02. The Shadow Dancers (18 page)

"Better than nothin', but not much. And you can't catch 'em at the substation?"

"We have it covered all the time, but no. Only the couriers. Remember, though, they did have access to a stationmaster who could both legitimately and illegitimately request sufficient spare parts for almost anything, and we didn't know about the one Vogel tried to use."

That stopped me. "You mean it's possible there's another someplace there? One you don't know about?"

"It's possible. There are a thousand weak points of one degree or another across any world from the Arctic to Antarctica. We have very few people who even know of this world and we are limited that way. Sensing, let alone tracing, a power drain and tracking it to its source is bad enough with full resources."

"Uh huh. Like tracin' a phone call." I
did
see, too. With all them points, so long as they turned the power on, used it, and shut down real fast, that small a drain might not even be noticed and definitely not traceable. The bet was it wasn't noplace geographically convenient, though. If it was, they wouldn't be riskin' improvin' the Pennsylvania substation unless that was some kind of diversion-and if it was, then they knew we was on to 'em so why set up all this new stuff? No, bet on the other station bein' in the middle of nowhere, like the Andes or the Congo or maybe Fiji. Useful, but not convenient. And to get enough bread and people to do anything major, they have to tip off the man behind it. It was real tricky.

"Any progress on your science detective work?"

He shook his head. "We're as far as we can go without new people to try new things on, and we don't dare pull any from this other world or they will pack and run. We have well-placed operatives there, but they can't get too close and
at the minimum safe distance it's too far to learn much more than this."

"The Security Committee's still in the dark about all this?"

"Yes, but not for much longer. We can't go on static like this or we just watch them do their job in ignorance. Sooner or later we will have to vastly expand, increase our monitoring, and perhaps go in with all we have. That takes money and people and technical support and that means the committee. It might drive them underground, or we might get lucky. At least it will set them back, and if we're fortunate enough to nab an Addison or Carlos we might well win."

"Not without somebody inside, you won't. See,
they
got somebody inside-right here. Without somebody to tell, gettin' a Carlos or Addison would be sheer luck."

I asked him two favors. One was to visit the ex-addicts again, the other to see Sam-alone.

"No problem, but there are few patients left now. We had several suicides, and a few whom we were able to treat with hypnotherapy and find places for. The few left are those for whom, for one reason or another, we have found no place, but who can be monitored against doing away with themselves."

The patient I decided to talk to was named Donna, and she was at one time a secretary in the Atlanta of Vogel's world. She had fallen in love with a young Party man with ambition, fed him some information on her bosses that would help his advancement, and then got caught doing it. She had been tried by a Party court and sentenced to "useful imprisonment," which meant being sent to the Montrose Hospital and Asylum near Houston, site of many medical and psychological experiments on humans and one in which Vogel's people had a part.

It was unnerving to talk to her. She had stuck in my mind from before because she was one of the ones who had stayed naked in her room always feeling herself up. She still was. She was also a little unnerved by me; I don't think she'd ever seen a black woman clothed and with more than one thought in her head before and she couldn't quite believe it.

"Every day they'd take me in a little room and give me a
jolt of juice," she told me. "It didn't take right away. You get that rush-" She shivered and closed her eyes, remembering it, and it took a minute or so for her to pick it up again. "-then you get a little sick and that's it. After a week or so, though, it took."

"What's it like?"

"You ever had an orgasm? Well, it's like that, only all over your body and a thousand times more intense. Like nothing else. You come out of it, but you don't feel down, you feel
good,
but you want that rush again. You live for it. It's what keeps you going-the thought that every day you'll get it again, always as good. The rest of the day-well, it's kinda funny. You're all right-I mean, you feel great, the best you ever felt-but you get these urges. Compulsions, really. You never know when they'll come on. You slowly get real turned on, I mean real up, and then you can't think of anything but sex, and you got to have it, and you stay up at real high tension until you do. Another time, you just got to exercise. You only feel good doing it. You get hungry sometimes for crazy things, like you're pregnant or something, but other stuff, things you've always loved, taste horrible. It's like you're not really in control of yourself, but yet you're still you. You lose all modesty, all integrity, all the brakes. Inhibitions, that's the word. Brakes get put on, but not by you. Almost in spite of you. I can't explain it. It's like you lose all sense of what's right and wrong, but something else decides-and it might not decide the way you would have."

