After leaving the rear of the department store in the shopping mall, Josef and the other Pipeline agent, whom he introduced as Leon, drove Ashling on a zigzag route around Atlanta to be sure they were not being followed. When Josef was satisfied, they headed for the Hyatt, where Josef had already arranged a reservation. They brought Ashling in through a side door and took him straight up to 7319, which turned out to be a suite of two main rooms: a living room and a bedroom at the rear, each served by a separate bathroom. Two more Pipeline agents were there already when Ashling and his escorts arrived. With them was an Offworld scientist called Kay, a colleague of Ulkanov’s, whom Ashling had talked to before from a public viewphone when the plans for his defection were being finalized.
“Good to see you again, Conrad,” she said. “It won’t be much longer now.”
“Let’s hope so,” Ashling replied.
He sat down at the table, and Josef took the chair opposite. Kay perched on the side of an armchair nearby, while Leon and the other two men dispersed themselves around the suite.
“You’ll be staying here tonight,” Josef informed Ashling. “A courier will be arriving tomorrow, who will stay with you all the way through to the FER.”
“What route will we be taking?” Ashling asked out of curiosity.
Josef showed his palms in a brief, apologetic gesture. “Just in case anything goes wrong…it would be better if you didn’t know the details. That way there can be no risk of our methods being compromised.”
Ashling nodded tightly. “Of course. I understand.”
“But I can tell you that you will be launching from Semipalatinsk on December sixth,” Josef said. “That gives us three weeks: time enough for you to take it slowly, and an ample allowance for contingency. We want to get you out of the Consolidation fast, before they have time to react. If there is time to spare, you can spend it relaxing after you get to the FER.”
“Fine,” Ashling agreed.
Josef looked at him. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, I was a bit shaky earlier, but I think it’s passing. Tired. I think I’ll turn in early this evening.”
“Kay has got some questions about Southside that she’d like to talk about while you’re here,” Josef said. “Are you up to it?”
“Oh, sure,” Ashling said.
Kay reached for a folder of papers that she had with her and rose to pull a chair up to the table. “How about doing it over a meal?” she suggested.
“Maybe later,” Ashling said. “I had lunch fairly late. And with all the excitement since, I don’t have any appetite. Maybe something to drink, though.”
Leon ordered tea, coffee, and soft drinks from room service, and for the next couple of hours Kay and Ashling talked about his work at Pearse and as much as he had discovered of Nordens’s true motives. When they had finished, Josef announced that he and Kay needed to take care of a couple of other things.
“We’ll be back sometime tomorrow,” Josef said. “Leon will stay here, with at least one of the others at all times, so you’ll be all right. And you know how to get in touch with me if there’s a problem?”
“Yes, I’ve got the number,” Ashling confirmed.
“Anything else you need for now?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“We’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
Josef and Kay left. Leon and his companions talked with Ashling for a while, and then settled down to watch a movie in the living room. Ashling stayed through most of it, even though it didn’t really interest him. Then he stood up, excused himself, and announced that he was going to get some rest.
In the bedroom, he sat down on a chair and sat thinking for a while about the journey that lay ahead of him over the next three weeks, culminating, if all went well, with his leaving Earth completely and going to Luna. It was a bit late in life for changes of environment as radical as that, he reflected. He hoped he was capable of surviving it. He patted his pockets to make sure he had his Panacyn pills with him, then remembered that he’d taken one on arriving and left them in the other bathroom. Not to worry. He didn’t feel as if he needed one right now. Surprising.
Suddenly, without warning, the door flew open and Leon hurled himself through. He started to turn, but before he could close the door a chair hit it from the other side with enough force to make him stagger back. An instant later, a figure hurtled through the doorway in a crouching posture, its body canted away and leading leg doubled back in readiness, and sent Leon crashing back over the bed with a sidekick. Before Leon could move or recover, the assailant leveled a pistol and shot him through his shirt.
“Oh, my God!” Ashling whispered, rising to his feet, horrified.
The man laughed. “Don’t worry. We don’t want killings. Too many complications. It’ll keep them out until I get back here to tidy things up.”
Ashling stared, confused, as he recognized him as from the project. “But you’re one of the volunteers. Demiro, isn’t it?…I thought you’d been transferred away. What’s going on? I don’t understand.”
Demiro turned with a wave and strode back through the living room. Ashling followed. Another of the Pipeline guards was unconscious on the floor. There was no sign of the third.
“Let’s just say for now that there’s more going on than you know about,” Demiro said. “There isn’t time now. Ask Nordens to tell you about it when we get back.” Then Ashling felt a pain and clutched at his chest, falling against the side of the doorway.
“What is it?” Demiro demanded.
“Pill,” Ashling croaked. “White jar…other bathroom.”
Demiro sat him down, then went away and came back with the pills and a glass of water.
Ashling took one of the capsules and sat for a while, recovering. On the room’s TV, a program was just beginning about tropical insects. Finally Demiro said, “Okay? Can you move now?” Ashling didn’t respond, but continued panting, staring down at the floor. “Come on,” Demiro said, straightening up. “We have to get your briefcase. What else do you need?”
“Where are we going?”
“Back. Where do you think?”
They left the hotel through the side door that Josef had brought Ashling in through. Demiro had a car parked nearby. He handed Ashling the keys and, still keeping the pistol in his hand as a warning, gestured toward the driver’s-side door. “Get in, and don’t try anything clever. You’re driving.…And things have changed since you last had anything to do with it. The name, to you, is Gordon. Maurice Gordon.”
They passed the Institute of Technology, and soon were on the familiar Northwest Expressway, I-75, heading back in the direction of the southern Appalachian fringe.
Almost thirty minutes went by before the paralysis that had seized Ashling’s mind began to wear off. The suddenness and violence of the assault had left him stunned. Now, as fragments of his thinking processes started coming together again, the numbness that had protected him gave way to all-consuming despair.
After all the planning and preparations, the growing nervous tension that had been tormenting him for weeks, and actually to have pulled it off it seemed, without leaving a trace.…Now this. Even Pipeline, his last hope, which he had come to regard as so professional and capable, to whom he entrusted himself completely…before his eyes, in seconds, reduced to impotence and helplessness. What hope could he have now?
As he drove, staring rigidly ahead, tight-lipped and blank-faced, he could feel in his chest the imminence of another attack. He realized then that even if these last events hadn’t happened, he’d been deluding himself anyway. He would never have survived the stresses of getting out of the Consolidation and going offplanet. And with these latest developments, he was beginning to wonder if he would even survive tonight. A part of him that he couldn’t ignore was already seriously doubting it.
He needed medical help, and quickly; there was no alternative but to get back to Pearse. And what then? He would never be up to another escape bid. And after this, the only prospect that the future held was to be kept there under virtual house arrest. Living as a captive, forced to work for a regime that he now had no hesitation of condemning as decayed and corrupt. Working to contribute to what further misapplications of science? For what else did this transformation of Demiro into something ruthless and inhuman mean? Ashling had found out about the covert political objectives of the project, but here, it seemed, was something else, even more sinister and repugnant, and he had never suspected.
No.
Whatever the consequences, he would have no part of it, he resolved. At several points he toyed with the thought of simply steering the car off the road and ending it right there for both of them. But he didn’t, because that would only have eliminated whatever opportunity might lie ahead for him to do something to stop all of it, entirely. Wasn’t it he, more than anyone, who had made it possible in the first place, after all?
