Politician (10 page)

At any rate, if I allowed the fear of observation to restrain me, I was captive indeed! I would take my action and discover what the consequence was. Some risk had to be taken, in order to gain. I used the thin rod to jam open the door latch, then pulled the door in to me. It swung on armored hinges, proof against any tampering except what I had done. Designers tend to overlook the obvious.

I peeked out into the dark hall. I saw nothing, of course—and trusted that no one could see me. Infrared light could do it, but again, why bother when the doors were locked? I started to step out and paused again. What about an alarm?

Again, why use a lock, if a laser alarm system was in place? It could be done and should be done, but probably wasn't. I decided to risk it.

I moved into the hall. Nothing happened. That did not necessarily mean there was no alarm; it could be silent, a light blinking elsewhere in the ship. If so, I would soon be in trouble.

I waited. Nothing happened. Apparently my captors were asleep, and there was no alarm. I deemed that to be criminally careless. Maybe they just weren't worried, knowing that I could not escape from the sub no matter how cunning I might be. Captors do tend to underestimate the potentials of captives, perhaps assuming that natural selection accounts for the roles.

Meanwhile, I felt deliriously free. Certainly I remained trapped in the sub and subject to the will of my captors, but I had achieved a measure of independence they had not granted me. I was, to this limited extent, master of my destiny. That did great things for my self-esteem.

I did not bother to walk down the passage; I knew the cell block was sealed off by airlock, not simple gates. If I broke that I would really be testing my luck. I closed my door, then went instead to the cell door opposite mine. I knocked.

There was no response. I knocked again, not loudly, sure that the inmate heard me. He would be wondering what was happening, assuming that it was a guard, puzzled because the lights had not been turned on.

I knocked a third time. At last there was a response—a hesitant return knock. I tapped on the window, then used my rod to work the latch. In a moment the door swung open.

“Make no sound,” I whispered. “I'm from the other cell. I used the bar on the sanitary fixture to jimmy the lock.”

After a moment a hand touched mine. Fingers caught me, drawing me in. I went and quietly closed the door behind me. If any guard made a spot check all would seem to be in order. He would have to turn on the lights and peer into the cells to discover that I had moved.

“This is folly,” my fellow-prisoner said, alarmed.

I froze in surprise. Those words showed me two things. First, my companion was Hispanic, like me, for they had been spoken in Spanish. Second, my companion was female.

“A woman?” I asked in Spanish. I realized that I had not been able to see enough of the face through the two window slits to identify gender; I had merely assumed male. I myself had missed an obvious alternative.

“All my life,” she agreed. “What I can remember of it.”

“Memory-washed?”

“Yes. You?”

“The same.”

We paused, there in the darkness. After a moment she said, “What if they catch you here?”

“What can they do to me that they haven't already?”

“But you must go back to your cell soon, so they don't know.”

“Why?”

“Because if they catch you, they'll see that we never meet again.”

There was that. To be effectively deprived of company now that I had found it—that would be torture indeed. “Soon,” I agreed. There was risk, but I had to get to know her better.

“I—hardly know you,” she said. “I can't see you at all. May I... may I touch you? Your face, so I can recognize you?”

“Touch me anywhere,” I said generously. I had not considered what I might do after reaching my fellow captive and remained surprised that it was a woman.

She stepped close, so that I inhaled the special female atmosphere of her, which was not a matter of perfume, for she wore none. She reached up her hands to find my head and face. The darkness remained impenetrable; I could not see any part of her. On a planetary surface, I understand, darkness is seldom absolute, because of the diffusion of light in the atmosphere. But here in the closed cell of a ship, there was none at all. It was as if I were back in my degradation cell—except that there was no woman there.

Her hands stroked lightly over my forehead, eyes, and nose, then down to my mouth. Her touch was ticklish on my lips. There was something ineffably sensual about it, causing me to become sexually aroused. “Oh, you're bearded,” she said.

