7

Poseidon base was a maze of catacombs more than forty years old. It rambled through the rock like termite trails in rotten wood, and eighty percent of it was abandoned.

Lilo had discovered the empty sections of her first full day at the station, after having been told to look around and familiarize herself with the place. Some corridors ended in mirrors. When she passed through them, her suit formed around her to give protection from the vacuum on the other side.

Poseidon had been a much larger operation when Tweed had been President, and able secretly to funnel taxpayers' money into the project. Now that he was out of office and had to rely on his own funds and those of the party, it had been cut back. Still, it was a large undertaking for one man, involving eighty adult prisoners, their children, and an indeterminate number of guards, all of them clones of the ubiquitous Vaffa.

There was no way to tell how many Vaffas there were simply because they were never all in the same place at the same time. They had their own section of the station, walled off by a nullfield that was tuned to allow them to pass, but to bar everyone else. They came in the two standard models—male and female—and they were all completely hairless. There were at least six of them, but there could have been twice that many. It was impossible to tell how they worked the watch periods and how many remained behind the impenetrable wall at any given time.

Security was unobtrusive. Everyone was free to go anywhere on the base, with the exception of the guard room, and interference was minimal as long as the assigned projects got done. Each Vaffa carried a laser sidearm. It had been learned at great cost that the guns were effective for shooting prisoners, but useless for shooting Vaffas. They would shoot through a nullfield as long as a Vaffa wasn't behind it. Some had tried to adjust their suit generators to screen out the laser frequency. That worked fine, but only outside when the field was in operation. And the air in your lung would only last thirty hours. When the rebels had to come back in, they were shot.

Lilo learned all this quickly. No one seemed reticent about discussing past escape attempts, and they were all willing to listen to what might be new ideas. But there was an answer for everything she proposed. The general opinion was that Poseidon was escape-proof. Lilo reserved judgment, but admitted to herself that it didn't look good.

"But anything's better than being in a death cell," she said.

"I suppose so. I wouldn't know."

Her companion of the moment was a man named Cathay. She had met him in the mess hall a few minutes earlier when he came to sit with her at breakfast. They were the only people in the room; it was early, and Lilo's schedule was not yet synchronized with the rest of the station.

The mess hall was one of the areas that was centrifuged, spinning slowly in a hollow in the rock. There was a larger wheel that was used as a gymnasium for running and weight lifting, and a third which held bunk rooms for those who did not like sleeping in free-fall.

Cathay was a tall, thin man. He had a lot of untidy brown hair, long legs, and a boyish face with incongruous muttonchop sideburns. He was handsome without overdoing it and Lilo liked that, felt a definite physical attraction without having actually touched or smelled him, and that was rare for her. Physical beauty was cheap and universal with cosmetic surgery, but it tended toward about a dozen standard types. Lilo was bored with them all. Any visual stimulation she got from a man was in proportion to the degree he departed from the current, stultifying fashion.

"Then you weren't kidnapped from the Institute?" she asked, mopping up the last of her maple syrup with a piece of pancake.

"I was kidnapped, but not from the Institute. I was genenapped."

"You mean you didn't do anything... well, to deserve being here? Would you like some more coffee?"

"Yes, please. What I did to end up here was to trust Tweed. I should have known better, but then who could have expected this?"

Lilo placed a white plastic mug in front of Cathay, then leaned back in her chair. She hooked her shoulder blades over the chair back, stretched out her legs, and held the warm mug on her belly.

"Okay," Cathay went on. "I was in trouble, admitted. But I wasn't in jail. Tweed came to me with a good offer. He said he'd..." Cathay stopped, then looked away from her. He glanced back once, sighed, and went on, not meeting her eyes.

"I'm a teacher," he said. "Was a teacher. There's no sense in trying to hide it from you. I was kicked out of the Education Association. Unjustly, I believe, but there's no way I could prove that to you." He looked up at her again. Lilo shrugged, decided that wasn't enough, and smiled at him.

"It makes no difference to me," she said. "I'm an Enemy of Humanity, remember?"

"Well, that's mostly crap, too," he said, easily. "You're not the only one here. A couple of them are really nuts, but most of them are just like anyone else. They went a little too far, but it was usually from some sort of principle." He raised his eyebrows, but Lilo was not yet ready to talk about that. Not yet; not to someone she'd just met.

"Go on."

"Well, Tweed said he could get me work again, teaching kids. I was really desperate. It had been five years. I need kids, I really do. Anyway, the deal was that I do two jobs for him. One was teaching the kids at some remote, unspecified place. The other—I thought the other was after I'd finished the first, you see—was to work for him on Pluto. He didn't say what kind of work, and I didn't care. After a few years, he'd let me go and see to it that I was reinstated under another name."

"So what happened?" Lilo reached over to stir another spoonful of sugar into her coffee, hoping to mask the taste. "This stuff's terrible."

"Yeah, isn't it? See, I should have been suspicious when he said he could reinstate me. That means he has access, illegally, to some pretty high-powered government computers. He can get things. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah. I'm afraid I do. What did he get? Your recording?"

Cathay smiled. "Uh-huh. Turns out that all along he meant for me to do both jobs simultaneously. He sent me out to Pluto, I assume. He took my recording and played it into a clone. Me."

"Shanghaied."

"Exactly. There's about ten others like me here. People who made a deal with Tweed and found themselves being awakened in a clone body."

Lilo sipped at her coffee. "That's really rotten. Doesn't he have any... what? Shame? Principles?"

"I don't know. When something is important to him, though, it gets done. One way or the other."

"Then the rest of the people here are like me? Condemned prisoners?"

"No. There're about fifteen. He seems to like them. The rest of the people here were stolen, as simple as that. They're scientists, most of them. Tweed decided he needed them. Apparently it's easier for him to steal their recordings and a tissue sample and grow his own scientist than to abduct the original."

"I can see the logic. This makes no waves at all. No one even knows a crime's been committed."

Cathay got up to refill their cups, and they sat in silence for a while as people drifted in for breakfast. No one joined them, but Cathay waved to many of the people.

"What no one's told me so far," Lilo said, "is why Tweed needed a genetic engineer. What will I be doing here?"

Cathay made a face. "For starters, you could breed us a better coffee plant. Can you do that?"

"Maybe," Lilo laughed. "I'm a pretty good cook, too, and it looks like you could use one. Is that why Tweed sent me here?"

"He didn't tell me why, actually. But if you can cook, he's not as ruthless as I thought."