by Ted White
“Okay,” I said. “Now tell me about cycles.”
“It’s the only way to get around, you know what I mean?” the kid grinned. “They pass a law—this town is a landmark. No cars. No pods. No nothing except cycles—the kind you work with your feet.”
“You live here?” I asked. I didn’t see any cycle around that belonged to him.
“Naw, I live down south,” he said, waving his hand in the direction of most of Southern Pacifica. He shrugged. “But this is a nice place to visit.”
“Everybody who comes in here—do they all get cycles?”
“Most people. Some walk.”
“And if you wanted a cycle, how would you get one?”
“Oh, mebbe you buy one—or mostly you just hire one, by the day or the week, you know?”
“Most people who come here—they hire them?”
“Sure.”
“How many shops hire cycles?”
“’Round here? Just one.”
“I think I’d like to pay that shop a visit,” I said, climbing back to my feet.
“Sure thing,” he said. “‘Bout time,” he added with another grin.
The cycle shop was a pleasant little place just up the block in the opposite direction from that which we’d come. Old Spanish (or fake-Spanish) architecture provided a row of pillared arches, inside of which were grouped cycles in stands, and an old man in a relaxer. The old man wore a toga of loose-woven mesh, and not a lot else. The town fathers apparently held a casual attitude about such things. I stepped under another of the ubiquitous red-tile roofs, and he opened his eyes and looked up at me questioningly.
“Hey, Mr. Hoolihan, I bring you a customer,” my guide sang out.
“Eh, Mitchell,” the old man said. “Always in my siesta—you little smartass.” He sat up. “What can I be doing for you, huh?” He cackled. “Would you like to hire a cycle, or perhaps do you want to hire a cycle?” He laughed at his joke.
“Neither,” I said. Both gave me startled looks. What was this? A new joke?
“Yesterday,” I said. “Last night. A man and woman came here to rent cycles from you.”
“Ah, yes,” old Hoolihan said. “Yes?”
“You remember them, do you?” I asked.
”I remember that men and women have come to me to hire cycles, yes,” he said with evident pleasure. “All day long, and into the night. It is my business, and I have the monopoly here.”
“A specific man and woman,” I said with patient care. “A small woman, kind of bouncy”—but that wasn’t true any more—”and uhm, very relaxed and certain in her manners. Short-cropped, green-frosted hair.… The man looks like the kid, here, grown up. Tall. Almost seven feet tall.”
Almost reluctantly it seemed, the man nodded. A stray breeze poked its way into the open shop and stirred the fine white hair on his head at that same, precise moment, I felt a tingling.
“They were here,” the old man said. “They were here. I remember them.”
“They rented cycles?”
“One. A tandem.” Seeing the question on my lips, he added, “Intended for two to ride—I only have two in the shop.” He gestured and in the gloom I saw the second, two sets of handlebars, two seats, one behind the other, leaning against a rear wall, dusty and long unused. “Not many people want them. But those two—they saw them and they wanted one. Laughed a lot, they did.”
“How long did they, uh, hire it for?”
‘Told me a week. Lots of people do that, but stay longer, keep their cycles longer. No matter to me. I get paid. This is the only shop that hires cycles.”
“A week.…” I reflected. They weren’t just passing through, then. But where were they likely to have gone? Who did they know here? “Where’s your infomat?” I asked.
“Infomat? I don’t have no truck with those things,” he said. “You want one, you try the tube station.”
I guess I was staring at him a little strangely. He added, in a defensive tone, “This town is a landmark, mister. A place of the past. We don’t go for all those modern gadgets. You won’t likely find one anywhere else.”
“You want I should show you?” the kid asked. He’d been standing to one side, acting like a natural part of the scenery until now.
“Sure,” I said, although I really doubted I needed a local guide to find the tube station’s infomats. But I wanted to talk to the kid some more. “I might be back for a cycle,” I told the old man.
