The Shockwave Rider

by John Brunner

  “Instant firestorm. Hotter than the surface of the sun.” The passenger gave a wry chuckle. “Still want to be closer when she blows?”

  The driver shook his head emphatically.

  “Nor me. Okay, there she goes. Swing around, head south, don’t hurry.”

  Later there was a bright reflection on the low gray cloud sealing in the city.

  WELL DOCUMENTED

  Dutifully, at each state border control post, Dr. Jake Treves presented a succession of documents to the inspectors: his own ID, his certificate of professional status, his permit as a research biologist to transport protected species interstate, and his manifest for this particular journey.

  Upon which the dialogue developed in predictable patterns.

  “You really got a mountain lion in this truck?”

  “Mm-hm. Safely sedated, of course.”

  “Say! I never saw a live mountain lion. Can I. …?”

  “Sure.”

  Invited to slide back the door over a peephole, the inspectors saw an elderly though still sleek male specimen of Felis concolor, drowsy but alert enough to curl his lip in annoyance.

  Also they smelt a strong feline stench. From an aerosol can. Very useful to induce big cats to breed in captivity.

  “Faugh! Sure hope for your sake you got air conditioning in your cab!”

  And for getting up the nose of nosyparkers.

  COUNCIL OF PERFECTION

  For a while Bagheera had padded around Ted Horovitz’s moss-green office, searching for Natty Bumppo, whose trace-scent was everywhere, but all the adult dogs were still on perimeter patrol. Now he way lying contentedly at Kate’s side while she gently scratched him behind the ears. Occasionally he emitted a purr of satisfaction at having been reunited with her.

  The problem of what to do when he discovered he was among more than a hundred dogs built to his own scale would have to wait.

  Looking around the company of local people—Josh and Lorna Treves, Suzy Dellinger, Sweetwater, Brad Compton—Ted said briskly, “Now I know Nick and Kate got a lot of questions for us. Before we get into that area, any of you got questions for them? Keep ’em short, please. Yes, Sweetwater?”

  “Nick, how long before they see through your doubletalk about a parthenogenetic worm?”

  Nick spread his hands. “I’ve no idea. People like Aylwin Sullivan and his top aides probably suspect the truth already. What I’m banking on, though, is … Well, there are two factors. First, I really did write one worm that’s too tough for them to tackle. Second, from their point of view, whatever this new gimmick may be it’s doing precisely what a parthenogenetic worm would do if such a thing could be written. Now there’s a recherché theorem in n-value mean-path analysis which suggests that at some stage in the evolution of a data-net it must become possible to extract from that net functional programs that were never fed into it.”

  “Hey, hey!” Brad Compton clapped his plump hands. “Neat, oh very neat! That’s what they call the virgin-birth theorem, isn’t it? And you’ve given them a nice subtle signpost to it!” He chuckled and clapped again.

  “That’s the essence. Not original. I stole the idea. The western powers, back in World War II, pioneered the trick. They set their scientists to building devices which looked as though they absolutely must do something, put them in battered metal cases, took them out on a firing range and shot them up with captured enemy ammunition. Then they arranged for the things to be found by the Nazis. One such bit of nonsense could tie up a dozen top research personnel for weeks before they dared decide it wasn’t a brand-new secret weapon.”

  A ripple of amusement ran around the group.

  “In any case,” Nick added, “it won’t make much odds how soon they decide they’ve been misled. They’d still have to shut down the net to stop what’s happening, wouldn’t they?”

  “No doubt of that,” Mayor Dellinger said crisply. “At latest count we have ninety-four sets of those Treasury files they changed the lock on, and over sixty of the FBI files, and—well, nothing that I know of has been copied to fewer than forty separate locations. And while the Fedcomps are tracing them we can be sure that people we don’t know about will be making copies in their turn.”

  “People we’d better not know about,” Lorna Treves muttered. Her husband gave a vigorous nod.

