Forever Peace (29 page)

I had to get away. Amelia and I found bathing suits and pedaled to the beach. In the men's changing room two men watched me in a strangely hostile way. I supposed black people are rare up here. Or maybe bicyclists.

We didn't do much swimming; the water was too salty, with a greasy metallic taste, and surprisingly cold. For some reason, it smelled like cured ham. We waded out and dried off, shivering, and walked for a while on the odd beach.

The white sand wasn't native, obviously. We'd come in pedaling over the actual crater surface, which was a kind of dark umber glass. The sand felt too powdery underfoot, and made a squeaking sound.

It seemed really strange compared to the Texas beaches where we'd vacationed, Padre Island and Matagorda. No seabirds, shells, crabs. Just a big round artifact full of alkaline water. A lake created by a simpleminded god, Amelia said.

"I know where he could find a couple of thousand followers," I said.

"I dreamed about him," she said. "I dreamed he had gotten me, like the one you talked about."

I hesitated. "Do you want to talk about it?" He had opened the victim from navel to womb, and then made a cross-slash through the middle of the abdomen, as a kind of decoration after cutting her throat.

She made a brushing-away gesture. "The reality's more frightening than the dream. If it's at all like his picture of it."

"Yeah." We'd discussed the possibility that there were only a few of them; maybe only four deluded conspirators. But he seemed to be able to draw on an awful lot of resources—information, money, and ration credits, as well as gadgets like the AK 101. Marty was going to talk to his general this morning.

"It's scary that their situation is the opposite of ours. We could locate and interrogate a thousand of them and never find anyone involved in the actual planning. But if they jack with any one of you, they know everything."

I nodded. "So we have to move fast."

"Move, period. Once they track him or Jefferson up here, we're dead." She stopped walking. "Let's sit here. Just sit quietly for a few minutes. It might be our last chance."

She crossed ankles and drifted into a kind of lotus position. I sat down less gracefully. We held hands and watched morning mist burn off the dead gray water.

MARTY PASSED ON WHAT Ingram had revealed about the Hammer of God to the general. He said it sounded fantastic, but he would make cautious inquiries.

He also found for them two decommissioned vehicles, delivered that afternoon: a heavy-duty panel truck and a school bus. They turned the conspicuous army green into a churchly powder blue, and lettered "St. Bartholomew's Home" on both vehicles.

Moving the nanoforge was no picnic. The crew that had delivered it long ago had used two heavy dollies, a ramp, and a winch to get it into the basement. They used the machine to improvise duplicates, jacked it up onto the dollies and, after widening three doors, managed to get it into the garage in one backbreaking day. Then at night they snuck it out and winched it into the panel truck.

Meanwhile, they were modifying the school bus so that Ingram and Jefferson could stay jacked continuously, which meant taking out seats and putting in beds, along with equipment to keep them fed and watered and emptied. They would stay continually jacked to two of the Twenty, or Julian, working in staggered four-hour shifts.

Julian and Amelia were working as unskilled labor, tearing out the last four rows of seats in the bus and improvising a solid frame for the beds, sweating and swatting mosquitoes under the harsh light, when Mendez clomped into the bus, rolling up his sleeves: "Julian, I'll take over here. The Twenty need you to jack with them."

"Gladly." Julian got up and stretched, both shoulders crackling. "What's up? Ingram have a heart attack, I hope?"

"No, they need some practical input about Portobello. One-way jack, for safety's sake."

Amelia watched Julian go. "I'm afraid for him."

"I'm afraid for us all." He took a small bottle from his pants pocket, opened it, and shook out a capsule. He handed it to her, his hand quivering a little.

She looked at the silver oval. "The poison."

"Marty says it's almost instantaneous, and irreversible. An enzyme that goes straight to the brain."

"It feels like glass."

"Some kind of plastic. We're supposed to bite down on it."

"What if you swallow it?"

"It takes longer. The idea is—"

"I know what the idea is." She put it in her blouse pocket and buttoned it. "So what did the Twenty want to know about Portobello?"

"Panama City, actually. The POW camp and the Portobello connection to it, if any."

