“There’s nothing usual about it, Leo, I assure you.”
“You know what I mean, Mr. Thane.”
“Would it be worth something to you?”
Sarda frowned, then showed both hands in a gesture that asked what other way was there to answer. “Well, if you recover five million for me, I guess yes, that would have to be worth something.”
“Then let’s talk about it when it’s recovered,” Kieran suggested.
8
The center panel of the mural design on June’s living-area wall was switched to viewscreen mode and showed a replay of people waiting in front of the reconstitution chamber in the R-Lab at Quantonix. A frizzy-haired figure in a gray lab smock, whom Kieran had met during his visit there and recognized as Stewart Perrel, chief physician on the TX Project, swung open the access door and leaned inside. A moment later he turned to call back over his shoulder, “He’s okay! It worked fine! Leo’s okay!” Relieved murmurs came from the company. Then Sarda, draped in a surgical smock, was helped out to a chorus of congratulations and applause.
“So Sarda was brought out from Earth about a year ago to run the project,” Kieran said, keeping his eyes on the screen and selecting parts to zoom into close-up. It was mid afternoon, the same day. Kieran had called June, saying they had a problem, and asked her to meet him back at the apartment. He didn’t really expect to see anything new since they had rerun the recording several times, but there was always the chance. “Was it a typical sunsider deal?”
June nodded from where she was curled up at an end of the eggshell-blue couch with Teddy stretched out alongside in that attitude of perfect laziness and contentment that only cats and teenagers, before being smitten by culturally instructed adulation of avarice, can achieve. A precarious truce had been reached with regard to Guinness, who just at the moment had been taken for a romp along the lakeshore by some children from the neighboring terraces. “He’d been trying to get something going there, but the problems would have tied up city blocks of lawyers for the next hundred years,” she said. “He came out on an exclusive retainer. Five million on top of what he’d have collected in a year, in the bank before any deal with a principal was finalized, wasn’t a bad offer.” Kieran nodded. As the technical brains of the business, Sarda would also have been cut into a share of the proceeds later, when the proven technology was sold. With the sunsider not getting involved in the hassles of producing and marketing the actual goods, everything beyond paying off the costs of the research would be pure profit. That was where the real payoff lay.
Kieran cut off the replay and swivelled the recliner to face June across the room. “If it wasn’t Sarda-the-First that the bell tolled for at midnight, then it must have been something else that was substituted. A client from a morgue somewhere, perhaps, who was past caring where it all led?”
“That’s what I was wondering,” June said. “But surely a body in suspension like that would be monitored. Wouldn’t substituting a corpse set off all kinds of alarms?”
“Not necessarily. The sensors would feed into a monitoring computer. All you’d need to do would be to change the software to make it carry on reporting normal readings, whatever the sensors were registering.”
June conceded with a nod. “Of course. Okay . . .”
Kieran went on, “Someone else must have done the switching. So we have an accomplice. It has to be someone with the medical background to do the body switching and take care of resuscitating the original; also enough computer savvy to reprogram the monitoring system without setting off bells.” He stared at June invitingly to make the connection.
“Ah! Is this where the missing mystery woman enters: Elaine, the tall and slim, of the curly black hair?”
“Maybe. But the funny thing is, Sarda-Two doesn’t know anything about any such arrangement with anybody. Yet he’s supposed to have the same memories as the Sarda who would have made them. They’re supposed to be the same person.”