The Eleventh Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by F. L. Wallace

  “Suits me. Book me for it.”

  “Be glad to,” said the robot. “Passport, please.”

  * * * *

  It was going to cost more than just the fare, Jadiver knew. He would arrive on Earth with very little money and could expect to start all over. He was no longer fresh out of training, willing to start at the bottom. He was a mature man, experienced beyond the ordinary, and most organizations he could work for would be suspicious of that.

  But it was worth it, aside from the escape. No future for him there, jammed in on a crowded world, but it was his planet, always would be, and he wouldn’t mind going back.

  “Sorry,” said the clerk, flipping over the passport and studying it. “I can’t book you. The flight’s only for Earth citizens.”

  “I was born there,” Jadiver impatiently said. “Can’t you see?”

  “You were?” asked the robot eagerly. “I was built there.” It handed him back the passport. “However, it doesn’t matter where you were born. You’ve been here three years without going back. Automatically, you became a citizen of Venus two and a half years ago.”

  Jadiver hadn’t known that. He doubted that many did. It was logical enough. Earth was overflowing and the hidden citizenship clause was a good way of getting rid of the more restless part of the population and making sure they didn’t come back.

  “There’s still the orbit flight,” said the clerk, smiling and serene. “For that you need a visitor’s visa, which takes time. Shall I make the arrangements?”

  Aside from the time element, which was vital, he couldn’t tip the police off that he intended to leave.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking the passport. “I’ll call back when I make up my mind.”

  Down the street was another interplanetary flight office and he wandered into it. It might have been the same office he had just left, robot and all.

  “Information on Mars,” he said, his manner casual.

  The clerk didn’t bother to consult the schedule. There was a difference, after all. “There’ll be an orbit flight in four months,” it said pleasantly. “Rate, four-fifths of the standard fare to Earth.”

  Nothing was working out as expected. “What about the moons of Jupiter?” This was the last chance.

  “Due to the position of the planets, for the next few months there are no direct flights anywhere beyond Mars. You have to go there and transfer.”

  That escape was closed. “I can’t make plans so far in advance.”

  The robot beamed at him. “I can see that you’re a gentleman who likes to travel.” It grew confidential and leaned over the counter. “I have a bargain here, truly the most sensational we’ve ever offered.”

  Jadiver drew away from that eagerness. “What is this bargain?”

  “Did you notice the fare to Mars? Four-fifths of that to Earth, and yet it’s farther away. Did you stop to think why?”

  * * * *

  He had noticed and he thought he knew why. It was another side of the citizenship program. Get them away from Earth, the farther the better, and don’t let them come back. If necessary, shuttle them between colonies, but don’t let them come back.

  “I hadn’t,” he said. “Why?”

  The voice throbbed throatily and robot eyes grew round. “To induce people to travel. Travel is wonderful. I love to travel.”

  Pathetic thing. Someone had erred in building it, had implanted too much enthusiasm for the job. It loved to travel and would never get farther than a few feet from the counter. Jadiver dismissed that thought.

  “What’s this wonderful offer?” he asked.

  “Just think of it,” whispered the robot. “We have another destination, much farther than Jupiter, but only one-tenth the fare to Earth. If you don’t have the full fare in cash, just give us verbal assurance that you’ll pay when you get the money. No papers to sign. We have confidence in your personal integrity.”

  “Sounds intriguing,” Jadiver said, backing away. It sounded more like a death sentence. Alpha Centauri or some such place—hard grubbing labor under a blazing or meager sun, it didn’t matter which. Exile forever on planets that lagged and would always lag behind Earth. It took years to get there, even at speeds only a little below that of light, time in which the individual was out of touch.

  “I hope you won’t forget,” said the robot. “It’s hard to get people to understand. But I can see that you do.”

  He understood too well. He ducked out of the flight office. He’d stay and take it here if he had to, escape some way if he could. Nothing was worth that kind of sacrifice.

