Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail (13 page)

“You will join. You will go along with what they ask. We don’t want you to just report a contact. We want you to join the organization, perhaps for some time. We want to know who these people—this cell—are. We want their leader, because she will be the only one with enough information to take us further.”

I nodded as several questions immediately leaped to mind. “Ah, Major, I may not be very old but I was trained for organization and administration. I know how these political things work. First of all, I will
never
know their real names, most likely, and only one of them will know mine, unless we run across each other by accident in the street or on the job.”

“But you’ll know what they look like and you’re a bright boy. You’ll be able to figure out a lot of information about many of them. Somebody will make a slip about her family, or somebody else will betray knowledge that will indicate her Guild, at least. Eventually we’ll have pictures from your description to match with our computers, and we’ll come up with a fair number of them. Don’t worry—we understand the limits of this work better than you do.”

“All right, I’ll accept that. But the one that
they
killed worries me. That means they have some way to check sincerity. One of ‘em’s probably either a psych or a technician for a psych lab. That’s going to be hard to fake.”

She gave that smile again. “You
are
a bright boy. Your objection can be very easily disposed of. The equipment has to be basic and portable. They can’t possibly do a full job on you. The solution is very simple, then—you tell them all about this meeting and you tell them about me.”

“Huh?”

“You tell them you’re playing along with us, but you really sympathize with them. That will be the truth—don’t bother to deny it. The ambivalence will be enough to confuse their devices, our psychs assure me. You’re still new enough and fresh enough to cause no problem on that score.”

I frowned and looked nervous at the suggestion, although she was perfectly correct and it was exactly what I was planning to do anyway. “How sure are you about that?”

“Very,” she assured me. “Believe me, we have the best here. And it worked before. The third one, the one whose mind is gone, was one of ours. Unfortunately for her, she went too far over to their side and tried to double-cross us. In that case, what happened to her will happen to you, Bul. Remember that.”

I shivered. “I’ll remember,” I assured her. “But—sooner or later they’ll rig some way to make a final test, and that’ll be with the full gear. Ill have to go through that before I’ll really know who they are.”

She nodded. “We anticipate that, although we have no direct knowledge. There is some evidence that this operation is-Confederacy-backed, by person or persons unknown elsewhere in the Diamond who are, if not in the Confederacy’s employ, at least working against us. When that kind of test comes, you will be ready. The one who went before you passed it, we think—with the help of our own people. If you get into trouble on that, we will give you a basic psych overlay that will fool them. We’re certain it will, since it will simply build on those anti-State parts of your own nature and background. We will make a rebel out of you, and then we will unmake it.”

I could hardly tell her that I could make any psych probe read exactly what I wanted, probably including their best. “All right—I understand so far. But if this works so well, why did they kill one of us?”

“She wasn’t working for us, directly. We mishandled the situation and have learned from our mistake. We made no mistakes the second time—except that she got to the point where she decided to play
us
for suckers. You’re our third, Bul. We have all the prep techniques down pat now, and we’ve covered our trail on the last two very well. Nobody, and I mean, nobody, except you and me knows about this arrangement right now. At the proper time, two others in TMS, one a top psych, will be informed—and that will be all. There is no recording in this office, no record at all of what happened here. A very convincing and totally fictional dressing-down for a minor infraction is being substituted.”

“Okay. I admit I’m very bored cleaning buses and I would sure like some more credit. Besides I can play a pretty good part. It wasn’t easy getting into that reception back on Halstansir, you know, particularly carrying a sword.”

She liked that. I wondered if she were native, as her accent suggested, or a convict. Probably I would never know.

“I am glad you approve, Bul—but you realize you have no choice in this matter?”

I nodded. “I’ve had very few choices in my life.”

“Now, we’ll get on to the procedures for reporting. You will not report to or trust your terminal or other TMS officers. I will give you a code which can be keyed from any terminal. It is simply a variation on getting your credit and debit statement from the Central Bank—and it
will
give you that. But it will also be a signal to me. Key it, and I will know, and you will be picked up for a routine interrogation as you were today. Understand?”

I nodded. “One thing, though—what about Ching?” 

“While we have been having this talk, Ching was picked up and taken to the psych used only by my special branch. Oh, don’t look so worried—there will be no change. All we’ve done is to reinforce a weakness already obvious in her. She practically worships you now. From this point, that will simply dominate. You’ll notice no change, nor will she even be aware that she’s been to a psych—as far as she’s concerned, she’ll have been waiting for you in your room all this time. But she will be very uncritical of your attitudes and inclinations on the social and political front. She was born and raised here. As a loyal native, she would have turned you in for your own good, or reported anything odd to us. She won’t now. If you say to betray the government, she will go along with you. If you join the Opposition, she will go along and accept it. And if you later betray the Opposition, she will think all the more highly of you for it. They will have no trouble passing her on that basis. That is one reason we thought of her as a logical pair-mate for you. As with most totally frustrated people, she is an incurable fantasizing romantic.”

I didn’t like the idea of messing with Ching’s mind—she had enough problems as it was—but it didn’t seem too bad, and it would keep her out of trouble as long as I was all right. However, she would now be exposed to exactly the same dangers—and fate—from either side that I faced, and she was not well prepared for it. I liked her too much not to worry about what might happen, but I
was a.
professional. If it had to be, it had to be—and, if it came down to her or me, I knew I would have no such romantic notions.

