Ben Bova - The Multiple Man

He started to whistle, impressed, but caught himself. “Just one moment, Mr. Albano. I’ll phone the reception lobby.”

He did that, came back still looking puzzled, but opened the gate and waved me on. I drove up another half-mile of blacktop, pulled up on a graveled parking area, and walked from the car to the reception lobby. There were fewer than a dozen cars in the parking lot; either their staff was incredibly small or there was another parking lot for employees tucked off in the back somewhere. Or the employees live here, said something in my head. Nonsense, I thought.

The reception lobby was equally quiet. Nobody there at all. A curved desk with all the paraphernalia of a busy receptionist: phones, picture screens, computer access keyboard, plush little wheeled chair. The lobby was paneled in warm woods, furnished with leather couches and chairs. There were even fresh flowers in vases on both low-slung wood slab tables. But no people.

A door in the wood paneling opened and a smiling, tall, handsomely dressed man came out. About my age, maybe a few years older. The suave public relations type: touch of gray at the temples, precise manner of speech, self-confident stride. A very careful man. The ideal pickpocket.

“Mr. Albano,” he said in a well-modulated voice that was somewhere between a confidential whisper and a throaty tenor. “We are honored.”

My estimation of him went up. Scratch pick-pocket. He was a confidence man.

I let him shake my hand. He had a very firm, manly grip.

“My name is Peter Thornton.I’m Dr. Peña’s assistant—”

“Dr. Peña?”

He almost looked hurt. “The director of this organization. Dr. Alfonso Peña. Surely Dr. Klienerman has explained—”

I cut him off with a nod. He was pumping me, and I decided to be the pumper, not the pumpee.

“Where is Dr. Pena? I’d like to see him. I don’t have much time, you understand.”

“Of course. Of course. But the gate guard said you were asking for Dr. Klienerman and Mr. McMurtrie.”

“That’s right. I’m part of the investigating team. We’ve got to make certain that we can handle the media from a knowledgeable basis.”

“Oh, yes, certainly. That is important, isn’t it?”

“Right.” But we hadn’t moved a centimeter from where I’d been standing all along. The door to the laboratory proper was still behind Thornton, and he was making no effort to take me through.

“This is a very unfortunate business,” he said, lowering his voice even more.

“Yes. Now where’re Klienerman and McMurtrie? And I also—’

“Dr. Klienerman left last night,” Thornton said, giving me a you should have known that look. “He and Mr. McMurtrie went together.”

“Last night?”

“By chartered plane. General Halliday insisted.”

“General Halliday?” The President’s father.

“Yes. They should be in Aspen by now.”

Damn! That was one of the troubles with skulking off on your own. You got out of touch with everybody else. I decided to take the offensive.

“I should have been notified,” I said sternly.

His eyebrows rose in alarm. “We didn’t know. They didn’t inform me—”

I shook my head. “There’s no excuse for this kind of screw-up. I know it isn’t your fault personally, but…”

He made a gesture that was almost like hand-wringing.

“Well,” I said, “as long as I’m here, I want to meet Dr. Peña. And I’ll need to see the bodies, of course. The bodies are still here, aren’t they?”

“Oh, yes! They’ve been subjected to extensive post-mortem examinations, you realize… but they’re here.”

“Let’s get with it, then.”

I had him on the run. He ushered me through the door and into the main building of the laboratory. We walked through miles of corridors, down stairs, through plastic-roofed ramps that connected different buildings. I got completely lost; I couldn’t have found the lobby again without a troop of Boy Scouts to lead me.

We passed a strange conglomeration of sights. At first we were in an office area, obviously administrative. Rugs on the floors, neat little names and titles on the doors. Secretaries’ desks placed in alcoves along the corridors. Then we stepped through one of those rampways into a different building. Here I saw workshops and what looked like chemistry laboratories: lots of glassware and bubblings and people in white smocks. Then a computer complex: more white-smocked people, but younger, mostly, and surrounded by head-high consoles with winking lights and display screens flashing green-glowing numbers and symbols.

Then we passed more offices, but here there were no doors, no names, no titles. The men and women inside these cubbyholes looked like researchers to me. They were scribbling equations on chalkboards or punching computer keyboards or talking animatedly with each other in words that were English but not the English language.

As we were going down a clanging flight of metal stairs, deeper into the basement levels underneath the surface building, it finally hit home in my brain that North Lake Research Laboratories was not a medical institution. It had nothing to do with medicine at all, from the looks of it.

“What’s the major area of research here?” I asked Thornton.

“Em… biomedical,” he said.

“Biomedical?”

“Well… mostly biochemistry. Very advanced, of course.” He produced a chuckle that was supposed to put me off my guard. “I’ll tell you something. I’ve got a doctorate in molecular biochemistry, and I don’t understand half of what these bright young people are doing nowadays.”

‘That far out, eh?”

I was about to ask him who paid for all these bright young people and their far-out research. But we had come to the bottom of the stairwell. There was nothing there except a blank cul-de-sac, about four paces long, with cement walls and an unmarked steel door at its end.

Thornton, looking suddenly grim, fingered the buttons of the combination lock set into the wall next to the door. It swung open and we stepped through.

This area looked medical. A large room, with pastel green walls. No windows, of course, this far underground. Glareless, pitiless overhead lights. Cold. Like a morgue, only colder. Two rollable tables in the center of the room, each bearing a body totally covered with a green sheet. Nineteen dozen different kinds of gadgets arrayed around the bodies: oscilloscopes, trays of surgical instruments, heart-lung pumps, lots of other things I didn’t recognize right off.

I found myself swallowing hard. Despite the cold of the room, the stench of death was here. I went to the tables. Thornton didn’t try to stop me, but I could hear his footsteps on the cold cement floor, right behind me. I stopped at the first table. So did he. I lifted a corner of the sheet.

James J. Halliday stared blankly at me. Christ, it looked exactly like him!

I let the sheet drop from my fingers and went to the other table. This time Thornton stayed where he was. I lifted the second sheet. The same face stared at me. The same sandy hair, the same blue eyes, the same jaw, the lips that could grin so boyishly, the broad forehead, the thin slightly beaked nose.

“I wouldn’t pull the sheet any further back,” Thornton’s voice came from behind me, “unless you’ve had some surgical experience. It… isn’t pretty.”

I placed the sheet gently back on the cold face. Dammit, there were tears in my eyes. It took me a minute before I could turn back and face Thornton again.

“What were the results of the autopsies?” I asked. “What killed them?”

Thornton looked uncomfortable. “I believe Dr. Peña should discuss that with you.”