Identity Matrix (1982) (12 page)

Everything, I realized, about Harry Parch was phoney.

He brightened and smiled. "Well! You certainly have adjusted well. Most folks in your—er—situation go a bit off the deep end, you know. Some worse than others."

I nodded. "I think Dory's a bit off. Nothing serious—but she's not quite herself, I'd say."

He shrugged. "Could be worse. We have an entire psychiatric unit here just to treat problems like that. They're good, but nobody can work miracles. I suspect we'll let them take a good long look at your friend when you take the routine tests tomorrow. Maybe they can help her adjust. She's going to be no good to anyone, even herself, unless she does."

It was clear as we walked down the hall who was the boss here. Sentries snapped to when he approached, nobody once questioned him about anything at all, and he walked to a small executive dining room like he owned the place. In a sense, he did. The dining room with its own chef and fancy meals, was obviously for the select few at the top.

"Why the costume?" I couldn't help asking him as the salad came.

He smiled softly. "Symbols are important to anyone. I head the people who track the dybbuks down, and I'm immune to their biggest trick. I'm not Superman, though—a bullet does the same thing to me that it does to you. They both hate and fear me—and so I let them hate and fear this. It affords a physical magnet for them that also serves as a terror symbol—the man with the stake out after the vampire, so to speak. And it protects me as well, of course. If they knew my real identity and appearance I could never venture anywhere without an armed guard."

"The accent—is that phoney, too?"

"Oh, my, yes, ducks!" he came back in thick Cockney. "Any bluddy toime y'want, luv." He chuckled, then switched to Brooklynese. "Dem bums ain't gonna know wud I'm like." He switched back to the familiar soft Irish he normally used. "You see? I've studied accents for years. Makeup, too. In my younger days I was going to be a great actor. Maybe I am. I like to think so."

"That Belfast story—it was a phoney, then?"

He thought for a moment, and I wondered if he were deciding whether to elaborate a lie, invent another, or tell me the truth. Would I ever know? This strange man exuded something vaguely sinister, something I couldn't really pin down intellectually but felt, deep down. Per-haps it was his total lack of anything real—or was that cold and analytical tone the real man coming out? In his own way, Harry Parch was as chameleon-like as the alien dybbuks he chased.

"Yes, I'm a naturalized citizen," he said hesitantly.

"The early part is genuine. I'll be quite frank, Ms. Gonser—that experience shaped my entire life. You have no idea what it's like to grow up with the army on every street corner, neighbor against neighbor depending on what church your folks went to, not knowing whether the next parked car contained a bomb or the next ordi-nary man or woman you passed wasn't going to turn and blow your kneecaps off." His tone grew very seri-ous. "You have no idea what it is like to see your par-ents blown to bits before your twelve-year-old eyes."

There was nothing I could say to that, but I couldn't help thinking that he was either being honest or was one hell of an actor.

"Those early nerves—Belfast reflexes, I call 'em—stand me in good stead now. Coming down that trail up north, not knowing who was who… And I'm well-suited for this battle, I think. I always doubt strangers, but only a Belfast boy doubts his old friends."

I more or less believed him, but it didn't make me feel any better about him. I had the strong feeling that Harry Parch loved no one, trusted no one, lived in a violent world where all could be enemies. If his story were true he was undoubtedly so paranoid as to be in many ways insane; if it were not true, then he was even worse—a man who loved the game, to whom patrio-tism, ideology, and human beings were all just words to him, labels on chess pieces to be moved and sacrificed at will. I wondered which he was. A little of both, proba-bly. Pragmatically, governments need people like Harry Parch, I reflected, but always as agents of someone else, never as the boss.

We continued talking as dessert came, but it was all small talk. That was all I was going to get from Harry Parch, on himself or on anything else. I was just another pawn to him in his grand game and I would get only what he decided I should get.

We left the dining room and he led me back to the elevator which we took three more levels down. The new area looked like a clinic—which, in a sense, it was. Three people met us—two women and a man—all dressed in sharp medical whites. He talked with them for a minute, then introduced me to them, and finally said, "Well, I have to go in there with him. I'm supposedly immune but you never know—so what about a password?"

