Identity Matrix (1982) (10 page)

"Look, if I gotta be thirteen again I may as well enjoy it," she said lightly. "

There's some advantages to it. You can act like a kid with nobody looking twice because you
are
a kid."

I chuckled at this and sat down, signing the top line on the travelers' checks.

There were a
lot
to sign, and Parch had told me to go ahead and sign them

"Dorian Tomlinson," using Dory's driver's license as back-up. I felt a little odd about it, but it was the best way to handle it, I knew.

Finally I was finished, and turned to Dory, who was fooling with the television. "Enough of that," I told her. "Let's go spend this money."

She giggled, turned off the set, and bounded up, ready to go.

Dory was relatively easy to do, since a kid looks like a kid in practically everything that fits, and she opted for the continued informal look of jeans and T-shirts, buying several pairs in different colors, plus some sandals and tennis shoes. She also made one change in her looks, getting her hair cut to a shorter Indian-style with bangs. Having had to manage that ton of black hair I could hardly blame her, although if anything she looked more Indian than ever now.

She spent a lot of time on me, though. I'd never had to shop for women's clothing, let alone wear any, and bowed completely to her advice. It was clear that she still considered this body of mine her own, and she was redesigning it from an unusual vantage point.

By the time I was through I looked like a fashion model. Dorian was, as I'd mentioned, a beautiful woman, and Dory bought, fitted, and matched clothing, cosmet-ics (about which I had a lot to learn), and the like until I hardly recognized myself. Every time I looked at myself in the mirror it was like looking at somebody else, gor-geous, desirable, stunning. The figure in the glass was everything I'd ever dreamed about in a woman, not only my but many men's fantasy woman come to life. The only trouble was, it wasn't my fantasy I was seeing, it was
me
. I was the girl of my dreams, not her lover.

Years ago I'd discovered that people judged you by how you looked, dressed, acted, with no regard for the person inside, the important part of a human being. Women, even beautiful, desirable women, would find the inner me, would come to me with their problems and confidences, make friends with me.

But they'd always go to bed with Handsome Harry down the hall, even though his insides were hollow. Everybody does it, even when they condemn it. The cover is everything—what's inside rarely matters at all, and never matters until later.

We wound up still with a couple hundred dollars, and blew that easily on some jewelry for me and a petite watch. Dory insisted on, and got, a Mickey Mouse electric.

We went back, got a meal, then watched a little TV and went to bed. After a short time, Dory said she felt a little lonely in that bed and asked to shift to mine.

I agreed readily, and we talked for a little bit, hugged, kissed, and finally drifted off to sleep.

We were up before the wake-up call, and Dory picked out my wardrobe.

Now I looked at myself once again in a mirror and marvelled anew at what I was seeing. My blondish auburn hair had been restyled into a sexy set of curls and bangs, and small crystalline earrings set off my almost perfect Madonna-like face to which cosmet-ics had been expertly but discreetly applied, and Dory applied a little perfume in the right places.

The clothes were tight-fitting, a black satin pants-suit set off by a gold-colored belt with sunburst pattern, going into long leather boots.

"You're crazy, Dory," I told her. "You've made me into a hell of a sex symbol.

I'll have to fight everybody off. Christ! I think I'm madly in love with myself. Is all this really necessary?"

"I told you I was going to make a real woman out of you, Vic Gonser," she responded somewhat playfully. "For as long as it takes you're going to be
me
, the me I never was but always wanted to be. You might as well learn to play the part. And, when I get it back, I'll know what I'm like and you'll know everything about being a woman."

I couldn't really find a response to that. She was obviously neurotic about me, although I couldn't blame her for being a bit odd after what she'd gone through—and what she'd lost, which was what I was seeing in the mirror. I kept wondering why I wasn't off myself—or, perhaps I was and just didn't know it.

But, damn it, I
owed
her, and she was the boss. I wanted it that way. If she wanted me to be her surrogate self, living her life for her, then I'd do it.

I almost understood it.

