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forty-six

They passed the Institute of Technology, and soon were on the familiar Northwest Expressway, I-75, heading back in the direction of the southern Appalachian fringe.

Almost thirty minutes went by before the paralysis that had seized Ashling's mind began to wear off. The suddenness and violence of the assault had left him stunned. Now, as fragments of his thinking processes started coming -together again, the numbness that had protected him gave way to all-consuming despair.

After all the planning and preparations, the growing nervous tension that had been tormenting him for weeks, and actually to have pulled it off it seemed, without leaving a trace. . . . Now this. Even Pipeline, his last hope, which he had come to regard as so professional and capable, to whom he entrusted himself completely . . . before his eyes, in seconds, reduced to impotence and helplessness. What hope could he have now?

As he drove, staring rigidly ahead, tight-lipped and blank-faced, he could feel in his chest the imminence of another attack. He realized then that even if these last events hadn't happened, he'd been deluding himself anyway. He would never have survived the stresses of getting out of the Consolidation and going offplanet. And with these latest developments, he was beginning to wonder if he would even survive tonight. A part of him that he couldn't ignore was already seriously doubting it.

He needed medical help, and quickly; there was no alternative but to get back to Pearse. And what then? He would never be up to another escape bid. And after this, the only prospect that the future held was to be kept there under virtual house arrest. Living as a captive, forced to work for a regime that he now had no hesitation of condemning as decayed and corrupt. Working to contribute to what further misapplications of science? For what else did this transformation of Demiro into something ruthless and inhuman mean? Ashling had found out about the covert political objectives of the project, but here, it seemed, was something else, even more sinister and repugnant, and he had never suspected.

No.

Whatever the consequences, he would have no part of it, he resolved. At several points he toyed with the thought of simply steering the car off the road and ending it right there for both of them. But he didn't, because that would only have eliminated whatever opportunity might lie ahead for him to do something to stop all of it, entirely. Wasn't it he, more than anyone, who had made it possible in the first place, after all?

Beside him, Gordon remained alert, pistol in hand. After a while he began passing the time by taunting Ashling mercilessly.

"I ought to thank you, I know, but I'm afraid they didn't make me that way. I don't thank anyone because I don't need anyone. Know why? Because I'm more than any of you could become in a lifetime. It's called 'superiority.' Being ashamed to claim it is a weakness, and I don't suffer from it. I don't suffer from any of them."

Ashling stared at the road unrolling itself ahead, and said nothing.

"So you'll go back, and be nothing and timid, because that's what the rest of you are. That's what you're made for. I was made for something else: living. Living all of it, to the full. I like killing people, do you know that? Want to know why? Because killing them makes me more alive. That's something that you could never understand. You couldn't understand because you're not alive. Not fully. You never have been. That's why the weak think life is so precious: it's something that they desperately want, but can't have. It's natural to value what you can't have, isn't it? Come on, you tell me. You're the smart scientist. What's the matter? Does it offend your precious pride to even talk?"

They turned off the main highway onto the approach road to Pearse. Gordon waved him onward when he -began slowing at the main gate. "No, not that one. Farther around."

Ashling knew that there was a separate section known as the Permanent Quarters Annex, where some officers and high-clearance personnel resided. He himself was housed in a billet section inside the main establishment compound, and had never had reason to visit the Annex personally before.

It had its own gate and guardpost at the end of a road leading in from the perimeter road, but security was less stringent than at the regular entrances. From its position relative to the rest of the layout, Ashling estimated that it backed onto the experimental wing inside the Restricted Zone, which he knew from his work inside.

Past the guardpost, they drove across a dark yard with parked vehicles, and then around a projecting building to enter what seemed to be, as far as Ashling could make out in the shadows between the widely spaced lamps, one of several interconnecting enclosures of chalets and apartment units jumbled together among screening clumps of foliage and trees.

"That way," Gordon said, waving. "Park next to that truck."

What happened then was completely out of Ashling's conscious control. The pickup that Gordon had indicated was parked at the limit of the glow from one of the lamps, nose to the curb. In the back it was carrying several lengths of thick piping, four inches or so in diameter, lashed -together and projecting back from the tail. As Ashling came toward it, he registered subconsciously that all was dark and still, with nobody around.

Perhaps it was an expression of a hopelessness that made him simply not care anymore. Maybe it was his accumulated emotions, now fermented into hatred. Instead of parking alongside the pickup, he accelerated at the last moment and ran the car straight at the projecting pipes to drive them through the windshield, right in front of Gordon's head.

Nine hundred ninety-nine men in a thousand would have died right then. Gordon's reflexes, however, were all but instantaneous, and he managed to duck—but not without cracking the side of his head on the dash, and in the process stunning himself for one vital fraction of a second. The pistol dropped from his fingers, and Ashling, still not -really aware of what he was doing, grabbed it and shot Gordon in the neck, just below the ear. Without thinking or considering anything, he started the motor again, backed the car off the impaling pipes, and eased it up alongside the truck. Then he sat numbly in the darkness, waiting for retribution to come.

