now the city police were involved, along with the state authorities, God alone knew who else, and the fan was about to receive a shovelful. True, they would doubtless be able to spirit Samurai away under the secrecy protection provisions, but that didn’t alter the fact that they had suffered a lot of visibility where it wasn’t needed, and some important people weren’t going to be pleased. He cleared down, stared reluctantly at the blank screen while he mentally prepared his line, then sighed and touched a button to call Fairfax, the establishment’s director.
Raymond Fairfax was in his office with Dr. Nordens, waiting for news. They listened silently while Tierney summarized what had happened, Fairfax sitting erect like some frosty Olympian with his crown of white hair, his mouth clamped in a grim line across his florid features; Nordens watching expressionlessly through his rimless spectacles.
Tierney concluded: “He’s being taken to police headquarters up there right now. Wesserman is waiting for them, and will take him in charge immediately under Section 36. But there’s still the problem of the girl. Obviously she’s going to be blabbing all over the place that Demiro is supposed to be dead, if she hasn’t started already. We need a line that’ll tie in with it.”
Fairfax was aware of that. He should have let Tierney go to Chicago himself and handle things on the spot, the way Tierney had wanted, he told himself bitterly—although it was the last thing he was going to admit now. “We’re working on that,” he replied. “Stall them for now. Tell Wesserman to say that he knows the subject only by a code name; his job is simply to return him to military custody. So either the girl’s crazy, or there must have been a mixup in the records department. Then make sure that Wesserman gets him out without leaving tracks. And I want you to monitor every move personally. After that, work out a clean way for getting Wesserman and his whole bunch off the case. We can’t risk any more incompetence.”
Fairfax cleared down without waiting for Tierney to reply, and looked at Nordens. “I don’t like it,” he muttered darkly. “The whole business was illicit. It was a mistake ever to have got involved with it. And the others will all be bailing out with emergency chutes when this gets around. It’s us that’ll be left carrying it. I say the best thing would be to get rid of Samurai as soon as he’s back here. Then it’ll just be the girl’s word against everyone else’s that it was Demiro at all. It wouldn’t be too difficult to put some holes in her story.…Clear up the whole mess. What do you think?”
Nordens remained motionless for several seconds. Finally he said, “I’m not so sure. Samurai is still our best hope for finding Ashling, and if Ashling’s loose it could sink all of them, not just you and me. So it would pay them to sit tight in their seats for a little longer yet.”
“If Ashling hasn’t already slipped the country,” Fairfax said.
Nordens gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. “I don’t think so. If he had, then Pipeline wouldn’t be showing so much interest.…And besides, Samurai might be the ideal means for getting rid of the Chilsen girl and putting a stop to any story of hers permanently. We wouldn’t want to involve Tierney’s people in something like that. Too much risk of it getting messy—especially with all the attention that they’ve attracted now. Then Samurai can be eliminated without leaving any traces. That would be the best course, for everybody.”
Fairfax took a long breath and nodded reluctantly. “All right. Let’s get Jerry over here when he’s off the line from Chicago. This time I want us both to be in on all the details, every step of the way.”
Jarrow was flown south to a military airbase that he took to be in Georgia, where a helicopter was waiting to collect him, along with the three men whom the police had handed him over to in Chicago. They flew at a modest height for about twenty minutes over wooded, hilly terrain and an occasional river valley. Then, a broken area between the trees ahead unfolded into a cluster of white and brown office blocks and other structures several stories high, standing amid a sprawl of outbuildings and parking lots, a tower with a water tank and another carrying communications antennae, all geometrically segmented and enclosed by lines of wire fences. As the helicopter descended, the central complex of buildings rose up and took on solid form to look for a moment like the superstructure of a ship sailing on a sea of green…and then they were landing on a pad in front of a five-story frontage of polished stone panels and copper-tinted glass. They got out to the scent of pines and a breeze pleasantly mild after the wintriness of Illinois. Everything about the surroundings suggested efficiency, organization, authority, and order, from the military emblem painted on the helicopter’s fuselage to the smartly turned-out uniformed guards in the post ahead of them beside the door. Jarrow felt the reassurance of being on the right side and in capable hands at last. His problems, he was sure, would soon be resolved.
They took him up to the top floor, where wood-paneled doors opened off carpeted corridors, and secretaries sat at desks with terminals and screens outside glass-partitioned offices. He waited in a small room with chairs and a table set conference style, and a woman in a pastel blue two-piece and blouse brought him a snack with a cup of coylene. Then he was shown into a spacious office with a leather-topped desk standing before a wall of tinted windows looking out over the Georgia hills. A man with white hair and a pinkish, tight-mouthed countenance, wearing a dark suit, was sitting behind the desk. With him were a sallow-faced man with dark curly hair, dressed in a light tan suit, and a smaller man with rimless spectacles and an intense expression, who, from the description that Josef had obtained from Ashling, had to be Dr. Nordens. Jarrow guessed the man behind the desk to be the director, Raymond Fairfax, whose name Josef had supplied in the course of briefing Jarrow with as much as he knew about the setup at Pearse. Jarrow didn’t know who the third man was.
