“What did you do to him?”
“We were just talking. He got angry. And then—” A wild, screeching groan came from the bedroom, a sound ripped from tortured and disintegrating vocal cords. Elena went in. She emerged only moments later, looking appalled.
“You gave him a poison!” she cried.
“No. I don’t know what happened. While I was with him, suddenly—”
“Don’t lie. Roditis sent you here to kill him. And you told me you just wanted to talk to him!”
“Elena—” With savage fury she pulled at him, tugging him out of the apartment. She seemed almost berserk with fear and shock. But in the fresh air she calmed; she had had a moment to digest the event, and her control had returned.
“Now we go to my place,” she said. “You tricked me once tonight, Charles, but not again. Now you keep your bargain.” Noyes was close to collapse. Drenched in sweat, trembling, terrified, he let her shepherd him across to her little apartment in New Jersey. He tumbled wearily onto a couch. Elena stood over him, eyes bright, features rigid with malevolence.
“Now, Mr. Discorporator,” she said, “you’ve done Roditis’ filthy work and made me an accomplice. You owe me something for that. Out of that body now!”
“No,” Noyes said feebly. “No? No! We have a deal! Come, now. Shall I give you a drink? To make it easier? No trickery, Charles!”
Noyes felt Kravchenko hammering vehemently at the fabric of his mind, making a savage attempt to go dybbuk. Desperately Noyes resisted. I won’t do it, he told himself. This is one bargain I won’t keep. They can’t make me destroy myself this way. I’ve got to get out of here, back to Roditis to get blanked, fast.
—You miserable cheater, Charles. You filthy pig! It was Kravchenko. Noyes was stunned to realize that he had spoken nothing aloud. Kravchenko had tapped right into his flow of interior monolog! That meant the persona had taken a deeper hold than ever before on him, and was now in direct contact with his mind.
“Let’s go, Charles,” Elena said. “Out!”
“No. No, please—”
She seized him by the shoulders and shook him in a wild fury. He tried to push her away, but she was too strong for him; and now he could feel Kravchenko ripping at his brain, uprooting neural connections like saplings, drilling his way through the centers of control. Already it seemed to Noyes that whole sectors of his brain were cut off, that he was being thrust aside, pushed into a single lobe, isolated, undermined—
Ejected.
“No!” he cried. “The deal’s off! I never meant to—”
“ — but now I’ve changed his mind for him,” Kravchenko finished.
Elena rose in triumph. “Jim? Jim, that’s you, yes?”
“Yes. Me. God, it’s good to be free!” Kravchenko stretched lavishly. He took a few steps, stumbled, recovered. “The coordination takes a little while to come back, I guess. But to have a body again! To feel! To breathe!”
“He’s really gone?” she asked. “I’ve rammed him down far out of sight. Nothing left of him but a few shreds, and I’ll hunt those down and pull them out. Free, Elena! After all those years penned up in that sniveling hulk of a man!” He reached for her. His fingers clutched at the taut cones of her breasts, missed aim, got her shoulders instead; with an effort he drew his arms downward.
Softly he said, “I’ve got some other reflexes to test, Elena!” He found that coordination returned more swiftly than he expected, although not altogether at a satisfactory level. It would take some time, he decided. Time and practice.
As dawn came Elena said, “Now we head for Indiana.”
“What for?”
“So that Roditis can blank you, stupid! As far as the world knows, you’re Charles Noyes, right? And Charles Noyes has discorporated Martin St. John. The memory of that must be wiped from your mind. Come. Come.”
Kravchenko nodded. “You’re right. I’ll have to go to Roditis — bluff it through, let him blank me on the killing. Then I’ll quit him and we’ll go off together, eh?”
“Yes!”
“But why are you going to Indiana?” he asked. Elena gave him a slow, simmering smile. “Do you think I’m going to be apart from you even for an hour, now that I have you again?”
Chapter 13
“Dead?” Mark Kaufmann asked. “How could he possibly be dead? The St. John body was in good health. I saw it myself before I went to San Francisco.”
The medic shook his head. “There was a total breakdown of autoimmunity. A civil war inside him, so to speak. No hope whatever of saving him.”
—Murder, Paul’s persona said. But it did not take any great shrewdness to see that. Mark said, “Can such a thing happen naturally?”
“Most unlikely. You realize, Mr. Kaufmann, that it’s statistically possible for such a thing to occur, but—”
“Not very probable?”
“No. Not at all.”
“What was it, then? Carniphage?”
“These are not the effects of a carniphage,” said the medic. “However, the poisoner today has an extremely wide choice of drugs. I’ve been running a data check, comparing effects with possible causes, and this is what I’ve come up with.”
He handed Kaufmann a data sheet. It was headed: CYCLOPHOSPHAMIDE-8 Mark scanned it hastily. “Is this drug easily available?”
“I’d say it costs roughly a million dollars fissionable an ounce,” the medic replied. “The lethal dose is perhaps a hundredth of an ounce, though.”
“Expensive, but not prohibitive. Rare?”
“It can be had. The sources are difficult to reach, but they exist. With enough money—”
“Yes, with enough money,” Mark said. “Have you found any traces of this — this cyclophosphamide in the body?”
“It leaves no traces. It metabolizes completely in use, and the only indication it leaves is in its effect.”
“In other words, proof of use has to be empirical, deduced from the ruin it makes out of the victim?”
“Essentially, yes,” said the medic smoothly. “The quaestorate is now conducting a second autopsy, and naturally will be making every effort to determine the actual cause of death. But I venture to predict that the ultimate verdict will be the same as mine: poisoning by cyclophosphamide-8.”
“All right. Thank you. Go.” — You need to tighten your security net, Paul told him. A murder committed in your own apartment is shameful. “There are finite limits to security,” Mark said. He moved about the apartment, scuffing at the carpet. This incident left him tense and baffled and angry. He did not mind at all that someone had discorporated Martin St. John. the dybbuk Paul Kaufmann, so speedily after the transplant. But it offended him that St. John could be discorporated right here, of all places. And he was troubled by the possibility that suspicion of the discorporation might come to rest on him.
It was poor business. If the quaestorate hatched the idea that he was in any way connected with the murder, he’d be hauled down on a mindpick warrant, and not all the money in the universe could buy him out of that. Naturally, the mindpick would show that he had no complicity in the discorporation of Martin St. John, since in fact he had not been involved at all.
But at the same time the mindpick would reveal the illegal presence in his mind of the persona of Paul Kaufmann.
This had to be the work of Roditis, Mark thought. To take advantage of his absence by sneaking an agent in here to kill St. John, thereby opening him to mindpick and disgrace — no, no, Roditis could have no inkling of what he had been up to in San Francisco, and it was a mistake to attribute to the man more deviousness than he actually possessed — unless, that is, Roditis had his hooks into the lamasery too, and had instantly received word that Mark had come there to undergo a sub rosa persona transplant…
Exhausted by the intricacy of his own hypotheses, Mark sank down on a couch to collect himself.