by Ted White
“Sir?”
“Let’s start with point one,” he said, bringing his hands into view and ticking off his fingers. “Point One: you have not established the slightest actual, factual link between this Linebarger and the other one—Mills?—much less a link between them and your fugitives. Why, you haven’t even found holograms of the two of them for confirmation by your cycle-shop man—and he’s the only one who has seen all four of them together, as far as you know. Okay, point two. Without confirming their connection to this Linebarger, you’ve gone and turned a car-rental agency upside-down. You’ve spent good Bureau credit on renting a car for yourself, even! And you’ve operated on the assumption that this Linebarger, in turning his car over to somebody else, must be the party you want. That’s points three, four and five, at least. Point Six is that you’ve assumed Linebarger and party—if they’re the ones you want—are still in the immediate area of, what is it? Big Sur? If they are your people, do you think they’d lay as open a trail as that? Count on it: if they told your Tanner kid they were staying there, it was so he could pass that info along. By now they could be hundreds of miles away.”
“How, sir? Both Dian and Bjonn have no credit—it’s been canceled. And I put a Temporary Hold on both Mills’ and Linebarger’s credit.”
“You what? On whose authority?”
“On the Bureau’s, sir.”
“Oh, fine.” He smote his brow in a fine gesture of defeat. “Just fine. And how would you like a civil suit slapped on you—on us?”
“I don’t think it is that likely, sir—not if they’re our people.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I have a pretty strong hunch.”
“Totally unconfirmed.”
“Okay,” I said, suddenly very mad. “I’ll get confirmation, then!” And I disconnected.
I was still sitting in the infomat booth, figuring out the logistics of my next set of moves—drive down to Pacifica, or back to Monterey and hop down? Speed versus personal pleasure, of which I had thus far enjoyed relatively little. And what about the kid, anyway?—when the infomat buzzed me.
It was Tucker again.
He spoke as if nothing had happened, as if my last outburst had never taken place. “I’ve sent a local man to that shop, with holograms,” he said. “If these are our people, what do you plan next?”
“Only one thing I can think of,” I said. “Bring in men and conduct a house-to-house search.”
He gave me a look of incredulity. “Surely you jest,” he said.
“I’m sure you have a better plan,” I said.
He said nothing.
“So far I think I’ve done pretty well,” I said. “But I’m just one man, and I have my limitations. I think we’ve about reached them. I’ve pinpointed their whereabouts for you to my own certainty. Now I pass the buck.”
When he spoke, his voice had none of its former bark and bite. There was no trace of his drawl, either. Suddenly he sounded very tired. “We’ve reached a dead end,” he said. “I’m going to ask you to abandon the case.”
“Sir?” I asked, my brain reeling from this abrupt about-face.
“We’ve pushed it further than I’d expected,” he said. I noted that “we” in my mental jotbook. “I’ve taken it this far on my own authority. I can’t buck it higher, and I can’t push for anything like what it needs now—what you’ve suggested. There’s no real crime on the books, Dameron. We had very slim provocation for going this far. To take it further—to get warrants for Invasion of Privacy, which is what we’d need to conduct a search—it’s just more than I can swing. It’s over, can’t you see that? You’ve done an excellent job. But there’s pressure from above; you’re needed on other work assignments. I can’t keep you on this any longer. I had to go out on a long limb with Conners, and it’s about to give way.” I’d never heard him sound like that.
“What about the man in the cycle shop?” I asked. “What if he does confirm Linebarger and Mills? What then?”
“We’ll kick it up to the next level, and see what the big boys have to say,” Tucker said. “But I don’t expect much, and neither should you.”
Leroy Tanner was leaning against the side of the car. “What’s going to happen?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, letting the bitterness cut into my voice. “It’s being dropped.”
“I don’t it” he said. I hadn’t told him any of the background—why we wanted this Linebarger—anyway.
“You don’t have to—replied. “Get in. Time to go.”
