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twenty-two

Josef said they had to wait for more Pipeline people to join them before they could make any further plans. These people had some distance to travel, so it would take time. Jarrow thought it probable that they were involved in the scheme to extract Ashling, and would therefore be coming up from Atlanta, but it didn't seem the place or time to be inquisitive.

He and Rita were given rooms to use for the night, which like the rest of the house were bare and on the drab side, but adequate. Although they weren't captives as such, Josef made it plain that they were to stay out of sight and not go wandering around the neighborhood—which was fine by both of them, in any case. Jarrow had no incentive to go anywhere else, and Rita was reluctant to go back to her apartment. Susan went out to do some shopping, returning with changes of clothes for both of them. There were books to read, a collection of movies, and the evening passed with pleasant uneventfulness.

The tensions of the past twenty-four hours must have exhausted both of them more than they realized, for Josef and his companions were all up and about and had eaten by the time Jarrow and Rita surfaced. They had a late breakfast alone together in the kitchen.

"You mightn't believe it, but I wanted to be a biochemist once," Rita said over the table. "I even started a degree. But it got to be disheartening. Everybody these days seems to think that anything in that line has to be involved with engineering viruses that might escape, or putting things into food that cause cancer—which is stupid anyway, because natural pesticides that plants make themselves are thousands of times stronger. We've got so many laws now protecting the rights of malaria viruses that making a career fighting disease seemed pointless."

"Oh, come on. Aren't you exaggerating?" Jarrow said.

"Am I? There are people dying today from malaria and viral encephalitis in California. And don't tell me I read too many campus propaganda sheets, because I had a cousin who was one of them. Things like that were wiped out once in this country." Rita tossed salt liberally over her plate of eggs, hash browns, and bacon and poured a glass of orange juice. "So, I went and worked for a company that made coolants for power transformers. Then they got banned, the owner closed down, sold everything, and moved out to Malaysia." She paused, looking oddly at Jarrow as the sight of him across the breakfast table triggered old memories. "Know what I'd really like to do?"

"What?" he asked.

"We used to talk about it: run a coffee shop. Have a family and run a coffee shop. I don't know why, especially. I think maybe it's the thought of having lots of people stopping by, who you'd get to know and never be short of friends. I just like people, I guess. I hate all these restrictions, as if humans were pollution or something. It shouldn't be that way."

"Well, now, I'm not so sure," Jarrow replied. "You have to admit that overpopulation is a real problem. And if the Southern World and the FER states don't fall into line pretty soon, it's going to turn into a real catastrophe."

Rita shook her head. "I don't believe it. . . . Oh, sure, I agree there are places that have got local problems. But most of the world's still empty. People produce more than they use—at least they can, if they're let. They solve problems. Having more of them around ought to make things better, not worse."

"Surely it's elementary," Jarrow said, feeling more like a teacher for the moment. "More people use up more resources. Therefore they'll run out sooner."

"But they make resources too," Rita objected. "Foxes and people both eat chickens. With foxes it means less chickens, but with people you get more chickens. See what I mean? It's the same with everything else." She stared down at the muesli and fruit on his plate and smiled faintly to herself.

"What's funny?" Jarrow asked.

"Oh, I'm sorry. . . . It just seems strange to watch you—sorry, but I can't help thinking of Tony—eating that kind of food. He was always meat, potatoes, and everything fried."

Jarrow maintained a cold, defensive look. "Why? Didn't he believe in keeping healthy?"

"Look," Rita said, gesturing at him generally. "How does it feel? Looks okay to me. From the way you talk, it sounds as if you're the one who had problems. He didn't believe any of that garbage. I don't either."

"It's all been scientifically proved," Jarrow assured her loftily.

Rita snorted. "Stuff a rat till it bursts, then wonder why it got sick? You don't call that science. It'd be like testing a piano with a sledgehammer and saying it's equal to ten years of playing. I mean, you just can't do that. . . . Those people aren't scientists, not real scientists. They're paid propaganda hacks. They start out with the answers they want to prove. Science doesn't work like that."

It seemed they were about to get into another of their arguments, when Josef came into the room and rescued the situation. "Oh, you're still eating," he said.

"That's okay. What is it?" Jarrow answered.

"I thought you'd like to know, Rita's place is still under surveillance by federal security agents," he informed them. Which meant they had done the right thing at Sandy and Bruce's by deciding not to risk going back there. All the same, Sandy and Bruce would no doubt be wondering what had happened to them, Jarrow thought. The same thing evidently occurred to Rita.

"Could I call the people that we stayed with, just to let them know we're okay?" she asked, looking at Josef. There was a phone upstairs somewhere that Jarrow and Rita didn't have ready access to, doubtless intentionally. They hadn't seen any reason to disclose which of the names, from the list of possibilities that the Pipeline people had compiled and called, they had sought refuge with after fleeing the apartment, and Josef hadn't asked them.

