by Jack Vance
No one came hurrying after.
He crossed the street, entered the Grand Maison Café.
The food panel made an island down the center; to either side were tables. The boy walked around the food panel, ignoring a table where a young woman in a brown cloak sat by herself. He ducked out an entrance opposite to where he entered, rounded the building, entered once more.
The young woman rose to her feet, followed him out. At the exit they brushed together accidentally.
The boy went about his business, and the young woman turned, went back to the restroom. As she opened the door a black beetle buzzed through with her.
She ducked, looked around the ceiling, but the insect had disappeared. She went to a visiphone, paid for sonic, dialed.
“Well?”
“I’ve got it.”
“Anyone follow?”
“No. I watched him leave Marmion Tower. I watched behind him in—” her voice broke off.
“What’s the matter?”
She said in a strained voice, “Get out of there fast. Hurry. Don’t ask questions. Get away—fast!”
She hung up, pretending that she had not noticed the black bug pressed against the glass, crystal eyes staring at the visiphone dial.
She reached in her pouch, selected one of the four weapons she carried, drew it forth, closed her eyes, snapped the release.
White glare flooded the room, seared behind her closed lids. She ran out the door, picked up the dazed bug in her handkerchief, stuffed it into her pouch. It was strangely heavy, like a slug of lead.
She must hurry. She ran from the restroom, up through the café, out into the street.
Safe among the crowds she watched six emergency vans vomit Black and Golds who rushed to the exits of the Grand Maison Café.
Bitterly she rode the slipway north. The Teleks controlled the police; it was no secret.
She wondered about the beetle in her pouch. It evinced no movement, no sign of life. If her supposition were correct, it would remain quiet so long as she kept light from its eyes, so long as she denied it reference points.
For an hour she wandered the city, intent on evading not only men, but also little black beetle-things. At last she ducked into a narrow passageway in the hard industry quarter, ran up a flight of wooden steps, entered a drab but neat sitting room.
She went to a closet, found a small cannister with a screw top, gingerly pushed the handkerchief and the beetle-thing inside, screwed down the lid.
She removed her long brown cloak, drew a cup of coffee from the dispenser, waited.
Half an hour passed. The door opened. Shorn looked in. His face was haggard and pale as a dog skull; his eyes glowed with an unhealthy yellow light.
She jumped to her feet. “What’s happened?”
“Sit still, Laurie, I’m all right.” He slumped into a seat.
She drew another cup of coffee, passed it to him. “What happened?”
His eyes burnt brighter. “As soon as I heard from you, I left the tavern. Twenty seconds later—no more—the place exploded. Flame shooting out the door, out the windows—thirty or forty people inside; I can hear them yelling now—” His mouth sagged. He licked his lips. “I hear them—”
Laurie controlled her voice. “Just ants.”
Shorn assented with a ghastly grin. “The giant steps on forty ants, but the guilty ant, the marked ant, the intended ant—he’s gone.”
She told him about the black bug. He groaned ironically. “It was bad enough dodging spies and Black and Golds. Now little bugs—can it hear?”
“I don’t know. I suppose so. It’s shut up tight in the can, but sound probably gets through.”
“We’d better move it.”
She wrapped the can in a towel, tucked it in a closet, shut the door. When she returned, Shorn was eying her with a new look in his eye. “You thought very swiftly, Laurie.”
She turned away to hide her pleasure. “I had to.”
“You still have the message?”
She handed the envelope across the table.
He read, “‘Get in touch with Clyborn at the Perendalia.’”
“Do you know him?”
“No. We’ll make discreet inquiries. I don’t imagine there’ll be anything good come out of it.”
“It’s so much—work.”
“Easy for the giants. One or two of them manage the entire project. I’ve heard that the one called Dominion is in charge, and the others don’t even realize there’s dissatisfaction. Just as we appoint a dog-catcher, then dismiss the problem of stray dogs from our minds. Probably not one Telek in a hundred realizes that we’re fighting for our lives, our futures, our dignity as human beings.”
After a moment she asked, “Do you think we’ll win, Will?”
“I don’t know. We have nothing to lose.” He yawned, stretched. “Tonight I meet Circumbright; you remember him?”
“He’s the chubby little biophysicist.”
Shorn nodded. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll take a nap.”
IV
At eleven o’clock Shorn descended to the street. The sky was bright with glow from the lakeshore entertainment strip, the luxury towers of downtown Tran.
He walked along the dark street till he came to Bellman Boulevard, and stepped out on to the slipway.
There was a cold biting wind and few people were abroad; the hum of the rollers below was noticeable. He turned into Stockbridge Street, and as he approached the quarter-mile strip of night stores, the slipways became crowded and Shorn felt more secure. He undertook a few routine precautions, sliding quickly through doors, to break contact with any spy-beetles that might have fixed on him.
At midnight the fog blew thick in from the harbor, smelling of oil, mercaptan, ammonia. Pulling up his hood Shorn descended a flight of stairs, pushed into a basement recreation hall, sidled past the dull-eyed men at the mechanical games. He walked directly toward the men’s room, turned at the last minute into a short side corridor, passed through a door marked ‘Employees’ into a workshop littered with bits and parts from the amusement machines.
