He and Dave Siskind rode back to the hotel in a police car, since the officers did not want to risk him in a taxi. He had little to say on the way, and if Siskind took his silence for fright, he was not inclined to disagree.
"Dave," he asked at last, "did you find out who that guy Byers represented?"
"Yeah. An old couple named Morgan. Right-wing oddballs. But the police figure they're innocent dupes, and Byers is really fronting for somebody else."
A couple of blocks later Siskind asked softly, "Want me to cancel everything for a while?"
"I don't know. What's next on the schedule?"
"The Tchaikovsky in Toronto, with the dress tomorrow night. I ought to be on my way now, and you're booked on TransAm at 9:47 this evening."
Kent thought it over. The temptation was to stick to the schedule, to act as if nothing were wrong.
"I'll let you know in a little while, after we get to the hotel," he said. As soon as he was alone in his room he woke Pard.
"Well, I'm out of jail," he mouthed, "but maybe I would be safer in. Here's what happened." Quickly he filled Pard in, then said, "The question is, do we stick to the schedule?"
Yes.
"Suits me. I'll tell Siskind I'll be on the TransAm flight."
No.
"Huh? Now what?"
Pard tapped Kent's side of the skull: Use your brain.
Kent tried it. "Oh," he muttered. "I see your point. No innocent bystanders, huh? Except me."
Yes.
Kent called Siskind in. "Dave, I'm going to stay on schedule, but after what's happened I'd better not travel with other people. They might get hurt. See if the police will make secret arrangements for me to leave on another fast clopter—maybe from the hotel roof."
His manager nodded. "That makes sense. I'll travel with you this time. Maybe I can be—"
Kent was shaking his head. "No. By myself, Dave."
Siskind shrugged helplessly. "You're the boss. Good luck." He reached the door and turned to say, "That was a great performance last night, Kent. The recording of it will be a classic, no matter what!"
"Why, thanks, Dave."
His manager left him wondering if he had just heard his own funeral oration.
The clopter was waiting on the roof at 7:30. He walked to it in the twilight, escorted by Dave and two policemen, then ducked down and scooted underneath the craft.
"Hey!" a policeman objected.
"Just curious," Kent explained, coming out. "The clopter I came in had a hole in it, and I wondered if this was the same bucket."
"No. That one's impounded," said the officer.
Kent climbed into the doorway and stood on tiptoes to examine the roof. "It had a hole in its top, too," he explained. No green spot, nor even a slight irregularity in the clean metal, could he see.
Satisfied, he got in, waved, and took off.
As soon as he was established in the northeast traffic pattern he got a twitch from Pard: Give me control.
"Boy, if you could only talk," Kent moaned, "I'd give you control from here on out!"
Pard twisted out of the seat, which was not easy in the cramped compartment, and methodically began pulling the seat to pieces. "What now?" Kent demanded.
His skull-mate ignored him and kept working until he found what he was after. It was under a reglued manufacturer's label on the shock-cushion assembly.
Another green disk!
Squatting in the clutter of seat components, Pard got a razor blade from his toilet kit and hurriedly sliced the disk into tiny shreds. These he wadded into the remains of the label. He tugged the emergency-vent plug out of the side of the cabin and allowed the escaping air to yank the wad out of the clopter entirely. Then he shoved the plug back in place and waited for the air pressure to normalize. When he was breathing easily again he reassembled the seat and wriggled back into it.
Relax, his wrist twitched.
What was Pard up to, anyway? Kent wondered fretfully. And how could he possibly have got mixed up with the kind of people who stole secret weapons and planted bombs under beds? Kent simply didn't mingle with such grim individuals, so how could Pard have managed to do so? Of course, there were those midnight strolls of Pard's, but how involved could a man get who couldn't communicate? Yet, Pard was entangled in something, as the "mystery girl's" pictures testified. And Pard said he was in love with her!
Kent mumbled, "You sure that girl is worth all this?"
Yes.
"How do you know? Have you kissed her?"
No.
"Touched her at all?"
No.
Kent sneered. "One of those I-worship-thee-from-afar bits, huh? You're an oddball, Pard! You really are!" He sat back huffily, staring ahead into the starry night. "She's the reason you won't let me get involved with any kind of girl except cheap fluff," he guessed after a moment.
Yes.
"And you keep strewing her pictures around for me to find. Am I supposed to fall for her, too?"
Yes.