  He went slowly back to the apartment. It was not so strange that the police hadn’t arrested him. They knew that he’d stay on the planet, that he had to. They’d had it figured out long before he did.

  He fell into the bed without removing his clothing. The bed made no effort to induce him to sleep. It wasn’t necessary.

  * * * *

  In the morning, Jadiver awakened to the smell of food. The room he slept in was dark, but in the adjacent room he could hear the Kitch-Hen clucking away contentedly as it prepared breakfast.

  He rolled over and sat up. He was not alone.

  “Cobber?” he called.

  “Yeah,” said Cobber. He was very close, but Jadiver couldn’t see him.

  “The police got them,” Jadiver said, reaching for the tangle gun. It was gone. He’d expected that.

  “I heard. I was waiting for them and they didn’t come.” He was silent for a moment. “It had to be you, didn’t it?”

  “It was,” Jadiver said. “When I found out, I tried to tell them. But it was too late.”

  “Glad you tried,” said Cobber. At that instant, so was Jadiver. “I checked you myself. I couldn’t find anything,” Cobber added thoughtfully. “They must have something new.”

  “It is new,” Jadiver wearily confirmed. “I can’t get rid of it.”

  “Mind telling me? I figure I ought to know.”

  Hunched up in the darkness, Jadiver told him what he could. At present, he was defenseless. Cobber was a little man, but he was no stranger to violence and he had the weapons. Perhaps that was what the police counted on—that Cobber would save them an arrest.

  “Bad,” said Cobber after an interval. It sounded like a reprieve.

  Jadiver waited.

  “I liked Burlingame,” continued Cobber. “Emily, too.”

  Burlingame was a decent fellow. Emily he had seen only once, twice if he counted last night. She deserved better than she got.

  “I don’t know who it was,” Jadiver said. “Some big policeman.”

  “I know a lot of people—I’ll find out,” Cobber promised. “I liked Emily.”

  It wouldn’t do any good, though Jadiver approved. For a while there’d be one less sadist on the force, and after that they’d hire another.

  “You’d better leave while you can,” said Jadiver.

  Cobber laughed. “I’ll get away. I know Venus and I don’t have a spy inside.” He got up, turned on the lights and tossed the tangle gun on the bed. “Here. You need this worse than I do.”

  Jadiver blinked gratefully and took it. Cobber believed him. If the police wanted to eliminate him, they’d have to come for him, after all.

  He stood up. “Breakfast?”

  “No breakfast,” said Cobber. “I’m going to take your advice and get out of here.” He went to the door, opened it a fraction and listened. Satisfied, he closed it and turned back to Jadiver. “Tell that cop I know a few tricks with a tangle gun he never heard of. I’ll show him what they are.”

  “I won’t see him, I hope.”

  “You don’t have to. They’re taking everything down. They’ll tell him. That is, I hope they do.”

  He slipped out the door and was gone.

  * * * *

  The Kitch-Hen tired of waiting for Jadiver to come out. It cackled disgustedly and sent a table into his room. Mechanically he sat down and began to eat.

  Not onl
y how far but also what kind of data did the circuit transmit? That was one unanswered problem. If he couldn’t outrun it, he might outthink it.

  First, the data was transmitted to the police with some degree of accuracy. They had been able to anticipate the robbery. Not completely, but they did know it was Burlingame and how many men he was using. They also knew the approximate date. From that, it was a matter of logic to determine what specific society event he was aiming at. Jadiver had been able to do the same.

  Thoughts, visual and auditory impressions, tactile and other sensory data—that was the sum of what the circuit could transmit, theoretically.

  He could almost positively rule out thoughts. It had never been proved that thoughts could be transferred from one person to another, mechanically or otherwise. But that was not his reason for rejecting it. If they could read his thoughts, it was useless for him to plan anything. And he was going to plan ahead, whether it was useless or not.

