Jack Chalker - Cerberus - A Wolf in the Fold

Inside the sleeping, small form it took thirty-seven minutes for the nuraform to cycle out of the system, aided by Warden rejection, whereupon she began the process of switching bodies again.

Almost an hour had elapsed before Dylan could make her exchange. Once inside, she checked and saw that she’d positioned her body correctly and there had been no problems. The janitor still slept.

She decided, though, to take a chance on not using the nuraform. This was a light, troubled sleeper who might easily be awakened by the necessity of opening the doors. She went quickly to the consoles and, as Sanda had, followed instructions to the letter. It took less than five minutes to complete the job, and reconcile Sanda’s alterations with those going on on a floor below.

Checking often her sleeping charge outside the room, she had several nervous moments when the figure shifted, but so far so good. She stretched back out on the floor, relaxed, and let her mind flow toward the other outside the plastiglass. Her own body was so tired and achy she feared she might accidentally go to sleep herself.

Sanda awoke back in the chair outside the plastiglass with a splitting headache and some double vision. It had been her body, after all, that had been nuraformed.

She looked into the glass—and froze, as the janitor’s body shifted slightly and he awoke and looked around, a puzzled expression on his face. He stood up, looking not in her direction but rather at the cleaning equipment on the far side of the room.

He barked an order to it and it started to move toward him. Taking the noise as her only cue, Sanda slid out of the chair and pushed it away, down the hall, literally on her knees, one eye always on the janitor. It was a nervous time, but she was saved partly by bis lack of suspicion and partly by the fact that the ulterior lights of the banking section reflected off the plastiglass, masking much of what went on in the darkened hallway. Once or twice he seemed to look in her direction and she froze, but then he’d just look away at something else or shake his head and yawn, and that was that.

Not until she was back in the conference room, though, and with the door closed and latched behind her, did she allow herself to relax and nurse her still aching head. She was just about to congratulate herself when she realized that she’d left the nuraform bottle right there, next to the door. Her nerves overcame her conditioning, but she had enough common sense to know there was nothing she could do about it now.

Back in the banking section, the janitor gathered up his machines, yawned, stretched once more, and wondered a bit about some strange feelings and after-impressions in his head. Putting them down to his exhaustion, he gathered his cleaning crew and brought them out the door once again.

The sweeping machine turned and started down the hall, sweeping up the tiny bottle and sucking it inside with the rest of the garbage.

It was more than two hours later before Dylan could make the switch, two anxious hours when it appeared that at any moment the sleeper would awake or, worse, Dylan would fall asleep herself. Still, she managed the switch, and back in the accounting room, thanks partly to the tiredness of the janitor’s body and partly to the reclining form, there was no awakening. Dylan was able to return to her office hideaway and relax.

I in turn knew nothing of this at the time, but I finally kissed my two alibis off and settled down to a nervous wait. My greatest fear was that one or both couldn’t make the original switch or the switch back without awakening the sleepers. I had never doubted that both janitors would take the snooze; they usually did anyway, and my false alarms just ensured that this night wouldn’t be the exception.

I had also exempted, on the janitor’s schedule, both the meeting room and Sugal’s office. This wasn’t unusual—those areas weren’t to be used until Monday, anyway, and with a half crew on for the weekend they would be cleaned at that time.

I got a little sleep, but not much, and showed up at Tooker about 6:00 a.m. Very early, but not totally unusual in these hard-pressed days. You either worked really late or you worked early. I’d established an irregular enough pattern so that the records wouldn’t show anything particularly odd.

Once in the still mostly deserted building, I headed for my office and picked up the phone. No outside calls would be possible until eight, when the master building control computer came back on to normal, but the interoffice system worked regardless. I rang Sugal’s office, letting it ring twice, then hanging up and dialing again.

“Qwin?” I heard Dylan’s anxious voice and felt some relief.

“Yeah. Who else? How’d it go?”

“Hairy, you bastard. I’d much rather hunt borks.”

I laughed. “But you did it?”

“Yeah, it’s done, although I still don’t believe it. Sanda?”

“I haven’t called yet. I’ll do that in a minute.”

“Look, isn’t somebody going to be coming in here shortly? When can I leave this mausoleum? I’m starving to death!”

“You know the routine. At seven-thirty the public function elevators will revert to normal, and you’re on the office level. Just take the first car at seven-thirty down to the main level and use the emergency exit I told you about. No card needed.”

That was true, for the fire code—but it would snap her picture along with day and time. That was no problem at all, though. As soon as they were both through, I’d use the handy little code Sugal supplied to erase the recording.

I gave her some encouraging words and rang the conference room with the same signal. The second time I called, Sanda answered, even more breathless than Dylan had been.

“How’d it go?”

She told me the whole story, of how the man had awakened and she had left the bottle there and, later, when the janitor had cleared the floor, it wasn’t there any more. I calmed her, noting that he cleaned and polished the halls with that equipment, too.

Calmed of that particular fear, she was otherwise gushing. “It was,” she told me, “the most exciting time of my whole life. More, even, than my first baby!”

I had to laugh at that, then reminded her of the exit procedures, and made certain that she, too, would be out of the building by seven forty-five. That was when I was going to take care of that little security record.

I sat back, feeling satisfied. They’d both been right: the plan had been absurd and certain to fail, so many variables beyond our control, all that. But it had worked. Worked perfectly. And the two women and I all had wonderful alibis.

I’d had all sorts of fallback positions in case something had gone wrong, including convincing cover stories for both of them to use about being locked in the building and all that. But that would have caused a lot of suspicion and might have blown the whole thing even if they were believed by the night janitors and security people. Nothing had to be used. Free and clear.

At seven forty-five I cleared the security recording.

At eight the Chief of Security checked, found a blank recording, and was satisfied that nobody had passed. By that time I was actually doing a little work, although I planned to knock off by ten. I was tired, damn it.

The whole plan looked crazy on paper, and it was; yet it was also tailor-made for the weaknesses inherent in the system. The conviction that nothing save orders from legal judges could change you against your will had made it possible to do just that with the janitors, under the circumstances of the deserted, familiar halls of the building.

But the final item that made it all possible was the certainty in every Cerberan mind that even if you could electronically steal money you couldn’t get away with it, and that therefore nobody would bother to try. A few early and prominent examples sufficed.