Wives are not property.
—Lazarus Long
Halfway through shaving, whistling Louis Jordan's "Blue Light Boogie," I looked at myself in the mirror and asked, What's wrong with this picture?
Well, I replied, nothing much that I can see. Or no more than usual. Naked white male in pretty good shape, happy, loved, and recently laid. Not so much as a pimple, or a—
—or a scar! Smooth, unblemished skin, from my scalp down as far as the mirror showed, about hip height. No sign of the two bullet scars in my arm and shoulder, no trace of the old razor scar across my right pec or the shrapnel tracks on the left one . . . and especially, no sign of a recent puncture wound in my side . . .
It dawned on me for the first time that the vigorous and glorious sex I had woken in the middle of, some ten minutes ago, should not have been possible for a post-op patient—dope or no dope.
I pawed at my side, as though I might pull aside some flap of meat and locate the missing wound. I prodded the area, gently at first, and then harder. Soon I was punching at it with the side of my fist.
I was so pissed I stormed out of the bathroom and barked at Arethusa. "Where the hell is Lady Sally? I'm gonna kill her!"
"What's wrong, Joe?" she said, wide-eyed. There was only one of her present, dressed in perspiration and glory.
"What's wrong? God damn it, nothing. That's what's wrong! Oh, Kate probably actually did it—but the orders came from Sally. The rotten bitch went and healed me . . . without so much as a 'By your leave'! I'm not going to stand for this—"
She burst out laughing, strove at once to stop.
"Dammit to hell, I earned those scars. She had no right—"
She had it under control now. Way under control. "Joe Quigley, did you or did you not verbally acknowledge recruitment into an army, just yesterday?"
"Well, yeah, but—"
"Did you or did you not verbally acknowledge, just yesterday, that the crisis in your war could come at any moment?"
"Yes, but—"
"Soldier, shut up and soldier. The Lady did what she had to."
Oof. "But you don't—"
"The world is supposed to balance on a knife edge, while you take R&R in a cathouse, just so you can preserve the record of your mistakes, to impress the new meat? It was necessary to heal you quickly."
Every prostitute in America knows grunt talk. "Dammit, Arethusa, those scars were my combat ribbons—"
"Are you the kind of soldier who needs his ribbons? More than he needs to get his job done?"
Well, if you put it that way . . .
After a time, I stopped frowning and sat down beside her. "Thanks for straightening me out, baby," I said, and put my arm around her.
"I understand, Joe," she said, snuggling into me. "I'd have been mad too. But it was necessary. Now that you know Lady Sally's secret, there was no longer any reason for you to waste time recuperating normally."
I glanced down at myself. "I'll miss them. Most expensive ornaments I ever bought."
"You can always have them tattooed back on, after all this is over," she suggested.
"No," I said. "It's done."
She looked hesitant. "Well, if you really have accepted it, I guess I should tell you the rest of it."
I gritted my teeth. "Out with it."
"Uh . . . I'm afraid you're never going to get sick again, darling."
You can't grit your teeth and gape at the same time. "Never? Ever?"
She shook her head sadly. "I'm afraid not. Your DNA has been optimized. It was an unavoidable side effect of healing you quickly. If it makes you feel any better, it's been done to me too. If we're going to die, my love, it'll have to be accident, murder, or suicide—and even that will have to be a kind that kills instantly."
That redheaded bitch, making me immortal without asking me first, why, I oughta . . .
"Let me finish shaving, and we'll go down for some breakfast," I said. My voice sounded odd to me.
"Sit there," she directed, and went into the bathroom. She came back with the electric razor. It harmonized with the buzzing in my ears. I sat passively as she completed my shave.
How do you wrap your mind around the knowledge that you could safely kiss a cobra, or dance naked in snow, or share a needle with a promiscuous male prostitute? As far as I could get was to wonder if I could somehow get a refund on my Blue Cross and life insurance without blowing Lady Sally's cover . . .
No, maybe I shouldn't do that. It had only been a few days since the last attempt on my life. And I had new enemies . . .
"Darling," my Arethusa said as she ran the razor across my face, "there's a conversation I think we ought to have before we go down to eat."
