Collected Short Fiction, page 629
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The battered veterans of the skirmish with the pyropods, limping out of the battlefield and taking the swift elevators to the surface, found the Planner standing like a jovial Santa Claus on a quartz-walled balcony, near the snowy summit of the mountain in which his headquarters was buried.
This was his eyrie, the great crow’s-nest of his palace. He chuckled to General Wheeler, “They tried to get me and missed! They’ll not have another chance! We’ll wipe out every last lone rebel.”
The general rasped, “Sir, here is your first traitor! This is the man who is responsible. I found him bearing this document.”
Gann cried, “Planner, the general is lying! He knows I didn’t—”
“Silence!” snapped the general.
The Planner did not even look at Gann. Smiling and nodding, he read the square of paper, then dropped it negligently to the floor. “You’re sure he’s the Starchild, General?” he asked.
“Consider the evidence, sir!” rapped the general. “One. He appeared originally in the vaults of the Machine, with no explanation of how he got there. Two. At the same time, the Writ of Liberation appeared, also unexplained. Three. He was bearing this document when I apprehended him. Four. He displayed a suspicious knowledge of the vulnerable spots on the pyropods when his own life was in danger. Five. He purposely slew Sister Delta Four, making it look like an accident, so that she could not speak against Mm. Six. He was about to do the same to me when I ordered the guards to disarm him. The conclusion, sir, is overwhelmingly indicated that Machine Major Boysie Gann is indeed the Starchild.”
“But, sir,” cried Gann.
The Planner gestured, and one of the guards wrenched his arm, forcing him to be quiet. “That’s better,” chuckled the old Planner, beaming down on Boysie Gann. His dose of communion had clearly lasted him a long time; he was as bubbling with, good humor as if the Machine even now were shooting pleasure sensations into his brain. “Yet,” said the Planner, smiling good-humoredly at General Wheeler, “one of the guards reported that it was you, not Gann, who killed the sister. Could you have been mistaken?”
“No, sir! Impossible, sir. I had no reason.”
The Planner nodded cheerfully and scratched his plump old cheek. He got to his feet and went to the quartz wall of his eyrie, squinting out into the sunset sky. To windward of the summit, the descending sun picked out a towering crown of cumulus. Beyond the crystal parapet, its last rays shimmered on a small waterfall and tinted the falling slopes of evergreens.
“As a matter of fact,” the Planner added over his shoulder, “Sister Delta Four is not dead.” He stared smiling down the slopes toward a brown-smogged city below. “She is now in surgery. Her heart was destroyed, but circulation was restored before the brain was damaged. Even now a donor is being provided to replace her lost parts.”
Boysie Gann cried joyfully, “Plan be thanked! Sir, she’ll tell you that I knew nothing of the pyropods until she herself told me about them!”
“Silence!” rasped General Wheeler. “Guards! Your orders are to keep him quiet. I understand donors are needed for several of your wounded comrades. The first man who fails to keep the prisoner silent will be considered a volunteer!”
“Not so fast,” said the Planner, chuckling. “Your zeal goes too far, General.” His heavy-lidded eyes looked dark and as old as the lichen-crusted stone below the crystal wall as he gazed benignly toward the far city in the smog. “Let us Plan,” he said, turning and smiling. “Let us decide What to do.”
The Vice-Planner for Venus spoke up promptly: “Double the guards in the vaults of the Machine, sir. Institute maximum security measures, admitting no unauthorized person . . .” He broke off and scratched his enormous nose in puzzlement as he realized that neither Boysie Gann nor the pyropods had submitted to security check before entering the most heavily guarded places in the Plan of Man.
A male acolyte in the black robes of the Machine, listening to a subdued buzzing from his linkbox, raised his voice suddenly. “The Machine requires the services of the prisoner,” he chanted. “The Machine instructs Machine General Wheeler that the prisoner is not to be harmed in any way that will affect his memory or his intellect.”
