He lay down on the sofa and was silent while the professor attached the electrodes and adjusted the controls of the machine. This time, instead of using the sprayer can, Carebara told Duncan to open his mouth. He held a tiny dropper above Duncan’s tongue and squeezed the bulb on its end. Duncan felt the cold wetness and smelled the violetlike odor. He went under so quickly that he was not sure, when he opened his eyes, that the drug had taken effect. A glance at the digital time display showed him that thirty-five minutes had passed. Carebara, who had looked so glum and sour, was now smiling broadly.
Which doesn’t improve his looks any, Duncan thought.
He sat up and said, “You must’ve struck something. A speck or the mother lode?”
“What?” Carebara said, blinking his big green eyes.
Evidently, he did not understand the reference.
“How did we do?”
Still smiling, Carebara rubbed his hands together, a gesture somehow similar to that of a praying mantis clicking its claws together before seizing its victim. Or was he recalling some other insect?
“We’ve found the right location. Now, we’ll start digging.”
“I’m not an ant colony,” Duncan said. He asked for a glass of water; the drug always dehydrated him. Flatass brought it to him. Duncan said, “Thanks,” and drained the glass. But his mouth was still a little dry.
Carebara sat down but was careful, Duncan noted, to do so in a chair a good distance from him. The professor said, “Let’s run it now. You’ll see what I mean.”
Carebara fast-forwarded the preliminary boilerplate questioning required at every session. This consisted mostly of twelve questions needed to establish that the subject was indeed whom he said he was. Even though it had been proved many times that Duncan could lie and that the boilerplate was useless, Carebara proceeded by the book.
The professor had then gone through each ID, working backward, simply asking each for his name and citizen’s overall code number. None had responded until he had requested Jefferson Cervantes Caird’s. And then, while Carebara gasped, the information had been given. The professor had been so taken aback at his entirely unexpected success that he had been unable to speak for several seconds. Overwhelmed, he had not even checked for pupil sizechange or the machine’s indicators for blood pressure and skin field changes. That made Duncan wonder if there had been any. But the professor, when he made his report for Ruggedo, would be sure to run off the records the machine had made at that time. Duncan was not really worried.
“How did you do it?” he said.
Carebara quit smiling. His hands came together on his chest, and his fingers wiggled.
“I…don’t…know.”
He put his hands onto his lap, leaned forward, and smiled again.
“What’s the difference? I can determine that later. The important thing is that I was successful. It worked, whatever it was.”
Watching his answers to the professor’s excited questions, Duncan had to admit that it certainly seemed to have worked. One by one, he gave the answers Carebara wanted. At the end, he had revealed the outline of the techniques for making a completely new persona.
The wall screen displayed the code number of the taping and went blank.
“Now for the details,” Carebara said.
“Tomorrow,” Duncan said. “I’m far too tired to attempt that. I’m much more fatigued than from the other sessions. It wouldn’t do any good to make another run. I’m just too pooped out.”
Carebara looked disappointed, and he opened his mouth as if he were about to argue. He shut it, chewed his lip for a moment, wiggled his fingers, then said, “Very well. Tomorrow, shortly after breakfast, we tackle the details.”
Duncan rose along with the professor. “I’m very excited, too. I was beginning to think it was hopeless. But you must’ve done something, something you don’t realize, to have gotten through to the basic persona.”
“Yes! But after we get the procedure programed, we have to make sure that the new persona can lie under TM. I don’t know…the process seems so simple…maybe…”
“You’re thinking that maybe not everybody can be taught it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure that you won’t have to try it out on too many people before you find someone who’ll respond, someone who’ll be able to do it as easily as I did.”
Carebara, walking toward the door, the guards behind him, called back. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, a hell of a lot! I won’t be sleeping tonight!”
Duncan was certain that Carebara would notify Ruggedo at once of his success. Whether that would bring Ruggedo here tomorrow, Duncan could only guess. He would come eventually. Then, if all went as Duncan hoped it would, he and Cabtab and Snick might escape.
