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ASSASSIN

Even before the conscious parts of his mind realized that he was awake, his reflexes had taken control. The slow and even rhythm of his breathing remained unbroken; not a muscle of his body stirred. To all appearances he was still sound asleep, but already his brain, now fully alert, was sifting the information streaming in through his senses.

There were no alarm bells ringing in his head—no half-remembered echo of perhaps the creak of a shoe, the rustle of a sleeve, or the barely audible catching of breath that would have betrayed the presence of somebody in the room. He could detect no change in the background pattern of sound and smell that he had registered and filed away in his memory before falling asleep.

Nothing abnormal then. Just the routine beginning of another day.

He opened his eyes, allowed them to sweep around the darkness of his hotel room probing for anything irregular, then rolled over and switched on the bedside light. He yawned, drawing the first clean breath of the new day deep into his lungs, and then stretched, long and luxuriously, allowing the energy that accumulates through eight hours of complete rest to charge every nerve and fiber of his body. After holding the position for perhaps ten seconds, the man who currently called himself Hadley Krassen relaxed, and returned fully to wakefulness.

His watch told him it was 6:35 A.M. He leaned across to the bedside console and flipped a switch to activate a voice channel to the hotel computer.

"Good morning." A synthetic bass-baritone voice issued from the grille near the top of the console panel. "Can I help you?"

"Room service," Krassen replied.

"Room service." The machine was now speaking in a rich, New England, female voice.

"Cancel my call for seven hundred hours. Also, I'd like a room breakfast at seven-thirty—two eggs, bacon, tomatoes, toast, coffee. Okay?"

"Okay."

Pause.

"That's all."

"Thank you." Click. 

Krassen flipped off the switch and interlaced his fingers behind his head as he settled back to reflect on the events of the past ten days. Experience had taught him that this was the time to catch any danger signals that might have been thrown up by his subconscious data processing during the night. Once whatever the new day had in store had begun to unfold, they would be lost forever.

His voyage from Mars—as a regular fare-paying passenger aboard the Sirius-class photon-drive ship Percival Lowell—had passed without incident. Upon his arrival at the Earth-orbiting transfer satellite, the passport and papers identifying him as Paul Langley, structural design engineer, citizen of the Federation of Martian City-States, visiting Earth for two weeks' vacation, had passed the scrutiny of the immigration officials. Nothing to worry about there—everything had gone smoothly.

The shuttle from the transfer satellite had brought him down thirty miles north of Oklahoma City limits at Roosevelt Spaceport, where, as prearranged, he had collected a package from the information desk at the east end of the arrivals terminal. The package had contained the key to a baggage locker, and inside the locker he had found a black briefcase. The briefcase had provided the items that he would need for the assignment, including a complete set of personal documents relating to one Dr. Hadley B. Krassen, in whose affairs he had already been thoroughly schooled. Also, there were the keys to Krassen's personal airmobile, located three hundred miles away in the public parking area at Kansas City International Airport.

Who the "real" Hadley Krassen was the Assassin didn't know and probably never would. Hadley Krassen was a sleeper—an agent quietly injected into an ordinary, everyday position in American society, possibly years previously, since which time he had maintained banking and credit accounts, acquired ground driver's and airmobile pilot's licenses, and generally performed all the functions expected of a statistical unit in the federal data banks. Whoever had been Hadley Krassen would already have been spirited away to some low-profile existence elsewhere. If, by some inspired piece of detective work, the authorities managed to trace anything that happened subsequently back to Hadley Krassen, it wouldn't matter very much; by that time, "Hadley Krassen" would have ceased to exist.

After arriving at Roosevelt and collecting the briefcase, the Assassin had rented an airmobile, still as Paul Langley, and flown it to Kansas City Airport. On arrival there he had confirmed his reservation on a suborbital flight to London in fourteen days' time. Then he had switched identities.

He had locked all of Langley's papers, including the ticket to London, inside the rented airmobile and secured the keys out of sight up inside the undercarriage recess. Then, carrying only Krassen's papers and with nothing on him to link him with Paul Langley in any way, he had walked down two levels of the airmobile park, located Krassen's vehicle, and departed on a ten-day hotel-hopping tour of the North American continent. Thereafter he had faithfully acted out the part of a holidaymaker with a surplus of money and time and a shortage of ideas as to how to spend both of them. So far as "his" employers—the Fellerman Chemical Company of Long Island—were concerned, Dr. Krassen had left on two weeks' vacation and was strictly incommunicado. Anybody calling his apartment would have discovered that before leaving he had not programmed his infonet terminal to forward incoming calls.

During those ten days he had detected nothing suspicious. His tortuous meanderings about nearly a dozen cities, back and forth among the ramps, terraces, and walkways of the pedestrian precincts, on and off the autocabs, had failed to reveal any sign of a tail. There had been no unlikely coincidences, such as the same face appearing in two different restaurants a mile apart, or a fellow hotel guest "happening" to choose the same bar as he for an evening drink of the far side of town. His comings and goings had not been watched by curious eyes shielded by newspapers in hotel lobbies; no room that he stayed in had been searched; his vehicle had not been opened during his absence. He allowed himself to arrive at the conclusion therefore that he was, with a high degree of certainty, "clean."

He rose, took a shower, and shaved, moving with the unhurried ease of one conditioned to the notion that haste and disaster go hand in hand. That done, he selected his clothing from piles arranged the night before on top of the room's second, unused bed. The lightweight undervest, made from a foam-filled honeycomb of toughened nylon mesh, would stop a .38 bullet fired from anywhere beyond twenty feet. The trousers were of a strong but flexible material, loose-fitting around the hips and narrowing at the ankles to afford maximum freedom of movement; to go with them he chose a short-sleeved shirt, plain necktie, and conventional jacket. His shoes were soft, light, and nonslip, and would enable a suitably skilled wearer to move noiselessly over almost any surface.

With his single suitcase open on the bed, he sat down at the writing desk alongside and emptied his pockets and his wallet. First he checked Krassen's personal documents, transferring them into the wallet as he did so. The last item among them was a high-security pass folder, about half the size of a postcard, which contained his own photograph and thumbprint, and which, according to the wording carried on its face, had been issued by the Defense Department (NORAM) of the United Western Democracies and signed by James S. Vorner, Secretary to the Director of Military Intelligence. Then he put the wallet in one of his inside jacket pockets and his airmobile keys and a handkerchief in the side pockets, leaving his trousers empty for better mobility. Everything else went into the suitcase along with his spare clothing.

Next he checked the technical papers and research journals that provided legitimate contents for the briefcase, arranged them inside, and finally closed the case and positioned it on the desk in front of him, together with two other items—an ordinary-looking gray ballpoint pen, and a small transparent plastic box containing what appeared to be a common brand of tranquilizer capsules.

The pen came apart rapidly under his practiced fingers, the writing head, ink tube, and tapering portion coming away at one end and the rounded cap at the other, to leave just a plain cylinder of toughened, high-density plastic.

Turning his attention to the briefcase, he located the concealed catch beneath the lock and pressed it, allowing the handle to come away in his hand. The grip was bound with decorative hoops of leather thong. When he took the handle between both hands and flexed it, the grip broke like a shotgun, parting between two of the leather hoops and pivoting about a hinge on the inner edge of the grip; at the same time, a trigger clicked out from a point near the hinge. The handle had hinged into two parts of unequal length: The larger section formed the butt and body of the pistol, while the smaller section, hinged back to curve below his index finger, provided the trigger guard. The gray plastic tube screwed quickly into place to become the barrel.

