“I’m sure you did, Horst. Just pull it off and throw it away over there.”
“How did you know it was there?” demanded Helmstreit as he balanced precariously on one foot and stripped the patch away.
“When I was a kid I was fascinated by an old-time magician named Harry Houdini. One day I read that Houdini used to keep his picklocks taped to the bottom of his feet when he did his celebrated jail escapes. They’d strip him naked, search him all over, and never find a thing.”
“Harry Houdini, ha! I’ll remember that.” The Austrian smiled benignly. “And now, Sam, shall we talk?”
“Yes. We’ll walk out in the water as far as we can go and bounce around in the waves. That ought to prevent anyone else from listening in.” Sam’s right hand tightened powerfully around Helmstreit’s upper biceps. “But first, Horst, let’s also take a look at the bottom of your right foot.”
Twenty-two years earlier, Sam had met Horst Helmstreit toward the end of the Great Sweep. Helmstreit was both the chief of Vienna’s painluster investigation bureau and the Austrian liaison with Sam’s painluster research center in Kansas City. Sam had spent three weeks in Austria while Helmstreit relentlessly rolled up one pain cult after the other. They had shared a few dinners together, a number of beers and coffees in sidewalk cafes. It had been nearly twenty years since they had last spoken. Now they bobbed together in the warm waves of Matagorda Island Nature Retreat, fifty miles northeast of Corpus Christi, Texas.
“Why me?” asked Helmstreit.
“Of all the people I’ve ever met who now work for the Federation you’re the most senior. And the one I have the most friendly recollections of.”
“All right, I’ll accept that for the moment. But why are we meeting?”
“You checked me out as I told you to?”
“Your political career, your family, your life? Yes, of course. There are lengthy dossiers on you scattered throughout the world.”
“Especially at the Office of Planetary Security.”
“I don’t work for the OPS, Sam, I told you that. I work for—”
“I don’t care who you pretend to work for. You know everyone in the Federation. And everything that’s going on in the world. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have gone to work for the Federation in the first place.”
Helmstreit nodded gravely. “Possibly, possibly.”
Sam looped his still muscular arm around the Austrian’s neck and pulled him closer. “The Senate filibuster on the Constitution, Horst,” he whispered in a voice that was barely audible. “I might—might!—be willing to switch my vote. But only in return for certain guarantees from the Federation.”
“Guarantees? For what?”
“The absolute safety of my immediate family, for starters. Now and for the next hundred years.”
“I don’t, of course, know what you’re talking about, Sam, but I think I could guarantee that. Yes, I really think so. We’re not tyrants, you know.”
“We’ll see. Next, I want Roderick Bantry and his wife back. Healthy, unharmed, and—this is most important, Horst—unbrainscrubbed. Do you follow me?”
“Not really, but supposing I did? Why might this couple I’ve never heard of be brainscrubbed? Assuming I even knew what that word meant.”
“That’s the other thing we’ve got to settle right here and now, Horst. Either you’re going to tell me what the Federation plans to do about the scanner or there’s no deal.”
“The scanner?”
Sam let some of his smoldering rage boil over. “Horst, this is me, Sam Ferron! Stop fooling around! If you don’t—”
Helmstreit looked at Sam with unblinking eyes. “Sam. I swear I don’t know what this scanner thing means.”
Sam considered the slab-like face skeptically. “Is it possible?” He unwrapped his arm from around Helmstreit’s neck and let himself drift away in the warm Gulf waters. “All right then, I’ll call your bluff. So go talk with someone who does know—and meet me back here in twenty-four hours.”
The following day was, if anything, even hotter. Sam and Helmstreit bobbed together in the same tepid water, this time with a thick green cabbage leaf protecting the top of Sam’s shiny skull.
“All right, Sam,” said the Austrian, “I finally found someone who appeared to know what you might be talking about. It’s the most closely guarded secret in the Federation. And from the little they told me, I can see why. This would be the most disruptive—”
“Horst, you, a former policeman, saying that? It would be the greatest thing for fighting crime that ever happened. Better than perceptualization enhancement even! It would wipe out crime and war forever! Isn’t that what your precious Federation is being set up for? It—”
“It would lead to absolute dictatorship,” declared Helmstreit flatly. “No one would ever have any privacy!”
“It would lead to absolute dictatorship if only one group of people had it—such as the Federation OPS. If everyone had it, though, then the opposite would be true—there’d be absolute freedom!”
“Freedom? Spying on—”
“Lying, stealing, crooked politicians? Not only to keep them from preparing for war, but from putting their hands in everybody’s pockets? I know that’s the Federation’s real worry, Horst, just like it’s going to be every politician’s worry all over the world. So to save their asses, the scanner’s going to have to be used under an absolutely rigidly defined legal code. There’ll be licensed genealogists and historians who’ll have access to it, laws about no peeping on living persons, regulations to—”
“Then what about policemen and wiping out crime and war, as you just said? How can they use it if—”
“Court orders, Horst, court orders. In Europe you don’t have a tradition of them like we do here in the States. But picture yourself five years from now as chief of police in Vienna. You want to use your brand new scanner to see if Heinrich Q. Glockenspiel has just used a big shiny ax on his wife over on the Prinz Eugenstrasse. First you’ll have to get a judge to issue a warrant for a scan on the basis of some concrete evidence or information, just the way you have to present a valid reason in order to get a search warrant today. Even if you personally saw him wielding the ax, you’d still have to get a court order.”
“Umph.” Horst Helmstreit sounded largely unconvinced. “In any event, Sam, that’s not the way it’s going to happen. Nothing is going to happen, do you understand, nothing! And that’s all I’ve been authorized to say.”
Sam took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. His worst fears had now been realized. “You mean you really are going to try to suppress it?”
“Suppress? That’s not quite the word—”
“Well, at least keep it for the Federation—and the OPS.”
“That I can’t comment on.”
“No, I suppose not. What about Roderick and Linda?”
“The Bantrys.” Helmstreit pursed his lips. “I’ve been told to tell you that we know nothing about them, have never even heard of them, but that we will keep an eye out for them. And that it is possible—possible, Sam—that after the next vote in the Senate, if all goes well, who knows, maybe they might be found after all.”
Sam looked at the Austrian with arctic blue eyes that were now glacially cold. “So you’re going to disappear them, are you? Them and everyone else who’s ever heard of the scanner?”
“Not you, Sam, and not your family. Not if…. ” Helmstreit shrugged eloquently.