“Kahoolawe.”
“Whatever—that Karol told him to take me there because he’d seen the message. If he knew about the message before it was dumped...” He stopped abruptly, wondering how best to proceed. One of the legacies of his chequered past was a deep-seated reluctance to tell the cops anything he didn’t actually have to, and he still harboured the ambition of getting to the bottom of this before Interpol did.
“That’s very interesting,” the Interpol man said. “There’s no evidence of Singh’s involvement with the Eliminators, incidentally, or anyone else of a criminal disposition. In fact, his record is unblemished to a degree that’s rather remarkable in such an old man. He’s an ecological engineer and has been for well over a century. He knew your father, although that was a long time ago.”
“How did you get on to him so quickly?” Damon asked.
“We were keeping a close watch over you, Mr. Hart, even before Operator 101’s third message went out. We were already tracking the plane. Did they but know it, Mr. Kachellek and Mr. Singh had no chance of stealing you away unobserved.”
Did they but know it, Damon echoed, silently. The trouble is that it’s impossible to figure out how much they do know, and what their real purpose might be. He knew that it was possible for internal technology to fake medical emergencies as well as taking action to solve them, but he didn’t know whether it was unduly paranoid to suspect that Rajuder Singh had done some such thing in order to avoid—or delay—having to answer awkward questions.
“Did you catch the pilot?” Damon asked Yamanaka.
“Alas, no. The plane landed at Hilo on full automatic. He must have bailed out. We’re pursuing our investigations on Hawaii and Oahu, but the situation there is very confused because of another incident.”
“What incident?” Damon asked, warily.
“An explosion aboard the Kite. Rescuers have picked up a dozen survivors so far, but there’s no sigh of Karol Kachellek. That’s a pity—we’d hoped to ask him a few more questions about this business.”
Either the unknown enemy is stepping up the violence of his campaign. Damon thought, or... It wasn’t easy to find words to couch the alternative. “You seem to have a talent for losing geneticists,” he observed, drily. “Is Eveline still where she’s supposed to be, out in L-5?”
“I believe so. For the moment, I’m more concerned with the whereabouts of Silas Arnett and the identity of the persons who have been broadcasting the messages. It may not mean anything, but we’ve received communications from someone who claims to be the real Operator 101, disowning all the recent notices posted under that alias. It’s rather difficult to check his story, of course, as he insists on maintaining his anonymity.”
“I saw a tape of Silas’s supposed confession,” Damon said. “It wasn’t him, you know—the whole thing was a fake worked up from a template. It wasn’t even a particularly slick job. I could have done it better. In fact—”
He stopped, not wanting to put ideas into Yamanaka’s head—but they were already there.
“In fact,” the Interpol man said, smoothly, “it was a painfully obvious fake, especially at the end. Which raises interesting questions about the whole series of broadcasts. If they’re supposed to look like fakes, what are we being tempted to believe, and why? Given that it’s been made so very obvious that this whole case is trumped up, might we not consider it more seriously than we would had it been more expertly compiled?”
Yamanaka didn’t mention the possibility—which had occurred to Damon while he watched the last tape—that the various messages had been put out from more than one source: that the third and fourth had been put out with the intention of discrediting the first and second by piling up lies and confusions. The fact that the man from Interpol didn’t mention it didn’t mean, however, that he wasn’t aware of it; he had used the plural when talking about persons who had put out the messages.
“What did your DNA analyses tell you?” Damon asked, gruffly, as he sat up gingerly, touching his fingertips to his forehead. “You must have the results by now—and I’ll bet you weren’t content with superficial tissues, either. You probably drained some spinal fluid, maybe even bone marrow. What’s the verdict? Am I my father, or my father’s son?”
“We’re completely satisfied that you’re not Conrad Helier,” Yamanaka told him, serenely. “If the records can be trusted, you and he have exactly the degree of genetic similarity that would be expected were you father and son. There’s some uncertainty, of course, as to whether the data relating to your father’s genome has been rigged to give that impression—but that kind of data is routinely filed in so many places that it would have been exceedingly difficult to alter them all. We also have a detailed record of your childhood and adolescence—it would have taken a great deal of effort to fake all that.”
“It’s not faked,” Damon assured the policemen. “I remember it quite clearly. I didn’t spring into the world full-grown. In this instance, the transparent lie really is just a transparent lie, not a cunningly-wrought truth.”
“I assume, then, that we must construe it as a provocative move of some kind,” Yamanaka said, evenly. “It may have been intended to startle a reaction from someone. Perhaps your kidnapping was that reaction—but it’s also possible, I suppose, that it was part of the provocative move. What do you think, Mr. Hart?”
“What I think,” Damon said, “is that your coming to my apartment in person was a provocative move on your part. You wanted to set me off, didn’t you? I suppose you’re delighted with the success of your strategy—I wasn’t involved before, but I’m certainly involved now.”
“You credit me with too much cleverness,” Yamanaka said, with a modesty that was surely feigned. “I had no idea then whether you were involved or not, and I’m still not sure. I don’t now where Karol Kachellek fits in, or Surinder Nahal—or Madoc Tamlin.”
“Madoc Tamlin?” Damone echoed, trying to conceal his dismay. Clearly the Interpol man was no fool—but what was he trying to imply now?
“He’s been asking a lot of questions,” Yamanaka observed. “He’s using your money to buy the answers. When you saw the second message you called him and you extended his authorization. You presumably believe that you’re pulling his strings—but I have to consider other possibilities too. I have to consider the possibility that your strings are being pulled. This is a very convoluted puzzle, Mr. Helier, and Madoc Tamlin has some very convoluted friends.”
“So have you, Mr. Yamanaka,” Damon countered.
The man from Interpol didn’t deny it. Instead, he said: “Dr. Arnett’s supposed confession was an interesting statement, wasn’t it? Food for thought for everyone—and food which will be all the more eagerly swallowed for being dressed up that way I dare say that he was right about the effect the Crash had, of bringing people together so that for the first and only time in human history they were all on the same side. The world isn’t like that any more, is it? In a way, that’s rather a pity, don’t you think?”
“Not really,” Damon replied. “A world devoid of conflicts would be a very tedious place to live. It’s good to know that we might live for a very long time—but it’s also good to know that we might not. Without an element of danger, life might easily become insipid.” He felt a lot better now, and he was able to sit up.
“I take your point,” Yamanaka conceded, graciously, “but you must remember that you and I are young men, who can barely imagine what the world was like before and during the Crash. I wonder, sometimes, how different things might seem to the very old—to men like Rajuder Singh, Surinder Nahal and Karol Kachellek, and women like Eveline Hywood. They might be rather disappointed in the world they made, and the children they produced from their artificial wombs, don’t you think? They were hoping to produce a Utopia, but... well, no one could convincingly argue that the meek have inherited the world—at least, not yet.”