There was the sound of movement: People stirring, getting up and walking, the clink of a glass.
“Scotch and water,” Eleanor said.
There was the sound of sitting down. A man sighed gratefully. “I’m tired. What a night. I’m going to turn in early. A whole day gone to waste.”
“It was your fault.”
“He’ll keep. He’ll be there for good old Keith Pellig.”
“You’re not going to go over the implementation, not in your condition.”
Moore’s voice was full of outrage. “He’s mine, isn’t he?”
“He belongs to the world,” Eleanor said icily. “You’re so wrapped up in your verbal chess-games, you can’t see the danger you’re putting us in. Every hour that crackpot has gives him a better chance of survival. If you hadn’t gone berserk and turned everything on its head to pay off a personal grudge, Cartwright might already be dead.”
It was evening.
Benteley stirred. He sat up a little, surprised to find himself strong and clear-headed. The room was in semi-darkness. A single light gleamed, a tiny glowing dot that he identified as Eleanor’s cigarette. Moore sat beside her, legs crossed, a whiskey glass in his hand, face moody and remote. Eleanor stood up quickly and turned on a table lamp. “Ted?”
“What time is it?” Benteley demanded.
“Eight-thirty.” She came over to the bed, hands in her pockets. “How are you feeling?”
He swung his legs shakily onto the floor. They had wrapped him in a standard nightrobe; his clothes were nowhere in sight. “I’m hungry,” he said. Suddenly he clenched his fists and struck wildly at his face.
“It’s you,” Eleanor said, matter-of-fact.
Benteley’s legs wobbled under him as he stood unsteadily. “I’m glad of that. It really happened?”
“It happened.” She reached around to find her cigarette. “It’ll happen again, too. But next time you’ll be prepared. You, and twenty-three other bright young men.”
“Where are my clothes?”
“Why?”
“I’m getting out of here.”
Moore got up quickly. “You can’t walk out; face facts. You discovered what Pellig is—you think Verrick would turn you loose?”
“You’re violating the Challenge Convention rules.” Benteley found his clothes in a side closet and spread them out on the bed. “You can only send one assassin at a time. This thing of yours is rigged so it looks like one, but—”
“Not so fast,” Moore said. “You haven’t got it quite doped out.”
Benteley unfastened his nightrobe and tossed it away. “This Pellig is nothing but a synthetic.”
“Right.”
“Pellig is a vehicle. You’re going to slam a dozen high-grade minds into it and head it for Batavia. Cartwright will be dead, you’ll incinerate the Pellig-thing, and nobodyll know. You’ll pay off your minds and send them back to their workbenches. Like me.”
Moore was amused. “I wish we could do that. As a matter of fact, we gave it a try. We jammed three personalities into Pellig at once. The results were chaos. Each took off in a different direction.”
“Does Pellig have any personality?” Benteley asked, as he dressed. “What happens when all the minds are out?”
“Pellig becomes what we call, vegetable. He doesn’t die, but he devolves to a primitive level of existence. The body processes continue; it’s a kind of twilight sleep.”
“What kept him going last night at the party?”
“A bureaucrat from my lab. A negative type like what you saw; the personality comes across about the same. Pellig is a good medium: not too much distortion or refraction.”
Benteley veered away from the memory as he said, “When I was in it, I thought Pellig was there with me.”
“I felt the same way,” Eleanor agreed calmly. “The first time I tried it I felt as if there was a snake in my slacks. It’s an illusion. When did you first feel it?”
“When I looked in the mirror.”
“Try not looking in the mirror. How do you think _I_ felt? At least you’re a male. It was a little too tough on me; I don’t think Moore should try women operators. Too high a shock value.”
“You don’t jam them in without warning, do you?”
“We’ve built up a trained crew,” Moore said. “Over the last few months we’ve tried out dozens of people. Most of them crack. A couple of hours and they get a weird sort of claustrophobia. They want to get away from it, like Eleanor says, as if it’s something slimy and dirty close to them.” He shrugged. “I don’t feel that way. I think he’s beautiful.”
“How many have you got?” Benteley asked.
“We’ve got a couple dozen who can stand it. Your friend Davis is one. He has the right personality: placid, calm, easy-going.”