“Okay,” he said, sounding as though he thought I must be blaming him for the whole thing.
“Relax,” I told him. “It’s not your worry. It’s a nice day, and you’re getting an extra ride out of it—for free. I might even swing that credit on deposit for you, too.”
“Yeah?” he said, perking up considerably.
For a moment, I felt a little better, a little happier. I took a deep breath, the air scented with evergreen suddenly alive in my throat, my lungs. I shrugged the weight from my shoulders. What the hell. It wasn’t my problem any more. I’d done my part of the job—I’d done more than had been expected of me. I was okay.
It was while we drove back up toward Monterey that the thought came to me that Tucker had known it would probably end like this all along. He’d known what would most likely happen—and he’d flayed me to get it this far before it stopped. Suddenly I hated the man. Damn his corrosive soul, anyway!
PART TWO
THE FURIES
Chapter Ten
In the late fall the green mountains of Vermont are a subdued brown. In Megayork the skies are gray and bleak, and matched my mood. I picked up Ruth Polonyck at the hencoop in Westport where she still lived, sharing a bunkroom with five other uncontracted girls, and took her to a party in Old Manhattan. Ruth had been brought into our department at the Bureau soon after the fuss over Dian Knight’s untimely departure had died down, and I had the feeling that, although she was still a Level Five, she was being groomed to take Dian’s place.
I’d had some time to brood about things, and uppermost in my mind had been a question, still unsatisfactorily unanswered, about my boss’s motivations.
I’m a civil servant. I put in for the job when I read the notice of an opening, took a battery of tests, and in spite of them I got the job. My advancement since then has been a slow and measured crawl, but it has been largely a function of my own aptitudes, talents, and personality. Which is fine, as far as it goes—and if I never exceeded Level Seven, I would at least have earned the right to remain on that level the rest of my working life, barring disasters of course. (At the time, I’d thought the whole Bjonn-Dian thing was a disaster. Perhaps I was right, but… a disaster for whom?)
When you rise into the higher levels, however, it is less a factor of your test results and automatic promotions. Up there, in the stratified levels, you come face to face with the fact that a government, no matter how entrenched and bureaucratic, is still a basically political animal. And your job becomes a matter of politics—both polite and dirty.
I always assume everyone I meet thinks as I do, wants what I want, and does as I do—until I’m proved wrong. If coincidence conspires to shield me from the truth, I will go on regarding my acquaintances and associates in that light for the longest time, blithely unaware of their true natures.
This man, Tucker: I took him at face value. I needed to. He fulfilled a need in me that I wasn’t even aware of then. I looked at him pretty much as I guess every boy looks on his father—part man, part god, someone you want to impress, someone whose judgment you never question, someone you assume reciprocates your feelings toward him to the extent that he, too, loves you.
But every boy who knows his father after he’s six must—I assume—inevitably come to that moment of disillusionment when he finds his father’s feet of clay. There comes a time when he can no longer escape the fact that his father is not all-knowing, all-wise, or all-loving. He find
s out his father is living a separate life, and one which is not exclusively devoted to his son. He finds out his father is human.
Some sons, I’m told, never forgive their fathers that.
I never knew my father after the age of six. But I had Tucker.
Just what was Tucker’s real relationship with Dian Knight? Had there been something between the two of them? Or just the desire for something, on Tucker’s part? You can see how my mind shied from the notion: Did Dad have an itch for his son’s girlfriend? But of course Tucker wasn’t really my father—and there was no real reason he shouldn’t have had his own interest in Dian. She wasn’t contracted to me or anything.
Tucker had thought a lot of Dian. Hindsight really helps, I’ve found. Little things I hadn’t noticed, like the way Dian rose so readily through the ranks, the way Tucker seemed to be in closer contact with her than the rest of us—the fact that when Dian was upset about Bjonn’s initial proposition, it was Tucker (who has his office a thousand miles away) I found with her, in her office. She should have contacted me—it was my case. She should’ve left a message with me, one I’d have gotten upon awaking. Instead she called Tucker, brought him east on the run, and left the message in my office almost as an afterthought.