Jarrow sat down, and the assistant who had shown him in withdrew, closing the door. Fairfax stared at him fixedly for several seconds. It was a troubled look, the look of somebody trapped into something he’d rather not have to deal with, and at the same time wary of an unknown.
Finally he said, “Why did you decide to run? What did you think you were doing?”
Jarrow shrugged and did his best to look mystified but composed. The fastest way to getting this whole business resolved would be to tell them everything candidly.
“I don’t know,” he replied simply. “I don’t remember anything about it.”
The news didn’t seem to take Fairfax by surprise. But of course he would already have known enough to have expected that. “Do you know who I am?” he asked, looking at Jarrow strangely. He raised a hand in a brief, dismissive gesture. “Do you know these people…or these surroundings, where you are?”
“From what I’ve been told, I presume this is the Pearse military psychological laboratories,” Jarrow replied. “I don’t know if I’ve been in this office before. I imagine that you’re the director here, Raymond Fairfax.” Jarrow inclined his head to indicate the others. “This looks like Dr. Nordens, whom I know I’ve dealt with.…I’m sorry, I can’t place you.”
“This is Jerry Tierney,” Fairfax said. “He’s in charge of security operations here.” Tierney returned a faint nod.
Nordens shifted his posture and looked at Jarrow, intrigued. “Who told you these things?” he asked. “What’s the last thing you do remember?”
Jarrow took a moment to collect his words, and then began relating his story. He described his last recollection of visiting Valdheim in April, then told of waking up in Atlanta with no idea of how he got there; his journey back to Minneapolis, discovery that it was November, and confusion on learning that Richard Jarrow was dead; of going to Chicago and the subsequent events there after meeting Rita. “I realize now that what happened was a misunderstanding,” he said. “Your people were merely taking precautions, as they had to in the circumstances. There wasn’t any violence or shooting or anything like that. The problem was my doing, for overreacting.”
“Where did you go after you evaded them?” Nordens asked curiously.
“Some friends of Rita’s put us up for the night, in another part of Chicago.”
“Do you have their names or the address?” Tierney asked.
Jarrow hesitated. He didn’t see how that could be useful. “No, I’m afraid I don’t. It didn’t seem important.”
“Carry on,” Fairfax said.
Jarrow told how he had learned from Rita that the day before he awoke in Atlanta he had apparently been functioning as Warrant Officer Tony Demiro, who had been connected with certain work going on at Pearse, and that this was Demiro’s physical body. Finally, he described how they were contacted by Pipeline, the meeting with Josef, and the two days that followed in the house somewhere outside the city. The people from Pipeline were looking for a scientist called Ashling, who had apparently disappeared from Pearse, and they thought that Jarrow would be able to help. In response to Tierney’s further questioning, Jarrow described the Pipeline agents whom he had met and outlined their apparent functions. He concluded, managing a hint of a wry smile, “They hoped they could recruit me as a spy to work for them on the inside, here at Pearse. I played along with it because it seemed the only way to get away. So here I am.…And now you know as much as I do.”
He waited. There was a drawn-out silence. Jarrow looked from one to the other expectantly, but their expressions remained unreadable. At length Nordens asked him, “Do you recall anything at all about Ashling?”
Jarrow shook his head. “Apart from what they told me, no, nothing.”
“Nothing about Ashling’s intending to leave the country, maybe? About where he might be going?”
“Nothing,” Jarrow said again. “But they were anxious to find him too, so I imagine he’s still here.”
Nordens nodded. He seemed relieved.
“You don’t actually remember anything about being Demiro the day before you woke up as you are now?” Tierney checked once again.
“No.”
“Anything at all prior to waking up on November seventeenth?”
“Nothing since the visit to Valdheim on April third. Up to that point everything was normal.”
“Does the name Samurai mean anything?” Nordens asked.
“Your agents called me that when they tried to intervene in Chicago. I assume it was some kind of code designation associated with whatever Demiro was involved in here.”
Nordens gave a noncommittal nod. “I see.”
Again there was silence. Jarrow looked from one to the other, puzzled and feeling increasingly disturbed now. “Look, I’ve been as frank as I can,” he said at last. “I was hoping for some answers myself.”
Which of course was only reasonable. Nordens took off his spectacles, squinted through one of the lenses, then removed a speck of something and replaced them again. “We’re not sure of all the answers ourselves yet,” he replied. “We’ll need to perform some tests, check our facts. This is an extremely complicated matter. I’m sure you understand.”