Wheeler’s expression was that of a steel-gray thundercloud. The Planner turned toward him, chuckling. “You have your orders, General,” he said good-humoredly. “Be sure they are carried out. Do you know what those orders are, young man?” he added, turning with a bland expression of cheer to Boysie Gann.
“No, sir. But I stand ready to serve the Plan of Man!”
“Oh, you do indeed,” nodded the Planner. “In a very special way, as it happens. Major, you have been selected to replace Sister Delta Four. The Machine is about to permit you to receive training in its special service as an acolyte—and then communion!”
The heavy iron security collar was not enough for so precious an enemy of the Plan as Boysie Gann.
“You’re not just a Risk,” one of the guards explained solicitously. “See, we can’t take a chance, Major. We don’t want to blow your little head off. We don’t want to kill you. We want to deliver you in one piece, right? So just stand still there while we put these cuffs on you . . . and we’ll take you to the training base . . . and then, when the Machine’s all finished with you, then we’ll blow your head off!” And the guard snapped the fetters cruelly tight on Gann’s wrists and started him moving with a shove.
They took him to a subtrain station first, and would not answer his questions. Was Julie Martinet all right? Why had General Wheeler lied? What was the Machine going to do with him? To each question there was only one response: “Shut up, you! Move on!”
But then there was nowhere to move. They were in the subtrain station, the great cold, vaulted shed where the enormous electron-flow-driven globes waited to carry their passengers through tunnels in the earth, across a continent or under a sea. But no globe was moving.
They brought Gann to a platform, ten security guards forming the detail that surrounded turn; then they waited. Boysie Gann could see that the station was a military base, because of the armored guard boxes beside the troughs, and because of the black Technicorps uniforms on everyone. That was understandable enough; this was the depot that served the Planner himself, the one nearest his tunneled-out mountain retreat. But what was not understandable was that there were neither arrivals nor departures.
Behind him, a track lock closed with a wheeze of leaking air. A Togetherness girl froze her automatic smile as she caught sight of his collar, and hurried past. The guards in their radar horns gazed vacantly after her.
“Look,” said Boysie Gann, “what’s the matter? What are we waiting for?”
“Shut up, you,” growled a Machine Sergeant of the guards. But he had a worried look. One of his men said something to him; the sergeant replied in an undertone. All Gann could catch was: “. . . trouble in the tunnels somewhere. Now shut up. When they’re ready for us, we’ll know.”
The great forty-foot bubbles waited silently in their passage cradles, and Boysie Gann stood regarding them. Wherever he was going, it was probably somewhere far away. Short-haul trips were seldom by way of the sub-trains. The great atomic drills of the Plan had tunneled straight-line passages from all major centers to all others, sometimes relayed, sometimes piercing nearly through the nickel-iron core of the Earth itself in a single non-stop thrust from Sidney, say, to Calcutta. The great freight and passenger globes reached speeds so great that Coriolis force was their principal adversary; the electrostatic hoops that banded the evacuated tunnels were double and triple strength on the side against which the earth’s rotation tended to throw the spheres. Via the subtrains, no point on Earth was more than a few hours away from any other. . .
Boysie Gann became aware of a confused mutter of excitement, and focused his eyes on what was going on in the subtrain shed. A great dull freightsphere was sliding gently into the station, emerging from the mouth of a belt-ringed tunnel.
“About time they got ‘em going again,” grumbled the Machine Sergeant. “All right, let’s move out. They’ll be letting us board now.”
The sergeant was right. Within ten minutes they were hi a subtrain globe, settling down in a passenger compartment. But there was a wait of nearly a quarter of an hour more before Boysie Gann felt the gentle lurch that meant they had begun to move.
His guards were more relaxed, now that they were in the subtrain. Gann could not very well escape them now, not when there was nowhere to go but the interior of a forty-foot sphere, with nothing outside but great electrostatic hoops in an airless tunnel, whizzing by at speeds of thousands of miles an hour. A couple of the guards disappeared, came back with self-satisfied smiles, and relieved the others. Clearly there was a Togetherness canteen on the globe. Even the radar-horned sergeant looked somehow less inimical, more like a human being.