Then there was the way Tucker had called me, the next morning. He was still in Megayork. Why? How had he discovered Dian’s disappearance so quickly? Had they made arrangements to meet—an arrangement she had not kept?
Had they met, clandestinely, before? Could that explain the apparent lack of men in Dian’s life? Had she been seeing her boss on the sly? Or was I starting to build something out of nothing?
There was no mistaking Tucker’s reaction at her disappearance. He had betrayed more than just a superior’s concern for an underling. If he hadn’t punched so many of my own emotional buttons I would have instantly recognized that.
I brooded. And when Tucker brought in Ruth Polonyck, only lately removed from the Public Care rolls, it was a little more obvious to me than it might have been to someone else. Ruth was Dian Knight all over again. Why, Ruth even looked a little like Dian: same pert little figure, same bouncy, exuberant personality. She was cute, like Dian—not as bright, maybe, but winsome.
So I sat back with a cynical smile and watched Tucker conduct a new protégée into the department. I sat back for the first month and I watched, brooding all the while.
Then I struck back with a deliberate campaign to take Ruth away from him.
During that first month a number of the men in our department made plays for Ruth. They rarely even got a first date. No one got a chance to encore. Looking for it, I found the whole pattern very obvious. She would go through the motions to a limited extent, but her interests were elsewhere. I knew where.
So I pitched my campaign differently. I found ways to include her in my routine assignments, ways which accented the (ho, ho) glamour of my job, and kept her out from underfoot during the dull (more common) parts. I became a Fun Fellow To Be With, a fellow worker with whom she could share a sense of common adventure. We were Partners In Adversity.
Tucker lived in Great Lakes, and he had a family to look after. He couldn’t drop in on Ruth every evening—not even, I decided, as often as once a week. She was chafing for companionship. Young, nubile, and Tucker had gotten her juices flowing; it was inevitable that she would turn to me. At first I was the fill-in man. Then I suspected Tucker and I had reversed roles. I was her primary interest; Tucker was the fill-in.
It wasn’t that I really enjoyed what I was doing that much. I felt a cynical pride in my accomplishment—my way of striking back at The Old Man—but I didn’t really like Ruth that well. The ease with which she had swallowed my line earned for her a certain measure of my contempt. She hadn’t even any great loyalty to Tucker! But most important, every time I looked at her a certain way, the light on her face just right, I would see a subtle distortion of Dian’s face. And that bothered me.
The party we were going to on this particular night was in a luxury tower in Old Manhattan, down near the tip of the island. The lift ran up the outside of one sheer wall, and the illusion of open space as the city dropped away beneath us was enough to keep Ruth clinging to me all the way up. I wished she wouldn’t.
We got off at the 201st floor, most of which belonged to our hostess, Elvira Moore-Williams. She had inherited the largest single share of one of the big private corporations (I don’t remember which, and I doubt she does either) and bringing Ruth to her party had been my master stroke. I knew it would get back to Tucker.
“Oh my God,” Ruth whispered to me as we waited under the door-scanner, “I never thought I’d be able to walk off. Promise me, please, you won’t take me back down in that thing!”
I was saved the necessity of a reply by the opening of the doors. A long, sensual-looking woman stood at one side, a handsome freak with oiled muscles on the other. The woman rubbed her bare belly up and down my hip and thigh, squeezed my arm between her nubbin-like breasts, and breathed, huskily, “I’m Veronica. Please come in.”
Ruth, I saw, was receiving similar attentions from the muscle freak, so I abandoned her to her own delights, such as they might be.
Some mildly hallucinogenic gas, perhaps, nitrous oxide, was being circulated through the air-conditioning system, and I found myself laughing along with Veronica as we strolled into one of the main rooms. She had her hand under my loincloth and was kneading my buttocks. “I like the feel of the way they move when you walk,” she told me.
