“Now we go to my place,” she said. “You tricked me once tonight, Charles, but not again. Now you keep your bargain.”
Noyes was close to collapse. Drenched in sweat, trembling, terrified, he let her shepherd him across to her little apartment in New Jersey. He tumbled wearily onto a couch. Elena stood over him, eyes bright, features rigid with malevolence.
“Now, Mr. Discorporator,” she said, “you’ve done Roditis’ filthy work and made me an accomplice. You owe me something for that. Out of that body now!”
“No,” Noyes said feebly.
“No? No! We have a deal! Come, now. Shall I give you a drink? To make it easier? No trickery, Charles!”
Noyes felt Kravchenko hammering vehemently at the fabric of his mind, making a savage attempt to go dybbuk. Desperately Noyes resisted. I won’t do it, he told himself. This is one bargain I won’t keep. They can’t make me destroy myself this way. I’ve got to get out of here, back to Roditis to get blanked, fast.
—You miserable cheater, Charles. You filthy pig!
It was Kravchenko. Noyes was stunned to realize that he had spoken nothing aloud. Kravchenko had tapped right into his flow of interior monolog! That meant the persona had taken a deeper hold than ever before on him, and was now in direct contact with his mind.
“Let’s go, Charles,” Elena said. “Out!”
“No. No, please—”
She seized him by the shoulders and shook him in a wild fury. He tried to push her away, but she was too strong for him; and now he could feel Kravchenko ripping at his brain, uprooting neural connections like saplings, drilling his way through the centers of control. Already it seemed to Noyes that whole sectors of his brain were cut off, that he was being thrust aside, pushed into a single lobe, isolated, undermined—
Ejected.
“No!” he cried. “The deal’s off! I never meant to—”
“—but now I’ve changed his mind for him,” Kravchenko finished.
Elena rose in triumph. “Jim? Jim, that’s you, yes?”
“Yes. Me. God, it’s good to be free!” Kravchenko stretched lavishly. He took a few steps, stumbled, recovered. “The coordination takes a little while to come back, I guess. But to have a body again! To feel! To breathe!”
“He’s really gone?” she asked.
“I’ve rammed him down far out of sight. Nothing left of him but a few shreds, and I’ll hunt those down and pull them out. Free, Elena! After all those years penned up in that sniveling hulk of a man!” He reached for her. His fingers clutched at the taut cones of her breasts, missed aim, got her shoulders instead; with an effort he drew his arms downward.
Softly he said, “I’ve got some other reflexes to test, Elena!”
He found that coordination returned more swiftly than he expected, although not altogether at a satisfactory level. It would take some time, he decided. Time and practice.
As dawn came Elena said, “Now we head for Indiana.”
“What for?”
“So that Roditis can blank you, stupid! As far as the world knows, you’re Charles Noyes, right? And Charles Noyes has discorporated Martin St. John. The memory of that must be wiped from your mind. Come. Come.”
Kravchenko nodded. “You’re right. I’ll have to go to Roditis—bluff it through, let him blank me on the killing. Then I’ll quit him and we’ll go off together, eh?”
“Yes!”
“But why are you going to Indiana?” he asked.
Elena gave him a slow, simmering smile. “Do you think I’m going to be apart from you even for an hour, now that I have you again?”
13
“DEAD?” MARK KAUFMANN ASKED. “How could he possibly be dead? The St. John body was in good health. I saw it myself before I went to San Francisco.”
The medic shook his head. “There was a total breakdown of autoimmunity. A civil war inside him, so to speak. No hope whatever of saving him.”
—Murder, Paul’s persona said.
But it did not take any great shrewdness, to see that. Mark said, “Can such a thing happen naturally?”
“Most unlikely. You realize, Mr. Kaufmann, that it’s statistically possible for such a thing to occur, but—”
“Not very probable?”
“No. Not at all.”
“What was it, then? Carniphage?”
“These are not the effects of a carniphage,” said the medic. “However, the poisoner today has an extremely wide choice of drugs. I’ve been running a data check, comparing effects with possible causes, and this is what I’ve come up with.”
