Damon didn’t know what Yamanaka might read into any answer he gave, so he prudently gave none at all. He just wants to use me as a pawn, he thought. Maybe I could have stayed out of it, if I hadn’t gone to Madoc the minute he alerted me to what was going on, but I’m in now for better or for worse, and I have to play it through—not for Interpol, and not for my father’s true blue friends, but myself.
“Sometimes,” Yamanaka added, in the same off handedly philosophical tone, “I wonder whether anyone can inherit the world, now that people who owned it all in the days before the Crash believe that they can live forever. I’m not sure that they’ll ever let go of it deliberately... and such fighting as they have to do to keep it is mostly amongst themselves.”
“My father never owned more than the tiniest slice of the world,” he said, awkwardly conscious of the fact that he had said my father instead of Conrad Helier. “He was never a corporation man.”
“Your father remade and reshaped the world by designing the New Reproductive System,” Yamanaka replied, softly. “The corporation men who owned it might well have hated him for that, even though he never actually succeeded in toppling their commercial empire. Men of business always fear and despise Utopians. They probably hate him still, almost as much as the Eliminator diehards hate them.”
“But he’s been dead for fifty years,” Damon pointed out. “Corporation men wouldn’t waste time demonizing the dead.”
“His collaborators are still alive,” Yamanaka countered. “Or were, until this plague of evil circumstance began.”
When the plane landed in Los Angeles Damon was invited to accompany Hiru Yamanaka and his associate to the local Interpol headquarters, but he declined. Despite stem warnings regarding Interpol’s inability to guarantee his safety he insisted on going back to his apartment—and in the end, Yamanaka agreed to take him there.
“The claims made by the so-called real Operator 101 are, of course, receiving a full measure of publicity,” the policeman told him. “They have not gone uncontradicted, but would-be assassins might be not inclined to believe the contradictions. You really would be safer in another location.”
“You can’t take me into custody,” Damon said, obstinately. “I haven’t done anything wrong. If I thought I needed bodyguards, I could hire some very experienced street-fighters.”
“That would be unwise,” Yamanaka said, blandly. “My advice is to leave Madoc Tamlin and your former friends out of this. They’re essentially unreliable.”
Damon had his own views on that particular matter, but he didn’t object when Yamanaka’s taciturn companion didn’t get back into the car when they dropped him outside the cap-stack.
“Just a precaution,” the policeman said, as they rode the elevator to the thirteenth floor. “I won’t camp outside your door, but I’ll be around.”
Damon knew how easy it was to mount eyes and ears in the walls of the corridor, and he didn’t doubt that anyone approaching his apartment would be under constant surveillance. Yamanaka hadn’t made any false promises about respecting his privacy.
When he’d taken time out to visit the bathroom and order some food from the kitchen Damon stationed himself before the windowscreen. He wasn’t unduly surprised or alarmed when Madoc Tamlin’s phone insisted that he was unavailable. He half-expected to get the same response from Eveline Hywood, but in fact she answered immediately. She even came on camera, so that the time delay occasioned by the fact their words and gestures had to traverse a quarter of a million miles wouldn’t be quite as disconcerting.
“Damon,” she said, pleasantly. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been worried about you. Is there any news of Karol or Silas?” She was obviously well informed about what had been going on.
“They haven’t been found yet—dead or alive,” he told her. “Interpol insists that it’s only a matter of time. Do you have any idea what’s going on, Evelyn?”
“Someone is evidently intent on blackening your father’s name. I can’t imagine why. These self-appointed Eliminators seem to be getting completely out of hand. There are none up here, mercifully; L-5 isn’t perfect, but it’s a haven of perfect sanity compared to Earth.”
Damon didn’t bother to question her certainty as to whether L-5 was really Eliminator-free. For the moment, he was inclined to the opinion that the aggrieved Operator 101 really was the victim of a pseudonym-hijack and that this whole affair was a struggle between two very different groups.
“Why not, Eveline?” he asked, softly. “What brought your adversaries crawling out of the woodwork now?”
“I have no idea,” she said. He couldn’t tell whether she was lying. “You might be better able to guess than I am. After all, this whole affair is really an attack on you, isn’t it?”
It is now, he thought. But it didn’t start that way. That’s a deflection, a diversionary tactic, for which my father’s so-called friends are at least partly and perhaps wholly responsible.
“Could it have something to do with this stuff that you and Karol are investigating—these para-DNA life-forms?” he asked, abruptly. That was the only thing that was happening now, so far as he could judge—the only thing which made it a “bad time.”
“How could it?” she asked, frowning. Was she puzzled, he wondered, or annoyed by the accuracy of this guess?
“Karol said there were two possibilities regarding its origins: up and down. He was looking at the bottom of the sea while you’re looking for evidence of its arrival from elsewhere in the Solar System. But he seemed to have a third alternative in mind when he said it—and there is a third alternative, isn’t there?” He knew that he didn’t have to spell it out that the third alternative was sideways; Eveline understood well enough what he meant.
“I’m still very worried about you, Damon,” Eveline said, scrupulously ignoring his question. “I wish you were safe. I’m sure it will all work out, though, if you only give it time. When they find Silas, he’ll put the record straight.”
“What about Surinder Nahal?” he asked. “Could he really be the one behind this stupid carnival? Does he really think my father orchestrated the Crash as well as the recovery? Why hasn’t he said so before?”
“I don’t know, Damon,” she said, with exaggerated patience. “It’s all lies. You know that.”
“Is there going to be a new plague?” he asked, abruptly switching tack again. “Is para-DNA going to throw up something just as nasty as the old meiotic disrupters and chias-malytics?”
“That’s ludicrously melodramatic,” she answered, calmly. “So far as we can tell, para-DNA is quite harmless. Organisms of this kind compete for resources with life as we know it, but there’s no evidence of any other kind of interaction and it would be surprising if there were. Para-DNA is just something which happened to drift into the biosphere from elsewhere—probably from the outer Solar System. It’s fascinating, but it’s not dangerous.”