Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

“And will you tell TMS that you have contacted us, and joined us?” Sister 657 asked.

I nodded. “Sure. And you’ll have to cook up something occasionally for me to feed that stonelike major or they’ll pick me up and put me under a psych machine. They did that to one of your own—I don’t know any names—a few months back, another newcomer like me, breaking her mind. I don’t want anything like that happening to me, so if you’re as powerful as you say you are I expect protection.”

The man—possibly the only male other than myself—rose for the first time. “You make good sense, young man. You are very clever. Perhaps too clever. I almost wonder about you. The Cerberans, it is said, can make robots in any shape or form that cannot be told from humans. Ones that can assume the characteristics of any of the four Warden worlds.”

“I’m no robot,” I assured him, “but that information interests me.” I paused, as if thinking over some weighty matters, then showed by my face and manner that I had made a decision. “In point of fact, I’m going to tell you something that isn’t even on my records. Something Medusa, and, I suspect, Halstansir doesn’t really know. I was a ringer back home. I didn’t come out of the administrative breeding pool nor out of their schools. Do you think a high-class administrator could have managed to get into a reception and chop off a top politician’s head with a sword? No, for reasons that are old history and have no business with you or anybody else any more, I came out of the assassin’s pool.”

There. A nice white lie that allowed me to be a little more of myself while at the same time protected my real identity and purpose. Who knows? My logic was so good maybe the kid had been from my old school at that. I’d like to think so. It disturbs me that an amateur could have pulled off that job so neatly.

And they bought it, hook, line, and sinker, just because it did make good sense. My first meeting, and already I’d engineered at least a social promotion for myself. As I said, amateurs.

“This explains a lot about you and your manner,” Sister 657 said. “If this is so, then you are a far more valued recruit than I—we—had originally hoped for.” Interesting slip, that. It implied that I knew her and she knew me, and I didn’t know that many older folks on Medusa. She seemed unaware of her slip, though, and continued.

“Our time is run for this matter,” she told us. “I propose we administer a small hypnotic and replace him at the cafe. Later, this week or early next, 6137, you will be called to the company psych for a routine check. There one of our people will add her own little bit to your testing, and we will check out your facts. If you prove out, then you will join our group, leaving for meetings in the same manner, but without the drug, from various small cafes. Objections?”

I shook my head. “Not on the psych stuff, no. But I suggest we continue to use the Gringol, at least for me. It wouldn’t make any sense at all to compromise other cafes and similar places, since I am both being watched and obliged to report to TMS. Everybody else can use different spots—but keep me on the cafe. Eventually they’ll put a transmitter on me somewhere, probably one I know about and one I won’t, but I assume you have some kind of scanning for that sort of thing. If not, the next time or two, I’ll show you how to build one. They’ll assume any failure in the gadgets is your doing, anyway.”

“Why do I feel we just joined him?” a woman in the front said grumpily.

I smiled.

They were smooth, I’ll say that. Ching had passed out, but with the careful administering of additional doses of the hypnotic—a native plant, since anything else would be quickly negated by the Wardens—she was hardly aware that time passed at all. Nicely susceptible to the hypnotics, as most people are, she accepted a reasonable romantic scenario set in and near the cafe that, the Opposition assured me, would be supported in TMS records.

I dutifully keyed in the major on the terminal later that night, and, sure enough, the next day, after returning to Gray Basin and getting something to eat, TMS had another “random pickup,” this tune of both of us, although we were separated, once at headquarters.

The major, whose name, I learned, was Hocrow, was more than interested in my account, which, no doubt, was being checked and verified by countless scanners and sensors. No doubt, indeed—because she not only had a chair for me this time, she insisted I sit in it. Still, I had no worries about them, either—not only could I control just about all my important bodily indicators to make those machines read any way I wanted, I insured things by telling nothing but the truth, leaving out, of course, some of the inconvenient details.

“We have monitors along that whole area under the cafe, and in every maintenance room,” the major grumbled, “and we did a total check when it was obvious you could have gone nowhere else. They showed nothing. How is it possible?”

“One sewer looks exactly like another,” I pointed out, “and most of it is totally uninhabited most of the time. It’s pretty easy to patch in and substitute an old recording of a sewer doing what sewers do.”

She nodded. “And all the monitors are on one cable down there, to save money. I could make them all independent, which would compound their troubles no end, but that would be a rather obvious ploy.”

“Not to mention the fact that, unless you did it to the whole city, something that would not only be obvious but would cost a fortune and disrupt the place for months, they could just move to a different sewer. But surely you already knew they were in the sewers.”

“We did. It is the most logical place, anyway. But any attempt to breach that cable should set up all sorts of flags in Control.”

“Well, there are two possibilities there. One is that they have somebody in Control who can be at just the right spot to cover up this sort of thing when needed. The second possibility is that you’ve simply been outclassed technically.

This system of yours is pretty sophisticated, but it would be easy for a Confederacy tech team to beat and you know that better than I do.”

“Are you suggesting that the Confederacy is behind this group?”

“It seems likely—but indirectly. Maybe they supply the smarts from someplace like the picket ship or their own satellites, but the people are home-grown. I don’t know—for all their technical wizardry, they seemed to me like kids playing a game, sort of a more dangerous version of trying to beat the automatic doors on the buses and trains. They’re playing at revolution, at least the ones I saw were.”

Hocrow looked at me strangely for a moment. “Is what you told them about actually being a bred assassin true?”

“Yeah, it’s true. Big money was paid, too. I was a long-range hidden gun in a power play my father planned. They got the jump on him before he was ready or I was old enough to be a factor, and I admit I was too young—too emotional—then.”

“Then you wouldn’t avenge your father’s death if it happened now?”

“Oh, sure I would—but I wouldn’t have been caught.”

She mulled that over, just sitting there, looking up at the ceiling for quite some time. Finally she nodded to herself. “That’s what was bothering me so much about you before. It fits. It explains a lot.” She gave that icy smile again. “It seems you are misplaced. You should be in TMS.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I thought I was. Otherwise, what are we doing here?”

She sighed. “One thing does bother me. If you have your preliminary training and all that special design, how will we ever know which side you are really on?”

I chuckled. “No matter what, I have limited experience. If you and your entire staff of monitors, psychs, and the like can’t be sure of me, then your system’s too shaky to have any hope of long-term survival anyway. Either you can do the job or you should give it up.”

That was blunt, almost daring talk, but it was also guaranteed to play directly to a solid cop’s ego because, frankly, it was true. The fact that I was trained to beat any system didn’t mean I couldn’t be beat. It only meant they had to be up to the job.

“Now, what about this psych exam?” I asked her. “Can you get me by it?”

“It should be relatively easy for someone with your supposed abilities,” she mocked. “Still, we can do a little reinforcing before you leave here, with your help. I have a tech on call.”

“That’ll do,” I told her. “But you’re not going to do anything crazy like pick up any of the cafe staff, are you? They all have to be in on it, at least in another cell that supports mine. I’d just trail and track ’em, if possible. My own intention is to make myself invaluable enough to the organization that I’ll be passed ever upward. If