The Fellowship of the Hand (19 page)

Jazine scratched his head. “But he couldn’t have gone back the other way to the main entrance. The troops were coming in, and they rounded everybody up till they could sort them out. I got here just a little after that, and I can tell you nobody left.”

“I believe you, Earl.” Crader sat down in one of the foamfold chairs, letting his eyes wander over the splotches of blood and water and dirt on the white shag rug. Somehow it seemed a reflection of all that was Nova Industries at the moment.

“Then what happened to him?”

Carl Crader thought about it. He thought about Nova and Jason Blunt and the Venus Colony and HAND, and everything that had happened during the past weeks. Mostly he thought about Andrew Jackson McCurdy and what it must be like to be president of the United States and Canada.

Finally he roused himself and said to Jazine, “Come on. We’re going to get him.”

“You know where he is?”

“I know the only place he could possibly be.”

He took a laser pistol from one of the army officers, though he hated using a weapon to kill. With Jazine at his side he led the way across the main computer area, still wet and smoky from the siege. Jason Blunt had trailed along behind them, and Crader asked, “How bad is the damage?”

“Nearly half our computers were destroyed,” Blunt said sadly. “And a good deal of the taped records. It finishes us for a long time to come.”

Crader nodded silently.

“Where are you taking us?” Jazine asked as they rounded a corner.

Crader stopped before the familiar door with its broken seals. “These are the wiring tunnels where I found the skeleton. The troops wouldn’t have thought to look here.”

“You think he’s inside?”

“I know he is. It’s the only place.”

Crader slid the door open and stepped into the tunnel once more. The light was even dimmer now, because many of the computer banks had been knocked out in the siege. The glow from their transitubes came through only at irregular intervals.

Shining his wrist-light before him, Crader moved deeper into the tunnel. “Ambrose? Stanley Ambrose? Are you here?”

At first there was no response, but after he called out twice more they heard a far-off reply. Presently, following the voice to its source, they found Stanley Ambrose huddled against one of the glowing circuit panels.

“Are you all right?” Blunt asked, helping the man to his feet.

“I … I think so. Is it over?”

“It’s over for you,” Crader said. “I’m placing you under arrest.”

Ambrose shook off Jason Blunt’s helping hand. “Arrest? On what charge, may I ask? We were the ones attacked by those outlaws from HAND, remember.”

And Blunt joined in. “Is this still part of your wild idea about a plot to overthrow the government, Crader?”

“The plot was a long-range one, very complex. It was not an overthrow of the government at all. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact.”

“Then why are you arresting me?” Ambrose asked again.

“For murder. Vikor is dead, and I imagine he did the actual killings, but only on your orders. There are three that I know about, plus the attempt on Earl Jazine here.”

“Three?”

Crader nodded. “A computer engineer named Harry Rogers, a woman named Milly Norris, and of course the real Stanley Ambrose.”

“What?”
It was a gasp from Blunt. “But this is Ambrose!”

“No, no.” Crader shook his head and took a firm grip on his prisoner. “I think when we remove all the makeup we’ll find someone quite different underneath. I think we’ll find the inventor of the election computer—Professor Lawrence Friday.”

Later, when they’d gathered back in Jason Blunt’s office, and Lawrence Friday had been taken away, Crader explained. “You see, he never wanted to overthrow the government—he simply wanted to be president of the USAC himself. And that was his problem. Because, of course, the single person in this country who could never be elected president of the FRIDAY-404 computer was the man who invented it. Public opinion would never allow such a thing. There’d always be those who would claim he knew how to cheat the machine.”

“And he did,” Jazine said.

Crader nodded. “Yes, he did. Later I hope he’ll tell us exactly how it was done, but I imagine his system consisted of supplying an extra electrical impulse. In simple terms, if candidate A is computerized by a dash, or a long electrical impulse, and candidate B by a dot or short impulse, it’s not too difficult to imagine adding impulses to B’s signal to make it look like A’s.”

