Collected Short Fiction, page 602
But by the same token, it was highly dangerous for them to wander around. Ryeland stopped short and waited until someone else came by. “Sir!” he called. “Excuse me!” It was a straight, gray-haired man in the blue of the Planner’s guard, wearing the silver mushrooms of a Technicorps colonel. “What is it?” he demanded impatiently.
“We’re ordered to compartment 93,” Ryeland explained.
The colonel looked at him thoughtfully. “Name,” he snapped. “Ryeland, Steven. And Oporto.”
“Umm.” Presently the colonel sighed. “All right,” he said grouchily. “Can’t have you messing up the Planner’s car with your blood. Better get secured. This way.” He led them to a tiny room, ushered them in. “Look,” he said, flexing the knob of the door. “No lock. But I should warn you that most of the corridors are radar-trapped. Do you understand?” They understood. “All right.”
He hesitated. “By the way. My name’s Lescure, Colonel Pascal Lescure. We’ll meet again.” And he closed the door behind him.
Ryeland looked quickly around the room, but it wasn’t the splendor of its furnishings or the comfort of its appointments that interested him. It was the teletype. Quickly he reported in for himself and Oporto.
The answer came:
R. Action. Await further orders.
Oporto was beginning to look flushed and to tremble. “Always it’s lige this,” he said thickly. “I ged a cold and if I don’t tage care I’m sick for weegs. I’m feeling light-headed already!” He stood up, tottering.
Ryeland shook his head. “No, you’re not lightheaded. We’re moving.” The hand at the controls of the subtrain knew whose private car he was driving down the electrostatic tubes. The giant sphere was being given a featherbed ride. They had felt no jar at all on starting, but now they began to feel curiously light.
That was intrinsic to the way of travel. The subtrain was arrowing along a chord from point to point; on long hauls the tunnels dipped nearly a thousand miles below the earth’s surface at the halfway mark. Once the initial acceleration was over, the first half of a trip by subtrain was like dropping in a superspeed express elevator.
Absently Ryeland reached out an arm to brace Oporto as the little man weaved and shuddered. He frowned. The helical fields which walled the tunnels of the subtrains owed part of their stability to himself. On that Friday night, three years before, when the Plan Police burst in upon him, he had just finished dictating the specifications for a new helical unit that halved hysteresis losses, had a service life at least double the old ones.
And yet he could only remember that much and no more.
Had something been done to his mind? For the thousandth time Ryeland asked himself that question. He could remember the equations of his helical field theory that transformed the crude “magnetic bottles” that had first walled out the fluid rock, as early nucleonicists had walled in the plasma of fusing hydrogen. Yet he could not remember the work that had led him to its design. He could remember his design for ion accelerators to wall the atomic rockets of spaceships, and yet the author of that design—himself—was a stranger. What sort of man had he been? What had he done?
“Steve,” Oporto moaned. “You wouldn’t have a drink on you?”
Ryeland turned, brought back to reality. A drink! Oporto was feverish. “I’d better call the machine,” he said.
Oporto nodded weakly. “Yes, call in. I’m sick, Steve.”
Ryeland hesitated. The little man did look sick. While he was standing there, Oporto blundered past him. “I’ll do id myself,” he grumbled. “Ged out of my way.”
He reached with fumbling fingers for the keyboard, his face turned angrily toward Ryeland. That was a mistake; he should have been watching. In the unsteady footing he lurched, reached for the keyboard, missed, stumbled and fell heavily against the teletype.
It toppled with a crash. There was a quick white flash from inside it and a sudden pungent smell of burning.
Oporto got slowly to his feet. Ryeland opened his mouth and then closed it without saying anything. What was the use? Obviously the teletype was out of commission; obviously Oporto hadn’t done it on purpose.
Oporto groaned: “Oh, dabbit. Steve, where’d thad colonel go? Maybe he could ged me something . . .”
“Take it easy,” Ryeland said absently. The little man’s condition was clearly not good but, in truth, it was not Oporto that was on Ryeland’s mind just then. It was the teletype.
Always, since the first days after school, there had been no move Steve Ryeland made, no action he performed, without checking in with the Machine. Even at the maximum-security camp there had been a teletype on direct linkage with the Machine, standing in one desolate corner of the bare barracks.
He felt curiously naked, and somehow forlorn.
“Steve,” said Oporto faintly, “could you ged me a glass of water?”
That at least was possible; there was a silver carafe and crystal tumblers, fired with gold designs. Ryeland poured the little man a glass and handed it to him. Oporto took it and sank back against a huge, richly upholstered chair, his eyes closed.
Ryeland roamed around the little cubicle. There wasn’t much else for him to do. The colonel had warned them against radar-traps in the corridors; it was not to be thought of that they would go out and take the chance of being destroyed by a single wrong move.
For they were Risks; and the iron collars they wore contained eighty grams of a high explosive. A step into an area proscribed for Risks (and such areas were common all over the world) meant that a triggering radar beam would touch off the explosive. Ryeland had seen that happen once. He didn’t want it to happen to him.
