I will say they came right quick—almost
too quick, I remember thinkin’. I couldn’t help
wonderin’ if some of them folks gettin’ to the dead and
dyin’ and gettin’ emergency medical and transport
through the Labyrinth wasn’t some of the same folks who done
the shootin’. A security alert went out for all of ’em
up and down the line, and nobody not authorized or unexpected came
past either switch point. Now, sure, there was a lot of worlds
goin’ toward the headquarters junction, but these people had
to know the Labyrinth, have almost unlimited access to it, and have
some kind of communications that allowed them to know, at three
different substation points, just when to jump in and jump us.
They not only had vehicles in the Labyrinth when they wanted
them, they had at least one that was a small hospital all by
itself, but Sam was the only one they loaded in and he didn’t
look long for this world. They pumped so many bullets into
Vogel’s fat head that it wasn’t nothin’ but a
grease spot, but then they went and shot everybody else. They shot
me, too, it turned out, only I didn’t even notice until they
rushed to give me medical help. The bullet tore a nasty gash right
in my left side, but it didn’t hit nothin’ fatal or
even cripplin’.
By the time this little ’copterlike thing with a seat on it come
for me, Sam and the big medical truck was long gone. All I wanted
to do now was to follow them, to be with him at the last. Last
thing I wanted was Sam dyin’ without me there.
So help me, they still made us go through the whole routine at
the entrance to headquarters, although I was okay. The best medical
knowledge anywhere was just inside, but I wondered how long it took
’em to test Sam and spray their damned rays before they got
him where he had to go.
Still, they didn’t waste no time gettin’ me to the
surface and off to what could only be called their big medical
center. It was out in the boondocks just like Mayar’s place,
but it was an enormous complex of buildings, rounded, cubed,
A-framed, and everything else, and it went up and out for a long
ways.
They finally gave me a shot for the pain, though frankly I was
too keyed up emotionally and physically to feel much, and I dozed
in spite of myself for most of the trip.
It was still kinda weird and frightenin’ to be rushed into
this place with all these golden perfect people around
talkin’ away in that singsong language and not bein’
able to talk to them or understand what they was sayin’ or
doin’. They put me in some kind of pack and treated the wound
almost by remote control, but the itching and pain stopped almost
at once and when I had the thing taken off there was a kind of
feltlike bandage over it and just about no feelin’ right
there at all. Some kind of anesthetic in the bandage, I
guessed.
I kept tryin’ to get some word on Sam, who I knew had to
be brought to this place, but all I got were shrugs and apologetic
looks. They took me to a small room with a bed and a window that
didn’t look out on much, as well as a sink and bathroom, and
kinda signed to me to stay there. I didn’t have much choice,
really.
I had had one hell of a day. I’d gone from despair and
surrender as a damned slave on that Nazi world to complete joy and
relief at bein’ rescued to even worse seein’ Sam get it
like that—and in the head, too. Thing was, he was
blockin’ the finish-off shot to me. He got it savin’ my
life. That made me feel even more miserable.
After a couple hours of just layin’ there, Bill Markham
came in, lookin’ like death warmed over himself. He needed a
bath and a shave and he looked like he hadn’t slept in a
week, but he’d come as soon as he’d got the word and
could get in here. I was relieved to see somebody, anybody, I could
talk to.
“Sam’s here,” he told me right off, “and
he’s still alive. That’s the good news. The bad news is
that the slug took a chunk out of his skull on the right side and
we don’t know just what damage there is. He’s in what
passes for brain surgery here now, and will be for some time.
There’s nothing to do but wait.” He sank down tiredly
in the one little chair near the bed. “I’m really
sorry, Brandy. Ishould have guessed! I feel like
a complete idiot!”
“No, none of us seen it, Bill. Now dat dey gon’ and
done it, it be de only thing dey could do. When dey go bad, dey go
weal bad.”
He looked up, but he didn’t really believe a word of it.
Fact was, I was kickin’ myself over it, too. Damn it,
we’d had a runnin’ gun battle through the Labyrinth and
into another world once. Only made sense that what you could do one
way you could do the other—if you had the information. We was
all too smug. Even Bill admitted that Vogel’s getaway
substation was unknown to security. This whole thing was just too
damned complicated and the Labyrinth itself had just too many
entrances and exits to ever secure it. No wonder they was able to
run this drug or whatever back and forth for a while without
gettin’ caught—and then only by lucky accident.
He looked over at me. “Look, there’s nothing to see
in the surgery, and all your medical records were transferred here
by Jamispur. They tell me you lost some blood but that your
wound’s a lucky one and it should heal completely in a week
to ten days. Maybe you should think of using this waiting time to
get them to restore you. Get rid of Beth, get your teeth and jaw
back on so you talk normally, that kind of thing. You want to be
ready when Sam wakes up.”
I knew he was just tryin’ to divert me. Yeah, when Sam
wakes up. If Sam wakes up . . . Still,
I sure as hell didn’t want to stay this way any longer than I
had to.
They used Jamispur’s hypnoscan records to fix that first,
since that was the biggest headache, and while I was under they
used the time to do some of the corrective dental work needed. Beth
wasn’t erased, exactly, but she became a memory, not a
personality, like somebody you once knew real good and close. I
liked it that way. I wanted to remember Beth, and all the Beths in
all them worlds out there. Anytime in the future when I was
feelin’ sorry for myself or wallowing in self-pity I’d
just think of Beth and the others and know just what
blessin’s I had.
I couldn’t talk at all after the dental and facial stuff,
but by then several English speakers were around for my benefit.
That hypnoscan could be damned useful as well as dangerous.
They told me that Markham had simply passed out and was sent to
bed with a sedative to sleep it off, but then they took me down to
see Sam. He was in a special wing just for head injuries, the most
common and still the hardest things to deal with.
They understood a hell of a lot more about the brain than we
did. I think they knew just how it worked and could do tricks with
it, but head injuries were no less tragic here for all that. They
could even grow new brain tissue, something the body has problems
with, but they couldn’t replace what you lost, only give a
replacement place for something else to be written. Sam might have
lots of problems, even memory problems, when he woke
up—if he woke up.
He wasn’t much to see. They had him floatin’ in a
tank covered in some kinda liquid that sure wasn’t water, his
head down to his big nose encased in a special kind of bandage, all
sorts of tubes leadin’ to and from his body to big machines.
I was afraid he’d drown, but they assured me that he was
gettin’ all they could give. Even they didn’t know if
it’d be enough, though.
In that chamber I couldn’t even kiss him or talk to him or
hold his hand. It was tough.
He had plenty of brain activity, so he wasn’t brain dead,
but they didn’t know much more. He might be out for days, for
weeks, for months, even forever. There was no way of tellin’
now ’cept to monitor and wait.
Within a day I could talk again, and I got to admit that from
that point on I never again was the least bit self-conscious or
embarrassed about how I talked. Anybody didn’t like it, piss
on them. In fact, that whole experience really changed me for the
better in a lot of ways. I was a lot more humble now ’bout my
own strong will. Damn, just bein’ in that damned
world started breakin’ me. The technicians at the
Center—that’s what they called the medical place, just
the Center—told me that, yeah, it was true, if they’d
started torturin’ me or used hypnoscans or drugs on me while
I was in control I’d revert to Beth, but just the fact that
Vogel knew that kept him from doin’ it. He loved
breakin’ people. That was his hobby and his fun. No fun in
trippin’ somebody over when you don’t figure she really
knows what you want to know anyhow.
But he was lyin’ through his teeth ’bout me
turnin’ into Beth slow and on my own. Fact was, the Beth
personality was there, but it was real weak compared to mine.
He planted that seed, and I swallowed it, and just
’cause I swallowed it Beth was able to get control. Vogel was
right when he said anybody can be broken, but in the end
you’re the one that breaks you. He didn’t
really want Beth; he wanted an obedient slave girl who had all my
knowledge and talents and abilities. And just ’cause his kind
was the bosses on that Nazi world didn’t mean we didn’t
have ’em just like him on our world, or most any world.
I was stronger, too, because of that mission. More
self-confident, I think, but also knowin’ my limits. I was
ready now to not worry what anybody else thought about me and just
be me and cope with whatever came along.
I didn’t have them put me back all the way, I admit. I
never was able to grow or keep straight hair before, and with my
own more rounded face I kinda liked the look. They told me it would
keep growin’ straight so long as I only cut it at the ends.
If I ever shaved my head it’d come back the old way. I also
kept that creamy complexion. Folks spend millions tryin’ to
get a nice, even, perfect complexion like that.
My body was toughened by those days I spent with no clothes in
all weather. I found it damned hard just to wear shoes and so went
barefoot most of the time. The golden people’s saris felt
okay, but I knew I was gonna haveta ease back into more normal
clothes.
Fact was, I was ready to go out and enjoy life and conquer the
damned world, and I didn’t care if I was starvin’ and
shunned so long as I was free, but it just didn’t mean a
damned thing without Sam.
The trouble was, I couldn’t imagine life without Sam, and
at the same time I was already easin’ into just that. All
that stuff I spouted to him about risks and gettin’ hit by a
truck—I didn’t really believe that. Besides, we was
talkin’ about if somethin’ happened to me. I
just never even imagined that anything would take Sam from me
’cept’n my own death.
After a few days, I met Bill Markham and Aldrath Prang for a
debriefin’ and brain session.
“You set us up,” I told them. “One of you,
anyways, with that damned dinner meet. Whichever one it was was
handed the time, place, and all the rest on a platter—and you
still didn’t catch him!”
“It was one of Mayar Eldrith’s schemes,”
Aldrath told me. “He is a senior vice president and chairman
of the Security Committee. In other words, he is my boss. I was
powerless to prevent it, although I recommended strongly against
it.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and what’s he say now
that he’s lost Vogel and maybe killed Sam and the
others?”
“The usual,” the security chief replied with a
shrug. “He is blaming it on me and on security in
general.”
Bill grunted. “He is on our list, isn’t
he?”
“Near the top,” Aldrath admitted. “But he is
also near the top in both social class, and corporate power. You
see the problem. These are all high-ranking, extremely powerful
men.”
“Who would know enough ’bout security’s ways
and all that would be needed to have set up this thing?” I
asked them. “I mean, not all of ’em could pull this
off, could they?”
“Any of them might,” Aldrath replied,
“although some are more likely than others. Certainly the
vice president could do it effectively without even touching it
himself, and Mukasa Lamdukur is in charge of day-to-day
operations.”
“The one with the airhead mistress.”
He nodded. “Alas, so. And Basuti Alimati, who is something
of a fanatical personality but whose office handles much of the
routine business communications between our many divisions. I
cannot rule out the other two, since Dringa heads Research and
Development and Hanrin holds the security purse strings, but
neither of those two have as much day-to-day interaction with
operations. They would need a good number of support and managerial
personnel to do the actual work. Neither is particularly
technically oriented.”
Even Bill was surprised. “You mean the head of R & D
isn’t technically oriented?”
“He authorizes a lot of things depending on what his
advisors, both technical and political, recommend, but he
understands little. He is a typical executive. What can I say?
Basuti and Mukasa, on the other hand, are both inquisitive and
highly intelligent and make a point of learning as much as possible
about their responsibilities. Mayar understands almost nothing,
being a politician, but if he wished he could through his vast
power and position arrange practically anything.”
None of that helped much. We still had five big, fat suspects,
no real motive, no real clear knowledge of the plot, and while two
was most likely suspects and one was in the best position to do
just about anything, the fact was the least likely suspects
couldn’t be ruled out. Back to square one.
“Listen, like I told your men, I didn’t get much out
of Vogel, but whatever else that bastard was I don’t think he
was no traitor. He was real surprised and real upset when he
learned that it was the Company after his hide, and the reason he
didn’t face us was ’cause whoever he got his orders
from was high enough up that it woulda been his neck in a noose. He
was had, though, by this dude. I think he got routine orders from
somebody to set this thing up and he didn’t think it was
crazy ’cause he had the perfect setup to experiment on
people, and he didn’t ask no questions not only ’cause
it was from so high up but also ’cause he was gettin’
payoffs for it, like that hypnoscan in the basement. Imagine a
paranoid like him with a hypnoscan!”
“Agreed. He knew and we blew it,” Bill said.
“I mean, our computer simulations actually said that an
attempt within the Labyrinth was a likely thing, but that was if
the whole plan went down pretty much as it was. When he escaped
with you and then lost us for over a day and a half, all our
resources went into locating and then tracking you. I was
constantly shifting people inside the Labyrinth from one track to
another to cover all the possibilities. The fact was, the other
dangers just weren’t important if we didn’t have Vogel
alive in the first place. When we got him, we were just so damned
happy and smug we forgot to put everything else in place before
moving him. It really was our fault, and I don’t know any way
around that.”
