"What did he do just now," an eye-eater which reminded him of Hank Szantho said, "that made you yip like that?"
The Gretch Borbman thing said in a low, sullen voice, "He attempted to diddle me."
"Well," the Hank Szantho eye-eater said mildly, "I don"t see where that alone indicates anything; I might even attempt that myself, some day. Anyhow, as long as Sheila feels it"s called for-"
"I"ve already got the forms ready," the one whom he had identified as Sheila Quam said. To Rachmael she said, "Here is 47-B; I"ve already signed it. Now, if you"ll come with me-" She glanced toward the Gretchen Borbman eye-eater. "Miss Borbman already knows her paraworld . . . I hope her confidence is vindicated; I hope that what you perceive, Mr. ben Applebaum, is not congruent with hers."
"I hope so, too," the Gretchen Borbman thing agreed faintly.
"As I recall," the Sheila Quam eye-eating ent.i.ty declared, "Mr. ben Applebaum"s initial delusional experience, set off by the LSD dart, consisted of involvement with the garrison state. Do you remember clearly enough to voluntarily testify to that, Mr. ben Applebaum?"
"Yes," he said huskily. "And then the aquatic-"
"But before that," Sheila interrupted. "When you first crossed by Telpor. Before the dart-before the LSD."
Hazily, he said, "It"s a blur to me, now." Reality, for him, had slipped and floundered too much; he could not be absolutely sure of the sequence of events. With a vast final effort he summoned his waning attention, focussed on his past-it seemed a billion light-years ago, and yet in actuality the experience with the garrison state had been reasonably recent. "It was before," he said, then. "I perceived the garrison state, the fighting; then then a THL soldier shot me. So the experience with the garrison state came first; then, after the LSD, the aquatic nightmare-shape." a THL soldier shot me. So the experience with the garrison state came first; then, after the LSD, the aquatic nightmare-shape."
Hank Szantho said thoughtfully, "You may be interested to know, Mr. ben Applebaum, that you are not the first person among us to live with that hallucination-I refer to the prior one, that of the garrison state. If your delusional gestalt, when you present it to the computer, comes out on those lines, I can a.s.sure you that a true bi-personal view of a paraworld will have been established . . . and this, of course, is what we fear, as you well know. Do you want to see the garrison state world established as the authentic reality?" His voice lifted harshly. "Consider."
"The choice," Sheila Quam said, "is not his; it"s mine. I therefore officially declare this late Wednesday afternoon and Computer Day, and I order Mr. ben Applebaum to accept this form I hold here, to fill it out, and then return it to me, as Control, to sign. You understand, Mr. ben Applebaum? Can you think clearly enough to follow what I"m saying?"
Reflexively, he accepted the form from her. "A pen?" he asked.
"A pen." Sheila Quam, plus all the other eye-eating quasi-forms, began to search about their bulb-like bodies-to no avail.
"Chrissake," Rachmael said irritably, and searched his own pockets. Not only to be compelled to fill out the 47-B form, but to come up with his own pencil- In his pocket his fingers touched something: a flat, small tin. Puzzled, he lifted it out, examined it. The eye-eaters around him did so, as well. In particular the Gretchen Borbman one.
MORE FUN.
AFTER DONE!.
"How disgusting," Gretchen Borbman said. To the others she said, "A tin of Yucatan prophoz. The worst kind possible-fully automated, helium-battery powered, good for a five-year life span . . . is this what you had in mind, Mr. ben Applebaum, when you diddled me a moment ago?"
"No," he said. "I forgot I had these." Chilled, he thought, Have I had this all along? The cammed, hyperminned UN weapon: the personnel variation of the time-warping construct which const.i.tuted the major device in Horst Bertold"s a.r.s.enal. Naturally he retained it; the effectiveness of the camouflage lay beyond dispute-and had now been tested and ratified in practice . . . it had even seemed to him, during the first moment of discovery, that this was exactly as it appeared to be: a box of prophoz and nothing more.
"Out of respect for decency and the women present here," the Hank Szantho eye-eater said, "I believe you should put that obnoxiously specific tin away, Mr. ben Applebaum; don"t you, on second thought, agree?"
"I suppose so," he said. And opened the tin.
Acrid smoke billowed about him, stinging his nostrils. He halted, dropped into an instinctive crouch of self-defense. Matson saw gray barracks.
Beside him. Freya appeared. The air was cold; she shivered and he, too, quaked, drew against her, stared and stared at the barracks; he saw row after row of them, and-charged, twelve-foot-high wire fences with four strands of barbed wire at the top. And signs. The posted restrictive notices; he did not even need to read them.
