Ben Bova - The Multiple Man

At the open end of the cylinder was a hospital table, holding the whitely lifeless body of a man. The man who had been covered by the blanket in the alley behind Faneuil Hall. He was uncovered now. Completely naked. Obviously dead.

My knees sagged beneath me.

The dead man was James J. Halliday, the President of the United States of America.

It was McMurtrie who grabbed me. He wrapped his gorilla arms around my shoulders. Otherwise I would’ve gone right down to the floor.

“It’s not him, ” he whispered fiercely. “It’s a copy, a duplicate…”

I was having trouble breathing. Everything seemed to be out of focus, blurred. I couldn’t get air into my lungs.

Next thing I knew I was sitting down and gulping at a plastic cup’s worth of water. McMurtrie was looming over me. But I was still looking past him, at the body lying in the cryonics chamber. Cold. Dead.

“It’s not the President,” McMurtrie said at me. “He’s on the plane, on his way back to Washington. I talked to him ten minutes ago.” He jerked a thumb toward the picture-phone on the desk.

“Then who…” My voice sounded weak and cracked, as if it were coming from someone else, somebody old and badly scared.

McMurtrie shook his head, like a buffalo getting rid of gnats. “Damned if I know. But we’ll find out. Believe it.”

I was beginning to register normally again. Taking a deep breath, I straightened up in the chair and looked around the glareless white room. Four of McMurtrie’s men were standing around. They had nothing to do, but they looked alert and ready. One of them, closest to the door, had his pistol out and was minutely examining the action, clicking it back and forth. The ammo clip was tucked into his jacket’s breast pocket.

“Somebody’s made a double for the President,” I said to McMurtrie, with some strength in my voice now, “and your men killed him.”

He glared at me. “No such thing. We found this… man… in the alley. Just where you saw him. He was dead when those two cops stumbled over him. No identification. No marks of violence.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Just lying there stretched out in the alley.”

“The cops thought he was a drunk, except he was dressed too well. Then when they saw his face.

“No bullet wounds or needle marks or anything?”

McMurtrie said, “Go in there and examine him yourself, if you want to.”

“No, thanks.” But I found myself staring at the corpse in the misty cold chamber. He looked exactly like Halliday.

“Are you in good enough shape to walk?” McMurtrie asked me.

“I guess so.”

“And talk?”

It was my turn to glare at him. “What do you think I’m doing now?”

He grunted. It was what he did instead of laughing. “There’re a few reporters out at the front desk. The local police and two of my people are keeping them there. Somebody’s going to have to talk to them.”

I knew who somebody was. “What do I tell them? Disneyland made a copy of the President?”

“You don’t tell them a damned thing,” McMurtrie said. “But you send them home satisfied that they know why we’re here. Got it?”

I nodded. “Give’em the old Ziegler shuffle. Sure. I’ll walk on water, too. Just to impress them.”

He leaned over so that his face was close enough for me to smell his mouth freshener. “Listen to me. This is important. We cannot have the media finding out that there was an exact duplicate of the President running loose in Boston tonight.”

“He wasn’t exactly running loose,” I said.

“Not one word about it.”

“What’d he die of?”

He shrugged massively. “Don’t know. Our own medical people gave him a quick going over, but there’s no way to tell yet. We’re going to freeze him and ship him down to Klienerman at Walter Reed.”

“Before I talk to the reporters,” I said, “I want to check with The Man.”

McMurtrie grumbled just enough to stay in character, then let me use the phone. It took only a few moments to get through on the special code to the President in Air Force One. They were circling Andrews AFB, about to land. But one thing the President insists on is instant communications, wherever he is. He’s never farther away from any of his staff than the speed of light.

In the tiny screen of the desktop phone, he looked a little drawn. Not tired or worried so much as nettled, almost angry. I reviewed the situation with him very quickly.

“And McMurtrie thinks I ought to stonewall the reporters,” I concluded.

His public smile was gone. His mouth was tight. “What do you think?” he asked me.

One of Halliday’s tenets of faith had been total honesty with the press. He was damned fair to the working news people, which is one of the reasons I was attracted to him in the first place. Completely aside from Laura.

“I’m afraid he’s right, Mr. President,” I answered. “We can’t let this out… not right now.”

“Why not?”

It was a question he always asked. Working for him was a constant exercise in thinking clearly. “Because”—I thought as clearly and fast as I could—“a disclosure now would raise more questions than answers. Who is this… this double? How’d he get to look like you? And why? How did he die? And…” I hesitated.

He caught it. “And is it really James J. Halliday you’ve got cooling down in there, while I’m an imposter replacing him? Right?”

I had to agree. “That’s the biggie. And if you’re an imposter, who’re you working for?”

He grinned. “The Republicans.”

Seriously, he asked, “Meric… do you think I’m an imposter?”

“Not for a microsecond.”

“Why not?”

“You wouldn’t be challenging me like this if you were. Besides, you’re behaving exactly the way you always behave.

He cocked his head to one side slightly, which is another of his personal little pieces of action. I had never paid much attention to it until that moment.

“All right,” he said at last. “I don’t like hiding things from the press unless there’s a damned vital reason for it.”

“This is very vital,” I said.

He agreed and then asked to speak with McMurtrie. I got up from the desk and stared again into the cold chamber. The team of green-gowned meditechs was starting to slide the corpse into the stainless-steel cylinder that would be his cryonic sarcophagus. Liquid nitrogen boil-off filled the chamber with whitish vapor. Each of the meditechs wore a face mask; I’d never be able to identify them again.

Then that one word struck me. Exactly. The man I had just spoken to on the picture-phone acted exactly like the James J. Halliday I’d known and worked for since he first started campaigning. The corpse they were sliding into that cold metal cylinder looked exactly like James J. Halliday. My knees got fluttery again.

McMurtrie came over beside me. I could see our two reflections in the glass that separated us from the cold chamber. He looked as grim as vengeance. I looked scared as shit.

“Okay, kid,” he told me. “You’re in the big leagues now. Put on a straight face and get those newsmen out of here while we ship the casket out the back way.”

One of his men walked with me up to the waiting room near the hospital’s main entrance. He was a typical McMurtrie trooper: neatly dressed, quiet and colorless to the point of invisibility. And perfectly capable of quietly, colorlessly, maybe even bloodlessly, killing a man. It was something to think about.

Len Ryan was among the news people in the waiting room. There were eleven of them, a modern baker’s dozen, sitting on the worn and tired-looking plastic chairs, talking and joking with one another when I walked in. Ryan was off in a corner by himself, writing in a thick notebook. He threw me a look that was halfway between suspicion and contempt.