“We’re positive,” Wakeman said aloud, and it was a coldblooded lie. To Shaeffer he silently thought, “I hope we’re doing the right thing. Verrick probably knows. But it doesn’t matter; if everything goes right Pellig will never get out of Batavia.”
“And if he does?” the thought came back wryly.
“He can’t. It’s your job to stop him. I’m not really worried, but I’d feel better if Verrick’s Hills didn’t hold the land on three sides of our resort.”
The lounge of the intercon liner was swank and glittering with chrome. Keith Pellig stood by Miss Lloyd as she seated herself awkwardly in one of the deep thick-plush chairs and folded her nervous hands together on the surface of the null-legged plastic table. Pellig then sat down opposite her.
“What’s the matter?” the girl asked. “Is anything wrong?”
“No.” Pellig moodily examined the menu. “What do you want to drink? Make it snappy; we’re almost there.”
Miss Lloyd recoiled and her cheeks burned. The nice-looking man was grim-faced and sullen; she repressed a sudden desire to leap up and hurry downstairs to her seat. He was acting badly, insulting and nasty . . . but the needling fear that it was something she had done dissolved her resentment and made her fearful instead. “What Hill are you under fief to?” she asked timidly.
There was no answer.
The MacMillan waiter glided up. “What did you wish, sir or madam?”
Within the Pellig body, Ted Benteley was deep in stormy thought. He ordered bourbon and water for himself and a Tom Collins for Margaret Lloyd. He scarcely noticed the two glasses the MacMillan slid before them; he paid the chit automatically and began to sip.
Miss Lloyd was babbling youthful nonsense; she was excited with anticipation, her eyes shone, white teeth sparkled, orange hair glowed like a candle flame. It was wasted on the man opposite her. Benteley allowed the Pellig fingers to take the bourbon and water back to the table; he fooled with the glass and continued reflecting.
While he was reflecting, the mechanism switched. Silently, instantly, he was back at the Farben labs.
It was a shock. He closed his eyes and hung on tight to the circular metal band that enclosed his body, a combination support and focus. On his ipvic-engineered vidscreen the scene he had just left glimmered brightly. The body cast a microwave sheet that bounced at close range and was relayed by ipvic along the control channel to Farben in the form of a visual image. A miniature Margaret Lloyd was seated across from a miniature Keith Pellig, in a microscopic lounge. Tiny sounds filtered from the aud end of the system, as Miss Lloyd bubbled away.
“Who’s in it?” Benteley demanded shakily. Herb Moore shoved him back down as he started to climb from the protective ring of metal. “Don’t move! Unless you want half your psyche slammed over there and half left here.”
“I was just in it. It won’t hit me again for awhile.”
“You might be next. Sit still until your focus-system is disconnected and you’re out of the circuit.”
At this moment a red button three rows down and four to the right was illuminated. On the screen the operator had already taken over; there was no time lag. He had, Benteley noted, in his first moment of shock spilled his glass of bourbon.
Miss Lloyd’s chatter paused momentarily. “Are you all right?” she asked the Pellig body. “You look so sort of—pale.”
“I’m okay,” the Pellig body muttered.
“He’s doing fine,” Moore said to Benteley. “That’s your friend Al Davis.”
Benteley allowed the position of the luminous button to impress itself on his mind. “Which one represents you?”
Moore ignored the question. “The switch will ignite your indicator a split-second before you’re actually arced across. If you keep your eyes open you’ll have warning. If you turn away you may find yourself standing under a palm tree facing fully armed teeps.”
“Or dead,” Benteley said. “In this game of musical chairs who gets left standing up?”
“The body’s not going to be blasted. It’s going to reach Cartwright and destroy him.”
“Your lab is already constructing a second android,” Benteley contradicted. “When this one is demolished, you’ll have it ready to be named by the Challenge Convention.”
“Assuming something goes wrong, the operator will be jerked back here before the body perishes. You can calculate the odds against your being in the body at that particular moment. One out of twenty-four, times the forty percent chance of losing the body at all.”
