Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (24 page)

It was like wandering through Manhattan hoping to run into an acquaintance. From time to time, I stopped pedestrians along the way and explained that I was looking for a friend but couldn’t recall his room number. Some of them took this at face value, but a larger number had either seen my talk or heard about it, and recognized me. They had also read the DSI denials, which put me in a pretty bad light. Invariably, people were courteous, but none of them divulged the information I was looking for
—if
they knew it. A few made tactfully expressed comments about the need to preserve unity and to avoid paranoia. The phrasing of their advice was straight out of the DSI sooth-and-desist letter.

Clearly it was a hopeless cause, unless I wanted to become the ghost that haunted deck D, or worse, be categorized as the deranged old man who needed to be institutionalized for his own good.

Day 2275
:

I had an inspiration. In one of the library terminals, I word-searched the main computer for
Kosmos
, found a million links, and then narrowed it down to sites referencing staff and passengers for the big expedition. Again, a lot of links, thousands, actually. On the main official site for the voyage, I noted that the last entry had been made a day before departure from Earth. And there I found what I’d been looking for: a complete list of personnel, each name accompanied by an identiphoto and short biography.

It took a few hours to go through, and when I reached the end of it I stood back with my heart thumping unnaturally. According to the companion article, this list included every person who would be on the ship, a total of 676 individuals, none excepted. But nowhere in all those photos had I seen Dwayne’s face.

I knew that he was on board. I knew what his face looked like. He was no phantom. But he simply wasn’t there. I cross-referenced to maintenance personnel and discovered fourteen young men who visually fit his description, but none of their faces were his. Fearing that I might have sped too quickly through the photos, I entered more cross-references to every other department. Again, nothing.

I went back to my room to think about it.

Dwayne—whoever he was, whatever his name really was—had been deleted from the files. Why?

I examined the possible explanations:

Perhaps he had never been entered in the files. An oversight? Hardly. Not on an expedition as well-planned as this one.

A stowaway? Maybe. But if he was a stowaway, how would he have managed to procure a job in Maintenance, taking his shifts year after year? If he had been a fake cleaning man, surely Maintenance would have sent the real cleaners to my room on schedule, and the duplication of labor would have come to my attention. Not once during the three six-month shifts when he vacuumed the hallways and scrubbed my room had anyone else shown up.

He was a master cyber-hacker. Maybe he had deleted himself from the files. Now this was a possibility. But why would he do it? It struck me that he would do it only if he felt himself endangered in some extreme way. But this did not make any sense. Our controversy with DSI was heated and unpleasant, but surely it wasn’t dangerous.

Was Dwayne a “plant”, a “mole”, quietly working for the authorities? Obeying orders, had he been taking the psychological pulse of a few select passengers? Perhaps a stress-test on potentially problematic individuals such as Stron and myself? Or was a grander study underway, originating in the fervid imaginations of the director of DSI and his assistant, the deputy director? Was Elf, even now, writing a thesis for a new degree to add to his name? After all, the voyage was absolutely
sui generis
, a first of its kind, prime material for a unique experiment.

Of all the possibilities, this last one began to make more and more sense to me. It all added up to a project, approved from above. After all, how could a janitor have come by skills that outwitted a computer system as sophisticated as ours? Maybe he hadn’t outwitted the system. Maybe he had been going through the motions just to pull the wool over my eyes. I never saw him at work. No one had seen him do what we conspirators believed he had done. And wasn’t it odd the way he and I shared so neatly our Southwest riders-of-the-open-range culture? A bit too good to be true, that one.

Still, I had spent a lot of time with Dwayne, or whoever he was. I hadn’t spotted a single false note in him. The things he had told me about his past rang true, flavored with the hint of sagebrush and sadness, a world lost. A real person carrying real grief and raising real questions. The real stuff, he had called it.

I examined all the possibilities again, and none of them quite matched the situation.

Opening up my
max
, I did a search one more time, arriving at the list of passengers and crew I had just read on the main computer. It gave me the same total of 676.

I’m not sure why I did it, but I then flipped through the earliest entries in my paper journal and came to the page where I had written a summary of people on board, according to categories. The total was 677. I was off by one. I’d been guilty of mathematical mistakes before, but I now recalled how interested (and careful) I had been while doing the number breakdowns and totaling it up. Yes, 677. I was sure of it.

The main computer and the
max
both said 676.

It then struck me that I had printed out the official list of personnel six years ago. I flipped through pages and found it inserted between some initial pages of my journal. I counted the names carefully, and arrived at 677. I did it again just to be sure. And a third time: Yes, the original list contained 677 names—but none of them was a Dwayne.

This could only mean that the main computer had been revised. It also meant that my
max
had been “corrected” as well, which meant that it was no longer protected. This might mean that it had never been changed by Dwayne, or it might mean the opposite—it had been privatized but the block had been detected and removed.

Taking the staircase to another concourse, I entered a different library and found a vacant terminal. There were several people in the room busy at the other terminals. I accessed the main computer and entered a search. All the official and primary links offered the revised number. I keyed forward to an innocuous-looking three-hundredth link and clicked on it. It was the site of an Earth-bound astronomy club devoted to the
Kosmos
and its then-impending voyage. Enthusiasts and dreamers had created a complex site, and it was well done. Once I was inside it, I searched for a passenger / crew list, and suddenly there it was: Pages upon pages of names appeared, each accompanied by the individual’s position and his photograph. The total was 677. The file was dated two days before departure from Earth-base.

I wondered if whoever was overseeing onboard surfing would be able to track me. They wouldn’t know who I was, but they would know that someone was looking at potentially damaging information. I scanned down the site’s pages to Maintenance and there, among the department’s two hundred employees, his face looking back at me, was Dwayne.

