“To be sure, listening at keyholes.” T’mwarba sighed and sat down in a bubble chair in front of the desk. “They’re ancient, twentieth-century languages—artificial languages that were used to program computers, designed especially for machines. Onoff was the simplest. It reduced everything to a combination of two words, on and off, or the binary number system. The others were more complicated.”
The General nodded, and finished opening the folder. “That guy came from the swiped spider-boat with her. The crew got very upset when we wanted to put them in separate quarters.” He shrugged. “It’s something psychic. Why take chances? We leave them together.”
“Where is the crew? Were they able to help you?”
“Them? It’s like trying to talk to something out of your bad dreams. Transport. Who can talk to people like that?”
“Rydra could,” Dr. T’mwarba said. “I’d like to see if I might.”
“If you wish. We’re keeping them at Headquarters.” He opened the folder, then made a face. “Odd. There’s a fairly detailed account of his history for a five-year period that started with some petty thievery, strong-arm work, then graduates to a couple of rub-outs. A bank robbery—” The General pursed his lips and nodded appreciatively. “He served two years in the penal caves of Titin, escaped—this boy is something. Disappeared into the Specelli Snap where he either died, or perhaps got into a shadow-ship…Well, he certainly didn’t die. But before December ’61—” the General frowned—“he doesn’t seem to have existed. He’s usually called the Butcher.”
Suddenly the General dived into a drawer and came up with another folder. “Kreto, Earth, Minos, Callisto,” he read, then slapped the folder with the back of his hand. “Aleppo, Rhea, Olympia, Paradise, Dis!”
“What’s that, the Butcher’s itinerary until he went into Titin?”
“It just so happens it is. But it’s also the locations of a series of accidents that began in December ’61. We’d just gotten around to connecting them up with Babel-17. We’d only been working with recent ‘accidents,’ but then this pattern from a few years ago turned up. Reports of the same sort of radio exchange. Do you think Miss Wong has brought home our saboteur?”
“Could be. Only that isn’t Rydra in there.”
“Well, yes. I guess you could say that.”
“For similar reasons I would gather that the gentleman with her is not the Butcher.”
“Who do you think he is?”
“Right now I don’t know. I’d say it’s fairly important we found out.” He stood up. “Where can I get hold of Rydra’s crew?”
3
“A PRETTY SNAZZY PLACE!” Calli said as they stepped from the lift at the top floor of Alliance Towers.
“Nice now,” said Mollya, “to be able to walk about.”
A headwaiter in white formal wear came across the civet rug, looked just a trifle askance at Brass, then said, “This is your party, Dr. T’mwarba?”
“That’s right. We have an alcove by the window. You can bring us a round of drinks right away. I’ve ordered already.”
The waiter nodded, turned, and led them toward a high, arched window that looked over Alliance Plaza. A few people turned to watch them.
“Administrative Headquarters can be a very pleasant place.” Dr. T’mwarba smiled.
“If you got the money,” Ron said. He craned to look at the blue-black ceiling, where the lights were arranged to simulate the constellations seen from Rymik, and whistled softly. “I read about places like this but I never thought I’d be in one.”
“Wish I could have brought the kids,” the Slug mused. “They thought the Baron’s was something.”
At the alcove the waiter held Mollya’s chair.
“Was that Baron Ver Dorco of the War Yards?”
“Yeah,” said Calli. “Barbecued lamb, plum wine, the best-looking peacocks I’ve seen in two years. Never got to eat ’em.” He shook his head.
“One of the annoying habits of aristocracy,” T’mwarba laughed, “they’ll go ethnic at the slightest provocation. But there’re only a few of us left, and most of us have the good manners to drop our titles.”
“Late weapons master of Armsedge,” the Slug corrected.
“I read the report of his death. Rydra was there?”
“We all were. It was a ’retty wild evening.”
“What exactly happened?”
Brass shook his head. “Well, Ca’tain went early…” When he had finished recounting the incidents, with the others adding details, Dr. T’mwarba sat back in his chair.
