Forever Peace

  Two doors down the corridor, we turned into an unmarked room. It had a mahogany conference table with overstuffed chairs and an autobar. “Something to drink?”

  Jefferson and I wanted water and wine; Mendez asked for apple juice. The bar wheelie brought our orders while we were sitting down.

  “Is there some way we can help each other?” Mendez said, folding his hands on his small paunch.

  “There are some things Sergeant Class might shed some light on.” He stared at me for one second. “I suddenly made full colonel and had orders cut for Fort Powell. Nobody in Brigade knew anything about it; the orders came from Washington, some ‘Medical Personnel Redistribution Group.’”

  “This was a bad thing?” Mendez said.

  “No. I was gratified. I’ve never been happy with the Texas and Portobello posting, and this move took me back to the area where I grew up.

  “I’m still in the middle of moving, settling in. But I was going through my appointment calendar yesterday, and your name came up. I was scheduled to jack with you and see how well the antidepressants are working.”

  “They’re working fine. Are you traveling thousands of miles to check up on all your old patients?”

  “Of course not. But I punched up your file out of curiosity, almost automatically—and what do you know? There’s no record of your having contemplated suicide. And it seems you have new orders cut, too. Authorized by the same major general in Washington who cut my orders. But you’re not part of the ‘Medical Personnel Redistribution Group’; you’re in a training program for assimilation into command structure. A soldier who wanted to commit suicide because he killed someone. That’s interesting.

  “And so I trace you down to here. A rest home for old soldiers who aren’t so old, and some of whom aren’t soldiers.”

  “So you want to lose your colonelcy,” Mendez said, “and go back to Texas? To Portobello?”

  “Not at all. I’ll risk telling you this: I didn’t go through channels. I don’t want to rock the boat.” He pointed at me. “But I have a patient here, and a mystery I’d like to solve.”

  “The patient’s fine,” I said. “The mystery is something that you don’t want to be involved in.”

  There was a long, thick silence. “People know where I am.”

  “We don’t mean to threaten you, or frighten you,” Mendez said. “But there’s no way you have the clearance to be told about this. Julian can’t let you jack with him, for that reason.”

  “I have top-secret clearance.”

  “I know.” Mendez leaned forward and said quietly: “Your ex-wife’s name is Eudora and you have two children—Pash, who’s in medical school in Ohio, and Roger, who’s in a New Orleans dance company. You were born on 5 March 1990 and your blood type is O-Negative. Do you want to know your dog’s name?”

  “You’re not threatening me with this.”

  “I’m trying to communicate with you.”

  “But you’re not even in the military. Nobody here is, except Sergeant Class.”

  “That should tell you something. You have top-secret clearance and yet my identity is concealed from you.”

  The colonel shook his head. He leaned back and drank some wine. “There’s been time enough for somebody to find out these things about me. I can’t decide whether you’re some kind of super-spook or just one of the best bullshit artists I’ve ever come across.”

  “If I were bluffing, I’d threaten you now. But you know that, and that’s why you said what you just said.”

  “And so you threaten me by making no threat.”

  Mendez laughed. “Takes one to know one. I will admit to being a psychiatrist.”

  “But you’re not in the AMA database.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Priest and psychiatrist is an odd combination. I don’t suppose the Catholic Church has any record of you, either.”

  “That’s harder to control. It would be cooperative of you not to check.”

  “I don’t have any reason to cooperate with you. If you’re not going to shoot me or throw me in a dungeon.”

  “Dungeon’s too much paperwork,” Mendez said. “Julian, you’ve jacked with him. What do you think?”

  I remembered a thread from the common mind session. “He’s completely sincere about doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So if you left the room, he and I could talk patient-to-doctor. But there’s a catch.”

  “There is indeed,” Mendez said. He remembered the thread as well. “A trade you might not want to make.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Brain surgery,” Mendez said.

  “You could be told what we’re doing here,” I said, “but we’d have to make it so that no one could learn it from you.”

  “Memory erasure,” Jefferson said.

  “That wouldn’t be enough,” Mendez said. “We’d have to erase the memory of not only this trip and everything associated with it, but also your memories of treating Julian and people who knew him. That’s too extensive.”

  “What we’d have to do,” I said, “is take out your jack and fry all the neural connections. Would you be willing to give that up forever, to be let in on a secret?”

  “The jack is essential to my profession,” he said. “And I’m used to it, would feel incomplete without it. For the secret of the universe, maybe. Not for the secret of St. Bartholomew’s Home.”

  Someone knocked on the door and Mendez said to come in. It was Marc Lobell, holding a clipboard over his chest.

  “May I have a word with you, Father Mendez?”

  When Mendez left, Jefferson leaned over toward me.

  “You’re here of your own free will?” he said. “No one’s coerced you?”

  “No one.”

  “Thoughts of suicide?”

  “Nothing could be farther from my mind.” The possibility was still back there, but I wanted to see how this turned out. If the universe ceased to exist, it would take me with it anyhow.

  I suspected that that would be the attitude of someone resigned to suicide, and that realization may have shown on my face.

  “But something’s bothering you,” Jefferson said.

  “When did you last meet someone with nothing bothering him?”

