N-Space Part 62

"Yah. Jack, the ARM isn't doing anything to put the human race back on a war footing."

"Maybe they've done something they haven't told you about."

"Jack, I don't think so."

"They haven't let you read all their files, Anton. Two weeks ago you didn't know about peace games in Aristarchus. But okay. What should they be doing?"

"I don't know."

"How's your chemistry?"

Anton grimaced. "How's yours? Forget I said that. Maybe I'm back to normal and maybe I'm not."

"Yah, but you haven't thought of anything. How about weapons:'

LARRY NIVEN 313.

Can't have a war without weapons, and the ARM's been suppressing weapons. We should dip into their files and make up a list. It would save some time when and if. I know of an experiment that might have been turned into an inertialess drive if it hadn't been suppressed."

"Date?"

"Early twenty-second. And there was a field projector that would snake things burn, late twenty-third."

"I'll find 'em." Anton's eyes took on a faraway look. "There's the archives. I don't mean just the stuff that was built and then destroyed. The archives reach all the way back to the early twentieth. Stuff that was proposed: tanks, orbital beam weapons, kinetic energy weapons, biologicals-"

"We don't want biologicals."

I thought he hadn't heard. "Picture crowbars six feet long. A short burn takes them out of orbit, and they steer themselves down to anything with the silhouette you want . . . a tank or a submarine or a limousine, say. Primitive stuff now, but at least it would do something." He was really getting into this. The technical terms he was tossing off were masks for horror. He stopped suddenly, then said, "Why not biologicals?"

"Nasty bacteria tailored for us might not work on warcats. We want their biological weapons, and we don't want them to have ours.

"Stet. Now, here's one for you. How would you adjust a 'doc to snake a normal person into a soldier?"

My head snapped up. I saw the guilt spread across his face. He said, "I had to look up your dossier. Had to, Jack."

"Sure. All right, I'll see what I can find." I stood up. "The easiest way is to pick schitzies and train them as soldiers. We'd start with the same citizens the ARM has been training since . . . date cla.s.sified, three hundred years or so. People who need the 'doc to keep their metabolism straight or they'll ram a car into a crowd or strangle -"

"We wouldn't find enough. When you need soldiers, you need thousands. Maybe millions."

"True. It's a rare condition. Well, good night, Anton."

I fell asleep on the 'doc table again.

Dawn poked under my eyelids, and I got up and moved toward the holophone. Caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Rethought. If David saw me looking like this, he'd be booking tickets to attend the funeral. So I took a shower and a cup of coffee first.

My eldest son looked like I had: decidedly rumpled. "Dad, can't you read a clock?"

"I'm sorry. Really." These calls are so expensive that there's no point hanging up. "How are things in Aristarchus?"

"Clavius. We've been moved out. We've got half the s.p.a.ce we used to, and we'd need twice the s.p.a.ce to hold everything we own. Ah, the time change isn't your fault, Dad; we're all in Clavius now, all but Jennifer. She-" David vanished. A mechanically soothing voice said, "You have impinged on ARM police business. The cost of your call will be refunded."

I looked at the empty s.p.a.ce where David's face had been. I was ARM . . . but maybe I'd already heard enough.

My granddaughter Jennifer is a medic. The censor program had reacted to her name in connection with David. David said she wasn't with him. The whole family had been moved out except for Jennifer.

If she'd stayed on in Aristarchus or been kept on . . .

Human medics are needed when something unusual has happened to a human body or brain. Then they study what's going on, with an eye to writing more programs for the 'docs. The bulk of those problems are psychological.

Anton's "peace games" must be stressful as h.e.l.l.

II.

Anton wasn't at the Mon.o.bloc Thursday. That gave me another week to rethink and recheck the programs I'd put on a dime disk, but I didn't need it.

I came back the next Thursday. Anton Brillov and Phoebe Garrison were holding a table for four.

I paused-backlit in the doorway, knowing my expression was hidden-then moved in. "When did you get back?"

"Sat.u.r.day before last," Phoebe said gravely.

It felt awkward. Anton felt it, too, but then, he would. I began to wish I didn't ever have to see him on a Thursday night.

I tried tact. "Shall we see if we can conscript a fourth?"

"It's not like that," Phoebe said. "Anton and I, we're together. We had to tell you."

But I'd never thought . . . I'd never claimed Phoebe. Dreams are private. This was coming from some wild direction. "Together as in?"

Anton said, "Well, not married, not yet, but thinking about it. And we wanted to talk privately."

"Like over dinner?"

"A good suggestion."

"I like Buffalo Bill. Let's go there."

Twenty-odd habitues of the Mon.o.bloc must have heard the exchange and watched us leave. Those three long-timers seem friendly enough but too serious . . . and three's an odd number . . .

We didn't talk until we'd reached Apt 23309.

Anton closed the door before he spoke. "She's in, Jack. Everything."

I said, "It's really love, then."

Phoebe smiled. "Jack, don't be offended. Choosing is what humans do."

Trite, I thought, and then: Skip it. "That bit there in the Mon.o.bloc seemed overdone. I felt excessively foolish."

"That was for them. My idea," Phoebe said. "After tonight one of us may have to go away. This way we've got an all-purpose excuse. You leave because your best friend and favored lady closed you out. Or Phoebe leaves because she can't bear to ruin a friends.h.i.+p. Or big, burly Jack drives Anton away. See?"

She wasn't just in; she was taking over. Ah, well. "Phoebe, love, do you believe in murderous cats eight feet tall?"

"Do you have doubts, Jack?"