“The papers didn’t give it that way. But they wouldn’t. What was this TW-55 anyway?”
Brass shrugged.
There was a click as the discorporaphone in the doctor’s ear went on: “It’s a human being who’s been worked over and over from birth till it isn’t human anymore,” the Eye said. “I was with Captain Wong when the Baron first showed it to her.”
Dr. T’mwarba nodded. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”
Slug, who had been trying to get comfortable in the hard-backed chair, now leaned his stomach against the table edge. “Why?”
The others got still, quickly.
The fat man looked at the rest of the crew. “Why are we telling him all this? He’s going back and give it to the stellar-men.”
“That’s right,” Dr. T’mwarba said. “Any of it that might help Rydra.”
Ron put down his glass of iced cola. “The stellarmen haven’t been what you’d call nice to us, Doc,” he explained.
“They don’t take us to no fancy restaurants.” Calli tucked his napkin into the zircon necklace he’d worn for the occasion. A waiter placed a bowl of french-fried potatoes on the table, turned away, and came back with a platter of hamburgers.
Across the table Mollya picked up the tall, red flask and looked at it questioningly.
“Ketchup,” Dr. T’mwarba said.
“Ohhh…!” Mollya breathed and returned it to the damask tablecloth.
“Diavalo should be here now.” The Slug sat back slowly and stopped looking at the doctor. “He’s an artist with a carbosynth, and he’s got a feel for a protein-dispenser that’s fine for good solid meals like nut-stuffed pheasant, fillet of snapper-mayonnaise, and good stick-to-your-ribs food for a hungry spaceship crew. But this fancy stuff…?” He spread mustard carefully across his bun. “Give him a pound of real chopped meat, and I bet he’d run out of the galley ’cause it might bite him.”
Brass said: “What’s wrong with Ca’tain Wong? That’s what nobody wants to ask.”
“I don’t know. But if you’ll tell me all you can, I’ll have a lot better chance of doing something about it.”
“The other thing nobody wants to say,” Brass went on, “is that one of us don’t want you to do anything for her. But we don’t know who.”
The others silenced again.
“There was a s’y on the shi’. We all knew about it. It tried to destroy the shi’ twice. I think it’s res’onsible for whatever ha’’ened to Ca’tain Wong and the Butcher.”
“We all think so,” the Slug said.
“This is what you didn’t want to tell the stellarmen?”
Brass nodded.
“Tell him about the circuit boards and the phony takeoff before we got to Tarik,” Ron said.
Brass explained.
“If it hadn’t been for the Butcher,” the discorporaphone clicked again, “we would have reentered normal space in the Cygnus Nova. The Butcher convinced Tarik to hook us out and take us aboard.”
“So.” Dr. T’mwarba looked around the table. “One of you is a spy.”
“It could be one of the kids,” the Slug said. “It doesn’t have to be someone at this table.”
“If it is,” Dr. T’mwarba said, “I’m talking to the rest of you. General Forester couldn’t get anything out of you. Rydra needs somebody’s help. It’s that simple.”
Brass broke the lengthening silence. “I’d just lost a
shi’ to the Invaders, Doc; a whole ’latoon of kids, more than half the officers. Even though I could wrestle well and was a good ’ilot, to any other trans’ort ca’tain, that run-in with the Invaders made me a stiff jinx. Ca’tain Wong’s not from our world. But wherever she came from, she brought a set of values with her that said, ‘I like your work and I want to hire you.’ I’m grateful.”
“She knows about so much,” Calli said. “This is the wildest trip I’ve ever been on. Worlds. That’s it, Doc. She cuts through worlds and don’t mind taking you along. When’s the last time somebody took me to a Baron’s for dinner and espionage? Next day I’m eating with pirates. And here I am now. Sure I want to help.”
