03. The Maze in the Mirror (26 page)

"But how-how could anyone . . . ?" she asked, befuddled.

"A hundred ways. It might have been Tarn's people with their own clothes over ours that would have saturated what we wore beneath, or it might be the way the stuff is coming back from the laundry each day. I've never had call to use the system to track somebody in the Labyrinth but I know of it."

"Who, then? Voorhes?"

"Maybe. We'll ask, although I don't know if we'll get a straight answer."

"But is this not a major risk? I mean, if
they
can track us, then can not the Company do the same?"

"It could-if it had us located from the moment we enter the main system, but that presupposes that we're blown and that the Company's been tailing us all along. I don't think that's so. Mark-ham would need Headquarters approval for such a thing, and when he got it he'd also get one of those ham-headed Company race security bosses rushing in to take the credit. They'd have stormed Tarn by now and certainly nabbed Mancini. No, it's not the Company. I have an idea who it might be, but I'm not worried right now."

"Then do we get our own washers in here or something, and all new clothing checked out as clean? I believe I could manage it."

"No, no. It would be handy if you can pick up some clean stuff to use, but I suspect that in my case my original clothes will be O.K. and I can
always detox my shoes when I have to with what I have here. No, it's important that they
don't
change procedures, if they're not listening to us and doing so right now. Let 'em follow. We just want to make sure that we can squeak out without ringing a lot of bells if we have to-so you'll need to pick up something clean at some point and keep it here."

I wanted to make sure that all our listeners, no matter whom they might be or where, got the idea that I was an old fuddy-duddy, self-conscious of my appearance and traditional in my moral outlook. Now that I knew it was the clothes I also knew of at least one way I might possibly slip out-if it came to that. I had no intention of telling them, or Maria, how so that somebody could adjust and close that little loophole which, after all, just might not really be there. If I needed it, though, I wanted to have it.

So I started pulling on my pants again and only when I sat down on the bed did I notice Maria standing there, still naked, looking at me. "Problem?" I asked her.

"Do you find me-unattractive?" she asked, sounding a bit worried.

"No, I find you very attractive indeed." I wasn't quite sure what brought this on. "I find this situation very difficult and very tempting. It is difficult not to capitalize on it."

"Then why don't you?" she asked, straight-faced and sincere.

I knew she damn well wasn't in love with me. I had no romantic illusions in that department, and I hadn't done an awful lot to be romantic, either. "Because I am married and I am in love with my wife. The only other reason for doing it would be
to gain some major advantage, and I don't see much possibility of that."

"Love is an antiquated concept invented by upper-class writers to disguise their own lusts," she responded. "Likewise marriage is an antiquated and obsolete system wherein lust and cohabitation somehow needed to be legalized or licensed so that the State could control people better. It is merely legalized prostitution."

"Don't knock it if you haven't tried it. Of course, many people try it and a lot of them knock it because it's tough over the long haul, after the lust has gone. And the state has little to do with it except to write the license cheap and easy when you do it and then ream you if it needs to be dissolved. But love-it's often, maybe usually, confused with lust, which is why there are so many divorces, but it's real. It can die out, if you aren't careful, and takes work, but it's worth it. And if both partners do what they want to do best for the marriage, then it's not prostitution. You can have sex without marriage or love-that's a kind of prostitution-but when you have love as well it's different. It's better all around. It means something."

"What?"

"My wife is my best friend, my closest confidant, the person outside of myself I respect and care for the most, and, while we're very different, we know each other so well we often know what the other is thinking or how they'll behave. I miss her. I wish I had her here on this case. And while you're young, attractive, and very available, you're not her."

She shook her head in wonder. "I do not understand this. It is babble and nonsense. You mean to tell me that you have never cheated on your wife nor she on you?"

"No, I can't say that-at least about her," I responded, "although it was under a coercive set of conditions, not voluntary. As for me-no. Never really have in spite of occasional thoughts to the contrary now and again and a lot of temptation. With me it'd be voluntary, deliberate. I know how much it hurt me when she did it even though I knew she had no choice, and I understand how much more that hurt would have been if it had been true cheating. I couldn't inflict that on her. Not deliberately."

She stared at me the way somebody would stare at a Martian. "You are the strangest man I have ever met. An anachronism, someone not real but out of an old novel in an earlier age. I think you are quite mad. Who or what do you think you are?"

"Nick Charles," I responded, fixing myself a drink and not elaborating further. "Now put your pants on. Or do you really crave me that much?"

"You are a singularly ugly specimen of manhood," she said flatly. "On my world such imperfections were genetically corrected years ago. I just felt in the mood, and you have made certain that I cannot go out and find someone better."

I would have liked to think she was just getting back at me, but it was probably the truth.

On the other hand, maybe it really was the truth. That brought up an interesting idea.

When she was dressed, I beckoned her over to the desk and took out a pad and pencil. "Would it be worth it to you to have some freedom if you also had to trust me? Write all answers. They can't
visually see what we're writing here."

She read it, took the pad, and wrote, "?"

"If I let you go out then I have to trust that you will not reveal the information we have to anyone. If you do, you will undo all my work. But you can not exit without me. That would mean leaving me alone in the Labyrinth," I wrote.

The proposal startled her, but I could see it tempted her as well. I hadn't realized my constant company was
that
odious, but if I were her and stuck in this situation I'd probably feel the same way no matter who I was stuck with. I was counting on it.

She took the pencil and wrote, "But how could I trust you? You control my energy, but I have no hold over you. And if you betrayed us or we were even found out, I would die in an ugly manner."

We were gonna have a real bonfire here with this amount of paper. "My word is all I can give you. But I have some work for you that only you can do, without me, as well."

"Where would you go?" she wrote.