"Huh!" Kent grunted disgustedly. But he had to admit that the "mystery girl" looked most appealing, with that uncertain little smile. Maybe she was right for him. It would be fun to meet her and find out. Besides, he was twenty-four years old, and ought to be thinking about marriage. And his wife should meet Pard's approval, because in a way she would be Pard's wife, too.
Poor old Pard, he mused. A mind living all these, let's see . . . these eighteen years in isolation, practically incommunicado. What strange thoughts would such a mind have by now?
He and Pard had been one person at first, so whatever Pard was now was what Kent himself would probably be if he had been stuck with the voiceless half of their brain. Kent tried to imagine himself in that situation, but it was too much for him to picture. It was a wonder, he decided, that Pard hadn't gone raving mad long ago.
He had been too young at the time of their separation to recall many details. That was in the year of the big Florida hurricane, when he was six . . . A lot of loud noise and the house tearing up all around him, and something hurting his head, and his mother and father never being found . . .
He had no memory of being violently epileptic at the little rural hospital where the rescuers took him. He was told about that a week or two later, after he had been operated on and was well. The old doctor had been awfully nice to him, and had said how sorry he was that the hospital didn't have the equipment to make him well with just a small operation instead of a big one.
Kent remembered some of the doctor's words:
"We had to give you a partner, son, to live inside you. You and he must be friends, and always work and play together, because he can make you do things you don't want to do if you fuss with each other, or he can keep his side of your body from doing what you tell it, if he wishes. And probably only one of you will be able to talk, and the one who talks should be especially nice to the other one. And the one who can talk must never tell other people about his partner, because other people might think you are still sick, and make you stay in a hospital all the time."
When he was older, Kent had read up on the treatment of epilepsy, to learn what had been done to him.
It was a drastic cure worked out some ten years earlier, and justifiable only in the most violent cases even then. It had soon become outmoded as neural research learned how to pinpoint more precisely the cause of epilepsy in an injured brain. But that old country neurosurgeon in Florida had doubtless done his best under emergency conditions.
The operation amounted, quite simply, to slashing the two hemispheres of the brain apart. The connective neural tissues near the core of the brain—the corpus callosum and the lesser commissures—were cut, breaking communication between hemispheres and at the same time disrupting the epileptic syndrome.
The consequences of such an operation were less severe than one might expect, especially in an adult patient. Either hemisphere can direct almost all body functions. The two hemispheres begin their existence in a nearly balanced state, but during childhood one becomes increasingly dominant as the seat of consciousness—the left hemisphere in right-handed persons and vice versa—while the other becomes responsible for less exalted sensory and motor functions. Thus, in the adult patient there would be no emphatic "twoness," no great awareness within the severed secondary hemisphere.
But as the old doctor had known or suspected, this was not necessarily true of a six-year-old. Consolidation of ego in a single hemisphere would have only started, primarily with the shift of language functions to one center. A major portion of Kent Lindstrom could never move out of the secondary hemisphere, because the bridges were down, and would grow—if it grew at all—as a separate ego, a silent partner—Pard.
So there they were—as far as Kent knew the only human of their kind in existence—a duplex man, two functioning minds in one body. And a hell of an inconvenience to each other—except at the piano, of course.
But Kent could console himself that Pard was basically a nice, reasonably sane guy, even if he was mixed up in something pretty weird. The mob was out to kill him, which proved he wasn't on their side. And the upshot of his acts in Los Angeles had been the exposure of that weapons cache.
Also, Pard's special interests—electronic gadgetry and the like—might be trivial, but there was nothing unwholesome about them.
"Pard," Kent said at last, "those characters know we're headed for Toronto. Won't they be waiting for—"
Yes.
"We've got to stay alive and get to the bottom of this," said Kent, "and our chances of doing either in Toronto don't seem worth a damn. If I talked to this girl of yours, would she fill me in?"
Yes.
"Where is she?"
Pard pulled a map out of the rack and put a finger on New York City.
"I'm sure to be recognized there!" Kent protested.
Pard swooped a finger through the air and down on a little town in New Jersey, then rubbed it along the map to the big city. Kent nodded.
"Yeah, it might help to land in a cornball town and go the rest of the way by train. But I wish I had a disguise."
Pard made clipping motions around his head.
"That's what I was afraid you would do," said Kent glumly. Nevertheless, he took the scissors and a small mirror from his toilet kit and began shearing his long curly locks. He had trimmed his coiffure frequently—but far less severely—in the past, and could do a neat job of it. But when he had the mop down to businessman-length, he stared in the mirror with sad misgivings.
"I don't know what my fans in Toronto will think of this," he mourned, "if I ever get to Toronto."