The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton, page 12
As she nodded her acceptance and turned away, the clerk pressed a button which signaled Langley’s office.
The speculative look in Langley’s eye changed to a smile. He breathed a small sigh. Satisfaction? Regret? Could it have been loneliness? Envy? He shrugged his mood away, and prepared to have his talk with Slater.
“Slater! They’re coming into the room now!” The whisper brought the shop steward into the room from the hall. It was characteristic of Barnes that though they were seven stories below the room they were spying, he must still whisper hoarsely. Slater came swiftly across the dim basement room to where his assistant crouched over the tape recorder.
Barnes squinted up at him from a round, heavily featured face and grinned triumphantly.
“They’re milling around, and there’s a lot of incidental crowd noise,” he said. “Guess Cameron hasn’t come in yet.”
“Cameron,” Slater exploded, as if it were an expletive.
“Yeah?” Barnes commented with a rising questioning note. “What happened over at Div Tech this afternoon?” He was a huge shapeless blur as he crouched before the recorder, making final adjustments with fat fingers.
“Cameron put the beef on me again,” Slater said shortly.
“Bad?” Barnes asked quickly, and turned his head to look up over his shoulder.
Slater grinned down at him, and pulled down the corner of his mouth. His eyes were derisive; his thin face filled with contempt and triumph.
“Yeah,” Barnes almost barked the word in relieved admiration, as he interpreted the expression. “Know what you mean, chief. You’d think Cameron’d realize he hasn’t got the drag with Div Tech that you have.”
“Div Tech knows who’s loyal,” Slater commented; then added significantly, “Same as I do. You rig up that decoy mike?”
“Sure, chief,” Barnes chuckled. “Handled it myself, personally. Put the video eye in back of the light reflector. If they look for it, they’ll be looking right into the light and can’t see what’s behind it. Then I hid in a dummy mike which won’t be too hard for them to find.”
“That’s right,” Slater complimented. “That was a smart idea you had, chief.” Barnes said with extravagant admiration. “They get rid of the dummy mike and then think they’re safe. Smart, chief.” A part of his admiration was genuine, a part of it job insurance.
“You got to be smart to hold my job,” Slater commented. “Div Tech don’t give a stupid man a second chance. Them engineers want just one thing, results. Got the real mike connected to the recorder? I want evidence this time. Real evidence.”
“Sure, chief,” Barnes answered. “Turn on the video, so we can see what’s going on up there,” Slater commanded. He looked about the storage room critically.
“I checked this room, chief, personally,” Barnes reassured him hurriedly. “Nobody’s got a spyeye on us.”
“You’re sure of that.”
“Sure I’m sure, chief.”
Slater walked over and took a chair in front of the video. Barnes and his assistant, who had been hovering unobtrusively in the background while the great men talked, sat down in chairs behind their chief. Theirs was the exaggerated respect and deference to a superior found in men who are arrogant to those they can command, slavish to those who command them. Technology had gone ahead, but psychology was still blundering around in its blind alleys; not yet ready to give up its fond theories; still preferring to tailor men to fit the theories; still looking through the wrong end of the microscope. Thus there had been no relief for men, such as these, from their warps, pressures, tensions. They still must find their satisfactions as best they could from the frustrations and unrealities psychology still fostered.
“You recording the video, too?” Slater asked.
“Sure, chief,” Barnes answered. It was wonderful how he had done everything the chief had thought of. He felt a warm glow of self-approbation. “Installed the recorder right behind the eye in the ceiling, like you said.”
“You check the mechanism to make sure nothing will go wrong?” There was a sharpness to the question.
“Why no, chief,” Barnes answered in apprehension. Then caught himself. Why hadn’t he lied? “I thought you checked it,” he alibied hurriedly. “You handed it to me and said install it. I thought . . . I’m not . . . I didn’t—”
“All right, all right,” Slater shut him off disgustedly. “Sloppy, Barnes. Sloppy! Too late now. I got no time to check every little detail. I got conferences over at Div Tech to attend to. Not one man in a million gets called in to Div Tech, Barnes. You know that. A man who gets called to conferences in Div Tech has a right to have assistants he can depend on,”
“Yes, chief, you sure have.”