Beside him, Gordon remained alert, pistol in hand. After a while he began passing the time by taunting Ashling mercilessly.
“I ought to thank you, I know, but I’m afraid they didn’t make me that way. I don’t thank anyone because I don’t need anyone. Know why? Because I’m more than any of you could become in a lifetime. It’s called ‘superiority.’ Being ashamed to claim it is a weakness, and I don’t suffer from it. I don’t suffer from any of them.”
Ashling stared at the road unrolling itself ahead, and said nothing.
“So you’ll go back, and be nothing and timid, because that’s what the rest of you are. That’s what you’re made for. I was made for something else: living. Living all of it, to the full. I like killing people, do you know that? Want to know why? Because killing them makes me more alive. That’s something that you could never understand. You couldn’t understand because you’re not alive. Not fully. You never have been. That’s why the weak think life is so precious: it’s something that they desperately want, but can’t have. It’s natural to value what you can’t have, isn’t it? Come on, you tell me. You’re the smart scientist. What’s the matter? Does it offend your precious pride to even talk?”
They turned off the main highway onto the approach road to Pearse. Gordon waved him onward when he began slowing at the main gate. “No, not that one. Farther around.”
Ashling knew that there was a separate section known as the Permanent Quarters Annex, where some officers and high-clearance personnel resided. He himself was housed in a billet section inside the main establishment compound, and had never had reason to visit the Annex personally before.
It had its own gate and guardpost at the end of a road leading in from the perimeter road, but security was less stringent than at the regular entrances. From its position relative to the rest of the layout, Ashling estimated that it backed onto the experimental wing inside the Restricted Zone, which he knew from his work inside.
Past the guardpost, they drove across a dark yard with parked vehicles, and then around a projecting building to enter what seemed to be, as far as Ashling could make out in the shadows between the widely spaced lamps, one of several interconnecting enclosures of chalets and apartment units jumbled together among screening clumps of foliage and trees.
“That way,” Gordon said, waving. “Park next to that truck.”
What happened then was completely out of Ashling’s conscious control. The pickup that Gordon had indicated was parked at the limit of the glow from one of the lamps, nose to the curb. In the back it was carrying several lengths of thick piping, four inches or so in diameter, lashed together and projecting back from the tail. As Ashling came toward it, he registered subconsciously that all was dark and still, with nobody around.
Perhaps it was an expression of a hopelessness that made him simply not care anymore. Maybe it was his accumulated emotions, now fermented into hatred. Instead of parking alongside the pickup, he accelerated at the last moment and ran the car straight at the projecting pipes to drive them through the windshield, right in front of Gordon’s head.
Nine hundred ninety-nine men in a thousand would have died right then. Gordon’s reflexes, however, were all but instantaneous, and he managed to duck—but not without cracking the side of his head on the dash, and in the process stunning himself for one vital fraction of a second. The pistol dropped from his fingers, and Ashling, still not really aware of what he was doing, grabbed it and shot Gordon in the neck, just below the ear. Without thinking or considering anything, he started the motor again, backed the car off the impaling pipes, and eased it up alongside the truck. Then he sat numbly in the darkness, waiting for retribution to come.
But none did. The court remained deserted; no light or sound came from the buildings around.
Ashling stared disbelievingly at Gordon’s inert form, slumped back in the passenger seat, shards of windshield glass glinting in the light from the lamps outside. He felt himself turning cold and starting to shake uncontrollably. His chest pounded, with searing pains tearing through him at every beat. He waited, fully expecting a terminal attack right then, but gradually the feeling eased. He got out unsteadily.
There was a path, leading to several steps going up between shrubs and a grassy mound to a covered walkway. The walkway brought him to a door of what seemed to be one of the residential units. There was no sign of light from inside. Ashling explored around but could find no other door nearby. He decided that this had to be where Gordon had been bringing them. Presumably it was where he stayed. From its location, Ashling wouldn’t have been surprised if it connected on the inside, somehow, through the Restricted Zone boundary and into the experimental wing. So that was how Gordon had intended to get him inside. Did that mean that whatever had happened to Demiro was too secret for its subjects to be allowed to go in and out through main-gate security?
Or too unofficial, perhaps?
But whatever the answer to that, it was the only available place to hide Gordon, and that was the uppermost concern in Ashling’s mind right now.
He went back to the car and returned with the keys that Gordon had given him. After some trial and error, the door opened. Ashling stepped inside, closed the door behind him, drew the drapes across the single window facing out frontward, and turned on the lights.
It was stark, harsh, brutal in its assault on eye and sensibilities; a visual percussion of black and white, metal and glass, porcelain and leather; acute, angular forms, unrelieved by warmth, curve, or any concession to softness. Yes, Ashling decided, looking around stonily, there could be no mistaking it. If that was what they had turned Demiro into, this was where he would live.
He checked quickly around the remainder of the place: bedroom, kitchen and breakfast area, and bathroom, all echoing the same theme. It was deserted. He paused in the bathroom to gulp down a pill and stare at himself in the mirror, asking himself what he thought he was doing. Then he went back to the car and, with a lot of puffing and heaving, moved Gordon inside and dumped him in the recliner, after which he went back for their briefcases. Miraculously, nobody had been roused. He closed the door again, then slumped down on the couch and stared at Gordon’s inert form while he considered what to do next.
Going back to the Hyatt was out of the question. For all he knew, the whole Pipeline operation could have been blown, and he might be walking straight back into a trap.
Besides, what would be the point? He was already a dead man. He could feel it, a dull, heavy lethargy taking hold deep inside, like cold creeping up into a house that has lost its heating. Why consider anything?
He stared again at the motionless figure in the recliner, Demiro, who now called himself Gordon. As far as Ashling was aware, the first phase of the project had been completed months ago and the volunteers sent back. So what was Demiro doing here still?…He remembered Demiro from their occasional contacts: easygoing, personable, unconvinced by most of the propaganda but too intelligent to make an issue of it, popular with everyone. The cold, precise, purpose-built combat machine that had appeared in the Hyatt and demolished three guards in virtually as many seconds was somebody else.
The phrase that had come to mind repeated itself again in Ashling’s head: purpose-built.
Was that what Nordens had been doing? Suddenly, lots of things that had been happening during the previous few months came together and made sense. Long calculations and pattern-manipulation algorithms that Nordens had wanted, that went far beyond anything needed for the limited transfers called for by the initial specifications. New symbolic syntaxes for manipulating entire groups of system pathways. An entire macrofunction transform calculus.
They had created a synthetic pseudo-personality. Ashling swallowed dryly as all the sinister implications unfolded in his mind.
And then he sat up slowly in his chair as a new possibility dawned on him. Suddenly his eyes, only a moment ago dulled by despair, were bright—bright from the thought of the sheer audacity of it. His chest was thumping rapidly again, but this time from excitement.
He had long ago cracked the access codes into Nordens’s private sectors of the computer system. Therefore he could retrieve all those personality-synthesis and transfer routines that Nordens had been developing. And if so, maybe he could take it a step further.
Maybe he could transfer a complete set of patterns defining himself into Gordon!