It seemed very vague. Jarrow conceded the point with a nod, but holding his ground in the manner of one who was still entitled to something. “Of course. But at least give me an outline of what’s been going on, even if you can’t explain all of it just at this moment.”
Nordens glanced at Fairfax, who nodded a quick assent. Nordens looked at Jarrow and replied, “Demiro was part of a volunteer program that we’ve been running here to investigate a new method of training military personnel—and eventually we hope it will have many other applications too. Essentially it involves extracting encoded skills from the brains of existing experts, and implanting them into novices. The results have been quite remarkable.”
“Yes.” Jarrow was aware of that much, which tied in with the things that Josef and Kay had said. What he wasn’t ready to accept was the further account of sinister political agendas and deliberate use of unwitting subjects that they had tried to draw from it.
Nordens went on, “Dr. Valdheim’s work was also in a new area of physiological research that involved deriving the codes of certain neural patterns, but in his case for pathological diagnosis and treatment. That was why you were referred to him. Well, to cut a long story short, we reached an agreement with the department sponsoring Valdheim’s work, under which he could transmit his data here for processing. We possess a large array of computing and other equipment, together with appropriate software, that is already developed to perform precisely the kind of tasks that Valdheim required.” Nordens raised a hand briefly. “As far as we can make out, one of those files from Valdheim—it was still stored here, you understand, after Jarrow’s unfortunate death—was somehow mixed up with our own experimental training files, and implanted into Demiro. How it happened, we don’t know. And even more perplexing is the fact that the entire Jarrow personality seems to have established itself. By all our models and theories that shouldn’t have been possible. And that, of course, is why we’re so anxious to find Ashling: an intellect of his caliber will be essential to help us resolve your problem.”
“Where’s Valdheim now?” Jarrow asked. He had already told of his attempts to locate the doctor when he was in Minneapolis.
“Back in Washington. After the unfortunate setback involving yourself, naturally his program was suspended. As far as I know, the department responsible has ruled to keep details out of the public domain until they have more facts to go on. Premature release of information in cases like this always causes misunderstandings and needless alarm.”
There, it all had an innocent explanation, as Jarrow had known all along that it would. “And Samurai?” he inquired lightly, as if just filling in a missing detail. “Where did he come in?”
Nordens tossed up a hand carelessly. “Oh, Samurai and Gordon were pseudonyms connected with some tests we were carrying out on Demiro.”
Jarrow was already nodding. He felt like laughing aloud with relief and gratitude. The situation was a bizarre one, no question about that. But the world could be a strange place. The fantasies that Kay and Josef had spun were typical of the delusions of subversive mentalities everywhere, resentful at not having what they thought should be their say in running things, who would say anything to derogate what they couldn’t become part of.
“There’s just one more thing that I’m not clear on,” he said. “How could Demiro have been the subject of all this if he was killed five months ago in June?”
Nordens made a good job of looking puzzled. “Killed? What do you mean, killed?” he asked, taking off his spectacles again.
Jarrow gestured uncertainly. “I told you just now.…The girl, Rita Chilsen. She said that Demiro was killed in June, in a helicopter accident.”
“Oh, that!” Nordens scoffed, dismissing the suggestion with a wave. “A hysterical woman, maybe wanting to rationalize breaking up with her fiancé or something. Who knows? People do the oddest things all the time, Mr. Jarrow. Sometimes I wonder if half the world is sane at all.”
Jarrow was incredulous. “Surely you’re not saying that she made it up?”
Nordens allowed his mouth to bend in a rare hint of humor and motioned in Jarrow’s direction. “Consider the evidence for yourself. You don’t look very dead to me. Do you feel dead, Mr. Jarrow?”
Jarrow saw that the others were smiling thinly too. It was reassuring. This was where the power lay, and they were on his side. He smiled in turn, and then broke into a quick laugh that he found impossible to suppress. “No,” he told them. “I don’t feel dead at all.”
Nordens and Tierney took him on a tour of parts of the establishment. He learned that the cluster of larger buildings that they were in was called the Main Complex, which contained the administrative section and much of the laboratory space. The major projects were located within a Restricted Zone, outside which were various ancillary buildings and outstations. One of these was the Facilities Block, housing such general amenities as the dining hall and cafeteria, medical center, recreational provisions, and a social club. None of it meant anything to Jarrow. They took him out to a fenced compound behind the primary establishment buildings and showed him around inside a military-style billet hut with dormitory area, washrooms, staff room, and kitchen, all very clean, bare, and deserted. Jarrow got the feeling that it was an attempt to trigger his recollections of something by means of association. But it didn’t succeed.
