“It’s the Indians I feel sorry for. They did the same thing to make corn, and they learned how to pop it, and it was at least two thousand years before anyone showed up with butter.”
May made a noise, glared, chewed, swallowed, and said, “I
told
you not to make me laugh with my mouth full.”
She had. He recalled when. A strategic retreat to the kitchen seemed called for.
XV
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
—THOMAS ALVA EDISON
Decades earlier, a practical philosopher had made the observation that if a television program had been created showing a gang of professional criminals at work, who engaged in as many errors of fact, procedure, logic, and physical possibility in as the police did in any number of cop shows popular at the time, and the criminals in the show were as successful in their endeavors as the cops were on the aforesaid shows, every prison in America would have to be doubled in size to hold the credulous viewers who thought they were learning how things were actually done. He speculated that collusion between police and TV producers may have taken place, in an attempt to convince potential offenders that they knew what they were up against.
Whether or not there was any truth in the notion, it was certainly true that much of the public had spent something more than a century developing a thoroughly confused and inaccurate view of the process of law enforcement.
It was also true that a varying but significant proportion of the training received by new law enforcers consisted of correcting their misapprehensions on this score, and acquainting them with the basic truth of police work: most of it is tedious, much of that is without result, and more than half of all U.S. police officers never have occasion to fire their weapons outside the practice range. The ostensible motivation for members of the profession is to keep the peace, and that was certainly why most of them joined up; but the principal wish of anyone who has been on the job for any length of time is simply that things go smoothly. Barring a few notorious exceptions, when an organization for American law enforcement has an employee who starts acting like a TV or movie cop—preferring force to intimidation, arguing with a supervisor—it either harasses him out of the job, or, if he is too hardheaded to go, arranges to put him at a desk and staple his ass to a chair at the earliest opportunity.
Consequently the people whose job consists entirely of the drudgery that other law enforcers loathe, but cannot do without, tend to be stubborn and bitter.
They are ideal for the work.
In a cubicle in an unobtrusive glass box in Largo, Maryland, one such obsessive toothgrinder was reading the report of the autopsy done on the putative cadaver of DHS Senior Agent Charles Opie. Opie had been sent with his team to extradite Toby Glyer by the current usual procedure: acquire, remove, and only then notify the host nation. The reasonable supposition was that Glyer had had friends who had killed the team.
Cursory study of the autopsy report seemed to support this. All dental, retinal, and DNA identification had been in order, and skin, lungs, membranes, and teeth displayed damage and odor consistent with death by chlorine poisoning.
More thorough study, however, showed a distinct absence of simple chlorides resulting from the action of hydrochloric acid, which is produced along with hypochlorous acid when chlorine reacts with water. Hypochlorites were present in abundance.
He checked the other four reports. Likewise.
The bodies had been shipped home. He requested an analysis of the hypochlorites present.
All five bodies showed significant amounts of sodium hypochlorite.
They had been treated to simulate burns and corrosion, then rinsed with bleach.
Genuine chlorine gas is so easy to make that precautions must be taken to avoid making it accidentally. However, treating a corpse with chlorine will not produce the same sort of internal damage as killing a live person with it. The only reason to go through such a rigmarole would be to conceal something else.
He requested massively detailed autopsies on all five, with analysis of the condition of all tissues down to the cellular level. Any anomaly was to be noted. The fact that this would produce a list of staggering length—no human being is textbook “normal”—was unimportant to him; what he wanted was the anomalies all five had in common.
All five showed slight osteoporosis, and signs of recent bone growth—the latter unheard of in adults other than pituitary giants.
None of the five had any sign of untreated caries—miraculous in almost anyone.
Analysis of DNA showed no test artifacts—DNA not matching the overall sample, because it came from individual cells that had undergone slight mutations—and that was impossible.
The only explanation, that these were corpses of strangers that had been completely altered to match the four agents and Glyer, seemed absurd …
… except that Toby Glyer was a nanotechnologist.
He wrote up a report, included his speculations, and delivered a hard copy to his supervisor’s in-tray, then went back to his desk. A note appended to the report explained that it had been delivered by hand because, given the swiftness of the action against Opie’s team, he did not consider the computer network secure. He sat back and awaited the fireworks.
What he got, about an hour and a half later, was the mail boy sticking his head into the cubicle and saying, “Boss wants more details face-to-face. Small conference room.”
She was sitting at the middle of the table with a pot of coffee and an extra cup, which she pushed toward him as he closed the door. “Sit,” she said. When he had, she held up thumb and forefinger a little ways apart. “When you were assigned here, I came about this close to having you assigned to the cowboys,” these being the field agents for DHS. “I decided to see if you could do effective intel analysis. Talk about dodging a bullet. There’s a chance that you’ve prevented the destruction of the United States of America.”
“There is?”
“If we’re lucky. Your assessment makes sense. My job is to take it further. If he can do this, he can do pretty much anything he wants. In that case, so far he’s been a paragon of self-restraint. Unfortunately, at the moment the cowboys are harassing and abusing every one of his old friends they can find, trying to get some kind of response out of him. I don’t want to see that response. We need to find and contact Glyer, quietly and without upsetting him. That means we have to assume you’re right, the system is compromised, so we do everything by hand.”
“Oh hell.”
“It’s how the FBI worked under Hoover, and they did wonders. We’ll have the advantage of only having one case to work on. First thing, we need more heads and hands. I trust you to find someone competent to help, who you trust to find someone that
they
trust to find someone—you follow?”
