II
"...one... two... three."
Davidson opened his eyes, blinking for a minute as they adjusted to the room's light. He swallowed experimentally, glancing at the clock on the desk to his left. Just after three-thirty in the morning, which meant he'd been under for nearly an hour... and from the way his throat felt, he'd apparently been talking for most of that time. "How'd it go?" he asked the man seated beyond the microphone that had been set up in front of him.
Dr. Hamish nodded, the standard medical professional's neutral expression pasted across his face. "Quite well, Major. At least once we got you started."
"Sorry. I did warn you I've never been good at being hypnotized." A slight scraping of feet to his right made Davidson turn, to find a distinguished-looking middle-aged man seated just outside his field of view there. On the other's lap was a pad and pencil; beside him on another chair was a tape recorder connected to the microphone. "Dr. Saunders," Davidson nodded in greeting, vaguely surprised to see Backdrop's director looking so alert at such an ungodly hour. "I didn't hear you come in."
"Dr. Hamish was having enough trouble putting you under," Saunders shrugged. "I didn't think it would help for me to be here, too, during the process."
Davidson's eyes flicked to the notepad. "Did you get what you wanted?"
Saunders shrugged again, his neutral expression almost as good as Hamish's. "We'll know soon enough," he said. "It'll take a while to run the equations you gave us past our various experts, of course."
"Of course," Davidson nodded. "I hope whatever you got doesn't make things worse, the way Garwood thought it would."
"Dr. Garwood is a pessimist," Saunders said shortly.
"Maybe," Davidson said, knowing better than to start an argument. "Has there been any word about him?"
"From the searchers, you mean?" Saunders shook his head. "Not yet. Though that's hardly surprising—he had over half an hour to find a hole to hide in, after all."
Davidson winced at the implied accusation in the other's tone. It wasn't his fault, after all, that none of the damned "not-me" generation drivers on the interstate had bothered to stop. "Men with mild concussions aren't usually up to using car radios," he said, perhaps more tartly than was called for."
"I know, Major." Saunders sighed. "And I'm sorry we couldn't prepare you better for handling him. But—well, you understand."
"I understand that your security wound up working against you, yes," Davidson said. "If a fugitive is carrying a weapon, we're supposed to know that in advance. If the fugitive is a weapon, we ought to know that, too."
"Dr. Garwood as walking time bomb?" Saunder's lip twitched. "Yes, you mentioned that characterization of him a few minutes ago, during your debriefing."
Davidson only vaguely remembered calling Garwood that. "You disagree?"
"On the contrary, it's an uncomfortably vivid description of the situation," Saunders said grimly.
"Yeah." Davidson braced himself. "And now my men and I are in the same boat, aren't we?"
"Hardly," Saunders shook his head. The neutral expression, Davidson noted, was back in place. "We're going to keep the three of you here for awhile, just to be on the safe side, but I'm ninety-nine percent certain there's no danger of the same... effect... developing."
"I hope you're right," Davidson said. Perhaps a gentle probe... "Seems to me, though, that if there's even a chance it'll show up, we deserve to know what it is we've got. And how it works."
"Sorry, Major," Saunders said, with a quickness that showed he'd been expecting the question. "Until an updated security check's been done on you, we can't consider telling you anything else. You already know more than I'm really comfortable with."
Which was undoubtedly the real reason Saunders was keeping them here. "And if my security comes through clean?" he asked, passing up the cheap-shot reminder of what Saunder's overtight security had already cost him tonight.
"We'll see," Saunders said shortly, getting to his feet and sliding the pad into his pocket. "The guard will escort you to your quarters, Major. Good-night."
He left the room, taking the tape recorder with him, and Davidson turned his attention back to Hamish. "Any post-hypnotic side effects I should watch out for, Doctor?" he asked, reaching down for his crutches and carefully standing up. He winced as he put a shade too much weight on his injured leg.
Hamish shook his head. "No, nothing like that."
"Good." He eyed the other. "I don't suppose you could give me any hints as to my prognosis here, could you?"
"You mean as regards the—ah—problem with Dr. Garwood?" Hamish shook his head, too quickly. "I really don't think you're in any danger, Major. Really I don't. The room here didn't suffer any damage while Dr. Saunders was writing down the equations you gave him, which implies you don't know enough to bother you."
Davidson felt the skin on the back of his neck crawl. So Garwood had been telling the truth, after all. It was indeed pure knowledge alone that was behind his walking jinx effect.
He shook his head. No, that was utterly impossible. Much easier to believe that whatever scam Garwood was running, he'd managed to take in Backdrop's heads with it, too.
Either way, of course, it made Garwood one hell of a dangerous man. "I see," he said through stiff lips. "Thank you, Doctor. Good-night."
A Marine guard, dressed in one of Backdrop's oddly nonstandard jumpsuit outfits, was waiting outside the door as Davidson emerged. "If you'll follow me, Major," he said, and led the way to an undistinguished door a couple of corridors away. Behind the door, Davidson found a compact dorm-style apartment, minimally furnished with writing desk, chair, and fold-down bed, with a closet and bathroom tucked into opposite corners. Through the open closet door a half dozen orange jumpsuits could be seen hanging; laid out on the bed was a set of underwear and a large paper bag. "You'll need to put your clothing into the bag," the guard explained after showing Davidson around the room. "Your watch and other personal effects, too, if you would."
"Can I keep my cigarettes?"
"No, sir. Cigarettes are especially forbidden."
Davidson thought back to the car ride, and Garwood's disintegrating trick. "Because that effect of Garwood's destroys them?" he hazarded.
The Marine's face might have twitched, but Davidson wouldn't have sworn to it. "I'll wait outside, sir, while you change."
He retired to the hallway, shutting the door behind him. Grimacing, Davidson stripped and put on the underwear, wondering if it would help to tell Saunders that he'd already seen what the Garwood Effect did to cigarettes. The thought of spending however many days or weeks here without nicotine... Preoccupied, it was only as he was stuffing his clothes into it that his mind registered the oddity of using a paper bag instead of the usual plastic. A minor mystery, to go with all the major ones.
The Marine was waiting to accept the bag when he opened the door a minute later. Tucking it under his arm, he gave Davidson directions to the mess hall, wished him good-night, and left. Closing the door and locking it, Davidson limped his way back to the bed and shut off the nightstand light.
Lying there, eyes closed, he tried to think; but it had been a long day, and between fatigue and the medication he'd been given for his leg he found he couldn't hold onto a coherent train of thought, and two minutes after hitting the pillow he gave up the effort. A minute after that, he was fast asleep.
—
The jumpsuits hanging in the closet were the first surprise of the new day.
Not their color. Davidson hadn't seen any other orange outfits in his brief walk through Backdrop the previous night, but he'd rather expected to be given something distinctive as long as he was effectively on security probation here. But it was something else that caught his attention, some oddity in the feel of the material as he pulled it off its wooden hanger. Examining the label, he quickly found the reason: the jumpsuit was one hundred percent linen.