MARTY PASSED ON WHAT Ingram had revealed about the Hammer of God to the general. He said it sounded fantastic, but he would make cautious inquiries.
He also found for them two decommissioned vehicles, delivered that afternoon: a heavy-duty panel truck and a school bus. They turned the conspicuous army green into a churchly powder blue, and lettered "St. Bartholomew's Home" on both vehicles.
Moving the nanoforge was no picnic. The crew that had delivered it long ago had used two heavy dollies, a ramp, and a winch to get it into the basement. They used the machine to improvise duplicates, jacked it up onto the dollies and, after widening three doors, managed to get it into the garage in one backbreaking day. Then at night they snuck it out and winched it into the panel truck.
Meanwhile, they were modifying the school bus so that Ingram and Jefferson could stay jacked continuously, which meant taking out seats and putting in beds, along with equipment to keep them fed and watered and emptied. They would stay continually jacked to two of the Twenty, or Julian, working in staggered four-hour shifts.
Julian and Amelia were working as unskilled labor, tearing out the last four rows of seats in the bus and improvising a solid frame for the beds, sweating and swatting mosquitoes under the harsh light, when Mendez clomped into the bus, rolling up his sleeves: "Julian, I'll take over here. The Twenty need you to jack with them."
"Gladly." Julian got up and stretched, both shoulders crackling. "What's up? Ingram have a heart attack, I hope?"
"No, they need some practical input about Portobello. One-way jack, for safety's sake."
Amelia watched Julian go. "I'm afraid for him."
"I'm afraid for us all." He took a small bottle from his pants pocket, opened it, and shook out a capsule. He handed it to her, his hand quivering a little.
She looked at the silver oval. "The poison."
"Marty says it's almost instantaneous, and irreversible. An enzyme that goes straight to the brain."
"It feels like glass."
"Some kind of plastic. We're supposed to bite down on it."
"What if you swallow it?"
"It takes longer. The idea is – "
"I know what the idea is." She put it in her blouse pocket and buttoned it. "So what did the Twenty want to know about Portobello?"
"Panama City, actually. The POW camp and the Portobello connection to it, if any."
"What are they going to do with thousands of hostile prisoners?"
"Turn them into allies. Jack them all together for two weeks and humanize them."
"And let them go?"
"Oh, no." Mendez smiled and looked back toward the house. "Even behind bars, they won't be prisoners anymore."
I UNJACKED AND STARED down into the wildflowers for a minute, sort of wishing it had been two-way; sort of not. Then I stood up, stumbled, and went back to where Marty was sitting at one of the picnic tables. Incongruously, he was slicing lemons. He had a large plastic bag of them and three pitchers, and a manual juicer.
"So what do you think?"
"You're making lemonade."
"My specialty." Each of the pitchers had a measured amount of sugar in the bottom. When he sliced a lemon, he would take a thin slice out of the middle and throw it on the sugar. Then squeeze the juice out of both halves. It looked like six lemons per pitcher.
"I don't know," I said. "It's an audacious plan. I have a couple of misgivings."
"Okay."
"You want to jack?" I nodded toward the table with the one-way box.
"No. Give me the surface first. In your own words, so to speak."
I sat down across from him and rolled a lemon between my palms. "Thousands of people. All from a foreign culture. The process works, but you've only tried it on twenty Americans-twenty white Americans."
"There's no reason to think it might be culture-bound."
"That's what they say themselves. But there's no evidence to the contrary, either. Suppose you wind up with three thousand raving lunatics?"
"Not likely. That's good conservative science-we ought to do a small-scale test first-but we can't afford to. We're not doing science now-we're doing politics."
"Beyond politics," I said. "There's no word for what we're doing."
"Social engineering?"
I had to laugh. "I wouldn't say that around an engineer. It's like mechanical engineering with a crowbar and sledgehammer."
He concentrated on a lemon. "You do still agree that it has to be done."
"Something has to be done. A couple of days ago, we were still considering options. Now we're on some kind of slippery ramp; can't slow down, can't go back."
"True, but we didn't do it voluntarily, remember. Jefferson put us on the edge of the ramp, and Ingram pushed us over."
"Yeah. My mother likes to say, 'Do something, even if it's wrong.' I guess we're in that mode."
He set down the knife and looked at me. "Actually not. Not quite. We do have the option of just plain going public."
"About the Jupiter Project?"
"About the whole thing. In all likelihood, the government's going to discover what we're doing and squash us. We could take that opportunity away from them by going public."
Odd that I hadn't even considered that. "But we wouldn't get anything close to a hundred percent compliance. Less than half, you figured. And then we're in Ingram's nightmare, a minority of lambs surrounded by wolves."
"Worse than that," he said cheerfully. "Who controls the media? Before the first volunteer could sign up, the government would have us painted as ogres bent on world domination. Mind controllers. We'd be hunted down and lynched."
He finished with the lemons and poured equal amounts of juice into each pitcher. "Understand that I've been thinking about this for twenty years. There's no way around the central conundrum: to humanize someone, we have to install a jack; but once you're jacked two-way, you can't keep a secret.
"If we had all the time in the world, we could do it like the Enders' cell system. Elaborate memory modification for everybody who's not at the very top, so that nobody could reveal my identity or yours. But memory modification takes training, equipment, time.
"This idea of humanizing the POWs is partly a way of undermining the government's case against us, ahead of time. It's presented initially as a way of keeping the prisoners in line-but then we let the news media 'discover' that something more profound has happened to them. Heartless killers transformed into saints."
"Meanwhile, we're doing the same thing to all the mechanics. One cycle at a time."