One of the men in our “group walked nervously over to the table and sat down at another folding chair placed in front They were just slightly too far away to hear them when they talked in low tones, but normal conversation carried sufficiently so that we were all more or less in on the interview.
It was pretty routine really. Name, age, special skills and backgrounds—things like that. Then right in the middle I experienced something odd, as if, somehow, a second or two was lost—sort of edited out. Nobody else seemed to notice it and so I said nothing, but it was eerie nonetheless—either this was something I should know about or it was me, and the latter worried me the most.
The same thing happened during the second and third interviews—a sense of following along, hearing the routine procedure when, blip, there was a sudden slight difference in the scene—people slightly out of position, something like that. The more it happened, the more I became convinced that something not apparent to everyone else was happening.
Interestingly, the occurrence was repeated with each interview except one—Zala’s. I followed what was going on particularly keenly, not only looking for the telltale blackout but also to see how well Korman’s records jibed with Zala’s own version of her life. It was pretty close, I had to admit—and there was no disorientation.
I fidgeted irritably as the boring process continued, although it was not completely without interest. Our big bully upstairs with the private room had been something of a dictator, it appeared, on an off-the-beaten-track frontier world; he had a particular fondness for grotesque maimings and the like. Although this information confirmed the man’s chilling aura, it also reminded me that big, brawny, and nasty did not necessarily mean stupid. Anybody who could pull off a virtual planetary takeover and hold on for almost six years was definitely on the genius side—which is why he was here at all. Aeolia Matuze would love him—but whether he’d play ball with her was something else again.
I was kept for last, and when Korman called my name it was with a great deal of curiosity that I approached the table. Would I too suffer an “edit”?
He was pleasant and businesslike enough, as he had been with the others.
“You are Park Lacoch?”
“I am,” I responded.
“You have no objections to your past being reviewed?”
I hesitated for what I judged was an appropriate length of time, then said, “No, I guess not.”
He nodded. “I understand your apprehension. You are a most colorful character, Lacoch—did you know that?”
“I hardly think that’s the word most people would use.”
He chuckled dryly. “I daresay. Still, you’re in a long line of mass murderers from respected backgrounds. They color human history and make its humdrum aspects more interesting. I gather they solved your basic problem?”
“You could say that. I was in deep psych for quite a long time, you understand. I emerged as what they call sane, but because of my notoriety I could hardly be returned to society.”
“You see what I mean about colorful? Yes, that fits. Also, we could hardly ignore the fact that you’ve shared quarters here with a woman and have now spent a week in a town full of them and you’ve been nothing but civilized to all. Tell me, though, honestly—do you think that any conditions might set you off again, even the most extreme?”
I shrugged. “Who can say? I don’t think so, not any more than you or anybody else. I’m pretty well at peace with myself on that score, so much so I can’t even imagine myself doing such things, though I know I did.”
“What about killing in general? Could you kill someone under any conditions?”
That was pretty easy. “Of course. If somebody was trying to kill me, for example. They didn’t take that route out with me, sir. I wasn’t programmed—I was cured.”
He nodded approvingly, then looked up suddenly and straight at me, eyes wide, almost burning—a hypnotic gaze, an amazing one, but it flared for only a second and then was gone. Korman sighed and relaxed a moment. “There, we’re alone now.”
I jumped. “Huh?” I looked around at—well, nothing. There appeared to be a huge, smooth black wall right in back of me.
It was clearly too routine a thing for him to even be amused by my reaction. “A simple thing. When we return to the real world once more none of your compatriots will even be aware of any gap.”
“So that’s what happened! I noticed the jerkiness.”
“I’m impressed. Almost nobody does, you know. The brain fills in the gap or explains it away. You say you noticed it with others?”
I nodded. “The first time I thought I was going a little crazy, but when it happened again and again I knew something was up.”
“You noticed it with every one of them?”
I smiled, seeing his probe. “All but Zala. You didn’t take her aside like this, I don’t think.”
He nodded approvingly. “You’re quite correct. I don’t think I’ve underestimated you, Lacoch. With training, you might even gain and control the Power yourself. You have demonstrated an abnormally early affinity.”
“I’d like to give it a try,” I told him sincerely—and that was no lie.
“We’ll see. Chance has placed you in a most fortuitous position, Lacoch, and now you show even more interesting abilities. You’ve got a golden opportunity to go far on Charon.”
“Oh? In what way?” I was both curious and a bit suspicious at all this interest. I didn’t like having attention called to myself quite this early in the game.
Korman thought a moment, seeming to wrestle with some question in his mind. Whatever the dilemma, he seemed to resolve it and sighed.
“A little more than five years ago the Lord of Charon was Tulio Koril. He was a wily old rogue, and tremendously powerful. He had little stomach for the routine affairs of state—when one can be a god, how much more do bureaucracy, paperwork, and routine decisions weigh on him?”
“Why did he keep at it, then?”
“A sense of duty, of obligation, mostly. He derived no joy from it, but he saw the potential for terrible abuse in the position and felt that any of his logical successors would be a disaster—his opinion, of course, which has to be balanced against the egomania necessary to get to be Lord in the first place.”
“A Warden man with a sense of duty and obligation?”
“There are many. I fancy myself one, in fact. You are as much an outcast as any of us, yet far more than we, you are the product of the society that cast you out. It is a society that aims overall for the common good, but to achieve that aim it requires all its citizens to take a certain viewpoint that is not necessarily the only one. Many of us are criminals by any lights, of course, but many more are criminal only because we dared take or develop a different viewpoint than the one the Confederacy favors. Throughout man’s dirty history ‘different’ was always equated with evil, when ‘different’ is—well, simply ‘different.’ If their system is perfect, why do they employ detectives, assassins, and, for that matter, how the hell can they produce us!”
It was not a question easily answered, nor profitably responded to at this time. I said nothing.