Finally they left the main compound and drove around to a wooded area on one side of the establishment, hidden from the main approach road and secluded, where a smaller side gate with its own guardpost gave access to a separate annex area. It consisted of low, bungalow-style chalets and what looked like apartment units, jumbled together around an irregular arrangement of interconnecting parking areas and forecourts. Some effort had been made here to relieve the uniform, military-scientific austerity of the larger adjoining compound, with its faceless walls of concrete, storage tanks, and pipes. The designs of the buildings were colorful and varied, and the outlines broken up with screens of greenery interspersed with pines. This, Jarrow was informed, was the Permanent Quarters Annex, or PQA. It backed onto one side of where Jarrow thought the Restricted Zone perimeter lay inside the Main Complex.
“Do you recognize this place?” Nordens asked him.
This had become a familiar routine by now. Jarrow shook his head. “Sorry. It could be off a street in any town. Should I?”
“Yes, you should,” Nordens told him. “It’s where you’ve been living. Come on, we’ll show you.”
They walked along a path behind several parked vehicles, then up a short flight of stone steps flanked by a grassy mound and a wall masked by shrubbery to a covered walkway that brought them to a door. “Try your keys here,” Nordens said.
For a moment Jarrow didn’t know what he meant. Then he remembered the keys that he’d taken from the hotel room in Atlanta—which had been no good for his own former apartment in Minneapolis. He took them from his pocket, selected one that looked right, and the door opened on the first try. He withdrew the key and entered. Nordens and Tierney followed.
It was a residential apartment. But not any kind of apartment that Jarrow would have chosen for himself. His first impression was of one of those ultra-contemporary galleries intended to display avant-garde art forms. The floor was of mottled gray, polished marble, the walls stark white, and the furnishings sleek and streamlined, unrelieved harshness, in black leather curves with chrome and steel supports, glass surfaces, ceramic inlays, and tiles. The fittings were contrasting black and white or metal; the framed designs and sculptures adorning the walls and alcoves were angular and sharp; the lighting bright, hard, penetrating, precise. A terminal with several screens and an entertainment selector panel, black and silver, with aluminum controls, formed a cornerpiece between a black-upholstered recliner and a glass-sided, slender-legged desk. Everything was well spaced, positioned exactly, selected for function. Every ornament, even, was there for a purpose. It was all hard, cold, unyielding, without blemish of any wavering to the seductions of softness or color; no admission of the weakness that succumbing to warmth and frivolity betrays.
To Jarrow it was daunting. He had lived here? He could no more picture himself inhabiting such surroundings than a piece of sterilized packaging enlarged to room size. If gleaming robots with metal faces and compound-lens eyes ever took over the world in the way the movies depicted, this was where they would come home to.
“We’ll leave you on your own for a while to adjust and find your feet,” Nordens said. “You’ll find all your possessions untouched. There is a domestic staff who look after the Annex and take care of things like housekeeping, catering, and laundry. Seven-seven will get them on the terminal. Is there anything else that you need for now?”
Jarrow was too disoriented by this latest turn of events to think of anything. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “You’re probably right. Just let me rest up for a while.”
Nordens nodded. “Best. It’s late afternoon now. I’ll be around for a few more hours. If you need to contact me for anything, the terminal will give you my code. Otherwise we’ll see you again tomorrow.”
After they had left, Jarrow explored the rest of the apartment and found it to consist of a bedroom, kitchen and breakfast area, and bathroom in addition to the living room that he had already seen. In keeping with his first impressions, all of it was harshly etched in black, white, metal, and glass, tile, and ceramic; sheer drapes, maroon-and-black bed linen; suits and jackets of black, light gray, charcoal, and subdued blue in the closet; tailored shirts, silk ties; all dispassionately severe, coldly masculine.
He took off the crumpled clothes of Gordon’s that he was wearing again and dropped them into the laundry basket provided. Then he shaved, using a new, manual razor, and after that spent twenty minutes soaping and rinsing away several days of grime, perspiration, travel, and tensions in the shower. He selected some clean clothes and shoes from the closet and drawers in the bedroom, stretched out on the bed, and relaxed totally and luxuriously for almost the next hour. By that time he was feeling hungry. He called the service number from the bedside unit, switched to audio only. A man’s voice answered, sounding courteous and obliging. After some questions and answers, Jarrow ordered a cheese-and-mushroom omelette with potatoes, side salad, whole-grain bread with butter, orange juice, followed by milk pudding and fruit dessert, cheese with crackers, pot of coylene. He was told it would be there in fifteen minutes.
Shortly afterward, a chime sounded from the front door. Jarrow went out to the living room and opened it. The woman standing there could have been a model for one of the magazines that some of his students occasionally showed up at school with. She had long, straight, ebony-black hair sweeping down to her shoulders, sultry eyes, emphasized with shadowed lids and mascara, and full, heavily made-up lips. Her outfit could have been chosen to match the decor of the apartment, and comprised a black leather skirt, cut at half-thigh length to reveal well-shaped legs in net stockings, a white top embroidered with silver thread, which squeezed and exposed the tops of her breasts, and a light, silver-gray jacket thrown back at the shoulders. She exuded a voluptuous perfume and wore a silver pendant at her throat, bracelets, rings on several of her fingers, and a jeweled brooch on one lapel.
