The Janus Syndrome

The Janus Syndrome
By Steven E. McDonald

(c)1981, 2007 by Steven E. McDonald
Originally published by Bantam Books, 1981

Made available under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)
To Pam and Sandy for the 'toons, the DNA, the cookies and the giraffe.
Thanks to Dirty Dick's No Pap Records for the records, and to Ben
Bova for guidance, foresight and inspiration.

1. ST. LOUIS BLUES
Click.
The TV set I'd been staring at for twenty minutes suddenly shut down,
leaving me to search for quarters while checking my watch. Seeing the
time, I stopped checking the watch. Your time is up, number three. At
least mine was.
I looked up and pulled a face, picked up a can of crapawful soda that I'd
brought twenty minutes ago, and tried it. Still crapawful. I wasn't
exactly comfortable either; the TV seats the Greyhound Bus people had

put into the various terminals, including the St. Louis terminal, were
designed to make you so uncomfortable you didn't notice the crappy
quality of the TV signal.
Show-me. The goddamned show-me state. Missouri didn't have much
to show. I wasn't particularly interested in looking, either. Area
Fourteen had set one of his favorite midway contacts on me, cloak and
dagger and all, and I wasn't amused.
He refused to tell me why I was here, the assumption being I'd be able
to pick up things for myself, looking at everything, rather than having
preconceptions.
So show me, Missouri.
I was approximately in the middle of the terminal, with a good view all
around of a modern gray-and-black urban plastic rat hole. Wide
windows all along one side, ticket desks at the other, exit way in the
distance, at the bottom end, left luggage right behind me, lights high
overhead, pillars at skewed intervals form one end to the other, exit out
to the buses back and on my right. I'd almost memorized the layout at
the start. I'd had to.
On my left, an alcove filled with pinball machines and automatic soda
vendors; I'd gotten the soda from there. There was no one in there at the
moment. Further down the terminal hall, there was a larger game room
for less transient people, and a cafeteria.
I watched the exit at the bottom, and the exit from the game room and
café. My contact was a remarkable young creature called Kerry
Fossen, and it would be like her to sneak up in back of me and shout
boo, making me piss my pants, and thanks, Area Fourteen. He'd love
that. I'd damn near made a total physical wreck of myself traveling
Greyhound all the way from Fresno to St. Louis. And now, just to use a
simple and highly descriptive phrase, I was pissed off.
Area Fourteen loves handing me need-to-know assignments. Usually
the stuff I didn't need to know was the crucial stuff. I did a lot of fast

talking and even faster running. I wasn't meeting Kerry to arrange for
her to be shipped up to Area Fourteen, nor was I the one to be shipped.
All the damn Mastercomputer had to do there was ship either of us a
Bullet; instant zap, and there we are. Fortunately for my disposition, the
midway contact had brought me something to allow me to get a decent,
if short, sleep.
I quit bitching at myself and watched harder, checking faces and
looking for anything unusual. Kerry was a fine agent, one of the most
reliable -- some of them were garbage, barely capable of growing fat
and old at the same time. If Kerry had a contact time set, she'd do her
damnedest not to undershoot or overshoot it.
I sighed and gave my eyes a test swing to make sure I could keep her in
line of sight. Lady has a walk would kill an octogenarian a fifty paces.
More than the physical attraction, though, there was the attraction of
knowledge: she could point me in the right direction and tell me to go.
Need-to-know. Show-me. Whirrrr.
There are days I hate, and this was one.
I was worried, all the same. Situations like this could mean Enemy in
the area. On occasion, silence is the only possible route; too many ears
and eyes watching out for wisps of information. If there was an Enemy
tag on Kerry, it could mean trouble.
And if Kerry was in trouble, better break out the shining knights -- or at
least a slightly overdone one. Enter Kevven Tomari.
I checked my watch, checked the terminal clock, noted the positions of
the big hand and little hand on the terminal clock, and the shape of the
figures on my expensive watch. Love my expense account, even if Area
Fourteen hates it.
Show-me.
He liked that