The Multiple Man

“Because I have no opinions!”

“Suppose I asked you if the man sitting in the White House this morning is actually James J. Halliday?”

His breath caught on that one.

I stepped closer to him. “Is one of those… corpses… the President?”

He glanced at Thornton, then back to me. “I can only tell you that each of those corpses looks exactly like the President. Same height, same weight. Same fingerprints, retinal patterns, ear-lobe structure, cephalic index. Every physical determinant I have measured is precisely the same as the records Dr. Klienerman gave me for the President.”

“Fingerprints,” I echoed.

“Everything,” he repeated. “They are physically identical to each other and tothe President. They are not machines, not automata or plastic creations. They are completely human, as human as you or I. More human than I am, considering…”

“Who could produce such exact duplicates?”

Dr. Pena was silent on that one.

“Well… what killed them?” I asked.

His head sank onto his chest. His eyes closed. Thornton stepped between us. “I told you not to tax him too far.”

But Pena waved a feeble hand. “No… it is all right. I’m perfectly capable of… answering him.”

“You should be resting,” Thornton insisted.

“What killed them?” I asked again.

He gave a one-gasp laugh, a nasty accusative little snort. “What killed them? A very good question.An excellent question.”

“Well? What did?”

He looked up at me, his eyes glittering with pain or hate or maybe both. “Nothing killed them. Nothing at all. No marks of violence. No poison. Not even asphyxiation. They simply died. Like marionettes whose strings have been cut. They simply fell down and… died.”

SEVEN

All the way on the flight from Minneapolis to Denver I nibbled on Dr. Pena’s words.Nothing killed them… they just fell down and… died. Cause of death: unknown. They just stopped living. Two adult human males who looked exactly like the President of the United States. Each died within a hundred yards of the real President. Each died of—nothing.

I was out of my league and I knew it. But something stubborn in me (or maybe something scared witless) told me to follow McMurtrie’s trail. McMurtrie knew what he was doing. If he had gone to Aspen to see General Halliday, that’s where I was going, too.

It’s hard to believe that Aspen was once a center of the youth cult. The old city had begun as a silver miners’ boom town, then rusticated for a long while, and then had become a ski resort. Kids from all over the country flocked there a couple of generations ago, to ski and loaf in the winter snows and summer sunshine. Easy living. But all things change. The kids grew up, started businesses, got respectable. Aspen became a very exclusive resort, especially after Colorado followed Nevada’s lead and legalized gambling and prostitution.

Funny. Old Las Vegas had become a ghost town after the Shortage Riots of the nineties. It was really a defenseless city. When Dahlgren led his army of unemployed against the “temples of sin and gold,” as he evangelistically put it, they burned the casinos and hotels to the ground. When they tried the following year to sack Denver, Morton J. Halliday, an obscure colonel in the Colorado National Guard, became a national hero. He saved Denver from the mob. He faced them down with trained, disciplined troops. And then he fed them, put them to work rebuilding the damage they had done in Pueblo and Albuquerque, and became the first honest-to-god hero this nation had seen since Sirica.

So now Aspen was a stronghold of the rich and the elderly, a bastion of wealthy and quiet luxurious living tucked among the mighty guardian peaks of the Rockies. Las Vegas was this generation’s youth center; kids lived out on the desert in communes all around the burned-out Strip, using the still-functioning solar power stations to pump up water from the deep wells.

Flying into Aspen had never improved much from the earliest days. You still had to bounce through the rough mountain air, lurching every which way while the plane’s entertainment tape fed you P.R. garbage about how “the clear air makes the peaks seem much closer than they actually are.”

I had white knuckles and sweaty palms all through the forty-minute flight. By the time we landed, my stomach was in a mess. It calmed down a bit on the taxi ride to the Halliday enclave. You didn’t just drop in on General Halliday. Not even if you worked in the White House. He ruled this area—the whole state of Colorado, in fact—from his mansion on Red Peak—the Western White House, when his son was home. When James J. had first become governor of Colorado, most political pundits had assumed that he was just a front man for his powerful father. They got several stunning surprises when James proved to be his own man. You couldn’t predict the Governor’s behavior by finding out what the General wanted. This caused some towering arguments between them. I’d seen a few that raged from cocktails through dawn.

The taxi dropped me off at the gate house, a solid stone, pitched roof, four-story building that could have held a couple of Swiss chalets and Fort Apache inside it. Actually, it quartered most of the General’s security staff. Many of the older men had been the scared young troopers who’d made a hero out of the General back in Denver. And there was enough new blood to take on the state police, it seemed to me.

A helicopter droned past as I crunched along the gravel walkway up to the guardhouse’s front door. The reception area was sliced into two spaces: a small lobby just inside the door, where visitors stand, and, on the other side of a transparent bulletproof screen, a much larger area staffed mostly by women sitting at desks, phone switchboards, and television monitoring devices.

The girl at the desk closest to the partition looked up as the door closed silently behind me.

“Yessir, can I help you?” She had a pleasant smile, the kind they teach you in those schools that specialize in getting ahead in the world.

I told her my name, and she recognized who I was almost instantly. The “almost” was a glance at the little computer screen on her desk. Fast computer, with deep personnel files.

It took only a few minutes for her to phone the main house, then smile up at me again and tell me that a car would pick me up outside in a few minutes. I thanked her and went outside to bask in the spring sunshine.

Snow was still banked deep around the building, but the sun was warm and birds were chirping cheerfully in the newly leafing trees. I walked across the cleared gravel-covered parking area to the lip of the trail. You could see the whole valley from up here, sparkling in the snow like a picture in a tourist brochure. The air was clear, and clean. I remembered nights up here when I had first started working for The Man, going out for long walks with him. We’d start out talking about R D policy and end up stargazing.

The car came and I was driven to the main house. The driver took me inside and ushered me into a library: dark woods; ceiling-high bookshelves covering three walls, except for a stone fireplace; windows on the fourth wall overlooking a pine forest. The fireplace was empty, although the room was comfortably warm. I paced between the easy chairs in front of the hearth and the couch alongside the windows.

The door opened, and Robert Wyatt stepped into the room. I felt my mouth open in surprise.

“I thought you were in Washington.”

He looked annoyed, thin lips pressed tight. “I could say the same for you.”

“I’m looking for McMurtrie. I told the woman at the gate house that he’s the one I want to see.”

“Too late,” His Holiness said.

My stomach clenched. “What do you mean?”

“He just ’coptered out of here, going back to Denver and then to Washington.”

For a few heartbeats we stood facing each other, me by the windows, His Holiness across the room, only three paces from the door. Between us was a Persian carpet, glowing red and gold where the sun streaked across it.