6

You probably remember it; he certainly went out in a blaze of glory. It made front page headlines all over the country. In case you don't recall, there was an earthquake that ruptured a huge field of underground natural gas storage tanks. The gas was seeping out of the ground in dozens of different places. The gas company was willing to take their losses from the leakage and pay the penalties for the environmental pollution, and just send in a team of company Minors to open some pipelines so they could drain off as much as possible into other storage facilities.

Linkowski proposed the idea of going in there and sealing all the surface leaks. He told the company he'd save them the pollution penalties, and he'd take in payment half the value of the gas they would have lost. He figured he could go in there with his team of bodies, find all the leaks and seal them in a matter of hours. It looked like a good gamble; the danger of a gas explosion and fire was actually quite small for a well-coordinated effort if the proper precautions were taken, and he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars overnight.

It was classic Linkowski. He took in every last body he owned, including his Primary, figuring that time was money and wanting to squeeze out every cent he could. He just about had it made, too. What he hadn't figured on was the second quake. It was bigger than the first, and left a gap through the middle of the field you could have run a train through. Gas poured into that trench, and it went off with an explosion that sent metal storage sheds and piles of pipe flying across the field in all directions like shrapnel. The fire burned in that trench for days, but the investigators figured later that Linkowski and all his clones were killed within seconds of the explosion by the blast that blew across the field.

I came to believe that if anyone might try to operate someone else's body it would have been Linkowski. At any rate, not knowing when to expect him meant I had to keep my various selves in appropriate frames of mind; the playboy business mogul for Gregory, and simple retainers for the rest. We had to assume that Linkowski might be able to pick up the recent memories of the body he activated. This would explain how he had known his way around the places he invaded, and how he found his way to the banks and managed to forge the signatures and so forth.

I had thought about this some, too, while we were getting prepared, and it seemed to me that there was a sense of memories being attached to my various bodies. This is a subtle thing, not surprising that I had overlooked it before, but it leant credence to some of the theories Haggerty had mentioned. So I took care to create a mental pose as well as a physical one, and on the day after our "arrival" I directed a lot of attention to my trip to a local bank (where Haggerty was posing as a manager) to set up a convenience account under the name Clifford Gregory, using my thumbprint for ID. Afterward I reviewed a number of times the huge sum of money I had transferred there from my "home" bank, and carefully memorized the new account number.