“All right, I’ll buy that,” I told them. Hell,
if they wanted the guilt trip, let ’em have it. Their lapse
was understandable but, damn it, it was their fault. I had
my own problems to worry about—I couldn’t do their job,
too. “The thing is, what happens now?”
The question seemed to catch both of ’em off guard.
“What do you mean?” Aldrath asked.
“You got a skunk, a traitor, high up. Somebody who makes
even Vogel look human. That skunk’s gone to a whole lotta
trouble to set somethin’ up that is definitely aimed at the
Company, maybe at its heart, and it comes right out of the Security
Committee.”
“But we lost Vogel!” Bill protested.
“Yeah, so you lost Vogel—but so did
he!”
That seemed to hit the both of ’em like some new
concussion grenade. I guess in a way they was just like
Vogel—you get so much power, you get so arrogant and
self-confident, you can’t see your damned nose in front of
your face.
“Go on,” said Aldrath Prang.
“Look, how long you figure this has been goin’ on?
This drug thing, I mean?”
“Two, maybe three years so far. Why?”
“What’s two or three years to a guy fifty to seventy
who expects to live another hundred to hundred and fifty years?
That’s why he’s takin’ the time to experiment and
movin’ so slow and cautious. But we just blew a lot of that
research down the drain. We don’t have it, but neither does
our big boy, and he ain’t gonna get no more from Vogel or his
world. They wasn’t done—that’s clear. How long
was it supposed to go on? Another year? Five? Or maybe until they
found out what they wanted to know no matter what. Well, they
ain’t found it yet ’cause they was still doin’
research and experiments. We don’t know what they’re
lookin’ for and why, but it’s pretty damned clear that
if they don’t find it then there’s no plot, no threat,
no scheme. They just lost their main man and the technicians who
done most of the work, but they still need the work and now the
heat’s on real hard. Now, he’s got two choices. Either
open up somewheres else and start from scratch, or step up in a
place he’s already at. You tell me which one’s less
risky and less trouble.”
Bill thought a moment. “Aldrath, who knows about that
second world except us and your immediate staff? Was it in your
report to the committee?”
“No. Since we were doing only surveillance activities
there, I thought it prudent not to mention it or we might drive the
operation totally underground. They do not even know we intercepted
the courier. They were told that we discovered it by accident
during routine checks of Vogel’s station.” He paused a
moment. “Sometimes you find it best and prudent to tell your
superiors only what they need to know. We needed a plan for Vogel,
lots of manpower and appropriations, all the rest. We had to take a
station, have an attacking force, plus all the monitoring both in
that world and within the Labyrinth. The committee had to be
told.”
“And I’d say that would be used, since it already is
set up,” Bill added. “To try the same thing that they
did with Vogel with a new stationmaster would be too risky for
words now that we know how he did it, and it would take a long
time. I think you’re right. I think they’ll step it up
where they already are and go with what they have. If it goes bad,
then they can always start new.”
Somethin’ just sorta snapped inside me. Maybe it was my
brains, but it all come together. “Look,” I told them,
“I want this bastard. I want him bad. You know the odds on
Sam. They grow longer every day, every week. I tell you, if he
goes, there ain’t much I got to live for and that’s the
truth. All I got is a burnin’ hatred and will to get this man
and nail his hide to Sam’s tank.”
Bill looked at me and shook his head. “You’ve done
your bit, Brandy. More than done it. You have millions,
you’re still young and attractive, you still have quite a
life ahead no matter what happens to Sam. You’re in shock
now, and grief, too, and I can’t say you’re going to
ever forget that, but you’ll learn to live with it just like
others have. Besides, what if Sam comes out of it and you’re
back in the fire again?”
I didn’t really believe that, any of it. I accepted that
much. I had no family, no friends, and all I could look forward to
was the best friends money could buy. I wasn’t real unhappy
in that broke-down office in Camden with the roaches and shit once
Sam was there. Half of me was down in that damned tank or in
splatter on the Labyrinth floor. I didn’t want to
learn to live with it.
“I want this bastard no matter what the cost, and I think
Sam would, too.”
Bill sighed, and I could almost see his brain workin’.
Half of him was wracked with guilt and embarrassment over
blowin’ this at the end, and the other half was real tempted.
He really wanted me to do it; he just didn’t want me on his
conscience right next to Sam.
“Look,” he said carefully, “this isn’t
the same thing. We don’t have a Vogel to snatch here. We
don’t even have a station or operation on that world, just
some agents, a communications link, and some weak points. They only
have access to it because the Pennsylvania weak point is between
two heavily traveled worlds and the Labyrinth comes on for brief
periods spontaneously there, and we can’t build a substation
without getting the authority and approval of the committee.
There’s no spy satellites, no big team with all sorts of
connections, nothing. There’s no backup.”
“If I can be watched and get word out, then that’s
the only backup I’ll need. If I get in too deep, even the
damned United States Marines ain’t gonna be no help to
me.”
“It’s a string of hookers and the mob, you
know,” Bill reminded me. “To get close there, you run a
real risk of getting hooked on this stuff yourself, even without
meaning to. You’re over the age they like, but if they find
out who you are or suspect you’re working for us,
they’ll do it.”
When you been broke as a naked slave in chains, bein’
hooked don’t seem so damned horrible no more. “I know
the risks. But if I nail this bastard, it’ll be worth
it.”
“Yeah, but what if you do and then Sam comes around? So we
break ’em, but you’re hooked for good or die from a
supply cutoff. No, I can’t allow it.”
“You told me they could break the addiction. Here,
probably.”
“We have had some success, yes,” Aldrath admitted,
“but it is very unpleasant and very ugly and quite often
results in irreversible brain damage. Come, let us go over and
we’ll let you see just what we are facing and what you are
truly talking about.”
We went to one of the separate buildings, away from the main
center. This was a security building, with all sorts of controls on
gettin’ in and gettin’ out, but with Aldrath Prang
along there weren’t too many doors you couldn’t get
through.
In some ways it was hard to think of the Center as a hospital,
since even though you had patients and some regular kind of rooms
none of the treatment rooms or labs looked anything like treatment
rooms or labs. We went into this room that looked more like some
computer room or library. There was a bunch of screens, chairs, and
both microphones and keyboards all around, ’cept them
keyboards had about a hundred keys and the symbols on them made
Arabic or Chinese look real familiar. Aldrath sat down at one and
typed a few things and the screen came on. It looked like one of
them medical shows where they blow up the blood or cells to giant
size.
“There is the enemy,” he told us. It all looked like
icky brown slime to me with lots of little things floatin’ in
it. “I’ll blow it up and you can see it
face-to-face.”
The thing zoomed in, and suddenly there was a real pretty
pattern of multicolored see-through shapes. They looked kinda like
them Christmas stars with all the points comin’ out like
sunbursts, but somehow they all fit together. Inside, they seemed
to be made up of millions of little strings, like jellied shredded
wheat.
“I never seen nothin’ like that,” I told
him.
“Neither had we,” he replied. “Separately,
they aren’t much, and the amount of magnification needed to
get them this large and this clear is enormous. They’re not
quite as big as a common virus, but much more complex. The raw
stuff has a different pattern than you see here—really
colorless, with fewer spikes and more tightly packed granules. When
it invades a host, it makes the entire trip through the bloodstream
in a minute or so and finally settles in the brain, but it takes a
grand tour first. When it settles in, it changes, and it’s
never the same twice in any two individuals. It adapts to what it
finds in incredible ways. At the start, it seizes control of vital
chemical areas of the brain, turns off the body’s defenses
but only to it, then reproduces and grows to a certain size that
the body can support without harming it, then stops. As a body
manager, it’s actually quite good and unique to each
individual.”
“You mean—it thinks?”
“No, we’re pretty sure it doesn’t, not in any
sense we think of it. It can live only in a host, and its sole
imperative seems to be survival of itself and its host. It cleans
house, and much more efficiently gets rid of invading bacteria,
viruses, you name it. Cancerous and precancerous conditions are
identified, attacked, and dissolved. Arteries are unblocked. Body
chemistry works at maximum efficiency. Hosts are actually healthier
and in better condition than any human we find
naturally.”
“You make it sound almost like somethin’ worth
havin’.”
“We think that in the world where it evolved, it
is something worth having. The only way you can catch it
is by sexual transmission. I could take a vialful of the stuff and
inject it directly into you and you couldn’t get it, since it
would be individually adapted to its host. To reproduce, it
actually builds a cluster of virgin and unadapted units encased in
a gelatinlike shell with a mind of its own and some real power. It
not only goes in with sperm, it can appear in females as well and
actually invade upstream, as it were, through the penis of the
male. The world where it comes from has no addiction problem, since
they live with it naturally the same as we live with a host of
beneficial bacteria, and, as I said, it pays its own freight by
making a more efficient body. We know that host is a Type One
because it’s close enough to us that this thing can adapt,
recognize, and use our body so well, but it’s not a hundred
percent.”
I nodded. “Bill told us. It can’t keep livin’
in our bodies, right?”
“Right. First of all, there seems to be something, some
element, that it needs that our bodies lack. It forms its
reproductive units, but they don’t work. They fall apart and
are gobbled by the would-be host’s immune system. Therefore,
it can’t reproduce—but it doesn’t know that and
keeps trying anyway. Second, this element, which defies isolation,
is present in the clusters we see, but since no more can be made in
our bodies it starts to break down and be expelled or changed,
perhaps by the chemicals of our own bodies, into harmless material.
We suspect the latter, since that would explain why we can’t
find it. Within thirty-six hours the thing starts to die, and
starts killing the host in the process. Only a fresh infusion of
virgin material will restore it. Hence, we have a dangerous and
deadly addiction.”
He turned back to us. “You see, we can’t even take
material from another host and inject it, since it changes to be
specific only to that host and it’s using every bit of it for
its own use anyway. The virgin cells won’t grow on their
own—they need a host—and so we can’t make our own
supply. Since the carrier in the drug modules appears to be semen,
we’ve made a genetic analysis of the host and we’re
trying to find the world it comes from. The problem is, we’ve
not yet found an exact match and there are hundreds of thousands of
worlds in this genetic category. We’ll find it, eventually,
but it takes lots of time. I mean, you just can’t walk in to
every world, walk up to the nearest male, and demand a semen sample
for lab analysis.”
Yeah, I could see that. Pardon me, sir, but we in our protective
suits to keep from catchin’ nasty diseases want you to lie
down and jerk off into this here tube for
us . . .
“But Bill said you could cure it.”
Aldrath sighed. “Sort of. The trick is to get a host when
the thing is in full control, not breaking down. Then the subject
is somewhat frozen and suspended, life support slowed, and the
entire organism is then attacked at one time throughout the body.
It is a foreign organism; our scanners can isolate it and
attack it with equal strength all through the body. That kills it,
and keeps it from killing the host, but it doesn’t replace
the body chemicals the thing was managing. We then have to keep the
host in suspension for many weeks while we stimulate the right
areas of the brain and get it used to doing things the old way
again. Then the body is okay, but the mind is something
else. Most of them resist cures to the last moment. When we cure
them, they feel terrible physically and they would go back on the
stuff in a moment no matter what the price, even months
later—which is all we’ve had to study this. It requires
the hypnoscan and psychiatric techniques to remove that craving.
The hypnoscan is a wonderful invention, but it cures nothing. It
can only add and subtract and distort.”
“I see.”
“Only slightly. All of our subjects came from projects run
by Vogel, outside of his compound, and snatched in convincing ways
so neither he nor his people knew we were involved. We’ve
found none without some evidence of brain damage, although we
suspect this was the result of experiments or somebody not getting
their injection in time. The long-term users also retain their
habit patterns. Their inhibitions remain suppressed, their
selfishness remains high, their sexual drives become insatiable in
an attempt to recapture that ultimate high. No one has yet
completed therapy sufficiently to be restored to total normalcy.
Come on. I’ll show you just what we’re up
against.”
We went down to a lower section of the building that began to
look more like a luxury jail than a hospital. I seen
good-lookin’ young guys and pretty young girls sittin’
there in rooms in near constant masturbation. The weird thing was,
you could talk to ’em and they’d talk back, but they
never stopped. Others seemed to act normal, but had problems
talkin’ or writin’ or rememberin’ what they just
said, and others with jerky muscle movements like the palsy. The
best ones seemed tired, run-down, not ambitious or much interested
in doin’ things.
