No escape in omen hunting now, he had thought, and crossed the streets to tell McLeod what he had concluded.

  “The sentiment is fine, Frank, and I couldn’t agree with you more, but do you really think it’s the right thing to do now? I mean, here we’re safe and all we have to do is wait until things get straightened out. And if they don’t ...” and he shrugged. “Well, at least we’ll die happy.”

  Parric, leaning on his forearms, didn’t look away from the tree he had been staring at. "You don’t believe that any more than I do, Cam. Things are different now, things have changed.”

  "Not as much as you have, Frank, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know what to make of it.”

  Parric wanted to say he didn’t really care now that he had made up his mind, but chose instead to reach down to flick a damp blade of grass from his shoe.

  "Cam, it’s the only way we can go without cheating. The way I see it, people are going to need help, and they’re going to need it in a hurry. With so many dead, God knows how many dying, nothing is ever going to be the same again, at least not for a damn long time. If we’re lucky, we can stall off another war until people get smart.”

  “Now you’re dreaming, old pal. That way has been tried a million times before.”

  “So we try it again. Look, it’s simple, really: as soon as we’re ready, we’ll head for the Central. It’s a complete, absolutely complete Town in itself. Coates, if you’ll remember, lectured long and hard about that aspect of the Project. All that our little places were is contained in that one huge complex. It has total facilities for repair, maintenance, even a shop to build new androids just like old Willard. If we work at it, get it going without a hitch or a halt, we’ll be able to do some judicious restocking in communities that need it the most. The Cities, Cam, the organifarms and the factories. There’s too much work to do and too little numbers. If we want to stop a slip and slide into something worse than prehistoric cave dwelling, we’ve got to do it.”

  “And what if those poor little people you want to help so much don’t want you near them? In case you’ve forgotten, those friendly cavemen from Oraton didn’t think a hell of a lot of you.”

  Parric stabbed at his knee with a finger. “That,” he said, “is where Coates and people like Jess come in. The name of the phase will be reeducation. Listen, Cam, our survival depends on it. We can’t afford this dimwitted, shortsighted, practically superstitious fear of androids. For crying out loud, if we can’t handle that, what the hell are we going to do if the Alpha actually comes across an alien civilization? Are we going to throw it back into space and forget about it?”

  “Most likely,” McLeod said. “Or build a warship and blow it all up.”

  “Now you know what I’m talking about!”

  “Hey, listen, old friend, I’ve known what you’ve been talking about for the past two hours, and my ears are killing me. My point is, if there’s all that doubt about success, why bother? Why give up our own little heaven for what might be a bigger hell?”

  Parric stood and paced the length of the walk from the steps to the sidewalk. He knew he shouldn’t allow anger to infiltrate his thinking, not now. McLeod was only voicing the same objections he himself had delivered during his own mental wrestling.

  But it was so obvious. Perhaps, he doubted, too obvious. Perhaps he had blinded himself in the light of his own conception, a reformed cynic, a mid-thirties true believer.

  And then, there was Eisentor.

  And the doles.

  And the riots.

  And bloated masses of the dead.

  "It may not even be there," McLeod said, stretching his arms over his head as if reaching for a ration of sunlight.

  “Maybe not,” Parric said.

  "And what about that savior of yours, the old man?’ ’

  Parric frowned. “What about him? You owe him, you know.’’

  “Yeah, maybe. But how can we trust him? Why the hell should he be the only sane machine left in the world?’’

  “Maybe he isn’t,’’ Parric said, “but—’’

  McLeod glared at his hands, then up to the sky. “But what? I don’t like him, Frankie, I’ll tell you that now. I’ve damn near been killed a dozen times, and I can’t see that Dix is any different from the others. Quiet now, maybe, but the next time we sleep ...” and he drew a finger across his throat in a too-graphic gesture.

  Parric said nothing. This too had been integral to his doubts, and it was more a sense than illustration of logic that he believed Dix could be trusted. There had been a moment, a frighteningly long moment, when he’d been ashamed of his distrust, quickly suppressed it. If the android was functional, he would be invaluable not only in reaching the Central, but also in its own now uncertain future.

  If he was functional.

  I was sick once: deception, or a typically laconic explanation?

  Sick once, sick again?

  Damn, Parric thought, I can’t start this all over. There would be no proof at hand at all, he realized— only in the traveling. A risk. And there was too much at stake not to grab it.

  “He’ll do as I ask,” he said to McLeod’s glowering impatience. “I’ll do the watching.”

  “If you don’t, I could be dead. And Jessica.”

  “He goes.”

  “I’ll have to think about it,” McLeod said, wandering off toward the house.

  “Do that,” Parric called after him, “but don’t take as much time doing that as you do eating or we’ll never get out of here.”

  “Doing what?”

  Parric turned just as Jessica left the ContiGov store. Somewhere in the ranks of dun-colored dispensers she’d found a clothing unit which had given her an outfit exactly like his except for the color: a night-forest green that turned to solar fire the hair she combed with a slim-handled brush. The facial lines he’d noticed the day before had softened, blending into her equally soft features until they’d almost vanished with the events that had caused them. Suddenly he felt awkward, embarrassed, and boyish, and he took a rapid swipe at his own hair as she came up to him.