"What are they going to do with thousands of hostile prisoners?"

"Turn them into allies. Jack them all together for two weeks and humanize them."

"And let them go?"

"Oh, no." Mendez smiled and looked back toward the house. "Even behind bars, they won't be prisoners anymore."

I UNJACKED AND STARED down into the wildflowers for a minute, sort of wishing it had been two-way; sort of not. Then I stood up, stumbled, and went back to where Marty was sitting at one of the picnic tables. Incongruously, he was slicing lemons. He had a large plastic bag of them and three pitchers, and a manual juicer.

"So what do you think?"

"You're making lemonade."

"My specialty." Each of the pitchers had a measured amount of sugar in the bottom. When he sliced a lemon, he would take a thin slice out of the middle and throw it on the sugar. Then squeeze the juice out of both halves. It looked like six lemons per pitcher.

"I don't know," I said. "It's an audacious plan. I have a couple of misgivings."

"Okay."

"You want to jack?" I nodded toward the table with the one-way box.

"No. Give me the surface first. In your own words, so to speak."

I sat down across from him and rolled a lemon between my palms. "Thousands of people. All from a foreign culture. The process works, but you've only tried it on twenty Americans—twenty white Americans."

"There's no reason to think it might be culture-bound."

"That's what they say themselves. But there's no evidence to the contrary, either. Suppose you wind up with three thousand raving lunatics?"

"Not likely. That's good conservative science—we ought to do a small-scale test first—but we can't afford to. We're not doing science now—we're doing politics."

"Beyond politics," I said. "There's no word for what we're doing."

"Social engineering?"

I had to laugh. "I wouldn't say that around an engineer. It's like mechanical engineering with a crowbar and sledgehammer."

He concentrated on a lemon. "You do still agree that it has to be done."

"Something has to be done. A couple of days ago, we were still considering options. Now we're on some kind of slippery ramp; can't slow down, can't go back."

"True, but we didn't do it voluntarily, remember. Jefferson put us on the edge of the ramp, and Ingram pushed us over."

"Yeah. My mother likes to say, 'Do something, even if it's wrong.' I guess we're in that mode."

He set down the knife and looked at me. "Actually not. Not quite. We do have the option of just plain going public."

"About the Jupiter Project?"

"About the whole thing. In all likelihood, the government's going to discover what we're doing and squash us. We could take that opportunity away from them by going public."

Odd that I hadn't even considered that. "But we wouldn't get anything close to a hundred percent compliance. Less than half, you figured. And then we're in Ingram's nightmare, a minority of lambs surrounded by wolves."

"Worse than that," he said cheerfully. "Who controls the media? Before the first volunteer could sign up, the government would have us painted as ogres bent on world domination. Mind controllers. We'd be hunted down and lynched."

He finished with the lemons and poured equal amounts of juice into each pitcher. "Understand that I've been thinking about this for twenty years. There's no way around the central conundrum: to humanize someone, we have to install a jack; but once you're jacked two-way, you can't keep a secret.

"If we had all the time in the world, we could do it like the Enders' cell system. Elaborate memory modification for everybody who's not at the very top, so that nobody could reveal my identity or yours. But memory modification takes training, equipment, time.

"This idea of humanizing the POWs is partly a way of undermining the government's case against us, ahead of time. It's presented initially as a way of keeping the prisoners in line—but then we let the news media 'discover' that something more profound has happened to them. Heartless killers transformed into saints."

"Meanwhile, we're doing the same thing to all the mechanics. One cycle at a time."

"That's right," he said. "Forty-five days. If it works."

The arithmetic was clear enough. There were six thousand soldierboys, each serviced by three cycles. Fifteen days each, and after forty-five days you had eighteen thousand people on our side, plus the thousand or two who run the flyboys and Waterboys, who would be going through the process.

What Marty's pet general was going to do, or try, was to declare a worldwide Psychops effort that required certain platoons to stay on duty for a week or a few weeks extra.