“So he could fix the election,” Blunt agreed. “What does that have to do with killing Stanley Ambrose and taking his place?”

“Well, if Friday couldn’t run for president under his own identity, then he needed to assume another one, right? But whose identity, and how? Obviously, a candidate for president has to be someone in the public eye, preferably already in the government. But for Friday’s purpose it also had to be someone completely cut off from family and friends—someone who could be successfully impersonated without the ruse being discovered. And who fit those qualifications perfectly?”

“Stanley Ambrose.”

“Correct—Stanley Ambrose. A man without a family, a man who had just spent five years as director of the Venus Colony. He was a member of government, well known to the public, and yet he had been quite literally
on another planet for the past five years!
Anyone can change a great deal in five years. Even new quirks of personality could be put down to the hardships of life on Venus.”

“When did he kill the real Ambrose?” Blunt wanted to know.

“As soon as he returned from Venus, a year ago. Then, of course, Friday—Ambrose had to go into hiding—for two reasons. First, to protect his new Ambrose identity from too many prying newsmen, and second, to continue his existence as Lawrence Friday. I said this was a long-range scheme, and its target date was still four years away. Sometime in those four years, Friday would ‘die’ and Stanley Ambrose would come out of seclusion to begin his campaign for the presidency.”

“How did he know he’d get the nomination?” Blunt asked.

“The primary elections could be fixed the same as the national election. And since primary results are binding on the party, there would have been no way to stop him.”

“Let’s get back to this dying,” Earl said. “How would he work that?”

“I doubt if he knew all the details himself yet. But I do know he kept a skeleton—probably Stanley Ambrose’s skeleton—in reserve in case it was needed. That’s why the skeleton was sealed away in that tunnel instead of being buried. I imagine he lured the real Ambrose to the Lexington plant last year on some pretext or other, killed him or had Vikor do it, dissolved the flesh with acid or ultrasonic waves, and shipped the skeleton out here to Utah. Sometime during the next four years, if necessary, it could become the skeleton of Lawrence Friday.”

“That’s horrible,” Masha said. She was sitting very close to her husband, and it was the first time she’d spoken.

“Horrible, yes. But necessary to his plan. You see, once he was really in the public eye, with all his time accounted for, leading a double life would be impossible. He would become Stanley Ambrose, late of the Venus Colony, now a candidate for president. He would win the nomination, he would win the election. And only then, four years from now, would he make use of this massive computerized history by Nova Industries. Only then would the machines take over, with a little human help from him, of course.”

“But how did you know all this?” Blunt asked.

“There were many things—call them clues if you will. First, there was the doubt about the identity of Stanley Ambrose. Last week, Earl, you showed me copies of some photographs of Ambrose taken by Milly Norris at a picnic before he went to Venus. They showed him pitching softball with his left hand. And yet the man I met here today lit a cigar with his right hand, and held a laser pistol with his right hand. That at least gave me reason to doubt that he was the real Stanley Ambrose. Then too, there was the murder of Milly Norris. Why was she killed? When I considered that question in light of the possibility that Ambrose might be a fake, the answer was immediately obvious. Ambrose was a man without family or close friends. Only Milly Norris, his mistress of six years ago, would be likely to realize the truth. I think Friday went to her the other night in his Ambrose disguise to see if he could fool her. It was to be the supreme test, and I imagine Vikor was standing close by with his laser gun. Of course we know what happened. Friday—Ambrose failed the test. Perhaps she saw through his disguise. Or perhaps he lit a cigar with his right hand and she remembered he was left-handed. In any event, she had to die.”

Earl Jazine merely shook his head. “But even if you suspected it was a fake Ambrose, how in hell did you know the man behind the fake was Lawrence Friday?”

“Several things told me that, Earl. For one, Vikor first tried to kill you after you’d questioned Friday about the election computer. And Vikor killed Rogers and erased the election results after you told Friday of your findings.”

“But Friday was the one who first suggested a secret election.”