  “You know,” she said, looking around at the Town as if seeing it for the first time, “I don’t know why they built these places.”

  “What’s the matter with them?”

  “My clouds over the royal Coates’ jowls,” she said, grinning in mocking imitation of McLeod’s impotent imprecations, “touchy, aren’t you, doc?”

  “Maybe, but what’s wrong with them?”

  She stepped down off the curb and pointed as she spoke. “Look at it, Frank, it’s too unreal. I don’t know what your dear supervisors were thinking of when they constructed it, but there’s nothing right about it, nothing at all.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Look again,” she said. “The trees, all that lovely shrubbery and manicured lawn space. Fresh paint, trim houses, straight without a speck in the gutters. It’s just rained and there’s not even any mud on the sidewalks. ” She looked up at him, her expression expectant, but he could only stare back and feel uncomfortably stupid.

  “It looks fine to me,” he said finally. “Very pretty.”

  “Frank, for a man that’s doing a pretty fair job as a part-time hero, you’re not very bright.” She grinned away the sting and took his hand, leading him across the street to the nearest house. “Too nice, Frank. I’m a reporter, right? I’m supposed to see things terribly profound in your daily life and tell you not only why they’re profound, but also why they’re there in the first place.”

  “All right, all right,” he said, “so I’m not taking offense. Explain, will you?”

  "Every little thing about this Town is false. You said you’ve spent most of your life traveling the walkways from home to office and back again. You’ve seen only 'the Cities, and I’ll bet not much more than Philayork. You were supposed to be training these androids to exist in a human society with a minimum of disruption. So why not put them in what human society is really like?”

  “Hey, don’t get mad at me. I didn’t think this up. ” “No, but you’re going to have to, aren’t you?” He pulled her to her feet after she had knelt in front of a bush carefully trimmed to the right degree of shaggy , misshapen abandon. “What do you mean by that?” “We reporters also snoop, Frank.”

  “You heard me arguing with Cam and you didn’t come out?”

  She shook her head and dodged a playful slap at her hips. “Most of what you said makes real sense,” she said, backing away, “but you’ve got to do something about all this perfection. It just won’t do.”

  He took a step, feinted a sprint, and laughed as she took refuge behind a tree. Laughing louder, he chased her until he realized he wasn’t fast enough, and she was purposely allowing him to close in.

  “Jess,” he said, leaning against a corner lamppost, “maybe it is too perfect, and maybe the Central is just a bigger Town with all the faults you say it has, but we can’t let it go just because of that.”

  “Who said we were going to let it go?”

  “In fact, why couldn’t we make something like this the norm instead of the ideal? With the androids’ help, it might not be so farfetched. We could come close, anyway.”

  “Frank,” she said, a hand on his arm just long enough to make him feel warm, “what happened to the Alpha?"

  He scratched at his forehead, looked up at a crescent 'of sun riding above a streamered cloud. “I don’t know. It’s still up there, I guess.”

  “You haven’t forgotten what you said about it, have you?”

  “No, but does it matter?”

  She looked bemused. “A little,” she said.

  And they were quiet, saying nothing and knowing nothing needed to be said. The afternoon passed and they walked, not touching, and when his stomach decided it could no longer be put off by the confusion within him, she raced him back to the porch where she collided with Dix, who had just opened the front door.

  “Hot to be running,” he said.

  “Working up an appetite,” she said. “Where’s Peg?”

  “Inside. Watching the screen on the wall.”

  Parric darted past when he heard. Peg was sitting on the floor making soft suggestions to McLeod, who had taken the ornamental console panel off the outwardly slanting control unit and was elbow-deep inside it. She hushed him when Parric began a, question, and he turned his attention to the screen. Where there had once been only filmy gray, colors now spattered; where there had been nothing but a suppressive silence there was the difficult to hear but unmistakable sound of garbled voices.

  Parric refused to believe it, knelt beside Peg and gripped her shoulder as she directed McLeod with what she saw and heard.

  “How?” he whispered when she stopped for a moment.

  “I was sitting here trying to figure that old man . . . android ...”

  “Man is fine,” he said impatiently, thinking Cam had infected her with his doubts, “as long as you don’t forget the other.’’

  “Well, I was . . . shapes, Cam! Like ghosts behind all that static.”

  McLeod grunted, straightened to ease the strain on his back, then plunged in again.

  “I was listening to him talking,” she continued, “and ... did you know he was the one who led those men away from you and Jess when you escaped your Town? Anyway, I was watching the comunit, just sort of imagining I could talk to people I used to know, when all of a sudden there were colors bouncing all over the place. At first I ... the shapes are gone, Cam!”

  “Bastard son of a preempted monk!” McLeod yelled, kicking at the baseboard.

  “Back again!”

  “Lord of sweet holiness,” McLeod muttered without looking up.

  “So?” Parric prodded.

  “So nothing. I thought I was seeing things until the old man said something about his lenses going bad. Then I called Cam and he said he would try to boost something or other so that something else would do something right for a goddamn change.” She grinned at Parric’s startled expression. “That’s a quote, by the way.”