He handed Kaufmann a data sheet. It was headed:
CYCLOPHOSPHAMIDES-8
Mark scanned it hastily. “Is this drug easily available?”
“I’d say it costs roughly a million dollars fissionable an ounce,” the medic replied. “The lethal dose is perhaps a hundredth of an ounce, though.”
“Expensive, but not prohibitive. Rare?”
“It can be had. The sources are difficult to reach, but they exist. With enough money—”
“Yes, with enough money,” Mark said. “Have you found any traces of this—this cyclophosphamide in the body?”
“It leaves no traces. It metabolizes completely in use, and the only indication it leaves is in its effect.”
“In other words, proof of use has to be empirical, deduced from the ruin it makes out of the victim?”
“Essentially, yes,” said the medic smoothly. “The quaestorate is now conducting a second autopsy, and naturally will be making every effort to determine the actual cause of death. But I venture to predict that the ultimate verdict will be the same as mine: poisoning by cyclophosphamide-8.”
“All right. Thank you. Go.”
—You need to tighten your security net, Paul told him. A murder committed in your own apartment is shameful.
“There are finite limits to security,” Mark said. He moved about the apartment, scuffing at the carpet. This incident left him tense and baffled and angry. He did not mind at all that someone had discorporated Martin St. John, the dybbuk Paul Kaufmann, so speedily after the transplant. But it offended him that St. John could be discorporated right here, of all places. And he was troubled by the possibility that suspicion of the discorporation might come to rest on him.
It was poor business. If the quaestorate hatched the idea that he was in any way connected with the murder, he’d be hauled down on a mindpick warrant, and not all the money in the universe could buy him out of that. Naturally, the mind-pick would show that he had no complicity in the discorporation of Martin St. John, since in fact he had not been involved at all.
But at the same time the mindpick would reveal the illegal presence in his mind of the persona of Paul Kaufmann.
This had to be the work of Roditis, Mark thought. To take advantage of his absence by sneaking an agent in here to kill St. John, thereby opening him to mindpick and disgrace—no, no, Roditis could have no inkling of what he had been up to in San Francisco, and it was a mistake to attribute to the man more deviousness than he actually possessed—unless, that is, Roditis had his hooks into the lamasery too, and had instantly received word that Mark had come there to undergo a sub rosa persona transplant….
Exhausted by the intricacy of his own hypotheses, Mark sank down on a couch to collect himself.
—Fool, you’re panicking over this.
“Let me think, Paul. Please.”
—Think all you like. But think fast! An hour from now you may be under arrest.
“No, there’s more time than that. The quaestorate hasn’t finished the autopsy. And then they’ll have to move through channels, deciding if they dare to arrest me, swearing out the warrant, arranging the mindpick. I’ve got at least twenty-four hours.”
Paul did not reply. His head aching, Mark attempted to reconstruct the sequence of events.
He had seen Donahy Tuesday afternoon. That same day Santoliquido had called to announce his intention of transplanting Paul’s persona into
the vacated St. John body. On Wednesday, Mark had inspected the St. John body, then had flown to San Francisco. Also on Wednesday, Donahy had abstracted last year’s persona recording of Paul Kaufmann from the archives. Wednesday night, in San Francisco, Donahy had transplanted the persona into Mark. Mark had remained out there on Thursday, resting and adapting to the powerful new persona. Meanwhile, in New York on Thursday, the most recent Paul Kaufmann persona had been transplanted into the St. John body, and St. John had been taken to Mark’s apartment for recuperation. Sometime late Thursday night St. John had been murdered.
Now it was Friday afternoon, and Mark, back from San Francisco, found himself in deep trouble.