“Calli’s too mixed up with his stomach,” Ron interrupted. “What it is, is she gets you thinking, Doc. She made me think about Mollya and Calli. You know, she was tripled with Muels Aranlyde, the guy who wrote Empire Star. But I guess you must, if you’re her doctor. Anyway, you start thinking that maybe those people who live in other worlds—like Calli says—where people write books or make weapons, are real. If you believe in them, you’re a little more ready to believe in yourself. And when somebody who can do that needs help, you help.”
“Doctor,” Mollya said, “I was dead. She made me alive. What can I do?”
“You can tell me everything you know—” he leaned across the table and locked his fingers—“about the Butcher.”
“The Butcher?” Brass asked. The others were surprised. “What about him? We don’t know anything exce’t that Ca’tain and him got to be real close.”
“You were on the same ship with him for three weeks. Tell me everything you saw him do.”
They looked at one another, silence questioning.
“Was there anything that might have indicated where he was from?”
“Titin,” Calli said. “The mark on his arm.”
“Before Titin—at least five years before. You see, the problem is that the Butcher doesn’t know either.”
They looked even more perplexed. Then Brass said, “His language. Ca’tain said he originally had s’oken a language where there was no word for ‘I.’ ”
Dr. T’mwarba frowned more deeply as the discorporaphone clicked again: “She taught him how to say I and you. They wandered through the graveyard in the evening, and we hovered over them while they taught each other who they were.”
“The ‘I,’ ” T’mwarba said, “that’s something to go on.” He sat back. “It’s funny. I suppose I know everything about Rydra there is to know. And I know just that little about—”
The discorporaphone clicked a third time. “You don’t know about the myna bird.”
T’mwarba was surprised. “Of course I do. I was there.”
The discorporate crew laughed softly. “But she never told you why she was so frightened.”
“It was a hysterical onset brought about by her previous condition—”
Ghostly laughter again. “The worm, Dr. T’mwarba. She wasn’t afraid of the bird at all. She was afraid of the telepathic impression of a huge worm crawling toward her, the worm that the bird was picturing.”
“She told you this—?” and never told me, was the ending of what had begun in minor outrage and ceased in wonder.
“Worlds,” the ghost reiterated. “Sometimes worlds exist under your eyes, and you never see them. This room might be filled with phantoms—you never know. Even the rest of the crew can’t be sure what we’re saying now. But Captain Wong, she never used a discorporaphone. She found a way to talk with us without one. She cut through worlds, and joined them—that’s the important part—so that both became bigger.”
“Then somebody’s got to figure out where in the world, yours, or mine, or hers, the Butcher came from.” A memory resolved like a cadence closing, and he laughed. The others looked puzzled. “A worm. Somewhere in Eden now, a worm, a worm…That was one of her earliest poems. And it never occurred to me.”
4
“AM I SUPPOSED TO be happy?” Dr. T’mwarba asked.
“You’re supposed to be interested,” said General Forester.
“You’ve looked at a hyperstatic map and discovered that though the sabotage attempts over the last year and a half lie all over a galaxy in regular space, they’re within cruiser distance of the Specelli Snap across the jump. Also, you’ve discovered that during the time the Butcher was in Titin, there were no ‘accidents’ at all. In other words, you have discovered that the Butcher could be responsible for the whole business, just from physical proximity. No, I am not happy at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s an important person.”
“Important?”
“I know he’s…important to Rydra. The crew told me that.”
“Him?” Then comprehension struck. “Him? Oh, no. Anything else. He’s the lowest form of…Not that. Treason, sabotage, how many murders…I mean he’s—”
“You don’t know what he is. And if he’s responsible for the Babel-17 attacks, in his own right he’s as extraordinary as Rydra.” The doctor stood from his bubble seat. “Now will you give me a chance to try out my idea? I’ve been listening to yours all morning. Mine will probably work.”
“I still don’t understand what you want, though.” Dr. T’mwarba sighed. “First I want to get Rydra and the Butcher and us in the most heavily guarded, deepest, darkest, most impenetrable dungeon Administrative Alliance Headquarters has—”
“But we don’t have a dun—”
“Don’t put me on,” Dr. T’mwarba said evenly. “You’re fighting a war, remember?”
