2
Henry Balmer was a short, squat man with a fleshily jowled face, searing eyes set beneath immense eyebrows, hair combed straight back, and a dark, trimmed mustache. As was often the way with small men, he tended to overcompensate with aggressiveness what he lacked in stature. On the rare occasions when he found himself forced onto the defensive, his shoulders hunched protectively, imbuing him in form and manner with the salient attributes of a cannonball. Just at the moment, in Herbert Morch’s office at Quantonix, confronted by Herbert and Max, and the project’s chief physician, Stewart Perrel, he felt very much on the defensive indeed.
After Herbert Morch’s call two days previously he had panicked, entrusting the bemused Sarda to the care of his receptionist, Fay, and deciding suddenly that Mrs. Jescombe was a patient with a critical condition who couldn’t be ignored. Since then, he had gone into hiding, keeping away from his office and ignoring Fay’s frantic calls, torn between a self-preservation instinct responding to distant places beckoning far from Mars, and a deeply rooted part of his nature that balked at the thought of walking out on any prospect that might remain of netting a quarter of a billion Zodiac Bank-underwritten, offworld, inner-system dollars. However, before he had reconciled his dilemma, a terse note in his mail system from “The Auditor,” suggesting pointedly that his longer-term health might benefit from his making himself visible and condescending to communicate again, had induced his eventual appearance at Quantonix. That was where Sarda was, and about the only chance Balmer had of placating certain netherworldly go-betweens who weren’t feeling amused just now depended on unlocking information that he hoped still resided somewhere inside Sarda’s skull.
“If Leo Sarda has been a client of yours, we should have known about it, Dr. Balmer,” Herbert said, looking disgruntled and not a little suspicious. “He’s key in our main project here. You say he’s been disturbed for some time. Then possibly that’s the reason for the condition we’re seeing now. But the project is being blamed. The market value of our whole program has collapsed to nothing.”
Balmer forced a parody of a smile through clenched teeth, fighting down the urge to scream that if the people at Quantonix had kept adequate tabs on the Sarda they were supposed to have been dealing with, none of this would have happened. “A matter of professional ethics and client confidentiality. I sympathize with your situation, but . . .”—he shrugged—”your internal affairs here are hardly my affair. My obligation was to my patient.”
“What kind of problems was he experiencing when he first came to you?” Stewart Perrel asked. Balmer had cited rising apprehension about the forthcoming experiment as the root cause of Sarda’s becoming unhinged. Although not widely publicized, the nature of the TX Project was not a closely guarded secret that Sarda would never have discussed—hence, it was acceptable for Balmer to reveal that he had known about it. And if it helped give the Quantonix people a feeling of responsibility for what had gone wrong, then so much the better.
“Acute stress and anxiety,” he answered. “Patches of memory loss with no coherent pattern. I interpreted it as a subconscious attempt to disown the old personality, anticipating the need to identify with the new one. The problem was reconciling internally what he had convinced himself he believed consciously.”
“Hmm.” Perrel looked perplexed. “It seems strange that none of this showed up in our tests.” He was probably also put out at Sarda’s having consulted an outsider and not the project’s physician. “Did you know Leo previously, or something?”
“He was introduced by my professional partner, Elaine Corley. They had been friends for a while.”
“He’s never mentioned any such person to me.”
“That was one of the things he’d forgotten when he appeared at my office. I attributed it to a complete breakdown.”
“So it would seem. . . . And is she helping in any of this?”
Balmer fidgeted uncomfortably. “I, er, haven’t heard from her for two days. She doesn’t return calls.”
“Strange,” Perrel commented. He shook his head, seemingly not knowing what to make of it.
Balmer shrugged. “She was a highly strung woman under a lot of stress, if you want my opinion. A lot of this Sarda business was affecting her too. She’d been acting erratically in a number of ways. I can’t say I’m totally surprised.”