"Have you been threatened in any way?" Matt laughed.
"You don't need a lawyer. You haven't been accused of anything. It's all perfectly legal. Haven't
you heard of the Patriot Act? We just want you to answer some questions."
"I have. You have more questions?"
"Yes, but there's no point going on with them right now. Your responses have not been entirely
forthcoming."
"You mean you think I'm lying?"
"No. You're telling the truth, but not all of it. You're hiding something." He gave Matt a small
smile. "I'm afraid I need to regroup a little, too. It's just possible I'm not getting the right answers because I don't know how to ask the right questions."
"Join the club," Matt said.
The inquisitors put everything back into the cardboard box and left.
MATT was not surprised when they drugged him. It was the logical next step.
There was nothing to prevent them from simply tying him down and jabbing a needle into him, but they elected to put it into his food, or his water. And what could he do? He had to eat and drink,
so he ate and drank, and then felt the strange feeling of euphoria overcome him.
He laughed.
They let him laugh for an hour, Albert and Argyle, and then came back in again. All they brought
this time was his computers.
"Good morning, Matt," Albert said. "How are you feeling?"
"I'm feeling great," Matt said... and then realized he hadn't said anything at all. He had opened
his mouth, he had taken a breath, he had sent the signals to his lips and tongue that should have produced words, but something had short-circuited and no words had come out.
He laughed again. It was very funny.
"You know you have to answer these questions, don't you?" Albert said.
"Yes, I know," Matt didn't say, and laughed again. What was so funny was, he wanted to answer the questions. Oh, there was a part of him, a part that seemed to have been deeply suppressed by the drugs—and what was this stuff? It was very good!—that wanted to keep his secret, that still felt it was important, but most of him was eager to spill everything. He knew it would make him feel very good to tell these fellows everything he knew. But, on the other hand, not telling them, not being able to tell them, didn't make him feel bad... so he laughed.
"Where is the time machine?" Argyle asked.
Matt tried to tell them. Without success.
Albert drummed his fingers on the table, then abruptly got up and left the room.
Matt and Argyle sat there for ten minutes, staring at each other. Argyle had absolutely no expression on his face, and no nervous mannerisms. Somehow, Matt found this scarier than if he had shown overt hatred, hostility, menace, even frustration. He felt Argyle could rip out his guts with absolute indifference.
But he was not capable of worrying about such things at the moment. Thoughts, observations, conclusions entered his mind and were filed away impartially, with no emotional component. If Argyle had told him he intended to cut off Matt's arms and legs he would have filed that way, too, with no fear. Maybe Argyle knew that, and was saving his venom for a time Matt could appreciate it.
Albert came back with a huge stack of paper under one arm. He slapped it down on the table in such a way that Matt could see what was printed on the front of the file: DR. MATTHEW WRIGHT. More psychology, Matt figured. All that paper could obviously have been put onto a computer and Albert could have consulted that. Albert wanted Matt to see the amount of documentation available to him.
Albert flipped through the file and reached the page he wanted.
"Aphasia," he said. "You've suffered from it before."
Matt nodded.
"He's faking," Argyle said.
Matt shook his head.
"I don't think he is," Albert sighed. "I think he really wants to tell us where it is. Don't you,
Matt?"
Matt nodded.
"Then we'll just have to play twenty questions, won't we?" Albert said.
BIG as the dossier with his name on it was, there was still more. They brought in stacks and boxes of paper, spread things around on the table. They made no attempt to hide any of it from him.
Results: zero.
The Esalen Institute had been—was still being—searched. When the government was done they'd have to rebuild the place practically from the ground up. Matt regretted bringing all that trouble on them.
Every police force and fire department and National Guard unit and Boy Scout troop and, probably, the Brownies and Bluebirds, were beating the bushes along his entire route from Los Angeles to Big Sur, looking for a steel attache case. They had been joined by thousands of civilians spurred by a million-dollar reward.
Results: a big pile of garbage. Thus the game of twenty questions.
It can be an effective tool in the hands of a skilled questioner, and Albert was no slouch. But you have to know the right questions to ask, or you never even get on the right track.
First they brought out a map. Did you leave the time machine here? No? Did you leave it here? Here? No, no, and no. All the way down the map, town by town.
Albert thought about it.
Well, did you last see it here? No, no, no, no... yes.
The yes was Los Angeles. Albert brought out another map. Pointed to the tar pits.
Yes.
"OH, man," Susan said. "That was..."
"About a week after our little adventure. I'm not sure precisely, since I didn't have a clock and the drugs screwed up my time sense a bit."
"That was when they sealed off that whole area. A square mile, evacuated and decontaminated
because of that dirty bomb."
"I read about it later," Matt said. "It was a while before I added it up."
"You think... the government set off the bomb?" "If there was a bomb."
"What I meant was, if there was a dirty bomb. A radiological bomb, one that would take a while to decontaminate after it went off. The way I'd do it, I'd put some dynamite in a truck, call in a warning so the immediate area can be evacuated. Then I'd blow it up and release a small amount of some relatively harmless radioactive gas, enough to set off the Geiger counters. The story was the terrorists chose that area because of all the publicity with the mammoths. Then seal off and evacuate a square mile and ban all overflights because of the radiation danger, to give yourself a little privacy, and get to work looking. When I heard about it I figured it was too much for coincidence. What was it, three weeks before they let anyone back in? That's long enough to do quite a search."
"Almost four weeks," came a voice. Susan gasped, turned, and saw Howard Christian standing on her deck, looking through her huge front windows.
23
SUSAN had been raised to offer food and drink to any guest, even if she'd really like to leave him out on the front porch looking in like a pathetic waif. But he was with Andrea de la Terre, and Susan liked Andrea. She had liked her before the woman—amazingly!—fell in love with Howard, first as a fan, later as an acquaintance. She knew a lot of famous people now and had learned that, for the most part, they were no better and sometimes a lot worse than your ordinary citizen.
Andrea was different. She was one of those rare ones that could somehow transcend her celebrity, get close to just about anyone quickly, so that in no time at all you felt you'd known her all your life, and might even think of her as a friend. So she'd shown Andrea where to hang that ridiculous mammoth-fur coat in the front closet, and hurried into the kitchen to see if she had anything suitable to serve to a multibillionaire and the most famous movie star on the planet.
Howard was easy. She knew that a handful of stale beer nuts would satisfy him. What she had was a bag of chips that was only three days past the sell-by date and an unopened bowl of pretty good guacamole dip that didn't smell bad.
So what wine goes with chips and salsa, red or white? She dithered a while over the bottles, hearing the vague buzz of conversation from the living room behind her, wondering what the hell they could be talking about, given the fact that Howard hated Matt. But it wasn't her problem, she decided. Screw Howard. She grabbed a bottle of red and went back to the living room.