by Ted White
“Is he in any kind of trouble?”
“Nope. Just rubbernecking, I gather.”
“And you think I ought to be with him.”
“Well, that’s your job, isn’t it?”
“He’s a big boy. You should’ve seen him handling the media.”
“I did.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Do as you think best, son.”
“I’ll get down there,” I promised.
The screen blanked out. For some reason I always feel chastened after one of Old Man Tucker’s little spiels.
Chapter Three
I punched our Restricted Code into the infomat, and asked for Monitor Central.
When Bjonn went through Bio-Customs on the Moon, he received the full treatment—although of course his five months or so on the Longhaul II served as a sort of quarantine. Once checked out, he had been given a small pellet of an extremely weak radioactive isotope. It had been surgically inserted under his skin in his back, just below his right shoulder blade. He probably didn’t know it was there; they’d have been sticking things in him for half an hour or more by then. The pellet was a tattletale—it would activate automatic monitors wherever Bjonn went.
It could be argued that this was a fundamental invasion of the man’s privacy. But I think I could make an equally valid case for the notion that it preserved his real privacy. As long as machines can watch, human beings will not. Monitoring a man’s movements can be the dullest job in the world, and I think if I was faced with the choice, I’d rather the eyes which surveyed me in my public and private actions were mechanical, and not human and knowing. More important, Bjonn required watching, as much for his own protection as for anything. As the first representative of man’s first interstellar colony, he was an enormously important and valuable person. He required protection. In an earlier age, when fewer people clogged the cities, he would have required a phalanx of bodyguards, and his fame would have guaranteed him a mobbing every time he ventured out into public. He could hardly have enjoyed himself; his “freedom” would have been minimal indeed.
But this is the modern age, the Age of Anonymity. His image had been broadcast over the entire world; and was on recall for printout at any infomat. Ergo, no one really needed to “see” him in the flesh, and few indeed would even recognize him, so accustomed are we all to the anonymity of the teeming masses we move about in. Over one billion people live in Greater Megayork these days: compute the odds, if you will, of your likelihood of bumping into Bjonn.
Thus, the Monitor System: a way of keeping easy, automatic, unrestrictive tabs on the man. A way of letting him enjoy his freedom without danger. And a way for me to find him, now.
Shortly I had his present coordinates, a graph of past movements, and a projection based thereon. I keyed in a printout, tore off the sheet of plastic, and all but bolted from my office.
Dian poked her head out of her office as I rushed past. “Trouble?”
“Come along, why don’t you?” I suggested. “Unless you’re busy?”
In the down lift she asked, “Why the rush?”
“Our man is out on the town,” I replied.
“Aha! Is that bad?”
“Yes and no. Not really—I can’t imagine him unable to handle himself.” I pointed at the printout still in my fist. “He’s just ambling along, looking to see what there is to see.”
“Around the Stiles Arms?” Dian laughed. “Not much!”
“Not if you’re used to hundred-story buildings, podlines, park strips, and all the rest, no,” I agreed. “But he isn’t.”
“But you don’t think he’s in any sort of trouble, do you?”
“No, but I can see where I might be, if something did happen. Ergo, I’m in a rush.”
I put her into a Bureau pod, slid in beside her, and punched out the coordinates of the point Bjonn had last been near.
“You haven’t told me why you want me along,” Dian said. The pod zipped out of the holding lane, and into the traffic stream. We were less than fifteen miles away; we’d be there in minutes.
“I’d like a woman’s opinion,” I said, hesitating a little.
“A woman’s opinion? Of Mr. Bjonn, you mean?”
“Yes,” I said, more or less thinking out loud. “We’ll say you’re my secretary—and, uhh, you wanted to meet him. First man back from Farhome, all that. You’ve seen a recording of him?”
“On the morning show,” she said. “Live and direct—solid color, you know?” Again, the bubbly laughter in her voice that had always warmed me to her.