Brig or no brig, this room was part of the Planner’s private car and it was furnished in a way that Ryeland had not seen in three years. He fingered the drapes around a mock-window and reached out to touch the polished mirror of a hardwood table top.
Three years ago Ryeland had lived in a room something like this. No, he admitted, not quite as lavish. But a room that belonged to him, with furniture that no one else used and a place for his clothes, his books, the things he kept around him. But in that life he had been a cleared man, with a place in the Plan of Man and a quota to be met. That life had ended three years ago, on that fatal Friday afternoon.
Even now, after endless sessions of what was called reconstructive therapy, Ryeland couldn’t understand what had happened to him. The vaguely worded charge was “unplanned thinking,” but all his merciless therapists had failed to help him recall any thoughts disloyal to the machine. The only material evidence of unplanned activities was his collection of space literature—the yellowed old copies of books by Ley and Gamow and Hoyle and Einstein that he had saved from his father’s library.
Of course he knew that the books were not on the list approved by the Plan, but he had intended no disloyalty with his hobby. In fact, as he had many times told the therapists, the special equations of the helical field were related to the mathematics of the whole universe. Without knowing the equations for the expansion of the universe and the continuous creation of matter in the space between the galaxies, he could not have improved the helical units for the subtrain tunnels.
But the therapists had always refused to specify exact charges. Men under the Plan no longer had rights, but merely functions. The purpose of the therapists was not to supply him with information. But to extract information from him. The sessions had failed, because he couldn’t remember whatever it was that the therapists had been attempting to extract.
There was so much that he could not remember . . .
Oporto said weakly: “Steve, ged me a doctor.”
“I can’t!” Ryeland said bitterly: “If the Plan wants you sick you’ll have to be sick.”
Oporto’s face turned a shade paler. “Shut up! Somebody may be listening.”
“I’m not criticizing the Plan. But we have to stay here, you know that.”
“Ryeland,” Oporto begged, and went into a coughing fit.
Ryeland looked down at the little man. He seemed to be in serious trouble now. Evidently his system was an ultra-allergic type. Swept clean of disease organisms in the sterile air that blew down on the isolation camp from the Pole, he had been ripe for infection. He was breathing heavily and raggedly, and heat wafted off his forehead as Ryeland brought his hand near it.
“Hold on, Oporto,” he said. “It’ll only be a little while. Maybe a couple of hours.” At a thousand miles an hour, there was no place on Earth much farther away than that.
“I can be dead in a couble of hours,” said Oporto. “Can’t you ged me a doctor?”
Ryeland hesitated. There was truth to what the little man said.
The Plan provided constant immunization for those who lived in areas exposed to disease; but the hypo-allergic, like Oporto, might well lose that immunity in a few months. And Oporto had been breathing sterile air for three years.
“All right,” said Ryeland wearily, “I’ll do what I can. You come with me, Oporto.” Booby-trapped the halls might be, dangerous the trip certainly was; but it was life and death to Oporto.
The door opened easily.
Ryeland, half supporting Oporto, looked out into the corridor. No one was in sight. He sighed; he had hoped that they might find a passerby. Oporto babbled: “Steve, what are you doing? Led me alone. We can’t go out here—the colonel warned us!”
“We have to get you to a doctor, remember?” Ryeland scanned the corridor. At the intersections were curious canopied devices like the sun-shelter over a mogul’s howdah. Perhaps they were the radar traps; at least, Ryeland couldn’t imagine what else they might be. But there was one back the way they had come, and surely there had been no trap there.
No, Ryeland thought it out carefully. The fact that they had been allowed to get to Compartment 93 didn’t prove anything at all; quite possibly the traps had been turned off to allow them to pass. In fact, thinking it over, it seemed certain that the one route that would be prohibited would be the corridor going back to the entrance port.
“Oporto,” he said, “do you see those doors? I think we can go into one of them.”
“You do, Steve? What mages you think so?” the little man asked sardonically.
“Because there’s nothing better to try,” Ryeland snapped, and dragged the little man with him.
Around his neck the iron collar weighed heavier than ever. If only he were a superman, like that Donderevo whose name stuck half-forgotten in his mind . . . whose fate, somehow, was linked with Ryeland’s own.
Who was Donderevo, exactly? The therapists had questioned him so persistently about the man that there had to be some strong reason. Did Ryeland know him? When had he last seen him? When had he received a message from him? What was the message about?
Donderevo was the son of an explorer and trader who had gathered a fortune from the asteroids and the moons of the outer planets, and had built a commercial empire outside the Plan of Man. Ron Donderevo had come to Earth as a student of space medicine at the great technological institute where Ryeland’s father was a mathematics professor. While he was there, the Plan had annexed the last reluctant asteroids and moons which had remained outside. Donderevo’s father had been defeated in a space fight, resisting the annexation. Donderevo himself had been placed in an iron collar, as a result of a student demonstration. Then one day he had disappeared. The legends said that he had somehow removed the collar, and escaped into space beyond the power of the Plan.
Ryeland remembered meeting him only once, in his own father’s study. Ryeland was an eight-year-old Technicub. Donderevo was a grown man, a graduate student, romantic and mysterious with his knowledge of far planets and unknown space. But was that enough to account for the questions?
