“You know it’s only, uh, temporary—”
“Temporary! Young man—”
“Dr. Ellis,” he said mildly.
“Young doctor; it might only take me a couple of weeks starving in a null-gee field to lose all of this muscle, but I’ve got to get it back the old-fashioned way. Even with hypnosis—”
“No, Colonel, it is temporary… I mean…”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re expected to… recover while on the assignment. Your persona is that of a, well, you might say a professional athlete.”
“Yeah, the hundred-meter crutch relay, I can—”
“But no… no, you don’t see, he’s been…” Ellis shuffled papers some more. “If we can get on with the briefing, I’ll—”
“All right, all right. Nobody ever lets me bitch. What, I’m going to infiltrate a hospital? A health spa?”
“Oh no, no, neither. First a police station. The individual you’re impersonating is in jail, awaiting sent—”
“For dripping on somebody.”
“Uh, no, for murder. Premeditated first-degree murder. Assassination, actually.”
“Hey, that’s really fine. A new experience. Brainwipe.”
“Uh, well, you won’t be on Earth, you see, uh—”
“I think I get the picture.”
“On Selva they punish murderers either by burning at the stake or public cas—”
“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to do it.”
“You have no choice, of course.”
“Ah, but I do,” Otto said, tensing. “All I have to do is kill you before you can—”
“Pulpy—rouge—battery—cashew!” he shouted. Otto slumped in the chair, face slack. Dr. Ellis sighed and blotted his forehead, got up, and rummaged in a file until he found a holstered laser. He beat the dust off it, sat down again, drew out the gun, and pointed it at the center of Otto’s chest. “Cashew. Battery. Rouge. Pulpy.”
Otto shook his head to clear it and looked down the barrel of the weapon. Quietly: “Put that Goddamn thing away before you electrocute yourself. The battery selector’s on ‘charge.’”
No ten-year-old would fall for that, but Dr. Ellis had evidently spent his youth in the pursuit of scholarship. He reversed the weapon to look at the power matrix, holding it very gingerly. Otto smacked it out of his hand and, not moving too swiftly, picked it up off the rug.
“Pulpy, uh…”
“No.” Otto had the weapon shoulder-high, the muzzle of it wavering a meter from the man’s nose. “Calm down.”
He went back to his chair, keeping the doctor covered, and sat. He shook his head.
“You bureaucrats are really max. Really max. Can’t take a joke.” He tossed the gun to the doctor’s desk, but it didn’t quite make it. It clattered against the edge and went spinning to the floor.
“That’s government property,” Ellis said.
“So am I, Goddamnit.” Otto leaned back and started when a joint popped loudly. “So am I.” He studied the doctor for a few silent seconds. “Go on. I’m this murderer…”
“Ah. Yes.” Ellis relaxed, lacing his fingers together. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We have a problem on Selva.”
“I gathered.”
“Um, yes, it’s a problem. On the level you’re operating, it’s a problem of murder. Of systematic assassination, really.”
“So I’m an assassin.”
“In a… manner of speaking. But the problem is much larger than that.”
“I should hope.”
“Yes, well, it’s war.”
“So? Nothing in the Charter—”
“Interplanetary war.”
Otto leaned forward, smiling slightly. “Interplanetary war? You’re pulling my fern. Nobody—”
“I know.” He sighed. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves again.”
“Begin at the beginning, then.”
“I was going to say, yes. Do you know anything about Selvan politics?”
“Look, I can’t keep up with every jerkwater—”
“All right, that’s what I thought. Don’t worry, your persona knows all it has—”
“Of course. Go on.”
“Well, Selva is classified as an hereditary-representative oligarchy.”
“Like you say, I’ll know all of this.”
“Patience, please. There are forty-two hereditary clans who send one representative apiece to an interclan ruling council, the Senado Grande. This representative is the eldest son of the head of the clan. He will eventually head up the clan himself, and send his son to the Senado.”
“Just a puppet for the old man, I assume.”