To Jarrow the sight was totally unnerving. All he could do was stare, incapable of speech.
“So you’re back,” she said. Her voice was low, soft, intimately familiar. “Could you use some company over dinner? From your choice, your tastes seem to have changed toward what might be called the more conservative.” She reached out a hand with slender fingers tipped by long, red-lacquered nails and undid the top button of his shirt. “Then later, I thought maybe a little …‘relaxation’ might be a good idea? Kind of, like a welcome home?” Her eyes flickered quickly across his face, but without losing their mischievous half smile. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Jarrow gulped and shook his head. No home comforts were spared for the volunteers here, it seemed. She had evidently been briefed since his arrival.
“I’m Vera,” she said.
Confusion came boiling up uncontrollably inside him. “No.…Not now, really,” he stammered. “I’ve been affected by some kind of amnesia or something. They must have told you.…I just need to rest.”
“Sure,” she said lightly. She was unperturbed and unfazed, evidently prepared for something like that. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m still around. There’ll be plenty of time for reunions later. They say that waiting makes it that much better. I’ll see how you’re feeling in the morning.” She smiled, winked at him, and walked away.
“Yes.…Do.” Jarrow closed the door shakily and sat down.
He went to bed shortly after finishing his meal. But the feeling of self-congratulatory satisfaction that he had anticipated wasn’t there. He thought of Rita, Sandy and Bruce—he was glad now that he’d chosen not to remember their names—of Josef, Kay, and Scipio, and while he could never condone what they stood for, somehow he couldn’t bring himself to think of them as “enemy.” And while by no stretch of the imagination could he accept that denouncing self-proclaimed saboteurs and subversives qualified as “betrayal”…somewhere deep down, he wasn’t comfortable about what he had done.
Again Jarrow’s sleep was troubled by strange, yet vividly real, dreams. He was one of a group of men who lived in the empty billet hut that Nordens and Tierney had taken him to. They were all military people, he knew somehow, although in the dream everyone wore a green, one-piece smock, something like a surgeon’s. They moved with jerky, zombielike motions and their features were distorted like the faces of rubber bendy-dolls. There were mirrors on the walls, which Jarrow continually avoided confronting, because he was terrified of seeing that he might be the same as the others, although he knew all along, anyway, that it was true.
He woke up feeling panicky and shook while the images faded away. But even when he was fully conscious again, he still felt acutely disturbed. He was unable to pinpoint why.
As his mental gears slowly reengaged, the events of the previous day replayed themselves through his mind, leading him to experience again the vague but firmly rooted dissatisfaction that he had felt just before falling asleep. Something felt very wrong about this whole business. Something was trying to stare him in the face, but the conscious part of him that was in control kept looking the other way.
He got up, showered, and dressed slowly, moving around as he did so and taking in the mood and feeling of the place he was in. These had been his quarters for several months at least, seemingly. Yet nothing was familiar; nothing evoked any flicker of recognition or touched a sympathetic chord of some buried memory. And even more than that, every bit as much as yesterday, it was all so unlike him, so uncharacteristic of anything he could have wished to be a part of, so…alien.
Several months here—of doing what? How did it tie in with appearing one day at the Atlanta Hyatt as Maurice Gordon, carrying weapons and strange equipment that looked like the kinds of things that secret agents in movies used? Josef had told him that he had arrived there looking for Ashling. Why would Demiro, a volunteer subject for a research program intended to explore a new military training method, know anything about a defecting scientist or be involved with attempts to find him? Could Josef have been simply grasping at a straw in the wild hope that anyone from Pearse might know something about Ashling?…No, that didn’t ring true, Jarrow told himself. Josef wouldn’t act that way. He’d had a reason for saying what he had. Jarrow stopped in the living room and stared at the window looking out over the shrubs screening the parking area below. He had to find out more about those missing months and the connection with Ashling.
The sound of a woman’s footsteps approaching came from the walkway below the shrubbery and the steps leading up to the door. Jarrow moved forward, expecting to see Vera again, but it was a dark-skinned girl in a white tunic. She was carrying a plastic bag containing the clothes that Jarrow had left for laundering the evening before. Jarrow opened the door before she could ring.
“Good morning,” he said, extending an arm to accept them.
“Good morning, sir. That’s all right, I’ll take care of it.” She had a Hispanic voice. “There were these things as well.” She handed him some scraps of paper, ticket stubs, a few receipts, and the memo pad from the Hyatt, all from the pockets of Gordon’s gray suit, which he had been wearing yesterday. The girl went through to the bedroom to hang the jacket, shirts, and pants, and put the other items away. Jarrow moved over to the desk and opened one of the drawers to get rid of the things that she had given him. He paused when he saw the note that he had found in the pad on the morning that he first awoke:
Headman to ship out via J’ville, sometime Nov 19. Check ref “Cop 3.”
