'It takes longer. The idea is – '
'I know what the idea is.' She put it in her blouse pocket and buttoned it. 'So what did the Twenty want to know about Portobello?'
'Panama City, actually. The POW camp and the Portobello connection to it, if any.'
'What are they going to do with thousands of hostile prisoners?'
'Turn them into allies. Jack them all together for two weeks and humanize them.'
'And let them go?'
'Oh, no.' Mendez smiled and looked back toward the house. 'Even behind bars, they won't be prisoners anymore.'
I UNJACKED AND STARED down into the wildflowers for a minute, sort of wishing it had been two-way; sort of not. Then I stood up, stumbled, and went back to where Marty was sitting at one of the picnic tables. Incongruously, he was slicing lemons. He had a large plastic bag of them and three pitchers, and a manual juicer.
'So what do you think?'
'You're making lemonade.'
'My specialty.' Each of the pitchers had a measured amount of sugar in the bottom. When he sliced a lemon, he would take a thin slice out of the middle and throw it on the sugar. Then squeeze the juice out of both halves. It looked like six lemons per pitcher.
'I don't know,' I said. 'It's an audacious plan. I have a couple of misgivings.'
'Okay.'
'You want to jack?' I nodded toward the table with the one-way box.
'No. Give me the surface first. In your own words, so to speak.'
I sat down across from him and rolled a lemon between my palms. 'Thousands of people. All from a foreign culture. The process works, but you've only tried it on twenty Americans-twenty white Americans.'
'There's no reason to think it might be culture-bound.'
'That's what they say themselves. But there's no evidence to the contrary, either. Suppose you wind up with three thousand raving lunatics?'
'Not likely. That's good conservative science-we ought to do a small-scale test first-but we can't afford to. We're not doing science now-we're doing politics.'
'Beyond politics,' I said. 'There's no word for what we're doing.'
'Social engineering?'
I had to laugh. 'I wouldn't say that around an engineer. It's like mechanical engineering with a crowbar and sledgehammer.'
He concentrated on a lemon. 'You do still agree that it has to be done.'
'Something has to be done. A couple of days ago, we were still considering options. Now we're on some kind of slippery ramp; can't slow down, can't go back.'
'True, but we didn't do it voluntarily, remember. Jefferson put us on the edge of the ramp, and Ingram pushed us over.'
'Yeah. My mother likes to say, 'Do something, even if it's wrong.' I guess we're in that mode.'
He set down the knife and looked at me. 'Actually not. Not quite. We do have the option of just plain going public.'
'About the Jupiter Project?'
'About the whole thing. In all likelihood, the government's going to discover what we're doing and squash us. We could take that opportunity away from them by going public.'
Odd that I hadn't even considered that. 'But we wouldn't get anything close to a hundred percent compliance. Less than half, you figured. And then we're in Ingram's nightmare, a minority of lambs surrounded by wolves.'
'Worse than that,' he said cheerfully. 'Who controls the media? Before the first volunteer could sign up, the government would have us painted as ogres bent on world domination. Mind controllers. We'd be hunted down and lynched.'
He finished with the lemons and poured equal amounts of juice into each pitcher. 'Understand that I've been thinking about this for twenty years. There's no way around the central conundrum: to humanize someone, we have to install a jack; but once you're jacked two-way, you can't keep a secret.
'If we had all the time in the world, we could do it like the Enders' cell system. Elaborate memory modification for everybody who's not at the very top, so that nobody could reveal my identity or yours. But memory modification takes training, equipment, time.
'This idea of humanizing the POWs is partly a way of undermining the government's case against us, ahead of time. It's presented initially as a way of keeping the prisoners in line-but then we let the news media 'discover' that something more profound has happened to them. Heartless killers transformed into saints.'
'Meanwhile, we're doing the same thing to all the mechanics. One cycle at a time.'
'That's right,' he said. 'Forty-five days. If it works.'
The arithmetic was clear enough. There were six thousand soldierboys, each serviced by three cycles. Fifteen days each, and after forty-five days you had eighteen thousand people on our side, plus the thousand or two who run the flyboys and Waterboys, who would be going through the process.
What Marty's pet general was going to do, or try, was to declare a worldwide Psychops effort that required certain platoons to stay on duty for a week or a few weeks extra.
It only took five extra days to 'turn' a mechanic, but then you couldn't just send him home. The change in behavior would be obvious, and the first time one was jacked, the secret would be out. Fortunately, once the mechanics were jacked, they'd understand the necessity for isolation, so keeping them on base wouldn't be a problem. (Except for feeding and housing all those extra people, which Marty's general would incorporate into the exercise. Never hurt a soldier to bivouac for a week or two.)
Meanwhile, the publicity over the miraculous 'conversion' of the POWs would be priming the public to accept the next step.
The ultimate bloodless coup: pacifists taking over the army, and the army taking over the government. And then the people-radical idea! – taking over the government themselves.
'But the whole thing hinges on this mystery man, or woman,' I said. 'Someone who can shuffle medical records around, have a few people reassigned, okay. Appropriate a truck and a bus. That's nothing like setting up a global Psychops exercise. One that's actually a takeover of the military.'
He nodded quietly.
'Aren't you going to put water in the lemonade?'
'Not until morning. That's the secret.' He folded his arms. 'As to the big secret, his identity, you're perilously close to solving it.'
'The president?' He laughed. 'Secretary of defense? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?'
'You could figure it out with what you know, given a table of organization. Which is a problem. We're extremely vulnerable between now and the time your memory has been tailored.'
I shrugged. 'The Twenty told me about the suicide pills.'
He carefully uncapped a brown vial and shook three hard pills into my hand. 'Bite down on one and you'll be brain-dead in a few seconds. For you and me it ought to be in a glass tooth.'
'In a tooth?'
'Old spy myth. But if they take you or me alive, and get a jack into us, the general's dead meat, and the whole thing is over.'
'But you're one-way.'
He nodded. 'With me, it would take a little torture. With you... well, you might as well just know his name.'
'Senator Dietz? The pope?'
He took my arm and started to lead me back to the bus. 'It's Major General Stanton Roser, the Assistant Secretary for Force Management and Personnel. He was one of the Twenty who supposedly died, but with a different name and face. Now he has a disconnected jack, but otherwise he's well-connected indeed.'
'None of the Twenty knows?'
