Moore walked all around it, face dark and brooding, saying nothing to Verrick until he had examined it from all sides. Finally he took hold of the hair and tugged. The skull-covering came off, leaving a dully-gleaming metal hemisphere. Moore tossed the wig to one of the robots and then turned his back on the exhibit.
"It looks exactly like the photograph," Verrick said admiringly.
Moore laughed. "Naturally! The dummy was made first and then photographed. But it's probably about the way Preston looked." His eyes flickered. "Looks, I mean."
Eleanor Stevens detached herself from the watching group and approached the dummy cautiously. "But is this anything new? Your work goes much farther than this. Presumably Preston adapted the MacMillan papers the way you did. He built a,synthetic of himself the way you built Pellig."
"What we heard," Moore said, "was Preston's actual voice. It was not a vocal medium artificially constructed. No two voices have the same tape-pattern. Even if he's modeled a synthetic after his own body—"
"You think he's still alive in his own body?" Eleanor demanded. "That isn't possible!"
Moore didn't answer. He was staring moodily at the dummy of John Preston; he had picked up the arm again and was mechanically pulling loose the artificial fingers one by one. The look on his face was nothing Eleanor had ever seen before.
"My synthetic," Moore said very faintly, "will live a year. Then it deteriorates. That's as long as it's good for."
"Hell!" Verrick grunted, "if we haven't destroyed Cartwright in a year it won't make any difference!"
"Are you sure a synthetic couldn't be built so accurately that the aud and vidtapes would—" Eleanor began, but Moore cut her off.
"I can't do it," he stated flatly. There was a strange note in his voice. "If it can be done, I sure as hell don't understand how." Abruptly he shook himself and hurried to the door of the lab. "Pellig should be entering the teep defense network. I want to be integrated in the apparatus when that happens."
Verrick and Eleanor Stevens followed quickly after him, the dummy of John Preston forgotten.
"This should be interesting," Verrick said briefly, as he hurried toward his office. Anticipation gleamed from his heavy face as he rapidly snapped on the screen the ipvic technicians had set up for him. With Eleanor standing nervously behind him, Verrick prepared himself for the sight of Keith Pellig as he stepped from the intercon transport, onto the field at Batavia.
Keith Pellig took a deep breath of warm fresh air and then glanced around him.
Fluttering excitedly, Margaret Lloyd rushed down the ramp after him. "I want you to meet Walter, Mr. Pellig. He's around somewhere. Oh, dear! All these people..."
The field was crowded. Commuters were getting off transports, hordes of Directorate bureaucrats were lined up for transportation home. Milling groups of passengers waiting fussily for interplan ships. There were stacks of luggage and hard-working MacMillans everywhere, and a constant din of noise and furious activity, the voices and the roar of ships, public loudspeakers, the rumble of surface cars and busses.
Al Davis noted all this, as he halted the Pellig body and waited warily for Miss Lloyd to catch up with him. The more people the better: the ocean of sound obscured his own mental personality.
"There he is," Margaret Lloyd gasped, breasts quivering, bright-eyed and entranced by the sights. She began waving frantically. "Look, he sees us! He's coming this way!"
A thin-faced man in his middle forties was solemnly edging through the throngs of talking, laughing, perspiring people. He looked patient and bored, a typical classified official of the Directorate, part of its vast army of desk men.
He waved to Miss Lloyd and called something, but his words were lost in the general uproar.
"We can have dinner someplace," Miss Lloyd said to Pellig. "Do you know a place? Walter will know a place; he knows just about everything. He's been here a long time and he's really got to where he—" Her voice momentarily faded, as a giant truck rumbled by.
Davis wasn't listening. He had to keep moving; he had to get rid of the chattering girl and her middle-aged companion and start toward the Directorate buildings. Down his sleeve and into his right hand poured the slender wire that fed his thumb-gun. The first sight of Cartwright, the first moment the Quizmaster appeared in front of him—a quick movement of his hand, thumb raised, the tide of pure energy released...
At that moment he caught sight of the expression on Walter's face.
Al Davis blindly moved the Pellig body through the milling people, toward the street and the lines of surface cars. Walter was a teep, of course. The moment of recognition was evident as he caught Davis' thoughts and his brief run-through of his program of assassination. A group of people separated and the Pellig body sprawled clumsily against a railing. With one bound Davis carried it over the railing and onto the sidewalk.
He glanced around... and felt panic. Behind him, Walter had kept on coming.
Davis started down the sidewalk. _He had to keep moving._ He came to an intersection and hurried to the other side. Surface cars honked and roared around him; he ignored them and raced on.
The full impact was just beginning to hit him. Any of them might be teeps. The word passed on, scanned from one mind to the next. The teep network was a connected ring; he had run up against the first station and that was the trigger. There was no use trying to outrun Walter; the next teep would rise up ahead of him and intercept him.
He halted, then ducked into a store. He was surounded by fabrics and materials, a dazzling display of colors and textures on all sides of him. A few well-dressed women were examining and languidly buying. He sped past a counter toward a rear door.
At the door a clerk cut him off, a fat man in a blue suit, pudding face flushed with indignation. "Say, you can't come back here! Who the hell are you?" His fat body wedged itself in the way.
Davis' mind raced frantically. He dimly sensed rather than saw the group of figures quietly entering the swank entrance behind him. He ducked down and then hurtled himself past the astonished clerk, down an aisle between counters. He bowled over a terrified old woman and emerged beside a vast display rack that majestically revolved to reveal its anatomy. What next? They were at both doors; he had trapped himself. He thought frantically, desperately. What next?
While he was trying to decide, a silent _whoosh_ picked him up and slammed him violently against the protective ring that circled his body. He was back at Farben.
Before his eyes a miniature Pellig raced and darted on the microscopic screen. The next operator was already working to solve the problem of escape, but Davis wasn't interested. He sagged limply in his chair and allowed the complex wiring attached to his body—his _real_ body—to drain off the bursts of adrenalin that choked his chest and heart.
Another red button, not his own, was illuminated. He could ignore the shrill sounds scratching at his ears; somebody else had to work out the answer, for awhile. Davis tried to reach his hand up to the good-luck charm inside his shirt, but the protective ring stopped him. It didn't matter: he was already safe.
On the screen Keith Pellig burned through the plate-plastic window of the luxurious clothing store and floundered out onto the street. People screamed in horror; there was pandemonium and confusion.
The fat red-faced clerk stood as if turned to stone. While everyone else raced around frantically, he stood motionless, his lips twitching, his body jerking in convulsive spasms. Saliva dribbled from his thick mouth. His eyes rolled inward. Suddenly he collapsed in a blubbery heap.