The weapon fitted snugly in his hand. It was small, lightweight, and smoothly angled, easily concealed in an inside jacket pocket. Formed from plastic components that resembled everyday objects, it could be carried with impunity through the most stringent X-ray and visual security checks.

He squeezed the trigger a few times and felt the mechanism trip smoothly. Then he opened the pillbox and took out one of the yellow-and-blue capsules. What made these capsules different from those that looked the same and could be obtained in any drugstore was that the yellow end was soft and concealed a needle-sharp projectile formed from a fast-acting neurotoxin designed to fragment almost immediately after impact and cause death in under five seconds. The propellant was a charge of highly compressed gas contained in the blue end.

The Assassin drew the magazine slide out from the butt, carefully pressed the capsule into one of the five positions provided, and pushed the slide back in until he felt its restraining spring click into place. Pistol in hand, he rose from the chair, selected a large Florida orange from the bowl of fruit provided by the management, and lodged it firmly in the ashtray standing on the desk. He backed off ten paces, raised his arm, aimed, and fired.

A dull phutt from the pistol, a sharper splatt from the orange, and the briefest suggestion of a hiss from nowhere in particular sounded all at the same time. He walked back to the waiting desk to inspect his handiwork.

About an inch off center, the skin of the orange was punctured by a quarter-inch diameter hole surrounded by a thin halo of pulped peel and flesh. The juice oozing out was discolored a greenish yellow. He peeled the skin back and inspected the damage, checking the depth of penetration and looking especially for signs of incomplete fragmentation. If the bullet were from a bad batch, with the center of mass not lying precisely on the spin axis, the ensuing in-flight wobble would cause too much energy to be dissipated in tearing through layers of clothing, preventing effective penetration of the target.

Satisfied, he removed the spent propellant cartridge from the magazine and tossed it down the disposal unit, to be incinerated, along with the orange.

He dismantled the pistol, refitted the briefcase handle, and put the reassembled pen and pillbox away in zip-protected pockets in his jacket. The chime of the console panel sounded just as he was finishing.

"Krassen," he said, touching a button to accept the call.

"Seven-thirty breakfast, sir. Would it be convenient now?"

"Okay."

"Thank you."

Half a minute later the light above the room's dispensing unit indicated that the tray had arrived.

As he ate his breakfast he made his final mental run-through of the day's planned operation. Normally he preferred to work alone; on this occasion, however, too many specialized skills had been called for, so that had not been possible. But he had satisfied himself that those chosen to make up the rest of the team were all first class in their jobs.

His meal over, he swiveled the console around to face the desk and activated the keyboard. A swift sequence of commands connected him to the continental infonet service and activated an inquiry program already residing in a file established in the system. The program accessed a virtual address in the net and relayed its contents back to the screen on his console. The process was the electronic equivalent of the traditional dead-letter box: messages could be deposited in and retrieved from the virtual address with neither sender nor recipient being known to, or traceable by, the other.

The message read:

 

JOHN

VISIT PROFESSOR AS ARRANGED.

MARY (7:00)

 

So—everything was go up until seven that morning; no last-minute hitches. He finished his coffee, then operated the console once more to access the hotel computer and call up the checkout routine. A record of the transaction appeared from the console's hard-copy unit, accompanied by a message thanking him for his business, expressing the hope that he would choose Holiday Inn again next time, and inviting him to call for manual assistance from the duty clerk if everything had not been to his complete satisfaction.

He loaded his suitcase into the receptacle of the baggage-handling system and left instructions to deliver it to the hotel airmobile park, Level 2, Bay 26. After a final check of the room, he put on his jacket and hat and walked down the hallway to the elevator.

Five minutes later, he settled himself into the pilot's seat of the airmobile, switched on the control console, and flipped the Manual/Auto flight mode setting to Auto. The display screen came to life:

 

ALL SYSTEMS CHECKED AND FUNCTIONING NORMALLY.

FLIGHT MODE AUTO SELECTED.

KEY FOR DESTINATION:

N NEW

P PREPROGRAMMED

X AUXILIARY SERVICES

 

He pressed the N key.

 

AUTO FLIGHT LOG-IN.

SPECIFY DESTINATION REQUIRED.

 

He bit his lower lip as the first trace of tension began building up inside him. If disaster was going to strike, it would surely be within the next sixty seconds. He keyed:

 

JOINT SERVICES ARMAMENTS RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT

ANDERSCLIFF

LINCOLN

NEBRASKA

 

Almost certainly, the destination that he had specified would trigger a response from a surveillance program somewhere in the system. Sure enough:

 

QUERY

DESTINATION REQUESTED IS TOP-SECURITY LOCATION.

ACCESS PERMITTED TO AUTHORIZED PASS-HOLDERS ONLY.

STATE 

NAME, POSITION HELD, PASS CODE/VISITOR CLEARANCE REFERENCE.

 

He responded:

 

DR. HADLEY B. KRASSEN

SECTION A.8, DEPARTMENT 39, PLASMA PHYSICS

7x8H/927380.BB

 

An eternity passed while the characters remained frozen on the screen. This was the moment of truth.

No Krassen had ever been employed at Anderscliff.

Eighty-seven miles away, a computer deep below the administration building of the Joint Services Armaments Research Establishment scanned the information that he had entered and compared it against the stored records. It located a record pertaining to a Krassen, Hadley B., as described, and verified the pass code. Its verdict was composed into a message and flashed back through the infonet system. In the airmobile, the display changed at last:

 

AUTHORIZATION POSITIVE

DESIRED TAKEOFF TIME:

 

The Assassin felt a surge of jubilation as he replied:

 

IMMEDIATE.

The rest of the preflight dialogue took only a few seconds.

 

ESTIMATED FLIGHT TIME IS 18 MINUTES. DETAILED FLIGHT PLAN REQUIRED?

 

NO.

 

FUEL ADEQUATE. ESTIMATED RANGE REMAINING ON ARRIVAL WILL BE 328 MILES. OKAY?

 

YES.

 

VEHICLE SYSTEM SLAVING TO TRAFFIC CONTROL. CLEARED FOR IMMEDIATE TAKEOFF.

 

Five minutes later, the man who currently called himself Hadley Krassen was gazing down from one of the speeding dots in the westbound traffic corridor at ten thousand feet, Route 305, of the Omaha Traffic Area.

* * *

Over fourteen hundred miles away, in an office block in the center of San Francisco, the plaque on the door of one of the suites proclaimed it to be the registered business premises of J.J. MARSHALL, INDUSTRIAL FINANCIAL ANALYST. Inside, the offices all looked normal enough One room at the rear of the suite, however, was different. Inside it, four people—three men and a woman, all in their late twenties to late thirties—sat surrounded by an array of consoles, keyboards, and display screens amid a confusion of banks of electronic and computing equipment. Working in these cramped conditions over the previous five months, this team had penetrated the "hyper-safe" integrated communications and database network of the NORAM Defense Department. That, of course, included the computers at Anderscliff.

From their room in San Francisco, the Martian Federation scientists could extract and alter any data in the Anderscliff system and monitor the operation of its most highly protected programs. Also, if they wished, they could insert into the system, and run, programs of their own devising—the personnel record for Krassen, Hadley B., had not found its way into the Anderscliff file system through the normal channels.

