03. The Maze in the Mirror (14 page)

I wasn't sure if that was the truth or not. It certainly made a lot of sense out of what they'd done, but then the cost had been high and Voorhes had seemed genuinely surprised at the news. It made little difference in the outcome but the answer would tell me a lot about how far I could trust these jokers. I decided to test it.

"If that's so, then you lost a lot of people in the taking, cost yourself a fortune, exposed an underground organization on my world, and lost two of your own in the process."

Voorhes shrugged. "The organization was no longer necessary or relevant to us. The people, with two exceptions, were little more than cannon

fodder in the struggle-less than pawns, really. The two of any import knew the risk and felt confident of themselves. They were also expendable, as are we all, in the cause. Their usefulness was in running the cover on your world in any event, and, as I said, that was no longer needed. Its exposure has actually saved us time, money, and manpower, since such a network and those who taste the power of it is not easily shut down with an order. Still, I find it curious that you would come after getting your son back. Come defenseless and alone."

I shrugged. "I'm an easy man to kill, so I don't worry about that part of it in my profession. I brought no weapons because I'm lousy with weapons. That's not my field of expertise. Brandy is the weapons expert, as your people discovered. And I have clients, not owners, and my value to said clients is useless if my brain's messed with or drug dependent or anything like that. Besides, while I have no reason to love you or your people, I don't have much love and admiration for the Company, either. I see the same things wrong that you see, and I don't like them. At the moment, if you'll pardon my honesty, I think both you and the Company are a pair of slime balls. You're both vicious, corrupt, and you see people, even whole worlds, as nothing more than spots in a ledger or-less than pawns, really."

Voorhes looked uncomfortable at that. "All that you say is true, yet we will stop it. Without the Labyrinth there is no corrupting power."

"And you're not really sure that you have the strength or will to turn it off, even if you have a method, are you? That's why some murder of one
of your top people has you in a tizzy. You're not afraid that one of your top boys has turned traitor; you're afraid that at least one of your boys has become so corrupted that he'd rather be a demigod than give it up. That's it, isn't it?" "You are quite perceptive, Horowitz. I'll give you that. Perhaps I misjudged you."

"You said you were against bringing me in at all. Why? And who was my champion?"

"We had a choice of many of the greatest detectives ever produced by civilization. Frankly, I didn't find your qualifications all that great in comparison. I also believed that you had too much of an ax to grind against us for past indiscretions. However, you might just be the right one for this after all. As to who championed you- interestingly, our computers suggested you as one on a very short list.
Two
others, one of whom I think you know-or at least know of-picked you off it."

I gave him a wan smile as the storm continued to howl and pound all around them. "Now I'll tell you the conditions under which I'll take your case," I said.

"Conditions? Consider your position, man! Have you lost your senses?"

"Some people think I never had them. You know that I've got high security Company blockers in my head. Any attempt to put me under a hypno or something like that and reprogram me or get at information would be very unpleasant for me. I'm sure you've had a monitor on me at least since we came inside, though. You know I'm not lying to you. I'll catch your murderer for you-or he'll catch me-but beyond the lie detector we don't
go. No drugs, no programming, no funny techniques. The most I'll accept voluntarily is the same kind of blocking seals on what I learn about you all as I have on the Company data. I don't tell them your secrets and I don't tell you theirs. Beyond that, I have free and unlimited access to any and all data that I need, any people, places, and the like I require, and absolute freedom of action. I will get all the cooperation I need or I'll quit. Either you trust me, within reason, to play as fair with you as I do with the Company, or it's impossible. My wife and child stay out of it and sacrosanct. Anybody touches them and that becomes my only concern and you can go to hell."

Voorhes sighed. "You ask too much trust from ones like us. They will never go for it."

"Then everything you did was in vain. You play with my mind and it'll blow up. You hook me on some new variety of drug and you blow any chance I'll have a clear head and the sort of conditions conducive to solving anything at all. You are a client, nothing more or less. As a client you are confidential from anyone including my other clients, and I'll take no case that treads on conflict of interest. Since I've mostly been designing and checking out security installations lately, that's not likely. I don't even care which one of you wins. The case stands alone. Either it's my way or you can either send me back and find one of your great detectives to take it or you can blow me away and do the same."

