Charles Sheffield - Aftermath

Art found himself in a big, airy office with a high ceiling. That’s all he had time for, because once his eyes reached the man standing by the window he could look at nothing else.

Saul Steinmetz. Not quite as tall as he seemed on media releases, thinner, and with the stoop of a scholar. As he turned, penetrating eyes of pale gray skipped rapidly from one person to the next.

“Very sorry to hear about your brother,” he said to Yasmin. And, to Art and Dana, “And you lost a relative, too. Terrible business. I wish I could think of something better to say.”

He did not go through the charade of pretending that they might not know who he was. And he obviously knew who they were and where they had been. Art immediately wondered what else Steinmetz might find out. That they were not related in any way to the dead Desmond Lota? That they had no valid personal reason for a visit to the Q-5 Syncope Facility? He glanced at Dana, and saw that she was having the same worries. Her eyes were wide, fixed on Saul Steinmetz.

Very deliberately, Art forced himself to turn his head and look over to the corner of the office. Something odd was there, something he had caught from the corner of his eye as they entered. It was a ghostly projection, an insubstantial hologram of a man with the wall showing through his head and body. The head and mouth and eyes moved in stop-action jerks, like an old-fashioned clockwork figure.

The tick-tock man, Art thought.

“That monstrosity is supposed to be Benjamin Disraeli,” Steinmetz said. He had caught and followed Art’s look, and he spoke in the friendly and informal tone that came across so well at public meetings and press conferences. “Not quite what he was before Supernova Alpha. But maybe none of us is. I’m promised something better before the day’s out.”

He gestured to an oval coffee table surrounded by chairs at the other side of the office. “The more I hear about Pearl Lazenby and the Eye of God and the Legion of Argos, the less I like the sound of them. Look at this.”

He held out a black-and-white photograph. “Taken with a long focus camera from a high-flying military aircraft over North Carolina. See the lines of dots, like columns of ants? Those are people, coming out of one of the Legion of Argos strongholds. So far as we can tell, they’re moving north. Did you know that her followers have been saying for years that she prophesied her own return from judicial sleep? She was sentenced to six hundred and fifty years. All logic said that she would die of natural causes, centuries before her time was served. But she was right, and logic was wrong.”

He turned to Art and Dana as they all sat down. “Yasmin tells me that you were the first people to come across Pearl Lazenby’s empty body drawer. I’d like you to tell me exactly what you saw in and around the syncope facility. What direction you approached from, what condition the ground was in, tell everything. Take as much time as you want, and try to forget that you are in the White House. Yasmin asked for only a few minutes, but you have as long as you want.”

Steinmetz had noticed Art’s and Dana’s discomfort, and read it as nervousness in the presence of the President. But that idea wouldn’t last. Art knew Steinmetz’s reputation, as someone with an uncanny gift for reading people far below the level of words. Now he and Dana were proposing to lie to the man — and hope to get away with it. It would never work, not in this world. Those pale gray eyes were frighteningly luminous and knowing.

Dana was staring at him, expecting him to take the lead. Well, he would — in a direction she might not like at all.

“I’m going to do what you ask,” Art said slowly. “Even though at first you may not think I am. And this will take a little while.” He looked again at Dana, and was encouraged by her nod. She understood, and she approved. “My name really is Art Ferrand, and this is Dana Berlitz. But we are not related to each other. And we didn’t have a relative at the Q-5 facility. We went there for a quite different reason.”

Tell everything.

Art began to describe telomod therapy, and was surprised by Saul Steinmetz’s quick, “I know about that. Experimental, right? Go on.”

Art started over, this time with his call to Dana from Joe’s house in Catoctin Mountain Park. Then it was the journey to the Treasure Inn, the ruined Institute, the decision to look for Oliver Guest ("Guest and telomeres? I thought he was the clone man.” “Telomeres, too, Mr. President."), the trip through the echoing storm drains, and the scow and tobacco runners’ boat down the Potomac, all the way to Maryland Point. The story sounded unreal, as much as the events themselves now felt unreal.

Steinmetz said hardly a word. A couple of times he nodded, and once when a buzzer sounded he told Yasmin, “Tell ’em not now, no matter who it is.”

Art described the river landing at Maryland Point, the discovery of the trails from that side of the fenced facility around to the front, the broken gate. He told how they had found at first only corpses, but at the higher level at least some of the sleepers were alive.

He looked Saul Steinmetz straight in the eye. “We didn’t try to save them. We kept moving.”

The President nodded. “We’re on to that. Don’t worry. What next?”

It was the finding of Pearl Lazenby’s body drawer, empty. Then the resuscitation of Oliver Guest, interrupted by noises from below.

“We didn’t want to be discovered, doing what we were doing.”

“Of course not.” Steinmetz spoke as though that were obvious. “For one thing, it might have been Pearl Lazenby’s followers again. Then you’d have been in real trouble.”

“So we left Seth with Oliver Guest, back in the body drawer.”

“You weren’t worried about him? Left behind with Grisly, Guest?”

“You don’t know Seth. Anyway, that’s the last that Dana and I saw of them. We came down, and we met Yasmin. And she brought us here.”

“She did, indeed.” Steinmetz stood up and walked across to the window. “You’re telling me the truth. Why?”

Why? Art and Dana stared at each other. “We’d never have convinced you with a lie,” she said at last.

“You might have, if you kept it simple and agreed to your story ahead of time. I’m pretty good, but I’m not infallible. Ask my mother, she’ll tell you. But you told the truth. I’d like to know the reason.”

“I didn’t decide to tell the truth,” Dana said. “But I’ll tell you why I agreed with Art when I realized where he was going.”

“That will do fine.” Steinmetz came back, sat down, and speared her with that luminous gaze that made her feel pinned in her chair. “Why?”

“You said that telomod therapy is experimental, and you are quite right. Nobody knows the possible side effects, or what will happen to the patients in the long term. But the hell with the long term. Who cares about that if you’re dead?”

“ ’In the long run, we are all dead.’ Not the words of our quantized friend over there” — Steinmetz glanced across at the spectral shade of Disraeli — “but of the economist, John Maynard Keynes. I agree with him completely. We have to worry about now, today, and worry about later if and when we have time.”

“Well, without telomod therapy I would be dead today. So would Art, and so would Seth Parsigian. Every doctor I went to before I found the Institute for Probatory Therapies said the same thing: try to put your mind at ease and prepare for death. I wouldn’t do it, and I won’t do it. We may not seem to be dying to you, but we have no idea what might happen next. The Institute is gone, the genome-scanning equipment is useless, and our doctors are dead. The only person we know who has a prayer of telling us anything is Oliver Guest. But suppose we can’t find him? Suppose he gets away from Seth, or kills him, and disappears?”