“That thing bothers you does it?” growled Mr Occam. “You should have seen my brother’s girlfriend after you lot blew her head off.”
The thing suspended in the water was dark red like congealed blood, its half-formed face an eyeless, orifice-less sculpture made of blood. All over its surface were hundreds of fine, branching strands, which at first seemed to be some kind of growth like seaweed, but then turned out not to be solid outgrowths at all but patterns of inward movement, rivulets of matter being drawn from the surrounding fluid and streaming into the solid mass of the body.
“Recognise the face at all?” asked Mr Thomas.
Karel looked at the eyeless mask. Red as it was, eyeless and hairless as it was, covered as it was by the little branching rivulets, the resemblance wasn’t immediately obvious, but now that he looked more closely it was unmistakeable. This thing was a likeness of himself.
“We always make several copies,” said Mr Thomas. “It gives us a margin of error. If we’re too rough with the first copy and it goes and dies on us, we can fall back on one of the others. Copies aren’t quite as resilient as originals unfortunately. In fact, in about ten per cent of cases, you can’t even get the heart to start and we just have to bin the things.”
He looked down thoughtfully into the mineral bath.
“It’s funny. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen this, I still always find myself wondering why they don’t drown down there, and why they don’t float or sink to the bottom. It’s hard to get your head round the fact that it isn’t a living entity at all at this stage. Nothing is moving in there. The field is a rigid template, the matter flows into it, and once every particle is in place, it is locked there, completely and utterly motionless. It’s the ultimate in suspended animation.”
They moved towards the third Inducer.
“This will only have been started a short time ago,” said Mr Thomas as the panel slid open.
At first this one seemed empty – there was certainly no solid object in there – but after a moment Karel made out a faint reddish vaguely man-shaped blur. Mr Thomas took an aluminium pole which rested against the Inducer and stirred the liquid until the reddish mist had disappeared. Then he laid down the pole again and they watched as the wispy shape slowly began to reassert itself.
“Suppose what you say is true,” said Karel/Heinz. “Suppose that I am only a copy of Karel Slade. Why tell me?”
Mr Thomas glanced at Mr Occam.
“Well in a certain sense, Heinz, it doesn’t make much difference to us whether you believe yourself to be the original or the copy. Either way you have the information we want and we’re going to extract it from you by any means possible. And if that involves razors, that’s too bad. If it involves putting vinegar on your scalded flesh or pulling off your nails with pliers, that’s too bad too. But it does seem unfair. So Mr Occam and I, when we talked outside earlier, we agreed that you might like to reflect on your position a bit before we go any further.”
“What do you mean, my position?”
“Think about it Heinz. Think it through. If you resist and we have to hurt you, you won’t be suffering on your own account but on behalf of Karel Slade. You’ve never been part of the SHG. We know that. In fact we’re your alibi. We can vouch for the fact that we fished you out of the soup ourselves, only a few hours ago. So there’s no doubt about it, you’ve never ordered anyone’s death. You’ve never harmed anyone at all.”
Mr Thomas took hold of Karel’s throne by the arms and turned it to face him.
“You’re an innocent man, Heinz,” he said. “Why should you suffer on behalf of someone else? Why should Mr Slade be protected by the law while we torture you to try and stop his wrong-doing.”
“Even if I am… Even if I’m not…”
Karel glanced at the misty red phantom of himself suspended in the mineral bath. Tears came welling up into his eyes.
“I mean whatever I am,” he persisted, fighting them back, “my beliefs are still the same.”
“Hey, hang on a minute there, Heinz, are you quite sure about that?” protested Mr Thomas. “Your beliefs the same? Think about that for a minute. Think, for instance, about what Karel Slade would think of you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wake up Heinz!” said Mr Occam giving the throne a rough shake. “Wakey wakey! You’re a copy, remember? You’re an abomination against God. That’s what Karel Slade thinks, doesn’t he? He thinks that even the lab technicians who make things like you deserve to be killed. And as for you yourself, well you’re just an object to him, aren’t you? You’re just a thing.”
“That’s right isn’t it Heinz?” asked Mr Thomas. “In Slade’s book you’re not even a person. You have no soul and no feelings. You have no rights, not even a right to pity. Think about it. That man we watched in the restaurant earlier on, if he knew what was going on here, would be pretty worried. But he wouldn’t be worried about you. He wouldn’t give a damn about you. Your feelings just wouldn’t come into it.”
“So if you don’t tell us what we need to know,” said Mr Occam, “and I have to hurt you, you’ll be suffering for another man who cares nothing for you. A man who denies that you are even capable of thinking and feeling.”
“But he’d be wrong there wouldn’t he?” said Mr Thomas. “You do think, don’t you Heinz? You do feel. Mr Occam and I, we know that and, like I said before, we aren’t sadists, whatever you might think. We’d really rather not hurt a living thing who’s done nothing wrong at all.”
Heinz looked from one to the other of his two interrogators.
Help me God, he began to pray, but then stopped. How could he pray if he was a copy? What was he to God? God belonged to Karel Slade, laughing and joking in the restaurant with his pretty wife, not to this flimsy shadow, summoned out of nothingness by a machine.
“So what will happen to me? When this is done, I mean.”
“Well if you stop to think about it, Heinz, I think you’ll realise that we’re going to have to terminate you,” said Mr Thomas gently. “As you pointed out yourself, you can’t legally exist. And copies don’t last long anyway. A week or two at most. You’ll have to go. But it can be peaceful if you want it to be, quiet and peaceful and soon.”
“Yeah,” said Mr Occam, “and think on this. If you act stubborn and we end up killing you the nasty way, well then we’ll just take that blood-clot guy out of the inducer there and start hurting him. And if he doesn’t play ball, well then we’ll take out that cloudy guy – he should be good and solid by then – and start on him. And if he plays the hero, well then, we’ll get a few more copies going that don’t even exist yet, and bring them alive just so they can suffer like you. But if you talk, well then they’re all on easy street. They can all stay in oblivion for good.”
Mr Thomas touched a button on the Inducer and the lid slowly closed.
Back in the interrogation room, Heinz told them the codes and the names and the bank details. What were these things to him after all? He was no more responsible for them than a traveller at an airport was responsible for contraband slipped into his luggage when he was looking the other way.
When Heinz was finally done, Mr Thomas went and fetched three cups of coffee from a machine in some other part of the building that Heinz would never see. He brought the three cups in on a little plastic tray, along with some little packets of cookies, and used his remote controller to release Heinz’s wrists from the shackles so he could hold his own cup and eat his own cookies. For a short time they all sipped peacefully in companionable, almost dreamy, silence, enjoying the warm surge of caffeine in their blood.