“They gave me no way to shave,” I explained apologetically, though I had not thought of the matter before.

“It's all right,” she said quickly. “I was just surprised.” Her fingers traveled on down across my face and to my neck and shoulders and arms. This, too, aroused me; I hoped she wouldn't go farther down, lest I suffer embarrassment. “I suppose I know you now,” she said.

“Do I get to check you similarly?” I asked.

“I suppose so.” I could tell she was smiling.

She stood for me while I ran my fingers over her face. I was not used to this and may have poked her in the eye, but she did not complain. Despite my ineptitude, I became aware of one thing: These were extremely comely features.

“What's your name?” I asked as my hands passed across her firm young chin and her smooth neck.

She shook her head, not answering. Because I was touching her, I could read her to some extent. My question caused her to tighten; she knew her name but did not feel free to tell me.

“Then I will name you,” I decided as my hands continued down. No, I did not handle her torso, though the temptation was there; I checked her shoulders and arms, as she had mine. “Dorian Gray.”

“Who?” she asked. She was relaxing now, a hurdle evidently having been negotiated. That was interesting; I had expected her to become tense as my hands reached hers, as the further exploration might be more intimate than she liked.

“The one whose face I cannot see,” I explained. “It's a historical or literary reference.”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “You'd better go back to your cell now.”

“But I don't know anything about you,” I protested. “Why are you here? Have they—?”

“I don't know why I'm here,” she said. “The mem-wash, remember? Yes, they used the pain-box on me, but they didn't ask me any questions, they just made me hurt. I don't know what they want of me.”

“Any lesson-sessions?”

“They showed me how to bake bread. I knew it was for prisoners, so I slipped some rivets into it, so maybe they could use them. I don't know.”

“ You put those rivets in?” I asked. “I chewed on one!”

“I didn't know how else to do it. Did you get any use of it?”

“I thought of using it to scratch a message on the wall, but there was already a message there.”

“Oh? What did it say?”

“Well, it was in code. It took me a while to figure it out, but, of course, I had plenty of time and few distractions. Then it turned out to be only advice not to hope.”

She laughed. “How can you, of all people, abandon hope? It's your name!”

“It may be good advice, anyway. This is a sub, a ship hidden in space. It's impossible to escape.”

“But there has to be hope,” she said.

I shrugged. “Maybe so. I haven't found it yet.”

“Now you'd really better go. A guard could come anytime.”

She was correct, of course. I used my bar to jimmy the door again, exited, and got back into my own cell. I restored the bar to the toilet fixture, then lay on my hammock. It had been quite a little adventure; soon I would learn whether I had gotten away with it.

Nothing happened. Gradually I relaxed. It seemed that our cells were not being monitored.

But sleep did not come. Something was bothering me, and as the first nervousness abated, that secondary concern loomed larger. What was it?

First, my excursion had been too easy. There should have been an alarm of some sort. This was a modern sub, whatever kind of yacht it might have been before conversion; the modernity had to do with the technology of concealment, not of vessel construction. They wouldn't be primitive about observation procedures, external or internal. My captors had to know when I left the cell. Why hadn't they pounced on me?

Second, there was something about my dialogue with Dorian Gray. I had noticed it on one level of attention while conversing with her on another. In a moment I had it: We had not exchanged names. I had asked her, and she hadn't answered, so I had named her myself. I had not told her mine. Yet she had known it. How?

Oh, there could be explanations. A guard could have told her. She could have been a captive longer than I, or at least longer than the time since my mem-wash. She could have sent me a rivet before my wash, enabling me to scratch my message to myself. She could have seen my name written on a cell door or something. But I doubted it. For one thing, she had not been telling the truth. I had been touching her when she told of her own mem-wash and pain-box treatment, and her body reactions had suggested that she was lying or, at any rate, not telling the whole truth.

Third, the facility with which I had escaped the cell. A latch that could be jimmied, a rod available to do it. It was almost as if my captors had wanted me to escape.

