Strangers

further notice. You'll hear my order on the public address system in a couple minutes."
        "But why's he want that?" Miles asked.
        Alvarado sat in a chair near the open door, the frosty swath of light falling across his feet and up to the middle of his chest, leaving his face in darkness. "Falkirk's bringing in the witnesses and doesn't want them to be seen by any of our people who don't already know about them. Or that's what he claims is behind the request."
        Astonished, Miles said, "But if the time's come to put them through another memory-scrub, it's better to keep them at the motel. Though as far as I know, he's not called in the damn brain-fuckers."
        "He hasn't," Bob Alvarado confirmed. "He says the coverup might not be continued. He wants you to study the witnesses, especially Cronin and Corvaisis. He says maybe he's right, maybe they're not human any more. But he says he's been thinking over his conversation with you, wondering if maybe you could be right and maybe he's too paranoid about this. He says if you decide they're fully human, if you determine that their gifts are not evidence of an inhuman presence within them, he'll accept your word; he'll spare them. Then, so he says, he might decide against another brainwashing session and even recommend to his superiors that the whole story be revealed to the public."
        Miles was silent a moment. Then he shifted in his chair, more uneasy than ever. "It sounds as if he's finally got some common sense. Why do I find that so hard to believe? Do you think it's true?"
        Alvarado reached out from his chair, pushed the door shut, plunging the room into darkness. Sensing Miles reaching for the lamp switch, he said, "Let's keep it this way, huh? Maybe it's a little easier to be frank with each other when we can't see faces." Miles settled back in his chair, leaving the lamp unlit, and Alvarado said, "Tell me, Miles, was it you who sent the photographs to Corvaisis and the Blocks?"
        Miles said nothing.
        "We're friends, you and I," Alvarado said. "At least I've felt we are. I never met another guy I could enjoy playing both chess and poker with. So I'll tell you… I'm the one who got Jack Twist back here."
        Startled, Miles said, "How? Why?"
        "Well, like you, I knew some of the witnesses were slowly shedding their memory blocks and having psychological problems in the process. So before anyone could decide to wipe them again one by one, I figured to do something to focus their attention on the motel. I hoped to stir up enough trouble to make it impossible to continue the cover-up.
        "Why?" Miles repeated.
        "Because I'd finally decided the cover-up was wrong."
        "But why sabotage it by such a back-door approach?" Miles asked.
        "Because if I'd gone public, I'd have been disobeying orders. I'd have been throwing my career away, maybe my pension. And besides… I thought Falkirk might kill me."
        Miles had worried about the same thing.
        Alvarado said, "I started with Twist because I thought his Ranger background and his inclination to challenge authority would make him a good candidate for organizing the other witnesses. From the information turned up during his memory-wipe session that summer, I knew about his safe-deposit boxes. So I searched the file on him, got the names of the banks, the passwords. The file also contained copies of all the keys to his boxes; Falkirk had them made in case it was ever necessary to turn up criminal evidence against Twist to use as blackmail or to put him out of the way in prison. I made copies of the copies. Then, when I was on leave for ten days in late December, I went to New York with a bunch of postcards of the Tranquility Motel, and I put one in each of his boxes. He didn't go to those banks often, just a few times a year, and they've all got thousands of safe-deposit customers, so nobody remembered what Twist looked like or suspected that I wasn't him. It was easy."
        "And ingenious," Miles said, staring with admiration and fondness at the bulky, shadowy form of his friend. "Finding those cards would've electrified Twist. And if Falkirk had gotten wind of it, he'd have no way of knowing who'd done it."
        "Especially since I always handled the postcards with gloves," Alvarado said. "Didn't even leave a fingerprint. I planned to come back here, give Twist time to find them. Then I was going to go into Elko