His name was David William Ayne, born in Antelope, Nevada. Graduate in process engineering from a college in Sacramento, California. He also had a graduate degree from Stanford University in computer science. Listed also was his employment by the very aerospace corporation he had told me about, as well as his specialization in digitalized testing of alloy stress environments.

I closed the page, deaccessed, and walked as quickly as I could back to my room.

Day 2276
:

In a quiet corner of the cafeteria on my concourse, over breakfast this morning, I presented these discrepancies to Stron, Xue, Etienne Pagnol, and Dariush. Each in his way pondered what I told them, saying little. In the end, none of them seemed alarmed, though none took it lightly.

“At worst, I suspect they’re isolating him for the extent of the voyage”, said Stron.

“That is a lengthy isolation”, Dariush commented. “It would be hard on him. I ask myself why they would do it.”

“Because he knows the truth”, I answered. “He knows the truth conclusively, while we who believe him have only our faith in what he told us. We have no evidence that would stand up in court.”

“And thus we are a relatively small threat to the administration”, said Xue.

“We’re easily dealt with. We’re small spot fires they can put out with a toe of their shiny shoes. In fact, they have done so.”

“Yet if that is the case, the deletion of his records from the ship’s database seems to me an extreme and unnecessary measure”, said Pagnol.

“It does”, Stron scowled. “It means they feel threatened in a big way by this lad. It’s not just the surveillance he knows about, you see. He also knows they’ve been lying to everyone.”

“And if that came to light, it would destroy the equilibrium of. . .”

“Of social infrastructure”, said Stron with disgust.

“It is most informative that so many sites on the main computer have been altered”, Dariush said in a milder tone. “Does this not seem to you a concerted effort to delete all references to David Ayne? Of course, there are too many sites for them to change at once. It seems they are going through them one by one, and this would demand a great deal of time, since there are thousands.”

“Neil, you say you checked a site very far down in the link list?” asked Xue.

“Somewhere around the three-hundredth link.”

“It might be useful to find out how far they’ve got with their deletions.”

We decided to access terminals in libraries on each of the four concourses. I told them the name of the little enthusiast site, and we split up in order to check it out.

Gathering again over lunch, huddling in relative isolation at the far end of a long table in the cafeteria on deck D, we compared our findings. The deletion had been done on the site, and random checks beyond that narrowed it down still further. Someone was hard at work eliminating any reference to David Ayne, and was now past the eight-hundred mark.

Xue had taken the trouble to transfer onto his pocket
memor
a photo and biographical data from a randomly chosen site beyond the one-thousand level. His wasn’t an ordinary port
-memor
, he explained, but a new test model which worked without circuit contact. He’d brought along the print-out, which he said he had made through a
max
.

“How did you do that!” Stron protested. “
Maxes
don’t have ports for
memor
s. Besides, we have to assume that none of ours are safe anymore.”

“Right”, said Xue. “That’s why I took it to a friend—who shall remain unnamed—a friend whom the administration doesn’t realize is connected to our little revolt. He’s fairly high up in one of the science departments and has a
max
in his office to which my
memor
can speak—both downloads and uploads. He kindly permitted me to print out David’s biography on his
max
. It took a few seconds. We deleted any trace afterward.”

“Hopefully, his office
max
isn’t monitored”, I suggested to Xue.

“It may be. It probably is. But the file was multiple-encrypted and numerically named. I doubt that anyone would be able to crack it and see just what it was.”

We all bent over the sheet he held in his hand.

“That is the man who spoke to you briefly in the restaurant”, said Pagnol.

“The Mysterious Stranger”, murmured Stron.

Later that afternoon, we rechecked the site where Xue had obtained it. We found that this, too, had been scrubbed.

“Either someone’s working very quickly,” said Stron, “or they have a team on it. It smells like a team to me.”

“What puzzles me most”, I said, “is that this deletion business isn’t going to be very effective for them. After six years, David would have made friends with people on board. At the least, he would be known to his coworkers. And they’d probably ask around, wanting to know where he’d got to.”

“Neil, you say you checked with the people in Maintenance?”

“Yes, but that was before I had a real name to give them. We’ve learned that
Dwayne
is a pseudonym. And his general physical description matches quite a few men in that department.”

“Even so, a face and a personality are unique. Surely, someone on that level has noticed his absence.”

Xue said, “We have a photo and bio now. I think it’s time for a focused inquiry.”

Day 2277
:

Thoughtlessly, I sent a text inquiry via my
max
to the maintenance address, asking for contact info for David W. Ayne. There was no reply from M department. I e-voiced a call, but the M desk did not respond. Within the hour, there came a knock at the door, and there stood my two old friends, the agents from DSI. They were as courteous as before—and as determined. I was
required
, they informed me, to attend another meeting with Dr. Larson.

I now wear my button recorder at all times.

Elf did not greet me with a handshake. He did not use my name. There were no preliminary warm-up comments.

“Why have you had me arrested again, Elf?”

He rolled his eyes. “You are
not
being arrested.”

“You mean, I’m free to walk out of this office, having decided on my own that this is not a productive encounter?”

“That remains to be seen. Please sit down.”

“I regret I’m very busy right now. If you’d care to make an appointment, just send a request to my
max
address. I’m sure you know it. Good day to you.”

I turned to go.

“Who is Dwayne?” he said to my departing back.

I sat down on a chair and faced him squarely. It took a few moments for me to calm my nerves. He watched me coldly from the other side of his desk.

“The real question here”, I said through my barely controlled anger, “is
where
is he?”

He shook his head as if he had just heard something incredibly irrational.