Ben Bova - The Multiple Man

“Don’t kid me, son,” I said. But my stomach was starting to feel hollow. “You couldn’t get close enough to see him if he was there, and he wasn’t there in the first place.”

“Wrong on both counts.” Ryan leaned over and delved into the quarter-ton leather carrysack that he had brought with him. Out came a camera with a foot-long lens attachment.

“Electronic booster,” he said. “Japanese. I could get close-ups of guys walking on the moon with this.”

I tried to hide behind my beer mug.

“I figured something screwy was going on when the guards wouldn’t even let me turn off the road,” Ryan said, with a smug smile on his face. “They told me the President wasn’t there—”

“He wasn’t.”

“But the word before I’d left Boston was that he’d be at Camp David all weekend.”

“He changed his mind at the last minute.”

“Yeah? Well, driving up to the camp, I saw enough helicopters—Army, mostly—to make it look like the place was being invaded.”

My stomach lurched at that word.

Ryan was cheerfully oblivious to my distress. “Anyway, I figured something big was going on. So I drove a mile or so up the road, parked the car, and climbed a tree.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Couldn’t see much, but I got this one shot… He pulled a three-by-five photograph from his pocket. Black and white. Handed it to me.

It was fuzzy, but it showed four men duck-walking out from under an Army helicopter’s whirling rotors. Off to one side of the picture, three other men were standing waiting for them. The tallest one looked a helluva lot like James J. Halliday.

“Can’t really see his face,” I muttered.

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “But you can see the stars on those generals’ shoulders. And when they came up to that man they saluted him, like he was the Commander-in-Chief.”

I shook my head, but without much enthusiasm. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“What time was this taken?”

“Saturday… around six-thirty, seven o’clock.”

This time I felt as if I were dropping down a chute. “I had dinner with the President at seven Saturday evening. In the White House,” I said as evenly as I could. “He couldn’t have been at Camp David when you took this photo.” He couldn’t have been. But another double could. A double who was meeting with a lot of military brass, secretly, while the President argued with Admiral Del Bello.

Ryan grinned at me skeptically. “Okay. Go ahead and cover for your boss. It’s part of the game. I expect it.”

“Let’s drop the subject,” I said. “I’m telling you the truth and you don’t believe it, so let’s just drop it here and now.”

“Okay by me,” he answered. But the smug smile remained. It was a smile that said, See, I’m still pure and holy, but you’ve sold out to the Establishment, and now you tell us lies.

The thing that really pissed me off was that he was right, but in a way he didn’t understand. I realized that I couldn’t tell him what I knew, couldn’t break the story to him. He probably wouldn’t believe it. But he’d report it quickly enough. Oh sure, he’d report it. And inside of ten minutes I’d be wrapped in a plastic cocoon and on my way to the most remote funny farm in the land. And Ryan would be laughing about how guys crack up when they go to work for the Establishment.

I couldn’t break this story with nothing to go on but my unsupported word. It would never get off the ground. Even if it got into the headlines, there’d be an official investigation, a whitewash, and the guy who originally spilled the story would quietly drop out of sight. I’d end up in an alcoholic ward somewhere, or maybe dead of an overdose of truth.

Not for me. Not yet, anyway. Not until I learned just what in hell was really going on.

So Ryan and I fenced our way through an interview, pinking each other here and there about the need for honesty from the President and his staff, and the need for responsibility from the news reporters. By the time he left, I was sore at him, more scared than ever, and even angrier at myself for whatI had to do next.

I called Johnny Harrison in Boston and told him about Ryan’s photograph.

“The kid’s a little overeager, isn’t he?” Harrison smiled slyly at me.

I grinned back into the phone screen. “He could get himself into trouble pulling stunts like that. Those laser-directed intruder alarms don’t recognize press passes.”

“Martyred reporters are good copy,” Johnny said.

What about martyred editors? Iwanted to ask. Instead, I said, “When you see that photograph, give me a call and tell me what you think of it.”

“I’ve already seen it,” he said. “Len sent a wire copy of it to me Saturday night. Interrupted my dinner with it.”

“Well? What do you think?”

He shrugged. “Tempest in a teapot. I can’t swear that it’s the President in that picture, and neither can he. You say The Man was in the White House. Ryan says he’s sneaking around with generals. Maybe. But that picture doesn’t prove anything.”

“There’s nothing to prove,” I insisted.

“Sure.” But his face did a Groucho Marx version of, If I believed that, I’d be as dumb as Harpo.

“Well,” I said weakly, “I just wanted to know what you planned to do.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Don’t worry about that photo. But, ahhh, I am going to keep Ryan down in Washington for a while. Beef up our Washington bureau. And keep him out of my hair.”

“Thanks a helluva lot,” I said.

“All in a day’s work,” he answered cheerfully.

I damn near decided not to go to Hogate’s that afternoon. I couldn’t decide whether my elevator rendezvous was a joke, a serious attempt to recruit me for something secret, or a step in setting me up for the same kind of treatment McMurtrie had got.

But I went. Cursing myself for a damned fool, I went without telling anybody a word about it.

Hogate’s had been a landmark in Washington for more than a century. The restaurant had gone through several incarnations, including being burned to the ground by insurgents once, during the battles of the nineties. The newest Hogate’s showed nothing more aboveground than a fair-sized plastic bubble. It was built down at the foot of Eleventh Street, right by the river. Most of the restaurant was subsurface. Not underground, but underwater: very fitting for a seafood restaurant.

It was like going to have a drink with Captain Nemo. You walked down a long, dank, tubular corridor, guided by faintly fluorescent patches of color arranged to look like moss or algae. The air was spiced with a salt tang, and a faint murmur of distant surf. A live mermaid with a plastic tail smiled at you through a heavy-looking hatch and you stepped into an aquarium. You’re on the inside; the fish are on the outside, all around you. Fantastic effect with the shimmering light from the water and big toothy sharks sliding by six inches from your nose.

The main dining area was actually built like the interior of Nemo’s Victorian submarine, complete with bookcases, pipe organ, and portholes that looked out on the ever-present fish.

I stood blinking in the dim light, trying to locate my taciturn contact man. I didn’t remember much of what he looked like, and I didn’t see anyone who seemed to be searching for me. So I sat at the bar and ordered a synthetic rum collins. The synthetics were pretty good; they tasted right and even got you high, but without the after-effects. The FDA was investigating claims that they were addictive and carcinogenic. Considering what was boiling in my mind, I couldn’t have cared less.