Soulminder

by Timothy Zahn

  Walker nodded to the door behind him. “The nurse in there monitoring the body called us, and Mr. Porath sent me over here to prevent any irrevocable action from taking place. That’s about it.”

  “Death is as irrevocable as you get,” Marsh snorted. “All you’re doing by your grandstanding is preventing Mr. Ingersoll’s last wishes from being carried out and denying four sick people the organs they so desperately need.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be quite so quick to dispose of Mr. Ingersoll’s property,” a new voice came from behind. Sommer turned to see Murray Porath stroll up, dapper as always in a three-piece suit of his own. “Especially since he may not be done with it yet.”

  Marsh glared at Porath, and for an instant Sommer had the sense of two fighters sizing each other up. “You’re with these other ghouls, I take it?” Marsh asked.

  Porath raised polite eyebrows. “That’s hardly the term I would use,” he said calmly. “At least, not for us. I’m Murray Porath, chief legal counsel for Soulminder. Tell me, Mr. Marsh, did you know Mr. Ingersoll was on file with us?”

  “Mr. Ingersoll’s been into a lot of fads,” Marsh said shortly. “Cryogenics, crystal healing, sub-sonic bio-feedback—you name it, he was probably into it at one point or another. Usually he’d go through all the motions, read all the literature, even sign the papers; then his interest would fade, he’d let his memberships lapse, and that would be the end of it. As far as Soulminder was concerned, he told me at least twice in the past month that it was a waste of money and that he was going to dump it.”

  His eyes and face were hard, the very essence of righteous anger and honesty. Liar, Sommer thought.

  “Indeed,” Porath said. From his tone, Sommer guessed that he thought so, too. “I don’t suppose there were any witnesses to this conversation?”

  “Not that I recall,” Marsh said, his tone frosty. “Are you questioning my memory? Or just my word?”

  “Oh, heaven forbid,” Porath said soothingly, almost as if he really meant it. “It would have been nice to have some corroboration, but we all understand how these things are. Incidentally, if you’d rather have your lawyer present before you answer any more questions, by all means give him a call.”

  “I don’t want a lawyer,” Marsh snapped. “And I don’t want any more of these stupid and totally irrelevant questions. Mr. Ingersoll was more like my father than my boss, and I’m damn well not going to sit by and let him be robbed of the respect and dignity that he deserves. He’s been certified as dead, I’ve officially claimed the body, and that is that. The funeral home in New York has been notified and the service has been scheduled, and I want whatever organ removals he specified to be done now.” He glared at Bartok and Raines. “Or else I’m going to go in there and shut down all that hardware and take him out myself.”

  Raines took a deep breath, glanced at Bartok, and took an uncertain step toward Walker and the door behind him—

  “Funeral already scheduled, eh?” Porath said interestedly, moving smoothly past Sommer to stand beside his subordinate. “That’s fast work, I must say, Mr. Marsh. Almost as if you were expecting his death. Hmm?”

  “This was his third heart attack,” Marsh grated, “and he died two hours ago. He set up the funeral arrangements himself, incidentally, over two years ago. Not that you seem to have much respect for personal wishes. Dr. Bartok?”

  “Tell me, Dr. Raines,” Porath said, “didn’t you notice that Mr. Ingersoll was wearing a Soulminder ID bracelet before you signed that death certificate?”

  “It would have been hard to notice something he wasn’t wearing,” Raines growled, irritation beginning to shade into the uncomfortable defensiveness in his voice. “There was no Soulminder bracelet. Not here, not in the ambulance.”

  “It was seven-thirty in the morning,” Marsh put in, “and Mr. Ingersoll was still getting dressed when he had his attack.”

  “And you didn’t think to mention to the paramedics that he was on file with Soulminder?” Porath asked pointedly.

  “I told you, I assumed he’d dropped his registration.” Marsh took a long step forward, his hand coming to rest, not quite heavily, on Porath’s shoulder. “And I am finished with your stalling. The law is on my side, Mr. Porath. You know it and I know it. And you’re going to move aside, or I’m going to move you aside.”

