Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

"Maybe he's bluffing," Amelia said, probably remembering the conference room at St. Bart's. "Waiting for an opportunity to strike."

"That's why he's handcuffed," Marty said. "He's a wild card now."

"He's just not there," Jefferson said. "I've jacked with more people than everybody in this room put together, and nothing like this has ever happened. You can't unjack yourself mentally, but that's what it felt like. Like he decided to pull the plug."

"Not exactly a selling point for humanization," I said to Marty. "It works on everyone but psychopaths?"

"That's the word they used to describe me," Ellie said, saintly and serene. "And it was accurate." She had murdered her husband and children, with gasoline. "But the process worked with me, and still works after all these years. Without it, I know I would have gone crazy; stayed crazy."

"The term 'psychopath' covers a lot of territory." Jefferson said. "Ingram is intensely moral, even though he's repeatedly done things that all of us would call immoral; outrageously so."

"When I was jacked with him," I said, "he reacted to my outrage with a kind of imperturbable condescension. I was a hopeless case who couldn't understand the rightness of the things he had done. That was the first day."

"We wore him down a little over the next couple of days," Jefferson said. "By not disapproving; by trying to understand."

"How can you 'understand' someone who can follow an order to rape a woman and then mutilate her in a specific way? He left her tied up and gagged, to bleed to death. He's not even human."

"But he is human," Jefferson said, "and however bizarre his behavior is, it's still human behavior. I think that's what shut him down-we refused to see him as some sort of avenging angel. Just a profoundly sick man we were trying to help. He could take your condemnation and laugh at it. He couldn't take Elbe's Christian charity and loving kindness. Or, for that matter, my own professional detachment."

"He should be dead by now," Dr. Orr said. "He hasn't taken any food or water since the third day. We've kept him on IVs."

"A waste of glucose," I said.

"You know better." Marty waved fingers in front of Ingram's face and he didn't blink. "We have to find out why this happened, and how common it's going to be."

"Not common," Mendez said. "I was with him before, during, and after his retreat into wherever he is now. From the first, it was like jacking with some kind of alien, or animal."

"I'll go along with that," I said.

"But nevertheless very analytical," Jefferson said. "Studying us intently from the very first."

"Studying what we knew about jacking," Ellie said. "He wasn't that interested in anybody as a person. But he had only jacked before in a limited, commercial way, and he was hungry to absorb our experience."

Jefferson nodded. "He had this vivid fantasy that he extrapolated from the jack joints. He wanted to be jacked with someone and kill him."

"Or her," Amelia said, "like me, or that poor woman he raped and cut up."

"The fantasy was always a male," Ellie said. "He doesn't see women as worthy opponents. And he doesn't have much of a sex drive-when he raped that woman, his penis was just another weapon."

"An extension of his self, like all of his weapons," Jefferson said. "He's more obsessive about weapons than any soldier I ever jacked with."

"He missed his calling. I know some guys he'd get along with fine."

"I don't doubt it," Marty said. "Which makes him that much more important to study. Some people in hunter-killer platoons have similar personality traits. We have to find a way to keep this from happening."

Good riddance, I didn't say. "So you won't be coming with me tomorrow? Stay here?"

"No, I'm still going to Portobello. Dr. Jefferson's going to work on Ingram. See whether he can walk him back with a combination of drugs and therapy."

"I don't know whether to wish you luck. I really prefer him this way." Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought the bastard showed a glimmer of expression at that. Maybe we should send Marty down to Portobello alone, and leave me up here to taunt him out of catatonia.

JULIAN AND MARTY MISSED by only a few minutes sharing the Guadalajara airport with the woman who had come down to kill Amelia. They got on a military flight to Portobello while she took a taxi from the airport to the hotel across the street from the Clinic. Jefferson was staying there, no coincidence, and so were two of the Twenty-Ellie and the old soldier Cameron.

Jefferson and Cameron were dawdling over breakfast in the hotel cantina when she walked in to get a cup of coffee to take back to her room.

They both looked at her automatically, as men will when a beautiful woman makes an entrance, but Cameron kept staring.

Jefferson laughed and put on the accent of a popular comedian. "Jim ... you don't stop puttin' eye tracks on her, she's gonna come over and smack you one." The two men had become friends, having worked their way up from the same beginning, the lower-class black suburbs of Los Angeles.

He turned around with a careful expression and said quietly, "Zam, she might more'n smack me. Kill me just for practice."

"What?"

"Bet she's killed more people than I have. She has that sniper look: everyone's a potential target."

"She does hold herself like a soldier." He slid a glance over to her and back. "Or a certain kind of patient. Obsessive-compulsive."

"How 'bout let's not ask her over to join us?"

"Good idea."

But when they left the cantina a few minutes later, they ran into her again. She was trying to deal with the night clerk, a frightened teenaged girl whose English was not good. Gavrila's Spanish was worse.

