03. The Maze in the Mirror (35 page)

I had already figured out that our home sweet home had to be a key to it all. When I saw it
marked with a circle on Yugarin's map, along with a lot of others I didn't know, it cleared up a lot. And when he told me that they'd come up with this like ten years earlier, the rest fell into place. And the crazy thing is, with all this hatred among this group, the key was a kind of lopsided, bent love story.

See, the first case, the one that brought Brandy and me into the Company, was their initial attempt to seize control of the State College siding and substation. They were going to replace key people in the Philadelphia branch of the Company with their own duplicates and insure a no-interference situation up at State College. Whitlock would have seen that commerce was maintained, maybe even profits increased, while one by one he used his own high position to tag and replace others. Bill, you'd be one of the key ones later on. They couldn't go after Company security officers right off, but if they had the financial and corporate officers they'd have no trouble replacing security.

But it didn't work. They screwed up when they failed to kill Whitlock. They were as ruthless then as now, but not at all experienced. They simply didn't realize that the Company was hand in hand with organized crime and they failed to cover the mob bosses. Whitlock went underground and away, in the process stiffing the mob, which went after him. That blew the operation and they were trying to clean up the botch when we got involved.

Having made our world too hot for them for a while, they looked for alternatives. I should have made the link when Brandy's case developed. They had taken over an alternate Earth close enough to ours that you didn't even have to go
through a switch to go between them, and they'd developed their own siding to the same State College switch point. They'd learned, too. In that world
they
allied with and took over the mob. We thought they were just using the world as a testing ground for their damned drug, and certainly they let Carlos do that in the hopes his plot would succeed and make theirs unnecessary, but the object was to secure the substation and use it as a substitute for ours.

We saw only one plot, unconnected except by the leaders to any past plot. The fact is, there were two-the officially sanctioned one Carlos was working and the private plot by Yugarin and Mancini about which the others knew nothing. But Brandy blew the security of that other Pennsylvania substation, making it useless anyway, and maybe it wasn't any good anyway. Just a hair off, increasing the odds of the surge being uncoordinated. They probably took over and tried a dozen more we never knew about, but it never worked. If they used another substation, then one or more of their already secure substations didn't work. It was a Chinese puzzle, you see. When you moved one piece it automatically moved two or three other ones. Eventually they came to decide that the only practical solution was to take over ours after all.

But how? For one thing, the two people presiding over the substation were the same two who had constantly thwarted them in the past. For another, security was better on our world after their initial failure. The only plus in their favor was that our substation was rarely used. It hadn't even been staffed until we moved up there. The weak point that existed there was simply too small to be useful except as an occasional convenience entrance and exit. We'd staffed it only because the opposition had drawn our attention to it and the vulnerability it represented, but we didn't take the next step of asking ourselves why the hell the opposition was drawn to it. I blame myself for not seeing the linkages. Again and again all the cases were drawn to that damned substation. Why?

Well, Yugarin and Mancini had managed a lot on their own, but now they had a situation where everybody was required and commitment from the whole Board was necessary. It didn't take 'em ten years to get the risk factor down-they went to the committee after ten years' work with a
fait accompli.
The other places were secured, the great storage batteries built, the math all done. Only it couldn't work without our substation.

Some of the committee were enthusiastic, others had reservations but finally went along, impressed by the work and planning that had gone into it ever since Yugarin had mapped all the sidings and substations and realized the possibilities unused sidings might give for such a project. It was Kanda's math that kept the risk factors high, but in the end not high enough. Mancini in particular is no dummy himself, and when I was told that Carlos had his own secure and independent computer system I only had to put two and two together to figure that there was no way to fool Mancini and the others by doing a lot of fake figures. So, in the end, we had eight people giving the go-ahead and starting to plan how to take over our substation for the length of time necessary to install and charge their batteries and rig their timing circuits under the Company's nose, as it
were. And we had one man who, although he had to go along, was desperate to stop it if he could.

