The Ophiuchi Hotline

"We're calling him," Vaffa said. "I have only one more question. How do I know you're telling the truth about knocking Poseidon out of its orbit? How could I tell that?"

"Uh... I guess I can't prove it's not a bluff. But it doesn't change anything. The broadcast goes out in one hundred and fourteen minutes."

"Very well." There was a pause. "I suspect you're telling the truth about that. It was quite a jolt."

Lilo sat back again. She was sweating. She looked at Cathay, found herself hoping for his approval.

"How'd I do?"

"I thought it was pretty good," he said. It was sinking in on him now that they were really committed. His son was down there, out of his reach, dependent on Tweed's decision. "What if he does something else? I almost wish we hadn't done it. It's... it's such a responsibility."

Lilo reached over and touched him, gently. She knew she didn't have as much at stake as he did, and yet it was very important to her that the trick work. Her initial dislike of Cathay had faded as she came around to his way of thinking, as his interests began to coincide more easily with hers. On the trip from Saturn, they had grown close. She was anxious to meet his son, who was supposed to have been her clone's best friend. She hoped she would get the chance.

"What can he do?" she said. "We've gone over it a million times."

"I know. I just get scared he's got some trick."

"Look. When Tweed gets the message from Vaffa, he's got two hours. A couple minutes to make up his mind, forty-eight minutes for his answer to get to us, then another forty-eight before our broadcast could reach Luna. He's a public figure. The police computers know where he is, because he's an assassination target. If he drops out of sight quickly, with no notice, the whole machinery will be looking for him in sixty seconds."

"But he must have prepared something. He knew I'm out here, with a radio, and could blow the whistle on him anytime."

"But he knew you wouldn't. He felt safe enough about that, because if you did, it would kill your son."

Cathay was shaking now, and Lilo stroked his shoulder. The control cabin of the tug was too cramped for them to even turn to face each other, but she managed to kiss his cheek.

"Tweed doesn't have a choice," Lilo said. "If he doesn't do what we told him to, he'll have only two hours to get so far underground that the kind of massive search we could stir up won't be able to find him. I just don't think he can do that."

"But could we really broadcast?" Cathay was in increasing agony now. It was going to be a long two hours.

Lilo said nothing. The choices were really out of their control now; had been since Vengeance smashed in. If they didn't get confirmation from Niobe in two hours it would mean that things too ghastly to think about were happening on Poseidon.

And then they damn well would broadcast.

Tweed was a familiar figure in the public ways of King City, and he had always loved it. The sight of him lumbering down Clarke Boulevard was beloved by most of his former constituents. Some days he would waddle aimlessly and amiably, pressing the flesh, with a smile and a pat on the back for all.

But the love of the people sometimes had to be kept at arm's length. One had to hobnob to keep wi

Hat firmly on his head, Boss Tweed pounded down the center of the corridor, implacable as a rhinoceros, spouting blue clouds of smoke from his cigar.

He turned corners with the ponderous grace of a tugboat, gradually working his way into less frequented parts of the city. There was an anonymous door at the end of a deserted stretch of corridor. It opened to his palmprint; he stepped into a small room and sealed the door behind him. At the press of a button, the room began a slow descent.

Off came the black and gray coat, the baggy pants, the shoes of hardened leather, the white spats. Soon he stood naked in front of a pile of clothes. Without his shoes he was nine centimeters shorter, but he was still a big man.

He did something to his face and the sagging jowls sagged even further, dropped, and fell into his hands. They were warm to the touch, made from a plastic that sat on the borderline between living and dead material. He dropped the two quivering masses onto the pile of clothes, onto the stovepipe hat he had worn every day for fifty years. The hat collapsed on itself.

For a moment he stood staring down at the pile of clothes, and he began to shake.

"No," he said. "No, this isn't the end. It's just a setback." He leaned against the wall behind him and waited for the fit of weakness to pass. With his face buried in his hands, more scraps of plastiflesh peeled away. When he finally looked up, his sense of purpose restored, he was a different person. He had shed thirty years of apparent age, along with the subtle gestalt of lines and protrusions that had marked his face as that of a male human being. He was androgynous now; his huge paunch could not conceal the fact that he had no genital organs. Two swellings on his chest could have belonged to a woman or a very fat man.

He heaved himself erect. With a wet slithering sound, twenty-five kilos of rubbery plastiflesh fell from his belly, his arms and legs, and his buttocks. The breasts remained, jutting out over a flat stomach he had not seen in fifty years.

Tweed was now outwardly a female, but a close examination of the labial folds hidden under the triangle of pubic hair would have revealed no vaginal opening. No hormones raged through Tweed's body, nothing that could divert him from his purpose. He had decided on neutrality long ago, and had never regretted it. Now, it was going to help save his life. The first step in adopting a new identity was radical cosmetic surgery, usually involving a sex change. That alone would never be enough to turn the trick, but it was an essential first step. He had just accomplished it in record time, as he had pla

"Came to this..." he muttered. Again he felt weak. He staggered, and nearly fell on the slippery floor. The plastiflesh had dissolved, and so had the clothes. The water and gray sludge left behind by the disintegration was sucked into a drain in the floor.

He thought back over the years since the first glimmerings of the vision, the future of a liberated Earth. He knew there were those who thought him an opportunist, who felt he was just cashing in on a vein of opinion which had been growing in Luna for a century. But he was sincere.

Tweed had been sincere enough to take his only son and carefully raise him to be a killer, a follower of orders no matter what those orders might be. He had pored over ancient books for a year before trying it, but he had raised a soldier. The methods of the U.S. Marines and the Red Army had worked admirably, combined with drug therapy and behavioral psychology. Vaffa had never disappointed him, except for a lingering sadness that he and his clone brothers and sisters had been such dull company.

It would be a scandal, all right. Even with the month's grace period, things would begin to come out as soon as it was clear that Tweed had actually disappeared. People would be looking for him, computer search programs narrowing down on him, at first with concern for his safety. Later, when questions started to be asked, things would start to come to light. Vaffa would be the first of those things, but there would be more. There were two Vaffas still on Luna, and no chance to do anything about them.