Just when everything had been going so well, too. He and Paul had adjusted to one another remarkably smoothly. There had been none of the tests of strength, none of the jockeying and probing that might have been anticipated when strong-willed old uncle entered strong-willed nephew’s mind. Paul had been delighted at getting a new carnate trip, fascinated by the shady way Mark had obtained his persona, and absolutely overjoyed to learn that a second and later version of himself was also going to be at large in dybbuk form. He showed no resentment of the fact that the provision in his will barring transplant to a member of his family had been circumvented, possibly because that codicil had been added after this particular persona had been recorded. Recognizing Roditis as the real family enemy, Paul was willing to aid his nephew in every way, while at the same time helping to isolate and immobilize the dybbuk-Paul whom Santoliquido had spawned. Of course, Mark was prepared for conflict with his uncle sooner or later, possibly even a sneaky attempt to go dybbuk at his expense. But for now, at least, their mutual adaptation was splendid, and Mark reveled at having the crusty, indomitable old brigand finally safe in his mind.
Then, to fly home and walk into this—
Well, there were certain obvious first steps to take. The most obvious of all was to check last night’s scanner records and see who had been in his apartment. He had a pretty good idea. There weren’t many people who had even conditional access, and the only one with full access, Risa, was still in Europe, so far as he knew.
The scanner file gave him the quick answer.
Elena had been here. She had applied for admission just before eleven last night, and the robots had let her in. Mark saw her on the tape, and there was nothing unusual about her expression, as there might have been if she had come to commit a discorporation.
But who was this who had come in with her? This tall, blond fellow with the taut, edgy look in his eyes?
Noyes? Charles Noyes?
Noyes of Roditis Securities?
Elena had brought him here?
—There’s your killer, Paul said. He must be.
“Not so fast,” Mark muttered. “Noyes is Roditis’ man, sure, but Roditis doesn’t do foolish things. If he wanted to kill St. John, he wouldn’t send someone like Noyes here to do the job. It’s too transparent.”
—What do you know about Noyes? I recall that he’s not too stable.
“No, not very.”
—Then perhaps Roditis picked a bungler. Run the tape a little further.
Mark moved it along. The figures of Elena and Noyes appeared at the door again some ten minutes later. Noyes looked more tense than ever, almost close to collapse. And Elena, now, gave every impression of hysteria. Obviously something significant had happened in those ten minutes—such as the murder of Martin St. John. The two figures were exchanging hurried conversation at the door. Mark could not read their lips, nor was there any audio on the scanner tape, but he knew that a simple computer analysis of lip patterns would tell him what they were saying. He watched Noyes hurry from the apartment. Then Elena disappeared from the door. About twenty minutes later she left, looking calmer. That concluded the Thursday night record. The file of outgoing calls showed none until one in the morning, when a robot had noticed St. John dead and had summoned the quaestors.
“That’s it, then,” Mark said. “She let him in, and he killed St. John.”
—There’s no proof. It’s all circumstantial, Mark. Where’s the weapon? Where are the witnesses? St. John might have been killed by someone else before Noyes ever got here, for all your records show. A blowdart through a window, maybe.
“It’s enough to authorize a mindpick, Paul. And a mindpick will show Noyes’ guilt. I’ve got to get him picked before anyone thinks of mindpicking me, or they’ll find you.”
—You might try talking to Elena, Paul suggested.
But Elena did not answer when he called her apartment. Curiously, she had not even left a forwarding number. Mark buzzed her inner number, thinking that perhaps she had posted a forwarding number for limited distribution to close friends, but that drew a blank too. Where was she? She never went anywhere without notifying him first. And she surely knew that he was due back in New York sometime today.
He phoned Santoliquido next.
As usual, it was a slow, bothersome job to get through to him. When Santoliquido appeared, his quizzical expression showed that he had heard the news.
“Where have you been, Mark?”
“Away on business since late Wednesday. And when I got back—St. John—”
“I know. The quaestors notified me.”
“What is this all about, Frank?”
“I haven’t any idea. But of course I have my suspicions.”
“Such as?”
“Never mind,” said Santoliquido. “They’re unfounded at present. The important thing is that your uncle is discorporate again, and we have to start the whole process from the beginning.”
