Jason said sardonically, “The church of my choice is the free, open world.”
After that there was silence, except for the noisy clatter of the quibble’s engine, and Ruth Rae’s whimpering.
14
Twenty minutes later the police quibble van landed on the roof of the Los Angeles Police Academy building.
Stiffly, Jason Taverner stepped out, looked warily around, smelled smog-saturated foul air, saw above him once again the yellowness of the largest city in North America … he turned to help Ruth Rae out, but the friendly young Jesus-freak pol had done that already.
Around them a group of Los Angeles pols gathered, interested. They seemed relaxed, curious, and cheerful. Jason saw no malice in any of them and he thought, When they have you they are kind. It is only in netting you that they are venomous and cruel. Because then there is the possibility that you might get away. And here, now, there is no such possibility.
“Did he make any suicide tries?” a L.A. sergeant asked the Jesus-freak pol.
“No, sir.”
So that was why he had ridden there.
It hadn’t even occurred to Jason, and probably not to Ruth Rae either … except perhaps as a heavy, shucky gesture, thought of but never really considered.
“Okay,” the L.A. sergeant said to the Las Vegas pol team. “From here on in we’ll formally take over custody of the two suspects.”
The Las Vegas pols hopped back into their van and it zoomed off into the sky, back to Nevada.
“This way,” the sergeant said, with a sharp motion of his hand in the direction of the descent sphincter tube. The L.A. pols seemed to Jason a little grosser, a little tougher and older, than the Las Vegas ones. Or perhaps it was his imagination; perhaps it meant only an increase in his own fear.
What do you say to a police general? Jason wondered. Especially when all your theories and explanations about yourself have worn out, when you know nothing, believe nothing, and the rest is obscure. Aw, the hell with it, he decided wearily, and allowed himself to drop virtually weightlessly down the tube, along with the pols and Ruth Rae.
At the fourteenth floor they exited from the tube.
A man stood facing them, well dressed, with rimless glasses, a topcoat over his arm, pointed leather Oxfords, and, Jason noted, two gold-capped teeth. A man, he guessed, in his mid-fifties. A tall, gray-haired, upright man, with an expression of authentic warmth on his excellently proportioned aristocratic face. He did not look like a pol.
“You are Jason Taverner?” the man inquired. He extended his hand; reflexively, Jason accepted it and shook. To Ruth, the police general said, “You may go downstairs. I’ll interview you later. Right now it’s Mr. Taverner I want to talk to.”
The pols led Ruth off; he could hear her complaining her way out of sight. He now found himself facing the police general and no one else. No one armed.
“I’m Felix Buckman,” the police general said. He indicated the open door and hallway behind him. “Come into the office.” Turning, he ushered Jason ahead of him, into a vast pastel blue-and-gray suite; Jason blinked: he had never seen this aspect of a police agency before. He had never imagined that quality like this existed.
With incredulity, Jason a moment later found himself seated in a leather-covered chair, leaning back into the softness of styroflex. Buckman, however, did not sit down behind his top-heavy, almost clumsily bulky oak desk; instead he busied himself at a closet, putting away his topcoat.
“I intended to meet you on the roof,” he explained. “But the Santana wind blows like hell up there this time of night. It affects my sinus passages.” He turned, then, to face Jason. “I see something about you that didn’t show up in your 4-D photo. It never does. It’s always a complete surprise, at least to me. You’re a six, aren’t you?”
Waking to full alertness, Jason half rose, said, “You’re also a six, General?”
Smiling, showing his gold-capped teeth—an expensive anachronism—Felix Buckman held up seven fingers.
15
In his career as a police official, Felix Buckman had used this shuck each time he had come up against a six. He relied on it especially when, as with this, the encounter was sudden. There had been four of them. All, eventually, had believed him. This he found amusing. The sixes, eugenic experiments themselves, and secret ones, seemed unusually gullible when confronted with the assertion that there existed an additional project as classified as their own.
Without this shuck he would be, to a six, merely an “ordinary.” He could not properly handle a six under such a disadvantage. Hence the ploy. Through it his relationship to a six inverted itself. And, under such recreated conditions, he could deal successfully with an otherwise unmanageable human being.
The actual psychological superiority over him which a six possessed was abolished by an unreal fact. He liked this very much.
Once, in an off moment, he had said to Alys, “I can outthink a six for roughly ten to fifteen minutes. But if it goes on any longer—” He had made a gesture, crumpling up a black-market cigarette package. With two cigarettes in it. “After that their overamped field wins out. What I need is a pry bar by which I can jack open their haughty damn minds.” And, at last, he had found it.
“Why a ‘seven’?” Alys had said. “As long as you’re shucking them why not say eight or thirty-eight?”
“The sin of vainglory. Reaching too far.” He had not wanted to make that legendary mistake. “I will tell them,” he had told her grimly, “what I think they’ll believe.” And, in the end, he had proved out right.
“They won’t believe you,” Alys had said.
“Oh, hell, will they!” he had retorted. “It’s their secret fear, their bête noire. They’re the sixth in a line of DNA reconstruction systems and they know that if it could be done to them it could be done to others in a more advanced degree.”
Alys, uninterested, had said faintly, “You should be an announcer on TV selling soap.” And that constituted the totality of her reaction. If Alys did not give a damn about something, that something, for her, ceased to exist. Probably she should not have gotten away with it for as long as she had … but sometime, he had often thought, the retribution will come: reality denied comes back to haunt. To overtake the person without warning and make him insane.
And Alys, he had a number of times thought, was in some odd sense, in some unusual clinical way, pathological.
He sensed it but could not pin it down. However, many of his hunches were like that. It did not bother him, as much as he loved her. He knew he was right.
Now, facing Jason Taverner, a six, he developed his shuck ploy.
“There were very few of us,” Buckman said, now seating himself at his oversize oak desk. “Only four in all. One is already dead, so that leaves three. I don’t have the slightest idea where they are; we retain even less contact among ourselves than do you sixes. Which is little enough.”
“Who was your muter?” Jason asked.
“Dill-Temko. Same as yours. He controlled groups five through seven and then he retired. As you certainly know, he’s dead now.”
“Yes,” Jason said. “It shocked us all.”
“Us, too,” Buckman said, in his most somber voice. “Dill-Temko was our parent. Our only parent. Did you know that at the time of his death he had begun to prepare schema on an eighth group?”
“What would they have been like?”
“Only Dill-Temko knew,” Buckman said, and felt his superiority over the six facing him grow. And yet—how fragile his psychological edge. One wrong statement, one statement too much, and it would vanish. Once lost, he would never regain it.
It was the risk he took. But he enjoyed it; he had always liked betting against the odds, gambling in the dark. He had in him, at times like this, a great sense of his own ability. And he did not consider it imagined … despite what a six that knew him to be an ordinary would say. That did not bother him one bit.