“Figure it out, Barnes,” Slater went on slowly, remorselessly. “I think I got a man here I can depend on to handle the details. I leave it in your hands. Confident I got me a good assistant. But you don’t check it. And you call yourself a Security man!”
Barnes was crushed, abject, then roused to turn on his assistant fiercely.
“You check it?”
The assistant looked up startled. Secretly he had been enjoying Barnes’ discomfort, unable to look far enough ahead to realize it would all turn on him.
“Forget it, I said,” Slater commanded through thin lips. “Don’t pass the buck, Barnes. Too late now, anyway. We’ll just have to take our chances that nothing will go wrong. But I don’t like it. A good Security man doesn’t take chances. None at all.”
“I—” Barnes started to rise to his feet, as if to come over to the side of his chief.
“Forget it, I said, and siddown!” Slater shouted at him. Then more quietly, “I said I wanted to check this meeting. There’s Cameron now. He’s already come in and is going up to the front of the room. You guys yak-yaking made me miss what he’s been saying. Security men!” he exploded in added disgust.
The two men sat on the edge of their chairs behind him, hardly breathing, dreading the thought of a future where they might not be permitted to carry on their work; might not enjoy the secret feel of power over other men; the delicious sensation of storing up little remarks, actions, emphases, to bring back to the chief. His praise. Self-sacrificing, noble, loyal men. Somebody has to look out for the welfare of the company, Div Tech.
They sat in abject misery, alternating looks at one another with looks at Slater’s back.
Slater, conscious of their apprehension, pointedly doing nothing to relieve it, leaned forward and turned up the volume on the speaker.
“Gentlemen, and Miss Hills,” Cameron opened the meeting. He stood, slender and intense, at a small table in the front of the room, and looked over the dozen men and one woman who sat in front of him. “I’ve called you here this evening for a purpose. I know it is after hours, but during the day it’s hard to get you all together. You’re all key men in the company, and I’ve brought you here to ask your co-operation—”
“Hey, Art,” a voice called from the back of the room.
Cameron stopped suddenly and looked at the speaker questioningly.
“You don’t have to be careful, Art,” the man called out. “I found their mike. They were even more careless than ever. Hid it in back of that table over there in the corner. I just sort of accidently shifted the table against it, hard, and smashed it. They won’t hear anything, and they’ll think their mike got smashed by accident.”
Cameron grinned at them with relief, and relaxed his official pose.
“Good going,” he said. “I couldn’t ask, you know.” Then he became deadly serious, and this time he took control of the meeting without any make-believe about it.
“Mona tells me she got that list of us approved for a tour of the ship tomorrow night.”
There was a stir around the room, a collective sigh of relief, looks of congratulation in the direction of Mona Hills.
“You know what that means,” Cameron continued. “Tomorrow night we and our families will enter the ship on an inspection tour. Big privilege for special people!” he exclaimed ironically. “We will close the locks, break the seal on the control room door. We then, instead of Div Tech’s picked puppets, will take that ship and head out for our planned destination.” There was complete silence in the room, not even the rustle of cloth.
In the basement room below there was a sharp gasp from Barnes as he heard the incredible conspiracy. He leaned forward as if to see around Slater better. The side of Slater’s face was set in a grim mask, and Barnes felt a warmth of anticipation.
“I know you’ve all briefed your families again and again,” Cameron was saying now from the video. “No favorite toys for the children. No treasured wedding presents from Aunt Minnie. Just the clothes you have on, nothing more. There must be nothing to arouse suspicion from Slater’s security guards. They’ll be suspicious enough, as it is, because we’ve all brought our children, without giving them anything else to excuse their looking closer.
“It’s not going to be easy, leaving everything,” one of the men sighed aloud.
