“Yes, sir,” the man said—the first words Donald had heard him utter—and went out of the room, his feet making the inevitable soft clanging because all the floors everywhere in Boat Camp were of resonant metal.
“You figured out who he was, presumably,” Delahanty said almost affably, raising his head at last to look at Donald. Donald shrugged. It was obvious the man must be a bodyguard.
“Fast eptification of the kind you’ve undergone can be risky,” Delahanty amplified. “The killer instinct exists in all of us, but it has to be overlaid with certain social inhibitions. Taking them all off at once occasionally leads to random outbreaks of violence in the subject. You seem to have responded very well, though. All that remains for me is to issue you with your travelling kit and documents, and then we’d better get you along to the emergency expressport.”
“Emergency?” Donald repeated.
Delahanty betrayed faint surprise. “Of course. You don’t imagine they could already have—Ah, you wouldn’t have heard, possibly. The yellowbellies put another one over on us. An express from Manila went to the refuelling bay and proved to be carrying a static charge on its tanks. When they coupled up the hoses it blew the entire fuel-store.”
Donald nodded with new-found professional appreciation of an ingenious trick.
“However, it’s perhaps a blessing in disguise for our purposes,” Delahanty continued. “There’s forty-eight hours’ worth of accumulated traffic being pressure-hosed out of the emergency port, and with luck they’ll also be bottlenecked at the arrival end, so you won’t rate too intense a scrutiny. You can’t exactly call it turning the tables, but when the advantage presents itself one grabs it—as no doubt you’ve been taught. Now, as to your equipment!”
He pointed at a pile of baggage stacked in the corner. “Some of that is gear reclaimed from your own apt. Some of it’s new. All the new stuff is trigger-rigid, like a Karatand. Make sure you’re wearing some of the new clothing all the time over your vital organs. It’s almost bullet-proof and an excellent insulator.
“Your communikit, as you’ve been shown, is a bomb. But that’s for dire emergency only. For minor emergencies—which had sheeting well better be emergencies, nonetheless—you’ll have a well-disguised gas-gun. We daren’t give you anything more in the way of weaponry. You must have gathered from your study of Yatakangi that no slit-eye government these days gives a pint of whaledreck whether a round-eye gets lynched or mugged or chased through the streets with a halter round his neck. That’s why we decided we’d have to eptify you. Otherwise you’d be defenceless. Okay?”
Donald nodded.
“Good. As to your professional cover, then! You’ve been taught the use of the standard communikit. I’m going to give you a press authorisation and a Satelserv credit card, and a correspondent’s manual which you must study at the first opportunity. It’s been convincingly well-thumbed, with facsimiles of your own prints, but there’s nothing like the genuine article.
“Your main contact in Gongilung is Engrelay Satelserv’s regular stringer, an English-speaking woman called Deirdre Kwa-Loop. She’s a black South African, which is why her name and picture aren’t much used over internal American services, but they think very highly of her indeed—so highly, they’ve been satisfied to rely on her dispatches throughout this big sensational series of stories from Yatakang. If we hadn’t asked for their co-operation, they wouldn’t have planned on sending anybody to give special coverage. As it is, you may find her a little touchy—she’s apt to feel that your assignment is an expression of lack of confidence in what she’s been doing. Watch that, won’t you? Be tactful.
“And remember, too, that as far as she’s concerned you’re exactly what you claim to be. She has no inside data. The man who has—the man who acts as our link to Jogajong—is a freelance, a Pakistani immigrant called Zulfikar Halal. While it’s wholly convincing that he will want to sell exclusive information to someone like yourself, representing one of the world’s biggest beam agencies, this piece of the cover must be reserved until you’re in sight of the successful completion of the assignment.
“Which is, in the full official version: to investigate the claim made by the Yatakangi government regarding the optimisation of future births; to file normal press dispatches on it, some of which will actually be used by programmes up to and including SCANALYZER, by the way; and to seek out—with all due diligence, as the phrase goes—proof that the claim can’t be substantiated.
“When you have it, you’re to rendezvous with Jogajong and give it to him in full. The disappointment resulting from refutation of the claim, so our computers tell us, may well spark the wave of indignation that sweeps him to power in place of Solukarta.”
“And supposing I don’t find such proof?”
Delahanty looked bewildered. “You’re to keep at it until you do, or until you’re recalled. I thought that went without saying.”
“You miss my point. I read all the scientific papers Sugaiguntung ever published, while I was on standby.” The jargon phrase tripped lightly off Donald’s tongue; what did feel uncomfortable was saying “I”—it seemed like laying false claim to someone else’s work. “And if there’s anyone alive in the world today who can make the promise come true, it’s Sugaiguntung.”
“Our computer evaluations show the project is uneconomic,” Delahanty answered stiffly. “You’ve just been through eptification, so you know what techniques exist already to make optimised individuals. But we can’t even afford to eptify our adult population en masse, let alone apply prenatal techniques that call for vast numbers of skilled tectogeneticists.”
“But what if he’s made a breakthrough to something quick and easy? Suppose he’s envisaging a modified Gershenson technique—say by immersing the ovum in a solution of a template organic?”
“In that case, obviously, we’ve got to have the details. And very, very fast.”
Donald hesitated. He said eventually, “I saw Sergeant Schritt at Guinevere Steel’s party.”
“I wager you did,” Delahanty sighed. “So did everyone else. I can’t really blame the poor bleeder, I guess—but he’ll be no more use to me.”
His tone made it clear that he didn’t intend to pursue the subject, but he went on regarding Donald thoughtfully. “I should have made more allowance for your not being able to follow the news,” he continued at length. “You must put that right at once, because a lot has happened since the claim was made public. To give you a rough idea, multiply Schritty’s reaction by a thousand.”
Chad Mulligan, Donald recalled—and the recollection was like the echo of a dream—made it a million.
“You get the picture? Very well, then. I’ll wish you luck and send you on your way. Unless you have any more questions?”
Donald shook his head. The one thing Delahanty had not said straight out was perfectly clear; whether the process could be made to work or not, it must not be allowed to work in Yatakang.
tracking with closeups (15)
OUR PARENTS’ FEET WERE BLACK
After the greetings, the sisterly and the sister-in-lawly kisses, the invitations to sit down and the how have you been since we saw you lasts: an absolute dead pause, as though neither Pierre Clodard, nor his sister Jeannine, nor his wife Rosalie, had anything to say to one another.
The house, in a sought-after district of Paris within easy walk of the Bois de Boulogne, was the one which Etienne Clodard père had bought on coming home unwillingly from Africa following Algeria’s independence. The whole of it, but this salon in particular, retained the flavour of another continent and another century. The layout, betrayed North African influences in the long low couches against the walls, the use of a carpet not to walk on but as a wall-hanging, the small tables on one of which rested a set of tiny copper cups for Algerian coffee, each nestling in its own hollow in a tray of beaten brass with formalised Arabic script enamelled around the rim. In absolute contrast the room also memorialised what Etienne Clodard the ex-colonial administrator had thought of as proper Parisian elegance when he was out there in the heat and barbarity of Africa: the florid wall-paper, the heavy glazed chintz of the curtains, the two intrusive overstuffed armchairs.