Collected Short Fiction, page 609
“But, my dear Ryeland!” The major’s expression was tortured, “If isn’t only a matter of power sources. Think of the other considerations!”
“What the Plan requires, the Plan shall have,” Ryeland quoted, beginning to enjoy himself.
“Of course, of course. But—” The major studied the list. “You have enough electronic equipment here to run a university lab,” he wailed “And some of it is dangerous. After the, uh, accident Mr. Oporto was talking about, surely you understand that we can’t take chances.” Ryeland stared. “What does that have to do with the Team project?” The major said angrily, “The Plan can’t stand accidents, Mr. Ryeland! This equipment creates radiation hazards, if nothing else, and there are eighty thousand people in Points Circle Black, Triangle Gray, Crescent Green and Square silver alone. They can’t be exposed to this sort of thing!”
Ryeland tapped the teletape meaningfully.
“Oh,” sighed the major, “if the Machine approves . . .” He thought for a moment, then brightened. “I have it! An orbiting rocket!”
Ryeland was taken aback. “What?”
“An orbiting rocket filled with all the equipment you want,” Chatterji said eagerly. “Why not? Everything run by remote control. I can requisition one for you at once, Mr. Ryeland! And you can fill it with all the dangerous equipment you like—what do we care what happens to any wandering spacelings, eh?” He winked and giggled.
“Well,” said Ryeland doubtfully, “we could do it that way.”
“Of course we could! We’ll arrange a TV repeater circuit with remote-controlled apparatus. You work in your lab, the equipment is out in space. Perform any experiments you like. And that way,” he beamed, “if you blow the lab up you destroy only one ship, not all of us.”
He bustled off.
It was astonishing what the Plan of Man could accomplish. The rocket was loaded, launched and orbited in forty-eight hours.
Ryeland never saw it. He monitored the installation of the equipment he wanted via TV circuits, tested the instruments, gave the okay—and watched the fire-tailed bird leap off its launching pad through a cathode screen. At once he put it to work. The only thing they had learned about the force the spaceling generated, what the Planner had called the “jetless drive”, was that it was indetectable. But that in itself was a great piece of knowledge. Ryeland’s researchers had turned up another fact—a high-energy nuclear reaction which turned out less energy than went into it—and it was just possible, it was more than possible, it was perhaps a fact, that that missing energy was not missing at all, but merely not detectable.
Like the energy of the spaceling . . . Ryeland determined to recreate the nuclear reactions which were involved.
Until the morning that the Togetherness girl woke him with news: “Rise and shine, Steve,” she sang, bringing him his breakfast. “Guess what! General Fleemer’s going to be at the Teamwork conference today.”
Steve got groggily to his feet. “That’s his privilege,” he said thickly, and looked at her, young, pretty, fresh—though she had been with him, tirelessly running errands, through half the night. “Don’t you ever get tired?” he asked sourly.
“Oh, no, Steve! Eat your breakfast.” She perched on his chair, watching him, and said earnestly: “We’re not here to get tired, Steve. We have our job! We Togetherness girls are the connecting wires that hold the Plan of Man’s circuit together.”
He gaped at her, but she was serious. “That’s right,” sue nodded. “The Plan of Man depends as much on us as on the transistors and condensers and capacitors—that’s you and the other brass. Everyone, is important! Don’t forget, Steve: ‘To each his own job—and his own job only.’ ”
“I won’t forget,” he said, and wearily drank his citrus juice. But the girl had something on her mind, he saw. She was waiting for an opportunity to speak to him. “Well? What is it?”
She seemed embarrassed. “Oh, “Uh—it’s just that—well, there’s talk, Steve. The girls were wondering about something.”
“For heaven’s sake, say it!”
“We wondered,” she said primly, “if our Team really had anything to do with these accidents.”
Ryeland blinked and rubbed his eyes. But rubbing his eyes didn’t change anything; the girl still sat there with the mildly embarrassed, mildly apologetic expression. “Accidents? Faith, what are you talking about?”
