by Larry Niven
“Two more days.”
“You read the whole program?” he said, startled.
She looked thoughtful. “Apparently. I did page through it. These things are doing wonders for my memory.”
Toby found that more worrisome than getting stronger. “That gives rise to some disturbing ideas,” he said.
“Like?”
“Like when I said cutting his head off might not kill him. They have to have kept his heart beating and his neurons firing when he was executed. If he’s got all his memories copied into the network, and the bleeding is stopped—which it would be—it could grow back.”
May stared at him, visibly swallowed, and said, “Who Goes There?”
“Yeah. He’s even got the rubber suit.”
“He who the what?”
Toby was surprised. “The first movie from that story. The monster was James Arness in a rubber suit. Later went on to play Marshall Dillon in Gunsmoke?”
May studied him for a moment, then said, “And you say Connors used to throw enough obscure references into the conversation to disturb you?”
Toby chuckled. “As a matter of fact, I learned about both those things from him. Checked out the show online. Given the social context it was well done. Good writing. The movie was kind of weak. First remake was okayish, but it was the second that was so good it was slapped with an NC-17 rating. Apparently somebody didn’t want kids thinking about how smiling helpful people might just be trying to take over your mind.”
“I never should have dafiated.” She sighed. “There was just so much to do.”
“Yeah. I don’t even know what…” He reflected. “I wonder what science fiction is doing these days? The real stuff, not Hollywood.”
She grinned. “Infiltrating.”
“More than it used to?”
“Oh, yes. Pick up a romance novel sometime. In between the softcore there’s an awful lot of ‘Should I marry the rich heir to the local windmill farm or the honest older man who lost his money and his front teeth trying to legalize pulp conversion?’ Subversives never sleep.”
“Three thumbs up. But I meant fandom.”
“No idea.” She took him by the hand, led him around the counter and to the living room, and started up the screens.
After a while, May said, “Well, not a lot of conventions in the U.S. Large assemblies of technically minded people need a permit from DHS. GISS. Except for England, Europe’s just as bad. Good grief. Nairobi U has had a Science Fiction College for years and funds a convention every month. The college has just established a Tobias Glyer Memorial Scholarship Fund. No action in Haiti, but they’re still short of topsoil. Hang on … Haiti’s building an OTEC plant at Cap Haitien. Since January. You got anything?”
“Westralia has a Con in Perth in six weeks. With Wade Curtis. Who is over a hundred and twenty.”
May sat with her mouth hanging open for a moment, then said, “Connors a big Curtis fan?”
“That seems fairly likely, wouldn’t you say? But that sounds like Connors must have had something life-extending made before he went to prison. Curtis was older then than Connors is now. Jane Curtis is still alive too. —Well, of course she is,” he told himself.
“So he was treating prostitutes before he went to prison?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. Seems likely.”
“I’d have said certain. I hardly think Connors stuck his own tongue into Curtis’s mouth. Or into his wife’s.”
“I doubt anyone did except each other. Curtis had combat experience. He wouldn’t have been successfully ambushed. I wonder how it was delivered.” He looked in vain for a phone number or e-mail address. “Can’t contact him to ask.”
“We know where he’ll be on August twenty-third.”
Toby stared. “You want to go to Australia so we can say hi to somebody?”
“No, actually I want to go to the Moon so we can play darts at forty paces, but this is what’s available. Toby, you created life to hopefully end poverty forever, I sent it into space to do the job, and a friend of yours has used it to make us young again. This is just an airplane ride. If you can’t get used to an age of miracles, at least try to get used to having money.”
“Easy for you to say. You grew up with it,” he said.
“Okay, it takes a generation or two. You’ve got that and more. Get started now. You want me to make the reservations?”
He nodded. “I’d better check the bread anyway.”
He was getting the loaves out when she called out, “We have reservations.”
“That was quick.”
“We already did. All I had to do was confirm them. Ambrose Hawking and October Kroft have a honeymoon cabin on a Last Continent Skyhook on August eighteenth.”
“A zeppelin?” When the Westralians had finally gotten fed up and seceded, a host of new industries had started there to take advantage of the tax structure. After various other governments had begun harassing the successful outfits to protect their own campaign contributors, a corporate alliance had formed under the name Last Continent, giving them enough muscle to fight back effectively.
One of the screwy ideas that hadn’t been able to get backing elsewhere was the manufacture of hot-nitrogen airships for the luxury tourist trade. “It’s probably not a great idea to use the German term with Aussies. They learn history. Anyway, it’s all that’s open. Reservation was made last week.”
“Connors strikes again.”
“Yep. You know, I’m not sure I wanted to meet him anyway. I’m not used to talking with people who are smarter than I am.”
“Then I better do the talking when we see Curtis. Connors met him a few times. He said it felt really weird not to be the smartest one in the room.”
“Curtis is smarter than Connors?”
