The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 418
Any show of sentiment would be mistaken for the maudlin sentimentality of a silly old man, which was why Barclay made a special effort to be objective as he went on to describe the course of treatment he had devised and put into effect. He had been eighteen at the time and the therapy had been rule of a very tender thumb, because he still had not understood the reality behind the cases he had studied in the psychology textbooks. His language was coldly clinical as he described to Conlon her increasing and constant need for reassurance and the wild, see-saw swings between apparent acceptance of the situation and fits of depression so deep that for days on end she would not even acknowledge his existence.
But there had been progress, nevertheless. His academic record had been very good although he had not sought clinical experience in a psychiatric hospital or in private practice, preferring to specialize in the long-term treatment of one particular patient for whose condition he felt partly responsible. Gradually her fits of depression became rarer and less prolonged. More and more often she had discussed the future, his current girlfriend, his feelings about getting married and making his own way in life. She had said that she should renew old friendships from the space center days. On one occasion she said that his father would probably not have approved of the way they both had been wasting time trying to find out what had happened to him ...
A PHOTOGRAPH of his mother taken from her space center ID card appeared on the screen, but Conlon was concentrating all of his attention on Barclay.
"It wasn't that she was over-possessive or selfish where I was concerned," he resumed, looking at the fifty-year-old photograph. "She did not ask me to do the things I did for her. It was just that she was so terribly dependent on my father that ... I mean, if it hadn't been for his death this minor flaw in her personality would never have shown up. Even by objective standards," he ended firmly, "she was a very fine person."
Conlon said, "Go on."
"Why this morbid interest in my mother?" Barclay burst out. "All I came here to find out was—"
"I know what you came to find out," the other said calmly. "But first I have to find out all about you. This includes the people and events which have made you the ... nuisance ... that you are today. I am especially interested in what you are today. Now, you say that your mother's mental condition showed signs of improvement, and your qualifications should make this a statement of fact rather than wishful thinking. But there was, I believe, some kind of trouble with the law which brought about a rapid deterioration?"
Barclay nodded, then explained that the police in one of the cities they had lived in became suspicious about the missing person report he had filed on his father, and had referred the matter to an aging, irritable and overworked senior lawman belonging to an unnamed Government agency. This man had drugs, muggings, race-rioting, and steadily mounting larceny and murder figures to contend with, he had told them, and they were not helping things by playing childish games with the constabulary all over the country. The file on astronaut Barclay was closed and they should both go home and make the best of things.
They had fully intended doing just that, but Barclay had not been able to resist the opportunity of asking more questions.
The man had been simply trying to get rid of them, but Barclay had been young and emotionally involved and his mother had not progressed enough to withstand that kind of shock, and suddenly it seemed that someone had not only caused his father's death but was intent on committing character assassination on him as well.
"What, exactly, was said?" asked Conlon.
"He didn't say anything," Barclay replied bitterly, "but he gave the impression that my father had defected and taken with him valuable technical material to the Russians. Our people had kept quiet about it, apparently, because a lot of public opinion was building up in favor of a complete cancellation of all space projects, and a scandal like my father's defection would have given too much ammunition to the opposition ..."
The man's words had made the desired impression on Barclay—for a few hours, at least. But then he decided that he disbelieved the latest story even more than the one about the plane crash. Because he remembered his father talking about the Russian astronauts and how closely they cooperated in space. The space agencies in both countries had been under the same kind of political and economic pressure to suspend operations, there no longer had been expensive duplication of technical effort and few, if any, secrets. There had been no apparent reason to defect, therefore, even if he had been the type of man who would desert his wife and son to do so—which he very definitely was not.
But his mother, while she had said that she did not believe the story either, had not reacted in a rational fashion. Once again she became desperately anxious to find out what really had happened to her husband.
Dr. Goyer had died a few weeks earlier—in an accident on the space station, a still friendly contact at the center had told them. He also told them that the Doctor was due to be arrested the moment he returned because of a major misappropriation of funds and equipment, so that his death might not have been an accident. His mother had wondered if her husband had become involved in some fashion with Dr. Goyer. She was sure that he was not a thief who had been found out and suicided rather than face his family. Possibly he had discovered something very wrong going on and had been silenced. She had not even mentioned the possibility of his defecting. She became very confused and emotional and she had to find out what had happened at all costs, and it had cost them nearly all the money they had possessed ...
"YOU WERE an unusually dutiful son." Conlon broke in, his tone making the words sound anything but complimentary. He went on, "Was it at this point that you started the collection of technical publications which I've been hearing rumors about?"
Defensively, Barclay said. "I was not being forced to learn languages and spend money on foreign journals, at least not by her. I'd wanted to be an astronaut for as long as I could remember and I still had the interest, even though the Mad Years were starting and spaceflight was dead. Besides, when the TV and radio stations became protest targets and dusk-to-dawn curfews became general, there wasn't anything else to do but read."
