The Fellowship of the Hand

by Edward D. Hoch

  At the electronic casino, Masha soon became a regular sight. She would arrive on the arm of Stevro, dressed in some expensive and radiant costume that could not fail to attract attention. Her favorite among these was a long white gown of moondust, slit from neck to ankles, which fell open at every movement to reveal the pale pink bodysuit beneath. She especially liked its effect on men, liked the way their mouths dropped open when she entered a room for the first time.

  She was wearing the moondust gown on the night she first met Jason Blunt. He was not the first of the millionaires to whom Stevro had been attracted, but he was the first to show real promise. Just two nights earlier, while displaying Masha’s charms to a visiting Frenchman, Stevro had been forced to break the man’s arm when he attempted to pull her away into his car.

  Jason Blunt was nothing like the Frenchman. He was an American for one thing, and Masha had known very few of those. She guessed his age at about forty-five, though at the swimming pool and in the gym he displayed the muscles and endurance of a much younger man. His long black hair and trim beard were only beginning to streak with gray, and there was a twinkle about his eyes that made Masha hope from the moment she met him that he would be the one.

  As the moondust gown fell away from her thighs, she saw the interest in his face, and when she happened to make some intelligent comment on the state of the Venus Colony with its continuing rivalry between the Americans and the Russo-Chinese, he reached out to touch her hand in a gesture of agreement.

  “You know a great deal for one so young and charming,” he said.

  “I had a good teacher.” She raised her eyes to Stevro, who at times like this never left her side.

  Perhaps something in her look caused Jason Blunt to turn his head toward the bulky man with his short, foul-smelling cigars. He nodded slightly, as if he understood everything.

  The following night, Blunt and Stevro dined alone while Masha anxiously awaited the verdict in her room. When Stevro joined her shortly before midnight he was smiling, and she knew it would be all right. “He wishes to spend one night with you, my dear, to verify the truth of all that I told him. If he finds I have not lied, he is prepared to pay one million American dollars for your hand in marriage.”

  “A million …”

  “A small sum to him. One day’s output of his undersea oil wells.”

  “But to pay so much for me!”

  Stevro came up to where she sat and ran his pudgy fingers through her hair. “You are more than worth it, my dear. Never forget, wherever life may take you, that I taught you what you know. You’re a pupil of Stevro, and that’s something to be proud of.”

  “But if Jason Blunt marries me, what will you do?”

  He shrugged and looked away. “Go back to Fizel’s, I suppose, and find another like you. If such a thing is possible.”

  Her night with Jason Blunt was more than successful, as she knew in her newfound confidence it would be. The following morning he presented Stevro with a certified check for one million dollars, and that afternoon Masha and Jason were married in the New Church of the Moon, overlooking the Bosporus. That evening they sailed with the tide and were carried into the becalmed waters of the Mediterranean on a honeymoon voyage.

  When they had been at sea five days, Masha looked up from her sunning mat and asked, “Jason, were you ever married before?”

  He was exercising nude on the top deck of the atomic yacht Strombol, and he waited until he had lowered himself from the parallel bars before answering. “Few men in my position reach the age of forty-five without a wife or two along the way. But they were nothing like you, Masha.”

  “I was just curious.”

  “There were two. Both are gone now.” She did not know if he meant dead or merely divorced, and she did not ask him.

  “Stevro said you are very wealthy.”

  He chuckled at that, flexing thigh muscles as he bent to lift a hundred-pound weight. She could not help admiring the curve of his naked body, remembering how he had held her just a few hours earlier. “Yes,” he answered. “I am very wealthy. Next week we will dock at one of my man-made islands, where the oil drilling is carried on. Then you will see what real wealth is!”

  “You said you lived on an island.”

  “I live on many islands, all of which I own. My home base is the man-made island of Sargasso.”

  “In the Atlantic?”

  “No, though in a way it was named for the onetime Sargasso Sea. When that calm area of seaweed-infested ocean became clogged with pollution—bits of plastic, beer cans, logs, everything—around the turn of the century, it was my father who helped clear it out. He owned a marine salvage company, one of the best in the business at the time, and the sea-rail companies hired him to do the job. With the profits from it, he built the island of Sargasso in the Gulf of Mexico, and it was there that he drilled his first undersea oil well. You see, Sargasso and these other places are drilling islands—floating islands, anchored in place—whose primary function is the location and production of oil from undersea beds. There are dozens of them now, and they have made me very wealthy.”

  “Is your father alive?”

  “No. He and my mother have been dead for years.” He put down the weight. “But that is enough family history for one day. We’re on our honeymoon, remember?”

  She rolled over on the mat, welcoming him to her.

  Masha’s first glimpse of Sargasso was a bit startling. Somehow she’d envisioned it as a sunny plantation in the middle of the sea, with rolling lawns and a big white twentieth-century house. She’d even imagined that the yacht would be met by hundreds of workingmen, their faces dabbed in oil, who’d turn out to welcome the master home.

  When she told Jason Blunt of her dream, he merely scoffed. “This is no old-time cotton plantation, girl. The drilling is fully automated, done by machine. Except for a handful of technicians and personal servants, we are alone on the island.”