I raised an eyebrow or two. "Really? How could we possibly be in any hurry about anything? Except saving space and time, I mean."
"Maybe we should have had it long before now. Things have been rushed since we met." Understatement of the century. "I barely found time to propose to you—"
"I know. I'd been waiting for a chance myself for hours."
"—and I'm very glad you've agreed to marry me. But perhaps it's past time we defined what that means. The worst misunderstandings are the unspoken ones. What do you and I expect of each other?"
I honestly didn't know what she meant. "A square deal."
"Then let's negotiate the deal. Not necessarily in writing—but explicitly."
"That's easy. You can have anything I've got, and I'll take anything you feel like giving me."
She chased down the last bit of stubble, shut off the razor, and smiled. "I'd love to have that reciprocal agreement with you. But have you thought it through?"
I blinked. "I hadn't thought of it as something that needed thinking through."
She acquired a look of tender exasperation. "I guess I'll have to spell it out. You know what I do for a living. I have no plans to quit working. Do you anticipate that being a problem for you?"
At last I got it. By God, she was right. This was certainly something a man ought to think through before climbing into his tux. How could I have failed to wonder about it myself?
So I thought about it.
I probed within my heart for jealousy, possessiveness.
No echo came back.
Why not? I'd always had the normal male human complement of both vices.
Think it through, Joe. What are the reasons that make a man unhappy if his love starts having sex with other people?
Maybe she'll find a better lover than me, and leave me . . .
She'd already had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lovers, male, female, and otherwise . . . and found me good enough to propose to, took the very first chance she got, not even waiting for privacy. And who says women choose mates by athletic criteria? No possible marriage partner could be less likely to abandon a good relationship with me for mere hot sex. If it wasn't a good relationship, that was my fault, not somebody else's.
How will I know whose the children are? . . .
In the first place, she was professionally competent at managing contraception, proven so over time. In the second place, what the hell did I care? Any child that came out of that beautiful belly would be lovable, worth cherishing and raising, whether it happened to carry my personal congenital deficiencies or not.
Maybe she'll bring home some jerk I don't like. Or some germ that doesn't like me . . .
In the first place, none of her clients would be staying that long. In the second place, they'd all have been prescreened by Lady Sally, who didn't seem to tolerate jerks in her House. As to health, they'd all be monitored by Doctor Kate. Arethusa was less likely to give me an infection than the average secretary I'd meet in a bar.
Maybe I'll have to compete for her attention . . .
This argument might possibly have applied . . . to any of Lady Sally's artists except Arethusa. There were two of her. And one of her rarely entertained clients, except on the piano.
All this intellectualizing was fine. What did my ape glands think? I looked at my beloved, and visualized handsome men touching her, making love to her, making her throw back her head and clench her eyes shut and cry out with joy the way she did . . . come to think of it, it might just as well be beautiful women, who knew more about pleasing another woman than I ever would, driving her wild . . . Or both . . .
I found I was getting an erection.
"No problem at all," I assured her. "But it raises an interesting corollary question. I've been offered a permanent job here—assuming that the world and I both continue to exist—and I'm thinking seriously of taking it. The trouble with being a private eye is all that goddam privacy. Do you anticipate that being a problem for you?"
She blinked. "Touché. I never thought about it."
"Think about it. There are two of you, and only one of me. And even if there were only one of you, the supply and demand equations are different for men and women. You can make love to a thousand men, and still bring me all you've got. My equipment takes a lot longer to reload."
"So what? Erections are certainly useful in pleasing a woman, but I've never understood why so many people seem to think they're essential. Sure, they're flattering—but a man who doesn't have an erection and still wants to make love to me: now, that's flattering. Joseph my darling fiancé, if you were a paraplegic, I think you could send me through the roof with your eyelids."
As I envisioned that, my erection, too dumb to know it had been insulted, intensified and began to climb. "But are you the jealous type? It's not a silly question. I've known jealous prostitutes. What if you smell some other woman on those eyelids?"
She grinned. "Ah, but I'm twice the woman she is—no matter who she is. No, really, Joe: the jealous type I am not. I was when I came here, a little, but this place cured me. My first hour in the Bower cured me. I'd love to see you making love with someone else."
Up to half mast now.
