“You are Jason Taverner?” the man inquired. He extended his hand; reflexively, Jason accepted it and shook. To Ruth, the police general said, “You may go downstairs. I’ll interview you later. Right now it’s Mr. Taverner I want to talk to.”
The pols led Ruth off; he could hear her complaining her way out of sight. He now found himself facing the police general and no one else. No one armed.
“I’m Felix Buckman,” the police general said. He indicated the open door and hallway behind him. “Come into the office.” Turning, he ushered Jason ahead of him, into a vast pastel blue-and-gray suite; Jason blinked: he had never seen this aspect of a police agency before. He had never imagined that quality like this existed.
With incredulity, Jason a moment later found himself seated in a leather-covered chair, leaning back into the softness of styroflex. Buckman, however, did not sit down behind his top-heavy, almost clumsily bulky oak desk; instead he busied himself at a closet, putting away his topcoat.
“I intended to meet you on the roof,” he explained. “But the Santana wind blows like hell up there this time of night. It affects my sinus passages.” He turned, then, to face Jason. “I see something about you that didn’t show up in your 4-D photo. It never does. It’s always a complete surprise, at least to me. You’re a six, aren’t you?”
Waking to full alertness, Jason half rose, said, “You’re also a six, General?”
Smiling, showing his gold-capped teeth—an expensive anachronism—Felix Buckman held up seven fingers.
15
In his career as a police official, Felix Buckman had used this shuck each time he had come up against a six. He relied on it especially when, as with this, the encounter was sudden. There had been four of them. All, eventually, had believed him. This he found amusing. The sixes, eugenic experiments themselves, and secret ones, seemed unusually gullible when confronted with the assertion that there existed an additional project as classified as their own.
Without this shuck he would be, to a six, merely an “ordinary.” He could not properly handle a six under such a disadvantage. Hence the ploy. Through it his relationship to a six inverted itself. And, under such recreated conditions, he could deal successfully with an otherwise unmanageable human being.
The actual psychological superiority over him which a six possessed was abolished by an unreal fact. He liked this very much.
Once, in an off moment, he had said to Alys, “I can outthink a six for roughly ten to fifteen minutes. But if it goes on any longer—” He had made a gesture, crumpling up a black-market cigarette package. With two cigarettes in it. “After that their overamped field wins out. What I need is a pry bar by which I can jack open their haughty damn minds.” And, at last, he had found it.
“Why a ‘seven’?” Alys had said. “As long as you’re shucking them why not say eight or thirty-eight?”
“The sin of vainglory. Reaching too far.” He had not wanted to make that legendary mistake. “I will tell them,” he had told her grimly, “what I think they’ll believe.” And, in the end, he had proved out right.
“They won’t believe you,” Alys had said.
“Oh, hell, will they!” he had retorted. “It’s their secret fear, their bête noire. They’re the sixth in a line of DNA reconstruction systems and they know that if it could be done to them it could be done to others in a more advanced degree.”
Alys, uninterested, had said faintly, “You should be an announcer on TV selling soap.” And that constituted the totality of her reaction. If Alys did not give a damn about something, that something, for her, ceased to exist. Probably she should not have gotten away with it for as long as she had…but sometime, he had often thought, the retribution will come: reality denied comes back to haunt. To overtake the person without warning and make him insane.
And Alys, he had a number of times thought, was in some odd sense, in some unusual clinical way, pathological.
He sensed it but could not pin it down. However, many of his hunches were like that. It did not bother him, as much as he loved her. He knew he was right.
Now, facing Jason Taverner, a six, he developed his shuck ploy.
“There were very few of us,” Buckman said, now seating himself at his oversize oak desk. “Only four in all. One is already dead, so that leaves three. I don’t have the slightest idea where they are; we retain even less contact among ourselves than do you sixes. Which is little enough.”
“Who was your muter?” Jason asked.
“Dill-Temko. Same as yours. He controlled groups five through seven and then he retired. As you certainly know, he’s dead now.”
“Yes,” Jason said. “It shocked us all.”
“Us, too,” Buckman said, in his most somber voice. “Dill-Temko was our parent. Our only parent. Did you know that at the time of his death he had begun to prepare schema on an eighth group?”
“What would they have been like?”
“Only Dill-Temko knew,” Buckman said, and felt his superiority over the six facing him grow. And yet—how fragile his psychological edge. One wrong statement, one statement too much, and it would vanish. Once lost, he would never regain it.
It was the risk he took. But he enjoyed it; he had always liked betting against the odds, gambling in the dark. He had in him, at times like this, a great sense of his own ability. And he did not consider it imagined…despite what a six that knew him to be an ordinary would say. That did not bother him one bit.
Touching a button, he said, “Peggy, bring us a pot of coffee, cream and the rest. Thanks.” He then leaned back with studied leisure. And surveyed Jason Taverner.
Anyone who had met a six would recognize Taverner. The strong torso, the massive confirmation of his arms and back. His powerful, ramlike head. But most ordinaries had never knowingly come up against a six. They did not have his experience. Nor his carefully synthesized knowledge of them.
To Alys he had once said, “They will never take over and run my world.”
