Alternities (48 page)

“I see you’re not quite the moralist, after all.”

“A pragmatist will grow fat while a moralist starves,” Wilkins said. “I have reason to think that you’re a pragmatist. Senator.”

“What are you after?”

“As I said, information. About the National Resource Center. About the gate, the Guard, and Rathole.”

Though Endicott’s poker face never showed the faintest tremor, behind the mask he was reeling from the shock. Even the questions denoted a breach in secrecy so serious that Endicott had trouble crediting it. It was easier to think that this was Tackett’s doing, a little buddy-fuck meant to cost him the President’s confidence. “Who wants to know?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah. Who’s your client? Who’s buying?”

“I don’t see that you should entangle yourself with my business dealings.”

“I asked you a question. If you don’t have an answer, we’re done talking. Who’s buying?”

Wilkins frowned. “A foreign interest.”

“Who?”

“That should be enough.”

“Who?”

The frown deepened. “A friendly power.”

It felt like an evasion. “If you want the truth from me, you’d better give me the same.”

For a long moment, the two men tried to stare each other down. “A Mr. K is the principal buyer,” Wilkins said finally.

Kondratyev?
“Jesus Christ, Wilkins, you’re one of us.”

“I said I was a pragmatist. Just as you are.”

Only fools left their guns hidden in drawers. Endicott’s four-shot pistol rested in an open soft-sided sleeve in the well of the desk, out of sight but close to hand. He did not need to worry that Wilkins was armed; the wand-carrying guards at the entrance were very thorough.

“You don’t know me very well,” Endicott said, sitting forward and reaching for the pistol. “No woman’s worth that much/”

“I didn’t want to insult you with money. But we would consider sweetening the offer—”

Tackett or the Russians, it did not matter. The same message needed to be sent. Endicott leaned back until his hands cleared the desk, then raised the pistol and smoothly squeezed the trigger twice. The pistol sounded like a cap gun, but the bullets left Wilkins slumping slack-jawed in his chair, fast-flowing blood darkening the fine fabrics of his shirt and coat.

The office door flew open, and his secretary—rushed in, stopping short when she saw Wilkins.

“Senator—”

“It’s all right, Jo,” Endicott said, gathering in the tied envelope.

She gaped disbelievingly. “You shot him?”

“We still execute spies. I just saved us the cost of his trial.”

“I’ll… I’ll call security—”

“No. Get the FBI for me. Counterintelligence Division. Then I want you to leave and lock the door after yourself. Nothing should be touched until they get here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Please.”

He held the line until he heard her leave, then hung up on the puzzled FBI agent. It took five minutes to make sure that neither the briefcase nor Wilkins’ clothing contained anything that would not bear scrutiny. Then he placed his own call.

“This is Walter,” he said. “Peter, we have a problem.”

Richard Bayshore looked up from the clipboard at the sound of footsteps on the porch.

“Where have you two been?” he asked as Wallace and Shan entered. “No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. But for future reference, please be informed that rain does not wash straw out of a sweater.”

Wallace flashed a guilty smile as he looked down at his clothing. Shan’s smile was the kind that went with childish secrets.

“You remember Malcolm Davis?” Bayshore continued, inclining his head toward the ethnologist seated across the table.

“Sure. From headquarters. Look, I’m sorry—”

Bayshore held up his hand. “It’s just as well you took the opportunity. I don’t know the next time you’re going to get a free moment. There’s a lot of work ahead.”

“I understand.”

“We need to decide what to do about the Guard’s incursion. But that’s almost secondary. We need to find out everything we can about how the world you come from is different from ours. I hope that will help us figure out why it’s different.”

“You’ll be ahead of me if you do,” Wallace said.

“What did they tell you when you became part of the Guard?” Davis asked.

“I can’t say they tried to explain it. They took me through the gate, showed me another alternity. Made me understand that we had to control the gates, control the maze, to protect ourselves.”

“But didn’t you wonder?” Davis pressed.

“When you see it right in front of your face, you don’t wonder. You just accept that this is the way the world is.”

“But why should it start being that way in our lifetimes?” asked Davis.