The General made a face. “Why all this security?”
“Because of the mayhem this guy has caused up till now. He’s not going to enjoy what I plan to do. I’d just be happier if there was something like, say, the entire military force of the Alliance, on my side. Then I’d feel I had a chance.”
Rydra sat on one side of the cell, the Butcher on the other. Both were strapped to plastic-coated chair forms that were part of the walls. Dr. T’mwarba looked after the equipment that was being rolled from the room. “No dungeons and torture chambers, eh, General?” He glanced at a spot of red-brown that had dried on the stone floor by his foot, and shook his head. “I’d be happier if the place was swabbed out with acid and disinfected first. But, I suppose on short order—”
“Do you have all your equipment here, Doctor?” the General asked, ignoring the doctor’s goad. “If you change your mind I can have a barrage of specialists here inside of fifteen minutes.”
“The place isn’t really big enough,” Dr. T’mwarba said. “But I’ve got nine specialists right here.” He rested his hand on a medium-sized computer that had been wheeled into the corner beside the rest. “I’d just as soon you weren’t here, either. But since you won’t go, just watch quietly.”
“You say,” General Forester said, “you want maximum security. I can have a few two-hundred-and-fifty-pound aikido masters in here also.”
“I have a black belt in aikido, General. I think the two of us will do.”
The General raised his eyebrows. “I’m karate myself. Aikido is one martial art I’ve never really understood. And you have a black belt?”
Dr. T’mwarba adjusted a larger piece of equipment and nodded. “So does Rydra. I don’t know what the Butcher can do, so I’m keeping everybody strapped down good and tight.”
“Very well.” The General touched something at the corner of the door jamb. The metal slab lowered slowly. “We’ll be in here five minutes.” The slab reached the floor and the line along the edge of the door disappeared. “We’re welded in now. We’re at the center of twelve layers of defense, all impregnable. Nobody even knows the location of the place—including myself.”
“After those labyrinths we came through, I certainly don’t,” T’mwarba said.
“Just in case somebody managed to map it, we’re moved automatically every fifty seconds. He’s not going to get out.” The General gestured toward t
he Butcher.
“I’m just assuming no one can get in.” T’mwarba pressed a switch.
“Go over this once more.”
“The Butcher has amnesia, say the doctors on Titin. That means his consciousness is restricted to the section of his brain with synapse connections dating from ’61. His consciousness is, in effect, restricted to one segment of his cortex. What this does”—the doctor lifted a metal helmet and put it on the Butcher’s head, glancing at Rydra—“is create a series of ‘unpleasantnesses’ in that segment until he is, so to speak, driven out of that part of the brain back into the rest.”
“What if there simply are no connections from one part of the cortex to the other?”
“If it gets unpleasant enough, he’ll make some new ones.”
“With the sort of life he’s led,” commented the General, “I wonder what would be unpleasant enough to drive him out of his head.”
“Onoff, Algol, Fortran,” said Dr. T’mwarba.
The General watched the doctor make further adjustments.
“Ordinarily this would create a snake pit situation in the brain. However, with a mind that doesn’t know the word ‘I,’ or hasn’t known it for long, fear tactics won’t work.”
“What will?”
“Algol, Onoff, and Fortran, with the help of a barber and the fact that it’s Wednesday.”
“Dr. T’mwarba, I didn’t bother with more than a precursory check on your psyche-index—”
“I know what I’m doing. None of those computer languages have the word for ‘I’ either. This prevents such statements as ‘I can’t solve the problem.’ Or, ‘I’m really not interested.’ Or ‘I’ve got better things to waste my time with.’ General, in a little town on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees there is only one barber. This barber shaves all the men in the town who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself or not?”
The General frowned.
“You don’t believe me? But General, I always tell the truth. Except Wednesdays; on Wednesday every statement I make is a lie.”