“That’s no trouble,” I replied. “The company dispensary keeps some around. I can steal it pretty easy.”
“Why bother?” she asked me, and pulled a small magnakey from her pocket “We always carry a small supply on the boats.”
I not only could have kissed her, I did.
“But what good’s nuraform?” Sanda asked. “I mean, you can’t switch with it, and if somebody’s knocked out with it they’ll know.”
“Not if they’re asleep,” I told her. “Look, let’s go on to other phases of this operation. What about the chips?”
“He took the job,” Sanda told me, “although it required some real haggling, and I had to do a lot of squirming. I also had to borrow Marga’s body to get in there, so I’m really going to have to find something to get her.”
“You figure that out and I’ll get it,” I assured her. “Now—when will you have them?’
“Tuesday. He was pretty firm about that, no matter what. I can send a messenger then, because it’s prepaid.”
“Okay. I’ll need ’em Tuesday evening, and I’ll drop down to pick them up. We’re looking good—fewer hitches than I’d ever dreamed. You can do wonders when you’re doing a duty deed for the boss. The amount of information I’ve gotten would have taken a year of hard and risky work.”
“I still say you’re crazy and this plan’s insane,” Dylan said, shaking her head. “It’s so crazy and so complicated it can’t possibly work.”
“You think they make this kind of operation easy? Look, every corporation president, every syndicate boss, got where he was by doing the insane and crooked thing at just the right time. Even with that, their investigators will know they’ve been had. Within two weeks they’ll have figured out how it was done—although, hopefully, not who did it, since I’m not even the one getting rewarded at the end but pastured instead. No, they’ll come up with the right solution, all right, but the scheme is so crazy they won’t believe it themselves, and that’ll stop that. As for its being complicated—yes, I don’t like that. The more complicated something is, the more likely it is to go wrong. But at least there are provisions almost to the end to back out at any point, so if we do our jobs properly there’s minimal risk of getting caught. Don’t worry about that part—just worry about your own.”
“I am,” Dylan responded glumly.
“Look, let’s go through the key rehearsal now. Just think about this, both of you. If it works, you, Dylan, will have your own boat under nobody’s supervision and no real worries—independent and secure. And you, Sanda, I promise—if all goes as planned, we’re going to liberate you from the motherhood and do it so slickly that nobody will bat an eyelash. If you can be patient and not jump the gun, the three of us might wind up running this damned world in a couple of years.”
Neither of them believed that, but they believed in me and that was enough. It usually was. Only this time, for a change, I wasn’t just pulling a con to set up a mission. I really meant business.
“Now, let’s see what sort of hypnotic subjects you are,” I said.
Sanda went under quickly and easily. Dylan resisted somewhat, and I could understand why and sympathize with her. After a long struggle she was who and what she wanted to be. Hypnosis was a threat to that. It took a good deal of smooth and soothing talk finally to get her to the point where she was willing.
Sanda had romance to gain and absolutely nothing to lose in this whole business—if we weren’t caught on the spot. Dylan, on the other hand, had relatively little to gain but was risking all that she held dear in this business. She was’n’t really doing this for herself, but for me, and I knew it.
I knew the routine well from past operations and had had a lot of practice. I’d also used Tooker’s computers to do a lot of medical research on exactly how to handle this particular ticklish business, but actually doing so would not be easy.
Being there alone in a boat lounge with two attractive women in deep hypnosis was something of a kinky turn-on, but that feeling passed in a minute. This was business. In the Confederacy there were drugs and devices that could do this much better. But I was prevented from using the first by the Warden organism and didn’t have access to the second. That’s why we learned hypnosis from the start. You never had the right stuff around when you really needed it.
They both seemed to be asleep in their chairs, and I went over to Dylan first. “Dylan, you will listen to my voice and nothing else, listen and trust me and do exactly as I say. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Sleepily, faraway.
“Answer my questions truthfully, Dylan.”
“I will.”
“Would you ever betray me or my mission?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Dylan, why are you willing to do this?”
“Because you want it.”
“But why is that so important? Why should you take risks for me?”
“Because I—”
“Yes?”
“I think I love you.”
Love. A fascinating word and feeling. One I had used many times but still didn’t quite understand myself. Certainly love was usually an abstract concept on Cerberus.
“You do love me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Very much. Very deeply. More than you’ve ever loved anyone, more than you love yourself.”
“Yes.”
“You would trust me with your body, even your life.”
“Yes.”
“And I could trust you with my body, my life.”
“You could.”
I moved over to Sanda and repeated some of the process.
“Would you betray us or our mission?”
“No,” she assured me. “Never.”
“Have you told anyone in the House about this?”
“No.”
“Has anyone there suspected you were up to something? Asked questions?”
“One or two.”
“And what did you tell them?”
“I said I was in love with you and that you were in love with me.”
“Did they believe you and press no more?”
“They were envious,” she told me. “They ask me about you.”
“And what do you tell them?”
“I tell them you came from Outside and you work for Tooker.”
“And what else?”
The next segment was more than a little embarrassing to me personally. The romantic fantasies this lonely and bored young woman had concocted were graphic and hard to believe, and the image of me as someone approaching godhood was beyond any technique I’d ever studied. Still, it was satisfactory. They would understand those fantasies for what they were and put down a lot of her nervous excitement to meeting me.
Her emotional patterns were at once simpler and more complex than Dylan’s or the average person’s. She loved, truly loved, Dylan, but she worshiped me.
Confederacy agents are born and bred to their jobs and are as perfect as the biological and social sciences can make them for doing whatever needs to be done.
As a youngster in the game I’d been amazed at how easily people could be turned, how malleable they were in emotions and will if only the right words were said at the right times, the right buttons pushed. It was something I’d never really thought about, something that came almost instinctively. Even now it still amazed me. Two women were in love with me and were willing to risk their necks and who knew what else for me.
Even when they knew,as Dylan knew, they still went along. And yet standing there looking at the two women, I felt something that I had never really felt before, the stirrings of care, of concern, of real affection and approciation for these two. Perhaps, I reflected, not quite understanding myself, I too could love. But business came first.