The Second Saladin

Help me, help me, oh, help me.

Help me, Chardy, help me.

He wished Chardy were here. Yet he hated Chardy also. Not Chardy; Chardy was another disappointment. Chardy had disappointed him too. Chardy had looked at him dumbly. He’d sat there stolidly, eyes dull, radiating aimless violence. Chardy was another fool.

Danzig stared into dim space, working himself into rage over Chardy’s stupidity. Chardy didn’t know a thing. Chardy was entirely a figment of Danzig’s imagination; he was an invention, a contrivance, an assemblage. He was a simple soldier, man of violence, narrow of mind and imagination. Danzig had foolishly built him into something he was not. It was where his illness had begun, this business of Chardy. It was the first sign of his weakness. Hadn’t Chardy almost gotten him killed in his carelessness with the Harvard woman? Hadn’t Chardy allowed the Kurd to get within killing distance? Chardy was no good. He was ordinary in the worst sense.

He hated Chardy. It occurred to him to call Sam Melman this second and demand that Chardy be fired, be let go. No, more: that he be punished, disgraced, imprisoned. Chardy was no good. You could not depend on Chardy. Once Chardy had come aboard, the whole thing had begun to fall apart.

His rage mounted. He saw Chardy arrested, interrogated, humiliated. He saw Chardy in prison among lunatics and blacks and hillbillies. Chardy violated, Chardy abused. Chardy ruined. Danzig absorbed a great satisfaction from the scenario. He drew warmth and pleasure from it and at one point actually had the phone in his hand (miracle that he could even find it in the rubble) and had dialed the first two numbers.

But then he froze.

Perhaps they wanted him to hate Chardy. Perhaps they had driven a wedge between him and Chardy, knowing them to be natural allies, fearing the potency of any allegiance between them. Maybe, therefore, it would be better to …

Once again, he sat back.

My mind is going nowhere. I’m agitated at nothing. They are taking my mind away from me — this Kurd, whomever he works for.

His bowels began to tense. The scalding need to defecate came over him. He thought he would mess himself, foul his own nest, the ultimate degradation.

My own systems betray me also. They are in revolt.

He passed a terrible burst of gas. Its odor nauseated him. He ran into the adjacent bathroom and sat on the toilet. He sat there for a long time, even after he had ceased to defecate, making certain the attack was over.

I can still do one thing, he thought.

I can still shit.

He reached for the toilet paper and unreeled a long train of sheets, gathering them in his hand. Yet as he pulled loose the last of them, separating it at its perforations with a smart tug, something fell away to the floor. In the dark he could not see. He leaned over, his fingers on the tile. He felt a piece of paper. He brought it quickly to his eyes.

Metternich, it said.

Danzig cleaned himself, rose, and went swiftly back to his office and to the shelves.

He picked up Metternich, Architect of Order, by Joseph Danzig, Harvard University Press, 1964, and began to page through it.

A piece of paper fell out.

You must flee, it said.

They will kill you, it said.

It told him where to go, and when.

It was signed Chardy.

50

“All right, Miles. Now we’re going to talk computers.”

“So talk,” said Miles. He would just sit back and be pleasant. He would not get anybody mad. It would all work out and then he’d go to Sam so fast —

“No, Miles. You’re the one who has to talk.”

Miles said, “I can’t tell you anything about computers. All that stuff is highly classified.”

Leo said, “I can still shoot him up.”

“No,” Chardy said, “we need him sober.”

He turned back to Miles.

“Miles, we’re very close to something very big. And it’s come to pass that you’ve got the key.”

Miles just looked at him blankly.

“The files. All on computer discs, right?” Chardy asked.

Miles answered with silence. But his eyes must have signaled yes, for the conversation continued. But he wasn’t sure where this computer angle had come from all of a sudden. It seemed to come from nowhere. Or maybe it had been there all along, and he just didn’t know.

“Harris got the contract, didn’t they?” asked a new voice. “The fifteen-hundred line of terminals in the pit. They bump ’em up to seventeen-fifties yet?”

An expert. They had an expert.

He said nothing.

“Mr. Lanahan, if you want I can show you photocopies of the contract. We’re on pretty solid ground.”

“Paul, why are you doing this to me?”

For the first time Chardy showed his temper.

“Look, nobody’s done a thing to you. People are dead on account of this business, have died horribly, pointlessly. People were ruined, people were destroyed—”

“Paul—” Leo was trying to hold him back.

“That’s the way it’s played, that’s how rough a game it can be. And you still don’t have a clue. Nobody’s ever even breathed hard on you. So don’t tell me you’re having troubles, Miles, because I just don’t have time to listen.”

He’ll make you choose, Sam had said. Sam had known. Sam must have had his suspicions all along, had it doped out, tried to warn him, give him some strength. Sam had known it would fall this way: Sam and Paul locked in it for Miles’s young soul.

“It doesn’t really matter,” said the expert. “If you can fly the fifteen-hundred you can fly the seventeen-fifty. It’s keyboarded up the same, has the same command vocabulary. It’s just bigger, more flexible, and has a much faster response time, which can be important if you’re in a rush.”

“I’m not sure the seventeen-fifties have gone on-line,” Miles finally said. “They were slated to go in earlier this year, but that stuff is always behind. I’ve never worked at a seventeen-fifty. In my time in the pit, we were fifteen-hundred all the way. If you know so much, then how come—”

“Okay, Miles, fair question. Here’s the answer. We think there’s a piece of information buried in the Langley computer memory. And we—”

But Lanahan, computer genius himself, instantly saw the flaw in the supposition and could not hold himself back.

“That’s crazy,” he said in utter indignation. “That’s the largest, the most carefully tended, the best system in the world. It’s limited access all the way; it goes off of generators on-site. There’re no lines into it, no lines out of it. You couldn’t possibly tap into it, or tuck something into it.”

“The guy who buried this item buried it a long time ago, back in the first days, when the system was being set up. He worked there for a little while. And he buried it very carefully.”

“Tell him,” Lanahan petitioned the expert, “tell him that the capacity of the Langley computer is two billion bits. You can’t imagine a number that big. That’s all the libraries in the world; that’s a trillion words. And it’s all broken down into individual units or entries called slugs and the slugs are in directories. And there are directories inside of directories. You fetch a directory by its code. It’s got ten thousand coded entries. One, just one of those,