Identity Matrix (1982) (8 page)

There seemed little choice but to try and ignore them and walk right by. After all, they'd probably been on since the start and hadn't picked me up yet. I just held onto Dory's hand and kept going. They'd never catch these aliens like that—but I was damned resolved that they wouldn't catch me, not now, not when I was so close.

Now we were past them and walking down the corri-dor, and I turned my head slightly and glanced back. One of the men was slowly and casually walking behind us, then stopped, took out a cigarette, and lit it as we continued walking.

There was a stairway ahead, just before the lounge chair section. "Let's go down a deck," I suggested ner-vously, "and use the ladies' room."

Dory sighed, not having seen what I'd seen and hav-ing a sense only that I was paranoid. Oh, Dory, if you only knew the truth!

There were footsteps on the stairs behind us and I turned again, seeing with some relief a middle-aged couple, obviously tourists, instead of Moustache and his boys. We reached the bottom of the stairs and continued on when suddenly I heard a shout and we both turned.

How he'd gotten ahead of us I don't know, but it was Moustache, who'd been flattened against the wall near the stairs. Now he whirled and grabbed at the middle-aged man, who snarled, then yelled, "
Gfrhjty tig smurfi"

Dory said, "What?" but I dragged her forward. "Come on!" I implored. "For God's sake get into the john!"

I opened the door and practically dragged her in, clos-ing it behind us. The six-stall john was apparently unoccupied.

"Wha—what's going on?" Dory gasped, but before I could answer the door opened again and the middle-aged woman burst in, slamming it behind her. She had a wild look in her eyes and we both just stared at her in mixed apprehension and fear.

The woman reached into her purse and pulled out a shiny-looking .38 pistol. "

Just relax," she snapped, gasp-ing for breath. "Oh, that bastard, that devil!" she added, talking now to herself rather than us.

I let go of Dory, who was standing there petrified and speechless. "You may as well just give yourself up," I told the woman with the gun. "Moustache's men will be here any second and you're trapped in here."

The woman grinned evilly. "Not necessarily," she re-sponded, and I knew exactly where her thinking lay.

"We won't do you any good," I pointed out. "They saw us come in here."

It was too much for Dory. "Vicki—who
are
these peo-ple?" she asked, amazed and frightened.

The "woman" considered what I said. I could almost see the wheels turning in her stolen brain. Idly I won-dered if this were Charlie's or Dan's. She looked at me with a nasty expression on her face. "We should have finished you back there on the trail. Why the hell did you have to follow us?"

"You stole what was rightfully mine," I came back. "What the hell did you expect me to do?"

Dory was confused but she'd overcome her initial fright. She knew that, somehow, Moustache and his men were some sort of cops and that this woman was a fugitive, and that we were now hostages. Initial fear was re-placed in her by a sense of indignation, even anger.

"Put that gun away!" she told the woman. "You're not going to shoot us in here. It'd bring everybody running."

"Dory! No!" I almost shouted. "That's just what she wants! Believe me!"

The woman with the pistol grinned, knowing the truth of what I said. Still, she relaxed rather than tensed and I knew that she was quickly writing the script. "It's the only chance I got," she said, almost apologetically. The pistol came back up, trained on me.

"No!" Dory screamed, and launched herself at the woman, hitting her and knocking her back against the door. I rushed forward, grabbing at Dory to pull her away.

Again there was that terrible explosion in my head and the total numbness of body, the feeling of electrocu-tion, almost combined with something pulling, on me…

And I lapsed into shock and unconsciousness.

Chapter Four

I awoke, this time, in a bed. The terrible headache and numbness was there as before, but it seemed less severe this time. Maybe I was just getting used to it, but maybe, too, it became easier the more times you did it. The aliens or whatever they were seemed to have no blackout at all.

I just relaxed, groaned slightly, and let it pass. A soft bed, at least, was a lot easier to take than hard rocks and bruises. Still, my first thought was,
it's
happened again. God in Heaven, they got me again
! But who was I? Three of us were involved this time. I could easily have stirred, tried to see, but I found myself unable to do it. It wasn't the shock, I just couldn't make myself do it. It wouldn't matter to the alien, of course. She was count-ing on the rescuers coming in, finding three unconscious bodies, and making the switch in the confusion. I won-dered
if
the creature had.

