Aftermath (50 page)

A gargling sound came from the corner. The hologram brightened, and the figure within it became opaque and three-dimensional. After a few seconds the image vanished with a loud sizzling noise.

Steinmetz scowled at the empty corner. "I take that as an appropriate opinion on the opposition. But now do you understand?"

Dana nodded slowly. She seemed crushed. It was because of the look on her face that Art blurted out, "If you help us to find Guest and you let us talk to him, we'll try to make sure he's captured."

He knew it was stupid as soon as he spoke. Steinmetz raised his eyebrows. "Let's see if I have this right. If we help you, you'll help us catch him; but you were the ones who let Guest out in the first place. If it weren't for you, there would be no problem. I assume you're familiar with the man who kills his parents and asks for special consideration from the court because he's an orphan?"

His words were harsh, but the humorous gleam in his eye took the edge off. Art decided that Saul Steinmetz was a very hard man to dislike—and more dangerous because of that.

"Put yourself in our position." Art had nothing to lose. He opened his shirt, raised his undershirt, and pulled the front of his pants lower. The clean-edged scar ran from the right side of his ribs down his bare belly to well past his navel. "I have half a dozen more like this, from operations before I found the telomod therapy. The treatment saved my life, but I don't know for how long. Without doctors who know what they're doing, I'm under a death sentence. Not just me—Dana, and Seth, and all the others in the program. We three just happened to be near Washington after the supernova zapped the microchips. Wouldn't you be ready to try just about anything if you were one of us?"

His shirt was still open. He began to move it across to the left. Steinmetz held up his hand.

"No need. One picture is worth a thousand words. I don't think two would be more persuasive." He turned to Yasmin, who was staring at him steadily. "I have to, don't I? I know it's different, but it's not different enough. And politics is the art of the impossible." He turned back to Art. "How long before your friends—no names now, even though we're not being recorded—how long before they're supposed to meet you up north?"

"It depends how long it takes them. They could be there now."

"They could. But you're not. Here's what I can do for you. Government vehicles come and go from Washington all the time. You work out with Auden what's going tomorrow morning, to where you need to be. I don't want to know the place. You then have four days. After that we are going to discover that Oliver Guest is missing from the Q-5 Syncope Facility, and I'm going to mount a full-scale manhunt for the famous murderer. If you turn him in before that, fine. But don't mention me or the White House, because nothing like this meeting ever happened."

He stood up. "One other thing. However this turns out, I want you back here to give me a personal report. Whatever you say won't go beyond this office. And now I must get on to other things. Do you realize that you've been here for over an hour?"

"We're sorry," Dana said.

"No, you're not." Steinmetz held out his hand. "Nor am I. Good luck."

She took it, but gripped it in both of hers. "Why are you doing this for us, sir?"

"I am the President of all the people. And if I were in your position, I suspect that I'd have done exactly what you did." Then he winked at Art and Dana, and the urge to smile back was irresistible. "And sometimes when you're President, you have to do something that nobody else in the whole damn country could get away with, just to prove you can." He shook Art's hand. "You go ahead, I need a private word with Yasmin on another matter."

When they were outside the door, Dana asked softly, "Did you vote for him?"

"No. I liked him, but he was running against the first woman candidate
ever.
Did you?"

"No." She laughed. "I thought he was too rich. You'd vote for him next time, though?"

"You better believe it. After today, if he asked me nice I'd marry him." Art realized, too late, that the man who had greeted them—Travis?—was still in the room. He had a puzzled expression on his handsome young face.

33

From the secret diary of Oliver Guest.

My relationship with Seth Parsigian has undergone a curious evolution over the past several days. It is, to invoke the vocabulary employed elsewhere in this diary, a form of restricted mutualism. We need each other. On the other hand, we both know that our value to the other will at some time cease. We are therefore wary, releasing just enough information to satisfy the other while retaining his dependency. It is bounded symbiosis.

