“Cohaagen depressurized the tunnels,” Tony continued. “And they’re rigged to blow up.”
George glanced over his shoulder at Melina and then looked back to the videoscreen. “Okay, sit tight. Melina just got here with Quaid.”
“I hope it was worth it,” Tony said. George ended the transmission and paused for a moment, looking grim. He turned to face Melina and a faint smile passed over his lips.
“Glad you made it,” he said.
“You don’t look so glad,” Melina replied.
George rose from his chair and the grim look returned. “Cohaagen sealed off Venusville.”
“We know,” said Melina. “We almost got caught ourselves.”
“What you don’t know is that he’s pumping out the air.”
Melina’s hand flew to her mouth. She had known Cohaagen was ruthless, but she hadn’t known how ruthless, until now. George looked at Quaid.
“You must know something pretty damned important, Quaid. He wants you.” Quaid was appalled. “If we don’t hand you over, everybody’ll be dead by morning.” George led them to a fortified door. He punched in a series of numbers. The lock clicked.
“What are you going to do?” asked Melina.
“That’s up to Kuato,” George said. He beckoned to Quaid. “C’mon.”
Would Kuato be able to unblock his memory? Since Quaid himself didn’t know what he was supposed to know, he doubted that anyone else could tell just by looking at him. Maybe they intended to drug him and question him. That was unlikely to work either. He still couldn’t remember the Rekall experience clearly, but believed that they had encountered severe problems with his prior memory conditioning. It would be no different here.
Quaid glanced at Melina before following George. She held up her hand in a small gesture of farewell and for a moment looked precisely as she had in his dream. He wanted to go to her, to hold her to him and never let her go, but he wanted his memory, needed it, even more. Not only for their sake, but also for the sake of those who lay dying in Venusville. He had something trapped out of reach in his head and he had to free it and the people of Mars before he could be free to love Melina. He tore his eyes from her and followed George through the door.
He entered a dark, domed chamber which was as empty as the other had been full. There were no rebels in sight and no sign of Kuato. The man wasn’t going to arrive after them, either, for the door had shut behind them and Quaid could hear the lock click back into place.
George led him to a table with two chairs. “Sit down,” he said.
Quaid sat in one of the chairs and scanned the room for another entrance. Naturally Kuato would have his own entry, independent of the one used by the troops. Except that there was none. Unless they were better at masking the door than his trained eye was at unmasking it, which he doubted. He knew it was Hauser’s eye doing the checking. Hauser—
Something clicked. Melina had known him as Hauser, not as Quaid. Yet in the dream-memory she had called him Doug. How could that be?
The answer was so obvious it made him smile. They hadn’t changed his first name, just his last! Douglas Hauser had become Douglas Quaid. He remembered now, or thought he did. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a significant memory. His thoughts returned to the present.
“Where’s Kuato?” he asked.
“On his way,” George replied shortly. He seemed to mull something over before speaking again. “You heard the rumors about alien artifacts?” Quaid nodded. “They’re true. Cohaagen found something in the Pyramid Mine, and it’s got him scared shitless.”
Which explained why the Pyramid Mine had been closed down. Quaid felt the flutter of memory. There was something buried deeper in his mind than the turbinium was in the frozen Martian ground, but he could not dig it up. “What was it?”
“You tell me,” George said. “A year ago, you fell for Melina and said you wanted to help us. So we said. ‘Great. You’re on our side now? Then tell us what’s in the mine.’ You went away to find out. And that was the last we heard of you.”
“My dream!” Quaid exclaimed. “My memory! I went there with Melina, and fell into the pit—”
George unbuttoned his jacket and threw it on the back of the other chair. “We didn’t know whether you died in the fall or got captured,” he continued. “Or maybe you were just jerking us around. But if that was the case, why is Cohaagen so desperate to get you back now?” George shook his head. “No. Cohaagen’s big secret is locked away in that black hole you call a brain. And we need to know what it is.”
There was no question about that, Quaid agreed. Obviously he hadn’t died in the fall, and had been captured. But how long had he been free in that alien complex before they caught him? What had he learned? Because he knew he had learned something amazing, something bigger than any of them had imagined. A whole chapter of his life was missing, and he wanted it back.
George sat down across from Quaid, close. “Now my brother, Kuato, is a mutant. Please don’t show revulsion.”
“Of course not,” Quaid agreed, bracing himself. So the man had three arms, or teeth in his ears. What counted was what he could do.
George unbuttoned his shirt. There was something odd about his chest, Quaid realized. It had looked pretty solid, as if the man were perpetually thrusting it out, a braggadocio. Now this was revealed as a front, a plastic form. A man’s version of falsies? It must be rough when someone punched him there: rough on the man’s fist.
Then George removed the shaped plastic, revealing—
Quaid stopped his jaw from dropping only with an effort. A small second head was growing from the man’s chest!
Wrinkled and hairy, the head was a cross between a fetus and an old man. Its eyes were closed in sleep. Evidently it was only partially formed, like Benny’s claw-hand. Mutations were seldom beneficial; most of them were negative, being not only grotesque but useless. Yet some were otherwise…
George turned to Quaid and held out his hands. “Take my hands,” he said. Then, noting Quaid’s hesitation: “Go on.”
Quaid reluctantly held George’s hands. He was trying not to be finicky, but the notion of being close to the mutant repelled him. So did the notion of holding hands with a man.
“I’ll leave you with Kuato,” George said. He closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep.
Simultaneously, the Kuato head twitched, yawned, and woke. One of his eyes was abnormally large.
Kuato stared intently at Quaid, opened his toothless little mouth, and spoke. “What do you want, Mr. Quaid?”
“Same as you,” Quaid said as evenly as he could manage. “To remember.”
“But why?”
Quaid was puzzled. If Kuato knew his name, why didn’t he know his mission too? “To know who I am.”
“You are what you do,” Kuato said. He paused, letting that sink in. Unfortunately, most of what Quaid had been doing recently was searching for his memory, and trying to survive.
“A man is defined by his actions, Mr. Quaid,” Kuato continued. “Not by his memories.” He stared at Quaid, who had difficulty returning that uneven gaze. One eye was so big, the other so small!
“Now open your thoughts to my presence…”
Quaid couldn’t help staring at Kuato’s large eye. It was hypnotic. He found himself falling into a trance.
“Open…” Kuato said.
Quaid seemed to fall toward that huge eye. He saw himself reflected in the pupil. It was as if he were zooming in on his own image, on his own reflected head, his eye, his pupil, in which he saw the reflection of…