by John Brunner
A brilliant light, dazzling as a magnesium flare, rose into sight above the trees and to the roar was added the impact of blast. He just managed to discern the needle-form of a one-man orbital ship before the glare compelled him to shut his eyes and turn away, groping for the window-closure again.
No doubt that would be one of G2S’s troubleshooters on his way to orbit. The company was proud of its prompt and efficient after-sales service, and since even now three out of four orbital factories were one-off projects—new industries kept deciding to jump up there every other week—that was an essential element in preserving its field-leader rating.
Which was not, in fact, as stable as the G2S board wished the public to believe. He’d investigated. Among the tasks he expected to be assigned, even though Ina hadn’t mentioned it, was penetration of a rival corporation’s research into so-called olivers, electronic alter egos designed to save the owner the strain of worrying about all his person-to-person contacts. A sort of twenty-first-century counterpart to the ancient Roman nomenclator, who discreetly whispered data into the ear of the emperor and endowed him with the reputation of a phenomenal memory. G2S was badly in need of diversification, but before picking up the option it had on a small independent company’s work in this area, it wanted to make certain nobody else had reached the stage of commercial launching.
It would be a good-sized feather in his cap if he produced the answer within a few days of starting work.
Continuing his tour of inspection he discovered, neatly tucked away under the bed, a tension reliever with a reversible proboscis which a woman could let stand out and a man could simply push inward … or not, according to taste. Above it was a small but fine-detail screen, the images fed to which were changed—said a little label—on an eight-day rota; there were also headphones and a mask offering twenty odors.
Replacing the instrument in its sanitizing case, he decided he’d have to experiment with it at least once or twice; it was appropriate to the plug-in life-style, after all. But at most two or three times. Corporations like G2S were wary of people who relied excessively on machines in place of person-to-person contact. They would be watching.
He sighed. To think that some people were (had to be?) content with mechanical gratification. … But maybe it was best in certain special cases: for instance, for those who had to establish deep emotional attachments or none at all, who suffered agonies when a change of employment or a posting to another city shattered their connections, who were safest when keeping their chance colleagues at a distance.
Not for the first time he reflected on the good fortune—heavily disguised—which had stunted his own capacity for intense emotional involvement to the point where he was content with mere liking. It was so much superior to the transitory possessiveness he had been exposed to in childhood, the strict impersonality maintained during his teener years at Tarnover.
Best not to think about Tarnover.
Showering down, he relished his new situation. Much would depend on the personalities of the people he was about to meet at the welcome party, but they were bound to be good stable plug-in types, and certainly the nature of the job was ideal for his talents. Most commercial systems were sub-logical and significantly redundant, so he’d have no trouble tidying up a few tangles, saving G2S a couple of million a year, by way of proving he really was a systems rash. They’d regard him within weeks as an invaluable recruit.
Meantime, taking advantage of the corporation’s status, he could gain access to data-nets that were ordinarily secure. That was the whole point of coming to KC. He wanted—more, he needed—data that as a priest he’d never have dared to probe for. Six years was about as far ahead as he’d been able to plan when he escaped from Tarnover, so …
He was stepping out of the shower compartment, dried by blasts of warm air, when he heard the sound of his circulation enormous in his ears: thud, thud, thud-thud-thud-thud, faster with each passing second. Giddy, furious, he clutched at the rim of the hand-basin to steady himself and caught a glimpse of Sandy Locke’s face in the mirror above it—haggard, aged by decades on the instant—before he realized he wasn’t going to make it to the tranquilizers he’d left in the main room. He was going to have to stay right here and fight back with yoga-style deep breathing.
His mouth was dry, his belly was drum-taut, his teeth wanted to chatter but couldn’t because his jaw muscles were so tense, his vision wavered and there was a line of cramp as brutal as a knife-cut all the way up his right calf. And he was cold.
But luckily it wasn’t a bad attack. In less than ten minutes he was able to reach his inhalers, and he was only three minutes late joining the party.
BETWEEN 500 AND 2000 TIMES A DAY
Somewhere out there, a house or an apartment or a hotel or motel room: beautiful, comfortable, a living hell.
Stonkered or clutched or quite simply going insane, someone reaches for the phone and punches the most famous number on the continent: the ten nines that key you into Hearing Aid.
And talks to a blank though lighted screen. It’s a service. Imposing no penances, it’s kinder than the confessional. Demanding no fees, it’s affordable where psychotherapy is not. Offering no advice, it’s better than arguing with that son (or daughter) of a bitch who thinks he/she knows all the answers and goes on and on and on until you want to scream.
In a way it’s like using the I Ching. It’s a means of concentrating attention on reality. Above all, it provides an outlet for all the frustration you’ve struggled to digest for fear that, learning of it, your friends would brand you failure.
It must help some of the unhappy ones. The suicide rate is holding steady.
FLESHBACK SEQUENCE
Today, said the impersonal instruments, it would be advisable to waken the subject fully; too long spent in the trance-like state of recall that he had endured for the past forty-two days might endanger his conscious personality. The recommendation was not unwelcome to Paul Freeman. He was growing more and more intrigued by this man whose past had been mapped along so improbable a course.
