Next day Mannix turned me over to his interrogation specialists, who asked me more questions than I’d known I had answers for. A trankstim pill kept me alert but unemotional, as if I were operating myself by remote control.

  Among other items, I showed them how a Decaturist who had access to the right equipment made contact with fellows elsewhere, whom he’d probably never met, or with higher-ups whom he definitely hadn’t. The method had been considered by political police technicians, but they’d failed to devise any means of coping.

  Problem: How do you maintain a network of illicit communications?

  In practice you mostly use the old-fashioned mail drop. It’s unfeasible to read the entire mails. The authorities must settle for watching the correspondence of suspicious individuals, and these may have ways of posting and collecting letters unobserved.

  Yet sometimes you need to send a message fast.

  The telephone’s no good, of course, since computers became able to monitor every conversation continuously. However those same machines, or their cousins, can be your carriers.

  Remember, we have millions of computers around these days, nationally interconnected. They do drudge work like record keeping and billing; they operate automated plants; they calculate for governmental planners and R & D workers; they integrate organizations; they keep day-by-day track of each citizen; etc., etc. Still more than in the case of the mails, the volume of data transmissions would swamp human overseers.

  Give suitable codes, programmers and other technicians can send practically anything practically anywhere. The printout is just another string of numbers to those who can’t read it. Once it has been read, the card is recycled and the electronic traces are wiped as per routine. That message leaves the office in a single skull.

  Naturally, you save this capability for your highest priority calls. I’d used it a few times, attracting no attention, since my job on base frequently required me to prepare or receive top-secret calculations.

  I couldn’t give Mannix’s men any code except the latest that had been given me. Every such message was re-encoded en route, according to self-changing programs buried deep down in the banks of the machines concerned. I could, though, put him in touch with somebody close to Sotomayor. Or, rather, I could put myself in touch.

  What would happen thereafter was uncertain. We couldn’t develop an exact plan. My directive was to do my best, and if my best was good enough, I’d be pardoned and rewarded.

  I was rehearsed in my cover story till I was letter perfect, and given a few items like phone numbers to learn. Simulators and reinforcement techniques made this quick.

  Perhaps my oath-brothers would cut my throat immediately, as a regrettable precaution. That didn’t seem to matter. The drug left me no particular emotion except a desire to get the business done.

  At a minimum, I was sure to be interrogated, strip-searched, encephalogrammed, X-rayed, checked for metal and radioactivity. Perhaps blood, saliva, urine, and spinal fluid would be sampled. Agents have used pharmaceuticals and implants for too many years.

  Nevertheless Mannix’s outfit had a weapon prepared for me. It was not one the army had been told about. I wondered what else the political police labs were working on. I also wondered if various prominent men, who might have been awkward to denounce, had really died of strokes or heart attacks.

  “I can’t tell you details,” said a technician. “With your education, you can figure out the general idea for yourself. It’s a micro version of the fission gun, enclosed in lead to baffle detectors. You squeeze—you’ll be shown how—and the system opens; a radioactive bombards another material which releases neutrons which touch off the fissionable atoms in one of ten successive chambers.”

  Despite my chemical coolness, awe drew a whistle from me. Given the right isotopes, configurations, and shielding, critical mass gets down to grams, and you can direct the energy through a minilaser. I’d known that. In this system, the lower limit must be milligrams; and the efficiency must approach one hundred percent, if you could operate it right out of your own body.

  Still— “You do have components that’ll register if I’m checked very closely,” I said.

  The technician grinned. “I doubt you will be, where we have in mind. They’ll load you tomorrow morning.”

  Because I’d need practice in the weapon, I wasn’t drugged then. I’d expected to be embarrassed. But when I entered an instrument-crammed concrete room after being unable to eat breakfast, I suddenly began shaking.

  Two P. P. men I hadn’t met before waited for me. One wore a lab coat, one a medic’s tunic. My escort said, “Dowling,” closed the door and left me alone with them.