“Generally, yes. In practice, the Senado serves as a training ground, preparing the young men for the more difficult jobs waiting for them when their fathers die or step down.
“Selva doesn’t have a strong central government; hasn’t had one for centuries, and the Senado just formalizes into law agreements made between the various clan heads in secret meetings.”
“Very advanced.”
“Well, it works. They started out neo-Maoist… anyhow, here’s the problem:
“On Selva, serious personal differences between adult males are generally settled by dueling—”
“Dueling!”
“Yes, it’s a delightful planet. Usually they duel with swords, sometimes with more exotic weapons. The outcome of the duel usually is just a wounding—first blood wins the argument—but over serious matters they sometimes duel to the death.”
“I haven’t handled a sword since training! Almost twenty years—”
“That long? Well, don’t worry, your persona is quite expert: the boy he murdered, he murdered with—”
“Boy? The boy he murdered?”
“He was sixteen, just a few days past his sixteenth birthday. That’s the legal age limit for duels.
“Which is at the bottom of your assignment. Let me explain. The man behind this interplanetary war idea is a clan head named Alvarez. He wants to attack Grünwelt—”
“Oh, I’ve heard of—”
“Yes, Grünwelt is a comparatively prosperous world: unlike Selva, it has stayed in the mainstream of Confederación life. And they’re practically next-door neighbors. They come as close as sixty million kilometers at opposition.”
“What do they want to start a war for? Haven’t they ever heard of—”
“October? Sure, they’ve heard of October. In their schools, they teach that it’s a myth, that the Confederación is too spineless to ever—”
“Still, why an interplanetary war?”
Ellis shrugged. “This man Alvarez… well, for generations Selvans have been jealous of Ghünwelt, and Alvarez is playing on this jealousy. Reduced to the simplest of terms, he proposes to swoop in and loot it.”
“Is Grünwelt aware—”
“Only our representative there. They don’t have any espionage system on Selva: they’ve never seen her as a potential threat. How could they? Selva has only two working interplanetary vessels, not even a Class II spaceport.”
“Then how does Selva propose to—”
“That’s the funny thing. They could do it. Sneak attack with ten, twelve small ships. Bomb a couple of cities, threaten to bomb more, collect the booty, and return. Leave a couple of ships in orbit as insurance against retaliation.”
“Never work.”
“I know it wouldn’t work and you know it wouldn’t work and I suspect that Alvarez knows, too. We can only guess at what he’s actually up to.”
“Power base, I suppose. He’ll use the scheme to make himself top man on Selva—”
“—and then perhaps blackmail himself into a position of power on Grünwelt. Who knows? That’s one thing you may be able to find out.
“The man you’ll be impersonating is Ramos Guajana. You’re one of four or five skilled duelists who have been systematically assassinating not those who oppose Alvarez, but the sons of that
opposition.”
“As soon as they turn sixteen.”
“When practical.” Ellis lit up a stick and passed the box to McGavin. “It’s all very legal.”
“I’m sure. Thanks. But question: how could this wreck, Guajana, bump off anything bigger than a cockroach?”
“Oh, you’re normally in much better shape, of course. Guajana’s been imprisoned for over two months—starvation diet, beatings almost daily. You’ll be in good fighting trim soon after you escape.”
“But first I have to starve down to where I can slip through the bars—”
“Oh, no. We have a foolproof plan.” Ellis looked at his watch. “Well, you’ll get more detailed orders on the ship. Put out your cigarette, we’ve got to—”
“There’s not that big a rush,” Otto said. He smoked slowly for a few minutes. Then he put out the stick and returned to his chair, and Ellis put him under with the sequence of nonsense words.
“When you awaken,” Dr. Ellis said confidently, “you will be about ten per cent Otto McGavin and ninety per cent Ramos Guajana. Your response to any normal situation will be consistent with Guajana’s personality and abilities: only in times of extreme emergency will you be able to call upon your skills as a prime operator.
“Pulpy. Rouge. Battery. Cashew.” He pushed a call button under his desk.
