“Wait a minute, I’ll ask.” He heard her voice repeating the question; then there was a long pause. Eventually she said, “Young, tall, thin, brown hair.”
“Okay.” Trilling punched off and looked around. He could see a little group of maintenance people not far away, and one or two others glimpsed between bodies, but the crowd was too thick to see more, and his eyes were watering. This would have to happen on a day when he really ought to be in bed with a hot toddy. He punched for Owen’s office, got a simulation. “This is Drillig. Gimme Mr. Corcorad, blease.”
“By Corcorad do you mean Corcoran?”
“Yes, dabbid!”
“One moment.” He waited, fuming.
“Corcoran,” said a voice.
“Jib, we have an ebergency. Ask the computer to flag a maintenance worker named Charles Wilson—got that?” As he spoke, he was working his way back out of the crowd. He spotted two of his own people and beckoned them over.
“Charles Wilson,” said Corcoran.
“Right, and tell me where he is dow.”
“Probably on the Sports Deck.”
“Hell! I mean exagly where he is. And for God’s sake hurry.”
19
The two guards were Murray Siever and Jane Goodwright. Covering the pickup, he said, “A maidedance man named Charles Wilson.
He’s been killig children with a poisoned ring, if you can believe it.” Their faces expressed shock and excitement.
Corcoran’s voice said, “He’s in front of the dais on the left-hand side, near the entrance to the tennis courts. What’s he done?”
Without bothering to answer, Trilling punched off and said, “Did you get that?”
Both guards nodded.
“Okay, let’s get him, and be dabbed careful aboud that ring.”
As the crowd gathered around the elevators, a man in a blue Maintenance coverall found himself next to a little black girl. He bent down a little. “How old are you, sweetheart?”
She looked up shyly. “Three and a half.”
“What’s your name?”
“Marion.”
“My name is Charlie. Nice to meet you, Marion.” He put out his hand, but before the girl could take it two Wackenhuts grabbed his arms and wrestled them behind his back. They velcroed him, made him kneel with his head down, and then very carefully, using heavy gloves, removed the ring from his finger.
Late that afternoon, after Owen had dealt with the media and the department, she called Trilling in. “Mac,” she said, “as you certainly know, I’m completely grateful to you. You’re not going to get any medals, I’m afraid, but I’ll put something in your personnel file that will make you blush. Now I think we should put our heads together and tty to decide how something like this could happen. What can we do to prevent it in the future?”
“Not much,” said Trilling. “We have a certain amoud of irreducible turnover in service personnel. If adybody seriously wants to penetrade us, they can do it. The only way to guard against that would be to have a permadent staff and never let adybody else onboard, and even then a deterbid antagonist could do us great harm.”
“How?”
“Oh—a dozen ways. Aircraft. Missiles. Frogmen. Poison in food. We’re conspicuous and we’re vulderable. We have this feelig of isolation which perhaps is bad for us, because it gives us a false sense, if you’ll excuse be, of security.”
“So it could happen again, at any time?”
“Yes, it could. As a professional matter, I would undertake to do it myself.”
After a moment Owen said, “What’s gone wrong with us, that we can talk this way about the murder of children?”
Trilling smiled ruefully. “Whatever it was, dear lady, it took blace a long time ago.”
“Thank you, Mac. Go home now, and take care of that cold.”
When he was gone, she told Mitzi to hold her calls and sat with hands folded. What haunted her was the thought that if she had not gathered these children together on CV and made them a target in the first place, the two murdered ones would still be alive.
Yes, of course, there were unavoidable risks in every experiment. Even in building a bridge or a highway, planners always allowed for a certain percentage of fatalities. If you had to know in advance who those people were going to be; how it would affect their spouses and children, you would never do it. But when they were just a percentage, a statistic in the charts, that was acceptable because it was random. And you wrote letters to the survivors.
It was true that you had to accept these deaths, or necessary work would never be done. She had faced that years ago and accepted it; why was it giving her so much anguish now?
She knew, although she couldn’t prove it, that the assassin had been sent to CV under President Draffy’s direction or with his approval. Draffy was no longer entirely sane, of course, but after all he too was trying to destroy a few human lives for the greater benefit of all. It was even possible that he was right. That was what she couldn’t swallow.
There was a passage in Koestler that she remembered reading as an undergraduate; it had seemed then to sum up all that she believed about human experimentation. She said, “Mitzi, can you find me a passage in Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler? Something about a dog licking the hand of the experimenter.”
“Is this it?” The paragraph came up on the flatscreen:
“Have you ever read brochures of an anti-vivisectionist society? They are shattering and heartbreaking; when one reads how some poor cur which has had its liver cut out, whines and licks his tormentor’s hands, one is just as nauseated as you were tonight. But if these people had their way, we would have no serums against cholera, typhoid, or diphtheria ...”
Yes, that was it, and it was reassuring, and yet she still felt uneasy. “Back a page,” she said. She was beginning to remember the novel now; this scene was part of the interrogation of the apostate Rubashov by Ivanov, the inquisitor who wanted to save Rubashov’s life by bringing him back to reason. “What has changed you that you are now as pernickety as an old maid?” he asked. A pointless insult, but then Ivanov was a sexist, and probably Koestler too, both with the same excuse—like all the other sexists, they were the products of their time. Farther down, another passage caught her eye:
“Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to be foreseen, and hence all action is evil?”
Good; now that was exactly right. Then another passage:
“Every year several million people are killed quite pointlessly by epidemics and other natural catastrophes. And we should shrink from sacrificing a few hundred thousand for the most promising experiment in history?”
Wait a minute. Ivanov was talking about the Soviet experiment, a pseudoscientific disaster; she felt intuitively that the argument was wrong, but where was the error?
Again:
“Yes, we liquidated the parasitic part of the peasantry and let it die of starvation. It was a surgical operation which had to be done once and for all; but in the good old days before the Revolution just as many died in any dry year—only senselessly and pointlessly. The victims of the Yellow River floods in China amount sometimes to hundreds of thousands. Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself?”
Now she began to see the root of her uneasiness. The argument was a diabolical sophistry; first it personified “Nature,” and then it assumed a “mankind” which could experiment on itself, instead of individual human beings who could experiment on each other.