02. The Shadow Dancers (39 page)

"Ah, yes, we know about him," Mukasa said.

"You do and you don't. You see, they were very clever. Vogel received orders to carry out experiments using supplies of this viral agent with his normal company mail, under a Most Secret clearance. The orders came from very high in the Company hierarchy. He had no reason to doubt them, or that he was doing what the Company wanted. Vogel's own projects were equally clever. The virus was represented as something discovered on that world only recently. They were put to work analyzing it, diagramming it, and, of course, seeing what it would do to human subjects, both its powers and limitations. Vogel got his supplies of the agent-actually the semen of both the trapped humans and males of the native race there, repacked into injection capsules in minimal doses-with his normal Company pouches. He had no idea they were being smuggled into the mail system by Carlos and those few he had recruited to help him, with the aid of some corrupt people in the transport union. It was perfect, as far as it went, since Vogel supplied the raw data and Carlos could then reinterpret it in light of knowing its true origins."

"But we know all this," Mayar Eldrith pointed out. "You are only filling in the details."

"I asked for patience. During the experimentation, it was discovered that the viral agent reproduced only sexually, but created microscopic, specialized reproductive units. These units were present in male and female subjects, but they were malformed, weak, and tended to break up when expelled from the body. This was very fortunate considering the heightened promiscuity of all the infected subjects, since a few could quickly create a plague, but it also
indicated that the reason the thing broke down was because it lacked some certain chemical element. Vogel's people searched for that missing link but couldn't find it, and I doubt if they would have used it if they had. But this very fact turned what had begun as basically an illegal side operation with potential business uses to something else."

"Now we're finally getting somewhere," Basuti grumbled. I noticed, though, that all the others was listenin' real good, and ones like Dakani and Jamispur hadn't said a word.

"Now, I won't take up any of your time detailing the viral agent or how it works. We all know that. But our man back here, the one who started it all, began to think along more ambitious lines. In my world, we once had a woman who became infamous in history as Typhoid Mary. Typhoid was a particularly virulent killer disease, easily transmitted and quite fatal. Mary was found to be literally infested with the disease, but she didn't catch it. She was a carrier, immune herself to its awful effects but able to give it to almost anyone she touched. Now this fellow started to wonder what a Typhoid Mary, or perhaps many Typhoid Marys, would do to this world. Suppose they were introduced as professional courtesans at a party like this one, for the high and mighty. Not everyone would partake, of course, but some would, and there would be other opportunities. Now you begin to go into withdrawal, but someone, an agent for the top man, could offer you not a cure, perhaps, but a daily fix that would keep you going and even cure what you might catch. Ask your doctors-no mind can tolerate that withdrawal, not even any of yours. Right, Jamispur?"

The doc nodded. "It is true. Within a few hours of the onset of withdrawal you would kill your family and cut off your leg for it. It is not a matter of will; the thing is in control of your mind and its sole imperative is survival."

"They wouldn't snare Basuti," Mukasa chuckled. "He has a permanent vow of celibacy." He stopped a moment. "Say-that's
right
..."

Eyes went to Basuti, all lookin' at him funny, but he ignored them. "The plot is an infantile concoction of this madman," he said. "First, you would have to find the missing agent. Second, you would have to get that agent
into this world, something I find impossible to believe. Third, you would have to have some way of continuing to import it."

"Oh, once they had enough people-most of you, say, and some key security people, they wouldn't need subterfuge. They could get all of it in they wanted," Sam pointed out. "But, you're right. The thing was, that original, stranded exploiter team finally figured it out. It was literally under their noses all the time but it was so obvious and yet so alien they failed to
recognize
it. The staple food here is haipi, and pardon my mispronunciation. There's some haipi in these snacks right here. Where I come from, it's potatoes, rice, beans-you name it. The rainbow weed was the number-one staple of the origin world. It grew like wildfire all over the place and was eaten all the time in every imaginable way by just about everybody. They long suspected it was something in the diet or something in the forms and balance of radiation in sun, soil, or water, and they very courageously self-experimented to find what it was, but rainbow weed was the last thing they tried because it was everywhere.

