Collected Short Fiction, page 603
But there was no answer to that question just then. Oporto was screaming under the attack of the silvery doves, the woman guards were bearing down on them.
The girl stopped them all with a single word. “Wait.” She swept a mound of bubbles away from her face to see better, exposing a throat of alabaster. Her eyes were green-gray and serene. She looked very lovely and very young.
She caught Ryeland completely undefended.
In the isolation camp there had been no women—not even a pinup picture; and here he was in the presence of a most beautiful woman, in what should have been the privacy of her bath. Apart from everything else, she could hardly have been unaware of the shattering effect she had on him. But she seemed completely at ease. She said, in a voice more polite than curious: “What do you want?” Ryeland coughed. “This man needs a doctor,” he said hoarsely, looking away.
The first of the female guards laughed sharply. She was tall, brunette; a heroic figure of what might have been a lovely girl, if reduced ten per cent in all dimensions. She said in a voice that just missed being baritone: “Come on, Risk! We’ll take care of you and your friend too!” But the girl in the tub shifted position lazily. She waved an arm through the foam, watched the bubbles billow in slow concentric waves and said: “Never mind, Sergeant. Take the sick man to a doctor, if that’s what he wants. Leave the other one here.”
“But, Madam! The Planner—”
“Sergeant,” said the gentle voice, not raised at all; the sergeant turned almost white. She gestured at the others; they half carried Oporto out. The door closed behind them, cutting in twain a look of pure hatred and contempt that passed from the sergeant to Ryeland.
The doves, which had been describing precise circles in the air, shook themselves and returned to the girl’s shoulders. Their hot small eyes never left Ryeland, but after a moment they began to coo again.
“You’re an iron-collar man, aren’t you?” the girl asked suddenly. Ryeland nodded. “A risk. Yes.”
“I’ve never spoken to an iron-collar man,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you mind if we talk? I’m Donna Creery. My father is the Planner.”
“I know.” Suddenly Ryeland was aware of his rumpled denims, of the fact that he was an intruder on this girl’s bath. He coughed. “Don’t you think your father—I mean, I don’t mind if we talk, but—”
“Good,” said the girl, nodding gravely. She shifted position to get a better look at him. The bubbles rippled wildly. “I was afraid you might be sensitive about it,” she told him. “I’m glad you’re not. What’s your name?”
Ryeland raised his chin and spread the dollar of his denim shirt to display the iron band.
“Steven Ryeland,” she read, squinting to make out the glowing scarlet letters with his name and number. “Why, I think I know that name. A doctor? No. A rocket pilot?”
“I am a mathematician, Miss Creery.”
She cried: “Oh, of course! Your folder is on my father’s desk. I saw it this morning, when we were leaving Copenhagen.”
An anxious eagerness took his breath. For three years he had been trying to learn the charges against him. The therapists had refused to give him information. Their questions had been carefully phrased to tell him nothing—they had asked him a thousand times what the word spaceling meant, and punished him more then once for guessing that it meant an inhabitant of space.
“Did the folder tell—” He gulped. “Did it specify any charges against me?”
Her greenish eyes surveyed him, unalarmed.
“You displayed unplanned interests.”
“Huh? What does that mean?”
“You possessed a secret collection of books and manuscripts, which had not been approved by the machine.”
“No, I didn’t!” A cold breath touched the back of his neck. “There has been some terrible mistake—”
“The Planning Machine permits no mistakes,” she reminded him gravely. “The titles of the forbidden books were listed in the folder. The authors were scientists of the wicked times before the Plan. Einstein. Gamow. Hoyle—”
“Oh!” He gasped. “Then those were just my father’s books—a few that I saved. You see, when I was a kid I used to dream of going to space. I’ve met Ron Donderevo. I wanted to pilot a spaceship, and discover new planets. The Machine killed that dream.”
He sighed.