“I don’t know.”

Wallace looked uncomfortable, as though he were failing an oral exam, prompting Bayshore to intervene. “Malcolm’s got a list here of more kinds of experts than I knew existed,” he said lightly hefting the clipboard. “Frankly, I don’t know what questions to ask you. I’m bringing these people here to pull things out of your head.”

“I’ll do my best to help.”

“I know you will. I want you to know what to expect. There’ll be some people coming in yet tonight, and we’ll start first thing tomorrow, eight to noon and one to six. By the end of the day, you’re going to think you’ve been wrung out by a three-hundred-pound washerwoman.”

Grinning, Wallace said, “I can take it. Bring her on.”

“Malcolm and I and someone you’ll meet tomorrow, a man named Warren Eden, will sit in on everything. After dinner we’ll roundtable, the three of us, to talk through the day’s sessions and figure out what we learned. I’d like to have you part of that, too. Both of you, actually.”

Shan nodded. “Are you going to have enough bunk space for everyone?”

“It might get to where it’s a bit crowded around the sinks in the mornings,” Bayshore allowed.

“Rayne and I will only need one room,” she said, taking his arm. “If that’s all right.”

Wallace looked startled.

“I’ve got no problems about it,” Bayshore said. “Except if I send you two upstairs to change and move your stuff, I want you back this century. We need to get started tonight.”

“Promise.” She tugged at Wallace’s arm and led him away.

As the sound of their footsteps in the hallway above receded toward the far end of the house, Davis grunted. “I’m impressed,” he said. “Just as you wanted it. How did you know?”

Bayshore rose from the couch to walk to the window. “Necessity, not sagacity,” he said, peering out. “We had to help him find a better reason to help us than being afraid of his own people. That wouldn’t have lasted long.”

“Did you tell her that’s what you wanted from her?”

“It wasn’t her that I was worried about,” Bayshore said. “You finished at the Waterford safe house?”

Davis nodded. “I am.”

“And?”

“As might be expected, Messrs. Robinson, Barstow, and Tackett are all thoroughly confused by having been spirited away to a cabin in the woods to be given a cultural litmus test.”

“And the test showed—”

“They’re ours. A Chicago banker, a Stanford English prof, and a Boston drunk, just as advertised. Are you going to hold them?”

“Yes,” Bayshore said.

“What on earth do you want them for?”

“I don’t want them. I just want to make sure that no one who does can find them.”

Through an endless rainy night, members of Bayshore’s study team continued to arrive. Lying wide awake in the dark with Shan sleeping peacefully beside him, Wallace heard another helicopter and at least three cars.

Shan’s body was warm against him, and the rich scents of their lovemaking lingered, trapped in the blankets, but those were minor distractions. He knew he should sleep, knew a restless night would dull his wits, but he could not turn off his brain.

It was Davis who had pushed Wallace to consider matters which he had always found more convenient to ignore. The mysteries were for the men upstairs. Even among themselves, even in private, runners avoided such questions.

The gates
were
. You used them. You learned the routes and how to read the changes. You didn’t waste time wondering why. The only exception was the Shadow. A brush with that silent gatekeeper made runners mumble in their beer about devils. But even that was pointless, for there were no answers. As far as Operations was concerned, there weren’t even any questions.

In truth, Davis’ vision of multiple worlds was foreign to the experience of the runner. The Cairo of Alternity White was more real to Wallace than the Cairo of Home, which he had never seen. With no two gates located in parallel cities, the maze seemed less a link between different realities than a shortcut around a single world. Not until his visit to Hagerstown had Wallace confronted the differences between the alternities—and he had shrunk from the encounter.

Now Davis and Bayshore and the parade of nighttime arrivals would expect him to confront Hagerstown again. Without understanding how that threatened him. Without knowing themselves the terrible emptiness of being a stranger, an outcast, a nonperson in a familiar land.

Nor would they ever know, even if he could somehow take them on a tour through all the alternities. They were Common World, all of them, cats with nine lives, or ninety. His grasp on life was frailer than theirs, his existence more tenuous. A candle flame, quivering in the breeze. That was all he was.