"When they discovered this, they sent the seed pods down to Carlos to analyze and grow others, and our man went into action. Under a cover, he had agents on the colonial worlds of your people recruit, perhaps even kidnap, young women under twenty years of age, and, by virtue of his committee authority, flagged their Labyrinth IDs as security recognized and moved them out. Carlos had already prepared a place for them, a camp in a world without Company personnel but near the so-called stroke seven worlds like mine, in a primitive jungle where there was an uncharted weak spot. There the girls were hypnos-canned to be unable to access their entire past, and a new, simpler, rougher past consistent with that world was brought forward. They were given cosmetology treatments to change their hair, alter their eyes, vary their skin color, and the rest. They were hooked on the drug, which made them quite suitable as prostitutes and dancers. The only problem was, Carlos had few people and a lot of other work to do. There was no way he could handle up to fifty girls, as there eventually were, about the limit for the amount of the
agent, or 'juice,' that the team up in the origin world could produce and ship, allowing for accidents and unexpected losses. In the end, it was decided to take a leaf from the Company's own method of operation."

They was all ears now, and all of 'em looked downright uncomfortable. I begun to worry that maybe they was
all
in it.

"Oh, I forgot to mention Addison. I shouldn't, she's a key player and there are things even the one here who knows her well doesn't know about her. She had relatives in one of the colony worlds, and she was a mistress of a Security Committee member so she had a security code and legitimate reason to go back and forth. She was, then, the liaison between our man here, who couldn't leave, and Carlos. She had a safe world where she could undergo a rather startling metamorphosis into a cold, plain-looking woman who had only superficial resemblance to the women of this world, and she did it all without high tech machines. She came from a family of professional performers and she knew just how to do it and do it right. She was also a quite accomplished method actress, who, when Addison, was really a different personality. Colored contact lenses and tinted glasses added the final touch. She approached Arnie Siegel, a major criminal boss in the northern hemisphere, about the girls. He was big and powerful enough to cover for her, and she was able to hand him some Company gadgets and secrets that made it easy for him to evade the law and gave him an edge on possibly knocking over his own boss, a fellow named Wycliffe, who was ignorant of the affair. The only ones he let in on it were people he owned, body and soul, such as the master pimp Edward 'Fast Eddie' Small, who would take over Siegel's position when Siegel moved up, and gunmen personally loyal who would oversee the project's security."

"You mean they turned fifty girls of
our race
into whores for this-this-filthy world?" Hanrin Sabuuk seemed real angry and upset at that.

"Yes, because this not only assured them the preservation of the fifty with no effort on their part, and also because by then Aldrath, here, had by sheer accident stumbled into the very existence of this agent, or drug, and knew just from its
existence that the plot had to be very ambitious and go very high. His big attention was on Vogel, since that's where the experiments were and he knew Vogel had to know who was behind it, but he sent a couple of agents to scout around this other world and set something up just in case. The agents went completely by the book and followed absolutely standard procedures; as a result, they were led by the nose by ones who already knew the book to Lindy Crockett, a New York private eye with mob connections, and were highly impressed with her. They should have been. She was carefully coached on what to say and do to impress them. She was more than connected; she was the chief private eye agency handling the Wycliffe mob's investigations. From that point on, there was a constant flow of information from Crockett, all of it written by the very people she was supposed to be investigating. It checked out and was mostly truthful; it was just worthless. She gave Aldrath Addison and Carlos, which was safe enough, but said they couldn't be photographed and gave slightly distorted descriptions and sketches so they wouldn't be recognized even if they were next to the sketches. She sent the news of Carlos's operation in Guiana, but only after it had served its purpose and was already pretty well closed down. And you, Aldrath, took that information and fed it into the computer and came to all the conclusions they wanted you to."

Aldrath shrugged. "A detective is only as good as his information."