In every way but one, Lothar Pandross was exactly what he seemed to be. A true genius with an affinity for machines, maybe even a love affair with them. He wasn't personable, and people made him feel uncomfortable. Maybe he was just over the bend paranoid, or maybe he was an agoraphobe-staying most of the time in that one computer command center suggests that-but the fact was that Pandross was far happier interacting with machines than people and he had the kind of job and challenges that kept him happy and content. He went out seldom; the only clear instances I could see where he interacted with others, mostly just sitting back, was at the committee meetings which were held inside Kanda's alternative computer-a computer that Kanda told me Pandross had helped design and build.

Pandross's personality and genius had made him perfect for the job he'd taken on at the start. Unlike the others, you see, he wasn't from that destroyed world. We'll probably never know which world he came from. But he was a Company man, a computer genius who'd probably been recruited to work on and improve the Company's own master computers. That's why his design for Kanda was so close and so competitive. But he worked for Security, not Maintenance, and so at the key time he worked directly under the ambitious traitor destined for the Company board, Mukasa Lamdukur.

In a way, they all underestimated the Company and Mukasa. He was an old security hand. He wasn't about to arm and train and turn loose eight loose cannons inside the Labyrinth with access to most of its secrets and all twisted up inside by hatred of the Company and thirst for revenge. He needed to always be sure of them, and Pandross was ideal. As a man virtually phobic about interaction with people, he was less likely to be exposed or make a slip. The position was irresistible to Pandross because it gave him nearly a free hand at designing an alternate security system and force, creating new systems, beating his old compatriots at the Company at their own game, and, of course, as chief of Security and head of the computer system as well, he could monitor and track the eight rebels as they went about their destructive work. And if Mukasa took over, Pandross was promised that he would be the king of the highest technology in the new pecking order.

Pandross, of course, eventually figured out, or maybe he just overheard it in snooping, that when Mukasa took over it would still be Company race first. He would still have a master in his own field, a comparative dolt who would still be able to order him around and restrict his activities and determine budgets and priorities. When he discovered that Carlos was going after Mukasa and planning to infect and hook the entire Company, Pandross made a fateful decision. He did absolutely nothing. That's why Mukasa was so surprised, and eventually victimized.

But Brandy threw a wrench into that operation, and we were able to put the pieces together and expose the plan at the crucial moment when it could still be stopped. Pandross was now king- but of the opposition only, with no more inside to the Company.

By that time, however, he was well along in his
own project, which was Kanda's great thinking and self-repairing and self-improving master computer. To Kanda, it was a dream come true, a marvel and wonder, a true alien intelligence beyond his imaginings and a tremendous achievement. But he only designed it in the initial stages. Pandross is the one who truly created it, and used his vast stores of information taken from the Company computers to establish this new creation's foundation in reality.

To somebody like Pandross, that great, new computer was probably the only thing he ever truly loved.

And, see, that was the problem. While the few objectors on the committee were mostly concerned with the five percent chance of a total wipeout, a breakthrough to the Zero world and a searing release of all that power channeled via the Labyrinth to all Earthly creation, Pandross didn't give a damn about that. See, he was more bothered by the eighty percent chance that it would work. Short out the Labyrinth, cut off the power supply.

The power supply to his machines, his computer. They were talking about taking the only love he had, cutting open its arteries, and making that love bleed to death.

Pandross never gave a damn about the Company, and he never gave a damn really about the opposition, either. Neither had any real meaning for him so long as he was able to do what he loved to do. Maria had called it "function." Everybody has a function, something they do best, some place where they are the perfect fit in the cosmic machine. Not all of us find that fit, and not too many of us function perfectly, but that made Pandross
all the more aware of his position.

He had to stop them, but what could he do? Leak the plan to the Company, certainly, but that would also mean breaking apart the opposition, betraying and crumbling the network that was part and parcel of his own life and existence, and with no certainty that he would not be traced and held responsible for it. He was in association with eight brilliant psychopaths and he knew them well and didn't underestimate them. Still, the potential was there for him to betray them all.