Guajana/Otto shook his head twice and looked across the desk with clear eyes full of pain. His face had changed in subtle ways.
“I will remember you, doctor,” he croaked with a heavy accent.
2.
MISSION PROFILE
NAME: Guajana, Ramos Mario Juan Federico
AGE: 39 SEX: M MAR STAT: Div
BIRTHPLACE: Paracho, Stvo. Or., Selva
ADDRESS: Currently detained at Cerros Verdes Clinico Psych’o, awaiting trial for 1st-degree murder.
EDUC: Equiv 1–2 yr college
PROF: Dueling master
DIST PHYS CHAR: Body and face covered with dueling scars (see accompanying chart): presently showing effects of severe beating, lack of medical treatment.
AGENT: McGavin, Otto (S–12, prime)
PHYSICAL/CULTURAL DIVERGENCE INDEX:
SUBJECT AGENT INDEX:
HGT. 174 cm 175 cm —
WGT 62 kg 80 kg .98
AGE 40 (T) 39 (T) .99
STP. J.101M.024K.039 J.090M.036K.021 .80
LNG. Selvan (var Sp) Eng (LI.98) .99
PPRF. AG.95H.46L.05– AG.83H.79L—
PT.88LA.68LY.90– PT.72LA.78LY.68–
AN.32SH.11D.89 AN.41SH.75D.88 .82
OVERALL 0.86
PO SCALE: 0.99
TIME SURG: 3d, 4hr
TIME PO: 24d, 12hr
And there were over a hundred pages-after that. It was the only thing to read in the crowded cabin of the tiny T–46, and in the four weeks it took to get to Selva, Otto/Guajana read it over completely sixty-three times.
Most of it detailed Otto’s mission. From past experience, he knew that ninety-nine per cent of the planning would be worthless after the first day or two. And as far as the reams of data about the man he was impersonating… normally that would also be useless; if he ever had to consciously act like the man, it would mean his PO was fading and he would soon have to fight or run for his life.
But most personality overlays are done in hypnotic rapport between the agent and the person he is going to impersonate. In this case that had been impossible; Guajana couldn’t be kidnapped for a month and have his copy remain of any use. So they had examined and profiled Guajana as well as possible, and Otto was a very good academic copy of the man. He lacked the important artificial memories that would have been overlaid in hypnotic rapport—but then he could make a good case for having been beaten into amnesia.
So Otto memorized all of the information about Guajana, just in case, which was not too pleasant: Guajana was about the most villainous person Otto had ever impersonated. Cold-blooded murderer of children, for hire. Well, maybe he had a good side. Kind to snakes or something.
It was a cloudy, absolutely starless night when Otto landed on Selva in a small clearing in the mountainous jungle that surrounded Cerros Verdes. His timing was very bad.
The T–46 is about as automated as a spaceship can be. It locks in on a landing signal—generated in this case by Otto’s TBII liaison—and casts about for the nearest thirty-meter stretch of level ground on which to land. But the signal in this case was being generated from the top of a steep hill in the middle of a rain forest so up-and-down that it would drive a cartographer insane.
The ship glided to a stop and Otto pulled from a pocket of his rags a simple signal-detector/rangefinder that told him he was 12.8 kilometers south-southeast of where he wanted to be. A small error in a 145-light-year journey, but Otto/Ramos was understandably upset.
As noted, the T–46 is very automatic: automatic to a fault. Its function is to land an agent safely and get away—its door opens and the agent has sixty seconds to clear out or be automatically ejected. Otto was upset because the hundred-page report had stressed that only rabid sportsmen and other mad-men dared venture into Selvan jungles at night.
Otto got out and felt the ship depart silently behind his back. Laser ready, with his left hand he adjusted his nightglasses and tightened the shoulder straps of his kit. He looked around and saw nothing but then felt a crawly sensation center on his back and whirled.