“Will you really be hooked into this rig?”
“I’ll be hooked in exactly like you.”
As Moore moved restlessly toward the exit lock of the cube, Benteley demanded, “What happens to my real body while I’m over?”
“As soon as you’re arced out this stuff goes into action.” Moore indicated the machinery that filled the metal chamber. “All this keeps the body functioning: supplies air, tests blood pressure, heart rate, carries off wastes, feeds, supplies water—whatever is needed.”
The exit lock slammed. Benteley was alone in the machinery-crammed cubicle.
On the screen Al Davis was buying the girl a second drink. Neither he nor Miss Lloyd had much to say: the sound coming over the aud was a blur of crowd noise and clink of glasses. Benteley caught a glimpse through the microscopic window of the liner and his heart constricted. The ship was getting near the sprawling Indonesian Empire, the largest functioning aggregate of human beings in the nine-planet system.
It wasn’t hard to picture the teeps checking the mechanics of their interception network. A vision of the first contact: a teep lounging at the transport field, or pounding a typer as some minor official in the ticket office. Or a female teep hanging around with the usual squad of bed girls that met the incoming ships. Or a teep child being tugged along by its parents. Or a terribly old man, a veteran of some roger-war, sitting feebly in the shade with a blanket over his knees.
Anybody. Anywhere. What looked like a lipstick, a fluff of candy, a mirror, a newspaper, a coin, a handkerchief. The variety of modern high-quality weapons was infinite.
On the screen the passengers of the transport were getting fussily to their feet and preparing to land. There was always this moment of suspense and tension as the sleek liner set itself down; then the sigh of relief as the reactors clicked off and the landing locks rumbled open.
Keith Pellig got clumsily to his feet and made vague motions toward Margaret Lloyd. The two of them joined the slowly-moving crowd that pushed down the ramp to the passenger level. Davis was doing fairly well; once he stumbled, but that was all. Benteley glanced up tautly at the detailed schematic of the Directorate’s Batavia buildings. The landing field was linked directly to the main building grounds; the position of Pellig was already indicated on the schematics by a moving pin of color.
There it was—but no pin showed the position of the teep network. Without effort Benteley could calculate how soon the first contact between Pellig, the artificial android, and the teep network, would occur. In minutes, it could be figured on one hand.
Wakeman arranged for the C-plus rocket to be brought up to the surface from its storage locker. He poured himself a drink of Scotch, gulped it hastily, and then conferred with Shaeffer. “In half an hour Batavia will be a _cul-de-sac_ for Pellig. Bait but no quarry.”
Shaeffer’s hurried response came back to him. “We now have an inferential report on Pellig. He boarded a regular non-stop intercon liner at Bremen. Passage to Java. He’s on his way someplace between here and Europe.”
“You don’t know which ship?”
“He has a non-specific commute ticket. But we can assume he’s already taken off.”
Wakeman hurried upstairs to Cartwright’s private quarters. Cartwright was listlessly packing his things with the aid of two MacMillan robots and Rita O’Neill. Rita was pale and tense, but composed. She was going through aud reference tapes with a high-speed scanner, sorting those worth keeping. Wakeman found himself smiling at the slim, efficient figure with a lucky cat’s foot dangling between her breasts as she worked.
“Keep hold of that,” Wakeman said to Rita, indicating the cat’s foot.
She glanced quickly up. “Any news?”
“Pellig will be showing up any minute. Transports land all the time; we have somebody there to check them in. Our own ship is almost ready.” He indicated Cartwright’s unpacked things. “Do you want me to help you pack?”
Cartwright roused himself. “Look, I don’t want to get caught out in space. I—don’t want to.”
Wakeman was astonished at the words, and at the thoughts he caught behind them. A naked fear trickled piteously through the old man’s mind, up from the deepest levels. “We won’t get caught in space,” Wakeman said rapidly; there wasn’t much time for any more shilly-shallying. “The ship is the new experimental C-plus, the first off the assembly-line. We’ll be there almost instantly. Nobody can Stop a C-plus once it’s in motion.”