Collected Short Fiction, page 270
“Johnny! What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” I said weakly. “Nothing.”
But something was wrong. In one wild sweep the last twelve years rose before me, from the day of my dismissal at Klingsan to the day I fled, a hunted murderer, from Mulciber. Those memories arrayed themselves in a solid column—and the column toppled and fell, shattering into a million pieces.
Starhaven spun about me. I burst into a sweat and grabbed hold of the table-top to keep from tumbling to the floor. Dimly I sensed Myra grasping my cold hands, saying things to me, steadying me. I fought to catch my breath.
It was over in a second or two; I sat exhausted, bathed in sweat, my head quivering.
“What happened, Johnny?”
“I don’t know. Some aftereffect of the psychprobing, I guess. For a second I—I thought I was someone else.” I laughed sharply. “Too many drinks, probably. Or not enough. I better have another one.
I downed another rye. Nervously, I gathered up the fragments of my identity and pasted them together. Once again I was Johnny Mantell, ex-beachcomber, late of Mulciber in the Fifth Octant.
“I feel a lot better now,” I said. “Let’s go get some fresh air.”
CHAPTER V
THE REST of my week of indoctrination passed quickly. I saw Myra often, though not as often as I would have liked, and our meetings always seemed to be held at arm’s length; veils blocked any real communication between us, I realized. There was something she was not telling me because she would not, and something I was not telling her because I did not know it myself.
The thing that had happened to me in the bar happened twice more during that week: the sudden cold sweat, the sudden swaying, the sudden feeling that I was somebody else, that the life I had lived was not that of a beachcomber on Mulciber.
Once it happened at three in the morning. I woke and sat upright in bed, staring into the darkness, shaking uncontrollably. On a wild impulse I bolted to the phone and punched out Myra’s number, hoping she’d forgive me for waking her at this hour.
Only I didn’t wake her. The phone chimed eight, nine, ten times in her apartment; then a robomonitor downstairs cut in, and the blank metal face told me, “Miss Butler is not at home. Would you care to leave a message? Miss Butler is not at home. Would you care to leave a message? Miss Butler is—”
I listened to the chant for almost a minute, hypnotized. Then I said, “No thanks. I don’t have any messages.”
I broke the contact and returned to bed. But I remained awake until morning, tossing restlessly. There was only one place Myra could be.
She had to be with Ben Thurdan.
I threw that thought around for five hours straight. At eight in the morning I rose, gobbled down some de-fatiguing tablets, and, with a hearty but synthetic night’s sleep now under my belt, headed for the Pleasure Dome to iron some of the tensions out of my system.
I DRIFTED. It came naturally to me, I told myself. On the seventh day, Thurdan called me.
“It’s time to put you to work, Johnny. You’ve had a week to rest up.”
“I’m ready,” I said. “It’s twelve years since I last had anything like a job—and that’s enough of a vacation for any man.”
He met me in an aircab and we set off for a distant part of Starhaven. I had already discovered that though the shell extended around the entire planet, only part of one continent had been settled. Starhaven was one gigantic city of twenty million people, sprawling ever outward with each influx of new inhabitants. Beyond the city borders lay the barren land that had been here before Thurdan had taken over the planet.
We came to rest on a landing stage atop a square windowless building far to the west of the last outskirts of the settled area. “This is the guts and brain of Starhaven right here,” Thurdan told me, as we entered.
Men in lab outfits greeted him. He introduced me as an armaments technician recently arrived.
The tour began.
“Starhaven’s defenses operate on two principles,” Thurdan said, as we crawled through a tunnel lined with electronic approach perceptors. “One is that you need a protective barrier. That’s why I built the metal shell. Second, and more important, you need a good offense. Starhaven has the best offensive battery in the universe—and when you couple that with our defensive screens, our energy-field, and the sheer strength of the shell itself, you’ll understand why the SP is helpless against us.”