"It sounds like you become some kinda robot or something."

"Uh uh. It's not like that at all. You're still you, and there's lots of time in the day when you are. You know what's happened, but you don't really care. You're basically free-they never even bothered to watch over me most of the time and I was never locked in-but you won't go. There's no way you're going to miss your next juice shot. That's the control. If the one person in the world who can give it to you asked you to stand on your head or shoot somebody, you might feel bad about it but you wouldn't hesitate to do it. If you had an unlimited supply of the juice you'd tell 'em to stuff it, but if it's obey orders or no juice, you'll strangle your own mother."

"You sound bright, intelligent, and you're not hooked anymore. Why do you stay here-like that?"

"It's what I mean that I can't really describe," she told me. "The juice needs its own juice. It changes you. First time they tell you to do something horrible or disgusting and you won't, so they don't give you the juice and you go to hell real fast. One thing they wanted to know was whether they could cause the stuff to change the body and brain if one particular thing was demanded to get your jolt and they kept it from you for a while. They ordered me to go, every evening, down to the military and staff wings, stark naked, and proposition every man and woman I could find and do whatever they wanted. Every night. I fought it. Some of them were brutal, sadists and the like. They kept me from the juice for a while until I finally had to agree. They did this every night for weeks. Finally, the juice learned. One day, I woke up, and that was all I wanted to do. It told me when to eat and like that, but the rest of the time I only wanted that. I was totally turned on and I stayed turned on. Not in the head-it was physical."

"It made you a raging nymphomaniac?"

"I guess that's the right word. I didn't want clothes, I didn't want anything except I was compelled to go down and do that. I
wanted to
do it. I
had to
do it. I lost any will to fight-anything. I still can't. My voice got higher, my breasts and hips got bigger, everything."

"But that's over now," I said. "It's not there anymore."

"I'd take it again in a minute, if I could," she told me. "Right now they got me on half a dozen drugs. Otherwise I'd be all over you begging for it. They say my brain's permanently locked in that pattern-chemicals and all, and that my hormone level is monstrous. The drugs I'm taking now are blockers, that keep the worst of it from being triggered, but without them I wouldn't even be human. I'd just be a bitch in heat all the time."

"But-can't they do nothin' for you? I mean, physically?"

"Sure. A oophorectomy and brain surgery. They say I'd come out sexless, a nothing. That's bad enough, but they say there'd be side effects because of where the damage and changes are and what they know from having to replace the areas in natural brain damage. At the very least they say I'd
have no feelings. No love, no hate, no envy, no greed, no friendship, no loyalty, no compassion, no mercy, no- nothing. I would think, and remember, but I'd be like a machine. I still have feelings. I wouldn't want to be some machine. No hopes, no ambitions, nothing. If that's the way it is, I'd rather stay right here, just like this."

It was hard to think of this pretty, intelligent young woman a neutered machine, and I could see her point-and the Center's. She was still a fund for research and information. They could "cure" her, sorta, but since the cure would be worse than the disease they wouldn't force it.

The interview was sobering in a number of ways. I didn't underestimate what them Nazis who could gas millions and make lampshades outta 'em and sleep like babies and even go to church every Sunday could come up with. The scariest thing was, somebody with a real strong will and sense of identity and purpose could break even heroin, though it sure wasn't easy, or at least live a fairly normal life on methadone. But
this-
no self-cure possible, no methadone-style alternative, and if you got cured you wound up like Donna between a rock and a hard place.