“The Paris-Finland tube,” she recited. “The Bombay power plant explosion. The cargo-jet crash in Nevada. You know.”
“No, I didn’t know. Half those things I never heard of. Oporto’s been falling down on the job.”
“There are others, Steve. And what the girls are saying—” She paused. “I only wondered if it was true. They say our Team project has caused them. They even say that you, Steve—”
“That I what?”
“Oh, I suppose it’s ridiculous.
General Fleemer said it wasn’t really true, anyway, that you had something to do with it. But they say you were involved in planning the subtrains . . .”
He grumbled, “They say some weird things. Excuse me while I dress, will you?”
He couldn’t put it out of his mind. It was foolish, he thought testily. How did rumors like that start?
At the day’s Teamwork conference, sure enough, General Fleemer had done them the unusual honor of attending. Ryeland scowled at him thoughtfully, then remembered the silly rumor. “Before we get started,” he demanded, “has anybody heard anything about our work causing accidents?”
A dozen blank expressions met his stare. Then the head of the computer section coughed and said hesitantly, “Well, there was some talk, Mr. Ryeland.”
“What kind of talk?”
The computerman shrugged. “Just talk. One of the data-encoders had heard from a cousin who heard from somebody else. You know how it goes. The story is that our work here has upset the radio-control circuits, heaven knows how.”
“That’s preposterous!” Steve exploded. “What the devil do they mean by that?” He stopped himself. It wasn’t the computerman’s fault, after all. “Well,” he said grimly, “if anybody hears anything else like that, I want it reported to me!” Heads nodded; every head but General Fleemer’s. He barked testily: “Ryeland! Are we going to gossip about accidents, or is the Team going to chart its course for the day?”
Ryeland swallowed his temper. In spite of the fact that Donna Creery had put him in charge of the Team, General Fleemer’s seniority made him a bad man to tangle with.
“All right,” said Ryeland, “let’s get on with it.” Then he brightened. “I saw your report, Lescure. Want to elaborate on it?”
Colonel Lescure cleared his throat. “After a suggestion by Mr. Ryeland,” he said, nodding, “we instituted a new series of X-ray examinations of the spaceling. By shadowgraphing its interior and using remote-chromotography analytic techniques I have discovered a sort of crystalline mass at the conflux of its major nervous canals. This is in accordance with the prediction made by Mr. Ryeland.”
Fleemer demanded harshly: “What does it mean?”
Ryeland said eagerly: “It means we’re making headway! There had to be some sort of such arrangement for controlling and directing the jetless drive. After yesterday’s computer run, and some further calculations Oporto did for me, I asked Colonel Lescure to make the tests. He did—on overtime, as you see.
“What this means,” he said, beginning to lecture, “is that we have found where the spaceling’s force is generated and directed. And there’s one other thing we learned from yesterday’s calculations. Phase-rule analysis indicates zero possibility of any electromagnetic or gravitic force. I have the report here, ready for transmission to the Machine.”
General Fleemer nodded slowly, looking at Ryeland. After a moment he said, “Does it account for what happened to the mining colonies in Antarctica?”
Ryeland was puzzled. “I don’t understand.
“No? I refer to the explosion of the power reactor last night, which destroyed them, at a very great loss to the Plan of Man. Not the only loss, Ryeland. A spaceship has been lost through a failure of its helical field accelerator. The same helical field which was involved in the reactor explosion—and in other accidents, Ryeland. The same field which you helped to design.”
“The design is not to blame,” Ryeland protested desperately. “If there have been accidents, they must be due to mechanical failure or human error or deliberate sabotage—”
“Exactly!”
“How could I be to blame for accidents in Antarctica and a hundred miles down and out beyond the Moon?”
“That’s exactly what the Machine will want to know.”
“Perhaps it is only chance,” he suggested wildly. “Coincidence. Accidents have happened in series before—”
“When?”
“I don’t remember. I—I can’t recall.”