Freya said, "Mat, have you ever heard of a town called Sparta?"
" "Sparta," " he echoed, standing holding his two suitcases.
"Here." She released his fingers, set the suitcases down. A few people, drably dressed, slunk by, silently, carefully paying no attention to them. "I was wrong," Freya said. "And the message of course to you, the all-clear, was spurious. Mat, I thought-"
"You thought," he said, "it was going to be-ovens."
She said, with quiet calmness, tossing her heavy dark mane of hair back and raising her chin to meet his gaze, look at him face-to-face, "It"s work camps. The Soviet, not the Third Reich, model. Forced labor."
"Doing what? Clearing the planet? But the original authentic monitoring satellites reported that-"
"They seem," she said, "to be forming the nucleus of an army. First starting everyone out in labor gangs. To get them accustomed to discipline. The young males go into basic training at once; the rest of us-we"ll probably serve in that. that." She pointed and he saw the ramp of a subsurface structure; he saw the descent mechanism and he knew, remembered from his youth, what it meant, this prewar configuration.
A multi-level autofac. On continuous schedule, hence not entirely homeo. For round-the-clock operations, machines would not do, could not survive. Only shifts, alternating, of humans, could keep the belts moving; they had learned that in "92.
"Your police vets," Freya said, "are too old for immediate induction; most of them. So they"ll be a.s.signed to barracks, as we will be. I have the number they gave you and the one they gave me."
"Different quarters? We"re not even together together?"
Freya said, "I also have the mandatory forms for us to fill out; we list all our skills. So we can be useful."
"I"m old," he said.
"Then, Freya said, "you"ll have to die. Unless you can conjure up a skill."
"I have one skill." In the suitcase resting on the pavement beside him he had a transmitter which, small as it was, would send out a signal which, in six months, would reach Terra.
Bending, he brought out the key, turned the lock of the suitcase. All he had to do was open the suitcase, feed an inch of punched data-tape into the orifice of the transmitter"s encoder; the rest was automatic. He switched the power on; every electronic item mimicked clothing, especially shoes; it appeared as if he had come to Whale"s Mouth to walk his life away, and elegantly at that.
"Why?" he asked Freya as he programmed, with a tiny scholarly construct, the inch of tape. "An army for what?"
"I don"t know, Mat. It"s all Theodoric Ferry. I think Ferry is going to try to outspit the army on Terra that Horst Bertold commands. In the short time I"ve been here I"ve talked to a few people, but-they"re so afraid. One man thought there"d been a nonhumanoid sentient race found, and we"re preparing to strike for its colony-planets; maybe after a while and we"ve been here-"
Matson peered up and said, "I"ve encoded the tape to read, Garrison state. Sound out Bertold. Garrison state. Sound out Bertold. It"ll go to our top pilot, Al Dosker, repeated over and over again, because at this distance the noise-factor-" It"ll go to our top pilot, Al Dosker, repeated over and over again, because at this distance the noise-factor-"
A laser beam removed the back of his head.
Freya shut her eyes.
A second beam from the laser rifle with the telescopic sight destroyed first one suitcase and then its companion. And then a shiny, spic-and-span young soldier walked up, leisurely, the rifle held loosely; he glanced at her, up and down, carnally but with no particular pa.s.sion, then looked down at the dead man, at Matson. "We caught your conversation on an aud rec." He pointed, and Freya saw, then, on the overhang of the roof of the Telpor terminal building, a netlike interwoven mesh. "That man"-the soldier kicked-actually physically kicked with his toe-the corpse of Matson Glazer-Holliday-"said something about "our top pilot." You"re an organization, then. Friends of a United People? That it?"
She said nothing; she was unable to.
"Come along, honey," the soldier said to her. "For your psych-interrogation. We held it off because you were kind enough-dumb enough-to inform us that your husband was following you. But we never-"
He died, because, by means of her "watch" she had released the low-velocity cephalotropic cyanide dart; it moved slowly, but still he had not been able to evade it; he batted at it, childishly, with his hand, not quite alarmed, not quite wise and frightened enough, and its tip penetrated a vein near his wrist. And death came as swiftly and soundlessly as it had for Matson. The soldier swiveled and unwound and unwound in his descent to the pavement, and Freya, then, turned and ran- At a corner she went to the right, and, as she ran down a narrow, rubbish-heaped alley, reached into her cloak, touched the aud transmitter which sent out an all-points, planet-wide alarm signal-alert; every Lies, Incorporated employee here at Whale"s Mouth would be picking it up, if this was not already apparent to him: if the alarm signal added anything to his knowledge, that which had probably come, crushingly, within the first five minutes here on this side-this one-way side-of the Telpor apparatuses. Well, anyhow she had done that; she had officially, through technical channels, alerted them, and that was all-all she could do. she could do.