He licked his lips as he thought about it. What was there to lose, after all? He was as good as dead if he did nothing. And even if that was not the case, he could never have survived the stresses of getting himself out to the Offworld independencies to place his work at the disposal of the free scientists out there, such as Ulkanov—which was his only real goal now.
No, he could never get there. He accepted that now. Or rather, his body couldn’t. But Gordon’s could!
He got up and explored the apartment again. At the back he found what he was looking for: an ordinary-looking door that, when opened, revealed a second, heavy-duty door leading in the direction of where he estimated the Restricted Zone perimeter and the experimental wing to be. It was locked of course, and one of Gordon’s keys seemed to fit. But there was a second lock too, and the door remained unmovable. So close, yet thwarted. Ashling came back into the living room and looked around frantically. The desk! He went over to it and went through the drawers. In a box in one of them he found more keys. One of them was similar to the one that had fitted the door—a reasonable precaution: one key kept on Gordon’s person, the other in a different place. Ashling hurried back and tried both keys simultaneously. The door opened.
There was a short, bare corridor leading to a second door. Beyond that, Ashling found himself in the familiar lab area. It was late Saturday night; nobody was about. He went back into the apartment and retrieved from his briefcase one of the sheets that he had taken with him, giving the access codes into Nordens’s filing system. Then he went back through to the labs, activated a terminal in one of the computer rooms, and began picking his way in.
An hour and a half later, Ashling sat back tiredly, yet intrigued. His human and ethical side apart, Nordens had greater scientific capabilities than Ashling had given him credit for. He had delved more deeply into the problems of total personality integration than Ashling had even contemplated, solved a lot of the problems, and in some cases hit upon methods that Ashling had to concede were highly innovative and effective. There was a lot that Ashling couldn’t be sure of, and of course his biggest hazard was lack of time.…But it seemed, basically, that with a bit of hasty improvisation and more than his due share of luck, Nordens had furnished him the tools to do the job.
There was a further problem, but Ashling had been turning that over as he worked, and now thought he had a solution.
It was all very well to think of re-creating himself in Gordon’s body, and using that to take him across to the FER and then offplanet. But Ashling could never hope to pass himself off as Gordon—what did he know about violence and aggression, and the rest of the world that Gordon had been engineered to function in? But suppose that he could deactivate his own, implanted Ashling personality temporarily, letting Gordon resume functioning as himself, and none the wiser. What better cover could he ask for than that?
If he could somehow contrive for Gordon to be sent off along that very route on an official mission, Gordon would travel with the aid of all the permits, foreign cooperation, and other resources that would be available to an agent of the state, but which Ashling as himself could never enjoy. The government would get him there more surely than Pipeline could ever hope to. Yes, he rather liked the thought of that, Ashling decided. He liked the thought of that a lot.
By the time he had his plans finalized, it was close to midnight. He moved Gordon through into the laboratory area and coupled him into the transfer machine. Then, working feverishly and praying that he hadn’t made any major errors in his haste, he used one of the auxiliary scanners to read the layers of superposed connectivity functions that had been accumulating throughout life to form the essence of his being, and assembled them all into superconvoluted megaplex code, using the facilities that Nordens had developed. As far as he could tell, it was complete. The machine now contained a full representation of Ashling’s persona, coupled with transform parameters that would activate an emulation of it in Gordon’s particular neural configuration.
He then added two further functions.
First, he set up an inhibiting code that would deactivate the implanted Ashling personality during the first period of natural sleep to occur after completion of the implanting process. Thus, Gordon would recover consciousness tonight as Ashling, which would keep Ashling in control to get his transferred self—in Gordon’s body—away, dispose of Ashling’s own body, which didn’t feel as if it had much longer to go, and set in motion the remainder of his plan. But after going to sleep tomorrow night, Gordon would awaken as Gordon once again, with no knowledge that he was carrying another personality suppressed below his level of awareness.
Second, for the plan to work, Gordon would need to awake unsuspicious that anything abnormal had taken place. That meant that he couldn’t be allowed to remember anything about the most recent events of this evening: taking Ashling from the Hyatt, the drive back to Pearse, Ashling’s shooting him in the car when they arrived. To achieve that, Ashling erased the most recent parts of Gordon’s memory, back to the time when he was still in the room at the Hyatt, having dealt with the three Pipeline guards. There was no way to change that event, and eliminating the memory of it would serve no purpose. True, there would be a discontinuity in Gordon’s recollections, but there was nothing to be done about that. Given the human capacity for inventiveness, Gordon would doubtless fabricate his own rationalization.
When they were leaving the hotel room, a program had just begun on the TV about tropical insects, Ashling recalled. He checked the time of that from the published schedule, and erased Gordon’s memories back to then.
The next problem was to arrange for Gordon to be sent offplanet. A promising way of achieving that would be to make it appear that Ashling himself was heading that way, and hope they would send Gordon in pursuit. In fact, if a suitable trail of clues could be set up, it might be possible to lead Gordon all the way to Andre Ulkanov’s laboratory at Copernicus, on Luna, which was where Ashling wanted to go. And Andre would be the ideal person to reactivate Ashling when Gordon obligingly got him there.
But that side of things could wait until Ashling knew whether the copying of himself into Gordon had been successful or not.
He made a final check over the machine settings and couplings to the probes around Gordon’s head, and entered the code to commence the process. Then he sank down in a chair in the next room to wait. Now that the need for concentrated effort was over, he could feel himself fading rapidly. He grew weaker, his arms dropped over the sides of the chair, and he lost consciousness.
Ashling opened his eyes and found himself looking up at a ceiling past parts of machine and loops of cable. The only sound was the subdued humming of motors and cooling fans, punctuated by the intermittent beeps of check routines timing out. His head was restrained by pads, and he could feel probes positioned around his skull. He blinked, hardly daring to believe it. Was this real? Had the machine really done its task?
He moved his hands up to his head and, working by touch, carefully removed the probes and slackened off the restraining pads. Then he sat up cautiously. Yes, this was the machine chamber at Pearse. He felt strong, young, and vigorous—sensations that he hadn’t known for years. On looking down, he saw that he was wearing Gordon’s clothes. But to his surprise, there seemed nothing unusual about his arms and hands. Evidently there was an effect that he hadn’t thought through sufficiently. But there could be no doubt that what now constituted him was functioning in a different body. His watch showed it to be a little after five, not yet dawn.
He braced himself, and then went through into the adjoining room. But curiously he experienced little of the emotions that he had expected. The figure slumped over in the chair was a stranger. Oh, yes, it possessed all the attributes that Ashling could recite in a purely intellectual fashion as having pertained to himself: white hair, hawkish nose and chin, tired features, but the details were all as he might have remembered of an acquaintance. He felt no sense of identity with the person he was looking at, no intuitive recognition of self. He turned and found a glazed panel on the front of one of the instrumentation racks, which in the prevailing light returned a reasonable reflection of himself. Young, olive-skinned face, wavy black hair, large, dark eyes, and full mouth. Again, he knew from his memories that he should be seeing the face of an old man, but the face peering back at him looked familiar. He shook his head, unable to explain it. Then he turned away and moved closer to the form that had been him, in the chair. It was dead and already cold. There could be no going back now.