On the other hand there was a diktat in force, straight from the Federal Bureau of Data Processing, which instructed him to produce a full report in the shortest possible time. Hence Hartz’s flying visit. And that had lasted a whole working day, moreover, when one might have expected the typical “hello-how-interesting-goodbye” pattern. Someone in Washington must have a hunch … or at any rate have gone out so far on a limb as to need results regardless of what they were.
He compromised. For a single day he would talk person-to-person instead of merely replaying facts from store in a living memory.
He quite looked forward to the change.
“You know where you are?”
The totally shaven man licked his lips. His gaze flickered around the stark white walls.
“No, but I figure it must be Tarnover. I always pictured rooms like this in that faceless secret block on the east side of the campus.”
“How do you feel about Tarnover?”
“It makes me want to be scared stiff. But I guess you dose me with something so I can’t.”
“But that wasn’t how you felt when you first came here.”
“Hell, no. In the beginning it seemed wonderful. Should it not to a kid with my background?”
That was documented: father disappeared when he was five, mother stood the strain for a year and vanished into an alcoholic haze. But the boy was resilient. They decided he would make an ideal rent-a-child: obviously bright, rather quiet, tolerably well mannered and cleanly in his habits. So, from six to twelve, he lived in a succession of modern, smart, sometimes luxurious company homes occupied by childless married couples posted in on temporary assignment from other cities. He was generally well liked by these “parents” and one couple seriously considered adopting him but decided against landing themselves permanently with a boy of another color. Anyhow, they consoled themselves, he was getting a terrific introduction to the plug-in life-sty
le.
He appeared to accept the decision with good grace. But several times after that, when left alone in the house for an evening (which was in fact often, for he was a good boy and to be trusted), he went to the phone—with a sense of dreadful guilt—and punched the ten nines as he dimly recalled seeing his mother do, his real mother, during the last terrible few months before something went wrong inside her head. To the blank screen he would pour out a nonstop volley of filth and curses. And wait, shaking, for the calm anonymous voice to say, “Only I heard that. I hope it helped.”
Paradoxically: yes, it did.
“What about school, Haflinger?”
“Was it really my name …? Don’t bother to answer; that was rhetorical. I just didn’t like it. Overtones of ‘half,’ as though I was condemned never to become a finished person. And I didn’t care for Nick, either.”
“Do you know why not?”
“Sure I do. In spite of anything it may say to the contrary on my record, I have excellent juvenile recall. Infantile too, in fact. I found out early about Auld Nick, the Scottish term for the devil. Also ‘to nick,’ meaning to arrest or sometimes to steal. And above all Saint Nick. I never did manage to find out how the same figment could give rise to both Santa Claus and Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of thieves.”
“Maybe it was a matter of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Did you know that in Holland Sinter Klaas brought gifts to children in the company of a black man who whipped the ones who hadn’t behaved well enough to deserve a present?”
“That’s news to me, and very interesting, Mr.—Mr. Freeman, isn’t it?”
“You were going to tell me how you remember school.”
“Should have known better than to try and strike up a brotherly chat. Yes, school. Much the same—the teachers turned over even faster than my temporary parents, and every new arrival seemed to have a new theory of education, so we never did learn very much. But of course in most respects it was a hell of a lot worse than—uh—home.”
The high walls. The guarded gates. The classrooms where the walls were lined with broken teaching machines, waiting for the engineers who never seemed to come, inevitably vandalized after a couple of days and rendered unrepairable. The stark corridors where so often sand greeted the soles with a gritty kiss, marking a spot where blood had been shed. The blood on the floor was his only once; he was clever, to the point of being considered odd because he kept trying to learn when everybody else knew the right thing to do was sit tight and wait to be eighteen. He contrived to avoid all the shivs, clubs and guns bar one, and his wound was shallow and left no scar.
The one thing he was not clever enough to do was escape. Authoritatively the State Board of Education had laid it down that there must be one major element of stability in the life of a rent-a-child; therefore he must continue at this same school regardless of where he currently happened to reside, and none of his temporary parents remained in the vicinity long enough to fight that ruling to the bitter end.
When he was twelve a teacher arrived named Adele Brixham, who kept on trying same as he did. She noticed him. Before she was ambushed and gang-raped and overloaded, she must have filed some sort of report. At any rate, a week or so later the classroom and the approach corridor were invaded by a government platoon, men and women in uniform carrying guns, webbers and fetters, and for a change the roll was called complete bar one girl who was in the hospital.
And there were tests which for a change could not be ignored, because someone with hard eyes and a holster stood by you to make sure. Nickie Haflinger sank all his frustrated lust for achievement into the six hours they lasted: three before, three after a supervised lunch eaten in the classroom. Even to visit the can you were escorted. It was a new thing for those of the kids who hadn’t been arrested yet.
After IQ and EQ—empathic quotient—and perceptual and social tests, like the regular kind only more so, came the kickers: laterality tests, double-take tests, open-dilemma tests, value-judgment tests, wisdom tests … and those were fun! For the final thirty minutes of the session he was purely drunk on the notion that when something happened which had never happened before one human being could make a right decision about the outcome, and that person might be Nickie Haflinger!
