WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

was awash with strange lights, with an aurora borealis brought down to ground

level. Those sleazy streets had a certain mystery and cheap allure after dark,

in the fog, but not if you’d seen them in daylight first and remembered what you

had seen.

In the Mercedes, Einstein was waiting patiently.

“Couldn’t arrange to have you turned into a poodle, after all,” Nora told him as

she buckled her seat belt. “But we sure did ourselves up right. Einstein, say

hello to Sam Hyatt and Nora Aimes.”

The retriever put his head over the front seat, looked at her, looked at

Travis, and snorted once as if to say they could not fool him, that he knew who

they were.

To Travis, Nora said, “Your antiterrorist training . . . is that where you

learned about places like Hot Tips, people like Van Dyne? Is that where

terrorists get new ID once they slip into the country?”

“Yeah, some go to people like Van Dyne, though not usually. The Soviets supply

papers for most terrorists. Van Dyne services mostly ordinary illegal

immigrants, though not the poor ones, and criminal types looking to dodge arrest

warrants.”

As he started the car, she said, “But if you could find Van Dyne, maybe the

people looking for us can find him.”

“Maybe. It’ll take them a while, but maybe they can.”

“Then they’ll find out all about our new identities.”

“No,” Travis said. He turned on the defroster and the windshield wipers to clear

the condensation off the outside of the glass. “Van Dyne wouldn’t keep records.

He doesn’t want to be caught with proof of what he does. If the authorities ever

tumble to him and go in there with search warrants, they won’t find anything in

Van Dyne’s computers except the accounting and purchasing records for Hot Tips.”

As they drove through the city, heading for the Golden Gate Bridge, Nora stared

in fascination at the people in the streets and in other cars, not just in the

Tenderloin but in every neighborhood through which they passed. She wondered how

many of them were living under the names and identities with which they had been

born and how many were changelings like her and Travis.

“In less than three hours, we’ve been totally remade,” she said.

“Some world we live in, huh? More than anything else, that’s what high

technology means—maximum fluidity. The whole world is becoming ever more fluid,

malleable. Most financial transactions are now handled with electronic money

that flashes from New York to L.A.—or around the world— in seconds. Money

crosses borders in a blink; it no longer has to be smuggled out past the guards.

Most records are kept in the form of electrical charges that only computers

read. So everything’s fluid. Identities are fluid. The past is fluid.”

Nora said, “Even the genetic structure of a species is fluid these days.”

Einstein woofed agreement.

Nora said, “Scary, isn’t it?”

“A little,” Travis said as they approached the light-bedecked southern entrance

to the fog-mantled Golden Gate Bridge, which was all but invisible in the mist.

“But maximum fluidity is basically a good thing. Social and financial fluidity

guarantee freedom. I believe—and I hope—that we’re heading toward an age when

the role of governments will inevitably dwindle, when there’ll be no way to

regulate and control people as thoroughly as was possible in the past.

Totalitarian governments won’t be able to stay in power.”

“How so?”

“Well, how can a dictatorship control its citizens in a high-tech society of

maximum fluidity? The only way is to refuse to allow high tech to intrude,

seal the borders, and live entirely in an earlier age. But that’d be national

suicide for any country that tried it. They couldn’t compete. In a few decades,

they’d be modern aborigines, primitive by the standards of the civilized

high-tech world. Right now, for instance, the Soviets try to restrict computers

to their defense industry, which can’t last. They’ll have to computerize their

entire economy and teach their people to use computers—and then how can they

keep the screws tight when their citizens have been given the means to

manipulate the system and foil its controls on them?”

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