To Sam’s surprise, the face of Linda Rawlings peered out of his deskphone. Her mousy-brown hair, he saw, was as straggly as he had remembered, her eyes even more bulbous. “I’m sorry,” she said, “neither Roderick nor I can answer your call at the moment, but if you leave your name and number we’ll call you back as soon as we can.” The screen went blank.
Sam sagged back in his chair, tugging fretfully at the loose flesh that seemed to be accumulating beneath his chin.
Linda Rawlings?
Rawlings was the Treasury Department snoop who had been assigned to keep the O-CLIP in Emily’s clipper room from unauthorized use. She hadn’t done her job very well. First Roderick Bantry, then ten-year-old Bruce Ferron, had managed to overcome her precautions with contemptuous ease. The bizarre upshot had been a disastrous affair between Roderick and Linda that Emily had discovered via her husband’s prototype time scanner. Emily had filed for divorce—and Roderick had been forced to marry Linda in order to keep her mouth shut about his illegal use of the O-CLIP.
The hatred and contempt that Roderick had evinced for her a few short weeks ago had been unmistakable. Was it possible that he would ever turn his wristphone over to her to program?
Something was very wrong.
“You are due on the floor in seven minutes,” reminded his commcent.
“Damn. Keep trying to get Roderick Bantry. Call every ten minutes. Call every number you have for him. When he answers, tell him I’ll call as soon as I’ve finished my damn orating.”
But four hours later Bantry still wasn’t answering any of his phones—and Linda Rawlings’s face was still turning up on his wristphone.
“Well,” said Sam to his daughter that evening over his own phone, “I suppose he could be on his way to London with the people from the observatory and this is his way of being subtle and clever.”
“Subtlety and cleverness aren’t Roderick’s strong points,” said his former wife. “And even if they were, I can’t believe he’d let that… that creature leave a message for him instead of doing it himself. Unless he was dying in a hospital somewhere.”
“I know. That’s what makes me nervous.” Sam felt his eyes closing and his body being racked by an enormous yawn. “The hell with it. I’ll keep after him all day tomorrow until I get him.”
But the next day he was no more successful. “All right,” he muttered at last, “now for the next step.” He called first Seticorp and then the Keck Observatories on Mauna Kea.
“I’m sorry, Senator Ferron,” said a puzzled receptionist ten minutes later, “but I can’t seem to locate Mr. Bantry at all. He’s supposed to be here. He was gone for the weekend, of course, but now it’s late Monday afternoon here in the Islands and he’s still not… Did you try his home?”
“I’ve been trying his wristphone for two full days. And his home too. But I’ll try again.”
Still no answer. Sam drummed his fingers rapidly on his desk for a moment, then called his staff’s legal assistance liaison, a terrifyingly competent lady whose actual job was to know everyone in Washington—and where their skeletons were closeted and their bodies buried. “Sorry to bother you so late in the afternoon, Ms. Dockerty-Dawson, but this is extremely important. I need to find a certain Roderick Bantry and/or a Linda Rawlings. Or the phone numbers where they can be reached. They’re legally married but possibly informally separated. Here are the numbers I already have for Bantry; for Rawlings I’ve got nothing. If you could come up with something within twenty-four hours I’d be extremely grateful.”
Twenty-four hours later nothing had turned up except three more hate calls to everyone in Sam’s family.
Inwardly Sam raged. Outwardly it was hard to keep from manifesting some of that rage on the people around him. Sam fought for control as he considered what Ms. Dockerty-Dawson had turned up: nothing. Seven different phone numbers for Bantry and Rawlings—none of which were ever answered.
“One checked a little further,” whinnied Ms. Dockerty-Dawson in her teeth-gritting voice. “It’s strictly prohibited, of course, but if one speaks to precisely the right person, one can find out where a working wristphone is physically located, at least within a certain broad area. Those two wristphone numbers we’re speaking of are now somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about 900 miles west of Portugal. Wristphones don’t work under more than two and a half inches of water, I am informed, so the most obvious explanation is that both phones are now on a boat in that general area.” Ms. Dockerty-Dawson sniffed loudly in contemptuous disbelief.
Or in a watertight bag floating on the ocean, thought Sam bleakly, dumped there by people who didn’t want Bantry or Rawlings found—but who didn’t want their phones to conspicuously stop working either.
Sam spent the next six hours fruitlessly calling the seven numbers he had been given. After that he called the operations director of the FBI. “Judith? Sam Ferron here. I think that the present passive surveillance is no longer enough. No, I can’t tell you why at the moment, you’ll just have to take me on trust. Can you round up my family—Marianna, Bruce, and Emily—and salt them away somewhere for a while where nobody can get at them? Even if they come after them with an army? How about that fortress of yours in the Poconos? Yes, I’ll call them this moment and tell them to be prepared to leave in the next thirty seconds. I truly thank you, Judith, I truly, truly do.”
Sam broke the connection and slumped back in his chair, his mind numb with fatigue. What next? Only one thing suggested itself. He had to talk to the Federation. But how—and to whom?
Horst Helmstreit cast an amused eye at the several thousand naked people of both sexes at play on the golden sand that stretched as far as the eye could see. A dense growth of imported palm trees provided shade along one edge. Small gray rollers from the Gulf of Mexico lapped slowly against the other. Above, a furnace-like Sun burnt down from a cloudless blue sky.
“I didn’t know you were a nudist, Sam,” observed Helmstreit mildly, his slate-gray eyes appraising Sam’s fish-belly white body and darkly tanned arms. “If you are, you’re not much of an advertisement. Although I must say that aside from your color, you look in pretty good shape. Including your foot.”
Sam glanced down at his barely discernible artificial left foot, the legacy of the encounter with painlusters nearly forty years before that had cost the lives of his first wife and her parents. He wiggled the prosthetic toes. “Yes, they get better and better every year. But I didn’t come here for the sun.”
“No? Then why?”
Sam turned around slowly, then held out his empty hands. He rubbed a hand over his gleaming scalp. “As you can see, Horst, I’m naked, there’s nothing hidden on me, no recorders, no spyalls, nothing. And you’d better be the same. Otherwise the conversation ends here.”
Horst Helmstreit nodded approvingly. “Very clever, old colleague. I see you haven’t forgotten everything from the old days.” His gray eyes swept the beach. “You have your men planted here?”
“Some of them are women, I believe. I imagine you have your own?”
“Possibly, possibly.” Helmstreit held out his own thick brown hands. “What next? You can see I’m completely clean.”
“Are you? Come over here a few steps. Good. Now lift your left foot and let me see the bottom. Quickly, Horst. Quickly!”
Helmstreit hesitated, then broke into a dour smile. “So!” he muttered, lifting his left foot to reveal a small, flesh-colored patch. “I cut my—”