Benteley tightened. “So this is his new classification. That he beat the Quiz at.”
“Everybody goes up a notch for this. Bought off the black market, of course. You’re in on it, according to Verrick. It’s not as risky as it sounds. If something goes creeper, if they start popping at Pellig, whoever’s in there at the moment will be withdrawn.”
“So that’s the method,” Benteley said, half to himself. “Successive.”
“Let’s see them prove a Challenge violation,” Moore said spiritedly. “We’ve had our legal staff going over all the wherefores and aforesaids. There’s nothing they can get us on. The law specifies one assassin at a time, chosen by public Convention. Keith Pellig was chosen by public Convention, and there won’t be more than one of him.”
“I don’t see what purpose it serves.”
“You will,” Eleanor said. “Moore has a long story that goes with it.”
“After I’ve eaten,” Benteley said.
The three of them walked slowly along the thick-carpeted hall toward the dining room. Benteley froze at the doorway; there was Pellig sitting placidly at Verrick’s table, a plate of veal cutlets and mashed potatoes in front of him, a glass of water at his pale, bloodless lips.
“What’s wrong?” Eleanor asked.
“Who’s in it?”
Eleanor shrugged indifferently. “One of the lab technicians. We keep somebody in it all the time; the more familiar we are with it the better chance well have.”
Benteley moved toward the far end from Pellig. Its waxen pallor made him uncomfortable; it was like some insect newly out of its shell, not yet hardened and dried by the sun.
And then it came back to him.
“Listen,” he said huskily. “There’s something more.”
Moore and Eleanor Stevens glanced sharply at each other. “Take it easy, Benteley,” Moore said.
“The flying. I left the ground. And I wasn’t just running.” His voice rose fearfully. “Something happened to me. On and on, like a ghost. Until the fireplace.” He rubbed his forehead, but there was no bump, no scar.
Of course not. It was another body.
“Explain,” he demanded hoarsely. “What happened to me?”
“Something to do with the lighter weight,” Moore said. The body’s more efficient than a natural human body.”
Benteley’s face must have showed his disbelief, because Eleanor put in, “Pellig may have accepted a drug-cocktail before you entered the body. They were passing them out; I saw some of the women take them.”
Verrick’s gruff voice interrupted them. “Moore, you’re good at abstract questions.” He pushed a heap of metalfoil across to Moore’s place. “I’ve been studying our confidential report-tapes on this crackpot Cartwright. There’s nothing to him of importance, but I’m worried.”
“Why?” Moore asked, as he took his seat.
“First of all, he had his p-card. That’s unusual, for an unk. The chance of any one p-card coming up in a person’s lifetime is so microscopically small, so utterly worthless—”
“There’s always the statistical possibility.”
Verrick snorted scornfully. “The bottle is the biggest racket ever thought up. The damn thing’s a lottery and everybody alive holds a ticket. Why keep a card that gives you one chance in six billion, a chance that’ll never come? The unks are smart enough to peddle their cards, if they’re not taken from them by their Hills. What’s a card worth these days?”
“About two bucks. Used to be more.”
“All right. But this Cartwright keeps his. And that isn’t all.” A cunning look spread over Verrick’s massive face. “According to my reports, Cartwright purchased—not sold— at least half a dozen p-cards within the last month.”
Moore sat up straight. “Really?”
“Maybe,” Eleanor said thoughtfully, “Cartwright finally found a charm that works.”
Verrick roared like a gored ox. “Quack that talk! Those damn fool miserable charms.” He jabbed a furious finger at the girl’s bare breasts. “What’s that, you have one of those little bags of eye of newt hanging there? Take it off and throw it away. It’s a waste of time.”
Eleanor smiled gently; everybody was used to Verrick’s eccentricity, his disbelief in good-luck charms.
“What else?” Moore demanded. “You have more information?”
“The day the bottle twitched, there was a meeting of the Preston Society.” Verrick’s knuckles were white. “Maybe he’s got what I was after. What everybody’s after—a way to beat the bottle. A dope-sheet to plot out its future moves. If I thought Cartwright was sitting there that day waiting for notification to come . . .”