The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [26]
“No. Do you think he might have been the inside man? They could have arranged to knock him over to give him an alibi of sorts.”
“No,” said Lisa. “Ed’s straight. So’s Morgan. Neither of them would have tried to hide something useful to national security, or even something valuable in purely commercial terms.”
“Unless they had a good reason,” Mike pointed out, “or the temptation was so great that even an honest man could be corrupted. Everyone has his price.”
“Not Morgan. And it’s still the stuff of cheap technothrillers.”
“It’s their script, not ours,” Mike reminded her. “If they’re crazy enough, they probably think like a cheap technothriller. Anyway, remember what you said earlier about the Cassandra Complex. Morgan Miller has spent fifty years preaching that a population crash is inevitable, even though everyone with half a brain can see that we can’t carry on increasing our numbers without completely fucking up the ecosphere. He’s been suffering all the while from feelings of impotence and bitter frustration. Just suppose that after those fifty years, he suddenly found there was, after all, a way that he could do something. If Morgan were offered a way to stop playing Cassandra, couldn’t he be tempted? If he were offered a means of taking a hand, mightn’t the chance to set aside that awful feeling of futility have been irresistible?”
“Morgan’s not behind this,” Lisa assured him. “I’d know.”
“Would you?” he asked, so softly that the other men might not have been able to hear him even if they were listening hard, “or is it just that you can’t stand the thought that you might not… that he’d let Stella Filisetti in on it, but not you?”
“There were two women,” Lisa reminded him grimly. “And that’s just here. Maybe all of them were women—the fact that Sweet’s convinced that no woman could have dragged Ed Burdillon away from Mouseworld at a trot only means that he never met Arachne West, or any other Real Woman. If you think it might have been Morgan or anyone working for him who shot the phone out of my hand, wait till you hear the tape from my living room. The way he—or she—spoke Morgan’s name is enough in itself to establish that he’s a victim.”
“Don’t rule anything out, Lisa,” Mike urged in the same low tone. “Just think about it. We need this result, you and I. If we can get one over on Kenna while the MOD man’s watching, we’ll have arms and armor—but if we come out of it looking bad, we’ll both be on the scrap heap in no time.”
“Morgan’s a victim, not a conspirator,” Lisa insisted frostily. “As am I. Not to mention half a million mice. Which is, if you care to think about it, the oddest thing of all. Why kill the mice, Mike? If there was some amazing secret hidden in Mouseworld, why not simply steal the mice that contained it? Why kill them all?”
“I can’t answer that,” Grundy whispered—and for the first time, Lisa realized just how frightened he had become. “I can’t make sense of any of it yet. I can see Kenna’s ax coming down on my neck, but I can’t see any way off the block. How’s that for a Cassandra Complex? The only one who can get us out of this with our careers intact is you, Lis. Even if the fools who came to your flat had it completely wrong, they think you know what’s going on. They must have a reason to think that, and you’re the only one who stands a chance of figuring out what it is. Whatever it is, Lis, you have to get to the bottom of it—and you have to face up to whatever it turns out to be. All I’m asking is that you don’t leave any stone unturned, no matter how uncomfortable it might be—not just for your sake, or mine, but for Morgan’s. If he isn’t behind it, they’re going to kill him as soon as they