  The following day he showed her around the place, starting with the big glass-and-steel cube that was their home. She had never been in such a house, where buttons controlled everything, where video cameras recorded every move and fed preprogrammed signals to the kitchen computer or the recreation computer or the health computer. She had only to rise from bed in the morning and her video image was enough to prepare the orange juice and eggs and coffee before she’d reached the kitchen. She had only to sneeze and the sound of it electronically adjusted the purity of the air to guard against pollutants.

  The drilling platform itself was much the same. It was a world without workers, where intricate machines pumped the oil and shipped it off by sea-rail to the great refineries along the Gulf Coast. A few computer technologists and a handful of personal servants were the only people she ever saw, and she often wondered if they were present merely to divert her while Jason was away from the island on his frequent business trips.

  It was a boring life at times, but there were compensations. At least twice a year they cruised around the world on the atomic yacht Strombol, inspecting the other drilling islands, and in the spring there was a trip to Paris to attend a world meeting of oilmen. She settled into this routine, with occasional trips to New York or Los Angeles, and became a loving, faithful wife to Jason Blunt. She was all that Stevro promised, and more, even learning the role of charming hostess when Jason began to hold his mysterious meetings on the island.

  Masha had been married to Jason for three years, and thus she was nineteen when the sea-rail deposited a gray-haired visitor at the island one sunny afternoon in early October.

  She went down from the glass-and-steel cube to meet him as a good hostess should, imagining him to be one more of Jason’s shadowy associates. “I am Masha Blunt,” she said, extending her hand. “Jason should be returning shortly. Are you a business associate of his?”

  The gray-haired man, who must have been over sixty years old, smiled down at her. “Not exactly, Ms. Blunt. I’ve come down from New York to ask him a few
questions. My name is Carl Crader, and I’m with the Computer Investigation Bureau.”

  4 EARL JAZINE

  HE WAS STILL LIMPING a bit when he left the elevator at the 110th floor and waved hello to Judy. “Thanks for the flowers.”

  “Good to have you back from the lion pit,” she said with a grin. “How’re you feeling?”

  “My ribs are taped up and my head’s not quite right, and I sprained my ankle. Otherwise I’m fine. Is the chief in?”

  “The chief is out of town,” she informed him. “Gone to the Gulf of Mexico to check on one Jason Blunt.”

  “The Blunt from the election computer?”

  “We think so. He’s had a half-dozen people on the case since we learned about Rogers.”

  “What about Rogers?” Jazine lowered himself into a convenient chair by her desk.

  “Sorry, I thought you knew. Somebody entered his office and killed him three days ago. He was shot at close range with a stunner on maximum power.”

  “So that’s why Sabin was sticking so close to me at the hospital! Was it the same guy who tried to feed me to the lions?”

  “We think so. A secretary who worked for Rogers described him as a nondescript man, except for a tattoo on his left cheek.”

  “That’s him,” Jazine agreed. “Somebody’s trying to stop this whole investigation.”

  Judy nodded. She’d used some of the new glowon makeup this morning, a variation of the old flippie cult colors, and Jazine found it oddly attractive. “That’s not all, Earl. After he killed Rogers, he apparently took the time to electromagnetize the FRIDAY-404 memory cells. The computer was wiped clean of all reference to the Blunt-Ambrose election.”

  Somehow the news didn’t surprise him. The only real surprise was that the tattooed man had bungled with him and left him still alive. “How did the chief get a line on Blunt?”

  “There were only two Jason Blunts listed in the names registry, and the other one is eighty-two years old.”

  “It could be an unknown—some Jason Blunt from Kansas that nobody ever heard of before.”

  Judy shook her head. “The chief and I reasoned that if there really is a secret election to HAND or some other underground group, the candidates would have to be known well enough within that group. Since the use of the FRIDAY-404 implies a nationwide election, we’re looking for someone of nationwide prominence. Jason Blunt seems to fit. We did a quick check on him and discovered he lives on a drilling island in the Gulf of Mexico. Especially interesting is the fact that the island has been the scene of a number of meetings during the past year.”

  Jazine perked up. “What sort of meetings?”

  “That’s what the chief went to find out.”

  “Christ, couldn’t he have sent Sabin, or waited till I was out of the hospital? It might be dangerous.”

  “Jason Blunt is a wealthy man. A mere investigator might get nowhere with him, but he could hardly be rude to the director of the CIB.”

  “Maybe,” But he wasn’t happy. Perhaps it was just being left out of the investigation that troubled him. “What about the other name—Ambrose?”

  “We have four Stanley Ambroses on the list. You can tackle them if you’d like.”

  He accepted the sheet of paper she gave him. Four names. “This Ambrose’s whereabouts are unknown?”

  “That’s right. The chief thought it strange too.”

  He remembered a random line in a twentieth-century book by a man named Charles Fort, written after the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce and Ambrose Small. Was somebody collecting Ambroses? He left Judy at her desk and spent the rest of the morning checking computer printouts on the four listed men. There was nothing suspicious about any of them—except for the one Stanley Ambrose’s seeming disappearance after retiring from the Venus Colony a year earlier.

