"In Hiding," I said.
"What?"
"That's the name of the movie. In Hiding."
I hadn't realized it, but the waiter had just come out with our desserts, and overheard me. "You see that flick?" he asked.
I looked up. "No," I told him, "but I heard about it."
"Some show! I mean . . ." He looked at Tuuli then, embarrassed. "That Misti Innocenza is something else." He paused defensively. "She can act, too. Good enough, she could be in big-time flicks."
I decided I'd misjudged Mr. Ethel's waiters; this one anyway.
"I'm sure she could," Tuuli told him. He put down our sundaes and hurried away. "My next question," she said, "was who's the actress. And we've got the answer."
Misti Innocenza. Okay, but so what? Still, I felt a stir of excitement.
5
Life-Tex masks are carefully molded to the wearer's face, otherwise they're useless. This one had thickened the brow ridge, and given the face a broad, high-bridged nose and neat, reddish blond beard. So the wearer's hair was probably more or less blond. And the mask had a well-tanned complexion, which suggested the original didn't. For the camouflage effect.
At the lab I told Skip what I wanted, and left the mask with him. An hour later he buzzed me, and I went over. Using the computer, he'd developed a facsimile of the wearer's own face, and had tried three hair styles with it, printing off each of the versions.
I knew it at once, from my recent research.
"I've seen this guy," Skip said, "but I don't recall who he is. Someone on a magazine cover." He paused. "Or a tabloid."
I nodded. "Buddy Ballenger."
"That's it." Reaching, he touched a key on his intercom. "Fidela," he said, "could you come to the lab a minute? This is Skip." Fidela, who read the tabloids, confirmed the identification at once. When she'd left, Skip looked curiously at me. "What's this all about?"
I shook my head. It looked like Ballenger might have had a sexual fixation on Misti Innocenza, a fixation strong enough, he'd gone to a porn theater to watch her perform. He could have called up the flick at home, if he'd wanted to. Maybe he liked the vibes and smell of a porn theater. And the mask would keep anyone from recognizing him. But why would he take it off before ducking out when the police arrived?
I'd been thinking out loud, and Skip answered. Life-Tex masks aren't as convincing in reality as they seem on the screen. In extreme close shots—shots that show little more than the face—even Life-Tex masks don't look lifelike when the actor is talking. In films and holos this is dealt with by a computer process, but live that doesn't help.
So apparently Ballenger, fearing he'd be questioned, got rid of the mask. His face wasn't that well known, except to people who watched his show or read the tabloids, and hopefully any cop who might stop him wouldn't be one of them. Of course, the odds of his being questioned had been next to zero—the police were looking for a small wiry Asian, not a big blond Caucasian—but Ballenger hadn't known that. He'd panicked, and left his mask behind.
Interesting. But being horny over Misti Innocenza wouldn't mean a thing in court, any more than her story would. Not by themselves. What I needed to learn was how it was done.
6
Back in my office, I phoned Ole Sigurdsson. He was tied up that afternoon, but as a personal friend, I got an appointment for eight that evening. Tuuli went with me.
We were having an early April rain, unusually hard, with thunder and lightning. Ole's place is on top of a steep ridge between two canyons in Bel Air, and the goat-trail street that zigzagged up the side flowed like a shallow creek, between ivy-covered banks that glistened wetly in the streetlights.
From the front, his house looks small for Bel Air—one story high and not particularly wide—but that's the uphill side. Seen from downhill, it's the second floor. It contains a large room with bar for entertaining, along with a small kitchen and one and a half baths. And Ole's office—a kind of smallish sitting room actually, with a long sofa where he naps when he feels like it. He's in his eighties, and doesn't take as many clients as he used to. Downstairs are their living quarters, and Laura's offices. His wife is Laura Wayne Walker, a producer of theater and TV films and holos. She's a lot younger than Ole—maybe sixty-five—but they suit each other. Besides being compatible and highly competent, they have a lot of mutual admiration.
Tuuli was my in-house psychic, but Ole has a different spectrum of talents, so I turn to him from time to time. What I wanted now was his viewpoint, which sometimes picks out things both Tuuli and I have missed.
I summarized the case for him, which didn't take long, then asked: "What actually happened, do you think? How did these assaults take place? Assuming it wasn't some kind of hypnosis."
He showed no sign of uncertainty. "They are real enough," he said. "Each of them lived two lives at vunce for a v'ile, as if they had parallel existences. Then something happened and vun of them died—and the memories of that self snapped back into the first vun."
"But how? How could something like that happen?"
He grunted. "That's your yob to find out. You're the detective. But these veren't no freaks of nature. Somevun made them happen, that's vun thing I'm sure of."
He had a small wood-burning brick stove, and had put on the same old-fashioned orange-red coffeepot I'd seen the first time I'd been there. It began to perk.
"Do you have any idea what kind of connection Ballenger might have with whoever—made these things happen?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe they both belong to a Misti Innocenza fan club on the Veb."
A fan club? I shuddered at the amount of work it would be to attack the case from that angle, though I might have to.
Ole got up and poured us coffee. He knew we took ours black, but he stirred cream and sugar into his until it had enough calories to feed the starving Sudanese. Then we sipped and talked some more. It was hard for me to accept parallel existences, even as part of quantum theory, and Ole had no more idea than I did how anyone could split a time line. Not at the level of particle integration that humans experience. But on the other hand, the breakthrough that produced the geogravitic power converter had given and continued to give rise to a whole spray of new developments, in both basic science and technology. A lot of us aren't as sure of what we know as people used to be.
Tuuli and I drove home without saying much. I didn't know whether the trip had been worthwhile or not.
7
I woke up in the morning with a decision, and when I got to the office, phoned Vic Merlin in Arizona. Vic and his wife were old friends of Ole's, that I got to know on the Puppetmaster Case. Vic is undoubtedly a higher powered psychic even than Ole. I gave him a rundown on what I was up against, then asked: "Can you think of any way someone could split a time line?"
Education, and decades spent away from rural west Texas, hadn't entirely erased his accent. "Not and transfer memories across like that," he said, then added what seemed like a total non sequitur. "But there's a guy named C.K.F. Linyetski in England, at the University of Birmingham, built an operating teleport a couple years ago. The only problem was, the block of iron he teleported arrived at the receiving plate as a little mound of fine dust—atoms of iron and assorted impurities in the same ratios as in the block."
I frowned. "What's the connection between that and splitting a time line?" I asked.
"I sure don't know; it just came to me." That definitely sounded like Vic. "I've got something else you might be interested in," he added.
* * * * * *
Vic's mainly a psychic researcher, but like Ole Sigurdsson, he's also a healer. He'd just treated an old friend named William Harford, who'd had a severe psychotic seizure and heart attack at his home in Los Alamos, New Mexico. When her husband's condition was upgraded to stable, Harford's wife had phoned Vic, and he'd flown to Los Alamos the next day. Vic had worked his way beneath the sedatives and Harford's severe confusion, and gotten a story that in important respects was like the others I'd heard. Harford worked for the government in weapons research—he did basic theoretical work in matrix physics—and his intrusive memories were of waking up in a clinic at a foreign laboratory, in India or Pakistan he thought. There he'd been grilled about his own research and related work. When he'd refused to cooperate, they'd tried drugs and psychological stress, and having a pre-existing heart condition, he'd had a coronary attack. And died. He was sure about that: as the duplicate Harford, he'd died.