  Lab Coat was thin, bald, and sourpussed. “Okay, peel down and let’s get started,” he snapped.

  Medic, who was a fattish blond, laughed—giggled, I thought in a gust of wanting to kill him. “Short arm inspection,” he said.

  Bonnie, I reminded myself, and dropped my clothes on a chair. Their eyes went to my crotch. Mine couldn’t. I bit jaws and fists together and stared at the wall beyond them.

  Medic sat down. “Over here,” he ordered. I obeyed, stood before him, felt him finger what was left. “Ah,” he chuckled. “Balls but no musket, eh?”

  “Shut up, funny man,” Lab Coat said and handed him a pair of calipers. I felt him measure the stump.

  “They should’ve left more,” Lab Coat complained. “At least two centimeters more.”

  “This glue could stick it straight onto his bellybutton,” Medic said.

  “Yeah, but the gadgets aren’t rechargeable,” Lab Coat retorted. “He’ll go through four or five today before the final one, and nothing but elastic collars holding ’em in place. What a clot of a time I’ll have fitting them.” He shuffled over to a workbench and got busy.

  “Take a look at your new tool,” Medic invited me. “Generous, eh? Be the envy of the neighborhood. And what a jolt for your wife.”

  The wave was red, not black, and tasted of blood. I lunged, laid fingers around his throat, and bawled—I can’t remember—maybe, “Be quiet, you filthy fairy, before I kill you!”

  He squealed, then gurgled. I shook him till his teeth rattled. Lab Coat came on the run. “Stop that!” he barked. “Stop or I’ll call a guard!”

  I let go, sank down on the floor—its chill flowed into my buttocks, up my spine, out along my rib cage—and struggled not to weep.

  “You bastard,” Medic chattered. “I’m gonna file charges, I am.”

  “You are not. Another peep and I’ll report you.” Lab Coat hunkered beside me, laid an arm around my shoulder, and said, “I understand, Dowling. It was heroic of you to volunteer. You’ll get the real thing back when you’re finished. Never forget that.”

  Volunteer?

  Laughter exploded. I whooped, I howled, I rolled around and beat my fists on the concrete, my muscles ached from laughing when finally I won back to silence.

  After that, and a short rest, I was calm—cold, even—and functioned well. My aim improved fast, till I could hole the center circle at every shot.

  “You’ve ten charges,” Lab Coat reminded me. “No more. The beam being narrow, the head’s your best target. If the apparatus gets detected after all, or if you’re in Dutch for some other reason and your ammo won’t last, press inward from the end—like this—and it’ll self-destruct. You’ll be blown apart and escape a bad time. Understand? Repeat.”

  He didn’t bother bidding me good-by at the end of the session. (Medic was too sulky for words.) No doubt he’d figured what sympathy to administer earlier. Efficiency is the P.P. ideal. Mannix, or somebody, must have ordered my gun prepared almost at the moment I was arrested, or likelier before.

  My escort had waited, stolid, throughout those hours. Though I recognized it was a practical matter of security, I felt hand-lickingly grateful to Mannix that this fellow—that very few people—knew what I was.

  The day after. I placed my call to the Decaturists. It was brief. I had news of supreme importance—the fact I’d vanished for almost a month made this plausible—and would stand by for transportation at such-and-such different rendezvous, such-and-such different times.

  Just before the first of these, I swallowed a stim with a hint of trank, in one of those capsules which attach to the stomach wall and spend the next three hundred hours dissolving. No one expected I’d need more time before the metabolic price had to be paid. A blood test would show its presence, but if I was carrying a vital message, would I not have sneaked me a supercharger?

  I was not met, and went back to my room and waited. A side effect, when every cell worked at peak, was longing for Bonnie. Nothing sentimental; I loved her, I wanted her, I had to keep thrusting away memories of eyes, lips, breasts beneath my hand till my hand traveled downward…In the course of hours, I learned how to be a machine.