In his intended defection, he had planned to take with him information on the most important aspects of his work. It was all in his briefcase, written onto a thin package containing an ultra-high-density holographic storage film that he had concealed behind the lining in the lid. The papers that the briefcase carried ostensibly were innocuous. To supplement the film, he now wrote the procedures he’d discovered in Nordens’s files onto a second holofilm, and sealed it into a sandwich between two inch-square pieces of card. That would be his present to Ulkanov. Then he reset the equipment to its quiescent condition and cleared away all traces of his activity. That done, he lifted the Ashling body from the chair—a much easier task than before, now that he had Gordon’s musculature to work with—and took it back through the connecting corridor into the apartment. He retrieved the holofilm of his own work, and put both of them in his pocket, to be prepared for Gordon to carry with him, later.
While tidying up the apartment, he thought over the next step: getting out. He didn’t want to use Gordon’s car if he could avoid it—the smashed windshield would be bound to attract attention. He wondered about the pickup truck. It was parked at the end of the path leading up to the apartment, and there seemed to be no other doors nearby. Maybe Gordon had been using it for some reason. If so, he should have the keys. Taking both sets with him, Ashling went back outside and tried them. Sure enough, he found a key that did the trick. He got out of the cab and checked the toolbox in the rear. It contained tools for just about every eventuality imaginable, including a shovel. The first streaks of daylight were showing. He would have to move fast.
He carried the body out, put it in the back, covering it with a tarp, and he went back inside for the two briefcases. On checking the clothes he was wearing he found a magnetic passcard to a room in the Hyatt, along with a card reminding that the door number was 1406. His jacket pocket contained a wallet with ID and contents carrying the name Maurice J. Gordon. So, everything seemed fine. Gordon would wake up tomorrow back in his own room, but with a gap in his memory from the time he’d been with Ashling in suite 7319. He could place his own interpretation on that.
Ashling took one final look around the apartment and closed the door. He backed out and drove at a leisurely speed to the Annex gate. The guards there evidently knew him and waved him through. Minutes later he was back on the highway, heading south, with the tip of the sun’s disk just breaking over the hills to the east.
When he was about ten miles from Pearse, he turned off into a narrow lane leading up off the main road and disappearing among trees. He followed it and came to a deserted spot, hidden in a dell. There, amid the undergrowth, he dug a grave and placed his former body in it, along with his briefcase, which he would no longer need. Before covering the body over, he removed the container of Panacyn medication and a few other personal effects that might prove useful for constructing the kind of trail of clues that he had in mind.
He completed the task and stared at the spot for a while with mixed feelings. Then he replaced the shovel in the toolbox and drove back down the trail. At the highway he stopped and looked around, noting the landmarks to the place, wondering if he would ever return here. There was no obvious reason why he should. He drove back onto the highway and headed south once more, back toward Atlanta.
He arrived at the Hyatt less than two hours later and went straight up to room 1406. There was a leather traveling case of Gordon’s there, and some clothes in the closet. The first thing to take care of was the three unconscious members of Pipeline who were still in suite 7319. At least, he assumed they were still there—Josef had said that he and Kay wouldn’t be back until later today. He called the number and let it ring for a while. Nobody answered. He called the hotel switchboard on an outside line, but was told there was nobody there. If anything irregular had been discovered concerning that room, he reasoned, the operator would surely have shown more interest in him. Therefore it was as Gordon and he had left it.
His first thought had been to call Josef on the emergency number, relate the whole story, and recruit their cooperation in getting him, as Gordon, across to the FER. But as he thought more, he decided that wasn’t the way to go about it. When he awoke as Gordon tomorrow morning, he would know nothing about the events of today. Any contact or action by Pipeline that hinted of cooperation would be the surest giveaway that something was wrong. If he was going to believe himself, totally, to be Gordon, then so should everyone else who might get involved; then they would all play their roles faithfully.
Better, then, if only Ulkanov knew. With the advantage of unrestricted communications to the FER, Ulkanov would be in a far better position to coordinate everything, even from Copernicus. And Ashling already knew that Pipeline had its own ways of getting messages up to Luna.
He didn’t want to talk to Josef, since that would have invited too many awkward questions. Besides, with Gordon’s body his voice would have changed. He therefore composed a text message and sent it via the room terminal to Josef at Pipeline’s number. It began:
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.
The message that he appended was encrypted in a code of scientific jargon that scientists inside the Consolidation had developed among themselves to flout official restrictions and censorship, and had been using to circulate information around their own professional network for some years. Basically it outlined Ashling’s scheme for luring Gordon to Luna and indicated the kind of help that he needed, though leaving Ulkanov plenty of latitude in implementing the details. It also advised that the physical clues listed—Ashling’s Panacyn container, a matchbook from the Hyatt, and a few other things that he thought Ulkanov might be able to use—would be forwarded to a scientist in Volgograd, whom Ashling and Ulkanov both knew. All further references to Ashling, the message stipulated, were to be coded as “Headman.” Satisfyingly amusing, Ashling thought to himself.
He obtained some packaging and wrapping material from the bell captain, made a parcel of the Panacyn container and other items, and handed them over to the front desk to be mailed to the scientist in Volgograd. On the required customs form he described the contents as “personal mementos,” which was accurate enough if it was checked, and sufficiently innocuous. Then he returned to his room to take care of the rest.
The next part was to launch Gordon on the course that would lead him to Ulkanov. However, to allow Ulkanov enough time to get the communication through Josef and lay his own plans in turn, Gordon shouldn’t be dispatched too soon. Ashling should be made to “disappear” from Atlanta and the U.S. as soon as possible, however. That meant that Ashling should leave soon but travel slowly. The obvious way of achieving that would be to have him go by sea.
Ashling used the room terminal to access published tables of shipping routes and schedules, and after some studying found a connection from Jacksonville to Hamburg that suited his purpose. In case there were problems with the later clues that he hoped Ulkanov would arrange, it would be preferable if, right up front, this initial pointer also included a hint of Ashling’s final destination. Accordingly, he took the hotel memo pad supplied for the use of guests and wrote on the top page: Headman to ship out via J’ville, sometime Nov 19. Check ref “Cop 3.” Gordon would find that waiting for him when he awoke the following morning.
Now, Ashling was a scientist, not an intelligence agent. He didn’t know if Gordon would communicate such information back openly to Nordens. Somehow he doubted it. So he called Nordens’s number at Pearse and left a message on the machine there, saying only: “The bird has slipped its cage and is planning to migrate. Have details of route and destination. Will advise tomorrow.” Gordon and Nordens could then figure out what it meant when they compared notes, and would deduce that Gordon had discovered Pipeline’s plans somehow during the period in which he was blacked out following a presumed attack by somebody unknown, but nevertheless had enough presence of mind left to record the information.
Lastly, he bought a pack of razor blades and adhesive from the shop in the lobby, and back in his room carefully opened a seam in the lining of Gordon’s briefcase, into which he inserted the two holofilms that he had brought from Pearse. He resealed the seam and satisfied himself that the join was practically invisible. That would be another item that Gordon wouldn’t know he’d be carrying.