"I'll prove it to you, a little later today. Doctor Kate has this unusual billing policy, you see. She believes in reaping what she sews—and she did quite a lot of sewing on you, even if the evidence is gone. You won't mind if I watch, will you? I know she won't. But I promise I won't be disappointed if you'd rather I didn't. Well, not too disappointed. I really don't need to own you, my darling. Just to share my life with you."
Something bumped me just below the navel.
"I'm more concerned about you, love," she went on. "You've only been here a few days—and you come from a macho kind of background—"
"I come from a background that almost guaranteed I was gonna drink myself to death all alone in the Old Dicks' Home one day," I told her. "That sounded romantic to me when I was a kid starting out, but as I get older it sounds less and less attractive. I'm ready for a change." The words surprised me as they came out, but I knew they were true.
"Yes, but are your emotions?"
I started to answer, and hesitated, frowning. "I know what you mean. I rummage around in my head looking for jealousy, and I don't seem to find any—but it may be different in practice. All I can tell you is, I'm being honest when I say I don't anticipate a problem. But I admit I could be wrong. I'm willing to gamble if you are."
Her eyes were bright. "Joe . . . shall we test it?"
"Now, you mean? How? Invite somebody in?"
"It's not necessary."
"I don't get you—oh!"
She nodded. "My other body went on-shift a few hours ago. I've been out of rotation for days now, and my clients were starting to miss me. As an experiment, why don't we lie back down here, while I tell you just what I'm doing . . . and what is being done to me . . . at this moment, a few doors away? A sort of blow-by-blow description . . ."
As she meshed her two body-awarenesses, there came a time when she no longer needed to tell me, verbally, what was happening down the hall. I could tell, to a large extent, by her local body's responses.
It was a transcendentally strange sensation. Four bodies were having sex . . . but all the action was being directed by one of us. The one that I had never met. What jealousy? How could he possess my woman?—he didn't even know that I was in her too as he plunged away; he was sublimely unaware of my existence.
And as I paid more and closer attention to Arethusa's body and facial expressions—without the distraction of having to think about what she might like me to do to her next, or how I was "performing"—I knew her ever better, grew ever closer to her, understood her ever more deeply. She had previously displayed a limited ability to read my thoughts during lovemaking; somewhere in there a switch was thrown and I was inside her head. The one down the hall.
I was—at least in part, like an overlay—a beautiful, highly aroused woman, and an acceptable male was making more than acceptable love to me . . .
Like most heterosexual men, I had sometimes wondered what a homosexual experience might be like. Like most heterosexual men, I had occasionally wished to find out. Like most heterosexual men, I had never been able to figure out a way to do so without risking loss of dignity. Now that I found myself, as it were, in the middle of things, I felt the same impulse most heterosexual men would feel. Panic . . .
But it faded almost as I felt it. How could I possibly doubt my masculinity? Even as I felt my vagina joyously plundered, my clitoris electrified, my breasts squeezed, a man's tongue in my mouth, I could feel Arethusa's vagina embracing my penis, her strong fingers clutching my back, her sweet mouth opening under mine, the lush scent of her in my nostrils. I might not have known how to enjoy being penetrated, being invaded . . . but she was right there with me, teaching me how, showing me how. For the first time in my life I began to dimly understand just how lucky women are . . .
As he spilled into me, Arethusa spilled into me, and I into her, and I knew that jealousy was not going to be a problem in our marriage.
Sometime in there, the last of my annoyance at Lady Sally leaked out of me. It was nice having my strength back again . . .
We saw Tesla in the cafeteria, eating dinner at a table in the far corner and reading. The eighteen crumpled but snow-white linen napkins he had used to polish his knife and fork before beginning to eat were piled on the table beside him. It was a good thing I'd read about Nikky, or I might have tried to join him at his table, and upset him. He hated company at meals, because it distracted him while he was busy trying to compute the cubic contents of each bite. You don't give indigestion to the man who's going to help you save reality. Not when you've just acquired such a compelling reason to love reality as Arethusa . . .
But the moment he was done eating, he put his book down and called us over to join him. I glanced at the open book as we reached his table; it seemed to be poetry by somebody named Kranjcevic.