Just joining Parch for breakfast gave me a real taste of what being this surrogate was like. Heads turned in my direction when I entered the coffee shop; men cast rather obvious covetous glances at me, women a different sort of look.

People scrambled to open the glass doors to the restaurant for me despite the fact that I was not only capable of it myself but had to step carefully to keep from tripping over them, and waiters seemed to vie with one another to offer me a chair in their territory. I was the center of attention, no doubt about it. And, I found, I kind of liked it, too.

Everything I'd done in my whole life was an attempt to escape the psychological barriers to humanity that my sequestered youth had built up. I had never broken free on my own, not with my learning, my books, my position of respect. Suddenly it had been done to me, and for me, without me having to even lift a finger. It was, in a way, the confirmation of my whole dismal view of human behavior. Not one of those people scram-bling for the door or chairs or eyeing me either lustfully or enviously knew who I was, what I did or didn't do for a living, whether I was rotten or nice, brutal or gentle, any of these things. It was irrelevant what I was; only what I looked like really counted.

Parch had been surprised and a little taken aback at my appearance. Still, he remained rock-solid, as distant as always, barriers up. I wondered about him—his strange background, his odd vocation, his outlandish moustache and manner of dress. Somewhere in that head was a very strange mind, I knew, and a tremendously private one hidden behind granite layers as mine had been. I couldn't help wondering if it was as fragile as mine, or, perhaps, hid something far darker. No matter what, all we could see of him was a carefully crafted and totally masked
persona
.

"Where to from here?" I asked him over eggs and coffee.

He put down his knife and took a long drink of brewed tea. "South, eventually to IMC, if only for your own protection. No telling if there might be more around, tracking us, trying to find out where their comrade has been taken. I can tell you no more now—you will be thoroughly briefed after you arrive and settle in."

"What's this IMC you keep mentioning?" Dory wanted to know.

Parch just smiled. "You'll find out soon enough." He glanced at his watch. "

After ten. We'd best be going, I think. I'll ring for a car to pick us up and we'll be off."

This was quickly done, and a nondescript blue Ford soon pulled up and two serious-looking men got out and helped us load our new baggage and Parch's one small case into the car. Dory insisted on sitting up front and I found myself in the middle of the back seat sort of squashed between Parch and one of the security men. The stranger bothered me a bit, mostly because he kept making subtle moves directed at me. His arm somehow kept finding its way around me, and he seemed to press in on me a bit more than was necessary. I found it more than irritating but couldn't think of anything to do; Parch seemed oblivious and gazed idly out the window. I could only pretend I didn't notice, try to squirm out when possible, and make the best of it. Dory, I noticed, looked back at me from time to time, saw the problem, and seemed somewhat amused by it.

It wasn't a long ride. As we neared the Seattle-Tacoma Airport we turned off on a side road, then went up through the freight terminals and over to a small build-ing that bore the insignia of an Air National Guard unit. I sighed in relief as we got out, then noticed Parch take out a small walkie-talkie and speak into it.

He looked up, and we followed his gaze, seeing a small helicopter in that direction now turn and go swiftly away from us.

Parch turned back to us and put the walkie-talkie away. "No obvious tails," he told us with a little bit of disappointment in his tone. "I think we're safe."

We walked through the small building with all of us getting curious looks from the uniformed servicemen there and me getting some different kinds of looks, then quickly out onto the tarmac. Waiting for us was not the military plane I'd envisioned but a sleek Lear Jet.

The interior was wonderfully appointed; it looked like it had been decorated by Gucci for a millionaire. Parch told us it was a VIP plane used for ferrying congressmen, senators, Pentagon bigwigs and the like. It had a bar, music system, and wide and comfortable seats, which, fortunately, were individual and of the swivel-type, so I didn't have to put up with any amorous secu-rity men there.

Once airborne, Parch served some coffee and cookies and seemed to relax quite a bit. "No more problems for now," he almost sighed, and for the first time I got an idea of the tension he'd been under.

"All right, then—what is the IMC and where is it?" I wanted to know.

"Nevada," he responded unhesitatingly, telling me that we were heading now straight for the place. "It's near where they used to test atom bombs years ago.

