The Multiple Man

position at the old Army Chemical Warfare center in Edgewood, Maryland, straight out of college. Then he transferred to Fort Detrick and biological warfare studies: how to use disease as a weapon of war. When Fort Detrick was officially “peacified” and turned into a cancer research center, Pena went right along without changing his line of research in the slightest. By then he was deeply into genetic research, tinkering with the basic chemical of life, the long double-helix molecules that the bio people call DNA.

Not even Solomon’s friends could trace Pena’s career year by year. But shortly after North Lake Labs changed owners—it had started as a dairy research adjunct to the University of Minnesota— Pena showed up there as its new director. The new owner of North Lake Labs? A consortium of businessmen whom I’d never heard of before: small-timers, all of them. Except for the majority owner: Morton J. Halliday, who at that time was neither a general nor a national hero.

North Lake prospered mainly through contracts with the Defense Department. Most of the work was so deeply classified that nobody outside the direct chain-of-command could get an eye on it.

But Solomon got something that might have been almost as good: a personnel roster of the research staff of North Lake, a roster that went back to the labs’ change of ownership some forty-three years earlier. It was a long list, and Solomon had no way of knowing if it was complete. But it was all we had to go on.

* * *

It was evening when I showed up at the Library of Congress, and yet the building was still busy with people. I had always pictured the Library as a musty old place, quiet and slumbering, disturbed only by an occasional Senator who needed a place to get away from his constituents. But the Library was alive, mostly with young people who were eagerly tapping the nation’s storehouse of books, films, tapes, knowledge. Everything and anything was on tap in the Library’s computerized memory files. This was the real information center of the nation.

It took me damned near an hour to find Vickie inside that building. She had told me the number of the room she had reserved under her own name. But I was reluctant to go blundering through the place asking questions, leaving a trail that could be followed blindfolded.

So I wandered through the high-ceilinged reading rooms, marble hallways that echoed my foot-falls, long rows of reading booths where video screens flickered with page after page of the nation’s treasure house of books while intent young students or Congressional aides studied and copied down notes, somber-faced and greenish in the light from the electronic screens.

I even wandered into the computer center, down in the first subbasement, by mistake. The machine was so damned vast that I couldn’t see the end of it; just bank after bank of man-tall consoles humming and blinking, right on down an entire level of the Library’s underground labyrinth.

No one was there except a pleasant-looking young woman who looked up from her control desk and saw me standing there, gawking stupidly under the glareless ceiling light panels that seemed to stretch off to infinity. She got up from her desk and walked over to me. She was wearing jeans and a pullover sweater; it was quite cool down there. With a no-nonsense smile she asked me where I was going. I tried to sound like a bewildered Midwestern tourist and succeeded only in sounding bewildered. I gave her a room number on a different level and she gave me polite instructions. She punched the wall button behind me, the elevator door slid open, and she bade me a polite but firm good-by. She was very protective of that mammoth computer.

I finally found Vickie, and Hank was already with her. The room was only one level above the computer area, still underground and windowless. It was a small reading room, furnished with two chairs and a picture screen sitting on a tiny desk, soundproofed in that funny airless way that makes it feel as if somebody’s holding his hands over your ears.

Hank started to get up and offer me his seat, but I told him to stay where he was. I’d been sitting all damned day; it felt good to give my butt a rest. But the room was small, too small for three people, and as I leaned my shoulder against the thin plywood of the door I felt just the slightest bit trapped, claustrophobic.

“Okay, Vickie,” I said, trying to override my inner tension, “this is your show. What’d you call us here for?”

She was wearing a miniskirt and a loose blouse, open at the throat. Hank had already taken a more than professional interest in keeping an eye on her. He had doffed his “business” suit in favor of a faded denim jacket and corduroy slacks—made him look more like an unkempt perennial student than a Secret Service agent. Except for his hair, which was too long for a modern student’s. He was even smoking. Synthetic tobacco, from the perfumy smell of it. Noncarcinogenic, according to the corporate advertising claims. The air conditioning sucked the smoke up into a ceiling vent.

Vickie tapped the computer readout screen with a fingernail.

“We’ve all been trying to get information to-gether about Dr. Pena and North Lake Labs…”

“Maybe we oughta put General Halliday on our list,” Hank suggested. “Him and those friends o’ his that helped him buy North Lake.”

“I’ve already done that,” Vickie said, very professionally competent. “I took their biographies from a Who’s Who and other references before you two showed up.”

“Okay, so we’ve got a pile of biographical information,” I said. “I don’t see how that helps us to find out who’s doing what to whom. And that’s our real goal.”

“Our first goal,” Hank said, squinting narrow-eyed at me, past the cigarette smoke, “our real objective, is t’ set things straight after we find out who’s doin’ what.”

“If we can,” I said.

He nodded grimly, and I caught a mental flash of Hank gunning down, Western style with blazing revolvers, whoever had killed McMurtrie. It was a personal matter with him.

Vickie resumed. “We have access to an enormous amount of information here. This computer can tell us almost anything—”

“Except what we want to know,” I said.

“Wrong.” She had a very serious look on her face, but there was something else going on behind those sea-green eyes. She was excited, anticipating.

“Wrong?” I echoed.

“Wrong,” she confirmed. “This computer can do something more for us. It can correlate all the information we have, find the connections, pull out the key links for us…”

Hank was skeptical. “You mean a computer can go through a pile of information and find out what’s important to us and toss away th’ rest? Like a human detective?”

“Not quite,” Vickie said, “but close enough. See, this is a specialized computer. It’s programmed to serve the needs of the people who use the Library of Congress. People come here with a few scraps of information and ask the computer for help in finding more, just as they’d ask a librarian.”

“And yore sayin’ that a librarian works like a detective?” Hank didn’t believe a word of it.

Vickie answered, “Sort of. You give a librarian a few clues and she’ll usually be able to find what you’re looking for. This computer,” she tapped the screen again, “will do the same thing. Only better, faster, and with a much bigger memory than any human librarian has.”

Hank just shook his head.

I said, “So you’re saying that if we feed the computer all the information we have, it can point out the connections—”

“That’s right,” Vickie answered, bobbing her head vigorously enough to make her golden hair jounce prettily.

“I’m not sure…”

“You’re an ex-newspaper reporter,” Vickie said to me. “Your method of getting information is to grab people by the neck and fire questions at them. I’m a researcher. I find information by going through records, dealing with computers and librarians and reference books. Your way hasn’t produced very much, boss. Not yet, anyway. I want to try my method.”

“With an electronic detective,” Hank added, still skeptical.