Kluge rose to shake his hand, and Kolb left the large office, hurrying back down into the main village with its tiny little gingerbread houses and gleaming, spotless windowpanes. His missed breakfast was long forgotten.
An hour later, he was packed. The same young man who had led him to the main house was outside his cottage with a small Fiat, its engine running. He loaded the doctor's luggage into the trunk and helped the old man into the front seat.
A plane ticket to New York's JFK Airport was tucked into the sun visor above the passenger's seat.
The young man got in his own side and, revving the engine, made his way quickly and carefully through the clean cobblestone streets past the whitewashed buildings. They headed out to the mountain road.
And so it was that at eighty-nine years of age, Heinrich Kolb, best known as Dr. Erich von Breslau, history's notorious 'Butcher of Treblinka,' set forth from the tiny Argentine village to fulfill a dream he had thought was long dead.
11
Mervin Fischer quailed nervously in his seat before asking the question. 'Is this ethical?'
Holz dismissed the possibility as irrelevant. 'He's already agreed to it.'
'I'm not sure it's right....'
'I am not interested in your opinion. You've seen Newton's data?'
'Yes.'
'So you understand the possibilities? If we can download selectively?'
'Theoretically. But your host is a mess. He's not living in the real world. The delusions will be prob-lematic. They'd be a real danger in practice.'
'You'll weed them out.'
Holz was very persuasive. But he should have understood that this wasn't exactly Mervin's area of expertise.
For the past hour, Mervin Fischer had examined the data as it streamed from the temple electrodes into the mainframe. The individual with the deep-set eyes that seemed to glare at everyone in the room at the same time had remained rigid beside the terminal throughout the entire procedure.
Mervin was glad the man couldn't move. There was something in those eyes—as cold and limitless as the far reaches of space—that the young programmer found unsettling.
Fortunately the signal from the mobile interface unit had been transferred to the lab when Holz had returned to the PlattDeutsche complex in Edison, New Jersey, and so the man was sustained in his immobile state. Good thing, too. If this subject was as dangerous as Holz said he was, it was a risk to even let him out of prison. Mervin wondered what kind of warden would allow a dangerous psychotic out without armed supervision. Of course, they had tested the interface on prisoners early in the developmental stage, but the experiments had always been on volunteers and always under strict supervision.
And never, ever outside of prison walls.
Under ordinary circumstances, he would have doubted the veracity of the storyteller, but he had heard this from Mr. Holz himself.
Dr. Newton had gone to his own lab with a few information CDs and a single hard drive from the mobile lab. The driving force behind the entire interface project had been upset that he didn't have primary access to the volunteer. When Mervin had arrived, Newton had left, griping that he was being shut out of his own program. He hadn't even had time enough to download all of the subject's file from the van.
When the programmer requested the backup information to confirm what he had gotten from the subject, Newton had refused.
That didn't matter to Mervin. In fact, it was probably better this way. There were still problems with the radio interface hookup.
Sometimes the signal deteriorated due to background radio signals, atmospheric conditions or just a plain lousy signal. He couldn't count the number of times the tech people had to replace the little black signal antennae on the backs of all the computers.
No, in Mervin Fischer's view, whenever possible it was better to use a physical link. Hence, the electrodes on the volunteer's temples.
Mervin didn't really need the original files. He was just being anal. At least, that's what everyone always accused him of being.
Carefully he created his own backup file from the man's brain.
He had barely downloaded the information before Mr. Holz had stormed into the lab. A crew of technicians led by Ron Stern transferred the interface signal from the lab back to the van. They then trundled the test subject with the frightening eyes back outside on some kind of mysterious mission. Lothar Holz himself gave a few hushed last-minute instructions.
Mervin Fischer assumed his work was done once the information was downloaded. He was wrong.
Moments after the van had passed through the gates of PlattDeutsche America, Holz returned to Mervin's cramped office. What he asked from Mervin made the young man's forehead itch. It always itched when he was placed in a difficult moral situation. He could feel the large red blotches already forming.
'I'm uncomfortable with this, Mr. Holz.'
His boss was asking him to do something that would push the interface technology further than it had ever gone before. And he wasn't quite certain if he was the right man to do it. But Holz didn't seem to have the same reservations.
'Fischer, I don't want your input. I want you to do it.'
'Dr. Newton is probably best suited to perform this sort of test,' the programmer said uncertainly.
'You know how to program a computer?' Holz asked testily.
'Yes, but—'
'You understand the interface programming?'
Mervin was sure that Mr. Holz knew he had written much of the interface programming himself. He nodded nonetheless.
'You're one of the ones who kept telling me that a computer was just a less complex version of the human brain. And if we can download human
thought into one of these blasted machines, why can't we download the duplicated information into someone else's brain?'
'Theoretically...'
'Don't give me theoretically!' Holz exploded.
'I've had it up to here with all of your theoretical garbage! Can you do it or not?'
Mervin was frightened. Barely twenty-two years of age, he was a brilliant computer hacker who had graduated from college three years early and moved swiftly into the work force. But he was hopelessly inept in most social situations. Mervin could remember being yelled at precisely twice in his life. Once by his father for breaking into his savings account and increasing the balance by eleven million dollars and once by a stranger when he had stepped in front of the man's car, his nose buried deep in the pages of Star Trek fan magazine. Both times he had responded to the shouting the same way. His bladder had burst like a mud-and-twig levee in a monsoon.
'I can, um... That is, urn...' Mervin looked at his computer screen. He nodded dumbly. A shiver pulsed through his body, and a flush rose to his cheeks.
'Is that a yes?' Holz snapped. Mervin nodded again. Holz was mollified. 'Perfect. Great. That's the answer I expected after all the money we've dumped into this ridiculous program.' He paused, sniffing the air. 'What's that smell?'
Holz found a volunteer in Zach Pendrake, one of the white shirts from marketing who had been coordinating with the PR boys to put a positive spin on the bank fallout from the day before. Pendrake was a loudmouth, opinionated on any subject from poli-tics to software to anything in between. He was the type who thought shouting down an opponent in a debate was the only way to win. Knowledge and experience be hanged.
Pendrake had taunted Mervin in the cafeteria for the past eight months to the point where the timid young