  “There’s no need to get dramatic,” Porath said calmly, his eyes flicking over Marsh’s shoulder. “No need at all. James! Over here!”

  Sommer turned to see a young man striding toward them, an envelope clutched in his hand. “Mr. Porath?” the other asked tentatively.

  “Right here.” Porath raised a finger. “That goes to Dr. Bartok—that lady right there.”

  “What is it?” Bartok asked … but it seemed to Sommer that some of the tension in her face smoothed out as she accepted the envelope.

  “It’s a temporary injunction,” Porath told her, his eyes steady on Marsh. “It bars you or anyone here from releasing the body of Wilson Anders Ingersoll—to anyone—and from taking any surgical action on it. So that, at least for the moment, is that.” He looked at each of the medical people in turn, then nodded briskly and turned to Sommer. “Well, Dr. Sommer. Shall we go in and see how our client is doing?”

  The media were on the story less than an hour later, and for the next day and a half Sommer found himself besieged by reporters and news services in a blitz strongly reminiscent of that following the original Soulminder breakthrough. Then, it had been a floodlight he’d been totally unprepared for. Now, with concerns of prejudicing the case weighing heavily on each word, it was no less difficult.

  Finally, late in the afternoon on the second day, the flurry began to fade and he was able at last to sit down with the others and find out what had been happening in the background while he’d been facing the cameras.

  “The preliminary deposition dates are all set,” Porath said, readjusting his feet on his desk and sipping at a cup of tea. “We’ve got Marsh, Ingersoll’s executive secretary, Doctors Raines and Bartok, the head of the hospital, and the nurse whose call originally got us onto this in the first place.”

  “I never did hear just exactly why she did that,” Sommer told him.

  Porath shrugged. “She just had a hunch, I gather. She told me that something about Marsh’s manner just popped the thought into her head.”

  “Just one more bit of proof that Marsh knew damn well that Ingersoll was still on file,” Sands growled. “As if we needed it.”

  “Hunches hardly qualify as proof, Dr. Sands,” Porath reminded her. “We’re almost certainly not going to be able to prove that Marsh lied about that, incidentally, so abandon any thoughts you might have of nailing him to the wall. Keep your eyes on the main point—getting Ingersoll back together again—and be glad that he had the blind luck to draw a nurse willing to play her hunches. Otherwise, Marsh would have just waltzed out with the body, and we’d have been left literally holding the bag.”

  Sommer shuddered. To be left with a hopelessly disembodied soul in their care … “Blind luck, or an act of God.”

  “Better call it luck,” Porath said wryly. “Events defined as Acts Of God have a peculiar status in the law, and they almost always wind up working in your opponent’s favor in court.”

  “If this ever gets to court,” Sands said.

  Porath snorted. “Oh, it’ll get to court, all right. Marsh isn’t likely to give up now.”

  “Not even when he’s lost?” Sommer asked. “I mean, couldn’t the judge just handle it on a pre-trial basis?”

  “He could, but he probably won’t. You see, Dr. Sommer, as a strictly legal matter, I have to tell you that Marsh has a pretty strong case.”

  “He what?” Sands growled.

  Porath shrugged. “Look at the facts. By all accepted medical and legal definitions, Ingersoll died when his EEG trace went flat. Everyth
ing else flows directly from that: the death certificate, Marsh’s claiming of the body, the card authorizing the hospital to remove Ingersoll’s organs—all perfectly legitimate. We, not him, are the ones walking on loose sand here.”

  “That’s crazy,” Sommer told him. “Haven’t erroneous death certificates been issued before? People who eventually recovered, or even just clerical errors?”

  “Oh, it happens all the time,” Porath agreed. “But in every one of those cases, the supposedly dead person is able to get up off the table and announce that he is, in fact, alive. Ingersoll can’t do that, and unless and until he does, Marsh has legitimate claim to the body.”

  Sands muttered something under her breath and shifted her attention to the fourth person in the office. “Everly? What have you dug up on Marsh?”

