He looks up at me, and my blood turns cold. I shouldn’t be talking about such things. I feel a rush of paranoia. Can he hear my thoughts? Is he transcribing them somewhere the way that the computer is supposed to be doing?
He smiles, and so I smile. “No, they couldn’t. But those guns in the guardhouse and the towers are just as keen on keeping us inside in case of a disaster as they are in keeping out invaders. Plutonium dust is worked here, as you know. It’s still the most deadly substance we’ve yet to find, and it can’t be allowed out of the compound.”
I nod, relieved that he isn’t suspicious. I squint in the snow-white glare up at the towers he has indicated. Men wearing dark shades stare back at me without humor. The open-mouthed gun muzzle of each guard forms a third black eye.
Together, we walk carefully on the icy cement leading up to the reception area. I’m amazed at how normal the place looks once you’re inside the compound. TA 96 looks like any campus building, if you ignore the fences and the armed men in the towers.
I have an unreal feeling being here. I sort of expected the security to have stopped me by now. Of course, they can’t be blamed. After all, my identification is absolutely authentic.
Taped interview: Manuel Ramirez, security guard, Technical Area 96:
I watched him like I watch everybody that comes in or goes out. He didn’t have any of the marks of a terrorist. He was a fat middle-aged man, maybe a bit sick, but not dangerous. I can see why they sent him. Who would suspect a wimpy old fat guy?
He didn’t meet my eyes, but then, few of them do.
Gideon’s Transcript:
I can’t stop thinking about my cancer. I know it doesn’t matter now, but somehow carrying around blotches of alien cells inside my body is worse than this girdle of squishy explosive. I keep thinking about my cancer, all the accelerated growth caused it, they tell me. No one can live a lifetime in just a few years and come out right. All I can do is walk and talk-oh, and wet my pants-like one of those dolls in the old commercials. I’m a fake. A department store dummy. A sham.
I must stop letting my mind wander and stick to the situation at hand. I can’t fail because I’m daydreaming.
I see the receptionist now, Sarah Rasmussen. She is security, too. She has a snub-nosed. 38 stashed in her desk, and her favorite-aunt appearance is deceiving, just like they said in the briefing. I can almost feel her sizing me up. Her eyes drop to my paunch. I’m suddenly self-conscious about it. Does it look right? Is it sagging in the right places, is it bulging properly? Women are so much more discerning about things like this.
Oh God, she’s frowning. We haven’t even been introduced, and she’s frowning at me, at my explosive belly.
“Sarah, this is Dr. Gideon,” says Bob Kieffer. I blink at them stupidly.
Sarah nods smartly, she already knows my name. It is her job to know me.
“Dr. Gideon,” she nods to me, smiling with her mouth, but still frowning with her eyes. “Just how old are you?”
There it was. She just came out with it. I’m supposed to be 28, right out of MIT, and any fool can see that I’m not 28, that I’m an imposter, a fat old man with a boy’s face and ID. I’m not actually old, but my body is. The aging processes have worked all too well on me. My mouth opens to answer and nothing comes out but a rumble of gas from my diseased, bomb-wrapped stomach.
“Just fill this out, will you Sam?” Bob asks me. To Sarah he says: “Sam is helping us with the software system down in the lab. He’s a networking expert.”
I gaze at him stupidly, then at the clipboard he is handing me. It takes me a moment to grasp that he is trying to save me embarrassment. He has completely misread the situation. I grab onto the opportunity like a drowning man reaching for a life vest. The clipboard almost slips from my grasp, but I recover with a nervous laugh. Right now, I realize with crystal clarity that I’m actually lousy at this.
“Could you show Dr. Gideon the orientation tape, Sarah?” asks Kieffer. I have a sudden urge to kiss the man.
The receptionist is still eyeing me, but with some resignation, like a cat swishing its tail at the foot of a tree full of inaccessible baby birds. I feel moved to make a lame reply to her earlier question.
“I’ve been ill,” I say, looking apologetic.
She simply nods, and all through the orientation, I feel her eyes boring into the back of my head. I watch inane tapes about Geiger counters and dust-proof white lab clothing. I watch people walking calmly for flashing exit signs during emergencies, and then checking in with their supervisors outside for a lackadaisical head count. No one is running, screaming on the wires, burned by radiation and blasted apart by bullets.
All through the videos I feel Sarah Rasmussen’s eyes.
Report: Sarah Rasmussen, Internal Security, TA 96:
Of all the people present that day, I feel the most responsible for letting Dr. Giddeon get through. I was the only one, to my knowledge, that suspected him in the slightest. What threw me off was his comment about being ill. So many of the great minds here seem to be encased in oddly misshapen bodies. I took Bob Kieffer’s flustered reaction to indicate that this was the case with Gideon, and that I was causing undue embarrassment. His face did indeed closely match the photos, as did his thumbprints.
Still, it was my mistake not to listen to my instincts.
Gideon’s Transcript:
The close call with the receptionist has left me shaken. I can hardly hold the red placard saying: UNCLEARED VISITOR IN AREA. Three badges now weigh down my shirt-front. One is a temporary security clearance badge, the second an ID badge, while the third, redundantly, identifies me as a security risk.
“How about a cup of coffee before we go down to the lab?”
I startle, almost dropping my red placard, but recover. Will I be able to go through with this? What if I am never alone? Can I reach inside my shirt and pull the tiny aluminum tab and kill Bob Kieffer?
Bob escorts me to the cafeteria. He, or one of the others on my short escort list, must be with me at all times. If I take a piss, they are supposed to look over my shoulder to see if I’m holding it right. We put the large ugly placard on the wall outside, where it sticks with a magnetic click. As I enter the room, the PA system announces that an Uncleared Visitor is in the cafeteria. Few of the people in the room bother to look up, but I feel like a microbe on a slide anyway. I sip my coffee and begin to realize that this whole thing is crazy, that in a matter of minutes something will go wrong. What was Sarah Rasmussen doing right now? Calling the right number at the right time?
My cancer feels bad today; it is a presence in my body. I know that if I did lead Bob Kieffer to the bathroom, there would be blood in my bowels. I can feel it.
It seems like ages have gone by. I don’t have much time left before the correct version of Dr. Gideon shows up. Finally, we get up and head down to the labs. I walk toward the first vault doors and another battery of Geiger counters in a dream-like state.
Report: Dr. Robert Kieffer, TA 96.
The first clue I picked up that something was wrong with Dr. Gideon came when we reached the first vault doors. I began to wonder if the man was drunk or something. When I spoke to him, he often didn’t hear me on the first attempt. He seemed distracted and a bit anxious. We had waved all the drug-screening, since he was only supposed to work on site for four days. I began to think this could have been a mistake.
Gideon’s Transcript:
First, I dress in white overalls, booties and a hairnet. Then they run detectors over every inch of me. I nearly have a heart attack when the detectors sing over my breast pocket. They remove two diskettes and keep searching. I pray that my belly is as inert as everyone told me it was because now they’re patting it down. Gelatinous explosive, warm from my body heat, is jiggling and pressing against my ribs.