"When the next appointment is made. I'll go to it and you'll go off, on your own errand and take time to do whatever else you like or need. I would be under your security anyway until you came and picked me up. What do you say?" I wrote to her.

It was tough, I knew, but that last had given her the out she needed. She nodded, then wrote, "What do you want me to do?"

"Memorize the following," I wrote back, "then we'll destroy all this. I need you to talk to friends in security and find the answers to some questions. Make any excuse, but do not let them know it comes from me."

She was hooked, just as I'd hoped when I talked Voorhes into this arrangement. I needed the legs and contacts she would have and I lacked in this alternate environment, and if she didn't blow anything I'd have what I needed.

Carefully, item by item, I gave her just what I needed to know.

8.

Assembling the Jigsaw

There still wasn't any information from Voorhes or anyone else on the duplicates, which was a key answer, but there was another round of interviews scheduled. I was glad to be moving again; I needed to complete this as quickly as possible, because while I was circumstantially figuring out the puzzle O.K. and, with Maria's help, maybe the more personal problem as well, but even when I had a sufficient amount of information to convince myself that I was right, that only brought up the other obvious problem-how to survive the solution.

Not that I had any kind of ironclad case, nor would I. Handcuffed and restricted as I was, there was no way I was ever going to make any sort of case that would stand up to close examination, but I'd faced that kind of case before as well, most notably when I'd deduced the guilty and traitorous Company director who'd made certain you could never prove him guilty of a hangnail. In the end, it didn't really matter to me whether I could prove the case to the satisfaction of others. Frankly, I didn't care if the bastards killed each other off or ran for deep cover and dissolved their little club or what. But the solution, the motive, the who, what, when, where, and why, was very important to me indeed.

I mean, even if I figured out how to keep my own head from getting blown off for good, what good would that do if I couldn't also prevent them from maybe killing every human being in existence? I mean, I was human, and Brandy, and Dash as well, and I had no desire to include any of them in the Twilight of the Gods that might be coming up.

Nor was I kidding myself that I was living on borrowed time, an unwelcome intruder let loose to do something that might be useful, might not, to them, but in any case somebody to be eliminated as soon as any usefulness I even potentially had was over.

The invitation to Yugarin was just what I needed next, not only to get some information from him but also to get Maria on her own way. The major problem was the Phantom in the Labyrinth. If we had a tail on us, then that tail would know that we had split.

I didn't have any illusions that we could jump whoever it was, or that we'd even know who it was if we somehow got a good look. The fact was, the Phantom was probably more than one person and almost certainly represented a double-check on security, put there as a sort of guarantee of me and of Maria. I didn't want to blow my little plot for getting out of their tracers right now, either-I'd need that later, maybe to slip Maria-but we had to teach the tail a lesson, scare him off enough to divert him, and then by the time he got his electronics going to take up the tail once again to mislead him.

In fact, it was Maria who came up with the gimmick and it was worthy even of, well, me. The desk chair was one of the usual kinds; a kind of
padded, thin, typist's chair with four casters on a stalk. Like most electronic tails, the radiation tracker tracked only blips based on the clothing, not warm bodies. A set of irradiated clothes on that chair would register as a second person on anybody's tracker, and with the casters it'd be a cinch to roll ahead of me. I already had the cover story for Yugarin's security boys, and I thought they'd buy it and so did Maria, and it gave a nice excuse for her not being there and them babysitting me, too.

Of course, she'd have to be stark naked and checked to make sure she wouldn't still show up before we exited, which was certainly a problem for her, but she didn't seem to think it was a serious one. Apparently she knew where to get a good, clean set of clothes without raising a lot of eyebrows and I didn't question that further. I just hoped we got away with it all the way. If they figured this out, Maria was right-we both would probably be dead soon after-and everything would be for nothing. Still, you have to take big risks for big stakes, and this was maybe the ultimate high-stakes game. If it worked, though, I would have successfully turned the tables on them and be running my own independent game.

They were banking on my moral sense that I wouldn't do anything stupid and get a whole world zapped. That was their big hold on me. Even so, they'd saddled me with Maria, a low-level agent who would follow whatever orders she was given, including executing me. In a sense, their faith in me was touching and their faith in their own double and triple redundancy security on me was even more heart-rending.

Just like the company, they could somehow maintain a comfortable double standard that I might just be good enough to solve their problem but nowhere near their equal when it came to playing their kind of games. They were very confident that they had set immutable rules for me.

I figured it was about time to change the rules.

When we got ready to leave, Maria disrobed and took a shower, which would look and sound normal, and I managed to get the chair on a pretext over towards the exit wall where I was pretty sure there was no visual scan but there was some of my stuff. I'd often used it as a stool, so it wouldn't appear odd to anybody. And it also gave a good reason for me to have my security kit.

Naturally, they'd know we were on to their irradiation scheme, but I didn't think the kind of minds I was dealing with right now would consider that more than a point in my favor for noticing it. Pandross, now, might have been a different story, but he was the least of my worries right now.

Maria came out, picked up her clothes casually, and came over towards me. We struck up an inane conversation about what we'd do when we reached Yugarin, and during that time she wiped herself all over with a towel, then I set up the clothes on the chair and then checked her with the meter and hoop. Not a hundred percent clean, but she would maybe show up real close as a ghost trace, of which there were bound to be many, and not as anything solid. She also had every intention of ducking out of the cube when possible and waiting until I was well away before coming back in and getting on her way.

There wasn't much danger of her being naked in
the Labyrinth in and of itself; there were often naked or nearly naked folks in there. Some of these worlds were interesting, and others required some prep at the station end. If it was kill or be killed and for the kind of stakes I was playing for, I guess I'd do it, but I probably wouldn't consider it in her position. Well, we were different, and in this case the difference was in my favor.