The Mirror Maze Page 8

  Mel hesitated before saying it. “And that was when?…”

  “The car he rented was found two days later, at the bottom of Devil’s Slide—a cliff on the coast a few miles south of San Francisco. The verdict was accidental death, but…”

  “You don’t think so.”

  Stephanie shook her head again, this time with a short, firm motion. “I had my doubts at the time, but what can you say? You can’t prove anything. But this latest thing with Eva has convinced me.”

  “When did it happen exactly?”

  “A little over two weeks ago. October fifteen. A Sunday.”

  The lights came on again suddenly.

  Mel got up from the couch. “Ah, perhaps we’ll get a hot breakfast after all. Thank God for Canadian nukes. Do you know we’re having to buy power from them now, here, to keep going through winter?” He went over to the kerosene lamp and raised the glass to blow it out. “Was there anything about the body that seemed suspicious?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “They never found it. It must have been washed out to sea. Apparently it’s happened there like that before.”

  “Oh.” Mel turned on a table lamp, put another log in the stove, and sat down on the couch again.

  Stephanie leaned forward and touched his arm to hold his attention. “Brett would never say anything about who he was dealing with or why. But listen to this. Some mail came for him a couple of days after the accident, from an outfit called the Western Peace Initiative. And more turned up in his mailbox in Denver this morning. I did some checking after the first batch. WPI turns out to be a subsidiary of the World Peace Council. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Mel frowned. “I thought that was a Soviet propaganda front.”

  Stephanie nodded. “It emerged in Paris in 1950 to launch a Western ban-the-bomb movement at a time when the Soviet weapons program was lagging. It was thrown out of France for subversion in 1951, moved to Prague, and then to Vienna, until the Austrians evicted it in 1957. It finally established a headquarters in Helsinki in 1968, followed by another European branch in Geneva in 1977. And it’s still true today that the Soviet International Department and the KGB both assign representatives to the permanent WPC Secretariat in Helsinki.” Stephanie drew back her hand and looked at Mel in a way that invited him to draw the conclusion for himself.

  Mel was rubbing his forehead in consternation. “What the hell are you saying?” he breathed. “No, Steph.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

  “You’re the lawyer,” she said. “Let’s go through the evidence step by step.”

  Mel licked his lips. “Now, let’s get this straight. First Brett develops an obsession… What would you call it?”

  “Paranoia.”

  “Okay, over the danger of conservative extremists starting an all-out war because they think it’s God’s will.”

  “More than that,” Stephanie said. “He figured that the biggest risk was right here: us, the West.”

  “He really thought that?”

  She nodded. “And you can see how a guy might think that way… With our policy-making in the hands of born-agains who think God’s talking to them, it would be easy to arrive at the conclusion that by comparison the Soviets might not be perfect, but at least they’re rational—a step forward from the Middle Ages. So maybe you could end up believing that one way to stop the crazies would be to make sure the situation stayed stable—which you do by preserving the balance. But if we went ahead and deployed the space defense system, the balance would be destroyed.” Stephanie was speaking rapidly and nervously now, as if she didn’t want to believe it either, but could see no alternative.

  Mel took it from there. “So, in a way that at first seems out of character, he ends up working in the defense program. At the same time, he’s getting involved with people he won’t talk about, and acting strange. The strain gets worse, and eventually you split up. Then, one day he quits his job, comes out to Denver, and seems to be his old self again. But then he gets a call and has to go back. And two days later he’s dead.”

  He stared hard at the stove, unwilling to meet her eyes just at that instant. What it seemed to point to was too clear to need voicing: Brett had been passing information on the top-secret strategic battle-management software to the Soviets—information that would be priceless in enabling them to devise countermeasures. Then, when his personal life came apart as a consequence, and maybe after he’d had second thoughts, he had tried to get out. But by then there could be no getting out. He had known too much.

  That left only one question unanswered. Mel brought a hand up to his mouth and drew a deep breath. But there was no way to avoid it. “So, how did Eva come into it?” he asked somberly.

  “She called me less than a week ago.”

  “You mean she’d heard about Brett somehow?”

  “No… but it wasn’t just a social call, either. She wanted to come and talk to me about something. Then when I told her about Brett, she decided to come out to Denver straight away.”

  “And did you find out what she wanted?”

  Stephanie shook her head. “I met her after work on the day she arrived. We went out to eat dinner before going home, but she wanted to hear about Brett, so we didn’t go into it there. She was planning on staying for a few days, and I’d bought a dresser and some other things for the spare room from some people across town, but hadn’t had a chance to collect them yet. Her car was bigger than mine, with a rear door… So we traded cars. She went on ahead in mine to the apartment, and I took hers to collect the things… And when I got back…”

  Mel was staring at her with a horrified expression. “Oh my God! Then it was you that found her…”

  Stephanie closed her eyes and nodded. “It was awful. There was blood everywhere, and…” She raised a hand to her face as she struggled to maintain her composure.

