Meanwhile, they were modifying the school bus so that Ingram and Jefferson could stay jacked continuously, which meant taking out seats and putting in beds, along with equipment to keep them fed and watered and emptied. They would stay continually jacked to two of the Twenty, or Julian, working in staggered four-hour shifts.
Julian and Amelia were working as unskilled labor, tearing out the last four rows of seats in the bus and improvising a solid frame for the beds, sweating and swatting mosquitoes under the harsh light, when Mendez clomped into the bus, rolling up his sleeves: 'Julian, I'll take over here. The Twenty need you to jack with them.'
'Gladly.' Julian got up and stretched, both shoulders crackling. 'What's up? Ingram have a heart attack, I hope?'
'No, they need some practical input about Portobello. One-way jack, for safety's sake.'
Amelia watched Julian go. 'I'm afraid for him.'
'I'm afraid for us all.' He took a small bottle from his pants pocket, opened it, and shook out a capsule. He handed it to her, his hand quivering a little.
She looked at the silver oval. 'The poison.'
'Marty says it's almost instantaneous, and irreversible. An enzyme that goes straight to the brain.'
'It feels like glass.'
'Some kind of plastic. We're supposed to bite down on it.'
'What if you swallow it?'
'It takes longer. The idea is–'
'I know what the idea is.' She put it in her blouse pocket and buttoned it. 'So what did the Twenty want to know about Portobello?'
'Panama City, actually. The POW camp and the Portobello connection to it, if any.'
'What are they going to do with thousands of hostile prisoners?'
'Turn them into allies. Jack them all together for two weeks and humanize them.'
'And let them go?'
'Oh, no.' Mendez smiled and looked back toward the house. 'Even behind bars, they won't be prisoners anymore.'
I unjacked and stared down into the wildflowers for a minute, sort of wishing it had been two-way; sort of not. Then I stood up, stumbled, and went back to where Marty was sitting at one of the picnic tables. Incongruously, he was slicing lemons. He had a large plastic bag of them and three pitchers, and a manual juicer.
'So what do you think?'
'You're making lemonade.'
'My specialty.' Each of the pitchers had a measured amount of sugar in the bottom. When he sliced a lemon, he would take a thin slice out of the middle and throw it on the sugar. Then squeeze the juice out of both halves. It looked like six lemons per pitcher.
'I don't know,' I said. 'It's an audacious plan. I have a couple of misgivings.'
'Okay.'
'You want to jack?' I nodded toward the table with the one-way box.
'No. Give me the surface first. In your own words, so to speak.'
I sat down across from him and rolled a lemon between my palms. 'Thousands of people. All from a foreign culture. The process works, but you've only tried it on twenty Americans – twenty white Americans.'
'There's no reason to think it might be culture-bound.'
'That's what they say themselves. But there's no evidence to the contrary, either. Suppose you wind up with three thousand raving lunatics?'
'Not likely. That's good conservative science – we ought to do a small-scale test first – but we can't afford to. We're not doing science now – we're doing politics.'
'Beyond politics,' I said. 'There's no word for what we're doing.'
'Social engineering?'
I had to laugh. 'I wouldn't say that around an engineer. It's like mechanical engineering with a crowbar and sledgehammer.'
He concentrated on a lemon, 'You do still agree that it has to be done.'
'Something has to be done. A couple of days ago, we were still considering options. Now we're on some kind of slippery ramp; can't slow down, can't go back.'
'True, but we didn't do it voluntarily, remember. Jefferson put us on the edge of the ramp, and Ingram pushed us over.'
'Yeah. My mother likes to say, "Do something, even if it's wrong." I guess we're in that mode.'
He set down the knife and looked at me. 'Actually not. Not quite. We do have the option of just plain going public.'
'About the Jupiter Project?'
'About the whole thing. In all likelihood, the government's going to discover what we're doing and squash us. We could take that opportunity away from them by going public.'
