She wasn't just in, she was taking over. Ah, well. “Phoebe, love, do you believe in murderous cats eight feet tall?”
“Do you have doubts, Jack?”
“Not any more. I called my son. Something secretive is happening in Aristarchus, something that requires a medic.”
She only nodded. “What have you got for us?”
I showed them my dime disk. “Took me less than a week. Run it in an autodoc. Ten personality choices. The chemical differences aren't big, but… infantry, which means killing on foot and doesn't have anything to do with children… where was I? Yah. Infantry isn't at all like logistics, and neither is it like espionage, and Navy is different yet. We may have lost some of the military vocations over the centuries. We'll have to re-invent them. This is just a first cut. I wish we had a way to try it out.”
Anton set a dime disk next to mine, and a small projector. “Mine's nearly full. The ARM's stored an incredible range of dangerous devices. We need to think hard about where to store this. I even wondered if one of us should be emigrating, which is why—”
“To the Belt? Further?”
“Jack, if this all adds up, we won't have time to reach another star.”
We watched stills and flat motion pictures of weapons and tools in action. Much of it was quite primitive, copied out of deep archives. We watched rock and landscape being torn, aircraft exploding, machines destroying other machines… and imagined flesh shredding.
“I could get more, but I thought I'd better show you this first,” Anton said.
I said, “Don't bother.”
“What? Jack?”
“It only took us a week! Why risk our necks to do work that can be duplicated that fast?”
Anton looked lost. “We need to do something!”
“Well, maybe we don't. Maybe the ARM is doing it all for us.”
Phoebe gripped Anton's wrist hard, and he swallowed some bitter retort. She said, “Maybe we're missing something. Maybe we're not looking at it right.”
“What's on your mind?”
“Let's find a way to look at it differently.” She was looking straight at me.
I said, “Stoned? Drunk? Fizzed? Wired?”
Phoebe shook her head. “We need the schitz view.”
“Dangerous, love. Also, the chemicals you're talking about are massively illegal. I can't get them, and Anton would be caught for sure—” I saw the way she was smiling at me. “Anton, I'll break your scrawny neck.”
“Huh? Jack?”
“No, no, he didn't tell me,” Phoebe said hastily, “though frankly I'd think either of you might have trusted me that much, Jack! I remembered you in the 'doc that morning, and Anton coming down from that twitchy state on a Thursday night, and it all clicked.”
“Okay.”
“You're a schitz, Jack. But it's been a long time, hasn't it?”
“Thirteen years of peace,” I said. “They pick us for it, you know. Paranoid schizophrenics, born with our chemistry screwed up, hair trigger temper and a skewed view of the universe. Most schitzies never have to feel that. We use the 'docs more regularly than you do and that's that. But some of us go into the ARM… Phoebe, your suggestion is still silly. Anton's crazy four days out of the week, just like I used to be. Anton's all you need.”
“Phoebe, he's right.”
“No. The ARM used to be all schitzies, right? The genes have thinned out over three hundred years.”
Anton nodded. “They tell us in training. The ones who could be Hitler or Napoleon or Castro, they're the ones the ARM wants. They're the ones you can send on a mother hunt, the ones with no social sense… but the Fertility Board doesn't let them breed either, unless they've got something special. Jack, you were special, high intelligence or something—”
“Perfect teeth, and I don't get sick in free fall, and Charlotte's people never develop back problems. That helped. Yah… but every century there are less of us. So they hire some Antons too, and make you crazy—”
“But carefully,” Phoebe said. “Anton's not evolved from paranoia, Jack. You are. When they juice Anton up they don't make him too crazy, just enough to get the viewpoint they want. I bet they leave the top management boringly sane. But you, Jack—”
“I see it.” Centuries of ARM tradition were squarely on her side.
“You can go as crazy as you like. It's all natural, and medics have known how to handle it since Only One Earth. We need the schitz viewpoint, and we don't have to steal the chemicals.”
“Stet. When do we start?”
Anton looked at Phoebe. Phoebe said, “Now?”
We played Anton's tape all the way through, to a running theme of graveyard humor.
“I took only what I thought we could use,” Anton said. “You should have seen some of the rest. Agent Orange. Napalm. Murder stuff.”
Phoebe said, “Isn't this murder?”
That remark might have been unfair. We were watching this bizarre chunky rotary-blade flyer. Fire leaped from underneath it, once and again… weapons of some kind.
Anton said, “Aircraft design isn't the same when you use it for murder. It changes when you expect to be shot at. Here—” The picture had changed. “That's another weapons platform. It's not just fast, it's supposed to hide in the sky. Jack, are you all right?”
“I'm scared green. I haven't felt any effects yet.”
Phoebe said, “You need to relax. Anton delivers a terrific massage. I never learned.”
She wasn't kidding. Anton didn't have my muscle, but he had big strangler's hands. I relaxed into it, talking as he worked, liking the way my voice wavered as his hands pounded my back.
“It hasn't been that long since a guy like me let his 'doc run out of beta-gamma something. An indicator light ran out and he didn't notice. He tried to kill his business partner by bombing his partner's house, and got some family members instead.”
“We're on watch,” Phoebe said. “If you go berserk we can handle it. Do you want to see more of this?”
“We've missed something. Children, I'm a registered schitz. If I don't use my 'doc for three days, they'll be trying to find me before I remember I'm the Marsport Strangler.”
Anton said, “He's right, love. Jack, give me your door codes. If I can get into your apt, I can fix the records.”
“Keep talking. Finish the massage, at least. We might have other problems. Do we want fruit juice? Munchies? Foodlike substances?”
When Anton came back with groceries, Phoebe and I barely noticed.
Were the warcats real? Could we fight them with present tech? How long did Sol system have? And the other systems, the more sparsely settled colony worlds? Was it enough to make tapes and blueprints of the old murder machines, or must we set to building clandestine factories? Phoebe and I were spilling ideas past each other as fast as they came, and I had quite forgotten that I was doing something dangerous.
I noticed myself noticing that I was thinking much faster than thoughts could spill from my lips. I remembered knowing that Phoebe was brighter than I was, and that didn't matter either. But Anton was losing his Thursday edge.
We slept. The old airbed was a big one. We woke to fruit and bread and dived back in.
We re-invented the Navy using only what Anton had recorded of seagoing navies. We had to. There had never been space navies; the long peace had fallen first.
I'm not sure when I slid into schitz mode. I'd spent four days out of seven without the 'doc, every week for forty-one years excluding vacations. You'd think I'd remember the feel of my brain chemistry changing. Sometimes I do; but it's the central me that changes, and there's no way to control that.
Anton's machines were long out of date, and none had been developed even for interplanetary war. Mankind had found peace too soon. Pity. But if the warcats' gravity generators could be copied before the warcats arrived, that alone could save us!