Touching a button, he said, “Peggy, bring us a pot of coffee, cream and the rest. Thanks.” He then leaned back with studied leisure. And surveyed Jason Taverner.
Anyone who had met a six would recognize Taverner. The strong torso, the massive confirmation of his arms and back. His powerful, ramlike head. But most ordinaries had never knowingly come up against a six. They did not have his experience. Nor his carefully synthesized knowledge of them.
To Alys he had once said, “They will never take over and run my world.”
“You don’t have a world. You have an office.”
At that point he terminated the discussion.
“Mr. Taverner,” he said bluntly, “how have you managed to get documents, cards, microfilm, even complete files out of data banks all over the planet? I’ve tried to imagine how it could be done, but I come up with a blank.” He fixed his attention on the handsome—but aging—face of the six and waited.
16
What can I tell him? Jason Taverner asked himself as he sat mutely facing the police general. The total reality as I know it? That is hard to do, he realized, because I really do not comprehend it myself.
But perhaps a seven could—well, God knew what it could do. I’ll opt, he decided, on a complete explanation.
But when he started to answer, something blocked his speech. I don’t want to tell him anything, he realized. There is no theoretical limit to what he can do to me; he has his generalship, his authority, and if he’s a seven … for him, the sky may be the limit. At least for my self-preservation if for nothing else I ought to operate on that assumption.
“Your being a six,” Buckman said, after an interval of silence, “makes me see this in a different light. It’s other sixes that you’re working with, is it?” He kept his eyes rigidly fixed on Jason’s face; Jason found it uncomfortable and disconcerting. “I think what we have here,” Buckman said, “is the first concrete evidence that sixes are—”
“No,” Jason said.
“‘No’?” Buckman continued to stare fixedly at him.
“You’re not involved with other sixes in this?”
Jason said, “I know one other six. Heather Hart. And she considers me a twerp fan.” He ground out the words bitterly.
That interested Buckman; he had not been aware that the well-known singer Heather Hart was a six. But, thinking about it, it seemed reasonable. He had never, however, come up against a female six in his career; his contacts with them were just not that frequent.
“If Miss Hart is a six,” Buckman said aloud, “maybe we should ask her to come in too and consult with us.” A police euphemism that rolled easily off his tongue.
“Do that,” Jason said. “Put her through the wringer.” His tone had become savage. “Bust her. Put her in a forced-labor camp.”
You sixes, Buckman said to himself, have little loyalty to one another. He had discovered this already, but it always surprised him. An elite group, bred out of aristocratic prior circles to set and maintain the mores of the world, who had in practice drizzled off into nothingness because they could not stand one another. To himself he laughed, letting his face show, at least, a smile.
“You’re amused?” Jason said. “Don’t you believe me?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Buckman brought a box of Cuesta Rey cigars from a drawer of his desk, used his little knife to cut off the end of one. The little steel knife made for that purpose alone.
Across from him Jason Taverner watched with fascination. “A cigar?” Buckman inquired. He held the box toward Jason.
“I have never smoked a good cigar,” Jason said. “If it got out that I—” He broke off.
“‘Got out’?” Buckman asked, his mental ears pricking up. “Got out to whom? The police?”
Jason said nothing. But he had clenched his fist and his breathing had become labored.
“Are there strata in which you’re well known?” Buckman said. “For example, among intellectuals in forced-labor camps. You know—the ones who circulate mimeographed manuscripts.”
“No,” Jason said.
“Musical strata, then?”
Jason said tightly, “Not anymore.”
“Have you ever made phonograph records?”
“Not here.”
Buckman continued to scrutinize him unblinkingly; over long years he had mastered the ability. “Then where?” he aske4, in a voice barely over the threshold of audibility. A voice deliberately sought for: its tone lulled, interfered with identification of the words’ meaning.
But Jason Taverner let it slide by; he failed to respond. These damn bastard sixes, Buckman thought, angered—mostly at himself. I can’t play funky games with a six. It just plain does not work. And, at any minute, he could cancel my statement out of his mind, my claim to superior genetic heritage.
He pressed a stud on his intercom. “Have a Miss Katharine Nelson brought in here,” he instructed Herb Maime. “A police informant down in the Watts District, that ex-black area. I think I should talk to her.”
“Half hour.”
“Thanks.”
Jason Taverner said hoarsely, “Why bring her into this?”
“She forged your papers.”
“All she knows about me is what I had her put on the ID cards.”
“And that was spurious?”
After a pause Jason shook his head no.
“So you do exist.”
“Not—here.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me how you got those data deleted from all the banks.”
“I never did that.”
Hearing that, Buckman felt an enormous hunch overwhelm him; it gripped him with paws of iron. “You haven’t been taking material out of the data banks; you’ve been trying to put material in. There were no data there in the first place.”
Finally, Jason Taverner nodded.
“Okay,” Buckman said; he felt the glow of discovery lurking inside him, now, revealing itself in a cluster of comprehensions. “You took nothing out. But there’s some reason why the data weren’t there in the first place. Why not? Do you know?”
“I know,” Jason Taverner said, staring down at the table; his face had twisted into a gross mirror-thing. “I don’t exist.”
“But you once did.”
“Yes,” Taverner said, nodding unwillingly. Painfully.
“Where?”
“I don’t know!”
It always comes back to that, Buckman said to himself. I don’t know. Well, Buckman thought, maybe he doesn’t. But he did make his way from L.A. to Vegas; he did shack up with that skinny, wrinkled broad the Vegas pols loaded into the van with him. Maybe, he thought, I can get something from her. But his hunch registered a no.
“Have you had dinner?” Buckman inquired.
“Yes,” Jason Taverner said.
“But you’ll join me in the munchies. I’ll have them bring something in to us.” Once more he made use of the intercom. “Peggy—it’s so late now … get us two breakfasts at that new place down the street. Not the one we used to go to, but the new one with the sign showing the dog with the girl’s head. Barfy’s.”
“Yes, Mr. Buckman,” Peggy said and rang off.
“Why don’t they call you ‘General’?” Jason Taverner asked.
Buckman said, “When they call me ‘General’ I feel I ought to have written a book on how to invade France while staying out of a two-front war.”
“So you’re just plain ‘Mister’.”
“That’s right.”
“And they let you do it?”
“For me,” Buckman said, “there is no ‘they.’ Except for five police marshals here and there in the world, and they call themselves ‘Mister,’ too.” And how they would like to demote me further, he thought. Because of all that I did.
“But there’s the Director.”