CHAPTER SIX

A Disloyal Opposition

Ching was, as promised, no different on my return than when I’d left her and, also as advertised, she told me that she’d been waiting in the room for me worriedly for the previous few hours. If I hadn’t been told differently, I would have sworn she was narrating the correct version of events, rather than just what she was told to remember.

Two days later we were both summoned to the Guild Hall for an audience with a top-grade supervisor. I played the surprised worker that Ching genuinely was. There we were informed that we had shown ourselves more than capable of higher positions. Effective immediately, we were being promoted to In-Service Passenger Attendants, Grade 6, and would shortly be assigned for a week of training and evaluation. Since we’d been Grade 3s (I never did learn what Is and 2s were—I could hardly imagine anything lower than bus cleaners) this was a substantial jump, although it was, of course, contingent on our successful training and initial job performance evaluations. The job actually only warranted a Grade 5, but the extra bump was given because we would now have two homes many kilometers apart, and would have double toiletries and the like. At our previous level you owned virtually nothing at all—you couldn’t afford it—but, while we wouldn’t be very well off compared to many others, we would now have a bit left over from basic expenses for luxuries.

We presented our cards, which were run through a computer and popped back to us apparently unchanged, but we knew that the information now reflected increased grade and status. We also had two days until our new shift, an afternoon one, would properly cycle so we could join our crew. We actually had some time to kill and made the most of it. Ching was particularly excited and pleased by the turn of events, and I tried as hard as I could to share in her joy and excitement. Doing so was tough when you knew what was really going on.

Two days later we went down to the main passenger terminal and found Shift Supervisor Morphy, a distinguished-looking woman in early middle age who looked a little like civilized worlders. A native most definitely, I decided, but a child or grandchild of a civilized worlder and a frontier type. These were very common on Medusa.

The job wasn’t very glamorous or exciting, despite the fancy titles. Basically we patrolled the cars, wiping passenger’s noses, answering then: stupid questions, explaining how to get food or drink or ‘how to operate the seat terminals as well as making sure that all the amenities were working properly. In some ways this was worse than cleaning buses. In that job, I mostly stood around and goofed off while seeing that the cleaning machines did their jobs properly, while here I was constantly exposed to the public and observed by shift supervisors as I walked from one end of the train to the other and back. And I had to be
very
neat, and
very
clean, and always smile, smile. …

In one way the job was similar to tracking down and confronting criminals. Both were filled with repetition and long, boring stretches, yet both were at the same time interesting and disgusting.

Our train usually had two or three passenger cars and the rest freight. The freight level remained constant but the passenger car number increased or decreased according to demand. In the first week we had one six-car passenger train and another that had only one, but never did we have a run with none.

The training period was really grating at times, with every little thing criticized. I almost belted Morphy more than once. The week seemed to last forever. Finally, though, we were on our own and less closely supervised, and things eased up a bit.

Train crews had distinctive uniforms, nicely tailored and with overly large insignia on them. Since a lot of our own Guild’s members used the trains to get to and from where they were needed, there had to be some way to tell the specific train’s crew from others in transportation. We looked, in fact, pretty elegant by Medusan standards, but that was par for the course. I remember a fancy resort once, long ago, that used a lot of human attendants just to give the place a more elegant and personal feel, and the best-dressed people in the joint were the doorman and the waiters.

Our new room in Rochande was virtually identical to the one back in Gray Basin, the only difference being that it was on the third, not the fourth, floor and the beds were against the left rather than the right wall. A mirror image, basically, to remind us where we were.

Rochande, however, was quite different from Gray Basin if only because of its geography. It was a food-distribution center for the region, and, therefore, a space-freight port. It was also pretty far south, comparatively speaking, and while the winter still hit it was neither long nor hard, and the city was on the surface rather than dug in and roofed over. There were also huge forests around, and quite a number of exotic plants, which gave the place a whole different feel, even if the city’s pie-shaped design and dull, blocky architecture was depressingly familiar.

The trip south, once through the electronic barricades of Gray Basin, was interesting, too. You could see the climate gradually change as you moved south, with occasional breaks in the thinning snow patches, showing hardy grasses at first, then some bushes, and eventually increasingly larger trees. Finally we were more or less out of the hard winter and into a more temperate zone. The world was not nearly as bad as Gray Basin made it seem, though there was not a sign of cultivation or even roads in sight for the entire distance. More than the climate and vegetation changes, that was the true contrast on Medusa, one brought home with every trip. In the cities and towns, and on the sleek, smooth, modern trains, you were in a highly technological, modern society though a regimented one. Outside the cities was a primitive world.

It was a world that was said to have genuine threats although I’d been able to learn very little about it. Basically, the people were very secure in their modern pockets on this wilderness world and most of them had never been beyond their society’s protection. What exactly was out there, other than wild and vicious animals, some of whom could change their shape, was really unknown. I found the stories about shape-changing most interesting and made it a point to research those animals as much as I could with the library access on the terminal. Apparently the Medusans didn’t even like to study these creatures, at least not publicly. If, in fact, some of those creatures could shape-change—something not even alluded to in the descriptions—I could see why Medusan authorities wouldn’t want the opportunity to plant ideas like mine into crooked heads.