How often did everything go strictly according to plan?
About once in ten thousand times, maybe.
Despite this thought, Duncan fell asleep at once. But not before saying good night to Caird II.
There was no reply. He had not expected one.
29
“You realize,” Duncan said to Carebara, “that once everybody learns how to lie under TM, the government and the justice system will lose greatly. Subversives and corrupt politicians will no longer be detected so easily. Criminals will escape their proper punishment. Society will be plunged into the mistakes and errors, the chaos of ancient times. Of course, I’m just pointing this out to you as something to debate about. It may be that the ability of anyone to lie whenever he chooses is a natural right. Humankind has enjoyed the right and the privilege since it learned how to talk. Lying comes naturally and is perhaps a gift that shouldn’t be taken away from people.
“On the other hand, look at how society has benefited or has seemed to benefit from the use of the truth drug. Justice is almost always done. The guilty almost never escape. The median citizen, knowing that he will assuredly be apprehended and punished if he commits a crime, refrains. The only criminals in the New Era are those who kill or injure because of a sudden passion or who are unintelligent enough to think they can escape the consequences of their crimes.”
Carebara frowned, then gestured at the guard, Flatass, to carry Duncan’s tray of dirty dishes to the wall panel. Flatass, a man with socially undesirable large buttocks, also frowned. He did not like doing a prisoner’s work, but he obeyed.
“I wouldn’t bother thinking about the problem,” the professor said. “The knowledge of anti-TM techniques will be very restricted. Only a few will even hear about it.”
Duncan smiled. “That’s what I thought. The only ones who’ll have that knowledge will be the very highest officials in the government.”
“Right. And, of course, those who teach it to the officials.”
Duncan smiled again. “How long do you think the teachers will be allowed to live or to go unstoned once they’ve taught all they know to a few officials?”
“Nonsense! That’s ridiculous! Treasonous! Paranoiacal!” Carebara said.
“If you think it’s so nonsensical, why are you pale?”
Carebara glanced at the wall screen, felt his throat, and spoke in a slightly trembling voice. “That would not be consonant with our high ideals.”
“Ideals?” Duncan said, and he spoke no more on the subject.
“Let’s get down to work,” Carebara said.
“After I go to the bathroom. My bowels always move right after breakfast. They make an offer I can’t refuse.”
“Very well, but don’t dawdle.”
Duncan stood up from the chair. “What’s the hurry? Is Ruggedo coming today?”
Carebara, his lips pressed together, looked away from Duncan.
“I didn’t expect you to tell me.”
When Duncan came out of the bathroom, he found that Stripes had also entered the apartment.
“One guard isn’t enough?” he said. “What do you expect me to do while I’m unconscious?”
Carebara was still scowling. “It suddenly o
ccurred to me that, if you can fake answers while under TM, you might also be faking unconsciousness.”
“And you think I might try something? Like attacking you again?”
Duncan guffawed.
“Who’s paranoiac now?”
He sat down on the sofa. “If you’re really worried about that, all you have to do is check out my alpha waves while I’m passed out.”
“Those can be controlled,” Carebara said. “You’re a very curious phenomenon, Beewolf. It’s too bad, in a way, that you have to be kept here. You should be in some institution with extensive laboratory equipment and under observation by scientists far more competent than I am to study you.”
He sighed, then said, “But that’s not to be for some time. After the revolution, there’ll be plenty of time.”
“I’ll still be a prisoner then?”
“That’s not up to me.”
Carebara attached the electrodes and pointed the antennae of the machine at various parts of Duncan’s body.
“I have some questions to ask while you’re conscious.”
