COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 152
He slammed the door at the end of that long corridor of the mind, hauled his memory back past the shut doors and the closed episodes, and scowled into Turner's watching blue eyes.
"So let's get down to cases," Harding said harshly. "Make me an offer. I'm in a hurry. Six months from now, maybe you could pick me up off the beach and hire me for a bottle of gin. I won't wait. What are you driving at, Turner. Or would you rather I just killed you?"
Turner chuckled unperturbedly, his fat face quivering.
"Well, now," he said, "maybe we can arrange something. I'll tell you one thing that's been on my mind a while. I'm a busy man. I get around a lot. I got plenty of contacts. Been hearing about a fellow named George Mayall. You know him?"
Harding's hands closed on the table edge. His face went perfectly blank, like a clock's face, or a dynamo's. His eyes searched Turner's. Then he nodded.
"Mayall knows me," he said.
"I'll bet he does," Turner said, chuckling and quivering. "I'll just bet. Hates you like poison, doesn't he? He was on your Integrator Team and he got kicked off. You got him kicked off. Oh yes, Mayall knows you, all right. Like to get his hands on you, wouldn't he?" The chuckles broke into a thick laugh that made Turner shake like a heavy and solid jelly.
"Very funny," Harding said coldly. "What of it?"
The jelly subsided slowly.
"Thought I'd hire you to pilot me out to Akassi," Turner said, watching Harding. "Trouble is, I don't think you're ready yet."
"I'm no pilot," Harding said impatiently. "I don't know these waters."
"Ah," Turner said in a wise voice, cocking his head, "but you know the Integrator. You could get me past the barriers around Akassi. Nobody else in the world could do that."
"Barriers?"
"Acoustics, visual, UHF, scrambler," Turner said in a comfortable voice, sucking his pipe. "Playing dumb, are you? Never heard of Akassi, eh?"
"What about it?"
"Quiet place these days," Turner said. "Strong defensive system all around it. As if you hadn't heard. Ha. Nobody goes in, nobody goes out. You and I could go in and come out with more loot than this submersible would carry—or we could stay and play god, with your talents and training. Except for one little thing—George Mayall. He might not like it."
Harding's eyes dwelt steadily on the fat, calm face. He did not speak.
"Didn't know Mayall was out here?" Turner asked. "Never even heard a rumor?"
"Rumors, sure," Harding said, and thumped the table with an impatient finger. "But not just where. Not this close. What are you getting at? What's Mayall up to?"
"In short, what's in it for you, eh?" Turner said. "Ah, that would be telling. Couldn't even guess, could you? What's likely to happen, when an Integrator man gets kicked off the Team?"
"He's given his choice of outside jobs, naturally," Harding said with some bitterness. "He doesn't stick with them." (How could a man stick with an outside job, once he had known the tight-knit interperceptivity of the Round Table? Membership in an Integrator Team is an experience which few men attain and none willingly forfeit. It is a tremendous psychic and emotional experience, the working out of a problem on the Round Table. Afterward, ordinary jobs are like watching two dimensional, gray television when you've got used to full-color tri-di images—) "A man doesn't stick," Harding said. "He drifts. He winds up in a fishery in the Archipelagic and then a trader with a lot of influence gets him fired. And won't tell a straight story afterward. Come on, Turner, let's have it."
"Don't like getting kicked out when you're on the receiving end, eh?" Turner said. "What did they throw you out for, Harding?"
Harding felt his face grow hot. He set his teeth and held his breath, trying to force the heat and the anger down. Turner watched him narrowly. After a moment he went on.
"Don't try to tell me," he said, "that it's bare coincidence brought you here, this close to Mayall. Don't say you haven't an idea what he's up to. You know more than I do, don't you, Harding?"
Harding struck the table hard.
"If you want something, say so!" he said. "If you don't, lay off and let me earn my living my own way. Coincidence? I haven't got any connection with Mayall any more. But I did once. We were picked for the same Team, and if you know what that means you won't think it's coincidence we drift the same way when we're free to drift. So we both wind up in the Archipelagic. What of it?"
"Mean to say you haven't been approached?" Turner asked keenly. "You've been out here this long and haven't heard a murmur from—anyone?"
"Murmur of what? Come to the point, Turner!"
Turner shook his head doubtfully. "Maybe they don't know about you. Maybe one Integrator man's all they needed. My good luck, anyhow. You mean the Secesh Thresholders haven't even tried to get to you?"
"Would I be here now if they had?" Harding asked reasonably. "Go on."
"Well, they got to Mayall. They set him up on Akassi with an islandful of machinery and he's feeding them all they need in Integration to organize a withdrawal from the empire. Big stuff. Now maybe you see how I could use you, if you were ready to throw in with me."
"I see," Harding remarked coldly, "how I could get to Akassi and take over Mayall's work and cash in on the Secessionist deal for just about as much money as an Integrator could count. But I don't see where you come in, Turner."
