The Fellowship of the Hand

by Edward D. Hoch

  “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Stanley, where have you been so long?”

  “I’m engaged in some secret activities. I’ve had to live underground.”

  “Underground? In an underground city?”

  “You know about that?”

  There was something wrong, something with his voice. It was almost as if she were speaking to a robot. “Yes, I know about it,” she said, and reached out to touch his hand, to reassure herself that he was indeed human.

  “What else do you know?”

  “The election—I heard about that. Did you win?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Stanley—why did you want to see me again?” She wished now that she had phoned Euler before leaving the apartment. Euler—or even Jason Blunt. Somebody!

  “I had to find out whose side you were on, Milly. There are sides to everything these days, you know.”

  “I was on your side for a long time, Stanley. But you deserted me, remember?”

  “You could have come with me to Venus.

  The rocket ride had started up again, igniting his ashen face with the reflection of bright orange fire. “No. No, I couldn’t have done that,” she mumbled.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that you’re a stranger to me, Stanley. It’s as if I didn’t know you. I guess six years is too long a time.”

  Too long.

  “I’m the same person, Milly.”

  No, you’re not!

  “No, you’re not, Stanley. None of us stay the same. We grow and mature and drift apart.”

  “There’s someone else, isn’t there?”

  “Not really. I didn’t stay celibate waiting your return, if that’s what you mean. But there’s no one person. No one who’ll ever be as close to me as you were.

  His right hand dipped into his pocket and came out holding an electric lighter. He fumbled for a short cigar and lit it quickly. She watched the hand as it deposited the lighter in an inner pocket and returned to view. “Smoking,” he mumbled by way of explanation. “These damned cigars are one more bad habit I acquired on Venus.”

  “Yes.” She had to get away. Somehow she had to escape from him.

  “You seem terribly nervous. Is that what seeing me again does to you?”

  A voice cut through the night, suddenly all around them. “Attention please! The amusement area will close in ten minutes due to rain night! We repeat, the amusement area will close in ten minutes!”

  “I have to go,” she said quickly. “The rain will be starting.”

  “Wait.” He put out his hand to touch her, but she backed away.

  “It was good seeing you again, Stanley. Good seeing you. Too bad we couldn’t …”

  She turned and started to run, losing herself in the departing crowd. When she paused to look back he was gone, and she sighed with relief.

  Now to get out of here and back to the apartment. She’d be safe there, and she could phone Euler. The crowd was thinning, almost all gone. She’d have to hurry.

  The first drop of rain hit her forehead.

  Damn! Early again! A full half hour early! She hurried toward the exit and the moving sidewalk that would take her home.

  That was when she saw the man with the tattooed face. He was standing by the exit gate with both hands plunged deep into his pockets. He seemed to be waiting for someone, and in that instant—seeing her—he began to move forward.

  She glanced around, looking for help, but there was none. The place was deserted, with the last of the stragglers scattered by the rain. Even Stanley was gone. It was as if the earth had swallowed them all up.

  Tears of rain blurred her vision. Don’t panic, she told herself. Just don’t panic. Perhaps this is a different tattooed man, not the one who tried to kill Earl Jazine. Surely more than one person in the country had a tattoo on his face. Surely …

  The closest building was the mirror maze, and she ran to that. The thick slabs of glass were unbreakable here, tempered to withstand a stunner’s blast or even an old-fashioned bullet. It was the safest place she could be, really, behind this unbreakable glass where he could see her but never reach her.

  She darted through the entrance and slid the glass door shut behind her, locking it. He was still coming toward her, but he wouldn’t be for long. The glass would protect her.

  But still he came, walking slowly, and she retreated farther into the maze, putting extra layers of glass between them but still keeping him in view.

  She looked around, seeking some alarm switch, or at least a light switch which could cloak her in darkness, but they were back by the door. Too far away.

  He was at the glass now, and even at this distance she could see the bright curving tattoo around his left cheek. Perhaps it covered a scar, or marked him as an eastern prince. Perhaps if she knew him she wouldn’t be terrified at all.

  All over the amusement area, the neons and strobes were beginning to die, blinking out as some unseen hand worked a switch. In another moment the mirror maze would be dark too, and then he could no longer look in through the glass at her.

  Another minute.

  No longer.

  She saw his hand come out of the pocket, as Stanley’s had done. Only this hand held a weapon, a squat little gun—too small to be a stunner.

  She recognized it just as the tattooed man pulled the trigger, and by then it was too late to run.

  The laser beam passed through the layers of glass without breaking them, seeking her out with unerring accuracy. She tried to scream as it hit her, but there was no time now. No ti——

  13 CARL CRADER

  EVEN WHEN THE NEWS of Graham Axman’s daring escape reached him, Crader did not alter his routine. It was a Saturday, after all, and he’d promised to spend the weekend at home with his wife.

  “Don’t worry,” he told Jazine on the vision-phone. “You warned the prison. We did everything we could.”

  “But he’s out, chief. He’s back with HAND.”