These, it was obvious, were designed to find out how much Duncan could recall of Caird’s persona while he was in the awake state. That was easier for Duncan than he had expected. He closed his eyes and summoned up the image of Caird II, its feet tangled in long bloody glowing-red flesh-roots that trailed away into the abyss until they were lost in the darkness. Duncan became, in effect, Caird II, though he retained enough of Duncan to fake him when the professor addressed him as such.
Carebara was reading the questions from a list held in his hand. Duncan wondered if that had been prepared by Ruggedo. It seemed to him that Ruggedo must know far more about his previous personae than Carebara.
“What do you know of Charles Arpad Ohm?”
The question yanked Duncan from his reverie. It had leaped at him as if from ambush.
“Ohm?” Duncan said. “I only know what you’ve told me of him. He was my Saturday persona in Manhattan, a weedie, a bum, a drunk.”
“That’s all you recall?”
“Yes.”
That was not true. Several faces had sped by that inner eye. His. Snick’s. Ruggedo’s. However… Ruggedo was named…was named…?
“Are you certain?”
Carebara was looking at the wall screen on which were displayed in large characters the readoff from the machine. They indicated that Duncan was very relaxed and was just having a nice chat with a friend.
Carebara threw his hands up and said, “Pah! What use is it?”
“Yes, I’m certain,” Duncan said. “What I know of Ohm is what you’ve told me.”
Carebara resumed the questions dealing with Caird. Using only part of his attention, Duncan answered them automatically. Now and then, he was steered away from the mainstream of his thoughts by his inability to give the data Carebara asked for. Then he would say, “I don’t remember,” and go back to fishing for the elusive name. It kept hopping about on the edge of his mind like a deranged kangaroo.
Ruggedo? Ruggedo? Ruggedo?
That suggested something. What? Carpets? Individualists?
It had something to do with clocks. Watches? Timepieces? Digital displays? Chronometers? Chron…chron…chron… Ancient instruments for measuring time. Gnomons? A gnomon was…now he had it…a metal triangle or pin on a sundial. By the shadow that it cast on the dial, the time of day was shown. But what could a gnomon…a part of a sundial…? Ah! Like a blank screen suddenly displaying a single huge word filling the screen flashed: GNOME!
But that was not quite it.
Gnome, gnome, gnome.
NOME!
The troll-like characters in Baum’s Oz series, the mean, nasty, loveless creatures that lived underground. Their king was Ruggedo!
“What are you smiling about?” Carebara said harshly.
“It has nothing to do with you,” Duncan said. “Next question, please.”
“You haven’t answered the present one.”
“I don’t know.”
The chief PUPA was a sardonic bastard. He had chosen that name because Ruggedo was the monarch of an underground band. Baum’s Nome king had dedicated his sordid life to invading and overthrowing the great and happy nation on the sunny surface of Earth, Oz. Oz was no danger to him and only wanted to be left alone. But Ruggedo could not stand the idea of all that easy living and joy. Besides, though he had in his dark and rock-shelled kingdom all the gold and diamonds that the most avaricious could desire, he wanted all that the open-air land of Oz possessed.
Duncan wondered if the PUPA Ruggedo was aware, when he chose the name to hide behind, that the Nome Ruggedo had always been foiled, his silicon-based ass deep in the mud and Glinda the Good’s magical shaft driven all the way up it.
The people and beasts in Oz, all living things, including trees, were immortal. The fairy queen Lurline had cast a spell on the land that ensured that no one could grow older or die. Even if a man was chopped into pieces, he lived; the pieces twitched forever.
Immortality. That…the green idea was receding behind an ever-spreading barrenness, like the Deadly Desert that surrounded the land of Oz. “Jesus Christ!” he cried, and he sat up straight.
Carebara jumped and threw the list into the air. “What? What?”
Immortality!
The face of Ruggedo, its heavy-lidded eyes glowing bright as a traffic signal, its smile superior and all-knowing, had risen from the dry-brown barrenness. Like the ghost of Samuel called up by the Witch of Endor.
“Ohm!” Duncan said loudly.
