Authors: Lawrence Sanders
“I know.”
“Listen,” he said, “are you sure that was from her?”
“I’m sure.”
“You are?” He looked at me narrowly. “Oh-ho! Section code. I get it. ‘Rush urgent latest. Emergency.’ R-U-L-E. Verification code—right?”
No idiot he.
“Right.” I nodded.
I looked at the bedside digital clock.
“If we hurry I can make the 2330 courier flight from Ellis. Let me shower, shave, and dress. First, you lay on a cart and copter, and book me on the flight. Then put on some clothes and get me an
Instox copy of that report from your office. Meet me outside in twenty minutes.”
He nodded and we started rushing.
Twenty minutes later he handed over the sealed report and drove the electric cart to the copter pad at the other end of the compound. “Nick,” he said. “Be careful.”
“Careful?”
“Something’s up. If she really needed that report, which l doubt, it could have been scanned to her. But she started with ‘You—You personally. . . .’ ”
“That’s right.”
“What is it?”
“I have no idea.” .
“You have no idea—or I have no need to know?”
“I have no idea.”
“Will you flash me after you see her?”
“No. If possible I’ll take the return flight. I’ll be back before dawn.”
“Nick, I grabbed a couple of things in my office—amitriptyline and the new iproniazid. Want one?”
“I’d like the fast upper but I’m not going to take it. I better play this straight.”
He parked in the shadow of the hangar, cast by the floodlights on the pad. The copter was waiting there, rotor slowly turning. Paul and I kissed.
“Take care,” he said lightly.
I made the 2330 hypersonic from the airfield that had formerly been Ellis Island. We landed in San Francisco two hours later, and most of the time was spent circling over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, going and coming through the sonic wall.
Arrival was approximately 0130, New York time. I was coptered and then driven to Angela Berri’s seaside home in less than 30 minutes. According to my digiwatch, I walked down to the beach just before 0200, New York time. But just before 2300, local time. Ergo, I had arrived before I had been summoned. Amusing.
We came up from the beach into the main house. Angela Berri led the way into a living room-office-den, then closed and locked the door behind me. She motioned me to a white plasticade armchair, then switched on a cassette of a gamelan quartet. I remembered she fancied Eastern music. She turned up the volume of her hemispherical sound system. Too loud. The windows fluttered. She went to a small office refrigerator and, without asking my preference, poured us each a glass of chilled Smack.
She sat down behind the red plastisteel desk.
“You brought the report I wanted, Nick?”
“Yes. Here.”
I leaned forward to scale the sealed envelope onto the desktop. She tore it open, scanned the report swiftly, tossed it aside.
“What is the status now?”
Curious. She received weekly progress reports, and I knew she listened to them. She had a double doctorate—in molecular biology and biochemical genetics. She would understand exactly what we were doing on the Individual Microbiology Profile Project.
But dutifully I replied, ‘ ‘Everyone in the Department of Bliss has been tested and coded.”
“New employees?” she asked sharply.
“Not those coming aboard in the last six weeks. But we have everyone else. The computer has been programmed. We’re tuning up now. We should be able to start blind tests in a day or two.”
She nodded. “I’m beginning to work on my budget recommendations,” she said tonelessly. “I must adjust the allocation for IMP.”
Curiouser. She knew as well as I that no specific allocation had ever been made for the IMP Project. The new dollars came from my discretionary fund, as did the love for all pure research projects. Congress and the public were interested only in hardware. We hid the rest.
She came over to me and stood directly behind my chair.
“I’m glad you could bring the new report personally, Nick.”
But it was not a new report. She had scanned it two weeks ago. What was—
Then, standing behind me, she began lightly stroking my temples, jawline, beneath the chin, with her fingertips. My initial reaction was ego-oriented. I knew she took profit from me, and thought she might want to use me. But then, as those cool fingers continued to search the outlines of my face, I knew what was happening.
That interrogation on the beach had been to assure her that I was who I claimed to be, Nicholas Bennington Flair. That I remembered events that only she and I had shared. But it was inconclusive. An object’s memories could be drained, to be learned by another object. I had helped develop the drugs to do it.