Conlon nodded. He said, "So you gave her plenty to occupy her mind. At what stage did you decide to discontinue therapy, and why?"
Therapy ...
What an off-hand way to describe all those years of careful cross-checking, of sifting and evaluating and cataloging data which was very often in a foreign language. By its very nature the work had lacked excitement, and the encouragements and disappointments had been so slow in becoming manifest that they had never been sure at any given time whether they had been proving or disproving his father's alleged guilt. In the beginning the material could be obtained simply enough bv subscription. But later, when their and everyone else's society fell apart, other methods of payment than money had to be used or the material had to be 'Permanently borrowed without permission'. But when the owners were dead or disinterested, where was the crime?
No doubt Conlon would be glad to tell him the answer to that question.
During the Mad Years the word "survivor" had very often been synonymous with "criminal". There had been law but no order, widespread killing for food, fuel or simple self-gratification, and no protection other than self-protection or voluntary slavery to a local gang leader willing to extend his protection for services rendered. The painstaking study and research his mother and he had pursued, the strict mental discipline which had been required to accomplish it, had been an escape to an unexciting but orderly world from the anarchy surrounding them. Conlon was right, it had been therapy, for both of them.
"Please answer." said Conlon. He did not sound impatient or even interested. Perhaps he had lost the capacity to feel or display emotion, or was trying hard to lose it as a good lawman should.
Barclay did not reply at once because he was remembering the aftermath of one of the early food fights between rival gangs. Nobody seemed to care how many innocent bystanders with official ration cards were killed and robbed of their week's supplies, but Barclay had cared very much about one of them. The pause was to ensure that all trace of emotion was absent from his voice and expression before he went on.
"The therapy never stopped," he said, "even after my mother died. This was nearly six years later, when I was thirty-three and the collection had begun to take over the available living space. But it was growing very slowly because the material was becoming increasingly difficult to come by. The evidence I was uncovering was invariably negative, and it was becoming obvious that the exchange of technical information between the Russians and ourselves long before my father's accident made the defection idea very unlikely, in fact virtually impossible. And that is an objective evaluation based on the evidence up to that time, not the subjective reaction of a twelve-year-old boy.
"So far as I am or was aware," Barclay went on, "there was nothing irrational or fanatical about my continuing search for information about my father. It may have started like that, but at that particular time there were so many terrible things going on in the country that the idea of devoting so much time and mental effort to clearing my father's name, or some such romantic idea, was unrealistic to say the least. I think the truth is that then, and during the intervening period until now, the search for evidence was a habit, something to do with my mind. It happens to be an orderly mind which dislikes unexplained loose ends."
"Good," said Conlon.
Barclay stared at the other man for a moment, wondering if he was being complimented or simply encouraged to continue. The former possibility was so unlikely that he dismissed it, and went on, "I had become very well-informed on the subject of spaceflight by then. At least, I knew enough to know what questions to ask if I could only visit the space center again ..."
THE SPACE center had been under constant attack both politically and physically for some time, because of the money it was costing to maintain even in its powered-down condition and for the large quantities of fuel and other combustibles it contained. One of the reasons for the breakdown of society at the beginning of the Mad Years had been the burning of public and Governmental records by armed protest groups.
In the beginning there had been a kind of logic behind the activity—destroying Income Tax records, traffic violation or criminal records, even certain types of medical records, benefitted certain groups of people. But then the destruction became less selective and much more practical, because power and fuel supplies were diminishing rapidly and books, papers and filing cards kept one warm in winter.
His contact was still living securely and fairly comfortably within the inner perimeter of the space center, and he told Barclay that his job was more like that of a curator in a science museum than a fuel systems engineer. He said that Barclay was welcome to call anytime for a talk or a look around, but that if he was considering making the four-hundred-mile round trip to the center he would need a military escort.
As quickly as possible Barclay set about providing himself with a military escort.
At that time Barclay was in the business of providing essential services to gang leaders and self-defended establishments in an area covering his own city and a few surrounding towns. It had been a very difficult and risky type of business to set up without losing his independence, but gradually he had been able to sell the powers-that-were in the area the idea that someone like himself, who owed allegiance to no particular group, was a necessity. If a specialist medic or a car or TV mechanic was being bought or exchanged—technically the people concerned were not slaves so it was referred to as a Change of Protector—a liaison man, someone who was neutral and therefore able to cross the heavily defended borders of the various gang leaders, was needed to arrange terms and conduct the transfer. In time he won the respect and even the friendship of some pretty terrifying characters and his people and vehicles were safe from all but a few ignorant free-lancers, and that was why he approached the local military commander with his most ambitious scheme until that time.