“Don’t let go all your three-wheelers,” the boy shouted back at him. He was laughing and grinning again.
I checked with the Bureau. A quick computer check hadn’t turned up any known friends or relatives in Santa Barbara when I’d first discovered that had been the fugitives’ destination. But such a search had been confined largely to names given on Bureau applications and questionnaires submitted by Dian each time she’d moved up a rank, and those forms had called simply for references and next of kin. Nobody had ever asked Dian to compile a list of her friends. And no one had checked to see if anyone she had-listed had since moved to Santa Barbara. So the in-depth research took a little longer. It required some human programming and innovation. Setting these wheels in motion had been one of my jobs before I’d left.
I might as well not have bothered, for all the results I got. The Bureau had turned up absolutely no leads at all. “We’re not a Missing Persons Bureau you know,” was about the way it was put to me. For which, you may read: “Look, Mac, I don’t know nothin’ about this job—so whad’ya expect, anyway?”
In any case, I thumbed the disconnect with more force than was necessary, and ended up mouthing a small imprecation the effect of which was not lost on my erstwhile companion.
“No good, huh?” he said.
“Mitchell—is that your name, Mitchell?—let us find a place once more to sit and talk,” I said.
Having nothing much else to do, and apparently fascinated by the oddity of my behavior, he assented cheerfully.
We ended up in the same little park, still deserted as before, and sat again on the same bench.
“You look to me as if you’re the sort who gets around,” I said for openers. “You see a lot.”
He nodded, grinning.
“Did you see the man and woman I described?” I asked.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “I saw them this morning. They was riding that cycle, you know, and wow! They sure was something!”
“How come you didn’t tell me that before?” I asked.
“How come you don’t ask me?” he replied, with flawless logic. It’s little endearing traits like that which make me so fond of computers.
“Any idea where they’re staying?” I asked. I knew already they weren’t checked into any public hostelry.
“I don’t know,” he said, pulling at his lower lip with his fingers. “Maybe up in the hills. I saw them going that way. But maybe they just riding around, you know?”
“If you were me,” I said, “and you wanted to find them, what would you do?”
“Oh, hell,” he said. “That’s easy. I’d just hang around for a while. They turn up. This is a small place, you know? Not like the city.”
I rented a three-wheeler—a tricycle, it’s called—and set out to see what I could of Santa Barbara.
It’s not a big town—Mitchell was right. Many centuries old, it seemed currently in a state of genteel decay, aided and abetted by its curiously languid inhabitants. I rode down to the waterfront—still where the original waterfront was, and surrounded, in a great U, by the enveloping arms of Pacifica reaching out on piers over the water to both the north and the south. The water was brackish and oily, and slapped against the seawall under the docks with the same air of helpless lassitude that affected the rest of the city. “Used to be lots nicer,” Mitchell, my guide, informed me, “before they built the city.” He waved his arms to take in the white man-made cliffs of the city on each horizon. “No drilling, either.” Squat black oil-drilling rigs worked thumpingly directly to
the west, a few miles out. Well, a mechanized society runs on oil. It seemed curious and ironic that this town, huddled in the arms of the modern world, had turned its back on progress and a sense of tomorrow to dream of yesterday. Even the sun seemed faded and fraught with nostalgic haziness. But perhaps that was just atmospheric pollution.
We circled around the town. There was little traffic; either the locals preferred a cooler time of day, or there simply weren’t that many people around. I favored the latter notion; it was easily accepted.
Time passed inexorably, and finally I’d had enough of aimless wandering and the pious guidebook inanities of my companion. And my legs ached. When I surrendered the tricycle to old Hoolihan, my thighs and calves hurt in hundreds of novel places and I felt that the simple act of standing upright was a brand new accomplishment. Then Hoolihan told me, as he handed back my credit card after refunding the unused portion of my-deposit, “Saw those people you were wanting.”