We still have what is referred to as a 'Nuclear Research Facility' there—that's IMC as it appears in the federal budget, Pentagon budget, official ledgers and such. Initial fund-ing was a bloody bitch—we took a little from just about every DoD program—but, since then, our maintenance budget hasn't really been out of line with what we're supposed to be. That's one way we get away with it. Most senators and congressmen are simply too busy and too rushed to check out every single project, particu-larly established routine expenditures, and we can get pretty convincing should one ever decide to inspect the place."

"I still can't believe you can keep such a thing secret," I told him. "You said DoD—that's defense.
Somebody
has to know."

He chuckled. "You'll see that we can be most effective there. But, you see, it has to be that way. There's per-haps half a dozen senators and two dozen congressmen who can keep a secret. The rest would cause more stu-pid, ignorant panic than anything else. Our work de-pends on secrecy, not really from our own people although that is necessary, but from the aliens. We can, after all, be penetrated. We don't know who's who—let's face it. That's why it's essentially a sealed facility, like a good top secret research project working on anything danger-ous. Once in, you're in until we feel we can let you out."

I wasn't sure I liked the implications of that. I won-dered just how free our choice was going to be, but I said nothing.

"IMC," he continued, "stands for Identity Matrix Cen-ter. When we discovered that we had been penetrated, invaded, whatever you like , by aliens who could body-switch it was the logical choice. Heretofore body-switching had been considered a total impossibility, a fantasy thing and nothing more. The very concept was unthinkable, for it meant that no one anywhere could be trusted and literally nothing could be safe for long. We were then forced, by a couple of blunders like the one that left you alive, to confront the reality of the thing—and there seemed only one logical response. In the forties this country decided upon an atom bomb, found the money, got the best experts on atomic physics together with as unlimited a budget as was possible, and told them to design and build one. They did. In the sixties, we decided to put a man on the moon and created NASA. It was more public, of course, but the approach was the same—get the money you need and the top experts in the field together in the best research facili-ties you have and tell 'em to do it. They did and there's American flags all over the moon now. The same ap-proach was tried with the Alternate Energies Task Force, although that's been underfunded. The same thing is applied to IMC. Body-switching exists. It's possible. Therefore, we need a defense against it as priority number one. A secondary priority is to learn how to do it ourselves if we can—for obvious reasons."

I nodded, only beginning to see the scope of this thing. "And have you made any progress?"

He shrugged. "We know what happens when they do it, but not how they can do it. I am living proof that they have made a lot of progress—I was not born im-mune to the aliens. The trouble is that it still requires enormous technological backup to do even that to one person. Mass protection is still practically impossible although theoretically we could do it. What we lack the most is concrete information on our enemy—how many they are, where they come from, just what they're doing here. Without those we're still somewhat defenseless, since we assume their technology to be far in advance of ours.

Were we to just go to a big program, let the cat out of the bag as it were, they might well easily invent a counter and then we're worse off than we were. See what I mean?"

"You're military, then?"

He chuckled. "Oh, no. Most of the boys you've met are FBI, of course, and the Defense Intelligence Agency ac-tually manages the security of IMC, but I'm the top watchdog. I'm the Chief Security Officer of the General Services Administration."

Chapter Five

IMC didn't look like much from the air—miles and miles of miles and miles, composed of yellow, red, and orange sand, mostly flat, with a few high sharp moun-tains far in the distance. We passed Yucca Flat, where long ago the first atomic weapons were tested—you could still see the ghostly remains of old mock villages and protective concrete bunkers as we circled for a landing.

Twenty or thirty miles from all this an airstrip loomed ahead on the barren desert. There was no question it was in use—a squadron of sleek fighter-bombers was berthed in two concrete parking areas and a couple of huge transports were parked near the tiny terminal, nearly dwarfing it. The base itself was small—a few dozen squads at best of what looked to be regulation Air Force barracks, all looking like long veterans of continu-ous occupation. All badly needed paint at the very least. I felt something of a let-down and said so.