I thought a minute. "How about—Machiavelli?"

He. laughed sharply, although I could see he was somewhat nervous.

"Machiavelli it is, then. You all hear that?" The others nodded and I was a little surprised to see that it was the two women who drew nasty-looking pistols from their pockets. One I recognized as a vet's dart pistol, the kind used for putting zoo animals to sleep, but the other was a vicious-looking magnum.

We walked down another corridor and entered what looked like a recording studio. No, I thought again, maybe like the place where police hold line-ups of sus-pects for witnesses. There were several comfortable seats in front of a thick pane of safety glass, with microphones in front of each chair. The two women took positions on either side of me, putting their weapons in swivel vises, then opening small doors in the glass win-dow through which the pistols could protrude. I saw that there was a wire mesh on the other side of those tiny openings, preventing anyone from touching the weap-ons. For a moment I was uneasy about this, since I wondered if these aliens might not be some sophisti-cated collection of microbes, an alien symbiote or parasite—but I quickly dismissed the idea. Not only would they have known that, at least, by now but the odds of any alien organism being able to affect humans was slight to none.

Behind the glass lay the man, on a hospital bed, a bottle of some clear fluid hanging on the side, dripping a little bit of itself into the unconscious figure through a small needle inserted in a vein in his wrist. The body was strapped securely to the table.

Parch and the male technician in white slid a number of bolts and locks from the door to one side of the glass—I could hear each lock give—and Parch stepped inside. The door closed behind him and I could hear every lock going back into place. Only when that was done did the inner door open electrically, allowing Parch to step into the chamber.

"Now, everyone, I'm going to slowly bring him around," Parch's voice came from the speakers, sounding oddly distant. "I'm simply going to prompt him with some elementary stuff, perhaps sprinkled with some little white lies, so we can get the measure of him a little better." He took a deep breath. "Let's do it."

I had to admire Parch's coolness, even though he was clearly a little nervous.

Carefully he removed the needle from the dybbuk's wrist and hung it to one side, then quickly left. I noticed that the medical technician who remained outside gazed anxiously at an electronic con-sole. Obviously the alien's body was monitored—and perhaps Parch as well.

"Now, no shooting unless my life is in danger," Parch ordered, and I realized that it was his fellow humans, not aliens, that worried him. "Also, please no one say anything until and unless I ask you to. He can not see you; the glass is one-way."

We sat there, waiting expectantly, intently watching the figure on the hospital bed. It took about five tense minutes before the man seemed to stir, groan, then, finally, groggily open his eyes.

Abruptly, his eyes focused, found Parch, and widened in what I could only think was fear. He struggled to get out of his bonds but got nowhere.

"You'll not break those shackles very easily," Parch warned him. "You should have chosen a weightlifter or someone else more muscular. However, that still would do you little good. You're covered by both a sleep gun and a magnum, and both would be used as unhesitat-ingly on me or on you."

The man—a rather good-looking man of thirty or so, with sandy hair and a ruddy, outdoorsy complexion—looked around the chamber and, stopped struggling. "Where am I?" he asked in clear and accentless Ameri-can English.

"You're at IMC, and at IMC you'll stay," Parch told him. "It's where your folks have been trying to get to all this time anyway. Well, you made it. Now, let's be civil about this—introductions?" He looked around with an-noyance. "I should remember to bring a chair in here." He sighed. "Well, I'm Harry Parch, Security Officer for IMC—but I expect you know that."

The man just stared at him.

"What do we call you?" Parch asked, shuffling a bit from foot to foot.

"My name would mean nothing to you—literally," the man on the table responded. "For general purposes, I use the name Dan Pauley."

I started slightly. So this was Dan, the leader on the trail.

Parch nodded to him. "All right, then, Mr. Dan Pauley it is. You know, this is the first time I've ever had the chance to talk civilly to one of your kind. This is quite an occasion. Sorry I forgot the champagne."

"You've killed a lot of us, though," Pauley almost spat.

Parch assumed a mock-hurt look. "Oh, come now! I'm not the one who picks innocent people and shoots air bubbles into their veins after stealing the bodies they were born in."