This probing of my face with her fingertips was to confirm that I was the em I appeared to be, Nick Flair, and not the product of clever surgeons using the new Juskin. It was a synthetic product, bonded to natural skin by a technique not unlike welding. It left no scars or seams, but it did leave an invisible welt at the line of juncture that could be felt.
She feared me an impostor-—a not unreasonable fear. Two months previously the Statistics Projection Chief of the Department of Agribusiness, formerly the Department of Agriculture, had proved to be an impostor, in the employ of a cartel of grain dealers. The original Chief had been assassinated.
She went back behind the red desk and sat there, staring at me. We both sipped our plastiglasses of Smack while she tried to make up her mind. I thought idly that the reason for her senseless questions about the IMP Project had been inspired by her suspicion that this room was being shared. That was also the reason for the high volume of the gamelan tape. The sound was sufficient to set up random vibrations of walls and windows, in case anyone was sharing with a long-distance laser beam.
I turned the glass of Smack in my palms. The Jellicubes of “ice” didn’t melt. Unfortunately. They looked like little blocks of squid.
Smack was interesting. It was the best-selling soft drink in the world, by far. It had a sweetish citric flavor. Other soft drinks tasted better, but Smack had an advantage they didn’t have: it was addictive.
The original formula was a serendipitous discovery. In 1978, Pace Pharmaceuticals, in St. Louis, was doing research on a drug that might be effective against the so-called ‘ ‘fatty liver” caused by alcohol addiction. Eventually, they found themselves working on the physiological effects of alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine.
Two years later, Pace had produced a powder that was, in solution, admittedly physically addictive. But it did not require increased dosage to provide mild euphoria over a long period of time. More important, Pace claimed, it produced absolutely no harmful physical or psychological effects.
It was a nice legal point. Pace decided to meet the issue head-on. They fought it through the courts for seven years. By the time the Supreme Court decided, in 1987, that addictive substances were not, per se, illegal, providing they had no toxic effects, Pace was ready with “Smack! The Flavor You Can’t Forget!” It was widely rumored that two Associate Justices and five law clerks became millionaires overnight by prior knowledge of the decision and purchase of Pace stock. This may or may not be operative.
What was operative was that Pace’s addictive formula was now licensed for chewing gum, toothpaste, ice cream, mouthwash, and candy bars. As the obsos were fond of saying, “Better living through chemistry.”
So there I was, sipping my Smack like millions of others throughout the world, and watching Angela Berri struggle to make up her mind. It really didn’t take her long. She rose, pulled heavy drapes across all the Thermapanes. She returned to her swivel chair, unlocked a desk drawer, drew out a tape cassette, placed it squarely in the middle of the desk blotter. She stared at it. I stared at it. Then she raised her eyes to give me that hard, tight half-smile of hers. I looked at her, computing.
When, at the age of twelve, I announced to my father that I had been accepted at the government’s new National Science Academy, under the Accelerated Conditioning Program, and that I intended to make a career of Public Service, he gave me a sardonic look and said merely, “Save yourself.”
It was five years before I understood what he had meant. As I moved up in PS, I became increasingly aware of the plots of Byzantine complexity and Oriental ferocity that swirled through government, and especially Public Service. Unless you were utterly devoid of ambition, it was impossible to remain aloof. You had to ally yourself with the strong, shun the weak. More important, you had to join the winners, reject the losers. It called for inching along a political tightrope. You hoped that you would master the skill before falling.
Now Angela Berri was presenting me with what I guessed to be essentially a political choice. I hesitated only a moment. In politics, as in war, it is better to make a bad decision than no decision at all.
Without speaking, I raised my eyebrows and jerked my head upward to point my chin at the tape cassette.
Without speaking, she motioned me over to stand next to her.
Without speaking, I picked up the cassette and examined it. It appeared to be a standard commercial cartridge, providing about thirty minutes of tape on each side. The clear plastic container was unlabeled.
Without speaking, she took a pad of scratch paper and a gold liquid graphite pencil from a side drawer. I watched her movements carefully.
She tore the top sheet of paper from the pad and placed it off the blotter, on the bare plastisteel desktop. She didn’t want to risk the second sheet of the pad or the desk blotter picking up even a faint imprint of what she would write. She scribbled a few words, then looked up at me. I bent over her. I smelled a pleasing scent of her sweat, the stallion’s, and the exciting estrogen-based perfume she was wearing.
