The Shockwave Rider (27 page)

He was good, this man, and very fast. Even as he returned the gun to his pocket he was slapping a patch of adhesive plastic over Kate’s mouth to silence her.

“Anesthetic dart,” he murmured. “No need to worry about him. He’ll be taken care of. Right as rain in two or three hours. But I had to give him the maximum dose, you know. Not my favorite pastime, messing with a beast like him.”

Having eased the door softly shut, he now produced a communicator and spoke to it. “Okay, come and pick her up. But best be quiet. This looks like a neighborhood where folk still take an interest in other people’s business.”

“You got the lion?”

“Think I’d be talking to you if I hadn’t?”

Tucking the communicator away again, he added over her furious futile grunts and snorts, “Save your breath, slittie. I don’t know what you’ve done, but it’s serious. I have a warrant for your arrest and detention without bail signed by the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Data Processing, who’s kind of high on the Washington totem pole. Anyhow, I’m not the shivver to argue with. Just an errand boy, me.”

DIFFERENTIATED

Things had changed. Not merely on the surface, although his situation was radically altered. Instead of being switched on and off by drugs and cortical stimulation, he had been allowed to sleep naturally last night: moreover, in a real room, hotel-stark but comfortable and well equipped, with actual windows through which he had been able to confirm that he really was at Tarnover. During his interrogation he had been kept in a sort of compartment, a man-sized pigeonhole, where machines maintained his muscle tone for want of walking.

Aside from that, though, something subtler, more significant had occurred.

What?

The door of his room opened with a click of locks. A man appeared—commonplace, clad in white, armed. He had expected that if he was taken anywhere away from the room it would be under escort. Rising, he obeyed an order to go into the corridor and turn left.

It was a long walk, and there were many turns. Also there was a descending flight of steps, thirteen of them. Eventually there was a lost corner. Rounding it, he found himself in a passage of which one side was composed of one-way armor glass.

Gazing through it into a dimly lighted room beyond was Freeman.

He accorded the newcomer a nod, then tapped the glass with one soft fingertip.

Beyond, a very thin girl lay naked and unconscious on a padded table while a nurse shaved her head down to the scalp.

There was a long silence. Then, at last:

“Mm-hm. I expected that. But, knowing you as well as I do, I’m prepared to believe it wasn’t your idea.”

After which there was another silence, broken this time by Freeman. When he spoke, his voice was full of weariness.

“Take him back to his quarters. Let him think it over for a while.”

YES, MR. KELLY! WAS IT ABOUT ANYTHING?

“It should never be forgotten that during all the time we were studying bats, bats had a unique opportunity to study us.”

I AM

What he had said to Freeman was quite true. Ever since, with the conclusion of the intensive phase of his interrogation, he had been able to reason clearly again, he had been expecting to be told that Kate also had been dragged here for “examination.”

Not that that made any difference, any more than reciting “nine-eighty-one-see-em-second-squared” makes one better able to survive a fall off a cliff.

He sat in the room assigned to him, which doubtless was monitored the clock around, as though on a stage before a vast audience alert to criticize any departure from the role he was meant to be playing.

The one factor operating in his favor was this: that after years of playing roles, he was finally playing himself instead.

All the data they have, he told himself, relate to others than myself: Reverend Lazarus, Sandy Locke—yes, even Nickie Haflinger. Whoever I am now, and I’m none too sure of my identity at this stage, I definitely am not Nickie Haflinger!

He started to list the ways in which he wasn’t the person he was named after, and found the latest was the most important.

I can love.

A chill tremored down his spine as he considered that. There had been little love given or received in Nickie’s early life. His father? Resentful of the burden his son imposed, intolerant of the demands of parenthood. His mother? Tried, for a while at least, but lacked an honest basis of affection to support her; hence her collapse into alcoholic psychosis. His temporary surrogate parents? To them one rent-a-boy was like another, so many dollars per week high by so many problems wide.

His friends during his teens, while he was here at Tarnover?

But love was not part of the curriculum. It was parts. It was split up. It was “intense emotional involvement” and “excessive interdependence” and “typical inflated adolescent libido” …

Now, on the other hand, when this new strange person he was evolving into thought of Kate, he clenched his fists and gritted his teeth and shut his eyes and dissolved into pure raw hate, unresisting.

All his life he had had to control his deep reactions: as a pre-teen kid, because if you didn’t you could be the one sanded on the way home tonight; as a teener, because every moment of the day and night students here were liable for reassessment to make sure they were worthy of staying, and the first five years he had wanted to stay more than anything else in the world and the second five he had wanted to use Tarnover instead of being used by it; thereafter because the data-net now ramified into so many areas of private life that his slightest error could bring hunters closing in for the kill.

It followed that yielding to emotion, whether positive or negative, had always seemed dangerous. It was bad to let himself like another person too much; if a child, he or she would run tomorrow with a different gang, mercurial, and whoop and holler after you to your hour of blood and tears; if an adult, he or she would depart for some other job and leave behind merely a memory and a memento. Equally it was bad to let yourself fear or detest somebody too much; it led into areas where you couldn’t predict your own behavior or that of others. “Here be tygers!”

But the capacity for emotion was in his mind, though he’d been unaware of the fact. He recalled with a trace of irony how he had looked over the detensing machine in G2S’s transient accommodation block and pitied those with the ability to form strong attachments.

I was pitying myself, I guess. Well, pity was the most that I deserved.

Now he was being forced to recognize just how intensely he could feel, and there was a sound logical reason for encouraging the process.

The data Freeman and those behind him had in store were derived from a coldly calculating person—call him Mister X Minus E. Substitute throughout Mister X Plus E.