Unlike a few of the military establishments he had heard of, which were little more than forced labor camps. Colonel MacIvor ran a very tight and orderly camp. He did not take people under his protection so much as offer them the chance to join his army, after which he gave them less and worked them harder than any gang leader. They became army farmers, army housewives, army schoolteachers, army children, army butchers, bakers and, during the frequent power blackouts, army candlestick makers. Camp MacIvor covered six hundred acres at that time and was still spreading like a great khaki blot of calm and order into the surrounding anarchy. Discipline was strict and the ultimate punishment was not death but discharge, a fate reserved for persistent troublemakers. There were remarkably few of those because Colonel MacIvor demanded every last ounce of mental or physical effort from his people, but their pride he allowed them to keep.
MacIvor's problem was that for a long time he had badly needed certain electronics and communications specialists, vehicle mechanics and a few more decent cooks while he had a comfortable, surplus of medics and teachers. Six hundred miles away. Camp Davidson had the same problem in reverse and was willing to swap. The Colonel had four transport helicopters and not enough fuel to use them for the job, and about twenty serviceable armed and armored personnel carriers with insufficient ammo to fight a six-hundred-mile running war—which he did not want to do in any case because most of the space aboard the vehicles would be taken up by spare fuel tanks for the trip, and the people being moved were noncombatants and incapable of using weapons effectively.
Besides, MacIvor was not a warlike man—a fact which he had successfully hidden from everyone except Barclay.
In the past Barclay had performed a few useful services for the Colonel, for which he had been paid in camp-grown food and maintenance on his three pickup trucks and TV set. But this was the biggest job that Barclay had ever taken on, and the negotiated terms were stiff. They included diverting sixty miles on the return journey so that he could spend a few days at the space center, and using an agreed minimum of surplus space on the vehicles for his own personal purposes. In return he undertook to get the MacIvor medics to Camp Peters and the Peters' specialists back to Camp MacIvor, using his reputation, influence and virtually every favor and obligation he had owing to him to ensure their safe passage.
The outward trip was not without incident, especially while they were traveling through areas close to Camp Peters where Barclay's name and reputation were not well-known, but there were no casualties. One reason for this was that Barclay had advised the transfer personnel to take every possible opportunity to practice both their surgical skills and their bedside manners during stopovers. Because space was limited in their vehicles, they were therefore unable to accept the usual goods as payment for services rendered and received instead a priceless return of goodwill.
The arrival at the space center of a convoy of military personnel was welcome in an establishment whose security force was stretched to the limit. He had suggested that if his charges concealed the fact that they were noncombatants, their three-day stay would be much more pleasant all round.
Most of the center's senior technical people had left for other positions or died, and only his contact, a small, graying man called Bob Saville, remembered Barclay's father. Saville did not mind answering questions or talking about the old days, reliving the past achievements while glossing over the disappointments, or retelling the rumors which had been going around after Dr. Goyer's death. But he had been a very junior member of the staff at that time. He did not know what Goyer had done to get into trouble. One rumor, later strenuously denied, was that the Doctor had falsified reports regarding the accidental loss of a shuttle, but all that Saville knew was that the Doc's technical material and files had been sealed in the security strongroom pending a Government investigation on his return from the space station. When he died on the station the investigation was dropped.
Saville did not know if Barclay's father had been connected with the Doctor's trouble, but the idea of him defecting was ridiculous.
Occasionally someone got the urge to look through the Doctor's papers, but there had always been someone else—an old-time friend of the Doc's, usually, with enough rank to have his way—who talked about morbid curiosity and suggested that Goyer's personal and professional effects should be left alone. Saville added that now, of course, the old-timers were dead and nobody cared anymore.
Next day Barclay wandered the space center at will, looking through bulky flight plans in the library, examining the hardware and models in the museum and playing spaceman on one of the simulators while Bob Saville talked excitedly about all the things they might have done if there had been more money and a little more time before their society sickened itself to death with the sight of its own warts.
At the end of one of the happiest days in his life came the most exciting night ...
A mob breached the perimeter fence in three places shortly after midnight, forcing the outer security men to withdraw into the main complex. Unlike the earlier attacking mobs, which had acted like a beast with a thousand arms and legs and no brain, this one was being used tactically. Disciplined units within the mob were using the screamers, rioters and burners as cover to attack the center's food warehouse and fuel storage tanks, and it was obvious that they were attacking to steal and not necessarily to destroy.
When the defenders realized what was happening and took the necessary countermeasures, the affair turned suddenly nasty. The mob was directed toward lightly defended buildings which were quickly overrun and set on fire. A few security men died at the hands of this mob and a large number of rioters perished in buildings which they themselves had set alight, but neither the food nor the fuel storage dumps were broached.