It struck me that, for such super-powerful beings, they were awfully ordinary crooks. They got neatly cornered—part
of
their ego, I suppose, catching up to them—but when they pulled guns they were no Buck Rogers ray guns, just standard old .38s.

The door opened and Moustache looked in. I grew apprehensive suddenly, not knowing where I stood with him—or who or what he was. Even if he were a govern-ment man, he'd touched that other alien on the stairs. Who was he now, I wondered, and in whose hands had I fallen? We. Poor Dory, I thought. What a monster I was to get her involved in all this.

Moustache smiled and fully entered the cabin. "Ah, I see that you're awake once more," he said in a friendly tone that retained the Irish accent if not quite so pro-nounced. He
sounded
like the same man I'd seen doing card tricks in the lounge.

He sat on the edge of the nightstand and looked down at me. "First," he continued, "let me introduce myself. I'm Harold G. Parch, I'm a federal officer, and I know for a fact that you're in the wrong body. That make things easier?"

I nodded hesitantly but said nothing. I'd met "federal officers" before.

"First of all," he went on, "let me assure you that we have all three of them.

Two, unfortunately, are quite dead, but we have a third in better condition, strictly controlled and out of this world on some drugs we have found effective with them. What I need to know from you first is who exactly
you
are."

I sighed. There was no use in concealing anything no matter who he really was. "Victor Gonser," I responded, my voice sounding odd to my ears, lower in pitch than I'd gotten used to. I started to have a real bad feeling about all this.

He nodded. "They got you somewhere on the trail, then. Swapped you with the Indian girl. That figures, although we weren't really sure. We found several bod-ies along the way and, while we knew that one of you had to be the Indian we really didn't know which."

"Bodies?" I managed weakly.

He nodded. "I'm afraid so. They rarely slip up, you know." He took a small spiral notebook from his back pocket and flipped through it. "Yes, I'm afraid so.

They usually like to make it look like a heart attack—hypoder-mic full of air into the bloodstream—but they were harried and rushed. They blew your brains out with the pistol, I regret to say."

I seemed to sink deeper into the bed. Somehow, somewhere in the back of my mind, I harbored the idea that, sometime, I might get back. Now that door was forever closed. Victor Gonser was dead, murdered on the trail in the wilds of Alaska. The final door was shut there was no going back, ever.

"I'm afraid we played a bit unfairly with you," Parch continued. "We missed you on the trail, but spotted you a couple of times as you came down. At first we thought you were one of them, but you just didn't act like it, and so we simply kept an eye on you. When you passed that park ranger and didn't body-swap we knew we were dealing with a human being, and we got curious. If you could get on the ferry, which we were prepared to let you do, we hoped that you would spook the dybbuks-what we call them-who thought they'd finished you off. And we were right, although it was a close call. I finally had to make an appearance in full regalia to unnerve them a bit."

"You unnerved me, too," I noted.

He nodded. "I had no idea if you knew what I looked like, but it worked out well. You stopped and turned, and they must have felt surrounded. They followed you with the intention of either killing you as they thought they had done or finding out if you were a part of some trap they should know about. We spotted them easy then, since the one was still too new to speak anything except that impossible jabber of theirs."

"I—I saw you leap out and grab the man," I said. "How did you get ahead of us? And why couldn't he change with you?"

Parch smiled. "As to the first, why, 'twas a simple matter. I simply watched you all go, then ran forward, down one flight, with the idea of approaching from the other side. My boys had everybody 'made' by then. As for the second, well, that's why they are so damned scared of me that they have little shit fits at the sight of me. You see, I'm immune. Scares the hell out of 'em—somebody they can't switch with. I suppose I'm the boogeyman in spades to them, the one who hunts them yet can't be disembodied, as it were."