But none did. The court remained deserted; no light or sound came from the buildings around.

Ashling stared disbelievingly at Gordon's inert form, slumped back in the passenger seat, shards of windshield glass glinting in the light from the lamps outside. He felt himself turning cold and starting to shake uncontrollably. His chest pounded, with searing pains tearing through him at every beat. He waited, fully expecting a terminal attack right then, but gradually the feeling eased. He got out unsteadily.

There was a path, leading to several steps going up between shrubs and a grassy mound to a covered walkway. The walkway brought him to a door of what seemed to be one of the residential units. There was no sign of light from inside. Ashling explored around but could find no other door nearby. He decided that this had to be where Gordon had been bringing them. Presumably it was where he stayed. From its location, Ashling wouldn't have been surprised if it connected on the inside, somehow, through the Restricted Zone boundary and into the experimental wing. So that was how Gordon had intended to get him inside. Did that mean that whatever had happened to Demiro was too secret for its subjects to be allowed to go in and out through main-gate security.

Or too unofficial, perhaps?

But whatever the answer to that, it was the only available place to hide Gordon, and that was the uppermost concern in Ashling's mind right now.

He went back to the car and returned with the keys that Gordon had given him. After some trial and error, the door opened. Ashling stepped inside, closed the door behind him, drew the drapes across the single window facing out frontward, and turned on the lights.

It was stark, harsh, brutal in its assault on eye and sensibilities; a visual percussion of black and white, metal and glass, porcelain and leather; acute, angular forms, unrelieved by warmth, curve, or any concession to softness. Yes, Ashling decided, looking around stonily, there could be no mistaking it. If that was what they had turned Demiro into, this was where he would live.

He checked quickly around the remainder of the place: bedroom, kitchen and breakfast area, and bathroom, all echoing the same theme. It was deserted. He paused in the bathroom to gulp down a pill and stare at himself in the mirror, asking himself what he thought he was doing. Then he went back to the car and, with a lot of puffing and heaving, moved Gordon inside and dumped him in the recliner, after which he went back for their briefcases. Mira-culously, nobody had been roused. He closed the door again, then slumped down on the couch and stared at Gordon's inert form while he considered what to do next.

Going back to the Hyatt was out of the question. For all he knew, the whole Pipeline operation could have been blown, and he might be walking straight back into a trap.

Besides, what would be the point? He was already a dead man. He could feel it, a dull, heavy lethargy taking hold deep inside, like cold creeping up into a house that has lost its heating. Why consider anything?

He stared again at the motionless figure in the recliner, Demiro, who now called himself Gordon. As far as Ashling was aware, the first phase of the project had been completed months ago and the volunteers sent back. So what was Demiro doing here still? . . . He remembered Demiro from their occasional contacts: easygoing, personable, unconvinced by most of the propaganda but too intelligent to make an issue of it, popular with everyone. The cold, precise, purpose-built combat machine that had appeared in the Hyatt and demolished three guards in virtually as many seconds was somebody else.

The phrase that had come to mind repeated itself again in Ashling's head: purpose-built.

Was that what Nordens had been doing? Suddenly, lots of things that had been happening during the previous few months came together and made sense. Long calculations and pattern-manipulation algorithms that Nordens had wanted, that went far beyond anything needed for the limited transfers called for by the initial specifications. New symbolic syntaxes for manipulating entire groups of system pathways. An entire macrofunction transform calculus.

They had created a synthetic pseudo-personality. Ashling swallowed dryly as all the sinister implications unfolded in his mind.

And then he sat up slowly in his chair as a new possibility dawned on him. Suddenly his eyes, only a moment ago dulled by despair, were bright—bright from the thought of the sheer audacity of it. His chest was thumping rapidly again, but this time from excitement.

He had long ago cracked the access codes into Nordens's private sectors of the computer system. Therefore he could retrieve all those personality-synthesis and transfer routines that Nordens had been developing. And if so, maybe he could take it a step further.

Maybe he could transfer a complete set of patterns defining himself into Gordon!

He licked his lips as he thought about it. What was there to lose, after all? He was as good as dead if he did nothing. And even if that was not the case, he could never have survived the stresses of getting himself out to the Offworld independencies to place his work at the disposal of the free scientists out there, such as Ulkanov—which was his only real goal now.

No, he could never get there. He accepted that now. Or rather, his body couldn't. But Gordon's could!

