I was impressed. Although artificially surfaced like the docks and landing areas, and made from careful cutting of the trees, the area around the Castle was something I hadn’t seen since leaving the Confederacy. They had imported sod from somewhere—probably Lilith, since that was supposedly the garden planet—and there was a huge, brilliant green lawn complete with exotic plants and flowers. I was impressed a little more with Laroo; this was the sort of thing I would have done in his position, but few others would have.
After another scan at the Castle entrance as we approached, we were inside double sliding doors. I had to admit, despite the tales from the concubines, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. We walked through huge open areas with incredibly opulent furnishings. Beautiful rugs and carpeting blended into furlike couches, chairs, and recliners. On the walls were beautiful works of original—I supposed—artwork that matched the mood of the rooms. The only jarring note was the policemen standing guard just about everywhere, that plus the knowledge that cameras were following us everywhere and seeing everything.
I never saw any stairways, although they might well be somewhere if only for safety reasons. We went up in a large elevator that was basically a glass tube wrapped completely around its supporting pole. Very neat, I thought. They control access to and egress from the elevators, can see you at all times, and make sure you go only where you’re supposed to.
We got off on what I thought was either the fourth or fifth floor, walked across to the main building on a small ramp—which had emerged when we stopped there and pulled back into the wall once we were clear, another nice touch—and down another corridor. This floor was filled with rooms resembling national museums, complete with display cases and lighting. Weapons, corns, and gems from many worlds were all there in their respective places. I was more than impressed. I knew, too, that this stuff wasn’t Wagant Laroo’s—it was just put in his charge. Everything here was a type of object that could survive Warden sterilization from the Cerberan organism, and all of it belonged to somebody else, put here for safekeeping until its owner needed it or was in a position to enjoy it. I began to appreciate just what Bogen secured most of the time.
Finally we reached the end of the hall and a door slid back to reveal a modern office waiting room, complete with receptionist but lacking, I noticed, anything to read or look at.
My two guards flanked me while I presented myself. The receptionist nodded at my name. “Go right in. Director Bogen is waiting for you.”
“I’ll bet,” I muttered and walked to the inner office door, then turned and looked back at my guards. “Not coming?”
They said nothing, so I opened the door and stepped inside.
It was a small, cramped office, one that looked really lived in—all sorts of books, magazines, print-cuts, you name it—were scattered over the place, practically obscuring an L-style office desk with computer access terminals on one side and a pile of papers and other stuff, even a dictawriter, on the other. Bogen, dressed in casual work clothes, needed a shower and shave. Clearly he wasn’t prepared for this, and his eyes had an angry look.
“Clear that junk away and sit down,” he snapped, gesturing to a chair. I did so and just looked at him.
“Well?” he shot. “Just what kind of shit are you trying to pull on me, Zhang, or whatever your name really is?”
“I wanted to prove a point about your operation, and I think I proved it to your satisfaction,” I told him, controlling heart rate, blood pressure, and everything else, to keep as calm and relaxed as was humanly possible.
“That my security stinks? Is that it? Look, it’s easy for you to have picked up that Project Phoenix name just from some of the stuff around the docks, and maybe to guess a little that we’re doing some kind of biological experiments out here. But you put your finger on the heart of the research, and that just isn’t possible. Aside from the Chairman, me, and six or seven other people on Cerberus—and the other three Lords—there’s nobody, and I mean nobody, who knows what we’re doing who ever gets off this island. I want to know how you know, and I want to know why you told me you knew, before I have you killed.”
“Charming,” I responded dryly. “I’ll bet that line is a big hit with all the girls.”
“Cut the clown act, Zhang! I’m in no mood for it.”
“Would you believe I deduced it?”
“Ha! From what? You’d have to know more than almost anybody on this planet to do that.”
“I do,” I replied coolly. “I’m not from this planet. And to judge from your accent, neither are you originally. I know about the aliens, Bogen. The aliens and their fancy robots.”
“How could you know? Or are you admitting you’re a Confederacy agent, like I thought?”
“I’m an agent,” I admitted. “My old employer was the Assassination Bureau of Security. They took me and using a process that seems to have been developed based on what happens here on Cerberus, they put me in Qwin Zhang’s body and sent me here.”
“For what specific purpose?”
“Basically because they already suspected how the robots were so perfectly programmed,” I told him, lying profusely and knowing that I was being monitored by lie-detection gear of the first [water]. That was all right. I had been trained to fool the best of them.
“That’s bullshit and you know it!” he shot back. “If they knew that they’d be on us like a ton of bricks, connections or no connections.”
“They know,” I assured him. “And I’m almost certainly not the only one here, although I don’t personally know of any others. Sure, they could knock down your fancy space station, maybe fry this island with a deep beam—but what would that get ’em? They want tne aliens, Bogen, and Cerberus is the only place so far where they have a direct link to them. They’ll fry us, maybe the whole damned planet, one of these days, that’s for sure—but not as long as they can gain as much or more than they lose.”
Bogen chuckled. “Well, they’ll have a long wait for that. I don’t think even Laroo’s ever met one. If any of the Four Lords have, it’s probably Kreegan of Lilith. This whole thing was his idea, anyway.”