Somebody shipping out? From the things he knew now, he guessed that it was probably a reference to Ashling. Had Samurai known something, then? Yesterday he would have taken this straight to Dr. Nordens. Now, with these new doubts assailing him, he was less sure.
His gaze came to the phone unit standing to one side of the desk. He thought of Vera again. There was somebody who could probably tell him a lot about those crucial missing months. He had no delusions that she had reappeared simply by courtesy of the management to let Samurai have his plaything back; she was on the payroll to watch Jarrow, and doubtless briefed to try to help him jog his memory. In other words she’d be more than ready to talk.
But he’d never learn anything if he wouldn’t let her near him. He put the pad in the drawer with the other things and closed it. The girl came back into the living room and began crossing toward the door. “What do I call you?” Jarrow asked, turning his head.
“My name is Maria.” A puzzled look crossed her face, as if he should have known that.
“Do you know the lady called Vera, who comes here?”
“Of course, sir.”
Jarrow gestured toward the desk. “How would I contact her?”
“Seven-oh will get you the general directory. You should have a personal section indexed from there. I think she would be in that somewhere.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Maria smiled a little nervously, gave him a strange look again, and left. Jarrow activated the terminal, tapped in 70, and after a little experimentation found himself looking at Vera’s feline-eyed features, framed by the sweep of black hair.
“Well, hello there,” she greeted. “Sleep well?”
“Not too bad. Look, I’m just about to order breakfast. How would you like to join me?”
“I’d love it.…Why? Changed your mind about needing some company?”
Jarrow fought to try to suppress the flush of color that he could feel rising around his ears. “I’d like to talk some more, anyway,” he replied.
Jarrow tried a few guesses based on the two strange regressions that he had experienced, which he presumed were flashes of the mysterious Samurai.
“Are there any recreational facilities here?” he asked Vera as they picked at iced melon and fruit slices across the table in the dining area of the apartment. “A gymnasium, training room, something like that?”
“Why?” Vera asked, raising an eyebrow and looking interested.
“I get the feeling of having been in a place like that here. With a soft mat floor, the kind they do martial arts in.”
“Were you doing anything like that yourself?”
“I’m not sure.” Jarrow saw the look of anticipation on her face. “Yes, I think I was.” He’d read somewhere about how so-called psychics achieved their results by leading their clients into telling them what they were later supposed to have divined. Maybe he could manage something similar too. He sat back and took on a distant expression. “There was a kind of teacher, or maybe sparring partner. He had an odd face, something different about it…”
“You mean Oriental, maybe?” Vera said.
“Yes, that was it. He had dark hair. I can see him.”
Vera leaned forward encouragingly. “What else?”
“Guns. I did things with guns.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it outside or inside?”
“Er, outside.”
“You’re sure?”
“Wait. No, maybe it was inside. There were bright lights overhead.”
“You mean like in a shooting range?”
“Exactly.”
Vera affirmed with a nod. “Yes, there is a range here. You used to use it.”
“Right.” Jarrow frowned and tried a long shot. “Wasn’t there a group of us? We were in one of the huts over the other side.”
“That must go back to some earlier days, before I was around.”
“Oh. So how long have we known each other?” Jarrow asked.
“Since around early September: a couple of months.”
“What happened to the others?”
“As I said, that must have been before my time. I gather you were something special. Anyhow, there weren’t any others around by then.”
“So how did you appear on the scene?”
“You don’t remember anything about that?”
Jarrow had nothing to go on here and could only shake his head. “Not really.”
“Maybe we should take another trip to Philadelphia,” Vera said, smiling suggestively.
“Another? Were we in Philadelphia?”
“We went there to set up your cover.”
Jarrow spooned scrambled eggs onto a plate and gave her a long, contemplative look. They were alone for now, and she was being cooperative. He didn’t know what might happen once Nordens reappeared and began unrolling whatever schedule he’d prepared for the day. If Jarrow had one chance of finding out anything on the side, it was now.
“Look, why don’t we save ourselves a lot of time and be frank,” he suggested. “Obviously you’re aware that I’m undergoing a severe loss of memory. And, just as obviously, you’re not here to add to the decorations. So why not simply fill me in with as much as you know? For instance, I believe that I was known here as Samurai, is that right?”
Vera frowned, for the first time showing uneasiness. “I’m not sure that it’s supposed to work like that. The whole idea is for you to try and remember.”
“But all I’m asking is my own name,” Jarrow said. “Just tell me if Samurai is what you call me. That’s hardly giving any state secrets away.” Vera hesitated, then nodded. “So what did I do?” Jarrow asked.