"But you were so certain that this was a sideline, a minor offshoot, that you didn't even keep permanent security personnel there to independently check it out. You see, you're vulnerable to this because you all have sealed yourself off here, away from the action. All of you are only as good as your information, and your computers believe what they're told to believe. The origin world was listed as lethal and useless, so you ignored it. Nobody even dared poke their head in and check it out. The data banks were sacred, couldn't be tampered with. Maybe they can't be-but all that means is that you tamper with the data you feed into them. You were had. You've got thousands of stations out there. Who's going to check to see if a hypnoscanner was really ordered by a station authorized to get one and that
they received it? So long as the order is proper and lawfully entered, and so is the receipt, you don't really know
where
that damned equipment went."

"A physical audit of everything is impossible in so vast a system," Mukasa noted. "We know there's a certain amount of built-in graft, but we try to keep it to acceptable levels."

"Uh huh. The trouble is, you don't know when that level's reached unacceptable. So, now we're set up. They are rolling and they have their active agent. The rainbow weed even grows well and apparently normally in worlds more in our line. Its molecular structure and balance seem identical to the parent's. The trouble is, it doesn't work. The addicts like it, but they still need their shot. It grows quickly, so you plant it every damned place you safely can-on the hundreds and hundreds of safe worlds. Nobody cares about the safe worlds except as havens and rest stops, so nobody ever bothers to look, say, ten, or perhaps a hundred, miles from the rest areas and supplies. I'll bet if you do you'll find this crazy-looking stuff multiplying like crazy. It's going to be the kudzu of parallel worlds."

"What is this kudzu?" Hanrin asked.

"Never mind. You'll see what I mean in time. At just this time, we threw them a real curve. Aldrath revealed that he was going to kidnap Vogel and had sealed off access to Vogel's world. Now Vogel couldn't be reached without betraying a hand. You know that story, too, in gruesome detail. We went crazy trying to figure out how in hell you could know the precise instant from three different parallel worlds that some specific person would be going through the particular entrance cube. Then it hit us. Vogel gave us the slip but took Brandy with him; as a result, we could track him because her security code included a tracker and was superimposed over her old code. The ambush was painfully simple. They simply waited until their devices,
set to Brandy's tracking broadcaster,
all went beep together and moved. The object was first and foremost to kill Vogel, of course, but if they could they were also told to spare Brandy. She got away with a wound, since in that confined space it was impossible to guarantee anything. I got a head wound, which was real bad but not fatal. They couldn't do
much, but they were prepared in case anyone survived except Brandy, since they would certainly be rushed to the Center-after quarantine and examination. That gave them, ahead of time, the names of any survivors, namely me, and the nature and extent of the wound. Again, they pulled their favorite trick.

"Care at the Center for most things is automated and computer controlled and monitored. The physician with his diagnostic computer just puts in the treatment and the like and it's done. Knowing it was a head wound and which doctor was alerted, they used the standard security taps on all medical emergencies and intercepted the doctor's instructions, adding a small extra detail, a slightly higher level of a support drug that would keep me comatose indefinitely. It was such a fine difference it took months before any doctor noticed it and questioned it."

"Who could tap into the medical line with such knowledge and finesse?" Mayar asked.

"In a minute, sir. First, why Brandy? Well, first of all, they'd just lost their experimental subjects and the heat was on. It was going to be dangerous to bring in more than small quantities of the needed semen in the future. My death- or, as it turned out, my coma-sent her into severe depression. They knew her well, had her entire mental profile. She would go in after the only lead left. This did them several favors. First, since Brandy went in and would be giving detailed, inside reports, Aldrath would hold off on a major commitment there pending what she found. Second, they could control those reports, via Crockett, and keep Aldrath more concerned about Brandy's safety than about what was actually there. Finally, they already had a Brandy of their own, one taken in the usual manner from a world close to ours but where the duplicate's life was, shall we say, less fortunate and the individual more opportunist."