  They came for me at the second spot on my list, a trifle past midnight. The place was a bar in a village of shops and rec centers near the base. It wasn’t the sleek, state-owned New West, where I’d be recognized by officers, engineers, and party functionaries who could afford to patronize. This was a dim and dingy shack, run by a couple of workers on their own time, at the tough end of town. Music, mostly dirty songs, blared from a taper, ear-hurtingly loud, and the booze was rotgut served in glasses which seldom got washed. Nevertheless I had to push through the crowd and, practically, the smoke—pot as well as tobacco. The air smelled of sweat.

  You see more of this kind of thing every year. I imagine the government only deplores the trend officially. People need some unorganized pleasure. Or, as the old joke goes, “What is the stage between socialism and communism called? Alcoholism.”

  A girl in a skimpy dress made me a business offer. She wasn’t bad-looking, in a sleazy fashion, and last month I’d merely have said no, thanks. As it was, the drug in me didn’t stop me from screaming, “Get away, you whore!” Scared, she backed off, and I drew looks from the men around. In cheap civies, I was supposed to be inconspicuous. Jim Dowling, officer, rocketeer, triple agent, boy wonder, ha! I elbowed my way onward to the bar. Two quick shots eased my shakes, and the racket around forgot me.

  I’d almost decided to leave when a finger tapped my arm. A completely forgettable little man stood there. “Excuse me,” he said. “Aren’t you Sam Chalmers?”

  “Uh, no, I’m his brother Roy.” Beneath the once more cold surface, my pulse knocked harder.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Your father’s told me a lot about you both. My name’s Ralph Wagner.”

  “Yes, he’s mentioned you. Glad to meet you, Comrade Wagner.”

  We shook hands and ad-libbed conversation a while. The countersigns we’d used were doubtless obsolete; but he’d allowed for my having been out of touch. Presently we left.

  A car bearing Department of Security insignia was perched on the curb. Two much larger men, uniformed, waited inside. We joined them, the blowers whirred, and we were off. One man touched a button. A steel plate slid down and cut us three in the rear seat off from the driver. The windows I could see turned opaque. I had no need to know where we were bound. I did estimate our acceleration and thus our cruising speed. About 300 K.P.H. Going some, even for a Security vehicle!

  From what Granddad had told me, this would have been lunacy before the war. Automobiles were so thick then that often they could barely crawl along. Among my earliest memories is that the government was still congratulating itself on having solved that problem.

  Wind hooted around the shell. A slight vibration thrummed through my bones. The overhead light was singularly bleak. The big man on my left and the small man on my right crowded me.

  “Okay,” said the big man, “what happened?”

  “I’ll handle this,” said he who named himself Wagner. The bruiser snapped his mouth shut and settled back. He was probably the one who’d kill me if that was deemed needful, but he was not the boss.

  “We’ve been alarmed about you.” Wagner spoke as gently as Mannix. In an acid way I liked the fact that he didn’t smile.

  I attempted humor in my loneliness: “I’d be alarmed if you hadn’t been.”

  “Well?”

  “I was called in for top-secret conferences. They’ve flitted me in and out-to Europe and back-under maximum security.”

  The big man formed an oath. Wagner waited. “They’ve gotten wind of our project,” I said.

  “I don’t know of any other vanishments than yours,”

  Wagner answered, flat-voiced.

  “Would you?” I challenged. He shrugged. “Perhaps not.”

  “Actually,” I continued, “I wasn’t told about arrests and there may have been none. What they discussed was the Society, the Asians—they have a fixed idea the Peking-Tokyo Axis has taken over the Society—and what they called ‘open indications.’ The legal or semilegal talk you hear about ‘socialist lawfulness,’ ‘American socialism,’ and the rest. Roger Mannix—he turns out to be high in the P.P., by the way, and a shrewd man; I recommend we try to knock him off—Mannix takes these signs more seriously than I’d imagined anybody in the government did.” I cleared my throat. “Details at your convenience. The upshot is, the authorities decided there is a definite risk of a cabal seizing the rocket bases. Never mind whether they have the data to make that a completely logical conclusion. What counts is that it is their conclusion.”