"The number could have been tagged," Josef cautioned. "If we were able to come up with some likely guesses, so could the FSS."

"I wasn't going to call them direct," Rita told him. "There's another friend who'll pass it on," meaning Eric.

Josef smiled. "I see you're starting to think like a professional. We'll end up recruiting you yet. Very well. Come this way." He glanced at Jarrow. "Excuse us for a moment."

"Go ahead."

Josef and Rita left the room. Jarrow finished his meal, rose, and sauntered back into the living room. Kay was alone by the woodstove, pondering over her notes. She had spent a lot of time the day before talking to him about his background and views, and made innumerable trips up and down the stairs, calling and taking calls from mysterious people, probably the ones who were on their way.

"Feeling better?" she asked, glancing up.

"Much."

"That's good."

He moved over toward the warmth and ran an eye over the files and papers strewn around her. "Are we getting anywhere?"

"Maybe," Kay said. She put down the pad she'd been jotting in and sat back. "The Jarrow side of all this makes sense. It's the Gordon part that doesn't fit."

"How come?"

"We know that the primary object of Southside was political reprogramming, not military training. And Tony Demiro would have been an ideal test subject—deep-rooted, anti-Establishment radicalism like his would be exactly the kind of thing they'd want to see if they could change. But not only that. He was an orphan, without close family connections, who joined the Army basically to have something to belong to. What was going on at Pearse was a shady, underhanded business. . . . You see what I'm getting at. If anything went wrong, he could quietly be made to disappear without fuss and complications—as in fact seems to have happened."

Jarrow sat down slowly in one of the other chairs. That much made sense, certainly. "Yes, I see."

"And that's where you come into it," Kay said.

He didn't see how immediately. "Go on," he said.

Kay made a tossing motion with her fingers. "The new patterns that were implanted had to be extracted from a suitable source." She gestured toward Jarrow briefly. "Well, wouldn't Richard Jarrow, the respectable, conservative schoolteacher—I'm not being impolite or offensive, am I? Is that how you'd describe yourself?"

"Well, yes, I can't say I'd disagree," Jarrow said, not really seeing what there was to be impolite or offensive about in that.

"Wouldn't somebody like you have been the perfect original for the kinds of patterns they'd need to reprogram somebody like Demiro?" Kay completed.

Jarrow blinked. Now that she had spelled it out, it seemed so obvious. "Of course," he murmured. "Of course. That's what Valdheim was doing, wasn't it?"

"Yes. That whole setup was a fake. Why would the Health Service use private practices to test a new technique? They've got enough places of their own, which they have far more control over. In any case, they're trying to phase out private practice, not encourage it."

Jarrow put a hand to his brow and shook his head as he strove to piece together what that meant. "So what are you saying?" he asked finally. "That something went wrong. Instead of just extracting the . . . the codes, patterns, whatever you call them, that they wanted, my entire . . . 'personality' got dumped somehow, instead?" He stared incred-ulously at her, not wanting to believe it; but there was no other -explanation.

"Yes, something like that." Suddenly Kay sounded weary.

Jarrow slumped back in the chair. "So Rita's right? I am really Demiro, just suffering from the delusion of being Jarrow?"

Kay sighed. "I don't know if that's the right way to put it," she said, endeavoring to soften the impact. "After all, what is a person? If a personality is defined by a dynamic configuration of neural activity, then you're Richard Jarrow. Is there more of Demiro underneath as well, somewhere? We have no way of knowing. And what about those strange manifestations of an alter ego that you say have happened twice now?—Rita says that Tony Demiro was nothing like that. All we can conclude is that more went on at Pearse than we're able to account for right now."

It didn't help Jarrow's discomfort. From outside there came the sound of a vehicle pulling up in the driveway. He looked away for a moment as footsteps sounded, -going around to the side door of the house. Josef came down from upstairs and went through into the kitchen. They heard the back door open and close, and then voices talking -indistinctly.

Jarrow faced back toward Kay. "What I don't understand about it all is why I find nothing abnormal in my appearance," he said. "If I think I'm Jarrow, but physically this is Demiro, then why don't I see any clash?"

"I've been wondering about that too," Kay admitted. "It's impossible to be certain. There's never been a case like this before."

"But you do have an idea?" Jarrow persisted. "You said you were involved with similar work Offworld on Luna with this—what was his name, the Russian?—Ulkanov."

"Well, possibly. . . . This is all very crude and speculative, you understand. But basically, it's pretty established these days that the mind contains two distinct operating levels. First, there's what we call the 'data' level, which processes fact-based information handled by the intellectual faculties: all the things that you 'know' and remember as representative of the real world. Then, below that, is the 'associative' level, which contains the structures and relationships that are invoked unconsciously by the operations of those faculties."