An elemental truth, learned by asking dangerous questions. Foolish questions. Foolish questions with the power to keep his eyes wide open in the dark, the power to deny him the sleep his body craved.

The morning session began with a pinch-faced linguist quizzing Wallace about a lengthy list of words gleaned from transcripts of earlier interviews. He wanted to know what the words meant, but also when Wallace had first heard each one, where he had heard it, what kind of people used it.

And when the list was done, there was another list, even longer, ferreting for words which hadn’t come up. What do you call a lumpy white cheese? Is this a common, a median, or a boulevard? What does the water come out of at a sink?

Before Wallace could find out why any of that mattered, the seat where the linguist had sat was being warmed by a jet-eyed political historian. At her request, Wallace flawlessly backtracked through the modern presidents—Robinson, Robinson again. Rockefeller, Vandenberg, Douglas, Stevenson. That took them back to 1956.

But all he could remember of Stevenson’s predecessor was that he had succeeded someone who died in office. Yes, he remembered Roosevelt. Something about the war. And Truman sounded familiar. 1952? No, not Eisenhower. That wasn’t the name. Scott Lucas? Never heard of him. Millard Tydings? What kind of name was that for a President?

Outside the presidential arena, Wallace could name one of Indiana’s two senators, the current mayor of Boston, the premier of the Soviet Union, and very little more. That was not nearly enough to satisfy the historian, who expressed her frustration over his head shakes and “I don’t knows” with sighs and tightlipped frowns.

“Mr. Bayshore, I can’t make a picture out of this,” she pronounced finally. “He’s politically ignorant. He simply doesn’t know enough.”

“You’re out of line, Doctor—” Bayshore began.

“No, that’s all right,” Wallace said, interrupting. “I have a friend—I used to have a friend—who said you can only vote for who the parties put up, and they put up who they want, not who you want. That the Republicans and the Democrats have it worked out to take turns at the top and make sure no one else gets there. He said he would never vote, because none of them are any better or any worse than the rest.”

“Sometimes it looks that way here, too,” Davis said with a smile.

Wallace continued, “Well, I voted the one time I was able to, and I voted for President Robinson. But the truth is I didn’t know much about him, and I still don’t. His name was at the top of the right column. But that’s not the whole story, because there were fifty names underneath his that I knew even less about, and I voted for them, too. So I guess I am ignorant, like she said. Ask your next question.”

The afternoon session went better, Wallace thought. The technologist, round-shouldered and chipmunk-cheeked, seemed delighted with Wallace’s descriptions of electric runabouts, thermostat-controlled showers, and the weaponry he had seen at Fort Harrison, Camp Atterbury, and the Jefferson Proving Ground. He was curious about everything from kitchen appliances (conventional) to computers (rare).

When did your family get its first television? (When I was seven.) Were records always ten inches across? (No, most of his father’s records were the old style, larger and thicker.) What were women’s stockings made of? (Silk, and almost no one could afford them.) These were questions Wallace could answer.

He had a little more trouble with the questions from a Dr. Jo Anderson, though not because he didn’t know the answers. The thirtyish woman was introduced to him as a human counselor, a title which did nothing to prepare him for her questions. She had a little list of inquiries which the linguist had overlooked, which ran him through such delicacies as charlies, pump boys, street sweet, parting the petals, riding lessons, and zipper queen.

Then things got personal. When did he first have sex? How many partners had he had? Had he had anal intercourse, performed cunnilingus, received fellatio? Had he had any homosexual experiences? Where did he obtain his contraceptives? Had he ever contracted a venereal disease, and who did he report it to?

Shan’s presence was partly responsible for Wallace’s discomfort, and she read him well enough to realize that fact. After the first half-dozen questions, she tried to excuse herself. But Dr. Anderson called her back.

“No, please, I’ll need your input as well.”

“Me?”

“I’m interested in knowing what differences you perceived between Rayne and your other partners—”

“Jesus Christ,” Wallace snapped. “If I started asking how long it’s been since you ran wet for somebody, whether you like a long ride or a hard one, you wouldn’t tell me. What gives?”