The Dark Half

named Thad Beaumont. You removed a lesion from his brain in 1960, when he was eleven. Please call me collect at the Orono State Police Barracks — 207-866

212 I. Thank you.'

  He finished in a mild sweat. Talking to answering machines always made him feel like a contestant on Beat the Clock.

  Why are you even bothering with all this?

   The answer he had given Thad was a simple one: procedure. Alan himself could not be satisfied with such a pat answer, because he knew it wasn't procedure. It might have been — conceivably — if this Pritchard had operated on the man calling himself Stark,

(except he's not anymore now he says he knows who he really is)

   but he hadn't. He had operated on Beaumont, and in any case, that had been twenty—eight long years ago.

So why?

    Because none of it was right, that was why. The fingerprints weren't, the blood—type obtained from the cigarette ends wasn't, the combination of cleverness and homicidal rage which their man had displayed wasn't, Thad's and Liz's insistence that the pen name was real wasn't. That most of all. That was the assertion of a couple of lunatics. And now he had something else which wasn't right. The state police accepted the man's assertion that he now understood who he really was without a qualm. To Alan, it had all the authenticity of a three-dollar bill. It screamed trick, ruse, runaround.

  Alan thought maybe the man was still coming.

  But none of that answers the question, his mind whispered. Why are you bothering with all this? Why are you calling Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and chasing down an old doc who probably doesn't remember Thad Beaumont from a hole in the wall?

  Because I don't have anything better to do, he answered himself irritably. Because I can call from here without the town selectmen bitching about the goddam long-distance charges. And because THEY believe it Thad and Liz. It's crazy, all right, but they seem sane enough otherwise . . . and, goddammit, THEY believe it. That doesn't mean I do.

  And he didn't.

  Did he?

    The day passed slowly. Dr Pritchard didn't call back. But the voiceprints came in shortly after eight o'clock, and the voice-prints were amazing.

5

They weren't what Thad had expected at all.

    He had expected a sheet of graph paper covered with spiky mountains and valleys which Alan would try to explain. He and Liz would nod wisely, as people did when someone was explaining a thing too complex for them to understand, knowing that if they did ask questions, the explanations which followed would be even less comprehensible.

    Instead, Alan showed them two sheets of plain white paper. A single line ran across the middle of each. There were a few groups of spike-points, always in pairs or trios, but for the most part, the lines were peaceful (if rather irregular) sine-waves. And you only had to look from one to the other with the naked eye to see that they were either identical or very close to it.

'That's it?' Liz asked.

   'Not quite,' Alan said. 'Watch.' He slid one sheet on top of the other. He did this with the air of a magician performing an exceptionally fine trick. He held the two sheets up to the light. Thad and Liz stared at the doubled sheets.

'They really are,' Liz said in a soft awed voice. 'They're just the same.'

  'Well . . . not quite,' Alan said, and pointed at three spots where the voice-print line on the undersheet showed through the tiniest bit. One of these show-throughs was above the line on the top sheet, the other two below. In all three cases, the show-through was in places where the line spiked. The sine-wave itself seemed to match perfectly. 'The differences are in Thad's print, and they come only at stress—points.' Alan tapped each show-through in turn. 'Here: 'What do you want, you son of a bitch? Just what the fuck do you want?' And here: 'That's a goddam lie and you know it!' And, finally, here: 'Quit lying, goddammit.' Right now everyone's focusing on these three minute differences, because they want to hang onto their assumption that no two voice-prints are ever alike. But the fact is, there weren't any stress-points in Stark's part of the conversation. The bastard stayed cool, calm, and collected all the way through.'

  'Yeah,' Thad said. 'He sounded like he was drinking lemonade.'

  Alan put the voice-prints down on an end table. 'Nobody at state police headquarters really believes these are two different voice-prints, even with the minute differences,' he said. 'We got the prints back from Washington very fast. The reason I'm so late is because, after the expert in Augusta saw them, he wanted a copy of the tape. We sent it down on an Eastern Airlines commuter flight out of Bangor and they ran it through a gadget called an audio enhancer. They use it to tell if someone actually spoke the words under investigation or if they're listening to a voice which was on tape.'

  'Is it live or is it Memorex?' Thad said. He was sitting by the fireplace, drinking a soda.

   Liz had returned to the playpen after looking at the voice-prints. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, trying to keep William and Wendy from rapping their heads together as they examined each other's toes. 'Why did they do that?'

  Alan cocked a thumb at Thad, who was grinning sourly. 'Your husband knows.'

  Thad asked Alan, 'With the little differences in the spikes, they can at least kid themselves that two different voices were speaking, even if they know better — that was your point, wasn't it?'

  'Uh-huh. Even though I've never heard of voice-prints even remotely as close as these.' He shrugged. 'Granted, my experience with them isn't as wide as the guys at FOLE who study them for a living, or even the guys in Augusta who are more or less general practitioners — voiceprints, fingerprints, footprints, tire-prints. But I do read the literature, and I was there when the results came back, Thad. They are kidding themselves, yes, but they're not doing it very hard.'

  'So they've got three small differences, but they're not enough. The problem is that my voice was stressed and Stark's wasn't. So they went to this enhancer thing hoping for a fall-back position. Hoping, in fact, that Stark's end of the conversation would turn out to be a taperecording. Made by me.' He cocked an eyebrow at Alan. 'Do I win the stewing chicken?'

  'Not only that, you win the glassware for six and the free trip to Kittery.'

  'That's the craziest thing I ever heard,' Liz said flatly.

  Thad laughed without much humor. 'The whole thing is crazy. They thought I might have changed my voice, like Rich Little . . . or Mel Blanc. The idea is that I made a tape in my George Stark voice, building in pauses where I could reply, in front of witnesses, in my own voice. Of course I'd have to buy a gadget that could hook a cassette tape-recorder into a pay telephone. There are such things, aren't there, Alan?'

  'You bet. Available at fine electronics supply houses everywhere, or just dial the 800 number that will appear on your screen, operators are standing by.'

   'Right. The only other thing I'd need would be an accomplice someone I trusted who would go to Penn Station, attach the tapeplayer to a phone in the bank which looked like it was doing the least business, and dial my house at the proper time. Then — ' He broke off. 'How was the call paid for? I forgot about that. It wasn't collect.'

  'Your telephone credit card number was used,' Alan said. 'You obviously gave it to your accomplice.'

    'Yeah, obviously. I only had to do two things once this shuck-and-jive got started. One was to make sure I answered the telephone myself. The other was to remember my lines and plug them into the correct pauses. I did very well, wouldn't you say, Alan?'

'Yeah. Fantastic.'

   'My accomplice hangs up the telephone when the script says he should. He unhooks the tape— player from the phone, tucks it under his arm — '

  'Hell, slips it into his pocket,' Alan said. 'The stuff they've got now is so good even the CIA buys at Radio Shack.'

    'Okay, he slips it into his pocket and just walks away. The result is a conversation where I am both seen and heard to be talking to a man five hundred miles away, a man who sounds different — who sounds, in fact, just the tiniest bit Southern-fried — but has the same voice-print as I do. It's the fingerprints all over again, only better.' He looked at Alan for confirmation.

  'On second thought,' Alan said, 'make that an all- expenses-paid trip to Portsmouth.'

  'Thank you.'

  'Don't mention it.'

    'That's not just crazy,' Liz said, 'it's utterly incredible. I think all those people should