It made a sort of sense. Jarrow nodded for her to continue.

"Okay. Well, what I suspect is that the patterns that Ashling's process implants only modify the recipient's neurochemical structure at the data level. That would mean, for example, that your intellectual personality knows -itself to be Richard Jarrow, and remembers factually related details that come with that knowledge—for example, that Jarrow is forty-six and has a mustache." Jarrow nodded again. Kay went on, "But the associative-level correlates have remained unaltered. So when the data-level Jarrow reaches down, as it were, to access the deeper associative substrate supporting that identity, the pictures that are returned to consciousness derive from the associative level of Demiro. That's why you're unable to recall any visual images other than the younger, darker -complexioned, clean-shaven face that you see in the mirror, and you find nothing amiss."

Jarrow swallowed visibly. "So there's no question, then. . . . The person who was originally me . . ." He couldn't finish it. But it really didn't need saying.

Then he realized that Josef was at the kitchen door and had been listening to the tail end of the conversation. He came forward into the room and was followed by the new arrival, wearing a hooded, red overjacket on top of a white sweater. He was tall, bronzed, and athletically built, with curly blond hair and clear eyes. Whereas, previously, Jarrow had classed Josef as "leader" among the group at the house, the presence that the newcomer brought into the room was commanding. Here, he knew at once, instinctively, was the person who would produce a decision on where they went next.

Kay obviously knew him and was about to say something, but he raised a hand. "No, that's all right. Please carry on."

Kay looked at Jarrow again. "Can there really be any doubt? The records that you saw in Minneapolis are about as conclusive as you can get." She hesitated. "We can see what must have happened. You used to see Valdheim about once a month, yes? Your last recollection is from the visit on April third. Everything was normal. Those must have been the occasions when Valdheim obtained the implants to send down to Pearse. But the visit on April third turned out to be the last, when Jarrow died unexpectedly from a stroke on May fifth—corresponding to a time about six months into the program at Pearse, which had begun in earnest the previous October.

"Then something went wrong down at Pearse, and Demiro was overwritten with an entire transplant of the Jarrow identity at its data level. To cover up what had been going on and prevent awkward questions being asked, Demiro was officially eliminated from the picture."

And Demiro, in effect, became Jarrow. There was no point in trying to deny it any longer. Jarrow exhaled a heavy sigh. Kay showed an empty palm, indicating that there was nothing more she could say.

"But this is November," Jarrow said. "Demiro was listed as killed in June. So what's been happening in these last five months? Where do Samurai and Gordon come into it?"

Josef spoke for the first time since entering the room. "We don't know. But we need to find out. Furthermore, what connection did it have with Ashling and his disappearance?"

"And we think that you, Mr. Jarrow, can enable us to find the answers to both questions," the newcomer said.

Kay motioned toward him as he came forward to look down at where Jarrow was sitting. "Richard, this is Scipio, another of our team."

Jarrow nodded in acknowledgment, but was too startled by the statement to let it go just then. "Me?" he said uncomprehendingly. "How can I help?"

"From the inside," Scipio replied. "Where none of us can penetrate. But that's where the answers are, and only you can get there."

Jarrow's bewilderment only increased further. "How?" he asked again. "What do you want me to do?"

"We want you to let the FSS agents who are looking for you find you, and go back to Pearse with them as Samurai," Scipio said. "Which shouldn't be too difficult to accomplish. After all, that's who they seem to think you are."

Jarrow looked from one to another of them in sudden alarm. "Now wait a minute. Whatever else you or those people at Pearse may think, I'm a schoolteacher. I don't know anything about what Samurai was doing. I couldn't hope to pass myself off as him. I wouldn't last five minutes."

Scipio sat down on an arm of one of the chairs and gazed at him intently. "It mightn't be as bad as you assume. Think about it for a minute. The people at Pearse were tampering with minds, and they know that something strange happened in Demiro's case. They know that he was acting unstably in Chicago. They won't know what to expect next. They'll be prepared for anything. You go in pleading amnesia, confusion, reversion to past personality types—whatever suits the situation. I think there's a good chance of pulling it off. You're the key to uncovering what's been going on in this whole business."

What Scipio was saying carried an implication that their problem was automatically Jarrow's problem, and that they all saw things from the same viewpoint. But Jarrow was far from accepting that such was the case.

"No,'' he said, shaking his head. His voice had a tight edge. "I don't think it's that simple at all. I'm sorry, but this kind of thing isn't my line." He stood up and turned, making a sweeping motion with his hand that took in the whole company. "You . . . you come up with this story about sinister brainwashing plots, then presume that I should want to get involved to elaborate it further—as if it were some duty I owe. . . . It could all be a paranoid invention for all I know. I mean, how do any of you know? Have you checked it? How?"