Voorhes thought a moment, then responded, "We considered this problem. There are a lot of good detectives, and, as you might imagine, some are on paper as qualified if not as experienced as you. We decided that the only way to insure our own security was to use someone with, oddly, a high moral sense-a strong conscience, if you will. That was what made the list so short. So far you have been sitting there saying, 'What a decent sort of chap this is. I simply can not reconcile this with the mad terrorists I know they are.' Well, I will not disappoint you. You will have your freedom, and your independence, but you will carry a burden with you. You have no idea how many or which worlds we either control or move freely in. If you take this case, and anything you learn of us gets to the Company-if
anything
goes wrong that results in a betrayal, whether your fault, our fault, or nobody's fault, an order will be given resulting in the obliteration of millions of innocent men, women, and children by nuclear devices or other means as we choose or that are convenient. The targets have been set up at random by our computers; even we don't know which ones are primed. But if we are betrayed, and you survive, we will make certain you get graphic evidence that we have carried out our threat."

I was appalled. "Now, wait a minute! I'll take responsibility for myself but you ask for things out of my hands!"

"That is the way it is, Horowitz. You must believe we will do what I said we will do. Those are the terms."

I shook my head. "Uh uh. I can't take on that kind of load no matter what. The Company's not stupid and you've drawn arrows pointing to me and mine that have drawn them like flies."

"You misunderstand, Horowitz," Voorhes said curtly. "If you refuse, then we shall not only
eliminate you but put all our resources on eliminating your wife and child as well no matter where they might be. A small nuclear device in a suitcase many miles from your home would do it, and we can track them and wait. You have already taken the case. You did that when you showed up here in response to my invitation."

I reached inside my shirt pocket, pulled out a cigar and lighter, and lit the stogie, then sat back and sighed. The storm was already slacking off; it was damp and unpleasant, even clammy, but clearly the rain was stopping.
Damn!
I never figured on them being
that
slimy! I had no doubt that the sons of bitches would do just what they said, too.

Still, this was the greatest challenge I could ever face in my career, and maybe one too great. Billions of lives ... a whole world. That was one hell of a fee. And solving their damned mystery was only the start of the problem.

"All right, then maybe we should start," I said, feeling curiously distanced, almost a third party watching the affair. "Background first. Why you started this rebel organization, why you hate the Company so much, and how the leadership came together. I want to know what binds you."

"That is easy," Voorhes replied softly. "We are all dead."

"Our home world was like most of the Type Zero worlds you know," Voorhes began. "The history, particularly from the Middle Ages onward, was quite divergent, but that common thread gives you a general idea that our values, our cultures, weren't so alien as to be unrecognizable. The precise details are unimportant."

"You're all from the same origin world?" I asked him.
That
was new.

Voorhes nodded. "The Board and top leadership, yes. The vast hordes of others, no. Below us are hotheads, malcontents, revolutionaries, criminal types, and madmen-the usual sort you can always find in such a fight, and we had an extraordinarily large pool to choose from. The larger groups are from worlds we either control or have agreements with. That sort of thing. But it's our world that's at the heart of it. You see, we bred a lot of people who were just too damned clever and societies where it was simply too difficult for the Company to remain totally unobtrusive, as it likes, as well as many things the Company wanted or could use.

"At, any rate," he continued, "they-the Company-were discovered. Found out. They had the tables turned on them, so to speak, as our own people worked to discover all that we could about the alien invaders even as they were trying to find out everything about us and take us over. Enormous projects in more than one nation had been working on dimensional mathematics and interdimensional physics since a couple of brilliant theoreticians had come up with the math for them, and discovery of the Company and of the stations fed rather than confused or cowed us. Our leaders didn't run from it or dismiss it as unbelievable nonsense. No, the evidence was that we were being invaded by a parallel world. The natural thing was to try and figure out how to invade them in turn."