Jefferson walked over to the rescue. " – Can I be of some assistance?" he asked in Spanish.

"You're American," Gavrila said. "Will you ask her if she's seen this woman?" It was a picture of Blaze Harding.

" – You know what she's asking," he said to the clerk.

"Si, claro." The woman opened both her hands. " – I have seen the woman; she has been in here for meals a few times. But she doesn't stay here."

"She says she's not sure," Jefferson translated. "Most Americans look pretty much the same to her."

"Have you seen her?" Gavrila asked.

Jefferson studied the photograph. "Can't say as I have. Jim?" Cameron stepped over. "You seen this woman?"

"I don't think so. A lot of Americans coming and going."

"You're here at the Clinic?"

"Consulting." Jefferson realized he'd hesitated a moment too long. "Is she a patient?"

"I don't know. I just know she's here."

"What do you want her for?" Cameron asked.

"Just a few questions. Government business."

"Well, we'll keep an eye out. You're ...?"

"Francine Gaines. Room 126. I'd surely appreciate any help you could give me."

"Sure." They watched her walk away. "Is this deep shit," Cameron whispered, "or just meters of excrement?"

"We have to get a picture of her," Jefferson said, "and send it on to Marty's general. If the army's after Blaze, he can probably get rid of her."

"But you don't think she's army."

"Do you?"

He hesitated. "I don't know. When she looked at you, and when she looked at me, she looked first at the middle of the chest and then between the eyes. Targeting. I wouldn't make any sudden movements around her."

"If she's army, she's a hunter-killer."

"We didn't have that term when I was in the service. But it takes one to know one, and I know she's killed a lot of people."

"A female Ingram."

"She might be even more dangerous than Ingram. Ingram rather looks like what he is. She looks like ..."

"Yeah." Jefferson looked at the elevator door that had just been graced by her presence. "She sure does." He shook his head. "Let's get a picture and get it over to the Clinic for when Mendez checks in." He was down in Mexico City, scrounging raw materials for the nano-forge. "He had some crazy woman break into St. Bart's."

"No resemblance," Cameron said. "She was ugly and had frizzy red hair." Actually, she'd had a wig and a pressure mask.

WE WALKED RIGHT INTO Building 31, no trouble. To their computer, Marty was a brigadier general who had spent most of his career in academic posts. I was sort of my old self.

Or not. The memory modification was seamless, but I think if I had jacked with anyone in my old platoon (which should have been done as a security measure; we were just lucky) they would have known immediately that there was something wrong. I was too healthy. They had all sensed my problem and, in a way you can't put into words, had always "been there"; had always helped me get from one day to the next. It would be as obvious as an old friend showing up without the limp he'd had all his life.

Lieutenant Newton Thurman, who was given the task of finding me a place to be useful, was an oddity: he had started out as a mechanic but developed a kind of allergy to being jacked-it gave him intense headaches that were no fun for him or for anybody jacked with him. I wondered at the time why they would put him in Building 31 rather than just retiring him, and it was clear that he wondered the same thing. He'd only been there a couple of weeks. In retrospect, it's obvious that he was planted as part of the overall plan. And what a mistake!

The staff in Building 31 was top-heavy in terms of rank: eight generals and twelve colonels, twenty majors and captains, and twenty-four lieutenants. That's sixty-four officers, giving orders to fifty NCOs and privates. Ten of those were just guards, too, and not really in the chain of command, unless something happened.

My memory of those four days, before I had my actual personality restored, is vague and confused. I was slotted into a time-consuming but unchallenging make-work position, essentially verifying the computer's decisions about resource allocation-how many eggs or bullets to go where. Surprise, I never found a mistake.

Among my other unchallenging duties was the one, as it turned out, that everything else was a smoke screen for: the "guard sitrep-log," or situation report log. Every hour I jacked in with the guard mechanics and asked for a "sitrep." I had a form with boxes to check, according to what they reported each hour. All I had ever done was check the box that said "sitrep negative": nothing's happening.

It was typical bureaucratic make-work. If anything of interest did happen, a red light would go on on my console, telling me to jack in with the guards. I could fill out a form then.

But I hadn't given any thought to the obvious: they needed someone inside the building who could check on the actual identities of the mechanics running the guard soldierboys.

I was sitting there on the fourth day, about one minute before sitrep time, and the red light suddenly started blinking. My heart gave a little stutter and I jacked in.

It wasn't the usual Sergeant Sykes. It was Karen, and four other people from my old platoon.

What the hell? She gave me a quick gestalt: Trust us; you had to undergo memory modification so we could Trojan-horse our way in here and then a broad outline of the plan and the incredible Jupiter Project development.

I acknowledged a numb kind of affirmative, unjacked, and checked the "sitrep negative" box.

No wonder I had been so damned confused. The phone buzzed and I thumbed it.

It was Marty, in hospital greens with a neutral expression. "I have you down for a little brain surgery at 1400. You want to come down and prep when your shift's over?"