The Key to Midnight

creeps,' Chelgrin said.
        'Rotenhausen will erase all the Joanna Rand memories and give her yet another identity. When he's finished, we'll provide forged papers and set her up in a new life in Germany.'
        'Why Germany?'
        'Why not? We knew you'd insist on a capitalist country with the so-called "freedoms" you cherish.'
        'I thought perhaps she could… come back.'
        'Back here?' Peterson asked incredulously. 'Impossible.'
        'I don't mean to Illinois or Washington.'
        'There's not a safe place in the States.'
        'But surely if we gave her a solid new identity and stuck her in a small town in Utah or rural Colorado or maybe Wyoming-'
        'Too chancy.'
        'You won't even consider it?'
        'Dear Tom, this trouble with Alex Hunter should make it obvious why I can't consider it. And I can't resist reminding you that she could've been here in the States all along, instead of Japan, if you had only agreed to plastic surgery along with the memory tampering.'
        'I won't even discuss the possibility.'
        'Your ego leaves no room for common sense. You see elements of your face in hers, and you can't bear to have them altered.'
        'I said I won't discuss it. I'll never let a surgeon touch her face. She won't be changed in any way.'
        'Stupid, dear Tom. Very stupid. If the surgery had been done immediately after the screw-up in Jamaica, Alex Hunter wouldn't have recognized her last week. We wouldn't be in trouble now.'
        'She's a beautiful woman. She'll stay that way.'
        'The point of the surgery wouldn't be to make her ugly! She'd still be beautiful. It would just be a different beauty.'
        'Any difference would make her less than she is now,' Chelgrin insisted. 'I won't allow her to be carved into someone else.'
        Outside, the storm grew more violent by the minute. Rain fell in dense cataracts. The driver slowed the Mercedes to a crawl.
        Peterson smiled and shook his head. 'You amaze me, Tom. It's so strange that you'll fight to the death to preserve her face - in which you can so readily see yourself - yet you don't feel any remorse for letting us carve away at her mind.'
        'There's nothing strange about it,' Chelgrin said defensively.
        'I suspect you didn't care about the brainwashing because she wasn't intellectually or emotionally your disciple. Her beliefs, her goals, her dreams, her hopes were different from yours. So it didn't matter to you if we erased all that. Preservation of the physical Lisa - the color of her hair, the shape of her nose and jaw and lips, the proportions of her body - was enormously important to your ego, but the preservation of the actual person called Lisa - those special patterns of the mind, that unique creature of wants and needs and attitudes so different from your own - was none of your concern.'
        'So you're calling me an egotistical bastard,' Chelgrin said. 'So what? What am I supposed to do? Try to change your opinion of me? Promise to be a better person? What do you want from me?'
        'Dear Tom, let me put it this way-'
        'Put it any way you like.'
        'I don't think it was a loss to our side when you were won over to their philosophy,' the fat man said. 'And I'd bet that the average capitalist wouldn't look at you as much of a prize either.'
        'If this is meant to wear me down somehow and make me agree to plastic surgery for her, you're just wasting your time.'
        Peterson laughed softly. 'You've got thick armor, Tom. It's impossible to insult you.'
        Chelgrin hated him.
        For a while they rode in silence.
        They passed through woodlands and open fields between suburbs. Thin patches of fog drifted across the road, and when lightning flashed, the ground mist briefly glowed as if it might be an unearthly, incandescent gas.
        Finally the fat man said, 'There's some danger involved if we tamper with the girl's memory a second time.'
        'Danger?'
        'The good Dr. Rotenhausen has never worked his magic twice on the same patient. He has doubts. This time the treatment might not take. It might even end badly.'
        'What do you mean? What could happen?'
        'Madness perhaps. Or she might wind up in a catatonic state. You know - just sitting, staring into space, a vegetable, unable to talk or feed herself. She might even die.'
        Chelgrin stared at Peterson,