  “Yes, it’s a fraught situation. Granted, it’s what we always said we were preparing for, but … Oh well; the fact that it took us by surprise is just another example of Toffler’s Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order. Nick, how long before they conclude Kate’s home was empty when they bombed it?”

  “Again I can’t guess. I didn’t find time on the way here to stop off at a phone and inquire.”

  That provoked another unison smile.

  “In any case,” Ted put in, “I’ve been taking precautions. Right now, after the media showing of their press conference, Nick and Kate have about the most recognizable faces on the continent. So they’re going to be recognized. In one location after another and sometimes simultaneously. Oh, we can keep them hopping for several days.”

  “Days,” Josh Treves echoed. “Well, I guess it’s all been computed.”

  Brad nodded. “And, remember, we’re dipping the biggest cima pool in history.”

  There was a pause. Kate stirred when she realized no one else was about to speak.

  “Can I put a question, please?”

  Ted waved her an invitation.

  “It seems kind of silly, but … Oh, hell! I really want to know. And I think Nick does too.”

  “Whatever it is,” Nick said dryly, “I agree. I’m still operating ninety percent on guesswork.”

  “You want the story of Precipice?” Ted grunted. “Okay, I’ll tell it. But the rest of us better get back to work. Among other things the crisis is overextending the resources of Hearing Aid, and if we don’t cope …”

  “Brad can stay too,” Sweetwater said, rising. “He just came off shift, and I won’t have him back after the last call he handled.”

  “Rough?” Nick said sympathetically. The plump librarian swallowed hard and nodded.

  “See you later,” Suzy Dellinger said, and led the way out.

  Leaning back with his hands on his ample paunch and gazing at the shimmering green ceiling, Brad said, “Y’know, we wouldn’t be telling you this if you’d done as Polly Ryan suggested the day you arrived.”

  “What do you mean?” Kate demanded.

  “Come ask for a sight of our first edition of the ‘Disasterville U.S.A.’ series. How many of the monographs did your father have?”

  “Why, the full set of twenty!”

  “Which, of course, looked to him, as to everybody, like a nice round number. Our edition, though, contains a twenty-first. The one that no publisher would handle, no printer would set in type—the one that finally in desperation we printed ourselves and had ready for distribution, only one night a bomb went off in the shed where we’d stored our first ten thousand copies and they burned to ash. Obviously we were fighting a losing battle. So …” He sighed.

  Kate leaned forward tensely. “What was the twenty-first about?”

  “It accounted with names, dates, places, photostats of canceled checks—all the necessary evidence—for half a million of the four million dollars of public money which by then had gone astray and never reached the refugees who were supposed to benefit.”

  “You’re not telling the whole story,” Ted said in a brittle voice. “Kate, when you were first here you asked whether Claes College broke up because most of its members stayed at Precipice—remember?”

  She nodded, her face strained.

  “The answer’s yes. After the night when that shed was bombed, they didn’t have a choice. Brad and I helped to bury them.”

  There was a long empty silence. Eventually Kate said, “This last monograph—did it have a title?”

  “Yes. Prophetically enough, it was to be called Discovering the Po
wer Base.”

  The next silence stretched so long, the air felt as though it were being drawn out until it threatened to snap. At last Nick uttered a gusting sigh.

  “Hell, I never looked at it that way. I must be blind.”

  “I won’t argue,” the sheriff said, his expression very grave. “But you were not alone. Yet in retrospect … Figure it this way. You equip the population of a whole continent with unprecedented techniques: access to information, transportation, so much credit nobody need ever be poor again—assuming, that is, that it’s properly shared. Just about at the same time, you admit there’s no point in fighting any more major wars because there’s too much to lose and not enough to win. In Porter’s famous phrase, it’s time for the brain race.

  “But you’re in government. Your continuance in power has always depended on the ultimate sanction: ‘if you don’t obey we’ll kill you.’ Maybe you weren’t consciously aware of that basic truth. Maybe it only became clear to you, against your will, when you were obliged to try and work out why things were no longer ticking along as smoothly as they used to. As a result, naturally, of the shift in emphasis from weaponry to individual brilliance as the key national resource.

