“Didn’t work very well, did it?”
Sulie stopped listening. She knew very well that her turn was next, but she was trying to think. Over Scanyon’s desk she saw the moving view from the copter. It was expressed as a schematic, the roads as lines of green, the vehicles as points of blue, buildings yellow. The few pedestrians were bright red. Now, if one of those red dots should suddenly start to move at the speed of a blue vehicle, that would be Roger. But he had had plenty of time to get farther away than the area the copter was covering.
“Tell them to scan the town, General,” she said suddenly.
He frowned, but he picked up the phone and gave the order. He didn’t get a chance to put it down again; there was an incoming call he could not refuse.
Telly Ramez got up from his chair next to the director and came around to Sulie Carpenter. She didn’t look up from the folded transcript of the simulation. He waited patiently.
The director’s call was from the President of the United States. They would have known that from the sweat that rolled down beneath Scanyon’s temples, even if they had not seen Dash’s tiny face in the screen on the director’s desk. Faintly the voice leaked through to them: “…spoke to Roger he seemed — I don’t know, disinterested. I thought it over, Vern, and then I decided to call you. Is everything going all right?”
Scanyon swallowed. He glanced around the table and abruptly folded up the privacy petals on the phone; the image dwindled to postage-stamp size. The voice faded to nothingness as the sound was transferred to a parabolic speaker aimed directly at Scanyon’s head, and Scanyon’s own words were swallowed by the petal-like shields. The rest of the room had no difficulty in following the conversation anyway; it was written very clearly on Scanyon’s face.
Sulie looked up from the transcript at Telly Ramez. “Get him off the phone,” she said impatiently. “I know where Roger is.”
Ramez said, “At his wife’s house.”
She rubbed her eyes wearily. “I guess we didn’t need a simulation for that, did we? I’m sorry, Telly. I guess I wasn’t keeping him on the hook as firmly as I thought I was.”
They were right; of course; we had known that for some time. As soon as Scanyon got off the phone with the President the security office called to say that the bugs in Dorrie’s bedroom had picked up the sound of Roger coming in through the window.
Scanyon’s lemony small eyes seemed almost at the point of tears. “Put the sound on the horn,” he ordered. “Display the house.” And then he switched his phone to an outside line and dialed Dorrie’s number.
From the loudspeaker came the sound of one ring, then a metallic noise and Roger’s flat cyborg voice rasping, “Hello?” And a moment later, softer but equally toneless, “Christ.”
Scanyon jerked the earpiece away and rubbed his ear. “What the hell happened?” he demanded. There was no answer from anyone to the rhetorical question, and gingerly he put the phone back. “I’m getting some kind of trouble signal,” he announced.
“We can send a man in, General,” the assistant security chief suggested. “There are two of our men in that car out in front of the house there.” The helicopter pickup had slid across the screen and settled at 1,800 feet over the Courthouse Square in the city of Tonka. The camera was set for infrared, and in the upper corner of the screen the broad dark band of the Ship Canal identified the edge of the town. A rectangle of darkness surrounded by the moving lights of cars just below the screen’s center point was the Courthouse Square, and Roger’s home was marked with a tracer star in red. The assistant reached up and touched the blob of light nearby to show the car. “We’re in voice contact with them, General,” he went on. “They didn’t see Colonel Torraway go in.”
Sulie stood up. “I don’t recommend it,” she said.
“Your recommendations aren’t too popular with me right now, Major Carpenter,” Scanyon snarled.
“All the same, General—” She stopped as Scanyon raised his hand.
From the speaker Dorrie’s voice came faintly: I want a cup of tea. And then Roger’s: Wouldn’t you rather I rnade you a drink? And her almost inaudible No.
“All the same,” Sulie spoke up, “he’s stable enough now. Don’t screw it up.”
“I can’t let him just sit out there! Who the hell knows what he’ll do next? You?”
“You’ve got him spotted. I don’t think he’ll move, anyway, not for a while. Don Kayman’s not far from there and he’s a friend. Tell him to go get Roger.”
“Kayman’s not much of a combat specialist.”
“Is that what you want? If Roger doesn’t come back peacefully, exactly what are you going to do about it?”
Do you want some tea?
No… No, thank you.
“And turn that off,” Sulie added. “Leave the poor bastard a little privacy.”
Scanyon sat slowly back in his chair, patting the top of his desk with both hands at once, very gently. Then he picked up the phone and gave orders. “We’ll do it your way one more time, Major,” he said. “Not because I have much confidence. I just don’t have much choice, either. I can’t threaten you with anything. If this goes wrong again, I doubt I’ll be in a position to punish anybody. But I’m pretty sure somebody will.”
Telesforo Ramez said, “Sir, I understand your position, but I think this isn’t fair to Sulie. The simulation shows that he has to have a confrontation with his wife.”
“The point of a simulation, Dr. Ramez, is that it should tell you what’s going to happen before it happens.”
“Well, it also shows that Torraway is basically pretty stable in every other respect. He’ll handle this, General.”
Scanyon went back to patting his desk.
Ramez said, “He’s a complicated person. You’ve seen his Thematic Apperception Test patterns, General. He’s high in all the fundamental drives: achievement, affiliation — not quite so high in power, but still healthy. He’s not a manipulator. He’s introspective. He needs to work things out in his head. Those are the qualities you want, General. He’ll need all that. You can’t ask him to be one person here in Oklahoma and another person on Mars.”
“If I’m not mistaken,” the general said, “that’s what you promised me, with your behavior modification.”
“No, General,” the psychiatrist said patiently. “I only promised that if you gave him a reward like Sulie Carpenter he’d find it easier to reconcile himself to his problems with his wife. He has.”
“B-mod has its own dynamics, General,” Sulie put in. “You called me in pretty late.”
“What are you telling me?” Scanyon asked dangerously. “Is he going to crack up on Mars?”
“I hope not. The odds are as good as we know how to make them, General. He’s cleaned up a lot of old shit; you can see it in his latest TATs. But six days from now he’ll be gone, and I won’t be in his life any more. And that’s wrong. B-mod should never be cut off cold turkey. It should be phased out — a little less of me being around and then a little less than that until he’s had a chance to build up his defenses.”
The gentle patting on the desk was slower now, and Scanyon said, “It’s a little late to tell me that.”
Sulie shrugged, and did not speak.
Scanyon looked thoughtfully around the table. “All right. We’ve done all we can here tonight. You’re all dismissed until eight — no, make that ten in the morning. By then I expect every one of you to have a report, no more than three minutes long, on where your own area of responsibilities stands, and what we should do.”