He got up and explored the apartment again. At the back he found what he was looking for: an ordinary-looking door that, when opened, revealed a second, heavy-duty door leading in the direction of where he estimated the Restricted Zone perimeter and the experimental wing to be. It was locked of course, and one of Gordon's keys seemed to fit. But there was a second lock too, and the door remained unmovable. So close, yet thwarted. Ashling came back into the living room and looked around frantically. The desk! He went over to it and went through the drawers. In a box in one of them he found more keys. One of them was similar to the one that had fitted the door—a reasonable precaution: one key kept on Gordon's person, the other in a different place. Ashling hurried back and tried both keys simultaneously. The door opened.

There was a short, bare corridor leading to a second door. Beyond that, Ashling found himself in the familiar lab area. It was late Saturday night; nobody was about. He went back into the apartment and retrieved from his briefcase one of the sheets that he had taken with him, giving the access codes into Nordens's filing system. Then he went back through to the labs, activated a terminal in one of the computer rooms, and began picking his way in.

An hour and a half later, Ashling sat back tiredly, yet intrigued. His human and ethical side apart, Nordens had greater scientific capabilities than Ashling had given him credit for. He had delved more deeply into the problems of total personality integration than Ashling had even contemplated, solved a lot of the problems, and in some cases hit upon methods that Ashling had to concede were highly innovative and effective. There was a lot that Ashling couldn't be sure of, and of course his biggest hazard was lack of time. . . . But it seemed, basically, that with a bit of hasty improvisation and more than his due share of luck, Nordens had furnished him the tools to do the job.

There was a further problem, but Ashling had been turning that over as he worked, and now thought he had a solution.

It was all very well to think of re-creating himself in Gordon's body, and using that to take him across to the FER and then offplanet. But Ashling could never hope to pass himself off as Gordon—what did he know about violence and aggression, and the rest of the world that Gordon had been engineered to function in? But suppose that he could deactivate his own, implanted Ashling personality temporarily, letting Gordon resume functioning as himself, and none the wiser. What better cover could he ask for than that?

If he could somehow contrive for Gordon to be sent off along that very route on an official mission, Gordon would travel with the aid of all the permits, foreign cooperation, and other resources that would be available to an agent of the state, but which Ashling as himself could never enjoy. The government would get him there more surely than Pipeline could ever hope to. Yes, he rather liked the thought of that, Ashling decided. He liked the thought of that a lot.

By the time he had his plans finalized, it was close to midnight. He moved Gordon through into the laboratory area and coupled him into the transfer machine. Then, working feverishly and praying that he hadn't made any major errors in his haste, he used one of the auxiliary scanners to read the layers of superposed connectivity functions that had been accumulating throughout life to form the essence of his being, and assembled them all into superconvoluted megaplex code, using the facilities that Nordens had developed. As far as he could tell, it was complete. The machine now contained a full representation of Ashling's persona, coupled with transform parameters that would activate an emulation of it in Gordon's particular neural configuration.

He then added two further functions.

First, he set up an inhibiting code that would deactivate the implanted Ashling personality during the first period of natural sleep to occur after completion of the implanting process. Thus, Gordon would recover consciousness tonight as Ashling, which would keep Ashling in control to get his transferred self—in Gordon's body—away, dispose of Ashling's own body, which didn't feel as if it had much longer to go, and set in motion the remainder of his plan. But after going to sleep tomorrow night, Gordon would awaken as Gordon once again, with no knowledge that he was carrying another personality suppressed below his level of awareness.

Second, for the plan to work, Gordon would need to awake unsuspicious that anything abnormal had taken place. That meant that he couldn't be allowed to remember anything about the most recent events of this evening: taking Ashling from the Hyatt, the drive back to Pearse, Ashling's shooting him in the car when they arrived. To achieve that, Ashling erased the most recent parts of Gordon's memory, back to the time when he was still in the room at the Hyatt, having dealt with the three Pipeline guards. There was no way to change that event, and eliminating the memory of it would serve no purpose. True, there would be a discontinuity in Gordon's recollections, but there was nothing to be done about that. Given the human capacity for inventiveness, Gordon would doubtless fabricate his own rationalization.

When they were leaving the hotel room, a program had just begun on the TV about tropical insects, Ashling recalled. He checked the time of that from the published schedule, and erased Gordon's memories back to then.

The next problem was to arrange for Gordon to be sent offplanet. A promising way of achieving that would be to make it appear that Ashling himself was heading that way, and hope they would send Gordon in pursuit. In fact, if a suitable trail of clues could be set up, it might be possible to lead Gordon all the way to Andre Ulkanov's laboratory at Copernicus, on Luna, which was where Ashling wanted to go. And Andre would be the ideal person to reactivate Ashling when Gordon obligingly got him there.

But that side of things could wait until Ashling knew whether the copying of himself into Gordon had been successful or not.

He made a final check over the machine settings and couplings to the probes around Gordon's head, and entered the code to commence the process. Then he sank down in a chair in the next room to wait. Now that the need for concentrated effort was over, he could feel himself fading rapidly. He grew weaker, his arms dropped over the sides of the chair, and he lost consciousness.

 

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