  This Ambrose was a man of fifty-six years, active in government and space matters, who’d served five years as director of the USAC Venus Colony. He’d accomplished much with the domed cities of Venus, changing their entire concept from that of a penal colony to a new frontier. Although the population of the Russo-Chinese Venus Colony still exceeded that of the USAC sector, under Ambrose’s farsighted direction there was hope at last that the Americans might someday emerge as the planet’s dominant force.

  Earl Jazine pondered all this, and decided this Ambrose was the best place to begin. He had no wife or family living, and the Washington file showed only one close friend back on earth—a woman named Mildred Norris who’d been his mistress in the years prior to his Venus assignment. She seemed the only link to the missing Ambrose. It took him another hour to locate her present address, in the medium-sized planned community of Sunsite, Ohio.

  That was just an hour away by rocketcopter.

  Jazine had never visited Sunsite before, but he’d been in dozens of planned communities amazingly like it. There was always the town square, a throwback to colonial days, with the town hall on one side, a courthouse opposite, and a church between. The fact that the church was only sparsely attended made no difference to the community planners, who felt it to be an integral part of the American scene.

  From this center radiated the streets of the community, striking out like the spokes of a wheel, intersecting every quarter-mile with cross-streets where shopping plazas and community centers and even an amusement park blossomed. From the air, the town of Sunsite seemed like a giant spider’s web—or more accurately, thought Jazine, like a computer’s core unit. More accurately, because Sunsite and the other communities like it were the ultimate in computerized living. Everything from traffic lights to teleprinters were controlled by machine. Even the goods on the supermarket shelves were carefully inventoried by computers that electronically printed out reorders whenever the supply of an item dropped below a preprogrammed level. And most people ate computerized meals right in their offices.

  In such a place, Jazine was not surprised to find Mildred Norris, the woman he sought, working as a computer programmer in the local tax office. He often thought that half the people in America must be employed in programming computers that regulated the lives of the other half.

  She was a slim, pretty woman in her early thirties, with hair dyed a soft blue in keeping with a fad of some months back. Her mouth had a sad softness about it that seemed always about to break into a smile, and he could imagine men striving mightily for the reward of that smile.

  “Ms. Norris, my name is Earl Jazine. I’m with the Computer Investigation Bureau.”

  The smile came easily. “Computer Cops.”

  “That’s what the papers call us sometimes.”

  “What do you want here? Somebody complaining about their taxes?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. Actually, I wanted to ask you about Stanley Ambrose.”

  The smile faded. “That was six years ago. Your records must be very complete.”

  “They are.” He glanced around the sterile white room. “Where can we talk?”

  “I’ll be finished for the day in twenty minutes. If you want to hear about Stanley Ambrose, you’ll have to buy me a drink.”

  “Good enough. I’ll meet you outside at four thirty.”

  She came out with two other girls, younger than herself, and left them to join Jazine. “Here I am, right on time!”

  “Know a place where we can get that drink?”

  “There’s an automated bar just down the street, if you don’t mind your drinks being mixed by machine.”

  “I’m used to it. If the mix is bad I’ll arrest them,” he said with a grin.

  The place was no better or worse than a hundred others he’d been in. He bought four large metal tokens as they entered, and dropped two of them in the table slot to order Scotch for himself and a bleaker cocktail for Mildred Norris. The drinks were machine-mixed at the bar and delivered to the table by a little automated cart that moved along a track in the floor.

  “The drinks are good enough here,” she explained by way of apology, “and t
he tokens don’t cost much. I come here with the people from the office sometimes.”

  “Nice place,” he commented, looking around.

  “And the police are very good about checking for drunks and under-sixteens.” She sipped her cocktail. “Now what did you want to know about Stanley Ambrose?”

  “To start with, where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in six years.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not at all. You must know that I was his mistress. He was teaching at the university here, and his wife was dead. It seemed a natural relationship, even though he was old enough to be my father. Marriage was never really discussed. It was simply a convenient relationship for us both. Then, because of his Washington contacts and his writings on space, he was offered the position as director of the Venus Colony. It was too good a job to turn down. We talked about it, and he made a half-hearted offer to marry me and take me along, but frankly I just didn’t want to go. The thought of living for five years beneath a big plastic dome on another planet didn’t appeal to me.”

  “So you parted.”

  She gave a little nod. “It was the best way, really. At first he wrote me every week, and it was fun getting letters from Venus. But that gradually slacked off and stopped about two years ago. Of course I read in the telenews that he was back on earth, but I’ve heard nothing from him.”

  “And you’ve no idea where he might be?”

  “None whatever.”

  “What about his politics, Ms. Norris?”

  “You can call me Milly. Everyone does.” The smile was back.

  “Milly.”

  “We talked very little about politics, though he occasionally mentioned something about it in his letters from Venus.”

  “Did you keep those letters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could I see them?”

  “They’re at my apartment. I suppose I could show them to you.”

  “Good.” He downed the rest of his drink and started to get up.