  Everly shook his head. “Hints and innuendoes, but nothing solid. He started out as a lawyer at Drummond Information Services about fifteen years ago, quickly became Ingersoll’s protégé, and has been his heir apparent for about three years. There was a certain amount of low-key friction between them earlier this year, centering on whether Ingersoll was keeping Marsh on too short a leash, but that seems to have faded away a few months back with Marsh accepting the limits set for him.”

  “And then came Marsh’s lucky break,” Sands said sourly. “Ingersoll has his fatal heart attack on an out-of-town business trip, with a doctor who doesn’t know he’s on Soulminder.” Abruptly, she sat up a little straighter. “Unless … ?”

  “Don’t even think it,” Porath warned her. “You start even thinking that Marsh might have committed murder here and we’ll all wind up on the short end of a major defamation suit.”

  “Unless we can prove he actually did it,” Sands countered.

  “He’s not stupid enough to take that kind of risk,” Everly said. “Especially when there was no need for it. The handwriting was on the wall—Ingersoll had already had two heart attacks and was bucking for a third. All Marsh had to do was to bide his time and not rock the boat.”

  “Agreed,” Porath nodded. “The police will be looking into that, but it’s almost certainly just blowing smoke rings. Regardless, we need to stay totally clear of it.”

  “So where does that leave us?” Sommer asked.

  “Like I said, walking on loose sand,” Porath conceded. “The original injunction will keep Ingersoll on life-support as long as the court is mulling it over, and the follow-ups will keep Marsh away from the body—just in case he does intend anything,” he added, nodding to Sands. “So that’s one for our side. On Marsh’s side is the fact that Soulminder’s own position in this case is fairly ambiguous—we’re not Ingersoll’s next of kin or his corporate partners or his heirs, or anything else that comes in a neat legal package.”

  “Friend of the court?” Everly offered.

  “I’ve already filed us in as a trustee,” Porath told him. “After all, we are holding something in trust for him.”

  Sommer shivered. “Yeah. Himself.”

  Porath nodded, and for a second the logical legal facade seemed to bend a bit. “Yes, well … anyway, the judge is still considering what status to grant us.”

  “Can’t we simply show that a Soulminder trap does indeed hold a person’s lifeforce?” Sands asked Porath. “We’ve done, what, six successful transfers?”

  “Eight, if you count Dr. Sommer and the Coleman boy,” Porath said. “I’ve filed them as part of my petition to have the judge turn Ingersoll’s body over to us, on the grounds that Soulminder is a life-saving technique and that its use wouldn’t in any way violate any of his last requests. But again, the judge is under no particular obligation to consider the data, just as he might not give much weight to the overall statistics on some surgical procedure in a particular malpractice suit.”

  “But it’s not like that,” Sommer objected.

  “It’s not like anything.” Porath spread his hands helplessly. “I’m sorry, Dr. Sommer, but it just isn’t. We’re breaking virgin legal ground here, and there just aren’t any obvious precedents.”

  “And I’ll just bet the judge is just smacking his lips over it,” Sands growled. “His big chance to write trail-blazing law. Well, you called it, Adrian—the judicial branch has just officially gotten into the act.”

  Sommer grimaced. “Yeah. Swell.”

  Everly cleared his throat. “That reminds me. We’ve finished identifying all the assorted Spook Central infiltrators now. Any particular way you’d like to have them bounced?”

  “Quick and clean and final,” Sands told him. “No publicity, unless they want to squawk about it to the media themselves. And you might have them tell their respective bosses not to bother trying again.”

  Everly cocked an eyebrow. “That could easily be construed as a challenge,” he warned.

  “So let them try,” Sands said grimly. “The sooner they find out we have no intention of becoming U.S. Government property, the better.”

  “Maybe we ought to try talking to whoever’s in charge before we start waving red flags,” Sommer suggested cautiously. Sands had a bad tendency to lose her sense of proportion when she latched onto something like this. “We really don’t have the energy to waste on a full-scale intelligence war. We’ve got at least a hundred American cities and foreign capitals clamoring for Soulminder facilities, and if Frank’s people have to spend all their time guarding our backs here, we may never get another adequately secure building built. Anywhere.”