“It transferred me out of the Technicorps and reclassified me as a research mathematician. It assigned me to an installation somewhere underground—I don’t know where it was; we were not allowed even to guess whether we were under dry land or the ocean floor or the polar ice. I don’t remember, even, if I ever guessed. My memory has . . . holes in it. I had two helpers—a teletype girl and a little man named Oporto, who is a sort of human computing machine. The Machine sent us problems, like the problem of hysterisis loss in the subtrain tunnels. They were problems the Machine couldn’t answer, I suppose—even it doesn’t know quite everything. Anyhow, we solved the problems.
“Of course I wasn’t supposed to need reference books, because I could ask the Machine for any fact I wanted. But for the sake of efficiency it had let me keep a few handbooks, and I had brought those books of my father’s among them.”
He smiled at her hopefully.
“You see, for a man who had set his heart on space, life in a tunnel isn’t very exciting. For a sort of hobby, I read those books about space. They were full of old theories about the nature of the universe. Using modern mathematics, I worked out a new set of equations to describe the expanding universe and the continuous creation of matter in the space between the galaxies—”
Her frown checked him. This was not quite the sort of talk for a young girl in her bath!
“But that was not unplanned,” he finished desperately. “It was just a harmless hobby. In fact, it was useful to the Plan. The equations that I used in improving the helical field units were derived from the equations that describe the continuous creation of matter and space.”
“And that’s what made you a risk?” She looked at him thoughtfully and frowned. “You don’t look dangerous.”
He could find no answer to that He waited while she waved a hand absent-mindedly. One of the doves left her shoulder to fly, tinkling, to the crystal dolphin. It pecked precisely at a fin-shaped lever on the dolphin’s back, and obediently the spray of perfumed water dwindled away. Ryeland watched, more than half lulled by the scent of lilac and the strangeness of his surroundings. The room was warm but not steamy; invisible ducts must be sucking the moisture out “Are you dangerous?” the girl asked suddenly.
Ryeland said: “No, Miss Creery.” He hesitated, wondering how to explain it to this child. “The collar isn’t a punishment. It’s a precaution.”
“Precaution?”
He said steadily: “The Machine has reason to believe that under certain circumstances I might work against the Plan of Man. I have never done anything, you must understand that. But the Machine can’t take chances, and so—the collar.”
She said wonderingly: “But you sound as though you approve of it!”
“I’m loyal to the Plan!”
She thought that over. Then: “Well, aren’t we all? But the rest of us don’t wear iron collars.”
He shook his head. “I never did anything that was against Security.”
“But perhaps you did something that wasn’t—quite?”
Ryeland grinned. She was amazingly easy to get along with, he thought; the grin became a smile—a real one, and the first he had worn in some time. “Yes,” he admitted, “I did something that wasn’t. There was a girl.”
“Steven, Steven!” Donna Creery shook her head mock-ruefully. “Always a girl. I thought that was only in stories.”
“In real life too, Miss Creery.” He was almost relaxed. Then, abruptly, her mood changed.
“Your folder contains another specification,” she rapped out. “You are charged with concealing information about a device which is dangerous to the security of the Plan of Man.”
“But I’m not!” he protested desperately. “Somebody has made a mistake—in spite of the Machine. For three years the therapists in the maximum security camp have been working me over, trying to extract information that I don’t have.”
Her eyes widened, with a calm concern.
“What kind of information?”
“I’m not sure.” He winced, with remembered pain. “They were careful not to give me hints, and they punished me for guessing.
“They questioned me about a list of words,” he said. “They strapped me down, with electrodes clamped all over me, recording every reaction. They repeated the words a million times. Spaceling. Reefs of space. Fusorian. Pyropod. Jetless drive. And two names—Ron Donderevo and Daniel Horrock.
“Putting all those words and names and other clues together, I guessed that the therapists thought that Horrock had brought me a message from Donderevo. A message from space, about things called reefs and spacelings and fusorians. Particularly, about something called a jetless drive. That was what they were trying to dig out of me—how to build a jetless drive.”
She frowned.