Adrenalin surged through my system. I glanced back into the rear of the shop. Where one dusty tandem cycle had stood there were now two. The second sparkled with chromework and plastic highlights, and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it the instant I’d come in.
“Told them a fella’ was looking for them,” the old man added.
“What did they say?” I demanded, wanting to pound the facts out the stubborn old fool.
“They just laughed,” he said, a twinkle in his eyes, “They just laughed to themselves.”
I stared out into the long shadows of the afternoon street. “Where’d they go?” I asked.
“As to that, I wouldn’t know,” he said. “They took a tube, I’d guess.” He paused and then dropped the bombshell he’d been saving. “All four of ’em,” he added.
Chapter Eight
I got home late that night—and the time differential which had worked in my favor earlier was now against me. I skipped my final meal and went straight to bed.
…where I dreamed …
I was sitting in a dark room. Others were sitting in a large circle around the edges of the room, their faces in shadow. We were linked, our hands joined. I felt the terrible thrill of the forbidden. A light began to glow in the center of the room. It began searching our faces, passing quickly over faces I did not know and could not remember. Then it stopped, directly across the circle from me. The face was Bjonn’s. His eyes were focused directly on me, even though I was certain I was not visible in the darkness, and I knew that the light must be blinding him. I stared into his eyes and knew that he could see me, was watching me. It frightened me, but it also held me transfixed. Then the light seemed to shift and I was aware that it was Bjonn’s eyes which were emitting the light: twin beams that were held on me, pinpointing me, making me visible to everyone in the room.
I was naked.
Worse: I was sitting on, attached to, a food-evacuation unit.
Someone handed me a meal-tube.
That’s when I woke up.
I was sweating profusely. I got up and looked at the time. Early morning, 04:12. I depolarized my windows and stared out. Moonlight and windows. Some were lit. Rutland is a bedroom community, but not everyone sleeps at night anymore. It’s an old instinct, one of the oldest, but in a complex civilization you can’t just shut down the machinery after the sun sets: After all, in other parts of the world it may be high noon. Life goes on, the world goes on, twenty-four hours out of twenty-four.
I used the ’fresher, and felt a little better. My stomach complained—I’d treated it to a pretty lopsided schedule—so I went into the meal-cubicle, attached myself, sat down and reached for the tube.
And stopped.
I was sweating again.
The dream: what did the dream mean? What was going on inside me? Something was messing me up. I pulled the tube to my lips, savoring the old familiar taste and feel, the plastic nozzle with its imbedded tooth marks, the big teat with its vari-flavored algae—and I had no appetite.
I sat there until my thighs went numb, and then decided in favor of expediency. I dropped a pill to start things moving, thumbed the evacuator to internal irrigation, flushed my system, and restocked myself. It was mechanical and joyless and I kept remembering my dream. Afterward, I had to stare at the menu on the wall to see what I’d had. My mouth just tasted sour.
I went back to my bed, lay in it for a while, and stared at the aimlessly moving pictures on the backs of my eyelids. Finally I got up again. If I was going to keep running through the details of my work, I might as well do it in an organized fashion. I sat down at the infomat, punched the code for my office recordostat, and started dictating additional prelims.
Dian and Bjonn had flown to Pacifica, and gone up to Santa Barbara. They arrived late in the evening—they had left Megayork soon after I’d run out on them; I already knew that. Okay, they took out a cycle. (Why didn’t we have a record of that before? Because Dian had simply left her roommate’s card with the shop as deposit. But that implied—)
In a strange little town at night, with a cycle and no usable credit (they had Bjonn’s card, maybe, if he hadn’t already disposed of it—but they hadn’t used it. Dian knew how instantly traceable credit use was. She was Level Seven, wasn’t she?), it pointed to one obvious fact. They, meaning Dian, knew someone who lived there, knew someone well enough, or hoped she did, to drop in on him/her/them unexpectedly, without advance warning.
And the next day there were four of them. Four laughing, happy people, looking like people in love, radiant and joyful—and somehow alien.