He stammered and gulped, and walked away. The veil of gray fog across his past was thicker. Everything except his science was a swirl of unreality and contradiction. Alone in his room, he tried again to come to grips with that old riddle of the three days missing from his life. What had the therapists suspected that he had done in that lost interval? Why had they expected him to know anything about a call from Dan Horrock, or about fusorians and pyropods and spacelings or about how to design a reactionless drive?
Lescure’s story had given him clues, but they were too fragmentary to make much sense. Horrock had left the Cristobal Colon with unauthorized specimens and descriptions of the life of space. Did the Machine suspect that he had been in contact with Ryeland, before he was recaptured and consigned to the Body Bank?
Ryeland turned the puzzle over, and saw no light.
According to Donna Creery, there had really been three days between the knocking on his door and the arrival of the Plan Police. Had the knocking he remembered really been Horrock?
If so, what had erased his memory?
He stared at the wall and probed through the fog in his mind. He tried to remember Horrock, still perhaps in his uniform, soiled from his flight, perhaps bleeding from some wound, panting with terror and exhaustion, lugging the black canvas space bag that held his stolen notes and specimens—
The images had become queerly real. Were they all imagination?
Had Horrock brought him some information vital to the invention of a jetless drive? He couldn’t recall.
He fell at last into a restless sleep, into a nightmare in which he and Horrock were in flight from the Plan Police.
The next morning Ryeland went directly from his room to the spaceling’s cage in the rocket pit—and stopped, appalled.
The spaceling lay crushed and bleeding in its cage.
Ryeland ran to the cage and let himself in. The creature had grown to know him. It lay wrapped in a fading glow of misty green, eyes dulled; but as he entered its eyes brightened angrily. It lifted off the floor. Suddenly apprehensive, Ryeland dodged outside and slammed the cage door—just in time. The spaceling darted toward him with flashing speed. The cage rocked as she struck the closing door. Anchor chains clanked. Fresh blood ran down the bars, and flap of golden fur was torn loose. She collapsed again, mewing piteously.
Ryeland felt the first real rage he had known in years.
He spun on his heel. “Gottling!” he bawled. “What the devil have you been up to?”
The colonel appeared, looking sardonically self-satisfied. “Mr. Ryeland,” he nodded.
Ryeland took a firm grip on himself. Gottling looked more like a skull than ever, the radar horns giving a Satanic expression to a face that was cold and cruel enough to begin with.
But those radar horns were not merely ornament. Team leader or not, Ryeland was a risk. The cold, complacent smile that twisted the corners of Gottling’s thin lips was enough of a reminder of their relative status. One touch of the radar button on Gottling’s harness and it was the end of Ryeland.
But this was too much. Ryeland blazed: “You’ve been torturing the thing again!”
“I suppose so,” Gottling agreed mildly.
“Damn you! My orders were—”
“Shut up!” There was no smile at all now. Gottling thrust a teletape at Ryeland. “Before you go too far, read this!”
Ryeland hesitated, then took the tape. It read:
Information. Agreed present line of investigation unnecessarily slow. Information. Danger of additional accidents possibly related Ryeland method of research must be investigated. Information. Possibility Ryeland engaged in direct sabotage subtrains, reactors, ion drives. Action. Direction of Team project returned to General Fleemer. Action. Supplementary lines to be initiated at discretion Colonel Gottling.
Ryeland stared at it, dazed. The Machine had reversed itself again! But in truth it wasn’t his own position, difficult though it had suddenly become, that concerned him. It was the spaceling. “Supplementary lines!” he thundered. “Man, you’ll kill her!”
Gottling shrugged, contemplating the spaceling. It lay gasping on the steel floor, looking up at them.
“Perhaps I will not wait for her to die,” the colonel said meditatively. “Pascal does not wish to perform a vivisection, but he would hardly dare refuse the orders of the Machine. Even he.” He smiled frostily and commented: “You are all alike, Pascal Lescure and the Planner’s daughter and you, Risk. Blood frightens you. But pain is not contagious. You need not fear to observe it in others, it will not infect you. Indeed,” he beamed, “there is much to learn in the pain of others.”
Ryeland said tightly: “I’m going to report this to Donna Creery.”