“Yes. And that’s in the opinion of Connors.” Toby tore off a chunk of loaf, split it, slathered it with butter, poured a glass of milk, and brought them out. “Bread?”
“I’m still full.” May inhaled, fluttered her eyelids, sighed happily, picked up the bread, and took a bite. “God bless the Egyptians,” she said indistinctly.
“And GM foods,” Toby said.
“?”
“Somebody once took apart wheat DNA and found it was a cross between four different wild grasses. Had to be deliberate. Some precivilization woman must have gotten very tired of the good stuff blowing away when she threshed seeds to go with whatever the hunters brought home.”
May swallowed, said, “Poor thing didn’t even have any SF to read,” and took another bite.
“It’s the Indians I feel sorry for. They did the same thing to make corn, and they learned how to pop it, and it was at least two thousand years before anyone showed up with butter.”
May made a noise, glared, chewed, swallowed, and said, “I told you not to make me laugh with my mouth full.”
She had. He recalled when. A strategic retreat to the kitchen seemed called for.
XV
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
—THOMAS ALVA EDISON
Decades earlier, a practical philosopher had made the observation that if a television program had been created showing a gang of professional criminals at work, who engaged in as many errors of fact, procedure, logic, and physical possibility in as the police did in any number of cop shows popular at the time, and the criminals in the show were as successful in their endeavors as the cops were on the aforesaid shows, every prison in America would have to be doubled in size to hold the credulous viewers who thought they were learning how things were actually done. He speculated that collusion between police and TV producers may have taken place, in an attempt to convince potential offenders that they knew what they were up against.
Whether or not there was any truth in the notion, it was certainly true that much of the public had spent something more than a century developing a thoroughly confused and inaccurate view of the process of law enforcement.
It was als
o true that a varying but significant proportion of the training received by new law enforcers consisted of correcting their misapprehensions on this score, and acquainting them with the basic truth of police work: most of it is tedious, much of that is without result, and more than half of all U.S. police officers never have occasion to fire their weapons outside the practice range. The ostensible motivation for members of the profession is to keep the peace, and that was certainly why most of them joined up; but the principal wish of anyone who has been on the job for any length of time is simply that things go smoothly. Barring a few notorious exceptions, when an organization for American law enforcement has an employee who starts acting like a TV or movie cop—preferring force to intimidation, arguing with a supervisor—it either harasses him out of the job, or, if he is too hardheaded to go, arranges to put him at a desk and staple his ass to a chair at the earliest opportunity.
Consequently the people whose job consists entirely of the drudgery that other law enforcers loathe, but cannot do without, tend to be stubborn and bitter.
They are ideal for the work.
In a cubicle in an unobtrusive glass box in Largo, Maryland, one such obsessive toothgrinder was reading the report of the autopsy done on the putative cadaver of DHS Senior Agent Charles Opie. Opie had been sent with his team to extradite Toby Glyer by the current usual procedure: acquire, remove, and only then notify the host nation. The reasonable supposition was that Glyer had had friends who had killed the team.
Cursory study of the autopsy report seemed to support this. All dental, retinal, and DNA identification had been in order, and skin, lungs, membranes, and teeth displayed damage and odor consistent with death by chlorine poisoning.
More thorough study, however, showed a distinct absence of simple chlorides resulting from the action of hydrochloric acid, which is produced along with hypochlorous acid when chlorine reacts with water. Hypochlorites were present in abundance.
He checked the other four reports. Likewise.
The bodies had been shipped home. He requested an analysis of the hypochlorites present.
All five bodies showed significant amounts of sodium hypochlorite.
They had been treated to simulate burns and corrosion, then rinsed with bleach.
Genuine chlorine gas is so easy to make that precautions must be taken to avoid making it accidentally. However, treating a corpse with chlorine will not produce the same sort of internal damage as killing a live person with it. The only reason to go through such a rigmarole would be to conceal something else.
He requested massively detailed autopsies on all five, with analysis of the condition of all tissues down to the cellular level. Any anomaly was to be noted. The fact that this would produce a list of staggering length—no human being is textbook “normal”—was unimportant to him; what he wanted was the anomalies all five had in common.
All five showed slight osteoporosis, and signs of recent bone growth—the latter unheard of in adults other than pituitary giants.
None of the five had any sign of untreated caries—miraculous in almost anyone.
Analysis of DNA showed no test artifacts—DNA not matching the overall sample, because it came from individual cells that had undergone slight mutations—and that was impossible.
The only explanation, that these were corpses of strangers that had been completely altered to match the four agents and Glyer, seemed absurd …
… except that Toby Glyer was a nanotechnologist.
He wrote up a report, included his speculations, and delivered a hard copy to his supervisor’s in-tray, then went back to his desk. A note appended to the report explained that it had been delivered by hand because, given the swiftness of the action against Opie’s team, he did not consider the computer network secure. He sat back and awaited the fireworks.