"Oh, Mayall works through me," Turner said, puffing blandly. "I've got my network spread out from the Celebes to the Solomons. The Archipelagic States couldn't hide a secret from me if their lives depended on it. Mayall needs outside contacts, and I'm the contacts." He rolled ponderously in his chair.
"Thing is," he went on, "maybe I feel it isn't enough, just being contact man. Maybe I want a bigger cut. Maybe that's why Mayall put a roof over Akassi, just in case somebody like me got my kind of ideas. I couldn't do a thing about it—without you. You know how his mind works. You know what screens he'd dope out. But without somebody like me, Harding, you'd never even find Akassi."
"I wouldn't? Don't be too sure."
"If you could, you'd have done it before now. Maybe you haven't tried? Never mind. Mayall's no fool. He's dug himself a hole in the ocean and pulled Akassi in after him, if you want to look at it that way. The Secesh boys aren't paying him to set up an island the first stray radar beam could pick out blindfolded. Those barriers around Akassi—well, they erase Akassi, that's all. You can't see it. You can't find it. It isn't there—unless you work with Mayall and know his code. Even then you can't pass the barriers unless Mayall invites you." He puffed violet smoke and squinted through it at Harding's face.
"You ready to risk your neck yet, my boy?" he asked. "It'll take the two of us. But Mayall hates you. He'll kill you on sight. That means a risk on your part. I'll buy you higher than the bottle of gin it'd cost next January. I'd cut you in for half the take—if you get me ashore at Akassi and help me work out my scheme to take over from Mayall."
"You'll have to have something pretty good to kick Mayall out a second time," Harding said thoughtfully.
"Well now, I expect I will," the fat man agreed. He took the pipe from his mouth and narrowed his eyes at Harding. "Surprised?" he asked. "You don't look it."
"If you expect perfectly normal human reactions from me," Harding said quite gently, laying his palms flat on the table with a soft, reminiscent gesture, "you're the one who's in for a surprise. A man doesn't work ten years on an Integrator Team and stay entirely human. A gradual occupational mutation sets in. For example—" He looked up and grinned suddenly.
"For example, I know we've been under weigh for about three minutes now. There's no perceptible vibration and no roll, so how could I have guessed?"
Turner grunted, but the blue eyes gleamed.
"You tell me."
"I am the boat," Harding said, and laughed. There was no amusement in the laughter. "I've got a score of my own to settle—with society. All right, Turner. I'm with you. Where's the control room?"
-
That was the question.
From Pluto to Mercury its echoes ran. From the New Lands mankind was molding into fertile red soil out of the stuff of fire and ice, on worlds where no man could have lived before technology brought the elements of life, from all the new colonies on the new planets that question went echoing endlessly. Where is the control room?
The artificial Threshold Experiments that mold humanity into shapes which can live on alien worlds had done their part. Thresholders inhabited the planets and the empire of Earth spun in a tight network around its sun. Interstellar drive was on the way. Paragravity was already a little more than theoretical. The enormous complexities of science sprang in century-long leaps across time. An engineering process would drag with it a dozen allied fields frantically trying to catch up, a biological method that could enable men to survive interstellar trips shoved rivals impatiently out of its all-important path, hustled other sciences along with it.
The web from Earth had spun out, intricate and tangled, through the Solar System. Now it stretched tenuous threads toward the tremendous macrocosm of the stars, and the moment the first star was reached—Earth could fall.
It could fall as Rome fell, and for the same reason. The New Lands beyond the stratosphere grew, young and strong and integrated, but for century after century Earth had been the control room. The controls grew so complex that unification became an almost impossible task. Only by absolute unity, by a complete and bonded sense of solidarity, could the intricate socio-technological system of Earth stay below critical mass. And it couldn't stay there long.
For Earth had grown to be too small a planet. And the other planets were not ready yet to take up their burden. They brawled among themselves and they complained against Earth. They threatened secession. The isolationism of the New Lands became a menace that threatened the unity of the Solar Empire as Thresholders tugged angrily at the cords which bound them to the Earth from which they had sprung. And desperately in the meanwhile man strove for one major goal—sanity, rational thought, system, organization—integration.
This wasn't the best method, perhaps. But it was the best one they had.
The Integrators were amazing things, electronic thinking machines that could be operated efficiently only by teams of specially chosen, specially trained men who lived a specially planned life. When you lived a life like that, you were apt to mutate in unexpected ways. You didn't turn into a machine, exactly, of course. But the barrier between living, reacting man and nonliving, machine broke down—a little.
Which is why Edward Harding could be the submersible boat he was guiding.
It didn't have isotopic mercury memory units, like a differential analyzer. It didn't trigger electric circuits that punched out stored information and analytical reasoning for Harding to read. But in a way it nevertheless remembered—
And Harding's instantaneous reaction-time sense made him perhaps the one pilot alive who could have guided the submersible through the strong defenses Mayall had flung out around his island.