The woman noted a change in the pattern of symbols on one of the screens and keyed a command string into her console. Groups of numbers appeared in columns on another display.

"The call code and flight-profile data for his airmobile have just been received from air traffic control, along with detail of a bunch of other vehicles," she announced.

One of the men behind her consulted another readout. "They'll all be incoming flights," he said. "Morning commuters into Anderscliff. Area control is programming the local ground processors and approach radars at Anderscliff to handle the landing sequences."

"He must be nearly there, then," somebody commented.

* * *

The Assassin gazed down at the expanding sprawl of office blocks, laboratory buildings, domes, storage tanks, and girder lattices, all tied together loosely by a triangle of roadways and pipelines, that made up the Joint Services Armaments Research Establishment. His vehicle was sinking toward a rooftop parking area, which he recognized as one of the staff parking zones from ground plans taken from satellite pictures; he had memorized it all thoroughly before leaving Mars.

The vehicle slowed as it descended, finally coming to hover thirty feet above the next available space along one of the partially filled rows. The optical scanner presented a view of the landing spot, and he satisfied himself that the area was clear before okaying the computer to proceed with the final phase of landing.

Three minutes later, briefcase in hand, he was walking toward the rooftop entry gate and checkpoint, through which he would have to pass to enter the Establishment itself. He had timed his arrival to coincide with the morning rush. Ahead of him, a half dozen or so persons, some shouting morning greetings back and forth, were converging on the door that led in to the checkpoint. Nobody took any notice of him as he tagged along behind two men talking shop in loud voices, and followed them through the doorway between two steel-helmeted guards.

Inside, the pair in front passed their hand-baggage to an attendant behind a counter, who in turn passed it through the hatch in the wall behind her for checking. The Assassin followed suit. There was no sign of the spot body-searches for which he had been told to be prepared.

Following the still-chattering duo, he found himself in a short queue shuffling slowly forward toward a desk where passes were being checked. Almost immediately, others lined up behind him. He watched the procedure being followed at the desk, searching for any subtle differences from what he had been briefed to expect. There were none. Whoever had been responsible for research for the assignment had done a thorough job.

Avoiding eye contact with the security officer seated at the check-in desk, he stepped forward, extracted the magnetically coded name-tag from his pass folder, pushed it into the slot provided, and keyed the memorized check digits into the keyboard below. He then pressed his right thumb against the glass plate located next to the slot and recited aloud into the microphone above:

"Krassen, Hadley B. 7x8H/927380.BB."

Elsewhere in the Establishment, a computer located the record and compared the check digits stored with the pass code against the sequence that had just been keyed in at the gate. They matched. The thumbprint and voiceprint profiles held in the record also matched those that had just been input.

"I don't know you, do I?" The security officer at the desk regarded him through narrowed eyes.

"Only started working here a coupla days ago." The Assassin's reply was in a matter-of-fact drawl. His face retained the deadpan stare of the early-morning riser not quite awake yet.

"Your pass folder, please."

The Assassin passed the folder across and stood impassively while the officer ran his eye rapidly down the card, pausing to compare the photograph inside it with the features confronting him.

"Who's your boss?"

"Professor Henderson, Department 39, Plasma Physics."

The security officer surveyed the column of illuminated signs on his console panel, all glowing POSITIVE for the computer checks, then nodded and passed the folder back together with a plastic lapel badge.

"Okay. Hope you enjoy working at Anderscliff, Dr. Krassen."

"Thank you."

The Assassin removed the magnetic name-tag from the slot in front of him, moved a few paces forward, and paused to insert it in the window of the lapel badge and fasten the badge to his jacket. Then he moved on to the counter beyond and retrieved his briefcase, checked and cleared.

For the first time in several minutes he allowed himself to relax a little, drawing in a long, slow breath and exhaling with it the worst of the tension that had built up inside him. He was in. He had penetrated the impenetrable. He knew of course that the real work had been done long before, and represented something like ten man-years of effort.

He took an elevator down to ground level and emerged from the building through a set of glass doors surmounting a flight of shallow steps, where he stopped for a while to study the geography of this part of the Establishment, especially the approaches to the building he had just come out of. Then, guided by his predeparture briefing and the direction signs about the Establishment, he made his way through the maze of buildings and up to the cafeteria on the third floor of the domestic block.

As he progressed from one area to another, detectors above the doorways through which he passed picked up the signal being transmitted by the microcircuit in the lapel badge. The signal was unique to his pass code, controlled by the magnetic name-tag that he had inserted from his pass folder. Everybody in Anderscliff carried such a badge. All the signals picked up by all the detectors all over the Establishment were monitored by a surveillance computer which continuously compared them against stored tables of which pass codes authorized entry to any particular building, floor, section, or room. An attempt to violate the system of limited access would trigger an immediate alert. The surveillance system thus provided an automatic check of who was entering restricted areas and enabled reports to be printed out, if required, of who had been in any particular place on any given day and at what time.

The surveillance computer was not programmed to track the movements of an individual through the Anderscliff complex, although the data from the detectors would have enabled such a task to be accomplished quite easily. The designers of the system had not seen any purpose in such a function. But the Martian Federation scientists in San Francisco had. Accordingly, they had developed a program of their own that enabled them, from fourteen hundred miles away, to monitor the precise movements of both the Assassin and his victim. They thus possessed all the information needed to guide him to his target.

He settled himself at an empty table by one wall of the cafeteria and consumed a leisurely cup of coffee, allowing the people who were still arriving time to disperse about the Establishment and settle down to their daily routines. After twenty minutes or so had passed, he rose and walked back to the lobby to enter one of the three public infonet booths located near the door. The message waiting for him in the electronic dead-letter box read:

 

JOHN

PROFESSOR WILL SEE YOU ALONE AT HOME

MARY (9:32)

 

So—Brozlan was alone in his private apartment suite in the residential sector of Anderscliff, as expected. Weeks of analysis of the data patterns extracted from the surveillance computer had revealed that the professor never left his private quarters before ten-thirty in the morning. Perhaps he was in the habit of working alone for the first part of the morning before going over to the biophysics labs, where he spent most of his time; maybe he was simply a late riser. The reason really didn't matter. The Assassin knew all he needed to know.

He left the booth, returned to ground level, and waited for one of the Establishment's auto-shuttles to take him to the residential sector. Eight minutes later, a porter seated at a desk just inside the entrance door of Residential Block 3 looked up in surprise as a tall, lean, hatted figure carrying a black briefcase marched straight past him, tossing back a curt "Good morning" over his shoulder. The porter just had time to check the ENTRY AUTHORIZATION POSITIVE display on his panel before the figure disappeared into the elevator at the far end of the hall.

The residential sector was a high-security zone, accessible to only a handful of privileged people apart from the scientists and other special-category personnel who resided within the perimeter of Anderscliff. The tables stored in the memory subsystem of the surveillance computer, however, told it that the holder of the pass code assigned to Krassen, Hadley B., could move freely anywhere within the Establishment.

When he came out of the elevator on the second floor, he was carrying the briefcase under his left arm and holding the pistol, assembled and loaded, in his right-hand jacket pocket. He moved slowly along the corridor, walking straight past the door that bore the nameplate BROZLAN without checking his stride or turning his head. At the end of the corridor he stopped, turned, and just as slowly walked back again, scanning the walls and ceiling for any sign of TV cameras. Finding none, he stopped when he came back to the door, listened for perhaps ten seconds, then pressed the ball of his right thumb against the printlock plate set into the doorframe. A click sounded as the lock disengaged.