He’d gotten to them, to Dian’s friends. Bjonn had seduced them, as he had Dian. First just Bjonn. Then Bjonn and Dian. Now Bjonn, Dian, and two more. It was snowballing.
Bjonn was a point of contagion.
It was getting out of hand. It wasn’t just a simple disappearance any more. It was something bigger, something strange with ominous overtones.
Something which wouldn’t let me sleep. ,
I coded into Credit Clearance again, and had a search made. Object: Santa Barbara couple, four fares on the tube out of Santa Barbara, destination unknown, for a one-hour period in the late afternoon. It wasn’t really a narrow enough criterion, but it might find me something.
It didn’t. No one with an established residence in Santa Barbara had bought four tube trips out in the right time slot.
Where had I gone wrong?
Maybe the couple didn’t have an established residence in Santa Barbara? Maybe they had a residence somewhere else, and were only extended visitors themselves?
Make it just four fares on one card, then, for the appropriate time slot.
Nothing.
I resisted the urge to do something destructive to the infomat, and told myself several times that it was simply a tool—a useful, if less than intuitively gifted, tool. It would tell me only the truth—and it would answer only the questions I asked.
Two cards, then. One his, one hers. Two cards, four fares. Narrow it down a little: two cards issued to a contracted couple. (Or was that cutting it too fine? What if they weren’t contracted?) I pulled three replies on that. I had a fast biographical research made on each of the three couples.
I hadn’t thought the traffic out of Santa Barbara had been that heavy. But then, I’d forgotten that the town was a tourist spot. I’d overlooked the obvious: a man and his wife and their two, state-approved, children. Or rather, to be more exact, three men, three wives, and three sets of two children.
So Dian’s friends—relatives—weren’t contracted to each other.
I thought about doing a make on each and every individual who had used his card for himself and someone else. I had the time slot right. There had to be a finite number, I knew that.
Two thousand, eight hundred thirty-six.
I had it verified, and there it was; 2,836 people had used that tube station at that hour for themselves and a guest. I shook my head in disgust. When I looked up I saw the sunlight streaming in through my bedroom windows. Sti
ll depolarized. I looked at the time: 05:18 hours. And the sun was already up.
Santa Barbara must be Southern Pacifica’s very own Central Park, for God’s sake. I wondered where they’d kept themselves hidden all day, and then snorted in disgust. Every damned one of them would have to be verified. The data wouldn’t take long; it was the idea of going over it all, trying to see where connections could be established, doing the human part of the job—
I set it up for printout in my office, and went back into the bedroom, pausing only to dim the windows and reset the alarm. Then I managed to go back to sleep. This time I slept soundly.
I spent the afternoon running cross-checks on my list of potentials. The idea was to eliminate as many as possible with the coarse comb before resorting to the fine one. The easiest method was an immediate check on their whereabouts. I had a strong suspicion that the two I was looking for would also have disappeared. Of course, a proportion of those who had been in Santa Barbara were vacationers, tourists, or otherwise not presently tied down to anything from which they’d be immediately missed. But I managed to account for 1,103 people that way. It was a definite step in the right direction.
By late that afternoon, I had my list narrowed down to thirteen.
Not one of them checked out on any list Dian had ever made, but I simply had to accept that. Three were from Tokyo, and that looked promising. Dian had lived in Tokyo. She must have known people there who didn’t appear on her lists.
I decided to dwell on those three.
Two were young and in their twenties: Robert Linebarger and Karilin Mills. The third, one Arthur Ficarra, was in his eighties. I-decided to eliminate Ficarra. He was on a retirement tour, anyway. He’d worked for the Bureau of Environmental Control—a garbageman.
Both Linebarger and Mills had taken the tubes north to San Luis Obispo, where Pacifica officially ends and the city tubes terminate. There Linebarger had hired a car. Mills hadn’t used any credit there. Linebarger had taken a car with seats for four.