“I didn’t go into that,” Vera said, speaking just a shade hastily. “Politics isn’t my thing.” She relaxed again with an effort and switched on her seductive smile. “I’m more concerned with, shall we say, the off-duty side of things.”
“So what does that make you?” Jarrow asked. “Some kind of a…” He trailed off, lost for a word.
“You could think of it as a personal companion,” Vera said. “The on-duty side could be stressful. The management believes in looking after a specially selected asset.”
Jarrow was about to say something more, when a tone sounded from the phone on the wall. “Excuse me.” He got up to answer it and found himself looking at a man in an Army major’s uniform. He had one of those mobile, expressive, smiling faces that exuded trust and bonhomie, adding instantly to Jarrow’s growing feeling of distrust.
“Hi. My name’s Gleavey. You may not be too sure of your bearings yet, but I’m the guy who used to take care of things for you and make sure that everything was just the way you like. Right now, I just wanted to touch base and go over the items that we’ve got scheduled for today.”
From the way that Gleavey had just happened to call as soon as Jarrow began pressing Vera for information, the suspicion rooted itself in Jarrow’s mind that the conversation had probably been monitored.
Gleavey appeared in person ten minutes or so later with a schedule for the day. First on the list was a visit to the medical department, where Jarrow was subjected to a thorough physical check. He was pronounced to be in good shape, with the bruise on his face having practically disappeared. The inflamed area around the tiny puncture on the side of his neck, which had been there when he awoke in Atlanta, had also nearly healed. The doctors showed more interest in this, but they volunteered no information about it.
Then came another round of debriefing with Nordens and Gleavey, again with the emphasis on probing Jarrow’s memory: Had anything further come together in his mind overnight? Had talking to Vera helped? Did he remember going with her to Philadelphia? Had he managed to recall anything about Ashling yet?
Through it all, Jarrow, despite himself, found his mind going back to Josef and the others from Pipeline whom he had met in Chicago. There was no evading the contrast that he saw between them and the people he was dealing with now. The assurance that he had felt only yesterday, of being in safe hands and among experts who had his best interests at heart, was already dimming. Josef had been blunt and candid in his answers, while Scipio hadn’t even tried to conceal that he didn’t expect Jarrow to believe him. Gleavey, on the other hand, came across as being about as sincere as his unremitting smile, which was beginning to have the same effect on Jarrow’s nerves as a coarse sock on a blistered toe. Everything that Nordens said sounded secretive and devious, as if hiding his true motives about anything had become second nature in whatever world of ubiquitous mistrust and paranoia he moved in. Jarrow found himself doubting everything. The story that he had swallowed so readily yesterday about his medical file having been mixed up with Demiro’s now seemed absurd. And when he thought of Rita’s honest directness, and Kay, with her calm, reasoned competence, and compared them to the polished whore who was presumably supposed to complete his existence, his disillusionment turned to outrage.
He lunched with Nordens in a private dining room on the floor below Nordens’s office in the Main Complex, where Tierney joined them. The same atmosphere of wariness and double-talk pervaded. They weren’t concerned for Jarrow’s interests at all. It was all a pretense. They only wanted to find Ashling. Jarrow grew increasingly perturbed and morose. When they were finished, he said that he needed time on his own to rest some more.
Back in his apartment of black and white and gleaming metal, he prowled agitatedly from room to room, going back over everything yet again in his mind. There were certain things that Vera had let slip that morning: snippets that he had barely noticed at the time, but which took on new perspective from the changing view that he found himself slipping inexorably into.
He had been “something special,” she’d said. What did that mean? It no longer smacked of the crude personal allusion that he’d taken it to be at the time. There had been no others around by then, she’d said. What others? He thought back.…It had been when he asked her about being one of a group of men in the hut that Nordens and Tierney had shown him on the far side of the complex—the men from his dream. But if that had been before Vera’s appearance on the scene, maybe it was before Samurai’s time too—in other words nearer the time that Tony Demiro had first arrived here. And that made sense, since Demiro had been an Army volunteer. Who else could the rest of the group in a military hut be but other volunteers who had arrived with him?
So Demiro had been picked for some reason.…Which also tied in. Somewhere else, Vera had talked about his being a “specially selected asset.” Selected for what?…He stopped, staring hard at the wall in the living room. Hadn’t Kay already told him?
And then another little phrase of Vera’s came back to him and clinched it: “Politics isn’t my thing,” she had said.
Politics!
That was what they had been looking for. It wasn’t any coincidence that Jarrow’s own political views were diametrically opposed to what Demiro’s had been. Nordens had needed originals to extract the transfer codes from. The real purpose of what had been going on was to experiment with methods of political reprogramming.