It only took five extra days to "turn" a mechanic, but then you couldn't just send him home. The change in behavior would be obvious, and the first time one was jacked, the secret would be out. Fortunately, once the mechanics were jacked, they'd understand the necessity for isolation, so keeping them on base wouldn't be a problem. (Except for feeding and housing all those extra people, which Marty's general would incorporate into the exercise. Never hurt a soldier to bivouac for a week or two.)

Meanwhile, the publicity over the miraculous "conversion" of the POWs would be priming the public to accept the next step.

The ultimate bloodless coup: pacifists taking over the army, and the army taking over the government. And then the people—radical idea!—taking over the government themselves.

"But the whole thing hinges on this mystery man, or woman," I said. "Someone who can shuffle medical records around, have a few people reassigned, okay. Appropriate a truck and a bus. That's nothing like setting up a global Psychops exercise. One that's actually a takeover of the military."

He nodded quietly.

"Aren't you going to put water in the lemonade?"

"Not until morning. That's the secret." He folded his arms. "As to the big secret, his identity, you're perilously close to solving it."

"The president?" He laughed. "Secretary of defense? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?"

"You could figure it out with what you know, given a table of organization. Which is a problem. We're extremely vulnerable between now and the time your memory has been tailored."

I shrugged. "The Twenty told me about the suicide pills."

He carefully uncapped a brown vial and shook three hard pills into my hand. "Bite down on one and you'll be brain-dead in a few seconds. For you and me it ought to be in a glass tooth."

"In a tooth?"

"Old spy myth. But if they take you or me alive, and get a jack into us, the general's dead meat, and the whole thing is over."

"But you're one-way."

He nodded. "With me, it would take a little torture. With you... well, you might as well just know his name."

"Senator Dietz? The pope?"

He took my arm and started to lead me back to the bus. "It's Major General Stanton Roser, the Assistant Secretary for Force Management and Personnel. He was one of the Twenty who supposedly died, but with a different name and face. Now he has a disconnected jack, but otherwise he's well-connected indeed."

"None of the Twenty knows?"

He shook his head. "And they won't find out from me. Nor from you, now. You don't jack with anybody until we get to Mexico and tailor your memory."

THEIR DRIVE DOWN TO Mexico was too interesting. The fuel cells in the truck lost power so fast they had to be recharged every two hours. Before they got out of South Dakota they decided to pull over for half a day and rewire the vehicle so it was powered directly by the nanoforge's warm fusion generator.

Then the bus broke down, the transmission turning to mush. It was essentially an airtight cylinder of powdered iron stiffened by a magnetic field. Two of the Twenty, Hanover and Lamb, had worked on cars, and together they figured out that the problem was in the shifting program—when the torque demand reached a certain threshold, the field switched off for a moment to shift to a lower gear; when it went below another threshold, it would shift up. But the program had gone haywire, and was trying to shift a hundred times a second, so the iron powder cylinder wasn't rigid long enough to transmit much power. After they figured out the nature of the problem, it was easy to fix, since the shifting parameters could be set manually. They had to reset them every ten or fifteen minutes, because the bus wasn't really designed for so heavy a load, and kept overcompensating. But they did lurch south a thousand miles a day, making plans.

Before they got into Texas, Marty had made arrangements of a shady nature with Dr. Spencer, who owned the Guadalajara clinic where Amelia had been operated on. He didn't reveal that he had a nanoforge, but he did say he had limited, but unsupervised, access to one, and he could make the doctor anything, within reason, that the thing could make in six hours. As proof, 2200 carats' worth, he sent along a one-pound diamond paperweight with Spencer's name lasered into the top facet.

In exchange for the six machine hours, Dr. Spencer shuffled his appointments and personnel so that Marty's people could have a wing to themselves, and the use of several technicians, for a week. Extensions to be discussed.

A week was all that Marty would need, to tailor Julian's memories and complete the humanization of his two captives.

Getting through the border into Mexico was easy, a simple financial transaction. Getting back the same way would be almost impossible; the guards on the American side were slow and efficient and difficult to bribe, being robots. But they wouldn't be driving back, unless things absolutely fell apart. They planned to be flying to Washington aboard a military aircraft—preferably not as prisoners.