Jaguar by Bill Ransom Page B

he was wrung dry.
    They called it “debriefing,” but he knew better. He kept high-ranking cattle in his personal corral—Belitnikoff, a lanky KGB Colonel; Wu Li, a troubled physicist; Mitsui, of the Tokyo
    Exchange and Livingston on the Federal Reserve. They were always up to something that Operations found tantalizing. Of course, his pryings caused disturbances in themselves that developed some interesting product.
    The Jaguar hated the pettiness of government meddling in other governments. After his first breach of the fabric of being he lost interest in the trivial politics of a measly little world. He had universes to conquer and he knew, in time, he could have them all.
    He was a tinkerer inside a great machine. He had not yet met another tinkerer on equal ground on the dreamways. Zachary Lee had blundered and the Jaguar had been lucky. His life depended on keeping his body alive and the dreamways secure. Right now, his body was his foremost concern.
    He had babbled to Max about the other side, about being the Jaguar, but it had been a fortuitous babble. Max thought he had taken him too far and broken his mind completely. That ended the debriefing, but not the threat. They believed in his domestic cattle because they could see them. They would no more believe in another universe than they believed in UFOs.
    His big breakthrough six years ago gave the Ops boys specs to a classy little jamming device. He told them he got it from Wu Li. The truth was, one of his priests had handed him his first link to an engineer of the Roam, Zachary Lee. That link had provided a pathway that ran both ways, and Zachary Lee had found it.
    The Jaguar had stumbled from a dreamway directly into the mind of the great Zachary Lee. Inventions, particularly information-gathering devices, information-gathering-jamming devices and magnetic motors had been Zachary Lee’s contribution to the Roam. His political clout meant nothing to the Jaguar. Lee’s charisma at the end proved nothing except that the Roam would not give up one of its own, not even to keep the Jaguar at bay.
    He had told Operations about his limits, but it was not in their interests to believe him. They stole his own blood and gave it back, they duplicated hormones and subhormonic compounds, they knocked him out, they kept him up but never could they get him to duplicate his sleep of the dreamways. Nor could he.
    It always just happened.
    Their job was to remain suspicious, and he respected that. When their job fell to make sure he was holding nothing back, he would tell them everything, he knew that. He had before. Not for awhile; but they did it before, and he knew they’d do it again.
    He allowed himself a flicker of amusement through his pain.
    They didn’t dare believe that a world coexisted beside their own. Amusement, again. The more he ranted about it, the less likely they were to believe it. And they would stop when he ranted because clearly he had told them everything.
    The Jaguar simply preferred to avoid them, and sleeping for months at a time had been perfect. He gave them less and less, pretending to burn out. It was not in their best interests to believe that, either.
    He prayed that they would not find out just how little pain he could stand anymore.
    I could stop it, he thought. I could sever my pain centers.
    But he couldn’t, no more than a surgeon could open his own chest and take out a lung. Self-tinkering was too dangerous to risk, and there was no one he trusted, in this world or the other, to go mucking about in his brain.
    His priests were ranch foremen to him, each in charge of a herd. They kept the Lees of the herd from seeking him out. The priesthood was both security and early warning system to the Jaguar. To get to him, the other side would have to get one of the priests. The Jaguar kept close tabs on the condition of his priests.
    A perfect, white pain slashed his cranial nerves and another snatched him in the belly for a hard twist.
    Breathe .