And what you’re going to wind up with, you sons of bitches, is what you fear above all. A unique solution in irrationals!

A little rain started to smear the west-facing window of his room. He rose and walked over to stare out at the clouds, tinted with red because the sun was setting and the rain was approaching from the east.

I am in approximately the position of someone attempting to filch enough plutonium from a nuclear research plant to build a bomb. I must sneak the stuff out without either causing a noticeable stock-loss, or triggering the perimeter detectors, or incurring radiation burns. Quite a three-pipe problem, Watson. It may take as long as a week, or even ten days.

MIRROR, MIRROR

You are in circular orbit around a planet. You are being overtaken by another object, also in circular orbit, moving several km./sec. faster. You accelerate to try and catch up.

See you later, accelerator.

Much
later.

HARTZ AND FLAWS

In the interrogation room the three-vee screen had been replaced by a stretch mirror. Not wanting to seem to look too hard or long at the naked body of the girl stretched out in the steel chair, Hartz glanced at his reflection instead. Catching sight of a smear of perspiration on his forehead, he pulled out a large handkerchief, and inadvertently dislodged his visitor’s authorization card, which he was not quick enough to catch before it fluttered to the floor.

Freeman courteously picked it up and handed it back.

Muttering thanks, Hartz replaced it, harrumphed loudly into his handkerchief and then said, “Your reports have been meager, to say the least.”

“I would naturally have informed you at once had there been any significant developments.”

“Oh, there have been! That’s why I’m here!” Hartz snapped, and decided there was no point after all in pretending not to look at the girl. Scrawny as she was, bald, childishly bare-bodied, she scarcely resembled a human being: more, a laboratory animal, some oversize strain of mutant hairless rat.

“What developments?” Freeman stiffened almost imperceptibly, and the tone of his voice hinted at harshness, but only hinted.

“You don’t know, hm?” was Hartz’s scathing retort. “But you met her mother, so you should! At least you must realize how much weight she swings thanks to her post with G2S!”

“Her mother,” Freeman returned with strained politeness, “has been extensively profiled. There’s no untoward emotional involvement between the pair of them.”

“Her profile,” Hartz repeated heavily. “I see. What can you tell me about her from her profile?”

“That Ina Grierson is not unhappy at her daughter’s departure from KC. This releases her to accept the kind of post she has been looking for elsewhere.”

“My God. Haven’t you gone beyond this profile thing? Didn’t you check out the real world lately?”

“I’ve done precisely as I was instructed!” Freeman flared. “And what is more, instructed by you!”

“I expect people to use their wits when I give them orders, not leave a continental mess for others to clear away!”

For a long moment the men locked eyes. At last Freeman said placatingly, “What appears to be the trouble?”

“Appears? Oh, not appears. This is only too real.” Hartz mopped his face again. “This girl has been here a week now—”

“Five days.”

“It’s a full week since her arrest. Don’t interrupt.” Hartz thrust his handkerchief back in his pocket. “If we didn’t have a. strong ex-Tarnover faction to vote our way on the UMKC board of administration, we’d—Oh, hell, I shouldn’t have to tell you this. You should know it already.”

“If there was something you wanted me to know, you could perhaps have taken steps to pipe the data to me,” Freeman said in a tight voice. “Since you didn’t, tell me now.”

Hartz’s face reddened, but he bit back the angry reply which clearly had been trembling on his lips. Achieving calm with an effort, he said, “Outside the P-A zones, hardly anybody goes twenty-four hours without using his or her code for credit purposes. Consequently the location of anybody on the continent can be determined near as dammit at any time. Kate Lilleberg is an adult, sure, but she’s also
in statu pupillari
and has never filed a don’t-talk order in respect of her mother, her only near relative. So ever since she was whipped out of KC there have been fifty or sixty people with an interest in tracing her, most of whom are on the faculty at UMKC but one of whom, the most troublesome, is a head-of-dept at G2S. How much more do I have to spell out before you realize what a hornets’ nest you’ve wished on me?”

“I’ve done what?” Freeman said slowly.

“Didn’t it cross your mind that if a week passed without her using her code, that would arouse suspicions?”

“What didn’t cross my mind,” Freeman retorted, “was that you’d expect me to make myself responsible for all the fiddling details! Since you insist, I’ll take time out and construct some convincing fiction: have her code reported in, for example, from a town in the P-A zones where it can easily take a week for a credit entry to reach the net. The rest, however, I’m afraid I must leave to—”

“Forget it. We already tried that. The moment we realized you hadn’t seen to it. Have you forgotten the pose Haflinger adopted at G2S?”

Freeman looked blank. “How is that relevant?”

“Heaven send me patience. He took a job as a systems rash, didn’t he? That position gave him damned near as much access to the net as I can get, cheating on G2S’s max-nat-ad rating. In fact he moused around so much it started to interfere with his regular work, so he wrote a program into the G2S computers to take care of the routine stuff by itself. You didn’t stress that in your interrogation report, did you?”

Freeman’s mouth worked. No sound emerged.

“And the program is still functional,” Hartz blasted, “and Ina Grierson has got to it! And worst of all, it’s so simple she knows damned well the entries we filed behind her daughter’s code are faked!”

“What? How?”

“How the hell do you think? What did Haflinger want to find out, using stolen G2S codes? Whether his own 4GH was still valid,
right?
And how could he have done that without being able to strip away an ex-post-facto cover label from a federal-authorized implant? Data concerning 4GH codes are not meant to be accessible to the public. They’re routinely disguised, aren’t they? Well, what Haflinger did was to peel them naked automatically, and in a way our top experts never thought of!”