Cerberus: A WOLF IN THE FOLD (31 page)

 
I shook my head from side to side.
"No, not this much, anyway.
My last report was more than two months ago, and I haven't been near the agent who can trigger the command. But I know who he is now, so they don't own me any more."

 
"Who?"

 
"Does it matter? If you nab him, they'll just establish
a.
dozen more, ones we don't know. No, from the point at which I learned of all this stuff, I started getting ideas of my own. First, I definitely wanted in. I don't like being a prisoner any more than you or any of the rest of us, and I don't like living under the Confederacy's gun. Whether I succeeded or failed, I was a dead man—and I don't want to be dead, Bogen, and I don't want the kind of stasis my life's now in, which was the other alternative. So that got me to thinking about you and Laroo and Project Phoenix. It occurred to me that you're dealing with a product of alien technology using people who have no experience even in our end of things. Organic computing's on the proscribed list, as you know, so there are few experts in it, and those who are, are basically industrially oriented, toward the parts the Confederacy
does
use. You don't have the people or the years of research and development to solve the problem, and I think you know it." „

 
"All right.
I'm not about to grant that, but I'll admit progress has been almost nil. We know
what,
but there's just no way to take the programming out selectively— and if you take it all out, you destroy it, since life support and all the other normal functions are part of the programming molecules within each tiny cell. Basically you need a full-blown organic computer to do the job, and we haven't been allowed to get near those things ir hundreds of years, not since the war."

 
I nodded. "There's only one place other than the aliens where the kind of expertise you need exists at all. You know it and I know it. I'm sure you've sicced some of your robots on it, but the data are too diffuse to get at. It might take years to put it all together, even Jissuming you can break the codes. I don't think you fed Hke you have years to spare."

 
"Goon."

 
"Security.
Confederacy Security.
They could easily tap the data, put it together, and send it to as complex a computing network as necessary to solve the problem.
They
use organic computers, you know. Not like these— not at all like these.
Bt
they
do
use them in their ships and modules.
They
could solve your problem for you."

 
He laughed. "And just like that—you ask 'em and they comply, right? Don't be ridiculous!"

 
I relaxed a little.
"Not at all.
I told you I knew who the communications agent was. If I walk in there and force him to put me through, there'll be no force, no coercion, and no forgetting. Now, just suppose I call upstairs and tell them I've got a crack at stealing one of the alien robots?" "What!"

 
"Uh-huh. And I tell them how I'm going to do it. I'm going to clear it of all prior -programming, then take control myself. Let my mind go into it and bring it—and me—out of Cerberus." "They won't swallow it."

 
"I think they will. Remember, they don't have any way to check on the truth of what I'm saying, and the mere fact that 111 be coming to them with this will prove an unbroken line. I'm a pretty good hypnotic subject when I want to be. Let's say I tell 'em some of the robot programming is being done on this island—they already know almost as much anyway—and that I've wormed my way into the project through my Tooker associations. Some of the experts working on the project don't like the idea of working for unknown aliens, and I've got some underground help—if I can get a robot out. And the only way to ensure that is to walk out as one. They'll buy it. It sounds just like me." He thought it over.
"Too risky."

 
"There's no risk, if you think about it. They already know that the Cerberans are involved in the programming, and it doesn't take a master detective to figure that it has to be the space station and the island. I'm giving them a convincing scenario that meshes with my previous reports and also with what they already know. They themselves then have the choice. Either they okay the plan and give the solution to me—if
they
can solve it—or they turn me down as too much of a risk for that kind of information. I think I know them. As long as they know they have the power to destroy this whole planet, they'll okay it. The temptation, the bait, will be too great."

 
"Supposing they do?
What happens to Cerberus when you don't deliver?"

 
"We have the key, and that solves the problem. Beyond that—well, I would assume protection for my wife and myself, perhaps eventually "cleared robot bodies of our own. And if the Confederacy makes a move to atomize Cerberus, we'll have a lot of advance warning. You just can't make that kind of decision easily, so we'll have
th
opportunity to call on those aliens for help."

 
"And if they won't?"

 
"Then at least
we
get away."

 
He thought it over some more. "Well, what you say is true—up to a point. My only concern is that, unbeknownst even to you, this is a subtle Confederacy plot."

 
"Huh? What could / do to
you?"

 
"Oh, not you.
But suppose they use all this to get
a
authorization for planetary destruction? Suppose that's what they really want—direct cause they can get through the Councils? Their primary, maybe only, objective is to bring these aliens out of the woodwork. Maybe the authorized destruction of Cerberus is the way they're planning to do that-—and we have no guarantees the aliens will protect us, or be able to. It seems to me that if they could defeat the Confederacy militarily they wouldn't have needed us in the first place."

 
It was a glum thought, one I hadn't really considered. As sneaky as my bosses had been, was this, then, their goal? Certainly it would be the ultimate goal, to smoke them out. I didn't like to think of the idea that they expected it all along, though, from me.

 
"It's a possibility.
A risk.
A big risk, I admit. But which is the bigger risk?
Not
to try it, not to crack this programming code, and still be sitting here when they eventually
do
get around to excising us? It's going to happen. You knqw it and I know it If they go along, at letet we have a chance—all of us."