  Mendez came through the door alone, carrying the clipboard. A lock on the door clicked behind him.

  “Interesting.” He asked the bar for a cup of coffee and sat down. “You’ve taken a month’s leave, doctor.”

  “Sure, moving.”

  “People expect you back in what, a day or two?”

  “Soon.”

  “What people? You’re not married or living with anyone.”

  “Friends. Colleagues.”

  “Sure.” He handed the clipboard to Jefferson.

  He glanced at the top sheet and the one under it. “You can’t do this. How could you do this?” I couldn’t read what was on either sheet, but they were some sort of signed orders.

  “Obviously, I can. As to how . . .” He shrugged. “Faith can move mountains.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m TDY’ed here for three weeks. Vacation canceled. What the hell is going on?”

  “We had to make a decision while you were still in the building. You’ve been invited to join our little project here.”

  “I decline the invitation.” He tossed the clipboard down and stood up. “Let me out of here.”

  “Once we’ve had a chance to talk, you’ll be free to stay or go.” He opened a box inlaid in the table’s surface and unreeled a red jack and a green one. “One-way.”

  “No way! You can’t force me to jack with you.”

  “Actually, that’s true.” He gave me a significant look. “I couldn’t do anything of the sort.”

  “I could,” I said, and pulled the knife out of my pocket. I pushed the button and the blade flicked out and then began to hum and glow.

  “Are you threatening me with a we
apon? Sergeant?”

  “No, I’m not. Colonel.” I raised the blade to my neck and looked at my watch. “If you aren’t jacked in thirty seconds, you’ll have to watch me cut my own throat.”

  He swallowed hard. “You’re bluffing.”

  “No. I’m not.” My hand started to tremble. “But I suppose you’ve lost patients before.”

  “What is so goddamned important about this thing?”

  “Jack and find out.” I didn’t look at him. “Fifteen seconds.”

  “He will, you know,” Mendez said. “I’ve jacked with him. His death will be your fault.”

  He shook his head and walked back to the table. “I’m not sure of that. But you seem to have me trapped.” He sat down and slid the jack in.

  I turned off the knife. I think I was bluffing.

  Watching people who are jacked is about as interesting as watching people sleep. There was nothing to read in the room, but there was a notepad and stylus, so I wrote a letter to Amelia, outlining what had been going on. After about ten minutes, they started to nod regularly, so I finished the letter quickly, encrypted it and sent it.

  Jefferson unjacked and buried his face in his hands. Mendez unjacked and stared at him.

  “It’s a lot to assimilate all at once,” he said. “But I really didn’t know where to stop.”

  “You did right,” Jefferson said, muffled. “I had to have it all.” He sat back and exhaled. “Have to link with the Twenty now, of course.”

  “You’re on our side?” I said.

  “Sides. I don’t think you have a snowball’s chance. But yes, I want to be part of it.”

  “He’s more committed than you are,” Mendez said.

  “Committed but not convinced?”

  “Julian,” Jefferson said, “with all due respect for your years as a mechanic, and all the suffering you’ve gone through for what you’ve seen . . . for having killed that boy . . . it may be that I know more about war and its evil than you do. Secondhand knowledge, admittedly.” He scraped sweat off his forehead with the blade of his hand. “But the fourteen years I’ve spent trying to put soldiers’ lives back together make me a pretty good recruit for this army.”

  I wasn’t really surprised at that. A patient doesn’t get too much unguarded feedback from his therapist—it’s like a one-way jack with a few controlled thoughts and feelings seeping back—but I knew how much he hated the killing, and what the killing did to the killers.

  * * *

  amelia shut down her machine for the day and was stacking papers, ready to go home, long bath and a nap, when a short bald man tapped on her office door. “Professor Harding?”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Cooperate.” He handed her an unsealed plain envelope. “My name is Harold Ingram, Major Harold Ingram. I’m an attorney for the army’s Office of Technology Assessment.”

  She unfolded three pages of fine print. “So would you care to tell me in plain English what this is all about?”

  “Oh, it’s very simple. A paper that you co-authored for the Astrophysical Journal was found to contain material germane to weapons research.”

  “Wait. That paper never got past peer review. It was rejected. How could your office hear of it?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I’m not on the technical end.”

  She scanned the pages. “‘Cease and desist’? A subpoena?”

  “Yes. In a nutshell, we need all of your records pertaining to this research, and a statement that you have destroyed all duplicates, and a promise that you will discontinue the project until you hear from us.”

  She looked at him and then back at the document. “This is a joke, right?”

  “I assure you it is not.”

  “Major . . . this is not some sort of gun we’re designing. It’s an abstraction.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “How on God’s green earth do you think you can stop me from thinking about something?”

  “That’s not my business. I just need the records and the statement.”

  “Did you get them from my co-author? I’m really just a hired hand, called in to verify some particle physics.”

  “I understand that he’s been taken care of.”

  She sat down and put the three pages on the desk in front of her. “You can go. I have to study these and consult with my department head.”

  “Your department head is in full cooperation with us.”

  “I don’t believe that. Professor Hayes?”