What he had underestimated was his own beloved computer, who monitored everything with maximum input. Perhaps he talked to it from his remote location. Perhaps he even asked it for solutions to the problem. I'm not sure what triggered it-maybe his own security programs, maybe the fact that his thinking computer was raised to think in the opposition manner in the same way that Maria was raised to think in the rigid terms of her own culture-but the computer, for all Kanda's talk of an alien intelligence, was one of them. It perceived that Pandross was cracking, that he was a threat to everything, even the computer itself. In fact, he was more of an immediate threat to the computer than the big bang plan itself. The computer was the hub of all activities for the eight and the thousands of agents they ran. You couldn't send a message, make a discovery, without having to send it via the computer's network.

And so the computer acted on the immediate threat and sent out a message under the highest authority to the opposition's top security. We'll probably never know who killed Pandross, if they're still alive themselves, but they did it faithfully and with the kind of obedience and unquestioned loyalty to the committee that Maria also represented. With the computer giving them all the accesses, all the blockings, everything he, she, or they needed, they carried out the orders and killed their chief.

The computer, of course, had solved one immediate problem by doing that but hadn't solved the one that had mandated the action. It had both a practical and a logical problem. As a loyal member of the opposition committed to its goals, it couldn't betray or destroy the others or dissolve or cause to be dissolved that organization. It had killed Pandross to preserve just that organization. But Kanda had been quite clever in his overall design; the computer had input and output capabilities, but it had no arms, legs, eyes, or whatever. It also was vulnerable for all its great power, knowledge, and size. Nobody was going to build and maintain a machine like that without adequate safeguards both against it should it turn out to be uncontrollable or should it be revealed in all its immobile bulk to the Company and fall into Company hands. Pandross himself wouldn't have permitted it, and the committee would certainly have thought of it as well. If those paranoid psychos ever even
dreamed
that their master computer, no matter what its motive, had knocked off one of their own, they would activate those systems and blow it.

Mancini had designed the other, easier substation bombs and their batteries. The computer couldn't get to them, and if it ordered any sort of security raid that destroyed them there would now be only one direction for bright ones like Mancini and the others to look for the culprit. The only safe way was to make something go wrong at the last and most vulnerable explosive point. My house, and the Pennsylvania substation.

I'm not clear on what it did next, but it needed some on-the-scene agent representing only it. Most likely it found a Pandross duplicate somewhere and had some security boys play their mind tricks so that the poor
schmuck
thought he was the real Pandross. Maybe someplace it's trying to make up for its murder by growing Pandross clones. I don't know. But when Voorhes' raid on my place to set up their part of the plan came off, there was a Pandross there. A disposable Pandross, keyed to finding me, to tipping me off, maybe even enlisting me, using threats against Dash or whatever against me. See, I didn't have any ready usable duplicates and I had to go through intensive security screening whenever I went out on a job. They made a lot of penetration operations all over hell and gone that kept me away from home more than in it. To have killed me would have been to bring Company security down on the place like a ton of bricks and maybe closed that siding and sealed or destroyed that switch. The Voorhes plan was to keep me so busy protecting Company assets that I'd spend little time at home.

But I was supposed to be home when the raid came down. It was timed for that. That's why they brought their martial arts nerve experts. Their plant, Bond, would appear to be the apparent reason for the raid. That is, a simple opposition raid to get a key man before he could reach the Company and divulge secrets. Once inside, Brandy and I were to be overpowered, and she, who has an incredible number of duplicates, would be replaced by one of them so highly trained and hypno-taught that she'd be damned near perfect, while I would be permanently and totally paralyzed, a basket case, with one of those permanent Ginzu-type holds the Ginzu Master feared had been done. I would have been helpless, out of the way, and accounted for.