“Think you’ll have any trouble playing the awestruck female bit?” I asked.
She gave me a lingering smile. “Now, how’d you guess?”
* * *
We found Bjonn sitting on a bench on the park strip only five blocks from his hotel. An old man wrapped in a trundle-suit sat at the other end of the bench, feeding pigeons from a large bag. The messy birds were fluttering all around the man and the bench, and went swirling into the air when we walked up.
“Don’t you know that’s illegal?” I said, flashing my badge—impressive, so long as you didn’t read what it said—at the old man. “Pigeons breed disease, and they create filth.”
The old man looked up at me. “How’s that, now?” he said. His hand dipped into the bag and he scattered bits of dried algae or something on my legs and feet. I kicked a pigeon away from my ankle.
“Leave him be, Tad,” Dian said, laying a hand on my arm. “He’s wired for sound. Can’t you see?” And then I noticed the flesh-colored bits of plastic in his ears that were feeding him a constant diet of pop sounds in mind-numbing aural stereo. He couldn’t hear a word I said.
Bjonn had been watching us in silence. Now I turned to him to introduce Dian, and he said, “Am I violating my parole?”
Dian laughed, and I put a brief smile on my lips for him. “You’re not under guard,” I said. “But you are unused to a city this size, I imagine.”
“It stretches for miles in every direction, I’m told.”
I nodded, and slipped in an introduction for Dian, “my secretary,” who had been dying to meet him. He gave her a smile that lit his face like the sun.
“I’ve just been sitting out here, trying to encompass it all,” Bjonn told us. We began strolling down the strip, away from the old man and his pigeons. “These monstrous buildings.…” He gestured with his arm at the buildings which lined each side of the strip and then pointed at the narrow band of yellowish sky overhead. “And the sky so far above. I feel that at any moment they will all topple down upon me; I feel their enormous weight.”
It was warm, out here in the open, and I wasn’t dressed for it. I didn’t have nose filters either, and the smell was vaguely annoying. I didn’t normally spend much time out here. “I had expected you would be tired, after your long day,” I said, “or I would have offered to show you around the town a bit.”
“I slept on the shuttle,” Bjonn said, “when we were, ah, berthed. Very pleasant.” We had spent almost all our free time in the lounge—but I didn’t bring that up.
“‘Well, I’m tired. My day started with the shuttle flight up,” I said. “Perhaps you’d enjoy seeing some of our nighttime entertainments with Dian?”
He glanced from me to Dian, his smile deepening. “If the young lady has no objections?”
“Oh, none at all,” she said. “I’d love it.” Either she was a fine actress or she was giving him a better reaction than she ever had me. “I wish you’d tell me about your home—Farhome, I mean….”
I left them there, happy—I thought—to get back down to traffic level and a pod. Dian was a Level Seven Investigator—my own rank. Bjonn would be in capable hands. So—why was I annoyed?
I took a high-speed tube to Vermont. I lived in Rutland, which is still a small city by modern definitions, but has a direct tube into Megayork. My aptrooms were located on the top floor of a ten-story coop, and not only is the sun closer and the air clea
ner, but I can see green mountains from my bedroom window—if it isn’t polarized (which it usually is).
I stripped, took a mist in the ‘fresher, and slipped into my meal chamber for the total pleasure of a complete dinner and evacuation. Then, cleansed, drained and refilled, finally at some sort of peace with the world, I went to bed. The events of the day slipped off me like an easily shed skin, and forgot the whole troubling mess.
It was with me again when I awoke, though.
My alarm clock, having sensed that the sun would strike me full-face and that the day was clear and not overcast, had depolarized my window. I turned my back, but the back of my neck and my shoulders grew uncomfortably warm. I had my usual pre-waking dream of being trapped in a burning room.
Finally I turned over, stared at my light-washed window, squeezed my eyes shut again, red and green afterimages still dancing under my lids, and groped my way from the bed to the door, where the clock and window control are. The light died to a blessed underwater greenish murk, and I peeped my eyes open.