I read what she had written: “For you only. ” I pondered a few seconds, then took the gold pencil from her fingers. Directly beneath her note, I jotted, “Paul Bumford?” She read it, raised her eyes to stare at me a moment, then nodded. Yes.
She took a ceramic crucible from a side drawer, crumpled our shared note, dropped it in the crucible. From another drawer she took a small bottle of a commercial solvent, Deztroyzit. The cap was actually a dropper with a bulb of plastirub. She dripped two drops onto the crumpled note. It dissolved. We watched the white smoke curl up. Acrid odor. In a few seconds the paper was gone. Not even ashes left.
I slipped the tape cassette into the side pocket of my zipsuit. We walked to the door without speaking.
In the hallway, the young em was just coming up from the lower level workshop. He was carrying a beautifully crafted model of an antique rocket. I think it was a Saturn.
“Nick,” she said, “this is Bruce. Bruce, meet my friend, Nick.”
We smiled at each other and stroked palms. I judged him to be about twelve. No more than fourteen. Handsome. Big.
“Bruce’s clone group is being conditioned for Project Jupiter,” she said proudly.
“Lucky Bruce.” I sighed. “I wish I was going.”
But of course I was much too old. I was twenty-eight.
Bruce, not having spoken, left us and carried his rocket to an upstairs room.
At the outside door she put those long, slender fingers on my arm.
“Nick, thank you again for bringing me that IMP report.”
“Sure.”
“Perhaps when I get back we can use each other again.”
“A profit!” I said. I meant it. She was an efficient user.
“For me, too,” she said.
I made the return flight with minutes to spare. There were fewer than twenty passengers scattered around the cabin of the 102-seat hypersonic. It was a waste of the taxpayers’ love. But if you worried about wasting taxpayers’ love, you shouldn’t be in Public Service in the first place.
Takeoff was right on the decisecond. After we were airborne, the Security Officer came down the aisle returning our BIN cards, surrendered for identification check at the boarding gate. As we circled out over the Pacific, I stared at my card. I had, as required by law, provided a new color Instaroid photo the previous year. But I felt many years older than that long-faced, rather saturnine em who stared back at me.
The BIN card noted I was 182 cm tall and weighed 77 kg. (The US had completed switchover to the Metric System in 1985.) Hair: black. Eyes: Blue. Race was not noted since by assimilation (especially interbreeding), classification by race, color, or ethnical stock was no longer meaningful (or even possible). Creed was not noted since religious persuasion was of no consequence.
My BIN was NM-A-31570-GPA-1-K14324. That is, I was a Natural Male with a Grade A genetic rating, bom March 15, 1970, who lived in Geo-Political Area 1, and whose birth registration number was K14324. The invisible magnetic coding made it almost impossible to forge a BIN card. Almost, but not quite.
I put it away when the stewardess came down the aisle, pushing her cart of nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, Smack, Somnorifics, tranquilizers, decongestants, antidepressants, antibiotics, diuretics, steroid hormones, and narcotic sedatives. In her white zipsuit and white cap, she looked exactly like a pharmaceutical nurse making the rounds in a terminal ward.
I asked for a two-hour Somnorific, but all she had was one-hour or three. I took the one. I settled back in my seat, the alumistretch strap holding me securely, and turned the inhaler over in my fingers before removing the seal.
About five years previously, the Space Exploration Section (formerly NASA, now a division of the Department of the Air Force) had let a contract to Walker & Clarke Chemicals to develop a controlled hypnotic. SES had found that on extended flights and tours of duty in the space laboratories, the crews frequently suffered from boredom and/or insomnia. SES wanted a precisely timed sleeping pill, inhalant, or injection with no side or toxic effects.
After some clever molecular manipulation of glutethimide, a nonbarbiturate hypnotic, Walker & Clarke came up with a powder that oxidized when exposed to air, releasing a gas that had the required somniferous effect when inhaled. After tests, the Space Exploration Section accepted the new product and felt it safe enough to license for unrestricted use. They claimed it was nonad-dictive.