We entered a vast room walled completely about with computers. “Nothing is left to chance,” Thurdan said proudly. “Every shot that’s fired by a heavy-cycle gun is computed precisely before release. We don’t miss often.”
I was dazzled by the display. A bright array of meters and dials met my eye on a higher level.
“The energy flow controls,” Thurdan said. “You ought to see what happens when we’re under bombardment. Every watt of energy that’s thrown at us is soaked up by our screens, fed through the power-lines here, and converted neatly into useful energy for operating Starhaven. We haven’t had a decent bombardment in years; the SP’s caught wise. We hardly needed to use our own generators for a while, thanks to the set-up here.”
I whistled. “What genius designed all this?”
“Genius is right,” Thurdan said, fondling an outjutting toggle switch. “Lome Faber built this for me. It took him three years to design it.”
“Faber? Killed his wife, didn’t he? I remember reading about the case.”
“A brilliant electronics man,” said Thurdan. “Too brilliant. It killed him, eventually. I knew he was insane when I first met him.”
“What happened to him?”
“Saw the ghost of his wife in a neutrino screen and took a hatchet to it. It took days to unscramble the short circuits.”
THE TOUR lasted over an hour; I was dizzy by the end of it. Forgotten knowledge welled back into me. I remembered hours spent designing defense screens, calculating inputs, tabulating megawatts, long columns of resistances and amperage.
We were on the topmost floor of the building. Thurdan led me into a room lined completely with vision screens. It was similar in tone and furnishings to his office back in the center of the city.
“And this is the sanctum sanctorum,” he said. “The nerve-center of the whole planet. From here I can control the defense screens, fire any gun from any emplacement, broadcast sub-radio messages to other planets.” His deep voice was throbbing with pride; I could see he gloried in this room, from which he could control a world.
He threw himself heavily into a relaxing cradle. “Now you’ve seen it, Mantell. What do you think?”
“It’s incredible. Starhaven’s completely impregnable. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I’m still not satisfied,” Thurdan said. “There’s a flaw in the defense.”
“Where? I’m rusty, Lord knows, but I’d swear that this is the most absolutely unassailable fortification that could possibly be built.”
He smiled. “That’s true as far as it goes,” he said. “But there’s a gaping hole. Inside.”
“Inside?”
“Starhaven can be attacked from within. If someone got control of this room, for instance, he could drop the screens and surrender us to the Patrol in a minute. Of course, he’d have to kill me first. The man who you saw executed the other day tried.”
“Marchin?”
“Yes. He was one of my original colonists. We never got along well, Marchin and me.” Thurdan swung up to face me. “I’ve got a job for you, Mantell. A special job.”
Frowning, I said, “I’ll do my best. What is it?”
“According to your psychprobe, you were a damned good defense-screen man once. And unless Harmon’s machine was cockeyed, you’ve got plenty of solid stuff inside you. Johnny, there’s a plot to kill me.”
“What? Who—”
“Never mind who. The fact remains that people on Starhaven want to kill me. I’m well protected, but not well enough. I’m going to turn an entire laboratory over to you, and the sky’s the limit on your budget. I want you to build me a personal defense screen.”
I was silent for a moment. The personal defense screen was the goal of every defense outfit in the galaxy—but so far it had eluded everyone’s grasp. The problem was a complex one: some arrangement had to be made to keep blaster energy out and let air in, and while this could be done without too much difficulty with a planet- or ship-sized screen, the problems of making a unit small enough for a man to carry, of grounding the diverted energy somehow, and of providing a steady power flow had been too much for some of the best brains in the field.
And even if these problems were to be solved, such a screen would be useless. It would be a perfect guard against energy weapons, but then such weapons would be obsolete and the old, crude ones would return. Then there would be the difficulty of providing a screen that would keep out knives and bullets without shielding off air, food, and such things.
“Well?” Thurdan said.
“It’s damned close to impossible,” I told him.
