The officer"s train of thought was interrupted. "What?"
"He"s not just "the subject." He"s a real person, probably smarter than you and me put together. His name"s Green. David Green. Keep that in mind."
"Uh, yes. The... the soldier Green had something go wrong with his crystal, so that the information stored in it was distorted.""What went wrong?" Singh asked.
Philaskut turned to answer the question from this new direction. "We don"t know precisely. That"s why we"ve been conducting our investigation.
We think it may have been an effect of a cosmic ray collision. You see, the Universe is constantly bombarding us with cosmic rays; they can come from any direction at any time, and they"ve got a great deal of energy. We thought we"d built sufficient shields against them, surrounding the crystals themselves as well as their container. What we think may have happened is that two or more cosmic rays may have hit the same spot almost simultaneously, penetrating the defenses. The high-energy rays struck this one crystal and knocked it slightly out of proportion, causing the deviation you saw."
He shook his head. "Believe me, such an occurrence is so rare it couldn"t happen again in a million years. The odds are trillions and trillions to one against it..."
"Can you fix it?" Hawker asked. "Can Green be restored?"
Philaskut cleared his throat. "You have to remember, that was the only such record of him we had. It wasn"t the person who was damaged, but the complete record of him. If it were something in the dupling device itself, or something that happened to the sub... to Green after he"d been dupled..."
"In other words," Belilo said, "there"s nothing you can do."
"No. That"s what I"ve been trying to tell you." The officer spread his hands to indicate how hopeless the situation was. "The record itself was damaged-and in fact, the crystal broke apart immediately upon being replayed. We couldn"t even duplicate the recreation. That"s why the...
Green is so important; we must study him thoroughly to learn exactly how the accident occurred, so that in the future we can take steps to see this never happens again."
Hawker felt ill that such a thing should happen to the closest friend he had in the Universe. "I want to see him."
"Who? Green? I"m afraid that isn"t possible. He"s in a cla.s.sified ward; I can"t order a video linkage...""I don"t want to see a f.u.c.king picture!" Hawker exploded. "I want to visit him, be beside him, give him comfort if I can. He"s my friend, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!"
Philaskut shrank back from this outburst. "That"s even more out of the question. That ward is strictly off limits to anyone without a triple-alpha clearance..."
"I don"t think you understand, friend," Symington said, coming around behind the computer screen so that he towered over the seated officer.
"That wasn"t a request. We didn"t say "pretty please." That was an order."
Philaskut looked around the room at the five determined faces, and at the look of fright on the clerk"s face as Costanza held her tightly. From some unexpected depths of his soul, the officer drew a tiny shred of courage. "Who are you to order me around?"
"Just a group of people who think five to one is pretty good odds." To emphasize his remark, Singh opened his tunic to show the b.u.t.t of the beampistol tucked into his trousers.
"What will you do, kill me?" Philaskut"s bravado was gaining momentum. "Do you think you"re the only people who can be dupled? Do you see this little b.u.t.ton in my neck? Everyone on Cellina has one. My pattern is being continuously broadcast to Resurrection Central, continuously updated. If you kill me, I"ll be dupled exactly as I was the instant before you did it. You"d gain nothing. I"m not scared of you."
"Actually, we weren"t thinking of killing you." Belilo leaned down, gently at first, on the computer screen; when it held her weight, despite its apparent lack of support, she sat on it, and leaned over toward the officer.
"Killing is so crude, don"t you think? Do you happen to know how many bones there are in the human foot?"
Philaskut blinked, confused by her apparent change of subject. "No."
"Neither do I, exactly, but I"m told there"s a lot. Twenty or more, I think. All nice, tiny little bones. I wonder if we can set a record for the most broken at one sitting." She looked back at Hawker. "Do you think we should do that before or after we peel the toenails all the way back?"
Philaskut"s courage evaporated as quickly as it came. "P-please don"t.I"ll take you there somehow. But it"s all the way across the base. I"ll have to get us a floater."
"We"ve got one downstairs," Singh said. "It"s all ready and waiting."
"What about her?" Costanza asked, bringing the clerk forward. "Do I have to drag her around all over?"
Belilo walked over to the frightened woman. "What about it, sister? You got one of those b.u.t.tons in your neck?"
"Y-yes."
"Good. I"ll try to make it painless." With a sudden blow, Belilo lashed out and snapped the woman"s neck. The clerk gave just a soft sigh, and fell to the floor as Costanza released her.
Belilo looked at the corpse for a moment. "Somehow it doesn"t seem so bad when you know it"s not permanent," she remarked.
Philaskut stared nervously at this display, and Symington had to lift him by his collar and deposit him on his feet. "Get moving," he said brusquely. "We"ve got things to do."