Records of which prints were authorized to operate which of the thousands of printlocks around Anderscliff were also stored in the surveillance computer. Officially, only four prints had been specified to open the lock of Brozlan's private suite: those of the professor himself, the domestic attendant for Residential Block 3, the manager of domestic services, and the duty medical supervisor. Somehow a fifth print had been added to that set; it was identical to the one stored in the personnel record headed KRASSEN, HADLEY B.

He paused inside the door and closed it softly behind him. One of the other doors leading off from the small entrance hall was ajar, and from behind it came the sound of movement and the rustle of papers. The Assassin moved forward and brought his eye close to the crack at the edge of the door.

The room was a litter of books, papers, and scientific journals, and its far wall consisted entirely of shelves. Sitting at a desk in front of the shelves, a white-haired man, probably in his late fifties, and wearing a plain gray suit, was sorting piles of documents into something approaching order. The Assassin recognized him at once. He stepped quickly and silently around the door. Three catlike paces brought him facing the desk, pistol leveled.

"Keep your hands on the desk. Don't move. Don't make a noise."

The white head jerked up sharply in surprise. Eyes open wide with alarm and disbelief took in the menacing figure confronting them.

"You—you are from the Federation . . ." He had detected the slight Martian accent in the other's voice.

The Assassin nodded expressionlessly. "And you are Professor Malleborg Brozlan—defector from Mars and traitor to the Federation."

Brozlan saw the coldness behind the unblinking gray eyes and knew then that he had no hope. He tried the only gambit open to him.

"Did they tell you why I defected to Earth? Haven't you wondered?"

"Those things do not concern me." The Assassin's tone was final.

"But they concern everybody. Did you realize that—"

A dull phutt, a muffled thud, and the briefest suggestion of a hiss sounded all at the same time. The professor recoiled back in the chair, his eyes wide with shock. His fists clenched as his body stiffened. Then his eyes glazed over and stared sightlessly at infinity. The rim of the small hole that had appeared in his shirtfront, an inch to the left of the breastbone, began to turn red.

The Assassin waited a few seconds longer, then stepped around the desk and lifted the professor's chin with his finger. The head lolled limply to one side. He reached out and felt the temple for a pulse. There was none. He raised the pistol again, rested the tip of the barrel against the pad of muscle over the carotid artery at the side of the neck, and gently squeezed the trigger again.

Five minutes later he emerged from Residential Block 3 and boarded the next passing shuttle. As the shuttle was pulling away from the pickup point, the wail of a siren heralded the approach of an ambulance moving at high speed. The ambulance screeched to a halt outside the residential block and disgorged three white-clad medical orderlies, who raced in through the door before the last moans of the siren had died away.

The planners of the Assassin's mission could not have known that six weeks before to the day, the professor had suffered a heart attack, and that during the ensuing surgery a microelectronic cardiac monitor had been implanted in his chest. The signals transmitted by the monitor were picked up continuously by detectors similar to those that read the lapel badges, and routed to measuring instruments in the Establishment's medical center. The instruments were programmed to sound an alarm the instant that any irregularity appeared in Brozlan's cardiac waveforms.

The Assassin almost made it. The alarm reached the rooftop checkpoint seconds after he had passed through without incident. As the guards came rushing out of the door behind him, shouting after him to stop, he broke into a run toward the airmobile. The tranquilizer dart hit him squarely in the back of the neck. The dose on it would have stunned an ox.

* * *

"Doctor, I think he's coming 'round now." The voice, a woman's, sounded blurred and far away. Coherent thoughts refused to form in his mind. Bright lights and meaningless patches of color swam before his eyes. Two faces seemed to be peering down at him from a million miles away. He passed out again.

* * *

He was in bed in what could have been a hospital room. Apart from the uniformed guard standing by the door, there were two other men in the room, seated on chairs flanking his bed. The one to his left was aged maybe forty-five and dressed in a navy-blue three-piece suit, white shirt, and silver tie. His hair was graying and his upper lip adorned by a clipped, military-style mustache that seemed to enhance his generally debonair image. His eyes were twinkling, and he seemed to be waiting for the Assassin to fully regain his faculties. The other was younger, dark-haired, swarthy-skinned and unsmiling.

"Allow me to offer my congratulations," the older of the two said after a few seconds. "Another minute and you'd have got clean away." He was obviously English, probably an army officer, possibly high-ranking. The Assassin said nothing, allowing his thoughts time to coalesce into something approaching organized. The most important thing was that the mission had been successful: He had penetrated one of the most closely guarded places on Earth and carried out his assignment. What happened now was of secondary importance.

He hauled himself up for a better view of his visitors, and the Englishman moved the pillows behind him to prop him up. Silence persisted for what seemed a long time.

"What went wrong?" the Assassin asked at last. His voice was monotonous and resigned . . . but curious.

"Wrong? Actually, nothing, old chap. That is, you didn't do anything wrong. We picked you up through something that you couldn't possibly have known about. Call it an accident. The details of that can wait until later. Right at this moment there are a lot of other things that we'd very much like to know about you."

The Assassin slumped back against the pillows and raised his eyes to the ceiling in feigned boredom. His expression said the rest.

"You'd be surprised how much we know about you already," the Englishman went on, unperturbed. "We know that you're from the Martian Federation, that you came in via Roosevelt Spaceport ten days before Anderscliff, posing as a structural engineer called Paul Langley, and that after assuming the role of Hadley Krassen you spent some time touring around the continent to test your cover. I can give you a list of the places you stayed at if you want."

The Assassin's face remained blank, but inwardly he felt uneasiness. If they had known this much all along, he would never have gotten within a hundred miles of Anderscliff. On the other hand, how could they have worked it out since his capture? He could think of no obvious flaw in his getaway arrangements.

"But let's start with introductions to prove that we are all civilized people," the Englishman continued. "I am Colonel Arthur Barling—this is Carl May. Our precise functions need not concern us for now. You are . . . ?" He let the question hang. The Assassin remained silent.

"Never mind. We'll call you Hadley for the time being. Any objections?" He paused but there was no response. "Very well, Hadley, now let's get down to business. It's obvious that you were sent here after the most meticulous preparations in order to eliminate Brozlan. Equally obviously, you are just one member of a team that includes some extraordinary talents." Silence. "Just think of it—all that effort, all that distance . . . just for one man. A man of your undoubtedly high intelligence must have wondered what made him so important. I know that people like you are never told that kind of thing."

The colonel regarded him silently for a few seconds. Carl May continued to sit frowning, saying nothing. The Assassin guessed that he was the observer, there to study his reactions while Barling did the talking. No doubt a camera was concealed somewhere as well.

The colonel carried on with what the Assassin had already decided was an outwardly nonchalant probing for weak spots.

"It's the old, old problem that separates you and us, isn't it, Hadley—the breakaway pressures of the New World pulling against the restraining influences of the Old. On the one hand there's the progressive new ideology of the former colonial city-states, and on the other the conservative and tradition-bound regimes of Earth." Barling made an empty-handed gesture and pulled a face. "And so we hear the old song about an oppressed people yearning to be free and go its own way. But in reality it's an old story of another kind—a bunch of opportunists who've spotted something that's up for grabs, only this time it's a whole planet. So they feed out the same claptrap that we've been hearing for a thousand years . . . liberty, justice, that kind of thing . . . and the incredible thing is that people like you still swallow it." An expression of disbelief spread across the Englishman's face. "Do you really believe that you'd be a penny's worth of anything better off if Mars did go its own way? I mean . . . Take that bunch that sent you off on your little errand. You can see the kind of methods that they don't think twice about using . . . the sort of scruples that they have. What kind of society do you think they'd make for you if they didn't have to answer to anybody? Is that the great `cause' that you're all so dedicated to fighting for?"