“Are you an official greeter?” I managed to ask.
She shook her head. “Haven’t you been to Elvira’s parties before?” she parried.
I found myself replying in doleful tones. “No,” I said, genuinely sad, “I have not been to one of Elvira’s parties before.”
“Don’t cry, dear man. Think how delightful it is that you are here now.”
“Yes,” I said, immediately brightening, “that’s true, isn’t it?”
“Elvira likes to be happy,” Veronica said. “So she tries to surround herself with happy people. Isn’t that lovely? I’m a cat,” she added. “Purrrr.” She rubbed herself up and down my side again. “Are you a tom?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a Tad.”
“Oh…. Are you really? Perhaps I’d better keep looking, then.” And without another word she moved away, leaving me alone in the swirling mass of laughing people.
I’d heard about Elvira Moore-Williams’ parties, but never any details. It had taken me two months to wrangle an invitation, and I had stooped to some politicking of my own to accomplish it. The very pink of fashion, they were, and, I’d been told, a complete world of their own. Now that I was here, I found that easy to understand.
I moved through the people, drifting aimlessly, no real thoughts in my mind—what thoughts I had were curiously elusive—simply wandering, exploring, from room to room. There were people everywhere, most of them fashionably unclothed, some of them doing things which might have shocked or fascinated me on another occasion. But somehow I didn’t care just now. I heard the sounds around me as if from down a long and echoing tunnel, a sort of whirling, cycle of repetition imposing itself in a pattern over what I could hear. I recall thinking that time was collapsing, condensing, closing in around me, contracting so that my past and future were both rushing at me simultaneously and—
I groped with my hand on a door button, it slid open, and I fell inside, into an eating cubicle. I let the doors shut without finding the light, and fell forward, my mouth over the evacuation unit, and vomited.
After that I felt a little better, but still unsteady. Everything still seemed to be on a great carousel, moving with ponderous speed past a brass ring. Each time I passed the ring I would reach for it, and one new sound, one new thought, or one new sensation would be added to the overlapping patterns of previous sounds, thoughts, and sensations, still reverberating in my skull. I didn’t like it.
Somehow I found the light and t
urned it on. The universe steadied for a moment. Then I saw that I was not in a normal eating cubicle at all. I was in a cubicle equipped for two.
I almost threw up again.
I staggered, and sat down, sitting, inevitably, on the other evacuation unit. I heard myself giggle. “Hey, Dian,” I said out loud. “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.” Without thinking, I fitted the meal tube to my mouth. It felt wrong tasted wrong. I dialed a flavor which would change the taste of bile in my mouth. I almost choked, laughing, while I ate.
When I was a little boy, I always wondered what it was like in a girl’s eating cubicle. I knew what it was like in mine, and in the others of boys I knew. But there was something mysteriously and subtly different about girls, and I knew it even then. I knew their plumbing was different, and while I hadn’t associated it with sex (well, not with the kind of sex an adult thinks about), I had already figured it out that their evacuation processes must be different than mine. Ergo, they would use different equipment, a differently designed evacuation unit. But how would it be different? I tried to work it out in my mind, but it was simply beyond my knowledge. My imagination could not cope with it. I was terribly curious.
One day, early in First Form, I saw a girl use an eating cubicle. That is, I saw her go into one, and, later, come out of it again, tugging at her clothing and licking her lips. I was stunned, because I had used that cubicle myself.
That was a day of great disillusionment for me. That was the day I learned that girls used the same exact cubicles boys did—that the cubicle at least observed no difference in the sexes. But my old curiosity lingered on. I knew better, but I still wondered… could there be girls-only cubicles? And even if there weren’t, what would they be like if there were such cubicles? Had there once been separate cubicles for girls? And so on, for the next few years. Then, gradually, I forgot about it. Every once in a long while the old fantasy would return, fleetingly, and I’d ponder the question for a moment before I recalled that I knew the answers, and the answers were prosaic and without consequence.