“We could wipe out much of their memories—get rid of
the longing for the high—but to do that we’d have to
rebuild their personalities,” Aldrath told us. “Our
only real hope is to find the world where this stuff comes from. If
we had just one individual from that world and could compare him or
her to one of us with it, we could find the critical chemical
difference. Then we could synthesize it, stabilize the organism,
and find a way to tame this beast. Cure the addiction, block the
reproduction, and those who have it would be able to live normal,
productive lives in the best of health and get its advantages
without its terrible drawbacks.”
I nodded and we walked back out into the sunshine and fresh air.
I was shaken by what I saw, but also angry. I didn’t want no
thing livin’ inside me, but them people and a lot
more was goin’ through hell because they didn’t have
the thing’s parents’ address. Somebody did, but they
didn’t want us to know it.
“That’s the bottom line, Brandy,” Bill told
me. “I don’t want you in there, like that. I
couldn’t handle that on my conscience.”
“But volunteers ain’t standin’ in line to
infiltrate this mess.”
“To say the least. It’s a real trap, since anybody
we send in who gets addicted becomes controlled by them and for
their own self-preservation goes over to the other side. We
can’t snatch and interrogate the underworld figures involved,
since they really don’t seem to have any knowledge beyond
ours worth blowing the only other lead we have. We’ve
considered a switch of some of theirs for some of ours—the
big boys, I mean—but it seems the reason these people were
chosen is that there are no good candidates who would work for us
against them inside that organization. The only possibles are
counterparts who are the same people inside and out and already
bosses themselves—not likely to want to work for us—or
the kind of people who would take the job but wind up enticed by
the power of this thing and be just as bad as the ones they
replaced.”
“We still don’t know where it comes from or how it
gets into our courier network,” Aldrath added. “The
actual couriers who deliver it get messages to pick it up at
different points every time, and only after it’s already
dropped. There’s been no pattern in those drop points that we
can find, and no single individual or group can be linked to most
of the drops.”
I nodded sadly. It shook me bad to see that and know just what
sufferin’ was goin’ on. The worst part was that nobody
did all this just to trap hookers or hook the kind of folks we seen
in that hospital wing. What did they plan to do? What was they
lookin’ for? An immunity agent, so they couldn’t get
hooked? Probably, but that wasn’t all of it, since
you’d need one hell of a population of the world these come
from jerkin’ off all the time to supply any huge amounts of
the stuff. A way to make it work just as good without shots in us
as it did in the people it came from? That didn’t make no
sense, neither, since that would mean no addiction and no control.
It didn’t make no sense. I did have a thought, though.
“What if they got it in here, to this world?” I
asked them. “You could just keep a few big men on a string
and rule it all.”
“We thought of that, of course,” Aldrath replied.
“Our first thought, really. But controls are very strict. We
do not allow it in, and our equipment is set to it. No virgin
material was ever here—that work was done elsewhere. Even if
it was surgically embedded in your body, we’d pick it up,
since it’s an alien compound with a unique structure.
Anything that would shield it from our instruments would show up
the shielding. The computer scanners can’t be altered by
anyone without exactly what was done being public. Not even the
President or Chairman of the Board could smuggle that stuff
in.”
“Yeah, but what if they snuck in one of the folks from the
world that has these natural?”
“First of all, he’d be pretty obvious since
he’d have to have sex to spread it and I’m afraid our
people are—clannish. They wouldn’t do it here, on this
world, other than with their own kind, and rape would be pretty
quickly reported, particularly by a Type One individual. They might
hook a few people before they were caught, but they wouldn’t
get close to the classes with the power by then and, once caught,
we could find the home world this thing comes from from the one who
came in. Besides, one of the things we do when you enter is read
your genetic code. We know their basic genetic code, and
we’re even attempting to clone some cells to see what they
really look like and give us more of a limited range to hunt for
them, but so far without success. Clones in any case don’t
come out as full-blown adults; it takes the same time as with
natural development. So far we’ve had no real luck, and the
code only gives us that vast range of worlds I talked about.
Unfortunately, it’s a pretty common species type, almost as
common as our own. To further minimize the risk, no one from that
family of genetic relatives is permitted in here at all. And nobody
from here, once they take a post in the Corporation,
leaves.”
It did seem like they thought of everything this time.
Sure, you might hook a young one out exploring but he’d
never come back ’cause he couldn’t get his supply of
the stuff while he waited around for twenty or thirty years to get
an important job, if then. This was a puzzler, all right. If not
hookin’ the Board, then what? Or, rather, who?
“What about transport and switchmen?” I suggested.
“Control them and it don’t matter what happens
here.”
“We know what it looks like so we can test for it,”
Aldrath said. “We test everyone four to six times a year for
a variety of things, and anytime we suspect or see anything unusual
or have someone in a critical area. They didn’t even hook
their couriers for that reason. You might hook some stationmasters,
but what does that get you in the end?”
Bill thought for a moment, then said, “It could get
forbidden stuff in and out of places. Ever think of
that?”
“Of course. But Vogel got his hypnoscan without it, and
there’s not much beyond this organism that’s so
dangerous and so valuable to make it worth the risk. Besides, if
that was all, why test it? Why hook fifty young, pretty girls and
make them sell sex for hire? Other substances do as well for that.
Why only women down there? Vogel’s people experimented on men
and women equally, with equal results. We have lots of pieces, but
whenever you build a frame they don’t go together.”
I couldn’t help thinkin’ how Sam woulda loved
this—did love this. Even though he was against my
goin’ undercover, he still had real joy at the puzzle itself
and a real yen to solve it. So did I. Havin’ seen the price,
though, I just couldn’t quite talk myself into it. The price
of solvin’ this one was a one-way ticket to hell.
After six weeks, I went back home. Sam was still in the tank and
there was no change, and I was beginnin’ to get used to the
idea that there might never be. There was sure no reason to hang
around; headquarters world was friendlier and more comfortable than
Vogel’s for me, but I was still an outsider in more ways than
one.
Goin’ home, though, proved only a temporary relief. The
agency was pretty well a dead duck; Sam had handed off his cases to
other PIs before we left and there wasn’t much to pick up on,
and I just didn’t feel much like tryin’ for new
business. I might no longer care what that class of people thought
of me, but that didn’t mean they was gonna keep comin’
in with new jobs. Sure, I could have picked up some work just from
the Company—but it woulda been charity work, just Bill and
the rest tryin’ to give me somethin’ to do.
Not that I had to do much. At first them bastards tried to get
away with payin’ just half the money, since they didn’t
have Vogel alive, but I shamed ’em into the full amount. I
didn’t need it; just the two and a half million was more than
I ever expected to see in my life. It was just the principle of the
thing, damn it.
I took a quarter of a million out and put it in liquid funds so
I had cash and let Whitlock at Tri-State Savings keep and invest
the rest. Then I got out all the bills we owed, big and small, and
paid them all off. It was kinda rough lookin’ at the check
register and seein’ Sam’s handwritin’ on most of
the stubs.
In fact, Sam haunted everything. I kept wakin’ up in that
apartment expectin’ to find him next to me, or maybe in the
livin’ room or kitchen. The phone would ring with
somethin’ or other and I’d instantly think it was Sam
callin’ from Pittsburgh or some other place and have it
picked up before I realized that it couldn’t be him.
There wasn’t no sense in keepin’ the office, so I
closed it down and sublet it to the end of the lease. I
didn’t want to stay in town no more, neither. Seems like once
you got money word gets around fast, and every fast-buck artist and
get-rich-quick schemer and con artist finds you real fast. I had to
get out of town, go off by myself awhile, but I couldn’t
think of anyplace I wanted to move to lock, stock, and barrel. I
went up to New York for a while, rented a shabby little studio
apartment just off Greenwich Village, under the name Beth Parker. I
know, I know, but I was feelin’ more’n a little like
poor Beth right then, kinda lost without nobody around. I picked
New York ’cause I was always a city girl at heart, and I
didn’t really know nobody up there and nobody knew me. The
Company arranged for driver’s license, credit cards, and a
local bank account in that name. With the straight hair and smooth
complexion even some of my relatives wouldn’t’a knowed
me anyways.
I was rich, but I didn’t feel rich, and I
didn’t want nobody to know that I was. Sam had married me
when I was a ghetto girl in cockroach heaven. I took very little
with me, and bought what I needed from second-hand stores in
Manhattan. When I was bored and lonely and depressed I ate a lot,
and since that was the case most of the time I satisfied my every
whim. Started smokin’ cigarettes again, too, and quickly got
up past two packs a day. Every kind of drug you can think of and a
lot you never heard of were easy in the Village, and I tried some
of the ones I knew about. They helped for a while, but I knew I was
only runnin’ from myself.
I at least started one thing I always meant to do and never had.
There was a congregation of black Jews in New York and I went up
there and started takin’ classes in instruction. They was a
little surprised—the Jewish faith takes converts, but
doesn’t go after ’em, and you really have to work to
join that religion—but I found it real interestin’ and
a real relief from the Bible thumpers of my childhood. Sam
wasn’t exactly the world’s most religious Jew, but deep
down it wasn’t just cultural. Deep down he really believed
it, and that was more than I could say about myself, so it seemed
to make sense. Actually, tellin’ the rabbi about
Sam—and his condition—without, of course,
revealin’ the hows and wheres, hurt me a little ’cause
he got real skeptical. “If Sam were a Catholic, I think
you’d be entering a nunnery now,” he said. It took some
time to convince him that I really meant it.
New York’s not the best place to be alone, though,
particularly if you’re a woman. Go into a bar and either ten
guys would try and put the make on you—and five women, too,
if you stayed in the Village—or you’d be wallflowered
out. Same with discos and other dance places, and it didn’t
feel right goin’ to the theater alone. About the only place
was the movies, and I went to see a bunch of ’em. And, yeah,
I did allow myself to get picked up a few times and I even went to
bed with a couple of one-night stands. I needed it. I
thought—hoped—Sam would understand. They was like the
drugs, though. They helped, but only for a little while.
I called Bill’s office in Philadelphia often about Sam,
but it was always the same news. No change. Finally, one night, I
was standin’ there naked lookin’ at myself in a mirror
and thinkin’ how fast and easy the fat goes on and how hard
it is to get off. I finally had it out with myself in that mirror,
too. Okay, girl, now what? You keep on like this, you’ll
slit your wrists in a year or wind up in a permanent heroin haze.
You got so much money you could light your cigarettes with it. You
can go anywhere you want, do anything you want, and what good is it
doin you? You don’t want to go nowheres or do nothin’.
You can go out and buy some business and run it, but you
don’t know no business but investigations and you done all
you could in that. You could just screw around, until you got to be
a fifty-year-old three-hundred-pound diabetic who had to buy it. If
this was reversed the way you thought it could be, you knew Sam
could handle it, but you can’t. Find some nice guy and shack
up with him? You already played with that, and you know that
wouldn’t be fair to him or you. It’d be a lie, a
let’s pretend.
Yeah, that was part of it, too. You don’t know no
business but investigations . . . Anyone who gets close enough to learn anything will probably
get hooked . . . That other world is the only thing they got
left . . . There’s no possible cure for these people unless we
find the origin world . . .
“Sam? Do you think it’s possible to do it? Do
you think I can do it?”
My conversion would have to wait. God knew how I felt, anyways.
The next day I took the train back down to Philadelphia and
arranged with the Company to visit Sam at the Center.
Aldrath Prang met me personally when I arrived, which surprised
me. “News?” I asked him.
“Some. Not about your husband, although there are some
recent encouraging signs of increased brain activity. I thought you
had a right to be informed of the progress, or lack of it,
we’re making.”
“I’m very interested.”
“You were quite right about the shift of activity. Larger
quantities are going to the other target world, and they seem to be
preparing to set up some facilities in a South American country
where absolute privacy and absolute license can be bought and paid
for. They’re still limited to the one Pennsylvania access,
but they seem to have recently completed a minor substation.
It’s no more elaborate than Vogel’s or Cranston’s
and far less versatile, but it gives them some freedom.”
“Yeah? That costs money and lots of expert manpower,
don’t it?”
“It does, but they seem to be willing to pay any
price—and able to do so—and most of a substation could
be built, in unrelated modules far apart, within your own country
right now, requiring only some small but vital sections to be added
from other worlds. It’s not difficult to do, unfortunately.
The competition, as you know, has a number of safe worlds with just
such substations. One could easily be dismantled and reestablished
component by component. They did basically that in setting up the
ambush in the Labyrinth. Which reminds me—how is your
wound?”