Shorn waited a moment, ears alert for sound, then went to the rear of the room, unlocked a steel door, slipped through into a second workshop, much more elaborately fitted than the first. A short stout man with a big head and mild blue eyes looked up. “Hello, Will.”
Shorn waved his hand. “Hello, Gorman.”
He stood with his back to the door, looking around the molding for a black, apparently innocent, beetle. Nothing in sight. He crossed the room, scribbled on a bit of paper. “We’ve got to search the room. Look for a flying spy-cell, like this.” He sketched the beetle he carried with him in the canister, then appended a postscript. “I’ll cover the ventilator.”
An hour’s search revealed nothing.
Shorn sighed, relaxed. “Ticklish. If there was one of the things here, and it saw us searching, the Telek at the other end would have known the jig was up. We’d have been in trouble. A fire, an explosion. They missed me once already today by about ten seconds.” He set the canister on a bench. “I’ve got one of the things in here. Laurie caught it; rare presence of mind. Her premise is, that if its eyes and ears are made useless—in other words, if it loses its identity on a spatial frame of reference—then it ceases to exist for the Teleks, and they can no longer manipulate it. I think she’s right; the idea seems intuitively sound.”
Gorman Circumbright picked up the canister, jiggled it. “Rather heavy. Why did you bring it down here?”
“We’ve got to figure out a counter to it. It must function like a miniature video transmitter. I suppose Alvac Corporation makes them. If we can identify the band it broadcasts on, we can build ourselves detectors, warning units.”
Circumbright sat looking at the can. “If it’s still in operation, if it’s still broadcasting, I can find out very swiftly.”
He set the can beside an all-wave tuner. Shorn unscrewed the lid, gingerly removed the bug, still
wrapped in cloth, set it on the bench. Circumbright pointed to a scale, glowing at several points. He started to speak, but Shorn motioned for silence, pointed to the bug. Circumbright nodded, wrote, “The lower lines are possibly static, from the power source. The sharp line at the top is the broadcast frequency—very sharp. Powerful.”
Shorn replaced the bug in the can. Circumbright turned away from the tuner. “If it’s insensitive to infrared we can see to take it apart, disconnect the power.”
Shorn frowned doubtfully. “How could we be sure?”
“Give it to me.” Circumbright clipped leads from an oscillograph to the back of the tuner, dialed to the spy-beetle’s carrier frequency.
The oscillograph showed a normal sine-curve.
“Now. Turn out the lights.”
Shorn threw the switch. The room was dark except for the dancing yellow-green light of the oscillograph and the dull red murk from the infra-red projector.
Circumbright’s bulk cut off the glow from the projector; Shorn watched the oscillograph face. There was no change in the wave.
“Good,” said Circumbright. “And I think that if I strain my eyes I can—or better, reach in the closet and hand me the heat-conversion lenses. Top shelf.”
He worked fifteen minutes, then suddenly the carrier wave on the face of the oscillograph vanished. “Ah,” sighed Circumbright. “That’s got it. You can turn the lights back on now.”
Together they stood looking down at the bug—a little black torpedo two inches long with two crystalline eyes bulging at each side of the head.
“Nice job,” said Circumbright. “It’s an Alvac product all right. I’ll say a word to Graythorne; maybe he can introduce a few disturbing factors.”
“What about that detector unit?”
Circumbright pursed his lips. “For each of the bugs there’s probably a different frequency; otherwise they’d get their signals mixed up. But the power-bank probably radiates about the same in all cases. I can fix up a jury-rig which you can use for a few days, then Graythorne can bring us down some tailor-made jobs from Alvac, using the design data.”
He crossed the room, found a bottle of red wine which he set beside Shorn. “Relax a few minutes.”
Half an hour passed. Shorn watched quietly while Circumbright soldered together stock circuits, humming in a continuous tuneless drone.
“There,” said Circumbright finally. “If one of those bugs gets within a hundred yards, this will vibrate, thump.”
“Good.” Shorn tucked the device tenderly in his breast pocket, while Circumbright settled himself into an armchair, stuffed tobacco in a pipe. Shorn watched him curiously. Circumbright, placid and unemotional as a man could be, revealed himself to Shorn by various small signs, such as pressing the tobacco home with a thumb more vigorous than necessary.
“I hear another Telek was killed yesterday.”
“Yes. I was there.”
“Who is this Geskamp?”
“Big blond fellow. What’s the latest on him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Hm-m-m.” Shorn was silent a moment, a sick feeling at the pit of his stomach. “How?”
“The Teleks turned him over to the custody of the Federal Marshal at Knoll. He was shot trying to escape.”
Shorn felt as if anger were being pumped inside him, as if he were swelling, as if the pressure against his taut muscles were too great to bear.
“Take it easy,” said Circumbright mildly.
“I’ll kill Teleks from a sense of duty,” said Shorn. “I won’t enjoy it. But—and I feel ashamed, I’ll admit—I want to kill the Federal Marshal at Knoll.”