"That's precisely what we're asking you to help us do, Mr. Jarrow," Scipio pointed out.

"Why should I help your subversions against my own government?" Jarrow retorted. "You are the aliens here, not me. This kind of notion might be credible where you come from, but it isn't here. This isn't that kind of country. We have a Constitution that gives our citizens certain rights protected by laws. I don't suppose anybody from Offworld could comprehend things like that."

That was too much for Kay. "Rights!" she exploded. "You talk to us about rights? What right could be more basic than the freedom to become whatever you're capable of? And that's just what the Offworld culture means: room for everyone to grow, and achieve, and become; with unlimited room to do it in and unlimited means to do it with, because new technologies create their own resources out of things that weren't resources before. We're already building industries that will make Earth's as obsolete as the windmills and waterwheels of the Middle Ages."

She too got up, walked over to a window, then turned to face the room again. "And what's happening down here? This idiocy that you call the Consolidation is the final expression of closed minds and a closed system. It's driven by this obsession with limits that exist only in its own collective imagination, dangers magnified out of all proportion until the fear of them paralyzes everything, even the capacity to think. There was a time when the West believed in itself, in reason, in its ability to carry on creating better futures. Now it's having to put up fences to keep its people in and the truth out. How much longer do you think something like that can last? It has to cave in under its own self-doubts and superstitions. The younger people are starting to reject it already. You try to indoctrinate them with defeatism and negativism, but their instincts tell them it's wrong. . . . And you talk to us about rights?"

Jarrow looked back at her stonily. "I teach reality," he replied coldly. "Not simple-minded pipe dreams. When your bubbles burst, then you'll be coming back, expecting us to take you back in. Don't think we won't be prepared."

"Oh, God, surely nobody really believes that," Kay groaned tiredly.

Josef made an appealing gesture at Jarrow, trying in turn. "But surely you can't deny the erosion of freedoms that used to be taken as basic. Even travel is restricted. Ashling had to approach us, an underground organization, to get himself out of the country."

"Regrettable, I agree, but necessary," Jarrow maintained unyieldingly. "Crime grows with population: vice, drugs. Terrorism is rampant everywhere. Do you think such people can be allowed to come and go whenever they please? We have to have controls."

"What terrorism?" Josef scoffed. "Show me where it exists as anything beyond an occasional nuisance, apart from in official propaganda and in the world created by mass -media."

"Ask your friend Daparras," Jarrow retorted.

"He's a writer, for heaven's sake," Kay pleaded. "And the Offworld population centers are far more densely crowded. But their society is open. People can live their lives as they please."

"Reckless and irresponsible," Jarrow opined. "You've got uncontrolled anarchy in the making. A workable society has to be structured and directed."

"You mean as with this environmentalist fascism that's out of control down here, bankrupting practically the -entire West?" Josef said.

"I'd call it responsible stewardship of a legacy that Offworlder mentalities are either unable to comprehend or have forgotten," Jarrow said.

Scipio could see that this wasn't going to get them anywhere, and held up a hand. "Maybe so, maybe not," he said. "We're not going to resolve any of that right now. But look at the actions of Valdheim and Nordens and whoever was behind them, and how the thing at Pearse was set up. It was hardly done in a way that you could call ethical, was it? Doesn't that say something about the powers that are running things here?"

"And I still say you're prejudging an issue that you know nothing about," Jarrow replied. "I don't know what really happened, and neither do you." He advanced a step and pointed a finger. "But I'll tell you one thing I do know, and that is that if whatever it was hadn't happened, I wouldn't be standing here now. So you three can intellectualize all you want, but that fact happens to mean a lot to me!"

"But that's what we're asking you to do: to help us find out!" Kay said again, her voice rising uncontrollably.

Jarrow had heard as much as he was prepared to listen to. His voice rose too, and his color deepened. "Oh, is that so? Well, now let me tell you something: I too would be curious to know how I got to be this way. But it's a lot to get mixed up in just to satisfy curiosity. I feel like an inte-grated, functioning person, and this body I've inherited seems a great improvement over what I remember. I figure that I can live with the complications. If you people want to know what went on down there in Pearse, well, that's fine by me but it's your problem. After being told twice in the last week that I'm dead, I'm quite starting to like the idea of being alive after all, and I'd prefer to stay that way. Who do you think you are to assume that I'm available for the asking to promote your ends? I've got my own. If you want to go messing with the FSS and the military, then go ahead. But I can live with the situation."

And with that, Jarrow marched stiffly and tight-mouthed from the room.

After a silence Kay said with a sigh, "I guess we blew it."

Scipio stared at the stove. "There must be a way," he insisted. "We have to find one. He's the only link we have to Ashling."

 

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