Ryeland had denied receiving any message from him, but the therapists were unconvinced.
In any event, whatever Donderevo might have been, Ryeland wasn’t; his collar was on for good, or until the Machine relented.
Ryeland wondered crazily if he would hear the tiny click of the relay before the decapitation charge went off. Would there be any warning? Would he know?
Or would it all be over, literally, before he knew what was happening?
The only way to find out was to open a door and walk through it.
He pushed a door open, selecting it at random from the half-dozen in the corridor. Oporto broke away from him and, surprisingly spry, ran a few paces down the corridor, whirled and watched him with a face of tense anticipation.
Ryeland didn’t stop to think it over, he walked in the door; and nothing happened.
Grinning, embarrassed, Oporto trailed after. “That one was all right, huh, Steve?”
Ryeland nodded; but there was no point in recrimination, although there were a lot of things he had in mind to say to the man who had urged him to take a chance—and then ducked out of the way of the possible consequences. But of more immediate interest was the room they were in.
It was about the size of Compartment 93 and empty. It was quietly furnished: A narrow bed, a table with a few flowers, a large mirror, an array of cabinets. A girl’s room, Ryeland guessed, but from the relative modesty of its furnishings, not the room of a girl who was part of the higher brass on this de luxe subtrain. Possibly a secretary’s room; perhaps a maid’s. Whoever she was, she wasn’t in.
But there was another door, leading to a flight of steps.
This time Ryeland didn’t wait for Oporto. He caught his breath and held it, and when he had passed through and established once again that that particular door was not radar-trapped, he tasted salt and acid on his lip. He had bitten hard enough to draw blood.
But he was through.
The stairs were steep, but it was easy enough to help Oporto up them, with the plunging of the car taking pounds off their weight. They came out into another room, also empty and small.
But this one was sumptuously furnished. It seemed to be a woman’s dressing room. It was white and gold, with ivory-backed brushes and combs on a little vanity table, before a gold-rimmed oval mirror. The stairs, Ryeland guessed, were for the use of the personal maid to whoever used this room.
And he heard someone singing.
Ryeland took a deep breath and called out: “Hello there! Do you hear me? I’m looking for a doctor!”
There wasn’t any answer. The singing went on, a girl’s voice, clear and attractive; she was singing for her own amusement. Every once in a while she would go back and repeat a phrase, pause, then start again aimlessly. And under the singing was a sort of musical cooing accompaniment.
Ryeland looked at Oporto, shrugged and pushed the door open.
They looked into a room that was green and silver. Its walls swam with fading, shifting green light. In the center was a round silver tub, six feet across, partly recessed into the floor. From the mouths of carved crystal dolphins tiny jets of perfumed warm water leaped and splashed, in a foam of bubbles, into the tub.
And above the thick blanket of foam protruded one knee, the head and the arms of the most beautiful girl Ryeland had ever seen.
“I—I beg your pardon,” he said, awkward and disturbed.
She turned her head and looked at him calmly. On her wet, white shoulders were perched a pair of—birds? No. They were shaped like birds, like doves, but they were made of metal; their feathers were fine silver scales; their eyes were red-lit jewels. The metal things moved restlessly, as the little eyes poked hotly at Ryeland and Oporto. They cooed soft threats, and the rustle of their wings was like thin whispering bells.
Oporto opened his eyes, stared and emitted a strangling sound. “She—She—” He swallowed and clutched at Ryeland. “Steve, it’s the Planner’s daughter!” he gasped, and flung himself to the floor. “Please!” he begged, writhing toward her. “Please, we didn’t mean to bother you!”
But the approach must have alarmed her. Not very much; for she didn’t raise her voice; but she stopped singing in the middle of a note and said, quite softly: “Guards.”
There must have been a microphone to pick up her words, for there was a sudden commotion outside. But more than that, she had defenders nearer still. The doves on her shoulders leaped into the air and flung themselves at the prostrate little man. Sharp beaks tore, wing-tips like knives beat at him. The door opened and four tall women in the blue of the Planner’s guard raced in.
II
Death had not been far from Steve Ryeland for these three years. It had worn the neat white smock of Dr. Thrale, the fat, bald, oily man who had been his chief therapist. It had whispered in the soft, asthmatic voice of Dr. Thrale, warning him a thousand times that he stood in danger of the Body Bank, unless he could recall a message from Ron Donderevo, unless he could find the right answers to nonsense questions about a string of words and names that meant nothing to him—spaceling, reefs of space, Donderevo, jetless drive.
Death had taken other forms. The concealed trigger of a radar trap, the menacing horns of a radar-headset, the more subtle and more worrisome peril of orders to the Body Bank; these were the deaths he had known and learned to live with. These women, though, carried projectile weapons, not radar. Queer, thought Ryeland, even in that moment, for if carried through the thought indicated that there were some dangers to the person of the Planner’s daughter that did not come from classified Risks like himself. Could ordinary citizens—cleared citizens—be dangerous to the Plan?