  “Keep me advised of developments. For now we just sit tight.”

  “Right, chief,” Jazine said with a sigh and switched off.

  Crader left the vision-phone and went back outside to the patio, where his wife was enjoying one of the last warm weekends of fall. “More work, dear?” she asked from her vibrochair.

  “Not really. Nothing that need concern me today.”

  “That’s good. Let some of the younger men handle things for a change.”

  He grunted and returned to his video viewer. He’d been running a cassette of the 2036 Olympic Games, but now it was difficult to concentrate on the running, jumping figures. He thought about HAND, and about Graham Axman once more in control.

  It was an opinion he had never communicated even to Jazine, much less to the President, but Carl Crader believed there was a great deal of good in the goals of Humans Against Neuter Domination. He had believed it ever since his first encounter with Euler Frost on the island of Plenish during the transvection affair, and it was an opinion that had been strengthened during the HAND raid on the Federal Medical Center. He allowed Frost to escape that time, in the smoke and confusion of the moment, and he’d never regretted that decision. The machines really were taking over the country—not in the sudden dramatic revolt of science fiction dreams, but rather in a slow, insidious seepage that every year, every day, robbed the human being of one more shred of self-esteem.

  Axman was, to some extent, an unknown quantity. But Crader was willing to put his trust in Euler Frost. Even a few bombed machines now might be preferable to a society that would awaken one morning to find its free will programmed into the memory unit of a computer.

  So he worried very little about the escape that weekend. Even on Monday, when one of the presidential advisers reached him by vision-phone, inquiring about it, Crader only referred him to another department. Certainly the escape itself was not a matter for the CIB. What might come after the escape, once
Axman and Euler Frost joined forces again, was another matter.

  During the week that followed, his mind was taken up with other matters. A complex scheme to swindle a midwestern bank through the use of forged voice-print commands to the bank’s computer had been uncovered, and it took a full two days of staff work to sort out just what happened. Then too, there was the matter of the FRIDAY-404 system, with President McCurdy still expressing concern about the election only a few weeks away.

  By week’s end, Earl Jazine brought in a favorable report on the election system. “Professor Friday has gone over every component, chief. It’s working perfectly. You can tell the President he doesn’t have a thing to worry about.”

  Crader was pleased to hear it. “Fine!”

  “A funny thing, though, chief.”

  “About the computer?”

  “No, something else.” He sank into the foamfold chair opposite Crader’s desk. “I thought I should check on that girl I was with when HAND pulled off the kidnap hoax.”

  “Milly Norris?”

  “Yeah. If she was in on it, I figured she might tell me something about HAND. If she wasn’t, I wanted to see if she was all right.”

  “And complete your business with her?” Crader asked with a grin.

  “No. Hell, it was just a loose end.”

  “I know.”

  “Anyway, she’s not there.”

  “Not where?”

  “In Sunsite. She’s been away from work since Tuesday, and she’s not at her apartment either.”

  “A vacation, perhaps.”

  “Without telling them at work? She just called Wednesday morning and told her boss she had to go away for a few days.”

  “You think it’s tied in with Axman’s escape?”

  “I think so, chief.”

  Crader thought about it. “If she’s with HAND, then she’s the one who’s been supplying Frost his information. But where is the information coming from? Has she been seeing Stanley Ambrose after all?”

  “Nobody else has, that’s for sure!”

  “Well, keep checking on her. If she comes back, try to find out where she’s been.”

  Earl Jazine nodded. “Meanwhile, what are we doing about Jason Blunt’s underground city?”

  “Not enough,” Crader admitted ruefully. “I’m glad you asked me before the President did. I think I’ll try to reach Blunt on the vision-phone.”

  But Masha only told him that Jason Blunt was away on another of his frequent journeys. He might be back on Sunday, or Monday. And so it was the first of the week before Crader finally reached him, and Tuesday before he flew out for another meeting at the underground city.

  By that time, Jazine had brought word of Milly Norris’s murder by laser gun, in the amusement area at Sunsite.

  For a time Crader considered postponing his flight to Utah and going to Sunsite instead, but finally he agreed that Jazine could handle things with the local police.

  “Check on any strangers who might have arrived in town,” he told Earl. “And especially check for anyone answering Graham Axman’s description.”

  “You really think Axman killed her?”

  “No, but someone’s sure to raise the possibility. I just don’t want to miss anything.”

  Jazine thought about it. “She was pretty easy to get into bed. It might have been a crime of passion—jealousy, something like that.”

  “With a laser gun? Maybe, but I doubt it.”

  “When will you be back from Utah?”

  “Who knows?” Crader said with a dry chuckle. “They might kidnap me and seal me up in a computer.”

  “If that happens I’ll call out the army and come rescue you.”

  “Good! I’ll be relying on that.”

  They shook hands as if departing for distant planets and Crader went up the stairs to the rocketcopter pad.