Donna, though, made me mad. She was bright, alert, good-lookin', and she had real potential. Anybody born and raised in a south where Martin Luther King got gassed as a kid if he got born at all and who come from some Nazi background to boot who could learn to talk to me and accept me as an equal human being in that time could adapt to other, better societies. They cheated her-and how many others? They never saved more than two dozen here, all they could sneak out and treat without revealin' their interest. How many more Donnas died in agony when we took Vogel out as supplier? Hundreds? Thousands? How many more was they gonna make in this other place, and maybe other places as well if they went underground again or got whatever they was goin' after with these projects. And for what? So some shithead born to power and gold silverware here could get a little more personal power.

Then, too, Donna got me to thinkin' 'bout Sam, who I was gonna go see now. Different cause, but they both had brain damage, and there was still only so much that could be done. Sam was all wrapped up and still floatin' in that
tank, but for the first time I began to wonder not just if he would ever wake up but whether it would be a blessin' if he did. Would he remember me? Be palsied? Be unable to tie his own shoes?

"Sam, I know you can't hear me or understand me, though they say my voice gets through at least," I said outside the window lookin' at his chamber, "but I'm gonna talk anyways, 'cause I never made a big decision or took a big case without talkin' it over with you.

"I can't hack it alone, Sam, not back home. Without you, there's only one thing I'm good at and that's investigations. I know the last one didn't go none too well, but that was them and their experts and their damned computers. There's a lot of innocent, good folks bein' crippled and put through hell out there, Sam. Bein' put through it by a whole bunch of cruds at least as bad as Vogel. I'm gonna take a crack at 'em. All of 'em. I
want
the bastards. I want the ones who did this to you and are doin' worse to others and who'll be in charge of all this if whatever they're plannin' comes off. The damn company's foul enough as it is; I can't sit back when I see firsthand that it might well wind up in the hands of Vogels and Hitlers and all the rest. Maybe I can't lick it. Maybe it's bigger'n I am. Maybe I'm just gonna sell myself into slavery and hell. But I
got
to try, 'cause there ain't nobody else and it needs doin'. If I can't be Nora Charles to your Nick, then there's nothin' for me back home.

"It'll be just my luck if you come outta that damn pool ten minutes after I'm stuck beyond any hope myself, but if you do, then you just play support like always, 'cause the only hope I got is findin' the source world and nailin' them bastards to the wall. You'll cuss and scream and yell, but you'll break it with or without me, 'cause we're the best, Sam. We're a damn sight better than this fancy security and we're better than their crooks." I stopped a moment. I was cryin' too much, and I really wanted him to thrash around in there and scream at me, but nothin' happened and the monitors showed no real change in his condition.

"So, so long, sweetheart. The problems of two crazy people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

I walked out and went to find Aldrath Prang.

6.

The Shadow Dancers

"You must understand what you are contemplating. The dangers involved . . ." Aldrath Prang told me gravely.

"I know the risks. Look, I'm not goin' in there to get captured or to get hooked. If I can keep from either one, I swear I plan on doin' just fine without 'em. I'm realistic enough t'know I might and I'm willin' to take that risk just like I was riskin' as much for you three months ago. Besides, don't give me no jive, Aldrath. You been expectin' me to do this for some time and probably got itchy when I took so long."

He looked hurt but you got to be a decent actor in his line of work.

"I assure you I did not. However, I am willing to listen and see if you have any chance."

"Like on the last one, huh? Look, this is strictly me and you. No big operation, no giant backup team. If they don't catch me I won't need backup, and if they do it won't make no difference, now will it? What I'll need from you, aside from a complete briefin' on this world, these people, all you know to now and who you got workin' the case so I don't shoot the wrong fella, access in, free access to the Labyrinth if I got to get out, and some way to monitor me so I can get information out to the right people, meanin' you, without gettin' caught."

"We have a resident agent there now, somebody local but she knows about us, and she uses local talent who don't know about us. She will have to know, and at least arrange signals and means of passing messages-if you can pass them."