people destined to exert that control. Mills was not disturbed by tile deaths he had caused in the Arabian Sea; he viewed one mighty will, his own, as infinitely more valuable than a thousand lesser wills. Had Friedrich Nietzsche not existed, Mills would have invented him.
For a time Mills had studied the structure of Mormonism, certain that his rise to prominence in a postwar economy would proceed best through that circuit. Now he saw it as a subsystem to be controlled from outside if at all. The LDS simply was not constructed to let a late convert rise to pinnacles of prophet or seer. But among the corporate bodies that might exert outside influence on a theocracy, only one had an open channel by which a brilliant manager might float quickly to the top: media.
Mills put away his notes and watched Eve Simpson. He heard Jon Fowler enter the room across the hall and hoped he'd struck out; Fowler had already enjoyed too much success.
An hour later, Mills was roused from nodding by a faint noise; the sound of a door sliding shut. His holo was on. Still half asleep, Mills decided the noise was from the holo.
Quantrill tingled with anticipation as Fowler's door slid open, keyed by his master plate. If Fowler were still awake, Quantrill would peer at the scribble on his note pad, apologize in soft sibilant accents, claim he had a message for Lt. Fowler as he moved near.
The room was dark, but Fowler's sleep was shallow. As the door slid open, Quantrill saw the form sprawled in bed, stepped through the portal, waved it shut again while memorizing placement of the two chairs and the shoes on the floor. Once more in darkness, he moved silently past the built-in carrel to the opposite end of the room. His own clothing was of low-friction fabric and made little sound. But sheets and blankets, suddenly thrust aside, make their own audio signatures.
'Who's'at?' The light over Fowler's bed winked on, Fowler blinking tousel-headed toward the door. He saw only innocent disarray ahead, did not immediately glance behind him.
The canny Marty Cross had taught Quantrill well. By remaining absolutely still, Quantrill managed to extend the moment to what, subjectively, was almost a geologic era.
Quantrill could not have expressed his need for this first sanctioned kill with words, nor his joy in its approach with song. Here in this moment he could face the specters of slain parents, of friends murdered by panic and by casual bestiality, without apology for his own survival. Here was irresistible justice come to face immovable evil. In his mind, Quantrill had created deaths of Byzantine complexity to fit crimes beyond understanding — but the teachings of Sabado and Lasser urged a quick, clean kill.
Quantrill could not afford to savor the confrontation longer than it took to make identification certain. When he saw Fowler's face, he would fire the gas pen. In the endless heartbeat before that, he was a silent demon of entropy who waited to unwind the clockspring of Fowler's universe, the better to celebrate its last anechoic tick.
Fowler's head snapped around.
The grey mist met him full in the face, his assailant only a blur that muffled him in his bedclothes before he could shout. Quantrill fought to hold Fowler's wrists through the coverlet, lying atop his writhing quarry to prevent signs of violence, waiting out the first ten seconds of Fowler's death struggle. After that, Lasser had assured him, his problem would be over.
But Lasser had not dwelt overmuch on the mechanism of a dying human system, and Quantrill was moved to sorrow by the thin despairing wheeze as the innocent Fowler fought for oxygen he would never use. To Quantrill it seemed that the word, 'Why?' punctuated each gasp.
'You know why,' Quantrill muttered, and fought his pity as well.
When the shudder subsided, Quantrill risked a glance at Fowler's fingernails, saw that they were slate-grey. Then he scurried to the half-bath, flushed the pressure cylinder away, remembered Reardon's dictum that every new instant may bring discovery. A cover story perfect at time one might not work at time two. Quantrill took the fifty dollar bill from his pocket, palmed it. He glanced again toward the thing on the bed, turned out the light, damned his sorrow as weakness, listened at the door before sliding it open to the hall. He heard nothing because Mills had slid his own door open while Fowler's toilet flushed and was still standing there, wondering if Fowler was out after curfew, wondering what use he might make of the fact.
Quantrill slid the door open, found himself staring into a familiar face under a vee of short hair with eyes that stared back unwinking under heavy level brows. He mastered the impulse to attack, essayed a sad little flash of gold teeth. “He said he would be nice to me,' Quantrill almost whispered, and let the banknote show as he stuffed it into his pocket. 'But he was not nice. Me, I think he is sick.' He waited until the door slid shut behind him, slouching as if contrite, dropping his eyes, then shuffling away to the stairwell. The witness had said nothing, but had changed everything. Quantrill knew he must not look back.
Mills almost smiled at the retreating youth. This was a datum worth remembering, he thought; a slice of Fowler's life that Mills had never suspected. There had to be a touch of the sadist in Fowler, too; those had been real tears in the eyes of the little latino.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Sandys jurnal Ap 5 Sat.
Mom says no use crying your lucky to be alive, at least you cant have a baby at your age. Maybe but I hurt down there a lot. I wish it was right to kill, I woud make Profet Jansen burn in hell if there is one. I woud do it while he is asleep, he always fires a little vessel and then sleeps after they raid a temple of false saints like they did in Roswel today. He says it is his godgiven rite. He says a lot of dumb things to make it alright that he is stealing. He tried to give me a dimond ring to make me stop hurting. Id rather have soap to wash his smell away. I wish I coud talk with afreind, somone who likes to make you smile, somone gentle. I wonder where Ted is tonite.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Because Quantrill could not know that Mills had bought the charade, he could not risk staying in the room until dawn. He ran the wig and custodian's clothing through the vacuum cleaner's macerator, pried off the gold caps and removed the contact lenses, washed the pigment from his brows; flushed the debris away in several stages. He almost forgot to swallow the fingerprint masks and strip away the filmy covers that had transformed expensive low-quarter shoes into cheap brogans, but the shredded covers went down the tube as well. He kept the master ID plate in case he had to flee into some other campus building.
Ten minutes later, he exited the basement room leaving only an antistatic vacuum cleaner behind; a sturdy blond youth whose ready cash took him back to Salem on the two AM interurban. En route, he delaminated the ID plate and abraded its card to powder underfoot.
Finally in Salem he allowed himself to contact Control. 'Tau Sector, Tau Sector,' he intoned, and waited. The voiceprint, the staggered frequency, and the key phrase all had to match.
Somewhere in Salem the freq. pattern triggered a relay. Somewhere in Ft. Ord the key phrase alerted a sleepy major in Control. From the unique voiceprint ConCom, the electronic part of Control's gestalt mind, identified the gunsel, Quantrill. By far the longest part of the process was the major's yawn before replying.
The major's voice was processed into the epicene contralto a gunsel was trained to recognize. Implanted critics had been known to pick up bits of stray messages. No human voice, not even castrati, sounded quite like Control's, so that no gunsel would be fooled by accident or countermeasure.
It had not escaped T Section's notice that by reprocessing every Control voice into the same voice, ConCom further removed the element of human contact from a gunsel's work. It was, in several ways, inhuman — which pleased Control immensely.
'Your program is running,' said Control. Always that acceptance phrase, or back to square one.
'Message delivered, Control. Am I clean?'