At neck level and ten meters away a batlike creature with a three-meter wingspan and an excessive number of claws and teeth was sliding rapidly through the air with a bloodthirsty grin on what served it for a face. It seemed to weigh about as much as a human child, and it screamed like a child when the laser opened it up in mid-flight. It tumbled suddenly graceless over Otto’s head to crash in the tall grass behind him, where it thrashed twice. There was a second’s stillness and then a slithering sound and then the crunch of strong jaws crushing bone.
In the flare of the laser, Otto had seen a hundred pairs of hungry eyes. There was no way to whistle the ship back.
It may be better in some absolute sense to accept a known danger, however great, than to forge off into the unknown. Otto knew that the woods probably held a more interesting variety of fauna than this small veldt—but he’d feel safer with a thick tree at his back. He checked his direction bump against the small rangefinder and set off north by northwest.
Twice in ten steps Otto fired at nothing. He cursed himself for nervousness, for wasting power, and then on the twelfth step a red snake with a head the size of a man’s and eyes that actually did glow lunged for Otto’s belt buckle. After the laser severed its head, the body coiled and writhed through eight long meters of grass.
For all the years of training and conditioning and experience, Otto suddenly had no control over the toroidal muscle that makes elimination a polite and private function. His anal sphincter bucked and spasmed in that final reflex that tries to make a trapped creature an unpleasant meal. There was no room in his mind for thankfulness that he had taken the elementary precaution that kept him from fouling himself—there was nothing in his head but primitive panic from ear to ear and he screamed and ran blindly for two seconds, hit dirt in a flat dive, rolled, and came up firing. The laser’s beam made a brilliant arc swinging back and forth in front of him, then behind, saving his life as it killed the bat-creature’s mate. When he took his finger off the trigger the glade was in crackling flames that dimmed and smoldered out in the dampness. At the edge of the woods something gave a bad imitation of a human laugh and Otto’s self-preserving panic reached so high a level that it flipped the final mental switch the conditioners had put into his brain and he was suddenly ice:
McGavin, you are going to die.
I know that, McGavin.
What do you do before you die?
Kill as many as I can.
There is a theory, not provable, that no creature in the Galaxy is more dangerous than man. At any rate, few men could be as dangerous as one who has given up
all hope for his own survival—add to that half a lifetime of experience in bloody murder and you may have the only kind of man who could survive three hours alone at night in a Selvan jungle.
The fact that nighttime is so hostile on Selva was the single most important influence on the strange evolution of Selvan politics. The planet was originally colonized by five hundred idealistic volunteers from the Terran country of Uruguay, members of the Programa Politico de Mao, who had bought the planet cheaply from a mining corporation that couldn’t find anybody willing to run their machines.
El Programa arrived with a nice efficient setup, a division of duties and rewards that might have worked very well in a more hospitable environment.
The mining company had not totally misled them about the danger of Selva—they came with guns and electric fences and grim determination and absolutely no desire to go near the jungle at night. But to the planet they were just so many relatively accessible pieces of protein dropped in the middle of about the most competitive land ecology ever discovered—twenty-five thousand kilograms of monster meat.
They lost nearly a hundred members the first day and the same number in the week that followed. The next week forty vanished, then seventeen, and then eight.
It might be naive to infer that a primitive kind of natural selection was going on, that only the toughest survived. There may have been some element of that, but far more important was the factor of simple luck and practice. They had all been farmers by profession—and temperament—and nor farmer, however tough, could know enough about knee-jerk killing to stay alive long on Selva—except by luck. If he lived and learned he eventually needed less luck—although he became a less pleasant neighbor.
Inexorably, in less than one generation, what had been intended as a gentle experiment in communal living degenerated into a bizarre association of mutually suspicious clans, a system more appropriate to the fourteenth century ‘than the twenty-third.
It started with the status of women. In El Progranta, women were supposed to have been absolutely equal to men, except for performing the special function of childbirth. To keep the colony from becoming inbred, the planners had included ten thousand sets of sperm and egg, ready for quickening; all of the expedition’s men had allowed themselves to be sterilized. With what were then considered modern medical techniques, a woman could give birth in four to five months after implantation.