“By whom? By authority of Chairman Laroo she’s been waived of that requirement. Anybody gives you trouble on it, tell ’em to call me.”
“But I thought she had a psych implant against it.”
“We had Dumonia remove it. It wasn’t much anyway. Go ahead. We’re wasting time.”
I switched off, feeling less than confident now. This change in the ground rules was hairy indeed.
Dylan, however, didn’t mind at all. “We’re in this together, remember.”
I nodded, and could do nothing but see her down to the docks and off. She was excited to be on a boat again, for she really did love the sea. She was gone about five hours, a time in which I became increasingly worried and nervous. When she finally returned I was still apprehensive.
“They didn’t do anything to you, did they?” I asked her.
She laughed. “No. Mostly I took the wheel and had a little fun. That’s a gorgeous place inside there, though. They only let me on the main floor, handed me the sealed, refrigerated case here, and marched me back.”
I looked at her nervously. Would I know if they’d replaced her with a robot? Would I know if they’d pulled a fast one with the psych machines?
Well, I’d know the robot situation if we swapped during the night, and I felt reasonably confident that at this stage they wouldn’t risk it. For the other, I’d need Dumonia—if I could trust him.
Suddenly I stopped short. “That son of a bitchl” I muttered. “That crafty old anarchist!”
She looked at me, puzzled. “What? Who?”
“Dumonia. He’s ahead of both Laroo and me. He knew this all along, set me up for it.”
Points of similarity indeed. He knew damned well what he was saying when he told me that.
We just brought the case into the apartment and then waited for more instructions, which didn’t come. Finally, we got tired of waiting, caught up on some routine paperwork, and went to bed.
In the morning the case was gone. I reported the theft to Bogen, who sounded none too thrilled about it all. He’d had lenses, agents, and a full security system trained on the place, and nobody had seen a thing. Worse, at least five separate tracing devices had been placed inside the case, all of which had functioned perfectly, apparently. At least they still were—they said the case was still in the apartment. The trouble was, no amount of detection and searching could reveal it, although they finally came up with a tiny recording module, something like a tiny battery, wedged inside the floorboards.
Sure enough, it nicely broadcast exactly all five tracing signals.
Bogen was both furious and unnerved by it all. I knetw damned well that a far different account would reach Laroo, one in which Bogen didn’t look so bad.
I had to admire the Confederacy’s ftther agent in this area, who seemed head and shoulders above even me, at least in audacity. In fact I was so impressed that when he called and made an appointment for us to go and see him, I could hardly wait.
The samples had been gone nine days, and during that time little of interest happened in any direction, except Bogen was becoming more impatient and threatening toward us. Both Dylan and I started becoming a little fidgety.
Finally, though, the call I’d been expecting came, and off we went, almost certainly unsuspected by Bogen and his other people.
“I always wondered how and why you thought you could talk so freely in here,” I told the agent.
Dr. Dumonia smiled and nodded to the two of us. “Oh, it’s a couple of modern wonders, really. The fact is, the place is bugged and Bogen’s people are right now hearing us talk. They’re just hearing something quite different. It’s so pleasant to work in a technological environment that’s a few decades behind what’s current.”
“You and your anti-Confederacy anarchism. I knew there was something funny about you, almost from the first, but I missed which side you were on.”
“I’m on my side, of course. So are you two—on your side, that is. I’m not a fraud, and everything I told you is true. I detest the Confederacy. If I could be sure these aliens of ours wouldn’t eliminate our whole race I’d cheer ’em on as they attacked. There would be no better shot in the arm for humanity than a good old war, as long as the race survived to build and grow. I’m a psychiatrist and I like my creature comforts and my profession, too.”
“Then why—why work for them?” Dylan asked, puzzled.
“Oh, I don’t work for them, exactly. On Cerberus, I just about am the Confederacy, which I consider a delicious joke on all of them. It has to do with the way I look at history and society. Qwin here might tell you more about that. I don’t really feel like philosophical chats right now, there’s too much to be done. Let’s just say that I use them, and they use me, and we both profit. I also use Laroo and his people and system. All to the end of living exactly the life I want, doing what I most love to do.”
“I don’t understand why they sent me at all,” I told him honestly, and with the respect one professional offers another. “You could have done everything easier and with less risk yourself.”
“Well, that’s not true. If I got anywhere near Laroo, or particularly his island and his projects, I’d put myself in severe and immediate danger, and I’m just not willing to do that. As I said, my activities are designed to keep me in my own personal nirvana as long as possible. Indefinitely, I hope. So I’m not the active sort. Laroo wouldn’t trust me near him or his babies simply because I know too much about him, know him too well.” He grinned. “He thinks I had a partial mindwipe about that, which is the only reason I’m still here. But on a secondary level, I’m too close to the problem. I’ve been here too many years, know too many people. My objectivity is askew. A fresh analytical mind was needed to filter the information. Besides, this way it’s your neck, not mine.”
“But you said you didn’t care if the aliens attacked,” Dylan noted, still trying to figure him out. “Then why help against this thing at all?”
He became very serious. “The ultimate threat is those creatures out there. Perfect organisms, superior in every way. Homo excelsus. And all totally programmable. Totally. Everybody’s programmed, of course, by what we call heredity and environment. But we have the ability to transcend much of that, to become what the programming never intended. That’s why no totalitarian society, no matter how absolute, in the whole history of mankind has been able to eradicate the individual human spirit These—robots—are the first true threat to that. They can’t outgrow their programming. Speaking euphemistically, I have to say they scare the shit out of me.”
We both nodded. “So where do we go from here?” I asked him.
“All right. We’ve analyzed and dissected and played with all those samples. I’ll tell you the truth: Dr. Merton is correct. We have no idea how to duplicate that stuft, how to make it ourselves. It’s beyond us. Which is all to the good, I think. I wouldn’t want [ulwin] that business, either, although Lord knows they’ll try. That’s the bad news, sort of. The good news is that though we can’t make it or quite understand how it works, we know how to work it, if that makes sense.”
“Not a bit,” I told him.
“Well, I don’t know how to make a pencil, but I know how to use one. Even if I’d never seen one before, I could still figure it out. The operation, that is. We have an infinitely Complex variation of that same idea here. Now, if the basic obedience programming were in the very chemical makeup of the thing, we’d be up the creek. No way to deprogram without dissolving it. Fortunately, it’s not. There is a programming device inside each quasicell, and it’s quite complex and we don’t understand it at all. However, knowing that, we can add programming information and be sure that the information is transmitted and stored via the Wardens the same way as we swap here. There’s an interesting implication that the thing is designed with Wardens in mind and might not work without them, which may mean that these things were developed by our aliens specifically for us here and now on Cerberus, rather than just being a variation of something common in their culture.”