The government people had brought a portable computer with them. Little by little he grew aware that each time it printed out, more and more of the gray-garbed strangers looked at him rather than the other children. The rest realized what was going on, too, and that expression came to their faces which he had long ago learned to recognize: Today, after class, he’s the one we’ll carve the ass off!
He was shaking as much from terror as excitement when the six hours ended, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself from applying all he knew and all he could guess to the tests.
But there was no attack, no sanding along the streets between here and his current home. The woman in overall charge switched off the computer and jerked her head his way, and three men with guns drawn closed on him and one said in a kindly tone, “Stay right there, sonny, and don’t worry.”
His classmates drifted away, giving puzzled backward glances and kicking the doorposts with fury as they left. Later someone else was sanded—the term came from “S-and-D,” search and destroy—and lost an eye. But by then he had arrived home in a government limo.
It was carefully explained, to him and his “parents,” that he was being requisitioned in the service of his country under special regulation number such-and-such issued by the Secretary of Defense as authorized by clause number whatever of some or other Act of Congress. … He didn’t take in the details. He was giddy. He’d been promised that for the first time in his life he could stay where he was going as long as he liked.
Next morning he woke at Tarnover, and thought he had been transported halfway to heaven.
“Now I realize I was in hell. Why are you alone? I had the vague impression that when you woke up I’d find there were two of you, even though you were doing all the talking. Is there usually someone else in here?”
Freeman shook his head, his eyes watchful.
“But there has been. I’m sure of it. He said something about the way you regard me. Said he felt scared.”
“Yes, that’s so. You had a visitor, who sat in on one day’s interrogation, and he did say that. But he doesn’t work at Tarnover.”
“The place where you take the improbable for granted.”
“So to speak.”
“I see. I’m reminded of one of my favorite funny stories when I was a kid. I haven’t told it in years. With luck it’ll have gone far enough out of style not to bore you. Seems that an oil company, back in—oh—the thirties of last century would fit, wanted to impress a sheikh. So they laid on a plane when they were few and far between in that part of the world.”
“And when he was at ten thousand feet, perfectly calm and collected, they said, ‘Aren’t you impressed?’ And the sheikh said, ‘You mean it’s not supposed to do this?’ Yes, I know the story. I learned it from your dossier.”
There was a short pause full of veiled tension. Eventually Freeman said, “What convinced you that you were in hell?”
After the legs race, the arms race; after the arms race …
Angus Porter’s epigram was not just a slick crack to be over-quoted at parties. But few people realized how literally true the bon mot had become.
At Tarnover, at Crediton Hill, at some hole in the Rockies he had never managed to identify beyond the code name “Electric Skillet,” and at other places scattered from Oregon to Louisiana, there were secret centers with a special task. They were dedicated to exploiting genius. Their ancestry could be traced back to the primitive “think tanks” of the mid-twentieth century, but only in the sense that a solid-state computer was descended from Hollerith’s punched-card analyzer.
Every superpower, and a great many second- and third-rank nations, had similar centers. The brain race had been running for decade
s, and some countries had entered it with a head start. (The pun was popular, and forgivable.)
In Russia, for example, great publicity had long attended the Mathematical Olympiads, and it was a signal honor to be allowed to study at Akadiemgorodok. In China, too, the sheer pressure of population had forced an advance from ad hoc improvisation along predetermined Marxist-Maoist guidelines to a deliberate search for optimal administrative techniques, employing a form of cross-impact matrix analysis for which the Chinese language was peculiarly well adapted. Well before the turn of the century a pattern had been systematized that proved immensely successful. To every commune and small village was sent a deck of cards bearing ideograms relevant to impending changes, whether social or technical. By shuffling and dealing the symbols into fresh combinations, fresh ideas could automatically be generated, and the people at a series of public meetings discussed the implications at length and appointed one of their number to summarize their views and report back to Peking. It was cheap and amazingly efficient.
But it didn’t work in any Western language except Esperanto.
The U.S.A. entered the race on the grand scale very late. Not until the nation was reeling under the impact of the Great Bay Quake was the harsh lesson learned that the economy could not absorb disasters of even this magnitude—let alone a nuclear strike which would exterminate millions plural. Even then it took years for the switch from brawn to brain to become definitive in North America.
In some ways the change remained incomplete. At Electric Skillet the primary concern was still with weaponry … but at least the stress was on defense in its literal meaning, not on counterstrike or preemptive strategies. (The name, of course, had been chosen on the frying-pan-and-fire principle.)
Newer concepts, though, were embodied at Crediton Hill. There, top-rank analysts constantly monitored the national Delphi pools to maintain a high social-mollification index. Three times since 1990 agitators had nearly brought about a bloody revolution, but each had been aborted. What the public currently yearned for could be deduced by watching the betting, and steps could be taken to ensure that what was feasible was done, what was not was carefully deeveed. It was a task that taxed the skills of top cima experts to ensure that when the government artificially cut Delphi odds to distract attention from something undesirable no other element in the mix was dragged down with it.
