Ben Bova - The Multiple Man

Wyatt finally stirred himself. “If you think…”

But the President silenced him with the slightest lift of one finger. “Robert, it’s the same conclusion I came to weeks ago.”

The old man looked truly shocked. “What?”

“I think it’s time we brought this all out into the open,” the President said. “Time to clear the air.”

He pushed his chair back from the desk and got to his feet. We automatically got up, too.

“Come with us, Meric,” said The Man.

Wyatt seemed to understand what he was going to do. “Wait up a minute… he’s not family.”

The President smiled sardonically. “He is now. He knows as much about us as anyone. Come on, Meric.”

We went out the side door of the office, down to the basement, past the inspection station where Hank still stood on duty, and along the West Wing to the private elevator. Wyatt pushed the button, the doors slid open as if the machine had been waiting all day to be called on, and we followed the President into the tiny, redwood-paneled elevator cab.

There were no tourists in the White House at this hour of the afternoon, of course, but we rode in the windowless elevator past the ground and first floors and got off in the quiet main corridor of the second floor, the sacrosanct living quarters for the President and his First Lady.

Wordlessly, The Man paced along the richly carpeted hallway and led us to the Lincoln Sitting Room. I had never seen it before, although I knew which room it was, right next to the Lincoln Bedroom. I had seen both of them in photographs.

But when the President opened the door, it wasn’t the fin de siècle furniture or the ornate draperies that hit me. Three more James J. Hallidays were already in the room: one by the window, sitting in a green velvet-covered chair; another at the scroll desk, tapping out something on a computer terminal’s keyboard; the third standing by the portrait of Chester Arthur that hung on the far wall.

I gulped.

The President—the one I had come upstairs with—grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me toward the middle of the room. Pointing, he introduced: “That’s Jeffrey, scowling alongside President Arthur. And Jackson, jiggling the national debt figures. And Joshua, by the window. You’ve met all three of them before.”

They nodded or smiled at me. But Joshua said nervously, “Why bring an outsider into this? There’s been enough trouble already, hasn’t there?”

“Meric’s not an outsider,” John said. “And if we want to keep our troubles out of the public view, we’re going to need Meric’s continued whole-hearted cooperation.”

Joshua didn’t reply, but it was clear that he wasn’t happy to see me up there in their private clubroom.

“What’s going on, John?” Jeffrey asked. “Why the melodramatics?”

I was still goggle-eyed. All of them looked exactly alike. Their voices were the same. The trim of their hair. The way they gestured with their hands. The only discernible difference was their clothing. Jeffrey, the defense expert, was wearing a simple one-piece tan jumpsuit. Jackson, the economist, wore a more conservative dark blue shirtjac and slacks, while Joshua—whose main interest was natural resources and agricultural policy—had a yellow sportshirt over pseudosuede jeans. A soldier, a banker, and a farmer. I tried to fix them in my mind that way. James John—the President, I kept thinking—wore his usual work clothes: dark slacks, comfortable boots and an open-neck light shirt.

Wyatt took a chair near the door and I drifted, weak-kneed, toward the windows as James John answered.

“We’ve all been trying to hide from the facts. I think it’s time we faced up to them. The deaths haven’t been natural. They were murders.”

Jackson looked up from his computer keyboard. “No way, John. If Peña couldn’t find any signs…”

“Peña was convinced it was murder,” John said. “He couldn’t figure out how it was done, but he knew it was murder.”

“No, I don’t believe that,” Jackson said. “Peña was just emotionally unable to accept the fact that his work… well… it’s failing.”

Jeffrey said tightly, “Each of us might go just as the others did.”

“No,” John said. “I don’t believe that.” It was like hearing an echo of Jackson’s words from a moment earlier.

“Sure, you can afford to disbelieve it,” said Joshua. “You’re the natural, the firstborn. Whatever it is probably won’t affect you.”

“That’s not so,” John answered. The voice was still calm, but there was an edge to it.

Wyatt said, “You’re all genetically identical. What happens to one of you, as far as your body chemistry is concerned, will happen to you all. Lord, you all got the mumps at the same time when you were kids, and it lasted exactly the same number of days for each of you. Like clock-work. John’s not immune to anything that the rest of you are susceptible to.”

“That’s only theory, Robert,” Jeffrey said. “Everything about cloning processes is totally new… nobody’s done it before with human beings. We’re the first.”

I was starting to see differences among them. Slight differences in nuance, in character. They were four identical brothers all right. But just like identical twins, although they looked alike on the outside, they saw the world differently, and the insides of their heads were far from identical.

Wyatt was saying, “We could keep you in a germ-free environment, back at the lab. Then you wouldn’t have to worry…”

“That’s impossible!” Jackson snapped. “How in hell can we function in the Presidency from a germ-free cell at North Lake? It’s tough enough playing this seven-man shuffle—”

“Four-man shuffle,” Jeffrey corrected. “We’re down to four now.”

John was still standing in the middle of the room. He raised his hands for silence.

“Now, listen,” he said. “I’ve been giving the matter a lot of thought. The deaths were not natural. They were murders.”

Jackson shook his head but kept silent. Joshua seemed to tense forward in his chair. Jeffrey, who was nearest me, asked quietly: “So what are we going to do about it, John?”

“Find out which one of us is the murderer.”

I think my heart actually stopped beating. For what seemed like an eternity, nothing stirred in the room. Not even the dust motes in the slanting sunlight from the windows seemed to move. Everything froze.

Finally Jeffrey found his voice. “What… did you say?”

I’d never seen such an expression on the President’s face before. It must have been the way Lincoln looked when he learned of the carnage at Gettysburg.

“It’s one of us,” John said, his voice deceptively level. “No one else could be doing it. One of us is systematically killing the others. One of us wants to be the sole occupant of that office down in the West Wing.”

They looked back and forth among themselves. No one spoke. Wyatt seemed to be in a state of shock, ashen-faced, immobile, staring at the floor. I could see the wheels working inside those four identical heads. They recognized the truth of it. Maybe each of them had suspected it from the first, but pushed it away. Now it was out in the open. They could no longer ignore it.

“One of us wants to be the only President of the United States,” John repeated.

“I can’t…” Joshua started, then lapsed back into silence.

“It does make some sense,” Jackson admitted.

Jeffrey said, “But… killing his own brothers. It’s horrible… he’d have to be insane.”

John nodded. “I suppose so. But power can corrupt, we all know that. There’ve been enough murderous families in history to drive the point home. And we’ve done a few kinky acts here and there… we’re not immune to the disease.”