Standard ritual.
When are they going to invent a clock that will wake a man up painlessly?
After my morning meal and ablutions, I dressed and punched the recall button on my infomat. No messages. A nice day, according to Eastern Seaboard Weather Central: average temperature-humidity only comfort-plus-five-degrees, smog index of .25, prevailing winds from the northeast at five miles an hour with gusts to fifteen. No messages; that meant Dian had encountered no problems the night before. Well, that was good, anyway. No news is good news. Yeah.
I stared at the console for about five minutes, and then got up and went over to my storage room.
I went into my storage room about three times a year, on the average, although it had probably been six months since I had last used it.
Actually, it was intended as a second bedroom for the apt, but I had converted it into a virtual replica of the den in which I’d spent my teens. The dimensions weren’t exactly the same—the storage room was larger—but I hadn’t been after a faithful copy, right down to the last nick in the wallplastic. And, since a great deal of my time during the years of my boyhood had been spent in both that original den and many others before it, in a sense the storage room was a four-dimensional replica spanning the years of my growth from age six—when I’d left my parents—through mid-adolescence.
The walls were papered with posters and pinups. Astronomical charts and photos covered one entire wall. A replica model of the Star Voyager hung from the ceiling, turning slowly in the vagrant air currents. Captain Lasher beamed a merry salute to me from the niche opposite the door.
They weren’t all originals—I’d lost many of those. But those I no longer had I could still easily buy, most of them on the open market and a few from antiquarian collectors, although most of my boyhood junk was of too recent vintage to interest a collector.
I walked into the room, let the door slide shut, and I was standing again in my own past. The room was bigger—the ceiling was higher—and the scale nearly matched that of my den when I had myself seen the world as a much larger place. Entering that room was like entering my younger self. I didn’t do it often.
I went over to my bunk and sat down on it. The foam was old and no longer very resilient; its lumps corresponded to my younger body, and the place where I sat now had been hollowed out long ago. I stared moodily up at the Star Voyager.
Her sister ship, the Deep Space, had set out at the same time she had, bound for the planet we even then were calling, hopefully, Farhome. An earlier series of unmanned probes had penetrated Farhome’s system, orbited Farhome and sent back their data. They said man had a chance on that planet. The Deep Space, loaded with one thousand people and all the implements of necessary technology, had set out soon after the probe returned. They made it. The Star Voyager did not. There was, and is, no record of what happened to it. The Eternal Hope is still embarked on its journey, and we will not know its fate within my lifetime.
What kind of people must have volunteered for those long and dangerous journeys, so long ago? How must they have felt, entrusting themselves to a primitive cold-sleep and the protection of untested machines? Those hardy few were our last pioneers. They were selected for genetic soundness, for survival talents, put through mazes of tests in order to prove themselves, five hundred men and five hundred women, all young, fit, virile, ready and willing to make and populate a new home on a new world.
They didn’t all survive the trip; we knew that now. (Cold-sleep has been discredited by modern science. How did those star-voyagers beat the average failure rate of 42 percent?) But most of them did; enough of them did. Four of them were Bjonn’s grandparents.
I looked at that great and monstrous fat globe of a starship hanging in the center of my den, felt all my old awe and wonder and worship for the men and women who had made a journey in a ship so much like it—and knew a violent, twisting pain in my gut at the thought of Bjonn, the offspring of those people.
They were the impossible ideals, suffering birth, life, and death before my time. Bjonn was reality; the reality I had been denied.
It was at that moment that I first learned of my hatred for the man.