“What is a jetless drive?”
“There isn’t any,” he said. “Because a jetless drive would be a system of reactionless propulsion. Crackpots for three hundred years have been trying to invent such a system, but everybody knows it would be a violation of the Third Law of Motion. It’s as impossible as pushing a rowboat forward without pushing the water back.”
“I see.” She was nodding gravely. “Impossible as creating new atoms and new space between the galaxies.”
He looked at her sharply. “But I couldn’t have had a message from Horrock—or anybody else,” he insisted desperately. “Not when they seem to think I did. On the Friday it happened, Oddball Oporto and the teletype girl had been with me all day. We were working late, finishing the specifications for the new helical unit. I let Oddball go about eighteen hundred hours, because he was getting a headache. The teletype girl went out with him, to bring coffee and sandwiches for us. They hadn’t been gone half an hour, when somebody knocked on the door. I thought it was the girl—but it was the Plan Police.”
“That wasn’t on Friday.” Donna Creery’s eyes were veiled, strange. “According to the records in your folder, you were taken into precautionary custody at eighteen hundred hours on a Monday afternoon. That leaves at least three days missing from your story.”
Ryeland gulped.
“That couldn’t be!” He shook his head. “Oddball and the teletype girl had just gone out—”
“I studied your folder with considerable care.” She failed to say why. “I am certain that you were picked up on a Monday.”
Ryeland felt a tingle of excitement. This was more than he had ever been able to learn about the case against him.
“I suppose it’s possible,” he muttered. “At first I was in a place miscalled a recreation center, somewhere underground. We weren’t allowed to inquire where. The therapy sessions went on around the clock. I had no way of knowing the time or the date.
“But I still don’t know how to build a reactionless propulsion system. And I still believe that the Machine has permitted itself to make a mistake.”
Donna Creery shook her head reprovingly.
Ryeland stopped, the collar tight around his neck. This was crazy! Staying here like this with the Planner’s daughter! He said abruptly, harshly: “Miss Creery, I’m interrupting your bath. I must go!”
She laughed, like a shimmer of pale music. “I don’t want you to,” she coaxed.
“But—your bath—”
“I always stay in the tub in these subtrain rides, Steven. It’s comfortable, when the up-grav drag begins to work. And don’t worry about my father. He rules the world—under the Plan, of course! But he doesn’t rule me.” She was smiling. She could hardly be twenty, Ryeland thought ruefully, but there was no more doubt in his mind that she knew she was a woman. She said comfortably: “Sit down, Steven. There. On the bench.”
One slim arm, wearing wristlets of foam, gestured at an emerald bench next to the tub. The doves moved nervously as he approached. Donna Creery said: “Don’t be afraid of my Peace Doves.” He looked quizzically at the silver-steel beaks. “Oh, I’m sorry they hurt your friend,” she apologized, “but they thought he was going to hurt me. You see, even without the guard I am protected.”
She waved a hand, and faint music seeped into the room from concealed speakers. “What was the girl like?” she demanded.
“She was beautiful,” he said shortly.
“And dangerous?”
He nodded, but under the heavy weight of the collar the stiff hairs at the back of his neck were trying to rise. Dangerous? This girl was far more dangerous to him. He had no right to be here. The Machine would not be blind to this. But Donna Creery said soothingly: “Tell me about her. Was she really lovely?”
“I believed she was. She had long yellow hair and green eyes. Eyes like yours. And she was in the secret police, but I didn’t know that until the day of the raid.”
Laughter pealed from the girl’s lips, and the Peace Doves fluttered their wings fretfully for balance. “And she betrayed you. Are you afraid I might? But I won’t, Steven, I promise.”
He shrugged. “I’ve told you. I suppose I was lucky, at that. I was sent to a maximum-security camp. It could have been the Body Bank.” She tilted her head to ponder that, and he watched the red glints flow through the dark waves of her hair. A last she sighed and said, “And for that you became a Risk. But you should have been more careful, Steven. You should not have defied the Plan. And now you have to wear that collar. Can’t you get it off?”