“Gone,” I told him, and that was the literal truth.
I never seen nothin’ like it. When it was ready to go, that
bandage, which withstood showers and rain and all the rest, just
fell off and there was nothin’ there. No scars, no marks of
any kind, no skin discoloration. It was a hell of a gash, yet you
couldn’t even tell now that anything had ever happened there.
“But gettin’ back to the other—what about the bad
guys? I mean, there’s got to be a couple who really know
what’s goin’ on now, both local and from off-world.
They need a Vogel type for this.”
“There is, alas, no shortage of Vogel types. A number of
locals may be being raised up and prepped—there is also no
end to the scientific amoralists who would jump at the chance of a
project like this, although the same problem exists as existed with
Vogel’s researchers. They are experimenting along given lines
with a license to freelance off on their own, but none are actually
told what they are looking for. The only off-world presences are a
man who is overseeing the South American operation and a woman who
is handling things up north. The man is called Dr. Carlos, the
woman is known only as Addison, both cover names, naturally. So far
we have been unable to get photographs, let alone more intimate
data, on the pair, except that Carlos is dark, looks like an
Indian—that’s the description, I can only offer
it—and speaks with an odd accent, and this Addison is young,
not terribly attractive, and has very short hair, wears glasses,
and is described as a cold fish who likes men’s clothing. We
suspect that they were part of Vogel’s team on his world and
were not present at the compound when it blew and therefore used
other exits.”
“Better than nothin’, but not much. And you
can’t catch ’em at the substation?”
“We have it covered all the time, but no. Only the
couriers. Remember, though, they did have access to a stationmaster
who could both legitimately and illegitimately request sufficient
spare parts for almost anything, and we didn’t know about the
one Vogel tried to use.”
That stopped me. “You mean it’s possible
there’s another someplace there? One you don’t know
about?”
“It’s possible. There are a thousand weak points of
one degree or another across any world from the Arctic to
Antarctica. We have very few people who even know of this world and
we are limited that way. Sensing, let alone tracing, a power drain
and tracking it to its source is bad enough with full
resources.”
“Uh huh. Like tracin’ a phone call.” I
did see, too. With all them points, so long as they turned
the power on, used it, and shut down real fast, that small a drain
might not even be noticed and definitely not traceable. The bet was
it wasn’t noplace geographically convenient, though. If it
was, they wouldn’t be riskin’ improvin’ the
Pennsylvania substation unless that was some kind of
diversion—and if it was, then they knew we was on to
’em so why set up all this new stuff? No, bet on the other
station bein’ in the middle of nowhere, like the Andes or the
Congo or maybe Fiji. Useful, but not convenient. And to get enough
bread and people to do anything major, they have to tip off the man
behind it. It was real tricky.
“Any progress on your science detective work?”
He shook his head. “We’re as far as we can go
without new people to try new things on, and we don’t dare
pull any from this other world or they will pack and run. We have
well-placed operatives there, but they can’t get too close
and at the minimum safe distance it’s too far to learn much
more than this.”
“The Security Committee’s still in the dark about
all this?”
“Yes, but not for much longer. We can’t go on static
like this or we just watch them do their job in ignorance. Sooner
or later we will have to vastly expand, increase our monitoring,
and perhaps go in with all we have. That takes money and people and
technical support and that means the committee. It might drive them
underground, or we might get lucky. At least it will set them back,
and if we’re fortunate enough to nab an Addison or Carlos we
might well win.”
“Not without somebody inside, you won’t. See,
they got somebody inside—right here. Without
somebody to tell, gettin’ a Carlos or Addison would be sheer
luck.”
I asked him two favors. One was to visit the ex-addicts again,
the other to see Sam—alone.
“No problem, but there are few patients left now. We had
several suicides, and a few whom we were able to treat with
hypnotherapy and find places for. The few left are those for whom,
for one reason or another, we have found no place, but who can be
monitored against doing away with themselves.”
The patient I decided to talk to was named Donna, and she was at
one time a secretary in the Atlanta of Vogel’s world. She had
fallen in love with a young Party man with ambition, fed him some
information on her bosses that would help his advancement, and then
got caught doing it. She had been tried by a Party court and
sentenced to “useful imprisonment,” which meant being
sent to the Montrose Hospital and Asylum near Houston, site of many
medical and psychological experiments on humans and one in which
Vogel’s people had a part.
It was unnerving to talk to her. She had stuck in my mind from
before because she was one of the ones who had stayed naked in her
room always feeling herself up. She still was. She was also a
little unnerved by me; I don’t think she’d ever seen a
black woman clothed and with more than one thought in her head
before and she couldn’t quite believe it.
“Every day they’d take me in a little room and give
me a jolt of juice,” she told me. “It didn’t take
right away. You get that rush—” She shivered and closed
her eyes, remembering it, and it took a minute or so for her to
pick it up again. “—then you get a little sick and
that’s it. After a week or so, though, it took.”
“What’s it like?”
“You ever had an orgasm? Well, it’s like that, only
all over your body and a thousand times more intense. Like nothing
else. You come out of it, but you don’t feel down, you feel
good, but you want that rush again. You live for it.
It’s what keeps you going—the thought that every day
you’ll get it again, always as good. The rest of the
day—well, it’s kinda funny. You’re all
right—I mean, you feel great, the best you ever
felt—but you get these urges. Compulsions, really. You never
know when they’ll come on. You slowly get real turned on, I
mean real up, and then you can’t think of anything but sex,
and you got to have it, and you stay up at real high tension until
you do. Another time, you just got to exercise. You only feel good
doing it. You get hungry sometimes for crazy things, like
you’re pregnant or something, but other stuff, things
you’ve always loved, taste horrible. It’s like
you’re not really in control of yourself, but yet
you’re still you. You lose all modesty, all integrity, all
the brakes. Inhibitions, that’s the word. Brakes get put on,
but not by you. Almost in spite of you. I can’t explain it.
It’s like you lose all sense of what’s right and wrong,
but something else decides—and it might not decide the way
you would have.”
“It sounds like you become some kinda robot or
something.”
“Uh uh. It’s not like that at all. You’re
still you, and there’s lots of time in the day when you are.
You know what’s happened, but you don’t really care.
You’re basically free—they never even bothered to watch
over me most of the time and I was never locked in—but you
won’t go. There’s no way you’re going to miss
your next juice shot. That’s the control. If the one person
in the world who can give it to you asked you to stand on your head
or shoot somebody, you might feel bad about it but you
wouldn’t hesitate to do it. If you had an unlimited supply of
the juice you’d tell ’em to stuff it, but if it’s
obey orders or no juice, you’ll strangle your own
mother.”
“You sound bright, intelligent, and you’re not
hooked anymore. Why do you stay here—like that?”
“It’s what I mean that I can’t really
describe,” she told me. “The juice needs its own juice.
It changes you. First time they tell you to do something horrible
or disgusting and you won’t, so they don’t give you the
juice and you go to hell real fast. One thing they wanted to know
was whether they could cause the stuff to change the body and brain
if one particular thing was demanded to get your jolt and they kept
it from you for a while. They ordered me to go, every evening, down
to the military and staff wings, stark naked, and proposition every
man and woman I could find and do whatever they wanted. Every
night. I fought it. Some of them were brutal, sadists and the like.
They kept me from the juice for a while until I finally had to
agree. They did this every night for weeks. Finally, the juice
learned. One day, I woke up, and that was all I wanted to do. It
told me when to eat and like that, but the rest of the time I only
wanted that. I was totally turned on and I stayed turned on. Not in
the head—it was physical.”
“It made you a raging nymphomaniac?”
“I guess that’s the right word. I didn’t want
clothes, I didn’t want anything except I was compelled to go
down and do that. I wanted to do it. I had to do
it. I lost any will to fight—anything. I still can’t.
My voice got higher, my breasts and hips got bigger,
everything.”
“But that’s over now,” I said.
“It’s not there anymore.”
“I’d take it again in a minute, if I could,”
she told me. “Right now they got me on half a dozen drugs.
Otherwise I’d be all over you begging for it. They say my
brain’s permanently locked in that pattern—chemicals
and all, and that my hormone level is monstrous. The drugs
I’m taking now are blockers, that keep the worst of it from
being triggered, but without them I wouldn’t even be human.
I’d just be a bitch in heat all the time.”
“But—can’t they do nothin’ for you? I
mean, physically?”
“Sure. A oophorectomy and brain surgery. They say
I’d come out sexless, a nothing. That’s bad enough, but
they say there’d be side effects because of where the damage
and changes are and what they know from having to replace the areas
in natural brain damage. At the very least they say I’d have
no feelings. No love, no hate, no envy, no greed, no friendship, no
loyalty, no compassion, no mercy, no—nothing. I would think,
and remember, but I’d be like a machine. I still have
feelings. I wouldn’t want to be some machine. No hopes, no
ambitions, nothing. If that’s the way it is, I’d rather
stay right here, just like this.”
It was hard to think of this pretty, intelligent young woman a
neutered machine, and I could see her point—and the
Center’s. She was still a fund for research and information.
They could “cure” her, sorta, but since the cure would
be worse than the disease they wouldn’t force it.
The interview was sobering in a number of ways. I didn’t
underestimate what them Nazis who could gas millions and make
lampshades outta ’em and sleep like babies and even go to
church every Sunday could come up with. The scariest thing was,
somebody with a real strong will and sense of identity and purpose
could break even heroin, though it sure wasn’t easy, or at
least live a fairly normal life on methadone. But
this—no self-cure possible, no methadone-style
alternative, and if you got cured you wound up like Donna between a
rock and a hard place.
Donna, though, made me mad. She was bright, alert,
good-lookin’, and she had real potential. Anybody born and
raised in a south where Martin Luther King got gassed as a kid if
he got born at all and who come from some Nazi background to boot
who could learn to talk to me and accept me as an equal human being
in that time could adapt to other, better societies. They cheated
her—and how many others? They never saved more than two dozen
here, all they could sneak out and treat without revealin’
their interest. How many more Donnas died in agony when we took
Vogel out as supplier? Hundreds? Thousands? How many more was they
gonna make in this other place, and maybe other places as well if
they went underground again or got whatever they was goin’
after with these projects. And for what? So some shithead born to
power and gold silverware here could get a little more personal
power.
Then, too, Donna got me to thinkin’ ’bout Sam, who I
was gonna go see now. Different cause, but they both had brain
damage, and there was still only so much that could be done. Sam
was all wrapped up and still floatin’ in that tank, but for
the first time I began to wonder not just if he would ever wake up
but whether it would be a blessin’ if he did. Would he
remember me? Be palsied? Be unable to tie his own shoes?
“Sam, I know you can’t hear me or understand me,
though they say my voice gets through at least,” I said
outside the window lookin’ at his chamber, “but
I’m gonna talk anyways, ’cause I never made a big
decision or took a big case without talkin’ it over with
you.
“I can’t hack it alone, Sam, not back home. Without
you, there’s only one thing I’m good at and
that’s investigations. I know the last one didn’t go
none too well, but that was them and their experts and their damned
computers. There’s a lot of innocent, good folks bein’
crippled and put through hell out there, Sam. Bein’ put
through it by a whole bunch of cruds at least as bad as Vogel.
I’m gonna take a crack at ’em. All of ’em. I
want the bastards. I want the ones who did this to you and
are doin’ worse to others and who’ll be in charge of
all this if whatever they’re plannin’ comes off. The
damn company’s foul enough as it is; I can’t sit back
when I see firsthand that it might well wind up in the hands of
Vogels and Hitlers and all the rest. Maybe I can’t lick it.
Maybe it’s bigger’n I am. Maybe I’m just gonna
sell myself into slavery and hell. But I got to try,
’cause there ain’t nobody else and it needs
doin’. If I can’t be Nora Charles to your Nick, then
there’s nothin’ for me back home.
“It’ll be just my luck if you come outta that damn
pool ten minutes after I’m stuck beyond any hope myself, but
if you do, then you just play support like always, ’cause the
only hope I got is findin’ the source world and nailin’
them bastards to the wall. You’ll cuss and scream and yell,
but you’ll break it with or without me, ’cause
we’re the best, Sam. We’re a damn sight better than
this fancy security and we’re better than their
crooks.” I stopped a moment. I was cryin’ too much, and
I really wanted him to thrash around in there and scream at me, but
nothin’ happened and the monitors showed no real change in
his condition.
“So, so long, sweetheart. The problems of two crazy people
don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy
world.”
I walked out and went to find Aldrath Prang.