The Englishman paused and considered the Martian quizzically, but was rewarded only by a stare of indifference. This was the kind of thing that the Assassin had expected. He knew that the mild taunts were intended to be provocative—to lure him into making the mistake of responding before he could think clearly.

Barling tried another angle. "Anyway, it couldn't possibly work, could it? Mars depends on the industrial capacity and resources of Earth. As long as that remains fact, any talk about Martian independence can be nothing more than an illusion. Without us you couldn't last a month."

The Assassin's jaw tightened as he fought to repress the indignation welling up inside him. The statement the colonel had just uttered was outrageous. Mars had no natural resources worth talking about. With no biosphere, no hydrosphere, and virtually no atmosphere, the planet had never experienced the processes of erosion, biological activity, and marine deposition that had laid down the treasures of Earth. But the pioneers had not expected to find any. What they had expected to find was freedom—freedom from stifling bureaucracy and legislation, and the freedom to tackle their problems in their own ways. Their first problem had been the horrendous cost of importing every ton of needed material from Earth.

In answer, the scientists of Mars had realized a dream that was centuries old, but on a scale that no alchemist had ever imagined. They perfected techniques for transmuting elements on an industrial scale. The Martian wilderness was no longer a waste. Not only that. Scientists eventually learned how to use the elements that they had created to synthesize increasingly more complex compounds, until virtually anything they required could be derived from a few common, locally available raw materials. Fusion reactors had satisfied the demand for the enormous amounts of energy required by these processes.

The new technology from Mars had transformed the industries of Earth in a few decades; indeed, all the nations of Earth rose to levels of affluence that would have been inconceivable, even to the most optimistic, only fifty years previously. The costs of synthetic compounds from Earth's own processing plants had plummeted so far that it became uneconomical for Mars to develop its pilot installations into full-blown industries and it continued to rely on imports.

And now Barling was turning that fact around and using it to imply that Mars could never survive alone. But it was Earth that would never have survived without Mars! Mars had paid its debt. It had earned the right to decide its own destiny, alone and without interference. The Assassin continued to say nothing, but his eyes glared his defiance.

"Oh dear. This really isn't getting us anywhere at all," the colonel conceded. "If we carry on in this fashion, the conversation is going to be very dull and one-sided. Although I'm sure you'd find the story of why Brozlan came to Earth a fascinating one, I've a feeling I might be wasting my breath if I tried to tell it to you. Therefore, I won't attempt it. Instead, I'll get someone else to tell it to you—someone who, I'm sure you will agree, will be able to make it far more interesting." The colonel nodded briefly to the guard, who turned and left the room. Silence descended, to be broken after a few seconds by the colonel whistling tunelessly to himself through his teeth. The Assassin remained expressionless, but deep inside he was becoming troubled.

Something was wrong. An alarm was sounding somewhere deep in his brain. There was something about the Englishman's tone and manner that didn't fit. The Assassin hadn't expected moral reproaches or accusations of criminal outrage; he had already assessed Barling as a professional at this kind of business. But the Englishman's nonchalance was coming through too sincerely to be contrived. If Brozlan's removal had been so important to the Federation, it followed that it should also have constituted a major disaster to the Western Democracies of Earth. The seriousness of the situation should have been detectable in the way that Barling spoke and acted. It wasn't.

The guard returned, ushering in before him somebody who had presumably been waiting outside. For the first time, the Assassin's iron self-control broke down. His eyes bulged, and he gaped across the room as if he had seen a ghost . . . which was not surprising.

"Good morning," said Professor Malleborg Brozlan.

Time seemed to stand still. For once, the wheels in the Assassin's mind ground to a complete halt. No coherent thought formed in his head; no words came to his lips. This was definitely no illusion . . . but there was no doubt that the man he had left at Anderscliff had been totally, absolutely, unquestionably . . . dead.

"Surprised?" The dryness in the colonel's voice did not conceal a faint trace of amusement.

The Assassin closed his eyes and slumped back against the pillows. "How?" he managed, in a voice that was barely more than a whisper. "How is this possible?"

"So—you're hooked, eh? You've got to know, haven't you? You'll listen to what we have to say?"

The Assassin nodded numbly without opening his eyes.

"Good." A pause. "Professor?"

The guard placed a spare chair at the foot of the bed. Brozlan sat down and began speaking. Clearly he had been following the conversation on a monitor outside the room.

"Maybe there were some hotheads among us." He nodded his snowy head slowly. "But the thought of a truly independent Martian civilization . . . free to benefit from all the lessons and mistakes that are written through the history of Earth . . . without having to inherit any of the consequences . . . a chance to begin again, in a way, but this time to get it right. It was a dream that fired the imagination and raised the passions of practically every young man of my generation." The professor shifted his eyes and regarded the figure lying in the bed. "I'm sure you know the kind of thing I mean." Despite himself the Assassin found his gaze drawn irresistibly to the apparition sitting a few feet away from him. Brozlan was real; he was warm; he was alive . . . and talking matter-of-factly to the man who, without a moment's thought or hesitation, had killed him.

"How can this be?" the Assassin whispered again.

Brozlan looked at him coldly, but without overt malevolence. When he spoke again, his voice was sad. "You know nothing of the power that exists on Mars today. You allow yourself to be manipulated by people who are interested only in serving their own ends . . . as I myself was once manipulated."

"I . . . don't understand." In spite of his resolve not to be drawn into conversation, the Assassin was unable to restrain the question. "What power are you talking about?"

"Science!" Brozlan replied, his voice trembling slightly with sudden emotion. "The power of science. The domes of Mars contain some of the finest brains that the human race has ever produced. Think back over the last twenty or thirty years. Think of the discoveries and developments that have come from the laboratories of Mars . . . the whole science of gravitics and the first practicable gravitic drive; economical transmutation of elements on a bulk scale; bulk synthesis of molecular compounds; computer biocommunications; genetic programming . . . the list is long. But do you think for one moment that all the knowledge acquired in those laboratories is public knowledge? Things have happened there, and are still happening, that people have never dreamed of."

The Assassin stared at him incredulously for a few seconds. "Are you saying that you are a reincarnation?" he gasped. "Something like that is really possible?"

Brozlan shook his head briefly. "No, nothing like that. Let me begin at the beginning." He paused to collect his thoughts. "I am a physicist. I specialize in molecular structures. Practically all of the raw materials used in industry today are synthesized from artificially transmuted elements—using techniques originally perfected on Mars." The Assassin nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on the professor. Brozlan did not continue at once, but gestured toward the flask of water that stood on the bedside locker. Carl May filled a glass and passed it to him, while Barling rose from his chair and began pacing to and fro between the bed and the window, his hands clasped loosely behind his back.

"To produce a full range of materials needed on Mars, it was not sufficient to just synthesize unstructured molecules in bulk," Brozlan resumed. "We needed to be able to duplicate, say, the crystal lattice structures of many metal-base compounds, or the polymer chains of organic substances—things that are abundant on Earth but totally lacking back there."