“You don’t have a world. You have an office.”
At that point he terminated the discussion.
“Mr. Taverner,” he said bluntly, “how have you managed to get documents, cards, microfilm, even complete files out of data banks all over the planet? I’ve tried to imagine how it could be done, but I come up with a blank.” He fixed his attention on the handsome—but aging—face of the six and waited.
16
What can I tell him? Jason Taverner asked himself as he sat mutely facing the police general. The total reality as I know it? That is hard to do, he realized, because I really do not comprehend it myself.
But perhaps a seven could—well, God knew what it could do. I’ll opt, he decided, on a complete explanation.
But when he started to answer, something blocked his speech. I don’t want to tell him anything, he realized. There is no theoretical limit to what he can do to me; he has his generalship, his authority, and if he’s a seven…for him, the sky may be the limit. At least for my self-preservation if for nothing else I ought to operate on that assumption.
“Your being a six,” Buckman said, after an interval of silence, “makes me see this in a different light. It’s other sixes that you’re working with, is it?” He kept his eyes rigidly fixed on Jason’s face; Jason found it uncomfortable and disconcerting. “I think what we have here,” Buckman said, “is the first concrete evidence that sixes are—”
“No,” Jason said.
“‘No’?” Buckman continued to stare fixedly at him. “You’re not involved with other sixes in this?”
Jason said, “I know one other six. Heather Hart. And she considers me a twerp fan.” He ground out the words bitterly.
That interested Buckman; he had not been aware that the well-known singer Heather Hart was a six. But, thinking about it, it seemed reasonable. He had never, however, come up against a female six in his career; his contacts with them were just not that frequent.
“If Miss Hart is a six,” Buckman s
aid aloud, “maybe we should ask her to come in too and consult with us.” A police euphemism that rolled easily off his tongue.
“Do that,” Jason said. “Put her through the wringer.” His tone had become savage. “Bust her. Put her in a forced-labor camp.”
You sixes, Buckman said to himself, have little loyalty to one another. He had discovered this already, but it always surprised him. An elite group, bred out of aristocratic prior circles to set and maintain the mores of the world, who had in practice drizzled off into nothingness because they could not stand one another. To himself he laughed, letting his face show, at least, a smile.
“You’re amused?” Jason said. “Don’t you believe me?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Buckman brought a box of Cuesta Rey cigars from a drawer of his desk, used his little knife to cut off the end of one. The little steel knife made for that purpose alone.
Across from him Jason Taverner watched with fascination.
“A cigar?” Buckman inquired. He held the box toward Jason.
“I have never smoked a good cigar,” Jason said. “If it got out that I—” He broke off.
“‘Got out’?” Buckman asked, his mental ears pricking up. “Got out to whom? The police?”
Jason said nothing. But he had clenched his fist and his breathing had become labored.
“Are there strata in which you’re well known?” Buckman said. “For example, among intellectuals in forced-labor camps. You know—the ones who circulate mimeographed manuscripts.”
“No,” Jason said.
“Musical strata, then?”
Jason said tightly, “Not anymore.”
“Have you ever made phonograph records?”
“Not here.”
Buckman continued to scrutinize him unblinkingly; over long years he had mastered the ability. “Then where?” he asked, in a voice barely over the threshold of audibility. A voice deliberately sought for: its tone lulled, interfered with identification of the words’ meaning.
But Jason Taverner let it slide by; he failed to respond. These damn bastard sixes, Buckman thought, angered—mostly at himself. I can’t play funky games with a six. It just plain does not work. And, at any minute, he could cancel my statement out of his mind, my claim to superior genetic heritage.
He pressed a stud on his intercom. “Have a Miss Katharine Nelson brought in here,” he instructed Herb Maime. “A police informant down in the Watts District, that ex-black area. I think I should talk to her.”
“Half hour.”
“Thanks.”
Jason Taverner said hoarsely, “Why bring her into this?”
“She forged your papers.”
“All she knows about me is what I had her put on the ID cards.”
“And that was spurious?”
After a pause Jason shook his head no.
“So you do exist.”
“Not—here.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me how you got those data deleted from all the banks.”
“I never did that.”
Hearing that, Buckman felt an enormous hunch overwhelm him; it gripped him with paws of iron. “You haven’t been taking material out of the data banks; you’ve been trying to put material in. There were no data there in the first place.”
Finally, Jason Taverner nodded.
“Okay,” Buckman said; he felt the glow of discovery lurking inside him, now, revealing itself in a cluster of comprehensions. “You took nothing out. But there’s some reason why the data weren’t there in the first place. Why not? Do you know?”
“I know,” Jason Taverner said, staring down at the table; his face had twisted into a gross mirror-thing. “I don’t exist.”
“But you once did.”
“Yes,” Taverner said, nodding unwillingly. Painfully.
“Where?”
“I don’t know!”
It always comes back to that, Buckman said to himself. I don’t know. Well, Buckman thought, maybe he doesn’t. But he did make his way from L.A. to Vegas; he did shack up with that skinny, wrinkled broad the Vegas pols loaded into the van with him. Maybe, he thought, I can get something from her. But his hunch registered a no.
