“I don’t understand the question Mr. Peripart Sir,” the jump boat said.
That was a bizarre response; usually you only hear it when children are playing nasty games like asking a robot the meaning of life or what’s the difference between a duck. “Was fuel delivered anytime after our arrival here this morning, either before or after your flight to Saigon?” It was a long shot, because the low tanks indicated probably not, but it was always just possible that whoever had been monkeying with my jump boat might have bought fuel and therefore created a traceable transaction.
“I don’t understand the question Mr. Peripart Sir,” the jump boat said, again.
I was beginning to get a prickly feeling on the back of my neck. It’s one thing to think that your boat might have been used by a smuggler—you read about that stuff in the papers all the time. Or even a spy making an untraceable flight—everyone knew those happened. It would be annoying and frightening enough even if it had just been taken by someone who went somewhere with it and then brought it back, hoping I wouldn’t notice what had happened. But if so, why didn’t he top up the tank, and thus conceal the situation completely?
This was something else again. They didn’t buy fuel to conceal their flight, and yet they had the resources to fake my voice print. Now it looked like they had tampered somehow with the robot’s memory, which meant they’d done a hell of a lot more than just take a joyride—and also meant I’d be checking this thing out for at least an hour before I could feel safe taking off. If I called the Dutch Reich port authorities, they had much better equipment than I did and could quickly get going on the problem of who had done what, and how much of it, to my jump boat’s brain.
But this case was weird, and anywhere in the Twelve Reichs, presenting the cops with something weird was a very bad idea. They were apt to decide that everyone associated with it, most especially including you, needed to be held for sustained questioning, and that you must surely have done something or you wouldn’t be associated with anything weird. A century after Hitler’s death, the old Nazi ideal of absolute purity had faded into the easier notion of rigid conventionality. It made them easier to live with but no more attractive.
Since I wasn’t going to the police, I was going to have to check out and overhaul the thing myself, and the sooner I started the sooner I’d be done. Naturally I began with the brain—if I could trust that, I could use it to check everything else out. Groaning with the thought of how long it would take, I pulled out the manual, sat down in a stool by the pilot’s chair, detached the chair, and opened up the half-dome that covered the protected inputs for the brain.
Twenty minutes later I had established that whatever had been done had been done at the deep, hardcoded level, which is supposed to be impossible anywhere except the factory, and requires many specialized tools and a full set of hard-to-get access codes. Logically, then, as my hypothetical spy, robber, or joyrider, I had to imagine someone who had technical skills enough to steal any craft in the harbor but chose a middle-priced jump boat. Whoever it was then boldly took my boat for a joyride, and somehow forgot to gas up to cover what he’d done.
An hour of hand-confirming each readout showed that the brain was just fine in its perceptions. I got the tank topped up by a robot tanker while I was working on the brain. Finally I recorded the recent memories, told the boat to do a restart—and found that it no longer remembered its side trip, or being refueled, or anything between landing here in the harbor and waking up just now. The unknown genius joyrider had covered his tracks with a restart-activated self-erasing memory editor— which had worked perfectly—but hadn’t bothered to buy two-thirds of a tank of fuel. It was one hell of an annoying anticlimax.
At least, since the brain was now fine, it could run the other checkouts, so I had it do them. Now very late and exasperated, I was on the brink of buttoning the jump boat up and scheduling a departure when the phone rang. It was Helen. “I just heard,” she says. “This is wonderful!”
“You really think so?”
“You don’t sound happy.”
I told her what had happened; the job offer, of course, but also the threatening note and the mystery joyride that someone had taken my jump boat on.
“But...” she finally said. “But... Lyle, are you feeling all right?”
“Why?”
“Because early this morning, when my liner landed in Surabaya for a stopover, you called me up and said your interview with Iphwin wasn’t until later, so you offered to take me over to Saigon and drop me off at the imperial landing, by the shopping center. You said you had a standing permission to use it or something. So you flew me over here, and I’ve been shopping ever since, and when I got back to our hotel room—where I’m expecting you to turn up sooner or later, laddie—I found a message from Geoffrey Iphwin saying he’d hired you. So I called you up at once—he did hire you, didn’t he?”
“He did,” I said, sitting back in the pilot’s chair. “And I called you on the liner to let you know.”
“But I didn’t take the liner; you took me over here.”
“Also, my meeting with him was at the regular time,” I continued.
“Well, that isn’t true either, or anyway it isn’t what you said.”
My head ached. “Anyway, you are at the Royal Saigon Hotel in Saigon, right?”
“Right. We can sort it all out, I’m sure, as long as you’re all right. You haven’t been feeling dizzy or confused, or anything, have you?”
“Not till just now.”
I could tell she was worried about me, and so was I; it appeared that I had some kind of severe temporary amnesia— except that I couldn’t have been interviewing with Iphwin and running Helen over to Saigon at the same time. After we rang off I ran a quick check from the communication computer on board, and it was absolutely clear—I was hired at ConTech on exactly the terms Iphwin had specified, right at the time I remembered it happening.
Oh, well, at least I would get to spend an interesting weekend. The Royal Saigon was eighty years old, built in the 1980s to commemorate the formal crowning of whichever junior branch of the Japanese Imperial line had just been picked to run Cochin-China, one of the many little chunks broken off of the old French colony of Indochina. The Imperial House had never been noted for its taste anyway, and perhaps the junior branches had even less esthetic judgment, for the Royal Saigon was as gaudy as possible, decorated with hundreds of statues and thousands of bas-reliefs of lions, absolutely none of which appeared to be even faintly Cochin-Chinese. There were Siamese lions, Bengal lions, Punjabi lions, Ceylonese lions—every kind of lion except anything from Cochin-China or Annam. But if you could endure the color and the busy sculpture, there were consolations— spectacularly sumptuous bedroom suites, the sort of place where you take a girl when you’re really hoping to do something stranger than you’ve ever done before, which might just be what would happen with Helen, given the way the weekend was going.
I turned back to getting permission to pull out of the harbor. A voice from the hatchway above and behind me—a deep woman’s voice that sounded like she’d lived all her life on cheap whiskey and cheaper cigars—said, “Forget it. When Iphwin decides to fuck with your brain, he fucks it so hard that it never goes straight again.”
My first thought was that the woman coming in through my upper hatch was a harbor whore looking to trade sex for a ride to somewhere—she had coarse bleached-blonde hair, bright red lipstick, the telltale scars of a facelift, near-black eye shadow. Her breasts had probably been modified too since they stuck out like torpedoes through her pink sweater. Her skirt, too short and too tight, revealed too much leg, making the varicose veins apparent. She had to be sixty, at least. She walked over to my chair, stood over me, and said, “May I come in?”