  Mel leaned across and squeezed her arm. “Don’t think about it, Steph.”

  She swallowed hard and went on. “They must have had some reason to think that Brett had told me more than he did about what he’d been doing. Or perhaps they just weren’t taking any chances. Under the circumstances, who would have been suspicious of an apparent suicide? But they got the wrong one. It was supposed to be me.”

  Mel was still shaking his head helplessly at the enormity of what Stephanie had been through. “And… you just left.” It was simply a statement, not an accusation. “You didn’t report it or anything?”

  “My sister had been killed, Mel. Her head was…” She shook her head violently, as if trying to rid herself of the memory. For a moment Mel thought she would break down. “And it was supposed to be me… They could still be there… anywhere. I didn’t want to be visible. I checked into a motel. I’m still panicking. I just wanted to get out.”

  Mel slumped back and looked across at her. “Why three weeks?” he asked. “After Brett’s accident, why did you let three weeks go by without calling me? You know you could have called.”

  “I don’t know. I was confused about the things I’d begun to suspect… disoriented. I went back to California to my folks for the first week. I meant to call you. I just kept putting everything off.” Stephanie pulled the blanket more tightly around her shoulders and stared numbly at the mug in her hands. Evidently she was through.

  Mel had no real idea what to do in a situation like this. Stephanie was watching him with tired but waiting eyes. But what was there for him to say? He got up and rested a hand on her shoulder. She brought her hand up and gripped his fingers instinctively. “We’ll work something out, Steph,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Anyway, you’ll be all right here for a while. First, you’ve got more than a few days of sleep to catch up on. We’ll leave worrying about the answers until morning.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Melvin Shears sat at a terminal in one of the university’s computer science labs, reading the message that had appeared on the screen in front of him. It meant that the program he had been modifyi
ng, testing, fixing, and remodifying all morning had at last compiled without errors. He stared at it for a few seconds, savoring something of the feeling of a conqueror’s triumph, then leaned forward over the keyboard again, defined a prepared datafile as a test input, and tapped in the command run. Then he sat back to await the result.

  Since the evening at the Brodsteins’, he had been thinking more about economic ideas and catching something of the infection becoming noticeable all over the campus—which by all accounts was happening nationwide. As Martha had pointed out, prices telegraphed information. The trouble with the idea of a centrally directed economy was that there was no effective way for buyers through the various levels of the system to tell suppliers what they needed. So the best the planners could deliver instead was what they thought people ought to have. And that tended not to work too well. It had been ruining economies around the world for half a century. The only thing that such systems did provide an effective means of control over—was people.

  The ironic part was that people should talk about “planned” economies as if what happened in a free market wasn’t planned. But in truth, in all the countless interactions that went on daily to form a free-trading system, there wasn’t a product made, a price set, or a new market chosen without extensive preparation and planning—all done by professionals with years of accumulated experience. Yes, true, they sometimes made mistakes, nevertheless; but did anyone seriously imagine that a handful of bureaucrats, who had never run a business and never risked a dollar of their own money, were likely to do better?

  And it simply wasn’t true, despite all the claims, that private enterprise defeated the spirit of human cooperation. The various activities involved in bringing materials together from all over the world to equip an airline, say, or to build and operate a hotel chain required contributions of knowledge and skill and a degree of cooperation among countless individuals—most of whom knew nothing of the others’ existence—that was staggering.

  “Figure you’ve cracked it, then?” Brett’s voice said over his shoulder. Mel looked up from his chair. Brett had wandered across from the graphics terminal that he had been working at on the far side of the lab, and was looking critically at the lines of code still displayed on Mel’s screen. About twenty other students were busy at keyboards, printers, and plotter tables around the room.

  “I’ll soon find out,” Mel said.

  “What d’you figure it was?”

  “One of the subroutines could get into a loop and never exit back to the main program.”

  “Uh—huh.” Brett’s tone was noncommittal. They carried on staring at the screen.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking,” Mel said. “I might sign up for one of Brodstein’s classes over in Economics. I thought that some of the stuff they were talking about over at his place the other night was interesting. I’d like to know more about it.”

  “You just wanna get closer to Eva’s pants,” Brett said flatly.

  Which was true, but not all there was to it.

  Mel gestured at the terminal in front of them. “Do you realize how much misplaced faith there is in these things by people who make decisions that affect the whole world, but who don’t understand the first thing about them?”

  “Misplaced faith in what things?”

  “Computers—computer systems generally. I mean, it doesn’t matter how simplistic the model is, or how unreliable the data, or how shaky the assumptions, once they’ve got an output in black and white, it becomes infallible and takes precedence over reality… Worse than that, it becomes reality, GIGO with a new meaning: Garbage In, Gospel Out.”

  “We already knew that,” Brett said.

  “Yes, but we’re not running the world.”