  “But brilliant individuals are cantankerous, unpredictable, fond of having their own way. It seems out of the question to use them as mere tools, mere objects. Almost, you find yourself driven to the conclusion that you’re obsolete. Power of your kind isn’t going to be viable in the modern world.

  “And then it dawns on you. There’s another organization exercising immense power which has always been dependent on individuals far more troublesome than those you’re being defeated by. In some cases they’re outright psychopathic.”

  “And this organization is equally determined to maintain its place in the sun,” Brad supplemented. “It’s equally willing to apply the final sanction to those who disobey.”

  Kate’s jaw dropped.

  “I think we got through,” Ted murmured.

  “Yes—yes, I’m afraid so.” Kate folded her hands into fists. “But I can’t bring myself to believe it. Nick … ?”

  “Since your apt was blown up,” Nick said stonily, “I’ve been prepared to believe anything about them. It was a miracle we had enough warning to clear the streets. Or did we … ? Ted, I’ve been meaning to ask. Was anybody injured?”

  The sheriff gave a sour nod. “I’m afraid some of the students didn’t take the warning literally. Ten were hurt. Two of them have died.”

  Kate buried her face in her palms, her shoulders shaking.

  “Go ahead, Nick,” Ted invited. “Spell it out as you see it. You yourself said yesterday: the truth shall make us free. That holds good no matter how abominable the truth.”

  “There was exactly one power base available to sustain the old style of government,” Nick grunted. “Organized crime.”

  Ted rose and set to pacing back and forth, back and forth. He said, “Of course that’s not exactly news. It must be fifty or sixty years since the traditional fortunes that used to put this party, then the other, into office either ran dry or came under the control of people who weren’t willing to play along. That left a vacuum. Into it criminals looking for ways to convert their huge financial resources into real power flooded like water through a breached dam. They’d always been intimately involved at city and state level; now was their chance to ascend the ladder’s final rung. It’s true that the syndicate’s first attempt at the presidency was pretty much of a bust. They didn’t realize how bright a spotlight could be shone on 1600 Pennsylvania. Moreover, they used tricks that were already well known, like laundering their bribe-money through Mexico and the Virgins. But they learned fast.”

  “They did indeed,” Brad said. “The moral of monograph 21 lies not in the half-million dollars we were able to trace, but in the rest of the money which we couldn’t. We know where it went—into political war chests—but we stood no chance of finding the evidence.”

  “In the context of the world nuclear disarmament treaty,” Ted muttered, “we were hoping for something better.”

  “I bet you were.” Nick was scowling. “Oh, I should have figured this out long ago.”

  “You weren’t so favorably placed,” Brad countered dryly. “Sharing a tent with ten refugees, without a change of clothing, decent food or even safe water to drink, it was easy to spot the resemblance between the federal agent and the mafioso. The fact that they were invariably on the friendliest terms merely underlined what we’d already realized.”

  “I should have got there by another route,” Nick said. “I should have wondered why behavioral science received such colossal government subsidies during the eighties and nineties.”

  “An important point,” Ted said with a nod. “Consistent with the rest of the pattern. The behaviorists reduced the principle of the carrot and the stick to the same kind of ‘scientific’ basis as the Nazis used for their so-called racial science. It’s not surprising they became the darlings of the establishment. Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferably terrified of what tomorrow may bring, and constantly being reminded that the man in the street must step into the gutter when his superiors deign to pass him by. Behaviorist techniques offered a means to maintain this situation despite the unprecedented wealth, literacy and ostensible liberty of twenty-first-century North America.”

  “If you recognize in Ted’s description a resemblance to Sicily,” Brad murmured, “that’s not purely coincidental.”

  Kate by now had recovered her self-control and was leaning forward with elbows on knees, listening intently.