By the time he had completed his preparations, it was afternoon. He went out of the hotel to walk in the fresh air, then returned for an early dinner. Afterward, he went back to his room, feeling tired. He looked around the room, took a long look at himself in the mirror, then showered and retired to bed. If this fantastic scheme went as planned, a lot of things would have happened and he’d have traveled a long way from Atlanta by the time he was next aware of anything. The words echoed through his mind again as he lay back on the bed. If it went as planned…But nothing was certain. It had all been done under too much stress. There hadn’t been enough time.
He closed his eyes, and slept…
…and woke up in a cot in a bright, clinical-looking room that could have been in a hospital. He lay for a while, letting his senses reintegrate themselves, and wondering. Could it really be possible?
Out of curiosity, he extricated an arm from the sheets and stretched it out. It felt extraordinarily light.
By the cot was a cart with a pitcher of water on top. He picked the pitcher up and weighed it experimentally in his hand. It too seemed very light. About a sixth of what it ought to have weighed, in fact. He still found it hard to believe, but already an expression of wonder was spreading across his face.
And then a figure who had been watching from the doorway came forward, smiling. He was big in stature, with gray hair, clear, striking features, and rebellious eyebrows. Ashling’s face creased with exuberance as he recognized him. “I’m here?” Ashling murmured. “This…it’s really Luna?”
“Correct,” Professor Andre Ulkanov told him. “Yes, my old friend, you are on Luna. Welcome to Copernicus.”
Slowly, the message sank in. In spite of it all, somehow he had succeeded. Ashling closed his eyes again, smiling. His mind let go, and he drifted away again, into sleep.
“That was how Conrad Ashling hid himself, and how he contrived to get himself here,” Ulkanov concluded. “Small wonder, then, that this ‘Samurai,’ as Maurice Gordon was officially designated, could never catch him. Samurai was him!”
The professor was speaking mainly for the benefit of Jason, Gunther, and the two girls—all students of his—who had helped spring the trap when Samurai got to the institute. Kay and Scipio, who were sitting on one side of the center table in the small conference room adjoining Ulkanov’s office, had given Ulkanov a full account of the events in Minneapolis and Chicago while they were waiting for Ashling to come around. Ashling, in his coded message to Ulkanov from Atlanta, had urged against divulging the secret about Gordon to them—in order that they would play their roles faithfully. Ulkanov, however, knew them better and had considered this overcautious. Needing all the help he could get, he had waited until they were in Europe and then filled them in on as much as they needed to know to take part in laying the trail that led Gordon to Semipalatinsk, and to act as bait for him to follow to the institute after he reached Copernicus.
Ashling, recovered enough by now to have joined them, smiled thinly over a mug of strong black coffee—not coylene. “But from the things I’m hearing now, it doesn’t seem to have all gone as simply as I planned,” he said. “I’ve been leading you people on quite a dance.”
“You…could say that,” Barbara, Ulkanov’s assistant, agreed from one of the chairs opposite.
Ulkanov looked at Ashling. “Do you want me to go on with what I think? After all, it was you who set the whole thing up, Conrad. It’s your show.”
“You’d better,” Ashling replied. “Just at this moment, I think you know a lot more about it than I do.”
“Very well.” Ulkanov nodded and sat back for a moment to send a look around the room, taking in the whole company. “Conrad’s intention, of course, was that after he sent the parcel from the Hyatt and got the message off to me through Josef, the Ashling personality would deactivate overnight, and he would wake up the next morning, thinking and functioning as Samurai, but with his memory erased from the time he was in Pipeline’s room two nights before.”
Ashling interjected, “I knew that Gordon would have a gap in his recollections of what had taken place. There was no way to get around that. But I figured he’d assume that he’d been jumped by somebody in Pipeline’s room that he hadn’t seen, or something like that.” He tossed up a hand briefly. “However, he’d find the note about Headman, Jacksonville, and Copernicus, and when he combined that information with the message I’d left for Nordens, they’d conclude that during the blank period, Samurai had established that Ashling was heading for Europe by sea.”
“Hoping they’d send Samurai after him,” one of the two girls said.
“Right.” Ashling nodded. “The sea crossing would take ten days, and by that time I hoped the parcel would have gotten to Volgograd, and Andre would be able to set up more clues to draw Gordon on from there.” Ashling looked at Ulkanov wryly. “But I, ah, gather it wasn’t quite that easy.”
Ulkanov sighed. “There was a lot that you had never tried before. You were working under stress and in haste.…I don’t think Nordens knew all the answers quite as well as you give him credit for, either.” He glanced around the table again, and resumed, “After they tried to cover their tracks by faking the record of Demiro’s death, Nordens and whoever else was in it with him were left with Demiro, overdosed with codes derived from Richard Jarrow.”
“Overdosed? He thought he was Jarrow!” Scipio said.
“Jarrow was this Minneapolis schoolteacher that they got the source codes from to reprogram Demiro, right?” Ashling checked. Ulkanov nodded.
Kay frowned and extended a finger to halt things there for a moment. Ulkanov raised his eyebrows at her inquiringly.
“Yes, I reached the same conclusion when we were back in Chicago, but there’s something that isn’t clear to me,” Kay said. “If that happened, it means that the Jarrow personality was reactivated sometime in that interval period at Pearse, between Jarrow’s death and the creation of Samurai. And yet Jarrow had no recollection of such an event. He was quite adamant that his last memory before waking up in Atlanta was of his final visit to Valdheim.” She looked unconsciously to Ashling for confirmation as she spoke, but Ashling could only shrug in a way that said that had been somebody else; it was all just as much a mystery to him too, now. Kay looked back at Ulkanov.
The professor showed his hands and sighed heavily. “Who can say? At this stage we have no idea what, exactly, took place during that period at Pearse. One possibility is that Jarrow’s condition was too confused for him to have registered any coherent recollections. Alternatively, Nordens might have erased that reawakening in the mistaken belief that he was erasing the complete Jarrow personality that shouldn’t have been there in the first place—as a prelude to the creation of Samurai.” Ulkanov shook his head and spread his hands open again. “Whatever the true story, by the time he began building Samurai, Nordens would have believed that the scrambled Demiro-Jarrow personality had been obliterated. But that wasn’t what happened. Instead of being substituted in place of the Demiro-Jarrow entity, the Samurai persona was superposed on top of it.”
“You mean the time-out code that was supposed to deactivate Ashling went too deep,” Barbara said.
“Exactly!” Ulkanov said, thumping the tabletop with a palm. “It not only deactivated Conrad, but Samurai as well, and then the Jarrow level that lay below that. So the person who woke up the next morning to find himself in an Atlanta hotel was Tony Demiro—completely bewildered, not knowing what he was doing there.
“What was he to do?” Ulkanov looked around, then answered his own question. “He called the person who was closest to him and the first who would naturally come to mind: the girl he intended to get married to one day, Rita Chilsen. That was on the Monday. Rita got there the same day.” Ulkanov looked at Kay. This was the part that she and Scipio had supplied.
“They talked and puzzled over it, but of course they couldn’t figure it out,” Kay said. “Tony’s last recollections were from when he was still with the program at Pearse. That had been something like five months before. He’d gotten fitter physically, and a lot tougher—that was from Samurai’s training, but they wouldn’t have known that. Everything was a complete mystery. But they were lovers, together again. She stayed that night.”