She had no long-range inter-system transmitter as Matson had had; she could not send out a macrowave signal which would be picked up by Al Dosker at the Sol system six months hence. In fact none of the two thousand police agents of Lies, Incorporated did. But they had weapons. She was, she realized with dread and disbelief, automatically now in charge of those of the organization who survived; months ago Matson had set her up legally so that on his death she a.s.sumed his chair, and this was not private: this had been circulated, memo-wise, throughout the organization.
What could she tell the police agents who had gotten through- tell them, of course, that Matson was dead, but what would be of use to them? What, she asked herself, can we do can we do?
Eighteen years, she thought; do we have to wait for the Omphalos, Omphalos, for Rachmael ben Applebaum to arrive and see? Because by then it won"t matter. For us, anyhow; nor for this generation. for Rachmael ben Applebaum to arrive and see? Because by then it won"t matter. For us, anyhow; nor for this generation.
Two men ran toward her and one bleated, "Moon and cow," shrilly, his face contorted with fear.
"Jack Horner," she said numbly. "I don"t know what to do," she said to them. "Matson is dead and his big transmitter is destroyed. They were waiting for him; I led them right to him. I"m sorry." She could not face the two field reps of the organization; she stared rigidly past them. "Even if we put our weapons into use," she said, "they can take all of us out."
"But we can do some damage," one of the two police, middle-aged, with that fat spare tire at his middle, a tough old vet of the "92 war, said.
His companion, clasping a valise, said, "Yes, we can try, Miss Holm. Send out that signal; you have it?"
"No," she said, but she was lying and they knew it. "It"s hopeless," she said. "Let"s try to pa.s.s as authentic emigrants. Let them draft us, put us into the barracks."
The seasoned, hard-eyed paunchy one said, "Miss Holm, when they get into the luggage, they"ll know. they"ll know." To his companion he said, "Bring it out."
Together, as she watched, the two experienced field reps of Lies, Incorporated a.s.sembled a small intricate weapon of a type she had never seen before; evidently it was from their advanced weapons archives.
To her the younger man said quietly, "Send the signal. For a fight. As soon as our people come through; keep the signal going so they"ll pick it up as they emerge. We"ll fight at this spot, not later, not when they have us cut down into individuals, one here, one there."
She. Touched. The. Signal-tab.
And then she said, quietly, "I"ll try to get a message-unit back to Terra via Telpor. Maybe in the confusion-" Because there was going to be a lot of confusion as the Lies, Incorporated men emerged and immediately picked up the fracas-in-progress signal "-maybe it"ll slip by."
"It won"t," the hard-eyed old tomcat of a fighter said to her. He glanced at his companion. "But if we focus on a transmission station maybe we can take and keep control long enough to run a vid track through. Pa.s.s it back through the Telpor gate. Even if all two thous of us were to-" He turned to Freya. "Can you direct the reps to make it to this point?"
"I have no more microwave patterns," she said, this time truthfully. "Just those two."
"Okay, Miss Holm." The vet considered. "Vid transmissions through Telpor are accomplished over there." He pointed and she saw an isolated multi-story structure, windowless, with a guarded entrance; in the gray sun of midday she caught a glint of metal, or armed sentries. "You have the code for back home you can transmit?"
"Yes," she said. "One of fifty. Mat and I both had them; committed to memory. I could transmit it by aud in ten seconds."
"I want," the wary, half-crouching veteran policeman said, "a vid vid track of this." He swung his hand at the landscape. "Something that can be spliced into the central coaxial cable and run on TV. Not just that we know but that they know." track of this." He swung his hand at the landscape. "Something that can be spliced into the central coaxial cable and run on TV. Not just that we know but that they know." They. They. The people back home-the innocents who lay beyond the one-way gate; forever, she thought, because eighteen years is, really, forever. The people back home-the innocents who lay beyond the one-way gate; forever, she thought, because eighteen years is, really, forever.
"What"s the code?" the younger field rep asked her.