“Have you had dinner?” Buckman inquired.
“Yes,” Jason Taverner said.
“But you’ll join me in the munchies. I’ll have them bring something in to us.” Once more he made use of the intercom. “Peggy—it’s so late now…get us two breakfasts at that new place down the street. Not the one we used to go to, but the new one with the sign showing the dog with the girl’s head. Barfy’s.”
“Yes, Mr. Buckman,” Peggy said and rang off.
“Why don’t they call you ‘General’?” Jason Taverner asked.
Buckman said, “When they call me ‘General’ I feel I ought to have written a book on how to invade France while staying out of a two-front war.”
“So you’re just plain ‘Mister’.”
“That’s right.”
“And they let you do it?”
“For me,” Buckman said, “there is no ‘they.’ Except for five police marshals here and there in the world, and they call themselves ‘Mister,’ too.” And how they would like to demote me further, he thought. Because of all that I did.
“But there’s the Director.”
Buckman said, “The Director has never seen me. He never will. Nor will he see you either, Mr. Taverner. But nobody can see you, because, as you pointed out, you don’t exist.”
Presently a gray uniformed pol woman entered the office, carrying a tray of food. “What you usually order this time of night,” she said as he set the tray down on Buckman’s desk. “One short stack of hots with a side order of ham; one short stack of hots with a side order of sausage.”
“Which would you like?” Buckman asked Jason Taverner.
“Is the sausage well cooked?” Jason Taverner asked, peering to see. “I guess it is. I’ll take it.”
“That’s ten dollars and one gold quinque,” the pol woman said. “Which of you is going to pay for it?”
Buckman dug into his pockets, fished out the bills and change. “Thanks.” The woman departed. “Do you have any children?” he asked Taverner.
“No.”
“I have a child,” General Buckman said. “I’ll show you a little 3-D pic of him that I received.” He reached into his desk, brought out a palpitating square of three-dimensional but nonmoving colors. Accepting the picture, Jason held it properly in the light, saw outlined statically a young boy in shorts and sweater, barefoot, running across a field, tugging on the string of a kite. Like the police general, the boy had light short hair and a strong and impressive wide jaw. Already.
“Nice,” Jason said. He returned the pic.
Buckman said, “He never got the kite off the ground. Too young, perhaps. Or afraid. Our little boy has a lot of anxiety. I think because he sees so little of me and his mother; he’s at a school in Florida and we’re here, which is not a good thing. You say you have no children?”
“Not that I know of,” Jason said.
“‘Not that you know of’?” Buckman raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean you don’t go into the matter? You’ve never tried to find out? By law, you know, you as the father are required to support your children in or out of wedlock.”
Jason nodded.
“Well,” General Buckman said, as he put the pic away in his desk, “everyone to his own. But consider what you’ve left out of your life. Haven’t you ever loved a child? It hurts your heart, the innermost part of you, where you can easily die.”
“I didn’t know that,” Jason said.
“Oh, yes. My wife says you can forget any kind of love except what you’ve felt toward children. That only goes one way; it never reverts. And if something comes between you and a child—such as death or a terrible calamity such as a divorce—you never recover.”
“Well, hell, then”—Jason gestured with a forkful
of sausage—“then it would be better not to feel that kind of love.”
“I don’t agree,” Buckman said. “You should always love, and especially a child, because that’s the strongest form of love.”
“I see,” Jason said.
“No, you don’t see. Sixes never see; they don’t understand. It’s not worth discussing.” He shuffled a pile of papers on his desk, scowling, puzzled, and nettled. But gradually he calmed down, became his cool assured self once more. But he could not understand Jason Taverner’s attitude. But he, his child, was all-important; it, plus his love of course for the boy’s mother—this was the pivot of his life.
They ate for a time without speaking, with, suddenly, no bridge connecting them one to the other.
“There’s a cafeteria in the building,” Buckman said at last, as he drank down a glass of imitation Tang. “But the food there is poisoned. All the help must have relatives in forcedlabor camps. They’re getting back at us.” He laughed. Jason Taverner did not. “Mr. Taverner,” Buckman said, dabbing at his mouth with his napkin, “I am going to let you go. I’m not holding you.”
Staring at him, Jason said, “Why?”
“Because you haven’t done anything.”
Jason said hoarsely, “Getting forged ID cards. A felony.”
“I have the authority to cancel any felony charge I wish,” Buckman said. “I consider that you were forced into doing that by some situation you found yourself in, a situation which you refuse to tell me about, but of which I have gotten a slight glimpse.”
After a pause Jason said, “Thanks.”
“But,” Buckman said, “you will be electronically monitored wherever you go. You will never be alone except for your own thoughts in your own mind and perhaps not even there. Everyone you contact or reach or see will be brought in for questioning eventually…just as we’re bringing in the Nelson girl right now.” He leaned toward Jason Taverner, speaking slowly and intently so that Taverner would listen and understand. “I believe you took no data from any data banks, public or private. I believe you don’t understand your own situation. But”—he let his voice rise perceptibly—“sooner or later you will understand your situation and when that happens we want to be in on it. So—we will always be with you. Fair enough?”