"Ken, my friend," he said as he seated Arethusa, "I was talking to Arethusa's avatar a few hours ago, and she informed me that you and she are affianced. May I offer you my sincere congratulations? You probably believe you know how fortunate you are . . . but I suspect you are wrong by at least an order of magnitude. You have accomplished something very much like reaching into a chest of splendid jewels and plucking out the Koh-i-noor."
"You don't know the half of it, Nikky," Arethusa told him. "I was the first eligible woman he laid eyes on in the House."
His bushy eyebrows rose. "Remarkable!"
"The first, and the last," I added in reflex gallantry.
She pinched me. "Ken, that lie is not just outrageous, it's unnecessary. Didn't we just settle that a while ago?"
I grinned at her. "You were the first, and you're going to be the last if I have my way. I didn't say anything about in between."
She twinkled. "That's better. I like my flattery plausible."
"I did have a pulse, last time I checked."
"Oh my, yes. Nikky, you'll come to our wedding, won't you?"
"I would not miss it for the world, dear lady," Tesla said gravely.
"That would be the one acceptable excuse," I said. "But we've got it tentatively scheduled for the day after we save the world. Whenever that is."
"That is the second reason I asked you both to join me," Tesla said. He glanced around and lowered his voice slightly. "That day approaches."
For no reason at all I thought: it's not "adrenaline," like everybody thinks it is, it's "adrenalin," a pharmaceutical trade name for norepinephrine that passed into the language like jello or kleenex. You can even catch doctors with that one. "You've got results already, Nikola? Overnight?"
Again his gaze flicked from side to side. "Yes, but I am reluctant to discuss them here."
Just then there was a mild disturbance at a nearby table. Reggie, the aged Brit I'd met on my previous visit to the cafeteria, was being braced by an agitated client. He was also a Brit, and nearly as aged, dressed expensively but in appalling taste; he might as well have been wearing a sign saying RICH QUEER. He had allowed his voice to rise in pitch and volume, and was close to hysteria. "But I mean, dash it all! I've lost Bingo and Tuppy and Sippy and Corky and Rocky and Biffy, all the Drones are gone, Aunt Dahlia—even Aunt Agatha, impossible as it seems, turned out to be mortal—I mean to say, old man, you're simply the only thing left on Earth that I understand."
Reggie didn't seem at all embarrassed; if anything there was compassion in his ancient eyes. "I'm very sorry, sir," he said gravely. "You know you are welcome to visit me regularly . . . but you must make your own way in the world now."
"But why?"
"Because, sir, I do not play that scene any more. As the poet Wordsworth said, 'A Briton, even in love, should be a subject, not a slave!' I have come to agree."
Reggie's client stood up. "Blast the poet Wordsworth! In fact, damn the man, and his heirs and assigns! No, hang on a minute—wasn't he the cove who worked that wheeze about a thousand pine tables?"
"'And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, and near a thousand tables pined and wanted food,' yes, sir," Reggie agreed.
"Well, there you have the thing in a nutshell!"
Reggie looked pained. He took a deep breath, and said patiently, "I can only repeat my suggestion that you form a liaison with Master Henry or Mistress Cynthia."
The man's shoulders slumped. "Not the same," he said. "You only made me surrender one garment at a time. And they won't let me talk. Oh, very well, I suppose there's nothing left to say." He spun on his heel and headed for the door, face contorted with grief.
Reggie's face was still impassive . . . but a single tear was trying to solve the maze of wrinkles that led to his chin. "Goodbye, Bertie," he said, so softly that I'm sure the guy never heard him.
No one had been exactly staring, but suddenly the conversations in the room were more animated. "You're right, Nikola," I said. "Let's find someplace more private to talk. I'm open to suggestions."
"Let us go to my laboratory," Tesla said.
I'd been hoping he'd ask . . .
It was an honor to be in Nikola Tesla's laboratory. That was about all it was.
One thing most PIs are notoriously good at: if we've spent more than a few seconds in a place, we can give you a fairly detailed description of it, maybe not as poetic as John D. MacDonald could make it, but accurate enough to reconstruct a crime scene for a jury. It's the part of the job we share with a Zen monk: trying to be aware of everything. They do it to transcend the illusion of consciousness; we do it to not get killed. I'm a little better at it than most PIs.