"I'd have thought that that's where you'd use traditional processing methods," the Assassin muttered. He didn't mind talking as long as it was he who was asking the questions. It could only be to his ultimate advantage to know more about what was going on.

"We could have done that." Brozlan nodded. His face creased into a frown. "But we were not satisfied with that idea. We had a virgin planet with no set ways or traditions to uphold. It seemed unsatisfactory simply to follow slavishly the methods that had evolved on Earth. We could have spent fortunes copying all of Earth's industrial complexes on Mars only to find them obsolete before they went into production. We were convinced that there had to be a better way."

The Assassin thought for a moment and looked puzzled. "How?" he asked at last. Brozlan's eyes glinted. He replied:

"Consider any form of component that is used in the construction of a larger assembly . . . the parts of a machine, for example. How is the component made? We take a lump of whatever material we need and cut away from it all the excess to leave the shape that we require. That forms the basis of just about every machining process that is used traditionally."

The Assassin shrugged. "What other way is there?"

"Deposition!" Brozlan peered at him intently. "Instead of cutting material away to leave the part, we deposited material to build the part up!"

"You mean like electrolytic forming? That's not new."

"The idea isn't," Brozlan agreed. "But the way we were doing it was. You see, electrolytic forming works only with certain metals. We were working with every kind of molecule."

"You mean you could build up something out of anything—any substance at all?"

"Exactly! And it didn't have to be all the same kind of molecule. We could mix them together any way we chose. We could produce a solid block that was phophor-bronze at one end and polythene at the other, with a smooth transition from one to the other in between. It opened up a whole new dimension in engineering design possibilities. The whole process was computer-controlled. A designer could develop a program to create any part he wanted out of any material he chose or any combination of materials—molecule by molecule if he really wanted to go down to that level of detail."

"Molecule by molecule . . ." The Assassin's face registered disbelief.

"Nevertheless, it worked," Brozlan told him. "There have been experimental plants on Mars operating for years now, turning out goods that are higher in quality and cheaper to produce than anything that could ever come out of the factories of Earth—even things normally processed from organically derived substances, such as paper, oils, fats, sugars . . ."

"Oil . . . food . . . paper . . . synthesized from transmuted elements? Why have we never heard of such things?"

"Politics." Brozlan sighed. "By that time there was a different brand of thinking among the higher echelons of the Federation government. Ambitious and unscrupulous men were taking over. They did not see these discoveries as potential benefits for all mankind, but only as a means of securing full economic autonomy. They began to see themselves as undisputed rulers over a self-sufficient world. That purpose would be served better if Earth were allowed to lag behind. The Federation authorities assumed tight control over our work and placed a strict security blanket over everything. That was why few people knew about what we were doing. That was also where the movement for Martian independence had it origins. Only a handful of individuals stand to gain, and not in the ways that are popularly believed."

"Interesting, isn't it, Hadley?" the colonel came in, spinning on his heel to face the bed. "But if you think that's hard to swallow, wait until you hear the next bit." He nodded at Brozlan, who continued:

"That was just one aspect of the research going on at that time. Another aspect was Dr. Franz Scheeman's work on structural scanning with neutrino beams. Scheeman developed a method for scanning a material object, inside and out, and for extracting from the transmitted beams a complete encoding of its arrangement of atoms and molecules. It was analogous to the way in which an old TV camera encoded the information contained in a visual scene." Brozlan took a deep breath. "The real breakthrough came when we combined Scheeman's technique with the molecular-deposition process that we have just been talking about."

Silence reigned for a long time while the Assassin digested the professor's words. Then his eyes widened slowly and transfixed Brozlan with a dumbfounded stare. "You're joking . . ." the Assassin breathed at last.

"A solid-object camera!" the colonel confirmed for him. "Yes, Hadley, you've got it. They could scan an object and derive a complete structural code for it. From that code they could generate a computer program to control the deposition process. Result—a perfect analog, a molecule-by-molecule copy of the original. And, of course, if they could make one they could just as easily make as many as they liked. Think of it, Hadley . . . but think of some of the deeper implications, too. What would happen if somebody suddenly introduced that kind of technology into a complex and established economy like Earth's? Suppose that once you'd built the prototype of, say, a domestic infonet terminal"—he pointed to the bedside console—"you could churn out a million of them, all for peanuts. What would happen to the conventional electronics industry then? What about the components industry that supplies it? What would happen to the industries that supply all the parts—the plugs, sockets, metalwork, moldings, and all that kind of thing? And then, what about the service industries that depend on all those in turn . . . office equipment, furnishings, data processing, real estate, and so on through the list? How could they survive if half their customers and half their business went to the wall?" The colonel spread his arms wide in the air. "All finished, Hadley. Total collapse. How could you cope with ninety-five percent of a planet's population being suddenly redundant? How could a global economy, with its roots buried in centuries of steady evolution, survive an upheaval like that?"

"You see," Brozlan added, "that is exactly what the Federation government wanted to do. They wanted to rush into setting up a huge Martian industrial conglomerate based on the new technology, flooding Earth's markets with goods at giveaway prices."

"Earth would have been ruined," Barling interjected. "Or at best would have faced the prospect of existing as a very second-rate entity, dependent on a new rising star."

The Assassin, however, was not satisfied. "People can always adjust to innovations," he said. "You can't stop progress. What about the Industrial Revolution in England in the nineteenth century, or the way that three quarters of the world jumped straight out of feudal economies into the atomic age in the fifty years after World War Two? Or the Communications Revolution across the West? They all caused problems in their time, but people learned to live with the changes, and ended up better off as a result."

"But those things take time, Hadley," Barling answered. "You're right—people can adjust to anything, given time." He made an imploring gesture in the air again. "But that was the one thing the Federation hotheads weren't prepared to allow. They didn't need it. Martian society was small and flexible. Mars could have absorbed the new technology and thrived within a generation; Earth couldn't. Relatively speaking, Earth would have been thrown back into the Dark Ages overnight.

"Fortunately, some of the more levelheaded scientists around at the time, including Brozlan here, talked them out of it. They argued that Earth would have gone all the way to unleashing an all-out interplanetary war rather than let it happen. With the balance of things as it was then, Mars wouldn't have lasted a week." The colonel scowled. "We would have, too," he added with a growl.

Brozlan went on. "For a long time we developed the duplication process in secret, striving to improve its resolution further. After ten years or so, we reached a point where we could consider seriously an experiment that we had conceived right at the beginning—to produce an analog of a living organism!"

"How about that, Hadley?" the colonel inquired quietly. "Interesting?"

The Assassin stared back at the scientists in mute incredulity. Nobody spoke for a long time.

"That's preposterous . . ." the Assassin whispered, but the expression on Brozlan's face stifled any further words.

The professor nodded his head solemnly. "We refined the process so much, you see, that we could duplicate not only the spatial arrangement of the molecules in an organism, but also the patterns of electrical activity in its nervous system. We could reproduce, in the copy, all the behavioral habits and memorized information that had been acquired in the lifetime of the original—in other words, all those phenomena which in higher forms of life we term `intelligence' and `memory.' We could create an analog of a living organism," Brozlan continued, "that was itself living! The analogs that we created were indistinguishable from the originals by any test that we could devise. We produced analog rats that could readily negotiate a maze that their originals had needed weeks of effort to learn . . . analog dogs that exhibited the same reflexes that we had conditioned into their originals. From the data collected in such experiments, it soon became obvious that there was no reason why the same thing would not work with a human being."