"We through yet?" Turner asked, up on deck. Around him the blue Pacific lay glittering emptily under a flawless sky. There was a faintly unpleasant smell in the air which the trades couldn't dispel. Turner puffed strongly at his pipe, studying the empty horizon that wasn't really empty. His eyes strained to find some break, as though the sky could tear like a veil, rift from top to bottom and let the real world show through. Mayall's world, Mayall's miraculously camouflaged island, impossible to find in spite of its plain markings on the charts.
In the control room below deck, Harding sat perfectly relaxed in a cushioned chair, his arms slipped into elbow-length metal gauntlets that glistened like wet snakes. Before his eyes hung a transparent disk, shaded like a color wheel. Harding moved his head gently so that his gaze looked through this section and that of the special lens. Before him, vertical on the wall, was the cosmosphere, a great half-globe than ran and bled and fountained with shifting colors and patterns. Radar and sonar made up only part of the frequencies that were the living chart of the cosmosphere. It showed the heavens above, the waters around, the reefs below—and most of the time now, it lied.
Harding said, "We're not through yet. One more barrier—I think."
On deck, Turner puffed violet smoke at the bland blue sea.
"Afraid of Mayall?" he asked the microphone.
"Shut up a minute. Tricky here."
The false screen bled and flared, showing a clear, narrow passage through empty water. Harding moved his head around the varying shades of the lens, trying to find a frequency that checked accurately with another. Only this would keep the ship from sinking, this and the magnetic control panel.
Over the ordinary manual controls, a metal plate had been attached, corrugated and colored and marked into a pattern as dizzying as that which spun across the cosmosphere. But Harding knew it. He had used such controls with the Integrator. His gauntleted hands moved above the plate without touching it, while his glittering fingers played upon an invisible keyboard.
The varying magnetisms leaped a synapse from the ship across lines of force into the metal gauntlets, and Harding's own body-synapses snapped the messages instantly to his brain. His fingers responded as instantly on the keyboard. And as his fingers moved, the ship moved, delicately, warily, perceptively, through wall after wall of frequency mirage where no ordinary compass or radar would operate sanely.
He was the ship.
"Afraid of Mayall?" he echoed Turner's question after a moment. "Maybe. I can't tell yet. I've got to find out something first. So it all depends."
"Find out something?" Turner sounded suspicious.
Harding cocked a sardonic eye at the round ear of the diaphragm. He said nothing. Presently Turner's voice came again. There was provocation in it.
"I've often wondered," he said, "why Mayall was kicked off the Team."
"Have you?" Harding asked in a noncommittal voice. He paused. After a while he said, "The important thing right now is that he blames me for it. So naturally, he hates me. He's afraid it could happen again. And it could. Oh yes, Mayall has the strongest reason in the world for hating me."
His tone grew thoughtful. "I'm a rival. I'm the heir apparent. And all he's got is Akassi. He'll be afraid of me. He'll try to kill me." Harding meditated upon this thought. "See anything up there?" he asked, after a moment.
"Nothing yet," Turner's voice came down thinly. "Sure he'll try to kill you. Wouldn't you, in his place?"
"I probably will anyhow. Try, I mean." Harding made the modification of his verb in a meticulous voice. "Akassi is—well, pretty tremendous. I hadn't actually realized it until now. These barriers are slightly phenomenal." He considered, then laughed shortly. "The defenses must be so complex that only something like this could have a chance. A direct, unexpected, outrageously simple attack. We'll have to—"
"Harding!" the diaphragm broke in with a sudden rasp. "Look! I can see the island!"
"Can you?" Harding asked dryly. There was a pause.
"It's gone," Turner said.
"Sure. And if we'd turned that way we'd be gone, too. Rocks. Wait."
The glittering gauntlets performed arpeggios in the air. "I think," Harding said, watching the cosmosphere, "I think we're through."
"We are," the voice from above said, more quietly now. "I can see the island again. Different now. I can see buildings beyond the hills there. And a spaceship, ready to take off. Take her in shore, Harding. Ground her on the beach. We've got a jet-stern, you know."
Harding had no idea what the beach looked like in a visual way, but the cosmosphere showed him all he needed to know of the strand he was approaching, the composition of the sand, what rocks lay under it, how far back the vegetation began. Under him the floor jolted upward as the ship's stern rose at a stiff slant, hesitated, grated motionless. A little shudder began in Harding's gauntleted hands and spread briefly through his body.
He took off the gauntlets.
He was no longer the ship.
He felt himself divide into two separate halves again, one flesh and blood, himself, the other mobile metal going inert as the life withdrew from it. For a rather horrible moment he wondered what it might be like some day if the machine he operated would not let him go. If the metal developed a taste for life, and the tool became the master.
"Harding?" Turner's voice called softly. "Come up. Better bring your gun."
Standing together at the rail, they scanned the peaceful, tree-fringed shore. Gentle green hills rolled upward inland a little way, and you could see rooftops over them, a high spider-web tower glittering against the sky, and farther back the unmistakable blunt, skyward pointing snout of a spaceship standing on its fins.
"It's quiet enough," Turner said, regarding a spider crab that scuttled across the sand, its eyestalks twiddling convulsively. "Have we sprung any traps yet?"