 
Bogen sighed and shook his head, but
all his
belligerence was gone. "This is too big a decision for me to make, you know. I'm going to have to buck this to Laroo.
You, too, probably."

 
"Suits me fine."

 
I sent back word with the boat crew that I would be remaining at least overnight, and gave Dylan some encouraging news, in the simplest form of code. I didn't really care if Bogen's people figured it out or not; if he didn't have some foreknowledge of me and my nature he didn't deserve to be in the business.

 
Then I waited for Bogen to call his boss, and finally he returned. "Okay," he said, "He's coming in tomorrow afternoon. Earliest he can get away. You're to stay here as his guest until he hears you out and makes a final decision."

 
"What about my wife?" I asked, somewhat concerned. "She has no credit, remember."

 
"She'll be all right through tomorrow. My people will be there if she needs anything. After that, well, we'll see. Remember, your future and hers are hanging by a thread right now."

 
Didn't I know it! Still, I was committed now. "Well, since I'm either in or dead, mind letting me see one of these wonders of the universe?"

 
He thought it over. "Sure.
Why not.
Come on."

 
We rode down in one of the transparent elevators, far beyond the ground floor and into the vast trunk of the main support tree itself.

 
The lab facilities down there were quite modern and impressive. Along the way I ran into several old Tooker employees who saw and greeted me, but Bogen wasn't in the mood to let me renew old friendships.

 
The center of all this activity was an eerie lab in two parts, with a monitoring and control panel of unfamiliar design on one side and a series of small booths along an entire wall. A young and very attractive woman with long black hair trailing down over her traditional lab coat was checking a series of readings on one of the machines as.
we
entered. She glanced up, saw Bogen, and rose to meet us.

 
"Here's the best mind on Cerberus, and one of the best in the whole galaxy," Bogen beamed.

 
She smiled and put out a hand. "Zyra Merton," she introduced herself.

 
I was startled even as I shook the thin, delicate hand. "Qwin Zhang. Did you say Merton?" She laughed pleasantly. "Yes. You've heard the name?"

 
"I sure have. Somehow, though, my vision was always of some little old man with wild hair and a beard."

 
"Well, I
am
pretty old," she replied good-humoredly. "In fact, I'm close to a hundred and eighty. The reason why I came here, almost ninety years
ago,
was not only to study the Warden processes on Cerberus but also because it was at the time the only way to save my life. However, I assure you that I am and have always been a woman, and I've never once had a beard."

 
I laughed back. She was charming, and a surprising answer to the question of just who Merton really was.

 
"But tell me, where did you hear my name?" she asked.

 
"I'm a product of what the Confederacy calls the Merton Process," I told her.

 
She seemed very interested. "You mean they solved the problems? It cost too many lives and too many people's sanity ever to be very practical, I thought. I abandoned that research when I turned entirely to researching Cerberan processes. That was—let me see—fifty years or so ago."

 
"Well, they solved some of it," I told- her. "Not the attrition rate, though."

 
She looked disappointed and a bit angry. "Damn them! Damn me! My biggest regret has always been that I developed the thing to begin with and sent out the data in so incomplete a form. Still, in those days there were few people here, and not much technology or governmental structure, and I was dependent on outside support to get anywhere. Still, I'd like to give you a complete psych scan sometime, just to find out how far they
did
go with it. It's a dead end beyond what you say, I fear." **

 
I decided not to tell her how much of a success the Confederacy thought it was. Out of respect for my counterparts on Lilith, Medusa, and Charon, I didn't want to blow too much right now.

 
"
Ill
be
glad to—sometime," I told her sincerely. If I could trust anybody on this crazy ball it was probably her, if only for her scientific detachment.

 
"Zhang's interested in our friends," Bogen told her. "Can you give us a bit of a demonstration?"

 
She nodded. "Glad to.
Got one that's just about ripe."

 
"Ripe?"

 
"Finished.
Complete.
Ready to go."
She went back to her instruments and punched in a series of instructions. A slight buzzer sounded over one of the booths, and a red light came on. After a moment the red light went out and was replaced by an amber standby, then a green.

 
She left her panel, went over, and opened the door to one of the booths. The sight revealed startled me. It was the body of a tall, muscular man to civilized worlds' norm. He looked recently dead.

 
"Two one two six seven—awake and step out," she instructed.

 
The cadaver stirred, opened its eyes, and looked around, and into its whole body came an eerie sense of life,-of full animation. It walked out of the box, suddenly appearing very natural.

 
I went over and looked at him. Doing so made me a little uncomfortable, because suddenly it was a person and not a thing I was eyeing as I would a piece of sculpture.

 
"The most amazing marriage of organic chemistry, computer, and molecular biology I have ever seen or known," Merton told me.

 
"This
is a
robot?"

 
She nodded. "They don't come packaged exactly like this, I should tell you. They arrive in a roughly human-old shape and with the same mass, but that's about all. From cell samples supplied us, we're able to graft an entire skin onto it so perfectly that it is an exact duplicate of whoever's cell we use. The material we use for it is similar to the stuff used on the entire device, but it's capable of following and using the genetic code of the original. When we have the original subject handy, it can add in moments any scars, blemishes, or oddities to make itself a complete duplicate."