Impossible thoughts that were already forming in the Assassin's head focused suddenly into clarity. His eyes had frozen into a stunned stare directed straight at the figure seated at the foot of his bed. Before he could form any words, the colonel spoke again.

"Think about that, Hadley! You can put a person through a harmless scanning process and derive a code that specifies everything about him uniquely—physically and mentally. You can store that code away in a computer, and then use it to generate an identical analog of him. But why stop at one? You could make as many as you like! If what we talked about before was alarming, then what about this?"

He allowed a few seconds for his words to sink in, then went on. "They had some brilliant brains on Mars all right. But suddenly there was no reason why they should have to be content with just some; now they could mass-produce them!" Barling rested his hands on the back of his chair and leaned forward to peer at the Assassin intently. "What could have been achieved in the twentieth century with a thousand Albert Einsteins?

"How would you fight a war with an enemy that can store his army away in a data bank and simply re-create it every time you wipe it out? Come to that, why should he wait until you'd wiped it out at all? He could make sure you didn't by making his army twice as big to start with . . . or ten times as big . . . or any number you like. What sort of strategy would make sense any more? It all gets crazy.

"Or what about life-insurance companies? Instead of paying out a cash benefit to compensate the bereaved for losing somebody, they could offer an analog to replace him. What kind of premium would they charge for that service?"

The Assassin gaped from Barling to Brozlan and back again as he shrugged to keep pace with it all. This was too much.

"I don't believe all this," he protested. "It's some kind of trick."

"It most certainly is not, I assure you," Barling replied evenly. He pointed toward Brozlan. "Isn't that enough proof for you?"

The Assassin followed the colonel's finger with his eyes and subsided back into silence.

"The things that Colonel Barling has just mentioned are just examples," Brozlan said. "It takes little imagination to realize what chaos could be let loose. The whole of civilized living as we know it would be turned upside down."

"Yes, exactly," Barling agreed.

"And consider this, Hadley—the code that controls the duplication process can be transmitted from anywhere to anywhere by ordinary telecommunications methods. Hence, the part of the machine that scans the original and the part that manufactures the analog don't have to be in the same place. You could send anybody anywhere, instantly! It would be the old science-fiction dream come true, but with a difference—you'd still be left with the original at the sending end." He paused and took in the Assassin's amazement.

"I assure you I'm not joking, Hadley. Never mind economic problems now. How would you cope with the social, moral, and administrative anarchy that would follow if this kind of thing ever got loose? How could anybody stay sane in a world that was proliferating dozens of everybody? That's not technical progress, it's an explosion!" He paused and looked down.

The other, still stupefied, shook his head weakly. "I am a Martian," he said. "You can't stop things like that, explosion or not. Man will always find answers. It's his nature."

"Oh, we can think of answers," the Englishman returned breezily. "Take that instant travel thing I just mentioned, for example. It would be an ideal way to send somebody to Mars or somewhere in a couple of seconds flat . . . if it weren't for the fact that you'd be stuck with two of him afterward—one here and one there. And things would get even worse if the one there decided to come back again the same way. So, why not simply arrange for the transmitting end to destroy the original? After all, the effect as far as the rest of the universe was concerned would be that he just `went' from here to there, wouldn't it?"

The Assassin shrugged. "Perhaps."

The colonel rubbed the palms of his hands together and smiled faintly. "Ah . . . But that would surely be murder, Hadley," he replied. "Our legal and moral system wouldn't allow it. Let me illustrate the point by asking a simple question. Suppose I were to say that we were going to send you through a system like that, and that in the very near future you were going to walk out of the receiving end in, say, Paris. Now, how would you feel about the idea? Would you be happy about it?" He paused and watched the change in expression on the Assassin's face. "Mmm . . . no . . . I thought not. The fact that another individual who happened to look and think like you had come into existence somewhere else wouldn't really be of interest, would it? You would still be dead. You can't really accept that there'd be any sense of continuity with your analog, can you? It just feels wrong—true?"

Again the Assassin did not reply, but the look in his eyes was enough. Barling nodded but still took the point further. "See, it wouldn't work. But suppose I were to argue that all we would have done would be to speed up slightly something that happens naturally anyway. Every molecule in your body will be replaced eventually by the normal processes of cell regeneration; the Hadley that will exist in six months' time won't contain one atom of the person lying in that bed right now. So why should you feel any less of a sense of continuity with your synthetic analog than you feel with the `natural analog' that will be you six months from now? Logically there is no difference. The two processes are the same, but one takes a little longer than the other." The colonel allowed the proposition time to register, then suggested: "But nevertheless something's wrong. The argument wouldn't convince you—right?"

"But one day maybe—" the Assassin began, but Barling cut him off.

"Ah—one day, Hadley, perhaps . . . but that's another matter. As you say, man will always find answers. Maybe some day things like that might be accepted as perfectly normal—as normal as embryonic genetic adjustments or artificially grown limbs seem to us today. Maybe someday we'll populate another star system by simply beaming the information to generate a few thousand analogs out to receiving equipment that has already been sent on ahead. Maybe someday we'll send people around the world as easily as we send messages through the infonet. It might become standard practice to back everybody up in data banks so that nobody need be permanently lost at all." Barling spread his arms appealingly. "But not today, Hadley—not in our lifetime. Good God, man, it will take fifty years at least just to plan how to use that kind of thing intelligently. We couldn't just let it loose overnight without any preparation at all."

"You see, that is precisely what the Federation was proposing to do," Brozlan supplied, sitting forward in his chair. "We managed to talk them out of doing anything rash the first time, but after this there was no way of making them listen. Mars was about to break free and find its own destiny. They saw themselves as potential gods—able to create at will and, in a sense, immortal. None of Earth's traditional advantages mattered any more: its military superiority, economic strength, huge population, and abundance of resources . . . all of them counted for nothing. Mars would begin a new era of civilization, and Earth would pale into insignificance in its shadow."

"And you—a Martian—didn't want this?" The Assassin seemed unable to comprehend.

Brozlan shook his head slowly. "I was older by then. I saw the future not in terms of Earth or Mars, but of mankind. I and many of my colleagues decided that if, by this new knowledge that we had discovered, man was to elevate himself to godliness, then he would do so united as one race. This new power would not be used for something that would have amounted to war. We agreed, therefore, that, before the imbalance became any greater, we would bring the new sciences to Earth."

"And so you defected," the Assassin completed for him, nodding.

Brozlan hesitated for an unnaturally long time before replying. "Yes and no," he said at last. The Assassin looked puzzled.

"By that time I was forced to work under conditions of intense and constant surveillance by Federation security. Straightforward defection would have been impossible. So . . ." He took a deep breath. ". . . One of me remained on Mars as a decoy; the other one of me came to Earth."

"Brozlan created an analog of himself," Barling confirmed. "Two years ago one came here while the other stayed there. For reasons he won't go into, he's never told us which was which. Because there was still a Brozlan working on Mars, it took the Federation over a year to find out what had happened."