Initially—I am making this diary entry a few days after the fact, for reasons that should quickly become obvious—initially, as I say, Seth's and my priorities coincided. We needed to remove ourselves far from the Q-5 Syncope Facility, and find a way to reach my home and laboratory. The tools to produce a simple monitoring device of Seth's telomeres lay there, together with certain things of mine that he did not need to know about.

In those first hours, I was perforce almost useless. Weak physically, I was also ignorant of the ways of the world following the supernova. I had to rely on Seth. I also had an opportunity to observe him.

There was plenty to respect about Seth Parsigian, if not to admire. My roundabout attempts to learn more about the two people with him at the syncope facility produced a genial smile. "No, Doc, you don't need to know about 'em. You picked up their first names, what more do you want? Anyway, you'll probably be meeting 'em in a few days. Gotta be patient."

Be patient.
Good advice; but for both of us, hard to follow. Our need to reach my home and lab as quickly as possible was a shared need. When he learned where I had lived before my capture and sentencing, he groaned and said, "Glen Echo. Jeez, that's almost back where we started. We'll have to go all the way upriver. An' we'll never make it the same way we came. How are you feelin'?"

"With some effort, I can probably stand."

"I was afraid of that. We can forget walkin' the roads anytime soon. So it's gotta be the river." He stood up. "I'll be quick as I can, but I might be a while. I could say, stay here, but I guess you're not plannin' on goin' anyplace."

He left me sitting on the block behind the syncope facility. I do not mind admitting that at that moment I had my doubts. My sustaining thought was that he needed me even more than I needed him. Even so, I was at a low ebb when he finally returned. He must have been away at least six hours, and though the night air was mild I could not lie down and rest in snow. I sat with my head in my hands, close to exhaustion.

"All set," he said. His trousers were soaked halfway up the thighs. "Got us a boat, didn't even have to kill anybody."

Was he joking? I had seen the gun and knife hooked into his belt. I suspected that he meant me to notice them. With his assistance I stood up, held his arm for support, and shambled down a dirt trail leading to the wide Potomac.

I had my first direct proof of a changed world. The night river, once busy at all hours with commerce and pleasure craft, sat calm and empty. Not a light showed, on the water or on the far-off other bank.

The object he led me to did not deserve the name of boat. It was a filthy, broken-sided scow, its flat well littered with items of rubbish.

"This!" I hissed at him. "We'll never get to Glen Echo in this."

He grinned at me, teeth white in a nearly invisible face. "No, we won't. This is what I came here in, but it won't take us back. I did my scouting in it, and it will take us to the real boat."

"Why didn't you bring the 'real boat' here?"

"You'll see. Let's get you aboard. Sorry, but you have to get your feet wet."

He helped me splash through a foot of water and hoisted me effortlessly over the side. More proof, if I needed it, of his physical strength. He settled me aft, went to the bow, and picked up a paddle. "We can talk now if you want," he said. "But we'll come to a place where we have to be real quiet. I'll let you know ahead of time. Sit back and relax."

I was too tired to talk, and too uncomfortable to sleep. We moved onto the dark water and slipped lazily downstream. The wrong direction for Glen Echo, but Seth seemed to know what he was doing.

After about an hour we passed a couple of moored sailboats. "Those," I said.

Seth shook his head. "Flat calm. We need engines."

Twenty minutes later we came to an inlet where recent high water must have created a strong whirlpool. The shallows were full of flotsam, everything from tree limbs and wooden crates and beams of timber, to a miscellany of shattered light boats and the wreckage of a light aircraft.

"Pity we don't have us one of them, in working condition." Seth grunted. He pointed to the plane. "We'd be at your place in half an hour. Course, we'd need parachutes, too—I reckon nobody's wavin' you in to land these days at local airfields. Now we've got to be pretty quiet. Nothing but whispers. We're nearly there."

He was appallingly cheerful. I wondered if I had cast my lot in with a madman.

