The Touch

FILE NOT IN MEMORY

A chill rippled over him. It was almost as if someone were trying to eradicate every trace of Alan Bulmer from the Foundation's records.

Again—why?

Only one man could answer that question.

Charles headed for the elevator.

"Charles!" the senator rasped from behind the desk as Charles entered his office. "I was expecting you."

"I'm sure you were."

"Sit down."

"I'd rather stand." Charles found he could best hide his uneasiness over the last hour's events by acting properly angry.

"Now, now," the senator said with a friendly chuckle. "I know you're upset, and with good reason. But I had to get those records to a safer place. You'll forgive me a little paranoia, won't you?"

Charles went cold at the lie. "They're in a safer place than my safe?"

"Oh, yes! I have them in my own ultra-secure hidey-hole where I keep very sensitive documents. The Bulmer data are there."

"I see."

Charles could almost admire the smoothness of the senator's line. Beautifully done, even down to that cute, folksy, hidey-hole bit.

But the bloody damn why of it all still plagued him. He suppressed the urge to call the senator out on his lies and wring the truth out of him. That would be futile. Besides, he had just thought of another avenue of approach.

"So," McCready said in a conciliatory tone, "are we still friends?"

"We were never friends, Senator. And let me warn you: I'm changing the combination to my safe, and if it's ever even touched by one of your stooges, you'll be looking for a new director."

With that, he strode from the senator's office and hurried for his own.

Charles sat in his locked office and punched Senator McCready's access code into his computer terminal.

He had seen the senator use it on occasion when they had to call up his personal medical file. For some reason—perhaps because the senator knew everyone's code and no one knew his—Charles had memorized it.

He now ran through all the files keyed exclusively to the senator's code.

He found the missing Bulmer data; everything regarding Bulmer that had been keyed to Charles' access had been transferred to the senator's exclusive access. Most of the rest was pure rubbish—McCready's most recent medical test results, notes, memos. Charles came across a public opinion projection done by the computer and was about to move on when he spotted the word "healed" in the center of a paragraph. He read it through.

The projection exhaustively covered the effect of illness and its cure upon public reaction to a presidential candidate.

It found that a seriously ill candidate had little chance of nomination and virtually no chance of winning.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the contrary, a candidate who had been seriously ill but somehow miraculously cured was haunted by a specter of doubt as to if and/or when the illness might recur, and was severely handicapped against a healthy opponent.

But even worse off was a candidate who had hidden a serious illness from the public and had then been cured. A question uppermost in many voters' minds concerned what else he might be hiding from them.

Everything was suddenly perfectly clear to Charles. Except for one thing: The "somehow miraculously cured" in the second scenario obviously referred to Bulmer, but the date on the report was June 1—almost six weeks ago.

He didn't have time to figure that out now—he had to get to Bulmer immediately.