Above all things, Gann wished he knew what had happened to Sister Delta Four. There had been a moment there, while the pyropods were attacking, when she had seemed less like a cold-hearted servant of the Machine and more like the girl he had kissed at Playa Blanca. He dreamed of getting her back—of somehow winning favor with the Machine and receiving the great reward of Julie Martinet’s release . . .
It was only a dream. Considering his position now, it was an insane one.
Gann realized that he should be devoting every second’s thought he could to planning—to trying to understand what had put him in this position, and what he could do. But it seemed quite hopeless. He had the giddy sensation that the universe had gone mad. From that first moment on Polaris Station, when he had followed Machine Colonel Zafar down to the methane snowball, events had carried him helplessly along; they made no sense to him, but there was nothing he could do to help interpret them. Their incomprehensibility was intrinsic. It was not that he was lacking in comprehension, it was that the things which had happened were not to be understood in the sane, sensible terms of life under the Plan of Man . . .
He felt a giddy sensation again, and this time it was not in his mind.
Boysie Gann leaped to his feet in alarm. He could not help thinking of the strange queasiness that had preceded his twenty-billion-mile drop into the Planning Machine’s catacombs . . . the same sensation, just before the pyropods struck. . .
But this was not the same thing at all. The lurching, twisting sensation he felt was simply explained. The sub-train car had come to a stop. It was hanging now, spinning slowly, between the charged hoops of its airless tunnel.
If Gann had been in any doubt, the cries from outside his room, the shouts of guards within, removed that doubt quickly. Everyone on the subtrain globe seemed to be shouting at once. “What’s the matter?” “We’ve stopped!” “Great Plan, we’re a couple of hundred miles down! The temperature—” “Help me! Let me out of here!” The voices were a confused babble, but they all had in common the warning knife edge of panic. There was terror on that subtrain car—terror that could not be calmed with words, for its base was all too real.
The Machine Sergeant comprehended the situation at once. With a jerk of his radar-horned head he bawled at his squad: “Come on, outside! Those sheep’ll stampede if we don’t keep ‘em in line!”
Boysie Gann was left alone. Outside he could hear the Technicorps guards shouting orders at the terrified travelers on the subtrain. No one seemed to know what had happened. They had stopped; that was all. Hundreds of miles below the surface of the earth, the rock outside hot enough to melt aluminum, the pressure great enough to crush diamonds into dust if the electrostatic hoops ever faltered—they were stopped. Whatever it was that had disrupted the service before they left the station was probably disrupting it again.
The only difference was that now they were where no help could ever reach them, where if the fields in the hoops failed they would be dead in the least fraction of a second—where even if the field maintained itself they would be dead in a few days of asphyxiation, unless they could move.
Then, abruptly, there was another lurch, and they were moving again.
As the great forty-foot sphere gathered speed and stability, Boysie Gann became aware that he had been hardly breathing. There was a great cry of thanksgiving from the people outside his room. One by one his guards came back, chattering and laughing, seeming almost human. They did not include him in their conversation, but they did not go out of their way to keep him out. One of them even disappeared for a few minutes, then came back with a tray of drinks from the Togetherness canteen . . .
And then the great globe shook again. Shook—crashed into something that shrieked of destroyed metal—slammed to a jolting, smashing stop. Gann and the guards tumbled across the room, hurled against the wall like thrown gravel.
Boysie Gann heard screams and a rending sound of the metal of the great sphere being crushed. “We’ve had it!” someone shrieked. “The fields have failed!” And as he went deep into black oblivion (not yet feeling pain but knowing that he was bleeding; he had struck the wall too hard to get up and walk away), Gann had time for one last thought: He’s right, thought Gann; this is the end.
When, some indeterminate time later, he opened his eyes and found himself still alive, he was almost disappointed.
Gann was in an emergency hospital. Stiff white bandages covered part of his eyes; his head ached as if a corps of drummers were using it for practice; he could see, under the shadow of the bandages, that one arm was encased in a balloon-cast.