  “The data-net must have posed a terrible threat to them,” she suggested.

  “True, but one they were able to guard against,” Ted answered. “Until now, I mean. They took every precaution. They built the Delphi system on the base provided by the existing gambling syndicates. They claim it was modeled on the stock market, but there was really very little difference, since by then gambling money was one of the two or three biggest sources of speculative investment. They took to leaving tribes alone when they went on the warpath, and the result was that the most ambitious kids, the ones with both rage and intelligence, wound up dead or crippled. That came naturally. Since time immemorial they’d been carefully isolating gang wars from involvement with the general public. Also they turned over the massive computer capacity designed to get men safely to and from the Moon to tracking a population moving to a new place at the rate of twenty percent a year. And so on. I don’t need to recite the whole list.”

  “But if they were so careful how did you—?” Kate checked and bit her lip. “Oh. Stupid of me. Hearing Aid.”

  “Mm-hm.” Ted dropped back into his chair. “Our computer capacity at Precipice has been adequate to dissect out patterns from the calls made to Hearing Aid for about—oh—sixteen or seventeen years. Now and then, moreover, we’ve had a single call that opened up a whole new area of investigation for us. Yours while you were at Tarnover, for example.” He nodded at Nick. “We’ve quietly followed up one lead after another, accumulating things like the keys needed to open Federal-secure data banks, convinced that ultimately a crisis must occur that would leave the public dazed and panicky. At which time they would want to be told where they were in the world. To further our design we created the—the underground railroad which we passed you along: friends, colleagues, associates, supporters, sympathizers, in literally hundreds of different professions.”

  “Paul Freeman put it neatly,” Nick said. “According to him, Precipice is a very big place once you learn to recognize it.”

  Ted chuckled. “Oh, yes! If you count in all those people whom we’ve created freemen, entitled to be defended by our defenses, our population totals five or six times what you find in a census return.”

  “We had models to copy,” Brad said. “The old hippie movement, for one. The eighteenth-century community of science. An organization
called Open Door which flourished in the middle of the last century. And so forth.”

  “Your foresight was fantastic,” Kate said warmly.

  “Pretty fair,” Ted acknowledged. “Above average, that’s for certain. But we never foresaw that the crisis would arrive in the shape of one young man!”

  “Not one,” Nick said. “Several. Tarnover deserter, life-style counselor, preacher, fencing hustler—”

  “Person,” Kate said firmly, and laid her hand over his. “And by the way, Ted!”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you for saving Bagheera.”

  “Wasn’t too hard. Did you talk to Jake Treves on the way here, find out why he was able to help out?”

  She shook her head. “He put us straight into the concealed compartment. We didn’t show our heads the whole time.”

  “Safer that way, I guess. Well, Jake is one of the people working on the problem of how to get our dogs to live to a ripe old age. It’s part of a wide program to find out how stress is linked to aging. When you get the chance you’ll enjoy talking to Jake, you know. Your father’s hypothesis—”

  He was interrupted. Distant in the night there was a sharp bark, followed by another and another.

  Brad cocked his head. “Sounds as though Nat caught the bomber we’re expecting.”

  Ted rose to his feet. “If so,” he grunted, “I wouldn’t care to be in his shoes.”

  AMONG THE FACTORS THAT CLIMAXED IN A BREAKDOWN OF GOVERNMENT

  1: Thank you for your inquiry concerning the whereabouts of Secret Service Operative Miskin A. Breadloaf. He is under intensive medical care at Precipice CA recovering from injuries sustained while resisting arrest by Sheriff Theodore Horovitz. He was in possession of six self-seeking catapult bombs, U.S. Army Code QB3, issued to him at 1010 PST yesterday from stocks held in the National Guard Armory at San Feliciano CA in pursuance of Confidential Presidential Directive #919 001 HVW, which states in full:

  “I’m sick of Hearing Aid. Get the buggers who run it and never mind who else you hurt.”