"Not being your mother," said John Paul.
"My snoopware should have caught this anyway," said Ferreira. "I blame only myself. The system shouldn't have had that kind of back door."
"Systems always do," said John Paul.
After Ferreira left, Peter said a few cold words. "I know how to keep Mother completely safe," he said. "Take her away from here. Go to a colony world. Go somewhere and do something, but stop trying to protect me."
"Protect you?"
"Do you think I'm so stupid that I'll believe this cockamamy story about Achilles wanting to kill Mother
?"
"Ah. You're the only person here worth killing."
"I'm the only one whose death would remove a major obstacle from Achilles's path."
John Paul could only shake his head.
"Who else, then?" Peter demanded.
"Nobody else, Peter," said John Paul. "Not a soul. Everybody's safe, because, after all, Achilles has shown himself to be a perfectly rational boy who would never, ever kill somebody without a perfectly rational purpose in view."
"Well, yes, of course, he's psychotic," said Peter. "I didn't mean he wasn't psychotic."
"So many psychotics, so few really effective drugs," said John Paul as he left the room.
That night when he told Theresa, she groaned. "So he's been getting a free ride."
"We'll put it all together soon enough, I'm sure," said John Paul.
"No, Johnny P. We aren't sure that it will be soon enough. For all we know, it's already too late."
9
CONCEPTION
To: Stone%[email protected]
From: Third%[email protected]g
Re: Definitely not vichyssoise
I don't know who you are, I don't know what this message means. He is in China. I was a tourist there, walking along a public sidewalk. He gave me a folded slip of paper and asked me to post a message to this remailing site, with the subject line above. So here it is:
"He thinks I told him where Caligula would be but I did not."
I hope this means something to you and that you get it, because he seemed very intense about this. As for me, you don't know who I am, neither does he, and that's the way I like it.
"It's not the same city," said Bean.
"Well, of course not," said Petra. "You're taller."
It was Bean's first return to Rotterdam since he left as a very young child to go into space and learn to be a soldier. In all his wanderings with Sister Carlotta after the war, she never once suggested coming here, and he never thought of it himself.
But this was where Volescu was--he had had the chutzpah to reestablish himself in the city where he had been arrested. Now, of course, he was not calling his work research--even though it had been illegal for many years, other scientists had pursued it quietly and when, after the war, they were able to publish again, they left all of Volescu's achievements in the dust.
So his offices, in an old but lovely building in the heart of the city, were modestly labeled, in Common, REPRODUCTIVE SAFETY SERVICES.