Odd that I hadn't even considered that. 'But we wouldn't get anything close to a hundred percent compliance. Less than half, you figured. And then we're in Ingram's nightmare, a minority of lambs surrounded by wolves.'
'Worse than that,' he said cheerfully. 'Who controls the media? Before the first volunteer could sign up, the government would have us painted as ogres bent on world domination. Mind controllers. We'd be hunted down and lynched.'
He finished with the lemons and poured equal amounts of juice into each pitcher. 'Understand that I've been thinking about this for twenty years. There's no way around the central conundrum: to humanize someone, we have to install a jack; but once you're jacked two-way, you can't keep a secret.
'If we had all the time in the world, we could do it like the Enders' cell system. Elaborate memory modification for everybody who's not at the very top, so that nobody could reveal my identity or yours. But memory modification takes training, equipment, time.
'This idea of humanizing the POWs is partly a way of undermining the government's case against us, ahead of time. It's presented initially as a way of keeping the prisoners in line – but then we let the news media "discover" that something more profound has happened to them. Heartless killers transformed into saints.'
'Meanwhile, we're doing the same thing to all the mechanics. One cycle at a time.'
'That's right,' he said. 'Forty-five days. If it works.'
The arithmetic was clear enough. There were six thousand soldier-boys, each serviced by three cycles. Fifteen days each, and after forty-five days you had eighteen thousand people on our side, plus the thousand or two who run the flyboys and waterboys, who would be going through the process.
What Marty's pet general was going to do, or try, was to declare a worldwide Psychops effort that required certain platoons to stay on duty for a week or a few weeks extra.
It only took five extra days to 'turn' a mechanic, but then you couldn't just send him home. The change in behavior would be obvious, and the first time one was jacked, the secret would be out. Fortunately, once the mechanics were jacked, they'd understand the necessity for isolation, so keeping them on base wouldn't be a problem. (Except for feeding and housing all those extra people, which Marty's general would incorporate into the exercise. Never hurt a soldier to bivouac for a week or two.)
Meanwhile, the publicity over the miraculous 'conversion' of the POWs would be priming the public to accept the next step.
The ultimate bloodless coup: pacifists taking over the army, and the army taking over the government. And then the people – radical idea! – taking over the government themselves.
'But the whole thing hinges on this mystery man, or woman,' I said. 'Someone who can shuffle medical records around, have a few people reassigned, okay. Appropriate a truck and a bus. That's nothing like setting up a global Psychops exercise. One that's actually a takeover of the military.'
He nodded quietly.
'Aren't you going to put water in the lemonade?'
'Not until morning. That's the secret.' He folded his arms. 'As to the big secret, his identity, you're perilously close to solving it.'
'The president?' He laughed. 'Secretary of defense? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?'
'You could figure it out with what you know, given a table of organization. Which is a problem. We're extremely vulnerable between now and the time your memory has been tailored.'
I shrugged. 'The Twenty told me about the suicide pills.'
He carefully uncapped a brown vial and shook three hard
pills into my hand. 'Bite down on one and you'll be brain-dead in a few seconds. For you and me it ought to be in a glass tooth.'
'In a tooth?'
'Old spy myth. But if they take you or me alive, and get a jack into us, the general's dead meat, and the whole thing is over.'
'But you're one-way.'
He nodded. 'With me, it would take a little torture. With you … well, you might as well just know his name.'
'Senator Dietz? The pope?'
He took my arm and started to lead me back to the bus. 'It's Major General Stanton Roser, the Assistant Secretary for Force Management and Personnel. He was one of the Twenty who supposedly died, but with a different name and face. Now he has a disconnected jack, but otherwise he's well-connected indeed.'
'None of the Twenty knows?'
He shook his head. 'And they won't find out from me. Nor from you, now. You don't jack with anybody until we get to Mexico and tailor your memory.'
Their drive down to Mexico was too interesting. The fuel cells in the truck lost power so fast they had to be recharged every two hours. Before they got out of South Dakota they decided to pull over for half a day and rewire the vehicle so it was powered directly by the nanoforge's warm fusion generator.
