A few days afterward, the Justice Department, usually stingy and slow in dealing with private investigation firms, surprised Joe with a transfer of funds that qualified as generous—payment for information leading to solution of the Harford case.
My clones were never mentioned, but they were questioned exhaustively, without knowing each other existed. And held, still separately, till on the forty-fifth day they jumped me only minutes apart. I'd been expecting them.
Meanwhile I seined the open Web for a few months until nothing more seemed likely to show up, watching for anything about certain people and certain places. Carefully of course, so it wouldn't draw attention. It brought me some interesting information. Any items that hadn't made the major media, I hand-carried to Joe and Carlos, but none of us said anything about any of it, even to each other. I didn't even say anything to Tuuli. Now, though, with recent developments, the records have been opened, some of them anyway, adding to what we already knew.
A week after his transfer to the federal high security prison near Bitter Springs, Nevada, Charles Scheele suicided. So the records say; I doubt it to beat hell. Two days later, his attorney, along with four other passengers, died aboard a transatlantic airliner, of salmonella poisoning, supposedly from eating tainted whitefish. Ferguson, Scheele's lab assistant, was reported killed that same week in a prison fight, a matter of homosexual jealousy. Carver, Scheele's muscleman, was "shot to death while assaulting a guard with a knife." Could be.
The day after Scheele's arrest, Buddy Ballenger was confidentially pulled in, questioned, and released, a no doubt very sobered reverend. Two days later he died in a traffic accident, along with an employee, William Bradley. The "accident" made the papers.
Within six weeks, Ibadhan's Minister of Finance died when his home was bombed; Shiite terrorists were blamed. That one came from UPA wire services. Three weeks after that, a massive explosion destroyed a weapons research installation in northern India, virtually wiping out its staff, and getting a lot of media attention. I could guess how it got detonated.
It took a year before I stopped worrying about something happening to me, and even then I wasn't totally sure. The government didn't want even a whiff of a hint that anything like a cloner existed, and I didn't blame them.
* * *
Then, last August, a news item hit the Web, papers, newsfaxes, and TV news channels: A physics professor at the University of Bologna, in Italy, had undertaken the maiden test on his newly invented teleport. He'd put a stone on the sending plate and closed the switch—and the stone still sat there, so he assumed it hadn't worked. Then his assistant in the other room shouted, "It works! It works!" The prof went in to see what the guy was shouting about—and there was a duplicate of the stone on the receiving plate. So he tried it with his watch, and got two watches, both showing precisely the same time.
He'd hurried to the Biology Department, borrowed a white mouse, and duplicated it too. Less than an hour later, while showing the two mice to his department chairman, one of them disappeared before their eyes. Then he'd checked his desk drawer, and the duplicate watch was gone.
By suppertime, the entire physics department, a bunch of other professors and grad students, a TV camera crew, and all of Italy had been treated to demonstrations. The cat was very thoroughly out of the bag, and by now, of course, the whole world knows about it. Which, along with the latest reform of federal security agencies, is why we got clearance to debrief ourselves on this, though the debrief is confidential.
Myself, I wish none of it had happened. The country—the world!—is having a hard time adjusting to the continuous major changes that shake their whole reality. Joe says we'll adjust, that most of us already are, and in the process we'll become a wiser species. I hope to hell he's right.
THE END
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