  The flight west was pleasantly relaxing, and he spent the time reviewing staff reports on the Utah facility and its history. The government in Washington had all but forgotten the existence of the underground city, supposing after its sale to Nova Industries that the space was being used for the storage of natural gas. Even the shipment of computer components and vast supplies to the site from Nova’s eastern plants had apparently passed unnoticed.

  As for Nova Industries itself, the government reports had little to offer. Originally a wholly owned subsidiary of Blunt’s underwater oil-drilling company, Nova had been reorganized a year ago as a separate corporation whose major stockholders were Jason Blunt and Stanley Ambrose. There the record stopped.

  Crader grunted and put away the files. Below him, on the transcontinental expressway, he could see the tiny dots of electric cars moving like ants through the tan and sandy stretches of desert. He was almost there, almost back to the dry lake bed that concealed the entrance to Nova’s underground city.

  Jason Blunt was already there, and he greeted Crader at the elevator. “I hardly expected to see you back here so soon,” he said, shaking hands. “Do you have a message from our President?”

  “In a way,” Crader replied, improvising. “He’s very much interested in your computer center here, but somehow he’s not reassured about your motives. He’d like me to inspect the place a little more carefully.”

  “Inspect? You mean search it? Do you think we have little men hidden inside the machines?”

  “Hardly, but you may have something else hidden there. It’s one thing to computerize past events in a memory unit. It’s quite another to program your machines with a learning power by which they could control future events. A close examination of the wiring can show me just what you’ve done.”

  “I’m certain you’ll find nothing, but come down to my office and we’ll talk about it,” Blunt said.

  They descended by elevator to a room Crader had only glimpsed on his first visit. It was a luxuriously appointed office, with high, radiant ceiling, foamfold chairs, a white shag rug, and a console desk that looked like the keyboard of a giant organ. On one wall hung a chart of the underground city, color-coded for seven different zones of activity.

  “Quite a place,” Crader marveled. “I wish the government could afford something like this for me!”

  “I can control input from here, and also get readouts on any of the programmed information. Though of course in actual practice our computer specialists do all the work.”

  Crader slipped into an especially comfortable chair and watched Blunt pass a comb through the fringes of his black beard. “But you do exercise some control over input.”

  Blunt shrugged. “Stanley Ambrose has a great deal to do with it too. I can’t swear that his people haven’t set up an entire program that’s unknown to me.”

  “Has Ambrose been here recently?”

  “He’s in and out.”

  “Strange that you’ve seen him and no one else has.”

  “That’s his way when he’s working on a project.”

  “Just what is the project?”

  “You know—this election business.”

  Crader nodded. “How many employees did you say Nova had?”

  “I didn’t, but there are two hundred here. Counting employees, stockholders and their families, there are over eighty thousand. My oil drilling people are included too. All of them voted in our election.”

  “And of those stationed here, how many would you say are loyal to you and how many to Ambrose?”

  “The split is about even.”

  “The figures we found in the FRIDAY-404 computer showed some forty-five thousand votes for Ambrose and thirty-six thousand for you.”

  Jason Blunt shrugged and did not seem surprised. “I had already assumed I lost the election.”

  “If Ambrose is around so little, how did he attract such a following?”

  “The computer programmers got to know him, of course. And the others know him by reputation. He had a good deal of publicity during his years on Venus.”

  “But the programmers who supported
him—certainly they would have done anything he ordered, even without your knowledge.”

  “I suppose so,” he admitted.

  “Then it’s more important than ever that I be allowed to run my check on the wiring and circuits.”

  “Do you have any idea of the enormity of the task? We have miles of tunnels and conduits, holding enough wiring to reach the moon and back. It would take your entire bureau a month to inspect it all.”

  “I know where to look for what I want,” Crader assured him.

  “Very well,” Blunt said after a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll show you whatever you want. Believe me, if you find the sort of evidence you’re talking about, I’ll confront Stanley with it. It’s time we had a few things out anyway.”

  “It may be too late to confront him, if he’s grown as powerful as I suspect.”

  “He’s not that powerful.”

  Crader thought of something. “In such a highly computerized operation as this, surely your own employees are rated and assigned by computer too.”

  “Of course.”

  “If Ambrose was in control, what would prevent him from rigging the computer to have employees loyal to him transferred here, and employees loyal to you moved elsewhere?”

  Jason Blunt frowned at the words. “There have been a number of transfers lately. I thought nothing of it, but …”

  “Ambrose had a mistress, a woman named Mildred Norris.”

  “Oh?”

  “Did he ever mention her to you?”

  “He might have.”

  “She was murdered last night.”

  Blunt’s hand jerked away from his beard. “My God!”

  “You’re startled. Did you know her?”

  “No!”

  “Then why does the news of her murder affect you like that? You’re trembling, man!”

  Blunt brought himself under control. “Violent death always affects me. Who killed her?”

  “We don’t know. It happened at an amusement park near her home. Somebody shot her with a laser gun.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because she’s the second person to die during this investigation. A technician named Rogers was murdered too. Any of us could be next—you or me or anybody. If you know anything …”