Cerberus: A WOLF IN THE FOLD (40 page)

 
Plastic worlds.
Did they, then, breed plastic people? Was Dumonia right? Was the alien threat more of a threat because of the way we'd remade ourselves?

 
And yet the civilized worlds were happy places. There was no poverty, few diseases, no hunger or other forms of human misery that had plagued man through the ages. Not even the frontier, with its vast technological support, was as miserable or threatening as past frontiers had been. He was raised in that culture and, seeing the historical record, believed in it. It
was
better than anything man had ever had before. That was the trouble.
The basic puzzle that haunted him.
It was neither bad nor evil. It was a
good
society full of happy, healthy, well-adjusted people, on the whole.

 
f
That thought cheered him slightly. Dumonia was wrong, too, in believing that the sparks of human greatness were extinguished in such a system. They hadn't been extinguished—they .merely lay dormant until needed. The Warden Diamond proved that.

 
Humanity's strength and hope lay in that dormancy.
In the fact that under trial the reserve was there to adapt, to change, to meet new challenges.
Dormant but not extinct.

 
That thought brightened his mood somewhat, although not completely. That was fine for the collective, but not for the individual. Not for one particular individual in five bodies.

 
Twice now he'd followed himself on dangerous ground. Twice he had seen himself change, in some ways radically, putting aside his self-image, his devotion to duty and ideals—even the ideals themselves. In all cases he'd violated, once and for all, his personal standards, his own sense of himself as
a bedrock
, the ultimate loner who uses but does not need. These, too, were dormant inside him and came out when—well, when the leash was cut.
The leash that bound him to the Confederacy, its authority, principles, and ideals.
He had willingly been leashed, and the cut had not been of his own making, but still it was there.

 
What disturbed him most of all was that he was still on that leash. That very thought was horrible, a violation of all he'd ever stood for or believed in, but it was a truth that had to be faced. Those men down there—they thought themselves trapped, and him the free man. They were wrong. And as they envied him, so he too was envying them.

 
'But, still, there was a mission, a problem.
One that even
they
had continued to serve.
He could at least address that.

 
"Evaluation?"

 
"Correlations with Lilith are fascinating," the computer told him. "There are certain totally irrational common grounds." -

 
He nodded. "I saw them." ^

 
"We'll need to get someone out to Momratn, of courw, but that may have been done for us from the data sifting in. We will also have to intensify patrols throughout the Warden system, since there are points of contact between alien and human here somewhere."

 
"We should tighten up on vacation resorts back in the civilized worlds, too," he noted. "Obviously that's the key place from which they kidnap their targets. They would have to be missing for at least a week to ten days."

 
"That can be done only to a point," the computer pointed out. "It would be helpful to know who selects those targets. So far the grand design, the pattern, eludes me, mostly because we do not have enough identified robot agents to correlate their positions. It seems obvious, though, that the aliens are quite subtle."

 
"We knew that from the start. Who the hell would ever imagine an enemy alien force hiring the chief criminal elements to do
all its
advance work?"

 
"I worry that it is more than advance work. Let us postulate one or two conditions that seem reasonable from the facts, bearing in mind that we are dealing with alien minds developed in an unknown evolutionary pat* tern that might not follow our logic."

 
"Go on."

 
"We assume that they are either numerically inferior to our own forces or unwilling to take the casualty rates a direct attack might bring."

 
"That may be a wrong assumption," he pointed out "After all, if they can make super-robots like this, they could do their fighting entirely with surrogates."

 
"Perhaps.
But I tend to believe that the processes involved in perfecting these devices is too long, involved, laborious, and costly for such mass production. Instead, I suggest that their plot may be
entirely
on the subtle side. We have been looking too hard at the direct military option."

 
"Huh? What do you mean?"