To get out, thinking myself unobserved, and meet my fellow captive, who just happened to be a lovely young Hispanic woman who had helped me make messages to myself? Perhaps I would have believed that, if I had remained mem-washed to the extent my captors believed me to be. But my secret message to myself—the one not intended for my captors to read—had triggered the recollection of a major sequence, and that substantially modified my outlook. For one thing, I now remembered my association with Megan, the woman I loved. That canceled any romantic interest I might have had in a mysterious young woman.

If this had been set up for me, what course did my captors plan? It fell into place readily enough. Their program was threefold. First, they washed out my memories and tortured me, making me vulnerable to change. Second, they addicted me to a drug, making me dependent on them for gratification. And, third, they meant to literally seduce me from my prior associations. They wanted me to cleave to my fellow captive, to know her and love her, so that I would be emotionally compromised before my memory of Megan returned.

But my message to myself had foiled the wash, and my body was throwing off or muting the addiction, and now I knew the true face of Dorian Gray. How aptly I had named her. She was no fellow captive; she was an enemy agent planted to complete my corruption.

But this insight did not ameliorate my situation. Why was I here? How could I prevail? I did not yet know enough of my real life to grasp why I had been taken captive. Probably I was a politician; that was what I had been headed for when my vision memory ended. Had I become important enough to be worth eliminating? But they hadn't killed me; they were trying to change me. If I were a figure in a powerful office, that might make sense, but surely my absence would be noted. So I still didn't have that answer.

There was also a problem about the woman. Now I knew her to be a spy or agent, but how could I safely reject her? If I did, my captors might suspect that their program was not working. Then they would try something else, and that other thing might be more effective. Suppose they lobotomized me? I would not be able to recover from that. Or they might simply give it up as a bad job, kill me, and start over with some more amenable captive.

No, I could not afford to show my captors the extent of their failure. Which meant I could not turn down the offering they were making in the person of Dorian. I had to play the part of a fish securely hooked, three ways. If that meant loving Dorian, I would love her—with my body only.

Forgive me, Megan! I thought fervently. I was not at all sure she would. I was of the new school, pragmatic, doing what I had to do. She was of the old school; there were some compromises she would not make. Of course, my memory did not take me as far as intimacy with Megan; we had married, but there had been no certainty that there would be anything more than the formality. It was possible that we had existed for the duration in that mock marriage and that I was free to dally wherever else I wished.

But I doubted it.

Perhaps I was making a mistake. But at the moment this seemed to be the reasonable compromise. Only if I fooled my captors completely could I hope to survive—and for me, survival was my first priority.

At last I slept, ill at ease. Recognition of the realities of one's situation does not necessarily make for a feeling of well-being.

In the morning the lights came on, and food arrived. I begged another drink of the drug, and it was granted. At this point I really had no physical need of the drink; it had become pure charade.

I was taken for another lesson-session. This one was about general economics and the advantages of a stable industrial system, and I was happy to agree. For one thing, this represented my best route to knowledge of what my captors really wanted of me. Evidently they were satisfied with my progress, for when I was returned to my cell, I was given a book to read. It was an instructive tome on the subject we had been discussing, written in English, excellent as far as it went but biased toward a conservative, authoritarian outlook. I perused it with interest; after all, any book was far, far better than none. But I assimilated it cynically. Some points were valid; others were not.

At night the lights went out again, and I knew my captors would be expecting me to stray and would be suspicious if I did not pay a call on Dorian Gray. So I had to do it, but with misgivings, for I suspected the art she would practice on me.

I was not disappointed. I still could not see her, but she touched my face to identify me—as if there could be any other man in this cell block!—and required me to do the same to her. Logically this was nonsensical, but esthetically it reminded me how well-formed her features were. This time she insisted on getting better acquainted, passing her hands down along my torso, and, of course, I had to do the same for her. She was young and voluptuous; on the proverbial scale of ten, she was overqualified.