Read Online The Multiple Man by Ben Bova - Free Book Online

the camps were nothing more than concentration camps. Halliday produced a long string of ecologist's and psychiatrists to show that: (a) the camp internees were making positive inroads in correcting the environmental damages done by earlier strip mining, river pollution, and other ravages of the land; and (b) the internees were adjusting to this useful outdoor life, gaining some sense of responsibility and self-esteem, and saving much of the cash they were paid for their work.
    Halliday's long-term plan was to build new communities in the land the internees had reclaimed and let them settle there permanently. He insisted that returning a ghetto kid to the place where he had committed his crime was merely inviting him to commit more crimes. The psychologists were behind him on this, but a strange combination of urban political bosses, real estate manipulators, and civil libertarians had formed a coalition against the program.
    They preferred to sit in their armed, walled-in enclaves and let the cities crumble. I paced back and forth across the department store's main entrance, watching the shoppers hustle in and out, their faces intent on buying and prices and what to do about dinner tonight. They weren't thinking ahead. They seldom did.
    My mind had wandered so far afield that I nearly jumped out of my boots when someone tapped me on the shoulder.
    I turned to see a Secret Service security guard type, neatly dressed in a conservative suit that was probably bulging with armaments.
    "The First Lady will see you on the roof of the store, sir," he said quietly, automatically eyeing the shoppers passing by us, "near the helicopter pad."
    He quietly led me through the store. It wasn't very crowded. Most of the Plaza housewives were on their way home now to prepare dinners for their husbands and kids. I wondered why the management maintained such a big, expensive store when anyone with a modern picture-phone and home computer could do all the shopping from bed. But then I guessed that the store was more of a showplace, a central meeting ground, an entertainment center, an excuse to get out of the house.
    All this philosophizing, of course, was my feeble way of keeping me from getting all worked up about seeing Laura. Think about other things—an old Catholic remedy. But as I rode up three flights of escalators behind that Secret Service guard, I could feel my temperature rising. We went through an office area and up a flight of metal stairs, my pulse throbbing in my ears louder and louder with each step.
    He opened a metal door and we stepped out onto the cement roof. A blue and white helicopter sat in the middle of the flat expanse, idle and empty. Smallish job; probably could hold no more than six. The rest of the roof was bare, unoccupied.
    "Mrs. Halliday will be here in a few minutes," the security man said. He shut the metal door, leaving me totally alone on the roof.
    A decent breeze was blowing, and from up here I could see all the way across the sprawling rooftops of Greater Washington to the Monument's spire sticking into the light blue springtime sky. Some high wispy cirrus were the only clouds, except for the contrails of jets.
    I walked over to the edge of the roof, feeling like a duke standing atop a king's palace, surveying his liege's domain, about to have a private meeting with his queen. Dangerous business , I thought. Especially if the king doesn't know about it.
    It suddenly hit me that I was very vulnerable. Physically. Alone Up here on the roof, I made an easy target for a sniper perched on any of the other rooftops around this building. I backed away from the edge. The thwap-thwap-thwap of a nearby helicopter startled me. They could get me from the air.
    I could feel myself sinking into paranoid fears when the metal door opened again and three security men stepped through. I stood frozen, as if my shoes had been welded to the rooftop's concrete. But they ignored me totally and fanned out across the roof to take