He laughed sharply.
She said seriously: “No, I suppose not. But if I were you, I think I might. You said you were a mathematician. If I were a mathematician, and wore the collar, it would be only one more problem for me. I would find a way to solve it.”
He said with a touch of anger: “The collar was invented by Colonel Zamfirescu, the best engineer in the Technicorps—before he was salvaged himself. He thought of everything.”
“It’s only a metal band, Steven.”
“The toughest armor plate in the world! And inside it there’s a decapitation charge, fused with a hydrogen power cell—it won’t last forever, no, but it will keep full power for a century! And that’s longer than I can wait. And the collar’s booby-trapped. If I try to cut it open—if I even try to unlock it, and use the wrong key, or turn it the wrong way—it will kill me on the spot. Have you ever seen a decapitation charge go off, Miss Creery? I have.”
She shuddered, but she said: “If I were you, I would run away.”
“Not very far! Radar runs faster. And even if you could get away—out to the Cold Planets, say, or to one of the orbiting stations around Mercury—there’s a timing device in the collar. It has to be reset periodically, with a key. If not—boom. And you never know when; just that it will be less than a year.”
“Oh.” She shook her head sadly. “Then you must take it off,” she said wisely.
He laughed out loud; he couldn’t help it. The idea was preposterous!
“Don’t laugh, Steven. Ron Donderevo did,” she told him.
“Donderevo! What do you know about Donderevo?”
She said, “Oh, a little. I knew him, you see, when I was very small. I remember seeing him with the collar—and I saw him again, without.”
He stopped, staring. He began: “You saw Donderevo—”
But there was a sudden, harsh knocking at the door. “Miss Creery!” a worried male voice clamored. “The Planner has sent for that Risk!”
Ryeland sat bolt upright. For a moment he had forgotten; the voice had brought him back to the realities of his life.
The girl said, “You’ll have to go, Steven.” She whispered, and one of the Peace Doves restlessly rose from her shoulders and circled the room, its hot red eyes fixed on Ryeland. It touched the door, and without sound the door opened. “Be careful,” the girl said gently. “And don’t think too much about Angela.”
“All right,” Ryeland said, numb, walking like a mechanical man to where the radar-horned officer of the Planner’s guard waited for him, with an expression like malevolent granite. It wasn’t until the door had slid silently closed behind him that he remembered he had never mentioned the name of the girl who betrayed him, his teletype girl, Angela Zwick.
For all of Ryeland’s life the Planner had been watching him. That fearless, genial, giant face had looked down on him from stereo posters in the home of his parents, the barracks of the Technicubs, the classrooms of his school—in every public square, and all the laboratories and buildings where he had worked. Ryeland knew that face as well as his own father’s—better—and so did every other human alive.
The Planner sat behind a great hardwood desk in a chair that was all air cushions and cunning springs. He was looking absorbedly through a folder of papers on his desk. Uncomfortably Ryeland stood waiting. There was no resemblance between the Planner and his daughter. She was brunette and lovely, with the face of a child saint; he was square and silver, a lion’s face. His hair was short, gray-white; it sat firmly on his head like a collision mat. And over his head, on the back of the great chair, a steel-gray falcon sat frozen; but it was not an ornament, for slowly metal-sheathed eyes opened and tiny bright red eyes peered out at Ryeland.
At last the Planner looked up and smiled. He said in a velvet bass voice: “Son, don’t you check in?” Ryeland jumped. “Oh. Sorry, sir.” He hurried over to the gold-plated teletype and tapped out his name. The station plate on the machine said simply: “ONE”.
The old man chuckled. “You’re Steven Ryeland. I saw you once before, but you wouldn’t remember that.”
Ryeland started. “Sir?”
“It was a long time ago, boy,” the Planner said contemplatively. “I visited your home; you were a baby. Don’t look shocked. You see, I knew your father.”