  “No. It was J. MacDonald Roman who signed—”

  “Macro? He’s not even in the loop.”

  “He hires and fires people like you. He’s about to fire you, if you aren’t cooperative.” He was completely still, and didn’t blink. It was his big line.

  “I have to talk to Hayes. I have to see what my boss—”

  “It would be better if you just signed both documents,” he said mildly, theatrically, “and then I could come by tomorrow for the records.”

  “My records,” she said, “cover the spectrum from meaningless to redundant. What does my collaborator have to say about all this?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I believe that was the Caribbean branch.”

  “He disappeared in the Caribbean. You don’t suppose your department killed him.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. The army doesn’t kill people.” She got up. “You can stay here or come along. I’m going to copy these pages.”

  “It would be better if you didn’t copy them.”

  “It would be lunacy if I didn’t.”

  He stayed in her office, probably to snoop around. She walked past the copy room and took the elevator down to the first floor. She stuffed the papers into her purse and jumped into the lead cab at the stand across the street. “Airport,” she said, and considered her diminishing options.

  All of her travel to and from D.C. had been on Peter’s open account, so she had plenty of credits to get to North Dakota. But did she want to leave a trail pointing directly to Julian? She would call him from the airport public phone.

  But wait; think. She couldn’t just get on a plane and sneak off to North Dakota. Her name would be on the passenger list, and somebody would be waiting for her when she got off the plane. “Change destination,” she said. “Amtrak station.” The cab’s voice verified the change and it made a U-turn.

  Not many people traveled long distances by train, mostly people phobic about heights or just determined to do things the hard way. Or people who wanted to go someplace without leaving a document trail. You bought train tickets by machine, with the same kind of anonymous entertainment chits you used for cabs. (Bureaucrats and moralists would love to have had the clumsy system replaced with plastic, like the old cash cards, but voters would just as soon not have the government know what they were doing when, and with whom. The individual coupons made barter and hoarding simple, too.)

  Amelia’s timing was perfect; she ran for the 6:00 Dallas shuttle and it pulled out just as she sat down.

  She turned on the screen on the back of the seat in front of her and asked for a map. If she touched two cities, the screen would show departure and arrival times. She jotted down a list; she could go from Dallas to Oklahoma City to Kansas City to Omaha to Seaside in about eight hours.

  “Who you runnin’ from, honey?” An old woman with white hair in short spikes was sitting next to her. “Some man?”

  “Sure am,” she said. “A real bastard.”

  The old woman nodded and pursed her lips. “Best you get some good food to carry while you in Dallas. You don’ wanna be livin’ on the crap they serve in that lounge car.”

  “Thank you. I’ll do that.” The woman went back to her soap opera and Amelia punched through the Amtrak magazine, See America! Not much she wanted to see.

  She pretended to nap the half hour to Dallas. Then she said good-bye to the spike-coiffed lady and dove into the crowd. She had more than an hour before the tr
ain to Kansas City, so she bought a change of clothing—a Cowboys sweatshirt and loose black exercise pants—and some wrapped sandwiches and wine. Then she called the North Dakota number Julian had left her.

  “Jury change its mind?” he asked.

  “More interesting than that.” She told him about Harold Ingram and the threatening paperwork.

  “And no word from Peter?”

  “No. But Ingram knew that he was in the Caribbean. That’s when I decided I had to run.”

  “Well, the army’s tracked me down, too. Just a second.” He left the screen and came back. “No, it’s just Dr. Jefferson, and nobody knows he’s here. He’s pretty much joined us.” The phone camera tracked him as he sat down. “This Ingram didn’t mention me?”

  “No, your name’s not on the paper.”

  “But it’s only a matter of time. Even not connecting me with the paper, they know that we live together and will find out I’m a mechanic. They’ll be here in a few hours. Do you have to change trains anywhere?”

  “Yes.” She checked her sheet. “The last one is Omaha. I’m supposed to get there just before midnight . . . eleven forty-six Central Time.”

  “Okay. I can get there by then.”

  “But then what?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll talk it over with the Twenty.”

  “The twenty whats?”

  “Marty’s bunch. Explain later.”

  She went to the machine and, after a moment’s hesitation, just bought a ticket as far as Omaha. No need to guide them any farther, if she was being followed.

  Another calculated risk: two of the phones had data jacks. She waited until a couple of minutes before the train was going to leave, and called her own database. She downloaded a copy of the Astrophysical Journal article into her purse notebook. Then she instructed the database to send copies to everyone in her address book with *PHYS or *ASTR in their ID lines. That would be about fifty people, more than half of them involved with the Jupiter Project in some way. Would any of them read a twenty-page draft that was mostly pseudo-operator math, with no introduction, no context?

  She herself, she realized, would look at the first line and dump it.

  Amelia’s reading on the train was less technical, but severely limited, since she couldn’t identify herself to access any copyrighted material. The train had its own magazine on-screen, and courtesy images of USA Today and some travel magazines that were just ads and puffery. She spent a lot of time looking out the window at some of America’s least appealing urban areas. The farmland that flowed by in the dusk between cities was peaceful, and she dozed. The seat woke her up as they pulled into Omaha. But it wasn’t Julian waiting for her.