“Demiro slept,” Ulkanov said. “But the deactivation code set up by Conrad, which was triggered by a condition of natural sleep, remember, hadn’t switched off as it was supposed to. During that night it suspended Demiro, and the self who woke up on Tuesday morning was the transferred personality of Richard Jarrow that had been in a dormant condition all the time. His last memory was from April third, which was the last time he visited Valdheim before dying unexpectedly from a stroke early in May.”
Jason frowned as he thought this over. Then he turned to his colleague, Gunther. “So why wouldn’t the next period of sleep deactivate Jarrow and restore Samurai again?” he asked. Gunther could only shake his head helplessly.
“A good question,” Barbara agreed. Everyone looked at Ashling.
Ashling eased himself back in his chair and returned a tired smile. “I don’t know why not,” he told them. “To be honest, I’m astounded that it worked the way it was supposed to at all. You have no idea of the pressure and the haste I had to work under when I set it up that last night at Pearse. It depended on a complex coding procedure that I had not devised and wasn’t familiar with…added to a tangle of convolutions pertaining to different personalities that were already jumbled. Probably no one will ever be able to know exactly what took place.”
“But whatever the reason, Jarrow he remained,” Ulkanov went on, getting back to the point. He looked at Scipio. “And that was when we lost him, wasn’t it?”
Scipio replied, “Josef had been away since the previous evening. He got a message from Ashling the next morning, telling him to clear out of the room in the Hyatt. But it didn’t say where Ashling was. When Josef went there with a couple of the others, they found Leon and the other two out cold and Ashling gone.”
“So they had no leads at all,” Barbara said.
“None.”
“So how did they pick it up again?”
“That was the amazing thing,” Scipio said. “After what happened Saturday night, Josef just got everyone out and laid low all the next day. On Monday he went back with Leon to settle with the hotel. And lo and behold, Leon spotted the agent who had gone in after Ashling on Saturday!”
“He was still there, in the hotel?” Barbara said, sounding mystified for a moment. Then she looked at Ashling. “But wait a minute. That’s right. You were Demiro by then, weren’t you.”
“But registered as Maurice Gordon,” Kay said. Ashling just shook his head hopelessly and said nothing.
Scipio resumed, speaking to Ashling. “Josef notified me, and we kept an eye on you. But the next morning you suddenly vanished. We didn’t know it at the time, but you’d gone back to Minneapolis, now as Jarrow. All we had left to go on was Rita. We followed her back to Chicago, and then discovered that Gordon was none other than her former fiancé, who was supposed to be dead! What did that mean? Nobody had a clue. So we did the only thing we could and kept a watch on her place in the hope that you’d show up there.”
“And so did the feds,” Kay interjected.
“Anyway,” Scipio went on, “we traced you after you and Rita got away from them, and to cut a long story short, eventually you agreed to go back to Pearse, essentially to help us find out what the hell had been going on there.”
Ashling looked uncertain. “I did?…You mean Jarrow did? I’m surprised that he would. I mean, from what I’ve been told, he sounded like a dedicated servant of the system. I’d have thought he’d be more against you than for you.”
Scipio snorted. “Oh, he didn’t mean it. It was just to get himself away. I’ll bet that the first thing he did as soon as he was back inside Pearse was to spill all the beans. But we gambled that maybe what he found out there would change his mind. What else could we do?”
“And Rita was pushing him to go back too,” Kay said. “For her he was Demiro literally back from the dead, but with delusions of being someone else. She hoped that something might happen there that would bring Demiro back again.”
Ashling looked at them in turn, nodding intently as he strove to keep track of it all.
Ulkanov took over again at that point. “And that was when the most extraordinary part of all happened,” he said. “You see, Conrad, by then your plan was totally screwed up. Samurai hadn’t been reactivated. The information that was supposed to send him after Ashling had got lost. And the situation of Demiro thinking he was Jarrow had happened all over again, only now he was loose with the FSS chasing him.” Ulkanov spread his hands and pulled a face.
“A mess,” Ashling agreed. He looked around at the other faces and shrugged in a way that said well, he’d done his best.
Ulkanov went on, “But we can only assume that when you went back to Pearse, Nordens put everything back on track for us by reactivating Samurai. And once Samurai was functioning again, he picked up the trail as you’d intended in the first place. The irony was that it was Nordens himself who saved it.”
Ashling shuffled in his chair and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table. “Fine, okay. Now this is where it gets interesting. I don’t remember anything after Sunday, which was the day I set everything up. I left a message for Nordens and wrote a note that Samurai was supposed to find the next morning. Between them they should have figured that I was sailing from Jacksonville to Hamburg on a German ship called the Auriga. It sounds as if that worked out in the end somehow, in spite of all the problems in Atlanta.”
“So it would appear,” Ulkanov agreed. “Exactly what happened at Pearse, we have no way of knowing. But I had gotten your coded message and so knew about the Auriga.”
“What did you do?” Ashling asked. “How did you get me the rest of the way here?”
“Well, whatever did happen at Pearse, they rushed Samurai over to Hamburg in time to be there with the local police when the Auriga docked. Of course, no Ashling came off it. But it so happens that there’s a certain brothel in Hamburg where one of the girls does a sideline as a police informer. Pipeline has known about it for a long time.”
“Oh, God, I didn’t go there, did I?” Ashling groaned.
“No, but a friend of ours called Nicolaus did. He’d had a lot to drink, talked too much, and mentioned that he was in town to meet an important scientist who was coming in secretly from the USA. He also let it slip that he was staying at a particular hotel-pub, not far away.”
“Good enough,” Ashling agreed. “What happened then?”
“That got back via the police, as it was supposed to. We even paid somebody who looked a bit like Ashling to put in a quick appearance there with Nicolaus. But when Samurai and the police arrived, it was too late, naturally. They should have found one of your medication containers there, though.”
“So that parcel that I sent got through to Volgograd in time?”
“Yes. It made things a lot easier.”
Ashling gave a satisfied nod. “Next?”
“Well, in case Samurai missed some of the other things we’d planned for later, I thought we should give an indication of your final destination right then. It turned out to be as well that I did.”
“Good thinking,” Ashling agreed. “How did you do it?”
“A telephone call from Volgograd, which we hoped would be picked up by the Consolidation spy satellites. It gave a rendezvous that you were supposed to make with a courier in Berlin the next day, and also your launch date from Semipalatinsk.”
“And Samurai showed up in Berlin,” Ashling guessed.
“Correct—which told us that the call had been intercepted. If it hadn’t, we had alternative plans in hand.”
“I assume that he missed me again in Berlin,” Ashling said.
“Yes. However, a cooperative restaurant manager and a bribed taxi driver provided some snippets that got you to the border. You were to cross over into Bohemia at Zittau. There’s a certain pair there—a border police captain and a Pole who gets people across for a fee—whom Pipeline have suspected for some time of working a double-dealing act. We set it up to look as if Ashling had gone across, and we assumed that the German authorities would let Samurai through officially. But that was when trouble hit.”
“How?” Ashling asked.