“Of course. But only because he’d already signaled Vikor to kill you when you left him, and ordered him to kill Rogers as well. Both Friday and Ambrose were about the same size, general appearance, and age, which is probably one reason Friday chose Ambrose to impersonate—that and the fact he’d been on Venus for five years. Two things really tipped me off, though. The day we took Friday to Washington to confer with President McCurdy, he knew that the results of the private election had been fed into a computer in Chicago. Yet none of us had told him. Moreover, while I was waiting to meet him today, I discovered that someone had disfigured the faces of the authors on the jackets of all those books behind your console, Blunt.”

“What?”

Crader nodded. “At first I thought you’d done it yourself. But then the true explanation became obvious to me. One jacket had a photograph of Lawrence Friday on it. Few people would be admitted to this private office, but certainly your partner Stanley Ambrose had been one of them. On one visit Friday disfigured those pictures so you wouldn’t be struck by anything familiar in the portrait of himself—a glint of the eyes, perhaps, or a tilt of the head. With your youthful video experience, he knew you must have a knowledge of the makeup skills available to actors today—face foam and voice boxes and the like. He couldn’t gamble on your seeing his picture without makeup and making the connection in your mind. Of course stealing or disfiguring that one book would merely have called attention to it, so he obliterated all the authors’ photos.”

“My God!” Jason Blunt merely stared at the shelf of books. “The man is mad!”

“But a mad genius. Knowing Ambrose wasn’t real, and that Friday was masquerading as him, I still had to ask myself why. The election computer was the only tie-in between the men, and then I realized his scheme. I should have tumbled to it much sooner, of course, because consider this—why should Nova Industries, with the largest computer complex in the nation, with vision-phone communications to all its employees throughout the world, go to the risk of tying their secret election into the FRIDAY-404 system? The answer now is obvious. This whole secret election was just Friday’s excuse to test the system, to see if it could be fixed in the way he thought possible. To be certain he could change specific votes, he even blackmailed the men of the Mediterranean drilling island into voting for you, Blunt. Then he changed their votes to his side. He won the secret election, but only as a test for the bigger one to come in four years.”

“A fantastic scheme!”

“It was that,” Crader agreed. “But perhaps without HAND to force the issue, it could have succeeded.”

“What’ll happen to the HAND people you captured?”

“They’ll be tried, of course. But I’d like to see their trial go into the broader issues of this whole affair. Despite everything you’ve told me, Blunt, you were setting up a computer city here. You and the fake Ambrose had designs on this country of ours, and I don’t think they were designs for the best. We can never be ruled by the past, no matter how pleasant and agreeable that past has been. You can’t freeze time, and you can’t program progress in terms of the past.”

Jason Blunt didn’t answer. He helped Masha to her feet and they walked out, past the rows of damaged computers. Crader had the distinct impression that he was already planning for some sort of tomorrow.

The rocketcopter landed on the World Trade Center just at sundown, and Crader and Jazine went downstairs to the office where Judy was waiting for them.

“I thought you’d be gone by now, Judy,” Crader said, lifting the cartridge from his pocket transcribing unit.

“I stayed in case you wanted me to get the report off to President McCurdy tonight.”

“We finished it on the copter coming in. Put it on the autotype and send it down by phone-vision copier in the morning.”

He tossed her the cartridge and she caught it with one hand. “Did Earl tell you what he did to me down in Lexington?”

“He saved your life, from the way I hear it.”

“I don’t think I could stand having my life saved that way every day.”

Crader smiled and turned to Earl. “Think you could get into that Lexington plant again—without Judy and through the front door this time?”

“I guess so, chief.”

“Try it tomorrow. Vikor is dead, and we’ve got Friday, but there may have been others involved. Check their visitors’ register for the date of Ambrose’s first visit. We need to establish as closely as possible just when he was killed.”

“I’ll take care of it, chief.”

Crader nodded. From the outer office he could hear Judy starting up the autotype. Nobody seemed ready to go home yet. He glanced out the window at the sun setting over the Jersey meadows, then sighed and swung back to his desk to read the day’s reports.

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