“It wasn’t the Federal Marshal himself,” said Circumbright. “It was two of his deputies. And it’s always possible that Geskamp actually did try to escape. We’ll know for sure tomorrow.”
“How so?”
“We’re moving out a little bit. There’ll be an example made of those two if they’re guilty. We’ll narcotize them tonight, find out the truth. If they’re working for the Teleks—they’ll go.” Circumbright spat on the floor. “Although I dislike the label of a terrorist organization.”
“What else can we do? If we got a confession, turned them over to the Section Attorney, they’d be reprimanded, turned loose.”
“True enough.” Circumbright puffed meditatively.
Shorn moved restlessly in his chair. “It frightens me, the imminence, the urgency of all this—and how few people are aware of it! Surely there’s never been an emergency so ill-publicized before! In a week, a month, three months, there’ll be more dead people on Earth than live ones, unless we get the entire shooting-match at once in the stadium.”
Circumbright puffed at his pipe. “Will, sometimes I wonder whether we’re not approaching the struggle from the wrong direction.”
“How so?”
“Perhaps instead of attacking the Teleks, we should be learning more of the fundamental nature of telekinetics.”
Shorn leaned back fretfully. “The Teleks don’t know themselves.”
“A bird can’t tell you much about aerodynamics. The Teleks have a disadvantage which is not at all obvious—the fact that action comes too easy, that they are under no necessity to think. To build a dam, they look at a mountain, move it down into the valley. If the dam gives way, they move down another mountain, but they never look at a slide rule. In this respect, at least, they represent a retrogression rather than an advance.”
Shorn slowly opened and closed his hands, watching as if it were the first time he had ever seen them. “They’re caught in the stream of life, like the rest of us. It’s part of the human tragedy that there can’t be any compromise; it’s them or us.”
Circumbright heaved a deep sigh. “I’ve racked my brains…Compromise. Why can’t two kinds of people live together? Our abilities complement each other.”
“One time it was that way. The first generation. The Teleks were still common men, perhaps a little peculiar in that things always turned out lucky for them. Then Joffrey and his Telekinetic Congress, and the reinforcing, the catalysis, the forcing, whatever it was—and suddenly they’re different.”
“If there were no fools,” said Circumbright, “either among us or among them, we could co-inhabit the earth. There’s the flaw in any compromise negotiation—the fact of fools, both among the Teleks and the common men.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
Circumbright gestured with his pipe. “There will always be Telek fools to antagonize common-man fools; then the common-man fools will ambush the Teleks, and the Teleks will be very upset, especially since for every Telek, there are forty Earth fools eager to kill him. So they use force, terror. Inexorable, inevitable. But—they have a choice. They can leave Earth, find a home somewhere among the planets they claim they visit; they can impose this reign of power; or they can return to humanity, renounce telekinesis entirely. Those are the choices open to them.”
“And our choices?”
“We submit or we challenge. In the first instance we become slaves. In the second we either kill the Teleks, drive them away, or we all become dead men.”
Shorn sipped at his wineglass. “We might all become Teleks ourselves.”
“Or we might find a scientific means to control or cancel out telekinesis.” Circumbright poured a careful finger of wine for himself. “My own instinct is to explore the last possibility.”
“There’s nowhere to get a foothold in the subject.”
“Oh I don’t know. We have a number of observations. Telekinesis and teleportation have been known for thousands of years. It took the concentration of telekinetics at Joffrey’s Congress to develop the power fully. We know that Telek children are telekinetic—whether by contagion or by genetics we can’t be sure.”
“Probably both. A genetic predisposition; parental training.”
Circumbright nodded. “Probably both. Although as you know, in rare instances they reward a common man by making a Telek out o
f him.”
“Evidently telekinesis is latent in everyone.”
“There’s a large literature of early experiments and observations. The so-called spiritualist study of poltergeists and house-demons might be significant.”
Shorn remained silent.
“I’ve tried to systematize the subject,” Circumbright continued, “deal with it logically. The first question seems to be, does the Law of Conservation of Energy apply or not? When a Telek floats a ton of iron across the sky by looking at it, is he creating energy or is he directing the use of energy from an unseen source? There is no way of knowing offhand.”
Shorn stretched, yawned, settled back in his chair. “I have heard a metaphysical opinion, to the effect that the Telek uses nothing more than confidence. The universe that he perceives has reality only to the backdrop of his own brain. He sees a chair; the image of a chair exists in his mind. He orders the chair to move across the room. His confidence is so great that, in his mind, he believes he sees the chair move, and he bases his future actions on the perception. Somehow he is not disappointed. In other words, the chair has moved because he believes he has moved it.”
Circumbright puffed placidly on his pipe.
Shorn grinned. “Go on; I’m sorry I interrupted you.”
“Where does the energy come from? Is the mind a source, a valve or a remote control? There are the three possibilities. Force is applied; the mind directs the force. But does the force originate in the mind, is the force collected, channeled through the mind, or does the mind act like a modulator, a grid in a vacuum tube?”
Shorn slowly shook his head. “So far we have not even defined the type of energy at work. If we knew that, we might recognize the function of the mind.”