“Somebody back in the States must have gotten wind of what was going on and alerted Berlin. German federal agents appeared in Zittau to take Samurai in.” Ulkanov smiled impishly. “You were quite a star, Conrad. You demolished them with ease, from the account I heard. Then you went across after him on your own. You weren’t in FER territory yet, and we were worried that the authorities would be looking for you. One of Pipeline’s people in that area, an American woman called Roxy, spent half the night touring the hotels and guest houses on the other side of the border to find you. She drove you to Prague and got you on an unofficial flight into Transylvania, from where you’d be able to join the regular FER routes. That was when I was glad we’d fed you the final destination. We heard nothing more of you until you appeared in disguise in Semipalatinsk the night before Ashling was due to launch. We’d been getting quite anxious.”
“We were in Semipalatinsk by then, booked on the same flight, with another Pipeline guy,” Kay said, indicating herself and Scipio. “We booked a room in one of the big hotels there under the name that Ashling was supposed to be using. Knowing Samurai’s abilities by that time, we figured that if he’d made it to Semipalatinsk, he’d track us down. And sure enough you did. But Ashling had flown again. You found confirmation that he’d been there, though. And, purely coincidentally of course, the exact place that he was coming to, here at Copernicus.”
“Okay, very good,” Ashling conceded. “So here I am. And now that I am here, let me show you something else that Samurai didn’t know he was bringing.” He lifted Samurai’s briefcase onto the table and opened it. “Does anyone have a razor blade or a sharp knife?” he asked, looking around.
Ulkanov felt through his pockets but shook his head.
“I’ll get one,” Gunther said. He rose and left the room.
Ashling started to say something more, then stopped, looking puzzled suddenly as a new thought struck him. “But if I was disguised, how did you know me when I got here?” he asked Ulkanov.
Ulkanov grinned. “Do you still have a piece of paper that you found in the Kosmogord hotel in Semipalatinsk?”
Ashling frowned and searched through his pockets. “This?” He produced a crumpled scrap and unfolded it. It read: Dr. Andre Ulkanov, Neurophysiology Dept., Science Institute at Copernicus 3, followed by a phone number with a lunar access code.
“Have you got the counter, Jason?” Ulkanov asked, looking toward the far end of the table. Jason produced a small silver box with an extending probe piece, and Kay passed it across. Ulkanov thumbed a switch on the side and directed the probe at the piece of paper in Ashling’s hand. The box began emitting rapid beeps.
“Impregnated with a radioactive tracer,” Ulkanov said, looking back at Ashling. “We picked you up the moment you walked in the door.”
Professor Ulkanov sat at a console in one of the rooms across the corridor from the main laboratory area, contemplating the image on the large screen in front of him. It showed in symbolic form the dynamic relationships within an associative set of schematized neural constructs. Several auxiliary screens to one side presented command summaries and algorithmic syntaxes of the specially developed group-manipulation calculus that Ashling had brought from Earth, including the extensions that Nordens had added to it.
Even after more than a week of devoting himself to absorbing these new representations and techniques with a born-again fervor that had wrought havoc with his schedule of other commitments and appointments, reducing his secretary to the verge of distraction from having to dream up excuses for him, he was still only discovering the full power of this. Ashling had taken a big chance when he buried himself underneath Samurai’s persona and trusted to Ulkanov to reactivate him after he got to Luna. For a start the equipment here, though adequate, still left a lot to be desired compared to what Ashling had enjoyed at Pearse—there were some immediate modifications that he could use, Ulkanov could see. But more to the point, some of the procedures that Ashling stipulated in his encrypted communication via Pipeline were completely different from anything that Ulkanov had employed before, and at the time had meant nothing. Fortunately, however, being always the meticulous professional, Ashling had given very precise instructions.
Ulkanov could see, captured within the equations, the changes taking place when new sensory information, processed and correlated in different parts of the brain, merged with and modified the conceptual structures to which it related. By entering a line of command code he could create the new associative net connecting all the modifications effected by that same data input as a higher-level mapping. One level higher still, and he could tag entire blocks of experience as variables that could be combined into symbolic functions and processed analytically. He could build a mind on the computer screen.
“Global,” he murmured aloud.
“Z mode?” the system vocalized from a grille below the auxiliary screens.
“Five five.”
“Function required?”
“Correlation nexuses with sigma above point three for the last five runs. Overlay at new level, sub VT.”
“Section scan running.…Integrated and complete.…Cross-links complete. Index mods complete. Functions available.”
“Transform AG through BT to mode five. Combine, and reintegrate with all delta. Show result in green three as level-four conformal.”
“Processing.”
“And put a message through to Gunther to send in some coffee.”
“Done.”
Ulkanov was impressed.
Yet at the same time, his face was troubled. He shifted his gaze to another screen, showing the “hardware” activation dynamics as a superposition of neural arbors, each depicted in its own color as a network of branching pathways in a skein of multiply connected, interwoven filaments. What, only two days ago, had been uniformly dense, intricately extended networks were separating into island groupings. Entire highways of associative cross-linkings, rich in interconnections essential to preserving coherence and functional integrity, were disappearing. The mind that he was looking into was beginning to come apart.
There was a perfunctory knock on the door, and Kay came in, looking her old self again. A week of rest after her spell on Earth and the journey back, with four days at Tycho with her husband and children, had made a big difference.
“Still at it, I see,” Kay said. “Barbara did warn me. She thinks they’re going to have to hire somebody else to run the department.”
Ulkanov grunted. “You have to see more of this, Kay,” he replied. “Then you’ll understand. God only knows what we’d have been doing by now if Conrad had been here years ago.”
Kay closed the door and came over to lean on the console while she contemplated the screen. “What is it that makes people like Nordens get twisted?” she sighed. “I’ve never understood this obsession with having to direct other people’s lives.”
Ulkanov leaned back in the chair, stretched, and yawned wearily. “I don’t know, Kay. Some people are just like that, I suppose, and others are not. They’ll never understand each other.…Anyway, did you have a good time back at Tycho? You look much the better for it.”
“Wonderful.”
“The family are all well, I trust?”
“Fine. Joao’s going out for six months on a spaceborne experimental plant that Skypower’s building. Max will be staying on at college, but the girls are coming here to Copernicus, so I’ll be able to see more of them, which will be nice.”
“Very good.…Skypower. That’s the antimatter recombination thing they’ve been talking about, isn’t it?”
“Right. They say that within twenty years they’ll be sending primary power around the Solar System as gamma-ray beams.”
“Hmmm.” Ulkanov thought for a moment. “Which is the one who wants to follow you into AI? It was one of the girls, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Maria. The twelve-year-old.”
“I suppose we’ll be seeing quite a lot of her, then,” Ulkanov said. “No doubt you’ll be dreaming up all kinds of reasons for bringing her along here.”
Kay smiled. “You do read minds. Would it be okay?”
“Oh, certainly. I’m surprised you ask. This place seems to be alive with children most of the time, anyway. Half of them belong to the students.”
“I just don’t like being presumptuous about things.”
Ulkanov turned in his chair. “My mind-reading powers also tell me that you didn’t come here to talk about things like that.”
As if she had been waiting for a cue, Kay’s expression at once became more serious. “No,” she said. “I didn’t. I wanted to talk about Ashling.”
Ulkanov’s face remained neutral. “What about him?”
Kay straightened up from the console and moved to the other side of the room, where she stood facing the other way for a few seconds. Clearly, whatever she had to say wasn’t something that came easily. Ulkanov waited. Finally she turned.
“When I was down on Earth, the time that we were with Scipio and the others in the house near Chicago, when he was still Richard Jarrow…I got to talking quite a lot with Rita.”