"Go ahead. I'm with you so far," I told him, fascinated in spite of myself.

"Well, you see, this was a case in which ignorance would have been better than a partial truth. We were like a planet in a solar system that for some reason could see nearer planets but could never see or imagine the millions and billions of stars. If invaded by aliens, they would assume the invasion was coming from one of the planets and they would build rockets to charge to the offense, never dreaming that these invading aliens came in starships and controlled a thousand million worlds. None of them ever dreamed that there was a Labyrinth. Oh, there might be an infinite number of parallel worlds, but one went through them one at a time. The concept of an almost random access network, an interdimensional railroad even, was inconceivable to them. And there was competition between nations as well for the potential prizes this alien civilization might hold. They played the game well. The Company was so arrogant and cock-sure of itself it didn't know what hit it. Agents were taken or killed, networks broken up, stations seized, in perfect coordination. Needless to say, it rang alarm bells everywhere."

I nodded. "A whole horde in control of stations with access to the Labyrinth. Yeah, I can see the problem. And I assume it was on a key part of the main line so the Company couldn't switch them off into limbo without cutting itself off as well."

"Indeed. Oh, the Company actually had little problems securing the Labyrinth proper, but once our folks had the technology they found weak points the Company hadn't exploited or covered and began to punch through themselves. Cruder mechanisms, naturally, by far, but a musket ball kills as surely as a machine gun bullet. And we
were learning fast. Never before had the Company faced a foe who understood pretty much what they were facing and who had sufficient knowledge and technological skills to build on what they discovered, and to analyze and use the technology they found. Worse, being on a main line they couldn't simply lock a switch onto a limbo line, as you called it, and let them stew. Besides, they might well begin analyzing the power grid and building their own switches. They panicked. The Company, the entire Board, panicked. Operations were disrupted for the foreseeable future, and that might have been enough, but they had the nightmarish feeling that the Visigoths were knocking on the very gates of Rome. They took a vote, and their Director of Security was ordered to back flush that area of the line."

"Now you've lost me," I told him. "I was with you up to now." But, deep down, I thought I knew what the man was going to say, and it made things instantly clearer-and it made me sick to my stomach.

"First you purify the line between two switch points where the problem is. You sterilize it by storing tremendous energy in the power substations at each switch point and then, at a given signal, you feed that power back through all but one of the lines in the Labyrinth. It is two massive force fields, pure energy, coming at one another from opposite directions, disintegrating anything and everything within the cubes as they come. When they meet, the energy can go neither forward nor back if you've done your job right, so it goes in one massive surge to every station or weak point at the cube where they meet. When that
happens there is an unavoidable additional surge from the central power core itself, suddenly liberated if only for a short while. The Labyrinth goes dark, but massive power rushes out until the power grid can be slowly brought back down to normal levels over a period of hours, even days. Otherwise it would melt the whole system. The energy release is sufficient to vaporize more than a third of the planetary surface, hurling up much of it in microscopic specks until it blankets the planet and darkens it for fifty to a hundred years. Everything not killed in the initial surge dies slowly and agonizingly in freezing cold thereafter."

Have you ever destroyed a whole world?

It's been done, but it takes a unanimous vote of the Board . . .

"Good God! There's nothing left?"

"Oh, some moss and lichens will survive, some microscopic spores, and probably a fair number of insects of the worst sort-cockroaches, that sort of thing. Some odd forms of sea life near volcanic vents that depend not at all on sunlight or warm water. But major life-human, plant, animal- that's gone. Every one and every thing. Worse than an atomic holocaust, if you can imagine that. The people, the culture, the books, the plays, the great works of art and architecture, the work of a millennia of intellectuals. All gone forever. There was never even a threat, let alone an attempt at negotiation or compromise. Not even a demand for unconditional surrender. They panicked and they did it and they didn't even lose any sleep over it. It was just one world, nothing important, peopled with inferior human beings."