They took Philaskut down to their waiting floater and drove as he indicated to a large building on the far side of the base. Several times they were stopped for ID checks, but Philaskut nervously inserted his clearance card in the appropriate slot and they were pa.s.sed on to the next checkpoint. Eventually they pulled up beside a door, got out of their floater and Philaskut"s card opened the way for them again.
Hawker and Symington walked on either side of the officer, each taking one of Philaskut"s arms and locking tightly to it so the frightened man could not escape. The other three walked close behind. They wandered up stairs and through a maze of corridors they could barely keep straight, pa.s.sing three checkpoints along the way. Each time, Philaskut"s card gained them admittance. Had he not been in such an angry mood, Hawker might have been impressed by the importance of the man he"d kidnaped.
At length they came to a door marked "Authorized Personnel Only."
Philaskut"s card worked perfectly on it, too, and the door opened wide.
The group marched silently into the room beyond, and the door slid shutbehind them.
They were in a laboratory. Five people in crisp green uniforms moved about the room, checking the wealth of instruments all around, recording the readings and resetting the calibrations. The entire room was bathed in the antiseptic glow of a cool blue light. And there, in the center of the room, lay Green.
He was suspended in midair on an antigravity field, surrounded by dozens of humming machines large and small that poked and prodded at his naked body. If anything, his twisted figure looked even more grotesque than Hawker remembered from the brief glimpse on resurrection day. "Is he awake?" Hawker asked their guide.
"I really don"t know. I"m not in charge of this aspect. His mind is as damaged as his body. He slips in and out of awareness..."
The other people in the room noticed the intruders for the first time.
One of them, a woman with incandescent orange hair, stepped forward.
"What are you doing here? Philaskut, you know perfectly well..."
"It"s visiting hours," Symington told her, his hand resting lightly on his hip a few centimeters from the b.u.t.t of his beampistol. "We"ve come to see our friend."
As Hawker"s group strode forward, the scientists parted reluctantly to let them through. Hawker noticed one of the men edging toward the door.
"No need to leave," he said as a gentle warning. "We don"t have any secrets from you people. Let"s just all stay together for now, shall we?"
They lined the scientists up against the wall, along with Philaskut.
Costanza kept an eye on them while the other four soldiers approached the body that floated in the middle of the room. Hawker had to force his stomach to remain steady as he glanced down at the surrealist parody that was his friend"s face. "Dave," he said quietly. "Dave, it"s me. I came to see how you were. Are they treating you all right here?"
Green"s face did not change expression; he showed no sign of having heard or understood. Hawker turned to glare angrily at the scientists.
"What have you done to him? What drugs have you given him?"
"None," said the woman who was apparently in charge of the scientificteam. "We wouldn"t introduce foreign substances, because we"re not sure how his body would react. We even have to prepare special predigested food, because his stomach has trouble on its own." She was indignant at the very thought.
Symington, more direct, laid his hand on Green"s shoulder and shook him gently. "Hey, Dave, it"s your buddies. We"ve come to see you. Can"t you even say hi?"
Green"s eyes continued to focus on some spot well beyond the ceiling, but his mouth began moving. Saliva dropped out of the side and the sounds, barely audible, were simply nonsense syllables.
Hawker"s anger reached new heights. Turning to the scientists once again, he demanded to know, "What have you been doing to him?"
"Just studying him," the woman said. "We run molecular scans of his entire body, recording the pattern and a.n.a.lyzing it to see precisely where the deviations are. We run tests, that"s all. We"re not trying to hurt him.
He was like that when he came to us; we"re not to blame for the accident.
We"re only trying to make some sense of it after the fact."
The fact that her words were reasonable did nothing to mollify Hawker"s anger. If anything, it only infuriated him more. What was the good of logic and reason when an unreasonable universe could turn a good man like David Green into a freak like this?
"I can see you cared for him a great deal," the woman continued. "But you"ll have to face the fact that the friend you loved is gone forever. We"ve done what we could to keep the sh.e.l.l alive, but his mind..."
"Welcome... to h.e.l.l."
Those words, even spoken as softly as they were, jerked everyone"s attention back to Green. There was awareness of a sort in his face; his eyes, both on the left side of his nose, were now focused on Hawker.
"Dave. Dave." Hawker felt closer to crying now than he had in centuries. "How do you feel?"
"How... do I look?""Like s.h.i.t," Symington replied.
"Then that"s how mfrtck tablkrt." A cloud pa.s.sed over Green"s eyes as he lapsed into gibberish once more.