I will say they came right quick—almost
too quick, I remember thinkin’. I couldn’t help
wonderin’ if some of them folks gettin’ to the dead and
dyin’ and gettin’ emergency medical and transport
through the Labyrinth wasn’t some of the same folks who done
the shootin’. A security alert went out for all of ’em
up and down the line, and nobody not authorized or unexpected came
past either switch point. Now, sure, there was a lot of worlds
goin’ toward the headquarters junction, but these people had
to know the Labyrinth, have almost unlimited access to it, and have
some kind of communications that allowed them to know, at three
different substation points, just when to jump in and jump us.
They not only had vehicles in the Labyrinth when they wanted
them, they had at least one that was a small hospital all by
itself, but Sam was the only one they loaded in and he didn’t
look long for this world. They pumped so many bullets into
Vogel’s fat head that it wasn’t nothin’ but a
grease spot, but then they went and shot everybody else. They shot
me, too, it turned out, only I didn’t even notice until they
rushed to give me medical help. The bullet tore a nasty gash right
in my left side, but it didn’t hit nothin’ fatal or
even cripplin’.
By the time this little ’copterlike thing with a seat on it come
for me, Sam and the big medical truck was long gone. All I wanted
to do now was to follow them, to be with him at the last. Last
thing I wanted was Sam dyin’ without me there.
So help me, they still made us go through the whole routine at
the entrance to headquarters, although I was okay. The best medical
knowledge anywhere was just inside, but I wondered how long it took
’em to test Sam and spray their damned rays before they got
him where he had to go.
Still, they didn’t waste no time gettin’ me to the
surface and off to what could only be called their big medical
center. It was out in the boondocks just like Mayar’s place,
but it was an enormous complex of buildings, rounded, cubed,
A-framed, and everything else, and it went up and out for a long
ways.
They finally gave me a shot for the pain, though frankly I was
too keyed up emotionally and physically to feel much, and I dozed
in spite of myself for most of the trip.
It was still kinda weird and frightenin’ to be rushed into
this place with all these golden perfect people around
talkin’ away in that singsong language and not bein’
able to talk to them or understand what they was sayin’ or
doin’. They put me in some kind of pack and treated the wound
almost by remote control, but the itching and pain stopped almost
at once and when I had the thing taken off there was a kind of
feltlike bandage over it and just about no feelin’ right
there at all. Some kind of anesthetic in the bandage, I
guessed.
I kept tryin’ to get some word on Sam, who I knew had to
be brought to this place, but all I got were shrugs and apologetic
looks. They took me to a small room with a bed and a window that
didn’t look out on much, as well as a sink and bathroom, and
kinda signed to me to stay there. I didn’t have much choice,
really.
I had had one hell of a day. I’d gone from despair and
surrender as a damned slave on that Nazi world to complete joy and
relief at bein’ rescued to even worse seein’ Sam get it
like that—and in the head, too. Thing was, he was
blockin’ the finish-off shot to me. He got it savin’ my
life. That made me feel even more miserable.
After a couple hours of just layin’ there, Bill Markham
came in, lookin’ like death warmed over himself. He needed a
bath and a shave and he looked like he hadn’t slept in a
week, but he’d come as soon as he’d got the word and
could get in here. I was relieved to see somebody, anybody, I could
talk to.
“Sam’s here,” he told me right off, “and
he’s still alive. That’s the good news. The bad news is
that the slug took a chunk out of his skull on the right side and
we don’t know just what damage there is. He’s in what
passes for brain surgery here now, and will be for some time.
There’s nothing to do but wait.” He sank down tiredly
in the one little chair near the bed. “I’m really
sorry, Brandy. Ishould have guessed! I feel like
a complete idiot!”
“No, none of us seen it, Bill. Now dat dey gon’ and
done it, it be de only thing dey could do. When dey go bad, dey go
weal bad.”
He looked up, but he didn’t really believe a word of it.
Fact was, I was kickin’ myself over it, too. Damn it,
we’d had a runnin’ gun battle through the Labyrinth and
into another world once. Only made sense that what you could do one
way you could do the other—if you had the information. We was
all too smug. Even Bill admitted that Vogel’s getaway
substation was unknown to security. This whole thing was just too
damned complicated and the Labyrinth itself had just too many
entrances and exits to ever secure it. No wonder they was able to
run this drug or whatever back and forth for a while without
gettin’ caught—and then only by lucky accident.
He looked over at me. “Look, there’s nothing to see
in the surgery, and all your medical records were transferred here
by Jamispur. They tell me you lost some blood but that your
wound’s a lucky one and it should heal completely in a week
to ten days. Maybe you should think of using this waiting time to
get them to restore you. Get rid of Beth, get your teeth and jaw
back on so you talk normally, that kind of thing. You want to be
ready when Sam wakes up.”
I knew he was just tryin’ to divert me. Yeah, when Sam
wakes up. If Sam wakes up . . . Still,
I sure as hell didn’t want to stay this way any longer than I
had to.
They used Jamispur’s hypnoscan records to fix that first,
since that was the biggest headache, and while I was under they
used the time to do some of the corrective dental work needed. Beth
wasn’t erased, exactly, but she became a memory, not a
personality, like somebody you once knew real good and close. I
liked it that way. I wanted to remember Beth, and all the Beths in
all them worlds out there. Anytime in the future when I was
feelin’ sorry for myself or wallowing in self-pity I’d
just think of Beth and the others and know just what
blessin’s I had.
I couldn’t talk at all after the dental and facial stuff,
but by then several English speakers were around for my benefit.
That hypnoscan could be damned useful as well as dangerous.
They told me that Markham had simply passed out and was sent to
bed with a sedative to sleep it off, but then they took me down to
see Sam. He was in a special wing just for head injuries, the most
common and still the hardest things to deal with.
They understood a hell of a lot more about the brain than we
did. I think they knew just how it worked and could do tricks with
it, but head injuries were no less tragic here for all that. They
could even grow new brain tissue, something the body has problems
with, but they couldn’t replace what you lost, only give a
replacement place for something else to be written. Sam might have
lots of problems, even memory problems, when he woke
up—if he woke up.
He wasn’t much to see. They had him floatin’ in a
tank covered in some kinda liquid that sure wasn’t water, his
head down to his big nose encased in a special kind of bandage, all
sorts of tubes leadin’ to and from his body to big machines.
I was afraid he’d drown, but they assured me that he was
gettin’ all they could give. Even they didn’t know if
it’d be enough, though.
In that chamber I couldn’t even kiss him or talk to him or
hold his hand. It was tough.
He had plenty of brain activity, so he wasn’t brain dead,
but they didn’t know much more. He might be out for days, for
weeks, for months, even forever. There was no way of tellin’
now ’cept to monitor and wait.
Within a day I could talk again, and I got to admit that from
that point on I never again was the least bit self-conscious or
embarrassed about how I talked. Anybody didn’t like it, piss
on them. In fact, that whole experience really changed me for the
better in a lot of ways. I was a lot more humble now ’bout my
own strong will. Damn, just bein’ in that damned
world started breakin’ me. The technicians at the
Center—that’s what they called the medical place, just
the Center—told me that, yeah, it was true, if they’d
started torturin’ me or used hypnoscans or drugs on me while
I was in control I’d revert to Beth, but just the fact that
Vogel knew that kept him from doin’ it. He loved
breakin’ people. That was his hobby and his fun. No fun in
trippin’ somebody over when you don’t figure she really
knows what you want to know anyhow.
But he was lyin’ through his teeth ’bout me
turnin’ into Beth slow and on my own. Fact was, the Beth
personality was there, but it was real weak compared to mine.
He planted that seed, and I swallowed it, and just
’cause I swallowed it Beth was able to get control. Vogel was
right when he said anybody can be broken, but in the end
you’re the one that breaks you. He didn’t
really want Beth; he wanted an obedient slave girl who had all my
knowledge and talents and abilities. And just ’cause his kind
was the bosses on that Nazi world didn’t mean we didn’t
have ’em just like him on our world, or most any world.
I was stronger, too, because of that mission. More
self-confident, I think, but also knowin’ my limits. I was
ready now to not worry what anybody else thought about me and just
be me and cope with whatever came along.
I didn’t have them put me back all the way, I admit. I
never was able to grow or keep straight hair before, and with my
own more rounded face I kinda liked the look. They told me it would
keep growin’ straight so long as I only cut it at the ends.
If I ever shaved my head it’d come back the old way. I also
kept that creamy complexion. Folks spend millions tryin’ to
get a nice, even, perfect complexion like that.
My body was toughened by those days I spent with no clothes in
all weather. I found it damned hard just to wear shoes and so went
barefoot most of the time. The golden people’s saris felt
okay, but I knew I was gonna haveta ease back into more normal
clothes.
Fact was, I was ready to go out and enjoy life and conquer the
damned world, and I didn’t care if I was starvin’ and
shunned so long as I was free, but it just didn’t mean a
damned thing without Sam.
The trouble was, I couldn’t imagine life without Sam, and
at the same time I was already easin’ into just that. All
that stuff I spouted to him about risks and gettin’ hit by a
truck—I didn’t really believe that. Besides, we was
talkin’ about if somethin’ happened to me. I
just never even imagined that anything would take Sam from me
’cept’n my own death.
After a few days, I met Bill Markham and Aldrath Prang for a
debriefin’ and brain session.
“You set us up,” I told them. “One of you,
anyways, with that damned dinner meet. Whichever one it was was
handed the time, place, and all the rest on a platter—and you
still didn’t catch him!”
“It was one of Mayar Eldrith’s schemes,”
Aldrath told me. “He is a senior vice president and chairman
of the Security Committee. In other words, he is my boss. I was
powerless to prevent it, although I recommended strongly against
it.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and what’s he say now
that he’s lost Vogel and maybe killed Sam and the
others?”
“The usual,” the security chief replied with a
shrug. “He is blaming it on me and on security in
general.”
Bill grunted. “He is on our list, isn’t
he?”
“Near the top,” Aldrath admitted. “But he is
also near the top in both social class, and corporate power. You
see the problem. These are all high-ranking, extremely powerful
men.”
“Who would know enough ’bout security’s ways
and all that would be needed to have set up this thing?” I
asked them. “I mean, not all of ’em could pull this
off, could they?”
“Any of them might,” Aldrath replied,
“although some are more likely than others. Certainly the
vice president could do it effectively without even touching it
himself, and Mukasa Lamdukur is in charge of day-to-day
operations.”
“The one with the airhead mistress.”
He nodded. “Alas, so. And Basuti Alimati, who is something
of a fanatical personality but whose office handles much of the
routine business communications between our many divisions. I
cannot rule out the other two, since Dringa heads Research and
Development and Hanrin holds the security purse strings, but
neither of those two have as much day-to-day interaction with
operations. They would need a good number of support and managerial
personnel to do the actual work. Neither is particularly
technically oriented.”
Even Bill was surprised. “You mean the head of R & D
isn’t technically oriented?”
“He authorizes a lot of things depending on what his
advisors, both technical and political, recommend, but he
understands little. He is a typical executive. What can I say?
Basuti and Mukasa, on the other hand, are both inquisitive and
highly intelligent and make a point of learning as much as possible
about their responsibilities. Mayar understands almost nothing,
being a politician, but if he wished he could through his vast
power and position arrange practically anything.”
None of that helped much. We still had five big, fat suspects,
no real motive, no real clear knowledge of the plot, and while two
was most likely suspects and one was in the best position to do
just about anything, the fact was the least likely suspects
couldn’t be ruled out. Back to square one.
“Listen, like I told your men, I didn’t get much out
of Vogel, but whatever else that bastard was I don’t think he
was no traitor. He was real surprised and real upset when he
learned that it was the Company after his hide, and the reason he
didn’t face us was ’cause whoever he got his orders
from was high enough up that it woulda been his neck in a noose. He
was had, though, by this dude. I think he got routine orders from
somebody to set this thing up and he didn’t think it was
crazy ’cause he had the perfect setup to experiment on
people, and he didn’t ask no questions not only ’cause
it was from so high up but also ’cause he was gettin’
payoffs for it, like that hypnoscan in the basement. Imagine a
paranoid like him with a hypnoscan!”
“Agreed. He knew and we blew it,” Bill said.
“I mean, our computer simulations actually said that an
attempt within the Labyrinth was a likely thing, but that was if
the whole plan went down pretty much as it was. When he escaped
with you and then lost us for over a day and a half, all our
resources went into locating and then tracking you. I was
constantly shifting people inside the Labyrinth from one track to
another to cover all the possibilities. The fact was, the other
dangers just weren’t important if we didn’t have Vogel
alive in the first place. When we got him, we were just so damned
happy and smug we forgot to put everything else in place before
moving him. It really was our fault, and I don’t know any way
around that.”