Jarrow turned and stared at the window in a daze. For that was precisely what Josef and Kay had been trying to tell him. But it wasn’t what Fairfax and Nordens had told him. So the whole official line that he had been given was a lie. They had lied to Demiro and the others; they had lied about Demiro’s death; they were lying to Jarrow still about Valdheim. The “subversives” whom he’d scorned had been correct all along. The realization surged through Jarrow like a tidal wave.
He stifled the anger that he could feel boiling up inside and forced himself to think it through further.
Suppose, then, that Kay had been right also in her theory about Jarrow’s whole personality having been transferred into Demiro inadvertently, instead of just the target patterns containing Jarrow’s political convictions.…And then Jarrow had died unexpectedly. Nordens and his group found themselves with an experimental subject walking around thinking he was somebody who was dead. Clearly an intolerable situation. So they had simplified things by officially getting Demiro out of the picture—cynically, callously, and with lies.
But despite what the rest of the world might have been told, they still had the actual “Demiro,” alive and well, inside Pearse. What might they have done with him then? A cold feeling of revulsion slithered up Jarrow’s spine as the glimmerings came to him of the answer. The people at Pearse—maybe just a close inner group of those connected with the original program—had found themselves in possession of a healthy, militarily trained body that had lost all recollection of its identity and which officially didn’t exist; also, they had at their disposal the unique new technology commandeered from Ashling, no doubt with many unanswered questions as to what it could accomplish.
And so they had suppressed the implanted Jarrow psyche, and in its place created a synthetic personality of their own devising, optimized for their own purposes: a “super agent” for employment in the most demanding assignments, formed by combining the best skills available from experts in every specialty that circumstances might require.
Jarrow moved across the room and stared numbly at his reflection in a mirror. He was a freak. A psychological Frankenstein monster, pieced together from the parts of scores of unknown minds. Code name Samurai. Meanwhile, Ashling had found out about the true political goals of Southside, decided that he wanted out, and approached Pipeline. After Ashling’s disappearance, Nordens and his group had no way of knowing how much Ashling had uncovered. Threatened with exposure, they sent their super agent out under the cover identity of Maurice Gordon to find Ashling and bring him back. Everything fitted now.
Unable to contain himself, Jarrow drove a fist into the other palm and paced about the room, slamming his fist and his hand together repeatedly. He stood for perhaps half a minute, breathing heavily and composing himself, then strode to the desk and hammered Nordens’s number into the viewphone with savage jabs of his finger. The assistant in Nordens’s outer office answered a moment later. “Dr. Nordens’s office. Is it—”
“Put me through! I want to talk to him now!”
Nordens and Tierney had observed Jarrow’s eruption via a monitor in another part of the building. “It’s as I’ve been saying all along,” Nordens said, swinging away from the screen. “He knows. There’s no hope of finding out anything this way. We can’t waste any more time on it. The only chance is to try and reactivate Samurai. Ashling must still be in the country somewhere, otherwise Pipeline wouldn’t be looking for him.”
In Jarrow’s quarters Vera had appeared, seemingly concerned. “It’s all right,” she told him. “They’re trying to locate Dr. Nordens for you now. Sit down. It’s just a relapse after all the tension you’ve been through. Everything will be all right.”
Jarrow felt an impulse to rage at her, but checked himself. Getting excited wasn’t going to do him any good. It would only give the game away. He needed time to get to an outside phone somehow and contact Pipeline. Vera took his arm and steered him to one of the armchairs. He allowed himself to sink into it. “Maybe you’re right,” he said.
Vera smiled. “That’s better. Take it easy for a day or two. But right now you look as if you could use a drink.”
Jarrow nodded, content to let things follow their course now. “Sure,” he agreed.
Vera went to a cabinet and began spooning ice into two glasses. “Usual?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Why not?”
She paused. “Does that mean that you remember what the usual is?”
“I haven’t a clue,” Jarrow said. Vera carried on pouring. He watched her from the chair. “You know, maybe that trip to Philadelphia wouldn’t be a bad idea. How soon could we fix it?”
She came over to him and held out a glass of something amber. “Not too long. It’s something to talk about, anyway. Here.”
“Thanks.” He took the glass and drank, then looked back up to find her watching him with an odd intensity. Only then did he realize how he’d been lulled off his guard. He started to rise, but whatever she’d used was taking effect already. The glass fell from his fingers as numbness came over his body. He collapsed back into the chair, still conscious in a fragmented kind of way of what was going on, but unable to resist the paralysis that was taking hold of him.
Vera, her face cold and clinical suddenly, stooped to lift one of his eyelids with a thumb and peer at him. Then she turned away, and Jarrow felt himself fading as he watched her move quickly across the room and open the door. He just had time to recognize Dr. Valdheim entering before he passed out.
Nordens was close behind, followed by several attendants. “Get him to the machine right away and power up the system,” he instructed. “We should have done it from the beginning. This whole nonsense has been nothing but a waste of time.”