  “And right, God damn it, right,” muttered the big man. He slammed a fist on his knee.

  “What do they propose to do?” Wagner asked, as if I’d revealed the government was considering a reduced egg ration.

  “That was a…tough question.” I stared at the blank, enclosing panel. “They dare not shut down the installations, under guard of P.P., who don’t know a mass ratio from a hole in the ground. Nor dare they purge the personnel, hoping to be left with loyal skeleton crews—because they aren’t yet sure who those crews had better be loyal to. Oh, I saw generals and commissioners scuttling around like toads in a chamber pot, believe me.” Now I turned my head to confront his eyes. “And believe me,” I added, “we were lucky they happened to include one Decatur man.”

  Again, under the tranquilization and the stimulation (how keenly I saw the wrinkles around his mouth, heard cleft air brawl, felt the shiver of speed, snuffed stale bodies, registered the prickle of hairs and sweat glands, the tightened belly muscles and selfseizing guts beneath!), fear fluttered in me, and under the fear I was hollow. The man on whom I had turned my back could put a gun muzzle at the base of my skull.

  Wagner nodded. “Yes-s-s.”

  Though it was too early to allow myself relief, I saw I’d passed the first watchdog. The Society might have been keeping such close surveillance that Wagner would know there had in fact been no mysterious travels of assorted missilemen.

  This wasn’t plausible, Mannix had declared. The Society was limited in what it could do. Watching every nonmember’s every movement was ridiculous.

  “Have they reached a decision?” Wagner asked.

  “Yes.” No matter how level I tried to keep it, my voice seemed to shiver the bones in my head. “American personnel will be replaced by foreigners till the crisis is past. I suppose you know West Europe has a good many competent rocketeers. In civilian jobs, of course; still, they could handle a military assignment. And they’d be docile, regardless of who gave orders. The Spanish and French especially, considering how the purges went through those countries. In short, they’d not be players in the game, just parts of the machinery.”

  My whetted ears heard him let out a breath. “When?”

  “Not certain. A move of that kind needs study and planning beforehand. A couple, three weeks? My word is that we’d better compress our own timetable.”

  “Indeed. Indeed.” Wagner bayoneted me with his stare. “If you are correct.”

  “You mean if I’m telling the truth,” I said on his behalf.

  “You understand, Colonel Dowling, you’ll have to be quizzed and examined. And we’ll meet an ironic obstacle in your conditioning against involuntary betrayal of secrets.”

  “Eventually you’d better go ahead and trust me…after all these years.”

  “I think that will be decided on the top level.”

  They took me to a well-equipped room somewhere and put me through the works. They were no more unkind than necessary, but extremely thorough. Never mind details of those ten or fifteen hours. The thoroughness was not quite sufficient. My immunity and my story held up. The physical checks showed nothing suspicious. Mannix had said, “I expect an inhibition too deep for consciousness will prevent the idea from occurring to them.” I’d agreed. The reality was what had overrun me.

  Afterward I was given a meal and—since I’d freely admitted being full of stim—some hours under a sleep inducer. It didn’t prevent dreams which I still shiver to recall. But when I was allowed to wake. I felt rested and ready for action.

  Whether I’d get any was an interesting question. Mannix’s hope was that I’d be taken to see persons high in the outfit, from whom I might obtain information on plans and membership. But maybe I’d be sent straight home. My yarn declared that, after the bout of talks was over, I’d requested a few days’ leave, hinting to my superiors that I had a girlfriend out of town.

  My guards, two young men now grown affable, couldn’t guess what the outcome would be. We started a poker game but eventually found ourselves talking. These were full-time undergrounders. I asked what made them abandon their original identities. The first said, “Oh, I got caught strewing pamphlets and had to run. What brought me into the Society to start with was…well, one damn thing after another, like when I was a miner and they boosted our quota too high for us to maintain safety structures and a cave-in killed a buddy of mine.”