“All right, I’ll buy that,” I told them. Hell,
if they wanted the guilt trip, let ’em have it. Their lapse
was understandable but, damn it, it was their fault. I had
my own problems to worry about—I couldn’t do their job,
too. “The thing is, what happens now?”
The question seemed to catch both of ’em off guard.
“What do you mean?” Aldrath asked.
“You got a skunk, a traitor, high up. Somebody who makes
even Vogel look human. That skunk’s gone to a whole lotta
trouble to set somethin’ up that is definitely aimed at the
Company, maybe at its heart, and it comes right out of the Security
Committee.”
“But we lost Vogel!” Bill protested.
“Yeah, so you lost Vogel—but so did
he!”
That seemed to hit the both of ’em like some new
concussion grenade. I guess in a way they was just like
Vogel—you get so much power, you get so arrogant and
self-confident, you can’t see your damned nose in front of
your face.
“Go on,” said Aldrath Prang.
“Look, how long you figure this has been goin’ on?
This drug thing, I mean?”
“Two, maybe three years so far. Why?”
“What’s two or three years to a guy fifty to seventy
who expects to live another hundred to hundred and fifty years?
That’s why he’s takin’ the time to experiment and
movin’ so slow and cautious. But we just blew a lot of that
research down the drain. We don’t have it, but neither does
our big boy, and he ain’t gonna get no more from Vogel or his
world. They wasn’t done—that’s clear. How long
was it supposed to go on? Another year? Five? Or maybe until they
found out what they wanted to know no matter what. Well, they
ain’t found it yet ’cause they was still doin’
research and experiments. We don’t know what they’re
lookin’ for and why, but it’s pretty damned clear that
if they don’t find it then there’s no plot, no threat,
no scheme. They just lost their main man and the technicians who
done most of the work, but they still need the work and now the
heat’s on real hard. Now, he’s got two choices. Either
open up somewheres else and start from scratch, or step up in a
place he’s already at. You tell me which one’s less
risky and less trouble.”
Bill thought a moment. “Aldrath, who knows about that
second world except us and your immediate staff? Was it in your
report to the committee?”
“No. Since we were doing only surveillance activities
there, I thought it prudent not to mention it or we might drive the
operation totally underground. They do not even know we intercepted
the courier. They were told that we discovered it by accident
during routine checks of Vogel’s station.” He paused a
moment. “Sometimes you find it best and prudent to tell your
superiors only what they need to know. We needed a plan for Vogel,
lots of manpower and appropriations, all the rest. We had to take a
station, have an attacking force, plus all the monitoring both in
that world and within the Labyrinth. The committee had to be
told.”
“And I’d say that would be used, since it already is
set up,” Bill added. “To try the same thing that they
did with Vogel with a new stationmaster would be too risky for
words now that we know how he did it, and it would take a long
time. I think you’re right. I think they’ll step it up
where they already are and go with what they have. If it goes bad,
then they can always start new.”
Somethin’ just sorta snapped inside me. Maybe it was my
brains, but it all come together. “Look,” I told them,
“I want this bastard. I want him bad. You know the odds on
Sam. They grow longer every day, every week. I tell you, if he
goes, there ain’t much I got to live for and that’s the
truth. All I got is a burnin’ hatred and will to get this man
and nail his hide to Sam’s tank.”
Bill looked at me and shook his head. “You’ve done
your bit, Brandy. More than done it. You have millions,
you’re still young and attractive, you still have quite a
life ahead no matter what happens to Sam. You’re in shock
now, and grief, too, and I can’t say you’re going to
ever forget that, but you’ll learn to live with it just like
others have. Besides, what if Sam comes out of it and you’re
back in the fire again?”
I didn’t really believe that, any of it. I accepted that
much. I had no family, no friends, and all I could look forward to
was the best friends money could buy. I wasn’t real unhappy
in that broke-down office in Camden with the roaches and shit once
Sam was there. Half of me was down in that damned tank or in
splatter on the Labyrinth floor. I didn’t want to
learn to live with it.
“I want this bastard no matter what the cost, and I think
Sam would, too.”
Bill sighed, and I could almost see his brain workin’.
Half of him was wracked with guilt and embarrassment over
blowin’ this at the end, and the other half was real tempted.
He really wanted me to do it; he just didn’t want me on his
conscience right next to Sam.
“Look,” he said carefully, “this isn’t
the same thing. We don’t have a Vogel to snatch here. We
don’t even have a station or operation on that world, just
some agents, a communications link, and some weak points. They only
have access to it because the Pennsylvania weak point is between
two heavily traveled worlds and the Labyrinth comes on for brief
periods spontaneously there, and we can’t build a substation
without getting the authority and approval of the committee.
There’s no spy satellites, no big team with all sorts of
connections, nothing. There’s no backup.”
“If I can be watched and get word out, then that’s
the only backup I’ll need. If I get in too deep, even the
damned United States Marines ain’t gonna be no help to
me.”
“It’s a string of hookers and the mob, you
know,” Bill reminded me. “To get close there, you run a
real risk of getting hooked on this stuff yourself, even without
meaning to. You’re over the age they like, but if they find
out who you are or suspect you’re working for us,
they’ll do it.”
When you been broke as a naked slave in chains, bein’
hooked don’t seem so damned horrible no more. “I know
the risks. But if I nail this bastard, it’ll be worth
it.”
“Yeah, but what if you do and then Sam comes around? So we
break ’em, but you’re hooked for good or die from a
supply cutoff. No, I can’t allow it.”
“You told me they could break the addiction. Here,
probably.”
“We have had some success, yes,” Aldrath admitted,
“but it is very unpleasant and very ugly and quite often
results in irreversible brain damage. Come, let us go over and
we’ll let you see just what we are facing and what you are
truly talking about.”
We went to one of the separate buildings, away from the main
center. This was a security building, with all sorts of controls on
gettin’ in and gettin’ out, but with Aldrath Prang
along there weren’t too many doors you couldn’t get
through.
In some ways it was hard to think of the Center as a hospital,
since even though you had patients and some regular kind of rooms
none of the treatment rooms or labs looked anything like treatment
rooms or labs. We went into this room that looked more like some
computer room or library. There was a bunch of screens, chairs, and
both microphones and keyboards all around, ’cept them
keyboards had about a hundred keys and the symbols on them made
Arabic or Chinese look real familiar. Aldrath sat down at one and
typed a few things and the screen came on. It looked like one of
them medical shows where they blow up the blood or cells to giant
size.
“There is the enemy,” he told us. It all looked like
icky brown slime to me with lots of little things floatin’ in
it. “I’ll blow it up and you can see it
face-to-face.”
The thing zoomed in, and suddenly there was a real pretty
pattern of multicolored see-through shapes. They looked kinda like
them Christmas stars with all the points comin’ out like
sunbursts, but somehow they all fit together. Inside, they seemed
to be made up of millions of little strings, like jellied shredded
wheat.
“I never seen nothin’ like that,” I told
him.
“Neither had we,” he replied. “Separately,
they aren’t much, and the amount of magnification needed to
get them this large and this clear is enormous. They’re not
quite as big as a common virus, but much more complex. The raw
stuff has a different pattern than you see here—really
colorless, with fewer spikes and more tightly packed granules. When
it invades a host, it makes the entire trip through the bloodstream
in a minute or so and finally settles in the brain, but it takes a
grand tour first. When it settles in, it changes, and it’s
never the same twice in any two individuals. It adapts to what it
finds in incredible ways. At the start, it seizes control of vital
chemical areas of the brain, turns off the body’s defenses
but only to it, then reproduces and grows to a certain size that
the body can support without harming it, then stops. As a body
manager, it’s actually quite good and unique to each
individual.”
“You mean—it thinks?”
“No, we’re pretty sure it doesn’t, not in any
sense we think of it. It can live only in a host, and its sole
imperative seems to be survival of itself and its host. It cleans
house, and much more efficiently gets rid of invading bacteria,
viruses, you name it. Cancerous and precancerous conditions are
identified, attacked, and dissolved. Arteries are unblocked. Body
chemistry works at maximum efficiency. Hosts are actually healthier
and in better condition than any human we find
naturally.”
“You make it sound almost like somethin’ worth
havin’.”
“We think that in the world where it evolved, it
is something worth having. The only way you can catch it
is by sexual transmission. I could take a vialful of the stuff and
inject it directly into you and you couldn’t get it, since it
would be individually adapted to its host. To reproduce, it
actually builds a cluster of virgin and unadapted units encased in
a gelatinlike shell with a mind of its own and some real power. It
not only goes in with sperm, it can appear in females as well and
actually invade upstream, as it were, through the penis of the
male. The world where it comes from has no addiction problem, since
they live with it naturally the same as we live with a host of
beneficial bacteria, and, as I said, it pays its own freight by
making a more efficient body. We know that host is a Type One
because it’s close enough to us that this thing can adapt,
recognize, and use our body so well, but it’s not a hundred
percent.”
I nodded. “Bill told us. It can’t keep livin’
in our bodies, right?”
“Right. First of all, there seems to be something, some
element, that it needs that our bodies lack. It forms its
reproductive units, but they don’t work. They fall apart and
are gobbled by the would-be host’s immune system. Therefore,
it can’t reproduce—but it doesn’t know that and
keeps trying anyway. Second, this element, which defies isolation,
is present in the clusters we see, but since no more can be made in
our bodies it starts to break down and be expelled or changed,
perhaps by the chemicals of our own bodies, into harmless material.
We suspect the latter, since that would explain why we can’t
find it. Within thirty-six hours the thing starts to die, and
starts killing the host in the process. Only a fresh infusion of
virgin material will restore it. Hence, we have a dangerous and
deadly addiction.”
He turned back to us. “You see, we can’t even take
material from another host and inject it, since it changes to be
specific only to that host and it’s using every bit of it for
its own use anyway. The virgin cells won’t grow on their
own—they need a host—and so we can’t make our own
supply. Since the carrier in the drug modules appears to be semen,
we’ve made a genetic analysis of the host and we’re
trying to find the world it comes from. The problem is, we’ve
not yet found an exact match and there are hundreds of thousands of
worlds in this genetic category. We’ll find it, eventually,
but it takes lots of time. I mean, you just can’t walk in to
every world, walk up to the nearest male, and demand a semen sample
for lab analysis.”
Yeah, I could see that. Pardon me, sir, but we in our protective
suits to keep from catchin’ nasty diseases want you to lie
down and jerk off into this here tube for
us . . .
“But Bill said you could cure it.”
Aldrath sighed. “Sort of. The trick is to get a host when
the thing is in full control, not breaking down. Then the subject
is somewhat frozen and suspended, life support slowed, and the
entire organism is then attacked at one time throughout the body.
It is a foreign organism; our scanners can isolate it and
attack it with equal strength all through the body. That kills it,
and keeps it from killing the host, but it doesn’t replace
the body chemicals the thing was managing. We then have to keep the
host in suspension for many weeks while we stimulate the right
areas of the brain and get it used to doing things the old way
again. Then the body is okay, but the mind is something
else. Most of them resist cures to the last moment. When we cure
them, they feel terrible physically and they would go back on the
stuff in a moment no matter what the price, even months
later—which is all we’ve had to study this. It requires
the hypnoscan and psychiatric techniques to remove that craving.
The hypnoscan is a wonderful invention, but it cures nothing. It
can only add and subtract and distort.”
“I see.”
“Only slightly. All of our subjects came from projects run
by Vogel, outside of his compound, and snatched in convincing ways
so neither he nor his people knew we were involved. We’ve
found none without some evidence of brain damage, although we
suspect this was the result of experiments or somebody not getting
their injection in time. The long-term users also retain their
habit patterns. Their inhibitions remain suppressed, their
selfishness remains high, their sexual drives become insatiable in
an attempt to recapture that ultimate high. No one has yet
completed therapy sufficiently to be restored to total normalcy.
Come on. I’ll show you just what we’re up
against.”
We went down to a lower section of the building that began to
look more like a luxury jail than a hospital. I seen
good-lookin’ young guys and pretty young girls sittin’
there in rooms in near constant masturbation. The weird thing was,
you could talk to ’em and they’d talk back, but they
never stopped. Others seemed to act normal, but had problems
talkin’ or writin’ or rememberin’ what they just
said, and others with jerky muscle movements like the palsy. The
best ones seemed tired, run-down, not ambitious or much interested
in doin’ things.