The Assassin was still confused. He had concluded already that the analog-generation process described by Brozlan was the explanation for the scientist's "reincarnation." But the account that he had just heard went nowhere toward answering the immediate question. One Brozlan was surely dead. The other Brozlan was just as surely still on Mars. So who was the figure sitting at the foot of the bed? He looked from Brozlan to Barling, but before he could utter any words the Englishman told him:

"As insurance, whichever of the two it was that came to Earth brought with him a copy of the program that had been used to generate the analog. Thus, once we had built the equipment at Anderscliff, we would be able to regenerate Brozlan if anything happened to him. Once a week he went through the scanning process to update the program with his latest memory patterns and so on. Hence, if we ever had to use the program, it would only be a week out of date at the most. He must have guessed that once the Federation had figured out the situation they'd stop at nothing to get rid of him . . . as you, Hadley my friend, very well know."

Brozlan lifted his chin and hooked his collar down with his finger to reveal the side of his neck. "No scar, you see," he said. "Yes—I am an analog, generated from the stored program at Anderscliff after you got to the Brozlan who arrived from Mars."

"Don't worry about losing control of your senses or anything like that, old chap," the colonel advised reassuringly. "The Brozlan that you left behind was very dead all right." He smiled wryly and added, "But it wouldn't do you any good to have a crack at this one, too. We'd simply make another one."

The Assassin sank back and closed his eyes as the full meaning of it all seeped slowly into his mind. Futile. The whole mission had been futile. The greatest piece of computer espionage in history—all for nothing.

He lay in silence for a long time. And then his mouth contorted into a faint smile. His chest began to heave with suppressed laughter. He opened his eyes and looked up at the Englishman. "But you've lost, Arthur, old chap," he mimicked in barely more than a whisper. "Don't you see—the Federation knows now that the mission has failed. They'll deduce that Brozlan is still working for Earth and that very soon Earth will catch up in technology. That means that the Federation will be forced to make its move now—while the gap is widest and in their favor—just the opposite of what you want. Earth needs time, Arthur—time to develop the ways of applying Brozlan's know-how. Once Earth has closed the gap, its traditional advantages will tilt the balance and count for something again. Given technical equality, Mars would have to stay in line and stay friendly. Earth could blow it out of the solar system if it had to, and lose nothing." The Assassin laughed again, this time out loud.

"Know what you should have done? You shouldn't have told me any of this. You should have let me escape somehow, still thinking that my mission had succeeded . . . I'd have gone back to Mars and given them a wrong report. Then, afterward, you could have quietly regenerated Brozlan and carried on. That way the Federation would have believed that they had a monopoly and as much time as they liked to set things up. By the time they found out differently, it would have been too late: Earth would have had the time it needed to make itself invincible." The Assassin shook his head in mock sympathy. "That, Arthur, is what you should have done."

The colonel looked down at him and stroked his mustache pensively. When he spoke, his tone was soft and mildly reproaching. "But, my dear Hadley, that's precisely what we did do."

The Assassin's face registered confusion and non-

comprehension.

"I must apologize," the colonel said. "I haven't quite told you everything yet." He swiveled the bedside infonet terminal around so that the screen was facing the Assassin, and keyed in a sequence of commands. "Here are some movie records from our files that I think you'll find answer your questions." The screen came to life to show a row of airmobiles in a parking area.

"Recognize it?" the colonel asked casually. "It's at Kansas City International Airport. We found out you were going there by interrogating the traffic control net to see what designation you'd logged in. We simply had one of our agents waiting on every level to see where you went after you landed. Here you come now—there—in the gray coat. Telephoto shot from five rows back."

The Assassin's bewilderment increased as he watched the image of himself walk along to one of the vehicles, which he recognized, retrieve the keys from up inside the undercarriage recess, climb in, and depart.

"It didn't take long, of course, for us to trace that that vehicle had been hired out by a Paul Langley at Roosevelt Spaceport," the colonel commented. "From there on it was just routine to establish how Langley arrived from Mars and that he was booked on a flight to London and from there back to Mars via Anglia Spaceport, England.

"British security agents watched you check through the boarding gate for the shuttle up from Anglia—just to make sure there were no hitches. We even had somebody up on the transfer satellite to make sure you didn't miss your ship out to Mars. There . . ." Barling touched another button, and the picture changed to show a short line of people standing at a check-in gate. "Passengers embarking for Flight 927 to Mars. There you are again—fourth from the front. The ship left on schedule, and that was the last we saw of you, or should I say of Paul Langley." He snapped off the screen and regarded the Assassin challengingly.

The Assassin shook his head wildly from side to side. "But—those pictures—I never did those things. I'm here!"

The Englishman frowned and made a clicking noise with his tongue. "Oh dear, you disappoint me, Hadley. Hasn't it dawned on you yet? Don't you realize? When you were captured, you were knocked out cold, weren't you? You've been out for quite some time now. I'm afraid that during that time we took something of a liberty. . . ."

A look of horror spread across the Assassin's face.

"Ah! I think you've cottoned on at last." The colonel nodded approvingly. "Yes—you've got it. You're not the real Hadley—the one who arrived from Mars. That one you've just been looking at on the screen was the real one. You're an analog of him.

"He woke up remembering exactly the same as you did—everything that happened right up until he was knocked out on the roof at Anderscliff; that, of course, included the successful elimination of Brozlan. Unlike you, however, he managed to escape. Quite extraordinary, that—wouldn't have thought our security could be so lax. Actually his escape was, shall we say, contrived, but he wasn't to know that. The rest you know. I think Earth has bought the time it needs."

The Assassin had been seized by something akin to acute mental shock. His eyes bulged, and his fingers clawed at the sheets. "But why?" he croaked. Perspiration showed on his forehead. "Why all this?"

"I explained it all at the beginning," the colonel replied in unruffled tones. "You can help us with so many things we'd like to know. We'd like to know a lot more about an organization that can crack one of our top-security computer systems . . . where they got the bogus information from to put in those files . . . how they knew the pass codes . . . you know the kind of thing, Hadley. There's lots more."

"No." The Assassin clenched his teeth grimly. "I am still a Martian. You can expect no help from me."

"Oh dear, Hadley." The colonel shook his head and sighed. "Look, how can I put this?" He paused as if considering how to phrase a delicate matter. "There really is no point at all in being obstinate. Everybody has his weakness. Some people crack up when things get unpleasant; others respond to the friendly approach. Every man can be bought for a price of some kind: money, women, a life of luxury without worries. . . . There's always something. The big problem that interrogators have had to contend with in the past has been that they've had only one subject to work with. It was always too easy to ruin any chance of the right approach working by trying the wrong ones first." The Englishman's eyes twinkled.

"But we don't have that problem with you, do we, Hadley? We can go back to the beginning as often as we like by simply generating another of you from the same program that we used to generate you. We're bound to succeed eventually. Maybe we'll learn a little bit from one Hadley, a little bit more from another. . . . Sooner or later we'll know all we need to."

He paused as if struck by a sudden, amusing thought. "Come to think of it, you've no way of knowing if you're the first Hadley at all, have you . . . or the only one? We could have ten Hadleys in this building right now for all you know. That day at Anderscliff might have been years ago now, mightn't it?

"Now, as I'm sure you understand, we are very busy people, and we'd much rather spend our time talking constructively to a sensible Hadley than wasting our time with one that chose to be difficult. It's up to you to decide which you are going to be. It really doesn't make a lot of difference to us; but, as I'm sure you will already have worked out for yourself, it could make an awful lot of difference to you."

A moan escaped the Assassin's lips as he slumped back against the pillows. He had been rigorously trained to understand and counter every situation of interrogation in the book. He knew all the tricks.

But they'd never thought of this . . . nothing like this. . . .

 

 

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