"Not anymore. I called my son. Something secretive is happening in Aristarchus, something that requires a medic."

She only nodded. "What have you got for us?"

I showed them my dime disk. "Took me less than a week. Run it in an autodoc. Ten personality choices. The chemical differences aren't big, but . . . infantry, which means killing on foot and doesn't have anything to do with children . . . where was I? Yah. Infantry isn't at all like logistics, and neither is like espionage, and navy is different yet. We may have lost some of the military vocations over the centuries. We'll have to reinvent them. This is just a first cut. I wish we had a way to try it out."

Anton set a dime disk next to mine, along with a small projector. "Mine's nearly full. The ARM's stored an incredible range of dangerous devices. We need to think hard about where to store this. I even wondered if one of us should be emigrating, which is why-"

"To the Belt? Farther?"

"Jack, if this all adds up, we won't have time to reach another star."

We watched stills and flat motion pictures of weapons and tools in action. Much of it was quite primitive, copied out of deep archives. We watched rock and landscape being torn, aircraft exploding, machines destroying other machines . . . and imagined flesh shredding.

"I could get more, but T thought I'd better show you this first," Anton said.

I said, "Don't bother."

"What? Jack?"

"It only took us a week! Why risk our necks to do work that can be duplicated that fast?"

Anton looked lost. "We need to do something!"

"Well, maybe we don't. Maybe the ARM is doing it all for us."

Phoebe gripped Anton's wrist hard, and he swallowed some bitter retort. She said, "Maybe we're missing something. Maybe we're not looking at it right."

"What's on your mind?"

"Let's find a way to look at it differently." She was looking straight at me.

I said, "Stoned? Drunk? Fizzed? Wired?"

Phoebe shook her head. "We need the schitz view."

"Dangerous, love. Also, the chemicals you're talking about are ma.s.sively illegal. I can't get them, and Anton would be caught for sure." I saw the way she was smiling at me. "Anton, I'll break your scrawny neck."

"Huh? Jack?"

"No, no, he didn't tell me," Phoebe said hastily, "though frankly, I'd think either of you might have trusted me that much, Jack! I remembered you in the 'doc that morning, and Anton coming down from that twitchy state on a Thursday night, and it all clicked."

"Okay."

"You're a schitz, Jack. But it's been a long time, hasn't it?"

"Thirteen years of peace," I said. "They pick us for it, you know. Paranoid schizophrenics, born with our chemistry screwed up, a hair-trigger temper, and a skewed view of the universe. Most schitzies never have to feel that. We use the 'docs more regularly than you do, and that's that. But some of us go into the ARM. Phoebe, your suggestion is still silly. Anton's crazy four days out of the week, just like I used to be. Anton's all you need."

"Phoebe, he's right."

"No. The ARM used to be all schitzies, right? The genes have thinned out over three hundred years."

Anton nodded. "They'll tell us in training. The ones who could be Hitler or Napoleon or Castro-they're the ones the ARM wants. They're the ones you can send on a mother hunt, the ones with no social sense. But the Fertility, Board doesn't let them breed, either, unless they've got something special. Jack, you were special, high intelligence or something-"

"Perfect teeth, and I don't get sick in free fall, and Charlotte's people never develop back problems. That helped. Yah . . . but every century there are less of us. So they hire some Antons, too, and make you crazy.

"But carefully," Phoebe said. "Anton's not evolved for paranoia, Jack. You are. When they juice Anton up, they don't make him too crazy, just enough to get the viewpoint they want. I bet they leave the top management boringly sane. But you, Jack-"

"I see it." Centuries of ARM tradition were squarely on her side.

"You can go as crazy as you like. It's all natural, and medics have known how to handle it since Only One Earth. We need the schitz viewpoint, and we don't have to steal the chemicals."

"Stet. When do we start?"

Anton looked at Phoebe. Phoebe said, "Now?"

We played Anton's tape all the way through, to a running theme of graveyard humor.

"I took only what I thought we could use," Anton said. "You should have seen some of the rest: Agent Orange, napalm, murder stuff."

Phoebe said, "Isn't this murder?"

That remark might have been unfair. We were watching this bizarre chunky rotary-blade flier. Fire leapt from underneath it once and again . . . weapons of some kind.

Anton said, "Aircraft design isn't the same when you use it for murder. It changes when you expect to be shot at. Here." The picture had changed. "That's another weapons platform. It's not just fast; it's supposed to hide in the sky. Jack, are you all right?"

"I'm scared green. I haven't felt any effects yet."

Phoebe said, "You need to relax. Anton delivers a terrific ma.s.sage. I never learned."

She wasn't kidding. Anton didn't have my muscle, but he had big strangler's hands. I relaxed into it, talking as he worked, liking the way my voice wavered as his hands pounded my back.

"It hasn't been that long since a guy like me let his 'doc run out of beta-damma-something. An indicator light ran out, and he didn't notice. He tried to kill his business partner by bombing his partner's house and got some family members instead."

"We're on watch," Phoebe said. "If you go berserk, we can handle it. Do you want to see more of this?"

"We've missed something. Children, I'm a registered schitz. If I don't use my 'doc for three days, they'll be trying to find me before I remember I'm the Marsport Strangler."

Anton said, "He's right, love. Jack, give me your door codes. If I can get into your apt, I can fix the records."

"Keep talking. Finish the ma.s.sage, at least. We might have other problems. Do we want fruit juice? Munchies? Foodlike substances?"

When Anton came back with groceries, Phoebe and I barely noticed.