Then the bus broke down, the transmission turning to mush. It was essentially an airtight cylinder of powdered iron stiffened by a magnetic field. Two of the Twenty, Hanover and Lamb, had worked on cars, and together they figured out that the problem was in the shifting program – when the torque demand reached a certain threshold, the field switched off for a moment to shift to a lower gear; when it went below another threshold, it would shift up. But the program had gone haywire, and was trying to shift a hundred times a second, so the iron powder cylinder wasn't rigid long enough to transmit much power. After they figured out the nature of the problem, it was easy to fix, since the shifting parameters could be set manually. They had to reset them every ten or fifteen minutes, because the bus wasn't really designed for so heavy a load, and kept overcompensating. But they did lurch south a thousand miles a day, making plans.
Before they got into Texas, Marty had made arrangements of a shady nature with Dr Spencer, who owned the Guadalajara clinic where Amelia had been operated on. He didn't reveal that he had a nano-forge, but he did say he had limited, but unsupervised, access to one, and he could make the doctor anything, within reason, that the thing could make in six hours. As proof, 2200 carats' worth, he sent along a one-pound diamond paperweight with Spencer's name lasered into the top facet.
In exchange for the six machine hours, Dr Spencer shuffled his appointments and personnel so that Marty's people could have a wing to themselves, and the use of several technicians, for a week. Extensions to be discussed.
A week was all that Marty would need, to tailor Julian's memories and complete the humanization of his two captives.
Getting through the border into Mexico was easy, a simple financial transaction. Getting back the same way would be almost impossible; the guards on the American side were slow and efficient and difficult to bribe, being robots. But they wouldn't be driving back, unless things absolutely fell apart. They planned to be flying to Washington aboard a military aircraft – preferably not as prisoners.
It took another day to drive to Guadalajara; two hours crawling through the sprawl of Guadalajara itself. All the streets that were not under repair seemed not to have been repaired since the twentieth century. They finally found the clinic, though, and left the bus and truck in its underground lot, guarded by an old man with a submachine gun. Mendez stayed with the truck and kept an eye on the guard.
Spencer had everything prepared, including the rental of a nearby guest house, la Florida, for the busload. No questions, except to verify their needs. Marty had Jefferson and Ingram installed in the clinic, along with a couple of the Twenty.
They began setting up the Portobello phase from la Florida. Assuming the local phones weren't secure, they had a scrambled military line bounced off a satellite and routed through General Roser.
It was easy enough to get Julian assigned to Building 31 as a kind of middle-management trainee, since he was no longer a factor in the company's strategic plans. But the other part of it – a request to extend his platoon's time in the soldierboys an additional week – was turned down at the battalion level, with the terse explanation that the 'boys' had already gone through too much stress the past couple of cycles That was true enough. They had had three weeks, unjacked, to dwell on the Liberia disaster, and some had not been in good soldierly shape when they came back. Then there was the new stress of retraining with Eileen Zakim, Julian's replacement. For nine days they would be confined to Portobello – 'Pedroville' – doing the same maneuvers over and over, until their performance with Eileen was close enough to what it had been with Julian.
(It would turn out that Eileen did have one pleasant surprise. She had expected resentment, that the new platoon leader had come from outside, rather than being promoted from the ranks. It was quite the opposite: they all had known Julian's job intimately, and none of them wanted it.)
It was fortunate, but not exactly unusual, that the colonel who brusquely turned down the extension request had himself a request for change of assignment in the works. Many of the officers in Building 31 would rather be assigned someplace with more action, or with less; this colonel suddenly had orders delivered that sent him to a relief compound in Botswana, a totally pacified place where the Alliance presence was considered a godsend.
The colonel who replaced him came from Washington, from General Stanton Roser's Office of Force Management and Personnel. After he'd settled in for a few days, reviewing his predecessor's policies and actions, he quietly reversed the one affecting Julian's old platoon. They would stay jacked until 25 July, as part of a long-standing OFMP study. On the 25th, they'd be brought in for testing and evaluation.