"I never liked the killing," Pauley responded in a sincere tone. "At first, I admit, none of us gave it a second thought—to them you seemed barely higher than the apes, if you'll pardon the expression. But I've lived here a long time, got to know this place, and it became more and more unpleasant. We simply had no choice if we were to stay undetected."

"Oh, my! Pardon me!" Parch responded, his tone if anything more cynical than before. "Isn't it fortunate that the first of you that we capture in one piece is a moralist, an idealist, and even has a guilty conscience! My, my!" His tone suddenly changed to chilling hatred. "And I'm so glad that all your murders were necessary! How much comfort that is to your victims, their spouses, children, friends. How very comforting."

Pauley sighed. "All right, all right. But don't make such a moral crusade out of it yourself. The human race hasn't been very kind to any of its own who happened to be in the way if they were more primitive than the civilization moving in on them. To a race that prac-tices genocide on parts of itself that differ only in color, or religion, or some other trivial thing I think we're pretty civilized about it. We killed only when necessary, and we killed only to safeguard our own mission."

Parch had started pacing a bit, but suddenly he stopped, turned, and looked directly at the man strapped on the table. "Ah, the mission. If the killing and body-stealing is an abhorrent necessity, then you must have quite a good reason for doing so, at least in your own mind. What? Anthropology? Conquest?

What?"

The man thought for a while, obviously wrestling with his inner self. If he told too much he'd betray his people to his worst enemy. If he told nothing he would be un-able to escape the moral corner into which he'd painted himself. I felt a little sorry for him. He couldn't know that he was not the first Harry Parch had caught nor, I suspected would he.

"Look," he said at last, "my people—we call ourselves Urulu, which just means people, really—are in trouble. In many ways we're quite different from you, maybe more so than you can imagine, but in some ways we're the same.

We evolved on a life-sustaining world, became dominant, and built a civilization.

Finally, we reached the stars, as you may someday do, and began looking for other civilizations. We found a lot, but none capable of interstellar flight, and things went along pretty well for a while. Like most expanding cultures, we stole from the civilizations we discovered, but not anything you might guess. We stole ideas—art, new ways of looking at things, scientific breakthroughs in areas we never con-sidered, things like that. They're the true treasures of a civilization, and we could steal them to our profit without injuring any other cultures. They never really guessed we were there."

"Like Earth."

"Well, not really. Frankly, Earth is just a bit too prim-itive and too alien to have much to offer us. But, finally, we bumped into another civilization, a far different one, also spreading out to the stars. We frankly don't know much about them, although they're technologically our equals. In many ways they seemed like us, even to the body-switching capabilities, but when they'd reached our level they had made different choices about how to use their powers. They weren't a civilization you could even talk to, identify with, or really understand.

They were—well, missionaries, I guess, interested only in con-verts. When we met they tried it on us, we resisted, and war resulted. A gigantic war, really, on a no-win scale. They won't surrender—they can't surrender, it wouldn't be something they'd comprehend—but we're so strong militarily that they can't win, either. This state of per-petual stalemate has existed now for thousands of years.

And we can't win, either—they're too many and we too few."

Parch's expression was both grim and thoughtful and I saw him nod once or twice to himself. I had the feeling that Pauley was confirming what Parch had been told by others, and I thought I could see how his mind was going. Either the Urulu had one hell of a convincing and consistent cover story or they were telling the truth—and they seemed too egocentric to bother concocting anything this elaborate. It would be hard for them to imagine being caught like this. And if this war were true—where was the other side?

"How does all this involve the Earth?" Parch wanted to know. "Are we now the front? Or might we be?"

"I—I really don't know. There's no front in the normal sense. We have a military stalemate, remember—and destroying a planet doesn't get you anything but one more dead planet. The war now is a battle for the minds, the souls, if you will, of various planets. There's some evidence that they are active on Earth, but it wouldn't be a high priority item for them. You're very rare in the galaxy, you know. Most—maybe 95 percent—aren't like you at all. Most races couldn't exist here in their natural forms, we included. But there are enough planets with what you might call humanoid life to make it worth their while—and ours. We have few allies, and those we have are much closer to our form of life than yours, and we occasionally need, well, warm bodies to work those planets.