"That often happens," the woman scientist volunteered. "There"ll be a brief period of lucidness, and then he-"
"Shut up!" Hawker snarled. All his concentration was on Green; he wanted no distractions. Despite the gibberish, Green"s face did not look as s.p.a.cey as it had at first; there were thoughts going on within his mind, but he couldn"t connect his tongue to the words.
Seconds pa.s.sed, with the only sounds being Green"s gibbered attempts at speech. Hawker strained, positive that if only he listened hard enough he could make some sense of what his friend was saying. But it continued to elude him, and eventually Green stopped speaking again.
It was Singh who broke the spell of silence. "What do you want to do now, Hawk?"
Hawker closed his eyes and tried to think, but it was no good; all his mind could see was Green"s twisted body and haunted face. "I don"t know, I don"t..."
"We can"t just stand around here forever," Costanza said. "We"ve got to do something."
Belilo, seeing the pained indecision in Hawker"s face, said, "We can take him with us, get him away from these ghouls."
"You can"t do that!" Philaskut objected. "He"s army property."
"So is this," Symington said, pulling his beampistol from his trousers.
With a single shot he blew off the officer"s head.
The scientists were cowed, but the woman in charge still had enough courage to speak up. "You don"t understand. Taking him away from here is the worst possible thing. He"s a freak now. He can"t survive in the outside world. You"d only be hurting him, not helping him."
"I told you to shut up," Hawker said. He kept his eyes on Green. "We"lllet him decide what he wants."
"He"s hardly competent..."
Symington"s beampistol lashed out again, tearing away the woman"s leg. She fell to the floor, moaning and crying in pain.
Hawker looked straight into Green"s face. "Dave," he pleaded. "Dave, please concentrate. This is important. Do you want us to take you out of here?"
An eternity pa.s.sed, then two. Finally, "Yes." The single sighed syllable echoed through the room like a shout.
"That does it, then," Singh said. "I guess he doesn"t like the facilities here."
"But where can you take him that"s any better?" one of the other scientists asked nervously. "What can he get outside he can"t get here?"
"How about freedom?" Belilo suggested.
"The army won"t let you get away with this," the woman scientist hissed as she lay on the floor. "They"ll hunt you down, bring you back..."
"But we"ll have a head start," Symington said.
"What do we do with them?" Costanza asked, indicating the scientists cowering against the wall.
"Well, we can"t have much of a head start if they"re here to give the alarm the instant we leave, can we?" Singh said.
Costanza nodded, and used his own beampistol to kill the scientists.
"The trouble is, they were probably right," Singh said as he stripped the body of one scientist to get clothes for Green. "We don"t know where we"re taking him, and we have no idea how long he"ll be able to survive away from these machines."
"Doesn"t matter," Hawker said brusquely. "You heard him; he wants us to get him out. If he dies, he"ll at least die free.""And for good," Belilo murmured. "Philaskut said his pattern cracked when they dupled him. They won"t be able to do it ever again."
They all stopped for a moment to ponder the implications of that. To die for the last time and never face the treadmill of war again. After all these centuries of being trapped in the endless cycle of battle and meaningless death, the idea held a lovely fascination. None of them would admit it-they"d been too highly trained in survival-but the thought was in the backs of their minds.
"Where do we go with him, though?" Costanza asked. "The only time I"ve been off the base was to go to that bar in town-and it"s such a small town we can"t hide him there. I don"t know anyplace else on this world."
"Let"s get him off the base first," Singh said. "We"ll figure the rest out later."
Green had slipped back into a trance as they dressed his unprotesting body, barely able to stand unsupported, in the dead scientist"s uniform.
Hawker and Costanza carried him to the door while Singh stooped over Philaskut"s corpse and retrieved the security pa.s.s, hoping it would get them off the base.
They retraced their steps carefully, with Symington and Belilo going on ahead to act as scouts and make sure the way was clear. They made it out to their floatcar and loaded Green into the back. Climbing in after him, they started their vehicle off toward a side gate where they hoped the security would be less rigid. As of yet there had been no alarm about their escape.
The late afternoon shadows were lengthening as they reached the gate.
There was only a robot sentinel stationed here, not a living person; that could be either good or bad. A robot could sometimes be fooled more easily than a real person-but if it became too confused, it could activate alarms and bring the entire base down upon them. They would have to proceed cautiously.
They stopped as the robot commanded, and Singh confidently handed out Philaskut"s security pa.s.s. The robot accepted the pa.s.s, scanned it, and handed it back. "Unacceptable," it said tersely.
Singh was sweating. He took the card back and looked at hiscompanions. "Any ideas?"
"Maybe Philaskut wasn"t cleared for this gate," Belilo said. "Or maybe the card doesn"t work after his death."