“You have a tough problem,” the young man sympathized. “You don’t have any reliable people on the Warden worlds, and anybody capable of doing what has to be done winds up on the other side. And now they’re selling us out to an alien force.”
“Exactly.” Krega nodded. “You see where this puts us. Now, of course, we do have some people down there. None are a hundred percent reliable, and an of them would slit your throat in an instant if doing so was in their best interests. But we find occasional inducements—small payoffs of one sort or another, even a little blackmail on ones with close relatives back in the Confederacy—that give us a little edge. A little, but not much, since the Four Lords are pretty ruthless when it comes to what they perceive as treason. Our only advantage is that the worlds are still fairly new to us and so therefore relatively sparsely settled. There is no totalitarian control on any of them, and there are different systems and hierarchies on each.”
The young man nodded. “I have the uneasy feeling that you are leading up to something—but I must remind you of what you told me about past agents, and also that, even kicking and screaming, I’d be but one man on one world.”
Commander Krega grinned. “No, it’s not quite like that at all. You’re a damned good detective and you know it. You’ve tracked down and upset rocks in places nobody else looked at twice; out-maneuvered and outguessed sophisticated computers and some of the best criminal minds ever known, even though you are still quite young. You are the youngest person with the rank of Inspector in the history of the Confederacy. We have two different problems here. One, we must identify this alien force and trace it back to its origin. We must find out who they are and where they are and what their intentions are. Even now it may be too late, but we must act as if it were not. Two, we must neutralize their information conduit, the Four Lords. How would you do it?”
The young man smiled thoughtfully. “Pay the Four Lords more than the aliens do,” he suggested hopefully. “Put ’em to work for us.”
“Impossible. We already thought of that,” the commander responded glumly. “It’s not profit—they have more than they need. And it’s not power—that, too, they have in abundance. But we have cut them off forever from the rest of the universe, trapped them there. Before, they could do nothing—but now, with an alien force as then* ally, they can. I’m afraid such people are motivated by revenge, and that we cannot give them. We can’t even commute their sentence, short of a scientific breakthrough—and nobody has more people working on that angle than they do. No, making a deal is out. We have no cards.”
“Then you need somebody good down there on each world, looking for clues to the aliens. There has to be some sort of direct contact: they have to get their information out and their little play-toys, like that fancy robot, programmed and in. An agent might turn traitor, but if he was a volunteer he wouldn’t be motivated by revenge and would sure as hell feel closer to humanity than to some aliens of unknown appearance and design.”
“Agreed. And it would have to be the very best for all four. Someone who could survive, even prosper under their conditions while having the ability to collect enough data and get it out. But how do we buy the time we also need?”
The young man grinned. “Easy. At least easy to say—maybe nearly impossible to do. You kill all four Lords. Others would take their places, of course, but in the interim you’d buy months, maybe years.”
“That was our thinking,” Krega agreed. “And so we ran it through the computers. Master detective, loyal, willing to volunteer, and with an Assassin’s License. Four needed, plus a coordinator, since they all would have to be put to work simultaneously and would obviously have no likely reason or means to contact one another. Plus for insurance, of course, spares that could be sent in if something happened to one or more of the originals. We fed in all these attributes and requirements and out you popped.”
The young man chuckled dryly. “I’ll bet Me and who else?”
“Nobody else. Just you.”
For the first time the man looked puzzled. He frowned. “Just me?”
“Oh, lots of secondaries, but they were slightly less reliable for one reason or another, or slightly weaker in one or another way, or, frankly, were engaged on other vital business or located halfway around the Confederacy.”
“Then you’ve got two problems,” the young man told Krega. “First, you have to figure out how the hell I’d volunteer willingly for an assignment like this, and, second, how you’re going to make…” His voice trailed off and he suddenly sat up straight. “I think I see…”
“I thought you would.” Krega sounded satisfied and confident. “It’s probably the most guarded secret in the Confederacy, but the Merton Process works now. Almost a hundred percent.”
The other nodded absently, thinking about it. When he’d received his promotion to Inspector over a year ago, they’d taken him into an elaborate and somewhat mystifying laboratory and put him into some sort of hypnotic state. He was never quite sure what they had done, but he’d had a headache for three days and that had aroused his curiosity. The Merton Process. The key to immortality, some said. It had taken a hell of a lot of spare-time detective work to come even that close to it, and all he’d been able to determine in the end was that the Confederacy was working on a process wherein the entire memory, the entire personality, of an individual could be taken, stored in some way, and then imprinted on another brain, perhaps a clone brain. He had also learned that every time it had been tried, the new body either had become hopelessly insane or had died. He said as much.
“That used to be the case,” Krega agreed, “but no more. The clone brains just couldn’t take it. Raised in tanks, they had developed different brain patterns for the autonomic functions, and those were always disrupted in the transfer. Still, we had been able to remove all the conscious part of the brain from someone and then put it back just the way it was in the original body while also keeping the original information on file. That led, of course, to trying it with other bodies —remove the cerebral part, as it were, just like erasing a recording, then put someone else’s personality and memories in there. It’s a ticklish business—only works once in a while, when loads of factors I don’t understand very well, and maybe Merton doesn’t either, match. The new body has to be at least two years younger than the original, for example. On the other hand, some important factors like sex or planetary origin seem to be irrelevant. Still, we get a perfect transfer about one in twenty times.”
He stirred uneasily. “What happens to the other nineteen?”
Krega shrugged. “They die, or are nuts and have to be destroyed. We use only minor antisocials anyway, those who would have to be psyched and programmed or simply eliminated. We took your print fourteen months ago—you must know that. Now we can make four of you. Different bodies, of course, but you inside in every single detail. More than four, if necessary. We can drop you on all four planets simultaneously, complete with criminal record and past history. We can drop you on all four and still keep you here, as you are, to correlate the data from the others.”
The young man said nothing for almost a minute, then: “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Four times damned, yet also not damned at all,” the commander came back. “So you see, there’s no risk. We already have your imprint.”