But he was alive.
A Togetherness nurse was bending over him. He said clearly, “I thought the tube collapsed.”
“Hush,” she said gently. “It did. But you were almost at the surface, and the wrecking squads dug you out.”
“Almost at the surf ace?” He squinted past her at the second figure standing by his bed. For one crazy instant on waking he had thought it was the Angel of Death come to take him away. Now he saw it was an acolyte of the Machine, the linkbox in her hand, whispering tinkling notes to the microphone it contained. “I—I guess I’m at the training center,” he said.
The nurse nodded. “Sleep if you can,” she ordered. And Boysie Gann was glad to comply . . .
For three days Boysie Gann had the status of a convalescent. It was a considerable improvement over his status as a major public enemy.
The immediate guard detail was withdrawn—several had been killed in the tube implosion and were going through the messy business of resuscitation and repair at the Body Bank. Gann was free to wander within the limited confines of one wing of the hospital in which he was a patient.
He was even allowed access to the recreation lounge, run by a young Togetherness girl who reminded him of Quarla Snow. Her disposition was like Quarla’s, too. She did not seem conscious of his collar. Most important, she let him watch the news-screens to his heart’s content.
Boysie Gann had been away from Earth, off on the Reefs or in intensive custody, for so long that he had lost touch with the running news stories.
He sat and dreamed. What was happening on the screen soaked slowly into his mind and heart. He watched, and loved, the gold-haired, long-legged choruses of Togetherness girls cooing their gentle threats: “Work for the Plan! Live for the Plan! You don’t want to go to Heaven and make spare parts for the Plan!” Though he knew his chances of winding up in the Body Bank called Heaven and making “spare parts for the Plan” must be rated pretty high, there was no fear in what the girls were singing. It was a part of a life that he had lost, and he wanted it back.
Above all, he wanted to find himself again.
Boysie Gann could not recognize himself in the enemy of the Machine who had been castigated by the Planner himself, denounced by Machine General Wheeler, interrogated by Sister Delta Four. That Boysie Gann was a creature who had been born on Polaris Station, a man who lived with undead Reef rats and queer creatures called spacelings and pyropods. Gann could not fit the strange, rebellious shape of this other Boysie Gann into his personality, could not add the two identities and produce a vector sum of his future life . . .
He sat up straight and glared at the viewscreen.
He had been watching a worldwide news broadcast with half his mind, hardly conscious of what he saw, although in fact what he saw was exciting enough. The news broadcast was almost a catalogue of disasters—a crashed Plan cruiser that destroyed half a city, earthquakes in Antarctica, a runaway nuclear reactor on the Indian subcontinent. Then there had been a nearer disaster. The screen had shown the very subtrain catastrophe that had put him in this place.
And called it sabotage!
Gann blinked. He hardly recognized the accident. The bland, fat Technicolonel puffing out his gruff charges of criminal conspiracy seemed to be talking about some other disaster, on some other world. Malicious sabotage? A bomb planted in the subtrain to discredit the Planner and the Planning Machine? Most incongruous of all, himself as the archvillain, with the radar-horned guard sergeant as his accomplice?
Gann put down his glass of vitamin-laced fruit juice and hobbled over to the Togetherness girl in charge of the lounge.
He was shaking. “Please,” he begged. “Did you see that? What is it all about?”
She scolded him sunnily. “Now, now! Your duty under the Plan is to get well! You must prepare yourself to return to serve. No questions, no worries—nothing but healing and rest!”
He said with difficulty, “It said on the newscast that I was responsible for the subtrain accident. It isn’t so! And the guard sergeant who was in charge of me—what happened to him?”
Her large, clear eyes darkened for a moment in puzzlement. But only for a moment. She would not question her orders; if her orders said that she was to care for an enemy of the Plan, she would care for an enemy of the Plan. She shook her head and, smiling, led him back to the couch. “Drink your juice,” she said with playful severity, and would say no more. To her, what the Plan of Man ordained was necessarily right and true—because “right” and “truth” were defined by the Plan of Man.