Nikola Tesla's laboratory was a rectangular solid with stuff in it.
The only thing I recognized was an electric typewriter keyboard, without a typewriter under it. I'd have taken it for a computer terminal, but it wasn't attached to anything, and it didn't seem to have any of those funny extra keys they have. And I didn't see anything around that looked like the brain part of a computer (or anything else I could name). There was a cylinder along its top end that looked like some kind of hinge; I decided maybe that was where the typewriter part attached. On a soft grey pad next to the keyboard was a little widget that looked like an electric guitarist's foot-switch. It, too, wasn't attached or wired to anything. The two objects were sitting on . . . well, it looked sort of like a piece of window glass, blued with age, suspended in mid-air.
Everything else in the room was much weirder.
Tesla (I could call him Nikola, but I couldn't seem to make myself think of him as Nikola) took some small objects off some larger objects that had flat surfaces on top, and bade us sit. They weren't chairs, but they agreed to hold our weight. Tesla sat on . . . climbed into . . . achieved comfortable equilibrium with something else. "There," he said, "now we can talk."
Confuse a PI and you get a wisecrack. Spenser says it's in the oath. "Testing," I said. "By God, you're right: I can." It went over like a lead balloon, so I gave it up. "Okay, Nikola—how many and where?"
He didn't try to drag it out. "Four each in the United States and the Soviet Union. One in each country that would be in a position to effectively employ a nuclear weapon of its own if it knew the two chief combatants were disarmed. A total of thirty."
I blinked a bit at the total—the last I'd heard, there were only supposed to be about a dozen members in The Club—but I let it pass. Catch me questioning Nikola Tesla's figures. "And you have them all located?"
He . . . well, sort of swiveled, both in and on his object, so that the keyboard was convenient to his hands. He did something to the hinge-like gizmo, and it opened up vertically like an upside-down home movie screen, widening somehow at the same time, to a size just a little larger than an open Time magazine and no thicker. As it finished growing it started glowing, blue-white. "Welcome to Macintosh" was written on it in black type. Thanks, I prefer Granny Smiths, I thought, but kept my mouth shut. In a few seconds, the thing changed color and little pictures appeared on it along the right side. He touched the fuzztone foot-switch with his hand, and everything changed again, much faster this time. Now it was a map of the world, two polar projections on black background that looked like live high-resolution video from some spacecraft, except that there were a total of thirty "hot spots" marked with tiny bright red crosses, almost all of them in the Northern Hemisphere. The four U.S. sites appeared to be Los Angeles, Chicago (or possibly Detroit; I'm vague on middle America), Washington, and New York. The only Soviet site I could name with any confidence was Moscow; another might have been Kiev. But Tesla must know them all.
"That's terrific," I said, feeling real confidence for the first time since I'd understood what we were up against. "That's a lot more than we knew yesterday. Is there any chance you'll be able to narrow one of them down closer? That one that seems to be in New York, say? And how soon?"
Tesla looked startled, then smiled. "Forgive me, Ken. I oscillate between a tendency to treat everyone around me as ignorant children, and a tendency to assume they know everything I do. Observe." He took hold of the little widget. A small arrow appeared on the screen. He used the widget to nurse it up against one of the tiny red crucifixes, the one in New York, and pushed the switch on the widget. At once the polar projections were gone, replaced by a highly detailed map of Manhattan Island. The tiny red cross was now roughly at Madison Square Garden. I opened my mouth to say something, and Tesla moved the pointer to a little cartoon of a magnifying glass and worked the switch again. Suddenly we were looking down on Penn Station from about fifteen stories above the roof, as if we were in a blimp. Again it looked like live color video—I could see traffic crawling down Seventh and along Thirty-third, and swarms of ants moving like people—but a long thin red hollow rectangle shimmered in and out of existence, running north and south (well, uptown and downtown). A major tributary of Water Tunnel One, by the width of it. Where it crossed Penn Station, it contained a very small solid red rectangular object, which also shimmered. As Tesla had prophesied, a cylindrical gun-type device. A tiny green hollow rectangle nearby on the left was connected to it by a series of thin green lines that doglegged several times on the way.