Carebara, on his knees, looking for the list, which had glided under a chair, turned his head toward Duncan. “Ohm? What about Ohm?”
It was a measure of his mental resistance that Duncan’s face did not reveal anything to the professor. The wall display showed a jump in blood pressure, a drumming of the heart, an electrical storm across his skin, a cataract of adrenaline in his blood, a nova of F-waves from the cerebellum. The professor did not see that, though he would when he studied the tapes later. By then, Duncan hoped, it would not matter. Meanwhile…he closed his eyes, visualized green fields, a white unicorn trotting across them, himself, goat-horned and shaggy-legged, atop the virgin the unicorn was heading for but would get to a few minutes too late.
He opened his eyes. As he had hoped, the readouts now indicated a man under no tension. That, of course, did not signify as much as it should. There were hundreds of thousands who could control the reactions to stress because of their many years of exercise in biofeedback. That was the main reason why, when the ganks administered TM, they seldom used physical/electronic lie detectors as auxiliaries.
“What about Ohm?” Carebara said again.
It had not been a trickle of recall. It had been a spurt, a geyser, rising and then falling and disappearing. So packed with images and words was the flash that Duncan could not see it all. Yet he had seen and remembered enough.
He, Charles Arpad Ohm, was in a secret apartment in the Tower of Evolution in Manhattan. Ruggedo was talking to him, but Ruggedo was Gilbert Ching Immerman, a man thought to have died a long time ago. Immerman was his grandfather and great-grandfather, and he was the founder and head of the subversive organization to which Caird and his six other personae belonged, an organization that had later been exposed and smashed. Somehow, Immerman had escaped detection and was still one of the world government councillors. Instead Of abandoning his plans, he had organized another group. Or perhaps the remnants of the old group.
Immerman had made the biochemical integrocompound he called the immortality elixir, though it did not ensure life forever.
“Seven times prolonged!” Duncan murmured.
“What!” Carebara said. “I asked you about Ohm!”
“Oh,” Duncan said. “There, just for a second, I thought I had some recall about him. But it faded away. I can’t seem to bring it back.”
Carebara looked pleased. “At last we’re making some progress.”
&
nbsp; Immerman’s elixir slowed the aging process by a factor of seven. Normally, a citizen who lived to be eighty subjective years old would live for 570 obyears. But an immer, one who took the annual drink of the elixir and whose normal lifespan was eighty subyears, would live to be 3,920 obyears old.
That was the other reason why the government had burned to capture him. Some of the higher officials, probably a very few of the very’ high, had learned that from the immers who had been caught. And the officials had kept the knowledge of the secret for themselves. Not only had they stoned all the captive immers, they had also stoned the lower-echelon people who might have found out about the elixir or might have heard rumors of it.
Snick had known nothing about it, but she had been brought to trial on trumped-up charges, sentenced, and put away in a warehouse.
Despite his effort at self-control, he was so angry that the screen showed a skyscraper blood pressure and a 20,000 Hz F-wave.
“Time to put you under,” the professor said. “Open your mouth wide, please.”
Duncan awoke an hour later, the electrodes removed from him. Carebara, looking puzzled, was standing over him. He handed a glass of water to Duncan after he had struggled to sit up. When Duncan had drained the glass, he gave it back to Carebara~ After placing the glass on the end-table, the professor walked away without a word, followed by the two guards. As soon as the door had closed on them, Duncan got to his feet. He was very shaky. His mouth, despite the water, was so dry that he felt his tongue could scrape sparks off his teeth. His brain and his stomach were playing catch with a red-hot iron ball.
As he reeled toward the bathroom, he said, “The bug must’ve used TM four times on me. And drugs, too. That’s brutal.”
If, however, Carebara had probed into anything exciting, he was keeping it to himself. Duncan doubted that he had gotten any more than his subject wished to give. He would have a long list of procedures for creating a new persona, and that might bring Ruggedo—Immerman—running.