  “And what are you going to say to them?” Sands scoffed. “Pretty please let us alone?”

  “Depends on what they want,” Everly told her. “If they’re after Soulminder itself and aren’t going to stop at anything less, then you’re right, talking won’t do any good. But if all they really want is to make sure a Presidential soul transfer will be secure, then we might be able to convince them that we’ve got things under control.”

  “I think it’s worth a try, anyway,” Sommer said. “Frank, can you get me the name and number of the man to talk to?”

  “No problem.”

  “Good,” Sommer said. “And I’ll want to talk some more with you about this later. There are some thoughts and scenarios I want to get your reaction to.”

  “Just let me know when you’re ready.”

  “Then let’s get back to Ingersoll,” Sommer said, glancing around the table. “If the judge—”

  He broke off as he saw a new and oddly intense look on Porath’s face. “Murray?”

  Slowly, Porath’s distant gaze came back to focus. “I was just thinking … no. No, it’s crazy.”

  “Everything about this is crazy,” Sands said. “Come on, Porath, out with it.”

  Porath’s fingers probed through his beard. “I was just thinking that—well, presumably the government wouldn’t try to influence the judge himself. But on the other hand, they might be able to get the type of judge they want assigned to the case.”

  “And what type of judge might they want?” Sands persisted.

  “A type who could be expected to rule against us,” Everly said quietly.

  All eyes turned to him. “Then it’s not just a crazy idea,” Porath murmured.

  Everly shook his head. “If Marsh wins Ingersoll’s body, you can probably say goodbye to ninety percent of our prospective clientele. No point in spending that much money when the courts won’t guarantee you’ll get a return on your investment. We’d either have to attract private funding somehow—and I don’t know offhand what we could offer them—or else find another source of money.”

  Sands swore. “And there would be the United States government with a bag of cash in each hand.”

  “Something like that.” Porath exhaled thoughtfully between his teeth. “It may be just fever-dreaming, but it would be stupid to take chances. I’ll get in touch with one of the judicial watchdog committees, see if I can get a list
of voting records and find judges we definitely don’t want.”

  “We’ll need to do more than that,” Sommer said, his stomach knotting. Of all the ironies about this whole mess … “We need to get this in front of the public—put your famous floodlit-microscope theory to work, Frank. If we’re lucky maybe we can scare off the trial-fixers before they get going.”

  “May I ask how you intend to do that?” Sands asked. “Without looking like we’re trying to fix the trial, that is?”

  “I really don’t know.” Sommer hesitated. “Frank, would you happen to know if Tommy Lee Harper is still in town?”

  “He is,” Everly said without hesitation. “He’s been making a tour of Capitol Hill, trying to drum up opposition to a couple of bills that are under consideration.”

  “Why do you want to know?” Sands asked, a trace of suspicion in her voice.

  Sommer got to his feet. It had been an exceedingly long three days, and the worst part was probably still to come. “Because,” he told her, “I’m going to ask him for his help.”

  “I must say, Dr. Sommer,” Harper said, coolly polite as he waved Sommer to a chair and closed the hotel room’s door behind him, “that you were probably the last person I expected to call me this evening.”

  “Proves that miracles still happen,” Sommer said, sinking into the chair and glancing around. It was one of the best suites in one of the most expensive hotels in Washington.

  Harper must have caught the once-over. “You’ll excuse the luxury, I trust,” his tone a bit defensive. “The Focus people made all the accommodation arrangements for us, and since I’m taping another interview with the network tomorrow they went ahead and booked me for the entire week. I would have preferred something less ostentatious, myself.”

  “Ah.” To anyone else it would probably have sounded like a rather feeble excuse. To Sommer, who’d had abundant dealings of his own with network guest liaisons, it sounded only too typical. “Yes, I’ve run into that mindset myself on occasion.”