“So was building Starhaven,” he shot back immediately. “But I built it. I don’t know a damned thing about electronics, but I found men who did know. They said Starhaven would be unbuildable, too. I don’t take impossibles for answers, Mantell.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t try. I’m just not promising success.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Don’t promise anything. Just deliver. I don’t want to die, Mantell.”
I caught the undertone there. Behind the bold voice, the commanding note, there was fear, and pleading. Ben Thurdan didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to lose his empire out here on Starhaven.
Well, I didn’t blame him, “There’s one other thing, Mantell. The matter of Miss Butler.”
I tensed. “What does she—”
“I asked her to accompany you for your first few days on Star haven, Johnny. Just until you got your footing here, you understand. But let’s avoid any future conflict right here and now. Myra isn’t available.”
“I—I never—”
“You called her place at three o’clock the other morning,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what you had to say to her, but I can guess. There are plenty of women on Starhaven: I’ll see to it you can have your pick. All but her.”
There wasn’t any arguing with that. If Thurdan had kept close enough tabs on me to monitor my phone, then lying to him was pointless. I said, “Thanks for warning me, Ben. I wouldn’t want to cross you.”
“No,” he said. “That wouldn’t be wise.”
I SPENT another hour listening to Thurdan daydream out loud about Starhaven. He showed me a room near his which would be my office, introduced me to three or four lab workers to whom I’d be responsible and who would supply me with any materials I might need in my research, and handed me five hundred chips pocket-money as a starting salary.
“After this you’ll draw your pay off the standard payroll here,” he said. “It’ll be five hundred a week. That ought to keep you comfortably alive.”
“I don’t doubt it. I scrounged for pennies for years.”
“All that’s behind you now, Mantell. This is Starhaven, and things are different.”
He drove me back to the center of the city. I watched his broad figure vanish into the doorway of his office, turned, walked away. I was thinking of Myra.
It was going to be my job to keep Ben Thurdan alive. But while he lived, Myra was his.
As I stood there, she came out of another office on the floor. We nearly collided.
“Hello, Johnny,” she said coolly. “I thought you were out at the control tower with Mr. Thurdan.”
“I was. We just got back. He’s in the office.”
“Oh—I’ll have to see him, then. Some messages came for him, and—”
She started away; I caught her by the arm. Then I remembered that hidden photon-absorbers in the ceiling were probably soaking up every bit of this scene. Or perhaps Thurdan was watching it directly.
“What is it, Johnny?”
“I—just wanted to say so long, that’s all. I won’t be seeing much of you now that—now that I’ll be working at the tower most of the time.” My voice came tensely, haltingly; both of us knew what I was trying to say. Thurdan had probably warned her to keep away from me, too.
“Sure, Johnny. It was swell.” She disengaged her hand gently but emphatically, turned on a wholly mechanical smile, clicked it off again like the closing of a camera shutter, and walked through the barrier-beam into Thurdan’s office. I stood looking after her, then shook my head and turned away.
I caught a passing cab and drove home. The robot attendant held out a package for me as I entered the lobby.
“Hello, Mr. Mantell. This just came for you by special courier.”
“Thanks,” I said abstractedly. The package was bound in a plain plastic wrapper; it was about the size of and felt like a book. Upstairs, I threw the package on the bed, depolarized the window, stared out at Starhaven, stared up at the fake sky and the fake sun and at the clouds circling under the metal skin.
Starhaven, I thought. Ben Thurdan, Proprietor. Lord and master of a world of fugitives, and I was the foundation of his hope to avoid death.
I tried to picture Starhaven without Thurdan. The entire planet revolved around his whims; he was an absolute monarch, though an enlightened one. The social system he had evolved here worked—though whether it would work with any other man at its helm was a debatable point.
And what would happen if Thurdan died? Probably the whole delicate fabric of the Starhaven system would come tumbling in on itself, ending a unique experiment in political theory. There would be a mad scramble for power; the man who grabbed possession of the control tower would rule . . . until the assassin’s bullet struck him down.
