Jack Chalker - Cerberus - A Wolf in the Fold

“That’s bullshit and you know it!” he shot back. “If they knew that they’d be on us like a ton of bricks, connections or no connections.”

“They know,” I assured him. “And I’m almost certainly not the only one here, although I don’t personally know of any others. Sure, they could knock down your fancy space station, maybe fry this island with a deep beam—but what would that get ’em? They want tne aliens, Bogen, and Cerberus is the only place so far where they have a direct link to them. They’ll fry us, maybe the whole damned planet, one of these days, that’s for sure—but not as long as they can gain as much or more than they lose.”

Bogen chuckled. “Well, they’ll have a long wait for that. I don’t think even Laroo’s ever met one. If any of the Four Lords have, it’s probably Kreegan of Lilith. This whole thing was his idea, anyway.”

“It’s to our advantage not to let anybody know that—to our advantage, really. I don’t want to be fried, Bogen.”

“It won’t make any difference to you, anyway,” he noted. “You’re a dead man right now.”

“I doubt it,” I responded, sounding less than upset by his threats. “Now, I’m going to make a point, and I think you’re intelligent enough to realize that it’s the truth. I could have just reported my findings on Project Phoenix to the Confederacy and let them take drastic action. I didn’t. Instead I reported them to you.”

“Go on.”

“You know the old problem with agents sent to the Wardens. We’re trapped here, same as you.”

“They must have been pretty sure of you, since they could hardly keep any kind of trace on you from body to body,” he noted.

“They were—and with good reason. I was born and bred for a job like this. It is the sole reason for my existence, what I live, eat, sleep, and breathe for. Once the objective’s accomplished, there’s no further reason for living. You’ve heard of the assassins before.”

He nodded. “Met a couple, and I agree. Fanatics. I think old man Kreegan used to be one, in fact. So I know what you are and what you’re like. I know out of your own mouth you’re the most dangerous man on Cerberus to me and my boss.”

“But they screwed up,” I told him. “Believe me, it surprised me as much or more than it’s gonna surprise them, but they slipped up. This place—well, it changed me, too. I have something to live for beyond the mission—or rather, someone.”

Bogen seemed to relax a bit. I saw, though, that one eye kept glancing down at something beyond my field of vision. The lie-detector screen, probably. “So now you want in and you’re trying to bargain with us, right? But you’ve got no cards.”

“I think I do,” I responded carefully. “The fact is, they were so sneaky they put in a deep psych command for me to report and forget I reported. I didn’t even know that until I put my wife and myself under Dumonia up in Medlam.”

Bogen tensed. “Then you might already have reported.”

I shook my head from side to side. “No, not this much, anyway. My last report was more than two months ago, and I haven’t been near the agent who can trigger the command. But I know who he is now, so they don’t own me any more.”

“Who?”

“Does it matter? If you nab him, they’ll just establish a dozen more, ones we don’t know. No, from the point at which I learned of all this stuff, I started getting ideas of my own. First, I definitely wanted in. I don’t like being a prisoner any more than you or any of the rest of us, and I don’t like living under the Confederacy’s gun. Whether I succeeded or failed, I was a dead man—and I don’t want to be dead, Bogen, and I don’t want the kind of stasis my life’s now in, which was the other alternative. So that got me to thinking about you and Laroo and Project Phoenix. It occurred to me that you’re dealing with a product of alien technology using people who have no experience even in our end of things. Organic computing’s on the proscribed list, as you know, so there are few experts in it, and those who are, are basically industrially oriented, toward the parts the Confederacy does use. You don’t have the people or the years of research and development to solve the problem, and I think you know it.”

“All right. I’m not about to grant that, but I’ll admit progress has been almost nil. We know what, but there’s just no way to take the programming out selectively—and if you take it all out, you destroy it, since life support and all the other normal functions are part of the programming molecules within each tiny cell. Basically you need a full-blown organic computer to do the job, and we haven’t been allowed to get near those things in hundreds of years, not since the war.”

I nodded. “There’s only one place other than the aliens where the kind of expertise you need exists at all. You know it and I know it. I’m sure you’ve sicced some of your robots on it, but the data are too diffuse to get at. It might take years to put it all together, even assuming you can break the codes. I don’t think you fed like you have years to spare.”

“Go on.”

“Security. Confederacy Security. They could easily tap the data, put it together, and send it to as complex a computing network as necessary to solve the problem. They use organic computers, you know. Not like these—not at all like these. But they do use them in their ships and modules. They could solve your problem for you.”

He laughed. “And just like that—you ask ’em and they comply, right? Don’t be ridiculous!”

I relaxed a little. “Not at all. I told you I knew who the communications agent was. If I walk in there and force him to put me through, there’ll be no force, no coercion, and no forgetting. Now, just suppose I call upstairs and tell them I’ve got a crack at stealing one of the alien robots?”

“What!”

“Uh-huh. And I tell them how I’m going to do it. I’m going to clear it of all prior-programming, then take control myself. Let my mind go into it and bring it—and me—out of Cerberus.”

“They won’t swallow it.”

“I think they will. Remember, they don’t have any way to check on the truth of what I’m saying, and the mere fact that I’ll be coming to them with this will prove an unbroken line. I’m a pretty good hypnotic subject when I want to be. Let’s say I tell ’em some of the robot programming is being done on this island—they already know almost as much anyway—and that I’ve wormed my way into the project through my Tooker associations. Some of the experts working on the project don’t like the idea of working for unknown aliens, and I’ve got some underground help—if I can get a robot out. And the only way to ensure that is to walk out as one. They’ll buy it. It sounds just like me.” He thought it over. “Too risky.”

“There’s no risk, if you think about it. They already know that the Cerberans are involved in the programming, and it doesn’t take a master detective to figure that it has to be the space station and the island. I’m giving them a convincing scenario that meshes with my previous reports and also with what they already know. They themselves then have the choice. Either they okay the plan and give the solution to me—if they can solve it—or they turn me down as too much of a risk for that kind of information. I think I know them. As long as they know they have the power to destroy this whole planet, they’ll okay it. The temptation, the bait, will be too great.”

“Supposing they do? What happens to Cerberus when you don’t deliver?”

“We have the key, and that solves the problem. Beyond that—well, I would assume protection for my wife and myself, perhaps eventually cleared robot bodies of our own. And if the Confederacy makes a move to atomize Cerberus, we’ll have a lot of advance warning. You just can’t make that kind of decision easily, so we’ll have th opportunity to call on those aliens for help.”