  Tactile sensations, temperature, roughness, and the like were unimportant except to a scientist. He doubted that police were that scientifically interested in him. He could forget about the sense of touch.

  Sight and hearing. Neither of these could be eliminated at present. They could see what he saw, hear what he heard. As long as they could, escape was out of the question. It wouldn’t take much to betray him—a street sign glimpsed through his eyes, for instance, and they knew where he was.

  As long as they could see what he saw.

  But there was such a thing as a shield. Any known kind of radiation could be shielded against.

  He was working with intangibles. He didn’t know the nature of the phenomenon he had to fight. He had to extrapolate in part, guess the rest. One thing was certain, though: If he was successful in setting up a shield against the circuit, the police would arrive soon after. Arrive here.

  His value to them was obvious. Through him they could make an undetected contact with the shadowy world of illegality. If that contact was cut off or if he seemed about to escape, his usefulness came to an end and they would want one more arrest while they could get it.

  Once he started to work on the shield, he would have to work fast.

  Jadiver went to the screen. There could be no hesitation; the decision was ready-made.

  The bank robot appeared on the screen and Jadiver spoke to him briefly, requesting that his account be cleared. He scribbled his signature and had it recorded.

  * * * *

  While waiting, he began to pack, sorting what he wanted to take. It wasn’t much, some special clothing. His equipment, except for a few small tools, he had to leave. No matter. With luck, he could replace it; without luck, he wouldn’t need it.

  In a few minutes he was ready, but the money hadn’t arrived. He sat down and nervously scrawled on a scrap of paper. Presently the delivery chute clattered and the money was in it, crisp new bills neatly wrapped, the total of his savings over the years. He stuffed the money in his pocket.

  The scrap of paper was still in his hand. He started to throw it away, but his fingers were reluctant to let it go. He stared curiously at the crumpled wad and on impulse smoothed it out.

  There were words on it, though he hadn’t remembered writing any. The handwriting was shaky and stilted, as if he were afflicted with some nervous disease; nevertheless, it was unmistakably his own.

  There was a message on it, from himself to himself. No, not from himself. But it was intended that he read it. The note said:

  RUN, JADIVER. I’LL HELP.

  YOUR FRIEND

  He sat down. A picture rose involuntarily in his mind: The face was that of Doumya Filone.

  He couldn’t prove it, but it seemed certain that she was the one. She knew about the circuit, of course, had known long before he did. He remembered the incident when his skin had itched.

  He had called her about it and she hadn’t seemed surprised. She had left the screen for some time—for what purpose? To adjust the mechanism, or have someone else adjust it. The last, probably; the mechanism was almost certainly at the police end, and at the time he called she had been at home. In any event, the mechanism had originally been set too strong and she had ordered the setting to be reduced. That suggested one thing: the power to activate the circuit came from the mechanism—a radarlike device.

  Then what? His skin had momentarily become translucent, allowing him to see the circuit. How she achieved that, he didn’t know, but the reason was obvious. It had been her way of warning him and it had worked.

  The message in his hand told him one thing. He had known about the danger, but he hadn’t guessed that he didn’t have to face it alone. Something else was evident: her control was limited—perhaps she could step in at a critical moment, but the greater part was up to him.

  He moved quickly. He opened the delivery chute and put in the small bag that held his clothing, then punched a code that dispatched it to the transportation terminal. In return, he received a small plastic strip with the same code on it. The bag could be traced, but not without trouble, and he should be able to pick it up before then. At this stage he didn’t want to be encumbered.

  He took a last look around and stepped into the hall. He leaped back again.

  A heavy caliber slug crashed into the door.

  * * * *

  That had been meant to kill. He was lucky it hadn’t.

  Who was it? Not the police. By law they were restricted to tangle guns, though they sometimes forgot. In this case, their memory should be good—they’d have difficulty explaining away the holes in his body. Not that they’d have to, really; if they wanted, they could toss him into an alley and claim they had found his body later.