“It’s to our advantage not to let anybody know that—to our advantage, really. I don’t want to be fried, Bogen.”
“It won’t make any difference to you, anyway,” he noted. “You’re a dead man right now.”
“I doubt it,” I responded, sounding less than upset by his threats. “Now, I’m going to make a point, and I think you’re intelligent enough to realize that it’s the truth. I could have just reported my findings on Project Phoenix to the Confederacy and let them take drastic action. I didn’t. Instead I reported them to you.”
“Go on.”
“You know the old problem with agents sent to the Wardens. We’re trapped here, same as you.”
“They must have been pretty sure of you, since they could hardly keep any kind of trace on you from body to body,” he noted.
“They were—and with good reason. I was born and bred for a job like this. It is the sole reason for my existence, what I live, eat, sleep, and breathe for. Once the objective’s accomplished, there’s no further reason for living. You’ve heard of the assassins before.”
He nodded. “Met a couple, and I agree. Fanatics. I think old man Kreegan used to be one, in fact. So I know what you are and what you’re like. I know out of your own mouth you’re the most dangerous man on Cerberus to me and my boss.”
“But they screwed up,” I told him. “Believe me, it surprised me as much or more than it’s gonna surprise them, but they slipped up. This place—well, it changed me, too. I have something to live for beyond the mission—or rather, someone.”
Bogen seemed to relax a bit. I saw, though, that one eye kept glancing down at something beyond my field of vision. The lie-detector screen, probably. “So now you want in and you’re trying to bargain with us, right? But you’ve got no cards.”
“I think I do,” I responded carefully. “The fact is, they w
ere so sneaky they put in a deep psych command for me to report and forget I reported. I didn’t even know that until I put my wife and myself under Dumonia up in Medlam.”
Bogen tensed. “Then you might already have reported.”
I shook my head from side to side. “No, not this much, anyway. My last report was more than two months ago, and I haven’t been near the agent who can trigger the command. But I know who he is now, so they don’t own me any more.”
“Who?”
“Does it matter? If you nab him, they’ll just establish a dozen more, ones we don’t know. No, from the point at which I learned of all this stuff, I started getting ideas of my own. First, I definitely wanted in. I don’t like being a prisoner any more than you or any of the rest of us, and I don’t like living under the Confederacy’s gun. Whether I succeeded or failed, I was a dead man—and I don’t want to be dead, Bogen, and I don’t want the kind of stasis my life’s now in, which was the other alternative. So that got me to thinking about you and Laroo and Project Phoenix. It occurred to me that you’re dealing with a product of alien technology using people who have no experience even in our end of things. Organic computing’s on the proscribed list, as you know, so there are few experts in it, and those who are, are basically industrially oriented, toward the parts the Confederacy does use. You don’t have the people or the years of research and development to solve the problem, and I think you know it.”
“All right. I’m not about to grant that, but I’ll admit progress has been almost nil. We know what, but there’s just no way to take the programming out selectively—and if you take it all out, you destroy it, since life support and all the other normal functions are part of the programming molecules within each tiny cell. Basically you need a full-blown organic computer to do the job, and we haven’t been allowed to get near those things in hundreds of years, not since the war.”
I nodded. “There’s only one place other than the aliens where the kind of expertise you need exists at all. You know it and I know it. I’m sure you’ve sicced some of your robots on it, but the data are too diffuse to get at. It might take years to put it all together, even assuming you can break the codes. I don’t think you fed like you have years to spare.”
“Go on.”
“Security. Confederacy Security. They could easily tap the data, put it together, and send it to as complex a computing network as necessary to solve the problem. They use organic computers, you know. Not like these—not at all like these. But they do use them in their ships and modules. They could solve your problem for you.”
He laughed. “And just like that—you ask ’em and they comply, right? Don’t be ridiculous!”
I relaxed a little. “Not at all. I told you I knew who the communications agent was. If I walk in there and force him to put me through, there’ll be no force, no coercion, and no forgetting. Now, just suppose I call upstairs and tell them I’ve got a crack at stealing one of the alien robots?”
“What!”
“Uh-huh. And I tell them how I’m going to do it. I’m going to clear it of all prior-programming, then take control myself. Let my mind go into it and bring it—and me—out of Cerberus.”
“They won’t swallow it.”
“I think they will. Remember, they don’t have any way to check on the truth of what I’m saying, and the mere fact that I’ll be coming to them with this will prove an unbroken line. I’m a pretty good hypnotic subject when I want to be. Let’s say I tell ’em some of the robot programming is being done on this island—they already know almost as much anyway—and that I’ve wormed my way into the project through my Tooker associations. Some of the experts working on the project don’t like the idea of working for unknown aliens, and I’ve got some underground help—if I can get a robot out. And the only way to ensure that is to walk out as one. They’ll buy it. It sounds just like me.” He thought it over. “Too risky.”
