“No one identified you as a possible suspect,” the Interpol man said. “We’re checking everyone who might have some kind of grudge against Conrad Helier—or Conrad Helier’s memory. We know that Operator 101 always transmits his denunciations from the L.A. area, and you’ve been living hereabouts throughout the time he’s been active.”
“I told you—I’m not that kind of lunatic, and I try never to think about Conrad Helier and the plans he had for me. I’m my own man, and I have my own life to lead. Why are you so interested in a message that’s so patently false? You can’t possibly believe that Conrad Helier is still alive—or that he was an enemy of mankind, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
“We’re interested because it’s a new departure,” Yamanaka said, evenly. “No operator, including 101 has ever used the phrase enemy of mankind before. Nor has any ever appealed to kindred spirits to do anything other than kill someone. It might be a hoax, or course—one of the nastiest aspects of the Eliminator’s game is that anyone can play. This code number’s been used eight times but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the messages came from one source. We became even more interested when we began checking it out. You’re not the only person connected with Conrad Helier living hereabouts.”
“One of my foster-parents, Silas Arnett, lives south of San Francisco,” Damon admitted. “I haven’t seen him in years. We don’t communicate at all.”
“He seems to have disappeared from his home,” Yamanaka said. “We don’t know how long he’s been missing, but we fear foul play. Another of your father’s contemporaries, Surinder Nahal—the only person who might conceivably qualify as an enemy of his, according to our files—has an address in San Diego, but he’s proving equally difficult to trace.”
“I don’t know Nahal at all,” Damon said, truthfully.
“Karol Kachellek also claimed that he hadn’t seen Arnett for many years,” Yamanaka added. “Eveline Hywood said the same. It seems that your surviving foster-parents fell out with one another as well as with you.”
“Maybe. Silas’s decision to retire must have seemed to Karol and Eveline to be a failure of vocation almost as worthy of censure as my own: yet another betrayal of Conrad Helier’s sacred cause.”
Yamanaka nodded, as if he understood—but Damon knew that he almost certainly didn’t. It was difficult to guess Yamanaka’s true age, because a man of his standing would have the kind of internal technology which was supposedly capable of sustaining eternal youth, but Damon judged that he was no centenarian. To the policeman, as to Damon, Conrad Helier’s career would be stuff of history. At school he must have been told that the artificial wombs which Conrad Helier perfected, and the techniques which allowed such wombs to produce legions of healthy infants while the plague of sterility spread like wildfire across the globe, were the salvation of the species—but that didn’t mean that he understood the reverence in which Conrad Helier had been held by his co-workers.
“Do you have any idea why anyone would want to blacken your father’s name fifty years after his death, Mr. Hart?” Yamanaka asked, with a blandness that was patently false.
“I was encouraged in every possible way to see my father as the greatest hero and saint the world ever had,” Damon said. “I couldn’t follow in his footsteps, and I didn’t want to, but that doesn’t mean that I disapprove of where they led. Whoever posted this notice is sick.”
“There were several witnesses to the death of Conrad Helier,” the Interpol man said, matter-of-factly. “The doctor who was in attendance and the embalmer who prepared the body for the funeral both confirm that they carried out DNA-checks on the corpse, and that the gene-map matched Conrad Helier’s records. If the man whose body was cremated on 27 January 2147 wasn’t Conrad Helier then the gene-map on file in the Central Directory must have been substituted.” He paused briefly, then said: “You don’t look at all like your father. Is that deliberate, or is it simply that you resemble your mother?”
“I’ve never gone in for cosmetic reconstruction,” Damon told him, warily. “I have no idea what my mother looked like; I don’t even know her name. I understand that her ova were stripped and frozen at the peak of the Crisis, when they were afraid that the world’s entire stock might be wiped out by the plague. There’s no surviving record of her name. At that time, according to my co-parents, nobody was overly particular about where healthy ova came from; they just wanted to get as many as they could in the bank. They were stripping them from anyone more than five years old, so it’s possible that my mother was a mere infant.”
“It’s possible, then, that your natural mother is still alive,” Yamanaka observed.
“If she is,” Damon pointed out, “she can’t possibly know that her ovum was inseminated by Conrad Helier’s sperm and that I was the result.”
“I suppose Eveline Hywood and Mary Hallam must both have been infected before their wombs could be stripped,” Yamanaka said, disregarding the taboos which would presumably continue to inhibit free conversation regarding the legacy of the plague until the last survivors of that era had retired from public life. “Or was it that Conrad Helier was reluctant to select one of your co-parents as a natural mother in case it affected the partnership?”
“I don’t think any of this is relevant to the matters you’re investigating,” Damon said, “and I think the investigation itself is a waste of time.”
“I don’t know what might be relevant and what might not,” Yamanaka said unapologetically. “The message supposedly deposited by Operator 101 might be pure froth, and there might be nothing sinister in the disappearance of Arnett and Nahal—but this could represent the beginning of a new and nastier phase of Eliminator activity. They already attract far too much media attention, and this story is only one step short of becoming a headline scandal. I have to investigate it at least as assiduously as the dozens of newsmen who must have been commissioned to start digging, and I need to stay at least one step ahead of them. I’m sorry to have troubled you, but I judged it to be necessary, if only to inform you of what had happened.”
He’s delicately implying that I might be in danger, Damon thought. If he’s right, and Silas’s disappearance has something to do with the message, this really might be the beginning of something nasty. Even if it’s only a newstape hatchet job...
“I’ll ask around,” he said, carefully. “If I discover anything that might help you, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“Thank you, Mr Hart,” the man from Interpol said, offering no clue as to exactly what he understood by Damon’s promise to ask around. “I’m grateful for your cooperation.”
“It’s too tight,” the boy complained. “I can’t move properly.”
“No it’s not,” said Madoc Tamlin, with careful patience, as he knelt to complete the synaptic links in the reta mirabile which covered the fighter’s body like a bright spiderweb. “It’s no tighter than pants and a shirt. You can move quite freely.”
The boy’s fearful eyes looked over Tamlin’s shoulder, lighting on Damon’s face. Damon saw the sudden blaze of belated recognition. “Hey,” the boy said, “you’re Damon Hart! I got a dozen of your fight tapes. You going to be doing the tape for this? That’s great! My name’s Lenny Garon.”
Damon didn’t bother to interrupt the flow to tell the kid that he hadn’t come to watch the fight or that he hadn’t—as yet—been contracted to doctor the tapes. He understood how scared the youngster must be. The fight was only for show, but that didn’t mean the kid wasn’t going to get hurt; in fact, if Damon judged the situation rightly, it was a guarantee that he was going to get cut up pretty badly. It would be the first time the little sucker had gone up against a skilled knifeman, and he must know that he was out of his depth. There was a certain irony in the fact that the only way someone like Lenny Garon could make enough money to equip himself with tissue-repair technology was to sustain the injuries that the relevant nanotech was geared to undo, but Damon no longer found anything to savour in that kind of irony.