"What the hell . . . excuse me, Nikola. What on earth is that thing?"
Tesla looked surprised. "An atom bomb," he explained.
I said nothing at all for five seconds. Then, very quietly, I said, "I meant, 'What is that thing there that's showing me the atom bomb?'"
I'm the kind of guy, when I catch myself being dumb, I get mad at myself and my voice gets very very soft. Tesla was the kind of guy, he chuckled. I envied him that gift; it was healthier. (Then suddenly remembered that I didn't have to worry about staying healthy any more. I was free to be as stupid as I wanted to be.) "I have done it again, Ken. Please pardon me. This will one day be marketed under the name 'Macintosh Five' . . . but I am told that its designers will privately call it 'Son of Jobs.' It is about minus twenty-five years old. It has a giggle bite of rum, three and a half tear a bites of ram, bubble mammary, super-seedy worm drive, and can perform some preposterously high number of trips."
I'm pretty sure that's what he said.
"Thank you," I said very very softly. "But what is that thing there that's showing me the atomb bomb?"
This time he laughed out loud. Since I knew perfectly well it was himself he was laughing at, I let him live. After a very few ha's, he saw the veins in my forehead and tapered off. "Again I beg your pardon, my friend. It is a computer, which will be produced in the year 2010. Her Ladyship provided it for me. Its earliest ancestor has only been on sale for a few months at this time." He waited to see if that was simple enough.
It didn't look like a computer. It didn't even look like one of those toy Apple computers they gave schoolkids in those days. And I thought computers were supposed to be the fathers of jobs. But what did I know? "Ah. I see. Like, some kind of super-IBM."
He said, "That's correct: a kind of super-IBM," with such an absolutely straight face that I knew I'd said something funny again. (I later learned that in 2007, IBM would save itself from receivership by subcontracting to supply the on-off switches for this model's predecessor—but that this one, which didn't need such a switch, would eventually finish them off. Why that's funny, maybe a computer person could tell you.)
To hell with it. Keep on asking questions and don't stop, and sooner or later you'll be asking intelligent ones. If you live long enough. "And it can pinpoint the other thirty-three toadstools that accurately?"
"In combination with certain equipment of my own, with which it is interfaced—excuse me, 'connected'—it has already done so. It contains the information in incorruptible form, in a series of Ultracard stacks that . . . in a conveniently manipulable format. The computer subsumes every existing human computer network or database, in much the same way that a Ferrari Testarossa usually includes a good FM radio. By that I mean that you can obtain literally any specific relevant datum that is presently known to mankind, and some which are not, in under a second, with a simple touch of the mouse."
I sighed, and straightened a kink out of my neck. "I was hanging on pretty good, right up until that last word," I said sadly.
"Oh!" he said. He pointed to the widget. "That input device is called a mouse."
"Why?"
He said, "Because . . ." and stopped. Then he said, "It's because . . ." and stopped. Then he said, "I think it's . . ." and stopped again. Finally he frowned and said, "There is no reason."
"Got it. Go on." I felt like Rocky Balboa. I was not going down . . .
"I connected the computer with the equipment of mine I told you about yesterday, which detects functional radio receivers. First I made a list of every receiver on the planet. That took under five minutes . . . although to display the data, at the fastest rate a human could even theoretically comprehend, would have taken hours. Fortunately this was not necessary. I pruned the basic list to those receivers whose characteristic signature indicated that they were underwater, and stationary. That took less than two minutes. Then I summoned up a list of all licensed, legitimate underwater receivers from the FCC and its planetary analogs, and assorted military databases, and subtracted that from my own list. Another five seconds. The remainder I investigated in some detail by diverse means. Altogether it was another hour before I had the last of the mines pinpointed as closely as that one on the screen."
"You're sure you've got them all."
"I am prepared to state authoritatively that there are no others with radio triggers, underwater or otherwise. Once I knew the characteristics of the enemy's radio triggers, I searched my original list for any of that type that were not underwater, and found none. But bear in mind that they may have one or more, either underwater or otherwise, that are not radio-triggered. If so, I can presently think of no way to find them."
"I can," I said grimly.
"Joe," Arethusa said softly, "isn't there something in the Geneva Conventions about torturing prisoners?"