“We could wipe out much of their memories—get rid of
the longing for the high—but to do that we’d have to
rebuild their personalities,” Aldrath told us. “Our
only real hope is to find the world where this stuff comes from. If
we had just one individual from that world and could compare him or
her to one of us with it, we could find the critical chemical
difference. Then we could synthesize it, stabilize the organism,
and find a way to tame this beast. Cure the addiction, block the
reproduction, and those who have it would be able to live normal,
productive lives in the best of health and get its advantages
without its terrible drawbacks.”
I nodded and we walked back out into the sunshine and fresh air.
I was shaken by what I saw, but also angry. I didn’t want no
thing livin’ inside me, but them people and a lot
more was goin’ through hell because they didn’t have
the thing’s parents’ address. Somebody did, but they
didn’t want us to know it.
“That’s the bottom line, Brandy,” Bill told
me. “I don’t want you in there, like that. I
couldn’t handle that on my conscience.”
“But volunteers ain’t standin’ in line to
infiltrate this mess.”
“To say the least. It’s a real trap, since anybody
we send in who gets addicted becomes controlled by them and for
their own self-preservation goes over to the other side. We
can’t snatch and interrogate the underworld figures involved,
since they really don’t seem to have any knowledge beyond
ours worth blowing the only other lead we have. We’ve
considered a switch of some of theirs for some of ours—the
big boys, I mean—but it seems the reason these people were
chosen is that there are no good candidates who would work for us
against them inside that organization. The only possibles are
counterparts who are the same people inside and out and already
bosses themselves—not likely to want to work for us—or
the kind of people who would take the job but wind up enticed by
the power of this thing and be just as bad as the ones they
replaced.”
“We still don’t know where it comes from or how it
gets into our courier network,” Aldrath added. “The
actual couriers who deliver it get messages to pick it up at
different points every time, and only after it’s already
dropped. There’s been no pattern in those drop points that we
can find, and no single individual or group can be linked to most
of the drops.”
I nodded sadly. It shook me bad to see that and know just what
sufferin’ was goin’ on. The worst part was that nobody
did all this just to trap hookers or hook the kind of folks we seen
in that hospital wing. What did they plan to do? What was they
lookin’ for? An immunity agent, so they couldn’t get
hooked? Probably, but that wasn’t all of it, since
you’d need one hell of a population of the world these come
from jerkin’ off all the time to supply any huge amounts of
the stuff. A way to make it work just as good without shots in us
as it did in the people it came from? That didn’t make no
sense, neither, since that would mean no addiction and no control.
It didn’t make no sense. I did have a thought, though.
“What if they got it in here, to this world?” I
asked them. “You could just keep a few big men on a string
and rule it all.”
“We thought of that, of course,” Aldrath replied.
“Our first thought, really. But controls are very strict. We
do not allow it in, and our equipment is set to it. No virgin
material was ever here—that work was done elsewhere. Even if
it was surgically embedded in your body, we’d pick it up,
since it’s an alien compound with a unique structure.
Anything that would shield it from our instruments would show up
the shielding. The computer scanners can’t be altered by
anyone without exactly what was done being public. Not even the
President or Chairman of the Board could smuggle that stuff
in.”
“Yeah, but what if they snuck in one of the folks from the
world that has these natural?”
“First of all, he’d be pretty obvious since
he’d have to have sex to spread it and I’m afraid our
people are—clannish. They wouldn’t do it here, on this
world, other than with their own kind, and rape would be pretty
quickly reported, particularly by a Type One individual. They might
hook a few people before they were caught, but they wouldn’t
get close to the classes with the power by then and, once caught,
we could find the home world this thing comes from from the one who
came in. Besides, one of the things we do when you enter is read
your genetic code. We know their basic genetic code, and
we’re even attempting to clone some cells to see what they
really look like and give us more of a limited range to hunt for
them, but so far without success. Clones in any case don’t
come out as full-blown adults; it takes the same time as with
natural development. So far we’ve had no real luck, and the
code only gives us that vast range of worlds I talked about.
Unfortunately, it’s a pretty common species type, almost as
common as our own. To further minimize the risk, no one from that
family of genetic relatives is permitted in here at all. And nobody
from here, once they take a post in the Corporation,
leaves.”
It did seem like they thought of everything this time.
Sure, you might hook a young one out exploring but he’d
never come back ’cause he couldn’t get his supply of
the stuff while he waited around for twenty or thirty years to get
an important job, if then. This was a puzzler, all right. If not
hookin’ the Board, then what? Or, rather, who?
“What about transport and switchmen?” I suggested.
“Control them and it don’t matter what happens
here.”
“We know what it looks like so we can test for it,”
Aldrath said. “We test everyone four to six times a year for
a variety of things, and anytime we suspect or see anything unusual
or have someone in a critical area. They didn’t even hook
their couriers for that reason. You might hook some stationmasters,
but what does that get you in the end?”
Bill thought for a moment, then said, “It could get
forbidden stuff in and out of places. Ever think of
that?”
“Of course. But Vogel got his hypnoscan without it, and
there’s not much beyond this organism that’s so
dangerous and so valuable to make it worth the risk. Besides, if
that was all, why test it? Why hook fifty young, pretty girls and
make them sell sex for hire? Other substances do as well for that.
Why only women down there? Vogel’s people experimented on men
and women equally, with equal results. We have lots of pieces, but
whenever you build a frame they don’t go together.”
I couldn’t help thinkin’ how Sam woulda loved
this—did love this. Even though he was against my
goin’ undercover, he still had real joy at the puzzle itself
and a real yen to solve it. So did I. Havin’ seen the price,
though, I just couldn’t quite talk myself into it. The price
of solvin’ this one was a one-way ticket to hell.
After six weeks, I went back home. Sam was still in the tank and
there was no change, and I was beginnin’ to get used to the
idea that there might never be. There was sure no reason to hang
around; headquarters world was friendlier and more comfortable than
Vogel’s for me, but I was still an outsider in more ways than
one.
Goin’ home, though, proved only a temporary relief. The
agency was pretty well a dead duck; Sam had handed off his cases to
other PIs before we left and there wasn’t much to pick up on,
and I just didn’t feel much like tryin’ for new
business. I might no longer care what that class of people thought
of me, but that didn’t mean they was gonna keep comin’
in with new jobs. Sure, I could have picked up some work just from
the Company—but it woulda been charity work, just Bill and
the rest tryin’ to give me somethin’ to do.
Not that I had to do much. At first them bastards tried to get
away with payin’ just half the money, since they didn’t
have Vogel alive, but I shamed ’em into the full amount. I
didn’t need it; just the two and a half million was more than
I ever expected to see in my life. It was just the principle of the
thing, damn it.
I took a quarter of a million out and put it in liquid funds so
I had cash and let Whitlock at Tri-State Savings keep and invest
the rest. Then I got out all the bills we owed, big and small, and
paid them all off. It was kinda rough lookin’ at the check
register and seein’ Sam’s handwritin’ on most of
the stubs.
In fact, Sam haunted everything. I kept wakin’ up in that
apartment expectin’ to find him next to me, or maybe in the
livin’ room or kitchen. The phone would ring with
somethin’ or other and I’d instantly think it was Sam
callin’ from Pittsburgh or some other place and have it
picked up before I realized that it couldn’t be him.
There wasn’t no sense in keepin’ the office, so I
closed it down and sublet it to the end of the lease. I
didn’t want to stay in town no more, neither. Seems like once
you got money word gets around fast, and every fast-buck artist and
get-rich-quick schemer and con artist finds you real fast. I had to
get out of town, go off by myself awhile, but I couldn’t
think of anyplace I wanted to move to lock, stock, and barrel. I
went up to New York for a while, rented a shabby little studio
apartment just off Greenwich Village, under the name Beth Parker. I
know, I know, but I was feelin’ more’n a little like
poor Beth right then, kinda lost without nobody around. I picked
New York ’cause I was always a city girl at heart, and I
didn’t really know nobody up there and nobody knew me. The
Company arranged for driver’s license, credit cards, and a
local bank account in that name. With the straight hair and smooth
complexion even some of my relatives wouldn’t’a knowed
me anyways.
I was rich, but I didn’t feel rich, and I
didn’t want nobody to know that I was. Sam had married me
when I was a ghetto girl in cockroach heaven. I took very little
with me, and bought what I needed from second-hand stores in
Manhattan. When I was bored and lonely and depressed I ate a lot,
and since that was the case most of the time I satisfied my every
whim. Started smokin’ cigarettes again, too, and quickly got
up past two packs a day. Every kind of drug you can think of and a
lot you never heard of were easy in the Village, and I tried some
of the ones I knew about. They helped for a while, but I knew I was
only runnin’ from myself.
I at least started one thing I always meant to do and never had.
There was a congregation of black Jews in New York and I went up
there and started takin’ classes in instruction. They was a
little surprised—the Jewish faith takes converts, but
doesn’t go after ’em, and you really have to work to
join that religion—but I found it real interestin’ and
a real relief from the Bible thumpers of my childhood. Sam
wasn’t exactly the world’s most religious Jew, but deep
down it wasn’t just cultural. Deep down he really believed
it, and that was more than I could say about myself, so it seemed
to make sense. Actually, tellin’ the rabbi about
Sam—and his condition—without, of course,
revealin’ the hows and wheres, hurt me a little ’cause
he got real skeptical. “If Sam were a Catholic, I think
you’d be entering a nunnery now,” he said. It took some
time to convince him that I really meant it.
New York’s not the best place to be alone, though,
particularly if you’re a woman. Go into a bar and either ten
guys would try and put the make on you—and five women, too,
if you stayed in the Village—or you’d be wallflowered
out. Same with discos and other dance places, and it didn’t
feel right goin’ to the theater alone. About the only place
was the movies, and I went to see a bunch of ’em. And, yeah,
I did allow myself to get picked up a few times and I even went to
bed with a couple of one-night stands. I needed it. I
thought—hoped—Sam would understand. They was like the
drugs, though. They helped, but only for a little while.
I called Bill’s office in Philadelphia often about Sam,
but it was always the same news. No change. Finally, one night, I
was standin’ there naked lookin’ at myself in a mirror
and thinkin’ how fast and easy the fat goes on and how hard
it is to get off. I finally had it out with myself in that mirror,
too. Okay, girl, now what? You keep on like this, you’ll
slit your wrists in a year or wind up in a permanent heroin haze.
You got so much money you could light your cigarettes with it. You
can go anywhere you want, do anything you want, and what good is it
doin you? You don’t want to go nowheres or do nothin’.
You can go out and buy some business and run it, but you
don’t know no business but investigations and you done all
you could in that. You could just screw around, until you got to be
a fifty-year-old three-hundred-pound diabetic who had to buy it. If
this was reversed the way you thought it could be, you knew Sam
could handle it, but you can’t. Find some nice guy and shack
up with him? You already played with that, and you know that
wouldn’t be fair to him or you. It’d be a lie, a
let’s pretend.
Yeah, that was part of it, too. You don’t know no
business but investigations . . . Anyone who gets close enough to learn anything will probably
get hooked . . . That other world is the only thing they got
left . . . There’s no possible cure for these people unless we
find the origin world . . .
“Sam? Do you think it’s possible to do it? Do
you think I can do it?”
My conversion would have to wait. God knew how I felt, anyways.
The next day I took the train back down to Philadelphia and
arranged with the Company to visit Sam at the Center.
Aldrath Prang met me personally when I arrived, which surprised
me. “News?” I asked him.
“Some. Not about your husband, although there are some
recent encouraging signs of increased brain activity. I thought you
had a right to be informed of the progress, or lack of it,
we’re making.”
“I’m very interested.”
“You were quite right about the shift of activity. Larger
quantities are going to the other target world, and they seem to be
preparing to set up some facilities in a South American country
where absolute privacy and absolute license can be bought and paid
for. They’re still limited to the one Pennsylvania access,
but they seem to have recently completed a minor substation.
It’s no more elaborate than Vogel’s or Cranston’s
and far less versatile, but it gives them some freedom.”
“Yeah? That costs money and lots of expert manpower,
don’t it?”
“It does, but they seem to be willing to pay any
price—and able to do so—and most of a substation could
be built, in unrelated modules far apart, within your own country
right now, requiring only some small but vital sections to be added
from other worlds. It’s not difficult to do, unfortunately.
The competition, as you know, has a number of safe worlds with just
such substations. One could easily be dismantled and reestablished
component by component. They did basically that in setting up the
ambush in the Labyrinth. Which reminds me—how is your
wound?”