What he got, about an hour and a half later, was the mail boy sticking his head into the cubicle and saying, “Boss wants more details face-to-face. Small conference room.”
She was sitting at the middle of the table with a pot of coffee and an extra cup, which she pushed toward him as he closed the door. “Sit,” she said. When he had, she held up thumb and forefinger a little ways apart. “When you were assigned here, I came about this close to having you assigned to the cowboys,” these being the field agents for DHS. “I decided to see if you could do effective intel analysis. Talk about dodging a bullet. There’s a chance that you’ve prevented the destruction of the United States of America.”
“There is?”
“If we’re lucky. Your assessment makes sense. My job is to take it further. If he can do this, he can do pretty much anything he wants. In that case, so far he’s been a paragon of self-restraint. Unfortunately, at the moment the cowboys are harassing and abusing every one of his old friends they can find, trying to get some kind of response out of him. I don’t want to see that response. We need to find and contact Glyer, quietly and without upsetting him. That means we have to assume you’re right, the system is compromised, so we do everything by hand.”
“Oh hell.”
“It’s how the FBI worked under Hoover, and they did wonders. We’ll have the advantage of only having one case to work on. First thing, we need more heads and hands. I trust you to find someone competent to help, who you trust to find someone that they trust to find someone—you follow?”
He nodded.
“Good. I’ll reassign the Wyndham disappearance.”
“I think it’s related,” he said.
She looked him hard in the eyes, nodded, and said, “Find one and find the other?”
“I think so.”
“Evidence?”
“None. But her medical records show she had diverticulosis. He was treating people for that in Bern. That’s how we found him.”
“‘We’?”
“Well, the action division.”
“For this case, it might help to start thinking of ‘we’ as being you, me, and whoever you find. We’re not going to get meaningful help from people who lock up a bunch of old farts because the sky is falling. It’s a good thing Wyndham’s people settled in Ecuador. Another visitor won’t be noticed.”
“You want me to go there?”
“I’ll go myself. You’ll be in charge here, of both versions of this case—the hands-on work, and making a show of using the computers for the dead ends I’m sure you’ll find.”
XVI
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
—FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
1
There were parts of the original plan that had been inapplicable by the time the entities got the new rock moving. However, the basic principles were valuable, as in the case of using Mars to dump some excess velocity. Too much, as it turned out; there was atmospheric friction as the rock skimmed the planet. There was plenty of warning, and no entities were killed, but it put the rock into a trajectory that wouldn’t provide an opportunity to match up with Earth’s position for several orbits.
There was no hurry.
And there was interesting material coming in by radio all the time.
Nobody doubted the concept of fiction any longer. Now the issue was what was fiction and what wasn’t.
Information was sorted into subsets of material that was internally consistent. A great many of the small subsets were clearly fiction. Some of the larger ones were deduced to be, after it was noted that they were incomplete but claimed all information not included in them was false. There was a large main body of material consistent with all but a few subsets, but these latter were excluded from serious consideration as soon as any content was found that contradicted observations the entities were able to make themselves.
A considerable mass of information was internally consistent, but significant portions of it were explanations of why it could not be substantiated by any observations. These seemed to be disseminated for the sole purpose of supporting warnings against things that could not be found to exist, and required
elaborate suppositions to account for such matters as, e.g., the visibility of distant objects which would have to be older than the Universe. The only thing that kept the entities from dismissing it was the fact that its assorted positions were endorsed by the vast majority of transmission sources.
It was Set who suggested that humans were doing the same thing that he and Wieland and Socrates had once done: disputing over which plan they should undertake. To this end, the faction currently in charge had convinced itself that any evidence to the contrary was some form of deception.
This notion would have been regarded by the other entities as deeply flawed—and probably would never have been imagined, by Set or anyone else—if not for the fact that all the material that had not been excluded, regardless of what its subsets disagreed about, was linked, if followed far enough, to the concept of deliberate fission explosions.
Supposedly there were thousands of fission—and fusion—devices, all over Earth, held in readiness to throw at, for the most part, other such devices. The purpose of this was to inflict enough death on other humans to persuade the survivors to follow the plan of the people who had taken the least damage, while preventing other factions from inflicting as much by destroying their bombs.
The peculiar thing was, just about everyone who had those devices was participating in some form of the deception system. They were already in charge.
And one of the things that they had made themselves believe would surely kill them all was, essentially, the entities. Forge.
There was actually a pretty good reason not to hurry.
2
So far, JNAIT had collected every gold medal awarded except one—archery. And they hadn’t entered that competition.
Ambrose Hawking and October Kroft had a skybox at the Games, and on Wednesday they showed up to use it.
They chased out a young couple who were necking in it. For the rest of the day, Toby or May would suddenly laugh at nothing.
Up until the weightlifting.
A JNAIT power lifter named Clarence Feet picked up 489.5 kilograms in the clean-and-jerk.
