Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“It should!” Donahue agreed fervently.

“I put him in new places and situations where he was unsure and I was sure, so that when I diverged from mirroring him, he gave me the lead and mirrored me. One of us had to be the originator and the other the reflection, but now it was reversed. He did not fight it subconsciously because the results were pleasant. I kept the lead and led him a mental dance through thoughts and reactions he had never had before, in a personality pattern completely foreign to his own, one that I wanted him to have. I hadn’t been hired for that, but I had time to pass before I could untangle that UT problem, and I wanted to do it for him. The mirror link was complete the first day, but I’m afraid the extra days made it indelible. He’ll always be me in his mind, and mirrors will never look right to him.”

“It’s so simple, it’s obvious,” said Donahue with disappointment. “It doesn’t sound like magic to me.”

The youth was thoughtful, frowning. “Sometimes it doesn’t to me either. I wonder if the ghost of my grandfather was telling me the right—”

“Forget the ghost of your grandfather,” Donahue interrupted hastily. On his few space trips he could never get used to this business of floating eerily around in the air, and it seemed a poor time to talk about ghosts. “What about Bryce Carter. What became of him? You know,” he said defiantly, “I like his plans for organizing the Belt and breaking UT. And, come to think of it, if I had been there when you were interfering with that, I think I would have shot you myself.”

“UT had only hired me to find the organizer of the smuggling ring and persuade him to disband his organization in UT. I had done that. So the third day, when I could walk, I left the hospital and went back to Earth, and collected my fee for a job done. Many people had vanished suddenly from their payrolls, and the crime statistics in some cities had shown a startling lull. They knew I had done it, and so they paid and were grateful.” The dark youth shrugged. “I didn’t feel I had to tell them about Orillo. He tipped the police and started a rumor, and there was evidence enough in the crime statistics of the months before, when they were correlated with the distribution of branches of Union Transport, though there was nothing to point at anyone in particular except the ones who had disappeared.”

Donahue remembered. “Sure that’s that investigation of transportation monopolies that raised such a stink last year. I saw part of it in Congress.”

Pierce handed him a travel folder. Gaudily illustrated, it advertised the advantages of the C&O lines for space tourists. “Carter and Orillo.”

Donahue looked up, puzzled, “But this is the next step in what he planned. I thought you changed him.”

“Mahatma Gandhi would have followed out those plans,” Pierce said with a touch of grimness. “As you pointed out, they are attractive. But I changed him. I won’t give you personality dynamics, but if you want a list of changes—He’s married to Sheila Wesley, that’s one change. And instead of going home nights he roisters around in bars and restaurants, talking to everybody, listening to everybody, liking them all and enthusiastically making friends in carload lots. That’s another change. He doesn’t look into mirrors because they make him feel cross-eyed. That’s because he unconsciously expects to see me in the mirror. And he will organize the Belt and be president as he planned. I won’t stop him in that. The difference will be that he won’t want the power he’ll get.” Pierce said grimly, “A power-lusting man can never be trusted with power: he goes megalomaniacal. Carter was already halfway there. But he’s safe from that now. He’s going to be given plenty of power, and see it only as responsibility, and not want it. That’s the only safe kind of man to have in a powerful position.”

“That—” said Donahue with great earnestness, “—is like sending a poor damned soul to Kismetic paradise as a eunuch. You psychologists are all complete sadists,” he said lifting his drink. “I suppose you’ve put something in my drink?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Roy Pierce assured him, grinning. “Funny thing was, when I got back to Earth that time, I kept feeling cross-eyed when I looked into a mirror. And my friends said I was not myself. If I was not myself, I knew I must still be Bryce Carter. Things had seemed different, and they had warned me that the technique sometimes backfired when I was learning. So I called my uncle Mordand on the televiewer—he’s the head of the family, and he lives in an estate in the jungle—and he—”

Donahue was fascinated again.

There was a different approach for each case, Pierce had found. It was not ordinarily ethical to discuss any case history, but he knew with great surety that Donahue could be trusted not to repeat what he was being told. The only reason there wasn’t something extra in his current drink was because there had been something in the last drink.

This was case five.

Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners—but what do you expect, when they used to be men!

All things considered—the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet’s murky atmosphere defied precision scanners—the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse.

Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State. He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous.

“Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage,” announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, “I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods.”

Volunteered HIS section! thought Kolin rebelliously.

Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscripted into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow!

Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly.

His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea—or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world’s less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably “re-personalized.” Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts.

“You will scout in five details of three persons each,” Chief Slichow said. “Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations.”

Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter’s decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line.

Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail.

Each scout was issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief’s sharp stare measured them.