Suddenly I went cold all over. If anyone were to gain control of that tower, it would be me, I realized: my research lab was close to the central control room, and I guessed that I would become a close associate of Thurdan during the course of my work. New ideas occurred to me.
After a while I turned away and glanced at the package lying on my bed. I held it to my ear; there was no sound of a mechanism within. Cautiously, I opened it.
It was a book—an old-fashioned bound kind, not a tape. Inscribed on its drab jacket was its title:
A STUDY OF HYDROGEN-
BREATHING LIFE IN THE
SPICA SYSTEM
A joke, I wondered? I opened the book to the title page.
A folded slip of paper lay between the flyleaf and the title page. I drew it out, unfolded it, read it—and a moment later it flared heatlessly in my hand, ashed itself, and was gone, drawn quickly into the air-circulating system of the room along with all other molecule-size fragments in the air.
It had been a very interesting message, printed in square vocotype capitals, standard model. It said:
TO JOHN MANTELL,
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN BRINGING ABOUT THE DEATH OF BENJAMIN THURDAN, VISIT THE CASINO OF MASKS IN THE PLEASURE DOME DURING THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS, BETWEEN THE HOURS OF NINE AND TEN IN THE EVENING. THERE WILL BE NO DANGER TO YOU.
CHAPTER VI
THREE DAYS LATER, I went to the Casino of Masks.
The decision cost me three days of agonizing inner conflict. My first reaction had been one of immediate anger; I didn’t want any part of any conspiracy against Thurdan, at least not yet.
But then I recalled Myra’s strange words that first night, and thought of the possibilities Thurdan’s death might hold for me. I began to consider the idea.
The book held no further clues; after a detailed examination of it I concluded it had simply been a vehicle for the message, and I destroyed it rather than risk being forced to explain what I was doing with so unlikely a volume.
I had a week to make up my mind. During the first two days I spent most of my time in my newly outfitted lab, giving myself a refresher course in defense-screen logistics—it was astonishing how the old knowledge sprang brightly into the front of my mind again after so many years—and sketched out a few preliminary functions toward the possible design of Thurdan’s personal defense screen. My sketches were simply trial hypotheses, shots in the dark, but I seemed to see a few stray glimmers of light ahead. It might take months or years of work, but I perceived a possible line of attack, and that was a big chunk of the battle won already.
During those first days I had little contact with Thurdan and none at all with Myra. When I thought of her it was only as a girl of a dead romance; there was a brief ache, nothing more. I hadn’t known her long enough for anything more, and I had become accustomed to disappointment in my life. I buried myself in my work; it was exciting to rediscover techniques and thought-patterns I had thought lost forever. I met my fellow technicians—Harrell, Bryson, Voriloinen, six or seven others. Most of them were brilliant eccentrics who had fallen foul of the law one way or another and had fled to Starhaven, where technicians of all kinds were given warm welcome.
Bryson gave me an uneasy moment. He was in my lab one day observing and helping, and I asked him where he had picked up his vast skill in electronics.
“I used to work at Klingsan Defense Screens,” he said. “Before my trouble.”
I dropped a packet of junction transistors; they scattered everywhere. “Klingsan, you said?”
He nodded. I said, “I worked there once, too. From ’85 to ’93. Then they canned me.”
“That’s odd,” Bryson said. “I was there from ’91 to ’96. I should have known you, then. But I don’t. I don’t remember any Mantells there. Was that the name you used then?”
“Yes.” I shrugged. “Hell, that was twelve years ago. Maybe we worked in different departments.”
“Maybe,” he agreed.
I tried to remember a Bryson at Klingsan, after he had left. I couldn’t. Something was very wrong.
But I pushed it to the back of my mind, back with my life on Mulciber and my brief few days with Myra and all the other things I wasn’t anxious to think about, and returned to my workbench.