He nodded.
“Good. I’ll reassign the Wyndham disappearance.”
“I think it’s related,” he said.
She looked him hard in the eyes, nodded, and said, “Find one and find the other?”
“I think so.”
“Evidence?”
“None. But her medical records show she had diverticulosis. He was treating people for that in Bern. That’s how we found him.”
“‘We’?”
“Well, the action division.”
“For this case, it might help to start thinking of ‘we’ as being you, me, and whoever you find. We’re not going to get meaningful help from people who lock up a bunch of old farts because the sky is falling. It’s a good thing Wyndham’s people settled in Ecuador. Another visitor won’t be noticed.”
“You want me to go there?”
“I’ll go myself. You’ll be in charge here, of both versions of this case—the hands-on work, and making a show of using the computers for the dead ends I’m sure you’ll find.”
XVI
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
—FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
1
There were parts of the original plan that had been inapplicable by the time the entities got the new rock moving. However, the basic principles were valuable, as in the case of using Mars to dump some excess velocity. Too much, as it turned out; there was atmospheric friction as the rock skimmed the planet. There was plenty of warning, and no entities were killed, but it put the rock into a trajectory that wouldn’t provide an opportunity to match up with Earth’s position for several orbits.
There was no hurry.
And there was interesting material coming in by radio all the time.
Nobody doubted the concept of fiction any longer. Now the issue was what was fiction and what wasn’t.
Information was sorted into subsets of material that was internally consistent. A great many of the small subsets were clearly fiction. Some of the larger ones were deduced to be, after it was noted that they were incomplete but claimed all information not included in them was false. There was a large main body of material consistent with all but a few subsets, but these latter were excluded from serious consideration as soon as any content was found that contradicted observations the entities were able to make themselves.
A considerable mass of information was internally consistent, but significant portions of it were explanations of why it could not be substantiated by any observations. These seemed to be disseminated for the sole purpose of supporting warnings against things that could not be found to exist, and required elaborate suppositions to account for such matters as, e.g., the visibility of distant objects which would have to be older than the Universe. The only thing that kept the entities from dismissing it was the fact that its assorted positions were endorsed by the vast majority of transmission sources.
It was Set who suggested that humans were doing the same thing that he and Wieland and Socrates had once done: disputing over which plan they should undertake. To this end, the faction currently in charge had convinced itself that any evidence to the contrary was some form of deception.
This notion would have been regarded by the other entities as deeply flawed—and probably would never have been imagined, by Set or anyone else—if not for the fact that all the material that had not been excluded, regardless of what its subsets disagreed about, was linked, if followed far enough, to the concept of deliberate fission explosions.
Supposedly there were thousands of fission—and fusion—devices, all over Earth, held in readiness to throw at, for the most part, other such devices. The purpose of this was to inflict enough death on other humans to persuade the survivors to follow the plan of the people who had taken the least damage, while preventing other factions from inflicting as much by destroying their bombs.
The peculiar thing was, just about everyone who had those devices was participating in some form of the deception system. They were already in charge.
And one of the things that they had made themselves believe would surely kill them all was, essentially, the entities. Forge.
There was actually a pretty good reason
not
to hurry.
2
So far, JNAIT had collected every gold medal awarded except one—archery. And they hadn’t entered that competition.
Ambrose Hawking and October Kroft had a skybox at the Games, and on Wednesday they showed up to use it.
They chased out a young couple who were necking in it. For the rest of the day, Toby or May would suddenly laugh at nothing.
Up until the weightlifting.
A JNAIT power lifter named Clarence Feet picked up 489.5 kilograms in the clean-and-jerk.
Something like ninety thousand spectators were dead silent.
Two said, “Oh, shit.”
May went on, “That’s torn it,” as Toby was saying, “Half a
ton
?”
They watched as tests were made and results were approved, and they sat and looked at each other in wonder.
There were tests that could be done for nanos, and nobody was even suggesting them. The IOC certainly believed they existed; some of the officials were from Kenya. It certainly wasn’t that they hadn’t been banned yet. Steroids had not been specifically banned the first time a competitor was disqualified for testing positive, and back in the Mexico City Olympics the runner who had had extra red blood cells fed into his veins before the Games, so his tissues were getting far more oxygen than the rest at that altitude, had been disqualified as well—and they had been his own cells, saved up for months.
“Are they being kept from thinking of it?” May wondered.
“That doesn’t sound like him,” Toby said. “There is another possibility, and if I’m right they’re being awfully discreet. They may have thought of it, got hold of an MRI, and done a test run. If they did, they’d have found that
everyone
was saturated with nanos.”
“I wonder why nobody else has said anything.”
“They don’t show up on normal settings. What I wonder is why nobody’s noticed—” He got out his phone and did a search. “Ah. Nobody’s doing PET scans anymore. The nanos must glom on to radioactive atoms to absorb all their output. Ha, that’s another reason Connors couldn’t be executed! They grabbed all the excess potassium to sort through it! And it hasn’t shown up since then because they don’t use that anymore. Just strap you down in a chamber full of sponge lime to soak up all the CO
2
you exhale, and as the oxygen runs out, you fall asleep and don’t wake up.”
“Who, me?”
“Behave.”
“Who, me?”
“Good point.”
May was silent for a few moments, then said, “I wonder what the next Olympics will be like. When everyone’s learned how to reach their absolute limits. They will learn, you know.”