Brought in to Building 31.
Roser's OFMP couldn't directly affect what went on in the huge Canal Zone POW camp; that was managed by a short company from Army Intelligence, which had a platoon of soldierboys attached to it.
The challenge was somehow to have all the POWs jacked together for two weeks without any of the soldierboys or Intelligence officers, one of whom was also jacked, eavesdropping.
To this end they conjured up a colonelcy for Harold McLaughlin, the only one of the Twenty who had both army experience and fluency in Spanish. He had orders cut to go to the Zone to monitor an experiment in extended 'pacification' of the POWs. His uniforms and papers were waiting for him in Guadalajara.
One night in Texas, Marty had called all the Saturday Night Special people and asked, in an enigmatic and guarded way, whether they would like to come down to Guadalajara, to share some vacation time with him and Julian and Blaze: 'Everyone has been under so much stress.' It was partly to benefit from their varied and objective viewpoints, but also to get them across the border before the wrong people showed up asking questions. All of them but Belda said they were able to come; even Ray, who had just spent a couple of weeks in Guadalajara, having a few decades' worth of fat vacuumed out of his body.
So who should be first to show up at la Florida but Belda, after all, hobbling in with a cane and an overloaded human porter. Marty was in the entrance hall, and for a moment just stared.
'I thought it over and decided to take the train down. Convince me it wasn't a big mistake.' She nodded at the porter. 'Tell this nice boy where to put my things.'
'Uh … habitatión dieciocho. Room 18. Up the stairs. You speak English?'
'Enough,' he said, and staggered up the stairs with the four bags.
'I know Asher's coming in this afternoon,' she said. It was not quite twelve. 'What about the others? I thought I might rest until the festivities begin.'
'Good. Good idea. Everyone should be in by six or seven. We have a buffet set up for eight.'
'I'll be there. Get some sleep yourself. You look terrible.' She pulled herself up the
stairs with cane and banister.
Marty looked as bad as she said, having just spent hours jacked with McLaughlin going over all the ins and outs, every possible thing that could go wrong with the POW aspect of 'the caper,' as McLaughlin called it. He'd be on his own most of the time.
There would be no problem as long as orders were followed, since the orders called for all the POWs to be isolated for two weeks. Most of the Americans didn't like jacking with them anyhow.
After two weeks, starting right after Julian's platoon moved in on Building 31, McLaughlin would take a walk and disappear, leaving the POWs' humanization an irreversible fact of life. Then they would be connected with Portobello and prepare for the next stage.
Marty flopped down on the unmade bed in his small room and stared at the ceiling. It was stucco, and the crusted swirls of it made fantastic patterns in the shifting light that threaded across the room from the top of the shutters that cut off the view of the street; light reflected from the windshields and glittering canopies of the cars that crawled by in the street below, noisily unaware that their old world was about to die. If everything went right. Marty stared at the shifting shadows and catalogued all the things that could go wrong. And then their old world would die, literally.
How could they keep the plan secret, against all odds? If only the humanization didn't take so long. But there was no way around it.
Or so he thought.
I'd been looking forward to seeing the Saturday Night Special crowd again, and there couldn't have been a more welcome setting for the reunion, as tired as we were of road food. The dining table at la Florida was a crowded landscape of delights: a platter of jumbled sausages and another of roasted chickens, split and steaming; a huge salmon lying open on a plank; three colors of rice and bright bowls of potatoes and corn and beans; stacks of bread and tortillas. Bowls of salsa, chopped peppers, and guacamole. Reza was loading a plate when I came in; we exchanged greetings in silly gringo Spanish and I followed his example.
We'd just collapsed in overstuffed chairs, plates balanced on laps, when the others came downstairs in a group, led by Marty. It was a mob, a dozen of the Twenty as well as five from our crowd. I gave up my chair to Belda and filled a small plate to her specifications, saying hello to everyone, and eventually found a piece of floor in a corner with Amelia and Reza, who had also given up his early advantage to a white-haired woman, Ellie.