  At that instant the pattern on the screen vanished, and a series of columns of numbers appeared, terminating with the words run complete. Mel gave a satisfied grunt and leaned forward to compare the results with a printout in a folder lying open beside the keyboard.

  “How is it?”

  “Looking good…”

  Brett glanced at his watch. “You’d better start clearing up. We re due out of here in a few minutes.”

  Mel ran a hard copy of the program on the printer beside him, folded it, and put it in the folder along with the other sheets that he wanted to keep from the papers strewn over the worktable. He stuffed the folder into the canvas bag propped by his chair and logged off from the system. They walked back to the far side of the lab to pick up Brett’s bag, and then headed for the doors leading out of the lab. Stephanie was just arriving from the direction of the main entrance-hall as they came out into the corridor. She began walking back with them.

  “How was class this morning?” Brett asked her.

  “Fine.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Fields and forces on conductors.”

  Brett looked down at the purse hanging from her shoulder. It was black leather, worn and faded, and too old for her years. “You still hauling that around? I’ll buy you a new one. When’s you birthday?”

  “June twenty-three. Promise?”

  “He’ll forget,” Mel said. “I’ll get you one.”

  “Still coming over to watch the movie tonight?” Brett asked Stephanie.

  “Sure.”

  Brett glanced at Mel. “You ought to ask her,” he said.

  “Ask me what?” Stephanie looked from one to the other.

  “Mel’s getting a crush on Eva,” Brett said.“How about seeing if you can fix him a date?”

  “Everybody gets a crush on Eva,” Stephanie replied. “It might not be that easy, though. When she isn’t studying, she’s always got something or other going on with the Constitutional people. I’m not sure that I see any more of her than you do. Maybe you should think about joining them, Mel.”

  “I think he already is,” Brett said.

  • • •

  Since he had some free time that afternoon, Mel decided to walk over to the social sciences department to ask about the chances of enrolling in one of Brodstein’s classes. On the way, he tried to visualize what a Constitutional amendment along the lines that Brodstein had described would mean. If all forms of trade or transfer of property were to be free of legal restriction, did it mean that things like drug smuggling would become legal? In fact, surely the very term smuggling would lose its meaning. What about prostitution? Mel didn’t care one way or the other about that himself, but the conservative right would never buy it. And how about the question of sensitive exports to the Soviets? Then a further thought occurred to him: If this new movement meant what it said about nobody being forced to pay for anything, then presumably the whole concept of coercive taxation would become illegal. Then what? Perhaps Brett had been a lot quicker than Mel had realized when he’d stated bluntly that it plain, flat, couldn’t work.

  When he arrived at the office, he found to his surprise that Eva was working at one of the desks behind the reception counter. She looked fresh and trim in a loose white dress with a simple floral design in pink and purple. “Well, hello,” she said, getting up and coming over to the counter. “What brings you into alien territory?”

  “I didn’t expect to find you here, either.”

  “I’m just helping out. They’re missing a secretary in the office.” Her voiced dropped to a whisper. “Strictly against regulations. Don’t mention it to the union.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, what can we do for you?”

  “I’m interested in enrolling if I can—in one of Paul Brod-stein’s classes. What’s the situation?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. I got to thinking about some of the things you people were talking about the other night. I’d like to hear more about it.”

  “Well, let’s see what we’ve got.” Eva hoisted a large binder off a shelf and opened it on the counter to reveal timetables, charts, and class lists. She stooped over, chewing the end of a pen thoughtfully while she studied one of th
e pages, then flipped over to another. Mel watched, hypnotized by the way that her dress outlined the curves of her back and bottom, and hung away slightly from her body in front. “It may take a while,” Eva murmured without looking up. “I’m not too used to this system.”

  “That’s okay,” Mel said. He would have been happy to wait all day.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” Eva went on absently. “There was a new secretary due to start here today. They were depending on her.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, she’s a single mother, on welfare. But she wanted to get off it. So she shopped around for a job and eventually got an offer from this department through an agency—with a raise guaranteed after six months if she did okay. Her mother had agreed to take care of the baby for her, she was all set… and then she doesn’t show up.”

  “How come?”

  “It turned out that her welfare counselor told her not to take it. They added up the nickels and dimes and figured that with her gas mileage and everything, she’d be better off staying with her benefits.” Eva turned her head to glance at him over her shoulder. “Can you imagine it? Never mind that she’d had the initiative, or about what it would have done for her self-respect and better prospects in the future. See what happens when these people hand out advice like that: it becomes a trap. They’re creating dependents. But it makes permanent jobs for themselves.” She shook her head and looked down at the timetables again. “Ah, here might be something… one of Paul’s…”

  Mel liked listening to her. He wanted to keep her talking. “So what would you do with the programs?” he asked her.

  “Get rid of them,” she replied simply, without looking up.

  Mel waited a few seconds before stating what he knew was the obvious. “I know what you’re saying, but is it really practical? A lot of people depend on them. What about all the unemployed, for instance?”