Freya said. " "Forgot to pack my Irish linen handkerchiefs. Please transmit via Telpor." " She explained, "We, Mat and I, worked out all logical possibilities. This comes the closest. Sparta."
"Yep," the older vet said. "The warrior state. The trouble-maker. Well, it is close geographically to Athens, although not quite close enough." To his companion he said, "Can we get in there and transmit the aud signal?" He picked up the weapon which they had a.s.sembled.
"Sure," his younger companion said, nodding.
The older man clicked the weapon on.
Freya saw, then, into the grave and screamed; she ran and as she ran, struggled to get away, she knew it for what it was: a refined form of nerve gas that-and then her coherent thoughts ceased and she simply ran.
The armed sentry-soldiers guarding the windowless building ran, too.
And, unaffected, their metabolisms insulated by preinjective antidotal hormones, the two field reps of Lies, Incorporated dogtrotted toward the windowless structure, and, as they trotted, brought out small, long-range laser pistols with telescopic sights.
That was her final view of them; at that point panic and flight swallowed her and it was only darkness. And a darkness into which people of all sorts-she glimpsed, felt, them dimly-ran alongside in company with her; she was not alone: the future radiated.
Mat, she thought. You will not have your police state here at Whale"s Mouth, and I warned you; I told you. But, she thought, maybe now they they won"t either. If that encoded message can be put through. won"t either. If that encoded message can be put through. If. If.
And if, on the Terran side, there is someone smart enough to know what to do with it.
SIXTEEN.
In his ship near the orbit of Pluto, Al Dosker received, routinely, the message transmitted from Freya Holm at Whale"s Mouth to the New New York office of Lies, Incorporated.
FORGOT TO PACK MY IRISH LINEN HANDKERCHIEFS. PLEASE TRANSMIT VIA TELPOR. FREYA.
He walked to the rear of the ship, leisurely, because at this distance from the sun everything seemed entropic, slowed down; it was as if, out here, there was a slower beat of the sidereal clock.
Opening the code box he ran his finger down the Fs. Then found the key. He then took the message and fed it directly into the computer which held the spools that comprised the contents of the box.
Out came a paper ribbon with typed words. He read them.
MILITARY DICTATORSHIP. BARRACKS LIFE ON SPARTAN BASIS. PREPARATION FOR WAR AGAINST UNKNOWN FOE.
Dosker stood for a moment, then, taking the original encoded message, as handled by Vidphone Corporation, ran it through the computer once again. And, once again, he read the message in clear and once again it said what it had to say-could not be denied from saying. And there was no doubt, because Matson Glazer-Holliday himself had programmed the computer-box.
This, Dosker thought. Out of fifty possibilities ranging from the Elysium field to-h.e.l.l.
Roughly, this lay halfway on the h.e.l.l side. By a gross count of ten. It ranked about as bad as he had expected.
So, he thought, now we know.
We know . . . and we can"t validate it. and we can"t validate it.
The sc.r.a.p of ribbon, the encoded message, was, incredible as it seemed, completely, utterly worthless.
Because, he asked himself, whom do we take it to whom do we take it to?
Their own organization, Lies, Incorporated, had been truncated by Mat"s action, by the sending of their best men to Whale"s Mouth; all which remained was the staff of bureaucrats in New New York-and himself.
And, of course, Rachmael ben Applebaum out in "tween s.p.a.ce in the Omphalos. Omphalos. Busily learning Attic Greek. Busily learning Attic Greek.
Now, from the New New York office, a second message, encoded, arrived; this, too, he fed to the computer, more quickly, this time. It came out drearily and he read it with futile shame- shame because he had tried and failed to stop what Matson planned; he felt the moral weight on himself.
WE CANNOT HOLD OUT. VIVISECTION IN PROGRESS.
Can I help you? he wondered, suffering in his impotent rage. G.o.dd.a.m.n you, Matson, he thought, you had to do it; you were greedy. And you took two thousand men and Freya Holm with you, to be slaughtered over there where we can"t do anything because "we" consist of nothing.
However, he could perform one final act-his effort, not connected with the effort to save the mult.i.tude of Terran citizens who, within the following days, weeks, would be filing through Telpor gates to Whale"s Mouth, but to save someone who deserved a reprieve from a self-imposed burden; a burden which these two encoded messages via Telpor and the Vidphone Corp had rendered obsolete.
Taking the risk that a UN monitor might pick up his signal, Al Dosker sent out a u.h.f. beamed radio signal to the Omphalos Omphalos and Rachmael ben Applebaum. and Rachmael ben Applebaum.