“It’s never easy to break away from comfort and security, old ties and sentiments,” Cameron said firmly. “But it’s even more difficult to stay here; to watch this civilization deteriorate into another thousand years of dark ages. With all our fine glittering technology, we’re making no more progress than was made a thousand years ago. Technical science can become as stern an inhibitor as superstition.”
He broke off suddenly, and grinned wanly.
“Excuse me, folks. I’m riding my hobbyhorse again. We’ve been all over it before. No one in this room would be here unless we all knew, beyond all doubt, that each agreed the only hope for man was for some of us to break away, get our children away, before they, too, become robotic in their thinking—little animated cybernetic machines.
“And there’s no other out. I went over to Div Tech this afternoon; on an excuse to complain about Slater, but hoping I could arouse some spark, some doubt that technology is heaven and all’s right with the world. Not a chance. They are so fatuous, so smug in their rightness; so closed of mind that not even the slightest doubt penetrates.
“Most of you are technologists; most of you are members of UPS. I don’t need to review the long months and years I tested you before I voiced my plan. But I found that you, too, wondered if the fate of man wasn’t something more than just to make bigger and better machines.
“We have a good cross section here of the necessary sciences; one of you is an astrogator, another is an experienced test pilot, Mona is our authority on domestic sciences. All of you have been training yourselves in supplementary sciences, and your wives.
“I’ve visited your homes, I saw no spoiled and whining brats. You’ve been training your children to sustain in a harsher environment. You’ve gone against the tenets of psychology whose purpose is apparently to create irresponsible and dependent weaklings. Your children are brave and stoic, perhaps better able to withstand the rigors of a hostile environment than you and I.
“The ship is fitted. It alone will sustain us for two years while we adapt. Gentlemen, and Mona, we have been preparing for a long, long time. We have every chance of succeeding. And we have already proved trustworthy to one another. No one suspects. Tomorrow night, then, we—
His words were interrupted with a faint clatter of some mechanism, as if a ratchet had slipped its bearing and was whirring against an obstruction. Every eye turned in alarm toward the source of the sound—the light fixture.
Seven stories below, the three Security men saw every face turned directly to the spy eye. Barnes, stricken, buried his face in his hands, as if to shut out the sight, shut out the sound of the whirring, clattering noise picked up by their mike. He rocked back and forth in an agony of apprehension.
“No, no, no,” he moaned over and over. “The scanning disk. It must have slipped. How could it have slipped? Chief, they just don’t slip! I should have checked it. I should have checked it.”
Slater sat and watched the video screen impassively, his lips a thin white line. He saw the men in the room above pull a table over to get at the light fixture in the ceiling. He saw one of them pick up a chair and begin smashing at the light fixture, poking a chair leg at the spyeye. The video screen went dark, the sound shut off suddenly. There was silence in the basement room, broken only by Barnes’ soft moaning.
“I should have checked it. I should have checked it.”
He stumbled to his feet, his eyes wild, his only thought to get out of the room before Slater could turn upon him in slashing wrath; before the terrible words could be said which would sever him from his job. Blindly, he rushed out into the hall and slammed the door shut behind him. Maybe if Slater got time to cool off first; maybe then Slater wouldn’t say the fateful words at all.
There should be some way to keep Slater from saying them, some way he could redeem himself. He thought of the men in the meeting room upstairs. What would they do now? They’d been discovered and knew it. He paused in his headlong flight down the hall and stood still. Of course! He could still redeem himself!
“Put a tail on everyone of them,” he mumbled aloud. “I got plenty of men. I’m still second in command. Get a man to follow every one of them. Report back to me what they do. I’ll hide. Tell the men to bring the reports to me. Slater won’t know. Then I’ll get all the evidence and turn it over to Slater. He won’t fire me then. He’ll be proud of me.”
He rushed his great bulk to the elevator, urgently pressed against the signal button, giving the emergency signal which would make the operator skip everything and rush with express speed to this basement floor.