"What if there is? I never signed it," I said. "And if I had, it seems to me jokers who plant nuclear mines are in a poor position to invoke it."
"Perhaps not," she agreed. "But one day you and I must sit down and work out the moral equation in detail. To save how many lives is it moral to torture one person? Do we double that for two people, and so on? Does it matter if the lives we're saving are those of people we dislike? Or if the person we're torturing did not consciously intend harm? This is not a simple question."
"In this special case it is. More than six billion lives are at stake."
"Far more than that, Ken," Tesla put in. "The terrorists intend to place six billions at risk. But if they succeed—if they merely succeed in letting the world know that those mines ever existed—they will destroy all those now living, and all those who ever would have lived. I cannot give an upper limit, but from things Lady Sally has let slip in conversation, I believe that exceeds a quadrillion lives . . . virtually all of them centuries in length."
Ever wake up in the morning wondering if there was any purpose to going on? Since that day, I never have again. "If there are any more mines, I'll find them. Whatever it takes."
"Yes, Ken," Arethusa said. "Uh . . . now, by the way."
"Beg pardon?"
She glanced at Tesla and colored slightly. "You asked me earlier to let you know whenever . . .
"Oh. Oh! Right. Thanks." I felt a silly grin on my face.
There was one on hers too. "It is nice. Sharing it with a third party."
"Yes, it is." Somewhere else in the building, Arethusa had just had an orgasm. I put out telepathic feelers—or tried to—but detected nothing. Well, the circumstances weren't ideal. And it was still nice sharing the knowledge . . .
Tesla cleared his throat gently.
"Sorry, Nikola. Private matter." Back to business. "Well, say, this is all good cheese. You've done as splendidly as I knew you would: a full quarter of our job is done. I always say, if you're going to tackle a tough one, try to get the smartest man that ever lived to help."
"Thank you, Ken," Tesla said gravely. Maybe I was among the first ten thousand people to call him that, and maybe I wasn't. "But why do you say only 'a quarter'?"
"Well, the job breaks down into four parts. Find the mines, disarm the mines, find the miners, inform the proper people."
"In that case," he said, "we are half done."
I could actually recall a time—less than a week ago!—when surprises were surprising. "Go on."
"Once I had located the receivers, it was a simple matter to determine what frequency they were all set to receive—"
"Hold on a half. There have to be thirty different transmitters, one within radio range of each receiver, right?"
Tesla shook his head. "They have the capacity to piggy-back on satellite transmission and conventional land lines. One transmitter covers the globe. It is located in Switzerland."
"Naturally. Okay, go on."
"I identified the pertinent frequency. A good choice, an obscure one."
"But you can't know what the trigger code is."
"Unfortunately, no. If their triggering software were a little more sophisticated, I could ask it questions on the order of, 'What would you do if I were to do thus-and-so?' As things are, I dare not. But I do not really need to know the trigger code."
"Why not?"
He looked slightly sheepish. "Here I may have overstepped my authority."
"Is that possible?"
"Lady Sally has told me that you are in overall charge—"
Surprises could still be surprising. "Me? Hell, no! It's her show; I'm just a consultant. Per diem and expense account. A merc."
"She was quite explicit," he said. "You are in command."
Jesus Christ on a bicycle! When I let Lady Sally recruit me, I assumed it was at the rank of buck private. In my wildest dreams, corporal. Commanding officer was one helluva field promotion . . .
Well, no time to admire my eagles: the battle was in progress. "I see," I said, and took three long deep breaths. "Tell me how you overstepped your authority, Nikola."
"I could not wake you while you were being rejuvenated. But it did not seem wise to allow things to remain as they were. So I took action. I apologize if I was imprudent. It was a very agonizing decision for me. I hope you will not be angry with me."
"Not if you tell me what you did within the next five seconds," I said carefully.
"I initiated a broadcast. Perhaps you slept through the brownout last night? Yes. I call your attention to the particular mine there on the screen, the one beneath Pennsylvania Station. Where once there was a radio receiver, now is melted plastic, melted copper, new glass, iron filings, and minor contaminants. The mine is disabled. I can disable the other twenty-nine anytime you wish. So you see, the job is nearly half done."