The Multiple Man

House and they found him collapsed at his desk. The body was still warm.”

Suddenly I was on my feet. “Somebody’s methodically killing each one of them.”

But the General grabbed my wrist and yanked me back down to my chair. “Stop looking for plots under every piece of furniture, dammit!”

“But…”

“Look at me,” he commanded. “Do you think for one instant that if I thought somebody was killing my sons, my son, I’d sit here and let the bastards get away with it? Or the President would allow his own brothers to be murdered without finding out who was doing it and nailing him? Do you think this planet’s big enough for such a murderer to hide in? It’s not.”

Finally I was beginning to understand why the President had kept the investigation so small, so tightly secret. It was a family affair, and no outsiders were wanted or needed.

“But what’s killing them?”

“They’re dying of the same thing that killed Jesse, in infancy. Somehow… and he looked at Dr. Pena as he spoke, “somehow their immunological systems are breaking down. Their bodies can’t protect them from germs or viruses. Their biochemistry is screwed up and they die from the slightest infection… anything, a scratch, a common cold could kill them. Somebody sneezing in the same room.”

A clatter made me turn back to the doctor. He had let the oxygen mask fall to the floor.

“No,” he said, as strongly as he could. It was only a harsh whisper. “That is not true! They are not… it cannot be true.”

“Alfonso, nobody’s blaming you…”

Dr. Pena shook his head from side to side. “No, my old friend. You do not understand. We have checked. We have performed tests. The immune defenses of the body… do not suddenly disappear… They cannot.”

The General went to his side. “Now don’t excite yourself.”

“But… you must listen!” Pena could barely get enough breath into him to wheeze out the words. He lifted one frail hand and pointed at me. “He…he is more correct… than you are. They…they are not just dying… they are being killed… murdered…”

“But how?” the General demanded. “You said yourself that there was no sign of violence. No poison. The deaths were from infections… they were natural. Natural!”

“No.” The doctor’s voice seemed to be coming from far away. “They… are being… murdered.”

His head lolled back. His mouth sagged open. His chest stopped heaving. General Halliday looked up at me, and damned if there weren’t tears in his eyes.

FOURTEEN

Only twice in my life have people close to me died. Both times by chance I was out of town when it happened. And I stayed away. I avoided the wakes, the funerals, the sobbing relatives and somber friends. It all seemed so pointless, so futile. Maybe I was scared, deep inside. Maybe I saw myself in the coffin, or was afraidI would.

I stayed for Pena’s funeral. I’m not sure why, but I stayed. The General’s people did it all very swiftly and efficiently. The old man was buried in the woods behind the General’s main house. They had to clear off the thinning layer of snow that was still on the ground to dig the grave. The soil was frozen; the digging was hard work.

It was a very small band of mourners. The General, Robert Wyatt, a few of the General’s hired hands, Peter Thornton from North Lake—trying not to look pleased that he was now in charge of the lab—and me.

And the President.

A local minister said a few hushed words and they lowered Pena’s coffin into the ground. I knew instinctively that there were already three other graves under the snow, with flat little markers that said “J. J. Halliday.” A fourth one would be dug soon.

That night the General, Wyatt, the President, and I ate a quiet dinner together. Thornton had flown back to Minnesota immediately after the burial service. The President turned out to be James Jeffrey, the specialist in defense policy.

I still couldn’t quite get it through my skull that he was one of eight identical clone brothers; one of four remaining brothers. Hell, he was the President! Every bone, every fold of skin, every gesture, every nuance of voice: the President. His eyes, the way his hair flopped over his forehead, the kind of grin he gave me as he kidded me about reading the old Watergate tapes for a lesson in how not to cover up a White House secret. He was the President, the only one I’d known. There couldn’t be another one just like him. My brain and guts and soul refused to accept the idea. He couldn’t be one of a set of eight. Or seven. Or four. We were pretty somber as we sat down to eat in the oak-paneled dining room. But as that same robot-like Oriental butler served us steaks, Jeffrey began telling his father about the arguments he had been having with his brothers over the Iran-Kuwait war.

“We’ve got to be ready to go in there,” he said fervently, “in force. We’ve got to be able to protect our own interests.”

The General nodded agreement. I worked on my steak and kept quiet.

“But do you think Johnny understands that?” Jeffrey grumbled. “He’s more worried about losing a few votes in Congress than losing the whole Middle East.”

“John knows the political infighting,” the General said. “If he doesn’t think…”

“I’ve made my own assessment of the politics,” Jeffrey interrupted. “I’ve dealt with the Senate committees. And the House, too. I could swing the Hill, if John would give me a chance to try.”

The General looked up from his plate. “It’s John’s job to make the political decisions. If he thinks the Congress would block you, you’d better go along with his estimate of the situation.” Jeffrey cocked his head slightly to one side. Just like the President. Dummy! I hollered at myself. He isthe President. One-eighth of the Presidency, at least.

With that smile I knew so well, the smile that meant he was going to say something unpleasant but didn’t want you to get upset about it, Jeffrey answered his father. “I don’t think John’s qualified to make this decision. He doesn’t understand the details of the military situation as well as I do. Nor the economic situation, for that matter.”

They discussed—or argued, depending on your boil-over threshold—the situation right through dessert. Just a quiet little family debate. Like father and son arguing over who’s going to use the family car tonight. Except that the son was the President of the United States, the subject was whether or not we will enter the Iran-Kuwait war, and the men he was arguing against were his identical clone brothers who were back in Washington.

My brain was telling me that I had to accept the reality of the situation. But the rest of me still didn’t want to deal with it. You can know something is true, intellectually, and accept it and even deal with the reality as part of your world-view, on which you base your work. But that doesn’t mean you believe it’s true, down at the deepest level of your existence. Inside me, in that special subbasement where I keep all my old Sunday school lessons and nightmare terrors and fantasy desires, down there the real, secret, deepest me hadn’t yet accepted what my brain had already filed away in one of its neat little storage cabinets. I knew the President had been cloned, and there were four identical brothers in the White House. I knew there had been seven, up to a few months ago. I knew it.

But I didn’t believe it.

I flew back to Washington that night in one of the General’s private supersonic jets with the President. We sat side by side in the most luxurious reclining chairs I’d ever flown in, and watched the television screen built into the forward bulkhead of the passenger compartment. The President was delivering a speech, live, from the White House. He was signing the new Economic Incentives Act, and taking the opportunity to coax the Congress for even more action on his domestic programs.

At forty-two thousand feet above the prairie wheat basket of the nation, I sat beside the President and watched the President on TV, live.

“…and although this act will go a long way toward turning urban adults into taxpaying, productive citizens