  Still, there was no particular reason why they should want to kill him outright when they could do it by degrees scientifically and with full legal protection. They didn’t call it killing. There was another term: converting.

  The converting process was not new; the principles had existed for centuries. The newness lay in the proper combination of old discoveries. Electric shock was one ingredient, a prolonged drastic application of it during the recreation of a situation that the victim had a weakness for. In the case of an adulterer, say, the scene was hypnotically arranged with the cooperation of a special robot that wouldn’t be short-circuited. At the proper moment, electric shock was applied, repeatedly. Rigorous and somewhat rough on the criminal’s wife, but the adulterer would be saddled all his life with an unconditional reflex.

  That was only one ingredient. There were others, among them a pseudo-religious brotherhood, membership in which was compulsory. C. C.—Confirmed Converters. They kept tab on one another with apocalyptic fervor. Transgressions were rare. Death came sooner.

  Jadiver stood there thinking. It wasn’t the police, because they had converting with which to threaten him. It wasn’t Cobber, either. He could have killed Jadiver earlier and hadn’t.

  Cobber might have talked, though. There were enough people who now regretted that Jadiver had once given them new faces. As far as they were concerned Jadiver was in the hands of the police.

  The identity of the man outside didn’t matter. He was not from the police, but he did want Jadiver dead.

  Jadiver stood back and pushed the door open. Another slug crashed into it, tiny, but with incredible velocity.

  He knelt, thrust his hand outside the door near the bottom and fired a random fusillade down the corridor. Then he took his finger off the trigger and listened. There wasn’t a sound. The man had decided to be sensible.

  Jadiver stepped out. The man was crouched in an inconspicuous corner and he was going to stay in that position for a long time. He couldn’t help breathing, though, and his chest was a tangle of wires. There were some on his face, too, where his eyelids flickered and his mouth twitched.

  The gun was in his hand and it was aimed nearly right. There was nothing to prevent his squeezing the trigger—except the tangle extruded loosely over his hand. And he could move faster than it c
ould. Once, at any rate.

  “I wouldn’t,” said Jadiver. “You’re going to have a hard time explaining that illegal firearm. And it’ll look worse if I’m here with my head wrapped around a hole that just fits the slug.”

  The man reaffirmed his original decision to be sensible about it by remaining motionless. Jadiver didn’t recognize him. Probably a hired assassin.

  The man paled with the effort not to move. He teetered and the tangle stuff coiled fractionally tighter.

  “Take care of yourself,” Jadiver said, and left him there.

  * * * *

  Jadiver headed toward the transportation terminal. The police could trace him that far. Let them; he intended that they should. It would confuse them more when he walked right off their instruments.

  Once inside the underground structure, he lost himself in the traffic. That was just in case he had been followed physically as well as by radiation. People coming from Earth, fewer going back. They arrived in swarms from the surface, overhead from the concrete plain where rockets roared out on takeoff or hissed in for landing. Transportation shunted the mob in one direction for interplanetary travel, in another for local air routes.

  Jadiver reclaimed his bag, boarded the moving belts and hopped on and off several times, again just in case. The last time off, he had coins ready. He slipped around a corner and walked down a long quiet corridor. There were doors on either side, a double deck with a narrow balcony on the second story. At intervals, stairs led to the balcony.

  He walked a third of the way down the corridor, inserted coins in the slot, and a door opened. He went inside the sleep locker and the door closed behind, locking automatically.

  It was miserable accommodation if he intended to sleep, but he didn’t. It was also a trap if the police were trailing him. He didn’t think they were—they were too certain of him. Nevertheless, the sleep locker had one advantage: it was all metal. Considering the low power that probably went into the circuit, it should be a satisfactory temporary shield.

  He changed into clothes that looked ordinary—out of style, in fact, though that was not noteworthy in a solarwide economy—but the material, following a local terrestrial fad of a few years back, contained a high proportion of metallic fiber. That solved only part of the problem, of course. His hands and his head were uncovered.