In the darkened room above, Cameron’s voice came to each of the members of the conspiracy, bitter and bleak.
“That tears it,” he said. “Our inspection permit isn’t worth the paper it’s written on now. As soon as Slater can get anybody to listen to him over at Div Tech, it’ll be canceled. And that’s the least of our worries.”
“Maybe that’s our clue,” a voice, obviously being controlled with effort, came out of the darkness of the room. “As soon as he can get anybody to listen to him, you said, Art. And who’s over at Div Tech this time of night with authority to cancel it?”
“We’ll carry out the plan tonight, then,” Cameron answered quietly. “Get your families together. Now. Assemble in an hour or less at the recreation hall across from the entrance to the blast field. We’ll try to bluff it. Tell the guards the tour was set this late at night to avoid publicity.”
“If they notice the wrong date on the permit?” Mona asked.
“Bluff that, too. A clerical error, we’ll say. Even Div Tech makes mistakes.”
No dissent was voiced. They might still carry out their plans. There was a movement of chairs as the standing people unfroze from their surprise at discovering the spy eye, and moved through the darkness toward the door.
Light from the hallway streamed in as someone opened the door.
“And gentlemen,” Cameron called loudly, “please attempt to be more prompt with your reports, hereafter.” He had no hope that the meeting had been unobserved, but with the secrecy which was Slater’s nature, he hoped Slater would tell no one before he went to Div Tech. To carry on nonchalantly might still win them through.
“O.K., Mr. Cameron,” someone called back to him.
“Him and his infernal reports!” someone else grumbled, as they went down the hall toward the elevators. One never knew what lurking Security officer might be hiding around a corner, or in an office with the door open a crack.
The group walked leisurely down the hall, commenting on the points raised in an imaginary meeting; wondering, as department heads normally do, if Cameron was as smart as he pretended to be; and where he got the authority to call them into a meeting this late in the evening.
As they left the building, and parted outside the Security gate, each was picked up by a Security man assigned to follow him.
Barnes sat slumped at his desk, head pulled down into the hard roll of fat which ringed his neck. His heavy lips jutted out as he turned his hand over on its back, and flipped it palm down, again and again,
“You call yourself a Security man!” He heard the scorn in Slater’s voice rasp across his memory, and drew his heavy brows together. The pressure of anger and frustration was too great to allow him to sit still. He flung himself out of the swivel chair and began to pace the floor.
“When will they start reporting?” he questioned aloud. The acoustic board of the walls and ceiling muffled his voice. He looked at the clock set in the wall and realized that only an hour had passed since that crowd of subversives had left the building. He continued to lumber heavily about the room in his nervous pacing.
“You call yourself—” He shook his head bullishly to shake off the echo of Slater’s contempt. He felt his heart quicken, the gnawing at his stomach as, in his imagination, he looked at the blue slip of an Unfit Discharge; the obscurity of the Common Labor Pool. Of course, there, he might pick up quite a little information, get reinstated. And then realized that even there the men would avoid him, dummy up when he came around. There is no contempt like that of men against one who has tried to trap and snare them; deliberately made a career of doing it.
In his sharp turn, the holster of his gun pressed against his side. He looked at it and the blued steel of the butt winked back up at him. His hand fell to caress the satin of the metal. With a spasm of despair, his hand gripped hard around the butt of (he gun, drawing reassurance from its strength. Rather than part with it—
The red glow of the intercom winked at him from the desk. In two strides he was leaning over the desk, not taking time to get around to his chair.
“Barnes here!” he grunted at its speaker.
“Barnes, this is Littlefield!” The voice at the other end was gasping as if the speaker had run a long way, and excitement mixed with terror in the tones. “They’re . . . they’re going to make the break tonight!” Barnes remembered that Littlefield had been the assistant in the spyroom with them. He had forgotten the assistant, and his witnessing the scene of his disgrace. Time to take care of Littlefield later.