“There’s no risk, if you think about it. They already know that the Cerberans are involved in the programming, and it doesn’t take a master detective to figure that it has to be the space station and the island. I’m giving them a convincing scenario that meshes with my previous reports and also with what they already know. They themselves then have the choice. Either they okay the plan and give the solution to me—if they can solve it—or they turn me down as too much of a risk for that kind of information. I think I know them. As long as they know they have the power to destroy this whole planet, they’ll okay it. The temptation, the bait, will be too great.”
“Supposing they do? What happens to Cerberus when you don’t deliver?”
“We have the key, and that solves the problem. Beyond that—well, I would assume protection for my wife and myself, perhaps eventually cleared robot bodies of our own. And if the Confederacy makes a move to atomize Cerberus, we’ll have a lot of advance warning. You just can’t make that kind of decision easily, so we’ll have th opportunity to call on those aliens for help.”
“And if they won’t?”
“Then at least we get away.”
He thought it over some more. “Well, what you say is true—up to a point. My only concern is that, unbeknownst even to you, this is a subtle Confederacy plot.”
“Huh? What could I do to you?”
“Oh, not you. But suppose they use all this to get a authorization for planetary destruction? Suppose that’s what they really want—direct cause they can get through the Councils? Their primary, maybe only, objective is to bring these aliens out of the woodwork. Maybe the authorized destruction of Cerberus is the way they’re planning to do that-—and we have no guarantees the aliens will protect us, or be able to. It seems to me that if they could defeat the Confederacy militarily they wouldn’t have needed us in the first place.”
It was a glum thought, one I hadn’t really considered. As sneaky as my bosses had been, was this, then, their goal? Certainly it would be the ultimate goal, to smoke them out. I didn’t like to think of the idea that they expected it all along, though, from me.
“It’s a possibility. A risk. A big risk, I admit. But which is the bigger risk? Not to try it, not to crack this programming code, and still be sitting here when they eventually do get around to excising us? It’s going to happen. You know it and I know it. If they go along, at least we have a chance—all of us.”
Bogen sighed and shook his head, but all his belligerence was gone. “This is too big a decision for me to make, you know. I’m going to have to buck this to Laroo. You, too, probably.”
“Suits me fine.”
I sent back word with the boat crew that I would be remaining at least overnight, and gave Dylan some encouraging news, in the simplest form of code. I didn’t really care if Bogen’s people figured it out or not; if he didn’t have some foreknowledge of me and my nature he didn’t deserve to be in the business.
Then I waited for Bogen to call his boss, and finally he returned. “Okay,” he said, “He’s coming in tomorrow afternoon. Earliest he can get away. You’re to stay here as his guest until he hears you out and makes a final decision.”
“What about my wife?” I asked, somewhat concerned. “She has no credit, remember.”
“She’ll be all right through tomorrow. My people will be there if she needs anything. After that, well, we’ll see. Remember, your future and hers are hanging by a thread right now.”
Didn’t I know it! Still, I was committed now. “Well, since I’m either in or dead, mind letting me see one of these wonders of the universe?”
He thought it over. “Sure. Why not. Come on.”
We rode down in one of the transparent elevators, far beyond the ground floor and into the vast trunk of the main support tree itself.
The lab facilities down there were quite modern and impressive. Along the way I ran into several old Tooker employees who saw and greeted me, but Bogen wasn’t in the mood to let me renew old friendships.
The center of all this activity was an eerie lab in two parts, with
a monitoring and control panel of unfamiliar design on one side and a series of small booths along an entire wall. A young and very attractive woman with long black hair trailing down over her traditional lab coat was checking a series of readings on one of the machines as. we entered. She glanced up, saw Bogen, and rose to meet us.
“Here’s the best mind on Cerberus, and one of the best in the whole galaxy,” Bogen beamed.
She smiled and put out a hand. “Zyra Merton,” she introduced herself.
I was startled even as I shook the thin, delicate hand. “Qwin Zhang. Did you say Merton?” She laughed pleasantly. “Yes. You’ve heard the name?”
“I sure have. Somehow, though, my vision was always of some little old man with wild hair and a beard.”
“Well, I am pretty old,” she replied good-humoredly. “In fact, I’m close to a hundred and eighty. The reason why I came here, almost ninety years ago, was not only to study the Warden processes on Cerberus but also because it was at the time the only way to save my life. However, I assure you that I am and have always been a woman, and I’ve never once had a beard.”
I laughed back. She was charming, and a surprising answer to the question of just who Merton really was.
“But tell me, where did you hear my name?” she asked.
“I’m a product of what the Confederacy calls the Merton Process,” I told her.
She seemed very interested. “You mean they solved the problems? It cost too many lives and too many people’s sanity ever to be very practical, I thought. I abandoned that research when I turned entirely to researching Cerberan processes. That was—let me see—fifty years or so ago.”
“Well, they solved some of it,” I told her. “Not the attrition rate, though.”
She looked disappointed and a bit angry. “Damn them! Damn me! My biggest regret has always been that I developed the thing to begin with and sent out the data in so incomplete a form. Still, in those days there were few people here, and not much technology or governmental structure, and I was dependent on outside support to get anywhere. Still, I’d like to give you a complete psych scan sometime, just to find out how far they did go with it. It’s a dead end beyond what you say, I fear.”
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