 
"Suppose their plot is to bore from within? To weaken and disrupt key services, key facilities, the bedrock of our economic and social system? A carefully chosen and placed organic robot could do more harm for longer periods than any direct attack by planet killers. I need only look at your own psychological reactions to the Warden to see how easily and subtly we can be turned. The human race and its culture is such that it would destroy itself rather than be conquered from outside. There are parallels among the early independent planets and even earlier, in the age of nations on a single planet
We
have often come very, very close to self-destruction rather than total capitulation. A direct attacker, then, would have nothing to win."

 
"So you think the choice of the Four Lords was more than just a clever expediency? Hmmm . . . Laroo indicated that Kreegan was the original mastermind; and Kreegan, to be sure, had a penchant for nasty and sneaky plots and behavior." He sat back. "Now, let me get this straight. You're suggesting that the aliens never intend to attack us directly. That the war they chose is the war they are now fighting. That they aim for internal disruption and collapse by exploiting our weaknesses, rather than conquest."

 
"It makes the most sense."

 
He nodded. "And it's the least costly of the alternatives. None of
their
people are exposed or jeopardized. The Diamond, and through it the robots, do the dirty work. It's even cost-effective. Assuming you're right— analysis?"

 
"If the Four Lords are directing things in this manner, and choose properly and correctly, it will work. Not quickly. We might not even
know
or
realize
the extent of their success until it's too late. And with the promise of those robot bodies and the chance to escape, the end could come not by kidnapping key people and replacing them but by mobilizing the best criminal minds of the last seventy years in such bodies and loosing them on an already weakened and infiltrated Confederacy."

 
The prospect appalled him. "But wait a moment. Only Cerberan criminals could be used. Those on the other three worlds have other Warden variants that won't step aside to allow a Cerberan mind-switch."

 
"Have you forgotten the Mertorn Process?"

 
He whistled and shook his head. "Then finding the aliens, bringing them out into the open, is our only hope. And we have no guarantees that there are any of them anywhere hear the Warden system. It could all be handled by robots and third parties hired by the Four Lords." - '

 
"Perhaps one of the remaining two will tell us for sure," the computer suggested hopefully. "Or if not, perhaps our in-system patrols will get lucky."

 
"Correlate and transmit what we've got," he ordered. "We just have to wait and see."

 
"Done."

 
The man walked back to the living quarters of the module on the great picket ship, poured himself a drink, and sat down on his bed. All that the computer had suggested disturbed him, but still he couldn't bring his mind to focus for long on the larger problem and plot.

 
Cal Tremon ... Qwin Zhang ... H ... Dylan Kohl
..
.

 
Like some song that gets stuck in your mind and you keep hearing it over and over whether you want to or not.

 
I
can't get you out of my head.

About the Author

 
Jack L. chalker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on December 17, 1944, but was raised and has spent most of his life in Baltimore, Maryland. He learned to read almost from the moment of entering school, and by working odd jobs had amassed a large book collection by the time he was La junior high school, a collection now too large for containment in his house. Science' fiction, history, and geography all fascinated him early on, interests that continue.

 
Chalker joined the Washington Science Fiction Association in 1958 and began publishing an amateur SF journal,
Mirage,
in 1960. After high school he decided to be a trial lawyer, but money problems and the lack of a firm caused him to switch to teaching. He holds bachelor degrees in hi^ory and English, and an M.L.A. from the Johns Hopkins University. He taught history and geography in the Baltimore public schools between 1966 and 1978, and now makes his living as a freelance writer. Additionally, out of the amateur journals he founded a publishing house, The Mirage Press, Ltd., devoted to nonfiction and bibliographic works on science fiction and fantasy. This company has produced more than twenty, books in the last nine years. His hobbies include esoteric audio, travel, working on science-fiction convention committees, and guest lecturing on SF to institutions such as the Smithsonian. He is an active conservationist and National Parks supporter, and he has an intensive love of ferryboats, with the avowed goal of riding every ferry in the world. In fact, in 1978 he was married to Eva Whitley on an ancient ferryboat in mid-river
They
live in the Catoctin Mountain region of western Maryland.