“Gone,” I told him, and that was the literal truth.
I never seen nothin’ like it. When it was ready to go, that
bandage, which withstood showers and rain and all the rest, just
fell off and there was nothin’ there. No scars, no marks of
any kind, no skin discoloration. It was a hell of a gash, yet you
couldn’t even tell now that anything had ever happened there.
“But gettin’ back to the other—what about the bad
guys? I mean, there’s got to be a couple who really know
what’s goin’ on now, both local and from off-world.
They need a Vogel type for this.”
“There is, alas, no shortage of Vogel types. A number of
locals may be being raised up and prepped—there is also no
end to the scientific amoralists who would jump at the chance of a
project like this, although the same problem exists as existed with
Vogel’s researchers. They are experimenting along given lines
with a license to freelance off on their own, but none are actually
told what they are looking for. The only off-world presences are a
man who is overseeing the South American operation and a woman who
is handling things up north. The man is called Dr. Carlos, the
woman is known only as Addison, both cover names, naturally. So far
we have been unable to get photographs, let alone more intimate
data, on the pair, except that Carlos is dark, looks like an
Indian—that’s the description, I can only offer
it—and speaks with an odd accent, and this Addison is young,
not terribly attractive, and has very short hair, wears glasses,
and is described as a cold fish who likes men’s clothing. We
suspect that they were part of Vogel’s team on his world and
were not present at the compound when it blew and therefore used
other exits.”
“Better than nothin’, but not much. And you
can’t catch ’em at the substation?”
“We have it covered all the time, but no. Only the
couriers. Remember, though, they did have access to a stationmaster
who could both legitimately and illegitimately request sufficient
spare parts for almost anything, and we didn’t know about the
one Vogel tried to use.”
That stopped me. “You mean it’s possible
there’s another someplace there? One you don’t know
about?”
“It’s possible. There are a thousand weak points of
one degree or another across any world from the Arctic to
Antarctica. We have very few people who even know of this world and
we are limited that way. Sensing, let alone tracing, a power drain
and tracking it to its source is bad enough with full
resources.”
“Uh huh. Like tracin’ a phone call.” I
did see, too. With all them points, so long as they turned
the power on, used it, and shut down real fast, that small a drain
might not even be noticed and definitely not traceable. The bet was
it wasn’t noplace geographically convenient, though. If it
was, they wouldn’t be riskin’ improvin’ the
Pennsylvania substation unless that was some kind of
diversion—and if it was, then they knew we was on to
’em so why set up all this new stuff? No, bet on the other
station bein’ in the middle of nowhere, like the Andes or the
Congo or maybe Fiji. Useful, but not convenient. And to get enough
bread and people to do anything major, they have to tip off the man
behind it. It was real tricky.
“Any progress on your science detective work?”
He shook his head. “We’re as far as we can go
without new people to try new things on, and we don’t dare
pull any from this other world or they will pack and run. We have
well-placed operatives there, but they can’t get too close
and at the minimum safe distance it’s too far to learn much
more than this.”
“The Security Committee’s still in the dark about
all this?”
“Yes, but not for much longer. We can’t go on static
like this or we just watch them do their job in ignorance. Sooner
or later we will have to vastly expand, increase our monitoring,
and perhaps go in with all we have. That takes money and people and
technical support and that means the committee. It might drive them
underground, or we might get lucky. At least it will set them back,
and if we’re fortunate enough to nab an Addison or Carlos we
might well win.”
“Not without somebody inside, you won’t. See,
they got somebody inside—right here. Without
somebody to tell, gettin’ a Carlos or Addison would be sheer
luck.”
I asked him two favors. One was to visit the ex-addicts again,
the other to see Sam—alone.
“No problem, but there are few patients left now. We had
several suicides, and a few whom we were able to treat with
hypnotherapy and find places for. The few left are those for whom,
for one reason or another, we have found no place, but who can be
monitored against doing away with themselves.”
The patient I decided to talk to was named Donna, and she was at
one time a secretary in the Atlanta of Vogel’s world. She had
fallen in love with a young Party man with ambition, fed him some
information on her bosses that would help his advancement, and then
got caught doing it. She had been tried by a Party court and
sentenced to “useful imprisonment,” which meant being
sent to the Montrose Hospital and Asylum near Houston, site of many
medical and psychological experiments on humans and one in which
Vogel’s people had a part.
It was unnerving to talk to her. She had stuck in my mind from
before because she was one of the ones who had stayed naked in her
room always feeling herself up. She still was. She was also a
little unnerved by me; I don’t think she’d ever seen a
black woman clothed and with more than one thought in her head
before and she couldn’t quite believe it.
“Every day they’d take me in a little room and give
me a jolt of juice,” she told me. “It didn’t take
right away. You get that rush—” She shivered and closed
her eyes, remembering it, and it took a minute or so for her to
pick it up again. “—then you get a little sick and
that’s it. After a week or so, though, it took.”
“What’s it like?”
“You ever had an orgasm? Well, it’s like that, only
all over your body and a thousand times more intense. Like nothing
else. You come out of it, but you don’t feel down, you feel
good, but you want that rush again. You live for it.
It’s what keeps you going—the thought that every day
you’ll get it again, always as good. The rest of the
day—well, it’s kinda funny. You’re all
right—I mean, you feel great, the best you ever
felt—but you get these urges. Compulsions, really. You never
know when they’ll come on. You slowly get real turned on, I
mean real up, and then you can’t think of anything but sex,
and you got to have it, and you stay up at real high tension until
you do. Another time, you just got to exercise. You only feel good
doing it. You get hungry sometimes for crazy things, like
you’re pregnant or something, but other stuff, things
you’ve always loved, taste horrible. It’s like
you’re not really in control of yourself, but yet
you’re still you. You lose all modesty, all integrity, all
the brakes. Inhibitions, that’s the word. Brakes get put on,
but not by you. Almost in spite of you. I can’t explain it.
It’s like you lose all sense of what’s right and wrong,
but something else decides—and it might not decide the way
you would have.”
“It sounds like you become some kinda robot or
something.”
“Uh uh. It’s not like that at all. You’re
still you, and there’s lots of time in the day when you are.
You know what’s happened, but you don’t really care.
You’re basically free—they never even bothered to watch
over me most of the time and I was never locked in—but you
won’t go. There’s no way you’re going to miss
your next juice shot. That’s the control. If the one person
in the world who can give it to you asked you to stand on your head
or shoot somebody, you might feel bad about it but you
wouldn’t hesitate to do it. If you had an unlimited supply of
the juice you’d tell ’em to stuff it, but if it’s
obey orders or no juice, you’ll strangle your own
mother.”
“You sound bright, intelligent, and you’re not
hooked anymore. Why do you stay here—like that?”
“It’s what I mean that I can’t really
describe,” she told me. “The juice needs its own juice.
It changes you. First time they tell you to do something horrible
or disgusting and you won’t, so they don’t give you the
juice and you go to hell real fast. One thing they wanted to know
was whether they could cause the stuff to change the body and brain
if one particular thing was demanded to get your jolt and they kept
it from you for a while. They ordered me to go, every evening, down
to the military and staff wings, stark naked, and proposition every
man and woman I could find and do whatever they wanted. Every
night. I fought it. Some of them were brutal, sadists and the like.
They kept me from the juice for a while until I finally had to
agree. They did this every night for weeks. Finally, the juice
learned. One day, I woke up, and that was all I wanted to do. It
told me when to eat and like that, but the rest of the time I only
wanted that. I was totally turned on and I stayed turned on. Not in
the head—it was physical.”
“It made you a raging nymphomaniac?”
“I guess that’s the right word. I didn’t want
clothes, I didn’t want anything except I was compelled to go
down and do that. I wanted to do it. I had to do
it. I lost any will to fight—anything. I still can’t.
My voice got higher, my breasts and hips got bigger,
everything.”
“But that’s over now,” I said.
“It’s not there anymore.”
“I’d take it again in a minute, if I could,”
she told me. “Right now they got me on half a dozen drugs.
Otherwise I’d be all over you begging for it. They say my
brain’s permanently locked in that pattern—chemicals
and all, and that my hormone level is monstrous. The drugs
I’m taking now are blockers, that keep the worst of it from
being triggered, but without them I wouldn’t even be human.
I’d just be a bitch in heat all the time.”
“But—can’t they do nothin’ for you? I
mean, physically?”
“Sure. A oophorectomy and brain surgery. They say
I’d come out sexless, a nothing. That’s bad enough, but
they say there’d be side effects because of where the damage
and changes are and what they know from having to replace the areas
in natural brain damage. At the very least they say I’d have
no feelings. No love, no hate, no envy, no greed, no friendship, no
loyalty, no compassion, no mercy, no—nothing. I would think,
and remember, but I’d be like a machine. I still have
feelings. I wouldn’t want to be some machine. No hopes, no
ambitions, nothing. If that’s the way it is, I’d rather
stay right here, just like this.”
It was hard to think of this pretty, intelligent young woman a
neutered machine, and I could see her point—and the
Center’s. She was still a fund for research and information.
They could “cure” her, sorta, but since the cure would
be worse than the disease they wouldn’t force it.
The interview was sobering in a number of ways. I didn’t
underestimate what them Nazis who could gas millions and make
lampshades outta ’em and sleep like babies and even go to
church every Sunday could come up with. The scariest thing was,
somebody with a real strong will and sense of identity and purpose
could break even heroin, though it sure wasn’t easy, or at
least live a fairly normal life on methadone. But
this—no self-cure possible, no methadone-style
alternative, and if you got cured you wound up like Donna between a
rock and a hard place.
Donna, though, made me mad. She was bright, alert,
good-lookin’, and she had real potential. Anybody born and
raised in a south where Martin Luther King got gassed as a kid if
he got born at all and who come from some Nazi background to boot
who could learn to talk to me and accept me as an equal human being
in that time could adapt to other, better societies. They cheated
her—and how many others? They never saved more than two dozen
here, all they could sneak out and treat without revealin’
their interest. How many more Donnas died in agony when we took
Vogel out as supplier? Hundreds? Thousands? How many more was they
gonna make in this other place, and maybe other places as well if
they went underground again or got whatever they was goin’
after with these projects. And for what? So some shithead born to
power and gold silverware here could get a little more personal
power.
Then, too, Donna got me to thinkin’ ’bout Sam, who I
was gonna go see now. Different cause, but they both had brain
damage, and there was still only so much that could be done. Sam
was all wrapped up and still floatin’ in that tank, but for
the first time I began to wonder not just if he would ever wake up
but whether it would be a blessin’ if he did. Would he
remember me? Be palsied? Be unable to tie his own shoes?
“Sam, I know you can’t hear me or understand me,
though they say my voice gets through at least,” I said
outside the window lookin’ at his chamber, “but
I’m gonna talk anyways, ’cause I never made a big
decision or took a big case without talkin’ it over with
you.
“I can’t hack it alone, Sam, not back home. Without
you, there’s only one thing I’m good at and
that’s investigations. I know the last one didn’t go
none too well, but that was them and their experts and their damned
computers. There’s a lot of innocent, good folks bein’
crippled and put through hell out there, Sam. Bein’ put
through it by a whole bunch of cruds at least as bad as Vogel.
I’m gonna take a crack at ’em. All of ’em. I
want the bastards. I want the ones who did this to you and
are doin’ worse to others and who’ll be in charge of
all this if whatever they’re plannin’ comes off. The
damn company’s foul enough as it is; I can’t sit back
when I see firsthand that it might well wind up in the hands of
Vogels and Hitlers and all the rest. Maybe I can’t lick it.
Maybe it’s bigger’n I am. Maybe I’m just gonna
sell myself into slavery and hell. But I got to try,
’cause there ain’t nobody else and it needs
doin’. If I can’t be Nora Charles to your Nick, then
there’s nothin’ for me back home.
“It’ll be just my luck if you come outta that damn
pool ten minutes after I’m stuck beyond any hope myself, but
if you do, then you just play support like always, ’cause the
only hope I got is findin’ the source world and nailin’
them bastards to the wall. You’ll cuss and scream and yell,
but you’ll break it with or without me, ’cause
we’re the best, Sam. We’re a damn sight better than
this fancy security and we’re better than their
crooks.” I stopped a moment. I was cryin’ too much, and
I really wanted him to thrash around in there and scream at me, but
nothin’ happened and the monitors showed no real change in
his condition.
“So, so long, sweetheart. The problems of two crazy people
don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy
world.”
I walked out and went to find Aldrath Prang.