In reality, I had not cast anything. I hadn't picked Seth. He, together with his two friends, had picked me. That pair was much on my mind. They knew that I was awake. Even were Seth to vanish into the great hereafter, I would know no peace so long as they knew what had happened, and were in a position to talk.

Be patient.
I had little choice.

Seth stopped paddling. In silence, we drifted up to another boat. It was a squat oblong, painted some distasteful color that looked in the dim light to be a drab olive-green. Two small outboard motors hung at the rear, propellers out of the water.

"Mil spec," Seth whispered. "Old, but these mothers were made to run forever. An' it has half a tankful."

"It's chained up."

"It sure is. Don't know how near the owner might be. That's why you gotta be real quiet now. When we go, we go fast—no stoppin' to pick up passengers. Climb in, I'll hold us steady."

Exhaustion made me clumsy. Seth had to be wincing as I stood up and toppled from the scow into his new find. The thump when I hit the bottom boards seemed to carry across the whole river. I crawled to the middle of the boat and lay there. Seth released his hold on the scow and came over the side as silently as a dark-clad ghost.

He lowered the outboard motors into position. The clicks as he primed them with fuel were audible to me, but I suspect that from the shore they sounded no louder than insect noises.

Seth slipped loose the chain securing the boat at its bow to a solid post on the shore, and lowered it link by link into the river. He came to my side and bent close.

"According to the control setting, the two motors are power-matched and synchronized." His whisper was barely audible, a mere breath of sound. "I can't tell if they are until I start them. Grab hold of something and hang on tight. I'm going to full power right away. Things might be messy at first."

I saw his teeth. The lunatic was grinning at me.

"That's if we're lucky," he went on. "If we're not, and the motors won't start, we'll be sittin' ducks for anybody who comes out to see what all the noise is. We can't have that. So if we don't have power inside half a minute, you and me have to get out of here. We'll go over the side. Don't worry none about drowning, 'cause I'll hold you up."

He moved forward to the little cabin and the controls, giving me no opportunity to ask, We go into the river, and then what?

I lay flat and clutched a center post around which a thick rope was neatly coiled. It should have been around Seth's neck. I had been better off than this in judicial sleep. An electric motor hummed a few feet aft, followed by the racketing racket of a pair of starters. Our efforts could no longer be mistaken for insect noises. The insect to produce so loud a sound would be the size of a horse.

The starter motors clattered on and on. I was bracing myself for the plunge into cold river water when suddenly the gasoline engines fired in unison. The noise level went from frightening to monstrous as Seth—too soon, the engines were still cold—gave them full throttle.

The engines coughed, spit, backfired, and finally hit a rhythm. The boat surged forward on a curving course that would run us right into the riverbank. Seth turned us at the last moment, juggled the power of one engine, and headed for midriver.

He turned to grin at me.

"Synchronized, my ass." He had to shout to be heard above the engines. "But we're doing fine now. Once we're half a mile out, I'm going to take the power up all the way. Then we head upstream. And you can have a sleep"—on the bare boards of a pitching boat, surrounded by a din loud enough to burst eardrums—"and dream about home, sweet home."

* * *

Home, sweet home. Seth seemed oddly confident about what we would find there, and I suppose that was my fault.

In my eagerness to assure him that I would be able to provide equipment to monitor the condition of his and his companions' telomeres, I had omitted to discuss one crucial point. Not about the scientific techniques, which were every bit as simple as I had suggested. Given a few hours in my home lab, I could put together a sequence of observational methods and wet chemistry tests to replace the role of the defunct genome sequencers.

There was, however, a default assumption in all this; namely, that my home lab still existed.

The law admitted an odd ambivalence regarding the property rights of individuals sentenced to judicial sleep. On the one hand, I and others like me were alive. New evidence establishing our innocence might one day be discovered, and we would then be resuscitated. It would thus be wrong to confiscate our possessions or to apply inheritance laws while we were still alive.