  “I gathered,” he said dryly. “Cam, is there anything I can do?”

  “Yes,” McLeod said, “but there are ladies present.”

  “Thanks,” Jessica said, taking a seat behind Parric, smiling at Willard, who chose the couch.

  “Light!” McLeod shouted, and Dix immediately dialed the ceiling’s glow to its maximum intensity. Parric blinked until his eyes adjusted, then repositioned himself to keep his reflection from disrupting the screen. The hope that contact with the rest of the country might soon be reestablished manifested itself in the sudden and prolonged silences that greeted McLeod’s successive commentary on the ancestry of those who had fostered the comunit linkage. Cocoons of concentration were spun, manipulated, designed in prayers that elemental singlemindedness might prove to be concrete enough to drive the screen into life. Parric’s eyes began to water, but he made no move to clear them, letting the tears fall onto his cheeks; he wanted nothing to disrupt the aura of possible salvation.

  An hour, then two, and Jessica rose to disappear into the kitchen.

  Dix became one with the furniture.

  Jessica returned with cups steaming, placed one in front of each of them, but neither Peg nor Parric moved to pick them up.

  Peg was whispering the progress, hissing the falling back in a continual atonal concerto to McLeod’s violent percussion outbursts.

  And in the background: voices, words, a phrase unintelligible but encouraging nevertheless. Then, for a full minute, a picture of a deserted Philayork walkway; a thirty-second scan of a makeshift barricade in a city unnamed. In order to utilize as much power as possible, McLeod bypassed dimensional depth modules and instantly there was the picture of a man standing in front of the Noram flag reading from a sheath of papers. Parric could not understand the speech, the words buried by static into what could have easily been an alien tongue; nor did he recognize the official, and he pounded his fists against his legs in frustration. It might have been a moment of reassurance for the populace, one that explained that all was well and the continuity of Noram existence had once again been fueled; but he doubted. The man was haggard, his infrequent glances at the camera self-conscious and uncertain. His lips kept pulling into shadows of smiles only to fight and return to tight irresolution.

  “Come on,” Parric whispered.

  “I’m trying,” McLeod said, breaking on the verge of tears.

  A flashaway, then, and a compound filled with men and women dressed in nonentity gray, their faces sullenly angry, their movements physical definitions of defiance.

  A soldier struggling with two guards as they dragged him toward a gleaming stake in the center of a concrete field; a firing squad at ease along a ragged white line.

  Stores looted, burned, shattered by the force of a thousand grasping hands.

  “Christ,” Parric said.

  A tapeclip of the President waving to a crowd obviously enjoying the best of times during his last campaign.

  The speaker again, holding the papers at his side, staring dumbly at someone off-camera, fidgeting until fade to black, black to gray, and a newsroom with a world map shaded a deep pink.

  “Forget the sound, Cam,” Parric said finally. “We don’t need it to know what’s happened.”

  McLeod stepped back from the wall and stared at the screen, one hand absently caressing Peg’s hair.

  The reporter’s face was grim and it was all McLeod needed to see. He flicked off the trivid and no one complained.

  “So,” he said, “it looks like Frank gets his way again.”

  “I still don’t want to go, now more than ever,” Peg protested. “If that’s what’s going on out there, it’s certainly safer where we are now.”

  "Perhaps," Parric said, "but for how long? Not that we’ll come under any really sustained attacks, not with people too busy trying to add to the confusion. But how long can we stay here alone knowing there are probably others out there like us? I couldn’t do it, Peg, I’m sorry. I can’t stay. Definitely not.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  “You’re young,” he answered.

  “Not all that much younger than you, Frank, but you’re acting like an old man, for crying out loud. Who do you think you are, the savior of the world?”

  “Peg!” Jessica said.

  “Forget it,” Parric said, standing. “No, little girl, I’m no savior of anyone’s world, least of all mine. But I would think being a nurse would give you a reason to live, not a reason to bury yourself in a mountain grave.”

  “I’m not a healer,” she said, quieter, less sure, nearly mouthing what Parric said next.

  “Neither am I, but I can learn.”

  “You’re both sounding like eulogists,” McLeod said, pulling a syntabac packet from his pocket and stuffing it into a corner of his mouth. “Whether we go or stay, we’re not about to change the world overnight. The question still in my mind, despite what I said before, is whether it’s worth leaving.”

  “It is,” Parric said simply. “And I’ll be gone in the morning. You all can do what you like.’’

  Leaving, then, he ignored the stares and an admonition from Dix to watch the night air. He leaned against the porch railing, thinking nothing, the thoughts too complex to sort themselves into coherent interior dialogue. Moods: nothing more, nothing less; and a hurricane’s eye shrouded in disappointment.

  “The clerk’s crusade.’’

  “Don’t, Jess. I’m not in the mood.’’

  “I was serious, you know.’’

  “What are you looking for, a position as official camp follower?’’

  “Historian. That’s what I was sent out here for, remember?’’

  “You have no equipment.’’

  “Since when have I become deaf and blind?’’ “Depends on how good your memory is.’’

  “Good enough to remember you were scared to death of me that first day.’’

 

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