“Yes?”
This wasn’t coming out the way Kay had intended. She tried changing to a different tack. “Look, Jarrow lived out his life and died naturally. The whole business about him reactivating again in Demiro was a freak accident. And Samurai was an artificial creation from the beginning. He was never what you’d call a…a real person.”
“Go on.”
Kay spread her hands for a moment, hesitating. “But that still leaves two others. There’s Ashling; and there’s Tony Demiro, who still exists and is alive inside somewhere, underneath all the mess that’s been going on. And physically, the person walking around up here is Demiro. You see what I’m saying, Andre.…I guess I’m still seeing the look in Rita’s eyes, hearing the way she talked. They had their lives, their hopes—hopes to come to Luna one day, and start their own family, without all the restrictions down there. Going home to Tycho brought it home to me. I looked at my kids, and I couldn’t help thinking about those other kids who should have had the chance to exist, but didn’t have. See what I mean? It just doesn’t feel…right”
Ulkanov stared at her, but whatever he was thinking remained unfathomable. “What do you want me to do?”
Kay closed her eyes and sighed. She moved over to a stool by the hard-copy unit and propped herself against it. “I don’t know, Andre. Maybe I just needed somebody to dump it on.…”
Ulkanov waited, guessing that she couldn’t leave it at that.
And he was right. She bit her lip for a moment and went on, “Ashling’s purpose when he copied himself into Samurai was to prevent his knowledge and his work from being lost—and he’s accomplished that now. It wasn’t to extend his life. His life was over. He died that night.” Kay took a long breath, and then finally got it off her chest. “He didn’t do it to buy himself a new lease on life at the expense of a young soldier who was just an innocent victim of the situation, and who had his own life ahead. That’s what I’m trying to say. That’s what isn’t right.”
There was a silence. At last, Ulkanov nodded. “I know what you are saying, of course. And I understand how you feel. But again, what would you have me—” A tone sounded from the viewphone on a shelf beside the console. “Excuse me.” He touched the accept pad. It was Barbara. “Yes?”
Barbara was uncharacteristically brusque. “Professor, there’s some kind of problem with Conrad. We’re in the machine section. Do you think you could come here, please?”
“At once.” Ulkanov cut the connection and tilted his head at Kay as he rose. There was a strange, distant look on his face. “You’d better come too,” he told her.
Ashling was sitting on the edge of the vinyl-padded couch in the workroom next to the machine installation. Barbara was standing by him, looking concerned. The nurse from the department’s medical dispensary, whom Barbara had also called as a precaution, hovered a short distance behind.
Ashling frowned at Ulkanov when he entered, as if he were having difficulty recognizing him. Suddenly his face broke into a smile of self-congratulations. “Ah yes, the professor. Hi.”
Ulkanov nodded an acknowledgment. “What’s happened?” he asked Barbara.
“He started acting strange while we were going over the machine. He didn’t seem to know who he was for a while. It seems to have cleared a little now, though.” She brushed a curl of hair from her eyes. “It had me really worried. Maybe it’s delayed stress from everything that went on down there, or something. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important.”
“No. You did absolutely the right thing.” Ulkanov turned to the nurse. “How does he seem to you?”
“He’s perspiring, and his pulse is fast. There’s nothing obvious to worry about that I can see. But he should have a full check.”
“Of course.” Ulkanov looked at Ashling. “How do you feel now?”
“I feel…You’re the professor, right?”
“Yes, I am the professor. I’m told that you weren’t sure who you are? Do you know now?”
“I…”
“He’s doing it again,” Barbara muttered.
“Ashling, Conrad Ashling,” Ashling pronounced. He thrust his chin out challengingly. “You thought I didn’t know, didn’t you?”
“Where are you from, Conrad?” Ulkanov asked.
“From?…” Ashling seemed about to answer, but then sat back and looked puzzled. “From different places. Different places, all at once. I don’t understand it.”
“Tell us about the places,” Ulkanov said. Kay looked at him oddly. It was almost as if he had known what to expect.
Ashling’s expression was distant. “One had lakes and a river. There was a city there, by the river.…” His face cleared, and he focused on Ulkanov suddenly, as if a different person were speaking. “I used to kill people. I liked killing people. They wouldn’t let me be like them.…Next I’m going to kill Larry. He wouldn’t believe who I was. And Shafer, Nimmo, that Lauer bitch, all of them. None of them believed me.…But not Vera.” He looked confused again and peered around. “Why isn’t Vera here?”
The nurse looked to Ulkanov with a worried expression. “He needs to rest,” Ulkanov murmured gravely. “We’ll take him to the dispensary. Do you have something you can give him?” The nurse nodded. Ulkanov put a hand on Ashling’s shoulder. “Come on, old friend,” he said gently. “There’s a warm bed waiting for you downstairs. You’ve had a hard time. You need to sleep.”
“You know,” Kay said to Ulkanov as they left the dispensary and began walking back along the corridor toward the front elevators. “I could tell, watching you. It didn’t come as a complete surprise to you, did it? You know what it is.”
Ulkanov nodded heavily. “I was looking at it when you came into the computer room just before. What they were doing at Pearse was too rushed, maybe because of the political pressures. I don’t know.…But the groundwork on basics wasn’t covered thoroughly enough. The overlay group linkages have inherent instabilities in them. They’re starting to break down. The same thing would have happened to Samurai. Maybe it did.”
Kay stared at him as they came to the doors. The car was already there. “Break down?…What are you saying, exactly?”
Ulkanov replied without looking at her as they stepped inside. “I think your problem might be solving itself. Think of it as analogous to a tissue rejection with a transplant. In subtle ways that we don’t yet comprehend, the mind, like the body, recognizes and protects its own. Maybe one day we’ll know how to prevent it. But that time isn’t yet.”
The door closed. They were halfway down to the main laboratory level by the time Kay had fully digested the meaning of his words. “There’s nothing that can be done?” The fervor that she had spoken with earlier was gone, and her voice was suddenly very quiet and sober.
Ulkanov shook his head.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Probably it’s better this way.”
They came out into a foyer with offices behind glass partitions, and corridors leading off in several directions. Ulkanov seemed to have been weighing something in his mind. “Kay, would you do something for me?” he said.
“What?”
“Get on to the Pipeline people. I’d like them to contact Josef again, if they can.”
She nodded. “Sure.”
“Let me know what they say. I’ll be in the computer room again.”
“I’ll call you there as soon as I’ve talked to them.” Kay went away in the direction of her own office.
Ulkanov walked slowly back to the room that he had been in earlier and closed the door. He sat down and stared again at the images still showing on the screens. What he had seen before was even clearer now.
The story he had given Kay was true in a way, but oversimplified. Yes, the overlays were unstable, and the linkages were breaking down.
But there was a director function in there, linked to another self-activating time-out sequence, which showed all the marks of having been constructed artificially. What was instigating the breakdown process wasn’t something that had evolved naturally. Why should it be? Nature had never encountered anything like this for which a natural defense would be required. It had been put there to do the job.
Ashling hadn’t wanted to steal Demiro’s body, just to borrow it for a while. But he’d known that once he experienced the change, he might feel tempted to change his mind.
And therefore he had arranged things this way.