Mark felt a secret pleasure at the knowledge that his uncle was far from discorporate. He heard the old man’s silent, complacent chuckle within him.
To Santoliquido he said, “Do you expect Roditis to reapply?”
“Why shouldn’t he? The persona’s available again.”
“And you’ve run out of ways to avoid giving it to him.”
Santoliquido nodded. “For the moment, at least.”
“Listen to me, Frank, I want one last favor. Stall him off. If only for a few days. I can’t explain now, but I’ve got reason to think you’ll be wasting everyone’s time if you give Paul to Roditis now. Will you wait at least until the report of the quaestors is issued?”
“I’ll do that, yes,” Santoliquido agreed.
“Good.” Mark paused a moment. Then, in a carefully more relaxed tone, he said, “You haven’t seen Elena lately, have you?”
With the same deliberate casualness Santoliquido replied, “Lately? Well, let’s see…I had lunch with her yesterday. Is that lately enough?”
“I meant today.”
“No. The last I saw of her was one in the afternoon yesterday. You’ve phoned her apartment?”
“Of course,” Mark said. “I suppose she’s taken a little trip. I imagine I’ll be hearing from her soon.”
Roditis said, “So it’s all done, and you’re back here, and no one’s the wiser, Charles. Was that so bad?”
Kravchenko attempted to keep his facial muscles fixed in the bland, idiotic expression of benignity that he imagined Charles Noyes customarily to have worn. He was on edge, here in Roditis’ Indiana headquarters, for this was the first test of his dybbukhood. If he failed to fool Roditis, he’d be on the scrapheap by nightfall.
He said carefully, “Well, John, I don’t deny I was uneasy about it. But it went off more smoothly than I dared hope.”
“And now we’ll get you blanked, and splice in a set of phony memories for last night, and you’ll be safe. Eh?”
“Yes, John.”
“Want to take a little workout first? Get yourself back into shape?”
“I think we’d better tend to the blanking first,” said Kravchenko. “I’ve got a few things on my mind that I’m better off without.”
Roditis nodded. “Right. Come with me.”
Kravchenko followed the stocky little financier through the maze of the bu
ilding. He did not much like the idea of submitting to a blanking; he hated to surrender consciousness, hated to go under the machine. But so long as he still carried around memories of the discorporation of Martin St. John, he ran serious risks. Noyes, whom he pretended to be, might well be under suspicion of that discorporation. If they picked him up, ran a routine mindpick on him, and found the evidence, all would be up not only for Noyes—whose personae would be destroyed because of his crime—but for Kravchenko as well, since the routine mindpick would be followed by a deep pick that would reveal who was actually running the Noyes body. Kravchenko thought he could conceal his dybbuk status if the pick merely went scraping around looking for a specific event, the discorporation episode. But he was finished for good if they sank the pick beyond the surface. His only hope of avoiding that was to blank out everything having to do with last night. Which Roditis now proposed to do.
Technicians were readying the blanking apparatus.
Kravchenko studied it warily. A blanking was something like getting a persona transplant—in reverse. Instead of having taped information poured into your receptive brain, you yielded information. Instead of being doped with mnemonic drugs to damp out memory decay, they washed your mind with a selective memory suppressant, carefully measured to obliterate a certain chronological segment of the memory bank. Kravchenko distrusted all this fiddling with the brain. Yet he admitted the necessity of it.
“Will you lie down here?” a technician said.
Kravchenko waited. They gave him injections. They strapped electrodes to his skull. They took EEG readings of Noyes’ brain waves. Silently they bustled about, while Roditis hovered somberly in the background.
“Ready, now,” someone said.
A helmet was lowered over his head.
“Don’t worry about a thing, Charles,” came Roditis’ confident voice. “We’ll clean you up in no time.”
“Wow,” said a technician.
Kravchenko went tense, imagining that switches were being thrown and contacts made. He could see nothing. His drugged mind grew foggy. Abruptly he heard what sounded like a colossal explosion, and in the same instant a burst of intolerably bright lightning shot through his brain. He felt as though his skull had split apart.