Perhaps I should have had myself disqualified from the project then. But, as I turned it over in my mind and viewed it from as many angles as I could then comprehend, it did not seem to me that my personal reaction-to Bjonn should enter into my professional relationship with him. What was wanted was my professional opinion—not my personal like or dislike. There were two separate and distinct factors here. The first was that I was bitterly and hatefully jealous of the man—for all the things he was and could be that were forever lost to me. The second was the alien quality I had sensed in him—a quality I recognized with certain awareness long before I had learned to dislike the man. It was that quality I was probing for. It made no difference whether I liked the man or hated him. And as for the way I felt about him—I was self-aware. I knew my own limitations. I’d seen my own file, my own personality profiles. No one had ever hidden my disqualifications from me. I knew my reaction for what it was, and I could handle it. I hoped.
When I sat down at my office desk, I found a message in my infomat; Dian wanted to see me. I wondered why she didn’t just pop in, as she so often had, but I rose and went down the hall to her office, knocked, and entered.
Tucker was sitting behind her desk. Dian was at the window, her back to me.
“Good morning,” I said. “You both look serious. What’s happened?”
“You tell him,” she said, without turning.
Tucker looked up at me, and then gestured to the spare chair. “We’re dealing with an unusual man,” he said, all traces of his drawl gone. “I went through your prelim notes on him. You’re on to something, all right. Last night he propositioned Dian.”
I glanced at her. The back of her neck was red, and her shoulders were flushed.
“Not for bedtime fun?” I asked. I had wondered if that might happen. Dian had repulsed me quietly, nicely, very firmly, the one time I had suggested it to her.
“No. For a meal.” Tucker had not smiled.
I said something profane and emphatic, then apologized to Dian. It had been unthinkingly appropriate. Then I added, “But he knew damned well—!”
“Of course he did. We know that,” Tucker said. “But he went right ahead.”
“What did he say, Dian?” I asked. “I mean, did he pretend ignorance again, or—?”
“No,” she said. Her voice was low and muffled. “No, he was perfectly honest about it. He told me that you—that you told him—”
“I don’t get it,” I said, shaking my head. “It makes no sense.”
“He—he said it was a customary ritual on Farhome. He wanted to share it with me….”
“A ‘customary ritual,’ you say?”
“That’s what he said.” She sounded on the verge of tears.
“I think our problem is one of communicati
on,” Tucker said. “It’s pretty obvious that not only are meals handled differently on Farhome—it’s a primitive planet, after all—but that they mean something very different there as well.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well, son,” he said, the corners of his mouth twisting down with his familiar drawl, “that’s a question I’m sure we’d all like answered.”
Tucker stood up, “It’s your baby,” he said to me. “You’ve rung Dian in on it, and I’m not complaining, but just you remember where the responsibility lies.”
“Thanks a lot,” I mumbled, shortly after he’d closed the door.
I looked back at Dian. “Why don’t you come over here and sit down,” I suggested, an idea starting to take shape as I said it. “It’s okay—we’ve both gone through it now, that’s all.” I tried a small chuckle on for size; it was meant to sound comforting.
She turned and I saw that her eyes were glistening. She nodded and sat down in her chair at the desk.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think anything like this would come up, you know, or I’d….”
“I know,” she said. “It’s not your fault. It’s not his fault, either.”
“‘His’? You mean Bjonn?”
“He wants something, Tad; I wish I knew what it was. The look he gave me just pinned me to the floor and made me want to bawl like a baby. He was so—so disappointed.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was that way with-me, too. Well, maybe not that extreme, but…. Uh, otherwise, how’d you hit it off?”
A little of the old sparkle came back to her eyes then. “Oh, we had a marvelous time! A concert at the Consenses, a live show in Old Manhattan! Everything was just grand, until we’d come back to his suite and he, he wanted to—you know. It was so much fun, being with him. He’s like a newborn baby when it comes to all those dull old things we take for granted. And yet, he’s so much a man.
“Do you want to see him again?” I asked.
“I—don’t know,” she said. “I told him I would, but….”
“Listen, “I said. “There’s something about the man that is definitely number five, you know what I mean? Off-key. This whole emphasis on meals, on—sharing food. He knows it isn’t done. He has no excuses left. And yet he’s still pressing the point.”