I envied him that distinction, and that immunity. "But why didn't you tell me?" I asked. "At least I wouldn't have gotten Dory sucked in."

He didn't reply immediately, and exhaled audibly. Finally he said, "We would have interceded if you attempted to leave the ship. But you must understand the situation. First, we didn't know who you were—only that you were not one of them. We didn't know who
she
was, either. Remember, these people can be anybody. Whatever, it's twenty-twenty hindsight right now."

I had gotten the courage, finally. I sat up and turned, sitting on the side of the bed. The mirror was directly across from me and it told the story.

"Oh, my god. Does Dory know?"

He shook his head negatively. "She hadn't awakened as yet when I last checked. One of my people is looking in on her and they'll call when she comes around."

I just stared blankly into that mirror for a few mo-ments, and watched Dorian Tomlinson stare back at me. I felt unclean, somehow, and a little sick. Finally I asked, "Who—which is Dory now?"

"The Indian girl," he responded. That made me feel a little better—the thought of Dory trapped in the body of that old lady was more than I could have borne.

My conscience was killing me as it was.

"Apparently what the dybbuk did was swap with Dory, then you, then back to the old woman again. They don't go into shock or anything when they switch—it's easier than changing hats to 'em. We were lined up outside and burst in the moment we heard the commotion, only to find all three of you apparently out on the floor. Fortunately I was the one closest to the old lady, and she suddenly got very awake and tried the swap with me. We plugged her on the spot. Messy."

There was a light tap on the door. Parch opened it and I heard a man's voice say, "She's coming around." The agent just nodded and turned back to me.

"I think I'm going to have a very difficult job right now," he told me. "I don't want it, but it has to be done and I'm the boss. I'd like you to come along if you feel up to it."

"Of course," I responded, and followed him. I felt a little dizzy and unbalanced, but that was to be expected.

Of course, Dory would be a much tougher job than me. I, after all, had been there before and knew what was going on. And, I thought glumly, my old body hadn't been a lot to lose when you came down to it. Dory had lost far, far more.

We approached the next cabin door and Parch turned to me and whispered,

"I think it'd be best if you stayed, just outside here until I prepare the way. Listen in if you want."

I nodded understandingly. She was going to have enough shocks without staring herself in the face the moment she woke up. A man stationed at the door opened it for him and closed it behind, leaving it slightly ajar. I moved nervously to it, slightly irritated at the guard's leering glance in my direction.

Parch greeted her in the same soft, friendly fashion he had me, and introduced himself. I heard a thin, weak voice ask what had happened to her, what all this was about.

Parch cleared his throat. "Something impossible is what happened and what all this is about," he began a little nervously. I didn't envy him this job. "Ms.

Tomlinson, we are at war, in a way. A funny war, although not comical. Our enemies are from a place we don't know and their weapon is a terrible and formidable, if impos-sible

one.

But it

is

not,

alas,

impossible.

This—enemy—has the power to change minds with you. Yes, now I know what you're thinking, and that's what our own reaction was the first time. We don't know how long it's been going on, either, since they normally kill those with whom they swap. A few times they slipped up, and that's what finally made us aware of their presence. We still don't know how many people just plain killed themselves or are locked up in crazy wards who may also be their victims. Your friend was such a victim—and now, so are you."

I heard her gasp.

"That's right—sit up," he invited soothingly. "Face the mirror and the truth and the worst will be over."

I heard movement and a sharp little cry, then silence. Finally I heard her say, in hushed and unbelieving tones, "It—it's not possible. I'm mad. This can't have hap-pened, can't be happening!"

And then she broke into tears and it was a long time before they subsided. I heard Parch pulling tissues and a nose blow, then silence for a moment. She was a brave woman, I told myself. She'd launched herself at that -thing—to save me.

She would accept it.

Finally I heard her ask, "My own—body. What's become of it?"

Parch explained the three-way switch and the outcome, ending with, "So, Vic—Vicki has your body now, and you have hers."

"Where is she?" Dory pressed. "Can I—see her?"

I sighed, swallowed hard, and stepped slowly into the room.