The colonel widened his eyes. “Oh? You need the Planner’s daughter to fight your battles?” He allowed a silence to hang over them for a moment. Then, forgivingly: “But it does not matter, for you will not find that possible, Ryeland. Miss Creery is on the Moon. So you see, Risk, what happens to the spaceling from now on is entirely up to me.”
VIII
Ryeland flung open the door of his room and headed for the teletype in the corner. Oporto and the Togetherness girl were there. He paused, distracted for a moment; he seemed to have interrupted something, but what? It didn’t matter. He barked: “Oporto! What’s Donna Creery’s call number?”
Oporto coughed. “Gee, Steve. I don’t know. Three? Fifteen?”
“Cut it out, Oporto,” Ryeland warned dangerously.
“Three.” Ryeland thumped the teletype keyboard:
Query. Permission for direct hookup communication Donna Creery station 3.
The teletype hardly hesitated:
Information. Refused.
“Well,” Oporto said reasonably, “what did you expect? The Machine can’t have its circuits tied up with—”
“Shut up.” Ryeland was typing again, demanding a connection with the Planner himself.
Information. Refused.
“You see, Steve? You aren’t getting anywhere. What’s got you so steamed up?”
Ryeland told him in half a dozen sentences what was getting him so steamed up. “Oh, that’s too bad,” murmured the Togetherness girl. “The poor thing.”
Oporto seconded: “Tough. Well, what are you going to do? We’re only Risks. We can’t buck Gottling and all those.” He sneezed, and complained: “See, Steve, you’re gedding me all upset. I bet I’m catching a code.”
Ryeland looked at him blankly; be had not heard what Oporto had said, and hardly knew the other two were in the room with him. What could he do? Cut off from the Planner or his daughter, he had no chance to keep Gottling from murdering the spaceling. That was the end of the project. If what the Planner had told him was true, it actually endangered the Plan itself; for the jetless drive, the spaceling’s queer method of propulsion, was important to the safety of all the Plan. Yet the Planning Machine would not allow him to—
He blinked and the room came into focus. “The Planning Machine!” he said aloud.
“What? Steve,” moaned Oporto, “now what are you going to do?” But Ryeland didn’t answer. He sat at the keyboard of the machine and with a steady hand tapped out an account of what had happened. Colonel Gottling had deliberately controverted the orders of Donna Creery and the Machine itself. The spaceling was in danger. The Plan itself was threatened. He finished, and waited.
And waited.
And waited for long minutes, while Oporto and the girl whispered behind him. It was incredible that the Machine should take so long to answer! Ryeland asked himself feverishly: Was it turned on, was the wire cut, could it be possible that the Machine’s circuits were so overloaded that the message was not received? He was actually bending over, hardly aware of what he was doing, to be sure that the machine was properly plugged in when abruptly it whirred and rattled.
Ryeland was up like a shot.
But the message was unbelievably short. It said only:
R.
“Received and understood,” Oporto said sympathetically from behind him. “Gee, Steve. That’s all? Well, that’s the Machine for you. It isn’t up to us to question—Steve. Hey. Steve! Where are you going?” But Ryeland was already gone.
Ryeland hurried down the corridors to General Fleemer’s quarters. He had wasted time and it was now late; he would be waking the general up, but he didn’t care about that, not now. He tapped on the door and then, without pausing, banged hard.
“A minute, a minute,” mumbled a grumpy voice. A wait. Then the door was flung open.
General Fleemer was in lounging pajamas, bright purple tunic, striped purple and scarlet pants. The collar and cuffs were picked out in silver braid, and the room behind him was silver. Silver walls, silver-mounted furniture on a silvery rug. It was a startling effect. Fleemer growled irritably: “Ryeland? What the devil do you want?”
“I have to talk to you, General.” He didn’t wait for an invitation, but slipped past him into the room. Then something stopped him and he paused, stared, distracted even from the important mission he was on.
There was a statue by the fireplace, a bright silver statue of a girl. But it moved! It opened silver eyelids and looked at him. With pink-tinged lips, like metallic copper in a silver face, it said: “Who is this one?”
